Fire On High (7 page)

Unfortunately for her, neither her lungs nor her brain seemed quite open to rational discussion and she knew that this was a contest of wills that she was going to lose.

She opened her mouth, expelling the contents of her lungs, quite certain that that was the last breath that she was ever going to draw.

And that was when she suddenly became aware that her legs were clear of the rock. Her feet kicked in midair, and then she was in free fall, her head and then arms coming free of the rocky strata overhead as she fell through. Fortunately enough, she only fell a couple of feet before thudding to a halt. She went limp, hitting the ground and rolling, and slapping it as she landed to absorb the impact.

The mental assault was now overwhelming, and Soleta's body shook as she was pummeled with desire, longing, loneliness . . . a cacophony of needy emotions.

Soleta gathered her mental resources, pulled them into a ball within her that she could almost visualize in her mind's eye, and then she exploded the ball in all directions as she bellowed with every thought, every fiber of her being,
"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

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And just like that—it stopped.

But she was too wary to assume automatically that it was over. Quickly she promptly rolled to her feet, her hands poised, in preparation for a possible attack.

There was another Vulcan facing her, ready to lunge.

Janos was startled awake.

He wasn't entirely certain what had alerted him, but something most definitely had. He was more than willing to chalk it up to basic animal instinct. It was that instinct that caused him to awaken with a deep, throaty roar. He didn't simply clamber down off the rocky precipice from which he was hanging upside down. Instead he flipped off, landing on his feet, his clawed bared and his lips drawn back to reveal his fangs. He looked right, left, and behind him, reacting to something that he couldn't readily detect. But there was nothing, or at least there seemed to be nothing.

"Soleta!" he called. He waited for a response and when none was forthcoming, he said again, "Soleta!"

For good measure he tapped his commbadge and said,

"Janos to Soleta," just in case she was simply out of earshot. When still no reply was forthcoming, he murmured to himself, "Bloody marvelous."

His nostrils flared as he assessed scents in the area, and he quickly picked up Soleta's trail. As he tracked her, he growled angrily to himself. It was bad enough that Captain Calhoun had vanished while Zak Kebron was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. That loss had stuck deep in Kebron's stony craw, for Kebron did not take particularly well to failure. How much angrier, then, was Janos for having surrendered
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to
exhaustion but, at the same time, unwisely heeding Soleta's expectations and confidence that she could attend to matters should something go awry. Obviously something had gone out of whack, and he had absolutely no idea what it was. But he was going to find out fast.

He saw the trail was leading him straight to Ontear's cave, and he wasn't the least bit surprised.

Although they had been exploring the entire region, Soleta had kept finding herself drawn back to that one place, as if she somehow sensed that all the answers she sought were wrapped up there. And he should have known that if she was going to run into problems, that would be where they would occur. The past, and the truth, were not always prone to yielding up their secrets without demanding a high price in return,

Janos was not a big believer in weapons. He was always more comfortable using his claws and his sheer bulk. But in this case, he decided that this was the time to err on the side of caution.

He pulled out his specially designed phaser. It was an alternate model with larger key pad, controls, and trigger to accommodate the size of his hand. He thumbed the power on and carefully entered the cave, pausing at the cave's mouth to allow his eyes to adjust. He had superb night vision, so it only took a couple of seconds for the interior of the cave to be completely and easily visible to him.

He entered slowly, his claws clicking on the rocky floor, his head moving from left to right and almost turning all the way around, since his flexible neck gave him 300-degree vision. He held his phaser in a relaxed grip, and he no longer was calling Soleta's
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name. Instead he was trusting his own instincts to guide him to her; if nothing else, he was concerned that calling out to her at this point might alert some enemy.

His eyes narrowed as he saw the small metal device that was her commbadge. He knelt down and picked it up in one clawed hand, turned it over idly like a magician performing tricks with a coin. Then he saw something else . . . a pouch of some sort. He remembered it immediately as the satchel that Soleta had been carrying slung across her chest and over her shoulders.

He knelt down next to it to pick it up, and found, to his surprise, that he couldn't. The strap was inside the ground somehow. He was able to lift the pouch, but it jerked to a halt as if something was holding tight the strap, and he discovered that it was as if the ground had sealed over the strap.

"Bloody hell," he said thoughtfully. He tugged once more to make sure and he remained unable to pull it out. Then he crouched next to the point in the rock where the strap entered and probed experimentally.

He expected some sort of sponginess, but instead the ground was, appropriately, rock solid. "Might be some sort of inverse phase transducer," he muttered.

"Something that dematerialized the rock around her." He didn't feel in any particular hurry, because if Soleta had been pulled down and then the rock had reformed around her, she was already dead. Expedi-tiousness is rarely required in the rescue of the deceased. But if she was alive, then rushing unduly might well put an end to the one individual who was in a position to rescue her. Obviously caution was called for.

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Something glittered two feet beyond. He did not approach it, though, out of concern that it might be some sort of triggering device for whatever trap had swallowed up Soleta. He decided to ignore it altogether, since obviously the main point of consideration was the place wherein she had vanished.

