His mind was clearer now, almost his own again. The memory still wasn’t quite right, but the processes, his ability to make sense of things, was back.
It had been almost a minute since he’d drifted off again into that place that wasn’t quite sleep. Back now, still perched on the edge of stone, he surveyed the landscape below.
It was an alien world all right, complete with off-color sky, massive indigo crystal formations and boulders that the elements had carved into weird conical shapes, foliage that was wild and varied, a mosaic of purples and crimsons and whites.
And, of course, there was the fire. The fires.
All around him there were pockets of it, wide sections of the wider expanse that had been somehow set ablaze. Pretty recently, by the look of them.
Were these the result of the plasma storm? The uniform spread and pattern of the burnings made that unlikely. And what about the storm? He had thought it the product of a core breach or some sort of fuel mixture incongruity but now, with his mind clearer, he knew that couldn’t be so. Such an accident would have wiped the local landscape clear, made it as smooth as polished glass for multiple kilometers in every direction.
No, whatever had caused the storm and these fires was local. Specific.
Familiar?
Yes. There was a pattern there that sparked again the remembrance of his old life on Bajor. He found it odd that his recollections of those increasingly distant moments would return with such clarity when his more recent memories were so elusive. He had seen these shapes, these patterns before.
Blast craters,he realized. That’s what they are. Somebody’s been lobbing incendiaries around.
He allowed himself a bleak flicker of hope that he’d only stumbled onto a munitions testing range of some sort and not into an ongoing local war. The former might mean the shelling had stopped for the day. The latter meant all bets were off.
It was then that he understood the odd background noises he’d been hearing to be those of a battle. Small arms fire. The shouts of combat factions. The occasional scream.
He needed higher ground to get a sense of where he was. He needed to see what was where, if the battle was coming his way and, most important, if there were any other stragglers from the shuttle crash.
The pain of the climb brought the borhyasback. Even as he hauled his protesting body up onto the summit of this giant stone, he returned again to that awful day when the Cardassians had come.
“It’s all right, Jem,” said his mother as he knelt, gasping from his exertions, at the lip of the precipice. “This will pass. Only the Prophets are forever.”
She was talking about the destruction of their homes, of their lives, as the Cardassian boots and ignition-bombs smashed them to bits. He hadn’t believed her platitudes then. How could he, with all that death and carnage smoldering below? His friends were scattered or dead. Their homes, their farms, the school, the shrine, all were in charred ruins. Where were her precious Prophets in all that?
He’d lost his faith in that moment, looking at the wreck of the Harka valley and the black-suited Cardassian troops marching implacably through the flaming craters. All because someone had hinted that maybe members of a resistance cell had holed up there.
His belief had dissolved as instantly and completely as the froth on a flagon of Bolian lager and not returned again until-until-
He shook his head, forced himself to focus on the here and now. This wasn’t Bajor. This wasn’t that time or that place. These fires were something else, something specific to this new location. The beings behind them-not Cardassians but people new and unknown-were still close enough to cause him more trouble than he, in his condition, could handle.
Indeed, the final few meters of the climb had nearly finished him. If he hadn’t been bleeding internally before, he certainly was now.
He looked up at the orange-gold sky, his eyes tracking smoke trails until they touched the horizon. He gazed down at the wide expanse of plants and stone below. He noted the pattern of the craters and their fires, noted the expansion of the plasma storm, tried and failed to see its far-off center. He caught motions, quick, violent, and furtive, rustling through the overgrowth. He heard the distant report of weapons fire. Where were his friends in all that? Presuming it had survived the crash, where was the shuttle, their only means of escape?
Where was Titan?
A strange chittering noise sounded in the nearby brush, drawing his eyes away from the fires. It suddenly occurred to him that any natives he met in this locale might not be in the mood for a peaceful first contact. It also crossed his mind that a weapon of some sort might be a good thing to have in hand. Just as he was deciding between the broken arm of one of the small purple saplings and a largish hunk of rock, the source of the noise emerged.
It was a hulking thing, about two and a half meters tall, covered in some sort of chitonous exoskeleton, possibly its own body rather than artificial armor. There were four oval protrusions on its head-eyes, most likely. Above them, two slender antennae stretching up and back, wavering slightly in the breeze. There was no visible mouth, and he was somehow glad of that.
Formica mactabilis,he thought. It’s a giant bug.
It was also, most definitely, a soldier. You could tell that from the bloody serrated blade it gripped in its lower right hand. It had four in total, the remaining three holding a second machete, something that looked disturbingly like a gun, and another something that might be a grenade.
The creature sported intricate patterns, like tattoos, all over its upper left arm, perhaps denoting rank of some kind.
This entire analysis passed through his mind in the five seconds it took the creature to notice him and raise the ugly little firearm toward him.
“No!” cried a familiar voice from out of nowhere. “Look out!”
The instant the soldier bug fired at him-not a beam weapon, thank the Prophets-a second creature, not insectoid, leaped out of the brush and smashed into the first. This one was somewhat smaller, and instead of an exoskeleton its body was covered in a number of protective armor plates. Its entire body was like burnished gold instead of the muted green and black favored by its enemy.
What it lacked in size it more than made up for in ferocity. The unexpectedness and sheer brutality of its attack was enough to nearly overwhelm its foe.
The two creatures smashed hard into the gravelly dirt, the gun now spraying its projectiles wildly. Only one of the little pellets managed to graze his right shoulder before the gun was smashed useless. The grenade was knocked free immediately after the pistol, leaving only the two serrated machetes for his golden savior to avoid.
His vision went fuzzy as his injuries, at last, took their rightful toll. Things inside him ripped and tore and, through the haze of pain, all he could make out of the scene before him was a storm of armored arms and legs grappling and pounding at each other.
He groaned, coughing blood as he fell to his knees and then face-first onto the ground as one of the creatures-he had no idea which-beat the head of the other into the rocks a first, second, and final time.
“I can’t be dying,” he said-or thought he said-as the victorious alien stood, shook itself, and oriented on him again. “This isn’t the way I-” The rest was lost in a fit of bloody coughs. His voice wasn’t his own anymore anyway. It was rough, phlegmy, as if he’d been beating it against the same stone against which the alien’s head had struck.
As a black velvet sheet fell slowly over the world, he became aware of the golden interloper, the victor, coming his way.
With each step forward its body seemed to melt and shift. The thickly muscled arms lost size and definition, becoming smaller and more delicate with each step. The body absorbed its hard armored plating and became a thing of long muscular curves. The long, vicious-looking spines that ran from the bridge of its nose across its head and down its back all shrank and retracted, either being absorbed into the body completely or else softening and drooping until they aped a mass of thick ropey braids. A head of hair? A mouth appeared and a nose and suddenly there was a woman, a golden woman, kneeling down beside him.