Ghost Dance

by Christie Golden

  With evident reluctance, Ulaahn told her about the weapons on his homeworld. There weren’t many. The Kwaisi did indeed seem to rely on the eight—seven, now—heavily armed vessels under Ulaahn’s command to protect them.

  Still, better safe than sorry. “Go to Yellow Alert. Shields up. Mr. Kim, please open a hailing frequency.” At Kim’s nod, she continued. “This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager, to the Kwaisi Council. You will have noticed that we come escorted by seven of your defensive vessels. With me on my bridge is Captain Ulaahn, commander of that fleet. We come to help you. We wish to warn you about a danger to your planet and people of which you are more than likely unaware. It is directly responsible for any chaos that has occurred on your homeworld.”

  “No answer, Captain,” said Kim.

  “Captain Ulaahn, why don’t you try?” asked Janeway.

  Ulaahn straightened in Chakotay’s chair and cleared his throat. “This is Captain Ulaahn, to the Council. What this Janeway says is the truth. They have technology that can save all of us.” He paused. “Ensign, is that frequency open?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Kim. “They are receiving. They just aren’t responding.”

  Ulaahn nodded, then seemed to reach a decision. He rose, speaking as if to someone who was present. “Eriih, my old friend, you must listen to me. We have been infected with something that makes us mad and attacks our bodies. I personally was so distraught and affected by this that I opened fire on one of my own vessels.” His voice caught. “I will of course stand trial for my crime.”

  Janeway stared. They would be able to show that Ulaahn had not been of sound mind when he ordered the destruction of one of his own ships, but why even bother? She was certain that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people had committed comparable crimes. If every one of them had to undergo trial, this whole planet could be tied up in litigation for years.

  “Please answer us. Let me help my people.”

  There was a long silence. It seemed that Ulaahn’s moving plea had fallen on deaf ears. Then the screen came to life. An elderly man with haunted eyes locked gazes with Ulaahn.

  “Flee, my young friend,” said the man, whom Janeway presumed was Eriih. “You would not want to see what has become of the Kwaisi. The Council has been overthrown, terror rules the streets. There have been mass suicides. Weapons have been stolen and aimed not at enemies but at friends. Find a world that will welcome you, not this rock of hatred.”

  “We can cure your people,” said Janeway, rising and stepping down to the viewscreen. “All we ask is assurance that you do not attack us.”

  “I cannot give such an assurance,” replied Eriih. “Whatever it is you intend to do to us, it cannot be worse than what we have done to ourselves.” He pressed a button on the console in front of him, and the screen was once again filled with stars.

  “How much longer until we reach orbit?” asked Janeway.

  “Eighteen minutes, twenty-two seconds,” replied Tuvok.

  “Senior staff to ready room. Now.”

  The meeting was of necessity brief. Janeway filled her staff in on the exchange with Eriih. “There are no assurances that whatever weapons are on the planet won’t be trained on us,” she finished.

  “There are not many weapons that could threaten this ship on the face of the planet,” said Ulaahn. “And from the sound of things, most of them have been trained on other targets. Kwaisi targets,” he said bitterly.

  “Torres? The planet can wait. It’s the people who are posing the threat, and who need to be healed the fastest.”

  “We don’t need to actually beam anyone aboard this ship,” Torres pointed out. “All we need to do in order to remove the dark matter is dematerialize them and separate it out. We can do that right on the planet without taking them anywhere. We can accommodate more people if we take certain computer functions off-line and use those terabytes to increase the size of the transport buffer.”

  “How many at a time?” asked Janeway.

  Torres thought. “Probably up to two hundred, two twenty at a go. As I say, it will mean shutting down certain computer operations. It is not without risk.”

  “How risky?”

  “If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have said the risk was high. Now? Minimal. We’ve gambled so much in the last few days, Captain, that I think we finally know what we’re dealing with.”

