“I could have sworn.”
“Not me,” said Stern, and then she looked up. “Although with all the distortion from the magnetic field here, maybe your comchannel caught a glitch.”
“Maybe,” said Garrett, though she was doubtful. Her fingers found her comm unit controls, and she double-checked the frequency and found that it was right where she’d set it before they left the shuttlecraft, a short distance from two landskimmers they’d spied from the air, and started down this tunnel.
Odd. She knew she’d heard something, someone. Familiar voice, too. Someone on the same channel? Maybe the Enterprise?No, then Stern should have heard it. Garrett cocked her head, listened. She was aware of how dark the tunnel was around them, how deep underground they were, and how far they still had to go. She wasn’t claustrophobic, and the dark didn’t bother her, but the space around her felt strange. Crowded and close: the same way she felt in a turbolift when too many people crammed into too small a space. Don’t get spooked.Her eyes roved over the red-hued rock and noted where tools had bitten into the hard stone. Dead planet, empty biosphere—well, not quite empty, it was clear that someone had been there, and not too long ago, from the looks of the place. She and Stern had reconnoitered the biosphere just long enough to take note of a medium-range shuttle, and the general disarray. As if whoever had been there had left in a hurry.
After another few moments of listening, Garrett gave up and nodded toward Stern’s tricorder. “You still reading atmosphere in there?”
“Yup, andheat, plus some sort of organized energy signature. And that neuromagnetic field, it’s still there. Stronger than we read on the ship.”
“What about life signs?”
“Now that.”Stern grunted. “Reads like a convention down there.”
“How many?”
“A lot. Five humanoid and, oh, hell.”Stern jiggled her tricorder then smacked it with the side of her gloved hand. “Damn thing.”
“Very high tech.”
“Whatever works,” said Stern. She squinted. “Sorry, Rachel, they’re not all resolving. Like I said, I read at least five humanoids. Can’t tell you what they are either, what species. And there’s a whole bunch of other readings.”
“Define bunch. Are they life-forms?”
Stern made a piffling sound with her lips. “Life-forms. It’s a damn big galaxy, Rachel. I’m reading high-energy, almost like ionized plasma. But they’re contained, cohesive. I’m just not sure. I’ll tell you something, though. They remind me of something I read once. Mac talked about them in his seminars on xenobiology. You remember the Organians?”
“Who doesn’t? Organian Peace Treaty, 2267,” Garrett recited, “imposed by the Organians to prevent war between the Klingons and the Federation. Are you saying that these are Organians?”
“Not quite. The Organians were noncorporeal life forms, though: pure energy, pure thought. Mac was there, you know. Well, his captain was, anyway, Kirk, and his first officer, Spock. Anyway, they encountered a similar class of beings, two years later. Zetarians, they were called. Same deaclass="underline" highly cohesive noncorporeal life-forms.”
“Are you telling me that’s what you’re reading here?”
“No, but it’s close. I’d have to get further in, I think, past all this damned interference, but there’s energy in there, and a lot of it. Neuromagnetic, for sure.”
Garrett was tempted to try to decipher the readings herself but doubted she’d have any more luck than Stern. “We saw two skimmers. Could whatever you’re reading have come from the biosphere?”
“I doubt it. That biosphere was made to handle ourkind, not,” Stern held her tricorder up, gave it a waggle, “this.”
“Okay,” said Garrett, though it wasn’t. “What about this panel? You sure about its being the source?”
“Absolutely, and I’ll tell you something else. This thing’s been opened three times now.”
Garrett was startled. “Three?But we only saw two alarms.”
“On the Enterprise.I know.” Stern gave her captain a significant look. “I don’t make these things up. You’d never catch it if you weren’t looking for it; the resonance band’s only slightly above that for Halak’s transponder, which was the reason we caught it the first time around. Only the secondtime, whoever opened it made a mistake. See here?” Stern pointed to a magnetic variance signature on her tricorder. “The first time, whoever did this got it right on the money. The second time, though, someone keyed in the wrong sequence to reverse polarity going in. Botched it.”
“And that set off the alarm.”
Stern nodded. “Then they seemed to have gotten it right. But the third time, well, here, look for yourself.”
Garrett thumbed through the entries. “Ionized debris, trace ferrous…Jo, this reads like a phaser blast. Recent, too.”
“Like within the last hour.”
“But then why isn’t the panel damaged? Or the surrounding rock?”
“Beats me. All I can tell you, whoever did this doesn’t have a hell of a lot of finesse, or patience. Not that hard to figure out, you know; this isn’t exactly twenty-fourth century state of the art technology here. But whoever was here just didn’t care, and that’s why the alarm has read continuous, only at a higher frequency. You could go in and out a hundred times now, and the alarm wouldn’t be any different.”
“Well, we ought to be able to do the same trick, minus the phaser.”
“But that’s weird. Phaser blast ought to have taken that thing right out of commission. From the looks of it, though, all it did was ramp up the alarm, only silently.”
“Your point?”
“Hell, I don’t know if I havea point. But I’ll tell you, this is one of the few times I wish we could just beam in, do our rescue, presuming whoever’s down there wants to be rescued, and then beam the heck back out.”
“We went over that. Too much…”
“Right, right,” Stern interrupted impatiently, “too much interference from the magnetic field. Don’t forget, I was there when you hatched this cockamamie plan. And I’ll tell you something right now. You can bet whoever’s out there listening won’t be far off. One blip, you can ignore. But not when it’s screaming. I don’t think we have a lot of time.”
“Noted.” Handing Stern back her tricorder, Garrett ran her eyes over the seam of the panel. “What’s immediately beyond this?”
“Another door. Passage beyond that. Tunnels. Beyond them, looks like a maze of tunnels, like an anthill. But, for my money, this is a kind of antiquated airlock.”
“So no explosive decompression,” said Garrett, pulling out her phaser. “Well, if someone’s coming, I guess we’d better get our asses in gear, don’t you think?”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” said Stern. She keyed in the sequence to open the paneclass="underline" red…red…red…double green. Watched as her tricorder read air evacuating from the lock. The door slid open. Stern slung her tricorder over her shoulder. “Fools go gladly.”
“Where angels fear to tread.” Garrett thumbed her phaser to setting two. “No one ever accused me of being an angel.”
“What do you mean, boy?” Chen-Mai felt so much blood choking his face, he thought he probably looked as purple as a bruised plum. He glared down at Jase, who knelt by Ven Kaldarren. “What’s wrong with your father? Speak sense!”
“But I’m tryingto tell you,” Jase said, desperation in his voice. He held his father’s head in his lap. Kaldarren grimaced, moaned. His face was stained with sweat and blood; his shoulder-length black hair clung in wet tendrils to his neck. Every few seconds, a tremor shuddered through his body. “They’re here,and they’ve gothim! Don’t you see them? They’re all over the place!”
“Who?All I see is you, that boy,” he jerked his head toward the prostrate figure of Pahl, “and your father.”