STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book Two
Page 17
“You come with us!” ordered a gruff voice, and she was pinned rudely against the wall.
fifteen
Leah Brahms was certain that she was about to be arrested—or beaten—in the sodden mall deep inside the asteroid named Protus. To her surprise, the two guards who had assaulted her suddenly let her go, and the one with the hose turned it back upon his fellows, several of whom were trying to advance to their position.
“It’s us, Captain!” barked a voice in her ear.
Leah whirled around to stare at the snaggle-toothed face under the gas mask and hood. “The hose was a brilliant idea!”
“Gradok?” she asked in amazement.
He nodded. “First officer Maltz, too.”
She looked at the wiry warrior manning the fire hose, keeping dozens of locals at bay. “Have you seen Kurton and Burka!” he shouted over the din.
“Yes ... they’re dead!”
“How!” roared the Klingon.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” she answered. “Can’t we get out of here?”
“Yes! Follow me.” Using the powerful jet as a battering ram, Maltz surged into the crowd, cutting an impressive path with the water bolt.
When a few phaser beams streaked over their heads, Gradok drew his disruptor and returned fire in deadly fashion. At least three of the guards dropped, and the others were soon in retreat. It seemed as if they didn’t want to fire for fear of hitting the onlookers, but Gradok had no such compunction.
They fought their way toward the monorail station until the length of hose ran out. Maltz let it go, and it snaked around violently, whipping a stream of chemical spray into the cascade already pouring down from above.
disruptors blazing, the Klingons ran toward the closest empty monorail car. Brahms could do little more than try to keep up with them. She realized they were shooting to open a hole in the conveyance. Their bold actions were lost in the general pandemonium, and no one rushed forward to stop them. However, the car began to move.
“Hurry!” yelled Maltz.
Shooting on the run with his disruptor, Gradok drew a crude oval on the side of the car, then he crashed into it at full speed. The Klingon and a chunk of the car fell into the cabin with a crash, and Maltz and Leah dove in after him—just as the monorail picked up speed and tore out of the station.
“We can’t stay here!” shouted Brahms. “We’ll lose pressure and oxygen!”
She charged toward the front of the car, which was connected to another car; and she grabbed the wheel to open the hatch just as a sudden rush of air yanked her off her feet. It almost sucked her backward out the gaping hole, but Maltz steadied her. Gradok took the wheel, twisted it easily, and opened the hatch. They ducked into the air lock and slammed the door shut behind them just as the last of the air rushed out of the cabin.
Calmly, regaining his composure, Maltz opened the door to the next car. It was full of what looked like dignitaries, the rich and beautiful people of Protus, who all turned around to stare in amazement. Maltz stepped into the cabin, leveled his disruptor with one hand and pulled off his gas mask with the other. At the sight of the crusty old Klingon, there were audible gasps among the thirty-or-so passengers.
Maltz sneered. “We are taking a slight detour.”
A well-dressed human frowned at him. “Are you the ones who have thrown this entire operation—the whole asteroid—into an uproar?”
“None other,” said Maltz with a sense of accomplishment. “So imagine what we could do to this one car if you don’t cooperate?” Without taking his eyes or weapon off the passengers, he nodded toward a console at the front. “Captain, you might want to see if you can get us back to our ship.”
“Right,” answered Leah, striding down the aisle, ignoring the looks of contempt from the passengers. “We didn’t treat you people any worse than you treated us,” she muttered to no one in particular.
While Leah settled in at the controls of the speeding monorail, she heard Maltz say, “Do any of you know Colin Craycroft, owner of the Pink Slipper?”
Now came vehement words of disgust, and more than a few people observed, “Of course you would know him!”
“Tell Craycroft to make his peace, because he will die the next time I meet him,” replied the old Klingon.
That somber proclamation brought much of the conversation to a hush, and Brahms was finally able to concentrate on the readouts. She located dock seventeen and found that she could reroute the monorail to get there.
She heard Maltz say, “I need crew. Who wants to sign on?”
Now there were disbelieving looks all around, followed by nervous tittering. Someone asked pleasantly, “Where are you going?”
“To find the fiends who created the Genesis Wave and kill them.” That brought the muttering to a complete stop, and the only sound to be heard was the whisper of the rail overhead.
It took a while, but finally a human youth stood up. “I’ll go,” he said shakily.
“Herbert, sit down!” shouted the woman with him, probably his mother. She clutched his arm. “They’ll kill you!”
“No, boredom will kill you,” declared Maltz. “Step out here, young human.”
The lad gently pulled away from the woman’s clutches. He looked down at her with sympathy and love, but also with the coldness that comes with a streak of youthful independence. “Aunt Patricia, I’m old enough, and this is what I want to do. Please don’t stand in my way.”
“To go off with these—” She glared at the Klingons, then lowered her head and sniffed. “If your parents were alive—”
“Well, they’re not and it’s because that thing, that Genesis Wave, killed them and destroyed our home. I’m not going to let the same thing happen here. Good-bye, Aunt Patricia.” The lad stepped forthrightly into the aisle, and Maltz and Gradok sized him up. He looked like a well-groomed teenager, with a slight build, sandy hair, about sixteen years old.
