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For Bryan Fuller, with thanks for all the advice
Historian’s Note
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This story takes place in 2252. It is four years before a day in May 2256 when a fateful meeting between the U.S.S. Shenzhou and T’Kuvma’s followers will spark a war with the Klingon Empire (Star Trek: Discovery—“Battle of the Binary Stars”).
Nothing routs us but the villainy of our fears.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CYMBELINE, ACT 5, SCENE II
1
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Out in the darkness, unseen and unheard, the danger was waiting for Saru.
He crouched low to the floor, his long arms and legs folded up close to his slim torso. He kept his head bowed and his eyes closed, extending his senses into the room, seeking the presence of the threat.
The aural channels of the Kelpien’s lobeless ears and pits on the surface of his scalp channeled every last fraction of sound into his awareness. Electrosensitive nerve clusters beneath the skin of his face and along the backs of his thin fingers tasted the constant background hum of the vessel around him. He instinctively sifted the wash of sense-noise for anything untoward and found . . . nothing.
Slowly, Saru opened his eyes. His vision instantly adjusted to the dimness of the unlit compartment. He unfolded to his full height, rising with his back to the corner of the room, and the only doorway in or out in front of him. Shadowy shapes crowded the edges of his vision: his sleeping pallet, a desk and computer unit, a table upon which stood a careworn box made of carved wood, a three-dimensional chess set, and a data pad. The objects were benign, unthreatening. Or at least, that was what he was meant to think.
He stood there for a full two minutes without expelling a breath. To an outside observer, he would have appeared totally inert, a strange statue in the still life of the cabin.
Then he moved, in quick and economical motions. It was exactly five hoof steps from the far corner of the room to the door, and Saru could cover it in an instant if he chose to, but today he stepped evenly, carefully. It was the pace of one passive and harmless, one who did not wish to upset the equilibrium of whatever might be waiting in the gloom.
He was taking his third step when he noticed a pair of identical cups sitting on the disposal tray of the cabin’s food slot.
There was no need for there to be two. Saru had no company in these quarters. As a Starfleet lieutenant, his rank was of sufficient level and the U.S.S. Shenzhou was a ship of enough tonnage to afford him the advantage of privacy in his billet. And he was too fastidious to needlessly fabricate a second drinking container when one already existed. The metallic shape of the cup rippled with an oily light and he turned toward it, instinctively drawn by motion where none should have followed.
The cup changed. The cylindrical shape transformed into something between a gel and a powder, dropping into a pool of itself. It rebounded into a spiny form that resembled a cluster of skittering crustacean legs, a knot of shiny limbs that had no hub to them. The creature exploded into motion, its greasy sensor palps detecting the change in air density as Saru moved past it.
The tips of its legs hardened into a density near that of tempered steel. Once it found a victim, the creature would seek the softest tissues through which to force its limbs, and after dermal penetration had occurred, it would eat.
This was a process in three stages. Paralysis of the target life-form caused by an extruded neurotoxin; then systematic liquefaction of all nerve tissue, as agonizing as it was horrific; and finally consumption of internal organs from within. The victim would, mercifully, be dead by the time the third stage occurred. If the meal was of sufficient richness, the engorged attacker would enter a budding cycle and reproduce. One well-fed creature could spawn many times, given adequate sustenance. Saru’s tall corpse would provide more than enough for a dozen generations.
He froze as it landed on his shoulder, and the cluster of legs halted, the needle-tips hesitating. It moved around the nape of his neck, across the back of his head, and then down his arm, palps twitching at the air. Its behavior suggested it was confused. The movement it had detected now ceased. In the creature’s primitive, predatory brain, it could not understand how a prey-thing of such mass could be in motion one instant and still in the next. It was used to the thrashing and panicked frenzy of a target, the confirmation that it had found its next meal.
Saru remained immobile as the thing picked its way down the length of his dark blue uniform, plucking at the cloth. Presently, it became disinterested and dropped off, clattering to the deck. He watched it wander across the floor before finally reconfiguring itself. The simple little polymorph reverted back to the last form it had adopted, once again becoming a passable copy of the ceramic cup. Sitting on the deck in front of the door, it looked odd and out of place.
Saru took a breath and surged forward, bringing one heavy hoofed boot to stamp on the creature before it could revert. It glittered as it died, not through organic means but in transformation as it became a flash of fading holographic pixels.
“Simulation concluded,” said a feminine voice from a computer panel on the far wall. “Do you wish to reset?”
“What was that?” Saru said to the air, refreshed with the rush of adrenaline tingling through his body.
“The holoprojection was a mature example of the species Salazinus metamorphii, colloquial name Salazar’s Feign. A type-two hazardous mimetic life-form native to a Class-Y world in the Lembatta Cluster. Do you wish to reset?”
