Still, Diaz found the dainty Caitian’s trademark insouciance even more inappropriate than usual. “I would’ve thought you’d be more worried, Harlie. I mean, there are alien invaders underneath you right now, firing potshots at the cities.”
H’Raal gave a dismissive sneer, wrinkling the black-and-white felinoid features that had earned her the nickname “Harlequin” among her human friends. “Aw, they’re probably just baring their fangs. Showing your strength is the first step in a lot of relationships.” She chuckled, twitching her tail. “You and I started out as bitter rivals, remember?”
“Well . . . yeah.” The two of them had both gotten into the University of Regulus V at an atypically early age, making both of them socially isolated and determined to prove their right to be there. They had latched on to each other as natural adversaries from the start. “At least . . . until I realized I needed your help to pass Exobiology.”
“Which you knew because of all the times I’d walloped you—academically speaking, that is. It was how I showed you my worth.”
“Hey, I got in a few good wallops too, Harlie-poo.”
“You did. And that’s how I knew you’d be a friend I could trust to have my back.”
Diaz gave a brief smile, but her concern remained. “Nothing the Agni have done so far suggests they’re interested in friendship.”
“That just makes it a challenge. I mean, aren’t you excited, Meesh? They’re a whole new order of life, right under our paws! Oh, I can almost smell them! I want to chase them down and do science to them!” Her tail lashed with predatory fervor.
Diaz laughed, but she wasn’t sure she’d envy the Agni if H’Raal got her way. The young Caitian, one of a band of settlers who had established a colony on the M-Class moon of Regulus VI over a decade back, had declined Diaz’s offer to join her in Starfleet, insisting that the glory of Regulus was that there were so many different forms of life to study without roving far from home. Diaz had known from experience that H’Raal included her human friends among those subjects of study. The excessively inquisitive Caitian had inflicted a variety of playful “behavioral experiments” upon them over the course of their college career. Some had been irritating and embarrassing, tempting Diaz to enlighten H’Raal about what curiosity did to cats . . . but others had proven pleasurably enlightening for all concerned. Adopting some of H’Raal’s disdain for boundaries had enabled Diaz to take chances she would never otherwise have dared to take, and had contributed to her eventual decision to apply to Starfleet while H’Raal had pursued graduate studies at the Regulus III Science Academy.
But as H’Raal’s words sank in, they gave Diaz pause. “I guess you’re right, Harl. It is our mission to find a diplomatic solution if we can. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one who makes the scientific breakthrough that lets us do that.”
“We will. You always were better with languages. You work out how they talk, I’ll work out how they think, and together we’ll make peace, so I can get on with studying them.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Things become easy when you make them that way. We just have to show them they can have a home here at Regulus. That’s just how Regulans are. Look how welcome you made us feel when we asked to settle your moon.”
“But at least you asked first. And you didn’t destroy our ships first.”
H’Raal dismissed her concerns with a flick of her ears. “Maybe no one’s ever made the Agni feel welcome before. Somebody has to try.”
Diaz stared in amused disbelief. “You haven’t changed. You always act like nothing’s ever challenging enough to break a sweat over.”
“Caitians don’t sweat, dear.”
“Which wouldn’t be so annoying if you didn’t prove yourself right so often.” She sighed. “I hope this is one of those times.”
“If your captain’s as great as you keep telling me, it will be. Oh, I hope I get to meet him. Is he really as sexy as they say?”
“Harlie!”
* * *
Regulus was three days from Ardana at the Sacagawea’s top sustainable speed. Kirk repeatedly pressured Engineer Desai to extract more speed from the scout vessel’s single nacelle, but despite the Hermes class’s mythical namesake, it couldn’t quite match the speeds that the ships of the Constitution class could achieve these days, after the various upgrades they had undergone in recent years. “If only Starfleet considered this class as important to upgrade,” Kirk muttered to Eshu Adebayo as they strode toward the exit of the vessel’s compact engine room following another futile meeting with Desai.
“Hey, don’t let the old girl hear you say that,” Adebayo said, patting the bulkhead as if to reassure the ship. “She’s served us well.”
