STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  “I had to hope that I was right about its vision. In light of what happened, I believe that it relied primarily on its other senses, especially the ‘tricorder’ sense, until it got close.”

  “Rigging that tricorder was a nice piece of work, Reg,” Geordi said from the other end of the table. “But timing all three phasers to overload at just the right moment. That’s tricky to do.”

  Reg blushed.

  “That thing had kept almost a constant speed, so I could calculate how much time I had. I just added a few extra seconds and prayed it didn’t slow down.”

  He said nothing about how the concussion had nearly knocked him out under the water. There was a moment of silence as the others considered what he had said. He had also left out any reference in his report to Cytherians or [120] spiders. Maybe later after he’d had time to sort things out. Data had already told him about the Vorel and that the Hawking had been shot down by missiles, part of an ancient, atmospheric defense system. Ironically, if the biologists had not beamed down, they might have been warned. But something still nagged at him.

  “Sir, was that creature a Vorel?”

  Picard stirred from his thoughts and spun his chair toward Reg-

  “Not exactly, but I think I will defer to Ensign Ro. She and Commander Data have spent the last few hours analyzing what we know. And I must add that if not for her initiative, the Enterprise would not have returned in time.”

  For the first time in his experience, Reg saw Ro Laren turn a bright crimson.

  “Commander Data and I have concluded that before the Vorel left here, they set a trap. Thousands of these creatures—Tovang, the Bajorans called them—were hidden below ground, probably shielded against detection. In any case, their lifesigns would have been faint inside the hibernation tanks we found. It appears the Vorel didn’t even risk giving them energy weapons. We believe they were warrior-class Vorel, specially bred and modified for one purpose only—to sense and destroy humanoid life-forms.

  “When the trap closed, so many Bajorans died that my people abandoned the place. The surviving Tovang probably returned to the vats and slowly died out until only this one remained. When the shuttle first touched the atmosphere, the Vorel’s defense system must have been alerted and awakened the creature.

  Reg nodded but could think of nothing to say. He had [121] played out the last acts in a war two thousand years old. It was a sad thought. He could see by something in Ro Laren’s eyes, so often hard and determined, that she felt it too.

  Later, in Ten-Forward he saw her drinking alone and sat down across the table from her. She wore the same sober expression as she had in the ready room.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Reg said.

  She gave a faint smile.

  “You’re the real hero of the day. You saved Carter and Ying.”

  Reg shook his head. “No, we both did.”

  Ro shrugged and took another sip of what looked like Aldebaran whiskey. “We haven’t learned much in two thousand years, have we?” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re still slaughtering each other.”

  Reg studied her face. He knew that Ro Laren had been raised in the Bajoran refugee camps. He’d always thought of her as a survivor—tough and resilient, even fierce. Nothing like Reg Barclay at all. But now he saw someone else as well. Someone who could be lonely, who was no stranger to tears. Someone familiar. Of course, maybe he had become just a little bit more like her. Perhaps that naked warrior was still inside somewhere just waiting for another chance to emerge. It didn’t matter.

  “I suppose you’re right. But if we haven’t made any progress and realize it, then that’s progress, isn’t it? At least if we keep trying?”

  He thought he heard just the spark of a laugh escape from her throat only to drown in the whiskey. But she was [122] looking at him now—appraising, he would have said. Odd, he wasn’t even blushing.

  “You know, I haven’t been to the arboretum for weeks,” he said. “They say there are some wonderful new species of flowers blooming in there. Very beautiful, I hear. Would you like to go take a look?”

  Something softened in Ro Laren’s gaze, and her lips curved into a real smile.

  “Yes, I’d like that, Reg. I’d like that very much.”

  The First

  Peg Robinson

  The shuttlebay was large. Not as large as that of Enterprise-D—but large enough. Picard acknowledged the guard standing duty with a nod and a tight smile and passed into the cavernous space, doors swishing shut behind him.

