by David Mack
It read the chemical engrams of the males’ minds. One was a warrior, the other an engineer. The engineer’s knowledge is more valuable, the hunger concluded.
The drones’ tools were crude and clumsy, but they would suffice. Organic nourishment, though inefficient, also would have to do until a more efficacious means of sustenance and maintenance could be devised. Until then, adjustments to these beings’ simple genetic code would maximize their longevity and facilitate needed energy-saving biological processes.
Operating the drones as though they were limbs, the hunger used the female and the engineer to terminate the warrior. Its loss was regrettable but necessary. With care and precision, its body was cut apart, meat and fat separated from bone, the edible from the inedible. When all of the warrior’s digestible fuels had been isolated, the hunger recharged her two remaining drones with the resources liberated from the third.
When warmer weather returned, the search could begin for a new source of energy. Until then, these vessels of the hunger had to be protected and their energy conserved.
Survival would depend on patience.
Sleep, the hunger bade its drones. Sleep.
* * *
Icy seawater crashed over the gunwales of the launch as it neared the shore. Sedath, the second-in-command of the private icebreaker Demial, took the brunt of the chilling spray but turned his head and shut his eyes until the stinging mist abated. He opened his eyes and saw the rowers laughing at him.
“Pick up the pace, men,” he said, his voice as level and professional as ever. He didn’t begrudge his men a bit of amusement at his expense, but discipline had to be maintained.
At the rear of the launch sat Jestem, the Demial’s athletic and weathered commanding officer, and Karai, a nervous and evasive young executive from the consortium that owned the icebreaker and employed its officers and crew. Both men were eager to be ashore, though for different reasons. Jestem was a glory seeker, always on the lookout for another chance to grab a measure of fame and acclaim. Karai’s ambition was more prosaic: He was in it for the money.
Sedath looked up at the pale sky. The sun had just peeked over the horizon, casting a golden glow on the arctic mountains. The landing party would have barely enough time to climb the slope to the lowest edge of the astounding scar that something had gouged into the primeval rock.
The scar fascinated Sedath. He had studied dozens of old topographical maps and surveyors’ drawings of this peak on the Demial’s months-long sea journey, and he was certain that the multitude of jagged, semivertical rock formations that dotted the lower slope had not been there just a few decades earlier.
It’s a meteorite, he surmised. Has to be. The distribution of the debris on the slope suggests an oblique impact from above. Although the Demial’s principal mission was to search the seabed for carbon fuel deposits, Sedath had always viewed his work aboard the arctic explorer as an opportunity to conduct scientific research far away from the meddling of the company’s sponsored labs or the ideologically extreme halls of academia.
Let the commander have the glory, he mused. Karai can keep the money. I just want to run some tests on those meteorites.
The hollow scrape of aluminum over pebbles and sand told Sedath that the launch had reached the shore of the fjord. Malfomn, the ship’s graying, square-jawed gendarme, got up from his seat next to Sedath and vaulted over the side of the launch. The older man landed with a splash in the frigid, knee-deep water, grabbed the prow of the launch, and towed it farther onto the shore. Sedath stood, laid a plank from the front benchboard to the bow, walked across it, and made a short hop to dry land.
Jestem and Karai were the next out of the launch, followed in short order by the rowers and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Marasa. To the same degree that Karai, Jestem, and Sedath himself were overcome with enthusiasm for the consortium-ordered fact-finding mission, Marasa had wanted no part of it. The weary-looking physician shivered as he took in his surroundings. “Okay, we’ve seen it,” he grumped. “Can we go back now?”
“Quit complaining, Doctor,” Jestem said. “We’re heading up the slope for a closer look at whatever hit this mountain.”
Marasa narrowed his eyes. “I bet it was a rock.”
Jestem replied, “Just put your snowshoes on, Doctor.”
Malfomn, Karai, Sedath, Jestem, and Marasa set down their backpacks, unstrapped their snowshoes, and started putting them on. Jestem was the first to finish securing his bindings. He began slide-stepping away, heading for the incline. “Come on,” he called back. “We’re losing the light, gentlemen!”
