SOLOMON GRUNDY


She'd taken a blow to the head when the tunnel's end spat her into this sterile space; that Hoshi remembered, if only from the impression of starry surprise and the stinging bright spot in her temple. What little remained of the last few moments was a drifting flotilla of dancing silver in a sea of exhaustingly endless black. There was the sense of falling, of thin light diminishing into darkness, that moment of stunned hurt . . . and now, pain in her throbbing temple. Everything else since the floor gave way had been knocked clean out of her head.

She ached from that fall she barely remembered, and as she drew in a breath that shuddered through her like the wind through a lace curtain at an open window, she found that the disintegrating taste to the air had been left behind with her memory. This air was tasteless, processed but clean, and she gulped it in greedily, ridding her lungs of their store of rancid dust until she felt giddy. It was now that she noticed she was lying on cold metal, and in unwavering silence.

Hoshi responded to the hush and opened her eyes with a snap, not so much drawn to reality as repelled by her own thoughts. A black as deep as the silence pawed at her with intangible hands she could not see. She pulled herself upright, startling a dizzy swell of colored lights behind her eyes momentarily.

she ventured, softly. It melted into the air like salt into water. Lieutenant, are you there?

Apart from the in-out of her own hungry lungs, there was not a sound to be heard, even by her. The silence tipped her from unease to terror in a way even the shattered tea-maker had been unable to do; it was never truly silent for Hoshi Sato. She had thrived by hearing what others could not, sieving the frequencies through mental fingers to discover what may catch in their net. Nowhere was ever truly silent, despite what her friends and her family and her colleagues may say to the contrary, and she had often nodded along with them, allowing their misimpressions, but secretly enjoying that exclusive layer of sounds that only she could hear. Here, now, was the first utter absence of sound that she had ever known.

she yelled, but like her breaths, the sound was absorbed into the nothing and not even a passing echo returned to her. She hugged herself tighter and called again, but the sponge of the air soaked up her voice, stealing it from her mouth as it left her. It was neither hot nor cold in this place, dry or humid; the stifled acoustics and pitch darkness stole away all sense of distance. She might be in a vast cavern or a tiny closet . . . underground or over, although her fall made her think under. But only her instinct told her even that much.

she screamed again, and again in Vulcan, Klingon, Andorian, Xyrillian, a host of others . . . until finally the plateau of unbroken quiet defeated her, and she sank back down to the floor, the wind snatched from her sails.

No matter how sternly she told herself she would not cry, a treacherous prickle of heat began to burn along her eyelashes. She blinked it back with a painful gulp, and fumbled her communicator from her pocket. She pried it open and listened for the comforting crackle of an open channel to welcome her, anticipating its invasion into the silence with barely restrained pleasure.

There was nothing.

The childish tears swept forward in a rush of disappointment, and angrily she swallowed their salty undertaste back, feeling the dryness coat her throat and ruin her voice as she spoke anyway. Enterprise, do you read? Captain, it's Hoshi, please respond.

Nothing returned, not even static. Before it could be stopped, a sob choked out of her, bringing the tears with it. Malcolm, are you there? she murmured, dropping her words to a whisper to disguise their lack of resonance. Lieutenant, this is Hoshi, please respond. Please, Malcolm, for once in your life, say something!

It was then that Hoshi became aware of the silence breaking like an eggshell; it was now invaded by an undulating buzz like the bass on a half-muted sound system, not sinking into the air but lying uncomfortably on it the way her own voice had lain and died. But it did not come from the communicator in her hand, much as her mind tried to rationalize that it did; it seemed to be coming from a few meters away, to her right.

His communicator, responding in kind to her call . . . unanswered, but clear in the hush.

Hoshi stiffened. The absence of even another's breathing in the darkness had convinced her that she was alone when she was sure of very little else. But his communicator, at least, was here, the call untaken, and it, she knew, had been in his pocket as her own was in hers. Did that mean . . ?

She gulped, balking at the final thought wanting to complete the chain. If his communicator lie nearby, and it had been with him, then . . . was he here, too, unable to respond but nevertheless close by?

His communicator could have shaken out of his pocket and simply followed her course instead of his . . . but it might also be that he was here, and no longer breathing.

