Chapter 30: Finding Dawn
On the bridge of the Enterprise, Spock occupied the command position. He had only a little time left before he would have to make the decision about pulling back. His orders left him no leeway.
Dr. McCoy came out of the lift.
"Dr. McCoy," Spock said, "you should be in Sickbay."
"You look terrible," Uhura said.
"Thanks," McCoy said. "I'm glad to know I look better than I feel." His smile was sickly. "It hurts just as bad lying down as standing up, so I might as well know what's going on." He rubbed his eyes, his temples. "Dawn has a lot to answer for, when Jim brings her back."
"If Captain Kirk brings her back," Spock said.
At the helm, Dave Bailey detected signals headed straight toward Enterprise. "Mr. Spock—unidentified ship—no, ships—at scanner limits! Heading toward us, toward worldship, at high warp factor. From Klingon Empire!"
"Thank you, Mr. Bailey," Spock said. He waited.
"Spock, you've got to warn Jim!" McCoy said.
"No, doctor— that would alert the fleet that Copernicus is within their realm. If we're silent ... perhaps they will not detect the shuttlecraft."
The Klingon fleet dropped from warp-speed to normal space and swept toward the worldship. The Enterprise held steady at the farthest edge of Federation space. The worldship drifted deeper into the Empire's realm.
"Starfleet invaders, retreat to your own territory."
"Our own surveys of this area say we are within Federation borders," Spock said.
"Then whoever did your surveys are fools." The person who appeared on the viewscreen wore elaborate civilian attire.
"May I know who it is I am addressing," Spock said.
"Of no interest to me whatever. My name," he said, "is a state secret. You may address me as 'director,' or 'your honor.'"
"Director," Spock said. "At this time, we cannot leave the area. We are on a mission of mercy."
"Ah. You have traveled to this interesting construct between us, with the intent of rescuing it?" He spread sarcasm heavily on his words.
"We were answering a distress call," Spock said. "Our surveys of this area did not show the worldship being here."
"We heard no distress call. As it sits the only one in need of help is you—because you're caught making preparations for the Federation's war."
"We are here on a mission of mercy," Spock stated again.
"Your fantasies bore me," the director said when he deigned to speak again.
A powerful jamming field settled around them, cutting off the Enterprise from the shuttlecraft and from its captain.
"Mr. Spock, one of the fleet ships is changing course," Bailey said.
"Thank you, Mr. Bailey." One of the director's battle cruisers dropped toward the worldship.
"Spock, we've got to stop it!" McCoy said. "The shuttlecraft hasn't got a chance against a cruiser!"
"The Captain's orders prevent our doing so," Spock said.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
The Quundar thundered slowly over the land, as the land rose into abrupt crags, Koronin considered what Dawn had told her. Good luck had saved her life when she struck the wall-sphere, for the worldship protected itself from impact by interstellar dust clouds, asteroids, stellar flares—or sword strikes—by turning the force back the way it had come. It possessed no intentional aggressive ability; in fact, its most extreme reaction was complete, irrevocable, annihilating retreat. It could be made to carry out a terrible revenge, once before it vanished. But that was for a last resort.
If Koronin wished to rule the worldship, she must begin by asserting her authority upon individual inhabitants. Soon they would give up concealing their leaders, denying the existence of leaders. She hoped she did not have to kill too many of the flying people before they surrendered. They intrigued her. Besides, she despised waste.
Dawn was slumped on the deck, her hands drooping at her sides, her knees pulled to her chest. Dawn had not even tested the limits of the forcefield around her. She appeared uninjured, but she also appeared unwell.
Koronin scanned again, searching for a flock of the aliens. She planned to demonstrate her power by shooting one down in view of the others. "They've gone to ground, the cowards," she muttered.
"But where ... ?"
"In the center," Dawn said.
Koronin swung toward Dawn. Dawn stared at her, strain and intensity in her gaunt face.
"What did you say?" Koronin asked.
"They are in the center. Of the worldship."
"Who?"
"The silent ones."
"Make sense, Human, or I'll rip the words out of you!" Koronin said.
