"Perhaps we shouldn't jet her," Gardner replied, peering through the one-way glass at the elderly woman.
The woman was seemingly unconscious on the floor of the room. A security team of five stood outside the passageway, armed, armored, and masked, with a metal coffin, a wheeled cart, and a portable welder. We weren't taking chances with the sedative still seeping visibly into the room. What difference did it make if we overdosed and murdered her?
I couldn't take my eyes off the old woman, the alien. She was struggling to keep human form while unconscious. Her skin trembled and glistened, turning black and rough; the shapes of her limbs extended temporarily, taking on mass; and her facial features fell apart: the flesh flowed and darkened, threating to take on some new form with each shudder. But before anything could take hold, everything came together, and she looked like an old lady again.
"Why not?" I asked Gardner.
"We may possibly use her as a hostage. Negotiate with the aliens. We return her, and they let us leave."643Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVbcqlcVtpG
"It's a lousy idea," I said. "Negotiate?" If Gardner couldn't figure out for himself why it was such an idiotic idea, I didn't feel like explaining, especially since I seemed to be wrong as often as not.
We waited another thirty minutes then I opened the door to the corridor and signaled the squad leader. I'd better be right about the timing, I thought: this section of the sickbays had been sealed off from the rest of the Enterprise. If I was wrong and that thing wasn't unconscious, or if it suddenly revived, we'd be trapped in here with it.
Gardner and I watched through the one-way glass as the mangled door was pushed open and the security squad entered the room, carrying the coffin. They moved quickly to the old woman, set the coffin beside her, and opened it. Four of them lifted her---one on each limb---and laid her inside. Another change-wave rolled through her, startling the squad and causing two of them to draw out stone burners; when the human form restabilized, they quickly closed the coffin lid and sealed it with the welder.
I turned to the security camera in the corner, nodded, and said, "We're on our way."
Gardner and I met the squad out in the corridor; I took the lead, Gardner in the rear. I couldn't help thinking that the squad wasn't any larger than the one that had come to arrest me. We moved quickly along the corridor, doors opening before us and closing behind us---a moving secure-zone, the path cleared for us to the nearest ejection tube. I kept looking back, but the coffin didn't change. Don't wake up, I silently chanted to myself, don't wake up...
At every door I called in the "clear" signal after looking back at the squad. The door would open, we'd move through, Gardner would call in his signal, the door would close. A half hour that seemed much longer.
Finally at the hull, I keyed open the ejection tube. The squad inserted the coffin, and I keyed the panel closed. Now was when a few more words were unusually spoken, a private eulogy for the closest friends and relatives of the newly dead. No words this time. I didn't hesitate.
I activated the chamber, and we felt the faintest tremor as the coffin was expelled. The viewing monitor came to live and we anxiously watched the gleaming silver vessel streak away from the Enterprise, a tiny metal bullet hurled into the darkness of space.
The trajectory was away from both the Enterprise and the alien vessel. I half expected some glowing energy beam to lanced out from the other ship, capture the coffin, and draw it back into its interior. But nothing like that happened. The coffin continued to sail away from us unimpeded until, like every coffin ejected from the ship, it dwindled, dwindled, then finally disappeared altogether.
I caught up with Jean-Luc and Hernandez in the chaos of the sickbay crisis ward. All of those still living were being attended to, and the three of us went down a passage for some privacy and quiet.
Five crewmembers were dead now, and two others probably wouldn't make it to the end of the day; the other four were stage-five critical, and had a chance. The explosion, if that's what it was, had ruptured suits and helmets and sent them all careening away from the ship; two of the dead had only recently been located.
"The old woman?" Jean-Luc asked me.
"Gone."
"We've got to try something else to break free of that ship," Hernandez said.
"Any ideas?"
