Rubbing her arms in the suddenly chill air, Leah Brahms stepped out of the shuttlecraft and looked at the crimson clouds backlighting the skyline. Light shifted on the earthen walls of the rustic dwellings, making them look like an eroded slope deep in the desert; and for the first time, Leah appreciated the naturalistic architecture. However, she wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of night falling in this quaint village.
That was silly, because the awful force which chased them moved almost too swiftly to be seen. Still, she didn’t want it to sneak up on her in the darkness. With a gulp, the scientist stepped closer to the open hatch of the shuttlecraft, so that she could hear the sensor alert she had programmed. Once the wave came within sensor range, they would only have a few minutes. How many minutes, it was anyone’s guess.
A furry animal about the size of a goat strolled through the vacant lot, a bell ringing from its collar. It stopped to consider her for a moment, then shook its bell and walked on. She had noticed a decline in the presence of the onlookers, who had probably gone home to eat the food she smelled wafting on the breeze. The police presence was still high, hovering around six or seven ever since that explosion an hour ago. No one had explained what the explosion was about, but it had obviously cast suspicion upon the doomsayers.
Leah figured even more constables were following Paldor, who had yet to return from his shopping trip. This was bad, because she didn’t know if they could effect repairs before they had to run for it. The Tellarite had checked in via combadge to say that he was making progress, albeit slowly, but that wasn’t much consolation. She [84] still couldn’t do anything but wait, and Leah had never been good at waiting.
Leah glanced inside the shuttlecraft at the radiation suit, hulking silently in the rear. She didn’t want to put it on again, but that gnawing, mindless drive for survival was urging her to don the suit. But to put on the suit meant that she had given up and was willing to watch another planet die. Besides, she needed full dexterity to pilot the shuttlecraft, because if they lost the shuttlecraft, there would be no escape at all. No way to warn anyone else. At the moment, the shuttlecraft and the data they had collected were more important than anything.
I’ll have enough warning, Leah told herself, not really believing it was true. She stepped inside the shuttlecraft and shut the door, blocking out the crimson sunset that was bathing the mud-colored street in a warm glow.
As Maltz pushed open the window, which he had unlocked with his lockpicks, he could smell the scent of something burning. Choking smoke didn’t fill the cavernous shuttlecraft hangar, but he could see light at the far end of the building, silhouetting a dozen boxy shuttlecraft. In fact, that was the only light in the whole building, now that night had fallen. He sniffed again, deciding that something was burning at the far end of the building.
As he stalked through the dark hangar, moving from one shuttlecraft to another, the Klingon drew his disruptor from his belt. There were windows on every wall, but the only light came from a work light hanging in the far corner, illuminating a shuttlecraft with its hatch open. It looked like somebody was packing to leave.
He drew closer, keeping to the shadows. To no surprise, it was the Capellan consul, Bekra, and he was burning papers, transparencies, and isolinear chips in a trash receptacle, where he had a [85] considerable fire going. Bekra wasn’t dressed in his usual finery, but instead wore a simple black jumpsuit as well as his ubiquitous turban. Duffel bags and boxes of gear sat outside the hatch, ready to be loaded into the waiting shuttlecraft.
“Going somewhere?” asked Maltz, stepping out of the shadows. He kept the disruptor trained on his old colleague.
“Ahh!” shouted Bekra with alarm, having been taken by surprise. He squinted into the wavering light, uncertain who the hooded visitor was. “Is that you, Maltz?”
The old Klingon scratched the stubble on his chin and grinned. “Makes me look younger, I think.”
The Capellan laughed nervously. “You don’t need that weapon, my old friend. If you want to escape with me in my shuttlecraft, that’s no problem. But I have to warn you—I don’t have warp drive. I’m thinking that if I leave now, I can get out of the path of that thing ... if it’s really out there.”
“It is really out there,” said Maltz, stepping toward the small bonfire. “What are you burning up in that can?”
