The Latter Fire

by James Swallow

  “Show us,” said Kaleo.

  Kirk gave a reluctant nod. “Do as she asks, Spock.”

  New images captured by the Enterprise’s probes filled the Syhaari monitors, grainy with distance but still stark enough to be horribly clear. For a moment, it seemed like a strange lunar eclipse was taking place, as the great shadowed mass of the intruder object passed between the probe craft and the blue-white disc of icy Hokaar. In those brief seconds, Kirk caught sight of what looked like glowing rivers of lava on the leviathan’s dark side; they shimmered with an angry, livid firelight.

  “Any contact from the rangers out there?” said Sulu, his eyes wide with shock.

  Hoyga had dashed to one of the control consoles nearby, and Kirk saw her make a negative gesture toward Tormid.

  There was something unreal about watching the silent play of the probe’s images, relayed via subspace through the Enterprise’s antennae to the command station. The angle of the visuals made it difficult to judge exact distances or relative scale—but when great whips of crimson lightning coiled off the surface of the craggy alien orb, Kirk knew they had to be as big as mountains.

  “Subspace radiation discharges detected,” Spock reported. “Magnitude seven and increasing.”

  “Impossible,” breathed ch’Sellor. Kirk hadn’t figured the Andorian to be knowledgeable about anything other than diplomatic issues, but the shift in the color of his face to pale blue showed he knew enough to understand the import of the Vulcan’s words.

  Tiny sparks of light flickered and went out as the arcs of red fire lashed the surface of Hokaar, and Kirk felt sick inside as he realized they had just witnessed the destruction of the ranger ships. Hating to give the order, he told Spock to magnify the image. The ice planet leapt closer, now only partly concealed by the motion of the leviathan around it.

  “What is it doing?” gasped Hoyga.

  “Killing,” said Kaleo, in an empty, dead voice. “It’s killing the planet.”

  Once she had said the words, there was no other way Kirk could think of the unfolding events. He felt his hands tightening into fists with all the unspent emotion inside him, the anger and resentment at being forced to stand here and watch, robbed of any opportunity to lend aid. But even if we had been there, what could we have done? The question echoed in his mind. Torn some luckless souls from that doomed outpost, then fled? Or would we have perished too?

  As the leviathan spat torrents of lightning toward the icy world, the captain could not take his eyes from the screen cluster. Even at this distance, he could see great canyons opening across the vast plains of nitrogen snow, yawning fissures wide enough to swallow cities, gases and fluids from far below surging up into mile-high plumes. Hokaar cracked open—and slowly it began to break apart.

  Huge plates of ice detached from the surface and crumbled, and the thin atmospheric envelope of Hokaar came apart under the continuing bombardment. Matter streamed off the ruined globe, blown out by gravitational stresses as it entered its death throes. But there was no final, catastrophic detonation; instead, the ice world became a mess of jagged fragments. Great, serrated planetesimals collided and tumbled around one another, still captured by their own weak gravity. A halo of gas and dust shimmered in the distant light of the Sya sun, a shroud about the corpse of a world.

  “So much power . . .” breathed Sulu. “It’d take twenty starships firing full phasers to come close to that.”

  “Why?” said Xuur, her face frozen with shock. “Why did it attack again?”

  “We don’t know,” Kirk admitted, watching as the leviathan’s lightning blasts slowed and finally stopped. As if it realized its target was now a ruin, the intruder object turned away from its close orbit around Hokaar and began to arc away from it.

  “Curious.” Despite the dreadful sight they had just witnessed, Spock’s scientific interest was undimmed. “It appears that the leviathan is preparing to leave its target behind. It is not remaining to feed on the . . . the residue.”

  “It is a cruel beast, then,” Tormid said, nodding to himself as if some great truth had been confirmed. “A predator loosed upon us from some dark place beyond the Veil. I have always said the alien is a danger to us. It gives me no pleasure to be proven right.”

