by David Mack
Projecting her question to the younglings in the simplest telepathic concepts she could imagine, she asked them where she would find the old symbionts, the ones who created the younglings. It took several attempts to get the infant symbionts to understand what she was asking.
Finally, she received a clear answer. It came from all the younglings, and it was expressed as a simple concept that nonetheless seemed gravid with dread.
<
One hour later, Saavik was back on the Enterprise, standing on a transporter pad while Montgomery Scott—who had served on the Enterprise for more years and under more captains than any other member of the crew—made the final adjustments to a heavy-duty environmental suit.
“I’ve done all I can with this thing, Captain,” he said. “Gravity and a weight belt will get you to the bottom of those pools, but whether a jury-rigged miniature integrity field will keep you from being crushed by the pressure at those depths … well, that remains to be seen.”
Eyeing the chief engineer’s handiwork, Saavik said, “I am more concerned about how this suit’s thermal exchangers will cope with the pools’ extreme heat. I need to dive very close to the springs’ geothermal source.”
“Aye, you’ll work up a sweat, I can tell you that.” He patted the back of the suit. “Avoid rupturing your coolant tank and you should be okay. But don’t stay down there too long, Captain. I had to strip out the basics to make this suit strong enough to get you down and back again—which means less than two hours of air.”
“I will endeavor to be swift and punctual, Mister Scott.”
The white-haired engineer sighed and nodded. “Aye, sir.” He lifted her suit’s helmet. “Ready?” Saavik nodded, and Scott fixed her helmet into place, muffling the low pulses of the ship’s life-support systems and the hum of the transporter’s energizer coils. Its wraparound faceplate offered her a decent field of vision, but she still felt as if she had been encased in a modern sarcophagus.
Scott moved to the transporter controls and opened a comm channel to the transceiver inside Saavik’s suit. “Can you hear me, Captain?”
“Yes, Mister Scott.”
“Right. I have the coordinates of the underground pool you scanned with your tricorder. Beaming you in won’t be a problem. But once you go deeper—”
“I am aware of the complications posed by the caverns’ geology.”
“Yes, sir.”
Earlier, while using her tricorder to select a covert insertion point for her dive to the symbionts’ source pools, Saavik had noted that only a short distance below the water’s surface the bedrock was rich with a mineral called fistrium. It would impede communications at depths below a hundred meters, and it would make it impossible for the Enterprise crew to beam her up until she was almost at the pools’ surface. Once she submerged into the chasms beneath the Caves of Mak’ala, Saavik would be on her own.
Over the transceiver, Scott said, “Coordinates locked in, Captain.”
“Energize.”
The transporter beam enfolded Saavik, and the familiar confines of the transporter room dissolved in a bright whorl of energized particles. …
Darkness descended. Sensation returned.
Saavik felt weightless for a moment before she became aware of her downward motion. She was sinking. Lifting her arm, she checked the status display mounted above her wrist. Seventy-five meters and dropping quickly. The sensors in her suit detected a solid surface a few meters below. Seconds later she touched down with a mild bump and bent her knees to absorb the impact.
She turned on her helmet beacon. Organic matter littered the rocky shelf on which she stood. Less than twenty meters ahead of her, the underwater plateau ended at a wide fissure along the base of a stone wall that seemed to reach upward to the pools’ surface. Saavik walked to the edge and looked over it, into the fathomless darkness below. To her dismay, her suit’s sensors were unable to give her a reading of the fissure’s depth.
There is no choice, she reminded herself. I must go forward.
Tucking her arms to her sides, Saavik pushed off from the edge and jumped forward. Then the blackness seemed to swallow her whole as it pulled her into the abyss. Her descent was slower than she expected, and soon she realized it was because the ion-rich, magma-heated water became more viscous as she sank deeper. To her alarm, the water was also thick with fistrium leached from the cave’s walls. That would explain why my proximity sensors no longer function.
Her free-fall descent lasted more than ten minutes, and it carried her past impressive swaths of brightly bio-luminescent orange moss clinging to the walls.
The fissure narrowed to the point where Saavik could extend her arms and touch both walls with her fingertips. By the time she finally reached the bottom, the shoulders of her bulky pressure suit scraped the sides. The ground under her feet was mostly level and covered with small, smooth stones.
She focused her suit’s external lights, but they were of little utility. The water at this depth was thick and cloudy. Her helmet beacon revealed little but the meter of ground directly ahead of her; beyond that she saw nothing but a wall of bright fog. She walked against the current, reasoning if young symbionts were spawned in the depths, flowing water must help carry them to the surface. Her hunch proved correct: a short distance away she entered a tunnel-like passage that sloped gradually downward, deeper into darkness.
