As the entrance flap flicked open, he thought he saw figures inside with red bands on their arms. Then Saru realized he was alone again among these beings, once more surrounded by the aura of their anxieties and suspicions.
Behind him, the elevator platform that had brought Saru here began its ascent back toward the upper tiers. That settles it, he thought. I am here. I have come this far. I am going to do this.
He regulated his breathing and opened his hands to present the most neutral, unthreatening aspect possible. Around the Kelpien, a ring of Gorlans was slowly gathering, all of them chattering and sizing him up. They stared at him with mistrust and interest in equal measure.
“Sah. Roo,” said one of them. He turned to see the speaker; it was a young Gorlan male, the patina of hair on his arms shaved into lines and dyed a dusty white. He rocked on his heels and grew bolder, saying the name again. “Sah-Roo.”
“Were you there before, in the gathering place?” Saru took a careful step toward the youth. “Yes. That is my name. I am Saru.” He tapped his chest and then pointed at the Gorlan. “Who are you?”
“Nahah.” The Gorlan eyed him, and Saru felt the prickle of a soft electrostatic aura emanating from the youth. “Am Nahah.”
Progress! Saru shot a look at his tricorder. With every second that passed, the device was soaking up data like a sponge, incrementally improving the UT’s ability to parse the Gorlan language and relaying it back to him. A few days of this, he thought, and we could have a complete lexicon . . .
“I greet you in peace, Nahah.” Saru bowed slightly. “I wish to learn.”
His words sent a ripple of consternation through the group, and the aura became prickly and irregular. Saru took a deep breath and concentrated on evening out his own electrostatic energy—and that wasn’t easy, given the racing of his own pulse. He was experiencing a peculiar mix of excitement and trepidation. One mistake, and I will ruin any chance I have to make a connection with these beings.
He took it slowly, recalling his Academy classes on First Contact Protocols. Saru asked Nahah leading questions based around simple concepts, and little by little the Gorlan relaxed, supplying him with fragmented, monosyllabic answers. The problem was, the translator software was still struggling to keep up, so asking the youth to describe his planet of origin gave a reply of land sky open close counting remote area.
Saru sensed Nahah’s aura as it flickered and waned with each utterance. His jaw stiffened in frustration. Without being able to factor in the Gorlans’ naturally generated EM fields into the communication methodology, there would be no way to machine-translate their language fully and completely.
But I don’t need to be able to craft a sonnet, Saru reminded himself. I just need to be able to ask them one question: Are you in danger?
“Are you friends with the Peliars?” He waited for what he thought was the right opportunity, and then dropped the question into the mix.
The prickle in the EM aura briefly became an itch that made Saru reflexively scratch the sensing spiracles on his temple, but the impression faded just as quickly.
Nahah toyed with a patch of discolored fur-like hair on his bare forearm and rolled his shoulders. “You ask,” said the Gorlan. “You know?”
“I don’t understand,” said Saru, and he felt the conversation starting to drift away from him.
What why seen hurting sleeping curling unless. The translator momentarily lost the meaning of the exchange and spat out a string of seemingly random concepts. It was all on the verge of falling apart.
Saru decided to reach for a shared experience as a way of keeping the tenuous connection he had made with the Gorlan youth. “Before, we were in the gathering place. There was a female of your kind there, dressed in robes of white.” He indicated his own clothes, pulling at them with his long fingers. “I want to learn more about that . . .” Saru struggled to find the right word. “That ceremony?”
In an instant, the motile, shifting resonance of the invisible aura faded away to nothing. It reminded Saru of a cloud passing in front of a sun, a pleasant warmth instantly becoming chills and shadow.
That was a mistake, he told himself, watching as the body language of Nahah and the other Gorlans became stiff and defensive. Did that question transgress some sort of cultural boundary?
“I am sorry,” he began, instinctively crouching, drawing low to minimize his size. “I meant no disrespect . . .”
