On the section of lawn at which the senior watcher had pointed, a glowing, golden disc appeared, an artifact with roughly twice the diameter of one of the personnel transporter stages aboard Titan.
“You’re early,” Vale said, feeling her endocrine system disabling the “safety” setting for her fight-or-flight response. “You said you’d be back in the morning. Something important must have happened in the meantime.” Or else, she thought, somebody has made a hasty decision to dispose of us.
“Please stand upon the conveyance,” Ereb said, affect-free in both face and voice as far as Vale could tell. “All of you, if you please.”
“You first,” Sortollo said.
Ereb released a breath in a manner that sounded remarkably like a sigh of frustration. “Yours is a most contentious species, Commander Vale.”
“Confinement doesn’t usually bring out the best in us,” Vale said.
“You asked for a hearing with Hranrar’s senior planetary leaders,” Ereb said, sounding puzzled. “I believe your exact words were, ‘Take me to your leader.’ With this device we will fulfill your request.”
A choice of phrase that I’m sure I will never live down, she thought.
Pointing at the still-glowing disc that Ereb had just conjured up on the lawn, Vale said, “How can we be certain that thing isn’t some novel form of capital punishment?”
Ereb blinked in evident confusion. “Capital . . . punishment?”
“Execution,” Vale said. “You know, state-sanctioned killing.”
She felt a hand on her shoulder; startled, she spun toward the hand’s owner, only to find that she was facing Deanna Troi.
“Relax, Christine. Ereb is appalled at the very idea of executions. I think we can trust that her disc is some sort of transporter, and not a matter-disintegrator of some kind.”
Vale nodded, then turned back to face Ereb. Gesturing grandly toward the disc, she said, “In that case, Ereb—after you.”
With a movement reminiscent of a shrug, Ereb sprang on grasshopper legs to the middle of the stage, to be followed by her six police escorts. Vale stepped up next, to be followed moments later by Sortollo, Troi, and the remaining four members of the team.
Vale had never been a fan of non-Starfleet transporters; in fact, if she’d had her druthers, she’d probably avoid entirely the process of having her body disassembled and reassembled. As she began to brace herself for whatever peculiar effects this alien transporter technology might have in store for her, she noticed that the sky had abruptly shifted.
In less than an eyeblink, the night sky had vanished, giving way instantaneously to mid-day. Nothing else seemed to have changed, from the Hranrarii transporter beneath her boots, to the fellow crewmembers and Hranrarii natives with whom she shared it, to the flat green meadow that surrounded the transport disc.
Despite the brightness of Hranrar’s primary star, a brilliantly glowing object was clearly visible in the azure sky: Brahma-Shiva, Vale realized, since she knew it to be located on the opposite side—the day side, at the moment—of Hranrar. They must have instantaneously transported to some virtually identical glade atop an urban tower that she’d never be able to distinguish from the one she’d just left.
Vale looked up, using her hands to shield her eyes against Hranrar’s fierce central star. Almost directly overhead, the disk of the lower portion of Brahma-Shiva, together with an oblique view of the object’s long, vertical spire, hung over Hranrar like a luminous sword of Damocles.
“Commander!” Sortollo cried.
Vale looked away from the glowing apparition in the sky in time to see another lift begin to emerge from beneath the short, manicured grass. The sight of the sod ripping open from beneath disconcerted her, reminding her of the horror vids she had spent far too much of her youth watching.
Putting aside her mental images of caskets opening and ravening, flesh-eating zombies rising from fresh graves, she watched as the lift finished emerging and opened.
An august-looking, yellow-robe-bedecked Hranrarii emerged, flanked by a pair of dour-looking, standard cops or bodyguards. The amphibious eminence wasted no time striding onto the transport platform. As though in possession of empathic or intuitive instincts to rival Troi’s, the creature strode unceremoniously past the bowing First Watcher Ereb and approached Vale. The newly arrived creature met the commander’s gaze head-on with an intense, yellow-eyed stare.
“I am Sethne Naq, Speaker for the Great Syndic of the Global Moeity of Hranrar,” the creature said in tones rendered mellifluous by the universal translators. “I am told that you claim to be able to explain the new light in our sky.”
