Part One — The Crack in the Tomb · The Threnody
Chapter Six
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
The numbers, Vash decided, were worse when they were clean.
Data had built the display himself, a soft-edged sphere of translucent blue hung in the center of the science lab's main screen, with the orb's position marked at its core like the pupil of an eye. Four hours after the transporter, the tone had faded to something you could only hear if you were listening, and every person who had been in that room had since admitted, reluctantly and separately to Dr. Crusher, that they had.
"Six independent readings," Data said, "across three instrument classes. All show the same drift."
"Walk me through it," Picard said.
"Yes, sir." Data touched the display. The sphere pulsed once, gently, as if breathing. "Within a radius that I currently measure at eleven point two meters, the local gravitational constant differs from Federation standard by four hundredths of a percent. The local speed of light differs by two thousandths of a percent. Both figures are small. Both are in the same direction."
"Instrument error?" Riker asked, from the back of the room.
"I have run the measurements forty times with independent equipment. Random error scatters. This does not." Data's head tilted. "I also note that the specific heat capacity of ordinary hydrogen has shifted within the field. It should not be a variable."
Geordi La Forge turned from his console, visor catching the light. "That's the one that keeps me up. Gravity I can fudge. Light speed I can pretend is a calibration issue. But you can't fudge what hydrogen does when you heat it. That's chemistry. That's the floor the chemistry stands on."
"How much has the field grown?" Picard said.
"Forty centimeters in the four hours since arrival," Data said. "The rate is not constant. It is consistently positive."
Vash stood at the back of the lab, arms crossed, with a bruised shoulder and a fresh dressing on her forearm. She had eaten a sandwich she didn't remember making. She had put on a borrowed uniform jacket two sizes too large and had been glad of the warmth. She watched the sphere breathe on the screen, and she thought about a hand-cut room, and a hair's width of nothing under a dark, patient weight.
"What happens at the wall?" she asked.
Geordi glanced at her. "Sorry?"
"The field's growing. The containment bay has walls. The bay's in the ship, the ship's in space. What happens when the field gets to the edge of the room?"
"Containment field's holding," Geordi said. "For now. 'For now' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If the growth rate keeps accelerating at even half what we've seen, we're looking at needing a lot more room than a bay in about sixty hours. Conservatively."
"And if it does not slow," Data said, "the mathematics beyond that point become considerably less comfortable to state."
"I don't like considerably," Riker said.
"I do not like it either, Commander. I use it because it is accurate."
Vash uncrossed her arms and recrossed them. "Then here's a question nobody's asked yet. The room on Doria Minor. The chamber where we found it. Is the drift still happening down there, now that the orb's gone?"
Data and Geordi exchanged a look that told Vash, before either of them spoke, what the answer was going to be.
"We have not allocated sensor resources to monitoring the original site," Data said. "Our working assumption was that the phenomenon was intrinsic to the object and would travel with it. I acknowledge that this assumption was not tested."
"You're telling me nobody's checking whether we left something behind that's still growing."
"I am telling you that it is now an open question. I will route a request through the long-range relay. I would not expect a useful answer within the hour."
"Then let's not leave it open a moment longer than necessary," Picard said. "Mister Data, allocate what you need."
Vash studied the pulsing sphere. The survey charts had erased this exact spot. Not flagged it unstable. Erased. She had seen concealment before, and the usual reason was that somebody was hiding treasure.
"This isn't treasure," she said, half to herself.
Picard turned his head. "No?"
"I've done this twenty years. When someone hides a thing, it's a treasure. Or it's a crime. This reads like somebody hiding a warning." She met his eyes. "I don't know whether that's better or worse."
Admiral Sorokin's face resolved on the ready room screen with the controlled stillness of someone who had decided how angry she would allow herself to appear and had settled on a good deal angrier than last time.
"Captain. I asked for quiet."
"Admiral."
"I received a report of an armed exchange with an unregistered vessel on an unclaimed world outside Federation space. I received it from the Outpost Fourteen watch officer, who received it from a civilian subspace broadcast. I didn't receive it from you." She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "You were told to keep a modest footprint. Explain how those instructions arrived at this outcome."
"A second armed team landed while my away party was still on the surface, Admiral. They were not Kestrel's. They fired on the lift carrying four civilians, one of whom holds no Starfleet protection and had declined it twice. I authorized a phaser shot across the skids of their shuttle. No one was killed." He kept his voice level and free of excuse, because he had learned over a long career that Sorokin heard excuses as weakness and facts as respect. "I regret the outcome. I do not believe a different decision was available."
"Noted." The expression did not change. "The anomaly."
He gave it to her plainly. The drift. The eleven point two meters. La Forge's sixty hours. She listened without moving, and he watched the stillness tighten, fractionally, as each number arrived.
"That's worse than what my own people told me an hour ago." Her voice lost none of its precision. It gained something harder. "There's something else you should hear. Forty minutes ago a Vantir Consortium liaison called my office and requested a courtesy briefing on, quote, Federation activity in the Keldan Reach. He mentioned the Enterprise by name. He mentioned Doria Minor."
Picard felt the room cool a degree. "Five people knew."
"Five people knew. You, me, Commander Riker, Director Halvane in Science, and Lieutenant Commander Voss." She said the names without inflection. "I've asked Voss to trace the inquiry. I'm telling you because I don't intend to discuss this aboard a ship with any more ears than necessary."
"You suspect a leak."
"I suspect nothing. I'm reporting a fact." A pause. "Here is what happens next. The Sarek is three days out and far better equipped for long-term anomaly containment than a flagship on an open survey. You will transfer the object to her when she arrives. Starfleet Science will take custody of the investigation. Your involvement concludes when the transfer does."
