After the Fall Page 13

“Not to worry, Ed,” Calhoun assured him. He circled the interior of his quarters while waggling an accusatory finger in the air, giving him the look of a caged professor. “For years now I’ve lived with the knowledge that my son is dead. Now you show up here, tell me he’s alive. You can’t possibly expect me not to do anything about it.”

  “At what point in any of this have I told you I didn’t expect you to? Of course I expect you to.”

  Calhoun looked suspiciously at Jellico. “You do.”

  “Naturally. All I was trying to do was emphasize some of the difficulties you may be facing, so you’d be better prepared. You’re the one who’s flying off in all directions, and that’s not the mind-set you need right now. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised at you. That’s not the way I generally expect to see you reacting in a crisis.”

  “Fair enough,” Calhoun allowed. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I feel like…” His fingers fluttered around the top of his head. “I feel like my brain is splintering in all directions. Like I’m having trouble focusing. There’s a dozen reactions all warring, one with the other, and I don’t know which one to give emphasis to.”

  “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Jellico said understandingly. “Whether—if and when you find Xyon—you’ll embrace him or hit him.”

  Calhoun contemplated that and then said, “Probably both.”

  “You’ll take the Excalibur into Thallonian space?”

  “Of course.”

  “You should know that you’ll have backup.”

  “Will I?” Calhoun raised an eyebrow questioningly. “Suddenly doubting my ability to get the job done?”

  “Not at all. It’s pure coincidence, Mac. The Trident is in and out of that region, doing a scientific survey that’s unrelated to what’s going on with Xyon.”

  “Are we sure it’s unrelated?” Calhoun asked.

  “I’m not sure what connection there could be,” Jellico said, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he considered the matter. “They’re investigating the possible generation of a transwarp conduit. I somehow doubt that Xyon’s making use of a conduit.”

  “Yes, that’s more the signature of the Borg, isn’t it.”

  “Or possibly another, even more formidable race.”

  “Thank you, Ed. You’ve just given me something else to be worried about.” Despite the seriousness of the situation, Calhoun allowed a smile. “Working with the Trident again. It’ll be just like old times.”

  “All right, well…you know the situation now.” He thrust out a hand and Calhoun shook it firmly. “You’re walking into a powder keg and you might just be what lights the fuse, Calhoun. For God’s sake, be careful.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “Almost never,” said Jellico.

  Calhoun shrugged. “Then I might as well stay with what works.”

  The Lyla

  “It’s not going to work, Kalinda.”

  From the moment that she’d been hauled onto the Lyla until Xyon had finally chosen to breach the silence between them, which had grown like a glacial wall, Kalinda had said nothing. Done nothing. Touched nothing. Not even looked in his direction. She had sat in a far corner of the main cabin, as far from Xyon as she could physically manage.

  The silent treatment? Xyon found it amusing. He had never been able to understand why in the world women thought that lack of talking was some sort of punishment. Xyon wasn’t necessarily the chattiest of individuals. Most males he knew considered the task of keeping conversation going with females to be the most onerous aspect of any involvement. So if, rather than haranguing him and complaining about her ill treatment, Kalinda was just going to sit there with her mouth tightly shut…okay. Fine. So be it.

  Hours rolled one over into the other as Xyon put as much distance as he could between himself and New Thallon. All things being equal, he simply would have tried to warp out of the area at high speed.

  That, however, was not possible, for the net that Si Cwan had drawn around the sector had been a very thorough one. There were ships everywhere. It seemed as if, no matter which of the infinite directions he traveled the spaceways, there were vessels on stakeout, waiting to snag him.

  He had several advantages. One was the cloaking device, of course. But that wasn’t an all-purpose cure-all for his difficulties. He had to be judicious about energy use, lest constant employment of the cloak leave him dry at a point where he truly needed the cloak to hide or his engines at full power to get away. Second, Lyla’s long-distance sensors were extremely efficient…more so than just about any other ship he was likely to encounter. So he always knew when someone was coming his way before they knew he was there.

