“It can ‘hear’ us, but it cannot see our diagnostic equipment or know the results of any tests Doctor Phlox has run. Nor can it examine the tissue samples.”
“But it’s huge,” Archer said, still staring at the viewscreen. “Look at it. How many hundreds of kilometers across is it?”
T’Pol paused, then replied, “It says that it can condense itself to humanoid size in order to facilitate working with us. It is not easy for it to accomplish this—it will take it some time in order to do so. But once in condensed form, it can remain thus indefinitely.”
The captain hesitated. He had no reason to deny letting this creature aboard his vessel, especially if it had already been exposed to the illness and was immune, as it claimed. Yet breaking quarantine left him enormously uncomfortable.
At the same time, he realized that they were being offered an incredible opportunity, not just [69] in terms of communicating with a radically different species with a great deal of spacefaring knowledge, but also in terms of learning more about the Oani’s medical disaster.
And that’s what Enterprise was here for.
“Very well,” he said finally. “Tell it to come aboard.”
Four
ARCHER HAD SCARCELY uttered the words when the shimmering vision on the viewscreen disappeared, leaving in its place the blue-green island world, Oan, against the backdrop of space, and the glow from the more distant sun the humans had labeled Kappa Xi.
Yet by the time the captain blinked and opened his eyes once more, the roiling blue-green energy field appeared once more—this time, in a condensed, more vibrantly colored column, roughly the size and width of a human male, just in front of Travis Mayweather’s helm console.
Mayweather, born in space and as blasé about new experiences as anyone Archer had ever met, craned his neck forward to gawk openly at the creature, and when he glanced over his shoulder [71] to gauge the reaction of the others, his dark skin bathed in the alien’s glow, his eyes were as round as Archer’s.
“You ever heard of anything like this?” Archer asked him softly.
“No, sir,” Mayweather breathed, then turned back to stare at the creature.
As for Reed, he took a step forward from his station, his eyes also widened by curiosity, but in his expression was distrust; instinctively, his right hand moved for the phase pistol he no longer wore.
The captain gathered himself and stepped toward the semitransparent, pulsating sea of energy. He wanted nothing more than to ask, How did you do that?, but the considerations of diplomacy came before any improvements to the transporter. “Welcome aboard. I’m Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise.” Extending a hand was out of the question; the creature was the general size of a human, but other than that, was entirely without form. There was definitely nothing there to grab hold of.
T’Pol moved forward from her station to stand beside the captain. “It has no name for itself, but it thinks of itself as a wanderer, and asks that we address it as such.”
“Very well ... Wanderer. I’d like to escort you down to sickbay so that you can confer with Doctor Phlox, our chief medical officer. Will you accompany me?”
[72] T’Pol made the slightest sound, which Archer interpreted as an extremely courteous clearing of her throat. “Captain ... Wanderer requests that I be present at all times to serve as translator.”
“Oh ... yes. Of course.”
“And,” the Vulcan added, “it says it is ‘anxious’ to meet with Doctor Phlox, as it has important information to share with him.”
Archer brightened at once; while the creature wore no expression, it suddenly appeared to him as wise and beneficent. Its blue-green glow seemed as warm and radiant as a smile. “Then let’s get moving.”
“Wonderful,” Doctor Phlox said, his face bathed in Wanderer’s azure glow as he stood in front of the sealed, decontaminated corpse of an Oani. The Denobulan’s eyes were bright with excitement, his tone even more animated than normal at the sight of such an unusual being. To T’Pol, he said, “Ask it—may I touch it? Study it?”
“Wanderer has already agreed to a cultural exchange,” the Vulcan replied.
“Doctor,” Archer interjected, “there’s a more serious issue to deal with first. Wanderer says it can help you find out what killed the Oanis.” The captain himself had hundreds of questions for the alien: Where had it come from? Were there others like it? It referred to itself using a neuter pronoun—how did it reproduce? Yet, staring at the [73] bronze-colored body on the bed behind Phlox, Archer felt an anxious sense of urgency.
“Indeed,” T’Pol agreed, most seriously. And then, with that wry, infinitesimal quirk at one corner of her mouth that betrayed a startling sense of humor, she added, “Besides, Wanderer warns against your touching it. It believes that its energy patterns might cause you to feel something akin to an electrical shock.”
Phlox did not actually release a disappointed sigh, but Archer got the clear impression that he repressed one. “Very well,” the Denobulan said. “Let us get started, then.”
Archer lingered for only a moment—long enough to watch as Phlox gestured the swirling energy column behind him, toward the dead Oani, long enough to stare with amazement as the creature compacted itself even further, and began, slowly, to seep inside the Oani’s body, lighting it up from within with an iridescent bluish glow.
He forced himself to leave. All he could do now was return to the bridge, and wait, and hope.
