by David Mack
To look around at the rest of the landing party, Xiong had to turn his entire torso. On his left, Spock circled the group, following some readings from his tricorder. Walking close behind him was security guard Luke Patterson. Turning the other way, Xiong saw Enterprise senior geologist Lieutenant Robert D’Amato take some readings with his tricorder. Security guard Scott Danes waited patiently a few meters away.
Kirk stood next to Xiong. “This used to be a jungle,” the captain said, his dismay evident despite his voice being filtered through the radiation suits’ shared comm channel.
Pointing down a slope of smoking ash and pulverized rock into a smoke-shrouded valley, Spock said, “The outpost was down there, Captain.”
Acting on a single nod from Kirk, Danes and Patterson moved quickly down the slope, ahead of the rest of the landing party. Patterson tested the ground as they went, checking for bad footing or other hazards. Danes observed the surrounding desolation for any sign of company and occasionally looked back to make certain the rest of the group was all right. When they were about halfway down the slope, Kirk followed in their steps, and the rest of the team took his cue and followed him.
Tromping down the slope, Xiong struggled to pierce the dusty gloom below and locate the concealed entrance to the underground excavation. Descending into the smothering blanket of smoke, visibility decreased rapidly, until Kirk, just a few meters in front of Xiong, was only a hazy silhouette against the gray twilight. The rest of the landing party was little more than dim shadows, their labored breathing a low rasp over the suit comms. Jagged chunks of red-hot rock littered their path.
“We should reach the remains of the outpost any minute,” Xiong said, more to reassure himself than to edify the others.
“There are no remains to find, Lieutenant,” Spock said.
“We don’t know that, sir. There might be—”
“We are now more than fifty meters below the recorded ground level of the outpost,” Spock said. “Logic suggests that the attack which destroyed the base was sufficiently powerful to expose the excavation below.”
Adding insult to injury, D’Amato quipped, “So much for Xiong’s artifacts.”
“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. “Mr. Xiong, you know what we’re looking for better than my security guards do. Take point and lead us in.”
“Aye, sir.” Xiong quickened his pace down the slope and soon edged in front of Danes and Patterson. Staring down at the tiny fragments of charred rock and powdery dust under his boots, he tried to discern any sign of the cata-combs he and the others had navigated when they first discovered this place. Every new step hammered home the grim realization that there was probably nothing left of the greatest archaeological discovery of the century except for memories and ashes.
Then it took shape in the dreary dimness—the outline of an enormous but disjointed mass of rubble. Xiong remembered first seeing it whole; it had been a truly unsettling experience. Now, beholding it shattered and collapsed, his initial fear of the artifact was transformed into anger at its loss. Its four evenly spaced external supports, which rose up and curved inward, towered nearly thirty meters overhead. The circular platform at which they had intersected had been obliterated, and the clawlike hemisphere it had supported had fallen onto its mirror-image counterpart below, yielding a disturbing, saw-tooth arrangement of shattered black volcanic glass. The lower hemisphere sat at the top of a gradual incline whose surface was rife with grotesque, semi-organic, semi-mechanical shapes and protrusions. Even in its current debased condition, the artifact continued to evoke in Xiong a sense of palpable menace.
The landing party regrouped around Xiong and stared at the ruins of the artifact. Danes and Patterson gazed upward in amazement. D’Amato scanned it with his tricorder. Arching his right eyebrow, Spock said, “Fascinating.”
“Xiong,” Kirk said, never taking his eyes off the alien structure. “What is it?”
“We don’t know, sir.” Noting the irritated look on Kirk’s face, he added quickly, “We were just starting our research when someone knocked out our sensor screen.”
Kirk took a few steps up the low incline, then stopped. “What kind of research?”
“Everything,” Xiong said. “Materials analysis, reverse engineering, cultural profiling. The S.C.E. had more than a dozen people down here.”
D’Amato looked up from his scanning, alarmed. “Captain, I’ve got readings below the ruins—complex structures, definitely artificial.”
Kirk looked at his first officer. “Spock?”
