“Interesting?” she asks.
“It’s a lot more than interesting.” I tell her. “It’s downright terrifying. So far, we’ve been able to fend the Borg off. But what are we going to do when they attack us with two ships? Or three?”
“There’s reason for optimism,” Coburn tells me. “We’ve received information on a drone who’s been able to sever her link with the collective. We believe we can use that information in the event of another invasion.”
“Can I have a word with her?” I ask, the journalist in me sensing one heck of a story.
Coburn shakes her head. “She’s not available for interviews, I’m afraid. At least, not yet.”
I understand. Still, the hope this former drone represents is important to me. Having explored the inside of a Borg cube once, I know I never want to see one again.
Political and territorial conquest are irrelevant concepts to the collective. They evaluate the technological and biological distinctiveness of every species they encounter, and if the Borg determine that they have something to gain, they simply assimilate it.
JANUS VI
MOTHER'S DAY
We take one of the tunnels “carved” by an infant Horta. While thousands of Horta populate the planet, only the one known as the “mother Horta” has maintained contact with the miners and countless Federation scientists.
Illuminated by my tripod light, the Horta regards me with every millimeter of her rusty brown, silicon-based corpus. My eyes tell me she’s just an exotic stalagmite, a strange-looking lump protruding from the cavern floor. But of course, I know better.
I can feel her alien thoughts moving like underground currents just beneath the surface of her consciousness. She knows that I’m a telepath. Apparently, she’s met at least one other in her day.
And a long day it’s been—fifty thousand years by our reckoning. Unfortunately, it’s about to come to an end.
I ask the Horta how she feels about that. After all, it’s why I came to this echoing, blue-violet cavern on Janus VI. I want to understand what it’s like for someone to be dying after fifty thousand years, so I can pass the knowledge on to my audience on Betazed.
The Horta feels sad. However, it’s not because she fears death or wishes to avoid it. In fact, she accepts it with exemplary grace. What she dreads is the prospect of dying before she`s discharged her responsibility.
I wonder what that responsibility might be. The Horta tells me to come with her. Time is short, she says. Then, with a scraping sound, she moves—a bizarre process of sliding forward on tiny appendages concealed by her girth—and disappears into a hole in the cavern wall.
I turn to Tony Vanderberg, the stocky, dark-haired colony administrator whose family has lived and worked on Janus VI for more than a century. He’s been my escort since my arrival here.
“Where’s she going?” I ask, noticing a metallic tang in the air for the first time.
Vanderberg eyes the Horta’s departure and smiles in sympathy. “The Vault of Tomorrow,” he tells me.
I nod in acknowledgment, having already been briefed on the place. Then I take the Horta up on her invitation. I activate my palm beacon, hunker down, and follow her into a smooth, almost perfectly straight passageway, my heart beating hard with anticipation.
After all, the Vault of Tomorrow is where the Horta keeps her young.
The Federation made first contact with the Horta in 2267, after she killed a handful of pergium miners who had inadvertently broken into the Vault of Tomorrow and destroyed some of her eggs. Thanks to the intervention of the U. S.S. Enterprise, the misunderstanding was cleared up and the miners and the Horta were thenceforth able to live in harmony.
That was slightly more than a century ago. A little while after that, the Horta’s eggs began to hatch. At first, it was a rare occurrence. Then it became more and more common. By 2300, there were nearly 1,100 new Horta burning tunnels through the rocky bowels of Janus VI, exposing new, rich veins of pergium for their humanoid friends. By 2350, the Horta population exceeded 3,000.
And by 2360, when Tony Vanderberg took over the mining colony’s administration from his father, all the eggs in the vast Vault of Tomorrow had done their jobs … except one.
The Vault of Tomorrow stretches for fifty meters in every direction, its walls the same blue-violet hue as the cavern I just left. Once, this place was full of iridescent green and red eggs, each one perfectly spherical, each one thirty to thirty-two centimeters in diameter.
