Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Sixteen
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
"Two Keys," Data said, "two effects."
The science lab had been darkened to a dim blue, its instruments banked low, every console set to silent. Two cradles stood on the long central bench, eight meters apart. In the one on the left, the Ke'Thara Key lay in its web of silver fractures, dull and quiet. In the one on the right, the Cirrus Key turned slowly in its field, whole and pale, every ring tilted at its separate angle. Between them, on the lab's main display, the drift radius of the orb two decks below rose and fell in a soft blue line.
Picard stood at the back of the room with his hands behind him and watched the line.
"I have run the Cirrus Key through the same protocol as the Ke'Thara Key," Data said. "It is brought within ten meters of the orb's containment field, held for ninety seconds, and withdrawn. The Ke'Thara Key raised the drift-growth rate by two point one percent. The Cirrus Key lowered it by six point four."
"Lowered," Geordi said. He sounded as though he did not quite believe it. "Not just no effect. Actively slowed. The curve bends. It's the first good news we've had in three days."
"It may not be good news for long," Data said. "The effect is reversible. When the Key is withdrawn, the rate resumes at a slightly higher baseline than before."
"A brake that wears off."
"Yes. The brake does not reverse the drift. It delays it."
Picard looked at the two cradles. A cracked Key that fed the orb, and a whole one that starved it. Seven rings each, nested in the same geometry. The same hand, he thought, had made them both, and had meant them to do opposite things.
"Then the Keys are not all one kind," he said.
"No, Captain." Data turned his head, in that small precise tilt. "I now believe there are at least two classes. Accelerants and dampers. At present I have no means of identifying which a Key is without testing it against the orb."
"Which is to say," Vash said, from the table's end, "that somewhere out there are eleven of these, and some of them will make it worse."
"That is my assessment."
She had been sitting with her legs crossed beneath her, in a borrowed uniform jacket too large in the shoulders, a cup of cold coffee forgotten at her elbow. She had slept. He could see it in her face, a faint unfamiliar slackness around the eyes. Beside her, Dara sat very straight, her notebook on the table before her. She had not spoken since the test began.
"Ms. Liang," Picard said. "You have been silent."
"I've been thinking." Dara looked up. "I think it makes sense, actually. Both kinds."
"Explain."
"A lock that can only be opened is an unfinished lock." She spoke slowly, working it out as she went. "If the Makers built a mechanism to recall their civilization, they would also have built one to hold it back. A failsafe. A way to shut the door if someone opened it by accident. The accelerant Keys would be the working parts. The dampers would be the safety." She glanced at the cradle on the right. "Cirrus is the safety. It's whole, and it's patient, and it slows things down. Ke'Thara was the engine."
"And the engine was damaged," Geordi said.
"Yes. Which is a mercy." She met his eyes. "If the engine Keys are broken, they do less harm. I'd say we should keep looking for dampers. Collect every one we can. And be very careful with the rest."
It was reasonable, Picard thought. It was so reasonable that it took him a moment to notice the part of it that was not.
"You say we should collect every damper," he said. "And the accelerants?"
"Leave them where they are, if we can. Or secure them." Dara's smile was faint and tired. "But we don't know which is which until we've touched them, Captain. That's the difficulty. We have to go to every site, and we have to take the Key, and only afterward do we learn what we took."
"Which means we must go to all of them."
"Yes."
It was an entirely logical inference. It was also, he noted, exactly the conclusion to which the whole argument had been leading. He did not say so. He had no grounds. He noted the small hard knot of unease that had formed beneath his sternum, and put it aside, and asked Data for the next site.
"Ashfall Vault," Data said. "On the fourth moon of Kel-Varesh. A volcanic body, geologically active, with a permanent ash atmosphere. It is uninhabited. The Federation has no claim. I estimate that the Vault lies in the wall of the moon's largest caldera, at a depth of approximately four hundred meters."
"Hot?" Geordi said.
"Very. The surface temperature in the caldera is forty-one degrees. The interior of the Vault, if the lava tubes are continuous, may exceed sixty."
"Naturally."
"The orbital approach is difficult. The ash has a high electrostatic charge and interferes with transporter locks. I recommend a shuttle landing on the eastern rim."
"How long?"
"Six hours, Captain. The Sarek's rendezvous window opens in ten."
