by Dave Stern
Outside the Kanthropian sickbay, Hoshi paced.
She’d been told to check back in an hour, and that hour had come and gone some time ago. Still no news on Theera. That wasn’t good. The doctors here (the Kanthropian medical facilities were apparently far superior to the Conani, and so Theera had been brought back to S-12 for treatment) had found disruption of the brain tissue at the cellular level, caused by the mind-sifter, and were still trying to decide exactly how to proceed. One group favored surgery, another treatment via direct electrical stimulation…neither was optimistic about the long-term prognosis for recovery. They were currently waiting for the arrival of Theera’s medical records, which they hoped to use as a baseline for comparison, particularly with regard to the measurement of electro-chemical activity within the brain—EEG readings and the like—before deciding how to proceed.
For her part, Hoshi kept flashing back to the look of betrayal on Theera’s face when Jaedez’s guards had first dragged her into that room and she’d seen Hoshi. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. She couldn’t stop feeling guilty for her role in what had happened.
Hoshi suspected that it would be a long, long time before that changed.
The sickbay doors opened, and—to her surprise—a Denobulan stepped out. He glanced at her, and smiled.
“Ensign Sato, yes?”
“Yes.” She strode over quickly to him.
“Doctor Hael. I’m handling the Andorian’s case.”
“You’re a Denobulan.”
“Yes.” He frowned. “Is there a problem with that?”
“No, not at all. We have a Denobulan physician aboard Enterprise.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A doctor…Phlox,” Hoshi said, realizing only at that instant that although the doctor might have another name (first or last, she didn’t know which Phlox represented), she had no idea what it was. Hael was considerably shorter than Phlox, and quite a bit older, she saw now, but still…
It was almost like running into a familiar face.
“Phlox.” Hael frowned, and shook his head. “Phlox,” he said again, and then finally, “I know no one by that name.”
He had a strange expression on his face.
Hoshi had a funny feeling he wasn’t telling her the exact truth. But she had neither the time nor the energy to pursue the question further.
“So how is she, Doctor? Theera?”
Hael shook his head, and for a moment, Hoshi’s heart sank.
“I don’t know how to explain what we’re seeing,” he said, “but…I believe the Andorian is going to make a complete recovery.”
Hoshi was at a loss for words. That was the last thing she’d expected to hear.
“I don’t understand. The other doctors—they said that there was cellular disruption. That the brain tissue itself was damaged.”
“It was. It still is, parts of it, and yet…” Hael shook his head. “Somehow, the Andorian’s neural pathways are in the process of regenerating themselves.”
Hoshi frowned. “Regenerating?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not a doctor, but…I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before.”
“Nor I. It is most puzzling.”
“Can I see her?”
“Not at the moment. She is still unconscious.”
“How long till she wakes?”
“Difficult to say. Several hours, at the soonest. I can keep you apprised of her condition, if you like.”
“I would appreciate that, thank you.”
Hael excused himself then, and disappeared back inside the sickbay.
Hoshi stood there a moment, giving thanks to whatever powers there were for Theera’s recovery. Another burden off her conscience, she thought, to go along with the one she’d experienced earlier, on returning to S-12 and contacting Enterprise. When she’d learned that her news about Sen and Captain Archer was not news after all and that the ship was even now in hot pursuit of the governor and his prisoner, who—they’d just discovered, thanks to a source on Procyron—was alive, or at least had been alive as of approximately twelve hours earlier, which meant that her failure to translate the Antianna signal was not, in fact, responsible for Archer’s death.
It was only as she approached the analysis chamber once more that the question she should have asked Hael occurred to her—that being, would Theera’s recovery include a complete return of all her memories, not just those pertaining to her time aboard the Antianna ship and the attack on Lokune, but those of her work, her husband, her childhood? She made a mental note to ask the doctor that the next time they talked.
She entered the analysis chamber, and stopped in her tracks.
In between visits to sickbay, Hoshi had been in the analysis chamber, working right alongside a group of several dozen Mediators, trying to make sense of what Theera had said under the influence of the mind-sifter. The ship’s computers quickly deciphered the Andorian’s references to “spectral matrix scan,” and the “four-hundred-seventy-three-nanometer” measurement. “Spectral,” referring to electromagnetic spectrum; “matrix,” representing the continuum of frequencies belonging to that spectrum; “scan,” the physical process involved in searching for a specific one of those frequencies, that being, the four-hundred-seventy-odd-nanometer wavelength, which represented (at least to the human eye) the color blue.
When she’d left earlier, the Mediators had all been gathered in front of their respectative consoles, working within the database, or gathered in small groups.
Now they were all clustered in a single large knot, at the very front of the huge room, near the transparent wall.
Elder Green stood in front of them. She was talking, her voice somehow amplified to fill the chamber.
Hoshi moved closer to listen.
“…to complete the retrofit, the engineers will need from us a number of items, then. Range of the EM spectrum to be monitored, and a separate list of those discrete frequencies to be generated. We should provide as well a list of species known to use specific portions of the EM spectrum to communicate, translations of their languages on UC code chips, and a complete record of encounters with same, which can be broadcast as library data. I would like to gather this data and supply it to them within the next half an hour, as the time needed to accomplish the retrofit is substantial. Questions?”
