Force and Motion (19 page)

Maxwell studied the Mother's pulsing tendrils.
Into the vents, into the bulkheads,
he thought.
Why?
Finch's monster must be mindless, despite whatever a meta-genome might be. It was doing the things all organisms do: looking for a safe environment, eating, excreting, and making little baby monsters.

Maxwell looked at the tendrils again. He smacked his forehead—or tried to, but the helmet stopped him. “Crap!” he shouted.

“What?”
Finch said. He was standing near—but not
too
near—the tank, admiring his work, watching the Mother expand and contract.

Finch would not share his dread. He would be delighted at the thought of Little Mothers, assuming he wasn't already thinking about them. Maxwell decided to sidestep the topic. “Just realized how much time has gone by. Your friend in the ship is going to get impatient.” He pointed at the tank where the Mother serenely floated. “How do we box it up?”

“You're the handyman,”
Finch replied.
“Recommend something handy.”

Maxwell fumed.
I could just leave,
he thought, but
there was the remote possibility that Finch would actually figure out some way to crate up his monster. He pointed at a row of storage lockers. “What's in these cabinets?” Maxwell asked, but didn't wait for an answer. He yanked open doors and drawers.

“Most of that is lab supplies or materials needed to sustain the Mother.”

“Back before it became self-sustaining.”

“Obviously.”

“I don't have time to go get anything. If we remove these cabinet doors, we could glue them in place around the tank frame. What do you think?”

“What about her tendrils?”

“We'll have to sever them. Hell, I'd prefer to sever them. Who knows what it can do with them? Or what they're currently attached to?”

“I would like to preserve as much of the Mother as possible,”
Finch said.
“And I find your use of the word
sever
distressing. Alas, I cannot think of a better idea at present. All right, then—hurry.”

Maxwell set to work on the first set of doors. Fortunately, they slid off their hinges easily enough when loosened with a probe. Within a matter of minutes, Maxwell piled up eight large slabs of lightweight, durable plasteel composite. Eyeballing the tank, he felt confident that he had almost enough material. One more set of cabinet doors would do the trick. He crossed to the last set of unused doors, but, when approached, they did not open. “This is locked,” he said. “Any reason? Something in there I don't want to disturb?”

Finch looked back over his shoulder to see what concerned Maxwell.
“Ah,”
he said, and waved his hand.
“The device.”

“The one that was supposed to sterilize the lab if the Mother escaped?” Maxwell took a respectful step back
,
then carefully tapped the door with the probe. He tugged on the door handles and they parted easily. While the rest of Finch's lab equipment was disabled, this device's control panel still appeared active. Status lights blinked on and off, suggesting life and purpose. Maxwell studied the controls, looking for something that obviously said, “Push me.”

“Stop worrying with that,”
Finch snapped
. “It's useless. Help me with the Mother. Our time is almost up.”

“Useless?” Maxwell asked. “Why?”

“It's been deactivated,”
Finch said absently, fussing with the cabinet doors.
“Long ago, in fact.”

“Long ago?”

“Of course. Why would I want to destroy the Mother?”

Why indeed?
Finch was still staring at his creation, not paying Maxwell the least mind.
I could just walk right up behind him,
he thought.
He wouldn't even think about me being there, wouldn't give it a moment's thought.
He straightened up from the spot where he had been crouching and mentally measured the gap between him and Finch.
Just a shove,
he thought.
And he'd be in the tank with his monster. Who knows what it would do to him? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
The Mother's tendrils waved in the void, as if beckoning. Maxwell took a step forward.
Maybe it's time to end this,
he thought.
Time to take the leap.

Central Core

A dozen purple tendrils
protruded from an open hatch at the top of the stairway. They waved back and forth, though Nog couldn't tell if they were beckoning or warning him back. He took a step down without looking back and bumped into the chief. Risking a look back over his shoulder, he briefly spied the mob of giant undead rats massing on the landing at the bottom of the stairway. Their naked, pink tails twitched expectantly. O'Brien changed his grip on the club he had fashioned out of a small crowbar, a mallet, and some duct tape. Nog lifted his fire ax, feeling the ache in his biceps. “Chief,
”
he said.

“Yes?”

“Remember what I said earlier about never leaving the station with you again?”

“Yes.”

“I'm amending that.”

“To?”

“Never going anywhere with you.
Ever
. Not even to lunch. Not even if Keiko asks me nicely.”

Nog risked another peek over his shoulder. The band of rats had edged closer, tails and the purple tendrils flailing. Nog felt queasy.

