Genesis Force

by John Vornholt

  * * *

  At the edge of the forest, two youths held each other in the same fashion as they crouched under a hollow log. The forest, which had seemed so lush and vibrant only a few instants ago, was melting away like snow caught in a warm downpour. They could hear the leaves crackling and withering as they died.

  “What is going on?” breathed Candra.

  “I don’t know,” answered Farlo honestly. “Did you see that light?”

  “How could I miss it?” Even though it was dark, the whole planet seemed to have a strange golden halo. The ground quivered after a tremendous tree collapsed just behind them, and they gripped each other even more tightly, waiting for the end of everything.

  * * *

  On the bridge of the Enterprise, the normal running lights went out, plunging them into darkness, and Captain Picard banged his knee on his own command chair. A moment later, the emergency reds went on, bathing them in eerie but functional light. Picard turned to look at Beverly Crusher, who was on bridge duty as acting first officer, and her eyes widened in amazement. It wasn’t often that the power went off unexpectedly on the immense starship.

  Picard hit his combadge and said, “Bridge to engineering. What is going on?”

  “Unknown, sir,” came the reply. “Computers are down. All systems are down . . . except for communications and emergency—”

  Without warning, the transmission went dead, and Picard continued to slap his combadge with no result. “Bridge to engineering.” No answer came, and the captain started to feel light-headed and light of foot. In fact, his feet lifted off the deck.

  “Conn,” he ordered, “get us out of here.”

  The helmsman held himself in his seat with one hand and tried to work his board with the other, to no avail. “Helm is not responding,” he answered. “We’re losing all ship’s systems, including artificial gravity.”

  Picard felt hands gripping his biceps, and he turned to see Beverly Crusher giving him a brave smile. “We could lose warp containment,” she said. “Want me to get down there and see what’s happening?”

  The captain looked instinctively at the main viewscreen, but it was dark. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he had seen a flash of light from the planet just before everything went haywire.

  “No, Beverly, stay with me,” he said, floating closer to her.

  “By the time you crawled there and back in the Jefferies tube, we might lose the warp core and our orbit. We’ll have to assume that someone will make their way here from engineering.”

  Before he floated too far away, Picard hooked the arm of his chair with his foot and pulled himself down to his command panel. There weren’t too many orders he could issue from this small console, but there was one which seemed appropriate. Under the fading red light, he entered his private access code and a shipwide alert.

  An emergency klaxon sounded, and a computer voice intoned, “All hands, abandon ship! Proceed to escape pods. All hands, abandon ship!”

  * * *

  The Darzor pitched back and forth, losing altitude and helm control, and Vilo Garlet was slammed against the transporter console he had just used to unleash the chromasynthesis process. “Slipstream particles!” he muttered to himself. “Feedback overload . . . how do I stop it?”

  He began pounding commands into his board, but the process had already terminated. There was no way to turn it off, because it was over. Whatever strange side effects had rippled back along the control waves to the ships in orbit, the anti–Genesis device had already done its job on the planet. He wanted to take sensor readings of the planet, but his controls were frozen as the royal yacht continued to heave and yaw like a rowboat caught in a hurricane.

  The laboratory door slid open, and Overseer Padrin and Seeress Jenoset charged into his domain, fear and anger in their eyes. “What’s happening?” shouted Padrin with alarm. “What have you done?”

  “Where’s Marla?” demanded Jenoset, her hands balled into fists.

  “She’s on the planet,” answered Vilo Garlet, staggering from behind his console. He suddenly felt as if the temperature had gone up twenty degrees, and he tugged at his collar. “And I don’t know what’s happening!”

  As the ship pitched again, Jenoset nearly fell into him, and both of them suddenly floated off the deck. “What have you done!” she screamed. “What have you done?”

  “What had to be done,” he answered, pleading for understanding. “We had to get Aluwna back to normal.”

  Jenoset reached for the rebellious scientist just as an awful squawking noise sounded over the shipwide intercom system. That was followed by a voice battling against static: “This is Captain Uzel . . . we’re losing altitude. We’re trying to compensate, but . . . we’ve lost control! We’re reentering the atmosphere. All hands, brace for impact!”

  “You have destroyed us!” wailed Overseer Padrin. As he floated to the ceiling of the laboratory, the short-lived ruler of Aluwna began to weep.

  Streaking out of control toward Aluwna, the sleek yacht Darzor careened into the atmosphere, with fire blazing along its entire length. The craft gradually turned into a giant fireball with a long tail of smoke, and it burned for several seconds before shattering into a billion burning embers. The pieces of the unfortunate craft floated through the dark sky over Aluwna, looking like the finale of a stunning fireworks display.

