Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [147]
“Lieutenant?” said Seven.
“Atmo,” said B’Elanna, coming back to herself. “Probably got trapped when the seals activated.”
“I agree,” said Seven.
As quickly as it had come up, the moaning alien wind died away. Some internal safety mechanism had engaged, capping the leak she and Seven had created. That meant somewhere, deep inside this thing, some lights might still be on. With only minor difficulty she and Seven of Nine propped the hatch to one side.
“Okay, away team,” said B’Elanna over the comm. “We’re in.”
“Tight fit,” said Hardy. He was the fourth to squeeze through into the bottleneck that B’Elanna was already calling The Front Door.
Beyond the small chamber they currently occupied, the interior of the construct was just a warren of tunnels extending in all directions.
Like ants they entered, single file, splitting off into separate passageways in order to maximize the effectiveness of the beams from their helmet lamps.
“There’s some sort of grav field working,” said one of the Delanys. “I can feel my stomach again.”
Like the hatch, all the interior surfaces seemed to be composed of the same vaguely crystalline material. Their tricorders deemed the substance to have been woven somehow or even perhaps grown into its current configuration.
“You’d think somebody would have thought to level the rutting floors.” said Edgely. The downward slope of the tunnel she’d chosen made keeping her footing difficult.
None of the surfaces kept a flat plane for long. Instead they were all faceted, segmented almost. It was like crawling around inside the veins of an enormous gem.
“I’m picking up something that could be biological,” said a deep resonant voice-Noah Lessing’s. “The reading’s inconclusive but- “
“When the Doctor comes through, take him and check it out,” said B’Elanna, cutting him off.
Janeway might be able to force her to work with Lessing, but nothing in the captain’s orders said she had to listen to him talk.
“Anybody else feel a chill?” said Cobb.
“All EVA devices are temperature regulated,” said Seven of Nine’s voice.
“Seven’s right,” said B’Elanna. “Nobody’s feeling a chill.”
“Yeah,” said Cobb. “My goose bumps beg to differ.”
“Mine too,” said Hardy.
“Noted,” said B’Elanna. “Now cut the- ” Something moved in her periphery and she went immediately mum.
“Lieutenant Torres,” said someone. “Are you- ?”
“Shut up,” she hissed.
Reaching slowly for the phaser in her belt, she swept her headlamp back and forth across the corridor. There was nothing there.
“All right,” she said after a time. “False alarm.”
“Anybody else getting that signal echo?” said Cobb. “Sounds like whispering.”
B’Elanna was about to tell Cobb to go back to Voyager if his nerves weren’t up to the assignment when she realized she heard it too.
The sound was very similar to that of a hundred people murmuring to each other, but from such a distance that the words could not be made out. If it was a signal echo, it was of a sort B’Elanna had never encountered.
She caught the same furtive movement again, this time on her right. In a motion that would have made her Klingon ancestors proud, she flipped onto her side and brought her phaser up.
There was definitely motion on the crystal facets above her. It was ephemeral, barely visible even with the light from her helmet shining directly on it.
Something, some volatile liquidy something, was moving there all right. But it was moving inside the structure of the crystal rather than across its surface.
Her free hand came up to touch the facet, but, perhaps triggered somehow by her movement, the strange apparition vanished. As did Cobb’s echo.
“What the hell?” said B’Elanna softly.
She was doing her best to convince herself that what she had seen in the crystal’s depths had not been a face when the Doctor started