“All right, let’s not get distracted, people. Fan out…D’zekeo, you and Chisholm that way, Brandt and Norgay in the opposite direction. Mr. Spock and I will take the remaining quadrants. Take samples and tricorder readings of whatever you find, report in at hundred-meter intervals. Keep those tricorders active, watch your footing, and stay in contact with the ship as well as each other…”
If there had been birds, he thought after they’d lost contact first with Brandt and Norgay, then Chisholm, and the sound of laser fire told them that D’zekeo was in trouble, and he and Spock ran toward D’zekeo’s last position even as Pike tried to contact the ship to get a fix on them and beam them out, they’d have warned us we weren’t alone down here. They could have reminded us that every Eden has its snakes…
Days later, alone in a holding pen on the alien ship, heading, he assumed, for their homeworld, Pike considered what he and his landing party had learned the hard way about this species.
For one thing, their interplanetary vessels were almost impossible to read on Starfleet scanners until they dropped out of hyperdrive. For another, they only visited this planet during hunting season. Which, unfortunately for his crew, coincided with the day his landing party chose to beam down to what they thought was an uninhabited world.
They were the predator that kept the “prairie dogs’” numbers down. And they were not averse to hunting larger prey.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and Pike would regret his lack of information for a long time afterward. For now, all he knew was that he’d lost contact with three of his crew, a fourth was under apparent attack, and he couldn’t get in touch with his ship.
He and Spock arrived almost simultaneously at the grove where they’d heard D’zekeo’s weapons fire, just in time to see the security officer swung off his feet as if he were a rag doll, into the opening maw of—
Just because they look like snakes—two-meter-tall, standing-upright, able to unhinge their lower jaws to swallow prey, hairless and scaled and slit-eyed and forked-tongued snakes, some rational part of his brain that wasn’t frozen in horror at what he was watching told him, doesn’t mean they really are snakes.
Reptiles, at any rate. To judge from the streamlined shuttle half-obscured in the tall grass, highly evolved spacefaring reptiles. Reptiles who had evolved articulated limbs and opposable digits and who were proportionately stronger than a humanoid, strong enough to grapple the security man, D’zekeo—either already dead or at least, mercifully, unconscious—toward the unhinged jaw and down the throat of the largest and most brilliantly colored of the creatures, who swallowed twice, its sides expanding to accommodate its prey and then, with the leisure of a sated beast unaware of any threat, lowered itself onto its forelimbs and strolled slowly toward a sunny rock, where it stretched itself out and basked in the sun.
The tricorders must not have picked them up, Pike thought. The entire planet could be teeming with them. We’ll need to figure out what’s wrong with the tricorders, assuming we have the time.
In the handful of seconds in which they’d watched their security man being ingested, Spock had instinctively raised his weapon to fire and Pike had stayed him, because they were too late for D’zekeo, and outnumbered four to one, at least here. No way of knowing how many more were in the shuttle, or if there were others.
Of the remaining seven creatures in the clearing, three more were as bloated as the leader. No mystery, then, what had become of Chisholm, Norgay, and Brandt. As these three joined the leader in stretching out on the rocks, the four who had not yet eaten continued hunting.
And, moving with deliberate speed, forked tongues long as a man’s arm flicking out before them to smell and taste the air, the ground, the grasses and tree trunks their prey might have brushed against, they fanned out in ironic parody of what the humanoid landing party had been doing only moments before. One of them was headed directly toward Pike and Spock.
Pike found his voice at last, released it in a whisper. “Are there snakes on Vulcan, Science Officer?”
“Indeed there are, Captain,” Spock said equally quietly. “Most of them quite deadly.”
Snakes are also deaf, Pike remembered, and wondered if this species was as well. No time to test it now. Everything Charlie had ever taught him about snakes flashed through his mind. Fortunately Spock would know these things as well. It was time to act.
“Split up,” Pike ordered, still whispering, gesturing with his phaser in the direction each would take. “Better odds against our both being captured. My guess is there’s a larger ship up there, and it may have spotted Enterprise, maybe even engaged her.”
He didn’t finish the thought with maybe unsuccessfully.
“On the assumption these creatures are deaf, they’ll rely on vibration as well as scent to track us. Tread lightly. Contact me at five-minute intervals. I’ll try to raise the ship.”
“Understood,” was all Spock said. Even as he began to move off, light-footed as a cat, Pike moved as well, wincing at the squeak the communicator made as he activated it yet again. “Pike to Enterprise. Enterprise, come in…”
“I am unable to get a fix on them, Number One,” Chief Engineer Moves-with-Burning-Grace reported solemnly. “Something is blocking the readings, and has been for the last several minutes. One minute I was tracking the entire landing party, the next—”
“Unacceptable, Mr. Grace,” Number One cut him off. She had no patience with what she saw as incompetence. In an ideal universe, she thought, she’d have been able to run all ship’s functions, including the transporters, from the conn. “They haven’t just disappeared. Keep scanning until you find them. Comm?”