It appears to be a lava tube, she thought, noting its smooth contours.
After five minutes of trudging progress, Saavik slowed as the passage narrowed. She took great care not to damage her suit’s externally mounted systems while pushing ahead into the claustrophobic tunnel.
Feeling her way forward, she was mindful not to let herself become stuck. No rescue team would be dispatched if she was overdue to check in at the end of this mission’s allotted time. She would simply be written off as “missing,” and Xon would become captain of the Enterprise.
Saavik kept walking for another thirty minutes before the passage’s sides and ceiling pressed in so closely that she was forced to drop to her hands and knees and crawl. The intense water pressure made every movement a labor for Saavik, despite her Vulcan strength and stamina. She checked the chrono on the suit’s forearm. She was more than forty-five minutes into her dive.
Impelled by a renewed sense of dwindling time, Saavik tried to quicken her pace. She lost her balance and fell hard against the side of the lava tube.
Upon impact, her helmet beacon flickered and dimmed.
That is quite inconvenient, she noted.
The rest of her suit’s functions also became erratic. Her forearm display stuttered on and off, and when it was on it sometimes showed gibberish. Lying on her back, she reached down and opened a pocket on her suit’s torso. From it she took a chemical flare that had been treated to withstand intense heat. She cracked it to life and held it ahead of her, its chartreuse glow her only beacon in the blistering, all-consuming dark.
Then there was no more ground beneath her hands.
Her fingers gripped the edge of the lava tube. Saavik checked her proximity sensor. In front of her was a vast space of open water. Because the water in the great chamber was mostly free of fistrium, she was able to coax a clear reading from her suit’s bio-scanner: there were life-forms ahead.
Glow-stick in hand, she pushed off from the edge of the lava tube. She sank slowly to the cavern’s floor. Though there was level ground to walk on, it was limited to narrow paths between massive rocky mounds. Wandering between them, Saavik felt as if she were trapped in a maze.
Fifty-five minutes, she noted, looking at her chrono. Time to make contact.
As if summoned by her desire, a trio of two-meter-long symbionts floated down from the lightless space overhead. The swimming worms were fat and crusted with a ragged carapace. One of the three descended to confront Saavik. It probed her with short bursts of violet energy that made Saavik’s skin tingle.
<
Saavik held out her hand and opened her mind as an invitation to a meld. I am an emissary of Emperor Spock of the Terran Empire. He has sent me to make contact with the true rulers of Trill so that—
<
The worms moved toward her, herding her back the way she had come. Backpedaling, Saavik was at a loss for how to persuade the elder symbionts it was in their best interest to speak with her. Turning a tight corner, she tripped and lost her balance. She put out her hands to break her fall and collided with the side of one of the looming rocky mounds—
In a flash of telepathic connection, Saavik understood.
The symbionts chasing her away were not the ancient ones; they were only caretakers, mere adolescents compared to the ones they called the Annuated. The great stationary masses grouped on the cavern’s floor were not rock—they were symbionts that had achieved terrifying size over tens of thousands of years. These beasts of antiquity were the ones that birthed new symbionts and commanded their offspring with unquestioned authority.
At Saavik’s touch, the Annuated Elder’s mind stirred. <>
It’s flock of caretakers backed away, apparently leery of taking action while Saavik was in communion with one of their rulers.
Saavik asked, How do you know of my kind?
<
Behind the Elder’s condescension, Saavik detected something else. Just as she had sensed a second mind in Trill’s humanoid governor, now she felt the presence of a second mind in the consciousness of this ancient being. At the risk of postponing her return to the surface too long, she initiated a full mind-meld with the Annuated Elder.
Its consciousness was perplexing, its storehouse of memories too vast for Saavik to comprehend. Her talents would be no match for the sheer mental power of the Elder—but its mind was not the one she sought to reveal. Her quarry lay hidden in the darkest recesses of the most primitive quarters of the Elder’s brain. It was a much younger intelligence—relatively speaking—and far more malevolent.
It was a parasite. An invader. A mutant spawn of Trill’s symbionts.
Saavik stole flashes of memory from the hateful creature’s mind.
The Trill had tried once, ages ago, to eradicate the parasites and their hosts. The Trill thought they had succeeded, but a few hardy parasites clung to life. Eventually they escaped their exile on the distant world that their forebears had laid waste.
Concealed inside an artificial comet of ice, they returned to Trill a century ago, falling in a blaze of fire to the sea. Riding one host after another, they found their way home to the Caves of Mak’ala. Safe now in its sweltering depths, they have infested the Annuated, yoking the ancient ones to their cause of vengeance. Bonded now to the egg-layers, the parasites will ensure the Annuated birth only aggressive, dangerous, mutant parasites bent on secretly usurping control first of Trill and eventually the entire galaxy—one mind and one world at a time.
