by David Mack
From the tactical console, Lieutenant Rriarr called out, “Captain? The passageway through the shell that the shuttlecraft Mance used to reach the surface has closed.”
Riker nodded to the Caitian, who was filling in for Keru. “Keep an eye open for any other changes.”
“Aye, sir.”
Ra-Havreii asked Riker discreetly, “Do you want me to look for a way to punch a hole in it? Maybe take a shot at beaming the away team back?”
Shaking his head, Riker said, “No. I doubt we’d even scratch it. And with the level of technology the Caeliar must possess, I’d rather not provoke them into a fight.”
“Sensible,” said Ra-Havreii, who then nodded past Riker, to Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar, the head of the ship’s sciences division, who had just joined them.
The thirtyish blond Elaysian woman looked strangely incomplete to Riker’s eyes, because he had become accustomed to seeing her limbs and torso surrounded by a powered exoskeletal armature. The mechanical suit—which Pazlar often jokingly referred to as “the armor”—had been necessary because she was a native of a world with a microgravity environment; in the Earth-normal gravity of most Federation starships, starbases, and worlds, her bones would snap under her own weight.
Now she stood beside him, at ease and unencumbered by her armature, thanks to the latest innovation of Commander Ra-Havreii: holographic telepresence. The figure next to Riker was not the flesh-and-blood Pazlar but her holographic avatar, which could go anywhere aboard the ship by means of a network of holographic sensors and emitters. Meanwhile, the real Pazlar was safely ensconced in the microgravity environment of the ship’s stellar cartography lab, interacting with perfect holographic simulacra of her shipmates in a real-time re-creation of the bridge.
“I presume we’re not simply giving up,” she said to Riker.
He felt his jaw tighten even as he replied, “Never.”
Hachesa looked up from his work and joined the conversation. “If we cannot fight the Caeliar,” he said, “and we do not wish to surrender to them, how shall we proceed?”
“As I see it,” Riker said, “we have two paths left to us: diplomacy and deceit. Our best diplomat is already on the surface, so I’d recommend we leave any negotiations to her.”
Pazlar folded her arms. “What kind of deception do you have in mind, Captain?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “What I want is for you and Ra-Havreii to go over everything we know so far about this system, this planet, and this species. Look for anything we can exploit, either tactically or politically. I don’t want to use violence while our away team is down there, so focus on making contact with our people and gathering intel any way we can.”
Ra-Havreii’s snowy eyebrows twitched upward. “I should advise you, Captain, that this is a task whose progress will likely be measured not over the course of hours but of days, even under the best of circumstances.”
“Then the sooner you get to work, the better,” Riker said, in a tone that brooked no debate. “Don’t you agree, Commander?”
Pazlar’s avatar tugged at Ra-Havreii’s shirtsleeve. “Come on, Xin. I have an idea where to start. We can work on it in your office.”
“An excellent suggestion,” Ra-Havreii said. “Fewer distractions down there.” He followed the holographic Pazlar into the turbolift. Before the doors closed, Riker was certain that he caught sight of a smug leer on the lean, angular face of the Efro-sian, whose reputation as a ladies’ man was well earned.
Riker sighed. “Commander Hachesa, I’ll be in my ready room. You have the bridge.”
“Aye, sir,” Hachesa said, and he returned to administrating the minutiae of the ship’s business as Riker walked aft and withdrew to the privacy of his ready room.
After the door had hissed shut behind him, Riker collapsed heavily onto the sofa, tilted his head back, and stared blankly at the overhead. It had been a long couple of days for him and Titan’s crew. Weighing most ponderously in his thoughts was the emotional turmoil that had been wrought in his and Deanna’s marriage by her miscarriage of their first successful pregnancy several months earlier, and the recent news, delivered by Dr. Ree only a few days earlier, that their second attempt had become not only nonviable but also a risk to Deanna’s health and life. Talking about it with his first officer had proved explosive, and Deanna’s refusal to heed Ree’s medical advice had only made an already tumultuous situation even more volatile.
