by Andy Mangels
There could be no mistaking their identity.
Orion slavers.
It was impossible at the moment to tell exactly how many intruders had entered the cavern, and Shran knew that discovering that bit of data was of overwhelming importance. But he also knew that obtaining a usable weapon was at least as vital at the moment.
More beams flashed in rapid succession. More Aenar bodies went down, then vanished in columns of light. Shran moved quickly, counting the assailants, calculating angles of fire and approach. There are eight of them, he thought as he circled behind one of the intruders, careful to crouch below a row of hoarfrosted stalagmites as he moved. No, nine.
Fighting off a feeling of vertiginous nausea brought on by his injured antenna, Shran leaped at his selected target, a ponderous giant who stood more than a head higher than the tallest Andorian soldier he had seen in all his time among the battle-toughened troops of the Imperial Guard. He slammed hard into the alien’s thickly muscled back, wrapping his arms around his neck before the other man could react.
I suppose they weren’t expecting a welcome like this from a bunch of pacifists, Shran thought, grinning savagely. His slightly asymmetrical antennae lashed back and forth like angry serpents as he applied every iota of his strength to the task of squeezing the burly slaver’s throat.
But the Orion was hugely strong, his broad back and neck reminding Shran of ancient Andoria’s powerful cavalry mounts. While still holding his rifle by the strap, the Orion was trying to grab Shran’s arms, obviously in an attempt to throw the Andorian over his head. Shran knew that if his opponent managed that, the fight would be settled immediately in the Orion’s favor by the greenskin’s rifle.
Absurdly, Shran thought of something the Terran pinkskin Jonathan Archer had said to him once during an unguarded moment in the captain’s personal mess: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, Shran,” Archer had said while scratching the neck of his peculiar Earth pet. “It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
The Orion turned in a circle, roaring like a wounded beast. Shran hung on, screaming out in a ululating Andorian battle cry. His nails sank into green flesh like pitons being driven hard into the unyielding ice of the northern wastes. Over the Orion’s shoulder he caught a brief glimpse of Jhamel, her face frozen in a rictus of horror as people fell to the slavers and continued to vanish all around her.
Shran tightened his grip, screamed another battle cry, and lowered his face to the Orion’s jugular. He sank his teeth into the sweaty, verdant flesh with a predator’s ferocity. Hot, dark ichor splattered him in steaming fire-hose pulses. The Orion crashed to his knees, pulling Shran down just as energy beams lanced over both of their heads.
Then Shran was standing over the giant’s already cooling corpse, rifle in hand, steam from the slaver’s bloodied, slain form rising all around him. Ushaan-Tor combat without the blades, he thought with grim humor.
Shran’s military training took over, and he found cover quickly, ducking behind an icy pillar. He began firing, guided to his targets by their muzzle flashes. Four Orions fell in fairly short order, and the remaining slavers seemed to be increasingly confused and panicked. Shran wasn’t certain just how many Aenar the slavers had succeeded in beaming away, but he could see that many had made it to the exits, thanks to his efforts.
Was Jhamel among them?
But there was nothing he could do to answer that question at the moment. All he could do was continue moving to new cover, finding his targets, and firing. Zhavey-less bastards! he thought as yet another slaver’s body crashed hard onto the ice before sledding roughly down a frost-slicked incline and into one of the cavern walls.
Shran was beginning to notice that his targets were growing as scarce as the Aenar, almost all of whom had by now either fled or been captured. He caught another glimpse of Jhamel, who had bravely stayed behind, apparently intent on helping every last Aenar get to safety. Beside her was Theras, who evidently hadn’t fled or been captured after all.
Shran grinned and resumed his continuous search for new targets, trying to cover Jhamel’s efforts. Maybe I’ll drive them all off before they can do any more—
Something abruptly slammed into Shran then, spinning him as though he were a small moon that had been dealt a glancing blow by a passing asteroid. His feet slipped out from under him, in spite of the heavy, studded treads built into his cold-weather boots. The entire left side of his body was suddenly numb and paralyzed, which prevented him from stopping himself as he slid down a slope on the icy cavern floor.
