The Dark Veil

by James Swallow

  “I am reluctant to theorize at this juncture,” Keret replied. “I am… looking into it.”

  Keret’s evasive answer gave fuel to Qaylan’s argument. “I will go further,” he said. “I believe there is a clear and present danger to us as long as these so-called evacuees remain on board our ship, and as long as their vessels continue to shadow us. They stumble about, interfering and asking too many questions, and we cannot predict what other accidents they may cause.”

  Zade saw others in the gathered group nodding in agreement, some of them with the blank-eyed stare that showed they were already coordinating together. He felt compelled to counter Qaylan’s argument before it could sway others.

  “You are committing the error of processing a conclusion from incomplete data,” he said, and the other Jazari flinched. “I do not believe that a human child is responsible for what happened. I know Thaddeus Riker. The boy is intelligent for a being of his age. Overly inquisitive, perhaps, but not malevolent or thoughtless.”

  Yasil glanced toward Veyen. “Kindred, you too have lived among these beings. Is Zade’s evaluation accurate?”

  “I do not know the boy.” Veyen answered without hesitation. “I have found individual humans to be agreeable. But in a group they are unpredictable, even dangerous.”

  “We have seen how they think in what they do,” insisted Qaylan. “In the laws they pass and the edicts they live by. Am I incorrect in that?”

  At length, Yasil gave a shake of the head. “You are not.”

  Zade sensed the mood of those in the council chamber shifting further and further toward Qaylan’s point of view. He thought of the friends he had made on board the Titan and the beings he had come to know during his years in Starfleet. Not all of them were the finest examples of their species, but most were striving toward that goal. They hoped to become the best they could, and for that he admired them greatly. They deserved better than to be characterized as lesser, immature beings.

  But he was also one of his kind, not one of theirs. Zade’s entire mission, every single day that he had spent in Starfleet, had been so that he could observe and understand the peoples of the Federation—and then report back those findings. His first duty was to his fellow Jazari, and it always would be. On the scales of significance, the future of his race outweighed the fate of a handful of aliens.

  “Perhaps it would be best to have our guests depart,” said Veyen. “In light of what has happened.”

  “Removal by force, if necessary,” Qaylan added. “If it comes to that.”

  “We offered our aid to them and now we take it back?” Zade frowned. “We send them to an uncertain fate, with an injured child among them? What does that make us?” He glared at Qaylan. “You believe we are superior to them. How are we so if this is how we behave toward beings in need?”

  “We have a code.” The voice came from out of the air once more. “Have some of you deleted that information? We have avowed responsibilities, laid down by the Makers thousands of solar cycles past.”

  “In the past,” insisted Qaylan, looking up at the vaulted ceiling overhead. “Times have changed. The galaxy is a very different place now. The fact that we have engaged in this migration is proof of that!”

  “We have abandoned our outpost world and repurposed all our technology to craft this vessel,” said the voice. “So now a new question must be asked: Will we also abandon what we are, abandon our code and our core?”

  All around Zade, the chamber fell silent as his kindred went inward to find their answer.

  * * *

  “Tell me where your people are hiding the synthetics,” said Helek as she moved the neural fractionator over the trembling Jazari’s forehead.

  She wondered what the pain caused by the device felt like. It wouldn’t be the commonplace, ordinary agony she had inflicted with her blade. It would be something exquisitely pure and perfect, generated by the reformation of the captive’s brain matter.

  But he was not responding the way she had expected him to. In previous uses of this tool, Helek had only needed to apply the lightest of power to get her subjects to comply. She remembered breaking a battle-hardened Nausicaan reaver in just a few minutes, using a setting six gradients lower than this one. This simple civilian technician should have been a drooling imbecile by now. But he resisted.

  The Jazari’s face was locked in a shuddering rictus, his one undamaged eye staring past her toward the ceiling. And still he did not speak.

  “How is he enduring this?” She demanded an answer from Vadrel.

