STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2336 - Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  He sidestepped, careful to keep his weight angled into the mountain. His feet bit into the earth, and he knew they crunched rock, though he heard nothing but his own breathing because there was no atmosphere to carry the sound. He wished there was something else to focus on but himself: his breathing, the fact that he was sweating so much he felt oily. He was sore, and his thighs trembled with fatigue and a hot burn from muscles that hadn’t been used in quite this way for months and months. His knees creaked and screamed with pain from the long downhill trek. His nose itched, and this was guaranteed to drive him crazy. And (wasn’t this just his luck?) he had to pee. Really bad. Just the thought made his groin clutch.

  But there wasn’t anything he could do about the sound, his aching muscles, the way his nose itched so much his eyes watered because he was in a stupid environmental suit, a couple four, five kilometers away from the biosphere, under a dead sky littered with the hard, sharp points of millions of stars. There was something he could do about having to pee. He just didn’t want to. Not in a suit. No matter how clean everyone (his mom, his dad, but especially his mom) said it was, no matter how well the suit grabbed all that stuff and recycled it, or did whatever. No way.

  He hadn’t planned any of this. Oh, he knew that his predicament (the pain in his thighs, the itch in his nose, the need to pee really bad) was entirely his own doing. He couldn’t even claim that he was just a stupid kid because he wasn’t a total kid, and even when he had been, he hadn’t ever been stupid. Like, he shouldn’t even have been in the suit. But either he waited until all the adults were gone then steal a suit and sneak out of the biosphere and not tell a soul (not even Pahl) and risk getting grounded for life; or go absolutely-stark-raving-bonkers-bathhouse-crazy with boredom. Probably his dad wouldn’t ground him for life. Probably.

  But he hated environmental suits. Stewing in a tin can, breathing canned air: That’s the way his mom described it, only she liked it, go figure. Jase didn’t know what a tin can was; he had to look it up. After studying a pretty strange painting by a twentieth-century guy who made a fortune painting the same soup can in different colors, Jase figured out two things. Being cooped up in a tin can looked uncomfortable, but the painter had been brilliant.

  A couple of years ago, Jase worried that hating environmental suits might keep him out of Starfleet Academy. (That was when he was just a little kid though. Now that he knew he wasn’t ever going to the Academy because he was going to be an artist or something, he probably wouldn’t need to stick a toe inside an environmental suit.) He knew that sometimes transporters broke down, or shuttles blew apart, and you needed to know how to use a suit. He’d visited his mom enough times while the Enterprise was in dock to understand that all sorts of people worked outside, in suits, all the time. He used to stand at one of the dock’s observation bays, his face plastered to cool glass, and watch the structural engineers, tiny as ants, crawl over the gray hull of his mom’s ship. And the most inane thought: What happens if they have to pee?

  Oh, no. At the thought, Jase felt a sharp twinge that bloomed into a full-blown ache in his groin. Again. Drat. Screwing up his nose, he hummed something tuneless, just to have something to do instead of thinking how much he had to pee but couldn’t. (Well, he could. There were buttons and dials and hook-ups, right?)

  Of course, right. He wasn’t a total moron. Still, gross. Jase tried thinking about sand dunes and deserts and hot red suns. Except his groin complained and his mind wouldn’t cooperate and his thoughts kept darting back to glasses of water and full bathtubs and swimming pools and blue, blue oceans.

  Walk, Jase. Jase crunched over rock. Just walk. As long as he didn’t jiggle too much, walking wasn’t too bad. But, boy, what a dumb idea, coming out alone. His mom would have a cow if she found out. He didn’t know how mothers, or people had cows and, truthfully, it was kind of a dumb expression. Probably Pahl would know where the slang came from. The Naxeran knew all these old slang expressions from all over the galaxy, but mainly Earth. Things like have kittens, or stiff as Herbert, or he’s not operating on all thrusters. Have a cow.

