Her body sliced through the water like a blade, sank in a straight line, and came to a stop in the deep pool. Fighting against the weight of the water and the pull of gravity, Theriault kicked and stroked her way to the surface. For several seconds, she struggled to tread water and pull in a breath. Despite being free of the underground river, her body was still trapped in its panicked state. Then her throat relaxed, and she coughed out huge mouthfuls of icy water, clearing the way for the sweetest breath of air she had ever tasted.
Floating in the still waters of the enormous pool, she turned slowly and surveyed the space that yawned around her. It was a staggeringly huge cavern, two kilometers wide and a few hundred meters tall. All around the cavern, massive jets of water erupted from natural-looking tunnels in the walls and fell in majestic plumes to the deep, wide pool. Multiple entrances to a labyrinth of other caves gave the cavern’s walls a honeycombed appearance. The pool emptied into a vast, high-ceilinged tunnel that led deeper underground. High overhead, the dome of the cavern’s ceiling was open, revealing a sky streaked with the painterly hues of a subtropical sunset.
Using slow, steady strokes, Theriault swam to shore, crawled onto the sandy ground, and collapsed. She was grateful to be free of the water, to be tasting air, to be alive. It took her several minutes to notice that she was shivering violently. Looking at her hands, she saw that they were almost blue. Hypothermia, she realized. Have to work fast, before I lose consciousness. She looked around and spotted several large rocks. In her exhausted, battered state, dragging several heavy stones into a line beside a small nook in the cavern wall was a labor of desperation. She assembled enough to make a row as long as she was tall, then crawled into the nook behind the rocks and drew her phaser.
A quick check of the device confirmed that its outer casing was intact. She hoped that it was as waterproof as its specs claimed, and she primed it to fire.
Short, controlled bursts on a low setting swiftly turned each rock orange-hot. That’ll do, she decided.
She tucked her phaser back onto her belt and let herself start to drift off. Basking in the warm glow of the rocks, she decided that, though her phaser used to be her least favorite piece of equipment, it had just become her new best friend.
14
“Kepler to base,” Ensign O’Halloran said, keeping one eye on the shuttlecraft’s flight controls and the other on the smoke rising from Gamma Tauri IV’s parched landscape.
“Go ahead, Kepler,” replied Commander al-Khaled.
Circling the landing site specified in his orders, O’Halloran reported, “We’re nearing the coordinates now. Lotta smoke down there, sir. Lotsa debris, too.”
“Can you tell what it’s from?”
Squinting against the glare of early morning light low on the horizon, O’Halloran said, “Negative. Not reading any metal, no bodies, no fuel. Doesn’t look like a crash or a battle site.”
“Find a clear spot to put down,” al-Khaled said. “Stand by for dust-off if the survey team gets in trouble.”
Guiding the shuttlecraft into a slow descent, O’Halloran said, “Roger that, base. Putting down in sixty. Kepler out.”
Slouched in the copilot’s seat, Ensign Anderson had one foot propped on the edge of his console and both hands folded behind his head. With a nonchalance that vexed O’Halloran to no end, he said, “What do you think we’re gonna find down there?”
“We aren’t gonna find anything,” O’Halloran said, “because we’re staying in the shuttle, as ordered.”
“Wow, that’s a really boring life choice you’ve made, my friend.” Gesturing at the sunbaked vista outside the cockpit, he added, “For all you know, the mysteries of the universe are down there, waiting to be found, and you’re gonna stay in the ship.”
O’Halloran watched the ground slip under the shuttlecraft as he made a banking turn. “I’d love to debate this with you,” he said, “but I’m kind of busy with the landing.”
“That’s your problem—you don’t multitask,” Anderson said.
Engaging the vertical thrusters, O’Halloran replied, “Your problem is you never shut up long enough to think.”
“Of course not,” Anderson said, unfazed. “Thinking too much is what gets you into trouble.”
“No one’s asking you to think too much, Jeff.” O’Halloran leveled the shuttlecraft with the ground. “I just want you try thinking.” He set the craft down with a soft bump and released the rear hatchway. It lowered with a smooth mechanical whine and served as a ramp for the rest of the team to file out of the shuttlecraft. Anderson got up from the copilot’s chair. O’Halloran looked up at him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Pointing aft, Anderson said, “To check out the big hole in the ground.” He started walking toward the ramp.
“Sit down,” O’Halloran said.
Flashing a grin over his shoulder, Anderson replied, “You have to outrank someone to give them orders, Bri.”
“Dammit,” O’Halloran muttered. He hurried through the postflight checks and secured the controls. For a moment he hesitated, torn between obeying orders and indulging his curiosity. Knowing he would probably regret it, he got up and followed his annoying friend out of the shuttlecraft, jogging to catch up with the survey team.
Lieutenant Donovan Adams led the survey team away from the Kepler, across a dusty plain littered with huge, irregular chunks of blackened glass and fine coal-colored dust. The enormous, jagged obsidian boulders looked as if they had fallen from the sky and embedded themselves in the ground. They radiated intense heat, and smoke wafted from their coating of smoldering resin. All around him, the ground had a scorched quality and stank of cordite.
“No life readings,” he reported, watching his tricorder for any kind of fluctuation. Several meters ahead, the dusty soil sloped down to the edge of a circular pit. Its walls were burned black and coated in what looked like a thick layer of dusky, polished glass. Broad columns of smoke ascended from its depths and mushroomed into the sky. Searing heat stopped him more than five meters from the edge of the abyss, and he backed off. To the rest of the team he said, “It’s too hot to go forward. Fan out around it.”
Ensign Blaise Selby, the team’s geologist, marveled at the data on her own tricorder. “The pit extends all the way down to the power source, Lieutenant. But the crystalline structures inside the pit are inconsistent with this area’s geological profile. That’s volcanic glass, sir, but there’s no volcanic activity here.”
Circumnavigating the pit, Adams noticed that the shuttlecraft pilots had followed the survey team. “What are you two doing out of the shuttle?”
“Uh, we just figured, um, you know, maybe you guys could use help with the, uh, stuff,” stammered the fair-haired one.
Adams stared at them until they took the hint and turned back. Once they began plodding back to the Kepler, he turned his attention to the gaping maw of the inferno that lay before him. He looked to his science officer, Lieutenant sh’Neroth. “What could have made this? Energy beam?”
The Andorian shen shook her head, bobbling her antennae slightly. “A blast powerful enough to penetrate ten kilometers of bedrock would likely have continued into the atmosphere. We would have detected that. It also would not account for the crystalline residue.”
Kattan and Ndufe, the team’s security guards, stayed on opposite sides of the pit, circling it slowly, phasers drawn.
“Let’s run a few more scans,” Adams said. “I want to know if we’ve found a central hub or maybe a node in its defense—”
The jagged black-glass boulders split apart, stood up, and glowed with violet motes of energy inside their shells. The survey team was completely surrounded. At least two dozen of the giants rose from the field of smoke and ashes. Slinging his tricorder and drawing his phaser, Adams yelled to the others, “Get back to the shuttle!”