by David Mack
“Okay,” Dax said. “How do we find the terminus?”
“I have a few ideas,” Helkara said. “It’s too soon to say which approach will work. But if I’m right and it’s still there, with Lieutenant Leishman’s help, I’m fairly certain I could track it down in a few hours.”
She frowned. “We’re supposed to be heading back now. I can hold us here for an hour, maybe two at the most. You have that long to find the subspace tunnel and figure out how to open it.”
“You know,” Bowers said, striking a hopeful note, “if we find it and it still works, we could be back on the line in Federation space today instead of next week.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dax said. “The tunnel’s still flooded with hyperphasic radiation.”
Leishman waved away the problem. “I can work around that. A properly harmonized multiphasic frequency channeled into the shields should be able to cancel out their effects.” She flashed an expectant look at Dax. “So what’s the word, Captain?”
“The word is go. Mikaela, get to work on those shields. Gruhn, start looking for the subspace tunnel. Sam, think up some excuse I can give the admiralty for why we’re not out of orbit yet.” She got up from her chair. “If there’s—”
An alert whooped once over the shipwide comm.
“Kedair to Captain Dax.”
“Go ahead,” Dax said.
“Captain, I need to see you and Commander Bowers in Shuttle-bay One, right away.”
* * *
Bowers followed Captain Dax out of the turbolift on Deck 12 and followed her at a quick step toward the shuttlebay. At the first curve in the corridor, they were met by four security officers armed with phaser rifles. The quartet of guards fell into step around the two command officers and walked with them until they approached the open door to Shuttlebay One, which was blocked by another duo of armed security officers. The pair stepped aside and let Dax and Bowers pass.
The first clue that something was amiss was the odor. Bowers wrinkled his nose at the sickly stench, which only became stronger as he and Dax neared the cluster of armed security personnel that surrounded the runabout U.S.S. Seine.
Security chief Kedair noticed their arrival. She stepped away from the group to meet them. Her complexion was an even richer shade of blue-green than Bowers was accustomed to, and he took it as a sign of agitation. “Captain,” she said, “I think we have an intruder.”
Before Dax could ask Kedair to elaborate, the guards between them and the Seine parted, revealing a troubling sight through the runabout’s open side hatch.
It was the slagged remains of a humanoid body, mixed with the burned tatters of a Starfleet uniform. Much of the victim’s skin was gone, exposing jumbled viscera, half-dissolved muscles, and bones wet with liquefied fats and spilled blood. The half of its face that Bowers could see looked normal from the scalp to the nose, but everything from the upper lip to the chin looked as if it had been blasted away, down to the morbid grin of the skull. Its tongue was draped across its throat.
Forcing himself to remain detached and businesslike, he asked Kedair, “Have you identified the victim?”
“Crewman Ylacam,” Kedair said. “Flight technician, first class. He was logged in for routine maintenance on the Seine.”
Dax stepped forward, studying the scene with the eyes of a scientist. “How much do we know about what happened?”
“Not much more than we know about what happened to Komer and Yott on the Columbia,” Kedair said. “Mirren’s pulling the internal sensor logs and starting a forensic review.”
Bowers averted his eyes from the stomach-churning carnage inside the runabout. “Are we sure it’s the same cause of death that we saw on the Columbia?”
“All but certain,” Kedair said. “I’m just waiting on final confirmation.” Looking over Bowers’s shoulder, she added, “And here it comes now.”
Dr. Tarses entered the shuttlebay, followed by a female medical technician with a stretcher. The CMO paused as he saw the state of the body inside the runabout. He looked back at the medtech and said, “We don’t need the stretcher. Go back and get some sample jars and a stasis pouch.” The technician nodded and reversed course, quick-timing her way out of the shuttlebay and looking relieved for the opportunity.
Tarses approached the runabout with a wary frown. “Not again,” he mumbled as he passed Kedair. He opened his satchel, removed a medical tricorder, activated it, and started a scan of the half-burned, half-melted corpse. “Molecular disruption,” he said, reading from the tricorder’s screen. “Acute thermal effects. Major breakdown in all organic material.”
