“Something that has an attractive force all its own,” Wu remarked.
Paxton nodded. “A kind of cosmic sinkhole.”
“An interesting thesis,” Kastiigan noted. “It would explain why we are only seeing part of the research vessel.”
Wu felt a trickle of cold sweat in the small of her back. “You mean because the rest has already been swallowed up by the sinkhole.”
Paxton shrugged. “Makes as much sense as anything else.”
The second officer studied the telemetry some more. She had heard of gaps in space–time that pulled matter from her universe into another. They had been documented in the logs of starship captains as far back as the twenty-second century.
“All right,” she said at last. “If this is a sinkhole, where does it lead?” She challenged her bridge officers with a look. “What’s on the other side?”
“That is difficult to say,” Kastiigan responded. “But one thing seems certain, Commander—the Belladonna won’t have the wherewithal to survive the journey.”
Wu didn’t like hearing that. However, it was hard to argue the point. The stresses associated with space–time rifts were such that few vessels had a chance of getting through them intact.
She stood up and eyed the viewscreen. “Mr. Paxton,” she said, “do you think you can use the probe to punch a comm signal through that mess?”
“I think so,” said the communications officer.
“Good,” Wu replied. “Try hailing them again.”
Paxton’s fingers crawled over his controls. Then he sat back and watched his screens for a reply.
“Anything?” she asked.
Paxton shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
Wu frowned. A lack of response could mean one of two things: either their signal still hadn’t gotten through to the Belladonna or there was no one in a position to answer it.
She hoped it was the former.
“Commander,” Kastiigan said abruptly, “we have a problem. The probe is being drawn into the phenomenon as well.”
Wu turned to Paxton. “Get it out of there.”
The comm officer tried. But after a while, he shook his head. “It’s not responding. The pull is too strong.”
The second officer considered their options. They were too far away from the probe to get a tractor beam on it. And if they got much closer, they would be putting the Stargazer in jeopardy again.
Had the class IV been a manned probe, Wu would have gone after it without a second thought. But it was just a set of instruments surrounded by a duranium hull. And instruments—no matter how valuable—could be replaced.
“Try a sudden acceleration,” Wu suggested.
Paxton looked at her. “You mean slingshot it out the other side of the accretion bridge?”
“If you can.”
“It’s worth a try,” the comm officer said.
His fingers moving with practiced ease, he tapped out the second officer’s order on his control panel. Then he implemented it.
On Paxton’s monitor, the yellow blip that represented the probe suddenly leaped past the research ship, striving to free itself from the phenomenon’s embrace. And for a moment, it appeared to Wu that it might make it.
Then, slowly but certainly, the probe was dragged backward. Paxton gave it all the thrust he could, but it didn’t seem to help. Finally, the class IV device vanished from the screen altogether.
Paxton turned to Wu, looking apologetic. “We’ve lost contact with the probe, Commander.”
She sighed. Clearly, she needed more information, and she wasn’t going to get it by sending in more unmanned probes.
Wu gazed at the main viewscreen, where all she could see was the accretion bridge. Somewhere inside it, the Belladonna was slowly but inexorably slipping into the stormy maw of the phenomenon.
If she were going to do a better job with the research vessel than she had with the probe, she had to do something—and soon. But this wasn’t a problem with a simple solution. She couldn’t just transport the survivors off the Belladonna—not when she couldn’t even get a comm signal through.
Turning to the rest of the bridge contingent, Wu said, “I need a plan—and I need it now.”
The sanjarra were already within twenty meters of Simenon’s party when Picard got his first glimpse of the beasts through a gap in the screen of crimson trees.
They looked like sleek, black greyhounds with blood-red tiger stripes and faces like fruit bats. Their eyes were like shiny, black pebbles and their mouths were full of long, curved teeth. A strange combination to be sure, but hardly the strangest the captain had seen in the course of hundreds of planetary surveys.
It was difficult to tell precisely how many there were, but Picard reckoned that there might be a dozen. As they got closer, their growls deepened and they bared their fangs.
The sanjarra looked completely undaunted by the fact that they had never seen the likes of the offworlders before. But then, the captain supposed, meat was meat.
As they emerged from cover, they got lower to the ground and their muscles seemed to bunch. Picard was reminded of Simenon’s instructions: “As soon as you see them, go on the offensive. Keep them off-balance. Once they leap, we’re as good as dead.”
Taking the Gnalish’s advice to heart, the captain lunged as if he were on a fencing strip and swung his tellek at the nearest bat-face. Its plans interrupted, the beast gave a deep-throated snarl and jumped back out of harm’s way.
Picard’s companions lashed out as well, with much the same results. The sanjarra looked angry, discomfited by the turn of events. But then, they were predators. They weren’t accustomed to defending themselves from their prey.
Again, the captain leaped forward and took a swing at the nearest of the bat-faces. And again, it withdrew with a dangerous-sounding rumbling deep in its throat.
Ben Zoma narrowly swung and missed another one. “When do we get to the part where they run away?” he asked.
Picard had been wondering the same thing. “Why do I get the feeling we’re just making them madder?”
