Destiny: The Complete Saga: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls

by David Mack

“I had to,” she said. “It was the only way to close off the passage and destroy the machine at the other end once we were clear. That’ll keep the Caeliar off our backs for a while.”

  “Define ‘a while.’”

  Hernandez shrugged. “Hard to say. Depends how much damage I did and how badly the Caeliar want to come after us. Could be a few days. Could be a few decades.”

  “We’d better get busy making repairs, then,” Riker said.

  She nodded once. “That would probably be a good idea.”

  Riker turned to Lieutenant Rriarr. “As soon as the turbolifts are working, have Captain Hernandez escorted to quarters and placed under guard.” To Hernandez, he added, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” she replied. “After eight hundred years with the Caeliar, I’m used to being treated like a prisoner.”

  * * *

  Deanna Troi screamed in horror as Dr. Ree sank his fangs into her chest just below her left breast, and Ree felt absolutely terrible about it, because he was only trying to help.

  The Pahkwa-thanh physician ignored Troi’s frantic slaps at his head as he released a tiny amount of venom into her bloodstream. Then the half-Betazoid woman stiffened under his slender, taloned feet as the fast poison took effect.

  Four sets of hands—one pair on each arm and two pairs on his tail—yanked him backward, off Troi, and dragged him into a clumsy group tumble away from her. He rolled to his feet to find himself confronted by the away team’s security contingent, which consisted of Chief Petty Officer Dennisar, Lieutenant Gian Sortollo, and Titan’s security chief, Lieutenant Commander Ranul Keru. The team’s fuming-mad first officer, Commander Christine Vale, snapped, “What the hell were you doing, Ree?”

  “The only thing that I could, under the circumstances,” Ree replied, squaring off against his four comrades.

  Vale’s struggle for calm was admirable, if unsuccessful. She flexed her hands and fought to unclench her jaw. “This had better be the best damned explanation of your life, Doctor.”

  A shadow stepped off a nearby wall and became Inyx, the chief scientist of the Caeliar. The looming, lanky alien tilted his bulbous head and permanently frowning visage in Ree’s direction. “I am quite eager to hear your explanation as well,” he said. The deep inflation and deflation of the air sacs that drooped over his bony shoulders suggested a recent exertion.

  Ensign Torvig Bu-kar-nguv cowered outside the door of Troi’s quarters and poked his ovine head cautiously around the jamb to see what was transpiring inside. Ree understood perfectly the reticence of the young Choblik, whose species—bipedal runners with no natural forelimbs—were descended from prey animals.

  As Ree chose his words, Commander Tuvok, Titan’s second officer, entered and kneeled beside Troi. The brown-skinned Vulcan man gently rested one hand on Troi’s forehead.

  “I confess it was an act of desperation,” Ree said. “After the Caeliar destroyed all of our tricorders—including mine—I had no way to assess the counselor’s condition with enough specificity to administer any of the hyposprays in my satchel.”

  “So you bit her,” Sortollo interrupted with deadpan sarcasm. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  Undeterred by the Mars-born human’s cynicism, Ree continued, “Commander Troi’s condition became progressively worse after she went to bed. Based on my tactile measure of her blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, I concluded there was a high probability that she had suffered a serious internal hemorrhage.” He directed his next comments to Inyx, who had moved to Troi’s side and squatted low, opposite Tukov, to examine her. “She would not permit me to seek your help or request the use of your sterile medical facilities for the procedure.”

  “And that’s why he bit her,” Dennisar said, riffing on Sortollo’s dry delivery. Commander Vale glared the Orion into a shamed silence.

  Inyx rested his gently undulating cilia over Troi’s bite wound. “You injected her with a toxin.”

  Menace was implied in Vale’s every syllable as she said, “If you’ve got a point to make, Doctor, now’s the time.”

  “My venom is a relic of Pahkwa-thanh evolution,” he said to her. “It places prey in a state of living suspended animation. Its purpose in my species’ biology was to enable sires of new hatchlings to roam a large territory and bring live prey back to the nest without a struggle, so that it would be fresh when fed to our young. In this case, I used it to place Counselor Troi in a suspended state to halt the progression of her hemorrhage.”

