by Peter David
“Why . . . why can’t you leave me . . . to . . .”
“To your fate? To die a slow, agonizing death?” When Rajari forced a nod, Adis continued, “I was sorely tempted to do so, I must admit. Granted, these men are in my service,” and he gestured to those grouped around him. “They are faithful to my house, and have been for many years. Still, this little endeavor did cost me time, money, and energy. I could have let it, and you, pass.”
Suddenly his foot swung sharply and cracked Rajari in the ribs. Soleta flinched inwardly as she heard one of the ribs snap.
With amazing casualness, as if he had not just viciously kicked his helpless captive, Adis went on, “But if I had done that, then that meant I would simply have tolerated your activities . . . except that your activities are, by definition, intolerable. Nature will always take its course, but what sort of Romulans would we be if we simply allowed our enemies to age out or die from illness, eh? I shall tell you. We would be Romulans who encourage others to become our enemies. That is not good or just or appropriate. And I would end up expending more time, money, and energy in defending myself against enemies who might otherwise not have come into existence. So if I take action now, I’m saving myself effort later on. Wise planning. That is the secret to a long and productive life. Perhaps you will have the opportunity to prove that in the next one.”
He kicked Rajari once more. Rajari cried out and then lapsed into choked sobs.
Adis actually looked disappointed, even disgusted. “Is that the best you can do, smuggler? No profanity? No curses upon my name, my family, my ancestors? No vows of revenge? Do you know why I came here myself? Because it was my desire to kill you with my bare hands. But I see little to no point. You are not worthy to have your life slip away beneath my fingers. A shame, Rajari, for you at least. Here you could actually have died at the hands of one of the aristocracy, and you have failed even at that. A pointless life, a pointless death. Perhaps it’s apt at that.”
He stepped back and away from Rajari, turned to the scarred one, and said, “Krakis. Kill him.”
McHENRY & KEBRON
ZAK KEBRON INSPECTED for perhaps the hundredth time the room that served as his prison. The fact that he had looked it over so many times really didn’t mean anything, because he could continue to inspect the bare room another hundred times and still not be deterred in his course. Because he always felt that perhaps the next go-around might wind up presenting him with something that he had overlooked the previous times.
The room was completely circular, and did not have a stick of furniture in it. The lighting was not particularly bright, but neither was it too harsh on the eyes. Kebron continued to pace it, without letup. By moving about consistently, it helped to make him feel less of a target.
He hated his new body.
He was furious with himself that he had agreed to take on this idiotic assignment from Admiral Nechayev. Not that his fury was displayed outwardly. When it came to commanding the ferocity of his emotions, Kebron could have made a Vulcan seem demonstrative in comparison. Kebron not only customarily looked like a large piece of statuary, but he oftentimes displayed the same emotional range.
Nechayev, who was reputed to have some involvement in some of the most secretive departments of Starfleet, had sought him out because she said she wanted exactly what he was capable of bringing into the picture: Someone who was sheer muscle. Someone who could shake some sense into those idiotic arrogant students. Someone who could so utterly terrify them just with his pure physical presence that they would never choose to target a harmless, helpless planet again and make it the subject of their juvenile pranks.
In point of fact, Kebron felt a bit foolish with the undertaking, but he did not see that ignoring a direct “request” from an admiral would be the brightest thing to do. He did feel, however, that he had made a smart move in having McHenry recruited as well. He might be an irritating presence, but he was a presence nevertheless. Their relationship—such as it was—went all the way back to their Academy days. As flighty and occasionally scatterbrained as McHenry could be, Kebron trusted him (at least as much as he trusted anyone). Furthermore, McHenry had a unique way of looking at a situation that prompted solutions no one else could conceive of. Kebron had felt that that might be a useful tool in dealing with the obnoxious students.
None of his forethought, however, had prepared him for this.
There was one door in the place, and it opened as Kebron happened to be on the far side of the room. Something told him that it wasn’t coincidence. And sure enough, there was his captor, or at least one of his captors.
The creature was from no race that Kebron had ever seen, or even heard of.
Like the Liten, it was green, but a much darker shade. It was remarkably tall, and so slender that it was a wonder its body did not break in half. If Kebron had half a chance, he would be more than happy to do the breaking. Its head was a perfect oval, its eyes deep-set and glistening like fiery jewels. It had yet to speak a single word.
The creature’s long, tapered fingers were wrapped around the shoulder of a Liten female. It pushed the woman into the room toward Kebron with such casual force that she stumbled. Kebron’s quick movement, belying his size, saved her from the fall as he caught her halfway down and righted her with an easy gesture. He allowed his momentum to carry him forward and made a quick move toward his captor.
The creature did not appear the least bit intimidated by Kebron’s sudden charge. It raised a hand and suddenly Kebron couldn’t move an inch. He struggled furiously and silently, trying to advance so much as a foot. But he was unable to do so, completely paralyzed.