"The silent ones are in the center of the worldship," Dawn said. "And they are waiting."
"They won't have to wait much longer," Koronin said.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
The worldship was thinly populated, its people solitary. By the time someone paid attention to Scarlet's request for help in locating Dionysus, Sulu had found the ship on scanners. Copernicus sped toward the location.
"Captain, look!" Sulu pointed.
High above them, soaring on ebony wings, Athene cavorted with one of the flying people. It skimmed beneath her, flicking a wingtip upward. She snapped at it playfully. It dodged and reversed to sail over her. She tried to follow it, turning so quickly she nearly stalled. The flyer noted her inexperience, stopped its aerobatics, and flew in a swift straight race.
Below, Lukarian and Stephen sat on the yacht's skids, watching Athene fly. They waved as the shuttlecraft approached. Lukarian met Jim and Buffy when the hatch was opened.
Scarlet sailed after Athene and the other flyer.
"Can you believe her, Jim? Buffy?" Lukarian said. "She flies like she's been doing it all her life! Isn't she beautiful?"
"She is," Jim said. "But can you get her to come down?"
"She'll come back eventually, Jim. I hate to call her, she's having so much fun—"
"We've got to get back to the Enterprise."
"Why?"
"Why? What do you mean, why? Ame, you shouldn't have come here to begin with! You don't know anything about this place, it's about to move into hostile territory, a Klingon renegade has abducted Dawn, or arrested her as a spy—and she could have done the same with you!" He found himself shouting.
"Dawn! Is she—? I'll bring Athene down." Lukarian cupped her hands and whistled. Athene sailed higher and farther, a strangely shaped bird. Scarlet spiraled above her.
Jim strode over to Stephen, who lounged arrogantly against the landing skid of his yacht. "It's one thing for you to put yourself in danger, Stephen, But Ame? She's got no off-earth experience—she has no way of knowing what you might get her into!"
"I have more experience in things out of the norm than you know," Lukarian said as she spun on Jim.
"What experience?" Jim asked.
"You have seen Buffy and Dawn's full files, correct?" Lukarian asked as Jim nodded. "So you know about the Key?"
"The Key?" Jim asked as he shook his head with confusion.
"So Dawn and Buffy kept that from their files," Lukarian said with a nod. "Sensible precaution. Great Grandma Willow worried needlessly it appears. Does their files talk any about vampires and demons?"
Jim thought for a moment as he went back through his memory of the files and then he nodded. "Yes. But…"
"They exist," Lukarian said. "Magic exists. My stage performance wasn't illusion, well not completely illusion but actual magic."
"Ame," Jim said. "Then you understand that the Enterprise can't follow the worldship into Empire territory."
"Yes," Lukarian said. "But I am not going anywhere but with you and Buffy. I can track Dawn."
"Stephen should follow," Buffy said as Jim looked at her. "If we can get to Dawn, he can do the mind meld before her mind is lost to us."
Jim sighed as far away on the plain, Athene touched down long enough for Lukarian to swing up. The equiraptor cantered, galloped, glided as Lukarian guided her into Stephan's ship. Stephen followed Lukarian inside and they had a few words. Stephen agreed to try and keep Athene calm while they searched for Dawn.
When Lukarian joined Jim, he was waving his arms and shouting for Scarlet. Jim and Lukarian sprinted for the shuttlecraft. Scarlet swooped down and followed them onboard. As soon as the hatch closed, Copernicus lifted off.
"How can you track her?" Jim asked.
Lukarian smiled at Jim. "The Key," she said. "At one time the Key resided only in Dawn, but Great Grandma Willow knew that Buffy and Dawn would live for a thousand years and to protect the Key she used her magic to split it in two. My family has carried half it, passed down from mother to daughter along with Great Grandma's magic for the last two hundred years."
"What is the Key?" Jim asked.
"It's complicated," Lukarian answered. "Simple answer, With a ritual it can open the doorway between realities. The last time it was opened our reality almost came to an end. Buffy herself was the one to stop that from happening."
Scarlet watched the trace of Quundar's drive. "Dawn has persuaded Koronin to take her to the center."