He felt the decision arrive the way real decisions usually did, not as impulse but as the quiet recognition that he had made it some time earlier without noticing.
"Admiral, with respect, I do not believe that is the correct course."
Something flickered across her face that might, on a more expressive officer, have been surprise. "Explain."
"Mister La Forge estimates sixty hours before the field exceeds any single vessel's capacity to hold it. The Sarek is three days away. Transfer in transit, under those conditions, is a far greater risk than continuity of custody aboard a ship already tracking the anomaly in real time." He let the pause stand. "There is also Mr. Kestrel and whoever stands behind him. They have attempted to take this object twice. I see no reason they would stop because Starfleet has changed which vessel is holding it. A mid-transit handoff is the single most vulnerable moment we could offer them."
"You want to keep it."
"I want it to survive. At present I am the nearest means of ensuring that."
"And your reading of my order?"
"The order as written says the object transfers to the Sarek when she arrives." He kept his voice steady. "She arrives in three days. Until then, the object is in my custody, and I intend to use that time to learn what it is."
Sorokin studied him for several seconds. "That is a lawyer's reading of an order."
"It is a captain's."
"They aren't always distinguishable, Captain." She breathed out through her nose. He could not tell whether it was anger or something wearier. "Seventy-two hours. After that the Sarek takes custody, and I can't protect you from what a hearing will say about how you spent them. And Ms. Vash is a material witness. She isn't a member of your crew."
"She has declined Starfleet protection."
"Of course she has." Sorokin reached for the control. "Sorokin out."
The screen went dark. He sat looking at it. The last thing she had said, he realized, had not sounded like a warning. It had sounded like permission.
She was waiting for him in the observation lounge, leaning on the window rail with her borrowed jacket sleeves pushed up, looking out at the dead brown curve of Doria Minor where the light from its small sun ran along the terminator like a wire.
"She wants it," Vash said, without turning.
"She wants what is best for the investigation."
"Don't." Vash's voice was tired more than angry. "Don't say it in that voice. She wants it in a facility with a committee and a stardate on the report, and six months from now it's going to be an artifact recovered in the Keldan Reach by Federation personnel. I spent four years on that hole in the rock, Jean-Luc. My name won't be on it."
He stood beside her at the rail. The stars beyond the glass wheeled a fraction as the ship began to move, bringing the dead world around toward its night side. "It may not be."
"You're supposed to tell me it will be."
"I would rather not say a thing I cannot ensure."
She almost laughed. "That's the worst comfort I've ever been offered."
"Yes." He considered her profile. "I have refused the transfer, for now. I've given myself seventy-two hours. If it goes badly, it will be recorded as my decision. Not yours."
"Why?" She finally turned. "Sixty hours is what the engineer said. You could hand it over tomorrow and be rid of it. Why keep it?"
He thought of several answers. The transit risk. Kestrel. The thing he had seen on Dara Liang's face and hadn't been able to name. The sound that none of them could quite stop hearing.
"Because I do not believe anyone else will look at it as carefully as you will," he said. "And because you asked."
She looked at him for a while. Then she looked away, out the window, and her throat moved once as she swallowed.
"Don't do that," she said quietly. "Don't make it sound like a reason."
"It is one of several."
"It's the one I can't argue with."
The comm chimed. Data's voice. "Captain, I apologize for the interruption. I believe you will wish to see something in the science lab."
Dara was already there. She stood beside the main display with her arms folded and her notebook tucked against her ribs. Data stood opposite, a padd in his hand and an expression Vash had learned to read as the closest thing he had to excitement.
"Ms. Liang provided a digital transcription of the plinth's surface pattern," he said. "I have been analyzing it against the acoustic signature the orb emits. The repeat interval of the pattern matches the tone to within a margin I cannot explain as coincidence. The grooves are not decoration. They are a score."
"I wrote that in my log," Vash said. "An hour after we found it."
"You were correct." He touched the padd, and the lab display lit with a dense tangle of curved lines that unfolded, slowly, into three dimensions. "More significantly, when the pattern is projected into three-dimensional space using the tone's own harmonic ratios as coordinates, it resolves into a set of points."
"Points of what?"
"I believe it is a list of places." He paused. "Eleven of them. Three I can already place, approximately, by stellar parallax. I have not yet been able to identify the others."
Silence in the lab. Vash looked at the tangle on the screen and felt a cold, exhilarated drop in her stomach, the feeling of a map resolving out of noise.
"May I see the original transcription?" Data asked, turning to Dara. "The notebook, rather than the scan. The pressure of the pencil might preserve information that the digitization flattened."
Dara's arms tightened very slightly around the notebook. "It's my field journal. Personal notes and sketches. I'd rather not have it out of my hands." She smiled at him, warm and apologetic. "I can rescan any page at higher resolution. Would that help?"
"It would be acceptable," Data said.
"Then I'll do it tonight."
"Thank you."
Nobody said anything else. Vash watched Dara's face and saw nothing in it but mild, helpful fatigue. She noticed that she was looking very closely, the way a person looks at a chart she has already checked twice. She made herself stop.
She looked at the screen instead. Eleven points of light against an unmapped dark. She understood, abruptly, that the orb hadn't been left in that room to be found. It had been left there to be followed.
"Sir," La Forge said. "Long-range relay's answered. Doria Minor."
"Put it up," Picard said.
The display cleared. A column of numbers scrolled. Data read them once and went perfectly still.
"The drift at the original site has not stopped," he said. "It has decreased to approximately eight percent of its prior rate. It is still growing."
"Without the orb," Picard said.
"Without the orb, sir. Something is still down there."
Vash felt the cold reach her hands, and closed them, slowly, into fists. Beneath the lab's hum, beneath the hush of a dozen people not breathing, the tone rose a fraction, and held.