The Klingon grudgingly reconsidered. “Yes. Have Powell and his men execute Disaster Plan Beta. Tell him it is in the manual.”
“Gotcha. Thanks, Worf. We’ll keep you posted.”
And then Worf was alone again, with only his frustrations for company.
The gap that they had created in the outer wall of the K’Vin embassy was still there. With the arrival of the Ariantu ships, its repair had no doubt become a low priority for Gregach.
What was more, there were no guards around. Or at least, none that Thul could see. Had they all been dispatched to the Strip?
The Sullurh slipped through the opening, negotiating a path through the debris. Still, no one challenged him. Before long, he found the cell in which he and the Enterprise officers had been incarcerated.
Here, too, things had been left as they were. The well that the android had fashioned in the center of the floor still gaped wide, though with all the dust in the air, it was difficult to see to the bottom.
Ironic, wasn’t it? The K’Vin were sitting directly on top of the very thing that might drive off the Ariantu fleet. And yet, preoccupied by the return of their ancient enemies, they had not yet investigated the prisoners’ escape—or they would have discovered the gleaming doors of the turbolift and plumbed its mystery.
If they had gone that route, they would have posted a guard here. Perhaps many guards.
And Thul would have been prevented from doing what he was doing now—lowering himself into the space beneath the cell and dropping to the floor. It was no easy task, considering his lack of familiarity with physical exertion; in fact, he almost turned an ankle in the process. As it was, dust puffed up in great clouds around him, filling his lungs and making him cough.
He took a moment to steady himself, catch his breath, come to terms with the reality of the turbolift and the significance it held for him. Then he approached, watched the doors slide aside, and entered.
Knowing what to expect, he had thought, would make the journey less terrifying for him. He was wrong. When the lift completed its horizontal passage and began to plummet, his knees turned to jelly and he sat down on the floor. After a second or two, he slid into a corner and wedged himself there, glad that the Starfleet officers were not here to disapprove of his squeamishness.
Thul tried to ignore the rasping of air outside the car, the dizzying speed of his descent. He distracted himself by reading the glyphs on the walls, which were similar to the written language of the Sullurh.
Would Lektor and his comrades have been able to read these glyphs with such ease, as divorced as they were from their own history? He wondered.
Suddenly he was seized by an irresistible sense of impending doom, and he was certain that the lift was going to crash. That the braking mechanism had failed, and that he would be mangled with the rest of the lift when it collided with the bottom of the shaft.
Instead, the cubicle came to a gentle halt. The doors opened, revealing the weapons level to him a second time.
Thul gazed at the banks of sleek, shiny consoles, the impossibly large curved screens, the sheer size and power and grandeur of it all.
How could he ever have doubted that this was the omega level? How could he have let Lektor or anyone else shake his faith in the promise of this vision?
If they had only agreed to come here, to see it for themselves . . . but no. It was too late for that. Much too late.
He walked out into the middle of the floor, intimidated by the potential of the place—the potential that he somehow had to unlock. The glyphs all around him offered a variety of data and directions, but none of it was immediately useful. The words were familiar enough; it was their usage that was a little puzzling.
He had some familiarity with computers—much more than the average Sullurh, anyway, thanks to his association with Coleridge. With any luck, these machines would follow the same logic as those used by the Federation.
But where to begin? He found himself drawn to the largest of the consoles and followed his instincts.
Then he got close enough to see the boldface glyphs on the machine. His blood started pounding in his ears as their meaning slowly sank in.
This was the ultimate weapon—the one the legends had named “the Howling God.” The stories had been truer than he’d dared to believe!
With a sense of reverence, he stood before it, savored the sight of it. As if it were a shrine.
For it was, in a way. A shrine to the might and the destructive capacity of his ancestors.
There was a seat before the control panel—perhaps a bit too high for him. Nonetheless, he clambered up and scanned the monitor. All it showed was an empty grid.
He read a glyph that was marked “begin.” Placing his hand on the round, silvery surface below it, he found that it was warm to the touch—almost as if the machine were a living thing.
He waited—but not for long. The image on the screen didn’t change, but other screens lit up around it, one by one. Each had the same sort of grid as the large screen, but superimposed on each grid was an array of blips: one big white blip in the center and a variable number of smaller colored blips surrounding it. No two screens showed the same configuration.
What was all this? And then he knew.
The Ariantu had been a spacefaring race. More than likely, these were sectors in space—no, solar systems! The large central blips would be suns; the smaller blips would be planets.
It opened up a whole new line of possibilities. Thul shivered with the immensity of it.
He had come here with but one thing in mind—to gain revenge on Lektor’s people. To even the score for the humiliation they had inflicted on Thul and his kind.
Surely, he’d believed, the omega level would give him the means to blast the Ariantu out of orbit. To serve notice that Kirlos wasn’t theirs, could never be theirs. That it belonged to the Sullurh—the only true Ariantu—and to no one else.
But now a grander scheme was taking shape in his mind. For if these were solar systems he saw before him, they had to include one particular system—the nearest, in fact, to the one occupied by Kirlos.
