After seeing Vexia’s hatch close, Worf watched the away team spread out across the land, though he noted that the pairs of planetary scientists and geologists stayed together. Everybody appeared to move deliberately, encumbered by their environmental suits, by a slightly stronger gravitational field, and by the debris strewn about their surroundings. Rocks and boulders littered the uneven geography that stretched away in one direction toward the mountain range, and in another toward the massive volcano.
Depending on the away team’s reports and recommendations, Worf knew, Enterprise and Eletrix might remain in orbit of the carbon planet for an additional two or even three days. While the basic execution of the joint mission would probably help establish a better relationship between the Federation and the Romulan Empire—and by extension, between the Khitomer Accords and the Typhon Pact—the people involved believed that the actual shared accomplishment of real goals would prove even more beneficial. Captain Picard, among others, thought that charting a region of unexplored space, mounting exploratory operations, and performing meaningful science would go a long way toward uniting the two crews and toward laying a substantial foundation for future interactions among their peoples.
As Worf paced about outside Vexia, he thought about where he stood on the matter. In general, he had never held Romulans in high regard, not because he believed them intrinsically inferior in some way, but because in his experience, their culture fostered duplicity and treachery, their citizens routinely engaging in behavior he considered dishonorable. Romulans had killed his parents in the sneak attack on the Klingon colony at Khitomer, Romulans had schemed to foment a Klingon civil war, Romulans stood as avowed enemies of both the Klingon Empire and the United Federation of Planets.
Except that Klingons had conspired with Romulans both to assault Khitomer and to provoke the civil war. And when the human madman Shinzon and his Reman forces had plotted to destroy Earth, it had been Romulan Commander Donatra and her crew aboard Valdore who had fought with honor to help the Enterprise crew avert disaster. Even with the prevailing mores of the Romulan Empire, Worf had learned that he could not reasonably generalize a Romulan character—just as he could not necessarily esteem a member of Klingon society merely because the person was a Klingon.
In his contact with Commander T’Jul, Worf had found her intelligent, efficient, and professional. She had treated Spock, Lieutenant Elfiki, and himself with dignity and respect. While he would not say that he trusted her, he did not distrust her.
As Worf stood watch outside Vexia, immediately available should any of the scientists need his assistance, he considered returning inside the shuttle so that he could interact directly, on a one-to-one basis, with Lieutenant Torlanta. During preparations for the joint mission, Captain Picard had emphasized the importance of the opportunity it would afford the Enterprise crew to get to know their Romulan counterparts, not just on a professional level, but also on a personal one. The captain believed that such relations would only serve to buttress the ongoing efforts to bring true peace. Worf understood and agreed with the captain’s view, but at that moment, he felt a responsibility to remain on alert as eight men and women in his charge roamed about a pristine, unfamiliar world—a world with a lethal atmosphere and an unknown number of other perils.
Peering up at the nose—the beak, Worf thought—of Vexia, he once more spotted the vessel’s pilot through the forward port. Though not an accustomed action for him, Worf raised one arm and moved it quickly from left to right, offering Lieutenant Torlanta a quick wave. For a few seconds, she did nothing, and Worf wondered if she had even seen him, but then she raised her own hand and returned the gesture.
Satisfied, Worf turned his back to the Romulan shuttle and gazed out across the carbon planet, to the expanse along which the members of the away team had spread. He quickly counted the number of environmental suits he could see, and to his consternation, tallied only seven. Reaching to the controls on his sleeve, he activated a sensor display that, projected on the inside of his faceplate, showed the relative positions of all eight scientists. As he looked out across the land, though, he still saw only seven. Anxiously, he hurried toward the area where sensors indicated one of the scientists should be, but whom Worf couldn’t locate.
As he reached for the tricorder tucked into a receptacle at his hip, his right boot kicked through a pile of rocks. He almost fell forward, but managed to keep his balance. As he steadied himself, a flash of light suddenly flared up ahead. He stopped and searched for its cause, and saw a ray of sunlight glinting off something on the soil, about thirty meters away. Alarm gripped Worf as he spotted a helmet at ground level, but then he saw it moving, and he realized that one of the Romulan scientists had descended into a gully, thus becoming difficult to see. Enterprise’s chief geologist, Catherine Rawlins, worked nearby, and Worf guessed that the channel in the earth allowed them to study different rock strata.
