by Gene DeWeese
Khozak grimaced at the sight while Zalkan almost shuddered. Riker held himself expressionless, thinking that Earth of a few centuries back had been headed in this same direction, and they hadn’t needed any help from alien intruders.
“This is what we had come to,” Khozak said softly, “by the time the decision to seal the cities was finally made. There are thousands of these around the world. In those last decades there was no effort to operate ‘cleanly,’ only quickly, to get and process material to seal as many cities as possible. The Plague had won, and all we could do was retreat.”
He fell silent as the pit disappeared into the haze, all of his earlier smugness seemingly gone. Zalkan was similarly subdued.
Minutes later, Worf slowed the shuttlecraft and began circling. “These are the coordinates, Commander,” he announced.
On the viewscreens, the land below them was an irregular series of gently sloping hills, gigantic mounds hundreds of meters across except that the crowns of nearly half of them were sunken in like softedged volcanic craters.
Data did something to the sensor controls, and circular outlines formed around the tops of each of the mounds, cratered and uncratered alike. “Those were the main entrances, Commander, the shafts leading down to all levels of the mines.”
“ ‘Were,’ Data?” Riker asked.
Khozak said, “According to Professor Gammelkar, they were all sealed when the mines were played out. All the surface buildings, the headframes, everything, were torn down. The land was returned to essentially the condition it was in before the mining began.” He grimaced. “We were still being careful then, for all the good it did us.”
“Many of them appear to have had a smaller entrance as well,” Data said. Smaller circles appeared on the screen, located near the bottoms of several of the hills.
Khozak peered at the screen, then nodded. “As I said, we were being careful then. It wasn’t always possible to fill in the entire shaft. Some of them were two kilometers deep. Instead, many were roofed over and covered with soil, even landscaped. As you can see, some of the roofs didn’t hold up very well. The smaller entrances are associated with access tunnels that were dug after the mines were sealed. The intent was to allow workers to enter periodically to check and repair the roofs from the underside, to prevent just the sort of collapses that have obviously taken place in several instances.” He gestured at the crater-like concavities that topped so many of the hills. “But that all ended more than a hundred years ago—like everything else. I suppose they must have sealed the access tunnels then, too. Or, more likely, abandoned them and let them collapse on their own.”
Data nodded as he continued to study the sensor readouts. “They all appear to have collapsed naturally, Commander, except for one.”
One of the smaller circles began pulsing more brightly than the others.
“What happened to that one?” Riker asked when Data didn’t immediately continue. “Is it still open?”
“No, Commander, but it is the only one that was almost certainly closed intentionally. There are traces of explosives in the blocked portion.”
Riker darted a look at the two Krantinese. Khozak looked almost triumphant, while Zalkan remained stiffly expressionless. “How recent?” Riker asked, turning back to Data. “Can you tell?”
“Not with any precision, Commander. I would say no more than twenty years, no less than five. A closer inspection with a tricorder will give a more precise time.”
Khozak nodded. “This is undoubtedly the work of the aliens, Commander. No Krantinese has lived outside the cities for more than fifty years.”
Zalkan said nothing, only shook his head in curt negation when Riker looked at him questioningly.
Riker turned back to Data. “Are there any signs of life, Data, alien or otherwise?”
“I can detect none above the bacterial level, Commander. However, the sensors are not able to penetrate to the levels at which the surges probably originated.”
Data paused, seemingly consulting a readout. “Commander, the time indicated by the pattern you specified has passed. No surge has been detected.”
Riker managed what he hoped was a convincing sigh of resignation as he turned to the Krantinese. “I’m sorry. Apparently the computer was wrong.”
“Then can we move on to the power station?” Zalkan asked impatiently.
“Of course. Mr. Worf?”
Abruptly the circles vanished from the screen as the shuttlecraft shot to a higher level and veered onto a new course.
