by Peter David
“I’ll take care of myself, thanks.” Trying to appear in control, Stiles held the rod higher between himself and the Romulan, doing his best to convey an ongoing threat. “Spock expects me to act right…get along here and…be an officer. I won’t let him down. Somehow he’ll know how I did. I’ve got to make him proud….”
Tilting his head, Zevon asked, “The ambassador? Is that who you were evacuating?”
“Sure was. Did it, too. He’s out and you can’t have him.”
“We don’t want him, ensign. Please try to relax and put that—”
“Don’t you tell me to relax! Don’t you say that word to me! That isn’t your word.”
“Very well…I’ll find another word…with whom did you have a date tomorrow night?”
“Huh?” Stiles narrowed his eyes. Was this man telepathic? “How’d you know…her name’s Ninetta. Ninetta Rashayd. She works down in atmospheric control at the starbase. Y’know, the base life support. Air. Took me two weeks to pronounce her name right so she wouldn’t give me that look when I asked her out. Not that it matters much now….”
“What kind of look?”
“Well…that look. The one that tells you to keep your mouth shut and don’t even ask.” His quivering left arm sagged a little, the rod now resting on his knee. “Travis used to rib me about it. Jeremy used to imitate the look. He was really good at it…really funny. I wonder if they’re really dead….”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I shouldn’t have yelled at them,” Stiles murmured, scouring the recent past, smelling his mistakes. “They were doing everything I said to do…they were with me. And I gave them hell because I couldn’t take a little ribbing.”
“Hardly matters now. Please put the blanket back on yourself. Your face is going pale—”
“What did you say made this Constrictor thing happen? Did you tell me? If you did, I forgot it all.”
“Graviton waves,” Zevon patiently explained. Clearing a place for himself, he sat down on something Stiles couldn’t see. “They originate in space and bathe the planet. A recurring disaster for the Pojjana. As unpredictable as lightning-lit wildfires. When the waves strike the planet, everything suddenly gets two, three, or even five hundred percent heavier. What you felt was the pressure of yourself suddenly weighing several hundred pounds. Blood trying to slog through compressed veins, muscles screaming for relief….”
“I remember that part.”
“The Constrictor causes massive shifts in tectonic plates, tidal waves, earthquakes, as you call them. Buildings collapse, air vehicles crash…some people suffocate if it lasts more than a few seconds…elderly people are crushed to death by their own weight….” Waving his hand at their surroundings, Zevon glanced up into the cylindrical pit that trapped them. “Sinkholes and fissures open up under people while they’re pinned helplessly to the ground….”
The rod sagged a little more, finally resting against Stiles’s leg with his limp hand upon the close end. He gazed at Zevon, listening to the ghastly narrative just as he had listened all his life to the stories of trial and triumph with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock at the helm of their legendary star-ship. This story, though, had a glaze of the horrific. It was real. He’d just been through it.
How many other people out there were suffering? What had happened to those rioters in the courtyard? The people in the other embassies lining that brick area?
“How long’s this been going on?”
“Nine years,” Zevon said. “The first Constrictor wiped out a fifth of the planet’s population. Nearly a billion people died.”
“A billion?” The word pulsed in Stiles’ head, cooling down the throbbing of his arm and back. How many million was a billion? Why couldn’t he do the mathematics? He was a pilot…he could multiply figures…do the trigonometry for atmospheric…for…landing….
A billion. The number grew and grew, pressing him down beneath the utter oppression of its swelling. If so many could die, he could endure some discomfort. A broken arm abruptly seemed surmountable, his moans and winces petty.
“Yes,” Zevon said. “At first I could scarcely absorb such a number. Now I can put a face to each one.”
“Why would you care so much about this Constrictor thing?” Stiles asked.