  “I… may have missed something on the scan,” ventured the scientist. “Perhaps there is a quality of Jazari neural structure that makes them resistant to the fractionator.”

  “Impossible.” She turned the power all the way up, to a setting she had never used before, and returned to work. On one level, Helek was infuriated by the device’s failure to provide her the results she wanted, but on another she was grotesquely fascinated by the prospect of turning the Jazari’s brain tissue into a jumbled, knotted mess.

  “He must be in incredible agony,” breathed Vadrel.

  “Are you?” Helek leaned over the shivering form of her captive, where his wrists and ankles juddered against their restraints. “It can all end with a word. Just answer me, Redei. It will stop if you answer.”

  With monumental effort, the Jazari forced out a reply. “Never.”

  A flare of hot fury surged through Helek at the alien’s continued defiance and she briefly lost command of her self-control. The major struck Redei with a vicious backhand blow across the face, biting back a gutter oath.

  It was as if the physical blow triggered something in the prisoner.

  With a high-pitched ping of breaking metal, the wrist restraint closer to Helek broke open and the Jazari’s right arm was suddenly free. His hand flicked out and grabbed her around the throat, lifting her off the ground. Boots kicking at air, she clawed at Redei’s fingers, but they were iron-hard and immovable.

  Vadrel stumbled back in open shock, and across the chamber, Hosa belatedly responded to what was going on. The guard went for the disruptor holstered at his hip.

  The Jazari’s other hand came free, and in a single fluid motion, he snatched up the photic probe from the tool tray and threw it across the lab. The improvised missile struck Hosa in the soft tissues of his throat and the guard fell to his knees, dropping his weapon before he could even fire it. Hosa made wet, choking noises as a gush of emerald blood flowed from a punctured artery in his neck.

  Still dangling from the end of the alien’s grip, Helek could only struggle to keep breathing, her eyes widening as she watched the Jazari free himself from the last two restraints. He cast around, his expression oddly vacant. “You gave me no other option,” he said flatly, then shoved her away.

  Helek fell into a storage rack and barely kept her footing. Coughing and wheezing through her bruised throat, she tore her own weapon from its holster, but the Jazari was on his feet. He pulled the disruptor from her hand, breaking two of her fingers as he did so.

  “I am leaving. Where is the nearest matter-transporter unit to this location?” The Jazari stared blankly at her, his red-purple blood dripping down his scaled face and off his barbed chin. Despite his condition, he gave no outward sign of distress or pain. He gripped her weapon as if he was unfamiliar with it. “Answer me.”

  “How…?” It was hard for Helek to speak.

  A brief flicker of confusion passed over the Jazari’s reptilian features. “I regret this. But the ways of the Jazari are our own.” He moved toward her, and Helek knew the kill would come next.

  The skirl of an energy bolt cut through the air and a green flash momentarily dazzled her. Helek blinked and saw Redei stagger away a few steps, his hands coming up to probe at the massive exit wound that had suddenly appeared in his belly.

  Behind him, on the floor near Hosa’s bleeding corpse, Vadrel crouched with the guard’s disruptor in his trembling grip, the emitter
tip still aglow.

  The Jazari seemed to freeze in place, and then he toppled over, turned rigid like a statue.

  Warily, Helek recovered her weapon and approached the dead captive. His eye was open, staring at nothing, and his blood still seeped over his face. But Vadrel’s close-range shot had opened up Redei from back to front, the blast disintegrating a good portion of his torso. Wounds like this were not unfamiliar to the major, and she did not shrink from the sight of it. But as she looked closer, she saw something amiss.

  Redei’s epidermis was fused from the disruptor hit, and the beam had cored through him. What she could see inside his chest cavity was not burnt meat and bone. “Look at this,” she hissed.

  “Must I?” Quaking, Vadrel put the pistol down. “I… I have never killed a living thing before…”

  “And you still have not.” Helek beckoned him closer. “Look!” she repeated, making it an order.

