Chapter Six.

FROM ACROSS THE RAVAGED REMAINS of their two crushed cells, Zevon pressed a hand to his face where Stiles had struck him.

"I am not your enemy;' he said. "I have no reason to hurt you. We'll both die if you hold me off like this for long"

"All Romulans are our enemies;' Stiles blistered. "You just keep your distance!" "But I freed you from the stone. I set your arm"

"To use me as some kind of hostage! I've been stupid enough for one day! I'm not being stupid again. You stay back. I'm getting out of here."

Zevon lowered his hand. His face showed a single bruised cheekbone, but no open wound. "We must help each other. The prisoners are the last ones they'll dig out. You can't possibly climb out of here, ensign. I doubt you can take a single step."

'I'll take all the steps I need." Stiles held the metal rod between them like a club or sword, ready to use it either way. His right shoulder and arm pumped fiercely now as he exerted himself, throbbing inside the splinted wrapping. Zevon had managed to splint the arm with the elbow bent instead of straight at Stiles's side, and that would prove an advantage as he tried to get out of this hole.

The nasty pit of broken rock wall and plaster sheets and plumbing spun around him suddenly, jagged edges and smooth sheets blending into a single blue-gray cylinder. "Lie down," Zevon suggested, "before you pa.s.s out." "I don't listen to Romulans!"

His chest heaving with effort, Stiles let his body rest slightly on the edge of a folded bolt of linoleum flooring. He had no idea where the flooring had come from-there had been nothing like this in the holding area. Probably from one of the floors above. How many stories had collapsed on them? Since he had never seen the building from the outside, he had no way of knowing.

Thinking of something else, he looked at his right arm. One irregularly cut sheet of linoleum had been formed around his lower arm and another around the upper arm, held in place by strips of wool. A single wedge of metal slat, some kind of corner brace, had also been strapped there, and was holding his arm in a bent position. By resting the arm on his lap, he could relieve the strain in his shoulder.

"We'll just wait," he gasped. "Somebody'll come to rescue us. They'll come for us... they'll get here."

"Ensign Stiles," Zevon attempted slowly, "we are prisoners. There's been a Constrictor, a bad one. The Pojjana will be cleaning up for months. They'll be digging the survivors and bodies out for at least two weeks. Two of your weeks, I should specify. While we may live that long, certainly you can't hold that rod against me for so long. Is there a point in holding it BOW?"

''There is," Stiles forced through a tight throat. "You're a Romulan. I'm Starfleet. I don't have to believe a thing you say. Maybe this wasn't an earthquake at all. Maybe you bombed the building, you or your people. The Pojjans could dig us out in an hour."

"And so a standoff begins?" Zevon folded his arms, shook his head, and offered a parental gaze. "You make yourself suffer for nothing. I am no soldier."

"I know what you are." His hand and arm shuddering under the weight of the metal bar, Stiles drew his legs up under him and tried to maneuver to a better position. The effort exhausted him, made his head spin. A dark tunnel formed on either side of his vision and he realized he was pa.s.sing out. With a single heave he rearranged himself. Fighting a sudden clutching muscle spasm in his back, he twisted sideways and managed to shift until he could lean back against the tilted mattress on the bunk he had never yet slept upon.

Sleep... sounded so nice fight now... deliberately he drew long, steady breathes until his head cleared and the tunnel-vision faded back. "We'll starve in here, like this."

Zevon nodded. Had he just said something like that? Stiles thought the conversation sounded familiar.

"I hear water" the Romulan said. "If we have water, we can survive."

"Yeah? How long's a week on your planet?" Stiles blinked to focus his eyes. He saw his bandaged left arm shiver as it held the metal rod toward Zevon. One arm bandaged, the other broken and splinted.

Tightening his folded arms, Zevon leaned back against the cracked wail behind him. "I'm counting in your weeks. I know how humans think."

Stiles raised his head from where he had allowed it to rest back on the upright mattress. "Oh? And how is that? Just how do we think? Since you know us so well, you who've never met one of us before, how do humans all think? For your information, soldier, humans are the least like each other of all the races around. That's what my grandfather told me, and he got it from n.o.body less than Captain James Kirk himself. So you just tell me again how all humans think." "I meant no insult." "Stay away from me."

