The Latter Fire

by James Swallow

  Spock eyed him. “Have you ever known me to be otherwise, Doctor?”

  “Of course . . .” Sulu nodded to himself, thinking it through. “Yes, I understand now. The commander is referring to life-forms like that gigantic amoeba we encountered in the Gamma 7A system.”

  “Correct,” said Spock. “But distinct from that creature, this one appears to be based on a silicon chemistry. We all recall the Horta of Janus VI. I believe the leviathan is simply an expression of the same biotype, but writ larger.”

  “Much, much larger!” McCoy noted, his eyes widening as he processed the incredible notion. “Good grief . . . I take it back, Spock. Suddenly this doesn’t seem like so wild an idea after all.”

  “And if we accept your hypothesis, we suddenly have a boatload of new questions,” Kirk broke in, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “For starters, is it native to this system? Why did it attack us and the Syhaari with such violence? And will it do so again?”

  “From the fragmentary scans our sensors were able to capture, I can offer an answer to the first query,” Spock replied. “The composition of the leviathan is dissimilar to any of the other planets in the Sya system. Therefore, I would suggest its origins lie elsewhere.”

  “That tallies with the information we have from our approach to the star system, sir,” added Sulu. “On Mister Spock’s orders, I sifted all the nav records in our memory banks from the moment we made contact with the Friendship Discovered to the point we entered orbit of Syhaar Prime. If there had been an object of such mass and dimension as that rogue planet drifting around out there, Enterprise would have picked it up on our scopes. The mass displacement alone would have tripped the sensors.”

  “So it can either cloak itself somehow or move at great speed.” McCoy shook his head. “Neither option is a good one. What the hell are we dealing with here?”

  Spock went on, letting the doctor’s question hang. “As for the reasons behind the object’s attacks, I have only supposition at this time. It might be an instinctive territorial reaction, as it was with the Horta, or a feeding impulse as with the Gamma 7A creature. I will need to examine the data we have in greater detail in order to build up a more coherent picture, and that will take time.” He hesitated. “There is one other factor of note. During our near-fatal encounter with it, Lieutenant Uhura reported the presence of unusual patterns of spatial distortion in close proximity to the object. With your permission, Captain, I would like her to assist me in my ongoing analysis.”

  “Granted,” said Kirk, with a brisk nod. “Use whatever shipboard assets you require, Spock. This leviathan is a clear threat, and we need to understand it better.”

  “Do you . . .” Sulu halted, then began again. “I mean, is it possible that it might be sentient, like the Horta?”

  “We cannot rule that out at this stage,” Spock noted. “But until it emerges from the dust cloud once again, we have no way to observe its actions to determine one way or another.”

  “How does that Tennyson poem go?” Kirk drew up the words. “ ‘Below the thunders of the upper deep, far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep . . .’ ”

  Spock nodded. “But it appears, Captain, that someone or something has awakened it.”

  “We weren’t ready for it, and we damn near lost the ship,” Kirk went on, his jaw hardening. “If we cross paths with the leviathan again, we need to be prepared. I want solutions for any future encounter. Best- and worst-case scenarios.”

  “A combat response?” asked Sulu.

  “That’s as good a place as any to start.”

  “Is that realistic, Jim?” McCoy gave him a questioning glance. “If we don’t know what it is, can we really advocate—”

  “Killing it?” Kirk returned a hard-eyed look. “I don’t need to tell you how many casualties that thing has inflicted on our ship and to the Syhaari.”

  The doctor nodded warily. “True. I have a dozen crewmen in sickbay with various injuries suffered during the attack. Not to mention Kaleo’s friend Duchad. But we can’t just respond in kind.”

  “You know me better than that,” Kirk replied. “But I need to have that option, Bones, even if I don’t use it.” Before McCoy could say more, he changed tack. “Tell me about our survivor. Is he going to pull through?”

