Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [66]
“As I said, I have little choice in the matter.”
Neelix frowned at her dour tone. “I’m going to scout around and see if I can find another exit from the caverns, perhaps another channel to the surface.”
Seven blinked slowly. She was finding it difficult to stay awake. She offered him the tricorder. “You should take this.”
He shook his head. “You need it more than I do. If there’s fresh air coming in anywhere down here, I’ll smell it.” He tapped his nose. “I’ll sniff it out.” Neelix moved off into the dark, leaving the woman alone in her pool of artificial light. He glanced over his shoulder just once, and the look of almost childlike dread he saw on Seven’s face made his blood run cold.
Neelix passed through the throat of the tunnel and into the cavern proper. There was light in here, after a fashion, a myriad of glittering flecks of yellow-green matter threaded throughout the strata of the rocks. Neelix was no geologist, but he’d seen enough of the ore in his time to recognize the element the humans called veracite. The planet was rich with it. An exotic substance laced with energy, veracite was used by many pre-warp civilizations as a power source, but the side effects of proximity to it-mainly the disruption of any technology with a duonetic field-made it anathema to most spacefaring species. Not that there was anyone on Nyma IV to be concerned with that… at least, not anymore. From space, the unremarkable brownish green planet seemed exactly like the hundreds of other life-bearing worlds that dotted the wilds of the Delta Quadrant, and on the surface Voyager’s survey teams had found nothing but a few higher order primates and the expected panoply of flora and fauna. It was only on the eighth day, when the crew had just started to grumble about “a wild-goose chase,” that things had become much more interesting. Performing a low-altitude sweep of Nyma IV’s eastern savanna region, Ensigns Duarte and Chell picked up something on the sensors of their shuttle that read like refined, starship-grade metals.
And there it was; a dolmen, Chakotay had called it, a structure akin to burial stones left behind by some of Earth’s precursor civilizations. The marker concealed the entrance to the tunnel network, and soon they were inside the long-dead arteries of the world, passing through lava tubes that crossed in a broad web. Just as Janeway predicted, people had lived down here. The tunnels were rife with pictographs and drawings, and in the caverns there were the cities.
Millions of years ago, vast basalt bubbles hardened into stone vaults hundreds of feet tall. The people that had come to Nyma IV mirrored their civilizations on other worlds and forged communities underground. They lived and loved and died under the constant glow of their veracite sky. Neelix entered the huge natural atrium and felt the same emotion he had the first time he had seen it, a mingling of awe and sadness. Voyager’s crew had been the first sentients to set foot in here for centuries.
They had only mapped about a quarter of this cavern’s interior when the tremors began. He wondered about the others; Tom and B’Elanna were working the next cavern over-had they made it out in time, or were they just as trapped as Seven and he? Neelix shook his head to rid himself of the black mood lingering about him. No. I have work to do. I have find a way out. He threw all thought of caution to the wind and began a quick circuit of the cavern’s inner wall. This was not the careful survey he had been sent to do; this was an emergency.
Neelix found her at the plaza of red stones where he’d left her before the quake. He was pleased to see that the tremor had done little to disturb the buildings; it seemed that only the tunnels were prone to cave-ins like the one that had injured Seven.
As it always