A distant clanging sound told Picard that the exterior hull plate had been jettisoned, and he grabbed the second disk and turned it with all his might. The wheel groaned like a creaking old hatch on a rusty submarine, and Picard’s arms and back ached from the effort to turn it. Gradually, the wheel turned more smoothly, and towering metal struts and sparking cables fell away from the shimmering warp coil. The glowing structure began to tremble like a rocket about to take off, and the captain ducked from a flying cable. The ghostly figure of Regimol moved to his other side and began to turn the third wheel, but it barely budged.
“Losing strength!” he groaned. “Help me!”
The captain pressed his shoulder against the Romulan’s and took a firm grip on the disk. As the warp core shuddered and klaxons and steam blasted in their ears, they turned the grating wheel one centimeter after another, until they could hear the roar of thrusters firing all around them. From the deafening noise, it sounded as if the entire warp chamber would launch from the ship. Suddenly the core erupted in flames and dropped straight down through a monstrous hole in the deck. Now Picard had to grip the wheel with all his strength just to avoid being sucked out, along with the towering cylinder of flame and several of the bodies. It was like a rocket from the twentieth century being blasted the wrong way into the center of the earth.
He gripped his comrade, Regimol, by an invisible arm and breathed, “You saved the ship ... come on!”
[270] “One more thing,” the Romulan croaked. “To restore emergency power to the helm, override the driver coil assembly and patch EPS power to the auxiliary computer core. I can’t move—you’ll have to do it.” He briefly turned visible and pointed to the emergency engineering console.
Picard didn’t question these orders, but he had to wonder how a Romulan knew so much about the engineering systems of a Federation starship. Moving as fast as the Brahms suit would allow—and realizing that he had less than two minutes of time left before the suit stopped working—Picard lumbered to the console. He tried to clear his mind of extraneous thoughts and concentrate on the job at hand. Without the warp core about to suffer an imminent breach, which took all the ship’s resources to contain, the auxiliary computer systems gradually came back online. Picard entered the instructions, breathed another huge sigh of relief, and turned to look for Regimol.
He found the Romulan floating at the wheel they had just rotated, tethered there by the cable of his interphase generator. Hoping he wasn’t too late to save the hero’s life, the captain shuffled across the deck, freed the Romulan’s body, and carried him to the doorway. Once outside in the corridor, he let Regimol’s body float for a moment while he entered commands to close the door and seal it.
At the same moment, a beep sounded inside the Brahms radiation suit, and a tinny computer voice said, “Power failing. Please replace power cell immediately. This suit is inoperative.” The screen, the faceplate ... everything went dark, and Picard felt as if he were wearing a hundred kilos of weight. He realized the artificial gravity was back on, and he lowered Regimol’s unconscious body to the deck.
“Jean-Luc!” cried a feminine voice, and he turned to see Beverly Crusher emerge from the Jefferies tube and come running toward him, a medkit in her hand. Another person crawled out right behind her.
[271] The captain collapsed to the deck, his back against the bulkhead. With considerable effort from his aching arms and back, he managed to extricate himself from the suit and stare gratefully at the doctor. “You’ve got to help Regimol,” he wheezed, pointing to the fallen Romulan.
“Regimol?” asked a voice curiously. Picard looked up to see the Romulan standing behind Beverly, with the other Regimol lying prone at their feet. The hero of the day suddenly materialized in full, and all three of them gasped. Even with his horrendous burns and horribly disfigured face, they could recognize the soft-spoken Antosian, Raynr Sleven. His once immaculately coiffed hair was now singed black all the way to his scalp.
With a tearful mixture of anger and grief, the real Regimol barked at his friend, “You idiot! You stole my interphase box.”
“Had to do it,” rasped the former Starfleet technician. “You wouldn’t have known what to do.”
Looking distraught at the seriousness of his injuries, Dr. Crusher opened her medkit and prepared a hypospray.
