Twenty years earlier
Quinn built a subspace transmitter out of three systems that had never been designed to speak to one another, and he did it in a night.
By morning half the deck of the communications compartment had disappeared under open panels, cable runs and components stripped out of navigation, emergency telemetry and one of the geological scanners the surface team was not going to need again. The main array was gone off the hull and nothing Quinn did was going to put it back.
What he was building was not a replacement. It was an argument against silence.
Adams came in a little after 0600 and found him on his back with both arms inside the console.
"Tell me something encouraging."
"No."
"Lie to me."
"You look rested, Captain."
Quinn slid out. His eyes were red and there was a burn across the back of one hand that he had not bothered to have looked at.
"If the field coils hold, I can give you gain enough for a burst."
"How long a burst?"
"Thirty seconds."
"I need more than that."
"Then you should have asked whatever tore the antenna off to leave us a spare."
Adams let that go by.
"Will Starfleet hear thirty seconds?"
"Depends who is listening. Depends on propagation. Depends on whether this holds together long enough to clear atmosphere."
"Can it transmit?"
"Yes."
"Then we are using it."
Quinn sat up on the deck with his wrists over his knees.
"Captain. If whatever is doing this notices."
"Then we transmit anyway."
Quinn looked at him a moment longer than was polite.
"That is what I thought you would say," he said, and went back under the console.
* *
On the planet, Morbius used the educator again before the sun was properly up.
Julia did not know until afterward. She woke alone, which had stopped being remarkable, and dressed and walked through the house and found the library empty and his notes gone off the desk. The lower entrance stood open. She looked down it for a long time before she followed.
He was out of the chair when she reached the chamber. He stood in front of a wall of Krell symbols that moved faster than she could separate one from the next, and there was blood dried on his collar from the night before or from an hour ago, she could not tell which.
"Again."
"Good morning."
"How many times, Edward?"
"You asked me that yesterday."
"You did not answer yesterday."
"I have work to finish. There is very little of it left."
"The expedition voted."
"The expedition voted to abandon the greatest discovery in human history because frightened people were asked to choose while they were frightened."
"Five people are dead."
"I am aware of the number."
"Then say their names."
He stayed facing the wall. The symbols went on falling upward across it, and Julia watched them, and hated them.
"They died because we do not understand this system."
"You do not know that."
"No."
"And you do not know that understanding it will save anyone."
"No."
"Then what are you doing?"
Morbius raised his hand.
Every symbol on the wall stopped.
Not slowed. Not faded out under a control. They stopped, all of them at once, the way a room goes quiet when somebody comes in.
He lowered his hand and looked at it.
Julia had gone very cold.
"You did not touch anything."
"No."
"Then how did you stop it?"
He let the question stand, and the chamber held the kind of silence that has weight in it.
"Edward."
"I wanted it to stop," he said.
And then, while they were both looking at his hand, the symbols began to move again, and he had not touched anything that time either.
For once, certainty left him. Julia saw it go and saw what was underneath, and it frightened her more than the wall did.
"What have you done to yourself?"
"I have increased my capacity to interact with the Krell systems."
"No. You wanted something to stop and it stopped."
"The distinction may be semantic."
"The distinction is terrifying."
"It is extraordinary."
And there was the whole difference between them in two sentences, spoken in a chamber two and a half kilometers under a house neither of them would ever leave.
"You are coming up with me today."
"I have not agreed to leave."
"I did not ask whether you agreed."
She walked out. Behind her the wall of symbols accelerated, and Edward Morbius watched them go, and did not consciously ask them to.
*
At 0843 the transmitter was ready. Quinn refused to call it repaired.
"Repair implies I know what I have done."
Adams took the communications station himself. Farman stood by the door with nothing to do and stayed anyway. The compartment's regular operator had died in it eleven days earlier, and her replacement, Ensign Helen Mercer, sat at the next console watching an output meter swing between inadequate and impossible.
"Carrier?"
"Trying."
"That is not a status."
"It is on this equipment, sir."
Quinn leaned over the open panel with one hand braced on the frame.
"Now."
Mercer hit the control.
For half a second nothing happened. Then the transmitter came alive and every light in the compartment dimmed and an alarm started somewhere behind Quinn that nobody attended to.
"Carrier established."
Adams leaned to the pickup.
