Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Carlin glances at me. “Admiral McCoy was a fine doctor, but he couldn’t save Lieutenant Hildebrandt.”

  McCoy’s eyes grow bright. “The man had given too much of his blood to this place.” He turns to gaze out the window for a moment and shrugs. “I like to think it’s still here, in the floors and the bulkheads and the sensors and the phaser batteries—Harvey Hildebrandt’s blood and that of a hundred more like him. That's what I would tell people.”

  TRIBBLES

  SECOND CHANCES

  As unlikely as it may look, since the only known sightings of tribbles have been in spaceship environs, the riverbed is the preferred natural habitat of tribbles. After donating tribbles to countless zoological societies, with the exception of those in the Klingon Empire, three worlds were explored for possible resettlement prior to the selection of Epsilon XVII.

  Our tribbles look like some exotic variety of lichen as they cluster on the warm, slick surface of a black boulder, their wispy fur quivering in the mint-scented jungle breeze.

  My fellow xenobiologists and I feel like quivering a little ourselves. This is, after all, a critical juncture in the life of the tribble species—one which survives now as a mere shadow of a horde that once threatened to choke the galaxy.

  Fifty-five of the creatures are gathered on the rock, shaded from the sun by immense leafy plants that average a hundred meters in height. Each tribble is a slightly different color from its neighbors, though the most popular themes are coffee, auburn, and sand. In some of them these hues are mixed and mingled, in others pure and inviolate.

  Up on our ship, in special stasis compartments, there are several hundred more of the small, warm-blooded beasts—insurance in case our grand experiment doesn’t bear fruit. To mangle an old expression, we don’t want to put all our tribbles in one basket.

  As thoroughly as we’ve studied this remarkably fecund M-Class world, selecting it from more than a hundred others in our databanks, we still can’t be sure it will provide the right combination of security and peril. By the former, I mean ample and appealing sources of nutrients, adequate shelter from the elements, and a breathable atmosphere. By the latter, I mean at least one local predator with a taste for small, furry mammals.

  Of course, that’s a drastic oversimplification of the problem. Planetary ecologies are vast and intricate phenomena, delicately and even precariously balanced on the most obscure biological issues.

  In selecting a home for the creatures, we had to take into account what they breathe in, what they breathe out, the composition of their solid and liquid waste products, their radiant body temperatures and so forth. We had to determine what dormant diseases and other parasites they carried in their blood. We even had to consider the complex of nutrients their carcasses would generate when they died.

  Once we had identified all the relevant criteria, we developed sophisticated computer models to predict the impact of a tribble introduction on native flora and fauna. If the creatures’ activities would seriously disrupt another species’ migratory patterns or reproductive behavior—which actually seemed likely in some cases—we crossed that species’ world off our list. After all, we didn’t want to help our tribbles thrive at the expense of some other worthy life-form.

  In the end, we settled on planet Epsilon XVII, which seemed perfect except for its uncomfortable proximity to the Romulan Neutral Zone, But for our efforts to bear fruit, we need the cooperation of this world’s largest and most fearsome predator.

  I take out my tricorder and call up an image of the savage hunter in question. It is lithe, graceful, and slightly more than half a meter high at the shoulder, with a flat head and almond-shaped eyes reminiscent of a Terran feline’s. That must be why the Federation survey team that first beamed down to this world dubbed the beast a river lion.

  However, with its black, orange, and green pelt and antlerlike cranial protuberances, it’s like no lion I’ve ever seen. What’s more, I’ve never met a feline who likes to hunt underwater as much as above it.

  My colleagues and I are hoping the river lion can make a small dietary adjustment. You see, since that first Federation survey and probably for millions of years prior, the creature has subsisted largely on something we’ve come to call a burrow dog.

  I punch a couple of inputs on my tricorder and the image of the river lion vanishes, to be replaced by that of a furry, chocolate-and-tan colored rodent: a burrow dog. The sight of one at fifty paces or less is enough to make a river lion salivate. We know—we have records of it.

  But there’s a problem. The burrow dog population has been declining precipitously, to the point where the species is flirting with extinction. Clearly, that’s not good news for the burrow dogs, but it’s almost as bad for the river lions who depend on them.

  That’s where our friends the tribbles come in.

  The five of us stand on a slick black rock jutting out over the lush valley where we’ve abandoned our tribbles.

  The jungle below us is warm and wet and riotous with color, breathing what smells like butterscotch and peppermint, cinnamon and hot pepper. Monstrous green and orange plants on either side of a deep-cut river move languorously under the influence of the wind. Tiny, scaly flying creatures that bear no resemblance to birds waft across a blue-green sky, their golden bodies glinting nobly in the sun.

  We’ll never know for certain what the tribbles’ original homeworld looked like, but we’ve pieced together a picture. Between drinks from our canteens, we repeat the litany we’ve been reciting for months.

  An oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. A soil rich in igneous precipitates, giving rise to a cornucopeia of dramatic plant forms. Magnificent sunsets leaning toward the red end of the spectrum.