“There’s no point, Doctor,” said the Antosian, a look of peace coming over his scarred face. “I should have died days ago on the Barcelona. I couldn’t save that ship ... but I saved this one. Please tell Alyssa Ogawa ... I am sorry.”
“Try to hold on,” insisted Picard, gripping the ship’s savior by the sleeve of his tattered uniform. “We’ll get you to sickbay, where we can—”
Raynr Sleven slowly expelled his last breath of air, and peace came to his charred body and tortured soul.
Beverly hung her head and dropped the hypospray into her medkit. “He was dead the moment he went in there. The phase-shifting protected him just long enough to do the job.”
Regimol sniffed back a tear and muttered, “I have known very few honestly good and simple people in my life ... here lies one.” The usually glib and cocksure Romulan covered his eyes and wept.
[272] Picard staggered wearily to his feet and looked around at his intact but deserted ship. “Thanks to Raynr Sleven, I won’t be going down with her after all. At least not today. There were dead bodies in engineering.”
“I estimate six dead shipwide,” said Crusher, brushing back an errant strand of hair. “That includes Raynr. It could have been much worse.”
“Now we’ve got to find out what caused this,” replied the captain, his jaw clenched in anger. He tapped his combadge and said, “Picard to away team. Are you there, Number One?”
“Captain!” answered a surprised voice. “We’ve been trying to contact you. I’d all but given up. Yes, we’re here, but something fried the circuits in the shuttlecraft, and it’s halfway submerged in mud, anyway. We saw the escape pods coming down and have been trying to collect the crew ... but things are pretty strange down here.”
“Things are strange up here, too,” muttered the captain. “We just manually ejected the warp core. Do you have any idea what caused this?”
“It’s something that the Aluwnans did,” answered Riker testily. “They tried to reverse the Genesis effect ... or something. We won’t know exactly what they did until we find Marla Karuw.”
Former regent, professor, and lover to an overseer, Marla Karuw sat dumbfounded on a worm-ridden log and surveyed the sun coming up over ... not the paradise she had envisioned ... not the overgrown chaos of Genesis ... but something much worse. This was neither beast nor fowl—it was the unholy conglomeration of two biological experiments that had both failed, and together they had produced the equivalent of a two-headed, mutant baby. Oil and water didn’t mix; neither did the overlay of Genesis technology and their own chromasynthetic, DNA-laced terraforming. Vilo Garlet had been right in one respect, though wrong in many others: unleashing widespread [273] chromasynthesis without testing was tantamount to killing an already ill patient.
She had destroyed what she set out to save.
Marla couldn’t even bear to look in the other direction, where there was nothing but a cracked, baked salt flat. Even the rocks were gone, and the wind bore reeking scents of ammonia and methane. She couldn’t even decide which half of the split world was supposed to be the real Aluwna—neither one looked like anything she had seen before, and that included the Genesis jungle. She squeezed the com bracelet on her left arm, and it beeped to say it was trying to contact the Darzor, but there hadn’t been any response from them since the fateful signal she had sent to Vilo.
How can I call myself a scientist when I released a planetwide scourge, without testing? The Genesis effect was still evolving ... and I should’ve brought my people down first.
Something rustled in the brackish, leaf-covered swamp in front of her, and Marla looked up but didn’t move—she was too tired
and despondent to move. She watched transfixed as a mammoth serpent with long tentacles and three beady, blistered eyes rose from the depths. Its arced neck and bulbous head towered over the trees, which had been blasted into gnarled twigs and bare branches. A lot of trees had fallen, such as the one upon which she sat. In their place rose the primeval vision of a behemoth that had existed before any creature walked on two legs. Or maybe it would never exist, except in this unique time and place.
“Go ahead and kill me,” she told the beast as it hovered ever closer, showing her rows and rows of interlaced picklike teeth. It studied her as if she were an unfamiliar but possibly delectable morsel. “I deserve to die—for my arrogance,” Marla informed the monster. “I have failed my people ... and myself.”