Zevon held up a peaceable hand and nodded. "You must pull the blanket back over yourself. You'll go into shock again if you fail to stay warm."

'I'll take care of myself, thanks." Trying to appear in control, Stiles held the rod higher between himself and the Romulan, doing has best to convey an ongoing threat. "Spock expects me to act fight... get along here and... be an officer. I won't let him down. Somehow he'll know how I did. I've got to make him proud. .." .."

Tilting his head, Zevon asked, "The amba.s.sador? Is that who you were evacuating?" "Sure was. Did it, too. He's out and you can't have him."

"We don't want him, ensign. Please try to relax and put that "

"Don't you tell me to relax! Don't you say that word to me! That isn't your word."

"Very well... I'll find another word... with whom did you have a date tomorrow night?"

"Huh?" Stiles narrowed his eyes. Was this man telepathic? "How'd you know... her name's Ninetta. Ninetta Rashayd. She works down in atmospheric control at the starbase. Y'know, the base life support. Air. Took me two weeks to p.r.o.nounce her name right so she wouldn't give me that look when I asked her out. Not that it matters much now...." "What kind of look?"

"Well... that look. The one that tells you to keep your mouth shut and don't even ask." His quivering left arm sagged a little, the rod now resting on his knee. 'Travis used to rib me about it. Jeremy used to imitate the look. He was really good at it... really funny. I wonder if they're really dead ...." "I beg your pardon?

"I shouldn't have yelled at them," Stiles murmured, scouring the recent past, smelling his mistakes. "They were doing everything I said to do... they were with me. And I gave them h.e.l.l because I couldn't take a little fibbing."

"Hardly matters now. Please put the blanket back on yourself. Your face is going pale-"

"What did you say made this Constrictor thing happen? Did you tell me? If you did, I forgot it all."

"Graviton waves;' Zevon patiently explained. Clearing a place for himself, he sat down on something Stiles couldn't see. "They originate in s.p.a.ce and bathe the planet. A recurring disaster for the Pojjana. As unpredictable as lightning-lit wildfires. When the waves strike the planet, everything suddenly gets two, three, or even five hundred percent heavier. What you felt was the pressure of yourself suddenly weighing several hundred pounds. Blood trying to slog through compressed veins, muscles screaming for relief..."

"I remember that part."

"The Constrictor causes ma.s.sive shifts in tectonic plates, tidal waves, earthquakes, as you call them. Buildings collapse, air vehicles crash... some people suffocate if it lasts more than a few seconds... elderly people are crushed to death by their own weight...." Waving his hand at their surroundings, Zevon glanced up into the cylindrical pit that trapped them. "Sinkholes and fissures open up under people while they're pinned helplessly to the ground...."

The rod sagged a little more, finally resting against Stiles' leg with his limp hand upon the close end. He gazed at Zevon, listening to the ghastly narrative just as he had listened all his life to the stories of trial and triumph with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock at the helm of their legendary starship. This story, though, had a glaze of the horrific. It was real. He'd just been through it.

How many other people out there were suffering? What had happened to those rioters in the courtyard? The people in the other emba.s.sies lining that brick area? "How long's this been going on?"

"Nine years," Zevon said. "The first Constrictor wiped out a fifth of the planet's population. Nearly a billion people died."

"A billion ?" The word pulsed in Stiles' head, cooling down the throbbing of his arm and back. How many million was a billion? Why couldn't he do the mathematics? He was a pilot... he could multiply figures... do the trigonometry for atmospheric ... for... landing ....

A billion. The number grew and grew, pressing him down beneath the utter oppression of its swelling. If so many could die, he could endure some discomfort. A broken arm abruptly seemed surmountable, his moans and winces petty.

"Yes," Zevon said. "At first I could scarcely absorb such a number. Now I can put a face to each one."

"Why would you care so much about this Constrictor thing?" Stiles asked.

