What Price Honor? Read online

  Static. Then silence. Then more static, and what sounded like the word “separating.”

  Reed tried to boost his signal, and saw he was already at maximum.

  “I say again,” he tried, practically shouting, “what is your situation?”

  Her reply was inaudible.

  “Damn,” Reed said.

  “Not a surprise. This thing’s just about useless, too.” Trip snapped the tricorder shut. “Pretty clear where we’re going, anyway.”

  “I’d prefer we knew what was waiting there,” Reed said.

  “Yeah, well…” Trip’s voice trailed off. “We don’t.”

  They walked on, Reed still in the lead. He set a faster pace, wishing that he’d been more insistent about beaming down a fuller security complement. Especially once he’d seen how much the power source ahead of them was affecting their tricorders. Whoever had attacked the outpost could be waiting in the central chamber for them. For the captain.

  Procedure, Reed thought. There need to be standard landing party regulations for this kind of situation.

  He knew how that suggestion would go over with the captain. Archer liked being in the thick of things, having the ability to gauge a situation for himself rather than sitting on his hands, tied by regulations. Reed felt just the opposite—to his way of thinking, regulations made quicker decision-making possible, particularly in time-sensitive situations. Regulations eliminated the gray areas. Regulations—

  He thought of Alana, in her quarters, the Corbett wet and ruined on the table behind her.

  “Malcolm,” she’d said. “It’s a stupid regulation.”

  In the tunnel, Reed turned to his left and reached for the com. Time to check in on her. And the others, of course.

  That motion saved his life.

  As he turned, he glimpsed a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye, about waist-high. He’d been walking too fast, preoccupied with his thoughts, or he would have seen it before. He should have seen it before. A pencil-thin beam, stretching across the tunnel.

  Rather, it would have been, had he not been standing in its path.

  An alarm. A booby trap. And he’d tripped it.

  The next few seconds seemed to happen in slow motion.

  “Back!” he shouted over the com without turning, because he was still walking forward, and he had to use that momentum, as he yelled he pushed off with his right foot and jumped, and in the lighter gravity of the planetoid felt for a second as if he were flying.

  Then the force of the explosion caught him, and he really was flying, windmilling through the air, vaguely aware of the tunnel walls hurtling past him.

  He slammed into the ground face-first, and heard something crack.

  My helmet. Explosive decompression, he thought, his heart racing, his mind picturing the alien corpses above, expecting to feel the air rushing out of his suit any second.

  But nothing happened.

  He lay there a moment, stunned, then got to his feet. Something in his neck was twisted—but otherwise he seemed fine. Miraculous.

  He turned around and saw that where the tunnel had been, there was now a mountain of rubble.

  “Trip!” Reed shouted into the com. “Trip!”

  No reply.

  Reed switched to another channel. Still nothing. The blast had happened so quickly—Trip would have had to react instantly to get out of the way. Otherwise…

  “Commander Tucker!” he shouted again. “Are you there? Come in!”

  There was nothing on the com. Not even static.

  He switched to the channel he’d been monitoring Hart on. Still nothing.

  The com could have been damaged in the fall—maybe the cracking he’d heard was the sound of it shattering.

  Or there could be no one out there to hear him. Not Trip, not Alana, not anyone on the captain’s team. Whoever had set this booby trap might have set another.

  He moved back toward the collapsed tunnel, thinking he could dig through it and reach Trip. But once he actually laid his hands on the rubble, he realized instantly that wouldn’t work. The top layer consisted of fragments of the duranium framework—and the pieces were far too heavy to move.

  But maybe he didn’t need to move them.

  He took out his phase pistol and fired it at the biggest piece of rubble he could see. After a single sustained burst, the duranium vaporized.

  Reed smiled tightly, and targeted another piece of rubble.

  Then he saw that single burst had drained the weapons charge by twenty percent.