Activating his tricorder, Spock quickly performed his own scan. “A power-distribution system, Captain,” he said. “A primary tap appears to have been physically severed seventy-one-point-two meters away, bearing three-one-five.” He turned off the tricorder and slung it back at his side as he finished. “The artifact appears to have been powered by a remote source. Readings indicate that it was capable of harnessing a vast amount of energy.”
Kirk once again focused on Xiong. “What was the S.C.E. doing before the outpost was attacked?”
“The next item on the agenda when I left was to try and restore power to a few isolated components. That’s why they had the sensor screen—to prevent their work from drawing attention.”
Kneeling down amid the twisting biomechanoid tendrils that covered the slope, D’Amato pressed his gloved hand against it. He seemed entranced by its dark coils and dust-shrouded patches of perfectly smooth, opaque black glass. “Xiong, how many of these structures have been found?”
“This is the only one,” Xiong said, then added, “That I know of.”
Kirk glanced at Spock then asked Xiong suspiciously, “When did you find it?” Xiong noticed that Spock and Kirk both were listening attentively for his answer.
“A few months ago, shortly before Vanguard was declared fully operational. Why?”
Spock said to Kirk, “Then this find could not have been the impetus for Starfleet’s push into the Taurus Reach. Construction of the station began nearly two years prior to this excavation.”
Nodding, Kirk took another look around the dustblown jumble of ancient debris. “What brought you out here in the first place, Lieutenant? Without a working starbase for support, this is a long way to go on a hunch.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but—”
“—but that’s classified,” Kirk interrupted. “Of course it is.” He turned his back on Xiong. “D’Amato, finish your scans of the structure and verify your readings with Mr. Spock. Patterson, Danes, help Mr. D’Amato collect any samples he might need for analysis.”
Everyone snapped into action and conversation ceased.
Regret nagged at Xiong as he wandered around the base of the ruins. He hated keeping information from fellow Starfleet officers, regardless of the orders he had been given. A truly staggering discovery had inspired the Federation’s exploration and colonization of the Taurus Reach, but in Xiong’s opinion whoever was making the “big picture” decisions about this mission was going about it all wrong. All they care about is gaining an advantage, getting one up on the Klingons or the Tholians. Why is it always about keeping secrets? If only they’d let the scientists handle diplomacy instead of the politicians, maybe we could stop trying to make weapons out of everything.
When he had expressed such sentiments to his father years ago, the “old man” had laughed at him and labeled him a “deluded peacenik.” On the day that a shuttle came to take Xiong from his home in Kunming, China, to Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, his father stopped laughing at him…or speaking to him. “How ashamed you must be,” Xiong had shouted as the old man walked away from him. “You wanted an architect and you got me.” Now, more than twelve years later, Xiong was hundreds of light-years away, marveling at an ancient majesty that was abandoned before modern humans even existed…and still his rage refused to die.
An earsplitting whine cut the air.
Kirk bellowed, “Fall back! Everybody out!”
The firs
t explosion tore Danes in half.
Xiong sprinted back toward the rest of the landing party.
Billows of red-orange fire jetted out of cracks in the artifact. Detonations erupted inside its interlocked hemispheres. Shrapnel rocketed in all directions. A blazing-hot fragment struck Xiong behind his right knee, buckling his leg. He fell face-first at the bottom of the slope and howled in agony. Unable to roll over, he twisted his torso and reached instinctively for the bloody tatters of his knee.
Blasts shattered the bases of the four towering supports. Xiong stared up in mute horror as the closest one fell toward him, in what seemed like surreal slow motion. Panic froze him in place. Paralyzed, he watched the gargantuan, curving rib of black stone rush down at him.
Someone’s arms wrapped around his chest. His feet dragged through the dust as he was pulled backward, each bump and jostle sending sharp stabs of pain into his knee. The falling support crashed to the ground and broke into millions of pieces. The impact displaced a wall of air, knocking Xiong and his rescuer away in a flurry of stone fragments. Its crashdown was followed by three others, all of which boomed like thunder. Dark plumes of roiling dust and smoke mushroomed up, completely obscuring all visibility for several seconds.
