The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (27 page)

Slowly, not wanting to look but knowing he had to, Jase turned his head and looked back up the mountain. He almost cried aloud in relief.

A suited figure was picking its way down the slope.

Environmental suit
—Jase watched as the figure bobbed around the rocks—
that’s an environmental suit.

In another moment, Pahl dropped to his knees by Jase’s side. Jase saw Pahl’s lips moving beneath his frills, but Jase couldn’t hear a thing. His comm unit—Jase reached his right hand up and fumbled at his suit for the control—he hadn’t activated his comm unit.

He caught Pahl in mid-sentence. “...
you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” said Jase, not really knowing if this were true but just so grateful not to be alone, he would have said anything. His shoulder still throbbed, and the back of his head hurt. “That is, I think I’m okay. I don’t know. I slipped.”

Then he had an awful thought. “What about my suit? Can you see my suit?”

“It looks okay. All your indicators are green. Can you sit up?”

Jase started to nod but stopped as a wave of vertigo left him nauseated. “A little dizzy,” Jase said, swallowing back something that tasted sour. He made a face, closed his eyes, and waited for the blackness before his eyes to stop spinning. “I hit my head.”

“Did you black out?”

“No. That is, I don’t think so.” What he didn’t tell Pahl was that he was feeling a little heavy and stupid, the way he did right before he went to sleep. Somehow he knew that was a bad thing because that meant that maybe he had a concussion.

Forcing his eyes open, Jase saw that Pahl’s face was creased with concern. “I’ll be okay.”

Pahl looked doubtful. “You don’t look very good.”

“I’ll be okay,” Jase repeated, as if saying it again made it true. “Help me sit up.”

Hooking his right arm under Jase’s left, Pahl eased his friend upright. Jase winced as the muscles along his spine complained. Pahl steadied Jase as Jase slumped forward, waiting for something bad to happen. When he didn’t vomit or pass out, he gave Pahl a weak smile.

“So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if I can stand.”

The first time he tried to push to his feet, Jase nearly fell. Pahl took most of his weight, and Jase clung to Pahl for support. After a few minutes, Jase felt steady enough to let go. He braced himself against the large boulder he’d collided with and watched as Pahl sidestepped down a short distance to retrieve Jase’s flashlight. Jase’s head still hurt, and he was reasonably sure he’d had a tremendous bruise on his right shoulder. But he didn’t think he’d broken anything, and he wasn’t feeling as sick.

“We should go back,” he said as Pahl trudged back up the hill, flashlight in hand. Jase had plenty of air but enough adventure for one day.

Pahl nodded then frowned. Pivoting on his heel, he looked down the mountain. Jase saw his friend’s gaze flitting across the rock field below. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something here, though. Like,” Pahl’s head cocked to one side, as if listening to something very feint, “old voices. You know? Like when there’s a big room and it echoes for a long time.” Pahl’s ice-blue eyes zeroed in on Jase. “You know what I’m talking about.”

For a brief instant, Jase had the impulse to lie, to deny the ghosts he sensed hovering in the shadows of this dead planet. Then he thought again about what had happened between them on the shuttle and, instead, he nodded. “I don’t really hear them all the time either. They come and go like waves.”

Jase wondered why his dad had never mentioned these voices. Then he had an odd thought. Maybe his dad couldn’t hear them. Yes, but then why could
he?
He was only half-Betazoid. He wasn’t a telepath.

“Can you hear what they’re saying? I don’t understand them.”

“No.” Pahl’s eyebrows crinkled to a point above the bridge of his nose, and his frills shivered with consternation. “It’s like being in a big room with a lot of people all talking at once. But it’s stronger here. Actually,” Pahl pointed to a mound of boulders forty meters down the mountain and to the right, “right there. I’m going to take a look. You want to come?”

All his common sense told him to stay put, to backtrack his way up the mountain and then down the ruined pass and back to the biosphere. Instead, Jase said, “Sure.”

They didn’t speak as they made their way down. Jase’s head felt mushy, and he had to work hard at the simple act of walking. But he felt that the thought-claws were stronger, too. Ten minutes later, they stood alongside the tumble of nonspecific brown and rust-colored boulders. Jase studied them then looked back up the mountain.

“Up there.” Jase pointed at a ragged fringe of overhanging rock. “Landslide.” Then he squinted. “Hey, you see that? Two meters up, to the left. That gap.”

“It’s a hole, like an opening. Cave, maybe.” Pahl glanced at Jase. “Let’s go.”

