Ra-Havreii smiled and extended his hand. “May I have your combadge, please?” he said.
She gave it to him and watched, fascinated, as he held them both up against the wall containing both the exit and the energy field blocking it.
A low-pitched whine began to emanate from the badges. She felt it in her bones as much as she heard it, a persistent and, frankly, discomfiting vibration that made her teeth ache.
There was a flash, a brief rainbow halo around the two badges, that was followed by what appeared to be a liquid ripple running through the wall. When the rippling stopped, so did the ache in her teeth. The noise was gone.
Ra-Havreii handed her badge back to her and pressed his palm against the exit door, which slid instantly and easily to one side.
“Pressure sensitive,” he said.
The field was down. The door was open. They could, with a little luck, locate the others and get the hell out of here before the quakes resumed. She had no plan beyond that yet, but just now, she didn’t need one. Let them find Troi and Keru first. Let them all get to the surface. Then they could search for the shuttle and maybe get off this rock.
“Well done, Commander,” she said, replacing the badge on her tunic. She also was beginning to feel a bit more like herself again. Even with Ra-Havreii’s findings about the crashed starship, they had no real evidence that Titanhad not still been destroyed in the conflagration, but she had what she needed: hope. “Very well done.”
“I believe, Commander Vale,” said the Efrosian, moving past her into the corridor beyond, “this is the appropriate juncture in our relationship for you to start calling me Xin.”
The Orishan holding cells were really just storage containers as it turned out, the place where the larval jelly was mixed and warehoused until it could be processed and consumed.
There was no crime on Orisha, after all, and therefore, no need for jails. Vale had been unsettled by the idea of being broken down into base chemicals to supply meals for the Mater’s young. Now, seeing the jelly itself flooding out from behind each cell door Ra-Havreii opened, and moreover, seeing the remaining bits of animal and insect carcass still breaking down inside-well, unsettling just didn’t cover it.
She hurried the engineer to the last few doors and hoped, whatever else Erykon’s wrath might have done, that it had allowed their friends to survive.
They found Keru first, essentially unharmed but for the bruise on his head and itching for some one-on-one time with the bug who had hit him. Vale was happier to see the big Trill than she could have imagined. She actually felt a bit naked when he wasn’t present to cover her six. He took the news about Titan’s possible survival fairly well.
“I knew it,” he said, slapping the Efrosian’s back. “I knewshe wouldn’t go down without a fight.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Ra-Havreii, gasping. “But my scapulae might not be so sturdy.”
They found Troi almost instantly, and though she had not been physically damaged either, she had, nonetheless, been hurt. When the door on her cell slid away, she never moved from the corner of the room into which she had presumably crawled. She only sat there, hugging her knees and staring straight ahead, her enormous ebony eyes seeing nothing.
She didn’t respond to their entry, and at first Vale feared the worst.
“What’s wrong with her?” said Keru.
It was the fertility treatments she had undergone, Vale realized in a flash. The same side effect that had made it possible for the little Betazoid to project emotions intensely enough to incapacitate a passerby had also left her more open to the emotions of those around her.
Vale and the others had sat through the Orishan cataclysm, listened to the terror in their screams, the horror in every cry for mercy as the apocalypse they had feared for generations finally rained down.
Troi had not only heard all that, she had felt it as well. Vale could only imagine what damage all that terror flowing in and out of her mind might do. Catatonia might be the least of it. But even now she knew that the true reason for Troi’s state was a private matter between her and her husband, so Vale answered Keru’s question with a simple, “I don’t know.”
“Let me talk to her,” said Ra-Havreii softly.
There was no time to argue with the engineer or to express their surprise at his stepping up in this way. Either Troi would come back from wherever it was she had gone inside and walk out of here, or she wouldn’t and Keru would carry her.
The engineer bent close to Troi, cradling her in an oddly fatherly gesture, and began to speak into her ear so softly that Vale couldn’t make out any of what he said.
She heard the words Rikerand aliveand she might have heard the phrase Rhea or Oberon, but she couldn’t be sure of either. Regardless, after a few seconds of listening, Troi’s posture relaxed into his arms, the life returned to her eyes, and she looked up at Vale.
“We have to get out of here,” she said at last.
The damage was worse than any of them had imagined. The bodies of Orishans, large and small, some with wings, some with sluglike protuberances instead of lower legs, lay crushed and broken all around them.
As they made their way upward from the food storage bins, the extent of the destruction only widened. The few glimpses any of them had had of the subterranean civilization had shown it to be a masterwork of smooth honeycombed arches, massive open causeways spanning from one side of a great cavern to the other, lights and sounds and technologies both strange and intriguing even to their practiced eyes.
Now all there was to see was death.
There was smoke everywhere, belching up in huge exhalations through the cavernous cracks in the floors. Great shards of the blue crystals, some as large as the missing shuttle, had broken through the walls, in some places exposing new fissures that reached all the way up to the surface.
“We’re almost half a kilometer down,” said Ra-Havreii, staring up into one of the enormous tunnels.
“Look at the sky,” said Keru, though he needn’t have bothered.
It wasn’t fire, but it did a damned good imitation. Gigantic undulating tongues of it crossed and crisscrossed the sky like some sort of enormous net. Bolts of something like lightning ripped down at the surface, their impacts unseen but their resulting destruction obvious to all.
And behind it all the strange undulating orb of Erykon’s Eye showing soft and green through the intervening veil of fire.
If this was the author of the cycle of destruction that had plagued Orisha, it was small wonder that their fear of its attention had driven them to such lengths. To have that hanging over you all the time? Believing it could see every thought, every action, and would punish any misstep with the fires of heaven?
Vale couldn’t bring herself to hate the Orishans anymore or even muster anger. All she had left was a growing sympathy for an entire civilization that had been so abused, and not a little awe at the sight above her.
“Is that what you and Jaza saw before?” Troi asked, breaking off to look at Ra-Havreii, at anything, really, other than that terrible beautiful sky.
“Not exactly,” said Ra-Havreii, puzzlement seeming to win out over all his other concerns. “It seems the destructive field is between the planet and the Eye rather than being projected by it.”
“We have to stop this,” said Vale quietly. “Whatever else we do, we have to shut this down.”
It was slow going making their way back to the Spire’s control chamber, with the party having to shift the corpses of dead soldiers from their path or navigate around a sudden chasm that was filled with exposed cables writhing like serpents and spewing lethal energies in random directions. Vale’s memory of the trip down and the near uniformity of the details in the structure itself made for many wrong turns and dead ends.