IMBALANCE
Page 13
As they turned a corner, a loud, high-pitched chord roared from the walls. From three directions came the sound of massed foot-claws chattering against the tiled flooring. Riker tried to estimate how many guardians were approaching, but without actually counting them he could not begin to guess their number. With a deep certainty he knew he did not want to see these Jarada, did not want to discover what his punishment would be for witnessing the deepest secrets of their race.
“Vrel’keth brefteev!” Zarn growled viciously. He dashed to the end of the corridor and pounded a code into the door’s control panel. The mechanism was slow to respond, starting and then cycling back shut. Zarn had to repeat the sequence before it registered properly on the lock. By the time Riker had caught up with him, the door was sliding open.
Zarn gestured for Riker to enter first. The shaft was dark and its walls gleamed suspiciously in the band of light from the corridor. A gust of stale, mold-scented air washed over him. Riker took a hesitant step forward, uncertain of what lay ahead but reluctant to be caught by the approaching guardians. The next thing he knew, Zarn kicked him in the pressure points on both calves. Predictably, his legs buckled and he landed on his seat. Before he could react, Zarn shoved him. Riker shot forward, gaining speed on the algae-slick surface of the disused ramp. Once more he was tobogganing into the darkness, unguided and out of control.
Chapter Ten
THE GROUNDCAR DUCKED AND WEAVED, tossing Crusher back and forth against the safety harness. The pillows that filled out the Jaradan contours to roughly human shape were not anchored to the seat, and they shifted with each violent lurch. Grimly, the doctor braced herself against the side of the car, hoping the restraints would keep her from serious injury. They had been designed for the lighter Jarada and she wasn’t sure how much extra stress they could withstand.
Wesley could have calculated it instantly, could have told her how many sharp turns and violent lurches the fastenings could withstand before they parted from their anchors and let her go flying against the far wall. She was glad Wesley was not around to tell her that, glad he was away at Starfleet Academy, where he would hear nothing of this adventure until she was safely back aboard the Enterprise. Then she could tell him the story with the proper humor and self-deprecation to let him know she had not really been in danger, that it had been an exciting but completely harmless little adventure to liven an otherwise dull week.
She tried to rehearse the letter to her son, tried to focus her mind on describing the events in the proper light, but somehow the exercise didn’t work. Her palms were sweaty with fear, and if she let up on her control for one second, she knew that hysteria would overwhelm her. This was the classic example of a situation where you called your ship to be beamed back aboard, leaving the work of unsnarling everything to the captain—and her communicator wasn’t working.
Get a hold on yourself, Beverly. Maybe it was just the car’s armor; maybe the plates were too thick for the signal to penetrate them. She knew that wasn’t likely, but it was at least possible and it gave her a small grain of hope. When they escaped their attackers and Vish raised the armor, everything would be all right. Things would be just fine then and she would be able to contact the ship.
She kept repeating that thought to herself, over and over, in the long minutes that the car twisted and dodged through what sounded like the mine fields she had seen in ancient flat-screen entertainments. This situation—being blind and isolated and alone with an alien who suddenly wasn’t talking to her—was not something she had imagined in her worst nightmares. Ship’s doctors were virtually never cut off from the rest of their crewmates.
Finally, the car left their attackers behind. Vish was still hunched over the control panel, its ochre body screening the status boards from Crusher’s view. She wasn’t sure she could make any sense of the panels, but it would give her a feeling of security to think she knew where they were going, like the virtual reality of the star fields on the ship’s viewscreens. “What’s happening?” she asked, hoping Vish would answer.
The Jarada did not move, did not acknowledge Crusher’s question with so much as a twitch of its antennae. Clenching her fists to fight off the panic of being unable to affect—much less control—her surroundings, Crusher forced herself to take several deep breaths. When she felt calmer, she adjusted the cushions and settled herself in her seat, braced for a ride of indeterminate length.
After half an hour the car slowed from its breakneck speed and turned sharply to the left. To judge by the jolting and bouncing when they picked up speed, they were on an unpaved road seamed with ruts and pitted with potholes. Crusher hoped that Vish would lower the shields so she could see where they were, but the Jarada still was not responding to her questions.
She felt more and more as though she were being kidnapped, but could see no reason for the abduction. Nothing Crusher had seen so far on Bel-Major pointed to problems that anyone would use terrorism to solve. Except for whoever had dropped the bombs on the groundcar, Jarada society seemed peaceful, orderly, and lacking the stresses that normally caused such disruptions. Nothing made much sense.
Crusher chased the problem around in her head, not reaching any conclusions except that she was missing several major pieces of the puzzle. Something in their information about the Jarada, or at least these particular Jarada, was so totally wrong as to make nonsense of everything else they knew. Captain Picard had thought the negotiations were going too easily, and the events of the last hour were proving his instincts correct.
She remembered discussing her own uneasiness with Troi earlier and wondered what had triggered her doubts. Something subtle, certainly, or Troi would have perceived it with her empathic abilities. The more she thought about it, the more Crusher remembered the clues that revealed how nervous all the humans had been, the little gestures and phrases that said how unsettling they found the Jarada even though Troi had not detected anything from their hosts in the way she normally sensed duplicity in strangers.