The boys clambered up the hill, Pahl leading the way. As soon as they were level with the gap, Jase immediately realized that what they’d seen was not a depression, or a hollow caused by rocks falling together, or a true cave. The opening was arched, like a passage in the side of the mountain. Jase edged closer. The opening couldn’t be natural.

As if reading his thoughts, Pahl ran his gloved fingers over the rock. “Machine cut. I feel ridges. You wouldn’t get that with a phaser.”

“But what’s weird is that the door is
here.
Usually, a door is something you see from the outside. I mean, if this part of the mountain hadn’t sheared away, how would you know it was here?”

“Maybe it was blocked off and you had to know what to look for. Or there might have been an outer door, only it got knocked away.”

Jase couldn’t see beyond the opening. Then he remembered his flashlight and flicked it on. The blue-white beam speared the inky hollow, and Jase swept the light over the interior of the cave. He could see now that a tunnel led down into the mountain.

“Can you see the end?” asked Pahl.

“No.” Taking a few cautious steps forward, Jase angled his light along the walls. He saw then
had
the sense that after three or four meters, the tunnel angled down and curved right. “It feels deep. You know what this reminds me of? Earth. Ancient Egypt. The tombs they used to build for the pharaohs. My dad took me to see them once, about a year ago. A place called the Valley of the Kings.”

“Valley of the Kings?”

“Yeah. The Valley of the Kings is a
wadi,
a valley surrounded by high mountains. The mountains have a lot of limestone in them, and that’s good because limestone makes for good walls and you can draw on it. The tombs had all these religious pictures and texts on the walls. The entrances,” Jase angled his flashlight back to the opening, “they looked just like this one, except they were rectangles, not arches. There was the opening, the entryway into the tomb and then this long shaft.”

Jase turned again, watching as the beam from his flashlight was swallowed by darkness, like water disappearing down a pipe. “Sometimes the shafts were ramps, and sometimes there were stairs. The older tombs were really steep and then by the later dynasties, the tunnels got more level. This one looks like it goes down.”

“How far?”

“No way of knowing without a tricorder. I mean, if this were Earth, it could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty meters long, and that would just be the first corridor. There’s usually more than one, and lots of rooms. I remember that a couple of them had gates and pits and booby traps. They were worried about grave robbers and stuff.”

“Then we have to come back,” said Pahl. “We have to get tricorders and lights and some extra air packs for our suits so we can come back.”

“We don’t even know what this is. Maybe it’s a big nothing. Or maybe it’s an old mineshaft,” Jase said, not believing himself for one second.

“We won’t know until we explore it.” Pahl looked past Jase into the darkness ahead. “It’s not a mine. You know that. We were led here. We’re
supposed
to be here. Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” Jase lied. “I just came over the pass. I didn’t know there was anything here. It’s a coincidence.”

Pahl’s eyes clouded, and Jase thought that his friend might argue. But Pahl just shrugged. “If that makes you feel better. But I’m coming back.”

Jase knew that he would come back, too. But he said only, “Come on. We need to get back to the biosphere before my dad does.”

Pahl didn’t protest. Jase led the way home, retracing his steps up the steep sides of the mountain and then down into the valley. They didn’t speak along the way. From a ridge that ran along the top of the mountains, Jase swept his eyes over the valley floor until he picked out the silver dome of the biosphere. His gaze drifted right, past the ship that squatted on its triangular pad, to the space where his dad usually left their smaller landskimmer. The space was empty. Checking his chronometer, Jase heaved an internal sigh of relief. If his dad and the others stuck to their routine, Jase and Pahl had three hours to spare.

An hour later when they were about a kilometer away and Jase could pick out the triangle of yellow entry lights around the airlock (Jase having discovered that Cardassians liked triangles and rhomboids and diamonds) Pahl said, “We shouldn’t tell them.”

“No,” said Jase.

“And you need to be careful what you think around your father.”

Jase stopped and turned back. “My dad wouldn’t do that. He respects my privacy. He said one of the most important things about being a telepath is to knock.”

“Still. You might,” Pahl searched for the word, “leak. I’ve heard that. Sometimes even when people try very hard not to have their thoughts show, they do, especially if their thoughts are too big for their minds. You know?”

Jase turned away without replying. Pahl was right. Jase knew his dad could pick up on stray thoughts. Gray, he’d have to be gray around his dad.

Jase took a few more steps then thought of something. “Pahl, how did you find me?”

