The Higher Frontier

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “So naturally,” zh’Lenthar said to the assembled officers, “we must request that you keep our survival completely confidential. In fact, Captain, I request permission to suppress the memory of our presence in your crew’s minds before we leave. It is imperative that the Naazh and their Lords not become aware of our continued existence.”

  “I’ll agree to classify your survival,” Terrell replied. “I’m not ready to authorize mental tampering, though. I trust my people.”

  The activist sighed. “You’re lucky we’re pacifists. We could just do it without asking, you know.”

  “You’re not making a compelling case, Zha.”

  “Kinoch,” DiFalco said gently, and the Aenar sighed and fell silent.

  “Frankly, I’m more concerned about these ‘Spectres’ you say you have living inside you,” Terrell went on. “You’re telling us that every human esper for centuries has had an incorporeal alien of enormous psionic power living inside them without their knowledge.”

  “Not every esper,” DiFalco said, sounding rueful. “At least, not most of the latent ones. The esper tests were based on the Vulcan model, on the assumption that telepathy was innate to human brains. So the tests produced a lot of false positives. People without Spectres inside them, just with brain structures that made them passively receptive to certain psionic effects, like the Vulcans’ esper testing devices or the energies of the barrier on the galaxy’s edge.” She looked at Chekov. “When the Enterprise passed through that barrier in 2265, it killed all the crew members with those sensitive brain structures, all the false-positive espers. But two others in the crew did have dormant Spectres within them, and the barrier awakened them and supercharged their abilities. It made them like us, but they were overcome by the shock of the sudden awakening and didn’t have control of their powers.”

  DiFalco gestured to the silver-eyed Aenar on the other beds. “But when the Medusans took us in, they told us about our Spectres and showed us how to communicate with them, allow them to awaken. We’ve spent the past year learning to commune with them, to harness their powers safely and controllably.”

  Chekov couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. “Can I ask about the eyes? What makes them turn silver like that?”

  Doctor Wilder spoke before DiFalco could. “I wondered that myself. My scans show that it’s some kind of biofluorescence of the electrolytes in their aqueous humors. The excitation must come from the intense psionic energy radiating out from their brains.” She tilted her head, causing some of her long cornrows to slide off her shoulder. “That’s why it manifests in the Aenar too. It’s only a surface effect, independent of the optic nerve. Oh, and I think the psionic energy bleaches the hair pigments too. That’s why they turn gray so fast, before the hairs have time to grow out.”

  DiFalco sighed. “The stigmata of an active Spectre, awake and exerting its energies.”

  “Can you even see through that?” Chekov wondered.

  “As long as the light’s good. Sort of like mirrored sunglasses. And … the Spectre shares its senses with me. I can perceive things we don’t have words for.”

  He touched her hand. “You … don’t seem thrilled by that.”

  The glint in her eyes shifted, and he realized why when a tear rolled down her cheek. “Oh, Pavel, I feel like such a fool. I was so … fervent about this new evolutionary stage in humanity. This unlocking of our untapped potential, elevating humans toward a new spiritual level.” She shook her head. “But it was all a lie. My powers were never mine. They were just … spillage from the sleeper inside me stirring out of dormancy. An intruder hiding inside my body since I was a child.” She shuddered.

  “I’ve told you before,” zh’Lenthar said. “If it’s always been part of you, it makes no difference. It’s symbiotic, not parasitic.”

  “Symbiosis is consensual!”

  “Did you consent to have mitochondria in your cells?”

  “Mitochondria have been part of cellular evolution for billions of years,” Wilder reminded the Aenar activist. “From the chief’s account, these Spectres began inhabiting humans only a few centuries ago.”

  “Exactly,” DiFalco said. “All those old tales of psychic and supernatural abilities in humans—they were just superstition and myth. For all we know, real psi abilities didn’t start to appear in humans until a generation or two before the Vulcan contact.” She lowered her head. “The potential was never ours to begin with.”