  His main disadvantage was that his vessel simply didn’t have the pure speed that larger ships possessed. Outrunning pursuers wasn’t an option. He had to outthink them.

  So began the cat-and-mouse pursuit that marked Xyon’s endeavors to stay one step ahead of his hunters.

  He kept mixing up his strategies so as not to become predictable and, thus, catchable. He would run under the cloak. He would stop dead still under the cloak. He would hide within asteroid fields. He would brazenly sit right atop nacelles of ships that were looking for him so their own ion emissions masked his presence. He would pretend that he himself was a search vessel on the lookout for that miscreant Xyon (a strategy that he employed only once, since the ship he tried to pull it on saw through his prevarication and came after him; if it weren’t for his cloaking device used to run for cover and then giving the pursuing vessel the slip through a convenient nebula, he’d never have escaped).

  All during his many trials, Kalinda continued to say nothing.

  Nothing.

  Not.

  A damned.

  Word.

  Xyon completely lost track of time. Finding that the silent treatment wasn’t as charming in the long term as it was in the short, he kept trying to engage Kalinda in conversation. She didn’t move. She just sat there, watching, glaring. Her legs were pulled up so that her knees were just under her chin, her arms draped across them.

  Well, at least she’s not getting in your way, Xyon told himself, trying to find some degree of pleasure from that.

  As much as he desired her, as much as he lusted for her, at absolutely no time did Xyon’s thoughts turn to the notion of acting upon those desires. Of forcing himself upon her. He was certain he wouldn’t need to. Sooner or later, she would relent. And not from torture, for he could never hurt her. Instead, inevitably, her genuine personality would reassert itself. She would come to realize that this Tiraud fool was not the one for her. That there was no one but Xyon who was suitable. Granted, the business of letting her believe he was dead for all this time presented a stumbling block as far as creating a trusting relationship was concerned. But he was certain they could work their way past it, as soon as she was willing to allow a genuine exchange of ideas to begin flowing.

  Unfortunately, she continued to be sullen and withdrawn, and neither attitude showed the slightest hint of lessening.

  “I said it’s not going to work. If you’re trying to put an evil eye on me, it’s not going to work,” he told her. Naturally she didn’t respond.

  Fatigue overwhelmed Xyon, so much so that he could not keep his head upright. His eyelids felt like slabs of lead. “Lyla,” he said when he’d been awake for thirty-seven straight hours and couldn’t take watching Kalinda for another minute, “I need you to stand guard on Kalinda.”

  “All right, Xyon,” Lyla said as she materialized near him.

  He’d neglected to change the default programming. Lyla was a dead ringer for Kalinda.

  Kalinda looked her up and down without comment, except for what sounded like a single, derisive snicker. Xyon growled low in his throat and said, “A different appearance, Lyla, please.”

  Her form wavered slightly and she rematerialized as a gorgeous blonde in a billowy white dress. “Will this do?”

  “Fine, fine,” Xyon said qui
ckly, feeling rather embarrassed by the incident. “If she tries to do anything—get to a control panel, alert someone as to our whereabouts—you stop her. Got that?”

  “Yes, Xyon.”

  “Power down all unnecessary systems. If it gets a little cold in here, I can live with that. I need you working, and the cloak, and right now, that’s it. Don’t even bother to hold our position. Just let us drift.”

  “Yes, Xyon. Whatever you say.”

  “How sweet. The perfect female. Compliant and willing.” It was the first utterance to come out of Kalinda’s mouth since he’d taken her. Her voice sounded cracked and hoarse, which only made sense, since she had taken neither drink nor food in all her time on the ship.

  “Hah,” Xyon said. “Finally talking to me, are you?”

  “Kindly let Xyon know I was talking to you, not him,” she told Lyla.

