“You do, sir.”
“The idea looks pretty good, at least on paper. It might even pass muster on the Prime Directive front. But in practice, it might not be quite that simple. Even if we managed to blow that artifact to quarks, we’d still have to get away from a half-dozen very fast, very well-armed Gorn vessels, and with no prospect of any Starfleet support for months. Mister Tuvok, what are the odds of Titan’s survival given those circumstances?”
The Vulcan’s grimmer-than-usual demeanor told Troi everything she needed to know. “There are a great many variables and unknowns in such a scenario, Captain, not the least of which is the possibility of the imminent arrival of Gorn reinforcements. However, I would estimate our long-term survival odds to be less than five percent. Should Gorn reinforcements come into play, I would revise those odds downward precipitously.”
Vale slapped her hands onto the tabletop in frustration. “So what do we do? Just sit up here, hiding in the weeds, watching?”
Will started to reply when Ensign Dakal’s voice interrupted him from his combadge. “Captain, our probes and long-range sensors have picked up something strange. The energy signature inside the terraforming platform is . . . fluctuating.”
Will nodded to Vale, who grabbed up her padd and began keying in the commands necessary to synchronize the holographic display with Dakal’s new incoming data. “Good eye, Ensign,” Will told Dakal. “We’re watching it in here.”
The holographic image being projected across the observation window rippled momentarily as the data being gathered remotely from Vela OB2–404’s distant second planet began to refresh. Troi realized only then that she was holding her breath, expecting the next image she saw to be that of a lethal energy-beam of some sort tearing a swath of destruction across the planet’s unprotected blue-green surface.
Instead the image settled down to reveal a bizarre mottled light-show encircling the alien artifact. The brilliance intensified, prompting Troi and others to raise their hands to protect their eyes even as the emergency illumination dampers cut in to ensure that no one was blinded. Spots swam before her eyes momentarily.
When they cleared, the alien artifact merely continued tumbling in its orbit, its pitted gray skin appearing as cold and dead as the surface of a multi-billion-year-old comet.
“What the hell just happened?” Will said, breaking the room’s stunned silence.
“The device appears to have malfunctioned, Captain,” Tuvok said, using a padd to consult his tactical station remotely.
Will stood, signaling that the meeting was at an end. “Has the planet been affected in any way?”
“Evidently not,” said Tuvok, also getting to his feet, as was everyone else, with the exception of Pazlar, who hovered about half a meter above the carpet. “I suspect that the Gorn have just experienced an unanticipated technical failure of some kind.”
Will nodded his acknowledgment. Addressing the room, he said, “I want a full analysis and report within the hour, people. Let’s get to it.” He remained standing at the head of the conference table, as did Troi, until the last of the other senior officers had finished filing out of the room.
“I believe I already have a preliminary report for you, Captain,” Troi said, trying to lighten his confused, frazzled mood by speaking with mock-officiousness.
He favored her with a small smile. “Go ahead, Commander.”
She stepped toward him so that the new imagery from Vela OB2–404 II framed them both. Since they were alone in the room, she took the liberty of taking both his hands in hers. “I think the universe may have just granted you another one of those proverbial nick-of-time rabbits.”
6
GORN HEGEMONY RECONNAISSANCE VESSEL SSEVARRH
The “mysterious breakdown” of the ecosculptor threw tech-casters and war-casters into near identical flurries of panic throughout the Ssevarrh, and probably aboard the other ships in the flotilla as well. As S’syrixx had expected, his fellow technologists overcame the initial chaos first and began applying analytical thinking to the problem.
What he didn’t expect was the voice that roared at him less than a mealtime later as he traversed the corridor that took him to the door to his quarters. Though he cowered instinctively, S’syrixx turned toward the sound even as his door slid open.
Out of his peripheral vision, S’syrixx could see through the irised-open hatchway that his personal work desk lay upended, his data terminal broken and smashed. Tools, clothing, padds, and data flimsies were strewn about the floor. Obviously, the captain had searched his quarters while he had been working elsewhere.