"This is Captain J. J. Adams, Federation survey vessel Bellerophon, transmitting emergency priority from Altair IV."
The output meter fell. Quinn hit the side of the console with the flat of his hand and it came back up.
"Expedition compromised. Multiple fatalities from an unknown hostile force or phenomenon. The source has not been identified. The hazard is present on the planetary surface and in orbital space."
Mercer held up two fingers. Twenty seconds.
"All vessels receiving this transmission are warned not to approach Altair IV."
"Captain," said Quinn, watching a temperature gauge.
"Repeat. Do not attempt a landing. Altair IV is to be considered hazardous pending full Starfleet investigation."
The transmitter began to scream. Quinn reached for the cutoff and Adams caught his wrist.
"Wait."
Five seconds.
Adams leaned closer to the pickup and said the last thing anyone in the Federation would ever hear from the Bellerophon.
"This is Captain J. J. Adams. Do not come back."
Quinn killed the power. The transmitter died, and smoke came up out of the open console and stood in a flat layer under the ceiling, and nobody in the compartment said a word.
Mercer looked at the receiver as though it might answer.
"Did it get through?"
Quinn dragged both hands down his face.
"It left the ship."
"That is not what I asked."
"It is the answer I have got."
Adams stood up and looked at the blackened thing Quinn had built in a night.
"Begin evacuation."
*
The first transport came up at 0910 and the second at 0916.
Adams had expected resistance and got almost none. Whatever the settlement had been to these people had been burned out of them one impossible morning at a time. They packed what they could carry and left the rest, and the rest was most of it. Instruments. Samples. Clothing. Photographs.
One engineer tried to take a chair he had built himself out of packing crates, on the grounds that he had spent three months getting it comfortable and saw no reason an invisible murderer should inherit it. Farman made him leave it.
Cookie evacuated twelve sealed containers of food and then went back down for a thirteenth. Adams found him at the transporter marker with it against his chest.
"What is in that?"
"Coffee."
"Leave it."
Cookie looked at him with real injury.
"Captain."
"We have coffee aboard."
"Not this coffee, sir."
Adams turned to him. Cookie looked back, entirely prepared to spend the rest of the morning on it.
"Fine."
"Thank you, sir."
He went up in the beam holding the container like a child, and Farman watched him go.
"If we die, at least breakfast is covered."
"That is leadership, Jerry."
"Yes, sir."
They almost smiled at each other.
Then something hit Laboratory One and the building moved half a meter sideways. Not a wall of it. The building.
Farman had his weapon out before the sound arrived. Adams looked across the compound. Nobody had been inside.
"Keep them moving."
A second impact took the eastern power station, and the lights ran down and came back across the whole settlement. The transporter field collapsed around two crewmen halfway through materialization, and both reappeared on the pad intact and gray in the face.
"Bellerophon, report."
"Transporter lost pattern cohesion, sir. We have interference."
"Source?"
"Planetary."
Morbius came out of the house with a data case in either hand and looked at the laboratory.
"I had nothing to do with that."
Adams had not accused him. That he answered anyway was a thing Adams would remember for the rest of his life, which was four hours.
"Get in line."
"I have more material below."
"No."
"Captain, I have spent months reconstructing the central Krell language. There are records under this house that exist nowhere else in the galaxy."
"And they are going to stay there."
"Do you have the slightest conception of what humanity stands to lose?"
Adams looked at the laboratory sitting half a meter out of true.
"I have a fair idea what we have lost already."
"That is emotional reasoning."
"Yes," said Adams, and that stopped him, because it was the one answer Morbius had no argument prepared for.
"Five people are dead, Edward. I am finished pretending that does not belong in the arithmetic."
Julia came out of the house behind her husband carrying one bag.
The bag was very small. Adams looked at it, and then so did her husband.
"Where are the rest of your things?"
"I do not need them."
"Julia, the research notes in the bedroom."
"Leave them."
He stared at her with what appeared to be honest shock.
"They are months of work."
"We are alive. Bring that."
Adams watched it happen and understood that the man was being taken apart in pieces. First his authority. Then the expedition. Now his wife was choosing the transporter over the thing he had given himself to, and doing it in front of the captain.
He could see the anger clearly enough. What he could not see was where it went.
*
By noon they were taking people and nothing else.