But Zevon did not answer that. “Half the buildings were destroyed,” he continued instead. “Countless trillions of tons of planetary material suddenly heavier for a few critical, deadly moments…even the most stoic among us was disturbed to his core. The people of the planet worked valiantly to rebuild. Then it came again, and we knew it was a recurring phenomenon. After the second time, they gave up rebuilding and concentrated on structural shoring of the buildings and bridges which had been strong enough to survive the first two. They’ve constructed pressure-tolerant housing and connected buildings so the structures could hold each other up…I could liken this to a meltdown in a nuclear plant. Now the Pojjana hate all aliens, who brought this thing upon them. If they could put the aliens off the planet, perhaps the Constrictor would go with them. They’ve scrubbed their planet clean of all who were not native, and still the blight from space has struck on. It will continue to strike, and they will continue to hate you and me and all aliens for what we have done to them. Periodically the Constrictor will send out a roaring burp of radiation into subspace, which causes waves of gravitons. There is no turning it off…it will go on indefinitely now. Our meager lifetimes will never see the end of it.”
Something in the Romulan’s voice, something in his bearing and the set of his shoulders caught Stiles with an unexpected wave of empathy. Zevon’s arms were still folded, as if to protect himself, and he gazed not at Stiles but at a nearby pile of russet tiles that no longer resembled a floor. He seemed resigned to the facts, but troubled by hearing them so clinically reviewed in his own voice.
Again, with a different tone, Stiles raised the question that his clearing mind insisted needed asking.
“How do you know so much about this?”
In a clear silence that now fell, moisture dripped from an unseen pipe, draping its solemn percussion on Stiles’s question and Zevon’s answer.
“I caused it.”
“Nobody told me the Romulan Empire was at war with these people!”
At such a declaration, the walls crackled and vibrated, pebbles shivered down the tilted slabs into the sinkhole that had trapped the two unfortunate prisoners.
Across the well, the young Romulan’s brows rose at Eric Stiles’s abrupt statement. “War? Oh…no, no, there is no war. This was…utterly unintentional.”
Curbing a lifetime of parochialism for the moment, Stiles reined in his assumptions. “Well…what happened, then?”
“This sector is run by the Bal Quonnot, on another planet in this system. They allowed us to conduct quantum-warp experiments here.”
“Us? The…Romulan Empire?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
“Yes. The Pojjana have been struggling for identity amid the Bal Quonnot administration. The Pojjana did not want to deal with the Empire.”
“I don’t think I’d deal with you either,” Stiles said. “If you caused this thing.”
Zevon actually nodded, perhaps in agreement, but certainly in understanding. “The Pojjana let the Federation court them for membership, to see if an alien science could retract what another alien science had done to them. The Federation went so far as to establish a planetary outpost.”
“How many of these things have happened?”
“Six, now. In nine years. Not in predictable intervals. The Pojjana led the Federation along, but avoided committing to membership, hoping you would help. They wanted the benefits but not the obligations.”
“It’s happened before,” Stiles confirmed. “I’ve heard of planetary governments trying to get the best of both worlds, refusing to make the decision but still accepting Federation protection and help.”
“The Federation is disappointed,�
� Zevon went on. “To your credit, you practice what you preach. The sector is red now.”
Stiles paused to fill his lungs with a full breath. His shoulders squeezed in a muscle spasm, and he closed his eyes briefly. “That’s what Spock said…red sector. I don’t know what it means….”
“It means many things. Many banishments, many edicts, many restrictions.”
Stiles cleared his throat, and the effort made his ribs ache. “How do you know so much about…stuff I’m supposed to know?”
“All Imperial royal family members are well-schooled in astral politics.”
Raising his head sharply, Stiles blurted, “Royal family!”
“Yes.”
He stared, but Zevon did not meet his eyes. “How close…how high…”
“The Emperor is my mother’s brother. I am fourteenth in line for the throne.”
“Is that…close?”
“In a population of two hundred billion inhabiting ninety planets, it is considered very close. However, it’s unlikely that I shall ever actually take the throne. Certainly I have no desire to take it.”
A cold rock formed in Stiles’s chest as he digested the fact that he was involved in something with far more depth than he had first imagined. What moments ago had been two minor players in somebody else’s huge drama now became something entirely different.
