The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (12 page)

“Do you?” Halak erased the distance between them until he stood just centimeters away. He didn’t touch her, though he wanted to.
Arava, Arava, please listen to me
. ...
“Do you really?”

Arava swallowed, a loud liquid sound in the sudden silence. Her eyes were bright, but her voice was firm. “I know what I’m doing. Dalal’s concern won’t change a thing. The risks have always been there, they’re not going to go away. And until I finish, no place I run will be far enough. As for risk,” she lifted her chin in the direction of his left arm, “you’re the one who ought to be worried. The way you’re holding yourself, looks to me like they cut you up pretty good.”

“They did all right. We did better.”

“Yeah? You think so? Let me tell you something, Samir. You walked away because you had Lady Luck on your side, nothing more and nothing less. Next time, maybe, you won’t be so lucky. Maybe Lady Luck’ll take a hike.”

“No, she won’t,” said Batra. “Not a chance in hell.”

Halak flashed her a tight, grateful smile before turning back to Arava. “Luck, no luck ... you know what I think? I think I was
meant
to walk away. Even out of uniform, my being in Starfleet has certain advantages. Kill me, and Qadir attracts too much attention. Scaring me off serves just fine. I think this, us meeting and
contact
with Starfleet”—he used his hand to indicate the space between them—“this is what Qadir wants to avoid.”

“You?”
Arava made a derisive sound. “You’re too obvious. He’s worried about the ones he
can’t
see.”

“And how many of those are there?”

Alarm flickered across Arava’s face, and her eyes narrowed: a warning. “Don’t ask stupid questions, Samir.”

“I’m sorry.” Halak spread his hands in a placating gesture then lightly placed them on her shoulders. She was thinner than he remembered; the humps of her bones dug into his palms. “Look, I didn’t come all this way to fight with you.”

“Then what did you come for?” Arava shot back. She twisted away. “I don’t need lectures, Samir. I made my choice. I just need more time, that’s all.”

“Time?”

Arava’s eyes flicked to Batra and back to Halak. She arched her eyebrows. The question was there:
Is it safe?
Halak moved his head fractionally, side to side.

“Right.” Arava made a small sound in the back of her throat. Sighing, she scooped a hand through her golden hair. “Baatin was in deep, you know that. I’ve”—that quick sidelong glance to Batra again—“I’ve taken over where he left off, that’s all. It shouldn’t be much longer.”

This was what Halak had been afraid of. Baatin had been smart, careful. Trusted. And he was still just as dead. “Do you know how much longer?”

Arava chose her words with care. “I’ve done some ... negotiating. Depending upon what the higher-ups say, maybe as soon as next week, the week after. There’s a glitch, though. I’m not the only one who’s ... interested. But I can tell you that something’s up. There are new people in the organization, and there’s talk.”

“Talk?”

“Of men from the Orion Syndicate infiltrating the rank and file, working their way up. The problem is, no one knows exactly who.”

“You think it’s true?”

Arava hesitated then nodded. “There have been intercepts of some shipments. Others disappear before they reach their destination. Qadir thinks there’s a mole, maybe more than one. I’ve already been questioned, twice.”

“How close do you think he is?”

Arava considered. “Let me put it this way: I hear he’s getting a telepath next.”

“Then you’re running out of time.”

“Maybe. I told the ... contact, and she’s working on it.” Arava dragged in a deep breath. “Just a little longer, though. That’s all I need.”

“I can’t believe that you couldn’t leave now. Don’t you have enough to ... ?”

“Not quite yet. Look, I’ve worked long and hard to get where I am, and I’m not going to cash out now. I want to take as large a piece of Qadir with me as I can.”

“Baatin tried that.”

“And failed. Yes, I
know
,” said Arava, bitterly. “You think I don’t think about Baatin every damn day? Probably more than you ever will.”

“No,” said Halak, feeling a crush of guilt. “But this isn’t a contest.” He blew out, frustrated. “All right then. You’ve made up your mind. I’ll leave you alone.”

