Blackout

by Phaedra M. Weldon

  Bart nodded and stood.

  And sat right back down.

  Jewlan leaned in close to him and gently laced a thin but strong arm under his left shoulder. He caught the whiff of what he thought was jasmine as she leaned into him.

  “That smell—what perfume is it?”

  “No perfume,” Jewlan said as she tugged at him to stand up. “Wow…you’re a tall man.”

  “I smell something,” Bart insisted. “Like flowers.”

  “Oh, that.” Jewlan gave a light, if not pleasant laugh. “I’ve been writing. That always happens when I write. Okay, here we go.”

  Bart wanted to ask more questions about the scent, but his concentration was shaken when he was practically lifted off his feet. The Asarion was indeed a lot stronger than she looked. The two stood together, Jewlan cautioning him to take it slowly. “See? You’re just going to have to depend on me for the day. Remember, just take it slow and you should be fine.”

  The linguist nodded, though he kept a firm hold on the Asarion’s shoulder. The smell of jasmine was fading. But the memories the perfume brought back to him of the garden he’d had on Earth, before the Dominion War, lingered.

  He hadn’t thought of that house or that garden in years. Why? Why was I remembering my life before before the S.C.E.?

  Before Anthony.

  “Ready?” Riz was watching Jewlan and Bart. “Now, let’s see if we can straighten out this mess Jewlan’s made.”

  Chapter

  5

  Communication with the other S.C.E. team was sketchy when it worked at all. Whatever was preventing full power restoration appeared to be stronger during the day. Jewlan had a niggling suspicion that by entering the wrong combination she’d inadvertently triggered some sort of protective dampening field.

  Jewlan didn’t believe she’d entered anything really wrong; it was right for activating the defense of—something. Only it was wrong because it wasn’t the key to open the door. Doren’s notes were specific; she’d tried several combinations on the other doors in private, and hadn’t triggered anything like this. So—either I lucked onto the “on” combination, or this door opens into something that needed protecting.

  Something dangerous, perhaps?

  All these things ran amok in her head. Theories, ideas, suppositions—but she kept silent. As a linguist Jewlan wasn’t allowed to speculate as to the mechanism’s purpose. That would be for her Beta State, when and if it arrived.

  Just not yet. Not yet. With Riz present, if she shifted, there was a chance her Beta job of mechanic wouldn’t be allowed by the supervisor. And Jewlan was sure both Riz and Corlis wanted any excuse to bring her back.

  Riz had already let her know several times how upset the Primary Conclave was at her actions. In fact, Jewlan was sure she’d counted the supervisor’s account of the meeting seven times. And, how it had been she—Riz Shedd—who had protected Jewlan’s position and prevented her from being recalled immediately.

  That much was pure fiction. Jewlan knew the only reason Riz had stood up for anyone was because she liked being out at the site so she could drink more tea.

  The thought of tea made her look at the linguist again. He seemed different than the two women. Forget the fact he was a man studying language and symbolism. Jewlan had encountered other species before that were gender-locked. There was something else about him—something deeper. He seemed almost lost, distracted.

  But about what?

  It still worried her that Bart had completely lost consciousness. He seemed okay now, if not a bit off balance from the stimulant. He’d been very pale, and very still when she’d stepped into the shuttle and found the small brunette female kneeling over him.

  The fusion generators brought by the S.C.E. team brought light back into the excavated chambers. There wasn’t enough power to run any cooling units, and the heat index during the day would be uncomfortable.

  Riz pointed this out during their walk to the site entrance. And as the sun rose, so did the temperature in the first two chambers, making work inside the site uncomfortable, but not impossible.

  Carol, Bart, and Corsi used their handheld lights to focus their combined illumination on the path ahead. Jewlan stayed close to Bart, watching him as well as the Starfleet team’s reaction to their discovery. Her attention was split between making sure the linguist didn’t fall down, and her own enjoyment at their excitement.