“Oh, nothing of interest,” said Bekra, edging toward the open hatch of his shuttlecraft.
“Stop there,” ordered the Klingon, aiming his weapon at the Capellan’s chest. “Just so you know, I never set weapons to stun. So who have you been spying for all these years?”
“Spying?” Bekra forced a laugh. “You are getting melodramatic in your old age.”
Maltz smiled wistfully and kicked the trash can over, spilling its flaming contents on the floor of the hangar. Hoping he was distracted, Bekra bolted for the hatch of his shuttlecraft, but Maltz drilled him in the leg, shearing it off just below the knee. Howling with pain, the Capellan dropped to the floor and writhed, gripping his burnt stump.
He screamed incoherently, while Maltz carefully picked through the smoldering debris.
[86] “I always suspected you,” said the Klingon. “Too much brains for this post—you had to have ambitions.”
“The first-aid kit!” sputtered the Capellan, twisting in agony.
“You will not die,” said the Klingon, scoffing at him. “Unless I have to shoot you again. Now who do you spy for?”
Without warning, the windows all around the enormous hangar imploded, showering them with debris; and a ferocious wind ripped half the corrugated roof off the building, revealing a blazing field of stars in the sky.
The wind churned through the metal cavern, whipping the burning embers from the fire into a glowing funnel cloud. Maltz rocked unsteadily on his feet, while Bekra cried out with fear and rolled under his shuttlecraft.
“The wind!” roared Maltz, holding his ears and gaping at the hole in the roof. “The wind!”
eight
Leah Brahms felt the shuttlecraft shake as if it were being vandalized by a mob of hooligans. That was her first thought—that the citizens of Hakon had attacked her for some stupid reason. She punched her board to open the hatch, bolted to her feet, and charged outside, ready to give them hell. Instead she was met by an icy blast of wind—so frigid, it was like being in the Antarctic. It staggered her, and she felt the skin of her face stiffening. She looked up, expecting to see the worst, but the starlit sky was so brilliant that it was like viewing it from space. The distant moon seemed to have a strobe light on it.
She had heard of it getting colder at night in some places, but this was ridiculous. As she shivered and tried to stand her ground in the freezing wind, she noticed that the Tellarites and constables were also running for cover. Their vacant lot was suddenly deserted, and there was a frightened buzzing sound, as if the populace were crying with alarm. This wasn’t normal weather.
She ducked back inside the shuttlecraft and shut the hatch, at the same moment that her sensor alarm went off. Without even [88] checking what it was, Leah started the transporter sequence to lock onto Paldor’s combadge and bring him back to their tiny refuge, which was shuddering like a grass shack in a hurricane.
The Tellarite appeared on the small transporter pad at the back of the craft, his arms full of dishes and electronic parts, which dropped to the deck as he shivered uncontrollably. “What’s ... happening?” he asked, barely getting the words out.
Leah studied her readouts, and her eyes grew wide with fright. “Oh, my God! The wave attacked the sun first, and it’s eating its way around it. This solar system could be without a sun!”
“Will we start to go out of orbit?” asked Paldor, dropping the rest of the spare parts and dashing up the aisle.
Leah shook her head in frustration. “Who knows? The sun should maintain its mass, and it might even remain a star—but what kind of star? Anyway, it will hit us soon. We’ve got to get out of here.”<
br />
“But all these people!” said Paldor.
“If you want to stay here and die with them, get out now,” said Brahms coldly. “Otherwise, sit down and prepare for launch.”
His face ashen, the Tellarite slid into his seat beside her. But he didn’t do anything to prepare for launch; he just stared at the blank front screen, weeping. Leah put everything else out of her mind as she plotted a course for the heart of the Federation and set the computer to work on compensating for the wind.
Moments later, the shuttlecraft roared out of the vacant lot, streaking over the tops of the earthen buildings, which were already beginning to crack and fall apart from the extreme cold and gravitational changes. In a panic, people rushed into the street, only to be blasted by the wind and flying debris. There wasn’t anything anyone could do for them now, thought Leah grimly.
