The Trellisane Confrontation

by David Dvorkin

  Petty as the details were, though, Hander Morl was forced to admit to himself that they held a surprising appeal for him. It was as much the emphasis on order, duty, and obedience preached by the United Expansion Party as its philosophy concerning the destiny of the Federation to grow to dominate the Galaxy that had attracted Hander Morl to it. He believed in the Federation's duty and destiny to expand and conquer, but he also believed in an individual citizen doing his duty even to the point of personal sacrifice. That, of course, was why he and his followers were willing to die on this mission, and why he was angry at the knowledge that the crew of the Enterprise would probably not be willing, if he gave them the choice, to do the same. Personal death was a high price to pay, but it was a small price in exchange for forcing a war of conquest upon the reluctant weaklings who ran the Federation. It was not impossible that the crisis would bring down the government and that the war against the Romulans, when it finally came about, would be conducted under the control of the United Expansion Party itself.

  Morl had always derived great pleasure from submitting himself to the will of the UEP leadership. He obeyed his orders without question, just as he expected his own subordinates to obey his orders. He had hoped that some day he would be invited to join the leadership himself, but if that never happened he would still school himself to be content. This mission was his idea; party leadership had jumped at the idea and immediately placed Morl himself in command of the mission. Now he would never rise higher in the UEP: he had known from the start that there would be no returning from this mission. He accepted that, too. To be chosen for this task was honor enough, even greater honor than commanding some section or brigade of the party. In the future, school children of the Galaxy-spanning Federation of Planets would learn of his exploit, would study his life. He would be one of the greatest martyr-figures in Federation history. Still, sitting at this hub of power, feeling the lines of command stretching throughout this magnificent space vessel, binding more than 400 people into an obedient whole, and converging in the raised chair on the bridge where he, Hander Morl, sat—this was a pleasure and an honor, too, even if he had not attained the position legitimately. No, he told himself quickly. Put that thought from you. My goals confer all the legitimacy I need. If the Federation were being run as it should, someone like me would already be sitting here.

  The Enterprise was still in an alert status. Hander Morl had heard the alert sounded via the wall speakers outside his cell. So far, despite the ship's departure from the scene of the battle, the alert had not been canceled. He had no idea if a day and a half was a long time for an alert to be maintained or not—if that might make someone outside the bridge suspicious—but maintaining it had at least one advantage. As long as the alert was in force, everyone on the ship would be too worried about what was going on invisibly outside the hull to concern themselves with the lack of crew changes on the bridge. Or so Hander Morl hoped. And there was a good excuse for maintaining the alert status: the escape of the prisoners from the Security section!

  He motioned one of the Nactern women over and pointed at Sulu, who was still lying on the floor where Morl had dumped him but was stirring and groaning. "Get him on his feet. Quickly." If there were any announcements to be made, Morl didn't want alarm spread by a stranger's voice on the ship's speakers.

  The warrior woman picked Sulu up easily and held him on his feet. His head lolled on his chest and his legs were rubber. "I meant, wake him up!" Morl said impatiently.

  She shook Sulu and slapped him hard a couple of times, and at last he could stand by himself. He held his head in his hands and tried to make his stomach settle itself. The phaser had been set on "strong stun," and Sulu's head felt as if it would fall to the deck in pieces if he let go. As his vision cleared, he looked around the bridge and saw the armed intruders, their weapons moving slowly back and forth to discourage all thoughts of heroism. His mind was still fuzzy from the phaser bolt, and he had no idea who Hander Morl and the others were, but it was clear enough to him that they were in at least temporary command of the Enterprise.

  "Sulu!" Morl snapped. "Come over here. I want you to make an announcement."

  His knees still weak but growing stronger, Sulu obeyed. Following Morl's orders, he thumbed a button on the command chair arm and announced the continuation of the Red Alert. "The escaped prisoners could be anywhere on the ship by now," he said, half listening to the amplified sound of his voice echoing faintly through the walls of the bridge. "Red Alert will be maintained until all have been recaptured. They are to be considered extremely dangerous. Alert procedures will be followed until further notice. Bridge out."

  Morl nodded. This one at least knew his duty and did it. "Return to your normal post on the bridge, Sulu." His tone came close to being kind.

  In the Medical section, Nurse Christine Chapel muttered in annoyance. With McCoy presumably still down on Trellisane, and his other assistants off tending to the wounded in the Security section, where the damage seemed to have been confined, she was virtually alone in Medical. Normally, she could have handled that with no difficulty, equipped as she was both by training and temperament to keep everything running properly. Quite a few badly mangled Security personnel had been brought to her, however, and the automated medical equipment was getting badly overloaded. She needed more than two hands to stay on top of things. For that matter, long exposure to Dr. McCoy had prejudiced her in favor of the human touch and against the mechanical, so that she felt morally bound to tend to each patient herself, no matter what the machine knitting the patient back together said about the patient's progress. The continuation of the Red Alert, just announced over the speakers, meant that she could not requisition any kind of help: everyone who could fulfill a duty had one assigned during such alerts, and no one, of those who might be of use to her, would be available to come down to Medical and place himself under her orders. Dr. Goro, who would normally have taken charge of Medical in McCoy's absence, had called in only minutes earlier to tell Chapel that he was staying in the Security section because of what he called "the carnage here" and had no idea when he'd be able to get back to Medical section.

