by Gene DeWeese
Abruptly, the newcomer stopped less than ten kilometers distant. The energy field collapsed instantly, the attendant flare vanishing with it.
“One humanoid life-form aboard, Captain,” Data reported a moment later. “No indication of energy weapons. Power is provided by hydrogen fusion.”
“Lower shields,” Picard ordered. “Mr. Worf, hail it on all EM frequencies.”
But it didn’t respond. Almost as quickly as the tiny ship had stopped, it turned about and raced away, its image on the viewscreen turning instantly from ship to fireball.
“Tractor beam,” Picard snapped, and a moment later the fireball lurched to a halt and once again became a ship. “Maintain position, Ensign. Number One, assemble an away team in the shuttlebay. I want—”
“Sir,” Worf broke in, “the alien has transmitted the same signal as the first ship.”
Almost before the Klingon had finished speaking, the viewscreen was once again swamped by a blinding flash of light, immeasurably brighter than the fireball had been. The Enterprise lurched very slightly as the tractor beam found itself focusing on nothing.
When the viewscreen cleared, it was once again empty.
Another moment, and Worf reported a second surge in the energy field, this one almost directly astern.
Then another, this one in the general direction of Krantin.
And another, now from high above the ecliptic.
And another.
And another.
There were seventeen in all when finally they stopped.
Picard grimaced mentally as he sat down in the command chair and tugged automatically at his uniform. In the back of his mind, he wondered if each of the surges marked the departure—or arrival?—of another of the alien ships. At the same time, the elusive reason for the feeling of familiarity triggered by the images of the first disappearance continued to hover just beyond reach.
“Take us back to Krantin, Ensign,” he said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t vanish as well.”
Koralus watched the viewscreen with apprehension as the giant ship once again approached Krantin. On the trip back from the asteroid belt, the Enterprise sensors had detected, he was told, over a hundred more “energy bursts.” They had come in groups of ten to twenty, with no discernible pattern except that all the bursts in a single group seemed to come from the same general volume of space, and all groups originated, as best their hampered instruments could determine, within the Plague cloud, possibly within the asteroid belt.
Whatever was going on, it was beyond him. He didn’t know whether to be encouraged or frightened that it seemed to be beyond these people as well. Either way, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it, which wasn’t that much of a change from his position the last ten years on the Hope.
But at least now there was a chance—if these people and the “Federation” they said they represented could be taken at their word. And if whatever had been happening in the Krantin system for the last five hundred years wasn’t as far beyond their abilities as theirs were beyond Krantin’s.
Again, as they slid into orbit smoothly and effortlessly, they did whatever it was they did to try to find a way to communicate with someone on the surface of Krantin. But there apparently was nothing to be found. Their calls, like his own messages of a decade ago, went unanswered, if they were even received.
Finally, the captain ordered the second-in-command, the Klingon, and the android to descend to the surface in one of their auxiliary ships, a so-called shuttlecraft. It was not ordered but strongly suggested that Koralus accompany them and lend them his “native perspective.”
“Survey the situation from the air before you commit yourself to landing,” the captain instructed. “And relay all sensor data directly to the Enterprise. Unless the energy field within the atmosphere is more powerful than it appears, the shuttle sensors should provide us with considerably more information than we can obtain from up here.”
Then the four of them were in the shuttlecraft and swooping down through the hazy upper atmosphere and into a layer of clouds that blanketed more than half of the main continent.
Antrovar, Koralus thought, and wondered if the name was still used. Were any of the names still used, now that virtually everyone apparently lived in a single, enclosed city?
Koralus suppressed a gasp as they emerged from the low-hanging clouds and the ground was suddenly visible.
He had been prepared for desolation, but not this. When he had left a hundred years ago, there had been plant life. Not the lush and abundant forests and fields and meadows that pre-Plague paintings and even some early photographs showed, but something. More land had been covered than was bare. Hundreds of species had survived seemingly unchanged—certain hardy breeds of grass, a scattering of long-lived trees, enough food plants to let the dwindling population survive until the conversion to hydroponics was completed.
But now . . .
The only trees were leafless, lifeless skeletons.
Here and there were grotesque patches of green and purple and gray groundcover, surrounded by bare ground or rock or mud. The little ship’s sensors apparently had things to say about the vegetation and the few animals still living. Koralus understood little of it, but he understood enough. “Mutated” he understood—and the android’s emotionlessly delivered verdict: “Even using the most optimistic assumptions, there will be nothing alive in twenty years.”
So this is what it comes to.
Then the city—Jalkor? once the greatest metropolis on Krantin?—became visible through the haze, and Koralus’s heart sank even further. It was not one of the graceful domes the original planners had envisioned, nor even one of the low, smooth hexagonal shapes that had been the plan when the Hope had departed. Instead, it was a squat, misshapen box, each corroded, irregular side at least fifty kilometers long and fifty meters high. The “roof” was an endless collection of flat, slightly sloped terraced segments, as if the height of the roof at any given point had been determined by the height of the buildings beneath it. Some areas near the center were at least five hundred meters high. All around the outside of the enclosure were skeletal remnants of tens of thousands of what might have once been houses, apparently abandoned and cannibalized for what they could contribute to the enclosure and what was inside.