“I know, I know,” Kirk said, abashed at his disloyalty. “Don’t get me wrong—nothing compares to your first command. I’ll always cherish her. But . . .” He trailed off.
The wise old first officer missed little. “But you don’t intend to stay on a scout ship forever. I thought I noticed a twinge of envy when you heard Bob Wesley had gotten the Lexington.”
“Is it so surprising that I’d want to command a Constitution-class ship one day?” Kirk asked as they exited into the corridor. He spoke softly so as not to be overheard by passing crew. “It’s not just their reputation, or their power—my first ship out of the Academy was one, the Farragut, and so were my last two ships before this one. Most of my career has been spent aboard those ships. So many of my friendships, my accomplishments, my growth as an officer and a man have been connected to those ships. I feel at home on them.”
“Understandable, yes,” Adebayo said. “Likely? That’s another matter. There are only about a dozen Constitutions—all with captains who have considerably more years of experience behind them than you’ve gained so far.”
“Believe me, Eshu, I know. And I’m willing to do the work to get there, however long it takes. It’s just . . . sometimes the goal just seems so far away.”
Adebayo chuckled. “Look at me. Nearly fifty years in Starfleet and I’m a first officer responsible for fewer than two hundred people. And I’m happy with that, Jim. I’ve experienced so much joy and wonder along the way. Much pain and loss too, but those are just as much a part of the full experience of living. I’ve been fulfilled in my career because I’m in it for the journey, not the destination. I’ve always tried to cherish each experience as it comes, rather than miss out on what’s happening right in front of me because I’m racing past it toward some future goal I might never reach.” He patted Kirk on the shoulder. “Look for the value in today, Jim. It’s what we do today that decides our tomorrows.”
Kirk appreciated his first officer’s wisdom, as always. But this particular bit of advice might have gone over better if their situation hadn’t called for greater speed.
Or maybe this was one piece of advice that Kirk just didn’t want to take.
Fifteen
When the dying component of the Regulus A binary cast off its atmosphere, leaving a white dwarf corpse behind, its companion swallowed much of the expelled hydrogen and swelled into a much hotter blue giant, vaporizing the system’s innermost planets yet warming several of the outer worlds to habitable temperatures. The resultant rapid ecological shifts created pressures that accelerated the pace of evolution on those worlds, allowing complex, diverse forms of life to emerge unusually early in the system’s history. Regulans take this as a reminder that life thrives on unexpected challenges.
—Vaacith sh’Lesinas, The Federation and Back
Laputa, Hearthside (Regulus I)
Upon the Sacagawea’s arrival in the Regulus system, Kirk made contact with the Central Council on Regulus III, but the councillors requested that he head directly to Hearthside in order to coordinate with the Regulan Defense Force detachment that was already on the scene, along with Councillor T’Zeri, the administrator responsible for the system’s two innermost worlds. According to the Council, the Agni had fired several more war
ning shots near the aerial cities in the preceding few days, but had not taken any more aggressive actions. Still, the councillors pleaded with Kirk to resolve the matter swiftly, reminding him that lives on multiple planets and moons were potentially endangered by this quiet invasion.
The Regulans Kirk had met, including Ensign Diaz, somewhat reminded him of the inhabitants of Vega Colony—at once proud and insecure about their homeworlds, as if aware of how tenuous their existence was around such inhospitable stars. Thirty millennia ago, an advanced civilization known as the Veliki had used Regulus as a living laboratory for the genetic engineering of ultraviolet-resistant life-forms—from the pale, sluglike bloodworms that eked out a subterranean existence on the dry, scalding second planet to the iridescent, mirror-feathered birds of the lushly forested fifth planet. When a rogue Veliki faction had begun to pursue eugenics for power and conquest, much as the Augments of Earth and the Suliban Cabal would later do, their resultant assaults on neighboring star systems had discredited the Regulus experiment, and the rest of the Veliki had abandoned the system and vanished into galactic history. Other races had resettled the system since then, even before the Vulcans came and made it a protectorate of their High Command. Today, Regulus was a significant Federation member with over a billion inhabitants—primarily of UV-tolerant species like Vulcans, Chelons, and Arodi, but including a sizable human population as well, for humans had never let an environment’s inhospitable conditions deter them from settling it anyway.