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Trip trod conscientiously soft as he crept ahead. He had never possessed Reed's feline grace or T'Pol's concise lack of exertion, and it took effort to set his feet down softly, especially over the crunching remains of a tea-maker inside the entrance.

He sucked in his breath, focused on one step at a time—but each step he made led him further into the black of a long-abandoned institute that only days ago had been bright, inhabited, and whole. The darkness beyond his flashlight's pale vortex swallowed the ceiling and all but a fragment of the floor and walls. The structure creaked as he walked, as if even the muffled click of his boots on the marble floor were causing an avalanche, and there was an unearthly silence not broken by his deliberate footsteps but somehow enhanced by them; the footsteps belonged to something alive, to an interloper in a forgotten ruin. Life did not belong in this strange modern spin on the valley of the dead.

When the captain had sheepishly awakened him, after barely an hour of sleep, to inform him that Hess had repaired the warp reactor to a capability of Warp 4, and that the Enterprise had arrived at Devoli V earlier than they had hoped, Trip had foolishly volunteered to take Shuttlepod Two in alone. The captain had pressed him to take Travis with him, at the least; but Trip had cheerfully shot down any suggestion of company, not expecting too much trouble on the planet itself, and wanting the situation taken care of the quickest way possible. He had a feeling that a paranoid Malcolm would respond more favorably to one alone than to a landing party of two or more. He also suspected, in truth, that Malcolm's hallucinations would be just that—hallucinations, groundless side effects of the nanobots as his miraculous recovery had apparently been, and no more. Besides, he had joked, three absent officers was more than enough for any one away mission.

But right at this moment, he would be grateful, so grateful, not to be the only living thing in sight.

I'd even be glad o' T'Pol right now, how bout that? he muttered to himself, wanting to hear even his own voice . . . but even as he spoke and his words fell flat and echoless on the stagnant air like the thud of a soaked, balled-up rag hitting the floor, he wished he hadn't.

After a moment, the subtle slope of the floor curved downwards, and carpet replaced the slick marble. The decline steepened briefly before leveling out again.

There he halted, pulling a scanner from his pocket with his sweaty right hand. Shuttlepod One had been in the plaza, large as life and twice as shiny, but he had only his vague impression that Malcolm was borderline obsessive to tell him they had ever ventured further than the threshold of this decaying institute. He did not intend to go a step further into the dark unless he knew for a fact that his crewmates were somewhere inside.

He quickly scanned for biosigns, as he had from Shuttlepod Two. On that initial scan he had registered two strong signatures, moving together in this very stretch of corridor . . . now he also registered two, the one far below him and the other in the very spot in which he himself stood. Both remained steady, his own immobile, the one below progressing through a confined area immediately surrounding it, and never beyond.

Two. There had been two before he entered, and now again two where three should be. One had disappeared as he ventured in . . . and there had not been time, even running, for the last one to leave. Nothing in the institute's residual energy signatures indicated a transporter beam-out of any kind.

One of his friends had either vanished into thin air . . . or was dead.

Second time for everything, I guess, Trip drawled shakily, amplifying its lilt in the hope that it would have some impact on the sedimentary air. It did not.

He walked on, but even more cautiously now, trying not to breathe too loudly although he hardly felt that he was breathing at all. The slope wound steadily down into darkness and silence; he stumbled forward in his solitary globe of mellow white light, the dark both closing seamlessly behind him and opening ahead, urging him deeper. He crept on, breath bated, knowing he should never have come alone.

As the corridor wound downwards, a drift mine cutting steeply and fatally into the darkness of the planet, his flashlight fell on a bright red spot, splashed on the carpet beside his weary feet. He panned the light, and found another, and another, a few centimeters apart. The trail led deeper into the subterranean corridors. Trip knelt, and tested the blood spot with his fingers. It was quite fresh.

A few meters on, the regular spots became a smear running parallel to the walls, as if the injured party had been dragged—or else had slid—along the floor.

The biosign he had picked up besides his own had been in the lower levels; the owner of this shed blood, perhaps. Or were those splashes and that smudged track symptoms of a more serious wound . . ?

