Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (14 page)

Isn’t that the truth
.

“Sayna, plot a warp jump to the statite. Clark, take Sorak, Theriault, and Ilucci, and suit up down in the cargo hold. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to go ashore.” He thumbed open an intraship channel from his chair’s armrest. “Ensign Taryl, report to the bridge. Doctor Babitz, report to the cargo deck, and bring antiradiation hyposprays for the landing party.”

As Sorak, Theriault, and Terrell left the bridge, Nassir watched the pulsar loom large on the main viewscreen. He couldn’t see the relativistic jets of supercharged particles bursting out of it at regular intervals of less than two seconds, but he knew they were there—just as surely as he knew that even the most infinitesimal miscalculation by zh’Firro would see the
Sagittarius
reduced to ionized gas before any of them had time to realize they were dead.

He clutched his armrest a little tighter and put on his mask of calm.

It’s not just a job,
he reminded himself,
it’s an adventure
.

The
Sagittarius
touched down with a rough bump, and Ilucci felt the impact rattle his bones.

Commander Terrell sealed the hatch to the main deck and the centenarian Lieutenant Sorak primed the depressurization sequence for the hold, both acting in preparation for the unsealing of the aft exterior hatch. Ilucci had never enjoyed stuffing his portly form inside an environmental suit, one of the least forgiving of all garments. As the landing party’s departure became imminent, the chief engineer tugged at his suit’s inseam, desperate to relieve its overly snug fit and give himself enough slack to walk with a normal stride. He wondered why the pressure gear always seemed cut for people with stick-figure bodies.

Overcome with what he believed was a reasonable degree of paranoia, he rechecked the settings on his suit: Oxygen level: check. Reserve power: check. Radiation barrier at full: check.

Everything was the same as it had been sixty seconds earlier.

He had almost succeeded in calming his frazzled nerves when the aft ramp began to fold down, away from the underside of the ship’s saucer, toward the ground below. As the sliver-thin crack between ramp and bulkhead widened, Ilucci took in the barren sprawl that awaited the landing party: a tenebrous, trackless waste on the dark side of a radiation-bathed disk blasted sterile by millions of years of bombardment by a pulsar.

Terrell led the landing party down the ramp and out into the forbidding darkness. Despite the small size and supposed low density of the statite, its gravity felt close to Terran normal.

Theriault jumped up and landed almost immediately, displacing the regolith beneath her booted feet. Over the shared helmet comm channel, Ilucci heard her say,
“Artificial gravity?”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “If it’s consistent, we might be able to use the rovers.”

Sorak stepped away from the team and moved a few strides beyond the sheltering overhang of the
Sagittarius
’ saucer. Ilucci, Theriault, and Terrell followed him. Standing in the open, Ilucci turned in a slow circle, observing his surroundings.

The graceful off-white form of the
Sagittarius
was veiled in shadow because its running lights were off. Over a hundred kilometers away in every direction, but still clearly visible thanks to the absence of an atmosphere to obscure the view with haze, the horizon curved upward by the slightest degree, making Ilucci hyperaware that they were on the shallowly concave side of the circular statite. Beneath that close horizon, he knew, light sails fanned around the statite’s edge, transforming the pulsar’s regular bursts of lethal energy into power and lift. Overhead, the stars burned with cold, steady fires, offering minimal illumination and no warmth.

He noticed that the others all were facing in the same direction. Turning himself toward the same bearing, he saw why.

An enormous structure stood several kilometers away, at the apparent center of the statite. It looked like a ruptured blister, a gigantic splashing droplet of molten black glass frozen in time. Its shapes and protrusions made it seem simultaneously biological and mechanical. The simple act of looking upon it, even from this distance, filled Ilucci with a cold dread. Everything about the construct made him want to retreat inside the ship; the last thing he wanted to do was move closer to it. Which made it very easy for him to predict what Terrell’s next order would be.

“Master Chief, let’s power up the rovers and head over to that structure, on the double.”