“Someone must have called ahead to make sure the lights would be on,” Ra-Havreii said moments after the transporter beam released its hold on the team assigned to board Brahma-Shiva. “I detest beaming into darkened spaces.”
“That might not be far from the truth,” said Lieutenant Commander Keru as he made a circular visual sweep of the brightly illuminated chamber, his phaser at the ready, mirroring the motions of Lieutenant Qur Qontallium.
“My sensor sweep indicates that the lights became active only a few of your minutes ago,” said SecondGen White-Blue, who hovered nearby to form the third point of an equilateral triangle in conjunction with Keru and Qontallium. “A humanoid-compatible nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere heated to twenty-one point eight degrees Celsius seems to have preceded the lights by a lengthy interval.”
“How lengthy?” Ra-Havreii said, sniffing the air; it carried a vaguely stale, musty smell, but was otherwise acceptable.
A reptiloid voice behind Ra-Havreii interrupted. “Long enough to allow Krassrr’s engineering and tactical teams to install antipersonnel explosives without having to use pressure suits.”
Ra-Havreii supposed the Gorn must have a natural aversion to pressure suits, at least as Starfleet personnel understood them; with claws like those the Gorn possessed, incidents of accidental explosive decompression must have been endemic.
“Why would Krassrr want to plant explosives in here?” Ra-Havreii asked. “He’d be placing his one chance to make this planet into a new Gorn warrior hatchery in jeopardy.”
“He reasoned that such an outcome would be better than allowing an enemy to turn Great S’Yahazah’s formidable power against the Gorn Hegemony.”
“I wouldn’t put it past Krassrr to try to bluff us,” Qontallium said. “How do we know he’s really installed any explosives?”
“I know they are here because I helped install them,” S’syrixx said.
Both Keru and Qontallium appeared convinced. “Where?” said the security chief.
“Follow me,” said the Gorn, who wasted no time leading the security contingent and Blue-White toward one of the nearby walls, where Keru and Qontallium began assisting S’syrixx in the painstaking removal of the series of small, palm-sized metal objects they found magnetized there amidst a busy, cramped filigree of complex markings that strongly resembled a written language.
Content to leave the task of looking out for further booby traps for the security contingent and the floating AI, Ra-Havreii devoted his entire attention to the room itself. Built into the center of Brahma-Shiva’s base, the oval chamber extended some forty meters across at its widest point, while the ceiling stretched more than twenty meters overhead. Every surface of the gently curving walls was festooned with the same small, intricate shapes that had concealed the explosive charges S’syrixx and the security contingent were now busy removing and disarming. Ra-Havreii’s engineering tricorder read the markings as primarily trypolymerized composites of silicon, molybdenum, and cobalt. Although the shapes on the walls strongly resembled writing, their composition led him to think they might be something far more subtle. He took his time studying them, discovering along the way that they weren’t merely markings etched onto the walls—they were more like components stamped onto a substrate, analogous to integrated circuits imprinted onto old-fashioned duotronic or multitronic microproce
ssors, or even the microtranstators that were grown into the matrices of modern isolinear chips.
Looks a little bit like a heuristic matrix, he thought, awed as much by the complexity as by the evident age of this find. Not too different from what you might expect to find imprinted on the positronic brain of a Soong-type android, or something similar.
Evidently having completed the task of disarming Krassrr’s explosives, S’syrixx approached Ra-Havreii and spoke in strangely low, reserved tones. “You may be looking upon the sublime thoughts of S’Yahazah, the Great Egg Bringer.”
Ra-Havreii somehow found the Gorn’s growling, hissing whisper more unnerving than the guttural rumble of his ordinary speaking voice, perhaps in part because of the alienness of their present surroundings. At least aboard Titan—an environment Ra-Havreii had essentially designed—he was surrounded by enough familiar touchstones not to be overly bothered by the Gorn’s presence. But here, however . . .
“I don’t suppose you can tell what she might be thinking about,” Ra-Havreii said.
