Destiny: The Complete Saga: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls

by David Mack

  Hernandez rolled her eyes and let slip a derisive huff. “Don’t take it personally, but we don’t see it that way.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Ordemo said.

  Reining in her temper, Hernandez said, “If it’s isolation you want, we can arrange that. I could have your system quarantined. None of our people would ever return.”

  “Not officially,” Ordemo said. “However, in our experience with other species and civilizations, we have often found that telling people not to come here inevitably attracts visitation by those who disregard authority—hardly the sort of guests we’d want to encourage. I’m certain you can understand that.”

  “Yes, of course,” Hernandez said. “But if it’s anonymity you want, we could wipe our records of your world from our computers—”

  Inyx interrupted, “Forgive me, Captain, but we have already done that. And we have rendered them blind to any new data about our world and star system.” When she glowered at the lanky alien, he added, “It seemed a sensible precaution.”

  “Do not be angry with Inyx,” Ordemo said. “The decision to tamper with your ship’s computers was made by consensus. He only carried out the will of the Quorum.”

  Diplomacy had never been Hernandez’s strong suit, and the Caeliar were making this overture more difficult for her than she had expected. Through gritted teeth she said, “All right.” After a deep breath, she continued, “So, if my ship’s databanks are clean, and I swear my crew to secrecy, there’s no reason you can’t let us go on our way.”

  The tanwa-seynorral seemed unconvinced. “Except that when you reached your people, they would expect an explanation for your absence. And you and your crew would still know the truth, Captain. Coaxed by threat or temptation, one of you would talk.”

  “Then erase our memories!” She knew she was getting desperate, but she had to press on. “We can’t reveal what we don’t know. With all this crazy technology of yours, I bet you’ve got something that could whitewash our minds, make us forget we ever saw you. You could erase everything since the ambush of our ship, send us back, make us think we blacked out—”

  “And that twelve of your years passed in the interval?” Now the first-among-equals sounded as if he was mocking her. “How would you and your crew react to that, Captain? Would you accept a circumstance so bizarre without seeking an explanation? And if you did, who’s to say that once taken back to that moment, you wouldn’t make the same choice you did before, and set course once again to our world?”

  Hernandez felt tired—of arguing, of plotting, of all the little battles that had marked every hour of her command since the ambush. Softening her approach, she said, “You make good points, Ordemo. I really can’t refute them, so I won’t try. But I just don’t understand your motives. You cite this need for privacy as the reason my crew and I are being held prisoner. Why are you so afraid of contact with other races?”

  “Our impetus is not fear, Captain,” Ordemo said. “It is pragmatism.” He looked at Inyx, and Hernandez did likewise.

  Inyx turned to her and explained, “When less-advanced species become aware of us and what we can do, they tend to respond with either intense curiosity or savage aggression—and sometimes both. In the past, alien civilizations have inundated us with pleas for succor, expecting us to deliver them from the consequences of their own shortsightedness. Others have tried to steal the secrets of our technologies or force them from us. Because we will not take sentient life, even in self-defense, it became increasingly difficult to discourage these abuses. Some sixty-five thousand of your years ago, we concluded that isolation and secrecy would best serve our great work, so we relocated our cities and people here, to what was, at that time, a relatively untraveled sector of the galaxy. However, the recent development of starflight by several local cultures and your arrival on Erigol have reminded us that while changes are never permanent, change is.”

  “Yeah, life is hard,” Hernandez said to Inyx. “Cry me a river.” While the scientist struggled to parse her sarcastic idiom, she aimed her ire at Ordemo. “So let me get this straight: My ship, my crew, and myself are doomed to spend the rest of our days here because you don’t like getting hassled?”

  The angrier she became, the calmer Ordemo seemed. “It is not quite so simple a matter, Captain. These conflicts tend to escalate, despite our best efforts to contain them. Often, as we take bolder steps to defend ourselves and our sovereignty, several less-developed civilizations will band together out of fear or avarice. When that happens, we often must take … extreme measures, up to and including their displacement.”