The rest of the group was about to set out after him when Malfomn called out, “Hold up! Everybody, stop!” All eyes turned toward the gendarme, who pointed at a nearby rocky outcropping. “What’s that, between the rocks?”
It was difficult at first for Sedath to see what Malfomn was talking about. Then he began to discern artificial-looking shapes and angles lurking beneath the deep, driven snow. “Malfomn, come with me, we’ll check it out.”
Sedath and Malfomn split away from the group and sidestepped up a gradual hillside to the rock formation. As they got closer to it, he saw pieces of metal jutting up out of the snow and catching the morning sunlight. As soon as he was close enough, Sedath reached out with one gloved hand and tugged on the narrow beam. It shifted a bit in the snow. “Help me pull this up,” he said to the gendarme.
Together they took hold of the metal bar and pulled it free of the snow. It was half again as long as Sedath was tall, and its edges were twisted and jagged, as if from shearing stress.
“Do you recognize this alloy?” he asked Malfomn.
The older man shook his head. “Never seen anything like it.” Nodding at the snow where they’d found it, he added, “Maybe we ought to do a little digging here, see what we find.”
“Good idea,” Sedath said. They retrieved their entrenching tools from the back of their packs and started shoveling away the snow and ice. Within a few minutes, beneath only a thin layer of the snow cover, they had exposed more metal pieces and a large patch of tattered, metallic-looking fabric. Lifting it and eyeing it in the sunlight, Sedath speculated, “Part of a shelter, you think?”
“Maybe,” Malfomn said. “But I don’t know anybody anywhere who makes shelters with materials like this—do you?”
Sedath bunched the shredded fabric and stuffed it into his pocket. “No, I don’t,” he said. He cast an apprehensive look up the mountainside at the raw wound in the stone and turned back to Malfomn. “We should get back to the others,” he said. “Jestem wants to climb that slope and make it back to the Demial before sundown.” Stepping closer to the gendarme, Sedath added in a confidential tone of voice, “Have the rowers come up here and finish digging this out while we’re gone. Whatever they find, I want it wrapped in a tarp and stowed in the launch.”
“Yes, sir,” Malfomn said. “It’ll be good for them to have work to do while we’re up on the mountain.”
“My thoughts, exactly,” Sedath said.
The two men kick-stepped back down the hillside. Back on level ground, they split up; Sedath cut across the plain to rejoin the commander, and Malfomn detoured to the shore and relayed Sedath’s orders to the rowers before regrouping with the climbing expedition at the base of the mountain.
“What’d you find?” Jestem asked Sedath.
“I’m not sure yet,” Sedath said, and it was an honest, if evasive, answer. “Some metal and some fabric.”
Jestem frowned inside his fur-lined parka hood. “Metal and fabric? Like you might find in a hastily concealed base camp?”
“Possibly,” Sedath said, not refuting the commander’s hypothesis, even though he had a more exotic idea of his own.
Karai shot a worried glance at Jestem. “Commander, the consortium has to defend its rights to all claims in this territory, mineral or chemical, or else we’ll lose them.”
“I know that,” Jestem said.
“If another landing pa
rty has arrived ahead of us, we can’t let them seize any materials or stake any—”
Jestem cut in, “I get it!” He nodded to Malfomn. “Keep your weapon handy, Mal. Seems like we might not be alone up here.” To the rest of the group, he declared, “Let’s go! Follow me.”
As the climb began, Sedath pulled a corner of the fabric from his pocket and stole another look at it. It was lightweight but substantial enough that no light penetrated its weave; it slipped easily between his gloved fingertips, like gear oil. Its metallic threads reflected a rainbow of colors as they caught the light. He truly had never seen anything like it before, and he had no idea how it had been made. But if his hypothesis about its origin proved to be correct, then Sedath was about to make a great discovery for science.
Of course, if we actually find an alien spaceship, he admitted to himself, the commander will be the one who gets famous, and Karai’ll probably end up the world’s richest man. The best I can hope for is to get the first look at the thing before it gets shut away in some company lab.