Now, it contains the cracked remains of those eggs, the life-forms within them having long since emerged and gone on to become thriving members of the Horta species. As I follow the mother Horta into the cavern, I can’t help stepping on some of the egg fragments and cracking them underfoot.
The Horta doesn’t mind, she tells me telepathically. Now that her young have been born, she doesn’t care about the shells anymore—with one exception. Moving forward again with her strange, rasping shuffle, she leads me to a spot near one of the cavern walls.
Planting a hand on the unexpectedly smooth rock, I shine my palmlight with the other. By its yellow-white glow, I see a single intact shell. It’s a bit more scarlet than green, but perfectly spherical.
This is the source of the Horta’s terrible sadness—her single unborn baby. Inside the shell, she tells me, the young one lives. However, she doesn’t know if the egg will ever hatch, and there’s no way for her to expedite the process without killing the life inside it.
Before, the problem bothered her. Now it consumes her. She’s horrified by the idea that she might die without ever seeing her last, tardy charge emerge from its shell.
I ask her how much longer she has. The news isn’t good.
Vanderberg isn’t a telepath, but he knows the Horta as well as anyone. He shows me the spot on her exterior where the Enterprise‘s chief medical officer repaired a phaser wound with old-fashioned cement.
“He said he was a doctor, not a bricklayer,” Vanderberg chuckles wistfully over a cup of hot, black coffee at the miners’ subterranean office. “But he did the job. Now the Horta wants to do hers.”
“She’s overseen the births of thousands,” I point out. “Even if this egg doesn’t hatch, that’s a pretty good record.”
“For you and me, maybe,” says Vanderberg. “But not for her.”
He’s right, of course. I’m applying Betazoid standards to a completely different life-form. A rookie mistake, and I’m no rookie.
“We ought to be getting back,” I tell Vanderberg. “I want to be there when she passes.”
Vanderberg and I begin our vigil in the haunting Vault of Tomorrow, where the Horta has chosen to live out her last moments in the hope of seeing her young one hatch.
We have a tripod light, sleeping bags, and some provisions. We take turns watching the Horta so the other can rest. Our agreement is that we’ll wake each other if her end seems near.
Two days into our watch, Vanderberg shakes me awake. “Any moment now,” he tells me anxiously.
I sit up and rub my eyes. By the light of our tripod, I can see the Horta. She doesn’t look any different to me, but the rock beneath her is hissing and fuming as she involuntarily releases corrosive acid into it.
I reach into her mind and find a bottomless sorrow there, a sorrow I can’t even begin to describe. I have failed, the Horta says in my mind miserably. My offspring is unborn.
I don’t attempt to console her. I can tell it won’t do any good. So I just sit there, feeling fifty thousand years’ worth of Horta memories sift through my mind like many-colored sand.
Then something happens. Out of the comer of my eye, I see a shiver of movement. I hear a cracking sound, then another. And as I trace it to its source, I realize that the last egg is beginning to hatch.
The Horta realizes it, too. She attends the event with all eight of her remaining senses, taking in the birth of her last child with a feeling of wonder and relief.
Pergium was once the lifeblood of many
planetary power systems. It is still used in many starships. While the Horta digest the rock surrounding it, they have no interest in pergium. According to the Horta, “It taste bad.”
As I look on, spellbound, the baby cracks away the last of its shell and slides free of the metallic-looking shards, a whole and viable life-form. And in that moment, as the mother Horta sees her last duty discharged, her consciousness fades into silicon oblivion.
For a time, I can’t speak. I can’t even think. That’s how thoroughly I echo with the Horta’s last, sweet thoughts. Then, little by little, I regain control of myself.
“Are you all right?” Vanderberg asks me, his eyes red with tears.
I watch the newborn Horta make its way across the cavern. It lingers for a moment by the corpse of the mother Horta. Then it proceeds to the cavern wall, where it corrodes an exit for itself and disappears into it.
“I’m fine,” I say, finding my voice. “But …”
“But what?” he wonders.
“But did the last egg know to hatch just as the mother Horta was about to die?” I shake my head, rejecting the magnitude of such a coincidence. “There wasn’t any link between them, or I would have felt it.”
