Star Trek™:
Corps of Engineers

Turn the Page by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Troubleshooting by Robert Greenberger

The Light by Jeff D. Jacques

The Art of the Comeback by Glenn Greenberg

Signs from Heaven by Phaedra M. Weldon

Ghost by Ilsa J. Bick

Remembrance of Things Past Book 1 by Terri Osborne

Remembrance of Things Past Book 2 by Terri Osborne

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For David Honigsberg
A true Renaissance man.
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Have fun jammin’ with Hendrix.

CHAPTER
1

Carol Abramowitz stared at the trees, the lush green lawns, and the old stone buildings of Cambridge University. Her attentions wandered to the other students as they made their way through Downing Street toward the Haddon Library, and she wondered how many thousands of other people had sat precisely where she was and just people-watched over the centuries the school had been in existence.

It was so peaceful, so soothing. It felt like being home after a lifetime away. She adored springtime. Just the smell of the tree blossoms was enough to relax her when she needed it.

“Carol!”

She turned to see Gabriel Collins walking toward her, a giant smile on his features. That smile was infectious, and she found herself returning it in moments. “Hey, you,” she said, allowing him to wrap her in an embrace when he finally reached her. “So, the final went well?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Looks like we’re both getting our master’s this year.”

“Fantastic! So, what do you want to do to celebrate?” She had deliberately added a come-hither note to her voice, but in all of the years they had known each other, he had yet to take her up on it. This was no exception.

“How about a pint? I’ll buy.”

Taking a deep breath, she said, “Sounds good.”

When they reached the pub, they were hardly the only ones celebrating the end of the term. A group of well-dressed students was in one corner, hoisting what appeared to be far more expensive drinks than ale. Ah, the law school grads. Can always count on them to be drinking beyond their means. In another corner, some lean, rough-and-tumble looking guys wearing footballers’ jerseys were drinking by the pitcher. That got Carol to wondering about the history of the place again. Wonder if the frat boys were that obnoxious when this university was just starting up?

She finally decided that, probably, they had been. Frat boys were frat boys, no matter what century you were in.

“Carol, come on!”

Brushing a lock of black hair behind her left ear, she headed toward Gabriel’s voice, and the bar. He had already ordered a pint of Guinness for her, and the dark, strong brew was just the thing she needed right then. She took a few gulps, savoring the warm flavor as it slid down her throat. This was the way life should be. Good friends—perhaps even more if he kept this up—good drink, and good times.

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Let’s see if there’s a booth that these hooligans haven’t appropriated for themselves.”

They managed to find one, tucked back in the corner away from the football on the viewscreens scattered through the pub. Manchester United was playing Liverpool in the playoffs, and there would be a riotous time, no matter which side took the prize.

Oh, there had been a time years ago when a club winning a playoff match usually also involved the police in full riot gear, but that was a long, long time ago.

“Hey,” Gabe said, wrapping an arm over her shoulder. “Where are you going for your doctorate?”

That stopped Carol in her tracks. She hadn’t really had a chance to think beyond her master’s thesis, but leave it to Gabriel to think big. “I don’t know. Why?”

“I was thinking Cairo,” he said, his eyebrows rising in a how’s about that? manner. “I think white linens would suit you.”

She cringed at the bad joke, but then softly smiled. “You’re serious.”

“Deadly.”

“You really want to do your doctoral work in the Egyptian desert?”

He stared off for a moment, and then a gleam of manic glee lit his eyes when they turned back to her. “That’s where it all is on this planet, and you know it. It’s not half as bad as it used to be. Come on. Come with me.”

Carol sat back for a moment. She’d heard some of the local students use the word gobsmacked before, but only at that moment did she believe she truly understood the word. Well, you’ve been waiting on him to make a move. Now what? Her thoughts were disrupted by a string of vulgarities in thick Liverpudlian accents.

Then they sounded like Federation Standard. Shaking her head, she suddenly was no longer in the pub cozied up to Gabriel, but instead was in the middle of something that bore a strong resemblance to a jungle.

“Carol? Carol, come out of it.”

Fingers snapped in front of her face, the sound shocking her back to reality.

“Hallucination?” This time, she recognized Bart Faulwell’s voice.

Bart, Inana. You’re not on Earth, Carol. You’re on Icaria Prime. You’re looking for the temple that Gabriel found. Keep it together.

“Yeah,” said Carol. She really hoped the disappointment at being pulled out of the vision didn’t come through in her voice too much. The last thing she needed was to have to explain the first few years of her relationship with Gabriel to the man’s wife.

She’d needed reliving that one moment again even less.

“You okay?” Inana Skanda asked. She’d known Gabriel ever since Gabe and Carol had arrived in Cairo for their doctorates. But still, Carol didn’t know just how much Gabe had told Inana in the intervening years. Enough for her to know that the two of them had been close, but it was difficult to tell anything beyond that from Inana’s attitude toward her.

“I’m fine,” Carol said, trying her best to sound resolute. Nothing would change the fact that she could still smell the pint of Guinness, its aroma mixed in with his cologne. That isn’t you anymore. That isn’t you. You have Vance now. Don’t forget that. Closing her eyes, she took several deep breaths before aiming her palm beacon straight in front of her and venturing forward, machete cutting the way.

Sonya Gomez was drowning.

She could feel the water cascading down her throat, filling her lungs, pulling her down. Lifting her arms, she fought as long as she could, trying to reach the surface once more…just for one more breath of precious air.

“Sonya!”

The sound of the rushing waters around her almost buried the voice, but somehow, she heard.

She tried to scream, but it only made fighting the water worse. She reached out, her hands slapping what felt like the surface. So close. So close.

But something just kept pulling her under.

No!

Then arms, strong arms, wrapped around her, pulling her out of the water. Sonya took a long, deep breath before coughing up far more water than she would ever have thought could fit in her lungs.

“Sonya! Can you hear me?”

She recognized the voice, but wasn’t sure from where. It almost sounded like Belinda, but it couldn’t be, could it?

She sputtered some more, until a hand reached out and touched soft, moist grass. The whisper of rain-soaked leaves in the gentle wind sounded too much like waves in the distance. That was when reality came crashing back to her at warp ten. “Paul?”

In an instant, the water was gone, leaving behind the peaty aroma of earth and vegetation mixed with the fresh rain in the forest that surrounded them.

“Sonya. It’s okay. It’s not real.” Paul Cunningham’s voice was far more of a soothing comfort than she would have given him credit for just a few hours before. “It’s not real.”

It had certainly felt like it. Suddenly she’d been right back there at Vieques, with Belinda, on that boat where she’d almost drowned after slipping on a wet deck.

But Belinda had saved her.

Or had she?

Sonya fought with the memory, trying to control it as it assailed her once more.

Yes, she had definitely felt a shove on her backside before the water had come rushing toward her. Her heart skipped slightly at the realization that she hadn’t slipped after all, but someone had pushed her into the water.

Who?

Fighting to keep her breathing even, she fought the flashback by sheer willpower. It seemed to be so very real, but she wrestled with it, reminding herself time and again that it was just a flashback, just like all of the flashbacks she’d had—and never wanted to admit—after Galvan VI.

Post-traumatic stress disorder was something for counselors and doctors to diagnose and treat, not engineers. Sarjenka had other far more important things on her mind at that moment, and there was no way Sonya was going to interfere with her treatment of Captain Picard. She could control her reaction to it for the time being. It could wait.

And it would.

She hoped.

“Sonya?”

This time, she readily identified Paul’s voice. And remembered both the machetes, and the reason they’d brought them. That brought her to a standing position in record time. “Snakes,” she whispered.

A small laugh that sounded like Abramowitz got Sonya’s attention. “Never thought you’d have a problem with reptiles, Commander,” Carol said.

“Try growing up on a tropical island,” Sonya shot back. “I’ll pass on snakes, thanks.”

That was when the pale look on Paul’s face caught her attention. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What did you see?”

Paul gave her a sideways glance. “I’d prefer not to discuss it just yet.”

She knew that tone far too well, having heard it out of her own mouth in the months after Kieran Duffy’s death. “Well,” she began, resting a hand on his shoulder, “when you’re ready to talk, I have a feeling I’ve been there.”

With a small nod, and a look that bled gratitude, they both managed to regain their wits. That was when Sonya remembered their new companions. “Carol, Bart, Inana. What are you guys doing out here?”

Inana exchanged a glance with Paul. “I’m guessing the same thing you guys are doing. The stones and the temple?”

Paul nodded.

“How many of the stones do you have?” Inana asked.

“Just one,” Paul replied. “Figured you or Gabriel would have the other two.”

Inana shook her head. “Just one. I even checked our tent before we headed over. Gabe doesn’t have the third.”

Paul gave her a sideways look, “But I thought Gabriel took one to go over himself?”

“He told me the other night he was done with it, and was going over to put it back in the work tent.”

“Then the looters must have gotten it,” Paul said, a resigned tone to his voice. “We’re dead.”

“Take it easy. Corsi’s gone off to get Vale and track them down,” Carol said.

“What do we do until they get back?” Sonya asked. “I’m not exactly thrilled with the notion of staying here.”

“Where is Gabriel, anyway?” Paul asked, a sudden concern in his voice. “He discovered this temple. He knows it better than any of us.”

“When I went to our tent, he was out like a light,” Inana said. “I couldn’t wake him. I’m not sure if it’s the hallucinations getting to him like they have Jean-Luc, or if it’s just that he’s exhausted. As soon as Sarjenka has a moment, I’d appreciate it if she took a look at him.”

Sonya gave a curt nod. “I’ll make sure she does.”

“Come on, then,” Inana said, hefting one of the machetes in her hand. “We’ve got a temple to check out.”

CHAPTER
2

Okay, we turned right here, so I need to go left…

Domenica Corsi cursed as yet another tree branch whipped her in the face. She was really beginning to hate the trees on Icaria Prime.

Then again, she was really beginning to just hate Icaria Prime.

Aiming her palm beacon ahead of her at a height that would allow her to see both the path she was walking and any more errant branches, she pressed onward back toward the archaeologists’ campsite. Just for her own sanity, she held her phaser—set to stun, to be safe—in her free hand. She knew full well it wouldn’t work, but it still made her feel better. She’d heard more than a few growls from indigenous life-forms in the distance. The last thing she needed was to get attacked by some bizarre alien animal.

Dank, miserable, depressing place. I’ll bet the Letheans had nothing to do with wiping the Gretharans out. They probably killed themselves if they couldn’t get off this rock. Where the hell’s Vale, anyway?

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than the light of another palm beacon crossed her path. Corsi pulled the phaser up to bear, until she saw the familiar yellow tunic and auburn hair of Christine Vale. “Christine?”

Vale sounded relieved. “Domenica. What are you doing out here?”

That stopped Corsi in her tracks. “You don’t remember?” she asked, raising the palm beacon to shine just over Vale’s head. It was just enough light to see Vale’s face, but not blind the woman. Christine looked pale, too pale. “How are you feeling?”

“Little bit of a headache, but fine,” Vale said, holding her free hand up to block some of the light. “Why?”

Corsi’s brow furrowed. Vale had been firmly in the grip of a hallucination when Corsi had first found her standing stock-still outside one of the archaeologists’ tents, almost as though she’d been waiting for a turbolift to arrive. Then she’d snapped out of it and left. It had all been just a little too weird for her taste. Weird, and suspicious. “Nothing,” she said, trying to hide her concern, “I need your help.”

It was Vale’s turn to look surprised. “You need my help? Okay, now I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Corsi said. “At least, I don’t think it is yet. Do you remember the looters hitting the camp?”

Vale’s lips pursed. “Yeah. We managed to fight them off, why?”

One blond eyebrow rose. “Not before they got what they came for.”

“That can’t be. We took an inventory after they were gone.”

“Somebody missed this one,” Corsi said. “Do you remember three stone balls, roughly this big?” She held out her hands, fingers curled as though they were cupping a ball roughly the size of her fist. “Each one had—”

“Glyphs all over them,” Vale finished. “Yeah. They checked out. One was in the work tent, one was in storage for Doctor Cunningham to study, and the third was in Professor Collins’s possession.”

Corsi pulled Vale along as they headed back through the dense forest. “Well, either the looters got it, and Collins lied, or he’s gone off with it. It’s not there anymore. What direction did the looters head for when you drove them out?”

“South,” Vale said after a moment’s thought. “There’s a small town about three kilometers south of here. It’s not Pibroch City or San Francisco, but it’s civilization.”

Corsi pulled a good old-fashioned compass out of her pack. The needle declined to make up its mind as to what magnetic north was on this planet. Great, just what I need. A planet with an attitude problem.

“That won’t work very well,” Vale said. “Magnetic north is weird here. It moves more than Earth’s does. I know how to get there, I think.”

“You think?”

Vale winced, and placed the fingers of her right hand against her temples. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Just starting to get a headache.”

“You sure about that?”

Vale took an unsteady step. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Are you armed?”

The light from Vale’s palm beacon went to the belt at her waist. Corsi could see a machete as well as a couple of smaller blades hanging from it. “Okay,” she said, “answers that question. Not a phaser rifle, but it’ll do. Let’s stop back at the camp, grab some more blades, and make these idiots regret they crossed our path.”

Corsi caught the smile on Vale’s face, one that suggested she was going to enjoy this.

And that made Corsi worry a bit more about her old friend.

Sarjenka sat back, her heart racing after hearing Data’s story. A distress call had gotten Data’s attention, and then Picard’s. But how? She remembered building that communications kit her father had bought for her eleventh birthday, right before the planet had begun ripping itself apart. It couldn’t possibly have had that kind of range.

But Father showed me how to improve the power output beyond what the kit said. It couldn’t have been enough to reach the Enterprise, couldn’t have.

But it had.

Against all logic and the laws of physics, it had.

The voice of a child in the night had saved her world—and it had been her voice.

A searing pain, one like nothing she’d ever known before, ripped through her brain at that point. She got to her feet, stumbling away from Data and Picard into the forward cabin of the shuttle. Reaching for her medkit, she gave herself a quick injection of hydro-cortilene to stave off the headache. She made sure the injection was only two percent. Any more, well, she didn’t have Klingon blood to handle that much of the stuff.

It did as expected, but it also made the flood of memories that came back to her at that point all the more surprising. Data had brought her up to the Enterprise to save her from the horrible floes of liquid dilithium that had threatened them all. She had walked the halls of the ship, her tiny hand in his cool one, until they finally reached the bridge, and Captain Picard. She remembered the fear at his angry tone, remembered hiding behind Data, knowing full well that he would protect her from the angry man. She hadn’t known the word human at that point, but she knew enough to realize that Picard hadn’t liked her being there.

He had been nothing if not abundantly clear on that point.

Then the dark-haired woman—Counselor Troi, Data had said—had tried to take her to get a sweet. But there was something about her that had said more. Somewhere in her mind, Sarjenka could recall being very afraid of being taken away from Data.

“You,” she began, turning back toward the android. “You saved my life.”

