The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (36 page)

There. Talma clambered up the short stretch of gangway to the bridge. She’d checked with Command. Now all she had to do was manufacture the forged confirmation from Starfleet Intelligence—
Dear Halak: Anything for you, darling. Love, Marta.
Thank the heavens, she’d had the foresight to know this might come up and had accessed Batanides’s personal authorization codes from the records of the real—and very dead—Laura Burke.

Tsk-tsk, Laura, how many times have I told you:
Always
lock your door when you go to sleep aboard ship. You never know just
who
might break out of her quarters in the middle of the night and leave a nice, bright, shiny, and very sharp souvenir in your back.

Vaavek—
no, Sivek, he’s Sivek for the time being
—sat with perfect Vulcan poise over the pilot’s console: back straight as a titanium rod, the seal-skin black of his hair gleaming in a soft white light that suffused the bridge from a bank of lighting panels recessed in the ceiling. Talma Pren paused a moment, eyes roving the bridge, her body reveling in the pristine orderliness of Vulcan engineering. She’d been on many ships in her lifetime. Some she’d stolen. (Well, actually, she’d stolen most of them. Maybe she’d bought one, two at the most.) She’d had Klingon shuttles, Starfleet shuttlecraft, even a Cardassian two-person trimaran liberated from a hapless Cardassian trader floating somewhere between Farius Prime and the Malfabrican Sector—and not many people living who could make that claim. (Cardassians didn’t take kindly to people liberating anything.) But in terms of ships, the Vulcans won, hands down. Their ships were so much more streamlined, so functional; they eschewed luxury and favored steely blue hues and well-lit workspaces. Not as fancy as Starfleet shuttles: Starfleet loved those delicate, homey touches so pleasing to the eye but with no functional purpose. The Klingons made suffering a virtue, so their ships were not only ugly, they were no fun at all; and the shadows that fell through the grills and latticework on Cardassian ships always reminded Talma of a prison cell. But the Vulcans knew how to build ships. Surveying the bridge, Talma gave a sigh of appreciation. Play her cards right, and she could buy herself a whole damn fleet. Why, she might even buy Vulcan.

“What’s our status?” she asked, slipping into the copilot’s chair. Again, not luxurious but padded just enough and sensibly proportioned, with a high back and a lumbar support. (For those long space flights: absolute murder on your lower back.) “Any Cardassians around?”

Vaavek’s head swiveled so smoothly it might have been oiled. “None, but I suspect that will change within the next twenty-four hours when that Cardassian scout comes through on patrol.”

“What’s our position?”

“On the perimeter of the system; 600,000,000 kilometers from the neutron star.” Vaavek’s sensitive fingers played upon his console. “Magnetic field is quite high, but one would expect that of a magnetar. Accreting gas from the remnants of this system’s supernova as well as the weaker brown star of the binary are being forced to flow along field lines to the magnetic poles of the neutron star. That shouldn’t pose much of a problem for us, but because the magnetic axis and rotational axis of the star aren’t co-aligned, the star’s an accretion-powered pulsar, with X-ray pulsations sweeping out once per rotation. Those pulsations combined with random gamma ray bursts from the star itself and a strong stellar wind from the brown star make more detailed sensor resolution quite difficult.”

“Mmmm,” Talma murmured, not really listening. Science always had given her a headache. She indulged in a stretch, arching her back and finishing with something very close to a purr. “Less technobabble, if you don’t mind.”

Vulcans were not known to smile, though they would, on occasion, give the ghost of a smirk. One touched Vaavek’s lips now. “There are two stars. One’s brown, and the other isn’t. The one that isn’t is stealing matter from the brown one. That means, there’s a lot of junk floating around out there, and that makes it very hard to see anything. Right now, we’re far away from the planet. At long range, our sensors and communications aren’t so hot, but then again the Cardassians will be blind as Torkan cavefish, too. At best, they’ll see sensor ghosts, or nothing at all. At worst, their sensors may be able to resolve a signature, but they will still have to rely upon visual.”

“Why, Vaavek,” said Talma. “I never knew you had a sense of humor.”

“It is always advisable to know the ways of one’s adversaries.”

“But we’re working together.”

“Precisely.”

Talma gave him a sidelong glance. “What about Chen-Mai?”

“He should have no idea we’re here. We’re early for the rendezvous. He won’t even begin to look until he’s ready to leave the planet’s surface.”

“Yes, we do want to keep that nice element of surprise.”

