by David Stern
“She was a doctor,” he said, and now his voice did crack, and a picture flashed across his mind, the one he kept in his quarters, the picture of the two of them at her graduation ceremony. “Like father, like daughter,” Mark Piper had said when he snapped it. Only now—
“Dr. Jaya Wandruska,” said Liyan.
“Yes. Her married name.”
“She was assigned to Starbase Eighteen. Of course.” Liyan nodded. “That is the reason your work on Argelius was continually referred to in her files. It makes sense now.”
Part of Boyce knew that what Liyan was saying was important, that it was related to the whole reason he was there, the whole reason she’d contacted Enterprise in the first place.
Part of him didn’t care at all.
“You killed her,” he said.
“Unfortunately, I did.” The tallith frowned. “This complicates matters.”
“Not for me. For me, it makes them a whole lot simpler.”
Boyce pulled the knife out from his lap.
Liyan’s eyes widened.
He lunged.
TEN
Liyan had seen his clumsy attempts to hide the weapon; she had expected then what was happening now. Idiot. Did he take her for a fool? Did he think she would leave herself unprotected if there was any danger?
Even after Boyce drew the knife, she waited, hoping that he would think better of attacking her. But when he lunged …
She moved, too. The serum flowed through her veins, lending her speed, strength. The human’s efforts were like a child’s. The knife flashed forward, and she seized his wrist.
His eyes widened in surprise. She bent his arm back, and he dropped the weapon. It fell to the floor between them.
She stared at it and felt the blood pounding in her veins, felt the strength circulating in her body. She was tallith; true heir of K’rgon. It was her destiny to rule not just the Orions but the entire galaxy, as K’rgon had in the times of old. That this human dared attack her … she had a moment of wanting to pick the weapon up herself, to turn it on Boyce.
Their eyes met. She saw fear within his, fear and surprise. And then his gaze shifted.
“Your arm.” He pointed.
Liyan looked down.
Her arm. The veins on it were visibly pulsing, the skin around them darkening.
She felt a tinge of fear. That it was happening this soon, after the last treatment …
Time was growing short.
“The girl in the medical wing, Deleen,” Boyce said. “The same thing was happening to her.”
“Yes.”
“What’s causing it?” The doctor was frowning. His anger, for the moment, dissipated. He was curious, Liyan saw.
Perfect.
“Come with me,” she said. “And I will show you.”
What in the hell was going on here?
It wasn’t just the fact that Liyan had overpowered him but the way she had done it, the speed with which she moved. Boyce had dealt with other species with accelerated metabolism before, but they were all strictly nonhumanoid. With Liyan, though there must be some sort of enhancement going on here. She must have taken some sort of drug, had some kind of genetic augmentation that enabled Liyan to move the way she had.
Either that, or he was getting old a lot faster than he thought.
“Zai Romeen, Doctor. Have you heard of it?”
Boyce shook his head. “Can’t say as I have.”
They were walking side-by-side down the corridor, Liyan’s guards a few paces behind.
“No reason you should have, I suppose,” she said. “It’s a single-planet star system on the far edge of the Borderland, several months’ travel time from here, even at warp six. We stumbled across it in the wake of our first major clash with the Klingons. Our four marauders, armed to the teeth. Invincible. Or so we thought.” Her voice hardened. “The Empire taught us differently. We—this ship, Karkon’s Wing —were the only one of the four to escape.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Boyce asked.
She glanced sideways at him and smiled. “Zai Romeen was where we came out of warp. Not on purpose, mind you. The engines simply stopped working. And there we were, stranded in the middle of nowhere. Without a functional propulsion system, with weapons and shields inoperative. My dream of restoring the Orion people to our former glory—of echoing K’rgon’s five-hundred-year reign as tallith—seemed to be over before it started.”
“Five-hundred-year reign?” Boyce shook his head. “That sounds more like myth than history.”
“Yes, it does.” She stopped walking, turned to him, and smiled. “Though I have found—perhaps you have had this experience as well—that at the heart of every myth, there is always the seed of some truth.”
They had stopped in front of a hatchway, of a style that looked very familiar to Boyce. It was an airlock, he realized, identical to the one he and the landing party had walked through, coming off Magellan.
“Come, Dr. Boyce. Let me show you what we found at Zai Romeen. Or, rather, in orbit around it.”
She nodded to one of the guards, who stepped forward and touched a section of wall. It slid aside, revealing a storage locker. The guard pulled out two heavy parkas, handed one to the tallith, the other to Boyce.
She put hers on. Boyce, after a second’s hesitation, followed suit.
Liyan preceded him into the airlock. The outer door shut; the inner one opened. Boyce felt a sudden chill.
“The temperature in here is slightly below freezing,” she said. “To preserve the samples.”
What samples? Boyce was about to ask, but she was already moving, stepping through the airlock, into the docking bay beyond. Boyce followed and, a second later, had the answer to his question.
The docking bay had been converted into a single huge chamber—forty feet wide, twice as long, half again as high. Equipment—Boyce spotted the LeKarz—lay arrayed along the far wall. There were a dozen other people in the room, gathered in groups of two or three around various pieces of machinery.
