Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Eleven
Ke'Thara — Present Day
"What's your name?" Vash said.
The man with the cutter stared at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and too wide, and the gold light of the chamber put hollows under them. He hadn't stopped shaking since she'd spoken. The laser's muzzle wavered a few centimeters from the Key's cracked flank, the way a compass needle wavers near a magnet.
"Varga," he said at last. "Teo Varga."
"Teo. I'm Vash. The man behind me with the phaser is Worf, and he has not fired it, because I asked him not to, and because he is slightly less frightening than he looks." She felt Worf's silent objection behind her. She ignored it. "We came to get you out."
"There's no out." A sound escaped him that wasn't quite a laugh. "The door shuts. Twelve hours. We knew that. Dev knew it. We were going to cut the thing loose and be on the surface before the tide turned. We had it figured to the minute." He glanced at the dead diver floating in the water at Worf's side, and the glance slid off like a hand off a hot stove. "It was right there. We had the cutter on it. And then it started singing."
"It's been singing since we arrived on Doria Minor," Vash said. "I've been hearing it for a day."
His head came up. "You hear it?"
"Every hour. It's very faint. Tobin hears it, and the captain. Everyone does, in the end." She took a slow step forward, hands open. "Teo, it isn't a voice. I don't think it's aimed at you. I think it's a signal, and you've been sitting in the speaker for twelve hours. That would drive anyone out of their head."
He was crying, she saw, without sound. The tears ran down his gray face and dripped off his chin, and he made no move to wipe them.
"I cut it," he said. "Dev was alive. He was at the third arch. I heard him shout when the gate came down. I heard him. And I was standing here with the cutter and I thought, if I cut it, it'll stop, it'll stop—"
"Teo."
"—and it got louder."
"All right." Vash kept her voice flat and warm. "All right. That's not your fault. Put the cutter on the floor."
He looked at the laser in his hands as if he had never seen it before. Then, slowly, he knelt and set it down on the wet stone and pushed it away from him with two fingers, and sat back, covering his face.
Worf was beside him in a stride, phaser holstered, one hand on the man's shoulder. "You are safe," he said, in his low, unlovely voice. It was the gentlest Vash had ever heard him sound.
Tobin hadn't looked away from his wrist. "Three minutes," he said. "Vash."
She crossed to the plinth.
It was absurd how calm she felt. She had done this perhaps two hundred times, in tombs and vaults and sunken temples, the quiet procedure of approach, the slow evaluation, the mental rehearsal of a dozen ways a thing could kill her. The Key hung above the plinth in its gold light, its rings turning imperceptibly against one another. The crack down its flank was clean and narrow, a silver thread from the top ring to the base. It didn't look like a wound. It looked like an invitation.
"Don't move it."
Dara's voice. She had drifted up beside Vash without a sound, her mask around her neck, her dark hair slick against her skull. She was looking at the Key with a pale, absorbed, terribly gentle expression.
"We have three minutes," Vash said.
"I know. But it's already damaged. If we pull it free, the crack will spread. I think the lattice needs to stay in tune, or it breaks." She reached out her bare hand, the one that had lost its glove at the door, and stopped short of touching. "It's so quiet in here. Did you notice? The sound's not as loud as it was in the passage. It's—" She hesitated. "It's as though it were resting."
"Dara." Vash caught her wrist, not roughly. "We take it. If the Consortium comes back for it, it's gone. If the tide closes on us, we're gone. And if it's the thing that's making everyone sick—"
"I know." Dara let her breath out. "I know. I'm sorry." She stepped back, and tucked the bare hand under her other arm, slowly, as if it cost her something.
Vash took off her own glove, hesitated, and put it back on. She'd never trusted her bare skin near a find and she wasn't going to start now. She wrapped both gloved hands around the base ring.
It was warm. Faintly, like a living thing. The metal under her fingers felt smooth, and it thrummed, a fine vibration that climbed through her palms into her wrists and down her spine. It weighed, to her astonishment, exactly what it looked as though it should. Fourteen kilos, perhaps. No more.
