by Kem Antilles
“Explosive gourds,” said the native girl.
Jake sighed hopelessly, then realized that these gourd bombs must have been the explosive devices used to attack the excavators in the video games he and Nog had played for Kwiltek. And, though they seemed crude, when the bombs hit certain sensitive parts of an excavator, the primitive explosives had been pretty effective. If Jake could show these natives the best places to aim, perhaps he could help them stall the destructive mining, or even inflict enough losses to stop the operation completely.
If Jake could get back to the mothership and warn the other kids to stop playing the simulation games… Why hadn’t he been beamed back up according to the plan? What had Kwiltek done with Nog? Would Kwiltek dare leave Jake stranded on this world forever?
He followed the native girl. As soon as they entered the thick, humid forest, they plunged into a twilight colored by the violet and ivory of the ferns and palm trees around them. Even the vines that hung from the tree branches were a deep, rich purple, dripping with moisture.
The collective mood of the three bouncing, furry bangas changed the moment they all entered the forest. Once out of sight of the excavators, the little creatures perked up as they hopped along, buzzing and purring.
The blue-shouldered girl fell into step beside Jake. “I am Tani,” she said, raising a hand so that her palm faced him. He looked at her and then did likewise. Tani touched her fingertips to Jake’s. She had to spread her small fingers wide apart to reach his.
“I’m Jake,” he said. “Jake Sisko.” He liked the way her red topknot covered one pink cheek as she walked, its strands rippling in the gentle breeze. It reminded him of a human girl’s ponytail.
When they arrived at the Citranese village, Jake was surprised at its simplicity. Fifteen small buildings constructed of deep purple wood were scattered around a clearing in the forest. Jake paused to look more closely at the huts, but Tani impatiently motioned for him to follow.
“Look at those later. I want to show you our weapons.” She led him to piles of what looked like stacked fruit. Some were the size of hydroponic watermelons, others no bigger than an orange.
Jake reached for one of the smaller ones, but Tani’s sharp voice stopped him. “Be careful with those, unless you want to lose your arm!”
Jake jerked his hand back. Tani told him how the explosive was made from the distilled sap of a special tree and carefully poured into a hole cut in the end of each hollow gourd, which was sealed with wax.
A male native ran into the clearing, his eyes wide with fear. “The excavator monsters are approaching our village. We must stop them!”
Alarmed, the Citranese swiftly loaded sack after sack with their sap bombs, slung them with great care over their shoulders, and hurried into the woods. From the ease with which they all hefted the heavy-looking bombs and sacks, Jake realized their spindly arms and legs must be far stronger than he had thought.
Tani tugged at his hand and urged him to hurry after her. She led him to another area of the forest where the trees thinned and dapples of ruddy sunlight reached ground level. Tani pointed upward.
Jake looked, and at first he saw nothing unusual. Then he noticed hundreds of vines woven together into a huge netlike array that extended to the tops of the trees high above. Branches, palm leaves, and grasses were clumped together to form platforms. A metallic gleam made the tangled vines look like the tensile cables Jake had seen on Deep Space Nine. He reached up and grabbed one of the vines. It felt cold and hard, like metal.
“Did you build this?” Jake asked.
“They did,” said Tani.
On the platforms high above sat a group of four-winged flying creatures. Their sleek, triangular heads caught the coppery sunlight, glinting on long, curved beaks. Their four wings—translucent like those of a dragonfly—beat slowly as they perched in their tree aeries. The splashing sunlight colored the wings with constantly changing patterns.
Tani signaled with her hand and held out her forearm. One of the creatures dropped beak-first from its platform, tucked in its wings, and streaked toward them. Alarmed, Jake wanted to dash into thicker woods, but since Tani didn’t seem in the least alarmed, he certainly wasn’t going to bolt.
Just before the large creature collided with them, it extended its wings, pulled up, and landed softly on Tani’s arm. Its sleek, elongated body extended well above Tani’s head. Its eyes were level with Jake’s, and they regarded the boy with intelligence. Tani was signing with her free hand and appeared to be explaining something. The creature chirped once, and Tani stopped, satisfied.
