by Diane Carey
If it did stop, the velocity would drop and there would be a primordial system again, as there was five billion years ago. The whole configuration of this area of space would be forever changed.
"Inner mass at one-sixtieth of one percent!" Karn was hovering near the port auxiliary monitors and tipped entirely onto his head in order to read the mass change. "Mass outside of our shields is zero, sir! Zero!"
Between the "zz" and the "o" of his last word, the planets of this solar system, now hardly more than loosely grouped areas of rocky debris, seemed to vaporize before them, molecules flashing in a million directions. All but the sun was decimated. The sun itself, too big to move far, expanded to unthinkable size now at the speed of light, well off their scales and engulfing all their screens. The shapes of the other five ships on the auxiliary monitors were only glazed silhouettes—
And suddenly there were only four other ships.
"The Shukar!" Ruhl shouted. "General!"
Kellen stared at the brightening screens until his eyes watered. The Shukar, blown into warp in a billion bits. An explosion so fast as to be virtual vaporization. Molecules suddenly radiating away from each other at the speed of light. They had failed to hold mass.
"Inner mass, one one-hundredth of one percent!" Karn whimpered, shielding his eyes with both hands as he hovered upside down. "One one-hundred-twentieth—we can't hold it!"
"Feed all weapons power to the shields."
Aragor was fighting to keep control, but Kellen knew him and heard the tremors in his voice. They barely had any mass at all, in practical terms it was nothing, but in physics the difference between something and nothing was a universe of difference. They were managing to remain intact while everything exploded around them, but the power drain was fabulous. Seconds were slipping away.
The planets were gone. The sun was still expanding. In a few more minutes—
Suddenly a great hand swatted Kellen toward the deck. His arms and legs flew upward, and he hit the deck on his considerable stomach. Ruhl landed on top of him, stunning them both. Confused by the sensation of their own weight, the bridge crewmen rolled about momentarily, searching for equilibrium. Was down once again down?
Kellen put his palms on the deck and heaved upward, pressing with his shoulder blades. For a moment he felt like a bird-of-prey in battle poise, wings down, shoulders tensed, knuckles in.
Ruhl rolled off and was dumped to the deck at Kellen's heels. Kellen pressed down his need to vomit and clawed toward the helm. "Status of gravitational forces system-wide!"
The crew shuffled dizzily to the shelf of readouts on the starboard side. Ruhl's reddish hair had come loose and was hanging in his face like a ragged mop. He was still trying to do too much himself. Promoted too quickly, it seemed. Not used to delegating responsibility. Sometimes promotions happened that way when a family was too well connected. He would learn.
"All readings returning to normal, sir!" Karn called. He swung around to look at the forward monitor.
Kellen did the same, as did everyone. The sun would tell.
Before their eyes the swollen, overextended mass of solar matter was drawing inward toward its core again, shrinking with a terrible violence to its normal size—but some of the solar matter flung off during the loss of mass was too far away to be pulled back and spun outward in all directions.
Now shorn of any life or growth, with the bits of living bodies crushed amid the rubble, the planetary material was bashed to primordial rubbish, thrown away at light speed, and all bets were off. The sun would have to gather itself, then slowly begin once again nipping at deep space to draw bodies to orbit it. The eons had begun again.
"Aragor," he said. "Aragor, are you there?"
The long silence was unfriendly. Had the same tragedy happened to Qul as to Shukar? He began to look from screen to screen.
"Aragor, sir," the comm system rasped. "The … sun has moved several millions of miles … recoalesced because of its size once gravity and mass returned … It is no longer actually a sun, but a hot cloud of gas beginning to act again as nature intended. . . . The planets are gone. . . ."
Random observations, coming as Aragor thought of them. He was deeply shaken.
"Everything has stopped," the science officer continued before Kellen has a chance to encourage him on. "The velocity must have been reduced to its previous levels somehow as the mass returned. . . . It must have something to do with natural conservation of energy. . . . Energy has to come from somewhere … it cannot just appear. . . . As long as we maintained the slightest mass, we remained … intact …"
He was searching for words. Saying what they were all thinking—that these things cannot happen, but they just had. Where had the energy come from that had caused this?
"What stopped the effect, Aragor?" Kellen prodded.
More silence came back at him. He glanced at Karn, who stared at him, waiting for Aragor to bear the weight.
'Nature stopped it."
Another stretch of silence.
Kellen could sense Aragor thinking and thinking.
"Mass … energy … and velocity are all related. When mass was taken away, nature balanced with more velocity, all the way to light speed. When the mass suddenly returned, velocity of the matter substantially decreased."
"But velocity is only measured relative to other things," Kellen broke in. "It decreased relative to what?"
They were all staring at him now. He felt the tense stares of men on the other ships too. They were all waiting for him and his science officer to find the answer.
"I do not know." Aragor sounded whipped. He hadn't wanted to say that. "I could be completely wrong. I see it, I can describe it … but I cannot explain it."
"Sir!" Ruhl gasped, moving on shaky legs back toward his own command chair to where Kellen stood near the helm. "Could it have been a weapon?"
