Iavo spun around and glared at her while two of his men lunged at Data and were thrown off. "Conspirators?"

'The Sentinel did it, didn't he?" Ansue Hashley reckoned, taking the topic and running with it while the other men fought their way around the arena. "He poisoned the royal family! He wanted power all the time. He's been close to it all his life, like the prime minister waiting for the queen to die, but he gets impatient. I've heard of that."

Crusher rewarded him with a nod, then accused Iavo with a glare. "I guess he thought he could get away with killing the entire royal family."

In the middle of a dagger-swipe, Iavo let his move be parried without challenge as he sang out, "I did nothing to make this happen! I have no idea why they turned ill at the same time! I thought it was their blood!"

Wondering how good an actor he was, Crusher moved sideways, keeping behind the periphery of Data's slashing weapon. "Who helped you engineer the vital terrorism?"

"I did not do it!" Iavo shouted. He actually stopped fighting, backed away from Data, and stood there waving his weapon in a kind of helpless gesture, as one of his guards writhed in pain at his feet and the other braced to charge again. "This was providence working! I had the power to see what could be! I wanted to change the hearts of our people, not this... this-stop it!"

He lashed out at the last guard, driving the charging soldier sideways into the table just before the other man would've plowed back into Data's circle of engagement. "Stop, all of you!" Iavo ordered. "Stop... stop. No more.. :' The other guards-the two conscious ones-clasped at their bleeding and broken limbs and obeyed him. Mindful of Data's dangerous abilities, they shrank back, away, and crouched near the fireplace. Somehow Crusher could tell that they weren't obeying because they were beaten. They were obeying because they knew they were wrong.

Emotionally destroyed, baffled and sickened by the rankness of what he had been tempted toward, Iavo stalked the width of the room, then finally sank into the chair at the center table as if some magical pry bar had opened a valve and let the air out of him. He raised his striking jewel-like eyes to Crusher, and she saw mirrors of anguish.

"A thousand loyalties," he mourned, "a thousand pressures... these days have been torment for me... I have spent my life in the service of the royal family, never once thinking such thoughts, until along came tiffs miracle, this disease that struck every one of them... at first it seemed tragic, soon changing to a glimmer... the allure of opportunity... to cut away the throne's ancient core... change the future of the empire, dilute the power of blood succession that causes these terrible dangers and finally try something new-this might've been the only chance in history to try. But I can't finish it-"

Demolished, Iavo sank back on the vanity, his head hanging, his arm draped across the console.

"I could let them die," he moaned, "but I could never kill them. You must believe me...." "Data, stand down," Crusher ordered.

The android lowered his weapon, although Crusher was rea.s.sured when he did not put it away, and remained poised in the middle of the room, ready to spring in case anybody got any ideas.

"Good work," she said as she came to the android's side. "How badly are you hurt? "A little lubricant leakage, Doctor." "I'll fuse you up in a few minutes."

Emboldened, Crusher crossed the furry carpet in three strides and got the dazed Sentinel by the collar, her hands knotted like cannonb.a.l.l.s at his throat. She leered into the crumple of his face.

"All right, Iavo. Look at me. I'm willing to have seen nothing here today, do you understand me? Data's not only the devil with a handweapon, he's also got what you might call a photographic memory. We've got a record of everything that's gone on here, but I'm willing to keep it between us if you do exactly as I order. You get your buddies out of here and don't show me another armed guard for the duration of my visit. You're now the empress's one and only bodyguard. Monarchies are stupid, but that little girl didn't do anything except get born into the royal family. It's like a curse, y'know? It's not her fault,"

"You must believe me" he beseeched. "I know nothing of the plot to make them all ill...."

"I believe you." She dropped his collar so abruptly that he flinched. "This biological a.s.sault's been going on all over the quadrant and it's never involved the Romulans till now. As much as I'd like to hate you right now, nothing points to you. You're just an opportunist. A clumsy one, at that. You think I can't tell that you've never done anything like this before?"