“A little skinny,” said Gradok with a frown.
“I’m a good rock climber,” declared the boy proudly.
“We accept you,” answered Maltz, slamming a beefy hand onto the lad’s scrawny shoulder. His aunt shrieked and tried to charge up the aisle, but her friends wisely stopped her.
Leah turned back to her board, and she made a decision, too. “There’s a maintenance station coming up,” she reported. “It’s empty, and I think we should stop and let everyone out there.”
“Except the lad,” said Maltz.
“Crazy volunteers exempted,” Brahms said with a glance at the boy. “Just don’t expect a long career and a pension.” She wanted to slap him and tell him he was insane, but they needed the crew. The rest of his life might be short, but it would be exciting.
“Captain,” said Maltz hoarsely, “how did Kurton and Burka die? Was it a warrior’s death?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered. “There was a fantastic battle in the tunnels. They were trying to protect me, but they were outnumbered. They went down in a blaze of phaser fire.”
“Their bodies were not desecrated?” asked Gradok.
“No. In fact ... they were vaporized by all the phaser beams.”
“Let’s announce them to Sto-Vo-Kor,” Maltz said with a tear in his rheumy eye.
The Klingons threw back their heads and roared to the heavens with frightening howls. The passengers shrunk back and covered their ears at the unearthly sounds. It went on for such a long time that even Leah grew edgy, and she finally decided that the only way to accept it was to join in. She cut loose with a gut-wrenching shriek, which only caused Maltz and Gradok to yell all the louder, until their voices collided in an anguished chord.
When they stopped at the maintenance station, the passengers bolted off without being told, while the howling went on. Herbert’s protesting aunt was dragged off by the friends, and Leah glanced back to see if their newest recruit was still aboard. He was.
“Last chance!” she shouted over the din. He stood perfectly still, rooted to the
spot, and Leah shrugged and put the monorail into forward motion. She no longer cared who lived and died anymore, as long as the ones responsible for the Genesis Wave were on the rolls of the dead.
This is quite an impressive hologram, Carol Marcus mused as she gazed around her spacious laboratory on Regula I, with its 360-degree view of the stars and an impressive collection of nebulas beyond.
One of them was the Mutara Nebula, which shouldn’t exist in this timeframe.
No wonder ail of it seemed so familiar—they dredged it up from my mind, warts and all. The old woman looked at a scratched microscope screen, which she had always meant to replace. She remembered how she had made that scratch ninety-five years ago with a pair of dropped tongs; in many respects, her memories had never been clearer.
Her captors had spared no effort in producing this recreation for her benefit. Still, parts of the lab were undoubtedly real, such as the computers and test chambers; other areas had to be fake. This whole space station couldn’t exist—didn’t exist—in the current year. Besides, she was convinced that they were on a starship. There was something in the familiar sounds and sensations—delicate whirs, the vague sensation of motion—that conveyed the impression they were headed somewhere.
As always, Marcus was able to compartmentalize and put all other considerations aside while she worked. It had felt wonderfully sinful to be immersed again in her Genesis discoveries and designs, all returned home to roost in her mind like long-lost children. But she no longer had to imagine the most soulless and evil purpose to which Genesis could be put, because she saw it outlined in front of her. The doomsayers had been right for once, she thought miserably. Imagine that.
Keep working, she ordered herself. “Computer, activate personal log.”
“Log activated,” said the officious voice.
She rubbed her eyes and continued: “Dr. Carol Marcus, general notes for Genesis Wave, test two. The goals are to implement three improvements over the first discharge. One will be a solar analyzer built into the matrix; this will analyze suns in the path faster and more accurately than before. Suns meeting criteria will undergo mild conditioning instead of drastic conditioning. These two improvements should cut down on the losses of otherwise suitable planets when their suns were altered too hastily.”
Carol shivered, trying not to think of how many worlds had been destroyed and then wasted when they couldn’t exist with their new mutilated suns. She hurriedly went on:
“The third change is increased resistance to phase-shifting, as found in non-Federation cloaking devices. Stage two will incorporate a random pattern of tachyons, which are known to disrupt temporal fields. Although this theory should work, we lack both the raw data and the time needed to test it, even in a simulator. I believe we have about a fifty-fifty chance of success.”
Carol paused, wondering who had circumvented the original wave with phase-shifting. Romulans? Some other race? How many races had they destroyed in the deluge of horror she had helped unleash?
“End log.” Sniffing back her emotions, Marcus tried not to grieve too much for the millions, probably billions, who had perished. She couldn’t afford to—as far as she knew, she was the only one standing in the way of a second Genesis Wave, worse than the first.
There were ways she could sabotage this new trial, but she knew they could read her mind. She had to be honest with them whenever possible, which meant not attempting to keep a secret. Yet in their own way, they were as wary of her as she was of them. There was something in her captors’ makeup that was oddly dependent ... nothing like the real David Marcus or Jim Kirk. It seemed as if they would do anything to keep her alive, solely because she was useful.