"If it was theirs," Kellen said, "they have destroyed themselves with it. If it was someone else's, then we have a new war on our hands."
Ruhl came to hunch beside him over the shuddering helm. "Starfleet?"
Kellen did not respond. There were some things even a Klingon preferred not to guess.
Starfleet. Their old enemy. His oldest. Certainly those people were capable of developing a mass-blanking weapon, but he wondered if Starfleet would use such a thing. Yes, but not without provocation, and there had been none lately.
Kellen knew that, because he had asked to do some provoking and been turned down.
The solar system remained in chaos. As the sun broiled fiercely during its reintegration, alone in space now.
Nothing left to conquer. Had the predator been starved by the prey's self-immolation?
If not a weapon, then what?
He turned to Ruhl, and found himself about to speak to a shag of reddish hair, and it threw him off for a moment. He shook his own combed locks as if in example.
"Ruhl, at least get your hair out of your face when I speak to you."
Pawing his hair out of his face, Ruhl caught part of his long mustache on a fingernail and ended up with one hand caught near his ear. He shook it loose, embarrassed, wondering if he had just been given an order or only a suggestion, and muttered, "Yes … yes, sir."
Rather than appease him with acknowledgment, Kellen said "Assess damage in the fleet and make a full sensor scan of the area."
Ruhl's small eyes grew wide. "What shall we scan for?"
"Whatever you find."
"Yes, Commander. . . ."
"Karn," Kellen began, and turned to face the startled science officer of this ship, so Karn would not look bad in the eyes of his own crewmates. "Was the suspension limited to this solar system? How far did it reach?"
Karn struggled to avoid thanking the general for his attention, and poured himself into the readouts. "Long-range sensors suggest it reached at least sixteen light-days."
"Dispatch immediate reports of all this to the Empire."
"Yes, General."
"General," Ruhl interrupted, "we should tell them the Uri Taug star system is now devoid of life. Otherwise they'll wonder why we failed to conquer."
Kellen held a hand toward the godlike ruin on the screens. "We'll tell them we did conquer. After all, the system is ours now. What's left of it."
"Sir!"
Both Kellen and Ruhl turned toward Karn. "Yes?"
"Sir … sir!"
Kellen swatted the young man's arm. "We are both here. Say something!"
"A … a … change!"
The baffled science officer stepped aside with forgivable gratitude as Kellen pressed toward the science station and Ruhl pushed in after him.
In the middle distance, reading only a light-year away, a core of turbulence had opened up on their screens. On each screen it looked different, for each screen picked up different elements—spectra, energy, spatial disruption. Not a swirl, but not a crack, yet still it moved. Like a piece of woman's fabric strung in space and waved by a giant hand, it taunted them.
Squinting, Kellen wondered aloud, "What is that?"
"Some kind of … storm?" Ruhl sounded compelled to invent an answer.
"A storm with good timing? I doubt that."
"Then what do you think?"
"I think we're seeing the cause of what he have just felt." Kellen straightened and reacted briefly to a sharp pain in his left shoulder from their experience. "I should be on my own flagship for whatever is coming. Continue to monitor that phenomenon. Remain at battle configuration."
"Yes, sir," Ruhl said.
"Aragor, are you still standing by?"
"Yes, General!"
"Are you reading this phenomenon?"
"I … see it, sir."
That was Aragor's way of admitting to Kellen that he hadn't a clue what the waving veil was.
Using the confusion of the moment to shade the fact that he didn't feel like walking all the way to the transporter room, Kellen plucked his handheld communicator from its holster and snapped it open.
"Pick up my coordinates and beam me back directly to the bridge immediately. We will find out what did this. If it is an accident, we will explain it. If it is a weapon, we will own it. Activate transporter beams now."
"Transporter officer, energize beams. Bring the general directly to the bridge."
Aboard the Border Fleet flagship Qul, Science Officer Aragor drew a long breath of relief that soon General Kellen would be back aboard and would take command during this strange time. Though he tried to appear supremely Klingon in front of the bridge crew, Aragor was frightened. The impossible had just happened before his eyes, and his whole body was still quaking. Had the mass drop continued a few more seconds, they would have become part of an uncontrolled whirl of hyperlight.
A drop in mass! Unthinkable! It couldn't possibly happen naturally.
The general would figure it out. He would find the answers. The two of them would piece together the data, and Kellen would decide what happened. Kellen was the smartest warrior in the universe.
The whine of transporter energy chewed at Aragor's ears, and he turned toward the open area of the bridge to which Kellen was being beamed. Seconds now.
A pillar of expanding lights appeared, many bands, bringing the disassembled atoms of their commander across the emptiness of space, to be reconstructed here. The pillar coalesced into shoulders draped with fabric, a broad torso clad in stiff metallic fiber. For a moment there was a short clean-cut beard and bronze hair trimmed above the shoulder. A thin mustache, as if stenciled on.
Then, the wide pillar of light began to fade. The whine rose to a scream. The lights thinned out.
"What is this!" Aragor struck the communications pad. "Transporter officer! What are you doing?"
There was no response. Before him, General Kellen's partially formed face frowned as if sensing the transportation going wrong. His right hand turned slightly outward from his robe, toward Aragor, and the fingers opened in beckoning.