  Keru sighed heavily and shook his head. “All right, that does kind of make sense.”

  “What you did was barbaric and violent,” Inyx said. A sheet of quicksilver spread beneath Troi like a metallic bloodstain. It solidified and levitated her from the floor. “Your paralyzing toxin, while effective in the short term, will not sustain her for long. If that is what passes for medicine among your kind, I am not certain you deserve to be called a doctor.”

  Inyx began escorting the levitated Troi toward the exit.

  Tuvok lurked silently behind Inyx, his intense stare fixed on Troi’s face, which was frozen in a look of shock even though she was no longer sensate.

  Vale blocked Inyx’s path. The security personnel regrouped behind her, fully obstructing the doorway. “Hold on,” she said to Inyx. “Where are you taking her?”

  “To a facility where we can provide her with proper medical care,” the Caeliar scientist replied. He glanced at Ree and added in a pointed tone, “You might be surprised to learn that our methods do not include masticating our patients.”

  Ree was a gentle being by nature, but the Caeliar seemed committed to putting his goodwill to the test. “She needs the kind of medical care that I can provide to her only on Titan,” he said to Inyx. “If you really were the beneficent hosts you claim to be, you’d let us return to the ship.”

  Inyx halted and turned back to face Ree. “I am afraid that is quite impossible,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” Ree groused. “Because of your sacred privacy.”

  “No,” Inyx said, “because your ship has escaped and left you all behind.” A gap opened in the ceiling above Inyx and Troi, who ascended through it into the open air of the starless night. Inyx looked down and added, “I will leave you to contemplate that while I try to save your friend’s life.” He and Troi faded into the darkness and were gone.

  A shocked silence filled the room as the remaining away-team members regarded one another with searching expressions.

  Dennisar asked no one in particular, “Do you really think Titan got away?”

  Keru gave a noncommittal sideways nod. “The Caeliar haven’t lied to us so far. Could be the truth.”

  Vale said, “If they did, good for them. And it’s good news for us, too, because you know Captain Riker will send help.”

  Everyone nodded, and Ree could sense that they were all trying to put the most positive possible spin on the cold fact of having been abandoned by their shipmates and captain.

  Torvig was the first to wander back to his quarters, and then Tuvok slipped away, his demeanor reserved and withdrawn. Vale left next, and Keru ushered his two men out of the room.

  Ree followed the burly Trill security chief out of Troi’s quarters into the corridor. Keru snickered under his breath. “I’m sorry, Doc,” he said. “But for a second there, I really thought you were trying to eat Counselor Troi.”

  “I would never do such a thing,” Ree said, affecting a tone of greater offense than he really felt. Then he showed Keru a toothy grin. “Though I have to admit … she was rather succulent.” Noting the man’s anxious sidelong glance, Ree added with a flustered flourish, “Kidding.”

  4527 B.C.E.

  2

  A fiery mountain fell from the sky.

  Deep thunder rolled above the snowy landscape as the behemoth of scorched metal plunged through the low cover of bleak autumn clouds. Wreathed in flames and ashen smoke, its angle of descent shallowed moments before it caromed off the rocky mountainside
. Eruptions of mud, splintered trees, and pulverized stone filled the air. The dark mass cut epic gouges into the alpine slope, and it broke apart on its descent to the rugged coastline of the ice-packed fjord below.

  An avalanche rushed before it. Millions of tons of snow, dirt, and ice moved like water and then set like stone as they buried the shattered crags of blackened metal. The ground shook, and the roar of the collision and its consequences echoed and re-echoed off the surrounding peaks and glaciers, until it was swallowed by the deep silence of the arctic wilderness.

  Twilight settled on the fjord.

  And there wasn’t a soul to bear witness.

  * * *

  “Stand back,” MACO Sergeant Gage Pembleton said. “I’m almost through. One more shot ought to do it.”

  He stood, wedged in a jagged rent in the foundation of the Caeliar city-ship Mantilis. He aimed his phase rifle into the gap he had melted, through the densely packed ice and snow that had entombed the wrecked vessel after its calamitous planetfall on this unknown world, tens of thousands of light-years from Earth. A quick tap on the rifle’s trigger released a flash of heat and light, and then he saw open sky. Frigid, pine-scented air surged through the new opening, and his whoop of celebration condensed into wisps of vapor in front of his face.