Worf replaced his tricorder in its place at his hip, and started back toward the shuttle. Ahead of him, he noticed something else flickering on the ground. He reached the spot where his boot had struck and scattered some stones, and he bent down to see chunks of translucent rocks brightly reflecting the daylight—not just reflecting the light, but refracting it, acting as prisms and throwing rainbows across the surrounding dirt. Worf retrieved his tricorder again and scanned the stones, identifying them as diamonds. He recorded his readings so that he could later pass them on to the scientists.
Back at the shuttle, Worf resumed his position. On the half hour, he checked in with each member of the away team, including Lieutenant Torlanta aboard Vexia. They all responded, with no issues to report. The same cycle occurred at the next three intervals, but then, with just thirty minutes before the end of the expedition, he received a different response from one of the scientists.
“Worf to Tornot.” A Bolian, Tornot served aboard Enterprise as a chemist. “Status report.”
“Tornot here,” the man said. “Commander, I think there’s something here you should see.”
Worf grew instantly concerned by the deviation from procedure. “Are you all right?” he asked. He gazed out across the land, but according to the sensor display on his faceplate, a rock formation stood between the shuttle and the chemist’s location five hundred meters away.
“Yes, sir, I’m fine,” Tornot said. “But I’d really like you to take a look at something I’ve found.”
“What is the nature of it?” Worf wanted to know.
“I’d really prefer you see it and make your own judgment,” Tornot said.
“Very well,” Worf said. “I will be there in five minutes. Worf out.”
He quickly checked in with the remaining scientists, and then contacted Lieutenant Torlanta. He informed her that one of the away team had requested his help, and that he would be leaving the vicinity of the shuttle for a few minutes. Then he started toward the chemist.
Alert to the possibility of danger despite what Tornot had said, Worf utilized his tricorder as he approached the scientist’s position. A scan confirmed Tornot’s life signs as strong and vital, as well as the fact that he waited alone. Nevertheless, before rounding the rock formation, Worf exchanged his tricorder for a phaser.
Tornot came into view, standing away from the rocks on a flat patch of ground. His scientific instruments sat off to the side, a few meters away. He held nothing in his hands, nor did there seem to be anything near him other than his equipment. He waved.
Worf holstered his weapon and approached. “Worf to Tornot,” he said, reopening a comm channel with the chemist. “What is it you wish me to see?”
In reply, Tornot squatted down and pointed to a spot of disturbed soil. “Here, sir,” he said. “Do you see the hollow?”
Worf lowered himself onto his haunches beside Tornot. He saw a depression, rectangular in shape, though some of the dirt along its edges had fallen into it, spoiling any precise lines it might have had. About twenty-five or thirty centimeters deep, it me
asured more than a meter on its longer dimension, and about two-thirds that length along its shorter. “I see it,” Worf said, “but I do not understand its significance. What is it? What caused it?”
The chemist stood back up, as did Worf. “I’d like you to make that assessment, sir,” Tornot said, “but I haven’t finished showing you everything.” He paced away on a straight line, and Worf followed. After almost half a minute, Tornot stopped and squatted down again. He did not have to point out the second hollow before Worf saw it.
Crouching, Worf saw that the hollow appeared similar to the first. He glanced up through the faceplate of his helmet at Tornot, whose pale-blue features had drawn into a look of concern. “We’re about twenty-five meters from where we started,” the Bolian said. “There are two more similar hollows to either side, about fifteen meters apart.” He reached down to the ground, poked four holes into the dirt, then connected the opposite pairs. It resulted in a longer and shorter line meeting at right angles, forming a shape like a lowercase t.
Worf rose and looked back across the flat land, visualizing the four hollows. Not hollows, he thought. Indentations. “A ship landed here,” he said.