But Zevon did not answer that. "Half the buildings were destroyed," he continued instead. "Countless trillions of tons of planetary material suddenly heavier for a few critical, deadly moments... even the most stoic among us was disturbed to his core. The people of the planet worked valiantly to rebuild. Then it came again, and we knew it was a recurring phenomenon. After the second time, they gave up rebuilding and concentrated on structural shoring of the buildings and bridges which had been strong enough to survive the first two. They've constructed pressure-tolerant housing and connected buildings so the structures could hold each other up... I could liken this to a meltdown in a nuclear plant. Now the Po'jjana hate all aliens, who brought this thing upon them. If they could put the aliens off the planet, perhaps the Constrictor would go with them. They've scrubbed their planet clean of all who were not native, and still the blight from s.p.a.ce has struck on. It will continue to strike, and they will continue to hate you and me and all aliens for what we have done to them. Periodically the Constrictor will send out a roaring burp of radiation into subs.p.a.ce, which causes waves of gravitons. There is no turning it off... it will go on indefinitely now. Our meager lifetimes will never see the end of it."

Something in the Romulan's voice, something in his beating and the set of his shoulders caught Stiles with an unexpected wave of empathy. Zevon's arms were still folded, as if to protect himself, and he gazed not at Stiles but at a nearby pile of russet files that no longer resembled a floor. He seemed resigned to the facts, but troubled by heating them so clinically reviewed in his own voice.

Again, with a different tone, Stiles raised the question that his clearing mind insisted needed asking. "How do you know so much about this?"

In a clear silence that now fell, moisture dripped from an unseen pipe, draping its solemn percussion on Stiles' question and Zevon's answer. "I caused it."

"n.o.body told me the Romulan Empire was at war with these people!"

At such a declaration, the walls crackled and vibrated, pebbles shivered down the tilted slabs into the sinkhole that had trapped the two unfortunate prisoners. Across the well, the young Romulan's brows rose at Eric Stiles' abrupt statement. "War? Oh... no, no, there is no war. This was... utterly unintentional."

Curbing a lifetime of parochialism for the moment, Stiles reined in his a.s.sumptions. "Well... what happened, then?"

"This sector is run by the Bal Quonnot, on another planet in this system. They allowed us to conduct quantum-warp experiments here." "Us? The... Romulan Empire?" "Yes." "You?"

"Yes. The Pojjana have been struggling for ident.i.ty amid the Bal Quonnot administration. The Pojjana did not want to deal with the Empire."

"I don't think I'd deal with you either," Stiles said. "If you caused this thing."

Zevon actually nodded, perhaps in agreement, but certainly in understanding. "The Pojjana let the Federation court them for membership, to see if an alien science could retract what another alien science had done to them. The Federation went so far as to establish a planetary outpost." "How many of these things have happened?"

"Six, now. In nine years. Not in predictable intervals. The Pojjana led the Federation along, but avoided committing to membership, hoping you would help. They wanted the benefits but not the obligations."

"It's happened before" Stiles confirmed. "I've heard of planetary governments trying to get the best of both worlds, refusing to make the decision but still accepting Federation protection and help."

"The Federation is disappointed," Zevon went on. "To your credit, you practice what you preach. The sector is red now."

Stiles paused to fill his lungs with a full breath. His shoulders squeezed in a muscle spasm, and he closed his eyes briefly. "That's what Spock said... red sector. I don't know what it means .... "

"It means many things. Many banishments, many edicts, many restrictions." Stiles cleared his throat, and the effort made his ribs ache. "How do you know so much about... stuff I'm supposed to know?"

"All Imperial royal family members are well-schooled in astral politics." Raising his head sharply, Stiles blurted, "Royal family!" "Yes."

He stared, but Zevon did not meet his eyes. "How close... how high..."

"The Emperor is my mother's brother. I am fourteenth in line for the throne." "Is that... close?"

"In a population of two hundred billion inhabiting ninety planets, it is considered very close. However, it's unlikely that I shall ever actually take the throne. Certainly I have no desire to take it."

A cold rock formed in Stiles's chest as he digested the fact that he was involved in something with far more depth than he had first imagined. What moments ago had been two minor players in somebody else's huge drama now became something entirely different.

"How did they capture you?" he asked. "If you're so... royal"

"I made the error of accompanying a landing party to take measurements of-not that it matters. I forgot I'd been declared a public enemy. There were bounty hunters. They turned me over to the government. That riot out there... it was sparked by my presence here in the city."

"And the government is holding you here? Sounds like they wanted the riots to spark. Why else would they keep you here?"

With a nod, Zevon congratulated him. "Very possibly. This is not a usual holding area for political prisoners. They're usually held in the mountains." "So we're hostages?"