  Janeway considered all the information, then put her hands down on the table. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  “ENTERING ORBIT AROUND THE KWAISI HOMEWORLD,” stated Tuvok. “There is no sign of aggression from the planet.”

  “Red Alert.” The bridge darkened and the too familiar red pulse began. “Torres, you may begin shutting down all nonessential computer operations. Get that pattern buffer as large as you can make it. Kim, monitor all signals from the planet. I want to hear the Kwaisi reactions, if any, to what we’re about to do.”

  Kim swallowed. Janeway knew she was asking him to juggle more balls in the air than he had ever attempted before. Gamely, he replied, “Aye, Captain.”

  “Ulaahn, do you have a suggestion as to where we should begin?”

  He was staring at the image of his planet in the viewscreen. Janeway had to repeat her question. He jumped, as if startled out of a deep reverie.

  “Takna-Marr is the capital city,” Ulaahn said. “It has the largest population. It’s also where the most weapons are located. I would begin there.”

  * * *

  “We’re starting with the capital city of Takna-Marr,” Torres told her team. Seven entered the coordinates.

  “The population is four hundred twenty-two thousand,” said Seven. She raised a golden eyebrow. “This may take some time.”

  “We need to identify and focus on those individuals in whom the concentration of dark matter is greatest,” Telek reminded them.

  “That, too, may take some time,” said Seven.

  It did, but not as much time as they had feared. They divided the city into square-kilometer portions and scanned those areas individually. They found only ten thousand two hundred twelve who had any concentration of dark matter at all, and of those, four hundred two registered dangerously high levels.

  “Let’s get them,” said Torres. “Engineering to bridge. We’ve targeted four hundred people in the capital who are the sickest or who will likely pose the greatest threat. We’re ready to begin when you are.”

  “The shields are down,” said the captain. “Do it.”

  “Energize,” Torres said, and crossed her fingers.

  The transporter did not explode. The warp-core bubble did not burst. The extra terabytes provided by shutting down all nonessential computer activity enabled them to successfully dematerialize the first two hundred without any problem. If only that awful noise and light would stop, Torres might begin to think of this task as a cakewalk.

  “Get the next batch,” she ordered.

  Again, they dematerialized two hundred people, separated out the lethal mutated dark matter, and rematerialized them. And again, everything seemed to be all right.

  “We were successful on our end, Captain. Awaiting your orders.”

  * * *

  “Harry, any reaction?” asked Janeway.

  For a moment, Kim didn’t reply. “There’s a lot going on. I’ve been following one signal that’s been broadcasting every known instance of violence in the capital. They’re saying that suddenly, in the midst of a street brawl, people shimmered out of existence and then reappeared.”

  “And?” Try as she might, Janeway couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “And when they returned, they were horrified at what they’d done. The wounded are being cared for by the same people who inflicted the injuries.” His face shone with delight. “It’s working, Captain!”

  “Tuvok?”

  “Still no sign of aggression from the planet directed at us,” Tuvok reported.


  “Excellent. B’Elanna, continue.”

  * * *

  There were fewer infected with the dark matter than Torres had feared. In groups of two hundred at a time, they located those whose tissue was inundated by the dark matter and freed them from the infection. Bit by bit, person by person, the Kwaisi returned to their normal selves.

  Torres didn’t let herself get too carried away. Their plan might be working—all right, so it was working perfectly—but there were still so many dead, so much damaged. For not the first time, she wondered what the enigmatic Tialin was keeping from them. Certainly, the rogue Shepherd she had mentioned, Lhiau, was a danger. But why? What did he want? What was it Tialin had told the away team? “Far, far more is at stake than I am permitted to tell you.” Torres had been so caught up in figuring out how to unlock the orb’s mysteries that she had forgotten about the bigger picture. Well, that big picture was right below their orbiting ship. People were dying, were killing, because of Lhiau, and once this was over Torres was going to get some answers.

