Stevens wondered at the Klingon’s uncharacteristic eloquence. Then he realized Kairn was encouraging the other by example to speak at length for the benefit of the universal translator.
The native leader spoke again, first tapping the side of his head, then indicating each of the others with an open hand. Stevens noted he had four digits, two long fingers between what seemed to be two thumbs at either side of his palm.
Introductions apparently out of the way, the leader pointed to Soloman, again asking a question.
“Soloman was injured in the explosion,” Kairn answered.
The leader motioned the two riders at the left end of the semicircle forward. One dismounted, towering even taller than Stevens had expected, and bowed to Soloman in what appeared to be respect.
With a gesture to the rest of them to follow, the leader turned his mount and the riders headed back the way they had come at a slow walk.
“It seems we’ve been invited to join them,” Tev said dryly.
Kairn grunted.
With no choice, the party followed the horsemen.
Lauoc hung back and Stevens turned to see the Bajoran hastily arranging stones in an arrow that pointed in the direction the natives were taking them.
He did not ask who it was for.
CHAPTER
14
Domenica Corsi kept her eyes fixed firmly on the job in front of her. Just at the edge of her vision, the stars shot so quickly over the horizon she expected warp streaks. It was difficult enough to work with tools that wanted to fling themselves into space without having to cope with her own vertigo.
Though the Klingon beacon network told her exactly where she was—and that there were a dozen other workers within sight of her—over three thousand square kilometers of curving metal hull could be overwhelming. It was easy to imagine herself alone on a blue metal plane beneath an endlessly rolling sky.
She set her spanner too near the edge of the gravimetric bubble and it began to slide toward the horizon. She caught it with the absentminded skill of long practice, setting it near the personal generator without taking her eyes off the open junction panel.
This phase of the job was simple, and dangerously monotonous in its simplicity. Someday when she had the time, she’d compute the odds on a culture that had never developed active scanning technology choosing hovinga iridium to insulate their conduits. For now, the sensor-blocking compound meant all available personnel—i.e., anyone not already pulling a double shift trying to get the colony vessel’s engines working—had to be on the surface checking tens of thousands of hardwire connections by hand.
Fortunately, ninety-nine percent of the navigational and control network was sealed within the duranium hull, intact except for the region the Dancidii had blasted. The network itself was integral to the hull, laid out before the builders had known where the rockets would need to be placed to balance the ship’s rotation. Each unit was simply mounted on the surface and plugged into the network. That meant external junction boxes at each of the twelve hundred rotational rockets that had to be inspected.
Having external junction boxes on a system like this made no sense to Corsi. On the other hand, sending thousands of people on a two-thousand-year journey inside a tin can because there just might be a habitable world at the other end made even less sense. There was probably some perfectly logical engineering reason for the setup. Like maybe they just came that way.
Green, green, green, green, green, green, green, purple,she read the telltales. Damn.
“Corsi to da Vinci. ”
“Go ahead, Commander.”Haznedl’s voice came crisp and clear. This far from the bow, there was no interference at all.
“I’ve got a break between thrusters nine-sixteen and,” she checked her padd, “seven-two-nine.” She stood and, blocking the view of the horizon with one hand, surveyed the hull as far as she could. “No visible surface damage,” she reported.
“Confirmed,”Haznedl replied. “Disconnects have been reported between unit seven-two-nine and units seven-one-one and three-oh-six as well.”
Corsi consulted her padd again, this time checking the inspection schedule. Thruster seven-two-nine was scheduled to be checked by a Klingon team in thirty-six hours. The next step was obvious, but in any cross-cultural cooperative effort it was best to be sure everyone agreed what obvious meant.
“Bridge, seven-two-nine is less than a kilometer from here. Please ask Commander Gomez to advise the Klingons I wish to divert from scheduled pattern and check thruster seven-two-nine. Be sure to explain why.”
“Understood.”There was a hint of chuckle to Haznedl’s acknowledgment. Then she broke the formal protocols of the open-mike comm system:“Hang on a sec.”
Corsi retrieved her spanner and secured the cover of the junction box while she waited.
Who thought sixteen-sided nuts made sense?
People who think exposed junction boxes on hundred-kilometer-long colony ships make sense think sixteen-sided nuts make sense,she answered herself. She had her tools packed by the time Haznedl got back to her.
“Commander Gomez has consulted with the Klingon engineers.”The lieutenant was once again the model of bureaucratic propriety. “Your diversion has been approved, Commander.”
Corsi snorted at the lieutenant’s choice of words, imagining Faulwell’s—or even Fabe’s—turning it into a quip. She double-checked the coordinates for booster seven-two-nine and jumped clear of the hull.
She used her steering jets to move toward the left as her gravimetrics kept her lightly in touch with the ship spinning beneath her. In normal circumstances, she would have looked ahead for her destination, but motion sickness inside an environmental suit was no joke. She kept her eyes off the horizon and watched the blue metal plane slide by directly below.
