Analogs included "warren," "clanhold," "house," and "tree."
Cracked arches of burned wood curved blackly against the vicious roil of clouds. Most had been blown down already, lying like charred skeletons in the rising gray water, lashed by rain and occasional hail. Blue-white lightning stitched the sky; scattered fog ghosts curled wherever there was shelter from the hurricane-force blasts; in black distance, waterspouts wove drunkenly.
It was Hell.
Of the civilization that had made this world its home—of the families that had made up the clan of the Tree of Oobast, listening to the oddly accented music or the incomprehensibly rambling radio plays—nothing remained. The sodden ground was a mangle of dead wires, cables burned free of their insulation, like a blackened mat of unbreakable vines; Kirk's boots crunched shards of porcelain and glass underneath it, and water squished thickly up through the mess. Mr. Kyle put them down on the high ground close to the city's western edge, where the Tree of Oobast had encroached over the ridge of hills that once had bounded it—the best-sheltered spot he could find. To the east, gray sheets of water lay only a few meters from the beam-down point, quickly lost in murky fog.
The water bobbed with chunks of burned stucco and plaster, with such fragments of wooden furniture as had not grown sodden and sunk yet; with bits of machinery and simple electronics. Ensign Lao, visual pickup on his shoulder, squinted around him into the pounding rain.
"I thought it'd…be worse," he said after a moment. "Where are the bodies?"
"Under shelter," McCoy said briefly. "Temperatures were up above five hundred degrees. The storms that kind of heat generates swept away everything that wasn't pinned down."
Kirk looked down at the pewter-colored sea stretching away before them at their feet. In spite of the hammering rain and tearing gusts of wind, white mist hung over it knee-deep, swirling around the melted spars of structural steel like the ghosts of everything that he and Starfleet had tried to protect here. A fragment of something bobbed ashore, smooth reddish wood, a tangle of copper wires with the remains of scorched cloth insulation clinging to them.
"Not even in the water," Kirk said quietly. "No bacteria—no internal gas."
They stumbled off, leaning against the wind, wading through standing water that hid debris and cables and things that gave and slithered underfoot, to explore. Where the curves of the hills sheltered portions of the original Tree from the wind—where thick masses of burned wood had fallen, bringing down the structural steel and glass of houses with it and burying all within, and where rising steam reduced visibility to a few meters—they found corpses.
Symmetrical primate analogs, Kirk deduced, peering through the twisted rubble at the barely seen bones: rounded rib cages, six limbs, flat, froglike heads. Early studies had postulated the same. Front-facing eyes. Three-fingered hands. McCoy and Adams from Anthro/Geo extricated two as best they could, Lao photographing them in situ. Russell, the thin, ascetic head of Historical, knotted yellow markers around the tree stalks, to mark the areas where he found bones.
Kirk was sharply aware that the "few scientists" of whom Mr. Spock had spoken—the ones who made Tau Lyra III and the Yoons their study—would be heartbroken to learn of its destruction, as if they had lost members of their families. As, indeed, they had.
They had lost the civilization that had been their distant study for the eleven years of the Federation's knowledge of the place. The civilization about which they had written articles, monographs, studies; which they hoped one day to live long enough to visit as messengers and emissaries of the Federation. The civilization they had fought to have recognized, put under Protected status, funded for surveillance.
Kirk understood that he owed it to these scientists to gather as much as he could from the ruins, before water and storm and seepage eroded it away.
"Any sign of life at all?"
McCoy shook his head. "The tricorder's set at maximum. There's a lot of electrical interference. But nothing could have survived this."
Distant barrages of thunder, and sky the color of Iowa tornado weather. No. Nothing could have survived. The big scanners on board the Enterprise, which could distinguish apple trees from orange trees kilometers above the surface, had been little use in the heaving washes of electrical interference generated by the storms. In spite of everything, Kirk had come down to the surface with some hope.
"Nothing." McCoy angled the tricorder in its plastic protector. "No animals, no insects—were there insects here?"