The aerial cities of Regulus I—Hearthside—were a case in point: delicate pockets of habitable atmosphere drifting through clouds of sulfuric acid, dozens of kilometers above a surface whose heat, pressure, and corrosive conditions would kill any humanoid in an instant and ruin a shuttlecraft within minutes. Not so delicate, Kirk reminded himself as he materialized in the transporter station of Laputa, the administrative capital of the planet. He knew that the cities were built with multiple safety features and redundancies, including deflector shields to supplement their acid-resistant outer shells.
The transporter station was within one of the upper spherical modules of Laputa—as Kirk could see clearly, for the station was designed so that the first thing new arrivals saw was the large window granting a panoramic view of the city outside. Dozens of spheres, each about fifty meters across, were linked together in a hex pattern, mostly in a single layer but with several scattered clusters nested above it—and probably below it as well. All in all, the city somewhat reminded Kirk of a gigantic bunch of grapes.
Beyond and below the city, the clouds of Hearthside stretched to the horizon in all directions, their sulfurous yellow-brown hue bleached by the actinic blue-white glare of the double sun looming overhead, a glare damped to tolerable levels by the window’s filtering. If he looked closely, Kirk imagined he could see diffuse dark streaks in the clouds, perhaps created by the massive blooms of aerial bacteria that these cities existed to harvest. But he might just be seeing what he expected to see.
Finding that out would have to wait, though, for several Regulans were approaching the transporter pad. The Sacagawea captain led his party down to greet the officials. At the head of the group was a tall, bald, tan-skinned human who extended his hand. “Captain Kirk? Welcome. I’m Khalil Farouz, city administrator of Laputa. Allow me to introduce Councillor T’Zeri, who represents our part of the system on the Central Council.” He gestured to a mature, slender Vulcan woman whose gray-frosted black hair was twisted into an elaborate bun. She offered a gracious nod of her head in response to Kirk’s greeting.
“And this,” Farouz went on, gesturing to a strongly built, ruddy-skinned woman with close-shorn silver-blond hair, “is Colonel Yelena Orloff of the Regulan Defense Force.”
Orloff gave a curt greeting. “Captain.”
“Pleased to meet you all,” Kirk said. He gestured to the officers accompanying him. “This is my first officer, Commander Eshu Adebayo; my security chief, Lieutenant Joshua Hauraki; and Ensign Kamisha Diaz, my science officer, who hails from Regulus V. ”
“Well, then, welcome home, Ensign,” Farouz said. “Or nearly so. Have you had occasion to visit Hearthside before?”
“Yes, I have, Administrator,” Diaz replied, “though this is my first time in Laputa.”
The niceties dispensed with, Farouz turned back to Kirk. “If you’ll accompany us to the conference room, please?”
As the party moved through the high, curving corridors of the city spheres and the wide, cylindrical airlocks that connected them to one another, Kirk was struck by the abundance of windows and the relative thinness of the walls that encased them. “I would have expected these cities to have sturdier construction,” he remarked, “to keep out the toxic atmosphere.”
“It is not necessary,” Councillor T’Zeri explained in polite tones. “The exterior atmospheric pressure at this altitude is equal to the interior pressure. It is the lower density of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide that gives us buoyancy. Thus, the walls need be no stronger than standard construction, and the use of lightweight materials reduces the need for additional flotation sacs or antigravs. All that is required is to maintain an airtight seal.”
The brief tour was intriguing, but once the group reached the conference room, Colonel Orloff got straight to business. “We’ve had no luck establishing any communication with these so-called Agni, and little luck improving our sensor scans of their surface outposts. We’re facing an invading force that we have very little intelligence about. Captain, we need to know everything you can tell us about them from Starfleet’s previous encounters.”
