Star Trek Discovery- Fear Itself

by James Swallow

  On a basic level, the layout of Saru’s quarters was little different from Burnham’s own, a single-occupancy cabin for a junior bridge officer with a bed in one section and an open living area in the other. But the lighting level was much lower than the brighter setting she preferred, the air slightly cooler. The atmosphere in Burnham’s cabin was a temperate near-analog to the Vulcan norms she was familiar with, while Saru seemed to favor gloom and shadows. She waited to let her eyes adjust.

  It didn’t surprise her that the fastidious Kelpien’s quarters were neat and tidy. Spare uniforms hung near the fabricator alcove, meticulously folded so that their longer legs wouldn’t drag on the floor. The automated ’fresher unit was spotless, and if it hadn’t been for the single empty mug resting on the disposal pad of the cabin’s food slot, she might have been forgiven for thinking the device had never been used. There was a box of herbal tea bags on a shelf close by, next to a container of what she first thought was sugar, but turned out to be table salt.

  Burnham made a slow orbit of the room, leading with the tricorder, scanning for anything that might be an anomaly. She detected the additional layer of acoustic shielding in the walls—it seemed to be functioning normally—but there was a peak appearing at the lowest levels of the sensor bands.

  She retuned the tricorder to focus on the discovery. There was something on the walls, flecks of an inorganic compound scattered here and there in what seemed to be a random manner. When she asked the device to analyze it, the conclusion it presented seemed incongruous.

  “Ink?” Burnham raised an eyebrow and spoke to the air, “Computer, acknowledge.”

  “Waking from standby mode,” said a synthetic voice from a console on the far wall. “Do you wish to reset?”

  She wasn’t sure what that meant, and glossed over the question. “Yes, I suppose so. I want to access environmental control for this compartment. Specifically, please re-attune the local light frequency to . . .” Burnham studied the analysis. “This setting.” She sent the data to the ship’s computer and waited.

  “Working.” If Burnham was correct, then the alteration of the lighting would allow her to perceive the interior of the cabin as if she were looking at it through Kelpien eyes—Saru’s eyes.

  There was a brief blink of blue-shifted color and the landscape of the room suddenly changed. The effect was like night and day; one moment, Burnham had been staring at blank, polymer-coated walls and the next she was seeing a matrix of glyphs written across the floors, the walls, the ceiling. She dropped into a crouch to take a closer look.

  This is . . . the Kelpien language? Did Saru write all this? Burnham was aware that some species in Starfleet altered their quarters in subtle ways to accommodate their personal or cultural needs, but she had never come across something like this. Tiny, tightly packed script in Saru’s careful hand moved in long lines from the doorway, up and around, and back again. “What does it say?”

  She scanned a short section and ran it through a translation program. It was a part of what appeared to be a poem. Perhaps this was how his people recorded their history, honored their culture, by scribing it onto every available surface in an ink that could be perceived only at extreme ultraviolet-light frequencies.

  The glow that illuminated the text also gave light to something else—a rectangular box sitting next to Saru’s desktop console. At first glance, Burnham had thought it unimportant, but under the changed illumination it was bright with subtle striations and intricate carving.

  The box was as long as her forearm and carved from a dark, dense wood. The smoothness of the shape suggested it was old and careworn. She couldn’t help but run her fingers over the surface of the lid, feeling a regular grid of indentations and symbols impressed upon it.

  Burnham hesitated at the thought of opening it. Aside from the glyphs, the cabin contained nothing else that she would have considered to be a personal item. Everything else was standard Starfleet issue. Peering inside the box felt like a step too far. Instead, she scanned it with the tricorder. The device registered small objects inside made of metal, glass, and bone, but nothing that seemed unusual.

  It was then that she saw the motion of the shadow from the corner of her eye. A deep-black shape made of hard angles, the surface of it glassy like obsidian. It advanced slowly, and she realized that it had used the change in light levels to move silently around behind her.

  The questions of what this intruder was or how it came to be in Lieutenant Saru’s quarters were pushed aside. The shape moved like a threat, and she found herself emulating the Kelpien, tensing for the danger to approach.

