by Gene DeWeese
And, one way or another, sooner or later, he was going to have to respond to their ship hovering in orbit above Jalkor and try to find out which kind of disaster he had precipitated.
Chapter Eighteen
COMMANDER WILLIAM RIKER turned abruptly from the main viewscreen as he heard the turbolift hiss open. It was, he was glad to see, Dr. Crusher.
“Conclusions, Doctor?” he asked as she strode down the ramp toward him.
The four defectors, after she had thoroughly examined them, had been deposited temporarily behind a detention screen in the security area, and Riker had been waiting impatiently for her report.
“For one thing,” she said, dropping into Counselor Troi’s seat next to Riker in the captain’s, “they said they already knew all about the implants—which did have a number of microchips in them, by the way, along with some other items I wasn’t able to identify. I gave Geordi the results of the scans; maybe he’ll be able to make sense out of them.”
“They knew about them?” Riker echoed after a moment.
“They’re disciplinary devices, apparently—and one of the chief reasons the four of them defected. Or escaped. Everyone who works for the Directorate, even if it’s just sweeping the floors, has to have an implant like that. They didn’t know precisely what the implants could do to them, or so they said. But they didn’t know of anyone who’d ever been able to successfully defy or escape the Directorate, either.”
“Did they want you to try to remove them?”
She shook her head. “They’re not in a hurry for it. For one thing, the Directorate lets it be known that any attempt to remove an implant results in a slow and painful death. And from what the exams told me, that might just be true. The implants could be boobytrapped. Those items I couldn’t identify might do anything. Some of them looked as if they were wired directly into the nervous system.”
Riker grimaced. “Nice bunch, this Directorate. Did you tell them all this?”
“I did, but they didn’t seem worried. The only way the implants can be activated, they say, is by the Directorate’s main computer network, and there’s no way it can reach through and get at them here.”
“How did they react to the idea that jumping from one world to the other had already been slowly killing them?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t believe it, at least not at first. But when I ‘guessed right’ about which ones of them had made the most jumps, and explained the results of a few of their metabolic tests, they looked a little less confident.”
“And when you compared their metabolic functions with those of Zalkan?”
“None were as low as Zalkan’s. However, all four of them had a problem that Zalkan didn’t: a decided deficiency in what I assume are vital trace elements.”
“Did you—”
“Commander,” Worf rumbled from the tactical station, “an energy surge, roughly the same heading as the previous ones.”
“Stand by to raise shields. Any indication of a ship?”
“None yet, Commander.”
“Open all EM channels. If there’s something there and it transmits anything at all—”
“Low-level EM pulse on the same heading as the energy surge, Commander. It was apparently directional, centered on the Enterprise.”
Riker frowned. What now? “Any information content?”
“Unknown, Commander. The computer has found none other than frequency and duration. Unless—”
Worf broke off, his eyes darting across the displays. “A second energy surge has just been detected, on the same heading as the previous one.”
“Lieutenant Worf!” The voice of one of the ensigns from the security detail came over Worf’s comm unit. “The prisoners—something’s happening to them!” The distant sound of screams could be heard in the background.
Dr. Crusher was on her feet, racing for the turbolift, a split second after the ensign’s words.
“Looks as if they were wrong, Commander,” she said over her shoulder. “Apparently the Directorate can reach them here.”
Riker hesitated only a moment, then raced after her.
All four prisoners were dead by the time Dr. Crusher and he arrived at the detention area.
Picard was gripped by a feeling of paralysis, and for just an instant, he thought that Riker had somehow located them and was beaming them up despite the loss of the comm units. But then the similarity to being transported ended in a wave of knee-bending weakness and a brilliant, all-enveloping flash, and he realized that whatever had happened to Zalkan a few hours before must now be happening to him.
When his vision returned, he was standing on a bare, concrete floor, his legs wobbling from the feeling of weakness that still gripped him. Data, Troi, Koralus, and Zalkan’s assistant were almost on top of him, not nearly as far away as they had been a second before. Data was steadying Troi, his android body obviously not as affected by the process as the flesh-and-blood bodies of Troi and himself and, from the look of them, the Krantinese.
Khozak and the guards were nowhere to be seen. Not surprising, Picard thought abruptly as he realized what must have happened. It had been the mysterious devices Denbahr had “found” in Zalkan’s lab. Like Starfleet comm units, they must enable people and things to be located by whatever machine it was that snatched them between worlds. And Khozak and the guards had not been given any.
All around him in the dim light was what looked like a random collection of dilapidated consoles of all sizes and shapes, with all manner of controls and screens. A bearded man with none of the sunless pallor of the Krantinese stood at one of the consoles, the only one in sight that had a lighted screen and controls. From somewhere, not from the console but seemingly from beneath the floor he stood on, came a deep-throated humming. The man stood with his left hand raised beside his face, as if still shielding his eyes from the bright flash that had undoubtedly marked the group’s arrival. He wore what struck Picard immediately as a uniform—gray-green tunic, trousers, and boots with geometric insignia on the front of the tunic. The room itself had the look of an abandoned warehouse—concrete block walls barely visible beyond the stacks of crates and cartons that took up most of the space not occupied by the paintchipped consoles. No doors or windows were visible anywhere.
