Nightshade

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  They had arrived in time. Very good. He glanced back at the ensign who was filling Wolf’s station on the bridge. “Ensign Chi, hail the alien vessel. Tell them we have arrived to give whatever assistance is needed.”

  “Aye, sir, hailing the alien vessel now,” Chi said. His dark up-tilted eyes scanned his control board.

  Almost immediately, Chi said, “They are answering our hail, Commander.”

  “On main viewscreen,” Riker said.

  The screen flickered to life. The distress call had been without visual. The alien’s skin was pale blue. His head was made up of soft squares, while his mouth was a deep slit in the center. The eyes were scarlet, like fresh blood—startling against the blue of the skin.

  His torso seemed to have no neck at all. He looked like a body builder gone mad, huge square shoulders meeting just under the chin.

  “I am Commander William Riker of the Starship Enterprise. We heard your distress signal. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  The voice was almost painfully deep, as if dragged out of the wide throat. The words seemed slow, as if the alien were speaking at half-speed. “I am Captain Diric of the Milgian vessel Zar. Our engines have malfunctioned and are a day away from imploding.”

  “Is there a way to repair?”

  “No, we would ask you to take off the families and civilians, so they will be safe.”

  “Gladly. How many people would that be, Captain Diric?”

  “Fifty, though some are injured. There have been explosions in sections of the ship. Internal fires. Three of my people have died.”

  “Then you will want to evacuate your entire crew?” Riker asked.

  “No, we do not believe in abandoning a ship. When our ship dies, it will not die alone. It is our way.”

  Riker blinked, not sure what to say. There wasn’t time to argue philosophies about the sanctity of life. He would try later to convince the captain to beam aboard. Right now, he had people to save.

  “With your permission I will send an away team over to you. Do you need medical help, or extra engineering officers?”

  “Medical aid would be most appreciated. I have every confidence in my own chief engineer but again, any aid is most appreciated.”

  “We will contact you as soon as we are ready to receive your people,” Riker said.

  “Most kind. I will meet your away team.” The screen went blank.

  “Communication has been cut off, Commander,” Ensign Chi said.

  Riker wanted badly to lead the away team himself, but he was acting captain, and he had no right to endanger himself. He watched over Picard’s safety too tenderly to risk himself now. It would set a bad example for the captain when he returned.

  “Data, take an away team and beam over to the Zar.”

  “Aye, Commander, with permission, until we ascertain the stability of the Zar’s engines, I suggest a minimal away team. I would include Dr. Crusher and Geordi.”

  “Agreed.” Riker smiled, “Make it so.”

  Data raised one pale eyebrow. “Dr. Crusher and Commander La Forge, this is Commander Data. Please meet me in Transporter Room Three. We will be looking at injuries and malfunctioning engines. Please pack accordingly.”

  Geordi’s voice came out of empty air. “On my way, Data.”

  “I’ll need ten minutes to gather materials,” Dr. Beverly Crusher said, her voice spilling out of nowhere.

  “That will be acceptable, Doctor. Data out.” He turned without another word and left the bridge.

  Riker began giving orders to prepare for fifty rescuees. He trusted Crusher to have left the medical preparations for the injured in good hands. A good leader was often only as good as his crew. Riker trusted everyone to do their job.

  Watching the viewscreen, he wondered what the alien vessel looked like inside. He hoped there would be time later to view the ship personally, if they could keep it from blowing up. A big if . . .

  Data, Geordi, and Dr. Crusher appeared in a large smooth hallway. The walls were the same gray-silver of the outside of the ship and perfectly smooth, rising perhaps five meters to a peaked ceiling. The shape echoed the outline of the ship.

  Captain Diric was waiting for them. His squarish bulk nearly filled the broad corridor. The Milgian looked like he was formed from a child’s building blocks and moved forward in slow, ponderous movements, reminiscent of his slow, crawling speech.

