The shuttle’s stealth field was still intact, thank the Prophets, still making it look like an innocuous bit of jungle. All he had to do was get to her, free her, and get back here. Then they could go and maybe, just maybe, send their friends in the future a beacon that could stop all this from happening.
He wouldn’t even need luck. This was something from the old days, the dark days, the time of blood and retribution. He would come at them invisibly, blast them away from her, and make the dash before they knew what hit them.
It wasn’t even a plan, just the application of lessons learned and perfected years before when his world was black and white and all his enemies were obvious and uniformly without pagh.
It would be quick and easy and-
Just as he crossed the threshold, the ground rippled with another quake. He was smashed down again, this time into the more yielding dirt and crystal of Orisha’s soil. He landed on his back and found himself staring up at something his mind could only barely comprehend.
The sky was on fire. Lateral columns of flame and force leaped and danced there from horizon to horizon, obscuring even the sight of the planet’s sun. The ground rumbled and churned beneath him like a living thing. He saw something like lightning bolts rip down from the heavens, boiling the landscape wherever they struck and, at the center of it all, like an eye gazing down on the destruction, was an undulating sphere of forces and energy that could only be what the Orishans had called the Eye.
Jaza Najem had another name for it, now that it had shown itself, and it was neither godlike nor demonic.
Tesseract, he realized, and then, as the effect subsided, and something else.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the apparition was gone and the world was quiet again.
That’s what’s wrong with the sky, he thought. It’s flooded with enough highly energized chronometric particles to affect the visible spectrum. That didn’t explain the massive tidal forces ripping across Orisha when the “eye” opened. It didn’t even explain how the damned thing existed at all outside a laboratory, but it explained enough, perhaps just enough to salvage this disaster. First, though, there was Modan to rescue.
When he was sure there would be no further upheavals he gathered up the weapons, activated his isolation suit, and stopped dead, frozen in place by the scene before him.
There was the flat orange disk of the Orishan sun, dipping low in the sparkling copper sky, a sky that had seemed both familiar and strange the first time he’d seen it.
There was the shimmering afterimage of the massive tesseract that trailed behind the planet mostly unseen. There in the dirt, unearthed by the rumbling ground, were nine of the ubiquitous blue crystals clustered either by chance or design into a pattern that recalled a Tear of the Prophets.
The air was ozone and ice around him, but he knew the cold was not from anything so mundane as a change in the local weather.
This was his vision. This was the place and time of his death.
Chapter Eight
ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.5
It was difficult tracking Keru through the chaos of giant vines and towering violet stalks. The pace Ra-Havreii’s abductors set was ferocious, eating up meters the way a horde of locusts devours a field of grain.
Despite his size and the trillion natural obstructions offered by the unfamiliar and hostile landscape, the big Trill tore through the jungle as if it were an open, level field.
Once the women lost sight of him completely and were forced to rely on Troi’s empathic abilities to stay on his trail. Troi could feel Keru’s grief, so similar to her own, burning white hot somewhere ahead of them. He masked it well, but there was fire raging under that calm, efficient exterior. If he did catch the ones who’d taken Ra-Havreii, she wasn’t sure if he or they would survive the encounter.
Though Troi was too intent on maintaining her fix on Keru’s emotional aura to notice much else, Christine Vale continued to marvel at the woman’s ability to bear up.
The death of her husband had obviously stripped her of every shred of hope she had once possessed, and yet here she was, doing her duty, doing her utmost to save the engineer.
I’d be catatonic if I was in her skin, thought Vale. Catatonic or worse.
Troi faltered suddenly, uttering a short ragged cry as she stumbled forward to the ground. Vale was with her in an instant, supporting her, keeping her on her feet.
“You okay?” she said.
“Feedback,” she said. “It’s Keru. He’s unconscious.”
“But alive,” said Vale. She couldn’t take any more deaths today, and certainly not Keru’s. “He’s still alive?”
Troi nodded. “There are two of them there, Christine,” she said. “Just over the next rise.”
“Only two?”
“I can sense them,” she said, rising. “They’re the same type of beings we encountered in space. I assume they’re Orishans.” Troi winced. “Their emotions are so alien,” she continued. “They’re getting easier to sort, but I think they’re waiting.”
“For?”
“Us,” said Troi.
“Their mistake,” said Vale.
Ch’ika’tik was unhappy. It was bad enough being out here in the open lattice with the midday sky peaking through the vault of vines above, but to have to approach the Shattered Place? To get there and to find these creatureswandering among the ebony Spires, creatures that were both as bizarre and as hideous as something from a hibernation fantasy?
And the weapons these creatures had. The funny noises they made when they fired was a weak herald to the destruction of the wave they produced. The first one they had taken had been no trouble, but the second, the one who tracked them, caught them and attacked, that one was deadly.
Ch’ika’tik was not taken out of the Dreaming caste, but she knew an ill omen when she saw it. This omen was as ill as they came.
It was soft like a tk’sit, though nearly hairless and with too few arms. It made noises like a tk’solthough neither as loud nor as deep. It had no armor, no spikes, no venom, no acid. The ugly little monster didn’t even have wings for escaping. For all that, it had taken three of her sisters to bring the creature down without killing it.
A’yujae’Tak had been quite clear about that.
“Find it,” she had said about the one who had dared to direct a wave at Erykon’s Tear. “Find it and bring it to me alive.”
As caste Maters went, A’yujae’Tak could be somewhat eccentric at times. She had come from the Dreamers and sometimes, when a thing should be clear as sparkle stone-killing anyone or anything that entered the Shattered Place, for instance-A’yujae’Tak would often find ways to make things foggy.
Still, she was the Mater and her will was Ch’ika’tik’s law, as it was for all the others in the caste. Though she was just a soldier, just a scout, she knew this latest eccentricity of the Mater would prove to be trouble.
She could still taste Tk’ok’iik’s pain as the alien wave had smashed into her, instantly stealing her consciousness. The Children of Erykon had nothing like this wave weapon.
The second creature had been so much trouble that Chk’lok’tok had told her and Kk’tik to wait behind and break the final two before returning to the Spire.
“These may be killed, yes?” said Kk’tik.
“No,” Chk’lok’tok had told them and added a command chemical to her scent for emphasis. “Only break them and bring them to the Spire. And any of their wave devices as well. A’yujae’Tak desires them.”
Kk’tik had been taken out of the Weaver caste and had difficulty with too much complexity. She was a done-or-not-done sort of drone. Still, she offered no protest, only mixed a hint of disappointment into her chemical aura.