by David Mack
Within seconds she was perusing Earth’s current historical archives and learning the entire chronology of the Earth-Romulus War. It had started shortly after her ship’s ambush by the Romulans, and it had lasted nearly five years. In the end, it had led to a bloody and bitter stalemate, and the creation of a no-man’s-land between the Earth Alliance and the Romulan Empire—the Neutral Zone.
If only I could have warned them, she lamented. Earth’s early losses could have been prevented. We might have saved thousands of lives. We might even have won the war.
But if Earth had been unable to claim victory, neither had it conceded defeat. And the alliances it had forged to repel the Romulans had led to something new: a coalition of many worlds, and soon after that, the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Finally, in all that perilous darkness, Earth was no longer alone. Humanity had grown up and become part of something bigger than itself. Maybe some good did come of the war, she admitted to herself. But then she felt a wave of deep sadness at being so far away from such a wondrous time in human events. Life goes on without me, she realized.
A morbid pang of fear nagged at her from the dark corners of her memory, and she plumbed Earth’s archives for information about her lost love, Jonathan Archer. She hoped and prayed that he hadn’t been a casualty of the war.…
Then his biography was at her fingertips, and she breathed a sigh of relief. His service during the war had earned him numerous commendations and a seat with the admiralty. He was still alive, and had just announced that he would retire his post as Starfleet chief of staff on the first day of the new year, to accept a diplomatic assignment as the Federation’s newest ambassador to Andoria.
Jonathan’s done all right for himself, Hernandez mused. Then she was gripped by a powerful temptation. If he knew I was alive, he’d come for me. He’d never leave me here.
She was tapped into Earth’s planetary information network, which was utterly vulnerable to the Caeliar’s superior technology. Finding Jonathan’s personal contact information would be as easy as wishing for it. In a moment she could be speaking with him, seeing his face, his distinguished gray temples, those wistful smile lines. She could be hearing his voice, his laughter, the wonder and relief he’d feel at learning she was alive.… It was all a thought away.
Then all of it vanished, and Hernandez was alone in the dark surrounded by cold machines. The dream had been there in front of her, the lifeline had been in her hands. In the space of a breath, it all had been torn asunder. She had nothing.
A grave and booming voice came from nowhere and assaulted her senses as if it had come from everywhere. “Erika,” said Ordemo Nordal, the Caeliar’s perpetually arbitrary first among equals. “We are very disappointed in you.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, her eyes narrowed and her brow creased with naked contempt.
Ordemo continued, “The Quorum wishes to speak with you and Inyx. Come to us at once.”
She rolled her eyes, uncertain if the entity behind the disembodied voice could even see her. “Aren’t you going to send someone to collect me?”
“You know the way, Erika. Do not make us ask you again.”
“Or else what?” she taunted him. “You’ll ask me again?”
“Don’t test our patience. Even our courtesy has limits.”
She knew that the Caeliar’s pacifistic ethos wouldn’t permit them to harm her or kill her, but she reflected somberly that it hadn’t stopped them from taking her prisoner and holding her for what might effectively be forever. They won’t kill me, she thought, but there are plenty of ways to punish someone without touching them. Then she thought of Valerian, who went slowly mad and lived out her days inside an illusion.
Deflating with a sigh, she replied to the tanwa-seynorral, “I’ll be there in a few minutes, Ordemo.”
* * *
Inyx stood before the Quorum and waited for Hernandez to arrive. The ruling body radiated condemnation, and he expected little from them in the way of understanding.
As the Quorum members conferred through the gestalt, Inyx sensed their impatience at Hernandez’s absence. He wanted to speak in her defense, remind the Quorum that she wasn’t able to move her mind from one catom cluster to another. But acting as her apologist would do nothing to appease the tanwa-seynorral or the Quorum at large. Instead, Inyx remained silent and watched the portals that had been prepared for Hernandez’s arrival.
