Part One — The Crack in the Tomb · The Threnody
Chapter Four
Doria Minor — Present Day
"I hear it," Vash said.
The loading bay swallowed her voice. On the handheld, Kestrel let out a breath that she could almost feel against her ear, and she knew that eleven years earlier she would have read the sound as relief. Now she read it as information.
"Capacitor bank's off," he said. "I checked. It's been off since you went down."
"Then it's the rock."
"Don't insult me, Vash. Two of my people have had nosebleeds since we landed. Kessel asked me to put him on the ship an hour ago because the ringing was making him sick, and Kessel doesn't ask for things." A gust of wind crossed the line. "I've been hearing it since I stepped off the ramp. Tell me what it is."
"I don't know."
The silence lasted long enough for her to count her own pulse.
"That," he said, "is the first true thing you've told me in eleven years."
"It won't be the last if you stop calling me on a private line to ask it."
"I'm not asking you for terms. I'm asking what I'm about to sell." Something almost like humor returned to his voice, dry and tired. "I'd like to know, for once, whether the thing I'm buying is going to hurt the person holding it."
"Then don't buy it."
"Four hours and forty minutes," Kestrel said. "I'm holding you to it. I'm holding myself to it. Don't make me be reasonable past that."
The line clicked off.
Vash stood with the handheld against her chest. Across the bay, Tobin had pulled the lid of the crate a finger's width open, peering into the padding with a penlight. He wasn't touching it. He shut the lid again when he saw her looking.
"Forty-two," he said. "Since you asked."
"Don't tell me the number again."
"Yes, ma'am."
The next four hours were the slowest Vash could remember.
They spent them on small, necessary work, because there was nothing else to spend them on. Tobin hauled a portable generator down from the transport on a sled, grumbling, and spent an hour coaxing the old ore lift's winch back to life with a wire brush and a bottle of solvent that smelled of lemons and rot. He tested the cable himself. He hung a bucket of rock on the hook, ran it up forty meters and down again, and wrote the load in grease pencil on the wall. Then he stood looking at the bucket with the expression of a man who has just discovered how little he trusts his own arithmetic.
"It held," Vash said.
"It held a bucket."
"It'll hold us."
"It'll hold us if," said Tobin, and went to find more solvent.
Dara copied the last of the groove pattern into her notebook and labeled the pages. She worked at the end of the loading bay under a clamp lamp, bent over the book with a pencil behind her ear and another in her fist, and every twenty minutes or so she stopped, flexed her fingers, and looked at the crate. She did not touch it. Vash noticed that, and noticed that she noticed, and set it aside.
Vash wrote the survey log twice. The first copy was for the Cartwright Foundation, in the flat, careful language of a funded project: Chamber located per charts, entry via structural seam, object recovered and secured pending analysis. The second was for herself. It ran to six pages and had no adjectives. It listed what she had seen, what she had heard, which of her instruments had lied to her, and which she suspected of it. At the bottom, in the space where she usually wrote her thoughts, she wrote I don't know what this is and then, because it was a log and she was an honest woman when she wasn't being paid, I want it to be mine.
She read that last line three times. She didn't cross it out.
At the second hour the weight on the load cell read forty-four kilos. At the third it read forty-five and a half. The sound, which she had tried and failed all day to ignore, became a thing with a shape. It wasn't a hum and it wasn't a whine. It was a held breath at the very bottom of the room, so low that it seemed to come up through the soles of her boots, and when she stood in the middle of the bay and closed her eyes, she could almost, almost, tell where one note ended and the next began.
"You hear it better in the dark," Tobin said, from behind her.
She hadn't heard him come. "Do you?"
"I do. I turned off the lamp earlier. It's louder. It's like it likes the dark." He laughed, a short dry sound. "Don't say it. I know how that sounds."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say it's the rock."
"I was going to say it's the rock," Vash admitted. "But I'm tired of saying it."
They stood together in the cold, listening. Down the shaft, very far off, a drop of water fell, and rang against iron, and the ring went on a little longer than a drop's ring should.
She didn't sleep. At the four-hour mark, Priya's voice cut in from the relay, low and suddenly alert.
"Vash. You said to tell you when I see a sky that isn't empty."
"Tell me."
"It's a big one."
The transporter took four tries.
O'Brien's voice, apologetic, had warned Picard before they stepped onto the pad. The ore in the crust was scattering the lock, and the coordinates Vash's survey transport was broadcasting kept drifting a few centimeters on every cycle, as if the ground were moving under the beam. The fourth attempt held. The transporter room dissolved, and the rock walls of a mining gallery resolved around Picard, cold and close and lit by a single work lamp, with the smell of old iron and standing water.
Worf was at his shoulder, phaser holstered, tricorder already open. "Captain. I am reading the same gravitational variance Starfleet reported. It fluctuates. I also read a periodic acoustic signature in the range of twenty-one hundred hertz."
"A sound?"
"Faint. I do not hear it."
"I do," Picard said, before he had decided whether to admit it.
Vash came out of the dark at a pace that was not quite a run, dirt on her hands, her jacket sleeves pushed up, her hair tied back with something that looked like a length of cable insulation. She had changed in two years. She was thinner, and there were new lines at her mouth, and her eyes had the brightness of someone who had not slept and had decided not to mention it.
"You came," she said.
"You asked."
"I said don't ask why."
"You did." He let himself have the smallest measure of satisfaction. "I chose to read that as permission rather than instruction."
"Of course you did." Something cracked in her voice, briefly, into a warmth she recovered from almost as quickly as it showed. She covered it the way she always had, by moving, and waved him and Worf toward the dark. "You have the worst timing in the galaxy and exactly the timing I needed. Both at once. It's infuriating how well that describes you."