Staring at death in its most hideous and primal form, her life memories assaulted her. It had been a life of great promise, great opportunities, and an almost psychotic urge to battle authority whenever possible. Every time she had been given an [274] opportunity, she threw it away because of hubris, and this disaster was the worst example of all. She had squandered her people’s faith in her, and she had introduced murder where there was none.
In fact, it had been the sight of the wizened corpse of Curate Molafzon that had tipped her over the edge. And even now she wondered if it had been but a vision, conjured by a failing, guilty mind. Marla gazed up to see the basilisk, cocking its fearsome head at her and watching her wallow in pity. She looked for a rock to hit it with, but many of the rocks had been pulverized and crumbled in her hands.
“Come on, finish me off!” she challenged the beast.
Almost smiling, the creature nodded and lunged its massive head toward her, jaws agape. A flash came out of the jungle and hit the beast a glancing blow near the base of its neck. It roared in terror and primal rage, shaking what few leaves were left off their branches, then it ducked quickly out of sight while another shot went wild and set a bush at water’s edge on fire.
“Bless me,” said a startled voice behind her, and she turned to see her former assistant, Komplum, wielding a Klingon disrupter rifle. His helmet was gone, and what was left of his environmental suit was soiled and ripped. “That should have killed it—what a monster!”
“And you deprived him of his dinner,” said Marla glumly, throwing her legs over the log and staring at her young apprentice. “If you’ve come here to capture me, you might as well shoot me. Go ahead. Unlike that animal, I’ll make sure to die.”
Komplum took the weapon off his shoulder and set it uneasily on the ground. “I’ve been watching you since you came back to camp with Alexander, and I saw where you ran when ... whatever you did ... happened. I stayed in camp, wandered around, listening ... and I picked up this disruptor from a dead Klingon. There’s been lots of death lately.”
“So why don’t you leave me alone?” she asked, turning away [275] from him in embarrassment. “Spare me the speeches—just kill me or leave me alone.”
“I’m not completely blameless,” muttered Komplum, hanging his head. “I was the one who put the curate’s body in the transporter booth.”
“What?” she shrieked, jumping to her feet and roaring as in days of old. She glared at him, tried to talk, and sputtered, “I didn’t know how ... it scared me. What ... where ... explain yourself!”
“You killed him,” said Komplum frankly. “That did more harm than everything else you did. Or at least it made you the False Divine, making life-and-death decisions without consulting anyone or any power. You ran roughshod over everyone else, including me. You never even officially fired me, just banished me down here, while you depended on Vilo.”
“Stop!” she grumbled. “I know my crimes. Of course, you’re right. So shoot me with that Klingon stick.”
“No, you don’t get off that easily,” snapped Komplum. “You told those people you would save them—you put them into the care of machines, and now you have to free them. The satellites are dying, and the people will die, too. Don’t you care?”
That stung her, and she turned toward him, her eyes glistening red. She couldn’t refute him, so she just listened.
Komplum pointed into the distance. “The Federation personnel didn’t deserve this. They’re out there now, trying to finish your work ... while you desert us. Before this, you’ve made every decision for a good end, but now you’re so selfish you can’t even do that much.”
“I’m sorry,” muttered Karuw. “When I saw the curate’s body ... how did you get it?”
“I announced him into your study, remember?” asked Komplum. “He came out, went with the constables, and was never seen again. You weren’t paying much attention to me even then, so I retrieved him with the transporter. He was quite dead and desiccated, of course, and I thought I would hold him ... as [276] a kind of insurance, in case you tried to leave me behind. You weren’t that cruel to me, until Vilo Garlet came aboard. I knew the two of you were planning something, but you never took me into your confidence. Then, I guess, you got nervous about me and sent me here. I stashed his body in one of the booths to be sent down—it beamed down yesterday to replace the one with the accident. Strange, eh?”
“That crime was waiting to be discovered,” grumbled the professor, “or for me to acknowledge it.” She stared into the bleak, foreboding forest, smelling what seemed like sulfur and creosote. “I knew his murder would come back to haunt me, but I had nothing to do with Tejharet’s death.”
