Of course he saw very well the giant vermillion fronds draping over the front of the vessel and caught tiny glimpses of the copper-colored sky through the breaks between. This wasn’t Titan. Titanwas dead.
The clock ticked. Jaza waited and meditated. A full three minutes passed and he found himself eyeing the remaining isolation suit and the phasers. He didn’t know what the stun setting might do against the Orishans’ dense chitinous exoskeletons, but he knew the kill setting could not be employed under any circumstance.
If he was forced into a choice between saving her life and killing one of these beings, he knew what it would have to be. He prayed that it wouldn’t come to letting Modan die to preserve the timeline. The Orishans, of course, were under no such proscriptions.
“They’ve gone,”she whispered suddenly.
“Good,” he said. “Come back.”
“ Not yet,”she said. “I think I can get the backup unit.”
“Modan,” he said, suddenly more nervous for her than when she had been silent. “Come back now. Right now.”
“You sent me for both units, Najem,”she said. “What if this one fails?”
“Ensign Modan,” he said. “I am ordering you to come back now. Now.”
“One moment,”she said. “It will take only a few more seconds to-”
She never finished. At that moment the sensors all went haywire and the ship begin to scream multiple alarms simultaneously.
“Warning,”it said. “Unquantifiable energetic field effect in proximity. Take evasive action. Gravitic conditions in flux.”
“Computer,” he yelled over the din. “Record all sensor data for analysis.”
“Acknowledged,”said the voice.
There was the sound of thunder overhead, as if two impossibly massive hands had been clapped together, sending ripples of concussive force in all directions. All around him the ground began to shake violently.
The shuttle continued its attempt to smash him into the bulkheads, but he held fast. As the data came through he began at last to understand what had happened. He wasn’t sure of the how, and the whywas completely obscure, but he felt he now knew what.
Time, he thought. Of course.
The revelation distracted him enough that he relaxed his grip on the control console. The shuttle lurched violently, hurling him to the floor. He groaned from the impact and immediately thought of Modan.
“Jaza to Modan!” he yelled. “Ensign Modan! Report!” Maybe she tried. There was the awful grating sound of static with what could have been her voice underneath. Or maybe he imagined it in the chaos.
The quake stopped abruptly, and for a moment, the entire world, within the shuttle and without, was unnaturally still and silent. It was, he thought, as if the entire universe had held its breath for fear that the release would inspire another of the violent temblors.
It never came. Jaza let himself relax by degrees, pulling himself back into the pilot’s cradle. He watched as the shuttle’s systems recalibrated themselves and performed the analyses he’d ordered.
“Modan,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“ Najem?”she said after a terrible moment. Her voice was distressingly weak and her speech was slurred. “I fell. Hit my head.”
He tried not to picture her lying there in the wreck of the starship, perhaps with a broken appendage, perhaps with something worse, unable to move or-
Her scream cut through the cabin like a laser through a sheet of silk. She had obviously meant to continue talking, leaving their channel open, and now, because of that, he could hear her grunting and perhaps growling as if in the midst of some struggle.
“The soldiers,”she managed to say before the link died. “They’ve come-”
It was obvious what had happened and just as clear what he had to do. He snatched up the remaining isolation suit, a phaser, and a tricorder by which to track her comm signal.
I’m coming, Modan, he thought. Just hang on.
He slid down the ladder from the crew cabin into the hold and grabbed a second phaser as he made for the rear access hatch.
The shuttle’s stealth field was still intact, thank the Prophets, still making it look like an innocuous bit of jungle. All he had to do was get to her, free her, and get back here. Then they could go and maybe, just maybe, send their friends in the future a beacon that could stop all this from happening.
He wouldn’t even need luck. This was something from the old days, the dark days, the time of blood and retribution. He would come at them invisibly, blast them away from her, and make the dash before they knew what hit them.
It wasn’t even a plan, just the application of lessons learned and perfected years before when his world was black and white and all his enemies were obvious and uniformly without pagh.
It would be quick and easy and-
Just as he crossed the threshold, the ground rippled with another quake. He was smashed down again, this time into the more yielding dirt and crystal of Orisha’s soil. He landed on his back and found himself staring up at something his mind could only barely comprehend.
The sky was on fire. Lateral columns of flame and force leaped and danced there from horizon to horizon, obscuring even the sight of the planet’s sun. The ground rumbled and churned beneath him like a living thing. He saw something like lightning bolts rip down from the heavens, boiling the landscape wherever they struck and, at the center of it all, like an eye gazing down on the destruction, was an undulating sphere of forces and energy that could only be what the Orishans had called the Eye.
Jaza Najem had another name for it, now that it had shown itself, and it was neither godlike nor demonic.
Tesseract, he realized, and then, as the effect subsided, and something else.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the apparition was gone and the world was quiet again.
That’s what’s wrong with the sky, he thought. It’s flooded with enough highly energized chronometric particles to affect the visible spectrum. That didn’t explain the massive tidal forces ripping across Orisha when the “eye” opened. It didn’t even explain how the damned thing existed at all outside a laboratory, but it explained enough, perhaps just enough to salvage this disaster. First, though, there was Modan to rescue.
When he was sure there would be no further upheavals he gathered up the weapons, activated his isolation suit, and stopped dead, frozen in place by the scene before him.
There was the flat orange disk of the Orishan sun, dipping low in the sparkling copper sky, a sky that had seemed both familiar and strange the first time he’d seen it.
There was the shimmering afterimage of the massive tesseract that trailed behind the planet mostly unseen. There in the dirt, unearthed by the rumbling ground, were nine of the ubiquitous blue crystals clustered either by chance or design into a pattern that recalled a Tear of the Prophets.
The air was ozone and ice around him, but he knew the cold was not from anything so mundane as a change in the local weather.
This was his vision. This was the place and time of his death.
Chapter Eight
ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.5
It was difficult tracking Keru through the chaos of giant vines and towering violet stalks. The pace Ra-Havreii’s abductors set was ferocious, eating up meters the way a horde of locusts devours a field of grain.
Despite his size and the trillion natural obstructions offered by the unfamiliar and hostile landscape, the big Trill tore through the jungle as if it were an open, level field.