"I'll take it as a compliment."
"Don't. It wasn't entirely one."
He fell into step beside her. The two years since he had last seen her collapsed into something smaller than the distance had been, and he found himself grateful, not for the first time, that Starfleet had taught him a professional register capable of holding several things at once without any of them showing.
"There is a formality I owe you before we begin," he said.
"Of course there is."
"Admiral Sorokin has asked that I place you under Starfleet protection. Formally, with a witness. Commander Worf has agreed to serve."
"I am the witness," Worf said.
Vash stopped walking. "Protection."
"Yes."
"That's a cage with a nicer name."
"It is a cage I can open from the inside." He met her eyes. "If it becomes necessary to do so."
She regarded him for a long second, and he watched her weigh the offer, the rank, the admiral, and whatever else two years of not calling had left between them. "Not yet," she said.
"Not yet," Picard agreed. "I will record that you declined, and that I explained the terms."
"You're a terrible liar, Jean-Luc."
"I am an accurate one. It's considered a different skill."
She did not quite smile. "Kestrel's deadline," she said, as they walked, "is thirty-one minutes from now. He has three people on the surface, one drone over the shaft, and a ship with guns. He also hears it. The sound. He called to ask me what it was."
"What did you tell him?"
"The truth. That I don't know." She glanced sideways. "It went over badly."
"Honesty with Mr. Kestrel seems to be a novelty."
"You have no idea." She led them on.
The loading bay was wide, low, and ugly, with hydraulic arms frozen at the angles they had held when the company died. Two people stood beside a load frame. The man was broad, gray at the temples, with a scanner held in both hands like a tray. The woman beside him was young, dark-haired, and looked at Picard with an expression that made him think of a good student asked a question she already knew the answer to.
"Captain." Vash's voice had changed. She was working now. "Tobin Hale, my technician. Dara Liang. Dara, Tobin, this is Captain Picard and Lieutenant Commander Worf."
"Mr. Hale. Ms. Liang," Worf said.
"Captain." Dara crossed the space and offered her hand. The grip was firm and dry, the hand of someone who had held tools all her life. "Dara Liang. I've worked with Vash four years."
"Vash speaks warmly of very few people, Ms. Liang. I gather you're one of them."
"She's generous when she's tired." Dara's smile was quick and unguarded, free of the wariness he had half expected from anyone who had spent years inside Vash's orbit. "I try to earn it."
He liked her at once. It was the ordinary liking one gave a person for no better reason than a firm handshake and an honest answer. He filed it the way he filed most first impressions, provisionally, and with the private hope that nothing would ever require him to revise it.
"This is it?" He looked past them at the crate. It was a plain ore-sample case, dented, strapped to the frame with cargo webbing. A faint tone seemed to rise from it, or from the floor beneath it. He could not tell which.
"That's it." Vash rapped a knuckle on the lid. "Three layers of padding. Nobody's touched it bare-handed, which was a rule I set and intend to keep. It's gained six kilos since we lifted it."
"Gained."
"Tobin's scale. Dara's load cell, and Dara's load cell checked against a reference weight. The numbers aren't drifting. They're climbing."
Worf had swept the crate with his tricorder twice already. "The readings here are stronger than at the entrance. Approximately seven times."
"It is a small object," Picard said.
"It's a small object that doesn't behave like one." Vash crouched and began releasing the webbing. "I'm opening the padding for an imaging pass. We want a record before anyone moves it again. If Kestrel contests the find, or the Foundation does, or Starfleet does, I want documentation that holds up."
"A sensible precaution." Picard watched Worf's scan resolve into the same stubborn inconsistency that Sorokin's science division had apparently spent an afternoon arguing about. "Though I would feel more prudent if I understood what we are being careful of."
"That makes two of us, Captain," Dara said.
Vash peeled back the top layer of padding, then the second. The orb appeared a little at a time, the way a thing surfaces from water. It was dark and dense, a sphere a little under a meter across, and when Picard leaned closer he saw that it did not quite touch the last layer of padding beneath it. A hair's width of nothing held it in place.
He had stood in front of many remarkable objects in a career that had taken him through the tombs of four civilizations and a number of other places he was not cleared to describe. This one did nothing. It simply was, with a patience that felt, absurdly, like attention.
"Dara," Vash said, without turning. "The marker for the imaging pass. Gloves on."
"Gloves on," Dara said.
She took a small calibrated marker from her kit and stepped to the crate's far side. Picard watched her put it in her left hand. He watched her stop, for half a second, and look at the gloves on her right hand as though she were reading something written on the fabric.
Then she pulled the right glove off.
It was done smoothly, without hurry, and Picard saw it only because he happened to be looking at her. Vash was bent over her scanner. Tobin was watching the readout. Worf was watching the gallery. Dara set the marker against the orb's base with her left hand, and with her bare right she reached out and touched the dark surface, lightly, just beside it.
She went still.
It lasted two seconds, perhaps three. Long enough that Picard noticed. Not long enough that anyone not watching her would have. Her hand rested flat against the orb, her expression settling into something he could not name, somewhere between recognition and its opposite. She looked like a person who has come home to a house she had been told was empty, and found the table laid.
Then it passed. She withdrew her hand. She drew the glove back on, flexing her fingers once, and stepped away from the crate.
"Marker's set," she said. Her voice gave nothing away beyond the faint, careful evenness of someone choosing every word. "Ready when you are, Vash."
Vash did not look up from her scanner. "Good. Thank you."
Picard did. He went on watching Dara's face a moment longer than he had any reason to, and said nothing, and filed this impression beside the first one, provisionally, with far less hope that nothing would ever require him to revise it.