The tension and grief that filled every silence between himself and Deanna had made it almost impossible for them to communicate these past few days. All the same, he wished she were here now, even if only as his diplomatic officer and not as his wife, so that he wouldn’t feel so adrift. At times such as this, he relied on sage advice from Deanna, Christine Vale, and Tuvok. Drawing on their experience and insight, he had come to think of command as a process of synthesis rather than one of genesis.
He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the tides of his breathing, because for the first time since he’d taken the reins of Titan, he felt the true loneliness of being in command.
* * *
Night had been falling on New Erigol’s northern latitudes for weeks without quite arriving. Arctic twilight suffused the sky with a dusky haze along the horizon, and outside Axion’s protective shield, fierce winds howled and whipped spindrifts across a dark and ice-choked sea.
Erika Hernandez stood next to Inyx on a circular platform at the end of a narrow walkway, which extended several dozen meters beyond the city’s periphery. She sensed his influence on the invisible cloud of catoms that surrounded them, as he used them to extend and shape Axion’s protective field around their just-created and temporary widow’s walk.
She stared into the half-light and let the vista imprint on her consciousness. Its qualities of color and shadow changed by slow degrees. “Please ask the Quorum to take the city south,” she said as mournful winds caterwauled between nearby glaciers.
“I thought you admired the austerity of the arctic,” Inyx said, passively resisting her request.
“It’s very pretty,” Hernandez said. “But it’s going to get darker soon, and I’m concerned about the effect that a prolonged night might have on the humans from Titan.”
Inyx sounded almost contrite. “Yes, I should’ve considered that. I’ll pass your request to the Quorum now.” She felt a low crackle of energy surround him as he communed with the gestalt. For a moment she was tempted to eavesdrop, but she decided that it would be too risky. Instead, she waited for his response, which she knew was imminent when the tingle of psychic communion faded from the air between them. “The city will be under way very soon,” he said. “We’ll complete the transition while our guests are asleep, and we will try to match our longitudinal position with the proper phase in their endogenous diurnal cycle.”
“Thank you,” Hernandez said. “It should ease their adjustment to life in the city. And if I’m to be completely honest, I was starting to miss our sunrises.”
“As was I,” Inyx said. “Though if some in the Quorum have their way, we may not have many more to share.” She felt a slight chill as he expelled all the free nanoscopic catoms from their immediate vicinity and configured those closest to them into a spherical scattering field to grant them privacy. “It has been proposed that if Titan’s crew accepts our invitation of sanctuary, our new guests should be exiled to remote settlements on the surface, and segregated by gender to reduce the risk of infesting the planet with a new civilization.”
Hernandez remained calm as she replied, “I object to the use of the term ‘infesting.’”
“As you should,” Inyx replied. “However, I think the more important issue is to oppose this crude and repressive measure.”
She was surprised to hear him speak out on behalf of Titan’s personnel. “I presume you have a different solution?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Though it would take greater effort, I think that more harmonious and sociologically balance
d communities could be created if we segregate the visitors not by gender but rather by genetic incompatibility.”
“Genetic incompatibility?” she repeated. She understood its meaning; she simply couldn’t believe that Inyx had suggested it.
As usual, he rambled on, oblivious of her objection. “It’s my hypothesis that a mix of male and female personalities, regardless of species, will help curb aggression in these new communities. By combining only those individuals who are not genetically compatible, however, we can achieve the desired state of negative population growth.”
“In other words, they can pass their days pursuing futile labors until they die,” Hernandez said with disdain. “Just like everyone else in the universe.” She sighed and looked at the purple silhouettes of mountain peaks in the distance. “Why do your people always resort to such draconian measures? Why can’t you try anything new?”
Inyx’s tone became stern. “You’ve lived among us long enough to understand our ways and our reasons.”
“Long enough to understand they’re misguided,” she said.