  But as I say, we can only speculate. After all, the Federation only encountered the creatures as recently as 2267. In that year, on Deep Space Station K-7, an interstellar trader named Cyrano Jones is said to have presented a tribble to a comm officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise.

  Jones called it a pet—one that was capable of reproducing at an amazing rate, though only when there was ample food around. lt made sense, of course—why would nature encourage reproduction at a time when the population was short on sustenance?

  The trader wasn’t kidding about the creatures’ rate of reproduction. lt multiplied more quickly than anyone could have imagined, until its offspring nearly overran the Enterprise. The creatures grew even more numerous on Station K-7, somehow finding their way into storage compartments containing a then-valuable grain called quadrotritacale.

  Unfortunately for the tribbles, the grain had been poisoned by a Klingon spy—a circumstance that became evident when the majority of the creatures were found dead, The remaining tribbles on K-7 are believed to have been removed by Jones, while the Enterprise’s tribbles were unceremoniously beamed over to a Klingon vessel.

  It’s not clear to us whether Klingons had run into tribbles before this time or whether they, like the Federation, first encountered them on Station K-7. In any case, the warrior race felt what can only be described as a murderous hatred for the little beasts. Calling them an “ecological menace” of unprecedented proportions, the Klingon High Council dispatched hundreds of warriors in the latter part of the twenty-third century to hunt down and destroy every last tribble in creation.

  Eventually, they succeeded. By the end of the twenty-third century, an armada had obliterated the tribble homeworld—along with the last remnants of the species. There were no more tribbles—a fact celebrated by several popular Klingon drinking songs. In “Hembec’s Sword,” the only one still sung today, the singer says he “waded in pools of the tiny demons’ blood” and “drank the stench of their burning fur like wine.”

  The tribbles’ story would appear to end there—and indeed it might have, had it not been for a classified temporal mission undertaken by a Starfleet team from the twenty-fourth century. While there aren’t any details available (it was classified, as I’ve noted), the team brought some live trib
bles back with them from the past.

  No one seemed to know what to do with them. Fortunately for the tribbles, Odo, the chief of security for space station Deep Space 9, took a liking to them and petitioned to have them introduced into a planetary ecology. With the support of his superior, Captain Benjamin Sisko, Odo eventually got his wish.

  It was only the second time in history that a species’ extinction had a chance to be reversed—the first time being the case of the humpback whales a century earlier.

  When we reach the top of the valley, where the sun’s heat is even stronger, Varitek takes out her communicator and calls the Heyerdahl for a beam out.

  We have line-of-sight access to a confinement beam at this angle, so there’s no interference from the transporter-hostile minerals in the valley’s slopes. Moments later, we find ourselves back on the ship, in the Heyerdahl’s small but efficient transporter room—grateful to whomever developed climate control technology.

  Motter, the gray-haired veteran in our little group, goes back to his quarters to get some shuteye. But the rest of us can’t sleep, even if we have been going for nearly twenty hours straight. Zwilling leads the way to the special surveillance station we’ve set up in the ship’s sensor room and we start monitoring the tribbles’ progress.

  Consulting the green and red graphics on our screens, Caruso says our electromagnetic tags are all functioning—allowing us to tell one specimen from another. Like the tribbles themselves, the tags are self-replicating, so we can keep track of each new generation.

  I chuckle, remembering how difficult it was to figure out which end of the creatures to tag. By the fifty-fifth subject, it was only beginning to get a little easier.

  Contrary to popular belief, tribbles can be distinguished from one another by more than just size and color. Their shapes vary from round to egg-shaped to elongated and there are considerable differences in the development of their brains and other organs.

  On the other hand, they’re indistinguishable by sex, since all tribbles possess both male and female reproductive organs. This makes them one of the few truly hermaphroditic species in the known galaxy.

  We’re still working on divining their societal and family structures, if they even have any. So far, we’ve seen none of the complex social behaviors displayed by other warm-blooded animals, but it could be that we just haven’t figured out what to look for.

  The burrow dogs’ unique society has contributed to their rapid decline. Family groups always travel together, making them easy prey. When trapped by hunters, males will offer themselves as bait. Since they mate for life, if the male does not return, the female will often leave her young to search for her mate. The abandoned pups seldom survive.

  Caruso checks the tags’ other, somewhat grimmer function—a kill feature. Like much of what goes on in nature, it’s cruel but necessary. After all, if the colony’s growth isn’t checked by a natural predator, it’ll upset the ecological balance on this planet and sound the death knell for some previously viable species. That would be neither fair nor desirable.

  And if the experiment fails here? We keep looking. There’s bound to be a place for our tribbles somewhere.

  Varitek wakes me in the middle of the night. “Come quickly,” she says. “Something’s happening.”

  Pulling my clothes on, I follow her to the sensor room and hunch over the surveillance screens with her. I see what’s got her so excited. Our EM tags, visible as red dots on a black field, are clustered differently—the majority of them concentrated in two places.

  Varitek turns to me. “Two river lions with big appetites?”

  For someone who really hated the idea of destroying our tribble colony, Varitek’s awfully happy to see its decimation. But then, so am I.