In most situations Crusher would have dismissed the away team’s uneasiness as premission jitters or latent xenophobia, which affected everybody once in a while, no matter how hard they fought it. Still, reviewing their discussion last night, she spotted what they had all overlooked at the time—when as experienced a group as theirs all were on edge, something was wrong. Subliminally, they had recognized a problem, but no one had been able to articulate their perceptions as more than vague uneasiness. Given their mission, Picard would need much stronger evidence before he took any action that might destroy the trust he was trying to build.
I guess you’ve got that evidence now, Jean-Luc, she thought, forcing herself to relax against the seat. She wasn’t sure how long it would take for the Enterprise to discover her predicament, but she knew it would mean the end of their mission. Meanwhile, she might as well use her time to collect whatever information she could. Anything she learned would help them sort out the situation later. She hadn’t heard any explosions for some time, which probably meant she wasn’t in any immediate danger. Certainly, if Vish had wanted to hurt her, the Jarada could have turned her over to the attackers. That meant Vish wanted her alive, at least for a while, and that gave her time to observe and to plan.
The groundcar slowed again and began climbing a steep incline, its engines laboring from the strain. After a short distance it slewed around a sharp hairpin turn and continued to climb. Five switchbacks later, Crusher was glad the armor plates still covered the windows. She was no judge of how far they had traveled, but from the tightness of the bends and the straining of the car’s engine, she knew they were fairly high up a steep mountain. Again she wished for the safety of the Enterprise, for the security of the thick bulkheads and the multiple layers of force shields that protected the ship. Planets were inherently dangerous, and traveling mountain roads in underpowered vehicles ranked just below refereeing Klingon war games on Crusher’s list of activities she expected to shorten her life expectancy to zero.
After four more switchbacks, two of which they negotiated by backing and taking a second run at the turn, the road leveled off. Crusher hoped they had reached the top, but that left her wondering what would happen next. She thought about asking Vish, but decided she would rather let the Jarada pilot the car, if that was what it was doing. Since the armor still covered the windows, they could be traveling along the edge of a cliff, for all she knew. Under the circumstances, distracting the driver did not seem prudent.
They traveled for fifteen more minutes, but encountered no more sharp curves or steep inclines. Despite her previous resolutions, Crusher was almost ready to demand an explanation from Vish when, unexpectedly, the surface beneath their tires went smooth. A paved road? On the top of a mountain? The doctor’s first thought was that she had taken leave of her senses, that the whole trip was an elaborate simulator hoax and that her wild imaginings were all paranoid fantasies.
The groundcar rolled to a stop. From behind them Crusher heard a loud thump, like the sound of the shuttlebay doors seating themselves against their seals. Vish tapped a pad on the control panel and leaned back in its seat, giving a low hum that reminded the doctor of nothing so much as a sigh of relief. The shields slid away from the windows, giving Crusher her first view of their surroundings. They were in a large, poorly lit cavern that extended deep into the mountain. Several other groundcars of various sizes were parked near them, but most of the area was empty.
Vish removed two small buttons from the base of its antennae and turned to face Crusher. “Please forgive the manner of our bringing you here. As you saw, there are those who do not believe in the wisdom of deciding that your people should be allowed into this place.”
“You mean, this was where we were coming all along?” Crusher inhaled sharply, fighting to keep from screaming at the Jarada for putting her through the hair-raising ride when they could have transported so much more easily. “Why didn’t we just use the transporter to get here? I could have survived without the tour of the city.”
Straightening itself to its full height, Vish gave Crusher a stare that she guessed would have paralyzed a graduate student or made a junior researcher quiver in its exoskeleton. “We do not permit transporters to operate within a seventy belevi radius of this complex. That translates to”—the Jarada cocked its head to one side, its antennae bobbing, as it did the calculation—“about fifty of your kilometers. Our work is too sensitive for us to risk giving marauders easy access to our facilities.”
“Marauders? Do you expect attackers even near your scientific facilities?” Crusher shivered at this new aspect of Jaradan life. They knew so little of these people—and most of their information was clearly wrong. Nothing in any report had suggested that violence directed against scientists, or against any other segment of their society, was a problem for Bel-Minor’s Jaradan population.
Vish released its safety harness and leaned over to unfasten Crusher’s. “So many questions. Come inside and we will answer them all.” The Jarada opened the car door and stepped out, waiting for Crusher. Reluctantly, although she was not sure why, she climbed out of the vehicle and followed the insectoid.
They crossed the cavern to the near wall and Vish tapped a coded pattern into the door panel. The door opened and Crusher noticed that it looked thick enough to withstand a direct phaser hit from the Enterprise’s main batteries. She shivered, wondering what sort of assault force they feared would attack the facility.
From her Earth history, she would have expected to find such a door on a secret weapons research facility, dating from the Eugenics Wars. Here, though, the occurrence was disturbing. Zelfreetrollan had invited her to visit a medical research facility, not a manufacturing plant for biological weapons. Either she had been given deliberate misinformation about the work done here, or the role of scientific researchers in Jaradan society had been grossly misrepresented. Or something even worse is going on. She shivered, not liking any of the possibilities.
