by Ilsa J. Bick
“Never stopped you before.” Stern chafed her arms. “Sorry. Just want to do something, that’s all.”
“You want to do something?” McCoy pursed his lips into a wet rosebud. “Tell me, you give Halak a clean bill of health?”
“I discharged him from sickbay three days ago. Why?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. I was just thinking: How long that poor soul been languishing in your brig?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Yesterday.” McCoy’s snowy white eyebrows reached for his hairline. “Over twenty-four hours without medical attention. And now he’s going to spend another four, five days, no medical care, cooped up on a godforsaken Vulcan warpshuttle, no doctor to make sure he’s comfortable, change his bandages.” He paused. “Give him his vitamins and such.”
“Vitamins.” Stern’s eyes slitted. “Vitamins?”
“Vitamins.” McCoy’s look was one of supreme innocence. “There are some powerful bugs out there, Jo, powerful bugs.”
The silence was so complete Stern imagined McCoy heard her swallow even over subspace. “Mac,” she said, “he’s in the brig—in isolation. No visitors.”
“Who’s talking visiting? You’re chief medical officer. And he’s your patient.”
After a moment, Stern’s lips split in a broad smile. “Mac, if my day gets any better, I may have to hire someone to help me enjoy it.”
“I’ll do it for free.” McCoy looked supremely pleased. That’s my girl.”
Two hours later, Bulast said, “T’Pol signals they’re ready to depart, Captain.”
Despite having prepared herself, Garrett experienced a stomach-twisting lurch of apprehension, the way she had when she was a little girl and someone jumped out of the shadows. She kept her voice bland. “Very well, Mr. Bulast. Wish the T’Pol a safe journey.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Mr. Castillo?”
“Course for Draavid cluster already laid in, Ma’am.”
“Very well.”
Glemoor said, “The T’Pol is moving off, Captain.”
“On screen.” The main viewscreen winked, and Garrett watched as the Vulcan warpshuttle peeled away. A moment later, the stars behind the T’Pol’s warp bubble blurred, and then the shuttle shot into warp and disappeared.
Good-bye, Halak. Garrett let out her breath in a long, slow exhalation. Godspeed.
She straightened. “All right, Mr. Castillo. Let’s get going. Warp four. Now.”
You can always tell when a ship goes to warp, thought Halak. Not that something very dramatic happened. The floors didn’t shake; the bulkheads didn’t rattle. If the ship and its engines were sound, you didn’t feel a thing. But Halak knew. The ship just felt different. So he knew, without being told, when they’d left Enterprise behind.
His quarters were Spartan: a bunk, a square lozenge of a pillow. A chair and a small round table bolted to the floor. No companel, no replicator, no portal. The walls were gray. They’d better make good time; else he’d go stir-crazy wondering what the hell had gone wrong with his life.
And this woman Burke: Obviously, SI hadn’t briefed her about his mission to Ryn III. Well, standard intelligence procedure: No dissemination of information, for pity’s sake, else everyone might know their right hand from their left. Batanides had better clear things up.
The door hissed, and Burke stepped into the room. “We’re under way,” Burke said. “I came to see if you were comfortable.”
Halak almost laughed. “The mattress is hard.”
“The mattresses are worse in prison. Mind if I sit down?” She didn’t wait for his reply but took the room’s only chair. Crossed her legs and clasped her hands over her left knee. “Commander, how would you like to save your career?”
It wasn’t the question he’d been expecting, and he wasn’t prepared for his reaction either: an overwhelming sense of relief. It was all a mistake; she was going to tell him she knew all about Ryn III and the Breen and the Cardassian connection, and it was all some horrible mistake.
“I’ll take silence as a yes. Well, then, how much do you know about the Cardassians? Specifically,” Burke gave him a look that was almost coy, “how much do you know about the Hebitians?”
Chapter 24
“Ten days,” said Su Chen-Mai, pacing. His moon-shaped face was as purple as an overripe Denebian plum. “Ten days, and you haven’t picked up a thing, Kaldarren. We have nothing to show for our time, nothing!”