At the power station, Riker and Troi accompanied Geordi, Zalkan, and Denbahr inside while Data and Worf remained in the shuttlecraft with a visibly impatient Khozak. Inside, Geordi briefly surveyed the control cubicle and stood back, monitoring his tricorder while Denbahr immediately plunged into the work, starting by calling up a series of readings to determine which of the units was the nearest to failure. Zalkan, obviously as familiar with the equipment as Denbahr, worked in concert with her, hardly a word being spoken. As soon as she selected a unit, he began temporarily disabling the associated self-repair circuitry so they would be allowed to work on the unit manually.
Finally, as Denbahr led the way into one of the cramped access corridors, Troi nodded to Riker and the two turned and left. In the airlock to the outside, Troi waited silently until the inner door had closed.
“Now that Zalkan is here, he’s the calmest I’ve seen him,” she said. “It’s as if he were totally immersing himself in the work with Denbahr. Whatever his fears or motives, I’m certain he is genuinely concerned about the Plague. And he was overjoyed when the laser unit tested as well as it did.”
“He didn’t sound overjoyed to me,” Riker said, remembering the scientist’s earlier display of pessimism. “Or even very hopeful.”
“It was only for a moment, Will, when Denbahr completed the final test on the unit and told us it worked perfectly. For that moment, all his fears, whatever their source, were forced into the background, but they returned the instant Geordi indicated that the vacuum in the unit was still degrading.”
“What about the mines? It looked to me as if Zalkan was trying hard not to react when Data found the one that had been tampered with recently.”
Troi nodded. “He was trying very hard. He also reacted very strongly, even fearfully, to the suggestion by Khozak that he was an alien infiltrator.”
“You mean he could actually be one?”
“An infiltrator, yes, but obviously not an alien, if we can believe the results of Dr. Crusher’s examination.”
Riker shrugged. “From what the Enterprise sensors told us, the pilots of the disappearing ships weren’t physically distinguishable from the Krantinese either.”
“So if the ships are from an alternate reality, another Krantin, Zalkan could be from the same place?” She returned his shrug. “It wouldn’t surprise me. It would probably surprise me more if he weren’t. I’m positive he knows more about the ships than he’s telling. And we discussed his illness before, and the possibility that it resulted from his having been on one of the ships. In any event, his reaction to the mine entrance was unmistakable. He was extremely tense the whole time we were over the mines, but he was almost terrified when Data located the one entrance that had apparently been collapsed by explosives.”
“Which is just one more reason for us to concentrate on that one,” Riker said with a smile. “Not that I wasn’t intending to anyway.”
Chapter Ten
RIKER EYED THE COLLAPSED ENTRANCE to the mine uneasily. Data’s tricorder had pinpointed the time of the collapse—the explosion—to roughly ten years ago, but the debris was still plainly visible. On any healthy world, the plant life would have obscured it long ago, but here there were only patches of the mosslike growth they had seen elsewhere and the softening of the edges by ten years of weather.
What concerned him, though, was that the shuttlecraft’s sensors, even at this close range, could not reach deep enough into the mines to tell him if
whoever or whatever was responsible for the energy surges—and the collapsed entrance—still lurked in the depths, waiting.
He turned to Data. “Now that the Enterprise is in low orbit, would it be safe to use the transporter for a short point-to-point jump into the mine, Data? If there is something down there, blasting in with a phaser is more likely to warn them we’re coming than a quiet beam-in.”
Data considered a moment. “You are correct, Commander, and the odds are good that the transporters would be safe to use. Even so I would not recommend it. It is true that the ‘background’ energy would not present an obstacle at this range, but there is no way to guarantee that another energy surge would not occur. It is even possible that our entry, if it were to be detected, could trigger such a surge. And a surge anywhere in the mines beneath us could disrupt or divert the matter stream.”
Riker nodded, not arguing. “Phasers, then. So be it.”
