Sighing, he said, “That’s not what they pay you for, Ben. Time to clean up the mess.” He vaulted the railing, his tools poking him on the back when he moved his arms. Maxwell awkwardly clung to the steel rail, his feet pressed flat against the stairway’s frame. Bending his knees, he pushed off and dropped down into the darkness, watchful for large chunks of debris.
The railing for the stairway on the opposite side of the core, but one (or possibly two?) deck down, whirled into view, much faster than Maxwell had expected. He was barely able to get his arms up in time, but managed to grab the rail and check his progress by swinging his legs around to brake against the stair. “Not too bad,” he said approvingly. It reminded him of the time he and Maria had gone zip-lining through a forest canopy.
He turned around, aimed, and pushed off again, exerting a little more force this time, mindful of the ticking clock.
Halfway across, he almost collided with something large, curved, and with what looked like a long, hairless tail. The shape barely registered before Maxwell had passed it. He didn’t even have time to shout in surprise before another railing zoomed into view. Maxwell raised his arms and bounced off. Realizing he had missed his chance, Maxwell tried to judge if he was going down or up or simply back toward the center of the core. If he was, he was in big, big trouble. Nothing to push against, nothing to grab.
Instinctively, Maxwell windmilled his arms, feeling foolish even as he did it, knowing it wouldn’t help, but unable to calm the primitive part of his brain that told him he should be able to twist around or rise above the imagined flood tide.
Maxwell’s hand brushed up against something. He grasped it before he could bounce off. If it was large enough, he knew he could throw it and use Newtonian physics to get moving again. He tried to bring the object around and shine his wrist-mounted lamp on it, but was surprised when the movement instead swung his body around.
Whatever he was holding wasn’t ready to move. Maxwell gripped it tighter, steadied himself, and brought the lamp up.
He stared at a line, taut as the cable in a suspension bridge and thick as a climbing rope. One end must have been anchored up above, on the core’s ceiling, while the other end was fixed below. He touched it with the tips of his free hand. Sticky, he thought, but not too sticky. The glue or gum was meant to aid movement, he realized, and not immobilize. He shone the torch from side to side, searching for other threads or for a familiar set of glittering eyes, but saw nothing.
Pointing his head down, Maxwell tugged hand over hand, headed toward the lower decks, careful never to let go.
Reaching the bottom of the core, Maxwell flipped around and reoriented his inner gyroscope, fixing the hatch to the reactor room in his sights. Pressing his feet to the taut cable, he released his grip, pushed off carefully, and sailed across the gap. Grasping the hatch handle, he twisted and pushed while wedging his foot against the bottom step of the stairs.
The hatch swung open without resistance. Good housekeeping, he thought.
The stairwell to the generator room was predictably dark, but a quick sweep with the torch revealed it was unobstructed. It was narrow enough that Maxwell could propel himself down it without worrying about losing an opposable surface. Reaching the end of the corridor, he faced the door to the reactor room, which had been Maxwell’s home, his lair, his place of safety. To his right was a stairwell of only a half-dozen steps that led to the hangar—or, judging from what Nog had said, what was left of it. Tempting, Maxwell thought, pointing the torch down the gloomy stairs, though delusional. The only thing I’ll find down there is open space and certain death. He turned back to the generator room door. As opposed to only almost certain death.
“Really no choice at all,” Maxwell said, and yanked open the hatch.
The lights were all on, and Honey was home. Or, to put it another way, she had made herself at home. Zero gravity was not a problem when you could make web lines to scurry up and down and round and round.
Honey hung in the center of her web about five meters off the deck. She quivered when Maxwell stepped into the room, and her web jittered in response. Behind her, a sickly orange light spilled out of a crack in the generator housing mounted on the bulkhead. Oh, Maxwell thought, with more surprise than he would have expected. I’m dead. And then realized, with more relief than he expected, Or maybe not. If Honey wasn’t dead, no matter how sturdy her alien physiology might be, then the reactor wasn’t spewing out radiation. Not enough to be immediately lethal, anyway.
