by L. A. Graf
“What is it?” Sanner was almost leaping up and down in the threshold in an attempt to get a better view inside the darkened cave. “I can’t see anything!”
“I saw something waver in the air,” Martine said, her voice tense. “It almost looked like heat shimmers, like the afterglow you get right after a torpedo goes out the bay. It’s just to Lieutenant Tomlinson’s right.”
“I see it.” Tomlinson craned his head across one shoulder. He took a sideways step toward Martine, then froze abruptly. “Is it following me? I think I saw it move, and I don’t want—”
“Lieutenant Uhura.” That was Yuki Smith’s diffident voice from the entrance. “We might be able to see it better if it were darker in here.”
Uhura took a breath that was a little too fast and deep. She paid the price when cold air burned down the inside of her throat, but right now that was the least of her worries. “Everyone adjust your lights down,” she ordered, but that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was what came next. “Martine, you and I will shut our lights off entirely.”
“Aye, sir,” said the female weapons officer, as if it was a perfectly normal command to be given when you were inside a cave with a completely unknown hazard on the loose. She reached up to her helmet quickly enough to make Uhura a little ashamed about her own hesitation, [148] and her light was the first to wink out. Uhura’s went a second later, then the glow from the threshold dimmed to orange-gold. The darkness inside the ice cave congealed down to a nearly solid black. Uhura closed her eyes and counted to twenty to help them adjust, then opened them again.
A veil of phosphorescence, the clear burning blue of a flame’s heart, hung in the air about ten meters away from her. It rippled and swirled and billowed, sometimes drifting a little further away, sometimes curling a little closer. There didn’t seem to be any particular purpose in its movement, but it was eddying perilously close to the darker shadows that were the two weapons officers.
“Crewmen, fall back to your left!” Uhura didn’t wait to watch them obey. She could see that she was blocking their only safe line of retreat, and she scrambled to clear it without even looking behind her. A jagged block of ice caught at her heels and nearly spun her to the ground, but Uhura felt a gloved hand catch her and steady her back to balance before she could fall. She glanced up and saw Sanner’s face peering down at her worriedly.
“Thanks, Zap.” It didn’t seem like the right moment to chastise him for leaving the safety of the threshold. “Did Martine and Tomlinson get away safely?”
“Yes, sir.” Their joined voices came from so nearly the same place in the darkness beside her that Uhura suspected they were clutching at each other’s hands.
“Good.” She kept her gaze fixed on the fire-colored phosphorescence that hung across the room from them. “It didn’t follow us, did it?”
“No, but it’s not exactly staying put, either,” Sanner [149] said frankly. “I’d feel a lot better, Lieutenant, if we were as far away from that thing as we could possibly get.”
“Me, too.” Uhura reached up to reignite her carbide lamp and brightened it to a fierce white glow that made the ominous phosphorescent curtain disappear. Then she headed back to the entrance of the ice cave, thinking out her orders as she went. “We’re going to head back down the conduits. Jaeger and Sanner, you’re in the lead. Smith, follow them and make sure you find the spot markers Mr. Chekov left along the way. Wright, you go next with Palamas and D’Amato to help you—” She had been about to say, “carry Davis,” but that determined young woman was already making her way unsteadily toward the exit. “—with anything,” Uhura finished lamely, but Wright gave her a somber nod before she turned to go, as if she’d heard the thought that had been left unspoken.
That left her with Martine and Tomlinson. Uhura turned to face them, wondering if the two young weapons officers were up to the task she was about to assign. The glare of her carbide light showed her two tired but steadfast faces, as well as a pair of unabashedly clasped hands.
“We’re going to be the rear guard,” she told them quietly. “That means one of us has to wait in the dark while the rest of the team goes on, to make sure that blue glow isn’t coming after us.”
Tomlinson reached up ruefully to touch the useless photon lamp on his caving helmet. “I guess that would be me.”
“That helmet’s not glued to your head,” Angela Martine told him tartly. “And neither is mine. We can take turns.”
