Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Not up to me. For what it’s worth, my bet is that Qadir will take a good long time deciding. Then again, you won’t be in any position to worry about anything in a few more minutes. I said, back away.”

  “Why didn’t you kill us earlier? No, wait, I know. The residual weapons discharge would show up on scan, and I’ll bet Arava will run an interior scan on this aircar as soon as you get back. If it shows up that a weapon was fired…”

  “Then bad luck for me.” The Bolian nodded. “She’d know something happened. For right now, it’s better that she not know.”

  Halak’s belly tightened. “What are you going to do to her?”

  The Bolian made a face. “I told you. I don’t know what they have planned. Not my department.”

  “No, I suppose not. Just killing us.”

  “That’s right. Come on now, back away.”

  Halak still didn’t move. “And I guess the other problem for you is that Arava expects this shuttle to be gone. A corpse can’t fly. Oh, but the computer’s got a preprogrammed flight path. Damn,” Halak feigned incredulity, though he wondered how he’d been so stupid, “you gave me two clues, and I missed that one, too. And I’ll lay odds that something really bad’s going to happen to the engines right outside of Farius Prime space.”

  “Let’s just say you’ll have a really bad accident.”

  “Right, because the unexplained disappearance of two Starfleet officers would draw too much attention to Farius Prime. But if our ship explodes a nice distance away, that solves a lot of problems. Only you can’t leave us alive until that happens.”

  “Because you might get smart all of a sudden and figure it all out, find how I rigged the explosive, and keep yourself from blowing up—more bad luck, but for me this time. My employers don’t like mistakes. But you want to know the real reason I didn’t kill you before now?” The Bolian’s lips split in a wide grin. “I didn’t want to have to carry you. You’d be amazed how heavy dead people are. So much easier if you just walk into the shuttle, and we do it in there. Now,” the Bolian waggled his pulse gun once, “away from the door. Bring her, too.”

  “She’s not part of this,” said Halak, knowing this wouldn’t do them any good. His hand crept by painful millimeters toward his phaser. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “She knows you. Too bad for her.” The Bolian gestured with the pulse gun. “And that phaser you’ve got? Don’t think about it. Hands in the air where I can see them, now.”

  Halak’s shoulders slumped. He lifted his hands, palms-out, in an attitude of surrender.

  The Bolian moved a step closer. “Which side?”

  “The right.” Halak’s last chance, he knew: He could make a grab for the pulse gun when the Bolian got closer.

  The Bolian jammed the muzzle of his weapon against Halak’s left temple. “You make one move, you even sneeze, I’ll burn you right now.”

  Halak felt that last burst of hope drain away. He stood very still as the Bolian patted around his waist until he found the phaser.

  “Thank you.” The Bolian jerked the phaser free and stepped back. “Now move two steps to your right, please. Not a step more.”

  Halak did as he was told. Stone squealed beneath his slippers. The Bolian flicked the pulse gun at Batra. “Out of the car.”

  Batra slid from her seat and stood, hands up. The Bolian gestured with his weapon. “That pouch: Unsnap it, then open it and shake out you’ve got in there. Once it’s empty, toss it on the ground in front of you and then step back.”

  Slowly, Batra reached her hands around to the small of her back. There was a tiny click, and the straps of her pouch fell away from her waist. Batra gathered the straps in her left hand.

  “Open it and empty it, I said.”

  Batra did as she was told. A credit chip and identification pattered to the ground. Then she let the pouch slip from her fingers. The pouch whispered against gravel and scree.

  “Back up,” said the Bolian. “Over there, to the right, next to him.” He waited until Batra had moved into position; then he dropped to his haunches and, keeping his weapon trained on them, stirred the pouch’s contents with his free hand. “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” said Batra. Her voice was tight. “That’s all.”

  The Bolian pushed to his feet. His knees crackled, and Halak had an absurd thought. He hadn’t known that Bolians got chondromalasia.

  “Okay. Move,” said the Bolian. “Toward the shuttle.”

  They started for the shuttle, Halak first. The going was treacherous. The couloir’s floor was studded with rock, and slurries of scree made the footing slippery. His slippers were soft and flexible, not made for climbing, the jagged edges of rocks biting the sensitive undersides of his feet, and he winced, staggered. His balance was off, too, because the Bolian made them keep their hands up and visible. Behind, he could hear Batra shuffling and sliding over rocks, with the Bolian carefully picking his way a short distance behind.

