“I was forced to pursue other avenues of curing Vega Nine, and ultimately I succeeded. We lost twenty-three of the original thirty-seven victims. Shortly thereafter, I convinced Regina to allow me to submit my cure to the Kriosian medical authorities. A few days after that submission, Kataly got us a message out. She was frantic. Terrified. She had been examined following our work, and it was determined that she was, in fact, an empathic metamorph. They were in the process of selecting a mate for her. She had refused to sign the waiver and was requesting political asylum.”
Sal paused again, collecting her thoughts.
“By the time we had received permission from Starfleet to respond to her request, she was dead. I don’t actually know if she was killed, or if her newly discovered ‘condition’ caused her to take her own life. Either way, it was made clear to Regina and me that the matter was considered closed and we were forbidden to investigate further.”
Cambridge was the first to break the silence that followed this revelation. “A fascinating and tragic story, Doctor Sal, but how does it explain Ensign Gwyn’s current condition?”
“When the potential for a stem-cell therapy was gone, I determined that the quickest and most certain way to cure Lieutenant Conlon was to use metamorphic cells.”
“Ensign Gwyn is half Kriosian,” Sharak said, suddenly understanding.
Sal nodded. “There was a chance she didn’t possess the mutation, but the first blood samples I took showed the presence of the cells I required. I did not coerce Gwyn into parting with those cells, nor did I share with her the unofficial history of her people. I simply asked her to consider whether or not a cultural restriction she never understood meant more to her than the possibility of saving a life. She agreed to every step of this process.”
“One cannot consent to a medical procedure when they are not provided all of the relevant facts about that procedure, as you well know, El’nor,” Cambridge noted.
“A minor detail given the circumstances,” Sal shot back. “I artificially induced the necessary hormonal levels just prior to her mission to that damned asteroid. My concern when she returned was that exposure to the radiation might have damaged the cells. It appears now that they actually increased their number. The cells have surged within her body, probably in response to the antiproton therapy, and have induced the finiis’ral. She is now under a biological imperative to find and bond with her perfect mate. I was concerned she had settled on you, Doctor Sharak, but her response to Cambridge suggests that it is still early in the process.”
“Can we reverse this?” the Doctor asked.
“I don’t think so,” Sal said. “I can’t imagine sentencing that poor girl to a life as anyone’s perfect mate, but I have no idea how to stop it. I also have no idea why her reaction to Ensign Icheb was so different.”
“We can help you there,” Cambridge said. “Icheb possesses a unique genetic variation as well, repressing his sensory receptors. If the hormones emitted as part of this empathic bonding require a detectable response from the intended mate, he is biologically incapable of providing them.”
“She can’t bond with Icheb,” the Doctor said.
“Obviously not,” Sal said. “She can’t be allowed to bond with anyone. But perhaps Icheb’s presence is calming in a way no one else’s can be. Since she can’t bond with him, she is better able to retain her own sense of identity when she is with him.”
“Can we seclude her until this passes? Surely the hormonal levels can’t remain at their heightened levels forever,” Sharak suggested.
“The only medical fact the Kriosians ever shared about empathic metamorphs with the Federation, the one that I think eventually convinced them to allow the practice to continue, was the reality that metamorphs who are prevented from bonding die. Once the process has begun, it must be completed,” Sal said.
“But you said that generations of Kriosian women found another solution,” Cambridge interjected. “So there has to be a way. Perhaps we could reach out to the Kriosian authorities and explain Gwyn’s condition.”
“Unless diplomatic progress of which I am unaware has occurred in the last thirty years, she’d be brought home immediately, most likely just assigned a mate by her people, and forced to complete the bonding,” Sal said.
“We can’t allow that,” Sharak insisted.
“And we’re not going to let her to die,” the Doctor added.
“I’m open to alternative suggestions,” Sal admitted.
“May I make one?” Sharak asked.
“Of course,” Sal replied.
“The Doctor’s presence does not appear to affect her, to activate this need to bond. Perhaps we should transport her to an environment where neither I nor many other humans will be available to further torment her.”
Sal smiled. “An excellent suggestion. Doctor?”
The EMH nodded. “I’ll arrange for transport to the Galen immediately.”
“In the meantime, I think one of us owes Ensign Gwyn an explanation,” Cambridge said pointedly.
“By one of us you mean me, right?” Sal asked.
DK-1116
Patel and Lasren stood in the lower chamber, doing their best to make sense of the room’s various alien technologies. Vincent and Jepel had agreed to remain in the column room and to download the data from as many spheres as they could into their tricorders. The library of data was large and their tricorders had limited storage space, but all had agreed that as much usable data as possible would be transmitted to the fleet as soon as communications were reopened.
“Thoughts?” Lasren asked.
Patel shook her head and sighed. Apart from limited, unsurprising molecular structures and various ranges of power readings, their tricorders were useless in terms of explaining what the various pieces of this puzzle were and how they fit together. The science officer was reduced to hypothesizing based on observation and what little data she’d been able to synthesize from the initial scans of the planet and all she’d seen beneath its surface.