  Twenty-Three

  Deanna Troi peered out the small viewport on her escape pod at a remarkable sight. The planet Aluwna was no longer a big ball of greenery with impressive polar icecaps; now it was striped like a zebra with alternating bands of chaotic Genesis growth and barren brown wasteland. It was green and tan, like a round watermelon, and there were brackish bodies of water where before there had been only jungle. The polar icecaps were smaller and were also ringed with barren patches. Of the hundreds of planets she had seen across the universe, she had never seen one that looked like this. In fact, Aluwna had not looked like this yesterday. It was like a dog with striped mange eating up its fur.

  She had wanted to stay aboard the Enterprise with Captain Picard and Beverly Crusher, but he had made it clear that an all-hands evacuation meant all hands. Besides, he wanted there to be leadership down on the planet, where there was bound to be mostly chaos. The escape pods would be coming down in a centralized locale but still separated from each other, perhaps by several kilometers. Half of the senior staff was already down there, but their situation was unknown. All that was known was that some unfamiliar particle stream from the planet’s surface had blasted every system on the ship, and the warp core was oozing deadly radiation. Even the warp-core ejection system was disabled, or else they could save the Enterprise by dispatching the core. But that wasn’t an option.

  All of them seemed to be caught in Aluwna’s ongoing nightmare.

  “We’ll be safe on the planet, won’t we?” said a small voice. Troi turned to look at one of three children strapped into the pod with her, along with their teacher, Valerie, who gave Deanna a game smile.

  “I’m sure we’ll be safe,” answered Troi, “although it may be quite an adventure. We’ll have to work together and do as we’re told.”

  “What will we eat?” asked a boy about eight years old.

  “Emergency rations,” said Troi. “Packaged food.”

  “What about my mommy?” asked a little Deltan girl.

  Troi gave her a reassuring smile. “I’m sure she’s on one of the other escape pods. When we have to leave the ship quickly, everyone goes to the closest pod.”

  The little Deltan nodded as if this made sense to her; then her lips pouted in the beginning of a sob. Before she could break into tears, the escape pod hit turbulence in the upper atmosphere, and they were buffeted about. Troi’s stomach flew somewhere above her head, and all of them gasped.

  “Hold my hands,” said the counselor to the two closest children. “I’m afraid.”

  Their teacher said the same thing, and they were all holding hands during the fri
ghtening tumble through the atmosphere. Deanna glanced out the viewport and could see no more than a blur of clouds and sparks. With a loud whoosh, the parachutes deployed, which brought another stomach-churning shift, frightened gasps, and renewed clutching of hands. Troi explained what was happening, and the children were very brave as the pod’s plummet to Aluwna finally began to slow. When Troi saw trees and rocks outside the window, she said, “Brace yourselves—we’re coming down.”

  The landing was surprisingly soft after the frenetic free fall through the atmosphere. There was a bump and a few moments of settling, and then the hatches popped open—one above their heads and another beneath their feet, which only opened partway because it was stuck in thick vines and branches, which were choked with velvety leaves. The shaken passengers were relatively calm until a mass of tentacles and squirming, fist-sized maggots began to ooze through the crack in the lower hatchway. Now the children cried in earnest, and the teacher began to scream.

  “Stay calm!” ordered Troi. “We’ll get out on top.” She unfastened her restraints and leaned forward far enough to reach the manual controls on the bulkhead panel. First she closed both hatches, crushing a dozen squirming tentacles and countless wiggly grubs, which continued to writhe just beneath their feet. Getting the hang of the controls and flashing back on her emergency training, the counselor managed to open only the upper hatch, leaving the lower one shut tight against the disturbing elements. She braced herself on the rungs of a small ladder and unfastened her restraints, then climbed to the nose cone of the escape pod and peered out at the new Aluwna.

  Troi tried not to gasp too loudly, but it was a stunning sight, even in the early dawn. They were mired in the thickest, sweatiest morass of brush she had ever seen, but ten meters away lay a desolate plain of caked soil. It looked like a drought-stricken desert right next to a luxuriant park. The desert wasn’t totally devoid of life, because there were blackened roots and stumps, and small buds appeared to be growing from them. Buzzing like an alarm clock, a huge flying insect dove from nowhere at her head, and Deanna had to duck back into the escape pod and pull the hatch shut.

  The children and their teacher stared at her, and she tried to smile. “I think we’ll stay in here awhile,” she said, “until they find us. Who wants some rations?”

  * * *

  Floating weightlessly, Captain Picard climbed out of the gloomy Jefferies tube into the corridor outside engineering, which was lit like a tart’s boudoir in hot red light. Clanging behind him on a tether was a large white suit, so bulky it was like a statue of some forgotten golem or perhaps an example of ancient deep-sea diving gear. Following the Genesis Wave threat, they were supposed to have returned all the Brahms radiation suits to the Romulans, because Leah Brahms had infringed upon Romulan phase-shifting technology to make her protective garment. But Geordi La Forge had saved one suit as a souvenir, and Picard had just liberated it from Geordi’s quarters. Similar suits had saved millions of lives during the height of the Genesis Wave, Brahms’ own life included, but this was the purpose for which it had been designed—to enter a room contaminated with lethal radiation.

