Deanna nodded. “Z’shezhira must have some genuine talent for persuasion—after all, she managed to survive as one of Gog’resssh’s hostages for more than a year.”
“By the way, do we have time to bid our Gorn guests farewell?” Riker asked.
Vale shook her head. “They wanted to see the Speaker immediately, so I went ahead and beamed them down. I didn’t think you’d mind, since they don’t seem to be big fans of long, drawn-out goodbyes.”
“Or of mammalian humanoids,” Deanna said.
Riker nodded. “There is that.” It’s probably just as well, he thought, especially with the Typhon Pact cavalry due to arrive any minute.
Vale’s expression suddenly became grave. “We’re leaving this society balancing on one hell of a sharp knife’s edge, Captain.”
“It’s not a perfect solution,” Riker admitted. “But it looks like the best one available, given this imperfect universe we all seem to be stuck with.”
He tapped his combadge. “Riker to Lieutenant Lavena,” he said.
“Yes, Captain,” came the flight controller’s breathless reply.
“Let’s get going, Lieutenant. Take it away, from the top.”
His XO and his wife, carrying their daughter, preceded him through the doorway. Once he reached it, he paused on the threshold for a backward glance at the planet and its ring system, just in time to watch the infinite darkness swallow them both. He experienced another pang of regret that he hadn’t found a way to extract anything usable from Brahma-Shiva.
Then he pushed the matter aside and left the room, bound for the bridge.
Epilogue
U.S.S. TITAN
Stardate 59663.4
The sound of the door chime nearly startled Ensign Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv into letting the coil spanner slip out of the grip of his prehensile tail.
“Come in,” he said, composing himself as his twin bionic arms set his tools back on the worktable beside the junkyard-still, multilimbed metal body.
The door whisked open to admit his engineering colleague, Ensign Mordecai Crandall, who wasted no time assessing what Torvig was doing.
“Still trying to get White-Blue jump-started? Torvig, it’s been nearly four days since he was . . .”
“Injured,” Torvig ventured after his friend trailed off.
“All right, injured. And you haven’t rested for a minute since then, have you?”
“SecondGen White-Blue is my friend. I owe him my best efforts.”
“You keep this up much longer, Torv, and nobody’s going to get your efforts, best or otherwise.”
Torvig noticed that his tail was beginning to move back and forth in a pattern of agitation; he stifled its motion with an act of will. “I believe I am close to restoring White-Blue to full functionality.”
Crandall looked at the still metal form on the table and shook his head. “Could have fooled me.” The human engineer focused his attention back upon the little Choblik. “Look, Torvig, take a day away from this, at least. Please. Don’t force me to speak to Commander Ra-Havreii about this. He’d probably make you sit through a few abusive sessions with that Tellarite counselor, Haaj.”
“But . . .” Torvig said, realizing he had no good options—and that his friend had a point. “Very well. I will initiate a rest interval. After you leave. It is late for you humans to be up and about, as well.”
Crandall frowned at him in a way that Torvig had learned to characterize as skepticism, or perhaps even suspicion. “All right, Torv. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“I would not know how, Mordecai. There is a good reason why my people tend to go into science and engineering rather than politics.”
Crandall exited with a small smile and a chuckle, apparently satisfied.
Torvig looked across his quarters and contemplated his rest chamber. He ambulated toward it.
Then he walked back to the worktable and grasped tools in each of his three manipulative limbs.
The “operational” light located on the AI’s carapace near its “brain” suddenly switched on.
“Finally,” Torvig said, speaking as much to himself as to his friend, “the nightmare is over.”
“No,” White-Blue said. “It may just be beginning.”
• • •
T’Pel maintained her patient vigil at her husband’s bedside, just as she had done for the entirety of the three previous days and the four previous nights.
A soft voice spoke from directly behind her. “You need to eat or drink something, T’Pel.”
T’Pel turned to face Counselor Troi. “Thank you, Counselor. But I am not experiencing any difficulties at the moment.”
Troi’s dark eyes narrowed as she folded her arms across her chest in a gesture of gentle challenge. “Remember who you’re talking to, T’Pel. I know what a dedicated caregiver you have always been for Natasha and Totyarguil Bolaji and Noah Powell.”
“I regret that I have had to ask others to take over those duties for the duration,” T’Pel said.
“I haven’t come to drag you back to work, T’Pel. I came because I’m worried about you. You’ve become so used to taking care of those around you that you forget to take care of yourself. I’d like you to get some rest.”
“I am a Vulcan. I require very little rest.”
Troi sighed, apparently willing to accept T’Pel’s word, at least for the moment. “All right. Just think about what I said. How is Tuvok?”
