STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book Two

by John Vornholt

  “Yes, sir.”

  Walking in silence, the captain followed his second officer to Transporter Room Two, where Chief Rhofistan remained on duty.

  “Hello, Captain,” the dour Andorian said. “Coordinates for Commander Jagron have been laid in.”

  Picard nodded. “Energize.”

  Two swirling columns materialized on the transporter platform and swiftly coalesced into two slim Romulans, the young commander Picard had met earlier and a statuesque female. With grace typical of their race, the visitors stepped down from the platform to greet their hosts.

  “Captain Picard,” said Jagron with a stiff bow. “I am pleased to meet you again.”

  “You, too, Commander. This is my second officer, Data.”

  Jagron raised a curious eyebrow. “Yes, the android—how interesting. This is Lieutenant Petroliv, my intelligence officer.”

  Petroliv smiled charmingly at Picard. “I’ll need to go to your bridge and check your sensor readings, to see if they correspond with ours. We don’t want to return to Myrmidon prematurely.”

  “No, we don’t,” agreed Picard. “Commander Data can take you to the bridge.”

  The android gave the attractive Romulan a cockeyed smile, while Picard turned his attention to the young commander. “I hope that your presence here doesn’t mean that some problem has befallen Commander Tomalak and the Terix,” said Picard.

  Jagron looked mildly annoyed, but he answered, “Both were fine when I last saw them. Commander Tomalak is a hero to us, something like yourself, and his presence was needed closer to home.”

  “I can understand that,” answered Picard. “We are having our own problems—with a fungal disease that’s infected several members of our crew.”

  Petroliv looked alarmed. “Is it under control?”

  “It’s confined to sickbay, but I’d like to keep contact between our crews to a minimum. There’s no reason to share crew, is there?”

  “That depends,” answered Jagron. “I had hoped that you would join us for this expedition. We don’t know what to expect, so we should have an observer from the Federation on board ... someone who can make decisions on the Federation’s behalf. For example, suppose we could save only a few hundred survivors? Who should they be?”

  With a thoughtful nod, the captain considered the request, seeing the logic in it. If Admiral Nechayev and the others were dead, Starfleet would want his confirmation. He preferred to stay close to Beverly, but he was almost too close. Even if she and her crew recovered fully, he might never find out what possessed them to act as they had, except for the vague effects of a fungus.

  “I’ll return with you to Myrmidon,” promised Captain Picard. “When do we go?”

  “As soon as we get the sensor readings and have time to study them,” the hawk-faced Romulan answered.

  Captain Picard had a sudden inspiration, and he motioned to the android at his side. “I’d like to bring Data with me. He’s very useful in places that may be dangerous for biological beings.”

  Jagron’s eyes narrowed as if he didn’t like the idea, but he still bowed and said, “If you wish. I shall return to my ship, while Lieutenant Petroliv consults your sensor readings on the bridge.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” said the captain sincerely. “Your help in this dire situation is more than we could possibly expect.”

  “More than you deserve,” the Romulan replied with equal sincerity.

  five

  Geordi La Forge sat on a large red boulder—at least it looked and felt like a boulder—and watched Dolores Linton weave a crude net from vines she had collected. There was no shortage of raw material on Myrmidon, but it was all extremely raw: gruesome mires, overgrown thickets, mammoth trees covered in grayish moss, slimy pools, and pulsing geysers. They were only about two hundred meters from their base at the riverbed, but it seemed as if they were two hundred kilometers from another living soul. A foul mist, which wreaked of ammonia and sulfur, hung over the dense forest, and Geordi shivered from the chill, even in his expedition jacket.

  Dolores, meanwhile, was in her element in this forest primeval. Most of the survivors were sitting around in a stupor back at the riverbed, unable to grasp the horrible metamorphosis of their world. But in the last few hours, Dolores had gathered driftwood and debris from the unaffected part of the riverbed, explored the woods, and hacked her way through a mass of vines with an improvised knife. Now she was patiently weaving her vine cuttings into a net, for what purpose Geordi had yet to fathom.