“Perhaps,” Data replied. “We did not know whether your home would be destroyed. And when you stopped communicating for so long, I began to—”

“Worry?” she said.

Then another memory flashed in her mind, the singer stone, as Dantas had called it, being given to her by Dr. Katherine Pulaski.

It did come from the Enterprise.

But it had been handed to her right before she had been placed on a nice bed to sleep, with Katherine wanting to do a scan just to make sure she was okay. “Katherine lied to me,” Sarjenka said, the realization hitting her in the stomach full-force. “She lied. She tried to erase my memory. She did make me forget. Traiaka, we studied her methods in neurology class.”

“She had no choice,” Picard said, his voice still holding an edge of rasp. “I ordered it.”

All Sarjenka could do was stare. Questions were flying through her mind so fast; it was hard to hone in on just one. Finally, one floated above the others. “Why? I mean, I understand the Prime Directive was part of it, but why try to erase the memory of one child? What harm could one child do?”

Data gave her a gentle smile. “What good could one child do?”

Sarjenka swallowed hard. Data was right. If the voice of one child could save the entirety of Drema IV, then they had no way of knowing what she could have done if she’d retained memories of her time on the Enterprise.

Granted, she had always played games with her Kakerna Krana doll, imagining that she could fly up into the night, going to each and every light in the darkness to find out what was there. In her heart, she always knew Drema IV wasn’t alone in the universe. Memories of the Enterprise would have been nothing more than sauce for the Uprising Day kreba, but they couldn’t have known that.

“No,” she said aloud. “You couldn’t have known.”

A part of her wanted to cry, mourn the possibilities that she’d lost, but then she realized that really, she hadn’t lost them. Images of the Enterprise’s sickbay had remained behind, coming to her in dreams. She had drawn them over and over in her design classes, without even realizing it. Somewhere, deep in her mind, her memory had protected what it could, saving itself from Katherine’s attack.

However, another part of her understood. She knew how highly regarded the Prime Directive was in Starfleet. There was no law above General Order 1. Intellectually, she knew everything Picard had done was right. The philosophy of the Federation valued pre-warp civilizations, much as hers had been back then. The integrity of the civilization had to be protected, allowing it to develop on its own, without Federation interference.

But then the Exiles had arrived, and all of that was torn asunder as her people were overtaken. Any artifice of outside interference in Dreman cultural evolution was stripped away. All it had taken was one photon torpedo casing to lead her people to the Federation.

Sarjenka turned her gaze to Picard, who still looked pale and fragile. He needed her help. Turning him over to Dantas’s care was only running away. You are a healer. Heal him as you would yourself. The past is gone. He did what he had to do, and you know it. You took the Oath. “First, do no harm.” Picard never had to do that.

Another part of her mind chose that point to remind her of something else. Picard may not have, but Katherine did. And she harmed me. Willingly. How could anyone lie like that? Tear a hole in my mind, but save my father’s life? Why didn’t she tell me what happened?

That was when it occurred to her. Could she have been trying to make amends? When Sarjenka saw Katherine again—she had thought then that it was for the first time—she was the chief medical officer of the U.S.S. Progress and was about to take over the star-base being constructed near Drema. Katherine had encouraged Sarjenka in her medical career.

Traiaka knew that penance was something the humans were familiar with. She’d had an interesting education in that aspect of their culture while in the Academy. Guilt could be an excellent motivator, even if one didn’t acknowledge it openly.

Katherine had attempted to strip Sarjenka of her memory of the Enterprise and all of its wonders, and had tried to atone by saving her father. Oh, she would take this up with Katherine as soon as she got back to the da Vinci. There were still stories to be heard, rationales to be presented, and she wanted to hear them all.

Pursing her lips, the Dreman reached for her medical kit and took a deep, cleansing breath. “We can discuss this further when you are healthy, Captain. Now, please, try to sleep. Would you like a delta-wave inducer? I can’t guarantee it will work, but I did bring one.”

Picard shook his head. “I am sorry. I had no other choice.”

“Go to sleep, Captain. You need rest. I gather your headache is improving?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Commander Data, could you please keep an eye on the captain while I see how Dantas is doing with the others?”

Data’s smile vanished at her formal tone. “Of course.”

“Alert me if anything changes.”

With a small nod from Data, Sarjenka turned and stepped out of the shuttle. She needed to be somewhere, anywhere, but there. As she turned toward the Shirley, she hoped Dantas was faring better with her patients.

CHAPTER
3

Fabian Stevens leaned back in his desk chair, staring at the planetary scans on his viewscreen and becoming increasingly irritated with the lack of scan results. “Damn. Where’s the source on this?”

He’d been looking for hours at the screen, so much so that his eyes were hurting.

He closed his eyes, rubbing the heels of his hands gently against his eyelids. When he opened his eyes again, his heart stopped cold for a moment.

The field had grown again.

“Computer, take latest field scan and compare to the others showing growth. Is there any kind of pattern in the expansion?”

“Unable to locate pattern in field expansion.”

“And there’s no sign of a source of the field?”

“Unable to locate field source.”

He took a deep breath, then said, “Okay. Go back to the first scans of the field. When it expands, is there an accompanying rise in field strength?”

“There is no accompanying rise in field strength in the first expansion.”

“In the first expansion? What about the second?”

“Field strength in the second expansion rose by 0.25 percent.”

“Not even a single percentage point?”

“No.”

Stevens wanted to smack the side of the viewscreen, but managed to restrain himself. As the old technology adage went, once was maintenance, twice was abuse. And neither was relevant in this instance.

“Okay, Fabe, think. If there’s no pattern, a negligible rise in field strength, and no obvious source, how is the thing expanding?”

That was when the idea occurred to him. The frustration at not having thought of it before brought him out of the chair like a bullet. “Conductors. That’s it. There have to be field conductors down there.”

“Unable to comply. Please rephrase question.”

“No, computer…wait. Scan the new edges of the field for known elements that are highly energy-conductive.”

Stevens stood, beginning to slowly pace the room as the computer worked. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? It seemed so obvious now. The field wasn’t getting stronger, so there had to be elements coming into play that were conducting the field strength out to the new limits, maybe even adding power of their own to keep field strength equal across the area. “It’s genius. Limits the power consumption at the field core, but keeps the strength at the required levels for everything to work. Damn, they’re good.”

“Scan complete. There are thirty instances of a beryllium-copper alloy along the new field boundary.”

“Oh,” Stevens began, “they really were good. Computer, scan the rest of the planet for more instances of this beryllium-copper alloy. Link anything resembling a concentric boundary and display.”

“Working.”

When Stevens saw the results, he slapped his combadge. “Stevens to Captain Gold. We need to talk, sir.”

Sonya hacked at another vine that reached across their path, relieved when it made a resounding crack. After they’d accidentally cut through a twig snake about twenty minutes before, Sonya was beginning to appreciate the sound of a vine breaking far more than she had ever expected.

“You sure you’re okay?” Paul asked from about two steps behind her. As he’d put it, the verve with which she’d been swinging that blade definitely gave off the stay away from me vibe.

“Positive,” she answered, her voice as flat and emotionless as she could manage.

“’Kay. I’ll just be back here watching out for the bats.”

That got the entire group to stop. She could tell he was trying to lighten her mood, and she reluctantly admitted to herself that she appreciated the gesture, but she wasn’t about to tell him at that moment. Encouraging such behavior could never bode well in the long term.

“Bats?” Carol asked. “Nobody said anything about bats.”

Inana raised an eyebrow. “That’s because there aren’t any,” she said. Sonya knew that tone of voice. She’d heard it from her own mother when she’d misbehaved. “Paul was just having a bit of fun, weren’t you?”

Paul looked appropriately abashed. Sonya couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a joke they practiced on all the visitors they got. It certainly held the feel of a well-rehearsed routine.

“All right, boss,” Paul said, “which way?”

Sonya hadn’t even realized they’d reached a small clearing in the trees until he’d said that. I’m getting too focused on whatever that was I saw. Sonnie, now is not the time to avoid reality. Snap out of it.

What looked like an already-cut path was on her right. It hadn’t even begun re-growth yet, unlike the gap in the trees to her left. Vines in every shade of green imaginable covered the ground, looking almost like a path of writhing serpents.

Sonnie, stop it.

An image flashed in her mind, a dark gray…thing…under water. She couldn’t make out many details, as what she saw was underneath a considerable amount of water, but it looked almost like what she remembered a water monitor—a big water monitor—to have looked like. You’re only scaring yourself. Stop it.

When an odd, unearthly glow surrounded everything, she realized what she was seeing. Her own body, floating just under the surface of the water of Sun Bay, too near the Biobay. Her face was in the water, and suddenly, Sonya couldn’t breathe.

She gasped for air, air that wasn’t coming. She was drowning again.

“Sonya!”

She could barely hear the voice in the layer of water that rested between her ears and whoever was talking. It didn’t sound like Mamí. It didn’t sound like Belinda. Who was it?

An arm grabbed her around the waist, shaking her by the motion. “Sonya! It’s Paul. Can you hear me?”

With a shake of her head, she was back to the forest, with Cunningham’s arm hard around her waist. “Yes,” she said, trying desperately to get her breathing back to normal. “Yes. I can hear you.”

“Another hallucination?” Paul asked.

Sonya could only nod her head.

Inana took that moment to step to the front of the group. “Then come on, let’s get this figured out before it gets any worse.”

CHAPTER
4

Sarjenka stepped into the Kwolek to see that Dantas had everything under control.

Well, as much under control as anything could be with Makk Vinx around.

Almost on cue, Vinx piped up. “Doc! Falcão here says people are gonna die if we don’t figure this one out. You really think that’ll happen?”

Sarjenka briefly reconsidered that anesthezine gas canister and the vent in his quarters. Dismissing the thought as not nearly strong enough to take care of the problem, she grabbed Makk’s arm and led him outside the shuttle. When they weren’t within earshot of the Kwolek, she said, “Makk, there is no need to worry the patients over that. If we can get them to the da Vinci, I can help them. Do you understand?”

“Capisce, boss. I gotcha.”

“Good,” she said. “If you want to help, take your tricorder and start walking that way.” She gestured to the starboard side of the shuttlecraft. “When it starts working, you know you’re outside the field. Then contact the da Vinci and tell them what’s happening. Then come back here and get us. Hopefully, the field didn’t expand too far from here. I don’t like the idea of Captain Picard being exposed to whatever this is for much longer.”

“Gotcha, Doc. I’ll be back before you know it.”

He says that like it’s a good thing. “I hope so, Makk. I hope so. Remember, there are lives depending on you here.”

Makk ran off toward the other side of the Kwolek, tricorder in hand. Well, if he runs, it might speed this evac up. Maybe he’s not completely hopeless after all.

Sarjenka chastised herself just for thinking such a thing about a crewmate. Teams were teams for a reason. Her father had taught her that from his time in the dilithium mines.

Another image chose that moment to flash in her mind. Her father, face covered in regenerated skin, arm still charred from where the bomb had torn part of it off. His life saved thanks to the very same person who’d tried to erase her memory.

Sarjenka turned around and stared at the aft of the Shirley. She could easily report Katherine’s actions to the review board at Starfleet Medical, even though Captain Picard was rather adamant that she had only done it at his orders.

It made sense, in a Starfleet kind of way. They’d violated the Prime Directive by even answering her distress call. Mitigating the damage was the most logical step to be taken.

Her distress call. Sarjenka was still trying to wrap her brain around that one. Her little radio had reached the stars. It had reached Data. It had reached Captain Picard.

It had saved her world.

No. I was just playing with the thing, trying to find anyone who might have still been out there. All I wanted was someone to talk to.

She’d gotten far, far more than she ever expected.

Closing her eyes, she tried to remember more, the gray and white corridors of the Enterprise, Data’s cool hand in hers, asking if one day, when she was bigger—

“Could I be on your ship?” she had softly asked, remembering Data’s assurance that one day, perhaps she could.

And she’d wished for it every moment she’d been on the Enterprise. She could recall it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. As her gaze fell on the hatch of the Shirley, she realized that there might have been some truth to the old human adage of being careful what you wish for after all.

What Gabriel had termed the temple was, to Carol’s eyes, a grassy mound roughly the size of a shuttlecraft. It looked more like an ancient tumulus than a natural formation. Gomez said, “This just looks like a burial mound to me—not an image I’m thrilled with, mind you.”

Inana reached toward the mound, wiping the moistened dirt from a small panel not much larger than her palm. “This shows what it is.”

From Carol’s vantage point, the panel appeared to have the same kind of glyphs on it that had been on Inana’s rubbing, only these weren’t encoded in any manner—at least not in any manner that Carol knew.

“I thought these people were fighting for their lives,” Gomez said. “Why advertise the location of a temple?”

Carol asked right back, “Why did they build obvious religious sites like Notre Dame or the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom on Earth? Everyone needed to know where to go to worship. Making the building distinctive helped.”

“And since they were a people under attack,” Cunningham said, “then camouflage the place, put a small sign on an unassuming spot where the attackers can’t figure out. Hide the temple in plain sight. Worked for dozens of cultures for centuries.”

Looking around, Carol didn’t see anything resembling a placement point for the stones. “Okay, if this is the temple, where’s the obelisk?”

“That’s where this race was brilliant. Watch this,” Inana said. She reached over, and ran her fingers over a few of the glyphs on the panel. Carol couldn’t see the specific glyphs, but it looked as though they slid down at her touch like buttons on a control panel.

While Carol watched, a small portion of the temple mound slid inward with the sound of rock against rock, expanding until it revealed an interior hallway. The lush aroma of the forest that surrounded them was quickly filled with the dry, musty smell of a long-dead building. “Nice, huh?” Cunningham said.

“Come on,” Inana said, aiming her palm beacon down the tunnel.

As they all entered, Carol noted there was barely enough room for them to stand, but that situation seemed to improve as they walked. The ground crunched under their feet as they walked, years upon years of dust pressed into the dirt floor. Slowly, they turned corner after corner, until Carol realized that they were spiraling downward. “How far inside the mound are we?”

“We’re probably twenty meters below the surface right now,” Inana said. “This ramp keeps going for another thirty meters.”

And keep going they did, into a downward spiral. Carol tried to get a good look at the walls of the spiral as they walked. It looked as though the original builder had used a sort of plaster to cover the dirt, but some of it had fallen away to reveal the packed earth underneath. “Inana, have you done a structural integrity scan of this temple?”

“Noticed the holes in plaster, did you?” she said. “We’re fine. We got a good look inside this place before the equipment went down. They actually used a plaster-reinforced wood frame, filled in with stonework that they quarried near a stream about ten kilometers from here.”

That took Carol aback a bit. “Okay, then how’d they manage a field generator if that was the extent of their building technology?”

“Wait for it,” Paul said, his voice full of anticipation. “Just wait for it.”

“Remind me not to invite him to the next promotion party,” Bart softly said.

“Something tells me Gomez will invite him herself,” Carol whispered back.

Bart tried to stifle his laugh, but wasn’t so successful.

“What’s so funny back there?” Gomez asked, turning her own palm beacon on them.