He smiled beneath his balaclava. I can live with that.
* * *
“Over here!” Jestem was far ahead of the rest of the group, standing near an ice fissure at the bottom of a steep cliff patched with snow. Sedath and the others hurried their pace, but only with difficulty. None of them had snowshoed in a long time, and the hike up the slope had proved exhausting for everyone—except the commander, apparently.
Malfomn and Sedath reached the fissure, where Jestem stood at the mouth of a narrow ice cave, staring into its depths. Sedath looked back and admired the view of the fjord. At its far end, near the channel, the Demial lay at anchor, silhouetted on quiet waters that reflected the dusky afternoon sky. A whistling gale sparkled the air with a dusting of ice crystals lifted from the slope around the landing party.
Karai and Marasa arrived looking wilted and sounding out of breath. The doctor said, “I promise to rig a clean drug test for anyone willing to carry me back down.”
Before anyone could take Marasa up on his offer, Jestem turned and said to Sedath, “Give me your palmlight, will you?”
Sedath undid the loop that held his portable light on his belt and handed the device to Jestem—who, as a privilege of his rank, usually traveled light and expected everyone else to come prepared with whatever he might need. The commander switched on the palmlight and aimed its narrow beam down the ice shaft. He squinted and said, “Sedath, do you see that surface down there?”
Peering into the foggy gloom, Sedath replied, “I think so.”
“What does that look like to you?”
He watched the way the light reflected off a bare patch of the cave’s floor, and he nodded. “Metal,” he said.
Jestem turned off the light, tucked it into his own belt, and said, “We’re going down there. Secure some safety lines in the cliff face, and relay our coordinates to the Demial.”
“Yes, sir,” Sedath said. He nodded to Malfomn, who set himself to work hammering spikes into the stone cliff face and securing sturdy ropes to them. Sedath removed his pack and dug out the radio. He turned it on, set it to the ship’s frequency, and pressed the transmit button. “Landing party to Demial, acknowledge.”
The watch officer’s voice squawked and crackled over the barely reliable portable transceiver, “Demial here. Go ahead.”
“Our coordinates are grid teskol seventeen, azimuth three-fifty-six-point-two, elevation one thousand three hundred nine.”
“Noted,” said the watch officer. “Any details for the log?”
“We’ve found an opening in a cliff wall,” Sedath said, and then he paused as Jestem snapped around and glared at him, as if to say, Not another word—not yet. Composing himself, Sedath continued, “We’re going underground to see where it leads, so we’ll be out of touch for a bit.”
“Got it. Watch your step down there.”
“Count on it. Landing party out.” He switched off the radio and tucked it back inside his pack. He walked back to the others and saw that Malfomn had finished securing two safety lines and was hurling their coils of slack down the ice shaft. Sedath sidled up to Jestem, who was still gazing down into the subterranean darkness. “Sir,” Sedath said, “maybe I should go first, just this once.”
“Nonsense,” Jestem said, slipping back into his practiced persona of nonchalant bravery. “I was just getting my bearings, that’s all. Let’s get down there before we lose the light.”
There was no time for Sedath to protest. Jestem locked his jacket’s climbing loop around the safety line and started down the shaft, his boots slipping clumsily across the snow-dusted ice as he worked his way down the rope, using his hands as a brake. Half a minute later, the commander was at the bottom, shining his borrowed palmlight down the tunnel.
Sedath directed and supervised the descents, and he was the last person down. After a few strides away from the ice, his footsteps echoed against metal, much as they did aboard the Demial. He halted in mid-step as Jestem, Karai, and Malfomn spun around and shushed him. As soon as he stopped, they turned away and seemed to be listening intently, so Sedath did the same.
Faint sounds reechoed in the darkness, so softly that they almost became lost in the melancholy moaning of the wind through the passages. Then the sounds became closer and clearer: a soft scrape and several light footfalls.
