by Peter David
“I’m saying you may be looking in the wrong place if what you’re seeking is a traitor.”
“Robin,” he said with obviously dwindling patience, “you’re dancing around something, and I find it very unbecoming if for no other reason than that I don’t have time for it. It—”
“Kalinda.”
He stared at her. “What about her?”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but she’s been leaving a trail of bodies behind her lately…”
“Are you saying,” and his voice rose dangerously, “that my sister is a traitor?”
“I’m saying your sister may not be what she seems.”
“This is absurd! You’re starting to sound like Xyon in his rants when Kalinda returned to us—”
“And maybe he was right!”
He sprang to his feet. Literally sprang. It was as if a string were attached to him and he’d been drawn straight up. It was just the latest reminder for Robin of just how strong and quick he was. She didn’t flinch, since never for a moment did she believe her own safety was threatened. He scowled so darkly at her that she thought his skin was on the verge of going from red to purple. “I cannot believe you would be so gullible as to accept the desperate ranting of a love-starved kidnapper.”
Robin got to her feet a lot less elegantly than Si Cwan did, and tried not to be annoyed by that. Why should she be? There was so much else to be annoyed by. “And I cannot believe that you would dismiss a real concern out of hand simply because it was first voiced by someone whom you dislike intensely! If Xyon has anything approaching his father’s knack for gut instinct…”
“Are you saying I don’t recognize my own sister?”
“I’m saying you’re allowing yourself to be blinded by your hatred for Fhermus and for Xyon, and the people of New Thallon are being made to suffer for it!”
A deathly silence hung over the room for what seemed a long, long while.
Finally Si Cwan said, very quietly, “I think it’s time.”
She shook her head in confusion. “Time for what?”
“New Thallon remains a target, and this place is ground zero. Hostilities are only going to escalate. It’s no longer safe for you here.”
“It’s no longer safe for anyone,” Robin pointed out. “But I don’t go willingly running from danger.”
“Then you’ll go dragged from it against your will.” He looked past her shoulder and nodded once.
Robin turned to see what he was looking at and her jaw dropped. There were two large guards standing in the doorway, both expressionless.
She turned back to Si Cwan. “You can’t be serious.”
“I have servants packing up your things. They’ll be meeting you out at the departure pad. That’s what I brought you here to tell you. I regret that we became so distracted discussing irrelevancies. It would have been preferable to use this time to say proper good-byes. But there’s no help for it, I fear.”
“Are you insane?” She stepped closer to him. Since he was drawing himself up to his full height, it wasn’t as if they could go nose-to-nose. Even so, she got as near as she could. “If that isn’t really Kalinda, that’s not exactly what you could call an irrelevancy! Furthermore, I’m both your wife and a Starfleet representative here! You don’t seriously think you can just pack me up and ship me away!”
“As a Starfleet representative,” Cwan replied coolly, “you are here at my sufferance. As your husband, my conscience is clear when it comes to acting in your interests.”
“In your interests, you mean!” She stabbed a finger at him. “All you’re concerned with doing is surrounding yourself with people who will tell you exactly what you want to hear!”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that an intelligent man surrounds himself with smart people who disagree with him!”
He took a step toward her so that he truly towered over her. “We’re in a war, Robin. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, we are in a war. I don’t have time for people who disagree with me. Anyone by my side needs to be in accord with my thinking. We need to move forward with one mind, one purpose, or we will not be able to move at all. And furthermore,” he continued over her attempt to interrupt him, “I don’t need a representative of Starfleet reporting back with all manner of intimate detail as to what our plans might be.”
“You don’t seriously think I’d do anything to endanger you or New Thallon, do you?”
“I think,” replied Si Cwan, “that you have your own concerns and priorities, and will do whatever you think to be right…even if I believe it to be wrong. In the new world order of the Thallonian Empire, my beliefs must override all other concerns.”
“Don’t you mean the Thallonian Protectorate?”
“Robin…” He sighed heavily. “If we continue to live in the past…we will have no future.” He reached out to touch her hair, but she automatically pulled back from his touch. He shrugged as if it meant nothing. “Farewell. I hope matters change so that we may be together once more.”
“Do you seriously think,” she demanded, “that if you have me hauled out of here against my will, I’m going to want to have anything to do with you ever again?”
“That,” he told her, “is your decision. Not mine.” He gestured for the guards to remove her.
The guards started to push Robin back, and she batted their hands away from her. “You push me around, I’ll break your fingers,” she snarled. The threat might or might not have been a hollow one, but the guards chose not to press the matter. They kept their hands to their sides as Robin shot a final, poisonous glance at Si Cwan.
She had never hated anyone in her life as much as she did her husband at that moment.
Then, as the doors were sliding shut behind her, she turned to toss off a final, angry insult at him.
And what she saw was the mighty Si Cwan in the midst of sinking to his knees, his hands over his face, and she could see his back shaking violently as if racked with sobs.