Nahah rocked on the balls of his feet, and the Kelpien thought the young male would respond. But the crowd began to break apart, drawing away. The elevator platform was coming back down, and Saru’s heart sank as he saw a familiar figure riding it, a figure in a dark blue uniform with flashes of bronze down the flanks.
The platform clanked to a halt, and Lieutenant Commander Johar stepped off, his eyes wide. Saru couldn’t help but notice the engineer had one hand very close to the grip of the phaser on his belt. “Lieutenant!” he snapped. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
“Sir.” Saru’s fingers curled in the air. “I have a very good reason—”
“Not to me,” Johar retorted, and beckoned him closer. “Come on, neither of us are supposed to be here. Let’s not complicate this any more than you already have.”
Irritation flared in the Kelpien’s eyes. Just as before, he was in danger of being dragged away before he could make a breakthrough. “Sir,” he said more forcefully, “I am trying to fulfill our mission.”
Johar lowered his voice so that only Saru could hear him, keeping one eye on the silent Gorlans gathered around them. “Look, I know this situation is a complex one. And I don’t disagree with your intentions. Your methods are ill considered, but I get what you’re trying to do here.” Saru opened his mouth to speak, but Johar kept talking. “None of that has any bearing on our orders. We have to go.”
“There’s more happening here than what we are aware of,” Saru insisted.
“I don’t doubt it,” Johar shot back. “But we have stuck our noses in far enough.” He jerked his head toward the elevator and put his hand on his weapon. “Do I need to make it an order . . . or do I have to stun you and drag you back unconscious? I’d prefer the former; it’d be a pain in the backside hauling you into the shuttle.”
“You would do that?” Saru guessed that Johar was only half joking about that last statement. At length, he gave a weary nod, feeling a great weight press down on him. I have failed. A sting of inward-directed anger followed. What was I thinking? I am not Burnham. This isn’t my way.
“What’s this?” Johar’s question drew Saru’s attention back. The chief engineer was looking over the Kelpien’s shoulder, toward the enclosure where Vetch had gone. The speaker had emerged again, this time with a group of five Gorlan males walking in lockstep behind him. All of them wore the red bands Saru had seen before.
Vetch ignored him and wandered over to Johar, invading the human’s personal space. The Gorlan made no attempt to hide his interest in the phaser on the other officer’s belt. He peered at it and licked his lips.
“Excuse us. We’ll be going now,” said Johar, backing off toward the elevator. He threw Saru a look. The human didn’t need to be able to feel aura-fields to sense the sudden sense of threat in the air.
“Agreed.” Saru took a last look over his shoulder and saw one of the red-bands share a word with Nahah. The older Gorlan had some similarities in skin tone and hair color with the youth, and Saru wondered if they were related. Nahah reacted sharply to whatever was said to him and stepped away, never meeting Saru’s questioning gaze as he melted into the crowd.
Saru felt a sudden tension in the flesh at the back of his skull, and his threat ganglia distended as the danger made itself apparent.
Something is wrong. The ghostly electrostatic aura scratched at the skin of the Kelpien’s bare hands, and that was when he saw the weapon in the other Gorlan’s grip. An energy pistol of some kind, with the fluted emitter characteristic of a disruptor.
The un
iversal translator spat out a garbled, unreadable noise as the armed Gorlan shouted a word, the sound hard and sharp with the unmistakable timbre of a command. The other red-bands produced weapons of their own, some of them like the disruptor, others more rudimentary blades that were no less lethal.
Vetch moved in a flash, snatching Johar’s phaser from his belt and dancing back out of his reach. Saru spun to find a wicked-looking dagger up at his throat, held by a muscular red-band who stood as tall as the gangly Kelpien’s chest. The other Gorlan, the one that had spoken to Nahah and given the command, came over and took Saru’s gear, removing his weapon and his communicator.
It was only when he reached for the rodlike universal translator and Saru’s tricorder that the Kelpien attempted to block him. “Please do not take those. They are very complex.” Saru made a motion at his mouth. “We need them to converse, do you understand?”
