Star Trek: Voyager: Children of the Storm

by Kirsten Beyer

  As he chided himself internally for expecting a miracle where none was warranted, Fife’s voice called to him over the comm.

  “Captain, the intensity of the resonance signatures of the spheres has begun to diminish.”

  “What about their movement?” O’Donnell shouted as he left his lab at a run to return to aeroponics one.

  “It is slowing,” Fife replied.

  As soon as O’Donnell reached the bay, he understood the reason. The few flowers that remained on stems were dried brown and black. Most of the blooms had already fallen into the humidifiers below them. Likewise, the unharvested fruits and vegetables were rotting on their vines.

  Brill had begun along the first track and was methodically clearing vessels.

  “All hands, this is the captain,” O’Donnell called urgently. “Everyone who isn’t flying the ship or standing post on the bridge is to report to their designated labs immediately. Fill every available receptacle with fresh sod or solution and seed them with whatever is handy. Forget about growth schedules. Plant anything you can find, and be prepared to continue planting around the clock until otherwise notified.”

  Assuming that his orders would be followed, and pleased that within minutes, six crewmen assigned to aeroponics one hurried into the lab and began clearing the dead specimens as if their lives depended on it, O’Donnell joined them, pulling as many spare vessels as he could carry to the first vacant row.

  When he turned to grab his first set of seeds, he realized there might be a long-term problem with his plan. Desperation told him to throw as many seeds as each vessel could hold into the solution containers, but a little math reminded him that their seed stocks were not endless, nor easily replenished.

  Of course, all of the specimens that had just gone through a growth cycle would have produced seeds that were automatically harvested. O’Donnell hurried to the seed receptacles that lay beneath the first row of vessels. There he found only a few of the dozens of seeds they should have contained. Those present were dark and coarse and clearly not viable.

  They’re moving through the life cycle too quickly, O’Donnell realized. Or something about the Children’s influence over them was destroying the seeds.

  Either way, it didn’t matter.

  “Limit your plantings to a single seed per vessel,” he called to those working hurriedly around him. “And be careful with the seeds. We can’t afford to waste a single one. Brill, pass the order along to the supervisors of each bay. We’re going to have to make our current seed stocks last as long as possible.”

  With a nod, Brill hurried out of the bay to do as O’Donnell ordered. Before he had finished seeding his first ten vessels, O’Donnell noted with satisfaction that tiny green shoots were already visible. Fifteen minutes later, Url confirmed from the bridge that the Children’s “joy” seemed to be returning. O’Donnell was truthfully less concerned with their emotional state than the opportunity it provided him to keep his crew alive and his ship intact until a long-term solution could be found.

  “Keep me advised,” O’Donnell ordered as he dug both of his hands into a fresh container of seeds and realized that he probably had less than two weeks to come up with that solution.

  Fife entered aeroponics one and paused, taken aback at the flurry of activity all around him. In the weeks he had spent aboard Demeter, he had avoided the growth bays. They were simply outside his area of expertise and were filled with quiet scientists who usually spent more time talking to their specimens than to each other.

  He quickly spotted O’Donnell standing on an antigrav lift, hanging a series of vessels from a track that ran overhead.

  “Captain,” he said, crossing to him.

  “What is it, Atlee?”

  “Am I to understand that your entire plan for dealing with our current crisis is to placate our captors indefinitely?”

  O’Donnell didn’t stop working as he replied, “I wouldn’t call it my entire plan, but it’s definitely the first part.”

  “We need to find a way to escape the energy field,” Fife insisted.

  “Feel free to work on it, but if you’re not on the bridge, you need to get your hands dirty, Commander,” O’Donnell replied briskly.

  Fife didn’t bother to tell him that he was constitutionally incapable of making things grow. Though he had made a point of studying all of the species Demeter stocked, as well as their uses, he had killed every single plant or flower that had ever been given into his care, usually out of negligence.

  “Sir,” he said, unable to believe that the anyone, least of all a Starfleet officer, could so vastly underestimate the danger they were in. “Have you forgotten that these creatures destroyed one of our ships, killing seventy of our people?”

  O’Donnell brushed the sweat from his brow with his forearm and turned to face Fife.

  “Of course not,” he said sincerely.

  “Then why are you appeasing them?” Fife spat. “It seems to me that if we’ve actually discovered something that makes them happy, we should use it to negotiate our release.”

  “How?” O’Donnell demanded.

  “We should begin by withholding it from them, and force them to make contact with us.”

  O’Donnell stared at him as if he were the stupidest person he’d ever encountered.

  “The few telepathic crewmen we had were transferred to Quirinal before this mess began. Without anyone capable of conversation, how the hell do you propose we engage in negotiations?”

  “I’m not sure,” Fife allowed, “but we can’t just go on providing them with entertainment until our supplies run out.”

  “I quite agree,” O’Donnell said. “But we need to buy ourselves a little time to find a more permanent solution, and in the interim, I think keeping them happy is exactly what we ought to be doing.”

  “They’re monsters, Captain,” Fife finally said, releasing more hostility than he realized he’d been holding back.