Vaavek arched his left eyebrow (a feat Talma never could master, though all Vulcans seemed capable of it from birth). “I doubt Chen-Mai will share your enthusiasm.”

“Likely not,” Talma said, pulling her features into a look of mock regret. “Well, he won’t live long enough to worry much about it.”

Chen-Mai had been the perfect choice for her scheme. The man had been in Mahfouz Qadir’s employ for the last seven years, and he’d never once been suspected of skimming. Talma knew. She’d been the one to bring him into the Qatala network. For her glowing reports to the Qatala, Chen-Mai always paid her extremely well and Talma adjusted the take she reported to Qadir accordingly. A beneficial arrangement: collateral built up against the day when Talma made her move. Today, she had decided, was as good a day as any. She had no intention of parting with whatever Chen-Mai and company had found, whether that was specs for a portal, or lots and lots of treasure. (Jevonite didn’t exactly grow on trees.) Likewise, she had no intention of letting Chen-Mai—and whomever he’d been careless enough to leave alive—get a day older.

And
that,
though he didn’t know it, included Vaavek. Sivek. Whatever.

“Well,” she said, her tone bright and cheery, “then let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Nothing: nothing in his mind, on the planet, or under the rock. There was simply nothing because there was nothing to find.

Try again.
Clad in his environmental suit, the sound of his breaths loud in his ears, Ven Kaldarren stood so still that he imagined anyone spying him would’ve thought he’d turn into a pillar of the same hard stone that formed the mountains, the land itself.
Failure is not an option. Try again.

Yet he was going to fail. He felt it. Only a day left, and he knew. He would never find the portal. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough, or his psionic signature wasn’t a match. Maybe whoever had built this fabled portal had such an individual mindprint that, like a fingerprint or DNA, there was no way for anyone else to detect, much less access, the device. Not terrifically useful then, but Chen-Mai’s anonymous employer didn’t seem to care about that.

Try again.

He could lie. He could say he’d picked up something faint, but they’d have to wait awhile, come back. Then, before that time came, he could take Jase and go someplace far away. Not back to Betazed: That was the first place Chen-Mai would look. But Kaldarren could take Jase to Earth, leave him with the boy’s grandparents. A good thing Chen-Mai didn’t know who Jase’s mother was, so he’d have no way to trace the boy. As for Kaldarren, he could watch out for himself, something that was easier to do if he didn’t have to worry about Jase.

And he had a lot to worry about because he’d tried to scan Chen-Mai. Doing so broke every vow he’d ever made not to misuse his gift. But this was his life they were talking about now; this was his son’s life. So he’d scanned Chen-Mai—and run into a brick wall. A mind block: Kaldarren had run the fingers of his thoughts over the wall, touching it here and there, and in a way that reminded him a little of what snakes did, flicking out their tongues, tasting the air. Then he’d tried probing Mar—same wall. Same
feel
to the wall. And then Kaldarren was certain. The men were taking a neural blocking agent, probably an anti-scopolaminergic compound. The drug wouldn’t inhibit their conscious cognitive processes but would render them telepathically opaque. Metaphorically speaking, he might as well have tried seeing into a room through a frosted window. Kaldarren could catch shapes now and then, vague outlines of thoughts but nothing definite.

So. The blocks and the fact that both men were taking a drug so he, Kaldarren, couldn’t crack through telepathically were proof enough. Kaldarren got a certain grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that you didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that a man fearful of you seeing inside
definitely
had something to hide. That both Mar
and
Chen-Mai were taking the drug told Kaldarren that both men knew the same thing, and neither could be trusted. They were going to kill him. They were going to kill Jase.

He couldn’t let that happen.
Can’t fail, I
can’t. He thought about stealing the shuttle, or contacting Garrett. Neither was an option. There was no transmitter on the planet strong enough to pierce the interference from both
the brown star’s stellar wind and the neutron star’s magnetic fields; and Chen-Mai had the shuttle in lockdown mode. Only Chen-Mai and Mar knew the code, and it was stupid of him not to have plucked the code from their minds while he had the chance.

Enough.
Closing his eyes against the dead and rock-strewn landscape, Ven Kaldarren focused on the sound of his breathing. An old trick, one used early on in the meditation techniques that all Betazoid telepaths undertook as part of their early training.

Unbidden, thoughts—
Jase—
crept into his mind. Kaldarren frowned. Couldn’t think about his son now.
Have to concentrate.
Kaldarren threw his mind out in a wide net, his thoughts like a sensitive web, ready to vibrate with the tiniest psionic disturbance.