“Cwan!” she shouted, but then the doors sealed off her last sight of him. She tried to head back to him but this time the guards were less gentle. They grabbed her by either arm—taking care to make sure she couldn’t grab their fingers—and hauled her toward her destination, while no betraying sound emerged from Si Cwan’s private sanctum.
U.S.S. Excalibur
i.
Burgoyne sat across from Calhoun in the captain’s ready room, and slowly shook hir head. “I can see why you’re suggesting it, Captain…but I have to say, I think you’re taking a tremendous risk.”
“And since we’ve never taken one of those before…”
“I’m just saying, Captain…”
Calhoun put up a hand and Burgoyne lapsed into silence. “I appreciate what you’re saying, Burgy. But we’re faced with risk no matter which way we go. Being forced to choose up sides in a genocidal free-for-all which—even if we don’t take the Prime Directive into consideration—”
“As is our wont.”
“—still thrusts us into a moral area so gray that even I’m not sure I want any part of it. But if we can access the technology that the Teuthis utilize…” Calhoun thought about it a moment. “The fact that he’s hauling around a Borg arm makes it fairly clear from where they got the technology for the transwarp conduit.”
“True,” said Burgoyne. “Obviously the Borg came to this…universe either by accident or by design…”
“That,” said Calhoun, “would certainly cover all the possibilities.”
“…but were not remotely prepared for what they encountered.”
“So you’re saying they were assimilated.” When Burgoyne nodded, a grin split Calhoun’s face. “You know…there’s something to be said for irony. But when did all this happen?”
“It’s difficult to say for sure. What Xy has theorized, based on his conversations with Pontalimus…”
“Who?”
“Pontalimus. The Teuthis leader sitting down in the s
huttlebay…”
“He talked to Xy?” Calhoun was incredulous. “After he delivered his ultimatum to me, he informed me that he had nothing more to say! Why did he talk to Xy?”
“Xy can be very persuasive.”
Calhoun leaned back in his chair. “This isn’t a starship, it’s an insane asylum. So what does Xy’s encounter with…” He hesitated.
“Pontalimus,” Burgoyne prompted helpfully.
“Yes, him. What does Xy think happened?”
“Xy believes that the Teuthis acquired the technology from the Borg centuries ago. That they used it to come to our universe and arrived on the planet now known as Priatia. There was either no one there, or—more likely—a race already in existence. But the environment, even the mere act of existing in our universe, may have been problematic for them. So they bioformed a new race that was intended to be the equivalent of the Teuthis in our universe. Their eyes and ears and extended tentacles, if you will.”
“Bioformed. The equivalent of terraforming, but changing the biological makeup of the individuals to survive on the world, rather than changing the world to suit the colonizing life-form.”
“Yes, sir,” said Burgoyne.
“But…then what happened? Why did they disappear for so long? Why did they come back now?”
“As near as we can tell, a combination of things,” said Burgoyne. “First…the return trip through the ‘Teuthis corridor’ wasn’t what one would call a smashing success.”
“What would one call it?”
“A total fiasco. They didn’t have any more full control of the technology than the Borg did initially. So when the initial exploratory ship, after instigating the newly created race on Priatia, tried to return home to report, they wound up arriving in several hundred pieces.”
“Somewhat discouraging in terms of making return trips.”
“Yes. So they made no further trips until they reworked the tech and could assure that a two-way trip was feasible.”
Calhoun considered that a moment. “And what else?” he asked.
“What else, sir?”
“You said it was a combination of things. What else factored in?”
“Ah. Yes.” Burgoyne leaned forward, placing hir elbows on the edge of the desk. “As you’re aware, the laws of physics that we’re familiar with don’t always seem to apply here. Among those laws could well be the passage of time.”
“Are you saying that time passes at a different rate here than back home?”
“There is that distinct possibility, sir, yes.”
“By how much? How much of a differential is there?”
“Impossible to say.”
“Can you do better than that?”
“I wish I had more to tell you, but this entire situation is so outside my…” S/he shook hir head, frustrated. “I mean, it could be anything. It could be that one minute here is five minutes there. Or five days or five years. It could be that there’s an exponential decay. That is to say, our continued presence could have an impact on the very nature of this place, and the longer we’re here, the faster the time displacement increases.”
“So even if we make it back, a century or more might have passed.”
“There is that possibility, yes. Of course, if that should happen, we could always slingshot around a sun and go backward in time.”
“Oh, great,” Calhoun said sarcastically, “because nothing’s ever gone wrong when we attempted that before.” Now he leaned forward, looking poised as a panther. “So what it comes down to is this: The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which brings us back to my original notion. Do you still have a problem with that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, well…too damned bad. Morgan!”
She appeared in a heartbeat in response to his summons. What was slightly disconcerting, of course, was that even as her holographic image was standing in the ready room, Calhoun knew that she was out on the bridge as well. In some ways it was almost godlike. The Excalibur was her own little heaven and earth, where she dwelt in a mysterious place that the average person never saw. She was omniscient as far as all the mortals wandering about the place were concerned. “Yes, Captain,” she said briskly.