“Lights,” Jestem said, switching on his palmlight. Karai, Malfomn, and Marasa did the same. Empty-handed, all that Sedath could do was stand to one side and try to gaze past the crisscrossed beams to see what might emerge from the darkness.
Two shapes shuffled into the penumbra of the palmlights. At first, all Sedath could see were their dark outlines, but even from those, he was certain that he was looking at a man and a woman. They were emaciated and garbed in tattered, loose-hanging bits of fabric, which fluttered in the chilly breeze that never seemed to cease. The beams from the palmlights were reflected in the pair’s eyes, which even from a distance had a disconcerting emptiness that sent a shiver of fear down Sedath’s spine.
“Identify yourselves,” Jestem called out.
Karai said with venomous anger, “We know who they are—corporate spies.” Sneering at the disheveled figures limping and walking stiffly out of the darkness, he added, “Looks like they already got what they deserve, too.”
Then the mysterious duo stepped fully into the harsh glare of the palmlights. They were definitely a male and a female, but Sedath was certain they weren’t Kindir. For one thing, their hands each had only a single opposable thumb instead of the normal two. Even more shocking to him were their pallid, mottled-gray complexions. Kindir skin varied in pigmentation from golden brown to ebony, and no one in the history of the world had ever had eyes the color of the sky—but this woman did.
The landing party was still and silent, dumbfounded by the significance of this encounter: They were face-to-face with living, intelligent beings not of their world.
The alien woman spoke in a monotonal voice. Her words didn’t sound like any of the dozens of major languages on Arehaz. She repeated herself as she and her companion advanced on the landing party.
Jestem muttered to Sedath, “Any idea what she said?”
“No clue,” Sedath said.
The aliens stopped at arm’s length from the landing party. The woman spoke again, repeating her monotonal declaration. Then she and the man each extended one hand to the landing party.
“I think it’s some kind of greeting,” Sedath said.
He stepped forward to take the man’s hand, but Jestem grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. “Looks like she does the talking around here. Let me handle this.” Jestem took half a step forward and offered his hand to the woman. “I am Salaz Jestem of the icebreaker Demial,” he said. “On behalf of Kindir around the world, welcome to Arehaz.”
The woman grasped the commander’s extended hand. Slender metallic tubules broke through the skin between her knuckles and leaped like serpents into the fleshy pa
rt of Jestem’s wrist. He convulsed and then became rigid. The light left his eyes.
Sedath and Malfomn sprang to Jestem’s aid. The male alien’s hand struck in a blur, locked around Sedath’s throat, and lifted him off the ground. The female let go of Jestem and snared Malfomn’s arm before he could land his punch.
The two men struggled in vain to free themselves. Despite the aliens’ gaunt appearances, they were amazingly strong. Out of the corner of his eye, Sedath saw Dr. Marasa spring to catch Jestem, who had staggered away from the melee in a daze.
Marasa shook Jestem by his shoulders. “Commander? Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Jestem looked up at Marasa—and then he lifted one hand to the doctor’s throat and skewered it with two silver tubules from his own knuckles. Marasa twitched in Jestem’s clutches, and next to Sedath, Malfomn was quaking and wearing a glazed look as the female alien withdrew her tubules from his wrist.
Then Sedath felt a bite on his own neck, like a pair of tiny fangs piercing his carotid. A dark, muffling curtain of terror descended on his thoughts as the female spoke again. This time, hearing her inside his mind, he understood her perfectly.
You will be assimilated.
2381
21
Gredenko looked back from ops and said, “Starfleet Command is confirming all reports, Captain.”
Dax smiled and heaved a deep, relieved sigh. Applause and cheering filled the Aventine’s bridge, and even Bowers let down his guard for a moment to pump his fist and shout, “Yes!”
It really worked. Dax could barely believe it. Assaulting the Borg probe ship had been a terrible risk and the wildest of long shots, but they had done it—and played a decisive role in saving five allied worlds from annihilation.
As the applause tapered off, Dax joined Lieutenant Kandel at tactical and asked, “How long before Captain Hernandez can tap into the Borg vinculum again?”