  Obediently, Lyla turned to Xyon. “She was talking to m—”

  “I heard her,” growled Xyon, and he was about to say something else but thought the better of it. Instead he stomped into his sleeping chamber. As he flopped forward onto his bed, he was dimly aware that Lyla wasn’t necessarily reliable in perceiving some sort of escape attempt on Kalinda’s part. For all he knew, he’d wake up back on New Thallon with Si Cwan scowling down at him and a smug Tiraud preparing to carve him to bits. But he was so exhausted that he was asleep an instant after his head hit the pillow, so he wasn’t able to do anything about his last-second concerns.

  He jolted himself awake some hours later, doing so with a kind of internal urgency as he realized that he had no idea what his situation was going to be like when he opened his eyes and looked around. But all was quiet.

  Still, he was concerned. Something seemed…not right.

  The ship was moving. That was it. There was a sense of direction, even propulsion. But he’d told Lyla to allow the ship to drift.

  He walked quickly out to the forward cabin, running his fingers through his tousled hair. “Lyla,” he called, “I specifically told you to—” Then his eyes widened from what he saw on the viewscreen. “Grozit!”

  The surface of a planet was coming toward them at high speed. Which was, of course, an optical illusion. The fact was that they were plunging toward the planet. The atmosphere was apparently thin, since the ship wasn’t superheating from the reentry, but the damned thing had enough gravity to pull the small ship straight down toward its extremely inhospitable—to say nothing of very hard—surface.

  Lyla was standing there with a benign expression. Kalinda, for her part, was exactly where Xyon had left her. Her eyes looked bleary, her smile was ragged, but there was grim amusement on her face. She barked out a laugh upon seeing Xyon’s reaction to impending doom.

  “All engines, emergency fire-up! Full power to reverse thrusters! Now! Now!” He was at the helm, frantically redirecting the ship’s course.

  The Lyla lurched violently, the engines roaring to life. In a starship, such sounds would never have been heard anywhere outside of the engine room. In the much smaller vessel, it was deafening. He felt as if he were surrounded by a wall of solid sound.

  The hull groaned under the abrupt exertion of g forces upon the ship’s structure, and for one horrific moment, Xyon thought the ship wasn’t going to hold together. That it would be torn apart, front and back, dumping Xyon and Kalinda out, miles above the planet. If the notion likewise occurred to Kalinda, she made no sign of it other than to emit another one of those weird laughs.

  And then the Lyla responded to the urging of its pilot, and the ship skipped across the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere, bumping wildly. Xyon was slammed back in his chair. Kalinda was sent tumbling, rolling across the floor. At least she’s not giving me that damned creepy laugh, Xyon thought grimly.

  The Lyla angled upward then, fighting against and overcoming the g pull of the unknown planet beneath them. Xyon held his breath as the field of stars loomed ahead of him, calling to him, and then the ship was clear. He continued not breathing until the planet was long behind them, at which point he exhaled deeply. He felt his heart pounding furiously against his rib cage, and tried to ignore it. “Lyla!”

  “Yes, Xyon?” She was standing right next to him, smiling that same beatific smile.

  “We could have crashed into that planet!”

  “Yes, Xyon.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you do anything to prevent it!?”

  “Because you gave me explicit orders to allow the ship to drift, Xyon. You were very clear on the subject.”

  “But didn’t it occur to you that having the ship crash was something I wouldn’t want to see happen?”

  “It did occur to me, yes,” she said reasonably. “But I thought you might have had some sort of reason for it.”

  He moaned softly and thumped the back of his head against his chair. “You know…I thought I got all the glitches out of the virus that wormed its way into you six months ago. Now I’m thinking maybe not. You’re not just a computer, Lyla. You’re an artificial intelligence. I expected more out of you than just blindly following the exact wording of what I said without any thought beyond that.”

  “I’m sorry for failing you, Xyon,” she said sadly, her head slumping and her lower lip protruding ever so slightly.