Vanderberg thinks for a moment. “Maybe it was always meant to happen this way … and the Horta just didn’t know it. Even when you live fifty thousand years, you may not know everything.”
“Maybe not,” I concede.
And then I wonder if it even matters. The Horta died happy, didn’t she? Maybe that’s all I should care about.
Vanderberg and I take a last look at the mother Horta, her silicon-based body surrounded by a sea of cracked shells. He claps me on the shoulder. “Come on,” he says.
As we pack up our supplies and our sleeping bags, something occurs to me. One of the Horta tunneling its way through Janus VI at that very moment is the next matriarch of her generation.
Unfortunately, I don’t know which one. And from what I’ve learned from plumbing the mother Horta’s mind, the future matriarch doesn’t know yet either.
Too bad, I think. I could save her some anguish. I could tell her that, no matter how doubtful it may seem at times, she’ll survive long enough to see that last egg hatch.
I could tell her that. But then, maybe it’s the mother Horta’s sadness that somehow triggers the hatching, and my assurance could disrupt nature’s intended outcome. Who knows?
Not even the Horta. And if it’s a mystery to them, an off-worlder like me has no business meddling with it. With that in mind, I retrieve our tripod. Then, along with Vanderberg, I leave the Vault of Tomorrow, newborn shadows dancing in my wake.
STARBASE 11
225 YEARS OF SERVICE
As part of the 225th anniversary celebration, two twenty-third century shuttlecraft have been reconstructed. Pilots from Starfleet Academy's Red Squad perform aerial maneuvers in and around the original complex, to the delight of staff and visitors in attendance.
Just in case I have forgotten what Starbase 11 was like, the sleek, black desk in Admiral Carlin’s mint green office reminds me. The desk serves as a display for a small but intriguing collection of souvenirs passed from one commanding officer to the next for more than two centuries.
To my right, as I sit down opposite Carlin’s empty black chair, I see a silver medallion enameled with a lavender-colored Romulan bird-of-prey. The medallion seems to hang suspended in midair, though it’s actually encased in a transparent plastic cube.
Of course, Earth forces never saw their enemy’s faces when the two species clashed in what’s become known as the Romulan War. However, my human ancestors were able to salvage artifacts like this one from the floating debris of Romulan ships.
To my left, I see a photograph of a half dozen smiling Earth pilots in their black and gold uniforms, fresh from some space victory over the Romulans. The image has an eerie feeling to it; not for the first time, I wonder how many of these brave men and women survived to see the conflicts end in 2160.
The third souvenir sits right in front of me. It’s a colorful, irregularly shaped meteor fragment made of iron, nickel, and cobalt. According to legend, the Terrans in charge of building Starbase 11—one of the few Earth facilities to be constructed planetside—were standing around discussing the perfect site for the place when a meteorite fell right at their feet.
Clearly, an apocryphal event. But then, so much about Starbase 11 smacks of myth and folklore, it’s difficult to know where the facts end and the fiction begins.
For instance, it’s a matter of record that in 2267, this base was the site of Captain James T. Kirk’s court-martial for murder. As it turns out, the victim was far from dead and the charges against Kirk were summarily dropped, though the incident lives on as an oddity in the annals of Starfleet.
Somewhat more dubious is the story that Kirk’s vessel, the Enterprise, returned to the base shortly thereafter and that Spock, her Vulcan first officer, abducted Christopher Pike, his former captain, from the premises. It’s possible that there’s some bit of truth to the tale, because Starfleet has classified all information pertaining to the incident—but I doubt any of us will ever know for sure.
“Miss me?” asks a warm and familiar voice.
I turn and see Admiral Carlin enter the room. His hair is a little grayer than when I saw him last and he’s put on a few pounds, but he’s still got an antic smile that smacks of a not so well-behaved child.
I grin back at him. “What do you think, sir?”
“I think it’s good to see you,” he says.