  Geordi wondered what they sounded like to the Milgian. Were their voices incredibly fast and high-pitched? How alien were they to the aliens?

  Data stepped forward. “I am Lieutenant Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise. We have come to give aid.”

  “Most welcome,” Diric said, each word said as if in slow motion. Geordi fought an urge to shake his head, as if he could speed up the words by giving his ears a good kick.

  “Our medical facilities are this way.” As he turned, the robes over his squarish body showed burn marks.

  Dr. Crusher went forward, nearly touching the alien captain. “Are you injured, Captain?”

  “A little,” he said. He turned his head toward Crusher. It was unsettling to see his head turn when it looked like he had no neck at all.

  “May I help you?”

  “No, a small injury is nothing when my ship is dying.”

  “Please, you are in pain.”

  “No, if I have allowed my ship to die, then I must suffer with it.”

  “But I may be able to heal you?” Crusher said.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Surely you would be better able to guide your ship and help your crew if you were completely healed,” Crusher said, softly.

  Geordi resisted an urge to applaud, good thinking on the doctor’s part.

  Diric seemed to think about this for a minute, then made a small movement with his spadelike hands. “No, thank you.” He moved off down the passageway.

  Data followed him.

  Crusher didn’t move for a moment. The look on her face was one of exasperation. “I never . . .” She seemed at a loss for words.

  Geordi patted her shoulder. “You tried.”

  “I just hope that all Milgians aren’t so stubborn. It could make being a doctor obsolete.”

  He smiled. “You know the old Earth custom. The captain goes down with the ship.”

  She nodded. “I’m not going to stand by while lives are lost needlessly. I don’t care if it is their way.” There was a set to her face, a grim determination in her green eyes, that made Geordi very glad she wasn’t after him.

  They hurried to catch up with the slow moving Captain Diric and Data. The two were walking in absolute silence. Perhaps Milgians didn’t feel anymore need for small talk than the android did.

  Diric paused beside a piece of corridor that seemed to bulge outward just a bit. He passed a hand in front of it, and the wall opened, peeling back like a curtain. He lumbered inside, and they followed.

  The room was uniformly dark. After the silver-brightness of the hallway, it seemed dingy. Milgians of all sizes lay on the floor with sheets over them. Geordi had assumed that all the Milgian would be the same blue shade as the captain, but some were pale yellow, and a few various shades of red. The Milgians looked like a box of crayons spilled onto the floor.

  A slightly smaller, yellow version of their captain walked among the wounded. The yellow alien still dwarfed any of the humans. “Which of you is the doctor?” The voice had the same slow measure, but there was lilt to the end of words. Female? Geordi honestly couldn’t tell. For that matter, why had he assumed that Captain Diric was male?

  “I am the doctor,” Beverly Crusher said. She came forward, the emergency medical kit slung over her shoulder.

  “Good, I am the only doctor for the whole ship. I am pleased for any assistance.” The yellow alien started to kneel beside one of the patients, but instead of bending knees, she seemed to melt. Geordi couldn’t see under the long robes, but the movement looked like the lower half of her body had quickly m
elted, then solidified when she was low enough to touch the patient.

  Crusher exchanged a glance with him. Even Data had his head cocked to one side, as if something interesting had happened. Beverly overcame her surprise and knelt by the alien doctor.

  Geordi searched the room and found all the Milgians had odd heat patterns. What he could only assume were injury sites were a bright screaming red-orange. The cooler the pattern, the healthier the Milgian. What was their normal body temperature? It had to be lower than a human’s.

  Crusher ran a scanner back and forth over the first patient. The alien doctor flowed back to her solid looking feet and moved on.

  Geordi moved forward to stand by Dr. Crusher. “How is . . . she?”

  “Burns over seventy percent of the body, but they have some sort of cell structure I’ve never seen before. It’s almost as if the structure isn’t solid.”

  “Like when the doctor knelt down. It looked like she melted.”

