by Greg Cox
McCoy remained unsatisfied. “But what about those exploding rocks? I mean, even if the Vaalians knew enough to stay clear of them, accidents happen. Why litter paradise with natural land mines?”
“The answer to that is more complicated,” Seven admitted. “The consensus is that the thermodynamically unstable rocks were not, in fact, part of the original design, but the result of a flaw in Vaal’s programming that developed over the course of some ten thousand years. The terraforming process that maintained the planet’s uniform ecosphere produced as byproducts various sediments and crystals that combined to form, via normal geological processes, the volatile compound that posed a threat to you and your crewmates.” She frowned; this imperfection in the environment’s design offended her sensibilities. “It remains unclear whether this was a result of a worsening malfunction . . . or simply an unanticipated consequence of the process.”
Kirk nodded. “Maybe they just weren’t looking ahead ten thousand years.”
“Sounds like damned sloppy planning to me,” McCoy groused.
“Small, seemingly insignificant changes can accumulate over time,” Seven observed, “with potentially catastrophic results. The so-called ‘Butterfly Effect.’ ” She stepped onto the transporter platform. “Hence the importance of returning me to my own time as promptly as possible.”
“Point taken,” Kirk said. “Let’s get a move on.”
The rest of the party took their places on the platform. Kirk addressed Chief Engineer Scott, who was manning the transporter controls.
“Beam us down, Scotty.”
“Aye, sir,” Scott replied with his distinctive burr. “Good luck to ye.”
Seven clasped her hands behind her back. The whine of the transporter filled her ears as she braced herself for a routine transport, at least by the primitive standards of the time. Everything seemed normal at first, but then . . .
When the device on the nameless planetoid had transported her across time and space, she had briefly experienced an unsettling flux in her chronometric node, accompanied by a transient, almost subliminal distortion to her visual perceptions. For an instant, a photo-negative effect had reversed the shades and tones around her, before her vision returned to normal. The distortion was so fleeting that she suspected that a normal human, whose senses had not been enhanced by the Borg, might not have even registered the phenomenon. But Seven had been aware of it.
Just as she was aware of it now.
The peculiar sensation, and visual distortion, passed quickly. Seven found herself, as expected, on the surface of the planet, beneath a clear orange sky. The chronometric flux left her momentarily disoriented. She reeled unsteadily and blinked in confusion.
“Captain? Doctor?”
She wondered briefly if the rest of the landing party had experienced any unusual sensations, then she realized that she was standing alone in what appeared to be a lush tropical jungle. Dense green foliage, high humidity, and an overpowering floral aroma impressed themselves upon her senses.
“Captain Kirk? Doctor McCoy? Lieutenant?”
She looked in vain for her companions. Even the red-shirted security officer, Lieutenant Jadello, was nowhere to be seen. She reached instinctively for her combadge, then remembered to use one of the Enterprise’s primitive handheld communicators instead.
“Seven to Enterprise. Please respond.”
But the communicator proved of no use in contacting either the ship or the other members of the landing party. She experienced an unhelpful flicker of anxiety. Clearly, something had gone wrong.
But what? And why?
She belatedly noticed a low humming noise coming from her backpack. She tugged it open in time to see that the crystalline fragment was emitting a violet glow, which gradually faded away before her eyes. Her ocular implant detected faint ripples of temporal distortion around the wedge-shaped artifact.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured.
Had the fragment somehow “hijacked” the transporter beam to bring her here? And where and when was that precisely?
Drawing her phaser, she surveyed her surroundings. Blooming flowers and abundant greenery matched her expectations. The temperature registered a comfortable twenty-three degrees Celsius, while heavy floral bouquets perfumed the atmosphere. Prolific shrubs and ferns crowded her, limiting visibility beyond more than a few meters, but appeared consistent with the reported ecology of Gamma Trianguli VI. Ripe fruit weighed down the branches of leafy trees. A single main-sequence star burned in the sky, near enough to provide more than adequate light and warmth. Seven felt confident that she was on the right planet, despite being detoured by the fragment.
