Chapter 13: Suliban
CRAMPED, TREMBLING, COLD, and admittedly out of their element, Archer, Buffy and Dawn hunkered elbow to elbow inside the Suliban cell ship as it blew free of the Enterprise and shot out into the swirling atmospheric sea.
The ship raced forward, fighting its own power and the turbulence at the same time.
Archer flinched when a light came on. "What's that?"
"Travis said not to worry about that panel," Buffy replied glancing at the indicated light.
"That's reassuring ..." Dawn muttered.
They were thrown against each other when the cell hit an atmospheric pocket. Queasy and bloodless, Archer fought to keep steady himself. "They sure didn't build these things for comfort."
"Wait till we get the Klingon in here with us," Dawn remarked.
"If I'm reading this right, we should be about twenty kilometers from Enterprise," Buffy said.
"Drop the pitch thirty degrees," Archer ordered.
"Look! The Enterprise!" Dawn said.
For just an instant, the visibility cleared, just enough to show a portion of the starship above them taking a hard whack from a luminous weapon stream.
"They're taking a lot of bad fire," Archer mentioned. "I should've given her permission for evasive maneuvers. If they change position, the Suliban'll have to look for them all over again."
"If they move, we might never find them again," Buffy reminded. "She'll probably just ride it out."
"That's what I'm counting on."
Dawn glanced at Archer. "You seem to be changing your tune with how Vulcans have treated us for the last century."
"I think it's changing some," Archer agreed. "After a whole lifetime of watching Vulcans generalize about humans, it seems all three of us are doing the same thing about them. All three of us just took it out on her."
Dawn thought about it and nodded. "Your right," she said as Buffy nodded in agreement.
"Look at this," Buffy said, pointing at the adjusting screens. "I think we're there."
"Bringing the docking interface on-line," Dawn said as she touched a button and the interface hummed to life. The cell ship rattled around them.
"Coaxial ports," Archer ordered.
Another control twanged. A quick, hissing sound blew some kind of ballast or docking mechanisms somewhere on the skin of the cell ship. Buffy embraced the steering mechanism and began to ease the ship downward. Through the ports, they could see blue phosphorous clouds begin to thin out. A moment later, they broke into clear space.
"Where is it?" Buffy wondered. "It was right there!"
Dawn studied the graphic. "Bank starboard ninety degrees."
Buffy heaved the controller over. The ship banked sharply, taking their stomachs with it.
A dizzying view of the Suliban complex rose directly below them.
"That's the upper support radius," Archer said. "Drop down right below it. Start a counterclockwise sweep."
The cell ship descended further, down past numerous levels of the aggregate. Other cell ships, most larger, engaged and disengaged from the huge structure for reasons of their own.
"A little more ... little more ... almost there ..." Buffy said as she guided the cell ship to a docking port.
Chhhh-UNK.
Contact. The cell jolted slightly. A series of whirring mechanical sounds signaled that the docking ports were locking into place. They knew those sounds. Everybody who flew knew those sounds.
Abruptly, the hatch opened—on its own!
Archer flinched and put his hands on Buffy and Dawn's arms. Before them was a long, dimly lit corridor, completely unoccupied. Their own private entrance.
Dawn looked at her sister and Archer. "Well?"
Archer pulled out his phase pistol. "Why not?" he said as Buffy did the same.
They moved quickly through the corridor. Archer kept eyeing the sensor scanner he held in his other hand. They rounded a corner, and came face to face with a—a face!
Caught by surprise, the Suliban soldier clutched for his own side arm, before a bolt of energy hit him first. Archer and Buffy looked to see Dawn one hand outstretched the other planted on a nearby console.
"I regulated the energy," Dawn said. "He should be out for a while, but not dead."
And they kept moving.
Klingon life-signs. A whole new quiver for an Earth sensor system.
However, being a machine, the sensor didn't care one way or the other and led them dutifully to the source.
Archer went through the door first, with Buffy and Dawn right behind him. And there was their big buddy, restrained in an elaborate chair-like thing, with tubes and devices attached to his body. He was alive, but semiconscious.