“Do you really believe members of the warrior caste to be stupid?” Captain Krassrr bellowed, flecks of cold spittle spraying from the scaly corners of his mouth. The countless facets of his metallic silver eyes appeared icier than Gornar’s most frigid northern glacier. “Did you believe that your crime would not be traced back to you?”
“Crime, Captain?” S’syrixx said, his voice a weak croak as he vainly strove to keep his trembling under control.
Krassrr continued as though S’syrixx hadn’t spoken. “I am told that yours was the only personal data terminal that was speaking with the ecosculptor at the time the tampering must have occurred. Your claws may as well be adrip with Gorn warrior blood.” A quartet of highly intimidating armed enforcers suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere, converging on S’syrixx from two directions.
S’Yahazah does indeed answer our prayers, S’syrixx thought as he stared down at his footclaws, his posture a motley mix of shame and defiance. And sometimes her only answer is a resounding “no.”
“I was merely acting to prevent the shedding of blood,” S’syrixx heard someone say before belatedly realizing that he had been the speaker. “And our shaming in the eternal eyes of the Egg Bringer S’Yahazah.”
The war-caster’s claws grabbed the body harness in which S’syrixx kept his various scientific tools and hoisted him clear off the deck. S’syrixx gasped as his footclaws sliced helplessly, out of contact with anything.
“You have committed an unconscionable act of sabotage!” Krassrr said in a voice like an avalanche. “You may have doomed my caste to extinction—and with us, the entire Hegemony!”
Despite his rising feelings of panic, S’syrixx found a split second to wonder why any of the non-warrior castes—the labor caste, say—couldn’t adapt itself to the purpose of defending the Hegemony and take the war-casters’ place. But there was nothing to be gained from giving voice to any such thought; nothing he could say was likely to calm Krassrr down.
“Extinguishing an entire civilization,” S’syrixx said tremulously, “is a deed unworthy of your caste.”
“The warrior caste does whatever is necessary,” Krassrr said. “Starting with meting out the wages of treason.” With that, he slammed S’syrixx to the deck hard enough to force the air from his lungs. The technologist gasped again and howled in pain as the deck plating scored the scales on his knees and elbows. He noted wryly that now blood really was on his claws, dripping from a laceration on his right forearm.
“Take him,” said Krassrr, then turned away in disgust.
The armed troopers hustled S’syrixx back to a standing position and used the barrels of their pulse rifles to prod him forward down the corridor and into one of the radial passages that led toward the outer hull. The procession took on a bizarre sense of unreality, as if it were occurring in a dream.
They marched him to an inner airlock door, which obediently opened for one of the troopers.
No!
“Get in, traitor,” said the nearest soldier, a nasty fellow whose distinguishing characteristic was the broad swatch of burn-scarred scales that ran diagonally across his blunt face.
S’syrixx spread both manus before him in what he hoped was a beneficent let-us-reason-together gesture. “Let’s not do this thing in haste. I should be entitled to due process.”
“You’ve had your ‘due process,’” said the trooper t
hat S’syrixx was coming to think of as Scarface. “Captain Krassrr has found you guilty of treason. And treason is punishable by death.” He raised his rifle and adjusted something on its stock so that it made a menacing clack. “Now get in the airlock, or I will shoot you dead.”
Moving at the same dreamlike pace he had taken during the long march from his quarters, S’syrixx meekly did as he was bid. He stepped into the small, iris-hatched chamber, noting that the trooper who had his hand on the wall-mounted control pad was oozing drool onto the deck. Bloodthirsty bastards, he thought. The warriors just live for this sort of thing. S’Yahazah help me, but the Hegemony would be better off without them.
The door irised shut behind him, leaving another similar door—also closed for the moment—as his only protection from dying in the airless cold of space. Through the talk box on the inner airlock wall, he could hear the warriors laughing and growling in anticipation of their imminent entertainment.