“How did they capture you?” he asked. “If you’re so…royal.”
“I made the error of accompanying a landing party to take measurements of—not that it matters. I forgot I’d been declared a public enemy. There were bounty hunters. They turned me over to the government. That riot out there…it was sparked by my presence here in the city.”
“And the government is holding you here? Sounds like they wanted the riots to spark. Why else would they keep you here?”
With a nod, Zevon congratulated him. “Very possibly. This is not a usual holding area for political prisoners. They’re usually held in the mountains.”
“So we’re hostages?”
“Certainly we carry some incendiary value for leverage,” Zevon contemplated, “but neither the Empire nor the Federation can cavalierly enter a sector declared red by any major power. That is one of the few agreements between the Federation, the Empire, the Klingons, Orions, Centaurans, and others that has in fact stood the test of time and trouble. Compromise of that is considered irremediable. Relations, friendly or strained, would change instantly. The Pojjana may hope to tempt all that, but…” The young Romulan shook his head, a gesture of clear understanding of the situation. “You and I…we are on our own here for some time, I should think.”
“Alone,” Stiles echoed, “on a planet full of people who hate everybody who isn’t them.”
Shift the legs again. He forced himself to adjust. His shoulders seemed like water now. In his hand the metal rod was like ice and suddenly heavy. His elbow quivered as he tried to continue holding the rod up.
“You’re a captain?” he asked, fighting for concentration.
“Centurion. I have…I had command of a science vessel. My command was a royal favor. It’s common to give lower royalty command of royal barges. I thought myself very lucky not to be carting one of my own relatives about in a barge. I always remained aware that I hadn’t earned command. I ceded most ship responsibility to my subcommander. The crew understood…they never spoke ill of me. What I earned was status as a fully qualified astrophysicist. I was supervising the unit conducting quantum-warp experiments that set up a sympathetic subspace vibration of free-floating gravitons. Now the Constrictor breaks on the shores of the Pojjan planet. And no one will ever stop it.”
Zevon dropped his gaze to the messy excuse for a floor. He didn’t look up anymore.
“I’m something of an embarrassment to my family,” he went on, so quietly that Stiles could barely hear him. “I’m not…”
“A ‘leader of men’?” Stiles supplied.
As odd as it now seemed to see someone who looked like Zevon return a smile, the Romulan did in fact grin mildly. “Just to prove it, if you said that to any of my uncles or brothers, they would kill you just to prove differently.”
Returning the grin, Stiles chuckled. “Call my mother a sow, but don’t tell me I’m no leader of men?”
“Something like that.”
As Stiles felt his small troubles shrink to inconsequence, he gazed at Zevon and absorbed what he had heard. A hundred questions—none good—crackled in his mind.
“Well, here we are then,” Stiles groaned. “A senior duty ensign who finagled his way into command of a landing party because of a family connection with Ambassador Spock. Big me, I thought I could distinguish myself. You know what I see when I look up the ladder? Captain Stiles, Lieutenant Stiles, Lieutenant Commander Stiles, heroes of the Romulan wars, officers on starship service…and little Ensign Stiles, who died in the pit after botching a simple evac.” He let his head drop back and gazed up, far up, to the patch of dim light at the top of the hole. “I wish I were Ensign Anybody Else.”
“Surrounded by giants,” Zevon offered. “No wonder you could barely see.”
Registering only slightly the favor just done him, Stiles clung instead to the sorrow and shame. “So here I am,” he trudged on, “trapped in a sinkhole with a Romulan duke who doesn’t want the command he’s got, and a collapsed building’s about to come down on us. Aren’t we pathetic? If you had any emotion, you’d probably cry.”
Sharply Zevon kicked at a plank that lay between them, sending it clacking into another position. His eyes hardened. “I am not Vulcan,” he snapped, and instantly looked away again.