She shrugged. "Send remotes to attach explosives. Damage to the Enterprise is more than acceptable." She paused. "My guess is that won't work. Then maybe try firing explosives at the docking mechanism; that would caus us even more damage, but still acceptable. That may not work either. So then we set charges inside the Enterprise. Blow off the forward sections of the ship." She shook her head. "I don't like that one bit, but we may have no choice. It should break us free, but it'll cripple us somewhat, and by that time who knows what kind of response we'll have provoked." She paused. 'We have no good options that I can see. But I am more than open to suggestions."
"What about attacking their ship?" Jean-Luc asked.
"I don't know. Riskier to the Enterprise as a whole, I'd think. A full-out battle with that ship? Not good odds for us, but it may come to that. Or they may attack us first, so there wouldn't be much of a decision. My own opinion, attacking their ship would only be a last resort."
"Pavel?"
"I can't argue with anything Macha's said."
Jean-Luc was working through the options, and Hernandez was waiting for orders. I was reflecting upon all the mistakes I'd made, and wondering if there was any way I could make up for them; in despair, I knew there wasn't."
"As far as I'm concerned," Jean-Luc said, "we're in a state of war. I'm not going to the Executive Council for approval of any of my decisions. Will that be a problem with the crew?"
Hernandez shook her head. "Not at all, Captain. It's your ship."
He nodded. "The remotes first."
Hernandez nodded in return. "Aye, sir." She turned and left the room.
Jean-Luc looked at me with concern. "We are in serious trouble, Pavel."
I searched desperately for Father O'Heron. Queries went out to everyone that I knew, to every place that I could think of. Nobody had seen her for days. Then I finally thought to try the place that I should have remembered earlier, a place where no queries would reach---the Wasteland.
The Wasteland was hot and dry, as usual. Sand the color of rust, boulders and stones bleached by an apparitional sun, and the palest blue- and rose-tinted sky; scraggly trees, stunted purple cacti, dense low bushes of thorns; a horizon that stretched into the rising waves of heat.
I closed the hatch over the metal stairs of one of the ground entrances, then turned a full circle, my gaze sweeping across the shimmering expanse. The sun was far along its downward arc on my right. I saw no movement, heard nothing but a faint hiss of sand as a faint breeze eddied past my feet.
"Father O'Heron!" I called. No response. I turned and called again. "Father O'Heron!" Then twice more with the same results.
I felt sure she was here. I picked out a cluster of rocks in the distance, flanked by spindly brush, and walked toward it.
The place was disturbingly quiet, especially after all the chaos and noise of the previous hours. The heat seemed to bake all sound of the air so that I barely heard my own footsteps in the coarse sand. Within minutes I was sweating and thirsty.
When I reached the cluster of rocks, there was no sigh of Father O'Heron. A pipe with a spigot emerged from the ground. I opened it and eventually cold water trickled forth. I drank deeply, splashed water across my face and neck, then closed the spigot. A six-legged lizard scuttled out from the shade and stopped at my feet. Its thin, forked tongue flicked out and lapped at the spilled moisture already drying in the heat, then it scuttled back out of sight.
The largest rock wasn't more than two meters high, but it would offer a slightly better view. I climbed it and surveyed the surrounding desert. Far away were two groupings of rocks and cacti; a flash of white came from the larger grouping. I called out Father O'Heron's name again, but there was still no answer. I climbed down and headed for them.
It took me half an hour to reach the two groupings; they hadn't seemed that far away. The larger consisted of several massive boulders interspersed with light purple spined cacti. Caught on the spines of a half-dead cactus was a scrap of white cloth; between two of the boulders was another water spigot, but nothing else.
"I'm here, Pavel."
Her voice came from the smaller cluster of rocks, which was only a few meters away. She rose to her feet from the shelter of a large boulder, brushing sand and dust from her cassock. She looked tired and drawn, thinner somehow, but also very beautiful. My heart ached as I realized we had not spoken even once since the excursion outside the ship to view the illuminated steel glass.
I walked over to her. She'd made a small camp nestled in among the rocks---sleeping mat, canteen, and a large satchel presumably filled with food packets and personal items.