  She held up a hand to interrupt him. “Displacement?”

  “A shifting, en masse, of an entire civilization and its people, often to another galaxy. To use an analogy from your own world, it’s like catching a spider in your home and expelling it to the outdoors rather than killing it.” He paused and grew more somber. “It’s a tactic we find distasteful and distressing. Having been forced to it in the past, we now choose to conceal ourselves rather than risk provoking another such travesty.”

  Begging and pleading both had proved ineffective. All that Hernandez could do now was try to lay groundwork for a future opportunity. “If my people and I have to stay here, we’d at least like to get to know more about your culture,” she said. “In particular, I’d like to learn more about this thing you keep referring to as ‘the great work.’”

  Inyx looked up at Ordemo. “With the Quorum’s permission?”

  “Granted.”

  “The great work,” Inyx said, “is a project that has spanned several millennia and is only now reaching its fruition. Reduced to its core objective, it is our effort to detect, and make contact with, a civilization more advanced than our own.”

  Hernandez arched her brow at the irony. “Finally … something we have in common.”

  * * *

  Inyx left the humans’ penthouse suite after escorting Captain Erika Hernandez back to her fellow guests. He guided his disk along the outer edge of Axion, to a narrow promontory that extended beyond the city’s edge and faced the setting sun.

  Sedín, his companion of many aeons, waited for him at the end of the walkway. They met frequently at this place to watch the sky’s ephemeral changes. Often they eschewed conversation, having long since run out of anything new to say. Silent presence now passed for friendship between them.

  The disk under Inyx’s feet melded back into the memory metal of the city, and he stepped onto the walkway and willed it into motion beneath him. It whisked him with speed and precision to within an arm’s reach of Sedín, and then it halted. With an ease born of many thousands of years of practice, he strode off the walkway and took his place at Sedín’s side.

  Beyond the mountains, the ruddy orb of the heavens made its descent, its colors bleeding into the darkness above it.

  “You brought the human ship commander to the Quorum,” Sedín said, her enunciation neutral but still intimating disapproval.

  “She asked to see them,” Inyx replied. “They consented.”

  The sky grew darker and swallowed the jagged silhouette of distant mountaintops. Stars peppered the sky before Sedín spoke again, her affectless manner betraying her disdain.

  “They could have been displaced.”

  Inyx countered that statement of fact with another. “That was not the Quorum’s decree.”

  “I audited the debate through the gestalt,” Sedín said. “You shaped that decree. If not for you, they would have been displaced, like all the others. You advocated custody.”

  “Displacement was not warranted,” Inyx argued. “They had no means of communication—”

  “I’ve already heard your justifications,” Sedín said. “And I know they swayed the Quorum. The matter is decided.”

  Darkness swallowed the last glimmers of twilight, and overhead the cold majesty of the galaxy stretched across the dome of the sky. Soon it would be time for Inyx to return to his research for the night, befor
e paying another visit to the humans at daybreak. Tired of the hostility in his discourse with Sedín, he turned to leave.

  He paused as she asked, “Why did you bring them here?”

  “They came of their own accord,” Inyx said, turning back.

  “But you secured them permission to make orbit and come to the surface. You welcomed them to Erigol. Our home.”

  In time, Inyx knew, it might be possible to persuade Sedín to let go of her anxiety toward the unknown. That time, however, would not be this night. For now, he could only tell his comrade the truth and hope that it would suffice to postpone the rest of their discussion until the next sunset.

  “I argued my conscience,” Inyx said. “Nothing more.”

  Sedín was not appeased. If anything, she sounded more suspicious. “Your conscience? Or your curiosity?”

  A new transportation disk appeared beside the end of the platform. Inyx stepped onto it and faced toward the city. He chose to ignore his friend’s question—not out of guilt or anger, but because he did not, in fact, know the answer.