All Trip knew was that one of them, alive or dead, must be at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs; and it was his duty, both as their commander and their friend, to find out who.

You owe me big if this is another one o' your little trick deaths, Malcolm, he growled. But it was only a half-serious threat, and more than a little made to try to convince himself, unsuccessfully, that it wouldn't be anything more.

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As a child, Hoshi had once volunteered to wear a blindfold for charity during a high school fund-raiser. She had thought it would be a valuable experience, not only in honing the use of her ears, but in learning to understand how the world changed for the blind. How even simple things like answering the door or making a drink became difficult. And it had been difficult, more than she had anticipated; she had fallen halfway down the stairs before twenty minutes of the agreed hour had passed. But she had known throughout that entire hour that should there be a real emergency, she could remove the blindfold—just reach up, and pull it away. And it was only now that she realized that. Because that was what was so terrible; there was no blindfold to pull away this time. Reed may be within arm's reach of her, wounded or . . . or worse . . . and without her sight, she could do very little to find out for certain, and even less to help him if she could find out. Communications were down and she was on her own.

Hoshi did what she had done all her life. She used her ears.

Trembling badly now, she raised her communicator to her mouth and spoke into it, repeating the old nursery rhymes she had used to teach basic elocution to entry-level students in Brazil; Solomon Grundy and her favorite, All the H's. One ear she kept focused on her own words, to keep them separate from all other sounds—with the other she listened for the faint hiss at the receiving end of the com channel, following it.

In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, she recited, finding the repetition oddly therapeutic, hurricanes hardly ever happen. Malcolm would probably approve her choice of rhyme, she thought wryly—they were all English place names. She listened, and sure enough, the snapping, popcorn sound was coming from her right. She sidled over on her thigh, using her knees to lever herself along, reluctant to stand when she had no idea how high—or how low—the ceiling may be. The crackle grew louder.

Solomon Grundy, born on Monday, she began another, edging to her right in incremental nudges, christened on Tuesday . . .

Her right thigh brushed against something that skittered forward a little from the collision. Something small, and light. The sound was coming from round about here. She closed her communicator, put it away, and crept her fingers forward across the floor the way a spider walks, until they came across the item to which the static had led her. It was smooth, about the size of a compact mirror, and cold to the touch. The crackle and static had died when she stopped speaking, but there was no mistaking the thing she held in her hands.

It was Reed's communicator.

Married on Wednesday, she gulped, tightening her throat around the perfect, muffled sounds of the nursery rhyme. Took ill on Thursday . . .

She walked her hands on, terrified of happening suddenly upon something soft, perhaps warm, perhaps not—she had no idea how long she had been unconscious—but speaking her idiotic mantra like a ward against panic. Worse on Friday, died on Saturday . . .

Her hands bumped against another article, as cold and inorganic as the first, but larger, cylindrical, with a switch raised on one long edge. Shaking so hard she could barely hold it, Hoshi ran her thumb over the bump, and flipped the switch there. Light flooded an empty room no larger than the mess hall on Enterprise, just steely walls and ceiling and floor glinting in the pale beam. A doorway yawned open ahead of her, but there was no sign of the opening that had spat her out in the first place. The ceiling above her was unbroken, scratched but whole. There was no way she could have come from up there.

And yet, she had.

Buried on Sunday, she whispered, and immediately wished she hadn't. That closed expanse above her looked too much like the lid of a coffin holding her underground, as underground she almost certainly was. Coaxing her stiffened joints to co-operate, she stood, panning the light around her in a wide arc. Looking, though she hardly dared admit that to herself, to see if these items of Reed's had followed her on their own—or fallen with him.

She was alone.

That was the end of Solomon Grundy, she breathed; but it was closer to a whimper, and remained unanswered.

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Trip shone his flashlight beam on the wall in front of him, blinking in the glare that cut back from the polished surfaces. The dark streak of red ran straight up to the right angle between wall and floor, and ended abruptly there, as if the injured party had been dragged clean through the wall. Already, in his mind, he had decided the party in question was Malcolm.

Well either I'm seein' things, Trip muttered, hardly realizing that he was speaking to his flashlight in the absence of a listening ear, or these days that crazy Brit's walkin' through walls.