First Contact, page 6
The spell lasted a full fifteen seconds. When it was over, she was weak, rubber-legged—but rage pushed her to her feet.
“Goddamn bastards,” she croaked. “Goddam bastards!” The ECON hadn’t been satisfied with simply rebuilding the whole freaking world that they’d destroyed—no, they had to use what pathetic few resources remained and make sure every single remaining, ragged bit of the planet was blown to hell, too.
Impossible to climb back up the crawl space to exit through the cockpit; instead, Lily pushed open the emergency hatch and staggered out onto the engine room-level catwalk. She was a walking dead woman, but she had a bit of agonizingly nauseated time before she passed out and/or started convulsing, and she intended to use it to accomplish two things: she would seal off the blast door so no one else—especially not Zef—could get in, then she would go down to the ground floor (ground zero, they called it, she remembered with irony) and retrieve his gun. She would die by her own hand rather than succumb to a nuke. It was a matter of honor, a statement against the war.
She had meant to go up rather than down in order to seal off the door first, but before she realized what she was doing in her blurry, feverish haze, she was crawling on the gently swaying first-level catwalk, pausing twice to stop and retch—so violently it left her gasping and her back and abdominal muscles torn. The ground was only one level beneath her, and she could not spare the energy to turn around and head back up.
The nausea was so fierce, so disabling, so outright painful that it displaced all fear. She moved toward the ground level—and the gun—with a singular purpose: the relief of suffering.
And when at last she arrived at the silo’s concrete base, she staggered, reeling over the scattered debris and equipment until she reached the metal cabinet built into the stone-gray wall.
Inside, hidden beneath thick coils of electrical wiring, lay Zef’s gun. She had taken it from him almost a year ago, when he had sunk into one of his depressions and threatened to kill himself; he had asked after it only once, then forgotten. She clawed through the neatly arranged coils, letting them fall to the floor and roll away; it no longer mattered now. She lifted the gun in her hand. It seemed astonishingly heavy, and she was forced to grip it with both hands, lest she drop it.
For a moment, blinded by nausea and a skull-splitting headache, groaning from the dizziness and freezing-hot feverish aches, she sagged against the cool wall and lifted the gun muzzle to her skull, just above the right ear. It was cold, solid, comforting against her warm flesh. She closed her eyes and put a finger on the trigger.…
No, no, Zef—remember? The door…
By then, the world seemed to be swimming, submerged in a blurry, ever-changing ocean. She took the gun and slung it over her shoulder as she had the abandoned Geiger counter, then stumbled back toward the ladder. The climb up to the first-level catwalk was so exhausting she wept when it was over and lay belly down against the metal.
Reality began to dissolve, leaving nothing but the physical anguish. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father standing before her on the swaying scaffolding, saying sternly: I tried to tell you, Lil, tried to set an example. They won. They took our cities, our sons, our daughters, our homes, our properties, our doctors—they took everything from us, including our hearts. What’s the point? Why did you keep punishing yourself? The only thing of worth you’ve had for the past ten years was Cochrane’s ship, and now they’ve taken that, too.
Pick up the gun, baby. Pick up the gun.
She fumbled, sweating, for the weapon, then remembered again: Zef. The blast door. If it wasn’t sealed off, he’d come in here and die—after he found her bloodied corpse.
Dying didn’t matter, nausea didn’t matter, the increasingly blurred vision that made negotiating the catwalk a terrifying experience didn’t matter.
Close the door for Zef. He was all the world had.…
Impossibly, she rose to her feet, clutching the railing with all that remained of her strength. The world spun dizzyingly again, but she gritted her teeth and took one step, then another.
Two levels above her, the blast door rumbled open. She stared myopically up at the entrance with pure horror; it had to be Zef, which meant she had failed at the one good thing she wanted to accomplish before death.
She almost sobbed his name aloud, but at the last second, instinct held her back, and she sank down behind the railing and peered over the top.