Again, he ignored the question and posed one of his own. “That felt slow to me. Was I slow? Would it have killed me in reality?”
“Negative. Your reaction time was sufficient to avoid a fatality. However, you were one point three milliseconds slower than your previous recorded instance.”
“Ah. Yes, of course.” Saru glanced up at the holographic projector module he had mounted on the ceiling of his quarters. That previous time, the simulation program had randomly generated a Denebian slime devil lurking in the waste disposal slot, and the thing had almost scored a bite that, if it had been real, would have taken off two of his fingers at the second joint. “Reason?” he demanded.
“Authorization required to access medical scans in order to generate conjecture,” said the computer.
“Yes, yes,” he said tersely, gesturing at the air. “Authorization Kappa-Saru-Seven.”
“Working.”
He glanced out of the cabin’s port, observing an unmoving field of alien stars framed against a fathomless reach of night. Off the Shenzhou’s port bow, Saru’s keen eyesight picked
out a smooth-sided slab of gray metal, its surface marred by heavy carbon scoring. He studied it, then looked away.
By rights, Saru should have already been on his way to his duty station, but this was something he didn’t want to put off. He’d been feeling sluggish and ill at ease for a few days, and if something was slowing him down, it was important he knew now. Before anyone else did.
“Analysis complete,” announced the computer. “Blood sugar levels are below recommended margins.”
Saru blew out a breath. “Ah.” Twice in the last three days he had missed a meal in the mess hall and filled the gap with a ration bar. That, combined with the stress of his current assignment, explained it. “I cannot afford to be slow,” he said to the air. “The slow and the weak are as good as dead.”
“Please restate command.”
“Suspend program!” Saru snapped irritably, then added, “For now.”
The whole purpose of the hologram predators and the randomizing software that generated them was to keep him sharp, he reminded himself. Left to exist on only the baseline level of response stimuli that his crewmates took for granted, Saru found himself “climbing the walls,” as Ensign Januzzi had once colorfully described it. The simulation helped to keep Saru focused and, more importantly, it was a constant reminder of the singular truth that he believed above all others—the universe was an inherently dangerous place, which would kill the unwary and the unprepared in a heartbeat.
Brushing lint off the silver tabs on the flanks of his uniform, Saru drew himself up and picked up the data pad from the table before stepping quickly out into the corridor beyond—
—And directly into the path of Chief Petty Officer Zuzub. The Kaferian security guard made a click-clacking noise with his wide mandibles and stepped back, apologetically raising his arms. “Pardon, pardon, Lieutenant,” murmured the insectoid’s shoulder-mounted vocoder unit. “Bridge has us on a drill, sir, in a hurry.”
“Hmm,” Saru managed, pushing away the flash of instant terror that had briefly come over him at the sight of a massive predatory arthropod looming in the corridor. “C-carry on.”
Zuzub’s large head bobbed and he went on his way. The Kaferian was actually a friendly sort, but his species had a fearsome aspect that belied their gentler nature. Saru considered this as he set off in the other direction. He had met many sentients since joining Starfleet and had visited several alien worlds. On an intellectual level, he understood that the outward appearance of most beings bore no connection to their inner natures. But it was hard to get past a lifetime of instinctive, ingrained reactions and a physiology like his, one attuned toward the triggering of a fight-or-flight reflex at the slightest impetus.
Saru continued on, having decided to postpone reporting to the secondary systems laboratory on deck three in favor of attending to a baser need: a decent breakfast. He could use the time to go over his notes on the data pad and prepare for the day’s work. Moving along the corridor in loping, long steps, he nodded in passing as two human ensigns from the astrogeology department crossed his path.
Humans always seemed so relaxed to Saru—dangerously so, in fact. He wondered if they, like him, felt the pull of their primitive natures dragging against their evolved selves. Their open, smooth faces bereft of attractive striation and the blank regularity of their sensory aura-fields made it hard for Saru to parse the more subtle emotional states of their species. It required careful observation and evaluation on his part, and that could be tiring. Not for the first time, he wondered what it would be like going through life without being able to hear the ghost hum of electromagnetic energy emitted by everything around him. It would be no different from living without a sense of taste or smell.
For Saru, the Shenzhou purred to itself as the starship’s systems operated in synchrony, the engines for now on standby as the vessel drifted at station-keeping. Had they been moving at impulse power, he would have known it the moment he stepped out of his cabin. There was a distinct resonance of the EM field that he felt somewhere near the crown of his scalp when they cruised at sublight, and a sharper timbre created by the bleed effect of warp travel that gathered at the base of his neck. After years in Starfleet, the Kelpien had become habituated to the effects, but there were still times—usually when he was fatigued—when they made it hard for him to concentrate. The captain had graciously allowed Saru to have a layer of baffle plating fitted around the walls of his quarters to aid his sleep, a fact that he was forever grateful for.