Carol lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the light. She felt like a kid having been caught passing messages from padd to padd in class. “Nothing, Commander. Anthropologist humor. That’s all.”

Great, just what I needed. Abramowitz and Faulwell doing a comedy routine. Sonya tried hard to ignore the chuckling behind her as they proceeded down into the darkness. When they reached the bottom of the ramp, it opened into what felt like an enormous cavern. With only their palm beacons to light the room, however, she couldn’t be certain.

“Hang on,” Inana said. “Paul, give me a hand with the lamps, will you?”

The two archaeologists worked portable light after portable light, until the room was illuminated to a point where few, if any, shadows fell. “Whoa,” Sonya said, unable to control her reaction. “They were hiding it, weren’t they?”

“Yep,” Paul said, a definite smugness in his voice. “Look around. We found two skeletons that matched Gretharan physiology down here. Probably the last two left after the war. Took them back to the surface and gave them a proper burial. Before that, we think this was the central meeting place for the leadership. What do you think?”

Carol stepped toward the obelisk, which served as the focal point for the room. It was an enormous piece of stone, as tall as Faulwell, with the same reddish hue that the Red Pyramid of Egypt had held. “Red granite?” she asked.

“It scanned out as something close to granite, but there’s a beryllium component that we haven’t seen before,” Cunningham said. “That’s not the interesting part, though. Check those out.” He pointed toward at least a dozen notches in the wall, where what looked to be cables sank across the room into the ground outside.

“They look almost like roots,” Carol said. “This can’t be a natural formation, though.”

“It isn’t. The equipment went down before we could find out where they lead to, but they’re definitely connected to something within the walls. They have a slightly higher beryllium component to them than the obelisk.”

Paul was right. The conduits seemed to run from the notches into the wall itself, but where they went to from there was impossible for Gomez to determine at that point. “So, if this is the Krialta, the field must be coming from here. Wait a minute,” she said, as Cunningham’s words finally registered in her mind. “There’s a beryllium component to the obelisk and the cables?”

Inana and Paul both said, “Yes.”

“Did you find any copper?”

“A little bit, why?”

Sonya couldn’t help but smile. “If there’s a beryllium-copper alloy here, it’s got to be what’s conducting the energy field. Let me get a better look at those fibers.” Sonya was comforted a bit by the fact that Paul followed her over to one of the circular holes in the wall. Cables lined the wall of the hole, and Sonya couldn’t shake the idea that she was looking at a bundle of cables from the inside. “This is weird.”

“It’s like looking into the inside of an enormous growth of vines,” Carol added.

“You’re not kidding,” Paul said. He aimed his palm beacon toward the center of the hole, which seemed to go on forever. “Definitely not natural.”

“Unless these trees actually have beryllium in the sap,” Inana said. “But I’ve been all over the quadrant with Gabe, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Sonya shook her head. “No, this formation definitely isn’t natural. It doesn’t just look like bundled cable, that’s exactly what it is. I’ll bet these cables feed out into whatever is setting the borders for the energy field.”

“Not taking that bet for a minute,” Paul said.

There was a pained tone to his voice, and when she looked over, his jaw was clenched and the corners of his eyes were tight. “Another headache?”

He nodded very gently. “It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. This can’t be good for any of us.”

“But you’ll figure it out, right?”

She didn’t get a chance to answer him, though. No sooner did the words leave his mouth than he fell over, unconscious.

CHAPTER
5

Captain David Gold had seen many things during his tenure in the center seat of the da Vinci, but this had to be one of the craziest. Leaning back in his ready room chair, he contemplated just what Fabian Stevens was proposing. “You really think you know where this border is going to go next, Stevens?”

“Yes, sir. Not only that, but I’ve been watching the expansion versus the field intensity. It’s maintaining a pretty even level when it grows, not getting stronger. I don’t think it extends much more than a thousand meters from the surface.”

Gold stared at the engineer. “You know what you’re asking?”

“Yes, sir. And I believe we can pull this off. We haven’t needed it, but we’re even more atmosphere-capable than we used to be. All we have to do is drop a bundle of instruments to test the theory.”

Gold’s lips twisted as he thought. “If we can get in there safely, what about the transporters? Will it be enough for the transporters to work?”

“If we can get a lock on their combadges, I believe so.”

“That’s a mighty big ‘if’ there, son.”

Stevens stared intently at him, almost as though he were trying to will the captain to come around to his line of thinking. “It’s better than sitting up here doing nothing while they might be dying down there. I know we haven’t tried entering an atmosphere since Galvan VI, but if we have a chance to help them, shouldn’t we try?”

He had to admit, the kid had a point. Gold was even beginning to get antsy himself. His mind ran back over the repairs and upgrades the ship had been given after its near destruction. Starfleet had upgraded the hull strength as much as was possible on the little ship. Perhaps if they used the shields as a backup termination point for the field, it just might work. I’ve been working with engineers too long. I’m starting to think like them.

“All right,” Gold finally said, “we’ll give it a shot. We may be atmosphere-capable, but remember we can’t land. This has to work from the air, or it won’t work at all.”

Stevens shot out of his chair, the smile on his face going from ear to ear. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll make it work.”

Sarjenka wiped another damp cloth across Captain Picard’s forehead. It was a palliative more than anything else. The cool moisture just made him feel better. Her long red fingers went to his neck, only to discover that his pulse was still as strong and steady as it had been all along. It had required a stronger sedative, but Picard was sleeping peacefully for what Data had said was the first time in days.

“Sarjenka, how is your family?” Data asked, dropping his tone to account for their unconscious patient.

“As good as can be expected.”

“Ah,” Data said. “Yes. I remember the report of the mine collapse a few years ago. I understand that Dr. Pulaski was able to regenerate enough skin to cover your father’s burns.”

“Yes,” she said, wariness creeping into her voice. Slowly, she turned her gaze from Picard to Data. “Where did you get that report? That was supposed to be an official and confidential part of our petition for protectorate status.”

“I have had an interest in Drema IV ever since the Enterprise helped your world,” Data said. “I merely programmed the ship’s computer to alert me if any mentions of your world appeared in Federation records.”

“You have access to protected records?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and was sure the look on her face conveyed that very message. “You were looking for me?”

“In a fashion.”

“Data,” she began, “that’s really…creepy. Why were you looking for me?”

The android’s eyes widened at her use of the word creepy. “I was concerned for your well-being. You were, as Captain Picard said, my ‘pen pal.’ I valued your friendship for the short time I had it.”

Sarjenka remembered some of the conversations they’d had. She told him about her family during one of their discussions, and her heart ached at the memory of her brother Senkare’s last words to her. “Take care of mother and father.”

But here she was, in the middle of an alien planet, as far from her mother and father as she’d ever been. How was this fulfilling his last request?

“How is your family?” Data asked once again, almost as though he could read her mind.

“If you’ve been keeping an eye out for me, don’t you know?”

Data stopped for a moment. If he’d been a living creature, she would have thought that he was trying to remember what he’d learned, but he didn’t need to be a living creature to have to access his memory. Finally, he said, “Your father was nearly killed in a dilithium mine explosion approximately eight years ago. He was treated by Dr. Katherine Pulaski on Drema Station, and returned to your home eight weeks later. At that time, you requested to go with Captain David Gold and take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. Your record was exemplary.”

Well, he had definitely read her record since joining Starfleet. Sarjenka decided it was time to test and see how far he’d really gotten. “What do you know about the Exiles?”

“Very little is in the Federation database about them. We know that a small band took over Drema IV for a few months, but we have no information on where their attack originated. Your people rose up and defeated them almost a year after they arrived. From what your planet’s government filed with the Federation, the Exiles had superior weaponry, and were using the dilithium of Drema IV to power their equipment. How did your people defeat them?”

Sarjenka couldn’t resist a bitter laugh. “We turned on the lights.” She could still remember the day her older brother had thought of that plan. “The Exiles had come from a planet where the natural light was very limited. In our buildings, under controlled artificial light, they were fine, but just to be outside on our planet they had to wear insulated clothing and darkened glasses. When stealing the clothing didn’t work, my brother got a group of the men together and tried stealing the glasses, then exposing the Exiles to light like they’d never seen before. The gas discharge lamps we had were few, but they were powerful. My brother blinded the Exile leader, but was killed before he could get away. We found out later that he’d also accidentally blinded himself in the process.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Data said, his voice a perfect mimic of human sympathy.

“Everyone says that. I wonder how many really mean it?”

Data’s hand came down on her shoulder. “Humans are quite unusual in that respect, Sarjenka. The longer you spend with them, the more you will realize that. I believe that the humans you spoke to are quite capable of respecting your brother’s sacrifice.”

“My brother was an idiot, Data. You don’t need to hide that from me.”

“Did he not formulate the plan of attack?”

Sarjenka raised an eyebrow. “You do have a point. One of the engineers on the da Vinci told me a saying that fits. ‘The law of averages had to work out in his favor eventually.’”

Data smiled. “Yes, it did.”

She could still hear the attempt at sympathy in his voice. “Data, please don’t patronize me. That was a long time ago, and on a planet that seems like an eternity away from this one. A lot has changed since then.”

Data’s smile vanished. “You no longer require comfort for the loss?”

Sarjenka shook her head. “Life goes on. The wheel turns. We mourn the dead and move on. We lost a lot of people during the Uprising. My brother may not have been the brightest of our people, but he was a fighter. Now, he’s just a memory and a name on the wall of the Uprising Memorial. And we’ve all seen how well memories work on this planet.”

Her heart tightened in her chest. She hadn’t thought about Senkare for years, but now she could feel tears beginning to well in her eyes. Memories long buried, playing with Jenkara when the reeka had been a baby, Senkare helping with her geography homework—it had been his area of expertise, but not quite hers—even simple things like walking to school together in the mornings. I wish he could have been there for my graduation.

Sarjenka mentally shook herself. The field must have been getting a stronger hold on them, as the memories were coming far more readily than they had been. They needed to get out of there, the sooner, the better.

Domenica Corsi warily stepped into what appeared to be the village’s central gathering area. Christine Vale was right behind her, machete in hand as though she were expecting to be jumped at any microsecond. That was the moment when Corsi realized that she had, without even thinking about it, grabbed a machete from her belt herself. Good thinking. Now, where do we start?

Boisterous laughter came from one building down the street. When Corsi took a closer look, she noticed the shaded windows, smoke—probably from less-than-legal sources if the aroma wafting her way was any indication—pouring from the front door, and the sound of clatter that bespoke dishware being washed.

Before Corsi could get a word out, Vale walked past her and headed toward the very same building. “The bartender owes me a favor,” she said. “If anyone would know what’s going on, it’s him.”

Corsi watched Vale move, and realized that the kid had learned more than she would have given her credit. She is the security chief on the Enterprise, Corsi reminded herself. They don’t give that position to just anybody. Following Vale through the door, Corsi took up a vantage point at the end of the bar—near the door, of course—and tried to both hear what Vale was saying and monitor the clientele.

On the seedy scale of one to ten, she’d have given the place about a six. Not exactly a place she’d take someone she cared about to, but not a place she’d altogether avoid on her own. The place was full of the lower class of patrons, with at least two couples in shiny “going out” clothes that were at least two years beyond the last time their wearers had been that size. Seven tables were all that the place had room for, and the décor wasn’t anything worth writing home about.

The place reeked of bad food, bad alcohol, and body odor. It looked as though a Pakled with a grimy plant fetish had decorated the place. Brown vines grew across the wooden walls, almost as though they were a part of the building’s framework. The lights were small wall sconces, and Corsi couldn’t tell whether they were lit by gas lamps, or were actual candles. She would have laid money that these people hadn’t seen electricity or even electronics until Collins and his team had shown up.

So why aren’t first-contact protocols in place? Corsi tried to tell the little voice in the back of her mind to shut the hell up, but—as usual—it wouldn’t listen. What’s so different about this place that the Federation can send archaeological teams here, but that’s it?

Corsi took a step closer to Vale, who was chatting up the bartender.

“Come on, Aegris,” Vale said. “You know who did it, I know you do. Everyone talks to you.”

Aegris, as Vale called him, was a hefty male. He looked human, but Corsi had long since learned that you could never take your first impression of someone as a given. Everyone had something to hide, and nobody was ever as they seemed. His voice, when she finally heard it, sounded like the voice of a man who’d smoked all his life, and then gargled a few razor blades on top of it for good measure.

“Not this time, Christine,” he said. With a head jerk in Corsi’s direction, he added, “Who’s your friend?”

Corsi leaned across the bar, “I’m your worst nightmare if you piss me off. Now, do you know who stole from the archaeologists, or not? And you’d best tell me the truth.”

The expression in Aegris’s eyes didn’t change at Corsi’s words. “Is that right now, little woman?” he asked, leaning on the bar as though he were out for a stare-down.

“Yes.” Vale stepped in. “Domenica Corsi, this is Aegris. Corsi taught me everything I know, Aegris. Be…”

Vale grabbed the edge of the bar, holding on until her knuckles were white.

“Christine?” Corsi asked, her voice as sharp as she could manage.

Vale lost her grasp on the bar, falling to the floor with the thud of a heavy piece of meat. “Christine!”

Corsi was on her knees beside Vale in an instant, checking her friend’s pulse, eyes, everything she could think of. “Aegris,” Corsi said, “where can I put her until she comes to?”

Aegris, for his part, looked at her as though she were nursing a drunk on his floor. “You can take her back to your camp.”

To the credit—or, perhaps not—of the rest of the bar’s patrons, they didn’t even notice a woman had just collapsed in front of them. If any of them had, they merely went back to their conversations. Yep, this place isn’t going to make even a one-star rating.

“No, Aegris, I can’t.” Corsi stood back up, reached across the bar and grabbed Aegris by the apron. “She’s sick. The same thing can happen to everyone in this room if you don’t help us find who stole items from the Federation dig site.”

Aegris gave her that same oh, dear girl look she’d received every single time a man had underestimated her. “And the sky will be bright green tomorrow.”

She pulled harder on the man’s shirt, noting from his occasional wince that she must have been getting chest hair in the process. “Fine,” she said. “If you want to die, far be it from me to stop you.”

Pushing Aegris back, hard enough to throw him into the shelf of bottles that lined the wall behind the bar, she turned back to the bar’s patrons. “Everyone, listen up. Looters broke into the archaeological dig just outside of town a few days ago. They took something that’s vital to the safety of everyone on this planet, including all of you. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, but if anyone here has remembered something in the last few days that they’ve been trying hard as hell to forget, that’s just the beginning. Anyone know where the looters are?”

Not a soul raised a hand.

She walked around the room, trying to catch the gaze of everyone present. “Nobody? Nobody’s had an old memory they’d rather forget come back to haunt them? Not even in a dream?”

One of the women in the back gasped at that. “Dreams, too?”

“That’s where it can start,” Corsi said. “You’re having a perfectly normal dream, and all of a sudden it’s something you wanted to forget.”

A perfectly normal dream… Corsi mentally shook the visions that had been plaguing her from her mind. Control it, Corsi. Vale needs you right now. Everybody on this planet needs you right now.