Arava jerked her head in a curt nod. “That’s what I want. Do you think you can get Dalal ... ?”

“She’s not going to budge a millimeter until you’re off-world.”

“Stubborn old mule.” A tiny smile flitted over Arava’s lips. “Remember the time I brought home that Vulcan
sehlat?
I thought Dalal was going to have a heart attack.”

“Yes, and I remember how set she was on getting rid of it, and how you cried all night until she gave in.” Halak grinned. “Damn thing nearly took my finger off the first time I tried petting it.”

“That’s because you didn’t smell right. It was just being territorial.” Arava’s expression softened. She walked to Halak, reached up, and cupped his face in her hands. “A lot of memories. When I’m out of here, Samir, I promise ...”

“Sure,” said Halak, kissing Arava on the forehead. Then he saw Batra standing off to one side. Her face was pale; her lips were set. Halak was seized by an urge to tell her everything, right there—and discarded the impulse as suicidal. He could never tell her. He could never tell anyone.

But it’s not what you think.
He tried to say this with his eyes.
Ani, it’s not what you’re thinking.
But Batra’s expression was unreadable.

Halak looked back down at Arava. “Sure,” he said again. “Sure.”

He tried to make certain that his smile made it to his eyes. Later, he was pretty sure it didn’t.

Pressed against the slick stones of an apartment building across the street, the woman watched and waited. She’d seen them meet: Arava with her Bolian bodyguard, the commander, and a small woman with long black hair she didn’t recognize but who seemed to be with Halak. From a distance, she couldn’t tell if the woman was a local. She tended to doubt it. Something about the way the woman carried herself suggested a life that hadn’t been conditioned by deprivation, or the everyday struggle for simple survival. Another Starfleet? More than likely: She’d have to run a check when she had a moment, figure out the likely candidates aboard
Enterprise.

She glanced over her shoulder every few moments, though she’d set up proximity alarms (silent, so only she would know, via a microtransceiver tucked in her right ear, if someone got within twenty meters). She was certain she hadn’t been followed, but operatives didn’t stay alive on Farius Prime for long if they weren’t cautious. (Two of her immediate predecessors had met ignominious ends: one with a knife wound through the heart in what was, putatively, a barroom brawl, and the other who’d been reduced to an oily smudge with a submolecular pattern disrupter. The weapon was illegal as sin, and very efficient.) She’d hung well back, letting the tracking device she’d slipped into the clasp of Arava’s cloak do the work for her.

All the while she waited for Halak to reemerge, the question kept bouncing around her brain: What was he doing here? It wasn’t as if coming to Farius Prime was illegal; it wasn’t a proscribed or quarantined world. But Farius Prime was the type of planet most people were happy to see receding in the distance.

And the point was Halak
was
here, and he was making contact with Arava. She fretted. Trouble there. She’d worked hard to make things come off with Arava; they were at a very delicate stage in their negotiations; and now if Halak interfered ... A lot of work, a lot of
time
—a lot of
money
greasing the appropriate palms—it would all be for nothing if Halak screwed up the works.

She considered, briefly, that Halak might be one of her own. There had been rumors floating around about that Ryn mission, the one before he transferred to
Enterprise.
Eight months of down time might be an appropriate period for someone to go to ground. But she couldn’t believe he’d been deployed to the same theater without someone giving her a head’s up, not when things were this delicate.

The Bolian, Matsaro, worried her, too. She knew the man by reputation, of course. A Qatala man for years, but she had her ear to the ground, and there were rumors that the Bolian wanted more than Qadir was willing to give. Except when she’d told Arava, Arava shrugged her off, and that made her uneasy. Arava was too damned sure of herself, not willing to listen to reason, and she put too much store in her being the only way, after Baatin was dead, of anyone getting into the Qatala.

Well, times had changed, and she’d recruited another source. No sense putting all her eggs in Arava’s basket.