  Vadrel did as he was told, and she watched the horror on his face turn to confusion and then amazement.

  Beneath a layer of organic skin tissue, the skeletal frame and internal organs of the dead Jazari were entirely artificial. The destroyed remains of complex arrays simulating lungs and micropumps distributing processing fluids were visible through the gaping wound. Bones made from spun polymers crackled and cooled as the spent heat from the energy blast faded.

  Redei was no more a living thing than the gun in Helek’s hand.

  “They’re not concealing synthetics aboard their ship,” Vadrel breathed. “They are the synthetics.”

  Helek had her answer, at last.

  TEN

  The Ochre Dome had moved into a night cycle, with the overhead illuminators dimming to simulate the end of the day, but Deanna Troi barely noticed.

  Her world had contracted to the space in the corner of the temporary infirmary, where Thad lay on the biobed, his breath coming in shallow stutters. She watched her son and time seemed to slow. She had been there for hours, keeping a vigil after her husband had reluctantly returned to the Titan.

  Will had wanted to stay, to give over command of the ship to Christine Vale and sit here with Deanna, but that would have solved nothing. He was captain and he had a crew to supervise, a vessel with repairs to oversee—and Deanna knew well enough that Will would be better off with something to distract him from worrying about Thad.

  She took on the burden because she knew she could bear it. Countless times, Troi had been there to guide other people through their own crises just like this one, and she knew how to cope.

  Don’t I? She took a deep breath that almost sounded like a sob. Counselor, counsel thyself.

  Not since her father died when she was a little girl had Deanna faced the specter of losing someone so precious to her. She had wept for Tasha Yar and again for Data when death had snatched her dear friends away, but despite how close she had been to them, they were not her blood. Thaddeus was hers, the child she brought into the world, he was the bright, amazing son she had watched blossom and grow over these past few years.

  In these times, when there were so many trials and darker moments at hand, Troi always sought out the good and the light. She found it every time in her son’s laughter and inquisitiveness, and the terrible possibility that she would see that extinguished filled her with a dread like no other.

  She took Thad’s limp hand in hers and gave it a gentle squeeze. More than anything, she wanted him to react to her presence. “Come back to us,” she said quietly. “If you can. Please come back.”

  The soft rustle of the tent’s flap drew Troi’s attention, and she used the heel of her hand to wipe away a tear.

  Zade stood hesitantly in the collapsible vestibule, and at his shoulder was the floating drone orb she had seen earlier.

  “Commander Troi,” said the Jazari, inclining his head. “May I enter?”

  “Of course.”

  Zade approached, and the drone followed, maintaining a respectful distance. He offered her a Starfleet ration pack. “I thought you might require sustenance.”

  “That’s very kind.” Releasing the child’s hand, she took the pack, and found a water sachet inside to drink from.

  “Has there been any improvement in Thaddeus’s condition?”

  “Doctor Talov has done all he can. We need to wait and see if my son can heal on his own.”

  Zade’s expression was full of sorrow. “The advent of the migration was meant to be a great event for my people. A new beginning. Instead it has become a mire of tragedy. I am so sorry that Thaddeus was caught up in this.”

  “Did you know the technician who perished?” Troi couldn’t stop herself from taking on the role of therapist, even at a moment like this. She saw someone in distress and she was compelled to reach out to them.

  “I was acquainted with Redei,” said Zade. “His loss is keenly felt, so soon after those we lost on the reclaim station during the spatial fracture. There are few of us in real terms, so the ending of any one of our kind is cause for great sadness.”

  Something that had nagged at Troi before drifted back to the forefront of her mind. No sign of any young or elderly Jazari on board the generation ship. It was believed that they were quite long-lived for a humanoid species, but as with much about them, that was more theory than proven fact.

  It wasn’t the only unknown about the Jazari that Troi had dwelled upon. She had never seen a female of their kind, and she wondered if they were a monogendered species. Perhaps reproduction was difficult for them, and that might account for the comparatively small size of their populace, and the graveness of Zade’s reaction to the death of one of his own. There are so many things we don’t know about them.