Meanwhile, Hoshi crouched over the hooded viewer in one of the labs near sickbay. She’d been staring at the images for some time, and finally straightened to rub the spot between her eyebrows, to fight the eyestrain headache that was just beginning.
The incident with T’Pol still worried her; she’d [74] been too busy to check on the Vulcan’s status—and each time she thought of calling to sickbay to see how T’Pol was doing, she instead redoubled her efforts at translating. If T’Pol was sick, then Hoshi needed to work faster; and even if T’Pol wasn’t sick, she, Hoshi, needed to work fast anyway, because who knew when the illness might strike one of them?
The thought made her stop rubbing her forehead and lean over the viewer again, feeling its glow illumine her face.
At least she had made enough progress so that she no longer needed to stop each few words and translate. Now she was listening to Uroqa’s medical logs, compelled by the image of the bronze-skinned Oani, his dark eyes naturally liquid and shining, more so than human eyes ever could. He was thick-necked, broad-shouldered, muscular, brimming with strength and life; but his voice, a resonant baritone, was tentative, filled with concern.
“It is not in the air, not in the earth, not in the sea,” he said. “Therefore, it must be in us. Is it a microbe, too small to be detected by our present filters?” he asked thoughtfully, with such a natural, conversational air that Hoshi felt he was speaking directly to her. “And if it is a microbe, who am I to say I have the right to end its life artificially? Who am I to claim the life of another piece of creation, no matter how small? Who am I to interfere with the natural order of things?”
[75] “But your people are dying,” Hoshi said in English to the small screen. “Do you have the right to let such a lower life-form kill them?”
“Reverence for life dictates that we must not kill,” Uroqa continued, almost as if in reply. “Yet how can I let my people die? All beings must compromise to live in peace—but how do we compromise with a being whose existence depends on our death? When does our right to live supersede another’s?”
Uroqa rose and stepped across the room to a place Hoshi instantly recognized: the shimmering sea green nutrient bed where the dying Oani woman rested—the one Dr. Phlox hadn’t been able to revive.
“I must save her,” Uroqa said simply, and gently took her limp hand in his own.
Hoshi snapped off the viewer, fighting off emotion. Periodically, she had translated and condensed the medical logs into purely pertinent data for Phlox’s computer, omit
ting the unnecessary personal information—including the sad story of Uroqa and his stricken mate, Kano. Now seemed like a good time to take a physical as well as mental break and walk her latest findings over to sickbay.
She sighed, popped her disk out of the computer, and headed down the corridor. As a scientist, she told herself, she needed to develop a tougher hide: watching Uroqa’s logs with full [76] knowledge of his fate was taking too much of an emotional toll on her, and she needed to remain detached if she was to be of use. It didn’t help matters that Uroqa was so personable, or that his relationship with his mate was so tender: Hoshi was beginning to look on him as a friend, and that, she knew, was dangerous.
He had a good life, an ethical life, she reminded herself. He knew real love, and he was devoted to peace.
But she couldn’t help being sad. The universe was diminished by the loss of a race of such compassionate beings; it would have been wonderful to have met them when they were still alive.
Yet what, she asked herself silently, could have filled a peaceful person like Uroqa with such fury in his final moments?
By that time, Hoshi found herself in sickbay with no memory of having made the walk there; and what she saw, when she walked through Phlox’s office back into the treatment area, made her stop in her tracks.
As T’Pol and the doctor stood at either side of the diagnostic bed, watching, something moved through Kona’s corpse, as if it had burrowed inside. Hoshi stared, aghast, as Kano’s spine began to undulate, and a strange blue-green glow radiated from within her, through the pale gauze of her long, loose tunic at the waist. The blue-green [77] pulse moved upward, through her neck, causing her throat to constrict, her lipless mouth to open and emit the same strange light. At last, her entire, once-passive face began to glow as well, and to Hoshi’s horror, her dark eyes popped open, agleam with shimmering turquoise.
“No!” Hoshi cried, in spite of herself, then firmly bit her lip. Whatever was happening here was sacrilege; Uroqa would have been outraged. Yet Phlox watched the procedure with hopeful fascination, and T’Pol with serene detachment.
T’Pol turned to see her at once, and immediately went to her side.
“What is it?” Hoshi asked, lowering her voice. Her outburst left her somewhat embarrassed; obviously the doctor and T’Pol would only do something that would help discover what had killed the Oani. Yet, after seeing how Uroqa had cared for Kano, Hoshi could not help feeling protective about her, even if a body was all that was left.
T’Pol’s cool demeanor never flickered. “This is Wanderer,” she said, gesturing toward the body. “The energy field that contacted me. Apparently, it has abilities that can discover the cause of the Oani’s extinction. It has merged with the corpse in a diagnostic procedure. I am here in order to translate for the entity.”