  The first thing Carol noticed about the chambers, other than their impressive size and artistic nuance, was their ascending levels in technological development. The First Chamber was built to resemble a cave, carved from bare rock, though preliminary tests showed it wasn’t the same rock indigenous to the geological area surrounding the front door.

  Pictographic images decorated the walls, none of which resembled any other paintings found in other sites. Neither Bart nor Carol could make out any discernible informational value to them. The other furnishings were sparse. Chairs carved from stone. Pots and urns were arranged on either side of the door as if they had, at one time, given offering to some deity.

  “That was our first thought,” Jewlan said, conferring with Carol. “Only what culture cements the decorations in place?”

  “Cements them?” Carol knelt beside them and attempted to pick up one of the colorfully painted bowls. It wouldn’t budge. She straightened. “Now that is odd.”

  The Second Chamber was much smoother, the walls more even and less jagged. Instead of pictures painted directly onto the walls, tapestries of strange creatures hung from modern hooks, each depicting a woodland scene. High-backed chairs flanked this chamber door.

  Bart looked at Jewlan. “Is that running water?”

  But it was Riz who answered. “Behind the left chair is a small running stream. Very small. The water is artesian. We analyzed it.”

  Jewlan smiled at Bart. He winked, and she knew at that moment he was as bored with Riz as she was.

  Bart took several careful steps closer and ran his right hand over the armrest of the chair on the right. Jewlan noticed his fingers were long and thin. An artist’s hands. She also noticed a dark smudge on the tip of the middle finger of that hand. Jewlan glanced down at a dark smudge on her left hand and gave a slight smile.

  Soft, fine-woven fabric covered each of the seats. Bart looked over at Carol. “Thrones? King and Queen? Renaissance?”

  “That was my first thought. It’s like Earth history—but it isn’t. This just keeps getting weirder.”

  Bart nodded. “It’s like each chamber is some throwback to a time period. Very much like Earth’s. If the first chamber were prehistoric humanity, and this chamber is more Renaissance or Middle Ages…” He let the sentence trail as Jewlan opened the door to the Third Chamber.

  “Then I’d say this one is more along early twentieth century,” Carol said as they stepped through. “Earth’s pre-outer-exploration age. Before Zefram Cochrane created warp drive.”

  The walls of the Third Chamber were also smooth, polished wood. There were no seats in front of this door or cemented bowls. The pathway was clear with only a wood podium to one side.

  Carol stood in front of it with her tricorder and shook her head. “Pulpit?”

  Bart shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m just along for the ride at this point.”

  “Oh, it gets even better.” Jewlan went to the door beside the podium and pressed the symbols in sequence.

  Light spilled from the opening door. Jewlan muttered a slight curse when Bart stepped unsteadily back, wincing at the light. She reached out and grabbed his left shoulder to steady him. She knew his present condition was an aftereffect of the stimulant. She’d seen the same behavior in Riz when she used the stimulants. It was making him light-sensitive and she could only imagine how it affected his headache.

  He reached out and took her arm as well and squinted at her. “Well, I guess whatever’s causing the blackout hadn’t had any effect in here.”

  “None,” Jewlan said. She waited for his e
yes to adjust to the light before leading them into the Fourth Chamber.

  “This is the only chamber that came with its own lighting,” Riz commented as she moved to stand at Bart’s opposite side. He was now flanked by Jewlan and Riz.

  Carol made a long, drawn-out whistling sound. The light emanated from the walls themselves. The floor was polished smooth, and there was a subtle hum surrounding them. Every time Jewlan stepped into this chamber she felt as if she were going to be transported to a distant world at any moment.

  There were no other furnishings in the room. No pictures. It was completely sterile. The light was almost deafening.

  “Lovely,” Bart muttered and moved to the next door, his boot heels clicking on the floor.

  Jewlan stood beside him, watching him in a sideways glance. He was an attractive man. Slight of build, but tall. And he carried himself with a grace and elegance very common to her own people. “Each combination to enter the next chamber is made up of four of these symbols. But they have to be pressed in the right order.”

