Star Trek: Enterprise - 017 - Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “And where will you find a cooperative melder?”

  V’Las gave her a knowing look. “Come now, Professor. We both know the potential exists in all Vulcans. The stigma did nothing to reduce the number of melders—it just minimized the practice, or at least kept it hidden from public view. Naturally there were those within the High Command with the training or natural inclination for melding. I even employed melder operatives on occasion for . . . special missions. To gather intelligence, to reprogram a mind, to kill undetectably. Some of those operatives are still among Zadok’s loyalists.”

  T’Nol was dismayed by what she was hearing. “Our goal is to restore Vulcan’s intellectual purity and strength.”

  “Use your reason, T’Nol! How can the power to enter and influence others’ minds be anything but a strength?”

  Bewildered by the question, she fell back on the certainties she had been raised with. “Melding is too intimate, too emotional. It risks neurological imbalance and damage, loss of identity, even physical debilitation.”

  V’Las considered her. “I think it’s time you learned the truth about something, T’Nol. When did medical science reveal these neurological hazards?”

  “Approximately two hundred and sixty years ago.”

  “About midway through Vulcan’s war with the Romulans.”

  “Yes . . . but what is the relevance of that?”

  “The relevance, my dear professor, is that the Romulans had begun infiltrating Vulcan with undercover operatives by that time.”

  T’Nol stared. “Not to doubt your word, Administrator—but how could such alien infiltrators pass undetected?”

  “Because they were not aliens. Their forebears had evolved on this world like the rest of us.”

  It took her a moment to realize what he was telling her. “You mean the Romulans . . . are the Sundered? Those who marched beneath the raptor’s wing?”

  “Why else do you think they were so implacably hostile to a Vulcan ruled by Surak’s ways?” V’Las circled around his desk, nearing her. “Or so threatened by a Vulcan that retained the mental abilities they had somehow lost?”

  The implication was staggering. “No.”

  “Yes, T’Nol. Those ‘medical findings’ on the hazards of melding were the work of Romulan sleepers, seeking to undermine the Vulcans’ telepathic advantage.”

  T’Nol could not accept what he was saying. “If you knew this, then why would you have promoted the stigma?”

  “Because at the time, I was working with the Romulans.” The revelation stunned T’Nol, but he gave her no pause to absorb it. “I believed that their warrior strength combined with Vulcan rationality could make both races stronger. And discouraging melding reduced the chances of anyone discovering the . . . actions and goals that I and those like me preferred to keep private.”

  He paced before her, and when he spoke again, it was more to himself. “But I was a fool to believe the Romulans had Vulcan’s interests in heart. I have learned from that mistake. Now, my only priority is to make Vulcan strong. And that means encouraging all our strengths, telepathy included.”

  T’Nol studied him in disbelief. “I thought you supported a return to our old ways.”

  “Haven’t you been listening, T’Nol? The melder prejudice was an imposition on our old ways, one that never should have been there. It was a revision, my friend, exactly the kind of offworld contamination that you so rightly abhor. You should welcome its abandonment. So long as it is in service to the true Vulcan path, rather than the pacifism and weak-willed tolerance of the Syrannites.”

  T’Nol’s mind reeled at the paradox she was faced with. Accepting the change in doctrine V’Las proposed would mean acknowledging that she had been . . . had been . . . wrong. But she had arrived at her conclusions through pure logic, and logic was infallible. Yet that would mean that V’Las was wrong, and how could that be? She had concluded decades ago that V’Las and his supporters stood for the purest, most correct interpretation of cthia, which was why she had aligned herself with them. That had also been the logical decision, so it could not have been wrong.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps this was a test of her purity of logic. He presented her with an untenable premise to make her doubt her convictions. The response must be to present a decisive logical counterargument for why she had been right all along on every count. She simply needed to meditate on the question until clarity came.