“They help us fight the excavators,” Tani told him.
“You’ve trained them to carry bombs!” Jake exclaimed. Those were the flying creatures he’d battled in the mothership’s video games. He felt colder and colder inside with each new revelation. He had been so proud of himself for each successful hit, each target he defeated—but all along, the mining company had been deceiving him into attacking these living creatures!
“No one trains an Aarda,” Tani said in a shocked voice. “We asked them if they would help us fight, and they agreed. All will die if our forests are destroyed.”
The Aarda chirped, and Tani signed to it. The Aarda chirped again in a different key. “Kree wants you to stroke her,” Tani informed Jake. Jake looked at the needle-sharp talons and wicked beak, and wasn’t sure he wanted to get near the creature. Tani urged, “Kree will consider it most impolite if you refuse her invitation.”
Jake gulped and tentatively reached out his hand. The Aarda bent over and extended her head so that it was within reach. Jake rubbed the back of her neck and was surprised to touch smooth skin, rather than feathers, covering a layer of rock-hard muscle.
“It is time to meet your excavator monsters,” Tani said angrily. “We have tried every defense, and still they come! Help us chase them away, Jake.”
As he and Tani emerged from the forest under cloudy, leaden skies, Jake saw three automated excavators working their way methodically toward where they stood, and six more mining machines close behind. Above each excavator circled its flyer, buzzing like an angry hornet.
The excavators and their flying vanguards moved ever closer.
Desperately, Jake tried to think of a way to stop them.
On the mining ship, Dobb frowned at the empty seats at Jake and Nog’s simulator console. Where are they? the Bajoran girl thought in annoyance.
They had not been late for their shift before. Perhaps Jake didn’t think he could repeat his winning performance from yesterday, so he had been afraid to show up. Maybe he realized how hard a Bajoran could fight. He and Nog might even have decided to avoid her altogether by getting themselves assigned to another shift.
Well, that was not her problem. She still had a job to do for the mining company. Dobb shook the distracting thoughts from her head, causing the silvery chains of her ear cuff to jangle.
She gripped her control stick and looked at the crude images on the colored screen in front of her. She concentrated on the geometric computer obstacles blocking the path of the excavator that her Benzite partner, Tandon, expertly maneuvered.
A pair of triangular needle-nosed blips darted down toward the excavator—enemy fighters—but she picked them off with a practiced ease that made her wish Jake and Nog were there to observe. Flying expert cover, she helped her partner avoid the tiny explosions. She could hear terse comments from other pairs around the room as they tallied damage or complained that the game this morning seemed more difficult than usual.
“Lightning storm brewing,” Tandon warned, pointing at the eye-level readout. Dobb released her grip on the controls, rolled her shoulders, and stretched her hands, trying to relieve some of the tension that had built up since they started their shift.
She gripped the control stick again and fingered her weapons controls. “Okay,” she said, with one last glance over at the empty position where Jake and Nog should have been. “Let’s rack up some points.”<
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Hardly daring to breathe, Nog stared through the ventilation grate into the ship’s main control center. As he had hoped, Kwiltek sat there with a steaming cup, slurping tea through his beak and staring at the display monitors. Actual images of rich purple foliage and low huts lit by flashes of multicolored lightning played across the flickering screens.
The room was filled with guards now, though. One was even posted directly in front of the ventilator shaft. But they hadn’t thought to check the grate in Nog’s own chambers.
Fine, thought Nog, allowing himself a small smile of self-congratulation as he crept on down the air shaft. The extra guards here would make his job that much easier elsewhere.
The mothership’s ventilation system was a made of twists and turns, but Nog did not hesitate. Before long, he found himself at his destination. He pushed aside the metal screen covering the air duct and leaped to the floor—of Kwiltek’s private quarters.