She was considerably less certain that she knew when she was.
Her survey of the environment offered no clues as to her current temporal coordinates. The planet’s ecology had been in a state of stasis, artificially maintained by Vaal, for at least ten millennia. The fragrant tropical garden around her could and had existed at any time during that interval. These same varieties of flowers had blossomed continuously, and without change, for thousands of years.
Flowers . . .
Kirk’s warnings came to mind, even as her Borg-enhanced senses alerted her to an ominous rustling behind her. She spun around in time to see a distinctive purple flower rotating toward her atop a tall, rigid stem. Sharp yellow thorns clustered at the center of the blossom. The flower tracked her as though drawn to her motion. Its thorns, she knew, were tipped with a powerful neurotoxin that was one thousand times more lethal than saponin, another plant-based poison. Identical thorns had once killed a crewman from the Enterprise—and nearly Spock as well.
Seven registered the danger immediately. She dived out of the way as the thorns fired explosively from the flower in a puff of vapor and pollen. The deadly thorns shot past her to disappear into the bushes and branches beyond. Seven exhaled sharply, acknowledging her narrow escape.
That had been closer than she would have preferred.
Although that particular blossom had discharged its venomous load without success, similar flowers were already turning their faces toward her. Seven found herself outnumbered by the homicidal foliage.
She did not hesitate to eliminate the threat. A sweep of phaser fire incinerated the flowers, thorns and all. She spied another clump of purple flowers nearby. Those particular blossoms had yet to take aggressive action against her, but Seven took no chances. She disposed of them with ruthless efficiency—as the Borg had taught her.
Not until her immediate surroundings had been sterilized, and the danger eliminated, did she pause to determine what other hazards might be at hand. A scattering of rough, reddish rocks caught her attention, and she approached them cautiously. According to her research, the planet’s dangerously unstable rocks could be handled carefully but would detonate if jarred with sufficient force. Another of Kirk’s men had been killed when he had accidentally trod upon an explosive stone.
Seven hoped to avoid that mistake.
Holding her breath, she gingerly lifted a rock from the ground and lobbed it at a seared flower bed several meters away. She braced herself for an explosion, but no such event occurred. The rock thudded harmlessly into the charred foliage.
Interesting, Seven noted. She recalled the theory that the explosive rocks had only developed over the passage of ages. Could it be that they did not yet exist at this point in time? Or were not yet sufficiently volatile?
Her discovery elicited profoundly mixed feelings. On the one hand, it meant that her present environment might be less hazardous than she had initially feared. On the other hand, it meant that she was now even farther in the past and more distant from her own time—and Voyager.
Not to mention alone.
She wondered where Captain Kirk and the remainder of the landing party were. She surmised that, because they had not been carrying the troublesome fragment on their persons, they had beamed down to the planet without incident. Chances were, they were “now”
on Gamma Trianguli VI in the year 2270, wondering what had become of her.
It was highly possible that she would never see them again.
Perhaps it is just as well, she reflected. At least she would no longer be tempted to tamper with their history. Part of her wished that she had left the fragment back aboard the Enterprise before attempting to beam down with the others, but maybe she was precisely where—and when—she was supposed to be if she wanted to locate another component of the time-travel device.
Her circumstances had changed, she realized, but her objective remained the same. Using the borrowed tricorder, she scanned the area in hopes of determining which way to proceed. Subspace vibrations emanating from a vast climate-control apparatus deep beneath the planet’s surface initially overwhelmed the sensors, forcing her to recalibrate the device to ignore the vibrations. The tricorder then picked up an antiquated Starfleet distress signal, identical to the one that had lured Voyager to the planetoid in the Delta Quadrant, coming from a location roughly half a kilometer away, on bearing two-three-two.