  On the screens, the leviathan seemed to shimmer, and then it was suddenly looming large in the probe’s scanner window. Before the Enterprise crew could react, the display was washed out by a brilliant discharge of crimson, and then there was nothing.

  “The probe has been destroyed,” reported Scotty. “Object leaving orbital path of fifth planet and accelerating.”

  “Back to its hiding place,” Tormid grated.

  “No,” said Hoyga, the long fur along the sides of her round face wilting. “According to the data from our orbital telescopes, the target is on a heading that will take it past the orbit of the gas giant Yedeen and then deeper into the system.” She swallowed audibly. “Tormid, it is on course toward the inner planets.”

  “It’s coming after our homeworld,” said Kaleo.

  Seven

  Leonard McCoy watched the replay of the images from the Enterprise’s remote sensor probe in silence, his eyes never leaving the briefing room’s tri-screen. When the playback finally terminated, he found that he had been holding his breath, and he gave a long, low sigh. “This just keeps getting worse.”

  “The doctor is, regrettably, quite correct,” said Spock, sitting across the table from him. At his side, Lieutenant Uhura sat with a hand pressed to her face, as if she were trying to hold in her shock and sorrow.

  “Do we have an ETA on the leviathan?” Kirk asked the question that was on all their minds, keeping his tone steady, keeping them focused on the job at hand.

  “If it maintains its current speed and heading, the object will cross the orbit of Gadmuur in approximately four hours.” Spock nodded toward a tactical plot on the tri-screen monitor in the middle of the briefing table.

  “The Syhaari are already assembling a battle flotilla in orbit,” said Envoy Xuur. She had insisted on taking part in the meeting, and there had been no reason to deny her. The events of the past few hours seemed to have changed something in the Rhaandarite woman’s behavior, and McCoy felt like he was now seeing the person behind the calm, smiling mask. If that was a good or a bad thing, he couldn’t tell. “This will not end well,” she added.

  McCoy looked back at the last images on the main monitor. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t it feed? I mean, the creature expended a colossal amount of energy on cracking Hokaar like an egg . . . and then it turned away. An animal would never do that. It’s not . . .” He threw Spock a look. “It isn’t logical behavior.”

  “In other circumstances I would concur, Doctor McCoy,” said the Vulcan. “However, in the light of new information gleaned by myself and Lieutenant Uhura, it appears we may have been mistaken about the leviathan’s motivation.”

  “We’re ascribing intelligence to it now, then?” Xuur frowned. “It is a sad fact that only a sentient being can commit murder and then walk away.”

  “Yes,” said Uhura, “and no.” She sighed. “The situation is more complicated than we first thought.”

  “It usually is,” said McCoy with a scowl.

  The lieutenant looked to Spock and he gave her a nod, encouraging her to continue. Uhura took a breath and launched into their theory. “This life-form is what we believed it to be. A gigantic cosmozoan with a silicon-based biochemistry. Using Doctor McCoy’s records from his scans of the Horta species, we found dozens of points of correlation that show a similar evolutionary path, but nothing to indicate the same level of cognitive development. By all modes by which we measure sentience, it reads negative. Which is why we were confused when I discovered this.” She inserted a data card into a slot on the table, and the tri-screen lit up with new data.

  A steady, repeating series of tones i
ssued out of a hidden speaker, and there was an unmistakably artificial cadence to them. Xuur cocked her head to listen. “This is coming from the creature?”

  Uhura shook her head. “Not exactly. At first we thought the leviathan was generating the signal itself, but deeper analysis indicates the message is coming from a location close to the surface of the object.”

  “There’s someone on that thing?” McCoy’s eyes widened. “How the hell are they still alive?”

  “Not on it,” Uhura corrected. “But probably aboard some kind of craft within the leviathan’s atmospheric envelope. We can’t locate the source directly because of the spatial distortions clouding our sensors.”

  Kirk leaned across the table. “More to the point,” the captain said firmly, “what’s this about a message?”