Must have been hit, he thought, feeling woozy as his slide continued unchecked. More energy discharges stitched the ice all around him, filling the air with superheated steam and the tortured creaks of breaking ice and grinding stone. He was keenly aware that he was now a target, no doubt of the highest priority.
The maw of a large, dark crevasse—perhaps opened up only moments earlier by the firefight’s relentless volleys, maybe even by one of Shran’s own blasts—yawned hungrily before him. He flailed with his good right arm to arrest his tumbling, sliding descent, but succeeded only in entangling himself awkwardly in the strap of the Orion rifle he’d been holding when he’d fallen.
The accelerating sensation of sliding abruptly ceased, replaced by the gut-churningly familiar vertigo that accompanied orbital freefall in ships not equipped with artificial gravity. His nervous system charged with survival-instinct panic, Shran realized that he was falling feet-first into the crevasse, tumbling toward the fathomless, unilluminated spaces below.
His right arm lashed upward as he dropped, and the sensation of weight returned with a suddenness that slammed his jaw shut and probably loosened a few of his teeth. He looked up and saw in the gloom surrounding him that his rifle strap had snagged on a stony, ice-covered outcropping. Awkwardly restricted to the use of his right arm and leg, he gripped the strap hard and struggled to pull himself back up over the crumbling lip of the crevasse.
Inching upward, his head cleared the ice-crusted verge, giving him a reverse view back up the path of his unplanned and haphazard descent. He caught sight of Jhamel, still calmly assisting what Shran hoped were the last few Aenar stragglers in escaping the predations of the Orions. Near her was Theras, who seemed every bit as paralyzed by fear as Jhamel was composed and self-possessed.
Until she crumpled to the ice in a strobe-flash of light, struck in the back by an Orion energy-weapon discharge. Theras hurried out of sight—fleeing!—even as a pair of the slavers converged on Jhamel’s motionless form and tagged it with a communications beacon that enabled them to have her beamed away.
“No!” Shran cried, pulling himself, one-handed and one-legged, up onto the creaking, groaning ledge. Fueled by rage and adrenaline, he dragged himself slowly toward the two slavers, one of whom very calmly raised his weapon, changed its setting, and took careful aim in Shran’s direction.
He didn’t bother looking away as he braced himself for the brutal heat of the beam he expected to take him down to final oblivion.
Then the surface directly beneath Shran cracked sharply and gave way, spilling him back into the crevasse while sparing him from the Orion’s weapon. An energy beam lashed out over his head, missing him by a wide margin, not that it mattered now. Time dilated as he plunged into the frigid darkness below.
A rough, sharp shock followed, and oblivion came.
The tingling and pain that commingled along the left side of his body, coupled with the biting cold of the surface on which he suddenly found himself sprawled prone, convinced Shran that he wasn’t quite dead—at least not yet. He wasn’t certain how long he had been unconscious, but the return of sensation to the part of his body that had been clipped by the Orion weapon told him that enough time had passed for his nervous system to begin returning to normal after the fierce stunning it had received during the firefight.
Jhamel!
He beat back his fear. Think, Shran, think. The Orions had her now, along with Uzaveh-onl
y-knew how many others. They could already have been under way at high warp for hours now, and might be anywhere in the sector, or maybe even farther away than that.
And that zhavey-less coward Theras ran instead of standing up to defend her.
His rage rekindled, Shran struggled into a sitting position and tried to haul himself to his feet. Nothing seemed broken, but he was frustrated by his inability to get his studded boots underneath him as his knees and elbows ineffectually sought purchase on the glassy ice on which he lay. He sighed in frustration, his breath curling upward like coolant leaking from an overheating warp core.
I have to get back to surface. Back to the ship. Find their trail before it grows as cold as this cavern.
