THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST Read online

  The long, jagged blade seemed to slow as it came toward his face. The point buried under his chin and ripped through his head, coming out the top. Blood spurted everywhere, darkening the white padded floor and walls, while a universal groan of disgust rose from the cadets who were watching.

  As Titus’s body crumpled, Bobbie Ray took up position over him, bowing slightly to the scattered applause. Victoriously, he raised one foot to place it on his prostrate opponent.

  Titus’s image flickered and disappeared. “Don’t you dare put your dirty paw on me!” Titus exclaimed as he dropped the handles of the hologame.

  Bobbie Ray’s image also disappeared as the Rex stood up, stretching. He had an unbearably smug look on his face. “Something wrong, roomie? It was a fair match.”

  “No, it wasn’t!” Titus muttered, handing over the holocontrols.

  “Excuse me?” Bobbie Ray drawled. “You picked the weapons. Though I don’t know how your people accomplish anything with a toy like an antara.”

  Titus smothered his anger in the face of the laughter from the other cadets who had crowded into their room to watch the match.

  “That’s a great hologame,” Jayme told Bobbie Ray. “Did your parents gave it to you during the midyear break?”

  “Yeah, they got it from a environmental designer they work with.” Bobbie Ray carefully put the holocontrols in a foam contoured box. “It’s a prototype that won’t be on the market until the end of this year.”

  Starsa was sitting cross-legged on Titus’s bed. “Is there any kind of game you don’t have?”

  “I doubt it.” Bobbie Ray was looking unbearably conceited again. Their friends started to drift out of the room, saying good-bye.

  Jayme sidled up to Titus. “You aren’t exactly the poster boy for good losers.”

  “It’s his game,” Titus retorted. “How can anyone beat him at it?”

  Jayme shrugged, grinning. “You were the one who challenged him to an antara match.”

  Titus turned away. “I’m not used to those controls.”

  “Hey, everyone, look!” Starsa called out, “Comm, sound on.”

  The small screen over the door routinely ran the Federation news service, along with information that was pertinent to the Academy, like announcements from professors or the superintendent herself. This time it was breaking news from the San Francisco local media station. The announcer had a fashionably shaved head with a blue forehead-cockade, and she seemed unusually shaken.

  “We take you live to the site,” she was saying as the sound came up. The image switched to a view of workers wearing the orange uniforms of the city maintenance department climbing out of an underground tunnel.

  “Starsa, who cares—” Titus started to say.

  “Look at that?” Jayme exclaimed as the image switched again.

  It was a head, like the severed head of a mannequin lying in the dirt. As the camera swung around to view the face, it revealed the blank, golden stare of Lieutenant Commander Data.

  The announcer was saying, “Work crews excavating beneath the city of San Francisco today discovered artifacts suggesting an extraterrestrial presence on Earth sometime during the late nineteenth century. Among the artifacts discovered is an object identified as the head of Lieutenant Commander Data of Starfleet. According to isotope readings, it has decayed from having been buried for some 500 years.”

  “That’s impossible!” Starsa blurted out, and was shushed by the others.

  “Starfleet Command reports that their flagship, the Enterprise-D, has been recalled to Earth to investigate this anomaly.” The blue cockade bobbed impressively. “Now we take you to the tunnels near the Presidio, home of Starfleet Academy, to view the remains.”

  “Remains!” Starsa exclaimed again.

  “Will you please shut up?” Bobbie Ray asked with exaggerated politeness, shouldering some of the remaining cadets aside to get a better view.

  Titus sat down at his desk, staring out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge. He was just as pleased to have their minds so quickly diverted from the antara match. He listened with only half an ear as the announcer described how the workers had discovered the severed head while installing additional seismic regulators in subterranean caverns to control earth movements that were typical along the San Andreas fault.

  “Subterranean caverns,” Titus repeated under his breath, realizing what that implied. Impatiently, he waited for the broadcast to end and the last of the cadets to depart to spread the bizarre news.