“Nothing, sir.” Dabisch shrugged. “Captain Pike didn’t check in at the quarter-hour mark, and there’s no response to our hails. Either something’s jamming them, or…” He left his thought unfinished.
“Number One?” José Tyler sounded nervous. “Unidentified vessel at seven o’clock. Scanners didn’t pick her up until she was practically on top of us.”
“Hailing frequencies,” Number One instructed Dabisch without looking over her shoulder. “Standard greetings.”
“Aye, sir.”
The universal translator was not rigged for a species that could not hear and, as it turned out, had no provision for communicating with a species that did. As soon as the alien ship was within firing range, it did so.
The exchange was brief. Number One ordered evasive maneuvers, and Enterprise managed to dodge the alien vessel’s fire, which ceased as soon as Enterprise retreated beyond the outer planets of the system. The message was clear: This world belongs to us, stay away!
“What now, Number One?” Tyler asked, wiping his sweating hands on his trouser legs. “We can’t just leave the landing party down there.”
“Unless we can communicate with that ship, that’s exactly what we’ll do for the time being!” Number One said a little too sharply. “We’re trespassing. And if Captain Pike and his team have gone to ground, there’s no point in alerting the aliens to their presence until we have the means to retrieve them. Mr. Grace…” She spun the command chair in his direction. “Scan that ship and tell me how many are aboard her.”
“Already done, sir,” Grace reported crisply. “But the sensors are unable to penetrate their hull.”
“What about comm?” Number One demanded.
“It’s the same code that Mr. Spock intercepted from that mechanized system,” Dabisch confirmed.
“So we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Number One said angrily.
“I’m afraid not,” Grace said. “However, whoever they are, they are releasing shuttlecraft all over that planet’s surface.”
From where Pike and Spock had taken refuge in the tree canopy, they could see the shuttles, perhaps a dozen more of them, each containing a crew of ten. The creatures emerged from their hatches and immediately began hunting the native marsupials, which they captured live, except for the occasional one swallowed as
a snack, anesthetized with a quick bite to the neck, and bound up in nets they stowed in the holds of the shuttles.
The aliens were also setting up a handful of temporary structures and what looked like a comm transmitter, suggesting, Pike thought, that they intended this world to be some sort of outpost.
“Captain?” Spock’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “With enough time, I believe I may be able to recalibrate my tricorder to penetrate whatever jamming these creatures are using to cloak their life-form readings. It may also be possible to gather enough of their…unusual form of communication…to feed into the universal translator…”
“All well and good if this were a laboratory experiment, Science Officer. But if we don’t manage to get out of this alive—”
“Captain, if I may, I estimate sunset in this sector in approximately three point five-six hours.”
Pike opened his mouth to ask what the hell that had to do with anything, but then he understood. “Meaning the temperature ought to drop, and these creatures will either have to retreat to their ships or at least slow down.”
“Precisely. I believe I have already noticed a subtle reduction in the rate of their activity.”
Pike could see it, too. The speed with which the aliens captured their small prey was beginning to slow and, if they’d ever figured out that there were still two members of the landing party on the loose, they were no longer actively looking for them.
“Good to know, Spock. If we haven’t heard from Enterprise by nightfall, this is what we’ll do…”
17
One Year Later
The event was now nothing more than a memory, a bad dream, only one of many from a second five-year mission which had only recently come to an end. Enterprise was due for another refit and so, Christopher Pike thought, was he. Very soon he would have to decide which way he allowed his career to take him next. Did he want to go back out there again? He didn’t know. For now, he sat in the officers’ lounge on Starbase 11 with his old friend José Mendez, staring into his drink as he told the story of his captivity by the creatures who, he came to know, called themselves Kan’ess. As he raised the glass to his lips, he suppressed a shudder.
“Snakes, eh?” Mendez shook his head. “Helluva thing, Chris. But it’s over. You’re reliving it as if it were yesterday.”
“Sometimes it seems as if it was,” Pike said grimly. He put the glass down. He’d always been able to hold his liquor, but lately he seemed to be holding too much of it. He’d never been drunk in his life, but he hated to think he was becoming dependent.
“You ever talk to anyone about it?” Mendez asked, concerned.
“You mean a therapist?” Pike shook his head. “No.”
“Maybe you should.”
“No,” Pike said again. There are too many other things I’d have to keep to myself, even under client confidentiality. Whatever’s inside my head will have to stay there.
“Well, you survived it,” Mendez pointed out, studying his old friend warily. “You’re here.”
“I wonder…” Pike began, then remembered himself barely in time. The more years between him and Talos IV, the more difficult it seemed for him to keep his silence about it. He and Mendez were old friends, but even he couldn’t know about Vina, about the power of the Talosian mind.
Particularly if that mind, as he’d suggested to Spock as they watched the reptiles and waited for the sun to go down, was still connected to his.
IN THE KANES SYSTEM
As day faded to night and it was clear Enterprise was out of reach, at least temporarily, Pike and Spock managed to elude the hunters by staying off the ground and moving from tree to tree. Movement was slow and arduous, particularly in the half-light, but, agile as the aliens were, it apparently did not occur to them to climb trees when there was so much game available on the ground. And empirical evidence suggested that whatever the aliens used to mask their life signs also kept them from detecting the Starfleet officers.
