“Moving through space,” said Maltz, scratching his long white beard. “Maybe they improved it.”
“Who is they?” demanded Leah. “Who controls this thing?”
“You do!” growled the Klingon. “You are the only ones who know the technology.”
Leah’s shoulders slumped, and the scowl returned to her face. “You’re wrong. Nobody would unleash this against their own people. Like they say, maybe you are crazy.”
The old Klingon howled with laughter, then he held up a triumphant finger, his eyes blazing. “I know the code word—what your people called this device many years ago. The Klingon High Council has our reports, but we never learned how to make it. All this time, I have feared it would be used again, and now it has.”
“Ridiculous!” snapped Leah, marching toward the door. “Get me out of here, Bekra. He is mad.”
“Mad?” said the Klingon, stifling a laugh. “Such great power you have never seen, have you? Such a force for change you have never seen. It takes matter and guts it, leaving behind something chaotic and loathsome.”
Leah turned again and stared at the wild Klingon. If he hadn’t seen it, then he had seen something eerily close. But the notion that this horror might be an invention fostered by her own government—a weapon—was repulsive in the extreme.
The door opened, and Maltz yelled one more thing. “How much time do we have?”
“A few hours,” she answered, pausing in the doorway. “Maybe ten. Maybe one.”
At that, the Klingon grew somber and gaunt, and Leah could see desperation and fear working in his rheumy eyes. It was the same desperation and fear that she felt churning in her stomach. She [73] didn’t want to believe him any more than the Tellarites wanted to believe her, but at that moment, she feared the old Klingon spoke the truth.
“The performance was lovely,” gushed Dolores Linton, shaking Data’s outstretched hand. The android was dressed in tuxedo and tails and looked very dapper, thought La Forge. Despite the high spirits at the end of the performance, most of the audience dispersed swiftly from the Antares Theater on deck fifteen. It was as if everyone realized their mission had assumed an element of the unknown, and they had better stay close to their posts.
Geordi wanted to escape quickly, too, but Dolores Linton wanted to stay behind and congratulate Data. To people who had never heard the violin played to weeping perfection, a performance by Data was sheer magic. Geordi was fortunate enough to have heard him play many times. Although he wanted to get back to the bridge, he couldn’t deny his friend a chance to hear a new fan tell him how wonderful he was. Geordi tried not to fidget, but the recital had lasted longer than he expected. Plus Data had been forced to take a curtain call, captain’s prerogative.
“And your sustains are sublime,” said the vivacious geologist as she studied Data’s hands. “Your finger strength must be phenomenal. I bet you could do anything you wanted to do with these hands.”
“When I first started,” said the android, “I broke many strings. The fragility of the violin is a large part of its appeal.”
“Yes, you have to handle fragile things with care,” replied Dolores, gently stroking Data’s palm.
“You should see his paintings,” added Geordi, just trying to enter into the flow of the small talk.
“I would like to,” answered the geologist, sounding in awe of the android.
[74] “Another time,” replied Data with a pointed nod to Geordi as he withdrew his hand and backed off.
Thankfully, there were only a handful of well-wishers left, and Geordi could edge toward the door without feeling guilty. “I’d like to give you that tour I promised,” he began slowly, “but we don’t know what we’re getting into.”
“Duty calls,” said Dolores, shaking her pert brown hair and flexing a sizable bicep. “I really appreciate your bringing me to hear Data play. I wouldn’t have come otherwise. I probably just would’ve sat in my room, stewing over the messed-up schedule.”
“What is our delay going to mean to you?” asked Geordi as they strolled down the corridor.
“We were already on a tight schedule, and if we can’t get done with Itamish III in eight weeks, then the team is going to have to delay another start. Then another. And we’re booked a year in advance.” Dolores smiled and batted her eyes playfully. “We’re real popular.”
“I can see that,” said Geordi, reaching the turbolift and holding it for her. They stepped inside, and he added, “We hardly ever know what we’re doing two months from now, or even two days from now. We’re always in scramble mode.”