“I’m afraid I can add comparatively little to what you already know,” Kirk said. “They’ve shown no interest in communication, so their motives in occupying N-Class planets in Federation space are not yet known. But they have no concern for humanoid life or even our presence. They treat us as a nuisance, to be ignored if possible, destroyed if necessary.” He turned to Diaz. “Ensign?”
“Yes, Captain.” The young science officer picked up with her prepared presentation, projecting image captures and sensor schematics onto the conference room’s holographic display. “Their technology is advanced, though alien in its materials and methods, since most of the metals and synthetics we use would dissolve quickly in their environment. That means their vessels, and no doubt their ground facilities, are extremely robust and hard to damage.
“Rather than using matter-antimatter, they have somehow managed to create artificial microsingularities, which generate energy when matter is injected into them and becomes superheated in the accretion disk, creating an energetic plasma not unlike what we use in warp engines. These singularities power an advanced magnetic tractor-field system that, while not functioning as a deflector shield in its own right, is used in concert with a flux-pinned halo of ablative armor plates to create a point defense system that works almost as well as deflectors, and can also become a weapon by propelling the heavy armor plates at ballistic speeds, causing damage comparable to a meteoroid impact. The plates can also surround a starship and use their mutual attraction to compress around it, crushing it.
“Additionally, the singularities’ plasma can be concentrated into a pinpoint beam of enormous destructive power. A single shot can overwhelm a heavy cruiser’s shields and . . . punch a hole clear through the vessel.” Diaz took a shaky breath, trying to maintain her detachment as sensor footage recorded by the U.S.S. Enterprise showed the near-destruction of the Kongo. Kirk forced himself to look, as he had so many times before. He would not forget Mehran Egdor’s sacrifice. “The good news,” Diaz went on, “is that it depletes their plasma supply and requires four to six minutes to recharge.”
“That’s terrifying,” Farouz said. “But if they have that kind of weaponry . . .” He hesitated and glanced downward, as if afraid of being overheard. “Why haven’t they used it on us? They’ve flung a few small projectiles past our cities as warnings, but they haven’t tried blasting or crushing
us.”
“The other good news is that they probably can’t use the singularity beam from the surface,” Diaz said. “The superheating of the dense atmosphere down there would cause a titanic explosion, like a high-yield photon torpedo. They’d immolate themselves if they tried it.”
“Thank Allah for small mercies.”
T’Zeri quirked an eyebrow at the administrator. “Rather, thank the physical laws of the universe.”
Farouz winked back. “Same thing.”
“As for the armor plates,” Diaz went on, “it’s harder to say. It could be that Hearthside’s atmosphere and magnetic field are too disruptive to their tractor field.”
“There’s another possibility,” Eshu Adebayo remarked. “Maybe they don’t want to destroy us if they don’t have to. We’ve seen before that they’re perfectly content to ignore us; they only retaliate when we try to stop them from getting where they’re going. Now that they’ve gotten there, maybe they simply want to ensure that we keep our distance and leave them alone.”
Yelena Orloff leaned forward, without seeming any less erect. “The cities have made no provocative moves toward them beyond simply drifting overhead. Yet they have fired their projectiles dangerously close, and getting closer day by day. The message is clear: they want us to abandon the planet altogether.”
“Which is out of the question,” Farouz said. “Regulus’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries are too reliant on the bacteria we harvest. Not to mention that these are our homes. My family has been born and raised here for two generations. Our cities may not be moored down, but we have roots on this planet, Captain.”
“Of course,” Kirk said. “We may not have a good understanding of the Agni yet, but we’ll do everything we can to find a way to remove them from Hearthside.”
T’Zeri folded her hands before her. “Given the opportunity, my preference would be to devise a means of communication with the Agni. If there is a way to achieve peaceful coexistence with this species, it is in our interest to pursue it. The scientific and practical benefits of contact with a novel form of life with unique technology are vast. And Regulus has always benefitted from the influx of new immigrants, from humans and Chelons in the early years of the Federation to our most recent addition, the Caitians.”
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