Looking down on the Spire, indeed, looking at it from any angle that wasn’t directly below, there was no way to make a distinction between it and the hundreds of thousands of other stalks jutting up from the sea of vines that covered most of the world.
“Sneaky buggers,” said Vale. “What are they hiding it from?”
“God,” said Troi. “I think they’re hiding from their god.”
It was easy getting into the Spire. There were several apertures at the base of the stalk, one so large they could have flown the shuttle in had they been able to find it.
There were no sentries, not on the ground level at least, and no warning system that they could detect. Inside, the place was alternately a maze of wide corridors and a series of large domed chambers into and out of which the corridors led. All of them were empty. Their good fortune made Vale nervous, but Troi thought she understood it a little.
“They don’t have crime here,” she said softly. “They don’t have wars. They don’t even have any of the social chaos that we take for granted even on the most advanced worlds in the Federation.”
“Hive mind?” asked Vale. The interior of the Spire, with its thousands of hexagonal facets and openings within the facets, did remind her very much of a wasp’s nest or possibly an impossibly large ant colony.
“Possibly,” said Troi, fretting with the tricorders. “The known sentient insectile species do tend toward order and rigid social structures as a rule. There’s something more going on here. One moment.”
There was indeed more to the Spire than met the eye. Though at the base level it seemed to be empty and its technological aspects were only hidden if looking down from the sky, the entire inner structure supported a network of force fields of some sort. The place almost hummed with the energy of these fields, though the tricorders could make no sense of their composition or purpose. It made scanning for Keru and Ra-Havreii very difficult.
“Faith,” said Troi as they entered the third of the giant domed rooms. “Their faith in this Eye, their fear of it, it’s shaped their whole society.”
“What society?” said Vale. “I watched the same footage you did. Those signals had to bleed off from somewhere. There should be cities here. There should be farms and, from the size of that space vessel, there should be a pretty large shipyard somewhere. There’s nothing out there but open jungle.”
“I don’t know,” said Troi, frustrated with the device she held. She handed the tricorder to Vale to see if she could get something useful out of it. The lattice of force fields continued to confound her scans. “I think there’s something obvious here and we’re missing it.”
As Vale adjusted the settings on the tricorder, Troi ran her fingers lightly along the nearest curved wall. It was not metal and it was not like any plant life she’d ever touched, even here on Orisha. It was a strange mixture of both.
They fear their god, but they revere it just the same, she thought. They don’t care about exploration, but they built a giant space vessel. They built this tower, hid it, and then left it empty. Where did they go? Where could they have taken-
“Deanna,” said Vale, her tense whisper breaking in on her thoughts. “I think I know where the Orishans are.”
Turning away from the wall, Troi was about to ask Vale where when she also knew. They were impossible to miss after all.
On the far side of their chamber several of the hexagonal facets had opened and from them a swarm of Orishan warriors, each with its own glowing lance, flooded in. In seconds there were fifty of the creatures there, training their weapons on the two women.
“I don’t suppose you can do that fear trick on all of them,” said Vale. Troi shook her head. “No. Of course not.”
After the fight-there was no way they could be taken without one-Vale struggled to remain conscious as she and Troi were carried off in different directions by their insectoid captors.
As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she tried to get a sense of what was happening.
She was being carried. The bug held her close in two of its four arms, pressed tight to its abdomen, as it scrambled along what looked like an access tunnel of some sort. The dimensions were only slightly bigger than those of her captor, forcing it and its fellows to run single file.
She could hear them all chattering, skittering along the hard smooth surface- chikkachikkachikkachikka-and was happy when the darkness pulled her down away from the sound.
She woke again, briefly, now slung like a sack over the soldier’s shoulder. It might have been the same one that had carried her down (she felt it was down somehow) or it might not. They really did all look almost exactly the same.
This time she got a flash of a huge empty space, a high vaulted ceiling made of the same ceramic that entwined the Spire. Purple and black Orishans crawled everywhere along its surface, climbing in and out of more hexagonal openings, some carrying bundles of some sort, some stopping briefly to chatter at one of their fellows. Some were bigger than the others. Some had wings, clear and veiny, that reminded her of dragonflies.
I’m underground, she realized, still fighting the losing battle to remain conscious. That’s where the cities are. They built down to get away from the sky. Then the darkness took her again.
The first thing she thought when she woke was, Deanna! Where have they taken Deanna!?
The second thing she thought was, Why am I still alive?
“Do not fight, creature,” said a voice that reminded her of a handful of nails being scraped across a sheet of metal. “Stand, but do not fight.”
With difficulty she pushed herself off her belly, up to her knees, and then finally to her feet.
She was not prepared for what she saw. This creature towered over the other Orishans by a good two meters. It was a darker shade of the ubiquitous violet that seemed to be the theme on Orisha. It had the same extra arms and the same armored exoskeleton, but there were bright markings on this one and, in places, protrusions that looked like small bulbous inverted bowls. Its face was more angular than the rounded ones of the soldiers, and both sets of its eyes blazed yellow instead of white.
“I am A’yujae’Tak,” it said. “I am the Mater of the [possible meaning: guardian] caste. What are you?”
On every visible surface, Orishans scuttled between giant viewing screens depicting at least two of the Spire’s siblings-one rising from the center of a lake and the other was near what looked like a volcano.
Notations of some sort appeared and vanished at regular intervals beside each image. Elsewhere in the chamber technicians manipulated what were so obviously power control systems, she almost laughed. The technology was alien, certainly, partly ceramic, partly organic, and partly utilizing the unknown force fields for various purposes.
Vale could actually see some of the fields flash briefly into the visual spectrum, shift color, and then vanish again.
Still, as alien as all of it was, she had been in rooms like this regularly for most of her adult life.
This was the power control center, the same as the engineering deck on any starship. The giant Orishan version of a warp reactor protruding from the distant ceiling was the final giveaway. The oscillating blue-white plasma flowing from two sources into a single pulsating reactor core was also familiar.
What the hell were these people doing?
When she didn’t respond right away, one of the soldiers that flanked A’yujae’Tak prodded Vale’s ribs with its lance.
“Speak when spoken to, creature,” it said. “Obey the Mater.”
She gave her name, her rank, and the name of her vessel. She tried to answer the flurry of obvious questions that followed as best she could, but she was never certain that the Orishans grasped all of it. There was some aspect of their communication that the universal translator couldn’t grip.