The turbolift door shut, and Dolores said, “Level six.” Then she turned to Geordi and smiled warmly. “Thank you for a great evening.”
“I’m sorry it has to end so soon,” he answered apologetically.
“Does it have to end so soon?” Dolores asked pointedly. “I heard them say that we’re not going to reach the area for about ten hours.”
“Uh, yes,” stammered Geordi. “That’s true.” The door opened, and Dolores gave him a sly smile and stepped out. La Forge took a gulp of air and followed the sauntering figure in the skintight black dress.
She led the way to her quarters, letting him trail along behind [75] her like a puppy dog. Since he didn’t know what to say to her, he didn’t catch up until she had reached her door. Then she turned to him, not with a sultry look but with doe-eyed sympathy.
“You know,” said Dolores softly, touching his cheek, “there’s something very appealing about a man in love ... with someone else.” She raised an eyebrow. “I hope she’s worth all the anguish you’re going through, worrying about her. Good night, Geordi. Thanks for the lovely evening.”
Her hand touching his cheek wasn’t exactly a kiss, but it felt like one as she pulled her fingertips away.
“I could check with the bridge,” said Geordi uncertainly.
“Good night. Just don’t forget my tour.” With a whoosh of the door sliding shut, Dolores Linton was gone.
Geordi immediately hit his combadge. “La Forge to bridge.”
“Riker here,” came the answer.
“Have there been any developments?”
“Well, one small one,” answered the first officer. “In addition to the other distress signal, we’re now picking up a Capellan distress signal from a planet named Hakon. We’re changing course now, because it’s not much out of our way.”
“Changing course?” asked Geordi with alarm. “I thought we were headed to Outpost Seran-T-One.” He began charging down the corridor.
“It’s on the edge of sector 4368,” answered Riker. “There isn’t a lot of traffic out here, so we’ve got to follow these distress signals, now that they’ve converged. They’re our only clue that something’s wrong.”
La Forge bit his lip, knowing that he couldn’t argue with his superior, and Riker read the silence perfectly. “Don’t worry, Geordi, we’ll find out what’s going on. I’ve got Data on ops running ten times as many scans as you can, and I really don’t need you on the bridge. Isn’t there somewhere else you can go?”
The engineer stopped and looked back down the corridor at [76] Dolores Linton’s door. He took a deep breath and finally said, “I promise I won’t pace too much.”
“Okay, see you on the bridge. Riker out.”
His brow furrowed with worry, the chief engineer strode toward the turbolift. He could almost hear Data berating him for his hapless handling of Mission Specialist Linton. This was all just one more reason to regret his obsession with Leah Brahms, an obsession Data could never understand.
seven
“Here’s your shopping list,” said Leah Brahms, handing a padd to her comrade, Paldor, who stood outside the open hatch of the shuttlecraft. “If we can get these parts, I think we can fix the comm array.”
Looking dismayed, the young Tellarite glanced at her and then at the gawkers who surrounded the vacant field where they had landed. Three of them were constables in red-and-white checked un
iforms, and he lowered his voice to say, “I don’t know where to begin. I doubt if they have half this stuff.”
“Come on, they’re your people, and you wanted to come here,” Leah reminded him, instantly regretting her testiness. “It may be a farming community, but they’re still part of the Federation. Ask around. I saw some sophisticated gear for monitoring the weather, so they must have antennas and dish arrays. We’ve also seen replicators.”
“And money? What am I supposed to use for money?” asked the Tellarite skeptically.
Leah pointed to the screen of the handheld padd. “I have a blank [78] purchase order right there on behalf of the Science Service. They should honor it anywhere in the Federation.”
The Tellarite’s orange beard bristled. “But this hasn’t been requisitioned. That’s illegal.”
“You and I are probably already presumed dead,” said Leah through clenched teeth. “Chances are we’re really going to be dead unless we get some help. Now get me the stuff on that list.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said the Tellarite, recoiling from her gaze. He took a few steps from the shuttlecraft but turned back to her, pain etched in his small, black eyes. “I can’t stand to talk to them ... knowing they’re all going to die.”