Archer gestured. Dawn immediately went to the Klingon and started unstrapping him. The Klingon stared, but didn't fight or make any noise.
"This is gonna be easier than I thought," Buffy said hoping she wasn't jinxing anything.
"It's okay," Dawn said. "We're getting you off this thing."
The third and final restraint slapped to the floor. Klaang, now free, suddenly erupted. He raised his arm, clubbed Dawn in the chest, and very easily blew the engineer across the room. She landed in a heap.
Buffy instinctively moved and with strength she had not used in a long time she wrestled Klaamg to the ground.
Klaang grew much more passive in the face of a stronger foe. He wisely yielded.
"I think he gets the idea," Archer said. "Give him a hand."
Buffy gave Klaang a supporting hand as Archer did the same for Dawn. They then followed Archer out the door.
"Qu'taw boh!" the Klingon roared, half dazed.
"yItamchoH!" Dawn ordered.
"Muh tok!"
A blast tore a chunk out of the wall. Suliban soldiers!
Dawn and Archer dove to the left, Buffy and Klaang to the right, for cover.
"Dajvo Tagh! Borat!"
"Give me the box," Archer told Dawn who had been carrying a case with her.
Dawn slid the silver case's strap off her shoulder and handed it to Archer. Just then, a Suliban attacker rushed into view from an adjoining corridor and caught them by surprise. As the Suliban took aim at Archer and Dawn, the Klingon suddenly rose like a grizzly bear.
The Suliban was caught under its chin and went flying into a bulkhead. Klaang followed him, caught him, and joyously pounded him unconscious.
A moment later he simply turned and came back to Archer, Buffy and Dawn, rumbling with satisfaction.
"qatlho'," Dawn said.
Another Suliban, and another after him, fired their weapons at them.
"Get to the ship!" Archer ordered. "Dawn and I'll be right behind you!"
Buffy didn't like the situation but knew that Dawn could handle herself and protect Archer. She grabbed Klaang and hauled him down the corridor.
Dawn and Archer crouched with the silver case. Archer removed a rectangular device and attached it with its own magnetics to the nearest wall, then activated it with the encoded authorization.
Then he dropped to his knees and covered his head, and hoped to live.
They huddled too near the magnetic damper, deafened somewhat by its whine. Only two seconds passed before the device emitted a blinding pulse of energy that radiated in all directions. They were blown over onto their sides. As the light receded, Archer and Dawn struggled to their feet. The corridor was trembling, shuddering! Thousands of magnetic docking ports unlocking—
The floor began to separate under their feet—the entire corridor was splitting in two! Force fields flashed on as the interlocking elements making up this section of the aggregate lost their cohesion. They were cut off.
Archer and Dawn had no choice but to turn and run in the other direction. The entire upper section of the Suliban aggregate was dismantling over their heads.
"John? Dawn?" Buffy's voice called at them under the boom and clack of disengagement.
Dawn and Archer found a corner to duck behind. "It worked," Archer said into his communicator without formality.
"Where are you?"
"We're still in the central core," Dawn said.
"Get Klaang back to Enterprise," Archer added.
"I promise that I will come back for you both," Buffy said. "Don't know how I will find either of you but don't worry I will. To make it easier stay as far away from the Suliban as you can."
"Believe me," Archer vowed with a glance at Dawn, "We'll try."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
Inside the Suliban cell ship, Buffy sat beside Klaang, who spat and coughed protests about the accommodations.
"RaQpo jadICH!"
"I wish Dawn were hear," Buffy said as she glanced at Klaang. "I don't know a word your saying."
"MajQa!"
Buffy kept sweeping for the Enterprise. "I don't get it ... this is right where they're supposed to be." She adjusted the scanners, but found nothing.
It wasn't. There was no one out there. Nothing.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
"The charges are getting closer again," Reed said as he looked over his console onboard the Enterprise.
"Another five kilometers, Ensign," T'Pol ordered.
Mayweather worked the controls on the helm. "At this rate, the captain'll never find us."