Undeterred, he continued, “I empathize with your desire to permit Titan into orbit, and even to let its emissaries come to the surface. But after what happened with your people on Erigol, we cannot risk such vulnerability again.”
“Then why did you let them come here?”
“Because their civilization is too large to be displaced without drawing unwanted attention to ourselves. If we shifted the worlds and peoples of the Federation into another galaxy or quantum universe, we would be obliged to do the same for all the many powers that neighbor it. Likewise, all the astropolitical entities across the galaxy that know of the Federation would have to be displaced, as well. Ultimately, it seems to be a more prudent use of our resources to restrain and impound one star-ship and its crew than it would be to disrupt a significant fraction of all known galactic civilizations.”
Hernandez considered Inyx’s argument and realized that, in the centuries since the Columbia’s disappearance, Earth and its allies—its Federation—had become a formidable power in local space. When she and her crew had first come to Erigol, the Caeliar had not hesitated to level a threat against Earth if the Columbia’s personnel breached the Caeliar’s precious secrecy. Now, however, they seemed reluctant to make such threats. It was the first sign of weakness they’d shown in all the time that she had known them—but she didn’t believe it would be enough to make a difference.
After more than 860 years in Axion, Hernandez had learned to accept defeat as a given. The sooner Titan’s officers embraced that essential truth, the sooner they would be able to let go of the past and find a new modus vivendi here among the Caeliar.
With a thought, she directed the ever-attentive catoms in the air to disassemble the widow’s walk. Inyx found himself standing on air, high above the churning sea. Hernandez strode away from him, followed by the vanishing edge of the walkway. “Call me when there’s a sunrise.”
4
Five hours had been barely enough time to make jury-rigged repairs on the Enterprise and render the ship strong enough to brave the volatile embrace of the Azure Nebula. The supernova remnant looked to Commander Miranda Kadohata like a bruise without a body as it grew larger on the main viewscreen. Then it swallowed the stars as the Aventine and the Enterprise moved inside it, less than a minute’s flight from the coordinates at which the Aventine had exited a subspace corridor from the Gamma Quadrant.
Kadohata was finding the task of coordinating the effort complicated by her body’s urgent desire for sleep. It took almost all of her concentration to stay awake as she tried to enter one more bit of data and assign one more damage-control task.
“La Forge to ops,” said the chief engineer over the comm.
Her eyes snapped open. “Go ahead, Geordi.”
“Miranda, we need some more bandwidth freed up on the subspace interlink.”
She scrambled to reorganize her interface to call up an inventory of available and committed computer resources. “How much more do you need?”
“At least four megaquads,” La Forge said. “Five if you can spare it. The Aventine’s data-burst capacity is incredible.”
Even though La Forge couldn’t see her, she shook her head in dismay. “Even if I dump the nontactical systems from the primary network, the most I can give you is three-point-six megaquads. Is there any way you can trim their signal?”
“Not without reprogramming their main computer,” La Forge said. There was a pause as he conferred with someone else, whose voice Kadohata couldn’t hear clearly. Then La Forge continued, “Lieutenant Leishman suggests we take all but our navigational sensors offline while we make repairs, since we’ll be relying on the Aventine ’s sensors inside the nebula, anyway.”
“I see,” Kadohata said. “Does the Aventine’s chief engineer have any suggestions for how I should monitor our damage-control efforts without an internal sensor network?”
La Forge stammered, “I, uh, I’m not sure I—”
“Because if she’s that interested in doing my job for me, I can knock off early, and maybe tell Ensign Rosado she can sleep in, too, since Lieutenant Leishman has the Enterprise’s operations-management needs well in hand.”
She could almost hear him rolling his eyes. “Getting a little defensive, aren’t you? There’s plenty of starship to go around, you know.”