  Suddenly, there was a sliding noise as Batra lost her balance, and then the sound of rock scraping against rock. Batra gave a single sharp cry. Halak jerked around in time to see her tumble to her knees. He moved toward her.

  “Stop,” said the Bolian. “She can get up on her own.”

  “Please,” said Halak, “let me help her.”

  “Absolutely not. Stand clear.”

  “Sorry,” said Batra. Halak heard tears edging her voice. Her face was turned back over her shoulder toward the Bolian, and Halak couldn’t see her expression. Her left hand clutched her left foot. “But I twisted my ankle. I don’t think I can stand.”

  “Get up,” said the Bolian. He twitched the pulse gun. “Now.”

  Her sobs tearing from her throat, Batra made some feeble scrambling motions. “I can’t.”

  “Let me go to her,” Halak repeated.

  “No.” The Bolian watched as Batra rolled onto her right side and then got most of her weight onto her right knee. “Come on.”

  “Almost,” said Batra. She was panting. “Almost there,” she said, trying to balance on her right foot. But she slid, and spilled onto the rocks again.

  Halak clenched his fists in frustration. “For God’s sake!”

  “Stay where you are,” said the Bolian. “Keep your hands up where I can see them!” Cursing, he scrambled over the rocks until he was standing over Batra. Bending at the waist, he reached across his body with his left hand and grabbed Batra’s left bicep.

  “I said,” he seethed, hauling her upright, his feet slithering on rocks, “stand up…”

  Suddenly, Batra exploded in motion. Surging up, she brought her right arm whipping around, and Halak caught the flash of something long and metallic.

  The knife. His mouth gaped in astonishment. The knife she’d taken from the men that afternoon.

  And then he remembered: She’d tucked it into her waistband.

  With a wild screeching howl, Batra jammed the knife into the Bolian’s left flank. The Bolian arched and screamed. The sudden movement threw them both off-balance on the rocks, and Batra, still howling, had the knife in her hand, and as the Bolian lurched backward, she threw her weight forward, driving the knife in deeper. Halak saw them stagger and nearly fall, and then he saw the Bolian’s face twist with rage and pain, his right hand jerk. The hand with the pulse gun.

  “Ani!” Halak shouted. It was as if he’d been in suspended animation and suddenly snapped back to life. He sprang forward, his hands outstretched, trying to get there in time. “Ani, Ani, the gun, the gun, look out for the gun!”

  The Bolian fired. There was a flash, a sizzle. A sweet smell that reminded Halak of burnt pork.

  Batra shrieked—once.

  “Oh God, no! What have you done?” Halak was rocketing toward the Bolian, even as Batra’s body sagged to the rocks. “What have you done? What have you done, what have you done!?”

  Halak slammed into the Bolian. Matsaro’s breath whooshed from his lungs, and Halak’s momentum lifted the Bolia
n from Batra’s body and brought him crashing down onto his back. Halak heard a ripping sound, and his mind registered, dimly, that his back wound had torn open again. Pain rippled like liquid fire down into his hips and up to his right arm, and in another instant, Halak felt a warm stream of his own blood drizzling down his skin, pooling at his waist.

  But then the moment passed, and Halak barely felt his own body. It was as if that single bright point of grief—that instant when Batra had screamed and Halak had known that she was truly, irrevocably dead—had burned his brain clean, searing into his consciousness until his mind boiled with a single, awful purpose: vengeance.

  Beneath him, Halak felt the Bolian twitch, then heave as the knife was driven in up to the hilt. He heard a hitch in the Bolian’s breathing and the harsh rasp of the Bolian’s breath in his ear, and he was dimly aware that the Bolian still had his pulse gun clenched in his right hand and was struggling to bring his arm around.

  Halak’s fingers scrabbled over an edge of sharp stone, and then his right hand closed around the rock. Rolling atop the Bolian, he straddled the Bolian’s chest, planting his knees on either side of the Bolian’s head.

  “No, no, no!” Halak screamed and brought the rock smashing down. The impact of rock against hard bone shivered up Halak’s arms; there was the sound that a ripe melon makes when it’s been thrown against a wall, and Halak felt the Bolian’s body jerk and flop beneath his body like a beached fish slapping against a dock.