  Waiting inside the remains of a laboratory complex, behind and beneath Pembleton, were the other five human survivors of Mantilis’s hard landing. Three of them were privates from the Columbia’s MACO company: Eric Crichlow, a bug-eyed and large-nosed son of Liverpool; Thom Steinhauer, a German with chiseled features, close-shorn hair, and little sense of humor; and Niccolo Mazzetti, a handsome Sicilian with olive skin, black hair, and a reputation for never being lonely on shore leave.

  Huddled between the MACOs was Kiona Thayer, the only woman in the group. She was a tall, raven-haired Québécoise with distant Sioux ancestry—and a bloody, hastily bandaged mess where her left foot once had been. Pembleton found her wound hard to look at—chiefly because he’d been the one who’d inflicted it, on orders from his MACO commander, Major Foyle.

  At the front of the group was the Columbia’s chief engineer, a broad-backed Austrian man named Karl Graylock. He asked, “Is it safe to move outside?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Pembleton said. He set the safety on his weapon and rubbed his brown hands together for warmth. “But I can tell you it’s cold out there.”

  Graylock raised his eyebrows. “Coming from a Canadian, that means something.” He glanced back at the others briefly before he added, “Maybe you and I should have a look first.”

  “Aye, sir,” Pembleton replied. “I’ll test the footing.” Taking careful steps, he felt that the gravity was stronger than he was accustomed to. He made a careful climb through the icy passage he had carved one shot at a time. A few meters shy of the top, he called back to Graylock, “It’s safe, Lieutenant.”

  The chief engineer followed Pembleton up the slope and out into the needle-sharp cold. The air was thin. As they stepped ankle-deep into the snow outside, Pembleton was awed by the sheer majesty of the vista that surrounded him: towering cliffs of black rock streaked with pristine snow; placid fjords reflecting a sky that glowed on the horizon with pastel hues of twilight; a few brilliant stars shining high overhead. It was so beautiful that he almost forgot that his fingers and toes had started going numb from the cold. “Quite a view,” he said, his baritone voice reverentially hushed.

  He looked sidelong at Graylock, who had turned to face in the other direction. The beefy engineer stared up the slope, his jaw slack. Pembleton did an about-face and beheld the swath that Mantilis had cut down the mountainside, through the upper half of the tree line. The devastation was impressive—in particular, the wounds that had been hewn into the mountain’s rocky face—but it paled before the sight that filled the heavens above it. Ribbons of prismatic beauty wavered behind the distant peaks, against a black sky peppered with stars. The aurora was breathtaking in its intensity and range of colors.

  “Wow,” Pembleton muttered.

  “Ja,” said Graylock, his voice barely a hush of breath.

  Pembleton pushed his hands inside the pants pockets of his camouflage fatigues. “We should probably wait until it gets a little brighter before we bring the others out here,” he said. Pointing at the fjord, he added, “Then we can head for low ground, by the shore. I’d suggest we make camp there and sort out the basics—shelter, fire, potable water, and as much food as we can stockpile. Then, if anything like spring ever comes, we can head for warmer weather near the equator.”

  “Why go so far, Sergeant?” Graylock asked. “Shouldn’t we hold position until we figure out how to call for a rescue?”

  Pressing his arms to his sides to quell his shivering, Pembleton said, “There’s never going to be a rescue, sir.”

  Graylock folded his arms across his chest and tucked his hands under his armpits. “We can’t think like that, Sergeant,” he said. “We can’t give up hope.”

  “With all respect, sir, I think we can.” Pembleton tilted his head back to look up at the stars. He remembered what the Caeliar scientist Lerxst had told him just before Mantilis made planetfall. “We’re almost sixty thousand light-years from home, and the year is roughly 4500 B.C.” He turned his head toward Graylock and added, “This is where we’re going to live the rest of our lives … and this is where we’re going to die.”

  * * *

  This nameless world had turned but once on its axis, and already Lerxst and his eleven fellow Caeliar felt the ebb of their vitality. “We should conserve our strength,” he said to his colleague Sedín. “Reducing our mass will lessen the effects of this planet’s gravity on our movement.”