“Keep at it,” Simenon told them, “and they’ll get the idea.” Taking his own advice, he drove back one of the beasts with a vicious two-handed attack. Then he added, “Eventually.”
Suddenly, someone cried out and fell in a heap. Glancing to his left, the captain saw that it was Greyhorse who had gone down, his leg caught in a thick, leafy vine.
Nor was Picard the only one who had noticed. A couple of sanjarra appeared to have taken note of the doctor’s fall as well. Their tiny eyes glittered with a fierce, undeniable hunger.
As the captain looked on, the beasts coiled to spring. Not good, he thought. Not good at all. Once they pounced on Greyhorse, he was as good as dead.
Someone would have to stop them before they could spring. Determined that he would be the one to do that, Picard started to move in the doctor’s direction.
But Joseph beat him to the punch. Leaping forward and swinging his tellek in big, savage arcs, the security officer made the beasts think twice about claiming their prey.
Then help came in the form of Simenon and Ben Zoma. Overmatched now, the sanjarra who had been eyeing Greyhorse grudgingly gave ground. But at the same time, it gave some of the other beasts an opening.
And when Picard and Vigo went after those bat-faces, it created an opportunity for the sanjarra to attack from still another quarter. It was as if the bat-faced predators were a deadly flood and Picard’s people were trying to maintain a leaky seawall in which they could only plug one hole at a time.
“Watch out!” someone cried, his voice thick with urgency.
“Behind you!” shouted someone else.
They whirled, swung their telleks, whirled again to face a new threat. None of them ever quite managed to hit anything, but neither did they let the sanjarra gain the advantage.
Picard blinked away sweat that had fallen into his eyes and tried desperately to hold up his end of the barg
ain. They all did—Greyhorse too, now that he was on his feet again.
Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, the beasts’ frustration seemed to overcome their hunger. They didn’t growl any less loudly or viciously when they were beaten back, but they also weren’t as quick to come forward again.
Then the breakthrough came. One of the bat-faces, perhaps the largest of them, appeared to lose interest in his prey. He turned around and began to pad away through the forest, not even bothering to give Simenon’s party a second look.
A moment later, a second beast admitted defeat as well. And as if by tacit agreement, the rest of the sanjarra followed suit.
In a matter of moments, they were gone. It was only then that Picard realized how much his arms hurt. Taking a deep breath, he looked around at his comrades. They were breathing hard but no one seemed to have sustained any damage.
Not even Greyhorse.
“Everyone all right?” Ben Zoma asked.
His question was met with tired murmurs of assent.
Vigo slipped his tellek back into its sheath. “Well,” he said, grpping Joseph’s shoulder, “that could have turned out worse.”
Joseph nodded. “Much worse.”
Ben Zoma swiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. “I’d call it a good omen.”
Simenon cast a skeptical look at him. “That is,” he amended, “if you believe in such things.”
“Come on,” the first officer told him. “Even you have to admit we did well just now.”
Simenon’s nostrils flared stubbornly. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll admit it.”
Then he started off down the path again.
As he fell in behind the engineer, Picard smiled through his weariness. If even Simenon could show a hint of optimism, their venture might turn out well after all.
Chapter Sixteen
“WELL?” SAID WU, scanning the faces of her bridge officers. She could feel the hum of the Stargazer’s engines through the deck plates, hear the control consoles’ unrelenting chorus of beeps and chirps. Normally, she tuned those things out the way any veteran officer would, but they seemed all too obtrusive now in the silence that followed her challenge.
“Who’s got a way to get those people off the Belladonna?” she asked, her voice echoing throughout the bridge.
No one spoke for a moment. Then Paxton broke the ice.
“We could try using a tractor beam. But that would require us to get a lot closer to the accretion bridge.”
“And we can’t do that,” said Idun, “because the pull would drag us into the phenomenon as well.”
Kastiigan nodded at his science console. “True.”
“We can’t transport them off,” Gerda thought out loud. “Not when we can’t get a reliable lock on them.”
“And,” Kastiigan added, “the radiation and the magnetic fields in the accretion bridge would wreak havoc with a confinement beam.”
“So the transporter isn’t an option,” Wu concluded. “What is?”
Silence ruled the bridge again. Wu found herself missing the captain, Ben Zoma, Simenon, and Vigo. Had they been aboard, there would no doubt have been a few more suggestions in the air.
Paris, who was manning the weapons station in Vigo’s absence, hadn’t spoken to that point. But now he said, “We’ve established that we can’t use our tractor beam to pull the Belladonna out. But why couldn’t we use it to send in an unmanned shuttle?”
Wu looked at him. “You mean as a rescue vehicle?”
The ensign nodded. “If we can get it to the Belladonna, they can offload their people one group at a time.”
The second officer considered the notion. It was interesting, all right. She turned to Lt. Dubinski, Simenon’s stand-in at the engineering console. “What do you think?”
The engineer took a moment to run some calculations. When he looked up, it wasn’t with a great deal of optimism. And when he spoke, it was with even less.
“Even if a tractor beam could be effective in an accretion bridge environment, we’d have to stretch it pretty thin to keep the Stargazer out of trouble. It wouldn’t be able to handle the mass of a shuttle pod, much less a full-fledged passenger craft.” Dubinski glanced at Paris. “Good try.”