  Terrell crossed his arms. “Chief DiFalco, are you telling us you don’t agree that the Spectres’ presence within the New Humans is benevolent?”

  She thought it over, grimacing slightly. “I understand why the refugees were forced to do what they did. I’ve gotten to know my Spectre well enough to know how much of a sacrifice it made, choosing to stay permanently dormant to ensure my freedom of choice. I know they only did it to hide from the Naazh. And … I’ve accepted having the Spectre awake inside me so that we can fight together to defend the Aenar—and now the New Humans. The refugees don’t deserve to die for what they did, and their hosts certainly don’t deserve to die for something that was done to us without our knowledge.”

  She looked up at Terrell with resolve in her eyes. “But I still feel betrayed and violated, and I’m not the only one. Some of the New Humans who know the truth are fine with it—like Jade,” she said to Chekov, who appeared to recognize the name. “But the rest … we want it to end.” She took a determined breath. “We’ll keep fighting as Spectre hosts for as long as it takes to stop the Naazh. But once the refugees and their hosts are no longer in danger … then I want mine gone. These powers were never mine, so I don’t want them anymore.

  “The hell with ‘New’—I just want to be human again.”

  Seventeen

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  A second Medusan ship had joined the convoy in the pocket continuum, and Jim Kirk was pleased when Miranda Jones brightened and informed him that Ambassador Kollos wished to beam aboard the Enterprise. Miranda had told him the night before that Kollos’s death had been feigned as part of the cover for the Aenar’s survival, but it seemed that her sorrow at his loss had not been entirely an act. She had known all along that he was alive, but he had been far enough away—in more than three dimensions of space—that their intimate link had been severed, with only the faintest psionic thread remaining to connect them. The loneliness and need that had led her to seek comfort from Kirk had not been feigned, and she had thanked him for the emotional support and companionship he had provided. But at the moment the Medusan ship was in range again, Kirk could see the return of the contentment that Miranda had radiated ever since her original meld with Kollos, and he wondered if she needed him anymore.

  Of course, Kirk was glad that the ebullient Medusan diplomat was still alive—especially as it came with the assurance that the Aenar and New Humans supposedly lost in the destruction of the recreation deck were still alive and well, teleported to safety by Kollos under cover of the blast. All aside from the unfortunate Edward Logan, who had been one of the first victims of the gold Naazh.

  Also known as Specialist T’Nalae.

  Once the Enterprise had entered the pocket continuum, it had apparently cut T’Nalae off from the separate pocket dimension that the Naazh drew their armor and weapons from. She was still possessed by a Lord, but it was helpless, unable to fight or to teleport her away. At last, it had been possible to capture and hold a Naazh. And there was no other Naazh that Kirk was so eager to interrogate.

  Now he stood in the brig along with Spock, McCoy, Jones, and the brig’s guard on duty, with Kollos’s mobile habitat hovering silently behind them. As he stared at T’Nalae through the force screen of her cell, seeing the shimmering silver eyes that had been hidden behind her blank gold visor, he thought back to how casually Gary Mitchell had reached out with his mind and strangled his friend Lee Kelso to death, when they had been laughing and joking together just days before. According to Miranda, the Spectre inside Ga
ry had most likely been panicked, hyperaggressive, and borderline psychotic from its forced awakening and power amplification, like a human suffering from a cordrazine overdose. By contrast, the Spectre Lord possessing T’Nalae’s body was a hunter, acting on a genocidal agenda and using her as its instrument. Kirk wanted to believe she was not responsible for Logan’s death any more than Gary had been for Kelso’s.

  T’Nalae, though, seemed determined to take full credit for the murders she had committed. “Whatever Jones and her mental ménage à trois told you is a lie, Admiral Kirk,” snarled the short-haired young Vulcan—no longer so young in appearance as before, and not just from the cosmetic surgery. “We hunters are not victims or slaves, the way the hosts of the renegades are. I freely chose to allow my Lord to enter me.”

  McCoy winced. “Did you have to phrase it that way?”