  “Will you ever tell me what you’re going to do with that?” he asked. “You’re not making a tree house, are you?”

  “I’ll show you in just a minute,” she answered playfully. “Are you ever going to get off that rock?”

  Geordi shook his head. “No. I feel safe up here—and unsafe when I’m walking around down there.”

  “The ground is okay, if you look out for sinkholes and quicksand.” As Dolores talked, her strong fingers continued to ply the thick strands. Something which looked like a large newt slithered up to her boot, and she shook it off without even glancing away from her work.

  Geordi shivered again and looked around at their gloomy surroundings. The tall trees, which were shrouded in hanging moss, blocked out all but a minimal amount of sunlight. Nevertheless, the misshapen thorn bushes and treacherous vines continued to sprout like weeds without direct sunlight. Despite the incredible growth, the new planet was eerily quiet; Geordi could hear the vines scraping together as Dolores worked them with her hands.

  He was reminded of the aftermath of a hurricane, an avalanche, or some other great disasters he had seen on away missions. Only in those cases, there were usually a few birds left to chitter and chirp in the rubble. On Myrmidon, there was no rubble, and no birds left to disrupt the silence.

  He looked up to see the geologist tying a fist-sized rock to one corner of the net, but he knew better than to ask her why. Her forearm muscles bulged as she pulled the knots tight. He did feel guilty for not pitching in more, but he couldn’t shake off his gloom. Leah had been right—this wasn’t the kind of place anyone would want to live in. To rebuild, the Bolians would have to be awfully determined. The worst had happened, but there was no sign of any relief. They could be in survival mode for years to come.

  His thoughts returned to Leah, the real root of his misery. She was gone again from his life—just like that—and he hadn’t even put up a fight to keep her. Instead, he had guaranteed they would remain apart by sticking himself on Myrmidon. All for spite.

  “There!” exclaimed Dolores, jarring him out of his gloomy reverie. He looked up to see her tugging on the center of her net, testing its strength. There were now rocks tied to two corners of the net; stretched out, it was about three meters by two meters.

  “That ought to work,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing?” asked Geordi.

  “Oh, you’re going to get a close look, because you’re going to help me.”

  “I am?” he replied in a scratchy voice.

  She nodded sweetly and batted her eyelashes. Grumbling, Geordi climbed down from the safety of his red rock and stepped gingerly over the mushy ground to her side.

  “There’s a good one,” said Dolores, striding to the slippery edge of a brackish pool. Scum floated on top of the black water, and life-forms teemed under it, producing ominous ripples on the surface.

  Geordi grimaced in disgust, then his implants widened with alarm. “Wait a minute! You aren’t thinking about using that net in there. I’m an engineer, not a fisherman.”

  “That’s too bad, because at the moment, we’ve got an opening for a fisherman but none for a warp-core engineer.” Although Dolores said it in a kidding tone, there was the backbone of truth in her words.

  With a sigh, Geordi picked up one corner of the net. “Okay, what do I do?”

  “Just a second.” Dolores drew her improvised knife and chopped a path all around the
teeming pool. “There, now we have room to maneuver.”

  She had left loops of vine on the upper corners of the net, to be used as handles, and she handed one of them to Geordi. “Just drag it along your side of the bank, and I’ll go along my side. We’ll see what we end up with.”

  Geordi moved slowly, aping her movements as much as he could. As soon as he got close to the edge of the pool, he sank into mud up to his ankles. Dolores did too, but she somehow kept moving, doing a sort of shuffle through the muck. They finally got close enough to the pond to lower the weighted end of the net into the murky water, which smelled like a combination of tar and dead fish. The rocks dragged the net down quickly.

  “Go slowly,” ordered Dolores.

  Geordi nodded, and once again, he mimicked her as he carefully dragged the net along the bank. About halfway across the small pool, the net got heavy and hard to pull, while the water churned with unseen life. Dolores grabbed her handle with both hands and told him, “Keep pulling, we’re almost done!”