She breathed a little easier when, after a half hour, Halak and the small woman emerged. There was a brief exchange, and then Arava went one way; the Bolian, Halak, and the woman went another. Matsaro was probably escorting Halak off-world. She hoped so. She didn’t need the complications.

She checked the time. Good: over three hours before she and Arava were scheduled to make contact. Time enough for her to get some answers.

A half hour later, she was in her tiny apartment, keying in her authorization code to open a secured channel.

Her CO answered right away, prompting her to wonder if the woman ever slept. “Batanides.”

Then, when she recognized her caller, SI Commander Marta Batanides’s piercing blue eyes narrowed with concern. “Burke. You’re on an emergency channel, and a day early. What’s wrong, Lieutenant?”

“Plenty,” said Starfleet Intelligence Special Agent Laura Burke, her tone clipped and urgent. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about Halak?”

What the hell
was
that?

The pain was so intense and yet so fleeting that Ven Kaldarren’s mind barely had time to register that the sensation
was
pain until it had flowed through and over him, the way a wall of water rushes toward shore. Kaldarren’s vision blacked, and the space behind his eyes blazed with a searing, brilliant mind-image: something that was white, swirling, luminous. Something on the edge of becoming.

And then, just as quickly, the mind-image was gone. So was the pain. Kaldarren felt the pain ebb and retreat, emptying out like a wave scouring sand. Even as it left him, Kaldarren scrambled after the mind-image, trying vainly to grab hold of something as insubstantial as thought.

What was
that?
Who
are
you?
Kaldarren opened his mind—carefully (he’d almost had his head blown off, after all)—and waited.
Tell me, please. Don’t be afraid.

Nothing.

He wasn’t altogether surprised. The contact had felt inadvertent and inchoate, like half-formed thoughts leaking around and over the edges of an alien mind, rather than something directed or exploratory. He couldn’t even tell if the mind-image had originated on the ship, or from the surface of the planet about which they’d slipped into orbit thirty minutes ago.

(Where are the boys?)

Mind still aching from the ferocity of the contact, Kaldarren grappled with residual sensations left from the mind-image, trying to put a name to the face, as it were. He couldn’t, though there was something almost familiar about the contact, as if he’d known the mind behind the thought. But the mind-image was fading fast, thinning like a cloud dissipating under a hot sun. In the next moment, it was gone.

A voice rasped across his consciousness, like nails biting into sandpaper. “... you
listening?”

“Yes.” Blinking, Kaldarren looked down on the sullen, angry features that belonged to Su Chen-Mai, and reality leaked back little by little. Kaldarren was aware now of the ship, its bridge, and that he’d come to the bridge of their small vessel a half hour after Jase had left their quarters.

Chen-Mai, hands on hips, glared up at him. Lam Leahru-Mar, the Naxeran, sat in the pilot’s chair, his frills trembling with anxiety. Like their quarters below deck, the bridge was very small, with barely enough room for a pilot and copilot, but that was because Chen-Mai was a smuggler and smugglers didn’t waste precious cargo space.

“Yes, of course, I’m listening,” Kaldarren lied.

“Then what do you think? You picking up anything, or what?” Chen-Mai rapped. He was a square man, with a moon-shaped face and narrow eyes, and he was very bald. He wasn’t tall but muscular and stocky, and when he became agitated—something that happened often enough—his sallow cheeks mottled with red splotches that made him look as if he’d just come in from the cold.

“I don’t think anything,” said Kaldarren. Best not to mention what he’d experienced until he understood what it meant: whether the image was thought-residua imprinted upon the planet from its long-dead inhabitants, or the true touch of an alien mind that was still very much alive.

“I don’t think that I’ll know anything until we get down to the surface. I’ve told you before, Chen-Mai, my abilities are limited by distance.” Kaldarren didn’t volunteer that who or whatever had touched his mind was much more powerful. “I think that our most pressing concern has got to be the Cardassians.”

Leahru-Mar made a nervous click in the back of his throat. “He’s right about that. How do we know your information’s good?”

