Progenitor

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “Thank you,” said the engineer, stoically watching his superior guffaw at his expense. “Thank you very much. I’ll remember your compassion next time you’re injured.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Greyhorse told him. He grabbed hold of Simenon’s tail and took a look at it. “It barely broke the epidermis. I’ll bandage it and you’ll be fine.”

  By then, the laughter had begun to die down. Joseph and Ben Zoma had to wipe tears from their eyes as they made an uphill attempt to recover their sobriety.

  The security officer took in a deep breath. “Now that,” he said, “was worth the price of admission.”

  “Twice the price,” Greyhorse decided as he delved into his pack for a plastiskin bandage and a dressing.

  “Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re not a good host,” Ben Zoma chipped in.

  Simenon scowled. “I’m glad I had the opportunity to provide you with some entertainment.”

  The doctor managed to keep his expression deadpan as he approached his colleague with the bandage he had found. “So am I. Now stand still. I can’t treat a moving tail.”

  And they started laughing all over again.

  Wu leaned back in Captain Picard’s chair in the captain’s ready room and pondered what she had learned from Lt. Kastiigan.

  The Belladonna’s descent into the sinkhole was slower than she would have guessed. Assuming the research vessel’s shields continued to hold up, it probably had a few hours before it was lost forever.

  That was good news. It gave her some breathing room, some time to come up with an option she and her officers hadn’t considered yet. If there is one, she found herself adding.

  There is, she insisted. There had to be.

  But there were only so many methods of getting a crew off an endangered ship. She ran down the list again in her mind, hoping to somehow find something she had missed.

  One way was to beam them off. However, she and her bridge officers had already ruled out that possibility because of the conditions that prevailed inside the accretion bridge.

  The other method was to put them in a shuttlecraft. But that was an impossibility as well because a shuttle couldn’t escape the pull of the sinkhole.

  Wu leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She had always found it easier to think with her eyes closed, even as a little girl back at the Aramis III agricultural colony. Her younger sister, Victoria, had made fun of her for that all the time. Then Victoria saw some of the things her sister was accomplishing in school and she secretly began to close her eyes as well.

  Wu sighed. Her accomplishments in school had meant a lot to her—much more than they might have to other children her age. They had paved the way for her to realize her dream of joining Starfleet, of ascending the chain of command—of reaching a moment like this one, when people depended on her for their survival.

  I can’t let those scientists down, she told herself stubbornly. I’ve got to get them out of there. Any other outcome is unacceptable.

  Of course, there was a third way; there had been one all along. If the Belladonna could generate enough thrust, and the Stargazer brought her tractors to bear at the right moment, they might be able to wrench the research ship free of the sinkhole.

  But that required a willing partner in the Belladonna, not to mention a considerable contribution from her impulse drive. And so far, they had been unable to obtain a response to their hails, much less any evidence that the Belladonna’s engines were still in working order.

  Wu frowned to herself. If not for those two small problems, the plan couldn’t miss.

  If only Ensign Paris’s idea had proven workable. They would already have sent out a shuttlecraft on a tractor beam, offering the crew of the Belladonna a lifeline. The survivors might have been boarding it at that very moment.

  But Dubinski’s calculations had thrown a wrench into the ensign’s plan. Too much mass on the end of the beam. Too much radiation, too many uncertainties presented by those magnetic fields.

  Even a pod would have been too much, the engineer said. But then, even the smallest one weighed nearly a metric ton. And there wasn’t anything lighter than a pod. . . .

  Or was there?

  Wu’s eyes snapped open.

  Could they send in a probe with instructions for the scientists? Maybe one they had stripped of its instruments and propulsion capabilities, to reduce the mass their tractor beam had to handle?

  For a moment, it sounded as if it might work. Then the commander thought about it some more and her heart sank. Sure, they could send in a probe. But what would it do when it got there? How would it gain access to the interior of the Belladonna?

  Probes couldn’t open hatches. Probes couldn’t canvass the research ship for survivors among the crew regardless of where they might have decided to gather.

  Only a rescue team could do that. And no rescue team Wu had ever heard of could survive in a radiation-shot environment full of fierce, bone-crushing graviton waves.

  All of a sudden, it came to her that she was wrong about that. Dead wrong. There was such a rescue team. And it was waiting for her in blissful ignorance on a lower deck of the Stargazer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  PICARD WAS JOGGING side by side with Simenon, the rest of their party a bit behind them, when he remarked that the trees ahead of them seemed to be thinning. “You’re right,” the Gnalish observed.

  It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Picard saw the reason for it. That was when he found himself standing at the brink of a narrow but remarkably deep crevasse that appeared to cut the wild tangle of forestland in half.

  Fortunately, there was a way at hand for the group to make their way across the half-dozen meters of treeless space. But it wasn’t one that inspired a great deal of confidence.

  “A bridge,” said Greyhorse, a lock of his dark hair lifting in the swirling winds that held sway here.

  “If one can call it that,” Ben Zoma added.

  To Picard, it looked more like a quartet of thick, scarlet ropes, two above and two below, with the latter supporting a series of short, wooden planks and the former serving as crude handrails. There were also a few short lines that connected the upper ropes with the lower ones.