  The room’s one inhabitant didn’t notice him. Not surprising. She was halfway down the bay, lying on the top of her little, primitive ship, hanging almost upside down into the open entry hatch. Her gray ponytail hung down, tied with a bright scarf. The distance, her preoccupation, the pulse that no doubt beat in her ears as she dangled there—all or any of them were enough to keep her from noticing the whoosh of air and well-lubricated machinery. Picard was just as glad. He wanted these few moments to watch her, appreciate her, before ...

  Before he had to destroy her.

  She was the first. While she would almost certainly not be the last, she would be the last for a very, very long time if he succeeded in doing what law and logic dictated. While his sense of duty was at ease with this, his heart was not.

  Jean-Luc Picard was a quiet man, and he grieved quietly. But he did grieve.

  [124] It was such a fragile ship—as fragile as any newborn thing. So clumsy. Such a little miracle. He longed to touch it, as he had savored the pleasure of touching the ship Zefram Cochrane and Lily had created together. He was half in love with the thing; and for the same reason.

  The woman dropped a microspanner and cursed in her own language. The universal translator tactfully left the words in the original, but the delivery made the intent clear. She hung there, arms dangling, hair flopping, and heaved a mighty sigh. “Blast, blast, blast it all to the Wexery and back.” She began to shimmy back up onto the roof.

  “Stay there. I’ll get it for you.” Picard stepped quietly across the flooring, boots clicking lightly, leaned over, and retrieved the tool from the threshold of the hatchway. He handed it up to the woman, who looked down at him, her russet face split with a good-natured grin. “You should be more careful. You could spend a good deal of time going up and down, if you drop your tools like that very often.”

  “Going up and down is the whole point, Captain Picard. Why I bothered in the first place. You didn’t think I designed this thing just to be careful, did you?” She chuckled. “Give me a moment and I’ll come down ... or you can come up, if you like.”

  Her race called themselves the Shadrasi. He thought they might be a handsome people, but it was hard to tell from her alone, and she was the first he’d ever seen. She wasn’t young—no more so than he, and she had a solid, blocky build, and plenty of sags. There were crow’s-feet marking her dark skin and underlining the ridges that arched over her brows, giving her a permanent look of surprise on a homely, humorous face. The wrinkles around her mouth made [125] cheerful brackets. Laugh lines, Picard thought. On me they’re just wrinkles. On her they’re laugh lines. I wish ... He didn’t allow himself to complete the thought. He could not afford to envy this woman as she was—or pity her as she would be. He smiled.

  “Thank you for the offer, I’d like that.” He paused, admiring the vessel. “Our engineers are still quite excited about the drive on this ship. It is quite unlike our own warp drives, yet appears to have potential to be just as efficient, given some refinement. A direction of development we never even imagined. Even in prototype it’s impressive. I’d enjoy a chance to work on her—if you don’t mind, Madame-emissary Conta Goalitz-romas azua Trobinda.”

  “ ‘Werta.’ I told you before. Just ‘Werta.’ The rest is stuffy formality. Good for impressing the peasantry, if you enjoy that sort of thing ... but I never have. So let’s stick to ‘Werta,’ and be comfortable.” She reached down a square, har
d hand to help him up the ladder welded to the side of her ship. “I don’t have a lot of patience with formality. And your help is welcome. Your precious engineers keep acting like it’s a diplomatic dilemma just loaning me a welding laser. It’s almost as bad as it was back home, without the advantage of being able to throw my noble lineage around when I want some cooperation.”

  Picard slipped up onto the metal roof, feeling the flex of the skin under his weight. The hull was stripped down to as thin a layer as possible to keep down the weight while still holding the vacuum at bay, and holding strong against the strains of use.