But he also heard something else: a familiar voice. “Stop this!”
R’rerrgran! He’s trying to rescue me!
“Don’t interfere, physician,” S’syrixx heard one of the warriors scoff. “Unless, of course, you’d like to suck space with your friend.”
Through the inner airlock door’s narrow crysmetal window, S’syrixx could see R’rerrgran making pleading gestures. Unfortunately, whatever any of them might be saying had evidently grown too indistinct for the comm to pick up. S’syrixx couldn’t tell whether R’rerrgran was making any headway in pleading for his life, but he had to regard the still-closed outer airlock door as a good sign.
Good work, R’rerrgran, S’syrixx thought with no small amount of gratitude. R’rerrgran was the physician who had cleared him and Z’shezhira for reproductive bonding; R’rerrgran would never abandon him.
An eternity later, the inner door hissed open again. Scarface leaned into the chamber and roughly dragged S’syrixx back into the corridor.
“You’ve been granted a temporary reprieve,” the warrior snarled. “Thanks to a point your doctor friend raised.”
“Sorry to disappoint you and your friends,” S’syrixx said as he wiped the blood from his lacerated foreclaw onto his tunic.
Scarface leaned toward S’syrixx, invading his space in the warrior caste’s uniquely intimidating manner. “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll all be back here before the end of my shift—once we finish interrogating you for the identities of your secret confederates.”
GORN HEGEMONY WARSHIP S’ALATH
On the command deck, Gog’resssh leaned once again across the sensor console with that almost-amorous warrior swagger that Z’shezhira found so distasteful. She remained seated at her station, sitting rigidly at attention and determined not to give offense through her body language. There was certainly nothing to be gained by going out of her way to antagonize the war-caster leader—just as there was nothing to be gained by revealing everything she had just discovered.
She could only hope that the ambient fear-chemicals that had proliferated among the conquered tech-caster crew ever since Gog’resssh had taken charge would work to keep her own interior emotional state obscure—along with her long-term plans to be rid of the mad warrior and his henchmen.
“What in the name of S’Yahazah’s nether regions are they doing?” Gog’resssh wanted to know.
He was referring, of course, to the six Gorn recon vessels that had lately taken such an intense interest in the inhabited planet known in the astrometrics database by its native name of Hranrar. The small recon fleet’s commander had evidently felt territorial enough about Hranrar to intimidate a Sst’rfleet vessel—allegedly an exploration ship with no military agenda—into fleeing the system.
Z’shezhira had been almost unable to contain the relief she felt after she’d persuaded Gog’resssh and Zegrroz’rh not to continue pursuing the retreating Federrazsh’n ship, at least for the moment, in favor of secretly monitoring the Gorn flotilla’s activities over the system’s second planet. Whether this was because they feared the vessel that had played such a pivotal role in the defeat of the machine-mammals, or because they were genuinely curious about what their conspecifics were doing on Hranrar, she neither knew nor cared; she was simply grateful to have been allowed such relatively close proximity to ordinary Gorn ships of the line, albeit only as a surreptitious presence watching them from the system’s edge.
“I’ve already had several passive-scanner probes sent out to try to determine why the recon fleet has come here,” she told Gog’resssh. That all but undetectable chain of small remote-sensing drones and outbound signal relays had told her a great deal about the flotilla of Gorn vessels, right down to the names painted on their hulls.
She’d felt a poignant mixture of joy and unrequited longing when she first saw the recon vessel Ssevarrh among those names.
Gog’resssh leaned unfortunately close to her, prompting her to notice that his breath stank of something that had been killed far too long before he had finally consumed it. “I hope you have kept your probes at a . . . discreet distance from those vessels. I would hate to misinterpret your commendable sense of scientific curiosity as an attempt to alert the recon fleet to our presence.” As if to prove a point, he reached for one of the switches on her console—he probably hadn’t bothered to make note of what it did—and snapped it into pieces.
