Progenitor

by Michael Jan Friedman

  By then, the human was starting to feel light-headed. The impulse to breathe, to replenish the supply of oxygen in his lungs, was becoming almost impossible for him to deny. But he put it aside somehow and focused on the task at hand.

  Working his way down Simenon’s body again, Ben Zoma felt one leg moving. But not the other one. Finally, he thought.

  A moment later, he found the problem. Simenon’s foot was wedged in a crevice. But as long as the vine rope was pulling on him, he wouldn’t be able to get free.

  Darting upward, Ben Zoma found the vine and swung his feet in the direction of the cave wall. When they met something solid, he planted his heels there and hauled for all he was worth.

  Just as he had hoped, the vine rope relaxed—probably because he had pulled it right out of Vigo’s unsuspecting hands. Freed of its pull, Simenon would be able to back his foot out of the crevice.

  But just in case, Ben Zoma felt his way down the wall of rock and tried to lend a hand. He arrived just in time to realize that the Gnalish wasn’t stuck anymore.

  In fact, as the first officer groped for his comrade, he realized that Simenon was gone.

  Then he put together what must have happened. Vigo had regained his grip on the rope vine and pulled the Gnalish through.

  At least, that’s what Ben Zoma hoped. With his lungs screaming for air, he launched himself forward alongside the wall, intent now on only one thing—saving himself.

  For a single, terrifying heartbeat, it seemed to him that he had waited too long and would drown in the darkness. Then he saw a hint of light up ahead and arrowed through the water with the desperation of a man who knew his life depended on it.

  Kick, he thought, a different kind of darkness closing around him. Kick, dammit!

  He kicked—and broke the surface just in time.

  As Ben Zoma dragged in draught after draught of warm, welcome air, he noticed Vigo a couple of meters away on a shelf of flat, dark rock. He was hovering over Simenon, who was gasping even harder than the first officer was, his ruby eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of his head.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the Pandrilite asked Ben Zoma.

  But the human couldn’t speak yet. All he could do was pull in one shuddering breath after another as he joined his companions at the water’s edge.

  Paris brought his shuttle to a stop as close to the unholy glow of the accretion bridge as he dared, then immediately redirected all available power to his forward thrusters.

  As he had anticipated, they held the shuttle in equilibrium. However, it was a rather uneasy equilibrium.

  The pull exerted by the sinkhole was so powerful here that he could feel it in his bones. Without some timely assistance, the shuttle would either have to abandon its position or be sucked inside the accretion bridge.

  Fortunately, that assistance was just a comm message away. Touching the communications pad on his control console, he said, “Paris to Wu. I’ve reached the coordinates we talked about.”

  The return signal was a sloppy one as a result of all the graviton activity, but the ensign was still able to make out the second officer’s words. “...establishing tractor lock...stand by.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Paris.

  He glanced at Jiterica, who was sitting quietly in her seat, staring at the accretion bridge through the shuttle’s forward observation port. He wondered what she was thinking about.

  Him, perhaps? How he and his tractor beam would soon be all that stood between her and the sinkhole?

  “Tractor lock...established...” Wu told him over the comm link.

  Paris could see it reflected in his readouts. “Confirmed.”

  Of course, at the distance the Stargazer was compelled to maintain, the beam couldn’t do much. But if it cut the stress on the shuttle’s thrusters by twenty percent and lent them a little stability, it would be all the help they needed.

  Providing I do my job, Paris added silently.

  Frowning, he put the thought out of his mind. It wasn’t productive for him to try to anticipate how he would perform. He would simply do his best.

  Paris turned to Jiterica. “Ready?”

  She turned to look at him, the golden glare of the accretion bridge reflected in the face mask of her helmet. He could barely see the spectral features that lurked beneath it.

  “Yes, Mr. Paris,” the Nizhrak said calmly, almost mechanically. “I am ready.”