She willed the image away, her grandfather, no. Not now. Go away. I’m not seeing it.

Vale began to stir, groaning as she slowly pulled herself up to a sitting position. “Corsi? What happened?”

“Just stay there, Christine. Take it easy. You passed out.”

“I what?”

“Just don’t move yet.”

Vale, of course, didn’t listen. Christine tried to reach toward one of the barstools in what was probably a logical attempt to use it to stand up, but nothing happened. “Um, Domenica?”

“What?”

“I can’t move from here.”

Corsi rushed back over, putting one of Christine’s arms over her shoulders as she tried to help her stand. “Come on, you can do it.”

Vale’s legs were like rubber, refusing to support her weight. Sitting her back down on the floor, Corsi placed a hand around Vale’s calf. “Can you feel this?”

Vale shook her head. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I felt fine just a minute ago.”

“Damn. We need to get you out of this field.”

“No,” Christine said, punctuating the statement with a shake of her head. “You need me with you. Unless you think you can strong-arm all of these people into telling you where the looters are?”

Corsi cursed under her breath. Vale was right. Besides, she’d also been in the firefight that had broken out when the looters were trying to escape the dig site. She’d know the bastards on sight. “Okay,” she said. “But I don’t like this. You need to get to safety.”

“Bull. You’d be giving the same protests if you were in my shoes, and you know it. Help me stand up and let’s get out of here.”

“Maybe Sarjenka has some crutches in her bag of tricks.” She once again reached a hand around Christine’s waist, using the other to drape Vale’s arm over her shoulders. Turning her head back to the establishment’s patrons, she said, “If anyone, and I mean anyone has any information about what happened, come to the archaeological dig site. Please. Help us save this planet.”

Together, they headed back toward Collins’s dig site, and from there toward the shuttles.

CHAPTER
6

When Sarjenka went back to check on Dantas and the others, she found a situation quite removed from what she’d seen before.

“Dantas?”

Dantas, however, was sleeping so soundly, not even a clap beside her ear awoke her. No. She didn’t even tell me she was seeing anything. It can’t have taken her down this fast. Placing two fingers against her assistant’s neck, Sarjenka breathed a sigh of relief to feel a pulse. It was thready, but it was still there. Falcão’s skin was cool to the touch, but not to a point where it was worrisome.

Looking around the shuttle, she checked the pulse of every patient, until she reached Rennan Konya. Rennan was sleeping peacefully in the shuttle’s command chair, apparently comfortable that there was no way more looters could get into the shuttle with the door closed.

Of course, the door wasn’t closed, and to Sarjenka’s knowledge, there wasn’t enough power in the Kwolek to move even a lever, let alone something as big as the shuttle’s door. “Rennan?” she asked, gently shaking the man’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

It took a moment, but the Betazoid finally roused. “Doc? Oh, no. How long was I out?”

“I don’t know.”

Rennan rubbed his hands against his face, almost pushing his eyes back into his head. “Damn. Everything okay here?”

“Yes. Dantas has gotten the situation under control. You can do us one favor, though.”

Rennan stood straight up, yawning when he reached his full height. “I’ll get the rest of the dig crew and bring them here,” he finally said. Then his brow furrowed. “How did I know you were going to ask that?”

Sarjenka quickly ran a hand over his hairline, not sure what she was checking for, but checking anyway. “You’re Betazoid, Rennan. This field has been acting differently on every different species here. The humans have been having migraines along with the memory visions. I’ve been having more visions than I can keep track of. Apparently it amplifies a Betazoid’s abilities too. Any memories coming back to you that you never remembered until now?”

Rennan shook his head. “Just suddenly being able to read your mind, Doctor.”

She took a deep breath, assimilating this new bit of information. “Okay, yes, I’d like you to go back and get the rest of the dig team. No questions. They need to be taken out of here as soon as possible. Makk is trying to find the new edge of the field. If he can do that, we’re going to need to get everyone out of this area as soon as possible. If you can read everyone’s minds now, you’ll be able to tell them whatever it takes to get them to come with us. And that’s what I need you to do. Can you do that?”

Rennan thought for a long moment before nodding. “Bring them to the Shirley?”

Sarjenka turned around and looked at the six sleeping patients in the rear hold of the shuttle. It had obviously taken a while to remove the various crates of equipment they’d brought down in the first place, but she noticed that at least two patients were sleeping on makeshift beds from the crates. “Yes. I’ll have Data help get the equipment out of the rear hold of the Shirley. We’ll get beds set up using the crates.”

“Understood. I’ll be back before you can say ‘Sacred Chalice of Rixx.’” Flipping her a quick, informal salute, he threaded his way between the sleeping people and out the shuttle’s door.

No sooner was he through the door than she heard him say, “Commander? What’s going on?”

“I think we’ve found another effect of this field. Hey, Doc!”

Sarjenka ducked out of the shuttle and found Domenica supporting Christine Vale, who appeared unable to walk under her own power. “Don’t tell me it’s spreading to the motor cortex. Come here,” she said, gesturing them toward the nearest bed of medical crates. “Let me take a look.”

Christine lay back on the crates, and Sarjenka couldn’t help but notice a sense of relief washing over the woman.

“Okay,” Sarjenka began, “tell me what happened.”

“She blacked out—”

“I think I passed out—”

“I think it’s best I hear it from the patient, please,” she said. “Or at the very least one at a time. You lost consciousness?”

“Yeah,” Christine said. “I think so. We were talking to one of my contacts when I just couldn’t stand up anymore. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor and couldn’t get back up.”

“Not without help,” Domenica added. “Doc, did you bring any crutches with you? We need Vale back out there.”

“Yeah,” Christine said, the fingers of her right hand moving to her forehead. “I need to be able to help with this investigation. There are some people in town who will never talk to Corsi. No offense, Commander.”

One corner of Domenica’s lips turned up. “I do tend to have that effect on people, don’t I?”

Sarjenka’s eyes went back and forth between Domenica and her friend, knowing full well that what Christine really needed was a trip back up to the da Vinci to get her out of that field. Then maybe a neural regeneration would help with the legs. But there was no way that was coming any time soon.

“Sarj!”

She stopped in her tracks. That had been Dantas’s voice, sounding quite panicked. Sarjenka ran back into the shuttle, only to find her assistant collapsed in a heap on the floor, only able to move her left arm and right leg.

“Okay,” Sarjenka said. “Dantas, just lie there. Commander Corsi, can you help, please? Can you get Commander Data to help Dantas into a bed?”

“You’ve got it.” Domenica said, her voice immediately followed by the thrash of someone running over the growth in the clearing.

Going back out to where Christine waited, she rummaged through the supply cases until she found what she was looking for: a passive two-leg orthosis for Christine’s legs that, combined with a set of crutches, would help her walk.

“You really brought crutches?” Christine asked.

“Of course,” she replied. “We were going to an area where my equipment would probably not work, so I put as much equipment that didn’t require computers or power as I thought might be necessary into the cargo. Yes, it’s archaic medicine, but it’s better than nothing. Besides, if there were leg wounds, these would help get the injured to the shuttles.”

Leaning the crutches against the makeshift bed, she began strapping the external supports onto Christine’s legs. The hinges creaked as she tested Christine’s range of motion, but even though they were old, they’d support her weight. “These should keep your legs solid enough to walk. Between these and the crutches, you should be able to get around. If I could use the medical tricorder, I might be able to give you a better treatment, Christine. I apologize.”

“It’s not your fault,” Domenica said, returning with Commander Data. “It’s whoever thought it would be a good idea to take those three stones from this temple. Most likely Collins. Typical arrogant academic.”

“Thank you for that vote of confidence, Commander Corsi. I feel so comfortable with my security in your hands.”

Sarjenka leaned around Domenica, just in time to see Gabriel Collins hobbling toward them. There was a stiffness to his walk that Sarjenka didn’t like. “Are you feeling all right, Professor?”

Gabriel looked down, and seemed to realize his gait was off. “Yeah. I just slept funny. What’s going on?”

“We’re evacuating the dig site,” Sarjenka said. “I don’t believe it’s safe for your people to be on this planet any longer.”

“What? You can’t do that. We have permits. We have—”

“I can, and I will. Your people are in danger, Professor. If Commander Gomez can’t figure out what’s set this off, your people are slowly going to die. And there’s nothing I can do about it as long as that field is in place. Is that what you want?”

It was at that moment that the gravity of what he was seeing appeared to sink in. “Heyerdahl, Davis, they’re down too?”

Sarjenka nodded. “They’re in the rear of that shuttle with my assistant—who has also lost the ability to move parts of her body. This field moves on to the motor cortex after it floods the hippocampus. I really don’t want to find out where it moves from there.”

“Sarjenka,” Data said. “If you no longer require my assistance, I will return to check on Captain Picard.”

“Yes, please, Data. Thank you.” With that, the android left, allowing her to return her attentions to the archaeologist. “Professor Collins, I know what you’re thinking. Can you really put your team through this for the sake of an ancient weapon that it may kill you to find? What if your wife dies because of this weapon? What about the natives? They’re innocent bystanders in this. They never agreed to it, but it’s affecting them as well. When the first native dies, the blood will be on your hands.”

Gabriel’s eyes went between Sarjenka and where Christine sat on the edge of the makeshift bed. The sight of the supports that held her upright seemed to help drive the point home. “All right. We’ll leave and come back when the field is brought down. Where are my wife and the rest of your team?”

Sarjenka breathed a sigh of relief. “They were looking for the temple.”

Gabriel slowly nodded. “Okay. I’ll go see what I can do to help them.”

He stepped back into the forest, a sense of determination about him that Sarjenka was happy to see. They might get out of this after all.

No sooner was he gone than Sarjenka turned to Corsi and said, “Domenica, you might want to take Rennan with you.”

“Why? Don’t you need him here?”

Sarjenka shook her head, explaining what had happened to the Betazoid. “Now he might be of greater use to you on the search than to me here.”

“Good call. Konya!”

Rennan’s head appeared around the shuttlecraft door. “You need me, boss? Yeah, you do. Be right there.”

Corsi arced an eyebrow and then reached down to help Christine stand. “Yeah, that’s going to be handy. Come on, Konya. You’re with us.”

CHAPTER
7

“You’re crazy. You know that, right?”

Nancy Conlon’s voice filtered through the general chaos of sounds in main engineering, making its way to Fabian Stevens’s ears.

“Yeah, but if I weren’t, this plan would never work,” he said, sliding out from under the control panel for the main deflector shields and flashing her his best Trust me, I know what I’m doing grin. Even he had to admit that of all the harebrained schemes they’d come up with in his years on the da Vinci, this was one of the furthest out there. But if it worked, he’d be a hero. And he liked that idea, especially when it came along with saving Dom’s life for a change. After his little trick with her rank pip, he could use all of the brownie points he could get. “All we have to do is route some excess power from the warp core into the shield generator. Then we extend the shields down as far as possible, and see where the field begins to interfere.”

Conlon’s eyes narrowed. “And what if the shields go down completely?”

Stevens paused. In his enthusiasm for trying to save the day, he hadn’t actually considered that prospect. However, his backbrain—which was often smarter than he was, but he’d never admit it—chose that time to throw out a response. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that be our first signal to get the hell out of there?”

Nancy opened her mouth to say something else, but appeared to decide against tempting fate. Pursing her lips, she headed over toward a distant console at a determined pace. Oh, she’s pissed. Dom could not possibly have gotten payback on her before she went down there, could she?

Stevens could hear Corsi’s voice in his head. No, she’s pissed because you’re appropriating her engine room for another one of your half-assed ideas.

But, he’d run five simulations in the hololab before bringing it to Captain Gold. It was nigh-on foolproof.

And you’re just the fool who’d mess it up.

Stevens took a deep breath, forced himself to relax, and went back to the shield controls. A little reconfiguration here, a move one isolinear chip there, and it would be perfect.

“Paul! Paul, wake up!”

Sonya placed a hand on Cunningham’s shoulder, shaking it for all she was worth. Yet he steadfastly insisted on remaining on the dirt floor. Nothing would make him stir.

“Damn,” Inana said, snapping her fingers in front of his nose. “He’s out like a light. Come on, he’ll wake up in a bit with a headache from hell, but we can’t wait for that.”

Sonya wasn’t quite as sanguine about his prospects as Inana. She’d seen the pain—both physical and mental—on his face back in the forest, and known it like an old friend. “First migraines, then unconsciousness, I don’t want to know what this thing’s going to do to us next.” She turned to Carol and Bart. “Guys, does anything look familiar around here? Anything that might give an indication of what these cables do?” She wasn’t quite sure why she wasn’t asking Inana, but there was just something that she didn’t like about the woman’s reaction to one of her teammates going down. Still, it was better to not appear overly suspicious. “Inana, what do you know about this place?”

“I’ll tell you,” Gabriel Collins said from the bottom of the ramp. “This was the temple for the real power in the battle between the Gretharans and the Letheans. It’s branching out from a generator somewhere near this complex. What you’re looking at are field conduits. At least, that’s what they seem to be. I haven’t been able to find the field generator anywhere. With no equipment, there’s no way to track the things once they enter the walls.”

Sonya slowly rose to her feet. “And you were hoping we’d help you with that part?”

Gabriel nodded. “What good is taking a theoretical weapon to the Federation Council? It won’t extend our grants or find us other funding, will it? How are we supposed to keep these projects going without results?”

“You knew the Krialta was here before we even came?” Inana sounded just as surprised as Sonya felt. “Gabriel, what the hell were you thinking?”

Collins took a step toward his wife. “I was trying to secure our future. All of us. You, me, Paul, everyone. If we could come here and bring back the Krialta, the galaxy would be ours.”

“And if you couldn’t sell it to the Federation,” Carol said, “let me guess. The Ferengi next? You’re not a weapons trader, Gabriel. I’ve known you too long to believe that. You’re exploiting history for your own gain. What happened to that idealist who wanted to protect the past?”

Gabriel turned a glare toward Carol. “It had to cave in to the realist. Come on, Carol, you’ve been out there. We don’t mean anything anymore unless we can turn a profit. This find, this will put us back on the map.”

“We never left the map, Gabriel,” Carol said. “We just helped expand it a little.” Even she hated how trite she sounded, but it was the first thing that had come to mind. “Come on. You’ve got the best engineers in the fleet here. Just help us shut this thing off, and then we can figure out how it works. We can take it back to Starfleet for you.”

Collins’s lips pursed. “Sure, and you’ll take the credit.”

“For crying out loud, Gabe. How long have we known each other? You know I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. Inana wouldn’t, either. Don’t tell me you don’t even trust your wife?”

Gabriel walked over to where his wife stood, still staring agape at him. “Oh, I trust you, my love,” he said. “As much as I can trust anyone. I was going to tell you everything once we’d figured out how it worked and how to get it out of here.”

“But you couldn’t figure out how to get the thing out. And then your equipment started going down,” Gomez said. “So you had Data call for Starfleet.”

Collins merely smiled.