"Certainly we carry some incendiary value for leverage" Zevon contemplated, "but neither the Empire nor the Federation can cavalierly enter a sector declared red by any major power. That is one of the few agreements between the Federation, the Empire, the Klingons, Orions, Centaurans, and others that has in fact stood the test of time and trouble. Compromise of that is considered irremediable. Relations, friendly or strained, would change instantly. The Pojjana may hope to tempt all that, but..." The young Romulan shook his head, a gesture of clear understanding of the situation. "You and I... we are on our own here for some time, I should think."

"Alone," Stiles echoed, "on a planet full of people who hate everybody who isn't them."

Shift the legs again. He forced himself to adjust. His shoulders seemed like water now. In his hand the metal rod was like ice and suddenly heavy. His elbow quivered as he tried to continue holding the rod up. "You're a captain?" he asked, fighting for concentration. "Centurion. I have... I had command of a science vessel. My command was a royal favor. It's common to give lower royalty command of royal barges. I thought myself very lucky not to be carting one of my own relatives about in a barge. I always remained aware that I hadn't earned command. I ceded most ship responsibility to my subcommander. The crew understood... they never spoke ill of me. What I earned was status as a fully qualified astrophysicist. I was supervising the unit conducting quantum-warp experiments that set up a sympathetic subs.p.a.ce vibration of free-floating gravitons. Now the Constrictor breaks on the sh.o.r.es of the Pojjan planet. And no one will ever stop it."

Zevon dropped his gaze to the messy excuse for a floor. He didn't look up anymore.

"I'm something of an embarra.s.sment to my family," he went on, so quietly that Stiles could barely hear him. "I'm not..." "A 'leader of men' Stiles supplied.

As odd as it now seemed to see someone who looked like Zevon return a smile, the Romulan did in fact grin mildly. "Just to prove it, if you said that to any of my uncles or brothers, they would kill you just to prove differently"

Returning the grin, Stiles chuckled. "Call my mother a sow, but don't tell me I'm no leader of men?" "Something like that." As Stiles felt his small troubles shrink to inconsequence, he gazed at Zevon and absorbed what he had heard. A hundred questions-none good-crackled in his mind.

"Well, here we are then," Stiles groaned. "A senior duty ensign who finagled his way into command of a landing party because of a family connection with Amba.s.sador Spock. Big me, I thought I could distinguish myself. You know what I see when I look up the ladder? Captain Stiles, Lieutenant Stiles, Lieutenant Commander Stiles, heroes of the Romulan wars, officers on starship service... and little Ensign Stiles, who died in the pit after botching a simple evac." He let his head drop back and gazed up, far up, to the patch of dim light at the top of the hole. "I wish I were Ensign Anybody Else."

"Surrounded by giants," Zevon offered. "No wonder you could barely see."

Registering only slightly the favor just done him, Stiles clung instead to the sorrow and shame. "So here I am," he trudged on, "trapped in a sinkhole with a Romulan duke who doesn't want the command he's got, and a collapsed building's about to come down on us. Aren't we pathetic? If you had any emotion, you'd probably cry."

Sharply Zevon kicked at a plank that lay between them, sending it clacking into another position. His eyes hardened. "I am not Vulcan" he snapped, and instantly looked away again.

The reaction was so sincere that Stiles almost reached out physically to yank back his words. "Sorry," he offered. "You can pretty much count on me to say the wrong thing. Look, if you were in the sector conducting experiments-everybody does that. Quantum warp... that's tricky business. There's n.o.body who knows everything about that. It's almost not even science. It's practically magic. ff something went wrong, it's not your fault."

"It was my fault," Zevon insisted. He pressed a hand to his left thigh and seemed to hurt himself with his own touch. "I should've stood up to my superiors when I first saw what the result might be. The graviton impulses were too erratic. I knew that. I knew it before we started. I should never have condoned the switch-on. As senior scientist, I had the right to postpone." "Why didn't you, then?" "I was... timid. Yes, I was the senior authority, but only because of my bloodline. There were other scientists who were more qualified quantum specialists. They warned me... but I was afraid to fail."

So familiar. Why did everybody have to go through this? Just doing their jobs, and all this had to happen. Sitting here in the near-darkness, three levels below the street, cradled in wreckage and out of the line of sight of any judgmental forces, Eric Stiles released himself from the bondage of prying eyes and pointless opinions. How foolish did he have to be to keep holding this weapon on Zevon? If only he could put it down.