Pahl seemed genuinely perplexed. “I saw you.”

But Jase was shaking his head. “You couldn’t have. I remember. I looked back up the mountain right before it happened, and there was no one there.”

“Well then, I guess I knew you were in trouble because I heard you scream.”

Jase thought back to that split second when he knew he would fall. His shrill scream. The silent rocks skittering down the mountain. But it was only after they’d ducked into the biosphere’s airlock and were peeling out of their suits—when Jase tugged off his helmet—that Jase knew what was wrong.

I heard you scream.
No. Jase stared at his helmet. Pahl couldn’t have heard him.

On the mountain, on his back. Staring into Pahl’s face. Pahl’s lips, moving, but no sound: There had been
no
sound—because Jase’s comm unit had been switched
off.

“Jase?” Pahl was beside him, his suit pooling around his hips. “You okay?”

Your thoughts. You could leak.

“I’m fine.” Hooking his helmet onto its peg, Jase thumbed down the locks to hold it in place. “I’m fine. It’s nothing, Pahl. It’s okay.”

And this time he even managed a smile.

“Look, facts are facts,” Castillo said, around mashed potato. (The crew’s mess chef was on an Old Earth kick again. Tonight’s menu was meat loaf with a tomato-basil glaze, fluffy mashed potatoes swimming in melted butter, green beans with slivered almonds, fresh-baked apple-walnut pie, and strong hot coffee boiled with chicory and finished with a dash of cinnamon, New Orleans-style.)

“Facts?” asked Thule G’Dok Glemoor, his forkful of salad halfway to his mouth. The tactical officer sat at Castillo’s left elbow. “What facts? We have only Starfleet Intelligence’s word for anything.”

Swallowing, Castillo used the side of his fork to chop off another juicy, steaming hunk of meat loaf, spear it, and then cram the bite into his mouth. “If Starfleet Intelligence says
they found stuff,” he said, his voice muffled by meat loaf, “they found stuff, pure and simple. Anyway, captain’s got no choice. They want him; she’s got to hand him over, no two ways about it.”

“You’re suggesting that we simply take their word?”

“You think they make these things up? Not a chance. Besides ...” Cheeks bulging, Castillo shrugged, swallowed. Hiccupped and then followed that with a gulp of ice water. He placed the flat of his hand against his chest, made a face as whatever he hadn’t chewed well went down. “Besides, from what I heard, they’ve been watching the commander for quite a while, after that Ryn thing ... you know,” he finished, vaguely.

Glemoor’s frills twitched as he chewed his lettuce with a contemplative air. “He was cleared. Now, all of a sudden, he isn’t. Wasn’t.” He shook his head, the muscles of his jaw working under his gleaming ebony skin. “I don’t understand that.”

Focused on cleaning his plate of every last molecule of mashed potato, Castillo grunted. “Boy, I do.”

“Oh?” asked Bat-Levi. She sat opposite Glemoor and next to Darco Bulast, who was on her left. After her duty shift was up, she’d thought about skipping dinner and simply grabbing something from a replicator to take back to her quarters. But when she’d clumped her way into the mess, she spied a cluster of crewmen around Castillo, Glemoor, and Anjad Kodell, the ship’s Trill engineer. Characteristically, Darco Bulast was also there at his usual spot: diagonally across from and to Castillo’s right. If there was one crewmember who enjoyed the mess chefs food more than Castillo, it was the garrulous Atrean; no one could remember the last time he’d missed a meal.

Seeing them all together had started her heart thumping with panic and she’d almost wheeled around and stumped out, but Glemoor called her over. She couldn’t refuse, gracefully, and then she thought about Tyvan keeping tabs
on her and his report—his damn report—and decided that, hell, she’d show
him.
Hanging onto her guilt: What a load of crap. So, plastering a smile on her face and feeling her scar pull tight as the skin of a drum, she’d come over with her tray, wincing internally at how loud her joints sounded. She just
had
to get them adjusted.

If the others noticed her servos’ clatter, they didn’t comment, and despite her anxiety, she appreciated Glemoor’s gesture. Of all the bridge crew, she felt most at ease with Glemoor and Bulast, whom everyone liked for his cheery good humor. After a few moments, though, Bat-Levi knew something was wrong with Bulast. Rather than join in on the conversation—something Bulast did with as much enthusiasm as he ate—the Atrean slumped over his plate, his attention fixed on his food. She wished she had the courage to nudge him and ask what was wrong but didn’t want to pry. She decided that even Bulast could have a bad day.