“That was what I thought,” Tornot said. “I would have just listed the finding in my report, but …” He did not complete his sentence, perhaps not wanting to voice his concern. Worf did it for him.
“But these marks at least roughly correspond to the landing gear of the Vexia,” Worf said.
“Not just roughly, sir.”
Worf nodded, understanding Tornot’s concern, and sharing it himself. If the Eletrix crew had sent down a shuttle to the carbon planet prior to notifying the Enterprise crew about the strange world, then why hadn’t Commander T’Jul revealed that? Keeping such a piece of information hidden amounted to a violation of the terms of the joint mission, which called for full disclosure on all operations. From such an action, Worf inferred a lack of trust: either the Enterprise crew could not count on the Romulans, or possibly the Romulans had acted as they had because they did not rely on their Starfleet counterparts. Whichever the case, such a failure of the mission, and so quickly, would mean a blow to efforts to craft a durable peace.
But the possibility that the Romulans had already breached the mission agreement brought Worf a more immediate concern. A lie, even one of omission, suggested Commander T’Jul might possess a different agenda than Captain Picard. Worf needed to know the repercussions of that with respect to the safety of the away team in particular, and of the Enterprise crew in general.
Of Tornot, Worf asked, “If the crew of the Eletrix brought down the Vexia or another shuttle to the planet’s surface before the Enterprise arrived, what did they hope to accomplish? Have you detected anything else in the area that might offer a clue?”
“No, sir,” Tornot said.
“No residual energy readings? No footprints?”
“No, sir,” Tornot said. “Nothing.”
Worf looked around, attempting to puzzle out what had taken place there, and why. “If Commander T’Jul did send down a shuttle from the Eletrix before the Enterprise arrived here, and if she wished to conceal that fact, then why would the Vexia set down so close to the first landing site?” Worf asked, and then offered a possible solution. “Typhon Pact vessels have been entering the Gamma Quadrant for a couple of months now. Perhaps a Romulan ship with a footprint similar to that of the Vexia landed here.”
“But those are civilian vessels,” Tornot observed.
“Yes, but military designs can migrate to nonmilitary usage,” Worf said. “And military vessels can be converted to civilian use.”
The questions and possibilities vexed Worf. He checked his chronometer and saw that seventeen minutes remained in the expedition. In that time, he needed to decide what course of action to take. If he falsely accused the Romulans of deceit, it could ruin the mission. If he withheld the discovery of the evidence of a landing on the planet, even until he could inform Captain Picard about the situation, and if the Romulans learned of the Enterprise away team’s holding back that information, that could undermine the mission as well, as it would constitute a contravention of the terms of the joint mission.
It occurred to Worf that perhaps the Romulans had intentionally engineered such a dilemma in order to test the fidelity of the Enterprise crew to the mission and to the conditions of the agreement on how to conduct it. The Romulans’ covert intelligence service, the Tal Shiar, had a history of conducting far more complex, even convoluted, plots to accomplish their aims. Worf knew of no Tal Shiar agents aboard Eletrix, but that did not mean that Chairwoman Sela had not sent along one or more of her operatives.
Worf looked over at Tornot. “We have little time left before we return to the ship,” he told the chemist. “You should gather your equipment and head back to the shuttle.”
“Yes, sir,” Tornot said.
Worf waited as the scientist collected his gear, and then the two started back toward Vexia. It would only take a few minutes to reach the shuttle, and shortly after that, once the rest of the away team had boarded, the time would come for all of the data gathered on the carbon planet to be pooled for examination by the crews of both Enterprise and Eletrix. Worf had until then to decide how to proceed.
23
Ben Sisko stood at the top of the tower and took in the view of the magnificent city for the final time. Laid out in a series of concentric circles, with the tower at its hub, the great metropolis looked almost like a diorama, like a scale model presented on a holodeck. A stunning, low-lying mass of subtly colored glass and steel, it ebbed and flowed like some cubist vision of a translucent, aquamarine ocean, its vast waters frozen in place. Cutting through the city radially and in rings, wide pedestrian thoroughfares allowed citizens to walk freely and easily, and when seen from a height, added to the overall impression of designed beauty. Numerous parks also dotted the urban landscape, as did public displays of artwork.
