Part One — The Crack in the Tomb · The Threnody
Chapter Five
Doria Minor — Present Day
Riker's voice came through Picard's combadge at twenty-two minutes to the deadline, calm and flat in the way Vash was learning meant trouble.
"Captain. A second craft has launched from the unregistered vessel. Six occupants, armored, no transponder. It is not on Kestrel's profile. It's headed for the shaft."
Picard did not look at Vash. "Distance?"
"Two minutes to ground."
"Mister O'Brien?" Picard tapped the badge again. "Can you beam us out of here?"
"Not from down there, sir." O'Brien sounded as if he were apologizing to the rock. "The ore's scattering the lock. I can reach anything within forty meters of the surface and not a centimeter deeper. Anything below that, I'd get you back in pieces, if I got you back at all."
Vash was already counting. The loading bay sat two hundred meters down. The shaft's main hoist ran straight up the center, a wire-cage elevator the company had left rusting in its housing. The ladder was faster for a person and useless for a crate that had been forty-six kilos when Tobin last lifted it.
"There is an alternative," Picard said, in the voice of a man reading a clause aloud. "We leave the object here. Your shaft, your claim. Kestrel's people and the Consortium take it or they don't, and we walk out with our lives and a great many questions."
"You won't do that."
"No." He didn't look away from her. "I won't. But I am obliged to have said it."
"Noted for the record." Vash nodded at the gallery. "The lift. Tobin."
"Generator's hooked up." He was already moving. "Forty seconds to spin it. Four minutes up. If the cable holds."
"Does it hold?"
"It held on the test." He hesitated. "We did the test with a bucket."
The handheld on Vash's belt buzzed before she could answer. Not the relay. The private channel. She knew the voice before she thumbed it on.
"Vash. They aren't mine."
"Roan—"
"Listen to me. Shuttle two is backer's escort. It was aboard when I left Sera. I wasn't told, and I wasn't meant to be told." His voice was flat and clear and very fast. "They'll come down the front. They've got a breaching sled. Don't come up the front."
"Who's paying them?"
"Who do you think." The line hissed. "Don't let them take it. And don't let them take you."
He cut the channel. Vash stood for the half-second that it took to decide whether she believed him. Then she realized that she had already started moving.
The lift cage was a box of rusted mesh, two meters by three, with a gate that closed on a chain and a control panel that had been dead for twenty-five years and was now hotwired to a generator the size of a coffee table.
Worf examined the cable before he let anyone board.
He did it in silence, with the dispassion of a butcher. He ran a gloved hand along three meters of the rusted steel, turned his tricorder on the winch, and listened with his head tilted to the long groaning tick of the generator. Then he stepped back and looked at Tobin for what felt like a very long time.
"It will hold," he said.
"You're sure?"
"I am not sure. It will probably hold."
"Probably." Tobin swallowed. "Is that, uh, a Klingon word?"
"It is a Starfleet word. I have learned to use it." Worf put the tricorder away. "A Klingon would say that it will hold, or that it will not, and die in either case with perfect confidence. I find that I prefer the other way."
"I thought you'd say that."
"I am surprised you thought of me at all." The ghost of a smile crossed his scarred face and was gone. "Board the lift. If it fails, I will catch you."
"You'll what?"
"It is a figure of speech," said Worf.
Tobin slammed the lever. The cage shuddered, gave a long grinding groan like a door in a haunted house, and rose.
Dara and Tobin crouched on either side of the crate, bracing it with their knees. Worf stood at the gate with his phaser drawn. Picard stood beside Vash. Nobody spoke.
The gallery walls slid down past them, black and rough, lit only by the cage's single work lamp. Two hundred meters. One hundred eighty. A hundred and sixty. Somewhere above, the tone rose a fraction, a high sustained note at the edge of hearing, and Vash thought it had grown louder since the loading bay. Nobody had told her whether that was possible.
"Vash." Picard spoke so quietly that only she could hear. "When we reach the ship, I will ask you what this is. I would like to hear the answer I'd hear if I weren't a captain."
"That's the same answer, Jean-Luc. I don't know."
"Yes. I was afraid of that."
"Afraid?"
"You have never said it before." The faintest dry edge came into his voice. "I find it unsettling."
She nearly laughed. The cage groaned past another seam in the rock, and her laugh turned into something with less breath in it.
"Commander," Picard said quietly.
"I hear them." Worf's voice was low. "Above. Ladder shaft. Eight, perhaps ten meters overhead."
Vash heard it too, the ring of boots on iron rungs, unhurried and coordinated. Six people coming down a service ladder, in armor, in the dark. They weren't rushing. They didn't need to. The lift was a box in a tube, and the tube had one exit.
"Ninety meters to the surface mark," Tobin said. "We need to be above the hundred-and-sixty line."
"We're at a hundred fifty-five."
"Then we've got sixty seconds."
The first shot hit the cage roof, a hard flat crack, and sparks sprayed across the mesh.
Worf fired back before the echo finished. The phaser beam lit the shaft blue-white, and for a moment Vash saw everything: the ladder, the armor, a figure thrown back against the wall, the cable running past them into the dark. Then the dark came down again, and someone above began to shoot in earnest.