  It was while she was sitting by the bedside of a young woman from Security, whose pallor seemed to indicate to Chapel that she was not doing at all as well as the life-support equipment claimed, that she heard a thin, high-pitched noise behind her that she knew didn't belong here. She turned quickly, then gasped in astonishment.

  At the far end of the room, jammed up against the wall as though using it for support, was a creature unlike any she had seen before. It was a roughly spherical thing, perhaps a meter in diameter, its color somewhere between pink and brown. She had not been present when the prisoners had been brought aboard, and she had heard nothing about them since then. Knowing nothing at all about Onctiliis and its four-sex group creatures, she had no idea what this thing was. Her first reaction to it, nonetheless, was fear. Its high-pitched, sweet-sounding cry continued, and it cut through her, fascinating and repelling her at the same time.

  Then Chapel saw that one side of the being, turned almost away from her, was oozing fluids; and as she watched it, the Onctiliian began to lose its spherical shape and to slump down, flattening more and more against the floor until it had no recognizable shape. "Why, you poor thing!" Chapel said. "You're badly hurt." It was due more to a feeling she received from the creature, this conclusion of hers, than to analysis. After all, she knew of shapeless creatures whose slumping down to the floor was no reflection on their state of health; similarly, she had seen beings who oozed fluids as part of their normal functioning. Somehow, she felt a communication of some kind come across the room to her, an impression that all of the Onctiliian's defensive ferocity had left it and that it was pleading for help.

  Chapel's instincts and training asserted themselves, and she got up and went quickly over to the Onctiliian, filled with the desire to help this latest patient. Essential as speed so often was in medical emergencies, sh
e had long ago learned not to seem to be attacking a frightened, wounded alien. She kneeled slowly before it and gently placed her hand on it, near the place the fluids were oozing from. The high-pitched cry softened and stopped at last. She could almost feel the dying creature relax under her comforting touch.

  Earlier that day, rushing about trying to take care of the needs of all the wounded and nearly dead being brought into Medical, Chapel had cut her hand badly, stripping off a few square centimeters of skin and flesh on her palm. Her own wound had been minor, in her opinion, compared to those of the patients being brought in, and if it hadn't been for the way it had interfered with her ability to function properly, she would have ignored it. As it was, she had dressed it hastily and forgotten about it. Now, losing consciousness at last, the Onctiliian twitched, and Chapel momentarily lost her balance and fell forward. Her hand slid across the smooth, wet skin and plunged into the body of the dead Onctiliian.

  Disorganization, putrefaction—these followed quickly upon death for an Onctiliian. Indeed, it was largely this rapidity of decay that doomed the other three Onctiliians in a bonding to death, for a longer grace period would give them time to expel the dead member and find a replacement. Chapel's hand sank into the flesh up to her wrist, and she cried out in horror.

  A fragment of bone within the dead creature had caught on the dressing as Chapel fell forward, and now the dressing and the scab beneath it were torn off together. Her hand sank through the almost liquid body of the dead member and came to rest at last against the junction, the boundary, with one of the living three, her flayed palm resting full length against the communication nexus and the fluid interchange.

  Chapel toppled over onto her side, her eyes glazing. She felt herself falling and falling, and then held firmly, both comforted and trapped. She opened her mouth to cry out again, this time in renewed fear rather than horror, but the sound that came from her, echoed by the group-creature, was that high-pitched, utterly inhuman Onctiliian cry of pain and bewilderment. A new communication was established, a new joining had begun, stranger and more exciting than any that had gone before.

  Had nothing out of the ordinary happened on the bridge—neither the takeover by Hander Morl and his men nor the attack by the Sealon ships which had made the takeover possible—the bridge crew would all have been relieved within a couple of hours after Morl's phaser had knocked Sulu out. As it was, those on the bridge had already spent two normal shifts trapped in that relatively small place, and they were all dreaming, not so much of freedom from the phasers pointed at them, as of hot meals, hot showers, and warm bunks with warm companions in them. It was very surprising, Ensign Chekov told himself, that he should keep thinking about and missing all those little pleasures and comforts of daily life, rather than worrying about the deeper issues: here the Enterprise was in the hands of a gang of criminal madmen, headed for the Romulan Neutral Zone, Chekov and his comrades apparently unable to do anything to retake the ship, and all Chekov could think of was his growling belly and his drooping eyelids. Ah, Pavel Andreievich, he thought, it's just that your backside is killing you from sitting here for so long.

  Chekov reached both arms up and stretched slowly and thoroughly. It didn't do anything for his aching buttocks or cramped legs, but it helped relieve the tension in his shoulders and back. He turned his head from side to side, wincing at the throbbing of a growing headache. For the first time, he noticed the Nactern warrior standing near his chair and gazing at the huge front screen in fascination. Well, well, he asked himself, what's this?

