"What could cause something like that? A small area of breathable atmosphere on a world so inhospitable otherwise?" Xyon wondered.
"A freak atmospheric occurrence," suggested Soleta. "Or perhaps some sort of terraforming experiment, left behind by a race long gone."
"Or a race that's still there," Kebron warned.
"That place has to be it: the Quiet Place." Si Cwan could not entirely keep the sense of wonder from his voice. "The Quiet Place. I can hardly believe it... I never thought I would see it myself-"
"What do you think you'll see there, Cwan? The face of God?" Kebron snorted.
"Absurd. Right, Soleta?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Soleta. "I am a woman of science. I try to keep myself open to all possibilities."
"You, Soleta?" Kebron rarely sounded surprised or at least allowed himself to sound that way. "You're a scientist. Your discipline is the antithesis of religion."
"Not necessarily. After all, for example, in the Judeo-Christian Bible, God charges Adam-the metaphor for the beginning of humanity-with the responsibility of naming everything in Creation."
"So?"
"So... that is, fundamentally, what I do. I research, I study, and I try to put names to things. They are scientific names, but they are names nonetheless. My life is defining that which is already there. In a way, you could say that I am doing God's work."
Kebron rolled his eyes. "Religious... nonsense. I hate when you do that,
Soleta."
"Do what?"
"Play devil's advocate."
"Whose advocate?" she asked, with a slight, puckish raising of one eyebrow.
"Devil's..." He stopped and then snorted once more.
Soleta walked up to the viewing port and studied the planet ahead of them. "I am just getting a feeling about this world. That is all."
"What sort of feeling?" asked Cwan.
"The feeling... that we are going to encounter something extremely unscientific."
XIV.
THE SCREAMING DID NOT BEGIN immediately; when it did begin, it did so quietly..
.
Riella felt as if the fog in which she had been living for many, many years was slowly lifting from the moment she set foot on the planet. The ground was surprisingly soft beneath her feet, almost spongy.
"I'm home," she whispered.
Rier was significantly less enthused by what he saw, for what he saw was a considerable amount of nothing.
He could not recall having seen a more desolate and uninteresting piece of real estate in his life. It was impossible for him to believe that there were any riches, any treasure, any secret of immortality there. There was nothing there.
Nothing. Not a damned thing.
The entire area was completely uninteresting. A few rises, a few crevices, that was all. No brush, no shrubs. Not a single animal of any sort was crawling across the slightly soggy ground.
The only intriguing thing was the sky. In the distance, high above, the clouds seemed to be whirling in a slow but steady vortex. They were dark, flashing every so often with lightning from within like a storm perpetually on the brink of opening up, but never quite getting there.
But they made no sound.
Rier's ears, sharp as they were, were strained to the utmost, and still he could detect no sound. Something was blowing the clouds, but there was no wind.
Lightning crackled from on high, but there was no thunder. All was silent. All was quiet.
"What kind of place is this?" Omon said. He was clearly trying to keep the apprehension out of his voice.
"I have no idea. But I'm going to find out." He turned and strode towards
Riella. "All right, girl," he said. "We're here in this world of oddity. You have led us here. Is this the Quiet Place?"
"You knew the answer to that question before you asked it," she told him.
It was odd. She seemed... taller somehow when she said that.
"Where are the riches, then? Where is the immortality?"
"All around you. Can't you feel it? Can't you sense it? For one such as yourself, who prides his senses, I can't understand how you can been so unsighted."
"You're the one who's going to be unsighted, girl,"
Rier told her sharply. "Once I rip your eyes out for playing games with us."
She drew herself up, straight and proud and disdainful, and said, "I don't need eyes to see far more clearly than you."
She was not acting like a victim. She was not behaving in a manner appropriate to someone whose life was hanging by a thread. Rier felt it time to make certain she understood just how precarious her personal situation was. He stepped forward and grabbed her by one arm with such force that it would have taken the smallest effort to rip it from her shoulder. "You will tell me," he said, "what
I want to know! Or you will die, here! Now! Right on the site of this precious
Quiet Place that you have led us to! You-"
"Let her go."
Rier, Vacu, Omon, and Krul reacted to the unexpected voice. Rier let out a low growl of anger.
There was a ship sitting on the ground not far away, and it was just rippling into visibility. A door had irised open, and standing just outside, weapons leveled at the Dogs, were two people in Federation outfits, a Thallonian, and a fourth whom Rier didn't recognize.
But Krul did immediately. "Him!" he said in alarm. "Rier... that one assaulted me! The one with the long hair! And he's the one who killed my brother! He's just as Rier described him!"
"And he was on the Redeemer ship!" Vacu spoke up. "He was fighting Atik, when I took the girl!"