"I never have... please forgive me... I never expected you to be so brave. We have always been told that humans whimper and sneak, stab in the night... I have served loyally all my life, until this opportunity raised it head-"

"And you can still have your coup d'etat someday, I'm all for revolutions, but not while the opposition is lying helplessly ill and I'm around to make them better. If the empire falls this way, this fast, you'll take all the rest of us down the drain with you. You threatened to kill me, so here's the counter often You won't kill me, and Data won't have to kill you. I keep treating her and the rest of the royal family, and you and your men pretend none of this happened and quit thinking that this is a good way to change things. You can all keep your positions and get another chance some day to do it right. I'll send you a biography of Benjamin Franklin and you can get some ideas, but until then be patient and do your jobs with some statesmanship. For now, you'll back off and let me do my job without any more theatrics. Simple enough?" The fire snapped, and the harp chimed.

Chapter Nineteen.

"MR. STILES..."

The devil's own carnival ride. Hands still tingling. Hate bad dreams... Orsova, loomimg over him while some creepzilla who'd won an auction rayed the flesh off him with bare fists. Arms throbbed. Legs, back... wake the dead with that drumbeat. Leave me alone. Can't go back, can't go back there ....

Lips clamped together and teeth gnashed, coming down on gritty shme. Stiles swam back to consciousness. Threads of grit made way between his teeth, file side of his tongue, the back of his throat he gagged himself awake.

As if something were crawling across his face, he backhanded himself in the mouth and wiped moist filth from his face, then heaved up spitting, weed pods netted with slime sheeting off the left side of his uniform as he rolled.

Someone groaned-he opened his eyes and seemed to see the sound of his own complaint rush into the sky like a bird. Pressing grit from his watering eyes, he forced himself up on both arms and hovered there on hands and 'knees, as his head battled to clear. He was kneeling in shoulder-high ferns. The ground was soft, sticky, made of pea-like pods in a great carpet, light green like duckweed on an everglade. And stank like a bilge. "What's that awful smell?" he complained.

A few yards from him, Spock rose to his knees in the ferns, his hands dripping with green stuff. "The great outdoors."

As if afflicted, Stiles stood up on a pair of rattling maracas. "G.o.d, we lived... that was the longest beaming I've ever been through. My head feels like a stone."

"The restraint shield they put around us is apparently geared toward weapons energy, fortunately. It allowed us to beam in is your phaser active?" Spock was holding his phaser, looking at it critically.

Stiles pulled his own phaser. "Drained! These were fully charged !"

"The shield sensed the charge" Speck said, "and neutralized them. Useless." Just like that he dismissed their lack of weaponry.

"Where are the grenades?" Spock slashed at the ferns with his hands, looking for the only thing they'd had time to bring with them-a pouch loaded with heavy-duty shaped grenades normally used by CST crews to blow off an irreconcilably leaking nacelle before the nacelle exploded and took a whole ship with it.

All around and above them, black trees spindled high and low, wretched branches dipping low into the marshy weeds and snaking up again with newly absorbed nutrients. Hands shaking, Stiles dug at the thickly shadowed overgrowth and wished there were more sunlight. Those clouds up there, blocking the light, those were the ones he'd seen displayed on the Saskatoon's screens as the energy from the planet drew the ship deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. The clouds seemed so pa.s.sive and blanketing, he had to struggle to recall that they were as deadly as venom, blinding his crew as they were sucked closer to being milled to dust.

Seemed like the ship was a million miles away, down here with the peace and quiet and ferns... be easy to lie down and take a nap.

"Twelve minutes" Spock reminded. "At this rate, the CST will crash at six hundred ten miles per hour." "And disintegrate I know" Stiles pawed furiously through the ferns now. "It's got to be here. It came through, didn't it? What if the envelope let us through and stopped the grenades somehow?" "The pouch would be here empty."

"Oh... right. Here it is!" He came up from the ferns with a weed-matted satchel, and half a bush attached to his hair. Through the pouch's mock-leather skin, he felt the presence of two charges in their canister. "We must hurry" Spock urged.

After a moment's clumsy hesitation, clarity struck him that Spock's statement was meant to let Stiles lead the way. "Right-this way."