"On three," she said. "Tobin, take the plinth. If it's rigged to drop, I want it to drop on me and not on a sensor."
"That's very generous."
"It's a habit. One."
The lattice shivered.
"Two."
"Vash." Dara's voice, high and sharp. "Don't."
"Three."
She lifted.
It came free of the plinth with a sound like a struck glass bell. The clear, high, terrible ringing of crystal under strain. The crack down its flank flared white, then ran, a bright silver lightning across the rings, one after another, each one singing a note as it split. The tone in the chamber broke apart into a dozen discordant voices and every person in the dome cried out together, hands to their heads, and the light guttered, steadied, and went a deep uneasy amber.
"Go!" Vash shouted. "Go, go!"
They ran for the water.
Worf had the dead man over one shoulder. Tobin had Varga's arm across his neck. The rebreather masks went on, clumsily, in the tight space at the edge of the bell, and Vash went under with the Key clutched to her chest, its metal shrieking faintly in her ears, and the gold dimness of the flooded chamber closing around her like a fist.
Seven arches, two minutes.
The first was dark.
She had not expected that. The glyph above it had gone dim, the green-gold reduced to a faint ember, and the gate beyond it was closing with the ponderous inexorable certainty of a door that had finished its patience. She swam for it, the Key dragging at her arms, and saw Dara dart past her in a stream of silver bubbles, turn in front of the arch, and begin to hum.
It wasn't the same hum. It was lower, darker, more urgent, the voice of someone begging. The arch flickered, brightened, and held.
"Go," Dara said through the link. "Go. I can hold it."
"All seven?"
"Yes."
They swam. The second arch. The third, where Varga's friend had died. Dara hummed each one in turn, dropping behind to let them pass, her voice growing hoarse over the link. At the fifth, she sang the phrase in reverse without pausing, and Vash noticed that she had stopped counting beats. She was no longer following the score. She was simply singing, and Vash would think about that for a very long time afterward.
The sixth. The seventh. The passage rose ahead, forty meters, white with churned silt. Above it, through the water, a dim circle of daylight. The round door, closing.
"Thirty seconds!" Tobin shouted.
"Swim!"
Vash kicked with everything she had. The Key's weight dragged at her, then wrenched, and she felt it shift in her grip and understood, with a cold certainty, that the next crack would be the last. She tightened both arms around it and kicked again. The door came toward her. A gap, a meter wide, then less. Worf went through it in a single surge with the dead man and the living one. Tobin followed. Vash reached it, turned her shoulders, and felt the stone scrape her back as the door closed.
She burst into the lagoon and sunlight at the same moment, gasping, blind with light.
She turned.
Dara hadn't come out.
"Dara!"
The door was sealed. A smooth black circle in the dome's flank. The water around it was still. Vash stared at it with her mask half off and the Key in her arms and felt her heart stop.
Then a pale hand broke the surface at her elbow, and a voice said, between coughs, "I'm here. I'm here. I was slow. I'm sorry."
Dara hauled herself up onto the skimmer's ladder, hair in her eyes, chest heaving. She was smiling. The smile was wrong, Vash thought. It was the smile of a person who has been inside something holy and come back out with her face still turned toward it.
The comm had gone dead at 14:02, and Picard had not sat down since.
He stood on the bridge of the Enterprise with his eyes on the aft screen, where the Hollow lay in the long afternoon light like a drowned jewel. At the base of the screen, a small amber beacon marked the skimmer's position. Beside it ran the clock Data had set to count the minutes of silence. It had been a green number once. At the twenty-minute mark it had turned yellow, without anyone's having asked it to.
"Captain." Riker's voice, low. He had come to stand at his elbow. "The door was supposed to close at fourteen minutes. It's been closed for six more than that."
"I am aware of the time, Number One."
"I know. I'm saying that if they're inside, they're sealed in. If they're out, they're out, and the comm should be live." He kept his voice level. "I want to put a rescue team in the water."