"Well well," Rier said. "So you're the near-legendary Xyon. You have caused us a great deal of inconvenience."
"We want the girl," the Thallonian said. "Believe it or not, that's all we want. Then you can have this place to yourself. You can stay here and rot for all we care. Let her go. Otherwise-" and he held his phaser straight at Rier.
"Otherwise... what?"
It was a new voice, from another direction. Judging by the reaction of the
Federation representatives, the owner of the voice was not someone they wanted or expected to see. It was another Thallonian, and he had a disruptor aimed squarely at the other Thallonian who was still aiming at Rier. The newly arrived
Thallonian, though, was one Rier recognized. He had been back on Montos. They had endeavored to get information from him and he had resisted until the unexpected attack from the locals had driven the Dogs off. He had not provided them with so much as his name.
"Zoran," said the Thallonian who was aiming at Rier. There was cold disdain in his voice.
"Si Cwan... milord," Zoran added in a voice dripping with sarcasm. He glanced in the direction of the Dogs. "Your war vessel crippled my ship. I barely managed to bring it down in one piece. You did me quite a bit of inconvenience, for which I would like to take the opportunity to repay you. And you, Si Cwan... you did not answer my question. Otherwise... what?" His disruptor did not budge in its targeting of Si Cwan.
"Otherwise I will kill him. And you, if need be," said Si Cwan.
"Not with that." It had been Riella who had spoken. She didn't seem aware that
Rier was gripping her arm. She didn't seem aware of anything, really. It was as if she had withdrawn completely into herself. "That weapon will not work here."
"Oh, really," said Zoran.
"Kally," Si Cwan spoke directly to the girl. "Kal-ly... it's me. It's Si Cwan.
Do you recognize me, Kally?"
"That weapon will not work here either," she continued as if he hadn't spoken.
'This is the Quiet Place. No weapons will function here."
"Let's test that little notion, shall we?" said Zoran, and he squeezed the trigger of the disruptor that was aimed at Si Cwan.
Nothing happened.
Riella closed her eyes, closed them very, very tightly. The screaming had begun.
She was the only one who could hear it, though. But that woul
d change, very soon.
Soleta saw Zoran try to fire and saw that nothing happened. She looked at her own phaser and saw that the energy gauge was high. It had full power. She tried to fire it into the ground, just as a test. Nothing. She cast a confused glance at Kebron. Kebron, normally the most inscrutable of beings, was for once visibly confused, for his phaser likewise wasn't functioning.
"Kalinda!" Si Cwan called out, and took a step towards her.
The largest of the Dogs stepped in between Si Cwan and Rier and let out a warning snarl. He was a head taller and considerably wider than Si Cwan and looked to be a formidable opponent.
"Hold it, Vacu," Rier said approvingly as he pulled Kalinda more tightly against him. His claws were at her throat. "I assure you all, that your phasers and disruptors may be nonfunctional, but my claws are working just fine. So all of you just stay right where you are, before it's-"
"Too late," Kalinda said. Her eyes were still shut tightly. Her voice sounded hollow. In the distance, Soleta could have sworn that the vortex of the sky was whirling even faster.
"That's right, before it's too late for your precious little girl here."
"Not for me," said Kalinda to the Dog, her eyes still squeezed shut.. "For you.
It is too late... for you. They have come. They are here. They know you... all of you. And they are very... very... Quiet."
"What is the girl blathering about?" demanded Zoran.
Kalinda's eyes snapped open.
Her pupils were gone. Instead, against the whites of her eyes, there was a tempestuous swirling image akin to the clouds from on high.
Rier saw the bizarreness of her eyes and reflexively released his hold on her, took a step back and gaped in confusion.
"You killed me," whispered Kalinda. Her voice echoed, reverberated hi itself, as if many of her were speaking at once.
"I didn't!" said Rier. "You're alive! You're... you're right here! What sort of?-"
"You killed us... and us..." Kalinda's voice tripled, quadrupled hi its resonance. It sounded as if a mob were speaking through her in unison. "You all did..."
"Kally," Si Cwan called to her.
Kalinda's body began to tremble, her arms spread wide. Her eyes were beyond frightening. When she spoke, it was almost deafening. "We died screaming.
We died sobbing. We died begging. All of us, from all over... we died as loudly as we could. And then we came here, to his place of quiet, in order to seek the silence in death that we could not have at the end of our lives. And you... a// of you... were responsible for sending us here. You had your reasons. You thought them good. You have killed, or helped others to kill, or served with those who sent us here, and we welcome you and you will stay here forever, with us, and in that way have the immortality you so richly deserve. For you took our lives, and in doing so, you took all our hopes, and our love, and our hatred. We will never love again, never feel again, and we have you to thank for that.
