Eyeing one of the nearby Resaurians, she licked her dry, chapped lips. “A little help here?”
Ulsah turned away from her own workstation, uncoiling very carefully and moving slow. She saw which tool Sonya needed, picked it up, and gingerly handed it over as if it were the most delicate thing in all the world. The grip felt odd in her hand, created for the more delicately boned fingers of a Resaurian. She would make do.
“Thanks.”
Ulsah nodded. She glanced nervously at her station’s panel of displays, hugged herself around her middle with long, thin arms. It was a familiar gesture. “Is there anything more I can help with?”
Sonya wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Her skin felt greasy, and far too warm after an hour in this oven of an engineering space. “Iced tea?” she asked. Ulsah studied the tool spread, as if trying to figure out what that might be. “Never mind. Not until I need another tool.”
Delays like this were costing her, in time as well as a rising frustration level. Her engineering sense told her that the tool tables were mounted perfectly for the wide Resaurian shoulders, accessible from any one of three possible maintenance panels. Sound ergonomics, really. But she was also used to her equipment being laid out a certain way, where she could snag the exact tool she needed without looking. She needed an assistant, but hadn’t thought to ask for one at the time. And other than Ulsah, only the guard at the door with his plasma welder wasn’t extremely busy.
Hopefully he would remain that way.
Bending back to task, all of her aches and bruises protesting, Sonya fused the power regulators together in a way that their small electromagnetic fields would complement each other rather than work in competition. A small victory, yet a possibly vital one. She bit down on the spanner’s handle, holding it in her teeth while she used a small tester from her back pocket to test the output. Perfect.
The tester went back into her pocket. The microspanner she let drop from her mouth, and then licked the taste of machine oil from her lips and spat dryly. “Dirty job.” But someone had to do it.
Es’a waited at her shoulder when she turned back. Sonya started at the appearance of the frail-looking Resaurian, then swore. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“We learn to move silently,” the alien lisped. His voice was frailer than most, full of a hissing accent that reminded Sonya of a serpent’s warning. “It is hard to give up.” He took the spanner from her, replaced it on the table, and handed her a fusion cutter when she glanced at it. He was very good at reading body language.
“Thank you. Have you learned anything more about my friends?”
“No. Reports from the upper decks come down slowly. We have no time to waste. This must get done before your friends alter the shield strength again.”
That much Sonya agreed with, especially as a new tremor shook the station. The station’s fusion reactors provided power along one of three different trunks. If she could not calibrate their flow patterns to within a micron, Es’a assured her, bad things would happen. She turned away, using the fusion cutter to open a flexible conduit along its entire length. The work was slow, but not taxing. “You know, you could try talking with S’eth. Make him understand your position.”
“More than one hundred years, my people struggle against his people. No talking is possible.”
Sonya shook her head. A century of stubborn refusal to negotiate. A hostile stalemate where each faction waited for the other to make a mistake. S’eth in control of life support and the shield generators. Es’a with foodstuffs and the fusion reactor rooms. What kind of division could turn a people so savagely against each other? “Is S’eth really so unreasonable?”
“He listens to none of us. His way is to keep things as they have always been. Our way is to search for a better life. To improve and to grow and to escape!”
“And another generation of traditionalists and radicals are born,” she said.
She felt S’eth recoil behind her. “What is that you say?”
Sonya handed back the fusion cutter. She felt the frown hang heavy on her face, wondering why what she had said bothered the Resaurian so much. Surely they had seen this for themselves. “I said that you’ve created here the exact same situation that caused you all to be banished in the first place. The overly cautious. The determined forward-thinkers. Only this time, instead of Klingon occupation throwing your culture out of whack, you did it to yourselves.”
Es’a looked ill. Not that he ever looked extremely healthy. The Resaurian hung his head low, letting it sway back and forth. Membranes rolled up over his eyes, giving them a white cast. “They did this,” he admitted. “We have done this as well.”
It seemed an odd choice of phrasing, but Sonya had too much work ahead of her to puzzle it out now. And she needed a break. Climbing out of the crawlspace, she brushed her hand against a torn and filthy uniform. She had long since discarded the jacket and was now wearing only the undershirt. Soon, the gold engineering color would be completely lost to a pallor of grease and dust-gray.
“You are finished?” Es’a asked.
“Refresher station.” She held her grimy hands out, then nodded toward the door. “Getting hard to hold tools properly. I’ll be right back.”
He nodded. And the guard at the door stepped aside when she thumped him on the shoulder.
Down a short, dimly lit corridor she found facilities meant for the Resaurians, but she managed adequately. As well as washing out some of the grime burning at the corner of her left eye, Sonya used a handful of water to slick her hair back, wetting it as protection against the humid engineering spaces. She stared into a mirrored wall, seeing the dark circles under her eyes, knowing that she had only hours to find Es’a’s problem and help fix it. Part of her mind worked on the repairs that were likely to be needed—necessary—if anyone on the station hoped to see real space again. But another part kept turning over the small clues she’d picked up over the last few hours.
