Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [50]
“Then what?” the doctor demanded.
Simenon looked grim. “We get our sticks out and stand our ground—and hope they’ve eaten recently.”
Picard drew his stick from its sheath and watched his officers do the same. Then, without anyone telling them to do so, they put their backs together and formed a knot.
As the beasts got closer, their growling grew louder and more frenzied. They were within a hundred meters now, the captain judged, though the forest still hid them from view.
His heart was pounding and he could feel a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face. Primitive reactions, he noted. But then, this was a primitive confrontation.
Picard would have given much for the reassuring weight of a phaser pistol in his hand. Unfortunately, the nearest directed energy weapon was in orbit high above the planet’s surface, securely locked in the Stargazer’s armory.
More growling, closer still. Without question, the sanjarra had caught their scent.
“As soon as you see them,” said Simenon, “go on the offensive. Keep them off-balance. Once they leap, we’re as good as dead.”
Another flight of colunnu crossed the sky in close formation. But this time, the captain didn’t look up to appreciate them.
He had a more immediate concern.
Chapter Fifteen
WU FELT AS IF she had been watching the streaming splendor of Oneo Madrin’s accretion bridge for hours before the Stargazer finally got some telemetry from its class IV probe. In fact, though, it could only have been seven or eight minutes.
“We’re receiving,” Paxton announced.
“What have we got?” asked the second officer, getting up to join him at his console.
Paxton frowned as he studied his communications monitors. “There’s interference from all the radiation, Commander. I’m trying to eliminate it . . .”
Wu leaned over his shoulder to see how he was doing. Little by little, the comm officer was cleaning up the image on his central monitor. As he did this, Wu could see the outline of a ship emerging.
Or rather, part of a ship.
But the part she could make out appeared undamaged, just as their sensors had already indicated. It was as if something had sheared the Belladonna in half.
Then Wu saw that there was something else in the accretion bridge—a churning maelstrom of energy that had no business being there, but was dancing around the severed end of the research ship. “What’s that?” she asked Paxton.
The comm officer peered at his monitor, its glare casting crimson shadows on his face. “It looks like a graviton storm—though I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of this intensity.”
“Is it intense enough to have drawn us toward the accretion bridge?” Wu asked.
“I don’t believe so,” Kastiigan told her. “Nor do I believe it is intense enough to have trapped the Belladonna.”
The second officer frowned. Something had exerted an attractive force on them. If not the graviton storm, what then?
As if he had read her mind, Kastiigan said, “Graviton storms seldom occur spontaneously. They are usually an incidental effect of some other sort of disturbance.”
“So maybe this one is concealing something,” Paxton speculated.
“Something that has an attractive force all its own,” Wu remarked.
Paxton nodded. “A kind of cosmic sinkhole.”
“An interesting thesis,” Kastiigan noted. “It would explain why we are only seeing part of the research vessel.”
Wu felt a trickle of cold sweat in the small of her back. “You mean because the rest has already been swallowed up by the sinkhole.”
Paxton shrugged. “Makes as much sense as anything else.”
The second officer studied the telemetry some more. She had heard of gaps in space–time that pulled matter from her universe into another. They had been documented in the logs of starship captains as far back as the twenty-second century.
“All right,” she said at last. “If this is a sinkhole, where does it lead?” She challenged her bridge officers with a look. “What’s on the other side?”
“That is difficult to say,” Kastiigan responded. “But one thing seems certain, Commander—the Belladonna won’t have the wherewithal to survive