“I know it’s hard,” admitted Leah. “Maybe your calculations were wrong, and it’ll miss here.”
“No,” said Paldor grimly. “But even if they believed us, I don’t know what they could do on such short notice.”
“Just get our stuff,” ordered Brahms, growing exasperated. She didn’t want to be cold to the plight of these people, but she had seen her husband and friends perish in the consuming flame. Strangers were important, but she had no emotions left to grieve for them. Maybe living their last day in ignorant bliss instead of panic was a blessing.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” said Paldor. He hurried off, taking with him two of the constables, who followed at a discreet distance.
Leah couldn’t worry about that now, because her associate’s departure would finally let her try something she’d been eager to do. She hurried back into the shuttlecraft and shut the door behind her, blocking out the prying eyes surrounding the field. Then she sat at the pilot’s console and ran a sensor scan of the constable station a couple of blocks away. She wanted to see if she could locate the Klingon in his cell, or at least find the force-field that marked his door. Then she would get a lock on him with the transporter.
No such luck. Surrounding the entire station was a dampening field, making it impossible to beam people in or out. These folks [79] weren’t the hayseeds they appeared, and she had to forget about pulling off a painless jailbreak. Although the dampening field worked against her, it wouldn’t do anything to stop the monstrous force headed their way.
It would, however, keep her from getting easy access to the Klingon and whatever he knew. So all she could do now was watch the sensors and the darkening sky, wondering how much time they really had left.
Maltz paced in his cell, suddenly more sober than he had been in the last fifty years. All he knew was that he had to get out of this place and help that poor, deluded human. He should have helped her more when she was standing in front of him, but if she persisted in thinking it was a natural disaster, then she was a bigger fool than those fat constables. They had to be honest about what they were fighting. Like most objects of true horror, the Genesis Device was artificially designed.
But who had control of it now? Who had turned it into an energy wave that could sweep across space? One thing was certain: he wasn’t going to get any answers sitting in this cell. He had to get out of here—or he’d be left to die like a caged animal.
Unfortunately, Maltz knew how long it took to roust the magistrate, if they even knew which bars to search. He glanced around at the brown earthen walls and shimmering force-field, realizing he had to arrange his own release. The Klingon had thought about breaking out of here before, but his rashness was always tempered by the knowledge that he would have to deal with these people the next day. Now there would be no tomorrow.
Although they had taken his knife, they had left him with his ceremonial chain-mail sash, not knowing what a treasure trove a Klingon’s sash could be. He surveyed the room again, thinking those rustic walls and ceiling could house video-log equipment. But [80] he decided that even if they were recording him, he was the only prisoner, and they probably weren’t paying very much attention.
Besides, he would look as if he were repairing his clothing, and it certainly needed it, after that brawl.
Maltz removed his sash at the same time that he removed his cloak. He wanted to look as if he were just getting comfortable, preparing to stay for a while. He sat on his cot and hunched his broad back, trying to shut off their view, while he turned over his sash and unsnapped the back lining. From hidden crevices and folds, he drew forth his arsenal: three small throwing daggers, a garrote and fishing line, a stiletto, a vial of deadly poison, a vial of acid, a wad of gel explosive, knuckle armor, lockpicks, sewing kit, Klingon communicator badge, and five strips of latinum.
The last object he withdrew was a small signal mirror, only it wouldn’t be used for signaling today. Carefully he returned all the other objects to their hiding places, except for the explosives, the mirror, and the armor to fortify his knuckles.
Maltz palmed these objects while he put his cloak and sash back on. Then he strolled over to the door of his cell and bent down, as if fixing something on his boot. In his experience, every force-field had blind spots near the edge, between the field emitters. These blind spots were only a few centimeters across, which didn’t do a normal-sized person a lot of good. But Maltz also knew that a force-field wall was actually thousands of crisscrossing beams, and that a beam reflected back onto itself caused all sorts of havoc.
