Signs from Heaven (6 page)

The group spread out around him, Pattie moving to the podium on the right. “This one's operating as well.”

Tev strode to the left podium. “So is this one. Good work, Specialist.”

Fabian grinned.
A gratuitous compliment from His Royal Tevness. Will wonders never cease.

The Tellarite touched the surface. Several images flashed up on the holographic screen in front of Fabian.

Images of the city. Building exteriors mostly.

“It's a map!” Scotty said.

Music, soft and playful, teased at the corners of Fabian's hearing. He cocked his head to listen. “Shhh…” There it was. Echoing from somewhere in the city. “Pattie, touch the panel again. Let's keep scrolling through.”

Pattie touched the panel slowly as different images moved from right to left in front of them. Dreena approached and stood behind Fabian. “There,” she said and pointed to a building with no windows. “That is where your people are.”

With a nod from Fabian she touched the screen several more times until they saw an image of the engine room—from above. Everyone looked up as if to see the camera.

What caught Fabian's attention was the layout of the tiers when seen from above. It looked like the ending of a peacock feather. It also looked like a button.

Fabian lifted his right hand—the images and grid remained in front of him. Hesitantly he reached out and touched the building's façade.

The music's volume increased with a crescendo as soft lights like rainbow fireflies moved around Fabian's hands. Again he could see the plane before him, and recognized it now—the lines of a piece of sheet music!

He had memories of his mother's notebooks, full of music she'd inherited from her mother, and her grandmother. Lines and dots danced in front of him, spun and sang in his ears.

It was loud. Too loud.

He closed his eyes and the sheet music vanished, replaced by the image of a symphony orchestra. A thousand players, each reading the same music, working perfectly together. A smooth running engine.

Except for one—one player in the middle. Everyone else's colors synched perfectly, but not his. His color was red and the notes that played along the lines of music were staccato, mis-numbered, turning dark and angry.

Abruptly that player rose in the air, as if the ship's inertial dampeners were—

He opened his eyes. “I know what's wrong with the engine.” He turned to look at Captain Scott. “I know what the RPMs are—and I know how to fix it!”

I
t
was like nothing Bart had ever seen before.

Vanov had called this an archive. No. More like a museum.

Most of the art hung on the walls, sat on pedestals, while others rested on individual dais like the one they had transported in on.

What caught the group's attention were the pieces obviously not part of the display. Sculptures, paintings, musical instruments, and books rested on the floor in a less than orderly fashion, propped against the walls or slung against one another.

As if they'd been piled inside with haste.

Vanov moved in the center of the path, not allowing his robes to brush any of the displayed pieces. He stopped a few feet ahead of them, his face expressionless.

“It looks like they just threw some of this stuff in here,” Carol said as she and Gomez joined them.

Corsi stood a few feet away, looking at a long, rectangular piece of art in a black frame. “I'm thinking they were in a hurry. Might have believed this museum was the safest place.”

“Oh, this is definitely a display hall of some sort,” Carol said and she pointed to the walls and the artwork. “Or it belonged to a private collector. Whether it was owned by the city's ruler or the richest man living in it—maybe even this Soske person—doesn't matter. It does look like it was used to safely stow precious things.”

Bart tried to think of what these people must have been thinking or feeling to have put what looked like family heirlooms in here. Thinking to come back to them someday.

It looked as if no one ever returned.

“It's like old ghosts,” Gomez said from where she stood. Bart stood, wincing at his creaking knees, and ambled over to her.

“Interesting description.”

“Things like this also tell you about the sort of people they were.” Gomez pointed to the painting Corsi was looking at. It was mostly blue, with a black background, with hundreds of straight lines moving at ninety-degree angles. “Like this. I'd call this a practice in line making. Doesn't really evoke any emotion.”

“Might not mean to,” Carol said. “Looks like it's part of something else too.”

Bart nodded as he examined it. He believed Carol was right. It did look like it was more of a puzzle piece than a whole. And to add a bit more to the mystery, the name of Soske was printed in the lower right corner. Along with another word.