Aside from the main control center, this room held the only computer console that had access to all the mining station’s systems. Nog knew this from the ship’s layout schematics that he had studied. He sat down at Kwiltek’s computer terminal and ran an admiring eye across its intricate controls.
Working quickly, he programmed an automatic message pod with a communication coded for his uncle Quark’s eyes only, and sent it hurtling toward the Wormhole and Deep Space Nine. Then, pulling together every scrap of knowledge he had about computers, and relying more than a little bit on his Ferengi intuition, he began to hack into the video filters that supplied the game room.
As it began to rain, Jake helped several of the desperate natives wrestle wooden catapult frames into place just inside the forest. On each frame, the Citranese loaded a large watermelon-shaped gourd with a rag protruding from the back end. Homemade bombs.
Pairs of slender natives dispersed up and down the forest edge. One member of each pair carried a four-winged Aarda on his forearm, signing to the creature with his free hand as they got into attack position. Jake did his best to summarize the automated tactics the unwitting gamers on the mining ship were most likely to use against them.
The other Citranese partner carried sacks full of small gourds about the size of softballs. Still other villagers ran to the top of a nearby bluff, hundreds of meters above the approaching excavators.
It seemed the Citranese could offer only token resistance to the enormous machines grinding their way upslope. Jake bit his lip. Think! Big as they are, excavators are only machines, and machines can be turned off or broken. They may have heavy armor, but they’ve got vulnerable parts, too.
Jake studied the rolling factories as they drew closer. Their front panels opened, revealing black voids into which their lobster-claw scoops shoveled huge quantities of rock and dirt. There must be conveyors inside those open mouths that transport the ore to the processing furnaces, he thought. How could he knock out an internal smelter?
Every few minutes, black-brown slag spewed from the rear portion of each excavator in an ugly, clumped pile—waste rock left over after the furnaces extracted the latinum and other minerals. A turret swiveled back and forth on top of each mining machine, studded with disks of black glass—spectral sensors, constantly transmitting data from the surroundings.
Jake pointed, calling to the Citranese within earshot. “That’s what we have to hit! If we shatter those sensors, the excavators will be blind!” Excited the natives sent couriers to tell the other defenders.
The excavators approached the forest edge. The slender natives used torches to light the rags in the gourd-missiles. Seconds later, the gourds shot from the crude, wooden catapults with bursts of fire and banshee screams, streaking toward the metal invaders.
Most of the bombs missed, fizzling out in the distance. But a few exploded into brilliant orange flames, rocking the huge excavators back on their treads and blasting large, discolored dents into their sides.
Still, the mining machines kept coming. Each time the Citranese launched a gourd, one of the attack flyers pulsed its phaser, trying to destroy the hidden catapult. But the Citranese quickly pulled their wooden launchers back into the shelter of the thick forest and to a new location.
Flying Aardas from the devastated slopes leaped into the air, clutching small explosive gourds in their talons. Their four wings hummed as they streaked in. Attack flyers fired phasers at them until the sky was full of the bright energy beams, like spears.
But the Aardas flew too fast for the eye to follow, diving and twisting and dodging the beams, weaving in and out only centimeters from searing death. The winged creatures were beautiful to watch as they worked their way closer and closer to their targets. Their swoops and lightning-swift changes of direction took Jake’s breath away.
Once in position, the Aardas dived for the sensor turrets of the excavators as Jake had instructed, sleek purple blurs that left deafening sonic booms in their wake. The sound pounded Jake’s eardrums.
The Aardas released their bombs as a team and pulled out of the dive. The gourds smashed into the machines and exploded into expanding fireballs that the swift Aardas barely outraced. With a pained shriek that tugged at Jake’s heart, one Aarda spiraled to the ground, its wings burned by a phaser burst from a nearby flyer.
How can I protect these creatures? Jake wondered desperately. Then he remembered when he’d been piloting a flyer from his mothership console—when he thought he was just playing games—and he had zapped a river with his phaser to create a pillar of steam. The Aardas could pull the same trick with their bombs! Jake hurried over to a group of nearby Aarda handlers and told them his new plan.