When the smoke cleared, Xiong turned to see who had just saved his life. Lying behind him, his own radiation suit torn in several places by hunks of shrapnel, was Captain Kirk. Barely visible behind him, sprawled in the dust and still-smoldering debris, were Spock, D’Amato, and Patterson. Waved over by Kirk, Patterson limped to Xiong and saw his mangled knee. Without saying a word, Patterson tore off a section of his own damaged suit and began tying a tourniquet above Xiong’s knee.
“Spock,” Kirk said, sounding winded, “report.”
The first officer reached for his tricorder, only to discover it was no longer on his belt. D’Amato nudged Spock’s shoulder and handed him his own tricorder. Spock activated it and made a quick scan. “Proximity fuses. Traces of enriched sultritium…high concentrations of triceron and thracium.” He deactivated the tricorder. “Demolitions, Captain. Tholian-made.”
Using the control pad on the wrist of his radiation suit, the captain opened the surface-to-ship channel. “Kirk to Enterprise.”
“Scott here, Captain.”
“Five to beam up.”
Scott clearly knew something had gone wrong. “Five, sir?”
“We’ll need a recovery team for Ensign Danes’s body.”
Dismayed, Scott replied, “Aye, sir. I’ll see to it. Stand by for transport.”
Patterson finished tying the tourniquet on Xiong’s leg. Xiong nodded his thanks to the security guard.
Waiting in shocked silence for beam-out, Xiong listened to a gust of wind shriek around the landing party. The lower half of his right leg was growing numb. Looking around at his comrades, guilt swelled inside him. I brought them down here. He glanced at the glowing-hot pile of smashed rock where the artifact used to be, and thought of the boyish young security guard who had just died there. He died because of me. For my mission. For a handful of secrets I never wanted.
He felt the immobilizing embrace of the transporter beam. As the dematerialization sequence energized with a musical ringing of white noise, Xiong imagined Captain Kirk writing a letter to Ensign Danes’s family, telling them that he didn’t know what their son had died for.
Not good enough, Xiong decided. Not even close.
Kirk sat on the edge of the biobed and pulled on a fresh shirt his yeoman had brought from his quarters. Spock, D’Amato, and Patterson were with him in sickbay, each of them confined by Dr. Piper to their own biobed. The monitors over their heads reported their pulse rates with softly throbbing bum-bump biofeedback tones.
A blond nurse had tended their minor injuries while Dr. Piper performed an emergency surgical repair of Xiong’s knee. At first the doctor had opined that he might need to amputate Xiong’s leg above the knee and replace it with a biosynthetic. Kirk hoped, for Xiong’s sake, that Piper was wrong.
A brief, three-note whistle preceded an intraship hail. “Bridge to Captain Kirk,” Scott said over the sickbay speaker.
Rising from the biobed, Kirk walked to the wall panel and opened a two-way channel. “Kirk here.”
“Recovery team is back aboard, sir. Mission accomplished.”
Kirk appreciated the chief engineer’s discretion in leaving certain details unsaid. “Thank you, Mr. Scott. What’s the status of our salvage operation?”
“We’ll have everything aboard in about six hours, sir.”
“Any sign of the Bombay’s log buoy?”
“Aye,” Scott said. “We’ve got a lock on it. It’s next on our list.”
“Good work,” Kirk said. “Notify Mr. Spock as soon as it’s aboard.”
“Will do, sir.”
“Kirk out.” He thumbed off the comm switch, then heard a door slide open behind him. He turned to see Xiong hobble out of the recovery room. The lieutenant’s sweat-pants looked amusingly lopsided, with the right leg sliced off above the knee to reveal the servo-enhanced brace that supported his nearly mummified knee. “Mr. Xiong. Still in one piece, I see.”
“Thanks to you, Captain.” One halting step at a time, Xiong moved to the biobed on which a fresh blue uniform shirt and his gear—which amounted to a communicator and a tricorder—were neatly arranged and awaiting his return.