  He rubbed his hand across his face, and then fired an infuriated glare at Kalinda. Having been tossed around fairly severely, she had managed to regain her position back in a corner of the cabin. She pulled her legs back up into that same defensive, almost fetal position. “And you!”

  Her eyes widened in mock innocence.

  “I don’t know if you were paying attention,” he continued, “but if the ship had crashed, you’d have died right along with me! So you have something at stake as well!”

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  He pivoted so that the chair he was in was facing her fully. “Oh, so now you’re talking to me, are you.”

  “Yes, I’m talking to you,” she told him with an exasperated sigh. “Because it’s the only way to get you to understand that you’re not taking me alive.”

  “What are you talking about…?”

  “Haven’t you noticed that I haven’t eaten?”

  That gave him pause. “I…figured you’d had something while I was asleep. Lyla…?”

  “No, Xyon.” Lyla shook her head. “She has consumed nothing.”

  He looked into her face, took a good long look for the first time in hours. Her color was off, a much more pale red than he was used to seeing. Her lips were parched, and her eyes had lost a good deal of their luster. Her cheekbones were beginning to stand out in stark contrast to the rest of her face. He realized that her breathing was becoming labored.

  All of his anger, all his swagger and bravado, evaporated. He rose from his chair, walked over to her, and crouched in front of her. He reached for one of her hands and she pulled it away from him. The movement was clearly an effort for her.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m starving myself to death.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Her eye sockets were starting to look hollowed out. “Do I look not serious?”

  “Kalinda…”

  “You might have me, Xyon, but you’re not going to keep me. And I’m not going to waste my breath telling you what an idiot you are, or why you should release me, because that simply wouldn’t be dignified.”

  “And this is dignified?” He started to touch her face and yet again she slapped his hand away. “Forcing yourself to waste away? Throwing away your life?”

  “Better to throw it away than to beg for it.”

  “You don’t have to beg for your life!” he told her in exasperation. “What are you talking about? Your life isn’t threatened! You must know that!”

  “Life,” she said, “is about more than living it. It’s how you live it. With free will. Where I want to be. My life is on New Thallon, Xyon. My life is with Tiraud. It’s not with you. Not
anymore. But you don’t want to hear that,” she continued before he could interrupt her. “So when the prospect of terminating my existence early presented itself in the shape of that planet, I opted for it. Thwarted in that,” and she shrugged her shoulders. The gesture seemed painful. “I return to allowing nature to take its course.”

  “Starving yourself to death isn’t natural!”

  “Really? Funny,” she said, and allowed her head to slump back against the wall. “To me…it seems the most natural thing in the world.”

  In mounting frustration, Xyon curled his fist and slammed it against the wall behind her head. She didn’t react in the slightest. “And do you think I’m going to just stand by and let you die?”

  “I don’t know, Xyon,” replied Kalinda in a whispery voice that sounded more like a sigh. “I don’t know you, any more than you know me. I don’t know what’s compelled you to do this. I don’t know why you’re no longer the dashing hero I fell in love with. But you’re not. And I’m in love with someone else. And that’s all there is to that.”

  “But you’ll die!”

  “You keep saying that.” She forced a smile even though it took her some effort. “You think I’m afraid of death? I, who converse with the dead when the mood and spirit seizes me? No, Xyon. Once you’ve seen through the curtain, the prospect of stepping around it isn’t that daunting.”

  For a long time they sat there then, Xyon staring at her, Kalinda looking off into empty air.

  Finally he said, “You’d really rather die than be with me?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “But I would really rather die than be forced to be with you.”

  He had been crouching all during this time, but now he lowered himself to sitting so that he was on the floor opposite her. “I thought…”

  She stared at him, saying nothing.

  “I thought,” he continued, “that once I had you away from the rest of them…from their influence…that you would know where you were meant to be.”

  “And you were right,” she said. There was no harshness in her voice. Merely sadness. “It just wasn’t where you expected, that’s all.”