Then the Quorum looked up in surprise, and Inyx turned to face the cause of their alarm. It was Hernandez, hovering high above them, in an open frame of one of the pyramidal Quorum hall’s walls. She had dissolved the triangular pane of crystal without making a sound. With her arms at her sides and her ankles crossed, she floated down toward the shocked mass of the Quorum and said with prideful insolence, “You called?”
Concealing his amusement from the gestalt, Inyx marveled at how intuitively Hernandez wielded the powers he had given her.
“Stand next to Inyx,” said Ordemo Nordal.
Hernandez glared at Ordemo as she descended to the main floor of the hall. “As you wish,” she said. She took her place with Inyx in the center of the fractal-pattern mosaic. “But only because I know how much you enjoy looking down on others.”
A murmur of disapprobation coursed through the Quorum. Ordemo muted the protest with a calming wave of emotion through the gestalt. “Recent events have made it clear that we have been too permissive with both of you,” he said aloud, his voice amplified and thunderous. “Inyx, you defied our wishes by Changing her, and you jeopardized our new homeworld by failing to impart the proper respect and self-control to your new disciple. From this time forward, we will hold you accountable for her actions. It is your responsibility to secure your lab from intrusion, and to see that Erika respects our laws.”
Inyx wanted to protest, Am I a mere watchman now? Shall I abandon my work and spend my every moment lording over her? Instead, he made a small bow to the tanwa-seynorral and replied, “I understand, Ordemo.” He felt Hernandez’s hateful stare.
Directing his next verbal barrage at Hernandez, Ordemo continued, “As for you, Erika … it troubles us to see you abuse such powerful gifts. If it were possible to revoke them without harming you, we would do so. Unfortunately, your catoms are part of you now, and to forcibly remove them from you would be fatal. Because the Change cannot be undone, it is imperative that we ensure your compliance with our laws. Do you understand?”
“No,” Hernandez said. “I don’t.” She threw an angry look at Inyx, then continued to Ordemo, “Why can’t I learn about events on my homeworld? You spy on the galaxy. Why can’t I?”
“Because you cannot be trusted not to try to contact your people,” Ordemo said.
Hernandez pressed her palms against her forehead and pushed her fingers through her hair. “So what? The timeline’s not at risk anymore. Would it be such a tragedy if I sent one message, one farewell to tell someone I’m okay?”
“You know our laws, Erika,” Ordemo said. “Our privacy is of paramount importance to our work. Letting you send messages home risks exposing us to outside scrutiny. We can’t allow that.”
Nodding, Hernandez replied, “I see. It was never about the timeline. It’s always the same thing with you people: fear.”
“That’s a simplistic—”
“Spare me, Ordemo,” Hernandez interrupted. “Don’t you understand that your obsessive need for privacy is completely incompatible with your Great Work?” Inyx turned to listen more closely as Hernandez made the argument he had long wished to espouse but had never had the courage to speak aloud.
“You say you’re looking for civilizations equal to or more advanced than your own, but you act as if you live in fear of the less-developed cultures that are thriving all around you. Can’t you see that your self-imposed isolation is making you narrow-minded and provincial? How can you devote yourselves to seeking out new worlds when you shrink and hide from the ones in your own backyard?”
&nbs
p; She turned and scowled at Inyx. “And what about you? I know this is what you’ve been thinking all along, so why don’t you speak up? Why don’t you say something?”
Paralyzed by her accusation in front of the Quorum, Inyx hesitated, then said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin, Erika.”
“No,” she said, looking away from him in disgust. “I suppose you wouldn’t.”
Ordemo hushed another susurrus of the scandalized Quorum. Then he fixed his gaze on Hernandez. “You are an outsider,” he said, “and you’ve been with us only a short time. Perhaps in a few thousands of your years, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of our motivations. For now, however, it is clear that we’ll need to be more vigilant in policing your actions.” He looked at Inyx. “See to it that this incident is not repeated, Inyx.”
“Understood, Ordemo.”