Twenty minutes later, Data leading the way, they eased through the cooling, cauterized opening into the darkness. At Riker’s suggestion, a constant lock on their comm units was being maintained from the Enterprise. If they ran into an emergency, the danger of which was more certain than that posed by an unexpected energy surge during transport, they could be instantly beamed back to either the shuttlecraft or the Enterprise.
Riker stood to one side, waiting for Khozak, who, though he had been fidgeting with impatience until now, trailed the others hesitantly. From the moment the shuttlecraft had left the power plant, the president had let it be known with annoying frequency that he was becoming more certain with each passing moment that the aliens responsible for the Plague were somewhere in the darkness below them. He had also been increasingly anxious to begin the search, but Riker noted that, once the final barrier had fallen to the shuttlecraft’s phasers, much of Khozak’s bravado had fallen with it. He had even refused Riker’s offer of one of the field-effect units that generated the virtu ally invisible, body-hugging energy fields that all except Data used. Instead, he had insisted on the “familiar technology” of his own battered breathing mask.
Once everyone was through the phasered opening, Riker set a portable field generator directly in front of it, switched it on, and waited while the field came to life with a brief flicker. It would keep the atmosphere out while they were inside, and when they left, they would reseal the entrance with the same phasers that had just now opened it.
Satisfied, Riker turned back to the tunnel. In the glow of the handheld lights, he could see that it was less a tunnel than a two-meter-wide corridor that sloped gently downward. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all of a concrete-like substance, rough surfaced but not jagged. Every few meters, translucent hemispheres that must have once held lights protruded from the walls.
“As the shuttlecraft sensors indicated, Commander,” Data said, looking up from his tricorder readouts, “the contaminant level is markedly lower here than on the surface. However, the air is still not safe to breathe for extended periods.”
“And life-forms?”
“None within the tricorder’s current range, Commander.”
“Very well,” Riker said, pulling in a breath and starting down the corridor, “let’s see what we can find.”
Three hundred meters in, the corridor opened abruptly into the square central shaft of the mine. There was no guardrail, only a rusty, metal-runged ladder that split the opening vertically in half and disappeared into the darkness above and below.
While Data and Worf peered into the abyss un anchored and seemingly unconcerned, Troi and President Khozak halted a good two meters short of the precipice. Riker took what he considered a prudent middle ground and stopped just short of the edge; he tested the ladder and, when it proved solid, gripped it firmly before leaning cautiously forward.
The shaft itself, he saw, was roughly five meters on a side below the level of the tunnel, a meter wider above. Over his head, the ladder continued twenty or thirty meters up the wall to the roof and the rusting metal beams that reinforced it. Because the shaft below the level of the tunnel was narrower than above, the downward extension of the ladder was recessed in a half-meter-deep groove in the wall. Similar grooves in the other three walls also contained ladders, but those only went down. Riker assumed that they had all originally been to provide an emergency escape route if the elevator ever jammed or lost power.
Below, where the elevator had once lumbered up and down, all that protruded into the shaft now were the guides the elevator must have followed. Like all the other exposed metal, they were rusting badly. The elevator itself, along with the cables and motors that had pulled it up and down the kilometer-deep shaft, had presumably been dismantled and removed, along with everything else movable, when the mine had been shut down and the shaft covered over more than a hundred years ago.
Steeling himself, Riker leaned farther out, looking down to where the ladders descended into the darkness beyond the glow from their handheld lights. Almost at the limit of the lights, roughly a hundred meters below, a shadowy rectangular opening in the far wall marked what must have been the highest level of the actual mine.
“Can you pick up any more from in here than from outside?” Riker asked as Data, standing with his toes at the very lip of the shaft, straightened and studied the tricorder.
“Only regarding the shaft and its immediate vicinity, Commander. It is at least a kilometer deep, and there are openings every fifty to seventy-five meters after the first level. There are still no life-forms within tricorder range.”
“Will you be able to get down there?” Khozak asked.