“He remains in a coma. Doctor Ree can find no physiological reason for it. Still, the cause can only be the prodigious amount of data to which his brain was exposed when he attempted to meld with the . . . entity that Mister S’syrixx believed was living inside Brahma-Shiva’s computer system.”
“I sense . . . a great deal of activity in the commander’s brain,” Troi said. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Not at all. Vulcan thoughts and emotions can be difficult for esper species to avoid sensing.”
T’Pel suddenly noticed a change on the overhead bio-monitor. Her husband’s life signs had abruptly strengthened.
“She . . . is correct, my wife,” Tuvok said, his voice sounding as dry as Vulcan’s Forge, his eyes still closed. “You must take better care of yourself.”
Apparently alerted by the changed bioreadings, Nurse Ogawa and Dr. Ree rushed into the room, their medical tricorders already deployed and scanning. Despite her desire to extend her hand toward her husband, T’Pel retreated several paces to allow the medical professionals to work unobstructed.
“Do not be concerned about me, my husband. You should concentrate instead upon your recovery.”
“Pulse, respiration, EEG,” Ogawa said. “All life signs have strengthened. But they are also growing less stable.”
“Twenty ccs inaprovaline,” Ree said.
Ogawa nodded, then picked up a hypospray and began to set it.
“I prefer the . . . traditional Vulcan method of regaining consciousness,” Tuvok said, his eyes still tightly closed. “My wife, please attend me.”
Ogawa and Ree exchanged confused looks for a moment, then stepped aside to clear a path for T’Pel.
T’Pel silently crossed to the biobed, pulled Tuvok’s shoulders until he had reached a slouched sitting position, and then methodically, unemotionally began to deliver a series of hard slaps across his face. Forehand. Backhand. Forehand. Backhand. She repeated the process as her husband absorbed the punishment with as much apparent equanimity as T’Pel delivered it.
Suddenly both his inner and outer eyelids opened, and his combat trained hands moved swiftly to immobilize T’Pel’s.
She remained at his side, gazing into his dark eyes as Ree and Ogawa scanned him. Her right index and middle fingers became her only point of physical contact with him, touching the same two fingers on Tuvok’s left hand.
“I believe you may finally be on the way to recovery, Commander,” Ree said at length. “Though I’m not sure I can explain it any better than I c
an account for what happened to you in the first place. I still don’t like the look of some of your brainwave readings, but we’ll keep an eye on those—perhaps they’ll settle down in time.”
Tuvok nodded in acknowledgment to everyone present. “Thank you, Doctor. Nurse. Counselor. If you don’t mind, I should like to speak with my wife.”
“Right,” Ree said good-naturedly. “Nothing to see here. Move along, everybody.”
Within moments, T’Pel was alone with her husband.
“How long have I been unconscious, T’Pel?”
“Four days, one hour, thirteen minutes,” she said. “I did not take note of the seconds.” She wondered if the counselor’s dire assessment of her condition might not have been correct. “What do you remember, Tuvok?”
Emotional strain of some kind striated his forehead slightly as he broke their tenuous physical contact. “My thoughts . . . remain rather jumbled. But I remember being aboard the Brahma-Shiva artifact.”
“You were beamed away from it shortly before its destruction. Titan left the Vela OB2–404 system not long afterward.”
“I see.” He straightened, squaring his shoulders, though he remained seated on the edge of the biobed.
“What do you remember of the mission?” T’Pel asked.
The striations on his forehead deepened as he forced himself to remember. “The away team made two attempts to access and download the contents of the device’s computer. Both attempts failed. We were running out of both time and alternatives.”
She was beginning to understand. “So you attempted to mind-meld with Brahma-Shiva’s computer system.”
“Yes. If that is indeed all that it was.”
“Do you believe you were in contact with a sentient entity?”
“I do not know. Whatever it was, it seemed capable of taking certain volitional actions to protect itself, such as jamming our out-system communications.”
“Surely it could have taken less circuitous action—such as preventing the Gorn from seizing control of it.”
“Perhaps. But it seemed . . . injured. Incomplete. Or perhaps it was simply very old, and finally beginning to succumb to the inevitability of entropy.” His eyes now seemed very large and earnest, as though the Brahma-Shiva artifact’s passing had greatly affected him. She had seen such intense emotions burning within him on only a few previous occasions, such as during the pon farr, the time of mating. Or more recently, during his ongoing meditations on the grief occasioned by the deaths of their son Elieth and their daughter-in-law Ione Kitain, both of whom perished while working as first responders during last year’s Borg attack on Deneva.
She realized that his intensity frightened her, making it a challenge to keep her emotions under the expected degree of control.