“However, Captain, I would advise against underestimating their ability to track us via their senses alone,” Spock cautioned. “If our supposition is correct, and these creatures evolved from reptilian ancestors, they will possess a vomeronasal organ making them capable of both smelling and tasting with their tongues. This highly developed sensory ability compensates for the absence of hearing, and their limited visual capabilities.”
“Vomero—who?” Pike asked. Charlie had simply taught him that snakes could both taste and smell with their tongues. He hadn’t needed any fancy words.
“In reptiles the vomeronasal organ is a highly developed passageway within the nasal cavity which connects olfactory impressions directly to receptors in the brain,” Spock began, settling his long frame into a crook of the tree as if it were his natural environment, and settling his voice into lecture mode. “This makes the processing of tastes and odors instantaneous, whereas in the mammalian brain, lacking this connection, an extra process is required in order to associate smells and tastes with the memory of previous encounters. In fact, most mammals, including humans, retain a primitive vomeronasal organ, but it is no longer directly connected to the brain.”
“Well, that’s a big help!” Pike joked, wishing he had Spock’s confidence that the aliens couldn’t hear them, wishing he had a Vulcan’s night vision as well, to help him see the creatures still moving, however slowly, below them on the forest floor. “Any luck getting the tricorder to penetrate the interference?”
“Negative, Captain,” Spock replied. Did Pike only imagine a tinge of disappointment in his voice? “However, I have made a start on encoding some of their language into the universal translator.”
Pike sat up straighter, then regretted it as a small branch poked him in the back.
“What language? If they’re deaf—you mean some kind of code? How the hell did you manage to do that?”
“In their haste to devour Dr. Chisholm, the aliens did not notice that her tricorder had fallen into the tall grass,” Spock reported evenly. Silently Pike cursed himself for not even noticing that Spock was carrying two tricorders. “It remained running in the clearing while they pursued and captured Lieutenant D’zekeo. The creatures communicate via head nods, hand gestures, and a kind of rhythmic drumming of their feet and tails on the ground. Dr. Chisholm’s tricorder was able to capture much of this language. Insufficient to build a communication base as yet, but I shall endeavor to capture more. If I can interface with the Enterprise’s library computer…”
“If there still is an Enterprise library computer,” Pike said grimly, then realized just how much work his science officer had accomplished in an afternoon. “Can you give me anything to work with now? Maybe a gesture that says ‘Hello, beautiful morning, isn’t it?’ Because if we are stranded down here, our best hope is to communicate with these creatures.”
“Not at present, Captain. However, given enough time…”
“Speaking of time,” Pike interrupted, restless, peering through the branches at the ground below. Not seeing the creatures was almost as unsettling as seeing them, and the growing darkness made it difficult to see anything. “How much longer do you estimate before it’s safe for us to move around down there?”
“Judging from the present ambient temperature and the rate at which it has been decreasing since sunset, I would estimate another sixty-seven point eight minutes.”
“An hour, then,” Pike said, folding his arms and repositioning himself for about the twentieth time.
He could dimly see Spock against the foliage, bent over the tricorder, shielding the visual display lest the light give their position away. Pike felt useless—at least Spock was doing something meaningful; all he could do was keep trying to contact Enterprise, getting nothing but static—and the darkness around them taunted him with the memory of watching D’zekeo being eaten alive by one of the creatures, and realizing what had happened to the others.
One minute they’d been talking, picking fruit, enjoying the sunshine,
the next they were gone, forever. No matter how many times he lost people on a mission, he would never get used to it. To keep the horrors at bay, Pike found himself thinking aloud.
“Spock? You ever wonder if all of this is an illusion?”
“Sir?”
“What I mean is, what if the Talosians succeeded in luring us all down into those caverns and we never escaped, and everything that’s happened to us since hasn’t really happened at all?”
“Dubious,” was Spock’s opinion.
“How so?”
“Captain, for the Talosians to be able to sustain the illusion, for this much time, for every one of us who came in contact with them, without ever once making a detectable error, is something of which, even with their vast powers, I believe them incapable. The expenditure in mental energy alone, the ability to know so much about each of us that none of us ever detected the illusion, not to mention the question of why they would wish to do such a thing, would be incalculable.”
That was when Pike told Spock about his encounter with Vina’s mother in the pastry shop.
“What would you have done, Spock?”
“There is a saying on Vulcan, Captain,” Spock said after a thoughtful silence. “‘It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself.’”
“So you’d have done what I did? Said nothing.”
Spock considered. “I doubt I would have sought out the pastry shop to begin with.”
“Not even out of curiosity?”
“No, sir.”
Pike shifted over to a different fork of the tree. No position was comfortable, and he couldn’t wait to be on the move again.
“That’s my point, Spock. Neither would I. At least, not the person I was before Talos IV. Ever since then, I don’t know how much of what I do is of my own volition, and how much might be…”
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