by David Mack
Senjin elbowed Kerlo in the jaw and knocked him to the ground. “Get back!”
Kerlo turned his desperate gaze toward Nimur. “Don’t do this.”
She sneered. “I pity you. Poised at the threshold of greatness, staring at the face of true power, you still don’t understand. What I’ve set in motion can never be stopped.”
Her words wounded Kerlo more deeply than he had ever thought possible.
Battle cries split the air. The Wardens fired beams of light from the heads of their lances. Blasts struck Nimur from all sides and cocooned her in cold fire. She became a pale silhouette inside the tiny sun whose heat singed Kerlo’s hair and filled his nose with its bitter, burnt stench. Even as the fireball raged and grew hotter, the Wardens marched inward, until they pressed their attack to within arm’s reach of Nimur, who seemed to have vanished inside the miniature blue sun.
Then the fire dissipated. The glow faded. And Nimur stood unscathed, her eyes blazing. A manic gleam lit her face. “Rejoice, my friends! Only hours ago, I would have crushed you like bugs for no better reason than spite. Now, I’ll reward you instead.”
She raised her arms, and all the Wardens around her rose from the ground and lingered there, suspended in slow motion as if they were floating in the depths of the sea. Their weapons fell from their hands and clattered together on the ground below their dangling feet.
Nimur’s eyes flared with eerie light. “Feel the fire that burns within us all. Fight it, and it will destroy you. Welcome it, and you will become the lords of creation.”
Two of the Wardens convulsed and struggled as if they were choking. One of them arched his back in agony and then burst into green flames that consumed him from within. As his empty headdress crashed to the ground and his ashes fluttered away on a warm breeze, the second struggling Warden suffered the same fate.
The other Wardens twitched for a few seconds, and then they were still. Nimur lowered her arms. The Wardens were returned with gentle care to solid ground. A few at a time, they removed their ceremonial headdresses and cast them aside, next to those of their fallen comrades.
All that Kerlo could do was watch in mute horror as ten former defenders of the people turned slowly toward him. Lying on the ground, looking up at them, he wanted to scream, to weep, to run—but all he could do was cower, half-paralyzed with fear.
All ten had eyes ablaze with the fire of the Change.
Senjin’s voice was flat and merciless as he looked back at Kerlo but spoke to Nimur. “What should we do with this one? Kill him quickly? Or make him suffer?”
Nimur stepped through the Changed Wardens’ ranks and took her place in front of them. “Leave him. There’s nothing he can do to harm us—and soon enough, he’ll take his place at our side.” She led her new myrmidons out of the village square. “They all will.”
• • •
Theriault watched, agape, from behind the corner of a large hut. Several dozen meters away in the village’s square, Nimur manipulated a dozen armed Wardens as if they were cheap puppets. The rest of the landing party huddled beside her, staring in shocked silence, while behind her the priestess Seta stood a seething watch over the bound and still groggy prisoner Tormog. Theriault tilted her head toward Tan Bao. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“I sure hope not. What I’m seeing has me scared shitless.”
“That makes two of us.” Theriault winced as one of the Wardens erupted from within, releasing a brilliant flash of emerald flames that rendered his body into smoke and ashes. She ducked back behind the corner, pulled Hesh with her, and snapped him out of his horrified trance with a harsh whisper. “Hesh! What the hell was that?”
The Arkenite fumbled with his tricorder, which had been running since they had returned to the village. “I . . . I’m sorry, sir. I, um, can’t explain this data. Bioelectric readings from Nimur are far beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Similar readings are emerging in the Wardens.”
Dastin continued his discreet observation of Nimur. “She’s building an army.” He reached toward his belt and rested his hand on his phaser. “We need to stop her. Now.”
Theriault put her hand on top of Dastin’s. “No.”
The scout looked at her. “Sir, Nimur can already kill anything she can see—and probably a fair number of things she can’t see. We can’t let her get any stronger.”
Seta took hold of Theriault’s free arm. “Your friend is right. Nimur must be stopped.”
