“I think my leg’s broken.”
“Yeah, that first step’s a doozy.” He removed his pack and retrieved the spare coil of climbing rope. “Hang on. I’ll have you up in a few minutes.” Fumbling to untie the simple knot on the coil, he silently cursed his bulky gloves for making his fingers so clumsy. As the synthetic-fiber rope unspooled onto the cavern floor, he called back to Bridy, “Try not to move.”
“Not much risk of that.”
Recalling his mercenary training from decades earlier, Quinn secured one end of the rope with a set of strong knots to the thickest ice pillar within a few meters of the crevasse, and ran the line behind another sturdy pillar to serve as a crude pulley. Then he paid out a few dozen meters of slack over the fissure’s edge, lowering it to Bridy. “Secure that around your torso in an X shape, and through your legs if you can reach.”
“Under the shoulders will have to do.”
“That’s fine. Let me know when you’re ready to come up.”
A minute later, Bridy tugged on the rope. “Let’s do this.”
Quinn leaned back and started pulling on the rope. Slack gathered in his hands, and he coiled it around his left arm while hoisting Bridy back to the top of the crevasse. Bridy was a slender woman, but the effort of lifting her as dead weight was exhausting. As she clambered over the edge onto the cavern’s floor, Quinn gave a few more heroic tugs on the rope to pull her to safety.
Then he fell on his ass and gasped for air. His exhaled breath gathered in a wispy cloud around his head while he waited for his limbs to stop shaking.
Bridy lay on her back a few meters away, clearly in no hurry to move, either. In a droll deadpan she said, “Don’t have a heart attack, okay?”
“Tryin’ not to, darlin’.” After a few more pained breaths, he sat up. “We should patch up your leg. Where’s the medkit?”
She nodded at her torn-up backpack. “At the bottom of the crevasse.”
“Of course it is.”
“Along with my tricorder.”
He scowled. “Anything you didn’tlose?”
“Just my good looks.”
“And your sense of humor.” He got up and moved to her side. “But I don’t think you’ll be laughing for long.” With a gingerly touch, he examined her injured leg and paid attention to her pained reactions. “The good news is you’ve got a simple fracture. The bad news is we’ll have to treat it the old-fashioned way.”
Bridy grimaced. “This is gonna hurt, isn’t it?”
“Oh, hell yeah. In a few seconds you’ll wish I still carried a flask.” He removed his gloves, then clapped his hands and set them in position. “Ready?”
“No. Do it anyway.”
“All right. I’m gonna count to three, okay?” Bridy nodded. “One.” He jerked the broken halves of her tibia back into alignment with one quick pull.
Bridy’s piercing scream of pain filled the cavern. Then she punched Quinn in the shoulder hard enough to knock him down. “Asshole! You said on three!”
“No, I said I was gonna countto three. Never said when I was gonna set the bone. Oh, and by the way—two.”
“Say ‘three’ and I’ll knock your teeth out.”
Quinn recoiled in mock indignation, one hand on his chest. “Is that any way to treat the guy who has to carry you back to the ship?”
“I’m not going back to the ship. Not yet, anyway.”
“Why? You got a death wish or something?”
“The source of that signal is less than two hundred meters from here, straight down that passage. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you realize how crazy it sounds.”
“If you’re willing to carry me to the ship, then a few hundred yards more won’t matter, will it?”
He started gathering up the rope. “What if we aren’t alone down here? Have you thought of that? If we get into trouble, how can we retreat if you can’t even walk?” He stopped and faced her. “Hell, even if we arealone down here, what’s the point of finding the signal source when we don’t have a tricorder?”
“Dammit, I just want to seeit. Let’s do a quick recon. Then we can head back to the ship, fix my leg, and come back with the spare tricorder.”
He put away the coiled rope and sealed his pack. “If this all goes wrong, do I get to say ‘I told you so’?”
“No.”
“Let me rephrase: Do you want to crawl the rest of the way?” She seethed for a moment. “All right, you can say it once. Now, can we please get this show on the road?”
“Your wish is my command.” He took her hand, helped her up, and draped her arm across his shoulders so he could support her weight. They moved together, taking care to synchronize their strides.
Bridy wore an amused expression. “You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. What’re you gonna say if we end up making the greatest discovery of our lives?”
“That’s easy,” Quinn said. “ I get half.”
Ten minutes later, Bridy clung to Quinn’s shoulder as they stood at the end of the downward-sloped passageway, facing a wall of ice at least a dozen meters thick.
Quinn frowned. “Hmph. I’d call this a sign.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a minor obstacle.”
“Honey, it’s a wall of ice. To me, that says, ‘Do not enter.’ ”
“Oh, come on.” She gestured at the dark, semitransparent barrier. “I can see flickers of light from the other side. Whatever we came to find is there.”
“Sure it is. But I don’t feel like hacking my way through the galaxy’s biggest ice cube to get to it”—he nodded at her broken leg—“especially since I’d be doin’ all the work, on account of you being a gimp.”
She rolled her eyes. “I swear, sometimes it’s like you forget we live in the twenty-third century.” Then she drew her phaser, set it for wide beam and high power, and fired at the ice. The blue beam lit up the ice for a fraction of a second, and then the frozen wall transformed into a dense cloud of sultry, gray vapor. Seconds later, the hiss of boiling water ceased, and Bridy took her thumb off the phaser’s trigger.
He scowled. “Oh, well, sure. If you’re gonna cheat.”
“Let’s go.”
Quinn helped her forward through the curtains of mist. Eerie, nigh-musical oscillations emanated from the chamber ahead of them, and an unearthly glow pierced the thinning fog as they neared the threshold of a vast cavern.
The first thing Bridy saw was the machine.
Every piece of it was in motion. Delicate elements composed of silvery crystal spun at many different speeds on a variety of planes, all orbiting a core consisting of equal parts hard angles and fluid curves. Ribbons of prismatic energy snaked through the machine’s open spaces, crisscrossing one another’s paths, sometimes intersecting in flashes of white light.
Rotating in the center of all that motion was an object unlike any Bridy had ever seen. Made of the same silvery crystal as the rest of the machine, the core element was in a constant state of flux, expanding into dramatic stellations of varying complexity and reverting to a simple icosahedron once every several seconds before repeating the cycle of transformations.
Warmth radiated from the titanic device. As she and Quinn drew nearer to it, Bridy noticed a profound galvanic tingling traveling across her body.
She looked away from the machine only because Quinn pulled urgently on her coat sleeve. “Um, honey?” Bridy turned, looked at him, and then shifted her attention to see what he was pointing at.
Her jaw went slack as she beheld the most beautiful and terrifying being she’d ever encountered: a giant nearly seven meters tall, its body formed from multicolored mist that concealed its lower half. A brilliant glow obscured its face, streams of shimmering motes circled its torso, and a great halo of golden light framed its head. As clouds of vapor rolled behind its back, Bridy saw fleeting glimpses of majestic shapes she was almost certain could only be wings.
Its voice was a stroke of thunder and the roar of the sea. “Welcome.”