“We’ll all three take turns,” Uhura said. “Staring at [150] nothing for too long makes you start to think you’re seeing things whether they’re there or not.” She pulled out her whistle and swung it between her fingers. “We’ll leave one lookout on guard for five minutes, then whistle them up the right path to join us and leave a new one behind. Understood, gentlemen?”
“Aye, sir!” said Tomlinson, but it was Martine who asked, “What should we do if we see the blue glow coming behind us?”
“Whistle the Starfleet emergency signal,” Uhura said. “Three short, three long, three short.”
“Then run tike hell,” Tomlinson added grimly. “Before you find out the hard way where the captain and Mr. Chekov went.”
She had started to measure the trip in watches, Uhura realized. Two more until she had to be the one left behind, then one more, then the ice-cold moment when Martine and Tomlinson tramped away after the rest of the cave party and left her standing alone with her helmet in her hands, watching the twirl of fire die in front of the reflector as a final drip of water sizzled on the reactive carbide rocks inside. By the time her eyes adjusted enough to see the departing glow of Martine’s helmet, it was nearly gone. The sound of Tomlinson’s voice lingered a little longer, rising once to a crack of laughter at something Martine said. Then the noise faded under the ubiquitous pop and crack of ice crystallizing inside the alien conduits, and Uhura was truly alone in the darkness.
It had gotten even colder than when they first tramped [151] down this way, cold enough that the engineered fibers of her cave jumper couldn’t tighten enough to insulate her body against it anymore. While she’d been walking, Uhura barely noticed the minute heat loss, but as soon as she began standing watch, she could feel a slow, inexorable chill seeping through to her skin. Her first instinct was to start pacing and generate more heat, but the ice-slicked surface beneath her feet quashed that idea. Uhura tried isometric exercises instead, but they didn’t seem to keep her much warmer. She finally fell back on swinging her arms back and forth as rapidly as she could. That at least gave her the advantage of counting how many times she had clapped her hands together rather than the ridiculously slow passage of her five allotted minutes.
At clap 173, Uhura thought she saw her hands leave a filmy blue path through the darkness as she swung them in front of her.
Fear propelled her into an unbalanced backward scrabble. She’d forgotten about the icy footing, and when her boots hit a ledge she hadn’t been expecting, they skidded out from under her completely. Uhura got her hands down in time to catch her weight and avoid the worst of the jolt, but she was left sprawled and unable to tell which way she had been facing before. She stared fiercely out into the darkness, trying to ignore the melting optical illusions that floated across your vision when you tried too hard to see in the dark. Maybe what she had glimpsed had just been another of those phantom traces of light, coincidentally moving in the same direction as her hands.
[152] “And maybe you’re just going nuts,” Uhura told herself bracingly. But as soon as she spoke she realized she could see the filigree edges of her misted breath turn blue in the darkness. Her hands shot up, the one with the whistle to her lips, the other to the lumpy carbide light on her helmet. But with her teeth clamped on the small whistle and her fingers poised on the igniter lever, Uhura paused. Now that she had made the decision that would soon bless her with light, she ironically found her nerves steady enough to tolerate another few moments of darkness. And there was something different about this
blue light, something she wanted to make sure of before she sparked the carbide’s fierce glare and drove it completely out of sight.
Uhura swung her head back and forth, trying to use the more light-sensitive corners of her vision. As soon as she did that, she realized what she was seeing. The bluish glow wasn’t hanging in the air—it came through the ice crust that covered the walls of the conduit. Beneath the ice, Uhura could just glimpse a dim and deeper blue-violet radiation shining from the ancient alien walls. It refracted into brighter shafts of blue inside the wall’s icy coatings wherever internal cracks and fractures caught and focused it, then sent it slanting out into the cold air. It had been one of those natural crystal mirrors that had illuminated Uhura’s hands and breath. If she hadn’t been standing in exactly that spot, Uhura realized, she might never have seen the light at all.