"But why?" Jim asked. "How does Dawn know anything about the worldship's center? You said it was wild ..."
"Dawn knows the same way she knew how to sail, and how to pass through the worldship's wall: she has some of my knowledge, as I have some of hers."
"What's out there?" Buffy asked.
"I fear for her, Buffy. She is seeking the silent ones."
Scarlet gazed unseeing at the trajectory formulae flickering across the screen.
"What do you mean?" Buffy asked.
"When you choose the life of a silent one, you heal yourself ... or you die."
Jim scowled. "I doubt Koronin will let her do either."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
On board Quundar, the pitiful animal cowered. Dawn petted it. It feared her, yet desired her comfort. It clutched her, but trembled in terror of her. Dawn whistled softly, trying to soothe it. How strange that it wore garments so similar to her, though the upper garment she had dropped had been blue, while the animal's was gold.
A bit of knowledge crept into Dawn's consciousness: it was odd for an animal to wear clothing. But it was also unusual for people to wear garments when they did not need to be protected from space. So again, she had the odd feeling of watching two incompatible images at the same time. Dawn tried to make sense of them, but finally retreated in confusion and exhaustion.
Dawn continued to pet the animal. Knowing the pain of her own confusion, she helped it forget its own.
"Human—why are you crying?"
Dawn raised her head. She tried to think of a reply to the strange, bare-faced, copper-haired being who approached her. But she was not even certain the being meant to address her. She felt the tears on her face, she tasted their salt warmth on her lips. She knew that people could cry, but did not feel grief—but she knew also that people could not cry, though they felt grief deeply. With a groan of despair, she pressed her hands to her temples and tried to understand what had happened to her. The small animal plucked at her arm with its tiny hand and made a soft, singing sound. But she felt no comfort. She knew only that she had to reach the center.
"They are waiting," Dawn said.
Koronin She shrugged and turned her attention to her ship.
Quundar reached the center of the worldship. The land below lay in jumbled destruction. If the worldship were made up of crustal plates like a real planet, then the plates jammed together here in the center. They crushed each other into abrupt mountain ranges, then crushed the ranges, working with such violence and geologic speed that erosion never softened the edges of broken stone.
"Where now, Human?" Koronin said, suspicious. "What kind of rulers would choose a wasteland for their palaces?"
"Koronin!" The Sergeant drew her attention to the image in the scanner. A flyer spiraled in an updraft. "You asked that one be captured ..."
"Let it go," Koronin said. "No need to give the rulers warning of our power."
"To the ground," Dawn said. "They are waiting."
Koronin landed the ship on a tilted stone slab that in normal gravity would have been too steep to use. Her ship sighed between the crags to land at the top of a precipitous cliff. She permitted Dawn to walk out onto the warm stone. She scanned the broken land. "There's nothing here, Human. You've lied to me."
"I must ... call them," Dawn said. She breathed the thin air. In the mountains, the sky was very close. She searched the ravaged landscape with her gaze. She pointed to a solitary pinnacle, a broken corner of the slab on which they stood. It lay with its face almost perpendicular to the ground, at the edge of a cliff so high that the river at its base resembled a silver string. "There."
The wind scattered tiny stones at Koronin's feet. Her unclasped veil fluttered at her throat. She did not trust Dawn, and she wondered if Dawn had the strength to climb that pinnacle. Dawn looked none too steady on her feet.
"I've nothing to lose if you climb rocks to call to phantoms," Koronin said. "Go."
Dawn crossed the gray stone and began to climb.
The sergeant peered after Dawn. "Koronin, these Humans, they're clever—she's planning some escape—"
"What will she do, sprout wings? Even Humans aren't that clever."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
Copernicus followed the trace of Quundar across the worldship's plain and over its central mountains.
"Buffy—see if you can raise the Enterprise," Jim said.
Without replying, Buffy bent over the console. She hummed an eerie phrase in an endless series of sequential variations. Every so often, Scarlet joined the melody with harmony or counterpoint or some accompaniment with no name.
"No response, Jim," Buffy replied.