  Finally only Bobbie Ray and Jayme were left, and Titus knew Jayme would probably linger in their room all evening unless he asked her to leave. He had noticed she didn’t like spending much time in her half-empty room, ever since Elma had resigned from the Academy. Jayme had more than once voiced her hope that a new cadet would fill the space after the half-year break, but her room was still empty.

  “I have an idea,” Titus told them both. “That is, if you want to have some real fun instead of holofakery.”

  Bobbie Ray curled one lip at the intended slight. “What’s your bright idea this time?”

  “You’ve never had a real thrill until you’ve descended a hundred meter fissure into an underground cavern.”

  “You want to go down to the caves?” Bobbie Ray asked in disbelief. “Are you crazy? You know how many security teams they must have posted?”

  “We can’t disturb the excavation site,” Jayme agreed. “It could interfere with the Enterprise’s investigation.”

  Titus raised his eyes to the heavens. “I’m not stupid. We can explore the caverns without going near the Presidio.” He directly challenged Bobbie Ray. “Unless, that is, you’re too scared.”

  Bobbie Ray hesitated, then shrugged, willing to go along with anything, as usual. Jayme briefly considered it before shaking her head. “You don’t know these caverns. They’re dangerous; that’s why they were sealed off ages ago.”

  “We’re not worried,” Titus assured her. “It’s better to have three people on an underground exploratory team, but we’ll go duo without you if we have to.”

  “Even if I did agree to go, you’d never find a way to get inside.”

  “Just leave that to me,” Titus told them, feeling much better now. “I’ll get us below ground. Or I’m not an Antaranan.”

  Titus had grown up in the human colony of Antaranan, more in the caves than on the surface, so he figured there was nobody better to find their way through these puny San Franciscan caverns than himself. His mother was a biospeleologist, and had often taken him into the unexplored caverns and passageways that riddled the crust of Antaranan, far beyond the familiar chambers used by the colony to grow the essential fungal-meats and fragile vegetable matter away from the harmful solar rays.

  It wasn’t difficult to access the maintenance records of the seismic regulators under San Francisco, as well as the original surveys of the caverns performed hundreds of years ago. Most of the main access ports were in the heart of the city—the financial district, in Union Square, even the ancient yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  When he showed Jayme the map, she shook her head at all of the access ports he suggested. As she liked to tell the other cadets, she knew the city inside out.

  “This is where we should go down,” she insisted, pointing to a small auxiliary porthole near the Cable Car Barn Museum.

  Bobbie Ray squinted at the print over that area. “Chinatown?”

  “I was looking for a more out-of-the-way place,” Titus protested. “That’s one of the most crowded areas in the city.”

  “Exactly!” Jayme exclaimed. “Everyone’s too busy and there’s too much going on for anyone to pay much attention to a few people going down the access port.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Bobbie Ray agreed. “Maybe we should get some orange coveralls. After all the media attention with the arrival of the Enterprise-D, no one will think it’s unusual for workers to access old tunnels.”

  “Fine,” Titus s
aid, resuming control of the expedition. “Then you’ll be ready to go on the next free day?”

  “Sure; should we tell Starsa?” Jayme asked.

  “The last thing we need is her medical alert going off,” Titus protested. “This isn’t some joyride we’re going on. It’s serious. Both of you should make sure you really want to do this.”

  Jayme nodded. “If you go, then I should go, too. I checked, and it is safer with three people.”

  Bobbie Ray yawned, reclining back on the cushions of his bed. “I think you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion. We saw those caves. Looks like an afternoon stroll to me.”

  “Just you wait and see.” Titus tried to sound ominous, but Bobbie Ray ruined it by laughing.

  Irritated, Titus left as the laughter continued to ring out behind him. He decided to take the transporter to the workout arena to blow off some steam. He couldn’t wait to get that big Rex down on his turf. Then they would see how tough he was.

  By the time their next free day came along, the Enterprise-D had finished its preliminary investigation on Earth. The analysis of the artifacts found at the dig site suggested they originated from the planet Devidia II in the Marrab sector.