"So we have four hours at the site." Picard looked at Vash. "Perhaps less."
"Less," she said. "Nobody's ever had four hours."
He almost smiled. A small, hard edge had gone out of her voice in the last two days, and he found he missed it less than he would have expected.
"Mister Data. Plot a course. Mister La Forge, I want your modifications to the cargo bay reviewed before we leave. By your last estimate we have perhaps fifty hours before the field outgrows the bay."
"Aye, Captain." Geordi rose. "I'll put the secondary dampers on a four-minute cycle. It'll buy us some margin."
"Do it."
They dispersed. The lab emptied slowly, each of them drifting off in a different direction, exhausted, brittle, politely not looking at one another. Vash went last. At the door, she paused and looked back at the two cradles, the broken Key and the whole, and he saw her lift a hand toward the pale one and stop, as if remembering something.
"It's so quiet in here," she said. "With that one near. Did you notice? It's like a held breath."
"Yes," Picard said. "I noticed."
"It's the first time I've been able to think in days."
She went. The door closed. Data remained at his console, and Picard crossed the dim lab to him.
"Mister Data. Ms. Liang's theory. The Keys as engine and safety. Does the evidence support it?"
"It is consistent with the evidence, Captain." Data considered. "It is also consistent with several others. I cannot distinguish between them on present data."
"And her conclusion, that we must collect every Key before we know what they do?"
"That is also consistent." A pause. "It is, however, a conclusion that would follow from almost any theory. I note that it would follow equally from a theory in which the Keys were all dangerous, and from one in which they were all safe. It does not require the truth of her premises. I find that unusual in an argument."
"Unusual."
"Most arguments are more selective about what they require." Data's head tilted. "I do not say it is suspicious. I say I have noticed it."
"Thank you, Mister Data. So have I."
Data returned to his readouts. Picard stood with the two sleeping Keys and the small blue line on the display, and listened, for the first time, to something other than the tone. It was a silence, and it was not empty. It felt as though the room had been waiting a long time for someone to stop talking.
They reached Kel-Varesh six hours later.
The fourth moon hung against the dark like a dirty coin. As the shuttle dropped through the upper atmosphere, Vash saw the ash begin: a thin gray haze at first, then a thick brown curtain rising to meet them, streaked with sheet lightning that crawled across the dark from one horizon to the other without a sound. Below it, through breaks in the cloud, the land was black. Black plains, black mountains, black rivers of cooled glass. Here and there, along the ridgelines, thin red threads marked the fissures where the moon's heart leaked through.
"Beautiful," Tobin said, without any conviction at all.
"It's a hell of a place to hide a Vault," Geordi said.
"That's why they hid it here." Worf's voice, from the pilot's seat. "No one lives on a world that is trying to kill them."
"Except the Klingons," Vash said.
"We do not live on such worlds. We visit them."
The shuttle bucked through a current of rising heat, and Dara, in the seat beside Vash, gripped the armrest. Her face in the orange light was pale and set, her lips moving very slightly, silently. Vash leaned a little closer. She thought she heard a rhythm in it. Seven beats, repeated.
"You're counting."
"Hm?" Dara blinked. "Sorry. Habit. The Vault's phrase. I've been rehearsing it."
"It's the third, right? Or the fourth?"
"The fifth," Dara said. "The one with the long turn at the end."
"Is it hard?"
"Yes. It's the hardest." She smiled. "I think we'll manage."
The caldera rose out of the haze like the rim of a colossal bowl, ten kilometers across, its inner wall a sheer black cliff streaked with old lava. Halfway down the eastern face, a single dark slot showed in the stone. It was a hundred meters wide, and perfectly regular, and it had been cut by no volcano.
"The Vault," Data's voice said, through the comm. "The entrance lies at the base of the slot. I am reading heat, a great deal of it, and a very faint repeating acoustic signature. It is the same as the others, with one difference. It is not a single tone. It is a phrase."
"A phrase?"
"Seven notes, rising and falling. It repeats approximately every nineteen seconds." A pause. "It sounds, if I may say so, like a question."
Nobody answered him. The shuttle settled onto the rim. The engines cut out, and the silence rushed in, and through the hull, faint and far and unmistakable, came the sound of something very old, asking.