Welcome to the Quiet Place. Stay... forever..."
XV.
YOU SEE THEM SOMETIMES.
They're just out of the corner of your eye, when you're not expecting them, and sometimes if you close your eyes very, very tightly, and then open them quickly, there will be a quick flash of them behind your eyelids before they dissipate.
They are the echoes of deja vu, they are the regrets that are fleeting, they are that which you didn't know you missed...
They are everywhere and nowhere, and they have come to the Quiet Place, and they are quiet no longer...
"Atik! We're losing all sensor trace of the planet!" Atik sat forward, confused.
"How is that possible?"
"The nebula is thickening around the world. Obscuring it further."
'Try to raise Rier on communications link. Let him know... and distance ourselves from the planet. If something goes too wrong, we don't want to be sitting on top of it when it happens."
Rier didn't know where to look first.
They were coming from everywhere, from all around, and they were screaming his name and screeching their fury. The Dogs drew together, confused, terrified.
From all over, they were attacking, and their eyes were missing, their arms were torn out, their intestines were trailing behind them, blood fountaining from hundreds of wounds. Everyone the Dogs had ever attacked and tortured and tormented, all of their victims, everyone who had suffered at their claws-all screaming, all screaming injury, protesting their fate. They were pouring from the girl, they were arcing toward the skies and descending towards the Dogs, tearing at their fur, howling at them, and the smell of blood and fear was thick in the air...
And the Dogs screamed.
Xyon didn't know where to look first.
There was the Dog of War he had killed, coming right at him, except it didn't quite look like him, it was a shade of him, twisted and distorted, but him, and there was Foutz, whom he had killed with his bare hands, and there were others, so many others, and he tried to explain, tried to tell them that he had been trying to help others, or just defending himself, and he had never been happy over anything that he had done, but it had been necessary, and please, don't rip his soul from him, don't punish him, leave him, leave him, take the others, take the Federation people, take the girl, just leave him...
And Xyon screamed...
Zoran and Si Cwan didn't know where to look first...
All the victims of the Thallonian Empire, swirling towards them, permeating them, and they felt cold in their bones, crushing them, turning their muscles to jelly, turning their souls to small, blackened husks that would stay in the
Quiet Place forever, to join the other tortured, shrieking beings who screamed quietly unto eternity...
The Thallonian Empire, which had destroyed so many in order to maintain its hold, that had ruled oppressively, and there was to be suffering and punishment for eternity...
And Zoran and Si Cwan screamed...
Zak Kebron knew exactly where to look first....
He saw shades coming at him, the howling images of people he had killed. People whose heads he had crushed, people whose guts he had personally removed...
He looked through them. He ignored them.
They screeched at him. They howled at him. Their screams permeated to his innermost being.
He pushed them away with an annoyed grunt and, unsure of how long he could maintain his sanity, started toward Kalinda with the intention of breaking her in half.
Soleta didn't know where to look first. At the screaming Dogs.
At the screaming Xyon.
At the screaming Si Cwan and Zoran.
At the unscreaming, but implacable Zak Kebron who was striding towards the screaming Kalinda.
She felt something pushing in at the outermost edges of her consciousness, but her mental shields easily blocked it. Other than that, however, there was nothing particularly inconvenient for her.
She looked at her tricorder, stared at the readings. She was detecting some sort of huge outpouring of psionic energy, but she couldn't lock onto the source. One moment it seemed to be Kalinda herself, and the next, it appeared to be coming from all around her. The one thing she was certain of, however, was that everyone else was seeing something that she wasn't. She supposed she should have felt a bit left out.
Then it fully dawned on her that Kebron was not about to pull punches with
Kalinda. Holstering her tricorder, she darted towards him and interposed herself between the quivering body of Kalinda and Kebron's considerable bulk. "Don't touch her, Zak," she warned.
"She's causing this," Kebron said over the shrieking of the confused creatures he heard around her. He spoke thickly, as if concentrating on forming the words.
"Perhaps. Or the planet is. We don't know."
"Won't wait... to find out."
And Kebron lunged at Kalinda.
And Krul and Xyon slammed into each other and went down, Krul's outrage and terror pouring from him as he tried to silence his brot
her's howling by slaying the slayer...
And Si Cwan and Zoran slammed into each other and went down, the two friends-turned-enemies trying to settle old scores, moved and tormented by the souls around them demanding blood vengeance...
And Rier and Omon slammed into each other and went down, the latter blaming the former for every death he'd ordered, every grisly raid, and the souls wanted them to join them...
Star Trek - NF - 07 - The Quiet Place Page 22