  The door signal chimed, and V’Las called, “Enter!” The panel slid aside and Zadok stepped in. “Yes, Commander?”

  “Sokanis is here, Administrator. He will require two V’hral in meditation to prepare, and then the meld can begin.”

  “Excellent. Tell him to begin with Archer. His mind should be the simpler one to subvert.”

  “Yes, Administrator. Also, our operative in spacedock has confirmed that T’Pau, Soval, Skon, and T’Rama are all aboard Endeavour. Skon lives, but his condition is serious. It is unlikely that his clanmates will leave his side. And the Andorian now commanding the ship has Soval aboard for his safety.”

  V’Las nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent. Let us prove him wrong. Do your forces stand ready?”

  “Yes, Administrator,” Zadok answered with martial pride. “As soon as the signal is received, they will advance on the target cities and Space Central.”

  “Excellent. Order our operative to proceed with the sabotage at once. The target time is four V’hral hence. Sokanis should be done by then.”

  “Yes, Administrator.” Zadok saluted and left.

  T’Nol turned to V’Las. “Sabotage?”

  “Of Endeavour,” he explained. “An efficient way to dispose of my remaining enemies, now that the two I need alive are in my control.”

  “You will destroy the ship?”

  “Earther warp drives are powerful but fairly primitive. Susceptible to catastrophic failure if the right safeguards are disabled. To the public, it will look like a tragic accident, a failure of human technology costing countless Vulcan lives. At which point I will step forward to restore order and hold Kuvak’s government accountable for allowing such a tragedy to occur.”

  The eagerness in his voice, on his face, gave T’Nol pause. “Many innocent Vulcans will die.”

  “You knew that would happen in any case. Logic, Professor. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

  “Yes, of course,” she murmured. It was a simple calculation, so it must be correct. And V’Las’s plan to shape the circumstances in his favor was intricately reasoned.

  Or was it? Intricate, yes, but to what goal? Was it truly necessary to abduct and mentally violate Archer and T’Pol, to kill T’Pau and her clanmates—including an unborn child—in order to set the coup in motion? Would not the brainwashing of their two captives achieve the legitimization he sought without the destruction of Endeavour and Space Central? Was the brainwashing even necessary given the longer-term legitimization stratagem he had assigned to her experts? It seemed as though V’Las was more concerned with personal vengeance on individuals who had wronged him than he was with the logical needs of Vulcan.

  And what of his commitment to his own allies? The Mental Integrity Coalition had served V’Las with equal dedication to her own Anti-revisionists. They believed he would stand with them and restore the melding ban once more. But even now, an actual melder was in this compound, readying to employ his perversion in V’Las’s service. What if the administrator were sincere about his plan to embrace melding wholesale? Would he really cast aside a staunch ally so casually?

  And if so, what was to prevent him from casting T’Nol aside when it suited him?

  No, logic could not be wrong. T’Nol was still sure of that. But other people certainly could be.

  21

  June 7, 2165

  U.S.S. Zabathu

  URWEN ZEHERI HAD NEVER been prone to unreasoni
ng fear. Few Vanotli who grew up during a storm generation could last long if they didn’t develop strong backbones. But these past few days aboard a ship of the stars had been a terrifying ordeal for her. The vacuum and radiation outside Zabathu’s thin hull weighed constantly on her mind. She’d grown up within walls protecting her from the elements, but somehow the very intangibility of these new dangers made them more unnerving than the wind and rain and lightning. Worse, the gravity aboard this ship pulled oppressively, making her heavier and more sluggish than she was accustomed to. If Travis and his friends had evolved in gravity like this, it would explain their supernormal strength and durability. But it just made her feel fragile and helpless by contrast.

  And the company inside offered no comfort. The blue creatures—Andorians—who made up most of the crew were more alien than any Underlander she had ever imagined. And Travis and the other humans, now restored to their natural appearance, were even more off-putting for how closely they resembled the Vanotli she’d believed them to be—and for how they’d lied to her the whole time. True, Travis and the others had made no secret of being from another place; Rey had even hinted at coming from the stars. But then they had simply played along with her ignorance, as if patting her on the head and laughing behind her back.