“Aye, sir,” Ilucci said, jogging back up the ramp and inside the ship’s cargo hold, in a hurry not to comply but to turn his back on the biomechanoid horror dominating the bleak nightscape. He took his time powering up one of the two terrestrial rovers, a pair of off-white, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles optimized for moving personnel but powerful enough to haul cargo. Stenciled on the back panel of each rover was its nickname. “Roxy” was the faster of the two, but “Ziggy” had proved on many occasions to be more maneuverable, particularly at speed or in tight quarters. Roxy started up with no difficulty, and Ilucci hopped behind the controls and guided it in reverse down the ramp. A quick jerk of the wheel and a tap on the brakes, and he spun it to a halt beside
the landing party, facing the alien structure. He hooked his gloved thumb over his shoulder at the empty seats. “Meter’s runnin’. Hop in.”

Terrell took the front passenger seat. Sorak sat behind Ilucci, and Theriault climbed into the seat behind Terrell’s. All four of them took a moment to secure their safety straps, and Ilucci gave the rover’s protective roll cage a firm tug to make certain it was secure. “And away we go.” Against his better judgment and natural instincts, he stepped on the accelerator and sped the landing party toward the obsidian nightmare ahead.

The drive across the statite’s surface was eerily silent. No one spoke; they all simply stared at their destination. The rover’s electric motor was quiet even in terrestrial settings, but in an airless environment such as this, it made no sound at all. No motor hum, and almost no appreciable vibration of acceleration. All that Ilucci heard during the drive to the structure was his own shallow breathing, hot and close inside his helmet. He watched the
Sagittarius
grow steadily more distant in the rover’s side-view mirror.

As they neared to within a hundred meters of the structure, its details became clear and all the more terrifying. It was almost obscenely black. A wall ten meters high ringed its base, and from it a dozen looming towers rose at thirty-degree intervals and curled inward toward its center, like the retracting legs of a burning insect. Every square centimeter of its exterior that Ilucci could see was either mirror-perfect, fissured with cracks, or ringed with tubes that made him think of veins. Small tendrils of violet energy crept up the ebon talon-towers, and when the creepers met at the apex, they coalesced into bolts of blue lightning that stabbed down into the heart of the machine. The design was strongly reminiscent of the Shedai-built Conduits that Operation Vanguard had uncovered throughout the Taurus Reach, but this was clearly the product of a different culture wielding a less organic technology than the Shedai’s.

Terrell nudged Ilucci and pointed to the right. His voice crackled softly over the helmet comm.
“Circle its perimeter, Chief. Let’s find an entrance.”

“Copy that, sir.” Ilucci steered right, off their collision course, and followed the curve of the structure. Within a minute it became obvious that the stadium-sized facility was round and highly symmetrical in its design.

They were two-thirds of the way around the wall when Sorak pointed at a subtle variation in the shadows-on-darkness surface of the wall.
“There. That looks like an opening.”

“All right,”
Terrell said.
“Chief, take us in. Sorak, set your phaser for heavy stun and stand by to scout the entrance.”

Ilucci drove the rover toward the wall and slowed to a gradual halt less than ten meters from the opening. Sorak freed himself from his safety harness, leapt from the rover, and dashed forward until he was beside the entrance. He peeked around the corner, then stole into the shadows with his phaser level and aimed straight ahead. Darkness swallowed him in seconds.

“Theriault,”
said Terrell,
“run a tricorder scan.”

The science officer fumbled with gloved hands to retrieve her tricorder from her suit’s thigh pocket, then she poked clumsily at its controls. A few moments later, she lowered it and shot a flustered look at Terrell.
“No good, sir. Too much interference from the pulsar.”

The first officer balled his right hand into a fist.
“Meaning we’ll have to go in there blind. I was afraid of that.”

Sorak returned to the doorway and signaled the rest of the team to follow him. Ilucci and the others unfastened their harnesses and clambered out of the rover. As they joined Sorak at the entrance, the Vulcan recon scout said to Terrell,
“It appears to be deserted, but I think you and I should do a full search while Theriault and the Master Chief inspect the device.”

“All right.”
Terrell motioned for Sorak to head inside.
“Lead the way.”

They followed Sorak through a long, zigzagging trapezoidal corridor whose glistening surfaces were all ridged and scaled. It felt to Ilucci like passing through an organic orifice.

