Back in the city, Vaughn had speculated that technology had somehow played a part in the extinction of the civilization here. Whether that was true or not, though, he thought that he had begun to see the mechanism by which the inhabitants of this world might have come to their ends. Vaughn had spent yesterday being visited by specters of his past that had evoked brutal feelings of loss and abandonment in him, and his emotions had reeled. If that same sort of thing had happened to the people here, but continuously, if they had been faced each day of their lives with such horrible feelings, then perhaps that had driven them to their destruction. Vaughn did not doubt that living day after day with a freshsense of loss would have been unbearable.
A shape appeared up ahead in the light of his beacon: an empty chair. As Vaughn approached it, he found the sight of it eerie, an apt symbol for this empty world. This place is haunted,he thought in a melodramatic and uncharacteristic manner, and he realized just how fragile his emotional state had become. He passed the chair and walked on.
The suggestion of ghosts, though, brought him quickly back to the middle of last night…to seeing his mother, hearing again those terrible words, and feeling once more the desperate grief and loss he had first felt as a boy. He had awoken this morning at the first gray light of day, only marginally rested from the interrupted and uneasy sleep he had gotten. Recollections of his dreams lurked vaguely beyond the outskirts of his consciousness, and he had the strange impression that he had dreamed the dreams of others—including those of Prynn and ch’Thane. He also had the sense that he had dreamed of the people who had once lived on this planet, and also, oddly enough, of Ezri Dax. But his first thoughts upon waking had not been of his dreams, or of his encounter with his mother, but of his daughter, and his hope that he would not fail her—would not leave her—again.
Vaughn had padded back to where he had first lain down to sleep last night, and had found almost everything where he had left it. His bedroll and blanket had been there, his food and water, his coat, tricorder, and beacon; he had taken only the latter three objects with him for his foray into the complex. Even the circle of stones had been there, the ashes of a dead fire blackening the ground around which they sat. Only his mother had been missing, a fact for which he had been grateful. He had examined the dirt around the circle of stones, and seen footprints leading away from the camp and back along the direction he had taken to get here.
Maybe she went to join Captain Harriman,Vaughn thought now, bitterly. He had not been on this world long, but he had come to despise it. The intensity of his feelings shocked him, and he tried to push them aside.
Up ahead, the corridor dead-ended against another. Vaughn saw a patch of light on the wall facing him, light not thrown there by his beacon. He stopped—the echoes of his boots diminishing quickly—and switched the beacon off. The darkness within the complex had faded to a dull illumination he recognized too well: the outside light of this shrouded planet. And he perceived something else besides the light: the high-pitched wail at the bounds of his hearing. It sounded louder here, stronger, which did not surprise him.
Leaving his beacon off, Vaughn continued down the corridor. At the intersection, he consulted his tricorder, then proceeded to the left. The light grew brighter, and he walked on until he reached another intersection. He turned again, right this time, following the light. Twenty meters ahead of him, the corridor ended in a tangle of building materials. Past a heap of metal and stone, he could see patches of the dark gray mass that stood at the center of the complex: the source of the pulse.
As Vaughn walked forward, he noticed a heavy curtain of dust hanging in the air, dust that he had not stirred up from the floor. He scanned the air. The dust was primarily composed of traces of stone, sand, and lime, along with some metallic particulates; he concluded that it was the residue of the building collapse up ahead, which must not have happened too long ago. He guessed that this part of the complex had come down during or after the last pulse.
Vaughn stopped at the pile of debris and studied it. It stood close to two meters tall at most points, though lower on the left side and higher on the right. On the left, though, a metal beam hung from the fallen ceiling all the way down to the floor. If he could squeeze past it, he would probably be able to get over the rubble there.
Vaughn set the beacon down, then closed his tricorder and secured it in a coat pocket, fastening a flap across it. Reaching up, he tested the stability of the metal beam; it seemed wedged in place. He ducked down and slowly pushed his body through the space between the wall and the beam, actually making it through without much effort. Just as carefully, he stepped over the debris. He dislodged a few pieces of broken building materials, but quickly got past the heap.
The place where the pulse had been generated stretched before him, a great, dark circle that could have been a reflection of the sky above it. The surface of the circle, perhaps a hundred meters across, roiled and spun, a gray vortex that descended from its edges to a low point at its center. All around the perimeter, the complex had caved in—either blasted by the pulse, Vaughn supposed, or falling in as the zone of energy had expanded over time, loosing the foundations of the buildings. A fine, gray mist hung in the air here, like a thin fog over a lake at dawn.
Vaughn pulled out his tricorder and scanned the vortex. The readings of its surface corresponded to those of the cloud cover, although the vortex was much more powerful. At the center point, sensor readings broke down. Vaughn ran a diagnostic, verifying the accuracy of the aberrant scan. The readings resembled those of a singularity, he noted, with significant distortions in the space-time continuum there, although he saw no compression of matter and no extreme gravitational force. Vaughn adjusted the tricorder several times, attempting to circumvent the conditions, but he could take no better scans.
Finally, he checked the amount of energy that had built up in the vortex, and the rate at which it was now changing. Both measures reached slightly higher than had been predicted by the crew’s extrapolations of the probe’s data. If Vaughn had harbored any scant hopes that he would reach this place and find the threat to the Vahni Vahltupali gone, or even delayed, those hopes now vanished.
Based on the tricorder readings, another pulse would surge from the vortex in less than four hours.
60
Prynn’s emotions seemed heightened today, as though whatever dreams had visited her during the night had somehow made her miss her father more. As she and Shar had worked throughout the morning, she had continually had to force herself to concentrate on what she had been doing. Even now, as they set to complete their final test, her mind drifted to her father, and to the image of him walking away from the camp.
Prynn shook her head, as though the movement could shake the picture in her mind loose. She refocused her attention on the tricorder in her hand, reached forward, and pressed a control. In an instant, white motes appeared before her eyes, and her surroundings faded from view.
She materialized one hundred meters from Chaffee’s aft section. She peered back at that portion of the wreckage, and just to the left of it, where Shar lay. She reached to the outside of her forearm, where the controls of her environmental suit’s comm system were set. She switched it on, and said, “Tenmei to ch’Thane.”