When the rocket vent appeared, she toggled her gravimetrics, pulling herself down to the hull. She landed beyond it, of course, and had to walk back. She saw the problem while she was still a dozen meters away.
“Bridge, this is Corsi,” she said. “Looks like it took a rock. Half the junction box is missing.”
* * *
“Tell her to let that one go,” Sonya Gomez told Lieutenant Haznedl. “The structural integrity field will cover it.”
She glanced over at Klath as she closed the connection. The Klingon engineer nodded his agreement. The two turned their attention back to the schematic diagram on the display screen.
The reconstruction command center was a standard Federation environmental hut that had been beamed piecemeal to the colony ship’s hull at the edge of what the S.C.E. team had dubbed the Dancidii Trench. Designed to house a dozen Spacedock workers and their equipment, it gave Gomez and Klath plenty of room to work.
They were fine-tuning the network of field generators that would act as stitches, holding the damaged section of ship steady when thrust was applied. She would have liked about a dozen more generators, but as Klath pointed out possible alternatives, Gomez had to admit they’d done an excellent job with what they had.
At first she had been irritated by the Klingon habit of rigging whatever was immediately available to do a job even when the parts they needed could be easily gotten from stores or fabricated on a replicator. But now she had to admit the Federation practice of using the best available first, then devising alternatives as those ran out would have left them farther behind at this point. As it was they were coming in ahead of schedule. She thought even Captain Scott would be impressed.
Probably surprised as well, Gomez thought; she had been. The Klingon engineers had proven to be remarkably adept and patient: craftsmen who took pride in quality workmanship. Not at all what she had expected.
Some things ran true to form, of course. Like Klingon workers not mentioning dangerous situations, or staying on the job until the last reserves of their environmental suits were exhausted. One technician had finished his shift without informing anyone he had been injured. If Gomez had not noticed the field repai
r to his environmental suit, he would never have reported it.
She had also had her entire team model complete and redundant communication for every action or change of plan, such as the multistep conversation she’d just had with Domenica. The Klingon practice of each individual simply moving on to the next task that caught his or her eye without informing anyone else had led to some confusion—and one potentially explosive confrontation—in the first day of combined operations.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, external repairs were proceeding without a hitch. Only the density of the hull material made the work difficult, requiring the workers to pause frequently for equipment recharges and recalibrations. Otherwise, it was straightforward engineering at its best.
Even with their best efforts, however, it was unlikely the damaged giant could survive making the skew flip its designers had intended. Rather than reverse the vessel and restart its ion drive to slow it down, the Klingons intended to attach impulse engines to bring it under control.
But that was a job for years from now.
The immediate task was to repair native systems and attach structural integrity field generators at key points. Their goal was simply to make the ship stable and provide its inhabitants with a viable environment until a more permanent solution could be found.
Unfortunately, even though they’d located over two thousand unused connection ports for the network linking the external thrusters, the system was not set up to accept external commands. And, despite exhaustive searches and scans, they had found no entrance to whatever drive or control systems lay beneath the surface. If they were going to find a way to get the ship under power again, it was up to the away team on the inside.
She glanced at the chronometer mounted on the bulkhead. One hundred and six hours since Tev and the others had disappeared inside the ship; thirty-eight until any communication was expected.
She wondered what she would be doing thirty-nine hours from now.
CHAPTER
15
Suspended in the blackness, Pattie could not decide whether she was blind or the tunnel was completely dark. The question had vexed her off and on over the last several hours. Or perhaps days; she had been wandering alone for so long she was no longer sure.
Even though she knew the outcome, she repeated her ritual. She closed her eyes and waited a hundred heartbeats before opening them. The hundredth or three hundredth time she had tried that. Nothing. No difference. Either she was blind or there was no ambient light whatsoever.
She was going to have to proceed on touch. Which was what she had been doing. The last thing she had seen was that nimbus of blue flame rising from her lighter to the huge, spongy mass against the ceiling.
She’d had a long time, while feeling along walls and bumping into objects and taking chances on empty expanses of floor, to think about what had happened. The heavy mustiness she had smelled had been a cloud of spores from the lichen, or whatever it had been, filling the gaps and covering the ceiling. Just as centuries ago on Earth sparks igniting airborne flour dust had blasted mills to oblivion, the open flame of the lighter had triggered an explosive combustion of the spores.
Reflex had curled her into a ball before the biomass exploded; she never saw the fireball that singed her shell and melted most of her utility harness. The thermal shockwave had bounced her down the tunnel like a cork in a flood. If it had been a natural cave, she might well have been dashed to death against jagged rocks. As it was, the smooth walls of the corridor had scraped and beat her, perhaps—she was not sure—even knocking her unconscious.
From what she had been able to feel of the wreckage afterward, her internal bruises and contusions were a small price to pay for having been blasted out from under the collapsing ceiling. No doubt the rest of the away team, her friends, thought she was dead.
She had rested long enough.