“Actually, Commander,”
O'Brien said,
“I understand. You're just being sensible. If we never go out anywhere again, the probability of another situation like this arising will be much lower.”

“Exactly. No hard feelings?”

“None,”
O'Brien said, but then was silent for a minute
because he was busy waving his club at something that had approached.
“I would be happy to shake your hand in acknowledgment of our newfound agreement.”

“Maybe later.”

“Right.”
O'Brien paused, trying to steady his breathing after having fought off his attacker.
“Any chance we can make it down past your lot and regroup on deck two?”

Nog assessed. More tendrils had appeared, including a couple really big ones. “Doesn't look good. Any other ideas?”

“Just the one.”

“Over the rail?”

O'Brien tugged the small grapple hook from the reel on his belt and freed a meter of cord.
“Over the rail.”

Nog glanced down into the abyss. Six decks below was a hatch back into the hangar, the very one they'd left less than an hour ago. “These were meant to be used in low or zero gravity,” he said, tugging out his own grapple. “Any chance they'll hold?”

“Of course,”
O'Brien said brightly.
“There is definitely an infinitesimally small chance that they'll hold. Or that the gravity will shut off while we're falling. Better chance of the latter, actually.”

“Always the optimist,” Nog said. “We'll have to climb the stairs again if we want to find Maxwell.”

“One problem at a time, Commander,”
O'Brien replied, setting one foot on the rail.

“Understood,” Nog said. “I agree with your recommendation, Chief.” He placed one foot on the lower rung in the metal railing.

The tendrils and the undead rats both surged forward.
Nog and O'Brien quickly wrapped their grapples around the railing. Tipping back, O'Brien said,
“I've been looking around for a new activity. Something to get me out of the quarters. Don't know why I didn't think of BASE jumping.”
He fell back into the abyss.

Nog took a deep breath and tried hard not to think as he released his grip on the rail. “Can't imagine how you overlooked it.”

Chapter 18

Three Years Earlier

Starfleet Penal Colony

“T
ell me about the gerbil, Ben.”

“I've told you about the gerbil, Michael. I don't want to have to tell you again.”

“Humor me,” Doctor Clark said.

Maxwell sighed and stared at the lampshade. He was fond of the lampshade. As often as not, when he was lying on the couch he closed his eyes, but, on the occasions when he kept his eyes open, well, there was his friend the lampshade. The ceiling above was painted an uninteresting beige, though it was broken up by an interesting topography of cracks and ripples. The tropical air was not kind to paint, even in the climate-­controlled inner sanctum of the director's office. Outside the office's single window, Maxwell heard the regular
cheet-cheet
of a fantail. “It was a gerbil,” he murmured. “One of two.”

“What were their names?”

“I don't remember,” Maxwell said. “They weren't mine. They were classroom pets—my sixth-grade class. It was a very small school—a small town—so the whole class was maybe twenty-five kids. Most of us—the kids, our families—lived in the same town our whole lives up
until that point. We went to school together for years, so they were more like my family. You know?”

“No,” Clark said. “Not really. My family moved a lot when I was young, and most of the schools were very large. It must have been pleasant.”

“It was,” Maxwell said. “Mostly. I didn't know anything else, so I don't really know how to compare it. Some good days, some bad.”

“The bad day?”

Maxwell nodded. He had grown accustomed to not looking at the doctor when they had these kinds of conversations even though he could have with the slightest turn of his head. He liked listening to Clark's disembodied voice, sometimes even treating it like it was another voice inside his own head. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He paused. “It was all my own doing, though.”

“What was?”

“What happened to the gerbil. I was . . .” He hesitated, gathering his thoughts, then resumed. “I thought I knew a lot about gerbils. When the class got them, when our teacher brought them in, I got very excited about them, about gerbils. I thought they were neat. My mother didn't really like to have pets in our house. It was too small, and she was away for days at a time sometimes. Sometimes cats would hang around for a few months—lots of fish, right?—but they were there for her, not me.”

“You never made friends with any of the cats?”

Maxwell considered. “Maybe? A couple? But they were usually mostly feral, so it wasn't like they were sleeping on the foot of my bed. Outdoor cats.”

“Okay. The gerbils?”

“Right. I did what I always did when I got excited about something: I looked up all the information I could find and read everything. The day after the gerbils arrived, I had learned everything about them.” Smiling despite himself, Maxwell said, “Ask me about gerbils. Ask me anything.”

Clark chuckled. “All right. Binomial nomenclature?