The transporter had put them down at the edge of the weed forest. As they broke out of the knotty growth, tripping on hidden roots and fingers of dipping branches coming up again as independent plants, Stiles immediately saw the center of his universe-a blocky gray beam housing nestled in a meadow, positioned so that it had almost 170-degree firing clearance in every direction, even over the mountain range to his right-those mountains sent a javelin through him, which seemed to drive him backward... moving his feet to go toward the building caused such physical stress that his legs nearly went numb.

The blocky beam housing was nothing more than a platform of granite blocks and a spidery dutronium arrangement that acted as legs for a conical device standing about thirty feet above the ground. From that device at this moment a blinding blue beam was being emitted, that bellowed like a concert band trying to tune up.

Maybe they could've brought it down with hand phasers, but it would have taken a while to melt, Stiles noted with some satisfaction. At least the right choice had been made there. They hadn't taken the time to get hand phasers out of the security lockers and had brought only the canister charges. A dumb mistake. A dumb midshipman's mistake. Why did his mind always turn to taffy when Amba.s.sador Spook was around?

"Both sides of the base?" Stiles asked as he handed one of the charges to the amba.s.sador. "Yes."

"These are shaped charges, sir, so be sure to point the open end down so the fore will go into the ground and not up to the ship. Saskatoon's not much more than fifteen miles over our heads by now."

"Twelve point two. These are five-minute charges? No more, no less?"

'That's it. When you're blowing off a nacelle, all the alternatives have been exhausted. The decision's already been made. All you need is a small safety margin. Five's usually enough."

"It will not be enough today." Spock glanced around as he positioned the canister between the bolted fingers of a stanchion. "Other than the trees, there is no cover here."

"Most of those 'trees' aren't even trees. They're tendrils of an ancient root system. They just keep going up and down out of the glade like some giant's sewing them all over the countryside. They're hollow with liquid inside. They'll be blown down and act like a big net on us. The bark'll just crumble and turn into shrapnel." "Perhaps we should head in another direction, in that case."

"We'll head over that way, on the open meadow. How far can we run in five minutes?"

"Hardly matters, Mr. Stiles. We're unlikely to survive the blast wave. If the ship is freed from this beam, Dr. McCoy can lead a landing party to collect your friend and continue with the medical mission."

Stiles peered through the dutronium spiderweb. "Is that why you left him up there? To lead a second landing party if we got killed?" "Yes. Two fronts are better than one."

"Hmm... I left him because I figured he couldn't run." With feelings appropriately scornful to that little step down, Stiles pressed the charged canister into place. "Ready ... it's set. Now what?" "Four minutes, fifty-five seconds."

Amba.s.sador Spock set his own canister, then stepped back from the granite block, his black eyes vibrant with the moment's risk. He was actually enjoying himself. "I believe the operative phrase," he said, "is 'run like h.e.l.l.'"

"Three minutes." How long can five minutes be?

As Spock ticked off the time in thirty-second intervals, Stiles's legs pumped in unison with the pounding of his heart.

The longest Constrictor on record (the last time Stiles had experienced one) was three and a half minutes. The last eruption of Mount Vesuvius had lasted nine hours. A two-minute earthquake was really long. A ten-minute tornado. Minutes stretched into drawn-out experiences that seemed never to end, seemed to make the whole universe turn slower and slower, until a heartbeat itself became a sluggish kettledrum with the drummer falling asleep.

Five minutes of running across a swamp meadow, splashing through rancid fluids, antic.i.p.ating the platform back there to blow sky-high and sweep him off the face of the planet-that five minutes shot by faster than a snapped finger. What happened to all those stories about minutes becoming hours?

As the five-minute mark approached, they were only a third of the way across the meadow, running toward a blister of stony hills. At thirty-six years old, Stiles could devour some ground, and he had been holding back somewhat because he didn't want to outpace the amba.s.sador in case Spock needed help. Soon that showed itself to be unnecessary-Spock was tall, long-legged, and Vulcan.