In a sign of what could only be considered disdain, the creature then turned its back to Kebron and glided out without even a backward glance. Only once the door had slid shut securely did Kebron have control restored to his body. He strode quickly to the door and punched it with all his strength. It had no impact on the door at all. Once upon a time it wouldn’t have hurt Kebron, either, but that was no longer the case. The genetic overhaul his body had been given had robbed him of some degree of his nigh-invulnerability. It had given him increased mobility, true, but he did not remotely consider it a worthwhile trade-off.
The Liten woman backpedaled away from him, clearly confused and uncertain of which way to look or whom to trust. She looked up at Kebron. “Who are you?” she asked, visibly making an effort to keep any stammer from her voice.
“Kebron,” he said. He looked her up and down. “Zanka?”
“Yes!” she said, clearly astounded. “How did you know?”
“Your husband hired me. Hired us.” Having ascertained her identity, he promptly lost interest in her and began to inspect the room yet again.
“Us? There’s more than one of you?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . and did you come here to rescue me?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to do it? Do you have a plan?” The words cascaded from her. “Yes, of course, you must have a plan. You’re clearly experienced, and someone with experience would naturally have some sort of plan. Is it a cunning one? Only a cunning plan can get us out of this. Do you have a weapon? Or some sort of signal device? Or others coming to rescue you? Are you planning to—”
“Shut up,” he said brusquely.
She seemed taken aback. “Adulux never spoke to me that way.” But rather than appearing to be offended by his manner, her eyes glittered with a curiosity, even excitement.
Kebron was too preoccupied to notice. He was simply surveying the room. Then he turned to her after a few more minutes of futile inspection and said, “What have they done to you?”
“Since they captured me?”
“No, since the dawn of time.” In whatever body he happened to be occupying, Zak Kebron did not suffer fools gladly. “Yes, since they captured you.”
“They’ve subjected me to . . .”
She spoke in a low voice, and Kebron didn’t quite catch
it. “To what?”
“Tests,” she admitted.
“Tests?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “What sort of tests?”
Krave, Nyx, and Quiv felt as if they were going to die. As their latest grueling test continued, Mark McHenry sat there and watched in silence.
This was not the first test that the three students had been put to by any means. McHenry had watched in quiet amazement as the Andorian and two Tellarites were subjected to what was quite possibly the most ludicrous series of physical demands that he’d ever seen. Quite against their will, they had been forced to shove eggs into their mouths and then expel them, with as much breath as they could muster, into pails set five feet away. They had been forced to run into walls repeatedly until they were nearly unconscious. A large board of wood had been set up in the middle of the room and they had been ordered to chop it in half using a dead fish. The board had been unyielding; the fish, on the other hand, had fared far less well. These, and other increasingly preposterous, endurance trials had been foisted upon them while McHenry witnessed it all, trying to determine what rhyme or reason there could be to it.
And their very strange host was overseeing all of it.
At this point, the three students had their arms folded, hopping up and down in place on one foot. They had been engaged in the rather ludicrous activity for the better part of an hour, but every time they tried to put one of their feet down, an electric shock from the floor would jolt them back into ongoing hop.
McHenry was seated on a small folding chair, which had been provided by his odd “host.” The tall green creature had made clear to the students exactly what was expected of them when he had entered the room, pointed at the three of them, and demonstrated the hopping motion that he wanted them to adapt. The three of them had not moved, but instead simply glared at him. They didn’t want to do it, and held on to some last shred of hope that if they mutinied then perhaps these absurd tests would come to an end.
They were overly optimistic. Instead their captor had simply gestured, and suddenly they were on their feet and hopping as instructed.
They had tried to stop the moment their captor had left the room, but the jolting floor had dissuaded them. So they hopped, and hopped, and hopped, until they were crying out in agony and begging for McHenry to do something, even just shoot them. Anything that would put an end to this insane endurance test. McHenry, for his part, had nothing to say or do in the matter. He simply sat there in the provided chair and watched them.
It was Quiv who ran out of energy first. Unable to sustain it any longer, he didn’t put his foot down; instead he simply fell over, like a great tree. McHenry braced himself, waiting to see a massive jolt of electricity pumped through the fallen Tellarite. None, however, was forthcoming. He simply lay there, beached.
Thrilled that their ordeal was over, the other two put their feet down, and were promptly jolted for their impertinence. They started hopping once more. Nyx, suddenly seeing a way out, flopped over, expecting that to be the end of it. Instead electricity danced around him, his limbs quivering, and with a startled and frustrated howl he got back to his foot and started hopping again. A few minutes later, however, he truly did run out of steam, and when he collapsed, there was no further punishment.
For Krave the Andorian, his greater endurance proved to be something of a curse. He was able to keep going for longer than the others were, and somehow whatever seemed to be controlling the circumstances of the test seemed to be aware of it. If he tried to stop voluntarily, he was immediately jolted. He sobbed in frustration, he let out a string of profanities, he begged, he threatened, he did everything, and nothing seemed to help.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” he cried out to McHenry at one point.
“I am,” said McHenry. “I’m watching.”
“Do something beside that!”