Marching into the belly of the beast
.

They emerged from its far end inside the aphotic arena, which
at first glance resembled a shallow crater of dark volcanic glass. Long tubes radiated from its center, like longitudinal markings on a map, guiding Ilucci’s eye immediately to the pit’s nadir. Forks of sapphire lightning zapped down from the overarching talon-towers, illuminating the spokes of a wheel-shaped onyx frame that held several thousand skull-sized, dodecahedronal crystals identical to the Mirdonyae Artifact secured inside Vanguard’s research lab. Unlike that captured prize, however, these crystals all were perfectly clear, rather than swirling with the eldritch energies of an imprisoned alien life force. Though Ilucci had no words to say why, the very sight of the alien contraption filled him with a sick sense of foreboding.

As Sorak and Terrell split up and began conducting a thorough search of the upper tiers of the stadium’s interior, Theriault shouldered past Ilucci and hurried down the slope of the pit, on a beeline for the crystal wheel. Seeing her rush headlong into peril made Ilucci’s gut twist, reminding him that he’d never really purged himself of his infatuation with the impulsive young Martian woman. Her energetic curiosity was a key ingredient of her charm, and as an officer she was expected to lead by bold example, but he worried about her more than he could ever say. All he could do was pick up his feet and run after her.

By the time he caught up to her, she was circling the thing, trying in vain to scan it with her tricorder. She cursed under her breath, but each profanity was perfectly audible over the comm channel. Ilucci cleared his throat, and she stopped abruptly.
“Sorry,”
she said.
“But I can’t get much on this thing except straight-up visual scans, and even those are coming out pretty rough from all the radiation.”
She pointed at the wheel’s hub, a thick trunk of onyxlike stone that appeared to be fused to the ground.
“It looks pretty well anchored. I can’t imagine how we’ll ever get this thing out of here. Or fit it into the ship, for that matter.”

He scrunched his brows. “Why the hell would we want to do that?”

A grimace made her lips thin and disappear, then she mustered
a weak and unconvincing smile.
“Because we were ordered to recover anything we found and bring it back for analysis.”

Ilucci raised his voice in anger as he turned and looked up toward the distant Terrell. “Nice of somebody to tell me!”

“Chief,”
Terrell said, sounding diplomatic but not the least apologetic,
“we were under strict secrecy protocols. This whole operation’s been on a need-to-know basis.”

The military cliché lit the fuse on Ilucci’s temper. “And why would I need to know, right? I mean, I’m only the goddamned chief engineer! Just the tool-pusher who has to figure out how to cut this thing free and turn it into cargo! Why tell me anything, right?”

Theriault sounded oddly chipper.
“Chief, it might not be that bad—look.”
He turned back toward her. She was pointing at an empty nook on one of the wheel’s spokes.
“This might be where one of the Mirdonyae Artifacts came from. Which suggests . . .”
She stepped forward, clutched the nearest crystal on the wheel with both hands, and pulled it free with ease. Stumbling backward, she was filled with innocent glee.
“Easy peasy!”

He shouted, “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?” The impetuous redhead held out the artifact toward Ilucci. Staring at the glibly plucked forbidden fruit being proffered by the object of his unrequited affections, Ilucci thought of Adam in the Garden of Eden. He held up a hand and shook his head. “No, thanks. You keep it.”

“Suit yourself, Master Chief.”
She turned to look in Terrell’s direction.
“Commander? I can’t get a reading on these things. What do you want me to do next?”

The first officer and Sorak were both on the way down to regroup with Ilucci and Theriault.
“Take that crystal back to the rover and find some way to pack it safely for the ride back,”
Terrell said.
“We’ll dump some of the ship’s cargo so we can use the empty crates to box up the other crystals. Master Chief, we’ll need both rovers to move them to the ship, so have your team get Ziggy ready to roll. We’ll come back with Threx, zh’Firro, Dastin, and Cahow.”

Ilucci stared at the huge wheel, its spokes clustered with artifacts. “This could take days.”

“I estimate it will take us four days and twenty-one hours,”
Sorak said.