On a hunch, Bowers asked, “Is the damage consistent with hyperphasic radiation exposure?”
“No, it’s not,” Tarses said, putting away his tricorder. “Hyperphasic radiation desiccates organic matter and disperses it into subspace. Basically, it turns people into gas and dust. Whatever did this turns people into soup.”
Dax asked the doctor, “Was this done by the same thing that killed our people on the Columbia?”
As he considered his answer, Tarses crossed his left arm over his torso and tugged gently with his right hand at the lobe of one of his pointed ears. “The effects are all but identical,” he concluded. “So I’d have to say yes, it was.”
“Lonnoc,” Dax said to the security chief, “sound a shipwide intruder alert. All nonessential personnel are restricted to quarters. Have your people sweep the ship, bow to stern. Use sensors, hard-target searches, whatever it takes. Something followed us up from the planet, and I want it found, now.”
Turning to Bowers, the captain added, “Sam, tell Starfleet Command we’re not going anywhere—not until I find out what we’re dealing with.”
2168
17
An electric charge in the air raised the fine hairs on Commander Veronica Fletcher’s forearm. She gazed into the chasm beyond the catwalk and felt humbled.
“This is as close to the apparatus as I can permit you,” said Inyx, who led Fletcher, Karl Graylock, and Kiona Thayer on a guided tour of the enormous machine at the center of the Caeliar’s “great work.” They had come here by way of a disk ride and a swift descent through a nondescript tube set into a promenade beside a vast, darkly translucent dome. It wasn’t until they’d reached the catwalk that Fletcher realized their destination lay beneath the hemispherical shield, which from this side appeared to be transparent.
A massive, clear cylinder with dozens of meter-wide vertical gaps placed asymmetrically along its entire length was connected at its top to the dome’s center, two hundred meters overhead. Suspended from it was a huge, circular platform whose surface was divided into a silver ring around the cylinder and a black outer ring of equal thickness. Both surfaces were polished to mirror brilliance and reflected the steady, pulsing display of prismatic energy inside the central column.
“It’s magnificent,” Thayer said, awestruck.
Fletcher continued to study the platform’s other large details. From her vantage point, she could see five of what she presumed was a total of eight narrow arms with chisel-shaped ends reaching down and away from a second layer of the platform; the arms were mounted on broad, ring-shaped joint mechanisms and spaced forty-five degrees apart. Between them were bevel-edged, blocky structures that resembled docking ports. From the center of each squarish mass bulged a black hemisphere set inside a bright metallic ring.
Underneath the thick lower ring of the platform was a shimmering globe of incandescent coils. The top of the sphere was connected by a weblike conglomeration of machinery and cabling, all of it silhouetted by the blinding ball. Its glow illuminated the distant sides of the silo-shaped abyss, but it was not powerful enough to reach the bottom, from which came an echo of the low, throbbing pulse of the machine.
“The apparatus serves two major functions,” Inyx said. He walked forward, and the Columbia officers followed him along the curved, railing-free catwalk that ran the perimeter of the silo. “It is a means of observat
ion, and a tool for communication. With it, we can listen for signals from the farthest extremities of the universe, and we can establish real-time contact with anyone or anything we discover.”
As Fletcher’s eyes adjusted, she discerned the shapes of Caeliar moving about in pairs on the surface of the sprawling platform. Watching them move in and out of portals in the blockhouse structures, she asked Inyx, “So, this is how you plan to talk with something more advanced than yourselves?”
“Yes,” Inyx said. “We realized several thousand years ago that many of the galaxies we were investigating were either long dead or had never been capable of supporting life. In order to find a civilization that meets our criteria, we limited our search to those billions of galaxies that were not inherently hostile to life, and that had remained stable for the estimated billions of years that might be necessary for it to develop.”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Thayer. “Did you say you searched billions of galaxies?”
