“Listen,” he told the others, “I may be on to something. I was studying the Oreias Seven colony back on the Yellowjacket a little while ago, and I noticed there were two hills at the edge of the colony.”
“Wait a minute . . .” said Shumar. “There were two hills outside the Oreias Five colony as well.”
“I’m aware of that,” Matsura replied. “I got the information from your first officer a few moments ago.”
“Two hills,” Stiles repeated quizzically. “And that means something?”
“It sure as hell might,” said Shumar.
“So what did you see when you went to examine the terrain for yourself?” asked Cobaryn.
“I’m not sure,” said Matsura.
Zipping open the front of his uniform, he delved into an interior pocket and pulled out a handful of what he had found. They were fragments of something, each piece rounded, amber-colored, and brittle.
“I did some digging with my laser,” Matsura told the others, “and this is what I came up with. The hill was full of it.”
Cobaryn held his hand out. “May I?”
Matsura deposited his discovery in the Rigelian’s silver-skinned palm. Then he watched Cobaryn’s ruby eyes glitter with curiosity as he held the material up to the light.
“Any idea what it is?” asked Shumar.
Cobaryn made a face. “I wish I did.”
Shumar turned to their host. “Can we bring up a scanner?”
“Absolutely,” said Hagedorn.
Before two minutes had elapsed, one of the Horatio’ s security officers produced the device Shumar had requested. Shumar hefted it, pointed its business end at the stuff in Cobaryn’s palm, and then activated it.
“What is it?” asked Matsura.
Shumar checked the scanner’s readout. “It’s organic.” His brow creased. “A polysaccharide—one that we found in great abundance in the hardest hit area on Oreias Five.”
The Rigelian’s eyes lit up. “Of course. I recall Crewman Milosovich telling me about it.”
“And now we’ve found it at both Oreias Five and Oreias Seven,” Shumar observed. “The same two colonies the aliens went after.”
“So we have a pattern,” said Matsura.
“So it would seem,” Cobaryn responded.
“Though it’s one we don’t understand yet,” Hagedorn pointed out.
“True,” Shumar conceded. “But if one of the other colonies is near a couple of hills, and the hills happen to have this stuff inside them, there’s a good chance that colony will be a target soon.”
Stiles scowled. “And if it is? You think we ought to sit in orbit and wait for an attack?”
Shumar shook his head. “No, because the aliens might go back to Oreias Five. Or Oreias Seven, for that matter.”
“So what should we do?” asked Dane, who, in Matsura’s memory, had never posed so earnest a question before.
“We use our five good ships to hunt the aliens down,” said Shumar, “just as Captain Stiles proposed. That’s the best approach to keeping all the colonies from harm.”
“But at the same time,” Matsura added, “Captain Shumar and I pursue our hill theory...and see if we can figure out why the aliens decided to attack Earth colonies in the first place.”
Cobaryn smiled. “A reasonable strategy.”
Hagedorn regarded Matsura. “You’re certain about this? I could always use an experienced hand on my bridge.”
“Same here,” said Stiles.
Clearly, thought Matsura, they didn’t think his services would prove critical to the research effort. Still, he shook his head. “Thanks,” he told his former wingmates, “but you’ll do fine without me.”
Hagedorn seemed to accept Matsura’s decision. “Suit yourself. We’ll hook up with you when we get back.”
“After we’ve plucked the aliens’ tailfeathers,” Stiles chipped in.
But Matsura had engaged the triangular ships, and he knew it wouldn’t be as easy as Stiles was making it out to be. Not by half.
“Good luck,” said Matsura.
It was only inwardly that he added, You’ll need it.
Alexander Kapono had been overseeing the spring planting on Oreias Eight when he was called in from the fields.
As he opened the curved door to the administrative dome, he felt a breath of cool air dry the perspiration on his face. It was a welcome relief after the heat of the day.
“What is it?” he asked Chung, one of his tech specialists.
Chung was sitting on the opposite side of the dome behind his compact communications console, a smaller version of the one used on the bridges of Earth Command vessels. “You’ve got a message from Starfleet.”
“Captain Dane?” asked Kapono.
Dane had said he would be in touch when they figured out what had prompted the attack on Oreias Five. However, the administrator hadn’t expected to hear from the captain so soon.
The technician shook his head. “It’s from a Captain Matsura. He says he’s on his way to take a look around.”
“Doesn’t he know Dane did that already?”
“He says he wants to visit anyway.”
The administrator grunted. “I guess he thinks he’s going to find something that Dane missed.”
Chung chuckled. “I guess.”
To Kapono’s knowledge, Earth Command captains had never worked this way. It made him wonder if Dane, Matsura, or anyone else in Starfleet had the slightest idea of what he was doing.
Cobaryn peered over his navigator’s shoulder at a pattern of tiny red dots on an otherwise black screen. “Are you certain?”
“As certain as I can be, sir,” said Locklear, a man with dark hair and blunt features who had navigated an Earth Command vessel during the war. “This is almost identical to the ion concentration that led the Horatio and the Gibraltar to the aliens.”
The captain considered the red dots. They seemed so innocent, so abstract. However, if Locklear was right, they would steer the Cheyenne and all her sister ships into a clash as real as flesh and blood.