The home system of the K’Vin Hegemony.
Thul located the glyph that instructed him to “select.” He pressed the round surface below it. Like the other one, this panel was warm to the touch.
Almost instantly the large grid displayed features similar to those of the one to the left and above it. Thul knew nothing of astrogation, but it was plain that this was not the K’Vin system. The glyphs on the bottom of the screen identified it as the home or a race called the Eluud.
He touched the “select” panel again, and the large monitor borrowed a different image. This one was wrong also, however: it was the system that had given birth to the Pandrilites, a member people of the Federation.
A third time he laid his palm on the panel, and a third time the image shifted. Thul inspected the data below, poised to make yet another selection.
It turned out to be unnecessary. He had found the K’Vin! Found them where they lived, in the heart of their distant Hegemony!
The Sullurh’s heart was beating so hard that he thought it would damage his rib cage. He felt his mouth going dry as he stared at the monitor.
The K’Vin home system. And he had the power to destroy it!
Questions sprang to mind—some fully formed, some less so. For instance, if this weapon was capable of destroying the hated K’Vin, why had it not been used before? And was it really possible to blast something so far away?
It didn’t take Thul long to give up on finding the answers. He had no knowledge of such things—or pitifully little.
And what difference did it make how the machine worked? All that really mattered was if it worked.
Licking his lips, the Sullurh scanned the console for a panel corresponding to the next step in the process. He found one marked “empower” and pushed it.
The effect was dramatic. Suddenly every machine in the place seemed to co
me to life, as if they were all enslaved to this one and had only been waiting for its instructions in order to serve it.
Each monitor was illuminated, a series of high-contrast images flitting across it in rapid-fire succession. There was a low whirr, the sound of dormant mechanisms reviving themselves.
So far, so good. Thul searched for the next likely command in the sequence—and found it: “activate.” He hesitated, but only long enough to remember the way the Ariantu had used him—used his people. There would be time enough to deal with them after they saw how wrong they had been about the Sullurh.
He pressed the panel.
But what followed was not what he had expected. The entire omega level began to vibrate—not just the sleek black machines, but the entire place.
It’s all right, he told himself. The machines are old. The vibrations will diminish.
They didn’t. In fact, over the next few seconds the tremors grew worse.
Thul’s chair was shuddering—shuddering! He had to get down off it for fear he would be thrown off.
But it was no better standing on the floor. He could feel the vibrations in his bones, to the point where they almost hurt. And more—he could hear a grumbling below the soles of his feet. The very bedrock of the planet seemed to be shifting about, as if the whole world was coming apart.
And Thul knew—with a certainty that exceeded the bare facts, that came from the pit of his stomach rather than from his brain—that he had done something horribly, horribly wrong.
Chapter Nineteen
GREGACH TUMBLED FORWARD, and only Worf’s strong arms prevented him from hitting the floor.
The two of them staggered to a window and looked out over Kirlosia. There was a steady vibration, as if the entire planet was surging with some sort of barely controlled energy. Buildings were trembling, and from their vantage point, Gregach and Worf saw people falling over one another, trying to run to safety when there was no safety.
“What’s happening?” whispered Gregach.
“What in the deity’s name is going on?” demanded Stephaleh, in that intense and yet soft tone she had.
Her view of Kirlosia was no better than Gregach’s. Her sensitive antennae were already throbbing with the intensity of the steadily building vibrations. Behind her, Geordi and Data were looking on in confusion.
“A power buildup of some sort,” said Data.
“Power from where?” demanded Geordi.
Data began to pace quickly, his mind racing. “Power . . . power building up. A weapon from outside, possibly. The Ariantu, trying to destroy Kirlos. But why? It makes no sense. Why would they come all this way just to destroy the planet?”
“Maybe they would,” said Geordi. “Who knows?”
“I do not believe it,” Data said. “For the sake of argument, let us eliminate it. That would mean the buildup is coming from within the planet rather than without.”
“But that makes even less sense,” said Geordi. “Where would the power be building from, and—”
His voice trailed off, and he realized what was happening a second after Data did.
“That level we discovered earlier,” said Data. “If any place has the weaponry to accomplish it, it would be there.”
“A weapon to destroy the planet? But why? Some sort of suicidal maneuver?”
“I do not know,” said Data, his calm voice never speeding up, despite the urgency. “I doubt mere suicide is involved, however. The Ariantu, from all we have learned, are a very aggressive and warlike race. If they were to destroy Kirlos, they would not do so without a reason. And whatever that reason is, it must lie in that level. We must hurry.”
“Back down there?”
“Back down there.” Data tapped his communicator. “Data to Worf.”
“Worf here,” came the brisk reply.
The situation was slipping away, and Data felt that he had to take control, had to be the leader, the commander. Data said, “Worf, we are returning to the K’Vin embassy.”
“That may not be wise.”
“But it is necessary. Prepare to meet us in the lowest level, by cell D. Data out.”
He cut off the communication before Worf could question it.
“What are you going to do?” said Stephaleh urgently.