  He sighed, lowered the pistol, and holstered it. Blasting his way through to Trip wouldn’t work. So the only way to reach him, then, to find out if he was still alive—was to go forward.

  Where—odds were—whoever had set that trap was waiting.

  Reed didn’t have to walk long before a faint yellow glow appeared ahead of him. Drawing the phase pistol again, he inched along the tunnel wall until he was right next to that light. Then he leaned around the corner. He glimpsed orange-yellow light and, beyond it, the suggestion of open space.

  He flattened himself against the wall again and waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Nothing. No reaction.

  He looked again, longer this time. No sign of movement. He stepped out into the center of the tunnel.

  The light filled the opening before him, shimmering and throbbing with a life of its own. It obscured whatever lay beyond, like a curtain of opaque material, though he again got the sense of a large open space, with some rough shapes and bright colors visible. Any details, however, eluded him.

  Reed reached out with one hand and touched the light.

  It pulsed with energy. He felt it through his glove. A forcefield of some kind, he guessed.

  Reed pushed on it with his hand—gently at first, then harder.

  His arm went through the curtain into the chamber beyond.

  He cried out in surprise, and pulled back. He looked his arm over carefully, searching for signs of damage to the suit, and found none. He pushed his arm through the light again, and then pulled it out. He shook it in the air, once, twice. Nothing wrong with the suit. Nothing wrong with him.

  He took a deep breath, and stepped forward. For a second, it was like trying to walk under water. He felt resistance. He pushed through it, and into the chamber.

  The light inside was much brighter than it had appeared from without. No longer an orange-yellow glow, but a yellowish white—the harsh glare of a spotlight. He blinked once as his eyes adjusted. The chamber came into focus. He took it all in with a single, sweeping glance.

  It was circular, perhaps oval, sixty feet around. The floor was the same sandy color as the tunnels had been, the steel gray walls gently sloping upward to a dome perhaps twenty feet above him. Spaced all around the chamber, every half-dozen feet, were openings like the one he’d just come through, filled with the same kind of pulsing curtain of light.

  In front of one of those, almost directly across from him, something lay on the ground. He moved closer, and saw it was an environmental suit—one of Enterprise’s. Almost instantly, he realized who it belonged to.

  Alana.

  Why had she taken it off? Had someone taken it off her? Didn’t matter. Without the suit, she was dead. Unless…

  Reed reached down to his side, and found the tricorder still attached to his suit. Thank God the blast hadn’t torn it loose. He flipped it open and checked the atmosphere inside the chamber. Four-to-one nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio, a smattering of other inert gases…

  Breathable.

  He took off his helmet, and surveyed the chamber again.

  Where was she?

  He glanced down at the tricorder. No life signs anywhere within range, but…

  He was reading a minute variation in air temperature—coming, he realized an instant later, from the ground, where her environmental suit lay.

  Body heat, he realized a second later. The chamber was on the cool side—and Alana had left traces of her presence here in the in
creased temperature readings he was picking up.

  If he was quick enough, he could use those to track her.

  Seconds later, he’d recalibrated the tricorder. Not much after that, he was standing in front of another of the chamber openings. The readings indicated she’d gone through here.

  Putting away the tricorder, he drew his phase pistol and stepped through the curtain of light before him.

  This time, it was not so much like walking under water as pushing through a huge snowdrift. The skin on his face tingled, as if warmed by a very bright sun.

  He pushed on. Ten seconds, he estimated. Fifteen. Suddenly, the resistance was gone. The light was dimmer, the air thinner, filled with a faint, lingering smell that he couldn’t quite place, and Reed looked up and saw he was in one corner of the single largest interior space he’d ever seen in his life.

  He tilted his head back and could see no roof. He looked across and could barely make out the opposite wall.

  At first he thought it was a cave—a vast chamber carved out of the planetoid itself by natural geologic processes. Then he took in the sharp angles of the walls as they pitched upward to the ceiling and out of sight, the smooth floor, and realized he was wrong.

