Brother Chevek had been assigned to receive the Starfleet scientists, and he had not known what to expect.
Warriors, perhaps. More of the sharply dressed officers who had filled the trial chamber, treating the sacred stones of Boreth like a problem requiring resolution. What he had not anticipated was a man who paused just inside the outer gate and looked up at the monastery walls. Not assessing, but like someone who had been waiting a long time to come here, and was giving himself a moment to experience it properly.
The reverence was reassuring.
‘Thank you,’ Commander Airex, USS Endeavour, said in careful if accented Klingon, ‘for receiving us.’
Chevek inclined his head. The woman beside him – Lieutenant Commander Thawn, red-haired, tricorder at her belt – was studying the stonework with the same focus her superior had given the walls. He supposed this was not unusual for people who studied things for a living.
‘The Chancellor has asked that we assist you,’ Chevek said, in Federation Standard, because the Klingon had been courteous and he would meet it. ‘We have been trying to understand this ourselves. We have not managed it.’
‘Then we’ll work together,’ said Airex. ‘That’s usually how we reach understandings.’ It was said simply, not a performance of humility, and Chevek found himself leading them inside before thinking about it.
The descent to the vault took them through passages that narrowed as they went deeper into the mountain, torchlight shining less on shaped masonry and more on the jagged rocks of the natural caves these facilities had been built into. Chevek waited until they were deep, far from prying ears, and still chose his words with care.
‘The Chancellor came to Boreth to seek the Emperor’s blessing,’ he began. ‘Kahless – who has withdrawn from these proceedings to not taint them – refused him. The Emperor does not lend his voice to one political faction over another, and he reminded the Chancellor as much.’ He paused on the stairs. ‘The Chancellor did not accept this. He went to the crystals without permission.’
He heard Thawn’s breath catch faintly. Airex said nothing, only listening.
‘He used them. I do not know what he saw – he never said. But he wore the face of a man who received an answer he suspected and did not want.’ Chevek felt it still, that certainty on Toral’s face. A man staring down inevitability. ‘Then he attempted to beam the crystals to his ship.’
‘Attempted,’ Airex checked.
‘They… resisted.’ Chevek paused again, not for effect but because the memory was difficult to assemble into words. The cold that had spiked in the room. The wrongness in his teeth, behind his eyes. The light guttering and contracting and then… nothing. ‘I felt it. What science would call it, I cannot say. The fabric of something pulling against something else, and losing. Then they were gone, and the room was dark in a way it ought not have been.’ He resumed walking. ‘Chancellor Toral left, and he did not look back.’
They had reached the bottom of the stairs. The vault door stood ahead, and Chevek stopped with his hand on it.
‘The next day, he came back.’ He looked at neither of them as he said this, eyes on the old wood of the door. ‘He returned the crystals and told us he was not the Chancellor we knew. The one we had last spoken with. That he had awoken at Boreth from somewhere else, with no understanding of how, and found himself holding power over people he did not recognise.’ He pushed the door open. ‘But he understood enough to believe the crystals responsible. He asked if we could help him, and return him to his own place.’
The vault was quiet. The crystals sat where they had been restored, and shone with the steady light that Chancellor Toral had first taken with him. And yet Chevek felt something had shifted.
‘Have you been able to help him?’ Thawn asked softly.
‘In so far as we can protect him. It is not too curious for the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire to sequester himself with the monks of Boreth seeking spiritual insight. The rest of the Empire need not know – but this cannot last forever.’
‘His withdrawal is noted,’ Airex mused.
‘We have theories on how this has happened.’ Chevek heard his own dissatisfaction with this. ‘We understand the crystals in many ways, but not… this. They are a river to follow the flow of, to see where it leads. Not a power to be mastered.’
Airex’s expression shifted. ‘When he asked you to grant us access, he told you about the Displacement? That he’s not the only one?’
‘He told us only that. There are many?’
Airex glanced at Thawn, then back. ‘Dozens. Maybe hundreds. People pulled from their own reality and deposited in another, across multiple universes. The Chancellor was not a singular event. But, perhaps, the first.’
Chevek stood with this for a moment. He was not a man who dealt with vast concerns such as this. His life was stone and shadow and contemplation. ‘Then it is far worse than we knew,’ he settled on at last.
‘Yes,’ said Airex. ‘Which is why, if the crystals are the start of all of this, we must understand more.’
‘We cannot -’
‘I do not seek to master them,’ said Airex, his anticipation of Chevek’s concern calm, collected. ‘Or use them. But if the river has been disrupted, something must be put right.’
They spread out across the chamber, the two scientists, tricorders open, with an unhurried efficiency. Chevek stood near the entrance and watched. He had worried, when told they would come here, that there would be a team with their sensors and equipment, seeking to turn the incomprehensible into something quantifiable. This was gentler than he had expected, but still thorough.
After a time, Thawn said without looking up, ‘The emission profile here isn’t residual.’
‘No.’ Airex had gone still in front of the largest of the crystals, his tricorder held steady. ‘Not residual. Sustained. Look at the variance in the lower frequencies. That’s not decay.’
‘It’s oscillation,’ Thawn said, moving to join him. ‘So the pulse didn’t come from the crystals directly. It came from the disruption of whatever process they’re always performing. They exist at a boundary -’
‘Between normal space and something outside it,’ Airex agreed. ‘That’s their function. They perceive along the margin of what is and what could be. When Toral used the transporter, he pulled them hard against that boundary. What Brother Chevek felt was the boundary pulling back. And in that moment of resistance, the disruption propagated outward as a pulse. Temporal-subspace radiation, broadcasting along the exact frequencies the crystals use to perceive.’
‘Across dimensions, subspace,’ said Thawn.
‘And at the portal at Starbase 80… that’s a pre-existing aperture into the multiverse, a genuine opening between realities. When the pulse reached it…’
‘It found a door already open,’ said Thawn. ‘And passed through it, and split, and the energy diffracted across multiple realities at once.’ She lowered her tricorder. Her expression was a mixture of satisfaction and horror, a job well done revealing new complexities. ‘That’s what caused the Displacement. Not just the crystals, not just the portal – both.’
Chevek had followed as much as he could. ‘Then the fault is here,’ he said. ‘At Boreth.’
‘The origin is here,’ said Airex carefully. ‘The fault is rather more complicated than that. And, I think, beside the point. We’re not here to judge. We’re here to try to set this right.’
Chevek nodded in satisfaction at the sentiment, but his brow furrowed. ‘The crystals have been returned, though,’ he said. ‘It has happened, but… it is done, no?’
Airex raised his tricorder again, expression still troubled. ‘It has happened,’ he confirmed, ‘but the disruption – the moment of resistance, the tearing against the boundary – doesn’t simply heal. These readings…’
His eyes fell on Thawn. She had already checked. Her silence was its own answer.
‘They’re not stable,’ she confirmed.
‘No.’ He lowered the tricorder. Looked at Chevek with an expression that was firm but not unkind. ‘I would like to remain here, with your permission, and continue scanning. There are things I must fully understand before I report back to my commanders.’ He hesitated, not with uncertainty of what he knew, but uncertainty of how much to say. ‘I think they will not enjoy hearing it.’