  “No, no!” Clutching the rock, he raised both hands above his head and brought the rock down again and again. “No, no, oh God, no, no…”

  Halak kept on long after the Bolian had stopped twitching. He kept on until the sound the rock made as it crushed through skull and flesh and tore through brain became soft and wet, and he kept on until his arms burned with fatigue, and the rock was so slippery that Halak couldn’t hold on anymore, and the rock slid from his fingers.

  Halak slumped over the Bolian’s body. His breath jerked in quick, sharp paroxysms, and his hands were slick with the Bolian’s blood. His own blood oozed along his skin and pattered to the thirsty earth, like a slow, steady rain.

  And then—he wasn’t sure when, or how—Halak was hunched over Batra. She lay on her back, her arms outstretched. There was a ragged burned patch over her left breast where the blast from the pulse gun had seared her skin, ripped into her chest, and ruptured her heart, and in the light from the headlamps that fanned the darkness he could see that her eyes were open and her lips peeled back from her teeth in a death rictus.

  “Ani,” he said brokenly, reaching for her face. This time, her skin wasn’t cool. It was icy, the warmth leeching away under his fingers even as he knelt beside her.

  “Oh, Ani, Ani, Ani.” Halak gathered Batra’s limp body into his arms. He folded her to his breast and dipped his face into her hair. He inhaled the scent of jasmine and lemon, the scent that was his beloved Ani. He wept, alone, under an alien sky.

  Then he carried her to the shuttle. The shuttle was small—only big enough for two—and there was no place for him to lay her out properly. In the end, he settled for detaching a restraining harness from one of the shuttle’s two chairs and strapping her body in place along the deck, looping the harness around her legs and chest and buckling the harness to a plate that ran the length of the shuttle’s starboard side.

  He stood over Matsaro for a few minutes. The Bolian didn’t have a head anymore: just a misshapen, pulpy mass of smashed bone and flesh and blood. Stooping, Halak pulled the pulse-gun from Matsaro’s dead fingers and stuck it into his damp, bloody waistband, and he retrieved his phaser. Then, grabbing fistfuls of the Bolian’s shirt, Halak hauled him back along the rocks and then hoisted the Bolian into the aircar. The Bolian slithered along the length of the front seat, his body twisted and his left hip jutting up, so that what was left of Matsaro’s head hung down, out of sight.

  Halak was seized with a sudden wave of dizziness, and then nausea. He slumped against the side of the aircar, turned his head to one side, and vomited. When he was through, he clung to the cool metal of the aircar, fighting to stay conscious.

  Lost a lot of blood. Halak ran his tongue over his lips, but his lips were numb and didn’t feel right. His legs were wobbly, and his vision was narrowing to a single point. Lost a lot of blood, that’s all, and…oh my God, oh my God, Ani, Ani…

  He couldn’t lose consciousness. Halak’s brain moved slowly, and he felt sluggish, stupid. He had to stay conscious. He shook his head from side to side, and it felt as if his face was as gluey as molten taffy, his movements slow and languid. Slowly, he reached in and punched in a new heading. He heard a click, then a whine as the aircar’s engine caught.

  Stay focused—Halak programmed the aircar’s speed and angle of descent—one thing at a time.

  On an afterthought, he tossed in his phaser and the pulse-gun, heard them clatter against something metallic and disappear into the well in front of the driver’s seat. Best not to have them on him. Then, reaching up with both hands, he forced the doors of the aircar down and shut. The movement made the pain in his side much worse.

  “Please,” he panted, pushing down hard on the door until he heard the lock engage. “Please, please, please, God, please.”

  Staggering back, he watched as the aircar shivered, then rose on its column of compressed air. The aircar turned, and Halak felt air puff against his face, and a chill rippled through his sweat-slicked skin. The aircar turned a lazy circle and then began its climb, heading east. The aircar’s lights dwindled then winked out.

  They might not find the body for a long time, if ever. Halak turned and began to trudge back to the shuttle. Every step made his stomach lurch and heave. He didn’t know how long it would take the aircar to sink, but with the speed at which the aircar would slam into the sea, there might not be much left to sink anyway. Probably not much of a body left either. That would be good for Arava and give her some time to get away.