“Contact the other ships,” Cobaryn told his navigator. He returned to his center seat and sat down. “Let them know what we have discovered.”
“Aye, sir,” came the response.
The fleet had spread out as much as possible to increase its chances of picking up the enemy’s trail. However, it would only take a few seconds for the Cheyenne’ s comm equipment to span those distances.
“They’re responding,” said Locklear. “The Horatio is transmitting a set of convergence coordinates.”
During the Romulan War, Hagedorn had led Earth Command’s top Christopher squadron—the one that had secured the pivotal victory at the planet Cheron. It made sense for Cobaryn to defer to him in tactical matters. Anything else would have been the height of arrogance.
“Chart a course,” the Rigelian told his navigator.
“Charting,” said Locklear.
“Best speed, Mr. Emick.”
“Best speed, sir,” his helmsman returned.
Cobaryn sat back in his chair and regarded his viewscreen, where he could see the stars shift slightly to port. They were on their way to a meeting with their sister ships.
And after that, if all went well, they would attend a different kind of meeting...along with their mysterious adversaries.
Bryce Shumar wiped some sweat from his sunburned brow and considered the hole he was standing in—a ten-foot-deep burrow that descended into the heart of a tree-covered mound of red dirt.
Oreias Eight’s sun was a crimson ball of flame, its sky a vast blue oven. The colonists who had come to watch Shumar work—a collection of children and their caregivers, for the most part—didn’t seem to mind the relentless heat so much.
But then, they had had a few months to get used to it. The captain had been on the planet’s surface less than half an hour.
Training his laser pistol at the unusually thick tree root at his feet, he pressed the trigger. The
resultant shaft of blue energy pulverized the root and dug past it into the rocky red ground below.
“Why don’t I take over for a while?” asked Matsura, who was sitting on a grimy shelf of rock at the level of Shumar’s shoulders.
The former Earth base commander cast a glance at him. It was true that his wrist was getting tired from the backlash of all his laser use. However, he hated to admit that he was in any way less physically capable than Matsura, who was a good several years his junior.
“I’m fine so far,” said Shumar.
“You sure?” asked Matsura.
“Quite sure,” the older man told him. Setting his jaw against the discomfort in his arm, he continued his task.
Suddenly, the ground seemed to collapse beneath the onslaught of his laser beam and Shumar felt his feet slide out from under him. Before he knew it, he was sitting in a drift of loose red soil. . . .
With something hard and amber-colored mixed into it.
“Hey!” cried Matsura, dropping down from his perch to land on a ledge of dirt that was still intact. “Are you all right?”
Shumar took stock of his situation. “I’m fine,” he concluded, though not without a hint of embarrassment.
The younger man reached down and picked up a molded piece of amber-colored material about a third of a meter long. “Look at this,” he said.
Shumar’s eyes narrowed as he considered the object. It was the substance they had been excavating for, but in aggregate form.
“Same stuff?” asked Matsura.
“Looks like it,” Shumar told him.
He poked through the dirt with his fingers and dug out another fragment. This one had a molded look to it as well, and it was even bigger than the first piece. As he brushed it off, he came to a conclusion.
“It’s part of a shell,” he said.
“How do you know?” the other man asked him.
“It’s too regular to be a random accretion,” Shumar pointed out. “And it’s not strong enough to be part of an internal skeleton.”
Matsura nodded. “So how do you think it got in here?”
Shumar frowned. “Good question.”
“If the shell belonged to an animal,” the younger man speculated, “the thing could have burrowed in here and died.”
“But, remember,” said Shumar, “we found evidence of similar remains in and around all those other mounds. So burrowing would have to have been an instinctive behavior for this animal.”
“And it would have to have been in existence on Oreias Five and Oreias Seven as well.”
Shumar nodded. “Which means it was transported here by an intelligent, spacefaring civilization.”
Matsura looked thoughtful. “For what purpose?”
For what purpose indeed? Shumar asked himself.
He turned the piece of shell over in his hands, watching it gleam with reflected sunlight . . .and an alternative occurred to him. “On the other hand,” he muttered, “maybe it wasn’t an animal at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Matsura.
But Shumar barely heard the man’s question. He was still thinking, still following the logic of his assumption. Before he knew it, the mystery of the Oreias system had begun to unravel right before his eyes.
“Are you all right?” Matsura prodded, concern evident in his face.
“I’ve never been better,” said Shumar. He turned to his colleague, his heart beating hard in his chest. “Have you ever heard of Underwood’s Theory of Parallel Development?”
Matsura shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“It encourages us to assume, in the absence of information to the contrary, that species develop along similar lines. In other words, if an alien has a mouth, it’s likely he’s also developed something along the lines of a table fork—even if his mouth doesn’t look anything like your own.”
“And if you find buried shells...?” asked Matsura.
“Then you have to ask yourself why you might have buried them—or more to the point, why you might have buried anything.”
Suddenly, understanding dawned in the younger man’s face. “Then that’s it?” he asked. “That’s the answer?”
Shumar smiled, basking in the glow of his discovery. “I’d bet my starship on it.”