  “It was touch and go for a while,” McCoy admitted, “but M’Benga and I managed to haul Duchad back from the brink. It helped having Kaleo on board. They have compatible blood types. She saved his life.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Not yet. He’s still unconscious, and I don’t want to mess around with the normal Syhaari healing process. It could be a couple of days.”

  “With the damage to the warp engines, it’ll take us at least that long to get back to the inner planets,” noted Sulu.

  Kirk drew himself up. “I’ll talk to Scotty and see if I can’t get him to work one of his miracles for us.” He nodded to the other men, signaling that the meeting was over. “Dismissed.”

  Sulu and Spock stood up and departed, but Kirk noticed McCoy’s obvious hesitation. “You have something else you want to say?”

  “Plenty,” McCoy said with feeling. “Just when I think I’ve seen it all, we run smack-dab into something else that’s not in any of the files. But that’s not what’s bothering me.”

  Kirk eyed him. “Spit it out, Bones.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that Captain Kaleo is as honest as the day is long,” he began. “I could tell when she was talking to Chapel. This is all as much a shock to her as it was to us.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But those others we met . . . Gatag, Tormid, Hoyga . . . call it a gut feeling if you want, but I don’t trust them.”

  Kirk didn’t want to admit that he shared some of that sense too. “I’ll admit Tormid comes off like a blowhard . . . but there’s a long road between that and, what? Some connection to what happened out here?”

  “I’m not making accusations, Jim, I’m just saying . . .” McCoy turned and walked away. “Don’t take anything at face value. Not until we get a better handle on all this.”

  * * *

  Scott stood there in the center of main engineering and listened to Captain Kirk’s précis of Mister Spock’s initial analysis, halting his commander now and then to bark out orders to his subordinates as they raced back and forth around them.

  The odor of smoke still hung in the air where the environmental system had broken down, and on the upper gantry of the systems bay, a black smear of soot showed where a short-circuited auxiliary console had gone up like a bomb. Lieutenant Masood had taken the brunt of the blast and even now was clinging to life in a medical support capsule under Nurse Chapel’s expert care. Scott did his best to keep an open mind as Kirk talked to him about living planetoids and half-cooked theories from the first officer, all the time thinking of the wringer his team, his engines, and his vessel had been put through.

  “Sometimes, sir,” he said, after Kirk finished, “I think this ship is a magnet for everything strange the universe has to throw at us.”

  “I don’t disagree, Scotty,” the captain said wearily. “Some of the logs I’ve submitted back to the records office at Starfleet Command, they message me back asking if it’s a joke or if my crew have been . . .” He tilted his wrist, miming a cup-and-drinking action. “But this is deadly serious.”

  Scott nodded, thinking again about Masood. “That it is. The ship took a hard cross, there’s no mistaking that. My people are shoring up structural damage on every deck from the keel to the bridge. We’ve got most of the main systems running at seventy percent capacity, but the engines . . .” He trailed off, sighing. “Well, sir. I could give you chapter and verse on the technical details, but the long and the short of it is, we’re hobbled. At best, we can make a cruising speed of warp one point seven, mayb
e warp two with a following wind. Anything faster than that, and we risk a catastrophic overload.” He gave a humorless chuckle. “For now, we’re reduced to riding in the slow lane along with the Syhaari rangers and explorers.”

  “How long until you can get us back to fully operational status?”

  “Three days, I reckon. That’s if we don’t take any more damage.” He threw a glance at the warp core, pulsing flame-orange beyond the safety grid at the back of the compartment. “And then we’ll need some dock time at a starbase to top and tail her.”

  “We can’t leave yet,” Kirk told him. “Not until we understand what we ran afoul of out here. If there’s a threat to the Syhaari, it could be a threat to the Federation as well. For their sake and ours, we need to know.”

  “Captain, if we go up against that big beastie again, if that’s what it really is, we may not come off best. Can we not call for some help, sir? Another Starfleet ship, maybe?” He paused, considering his own question. “The Altair is on patrol out here, is it not?”