  She got up from her seat and moved aft through the shuttle. With the press of a pad set into the bulkhead, she activated a selectively permeable force field like the one in the Stargazer’s shuttlebay—another of the improvements Lt. Chiang had been forced to engineer into the craft on short notice.

  Then she opened the hatch.

  Thanks to the force field, the atmosphere in the shuttle-remained inside instead of rushing to join the vacuum of space. Still, it was disconcerting for Paris to look past Jiterica and see the gleam of naked stars.

  Without a second look, the Nizhrak took hold of the hatch frame and swung out into space. The field sizzled around her for a moment, as if nettled at her interrupting its integrity. Then it was intact again—and Jiterica was floating outside the shuttlecraft, her momentum carrying her slowly toward the accretion bridge.

  “Ensign Jiterica has exited the shuttle,” Paris reported.

  “Keep us . . .posted . . . ,” Wu instructed him.

  “Will do,” he said.

  Then Paris activated the tractor beam device that Lt. Chiang had installed minutes earlier, trained its shimmering shaft on Jiterica, and established a lock. The procedure went every bit as smoothly as he had hoped.

  But the hard part was still ahead.

  Keeping an eye on his helm instruments, the ensign ever so carefully used the tractor beam to propel his colleague forward. Unaware that there was any reason not to trust Paris’s abilities, Jiterica wafted in the direction of the accretion bridge until Paris had to squint to see her through the viewport.

  A little farther, he told himself. Farther still.

  And then she was gone from sight, immersed in the furious stream of plasma moving from Alpha Oneo Madrin to Beta Oneo Madrin—her life and those of the Belladonna’s surviving scientists dependent on how Paris handled himself.

  He told himself that he wouldn’t let them down, and he meant it. It’s just that he wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  PARIS CLENCHED HIS JAW as he struggled to reestablish control of the shuttle’s tractor beam, which had suddenly begun whipping about as if it had a mind of its own. With all the graviton flux in the accretion bridge, Commander Wu had anticipated that it would likely affect tractor integrity. She had warned Paris that it might be difficult to keep Jiterica on target.

  But she hadn’t told the ensign to expect anything like this. It was like trying to thread a needle with a strand of overcooked spaghetti.

  Frantically, he consulted his monitors. The graviton emitter seemed to be functioning within expected parameters. The same with the subspace field amplifiers.

  So it wasn’t a malfunction. The graviton storm was just a lot more turbulent than it had a right to be. No doubt, with some careful analysis, Kastiigan and his people would figure out the reason for it after Paris got back.

  But that wasn’t any help to him right now. And it wasn’t any help to Jiterica, either. She was at the mercy of a bizarre and chaotic environment, a small and very fragile leaf in a violent, howling windstorm.

  If the graviton flux jerked her around like this much longer, Paris would lose his tractor lock on her. And if he did, he didn’t think he could catch hold of her again.

  Chilled by the prospect of watching Jiterica spiral off into the sinkhole, the ensign expelled a breath. You can do this, he told himself, working his controls. You’re a good helm jockey, as good as any man or woman in the fleet.

  But try as he might, he couldn’t steady the tractor beam. The forces acting on it were jus
t too fierce, too unpredictable. Every time Paris tried to compensate, he found himself taking the beam the wrong way.

  Come on, he told himself, a bead of sweat making its way down his face. Do it. Do it now.

  But his controls felt funny—as if they were shivering in his hands. Paris looked down and saw that it wasn’t the controls shivering. It was him. His hands were trembling just as they always did when he found himself under pressure.

  He could feel the weight of his family descending on him, crushing him, making it impossible for him to function. “No,” he groaned out loud. “Now now.”

  He was a Paris. It was his destiny to succeed. But he wasn’t going to succeed. He was going to fail—not just himself and his family, but all those people on the trapped research ship.

  And he was going to fail Jiterica, too. That felt worse to him than all the rest of it.