But the ensign didn’t seem especially gratified by the compliment. His expression said he wouldn’t be content until he had come up with something better.
Wu looked around the bridge. “Anyone else?”
No one seemed to have an idea—not even Paris, for all his obvious determination. Under different circumstances, that might not have bothered the second officer so much.
But under these circumstances, with a ship full of lives hanging in the balance, it bothered her a lot.
Picard sat down heavily and rested his back against the rough bark of a tree trunk.
“I just need a minute,” Greyhorse gasped, collapsing against another tree on the opposite side of the path.
Of course, this was the fourth time the doctor had said that since the beginning of the race a few hours earlier. Though no one had complained out loud, it was growing difficult to ignore the fact that he was slowing their team down.
To Simenon’s credit, he was managing to withhold comment on Greyhorse like everyone else. He just stood there a little farther up the trail, glancing occasionally at the paths of their adversaries to either side of them and frowning.
“Thanks a lot,” Greyhorse rasped in the Gnalish’s direction.
Simenon turned. “For what? I haven’t said a word.”
“You don’t have to,” the big man told him. “The way you’re standing there is comment enough.”
The engineer’s ruby eyes narrowed. “What would you have me do? There’s nothing more important to a Gnalish than winning this race. Nothing. And we’re sitting here wasting time when we could be looking after the future of my clan.”
“No one’s trying harder than I am,” Greyhorse wheezed.
“I didn’t say you weren’t trying,” Simenon shot back. “All I’m saying is that—”
He stopped in midsentence as something dark darted across the path and leaped into his backpack. Muttering a curse, the Gnalish reached for the pack, but he was too late.
Whatever it was had emerged with Simenon’s package of extra crackers and was dragging it off into the forest.
“Stop it!” the Gnalish cried.
Picard, who was closest to it, managed to head the thing off. It was then that he got his first good look at it.
The creature was small and slender with black, matted fur, a long reddish tail, and tiny paws. Picard would have sworn it was a Terran rat if not for the high, bony ridge in the center of its skull.
It stopped and looked at him for a second with its black, oval eyes, as if it were wondering what kind of smooth-skinned monstrosity had wandered into its forest. Then, with blinding speed, the creature whirled and darted back toward the path, still dragging Simenon’s cracker package along with it.
By then, the others had come after it as well. But when the thing scampered back into their midst, it made them spin and dance with the awkward determination of Tellarites at a Regency ball.
“It’s behind you!”
“Over there!”
“No,” said Picard, pointing to the thing as it scurried past him, “over there!”
Every time the creature made a move to elude them, someone blocked its escape route. And after a while, their efforts began to take a toll on the rodent. It moved less quickly and unpredictably, became easier to track with one’s eyes.
It still could have slipped into the brush and eluded its pursuers if it had relinquished its hold on their food supply. But having come this far, the creature seemed reluctant to part with its prize.
Finally, Picard and his officers surrounded it, blocking its escape at every turn. At that point, it was just a matter of retrieving the package of crackers.
“Stay where you are,” the Gnalish snappe
d. “I’ll get it.” And he moved in to recover what was his.
“Feel free,” said Ben Zoma.
“It’s all yours,” Joseph told him.
Hunkering down low, Simenon eyed the rodent. Then he advanced on it with a hunter’s purposefulness. “I’ll teach you to steal my food,” he said softly.
“You can teach him to steal mine, too,” Greyhorse remarked dryly.
The rodent didn’t move a muscle. It just sat there on its hind legs, its furry, ridged head tilted to one side, watching the engineer as if mesmerized by him.
“That’s right,” Simenon hissed approvingly. “Just stay there one moment longer, you filthy duwiijuc—”
Suddenly, he darted forward and grabbed for the creature. But as he did so, the rodent darted forward, too—right between the Gnalish’s legs. And before Simenon could do anything about it, the thing had grabbed hold of his tail.
A cry of rage and indignation boiling up from his throat, the engineer switched his appendage back and forth in an attempt to dislodge his tormentor. But it didn’t work. The rodent hung on as if its life depended on it—and maybe it did.
Cursing like a drunken Klingon, Simenon bent over and tried to reach for it through his legs. But that didn’t work very well either. The rodent managed to remain just out of reach.
By then, everyone was laughing so hard it hurt. They couldn’t help themselves. The only exceptions were Greyhorse, who never laughed, and of course Simenon himself.
Finally, Picard couldn’t stand it any longer. “Stay in one spot,” he told his engineer, “and I’ll get it off.”
“Easy for you to say!” Simenon hissed. “You haven’t got a duwiijuc eating you inch by inch!”
Nonetheless, he managed to remain still until the captain could grab the rodent by its furry torso. Trying not to get bitten himself, Picard pulled the creature off Simenon’s appendage. Then he flung it into the crimson brush.
As soon as Simenon was free of the thing, he brought his tail up and inspected it. “The damned thing drew blood!” he groaned.
“Stay where you are!” mimicked Ben Zoma, “I’ll get it!” And with that, he incited another wave of laughter.
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