“All right,” said McHenry. He closed his eyes and turned away. And that was how he remained until Krave tumbled over, practically unconscious. The floor did nothing to him at that point.
A door slid open at the far end of the room and the mysterious green alien stepped in, looking at them with apparent curiosity. Its eyes flared slightly, as if it had come to some sort of conclusion.
McHenry got to his feet. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What race are you? What do you want? And how do you do that sparkling thing with your eyes, because really, that’s pretty interesting.”
The alien turned away from him and headed out the door.
From the floor nearby, Quiv growled, “That sparkling thing? What kind of stupid question was that?”
McHenry shrugged. “Just trying to make conversation.”
“Conversation?” The strength was now surging back into Quiv, and he was getting to his feet, his hands flexing, and he shouted, “Conversation?” He lunged toward McHenry, who was too surprised by the sudden charge to do anything to get out of the way.
Quiv left his feet, hurtling forward, and he crashed into the chair that McHenry was sitting in.
Except that McHenry was no longer in it.
McHenry felt the air rushing up at him, and the sun was searing against his eyes. He raised an arm to shield himself from the glare, and tried to figure out just how he had wound up outside. For that matter he couldn’t quite understand just where outside he was.
He started to take a step back and immediately fell.
The fact that he did not plunge to his death was miraculous. Displaying a truly impressive degree of quick reaction, to say nothing of considerable upper body strength, McHenry twisted around as he fell and slammed into the upper section of the small platform he’d been standing on. The platform was floating in midair with no apparent means of support, but that wasn’t what concerned McHenry at the moment. Instead, his only priority was climbing back up onto it. His legs pumped in midair under the platform, reflexively looking for support that simply wasn’t there. Below him was a yawning, cavernous drop so deep that he couldn’t even begin to figure out how far it was.
Yet even as he fought for his life, even as he felt his fingers losing their grip, part of his mind was elsewhere, analyzing the engineering structure of the small round platform to which he was clinging. He could not detect any sort of hum of a power source, nor did it seem to come equipped with any type of antigravity technology with which he was familiar. This platform was just . . . there. It appeared to be right in the middle of some sort of vast canyon. He saw the edges of the canyon, but they had to be at least a hundred yards away on either side.
The platform began to tilt in response to the shifting of McHenry’s weight, but with Herculean effort he managed to straighten it and then slowly, carefully, climb upon it. His breath came in ragged gasps before finally steadying. Then he dusted himself off and looked around once more, as if to see whether his immediate situation had changed in any way that might be more favorable. Unfortunately, things hadn’t altered one bit.
No.
No, that wasn’t quite true.
The platform that he was on was sinking.
It wasn’t by a lot, but it was enough to get his attention. It was only a few millimeters over the course of several minutes, but it was enough to indicate to him that things were not going to get better for him anytime soon.
He looked up at the sun. It was sinking toward the horizon.
He sat down to watch it. If it was going to be his last sunset, he wanted to appreciate it.
KALINDA
THE MOMENT THAT KALINDA walked into the room, she wanted to run screaming from it.
That, however, was not appropriate behavior for a princess of the Thallonian Empire . . . even the fallen Thallonian Empire. One of her breeding and background simply did not bolt from that which she found unpleasant or daunting, no matter how tempting that impulse might be.
The room that had been the last one that Jereme had ever spent time in was exactly as she had seen it in her dream. It had no furniture in it at all.
It was some sort of practice room in which Jereme honed his skills and continued to train, even though he was ostensibly retired. The walls were sparkling white, or had been, which had made cleaning it that much more problematic. The blood had been cleansed, or at least the best effort possible had been put into cleaning it up. There were, however, still dark stains on the wall that she could see because she knew precisely where to look for them. Her gaze was drawn, however, to the center of the room where Jereme had been standing. For a brief moment the hyperreality of the dream overlapped with the reality of the world in which she was standing, and she thought that she could actually see Jereme standing there, only a few feet from her.
“Are you all right, Kally?” It took Kalinda a few moments to realize that not only was Si Cwan speaking to her, but also he had said the same thing several times. Each time he spoke, it was with growing concern.
“Yes. Yes, I am fine, Cwan,” she replied. However, she looked anything but fine. Every aspect of her body language signaled that what she truly desired to do, more than anything else, was turn and leave. Si Cwan very likely knew that, but he was not about to make matters that much more difficult for her by inquiring about it. “I just . . . need a few moments to prepare . . .”
Ookla was standing next to Si Cwan, and in unison they both said “Prepare?” in obvious confusion.
“Yes. Prepare. I know what needs to be done here. And I’m reasonably sure I can do it.”
“Kalinda.” Si Cwan drew nearer to her, and there was deep concern on his face. He had addressed her by her full name rather than the diminutive, and the stern tone of voice made him sound vaguely like a teacher about to issue a scolding. “Kalinda, what ‘it’ are you referring to? What are you playing at?”
“I’m not playing, Si Cwan. This is no game to me. It’s just . . . something I am certain I can do. Ever since I returned from the Quiet Place, my connection with those who have departed is . . . strong.”