Lifting a hand and pointing toward the illuminated snakes writhing all about the cavern, she said, “I’m calling that pure, unrefined Edrehmaia. That’s the base from which all of the experiments on the surface begin.”
Lasren nodded. “Seems plausible. This stuff runs throughout the entire planet. It forms the veins of ore in the walls of all of the caverns. But down here it has different properties. The luminescence, the tiny amounts of that black liquid that is extracted from it at a fairly steady rate and then cycled through that system over there,” he said, indicating the waterfall and the staging platform nearby with the spider legs.
“That’s the biological portion of it,” Patel said. “That’s the stuff that was used to form the thing I spoke to. But it was mingled with my DNA, so, at its most basic level, it has the capability to replicate and transfer genetic material and build from there. It is clearly critical to the experiments the other species were running here.”
“Like a virus?”
“Sure. Just a billion times more complicated.”
“So what we are looking at is a sort of living technology base,” Lasren surmised.
Patel nodded thoughtfully. “The potential applications of this are mind boggling.”
“As in?” Lasren asked.
“If you could properly control and modify something like this, you could grow any number of energy storage-and-release devices, everything from simple light sources to phasers or warheads with exponentially higher destructive capabilities than even our antimatter torpedoes.”
“Hull plating for starships?” Lasren asked. “That could repair itself if damaged?”
Patel nodded. “There is really no end to the possibilities.”
“Why is growing these things better than just building them?” Lasren asked.
“For us, it isn’t,” Patel replied. “We’ve found other solutions to those problems using the elements that were plentiful on our worlds. But if your species had bigger goal
s, more powerful enemies you were facing, or shortages of resources on your own world, a discovery like this is a game changer, comparable to humanity’s discovery of fire.”
“Only way more potentially destructive,” Lasren noted.
“And creative,” Patel countered.
“The volume of exotic radiant molecules here is most likely the thing that is jamming our communications,” Lasren offered. “I’m guessing our problem is simply our proximity to this stuff.”
“I agree,” Patel said. “Even a few kilometers away in the first cavern, we had comm and transport abilities.”
“But that door is literally closed to us now.”
Patel was searching the cavern above the living ore. Her eyes landed on the large white sphere with the spokes radiating out from its center, some of which were clearly no longer active.
“One of the things we know this substance does is release energy. It’s basically an unlimited and seemingly perpetual supply. It makes sense that you’d need something like that to sustain the energy fields creating the biodomes on the surface,” Patel said.
“Those could be the hard lines shunting power to the field generators,” Lasren said.
“And that thing could be the field generator,” Patel suggested.
“Does that help us?” Lasren asked.
“It might,” Patel replied. “Up for a little climbing?”
“If it means we get to live longer, absolutely.”
Together Patel and Lasren started up the staircases and down the catwalks that led closest to the sphere. It took the better part of half an hour to get as close as possible, and both were breathless when they had reached their goal. The first thing Patel did was open her tricorder and begin to scan.
“It’s definitely a massive power generator,” she finally said.
Lasren’s eyes were fixed on the nearest gray spoke that clearly no longer had power running through it. Finally he said, “Not that I’m actually anxious to get any closer to the massive ball of glowing death, but I wonder something.”
“What?”
“If these are hard lines and some of them are no longer functioning, doesn’t that suggest that these might still reach the surface or close enough that we might get a signal out?”
A wide smile spread over Patel’s lips. “We should try to open a channel.”
Lasren took out his tricorder and used it to search for patterns of transmission. The first few bands he accessed nearly blew out the tricorder and were accompanied by a shrill, screeching sound that nearly deafened both of them as it bounced around the cavern.
Finally, he found one that did not. Reconfiguring the communicator in his badge took another few minutes. When it was done, he handed the badge to Devi.
“Do the honors, Lieutenant?”
“It’s your creation,” Patel said.
“You’re the commanding officer of this team,” Lasren reminded her. “It should be you.”
It was a simple gesture of confidence and respect. It moved Patel more than anything she had discovered on the planet. Nodding, she accepted the badge and tapped it gently.
“Patel to Voyager. Do you read?”
A few heartbreaking moments of silence were quickly followed by faint static.
Patel repeated her hail. “Patel to Voyager. Please come in.”
“Patel? This is Waters. Where the hell are you?”
Lasren’s eyes met Patel’s in this shared small victory.
“Never mind that, Vanessa. I need to speak to the captain. And you have to get everyone off this planet immediately.”
Waters’s response was comforting. “Way ahead of you, Devi. Keep talking to help me refine this signal while I get Chakotay for you.”
DEMETER
Lieutenant Elkins was seated over a data terminal in his ship’s main engineering section when Lieutenant Bryce reported as ordered. Lieutenant Benoit was staring at the terminal over Elkins’s shoulder.