Vetch made no effort to intervene and the red-band took the devices regardless. “You get trouble,” the speaker said, walking toward Saru. “I told you.” Vetch took the rodlike translator and turned it over in his stubby fingers, examining the function controls. “I keep this.”
“Return our equipment and step aside.” Johar spoke slowly and clearly. “We just want to leave.”
“Not happen,” Vetch replied, and he gestured to one of the red-bands holding a disruptor pistol. The Gorlan moved in and pointed the weapon at the engineer’s chest. “You help Peliars. Now you help Gorlans.”
Saru shook his head. “We have done so, and there was no need to threaten us. My captain gave you medicines!”
“That’s not the kind of thing he’s talking about, Lieutenant,” Johar said gravely.
“Walk.” Vetch pointed back at the elevator platform. “Or there will be pain for you.”
• • •
The Gorlans forced their two hostages to stand in front of them as the platform rose once again, swiftly climbing out of the cargo modules and through the hull spaces of the freighter.
Twice, Johar tried to turn his head for a sideways look at Vetch and the red-bands, but on each occasion they noticed him watching and jabbed him in the back with Saru’s phaser. All he got a glimpse of was one of them pulling an access panel off the side of the elevator’s control podium, exposing the glowing wires within. He understood why when the lift rattled past the level where he had first boarded it and continued to rise at a fast clip, bypassing the ship’s engineering spaces and ascending on toward the bow.
Johar’s thoughts raced. From the piecemeal scans the Shenzhou had made of the Peliar cargo carrier, he knew that the massive vessel’s command and control decks were situated in the forward sections of the craft—and the prospect of an armed assault with him and Saru as living shields led inexorably to one conclusion. Vetch and his red-band companions were on their way to take over the ship.
The way the Gorlans moved, the speed and the purpose behind their actions, all of it told him that this was something that they had planned and prepared for. Perhaps they had always meant to involve the Starfleet team, or perhaps the rescue party from the Shenzhou had accidentally walked into their scheme and forced them to trigger it early. . . . It didn’t matter now. The chief engineer and the junior science officer were caught up in the unfolding events, and their chances of getting out unharmed diminished with each passing second.
Johar kept his gaze fixed on the bulkheads flashing past on the other side of the elevator platform’s mesh-screen doors, but from the corner of his eye he could see Saru shifting nervously from foot to foot, his hooved boots scraping on the deck plates.
“Calm down,” whispered Johar, out of the side of his mouth.
“Do you think they are going to kill us?” Saru hissed back, reaching up gingerly to massage his ganglia into the back of his head.
“If they wanted us dead, they would have dealt with us down in the cargo compartment.” Johar shook his head. “Besides, our phasers are set for stun.”
“Do they know that?” Saru eyed him. “Disruptors and daggers don’t have that functionality, sir.” The Kelpien let out a weak sigh. “This is my fault. I should never have come back here.”
Johar decided there was little to be gained right now by apportioning blame and ignored the comment. “Nothing has happened yet that can’t be taken back.” He spoke loudly enough for Vetch to hear him. “There’s still time to talk about this like reasonable beings.”
The words had barely left his mouth before Vetch was prodding him in the shoulder with the flat head of his stolen weapon. “Human say reason? Reason gone far ago.”
Saru glared at the Gorlan. “When you came to our ship, you told Captain Georgiou that everything was calm between your kind and the Peliars. Was that a lie?”
“Words for them, not you,” Vetch said dismissively. “Now I make use.” The elevator began to slow. “Interfere and there will be pain,” he added.
Saru looked to Johar. “Sir?”
“Follow my lead,” he told him as the platform finally emerged in the middle of the freighter’s command tier.
The engineer only got a quick glimpse of things, barely getting his bearings before the mesh slid back and the Gorlans shoved the two Starfleet officers out in front of them. The bridge of the Peliar star-freighter was a windowless oval chamber with a curved ceiling, and at one end there was a raised platform where Nathal stood, her face a picture of shock at the sight of the unexpected arrivals. Hekan and the other senior crew were all in front of their podiums, working haptic control interfaces for the big ship’s primary systems. Many of the consoles were unmanned, suggesting that the vessels were constructed with a far larger crew in mind.