  The process was a time-consuming one, as Seven had predicted. But the more people they cured of the dark matter contamination, the easier it became. The Kwaisi started working with them, instead of running madly in the streets. Janeway was able to establish contact with the Council, who had, by this time, returned to their former official building. They were able to negotiate shutting down the few weapons that would pose any threat. The replicators were put to work making blankets, clothing, and medical supplies. So as not to interfere with the transport of infected persons, all the shuttlecrafts, loaded with supplies, went to the surface.

  Neelix sent little Naomi Wildman down to engineering with a tray of sandwiches and coffee. The nearly exhausted team partook eagerly. Torres noticed that Khala hesitated only briefly before taking her own sandwich; she did not inquire if it had been replicated.

  They took breaks in shifts, calling in Carey, Vorrik, and others in engineering to take over for fifteen minutes at a stretch. Finally, hours later, it was done. Everyone on the planet surface who had been infected with dark matter had been cleansed of it.

  “Well done, Torres,” said Janeway. “How about nonhumanoid life forms that have been infected?”

  “Seven has the numbers on that. We can do it the same way we did the Kwaisi. It’s a lot, but not more than we can handle.”

  “Excellent. Since you already know how to do that, we’ll save that for last.”

  Torres knew what Janeway was going to order next. The final test of their knowledge of Shepherd technology: expanding the radiation emitted by the purple sphere to surround the entire planet.

  “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” she said.

  “Then do it.”

  Torres and her team went about taking the warp core off-line. Now, they had neither warp drive nor shields. She was glad that these people were friendly. No shields, no warp drive—they were sitting ducks. Once they had the warp core off-line, Torres nodded to R’Mor.

  The Romulan tapped in the command on the console. At once, the orb began screeching and glowing. Amid the light and the noise, Seven called out what was happening.

  “The radiation sphere is increasing. It is closing the distance between us and the planet. It has reached the planet. It is continuing to grow at an exponential rate. It has completely engulfed the—”

  Her voice sounded loud in the sudden stillness. She broke off in mid-sentence. The sphere was hovering peacefully, purple instead of red, its task done. It had taken only seventeen seconds to gather up all the dark matter that had been embedded in the planet’s soil and lower life-forms, not to mention every piece of Kwaisi machinery. It was incredible.

  “The amount of dark matter in the warp bubble has increased by six thousand four hundred percent,” reported Seven.

  And smiled.

  * * *

  Janeway was tired. She hadn’t realized how on edge she had been these last several days, as Torres, R’Mor, and their crew pushed through the barriers of ignorance one by one to reach this moment of exhausted victory. So when Eriih insisted on a conference, she desperately wanted to beg off.

  “It is a rare honor,” Ulaahn exclaimed. “You cannot refuse!”

  “I can and will,” bridled Janeway.

  Ulaahn raised his hands in a pleading gesture. “Perhaps I should say, I would urge you to accept. It would mean a great deal to my people to thank you in person. Perhaps you could postpone the meeting. That would give Eriih a chance to organize a formal dinner to thank you for your assistance.”

  A lengthy formal dinner with a tableful of Kwaisi was the absolute last thing Janeway wanted at this point. “All right,” she said tiredly. “I will meet with your Council now and get it over with.”

  Tuvok, the epitome of caution as ever, insisted that a security guard accompany his captain when she beamed down. He would not be overruled, no matter how much Ulaahn protested. It was therefore three people who materialized in the shambles that had once been the Council Chamber a few hours later.

  Janeway could not help but be saddened and angered anew at the destruction caused by the mutated dark matter. This had once been a beautiful building. Murals had been painted on the walls; fine carpets covered the floor. Now, the carpets had been slashed, and the walls had huge cracks and what looked like graffiti painted on them.

  “Captain Janeway,” said Eriih warmly. “You are the hero of our people. Please excuse the state of our hall. I think you already know the reason for it.”