“We’re not your assassins,” Theriault said to the young priestess. Then she turned her baleful glare on Dastin. “And this isn’t our fight.”
Seta was desperate. “How can you say that? You’ve seen what she can do. Not even the Wardens can stop her now. We need your help!”
Theriault felt sympathy for Seta and the other Tomol, but she had to remember her duty as a Starfleet officer. “I’m sorry,” she told the frightened teen, “but my friends and I all swore an oath a long time ago not to interfere in the lives of others.”
Her declaration made Seta shake with anger. She pointed at Tormog. “You’ve already interfered! When he and the others helped Nimur escape! Without them, the Wardens could’ve caught her and brought her back to finish the Cleansing while there was still time!”
“We’re not responsible for what the Klingons do,” Theriault said.
Tan Bao sounded doubtful. “I don’t know, sir. We could have stopped the Klingons from helping Nimur, but we let them get away. I think that makes us at least a little bit responsible.” He shrank back and swallowed as Theriault slowly turned a withering look in his direction.
Hesh’s expression turned from concerned to alarmed as he watched his tricorder’s display. “Actually, it might be too late for us to intervene at this stage. If one considers that four phasers set on heavy stun were not enough to subdue Nimur in the cave, and then extrapolates the escalation of her power from the increased levels in her bioelectric and neuroelectric fields, it would seem that no offensive power we possess at this time will be sufficient to stop her.”
Dastin scrunched his face at the science officer’s report. “Are you kidding? Do you really expect me to believe that a phaser set on full power can’t bring her down?”
“At this stage, I would rate its likelihood of success as ‘minimal.’ Such an assault might prove effective against the Tomol in whom she has only just now triggered the Change, but against Nimur herself, I fear such an effort would be futile at best.”
“A concerted attack, then. All four of us, firing on full power—”
“Would have only a nine percent chance of killing Nimur,” Hesh interrupted.
The Trill wasn’t ready to give up. “All right, so sidearms can’t get the job done. But we could use a tricorder to pinpoint her position, relay her coordinates to the Sagittarius, and they can take her out using the ship’s phasers.”
Theriault couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Overkill much?”
“Sir, this bitch ripped five Klingon warriors limb from limb using only her mind, and she left a cave painted with their guts. Now she has ten friends just as crazy and dangerous as she is. If anything, I’d call a precision strike from orbit a proportional response.”
Tormog slurred, “S’what I’d do.”
Theriault gave Tormog a punitive kick. “No one asked you.” She turned and confronted Dastin. “What if she and her friends are powerful enough to sense the Sagittarius? Right now they don’t know about space travel or starships, so they might not think to look for the ship. But if phaser beams start shooting down from the sky, the Changed might expand their new senses to figure out where those attacks are coming from.”
“All the more reason to dust them now and be done with this,” Dastin said.
Hesh shut off his tricorder and stepped between Theriault and Dastin. “Sir, we are presently out of contact with the ship, so sol
iciting their aid is a non-issue. Furthermore, we have another option. While four phasers set on kill might not possess sufficient firepower to stop Nimur and her Changed allies, those same phasers set for simultaneous overload and used as a localized demolition charge could release enough energy to destroy the Changed.”
Tan Bao held up a hand in a cautionary gesture. “Whoa. It’s a nice idea—in theory. But to make it work, you’d need Nimur and all her new friends in the same place. I mean, really close together. Even with four phasers bundled into one improvised explosive, the instant-kill radius won’t exceed eighteen meters. Against creatures this powerful, I’d expect the effective radius to be as little as ten meters. If they split up, this plan is toast.”
Dastin stole another look around the corner, then ducked back behind cover. “What if we grabbed a few of those lances the Wardens dropped? We could add those to a phaser barrage.”
Theriault shook her head. “Forget it. They hit Nimur with twelve of those things, and she didn’t bat an eye. Those might be useful against someone who’s still early in the Change, but once a subject starts to exhibit real power, those glorified stun-sticks are basically useless.”