The man at the controls frowned as he lowered the shielding hand and looked around from the screen and saw Picard and the other three standing there. The fingers of his right hand remained poised over the controls, as if he were about to enter another set of commands.
“Who are you?” he asked warily. “Where is Ormgren?”
“I am Ahl Denbahr,” the technician said quickly, setting Data’s tricorder on the floor. “These are the people from the stars that Ormgren was sent to warn. He came to me for help in finding them, but they were being held captive by Khozak. Bringing them here was the only way we could think of to set them free so they could get word to their ship.”
“But Ormgren—”
“He had to stay behind to place a marker near the city’s airlock. As soon as we know it’s in place, we can return there and I can take them through the airlock to the smaller ship they came down in.”
“Then no one on their main ship yet knows what we suspect?”
Denbahr shook her head, bringing a grimace to the man’s face.
“Perhaps it is just as well,” he said. “Our informant has had more to say since Ormgren was sent. And Zalkan now has an idea that the situation could be turned to our advantage, might even bring an end to the Directorate.”
He stepped away from the console. “I will have to take a chance and let this run unattended. You must talk to Zalkan, all of you.”
Then he was striding toward them. “Come,” he said, “follow me, quickly. It may already be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Picard asked, balking as his strength returned. “Where are we? And why have you—”
“Too late to save your ship,” the man snapped, starting toward a narrow co
rridor between a ragged line of consoles and stacks of cartons. “And Krantin. Your entire crew may be about to be killed, your ship stolen by the Directorate. Then, with that out of the way, what’s left of Krantin will probably be next.”
Picard’s stomach tightened at the words, but he merely looked questioningly toward Troi, who, except for still breathing heavily, seemed to have recovered her strength and composure.
She looked at the man, her dark brown eyes meeting his as he paused and turned back to frown at them impatiently. After a moment, she nodded. “He is telling the truth, Captain.”
Ensign Thompson, his round, bearded face bordering on haggard as he emerged from Data’s room and headed for the nearest turbolift, wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep. Volunteering for the late-night shift on the tactical station had seemed like a good idea at the time—he could get the experience working the station and its myriad readouts and controls without the added pressure of Captain Picard being on the bridge to look over his shoulder. And even at the Academy, he had always been a night person, though in space the distinction was more academic than real. Despite the twenty-four-hour “days” that were generally observed on the Enterprise, he had no way of knowing if they bore any relationship to the days and nights he had grown up with. His biological clock had been reset so many times, he often wondered if it hadn’t long ago cracked a mainspring—or a microchip—in confusion.
His inner clock, however, wasn’t the main problem. The main problem these days was that he was a light sleeper, and ever since they had entered the Krantin system with its so-called Plague cloud and its energy surges, Fido had not been his usual placid self. Normally the cat would curl up on one corner of the bed and rouse himself only when the covers were tossed back on top of him and he caught the odor of a feline breakfast coming from the replicator terminal. Now, however, if Thompson so much as turned over in his sleep, the motion would wake Fido, who would complain just loudly enough to make sure he wasn’t the only being in the room that was awake. If one of the energy surges occurred—and Data’s computer records of both Fido and Spot seemed to confirm the connection—the complaint seemed loud and violent enough to wake people in adjoining quarters. Several minutes of patient reassurance was the least that was required before further sleep could even be considered.
And now that Data was being detained—temporarily, he assumed—on Krantin and Spot needed similar ministrations, as well as someone to get her food down from the replicator terminal, his moments of sleep were even sparser. This time, Spot had been fairly easy to calm, as if she were becoming accustomed to the energy surges, or perhaps it was just her feline ability to ignore unpleasant aspects of her existence once she determined they were merely unpleasant rather than dangerous.
Yawning, he entered the turbolift, which waited patiently for the yawn to be completed and a deck number to be requested, then closed its doors and silently flowed away.
The doors were just opening on Thompson’s deck and he was stifling yet another yawn when a brilliant light erupted behind him in the lift. His immediate thought that, despite the Enterprise’s almost fool-proof systems, something had exploded shocked him into full alertness and sent him leaping into the corridor even as the light vanished.
Spinning around, he was confronted with a figure all in black, including gloves and tight-fitting hood with openings only for the eyes. The figure had a weapon of some kind in one hand, the other hand clenched tightly into a fist. For a moment, the figure staggered and seemed about to fall, as if it had dropped from a great distance and was having trouble regaining its balance.
“Intruder, Deck Seven,” Thompson snapped, slapping his comm unit on in the same moment he leaped back into the turbolift and made a grab for the weapon. For an instant he thought he had it, almost ripping it from the black-gloved hand, but then, as if triggered by the attempt, the grip tightened and a deafening explosion smashed at his ears. A moment later he realized he was falling, his left leg giving way under him, and the weapon was being jerked away. A sudden pain erupted in his collapsing leg, and he thudded to the floor of the turbolift, convinced that in another moment the weapon, now gripped tightly in the other’s hand, would be turned on him again.