  Spock addressed her sternly. “To clarify, Specialist: Do you freely confess to the murder of Crewman Edward Logan and several Aenar, to being an accomplice to the murders of Crewman Joshua Vidmar and Petty Officer Hrii’ush Uuvu’it, and to participating in the terrorist attack on the New Human compound on Earth?”

  She winced. “The guards were not our quarry. They just got in the way. As for the others, they were not what they pretended to be. Logan was not human anymore, if he ever truly was. The infiltration of your species had to be halted.”

  “By killing its hosts?” Kirk demanded. “You’re trying to make it sound as if they were victims of the Spectre refugees. So why kill the hostages along with their hostage-takers?”

  “You don’t understand. There is no difference between the two. The hosts are one with the so-called sleepers that possess them, their minds incurably corrupted from birth as their masters desired. There is nothing in them worth saving, and it would endanger far more lives if even one were allowed to escape.”

  “You Naazh have the same creatures inside of you,” McCoy challenged. “So doesn’t that make you just as corrupted?”

  “No, Doctor. That is why we hunters depend on the dimension stones, and on the extradimensional source of matter and energy from which we draw our armor and weapons. The crystals provide a filter, preventing us and our Lords from being tainted by a full merger. They protect us and let us remain ourselves.”

  Jones stepped forward and spoke contemptuously. “Or maybe they just don’t trust or respect you enough to teach you to share their true power. You’re just foot soldiers using the weapons they place in your hands. No, you are the weapons. Your hatred and fear toward us make you easy to manipulate into mindless killing machines.”

  T’Nalae stared back with hate. “My Lord and I share a common purity of vision, of purpose. It came to me and revealed what the Enterprise was harboring in the guise of the Aenar survivors. It saw that I recognized their intrinsic wrongness, and that of the human espers as well.

  “At its request, I let it join with my mind and share its knowledge of the long struggle. Of the perverted and unnatural experiments of the extremist faction you call ‘refugees,’ hybridizing corporeal and incorporeal forms from different universes in search of a chimeric blend with the power to conquer both. Just as humanity fought the Augments, so the Lords fought to eradicate these dangerous fusions before their corruption could spread through both domains of existence. But they escaped to this domain and began their long infiltration, breeding their chimeras for generations until they were ready to awaken and conquer. V’Ger was their cover story, their excuse to begin their emergence.”

  She took a step toward him, undaunted by her proximity to the force field. “You have seen the enormous power that these hybrids can wield in our plane of existence. Their ability to harness vast amounts of psionic energy, to manipulate and transmute matter into whatever forms they wish. You know how deadly that power is, how defenseless you are against it. You should understand the great danger it poses to our plane. You should stand with us, Admiral. We are Federation citizens fighting to protect our homeworlds from invasion. That’s supposed to be Starfleet’s job!”

  Kirk studied her for a moment. “It’s hard to believe in the Naazh’s benevolence,” he said, “when you go out of your way to kill so personally, so bloodily. To terrorize and stalk your victims, and take pleasure in the kill.”

  “We hate what they have done to themselves. What their insurrection did to the Lords’ domain, and what they will do to your domain if allowed to spread. They are deserving of hate, not of sympathy. We take pleasure in ending their scourge.”

  Kirk crossed his arms. “Let me tell you why I don’t believe you. Right now, there are a few hundred New Humans and over a dozen Medusans sharing this continuum with us, and they have you at their mercy. As you said, they’re powerful enough that I and my crew couldn’t stop them if they wanted to do to you what you’ve done to the Aenar and to many of them.

  “But instead of hunting you down with swords and daggers—instead of murdering the part of you that’s still T’Nalae out of hatred for the entity possessing her—they intend to do something you’ve apparently never bothered to try.” He smiled darkly. “An exorcism.”

  T’Nalae pulled back, eyes widening. “What?”