"Thousands of species." Arios knelt, head bowed, among the rubble. Water sluiced from his shining gray suit, from the polarized glass bubble that protected his head. Within that protection, his face was drawn with pain. "Birds…bird analogs, anyway. Slothoids, tree-runners…They kept tree-runners as pets." And, looking up, seeing the expression in Kirk's eyes, he said, "I…I feel this. It's like an echo rising from the ashes. Ghosts, like remembering a dream."
Kirk said nothing.
"I didn't kill these people."
Kirk still did not reply and turned away, staggering as another gust hit him.
Following Lao's analysis of Gilden's reconstruction of fragmentary data, they crossed the ridge, found what had been the center of the town. Some reports had indicated that there had been a high concentration of savants here, as if there were a university or some kind of psychic training facility. In extremis, the Yoons had used its underground rooms as a bunker, carrying chests of printed matter—awkward, bundled collections of pages bound with colored cord—of strange equipment, of pots and jars of what were probably medicines, down flight after flight of steps, until the heat overcame them and they died, huddled, crowded, contorted with their treasures still clutched in their withered hands. The lowermost of these underground rooms was already flooding, the ceilings sagging and creaking as the earth above grew sodden and heavy; every member of the party bent his back to lug the four unwieldy chests up flight after flight of steps to the surface again, and back to the pickup point for transport to the Enterprise.
Whatever the hell was in them, thought Kirk, as the boxes dissolved in swirls of golden dust, it was the treasure the Yoons most wanted to save. The least he could do was save it for them.
"The highest point in the city should be this way," said Lao, who had worked with Gilden over the maps. In the electromagnetic chaos that was left of the stripped magnetic field, not even a standard compass would work; Lao held a terrain-orientation scanner, its uneven lines repeated in a ghostly network on his face shield. The young man looked shaken and had been very silent after the heaps of charred and sodden bones in the bunker. He understood, thought Kirk, as the guards and Russell did not, that he was looking not at the victims of a so-called act of God, but at murder.
"And the question is," Kirk said quietly, into the portable recorder he'd brought along, clipped to his belt, "just who the murderer is, and how the crime was committed. Because the possibility remains that the man who claims to be the star witness—and the star character witness—is actually the author of this catastrophe."
And there was no way to tell.
Yet, thought Kirk, subconsciously quoting Lao's stubborn hopes for his brother, for change against all possibility of Fate. Yet.
The highest point in the city—or what remained of the city—was a sort of pinnacle of blackened tree-stem arches projecting from the side of the rocky ridge that formed the backbone beneath the Tree of Oobast. Sheltered by the ridge, the arches remained more or less intact, though they swayed sickeningly in the gales that howled over the crest; Kirk found himself clinging desperately to the bent ironwork, the bunches of seared wire that hung down like crumbling vines. Far below, the water churned among the tree roots and debris, sometimes visible under the slashing rain, sometimes masked by drifting stringers of steam. Kirk was panting, his breath coming short in the heat, and under the protective suit his clothes stuck to his flesh with a clammy douse of sweat.
Arios wrapped an equipment strap around hi
s waist, lashing himself to the strut of a twisted platform surrounded by dizzy mazes of black limbs, dangling cables, broken machines, forty meters above the hammering millrace of waters below. Folding his arms, he bowed his head in concentration, like a beggar in the rain, standing so for a long time while the winds hurled water around him, and he struggled visibly for footing amid the swirling steam. The rolling of the thunder was like the aftermath of Götterdämmerung, and lighting threw hard bars of whiteness across the landing party's gleaming shapes. Somewhere close by, a section of entangled limbs, structural metal, and messes of stucco plunged down into the maelstrom below. Beyond Arios, Kirk could see waterspouts weaving diabolically on the horizon through torn shreds of cloud and fog.
At length Arios turned back, unhooking himself from his support and almost falling. Lao and Kirk both sprang forward to catch him, Kirk knowing that protective suit or no protective suit, nothing would survive a drop into the flood below. Within the helmet, Arios's face was ghastly, and it came to Kirk what a horror it must be, to be a psychic, listening on a world whose entire population has been burned alive.