Kaldarren sat, his eyes tracking back and forth. Chen-Mai was having another tantrum, and Kaldarren knew from experience that it was best to wait him out. It helped that after eleven hours of crawling over rubble, he was too bone-tired to argue.
They were in the biosphere’s common room where they took their meals and had their arguments. The room smelled of men’s sweat, sour canned air, and the apricotlike aroma of Catrayan porridge Kaldarren hadn’t been able to force down because his stomach was in knots. He wanted something to drink though; he’d even settle for some of that awful bourbon Rachel liked so much. The air filters in the Cardassian biosphere were relics. The longer they stayed, coming and going and bringing more dust and debris that adhered to the electrostatic charges they built up on their suits, the more Kaldarren’s mouth tasted like grit.
Chen-Mai frothed. “And what do you bring back? Just some useless artifacts.” He swept a dismissive hand at a trio of sculpted stone figures. “Nothing valuable at all!”
Spoken like a true mercenary, not a scientist. Well, there was a saying for it, something he’d picked up from Garrett: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Kaldarren ran a finger over the rough stone of one figure. The statue was of a chimera, part lizard (snake?) and part woman but with the folded wings of a bat. The left edge of the stone had fractured, distorting what Kaldarren thought was the face. The figure bore some resemblance to what the Cardassians claimed were ancient Hebitian artifacts—specifically, the Hebitian god of the Underworld. As he remembered it, the Hebitian god was usually rendered as a dragon alongside the king who was portrayed as a plump, white, slumbering, bull-like Cardassian toj’lath.
But this figure was altogether different. For one thing, it was a woman, not a man, and for another ... Kaldarren’s finger traced the chiseled features. The stone had suffered over time, but there was the faintest suggestion of a half-mask of some sort, one that covered the face down to the nose. The mask was very odd. As far as he knew, the lore about the old Cardassian religion made no reference to masks of any kind. He wouldn’t know for sure until he could study the statue under a high-resolution magnifier, and access a database to check on similar finds, if any. The Cardassians weren’t known for their openness.
Kaldarren looked up at Chen-Mai. “I guess it depends on your definition of value. This is valuable. There’s nothing like it in any collection as far as I’m aware.”
Chen-Mai’s black eyes sparkled like polished stones, but he didn’t stop moving. “Don’t play games. You know exactly what I’m talking about. These statues, these potsherds and other things you’ve found, they’re not why we’re here.”
“I know why we’re here,” said Kaldarren. He swallowed, and felt his throat ball with the effort. “Chen-Mai, has it ever occurred to you that there might not be anything to pick up? Maybe our information is wrong.”
Chen-Mai stopped his pacing long enough to fix Kaldarren with a poisonous glare. “That’s not what the legends say. That’s not what you said when you read them.”
Chen-Mai had done the translation but Kaldarren decided to be charitable, and prudent. “Maybe we were wrong.”
“I wasn’t wrong, not then and not now.”
“All right. You weren’t wrong.” Kaldarren lifted his hands in a weary, well-what-do-you-want gesture and let them fall to the table. One of the boys (Jase, probably, he had always been a messy eater) had left a halo of crumbs. Kaldarren pressed the pad of his right forefinger to the table, dabbing up crumbs that he rolled between his fingers.
So, he had. After all my lectures about privacy. Kaldarren was embarrassed to admit it now to himself that he had probed his son: a light touch, nothing more.
The surprise had come the instant a finger of his thought brushed along the contours of his son’s mind. Jase had blocked him. Blocked him: It was as if Kaldarren stood on the other side of a pane of milky glass, unable to see through to what lay beyond in his son’s mind.
How did Jase do that? How long has Jase been able to do that and me not even know? Does Jase even know, or is it reflex?
Aloud, Kaldarren said, “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I assumed that telepathy is a constant. That was foolish, probably. We know that some species have no known telepaths, and that one species’ telepathy may be far cruder than another’s. It’s also possible—probable, in fact—that there was something here once, a long time ago, but there isn’t now. Time wreaks havoc on many things, Chen-Mai, not just stone statues.”