  “Shedding some of our catoms is only a short-term solution,” she replied. “Unless we find a new source of power, we’ll weaken to the point where we can’t recorporealize.”

  A pang of guilt impeded Lerxst’s thoughts; he had decided to jettison the city’s main power source and much of its mass into subspace, rather than risk inflicting its devastating potential on an unsuspecting world in the crash. But divorced from the gestalt, and with their city in ruins, he and the other Caeliar of Mantilis had no means of rebuilding their lost generators. Without them to power the city’s quantum field, the Caeliar’s catoms would swiftly exhaust their energy supply.

  “At this extreme polar latitude, solar collection will not be a viable alternative until after our reserves have been depleted,” Lerxst said. “Do we have enough strength to tap and develop this world’s geothermal resources?”

  Sedín’s gestalt aura radiated doubt. “The bedrock here is deep, and we’re far from any volcanic activity.” She shared an image of the mountain atop which their city had been sundered. “There is a greater likelihood of mining fissionable elements.”

  “Not enough for our needs,” Lerxst replied. “I am also concerned that their use might risk introducing toxins into this world’s ecosphere.” It had been aeons since he had felt so vexed. “If only we hadn’t lost all of the zero-point aggregators, we might have had time to build a new prime particle generator.”

  Another Caeliar, an astrophysicist named Ghyllac, entered the darkened control center from behind Lerxst. He was followed by two of the human survivors, Gage Pembleton and Karl Graylock. Ghyllac said, “Visitors for you, Lerxst.”

  Lerxst turned to greet their guests. “Welcome, Gage and Karl,” he said. “Have you reconsidered our invitation to use what’s left of Mantilis as a shelter?”

  “Nein,” Graylock said. “There is no food for us at this altitude on the slope. We need to move down to the fjord.”

  His statement seemed to perplex Sedín, who replied, “There is no greater variety of flora along the shoreline, Karl.”

  Pembleton said, “We’ll try our luck at fishing.”

  Sedín was about to apprise the humans of the folly of such a labor, but Lerxst cut off her reply with a gentle emanation through their tragically reduced gestalt. He aske
d Graylock, “Then to what do we owe the privilege of this visit?”

  “We need batteries,” Graylock said. “Large ones for charging equipment and smaller portable ones.”

  Apprehension passed like an electrical charge among the dozen Caeliar inside the demolished control facility. Parceling out any of their already scant stored energy to the human survivors would only hasten the Caeliar’s fade into oblivion.

  “We’ll share what we can, limited though it is,” Lerxst said, shutting out the swell of anxiety from his colleagues.

  The humans nodded. Graylock said, “As long as we’re here, we might as well ask if we can salvage parts and materials from the city’s debris.”

  Lerxst bowed and spread his arms slightly. “Be our guest.”

  “Thank you,” Pembleton said. He lowered his voice as he looked at Graylock and asked, “Anything else, sir?”

  Graylock shook his head. “No.” To Lerxst, he added, “You’ll let us know when the batteries are ready?”

  “Of course.”

  “Danke schön,” Graylock said with a nod. He turned and walked out, and Pembleton followed at his side.

  After the humans were far from the control center, Sedín asked, “Was that a wise promise to make, Lerxst?”

  “I obeyed the dictates of my conscience,” Lerxst said. “Nothing more.”

  Ghyllac interjected, “We need that energy to live.”

  “So do the humans,” Lerxst said.

  * * *

  The survivors’ first full day on the planet barely deserved to be called a day at all, in Pembleton’s opinion. The colorless sun barely edged above the horizon, turning the arctic sky marble gray above a wide, slate-colored sea.

  One by one, the rest of the group followed Pembleton from the rifle-cut tunnel, out onto the wind-blasted mountainside. Everyone was garbed in warm, silver-gray hooded ponchos provided by the Caeliar. Their backpacks were jammed with blankets, a smattering of raw materials, and battery packs of various sizes.

  Lieutenant Thayer lay on a narrow stretcher. The task of carrying her was shared by the MACO privates. At any given moment, two of them were handling the stretcher while the third rested between turns of duty.