  No, the ensign heard a voice tell him, a voice that rose from the depths of his psyche. You’re not going to fail. You’re going to straighten out this beam and complete your mission.

  It took him a moment, but he figured out whose voice it was. It belonged to the woman who had refused to accept his fear and uncertainty, who had bared her own doubts to free him of his.

  You make it, she had said. Somehow you make it and you get through to the other side.

  The ensign could see Commander Wu staring at him across the captain’s desk, demonstrating a faith that had taken him by surprise. Not because you’re a Paris. Frankly, that couldn’t matter less to me. The reason I think you’re the best is because you are.

  Paris’s teeth ground together. If Wu believed in him, who was he to give up on himself? If he failed in this mission, it sure as hell wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

  Shakes or no shakes, he wrestled with the shuttle’s tractor controls, doing his best to keep Jiterica on something remotely resembling her intended course.

  Picard was the last member of Simenon’s party to crawl out of the cave on the far side of the rock wall. As he did so, he saw his comrades shading their eyes and looking back.

  “What is it?” the captain asked, using his fingers to comb back an unruly lock of hair plastered to his forehead.

  Vigo pointed to the immense, dark gray barrier, first to a spot far on their left and then to another on their right. “We’ve taken the lead,” he said.

  As Picard followed his weapons officer’s gestures, he saw that Vigo was right. Both of Simenon’s rivals and their teams were visible from here, and neither had benefited from the decision to go over the wall instead of under it.

  The Aklaash were little more than halfway down, slowly and laboriously using a series of vines to lower each member of their party from ledge to narrow ledge. And the Fejjimaera group hadn’t even come that far. They were still in the vicinity of the summit, descending by use of hand-and footholds alone.

  The captain nodded his approval. It was the first glimmer of hope they had gotten since the beginning of the contest. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.

  After all, their underwater ordeal had been a grueling one. They were cold, their legs were rubbery, and their energy was at a decidedly low ebb. But the sight of the other teams’ positions was a tonic.

  “Let’s go,” said Simenon, always the driving force behind their efforts. Still breathing heavily, he dragged his battered body away from the cavern mouth. “We’ve still got seven or eight kilometers to go.”

  Ben Zoma looked as if he would have liked to rest for a moment. Like the engineer, he hadn’t quite caught his breath yet. Nonetheless, he followed Simenon without complaint into the towering woods on the other side of the wall.

  Picard could do no less. “Come on,” he said to the others. “This lead will evaporate all too quickly if we don’t get a move on.”

  Nor was he offering that simply as a spur. They might be ahead now, but the other teams could do a lot of catching up over the course of seven or eight kilometers.

  And no doubt, they would.

  * * *

  Ensign Jiterica had a problem.

  She could see the unconsumed portion of the Belladonna through the visual-analog apparatus built into her containment suit. It wasn’t far away, either—less than a kilometer, perhaps, its gray hull only partially obscured by drifts of fiery golden plasma. But the way she was whipping about on the end of the shuttle’s tractor beam made her wonder if she would ever reach the beleaguered vessel, much less get inside it.

  The Nizhrak wanted to rescue the research scientists as much as anyone. To accomplish that goal, she would suffer any hardship, assume any risk. However, she couldn’t get herself across the space separating her from the Belladonna. That was the job of her colleague, Ensign Paris.

  Commander Wu had said that Paris was a good pilot. She had told Jiterica that she would be in good hands. But clearly, the rescue effort wasn’t going as the commander had hoped.

  And the Nizhrak had no illusions about the deadly seriousness of her predicament. If the tractor beam lost its grip on her, if she tore loose from her tether, it wouldn’t matter that she could survive the radiation and magnetic forces that seemed to permeate this environment, or that the ebb and flow of the graviton storm couldn’t pulp her the way it would pulp a being of greater density.

