by Dayton Ward
Their wide-open eyes remained fixed on the mountaintop.
Bridy’s voice was barely a whisper. “So . . . that happened.”
Quinn rose from his chair and trod cautiously aft. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a short nervous breakdown.”
15
Bundled in cold-weather clothing and laden with arctic climbing equipment that had been stowed by SI in the Dulcinea’s hold (along with gadgets and gear for just about every other terrain and scenario Quinn could ever imagine), Quinn trudged away from the slope of the mountain in pursuit of Bridy. Screaming wind whipped grains of ice against the few bits of exposed flesh on his face, forcing him to dip his chin and watch his legs chop through knee-deep snow.
He clenched his jaw against the cold. “Are we there yet?”
“If you ask me that one more time, I’ll smash this tricorder over your head.” She led him across a level and nearly circular plain several kilometers in diameter and ringed by steep black peaks like the one they’d descended after leaving the Dulcinea. The mountains hid the sunset, which painted the sky in shades of violet.
Bridy pointed forward. “The signal’s coming from underground, inside some caves beyond the other side of this frozen lake. Another hour’s walk, tops.”
Quinn harrumphed from behind his air-warming face mask. “Remind me not to use you as my tour guide the next time I plan a vacation.”
“Do you ever stop complaining?”
“I was fine till you made me leave the ship.”
“I didn’t make you leave the ship. We decided to track the signal.”
“No, you decided to track the signal. I wanted to fix the impulse coils.”
She sighed. “Get serious, they’re fried. We’ll need a starbase for that.”
“That’s what you said about the thrusters, but I got those working.”
“Yeah, and if you’d used them, you’d have triggered an avalanche and buried us—not to mention the caves where the signal’s coming from.”
“Which is why we’re walking instead of flying. Of course, if we’d fixed the transporter, we could’ve just beamed over there.”
“I don’t know how to fix a transporter, and neither do you.”
“No, but we have a manual. We could figure it out.” He scowled. “Why is it whenever we disagree we always end up doing things your way?”
She glanced back at him. “Because I’m in charge.”
“Then why even ask my opinion?”
“To make you feel better.”
“Well, it ain’t workin’.”
They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the way across the lake. Quinn tried to keep up with Bridy, but she outpaced him enough to open her lead by slow degrees. By the time they reached the far side of the crater-shaped basin, she was twenty meters ahead of him, and she showed no sign of slowing down as she pressed forward into the mouth of a cave. She was limned by the pale glow of her tricorder and partly silhouetted by the beam of her small flashlight as she forged ahead into the dark.
Quinn was about to shout her name when he remembered that a sudden loud noise echoing off the mountains above them might prove disastrous.
Dammit, he cursed her in his imagination, don’t do nothin’ stupid.
He quickened his pace until he reached the cave, and then he stopped to fish his own flashlight from his jacket pocket. His gloved hands fumbled first to find the device and then to activate it. Its narrow beam slashed through the darkness as he pivoted side to side, surveying the path ahead. It was a wide space populated by stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars of dark-blue ice. He glimpsed another, smaller passage on the cavern’s far side, but there was no obvious clear path to it—only routes of greater or lesser resistance.
To his dismay, he saw no sign of Bridy.
Then he heard a weak and distant echo of her voice: “Quinn!”
“Honey? Where are you?” She called his name again, but he wasn’t sure from what direction. “Keep talkin’, darlin’! I’m comin’!” Bridy repeated his name; it sounded as if it had come from beneath him. He prowled about the cavern, searching its floor with his flashlight beam.
He stumbled to a halt half a step shy of a narrow crevasse. Kneeling beside it, he aimed the flashlight into its depths and called, “Bridy?”
“Down here!”
Targeting her voice, he trained the flashlight beam on her. She was a dozen meters below him and wedged between two walls of rough, black ice.
“You okay?”
“I think my leg’s broken.”
“Yeah, that first step’s a doozy.” He removed his pack and retrieved the spare coil of climbing rope. “Hang on. I’ll have you up in a few minutes.” Fumbling to untie the simple knot on the coil, he silently cursed his bulky gloves for making his fingers so clumsy. As the synthetic-fiber rope unspooled onto the cavern floor, he called back to Bridy, “Try not to move.”
“Not much risk of that.”
Recalling his mercenary training from decades earlier, Quinn secured one end of the rope with a set of strong knots to the thickest ice pillar within a few meters of the crevasse, and ran the line behind another sturdy pillar to serve as a crude pulley. Then he paid out a few dozen meters of slack over the fissure’s edge, lowering it to Bridy. “Secure that around your torso in an X shape, and through your legs if you can reach.”
“Under the shoulders will have to do.”
“That’s fine. Let me know when you’re ready to come up.”
A minute later, Bridy tugged on the rope. “Let’s do this.”
Quinn leaned back and started pulling on the rope. Slack gathered in his hands, and he coiled it around his left arm while hoisting Bridy back to the top of the crevasse. Bridy was a slender woman, but the effort of lifting her as dead weight was exhausting. As she clambered over the edge onto the cavern’s floor, Quinn gave a few more heroic tugs on the rope to pull her to safety.