  But where Saru’s instinct might have been to draw back and escape, Michael Burnham’s was rooted in a very different impulse. There was a lamp on the end of the desk, and she slipped her hand toward it, fingers gripping the heavy base. It would serve as a makeshift weapon.

  The shadow seemed to discern her intentions, and it came across the remaining distance in a flurry of silent movement. Drawing on the Suus Mahna defensive training she had learned in her youth, Burnham pivoted away and got her first good look at the intruder.

  Tholian!

  It could be nothing else. The distinctive crystalline shape, in this form with the six spindly legs clustered together into a tripedal configuration. The arms like scimitar blades, slicing toward her. The two smoldering eye spots glaring out of the gloom at Burnham.

  It was impossible for the alien to be here, and yet it was. The surface of its faceted skin was night black instead of the hot orange red Burnham knew from Starfleet visual records, a signifier that this intruder was one of the rumored stealth aspects, the Tholian equivalent of an elite covert-soldier class.

  The bladelike arms stabbed toward her, and she jolted back out of the way. Something was wrong—it all seemed illogical!—but Burnham couldn’t bring herself to stop and reason it through.

  She should have run for the door, should have screamed for security as loudly as she could, but in that instant Michael Burnham was caught in her pure, emotional reaction.

  She swung the lamp around in a hard arc, and the weighted end connected with the “brow” of the Tholian’s head—

  —And passed right through it, encountering nothing.

  She was so shocked by the reaction that she didn’t avoid the counterblow coming the other way. The ink-dark intruder stabbed her through the chest with its right arm, the glassy length of it piercing her sternum.

  But there was no pain, no sensation. Nothing at all. The Tholian stood there, frozen in time.

  “Failure condition,” said the computer. “Your reaction time was insufficient to avoid a fatality. Simulation concluded Do you wish to reset?”

  “No!” snapped Burnham, and the phantom intruder vanished in a glitter of holographic pixels. She drew in a shaky breath and muttered an ancient word in Low Vulcanian, self-consciously rubbing at the spot on her chest where the crystalline being would have stabbed her. “Tviokh.” The Vulcans didn’t have many ways to curse, but Burnham remembered that one, and she said it with feeling.

  “Please restate command,” said the synthetic voice.

  “What was that?” she demanded. “That . . . Tholian? Why did it attack me?”

  “Personal holographic program designated Saru-Six. Automated aggressor simulation keyed to trigger at random intervals.”

  “Purpose?”

  “Controlled stimulation and moderation of Kelpien fight-or-flight response, to facilitate continued emotional stability.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly it made sense to her. Burnham’s first thought had been that the hologram was some kind of alarm system, a trap for the uninvited entering Saru’s quarters just as she had. But it was nothing of the kind. It was a test.

  Just as Burnham would regularly engage in workouts down in the Shenzhou’s gym or sparring matches with an automated opponent, Saru had his own version of that exercise in the form of this program. “He can’t exist without some kind of danger at hand,” she said a
loud, carefully putting the lamp back where she had found it. “Even if it’s just a simulated one.”

  The words brought her thoughts into sharp focus. Saru had never made it easy to serve alongside him, his fussy, often prickly manner causing friction over the most trivial of things. But she respected his skills, even if she would rarely tell him so. The Kelpien had a keen analytical mind and a strong intuitive manner that would have served him better, had he not been so inward looking. For all his distance, his aloofness, Saru was a driven being, and the hologram program showed it. He’s always pushing himself, thought Burnham, even if the rest of us don’t see it. That Saru was competing with her had never been in doubt, but now she wondered how much it cost him to do that.

  She felt a twinge of empathy for him. Burnham understood all too well what it was to be driven, to be constantly tested, and to be secretly afraid of faltering and failing those around her. If there’s anything wrong with Saru, it’s that. He went back to the Peliar ship because he was pushing . . . and he got in over his head.