  She drew upon all of her abilities to try to read Zade. Her empathic senses were ineffective where the Jazari were concerned, reading nothing but a void where others projected an emotional aura—but Deanna Troi’s skills also included xenopsychology and neurolinguistics, and she searched his expression and his posture for every last clue as to his true feelings.

  To her eye, he seemed to be what she expected of him: a young man, troubled by loss and frustrated by events outside of his control. But there was something else beneath all of that, a faint disconnection that she could not quantify. Her instinct told her something was off, but she could not have articulated exactly what it was.

  Zade seemed to sense her scrutiny, and once again he gave the silent drone a look. Was the device watching him, or watching her? She couldn’t be certain.

  “I should leave,” said the Jazari. “Please let me know if there is anything I can do—”

  “Why do you hide so much from us?” The question slipped out of Troi’s mouth before she was aware of it, and once it had, she didn’t want to call it back.

  Zade’s manner shifted, his lips thinning. She had seen this from the Jazari before, the standard response mode they went into whenever anyone asked something they didn’t want to answer. But now it seemed false to her, too practiced, too much of a performance. “The ways of the Jazari are our own,” he said, after a moment. The statement had a tired, rote quality to it.

  Now that she had crossed the line, the faint sense of disquiet Troi had always nursed about the Jazari came to a head.

  “We have only ever wanted to know you,” she continued. “To be your friends and your allies. But your people have always held us at arm’s length. Why?” And then Troi found the core of it, the element of this relationship that had until now escaped her. “What have we done that makes us unworthy of your trust?”

  Zade’s expression shifted again, the false front briefly falling away, and beneath it, something else was revealed. Was that fear she saw?

  “I… cannot…” Zade frowned, unable to find the words.

  But then the drone drifting behind him glowed brightly and surged forward, over their heads, halting sharply over Thaddeus’s silent form.

  Troi heard her unconscious son give a strangled gasp, and in the next second the boy was in the throe
s of a seizure.

  “Summon aid,” said an urgent female voice, coming from the halo of vibrating air around the drone. “The boy is in danger.”

  * * *

  A conundrum always had the same effect on Vadrel. It detached the scientist from the common, routine reality of the world around him and plunged him into something exciting. It was the only time he truly had purpose, when the exhilaration of a problem to be solved was put before him.

  Without a challenge, Vadrel felt as if he were sleepwalking through life, just marking time. He sometimes wondered how his fellow Romulans of lower intellect and incurious natures lived their lives without such stimuli. It had to be a dismal and tedious existence.

  When something unknown was before him, when a mystery was there to be unpacked and solved, Vadrel felt alive. Nothing was greater than burying himself in theorems and experimentation, opening up the secrets of the universe and mastering them.

  In his life before this one, he had done exactly that. He had been part of an elite cadre of thinkers who crossed the limits of what was possible, while other scientists had wrung their hands and bleated about ethics and accountability. Unshackled from all restrictions by the personal command of the praetor himself, for the advancement of the Empire, they had been at the cutting edge of Romulan sciences.

  Forbidden, volatile technologies like omega particles, protomaterials, time-active substrates, even red matter, all of it had been at his fingertips. But then there had been the error, and everything else that followed.

  It cost him his life; that old life, at any rate.

  And now he was here, sentenced to eke out his days with a new face and a dull name, with a psychopathic Tal Shiar agent holding his leash.

  Thus, a new challenge—a conundrum that none before him had ever laid eyes on—was a cold draught of pure water to a man dying of thirst.

  Dissection of the Jazari-thing took a few hours, and interestingly, his earlier reticence vanished once he knew that he was examining an artificial, manufactured device rather than an organic life-form. The mechanism was intricate and beautiful. A work of engineering genius, clearly far in advance of anything commonly known in the Alpha or Beta Quadrants.