  He was inside the pyramid he’d seen from the shuttle.

  It was bigger than he would have guessed—it had to be a quarter mile from the corner he stood in to the one opposite him. And though his first impression had been of a vast, empty space, he saw now that he was wrong, that the chamber was full of freestanding structures, the size of a man, the shape of a book stood on its end. There had to be hundreds of them—maybe even thousands. They reminded him of nothing so much as tombstones.

  He took out his tricorder and scanned for life signs again. Still nothing. If Alana was here, she was hidden. Which was quite possible given the fact that the entire pyramid—the floors, the walls, even the tombstone-like structures scattered around the chamber—seemed to be composed of the same alloy he’d detected from space. Or rather, hadn’t been able to detect.

  More than ever, Reed wanted a sample of it.

  He stepped forward, and suddenly became aware of a noise, barely audible, coming from very nearby.

  It sounded like someone talking, though he couldn’t pick out what was being said, much less identify the voice. Or voices.

  He drew his phase pistol again, and stepped forward carefully, in the direction the noise was coming from, trying to be as quiet as possible. As he walked, he became aware again of the odor he had smelled when first entering the pyramid.

  And this time, he was able to place it.

  It was the smell of electricity—the air crackled with it. Instinctively he knew he was in the middle of whatever had been causing all the distortion in their sensor readings.

  That smell took him back twenty years, back to Earth, the summer after his disastrous second year of school, when his parents had sent him to spend time with his aunt and uncle at their country estate in Sussex. One night, a series of lightning strikes had burned down several cottages on the grounds. Reed remembered standing with his aunt and uncle on a hill overlooking the estate, smelling not just the fire, but the air around him.

  “It smells like a pool,” he remembered saying to his uncle.

  “Like chlorine, Malcolm,” the man had said. “You get that smell when electricity passes through oxygen. That’s what makes ozone.”

  Reed had stayed silent then, watching the storm rage, feeling the electricity, the power gathered in the air around him.

  He felt the same kind of power here, and wondered what it was all for.

  Reed walked on, the noise drawing him toward the center of the pyramid, staying behind the tombstone-like structures as much as possible, well aware that he could be heading right toward whoever had set that the booby trap for him.

  The farther in he went toward the center, the easier that got to do. The rectangles became more concentrated—it was like walking through a graveyard, dodging from tombstone to tombstone, trying to remain unseen.

  Then he stepped out from behind one of the larger stones and saw Alana.

  For a second he was paralyzed, unable to move.

  Reed had been in deep space for over a year. He’d seen a lot in that time—death, and some things he thought worse than death: the captain and Trip half-absorbed by an alien creature. The Suliban rebels blown to pieces by the Cabal. Even before Enterprise, he’d been witness to some fairly gruesome sights. As a cadet, he was touring the Cochrane Research Facility on Sirius IV when the reactor blew. Twenty people were trapped in the radioactive core—he stood in the shielded observation room and watched them die. One of those twenty had been a fellow cadet—a first-year named John Mayhill, an English boy whom Reed had never really gotten to know.

  Mayhill’s last few hours he spent standing opposite Reed, the two of them staring at each other and talking over a comlink from opposite sides of the window. The weaker Mayhill got, the braver he seemed to become, the more stoic. Try hard as he could, Reed had been just the opposite. He couldn’t keep the tears from flowing when the boy was no longer strong enough to stand.

  Once in a while, Reed still had nightmares about that day.

  But even that hadn’t affected him the way looking at Alana did right now.

  She lay on the ground directly in front of the rectangular shapes—only to use the word lay was wrong, because she wasn’t just lying there, she was twitching, her arms and legs flailing everywhere, and he would have called it a seizure, except he’d never seen a seizure like this before.

  She was in agony.

  The words coming out of her mouth were gibberish.

  Sickbay, Reed thought, and even though he knew it was useless, he dropped his phase pistol on the ground and flipped open his communicator.