“No move!” Vetch shouted the words at the top of his voice, waving the phaser in the air. “Back, go back! Resist and pain comes!”
The Gorlans spilled out of the elevator shaft, each of them menacing a different member of the crew. Most of the Peliars did as they were told to, but Commander Nathal was not cowed by the naked display of aggression. She strode down to the lower level, ignoring the red-band who threatened her and fixing Vetch with a venomous glare.
“You dare to do this? After all we have done for you?” She came at the Gorlan speaker. “Ungrateful creatures—”
“Back!” As Vetch shouted the word at her, the red-band who had taken Saru’s phaser fired a shot into the deck at Nathal’s feet. She staggered back, as if she had never expected them to go that far.
“You better do as they say,” said Johar, playing for time.
Nathal turned her ire on the two Starfleet officers. “You are the cause of this! Did we not tell you to stay away from them? Do you see now? Your interference has stirred them to violence!”
“We did not make this happen,” Saru blurted out. “We came to help you, all of you!”
“And that has been of such benefit,” Nathal spat back. “Aid us now, then. Rid my ship of these criminals.”
“No Gorlan crime,” barked Vetch, baring his teeth. “You, Peliar. Your crime!”
“I never wanted this mission,” said Nathal. “But I accepted it, because I do my duty. I overlooked my dislike of these outworlders.” She cut the air with the blade of her hand. “I was wrong to ignore my instincts.”
“You always hate.” Vetch glared back at her. “Gorlan see. Gorlan know.”
Johar took a step forward, trying to interpose himself between the two beings. “Listen to me. Whatever ill feelings you both have toward each other, it doesn’t need to be debated at the barrel of a gun!”
Nathal gave a sneering grunt. “You’re wasting your breath on these primitives. Look at them! Violence is all they know!”
“You made us!” Vetch clasped two of his hands around his stolen phaser, the other pair bunching into fists. “Drove us to this!”
“Animals!” The shout came from one of Nathal’s men, the crewman named Dakas, and Johar saw him pull something from a storage locker in the base of one of the podiums. Dakas’s hand came back up wit
h a clutch-grip needle laser in his fist and he fired, stitching a fine thread of brilliant red light through the air.
The beam sliced through the upper biceps of one of the red-bands, and the Gorlan let out a piercing scream; then all hell broke loose as the would-be hijackers hit back.
The emerald crackle of disruptor bolts spat from multiple weapons, striking down two of the Peliar crew in the first salvo. Johar dove forward, desperately trying to find cover behind a console, aware that Saru was close by. But the lanky Kelpien was just over two meters tall, and he presented a large, obvious target.
The engineer saw the injured red-band turn, the heavy shape of an energy weapon cradled in three of his hands swinging to point at the science officer’s back.
“Saru!” Johar reacted without thinking, throwing himself at his crewmate, shoving him out of the way as the Gorlan pulled the trigger. Green fire filled his vision, and suddenly Johar’s entire body was an inferno as the nerve-shredding discharge of the disruptor hit rippled across him. The horrific, heart-stopping agony engulfed the engineer, and he sank into it, swallowed by darkness.
Saru was not a stranger to death. His people were born with an innate sense of it, an almost preternatural capacity for sensing the immediacy of the end of life.
Death is the shadow at the heels of every Kelpien-born. It was an old axiom, taught to him from childhood as he listened to elders tell cautionary tales of those who died of foolishness, of inattention, of curiosity. Saru had never forgotten those words, even though time had taken him far from his home, countless light-years distant from the hunter-beasts upon it.
Some among his crewmates on the Shenzhou thought him to be morbid, even fatalistic, in the way in which a shadow lurked behind his every waking moment, his every thought and action. They didn’t understand that the reverse was true. Saru’s certainty that danger and death awaited him did not shade his life in morose tones. It made him all the more determined to live it, down to the very last second.
Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself Page 9