There were none from the Mediators, who quickly scattered about the chamber to perform their assigned tasks. Hoshi waited until Green was alone, and then approached her.
“Ensign.” Green smiled. “I have just received the news regarding the Andorian. Most welcome.”
“Yes, it is, but…” Hoshi waved a hand behind her, at the Mediators now hard at work once more. “What’s going on?”
“General Jaedez now agrees that the Antianna scan may represent an attempt at communication, and that we should try to respond to it.”
That was news. Last she had heard, Jaedez and Teraven weren’t entirely convinced that the mind-sifter had done its job, that the “memory” Theera had recalled was genuine. Largely because (as they had all quickly realized) Theera was not aboard the Antianna ship when it scanned Lokune.
“Our plan,” Green said, leading Hoshi over to one of the horseshoe consoles where Younger Emmen sat, inputting data at a terminal, “is to retrofit S-12, as well as a number of other ships within the Armada, with a series of light-transmitting diodes.”
Green pointed at Emmen’s screen. It displayed a portion of the visual spectrum, sliced up into discrete chunks, too many for Hoshi to count.
“We plan to broadcast along the wavelengths specifically cited by the Andorian, although we are building in the capacity to transmit at fractions of those frequencies. The signaling will of course be handled largely by computer, as our experience with the Mahadabalamin demonstrated that species who communicate in visual rather than auditory language usually do so at far greater speed, and so…”
Green continued in that vein, referenc
ing several languages and life forms who utilized visual communication among themselves and other species, but Hoshi had a hard time focusing on what she was saying. Her attention was drawn to Emmen’s terminal, to the narrow portion of the visual spectrum it displayed. A darker blue on the left hand side of the screen, a lighter one on the right.
Hoshi frowned.
A bell rang in her head.
“Ensign? Something the matter?”
“No. Not really.”
She stared at the screen. At the dark blue, shading toward light. The light blue, shading toward aqua. Water.
The color of the ocean.
“Excuse me a minute,” she said.
“Ensign Sato?” Green called after her, but Hoshi wasn’t listening, she was already hurrying to her own station, sitting down and grabbing up the headset as quickly as she could.
It was just a coincidence, most likely, she told herself as she entered the virtual database. And yet…
She entered the library, and accessed the specific records she sought. The virtual “librarian” showed her how to transfer them from the central storage banks to her console. That done, she exited the database, and returned to the analysis chamber.
She brought the records on-screen, moved through them quickly until she found an image that served her purposes. She split the display, moving that image to the left half, and brought up alongside it the image from Emmen’s console—the visual spectrum—and focused in on the right-hand side of that screen, the light blue shading toward aqua.
The colors matched.
She sat back in her chair a moment, and frowned. The match wasn’t a surprise. She’d seen it in her head immediately. The question was, did the match mean anything, or was it strictly coincidental?
Could she trust her instincts, or…
“Ensign?”
She became aware of Green standing over her.
“What are you doing?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure, really.”
Green pointed to the left-hand side of the screen. “What is that?”
“That,” she said, “is an image I found in the database. From a recording of a space battle, supposedly between the Allied Worlds and a race called the Barreon. This person,” and now she too pointed at the screen, to the close-up image of the ripped uniform, and the dead body wearing it, floating in space, “was one of them.”
“Why were you…” Green shook her head. “What makes you interested in the Barreon?”
“The colors,” Hoshi said, gesturing to the screen. “They match.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Barreon uniforms, the color the Antianna were scanning for…they match.”
“I can see that, but…Ensign Sato. All due respect, I’m certain one could survey the database for all of five minutes and find several dozen other matches. This…” She gestured toward the screen. “It means nothing.”
Hoshi nodded. Green was probably right, and yet…
Something else tickled at the back of her mind. Another connection, being made by her subconscious.
She frowned, and continued to stare at the screen.
“But…spectral matrix scan,” she said, as much to herself as to Green. “What exactly were they searching for?”
Green was silent a moment.
“Ensign—are you suggesting that the Antianna were searching for these uniforms? For the people who wore them?”
“I don’t know,” Hoshi said, turning in her chair to face Green.
The Elder shook her head. “If memory serves…quite a number of historians doubt the authenticity of these recordings.”
Younger Emmen stepped up behind Green. He looked at the images on Hoshi’s screen, and frowned as well.
Was that what she was suggesting, Hoshi asked herself. That the Antianna were looking for the Barreon?
She turned back to the screen. Aqua. The color of the ocean at her grandfather’s house. The Barreon uniforms, torn to shreds by the weapons of the Allied Worlds ships.
She thought back then to T’Pol’s briefing, back on Enterprise. Anecdotal evidence existed, the Vulcan had suggested, that the Thelasians were the descendants of the old Allied Worlds systems.
And all of a sudden, it clicked.
“No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m suggesting at all.”
