Finally they won through to find the place as empty of living Orishans as everywhere else but crowded nonetheless with their bodies.
The chamber was more or less intact, perhaps having been built with the intention of surviving this sort of cataclysm, with all of its machinery humming and buzzing away.
The visual displays showed the Spire’s counterparts, now clearly arranged all over the planet, if the multitude of dots blinking on the holographic map were any indication. Whatever this thing had been built to perform was still very much under way.
Ra-Havreii wanted a close look at the console, finding much of the technology familiar somehow despite the alien pictograms dotting the instrument panels and flickering on and off on every screen.
“Go ahead,” said Vale.
As he approached the unattended control console, Ra-Havreii literally stumbled over the tricorders the soldiers had stripped from his hands, still working.
As the others shifted the bodies and searched for signs of any survivors, Ra-Havreii scanned and examined the alien device.
“You said they called this the Veil?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” grunted Vale as she helped Keru move another body from where it had fallen. She, Troi, and Keru moved nearly all of the Orishans into several rows where they could at least rest in apparent repose rather than in the contorted positions in which they’d been found.
Vale knew it was a useless gesture in some respects. Nothing they had seen had indicated the Orishans cared one way or another about the bodies of the dead.
Burials are for the living, her mother would say. She understood it now in a way she hadn’t before. Her mother had been in her mind a lot lately, she realized. Now she wondered why.
“You notice anything?” Keru asked as he hefted his side of the last dead Orishan. He kept his voice low so the others wouldn’t hear. “About the bodies, I mean.”
“You mean that they haven’t been crushed or burned or whatever like the ones farther down?” said Vale. Keru nodded, dropping the arm he had been using to pull the last soldier into position. “Yes. I noticed.”
“Suicide,” said Troi, coming up behind them. Keru actually blushed when he realized she’d heard their exchange. “Mass ritual suicide.”
Vale understood. The Orishans had failed. They had failed to protect their people. They had failed to appease their god. Rather than face Erykon’s awful judgment, they had taken the verdict into their own talons. Was it some final act of defiance on their part or simply acquiescence to what they perceived to be their fate?
In either case, as she had sat confined in her little cell, Troi had felt each and every death, felt the terror and bleak acceptance of their deity’s will. That more than anything had immobilized her mind. Fear was one thing after all-eventually it could be processed and put away-but the absence of hope? That was worse than dying.
They stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of all the dead Orishans. There was rumbling in the distance that none of them mistook for thunder. Only Ra-Havreii, occupied as he was with the alien machinery, seemed unaffected by the atmosphere of mass death that still hung over the place.
“Commander,” he said, looking up from his work. There was something in his eyes none of the others had seen in their time with him. It was a sort of sparkle, as if a giant fire was raging in his skull that could only be seen through the tiniest of keyholes. “I think I may know what-”
Something large and dark and possessed of an extra set of arms dropped, chittering and screeching, from the darkness above them. It hit Ra-Havreii hard, knocking the wind out of him, its weight and momentum smashing him first into the control console and then to the floor.
“You!” said A’yujae’Tak, turning on the others even as she lifted Ra-Havreii’s limp form in one massive talon. “You have brought this upon us! The Eye slept until you desecrated this creation!”
Before the others could move or speak, she launched the engineer’s body at them like a missile. The Mater herself was close behind. Even as Ra-Havreii crashed into Troi and sent her flying, Keru had stepped in to grapple with the enraged alien.
“We’re not responsible for this,” said Vale, scrambling to see if their phasers had also been left behind with the tricorders. “Your people took their own lives!”
A’yujae’Tak screamed a clicking chattering response that the translator simply could not decode. Not that Vale needed the help. The Orishan leader’s actions told the story quite effectively.
She was more massive than the biggest of her soldiers, standing a full meter over Keru, whose burly form seemed almost childlike before hers. Somehow, so far at least, it didn’t seem to matter. She flailed at him, attempting to claw him or tear at him with her talons or shred his flesh with the serrated ridges on the backs of her arms and legs. Nothing seemed to touch Keru, who danced under every swing, swerved away from every lethal blow as if he were playing mag ball with his friends.
Of course he wasn’t playing mag ball, and he let her know it in short order.
“Commander,” he said, narrowly avoiding decapitation as he ducked under and between two of A’yujae’Tak’s flailing arms and sweeping her legs with one of his. “I could do with a lot less talk here and a lot more shooting.”
He managed to land several blows on the Mater’s abdomen as she fought to keep her balance, but because she was covered in a super-dense exoskeleton and he was just flesh and bone, the punches did him more damage than they did her. Keru’s knuckles were already a bloody mess.
“You will die for what you have brought down on us!” said the enraged Mater, slashing at him, this time missing his throat by millimeters.
He was good; those Ligonian battle forms he’d been practicing had worked wonders on his already formidable skill at hand-to-hand. Still, eventually he would slip or dodge a second too slowly and she would connect. It was only a matter of time before A’yujae’Tak landed a blow, and all of hers were killing strikes.
As Vale cast around for something she could use to at least stun the hysterical alien, she caught sight of Troi helping Ra-Havreii back to his feet.
Tougher than he looks, she thought, getting back to the weapon search and finally maybe spotting the grip of one of the phasers poking out from beneath a fallen bit of crystal.
“Any time now, Commander,” said Keru, clearly beginning to struggle to keep the pace. A’yujae’Tak seemed under no such difficulty.
Vale dived across the several dead Orishans that lay between her and the weapon. She landed near it, slid the rest of the way, palmed it, armed it, swung around, and fired just as A’yujae’Tak finally landed a bone-crunching blow to Keru’s chest.
Keru groaned and fell away even as the phaser beam struck the Mater squarely in the face. A’yujae’Tak made another untranslatable chittering noise and staggered back a few paces, but she did not fall.
Damn, thought Vale, getting to her feet and keeping A’yujae’Tak square in her sights. She adjusted the weapon to its highest setting and took careful aim.
“Don’t make me kill you,” she said.
“You have murdered my world!” bellowed the enraged insectoid, and lunged for Vale. “My entire world!”
Vale fired again, again catching A’yujae’Tak square in the face with the phaser’s now-lethal beam. Only it wasn’t lethal. The beam’s impact hurt A’yujae’Tak, that was clear, but it didn’t put her down and certainly didn’t kill her.
“Kill you,” said A’yujae’Tak. She looked a little wobbly on her feet, despite her firm tone, so Vale shot her again. A’yujae’Tak fell first to one knee and then to both before dropping forward to use her upper arms for support.
This time there were no more threats, only hums and clicks that, even without translation, seemed to indicate that A’yujae’Tak had been pacified.