She set off in the indicated direction, while keeping one eye on the sky. Vaal had also been known to dispatch intruders with targeted bolts of lightning. At present, the orange sky was calm and cloudless, but Seven intended to seek shelter at the first sign of a thunderhead. It occurred to her that the Borg often ignored intruders until they proved themselves a legitimate threat. Perhaps that was why Vaal had yet to attack her directly. It was possible that she was still beneath his notice.
She hoped to keep it that way.
The dense vegetation impeded her progress until she stumbled onto a well-trodden footpath through the greenery. She took this as encouraging evidence that she was headed in the right direction. She gripped her phaser in one hand, ready to incinerate any hostile flora, while employing the tricorder with the other. The signal grew stronger as she made her way toward it.
So did something else.
It started as a faint whispering inside her skull, echoing dimly along her cranial implants. At first she thought it might be merely fatigue talking; her inability to regenerate continued to wear on her. Yet she soon identified the whispering as a genuine phenomenon, impinging on her consciousness via the interplexing beacon implanted within her brain. The beacon was a sophisticated transceiver designed to facilitate communication between Borg drones—and their queen.
A very human chill ran down Seven’s spine. It was not too long ago that the Borg queen had invaded her thoughts in just this manner. The translink frequency carrying the whispers was unfamiliar to her, and it did not correspond precisely to those employed by the Borg, but the whispering unnerved her nonetheless. This was too close for comfort to what she had experienced before. The whispers seemed to be calling to her, urging her onward, even though she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.
Seven wasn’t sure she wanted to.
The trail, the distress signal, and the whispering combined to lead her out of the jungle into an open clearing where she came face-to-face with an immense stone temple crafted to resemble the head of giant horned reptile. Polished green eyes with golden slits gazed out from beneath chiseled stone brows. A solitary horn, not unlike those sported by Species 4673, rose above the sculpture’s gargantuan snout. Rough-hewn steps led up into the idol’s gaping maw, which was lit up by an infernal red glow. Its stony exterior was rough and irregular in texture, like the leathery hide of some prehistoric saurian. Seven recognized the imposing creation at once.
This was Vaal.
The artificial god of Gamma Trianguli VI was nestled in the shadow of a rugged brown cliff and framed by flowering trees and bushes. The resemblance to the mammoth sculpture of Kirk back in the Delta Quadrant was not lost on Seven, although she was uncertain if this was a coincidence or not. She also noted a slight resemblance to a giant radioactive lizard who figured into some of Tom Paris’s juvenile holodeck adventures.
She approached Vaal cautiously, not wanting to provoke the machine’s wrath. That Vaal had obviously not yet been deactivated in this time frame confirmed that she had indeed traveled farther into the past, although it was still impossible to determine precisely how far she had gone, given the unchanging nature of this world prior to Kirk’s intervention in 2267. For all she knew, she was ten thousand years before Kirk’s time, shortly after the dawning of the Age of Vaal.
The whispers grew louder in her head, fraying at her nerves. She realized that her interplexing beacon was attempting to adapt to the alien signal, which was almost surely the voice of Vaal. She winced in discomfort. She could almost make out his words, if she wanted to. Instead she forced herself to focus on the readings from the tricorder, which indicated that the signal was coming from somewhere deep within Vaal.
Naturally, she thought.
Eager to locate the hidden fragment, and remove herself from Vaal’s discomfiting presence, she approached the temple entrance, only to be repelled by a powerful force field before she came within ten meters of the stone steps. Frustration briefly drowned out the intrusive whispering in her head as she experienced an unwelcome flash of déjà vu. She was beginning to get very weary of force fields.
In fact, she was growing weary in general. Fatigue shortened her temper, making the incessant whispers even more irritatingly distracting. She lacked the mental energy to tune them out.