Inside, if he was to believe what he heard as the android and the Klingon read the craft’s instruments, was a haphazard mixture, again as if a sprawling city of twenty or forty million or more had simply been roofed over and modified. Streets and individual houses still existed in many areas, while in others they had been torn down and replaced by kilometer after kilometer of boxlike hydroponic enclosures. In still others they had been replaced by hivelike buildings, each capable of housing tens of thousands. In the center were warrens of cramped passageways and corridors, as if offices and apartments and industrial structures had been fused into a single block, half of which had been converted to living quarters, the rest to house more hydroponics and food-processing plants. There were even remnants of half a dozen of what must have been parks, but the vegetation was long since dead.
And beneath it all, just barely within reach of those same instruments, the android described what Koralus recognized as the remnants of a vast underground complex of tunnels and storerooms and sewers. Now there was one section with tens of thousands of sterile hydroponics tanks, although less than a quarter of them seemed to be in use. The rest was filled with pipes and machinery of every description, constantly taking in the waste of the millions and processing and reprocessing it and sending it back for yet another cycle. As in the hydroponics sections, less than half of what was there was functioning.
Better to die aboard the Hope than here, he thought despairingly.
There were dozens of tiny entrances—airlocks—scattered about the bases of the outer walls, but none appeared operational. Four massive airlocks, one on each side, led into what must once have been storage and repair areas for the machines used outside during
the construction of the enclosure, but only one of those showed any signs of use or repair. The remnants of a road led out into the haze and desolation, through the long-dead and cannibalized “suburbs.”
The one called Riker was scowling at the image when the Klingon looked up from the panel he had been hovering over since their entry into the atmosphere.
“Commander, I am detecting a signal.”
A moment later, a crackling sound erupted from the panel. There were no voices, no sounds other than the static.
“Data, can you locate the source?”
“Not precisely, Commander. It is coming from the direction of the fusion-power-generating facility that was detected from the Enterprise. The facility itself is approximately one hundred kilometers distant.”
Riker was silent a moment, listening to the static. Then he straightened, his fingers darting to the control panel. “Let’s take a closer look,” he said, the image on the screen shifting as the shuttlecraft wheeled about.
Chapter Five
AHL DENBAHR COUGHED as she sealed the inner door of the driver’s compartment of the converted hauler and pulled the clogged breathing mask from her sweat-and grime-streaked face. Like everything else that really mattered on Krantin, it was obviously not in the best working order. It was also desperately in need of recharging. It had not, after all, been designed for the kind of continuous use she had been putting it to. It had been designed to get her from her vehicle to the “safe” areas inside the sprawling plant, a journey of no more than a few minutes.
But there were no more safe areas, not the control cubicles, not the supply rooms, not the emergency access and inspection corridors and crawlspaces. For whatever reason, the filtering and recycling system had not started up at her remote command, and the air inside the plant had been almost as bad as the air outside when she arrived. It was certainly not good enough to breathe unfiltered for hours on end.
But that was the least of her problems, she conceded to herself as she nursed the engine into noisy life and set the vehicle to lumbering down the last remnants of the hundred-kilometer road back to Jalkor. Theoretically, the plant had been designed to repair itself and continue functioning near maximum efficiency indefinitely, but for design theory to be translated into fact, an inventory of reliable spare parts had to be maintained, particularly the laser confinement units that were the heart of the fusion assemblies. The plant could replace its own decaying units once they were delivered to it, but it couldn’t manufacture or repair them.
And neither, it was becoming increasingly apparent, could she or anyone else. The last dozen, brought to the plant barely a year ago, had already been used and ten of the twenty she had brought today had been scooped out of their “storage” compartments the moment she had deposited them. Worse, three of the modules that were being replaced were part of the twelve from the year before. They had lasted less than a year.
And, based on the final tests she had done on the new units, they would likely fail just as quickly. The high-level vacuums required for them to function safely, let alone efficiently, were becoming ever harder to produce and literally impossible to maintain.
Most of the last year, she had spent with the other technicians, testing and retesting, building and rebuilding the machines used in fabricating the units, and yet each day the vacuums degraded more rapidly and the life expectancy of the units decreased. Even Zalkan had spent several days with them, suggesting new techniques, new experiments, but his efforts had been as fruitless as hers. If the trend continued, the life expectancy of new laser confinement units would someday be too short for them to be transported to the plant and installed.
And then?
Then they would either shut the plant down, one fusion unit at a time, or they would miscalculate and wait too long, and the plant would shut itself down, permanently and probably catastrophically.
Either way, once the power plant failed, Jalkor would go the way of all the other cities.
It would be over.
The Plague would have won its final victory. Five hundred years of struggle would be over. Only the dying would be left, and death would be quick in coming.