With a cleansing sigh, he muttered, "Listen, I... I feel .... " In his left hand, the metal rod wobbled between them, stubbornly holding its position. "Do me a favor, will you? Come over and... hold this for me."

Across the wreckage, Zevon blinked, stood up stiffly, and moved toward him.

Stiles parted his lips and started to say something else, but in sudden punctuation of Zevon's dire prophesy, a loud crumbling noise erupted over their heads. Buffed in a gray cloud burping from above, Zevon disappeared as several large chunks of building material and a gout of rabble shattered through the hole in the floors above them, chittering like a rockslide, and came sheeting down into their chamber. The rain of rock and pebbles hissed furiously and crashed in a million pieces onto the desk of their little area. Stiles threw his working arm over his face and bent to one side, but he couldn't move far enough to avoid being painted with dust and grit. The metal rod he had claimed as a weapon flew out of his hand and clanked somewhere in the dimness. Cold, stinging debris sheeted his body. The Pojjan guards had taken away his padded vest, gloves, and knee pads, leaving only his daywear uniform to fend off the sharp bits. He felt himself being cut in a hundred tiny places.

As soon as the sound faded, he shoved himself up on his left elbow and twisted around. "Zevon? Where are you?"

In response, he only heard the sound of Zevon coughing somewhere in the cloud of dust. Alive, at least. Stiles pushed up on his elbow. "Are you okay?" Out of the puff of stone dust, shimmering paint fragments and insulation, Zevon finally and slowly came to his feet. Rock bits sheeted off his back and shoulders as he stood and limped over the jagged wreckage to Stiles' side, where he braced himself on the thing Stiles was sitting upon. "You okay?" Stiles asked again. Zevon wiped dust from his face. "What is 'okay'?"

"You don't know? Something tells me you speak English, right?" "Cla.s.sroom English."

"Oh. I guess it got started with two alphabetical letters, O and K. It means... agreement. All right. Well. No idea why it would mean that." "I see... yes, then, I am both O and K." "But you're limping." "A piece of this rod went through my thigh. I pulled it out." "What? You got speared by a piece of that stuff?." "Yes, when we first fell-"

"Come here! You could be bleeding to death! Let me see your leg."

Bending to show Stiles a crudely bandaged part of his thigh above the knee, Zevon winced and tolerated Stiles's tucking the strips of blanket which now bound each of them. "A few moments ago you were willing to spear me with a piece of this material."

"Well, never underestimate the capacity of Eric Stiles to make a dunderhead of himself. You're still bleeding here. That stuff's blood, isn't it? The green, uh-" "Yes. I thought it had stopped."

"It hasn't. Let me-come a little closer. Your pant leg is soaked with blood. G.o.d... we gotta stop this. Pad the wound with something... just a minute."

As Zevon gripped a standing slab and winced, Stiles ripped apart the edge of the mattress near him and pulled out a wad of stuffing. He folded the stuffing into a crude pad, then worked it between the blanket strip and the wound on Zevon's leg, unfortunately causing considerable pain, until Zevon could barely stand when it was over.

"That'll help," Stiles hoped. "Come here. Take the weight off it. Sit here next to me."

He smoothed a place on his slab and pulled Zevon to his side. They sat leg to leg, facing each other, as Stiles adjusted the knot on Zevon's bandage. "It didn't pierce through your leg, did it? You could be bleeding in two places. I can't tell-"

"No," Zevon told him, his voice weak now. "No... a simple puncture .."

Stiles looked at him and paused. "You dragged yourself all the way from your cell to mine, through that wreckage, with your leg impaled like this?"

"I thought you would die if I didn't come" As pebbles continued to trickle around them, Zevon dug through the rubble to the blanket that had fallen off Stiles. Without meeting Stiles's eyes, he pressed the blanket back around the ensign's chest and hips and tucked it as well as possible. "We must keep you warm. You could still go into shock."

Surveying his companion, Stiles allowed himself to be cared for by these unlikely hands. "Don't take this wrong," he began a moment later, "but why would you care? We don't know each other. I could've been just a garden-variety criminal. Why would it matter so much to you if I died?"