Suddenly as certain of herself as she had ever been, she said, “Something came back with you from Brahma-Shiva.” She reached toward his face with outstretched fingers.
Once again, he caught her hand, this time more roughly than before. “No. I do not know if it is safe for me to share my thoughts with you. Or with anyone.”
Her certainty began to evaporate, sublimating away like a chunk of polar ice dropped onto the Plains of Gol. “Why?”
“Because I can see so much now, so clearly. Diagrams. Specifications. Materials lattices. Energy vectors.”
“Terraforming knowledge,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Perhaps enough to reconstruct the device with which I melded. Perhaps not. I do not know.”
“Just like Genesis.”
“Like Genesis, such knowledge has undeniable potential to do good,” he said. “Particularly on Federation worlds that are still recovering from the damage the Borg invasion inflicted.”
Worlds like Deneva, she thought. She felt tears welling up, but willed them to stop with a brutal determination.
Aloud, calmly, she said, “And it could just as easily be misused. Even with the best of intentions, terrible consequences can eventuate from the use of such power. I am sure I do not need to reacquaint you with what happened at Eurymede VI.”
She carefully avoided using the phrase that some had used, unfairly in her estimation, to describe the incident: the Eurymede VI Massacre.
Tuvok stared straight ahead silently, obviously weighing each item on a very small slate of alternatives.
“Will you tell the captain?” she asked.
“I don’t know. As you say, there would be terrible risks.”
She considered what she knew of the chain of events that had led him from Eurymede VI to their marriage, their child-rearing years together, and finally his return to Starfleet, this time as a middle-aged, loss-averse security and tactical specialist rather than as the callow young scientist he once had been.
Touching his hand with two fingers, she said, “I shall support whatever decision you reach, my husband.”
He reciprocated the hand gesture. “I am grateful, my wife.”
“I merely ask you to keep in mind what happened the last time circumstance thrust such a decision upon you,” she said. “And that you remember S’vec’s dictum that one man can summon the future.”
“I have never been more aware of that proverb than I am at this moment, my wife,” Tuvok said, his inner torment now clearly on display. He held creation in one hand, destruction in the other. “But how can I determine which future I will summon?”
Appendix
Who’s Who Aboard Titan in Seize the Fire
Captain William T. Riker
(human male) commanding officer
Commander Christine Vale
(human female) first officer/executive officer
Commander Tuvok
(Vulcan male) second officer/tactical officer
Commander Deanna Troi
(Betazoid-human female) diplomatic officer/senior counselor
Commander Xin Ra-Havreii
(Efrosian male) chief engineer
Lieutenant Commander Shenti Yisec Eres Ree
(Pahkwa-thanh male) chief medical officer
Lieutenant Commander Ranul Keru
(unjoined Trill male) chief of security
Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar
(Elaysian female) senior science officer
Lieutenant Sariel Rager
(Human female) senior operations officer
Lieutenant Commander Tamen Gibruch
(Chandir male) gamma-shift bridge commander
Chief Axel Bolaji
(human male) gamma-shift flight controller
Lieutenant Commander Onnta
(Balosneean male) assistant chief medical officer
Lieutenant Alyssa Ogawa
(human female) head nurse
Lieutenant Eviku Ndashelef
(Arkenite male) xenobiologist
Lieutenant Chamish
(Kazarite male) ecologist
Lieutenant Huilan Sen’kara
(S’ti’ach male) junior counselor
Pral glasch Haaj
(Tellarite male) junior counselor
Lieutenant Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa
(Andorian shen) security officer; gamma-shift tactical officer
Lieutenant Aili Lavena
(Pacifican “Selkie” female) senior flight controller
Ensign Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv
(Choblik male) engineer
Ensign Mordecai Crandall
(human male) engineer
Lieutenant Bowan Radowski
(human male) transporter engineer
Ensign Tasanee Panyarachun
(human female) engineer
Chief Garem Urkral
(Saurian female) engineer
Ensign Peya Fell
(Deltan female) relief science officer
Dr. Se’al Cethente Qas
(Syrath male) senior astrophysicist
Ensign Y’lira Modan
(Selenean female) cryptolinguist
Ensign Zurin Dakal
(Cardassian male) sensor analyst
/> Ensign Evesh
(Tellarite female) sensor technician
Ensign Olivia Bolaji
(human female) shuttle pilot
Ensign Waen
(Bolian female) shuttle pilot
Ensign Kuu’iut
(Betelgeusian male) relief tactical officer
Chief Petty Officer Dennisar
(Orion male) security officer
Lieutenant Gian Sortollo
(human male) security officer
Ensign Hriss
(Caitian female) security officer
Lieutenant Qur Qontallium
(Male Gnalish Fejimaera) security officer
Chief Petty Officer Bralik
(Ferengi female) geologist