  Thinking about Pahl made him feel bad. Jase had snuck away without telling his friend anything. In fact, he’d avoided the Naxeran all day, since the breakfast they’d had with his own dad and Pahl’s uncle. (Su Chen-Mai never ate with them, and that was fine with Jase.) Pahl’s uncle and his father talked about their work but in ways that puzzled Jase, as if there was more behind every word they said. He knew that if he concentrated very hard, he’d figure it out. Once, he’d tried: chewing his food, emptying his mind. A meditation trick his dad taught him, something Jase had used in school when he was nervous about a test. Only lately, before they’d come to this place, Jase discovered that instead of his mind getting empty and blank, like a bank of endless white clouds stretched across the sky, he saw pictures. Fragments of pictures, really: colors, a sensation of movement. Nothing he could really describe. And he heard words, only garbled like the way the voices of his parents had been when he’d been small and they had argued.

  So he’d tried it that morning at breakfast—to see if he could get at the words bubbling beneath the stream of his dad’s conversation. He’d caught something. A picture, very coherent, of a big room made of red stone and a blue sky (a blue sky in a stone room?) but then his dad had given him a strange look, as if he knew. Instantly, Jase had clamped down, focusing again on the tart taste of his Maltaran orange juice.

  Through it all, Pahl had eaten and chattered about nothing in particular. Jase hadn’t told him about what he’d seen in his dad’s mind. (If that was his dad’s mind he touched. Jase wasn’t sure.) Pahl was okay, except there was something scary about him. Like there was a yawning black hole and that was Pahl and there was nothing in the hole: no light, and no escape either. (Like when the ship had slid into orbit around the planet, and Jase almost got sucked inside Pahl.)

  Not just sucked inside. Jase trudged, swinging the flashlight in a listless, mechanical, to-and-fro arc. Pahl had reached out ... and grabbed his mind, dug in with thought-claws, and then Pahl had hung on, pulling him down into that horrible black nothing in the center of his soul, and Jase had been so scared, he thought he’d just managed to save himself ...

  Jase’s left foot came down on a fall of loose scree, and suddenly, Jase was slipping, sliding. His hands flew up; his flashlight spun away. Reeling, Jase lurched right, made a wild grab at a boulder. He missed.

  Jase gave a ragged cry. His helmet banged against a boulder and sent him pitching sideways. He hit the ground, his left shoulder crashing into solid rock and Jase screamed. He flipped, cartwheeled head over heels, like an acrobat who’s mistimed his roll. His back slammed against the mountain, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, and then he was glissading, feet first, out-of-control, skittering down the rocky chute, hurtling down the mountain. Somehow, he rolled right, and then he saw a huge boulder rush at his face. No, not his faceplate, not his faceplate! Screaming, Jase threw his hands up to protect his face, arms crossed, palms out.

  That probably saved his life—or, at the very least, his faceplate didn’t shatter. Jase felt a hard, bone-shattering jolt in his forearms and then a bolt of pain that rattled his helmet and shivered through his limbs. He felt his body jerk and then fold at his waist, and he came to a sudden stop.

  For a moment, he couldn’t do anything except focus on breathing. He gulped air. He felt queasy, sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes, working hard not to vomit. Shaken, he clung to the rock, waiting for the dizziness to pass. As he did so, he realized he didn’t have to worry about not peeing in his suit—not anymore.

  Slowly, Jase pried open his eyes. He lay in an awkward twisted heap, his head down, his waist corkscrewed so that his left hip was pointing up and his right dug into the ground, his body literally folded around a hump of black rock. Maybe a meteor: The surface of the rock was scored with tiny pits. Lucky he hadn’t broken his neck. He felt the throb of his blood galloping in his temples, and h
is brain felt bruised. He was afraid to move. His shoulder hurt; his left hip hurt; his right leg was killing him. Maybe he’d broken something.

  He planted his palms against the large boulder and pushed. The movement sent a lightning flash of pain sizzling down his spine. He grimaced, moaned, but kept the pressure up until his body rolled and he lay flat on his back.

  It was then that he saw it: to his left. A flash of white. Something moving.

  Jase froze. Every muscle went rigid with fear. Sliding his eyes left, he made out rivulets of small rocks pattering soundlessly along the ground to pool along his left side, like water backing up on the opposite side of a dam.