“Ah,” Maxwell began. “That's actually a more complicated question than you would expect. There are many,
many
species of gerbils. You probably mean the domesticated or Mongolian gerbil, which would be
Meriones unguiculatus
. Also sometimes called the Mongolian jird. Don't ask me what a jird is. My knowledge is deep, but not quite
that
deep.”

“Understood.”

“Domesticated in the mid-twentieth century. Originally used as lab animals, until someone decided they were cute. Became quite popular for a while, though a large percentage of the world population died out in the Eugenics Wars due to the decimation of their homeland and general lack of pet stores.”

“Of course.”

“Interesting side note: gerbils are
persona non grata
in New Zealand. Or maybe that would be
Rodentia non grata.
My Latin isn't that good.”

“Competition with native species?”

“Indeed.”

“Very impressive,” Clark said. “So you were an expert.”

“And enjoyed proclaiming it,” Maxwell replied. “And I was humored because, well, because they humored me.”

“You were popular,” Clark offered. “And respected. The other children recognized your qualities.”

Maxwell squirmed on the couch. “Sure,” he said. “Nothing to do with how unbelievably, obnoxiously self-assured I could be.”

“Of course not.” He leaned a bit closer. Maxwell heard Clark's suit jacket rustle, and the doctor's voice become just a bit louder and more insistent. “And you're digressing, Ben. What happened?”

“Not digressing,” Maxwell said. “Very simple: I was careless.”

“How?”

Maxwell's eyes felt itchy. There was something in the air, something the filters weren't catching, so he rubbed his eyes in long, slow, satisfying arcs. When he was finished, the room was blurry and his eyes were warm. “We didn't have a cage,” he explained. “But we had an aquarium. A big one. I'm not sure why. Maybe it belonged to my teacher? Anyway, it was big and gave the gerbils plenty of room. When they were awake, they'd bounce around inside it like . . . like gerbils. I loved watching them. But they were good jumpers and we worried—
I
worried—that they would jump out of the aquarium, so we decided we needed a lid.”

“That seems reasonable,” Clark said. “What kind of lid?” He asked the question in the tone he used when he knew Maxwell might require a little assistance, a little bit of lead-in.

“The only thing we had to hand was a piece of transparent aluminum. I'm not sure where it came from, but it
was a little too small to comfortably cover the top of the tank. So we kind of angled it across the top.”

“Curious choice,” Clark said. “There must have been something better available.”

“Probably. But our teacher, he was a ‘you guys figure out how you want to do this' sort of guy. Believed in leaving us to our own devices.”

“How did that work out?”

“Not well,” Maxwell admitted. He soldiered on with the tale. “It was my turn to feed them, and I was feeling all very full of myself, very knowledgeable.”

“You
were
knowledgeable.”

Maxwell shrugged. “Maybe. But sometimes being knowledgeable isn't enough. I have a very clear picture in my mind of this moment: reaching over to pick up the cover and set it aside.”

“Okay. And then what happened?”

“I didn't set it aside.”

“No?”

“No. I bumped it. It fell into the aquarium and landed on one of the gerbil's backs. I recall that detail very distinctly. I could see it—the gerbil—through the aluminum and I could see his back. Flattened out.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran out of the room,” Maxwell said. “And hid in the boys' lavatory.”

“Lavatory?”

“Rest room. The boys' rest room.”

“And you stayed there?” Clark asked. “No one came to find you?”

“No, they did,” Maxwell said. He folded his arms
across his chest, knowing he was probably telling the doctor all kinds of things with his body language. “Eventually. My friend Chuck. He found me.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did he say?”

“He said the gerbil wasn't dead, that they lifted the aluminum off him, and he started moving around.”

Clark must have uncrossed and then recrossed his legs, because Maxwell heard a lot of rustling. “Then I'm confused,” he said. “The gerbil didn't die?”

“No,” Maxwell said. “Not right away. But the crack to the head or the spine or whatever must have done something bad. By the time I got back to the classroom, expecting him to be alive and, I don't know—forgiving me?—he was jumping all around in the aquarium like he couldn't stop. My teacher took out the second one because he was so alarmed. The injured one just jumped around maniacally until he died. Or so I assume.”

“Why assume?”

“It was late in the day. It was a Friday. The bell rang and we all went home.”

“You couldn't stay?”

“I don't know,” Maxwell said, trying to recall how he felt that day. “Maybe. I don't really recall much else about that day. I just know that when we came to school on Monday, there was only one gerbil. And a piece of wire mesh over the top of the aquarium.”