Two blurred figures, not one, stepped onto the upper catwalk. Both were dressed like North-Amers and palefaced—one ghostly so. They entered and moved over toward the Phoenix’s cockpit. Lily could not see their faces clearly, but their posture and movements were unmistakably not Zef’s.
The paler, taller one lifted a small, dark device and pointed it at the warp ship, then consulted its readout and said, in a masculine voice, “There is significant damage to the fuselage and primary intercooler system.”
She squinted up at the two, struggling to focus, to decide in her confusion what should be done. The intruder had a distinctly North-Am accent. Was he enemy or friend? And if he was a friend, then how did he know so much about the Phoenix, and where had he gotten that amazing device?
If he was an enemy, it didn’t matter. If they stayed long enough or got close enough to the engine, they were both dead.
Quietly, she lifted the gun with shaking hands, aimed it upward, and listened.
“We should have the original blueprints in the Enterprise comp—”
She did not wait for him to finish. She pulled back the bolt and began to fire. Bullets zinged off the metal scaffolding; the men at once dove for cover behind the railings.
“Hold your fire!” the other called, in a British accent. “We’re here to help you!”
By then, all the pain and rage had surfaced in her and she did not care whether they were friend or foe; she cared only that she might avenge herself, her mother, her father, the Phoenix, on anyone, anyone at all. “Bullshit!” she screamed, and fired another round.
Silence followed.
She peered over the railing to see if they were dead, and instead watched the paler man step over the railing off the catwalk, and drop forty feet to the scaffolding below.
You’re hallucinating now, Lil. Hallucinating. This isn’t happening; maybe these guys aren’t even here.…
As she watched, the man did it again—crawled over the railing on the second-level catwalk and plummeted downward.
Hallucination or not, she lifted Zef’s gun and pumped him full of a good dozen bullets. She’d hit him—even with her blurry vision, she saw the bullets tear into his torso, saw him recoil from the impact.
All the same, he landed with a loud metal clank on his feet… right in front of her on the catwalk.
She gaped at him, stunned, and pressed the trigger again. Once again, the bullets pierced him; once again, he rocked backward from the impact. Yet he would not fall, even when she continued to blast away at him, the bullets chewing a large hole in his jacket’s breast.
At last, the gun clicked empty. Lily lowered it and blinked, thunderstruck, at the creature standing before her.
He wasn’t human, wasn’t human at all; his face was the color of shimmering moongold, his eyes amber. He stared down at the bloodless, gaping hole in his chest with perfect impassivity, then looked up at Lily.
“Greetings,” he said.
It’s a hallucination. You’re dying; you can’t trust anything you see or hear. Don’t be frightened, Lil; it’s almost over, almost over.…
The creature began to walk toward her. She drew back, then wheeled about to run away, but the dizziness overwhelmed her. The silo dimmed abruptly, and she tripped, then fell forward. In the timeless instant before her head struck the metal grating, she thought: This is it. This is it. It’s all over, and there’s no hope for anyone anymore. I’m sorry, Zef.…
Silence then, and blessed darkness.
SIX
As he stepped back into the vast chamber housing the Phoenix, Beverly Crusher at his side, Picard heard Data’s urgent call: “Captain! This woman requires medical attention!”
Urgent, yes, but somehow detached; before entering the missile silo, the android had chosen to deactivate his emotion chip. It was a wise choice: had Data not done so, he might not so easily have come up with a quick solution, nor faced the desperate and rather violent young woman with such fearlessness.
It was a choice Picard rather envied.
However, at the sound of the android’s voice, neither he nor Crusher wasted a second’s time hurrying across the scaffolding to the place where the dark-skinned young woman lay unconscious, a twenty-first-century automatic weapon nestled against her cheek.
Beverly knelt down over her patient, tucked an errant strand of strawberry blond hair behind her ear, and magically produced a medical scanner. The woman had no visible injuries, but Picard noted the subtle change in Crusher’s intense expression as she checked the scanner’s readout; the condition was grave, very grave indeed.