  Someone was coming. Something. Ghosts, ghosts, those white ghosts! The hairs along the back of his neck stiffened with alarm. Cold sweat glazed his face, his chest, the undersides of his arms. Have to get away, have to! But he couldn’t move.

  Slowly, not wanting to look but knowing he had to, Jase turned his head and looked back up the mountain. He almost cried aloud in relief.

  A suited figure was picking its way down the slope.

  Environmental suit—Jase watched as the figure bobbed around the rocks—that’s an environmental suit.

  In another moment, Pahl dropped to his knees by Jase’s side. Jase saw Pahl’s lips moving beneath his frills, but Jase couldn’t hear a thing. His comm unit—Jase reached his right hand up and fumbled at his suit for the control—he hadn’t activated his comm unit.

  He caught Pahl in mid-sentence. “... you hurt?”

  “I’m okay,” said Jase, not really knowing if this were true but just so grateful not to be alone, he would have said anything. His shoulder still throbbed, and the back of his head hurt. “That is, I think I’m okay. I don’t know. I slipped.”

  Then he had an awful thought. “What about my suit? Can you see my suit?”

  “It looks okay. All your indicators are green. Can you sit up?”

  Jase started to nod but stopped as a wave of vertigo left him nauseated. “A little dizzy,” Jase said, swallowing back something that tasted sour. He made a face, closed his eyes, and waited for the blackness before his eyes to stop spinning. “I hit my head.”

  “Did you black out?”

  “No. That is, I don’t think so.” What he didn’t tell Pahl was that he was feeling a little heavy and stupid, the way he did right before he went to sleep. Somehow he knew that was a bad thing because that meant that maybe he had a concussion.

  Forcing his eyes open, Jase saw that Pahl’s face was creased with concern. “I’ll be okay.”

  Pahl looked doubtful. “You don’t look very good.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Jase repeated, as if saying it again made it true. “Help me sit up.”

  Hooking his right arm under Jase’s left, Pahl eased his friend upright. Jase winced as the muscles along his spine complained. Pahl steadied Jase as Jase slumped forward, waiting for something bad to happen. When he didn’t vomit or pass out, he gave Pahl a weak smile.

  “So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if I can stand.”

  The first time he tried to push to his feet, Jase nearly fell. Pahl took most of his weight, and Jase clung to Pahl for support. After a few minutes, Jase felt steady enough to let go. He braced himself against the large boulder he’d collided with and watched as Pahl sidestepped down a short distance to retrieve Jase’s flashlight. Jase’s head still hurt, and he was reasonably sure he’d had a tremendous bruise on his right shoulder. But he didn’t think he’d broken anything, and he wasn’t feeling as sick.

  “We should go back,” he said as Pahl trudged back up the hill, flashlight in hand. Jase had plenty of air but enough adventure for one day.

  Pahl nodded then frowned. Pivoting on his heel, he looked down the mountain. Jase saw his friend’s gaze flitting across the rock field below. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Something here, though. Like,” Pahl’s head cocked to one side, as if listening to something very feint, “old voices. You know? Like when there’s a big room and it echoes for a long time.” Pahl’s ice-blue eyes zeroed in on Jase. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  For a brief instant, Jase had the impulse to lie, to deny the ghosts he sensed hovering in the shadows of this dead planet. Then he thought again about what had happened between them on the shuttle and, instead, he nodded. “I don’t really hear them all the time either. They come and go like waves.”

  Jase wondered why his dad had never mentioned these voices. Then he had an odd thought. Maybe his dad couldn’t hear them. Yes, but then why could he? He was only half-Betazoid. He wasn’t a telepath.

  “Can you hear what they’re saying? I don’t understand them.”

  “No.” Pahl’s eyebrows crinkled to a point above the bridge of his nose, and his frills shivered with consternation. “It’s like being in a big room with a lot of people all talking at once. But it’s stronger here. Actually,” Pahl pointed to a mound of boulders forty meters down the mountain and to the right, “right there. I’m going to take a look. You want to come?”

  All his common sense told him to stay put, to backtrack his way up the mountain and then down the ruined pass and back to the biosphere. Instead, Jase said, “Sure.”