  Crusher nodded. “It’s as good a word as any, I guess. The temperature readings are all over the place, depending on which part of the body I’m registering, as if different parts of the body are compartmentalized.”

  “Compartmentalized?” Data said, standing just behind them. “Separate?”

  “I think so.” She stood and motioned the two men back from the patient. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “If this patient were any humanoid I’d ever met, he would be dead. Parts of the body are nearly burned away, but those sections seem to have been shut down, and the rest of the body seems fine. In fact, there’s shock that I can read.”

  “Can you help the Milgians?” Data asked.

  “I think so, but their internal structure is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It will be difficult to know what to do.”

  “But you can help them?”

  She nodded. ‘I’ll beam over to the Enterprise with the worst of the injured. And prepare my med team for some very unusual patients.”

  “Very good, Doctor,” Data said. “If you have everything under control here, I believe Geordi and I would be of more use in the engineering section.”

  “I don’t know about under control, but yes, we will do everything we can.”

  “Good. I leave you to see to medical matters. Come, Geordi. We will ask Captain Diric to take us to engineering.”

  Geordi fought an urge to give a mock salute, but he knew Data wouldn’t appreciate the joke. Though it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. No one tried harder than Data to have a sense of humor.

  “Captain Diric, with your permission, we would like to see your engines. Perhaps there is something we can do to help you.”

  “My Chief Engineer Veleck is most competent, but a captain’s duty is to his ship, and if anything can be done to save it, then of course, you may see the engines.” His voice sounded tired or perhaps sad.

  Geordi glanced around the room at the more than twenty injured, some of them very small, children perhaps. Against one wall were three large covered forms, no heat, no anything. Geordi knew death when he saw it. He never needed to take a pulse, once the corpse was old enough to cool. Suddenly, he understood the sorrow in Diric’s voice.

  The engine room was huge, full of flowing silver-gray tubes and open structures. It was like being inside a huge architectural display. Everywhere were flowing lines, arches, metal formed into shapes delicate as lace. Geordi saw them through a colored prism of structural details. But he had a sense of the wide open beauty of it. It was one of those times when he wished he could simply see.

  And just as Dr. Crusher had never seen cell structures like those of the Milgians, La Forge had never seen any metal like this. He wasn’t even sure it was metal. But it couldn’t be anything else.

  Geordi searched the vast space for the engines, but there were no heat patterns that he could detect. The room was cold, empty. All right, if there wasn’t any infrared radiation, there would be some sort of wave particles. Engines had to run on something.

  Geordi turned in a slow circle, concentrating. His VISOR responded to his efforts. Bands of color, cell structure, stress points flared along the metal. He could see the metal flowing in upon itself, forming strong melded joints that were flawless. But there were always stress fractures, blemishes where metal was joined. Even metal that had been forged into a single piece showed signs of imperfection to his VISOR. Geordi lived in a world where he could see all the flaws, and there were no flaws in this metal.

  Geordi ran his hand down one curved beam. The surface was like cool, metallic silk. It had almost a furlike quality, a texture that wasn’t visible to his VISOR, but his hand picked it up. The metal wasn’t metal at all. Exactly what it was, Geordi didn’t have a clue.

  A small Milgian moved out from behind a particularly thick band of “metal.” To Geordi’s eyes he was simply a hodge-podge of temperature variants and strange shifting auras. All races had shifting patterns, but the Milgians were scintillating, a constant wave of colors that nearly made La Forge dizzy.

  He turned away from the Milgian, to look once more at the metal structures. There were no moving parts, no heat, no fusion, no anything that he could understand. For all Geordi knew, the Milgians were lying, and this whole place was a recreation area. Maybe that was it. Maybe this wasn’t engineering at all, and they hadn’t been prepared for his VISOR seeing through the ruse.

  He shook his head. No, he just had to accept that he was in the presence of technology so different from his own that he didn’t even know where the engines were. Suddenly, he was beginning to wonder if he would be any help at all.