In some ways, Sisko thought, the Vahni Vahltupali are themselves works of art. Though reminiscent of humanoids in shape and size, the builders of the city differed in many ways. They had a long, narrow torso; a large, bulbous head; two legs; and two tentacles that functioned more or less as arms. They stood tall and slim, with a highly articulated skeleton that endowed them with extreme flexibility. They had no senses or organs that allowed them to hear or speak, but possessed a single, complex eye that circled their entire head. They communicated via conscious alterations to the colors, patterns, and textures of their flesh.
Although only a handful of the city’s buildings reached higher than one or two stories, the place nevertheless seemed tall. Sisko had anticipated such an effect, having heard Elias Vaughn speak about the Defiant crew’s contact with the Vahni Vahltupali. Seven years prior, Vaughn had taken the ship on Starfleet’s first extended exploration of the Gamma Quadrant after the end of the Dominion War. At that time, other than the towers at the hearts of cities, no structure anywhere on the Vahni world reached higher than two stories, since they had for more than two centuries experienced massive, planetwide temblors—not geologic in nature, but caused by a powerful pulse of energy intermittently surging through their solar system. During Defiant’s visit there, such a pulse had caused horrible devastation, including shattering the planet’s lone moon. Vaughn and his crew had tracked down the source of the pulse and put a permanent end to it, for which they occupied a revered place in the history of the Vahni.
It troubled Sisko to think about Elias Vaughn. Not only did he mourn the loss of a man to whom he’d felt particularly close—despite the fact that they hadn’t spent all that much time together—but he had expected something different for him. After all, it had been Vaughn who had helped usher Sisko out of the Celestial Temple so that he could be back on Bajor for the birth of his daughter. That alone—Vaughn acting as an instrument of the Prophets—had led Sisko to believe that his friend could and should serve as the Emissary in the so-called mirror universe, at least on a te
mporary basis. When that hadn’t happened, Sisko had thought some other important fate awaited Vaughn—more than the role he’d played with the Eav’oq and the Ascendants, more than what he’d done on Endalla.
And more even than sacrificing his own life to save both the Alonis and the crew of the James T. Kirk, Sisko thought. He envisioned Vaughn still lying in bed in the DS9 infirmary, his body alive only in a technical sense, his mind long since dead. It hurt Sisko to think of Vaughn in that way, and it pleased him that the Vahni remembered him only in his vitality, that they held him in such high regard.
Moments earlier, at the entrance to the rooftop of the five-story tower, Sisko’s guide had read him the contents of a plaque commemorating the previous tower that had stood there, on which Vaughn and a Vahni named Ventu had been standing when the last pulse had struck. When that occurred, the loss of the planet’s single natural satellite caused several physical effects on the planet itself. Without its moon, the world’s rotation speeded up, consequently shortening the length of its day by several seconds. The magnitude of the tides also decreased. But the greatest impact of the annihilation of the Vahni moon had been psychological. The plaque on the rooftop told of the collective dread and fear that had gripped their society, but also how Vaughn had survived the destruction of the previous tower—though Ventu had not—and how he and his crew had then gone on to forever end the terrible threat of the pulse.
The Federation had maintained relations with the Vahni Vahltupali in the years since first contact with them, though it had not done so initially. Because of the Vahni’s status as a pre-warp culture, UFP policy, much like Starfleet’s Prime Directive, precluded even basic communication with its people. Vaughn and his crew, bound by regulations, had not initiated contact with them. But despite lacking the capability to travel faster than light, the Vahni possessed a technologically advanced society. By the time the Defiant crew had come to explore the Gamma Quadrant, the Vahni had already toured their own solar system, had discovered subspace, and had begun major scientific and engineering efforts to develop both warp drive and transporter technology. Also, they had already been visited by two other spacefaring civilizations, and therefore understood that they were not alone in the universe. And so it had been the Vahni who had established contact with the crew of Defiant, rather than the other way around.
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