Calling up some additional options on her console, she replied to La Forge, “This isn’t about territoriality, Geordi. It’s about balancing conflicting needs.” She authorized some changes to the Enterprise’s status and added, “Speaking of which, I just isolated the internal sensors and comms on the emergency backup system, changed our protocol for incoming subspace radio traffic, and launched a subspace relay buoy to act as a signal buffer. That just bought you another point-six megaquads of bandwidth.”
“Thanks, Miranda,” Geordi said, sounding grateful. “You’re the best. We’re starting the relay from the Aventine now.” Adding a teasing quality to his voice, he added, “I’ll let you decide what to do with the data.”
“Don’t test me, La Forge,” she said with half-joking menace. “Routing it to aft stations one through four.”
The row of consoles along the bridge’s aft bulkhead came alive with mad flurries of data and imagery piped in from the Aventine’s sensors. Lieutenant Dina Elfiki, the Enterprise’s strikingly attractive, Egyptian-born senior science officer, took half a step back from the display, her dark brown eyes wide. “Wow,” she said. “That’s amazing.” She turned toward Kadohata and flashed a smile. “Commander, you have to see this. The level of detail is incredible.”
Kadohata got up from her chair and nodded to one of the relief officers to take over for her at the ops console. The young Saurian looked excited to finally be getting his webbed fingers on some real work as he slipped into her chair.
At the aft duty stations, Elfiki and two more lieutenants from the ship’s sciences division—theoretical physicist Corinne Clipet and subspace-particle physicist James Talenda—watched in awe as a flood of raw information poured in from the Vesta-class star-ship that was leading the Enterprise into the nebula.
“Dina,” said Kadohata, ever so gently, “is all that data going to analyze itself?”
The question snapped Elfiki back into motion. “Talenda, start looking for high-energy triquantum wave by-products. If there’s another subspace conduit out here, that’s how we’ll find it.” She turned toward the slender Frenchwoman. “Clipet, help Talenda filter out false positives by screening triquantum wave artifacts from any Borg ships still operating in this sector.”
Kadohata watched the three scientists’ hands fly across the consoles in a desperate and probably futile effort to keep up with the rapid crush of sensor input from the Aventine.
Clipet’s hands kept moving as she reported, “The Aventine crew is already running a triquantum filter on the stream.”
“Confirmed,” Talenda said. “I’m finis
hing a sweep around the Aventine’s subspace tunnel terminus. If there’s anything else like it within a hundred thousand kilometers of those coordinates, we should know in … a …” His voice tapered off as he finished, “… few minutes.” He let his hands fall by his sides, and he stared slack-jawed at the complex schematic the computer had just rendered on the large display in front of him.
Kadohata waited for Elfiki to follow up, and then the second officer noticed that all three science officers had the same stunned expressions on their faces. “Ahem,” she said with a loud and unnecessary clearing of her throat. Elfiki turned at the sound, prompting Kadohata to add, “What’s going on?”
Elfiki nervously fiddled with a lock from her stylish coif of mahogany-brown hair. “I know we’re looking for a different subspace tunnel than the one the Aventine used,” she said.
“Yes,” Kadohata said, “that’s correct.”
“Um …” Elfiki crossed her arms and leaned back a bit from the wall of consoles and screens. “Would you happen to know which one, exactly?”
I don’t like the sound of that, Kadohata mused. “Dare I ask how many there are?”
The senior science officer stalled. “About … roughly …”
“Twenty-seven,” Clipet declared.
Kadohata closed her eyes and wished that she were already asleep, so that this could be just a banal anxiety dream. Already braced for more bad news, she asked, “I don’t suppose there’s any way to tell which one the Borg have been using?”
“No, sir,” Talenda said. “For all we know, they might be using more than one.”
“Splendid,” she said, rubbing her eyes gingerly.
The chrono on the console showed ship’s time to be 0750. Her shift was scheduled to end in ten minutes, but sleep was going to have to wait, and there was no telling for how long, because the entire nature of their mission had just changed.
She tapped her combadge. “Captain Picard and Commander Worf, please report to the bridge.”