Using his knuckle armor, he slowly pushed the mirror across the floor, probing for a blind spot between the emitters. The mirror bounced off the shimmering barrier a few times, but each time he caught it in midair and patiently tried again. Finally he succeeded in slipping the reflective glass under the pulsing shield, and he gave a satisfied grunt. Now penetration in the right spot would change the direction of the beams just enough that they would strike the [81] mirror on the floor and be deflected upward. When that happened, the force-field would be attacking itself.
He couldn’t conceal what he would do next, but if he moved quickly enough, perhaps his jailers wouldn’t notice. He ran to his cot and grabbed his threadbare mattress. Holding it in front of him like a battering ram, the Klingon gritted his teeth and charged the door of his cell. The mattress hit the force-field and was propelled back into his face, but the Klingon kept charging forward as a lightning bolt rippled across the doorway. With a burst of smoke and sparks, the force-field imploded, and the shimmering curtain blinked erratically. Maltz’s momentum carried him and the mattress through the opening into a heap on the floor. He was free—then a siren screamed directly over his head.
Maltz leaped to his feet, slipping the knuckle armor over his fist just as the outer door opened. The first one through happened to be the haughty proctor, and he received a crushing blow straight to the snout that sent him reeling into the wall. Before the big Tellarite even hit the floor, the Klingon had ripped the disruptor from his holster, and he sent a wild beam streaking through the outer doorway—just to keep the others at bay.
Maltz quickly slammed the outer door shut and propped the Tellarite’s unconscious body against it. He chuckled at the shouting and commotion outside in the waiting room, and he ignored them when they began to demand that he give himself up.
“You can’t get past us!” they shouted.
He had no intentions of going past them. Gingerly, he retrieved his mirror from the doorway of the cell, which was attempting to return to normal. With his newly acquired disruptor, he drilled a small hole about waist-high in a wall which abutted the outdoors. The Klingon stuffed his tiny wad of gel explosive into the hole he had made
, then stepped back. With steely-eyed fearlessness, he adjusted the disruptor to maximum and blasted the charge he had planted.
[82] The resulting explosion rocked the neighborhood and sent a cloud of dust and debris spewing twenty meters into the air. It also blew open a hole in the wall about a meter across, through which staggered a bedraggled Klingon, his clothes and facial hair still smoldering. With shouts and whistles, concerned citizens began converging on the smoky site, and Maltz had to shake himself off and run for it. He covered his head with his cloak, hoping no one would be able to give a good description of him.
As he rounded a corner and dashed down a side street, Maltz tried to figure out where he could go or what he could do. He had to find the strange woman and her shuttlecraft, that much was sure. But he didn’t know where she was, and he couldn’t very well start asking; in fact, he had to stay out of sight, if possible. The constables would really be after him now.
As the Klingon staggered into the shadows and slumped behind a trash vaporizer, he remembered someone who knew where she was. His old colleague, Consul Bekra. If he knew the Capellan, he was probably taking measures to save his own skin. That would mean a trip to the hangar where he kept his shuttlecraft.
“Urgh, why don’t I have a shuttlecraft like everyone else?” muttered the old Klingon. He knew the reason—they didn’t trust him with one.
Maltz unfolded the hood from his cloak and pulled it over his head, hoping to hide his head ridges and shock of hair. But he glanced at himself in his signal mirror and realized it wasn’t enough, so he took the sewing kit from his sash. Using a pair of small scissors and the mirror, he clipped off most of his distinctive beard and moustache. A lot of it was singed, anyway, and it wasn’t hair that made a Klingon.
Now when he looked at himself in the mirror, he looked sufficiently different to fool people at a glance. With a groan, Maltz dragged himself to his feet and wrapped the cloak around his gaunt [83] frame. He had a long walk through back streets to reach the shuttle hangar, but at least the sky was darkening. Soon it would be night on this part of Hakon.
STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book One Page 8
