Roaring blackness gradually fades, and I come back to an awareness of my surroundings. I'm face down on hot stone, under a faceted yellow sky. Around me, the grinding noise of the walls moving into new positions; off to one side, the towering bulk of Bresar. Is that a smile on his immense face? I pull myself upright. My head is spinning.
There is no sign of Stiak anywhere.
My combadge chirps at me. I slap it. "Shohl."
"Tylha." Ronnie's voice. "You OK?"
"Stiak did a mind-meld." My head hurts, as well as everything else. "I think I'm over it, but...."
"OK, kiddo. Hang in there. Don't go towards the light just yet."
"Oh." I've heard about this. "Stupid thing to do. Andorian, remember? Light means ice, the surface, danger... where humans 'go towards the light', Andorian brains are conditioned to go towards darkness and safety, instead."
"Well, you learn something new every day," says Ronnie, acerbically. "How fascinating. You must tell me more about Andorian near-death experiences, only preferably, y'know, some time when you're not actually having one."
"Right." The walls are changing again. I look around, hoping for a glimpse of Stiak, but he's nowhere to be seen. "Stiak's gone," I tell Ronnie.
"His life signs are stable," Ronnie says. "Better than yours, last time we looked."
"He had some sort of idea," I say. "I wish I knew what it was. Wish I had one myself."
"Look around, can you form some kind of rudimentary lathe?... oh, God, sorry."
I briefly fantasize about going after the inappropriate-humour switch in Ronnie's brain. With a hammer and chisel.
"I can't see anything except stone walls and a giant Vulcan." I frown. "I lost my gun. All right, it didn't work... but I should still have it, shouldn't I?"
"You think there are inconsistencies in this... mindscape... thing?"
"Possibly. It's got flaws, we know that. Maybe Stiak's figured out how to use them." I shake my head. "Or maybe my gun just fell behind a wall when I landed here. I don't know."
Then I hear something - not just the grinding of the moving stones, or the vague rumblings as Bresar's vast body shifts - something else. A familiar noise: the sound of impulse engines, the whistling of a body passing through the atmosphere -
The sleek black shape passes over me, and I look up and gape.
"Walt Whitman!"
"Tylha." Ronnie sounds genuinely worried. "Um, random literary references are kinda my thing - if you've started them too, that's gotta be a bad sign -"
"No, no, no." I watch entranced as the shuttle's arrowhead shape curves across the air. "It's the name of my shuttlecraft. The one we used to get down to Chara V. USS Walt Whitman."
"OK, I'm confused now," says Ronnie.
"Stiak must have - hacked - Bresar's artifact, enough to create something of his own, inside the mindscape. He picked the shuttle."
"So what does that get you?"
"A weapon. Maybe. In here, Bresar is just a big chunk of meat. The antiproton array on the shuttle should be able to cook and carve him pretty neatly."
And as I speak, a line of red light lances from the shuttle, standing out starkly against the yellow sky, stabbing into Bresar's enormous chest. The giant roars in pain.
"Mind-meld." I clutch my head. "Stiak must be drawing on me for the Whitman's capabilities. Shields up!" I shout into the air. "Arm torpedoes!"
The dazzling pinpricks of Whitman's chroniton torps dart out. Bresar howls with fury as they slam into him, ripping the dark robe he's wearing and punching into the flesh beneath. Green blood begins to flow from the rents in the giant's clothing.
"If Bresar controls this mindscape of yours, though," says Ronnie, "won't he come up with something to counter all that?"
"He doesn't know how," I say. "The Whitman is one of those temporal-anomaly ships from the 29th century, even I don't know all the things it can do. Bresar's got no clue how to deal with it, and T'Nir's memories won't help him. I think she was impressed by it."
Bresar raises one enormous hand, and lightning flickers over his fingers, emerging in great crashing streams of light that rush towards the Whitman. "Basic charged-particle emissions? A standard shuttle could block that with its navigational deflectors!" I shout. And, indeed, the Whitman shrugs off the attack. The antiproton beams stab out once again.
Bresar howls. The sound is deafening. Then he closes his eyes and seems to concentrate. The trickles of blood flowing from his wounds... dry up; the wounds themselves close without leaving scars. "OK. Self-healing, within this mindscape. But he needs to concentrate in order to do it. You can break that concentration."
I don't know if I'm talking to Stiak, through the mental link he established, or just to myself. I don't know what, exactly, he's trying to do - or what will happen to us if Bresar dies in here. I don't know a lot of things. What I do know... is that this is the only chance.
Red light slashes across Bresar again, opening fresh wounds. "Tylha, what's happening?" Ronnie's voice demands.
"Stiak's got the hang of the shuttle." Or he's using my knowledge to guide him - whatever works. "If he can defeat Bresar in here...." A surge of hope runs through me. "Maybe if he can do that, he can take control of the artifact and get us out of here."
Bresar turns, his hands reaching out. "Steady," I mutter, "steady. The Whitman's controls are fast enough, responsive enough... you can evade anything he throws at you...."
More lightning flashes from the giant's hands. "Futile!" I yell. The antiproton array blazes back, a sustained, savage burst -
- and Bresar's hand flashes forward and closes around the Walt Whitman.
"Oh, no," I moan.
"What?" asks Ronnie.
"Keep calm. Not the end. The shield and hull crush limits are very high, you can shoot your way out, you can burn through his hand before the core -"
And then he proves me wrong.
The concussion and flash of the core breach is apocalyptic. I close my eyes, and the light dazzles even through shut eyelids. The sound, when it reaches me, is every thunderstorm I've ever heard, all rolled into one.
In sick despair, I open my eyes.
There is no sign of the shuttle - but Bresar is staggering. His right arm ends in a smoking, steaming stump, just below the elbow, green blood pouring out in immense gushes. His face is slashed and scarred with shrapnel from the blast. The giant screams and stumbles, and falls -
Bresar falls, and the shock of his fall runs through the ground, and through the sky. The stone walls all tumble down, and the stone slabs lift up like leaves on a gale. The sky is riven through with cracks, and darkness starts to leak in. The stone beneath me rises up and throws me into the air, and the world is full of dust and blackness, and I am falling again, falling -
No comments:
Post a Comment