  “Looks old,” said Vigo.

  “And rickety,” Joseph added.

  “It was built some time ago,” Simenon confirmed.

  “Decades?” Greyhorse asked.

  “Centuries,” the Gnalish told them.

  Picard looked at him, an expression of surprise on his face. “And it’s still standing?”

  “It was built to last,” Simenon explained. “Also, it’s maintained on a regular basis.”

  “What’s regular?” Joseph asked.

  “Every few weeks,” the engineer replied.

  “So it should be safe,” the captain concluded, though he didn’t sound as sure of himself as he might have intended.

  “Should be,” Simenon agreed.

  “You think it can hold me?” Vigo asked.

  “If it can hold an Aklaash,” the Gnalish reasoned, “I would think it can hold a Pandrilite.”

  Joseph looked at him. “How do you know it can hold an Aklaash? I thought this route was just for Mazzereht.”

  “This time it’s for Mazzereht,” Simenon told him. “Last time, it might have been for a party of Aklaash, or Fejjimaera. The routes are doled out at random.”

  “Hey!” said Joseph. He was standing on the brink of the ravine and pointing to something far to their right. “There’s another bridge down that way. Maybe it’s sturdier than this one.”

  “It’s not,” the engineer assured him. “And even if it were, we couldn’t use it.”

  “Why not?” asked Greyhorse.

  “Because,” said Simenon, “that’s the one the Fejjimaera are going to use. We’ve all got to cross the ravine somewhere. The Fejjimaera are going to cross it down there.”

  Ben Zoma grunted. “So we’re stuck with this bridge.”


  “In a manner of speaking,” said the Gnalish, “yes.”

  As he said that, the wind whistled a little more insistently and the bridge swayed drunkenly under its influence. Seeing it, they all fell silent—Simenon included.

  “Listen,” said Picard, breaking the spell, “it’s not as if we have a lot of choice in the matter.”

  Greyhorse shaded his eyes as he examined the bridge from one end to the other. “So it would seem.”

  The captain took his companions in at a glance. “So what are we waiting for?”

  There were murmurs of agreement. However, no one seemed very eager to try the span.

  “I’ll go first,” Simenon volunteered.

  He didn’t get any arguments from the others.

  Jiterica was sitting at her workstation in the science section, dutifully inspecting yet another set of sensor readings, when she heard someone call her name.

  Turning, she saw that it was Commander Wu. The second officer was crossing the science section, headed her way.

  “Commander?” Jiterica said in response.

  Wu looked serious. “I need your help with the research vessel,” she told the Nizhrak.

  Her curiosity piqued, Jiterica swiveled to face her superior. “I will assist you in any way I can.”

  Wu held a hand up. “Don’t say that until you’ve heard me out. What I have in mind will involve considerable personal risk. If you decline, I’ll understand.”

  “I would like to help,” Jiterica maintained.

  Wu nodded. “I was hoping you would say that.”

  “What do you need me to do?” the ensign asked.

  The commander didn’t tell her right away. Instead, she described Ensign Paris’s idea. Its flaw, apparently, was that a shuttle would have too much mass to be manipulated by a tractor beam under the conditions that existed in the accretion bridge.

  “But not a single crewman,” Wu continued pointedly. “That would be a different story entirely.”

  Jiterica looked at her. “A single crewman,” she repeated thoughtfully. The conclusion was an obvious one. “You mean me.”

  Wu nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Because I’m accustomed to the conditions in a gas giant.”

  “Exactly. Radiation and magnetic fields aren’t a problem for you and neither is high gravity, and your mass is no greater than that of the average human being.”

  Jiterica took a moment to consider the idea. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made—except for one fairly significant problem.

  “Given the inefficiencies of projecting a tractor beam into the accretion bridge, the ship will have to come rather close to it. Won’t she run the risk of being drawn inside?”

  “She would,” Wu agreed, “if she had to come that close. But what if she simply maintained a tractor lifeline to a shuttle . . .and it was the shuttle that sent in the crewman on a beam of its own?”

  “Two tractor beams,” Jiterica said. “One from the ship and one from the shuttle. An interesting approach.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Wu told her. “Of course, the beam would only get you so far. You would still have to find a hatch and gain access to the Belladonna.”

  It seemed to Jiterica that she was capable of doing that. Then something occurred to her. “Commander . . . unless I’m mistaken, our shuttlecraft aren’t equipped with tractor assemblies.”

  “Normally,” said Wu, “that’s true. But we’re going to take one of ours and make it an exception.”

  The ensign nodded. “I see.” She had just one other question. “Who will pilot the shuttle?”

  Wu told her who she had in mind.

  Simenon wasn’t nearly as matter-of-fact about crossing the crevasse as he had made himself out to be.

  Like most Mazzereht, he was discomfited by heights. It was one of the reasons his subspecies didn’t succeed in the ritual more often.

  On the other hand, what was the point of mentioning such a shortcoming? He had to cross the chasm. They all did. It was just a matter of looking straight ahead and doing it.

  All right, Simenon told himself, you can do this.