She scrambled to her feet, wondering if the sides of this conduit had been glowing all along. If the ice back along their path had been thicker or milkier, neither she [153] nor the two weapons officers might have noticed that near-ultraviolet glimmer. But now that she had seen it, there could be no further doubt. The light was rising off the engraved alien metal that lined this alien passage, and where it was focused into a stronger shaft, it looked exactly the same as the blue phosphorescence that had rippled through the ice cave an hour ago.
That answered two of the questions that had been haunting Uhura while she alternately walked and waited in the dark. Now she knew the force that had swept away Captain Kirk and Ensign Chekov hadn’t been an accident, hadn’t sprung unplanned from any natural deposit of transperiodic ore minerals. It was a product of some unknown alien technology, still alive and working in this cave despite the millions of years that must have passed since its makers had left or gone extinct. And worse than that—Uhura also knew that their departure from the ice cave hadn’t delivered them from the dangers of this ancient alien installation. It had merely put some space between them and the most dangerous part of whatever offensive or defensive force had sprung to life here in the dark.
Far off down the conduit, a whistle blew once, then fell silent. After a pause, it blew again. Martine or Tomlinson, Uhura realized, summoning her up the trail to join them.
Had it really been five minutes that she had sat there, watching the glow of alien light and mulling over all its implications? Uhura shook her head in disbelief and felt ice slide down her neck from the hoarfrost that had settled on her hair. She reignited her carbide lamp, tucked her whistle back into her pocket, then headed up the [154] slippery ice-floored conduit. The back of her neck was prickling, and she knew it wasn’t just because of the ice crystals melting their way down to her jumper’s collar. Now that she knew these conduits were intrinsically connected to the alien force that had been activated in this underground structure, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that the darkness she passed through was somehow watching her.
“Lieutenant Uhura?” Martine’s carbide glow came partway down the conduit to meet her, not normal for a shift change. “Be careful, the ice is really thick up here. We’re back to where the waterfall used to be.”
Uhura took a step up toward the other woman and found herself sliding back down the steep, icy slope rather than advancing up it. She accepted Martine’s outstretched hand to pull her over the crest of the former plunge pool, which now looked more like an ice-filled fountain permanently frozen in mid-splash.
“Did Mr. Jaeger find the blowhole Survey Team Three used to come down here?”
“He found where he thinks it used to be,” Martine said, grimly. “It’s completely covered with ice.”
Uhura followed her around the frozen torrent of thickly clustered icicles that had once been a waterfall. “Could we break through?”
“Wrong question,” said Sanner’s voice from somewhere far above her. There was a crunch of metal digging into ice, and a flurry of crushed ice crystals floated down over Uhura’s upturned face. Her carbide glow reached up to meet another, ten meters higher and obscured by the jagged edges of the broken conduit [155] ceiling. “The real question is, do we want to break through?”
“Zap?” Uhura took a step back, trying to angle her head so she could see the geologist clinging to the icy wall of the fracture. He had set a rope on pitons as he went up that wall, but he was unwinding it just as carefully now that he was on the way down. She watched him rappel down another half meter, his carbide glow swinging wildly as he turned in mid-air to approach the ice at a different angle. “What’s the matter? Is it too slippery for us to climb out?”
“Probably.” Sanner kicked up a second shower of ice shavings as he dug his crampons into the ice. His voice sounded unusually flat, especially considering the rush of his rapid descent. “But trust me, Lieutenant, you wouldn’t want to come this way, not even if I carved you a spiral staircase out of that waterfall.”
Uhura frowned, remembering the dim violet-blue glow of the conduit she had just left behind. “The force field, or whatever it is that we saw in the ice cave,” she said. “You saw it on the upper level of the cave?”
“In living color.” Sanner unwound the last loop of his rope, levered out the piton it had been lashed to, and did an unbraked slide down the rest of the way to the bottom. Shaved ice clung to his helmet, and glittered on his jumper like diamond dust, an incongruous contrast to his somber dark eyes. “Not just tendrils of it, either—the same kind of solid sheet we saw below. It must go right up through the rock like it wasn’t there. Hell, for all I know, it keeps going right up to the surface!”