  “We can only hope,” I tell her.

  Meeting Motter and Caruso in the transporter room, we beam back to the cliffs overlooking the valley. The trek down is a lot easier than the trek up, and not just because gravity’s on our side. We’re all eager to see if our optimism is justified.

  Finally, we reach the black boulder where we left the colony. It still has some survivors on it, but not more than a dozen. On the ground, we find several bloody tufts of fur, though the animals responsible for the damage have slunk off and are nowhere to be seen.

  It seems the river lions have risen to the occasion. They’ve become the population control we hoped they would be. As a result, our tribbles have taken a big step toward becoming part of the ecological balance.

  Varitek hugs me. Caruso does a little victory dance. Motter just smiles at us, having seen it all before.

  I call up to the Heyerdahl, advising the crew of what’s happened. “It looks like we’ve found our friends a home,” I tell them, not bothering to conceal the satisfaction in my voice.

  Having nearly exhausted their natural prey, the river lions of Epsilon XVII were themselves faced with extinction. It was determined that they were a satisfactory biological match for tribbles, whose proliferation could be kept in check by the river lions without truly threatening the survival of the tribble species.

  EARTH

  AT TIMES OF PERIL

  The everyday business of Starfleet carries on. It is not uncommon to visit an office and find that there are crumbling walls, and windows still missing. With the atmospheric controls offline, a storm front will bring rain, and water runs into many of the facilities. But everyone carries on as if there is nothing out of the ordinary.

  Charlie Katcavage has been operating a coffee cart beside the Starfleet campus for thirty-two years. The lines in his weathered face grow a little deeper as he tells his story.

  “It was like any other morning,” he says. “Everybody was going about their business. Nobody expected a thing. Then this big, orange beam sliced down through the clouds and skewered the bridge.”

  The wind off the bay ruffles Charlie’s wavy, red hair. “Before I knew it,” he goes on, “the middle of the bridge was on fire. Then it slopped into the water and the rest of the bridge half-caved in after it.”

  Shading my eyes, I gaze in the same direction as Charlie and see what’s left of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rooted in the dark blue expanse of the bay, its rust-colored remains look like the well-picked skeleton of some immense, prehistoric beast.

  “I had a better view of it than anyone,” Charlie says, “considering how close I am to it here.” He jerks a thumb at the Starfleet Headquarters building. “I was pouring a raktajino for Admiral Quinn, but I stopped when I saw the beam. And the admiral … he disappeared as soon as the bridge began to melt. I guess he had an idea of what was happening.”

  Charlie frowns and knuckles the inside corner of one bright blue eye. “He was a good guy, Admiral Quinn,” he says, emotion thickening his voice. “I miss him a lot.”

  I glance at the campus and see the blackened ruin of Starfleet’s once-proud administration building. Admiral Quinn had gone back inside it, perhaps to make sure his staff got out. But before he could save them, a Breen disruptor beam tore through the building and the ground beneath it.

  It took the better part of a day to put out the smoky, black fire. It’s said that there were forty-two dead, though no one’s sure of that yet. After all, they couldn’t recover any of the bodies.

  “You know,” Charlie sighs, “it was kind of hard to figure out at first. Then I saw all the other beams, walking across the city in big, swaggering strides like they owned the place … and it hit me what was going on.”

  Impossible as it seemed to Charlie and a million other residents, the city of San Francisco was under attack.

  Of course, no one knew who it was—no one on the street, anyway. But in the Starfleet Defense building, one of the few left standing, they figured it out in no time. They determined that it was a wing of Breen fighters, put a bunch of starships on the invaders’ tails, and blew the coldhearted beggars right out of space.

  The whole attack lasted nine, maybe ten minutes—about the time it takes one o
f Charlie’s hot lattes to cool down so you can drink it. Nine or ten minutes, but it created hundreds of casualties, both Starfleet and civilian—flesh-and-blood San Franciscans with families and friends and contributions to make, who never had the slightest idea what was happening to them.

  “Commander Illidge,” says Charlie. “He died too. And Captain Fong. And a couple of Bolian lieutenants whose names I never learned.” He bites his lip. “I wish now that I’d learned them.”

  I don’t know any of the people Charlie’s talking about, but I get a lump in my throat anyway. After all, these were Starfleet officers. They braved the dangers of space to push out the boundaries of what we know. They risked their lives to beat back the nightmare of the Borg.

  They deserved better.

  San Francisco has always been a place where dreams go to live and die.

  Until 1769, our famous fog banks kept Spanish ships’ captains from noticing the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Then a fellow named Gaspar de Portolá got lost trying to make an overland trip to Monterey and stumbled on what looked like a big inland lake.

  De Portolá was excited by the location’s potential. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one. The Spaniards established a mission church there and built a fort called the Presidio to protect it.

  However, San Francisco remained little more than a trading post until 1848, when men discovered gold in the rivers of northern California. Then money-hungry, creek-sifting prospectors showed up in droves, more and more of them all the time. Between 1849 and 1869, the town’s population climbed from less than a thousand to a whopping 150,000, prompting the creation of a great transcontinental railroad.