Wonderful, she thought. She wondered how long it would be before the quartermaster and the engineers could no longer accommodate her requests for spare parts—component replacements that First Myrmidon Gog’resssh’s ever-more-frequent demonstrations continued to make necessary on nearly a daily basis.
How delightful it would be indeed to be rescued from this increasingly unstable war-caster, not to mention his lieutenant, Second Myrmidon Zegrroz’rh, whom she noted was once again leering at her from an engineering station whose workings he almost certainly did not comprehend. But as much as she would relish any opportunity to get away, Z’shezhira was pragmatic enough to understand the odds against the prospect, particularly with the S’alath so well hidden at the moment among the boundless population of icy bodies that made up this system’s periphery—and with Gog’resssh so obviously paranoid, so primed and prone to kill her at the first sign of treachery.
She breathed a silent prayer of thanks to Fertile S’Yahazah that no war-caster had ever been known to possess any telepathic abilities.
“We all saw those recon vessels towing that strange metal object in from outsystem, First Myrmidon,” she said, “and settling it into orbit around this system’s second planet. And they seem to have tried repeatedly to activate some sort of inner mechanism ever since. I’m not sure, but one of the power spikes the sensors picked up makes me think they may have nearly overloaded and detonated the entire thing a little earlier this very dayturn.”
“So what do you believe it all adds up to?” Gog’resssh asked, his cavernous, scale-covered brow ridges folding in a rare approximation of real curiosity. Of course, his concerns were almost certainly strategic rather than scientific.
She debated for a moment how much she should tell him. What action on his part might her most tentative conclusions precipitate?
“Were I to speculate,” Z’shezhira said at length, “I’d say that the recon fleet believes it has found one of the ancient technological artifacts that was responsible—eons ago—for altering so many of the planetary environments throughout this sector. They must be trying to use it to remold one of these worlds yet again.”
“Why?” he said. His breath stank of rotting meat. Though she was thoroughly carnivorean herself, the odor was nearly enough to turn her into a dedicated leaf-eater—to say nothing of making her consider staying away from males entirely.
“I think they believe they’ve found a potent machine from out of the Hegemony’s prehistory,” she said. “A . . . planet maker of sorts. Perhaps even a device that might enable them to re-create Sazssgrerrn, and restore generational security to your caste.”
“It is a weapon,” he said. “A weapon like no other.”
“I suppose,” Z’shezhira said, increasingly uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. “But if this . . . artifact really can do what the fleet evidently thinks it can do, its best application would be to restore your caste’s lost hatchery world. Would it not?”
He paused, as though weighing the possibilities. She dared to allow herself to hope that he might actually be listening to her.
Then Second Myrmidon Zegrroz’rh left the helm console and approached Z’shezhira’s station. He showed an unnerving number of his knife-sharp teeth. Addressing Gog’resssh, he said, “That can wait until we have used the device to give the other castes a taste of the loss ours has suffered.”
Whatever hope Z’shezhira had that reason might prevail abruptly evaporated. “Yesssss,” said Gog’resssh.
Apparently relishing having captured his superior’s imagination, Zegrroz’rh continued. “Long have the other castes envied us our strength. Our resolve.”
Gog’resssh nodded. “Yesss.”
“Now we will give them further cause to envy us. We will be the heralds of an entirely new, divinely-ordained incarnation of the warrior caste.”
Gog’resssh seemed close to reaching the same fever pitch that Zegrroz’rh had. “A warrior caste that will never shirk its duty in the eyes of fate, the universe, and Great S’Yahazah herself.”
“A warrior caste that will rule all the other castes, rather than the other way around,” Zegrroz’rh said.
Zegrroz’rh’s one good eye shone with a light that Z’shezhira had seen before only in the orbs of those dying of severe radiation poisoning or some other wasting disease. Given the intense rad exposure these warriors had experienced during Sazssgrerrn’s destruction, she wondered if that was the inevitable direction their mutual madness—a progressive insanity that neither warrior seemed to notice at all—would lead them.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire Page 9