  Clenching his jaw, he grasped the rope rail on the right side and took a step onto the bridge. Then another. And another.

  As it turned out, the span wasn’t half as wobbly as it looked. It wasn’t as easy as walking down a corridor on the Stargazer—after all, corridors didn’t bounce as one negotiated them—but neither did it require a particularly sophisticated sense of balance.

  After Simenon had advanced a couple of meters, he was inspired to turn around and look back at his comrades. “Coming?” he asked them.

  Joseph frowned and ever so carefully followed the engineer onto the bridge. It didn’t appear to take him long to discover what Simenon had discovered—that the crossing simply wasn’t as prodigious a feat as it had appeared.

  “This isn’t bad at all,” the security officer observed.

  “All the same,” Picard said, “let’s not all pile on at once. We’ll go no more than two at a time.”

  “You’re the captain,” Simenon told him.

  Or rather, that was what he meant to say. Before he could quite get the words out, he felt the bridge give way.

  It all happened so fast, the Gnalish barely knew what he was doing. But somehow, he managed to snatch one of the ropes that attached the span’s rail to its floor and hang on for dear life.

  For a heartbeat, he couldn’t tell if only one end of the bridge had given way or both. Then he realized that it was only one—the one on the far side—and he was swinging back in the direction of the cliff he had left behind.

  That was the good news. The bad came when Simenon crashed into the sheer rock surface with bone-crushing force, squeezing the air out of his lungs and awakening a terrible, sharp pain in his side.

  Blackness threatened to overwhelm him. It seeped in from the edges of his vision, offering him the warm, welcome balm of oblivion.

  But the Gnalish fought it off, pulling in air as hard as he could. His throat burned with the effort—burned horribly as if it were on fire. But he didn’t let that stop him. He kept gasping, kept sucking down what little his tortured windpipe would accommodate.

  And somehow, he held onto the twisted remains of the bridge. The taste of blood filled his mouth and his ribs throbbed as if someone were taking a hammer to them, but he didn’t allow himself to fall to the bottom of the chasm.

  “Simenon!” someone cried. “Pug! Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” said the security officer, who was dangling just above Simenon. “I’m fine.”

  The engineer couldn’t answer. He was too busy trying to fill his lungs with air.

  “Simenon!” someone called again.

  “Here,” he croaked.

  “He’s below me,” Joseph shouted over the wind. “Just a couple of meters.”

  “Can you reach him?” someone asked. This time, Simenon recognized the voice as the captain’s.

  The wind keened through the valley as Joseph made his assessment. “I think so,” he said.

  “I’ll go down, too,” someone added. Vigo, thought Simenon.

  “No,” the captain told him. “You’re too heavy.”

  “Me, then,” suggested Ben Zoma.

  A pause. “All right,” said Picard. “But first, we’ll secure this end of the bridge as best we can.”

  While they did that, Simenon caught his breath. But the easier it came, the harder his side began to throb. And his right arm—the one that had borne the burden of his weight to that point—was beginning to ache with the effort.

  “Take your time,” he rasped with false bravado.

  Wu regarded Paris across the captain’s ready room. The ensign looked surprised by the assignment she had just given him—more so than she might have expected.

  “Me, Commander?” he replied after a moment.

  “Why not?” said Wu. “You may be young, Mr. Paris, but it’s clear
to me that you’re the best pilot we have—with the exception of Lieutenant Asmund, of course. And we need her to pilot the ship, which won’t be any mean feat.”

  “I suppose not,” Paris responded.

  Wu briefed the ensign on the particulars of the mission—how far he would have to go and what he would have to look out for, that sort of thing. By the time she finished, he seemed to have gotten past his surprise and was again exuding the confidence that had distinguished him from other young men of Wu’s acquaintance.

  It was a good thing, she reflected. She would need Paris at his best if they were going to pull this off.

  “Then go get ready,” the second officer told him. “Mr. Chiang tells me he’ll have that shuttle ready in the next twenty minutes.”

  The ensign lifted his chin. “Acknowledged.”

  Then he turned and made his way out of the room. As the doors hissed closed behind him, Wu nodded to herself. If anyone could do this, it would be Cole Paris.

  Simenon winced as Greyhorse used his fingers to probe the Gnalish’s tortured flank. “Careful,” Simenon groaned.

  “I’m being careful,” the doctor told him.

  “Well?” asked Picard, who was standing over them, a couple of meters back from the crevasse and the dangling bridge.

  Greyhorse rolled back onto his haunches and made a face. “You’re lucky,” he told Simenon. “I don’t think those ribs are broken, after all. And your arm’s in remarkably good shape considering it could have been torn out of its socket.”

  Somehow, Simenon didn’t feel that fortunate.

  After all, his hope of progeny had just been crushed. Unless he could get across the chasm, one of the other teams would claim the eggs waiting for them at the finish line. And without a bridge, the odds of their making it across seemed slim indeed.

  Not that it was impossible. The chasm was only six or seven meters from one side to the other. An Aklaash might have had the size and the power to leap across it.

  But not a Gnalish of Simenon’s stature—especially one who had injured himself the way the engineer had. For someone like that, leaping the gap simply wasn’t an option.