Synthesis - James Swallow [99]
Sweat coiled around his eye ridges and trickled down his cheek. He halfheartedly made a motion to his face to wipe it away, then felt foolish as his undamaged hand bumped against the visor of his helmet.
“Zurin?” Sethe was close by, and the Cygnian gave him a wary look. He spoke to him on a discreet comm channel. “I have painkillers in my suit’s medpack.”
Dakal shook his head. He had already taken those in his emergency kit, and they had done little but turn the pain down to a dull razor and muddy his thoughts. He didn’t want to blunt his senses any further, not while any moment of inattention could lead to danger. Isolated from the Titan, stranded on an artificial world, every member of the group had to maintain focus. He blinked again and found Commander Tuvok studying him.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
Without even altering his expression by one iota, the Vulcan nevertheless managed to convey perfectly his lack of belief in the ensign’s statement. “We will rest for a moment.”
Dakal’s shoulders sank with relief, and he took a long, deep breath of recycled air. He glanced back the way they had come, searching the wilderness for the mouth of the canyon where their interrupted transport had deposited them; he could not see it from there.
But the great disfigurements in the metal landscape were visible from this slightly higher elevation. Pava had spotted the first of them, walking to the edge of a rent in the ground that was anything but deliberate or constructed. Old, oxidized petals of heat-distorted iron bowed downward, bent flaps of material cored in by the whiplash impact of some incredible force. The edges of the damage were corroded, and they defied coherent analysis by tricorder; all that could be intuited with any degree of certainty was that something like a great roughhewn knife had slashed at the surface of the FirstGen construct some time ago. Sethe had used his suit’s wrist beacon to cast a light into the ragged wound, discovering that the gouge went deep and dark.
It soon became clear that this scar did not exist alone. They passed more along the way, and Dakal used the distraction of mapping them to keep his mind occupied. He made rough estimates based on length and apparent orientation, and on the tiny screen of his tricorder, an image grew, the image he would have seen if viewing the machine moon from high altitude. Not one scar but a whole skein of them, radial cuts that fanned out from some distant point of impact. The pattern of a claw, he imagined, the claw of some vast and monstrous carrion bird.
Zurin pressed his teeth together. His mind was wandering. He was becoming overly fanciful. The fault of the medication, perhaps.
Pava had also discovered the melts, the places where sheets of the metal ground were disordered and slagged, as if they had been superheated, flowed like runny wax, and been left to set again. Like the scars, these blemishes were the marks left behind after some previous battle, and while the heaped slag piles were cold and inert, the spatter of the metal’s recrystallization had provided some answers. Tuvok recognized the aftereffect from the wreckage of White-Blue’s shipframe. FirstGen Zero-Three had, at one point in its existence, been directly bombarded by the Null. How it had survived intact was a question Dakal was very interested in answering.
They walked on, and after a while, the noises returned. The sound over the communicators came and went without pattern or apparent trigger, forcing itself onto the standby channel that was open between the shuttle survivors. Dakal did not hear the whispers or the giggling that Sethe and Pava claimed to, but he could not ignore the bass thrumming at the low end of the noise. The sound seemed to gather at the bridge of his nose and echo back through his eye sockets.
He was thinking of this as his