“I feel alive!” bellowed the old Klingon, shaking his fists into the savage wind as it wreaked havoc in the shuttlecraft hangar. Nothing [89] was left of the roof, and the air was cold and bracing, like a firm slap to the face. Maltz stood tall against the debris which pelted him, shouting down the wind.
“Yes, you Genesis Wave ... you’re a worthy adversary! Come and get me.”
The wind was trying to get him, but he wouldn’t go down without a fight. His jaw set with determination, Maltz strode toward the shuttlecraft just as a blue phaser beam streaked past him, tearing a hole in his cloak. He ducked down and zigzagged in a crouch, dodging streaks as Bekra continued to shoot wildly at him. Maltz finally reached the injured Capellan and kicked the phaser out of his hand.
“Stop being a pet Q!” shouted the Klingon over the din. “I hate these Federation toadies and all they stand for, so I do not care who your masters are! But you tell me what you have done, or I will leave you here. Understood?”
“Romulans,” said Bekra, lowering his head. “I send dispatches to the Romulans. It started out innocently enough, when I—”
Maltz smacked him across the face, setting off another round of whimpering. Then he spit on the Capellan and said, “Romulans! I should kill you, anyway. But you brought the human to me, and she gave me the warning.”
The old Klingon pointed a crooked finger into the howling wind. “Somewhere out there is an enemy worse than any we have ever faced. To have unleashed this weapon on us ... they are worse than the Borg or the Dominion.”
But Bekra was too busy whimpering and clutching his cauterized stump, so Maltz heaved a sigh, grabbed the injured consul, and threw him into his own shuttlecraft. He threw in a few of his bags and boxes for good measure, but he left most of them behind.
The Klingon climbed aboard the shuttlecraft and sat at the controls, cracking his knuckles. He had flown similar vessels many times—there was nothing to it. Most shuttlecraft hadn’t changed much in a hundred years, and this one in particular looked [90] old-fashioned. Maybe Bekra wasn’t as important as he thought he was, having only this pathetic vessel with no warp capability.
He went into a vertical launch and zoomed straight up through the torn roof of the massive hangar. Paying no attention to the instruments, the Klingon punched the membrane board repeatedly until he got the craft to keep going up. There was no subtlety in this launch—it was thrusters blasting against the monstrous wind, with the craft straining and creaking to gain every centimeter in altitude. Finally they broke through the stratosphere of the planet into calm sailing, spiraling upward at a breakneck speed.
As they reached their maximum impulse speed, which was more suited to continent hopping than solar-system hopping, he turned on the sensors to take a look around.
The first thing he picked up was a distress signal about four thousand kilometers ahead of him, and he locked onto the signal and used it for a course heading. Ignoring Bekra’s moans and heartfelt pleas for assistance, Maltz opened several Federation frequencies and broadcast on all of them.
“Hello, fellow shuttlecraft,” he said jovially. “This is Consul Maltz and Consul Bekra on Bekra’s shuttlecraft. We have escaped from the planet, but we do not have warp drive.”
“That’s too bad,” came the woman’s unfriendly response, accompanied by static. “The wave is working its way through the sun in this solar system, and we don’t have a lot of time. I may save your worthless hides, but you’ll have to play by my rules.”
The Klingon grunted with distaste at having to be tactful to a human. “You could put a tractor beam on us, and both ships could go into warp.”
“Listen to me, Maltz—I’m the only one who has warp drive, so your shuttlecraft is worthless. Unless you’d care to face that demon behind us, you’ll do exactly as I say. I’ve got shields up, and I’ll leave you here unless you give me your word that I’m the commander.”
[91] The Klingon clenched his teeth and grunted, although his admiration for this human woman had soared tremendously.
“Take the deal!” rasped Bekra, writhing on the deck.
“I agree,” said Maltz, bowing his head and slamming his fist to his chest. “I pledge to follow your command if we unite crews. But I must report to a Klingon base as soon as possible.”