  The woman had shown absolute brilliance in her design choices, from the conception of the drive to the precise and [126] delicate balance of the thousands of elements that made up the hull and the interior. The result, to Picard, seemed just short of supernaturally perfect. So slight a ship: so great an accomplishment. He sat beside the woman who had birthed the miracle. “I’m sure you know how bureaucracies are, er, ‘Werta.’ ” He brushed a hand over an open access panel, and cursed himself for his own reserve, and his reluctance to do what had to be done. He steeled himself. “I’m afraid allowing you access to our technology is something of a diplomatic dilemma.”

  He looked up and met eyes as firm in their purple gaze as his own gray ones. This woman was not naive. Her mouth turned up, ever so slightly. “I see. I thought maybe ...” She looked down, then looked up again from under her lashes. “It struck me at the time that emerging from the transit field into the middle of a battle might create certain complexities. Your people are at war, aren’t they?”

  Picard didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It had been a momentous occasion.

  They had been ten minutes into an attack by Jem’Hadar ships, Enterprise-E, just barely holding its own; and in the middle of the phaser fire and the flaring shields, there was a burst of light—and there between all the combatants was a tiny little ship. He supposed he should thank Werta for her serendipitous timing: The Jem’Hadar moved to attack her as a dangerous unknown. The slight confusion that had followed had given Picard and his crew the time they needed to complete an attack pattern. They’d won, and they very well might not have. And Werta’s ship had only been slightly damaged. But ...

  When they’d pulled the ship in with their tractor beams [127] they’d also pulled in an ethical problem. The kind of command decision Picard hated. The exigencies of the Prime Directive, and the demands of expedience, were hard to balance against his own sense of justice.

  He looked away from her and patted the metal roof. “I don’t think I ever asked: Does she have a name?”

  “Of course. I named my aircar, my stove, my favorite cooking pot, and my writing console, too.” Her voice was dry, amused, patient. But he didn’t fool himself: She knew there was a dagger hidden in this conversation, and was on her guard. She ran her own hand over her ship, inches away from his own. “He’s called Vosin. After a man in a myth. The last reality, the world before this one we share, ended in apocalypse. The gods had failed. Chaos was eating up the multiverse. But there was a man named Vosin, who remembered all the beauty of the world, and the joy of life, and the dream of the stars. He was a performer, a sacred actor, and he brought his entire troupe together, and performed. ... They performed the entire universe itself. Every beloved rock, every tree, every river and cloud, every field, every man and woman and child. But they couldn’t imagine how to perform the stars. All the time he and his troupe performed, they cried because no matter how they tried, the stars would be lost from memory, and from the performance. When they were done a miracle occurred, and the world was reborn from the passion and love of their performance. The actors were at the point of death—and the gods, who had been reborn with all the rest, took the actors and put them in the sky and turned them into the planets, and Vosin into our own world. His blood became our blood, his love our love, his flesh our flesh and everything we grew from. And every [128] one of the tears they’d cried as they performed became a star. So my ship is called Vosin, because he gave us life—and the stars.”

  “It’s a good name.” Picard took up an engineering tricorder and ran it over the open panel. He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at her.

  “It’s a good myth.”

  “Yes. It is.” He put down the tricorder and began a delicate adjustment on a sensor connection.

  He heard her shift, restless. Then a firm hand clamped over his, and she took his microspanner gently from him. “Captain, don’t play hidey-guessy with an old Shadrasi noble. We invented the game. You came to tell me something. What?”

  He looked up, staring blankly across the shuttlebay to the beams and gray metal sheeting. It couldn’t reproach him. Any other duty he would have performed with less reluctance. Any other. He’d sent men and women to their deaths. He’d accepted the slow destruction of cultures, in the name of the Prime Directive. But this? Something inside screamed “no.” His lips tightened. “As you noted, Werta, you arrived at a less than convenient time.” He struggled, wanting to apologize for the Federation, like a housekeeper dropped in on when her laundry was undone, her meals unplanned, her beds unmade. “We are, as you noted, at war.”

  “And?”

  “And an examination of your ship, and the location of your planet of origin, would indicate that any further exploration you attempt will do as this attempt has done: place you in the middle of contested territory.”