“It’s good,” said Chen-Mai, his tone curt. “Their patrols come through here every fourteen days. As long as you did your job and kept them from seeing us, then we’ve got that long to find the portal.”

Despite his anxiety, Leahru-Mar’s ebony features turned peevish. “I did my job. We’re alive, aren’t we? No Cardassians shooting at us. Besides, it wasn’t all that hard to hide the ship. We’re small, and this is a binary star system. The primary went supernova, and the neutron star that’s left is accreting matter and gas from the brown star’s heliosphere, and ...”

“English.” Chen-Mai glowered. (He might have been born under the sign of the monkey, but he complained like a goat.) “In English.”

Leahru-Mar opened his mouth then seemed to reconsider whatever it was he’d been about to say. Instead, he punched up a display on the bridge’s viewscreen. A grid display wavered into focus, showing a privileged view of the binary system: The neutron star, embedded within a large nebula, was coded yellow. The slightly larger brown star, with its larger orbit, was orange.

“It’s pretty basic. You have a nebula left over from the time when this binary’s primary star went supernova. All that ionized gas and plasma makes it tough for anyone to see us, though it also works the other way. It makes it hard for
us
to see
them.
The distance between the two stars is point-zero-three AU, so the orbits are fast. About three solar days, give or take. Again, that works to our advantage because the close proximity means that those plasma streamers,” Leahru-Mar brought up twin red whorls spiraling from the orange-colored brown star toward the neutron star, “are highly volatile. Plus, this isn’t your usual neutron star. It’s a magnetar; it’s generating an intense magnetic field because the spin is so fast. So, for want of a better description, the whole place is one big magnetic
and
radioactive sink. Again, this works to our advantage because not only are signals subtended by the magnetic field, but the area’s ion-saturated because the neutron star’s stealing matter from the brown star. In turn, those accretion plasma streamers make for a very strong stellar wind.”

“Meaning that the surface of the planet is one big ion storm,” said Chen-Mai, satisfied with his own acumen. “We’ll be almost invisible.”

Leahru-Mar gave a nod of agreement. “That’s right,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of a parent whose toddler’s taken his first step. “To a cursory scan, that is. Anyone looking hard will see us, but only through a tremendous amount of distortion. They may not even know what they’re seeing.”

“There’s no reason anyone
should
be looking for us,” said Chen-Mai. “The Cardassians abandoned this site years ago and it’s outside their borders. There’s the biosphere they left behind, but it’s automated. Perfect for us. Otherwise, we’d have to spend the entire time on the ship.”

“That begs an important question, though,” said Kaldarren, who was not as cowed as the Naxeran when it came to dealing with Chen-Mai. Kaldarren wondered whether or not Chen-Mai had chosen Mar because the Naxeran was a member of the weaker Leahru clan instead of the dominant G’Doks. Having someone to bully around would, Kaldarren reflected, be consonant with Chen-Mai’s personality style. “Why leave a biosphere active if you aren’t planning to come back?”

“Self-explanatory, isn’t it? Because there’s something valuable down there.”

“Meaning they
could
come back,” said Mar. His nose crinkled, and he nervously groomed his frills with the back of his right hand. “Maybe before we expect them to.”

“Not going to happen. Starting now, we’ve got fourteen days, and if everything goes the way it should,” Chen-Mai’s lips tugged into something approximating a smug grin, “we’ll find it and cash in.”

A big
if,
Kaldarren thought. Actually, a lot of
ifs: if
this was the right binary star system;
if
these were the correct ruins;
if
these ruins were Hebitian;
if
the ancient Hebitians, a civilization the Cardassians claimed as their ancestors, were telepaths; and all those
ifs
begging a larger question.

Kaldarren turned aside, staring down at the long-dead planet spread below their ship. The planet looked like a flawed, red-gray agate marble, though his keen eyes picked out surface details as their ship skimmed over them in its orbit: the stippled ridges of mountains that were a curious rust color; a large irregular trough scooped out of the surface that had been a lake, or an inland sea.

