CHAPTER 15
A LOW-PITCHED WHINE deafened Archer as he huddled too near the magnetic damper. Only two seconds passed before the device emitted a blinding pulse of energy that radiated in all directions.
Archer was blown over onto his side. As the light receded, he struggled to his feet and found all his arms and legs still with him. The corridor was trembling, shuddering! Thousands of magnetic docking ports unlocking—
The floor began to separate under his feet—the entire corridor was splitting in two! Force fields flashed on as the interlocking elements making up this section of the aggregate lost their cohesion. He was cut off.
He had no choice but to turn and run in the other direction, and hope Tucker and Klaang got through.
The entire upper section of the Suliban aggregate was dismantling over Archer’s head. He imagined the huge sections, comprised of dozens of cell ships, disengaging from the central mass, tumbling away into the blue atmosphere, powerless and pilotless.
“Captain? Captain!” Tucker’s voice called at him under the boom and clack of disengagement.
Archer found a corner to duck behind and clawed for his communicator. “It worked,” he said without formality.
“Where are you?”
“I’m still in the central core. Get Klaang back to Enterprise.”
“What about you, sir?”
“Get him back to the ship! You can come back for me.”
Lies, all lies.
“It’s going to be hard to isolate your biosigns,” Tucker protested. “So stay as far away from the Suliban as you can.”
Archer breathed a gush of relief that Tucker intended to follow the very hard order to leave someone behind. Nobody liked that one. Nobody ever wanted to do it the first time out.
“Believe me,” he vowed, “I’ll try.”
Inside the Suliban cell ship, Trip Tucker gritted his teeth against leaving John Archer on that floating junk heap. Beside him, crammed in like a sausage in its skin, the Klingon spat and coughed protests about the accommodations.
“RaQpo jadICH!”
“I don’t particularly like the way you smell, either,” Tucker opined.
“MajQa!”
Tucker ignored the comment and kept sweeping for the Enterprise.
“I don’t get it ... this is right where they’re supposed to be.”
He adjusted his scanners, hoping the alien contraption was just plain wrong.
It wasn’t. There was no one out there. Nothing.
“The charges are getting closer again.”
Malcolm Reed tugged at the collar of his uniform tunic as the fifth low-frequency boom in as many seconds rolled over the starship.
“Another five kilometers, Ensign,” T’Pol ordered.
Mayweather worked the controls on the helm. “At this rate, the captain’ll never find us.”
“Wait a minute!” Hoshi interrupted. “I think I’ve got something!”
“Amplify it!” T’Pol ordered with endearing passion.
Hoshi tapped her controls. A cacophony of noises, radio signals, background noise, and distortion blasted through the bridge.
“It’s Commander Tucker!”
How had she deciphered that from these crackles?
“All I hear is noise,” Reed pointed out.
“Sshhh! Listen ... it’s just a narrow notch in the midrange ... he says he’s about to ignite his thruster exhaust!”
T’Pol moved quickly to her viewing hood and peered inside. “Coordinates—one fifty-eight mark ... one three.”
“Laid in!” Mayweather confirmed.
“Ahead, fifty kph.” She turned to Hoshi, and for the first time regarded the other woman with respect. “Shaya tonat.”
Hoshi offered a small smile. “You’re welcome.”
They all watched the sensors, though they could see very little on any screen that wasn’t the shifting of atmospheric chaos.
“Two kilometers, dead ahead,” Mayweather said, carefully maneuvering the ship to avoid a deadly collision—deadly for the Suliban pod that held their shipmates.
“Initiate docking procedures.” T’Pol authorized.
Hoshi turned to them, her face gray. “I’m only picking up two biosigns ... one Klingon ... one human.”
Somehow, a hunted animal knows, senses, that it’s being hunted. Jonathan Archer felt like a rabbit in a fox’s den. He clung to the help of his little scanning device, which showed two Suliban moving away from a central indicator. They’d lost him.
But he was far from out of trouble. He squatted behind a metal beam more than eight feet off the deck. When he was sure he could jump down safely, without being heard, he did.
His leg, which until now had pretended to be completely healed, nearly buckled. He fell against the wall and steadied himself for a few seconds, and used those seconds to tap the scanner and give himself a wider view of the vicinity. Other blips showed still more Suliban, but there was a large area to one side with no life-signs at all.
Sanctuary. If he could get there, he might be able to hide for ... long enough.
He made sure he wasn’t going to collapse on that leg and hurried down the corridor.