  Kirk nodded. “Not close enough to help us, though. I know Altair’s captain and chief medical officer, Adams and Ostrow. But they’re clear across the sector, Scotty. More than a week away, even at high warp. Like it or not, we’re on our own here. So do what you can, and keep me apprised.”

  Before the captain turned to walk away, Scotty cleared his throat. “Sir? Before you go, there’s something else.”

  “Go on.” Kirk frowned as Scott stepped closer.

  The engineer’s voice took on a conspiratorial pitch. “I didn’t think it was worth raising the issue beforehand, but with the way things are progressing, I think you should have all the information.”

  “You’re talking about the sensor scans of the Syhaari ships?”

  He sighed. “I know that Envoy Xuur would probably tear us off a strip for doing it, but I made sure it was nothing invasive.” Scott couldn’t stop himself from sounding defensive.

  Kirk studied him. “So. You found something unusual.”

  “Confusing is the word I’d use,” the engineer admitted. “I checked the records of the scans we had of Kaleo’s vessel from the first time we met her people, and they more or less match up to the configurations of the slower patrol ships we saw at the edge of the Veil, the ones the beastie took apart. Power distribution curves, energy output, warp signature, all within a similar range.”

  Kirk anticipated where he was going. “But the new ship, the warp three ship . . . that was different?”

  “To put it mildly.” Scott jerked a thumb at the Enterprise’s drive system. “I mean, a warp engine is like a wheel, Captain. Strip away everything, and the basic structure of the device is the same, no matter where it was made.” The laws of physics made the theory and design of warp drives relatively constant, and almost every spacefaring civilization that had mastered faster-than-light travel had discovered the same basic truths about the technology. “With a few exceptions, any starship engineer worth their salt could find the similarities,” he explained. “But in the differences, aye, that’s where the interesting bit is.”

  “What are you getting at, Scotty?”

  “The warp one and warp three ships flown by the Syhaari use two very different engine matrix designs. I mean totally different. I can’t imagine how someone starting from the same theoretical model could have come up with two approaches so far apart. I’m wondering what they’ve got under the bonnet over there, sir.”

  “The scientist, Tormid . . .” said Kirk. “He told us that he’d had some kind of eureka moment on his trip back to Syhaar Prime. A ‘unique insight’ is how he described it, I think.”

  “I’m not saying it’s impossible, Captain,” Scott replied. “But in all the years of having my head stuck inside warp drives, I’ve never known the like. Space/Warp theory isn’t the kind of thing you advance overnight. It takes generations, sometimes centuries, to perfect.”

  Kirk gave a slow nod. “I know where you’re going with this, Scotty, and you can forget it. There’s no way the Syhaari would let you crawl around in one of their engine rooms, and if we light up one of their ships with an active sensor sweep, you can bet we’d have a diplomatic incident on our hands as quick as Xuur can shout foul.”

  “I’m just calling it as I see it, sir.” Scott opened his hands. “I could be barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps I’m seeing something that isn’t there and this Tormid fella is the genius they say he is.”

  “Tormid certainly thinks so,” Kirk offered. “And I’ll admit, I’m nursing some reservations of my own. But for now, this is of secondary importance to our current situation. I need you to concentrate on getting the Enterprise back up and running.”

  “Understood,” said Scott. “And . . . what about monitoring the alien ships?”

  “I didn’t say anything about stopping that.” Kirk smiled thinly. “Keep an eye on them, but be discreet about it.” He stepped away, then halted, turning back briefly to face the engineer. “And if you come across anything else you happen to think is confusing or interesting, you tell me straightaway.”

  “Aye, sir,” Scott promised. “That I will.”

  * * *

  Spock looked up as the doors to the sensor lab opened, and Lieutenant Uhura entered. She gave him a smile, which of course he did not return, and the Vulcan launched directly into his briefing.

  “For the duration of this detail, you are transferred from your duty as senior communications officer and will report directly to me.”