"We cannot open the door. Mister Data's analysis was unambiguous. It will open at the next slack tide, in a little under twelve hours."
"Then I want to be on the surface when it does."
"We shall be." Picard turned his head. He found that his neck was stiff, and wondered how long it had been. "But I will not send eight more people through a door that has already shown us what it does with the unwary. I gave my word that I would not interfere. I should like, if it is at all possible, to keep it."
"Your word to whom?"
"To a woman I have given a great many reasons not to trust it."
Riker looked at him. Then he nodded once and went back to his chair, and Picard heard him say something quietly to the officer at ops, who said something quietly back. All around the bridge, in the way of a ship's crew that had understood something without being told, the ordinary sounds had gone soft. A console chimed and was silenced. Someone set a cup down without letting it touch the saucer.
At twenty-six minutes, Troi came and stood beside him.
"I can't feel her," she said. "I can't feel any of them. It's not that they're gone. It's as if I were trying to hear through a wall that's thicker than I can measure." She hesitated. "Jean-Luc, I do not think they are afraid. I'd know that. I think they are somewhere I cannot reach."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
"It was supposed to be honest."
"Then it is both." He took a breath. "Thank you."
At twenty-nine minutes, Data turned from his console. "Captain. I have noticed a discrepancy. The Enterprise's chronometer and the skimmer's chronometer are in agreement. The skimmer's beacon reports 14:31." He paused. "The away team's personal transponders, which are keyed to their own clocks, report 14:16."
"Report that again."
"The away team's clocks are running behind ours, Captain. By approximately fifteen minutes."
Nobody spoke. On the screen, the yellow number rolled past thirty.
"That is not possible," Riker said.
"No," said Picard. "I am afraid that is rather the problem." He closed his eyes. He did not pray, as a rule, and he found he was not praying now, only holding something motionless in the middle of himself, the way one holds a full cup across a crowded room. Come out, he thought. Come out. Come out.
At thirty-one minutes, the aft screen's amber beacon pulsed, and a hiss of static opened on the comm, and a voice said, hoarse with salt and fatigue, "Enterprise. This is Vash."
Somebody on the bridge let out a long, shaky breath. It might have been Riker. It might have been Picard himself.
On the skimmer's deck, in the blinding afternoon, nobody spoke for a while.
Varga lay curled under a foil blanket, shivering violently, his eyes closed. Worf knelt beside the dead man's body, which he had laid out with great care on the deck, and covered its face with a sheet. Tobin slumped against the gunwale, hands shaking as he pulled off his mask. He hadn't drowned. He would never tell anyone how close he had come to it, and Vash would never ask.
The Key lay on a sheet of padding on the deck. Its rings had stopped turning. The crack down its flank had branched in a dozen places, a fine silver web, and the gold warmth had gone out of it. It looked, Vash thought, like a thing that had been alive a little while ago.
"Captain," she said into her collar. Her voice was hoarse. "We've got it. We've got a survivor, and a body, and the Key, and it's damaged. I'll explain later."
"Vash." Picard's voice, through static, unsteady with relief. "You are all right?"
"We're alive."
"Thank God." A pause. "I've had no contact for thirty-one minutes."
Thirty-one.
She looked at Tobin. Tobin looked at his wrist, and she saw the color go out of his face a second time.
"Fourteen minutes," he said slowly. "By my clock. It's the same one I've had since Doria Minor. We went in at 14:02. We came out at 14:16."
"The skimmer's chronometer says 14:33," Worf said quietly, from the far rail. "The Enterprise agrees."
Vash looked at the water, the dome, the drowned city glowing faintly beneath the surface. Somewhere far below, through forty meters of black stone, the tone was still there. She could hear it faintly through the hull. But it had changed. She'd have sworn it had changed. It sounded lower now, and slower, like a voice that had been shouting and had turned to speak a word.
"Seventeen minutes," Tobin whispered. "Where did the seventeen minutes go?"
No one answered him.