  He willed the disk forward. “Good night, Sedín.”

  * * *

  In the shade of the tree by the pool, violent ideas were taking root.

  Most of the landing party was still asleep back at the penthouse suite. The MACOs, however, had risen at dawn, stolen away in silence, and gathered here. They circled around Major Foyle, who used a green twig snapped from a low branch to draw designs in the rich, black earth of the tree’s island.

  “Our biggest challenge right now is the scattering field around the city,” Foyle said, etching a circle in the dirt. “We can’t transport through it, and we can’t get signals out.”

  Lieutenant Yacavino tumbled three small stones in his hand while he stared at the circle Foyle had drawn. “Depending on our objective, we need to either get outside the field or collapse it. It’s fifteen klicks to get clear, and we don’t even know how to get back to the planet’s surface from up here, so I’d suggest we focus on knocking out the field.”

  “That’s a good plan,” said Sergeant Pembleton. “Except for the fact that we don’t have any power left in our gear.”

  Foyle waved away the complaint with his twig. “There are ways to fix that,” he said. “Worst-case scenario, we can use solar power to recharge the rifles.”

  “That would take weeks,” Crichlow protested.

  Pembleton deadpanned, “Are you going somewhere, Private?”

  “The city has to have some kind of power-generation,” said Yacavino. “Maybe we can find a way to tap into it.”

  “Talk to Graylock,” Foyle said. “But let’s remember that we have options. The rifles and hand scanners might be out cold, but we still have chemical grenades, flares, and our hands.”

  Private Steinhauer said, “I don’t want to sound negative, Major, but CQC with the Caeliar sounds like a bad idea.”

  “He’s right,” Pembleton said. “Going hand-to-hand with a shape-changer that can levitate is a good way to get killed.”

  “Except that the Caeliar are pacifists, Sergeant,” said Private Mazzetti. “They won’t kill.”

  “Not on purpose,” Foyle said, feeling the urge to clarify the situation for the younger men. “But accidents happen. Just because they aren’t trying to kill us doesn’t mean they have to save us when we make mistakes.” The three enlisted men nodded.

  Yacavino massaged his stubbled chin with his thumb and forefinger. “We need an objective.” The Italian-born MACO looked at Foyle. “I assume we’re trying to get back to the ship?”

  “Yes,” Foyle said. “And from there, out of orbit.”

  “And home,” Pembleton added.

  “Then we have to take down the scattering field,” Yacavino said. “That’s job one. Then we need to neutralize the Caeliar’s ability to hurt the Columbia. Once that’s done, we contact the ship, beam up, and get the hell out of here.”

  Foyle nodded. “It sounds like there’s a good chance we could achieve the first two goals by causing a major disruption of the city’s power supply. Do it right, and we might gain a useful distraction while we’re at it.”

  “A useful distraction?” parroted Yacavino. “An explosion?”

  “Correct,” said Foyle. “Is there a problem?”

  The second-in-command looked troubled. “We don’t know what kind of damage we might do with demolitions. We might be talking about a lot of collateral damage.” His jaw clenched and he swallowed. “I don’t think the captain will go for that, sir.”

  “No,” Foyle said. “I don’t imagine she will. Which is why we’re treating that part of the plan as need-to-know information until further notice—and the captain doesn’t need to know.”

  That seemed to mollify the privates, but Yacavino looked away to hide his agitation, and Pembleton had a cautious air about him as he asked, “What if she finds out anyway?”

  “Funny thing about collateral damage,” Foyle replied. “It can happen to anyone. Even captains.”

  2381

  14

  His cup of Earl Grey was long since cold, and Jean-Luc Picard stared at the padd in his hand and found no answers, only the gnawing emptiness of unanswered questions.

  Why had the Borg changed their tactics against the Federation? What was the reason for their mad frenzy of murder, the wholesale slaughter of worlds?