“Erika, you may go,” said the tanwa-seynorral. Hernandez took immediate advantage of the dismissal and ascended in a swift arc, back through the open pane, which reappeared, solid and unblemished, as soon as she was outside the Quorum hall.
Alone before the Quorum once again, Inyx said, “Will that be all, Ordemo?”
“For now,” Ordemo replied. “But if you cannot control her, Inyx, we will—in the only way open to us. Do you understand?”
Dread and resentment welled up within him; the Quorum was threatening to banish Hernandez to some distant galaxy, where she would be cut off from Axion’s sustaining energies. She would weaken, grow old, and die alone on an uninhabited world. It was a sentence of lifetime solitary confinement and certain death.
He swallowed his fury. “I understand,” he said.
* * *
Hernandez chafed at the notion of being leashed, and it wasn’t long before she put Inyx’s vigilance to the test.
She had thought she was being subtle. Her first challenge to the Quorum’s edict was a message embedded in the matrix of one of their soliton pulses. It was a simple message, a basic SOS coupled with a Fibonacci sequence, to get the attention of whoever might receive it. Once decoupled from the soliton pulse, it would have propagated on several frequencies, both in subspace and on regular light-speed radio waves.
Inyx had appeared before Hernandez one morning to report the failure of her attempt. “It was elegantly simple,” he’d said. “However, it was intercepted by the signal filters I’ve implemented for all outgoing energy pulses.”
Years elapsed while she investigated the nature of Inyx’s data filters, and eventually she concluded that she couldn’t fool them. That left her only one reasonable course of action: She would have to bypass them by altering the configuration of the transmission hardware and software.
Unfortunately, almost all of the stations were permanently supervised by the Caeliar. By the time she had clandestinely followed the soliton generation network to an automated backup relay, decades had passed since her first attempt at subversion. During all those years, she had presented Inyx with a pleasant façade, to allay his suspicions. Pretending to trust him and treating him like a boon companion had secretly vexed her, but she reminded herself after every encounter, Think long-term.
With patience and effort, she had converted the backup relay into a primary transmitter, one with an unmoderated uplink to the soliton emitters. To evade detection of her transmission, she had been forced to wait until a scheduled emission surge in the service of the Great Work. By listening to the Caeliar’s plans via the gestalt, pinpointing the time to act was easy.
On the night she’d chosen for her plan’s fruition, however, she’d arrived at the backup relay to find it sealed off. Forcing her way through the seals, she’d received another rude surprise: a hollowed space. Not only had her modifications been undone, the auxiliary system itself had been removed.
She’d returned to her residence that evening to find Inyx waiting for her, with two of her rebuilt components, one in each hand. “Fine workmanship,” he’d said, dropping them on the floor. “It was all that I’ve come to expect from you, and more.”
“The backup relay was a lure,” she’d replied.
“Yes. I wanted to see how far your skills had progressed.”
“And are you satisfied?”
“Quite,” he’d said, before vanishing in a flare of sparks.
Resentment had fueled her surreptitious efforts for several more decades. She had long used the Caeliar’s technology without really understanding how it had been built. Even a grasp of its essential operating principles proved elusive, and she’d dedicated the better part of a century to probing them, molecule by molecule, to unlock the secrets of their construction. Then she’d undertaken her boldest stroke of defiance yet: crafting her own soliton emitter, one that would interface with the systems in New Erigol’s shell without utilizing the Caeliar’s data network. Each component had been painstakingly crafted from the subatomic level, shaped by Hernandez’s obedient catoms.
One month before she’d heard of the approach of the Starship Titan, Hernandez had finished her machine and was ready to infuse it with power and bring it online. She had taken every imaginable precaution, and had dispelled the Caeliar’s surveillance catoms from her vicinity whenever she’d traveled to her hidden, underground lab deep inside Axion’s core. She’d built each part separately, never bringing any two of them together until all had been made and were ready to be assembled.
Then, as the last element had been fitted into place, Inyx had appeared from a smoky swirl in the darkness and with a wave of his arm disintegrated Hernandez’s machine. A human lifetime’s worth of labor was turned to dust in an instant.