“Morning, Chief,” Bryce said. “Cress.”
“Where’s Icheb?” Elkins asked.
Bryce was stung by the question. Not returning any of my messages was the truth, but he didn’t think this was the time or the place for that discussion. He settled for “I haven’t heard from him since he returned to Voyager last night.”
Elkins sighed. “I really wanted him to see this, but I don’t think it can wait.” Indicating the schematic of the planet before him with a stubby finger, he said, “We’ve been running continuous scans of the planet for several days, but starting last night I narrowed the focus to the areas where we intended to plant those sensors to determine the precise geometry and location of the field generator.”
Bryce studied the display and one thing smacked him squarely in the face.
“The power distributed along the angles we believe are linked to the field generator have remained constant, but in the last thirteen hours, new, significantly larger power readings are being detected planet-wide,” Bryce said.
“Right,” Elkins said with a satisfied nod.
“Why, and what does it mean?” Benoit asked.
Elkins shrugged. “I don’t know. What I do know is that the largest concentrations of increases have occurred in these six locations.”
The graphic shifted to show magnified scans of several of the biodomes.
“That’s where the water was contaminated,” Bryce realized immediately.
“Yes. And in those areas, new deposits of the planet’s native ore are growing at an incredible rate.”
“It’s like they’re making new connections,” Benoit said.
“If we think of these deposits more like conduits than raw elements, the structure of this system, of this entire planet, becomes something quite different, doesn’t it?” Elkins asked.
Bryce nodded as the horrific potentials began to play out in his head.
“Depending upon how many water sources we disrupted, we’re looking at power surges that will continue to increase exponentially,” Bryce said.
“But toward what end?” Benoit asked. “What device requires that much energy? It’s way more than the biodomes require to function. They’re remaining stable.”
“But if the biodomes have nothing to do with this planet’s true purpose, then we have to ignore that and consider other possibilities,” Elkins said. “To my mind, this planet only looks like one thing.”
“A bomb,” Bryce said.
Elkins turned to stare at him. “Not necessarily.”
“Then what’s your theory?” Bryce asked.
“An immediate release of all of the energy moving through this system would be catastrophic to the planet, that’s certain,” Elkins said, “but also pointless. Why create something like this if all you intended to do when it reached its maximum capacity was destroy it? But properly focused along these natural vectors here, it might serve a different purpose.”
“A weapon,” Bryce realized. “But something that powerful could knock another planet out of orbit, and there aren’t any other planets in the system. So why build this and leave it here?”
“I honestly can’t answer that,” Elkins said. “But whatever the purpose was of whoever built this, I have a feeling we’re a few hours away from witnessing it.”
“We need to get out of this star system immediately,” Benoit said.
“We’re still getting away teams off the surface,” Bryce said. “Even if we finished that now and started away at maximum warp, we might not escape the blast radius or shockwave.”
“And we can’t bring the slipstream drives online until we have cleared the outer asteroid field,” Elkins reminded him.
“We need to go now,” Bryce said.
“If my math is right, we needed to leave about four hours ago,” Elkins said.
GALEN
Since she had arrived on Galen, Ensign Aytar Gwyn had eaten almost two days’ worth of calories. And still she felt famished. Doctor Sal had filled in the gaps in her understanding about empathic m
etamorphs and the finiis’ral before she transported to Galen. While she couldn’t deny that everything she was feeling and all of her medical scans tracked with the diagnosis, she still found it impossible to believe that very soon she was either going to become the perfect mate of one of her fellow officers, or die. She was less clear on why this was happening to her. The odds of her injury on the asteroid and the life-saving radiation she had received resulting in this condition had to be impossibly long. But then, math unrelated to navigation and speed had never been Gwyn’s strongest suit.
“I hope whoever becomes my perfect mate likes their women curvy,” she said miserably.
“What would happen if they didn’t?” Ensign Icheb asked.
Gwyn stared at him openmouthed for a moment. Is he trying to make this worse? It was nice that she didn’t simply know the answer to that question. Unlike every other individual Gwyn had come within a few meters of since she had awakened, to her Icheb remained a cipher. With him, there was no urgency, no need to become. With him she felt almost normal.
Except for the constant hunger.
She decided he was asking out of simple curiosity and ascribed no other motives to the question. Clearly he cared enough to accompany her here, despite the fact that helping her remain sane was not among his many duties. She had embarrassed herself enough already when she was told she was being transferred to the Galen and practically got down on her knees and begged him not to leave her alone.
Now that she was here, she understood the wisdom of the move. There were so few organic people on this ship, and none in the medical bay other than herself, Icheb, and Lieutenant Conlon, who remained comatose. The constant humming pressure she had felt on Voyager, the physical possibility of connection with every individual she encountered, had diminished significantly. She was simply left with an aching emptiness in the center of her being that had to be filled and could only be filled by giving herself completely to another.
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