  “You didn’t see what you were walking into, did you?” She asked the question to the air. “You looked, but you couldn’t see . . .” Burnham trailed off as her own words echoed around the empty room. “Couldn’t see,” she repeated, and a sudden head rush came over her, the realization of something she had missed. “Because I was looking at it with the wrong eyes . . .”

  She rocked off her heels, abruptly propelled by her new flash of insight. Have to get to the lab. The monitor buoy . . . I know what to do!

  Burnham hesitated at the door, remembering ch’Theloh’s orders about checking Saru’s quarters. She tapped the intercom panel on the wall. “Lieutenant Burnham to XO.”

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” the Andorian answered immediately.

  “I’ve completed my survey as requested,” she said briskly. “No anomalies found. Saru is still Saru. That’s the problem as much as it is the solution. Burnham out.” She cut the channel before the first officer could reply, and set off at a rapid pace toward the lab decks. If ch’Theloh wanted to find a way to place some blame on the Kelpien’s shoulders, he would have to do it without her help.

  • • •

  The Gorlans left Saru to work on the helm control podium, and when it was clear that the Peliar engineer was unable to assist him, Vetch had two of the red-bands escort her below.

  He watched the speaker closely, trying to gauge his intentions. Would Vetch or his people be so callous as to take Hekan away to be killed? What purpose would that serve? It was difficult to remain focused on the problem at hand when his thoughts continually drifted off toward worries about the fate of the rescue party and the Peliars.

  One of the other Gorlans, a female named Kijoh, was assigned to give Saru whatever he needed to do the job, but he suspected she was there to act as his watcher. Kijoh had tightly cropped, sand-yellow hair that fell into a stubby queue down her back, and her round face bore a recent scar below one eye. She told him she had been a pilot aboard one of the ships that had borne the Gorlans to the Peliar Zel system, and that she understood the helm system of the star-freighter. Saru took that as a subtle warning from Kijoh, that she would know if he was trying to interfere with the controls, or stall the work in any way.

  Saru managed to get the control podium to switch into a self-diagnostic mode, and as he watched, a seemingly endless stream of computer code fell through a display readout on the illuminated panel. His tricorder dutifully scanned it line by line, attempting to find a loophole in the lockout software, but the task was slow and tedious. Not only did the data need to be translated from the Peliar language into Federation Standard, but the alien operating system had to be rendered into something Starfleet tech could interface with.

  Saru sighed and gave Kijoh a sideways glance, feeling the need to fill the wary silence between them. “If I may ask . . . The colony your people left, were you present when the Tholians attacked it?”

  The Gorlan’s severe green eyes fixed him with a glare. “Are you saying we lied about that?”

  “No.” He held up his hand. “Why would you assume so?”

  “How do you think I got this scar?” Kijoh countered, then let out a breath. “I have been questioned a hundred times by Peliars, from the first day we fell into orbit around their Alpha Moon. Did the Tholians really attack you? Did you provoke the situation? How many ships were there? What did you do to antagonize them? Did you fire first?” Her jaw worked, as if she were chewing on something tough and unpalatable. “I was on the surface when they came in their spinner ships. That saved my life. They put their energy webs around our orbital station and dragged it away. . . . The cargo lighter I crewed for was lost then.”

  “They attacked your planet without a reason?” Saru studied the Gorlan carefully, watching as her four hands clasped over one another.

  “Oh, they had a reason,” corrected Kijoh. “They didn’t care that it made no sense to us. The Tholians said that our colony was inside the borders of their Assembly, and it belonged to them. They gave us one rotation to leave. One!” She spat out the word. “We’d been there for twenty-two full solar cycles, you understand? Over four hundred thousand of us. Built lives and towns and chapels. Bonded there, had litters of young there. It was a home. And then overnight, these aliens came and told us to abandon it!”

  “But you were aware of the existence of the Tholians,” Saru pressed. “This sector of space borders their territory. You could not be ignorant of that.”

  “We knew what they were,” she snapped. “We always respected their boundaries. We kept our distance. We were no threat to them!”

  Saru gave a solemn nod. “In some circumstances, that is not enough. The Tholian Assembly are extremely aggressive in maintaining their borders.” He paused, reading the Gorlan’s stiff expression. “Your people refused to go.”