She looked up at Green, at Emmen, and then smiled.
“What if,” she said. “What if the Antianna are the Barreon?”
She had a hard time getting anyone to take her idea seriously. At first.
Hoshi pulled up more records—maps from the same database she’d gotten the images of the battle from, charts showing Barreon space and that belonging to the Allied Worlds.
She overlaid that map on top of a current one that showed both Confederacy territory and the rough boundaries of that space the Antianna, by virtue of their attacks over the last few years, had claimed. The correspondence was not exact, but it was close enough to cause Elder Green to raise an eyebrow, for Younger Emmen to sit down at the console next to Hoshi’s and begin research himself.
“If,” he said, emphasizing the word, drawing it out while simultaneously keying in commands faster than Hoshi’s eyes could follow, “you are correct, several questions immediately arise. Where have the Barreon been? Why have they chosen to identify themselves by a different name?”
Hoshi frowned. She couldn’t answer the first question—she suspected that really, only the Barreon could—and as for the second…
She remembered a lesson she’d learned while living with the Huantanamos.
“Maybe they haven’t chosen a different name. Maybe this is just the first time we’re hearing it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe Antianna is—or was—what the Barreon called themselves.”
The Mediator on the other side of Emmen looked up then and spoke.
“Sources within the database suggest that is not the case. References within surviving Barreon mythology suggest a clear etymology for the species name.”
Hoshi frowned. “Well. Is it possible that Antianna refers to the name of a particular subset of the race?”
“One moment.” The Mediator keyed in a series of commands, then shook her head. “There are no such references.”
“Are there any references at all to Antianna within the Barreon database?”
“I have run that query as well, and found no such word anywhere.”
“You’ve checked all the databases? Already?” Hoshi asked. That seemed awfully quick to her.
The Mediator nodded “I have also sent queries to some of the more specialized historical information brokers. No matches.”
Hoshi shook her head. She’d been so certain…
“I can query Teff-Langer, Elder,” the Mediator said, turning to Green. “The cost will be approximately—”
“Not necessary.” Green, who had been leaning over the Mediator’s shoulder while she worked, straightened now and spoke. “I am afraid that however intriguing your theory is, Ensign, the facts do not support it, and therefore—”
“Elder Green.”
They turned as one toward Younger Emmen, who had spoken.
“I have found a similar word in the lexicon.”
“Continue,” Green snapped.
“‘On-dee-ana,’” he said, accenting the second syllable. “It is found in an engineering manual, an instruction book of sorts regarding the construction of Type-Two FTL engines.”
“What does it mean?” Hoshi asked.
“It is difficult to say precisely. In the context of the document, it appears to refer to the procedure employed to insure successful merging of two warp fields within the drive.”
“A supplementary reference, Elder.” That from yet another Mediator, who had just looked up from his station. “Further explanation of the procedure, in a second such document. My reading suggests the word refers not to the procedure, but to the action. A verb, not a noun.”
>
“To put together,” Emmen added. “To join. I concur in that opinion.”
Green shook her head. “Despite the phonetic similarity, to me, this does not sound relevant.”
Hoshi frowned
She pictured Theera stretching her arms upward, out toward space, like a plea.
To put together. To join.
Not a plea—an imperative.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I think it’s very relevant indeed.”
Green turned to her, a look of puzzlement on her face.
Hoshi explained.
Twenty-Six
Bodies everywhere.
Fallen in corridors, sprawled across escape pod hatchways, on sickbay cots, on top of computer stations, with blood and spittle pooled in the corners of their mouths, with expressions of agony frozen on their faces.
Klingons could hardly be said to rank high on Captain Jonathan Archer’s list of “alien-races-I’d-most-like-to-be-trapped-aboard-a-starship-with,” but this…
What had Sen done?
The governor wasn’t telling. After releasing Archer, and bringing him down to the mess to eat, he’d told the captain they had two tasks before them. The first was cleanup.
“You will go to the sickbay, and fetch a gurney.” Sen, sitting across a long table from the captain—just far enough to be out of Archer’s reach—leaned back and popped some sort of food in his mouth that looked considerably more appetizing than the gagh on Archer’s plate. “You will then use the gurney to transport the bodies to shuttlebay, at which point we will jettison them into space.”
The captain nodded.
“I understand.”
“Good. You will not, of course, make the mistake of attempting any sort of escape, or sabotage, while you perform this task. The Klingon commander has thoughtfully equipped the ship with monitors everywhere.”
Again, Archer nodded. The monitors weren’t really the problem, of course, the problem was the collar he wore—some sort of punishment device that could be activated by a remote, which now rested in Sen’s hand, and which was, the captain suddenly realized, very similar to the ones used by some Orion slayers. Like the ones Enterprise had encountered in May. And thinking of Enterprise, he wondered where his ship was now; what was happening with his crew, what they thought had happened to him. He had vague memories of Sen firing his weapon, of lying on the floor, stunned, the feel of a transporter beam, a flash of bright light and then darkness, waking up in the Klingon brig, and realizing…