She glanced up at Picard, her tone somber. “Severe theta-radiation poisoning.”
“The radiation is coming from the damaged throttle assembly,” Data said; he had been scanning the ship with his tricorder.
Beverly’s blue eyes narrowed; she squared her shoulders, a little gesture that said (a) she had made her decision concerning what was best for her patient, (b) Picard would not like it, and (c) his chief medical officer did not, in this case, give a damn about his opinion. “We’re all going to have to be inoculated… and I need to get her”—she nodded at the unconscious woman—“to sickbay.”
Picard could not repress an immediate scowl. He opened his mouth to begin a stern speech, one that Crusher ought to have memorized by now, but she stopped him with a look.
“Jean-Luc, no lectures about the Prime Directive. I’ll keep her unconscious.”
He sighed. “Very well. Tell Commander Riker to beam down with a search party. We need to find Cochrane.”
“Right,” Beverly said, and pressed her comm badge. “Crusher to Enterprise. Two to beam directly to sickbay.”
He turned and heard, rather than watched, the women dematerialize; his gaze was already drawn back to the wounded Phoenix.
“We have less than fourteen hours before this ship has to be launched,” he told Data grimly, then tapped his comm badge. “Picard to engineering.”
* * *
“La Forge here, Captain,” Geordi replied, lifting his gaze from his padd and looking out across the multi-leveled cavern that was engineering. He had finally gotten used to the startling size of the area and all its new bells and whistles, but the sight of the newly designed, more powerful warp core still awed him.
He drew the back of a hand across his forehead and thoughtlessly wiped away the perspiration there as he listened to what Picard had to say.
“Geordi… Cochrane’s ship was damaged in the attack. I want you to assemble an engineering detail and get down here. We have some work to do.”
“Aye, sir,” he replied, but his professional tone belied his true reaction, which was embarrassingly similar to that of a kid set loose in a candy shop. A chance to work on the Phoenix—Zefram Cochrane’s ship, the mother of all warp drives!
He repressed a grin—the situation was, after all, too somber—as he turned to face the others working. “Alpha shift, assemble in transporter room three. We’re heading down to the surface.”
On his way out, he paused to speak to Ensign Paul Porter, a recent addition to the Enterprise-E, but a levelheaded man and a fine technician. “Porter, you’re in command here until I get back.”
The brown-haired, pink-skinned human nodded smartly. “Aye, sir.”
La Forge sighed and ran a finger under his collar; it came away dripping with perspiration. “And take a look at the environmental controls. It’s getting a little warm in here.”
* * *
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Picard asked softly of Data, as the two stood watching the engineering team set to work on the Phoenix. “This ship used to be a nuclear missile…”
The android raised his iridescent face upward, toward the ship’s scarred silver nose, but his eyes betrayed no emotion, only detached intellectual curiosity. “It is an historical irony that Dr. Cochrane would choose an instrument of mass destruction to inaugurate an era of peace.”
The captain sighed. Until Data reactivated his emotion chip, it would be impossible to explain to him what “a sense of wonder” meant. Rather than try, Picard reached out and rested a palm against the vessel’s now cool, radiation-free hull. Unbelievable, to touch her, to actually feel a piece of the most historically significant hunk of metal ever pressed to his own skin. The Phoenix had truly changed history, not just of North America or the world or the solar system, but of the entire galaxy.
The awe must have shown on his face; he glanced up to find Data studying him, and he gave a slight smile.
“Boyhood fantasy,” he explained. “I’ve seen this ship a hundred times in the Smithsonian, but I was never able to touch it.”
Data frowned slightly. “Does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?”
“Oh, yes,” Picard murmured, his smile widening. “For human beings, the sense of touch is sometimes more important than sight or sound. It connects you to an object, makes it more real.”
The android cocked his head inquisitively, then stretched forth an arm and pressed it stiffly against the ship’s hull. Picard worked to maintain a serious expression as Data absorbed this new concept.