Pushing against the side wall with his good leg, he grabbed for the figure’s feet, hoping against hope he could upend him and get a second chance at the weapon or even jar it from his grip in the fall.
But his fingers closed on air. The figure, instead of standing and turning the weapon toward him, had leaped out of the turbolift. Without even a glance at Thompson, the figure spun around and raced away down the corridor of Deck 7.
“Intruder on Deck Seven,” he reported, avoiding looking at his leg, “armed with handheld projectile weapon. He’s already used it on me.” He slumped back as the doors hissed shut. “Sickbay,” he said to the waiting elevator, “and when we get there, don’t close the door until someone comes and gets me.”
By the time Dr. Crusher was working on his leg in sickbay, a red alert had been issued.
Chapter Nineteen
DENBAHR AND KORALUS and the three star people silently followed the bearded man—whose name, he had finally told them, was Albrect—through the maze of consoles and cartons. Finally they came to a large metal sliding door, which he quickly unlocked and relocked behind them. Then they were in a corridor with similar doors on both sides, labeled only with letters and numbers. After a good fifty meters, they passed a freight elevator and continued on to a small passenger elevator around a corner in an alcove. Albrect’s right thumbprint opened it, and the six crowded inside.
Denbahr’s ears popped twice as the cramped elevator shot upward. When it came to a relatively smooth if sudden stop, Albrect placed a thumb—his left one this time—over a scanner and waited as the hidden circuits did their work and released the door.
Denbahr squinted as the door opened into brightness, then gasped as she realized what she was seeing. Sunlight as brilliant as any computer fantasy flooded into a large room through a floor-to-ceiling window that filled most of the facing wall. Centered in front of the window between two large but wilting indoor plants was a massive desk with what looked to be a computer screen angling up out of its surface, but she barely noticed the furnishings as, almost reflexively, she ran to the window. Only dimly was she aware that Koralus had come to stand beside her, as wide-eyed in wonder as she.
She hadn’t seen anything so beautiful since she had been extricated from the computer fantasies. She had never seen anything so beautiful—no one now living on Krantin, even Koralus, had ever seen anything even remotely so beautiful in the real world. A brilliant sun just shedding the redness of dawn was a few degrees above the horizon, shining through a sky as pure and clear as Krantin’s was dark and polluted. Looking down, she gasped again. Two hundred meters below the window was a wooded area with half a dozen trails meandering through acres and acres of trees. A score or more of people, seemingly unaware of the miracle they were walking through, were visible on the trails. The only blemishes were a dozen or so trees that were dead or dying, their branches bare, but they were as nothing to the hundreds and hundreds of others still vibrant in their blue-green splendor.
Beyond the other three sides of the forested area were what looked like dozens of massive power plants, some with the cooling towers that proclaimed them prefusion nuclear, others with the smokestacks that once on early Krantin had indicated the burning of fossil fuels. But here the stacks were short, protruding only a dozen meters or so above the broad roofs, each one ending in a rectangular cap of some kind. The air above all but one was as gloriously clear as the air everywhere else, but above the one, clouds of black smoke billowed.
Albrect cursed as he saw the smoke and rushed across the room, brushing past Denbahr and Koralus as he rounded the desk. A voice responded within a second of his tapping a code into the computer screen. “Number seventeen has shut down again,” he snapped to whoever was on the screen. “Get the burner shut
down now before someone less forgiving than myself discovers it! And have it back on-line before the day is out, is that understood?”
There was a pause as the screen made an unintelligible reply.
“If you’re short of parts, requisition whatever you need! I’ll authorize it in advance. Just get it done!”
Picard and Data had crossed to the window while Albrect had been talking. Picard gazed out through the glass next to Denbahr while Data, after a brief but comprehensive glance, turned to one of the wilting plants and pulled his tricorder from its case. After a quick check of a series of readouts, he glanced out through the window a moment, then detached a half-dozen of the drooping leaves from the plant and stowed them in a compartment of the tricorder case.
Picard’s attention, meanwhile, had remained on the outer world. “Those are some of the devices Zalkan told us about?” he asked, pointing at the rectangular caps on the tops of the stacks as Albrect stepped away from the desk. “The devices that keep your air clean and Krantin’s unbreathable?”
The man nodded as he headed toward a door in the wall on the right. “Those are the grids,” he said, “the visible parts the public sees. The drivers—the controls and generators—are somewhere in this building, behind so many locked doors and Directorate guards that even I have trouble getting in.”
“You’re Directorate, then?” Picard asked.
Albrect glanced down at the insignia on his tunic as he pressed his right thumb against a sensor and waited for the door to be released. “The ones who count think I am, at least for now,” he said glancing back toward Denbahr and Koralus, who still seemed to be in the grip of what they saw beyond the window. “Or until they catch me at something like this,” he added as the door finally opened.