The attacks came in bursts. That was worse than continuously, because between them the settlement was only a quiet place on a warm morning. A pressure line let go aboard the ship. A storage compartment opened and everything inside it crossed the room at the same instant. A section of exterior plating buckled inward with nothing near it.
Then forty minutes in which nothing happened at all.
During the silence Morbius went below, and Julia found out only when she turned to ask Robby where he was.
Robby had been standing inactive in the lower gallery for forty days. She had asked him out of nineteen years of habit that had taken her four weeks to build and would not break, and she stood in the doorway with the question in her mouth and nobody to put it to.
She found she was angry at all of them. At Adams. At Edward. At Starfleet, and at the Krell, dead two hundred thousand years and still managing this. At Robby, for standing underground with his eyes shut while the world came apart.
Mostly at herself, for waiting this long.
She opened her communicator.
"Edward."
Nothing.
"Edward."
Static, and then his voice, flat and far away.
"I am here."
"Come up."
"I require fifteen minutes."
"No."
"Julia."
"We leave in eleven."
The channel closed.
She stood looking at the communicator in her hand. In eleven years he had never once closed a channel on her.
*
At 1317 the Bellerophon lost artificial gravity for four seconds. At 1322 it came back with no explanation offered by any system aboard. At 1340 an empty crew compartment was crushed inward from six directions at once. At 1403 Quinn reported that something had been in among the impulse control relays.
By 1430 thirty-one people were aboard. At 1447, thirty-three. At 1502, thirty-five.
Thirty-five aboard the Bellerophon. Two on Altair IV.
Adams had gone up at noon, over his own objection, because Farman had pointed out that if anything happened to the ship while her captain was on the ground, the regulations would have a good deal to say about his judgment. Adams had told him that if they lived through this, Farman could read him the regulations personally. Farman had said he was looking forward to it.
Now Adams sat in the command chair and watched Altair IV turn under them.
"Transporter."
"Ready, sir."
"Surface lock?"
"Marginal. Holding."
"Get them."
* *
Julia stood inside the transporter marker. Morbius stood ten meters away at the door of the house with a data case in each hand.
"Edward."
"One moment."
"No."
He turned toward her.
"We have already left material I may never recover."
"Then you will not recover it."
"You cannot possibly understand what is being lost here."
"No. And I am tired of hearing that used as the answer to everything."
He came toward her across the terrace.
"These records could advance human knowledge by centuries."
"And if we die here they advance nothing."
"We are not going to die."
Julia looked past him at the laboratory standing out of true in the afternoon light.
"Tell Harris."
That stopped him where he was. She regretted it, and did not take it back, and understood that she had begun doing that a great deal lately.
The communicator sounded.
"Morbius, this is Adams."
He opened it. "We are ready."
"So are we. Step into the field."
He set the cases down on the stones, one and then the other, taking his time about it, and came and stood beside his wife.
Julia took his hand.
He looked down at her fingers around his as though he had not expected them, and something in him gave way, and for one moment she had her husband back.
The field formed. The light came up around them both and the world began to go.
Then it slammed back.
Julia staggered and Morbius caught her, and the beam was gone, and the terrace was exactly where it had been.
"Bellerophon."
The communicator came apart in static and then found itself.
"We lost the pattern."
Adams's voice cut across it. "Try again."
The second attempt never formed at all. The lights went out in the house behind them. The ground gave one small sideways pull, no more than a man feels stepping off a moving walkway, and Julia took hold of her husband's arm, and he had felt it too.
"Bellerophon."
"We have lost transporter lock completely."
"For how long?"
"Unknown, Doctor."
Morbius turned his head toward the lower entrance, and his wife was watching him when he did.
"No."
"I said nothing."
"You did not have to."
Adams came through then, and his voice had changed, and Julia heard the change before she heard the words.
"Edward. Listen to me. I cannot hold this orbit indefinitely."
Morbius looked up at a clear afternoon sky with nothing in it.
"The ship is in danger."
"We have had three more failures in the last hour. If I cannot restore transport, I have to take her clear of the planet."
Julia closed her eyes.
"And then?"
"Then we get outside the interference, repair what we can, and come back for you."
On the terrace of the house on Altair IV, Edward Morbius looked at the ridge line, and did not answer for four full seconds.