Then he fell on his ass and gasped for air. His exhaled breath gathered in a wispy cloud around his head while he waited for his limbs to stop shaking.
Bridy lay on her back a few meters away, clearly in no hurry to move, either. In a droll deadpan she said, “Don’t have a heart attack, okay?”
“Tryin’ not to, darlin’.” After a few more pained breaths, he sat up. “We should patch up your leg. Where’s the medkit?”
She nodded at her torn-up backpack. “At the bottom of the crevasse.”
“Of course it is.”
“Along with my tricorder.”
He scowled. “Anything you didn’t lose?”
“Just my good looks.”
“And your sense of humor.” He got up and moved to her side. “But I don’t think you’ll be laughing for long.” With a gingerly touch, he examined her injured leg and paid attention to her pained reactions. “The good news is you’ve got a simple fracture. The bad news is we’ll have to treat it the old-fashioned way.”
Bridy grimaced. “This is gonna hurt, isn’t it?”
“Oh, hell yeah. In a few seconds you’ll wish I still carried a flask.” He removed his gloves, then clapped his hands and set them in position. “Ready?”
“No. Do it anyway.”
“All right. I’m gonna count to three, okay?” Bridy nodded. “One.” He jerked the broken halves of her tibia back into alignment with one quick pull.
Bridy’s piercing scream of pain filled the cavern. Then she punched Quinn in the shoulder hard enough to knock him down. “Asshole! You said on three!”
“No, I said I was gonna count to three. Never said when I was gonna set the bone. Oh, and by the way—two.”
“Say ‘three’ and I’ll knock your teeth out.”
Quinn recoiled in mock indignation, one hand on his chest. “Is that any way to treat the guy who has to carry you back to the ship?”
“I’m not going back to the ship. Not yet, anyway.”
“Why? You got a death wish or something?”
“The source of th
at signal is less than two hundred meters from here, straight down that passage. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you realize how crazy it sounds.”
“If you’re willing to carry me to the ship, then a few hundred yards more won’t matter, will it?”
He started gathering up the rope. “What if we aren’t alone down here? Have you thought of that? If we get into trouble, how can we retreat if you can’t even walk?” He stopped and faced her. “Hell, even if we are alone down here, what’s the point of finding the signal source when we don’t have a tricorder?”
“Dammit, I just want to see it. Let’s do a quick recon. Then we can head back to the ship, fix my leg, and come back with the spare tricorder.”
He put away the coiled rope and sealed his pack. “If this all goes wrong, do I get to say ‘I told you so’?”
“No.”
“Let me rephrase: Do you want to crawl the rest of the way?” She seethed for a moment. “All right, you can say it once. Now, can we please get this show on the road?”
“Your wish is my command.” He took her hand, helped her up, and draped her arm across his shoulders so he could support her weight. They moved together, taking care to synchronize their strides.
Bridy wore an amused expression. “You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. What’re you gonna say if we end up making the greatest discovery of our lives?”
“That’s easy,” Quinn said. “I get half.”
Ten minutes later, Bridy clung to Quinn’s shoulder as they stood at the end of the downward-sloped passageway, facing a wall of ice at least a dozen meters thick.
Quinn frowned. “Hmph. I’d call this a sign.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a minor obstacle.”
“Honey, it’s a wall of ice. To me, that says, ‘Do not enter.’ ”
“Oh, come on.” She gestured at the dark, semitransparent barrier. “I can see flickers of light from the other side. Whatever we came to find is there.”
“Sure it is. But I don’t feel like hacking my way through the galaxy’s biggest ice cube to get to it”—he nodded at her broken leg—“especially since I’d be doin’ all the work, on account of you being a gimp.”
She rolled her eyes. “I swear, sometimes it’s like you forget we live in the twenty-third century.” Then she drew her phaser, set it for wide beam and high power, and fired at the ice. The blue beam lit up the ice for a fraction of a second, and then the frozen wall transformed into a dense cloud of sultry, gray vapor. Seconds later, the hiss of boiling water ceased, and Bridy took her thumb off the phaser’s trigger.
He scowled. “Oh, well, sure. If you’re gonna cheat.”
“Let’s go.”
Quinn helped her forward through the curtains of mist. Eerie, nigh-musical oscillations emanated from the chamber ahead of them, and an unearthly glow pierced the thinning fog as they neared the threshold of a vast cavern.
The first thing Bridy saw was the machine.
Every piece of it was in motion. Delicate elements composed of silvery crystal spun at many different speeds on a variety of planes, all orbiting a core consisting of equal parts hard angles and fluid curves. Ribbons of prismatic energy snaked through the machine’s open spaces, crisscrossing one another’s paths, sometimes intersecting in flashes of white light.
Rotating in the center of all that motion was an object unlike any Bridy had ever seen. Made of the same silvery crystal as the rest of the machine, the core element was in a constant state of flux, expanding into dramatic stellations of varying complexity and reverting to a simple icosahedron once every several seconds before repeating the cycle of transformations.
Warmth radiated from the titanic device. As she and Quinn drew nearer to it, Bridy noticed a profound galvanic tingling traveling across her body.