They ran. Hindered by the knee-high meadowgra.s.s and the uneven ground beneath, the exercise became a venture into hopping, tripping, sprinting, and catching on thorns and tangles. Another ten feet... another... each step drew him deeper into misery. His brain shut down, he couldn't think of what to do but keep running. In his periphery he saw the flash of purple and black-the amba.s.sador's clothing moving at his side, the flick of Spock's fists and arms pumping as he forcefully kept up with a much younger man.

Stretching out his right leg to pa.s.s over a depression that opened before him, Stiles gasped suddenly as a cramp tore through the bottom of his thigh, wrecking his stride. His foot connected with the upward slope of the depression, but his leg instantly folded and he crammed into the compacted dirt kneefirst, down onto his side, skidding on his right cheekbone into the gra.s.s. Not the kindly patch of green at the end of the block, this Pojjana idea of gra.s.s had serrated edges and left his hands and face reddened as if he'd just shaved with a sawblade. He was on the ground, and the last seconds were gobbled up. "Keep running!" he shouted into the dirt. "I'll catch-"

But then the landscape opened up and reached for the sky. Black noise concussed between the mountains and the swamp forest, a great stick striking a great drum, and Stiles's skull rang and rang. He tried to rise, to run again, but the flash blinded him and the raw force drove him into the depression, not more than eight inches lower than the level of the ground they'd run across.

Suddenly tie was lying in a furnace, pressed down by weight he couldn't fight. He turned his head to one side and opened his eyes in time to see the blast wave blow over him in a single, solid white-hot sheet. The side of his face turned hot mid he buried his head in his arms and waited to die.

Into the m.u.f.fling warmth of his sleeve, he murmured, "Go, Sa.s.sy, go, go... push .... "

The carnivorous shock wave sheeted across his body, raising the hairs on his neck and limbs. He couldn't breathe-he sucked at a vacuum- And just as the compression was about to crush his chest, Stiles took one more desperate attempt to breathe and got a lungful of warm dusty air. His head cleared almost instantly.

As he maneuvered his elbows, pinned under his chest, and tried to shove himself upward, a weight across his shoulderblades pressed him down and held him. A wave of cool air now flooded over him, replacing the rushing scalded air of the blast sheet.

"Stay down." Spock's voice rang in his ear. "Cover your head."

Drowning out Spock's words, a shattering hall of granite bits and shards of metal pulverized them as they lay crushed to the floor of the depression. Stiles shrank into the smallest crushed-up ball he could manage as his back was hammered by his own success. The wreckage of the beam housing had taken a little tour flight and was now coming to visit the two little elves who'd arranged the trip.

His chest heaving, he finally managed to press up onto his elbows, then to his 'knees.

Crouched at his side, Spock was slapping him on the back over and over.

As Stiles was trying to figure out a way to tell the amba.s.sador that he wasn't choking and didn't need to be patted, Spock simply explained, "Your clothes were burning." "Oh... thanks. Was that... one... explosion... or two?" "Two. One concussion wave." Spock spoke as if nothing had happened at all, then coughed. The cough made him seem perfectly mortal and gave Stiles a bit of comfort that otherwise might've slipped on past him.

As a shimmering cloud of debris-the last of the pulverized housing-drifted around them as if it were a theatre curtain lowering, he winced his way to a standing position and had to lock both legs to stay up. His whole body trembled and pulsed with aftershock.

Through the drifting dust, he peered at the ma.s.s of wreckage, completely flattened, in fact depressed into a crater. The steel structure that had held the beam's emitter lay in mangled messes all over the gra.s.s, which had itself been seared brown.

"Think it worked'?" Stiles wondered. "Is the CST okay now?"

"If they veered off at the correct tangent, yes." Spock made moves to stand up, but faltered. Instead he looked at his legs, first one, then the other, in a strangely clinical manner. Stiles turned to him. "Sir?"

Before he could ask the question that came up, he flinched bodily at what he saw-a shard of metal the size of a writing stylus embedded in the side of the amba.s.sador's left thigh, with a good two inches sticking out.

"Oh, sir..." Stiles knelt beside him. The cloth of Spock's pantleg was stained with his blood, and the Vulcan was plainly stiff with pain, although he pretended this didn't bother him much. "How deep in do you think it is?"