It was a lab of some sort, he realized.
“Here, Doctor. Come see.”
Liyan had moved to the far end of the chamber, to the single largest piece of machinery, a cylindrical object, standing on one end, perhaps four and half meters tall, half a meter in diameter. At first it looked like an unbroken sheet of material, only, as Boyce came closer, he saw that the surface was faceted, built up of smaller, diamond-shaped pieces of metal, perhaps six inches a side. Some of the facets were missing.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A ship.”
“A ship?” He walked around the object, stepping over a half-dozen color-coded cables that ran from the cylinder to a diagnostic console six meters away. “Looks awfully small to be a ship.”
“It is a single-person craft.”
“I don’t see a propulsion system.”
“I would be surprised if you did. In seventy years of looking, we have yet to find one ourselves.”
He turned to face her. “This is what you found at Zai Romeen, I take it.”
“That’s right. Entirely by accident. It could have lain undiscovered for another ten thousand years, if we hadn’t bumped—or, rather, not bumped—right into it.”
Boyce frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Zai Romeen’s single planet is ringed by meteors. This was disguised as one of them.”
“Disguised.”
“An image projector. There.” She gestured toward a sphere, perhaps half a meter in diameter, that lay at the foot of the cylinder—the spaceship. “It’s really quite a remarkable piece of equipment.”
“Your sensors couldn’t tell the difference between a projected image and solid matter?”
“Projector is perhaps the wrong word. The device is capable of creating simulations that can fool even the most sophisticated sensors. Such as those on Starbase Eighteen.”
Boyce got it right away. “The attack. This is what you used. To
make them think the ships were Klingon …”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
“It’s all very interesting,” he said, suddenly angry once more. “All very impressive. Your new technology. But I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
“New?” Liyan shook her head. “On the contrary. This technology is thousands of years old. From Karkon’s time, the Second Empire. Everything you see here”—she swept a hand before her—“is the product of those days. Orion civilization, at its height.”
Boyce frowned. He was, admittedly, no historian, though he did know there that had been several—heck, maybe even dozens—highly advanced civilizations in this quadrant, civilizations that had risen to star flight, and fallen back into savagery. But the Orions?
He’d never heard of any sort of technology like this being associated with them before.
“Something else I want to show you, Doctor,” she said, and without waiting for a response, she moved past him, heading toward the far corner of the reconfigured shuttlebay, where Boyce saw a group of four scientists huddled together around something. Another diagnostic console, he thought at first. And then, as he drew closer and was able to see past the scientists, he saw the object for what it truly was.
A body.
An Orion, male, of immense size. Bigger than Gurgis, even, with skin a far darker shade of green than on any Orion Boyce had yet seen. Naked and quite obviously dead, laid out on an examining table, part of his chest peeled back, with tubing and sensory instruments of various sizes inserted into it.
The veins on his body stood out like black ropes against his flesh.
“Any progress?” Liyan asked the scientists—three males, one female—who now stepped a few feet back from the body and regarded the tallith apprehensively.
“Nothing of import, Majesty,” the female said.
Boyce took a few steps closer. What Liyan had said earlier about preserving the samples—he understood that now. He could see his breath in front of him, which meant it was below freezing in the shuttle, but …
“It’s not cold enough in here to keep his body from decaying.”
“Under normal circumstances, no,” Liyan said. “But these are not normal circumstances.”
“I’m getting that,” Boyce said.
“You know who this is, Doctor?” She walked around the body, trailing her right hand along the edge of the table as she went. “A rhetorical question, of course,” she said before Boyce could respond. “Because you are not Codruta. You are not even Orion. So how could you know the story of K’rgon, or Madragas, or the battle of Akana, where the world killers were subdued. Or the ten sentries, whom K’rgon set to guard the borders of the Empire. But we”—Liyan gestured toward the scientists, who had remained virtually motionless, rooted in place ever since the tallith had approached them—“we who belong to the Confederacy know all those stories. Down to the very names of those ten sentries. Do we not, Zandar?”
The woman nodded. “Yes, Majesty.”
“The ten sentries, Zandar,” Liyan said. “Can you name them for the doctor here?”
“Yes, Majesty.” The woman smiled. A forced smile. In her eyes, Boyce saw sheer, naked terror. “There was Heythum, the first. Boren. Adai and Argost, Marriyan and Munya, Gozen and—”
“Gozen. Thank you, Zandar.” She smiled at Boyce. “The ten sentries who guarded the far corners of the Second Empire for the half-millennium K’rgon was tallith—and another five hundred years beyond.”
Boyce had heard enough. “Not that I don’t appreciate the history lesson, but would you mind telling me what this has to do with me? With why you’ve brought me here?”
She brushed a hand lightly along the skin of the dead man’s upper arm. “This is Gozen,” she said.
Boyce frowned. “What?”
“K’rgon’s sentry. One of the ten he chose to guard the Empire. This is his body. That”—she gestured toward the ship she had shown Boyce earlier—“his vessel.”
“This is Gozen.”
“Yes.”
“From a thousand years ago.”