  “How did you figure out the order?”

  “Luck, I thought. I figured out the first one—having seen these symbols at a site miles from here. There’s a temple there, or what we assume is a temple. We found scrolls of this language in a room behind the main altar.”

  “And you discovered the Rosetta Stone in there as well?”

  She frowned at him even though the left side of her mouth pulled up in a half smile. His eyes lit with an inner fire when he spoke, and she wondered offhandedly what he looked like without the beard. “The what?”

  “Sorry—an old Earth term. You found the key. The dictionary, so to speak, of how to read the language.”

  “Oh—the basis text. Yes. There are five base symbols, each corresponding to fundamental elements.”

  “You mean like water, fire, earth, and air?”

  Jewlan’s grin broadened. It was so refreshing to talk to someone who understood the basics of communication. “Yes, but not limited to just those universals. They refer to a great number of elements and their combinations.”

  “Periodic table,” Carol chimed in.

  Jewlan belatedly smiled at the small brunette. She’d almost forgotten the two S.C.E. women were there.

  Bart nodded and touched Jewlan’s arm. The cryptographer felt a light chill ripple up her arm. “Jewlan, in the notes I read on these keys, you used a set of rules to open each chamber.”

  “Well, not so much as rules as laws to live by. They’re called the Laws of Life, and there are four. The first one is light, which corresponded to fire, then motion, which corresponded to water; the third was stillness, which referred to earth, and this one,” she held her arms out at her sides, palms up, the “Law of Unity.”

  “Unity?” Bart looked around at the room behind them. “Well, maybe. If a society based its belief on unity being nonindividuality, I could see it. Wouldn’t want to live in it.”

  She nodded in agreement. “Then maybe you can definitely be of assistance in this next chamber.” Jewlan pressed the symbols in their order of Unity. Air.

  The Fifth Chamber—and the bane of Jewlan’s present predicament—spread out before them.

  “This room’s twice the size of the first four.” Carol moved past Jewlan and Bart as did the tall, quiet blonde. “It’s also as well lit as the Fourth Chamber.”

  The room was filled with things, unlike the sparseness of the previous chambers. Furniture, pots, trunks of both wood and stone, rusted, mechanical items that even Jewlan’s people were at a loss to discover their functions.

  “This place looks like a junkroom,” Carol said as she held up her tricorder. “I’ve got one of these in my house back on Earth.”

  “Does your junk room have pieces from every era on Earth?” Bart asked. “Because that’s what I’m seeing in here. It’s like someone cleaned out the first four rooms and stuffed it all in here to make way for guests.”

  “We were getting ready to catalog and clear this room out when Doren went into Beta State,” Jewlan said, though she kept an eye on Bart, who’d moved several steps away to one of the less cluttered walls. The walls in this chamber were also self-illuminating.

  “What makes this door different?” Bart said.

  Jewlan moved forward into the ceiling-high stacks of objects to a barely visible pathway. “We’ve been stalled in this room for weeks,” she called back to them.

  The light was dimmer through the path. A place had been cleared around the door where Jewlan had set up her worktable to the right. Her papers, both synthetic and pulp, were scattered about, along with scrolls from the temple site and several containers of pens.

  She wasn’t surprised when Bart stepped past her to the table. He tentatively touched one of the scrolls. Riz started to move toward him, but Jewlan put a hand out. Trust him, she hoped her gesture said.

  The chamber door to the table’s left caught his attention before he lifted any of the scrolls. He moved his hand and took several steps toward it.

  Carol moved up beside him, the hum of her analyzing device the only other sound in the chamber. Corsi came to stand beside Jewlan.

  “This is the door that won’t open?” the blonde asked.

  Jewlan nodded, but kept her attention on the other two. Her gaze tracked the way the female touched Bart’s elbow to get his attention. The way her fingers lingered on his as he took the device from her hands and looked at the information displayed as the female pointed it out.