  “Hardly,” O’Donnell replied. “We found them, they asked us to leave their space and never return, and we decided to come back anyway. It’s not hard to argue that we are the aggressors here and that they have only acted to defend themselves and their territory.”

  “The destruction of Planck was completely unwarranted,” Fife argued.

  “From our point of view, sure,” O’Donnell agreed, “but I’m not sure we should be judging them too harshly until we have a chance to get to know them a lot better. We’ve found a way to do that, and in the interest of keeping all of us alive a few more days, I’m ordering us to go with what we know until a better solution becomes available.”

  Fife started to open his mouth again, but O’Donnell cut him off. “Dismissed, Commander.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied.

  Before he made it back to the door, O’Donnell called after him. “One more thing, Atlee. We need to reschedule all personnel to ensure that every growth lab is fully stocked around the clock. And you should restrict all hands to replicated foods only until ordered otherwise.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Fife replied, though he was reluctant to obey the last. To accomplish what O’Donnell was asking would limit every member of Demeter’s crew to less than four hours of sleep per day. Assuming they kept this schedule up for the next two weeks, which was the earliest any rescue attempt might be expected from the rest of the fleet, they were all going to be bone tired. One of the few perks of working aboard Demeter, at least as Fife saw it, was the almost constant access to fresh food. Restricting everyone to the comparatively tasteless replicator fare wasn’t going to help morale.

  He decided to address the issue again the next time he spoke with O’Donnell. It was no use getting into another pointless argument right now.

  In the meantime, he needed to find a way to make obeying that order unnecessary. He appreciated the fact that O’Donnell had stumbled upon a way to keep the Children of the Storm distracted for the time being, only because it might buy him the time he needed to find a tac
tical advantage that might grant Demeter her freedom.

  Chapter Seventeen

  STARDATE 58458.5

  SURFACE OF UNNAMED PLANET

  B’Elanna found Captain Eden in the makeshift outdoor mess that had been set up a few hundred meters from what had once been Quirinal’s deflector array. Given all they were facing, she was surprised to see the fleet commander distributing hot meals to a long line of crewmen. It was likely the first warm food any of them had enjoyed in weeks, and it was possible thanks to a pair of replicators Conlon’s people had managed to rig in just a few hours.

  B’Elanna was about to take issue with Eden’s command priorities when she paused long enough to notice the looks on the faces of those who were accepting food, and in most cases, a few moments of conversation or a simple handshake from her. Their relief was palpable, as was their obvious pleasure in seeing the fleet commander cheerily pulling a duty shift none of them would have envied.

  Hesitant as she was to take Eden away from work that was clearly more important than it appeared at first glance, B’Elanna decided she must. And it would be better if what she had to say went unheard by Quirinal’s crew.

  “Captain, a word?” she asked, stepping beside Eden.

  The captain turned and acknowledged her with a faint nod. Minutes later, they were walking slowly away from the mess toward the valley’s command post.

  “You have a report for me?” Eden asked.

  “I’ve been through every centimeter of the ship that’s accessible,” B’Elanna replied, “and frankly I’m amazed it survived the landing.”

  “Let’s just be glad it did,” Eden offered.

  B’Elanna swallowed hard before continuing. “I know Achilles has many of the parts we’ll need to reconstruct her, and what they don’t have, they can replicate, but I’m still not convinced she’ll ever fly again.”

  Eden’s head snapped toward B’Elanna and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Why not?”

  “The structural damage is immense. A space port could probably make all of the needed repairs, but with her lying here like this, I don’t see how we can do it. Plus, it’s not like she just needs to be in good enough shape to get to the nearest starbase. She’s going to have to survive slipstream flight to rejoin the rest of the fleet, let alone ever see the Alpha Quadrant again. The effort alone is going to cost the rest of the fleet dearly in terms of supplies, personnel, and power. At the end of the day, I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

  Eden considered B’Elanna silently, her face settling into hard lines.

  “I don’t care what it costs,” she finally replied. “Seven was able to make contact with Esquiline. Achilles and Galen are on their way here right now and should arrive inside of twenty-four hours. Between now and then your orders are to prepare a complete list of supplies and personnel required to completely restore Quirinal.”

  “Understood,” B’Elanna replied. “But you do realize, this project is going to take weeks, even with all of our people working around the clock.”

  “How many weeks?”

  “Four, maybe five.”

  “You have three, Chief.”

  B’Elanna shook her head. She couldn’t believe she was about to have this conversation again. “Four is a minimum, Captain. I know a lot of engineers like to overestimate their timelines, but I’m not one of them. When I say I need four weeks, that’s exactly what I mean, and no amount of wishing or pushing or prodding is going to change that.”

  A quick smile flashed over Eden’s lips.

  “Very well. Four it is.”

  U.S.S. QUIRINAL

  Harry, Seven, and Patel had spent the last hour submitting the single sphere Quirinal now contained to every analysis possible, using portable scanners they’d brought from Voyager. As it was unsafe to enter the cargo bay, they had stationed themselves just outside it, but they could view the sphere through a small transparent window embedded in the tritanium-reinforced walls. While they had successfully scanned the sphere more thoroughly than any other individuals up to this point, the energy shell of the sphere and the psionic field keeping those inside it from projecting their will onto any nearby humanoid made a complete analysis difficult. Still, they were making progress.