  Though in her more honest moments, during the long hours she spent huddled in her cabin trying not to look out the portal at the terrifying void beyond, she admitted that perhaps she was angrier at herself. Some inquisitor she had been, letting her prejudices blind her to the evidence. But she still felt Travis had taken advantage of her. In fairness, he’d been completely honest with her since their abduction. He’d come to her that first day and told her everything: about his distant homeworld Earth and their own, surprisingly tentative probing into space, about his first encounter with the Ware and how he himself had fallen victim to it, about the Federation of Planets and its mission to save worlds like Vanot from being overrun by the Ware. She could sympathize with his reaction to having been personally violated by the Ware, his determination to protect others from it; but she had reminded him once again that keeping people ignorant did nothing to protect them. The Vanotli may not have mastered starflight yet, but they had aerial flight and industry and radio, they had a scientific outlook that had demolished the superstitions of the past (all right, except maybe the Underlanders), and they had unified as a people to stand against the atrocities of Fetul. Surely they had at least earned the status of an apprentice, the right to be educated rather than coddled like infants.

  How frustrating, though, to know that the one person on Zabathu who most agreed with her outlook was Daskel Vabion, her abductor. He was the only other aboard of her own race and heritage, yet he was the most alien mind on the ship, the last one she could turn to for sympathy or support—particularly given the bracelet he wore and the collar she wore, ever-present reminders that he could kill her, or Ganler or Katrina back home, on a whim. She didn’t understand how the bracelet’s signal could be received back on Vanot, now that they had traveled so far, but apparently Ware science, like Federation science, could surmount such obstacles.

  So Zeheri had spent most of the past few days by herself in her cabin. Not that she’d been curled up in a ball, panicking; she’d made full use of the cabin’s access to the ship’s electronic brain, studying its records and learning all she could about their situation, and particularly about the Ware. She was still an inquisitor at heart, determined to fight for justice no matter how far removed she was, professionally and physically, from the Vanotli justice system. So she did what she was good at and gathered information. Unfortunately, her study of the electronic records only revealed how little understanding the Federation had of its automaton enemies. And though Vabion had been cagey in response to her interrogation attempts, she had sensed from his veiled frustration that he was as much in the dark as the Federation was.

  Zeheri was just beginning to persuade herself that she needed to leave her cabin to gain more information when the decision was made for her. An alarm klaxon pealed over the ship’s loudspeakers mere moments before Zabathu began to tremble like a hut in a fierce lightning storm. Determined to find out what was going on, Zeheri rushed from her cabin and tried to remember the way to the ship’s bridge. No doubt Travis would be there.

  Before she reached the bridge, though, a forceful blow to the ship knocked her off her feet and caused the lights to flicker. She hit the deck hard in the high gravity, and at first she thought the swirl of lights in her eyes was from a blow to her head. But then her entire body tingled alarmingly, and when her vision cleared, she was not where she had been. Travis had told her of the teleportation abilities of the Federation and the Ware, but experiencing it firsthand was deeply unnerving. It took all her discipline to avoid panicking as she pulled herself erect and looked around.

  She, Vabion, Travis’s party, and the ten Andorians who made up Zabathu’s crew all stood in a spare white room whose aesthetics she immediately recognized as Worldwide Automatics design—meaning it was actually Ware design. The ship must have been overpowered, its energy shields (like something out of Ganler’s adventure serials) knocked out to enable their transportation. They were all in enemy hands now—Vabion no less than the rest, she thought with some satisfaction.

  But the industrialist recovered more swiftly than the others. “Administrative request, operator Vabion, code V-V-zero-four-six. Acknowledge.”

  “Your inquiry was not recognized.” Vabion was taken aback by the mechanism’s response.