A dejected silence settled upon the landing party. Seta grew visibly agitated watching the Starfleet team contemplating their doomed navels. “So, that’s it? You lie down and die?”
Theriault resisted the urge to slap the brash young teen. After all, the girl’s entire world was teetering on the verge of collapse. Who wouldn’t lapse into hysteria under those conditions? Instead, she decided to do what she thought was best for her team, the ship, and the Tomol.
“Okay, new plan. Step one: Gag the Klingon. Step two: We hide.”
17
Sickbay’s door slid open at Captain Terrell’s approach, and he stepped forward—face-first into a tangled web of duotronic cables and optronic wiring. “What in the hell—?”
“Sorry, Captain,” shouted Crewman Torvin from the other side of the wall of data fibers. Terrell couldn’t see the shaved-headed young Tiburonian, he could only hear him. “Had to open up a few junctions to run some bypasses, and, um, putting them back is, um—”
“Complicated?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Time is a factor, Tor.”
“I understand, sir. Hang on.” From behind the veil of duotronic webbing came the scrape of shuffling feet, the harsh spit of raw power dancing off live wires, and the low curses of an enlisted man in over his head while keenly aware of his commanding officer’s waning patience. After nearly half a minute of indeterminate sounds, the spaghetti junction of cables and wires parted to reveal Torvin’s flushed and anxious face. “Almost done, sir.”
He unraveled the Gordian knot of optronics that obstructed Terrell’s path and then pulled aside one half of the cable curtain to grant the captain ingress to sickbay. Terrell ducked through the narrow, temporary gap and looked around, bewildered by the chaos that greeted him.
Sickbay had, as far as Terrell could see, been ripped open on all sides, and its duotronic viscera spilled across its bulkheads and deck, as if the ship’s sole medical facility had been gutted by force. Seated in the middle of all that chaos, hands pressed against the sides of her head and hunched over a small computer terminal wrapped in twisted metal, was Doctor Babitz.
“Do my eyes deceive me, Doctor, or has sickbay committed seppuku?”
Babitz pointed at Torvin. “His fault.”
Terrell turned to face Torvin, whose face was stretched taut by a nervous grin. “I know this looks bad, sir, but I can explain, really.”
“Don’t let me stop you, Crewman. I would love to hear this.”
Torvin tugged one of his fin-shaped, outrageously large earlobes. “Well, I heard sickbay’s computer activate ten minutes ago. Thing is, we’re on a silent-running protocol—”
Terrell held up a hand to stop Torvin because he understood. “Which restricts computer operations to minimize our energy signature.”
The enlisted engineer nodded. “But then Doctor Babitz said she had priority orders to work on a medical emergency—”
“And she needs the computer to do it,” Terrell cut in. He hung his head in shame; this was his fault. Despite having ordered the ship into silent running, he had directed Doctor Babitz to conduct vital medical research. He was able to guess what had happened next. “So you isolated the sickbay computer from the main core and contained its energy signature.”
“Yes, sir. Well, I mean, I’m doing my best. It’s a work in progress.”
“I trust you’ll be able to put this all back together later, yes?”
“Probably.”
“Carry on, Crewman.”
“Aye, sir. Thank you, sir.” Torvin hurried away, opened another panel on the overhead, and freed a bundle of optronic cables that spilled over him like the entrails of a gutted beast. The young man stumbled, struggled under their weight, and then set to work on a new bypass.
Terrell sidled over to stand beside Babitz’s computer terminal, which was surrounded on five of six sides by a hastily assembled metal framework. The captain flicked his index finger against the crudely assembled encasement. “Dare I ask?”
Babitz shrugged. “It’s based on something called a ‘Faraday cage.’ Tor’s expanding the concept to encompass all of sickbay so I can use the rest of the systems later, if necessary.”
“Looks like a mess. But if it works, I’m all for it.”
Torvin looked across the compartment at Terrell. “It’ll work, sir.”