"Down!" Picard pulled Vash behind the crate. Bullets rang off the cage, tearing at the mesh. Tobin flattened across the load frame. Dara crouched with both arms around the crate's far corner, her face bloodless and very calm.
"We're thirty seconds from the line," Tobin yelled. "Twenty-five!"
"Worf—"
"They have the angle." Worf fired again, two quick bursts. "I cannot advance without losing cover."
Vash looked up. She wasn't a soldier. She had never wanted to be one. She had spent most of her life in places where soldiers had been, reading what they'd left, and the thing you learned from reading a battlefield afterward was that people broke things in predictable places.
Above the cage, ten meters up, a line of rock anchors ran along the gallery roof. The company had driven them in decades ago to hold up a timber frame that had long since rotted away. The bolts were still there. They were under load. Two of them were already weeping rust.
"Give me the rifle."
Tobin shoved it across the floor. She came up on one knee, braced the stock against her hip, and fired into the nearest anchor. The survey rifle was a bolt driver, nothing more, a tool for pinning sensor arrays to basalt. The bolt went in where the anchor met the stone, and the anchor let go with a crack like a snapped bone.
She fired again. And again.
The roof groaned. A slab the size of a door peeled slowly off the gallery wall and slid down across the ladder shaft, taking a length of iron rung with it. The shooting above stopped. A scream came down with the dust, cut off. Then a long, heavy, grinding sound, and a curtain of broken rock filled the tube between the cage and the men above it.
The dust cleared. The tone rose, for an instant, like something drawing breath.
"We're at the line!" Tobin shouted. "One sixty! One sixty-three!"
"Enterprise!" Picard slapped his badge. "Mister O'Brien, now!"
"Captain, I've got you." O'Brien's voice was tight. "Five signals. One object. I'm going to take the object and two of you first, and then come back for—"
"Take Liang and Hale and the crate," Picard said. "We'll follow."
"Aye, sir. Energizing."
Dara rose from her crouch. She looked at Vash, once, across the crate. Vash would remember that look afterward, long afterward, turning it over on sleepless nights for a meaning she hadn't had the context to read. It was not fear. It wasn't triumph. It was an apology that hadn't yet found its reason.
"It'll be all right," Dara said.
Then the cage light gave way to gold, and she was gone, and Tobin with her, and the crate.
"Second group," O'Brien said. "Two seconds."
The cable screamed.
Vash felt the whole cage drop. A meter, then two, then the lurch of a steel rope snagging on something and holding. Above them the rock curtain was shifting, letting the dust sift down in long pale threads, and Worf had his phaser up again, sweeping the dark where the boots had been.
"They're cutting the cable," Worf said.
"How?"
"Charge." A flat, dry statement. "Mounted on the shaft wall. They planted it on the way down."
Picard caught Vash by the arm. "Mister O'Brien—"
"Sir, I'm trying, the lock's jumping—"
"Then try faster."
"Aye!"
The cable parted with a sound like a cannon shot.
The world dropped out from beneath them. Vash's stomach went into her throat. She had time for one clear thought, which was an irrelevant one, I never finished my paper, and then something cold closed around her and the mesh and the dust and the dark all vanished into a column of gold.
The transporter room smelled of ozone and rubber and human sweat. Vash landed on her hands and knees on the pad, her pulse hammering, rock dust pouring off her clothes.
"Got them," O'Brien said. "All three. Sir, I've got them."
Picard was already on his feet, one hand on Worf's shoulder, one on his badge. "Number One. Report."
"Priya's transport lifted off three minutes ago, sir. She came across the plain with her running lights on and every comm channel open, as loud as she could, drew the drone and two of the shuttle crew away from the shaft. She's in our shuttlebay now. Says she'd like her pay doubled."
"Tell her it is under consideration. And the Consortium shuttle?"
"Disabled. We put a phaser across the skids when they tried to take off. No casualties on their side that we can see. Kestrel's ship did not fire."
Vash heard that last sentence as if from a distance. Kestrel's ship hadn't fired. She didn't know what to do with it yet. She put it aside.
Dara sat on the transporter platform with her knees drawn up, her arms around them, her eyes on something far away. Tobin knelt beside the crate, running a scanner across its lid with hands that shook.
"Forty-eight kilos," he said hoarsely. "It gained two on the beam."
"Is that possible?" Picard asked.
"I'd have said no. But I'd have said a lot of things no this morning."
Vash dragged herself to her feet. Her shoulder hurt. There was a long scrape down her left forearm that she hadn't noticed getting. She looked at the crate, and the orb inside it, and the long gray transporter room, bright and clean and ordinary after a dead world's dark.
"Sir," O'Brien said. He was frowning at his console. He had one hand halfway to his ear, and the gesture stopped, as if he had realized what he was doing. "Is someone humming?"
No one answered.
No one was. The room held eight people, and none of their mouths were moving. But everyone, she saw, everyone, Picard and Worf and Tobin and the two technicians and Dara on the platform, had gone quite still, their faces turned, slowly and without any sign of having decided to, toward the crate.
The tone wasn't faint anymore.