"We are getting close," Lukarian said. "I can feel my half pulling at her half. I am going to have to perform the ritual soon that closes my half back off from Dawn."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
Wrapped in her fur cloak, Koronin sat on her heels and sharpened the slagged blade of her Bat'leth. Dawn toiled up the nearly vertical pillar of stone.
"Koronin, I could follow ..." her sergeant said.
"When I want you to do something, I will tell you."
Koronin, felt uneasy, but not because she feared Dawn could escape. At first, she could not identify the reason for her unease. Then the subsonic throbbing increased to a perceptible level. She felt as if she were inside an enormous drum. Its beat crushed against her. She rose and looked into the sky.
The pulsation intensified. Only the thinness of the atmosphere prevented the pressure waves from evolving into a violent windstorm.
From beyond the peaks of distant mountains, a battle cruiser appeared. Above it, the light web sparked and dissolved, painting the starship in luminous colors that lasted an instant, then bled away in rainbow discharges.
The shock waves of the cruiser's antigrav field pressed her cloak against her. The vibrations changed as the cruiser rotated, nosing toward her with its bulbous prow.
Koronin strode toward Quundar. The sergeant stared at the cruiser, mesmerized. "Come! Hurry!" she said.
"It might ... it might not find us if we stay—"
"It will find us, you fool, if it hasn't already!" Koronin spun the sergeant around and shoved him toward Quundar. "Do you want to be caught helpless on the ground?"
He started toward the ship, then, irrational, he stopped. "The Human—!"
"Forget the Human!" She sprang into Quundar and started the launch sequence. The hatch rose. She heard the sergeant scrabbling on the stairs. The idiot! What good did he think a Human hostage would do her? She could imagine saying to the captain of the fleet, "You cannot fire on me because I hold hostage a member of the Federation of Planets." The blast of a torpedo would reach her before she ever heard the laughter.
The hatch sealed itself. Koronin noted with complete indifference that the sergeant had made it inside. "Station!" she shouted.
She heard no activity on the transmission frequencies, no coordination of an attack formation, only the crackling patina of a jamming field. Perhaps a single ship had followed; perhaps it had not yet found Quundar against the chaos of the worldship's center.
The jamming field faded briefly on a single channel.
"Koronin, surrender the ship and I'll allow you to survive!"
She hurried the preparations for liftoff. She did not believe the smooth promise. Survive? Yes, certainly—for as long as the oligarchs could contrive to make her life last. They would drag it from her atom by atom. She preferred a blast of flame and vacuum.
"Shoot me down, if you can," she replied. "Or are you as cowardly as the miserable captain who gave me this ship?"
Quundar lifted off and accelerated at a dangerous rate. The bow ports glowed with the heat of friction and the structure groaned with the strain of a full-power launch through the atmosphere. It plunged between the strands of the light web and gained the freedom of space.
Almost directly below, Sulu struggled to hold Copernicus steady against the turbulent antigravity pulses. The shuttlecraft plunged and bucked like a maddened animal.
The pummeling ceased.
The shuttlecraft sailed onward. The waterfall transformed itself into a limpid stream.
Above Copernicus, the light webs re-formed.
"Tell me that Dawn was not still on Koronin's ship?" he asked Lukarian.
"No, she is close," Lukarian answered.
Copernicus circled the mountain and came upon fields of tumbled, broken rock, canyons, cliffs, a vast landscape of rubble in which Dawn might be lost.
Scarlet opened the shuttle hatch and dove out to fly, so their search area would be increased.
"Mr. Sulu," Jim said, "touch down long enough for me, Buffy and Ame to get out."
"I can't get any closer, Jim," Lukarian said. "Once we set down, I will have to take a moment to perform the ritual to shield my half of the Key from Dawn's again. Then I will help you and Buffy find Dawn. The more boots on the ground the quicker we find Dawn."
As Buffy got out of her seat Jim noticed a distant look in Buffy's eyes. It troubled him along with her obsession with the language of the flyers.
Mr. Sulu," Jim said as he looked at his helmsman. "We're going to search for one hour. After that, we'll have no choice but to return to the Enterprise."