  A small device on his belt squawked loudly, followed by Beverly Crusher’s tinny voice. “Jean-Luc,” she said, “the last escape pod is away, and I think all hands have been evacuated. There’s one pod left for you and me, and I’ll meet you on deck six. Over.”

  Since the com system was down, they were using old-fashioned walkie-talkies, such as those issued in emergency kits for away teams. The captain pulled the device off his belt and stopped to collect his thoughts before he pushed the Talk buttom. “Beverly,” he said forcefully, “don’t wait for me. Get in the escape pod and launch. Over.”

  “What?” she said angrily. “I’m not going to leave you here.”

  “It’s the captain’s prerogative to go down with the ship,” he reminded her. “Besides, I’m not done yet. I have the Brahms radiation suit, and I’m going into the warp chamber to try manual ejection of the core.”

  “You’ll be killed,” Beverly warned solemnly. “Besides, that’s a two-person job at the very least. Get on the escape pod with me—it’s your only chance.”

  “With the Brahms suit, I won’t be killed unless I fail,” he replied, his lips thinning. “Beverly, get into the escape pod and launch—that’s an order. Picard out.” He turned off the walkie-talkie before she could argue with him further.

  Pushing off the bulkhead, he glided weightlessly toward the sealed door of engineering, where he stopped to strip out of his uniform. Carefully but with a sense of urgency, he climbed into the bulky white suit. All of them had undergone brief training with the Brahms gear, and Troi, Riker, and others had worn duplicate suits during the crisis. The gel interior molded to the contours of his body, shrinking or expanding as needed. Picard was glad he had paid attention, because operating the complicated apparatus with its interphase generators, self-contained life-support, computer, and robotic attachments was no trivial task. The controls were in the fingers of the gloves, and the upper right-hand corner of the faceplate gave him a reflective viewscreen of instructions and readings.

  The captain activated the suit, which gave him one immediate advantage—magnetized soles on the boots, which allowed him to walk again, albeit slowly and deliberately. He was relieved to see that the power levels were sufficient for ten minutes of operation, and he hoped that would be all he needed. The interphase generators kept him oscillating in and out of the temporal plane, allowing him to interact with physical objects yet avoid the most immediate physical dangers. He walked up to the sealed door of engineering and entered his security access code at the panel, which allowed him to override the emergency precautions.

  With a whoosh, the hatch unsealed, and the door creaked open a few centimeters. He pushed it open some more and then gasped as the unequal air pressure caused a bloated corpse to crash into him. The dead engineer’s skin was peeled off, and his eyes bulged grotesquely. Picard gulped and pushed the weightless cadaver out of his way. Sensor readings were scrolling frantically in the reflective viewscreen in the corner of his faceplate, but he didn’t need to read them to see that it was lethal to be in here. Half a dozen other bodies floated ominously in the carvernous hold of engineering.

  Red emergency lights glimmered all around him, but his eyes were drawn to the towering warp coil in the center of the circular silo. It looked like a neon Christmas tree, ablaze with white branches of pure energy and crackling beams that looked like lightning. Picard had to get a grip on his fear, because he had never seen a warp core in such bad shape before. It looked as if it could blow apart any second, turning the Enterprise into a gaseous cloud and spreading antimatter and radiation throughout the atmosphere. That alone might kill all life on the planet. Even if they didn’t eject the warp core, the ship would soon lose orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Once launched, the core had a self-contained guidance system that would steer it harmlessly into space.

  “We’d better hurry,” said a voice behind him, reflecting his thoughts. Picard turned around as quickly as he could in the radiation suit, but there was no one there.

  With a touch of a button in his left-hand glove, Picard activated a speaker system inside the suit. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  “It’s me—Regimol.” For a fleeting instant, the Romulan appeared, then disappeared, and the captain realized that Regimol had activated his own interphase device. Whether it fully protected the Romulan from the radiation, the captain didn’t know, but here was the help he badly needed.

  “The manual controls are over here,” said the ghostly voice, moving toward the glowing, pulsating warp core. “Hurry.”

  Picard knew where the emergency ejectors were, and he also knew how they could be operated, minus computer control. There were three innocuous-looking, hand-turned wheels: one to jettison the exterior hull plate, another to disengage the pylons holding the towering warp core in place, and a third to feed rocket fuel to the thrusters, whi
ch ignited when reaching threshold. All of it had to be accomplished in a matter of seconds, which was why he couldn’t have done it alone, which he now realized.

  Under bursts of radioactive steam and the unearthly blue-white crackle of the warp core, Picard could see the flickering image of a humanoid, turning the first wheel. “Hurry!” he croaked. “Get the second!”

  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!”