  Inside the shuttle, he found a flashlight. Then, he went back out and crawled along on his hands and knees, feeling and looking for the explosive. He found it, finally, nestled at the very back of the port nacelle, attached to the outside of the hull and rigged to detonate as soon as anything other than short-range communications was accessed. They would have disintegrated the instant they hailed Enterprise.

  It took him an hour to reach hailing distance. During the flight, he hadn’t looked at Batra’s body, because he had to work hard on the simple act of flying the shuttle. That, and staying conscious. He’d figured out how to bypass the preprogrammed flight path not because he needed to—the computer lockout was programmed to drop as soon as the shuttle’s sensors told the computer that the ship was out of Farius Prime’s space—but because it gave him something to do. He felt drained, dull. Empty. Dead.

  Halak opened a channel. “Enterprise,” he said, slurring the word, “Enterprise, this is Halak. Enterprise, this is an emergency hail, this is…”

  His gaze fell on Batra’s body, and then it was as if he peered through a pane of flawed glass.

  She never answered. Grief balled in his throat, and it was as if a giant fist had reached in, taken hold of his heart, and squeezed. She never really answered the question, and now she never can. Never will.

  “Enterprise,” Halak said again. Tears crawled along his cheeks, but he didn’t care if they knew he was weeping. “Enterprise.”

  Chapter 13

  “Captain, I’m busy,” Marta Batanides protested. Her coiffed pillow of brown hair was showing the strain; errant tendrils feathered her neck. “I don’t have time to argue with you about this.”

  Captain Rachel Garrett gave a short bark of derisive laughter, though none of this was funny in the slightest. She was so angry the muscles in her neck were taut as Vulcan lute strings, and her shoulders hurt. She knew she’d pay for this later—a migraine to beat the band for sure. Just as soon as she had the time and luxury to have one.

  Thank God, she was i
n her ready room (where she seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time these days, tending to business). When the Vulcan warpshuttle had come alongside Enterprise an hour ago, Garrett had such a heated exchange with the Starfleet Intelligence officer onboard—a Lieutenant Laura Burke—the Enterprise’s bridge hummed with tension. After that, she decided that it was better to do battle with Starfleet Intelligence in private, with the gloves off: mano a mano, as it were.

  “You don’t have time? Gee, that’s too bad. I suggest you make it, Marta.” Unlike Commander Batanides, Garrett didn’t take refuge behind formalities. The two women had known each other—albeit briefly—when Garrett had been on a layover on Starbase Earhart in 2327. Garrett had been heading back to the Carthage, where she was XO. Batanides was fresh out of the Academy. Batanides was a striking woman then—a lean brunette with a long neck and wide, almost oval-shaped blue eyes—and Garrett had seen nothing in the face that stared out of her companel to change her opinion. The two women had struck up a casual friendship; Garrett wasn’t there long enough for more than a few drinks in the bar. Garrett remembered Batanides as a somewhat anxious young ensign waiting for her first assignment. There were two others from her class, she recalled, close friends that Garrett hadn’t met at all, though she’d heard through the grapevine that there’d been a bar fight the day after Garrett shipped out: a couple of Nausciaans and one of Batanides’s friends. The friend was unarmed, and so, of course, one of the Nausicaans pulled a knife. Stabbed Batanides’s friend in the back, right through the heart, or so Garrett understood. It figured; Nausicaans were never known to worry about little things, such as fair play.

  Well, as far as Garrett was concerned, it would be fair play all the way as long as she was in charge of Enterprise: everything on the up and up, and out front, something Starfleet Intelligence wasn’t exactly famous for.

  “Now,” Garrett said, taking aim with her right index finger, “either you deal straight with me, or your people are going to hang in space a long, long time, and I mean it, Marta. I’ll take this as high as it needs to go. I am not going along with this until I understand why the hell they’re here in the first place. They show up unannounced, no advance warning, no contact from Starfleet Command, nothing. I don’t get a single communiqué; no one’s on the horn to me. Last time I checked, our communications systems were working just fine. So I’ll just chalk it up to an oversight on your part. But you want cooperation from this moment forward? Then you damn well ask me for it. Now, on whose authority is Burke here?”