  Picard had thought he knew the Borg, understood them even as he’d loathed them. He’d been perplexed by their desperate pursuit of the mysterious and elusive Omega Molecule as an emblem of “perfection,” but at least their obsession with it had been consistent with their cultural imperative toward the assimilation of technology and biological diversity. Genocide, on the other hand … It didn’t fit.

  The pragmatist in him didn’t want to look beyond the surface. From a practical standpoint, all that mattered now was fighting the Borg, halting their advance, and ending the war.

  But the part of him that was still an explorer needed to know why. Something had changed, and he needed to understand.

  He paced in front of his desk, padd in hand, trying to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle into something that made sense. The timing, the targets—he saw no patterns in them.

  His door chime sounded, and he was grateful for the interruption. “Come.”

  The portal hushed open, and Worf entered, followed by La Forge. “Captain,” Worf said, “we have something.” He nodded to the chief engineer, who continued the report.

  “Sensor analysis of the Borg cube we just destroyed picked up something odd,” La Forge said. “Traces of sirillium.”

  Picard lifted an eyebrow. “Sirillium? Out here?”

  “That’s what I said.” La Forge stepped beside a wall companel and activated it. He accessed the ship’s computer with touch commands as he continued. “I figured there were two likely explanations. One, the Borg might’ve started using it in their ships or weapons.”

  That struck a chord in Picard’s memory. “The Tellarites used to arm torpedo warheads with sirillium, back in the twenty-second century.”

  “Right,” La Forge said. “So did the Andorians. But that’d be a fairly primitive solution for the Borg, so I took a closer look at the samples we detected.” He called up a series of images on the companel screen. “All the traces we found were on external hull fragments from the Borg ship, or floating free with other atomized matter. We recovered debris from their weapons system, and it had no traces of sirillium. Neither did interior bulkhead plates, or sections of their life-support system. And that led me to my second possible explanation: They picked it up in transit.”

  With a flick of his finger, La Forge changed the display to a starmap of the surrounding sectors. “There are only two sites near Federation space with high enough concentrations of sirillium gas to leave deposits that rich on a Borg cube. One is the Rolor Nebula, on the Cardassian border, past the Badlands.”

  A glance at the starmap revealed the Rolor Nebula to be, quite literally
, on the far side of the Federation from the Enterprise and the recent spate of Borg attacks. Picard asked, “And the other?”

  La Forge enlarged a grid of the map—the sector adjacent to the Enterprise’s position. “The Azure Nebula, precisely twenty-point-one-three light-years from here. I ran an icospectrogram on the Borg cube’s most likely route from there to here, and I found sirillium traces at regular intervals.”

  Picard looked to Worf. “ETA to the nebula at maximum warp?”

  “Twenty-two hours,” Worf said. “Course plotted and laid in, ready on your command.”

  Picard gave his XO a curt nod. “Make it so.” To both Worf and La Forge he added, “Excellent work, gentlemen.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” La Forge said. “I’m heading back to engineering—see if I can push a few more points over the line and get us there in twenty-one hours.” He nodded to Worf and the captain, and then he made his exit from the ready room. Worf, however, remained behind.

  “Something else, Worf?”

  The XO frowned. “If Commander La Forge is correct, we can expect to face significant resistance when we reach the nebula.” He looked Picard in the eye. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “Granted.”

  In a quiet but still forceful baritone, Worf said, “You need to rest, sir.”

  Picard turned to walk back to his desk. “Your concern is appreciated, Commander, but I—”

  “Captain,” Worf said, blocking Picard’s path. “You have been on duty for more than twenty hours. I suspect you have been awake for at least twenty-two.”

  The captain stiffened in the face of his first officer’s confrontational behavior. Even though Worf generally respected human customs and courtesies, moments like this served to remind Picard that having a Klingon for an XO would take some getting used to. Taking care not to blink or demur, he looked into Worf’s eyes and replied gravely, “Do you mind, Mister Worf?”