This was a wild planet, terra incognita, completely untouched by anything recognizable as civilization, and they were about to crash into its heart. The pressure of reentry, without the normal shielding to protect them, pressed relentlessly against them all. Vale knew she was a moment from a blackout.
She saw something then on her periphery that drew her eye. A great black mass had appeared in the swirling chaos of energies around the planet, with a shape that was chillingly familiar.
She watched in horror as the shape, very obviously that of Titannow, was buffeted and ultimately torn to bits by the rampaging waves of energy. It went screaming down toward the surface in great burning chunks.
“Impact imminent,”said the computer as her mind rebelled against the sight her eyes forced it to process. “Implementing emergency protocol priority alpha.”
The transporter nimbus enveloped the members of her team, spiriting them to the ground where, in theory, they would have a better chance of survival than with the shuttle’s impact.
Vale had no time to grieve for her friends or to ponder whether their chances would be better naked on this unknown and likely hostile planet, but as the transporter beam took her and she slipped into unconsciousness, her last thought was, “At least I don’t have to hear Ra-Havreii’s damned humming anymore.”
Chapter Five
T he memories of the previous days came back to him in a rush, and with them the sort of shattering despair that only a supreme act of will could force to recede.
Titan. Dead with all hands. The whole crew. The rest of the away team scattered, maybe dead as well, and him and Modan trapped in the middle of some massive local conflict.
Jaza had seen bad days in his time, horrendous ones, in fact, but nothing to compare with this. He had lost friends before, fighting the Cardassians, during his previous Starfleet assignment as science officer on the U.S.S. al-Arif, even a few on Titan, but he had never lost so many so quickly.
Modan had dragged him away from the scene of her killing of the alien soldier, concealing him under a canopy of the massive leaves that made up so much of the local flora. She was off somewhere, making sure the soldier’s body would not be discovered by its fellows.
The change in her was remarkable and went far beyond the cosmetic. In shifting into what he could only guess was some sort of naturally evolved hunting or fighting mode, her body now sported, in addition to the new dermal plating, an assortment of spines running the length of her back from the base of her skull to the bottom of her spine. Her “quills” she called them.
She had adopted an almost hunched posture that forced her face forward and down in the way he had noticed in many lower forms of predator on several worlds. She still looked like a golden sculpture, but now, instead of some sort of idealized version of a humanoid female, Modan looked like something out of one of the fables he used to read his children when he wanted to give them a healthy scare.
He couldn’t let himself think of them now.
It was one thing to take these long missions of exploration away from home and family and something else to think that he might never see them again. No.
He froze the images his mind had tried to form and forced them back into the dark recesses. Plenty of time for that sort of grief later.
“There’s something wrong with the sky,”he thought, looking up at it. It wasn’t the color-a kind of copper and gold-or the complete absence of clouds or that the shape of the sun was somehow refracted into an oval by this planet’s atmosphere. There was just something wrongwith it as far as he was concerned, and something familiar too, though he couldn’t exactly say what that something was.
“Can you move?” asked Modan, suddenly beside him. It was odd hearing her mellifluous voice coming from that spiny animalistic face, but it helped reassure him that, despite appearances, she was still herself. “The battle is moving this way.”
He still hurt all over, especially where his ribs were obviously broken, but he knew from experience what skirting the edge of a pitched firefight could do. He could move and told her so.
As she helped him to his feet, he realized the sounds of battle-familiar shouts, explosions, and weapons fire-had shifted toward what he had arbitrarily named east.
“Where are we going?” he said. He had no clear idea how long he’d been in his delirium, but from the thin appearance of new hair on his jaws and chin, he presumed at least a day had passed since the computer had beamed them here.
“The shuttle,” she said.
“It’s intact?”
She nodded, one of her head quills stabbing lightly into his cheek. “Mostly. I fixed what I could. You can do the rest.”
“Why didn’t we go there straightaway?” he said, marveling at her confidence in his abilities. He wasn’t an engineer, after all.
“The way was blocked by the Orishan fighters,” she said, helping him navigate what looked like a small forest of enormous lavender palm fronds that grew straight up from the soil. “They’re all over this area, Najem.”
“Orishans?” he said, surprised. “What makes you think these are Orishans?” The last he knew, they were crashing down on someplace entirely new that was a good half million kilometers from Orisha.
“Didn’t you ever look at the visual signals we harvested?” she said, slashing at the snakelike vines with the serrated edge of her forearm. Jaza realized he hadn’t. He had been so busy getting the shuttle ready for the trip, he hadn’t actually gone back to look at the visuals that Modan and the rest had sifted out of the signal chaff. “Well, these are them. I don’t know where this war came from. This is supposed to be a rigidly stable society. They don’t even have nation states.”
As if to punctuate their confused state, a series of large explosions sounded somewhere behind them, close enough to shake the ground and the nearby foliage. They might not have nations, thought Jaza. But they’ve certainly got the conflict part down.
For a moment he was again transported back to those awful bloody days on Bajor when he spent every waking moment figuring and implementing ways to kill as many Cardassians as he could as efficiently as possible. Those days were long gone, thank the Prophets, but the memories were sometimes as fresh and immediate as the thought of his mother’s smile.
“Maybe this is a colony,” he said, stumbling over a small but hidden cluster of stones. “We thought they didn’t have space travel and we were wrong. What else could we have missed?”
“It seems as though we missed a lot,” said Modan, helping him stay upright. “But these are definitely Orishans. How they got here, wherever we are, I can’t say.”
“A broken colony of some kind,” he mused aloud. “That would explain some of this. The Federation has had a few of them. They’re often conflict engines.”
She stopped abruptly, motioning for him to be quiet and still. He nodded, resting his weight against the base of a massive vine that was as thick as one of the smaller sequoias he’d seen on his first visit to Earth four years ago, shortly after he’d transitioned from the Bajoran Militia to Starfleet. Huge as the vines were, they were all still relatively close to the ground, never rising higher than ten or fifteen meters. One day he envisioned there would be towering versions of these things, stretching high into the sky.
Modan disappeared briefly into the brush, only to return looking as agitated as her golden armored skin would allow.
She motioned for him to stay absolutely mum and still, as if he had enough energy to do more than nod. As they huddled there in the crook of the great vine, something moved past them in the jungle beyond.