Carol, however, took a step toward Inana. “He didn’t know about the message you sent to me?”

“What message?” Inana innocently replied.

“You didn’t need this tablet translated at all, did you?” Faulwell said. “You knew what it said all along.”

“I had an idea,” Collins said. “However, confirmation is always better. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“Where’s the third sphere?” Gomez asked. “I’ve got people injured, some severely. If any of them die, it’s on your head, Professor.”

Gabriel Collins smirked. “Well, risk is part of your business. Isn’t that what your much-vaunted James T. Kirk used to say?”

“He’s not my much-vaunted anything,” Gomez replied. “He was a good captain. He did some admirable things during his time, but he was a man just like you. He made mistakes.”

“Just like me?” Collins smugly asked. “Commander, if I did anything wrong by coming and finding this weapon, I would be honored to have you elaborate on the error of my ways.”

Abramowitz simply stared. There was no way to win this one. He had the Krialta in his possession. They all knew what it did, and how dangerous it could be in the hands of any government. “You don’t see the damage this one device can do, do you? Whose hands would you put it in? Look at what it’s doing to your team, your wife, yourself! Let it die here, a relic of a time long gone.”

Collins laughed. “And let it fall into Romulan hands? Are you mad? Look at what it’s doing to the humans. In the hands of Starfleet Medical, imagine what they could do with it.”

“And imagine a Gabriel Collins School of Xenoarchaeology at Cambridge?” Carol said, sounding more irritated with the professor than she’d ever sounded with Vance. “Gabe. Come on. You’re better than this. This isn’t you.”

Inana simply shook her head. Disappointment was etched on her delicate features. “You’re not the man I married, Gabriel.”

That was the straw that broke the archaeologist’s back. Collins rushed to his wife, taking both hands in his. “Nana, sweetheart. You know what this would mean to us.”

“No,” a very bedraggled voice said from the floor. “But I do know what this would mean to this planet.” With Sonya’s help, Paul Cunningham slowly pulled himself to his feet. “You’ve unleashed hell on this planet, Gabe. Are you really delusional enough to think you can control the genie once it’s out of the bottle?”

“That’s not my job,” Collins replied.

“But it is your job to take the money for whatever you find and run? How very Ferengi of you,” Inana said, the word wrapped in tremendous distaste.

“No,” Paul said, his voice sounding a lot steadier. “You’re supposed to study the history of this place. Make sure history never forgets the Gretharans. You yourself said you wanted to bring the Gretharans back to the universe. You wanted to know what their life was like, what war with the Letheans had really done to them.”

“You lied,” Sonya said, far more matter-of-factly than Carol had thought her capable.

“I may have stretched the truth a bit to make sure we got the university funding we needed.”

Sonya raised a dark eyebrow. “And committed fraud.”

Inana stepped in front of her husband, turning to face Sonya and the lot. “He wouldn’t have been the first scientist to do it, and he won’t be the last.”

“That doesn’t—” Carol began.

“Yes, it does,” Inana flatly stated. “Have you been with Starfleet so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like on this side of the coin? Defending dig sites to a university that doesn’t give a damn about the history of ours or any other worlds? Fighting tooth and claw for every bit of funding? Carol, you used to be one of the best at it.”

Carol opened her mouth to speak, but closed it once again.

“Come on,” Sonya said. “We can save the accusations and recriminations for when we’re out of here, this thing’s shut off, and everyone’s safe. Let’s get moving.”

CHAPTER
8

Corsi, Vale, and Konya worked their way back to Aegris’s establishment. The odiferous fumes were still signaling to anyone with a nasal passage that the place was open for business. Instead of walking inside immediately, however, Corsi stopped them near the door. “Konya,” she said. “Can you pick up anything?”

The Betazoid stared at the door of the establishment, an expression on his face that looked to Corsi to be somewhere between intense concentration, and needing to hit the head.

“Rennan,” Vale said. “Don’t push yourself. Let it come to you.”

Corsi wanted to ask where Vale had picked up that particular bit of information, then remembered that the counselor on the Enterprise was half-Betazoid. “Don’t try too hard, Konya. Just listen.”

Silence sat among the three of them for a long while, until finally, Konya’s head turned toward the right. It was as if he’d just picked up something. His eyes opened, and he looked Corsi directly in the eye. “Follow me. There’s someone this way.”

Corsi helped Vale back to her feet, and the trio went off through the trees behind Aegris’s establishment. She was trying to make sure Vale kept as silent as possible, but with the contraptions attached that were helping her move, that wasn’t the easiest job in the world. Crap. Vale’s making enough noise to alert a battalion. They took it slow, watching as many steps as she could, until finally Corsi was beginning to get impatient. “How far?” Corsi asked.

The Betazoid immediately hushed her, pointing ahead of them in the forest. Corsi barely caught a glimpse of a campfire. “Christine,” Corsi whispered. “Can you stand here?”

To her credit, Vale seemed to understand why Corsi was asking. Nodding, she took off her uniform jacket and then pulled the two long knives that hadn’t had to be removed from her belt for the leg supports. Hiding her crutches behind a large tree, she leaned back against that tree and smiled. “Bring them my way, I’ll be happy to take care of whoever’s left.”

Somehow, Corsi had a feeling that if any of them did happen to cross Vale’s path, they’d underestimate her into their own graves. The kid was good that way. And she’d also had the sense to get out of her uniform jacket. The less these gentlemen knew of Starfleet, the better off they all were. Corsi also shrugged out of her jacket, placing it alongside Vale’s. “Good call, Christine,” she said. “Beat me to it.”

Vale just smiled as Corsi went ahead.

Catching up to Konya, Corsi surveyed the situation before them. A small group of four people were sitting around a campfire. One, a heavyset man with a graying beard almost as wide as his paunch, seemed to be the ringleader, as the other three were sitting scattered around the fire with their attentions obviously focused on him. Corsi could smell how long it had been since they’d bathed from where she stood.

“What can you pick up?” Corsi whispered. “Besides the stench?”

Konya shook his head. “Not much. They’re trying to figure out if there’s anything left at the dig site that might make them some money.”

“Damn. Don’t tell me they’ve sold the sphere?”

Konya closed his eyes, and there was a long pause before he whispered, “The skinny guy on the left sold it on the black market for transport out of here, but got screwed.”

Corsi pulled one of the machetes, laying it on the ground before where she now knelt. “Oh, he’ll get transport out of here, all right. What’s his name?”

“Daviara,” Konya said, after another round of his concentration-or-bathroom expression.

He’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

Corsi winced as another vision entered her mind. Her grandfather, telling her stories over the campfire many years ago, when Domenica had been nothing more than a five-year-old with dreams of following in her father’s footsteps. No, not now. No.

She struggled against the vision, willing it to stop. She’d been seeing visions of her grandfather since shortly after they’d landed. For the first few hours, it had been easy to will them into that corner of her mind where all of the bad memories went to die. This one, however, wasn’t going to acquiesce easily. Corsi scooted back, until she was out of the line of sight of their prey. The last thing she needed was what had happened to Captain Picard.

But the pain. It felt like hot pokers being driven into her skull. I can control this. I won’t be taken out by a damned headache. Corsi fought with her breathing, forcing it back into a regular pattern. Putting her palm on the ground, she realized that the dirt under her hand was cool and moist, just what the headache ordered. Corsi took a handful of the mud and wiped it across her forehead.

“I just picked up pain. Are you okay?” Konya quietly asked. “Don’t tell me it’s getting you too.”

“Okay, I won’t,” Corsi said, after a deep, calming breath. “Mind over matter,” she whispered. “Mind over matter. I can control this.”

“No, you can’t,” Konya said. Reaching forward, he placed a hand on Corsi’s shoulder. “Not without help. Take my hand. I’ve got an idea.”

Skeptical, she took the Betazoid’s hand anyway. Anything was better than the pain.

Before either of them realized it, the group they were hunting began audibly complaining of headaches. “Aye, Fates be damned,” one said. “My head feels like it’s been beaten with a bucket.”

The white-hot pain began to ebb from Corsi’s skull, until finally, it was blessedly gone.

Within a few seconds, Konya let go of her hand. “You feeling better?”

Corsi nodded. “How the hell—?”

“Just adapting one of my old tricks, Commander.”

Corsi stared at Konya, realizing that she now had one of the best secret weapons in Starfleet. Telepathically redirected pain as an attack weapon. Damn. That’s an idea Starfleet needs to start employing. Of course, Betazoid security officers in Starfleet were fewer and farther between than she’d have liked, but this was definitely something that she would take to the brass when they got back to the da Vinci.

If they ever got back to the da Vinci.

“Don’t think like that, boss,” Konya said. “We’ll be fine. You’re right. Let me be the ace in the hole here.”

Corsi made a mental note to commend Konya on his tactical thinking when they got home.

“Thanks, boss,” Konya said. Shrugging out of his own uniform jacket, he added, “So, what’s our plan of attack here?”

“You said Daviara was the one who knew where the sphere was?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s him we go after. Come on. Let’s get what we came for.”

Rising to her feet, Corsi stalked into the clearing. “Gentlemen, it’s so good that we all could meet like this.”

Four hands reached for four weapons, only to be held at bay by four machetes. “Boys, boys, boys,” Corsi said as matter-of-factly as she could. “We can do this nicely, or we could spill your blood in creative ways you can’t possibly imagine. It’s up to you.”

The heavyset man lowered his hand, leaving only two men for Konya to actively cover. “What do you want?”

Corsi took a step toward Daviara. “I’ve been told that someone around here has something I’m looking for.”

Daviara may have been a scruffy human, but she could still see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Who are you?” he asked.

“The name’s Corsi,” she said. “You might have heard of my father, Aldo? He’s done a bit of business in this area and wants to expand his operation.”

“Don’t tell me your uncle was that idiot Giancarlo Corsi,” the heavyset man said.

Corsi turned on him, the point of her machete coming to rest against the man’s chest. “Surely you’re not stupid enough to call the uncle of someone holding a weapon on you an idiot.” It didn’t matter that he really had been, but she had principle to stand on, and she was going to tramp it into the moist ground at her feet.

“I am,” he said, “and I did. What are you going to do about it, little girl?”

Corsi moved the point of the machete in a little dance across the man’s ample chest, until she reached the left side of his rough-hewn leather suspenders. If these are as sharp as I think they are, and if those are as worn as they look… She barely nicked the man’s skin as she cut through the hide holding one side of his pants up in one stroke. “I can do a lot,” she calmly stated. She once again danced the machete toward the other suspender strap. “If I need to, I can do a whole lot. Care to find out?”

The man moved to draw his weapon. He had just gotten it out of the holster when Corsi quickly flipped the machete, and brought the spine of the blade cracking across his knuckles. The gun fell to the ground with a thunk of metal on moist dirt. “You don’t strike me as the suicidal type.” She glanced to Konya for a name, which then appeared in her mind. Yeah, this is going to take getting used to. Flipping the blade back to its original position, she scooted the sharp edge closer to his neck. “You definitely don’t strike me as the suicidal type, Yevarin. Now, let’s play nice and I won’t have to use this.”

Yevarin simply glared.

The two that Konya was covering, however, weren’t quite so smart. Not only did they end up with their weapons knocked out of their hands, but they were unhurt in the process. They quietly acquiesced, sitting back down until Corsi and Konya’s little op was over. Conveniently, Corsi noticed, they were sitting with their backs to where Vale stood in wait. Good. Try to escape you two. Just try it.

Daviara, to his credit, began hemming and hawing at the sight. He’s stalling for time. Why?

“Rennan?” Corsi began, hoping he would pick up on the stalling himself. To his credit, he already had.

He knows where it is, boss. He’s just stalling so his two friends…

Before Konya could even finish the thought, Corsi heard the crack of a machete against the skulls of Daviara’s “friends.” She hadn’t even seen them get up.

“Well, there goes that idea,” she said. “Now, Daviara, Yevarin, shall we talk business?”

CHAPTER
9

“He sold it to someone named Lupon,” Konya said once they’d gotten back to Vale’s hidey-hole, only minutes after Corsi’s interrogation of Daviara had garnered no results. “He thinks Lupon is strong enough to kick both of our asses.”

Vale got a hearty laugh out of that. “Yeah, right. Lupon couldn’t find his nose if it weren’t attached to his face.”

“You know him?” Corsi asked.

Vale nodded, leaning forward on her crutches. “He fancies himself an antiquities dealer. His base of operations is just on the other side of the Rakaran River. That’s about three kilometers from here.”

Corsi stared at her old friend, concern covering her voice. “Can you make that kind of hike?”

Christine seemed to take a mental inventory. “I think so. I’m not going to be running down any third-rate criminals, am I?”

Konya laughed. “From the sound of it, you did okay back there.”

Vale smiled. “Yeah, and it was nice to crack some heads instead of rocks for a change. Still…” She gave the contraption that was keeping her upright a blatant you’re kidding me, right? look.

“That’s the Christine I know,” Corsi said. “Come on, let’s go kick this guy’s ass.”

The hike was the longest three kilometers of Corsi’s memory, completely uphill. Konya—pick-a-deity love him—had remembered to grab canteens from Sarjenka’s supply kit. So, they were all starved when they reached Lupon’s little hideaway in the trees, but they definitely weren’t dehydrated.

And when Corsi considered the warm tropical air that surrounded them, she was doubly grateful for Konya’s foresight.

“You’re welcome, boss,” the Betazoid said.

“Stop that,” Corsi shot back.

“Stop projecting your thoughts, then. Don’t think this is any easier for me, either.”

Okay, so maybe the idea of a Betazoid on every security team wasn’t as good as she’d initially thought. Definitely need to add in some training for the non-telepaths on how to protect themselves from their own teammate.

Before they left the cover of the glade, Corsi made a note to work with Konya to see what it took to protect the crew’s privacy, just in case. While there was every probability that his newfound ability would go away as soon as they were out of the field, she couldn’t help but want to be prepared, just in case it didn’t.

CHAPTER
10

Lupon was everything Corsi had expected, and then some. The den of iniquity that contained his eminence was one full of old furniture, old rugs, and even older henchmen. Every single thing in the room gave it a unique, rather varied odor. Old crap and old alcohol. All we need is a match and this place is done.

The overfed, under-cleaned, and decidedly reptilian creature looked more like something out of a bad holodrama than the real world. He reclined luxuriantly on a long chaise, his ample belly jiggling when he laughed. “I told you, little girl,” he said, his voice an officious slither that just curled up in the back of Corsi’s brain and made her want to throw up, “I don’t know anything about any spheres.”

Vale, to her credit, took her right crutch and poked the fat lizard in the gut. “See, I’ve got people saying you do.”

Konya stared at Lupon.

“What?” Lupon asked. “You got yourself a deaf mute there? Wasn’t aware that Starfleet was that much of a champion of equal opportunity cannon fodder.”

He knows where it is, boss. Something about the gesula bowl.

Corsi, for about the tenth time that day, thanked the field for giving Konya his additional abilities. “No, I’ve got better. Enough toying around.” She brought the machete up to Lupon’s neck—or, what she thought was his neck—and said, “I think you know where the sphere is, Lupon. And I think you’re going to tell me.”

