“Keru to Vale,”his voice cut a welcome hole in her reverie. “Dr. Ra-Havreii has something down here you need to see.”
“What now?” she said.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he seems pretty happy,”said Keru, obviously perplexed. “It’s something to do with the warp core.”
“On our way,” said Vale.
It was worse being there. The blackened remains of Titan, hideous enough from a distance, were like a giant’s charnel pit from within. Vale was grateful that the descent that had burned Titanhad also cauterized the flesh of the crew. There was no stink of death here, at least, only the towering ebony monument to their loss and the absolute, relentless stillness.
While the jungle teemed with plant and animal life of nearly every description, this area was as tranquil as the graveyard it was.
The two women moved within the black maze of Titan’s remains in absolute silence, neither daring to break the quiet or disturb each other’s thoughts.
This lasted all of two minutes before the sound of phaser fire cut through the peace.
Troi and Vale broke into a dead run, bringing their own weapons up almost in unison. Far ahead of them, tens of meters away, they could see shapes, Keru’s and several others scuffling. Keru’s phaser fired again, slicing a bright narrow slash in the air.
Whatever they were smashed him to the ground and ran off into the place where the jungle crept closest to the crash site.
They had almost reached Keru, already back on his feet, before they realized the large black pillar towering over him was Titan’s warp core and that it was somehow still glowing with power.
“Orishans!” said Keru as he dashed into the jungle after the unseen attackers. “They took Ra-Havreii!”
His phaser had time to fire once more before Troi and Vale plunged in after him.
Chapter Seven
ORISHA, NO STARDATE
Jaza had a plan, but Modan didn’t like it. They needed to get the shuttle’s flight capability back and get off the planet sooner rather than later. The longer they stayed on Orisha, the more damage they might do to its natural timeline. They could only hope that Modan had not killed the Orishan soldier who had attacked Jaza or, if she had, that he would have died anyway as a result of the conflict raging around them.
The plan was simple enough in itself. Titan’s unstable warp core had to be neutralized. The shuttle’s flux regulator had been burned out by the energy discharge, but at least two of its counterparts in Titan’s warp core were still active and could be adapted.
The problem was that, though he had the necessary expertise to neutralize the core, the rad levels around the crash site were too high for him to get close. Modan’s Selenean physiology would allow her to survive the effects long enough to get the job done, but she was not an engineer.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “I’ll talk you through it, and then we will take this shuttle somewhere else where there are no sentients to corrupt with our presence.”
“This will work?” she said again, still dubious about the role he had set for her.
“It will,” he assured her. The isolation suit, one of two left when the others had vanished (along with a good portion of their emergency supplies) was set in rest mode, but it was working. She would be essentially imperceptible in the visible spectrum and well into the infra and the ultra as well.
“I’m not sure I have the skill set to do my part,” she said. “I’m just a code breaker, Najem.”
“Modan,” he said, a strange intensity in his voice that she had not heard before now. “The Prophets have put us together here for just this purpose.”
“The Prophets.”
“Yes,” he said.
“The beings who exist in Bajor’s stable wormhole.”
“Yes, Modan,” he said. “Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You believe your Prophets are controlling your actions, your life?”
“I believe,” he said, “that the Prophets guide my steps and shape my fate. Or, in this case, ours.”
“That’s perverse,” said Modan. “Selene doesn’t have deities. We know the universe is a mechanism.”
“It’s that,” Jaza acknowledged with a smile. “That simply isn’t allit is.”
“We are rational beings, Najem,” she said. “You are a scientist. You cannot seriously believe what you say.”
“I can,” he said. “I do.”
“I cannot process how this can be.”
He smiled. It was the first real smile he’d managed during this ordeal, and she was strangely glad of it.
“I was like you,” he said. “I was worse. But a mind that rejects new data, even if the data contradicts what the mind thinks it knows, is not functioning at peak.”
“And you have received this data?”
“Oh, yes,” he said.
She stared at him then, the turquoise orbs of her eyes seeming to bore straight through his being. He could only remember being scrutinized that closely once before in his life.
“The Mother has made me to think, as you say, at peak,” she said at last. “Present your data. If I agree with its rationality, I’ll obey your orders. If not, we must find an alternate plan.”
“I am the senior officer here, Ensign,” he said, not unkindly.
“There is no Starfleet now, Najem.” She wasn’t making an argument, she was stating a fact. Starfleet and any authority over her it granted him were a thousand years in the future. “There is no Federation. I can’t risk my life for an irrational notion.”
“Modan,” he said. “We’ve already wasted enough time. You don’t need to believe as I believe to get this done.”
She sat. She stared. She said nothing, and somewhere not far off, the dangerous substances inside Titan’s warp core continued their unregulated ebb and flow.
“All right,” he said. “All right, listen.”
The shrine was an old one, the kind that was usually built near the founding days of a settlement. It harkened back to those times before Bajor had developed space travel.
The hands of the founders of Ilvia had surely excavated the stones, seeded and cultivated the garden. Some local artisan had surely carved the image of a Tear that dominated the faзade.
It was exactly the sort of place the Cardassians usually destroyed under some pretext or another in their bid to separate the Bajoran people from their backward spiritual past.
Somehow this one had survived, even doing duty as a makeshift hospital where Jaza Chakrys tended to those deemed undesirable or unacceptable by their Cardassian occupiers.
He stood there, thanking the Prophets that his father wasn’t present after all and that at least one of the charges he had set, the one at the secondary target near the data processing station, had failed to blow.
Then it did.
He felt the explosion before he heard it and, in fact, never actually heard it at all. The shock wave flung him forward like a rag doll, smashing him against the broken stone courtyard of what once had been the first interior garden,
He felt he should have lapsed into unconsciousness-that was normal for this sort of bone-crushing injury-but instead, he heard the chimes.
“Hello, love,” said a voice that was enough like Sumari’s to send a hot electric thrill rippling through his body.