“I have a plan,” he said, and fired a glance at Burgoyne, “which my first officer doesn’t exactly agree with. I’m doing this over hir objections.”
“Well, I’m reasonably certain you’re empowered to do that, what with you being captain and all,” said Morgan. “What do you need?”
The Excalibur was still residing within the blasted shell of a Teuthis ship. Termic’s holographic image had disappeared because of the arrival of Pontalimus; he’d felt it vital to return to his people, apprise them of the situation, and “act accordingly,” whatever that meant. Calhoun suspected it meant nothing good. Now he made a wide, sweeping gesture as if to encompass the entirety of the vessel outside. “Somewhere in there,” he said, “in their computer banks or whatever passes for artificial intelligence around here…somewhere in there is the secret to the technology that created the transwarp conduit. Or, as they call it here, the Teuthis corridor.”
“And you want me to go in after it.”
He nodded. “Can you do it?”
“You want me to take my electronic essence, attempt to interface with a completely alien computer system, and extract information from it that is no doubt top-secret and likely encoded.”
“That’s about right, yes.”
“Not a problem,” she said. “Do you want me to work on solving some incurable disease while I’m at it?”
“Seriously, Morgan…”
“Seriously, Captain…it shouldn’t be all that much of a chore.”
“Good,” he said, nodding approvingly.
“Captain, once more, I must express my concern,” said Burgoyne. “We have no idea what manner of fail-safes might be present in the Teuthis vessel. If something should happen to Morgan…”
“Commander, I assure you, nothing’s going to happen to me,” said Morgan. “I’ll set up a simple electron pulse directed at the vessel as an exploratory mechanism, see where I can find a connect juncture—presuming there is one—and worm my way in. And it won’t even be me worming my way in. It’ll be an avatar, a representation of myself that I’ll duplicate from my core personality. There’s no danger involved.”
“We have no real idea where we are or what we’re surrounded by,” Burgoyne reminded her. “We’re in danger just by sitting here.”
“Then it seems to me we shouldn’t be just sitting,” Morgan said reasonably.
Calhoun said, “I agree.”
“All right, then,” said Morgan. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
“How long will you need to prepare?”
“No time at all, Captain. As a matter of fact, I’m sending the electron pulse right now. With any luck…ah!” She smiled. “That was easier than I could have hoped.”
“You’re in the other ship’s operating system?” Burgoyne looked at her in amazement. “Right now?”
“Yes,” Morgan said. She was all business. “Right now.”
In spite of hirself, Burgoyne was clearly fascinated by the situation. “What’s it like? Is it completely different from our own operating systems? What are you perceiving? What sort of data processing—?”
Morgan wasn’t responding. She was staring straight ahead, and Calhoun saw that her body was suddenly stiff and unyielding. Burgoyne realized it at the same time. He was the first one to her, touching her hard-light body at the shoulder. Morgan tilted back slightly, then rocked forward, then back again, beginning to topple. Calhoun was on his feet by that point and he caught her just before she hit the floor. “What the hell—?”
That was the moment the Excalibur went dead.
There were startled exclamations from out on the bridge and shouts of “Not again!” as the lights went almost completely out. There were also
a few startled profanities and the sounds of people banging into railings or chairs or each other.
“Captain!” came a shout from Kebron. “Morgan’s vanished from the ops station, and we can’t see a damned thing out here! Systems are out all over the ship!”
Calhoun propped Morgan up against his desk, walked quickly to the door of the ready room, and nearly slammed into it full-tilt before pulling himself up short. The doors didn’t open for him. “Go to manual overrides!” he called through the door. “Bring up emergency lights! Check weapons and defensive status! Have crewmen walk everything through if they have to!”
He made his way back to his desk and yanked his sword off the wall. Then he moved back to the door and thrust the sword forward, jamming it between the two halves of the door and using it to pry the doors open. “Well?” demanded Calhoun as he did so. “Aren’t you going to say ‘I told you so’?”
From the darkness, Burgoyne’s voice came. “What possible good would that do?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then I see no point in saying it.”
“Very wise.”
Calhoun got the doors open, and just as he did, Burgoyne added quietly, “But I did tell you.”
“Thank you, Burgoyne,” replied Calhoun. “Deep down, I knew I could count on you.”
ii.
In the darkness of the shuttlebay, Xyon looked around in confusion and said, “Now what?”
He had been spending much of his time lately down in the shuttlebay, speaking at length with the resident guest/prisoner. Xyon had a mercenary’s heart but an explorer’s soul, and this behemoth creature, this “Pontalimus,” was like nothing and no one he’d ever encountered before. He had sat back and watched as his namesake, Xy, had spoken with the strange being at length, and when Xy’s duties called for him to be up on the bridge, Xyon had taken over the conversation.
The most recent topic of discussion, curiously enough, had been Moke. Although neither he nor Xyon had been in any true danger, Moke had been impressed by Xyon’s quick thinking in beaming the both of them to safety. “I’m surprised you didn’t leave me to die,” Moke had told him.