Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [40]
“I think,” Vaslovik said, approaching the door, “we can abandon the direct approach.”
Graves grinned sheepishly and wiped a coating of gray dust off his forehead. “Good,” he said. “I can’t feel my hands anymore.”
Vaslovik smiled grimly, but did not otherwise respond as he unzipped his parka and reached into an inner pocket. Soong waited expectantly to see what he would pull out and was confused to see that it was only a stylus and a very old-fashioned-looking one at that. Handling it gingerly, Vaslovik twisted the base of the stylus until a tiny antenna shot out of the cap. He began to twirl the base from side to side, all the time studying a tiny display that opened on the pen’s stem. Soong heard a high-pitched whine that forced him to grit his teeth and take a step back.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Just a gadget,” Vaslovik said absently, concentrating on his adjustments. “Something I acquired a few years ago. It’s scanning the mechanism and looking for a resonant frequency just in case the lock is designed to …” He paused, seemed to struggle for the right words. “It’s hard to explain, actually.”
“I’ll bet,” Soong said skeptically.
Then, from the hatch there came a loud, menacing click, just exactly the sort of noise Soong would expect to hear from, say, the door for the main vault of the treasury building on the Klingon home world. Graves took a step back.
Somewhere in the hatch, tumblers shifted. Soong felt his skin crawl with invisible static electricity bugs. Then, there came a thin hiss of air pressure equalizing.
“How long did you say you thought this hatch has been shut?” Soong asked softly and, he hoped, casually.
“I didn’t,” Vaslovik replied.
“Hmm. Good bearings on the door, then.”
Stepping forward, Vaslovik replied, “I’ve always said you can always judge a culture by the quality of the ball bearings it produces.” He caught the lip of the hatch with a forefinger and pulled. The hatch swung open, releasing a cloud of stale, dry, warm air. Light panels on the walls and ceilings flickered on, revealing a featureless antechamber that terminated in a second hatch.
“Some kind of airlock,” Soong observed.
“Or a trap,” Graves muttered.
“Mmmm,” Vaslovik responded, resting one foot on the lip of the hatch. He scanned the chamber, first with the tricorder, then with the penlike device. “Nothing,” he said, “which doesn’t really mean anything. Whoever built this could easily deceive our sensors. No wonder Starfleet never found this.” He paused, apparently considering his options. Then, before Soong could stop him, Vaslovik stepped into the antechamber.
Nothing happened.
Graves released his breath. “Please don’t ever do that again,” Graves hissed between gritted teeth.
“Sorry,” Vaslovik said without looking back. “It seemed like the simplest solution. And, besides, you would have to be truly paranoid to build a bomb into an airlock hatch. One way in, one way out. Why clutter it up with explosives?”
“Sounds like something you’ve put some thought to,” Soong observed.
“Oh, certainly,” Vaslovik replied. “And you will, too, someday. When you’re older.”
He fixed his sights on a keypad in the opposite wall. Approaching it, he held the stylus out before him and the device began to whine softly. Soong and Graves glanced at each other, shrugged in unison, then crowded in close to watch. Moments later, a mechanism inside the hatch clicked and popped away from the rim.
Graves, obviously feeling brave now, tugged the hatch open and stepped into the second room. Soong knew they were pushing their luck and half-expected to see phasers erupt from the walls, but the only sign of movement was lights flickering on.
This room was not empty.
It was much larger than the antechamber, though almost as austere. There were several narrow platforms along one wall—most likely beds, Soong decided, though the bedclothes had rotted away to dust ages ago. A wide, waist-high cube surrounded by a half-dozen smaller