After making another failed attempt to stand, he noticed that the darkness was beginning to give way to a diffuse, amber light. His antennae twitched, responding to what felt like someone’s physical presence, which he’d somehow not noticed before now. The ice shifted behind him, and Shran craned his neck toward the sudden cracking sound.
Something grasped him firmly by the shoulders, and a disembodied voice inside his head shouted, “Move!”
A flurry of hot hailstones came down around him, scorching his jacket and trousers wherever they touched him. One of the thumb-sized, glowing objects landed momentarily on the back of his right hand, and he flipped it away onto the ice with a strangled cry of agony.
Ice borers, Shran thought, watching the slow rain of the tiny creatures, which was illuminated very faintly by the energy of their own heat-generating bodies. He recalled how he’d once been badly burned by the very same type of subterranean grubs during his youth. Ice borers provided the people of Andoria with a great deal of usable heat, but they also posed a serious hazard to anyone unfortunate enough to be directly beneath them when they chose to make a vertical downward passage through a mass of ice.
The patter of the small, incendiary bodies quickly slowed and stopped, leaving only a shotgun scattering of faintly glowing holes in the floor and ceiling of the cavern as the light levels quickly receded to stygian darkness.
That darkness concealed the identity of whoever had just dragged Shran to safety. “Are you injured, Commander Shran?”
“It’s just plain Shran now. And I’ve been in far worse shape than this.” Shran cradled his burned hand before him as his rescuer attempted to help him get up on his feet.
“Thank Uzaveh I managed to find you.”
Well, at least I know he’s not one of the Orions, Shran thought. He leaned against his benefactor as he experimented with putting his full weight on both of his feet simultaneously.
“Who are you?” Shran wanted to know.
“It’s me,” said the voice inside his head. “Theras.”
Shran found it difficult to rein in the contempt that surged through his soul at that moment. His instinct was to push the coward as far away from him as possible, but he restrained himself, not eager to risk taking another awkward tumble into the icy darkness.
“Theras. I thought you had run away.”
“I ran to find you.”
“Stop speaking inside my mind, Theras,” Shran said, his words as sharp as fléchettes. Only Jhamel had his leave to take such intimate liberties.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” Theras said, his voice sounding hoarse as though from long periods of disuse.
“I’m not the one you owe an apology to, Theras. Jhamel was captured because you decided to run instead of staying to help her.”
Theras’s voice took on a pleading tone that Shran found quite hard to distinguish from whining. “Shenar and Vishri were taken as well. I didn’t know what to do. I only knew that I had to make sure that you escaped and survived.”
“Me?”
“You, Commander. So that someone could take some sort of action to recover my bondmates.”
A low growl was slowly building deep within Shran’s chest. “That’s how you justify abandoning Jhamel?”
“What could I have done against the attackers? What could any of us have done?” Theras paused, as though allowing Shran time to assimilate the pain that was clearly audible behind his words. “You know that we Aenar are all committed pacifists, Commander.”
Pacifists.
As much as he admired Jhamel’s commitment to peace, Shran doubted that he would ever fully succeed in getting his mind around the concept of pacifism. Sometimes the choice was between fighting and dying. Otherwise scum like the Orions would inherit the universe.
But now was not the time to stage a philosophical debate, or to dwell on blame. Jhamel had been captured, or worse. The best-case scenario was that she was being sped away from Andoria at multiples of the speed of light at this very moment.
“All right,” Shran said. “I will take action, starting now. First, I need to alert the Defense Force about what’s happened here, just in case the Orions covered their tracks thoroughly enough to completely avoid detection on their way to and from Andoria’s surface. Maybe the military can track down the slavers before they find buyers for their latest…acquisitions.”
Shran closed his eyes, pained and enraged at the thought of his sweet, trusting Jhamel being condemned to the cruel uses of slavery at the hands of uncouth outworlders, the way her late brother had been.
“I pray that that this can be done,” Theras said.