Inyx faced the dark-haired young woman. “Yes. We were extremely selective. I confess that limiting our candidates in this manner might have led us to overlook viable systems, but I felt the risk of oversight was statistically insignificant.”
Fletcher watched a trio of Caeliar levitate and float from the platform, across the hundred-meter-wide void, to a catwalk below the one on which she walked. “So now you’re looking for contacts at the end of the universe,” she said to Inyx, to keep him from making note of her silent observations. “At what range? Fourteen billion light-years?”
“Slightly less,” Inyx said. “Approximately thirteen-point-eight-seven billion light-years, using your metrics.”
Graylock took his turn drawing their host’s attention. “Hmmph. Must take a lot of power to send a signal that far.”
“More power than your species has harnessed so far in its entire history,” Inyx said.
Graylock pointed at the distant platform and asked in amazement, “All through that machine?”
Inyx bowed his head in a stiff imitation of a nod, a habit he’d picked up from interacting with the Columbia’s landing party. “Yes,” he said.
Goading the Caeliar, Graylock inquired, “What if that generator on the bottom overloads?”
“As that is not the generator, there is little possibility of that,” Inyx said.
Thayer cut in, “See, Karl? I told you. They generate the power remotely, just like for everything else around here.”
“Quite correct, Kiona,” Inyx said in a patronizing tone.
She replied, “You must use up a lot of that power punching through the scattering field, though.”
“Nein,” Graylock said before Inyx could answer. “They use a subharmonic to collimate the signal after it leaves the field.”
“Hardly, Karl.” The visage of the Caeliar always seemed to convey hauteur, but Inyx’s tone was rife with it. Graylock visibly tensed whenever one of the Caeliar addressed him by his given name. Inyx continued, “At the power levels involved here, a phase-shifted soliton pulse is the only choice.”
“Really?” Graylock’s feigned ignorance was painfully obvious to Fletcher, but the Caeliar seemed so oblivious of human behavior that they took the landing party’s statements at face value. In this case, Graylock had made good use of the Caeliar scientist’s almost reflexive habit of correcting erroneous hypotheses. Had the question been left for Inyx to answer, his reply would have been vague. To correct Graylock’s blatant “errors,” however, Inyx seemed frequently compelled to elaborate and underscore his superior expertise.
Part of Fletcher’s task was to keep changing the subject, in the hope of distracting Inyx from the purpose of their many inquiries and ruses. “Assuming you locate a culture more advanced than yours,” she said, “what do you hope to learn?”
“We don’t know, exactly,” Inyx said. “One might say we are in search of our next step as a culture.”
Thayer said, “Are you certain there’s nobody worth talking to anywhere closer than the edge of the universe?”
“It has been hundreds of your millennia since we eliminated all the habitable galaxies within one billion light-years as viable candidates,” Inyx said. “Every failed search has spurred us to press on and look deeper into space and time. We believe that we are only days from opening contact with the civilization we have sought. If my analysis is correct, I have located a harnessed galaxy, an achievement unlike any I have ever seen.”
Fletcher regarded the giant machine, brilliant and held aloft over a pit of midnight blue shadows. She looked at Inyx. “That thing really must be one of a kind.”
“Not at all,” Inyx said. “There is an identical apparatus in each of our cities.” Conspiratorial glances passed between Fletcher and the other two officers, unnoticed by Inyx. He continued, “If your curiosity is now sated, may I suggest we—”
“Can we go to the platform for a closer look?” asked Fletcher. It had taken her months of pleading and assurances to secure permission from the Caeliar for this tour, and she wasn’t going to let it end without trying to make the most of it.
Inyx stiffened at the request, and his normally cordial demeanor chilled. “I’m afraid that would be quite out of the question,” he said. “It’s time to go back. Please follow me.”
The lanky alien led the three humans off the catwalk and down a narrow passage, one of several that radiated away from the vast empty chamber of the apparatus. Their visit to the Caeliar’s signature achievement had been brief but educational. Fletcher hoped that she and her officers had learned enough to find a way off this planet—and a way home.