“Probably only if we decide to take a chance on the transporter,” Riker said. “Even if this ladder is solid enough right here, I certainly wouldn’t trust it enough to try to climb down it. What we can do for a start is transport some remote-control surveyors down a few levels, possibly a tricorder as well.”
“That may not be necessary, Commander,” Data said. “Readings indicate that the ladder leading down this side of the shaft is sturdy enough to support at least twice the weight of any of us.” He paused, adjusting some of the tricorder controls.
“You’re positive about that?” Riker asked when Data remained silent over the tricorder for several seconds.
“Yes,” Data said finally. “The ladder on this side of the shaft has been reinforced no more than ten years ago.” He looked up where the ladder continued up toward the roof. “The mountings immediately above and below this opening have also been strengthened at approximately the same time.”
“The same time this entrance was opened and resealed!” Khozak, still hovering two or three meters back, said triumphantly. “What more proof do you need, Commander? Someone—alien or not!—entered these mines and carefully covered their tracks. Obviously, they’re still down there! Or at least their machines are! The energy surges you detected must tell you that much!”
“What about the other ladders, Data?” Riker asked, ignoring Khozak’s outburst.
Data once again leaned precariously into the shaft, holding the tricorder before him. A moment later, he straightened. “The others have not been repaired or modified at any time, Commander. In fact, the mountings of the ladder directly across from us have deteriorated to a point at which the ladder is on the verge of coming loose under its own weight.”
“How far down does the reinforcement on this side go?”
“Only as far as the first opening,” Data said.
“I will go down,” Worf rumbled, reaching for the ladder.
“Hold it a second, Lieutenant,” Riker snapped. “Data, you’re absolutely positive about this? And there aren’t any booby traps?”
“None that I can detect, Commander.” Rather than consulting his tricorder again, he gripped the ladder and silently pressed at it in several directions, in a methodical, more strenuous version of what Riker had done a few minutes earlier. “It is mounted quite solidly, Commander,” he said, stepping back. “I will follow Lieutenant Worf.”
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br /> Riker frowned but finally nodded. “Very well. But neither one of you go beyond that first level until we know a little more about this setup.”
“Of course, Commander,” Data said, echoed grudgingly by Worf a moment later.
Data returned to his tricorder as Worf gripped the ladder, swung onto it, and started down, his broad shoulders barely fitting within the groove.
“I cannot yet be certain, Commander,” Data said, “but at least the first two levels appear to be connected internally, not just through the shaft. Once there, we may be able to descend to other levels without resorting to the ladders again.”
“Not without orders, Mr. Data,” Riker said firmly.
“Of course, Commander,” Data said again.
Silently, they waited while Worf clambered down, Riker gripping the ladder unnecessarily, unable to completely ignore the impulse to steady it.
“I am in the first level, Commander.” Worf’s voice came over Riker’s comm unit, each word faintly echoed a split second later as the words carried the hundred meters up the shaft.
Tricorder case and light held firmly in place by a shoulder strap, Data stepped onto the ladder and moved effortlessly downward. Incapable of vertigo, he felt no different than if he had been climbing down a short access ladder in the heart of the Enterprise, and in less than two minutes, he reached the opening to the first level of the mine. The ladder, instead of being in the center of the opening as it had been above, was at the left edge. A pair of rails in the floor, ending flush with the shaft, explained the placement of the ladder to him: In the center, it would have blocked the ore cars from being wheeled on and off the elevator.
Swinging off the ladder, he saw that Worf was a good thirty meters down the tunnel, a bobbing island of light. Unlike the access tunnel above, this one, except for the area immediately next to the shaft, looked more like a primitive mining tunnel from twentieth-century Earth or even earlier, not high-tech in any obvious way. Only the floor was even remotely smooth, and it was that way only in the center to provide an even bed for the rails. Dirt and rock had fallen from the roof and walls in several places between the rotting braces, often completely obscuring the rails.