When I was stationed here as a fresh-faced ensign twenty years ago, the admiral was like a father to me. Though I’m now a lieutenant commander assigned to the Starfleet office of information, our feelings for each other haven’t diminished.
“Walk with me?” he asks.
I nod, “I’d be delighted to, sir.”
Michael Carlin came to Starbase 11 right out of the Academy, intending to remain only until a better assignment came along. Six decades later, he’s still waiting.
Few records remain from the era prior to Starfleet’s command of the base, but it is believed that the construction completed in 2190 used previously existing foundations. The base has evolved from its original role as a defensive facility into a premier research center.
We stroll across the outdoor plaza under a moist and misty twilight. The sky is a shade of lavender I’ve never seen anywhere else. The smaller of the planet’s two moons is caught in the grip of a lively nimbus; in its meager light, the crags that surround us are dark and foreboding.
The air is breathable enough in small doses, but I can taste the minerals suspended in it. It leaves a bitter, metallic tang in my mouth, just the way it used to.
“Since I became commanding officer twenty-eight years ago,” Carlin observes, “we’ve made it through a Midrossi attack, a temporal anomaly, earthquakes, epidemics, sabotage, and class reunions. And we came this close (he holds his thumb and forefinger a millimeter or so apart) to going head-to-head with the Borg.”
The admiral is a survivor. But then, I reflect, so is Starbase 11. It’s the only one of Earth’s original fourteen interstellar bases that lived to be converted into a Starfleet facility.
That’s why I’m back—because in the aftermath of our victory over the Dominion, Starfleet Command wants to mark the place’s 225th year in service with a lot of hoopla and backslapping, and someone’s got to chronicle it all. Thanks to all the time I put in here, I’ve become the chronicler of choice.
If you know where to look among the long dusky shadows—and Carlin knows better than anyone—vestiges of the old Earth base remain. You can find them in the archaic black spires of the deflector generators, which have been gutted and updated at least a dozen times. You can see them in the silvery, four-legged phaser stations, which used to house humble laser emitters, and in the capped-off, vertical barrels of what were once state-of-the-art atomic weapon launchers.
The outpost’s ten
-story-high administration building overlooks everything, its mostly transparent walls glowing with a golden light. I never thought much of it before, but it looks beautiful to me now. It was a wise man who said that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
As we duck into the mushroom-shaped towers on the far side of the plaza, the admiral shows me one of the improvements that has been made since I left. The sensor console covers an entire curved wall, its multitude of black-and-red screens working like a hive full of robot bees, cramming hundreds of gigabytes of information into bold, clear graphics. Once, the array was lucky to detect an approaching warbird. Now it can discern hostile vessels almost twenty light-years away.
Through the rectangular observation port to one side of the screens, Carlin and I can see the leading edge of the planet’s larger moon. Paler and brighter than its sibling, it’s beginning to rise from the jagged outline of the eastern mountains. The admiral’s eyes reflect its light.
I glance at him. “What should I tell people, sir?”
Carlin knows exactly what I’m asking. For a moment, he thinks about it. Then, as he opens his mouth to speak, someone else says, “Tell them about Harvey Hildebrandt.”
We turn and see a wizened old man in a Starfleet admiral’s uniform. Carlin smiles. “Commander, I’d like you to meet Admiral McCoy. He’s here for the anniversary celebration … though he seems to have arrived a little earlier than the other dignitaries.”
“Never liked being late,” McCoy grumbles.
I’ve heard of him, of course, though we’ve never met before. It occurs to me that he’s the oldest human being I’ve ever seen—almost 150 years old, if the stories are true.
“Pleased to meet you,” I tell him.
“Same here,” McCoy replies, his narrowing eyes accentuating the fine web of wrinkles at their outer corners.
“Harvey Hildebrandt?” I ask.
The admiral nods his head, his white hair looking like spun platinum in the glare of the ceiling lights. “He was a weapons officer. I met him here back in ‘98 on my way back to Earth.” He pauses, remembering. “The base was attacked by Klingon renegades. They busted through our shields and Hildebrandt was wounded. Badly. But he hung on until a starship arrived.”
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