Meanwhile, the little bangas, ignored by the mining company’s flyers, bounced toward the excavators in a series of small hops, never leaping more than half a meter above the ground. Their dark fur blended well with the gouged dirt hillsides. Each living ball carried several orange gourds secured to its top, camouflaged with a piece of woven cloth.
A banga at Jake’s feet buzzed in anxiety as one of its companions got to within meters of an excavator’s caterpillar tread. The banga deposited its bomb on the inside of the tread before hopping away.
As the caterpillar treads crushed the gourd, the homemade bomb exploded, blowing a section out of the tread and causing the excavator to twist to the right. The gathered Citranese sent up a cheer, and Tani rushed over to stroke the brave banga when it bounced back to pick up more gourds with its harness.
Then an Aarda slammed a gourd bomb directly onto the turret of another excavator, and a whole section of black sensor disks shattered in flame. The mining machine lurched to the side, then backed the other way. Blind, it slammed headlong into a neighboring machine. The excavator reminded Jake of a drunk Klingon he’d seen in Quark’s bar, colliding with other patrons as he wove his way back to his table.
Another Aarda dive-bombed a gourd into one of the attack flyers circling the battlefield, skillfully dodging its phaser burst. The winged creature streaked away as a mushroom of flame and smoke erupted from the engine. But a nearby attack flyer, sensing the disturbance, hit the Aarda with a full phaser blast. Jake thought he heard a shriek from the Aarda before it turned into a blazing cinder.
The sky grew dark with smoke from burning equipment and exploding bombs. Two excavators now stood motionless, their turret sensors blown apart, while a third lay on its side, the victim of a well-aimed gourd. A fourth lurched in aimless circles, minus one complete caterpillar tread that the bangas’ bombs had destroyed. Boulders and tree trunks tumbled down the nearby bluff, dislodged by the Citranese on its summit. These battered the sides of the remaining excavators but did little damage.
Then Jake realized that more than battlefield smoke had turned the sky a deep gray-black. A thick mass of storm clouds had piled up, and he could feel the electrical tension in the air, so strong that the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention.
The thunderstorm broke with a vengeance. Torrents of water poured from the sky, the rai
n heavy enough to obscure the details of the nearby excavators. He saw them only as immense dark shapes, blurry shadow creatures. The raw dirt quickly turned to ooze, and the machines floundered, sloshing and sliding, making little headway.
Jake watched as some of the automated flyers, unable to stay aloft in the gale-force winds, landed on the backs of the big excavators. The rain stung his cheeks, and his clammy clothes clung to his skin, but he barely noticed the discomfort. Now’s our chance to do something while those flyers are grounded, Jake thought. We must disable the remaining excavators.
CHAPTER 10
In the simulation room, Dobb pinched herself. She must have been concentrating harder on the game than she had thought. Her eyes were beginning to play tricks on her.
For just a moment, the gaming screen before her had changed, fluttered. It had seemed as if she was looking at real trees rather than a crystal forest, delicate gossamer-winged creatures instead of imaginary needle-nosed fighters, flesh-and-blood natives instead of rocky obstacles.
Working the controls with one hand, Dobb rubbed at her eyes. When she looked up again, crude animated lightning flashed across the screen. The picture had returned to normal.
In confusion, Dobb rubbed her ridged nose. Colored lightning lit the screen again, and she flinched as a piercing howl sounded near her from another station.
“I’m hit! My sensors are disabled. Pullout, pullout!” She could hear panic in the voice of the bewildered excavator driver, followed by a grinding crash and a wail as the partner who had been flying cover also lost control of his machine. Groans and cries of outrage erupted around Dobb as other equipment failed or was destroyed.
Her own screen altered again, showing her the clear image of purplish trees against a stormy sky. Dobb used one sleeve to blot perspiration from her forehead and was relieved when the screen display returned to normal. She could hear the loud, raspy breathing of her Benzite partner and wondered if he had noticed her acting unusual.