His voice gentle, he asked, "Did you hear anything?"
The Master shook his head.
In the briefing room, later, they reviewed the visuals Ensign Lao had taken, and those Yeoman Reilly had made of the other landing party's finds at the Tree of Ruig, half a continent away. Chapel and Sharnas had gone down with Gilden, DeSalle, and his redshirts. Chapel looked badly shaken, Sharnas ill.
Ruig was the only other major population center still above water at which Arios and Sharnas had deduced a concentration of savants. That Tree clung vertically to the end of an enormous box canyon in the mining districts of the mountains, and many of its inhabitants had sought refuge in the mines when the heat started to climb and the night skies to glow red. They'd been found—thousands of them—baked, withered, mummified by the heat, surrounded by whatever possessions they'd cherished enough to carry with them to world's end, anywhere down to seven hundred feet into the mountain.
The lower part ot the mine was already deeply flooded. The playback on the briefing-room vidscreen showed the contorted froglike faces, the withered limbs and sealed eyes, of the dead. One child's breast and arms were covered with a puddle of melted wax that must have been a toy. Near the bird-claw hand of another lay the fragments of a bisque doll, cracked to pieces in the heat. Nearly invisible in vapor and shadow, Sharnas stood knee-deep in steaming water in the shaft, a flashlight raised in his hand, stretching out his mind to the flickering darkness, seeking some response to his silent calls.
There had been none.
"So what happens now?" McCoy asked, and his Georgia drawl was deeper, a sign of how deeply the visit to the planet had disturbed him. There was a dangerous glitter to his blue eyes, the barely contained, helpless rage of a man who has witnessed utter evil without being able to do one thing about it.
"You just going to hop into the Nautilus and fly away into the sunset looking for some other planet to help you with your damned rebellion?"
"You mean some other planet we can lead McKennon to?" Arios's sandpaper voice cracked with bitterness as he raised his head from his hands, meeting McCoy's eyes—it was the doctor who looked away, ashamed.
Kirk looked around the table. All of them looked like ten miles of bad road, even the imperturbable Mr. Spock, who had just spent the past three days alternately coordinating information on the solar flareup and assisting Arios and Mr. Scott—with a suitable guard of redshirts looking on—in further repairs of the Nautilus's engines. Scott, the only one who hadn't been down to the planet and was in any case too pragmatic to worry about problematical futures, looked deeply troubled nevertheless.
But Lao, Kirk thought, looked the worst. He'd been in charge of the computerized reconstruction of everything concerning the planet Yoondri, putting together Uhura's final communication report and every unrelated bit of information Gilden could glean from the History Section's files, working far into the nights, sometimes straight through, as if the work were a drug to hold confusion and despair from his mind.
Kirk understood. His own nights had been sleepless, a prey to dreams of other eras, other futures, other pasts.
He scanned the faces around the briefing-room table: McCoy with his anger, Chapel leaning the bridge of her nose onto folded fingers as if she could not bear to see on vid what she had seen in person in the mines. Lao with his dark-circled eyes and the grooves that had formed from nostril to chin, turning his youth old overnight. Raksha and Cooper drawn into themselves, Thad looking worried as usual, and Adajia wary, suspicious…
But they, at least, would say whatever Arios charged them to say. The programming Cooper had spoken of so casually worked two ways.
Kirk said, "If this McKennon you speak about really exists. If there is a Consilium." Raksha raised her head, her eyes flaring with anger.
"I've had about enough of…"
Arios lifted a hand. "No, it's a justifiable question," he said. "It's been…our problem all along."
"The technology of high-compression fusion torpedoes capable of triggering explosions and flares in an unstable sun has been postulated in scientific journals already," put in Mr. Spock, in his reasonable voice. "It is not illogical to wonder whether it is already in existence. Conceivably, a missile-delivery system could be evolved with current technology to put such a torpedo in the star Tau Lyra even from the extreme edge of the cometary belt; conceivably, that torpedo could have been timed to explode eighteen hours or eighteen days after it was delivered. You do not have to have been anywhere near the system when the star pulsed."