  Uhura accepted this with a nod. “M’Ress can handle my station on the bridge. But what’s so important that it needs a hundred percent of my attention, sir?”

  “Observe.” Spock crossed the compartment to a tall, narrow screen, stepping around a data stack filled with processor modules. The sensor lab was something of an afterthought in the Enterprise’s design, squeezed into what had once been a mechanical space for fabricator units, now repurposed after a minor refit at Starbase 6. It was cramped, and in Spock’s opinion, not ideal for its intended function, but the alternative would have been to reconfigure a larger lab on one of the upper decks—and that would have taken time the captain did not want to waste.

  Spock activated the screen, bringing up panels of data from the sensors and, in particular, the anomalous spatial distortions Uhura had discovered.

  “Ah,” she said, nodding again. “I’ve been thinking about these too, sir. The patterns don’t fit easily into the category of random noise or manufactured signal. Frankly, I’m not sure what I trapped there.”

  “We will endeavor to find out,” Spock replied. “Your expertise in the field of subspace dynamics will be key to understanding these patterns of energy.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Uhura stepped past him to get a closer look at the screen, and Spock automatically drew back. She gave him an odd look. “Pardon me, Commander. I didn’t mean to invade your personal space.” The lieutenant glanced at the walls. “It’s a little snug in here, isn’t it?”

  “I would prefer a less-confined area in which to work.”

  She smiled briefly, and Spock caught a glimpse of some very human amusement in her eyes, there and then gone. “Don’t worry, sir, I’m no stranger to tight quarters. For a few years my parents and I shared a house in Nairobi with my uncle and his family. His very large family.”

  “Vulcan family units prefer solitude and tranquility,” he noted.

  “So do I, Mister Spock. And I probably appreciate it more than you do.” Uhura studied the display, returning to the issue at hand. “The patterns . . . you believe they’re connected to the leviathan’s behavior?”

  Spock studied her. “I see that the captain’s colloquial term for the object has already become embedded among the crew.” He nodded. “To answer your question, yes. At this stage, we have only theoretical models to work from, but the regularity of these impulses cannot be ignored.�
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  “If it is a living being . . .” Uhura said the words and trailed off, considering the enormity of the concept. “Just the thought of that is staggering in and of itself . . . but if the leviathan is more than just a rogue planetoid, could the spatial distortions be part of its physiology? The beating of its heart, even?”

  There was something in the human woman’s voice that gave Spock a moment’s pause. An instant of wonderment, he thought. Even though Lieutenant Uhura had been on the bridge when the object had attacked the Enterprise, and even though she had seen the terrible destruction it had apparently wrought upon the Syhaari patrol ships, she had not judged the life-form—if it was one—for its actions. Even with half his nature drawn from a human mother, Spock could still be surprised by the human ability to show compassion and empathy to something so alien to their experience.

  “If we are able,” Spock told her, “we will find the answer to that question and to many others, Lieutenant.”

  She smiled again. “Then let’s get started, Commander.”

  * * *

  The captain entered sickbay and found Nurse Chapel preparing a series of hypospray doses for distribution among her patients. “Sir,” she said, straightening to attention, but Kirk waved that away, letting her return to her work.

  “Where’s Doctor McCoy?”

  “In the operating room with Doctor M’Benga. Ron . . . I mean, Lieutenant Erikson . . . He suffered a seizure, a delayed effect from his injuries. They’re working on him now, trying to stabilize him.”

  Kirk frowned. “What are his chances, Christine?”

  Chapel’s expression became a merging of professional kindness and sad honesty. “Not good, Captain. But if anyone can help him, they can.”

  Kirk looked past the nurse and into one of the recovery rooms across the corridor from the main intensive care unit. “What about your Syhaari patient?”

  She brightened a little. “They’re a robust people, sir. Thanks to a blood transfusion, we managed to keep Duchad with us. He’s still out, though.”