  Nothing but static.

  He dropped down next to Alana, and took her shoulders. She shook uncontrollably, randomly, like a drop of water splattering its way across a hot griddle. As if a thousand volts of electricity were shooting through her.

  “Easy,” Reed said. “I’m here. It’s all right. I’m here.”

  His words had no effect.

  He had to get her back to Enterprise. Now. Which meant carrying her back to the chamber where her suit was, and back through the tunnels to the shuttlecraft.

  He couldn’t do that while she was seizing like this.

  For a second, he thought about stunning her with the phase pistol. He glanced around, looking to see where he’d dropped it.

  His eyes fell on a man lying on the ground ten feet away. He’d been hidden from Reed’s view by one of the stones. No, not a man. An alien. His skin pale, almost translucent. His eyes were open wide as well.

  Wide, and unseeing. He looked dead. Who was he? Did he have something to do with what had happened to Alana?

  On the ground next to him, Reed’s tricorder started beeping. Life signs approaching.

  He heard voices behind him, and turned to see Captain Archer, heading toward them at a run.

  Fifteen

  CAPTAIN’S MESS

  1/17/2151 0851 HOURS

  “THREE WORLD WARS,” Archer said. “The last one almost destroyed our planet. It took us a hundred years to rebuild civilization—and reach the stars again.”

  “In such a short span of time—those achievements are remarkable. I congratulate you,” Roan said.

  “Human beings have a hunger for achievement,” Phlox said. “One of the many reasons I took on this assignment—to be a part of their successes.”

  “And your race again, Doctor—Denobulans, you said?”

  Phlox nodded. “Yes. We are relative newcomers to space as well—at least compared to the Vulcans.”

  He smiled at T’Pol, who sat across the table from him. There were six of them crowded into the captain’s mess—Archer and Trip at the two heads of the table, Roan and Phlox on one side, Reed and T’Pol on the other. Most of the conversation had consisted of the captain talking about Star
fleet, and its development, pushing others to get involved at times, letting the commodore focus on eating and getting his strength back.

  “We are all newcomers compared to the Vulcans,” Roan said.

  T’Pol studied him curiously. “You are familiar with our history, then? Our race?”

  “We are.”

  “Surprising. In studying our database, I find no record of any encounters with the Sarkassians.”

  “Oh, we have never met Vulcans. I did not mean to imply otherwise. All I meant to say is that we have knowledge of your people.”

  “How?”

  “Through our records, of course,” Roan said, suddenly looking slightly uncomfortable.

  T’Pol looked to press the question—but the captain spoke first.

  “How’s your food, Commodore?”

  “Excellent. This—” He pointed with his fork to the plate before him.

  “Eggs,” Archer supplied. “An omelette.”

  “A frittata actually, Captain,” Phlox said.

  “Wonderful,” Roan said. “Very substantive.”

  “I believe there’s more,” Archer put in.

  “No, no—I am quite full.” Roan pushed his plate away. “Thank you. You were right about the food on your ship, Lieutenant Reed. Another remarkable achievement. My years of service would have passed much more pleasurably were our cooks able to achieve similar results.”

  “We’ll see if we can get you some recipes,” Archer said.

  “You have made some remarkable technological achievements yourself,” T’Pol said. “The jamming beam Ambassador Valay employed, for example. The level of computing power required to detect and almost instantaneously counter transmissions all across the EM frequency is staggering.”

  Roan nodded. “Yes, it is a staggering achievement.”

  Yet to Reed’s eyes, he seemed uncomfortable talking about it. The captain noticed too.

  “Forgive my saying so, Commodore,” Archer said, “but you don’t sound especially proud of it.”

  “No. I am not.” Roan sighed. “You know, I have been sitting here this entire time, trying to enjoy this excellent meal and yet knowing that it comes at a price—the price of trusting you with a secret my people have kept for hundreds of years.”