Shran took a tentative step forward, realizing that he would be as blind as the Aenar until they found their way out of the crevasse.
“Pray all you want,” Shran said, clenching his right fist and ignoring the flaring pain of the burn on the back of his hand. “After you help me find my way back to my ship.”
“What if the slavers have found your ship?”
Shran paused for a moment before replying. “Then I’ll pray, Theras.”
Six
Sunday, February 9, 2155
ShiKahr, Vulcan
AS CAPTAIN JONATHAN ARCHER walked alongside Minister T’Pau through the corridors of the Vulcan High Command headquarters, he considered how very differently they had been received here today as compared to six months ago. The last time he’d been here, T’Pau was the fugitive leader of the Syrrannite political faction, and the High Command, led by the power-mad V’Las, was minutes away from starting an interstellar war with the Andorians.
After Archer had come into the Command chambers then, carrying not only the Kir’Shara artifact that contained within it the true teachings of Surak, but also holding the actual katra of Surak himself inside his head, things had changed radically for Vulcan and for its ruling body. V’Las was forcibly removed, and his Council disbanded. The new leader of Vulcan’s civilian government, and its military affairs, now walked beside Archer.
“Here we are,” Minister T’Pau said, coming to a halt and gesturing toward a chamber outside of which two large—and heavily armed—guards stood, their bare, muscular chests mostly exposed underneath wide silver tunics and sashes. She nodded to them, and their stances relaxed only slightly as they stepped farther apart.
“Does the Kir’Shara really require a clean room, Minister?” Archer asked as they stepped through a pair of pressure doors and into a large, brightly lit, circular chamber. In the center of it, on a table, sat the meter-high pyramidal artifact that Archer had carried with him from its tomb underneath the T’Karath Sanctuary. The table was circular, and was ringed by an array of computer banks. Seated at a station in front of each computer screen was a Vulcan in white robes. Each of them were studying the symbols on their screens intently, and sometimes tapping data onto padd controls nearby.
T’Pau turned to Archer, one eyebrow slightly raised. “I would think that you, of all people, should understand the value of the Kir’Shara.”
Archer smiled slightly. “I guess you’re right,” he said simply. Despite his long-held animosity toward the Vulcans, and his conviction that they had long held Earth back from making advancements in exploration, his time on Vulcan—largely spent while the soul of its g
reatest leader had literally lived inside him—had made him somewhat more attuned to Vulcan causes than he’d ever been before. He wasn’t about to take up kal-toh, the bizarre Vulcan puzzle game that T’Pol had once shown him, but he did at least feel that he understood what the Kir’Shara represented to the Vulcan people: It was the embodiment of their highest ideals and aspirations, their living link with everything they regarded as noble and true.
“Thank you for showing me,” he said. “I’m glad it’s in good hands, and not in my backpack—or my head—any longer.”
“Your aid in retrieving the artifact—however unintentional its cause—has not been lost on me,” said T’Pau, her stony face betraying no acknowledgment of his jest as she turned away toward the door. “Nor on the many others who are presently organizing Vulcan’s new government. Your actions have done much to solidify positive future relations between humans and Vulcans.”
She stopped and looked up at him. “That is no small feat, Captain Archer. You have my thanks, and whenever possible, you will have my support.”
“I appreciate that, Minister,” he said. He knew she was referring to the twenty-three ships she had sent to help those battling the mysterious Romulan drone ship that threatened to destabilize interstellar politics and start a war between the Tellarites and the Andorians. At the time, he had been slightly annoyed that she had responded so frugally, but upon reflection, he realized that she had been truthful in telling him that this was all they could spare during Vulcan’s protracted time of internal political upheaval and reorganization in the wake of V’Las’s ouster.
T’Pau leading, the pair stepped back through the pressure doors and into the corridor. Waiting to meet them, as planned, were Trip and T’Pol.
“Is everything loaded, Trip?” Archer asked.