Bart pulled out his padd and tapped in the word to his translator.

It came back as
So below
.

Interesting.

“Hey, where's Vanov?” Corsi nearly growled.

Everyone looked around. But there was no sign of the Historian.

“Great. Let's find him before he trips one of these traps I keep hearing about.”

“She's right,” Bart said as the group started to follow her. “Art is where the Disruptors usually struck. As a way to get back at the City Dwellers.”

They stopped where the hallway branched in opposite directions. Corsi called out for the Ardanan, but there was no answer, only the echo of her voice. “I don't like this.”

Bart looked down each of the corridors, both filled with displayed as well as scattered pieces. “This is a fine mess we've gotten ourselves into.”

“Well,” Carol said, “common sense would suggest there would either be another door leading out, or these hallways merge into one, forming a sort of loop.”

“How far back does it go?” Gomez asked.

Carol shook her head. “I really don't have a way of knowing. The tricorder's range is limited. One of us could go back outside and keep trying until we hit the end of it.”

Bart half smiled. “Do we follow the yellow brick road through the cornfield, or mayhaps into the haunted forest?”

“Bart…” Carol nudged him.

“Maybe we should split up,” Gomez said. “Corsi, you, Rennan, and Bart take the left. Carol, Makk, and I will try right. Common sense suggests these two would meet in the middle.”

Carol beamed.

Corsi took the right hallway and Bart followed, Konya behind both of them. Bart kept his tricorder out and ready. Corsi already had her phaser out—he hoped set on stun.

Looking down at the tricorder, Bart noticed he could pick up signatures inside of the vault but not outside. He could detect Corsi just ahead of him, and—

“Commander,” Konya said, “Ardanan ahead of us by thirty meters.”

She nodded and kept her position in a sort of “ready” crouch.
You know, just in case the art-loving Ardanans decided to bean us with a valuable piece of statuary.

“Took you mooks long enough,” came Makk Vinx's distinctive Iotian tones as the three of them rounded a corner.

“So here's the party,” Bart said. It was just as Carol had suspected—the hallways led back to a central room. Vanov was oohing and ahing over a series of rectangular paintings that appeared to move around the entire room. Two mounted on each of the entrance walls, and three on the opposing walls.

“Your hallway was longer,” Gomez said. She nodded to Vanov. “Apparently this is definitely a private collection and we're standing in the showroom.”

“Showroom?” Corsi shrugged her shoulders. “There's just this weird collection of odd-colored pictures. Why show these? They look like that one at the entrance.”

Corsi moved away from them toward a series of lights along the right wall. Bart had noticed them too—odd circles cut into the wall. He'd assumed they were accent lights as they lined up along with the paintings on the opposite wall.

But now as he looked at their spacing, he realized they lined up with only the paintings with titles.

“Corsi—” he started.

At that instant she stood between two of the holes and touched one of the paintings as if to brace herself.

He heard it before it launched—the thud of a trigger mechanism releasing.

Without thinking Bart flung his padd away and lunged at Gomez, Carol, and Vanov, tackling them all to the ground just as something whizzed past.

“Bart!” Gomez yelled out.

Carol shoved him away as did Vanov. Bart moved back but continued to stare at something, his eyes wide at what he saw.

“What is wrong with you?” Carol said. “What did you—”

But Gomez had turned to see what Bart stared at and reached out with a shaking hand to touch her shoulder. “Carol.” She pointed.

Carol turned and slapped her hands to her mouth.

Sticking out of the middle painting was a shiny, steel pole.

“Bart just saved your life,” Corsi said in the ensuing silence. “Looks like we found a Disruptor trap.”

Fabian stared at Scotty for a moment before answering his question. “No, sir. I'm not sure why I see the images I do, or hear what I do. Maybe it's the parasite taking what's there and translating it into a way so that I can read the diagnostic controls.”

“Are you sure, lad?” Scotty looked less than convinced.

So did everyone else—well, except for Tev, who was too busy studying the schematics they now had to be concerned about something so inconsequential as the health of mere enlisted personnel. Sarjenka made up for Tev, though; her medical tricorder was out and trained on him like a phaser.