"Looking for me?" she said with a tired smile.
I nodded. "How long have you been here?"
"Six days."
"Things have changed. A lot has happened just in the past fifteen to twenty hours. You should know what's going on with the alien ship."
"I do know," she replied. "Bishop Worf has kept me informed."
"Did he come out here?"
"No. I've got a private com unit with me. With all that's been happening, it would have been irresponsible to just disappear. I told Bishop Worf I needed to get away, and told him to contact me if it became necessary." She shrugged. "I'm preparing to return in two hours. I'll be needed."
"I'll stay and help," I told her.
She shook her head. "The preparation is mental, Pavel. I'm not ready to offer either counsel or comfort to anyone right now, and I'll need to be."
"Doubts again?"
"I always have doubts. They change, but they're there." She paused. "But so there's no misunderstanding, the doubts are personal.....not spiritual."
"What do you mean by personal doubts?"
"Just what I said. Personal." She crossed her arms and held herself. The sun was setting, but it was not cooling off. "How bad is it, Pavel?"
"I thought the bishop told you."
"He's not always reliable. He would exaggerate if he thought it would benefit him."
I shook my head. "I don't see how he could've exaggerated."
She took a few steps to the side and sat on a low, flat stone, half in shadow, half in sunlight. I sat beside her, all in sun, and looked at my shadow stretched out for several meters across the sand. Exhaustion suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, aided by the heat. I had not slept since being awakened by Abigail, and the delay had been long. My eyes wanted to close, my body wanted to lie down on the warm sand.
"Sometimes," Father O'Heron said, "when I come here and look out across the desert, I think that maybe this place actually does go on forever, that we've been told it doesn't, told that it's just a visual effect, because it would be too much for us to comprehend. Too much for our minds to accept. I could accept that, I think. I might even welcome it." She turned to look at me. "What do you think our chances are of breaking away from their ship?"
"Not very good. We're going to try several courses of action, each one more drastic than the one preceding. Maybe one of them will work. I would guess that none of them will. I have no particular evidence for that. Just a gut feeling."
She nodded slowly. "What'll happen then?"
"I don't know. I think it's likely that we'll attack their ship. However, since we're docked to it the logistics will be difficult, and since we know nothing about it or its possible vulnerabilities, any plan of attack will be arbitrary. I don't hold out much hope for that, either."
"Attack before they attack us?"
"Probably. No one will want to wait."
"But they haven't taken any actual hostile actions yet, have they?"
"They won't let us go. Some people would characterize that as hostile by itself. And when we sent a crew out to manually disengate, there was an explosion of some kind that killed five and badly injured the others. That's hostile enough to me."
Father O'Heron wasn't convinced, or was trying hard not to be convinced. "Maybe that was just an act of defense against what they interpreted as a hostil action directed against them."
"Did the bishop tell you what I found on their ship?"
She turned her head away and nodded.
"I think their intentions are clear," I said.
"That must've been awful, Pavel. Once was almost unbearable. I can't imagine what twice would've been like."
"A reminder that the first time was real," I told her. "A reminder I didn't want or need."
We sat in silence, our shadows lengthening as the sun continued to descend at our backs. Faint stars appeared in the darkening sky.
"I've never been here at night," I said.
"It's peaceful. And awe-inspiring. It makes me feel quite small, which is sometimes a good thing." She turned back to me. "If our attack on their ship fails, what will we do then?"
"Wait for them."
"Will we be able to defend ourselves?"
I just shrugged. We were far too deep into unknowns and uncertainties. "Hopefully it won't come to that."
She nodded. "It's nice to think so." She sighed heavily. "I need to be alone now, Pavel."
"Okay." I felt stupid and selfish for staying as long as I had. I stood, looked down at her for a few moments. My heart was aching again. I wanted to say something more, but I had no idea what it should be. I turned away from her and left.
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