  Seven had been the first to point out that the sphere contained two distinct resonance frequencies of the life-forms and to hypothesize that these distinctions might indicate particular specialized functions of the individuals. Patel had argued that the distinctions could as easily indicate age, gender, or mood. Harry had decided they should agree to disagree until they were able to actually ask their captives about the frequencies’ significance, if that ever happened. They had then worked to construct a harmonic scan that could pierce the energy shell without puncturing it. Watching Patel and Seven try to solve a problem together reminded Harry of the early days of contention between Seven and B’Elanna. He was happy to referee, but he wondered if that job might not be better accomplished by Counselor Cambridge, who had also been ordered to join their team but had yet to report for duty. Harry had only been assigned to provide security while they worked.

  “That’s it,” Patel said triumphantly.

  After a moment, Seven apparently agreed, though with considerably less enthusiasm.

  “Lieutenant Kim,” Seven said, “we have managed to get a clear scan of a single life-form’s DNA.”

  “That’s great, you two,” Harry said, quick to divide the praise between them. He moved to the data terminal to glance at the DNA, but had to admit that he didn’t really understand exactly what he was seeing. The structure didn’t even vaguely remind him of the humanoid DNA he had seen countless examples of.

  Patel worked quickly, feeding the data they had retrieved into Voyager’s computer and requesting further analysis. For her part, Seven watched, staring at the various images on the screen before her as if they had some private message meant for her alone.

  Finally she said, “This can’t be right.”

  Patel nodded. “I know. I think our harmonics were off slightly.”

  “They were not,” Seven countered.

  “They had to be, Seven. There isn’t enough here to account for consciousness, let alone sentience.”

  “This does explain their resilience, however,” Seven noted.

  “Definitely.”

  Harry raised his hand. “Could one of you possibly explain what you’re talking about to the member of this team who is not a xenobiologist or former Borg?”

  Patel turned away from her screen and placed a hand on her hip, shooting Harry a weary smile.

  “The first question is: how do these life-forms survive in the atmosphere that sustains them?” Patel said.

  “I’m with you so far,” Harry replied.

  “To have life, you have to have metabolism, but there’s nothing in the atmosphere inside the sphere that any life-forms I’ve ever seen would metabolize.”

  “Other than these trace heavy metals,” Seven said.

  “Exactly.” Patel nodded. “Which are more likely to be waste products than a nutrient source.”

  “So that leaves the hydrogen,” Seven finished for her.

  “And the hard radiation they’d have plenty of access to in open space.”

  “So the quantity of available food is what makes them so resilient?” Harry asked.

  “No, this part of their DNA does,” Patel explained, indicating a particular sequence on the display. “I think they actually use radiant energy to repair their DNA.”

  “They appear to be virtually indestructible,” Seven added, “as long as their atmosphere remains relatively constant.”

  “But none of this explains their telekinetic abilities, which have to be a product of consciousness,” Patel went on. “These are microscopic organisms, not single cells, but no more than a couple hundred thousand each.”

  “What if we’re looking at two life-forms?” Seven suggested.

  “Go on,” Patel replied dubiously. />
  “There are examples of species that have evolved as pure consciousness. Perhaps at some point, likely thousands of years ago, one such species encountered these hardy extremophiles and infected them.”

  “Like a virus,” Patel said, obviously warming to the theory.

  “Exactly.” Seven nodded. “These sequences,” she said, pointing to the screen, “could have been formed by the merging of a distinct genome with a parasitic consciousness.”

  “And they evolved together,” Patel agreed. “That’s entirely possible.”

  “Can they reproduce?” Counselor Cambridge asked.

  All three turned to see him standing at the entrance to their makeshift lab.

  “Good of you to join us, Counselor,” Harry said with a light dollop of sarcasm.

  “Of course,” Cambridge replied as if he hadn’t noticed. Turning to Patel and Seven, he asked again, “Well, can they?”

  “Not in their present form …” Seven began.

  “They’re lacking key enzymes necessary for procreation,” Patel finished for her.

  Harry crossed his arms and considered them both.

  “What?” Seven asked.

  “I’m just not sure I’m ready for another pair of crewmen on Voyager who can complete each other’s sentences,” Harry said wryly.

  “But the upside is that it should make our scientific briefings considerably shorter in the future,” Cambridge said.

  Striding toward them, he continued, “It seems you three have made short work of this without me. Unless there’s something apart from the obvious you think you’ve missed.”

  Harry noticed Patel stiffen, while Seven settled for staring at the counselor with a gaze that could have melted the deck plates.

  “The obvious, Counselor?” Harry decided to ask, as both of his teammates seemed content to allow the uncomfortable silence to drag on indefinitely.

  “Yes.” Cambridge nodded. “We may now know what makes these extraordinary creatures thrive, but the fact that they can’t reproduce shouldn’t surprise anyone.”