The captain marveled again at how sensitive Torvin’s hearing was. “Tell me something, Tor. If you’re right, why don’t we design our ships this way to begin with?”
“Because as long as this signal-blocking grid remains in place, sickbay can’t access the ship’s main computer core, and it becomes a blind spot to our internal sensors.”
“Good to know.” Terrell turned back toward Babitz. “What have you got?”
“Nothing good, I’m afraid.” She beckoned Terrell to stand behind her, so he moved to look over her shoulder as she continued. “The challenge isn’t suppressing the Shedai Meta-Genome segments in the Tomol DNA, or even removing them. I could accomplish either with a retroviral gene therapy. The problem is, suppressing or excising those sequences would constitute a fatal alteration to the Tomol’s DNA. It would kill them almost instantly.”
Every new piece of the puzzle magnified Terrell’s concerns. “Why?”
“Because the Meta-Genome sequences appear to have replaced original strings of the Tomol’s DNA. Strings that were essential to their nervous and endocrine systems. Without a map of what those original portions of their genome looked like, we can’t replace them.”
Terrell tensed with frustration. They were close to an answer, he could feel it—he just couldn’t see it. “What about obstructing just part of the Shedai tampering? Shutting down only one or a few of the inserted sequences?”
“I explored that option. Some combinations are just as fatal as removing all the Shedai material. Some partial extractions or suppressions would have no effect. A few might make the Changed even more dangerous, by triggering sequences I think are related to telepathy and other high-level psionic abilities. And at least one would spark spontaneous combustion.”
“Would this apply only to the Tomol who have begun the Change?”
“No. It’s species-wide. I can’t see any way to stop the Change before it starts, or reverse it after it’s begun, without killing the subject.”
“Quite an effective bit of genomic sabotage the Shedai wrought here.”
Babitz’s shoulders slumped. “You’re telling me.” She stared at the genetic riddle on her computer screen. “If the Tomol’s mutation is so unstable, why do the Klingons want it?”
“Why do the Klingons want anything? Because they think it’ll add to their power
.” He crossed his arms and thought for a moment. There was something about the Tomol’s dilemma that didn’t add up for him. He thought about the data that the landing party had linked to the obelisk under the hill on the planet’s surface. “What I can’t figure out is why a culture like the Preservers would save a species like this. The first human settlers they had rescued from Earth’s North American continent lived in harmony with nature and were generally peaceful.”
“So are the Tomol, according to Hesh’s preliminary report.”
“True. But if every one of them has the potential to turn into a bloodthirsty monster—”
“I’d say that makes them about average,” Babitz said.
Her cynical observation drew a grim nod from Terrell. “Sadly, yes.”
• • •
Silence was a bad sign. A Klingon warship was a place for hearty laughter, roaring songs, and heated arguments. A quiet warship was one on which something was wrong. Kang was sure of it.
He watched Mara from across the bridge until he caught her eye. She acknowledged his unspoken summons with a rise of her chin, then she parted from tactical officer Mahzh with a curt order and returned to Kang’s side. “Yes, Captain?”
“Have we made contact with the recon team?”
“Not yet, sir. Kyris hailed them on all frequencies, but she reports no response.”
Kang’s vague disquiet was hardening into suspicion. “Have we detected any other communications? On the planet or in this system?”
“None.” Mara stole a glance at the image of the ringed planet on the viewscreen. “You think there is someone else here.” Her eyes narrowed. “Starfleet, perhaps?”
“I don’t know. But it is possible.”
Mahzh looked up from the weapons console. “Captain, we’re picking up unusual activity on the planet’s surface. An energy wave unlike any we’ve encountered before.”
With a sideways nod, Kang sent Mara to check out Mahzh’s report. She stepped around the dais that supported Kang’s command chair and nudged Mahzh aside so she could look at the sensor readouts. “Most unusual.” She adjusted a few controls. “Mahzh is correct. Our memory banks hold no match for this energy waveform.”