* * *
Sheltered under the gnarled boughs of the tree at the end of the black reflecting pool, the stranded members of the Columbia’s flight crew sat in a circle around their captain.
“The clock is definitely ticking, folks,” Fletcher said. “Inyx says they’re only days away from powering up this super gadget of theirs, so if there’s any way it can help us get back to the ship, we need to figure it out fast.”
Graylock and Thayer reached into the pockets on the legs of their jumpsuits and removed three hand scanners each. It had taken Graylock months to jury-rig a solar cell and then recharge the drained devices. From then until that day’s tour of the “apparatus,” the landing party had kept the scanners powered down and hidden to avoid detection by the Caeliar. As Thayer had hoped, the scattering field was configured as a shell around the city; the hand scanners functioned normally inside the protected zone but were blind to anything beyond it.
“We had these set for passive scans,” Graylock said as he handed two of them to Hernandez and Fletcher. “Each scanner was set to look for something different.”
Metzger and Valerian each accepted a scanner from Thayer, who noted, “Security on the ‘apparatus’ is tighter than other spots we’ve been to. It’s completely sealed in and underground.”
A warm breeze tossed locks of Hernandez’s black hair into her eyes, and she swept it away with a pass of her hand. “Karl, what is this thing?”
“The final word in subspace radio,” said the Austrian. “Inyx says it can make real-time contact between here and the end of the universe.”
Lifting her eyebrows in mild surprise, the captain asked, “Any idea how it works?”
Graylock tapped at the screen of his hand scanner. “The platform creates an intense subspace phase-distortion field. And the pulses inside the column—” He looked around, made a hasty swap of scanners with Thayer, and continued. “—are soliton waves, just like Inyx said. I think this thing sends the waves through subspace, uses them like a drill to make a hole. Then the phase distorter …” He leaned forward and traded scanners with Valerian. “The phase distorter acts like a nut and bolt, pulling the two ends of the hole together, until they meet.”
“Now my brain hurts,” mumbled Dr. Metzger.
Hernandez turned off her hand scanner and looked at Thayer. “Thoughts, Kiona?”
“With all the power tha
t thing uses, it might make a hell of a feedback pulse if it got disrupted during their big event, maybe enough to knock out their power source and drop the scattering field so Columbia can beam us up and break orbit.”
Graylock let out a derisive snort of laughter. “Or it might blow up the city—or maybe the planet.”
“That’s not the only flaw,” Fletcher said. “It would have to take the Caeliar out of commission for at least six minutes: one minute for Columbia to find us after the scattering field falls, four minutes to beam us up three at a time, one minute to break orbit at full impulse. And that’s assuming the crew on the ship is standing by and ready to act on a moment’s notice.”
“Actually,” Hernandez said, “we don’t even know if the rest of the crew is still up there. They might have abandoned ship and beamed down to the planet by now.”
Thayer added darkly, “Or the Caeliar might have displaced them.” Grim stares around the circle confirmed that she wasn’t the only one who had considered that scenario.
Valerian said, “Even if we do get back to the ship, what then? We’re still at least twenty light-years from the nearest friendly system, and there’s no tellin’ what’s moved into the space between while we’ve been tootlin’ around for the last twelve years. Are we just gonna limp home, show up thirty-four years late, and ask if we have any messages?”
Speaking like a man who knew a secret, Graylock asked, “Who says we have to get home late?”
Hernandez was not in a mood for a mystery. “Explain.”
“The tunnels the Caeliar are making through subspace are a lot like Lorentzian wormholes,” Graylock said. “Even though they’re in subspace, most of the rules still apply. If it makes a shortcut through space, it can make a shortcut through time—forward or backward.”
“Whoa,” said Hernandez, dragging out the word like she was reining a wild horse to a halt. “Time travel, Karl? Are you out of your mind? We’ve barely got the hang of warp speed, and you think you’re ready to break the time barrier?”
The chief engineer got red in the face. “Why not? If this thing’s as powerful as Inyx says, we can get back to Earth—not today, but twelve years ago, when it might make a difference!”