I’ll have to do something spur-of-the-moment, she decided, and I’ll probably have only one chance. Until then, I’ll pretend they’re my loved ones, while we all go through the motions.
The door whooshed open, and Carol quickly turned back to the schematic of a tachyon cannon, wondering how they could mount it inside the emitter array. The fake Kirk swaggered in, wearing the protective cleanroom suit he wore almost all the time now. That suit was designed to protect the environment from the wearer.
“Do you like the new suits?” he asked rhetorically, reading her mind as easily as she read the screen. “I’m just giving it a test—see how it wears.”
“I don’t care what suits you wear, darling,” she answered, peering at her instruments. “However, I would like to figure out how to time the tachyon burst with the variable speed of the wave.”
Jim cocked his head under the pale yellow hood and stepped closer. “I thought you had that figured out.”
“In theory,” she answered, “the carrier wave will force the tachyon stream to keep pace, but I have to adjust for the drag coefficient when we’re in active mode on a large celestial body. I mean, there’s no way to try the changes before the test, so we’ll have to live with the results. I’m also worried about matrix degradation, because this wave is already carrying a lot of data.”
Innocently, she added, “If we could delay the test—”
“Impossible,” snapped Kirk. He immediately softened his stance, and she could see a youthful grin behind his faceplate. “Hey, this test will tell us if the tachyons work or not, so let’s just do it. There’s no point in having two tests, now is there?”
“We are having two tests,” she answered truthfully, “and it would help if I could see all the figures from the first test. Where are the long-range scans you and David were talking about?”
“You heard us talking?” said Kirk with surprise. “Your hearing is very good for—”
“An old lady?” Carol finished his sentence. But she was thinking about something else ... that she had picked up their thoughts mentally. Unless they were talking to each other for her benefit, which they often did, they had no reason to communicate in audible sound. She couldn’t have heard them making verbal communication—she knew that for a fact.
“You’re not old,” said Kirk, mustering some of the tenderness with which he had enthralled her. With a gloved hand, he touched her cheek. “You know what you’re doing here, don’t you?”
“Getting a second chance,” she answered, knowing that was true in more ways than they ever considered.
“You’re worried about the target planets,” Kirk said with mocking good humor. “I told you, we’ve taken great pains to avoid inhabited planets. We are doing this quadrant a tremendous service, terraforming useless rocks into a chain of beautiful paradises!”
Plastering a smile onto her face, Carol squeezed his hand in return and tried to concentrate on pleasant memories, of which there were many. “Believe me, I’ve been thrilled to see you again, darling ... and to work with you and David. Whatever magic you used to make this happen, you won’t get any complaints from me.”
She turned back to her instruments with a sigh. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing when you keep data away from me, but I warn you that my results may be less than perfect.”
The fake Kirk held his palms up. “The data is ... confusing. We just didn’t want to confuse you.”
“But you’re also confusing the algorithms for the solar analyzer,” she replied. “Those variables are dependent upon raw data, and we could use some more data for the simulations.”
“You’ll get the raw data,” said Kirk, as if coming to a decision. “Let me go to the computer room and fire up the sensor logs. Quick thinking as ever, sweetheart.” When he playfully tweaked her cheek, she tried not to grimace.
After the creature left the room, the elder scientist let out a sigh and gripped her console for support. It was draining—keeping up her guard while working around-the-clock at a high level ... for a nefarious cause. But she had learned something valuable today—that the mind games seemed to be working two ways now. They had nearly killed her by accident, but their cure had left her with something of theirs. She had a feeling that she would only be seeing the two ghosts when necessary.
sixteen
All across the mottled plains, forests, and swamps of Myrmidon, massive fires burned out of control. Watching from orbit in the Romulan shuttlecraft, Dolores Linton thought it looked like a newly born sun trying to break out of its crumbling shell. Where the dense smoke and clouds allowed visibility, the forests blazed like glowing lava, and it was impossible to tell the chain of fires from the chain of volcanoes. In their zeal to fight the moss creatures, the Bolians had turned Myrmidon into an unholy inferno.
After taking a few sensor readings, she could tell that the smoke was winning the battle against the clouds to rule the blackening atmosphere.
“All readings getting worse,” she told Data, who sat beside her at the controls of the Romulan shuttlecraft.
The android cocked his head and replied, “If current trends follow my predictions, most of the survivors will be dead in thirty-eight hours, when the air becomes unbreathable. However, the moss creatures will be neutralized.”
“Small consolation,” Dolores said miserably, as she looked out the viewport at the smoldering planet. “I feel like I’m a part of that place—I don’t know why. It feels like I’m dying inside.”
“You were a part of the natural order,” answered Data, “before I rescued you.”
“Yeah, and I can’t thank you enough. But after all we tried to do ... to lose all those people is hard to take.”
“Perhaps they are not lost,” Data said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?”
“There may be a fleet of rescue vessels just waiting to come to Myrmidon,” said the android. “Certainly the Federation must be very interested in the outcome here, since we have been unable to communicate. But this hypothetical fleet will not be able to come here unless they know it is safe to cross the residue of the Genesis Wave.”