“To work,” he said aloud, and then suddenly realized how thin the air in his suit felt. He glanced at the gauge on his gauntlet and cursed. Fifteen minutes left, maybe twenty if he stayed calm. Ha!
He approached Honey’s web. Naturally, the controls to shut down the reactor were on the other side. “I have to get past this, Honey. No offense.” Maxwell knew the arachnoform couldn’t hear him, but he also knew she needed to feel safe with him. This is how he usually acted around her: he talked and went about his business. It was their little dance. Maxwell would work, and Honey would hover nearby, watching him, usually from a safe distance.
Maxwell pulled himself along the bulkhead—fortunately festooned with many knobs and handholds—intending to work his way around the room to the point where the control console met the wall. From there, it was only a few meters to the reactor controls. “I’m just going to turn this off, girl. And then we can sit here in the dark together until Miles comes back to get us. Won’t that be fun?” The arachnoform didn’t stir. He added, “Did you know I used to be in Starfleet, where I did all kinds of dangerous things?”
When Maxwell reached the junction of the bulkhead and the console, it was as if he had crossed an invisible line. Honey shuddered and scrambled down from the center of the web to stop a centimeter above the deck, no more than a short hop from Maxwell. If he wanted to reach the console, he would have to pull himself past Honey. Maxwell found this idea unaccountably distressing.
Beside him, one of the console’s data screens flickered to life. Images and text rapidly scrolled down the screen, stopping occasionally as if an unseen reader had found some bit of information that was especially interesting. Maxwell tried to read it, but he found it difficult to focus his attention on the screen for more than a half second at a time. Whenever his gaze flickered back to Honey, she was still hanging where she had been, uncharacteristically still. She was watching him, Maxwell realized, as he watched the images slide past. Sensing she wanted him to see what was on the screen, he tilted forward to get a better look.
Most of the data appeared to be old Starfleet reports: log entries and accounts of missions, the sort of thing cadets read at the Academy. Some of them dated back to the twenty-second century, though others were newer. It looked like they had been taken from Kathryn Janeway’s Voyager logs. The headings for all of the reports shared two words: First Contact.
“What is this?” Maxwell asked. He looked from side to side, expecting someone to step out of the shadows and announce their presence. “Who’s doing this?”
Honey hung from her thread, her legs folded loosely along her sides. She twitched when he spoke, almost as if she could hear him despite the vacuum. Leaning closer, Maxwell shone his torch directly on her, carefully inspecting her. Before, when she had dropped down to the deck, he had believed the arachnoform had been hanging by one of her threads, but now, near as she was, Maxwell saw that it wasn’t a thread at all. A strand of glistening purple goo protruded from the back of her cephalothorax. Slowly, carefully, so as to not make a mistake, he traced the strand back up to a spot where it emerged from the crack in the reactor vessel. “Oh, Honey,” Maxwell said, genuinely surprised by how the realization grieved him. “I’m so sorry.”
In response, Honey climbed down and pressed the tip of her abdomen, the spot where her spinnerets were, to the deck. She moved back and forth, her back legs shifting in a controlled, staccato action. The
sticky stuff she had on the tips of her long legs that allowed her to climb walls was keeping her from bouncing around in zero g.
Maxwell felt the seconds ticking past. He knew he was running out of air and that the generator needed tending, but he felt sure he owed Honey whatever time she needed to complete her task. Besides, he was pretty sure if he tried to get past her, she would find a way to stop him.
Honey’s limbs fell still and she rose up off the deck, though whether the purple strand tugged her up or she climbed, Maxwell could not say. Something glistened on the deck where she had crouched only a moment ago. Braced against the console, he leaned down and shone his torch on the spot.
In jagged, blocky letters, Honey had written SOME BUG.
All Maxwell could do was look up at Honey exasperated and ask, “What?”