A bar. Bat-Levi held a cup of steaming coffee in her right hand, the one with fingernails. Next time Command asked for suggestions, she was going to suggest a bar.
A
hell of a lot easier to socialize with a drink in your hand.

Your
good
hand.
Her lips turned down in a self-deprecating grimace. Her left hand, the one without nails, she kept tucked down in her lap, out of sight. Her dexterity was fine, but she was still self-conscious, eating in front of other people. Even after all this time.

“And what do you understand?” she asked Castillo.

Castillo’s fork clicked against porcelain as he scraped up tomato sauce and mashed potato. “Look, read your history books. This is the way all intelligence agencies operate. They work behind the scenes, gather bits and pieces of the puzzle. Then when they think they’ve got enough, bam!” He pushed his fork into his mouth and then slid it out, clean. “Done deal by the time they shuttle into town.”

Bat-Levi frowned. “Are you saying you mistrusted Com
mander Halak all along? I don’t think that’s being particularly fair.”

Glemoor spoke up. “Halak had ... how do you say? A tough row to hoe, yes. Captain Garrett and Nigel Holmes worked together well. They just ... oh, what is that saying? Commander, it’s a sound, meant to signify that two people mesh.”

“Click,” said Bat-Levi, figuring the Naxeran wouldn’t appreciate the irony about asking
her.

“Yes, thank you.” He turned back to Castillo. “I don’t think the captain’s ever really forgiven herself for what happened to Nigel. You could see it, the way she worked with Halak. Parrying at an arm’s length,” said Glemoor, whose tactical sense and fondness for fencing made him a formidable opponent. He and the captain fenced often, though she favored saber. “She was cautious. We all were.”

Bat-Levi hiked her shoulders. “Holmes was before my time, and Halak’s always treated me well. But that doesn’t mean Halak has to be everybody’s best friend.”

Tossing his fork on his plate with a clatter, Castillo sat back and heaved a contented sigh. “Look, I’m not saying that. Of course, everyone’s entitled to his privacy. On a ship, you know, you got to have that, what with everybody packed in here together. But you have to admit he hasn’t been the easiest kind of guy to get to know.”

Bat-Levi replaced her cup very carefully, not because she was afraid of spilling but she wanted to frame her words well. “Ani seemed to find him worth caring about.”

Castillo’s eyes shuttered, and Bat-Levi saw the color edge over the ensign’s collar. Even Bulast shot her a quick glance and frowned. Her heart sank. God, she was an idiot. She’d heard the scuttlebutt about Castillo and Batra, and the interesting triangle Halak’s arrival had made. Bat-Levi wanted to kick herself. Just like her to put her foot in her mouth. She compressed her lips into a single thin line. What was she
thinking? Better to just do her job and leave the social commentary to somebody else, someone polished, like Glemoor.

“Castillo,” she began.

“It’s okay.” Castillo held up a hand. He cleared his throat and gave her a tight smile that did not show his teeth. “Point taken. It’s just, well, he sure as hell picked a funny way of showing he cared, didn’t he? About Ani, I mean.”

“He couldn’t have known what would happen.”

Castillo’s chin jutted. “Why not? Farius Prime’s a rough place.”

“The way I heard it, she just showed up,” Bat-Levi said, even as her mind screamed at her to be quiet. What was she thinking? “He couldn’t control that. Ani was a grown woman, an officer. You can’t treat every situation like the military.”

“Maybe. But if it had been me?” Castillo snapped his fingers then hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Off the planet, like that. Ten seconds flat. You protect the people you love, period.”

A painful lump swelled in Bat-Levi’s throat.
Oh, Joshua.
“That’s not always possible, Castillo. No matter how hard you try, sometimes you have to let the people you love take their own risks. You can’t control everything, even when you want to. It’s like having children.”

(Where that came from, she had no idea. She knew as much about raising kids as she did about herding Catabrian warthogs.)

“Eventually, you have to step aside and let kids make mistakes. You just hope that you’ve taught them well enough they don’t do anything terribly foolish, or dangerous. Even then,” she gestured with her bad hand without realizing it, “there’s nothing you can do but pray for the best.”

“Wrong,” said Castillo, stubbornly. “No. Absolutely not. We’re not talking kids. We’re talking relationship. Totally different. The woman I love? Won’t happen. Officer, no officer; rank, no rank: The minute I think she’s in danger, she’s out.”

“I think you underestimate most women.”

“This isn’t about women.”