"No way to tell," Spock said, and looked around at the sky. "The blast was substantial enough to have alerted the author/ties. Someone should be arriving soon."

Shaken by that, Stiles also looked around at the gray sky. "And here we are, out on the lone prairie, with no way to defend ourselves-sir, don't!"

He put out a hand, though he didn't really know what to do when the amba.s.sador abruptly grabbed the protruding two inches of the metal shard and simply slid it out of his leg.

"You're not supposed to pull out something that's sticking in you like that!" Stiles protested. "What if it hit an artery? You could bleed to death!"

"I clot well." Spock tossed the shard into the scorched gra.s.s and pressed the heel of his hand tightly to the wound. "I must be able to maneuver, and certainly a metal implement in my leg would be troublesome."

Stiles stood up again and looked around. "They'll be here any minute. We can take cover in those hills... I've heard of people digging down a few feet and finding the hollows made by ancient root systems that aren't there anymore." In the blast-flattened gra.s.s, tie found a large piece of a support strut with the bolt still attached in one end. "We can dig with this. I think I can hide you for a while in there, mid after nightfall we can make it into the foothills." "Commander... would you consider-"

"No, I will not consider leaving you and going off on my own. That's not even in the picture, so don't think about it. If you'll let me help you up .... "

Holding his digger in one hand, he slipped the other arm around the amba.s.sador, who allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Smeared with Vulcan blood, their clothing scorched, hair filthy, they hitched their way out of the almost invisible depression that had saved both their lives by allowing the blast wave to pa.s.s over them instead of deep-frying them into the ground. Any minute now a patrol would show up to investigate the blast, which probably showed up on every scanner on this part of the continent. Obviously, too, the Pojjana must've known they'd caught something in that gravity-weird contraption.

"This way, sir." He drew Spock along, dismayed that the Vulcan seemed not to be helping much. "We'll hide until night, then we can make a bivouac in the hills and figure out a way to defend it. There they are! I see a plane! Come on, before they spot us!"

Chapter Twenty.

STILES PRESSED FORWARD, aiming for the shadowy protection of the rocklands ahead. He could hear the distant murmur of the plane's engine, recognized the type of aircraft, and made his bets.

"They're still miles away," he gasped, pulling Spock along, "but even if they spot us they can't land on this terrain. They'll have to send a recon hoverscout with a patrol team to flush us out. If we can make it to the hills-" "Commander?"

"Don't worry, I can take more of your weight. We can't slow down. If we can make it to-" "Of course, Mr. Stiles, but I do have a question." "What's that, sir?" "From whom are we hiding?" "Watch that rock-don't trip!" "From whom," Spock repeated, "are we about to hide?" "The authorities. They'll be here any time-" "And to whom... did we come here to speak?"

Stiles dragged the amba.s.sador along another five or six steps before this sank in. As the drone of the aircraft drew closer to the bomb site, he felt his face screw up in a frown of confusion and doubt. Something just didn't seem right about this.

The amba.s.sador tentatively put more weight on his injured leg.

Stiles shifted back and forth on his own feet and finally met Spock's eyes. "I'm doing it again, aren't IT'

Spock bobbed an eyebrow, flattened his lips, and charitably avoided nodding.

While digesting that little nugget, Stiles lowered the amba.s.sador onto the first sitting-sized rock they'd come upon, a harbinger of the fact that they could've made it to cover if logic hadn't gotten in the way.

They remained still, unresisting, out in the open, as the Pojjana aircraft buzzed the scene of the explosion and Stiles thought his arms and legs were going to fall off with the urge to run again, hide, defend-The plane strafed the flattened beam emitter for several seconds before veering abruptly toward them. His spine shriveled. They'd been spotted. 'They've seen us," Spock said with quiet satisfaction.

"How are we going to explain blowing up their emitter?" Stiles circled behind the amba.s.sador and came around the other side as if stalking the plane on its approach. "We had to do it. I couldn't let it pull my ship down-" "Of course not."

The plane soared over them, one wing tilted low, and they could clearly see the pilot in his helmet looking down at them. He was contacting the Pojjana security forces.