Lupon laughed, and it sounded like a bottle fizzing over. “Is that so, little girl?”

“What’s in the gesula bowl?” Corsi asked.

Lupon reached a grimy hand into it, pulling out something that was almost elliptical, but covered in moss. “My dinner, little one.”

“Do you always eat stones?”

If Lupon had had an eyebrow, Corsi was convinced he’d have raised it. “Of course, little one. Minerals are good for my skin. Probably would be good for yours too, if your puny human stomach could handle it.”

Corsi’s jaw hardened. She’d taken condescension before, and from more qualified sources than this Gorn wannabe. Although she really didn’t want to know how he knew about his favorite snack and the human digestive system. The two Tellarite bodyguards that stood on either side of the dais had faces so pockmarked that it looked as though they both had taken good old-fashioned buckshot rounds to the face. Either that, or puberty had been particularly cruel to their complexions. They were large, burly men, though, easily one hundred kilos each if not more, with projectile weapons as their sidearms that she was sure were probably supposed to look frightening. Corsi wasn’t altogether fond of the idea of having to dodge bullets from these two, but she was fairly sure she could outrun them with ease if necessary. It was getting the sphere from Lupon that was going to be the hard part.

Don’t worry, boss. He’s full of it.

“Lupon,” Vale said, hobbling toward the large dais where the lizard was reclined. “You know as well as I do that the Federation doesn’t want a bunch of archaeologists here any more than you do.” She put on a sickeningly sweet smile and said, “If you just help us out here, we can help you and get out of your way. You won’t have to worry about the Federation being in your backyard. How about that?”

Corsi walked over beside where Vale stood. “Got a second?” she asked.

“Sure.” Vale gestured toward a relatively empty corner with a jerk of her head. “Over there.”

Konya, need you here too.

You’ve got it. What’s up?

When they were all ensconced in the relative quiet of the corner of what could charitably be called Lupon’s “office”—this corner only held a dead, leafless plant in a busted vase that appeared to be only held together by what remained of the plant’s root system—Corsi whispered, “What else aren’t you telling me, Christine?”

“What?”

“You know damn good and well what I mean. What you just told Lupon. What else don’t we know?”

Vale shook her head. “Nothing. It’s not exactly a secret he wants the Federation out of his backyard. The only reason the planet’s governor allowed the dig was because the Federation Council itself backed Gabriel’s persistent requests. The smaller village rulers like Lupon hated the idea, but they put up with it.”

“So how do we get the sphere back?”

Christine raised an auburn eyebrow. “That, my friend, is your job.”

Corsi looked to Konya. You think it’s in his food dish?

He definitely thought about it.

Good, that’s where we go next.

“Lupon!” Corsi said, turning back toward the slimy lizard and plastering on her most winning smile. “How’s lunch these days?”

The reptile gave that fizzy laugh once again. “I didn’t think stones were to your taste, human?”

Corsi eyed the gesula bowl. “I don’t know. My people have some strange customs. Stones wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in the world. Try eating something that’s poisonous sometime.”

Lupon reached into the bowl, picking up a stone the size of Corsi’s fist. He opened his large jaws and tossed it into his mouth with a flip. His jaws came down on it with a crunch the likes of which Corsi had never heard in her life. The beast gestured back toward the bowl and said, “Help yourself, human.”

Corsi leaned forward slowly, her—and, she felt, Konya’s—eyes on Lupon for any movement. With her machete at an easy grasp in her right hand, she looked into the gesula bowl.

And that was when she found it, caked with mud and moss and other things she didn’t really want to consider, but it was a sphere, and it was exactly the right size. She reached her left hand into the bowl, ignoring the squelching sound of the cold muck that accompanied her motion, and grabbed the sphere. When she held it in her hand, she used what fingers weren’t holding the thing to try to clean it off a bit. Gotta make sure this is the right thing.

When she felt the glyphs buried deep in the ick, she knew they were set. Now, they just had to get out of there.

“If that’s the one you want,” Lupon said, “I can take care of it for you. Too big for your tiny human jaws.” He reached forward, grabbing the sphere from Corsi’s hand before she could do anything. With a toss, he opened his jaws and swallowed the sphere in one gulp.

Corsi knew the No. Just no. look on her face must have matched the expressions on Konya’s and Vale’s faces. Instinct took over at that point. They needed the sphere too much to let Lupon take it away. Corsi grabbed the machete, reached forward, and held the point to Lupon’s throat. “That was what we came for, Lupon.”

“Was it now?” he said, not sounding the least bit surprised. “I’m sure you’ll get it back in a day or two.”

Corsi’s stomach turned a bit at the notion of waiting on the sphere to pass through the lizard’s digestive system. If he lived off of the minerals, there was no way there would be enough of the sphere left for them when it finally emerged.

Boss, don’t do it.

“Corsi,” Vale said, an obvious warning in her voice.

Konya, get Vale out of here. We may need to move fast.

She was comforted by the sound of a weak groan from Vale, followed closely by Konya’s feet walking across the battered hardwood floor until he reached Christine. “Hey, boss,” Konya said. “I’ll get her back to the shuttles. She looks like she’s losing it.”

“Go ahead,” she said, “I’ll finish up with our friend Lupon here and meet you.”

Finish up? Or finish him?

Konya’s thoughts weren’t too far removed from hers. Whatever needs to be done to get that damned sphere, that’s what.

Oh, she didn’t want to do it at all. But what other choice did they have? How many of the humans in Sarjenka’s care had two days left to them? Sure, they could have tried forging a third sphere, but with what? They didn’t have any way to determine what minerals were. Oh, Corsi, you’ve been around Fabe far, far too long. You’re starting to come up with his kind of half-assed schemes. They needed that third sphere, preferably before Lupon’s digestive tract started working.

Lupon, for his part, didn’t seem too fazed by the presence of a machete point at his throat. “And just what do you think you’re going to do with that, little one?”

“Get our property back,” she said.

“And you’ll kill me to do it?”

Corsi’s expression hardened. She had never really thought herself a killer, but when the situation necessitated it, she wasn’t above it. The Dominion War had been her teacher, and by all accounts, she’d been an excellent student.

Memories of Dar kept coming back to her, as she considered what she was about to do. Necessity had dictated it then, and now was no different. She kept reminding herself that what she was doing would save all of their lives, mentally repeating it over and over as she slit Lupon’s throat from jaw to sternum, ichor spraying all over her, the shocked bodyguards, and the rest of the room, until she saw the sphere. Grabbing it from the muck and blood and digestive acids, she quickly wrapped it in a tablecloth and ran like a bat out of hell half a step in front of the quickly recovering guards. Konya and Vale were already through the front door, Vale hobbling as fast as she could on the crutches, and Konya behind her to cover.

Corsi bolted through the front door, shouting, “Run!” at the top of her lungs.

They needed to get out of there as fast as possible, because Corsi hated the odds of their few machetes against the projectile weapons of Lupon’s men.

Corsi had been right about being able to outrun the two goons, but the more gunfire she heard from behind them, the more certain she was that one of the three of them would be hit.

Although, those weapons didn’t look as though they held much in the way of ammo.

No sooner did the thought cross her mind than the sound of the firearms clicking on empty barrels made it to her ears. Corsi, Vale, and Konya kept running, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the goons before they could reload.

CHAPTER
11

“Take her in easy, Wong,” Gold said, hoping his nerves didn’t make it into his voice. Ever since Stevens had presented this crazy notion to him, he had been having flashbacks of the last time he’d taken the da Vinci into an atmosphere. His biosynthetic left hand tightened reflexively at the thought. No, we’re not leaving any more body parts on the bridge this time.

“Aye, sir,” Songmin Wong replied from the conn station. “Entering atmosphere.”

Flames lapped up against the viewscreen, a small gap of air somehow standing between the ship’s hull and the white-hot flame as they sank rapidly through Icaria Prime’s atmosphere. His stomach turned as memories replayed in his mind. In two quick steps, he was away from the center of the bridge, pacing an area far closer to his ready room than his command chair. He wouldn’t be there again.

He wouldn’t put his people through that again.

But aren’t you doing that now, David? He could hear Rachel’s voice in his head just as clearly as if she were standing beside him. In an effort to distract himself, Gold glanced over at P8 Blue, who was monitoring the ship’s structural integrity with her usual diligence. “How are the upgrades holding, Blue?”

P8 Blue turned her upper body toward him. “So far, so good, sir. The new hull plating is rated for three thousand degrees Kelvin. The hull temperature readings we’re getting aren’t even half that. Even if the shields fail, the hull will hold.”

The ship gave a little shake as it proceeded through the atmosphere. “Wong, what was that?”

“Thermal, sir. Nothing to worry about.”

Gold took a deep breath. Thermals he could understand. Thermals weren’t usually trying to crush his ship into a tiny ball with him still inside. “Stevens, this is your handiwork, how far from the surface should we go?”

Stevens stepped from his chair to stand behind Songmin Wong at conn. “Take her down slowly. No more than one kilometer from the surface. If we can skim the top of this field, and push enough power into the comm channels, I think we can punch through.”

Wong raised an expression that questioned Stevens’s sanity, to which Gold simply replied, “Do whatever he says, Wong. This is his ball game now.”

“Aye, sir. Bringing us down to two kilometers from the surface.”

Gold raised a gray eyebrow. Two kilometers wasn’t quite as low as Stevens had wanted, but it wasn’t a bad place to start. They sailed down over the trees, sweeping by villages and small towns, until finally they reached the coordinates Gomez had initially recorded for the field. “Altitude achieved, sir. Taking up stationary position two kilometers above recorded coordinates.”

“How are our shields holding?” Gold asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“Shields are holding at one-hundred twenty percent of normal, sir,” Shabalala said.

Damn, I knew Conlon was good, but that’s impressive. “Okay, let’s try the comms. Give me an open channel.”

“You have it, sir.”

Gold stood, beginning to slowly pace the deck as he spoke. “Da Vinci to Gomez, do you read?”

Nothing.

“Da Vinci to away team, do you read?

Silence was the only response.

“Can anyone on the surface hear me?”

The silence was deafening this time.

“All right, Stevens, you’re up.”

Stevens ran a hand through his dark hair. The kid’s got a bad case of nerves. Hell, I would too, if Rachel were down there. Gold chose that moment not to remind him that the safety of not only the away team was at risk here. If they dipped one meter too close, well, Gold didn’t want to think about that, either.

“Take us down another half-kilometer,” Stevens said. “No need to go any farther than we have to. And boost the gain on the comm system. We need to put out the strongest signal we can.”

Nancy Conlon’s voice appeared out of nowhere. “Don’t worry. We’ve got the thing turned up to eleven. If they can’t hear us, it’s not our fault.”

“Can we push it to twelve?” Stevens asked, a pained note to his voice.

“Not unless you’re willing to trade off some shield strength. Every spare drop of power I have is going to the shields and the comms.”

“What if we took it from somewhere else?” Gold asked.

“I’m sorry, sir. But I’ve already run a simulation on that scenario. It won’t give us enough power to make any of this work out. There’s a direct correlation between what communications needs to raise the output, and what tactical needs to keep us shielded from the field. I’ve already got a small team trying to figure out where else we can draw power from without taking out life support, sir.”

Gold raised an eyebrow as an idea struck him. “Conlon,” he began. “What if we reduced the draw on life support? Move the crew to the emergency backup areas and shut off life support everywhere else?”

To her credit, Conlon didn’t dismiss the thought immediately. “I didn’t want to go there, but that might do it.”

He stepped over to the comm station, turning the communication to shipwide. “This is Captain Gold. Folks, some of our people are down on this planet, and we can’t reach them. We don’t know whether or not it’s an emergency. But we need all of your help to find out. To do that, we need everyone to fall back to their emergency protected zones. We need to reduce the power drain from life support as soon as possible. I want to stress, the ship is not, I repeat not in danger. We just need every drop of power we can get out of the warp core. You have fifteen minutes to reach your designated emergency protected zone. Zone managers, please notify the bridge as soon as your people are present and accounted for. Gold out.”

The minutes seemed like hours. Stevens remained at that station, though, trying what looked like every trick in his book to reach the away team. Gold got a quiet sense of pride out of the fact that it looked as though he was even trying to write some new pages in that book. Wong kept slowly lowering the ship, and Stevens kept calling.

When the fifteen minutes was up, and all of the zone managers had reported their personnel present and accounted for, Gold finally gave the order. “Conlon, we have emergency protocols in place. Bulkheads are sealed. Take life support from the empty zones if you need it.”

“Aye, sir.”

When the ship reached Stevens’s magic number of one kilometer from the surface, Conlon was able to boost the output on the comms to an astounding one-hundred fifty percent. Damn, the girl is good. I’ll give her credit for that.

“Now if the communications pathways will just hold that much power going through them long enough,” Stevens said, his voice trailing off.

Gold definitely wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

“Shabalala, how are the shields holding?”

“Still at one-hundred twenty percent, sir.”

Gold turned back toward Stevens. “Okay, let’s see where this field boundary is. Shabalala, if those shields drop below one hundred percent, I want to be the first to know. Understood?”

The tactical officer nodded, and that was all Gold needed to see to know that he would not only sing out if the shields dropped below full power, but he’d be watching to see if they even began to drain.

“All right, Wong, take us down. Ten meter increments until the shields start showing the edge of the field.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” he said.

Gold didn’t like the tone in the conn officer’s voice. “There a problem, Wong?”

“Not at all, sir,” Wong said quickly. “Ten meter increments, aye.”

Putting an encouraging hand on Wong’s shoulder, Gold said, “I’ve piloted a few starships in my time too, son. I know this thing has the aerodynamics of a brick, and it wasn’t meant for traveling such short distances. But this is what we do here: what everyone says can’t be done.”

Nodding, unwilling to take his eye off his console, Wong sounded a bit more confident this time when he said, “Aye, sir.”

“And Stevens?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“You keep calling. We’ll reach them.”

Sarjenka was checking on Captain Picard when she heard a sonic boom. “That’s got to be the da Vinci,” she whispered. “We’re working on getting you out of here, Captain,” she said, wiping the cool cloth across his forehead for what felt like the eight hundredth time.

“I will check,” Data dutifully said. Rising to his feet, the android stepped outside the shuttle. Within seconds, he said, “Yes, it is the da Vinci. They appear to have found the shuttles.”

Sarjenka’s heart began pounding. They were finally going to get out of here. Captain Gold and Fabian and Pattie Blue and Nancy and the others would find a way to get them through the field. When all else failed, she could rely on Starfleet.

Her heart briefly stopped as the question began forming in her mind.

Could she rely on Starfleet? Really? Was it possible to rely on an organization that had already violated her mind to keep their secret?

As she heard the ship’s massive engines move into a steady drone, she realized that they were hovering. Sarjenka stepped out of the shuttle. She looked up and saw the enormous ship, big enough to take up a good portion of the sky in the clearing’s open patch. “Have they signaled?”