“They did this,” she whispered aloud, repeating Es’a’s words. “We have done this as well.”
Ulsah’s behavior. Her awkward shyness.
A new generation of traditionalists and forward-thinkers.
No!
Sonya pushed herself away from the mirrored wall. She hit the door hard, slamming it back with a bang, and sprinted for the engineering space and its maze of conduits and workstations. Her feet pounded an alarm against the steel deck. She knew what it was that S’eth—and Es’a—had kept from her. The stakes were going up, high enough to force either side to take the most drastic action available if they could not be brought to some kind of arrangement. She had to start things moving right away.
Which was the last thought to race through her mind, before arms reached out of an open doorway, grabbed her by her shoulders, and pulled her into a darkened room.
Chapter
7
The long, laborious climb down the lift shaft and the following search had taken a great deal out of Rennan Konya. He considered himself in great shape with his regular security training. But the emergency ladder’s rungs had been set too far apart for a non-Resaurian, and the frequent tremors shaking the station forced him to keep a death grip on each rail.
By the time he began exploring the lower levels of the station, his thighs already felt tight and his shoulders ached severely. He spent a great deal of effort working his way around the many watchstations set out by the Resaurians and avoiding their patrols. Alerted to their presence by his ability to tap into the motor reflex of other beings, he was always able to find a hiding place inside empty rooms or in the overhead pipes that ran along many corridor ceilings. But the constant effort to keep his own screens down and feel every twitch and strain in those moving near him, around him, in decks beneath him—it demanded a toll as well.
So when he finally sensed the familiar ache of a human’s lower back pain, he tracked in on it slowly but with a measure of relief.
Down a spiral stairca
se and through a large steam heat distribution venue, he approached with care, waiting to discover the guards set on Commander Gomez. He’d seen her on the way to the refresher station, but held back in the shadows while keeping an eye out. He spotted no furtive demeanor in Gomez’s movement; she certainly did not look like an escaped prisoner. He had to assume she was under some kind of surveillance. He still hadn’t spotted it by the time she decided to return, running as if there would be Resaurians chasing her, armed to the fangs. Chancing his own discovery, he clapped a hand over Gomez’s mouth as he pulled her into the room, wanting to take her from the corridor quickly and quietly in case anyone was close. His Betazoid training sparked a warning as Gomez drove her elbow back violently, relying on conditioning long since ingrained as a natural reaction. He barely had time to shift his weight before she buried her elbow into his midriff. Air rushed out in a desperate exhale.
“Commander,” he wheezed. He caught her next blow as she came around with a right hook, wrapping his arm around hers, trapping it. “Commander, it’s me.”
She jumped back, startled at his appearance. “Rennan? What the hell are you doing down here?”
“Keep it down,” he whispered, glancing into the corridor. “Where are they?”
“Who?”
“The Resaurians chasing you.”
Her black hair looked disheveled and dirty, streaked with an oily grime and slicked back from her elfin face. There was a smudge on her left ear that he wanted to wipe clean, so unbefitting an officer but quite appropriate for the engineer in her. Decorum did not stop him. The puzzled frown and the following exasperation did.
“Oh, for…Rennan, I don’t have time for you right now. Come on.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him into the corridor, heedless of their discovery. He felt her urgency in the tense set of her shoulders but no sense of panic. The flight-or-fight response was definitely missing from her posture and also in the way she put herself in front of the plasma welder brought to bear on him as the door opened to a new engineering space and a Resaurian guard snapped to feral attention.
“Easy,” she said with unnatural calm. “He’s with me.”
Rennan hated having to carry a phaser. Weapons were too often relied upon by security, when diplomacy and fast thinking should have sufficed. But the danger he read in the reptilian faces, and the tightening grips on weapons and tools, made him suddenly glad for his sidearm. He moved on the balls of his feet, hands always in view but ready for quick and decisive action. A panel operator coiled away from him. Her abdomen muscles spasmed, and he jumped away from her, thinking that she had tensed herself for an attack. Instead, she wrapped arms protectively around herself and slithered back several meters.
The Resaurian who waited for them did so with ill-concealed impatience. He shifted from foot to foot, his thick tail lashing out behind him. “Should this make me nervous?” he asked with a wheezing hiss. “You did not leave here with a friend.”
“Blue,” Gomez exclaimed. Rennan looked around, saw no sign of that color. It was the first thought, though, that Gomez decided to challenge this Resaurian with. “Es’a. The small Resaurian you had watching me earlier had smaller scales, and blue! Where are they?”
This was Es’a? The nest-breaker? Rennan felt the alien’s sickness, the fire raging within his body, burning up his strength. This did not feel like the strong leader S’eth had made him out to be. Leaders paled over the years, of course. But the Resaurian did not move as if he possessed a mature body taken over by the ravages of age. His muscles, his joints, they felt more like a stunted youth.
And his flesh crawled with a desperate flush.
“What is it you mean?” Es’a asked.
“You know what I mean. If you’re willing to go to such lengths for them, S’eth will be as well. It’s going to bring disaster. We’ve got to get this sorted out, and I mean now.”