The reaction was so sincere that Stiles almost reached out physically to yank back his words. “Sorry,” he offered. “You can pretty much count on me to say the wrong thing. Look, if you were in the sector conducting experiments—everybody does that. Quantum warp…that’s tricky business. There’s nobody who knows everything about that. It’s almost not even science. It’s practically magic. If something went wrong, it’s not your fault.”
“It was my fault,” Zevon insisted. He pressed a hand to his left thigh and seemed to hurt himself with his own touch. “I should’ve stood up to my superiors when I first saw what the result might be. The graviton impulses were too erratic. I knew that. I knew it before we started. I should never have condoned the switch-on. As senior scientist, I had the right to postpone.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“I was…timid. Yes, I was the senior authority, but only because of my bloodline. There were other scientists who were more qualified quantum specialists. They warned me…but I was afraid to fail.”
So familiar. Why did everybody have to go through this? Just doing their jobs, and all this had to happen. Sitting here in the near-darkness, three levels below the street, cradled in wreckage and out of the line of sight of any judgmental forces, Eric Stiles released himself from the bondage of prying eyes and pointless opinions. How foolish did he have to be to keep holding this weapon on Zevon?
If only he could put it down.
With a cleansing sigh, he muttered, “Listen, I…I feel….” In his left hand, the metal rod wobbled between them, stubbornly holding its position. “Do me a favor, will you? Come over and…hold this for me.”
Across the wreckage, Zevon blinked, stood up stiffly, and moved toward him.
Stiles parted his lips and started to say something else, but in sudden punctuation of Zevon’s dire prophesy, a loud crumbling noise erupted over their heads. Buried in a gray cloud burping from above, Zevon disappeared as several large chunks of building material and a gout of rubble shattered through the hole in the floors above them, chittering like a rock-slide, and came sheeting down into their chamber. The rain of rock and pebbles hissed furiously and crashed in a million pieces onto the desk of their little area. Stiles threw his working arm over his face and bent to one side, but he couldn’t move far enough to avoid being painted with dust and grit. The metal rod he had claime
d as a weapon flew out of his hand and clanked somewhere in the dimness. Cold, stinging debris sheeted his body. The Pojjan guards had taken away his padded vest, gloves, and knee pads, leaving only his daywear uniform to fend off the sharp bits. He felt himself being cut in a hundred tiny places.
As soon as the sound faded, he shoved himself up on his left elbow and twisted around. “Zevon? Where are you?”
In response, he only heard the sound of Zevon coughing somewhere in the cloud of dust. Alive, at least.
Stiles pushed up on his elbow. “Are you okay?”
Out of the puff of stone dust, shimmering paint fragments and insulation, Zevon finally and slowly came to his feet. Rock bits sheeted off his back and shoulders as he stood and limped over the jagged wreckage to Stiles’s side, where he braced himself on the thing Stiles was sitting upon.
“You okay?” Stiles asked again.
Zevon wiped dust from his face. “What is ‘okay’?”
“You don’t know? Something tells me you speak English, right?”
“Classroom English.”
“Oh. I guess it got started with two alphabetical letters, O and K. It means…agreement. All right. Well. No idea why it would mean that.”
“I see…yes, then, I am both O and K.”
“But you’re limping.”
“A piece of this rod went through my thigh. I pulled it out.”
“What? You got speared by a piece of that stuff?”
“Yes, when we first fell—”
“Come here! You could be bleeding to death! Let me see your leg.”
Turning to show Stiles a crudely bandaged part of his thigh above the knee, Zevon winced and tolerated Stiles’s tucking the strips of blanket which now bound each of them. “A few moments ago you were willing to spear me with a piece of this material.”
“Well, never underestimate the capacity of Eric Stiles to make a dunderhead of himself. You’re still bleeding here. That stuff’s blood, isn’t it? The green, uh—”
“Yes. I thought it had stopped.”
“It hasn’t. Let me—come a little closer. Your pant leg is soaked with blood. God…we gotta stop this. Pad the wound with something…just a minute.”