The bigger question: If the Hebitians had lived here, how had they gotten to the planet to begin with?

Kaldarren reviewed what he knew. According to the Cardassians, they claimed descent from an ancient civilization, the Hebitians. Hebitian ruins found on Cardassia Prime testified that the Hebitians had developed a rich, highly evolved culture. The burial tombs the Hebitians had left behind brimmed with tremendous wealth, and it was from the plunder of those tombs that the Cardassians had built up their formidable military and financed their missions of conquest.

But another fact: There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that the Hebitians were a spacefaring race, and nothing in any of the ancient Hebitian texts discovered so far suggested that the Hebitians had left the planet, ever. Until now.

Their orbit had brought them over a dried ocean bed, and Kaldarren could just make out the sheer drop-off of a continental shelf. Down there, once, there had been water, and on that water, ships had scudded from one shore to the next. Some of the ships had sunk, and if he only had time enough, Kaldarren might walk the trenches and submerged mountains, now laid bare to the naked eye, and wander into wrecks no living person had glimpsed for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years.

Kaldarren felt the familiar tingle of excitement the prospect of a new discovery always brought. When Chen-Mai had originally contacted him with writings that the man claimed were ancient Cardassian, Kaldarren had been dismissive. Only after he’d studied the writings himself was he convinced that there might be some truth behind the legends that the Hebitians were telepaths and that they had developed a fabulous technology: a psionic intradimensional portal capable of allowing the Hebitians to move about the galaxy with nothing more substantial than thought.

Which was why Chen-Mai needed Kaldarren. Chen-Mai’s motives were pure and simple: profit. He was, he’d explained, acting at the behest of an employer who was very wealthy and would pay very well for the technology. Even if the technology turned out not to exist, the discovery of another Cardassian tomb, and the riches that were surely within, would be more than ample return for the investment.

Failure was not an option. Neither was getting caught by the Cardassians. The region wasn’t technically Cardassian; it was in dispute. Still, the Cardassians were very touchy about these things and would view any ship in the region, exclusive of pre-arranged Starfleet contacts, as a violation—and a provocation.

So why am
I
here? Why have I come to this godforsaken place where I’m just as likely to get shot by a Cardassian as find anything?
They were questions Kaldarren had asked himself many times over, and ones to which he had yet to discover a satisfactory answer. He didn’t need the money. Money wasn’t a consideration on any Federation world. It was true that he needed resources that were hard to come by; all researchers competed for better ships, more personnel. That was why the Federation Science Council expected fairly detailed proposals.

Was it the challenge? Certainly there was that. But if Kaldarren were honest with himself, he would admit that he craved the prestige. He could picture the envy of his colleagues, the adulation and publicity he’d garner if he, Ven Kaldarren, were the author of the find of the century. (That Chen-Mai’s employer might not allow Kaldarren to publicize, much less publish and present, his findings had never occurred to him.)

But was he so callow that all he wanted was notoriety? No, there was more to it than that, and Kaldarren thought he’d hit upon it just a little while ago. There was Rachel Garrett. And why? Jase’s respect? To prove to his son that he, Kaldarren, was just as important as his mother? Maybe.

Or maybe it just has to do with Rachel. Just
...
Rachel.
How long before that pain, and his desire for her, went away?

There was no answer for that particular question. He didn’t expect one—yet. Soon, though: He suspected he needed to know, and very soon. He couldn’t keep on this way, taking these kinds of risks. It wasn’t good for Jase—or him.

“I have a question,” he said, out loud. Kaldarren looked over at Chen-Mai. “If we don’t find the portal ...”

Chen-Mai didn’t even let him finish the sentence. “Then you’d better hope the Cardassians do catch us, because you won’t like the alternative. Neither will your boy.”

Failure is not an option.
Kaldarren let a moment go by. “Well then,” he said, “I guess I’d better not fail.”

“No.” Chen-Mai didn’t so much as crack a smile. “I guess you’d better not.”