“That is correct.”
Ridiculous, he wanted to say. The body before them couldn’t be more than a few days old. Probably a victim of the Singhino attack. He looked over at the scientists. The three males were all still staring at the floor, the female—Zandar—still smiling nervously. Why were they going along with this insanity?
He saw that one of the sensor probes attached to the body ran to a standard chemanalyzer console.
“Mind if I run a little test of my own?” he asked, gesturing toward the device.
“By all means. Help yourself.”
Boyce did. He grabbed the probe, ran a standard carbon-dating test, got some clearly erroneous results, recalibrated the machine, and ran the test again.
And got the same clearly erroneous, blatantly impossible results.
“Problem?” Liyan asked.
“There’s something wrong with your machine here,” Boyce said.
“Why? What is it telling you?”
“That this body is fifteen hundred years old.”
Liyan smiled. Boyce frowned. It was a trick. Had to be. He knew a way around it.
He touched the probe to the inside of his own wrist. Sixty-one years. He shook his head.
“The machine is accurate, Doctor,” Liyan said.
Boyce spun, lifted the probe from his wrist, and extended it toward her. She held out one arm.
“Go ahead.”
He did, touched the probe to her skin, and watched the number change. He’d expected it to go down. Liyan, by his guess, was at least a decade younger than he was.
But the number went up. And up and up. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred. It stopped.
He looked at the tallith and frowned.
And remembered something. Something Lieutenant Hoto had said aboard the courier ship. Something he had paid little attention to then, because it was so clearly wrong. So blatantly impossible. Something about Liyan having assumed leadership of the Codruta seventy-five years earlier.
“No,” he said.
“The numbers you see are real, Dr. Boyce.”
“You’re a hundred years old.”
“Give or take a few months.”
“How is that possible?”
She reached beneath the jacket she wore and into her cloak and pulled out something. A vial—clear plastic, about the size of the standard hypo, filled with a quarter-inch’s worth of black liquid.
“It is possible because of this,” she said. “The most important thing we found aboard Gozen’s shuttle, Doctor. The germ of truth of which I spoke. The science behind the legend.”
I don’t understand, Boyce was about to say again, but held his tongue.
Because he did indeed understand. He knew exactly what Liyan was saying.
How could the body on the table be fifteen hundred years old? The woman in front of him going into her second century?
There was only one answer, really. Only one thing that could be in the vial.
He held out his hand. “Can I …”
“Have a look? Examine it? Of course. That’s why you’re here.” He took the vial in his hands and swirled the liquid around. It was thicker than water, he judged. Closer to the viscosity of heavy syrup. And the color wasn’t black, as he had thought at first, but a deep, dark shade of green.
“There were three of these aboard Gozen’s ship,” Liyan said. “This is the last.”
“The Fountain of Youth,” he said.
“More than that, Dr. Boyce. Much more than that.”
“What is it exactly you want me to do?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer to that as well.
“What I want you to do.” Liyan smiled. “Quite simple. Make me more of this.”
ELEVEN
Liyan gave him until the morning to decide; not that Boyce needed the time. She must be delusional, he thought, to suppose that after kill
ing Jaya and Captain Pike—not to mention a hundred or so other people—he’d even consider helping her.
The only thing he had to consider, really, was how he was going to die.
A guard escorted him to the treatment room where he’d left Hoto. To his surprise, she was sitting up in bed, a terminal display in front of her.
“Lieutenant. You’re feeling better?”
“Significantly so, Doctor.” She smiled.
She looked good to Boyce—better than he’d expected. Not just her physical condition, but mentally . . . she seemed alert. And not depressed—not obviously so, at least, which he might have expected, given what had happened to her. Waking up and finding out she was minus an arm.
“M’Lor has given me access to the ship’s medical database,” Hoto said. She gestured to an Orion male—aqua-skinned, tall, thin, with a shock of dark bluish-black hair that fell across his forehead—standing nearby. Boyce recognized him as one of Petri’s assistants. He’d helped Collins with the regen gel, that first day in the medical wing.
“I am browsing through the immediately available prosthetic implants for my arm,” Hoto said. “I am glad you have arrived. Perhaps you can make recommendations.”
“Uhhh …” Boyce frowned. Browsing through implants? With a smile on her face?
Maybe she wasn’t as mentally sound as he’d thought.
“I’ll leave you now,” M’Lor said.
“We will return for your decision at eight hundred hours tomorrow,” the guard added, and then the two left the room.
“Decision?” Hoto asked.
“We’ll talk about it in a minute,” he said, coming around her bedside to look at the screen. “Now, let me take a closer look at—”
He stopped talking because the computer terminal— which he had expected to display images of the implants Hoto had been referring to—showed nothing of the kind.
The screen was split into columns, the right-hand column filled with a series of numbers, the lefthand column text. English text.
“These are not prosthetic implants,” he said.
“No. That was a ruse.”
“So what are you looking at?”
“Output from the ship’s mainframe. M’Lor has foolishly interpreted my physical disability as a mental one as well. I have bypassed the rudimentary safeguards put into place by the Orion computer technicians.”