The young scholar shook his head sadly. “By that time, the Cursed Hand was loose upon us, and it was mixed with fatigue and the thirst for revenge.”
Vigorously Marla Karuw stood up and lifted her chin. “You’re right, we have to get them out of those satellites. I’ll go back to camp with you and confess to the murder I committed. I hope they’ll let me advise them.”
“Let me speak for you,” said Komplum, picking up his disruptor rifle. “The key person now is Worf—he’s in charge of this brutalized planet, which I have a hard time calling Aluwna. He’ll be very glad to see you.”
twenty-four
Worf scowled as he paced through the ooze of Base One, or what was left of it. The survivors of the second catastrophe on Aluwna had staked out a new camp on the high ground, although most of their shuttlecraft, shelters, and equipment were mired in a meter or two of mud. Some were underwater completely in the bog that was once a crater and before that was part of an extinct civilization. It was time these inhabitants learned to live with what had happened, although it was hard to blame irrational behavior on those who had suffered so much. Now the Aluwnans had dug their hole that much deeper, and more than anything Worf just wanted to get off this chameleon planet.
The snow and ash had been replaced by grit and sand from the new strips of desert wasteland, but the wind blew as fiercely as ever. The moss creatures were a distant memory, and Worf felt no fear or psychic pull from them. Everyone had discarded their headgear, but most were still wearing their enviro suits for protection from the cold. The sun was shining red through the salmon clouds, as if it could see its former paradise and was as mad as Worf.
The transporter booth had been moved beside their [278] half-submerged shuttlecraft, and broken metal walls from the geodesic domes had been laid down to walk upon. Leah Brahms, Geordi, Data, and most of the away team toiled down there, trying to figure out what to do for the people trapped in the satellites. With the ships in orbit out of commission or gone, there was very little they could do to help anyone on the ground. Alexander and two of the Klingons were trying to calm the panicked Aluwnans, while gangs of Aluwnans and Klingons were salvaging what they could from the new wave of wreckage.
Will Riker stood on a nearby sand dune, staring upward at the angry amber sky. He spoke into the wind, then tapped his combadge. Seeing Worf looking at him, Riker waved, then skidded down his heels toward the Klingon’s position. “The Enterprise has resumed orbit and is almost back online,” he reported. “But transporters are still iffy.”
“T
hat is the truth,” muttered Worf. “I feel like Reg Barclay—I never want to see another transporter.”
“Now that it’s daylight,” said Riker, “we’ve got to send out more parties to find the escape pods. They’re probably having a harder time than we are. At least now we can coordinate with the Enterprise’s sensors.”
“Yes, let’s organize—” Something caught Worf’s eye coming out of the bedraggled forest at the edge of the green zone, and he peered more closely. It was an Aluwnan female, about the right age and station to be Marla Karuw; an Aluwnan with a disruptor rifle was guiding her toward camp. “Come with me,” said Worf.
The two of them strode toward the approaching pair. A hush went up around the scattered refugees, and everyone knew something important was happening. By the time Worf and Riker reached Marla Karuw and her escort, others had stopped what they were doing to gather around. Members of the away team, Alexander and several Klingons, and a number of Aluwnans walked solemnly up the barren ridge, their scarves and tattered garments whipping in the wind.
[279] “Marla Karuw,” intoned Worf in his best wrath-of-God voice. “You have sabotaged our efforts and your own. I’m placing you under arrest.”
“Ambassador Worf,” said the young Aluwnan with the disruptor rifle. “I am Komplum, her assistant, and I captured her. By captor’s right in the Klingon canon, I can determine what’s done with this prisoner, as long as confinement is guaranteed. That might include her serving as a vassal to me. If she attempts to escape, the next captor would have the right to claim her. Even if she goes to trial for her crimes, she remains in my custody until the fate for her crime is determined.”
“That is a very old law,” grumbled Worf, clenching his teeth.
Data cocked his head and said, “I believe that law is the fundamental statute in the Klingon bounty-hunting industry.”
STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book Four - Genesis Force Page 26