“I can detect imperfections in the titanium casing,” Data reported at last, “temperature variations in the fuel manifold… but it is no more ‘real’ to me now than it was a moment ago.”
As he spoke, Deanna Troi emerged from around a corner and stopped abruptly at the sight of the two officers lovingly stroking the Phoenix.
“Would you three like to be alone?” Her tone was wry, but the vaguely troubled look in her black eyes boded ill. Data continued to pat the ship absently, but Picard immediately pulled his hand away and turned to face her.
“What have you found?”
All humor fled her demeanor. “There’s no sign of Cochrane anywhere in the complex.”
“He must be nearby,” Picard insisted. “This experiment meant everything to him.” He paused. “Start searching the… ‘community’ out there. And be careful; the people of this time are desperate and frightened. They’re not going to welcome strangers.”
“Understood,” she said, then paused and lowered her voice. “Captain… we should consider the possibility that Dr. Cochrane was killed in the attack.”
Picard stared up at the Phoenix’s scorched surface and felt his face harden. “If that’s true… then the future may die with him.”
* * *
Back on the Enterprise-E, Ensign Paul Porter stood on an upper-level engineering deck and scowled at the exposed circuitry on the environmental panel. Both the temperature and humidity had risen alarmingly over the past half-hour, and his new black Starfleet uniform was definitely not designed for comfort in swamplike conditions; both its front and back were soaked with perspiration that would not evaporate because of the damp air.
At his side, Ensign Inge Eiger followed his gaze. She hailed from one of the ice planets and was appropriately tall, flaxen-haired, with a plain face and crystalline blue eyes. Porter liked Eiger for her easy humor and quicksilver brain; most of all, he liked her because she had made sure from his very first day here that, as the newest assignee to the Enterprise, he never had to eat alone. In the officers’ mess, he had taken to calling her Inge, and she to calling him Paul, though both avoided such familiarity while on duty. At work, he forced himself to think of her as Eiger.
He hoped their friendship would deepen into something more, though he had no idea how Inge—that is, Eiger—felt.
“What do you think?” Eiger asked, her faint frown echoing Porter’s. Her translucent skin was flushed coral, ashine with sweat; a dark hourglass of perspiration stained the front of her uniform from neck to abdomen. “What’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” Porter replied honestly, reading the hieroglyphic circuitry and finding no answers there. “It’s like the entire environmental system’s gone crazy. And it’s not just engineering—it’s the entire deck.” He gave a small sigh and stared at the panel in frustration. No sign of malfunction here; it was as if someone had programmed in a different set of parameters and the system was merely doing its job. “Maybe it’s a problem with the EPS conduits,” he said at last, though he had little faith that it was; but La Forge had given the order, and Porter was determined to solve the problem before the away team returned.
Porter moved over to an access ladder and climbed up to the hatch on the ceiling. While Eiger watched from below, he opened the hatch and wormed into the maintenance crawl space.
Inside, the tunnel—too low to allow even a child to stand—was silent and shadowy. Most crew members complained that the crawl spaces were too claustrophobic, but Porter had always found the quiet darkness soothing.
Now, in the damp heat, the tube seemed oppressive, moody… even strangely intimidating. Ridiculous, of course; he dismissed it sternly and started scanning the conduits for any sign of malfunction. The dim auxiliary lighting, combined with the scanner’s glow, was just sufficient to permit him to see clearly.
He had barely begun when an odd noise emanated from somewhere down the crawl space—a skittering sound, like swift human footsteps, and yet not. But someone—or something—was moving toward him.
He stopped scanning at once and glanced down the tunnel—just in time to see a dark shape the size of an adult human suddenly disappear around a corner.
“Hello?” he called, then louder: “Hey!”
Eiger’s voice filtered up from below. “Who are you talking to?”
He paused. “Is there anyone else doing maintenance in this section?”