"Wait a minute!" Hoshi interrupted. "I think I've got something!"
"Amplify it!" T'Pol ordered with endearing passion.
Hoshi tapped her controls. A cacophony of noises, radio signals, background noise, and distortion blasted through the bridge.
"It's Commander Summers!"
"All I hear is noise," Reed pointed out.
"Sshhh! Listen ... it's just a narrow notch in the midrange ... she says she's about to ignite her thruster exhaust!"
T'Pol moved quickly to her viewing hood and peered inside. "Coordinates—one fifty-eight mark ... one three."
"Laid in!" Mayweather confirmed.
"Ahead, fifty kph." She turned to Hoshi, and regarded the other woman with respect. "Shaya tonat."
Hoshi offered a small smile. "You're welcome."
They all watched the sensors, though they could see very little on any screen that wasn't the shifting of atmospheric chaos.
"Two kilometers, dead ahead," Mayweather said, carefully maneuvering the ship to avoid a deadly collision—deadly for the Suliban pod that held their shipmates.
"Initiate docking procedures." T'Pol authorized.
Hoshi turned to them, her face gray. "I'm only picking up two biosigns ... one Klingon ... one human."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
Dawn looked at Archer and could sense that he felt like a rabbit in a fox's den.
"Stay calm," she whispered. "Your nerves are coming over pretty well."
"Sorry," he whispered to her as he looked over his scanning device, which showed two Suliban moving away from a central indicator. They'd lost them.
But they were far from out of trouble. They squatted behind a metal beam more than eight feet off the deck.
When they were sure they could jump down safely, without being heard, they did.
Archer tapped the scanner and gave himself a wider view of the vicinity. Other blips showed still more Suliban, but there was a large area to one side with no life-signs at all.
Sanctuary.
He motioned to Dawn and she nodded as they hurried down the corridor.
When they found the passage to the empty area, the narrow passage at a single door. Archer hesitated and motioned to Dawn and then the door.
Dawn shrugged. She couldn't sense anything from beyond the door. They moved cautiously to the door. She glanced over Archer's shoulder at the scanner and saw it was now heavily distorted.
Why would it be? Could the distortion also be why Dawn couldn't sense anything in the area beyond the door?
As they approached the door, it opened for them. They cautiously stepped through, inside was some kind of vestibule—a passage without an exit.
Dawn raised her arm—it stayed up after she put it down. ... Lights distorted their vision ... time began to slow ... to slow ... She realized they were in some kind of temporal alteration chamber.
Their arms and legs blurred as they moved. Gradually, deliberately, they learned to make forward progress, to ignore the echoes they saw. Archer moved his arms, and a second set made the same movement seconds later—or seconds before?
The sound of their footsteps preceded the actual steps. They stopped walking. Soon they had only two feet again. When they had a little control they clapped their hands.
The sound came before their hands met.
Now what?
Definitely time distortion, contained somehow. Moving with great deliberation, they began to explore the room, the alien architecture, the technology on undecipherable panels.
A podium rose before them. As it did, they were able to focus on it and noticed that the temporal distortions began to fade.
There was the podium, clear now before them, and a large weird-looking archway—metallic, huge, obviously purposeful in design and whatever its function was.
Dawn placed her hand on Archer's chest as they turned sharply when a reverberation rang through the chamber—the door was opening. Beyond it, the dark vestibule appeared empty. The door closed and sealed again, as if a ghost had entered ... or left.
"You're wasting your time. Klaang knows nothing."
A voice!
Dawn watched as Archer tried to track the sound of someone's footsteps with his pistol, ready to shoot.
"It would be unwise to discharge that weapon in this room," the voice said. "Or use your gifts Millennial."
"What is this room?" Archer asked. "What goes on here?"
"You're very curious, Jonathan. May I call you Jonathan?"
"Am I supposed to be impressed that you know my name?" he asked reasonably.
"I've learned a great deal about you. About you, your newly assigned first officer, and the Millennial with you. Even more than you know."