Her large eyes glistened. She cocked her head. If the Mother had taken control of her like it had Sabih’s body, then it was doing a perfect impersonation of Honey’s expectant stare. After a minute, expectation dissolved into disappointment. Honey dropped back down to the deck and painted new words.
When she rose again, Maxwell leaned in and read the new patch of lines: NO KILL I.
So many things depended on Maxwell moving, but all he could do was stare at the words and rack his brain.
NO KILL I. SOME BUG.
Maxwell was suddenly overwhelmed by the memory of his daughter, Sofia. She was, at most, five years old, and sitting in his lap, the back of her head smelling like sweet grass. She was leaning forward and pressing her fingertip to a padd, tracing the lines of words in an illustration.
All in a rush, the answer came to him.
Maxwell knew the clock was ticking. He knew that his air was almost gone. He knew his friends were wondering whether he was alive or dead and whether they had much longer to live. He knew all of this, and yet, he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stop.
Maxwell started to laugh. His eyes were streaming, which was frustrating, because he couldn’t clear them, and he was quickly out of breath because of the great, giant, oxygen-consuming whoops of hilarity. He had to grip the edge of the console or risk floating away into the center of the room or getting stuck in Honey’s web, which was difficult, weak as he was. When the onslaught subsided and his ears stopped buzzing, he tried to steady his breathing and clear his head.
“ ‘No Kill I,’ ” he said. “The Horta. It’s been a James Kirk kind of day, hasn’t it? And ‘Some Bug.’ That took me a minute.” He shook his head in wonder. “Sofia loved that book. Cried every time we read that chapter. ‘Some Pig.’ ” He readjusted his grip on the lip of the console, feeling steadier. When he glanced at the monitor, the well-remembered cover of Charlotte’s Web appeared. “Poor Charlotte,” Maxwell said, feeling genuinely sad, not only for the spider, but for his own behavior, his own suppositions and prejudices. He looked up to the crack in the reactor housing from where the purple strand descended. “Sorry,” he said. “Not Mother, but Other.”
The orange glow from the reactor was fading and the room was growing darker. Without needing to look at the control panel, Maxwell knew that the danger of the reactor overloading had disappeared, consumed. Whatever this piece of the Mother had wanted with the energy source, it had finished its meal, the energy used to give birth to . . . something. But what? He glanced at Honey. “What are you now?” he asked.
The arachnoform appeared to understand the question. She shrugged. Maxwell laughed. “Well, that’s strange,” he said. “A shrugging spider.” Maxwell rearranged his grip so he could continue to observe Honey in the lengthening shadows. “You know,” he said, “when I joined Starfleet, all those years ago, that was the promise they made to you: ‘ . . . strange new worlds. New life. New civilizations.’ It turned out that when you find strange new worlds, sometimes the new life you find wants to kill you. The universe needs soldiers just as much as anything else.”
Honey took a step closer. The light from Maxwell’s torch made her eyes gleam. He had the distinct feeling she was listening to him.
“But I never got to do a first contact.” He reached out and the arachnoform took another step closer. “Until now. What are you in there now? Mostly Honey? Mostly the Other?”
Honey took the last step forward and pressed her head into Maxwell’s open palm. He couldn’t feel the bumps and ridges of her carapace through his gauntlets, but he felt the pressure, even a little warmth. Maxwell was suddenly conscious of the cold. Whatever heat the room had held was quickly dissipating.
He tipped his gauntlet, even as he kept rubbing Honey’s head. The gauge on his gauntlet was blinking furiously. The needle was inching into the red. “So, here’s the thing, dear girl. Small things do not do well with me. Even if we can get out of here, I can’t really guarantee that we’ll make it very far.”
Honey pulled her head away and stretched her many legs. Limbering up. Maxwell pointed at the purple strand that terminated in Honey’s thorax. “Or can you even go?”
The arachnoform shivered. The strand broke away and crumbled like a dried fern.