  It was barely dawn when Titus woke to the news that the Enterprise-D was breaking orbit and was en route to Devidia II to investigate. He quickly called the others to get them moving. They needed to get past the upper tunnels and into new territory before the caverns were filled with secondary Starfleet investigators.

  Bobbie Ray was like a limp rag, never eager to get up early, and being provocative undoubtedly because he knew how impatient Titus was to get down to the caves. “Yeah, yeah, just a few more minutes,” the Rex repeated, rolling over lazily.

  Titus prodded him again, fresh from his own shower and ready to go. When Jayme poked her head around the door, also up and eager, Titus finally warned, “I’ll tell everyone you wimped out and we had to go without you.”

  That did the trick, and within minutes the three cadets had transported into Chinatown. Jayme had taken the entire Quad on a tour of the city soon after the academic year began, so Titus had already gotten a glimpse of the riot of color and noise and smells offered by the historic district. The streets were narrow canyons—very different from other Earth cities he’d seen so far, with their open green parks and towering spires. They had to watch their step along the sidewalks to avoid the squatting Asians who were tending their ion-grills, roasting a variety of real and exotic animal products right on the street.

  Bobbie Ray kept stopping to toss credits at the vendors, picking up skewers of unidentifiable meat, while Jayme kept running into the makeshift booths to rifle through colored scarves and costumes. Titus was too busy trying to get his bearings with the map on his padd, but somehow in the past few hundred years, the street locations and names had inexplicably shifted.

  “We’ll never find it!” he finally exclaimed, standing in the center of a five-way intersection that shouldn’t have existed.

  Bobbie Ray stuck a large fried insect in his mouth and briskly began crunching. The guy had a bottomless pit where his stomach should be.

  “Close your mouth!” Jayme snapped, obviously disgusted by the sight of legs and feelers being randomly mashed around in the Rex’s mouth.

  “Want one?” Bobbie Ray asked, offering her a plasteen container that was piled with the desiccated bodies of Terran grasshoppers.

  “You know,” Jayme told him with a wicked glint in her eye, “you shouldn’t wear that color. Orange on orange makes you look like a big Zarcadian squash.”

  “Will both of you pay attention?” Titus demanded. “We’re going to have to pick another access port. We’ll never find the one in here.”

  “Oh, give me that!” Jayme snatched the padd from his hand, muttering under her breath about “tourists.”

  With a few flicks of the screen, she overlaid a current map and zoomed in on their targeted access port.

  “Here it is,” she said. “Right behind the Ho Ching Acupuncture and Telekinetic Healing Clinic.”

  “Oh, what a relief,” Titus said sarcastically, taking back his padd.

  “What would you do without us?” Bobbie Ray commented, grinning around the spindly legs of the grasshoppers.

  * * *

  Jayme was right—no one paid any attention to three orange-clad workers opening the access port in the alleyway. Kids were running past, people were hanging clothes out overhead, and antigrav carts trundled by on both sides laden with warehouse goods or fresh produce.

  Closing the access portal overhead, they stood in a rounded dirt-floored chamber similar to the one shown on the media broadcasts where Data’s head was found. Titus felt a sinking feeling, wondering if all the caverns had been reconditioned by the workforces over the years.

  “This way,” he ordered, keeping his worries to himself. At the rear of the chamber was a long ladder, leading down. Here the walls were rougher and the black pit was too deep to be illuminated by their handlights. Titus began to feel a little better. “Down we go!”

  “Wait,” Jayme said, unslinging her pack. “We have to put these on.”

  She held out the white jet-boots issued by Starfleet.

  Titus took one look and groaned. “We don’t need those!”

  “I’m not going down without safety gear,” Jayme insisted. “And I’m not going to let you two go, either. This is supposed to be fun, not life-threatening.” She glanced down into the shaft. “And those rungs look slimy.”

  Bobbie Ray checked the two pairs she set out for them. “You brought my size!”

  Jayme slipped her white boots on and tightened the straps. With a little puff of dust, she activated the jets and lifted a few inches off the ground. “Good for thirty hours use.”