  “To reiterate, it is not the leviathan that is attempting to communicate with us,” Spock explained. “But these unknown entities in synchrony with it. Lieutenant Uhura’s intuitive leap has allowed us to isolate a discreet subspace signal in the highest ranges of the sigma band.”

  “It’s far outside the capabilities of Syhaari technology to pick it up,” added the communications officer. “Even for our more advanced systems, it’s a stretch.”

  “Why didn’t you speak of this when we were on board the star dock?” demanded Xuur. “Did you know then?” She glared at the captain. “Did you, Kirk?”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Kirk eyed his first officer. “Mister Spock, the envoy’s question is a valid one.”

  “The decision was mine. I ordered Lieutenant Uhura to say nothing until we could gather to discuss this,” said the Vulcan. “Given the circumstances, I felt it best to keep this information under our control until we can determine how best to reveal it. As we are all well aware, the situation with the Syhaari is already a delicate one.”

  McCoy gave a humorless chuckle. “Spit it out, Spock. Because you damn well have everyone’s attention.”

  Uhura produced a second data card and placed it in the reader slot. “Once we isolated the signal, I put it through every linguacode matrix and translator algorithm we had in the database. The sample wasn’t much to go on, but I believe we have a solid conversion of the message . . .” She trailed off as she flicked another switch, and the speakers groaned out a series of throbbing, atonal pulses that made McCoy think of the strangled croaks of swamp frogs from his childhood. “This is the filtered feed,” Uhura went on. “A single phrase, repeated over and over again.”

  Spock addressed a panel on the table before him. “Computer.”

  “Working,” responded a metallic female voice.

  “Analyze and render input signal using translation matrix Uhura-one-four.”

  There was a brief chatter of computation, and then the voice spoke again. “Analysis forms three distinct notional nodes. First group: collective unit. Second group: official statement. Third and final group: armed conflict.”

  “I don’t like where this is going,” McCoy muttered.

  “Closest translation rendering . . .” said the computer. “We. Declare. War.”

  Xuur shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “A formal announcement of hostilities? From whom? For what reason?”

  “I see now why you kept this quiet, Commander,” said Kirk. “Tormid has his people on a hair-trigger already. If they heard that . . .” He paused. “Something has been off since the very moment we arrived in this system. If there’s a war brewing here, and the Syhaari are involved in it, then we need to know the full truth.”

  “That assumes this is an act of retaliation,” noted Spock.

  Uhura shook her head. “I think that’s implicit in the use of terms, sir. From what I can determine, the structure of the alien language would be different if they were proclaiming an invasion.”

  Xuur rose slowly from her chair and took a few paces. Her gaze turned inward as she tried to process the new information. “This changes everything,” she whispered.

  Again, McCoy stared at the frozen image of the leviathan on the screen, thinking it through. “I think I get it now. It makes a sick kind of sense.”

  “What do you see, Bones?” said Kirk.

  He pointed at the screen. “When we realized that thing was a living creature, we thought we were dealing with some kind of random event. An . . . animal attack, if you want to call it that, just on a huge scale. But it’s not that at all.” McCoy glanced at the first officer. “Spock, Uhura said earlier your analysis of the leviathan raised parallels with the Janus Horta . . .”

  “Also your Terran whales and the cloud-sifters of Procyon,” agreed Spock.

  “The point is,” McCoy went on, “all of them are typically docile animals, even when they’re at megafauna scale.”

  “Correct, Doctor. Common to all those species is a nonpredatory behavior pattern, a pattern that is disrupted here.”

  “By force!” he retorted. “Don’t you see? Whatever ships or craft are riding in the atmosphere of the leviathan, they’re not just like fleas on a dog! They must be herding it! Using it as a weapon!”

  Kirk nodded gravely. “It’s a sound tactic. In Earth’s ancient past, preindustrial armies would use beaters to drive wild elephants into enemy villages to trample everything before them. What you’re suggesting is just the same thing on a far larger scale.”