“Easy as that?” Honey stared at Maxwell. “And how do I know you’re not just going to try to take over the galaxy once we get out of here?”
Honey pointed to the message on the deck: NO KILL I.
“Okay,” he said. Maxwell carefully worked his way back to the hatch, Honey at his heels, like a dog cheerful at the prospect of a walk on a sunny morning. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
Chapter 22
January 10, 2386
Romulan Shuttle
“Is it this one?” O’Brien asked. “Or this one? Dammit, which button do I push?” The Romulan shuttle’s controls were largely unlabeled, and though he was able to distinguish which panel controlled the sensor grid, he was unsure which switches were used to fine-tune the array.
The Romulan smacked his hands away from the controls. “None of them,” he said. “Hands off. Give me a moment and I’ll do it.” He had done as O’Brien had requested and pushed the ship out as far as it could go on thrusters for ten minutes and then stopped. When O’Brien had requested that they turn around and go back, the Romulan had stared at him like he was an idiot. After five minutes of futile argument, they came to a compromise: firing up the sensors and pointing them back toward the Hooke.
The Romulan locked down the pilot station (not without giving O’Brien a warning glance) and set about adjusting the sensors. “Are you looking for anything in particular?” he asked.
“No,” O’Brien said, trying to look over the Romulan’s shoulder. He had managed to remove his helmet and gloves, but was still wearing the bulky environmental suit, which was difficult to manage in the snug pilot’s cabin. “Well, yes. Radiation. A lot of it if the reactor went critical.”
“An explosion, then,” the pilot said, fingers moving over the controls. His hands, O’Brien noted, were etched with deep lines and there were crescents of dirt under his nails that no amount of soap could extract. “Working man,” Captain Maxwell had said. Farmer, O’Brien thought, and felt safe.
Back in the very cramped passenger compartment, Nog had taken charge of triaging the injured scientists. Two of the scientists were dead from trauma sustained during the gravity fluctuations and three others, including Nita Bharad, were severely injured, though Nog had stabilized them. Not surprisingly, Finch had taken up what he probably believed was a safe spot just outside the archway between the pilot’s cabin and the main compartment. O’Brien guessed that Finch thought a Starfleet officer would defend him if the shell-shocked scientists gathered their wits and came for him. The chief wasn’t entirely sure what he would do if someone suggested shoving Finch out the airlock.
“Nothing,” the Romulan whispered, slowly twisting a pair of tiny controls with the tips of his fingers. “Nothing, nothing, and noth—” He jerked his head back.
On the sensor display, O??
?Brien saw a bright orange spike peak and then slowly fade. “What was that?”
“I . . . I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head. He looked up at O’Brien, sheepish or apologetic. O’Brien had never seen that particular expression on a Romulan’s face. “I’m not an expert with this equipment, but . . .”
“But what?” O’Brien asked, trying to make sense of the data scrawling up the screen.
The Romulan pointed at the ship’s main viewscreen, which was still fixed (he had claimed) on the Hooke position. As O’Brien watched, a tiny yellow light briefly flared and quickly died, casting no more light than a match blown out the moment it was struck.
O’Brien stared at the screen, his mouth agape, uncertain what to say or do. He felt a hand on his arm and was surprised to see it was the Romulan’s. “I’m sorry,” the pilot said. “I don’t really know what’s happening here, but I know he was your friend.”
“He was,” O’Brien began. “He was . . . my . . .” He wasn’t sure what word he wanted to say next, so, instead, he said, “We have to go back.”
The Romulan just shook his head once and said, “No. There would be no point.”
“What’s happened, Chief?” Nog stepped over Finch and stuck his head into the pilot’s cabin. Somehow, he had managed to remove his environmental suit and was wiping his hands on a cloth soaked in some kind of antiseptic.
“We think the Hooke just exploded.”
“Think?”
O’Brien pointed at the pilot. “He . . . what’s your name?”
“Cretak,” said the Romulan.