When he found the pass to the empty area, the narrow passage looked completely different from anything he’d seen here before. It ended at a single door. Archer hesitated. Was he being herded? Funneled? He got that feeling. This area was too empty. Had he been lured here with a sense of safety?
Suddenly he felt vulnerable and somewhat foolish. On the other hand, he had nowhere else to go. Maybe there were still answers to be found here. He owed himself those answers, and he was beginning to realize that he owed them to T’Pol, to Admiral Forrest, and even to Soval and the Vulcans. He owed them a good, solid representation that humans and Vulcans could work together—yes, they could.
We can.
His vulnerability went away. If there was someone here who knew what was going on, Archer very much wanted a confrontation. As he closed in on the single door, his fears for himself dissolved. Escape went away as his primary objective.
The scanner’s information was now heavily distorted. Why would it be?
As he approached the door, it opened for him. That alone confirmed his suspicion that someone was inviting him here.
He cautiously stepped through, expecting for a moment to be assaulted, but that didn’t make sense. He could easily have been a sitting duck in the closed corridor.
Inside was some kind of vestibule—a passage without an exit.
He raised his arm—it stayed up after he put it down. ... Lights distorted his vision ... time began to slow ... to slow ...
Was he underwater? His movements slowed further. Time effect!
This was some kind of temporal alteration chamber. And Archer had walked right into it. His arms and legs blurred as he moved. Gradually, deliberately, he learned to make forward progress, to ignore the echoes he saw, movement echoes that unnerved him and confused his eyes. He moved his arms, and a second set made the same movement seconds later—or seconds before?
He looked down. The sound of his footsteps preceded the actual steps. He stopped walking. Soon he had only two feet again. When he had a little control—although his heartbeat had other ideas—he clapped his hands.
The sound came before his hands met.
Now what?
Definitely time distortion, contained somehow. Could he trust his own thoughts?
Moving with great deliberation, he began to explore the room, the alien architecture, the technology on undecipherable panels. After all, someone wanted him to see all this. He would oblige them.
A podium rose before him. As it did, as he was able to focus on it, the temporal distortions began to fade. Had someone been giving him a taste of what they could do, and now they were finished showing off? Had it been a test? A mistake?
There was the podium, clear now before him, and a large weird-looking archway—metallic, huge, obviously purposeful in design and whatever its function was. Certainly not just interior decor.
He drew his pistol and turned sharply when a reverberation rang through the chamber—the door was opening. Beyond it, the dark vestibule appeared empty. The door closed and sealed again, as if a ghost had entered ... or left.
Archer backed away, silent, listening. His senses chimed with intuition.
“You’re wasting your time. Klaang knows nothing.”
A voice! Real words. What a relief—more or less.
The sound of footsteps in the preecho chamber rumbled with strange sounds and repeats. Archer tried to track the sound with his pistol, ready to shoot. The voice preechoed, too. He heard two, three, four of each word.
“It would be unwise to discharge that weapon in this room,” the voice said.
“What is this room?” Archer asked. “What goes on here?”
“You’re very curious, Jonathan. May I call you Jonathan?”
“Am I supposed to be impressed that you know my name?” he asked reasonably.
“I’ve learned a great deal about you. Even more than you know.”
“Well, I guess you have me at a disadvantage,” Archer said, leading this person on. He knew by now that whoever was talking desperately wanted to tell him many things, or he/it wouldn’t be talking at all. “So why don’t you drop the invisible man routine and let me see who I’m talking to?”
Because you know you’re going to show me eventually.
“You wouldn’t have come looking for Klaang,” the voice said, “if Sarin had told you what she knew. That means you’re no threat to me, Jonathan. But I do need you to leave this room.”
The time-door hissed again, and opened invitingly.
“Now, please.”
The footsteps echoed again, but this time Archer saw something, a slight distortion against the far wall.
Instead of leaving, he fired his phase pistol. A blurred preshot flowed in before the blast itself, and the sound had no attachment to what he saw. The beam struck the far wall. A jagged wave of energy blew from the point of impact and swept the room. Archer was blown back, slamming his head against a wall. Pain drummed in his skull—he held his head and waited for the wave to pass. It passed four times.
“I warned you not to fire the weapon,” the voice said.
Again the distortion moved across the room.
Archer gasped, tried to steady his breathing, then spoke. “This chameleon thing ... pretty fancy. Was it payment for pitting the Klingons against each other? A trophy from your temporal cold war?”
An embittered action blew across the room, ultrafast, and slammed Archer again against the wall. But this was different from the weapon shot. This one had pure anger in it. He’d made the intruder angry.