"Transporter!" Aragor called. "Bring him in!"
"Trying," the comm buzzed. "There is interference, sir!"
"Fight for him!" Aragor waved the other bridge personnel back, away from the pillar of sparkling light, so no one else's physical presence would attract any of the particles trying so desperately to reassemble.
What was happening? The transporter should easily be able to do this. Ship-to-ship transportation at this distance was nothing. Nothing!
The pillar of lights surged once as if succeeding, but then suddenly sizzled completely away. The dim bridge lighting seemed somehow much dimmer now.
Aragor swung around to glare at the main screen, which showed a picture of the fleet ships. "Ruhl! Do you have him?"
"Not here," the other captain's voice came back, high with tension. "We do not have him!"
"Where is he? Where is he?" With the heel of his hand Aragor struck the intraship unit. "Transporter! Where is he!"
His transporter officer's voice was thready, shocked. "Sir, the beams … they went into that twisting form out there. I do not understand how it could happen—he was drawn in, as if magnetized!"
Aragor jumped to his science station, where he was met by the tactical officer, and together they stared into the science readout screen.
More of the impossible—the transporter beams, presented in an image of chittering energy, looped like the tail of a running animal, then were swallowed by the phenomenon out there.
As they stood together and watched the screen, a form began to take shape, emerge from the gash in open space. A solid form. A vessel … a ship …
"Taken," the tactical officer murmured. "Absorbed!"
With both hands Aragor gripped the rubber rim of the monitor. "I want him back, Vagh. . . ."
He plunged to the helm, hammered the controls until the main viewer switched to a sheet of black space incised by the waving valence of new energy.
He stared into the vision. His wail rattled the bones of his crewmates.
"I want my general back!"
Chapter Two
VOLCANIC WIND … perfumed, reeking atmosphere … and a sound of engines.
Kellen materialized gagging.
As soon as the transporter beams released him, he stumbled back against a hard surface, and choked. The air here was heavy, vaporous; the surface against which he leaned was mossy. He huddled against it until his eyes adjusted to the dimness.
The ceiling was only an arm's length over his head. Higher in some places. A tunnel of some sort? A cave?
Hard ground beneath his feet. Skin itching. Plant life—sedge, burrs and creepers, algae, spotted cabbage, puffballs, adder's tongue … He recognized some of them; others were familiar but had the wrong color, the wrong shape, or the wrong smell. He was no botanist.
Pungent odors … If he could only get a whole breath. Then he could think.
Think, think. Cling to self-control.
He had been transporting from Ruhl's ship to his own. Now he was on some planet, in a cave.
"But there were no planets left," he rasped. The sound of his own voice anchored him. "Especially none with life. . . ."
He pressed his hand to the wall. Parasites jumped from the moss onto his hand and skittered in confusion. Life.
Small life, but company was company.
At least he could eat.
He pushed off the cave wall. He took one step, then stopped as he thought of something else. Kneeling, he peered at the ground. There was growth here too, but vetchy, flattened growth. Flattened by other footsteps? Where he could walk, so could others.
Others …
He brushed the ground with the side of his hand, to tidy it a little, then stood up. That sound—he remembered it now, and in remembering heard it again. After so many years in spaceships he had come to ignore the necessary thrum of power generation.
"Engines," he validated.
His experienced ears knew the sound of a power source, but he could see none, nor discover any specific direction from w
hich the dim thrumming came. He must be near a factory of some kind. A power generator.
If there was power, he could use it to get back to his fleet, or at least to send a signal.
So the mass drop must have been some kind of weapon or distraction, and now he, the fleet leader, was kidnapped.
Speculating made him uneasy. He would deal only with the facts. Footmarks and power, on a planet with caves.
And light? Where was the light coming from? Another power source? The sun they had watched blow up and shrink back?
He paused to see whether the light changed at all. It remained hazy, but steady. No way to judge whether it was natural or not. No draft, no wind, yet the air was tolerable now that he was breathing more slowly.
Where was he? A planet with atmosphere.
A momentary panic struck him that he could be on a distant outer planet, waiting for the second wave of gravity gap to wash outward from the sun for a second apocalypse, yet he had seen those planets shatter, and even if they were balled up again there could be no life, no moss or insects left.
No. We reached zero mass. There is no planet left here.
Dismissing the possibility that he could still be in that mutilated solar system, he selected a branch of the cave at random and moved through it. The tunnel was narrow, but roomy above his head. Within twenty steps he found himself in another open area. Here the sound of the power source was stronger and he became more sure that he recognized the tenor of it. In fact, he noted the pitch was higher than normal … normal for what?
There was nothing here but another tunnel. He went through it into a darkness that nearly turned him back. As the blackness closed in, he paused to let his eyes adjust and to shore up his courage to move forward and not back into what he already knew. The fleet would be looking for him. He had to contrive a way to let them find him.
The darkness became blackness. The blackness pressed inward against his shoulders, down across the crest of his brow. He pressed back with his will, blinking his eyes as if they were the problem. The tunnel closed tighter at his sides—he could feel the change. He saw nothing, yet he sensed much.