“Then what?” Bat-Levi persisted, wondering why she was going after Castillo. He was young, brash and, yes, a tad chauvinistic. He reminded her of Joshua.

She could almost hear Tyvan’s voice:
Maybe that’s why you’re fighting to change his mind.

Go away, Tyvan.
She clamped down on the psychiatrist’s voice.
Just you go away.

Castillo looked exasperated. “Look, this isn’t about what women can, or can’t do. I’d expect someone I care about to do the same for me.”

“But would you do what she said?”

“Depends.”

“But don’t you see,” Glemoor interrupted, “that’s what Bat-Levi is saying. You have a, what do you call it, double standard.”

Bat-Levi turned to the Naxeran, almost grateful that he’d intervened and yet a little angry, too. She was doing just fine on her own, thanks.
Relax. He’s just trying to help. That’s what friends do.
Tyvan’s thoughts? Her own? Bat-Levi couldn’t tell, and that made her mad. That Tyvan was like an infection.

“From what I heard, Batra protected Halak as much as Halak tried to protect her,” Glemoor continued. “Anyway, what went on between the two of them is both private,
and
past. There is nothing we can gain by, how do you call it? That game, played with a stuffed skin, players ran around hitting one another and tumbling to the ground. A most puzzling sport.”

“Football,” said Castillo. “You mean Monday morning quarterbacking.”

“Exactly. Yes, thank you.”

“Sure, I can agree with that.” Castillo pushed his plate away with the flat of one thumb. His fork rattled against porcelain. “My original point was that we don’t know Halak
very well. We didn’t know him then, and we don’t know him now. And then we find out he’s not who he said he was.”

Glemoor stabbed at a slice of pear, nibbled at the port-wine colored flesh. “You are being naïve, Richard. What I don’t know is whether your attitude is willful, or calculated to, how do you say it?” Glemoor stared off into space a moment then returned his golden-yellow gaze to Castillo. “Pull my chain?”

“Glemoor, you don’t believe SI?” asked Bat-Levi. Privately, she thought the image of the Naxeran eating greens and fruit almost comical. With his long frills and golden eyes, Glemoor looked a little bit like a panther.

“I don’t know enough to believe or disbelieve. I
do
know that this would not be the first time an intelligence agency fabricated data to support a hypothesis they were wedded to. Earth history is rife with such examples, from your J. Edgar Hoover to Mars governor Benton Hubbard. And this is not relegated to Earth, you understand. Naxeran history, too—any number of individuals in my own G’Dok clan. Our society is quite stratified. You’d say the Haves, those with less but who still have power, and then the Have-Nots. The G’Dok, the Haves,” Glemoor held his hands as if balancing melons, “and the Leahru, those with less, and then at the very, very bottom, off the scale, the Efram. Either you are born to privilege, or you are not, or you are less than someone with none.”

“A caste system,” said Bat-Levi, who didn’t know much about Naxera.

Glemoor nodded, using the knuckles of his right hand to smooth down his frills the way a fastidious man grooms a moustache after taking a sip of tea. Again, Bat-Levi was reminded, involuntarily, of a panther—or a very large, very black cat. “It is that simple, and not simple at all. The Haves, in any society, want to maintain their position. This may include manipulation, or invention.”

Castillo gave a fake laugh. “You saying SI’s making this up?”

Glemoor’s ebony brow creased in a frown. “No, no, not at all. I just find the timing interesting. Things are happening too quickly, no? Usually, things that are quite complex go slowly, one step by one step.”

“You mean, a step at a time,” Bat-Levi offered.

Glemoor blinked. “I believe I said that. Anyway, my point: If they knew all this before, why not apprehend Halak while he was on Farius Prime, or before? And they’re finding computer records that just happen to corroborate their theories they could not have uncovered before? Everything falls into place so neatly, so quickly? You are telling me that no one looked through his private files before now?”

“Maybe they were waiting to see who his contact was. Or maybe they just didn’t put two and two together,” said Castillo.

Glemoor’s frills shivered with surprise. “They implicated Commander Halak in murder but merely bided their time, waiting to gather evidence, yet placing that same commander in a position where, potentially, more deaths would follow? How does that strike you as a strategy?”

“I’m sure
I
don’t know,” said Castillo. He scooped his hair back in a short, irritated gesture. “You’re the tactician, you tell me.”

“Well, and I
will
tell you. It makes no sense, tactically or otherwise. You do not leave an enemy behind the front lines and hope you catch him in the act.”