  She hadn’t noticed it before, and scolded herself for being less observant than she should have, but there appeared to be a close bond between the two. Jewlan should have realized this when Bart had been ill—the way the female had worried and tried to contact their people.

  Obviously the two were mates.

  Jewlan wasn’t prepared for the blow to her gut that came with this realization. How was it possible that she could develop such a liking for a gender-bound humanoid such as Bart?

  Unless it was that very uniqueness about him that had spurred the attraction.

  “Jewlan?” Carol called out to her. “Can you come here?”

  Masking any emotion that might be apparent on her face, the Asarion linguist moved toward them, and out of respect for their bond, stood beside Carol, even though Bart held the device.

  Her heart skipped a beat as he moved closer to her. His shoulder pressed against hers as he held the device where she could see the screen. He smelled of musk and ink. “Jewlan, we picked up a piggybacked message along a subspace pulse that we believe is the reason for your planet’s blackout. When we translated it, this was the message.”

  Jewlan read the sentence. “That sounds like one of our own lay texts.”

  Bart’s eyebrows arched. “Lay texts?”

  “My people have their own love of history—preserving it, mostly—since our flight from the Borg a century ago. So many of our scholars have dedicated their lives to preserving the doctrine and rituals of as many of my people’s religious and social beliefs as possible.” She shook her head. “Not all of us practice Layism, though I personally think it’s a fascinating doctrine, but we know the basics because we used them to build our society here.”

  “Sort of like having the Ten Commandments,” Carol said as she looked at Bart. “Some humans still follow the teachings espoused in that ancient religion, but nearly all of us follow those commandments, with basics set such as ‘thou shall not kill,’ ‘thou shall not steal’…”

  Jewlan nodded. “Very much the same principle. Here.” She stepped to the table and picked up a small, flat pad.

  “What is that?” Bart asked. “What do you call it? I looked at one on the shuttle ride here.”

  “The manufacturer has some long, drawn-out name for it. We call it a palm-pad. It’s basically a minicomputer, complete with its own language database and input speaker. Bart, you already found the base alphabet?”

  “A good sixty percent. Haven’t indexed vowels as clearly—it’s l
ike the language didn’t use many.”

  Jewlan nodded. “That was our assessment as well. Transmit your alphabet and I’ll add it to my own.”

  Almost immediately the palm-pad came to life when it sensed the signal. It began running through the database to find the closest word translation. “I was right. It translated into: ‘A cut upon another’s arm infects the heart of the one who wields the weapon.’”

  Carol grinned. “Bart, I’d say this proves the translator simply looked through the database on the da Vinci and chose the most appropriate translation, same as Jewlan’s just did.”

  “I’m afraid the captain’s going to be disappointed. No long-lost Jewish settlers here. Though I am curious why it didn’t just pick out standard metaphors like ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you?’”

  That was the moment the floor moved in a really big way.

  Chapter

  6

  The lights went out.

  When the dust had settled and the floor no longer moved Bart took a quick inventory of all moving parts. Everything appeared to be working—except his nerves, which seemed to be on permanent edge.

  “Everyone okay?” Carol called from the darkness.

  “I…I think so,” came Jewlan’s voice. She was near Bart and he reached out in the direction of her voice. He brushed against something soft. Bart found her hand and clasped it. “Bart, are you all right?”

  “I’m okay. Was it something I said?”

  “Shhh…” Carol said. “Do you hear that?”

  “All I hear is a hum—sort of like on a ship.”

  “Exactly. That sound wasn’t there before the quake.”

  The lighted walls abruptly flickered back on. Jewlan stood to his left, his left hand in her right.

  “What the hell was that?” Corsi asked, her phaser drawn and ready. She looked at Jewlan. “You didn’t say anything about this place being unstable.”

  “Because it wasn’t until yesterday,” Riz said. She glanced at the table to make sure nothing had fallen. “Those quakes started up about twenty hours after the blackout. That was the third, and the strongest.”