“No!” Chen-Mai hurled the negative like a spear. “I presume this probability. You’re not the right telepath for the job.” Chen-Mai’s upper lip curled, revealing a line of yellowed teeth. There was a gap between Chen-Mai’s two front teeth, and when he spoke, Kaldarren saw the tip of the smaller man’s tongue undulating, like a fat worm.
“You’re not strong enough,” said Chen-Mai, his tongue working against his teeth. “Maybe I need a better, stronger telepath.”
“Very possibly,” said Kaldarren, soberly. “Certainly that’s your choice.”
“Choice.” Chen-Mai’s features corkscrewed. “Maybe, but I don’t have time, or money. Oh, but money doesn’t mean anything to you Federation people.”
“That doesn’t stop us from needing resources, or pursuing a dream. Money isn’t the only motivator, Chen-Mai.”
“Well, it is for me. I have an employer who will be very unhappy if I don’t keep my end of the bargain, and I will be very unhappy not to get my money.”
“We still have four days before the next Cardassian patrol.”
“Are you saying you’ll find it by then?”
Kaldarren hesitated. “Possible, but unlikely. Chen-Mai, we may have to face the fact, however unpleasant, that the translations are in error.”
Chen-Mai’s mouth opened in protest, but Lam Leahru-Mar stirred. “What if it were shielded in some way?” the Naxeran said. His frills trembled, and he smoothed them down with his left index finger in a slow, meditative gesture. “What if there is a portal, but there’s something that blocks you from finding it? If I built something that powerful, that’s what I’d do.”
Chen-Mai exhaled a noisy snort. “And where’s the power source?”
“There’s all that magnetic disturbance in the mountains,” Mar offered. “Maybe it’s shielding a power source deep underground.”
Chen-Mai gave the Naxeran a withering look. “If that were the case, there ought to be an energy signature. No machine is so perfect it doesn’t have a signature.”
Mar turned his sleek black face toward Kaldarren. “What about the ion storms? The radiation? Could they interfere?”
It was tempting to pawn off his failure on that, but Kaldarren shook his head. “It shouldn’t. Honestly, I don’t know.”
There was, of course, one possibility none of them had voiced: Chen-Mai and Mar because they wouldn’t have considered it, and he because the idea filled with him with an icy dread. What if the portal didn’t want to be found? Or what if the portal didn’t want Kaldarren to find it, or only wanted him to find it on its own terms? A strange way to think of a machine, but telepathy was more than intimacy. Telepathy was a form of becoming something distinctly different from what you were. When a telepath touched another mind, a little piece got left behind—like a fingerprint, or a footstep in cooling tar—and imprints, done often enough for long enough, became permanent and were not washed away. So it stood to reason that a device, one attuned to and used by enough telepaths over a long period of time, might itself become ... selective, perhaps even sentient.
A machine with a soul. Kaldarren suppressed a shiver. He doubted Chen-Mai would understand that, so he opted to stick to the obvious. “Let’s face facts. We’ve based this entire operation on ancient Cardassian legends. Legends aren’t facts.”
“But they’re something,” said Chen-Mai. He was pacing again. “And there’s something here. Why would the Cardassians bother patrolling otherwise?”
“It’s disputed space. The Federation’s been haggling with the Cardassians over this region for years.”
Chen-Mai gave a dismissive, backhanded wave. “But the Cardassians are stretched so thin between their expansion and their conflicts with both the Federation and the Klingons, it makes no sense to worry about a region they can’t legitimately lay claim to, even if they did have bases here once, like this biosphere. But they still patrol, and why? Because there’s something here.”
“They could just be spoiling for a fight. All Federation incursions are supposed to be cleared first.” Kaldarren sighed. “Even discounting that, your something could be anything. Or what if they patrol because this is the way Cardassians do things?”
Mar spoke up. “Kaldarren’s got a point. If there’s something here, why not put a contingent on the surface instead?”