  “Barbaric is what it is,” McCoy replied, sickened by his realization.

  The room fell silent. No one could refute the doctor’s words.

  Finally, Kirk spoke. “All right. We don’t have a lot of time to act on this. Spock, pass orders to Mister Sulu to take us out to the Syhaari flotilla.”

  “What do we tell them when we get there, Jim?” said McCoy.

  The captain looked away. “We tell them everything. And hope they’ll be just as open with us.”

  * * *

  His people dismissed, Kirk lingered a moment in the briefing room to collect his thoughts; but not everyone had left.

  “Captain,” began Xuur, “I would speak candidly with you.”

  He gave a wan smile. “I thought I already made that clear, Envoy. You can tell me whatever is on your mind.”

  She eyed the door, making certain they were alone. “James,” she said, using his given name for the first time since they had met. “Don’t misunderstand me when I say this, but that message Lieutenant Uhura discovered. It may actually be a positive development.”

  “You see an escalation from an interplanetary disaster to a declaration of open warfare as a good thing? Since when has the Federation Diplomatic Corps been taking lessons from the Klingon Empire?”

  “You’re not a diplomat,” she retorted, showing a little heat. “So perhaps the nuance escapes you.” Xuur took a step toward him. “Tell me, if you meant to do me serious harm, would you hit me, or would you tell me you are going to hit me?”

  He saw where she was taking the discussion. “You’re talking about the difference between the act of violence and the threat of it.”

  “Exactly!” She nodded briskly. “In many ways, diplomacy is the art of delaying the act of violence until it becomes a redundant choice.” Xuur waved at the screen and the image of the planetoid. “If the beings directing your leviathan are making threats, then they are talking.”

  “They’re doing more than just making threats,” Kirk corrected. “They’re making good on them. Or did you miss what happened to Hokaar and the patrol ships?”

  Xuur dismissed the question with a shake of her head. “The point is, they are communicating. And if we can talk to them directly—”

  “There’s still a chance we might be able to stop this.”

  She clasped her hands together. “Now you see, James.”

  “I do, Veygaan,” he replied. “More than you realize.” He let the sentence hang, but they both knew what ha
d been left unsaid. We both know how ambitious she is. And what better way for a young envoy to make her mark than by stopping a war?

  Her practiced, placid gaze hardened. “This will not be easy,” she warned. “The Syhaari are not members of the Federation, they’re not a protectorate or even an associated nation state. We have only the most basic agreement in place with the Gathering. Any involvement by agents of the FDC or Starfleet with what is technically a local issue is strictly prohibited.”

  “That’s right. Unless of course a formal request for assistance is made by a member of the Learned Assembly.” Kirk’s lips thinned. “But from what I’ve seen, our friend Tormid and his supporters seem to think they’re fully capable of dealing with the leviathan. You heard him before. He wants us gone. That won’t alter.”

  “There’s a big difference between declaring war on a rogue animal, and doing so with another alien species. Tormid may change his mind when he hears what your officers have to say.”

  He shook his head. “I thought you were good at reading people. You’ve seen how the Syhaari culture works. Status is everything to them. Tormid won’t back down in the face of this new data . . . If anything, he’ll be more convinced he’s right to take up arms.”

  “Correct,” she said, and suddenly Kirk had the sense he was being maneuvered into something. “So it will fall to you and me to find another way.”

  * * *

  The Light of Strength could only be considered a warship, and it was with something like disappointment that Kirk studied its interiors. The other Syhaari spacecraft he had encountered were elegant and poised in their structures, refined in a way that reminded him of the racing yachts he had crewed as a youth or the fast and agile trainers he flew in the Academy. Not so the Light; it was a brutal collision of hulls and wings, something bolted together in haste with the pure intent of acting as a weapon. Every hundred meters along the central passage, the captain saw laser gunnery pods that had been hurriedly welded to the fuselage or clusters of deadly nuclear-tipped rockets.