Archer glanced at Dawn and looked back towards the empty room. "Well, I guess you have us at a disadvantage," he said, leading this person on. "So why don't you drop the invisible man routine and let me see who I'm talking to?"
"You wouldn't have come looking for Klaang," the voice said, "if Sarin had told you what she knew. That means you're no threat to me, Jonathan. But I do need you to leave this room."
The time-door hissed again, and opened invitingly.
"Now, please."
The footsteps echoed again, but this time Dawn and Archer saw something, a slight distortion against the far wall.
Instead of leaving, Dawn fired a blast of energy. A blurred preshot flowed in before the blast itself, and the sound had no attachment to what she saw. The beam struck the far wall. A jagged wave of energy blew from the point of impact and swept the room. Archer and Dawn were blown back, slamming their heads against a wall.
"I warned you not to use your gifts Millennial," the voice said.
Again the distortion moved across the room.
"This chameleon thing ... pretty fancy," Dawn said. "Was it payment for pitting the Klingons against each other? A trophy from your temporal cold war?"
An embittered action blew across the room, ultrafast, and slammed Dawn against the wall. Dawn could feel pure anger coming from the being. She looked up and saw the Suliban, now normalized against the background, its dappled face and skull still looking vaguely unreal. It held a weapon on Archer. As she stood with her eyes locked on those alien eyes, she recognized this as the leader of the attackers back at the spaceport on Rigel Ten.
"This is one of the Suliban that attacked us on Rigel Ten," Dawn told Archer.
"I was going to let you go," the Suliban said.
"Really?" Archer backed away slowly, trying to remember the timing of those echoes. "Then you obviously don't know as much about us as you thought you did."
"On the contrary," the Suliban said, "I could've told you the day you were going to die, Jonathon. But I suppose that's about to change as the Millennial watches. Can't do much to her, she is after all immortal and will outlive even me."
The Suliban opened fire on Archer, knocking first Archer's weapon from his hand and then driving Archer backward.
Dawn fired a blsat of energy knocking the Suliban down completely.
"What's the matter?" Archer chided. "No genetic tricks to keep you from getting knocked on your butt?"
"What you call tricks, we call progress!" the Suliban declared. "Are you aware that your genome is almost identical to that of an ape? The Suliban don't share humanity's patience with natural selection!"
"So, to speed things up a little, you struck a deal with the First," Dawn said.
Archer glanced at Dawn and tapped his head.
Dawn didn't need to be a telepath to know what Archer was thinking. They both moved so that they positioned themselves between the Suliban leader and the open time-lock.
Moving behind the consoles, Archer slowly removed the communicator from his belt. Carefully, he calculated the next trajectory of the temporal wave, then threw the communicator against a monitor on the far wall. The monitor sparked. The preecho effect made a dozen communicators sail through the air, drawing the Suliban's attention. The Suliban, disoriented, aimed clumsily and fired at the sparking monitor.
The shock wave thundered outward from the strike zone. The Suliban tried to brace himself against it this time, and managed to stay on his feet. But Archer and Dawn had situated themselves in the perfect spot to be thrown into the open time-lock vestibule.
They tumbled like a snowball through the door. The door began to close.
At the last moment, the intelligent and obviously strong-willed Suliban plunged toward the door and slipped through. The temporal compression began as the door locked and sealed itself.
They were locked in this small place, a place where time was in convulsions, with a Suliban whose plans they had wrecked. The Suliban raised the weapon again. ...
Dawn moved and planted her hand on Archer's chest and fired a blast of energy as it knocked the Suliban's weapon from its hand.
Twisting viciously, Archer managed to pin the Suliban to the floor and lean on his opponent's wrists in an attempt to keep the Suliban from tis weapon. It seemed to work, until the Suliban dislocated his own shoulder and wrist in a grotesque rotation and found a way to reach for the pistol, and got it. Archer punched the Suliban in the nose and the Suliban writhed and went momentarily limp. Archer shoved off him and he and Dawn bolted to the door and out.
Behind them, the Suliban had his weapon again and was coming out of the time-lock, aiming, firing—