She looked away from the machine only because Quinn pulled urgently on her coat sleeve. “Um, honey?” Bridy turned, looked at him, and then shifted her attention to see what he was pointing at.
Her jaw went slack as she beheld the most beautiful and terrifying being she’d ever encountered: a giant nearly seven meters tall, its body formed from multicolored mist that concealed its lower half. A brilliant glow obscured its face, streams of shimmering motes circled its torso, and a great halo of golden light framed its head. As clouds of vapor rolled behind its back, Bridy saw fleeting glimpses of majestic shapes she was almost certain could only be wings.
Its voice was a stroke of thunder and the roar of the sea. “Welcome.”
Quinn whispered to Bridy, “Is that what I think it is?”
“I think it is.”
The resplendent colossus interjected, “Yes. I am Shedai.” It spread its arms. “It is I who summoned you, and who have awaited your coming.”
Bridy took a cautious step toward the towering being. “I’ve seen your kind before. Which one are you?”
“I am the Apostate.”
16
Every nerve in Quinn’s body told him to run. Standing in the presence of the Apostate filled him with a sensation of impending catastrophe, as if he were teetering on the edge of an abyss and feeling the first tug of gravity. Bad enough the thing was huge, radiating light and heat like a bonfire, and had a voice that quaked the bedrock under Quinn’s feet, but it also looked as if it had been brought to life straight from the pages of the Old Testament.
In other words, it was exactly what he’d been afraid they would find, and he would already have been running back to the Dulcinea were it not for the fact that Bridy seemed intent on having a conversation with the damned thing.
“You say you summoned us,” Bridy said. “You mean, with the signals we picked up from the wormhole? The ones containing the Jinoteur Pattern?”
“Correct. Of all the Telinaruul, your faction has evinced the keenest grasp of our technology. Though your understanding continues to be limited, I trusted you to recognize my invitation.”
Bridy hobbled a few steps closer to the Apostate, dragging Quinn with her much against his will. “Well, here we are,” she said. “Wherever here is.”
“A universe of my own creation—a redoubt forged from the shattered remnants of the Jinoteur system and sequestered here to shield the last vestiges of its power from my exiled kin.”
Growing impatient, Quinn spoke up. “Uh-huh. We were there when you did it. You nearly took us down with you.”
“A transgression for which I apologize. However, it was imperative that I prevent the other Shedai from ever returning to the wellspring of our power—and that I deny you and your rivals access to its mysteries until I was ready to bequeath them on my own terms.”
Bridy and Quinn traded anxious glances, then she looked back at the imposing titan. “Is that why you lured us here?”
“I summoned you so that you might finish what I have begun. Your civilization stands upon the threshold of greatness, but there are those among the Serrataal who would crush your Federation aborning. For the sake of the galaxy, I believe they must not succeed.”
Quinn’s brow wrinkled with disbelief. “You want us to start a war with the Shedai? Are you nuts? Or do you just think we are?”
“War between your kind and the Shedai loyal to the Maker is inevitable, little sparks. My aim is to provide you with the arms and knowledge your people will need to survive.”
Distrust resonated in Bridy’s voice as she asked, “Why would you help us?”
“This is not the first time I have sought to rid the galaxy of my kindred. Aeons ago, I allied myself with a great race of Telinaruul known as the Tkon. They wielded technologies the likes of which your civilization has not yet imagined. I helped them craft a weapon that would let them contain and eradicate the Shedai threat. Soon afterward, the Maker and her faithful ambushed the capital system of the Tkon, detonated its primary star, and ended that empire in a nightmare of chaos and darkness. I will not see that fate befall your Federation. Never again wil
l I let such an atrocity come to pass as a consequence of my inaction.”
High above Bridy and Quinn’s heads, a ghostly image appeared. It was a twelve-sided polyhedron rotating slowly. Orbiting it were long, complex strings of data—alien symbols, Arabic numerals, equations, fragments of star charts—all of it distorted, spectral, and ephemeral. Quinn squinted and saw that each face of the polyhedron was etched with a unique alien symbol. He looked away from the spectacle and gazed in awe at the Apostate. “What is this?”
“A guide. Instructions for turning the weapon of the Tkon against the Shedai. With it they can be contained and, when the time is right, destroyed.”
Bridy’s voice trembled with excitement. “What is the weapon of the Tkon?”
“An array containing hundreds of these objects. Linked in the correct sequence and used properly, each can imprison up to a dozen Shedai.”
“All right,” Bridy said. “Where do we find it?”
“That I do not know. The Tkon constructed it in secret.”
Quinn waved one hand in a pantomime of dismissal. “Hang on—stop. If the Tkon had this superweapon, how’d the Maker get the drop on ’em?”
“I helped the Tkon build it, but I never told them how to activate it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“They refused to pledge mercy for myself and my brethren. At that time, I still harbored hope that I and the members of my loyal host might be spared. I have since abandoned such folly.”
Quinn pointed at the holographic-style projection above his head. “So, this is the weapon’s ‘on’ switch? And you’re giving it to us?” He permitted himself a grim chortle. “We’re flattered and all, but if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you go fight your own war and leave us out of it?”