  Her expression was one he had seen before, one he had worn on his own face for days on end when he was first assigned to the bridge. It was virtually impossible not to be captivated by the star field as seen on the forward screens of a ship in warp drive. Color shifts and relativistic distortions were compensated for automatically by the computer controlling the screen display, so that what showed on the screen was what Spock liked to call "a Newtonian analogue" of the scene a suited crewman on the forward hull would see, but in a way the result was even more entrancing. Dead ahead, in the center of the screen, the stars seemed motionless, as of course they were. Toward the edges of the screen, however, the ship's incredible velocity showed in the way the multicolored sparks crawled radially away from the center. Some stars were close enough to the ship's path to seem to move independently of the others, crawling past in front of them with an increasing speed that could induce vertigo in the inexperienced viewer.

  Never mind that the Galaxy was stable, moving only with astronomically slow majesty, and that what the screen showed was merely an artifact of the ship's motion and the computer's ingenuity: still, the unwary viewer could easily find himself lost in the illusion that he was the only fixed point in a twisting, flowing Universe, where constellations formed and dissolved as he watched, and the Galaxy rushed past on all sides, hurrying off to some unimaginable destiny behind him. Despite the simulations he had been shown beforehand and the warning he had received, Chekov had fallen prey to that illusion during his first days on the job, and it had kept him bewildered for days. He had experienced the phenomenon then himself, and he had seen it happen often enough to other newcomers, but he had scarcely expected to see it happen to one of these singleminded fanatics, and especially not to this cold and rather masculine woman. Use whatever the gods give you, he told himself.

  Chekov leaned toward the woman and said, "It's a dangerous illusion."

  She shook herself at the sound of his voice and said in a bewildered voice, "What?"

  "I said that it's a dangerous illusion. You can lose yourself in it and become nonfunctional." He explained quickly how the display on the screen was produced and how it differed from what they would be seeing if it weren't for the computer's processing of the image. She smiled at him in a friendly way. Chekov relaxed and began both to put more effort into it and to enjoy himself. Among the things he had always admired most about James Kirk was the captain's ability to switch from terrifying martinet to charming and tactful gentleman.

  Behind Chekov, Hander Morl watched and smiled cynically. Let the young fool try, thinking he's so clever, Morl thought. It will keep him occupied. Destiny is only hours away.

  Chapter Eight

  What arrived to take up a circum-Trellisane orbit only hours after Veedron's departure was quite different from anything Sealon the Trellisanians had seen before. It was huge, dwarfing the Sealon attack ships they were growing accustomed to. By all their sensors' indications, it was virtually amorphous, utterly lacking that Klingon-inspired bird-of-prey configuration they so feared. This strange, blobby thing circling their planet at low altitude and low inclination—it was an anticlimax, it was almost a laughable object. The leaders of Trellisane, Veedron and the other heads of the many gemots, felt hope revive at last: perhaps the Sealons had come to their senses and would cease their aggression!

  The crippled Sealon attack craft, left behind in a low orbit when its two companions had raised their altitudes and shifted to polar orbits, had long since succumbed to drag, spiraling ever lower until it deorbited and screamed down through the atmosphere, a brilliant fireball, its remains impacting on a large, uninhabited island near the equator. Ever highly moral, ever softhearted, the Trellisanians had rushed one of McCoy's new emergency medical teams to the spot to care for any survivors. Of course there were none. Now the huge new arrival, in just as low an orbit, began to break up. The Trellisanians watched the destruction—hinting at a loss of life far greater than the earlier disaster—with utmost horror. How could they watch such a tragedy and stay unmoved? They summoned the temerity to broadcast a message to the huge craft: "Raise your orbit! Can we help you in any way?" There was no reply from the Sealon vessel.

  At last the Trellisanian observers realized that the great ship's breakup was no accident. The pieces that separated from the main bulk were all of roughly the same size, and they detached themselves at regular intervals, deorbited under apparent control, and splashed gently
into Trellisane's oceans. Soon all that was left in orbit was a giant framework, the skeleton of the monster that had arrived in orbit, with one end bulging out to form the housing for impulse engines. This skeleton left orbit and departed upon the long coast back to Sealon. The invasion was underway.

  Kirk and Spock had managed to obtain transportation back to Veedron's headquarters building, which was in fact the administrative headquarters only of the Protocol Binders gemot, the gemot of which Veedron was head. With the advent of the Sealon crisis and because of Veedron's acknowledged eminence among the council of gemot leaders, the building had become the closest thing Trellisane had to a governmental center. Observation of the orbital sensors had been transferred here from the headquarters of the Orbit Traffic Controllers gemot on another continent, and it was here that Kirk and Spock watched helplessly while the Sealons' invasion force deorbited and vanished beneath the surface of the seas, unhindered by Trellisanian vessels in space, in the air, or on the seas.