In fact, that was exactly what he would be doing.
Aaron Stiles shifted in his center seat. “Anything on scanners yet?” he inquired of his navigator.
Rosten shook her head. “Nothing yet, sir.”
The captain frowned. It had been clear from the increasing integrity of the ion trail they had been following that the enemy wasn’t far off. It could be only a matter of minutes before they picked up the triangular ships and got a handle on the odds against them.
Not that it mattered to Stiles how many aliens he had to fight. This time, there was no retreat. One way or the other, he and his comrades were going to put a stop to the attacks.
“Sir?” said Rosten.
The captain glanced at her. “You have them?”
“Aye, sir,” his navigator assured him.
Stiles got up from his seat and went to stand by Rosten’s console. Studying it, he could see a series of red blips on the otherwise black screen. He counted six of them.
Good odds, he thought. Excellent odds.
He returned to his seat and tapped the communications stud on his armrest. “Stiles to Hagedorn.”
The captain of the Horatio responded a moment later. “I know,” he said over their radio link. “We just noticed them. I’ll contact the others.”
“Bull’s-eye formation?”
There was a pause on the other end. “You know me too well, Captain. Bull’s-eye it is. Hagedorn out.”
Stiles smiled grimly to himself, then turned to his weapons officer. “Power to all batteries, Mr. Weeks.”
“Power to all batteries,” Weeks confirmed.
“Maintain speed,” the captain told his helm officer.
Urbina checked her instruments. “Full impulse.”
Darigghi came over to stand by Stiles’s side. “It would appear a confrontation is imminent,” he observed.
The captain resisted the temptation to deliver a sarcastic comeback. “It would appear that way.”
“I realize I was not very helpful in our last clash with the aliens,” the Osadjani went on. “If there is something more I can do this time, please let me know.”
Stiles looked up at Darigghi. It wasn’t at all the kind of statement he had expected from his first officer.
“I’ll do that,” the captain assured him.
Darigghi nodded. “Thank you.”
Stiles leaned back in his chair. Maybe a leopard could change its spots after all.
“Navigation,” he said, “any sign that we’ve been spotted?”
“None, sir,” Rosten replied. “It’ll be—”
The captain waited a moment for his navigator to finish her sentence. When she didn’t, he turned to her—and saw that she was focused on her monitor, her brow puckered in concentration.
“Lieutenant?” he prompted.
Rosten looked up at him. “Sir,” she said, “I’ve received a message from Captain Shumar and Captain Matsura. They’re asking all of us to return to Oreias Eight.”
Stiles felt a spurt of anger. “Are they out of their minds? We’re on the brink of a battle here!”
His navigator’s cheeks flushed. “Yes, sir.”
The captain hadn’t meant to chew her out. It wasn’t her fault that Shumar and Matsura had gone insane.
“Sorry,” he told Rosten. “I should know better than to shoot the messenger.”
The woman managed a smile. “No problem, sir.”
“Why are we being recalled?” asked Darigghi.
Rosten shrugged. “They say they’ve discovered something that makes it unnecessary to confront the aliens.”
His teeth grinding angrily, the captain opened a channel to the Horatio again. “This is Stiles,” he sna
pped. “Did you receive a message from Shumar and Matsura?”
“I did,” Hagedorn confirmed.
“And what do you think?”
“I think we’ve worked hard to track the aliens down. I also think we’ve got an opportunity here to end their activity in this system.”
“Then we’re on the same page.”
He had barely gotten the words out when another voice broke into their radio link. “This is Captain Cobaryn.”
Stiles rolled his eyes. “Go ahead,” he said.
“I cannot imagine that the recommendation we received sits well with you. After all, we are close to engaging the enemy.”
“Damned right,” Stiles replied.
“Nonetheless,” said the Rigelian, “I trust our colleagues’ judgment. I do not believe they would have sent such a message unless the value of their discovery was overwhelming.”
“Same here,” a fourth voice chimed in.
Stiles recognized the voice as Dane’s. It was just like the Cochrane jockey not to follow protocol and introduce himself.
“Ever heard the one about the bird in the hand?” Stiles asked. “Right now, we’ve got the aliens where we want them. We may never get another shot like this one.”
“This isn’t just Shumar talking,” Dane reminded them. “It’s Matsura, too. He knows how you feel about stamping the aliens out.”
“And despite that,” said Cobaryn, “he is asking us to turn around.”
Try as he might, Stiles couldn’t ignore the truth of that. If it had just been Shumar trying to rein them in, he wouldn’t even have considered complying. But Matsura had an Earth Command officer’s mentality.
For a moment, no one responded, the only sound on their comm link that of radio buzz. Then Hagedorn spoke up.
“I hate to say this,” he said in a thoughtful, measured voice, “but it sounds like we don’t have much of a choice in the matter. If there’s a chance to avoid bloodshed, we’ve got to take it.”
Stiles felt his stomach muscles clench. They were on the verge of completing their mission, for crying out loud. They were this close to showing the aliens that Starfleet wasn’t an organization to be taken lightly.
But he couldn’t argue with Hagedorn’s logic. Even in war, one had to seize the bloodless option if it became available.
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