Then he thought about Orisha and what he knew of its people. Whatever the Eye actually was, its presence had tortured an entire civilization for millennia. Either with actual cataclysmic violence or with the perpetual threat that such violence might be visited upon them at any moment, the Eye of Erykon had taught its people only one lesson.
Fear.
He pictured the flux wave now expanding out from the Eye, sweeping over entire systems, destroying them, yes, but before that destruction, infecting them with the very same fear that had ultimately killed Orisha.
He suddenly found the idea of that intolerable. This thing had to be stopped, and it had to be stopped here and now.
He’d argued with Deanna about the Prime Directive, about the consequences of abandoning the rule book on a whim.
“Sure, jazz is improvisational,” he would say when she would inevitably toss up his love for the form as an example of the beauty of stepping outside. “But there are still rules.”
“No one is telling you to abandon them,” she would say. “Only that you’re always at your best when you are interpreting them in your own way.”
She was right. He loved her and she was right.
“Captain?” said Ree as the other turned and moved to exit the autopsy area. “Are we finished here?”
“Not quite yet, Doctor,” said Riker. “But thank you for the talk.”
“It is an extremely powerful, extremely delicate network of space fold devices,” said Ra-Havreii as he and Modan continued to struggle with the alien controls.
“Not a warp field?” said Vale, deciding that the seated position might be best for riding out these damned quakes.
“Not exactly, no,” said Ra-Havreii. “I presume you know the difference?”
Vale did, and it didn’t bode well. Space folding was monumentally dangerous under the best conditions.
“What does it mean, Xin?” said Troi.
There was a pause as Ra-Havreii asked Modan to move to an adjacent console and translate the pictograms there. She rattled off something that Ra-Havreii apparently understood but which was just so much babble to Vale and Troi.
“What it means, Counselor, Commander,” he said, picking up where he’d left off, “is that the Orishans have been aggressively folding the space around this planet.”
“Define aggressively,” said Vale, not at all sure she wanted to hear it.
“The Spire generates a folding field large enough to englobe the planet,” said Ra-Havreii. “There are eighteen identical Spires dispersed around Orisha, each generating folds of the same dimensions.”
“You mean simultaneously?” asked Vale, scarcely believing it. Ra-Havreii took the time to look back at her and nod before joining Modan at the second console. “That’s insane.”
“What is it meant to accomplish?” Troi asked.
“They call it the Veil, yes?” said the engineer. Modan was back at the first console again, translating the new symbols that flickered on the viewing screens. “This implies they are trying to cover something. Since the fields encompass the planet…”
He didn’t have to finish. The Orishans had wrapped their planet in multiple, fantastically large space folds in an effort to-what? Space folds were for travel. These were stationary, centered around a single set of points in space-time. And why eighteen of them?
Then it hit her. This had never been an attempt to create interstellar travel. It was an attempt at a cloak, one big enough to hide an entire world.
“There’s more, Commander,” said Modan.
“Spit it out, Ensign,” said Vale. She was doing her best not to hate Modan, but it wasn’t easy. Every time she looked at the golden metallic flesh, all she could think about was Jaza.
“The folds are reacting with each other,” said the Selenean. “The interaction has caused the fields to link into a single four-dimensional object.”
“A tesseract,” said Troi in a small voice. “We’re inside a tesseract.”
“I’m guessing that’s worse than the space folds,” said Vale.
“Monumentally,” said Ra-Havreii.
All at once the tremors stopped. Modan and Ra-Havreii stepped back from their respective consoles with identical masks of relief on their faces.
“Tell me that’s it,” said Vale, getting to her feet and brushing the dust out of her hair. “We’re done, the Veil is offline, and we can concentrate on getting the hell off this planet. Tell me that.”
“We’re not finished, Commander,” said Ra-Havreii.
Of course we’re not, she thought. Things can always get worse.
“Tesseracts are objects that exist both inside and outside of normal space-time,” he said. “Their contours can, with precise mapping, be used to navigate temporal jumps.”
“Which is what happened to us when we passed through the field, Chris,” said Modan, sounding too much like Jaza again. “When the computer beamed us out, the tesseract split the transport beams like light going through a prism. You materialized here, a few days before Titanarrived. Najem and I ended up in the distant past.”
But you’re here now, aren’t you?thought Vale. And he’s still stuck back there.
“All right,” said Troi, her face showing tiny creases as she turned it all over in her mind. “The Spires make the space folds and the folds have collapsed into each other to form this tesseract.”
“Correct,” said Ra-Havreii.
“And we’re inside the tesseract,” she said.
“Also correct,” said the engineer.
“And that is causing these ground quakes and the eruptions from the sky?”
“Ah,” he said. “Not exactly.”
Modan and Ra-Havreii gave each other a pregnant look, and Troi felt something like resignation wafting off them. They asked the two senior officers to join them at a breach in the wall where the sky showed through.
Things had calmed somewhat now that the Spire network was stable, but there was still that unnatural tint and occasional clusters of what Modan claimed were tachyons flickering in and out of sight.
“You see that?” said Ra-Havreii, gesturing toward the barely visible Eye of Erykon still floating, seemingly dozing now, just beyond the Veil field. “That is the planet Orisha.”
“This is the planet Orisha,” said Vale.
“Yes,” said Ra-Havreii. “And so is that. The tesseract effect is shunting the planet in and out of regular space-time at random intervals. When the network is stable, there is relative calm, as there is now. When the network destabilizes, Orisha tries to reenter regular space.”
“Tries?” said Troi. “Tries and fails, you mean.”
“Yes,” said Modan. “Whenever the planet Orisha tries to reenter normal space-time at a point in the past, something is there to block it.”
“What?” said Vale.
“The planet Orisha,” said Ra-Havreii. “You may not understand all of the math or physics, Commander, but you must know what happens when two objects attempt to occupy the same space at the same moment in time.”
Indeed she did. Vale had seen a transporter malfunction once while attempting to beam down some machinery from a spacedock above Izar. Due to the fault in the reintegration matrix, a crate of microprocessors and another of copper filaments that had dematerialized on two separate pads, had tried to reintegrate on a single pad at the end of their trip.
The result had been an explosion of shrapnel and energy that had left Vale hospitalized for two weeks while her pockmarks and burns were repaired. Now these two were saying Orisha was trying to do the same thing?