Sulu nodded. "Yes, sir."
"If we have not found Commander Summers you will only be picking myself and Ame up," Jim said.
"Sir?" Sulu said as Lukarian said, "Jim?" They were both puzzled on why Buffy would be left behind.
"Buffy's request," Jim said. "And I approved it."
Lukarian looked toward Buffy and nodded in understanding.
Copernicus touched down, Dionysus close behind. Jim, Buffy and Ame left the shuttlecraft. Sulu took off again to continue the air search.
Lukarian did her ritual and shielded her half of the Key form Dawn. She then went straight to the Dionysus and opened the hatch; she went inside for but a moment and then Athene out. A second later Dionysus lifted off again.
Jim nodded in understanding. With Athene, Lukarian could search from the air making three people in the air and himself and Buffy from the ground.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
The granite surface of the pinnacle's sheer face felt rough and cold against Dawn's bruised cheek. She looked down. The height revived her. The cold wind dried her sweat and soothed the scrapes and bruises on her hands and arms and face. Dawn tried to make sense of the changes she felt. This was the way people had dealt with grief and pain since they were people, by coming to the wilderness and healing themselves in solitude and freedom. Other vague memories troubled her, intimations of different ways, but she could neither recall them completely nor escape them.
Dawn stood up, balancing precariously on the soaring spear of stone.
Below Buffy and Jim saw Dawn standing on the granite spire, spreading her arms to the wind as if he had wings.
Jim had no time to consider, no time to explain, no time even to think.
"Ame! Look out!" He ran toward Athene. He stepped just wrong on his right leg, hearing the twist and snap of the joint but barely feeling it, anyway it did not matter, one more step and he lunged over Athene's hindquarters and onto her back and propelled her forward with his heels and his voice.
Lukarian jumped away with a shout of surprise. She quickly moved over to Buffy. She followed Buffy's gaze and understood what Jim was doing.
Athene plunged into a rough gallop. She, too, favored one knee. Jim clutched her mane. Her wings spread and rose and beat. She lurched into the air. Her feathers brushed against him from ankle to shoulder. He leaned into a turn. Athene responded, flying toward Dawn. Dawn looked exhausted and confused and at the limits of her strength. She wavered.
Athene swooped past Dawn. As her legs buckled, Jim grabbed her by one arm. Dawn fell against Athene's side. The extra weight and the abrupt, awkward change made her falter. Her wings hesitated, then pounded harder as she struggled to remain in the air.
Jim barely kept his seat. Though Dawn weighed little, the low gravity did not diminish her mass, her inertia. Jim had no leverage. Leaning sideways with his arm extended against Athene's flank, he dragged Dawn along. He clamped his legs to Athene's sides. Pain stabbed through his knee.
"Dawn! Dammit, give me some help!"
Athene's wing joints squeezed against his knees with every downbeat. The stiff primaries scraped against his face and neck with each upswing. His sweating hand slid on Dawn's wrist. Athene labored to turn, struggling across a canyon so deep that its river flowed among wall-spheres, the bedrock of the worldship.
Jim heard the beating of a second pair of wings. But if Scarlet could have helped another flyer carry a disabled person, she could not help Athene.
Slowly, painfully, Dawn's fingers clasped Jim's wrist. Dawn reached up with her other hand and grabbed Jim's arm.
Jim pulled Dawn upward. Dawn clambered onto Athene's back.
Athene touched down, stumbled, recovered, stretched her wings wide, and came to a trembling halt. As she limped toward Buffy and Lukarian, Jim sagged over her withers. He could hardly believe he was on the ground again. It seemed as if he had been aloft for an hour, but it could not have been more than a couple of minutes.
Lukarian and Buffy ran to him and eased Spock down. Jim dismounted, landing on his good leg, leaning against Athene's side to try to catch his breath.
"Jim, are you all right? Dawn—?" Lukarian said.
"I think so. Ame, I'm sorry, I couldn't see any other way—I hope I didn't hurt her ..." Jim said as his knee folded away under him and pitching him unceremoniously to the ground.