  All that would matter was that she possessed mass, however widely distributed, and that she would be inexorably drawn into the sinkhole like the Stargazer’s probe and the Belladonna before her. And if the research ship wasn’t likely to remain intact through such a passage, there was even less of a chance that she would do so.

  Jiterica didn’t want to die. But more than that, she didn’t want to die for nothing.

  She had barely completed the thought when she noticed something—that the intensity with which she was being cast about was diminishing. The tractor beam seemed steadier, more resistant to the graviton eddies that assaulted her. A brief respite, she wondered, or the first sign of an actual improvement in her situation?

  In the seconds that followed, the beam seemed to assert itself even more. And though the ensign’s progress in the direction of the Belladonna was a little slower than before, a little more deliberate, it was also markedly less erratic.

  Once again, she had reason for hope.

  Simenon was losing his battle.

  Despite the terrible urgency that coiled in his belly, despite the dark, looming knowledge of what would happen if he failed, he was slowing down kilometer by kilometer. He couldn’t help it. His strides were getting shorter, his legs heavier, his bruised ribs more excrutiatingly painful with each ragged, throat-searing inhalation.

  Nor was the Gnalish the only one nearing the limits of his endurance. Greyhorse, who hadn’t kept up right from the beginning, had managed to slow down even more. And for that matter, so had Ben Zoma, Vigo, and Joseph.

  Of them all, only Picard seemed to have the stamina to maintain their original, ground-eating pace. But it wouldn’t do Simenon any good if the captain reached the end ahead of everyone else. After all, it wasn’t really a question of who got to the clearing first.

  It was a question of who got there last—because none of the teams would be considered to have finished until its last member arrived at the cache of unfertilized eggs.

  So if Picard got there in record time and Greyhorse reached the end behind the last Aklaash or Fejjimaera, Simenon would lose. That was why he had gotten so irritated with the doctor in the beginning—because no matter what any of the others did, it was Greyhorse who would most likely determine their fate.

  And that of Simenon’s bloodline.

  As the Gnalish considered that, he stumbled on an exposed root. Damn, he thought, sure that he would go sprawling on his face. But almost instantly, a hand reached out and righted him. Glancing at its owner, Simenon saw that it was Picard.

  The Gnalish cursed himself out loud and roused a flock of colunnu in the process. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, he thought. Concentrate on that or nothing e
lse will matter.

  Suddenly, Joseph cried out, “I see a star!”

  Simenon cast a glance back over his shoulder at the security chief. What in blazes was the man babbling about?

  He was still trying to figure it out when Ben Zoma called out a moment later, “I see it as well!”

  It was then that the engineer realized what they were up to—a song sung by cadets back at Starfleet Academy, usually accompanied by copious quantities of alcoholic beverages until it became slurred entirely beyond recognition.

  “To reach that star!” Vigo trumpeted.

  “I’ll go through hell!” Picard barked between breaths.

  The second verse was considerably less tasteful than the first, but Simenon’s comrades didn’t let that stop them. They made the forest ring with that one as well. And then the third verse, which was even bawdier than the second.

  Before the Gnalish knew it, he was singing as breathlessly as the rest of them. It wasn’t like him to sing at all, much less in front of anyone else, but he was singing nonetheless. And as he sang, his spirits seemed to lift. His legs seemed to churn more easily and his pain seemed to fade into the background.

  He looked at Joseph, who saw him looking and winked. Simenon frowned at him. Singing in the midst of the ritual, he thought disdainfully. Then he sang some more.

  Jiterica knew exactly when she would come in contact with the Belladonna’s weakening deflector shields.

  After all, her suit’s sensor pack had warned her about it soon after she entered the accretion bridge. But she hadn’t worried about the research ship’s defenses because Commander Wu had conceived a way for her to bypass them.

  As Jiterica understood it, ships’ deflectors—like other force fields, including the one inside her own containment suit—were emitted at certain frequencies. They were designed to fend off solid objects as well as directed-energy barrages, but not other fields generated at the same frequency.