Xiong examined every square centimeter of the pod’s interior, looking for a way to access what was inside its bulkheads. As far as he could see, there were no removable panels. Damn, he thought with a shake of his head. I’d hate to be an engineer on a Tholian ship.
Questions formed quickly in his thoughts. How did the Tholian engineers make repairs to internal systems without access panels? Did they have some means of cutting through this obsidian surface and then making it whole again when their work was done? Might the ship’s bulkheads be like a mineralized form of smart polymer, capable of being retracted, reinforced, or reshaped by the application of properly modulated energy?
Looking at his multiple reflections on the black surfaces inside the pod, Xiong felt a surge of intuition: Somewhere on this ship, there is a tool that opens up these bulkheads. Climbing out of the pod back into the passageway beyond, he promised himself, Wherever that tool is, I’m going to find it.
Following the muddy river’s twisting path had proved to be the long way from the Sagittarius to the point where Theriault had plunged from a cliff into the rapids. Terrell had wanted to take a more direct route through the jungle, but Niwara had resisted. The rain, she’d said, had almost certainly obscured the trail that she and Theriault made during their flight from the Shedai attack, and she didn’t want to risk becoming disoriented while leading Terrell to the scene of the accident.
They had passed a high waterfall not long after leaving the ship. Since then they had traversed the top of the cliff. At most points along their winding route, there was less than two meters’ clearance between the edge and the tree line. Every few meters, Terrell snuck a look down into the ravine. It was choked with dry, tangled vines that stretched from one side to the other. They formed a thick layer of natural netting over the churning rapids below. He asked Niwara, “Were there vines like these where Theriault fell?”
“Yes, sir,” the Caitian scout replied. “Without them I doubt she would have survived the fall.”
Terrell hoped that Theriault’s ride down the river proved as fortuitous. “How much farther?”
“A few meters more,” Niwara said. She pointed at a bend in the gorge. “That’s where Ensign Theriault fell.”
He looked ahead and noted the gap that the science officer’s plunge had torn in the vines. When they reached the spot, Terrell said, “Hold up. We’ll run our first scan from here.” He lifted the tricorder slung at his side and powered it up. He set it to zero in on Theriault’s communicator signal. Within seconds it registered a lock. “Got her,” he said. “Bearing oh-eight-point-two, distance roughly twenty-one-
point-six kilometers. She’s moving, about three meters per second. It’s a good bet she’s still in the river.”
“It’s been two hours,” Niwara said. “I hope for her sake she’s a strong swimmer.”
Returning the tricorder to his hip, he replied, “Only one way to find out, Lieutenant. Take us downriver.”
Niwara continued forward along the cliff trail, and Terrell followed a few meters behind her. He hoped that Theriault was still alive and conscious, and that she could halt her journey on the river soon. Moving on foot, he and Niwara would only fall farther behind Theriault the longer she remained in the river.
As for whether the young science officer would be able to survive for two hours or more trapped in a raging current, he could only pray for the best and keep walking in slow pursuit.
Dr. Lisa Babitz hated germs. Most people she had ever known weren’t fond of infectious bacteria, but the blond surgeon reviled them with a passion that bordered on the pathological.
Keeping every surface of the interior of the Sagittarius clean and disinfected had been a challenge since her first day aboard, due in no small part to the habits of her crewmates. In the few short years that they had served together, she had learned to tolerate Ilucci’s penchant for eating with hands unwashed after working in engineering, Threx’s knack for leaving thick wads of shed body hair in the single shower that the entire crew shared, and even Lieutenant Niwara’s disturbing method of cleaning herself. In return, they had come to ignore her practice of conspicuously sanitizing every crew compartment on the ship at least once every other day.
Now there was mud in her sickbay.
There was mud, and trampled vegetation, and puddles of dirty water, tracked in long paths throughout the ship.
Worst of all, Lieutenant Commander McLellan, who was lying anesthetized on the biobed in front of her, and medical technician Tan Bao, who was standing on the other side of the bed, both were mummified in brown sludge. Just looking at them plagued Babitz with sensations of phantom insects creeping across her skin. She took a deep breath and searched in vain for calm.
Struggling to keep her tone professional, she instructed Tan Bao, “Cut away the fabric above the wound.” Tan Bao carefully sliced away several centimeters of the soiled green fabric. Babitz squinted at the unusual substance that had aggregated over McLellan’s wound. “Can you wash that?” she asked Tan Bao. “I want to get a clear look at it.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Tan Bao said, and he set to work rinsing the dirt and debris from McLellan’s leg. While he worked, Babitz reviewed the data from Tan Bao’s tricorder. The molecular structure of the crystalline substance on McLellan’s leg was very similar to one that Babitz had noted in an autopsy file Xiong had provided as part of her preparation for the mission.
Tan Bao interrupted her ruminations. “Doctor? The wound’s clean and ready for examination.” He stepped back to give Babitz more light.
She leaned down and eyed the dark, glasslike substance. “Hand me a two-millimeter biopsy punch,” she said. Tan Bao passed her the instrument, and she positioned it with care and precision above the thickest portion of the crystalline scab. With a quick jab, the punch penetrated its surface and came away with a tiny chunk of the substance lodged inside its circular cavity. She handed it back to Tan Bao. “Run a full-spectrum scan on this.” The technician nodded and carried the sample away to a compact analyzer on the other side of sickbay.
Babitz turned her attention to McLellan’s severed limb. The lower half of the woman’s right leg was cocooned in the peculiar crystal. She set it on the sickbay’s second biobed, from which she had only minutes earlier ejected engineer Torvin. A pallet of scanners mounted above the bed hummed as she powered them up. The indicators shifted on the bed’s display board. Babitz lifted her own tricorder and downloaded more complete results from the sickbay computer.
The severed leg showed no evidence of putrefaction. It had been all but completely mineralized by contact with the alien crystalline substance. Like petrified wood, Babitz thought. Except almost instantaneous. Impatient to verify her findings, she called up the autopsy report she had remembered from her pre-mission briefing. It took only seconds to find it.
Drs. Fisher and M’Benga had conducted an autopsy on the body of a Denobulan named Bohanon. According to the file, the man had been killed on Erilon during an encounter with a Shedai entity, slain instantly. His body had been returned in stasis to Vanguard, but as soon as it had been taken out of stasis for analysis something remarkable had occurred. Anabolic activity had been detected on all the exposed internal tissues contacted by the Shedai combatant. Some kind of alien bio-residue had started to transform the Denobulan’s organic tissues into a substance resembling a crystalline lattice. Fisher had noted that the process was short-lived, penetrating only a few millimeters into the surrounding tissue—but he also had speculated that the process might not be so abbreviated in a living subject.
Working quickly, Babitz placed McLellan’s crystallized leg into a stasis module, then returned to the woman’s side and initiated a new scan on the stump of her right leg.