  Jones smiled graciously, speaking with a mix of Kollos’s insouciance and her own righteous indignation. “We’re going to treat both you and your resident Spectre far more gently than you’ve treated us. With the help of the Medusans’ psionic and hyperdimensional abilities, we’re going to excise the Lord from your body and send it back to its home domain.” Her smile turned grim. “Frankly, more than a few of us would be willing to see you dead for what you’ve done to us. But that would be sinking to your level.”

  “Sometimes the best revenge is to be better than your enemy,” Kirk said. “To deny them the pretense that they’re just doing what anyone would do.”

  T’Nalae was shaking her head, horrified. “No. No, you can’t do this! Admiral, you speak of morality, but I consented to this joining! How many sleeper hosts can say that? It was my free choice to accept this power, and taking it away from me by force is a violation.”

  Spock replied gravely. “You forfeited the right to that power, T’Nalae, when you used it to kill others.” He stepped closer. “Last year, you came to me seeking insight on how I mastered my emotions. I have ruminated since then on how to answer that question, and I can now say that I have done so by understanding that the power of emotion—like any other power—is not a license, but a responsibility. I hope that you, too, will come to understand that once you have been freed from your possessor. I will be here afterward if you need me.”

  He moved back along with McCoy and Kirk, who nodded to Jones. She moved closer to the brig door, her eyes flaring brighter silver as Kollos’s habitat moved in alongside her.

  T’Nalae shook her head. “No. No, don’t take it from me!” Then she stiffened, eyes wide, and began to scream.

  “Please stop fighting it,” Jones said through clenched teeth. “You’re making it harder than it needs to be!”

  “I’ll … never … stop fighting!”

  She strained, fists clenching, but her groans intensified, accompanied by the occasional gasp of exertion from Jones. Kirk saw McCoy looking on in horror and Spock in unconcealed regret.

  Finally, T’Nalae flipped back and hovered in midair for several moments, convulsing as if she were drowning. Was the Spectre Lord trying to kill her rather than let her go? Or was it her own refusal to let it go that was killing her?

  Then she convulsed one last time and fell to the deck. Jones slumped as well, and the manipulator arms on Kollos’s habitat caught her tenderly. Kirk nodded to the guard to lower the force field, and McCoy rushed in to check on T’Nalae’s vitals. “She’s stabilizing,” he reported after a moment.

  But Kirk had already discerned that, for T’Nalae was sobbing. “Nooo,” she moaned weakly. “I’m alone. So alone …”

  He looked down on her in pity. “I hope someday you understand, Specialist. It’s not about fi
ghting for its own sake. It’s about having something worth fighting for.”

  * * *

  Now that T’Nalae’s Lord had been successfully excised and forced back to its native realm, the Medusans were finally able to bring the Starfleet convoy out of the pocket dimension—which had simply been a quarantine area to prevent the Lords from discovering their real destination. Kirk had assumed that the Medusans had intended to settle the New Humans on a planet within their territory. He had been correct as far as that went—but he had been mistaken to assume that the Medusans’ territory was limited to his home universe.

  What he saw now on the bridge’s main viewscreen, as the Enterprise and the other two Starfleet ships maintained tight formation between the two Medusan craft in order to be carried along with them, was almost beyond his comprehension. The space they passed through seemed to ripple, distorting the images of the other ships so that sometimes they appeared far more distant, or facing the wrong direction, or duplicated out to infinity, or even turned inside-out so that he could see their interior compartments and crew. Sometimes their engine glows and running lights seemed to be refracted by the surrounding space itself, warped into kaleidoscopic blobs and rippling rings of interference.

  “This is the real Medusan Complex,” Jones told him while she and Kollos’s habitat flanked him where he stood at the aft bridge rail, behind Spock in the command chair—an arrangement Kirk still struggled to get used to. “As in a complex transdimensional manifold, an interphase space connecting multiple spatial and subspatial domains.”

  “Interphase,” Kirk said. “Like the interphase space I was once trapped in on the Tholian border. But it was … not at all like this. It wasn’t like anything.”

  “You were merely adrift in one portion of it, Admiral,” Spock replied. “You would not have seen much.”