Dr. Piper emerged from the recovery room carrying a small plastic container with a prescription label. He handed it to Xiong. “Take one of these at night before you go to sleep. It’ll reduce the pain and swelling and speed up the healing.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Xiong placed the prescription bottle on top of the shirt, then folded the garment in half over it. He stared down at his things for a moment, his fists clenching on the edges of his shirt.
Kirk recognized the younger man’s look of self-blame, that haunted expression of anger turned inward. He had seen it on his own face eight years ago, after his moment of fearful hesitation on Tycho IV led to the deaths of nearly two hundred of his Farragut shipmates, including his commanding officer, Captain Garrovick.
“Captain,” Xiong said, “I just want to say…”
Kirk took advantage of Xiong’s pause. “Is this an apology, Lieutenant?”
“Kind of, sir, yes.”
“Keep it. You have nothing to be sorry for.” Seeing that Xiong was gearing up to protest, Kirk continued, “What happened down there wasn’t your responsibility, it was mine. I ordered the landing party, I led the mission. You made a convincing case for inspecting the site, but I made the decision to go. My command, my crewman, my responsibility. Clear?”
Xiong didn’t look as if he believed it—not that Kirk had really expected him to—but he nodded and said, “Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Go back to your quarters and get some rest. We’ll be back at Vanguard in a few days.”
Xiong lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “There’s something else I need to tell you, Captain.” Looking up with hardening resolve, he added, “Something important.”
The intensity of Xiong’s demeanor commanded Kirk’s full attention. In the same hushed tone, he said, “About what, Lieutenant?”
“I want to tell you why Starfleet is out here,” Xiong whispered. “And why one of your men died today…. You saved my life, Captain. The least I owe you is the truth.”
16
Anzarosh, Kessik IV’s shabby spaceport town, was one of the most depressing places Cervantes Quinn had ever visited.
Hands tucked inside the warm pockets of his greatcoat, he leaned against the forward landing strut of the Rocinante. The slow-burning cigar clenched between his teeth was half-gone. It sizzled as he took another puff. Lethargic coils of grayish smoke snaked away and lingered in the dank predawn air. Overhead, the landing pit yawned open to a dismal patch of gray sky. A faint mist of chilly rain drizzled down.
Just as Quinn had expected, Ganz’s client had arranged for him to pu
t down in the most remote, decrepit docking pit possible. Its amenities consisted of tangled fuel lines, a burgled maintenance locker, and rust. The whitewashed concrete floor was spiderwebbed from edge to edge with deep cracks. It was the kind of place to leave a body if you wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be found anytime soon.
Arranged in four neat rows, halfway between the small freighter and the wide hydraulic doors that led to an underground freight-rail loading platform, were the twenty-four cargo crates Quinn had smuggled off Vanguard.
The doors opened. Broon, an unkempt bear of a man, lumbered in, his open trenchcoat fluttering behind him like a battle flag. He was followed by an entourage of ten surly-looking lowlifes, all of whom came carrying disruptor rifles.
Quinn slowly removed his right hand from its pocket, tucked back his coat, and rested his hand on the stun pistol he had strapped on for just such an occasion. “You’re late.”
“And you’re an idiot,” Broon said, his voice a guttural rasp. His men fanned out in a semicircle and surrounded Quinn.
With a nonchalant sideways puff of cherry-scented smoke, Quinn said, “I was smart enough to get this far.”
“If you had any brains, you wouldn’t have come at all.”
On the edge of his vision, Quinn caught the silhouettes of snipers inching along the top edge of the docking pit. “What? And miss out on all this?” His hand closed slowly over the grip of his pistol. “Do you want your guns or not?”
“Oh, we’ll take the shipment, Mr. Quinn,” Broon said. His men began raising their weapons in Quinn’s direction.
“Not until you pay for it,” Quinn said. “My employer told me to bring back six kilos of pure dilithium.” He ignored the malicious chuckling that spread like a virus between the gunmen.
Broon smirked. “I think you’ve misunderstood the nature of this transaction, Mr. Quinn. That cargo is not our purchase—it’s our reward.”