Ensign Ot Rynaph
(Kasheetan male) airponics lab technician
Lieutenant Savalek
(Vulcan male) botanist
Crewman Ellec Krotine
(Boslic female) security guard
T’Pel
(Vulcan female) civilian child-care specialist
Noah Powell
(human male) civilian child, son of Alyssa Ogawa
Totyarguil Bolaji
(human male) toddler, son of Axel and Olivia Bolaji
Natasha Miana Riker-Troi
(human-Betazoid female) infant, daughter of Will Riker and Deanna Troi
SecondGen White-Blue
(artificial intelligence) guest
Acknowledgments
The author must recognize the contributions of the legions who enriched the contents of these pages, most especially: my editors, the patient and long-suffering Jaime Costas and Margaret Clark; Marco Palmieri and Keith R.A. DeCandido for coming up with the Typhon Pact in A Singular Destiny; my Typhon Pact colleagues (Dayton Ward, David R. George III, and most especially, David Mack, who demonstrated forbearance above and beyond the call of Starfleet duty); Andy Mangels, who coauthored the first two Titan novels (Taking Wing and The Red King) with me, and all the Titan novelists who have followed (Christopher L. Bennett, Geoffrey Thorne, James Swallow, and David Mack [again], whose astonishing Destiny trilogy has shaken the Star Trek universe to its foundations, thereby making this volume possible, and whose earlier TNG novels A Time to Kill and A Time to Heal were instrumental in getting Will Riker’s captaincy off the ground); Marco Palmieri (again), for laying the keel of the U.S.S. Titan in the first place, thereby allowing Taking Wing to take wing; the kind and indulgent folks at the New Deal Café (née the Daily Market and Café), where much of this volume was written; John Van Citters at CBS Consumer Products, for signing off on all the havoc I have wrought in these pages; the entire Star Trek internet community, those tireless wiki-compilers whose multitudinous and serried ranks defy enumeration here; Michael Jan Friedman, for lessons in Gorn protocol in his TNG novel Requiem and for introducing the Gnalish species in his earlier TNG novel Reunion; Geoffrey Mandel, for his ever-useful Star Trek Star Charts, which kept me from getting lost in the galactic hinterlands on countless occasions and added some color to Christine Vale’s Izarian background; Kevin J. Anderson, for conceiving the failed Gorn warrior coup of 2374, as detailed in Wildstorm’s The Gorn Crisis graphic novel; Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, for chapter 24’s oblique reference to the myth of the first Cardassians (Ailam and Neroon), initially presented in their Deep Space 9: Millennium novel, Inferno; Robert J. Sawyer, whose outstanding s-f novel www:wake (Ace Books, 2009) piqued my interest in Zipf plots as they relate to languages and information theory; Michael and Denise Okuda and Debbie Mirek, whose Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future (1999 edition) remains indispensable even in this modern age of ubiquitous wikis; Shane Johnson, whose Star Trek: The Worlds of the Federation yielded valuable information about Tau Lacertae IX (the Gorn homeworld) and its inhabitants; the brain trust at Interplay Games, whose Starfleet Command video game was the source of my references to the Egg Bringer S’Yahazah of Gorn mythology; Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton, for christening the original Gorn captain (played by Bobby Clark and Gary Coombs in the TOS episode “Arena”) “S’alath” in the premiere issue of Marvel Comics’ Star Trek Unlimited (“Dying of the Light,” November, 1996); Diane Carey, who originated “Eliar” as a Gorn name for a planet in the Cestus system in her TOS novel Dreadnought; John Vornholt, for his explorations of the pitfalls of terraforming technology in his Genesis Wave and Genesis Force novels; L. A. Graf, whose story “Reflections” in The Lives of Dax anthology begat the Trill mreker; Kenneth Hite, Ross A. Isaacs, Evan Jamieson, Steven S. Long, Christian Moore, Ree Soesbee, Gareth Michael Skarka, John Snead, and John Wick for creating the ancient Vulcan philosopher S’vec, who I culled from their 1998 Last Unicorn Games RPG module The Way of Kolinahr; Pocket’s own Emilia Pisani, who was hugely helpful during the copyediting and proofing phases of this Titan voyage; all the performers, show runners, and behind-the-camera talent who brought Star Trek to screens large and small over the past four-plus decades; every actor whose character participated in this volume’s events, beginning with Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and Tim Russ; Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991), for originating the universe in which I get to spend so much time playing; and lastly, though never leastly, my wife, Jenny, and our sons, James and William, for their long-suffering patience and unending inspiration.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire Page 41