“How close did you get?” That was Jaeger’s slight German accent, echoing from the far side of the frozen [156] plunge pool. Uhura glanced across and saw that the rest of the party had gathered there, making a tight knot for warmth while they waited for Sanner. She couldn’t see Davis in the huddle, and assumed Wright had placed the injured crewman in the middle for protection. With the cold this intense and their cave jumpers leaking heat, hypothermia was a danger for everyone, but especially for the disabled members of the party. Uhura glanced at Jaeger as well, and wasn’t reassured by the way his bruised cheek and cut lip stood out against a too-pale face.
“Not even a hundred meters,” Sanner said. “I had my carbide turned way down, so I could see it from far away. And when I saw it, I just turned right around and headed back. We spent enough hours poking around up there to know that there was only one way in.”
“One way at that end of the system,” Jaeger agreed. He paused to grit his teeth against a chatter. “But there’s still the warm draft we felt through the rubble pile in the upper chamber. One of those cracks must lead to the surface.”
“Yeah ... one of those hundreds of tiny cracks.” Despite his words, however, Uhura could see a spark rekindle in Sanner’s tired face. Clearly, the thought of squirming through hundreds of tiny cracks appealed to him. “I didn’t think you guys would want to go back and start digging there all over again.”
“What other choice do we have?” Palamas inquired, sounding almost as dispassionately logical as a Vulcan. Uhura wondered if she did a lot of work with Mr. Spock on the Science Deck. “If we can’t go out through either the upper or lower level at this end, and we can’t use the [157] transporter, then we have to try the rubble pile again.”
“And we’ll have lights this time, so it’ll be easier to see what we’re doing,” Yuki Smith said cheerfully. “And a lot harder to fall off.”
Uhura nodded. “It’s decided, then. We’ll go back up to the breakdown cave where we found Team Three, and start digging our way out. Let’s head out, same order as before.”
Sanner coiled up the last of his rope and stuffed it in his backpack, then headed over to Jaeger. “Come on, Karl,” he said, with surprising gentleness. “Let me give you a hand, just over this slippery part here.”
The older geologist grunted and let Sanner haul him to his feet. His teeth were definitely chattering now. “Just because you were right about the light going thro
ugh to the upper level doesn’t mean you know everything about this cave system,” Uhura heard him grumble to his fellow scientist. “For instance, those weren’t vadose passages back there.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what the hell were they?”
“Tension cracks, from the deroofing stress created by the conduit—”
Their voices dwindled up the tunnel, and the other members of the original survey team and the rescue team trailed after them. Uhura watched Wright lift Davis to her feet and gesture the quiet D’Amato to help support her on the other side. The surveyor was barely hanging on to consciousness now, her eyes narrowed down to pained slits as if even their carbide lights were too strong for her. Uhura gave Wright a questioning look and got a shake of the head in response that told her [158] wordlessly what she needed to know. Davis wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this cold and constant movement. If they didn’t manage to break through that rubble pile and get the injured surveyor some proper medical attention soon, they would run the risk of losing her entirely.
Tomlinson and Martine waited with Uhura until the last of the other team members had left the frozen waterfall. “Which of us gets to play rear guard first?” Tomlinson asked. He might have been trying to sound playful, but the words came out just plain weary.
“None of us.” Uhura met his surprised gaze with a look she hoped was stern enough to cut off questions. “We know that curtain is still back near the entrance—”
“Not really,” said Martine. “Zap said he saw it a hundred meters away, but we don’t know exactly where he was when he saw it. We walked a long way from the entrance to that section where Mr. Chekov fell through.”
Uhura sighed. She’d been hoping she was the only one to have that disconcerting thought. She could see from the two worried young faces in front of her, though, that the implications had sunk in on both Tomlinson and Martine. She chose her words carefully, trying to think about how Captain Kirk had inspired Chekov to reconstruct his map. “If that force field is moving, we’ll just have to deal with it when it arrives,” she said, although she didn’t have the least idea what she meant by “deal with it.” “In the meantime, the important thing is to dig our way out of the rubble pile quickly.”