Clark was quiet for a minute, letting the story settle in. Finally, he asked, “Did you tell your mother about what happened?”

“No,” Maxwell said. “That time of year she would have been out to sea for two or three days at a time. I probably didn't see her again until Sunday night or Monday. I don't remember exactly. I know I never told her about it.”

“Anyone else?”

“You mean besides you?”

“Yes.”

Maxwell considered and then recalled, “Yes. My son. I told him a version of the story back when he was on the
Rutledge
with me. Well, the whole family. He kept asking for a pet, some kind of pet. ‘Something small,' he used to say, believing, I think, that if it was small, it would be less trouble. Our quarters were small, even the captain's quarters. Not like
Galaxy
-class quarters.”

“So, your son asked you for a pet and you told him the story of how you killed a gerbil when you were his age?” There was only a slight note of incredulity in Clark's voice.

“No!” Maxwell said, exasperated. “I told him how there was a gerbil that I had known who was killed because his cage got jostled, and that aboard a starship, that kind of thing could happen all the time. It was too risky, I said.”

“And what did Carlo say?” Maxwell was always impressed how Clark could remember the names of people from his stories.
Of course
, he thought,
that's probably something they trained him to do.

“He said he understood,” Maxwell explained. “He said it probably would be better to wait until we were living planetside.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Get him a pet.” Maxwell paused for a long time before answering, so long that Clark asked, “Ben?”

“What?” Maxwell replied, speaking in a low tone. “Oh. Sorry. Yes. We did. I was just trying to remember its name.
His
name. The dog. We got a dog. A little mutt. He was shaggy. Smelled kind of bad when he got wet. Adored Carlo. Sofia was a little scared of him because the dog would protect Carlo from any perceived threat, including his sister when she got mad at her brother.”

“That's . . . well, strangely sweet,” Clark said softly.

“Yes,” Maxwell said, the word coming out more like a wet breath than a word. “It was. Worried Maria a little, but the dog didn't have a mean bone in its body. I wish I could remember its name . . .”

“It'll come back,” Clark began.

“We didn't find its body,” Maxwell continued, unprompted. “I looked through the debris of the house, but never found it. I figure the bastard Cardassians probably vaporized it with their goddamned disruptors.” He felt his fists clenching and couldn't stop himself. “Those . . .” He thought the word but didn't say it. Years of training as a captain made it practically impossible for Maxwell to say certain words. “Killing a little dog . . . that . . .” He unclenched his hands and held them up to look at his palms. There were tiny, crescent-shaped wounds there, four on each hand.

“That?” Clark asked.

“That was probably trying to defend my son,” Maxwell continued. The next words surprised him, “Because I wasn't there . . .”

“No,” Clark said. “You were doing your duty. You
were following orders and also, not inconsequentially, keeping your crew alive. You were a man, Ben, with many responsibilities. Maybe too many.”

“Maybe,” Maxwell said. “But still. They died.” He continued to study the small crescent groves in his palms, his mouth tasting of ashes, and added, “Small things in my charge tend to do that.”

January 9, 2386

Central Core

Robert Hooke

Falling isn't so bad,
Nog thought,
as long as you don't obsess about the sudden stop.
A distant portion of his brain was attempting to do the math, to calculate the relationship between mass and acceleration, even factoring in variables like the drag on the cable and possible fluctuations in the artificial gravity, but it was all too much.

He fell without knowing where the bottom was because math is not your friend in the dark. Nog felt the vibration of the spool in his belt unreeling and knew in his gut that the mechanism wasn't engineered to take the kind of shock he was about to put it through. Still, they had to try and, after what seemed the appropriate number of seconds in free fall, he squeezed the brake. Legs and head snapped backward, and the pressure against his lower back made Nog want to curse, but the breath was squeezed out of his lungs, so the only sound that came out was a soft, high-pitched
feeeeee
.

It might work,
he thought, and fixed his jaw so he
didn't accidentally bite off his tongue. But his engineer's mind returned to calculations, and the answer he arrived at was that he had already fallen too far. The deck was coming up fast; gravity would win out over the paltry amount of friction he applied to the line.
Probably just as well
, he decided. The amount of force he would need to stop his fall would probably snap his spine anyway.

Contact.

Nog expected to hear a
splat
or a
crack
, but instead the din filling his head was more of a
boooinnnggg!
This sound was quickly replaced by a sharp
thwack
and a piercing screech, which, surprisingly, didn't come from Nog.