Ghost of a Chance - Mark Garland [35]
She reached back toward the next closest tree as the earth disappeared from underneath her. Her hands came up empty. She felt herself falling, tumbling down the slope in a jumble of earth and roots and rocks. Sharp pain registered on her right side, and then her left leg turned underneath her. Abruptly her head slammed against something huge and hard, and she slipped quietly into darkness.
*** Captain Janeway was having a dream, though she was certain it was not her own. The acrid smell of hot sulfur and molten metals burned her nose and lungs; the smoke that curled and swirled from every direction made her eyes water. Blinking, then squinting, she found herself high up, and standing on a plateau only a few dozen meters from the edge of a great precipice. Far below and stretching out into the eerie distance lay a vast, glowing lake of molten lava. The steam and smoke and the high, arching cavern walls were illuminated for kilometers by the reddish glow of the lava lake, but more light came from behind her, bright light that radiated all around her, bringing stark detail to the entire plateau. As she turned, she was forced to raise her hand to block out the unnatural glare.
The plateau swept back to the nearest wall of the cavern, perhaps two hundred meters away. There, bathed in cool white light from dozens of fixtures set in the rock, and radiating light of its own, she saw an enormous machine unlike anything she had ever encountered.
Composed of thousands of glowing or darkened tubes all set in massive, curving banks of smooth metal, the components reminded Janeway of heat sinks coupled with scores of generators, though the scale was beyond her experience. Several of the tubes stretched from the plateau upward into the darkness of the cavern's ceiling. Still others twisted back into the cavern wall. Small, flat panels were scattered in wavelike patterns throughout the apparatus. Janeway tried to move toward the machine, but her feet would not cooperate.
Trapped, she thought, choking briefly, wondering how long she could survive in the heavily tainted atmosphere. What kind of dream is this? she wondered. Unless it wasn't any kind of dream at all. And if it wasn't, it occurred to her that death might be a real possibility here.
She had never dreamed in such vivid colors before or wiped wet tears from her cheeks as the smoke continued to irritate her eyes, nor had she ever coughed so. No dream was this clear.
She closed her eyes, rubbing them against the sting. When she opened them again, she saw something pass by just over her shoulder, moving swiftly along the plateau's edge. She turned to follow it with her eyes, but only caught a glimpse of a tenuous figure, almost impossible to see in the strangely lit, heavily polluted air. Still, it reminded her of a similar apparition she had encountered once before, aboard Voyager. Another of Chakotay's visiting spirits... or hers.
She saw several figures now, each so vague she could barely be certain she was observing anything at all. Yet she could sense them, too.
Near her. Almost a part of her. Then the dream began to fade away, replaced by growing darkness. She wondered if this was indeed the end.
The ghosts had somehow brought her here, and the poisons in the air were killing her. Perhaps they didn't know, she thought. She found it impossible to believe that the ghosts would go to so much trouble, aboard Voyager and then here, simply to lure her to an elaborate death.
The darkness became nearly complete. She waited for pain, for panic, for anything, but nothing happened. Then, in a sudden fresh glow, the cavern dreams were replaced by a new image, that of a fantastic alien vessel, a ship several hundred times Voyager's size, and completely unknown; in all her studies of countless Starfleet and alien records and in all her travels, she had seen nothing to compare with the ship