“It will not change anything,” he said, glancing at the nearby Resaurian who hovered protectively at the edge of the conversation.
Rennan was still behind, but catching up fast. First and foremost, he now knew that Gomez had not been kept as a prisoner. No matter how she had been taken from the team, she had remained voluntarily. Given her appearance, there were obviously engineering concerns she felt important enough to mitigate other concerns. Es’a’s reaction told Rennan that there might be one other thing going on that the Resaurian might consider even more critical. The security agent followed the alien’s gaze to the nearby panel operator. His abdomen hitched and jumped with sympathetic spasms.
And he knew.
“You’re pregnant,” he announced.
Gomez was right. This changed everything.
Chapter
8
Gold watched, in a detached way, as Carol Abramowitz and Bart Faulwell entered the bridge and stopped dead in their tracks. Abramowitz’s mouth might just have fit a half-dozen tribbles. He’d called her to the bridge to be present when they had their next run-in with Third Councilman Sha’a. She must have been with Faulwell, who had tagged along, no doubt feeling useless in a crisis with no call for his particular skills in cryptography or symbolic analysis.
Abramowitz, however, was still in her element, as Gold wanted backup from the ship’s cultural specialist in his next dealings with the Resaurians. He had no doubt he’d be hearing from the councilman soon enough, providing that the da Vinci crawled back from the brink of the Demon’s event horizon. The Dutiful Burden doggedly maintained its tractor lock, though it trailed the da Vinci’s fall by several hundred kilometers. Pointless, as both vessels were caught in the inexorable grip of the Demon.
He had another reason for wanting Abramowitz on the bridge, though he’d never admit to it. She was a good barometer and adviser for situations where his bridge crew would be too by-the-book and an engineer would simply default into technical jargon. There were times, Gold had seen, when being a scientist robbed one of the ability to simply sit back and observe the beauty or terror unfolding around you.
Gravimetric waves increased in frequency and strength the farther in they fell, rocking the ship with more fervor. Gold had become so used to the turbulence he’d almost forgotten about it, but not even a drunk Klingon could ignore the thrumming vibrations that rang through the whole vessel. And the farther they fell, the slower the ship moved as more and more power was dedicated to the structural integrity field. Each gravimetric wave had to be registered on sensors, and the ship maneuvered in this high-gravity soup to take the brunt along solid shield facings.
“Wong, how are we doing?”
“If Tev’s numbers are correct, we’ll be transversing the photon sphere in moments.” All eyes fixed on the main viewscreen.
The da Vinci crawled forward at a bare kilometer per minute. And that was still far too fast. They watched as a perfectly round hole sliced through the very fabric of existence, tunneling into…nothing. Even in the farthest depths of the quadrant Gold had found existence. Comets. Nebulae. Protomatter. Ejected coronas of supernovas. Even space dust. Though much of the matter could be clocked at millions and at times billions of years old, it still existed. This, however, could only be called the antithesis of what life meant. No, Gold corrected himself. Not just life—too narrow a definition. Existence itself.
Gold knew his wife would chide him that God made everything. However, if He’d made black holes, they were the largest drains in existence, where He flushed anything He no longer needed.
Like Gold’s crew, if they were not careful.
The ship continued its descent. The forward viewscreen showed absolute darkness, as though the ship were nudging into the universe’s largest tar pit. Only one where the dinosaurs were still alive somewhere in its depths and their angry kicks sent crushing ripples expanding out in every direction.
“Sidescreen.” If the front showed nothing, he wanted to see what they were passing through. Abramowitz gasped and Gold himself felt tingles rippling along his skin and setting his fingertips afire.
The universe had begun to crush itself. God’s drain, no doubt about it. And at the bottom, the universe’s trash compactor. The ultimate plunger rammed and thudded against existence, squishing the universe down into a thin band. What had once been the visible universe in front of them, now stretched in a concentric circle perpendicular to the orientation of the da Vinci. Not just the visible universe in front, but from behind them as well.
Einstein Rings. The words rang in Gold’s head and he chased after it, latching on to it with all his might. That’s what Tev had called them in a meeting that had occurred in another life.
Glancing over at Abramowitz, he could see the fear, naked on her face, a fear to match his own. Here they were, peeling back the very fabric of reality to show the skeletal underpinnings, and everyone immediately backpedaled in fear. Too awesome. Too grand. Too terrible. Too…simply too.
Perhaps all scientists, regardless of their outward façades, or their intellect, when they brushed up against such terrible magnificence, had to take refuge in their science. In their words and their calculations and their theories, or they’d simply collapse in fright.
Another sickening swaying lurch of the ship and the wonders of the universe continued to unfold. A second ring. Now a third. Gold had heard numerous accounts of bubble universes and other dimensions. He’d even spoken with respected, trusted comrades who had such experiences, and yet he’d never really been able to bring himself to believe.
Now, as he witnessed not simply the compacting of the universe, but its very replication as easy as one-two-three, he believed.
“Captain, there’s another ship following us in.”
The Demon Book 2 Page 4