Standing on the narrow rung, she steadied herself against the upright and flung the buckle end of her climbing rope—woven from what remained of her harness—above her head. The third time it hit the rung above and stayed. She eased the strap upward and cautiously waved another hand in the darkness until she caught the descending buckle.
If this buckle were metal, I could use it to strike a spark. Then I would at least know….
Forcing the thought from her mind, she focused on fastening the two ends together. Once buckled, her climbing rope formed a loop that hung from the rung above to about waist level in front of her.
The next part of the process terrified her; she had to will herself to make each movement. It might have been easier if she were certain this giant’s ladder led to safety, but she didn’t have that assurance. She only knew that after possibly days of tracing tunnel walls in the dark, this ladder going up was the only thing that held any hope of being a way out.
She released her hold on the upright, and holding the straps slightly apart with two hands, she eased a foot off the rung and onto the bottom curve of the loop. She took a deep breath and, trying not to imagine the buckle slipping, pulled herself up to a standing position.
She swung for a moment, vaguely surprised she was not plunging down into darkness, then felt above her head for the next rung. Once she had pulled herself up, she sat catching her breath and repeating the ritual check of her vision.
To her left in the darkness was something hot. She was reasonably sure it was a cluster of pipes, each as big around as she was tall, that she had felt rising out of the floor near the ladder’s base. At first they had merely been warm, but the heat of whatever they carried had been increasing. There was no way to tell whether the entire column was heating up or if the contents were simply hotter toward the top.
She wished her tricorder had survived the blast. It would have been good to know what was in the dark with her.
Or where she was going.
With a sigh she pulled herself to a standing position and flung the buckle end of her homemade climbing rope into the darkness above her.
CHAPTER
16
Terant sat, wrapped in a warm sleeping robe, taking care to appear at ease. Nights had not been good for his wife since the death of their children, but there was no reason for any outside his household to know that.
Vissint entered the outer parlor of the baron’s private quarters in evident haste, though he acknowledged the servant who held the door before the latter withdrew. A man who understood the reciprocal nature of loyalty.
The Chancellor of State wore the formal robes of office, but with a rumpled and distracted air. Terant deduced he was at the end of a long and difficult day.
“What news?” asked the baron. He did not offer his chancellor a chair or tea from the service at his elbow.
“The gnomes have been seen on the dawnward road,” Vissint said simply.
“Ah.”
Their messenger to the Tetrarchy with the news of the birth blight had returned days before with word of these gnomes. They had, during the time of her visit, lost the ability to speak the language of the People. She had gleaned that the Tetrarch’s Doctors were divided on the significance of this.
News that they were coming through the Wilderness toward Atwaan was interesting, but hardly warranted the chancellor’s late visit.
“And?”
“And they bear letters from Nazent of the Second House.” Vissint paused, ensuring that the Baron grasped the import of his next words. “The letters request that all who meet the gnomes assist them in seeking access.”
Terant’s breath whistled sharply through his nostrils. The flesh across his back and shoulders tightened in alarm. He slowly took a sip of tea with a steady hand.
It had been fortune of the Journey that the Giants had emerged from the hollow by his grandfather’s paddock. Their arrival had driven him to deep explorations of the hollows. His miners had discovered a refined metal too heavy and dense to be worked into anything more complex than ax or arrowheads. And of course the highly prized oddments of the
Builders—the luxury trade that provided so much for the Barony.
But these treasures had not been what the warden had sought. Unknown to any but his son and now his grandson and their closest advisers, the Giants in all their babbling had spoken of control. Somewhere within the hollows, very near to Terant’s holding, was a secret that would give its possessor the ability to control the destiny of the world.
If one could only gain access.
The Giants had died without describing the nature of this secret, or how it might be used. But those things Terant was willing to decipher once he held the secret in his hand.
And now these gnomes, creatures of unknown purpose and knowledge, came seeking access, seeking the secret of controlling the world. They would not ask so openly if they suspected the nature of their goal was known. For now the element of surprise was on his side. But for how long?
“Take the Household Guard,” he ordered. “Capture these gnomes. See that they speak to no one. Bring them to me.”
* * *
Kairn paused for a moment, allowing the others to reach him.
The stench of carbon dioxide was becoming so familiar that it was no longer an effort to separate out other scents. Still, he was aware of it and could feel it robbing his body of strength and resiliency. What must it be like for the others, to be unable to sense what was affecting them? They would die without realizing they were under attack, simply slipping into sleep.
He shuddered in horror.
“Cold, Kairn?”
He grunted at the cultural specialist, an answer that could mean anything. For a creature nearly devoid of hunting senses, the human female was remarkably perceptive.
Behind her the human male was supporting the wounded Bynar over a broken section of the trail. Seeing that Kairn had stopped, and having finally learned that his stopping signaled a rest period, the human helped the Bynar sit. They were the two least adapted to survival in this nearly tech-free environment, but they made a complementary pair.
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