“There’s something in here!” another voice shouted, and Xiong recognized it as the Endeavoursecurity guard who had fired his phaser. “It came through the damned wall!”
Xiong felt his heart beginning to race as he sprinted across the room to join the group. A loud crash echoed in the chamber somewhere behind him. Spinning around, he aimed his flashlight beam toward the source of the noise in time to see a blur of movement in the control room. A cry of pain echoed through the room, followed by a flurry of phaser fire as beams of blue energy sliced through the darkness.
Something was attacking? What was it? How could it have forced its way through solid rock? Was it native to this world?
Later!his mind screamed at him. You need to move, now!
“The door won’t open!” said another voice from somewhere to his left, sounding like Bohanon’s.
“Force it!” shouted Zhao.
Nervous bile stung Xiong’s throat as the screeching howl of metal against metal pierced the air and echoed against the hard, flat surfaces of the corridor. A second, longer grinding moaned from the yielding door as several men grunted from their effort, which sent a blast of chilled air from the airlock to surround them and immediately permeate Xiong’s uniform.
As he felt the huddle of men start to push beyond the doorway into more darkness, a frantic scream stabbed his ears. He looked toward it only to have his eyes burned by the flash of phaser fire. The brightness of the beam held for a couple of seconds, plenty of time for a vivid image to sear into the young researcher’s mind: one security officer’s grimacing face glowing sapphire in the flare of a thin, lancing beam, and that beam finding its mark against…something else—a shapeless, black form that seemed to envelop another guard and squeeze him at the torso, compressing his body to inhuman thinness.
Blind panic reached out to snare Xiong in its grip, his eyes wide as he looked all around for potential threats. Memories of Ravanar IV exploded in his mind—scrambling from danger, the near-blinding pain of his shattered knee, the shock waves of the energy blasts unleashed by Tholian demolitions as they obliterated all evidence of the similar artifact on that world.
“Where the hell’s the door?” he heard a voice shout, before another flashlight beam flared into existence and he saw Spencer, Bohanon, and one of the Endeavoursecurity men moving toward the airlock’s inner door.
“Xiong!” Captain Zhao called out, and the lieutenant saw him standing near the door, waving the others into the airlock. “Move it!”
He pushed his way into the airlock, followed by Zhao, who pulled the inner door closed behind him and engaged the manual lock. While Bohanon and Spencer fought with the outer hatch’s wheel, the captain reached into his parka and drew his phaser before turning his attention to Lieutenants Nauls and La Sala. Both security officers had drawn their own weapons, with Nauls standing near the outer hatch while La Sala had taken up a defensive stance, her back to the wall of the cramped vestibule.
“Once the door’s open,” Zhao said in a quiet voice that managed still to convey the tension of the situation, “sweep the area outside and make sure our way to the transport is clear.”
After some tussling and slight groaning of metal on metal, Xiong heard the hatch wheel give way and spin with the slapping of bare hands over hands to punctuate its process. Without warning, a thick slice of whiteness cut the room in half, the abrupt change in illumination momentarily blinding him as crisp, cold wind flooded the airlock.
One by one, the group began to duck quickly through the hatch and onto the cold, snow-covered ground outside the artifact just as a loud surge against the inner bulkhead rocked the temporary airlock and spilled Xiong and the others off of their feet. As he tried to regain his footing, another blow hit and a visible dent appeared in the airlock’s inner door.
La Sala suddenly stuck her head back into the airlock, her dark hair already smattered with snowflakes. “All clear! Let’s go!”
Xiong was almost through the outer door when another thunderous hammer blow rocked the airlock, and he turned to see that the inner door now was partly caved in.
A dark, amorphous blur sprang from the forced gap of the doorway, striking Spencer and yanking him by the arm against the door and wall. Xiong froze in shock, unable to look away as the researcher howled and kicked his feet, lashing out to free his limb from the gap. A hand slapped Xiong on the shoulder and spun him around, and he found himself looking at Zhao.
“ Go!”the captain yelled as he all but tossed Xiong out of the airlock. Behind him, Spencer’s shouting turned more guttural for a moment before stopping altogether.
Shoving Xiong toward the all-terrain vehicle and nearly knocking him to the snow-covered ground in the process, Zhao shouted, “Get that thing moving!”
As he rushed for the vehicle’s driver compartment, Xiong looked over his shoulder to see the captain and La Sala frantically climbing aboard through the passenger door. Throwing himself into the driver’s seat, Xiong stabbed at the control to start the vehicle, relieved when the engine powered up and the array of gauges and display readouts flared to life.
“Move!” Zhao shouted just as Xiong fed power to the transport’s drive, remembering at the last moment that a fast acceleration would cause more problems than it solved while trying to navigate the snow-laden path. As the vehicle came up to speed, he heard Zhao flip open a communicator. “Erilon base! This is Captain Zhao of the Endeavour. We are under atta—”
Bohanon’s shout cut off Zhao’s words. “Whatever it is, it just destroyed the airlock! It’s coming right at us!”
Trying to keep his attention on the snow-covered trail in front of him, Xiong still managed to look at one rearview monitor set into the panel above the windshield. He saw fragments of the airlock strewn across the frozen ground, though this was quickly obscured by a dual wake of snow and ice flying several meters high, stemming from a dark, undulating blur in the center of the path left by the vehicle’s passage through the snow.
And it was getting closer.
“Everybody hang on!” Zhao called out, and Xiong felt himself tensing up even as he tried to coax more speed from the lumbering vehicle.
Then the blur struck.
Like a jellyfish, Xiong pitched backward and hard against the back of his seat; then his world upended with the sounds of yelling and groaning metal as he felt the entire vehicle rise off its back wheels and tumble onto its side. Everything spun to the right as he was thrown against the driver compartment’s door, pain stabbing his shoulder. Then his head struck the doorframe and Erilon’s bleak white landscape was swallowed by unyielding darkness.
11
Waves of pure, focused thought-power rippled through the Lattice, disrupting the unity and tranquillity of Tholia’s Great Castemoot Assembly and all but crushing it in the suffocating sensations of oppression and raw, stark terror.
Harsh crimson tinged the boundaries of the immense telepathic network as Eskrene [The Ruby] maintained her tenuous union with the Ruling Conclave, defying every instinct that told her to flee the SubLink and seek out a safe haven.
Such pain! It suffocates me!The crimson now washed over the SubLink as her mind shouted to be heard over the cacophony enveloping them. All around her, Eskrene felt the other members of the council struggling under the onslaught, each of them torn between the almost irrepressible need to escape whatever it was that violated the thoughtspace and the imperative to maintain control over the supreme nerve center of the Great Castemoot Assembly to which they had been entrusted.