He rapped on the cave floor. "Knock knock," he said optimistically, and when he received no response, he added, "open sesame?" When nothing happened, he sighed and thumbed the phaser to active status. "Right, then. We do it the noisy way,"

he said.

53

IV.

SOLETA WAS POISED, bracing herself in preparation for the charge of the clearly belligerent Vulcan.

It was hard to make out much, because the area around her seemed thick with mist, but as near as she could tell, it was a female, like herself; ready for a fight, like herself; moving left, right, backing up, like . . . herself.

She stopped and simply stood there and waved. Her reflection waved back.

"That
was not one of my finer moments," she muttered.

Slowly she approached the highly reflective surface, tilting her head slightly as she got closer. At first she had thought it was some sort of metal, similar to the metal disk that she had touched to first get her into
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this fix. But now she realized that it was some sort of incredibly polished stone, similar to marble.

She pulled her tricorder from her belt and held it up to get readings. She stared at the device, frowned, adjusted it, and tried it again. In annoyance, or as close to annoyance as she ever got, she thumped the tricorder with the base of her hand. Then she turned it on herself and the tricorder obediently began giving out readings on her. She cleared it, turned it back to the wall, and once again tried to get readings off it.

And once again she got nothing. According to the tricorder, the wall simply wasn't there.

She had been reluctant to touch the wall because the last time she had touched something, it had gotten her into a world of trouble, unleashing a torrent of communication that she had been unable to shut off.

When she had hit the floor in this subterranean area, the link had mysteriously disappeared as suddenly as it had first contacted her. Coming into contact with another surface might set it off again, or unleash something even more forceful. But she felt as if she had no choice.

Tentatively she put out her hand to touch the wall.

She saw the reflection of herself reaching out as well, naturally mirroring what she was doing . . . and her hand passed right through it.

Impossible
went through her head, and she said out loud, "Impossible. If this wall is not here, if it is merely an illusion, there cannot be a reflection of me upon it. Light would not bounce off it, but merely pass through. Light needs something solid for a reflection to occur."

She reached forward again, and once again her
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image on the other side did so. Once again she came into contact with nothing, her hand passing through as if she were trying to touch fog. She withdrew her hand. . . .

Her reflection did likewise, but a few seconds later than she did.

"This is insane," she murmured. She paused a moment, considered the situation, and then stepped forward right through the wall. She moved through it without a ripple, of course, but then as she turned, she suddenly heard her own voice. . . . No, not just heard. Felt. Her voice shouting, "Leave me alone!"

with tremendous volume and force.

She spun and saw—herself. She was some feet away, crouched on the ground, looking as if she were desperately trying to pull herself together. Soleta watched in amazement as herself from moments ago scrambled to her feet, saw "herself," and froze in a defensive posture.

And Soleta automatically, purely instinctively, assumed the same stance. She couldn't help it, it was completely reflex. Even as she did so, she made a mental note that she truly needed to brush up on her assorted
kata
and other exercises, because the movements of her other self seemed less than sharp to her.

Her "previous self," having ascertained that she was not, in fact, under attack, appeared to relax.

Soleta did likewise. And at that point, Soleta realized what was happening: She had never seen a reflection of herself. She had seen some sort of time "phantom,"

an echo not of what had been, but what was about to happen. Something fatalistic within her prompted her to now make the same movements that she had seen her erstwhile reflection make only moments ago, since
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she reasoned that she might as well since she had already done it. She might as well keep her own personal history consistent. So she stepped forward toward herself, moved her hand when her past incarnation did, and watched the surprise flicker through her previous self upon realizing that she was not facing a hardened surface that would permit reflec-tions. All the while her mind was racing, trying to understand exactly what it was that she was in and what she was facing.

With great scientific curiosity she watched and waited as her previous self, after some moments more, made the decision that Soleta had really already made and stepped through the wall. For a moment she wondered if a double of herself was going to step through, and wouldn't
that
be cause for conversation once she returned to the
Excalibur
with a mirror image of herself. She could already hear the snide comments. Mark McHenry, for instance, would likely say something "clever" such as, "We like your mirror version better, Soleta, but understand, that's no reflection on you."

But no copy of herself came through, and she quickly understood why. She wasn't dealing with some sort of time machine, physically casting her from one place to another. Instead it was just a sort of viewer, showing her the future on one side and the past on another. It was, in fact, rather confusing, but she didn't have the time to dwell on it further. She needed to try and sort matters out before she inadvertently found herself once more under psychic assault.

She wasn't sure if she was imagining it, but it seemed to her as if the mist around her was thinning
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somewhat. Slowly she made her way forward and found herself walking down a length of corridor. She started to take tricorder readings once more, and this time something began to register. It was a slow pulsation of energy a short distance ahead of her, The readings were oddly in flux, and she couldn't begin to guess what any of it might mean, but she was game enough to explore it since—after all—that was her job.

Two people were killing each other directly in front of her.

She paused a moment, but only a moment as she realized she was seeing more images. And these seemed to be from a time much farther back than the mere minutes that she'd seen in her own recent passing. It was two Zondarians, and they were garbed in a style of dress that seemed rather unlike anything that modern day Zondarians appeared to be wearing.