  “I see.” She leaned back, her clothes rustling around wide [129] hips. “So. You’re telling me to go home—and don’t come back.”

  He nodded. At last he looked at her. It had occurred to him when he first saw her that, in some way, she was what Zefram Cochrane should have been. As quixotic as he, as individualistic, but not as tattered and rough. Not as much a refugee in her own life.

  When Picard had been a boy, struggling with his family and dreaming of the stars, he’d imagined Cochrane: imagined a man who would understand all he felt when he had hidden himself in his father’s vineyards and looked up at the night sky. Someone who would understand the pulse of passion he’d felt when he reached out thin adolescent arms, wanting to hold every speck and flash of distant light to his heart.

  Cochrane had been less, and more, than he’d dreamed. This woman was too. She certainly wasn’t an adolescent boy’s idea of a hero. Too old, too plain, too alien, too self-amused. But there was the same passion in her eyes as he had seen in his lost nephew’s, the same passion he remembered rushing through his own boyish blood. The same passion he still felt looking out at all that grandeur.

  He faced her, determined that if he had to close that passion off, he’d look her in the eye. He’d pay the price of his people’s laws and expedience. “I’m sorry. But it isn’t safe. Not for your people, and not for mine. I’m sorry I can’t explain it all. There are too many factions involved. If your people stay where they are, if they aren’t noticed, then they may be safe, if we succeed in our attempts. If we don’t succeed, then no one will be safe. But if you come out here again you may be found by people less benign than the [130] Federation, and they would use you to their advantage. Your world would fall under their influence; our enemies would have a platform from which to mount new attacks.”

  His eyes shuttered as he thought of the fascinating, novel drive system incorporated in Vosin’s design—so potentially useful that Geordi La Forge had moved analysis of that technology up to highest priority. The Federation needed this—and Picard dreaded the idea of it in the hands of the Borg, or the Dominion, or for that matter the Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans. ... “We can’t risk our enemies ... assimilating you. They’d have new technologies we aren’t prepared to defend against. They’re already far too strong as it is.”

  “Ah.” She rubbed her hands over her face. Looked, as he had looked, at the far wall, eyes slightly out of focus. “And you can’t see the possibility of us serving as allies?” She flicked a glance over at him, and her mouth twisted. “No. I see. We are too far behind
you, yes? The teelit offering to help the rombas ... too small to be respected.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. We have a law. It’s called the Prime Directive. It limits our dealings with other worlds to those which we cannot corrupt or overwhelm with our technological advantages or cultural dominance.” He grimaced, not knowing how to say what he must without being more tactless than he wished. “We also refrain from dealing with cultures that have not worked out certain aspects of their socialization yet. There are human rights concerns raised by some of the things you’ve told me about your own world. You would not be accepted as members of the Federation, and we would be unable to defend you as allies.” What he didn’t and couldn’t say was that no matter what they did, the Prime Directive was breached: The act of placing the Shadrasi in [131] political quarantine, and of asking Werta to ensure they remained on their own planet, was a breach in and of itself. Just less of a breach than allowing them to wander out into a war zone, or to ally with stronger, older worlds, or be assimilated into the power bases of enemies. Of course, it was also safer: for her people ... and for the Federation.

  Werta’s mouth tightened, and her purple eyes reminded him of hard, sharp-faceted amethysts. “Ah. I see.” Now she picked up the microspanner, and returned to the repair he’d started. Her voice was slightly muffled as she spoke. “And were your people so far advanced when you rose up into the stars, Captain?”

  He thought of Earth, as it had been at the time of first contact. Thought of fierce, honorable, soul-damaged Lily, of Zefram Cochrane and his despair, thought of the damage, and the rubble, and the poverty and rage that had been characteristic of Earth at the time of that first, historic flight. “No. No, we were not as we are now. But things are not the same for you. It’s a more dangerous universe.”