“I can only surmise, Commander,” S’syrixx said. “But I imagine she wouldn’t wander far from the usual topics. Life. Death. And the cycle that endlessly iterates them both.”
“I recommend against making any further active scans while we are aboard, unless absolutely necessary,” said Commander Tuvok as he consulted his own tricorder, which he was presumably running in a passive-scan mode.
“Yesss,” S’syrixx said. “This place may conceal any number of additional surprises for us.”
“I agree,” Ra-Havreii said with a nod.
As he opened up the small case that carried the team’s cache of antimatter charges, Keru spoke up quietly, pitching his voice low in an apparent effort to make himself audible only to his Starfleet colleagues. “Speaking of surprises, I can’t help but wonder why Captain Krassrr hasn’t posted any guards in here.”
Ra-Havreii had no answer to that, other than one he didn’t like very much—the possibility that the away team had just beamed into a carefully laid trap that Krassrr could spring shut on them at any moment.
“Krassrr claims to revere the Egg Bringer as much as any member of the technological or religious castes does,” S’syrixx said, either unaware or unoffended by Keru’s attempt to exclude him from the conversation. “He is no exemplar of piety, of course, or he would not be endangering the Hranrarii. But he may be disinclined to court S’Yahazah’s displeasure by quartering his troopers in Her sanctum.”
That made sense to Ra-Havreii, if such superstitions could be said to make sense on any level. Perhaps the reverence for the Ur-mother of Gorn mythology that S’syrixx exhibits—along with a predilection for identifying it with this ancient technological artifact—also exists in Krassrr’s caste, where it manifests as a general disinclination to risk the displeasure of an alleged god-thing by approaching it too closely.
Tuvok spoke, distracting Ra-Havreii from his musings. “Now that we have finished disabling Krassrr’s antipersonnel ordnance,” the Vulcan said, addressing the entire away team, “I suggest we make finding an active computer interface our top priority. We do not know how much time we have to accomplish that task, nor do we know how long it will take to download whatever data this structure might contain. I trust that I need not remind anyone that the shuttlecraft Gillespie could be discovered and destroyed at any moment.”
If anything were to happen to the Gillespie, the away team’s chances of escaping from Brahma-Shiva before Keru’s antimatter charges blew it to oblivion wouldn’t be worth computing.
With a nod to Tuvok, Ra-Havreii adjusted the scan radius of his tricorder and busied himself taking additional scans.
25
U.S.S. TITAN
Riker felt the teeth-rattling impact a moment after the tractor beam released the escape pod and allowed it to settle onto the hangar deck.
“Your tractor beam is badly out of adjustment, Rry’kurr,” Z’shezhira said as Riker began frantically working the hatch controls.
“I don’t think our tractor beam had anything to do with that,” he said as the ship rocked and rumbled again.
The hatch irised open with a hiss that sounded vaguely reptilian in Riker’s ears, and the captain bounded out of the small vessel, nearly bowling over Chief Petty Officer Dennisar and Ensign Hriss, the nearest members of the security detail that had come to greet the S’alath’s escape pod.
“Take my guest up to the bridge,” he told the surprised Orion security man, then headed for the nearest turbolift at a dead run.
“Return fire!” Gibruch said as he seized the arms of the command chair in a death grip. The bridge vibrated as the phasers stabbed into Hranrar’s atmosphere.
“Sorry, Captain,” Rager said. “With all this geomagnetic interference, I can’t maintain a weapons lock. I can’t tell if I’m hitting anything or not.”
When the port-side turbolift doors issued their signature pneumatic hiss, Gibruch turned his head briefly to determine the cause. A disheveled, slightly out-of-breath William Riker stepped across the threshold. The relief that the gamma-shift watch officer felt at the sight of his CO was so palpable and intense that he only barely restrained his cranial tails from fluting a triumphal major chord.
The tones burst forth nevertheless as a joyous, singsong “Captain on the bridge!”
As Gibruch stepped aside from the command well in the bridge’s center to make way for Riker, Titan rocked from yet another salvo from the S’alath.
