Well of Souls

And he had a lot to worry about because he’d tried to scan Chen-Mai. Doing so broke every vow he’d ever made not to misuse his gift. But this was his life they were talking about now; this was his son’s life. So he’d sca

So. The blocks and the fact that both men were taking a drug so he, Kaldarren, couldn’t crack through telepathically were proof enough. Kaldarren got a certain grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that you didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that a man fearful of you seeing inside definitelyhad something to hide. That both Mar andChen-Mai were taking the drug told Kaldarren that both men knew the same thing, and neither could be trusted. They were going to kill him. They were going to kill Jase.

He couldn’t let that happen. Can’t fail, Ican’t. He thought about stealing the shuttle, or contacting Garrett. Neither was an option. There was no transmitter on the planet strong enough to pierce the interference from both the brown star’s stellar wind and the neutron star’s magnetic fields; and Chen-Mai had the shuttle in lockdown mode. Only Chen-Mai and Mar knew the code, and it was stupid of him not to have plucked the code from their minds while he had the chance.

Enough.Closing his eyes against the dead and rock-strewn landscape, Ven Kaldarren focused on the sound of his breathing. An old trick, one used early on in the meditation techniques that all Betazoid telepaths undertook as part of their early training.

Unbidden, thoughts— Jase—crept into his mind. Kaldarren frowned. Couldn’t think about his son now. Have to concentrate.Kaldarren threw his mind out in a wide net, his thoughts like a sensitive web, ready to vibrate with the tiniest psionic disturbance.

Jase.Again. Why? Kaldarren was on the verge of dragging his mind away but didn’t. If his mind kept veering to Jase, there was a good reason. Kaldarren willed the tension to leave his limbs; he opened his mind wide.

Jase.His son had seemed different in the past few days—happier, certainly, and as if he looked forward to every new day. There was Jase’s ability to gray his mind; that was new, and a revelation Kaldarren hadn’t spent much time deciphering, or dwelling upon. He reasoned that the action was a reflex, something the boy learned as a consequence of having to live with telepaths. Come to think of it, Kaldarren didn’t have much experience with living in close quarters with non-telepaths. There was Rachel, of course. His mind caressed this Rachelthought: an image of Rachel’s auburn hair fa

His heart filled with grief. They’d lost so much. Until the last two rancorous years, when the marriage was dissolving, her mind had always been open. At the height of their love, Kaldarren felt as if they shared the same mind, the same feel….

Suddenly, a bolt of searing pain ripped through his brain. Kaldarren couldn’t help it; he screamed. His vision dimmed, and his knees buckled. He felt the sharp bite of rock as he sagged to the ground, hands clutched at either side of his helmet. The pain came again: sharp, knifing his brain as if someone had taken an axe and driven it through his mind, cleaving it in two.

Stop.Moaning, Kaldarren tried to put up a shield, keep the intruder-thought at bay. He had to get it to stop, stop!Who could be doing this, who had this much power…?

Then, through a haze of agony, Kaldarren saw an image: a shape. Indistinct, shadowy. Not humanoid. A dragon. No, not a dragon—Kaldarren tried clamping down on the pain shivering through his mind, along his limbs—not a dragon, a woman with a dragon’s… no,a serpent’s body, and wings, and eyes, those eyes….

Dad! Dad, help!Help us!

“Jase,” Kaldarren hissed, his mind spiraling toward blackness. “Jase!”

“What is it?” asked Jase. He passed his tricorder over the wall before them. The wall wasn’t rock; he stared at his tricorder’s readings then passed the device over the wall once more for good measure.

“It’s metal,” said Pahl, confirming Jase’s readings. He, too, had a tricorder. “A bunch of metal. Titanium and some other stuff, I don’t know what, I haven’t gotten that far yet in school.”

“Metal?” Jase echoed. “In a rock tu

“That’s what it looks like.”

Disgusted, Jase shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Looking around, he searched for a place to sit and found none. He settled for squatting, cross-legged, on the rock floor. He was tired and hungry, and now they’d run into a metal wall sealed with a magnetic lock, of all things. They’d been walking for hours, and he was sweating, not from exertion this time but anxiety.

His eyes roamed the tu

Discouraged, Jase swung his head back toward the metal panel. The panel made no sense. A magnetic lock, one that was still active, on a dead planet made even less. Unless it had been left over from the time when there were people here. If true, where was the power coming from? There had to be a power source somewhere, one to power the lock and to generate the field they’d found at the tu

He ought to tell Pahl to forget this whole adventure and go back. Jase was in over his head, and he knew it. Yet he felt a strange compulsion to keep going. Even as he fought the urge to go deeper and deeper, as if an invisible tether were reeling him in, Jase felt his apprehension grow. Small comfort he’d been right about the general design of the tu