  “I do indeed, and I am grateful that there was not further damage or loss of life.” Janeway permitted herself to be guided gently into a chair and accepted a glass of cherry-red liquor. It smelled terrible and tasted even worse, but she managed a small swallow in the name of courtesy. She gave the other six members of the Council, who sat at the dusty table with her, a strained smile.

  “Your intervention was responsible for the fact that there was no further damage or loss of life,” said Eriih generously. He took a healthy swallow of the beverage. “Ulaahn. Welcome home. You understand that after these formalities …” His voice trailed off. He looked uncomfortable.

  “I do,” said Ulaahn staunchly. “I feel certain that I will be exonerated, but I will stand trial.”

  Janeway glanced from one to the other, slightly disturbed by the conversation. Despite her dislike of Ulaahn, she felt compelled to defend what he had done and tried to do.

  “Eriih, may I say that Ulaahn cannot be held responsible for his actions, any more than you or the vandal in the street who attacked his neighbor. The dark matter rendered everyone affected temporarily insane, if it didn’t attack them physically.”

  “Yes, the dark matter,” said Eriih, deftly changing the subject. “We know of dark matter, Captain. Our scientists theorize that it is quite harmless. Please, if you have learned anything that may protect us in the future, we would be grateful to learn it.”

  “Dark matter is harmless in its natural state,” said Janeway. A servant refilled her glass. She did not take another sip. “But the dark matter you encountered had been mutated, rendered dangerous.”

  “How?”

  Janeway sighed. It had become abundantly clear to her that these people were litigious, orderly, detail-obsessed, and autocratic. She did not think that they would willingly let her go until they understood everything, down to the last detail. So, gritting her teeth, she explained everything as quickly as possible. She told them of the pursuit by the Romulans, of Telek’s wormholes and their unwitting abduction of him. She spoke of the disasters her own ship had faced, of locating Tialin, of the quest she had accepted to help remove all the mutated dark matter from the quadrant. She told of what the dark-matter cloaks had done to the Romulan warbirds, and how they had all worked together to decipher the purple sphere’s mysteries.

  “This Telek R’Mor—he is on your ship now? And he is the one who released this dark matter into the Delta Quadrant while he searched for your vessel?”
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br />   Janeway nodded. Then she realized why Eriih was asking the question. “Dr. R’Mor was forced to release the dark matter. He had no choice. His family was being held hostage,” she said, perhaps too quickly. “Also, he had no idea at the time that the wormholes were releasing anything dangerous. It’s largely because of him that we were able to utilize the Shepherd technology to save your world. You ought to be grateful to him.”

  “Oh, we are, we are. And to you, Captain.” Eriih saluted her with his glass while the rest of the Council nodded their agreement. “And such evidence will no doubt exonerate your Romulan friend.”

  Janeway sat up straighter in her chair. “Exonerate?”

  “Certainly. He released this terrible plague upon us, unwittingly or no. That he volunteered to correct his error will stand him in good stead at his trial.”

  Her eyes went icy. “There will be no trial of Dr. R’Mor. You have seen what this mutated dark matter can do. There are dozens of systems just like yours, infected and destroying themselves right this minute. We have to go and help them. Surely you understand that!”

  Eriih chuckled. “I’m not asking you to stay, Captain. Just release the doctor to us and you can be on your way.”

  “I can’t do that. We need Dr. R’mor’s knowledge and skill. Besides, he has more than atoned for—”

  “That will be for a court to decide!” interrupted Ulaahn. “Dr. R’Mor committed a terrible crime against the Kwaisi. He must be tried by us!”

  “I have had enough of this,” said Janeway. She rose. The security guard behind her stepped backward. “We prevent Ulaahn from blowing up his entire fleet of ships and, incidentally, from killing hundreds of people, including himself. We work without ceasing to find a way to help your people and dozens more races just like yours. We come to your planet, render ourselves vulnerable in order to save your world, and you thank us by demanding that we turn over a skilled, remorseful scientist who will do far more good saving other people than languishing in a Kwaisi jail.”