Data looked her straight in the eye. “Save this world,” he said.
It happened so quickly that none of the ships had a chance to react or even to fully understand what was occurring.
On the dark side of Kirlos, the perfectly round, flat area known as the Valley began to glow with a strange, lambent energy. The edges flickered to life, rippling and surging with power. The power emanations became more and more intense, and the ships of the Federation, the K’Vin, and Ariantu looked on with growing nervousness.
Suddenly the entire planet trembled, as if vomiting up something massive, and a huge cone of energy leaped from the edges of the Valley, coming to a point in space miles above Kirlos’s surface.
The cone was a dazzling swirl of colors, emitting energy readings that blew all the scales of every ship in the sector. The commanders of the Enterprise and the K’Vin vessel decided they were much, much too close to the point of the cone and started to move off.
And at that moment, space began to warp around the tip of the cone, as if it were drilling a hole right into the fabric of reality.
The warp was invisible to the eye, but all the instruments immediately picked it up, and lined schematics leaped into-existence on all the boards. A massive graphic whirlpool image was widening faster and faster, narrowing into a huge sinkhole. Small at first, only several hundred miles wide, but becoming larger with every passing second.
The defense shields of the K’Vin warship glowed a dull red. Within the shimmering fog were the blurred outlines of a bullet-shaped vessel studded with rounded metallic cylinders. One of those cylinders loosed a glowing ball of fire.
“Hard aport!”
Picard’s shout rose above the high whine of the ship’s engines. He braced for the pressing g-force that should have followed his order. And felt nothing.
“Helm, respond!”
The deck lifted even as he spoke, pushing him down into the captain’s chair. The Enterprise had veered up and to one side, but slowly, much more slowly, than he expected. Picard knew with a numbing certainty that the accelerating torpedo blast would hit its target. A simple evasive maneuver, one that should have carried the Enterprise out of harm’s way, had failed. In the few seconds before impact he jumped ahead to his next action, devising a response to the devastating blow that could not be avoided.
The photon pulse filled the viewscreen.
“Conn, all power to . . .”
He never finished the command.
Because the energy bolt never made contact.
Against all expectation, against all sense, it missed the Enterprise. The torpedo curved away, still gathering speed, and faded into . . .
Nothing.
“Where did it go?” demanded Riker. Then, half rising from his chair, he pointed toward the viewscreen.
The K’Vin warship was spiraling and twisting in space. And receding. Its image was growing smaller as the distance between the two ships widened.
“What the hell?” Picard stared at the image. He tried to understand why his ship was still intact, his opponent immobilized. He should have been relieved, but the anomaly was more frightening than reassuring.
“We’re being pulled off course,” cried Ensign Nagel from the Ops station. Her fingers rapped a frantic pattern across her panel. “Turbulence ahead.”
“Maintain heading!” ordered Picard.
Bridge lights flickered. A voice from the aft deck called out, “Engines are drawing on auxiliary power.”
“Why?” demanded Picard. “What’s going on?”
“Captain!” Lieutenant Dean looked up from his sensor scan; his face was drained of color. “Sir . . . there’s a wormhole out there.”
“Merde. “D
ean’s answer made the captain yearn for the simple threat of a photon torpedo. A wormhole was far more treacherous.
“Drop shields!” he ordered briskly. “Priority one emergency energy restrictions. Redirect all nonessential power to engineering.”
Bridge lights dimmed. Console systems dropped their chatter to a whisper.
“Holding position,” Nagel said as she labored over her controls. “Barely.”
Picard rose from his chair and stepped to the science officer’s side. “Lieutenant?”
Dean shook his head, answering the unspoken question in a low voice that only the captain could hear. “We’re far too close. There isn’t enough energy in this ship, in ten starships, to break free of the wormhole’s pull. The vortex diameter is thousands of miles wide and growing very quickly, unleashing incredible power. Very soon . . .” His voice faltered for an instant; then he continued, “Very soon it will be capable of pulling Kirlos out of its orbit around Sydon.”
Picard tried to make sense of the catastrophe, but his mind balked at the immensity of the forces at work. He barely registered the approach of his first officer.
“The K’Vin are stubborn fools,” said Riker. “They’re still maintaining their defenses instead of redirecting energy to their engines.”
A soft black cloud had enveloped half the warship’s length. Then the glow of the shielding snapped off. The ship shot forward, but not far enough to escape the hungry void, which still nibbled away at the edges of the ship’s image.
“Too little too late.” Yet Picard knew that only a matter of minutes separated his ship and crew from that same fate. Considering the circumstances, he had no obligation, but . . . “Helm! Attach a tractor beam to the K’Vin ship.”
“There really isn’t much point, is there, sir?” asked Riker under his breath. “We’re only postponing the inevitable . . . for all of us.”
“If we are to die,” answered Picard just as softly, “we shall do it as civilized beings.”
He and Riker watched in silence as the tractor beam locked on to the K’Vin ship and dragged it out of the cloud of darkness. The warship hovered just on the lip of the vortex but did not slip back inside.
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