Saavik severed the mind-meld, shed her weight belt, and fled.
The caretakers pursued her, and they were much more in their element than she was. One rammed into her back, knocking her onto her hands and knees.
They swim faster than I can, and they are more maneuverable than I am in this environment. I will need to change tactics.
Fortunately for Saavik, her chief engineer had insisted she come prepared to make a quick exit. Mounted on her right wrist was a compact phaser. She armed it as she rolled onto her back, and then she fired at the caretakers diving at her.
The phaser’s brilliant blue beam of energy shimmered through the water, which boiled and filled with bubbles. Then the huge symbionts’ heavy corpses dropped to the cavern’s floor, half disintegrated.
More caretakers converged on Saavik. Working quickly, she primed a special flare Mister Scott had jury-rigged to propel itself through hyperpressurized water and ignite on contact with a solid surface. Saavik aimed it straight up, triggered it, and released it into the great emptiness overhead.
The flare rocketed up, a pinpoint of light that seemed to vanish in the darkness—then it erupted into a blazing orb of light on a domed ceiling of rock more than two kilometers away. The entire cavern was lit as if by daylight, and Saavik saw the openings of many large lava tubes on the ceiling.
Exit strategy revised.
A few more shots of her wrist phaser kept the caretakers at bay while she energized her suit’s emergency thruster and extended its control handgrips.
Above her, the light of the flare started to dim.
The suit’s thruster was not fully charged, but Saavik could no longer afford to be patient. She set it for maximum burn and keyed the starter.
The roar of the engine was deafening.
Sudden acceleration left her paralyzed for a few seconds until the suit’s guidance circuit smoothed out its delta-v. Struggling to control its direction, Saavik aimed herself at the widest lava tube she could reach. Satisfied she was on target, she detached from her left leg the last of her dive weights, which had been designed to serve a secondary function: they were also high-yield plasma charges.
Watching the charges fall away behind her, sinking back into the cavern of the Annuated, Saavik touched their arming switch on her suit’s belt.
A holographic display on her helmet’s faceplate confirmed the plasma charges had been armed and were on a three-minute countdown to detonation.
Rocketing into the lava tube, Saavik hoped it would lead her back to the surface and not to a dead end or some inescapable underwater labyrinth. She followed the wide passage’s twists and turns, each of which seemed to bring the walls a bit closer. Three and a half minutes into her ascent, a thunderous boom shook the bedrock, and a wall of displaced water surged up behind her.
So much for the Annuated.
After five minutes, her suit’s thruster ran out of fuel. She detached the engine pack and let it sink into the darkness behind her. Kicking with her legs and making wide strokes with her arms, Saavik continued swimming in the direction her helmet’s holographic display told her was “up.”
Her air gauge was five minutes shy of zero when her wrist display confirmed she was close enough to the surface to be free of the fistrium’s interference. She activated her suit’s transceiver. “Saavik to Enterprise.”
The reply was staticky but audible. “Xon here. Go ahead, Captain.”
“Mister Xon, beam down strike teams to the Caves of Mak’ala. Kill the Guardians, and exterminate all symbionts in the pools.”
“Acknowledged,” Xon said.
Minutes later, Saavik surfaced in a remote pool inside the Caves of Mak’ala. Pulling herself out of the water, she collapsed onto all fours, utterly exhausted. The dive to the cavern of the Annuated and the subsequent swim back to the surface had been the most arduous physical experience of her life.
Sitting back, she took off her helmet, dropped it, and let it roll away. The caves echoed with the shrieks of phasers and the screams of the dying.
From nearby, she heard Xon’s voice call out, “Captain Saavik!”
Turning, she saw her first officer leading a team of security personnel from the Enterprise. She said to him, “I am unhurt.”
Xon helped Saavik stand, and then he nodded at one of his men. The security officer took out h
is communicator and spoke into it. “All teams, this is Lieutenant Treude. The captain is safe. Sterilize the pools.”
One of the other security officers stepped past Treude and opened a satchel slung on his hip. From the bag, the man took a handful of white tablets—a mix of radioactive toxins—and tossed them into the pool from which Saavik had emerged.
The water frothed with pale blue foam. Seconds later the pool’s surface was crowded with dead, floating symbionts. The worms’ cradle of life had become a pit of death. Nothing would ever live in these waters again.
“Well done,” Saavik said to Xon. “Let us return to the ship.”
Xon opened his communicator. “Xon to Enterprise. Two to beam up.”
Spock sat at the desk in his study, reviewing the latest dispatches from Carol Marcus. Pleased with the progress she and her team had made, he considered expanding the scope of the Memory Omega project.