  “We’re not on Vanot,” Travis told him. “It wouldn’t recognize your codes.” Still, Zeheri caught Rey’s intrigued reaction to the revelation that Vabion even had an access code. From what they’d told Zeheri, they’d made no progress determining how to access the Ware’s control systems.

  “The Ware on Vanot is but one part of a larger infrastructure,” Vabion replied, unperturbed. “It stood to reason that data would be shared across the system. Evidently it’s more partitioned than I’d hoped.”

  “Who are you?”

  It was not the chillingly polite feminine voice of the Ware. This one was rougher, more emotive; Zeheri would call it masculine if not for a certain animal quality. Or perhaps “alien” was the word. In any case, it sounded like a living entity.

  Zabathu’s shipmaster stepped forward. “I am Commander Finirath ch’Mezret of the Federation courier Zabathu,” the stocky Andorian declared. “And I demand that you return us to our ship immediately!”

  “You will identify and explain yourselves! You are with the alien force that has been assaulting our facilities and disrupting our commerce, are you not?”

  Travis held a hand up to ch’Mezret. “I’m Commander Travis Mayweather of the U.S.S. Pioneer. Are you the beings responsible for the technology called the Ware?”

  “Do not evade! Yes, the facilities are ours. Do you acknowledge your guilt in the ongoing acts of vandalism and sabotage against the commercial infrastructure of this sector?”

  “If you mean, have we been liberating sentient beings from the slavery you subject them to for the sake of powering your ‘infrastructure,’ then hell, yes,” Travis fired back, and Zeheri suddenly felt a twinge of the attraction and admiration that she thought she had left behind her. “You have no right to prey on other species like that!”

  “All customer groups are richly compensated for the resources they provide,” the voice insisted.

  “Compensated? I’ve seen worlds devastated by the Ware, societies enslaved, all to feed your hunger for living minds.”

  “We are not responsible for how consumers may abuse our products.”

  “It’s the products that are abusing the consumers!”

  Suddenly intense pain surged through Zeheri and she fell hard once more; the gravity in here was not much better than aboard Zabathu. When she recovered and pushed herself back to her knees, Vabion was saying, “Just a reminde
r, Mister Mayweather, of who has the authority to speak here.” As Travis moved to Zeheri’s side to help her up, Vabion looked up at the unseen source of the voice. “As you can see, these others are my prisoners. I am Daskel Vabion, founder and chief executive of Worldwide Automatics, the distributors of the Ware on the planet Vanot. I captured these saboteurs and compelled them to bring me here in search of you, so that I could learn how better to use your technology and improve its distribution across Vanot.

  “So you see, we share a common interest. Like you, I am a businessman seeking to preserve commerce and increase profit. If we work together, I can help you deal with the others who are disrupting your operations. As I have demonstrated, I have this group under my control.”

  After a deliberative pause, a second, similar alien voice spoke. “You are a primitive. What could you offer that could benefit us?”

  “I am the most advanced intellect on my world. I have spent years analyzing your technology, learning from it. Test me and I will show you what I can do.”

  “There is nothing you can know that we do not.”

  “There is at least one thing.” Vabion pointed to Travis. “I know that this man here is stolen property. Years ago, he was appropriated as an adjunct processor for a Ware repair station. His people vandalized that station in order to recover him.”

  Zeheri traded a shocked look with Travis as they both belatedly remembered how fond Vabion was of surveillance. Her collar must have included a microphone that Vabion had monitored through his bracelet controller.

  “Impossible,” came the first voice. “A stolen component would have been recovered soon thereafter.”

  “The facility in question was on the outskirts of your territory, evidently too far for a recovery vessel to reach. But if you examine him, you will no doubt be able to confirm that he has been an adjunct processor before. And that means,” Vabion went on with weight, “that his neurological configuration is suitable for your needs. I will return him to you as a gesture of my friendship.”