“Why?” Hernandez had cried in anguished rage. “You said you were my friend! They’ve censured you, too—so why do you betray me? Why are you doing their dirty work?”
For the first time in the centuries that she’d known him, he had sounded afraid. “It’s for your protection, Erika. If I don’t enforce their laws, you’ll be exiled, left to grow old and die in some remote corner of the universe.” Sinking into his own despair, he had seemed to diminish before her. “I can’t let them do that to you, Erika. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”
In that unguarded moment, she had realized how much Inyx cared about her, and she for him. Their threatened punishment had been sobering enough, but the realization of its potential impact on Inyx was what had swayed Hernandez. He had done so much for her, had taught her so many things, that she couldn’t conscience inflicting such sorrow upon him. For the sake of her friend, she had surrendered. After more than eight centuries of low-intensity resistance to the authority of the Caeliar, Hernandez had buried the last ember of her fighting spirit.
But she’d learned something she hadn’t known before: She could survive outside of New Erigol, despite the Change. Grow old and die, Inyx had warned. And she’d dreamt anew of escape.
Then Titan had come to New Erigol.
Inyx had arranged permission for their away team to visit the planet’s surface. At his request, she had joined him and Edrin to greet them, and had appointed herself as their liaison.
Now, less than three days later, she stood under a starless night, beside the petrified tree and the deathly still black pool, and she asked herself what she had done.
For all the Caeliar’s talk of her being a “guest with restrictions,” despite the role she had played in helping them find this new world to call their home, regardless of the superhuman abilities bestowed upon her by the Change, looking at her reflection on the preternaturally still water, she saw herself as she was: a prisoner with a nigh-eternal sentence.
And, as the instrument selected to impose the Caeliar’s rules on Titan’s crew, she had become a jailer, as well.
* * *
“All things considered, I think the op went fairly well,” Vale said as she paced. “Right up to the point where it fell apart.”
Tuvok stood in the main room of the away team’s Axion residence, apart from the rest of the group, while Vale led the post-mission debriefing. Sever
al hours had passed since Keru had been intercepted aboard the shuttlecraft Mance. Rather than meet immediately after their return to the residence, when the group was still agitated by its setback, Vale had suggested that everyone take some time alone to consider what had gone wrong, so that they could discuss the details later, in a calm and professional manner. Now it was later, and no one was calm.
“It was a total bungle,” said Lieutenant Sortollo, who sat on a sofa with fellow security personnel Keru and Dennisar. “The Caeliar saw us coming a hundred klicks away.”
Tuvok stepped forward and replied, “Not necessarily. If they had, it is unlikely they would have permitted us to beam Mister Keru onto the Mance. The fact that we did so would suggest that at least that much of our plan was a success.”
Keru nodded. “I agree. That caught them looking. But once they knew where I was, it didn’t take them long to shut us down. And now we’ve lost the element of surprise.”
“More important,” said Ree, who, with Torvig, flanked Troi’s chair, “we’ve lost our tricorders. And the shuttlecraft.”
Vale closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment. Then she sighed and opened her eyes. “It could be worse,” she said. “At least they didn’t destroy it.”
“So they say,” Keru replied. “For all we know, they ditched it in the ocean. Or blew it to pieces.”
Sortollo, Dennisar, Keru, and Vale overlapped one another with vitriolic remarks, but Tuvok ignored them. Something else drew his attention. A psionic pain shadow was lingering in the group’s midst. It was a dull suffering, the kind of malaise produced by illness or deep discomfort. He quieted his thoughts and reached out with a gentle telepathic touch, seeking the source of the pain. Within moments, his mind focused on the source: Commander Troi.
As the discussion continued, he kept his psionic senses attuned to Troi’s condition.
“All I’m saying,” Dennisar snapped, “is that there’s a lot of planet down there, and searching it for the shuttlecraft without tricorders or Titan’s sensors is going to take a very long time.”