What put him off a little was the attitude of the Ardanans. The local engineers had moved slowly up the tiers to stand to the side. Not one of them had tried to help, much less touch one of the podiums. Except for Dreena—but what she did was stay close, always watching him.

“It's simple.” He put his hands in the air as a gesture. The holographic schematic remained in place, hovering above the podium. “The way this system is set up…” He turned and started touching illuminated panels. The image before them changed, shifting down to the engine room. A side-layout of the cylinder as well as the tiers appeared. He pointed at the two areas beside the cylinder. “It's the dampening system—it's harmonically out of sync due to years of neglect.”

Pattie nodded slowly. “That should be easy to fix. That is, if we knew where to fix them. Or how.”

Fabian looked back at the schematic.
How do I fix this?

And the answer came to him. He stood directly in front of the podium. The images changed. He could set the sequence to recalibrate, but it would mean taking them offline for one point seven seconds before rebooting them.

But without the dampeners to govern up or down, the city could do a somersault, lose momentum and crash.

He looked at Scott and Tev. “I have an idea.” He tapped his combadge. “Stevens to Conlon.”

“Go ahead.”

“Ready with that tractor beam?”

There was a pause.
“Everything's set, but I have to warn you
—
with the preliminary tests we just completed, calculating for the city's structural integrity as well as overall weight
—
I'd say I could hold the city in the air for maybe one point six seconds.”

Point-one second off.

But it would have to work.

“What is it you intend, Specialist?” Tev asked.

“Reset the inertial dampeners—it's the only way to resync up the harmonics.”

“You're sure this'll work, lad?” Scotty's voice sounded concerned, and Fabian couldn't entirely blame him.

“Yes,” Fabian lied. No point in mentioning that point-one second. That was the sort of thing that would get Tev's bowels in an uproar, and Scotty probably wouldn't be too thrilled, either.

Tev and Scotty exchanged glances, then Tev tapped his combadge. “Tev to Conlon.”

“Go ahead.”

“Prepare to engage the tractor beam on Specialist Stevens's mark.”

“You got it.”

Fabian looked at everyone. “I'd grab hold of something—this might be a bumpy ride.”

Everyone did as he suggested.

Except for Dreena, who watched him with narrowed eyes.

He tapped his combadge. “Nancy—
mark
.”

“Did you feel that?” Carol whispered at Bart as the two of them stood in front of three of the series paintings. The pole remained in the wall to their left.

He looked up from his padd. “You mean the atmospheric shift combined with the abrupt drop of the floor causing me to rise about a fifth of a centimeter in the air?”

She nodded. “Yeah, that.”

Bart shook his head and looked back at his padd. “Nope. Didn't feel a thing.”

Carol smiled at him. “You always manage to make me laugh—even when I'm scared out of my wits.”

“Why so?”

“Bart, we're on a flying city.”

“Well, technically Stratos doesn't really fly. It floats.”

“Bart, I know you're being silly because we just had a bad scare. But something's just happened.”

“Gomez to Captain Scott.” Gomez moved away from Vanov and stared at the floor.

“
Scott here,
” came the familiar brogue. “
Everyone all right
?”

“Yes—I think. But is the city okay? That abrupt drop was a bit unnerving.”

“
Aye. Conlon put a tow line on us for a bit while Fabian restarted the inertial dampeners.
”

“He did what?” Gomez looked at Corsi who came nearer, her face unreadable as always. “Is Fabian okay?”

“
He's a bit disoriented
—
Sarjenka says the dendrites are growing larger, and longer. They're apparently moving into other regions of the brain
.”

Gomez continued to look at Corsi. “What's happened? Why haven't you transported Fabian to sickbay?”

“
Well,
” Captain Scott said in a tired-sounding voice. “
Lass, we can't beam out, and no one can beam in
.”

“What? How—”

“
The reset activated a city-wide shield that prevents any matter transportation in and out of the city. We can contact the
da Vinci
, which I've already done, but we can't get to her
.”