Jase.
Again. Why? Kaldarren was on the verge of dragging his mind away but didn’t. If his mind kept veering to Jase, there was a good reason. Kaldarren willed the tension to leave his limbs; he opened his mind wide.

Jase.
His son had seemed different in the past few days—happier, certainly, and as if he looked forward to every new day. There was Jase’s ability to gray his mind; that was new, and a revelation Kaldarren hadn’t spent much time deciphering, or dwelling upon. He reasoned that the action was a reflex, something the boy learned as a consequence of having to live with telepaths. Come to think of it, Kaldarren didn’t have much experience with living in close quarters with non-telepaths. There was Rachel, of course. His mind caressed this
Rachel
thought: an image of Rachel’s auburn hair fanning upon a carpet of emerald-colored grass; a burst of sunlight, and the smell of cool water from Lake Cataria. Rachel’s skin. Rachel’s lips.

His heart filled with grief. They’d lost so much. Until the last two rancorous years, when the marriage was dissolving, her mind had always been open. At the height of their love,
Kaldarren felt as if they shared the same mind, the same feel. ...

Suddenly, a bolt of searing pain ripped through his brain. Kaldarren couldn’t help it; he screamed. His vision dimmed, and his knees buckled. He felt the sharp bite of rock as he sagged to the ground, hands clutched at either side of his helmet. The pain came again: sharp, knifing his brain as if someone had taken an axe and driven it through his mind, cleaving it in two.

Stop.
Moaning, Kaldarren tried to put up a shield, keep the intruder-thought at bay. He had to get it to stop,
stop!
Who could be doing this, who had this much
power
... ?

Then, through a haze of agony, Kaldarren saw an image: a shape. Indistinct, shadowy. Not humanoid. A dragon. No, not a dragon—Kaldarren tried clamping down on the pain shivering through his mind, along his limbs—not a dragon, a woman with a dragon’s ... no, a serpent’s body, and wings, and eyes, those eyes. ...

Dad! Dad, help!
Help
us!

“Jase,” Kaldarren hissed, his mind spiraling toward blackness.
“Jase!”

“What is it?” asked Jase. He passed his tricorder over the wall before them. The wall wasn’t rock; he stared at his tricorder’s readings then passed the device over the wall once more for good measure.

“It’s metal,” said Pahl, confirming Jase’s readings. He, too, had a tricorder. “A bunch of metal. Titanium and some other stuff, I don’t know what, I haven’t gotten that far yet in school.”

“Metal?” Jase echoed. “In a rock tunnel? And what about this?” He shoved his tricorder before his friend’s faceplate. “A magnetic lock?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Disgusted, Jase shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Looking around, he searched for a place to sit and found none. He settled for squatting, cross-legged, on the rock floor. He was tired and hungry, and now they’d run into a metal wall sealed with a magnetic lock, of all things. They’d been walking for hours, and he was sweating, not from exertion this time but anxiety.

His eyes roamed the tunnel shaft behind. He picked out the faintly phosphorescent glow of flare markers, winding round like a string of fireflies, that they’d left wedged in rock clefts along the way just in case their tricorders quit. Other than their flare markers, the tunnel was pitch black. A kilometer back they’d left a pack of supplies: spare air, more flare markers. Plus they carried tiny packs of spare air on their backs, for emergencies. He hoped he wouldn’t need to use his.

Discouraged, Jase swung his head back toward the metal panel. The panel made no sense. A magnetic lock, one that was still active, on a dead planet made even less. Unless it had been left over from the time when there were people here. If true, where was the power coming from? There had to be a power source somewhere, one to power the lock and to generate the field they’d found at the tunnel mouth. But their tricorders had registered nothing, given not the slightest hint as to where this power source must be. Had to be. The only answer was that the source was shielded, or that they just didn’t know what or how to look. They were just kids, after all, and neither of them were exactly in love with science.

He ought to tell Pahl to forget this whole adventure and go back. Jase was in over his head, and he knew it. Yet he felt a strange compulsion to keep going. Even as he fought the urge to go deeper and deeper, as if an invisible tether were reeling him in, Jase felt his apprehension grow. Small comfort he’d been right about the general design of the tunnel, its similarity to tombs he’d seen in Egypt. The tunnel was carved out of the mountain rock and was tall enough for a man to pass through without stooping. Unlike tombs on Earth, however, these had no drawings on the walls, nor were the walls plastered. Instead of running straight down—under the dead lake, if their tricorders were accurate—the tunnel twisted and turned and doubled back several times in underground switchbacks, almost like a maze. Maybe now, with the metal door and the magnetic lock, this was probably just an old mine shaft, and not a tomb at all. How dumb. Jase was disgusted. They’d been like little kids, thinking they were going on some great adventure when, instead, this was a mystery better left for adults who knew what they were doing, not a couple of kids armed only with dinky tricorders—not even really fancy ones—air, and flashlights.