Data shook his head. “No. They appear to be descending in ten-meter increments. I was not aware that the da Vinci had atmospheric capability.”

“Neither was I,” Sarjenka matter-of-factly replied. “We’ve got the only two shuttles assigned to the ship down here. They must be trying to find a way to get to us through the field. Wong’s going to need an anti-anxiety regimen for that kind of precision flying. I’ll have to make sure to keep some on hand for him.”

A groan sounded from within the Shirley.

“I will remain here,” Data said. Sarjenka wasn’t sure if he was trying, but somehow, his voice was comforting at that moment. “If they are able to make contact, I will inform you.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll get the captain ready for transport and then help Dantas with the others. If they can get us out of here, they probably won’t have much of a window to work with. We’ll need to be ready to go.”

“If you require assistance—”

“No, Data,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly for her own liking. A part of her would have loved the help, but a part of her wanted Data somewhere, anywhere, else. If she was ever going to learn to cope with what Picard had ordered done to her, then she had to deal with him alone. “Thank you. I’m sorry, but if I require your assistance, I’ll ask. Okay?”

The android simply nodded, and went back to monitoring the da Vinci’s descent.

Sarjenka tried to bury her emotions as she walked back into the shuttle and into Picard’s presence.

Domenica Corsi came sprinting through the woods with Konya right behind. Vale was draped over Konya’s shoulders, with the orthosis supporting her legs resting along his right side. Corsi could tell the man was in pain. He was projecting it to anyone within thoughtreach.

She could also hear the two goons behind them, one stumbling as though he’d never walked in the forest before, the other shooting at anything that moved.

With luck, they’ll waste their ammo long before they get to us.

I’ll take Vale to the Shirley. You get where it’s safe. Maybe Data…

Konya didn’t get the chance to finish that thought, as Vale screamed in his left ear. The Betazoid kept running, even as Corsi knew he felt the warmth of Vale’s blood on his arm. Vale’s been hit.

“Wait a minute. Christine? You felt that?” Corsi asked.

“Yes, and it hurt like hell, thank you!” That was when it seemed to register in Vale’s head. “Rennan, put me down!”

The Betazoid did, and was surprised when she stood on her own without the crutches. She took off, walking slowly at first, then building up to the quickest run the orthosis would allow. Konya, to his credit, didn’t need to be told to keep pace with her.

Until they had the ability to use their phasers again, the machetes were all the armament they had.

Then all three paused at the sound of the da Vinci’s engines over their heads. The warmth of the massive power flowed through the field and added to Corsi’s already sweating forehead. They can’t land. What the hell are they doing? Wiping a hand across her face, she said, “Konya, Christine, keep going. Get to the shuttles.”

Finally, after running what had seemed like forever, they reached the relative safety of the two crafts. Konya immediately took Christine to the Shirley, while Corsi simply yelled for Data.

When the android saw Corsi running toward him at top speed, he immediately asked, “What is wrong, Commander?”

“Two goons. On our six. Take care of them. I’ve got to get this to the temple.”

“Understood, Commander.”

She didn’t have time to concern herself with whatever the hell the da Vinci was attempting, though. Knowing Fabian, he was probably trying to use the ship’s shields to find the upper border of this godforsaken field. It was just the kind of harebrained scheme he would think up. If she survived this, she made a mental note to thank him for the ingenuity.

Corsi kept running for all she was worth, following the slashed undergrowth and ignoring the pain that was assaulting every nerve ending in her body, until she reached a mound with a cave that looked like it extended into oblivion. “Commander Gomez?” she called. The sound echoed for a moment, until finally it stopped.

“Domenica?” Gomez’s disembodied voice called back. “Have you got it?”

She was already down the ramp at a full sprint before the echo of Gomez’s first question met her ears. Corsi followed the sound, until finally she found Gomez and her small party at the base of the ramp. Collins had a look about him that she was certain she didn’t like. “What’s going on?” Corsi asked, quickly coming to a full stop.

Carol stepped in between Corsi and the others. “It’s not what it looks like.” Then Carol turned back to the others, returned her attentions to Corsi, and said, “Screw that. Maybe it is what it looks like.”

“We can figure that out later.” Holding the tablecloth-wrapped sphere forward, she said. “I’ve got the third sphere.”

Inana’s eyes brightened. “We can shut this thing off?”

Collins reached for Corsi’s bundle. “Let’s get going.”

Within a few minutes, all three spheres were back in their homes in the obelisk.

Corsi screamed, falling to the dirt floor as a pulsating wave of pain began in the center of her skull and quickly worked its way out.

But she wasn’t the only one. Before she lost consciousness, she heard at least three other bodies fall to the floor elsewhere in the cavern.

Sarjenka wiped the cool cloth over Picard’s forehead once again, but this time, something was different. The cold sweating was back, but when she opened his eyes to check his pupils, those same pupils had dilated beyond the point where she had even thought possible. His eyes were black as night. He edged backward on the bed from her touch, almost as though it hurt him. Then Picard let out a scream the likes of which she had never heard before. He whispered one word before dropping back into unconsciousness. “Beverly.”

Before she could even begin to theorize on what was happening, it hit her. Something, somehow, had a death grip on her skull. When she reached a hand up to try and brush it away, there was nothing there. It felt as though fingers were trying to grab onto her brain, and then pull it out through her ears. If this was the pain that the captain felt, she could understand the screaming. It was all she could do not to do it herself. Never show weakness before the patient. It undermines their confidence in your abilities.

She reached back into one of the medical kits, retrieving two more hyposprays of melorazine. She gave Picard the largest dose she felt comfortable venturing, and herself about half that. “Data?” she called, dismayed to hear her voice as weak as she sounded.

Sarjenka heard punches being thrown outside, those fists falling on something far more solid than their owners. The fighting had made it to their camp.

She heard one fist fall on something hard, then a grunt of pain. “I am sorry,” Data’s voice said. “But I cannot allow you to enter this area.”

Another fist impacted another solid object, only this time, Sarjenka could have sworn she heard bones breaking. Think, Sarj. Ignore the pain and think. What can you use to splint hands?

All she could do as she lost the battle with consciousness was curse the fact that the planet wasn’t going to allow her to use something as simple as a bone knitter.

CHAPTER
11

“Da Vinci to away team, please respond.”

Stevens had run his fingers through his hair so many times, he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d looked like before the endurance test began.

“Da Vinci to away team, please respond.”

“They’ll be okay, Fabe.”

Fabian looked up and found Vance Hawkins staring at him from the next console. “Carol knows this group. They’re good people. They’ll take care of each other,” Hawkins said. “Just because they can’t call home doesn’t mean we should be worried. We knew that going in.”

“Yeah, but it’s not going to stop me from worrying.”

“Oh, buddy,” Hawkins said, his voice full of mock sympathy. “You’ve got it bad.”

“Yeah, like you can talk,” Stevens said, raising an eyebrow.

Hawkins’s eyes fell to the floor between them. Shaking his head he matter-of-factly said, “Yeah, face it. We’re whipped.”

At that, Fabian Stevens laughed for the first time since the away team had left. “That’s just mean.”

“But true,” Hawkins said.

“—to da Vinci. Repeat, away team to da Vinci, you there, boss?”

Hawkins and Stevens exchanged a look. “Was that Vinx?” Hawkins asked, with a what the hell is going on down there? tone to his voice. “Seriously. Was that Vinx?”

Stevens opened the comm. “Da Vinci here. Makk? Is that you?”

“Sure is, Fabe. Good to hear ya.”

“And you. Hawk, get the captain, will you?”

With a nod, Vance was gone.

“Makk, what’s your situation?”

“We’ve got injured, boss. The doc sent me out to find the border of the field. I guess I found it, huh?”

Stevens gave a nervous, but grateful laugh. “Yeah, Makk, you sure did.”

That was when a thought crossed Fabian’s mind. He called up his forecast for the beryllium-copper borders, overlaying the location of Makk’s comm signal, and sure enough, Makk was standing just outside the one that Stevens had theorized would go active next. It’s good to be right sometimes. It was expanding roughly every two to two-and-a-half hours.

“Makk, we don’t have much time. You need to get moving. The next expansion should end about a kilometer due west from where you are right now. How long do you think it’ll take to get everyone to that point?”

“Don’t know, boss. We’ve got the android and all, but there’s a lot of hurt folks back there. The doc’s had her hands full.”

“Just get everyone to that point as soon as you possibly can. I’ll meet you there. Okay?”

“Gotcha boss.”

“Good, da Vinci out.”

When Stevens and Hawkins finally beamed down to an area Stevens had calculated was at least one field expansion out, an empty pasture greeted them. “Crap. Where’s Vinx?”

“Good question,” Hawkins replied.

The grass grew wild, and came up to Stevens’s knees. He pulled out his tricorder, just to check his theory. They should have been just outside the next border.

Reality didn’t seem to be feeling too charitable toward Fabian Stevens that day. The tricorder’s display flickered to life for a moment, only to retreat to powerless darkness within a second. “What the—?”

Hawkins waded through the grass toward him. “Border expanded?”

Stevens shook his head. “It looked for a minute there like it was actually down. I could see the shuttles, then it just died.” Slapping his combadge so hard it hurt his chest, he said, “Stevens to da Vinci. Did you just pick up a fluctuation in the field?”

He could hear the frustration in Songmin Wong’s voice. “Yes. And I’d give half my stash of latinum if it would happen again.”

Stevens cringed. He’d have to pay Wong back big time for that kind of precision flying. “Any luck getting through to the away team?”

This time, it was Shabalala’s voice that responded. “Nope. You and Hawkins are the only comm signals we’re picking up.”

“No sign of Vinx?”

“No, sir.”

“Crap.” He checked his map once more. The topography was right, the surface scan had indicated a grassy pasture would be here. He faced away from where he was sure the border was, setting the tricorder to locate the beryllium-copper alloy.

Two strides in front of him, there was a hole in the overgrowth. When he took a closer look, Stevens found a small statue shaped almost like an old-fashioned lightning rod, only more conical instead of a straight rod. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Where the hell was Vinx? He paused for a moment, trying to calm down. There was no sense to what was going on, and that made him even more irritated. Damn, I’ve been picking up too much from Dom. Okay, Stevens, you’ve got yourself a dilemma. You have an idea of where the shuttles are. And you have a map with where you think the field is going to expand to next. Which way do you go?

As if on cue, Makk Vinx chose that moment to stumble across Stevens and Hawkins. “Hey, boss. Looks like ya found the edge of that field, there. Watch out, there are some piles of I don’t wanna know what around here. Stink like a skunk in heat if you step in ’em.”

Stevens smiled and quietly thanked the universe for finally deigning to cooperate.

For once.

And it was about damned time.

No sooner did he have Vinx heading toward where he suspected the next field border would fall than he and Hawkins turned back toward the general direction of the shuttles.

At least, Stevens thought it was the general direction of the shuttles. The screen had barely done more than flicker. But those two signals. They had to be duranium.

They had to be.

CHAPTER
12

Sarjenka opened her eyes to the bridge of the Enterprise—at least, she thought it was the Enterprise, only this was like no starship she had ever seen before. Shadows abounded through what little she could see of her surroundings. None of the muted pinks and grays of the Enterprise-D were there, none of the friendliness or the welcoming feeling she could finally recall from her brief moments with Data.

This, this was different. She called out for Data, but he was nowhere to be found. The rank, acrid smell of fresh blood threatened to turn her stomach. Somewhere in the darkness, the hiss of a vent breaking free sounded. Then she heard the sound of water dripping into a pool. Had the hydraulics ruptured? Were there even hydraulics in a Starfleet ship?

She reached out into the near-darkness, trying to find something—anything—to grab onto, something that could anchor her to reality.

If this was still reality.

Brain damage. The neurons must have been damaged by the field’s radiation.

Sarjenka tried to force herself to wake up. She yelled, smacked herself in the face, everything she could think of, but nothing worked.

If this isn’t sleep, it’s a hallucination. But if I recognize it’s a hallucination, how can it still exist?

Sarjenka rose to her feet, slowly walking into the darkness, toward the smell of blood and death. Her feet were bare, and she could feel shards of something thin and honed to a razor’s edge in the carpeted floor. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Her steps became more tentative as she moved, trying to find a spot that didn’t try to shred the soles of her feet. Another smell surfaced, that of something that was not of nature burning. She’d smelled isolinear chips burning once before, when a friend in the Academy had completely botched an isolinear circuitry experiment, but this was…bigger somehow. Instead of one or two chips frying, it almost smelled as though an entire engine room was on fire.

Where am I?

Sparks arced through the air above her head, causing her to duck. That was when she caught sight of a faint glow in the distance. It looked almost like light shining under a doorway, but that wasn’t possible. Starfleet didn’t use doors that would have gaps like that, and her own people hadn’t had them since the invention of the entrafield so many years before her own birth.

She walked toward the light, only to find that for every step she took forward, the light grew more distant.

“Sarjenka?”

The voice was cold, hard, but still somehow familiar. “Yes? Who are you?”

“Sarjenka?”

She stood for a moment, finding a place in the floor that somehow didn’t have any of the sharp edges to tear into her flesh. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the sound, allowing her ears to isolate the location.

“Sarjenka?”

When she opened her eyes, she was standing on the bridge of a crippled starship, one she was somehow sure was still the Enterprise. A gaping hole had been ripped into where the viewscreen should have been. At least, where she thought the viewscreen should have been. She couldn’t recall ever being on a ship with such a utilitarian bridge configuration before. This is a ship of war.

A flicker dragged her attention back to the major wound in the ship’s hull. The structural integrity field was holding. But for how long?

On the other side of the field, she saw bodies floating in the vacuum of space. After breathing a prayer to Traiaka to keep their souls safe, she took a step toward the field and looked more closely at the lost, their faces etching into her memory like circuits on an isolinear chip.

But one stood out from the others. As it floated, she caught sight of golden skin, and eyes that looked back at her with life, not the death that surrounded him.

“Data?”

An explosion of light forced Sarjenka to put an arm over her eyes. When it finally ebbed, she saw the interior of the Kwolek. Data knelt beside her, his fingers at the interior of her elbow checking her pulse. When she realized it was him, the image of his body floating in the debris field flashed in her mind. She backed away, tugging her arm from his grasp.

“Sarjenka? Are you all right?”

The light leaking into the shuttle from outside still hurt her eyes, but it was beginning to fade as her pupils adjusted. This must be what happened to Picard. But, what did he see?

She clambered to her feet, looking around for the captain. “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Captain Picard,” she said. “What did you do with him?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what did you do to me?”

Data at least had the decency to look surprised by the accusation. “Sarjenka, I did nothing. The da Vinci has found a way to communicate through the field. When I came in to inform you, you were unconscious.”

Sarjenka tapped her combadge. “Sarjenka to da Vinci, come in please.”

The connection held more static than her mother’s hair on the driest day, but it was there. “Da Vinci here, Doctor. Report.”

She smiled for the first time in too long. Captain Gold’s voice was possibly the most welcome sound she had heard since coming down to this planet. “Captain, we have multiple casualties here. Can you transport us?”