  Slipping and sliding, getting covered with stuff that looked and smelled like sewage, Geordi tried to match her stride. He was only a few paces behind her when they finally got to the end of the pond. Dolores immediately began pulling her catch out of the water, and he strained with all his might to get his end out. As they pulled, a gruesome collection of flopping, wriggling creatures spilled onto the bank, and La Forge nearly gagged at the sight of them. There were tentacled white slugs, squirming lam-preylike fish with toothy suckers, and things which looked like newts and tadpoles. Some of them were a half meter long, and a few were misshapen and half-formed, as if they were unsuccessful mutations.

  His mind off his work, Geordi slipped in the mud, and his feet flew out from under him, landing in the squirming mass of life. He yelled as the creatures latched onto his legs and curled around his ankles.

  Within seconds, Geordi felt strong hands reach under his armpits, dragging him from the wriggling morass. He gripped Dolores desperately, and she made a quick decision. “Get your boots and pants off!” she ordered.

  La Forge didn’t wait to be told twice, because many of the gruesome creatures still clung to his legs. With Dolores’s help, he finally squirmed out of his pants, and she held the infested clothing at arm’s length. With powerful strides, she walked back to his red boulder and beat the pants on the rock until the life-forms went flying. With her bare hands, she carefully wiped off the crushed tentacles and teeth.

  Geordi felt light-headed and probably would have fainted, except that he was freezing to death. His bare knees knocked together as he tried unsuccessfully to cover his thighs with his jacket.

  “Nice legs,” said Dolores with a smile. She tossed him his pants.

  Even though he was cold, Geordi hesitated before putting on the filthy pants. Instead he looked at the mass of life writhing in the mud, grimaced, and asked, “Please don’t tell me you’re going to eat those.”

  “Well, I’m going to cook them first,” she answered. “That’s why I gathered firewood. But I might try them raw, too. Who knows? Someday these things may be considered a great delicacy.”

  Geordi laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. “I wonder what kind of wine goes best with them.”

  Dolores started giggling, too. Geordi figured the sight of a freezing man in the wilderness with no pants, cackling insanely, was funny.

  After their laughter died down, La Forge caught Dolores admiring his legs again. He quickly pulled his pants back on, trying to ignore the glaze of slime all over them.

  She gave him a smile and looked off into the woods. “I have a feeling that food won’t be a problem, but it’s going to get damp and cold at night. We can heat rocks with our phasers for warmth, but that’s only temporary. We need to think about permanent shelter. We might have to phaser down a few of these big trees and hollow them out.”

  The engineer grabbed his boots and walked gingerly to the red boulder, where he found a dry spot to sit. He sighed and gazed up at the moss-covered trees. “I knew we might have to stay here for a while—without help—but I never thought about what it would be like. There won’t be any quick rescue, because every ship in the Federation is occupied.”

  Nodding her head, Dolores sat down beside him. “This is really Genesis all right—it’s like Adam and Eve.”

  “Except this isn’t exactly paradise,” replied Geordi as he poured rancid water from one of his boots.

  She looked frankly at him with wide brown eyes. “It could be.”

  Geordi didn’t feel very romantic, but anyone who had just saved his life deserved a kiss. Their mud-splattered faces came close together, and their lips met in a tentative kiss that probed for some kind of meaning in this madness. Finally Geordi gave in and let himself be swept away by her passion and vitality.

  When their lips finally parted, he gulped and said hoarsely, “Yes, let’s think about getting some shelter.”

  “What can we use?” Dolores rose to her feet and surveyed the dark canopy hanging over their heads. “There is a ton of that moss ... mistletoe, or whatever it is. I wonder if we could press it into building blocks.”

  With his superior hearing, La Forge caught voices in the forest—angry voices, coming closer. “There’s somebody headed our way,” he said, jumping to his feet.

  Dolores grinned. “It’s a good thing you got your pants back on.”

