“Looks that way, yes.”
“No,” she said, aghast. “Oh, no.”
“Yes,” he said. “We should have died. We should have smacked into this place and burned like Titan, like our friends, but because of the promise the Prophets made to me, we’re here, alive, a thousand years in the past.”
“And this makes you laugh?”
“Of course,” he said. “Because, no matter what else happens, we absolutely have to get off this planet, as soon as we can, and we have absolutely no way to do it.”
Her golden head tilted slightly to one side as she tried to determine if he was not still a little delirious from his injuries.
Chapter Six
ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.1
I t took Vale almost twenty minutes to disentangle herself from the vines, much of which time was also spent making sure she didn’t free herself too soon. Sudden release would have sent her plummeting twenty meters to the jungle floor.
Seen from above, the place had looked lush, bubbling with ambient moisture that rose off the violet flora in thick rolling clouds, but also somewhat peaceful. Now, in the thick of it, her body nearly immobilized by the spiderweb of sticky grasping vines, she was forced to revise that opinion. Everything moved here. Everything was not only alive but actively so. The vines, some as thick as a human arm, twined themselves in their multitudes around larger growths that, to her surprise, were themselves nothing more than enormous stalks. The thinner tangles that held her seemed to resist her exertions to get free, inspiring a few moments of panic. But with effort and patience, she managed to loose herself from their grip.
Pulling herself onto the lip of one of the thicker vines, she took a look around. The jungle stretched in all directions without a sign of a break anywhere. She could see stalks in the distance that rose up to a canopy higher than the tallest buildings on Izar.
There were scores of insects, birds, reptiles, and at least one creature that looked like a hodgepodge of several mammals crossed with a cactus. It stopped a few meters away to stare at her out of bulbous milky-white eyes.
“Vale to Troi,” she said, tapping her combadge. No answer. She tried again with Keru and then with the rest of the team with the same result. Either her badge was damaged or something was interfering with the signal.
Or she was alone.
She knew the longer she stayed at this height, the worse her chances for avoiding a deadly fall. But going down also meant losing any hope of keeping her bearings; little daylight penetrated to the ground, and she knew, without instrumentation of some kind, that it would be brutally hard to navigate a way out of this on foot, much less to find the others. They should have all materialized in the same vicinity. Emergency transports were meant to put the entire team and their supplies on the surface of a target world without damage. Clearly something had gone wrong.
“I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”The memory of the panic in Troi’s voice went through her again like an icy knife. She shoved the feeling away and considered her prospects.
The drop to the jungle floor was not sheer. In fact, were she simply to let herself fall, she could be assured of having every bone in her body shattered and her flesh torn by the innumerable serrated brambles, vines and leaves she would hit as she fell.
The way across the top of the canopy was far more treacherous. She might make a go of leaping and swinging from stalk to stalk, but eventually a vine would snap in her hands or her feet would slip on a mossy bough and down she would fall.
Every scenario eventually put her on the ground, and in mostly unpleasant ways. So, after deciding which way was east and fixing it in her mind, down she went. Better to get there on her own terms.
It was dark on the forest floor, the entire area suffused with that same gloomy twilight that seemed to permeate places like Ferenginar and Berengaria VII. It was cooler on the bottom as well. She lost her jacket fending off the attack of some large multilegged lizard and now felt its absence acutely.
Mites and other unknown creatures flitted and skittered in the hidden reaches, and there was a sort of deep moaning sound-animal or artificial, she didn’t know-that rumbled through the area periodically. For all of that, Vale was alone.
East, she reminded herself. There was no reason to go that way specifically. She just felt better walking-all right, trudging-through lichen and forest muck toward the light, even if the source was hidden behind the seemingly endless stretch of purple jungle.
It didn’t make sense. Once her body got used to navigating the wild but fairly predictable contours of the jungle floor, her mind was free to drift without impeding her progress.
Somehow, she knew, this was Orisha. There had been a range of mountains in one of the visual signals they’d managed to decipher that was identical to the one she’d seen from the canopy.
The strange energy mass hadn’t contained a new world but had served as some kind of shunt, bridging the hundreds of millions of kilometers to the planet in an instant. But what explained such a phenomenon? Was it natural or artificial? How had it formed?
In a way that was good news. They had made it to shore more quickly than they had anticipated, but what they found there did not match the data they’d collected.
Orisha was, at least in part, an industrial society. She had watched the snippets of visual data Troi and Modan had culled from the bizarrely warped signal bleeds. Granted there was no real pattern to any of it; they had been watching three to five seconds snipped from moments isolated from what could have been hundreds of years of signal bleed. It was a sure bet that they’d missed a lot; certainly they had missed all the subtleties that must be present in a society this large.
There were still things they had thought they knew for certain, and yet, now that she was here, none of them had been borne out.
Where were the cities? She had seen something that resembled one in one of the snippets. It had been a gathering, Troi supposed a religious gathering, of a few thousand Orishans in some sort of open arena, with a night sky and something like skyscrapers clearly visible in the background. Granted the Orishan architecture-a strange admixture of familiar constructions, the same woven metal she’d seen on the watchdog vessel, and massive blue crystals carved into useful shapes-was foreign to her, but some commonalities always arose no matter how alien the species.
So, where were the cities? Where were the roads connecting the cities? Where were the signs that the Orishans had mined, farmed, or otherwise domesticated the natural resources of their world?
Nowhere, apparently. This was as close to a pristine ecosystem as she had ever seen, and that couldn’t be if the Orishans had developed any version of high technology.
Invisible cities. Warp energy for something other than space travel. Space travel for something other than expansion or exploration. Weapons powerful enough to wreak havoc on alien vessels, but which had clearly been designed without an inkling that the enemy might wish to protect itself or fire back.
It was a puzzle all right, something Vale didn’t like normally. She was a fan of solutions, but in this context the puzzle kept her mind off the eventual concerns of her belly and the very strange thing she’d seen just before she’d blacked out.
“I can’t feel any of them!”Troi had said, meaning the emotions of Titan’s crew. They all just vanished from her perceptions, switched off like three hundred fifty lights. There was only one thing that could have caused that, as far as Vale was concerned. One thing and one thing only. In view of the large black shape she’d seen being torn to bits in the energy storm, she had a very solid suspicion that her feeling was correct.
Something was tracking her.
She’d been trudging for about four hours by her reckoning without sight or word of the others when she noticed her shadow.