The Apostate stretched one spectral hand ahead of them and the other behind. His fingertips glowed bright red, and his eyes burned with the same infernal hue. “These are not avatars of the Nameless,” he said, his voice of thunder even more ominous than before. “One of the Serrataal has come…. The Warden.”
She tried to flash an ironic smile, but her fear turned it into a faltering grimace. “All this for little ol’ me?”
“He has not come for you,” said the Apostate. “He has come to face me. It has begun.”
“Whoa, hold on,” she said. “What’s begun?”
“The war,” he said. “For control of the Shedai.” He thrust his hand toward the nearest wall, and a beam of indigo fire shot from his palm and cut a wide, round tube that reached through to a parallel corridor. He looked down at Theriault and hushed his voice. “Flee, little spark. While you can.”
Fearful of leaving his circle of protection, Theriault took another look at the battalion of faceless sentinels closing in on them. Then she did as he said and ran as fast as she could.
Pennington bounded off the causeway onto a curving promenade only a few seconds before the slender bridge fractured loudly and fell away toward the distant, fog-smothered ground.
Shapes were animating out of the façades of the structures all around him. Some were vaguely humanoid in form. Others adopted insectile bodies, and some were simply bizarre—wild amalgamations of multihinged limbs and undulating trunks that crawled across vertical surfaces; diaphanous clusters that rode the wind and trailed violently snaking translucent flagella; serpentine coils of glowing vapor that turned solid in flashes of motion and struck with enough force to obliterate anything they hit.
His first sight of them had carried a rush of terror, which persisted even though it had become apparent that the bizarre beings were paying no attention to him. He dodged for cover from the fallout of their battle, which dislodged towering blocks of crystal and stone from the walls and catapulted them in a variety of directions. Despite his best efforts to capture video of this fantastic place with his portable recorder, he couldn’t stay still long enough to get a steady shot of anything. Every few seconds he was forced to sidestep or duck another rolling, falling, or ricocheting hunk of debris.
Under his feet, the flat surface of the promenade that ringed the central cluster of buildings was changing. Its surface was shifting color, veining with cracks, and becoming translucent. The change in its structure spread in front of him faster than he could hope to run; he looked back and saw that it was retreating behind him just as quickly. The transformation was a metastasizing cancer, creeping across walls and bridges, turning everything pale and brittle. It’s spreading like an infection, Pennington realized. This whole place is one big body. He ducked through an archway into a cavernous passageway that led deeper into the heart of the city. Its ribbed and curving walls made him shudder to think that he was sprinting down some titanic monster’s gullet.
On either side of him the walls became infused with dancing motes of energy and took on an almost liquid consistency. Huge heteromorphic creatures cleaved themselves from the walls and lunged at one another. Pennington barely weaved past them and continued his mad scramble down the passage. His thoughts flooded with alarm. Good Lord! They don’t come out of the walls—they are the walls. This isn’t where they live—this place is them. The sensation that he was running headlong into the belly of the beast took on a renewed and distinctly palpable horror.
He checked the tricorder reading. She’s close, he realized, less than four hundred meters away. A rib in the wall cracked and fell across the passage. He hurdled over it and coughed through a cloud of silicate dust as he kept on running. I just hope I find her before this place buries us alive.
24
Captain Nassir listened to the relentless, brutal cadence of the Shedai’s hammering exploration of the riverbed. Each impact arrived stronger and louder than the last and violently shook the Sagittarius. According to Crewman Torvin’s acute hearing, in less than two minutes the Shedai’s crushing assault would reach them and shatter the tiny scout ship’s unshielded primary hull.
Lieutenant zh’Firro was back at the helm, and Sorak manned the weapons console. The modifications to the phaser emitter were complete; the engineers, however, were having difficulty mustering enough energy to make a shot that would count. Phasers normally drew their power from the warp reactor; the ship’s emergency-reserve batteries had proved woefully inadequate to meet the power demands of a main phaser bank.
Another roll of deep, watery thunder trembled the ship. It was a race now. Either the engineers integrated the new fuel pod and brought back main power in time for a phaser shot to fend off the attack, or the Shedai would strike an unanswered killing blow.
On the edge of his vision, Nassir noticed someone walking stiffly onto the bridge. He turned and saw Lieutenant Commander McLellan taking one gingerly step after another. “Permission to return to duty, Captain,” she said, and flashed a taut smile.
“Permission granted,” he said, elated to see her whole again. “Good to see you, Bridy Mac.”
The slender brunette limped to his side and turned her gaze upward as another thunderstrike percussed the ship. Marshaling the same kind of deadpan gallows humor that Nassir had come to expect from Terrell, McLellan pointed upward and quipped, “Planning on doing something about that, sir?”
Just as dryly, he replied, “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“I could do without it,” she said.
He shrugged. “Give it another minute. One way or another, I expect it’ll stop soon.”
“Good to know,” she said with a nod, and folded her hands behind her back to await the inevitable.
A vital thrumming resonated through the Sagittarius as the bridge consoles flared back to life and the overhead lights surged back to full power. “Go!” Nassir snapped at zh’Firro. Then he spun toward Sorak: “Fire at will!”
With a flurry of her hands across the helm, zh’Firro engaged the main thrusters and rocketed the Sagittarius vertically out of the water. On the static-filled main viewer, a colossal spiderlike monstrosity straddled the river, plunging two of its tentacles into the water in alternating strikes. It immediately recoiled as the Sagittarius emerged from the river.
The shriek of the phaser bank’s discharge was like music to Nassir. He watched its shimmering blue beam of energy slam into the gigantic creature’s body. The behemoth staggered, retreated for a moment, and snapped one of its tentacles forward like a whip. It elongated faster than Nassir could track, and only after the ship echoed with the ring of impact and heaved under his feet did he realize they’d been physically struck.
“Hull breach,” Sorak reported. “Sealing that compartment.”
“Sayna,” Nassir said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The Andorian zhen worked at her console and became visibly alarmed. “We’re being held, sir.” Fighting with another control, she added, “Correction: We’re being pulled toward the creature.”
They all looked at the viewer. The Shedai’s tentacle was still fully extended. “It harpooned us,” Nassir said.
“Another signal, Captain,” Sorak said. “A second Shedai.”
Palming the sweat off the top of his bald pate, Nassir asked, “I don’t suppose the phasers are still online?”
Sorak reviewed the gauges above his console. “The emitter overloaded, just as Torvin predicted.”
Nassir was about to consider the feasibility of actually using his ship to ram the Shedai holding it, when McLellan pointed at the main viewer. “Sir, look!”