“Am I supposed to know how, or what a Cardassian thinks?” Chen-Mai raged. “Ask Kaldarren! He’s the telepath!”
Kaldarren was tempted to point out that telepaths weren’t all-powerful; Vulcans couldn’t meld with Cardassians, and he couldn’t read a Breen. Instead, he held up the masked statue. “Look, Chen-Mai, I can’t even tell you with any certainty whether this is Hebitian, or Cardassian, or, well, take your pick. Just because these artifacts happen to be on a dead planet in disputed, possibly Cardassian, space doesn’t mean that the people who used to live here are connected to Cardassia, or the Hebitians.”
“That’s not what the legends say.”
Kaldarren made a face. “The Cardassians claim that the Hebitians may have been telepaths. Anyway, claims aren’t proof. If true, why aren’t there modern-day Cardassian telepaths? Betazoid telepaths trace their powers back in evolutionary time. Our telepathy didn’t evolve out of us; it got stronger.”
Chen-Mai leaned forward on his knuckles. “Ah, but that’s the key, don’t you see? The Hebitians evolved on Cardassia. They’re telepaths. Somehow, they developed a psionic portal, a gateway attuned to individual neural patterns. A properly attuned telepath activates the portal, and poof!” He leaned back, throwing his hands up and splaying his fingers, as if releasing birds. “Here one second, there the next. It explains how they got here.”
“If these ruins are Hebitian,” said Kaldarren. “A big if. That still doesn’t answer why these portals aren’t on other worlds, or why Cardassians aren’t telepathic.”
“I don’t know, and it’s not my problem,” said Chen-Mai. “All I know is, the Cardassians watch this planet—not just this region but this planet—and I think it’s because they’re worried somebody will find and then use the portal.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Kaldarren said, his weariness settling on him now like a heavy blanket. They were arguing about a phantom. “Find this magical portal and access it, if I can? Other than the specs, what are you’re going to do if we find it?”
Chen-Mai’s jaw set. “You don’t need to know. Your job is to find the portal. Figure out how it works. Then you get what you want, and I get what I want.”
I don’t know what I want anymore. “And what if I can’t, Chen-Mai?” Kaldarr
en fixed him with a searching look. He enjoyed seeing the smaller man flinch away, worried that Kaldarren might be probing. However tempting that might be, however, Kaldarren wouldn’t reach into Chen-Mai’s mind unless he had no other choice. Probably awfully slimy in there.
“It’s not a question of can’t. You don’t have that luxury, Kaldarren. You have four days. Then the Cardassians come back, and we need to be gone.”
“What about your employer? What if we don’t find the portal?”
“You don’t have to be a mind reader for that one,” said Chen-Mai.
Kaldarren left shortly after, taking the statues with him. Lam Leahru-Mar waited until the Betazoid’s footsteps faded. Then he looked over at Chen-Mai.
“What if he can’t do it?” The Naxeran’s black skin was sweating so much he looked dipped in clear glaze. “Or what if he does, but the Cardassians catch us? We still have to rendezvous with Talma. And what are we going to do with Kaldarren and that boy of his? No witnesses, Chen-Mai, that’s what Talma said.”
Chen-Mai had dropped into a seat across from the Naxeran. Now he fixed Mar with a baleful look. “You let me worry about Kaldarren and the boy.”
“But Mahfouz Qadir ... Talma said ...”
“Didn’t I just tell you not to worry?”
“Well, I don’t like it.” Mar squirmed. “Kaldarren doesn’t bother me so much, but a boy? No one told me I’d have to do a boy.”
“You don’t have to like it because you won’t have any part of it. You pilot the ship; you get around the Cardassians. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“All right.” Mar swallowed. “Fine. But I don’t want Pahl to know anything about it, you understand? He’s my sister’s boy, and I’m supposed to look out for him. He shouldn’t even suspect ...”
“When it’s all over, the only thing you’ll have to tell Pahl is the truth.”
“And that is?”
