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?”
Chapter 11
What the hellwas that?
The pain was so intense and yet so fleeting that Ven Kaldarren’s mind barely had time to register that the sensation waspain 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 wasthat? Whoare 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 usto 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 andradioactive 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 shouldbe 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?”