  Bobbie Ray buckled his boots on and was soon lifting himself up to the ceiling. “Maybe we should skip the ladder and go down this way.”

  “Maybe you want to give up now and go back to the Quad!” Titus retorted. “What’s the use of exploring if you might as well be in a holodeck?”

  Both of them hovered silently, staring down at him. After a few moments, Titus flung up his hands. “Have it your way, then! But we only use the boots in an emergency or I’m quitting right now.”

  Jayme sank back down to the ground. “That’s why I brought them. For emergencies.”

  Titus waited until Bobbie Ray also slowly floated down before jerking on his jet-boots and tightening them in place. “I think if you can’t manage to hang on to a ladder, then you get what you deserve.”

  Bobbie Ray laughed. “Then you go first, fearless leader.”

  Titus had the satisfaction of hearing the Rex’s laughter abruptly end as they started down the ladder. For most humanoids, any sort of vertical drop offered a test of nerves. Especially when you couldn’t see the bottom.

  The light at the opening at the top dwindled as they descended. He skipped several side tunnels that went in the direction of the Presidio and Starfleet Academy, choosing to go as deep as he could. The fracture widened at the bottom, becoming more rugged and raw. They climbed through a steeply inclined crack, into an underground canyon that stretched as far across as the Academy Assembly Hall. A stream had eroded the bottom into a gorge, and they had to edge along the wall, brushing their hands against the slippery, calcified coating on the rocks. Titus could imagine the tremendous force of earthquakes breaking open the crust around the San Andreas Fault, leaving behind this network of caverns and crushed rock.

  They passed cave flowers slowly extruding from holes in the rock, growing from the base and curling back like squeezed toothpaste. Titus checked one of the largest, nearly twenty-five centimeters across, and found that the delicate formation was pure gypsum. There were also shields or palettes forming from water seepage through cracks. The ridges of calcite were deposited on both sides, growing radially into parallel plates or disks, separated only by a thin opening through which drops of water continued to fall. Jayme sto
pped behind two large circular shields, her light outlining her body through the translucent calcite.

  Titus was more than pleased with their awe and wonder at the underground world. But he wasn’t satisfied yet. Bobbie Ray refused to acknowledge the effort it took to climb down so far, and he even scaled the wall bare-handed to get the tip of a crystal-clear stalactite for Jayme. Her glance at Titus clearly said who she thought was winning this little contest of skills.

  Titus took them up a high talus mound and into the next cavern, where flowstone coated the cave fill, narrowing the volume of the void. This cavern was filled with fallen ceiling blocks and most of the stalagmites had been broken off near the base by earth tremors. Additional seepage gave them an unusually fat, short appearance.

  They retreated back to the shaft. Though the ladder left off, the fractured hole continued down. Titus uncoiled the rope he had brought and hooked it onto his belt. The other two followed him without a word of complaint.

  A couple of dozen meters down the shaft narrowed, too small for them to go any further, but another fracture led east, fairly horizontal, following the path of the caverns far above them. Water coated the walls and floor, and here Bobbie Ray had even more of an advantage with his surefooted agility. Titus and Jayme kept slipping, and once Titus would have fallen badly except for Bobbie Ray’s obliging hand.

  After clambering carefully some distance through the tunnel, Titus noticed a fissure overhead only because he was looking for it. With the help of Bobbie Ray’s height and reach, they muscled their way up the fissure into another large cavern, in line with the other two they had already explored.

  “It was cut off from the last cavern by the talus mound,” Titus explained nonchalantly as first Jayme, then Bobbie Ray, emerged through the jog in the fissure that led into this small cavern. They were slightly elevated above the floor.

  Titus was pleased that he had guessed correctly. Jumping down, he felt the loose rock shift and slip under his feet. Jayme actually went down on her hands and knees, unable to keep her balance, while Bobbie Ray hung on to the stone lip they had just jumped over, staring up open mouthed at the dramatic low-hanging ceiling that dripped continually. The fat drops sparkled like rainbow stars under their handlights.