  “Commander La Forge!” came a shout. “Where are you?”

  “Over here!” he called. They kept shouting at one another until a search party of about a dozen people staggered into view. Geordi recognized the Bolian doctor and one or two others who were local dignitaries.

  “Has something happened?” he yelled. “Is the admiral okay?”

  “She’s recovering,” answered the doctor, panting heavily as he made his way toward them. “We just had to talk to you. What are you doing way out here?”

  “Take a look!” said Dolores, pointing proudly at her pile of wriggling food.

  “Oh, my!” the doctor exclaimed, with a grimace of disgust. Several members of his entourage looked away, their blue faces turning a mottled shade of purple.

  “This is what I have to talk to you about,” the doctor grumbled. “We can’t stay out here, living like animals. We want to go to the neighboring village of Quonloa.”

  “Uh, there’s no village left,” replied Geordi.

  “We know that,” said the doctor testily. “But they put the interphase generators inside the sanctuary, so the sanctuary is still standing. At least they have a roof over their heads.”

  “But there’s likely to be sixty thousand people crammed inside one of those places,” Dolores countered. “We can build shelters, if we just fell a few of these big trees and collect some moss—”

  “You do that, and you eat these disgusting animals, if you want. We’re not going to.” There were grumbles of agreement to the doctor’s words, and he went on, “A lot of us feel that things must have gone better at the sanctuary ... in the village.”

  “Things went fine in the riverbed,” said La Forge defensively.

  “You call losing ninety-three people doing fine?” snapped the doctor. “We’ve got nothing in this place—it’s a hopeless wilderness.”

  “The whole planet is like this, or worse,” Dolores said.

  “We’re going to the village!” shouted a woman in the crowd. “You can’t stop us!”

  “I won’t stop you,” Geordi said, with resignation. “I’d advise against it, because we don’t know what’s between here and there. I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of shelter.”

  “Anything has got to be better than this,” the doctor muttered, to more shouts of agreement. “Do you want to come with us?”

  “We can’t,” La Forge answered, “because this is where Starfleet is coming to look for us.”

  The woman cackled derisively. “Do you think Starfleet is coming back for you? They’re too busy trying to save Earth and everywhere else.
We’re on our own.”

  “More reason to stick together,” Dolores said, softly.

  “Which way is the village?” demanded the doctor, cutting to the point of their visit.

  Geordi took his tricorder from his belt and consulted it. “Almost due east from here, about twelve kilometers. If you backtrack to the riverbed, you’ll have to go a bit northeast.”

  “Can we have that tricorder?” the doctor insisted.

  “No, I need it.” La Forge rose to his tiptoes on the red boulder, peering east and looking for a landmark that could guide them.

  “Do you see that big geyser out there?” Geordi asked, pointing to a plume of steam rising over the treetops. “That’s due east from here. Once you get there, I’d say you’re close.”

  The doctor scowled. “All right. You won’t change your minds?”

  “No, but if you meet up with anyone, try to use the combadges, or send a runner back to tell us. Let’s try to keep in contact.”

  “All right,” agreed the doctor, his belligerence softening. “I know you told us this would happen, but ... seeing the destruction ... it’s mind-boggling.”

  “I know,” said Geordi. “I’m sorry. Good luck to you.”

  Chatting among themselves, the party turned and trudged back through the jungle the way they had come. Geordi and Dolores sadly watched them go.

  “Now it really does seem like Adam and Eve,” said Dolores. “Only this must be after they got kicked out of paradise.”

  The engineer nodded solemnly, feeling as if he should have done more to hold them together. But what could he offer them, besides slugs to eat? If Admiral Nechayev were well, maybe she could inspire them to stick together. But probably not. They were determined to see for themselves what was beyond the horizon, even if logic said it was the same foreboding wilderness as this.

  “We’d better get back,” said Geordi. “Let’s fill up the net with as many of these slugs as we can carry.”

  Dolores mustered a wan smile. “We need to find a better name for them if we’re going to convince people to eat them.”