  “We drew together to protect the . . . to protect ourselves.” Kijoh made a growling noise in the back of her throat. “They had no interest in listening to us. When their deadline passed, they started bombarding the colony from space. We had no choice then. We had to flee, or die.” She told him how the panicked rout of the Gorlans had claimed almost as many lives as the Tholian beam blasts. A shadow passed over the pilot’s face as she recalled their desperate flight to escape the star system, fearful that the dagger-shaped spinners would come after them. “Our vessels were overloaded and under supplied. Some went cold out there in the void. We prayed to the Creator for safe harbor, and when we stumbled on Peliar Zel, we thought we had found it.”

  Saru framed his next words very carefully. “You must have known they would be wary. The Peliars would have been as afraid of you as you were of the Tholians.”

  “Of course. That is why we threw ourselves on their mercy. One sentient to another. And at first, the Peliars seemed to welcome us. But that changed when they realized our ships had spent themselves reaching their shores. When they understood we were not going to leave anytime soon.” She made the growling noise again. “We didn’t want to be there. We wanted to be on our colony, living the lives we had built! Then the Peliars told us there was no room for us on their moons, just as the Tholians had told us there was no room on the planet we had made our home.” Kijoh eyed him. “What would you have done, Saru? If your life was torn away from you?”

  The question hit the Kelpien with a force he hadn’t expected. Saru experienced a sudden and very powerful sense of distance from the world that he had once called home.

  Taking a breath, he silenced the thought. “I would have run,” he answered honestly.

  “That is what we are doing,” said another voice. Saru turned to see Madoh, the bigger red-band, walking toward them with a weary swagger, one hand forever on his gun. “What we have been forced into.” He glared at the console. “It’s been several hours and you do not appear to be making any progress.”

  Saru knew full well what would come next: the threats. He deliberately stayed where he was, crouched low but
raised up enough that he was at eye level with the shorter Gorlan, rather than towering over him in a way that would unconsciously trigger an aggressive response. “From what I have been able to determine, the only way to halt this vessel’s progress would be to directly interfere with the power train from the warp core.”

  Madoh’s lips curled. “We can do that. We did it before.” He nodded at Kijoh. “You agree with the alien?”

  “I agree that we cannot divert this ship from its automated heading, not without breaking something vital,” said the pilot.

  It wasn’t the answer Saru or Madoh was expecting. The Gorlan red-band flexed his hands irritably, jabbing two of them at the Kelpien. “He said it is possible.”

  “Possible, and very dangerous,” Saru broke in. “I believe that if you attempt to force this ship out of warp again, the cascade effect that threatened to destroy it last time will reoccur. This time, the nadion pulse will be much more severe.”

  “You prevented it then. You can do so again.” Madoh dismissed his concerns with a snort.

  “No, I cannot!” Saru’s exasperation finally broke its banks and he almost shouted. “Please tell him!” He implored Kijoh.

  “The alien is right,” said the pilot flatly. “Interfere with the drive and it will kill us all.”

  Madoh’s sneer grew. “Has the Federation’s timidity tainted you, Kijoh? Where’s the boldness you showed when we broke through the Tholian blockade?” He made a point of studying her scar.

  “You are confusing bravery with desperation,” Kijoh replied. “We are on this journey to the end, like it or not.”

  Belatedly, Saru realized that the Gorlan pilot had been observing his work on the helm controls more closely than he had thought.

  “That is unacceptable!” spat Madoh. “If we cannot break this chain, then we need to find another way to stop the vessel.” He raised his voice so that all the other Gorlans on the command deck could hear him. Saru watched them pause and listen to their leader. “I do not wish to kill in cold blood,” he went on. “It is not our way. But our prayers go unanswered and for the Creator’s sake, we cannot stand with hands bound while the Peliars continue to control us!” Madoh marched to the helm console. “We have them as our captives, and yet still they are in command of this vessel! How much longer must we march to the demands of outworlders?” His angry words drew affirming nods from many of the other Gorlans.