He sensed another human approaching just before Shenzhou’s chief engineer, deep in thought, came around a corner in the corridor and strode briskly past him. Lieutenant Commander Saladin Johar took a couple of steps, and then executed a swift about-face to stare up at Saru. “Science officer,” he began, as if framing a question.
“Yes, sir?” Saru rocked to a halt, balancing on the tips of his hooves.
“I was on my way down to the bridge. Maybe you can save me the turbolift ride.” Most humans were shorter than the gangly Kelpien, and Saru found that many of them exhibited an unconscious defensiveness when forced to look up at someone, just as Johar did now. He resisted the urge to hunch forward as the chief engineer went on. “My team is ready to deploy the replacement buoy as soon as you give us the green light. I’m wondering why you’re making us wait.”
“There are questions that still need to be answered,” said Saru, his hands finding each other around the data pad. “Lieutenant Burnham and I are in the process of a full investigation of the damaged unit. . . . It would be unwise to launch a replacement until we are certain what caused the previous buoy to malfunction.”
“That’s what you told me in the last staff meeting. Twenty hours ago.” Johar eyed him, his tawny face creasing in a frown. The engineer had been pulling double duty over the last week, filling in for Lieutenant Commander Itzel García while the Shenzhou’s second officer was away on Pacifica, but that didn’t mean he was about to let anything slip by on his watch.
Saru experimented with a shrug. “My explanation remains the same, sir. The damage was extensive. The cause is unclear. It’s taking us a while to analyze.” He didn’t add that his disagreements with Michael Burnham over exactly how to handle the analysis had put a noticeable strain on the process.
To say that Saru and the human woman did not see eye to eye was something of an understatement. Burnham’s tendency to become hyperfocused on certain details frequently clashed with Saru’s innate desire to seek a more reductionist solution to problems—a disposition that stemmed from her education among Vulcans, he imagined—and while he was firmly a by-the-book analyst, her disinclination to consider other approaches was at times stifling.
Johar’s expression didn’t change. The chief engineer wasn’t happy with the answer. “Speed things along, Lieutenant,” he said, walking away. “Otherwise cobwebs will start forming on the warp nacelles.”
Saru nodded, not quite following the idiom, and continued on toward the mess hall as the problem at hand pushed its way to the front of his thoughts.
The remote monitoring buoy the Shenzhou had located two days earlier was one of a wide network of autonomous, self-sufficient devices seeded throughout this sector of space by Starfleet Command. Dozens of identical units, cylindrical modules the size of photon torpedoes, drifted out here on the frontier of the United Federation of Planets. Each contained a compact fusion reactor, an ion drive, a suite of high-acuity sensors, and a long-range subspace transceiver array slaved to an expert computer system. Under ideal conditions, the buoys could operate for up to twenty standard years before requiring replacement. They would listen for energy patterns or communications from out beyond the edge of Federation space. Endlessly watchful, ready to sound a warning if a threat made its presence known, they were Starfleet’s silent sentinels.
And they were stationed here with good cause. A few light-years distant lay the borders of another interstellar power, the maddeningly vague edges of the Tholian Assembly. Saru recalled
what he had learned about the antagonistic crystalline species during his years at Starfleet Academy. They had an unpredictable, bellicose nature and a tendency toward punctuality and hostile actions. The Kelpien had never seen one of their dart-shaped “spinner” ships outside of blurry data-tape images, and he had no desire to do so. Everyone on board the Shenzhou knew that the Tholians would be out there somewhere, watching the Starfleet ship’s every move from the extreme edge of sensor range. Saru imagined them like the ba’ul, the apex predators from his homeworld, which would lie in wait until they struck out at their prey.
The logical assumption, at least by Saru’s lights, was that the monitor buoy had fallen victim to Tholian aggression, but if that were proven true, it would invite a whole new raft of problems for the Shenzhou and Starfleet to deal with. Burnham had raised an eyebrow at Saru’s leap of reasoning, noting that proximity to the Assembly didn’t automatically make the Tholians the culprits. Quite rightly, she pointed out that there were other sentient species in the nonaligned border space between the two larger states, as well as stellar phenomena and other possible causes for the damage that the unit had suffered. Saru knew she was correct, but the Kelpien had lived this long only because of his species’ unerring sense for the dangerous, and right now that pragmatic streak was telling him to prepare for the worst.
The junior science officer was thinking of how he would explain that to Burnham when he stepped through the doors into the mess hall and found the dark-skinned human female seated at a table in front of him.
She was young and intense. Burnham’s gaze had a searching quality to it, and Saru always felt like she was on the verge of action even as her more moderated manner reeled her back in. She paused with her spoon in the bowl of food in front of her and saw the data pad in his hand. Burnham nodded at her own pad, propped up on the table. Like Saru’s, it showed blocks of dense text from the preliminary, close-range analysis of the buoy.
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