His pistol! His hand was empty! He grabbed around, but the weapon was gone.
Before him was a Suliban, now normalized against the background, its dappled face and skull still looking vaguely unreal. It held his pistol on him. As he stood with his eyes locked on those alien eyes, he recognized this as the leader of the attackers back at the spaceport on Rigel Ten. Not exactly a big surprise, and in a way, its own kind of win. Now he knew who he was up against, if not why.
“I was going to let you go,” the Suliban said.
“Really?” Archer backed away slowly, trying to remember the timing of those echoes. “Then you obviously don’t know as much about me as you thought you did.”
“On the contrary,” the Suliban said, “I could’ve told you the day you were going to die. But I suppose that’s about to change.”
The Suliban opened fire on him with his own phase pistol.
The preecho struck Archer in the chest and drove him back. He brought up every muscle he could control and darted sideways before the actual bolt could strike him. Instead, it missed by an inch and burrowed into the wall. Archer spun behind a bank of alien consoles as the shock wave swept the room, knocking the Suliban down completely.
Archer was ready for that shock and braced against it. “What’s the matter?” he chided. “No genetic tricks to keep you from getting knocked on your butt?”
“What you call tricks, we call progress!” the Suliban declared. “Are you aware that your genome is almost identical to that of an ape? The Suliban don’t share humanity’s patience with natural selection!”
“So, to speed things up a little, you struck a deal with the devil.”
Archer was careful to hide. Assault might work against him. The Suliban’s confusion in this echo chamber could be a weapon in itself, for, as advanced as the Suliban thought he was, Archer was able to adjust to this place. He was getting used to it. As he spoke, he positioned himself between the Suliban leader and the open time-lock. Moving behind the consoles, he slowly removed the communicator from his belt. Carefully, he calculated the next trajectory of the temporal wave, then threw the communicator against a monitor on the far wall.
The monitor sparked. The preecho effect made a dozen communicators sail through the air, drawing the Suliban’s attention. The Suliban, disoriented, aimed clumsily and fired at the sparking monitor.
The shock wave thundered outward from the strike zone. The Suliban tried to brace himself against it this time, and managed to stay on his feet. But Archer had situated himself in the perfect spot to be thrown into the open time-lock vestibule.
He tumbled like a snowball through the door. The door began to close.
At the last moment, the intelligent and obviously strong-willed Suliban plunged toward the door and slipped through. The temporal compression began as the door locked and sealed itself.
Archer was locked in this small place, a place where time was in convulsions, with a Suliban whose plans he had wrecked. Each of them battled to be the first to gain control of his body.
The Suliban was raising the weapon again. ...
Summoning every ounce of muscle control and sheer will, Archer shoved himself off the wall behind him and smashed into the Suliban in this eerie slow-motion chamber. The pistol jarred against his shoulder, dislodged from the Suliban’s hand, and tumbled toward the floor. It struck the deck just as time returned to something like normal, and the fight was on.
Archer realized quickly he was no match for combat with an enhanced alien. He had to get the pistol!
Twisting viciously, he managed to pin the Suliban to the floor and lean on his opponent’s wrists. It seemed to work, until the Suliban dislocated his own shoulder and wrist in a grotesque rotation and found a way to reach for the pistol, and got it. Archer certainly couldn’t use human moves against something like this—so he punched the Suliban in the nose. That had to work all over the galaxy.
It did. The Suliban writhed and went momentarily limp. Archer shoved off him and bolted to the door.
The Suliban had the weapon.
Archer ran for his life. He hadn’t intended for ass-n-elbows to be his plan, or the great final moments he ever had in mind for himself, but there was method in his madness—if he could keep the stubborn Suliban chasing him, then the Enterprise would have a chance to get away. A few minutes here, a few there ... if Trip Tucker or Reed were in command, this would never work. He had left T’Pol in charge.
A Vulcan—the bane of his life—was going to make sure his plan was fulfilled. T’Pol would stick to her line of demarcation and do the logical thing. She would know there was no way for him to be found in this maze, no way for them to infiltrate, to risk a half dozen lives on a rescue mission into the guts of this aggregate, which was breaking up. She would make all the right arguments, shout Trip down, over-British Reed, deal with Hoshi’s shrieks of protest, and she would finally seize the command Archer himself had confirmed. She would take the ship out of this mess, and Klaang, and she would succeed.
Not a bad legacy, Dad, for you or for me.
So he ran harder, taking the ache in his leg as validation of his personal honor. Behind him, the Suliban was coming out of the time-lock, aiming, firing—