“Proximity alert!” Rager shouted as a klaxon blared.
On the main viewer, the S’alath could be seen approaching rapidly; since the Gorn warship had been keeping station inside Hranrar’s atmosphere at a depth greater than Titan’s, it was obvious that she was now gaining altitude rapidly. The hostile vessel’s forward tubes flared with eye-searing brilliance as it hurtled relentlessly upward, filling the screen.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Riker shouted as the bridge rocked and bucked, the lights dimming as the S’alath’s weapons conspired with the planetary magnetic field to tax Titan’s shield generators to their limits. Gibruch half-fell and half-sat in the empty seat to Riker’s left, since the inertial dampers were under no less strain than were the shields.
Gibruch did not resume his regular breathing pattern until several seconds had elapsed—when it became clear that Titan had miraculously avoided what had looked like a certain collision.
The port turbolift doors hissed open once more. Gibruch was surprised again, but not altogether pleasantly; a Gorn he had never seen before stepped onto the bridge, flanked by Dennisar and Hriss from security.
“The shields took a hell of a pounding from that last salvo, Captain,” Rager said, intent on her console. “Judging from the S’alath’s firing pattern, it looks like Gog’resssh wanted to knock out our engines as he passed us.”
Riker rubbed his beard contemplatively as he turned and acknowledged the new arrivals. “Gog’resssh doesn’t want us following him.”
“He expects to claim Tie-tan and its technology as his own,” the Gorn said in a voice that sang with low growls and soft sibilances. “Just as he expects to claim me as the brood mother of his new warrior caste. He can’t very well achieve either aim if he destroys this vessel outright.”
“Good point,” Riker said. Addressing ops, he asked, “How much damage did he do to us?”
“Nothing serious, Captain,” Rager said. “The magnetic field spoiled the S’alath’s aim for the most part. Our shields did the rest, even though this isn’t their optimal working environment. Warp drive is still down, but I don’t think the Gorn ship made life any harder down in the engine room than it was already.”
Gibruch still couldn’t believe how lucky they had been. “I thought for a moment Gog’resssh meant to ram us,” he said, addressing no one in particular. “I wonder if he’s really crazy enough to do something like that.”
“I just dealt with him up close and personal,” Riker said. “He might know bett
er than to ram Titan, but I think he’s crazy enough to run headfirst into something.”
“The ecosculptor,” said the Gorn female.
“Lay in a pursuit course, Mister Lavena.”
Although the Pacifican hastened to comply with the order, she said, “Once we leave this magnetic hot spot, we’ll be exposed to anything Captain Krassrr decides to throw at us.”
“I think we lost the option of anonymity the moment Gog’resssh started that firefight,” Riker said. “Engage.”
Gibruch felt the ship lurch very slightly during the instant it took the inertial dampers to catch up with Titan’s forward acceleration. It occurred to him that this was the most excitement he had experienced on the bridge in over a year, since the Droplet affair last year.
The sound of the captain’s voice interrupted his reverie. “Commander, I’d like to ask you a question, if you don’t mind.”
“Sir?”
The captain hiked a thumb toward the female Gorn who still stood a few meters behind him. “When Z’shezhira and I slipped away from the S’alath, it was probably a little bit difficult to tell our escape pod apart from a torpedo casing.”
Gibruch nodded. “Given all the geomagnetism-related difficulties we’ve been having, I couldn’t distinguish two such objects using only sensor profile data.”
With a furrowed brow, Riker said, “Are you telling me that my escape pod might have been a photon torpedo as far as you could tell?”
“No, sir. Only that your sensor profile was inadequate to make the determination. I used other means instead.”
“You guessed.”
Gibruch felt his cranial tails filling involuntarily with air, which he began releasing in as quiet and controlled a fashion as possible, given his escalating nervousness. “Yes, Captain. But my guess was based on the fact that the S’alath’s weapons tubes were all cold at the time we detected your escape pod.”
The captain’s frown quickly smoothed itself over, and a wide grin split his face. “Commander, Miz Z’shezhira and I are both lucky that you have such a good eye for detail.”
Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire Page 34