Raksha's lips thinned and her nostrils flared, like an animal about to bite, and Arios put a hand over her wrist.
"There's always conspiracy theories," he said to her. "You know that. Most people still don't believe the Consilium seeded the plague on Qo'nos and Khergos and Romulus, in order to get half the populations wired to control the effects. I thought it was damn far-fetched myself until that night you and I broke into the Consilium main computer and found the files."
He turned back to Kirk. "And I know most people blame the aftereffects of the plague, or the deterioration of the educational system, or the cloning process itself for the drop in the general level of education—not the fact that about seventy percent of the clone lines are genetically engineered to be Secondaries, because Secondaries cause less trouble about low-paying jobs. They make damn good workers." He smiled across the table at Thad.
"We make pretty good rebels, too," said the Secondary, with shy pride. "If somebody tells us what to do, I mean."
Lao sat up, staring at Thad, at Arios, in shocked disbelief, but Arios was still watching Kirk.
"I guess what happens now is up to you, Captain."
"And I guess this is where we find out," said Phil Cooper, "if you are who you say you are…or if this is all a Consilium scam to get us to tell you where the Shadow Fleet is hiding, and why a yagghorth decided to quit the Fleet and join us."
There was a short silence in the briefing room. The three screens of the triangular viewer had gone dark. Kirk found it difficult to remember that of the Enterprise crew, only those in this room knew the whole truth: about the future, about the Consilium, about the implications raised by the presence of these ragged and scruffy outlaws. Around them the ship was settling in its normal business, rec-room conversation over dinner, the never-ending quest to get decent chocolate or shirts that fit out of the synthesizers, the small politicking over storage space that had become acute in the last year and a half. Tonight was the night of the big bowling match between Security and Engineering; elsewhere on the ship there was going to be a screening of Gargoyle Man. People trying to come to decisions about what they would do when the five-year mission was over.
And always the question, thought Kirk, of what to do. Of what he could do, to alter a future so distant.
"Uh…" Adajia lifted her hand timidly. She'd gotten gold nail pain
t from somewhere, and jeweled combs to stem the storm surge of her hair. "Master, is there any reason why we couldn't just…just stay here? I mean, the Consilium doesn't even exist yet, so they can't be after us. You don't have a criminal record here. We've got the fastest, most accurate starship in the entire galaxy and the best computer tech. We could clean up and be rich."
McCoy started to speak but did not, his eyes on Arios. Chapel did not raise her head from her hands. Spock, likewise, was watching Arios, and one eyebrow tilted upward—curious, thought Kirk. Wondering what the Master would say. Beside Thad, Ensign Lao sat with closed eyes, his forehead on his fist, but the tension in his shoulders, the look of nauseated bitterness on his face, did not let Kirk deceive himself into thinking that the young man rested.
"It's all very well to talk about our duty to the Shadow Fleet, Master," went on Adajia. "But you know we're not going to win. The Shadow Fleet has about forty planet-hoppers and a couple of freighters and maybe a thousand fighters, and most of them are hiding out. Starfleet nearly got you back on Delta Seven, and the next time…"
The malachite-dark lips flinched, and she looked quickly down at her hands. "Do we really have to go back at all?"
"There are certain rules concerning temporal paradoxes," pointed out Spock gently.
"We wouldn't talk to anybody," the Orion girl promised, and made a backcountry sign of childish avowal. "And even if we did…we might be able to prevent…"
Lao raised his head, feverish intensity in his gaze.
"Well," Arios cut her off, with a small grin, "for starters I'd hate to see what kind of temporal conundrum we'd cause by introducing twenty-sixth-century technology into the twenty-third century."
"But it wouldn't be twenty-sixth-century stuff then," pointed out Thad. "It would be twenty-third-century stuff."
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