Inside, the complex consisted of broad, well-lit corridors and large, well-equipped laboratory spaces. Vish led Crusher around, introducing her to the researchers and explaining the various projects. At first Crusher tried to keep the different individuals straight, but soon she lost track. Everyone she met was small, though most of them were taller than Vish, and all had large heads. All were various shades of ochre and tan, but the shadings were so subtle that Crusher knew it would take her weeks to keep the differences straight. Each gave off the faint scent of sage or oregano or some other cooking spice Crusher could never remember even when she was reading the label for it. And, Heaven help her, most of the names began with “Zel-brek-k’vel,” and despite the invitation to address them informally, she had trouble sorting the individual names from the first three, which she knew meant “worker of the scientific caste of the hive Zel.”
Many of the projects she was shown centered around Vish’s favorite topic, the role of nutrition on Jaradan development. Other groups were working on plant biology, on genetically engineering imported plant species to survive Bel-Minor’s radiation, and on exploring the effects of that radiation on the Jarada. The researchers were all friendly, eager to show her their work and excited when she made comments on what they were doing.
As the afternoon wore on, Crusher became more and more puzzled. Nothing she saw justified the secrecy with which she had been brought to the facility nor the elaborate security precautions that guarded the researchers. She began watching the Jarada around her, looking for anything abnormal, trying to spot any differences that separated these people from each other or from any other Jarada she had met.
The first clue presented itself as she was listening to a young researcher discuss its studies into the link between breveen genetics and nutrition. It was showing her a series of glass tanks, each containing plants with different colored flowers. “We’ve isolated the genes that control every blossom color except one. The most common color for breveen on our homeworld is a pale lavender, which we have been unable to produce in any of our tests.”
The Jarada paused, its eyes shifting color as it focused on various parts of the room. After a moment it gave its head a couple of sharp jerks and returned to its explanation. “Reproducing the pale lavender flower, which is the most common shade on our homeworld, has proved impossible in all our tests. Since all the colors are determined by the genetics, with the expression of the genes being controlled by the effect of certain trace elements on enzyme function, and since even the first-generation plants display this problem . . .”
When the young researcher paused again, its head twitching violently, every Jarada in the room began running toward it. Even so, they were not fast enough. With a falsetto shriek it launched itself at Crusher, its claws slashing toward her eyes. She threw her arm across her face and retreated until a lab bench hit her legs. The Jarada raked its claws against her arm, ripping her uniform and gouging deeply into her flesh. Crusher jerked backward and overbalanced, landing across the bench in a crash of breaking glassware and smashed experiments.
The other Jarada overwhelmed the young researcher and hauled it away. It continued to twitch and to shriek, its behavior reminding Crusher of her brief stint as a young intern on the mental wards after the Kadreelan plague so many years ago. For most victims the plague killed swiftly and horribly, but a few people survived with their mental faculties ravaged. Crusher shuddered at the memory of what it had been like when the sudden and unexpected influx of incurably insane, triple what anyone had dealt with in over a century, had stretched the Federation’s resources beyond their capacity.
Slowly, Crusher pushed herself upright, trying to avoid cutting herself fur
ther on the broken glass. The claw gouges on her forearm were bleeding freely and her back felt as though slivers of glass had cut through her uniform in several places. She ought to be furious, she thought, but couldn’t summon the emotion. The attack had been too sudden. Her hosts had recognized the symptoms, had known what was going to happen, but even for them, things had happened too quickly.
Vish waited for her to get to her feet. As she separated herself from the broken glassware, Crusher realized that the Jarada’s posture was far more deferential than she had ever seen it. “Forgive the attack, Honored Crusher-Doctor. If we had known that one was so unstable, we would not have brought you to see its most important project.”
“Does this sort of thing happen very often?” Her temper was finally starting to waken, and Crusher made no attempt to rein it in. It was about time the Jarada gave her some answers.
“We will show you to a place where you may cover your injuries, and afterward we will answer any questions.” Vish started for the door, as if to pull Crusher along by its movement.
The tactic might have worked if the throbbing in her arm hadn’t compounded Crusher’s irritation. She planted her boots on the floor and refused to budge. “I want some answers and I want them now. Does this happen very often?”
Vish turned to study Crusher with eyes that flickered from amber to green to red. Finally, it lifted all four hands to its shoulders in the Jaradan equivalent of a shrug. “As you wish, although this is not the place I would choose for such discussions. Since we have come to this planet, it has been happening with increasing frequency. None of our researchers know why this should happen, and as each one becomes crazy, the ripples of its madness pass through the rest of our group.
“We are now so diminished that only the strongest are still able to continue our work. Soon all of us will lack the support of our hive-mates and will become as lost and insane as the youngling that attacked you. Since you are a solitary being and can function without the support of your hive-mind, we brought you here to help us. You will find the cause of this insanity before it destroys our entire hive.”