Jase pushed against his thighs and clambered to his feet. His calves cramped, protested the unaccustomed exercise. “We should go back, tell my dad, and let him decide what to do.”

But Pahl was shaking his head. “I think I can get us through this. There’s a magnetic field here all right, just like at the entrance. But the field has a periodicity, like a pulsar.”

“So?”

“
So
,” said Pahl, fiddling with his tricorder, “that far in school I did get. Maybe if I match the ambient resonance frequency of the magnetic field but
reverse
it, I can open this.”

“And then what? How do we know you can get us back out? We don’t even know what’s on the other side. Could just be another tunnel that’ll go on for kilometers.”

“Or it might not,” said Pahl, turning his head until his ice-blue eyes and pale brown face stared down at Jase. “You and I both know there’s something here, something that wants to be found. Why else put up a wall? Why lock other people out?”

He knew Pahl was right. The setup was too elaborate: the magnetic distortion field topside, the panel and its lock. “The lock could be to keep whatever it is
inside
.”

“Maybe,” said Pahl, turning aside and staring at the readings on his tricorder.

Jase watched in silence as Pahl’s tricorder searched for a match, found it, and then began to emit a reverse polarity pulse. The tricorder pulsed red ... red ... red ... green.

“Jase,” Pahl began.

The metal panel slid to one side. There was no sound, though Jase imagined that there must be the whine of some mechanism scrolling the panel to one side. But Jase heard Pahl gasp and, instinctively, both boys took a step back. On cue, they glanced at one another and exhaled a peal of embarrassed laughter.

Jase shone his torch into the blackness. Almost immediately, he felt a twist of disappointment. The panel opened into a tiny, arched room that reminded Jase of the well chamber he’d been expecting. Only the walls curved and there was no shaft to catch water. The floor was smooth and level with that of the tunnel in which they stood. Opposite the panel was another door.

“Same metal,” said Pahl, consulting his tricorder. “But there’s no magnetic field.”

“So it’s not locked.” Jase chewed on his lower lip. “An invitation? Like it wants us to come on in.”

Pahl nodded. “There are old-fashioned laser sensors. Here and here,” he gestured with his tricorder to either side of the chamber. “All along the walls. Can’t see the beams, though.”

“Are they weapons?”

“No, the beams aren’t strong enough to burn anything. I think they’re meant to trigger some sort of mechanism.”

“Wait.” Jase bent, scooped up a small quantity of fine-grained dirt from the tunnel floor, and tossed the dirt into the chamber. The dirt was so fine that it formed a swirling cloud, like curls of smoke. Then, so ephemeral they were like the threads of a spider’s web, a network of thin, pulsing red lines appeared, crisscrossing the chamber.

“Sensors, all right. Displacement detectors, I’ll bet.” Jase looked over at Pahl. “And you want to go in there.”

Pahl nodded. “Don’t you? Can’t you feel it?”

“
No
,” Jase lied.

“Well, I do. It’s almost like a voice, only not words so much. Just a feeling. It’s not going to hurt us.”

“Then what? What is it? And why is it talking to us? Why not my dad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe your dad isn’t the right person.”

Jase took a step back. “I don’t understand that, and I think that until you understand something ... until somebody tells us it’s okay, we ought to go back.”

“Well, I’m not,” said Pahl calmly. He snapped his tricorder shut and slung the carrying strap over his shoulder. “I’m going on, Jase. This is where I’m meant to be. You can go back. You know the way. Go get your dad, if that’s what you want. But I’m going.”

For a brief moment, Jase was tempted to do just that: to leave. The way he felt, staring at Pahl and then into the chamber, was just what he’d experienced aboard Chen-Mai’s ship. There was a terrible darkness in Pahl, a void scoured out of Pahl’s soul by grief and loss. This void was bottomless; Pahl’s need knew no end. Once before, the Naxeran had reached out without knowing what he was doing and grabbed hold of Jase, trying to pull him down into this black whirlpool, and Jase was afraid this would happen again. Only this time, Jase was being asked to walk, willingly, into the abyss.