“Fine with me,” answered Leah. “I think it’s a little grandiose to say we’re ‘uniting crews,’ but—” Her voice broke up in a crackle of static.
“We have interference,” said Maltz.
After several moments of useless noise, her voice came back forcefully. “I’ve stopped. We only have short-range communications, and the anomaly is affecting it. Lower your shields and prepare to transport.”
“All my gear ... my records,” said Bekra, suddenly alarmed at the finality of what they were doing.
The Klingon scowled as he punched the board. “Your deeds in the next few days will mean more than anything you’ve done before. We’re going to go down in history, my friend ... if there is any history after this.”
One at a time, their bodies turned into shimmering columns of suspended molecules, only to disappear entirely, while the empty shuttlecraft hurtled toward its doom.
Captain Picard paced within the circle of workstations on the bridge of the Enterprise, trying not to show his concern. They weren’t making any headway—this process was moving too slowly over too vast an area. They were on the defensive, waiting. And he never liked to wait.
La Forge looked up from his engineering console and said, “Captain, the planet Hakon is sending all kinds of distress signals and subspace chatter. Something must be happening there.”
“I concur,” said Data on ops. “We are picking up unusual [92] readings from solar system SY-911 on long-range sensors. It appears the sun in that solar system is in distress.”
“Distress?” asked Captain Picard curiously, taking a step toward Data’s station. “It is going nova? Dark corona syndrome?”
Data shook his head. “No, sir. The sun appears to be decreasing rapidly in temperature and size—among other radical changes. It is oscillating and emitting variable gravity waves and solar winds, which must be affecting the planets in the solar system. These readings are troubling, because there is no recognized phenomenon that would cause them. One thing is certain—unless the inhabitants of Hakon have a reliable shelter system, they are not going to survive the drastic changes in climate.”
Picard gritted his teeth and looked at the concerned faces all around him. “How many inhabitants?”
“Eight million, Sir, most of them Tellarites,” answered Data. “The colony was settled on agrarian principles and has relatively small population centers spread out over one large continent.”
“Captain!” called La Forge with urgency in his voice. “Most of the messages from Hakon have now stopped, although we’re still getting distress signals from a few ships in the area ... freighters and shuttlecraft.”
The captain stepped toward the tactical station, where a pale Antosian, Ensign Coltak, busily worked the board. “Did you try to answer their hails?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Coltak, sounding fr
ustrated, “but they haven’t responded. There’s a great deal of interference, but we captured what we could before the channels went dead.”
“ETA, Mister Data?” asked Picard, helplessness gnawing in the pit of his stomach.
“Two hours and twenty-three minutes before we reach the solar system,” answered the android.
Picard’s shoulders slumped as he turned toward the tactical station. “Mister Coltak, it would appear that we have time to view [93] some of those messages from Hakon. Maybe we can get an idea what we’re facing.”
“A thing that can blight a star,” answered the Antosian in amazement as he studied his readouts. “I’m sorry, Sir, I’ll start isolating the messages.”
“That’s all right, Ensign,” said the captain, knowing how he felt.
A few moments later, the main viewscreen blinked on, showing what appeared to be the interior of a spaceport. A few panicked people dashed across the screen, covering their heads from flying debris. The walls and ceiling of the building appeared to be crumbling all around them, and wind ripped the furnishings. Finally a frightened Tellarite staggered in front of the chaotic scene; although he was large, he was shivering uncontrollably, and Picard could see his icy breath.
“Dispatcher Makolis from Cloud Spaceport on Hakon ... calling whoever’s out there!” shrieked the Tellarite, his voice barely audible over the ferocious din. “Something is happening ... strange weather, without warning. Help us, please!”
The distraught Tellarite went on, begging futilely for help, but Picard barely listened, he was so deep in thought. “They did have warning,” he said to himself. “Somebody went all the way there from Seran to warn them, but it didn’t do any good.”
STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book One Page 9