Seven scanned the force field, which registered as considerably stronger by several orders of magnitude than the one that had trapped her in the hidden tomb back in her own time. She knew that there was little chance that she could breach the field on her own; a sustained barrage from the Enterprise’s main phaser banks had been required to overcome the field in Kirk’s time. A single hand phaser, albeit of superior twenty-fourth-century design, could not begin to disrupt the field. A direct assault was doomed to failure and might serve only to call down Vaal’s lightning upon her. She slowly lowered her phaser to avoid presenting herself as a threat.
Now what? she wondered.
Startled gasps, coming from behind her, announced that she was no longer alone. Seven turned around to find a few dozen Vaalians staring at her with various combinations of wonder and confusion. The primitive humanoids were identical to those Captain Kirk would encounter sometime in the future. Copious amounts of burnished red skin were exposed by their scant attire, which was well-suited to the planet’s balmy climate. The males wore only simple white linen skirts and bracelets of flowers wound around their wrists, while the females sported revealing two-piece outfits and adorned their snow-white tresses with colorful blossoms. Geometric patterns were painted on the awestruck faces of both sexes, and white eye makeup highlighted their bulging orbs. The men’s cottony white hair was piled high atop their scalps, like the snowdrifts found only at the planet’s extreme polar regions, many thousands of miles from this location. Bearing heavy bushels of fresh fruit and vegetables, the so-called “Feeders of Vaal” were understandably surprised by Seven’s presence.
She noted, as Kirk and his crew had (or would), the total absence of children or geriatrics among the Vaalians. Eternally youthful, the tribe people neither aged nor reproduced, except on those rare occasions when an accidental death created a need for a “replacement.” Caught in a state of cultural stasis, they lived only to serve Vaal endlessly and unthinkingly.
Like drones, she thought, albeit somewhat less attired.
Easily plucked from the planet’s abundant trees and vines, the fruits and vegetables carried by the natives were intended for Vaal’s consumption. That a sophisticated super-computer would be powered by raw organic matter had puzzled researchers; some anthropologists believed that the ritual was purely symbolic, intended to give purpose and structure to the Vaalians’ lives, but this hypothesis failed to account for the fact that Kirk had weakened Vaal by depriving him of “food.” A more convincing theory was that Vaal had been designed to run on an environmentally clean and self-sustaining energy system that involved no potentially hazardous t
echnologies or materials, such as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter reactions, which would be beyond the ability of the primitive Vaalians to maintain or replenish.
Seven saw merit in this approach. It was impossible to imagine the simple tribe people before her providing Vaal with fresh dilithium and antimatter. Fruits and vegetables were better suited to their limited abilities.
“Who are you? Where have you come from?”
A puzzled Vaalian stepped forward to address her. A pair of curved silver antennae, jutting from behind his ears, indicated that he was the leader of the tribe—and directly in contact with Vaal. He appeared to be about a decade older than the other Vaalians, although his actual age was impossible to determine. Seven wondered if this was the same village elder Kirk had/would encounter, or if there had been a replacement somewhere over the ages.
“I am called Seven,” she responded carefully. “I am a visitor from . . . far away.”
“Far away?” The man was visibly baffled by the concept. “How far is far?”
“That is irrelevant,” she answered. “And you are?”
“I am Akuta. I am the Eyes of Vaal.” He examined her curiously. “What brings you here?”
His people held back, keeping their distance. They displayed no aggressive behavior, only a certain degree of apprehension. Seven recalled that the Vaalians had been completely ignorant of violence and killing prior to Kirk’s arrival. She did not intend to given them occasion to learn.
“I am a friend,” she stated. “I seek only an audience with Vaal.”
Akuta grew even more confused. “But Vaal speaks only through me. I am his eyes and ears and mouth.”
“So I understand, but perhaps Vaal can make an exception in my case.”
“Exception?”
She peered more closely at the man’s metal antennae. As she understood it, the implants served as a transceiver linking Akuta to Vaal, not unlike her own interplexing beacon. It was a case of similar technologies developed to serve uncomfortably similar functions. Akuta was akin to Locutus, she realized. A humanoid being modified to serve as the voice of a superior cybernetic intelligence.