“We’re working on it…seen Stevens?”

“Stevens is here? How?”

“He and…transported to the…field.”

Sarjenka softly cursed. “Data, do you know of a way to strengthen the signal on our end?”

Before Data could respond, Stevens’s voice sounded from the hatchway. “Won’t work. We’ve got the output at one-hundred fifty percent of maximum on the comms just to get through here.” Patting his own combadge, he said, “We’ve found them, da Vinci. We’re working on getting them clear of the field now.”

Garbled static answered his report.

“We need to find Captain Picard first,” Sarjenka said.

Stevens gave her a look that questioned her grip on reality. Pointing toward the cot where Picard had been ever since they’d brought him to the shuttle, he said, “The captain’s right there, Doc.”

Sarjenka stared in complete disbelief at the sleeping captain. “How?”

“You were incapacitated by the radiation field,” Data said. “You were hallucinating before you woke. Perhaps you thought you did not see the captain?”

She stared at Data, still unable to shake the image of him in the void of space from her mind. “Maybe I didn’t,” she said. “It’s been a rough time.”

Stevens placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get you out of here.”

CHAPTER
13

Once the pain had finally decided to stop trying to pry her brain apart, Carol realized that something was wrong. She stumbled over to the obelisk, only to find Gabriel collapsed on the floor beside it. “Gabe?” Carol reached down and shook him by the shoulder. “Gabriel? Wake up!”

He didn’t move.

Carol placed a hand against the obelisk, using it to steady herself as she stood. With her head throbbing against the inside of her skull, she tried to read the glyphs on the inside of the unit, looking at the spheres, and where they sat. “These are in the wrong place,” she said, pulling the top sphere out and swapping it with the bottom sphere.

A mechanical whine the likes of which Carol had never heard before seared through the chamber, the walls shaking as though they were going to collapse. “We need to get out of here.”

Carol began shaking everyone she could reach, but nobody responded. The whine grew in intensity, threatening to shatter her eardrums with its piercing shrillness, but she continued trying.

Finally, the whine began to subside, as did the pain in her skull.

Slowly, everyone on the floor began to rouse.

“What the hell happened?” Corsi asked.

That sentiment was echoed by everyone as they came around. Gabriel finally stood, and stared at the spheres in the oblisk. “They were in backward?” he asked.

Carol gently nodded.

“How did I screw that up?”

She put a hand on his arm. “You weren’t exactly yourself, Gabe.”

“Da Vinci to away team, please respond.”

“Oh, that’s the best sound I’ve heard in too long,” Gomez said as she too pulled herself to her feet. Tapping her combadge, she said, “Da Vinci, this is Gomez. Can you get a lock on us?”

“I count seven life signs at your location, Commander,” Susan Haznedl’s voice sounded over the comm line. “Can you confirm?”

“Confirmed. Requesting immediate beamout.”

Carol took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax. As she watched Gabriel and Inana hold each other for dear life, she realized that Gabriel had what he wanted. And in Vance Hawkins, Carol had what she wanted. Their lives had gone in two completely disparate directions. She wasn’t going to be happy sitting in an archaeological dig with nothing else to do all day but catalog artifacts and clean up tiny bits of pottery. That wasn’t who she was.

But it was, apparently, what Inana had become.

As Gomez, Cunningham, Corsi, and Faulwell disappeared in the transporter’s beam, Carol turned to her old friends. “Guys, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Inana asked.

Carol gave a soft chuckle, and said, “For everything I didn’t say. I didn’t exactly come down here with the best thoughts in mind. And for that, I apologize.”

“Times change,” Inana said. “And so do we.”

Carol nodded. She started to reach to hug Inana and Gabriel, but stopped when she felt the transporter begin bringing her home.

When Jean-Luc Picard awoke, Sarjenka quickly stepped to check his readings on the biobed’s scanner. “You’re doing well, Captain. Just rest.”

“Sarjenka?” he asked, sounding quite surprised. “That really was you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It really is. You’re on the da Vinci, and we have you stabilized. The radiation field did some neural damage thanks to your prolonged exposure, but I have begun treatment with a peridaxon base, followed by a neurocortical treatment that has an excellent track record to date. There is a small structural defect in your parietal lobe, however. I assume you are already aware of this, Captain?”

Picard nodded. “I’ve been warned of the possible outcomes, yes.”

“I’m sorry I can’t repair the damage, Captain. In a few years, maybe, but—”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I came to terms with the possibilities long ago.”

Sarjenka pursed her lips. “All right.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me, Lieutenant?”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

Picard put his palm flat on the bed. “I ordered your memory erased.”

“I know,” she said. “And I understand why.”

The sickbay doors slid aside, and Data walked in. He looked at Sarjenka, then at Picard, and took on a rather awkward expression. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No, Data,” Sarjenka said. “As a matter of fact, your timing couldn’t be better. We were just discussing what happened when I was a child.”

“Again?” Data asked. “I thought we discussed this.”

“We did,” Sarjenka said. “But the captain wasn’t exactly lucid at the time.”

Data smiled, and she couldn’t help but wish he wouldn’t. The time wasn’t right for brevity, but she couldn’t expect the android to know that. “I will return to the bridge to monitor communications with the Enterprise, sir.”

“Of course, Data,” Picard replied.

“If that’s what you want, Data,” she said.

When the door closed behind the android, Picard turned back to her. “You understand why? This can’t be an easy thing to learn.”

Sarjenka looked him directly in the eyes. “I’d be lying if I said it was. But I also know that the Prime Directive still applied to my planet when you were there. You couldn’t risk any damage that I might have done if I’d talked about the Enterprise to my people.”

“You do understand,” he said. “I’m truly sorry. I did what I had to do.”

“I know,” she said. “You saved my world. And now that we know, we will always be grateful.”

“You had more than a bit of a hand in that, you know.”

Sarjenka took a deep breath and slowly released it. “I know. And if sacrificing the memory of it was the price that had to be paid, then so be it. All that matters is that my people are safe. We’ve taken our rightful place in the universe. And that should be the goal of a civilization, shouldn’t it?”

“And Starfleet should be glad to have you in their fold,” Picard said. Closing his eyes, he leaned back against the pillow and fell asleep.

Sonya Gomez sat in the observation lounge, staring at the padd. On it was a personal message that she’d transferred to it shortly after Shabalala had sent it to her quarters.

Paul Cunningham invited her to dinner.

Her first instinct was to say no. Her attempts at dating since Kieran’s death weren’t spectacular failures, exactly, but they wouldn’t go down as any great shakes. She and Wayne Omthon seemed doomed never to connect properly, and while both Tobias Shelt and Brilson Lodine were nice enough, they didn’t set her heart on fire, either.

But she and Paul had also been through hell together—and he seemed a nice enough person. He was right there with her in condemning what Collins did, which she certainly saw as a plus.

Of course, that wasn’t the really hard decision. She was just focusing on this one to avoid the other one.

The doors whisked open and Pattie Blue scuttled in, Soloman following. “We’re getting ready to beam down to start work on the weather satellite, Commander,” Pattie said.

Sonya looked up at them. “Good. We’ll be heading off to rendezvous with the Enterprise and also pick up Tev after you beam down. I’m sure he’ll be devastated when he finds out we got through this mission without him.”

Soloman stared at her with a concerned expression. “Is something wrong, Commander?”

If I’m this transparent to the Bynar and the Nasat, I’m definitely wearing my emotions on my sleeve. “Nothing I can’t deal with. I’m trying to decide whether or not to—” She shook her head. “Whether or not to call my sister. It’s just so hard with family, you know?”

As soon as she said it, she realized it was a foolish thing to say. By not rebonding after 111 died, Soloman became an outcast from his people, and Pattie was also something of an oddity among Nasats, more comfortable in space than on her own home-world.

But neither took offense. Pattie made a pleasant tinkling noise and said, “I think that both of us would probably have an easier time of things if people were willing to talk to us instead of just judging us and ignoring us.”

“Agreed,” Soloman said. “When we were on Venus, the Bynars there did not see me, they saw a singleton. They never spoke to me.”

“And the other Nasats just saw me as a Quiet who didn’t know her place.” Pattie’s antennae curled inward. “I believe, Commander, that if you talk to your sister about whatever it is that’s bothering you, it would be better than if you didn’t.”

Sonya nodded. “You’re probably right. Thanks.”

Soloman favored her with a rare smile. “That’s what friends are for, Commander.”

“Good luck down there. I think they’ll appreciate cutting down on the rainfall.” As they turned to leave, Sonya called out, “Oh, and watch out for the bats!”

Domenica Corsi followed Fabian into her quarters. No sooner had the door closed and locked behind her than she leaned back against it. Every muscle in her back ached. Her arms felt as though they were going to fall off, but there was only one image that filled Corsi’s brain. It had been there ever since Sarjenka had brought Picard up to the ship to treat him. Corsi had tried her best to ignore it, to tuck it back into that distant, safe place where the bad memories lived.

“Dom?” Fabian’s voice cut through the haze of memory. “Dom, are you okay?”

She gave him the only answer she could. “I don’t know.”

Corsi felt one tear roll down her cheek. She’d fought against the memory so long on Icaria Prime that she wasn’t sure how to answer him. Would he believe any of what had happened to them down there? She had no clue. If they had a counselor on the ship, she might have turned away and headed for that person instead. Memory after memory began flooding back into her mind, and she didn’t want anything to do with any of it. Not that day. Not that week. Not that month.

The day she had found her grandfather, collapsed on the floor in a barely conscious heap, and a five-year-old Domenica Corsi yelling for help that wouldn’t come in time.

“Domenica,” he’d said, the remnants of his northern Italian accent wrapping around her name, “I love you. Your father’s a stubborn ass, but he loves you. “

I love you too, Nonno. I love you too.

CHAPTER
14

“You sure about this, mija?”

“Yes,” Sonya told her mother’s image on the viewscreen, leaning back in her favorite chair. “I need to talk to Belinda. She’s not answering at home. Where is she?”

Guadalupe Gomez’s eyes shot to her left. “Sonya, Belinda—”

“Where is she, Mamí?”

“She’s in Barcelona at your uncle’s house, mija. Why?”

“I need to talk to her, Mamí. About that day on the boat when we were kids.”

Her mother’s brow furrowed. “She saved your life. What’s left to talk about?”

“Mamí, I just need to talk to her.” Sonya tried her best to keep her patience, but it could be difficult with her mother sometimes. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m keeping a friend waiting. Please, where in Barcelona?”

And that was when Sonya realized she’d made a mistake. “A friend?” her mother asked, a wide smile quickly appearing on her face. “A new man, mija? I always wished you would have married that Starfleet officer of yours.”

Sonya winced, and was somewhat relieved that the mention of Kieran didn’t hurt quite as much as it used to. She was, however, considerably grateful that she hadn’t told her mother of Kieran’s proposal—though, ironically, she had told Belinda, a decision she was now regretting. “Mamí, let it go, please. I will talk to you later.”

Before her mother could get another word in, Sonya cut the connection. She took a deep breath, calming herself down before she rang her uncle’s house. When her sister’s face appeared on the viewscreen, Sonya wasn’t sure whether to smile or cry.

“Ess, are you okay?” Belinda said, her voice filled with what sounded like genuine concern. “What’s wrong?”

Sonya licked her lips, still trying to figure out how to broach the subject. “Bee, do you remember that day on the boat when we were kids?”

Belinda’s brow furrowed, and Sonya couldn’t help but note how much her sister was starting to resemble their mother. “What about it, Ess?”

You can do this, Sonya. You can do it. Just ask the question. That’s all. Just ask the question.

Sonya closed her eyes, bowed her head slightly and said, “Why did you push me in the water? You knew I couldn’t swim.”

Belinda’s eyes widened like a deer’s. “How did you—?”

“I remember it, Bee. I remember you pushing me and then making fun of me.”

Belinda looked away from the screen, and Sonya thought she saw a tear run down her sister’s cheek. “Sonya, I was young. You have no idea what it’s like growing up in your shadow. Mamí always wanted me to be more like you. You were so driven, so determined. I knew there was no way I would ever be seen for anything I did on my own. I knew I’d always be compared to you.”

“You were in my shadow? God, Bee—all my life I’ve been Belinda Gomez’s little sister. I was driven ’cause I had to keep up with my sister the soccer star.”

“To other people, maybe. But to Mamí?” She shook her head.

Sonya lifted a hand toward the viewscreen, already regretting she even contacted her sister. “Bee, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you with this. I—” Sonya swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

“No,” Belinda quickly said. “I need to face up to what I did. I was jealous and mean and I was horrible. I never wanted to hurt you.”

“I know,” Sonya replied. “I’m sorry, Bee. I’m sorry for everything. I never realized.”

“You forgive me?” Belinda asked, the surprise reaching all the way into her eyes. “Really?”

Sonya pursed her lips. “I understand. Forgive? I don’t know. That might take me some time.”

“Okay,” Belinda hesitantly replied. Sonya could see the tears still streaming down her sister’s face. “I suppose that’s a good first step, right?”

Gomez felt tears running down her own face. “Yeah. Bee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you with this out of nowhere. I just—let’s just say I just remembered it and needed to get it out in the open as soon as I could, okay?”

Belinda nodded. “When are you coming home again?”

“I don’t know,” Sonya said. “We have to meet up with the Enterprise and pick up Tev, and then finish things up here, and then we’re supposed to go check on the status of the rebuilding on the Kelvas Repair Facility, and from there, I don’t know yet. Next time I’m home, though, I promise, we’ll go to that little tapas place you love in Ibiza. Sound good?”

“You paying?”

“Of course,” Sonya said. “Unless your new job pays you better?”

“I need to get the job first, Ess. Wish me luck?”

“You know I always do. I love you, Bee.”

That brought the first real smile to her sister’s face that Sonya had seen in the entire conversation. “I love you, Ess. See you when you’re home.”

With that, the conversation ended.

Thank you, Pattie. Thank you, Soloman. This was definitely the right thing to do.

Sonya wiped the tears from her eyes, even going so far as to run a cool cloth over her face. Checking her appearance in the mirror over her sink, she decided that only having slightly bloodshot eyes was the best possible outcome of the last few days’ experiences. Running a brush through her hair, she adjusted her uniform jacket and headed toward the mess hall where Paul Cunningham was waiting for her.

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This is TERRI OSBORNE’s third trip aboard the da Vinci, following Malefictorum (the landmark fiftieth installment of the S.C.E. series) and Progress (which kicked off the six-part What’s Past miniseries). Terri’s short fiction has appeared in the Star Trek anthologies Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change, New Frontier: No Limits, and Voyager: Distant Shores. Forthcoming are That Sleep of Death, the fourth part of the six-eBook Slings and Arrows series, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation; and “Good Queen, Bad Queen, I Queen, You Queen” in the Doctor Who: Short Trips anthology The Quality of Leadership, both due out in the spring of 2008. Terri is also working on several other projects that will take her to Ireland of the past, Mars of the future, and other places both near and far. Find out more on her website at www.terriosborne.com.