  The Milgian that walked toward them was much smaller than the captain. He was a dark rich blue, like a sky before night fall. Black streaks decorated the tough outer skin of his body.

  “This is Chief Engineer Veleck,” Captain Diric said. “These are two Federation officers, Chief Engineer La Forge and Lt. Commander Data. They have come to help our ship.”

  It was only with the Milgian nearly standing in front of La Forge that he was able to see the scarlet lines on his wounded body. “You’re injured. Dr. Crusher would be happy to help you.”

  Veleck made a small motion with his hands, Geordi assumed it was his version of a shrug. “I am chief engineer. If I cannot heal my engines, then I cannot allow myself to be healed. Is this not your way, as well?” There was the faintest edge of question to the low voice.

  “Well, no,” Geordi said. “Don’t you think you could perform your duties better if you were completely well?”

  “My engines are dying, I will die with them.” There was no hint of reproach, or doubt, or even fear. Fatalism at its best crept through the Milgian’s voice.

  “If you could show us your engines, perhaps we could help heal you both,” Data said.

  “Quite right, Lt. Commander,” Captain Diric said. “Veleek, show them what they request. I will refuse no help.”

  The captain’s voice said plainly that he didn’t believe the two men could help. Geordi stared up at the supposed engines and wasn’t sure either. However, Data moved forward smoothly, with no doubts. He wasn’t programmed for them.

  Geordi took a deep breath. He knew Data couldn’t feel uncertainty, but somehow just following his friend’s confident walk made him feel better. If there was a way to help, they would find it.

  The closest thing to a solid object in the room was a curved mess of “metal.” It swirled in upon itself. Geordi stared at it, but couldn’t find a beginning or an end. It was like a Mobius strip, a snake eating its own tail.

  Data leaned forward, running a pale hand down the structure. “What method of propulsion do you use?”

  Veleck stared at them, blinking tiny eyes. “The ship wishes to move, and it moves.”

  Geordi and Data exchanged glances. They waited for more explanation, but the alien engineer remained silent. He seemed to think that his explanation was complete.

  “Explain further please,” Data said.

  “I do not understand,” V
eleck said.

  “You have not given us sufficient explanation of your propulsion systems.”

  “The ship wishes to move, and it does. There is no more explanation.”

  “Let me try, Data. Um, Veleck,” Geordi began. “What makes the ship want to move?”

  “We do.”

  If Geordi could have, he would have rolled his eyes. “Okay, how do you make the ship want to move?”

  Veleck glanced over their heads at his captain. “I do not believe I understand the question.”

  “Nor do I,” Captain Diric said.

  “Allow me, Geordi. Captain Diric, you say that your engines are in danger of imploding. Could you explain this damage to us?”

  “The center of our engines is not functioning properly.”

  “Could you be more specific?” Geordi asked.

  Veleck seemed to think about that for a moment. “If I knew specifically what was wrong, I could fix it. But the damage is too extensive. It is irreversible.”

  “If you do not know specifically what is wrong, then how do you know it is a problem with the engine core?” Data asked.

  “We are not sure,” Veleck said, “but unless the damage can be repaired, the engine will consume itself in a matter of hours. The engines are the heart of the ship, and the ship will die.”

  Geordi ran his hands over the cool metal. It had a texture almost like . . . skin. “Is your engine alive?”

  “Please to explain the question?”

  “Are their biological components to your engine?”

  “There is cell structure similar to living tissue in our engine, yes.”

  The strange readings he’d been getting suddenly made sense. It was like looking at a giant puzzle and suddenly having all the pieces fall into place. “It isn’t a communications problem. Your engine really is eating itself alive.”

  “This is what we told you,” Veleck said.

  Geordi stared up at the complex structure and asked the only question he could think of. “How does a living engine make a ship move?”

  “We have told you. It wishes to move, and it does.”

  La Forge was beginning to feel like he was caught in a logic loop. “But . . .”