  They didn’t speak as they made their way down. Jase’s head felt mushy, and he had to work hard at the simple act of walking. But he felt that the thought-claws were stronger, too. Ten minutes later, they stood alongside the tumble of nonspecific brown and rust-colored boulders. Jase studied them then looked back up the mountain.

  “Up there.” Jase pointed at a ragged fringe of overhanging rock. “Landslide.” Then he squinted. “Hey, you see that? Two meters up, to the left. That gap.”

  “It’s a hole, like an opening. Cave, maybe.” Pahl glanced at Jase. “Let’s go.”

  The boys clambered up the hill, Pahl leading the way. As soon as they were level with the gap, Jase immediately realized that what they’d seen was not a depression, or a hollow caused by rocks falling together, or a true cave. The opening was arched, like a passage in the side of the mountain. Jase edged closer. The opening couldn’t be natural.

  As if reading his thoughts, Pahl ran his gloved fingers over the rock. “Machine cut. I feel ridges. You wouldn’t get that with a phaser.”

  “But what’s weird is that the door is here. Usually, a door is something you see from the outside. I mean, if this part of the mountain hadn’t sheared away, how would you know it was here?”

  “Maybe it was blocked off and you had to know what to look for. Or there might have been an outer door, only it got knocked away.”

  Jase couldn’t see beyond the opening. Then he remembered his flashlight and flicked it on. The blue-white beam speared the inky hollow, and Jase swept the light over the interior of the cave. He could see now that a tunnel led down into the mountain.

  “Can you see the end?” asked Pahl.

  “No.” Taking a few cautious steps forward, Jase angled his light along the walls. He saw then had the sense that after three or four meters, the tunnel angled down and curved right. “It feels deep. You know what this reminds me of? Earth. Ancient Egypt. The tombs they used to build for the pharaohs. My dad took me to see them once, about a year ago. A place called the Valley of the Kings.”

  “Valley of the Kings?”

  “Yeah. The Valley of the Kings is a wadi, a valley surrounded by high mountains. The mountains have a lot of limestone in them, and that’s good because limestone makes for good walls and you can draw on it. The tombs had all these religious pictures and texts on the walls. The entrances,” Jase angled his flashlight back to the opening, “they looked just like this one, except they were rectangles, not arches. There was the opening, the entryway into the tomb and then this long shaft.”

  Jase turned again, watching as the beam from his flashlight was swallowed by darkness, like water disappearing down a pipe. “Sometimes the shafts were ramps, and sometimes there were stairs. The older tombs were really steep
and then by the later dynasties, the tunnels got more level. This one looks like it goes down.”

  “How far?”

  “No way of knowing without a tricorder. I mean, if this were Earth, it could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty meters long, and that would just be the first corridor. There’s usually more than one, and lots of rooms. I remember that a couple of them had gates and pits and booby traps. They were worried about grave robbers and stuff.”

  “Then we have to come back,” said Pahl. “We have to get tricorders and lights and some extra air packs for our suits so we can come back.”

  “We don’t even know what this is. Maybe it’s a big nothing. Or maybe it’s an old mineshaft,” Jase said, not believing himself for one second.

  “We won’t know until we explore it.” Pahl looked past Jase into the darkness ahead. “It’s not a mine. You know that. We were led here. We’re supposed to be here. Can’t you feel it?”

  “No,” Jase lied. “I just came over the pass. I didn’t know there was anything here. It’s a coincidence.”

  Pahl’s eyes clouded, and Jase thought that his friend might argue. But Pahl just shrugged. “If that makes you feel better. But I’m coming back.”

  Jase knew that he would come back, too. But he said only, “Come on. We need to get back to the biosphere before my dad does.”

  Pahl didn’t protest. Jase led the way home, retracing his steps up the steep sides of the mountain and then down into the valley. They didn’t speak along the way. From a ridge that ran along the top of the mountains, Jase swept his eyes over the valley floor until he picked out the silver dome of the biosphere. His gaze drifted right, past the ship that squatted on its triangular pad, to the space where his dad usually left their smaller landskimmer. The space was empty. Checking his chronometer, Jase heaved an internal sigh of relief. If his dad and the others stuck to their routine, Jase and Pahl had three hours to spare.