And the Deserters would have been proven right.
For a moment, anger pulsed through her, not against the Deserters but against herself for continuing this futile struggle. And against Zalkan for having “rescued” her from the electronic womb she had retreated into a dozen years before. Like millions of other “survivors,” she had one day looked at the world around her and realized she was no longer able to deny what her future—what Krantin’s future—was. Like millions of others, she had cursed her parents for having brought her into a world so obviously dying.
And she had surrendered.
Unlike millions of others, however, she had “recovered.’’ After two years—she still had trouble believing it had been only two years, so endless had it finally begun to seem—after two years of emerging from the computer-generated fantasies only long enough to eat and sleep, she had awakened one day to find the fantasies temporarily replaced by the frail figure of a man she had never seen before, awake or dreaming. His name was Zalkan, he said, and he was the latest to take up the increasingly impossible task of maintaining the machinery that kept the city alive. He was searching out all who had worked for his predecessors, trying to coax and bully them back into the real world, where they and thousands of others were desperately needed. Unlike most, Ahl Denbahr had been ready to return.
For all the good it had done.
The power plant—the single most critical piece of machinery; if it went, everything went—was barely limping along, as was everything else. If demand had not decreased—the hundred million who had filled Jalkor when it had been sealed had dwindled to five million or less—the systems would have long ago broken down completely.
But if the population had not decreased, if more and more of those who remained had not simply given up and retreated from reality, then there would have been more than enough skilled and willing workers to keep the systems going, even improve and replace them. Or such was Zalkan’s constant litany against the sin of surrender.
Sometimes Ahl agreed with him, sometimes she didn’t. Today she had serious doubts. No matter how skilled or how willing a workforce existed, there was still only so much that could be done in the face of the Plague. The inability to produce new units for the power plant was only one example, though by far the most critical. More and more often, surrender to the inevitable was once again striking her as the rational alternative, while constant struggle seemed both futile and foolish. It certainly wasn’t pleasant, and more than once she had found herself envying those who were able to simply retreat into the fantasies and, unlike herself, resist the temptation to be drawn back to reality.
Coughing again, she wondered if, this time, the mask had let something truly deadly into her lungs. Shoving the useless thought away, she switched on the radio and tried to raise Zalkan.
But there was no response.
Sighing, she set the call on automatic and settled back to drive and wait. She couldn’t blame Zalkan for not responding instantly. Though he never complained, his health was obviously bad. He had never been strong, even ten years ago when he had dragged her back to reality, and in the last few months he had seemed increasingly frail, as if he had finally reached a point at which even his iron will and determination were not enough to keep him going much longer.
Also, he was doubtless anticipating what her report would be, and he could be no more eager to hear it than she was to deliver it.
The Plague was winning even faster than they had feared, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
Zalkan insisted—had always insisted—that the only solution that held any real hope was, first, to build new construction and storage facilities deep underground, and then to build a new power plant at the same depth. The Plague, he believed, grew progressively weaker the deeper underground they went. Go far enough dow
n, and it would be weak enough to overcome, or at least work around.
But a massive project such as that—far more massive than the sealing of Jalkor had been—would require, first and foremost, massive numbers of workers, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands, even millions. And Zalkan knew all too well that such numbers were impossible. After more than a decade of coaxing and cajoling and threatening, he had begun to lose ground, with more workers surrendering than he was able to recruit. “We’ll all be dead in another five years or maybe a year, maybe even a month,” he was told again and again, when he received an answer at all, “and I’m not going to spend what little time is left working myself to death even faster.”
Even the Council, the only governing body left, such as it was, refused to use what little power it still retained to back Zalkan. “You might as well ask us to build a new fleet of Deserter ships!” was a typical response whenever Zalkan or anyone else brought the subject up.
Only Council President Khozak had ever had even limited enthusiasm for the project, and he had long ago realized it was hopeless. There simply weren’t enough willing workers to even scratch the surface of such a project. There weren’t even enough to properly hold the city together, let alone start something new. Most of the people had retreated into their computer-generated fantasies, while more and more of those who stayed in the real world had abandoned all discipline, taking and doing and destroying whatever they wanted. Some had even attempted to breach the city’s walls, and more and more of Khozak’s dwindling security forces had to be given over to fighting that and other lesser kinds of pointless destruction.
No, Denbahr thought, the Plague was winning, and there was nothing Zalkan or Khozak or anyone could do about it at this late date. A hundred years ago, if her ancestors had known what she knew now, if they had thrown all their efforts into building more and better ships instead of fighting among themselves and, in the end, abandoning space altogether, things would be better. Not specifically for her or for the few million still existing in the patchwork monstrosity Jalkor had become, but for Krantin. She and most of the others, without the covered cities, would never have been born. Their ancestors, their parents and grandparents, would have been long dead. Nothing could change that. But at least a few more tens of thousands, possibly as many as a million, could have been—not saved, necessarily, but at least put on the road to finding a new home for their many-times-removed great-grandchildren.