“Oh. Good. Well, I’m glad that you’re all right,” Hoshi said awkwardly. She had no desire to move [78] any closer to the strange creature inside Kano’s body, so she handed the Vulcan the disk. “Here. Would you give this to Doctor Phlox? It’s the latest compilation I made of the Oani medical logs.”
T’Pol tilted her head somewhat quizzically, as though she were going to question why Hoshi didn’t give it to the doctor herself—but the human woman didn’t give her the chance to ask. She turned swiftly and headed out of sickbay without another look back.
Perhaps she should have been fascinated: after all, here was an amazing creature, unlike anything the humans had ever seen—but Hoshi wanted nothing to do with it. There was something irreverent, even callous about the way it had moved inside Kano’s body ... something that left Hoshi filled with a curious foreboding that she could not explain.
On the bridge, Archer finally got the call he’d been waiting for.
“Captain ... Phlox here in sickbay.”
“Report, Doctor.” Archer was literally sitting on the edge of his seat; it had been a perfectly quiet shift, and there’d been nothing to distract himself with, other than his own thoughts and the sight of the blue-green world on the viewscreen.
“Wanderer has explained to me what killed the Oanis.”
“Wonderful!”
[79] Phlox sounded doubtful. “I wouldn’t necessarily describe it in those terms, Captain.”
“Explain.”
“Apparently, solar winds caused a shift in their stratosphere, which permitted a rare form of harmful radiation which had always been present to kill them.”
“What type of radiation?”
“Wanderer isn’t being specific in this regard, Captain. It has no name for the radiation, though it’s extremely good at sensing different types. It has no name because we have no name for it—we haven’t discovered it yet, nor have the Vulcans, so it doesn’t know how to explain it to T’Pol. As Wanderer said, it’s extremely rare. And ...” Phlox paused ominously.
“Say it, Doctor,” Archer demanded, even though he knew he did not want to hear the answer.
“And it’s fatal to humans, Vulcans, Denobulans ... most humanoids, in fact, if exposure is sustained.”
Archer let go a silent breath, as though he’d been firmly struck below the breastbone. He had insisted on keeping the ship in orbit around Oan, for fear of spreading a disease. “How much exposure?”
Phlox did not answer for a beat, and Archer demanded with anger—anger directed entirely at himself—“How much exposure, Doctor?”
“I just had T’Pol ask Wanderer. Apparently, [80] Wanderer doesn’t know. This is its first encounter with humans.”
“Well, ask Wanderer what it can do to help us avoid this type of radiation sickness.”
Another pause, then Phlox responded, “Wanderer says it can do nothing. If any of us are going to be ill, we’ll probably start showing signs soon.”
“Nothing? Come on, Doctor. This entity is some sort of radiation specialist—and even us humans have learned how to deal with other types of radiation sickness. Surely it has some advice on this rare type.”
“I’m afraid not, Captain. It says that it understands radiation perfectly well, but doesn’t understand why humanoid bodies react as they do to it. It’s coming from an entirely different perspective. ...”
“Well, it’s going to have to learn some new perspectives,” Archer said, “if it wants that ‘cultural exchange.’ Archer out.” He punched the control on his companel, then stared forward at the viewscreen, where the blue-green island world rotated lazily on its axis. “Ensign Mayweather. Plot a course out of here.”
The ensign’s young features reflected the concern on the captain’s own. “Direction, sir?”
“Surprise me,” Archer said flatly, then pounded the underside of his fist on the companel again. “Commander Tucker.”
“Yes, sir.” Trip’s voice filtered up from [81] engineering. Normally, he would have responded far more casually, or put a humorous emphasis on the sir, but he clearly sensed from Archer’s tone that this was all business.
“I need warp four, Trip. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as possible.”
Trip didn’t even pause. “You’ve got it coming, Captain. I’ll signal you back when she’s ready.”
Archer flipped a different toggle for ship-wide communication. “All hands ... prepare for warp speed.” He paused, then said reluctantly, “We are leaving this area of space because we were apparently exposed to a rare form of radiation. Once we know more about it, Doctor Phlox will inform you as to what steps to take. Archer out.”
He braced himself, feeling the deck beneath his feet vibrate as the warp engines powered up. And as the planet Oan disappeared from the viewscreen, replaced by streaming stars, Archer got the unpleasant premonition that the Enterprise crew was fleeing something that already held them firmly in its grasp.
The lighting aboard Enterprise was muted in deference to Earth’s night—as it was in sickbay, where T’Pol watched as a weary-looking Phlox spoke into the companel. Wanderer hovered between them, its radiant field not quite grazing the deck.
[82] “Now that we’ve established some distance between ourselves and the planet,” Phlox said into the bulkhead companel, “I’ll be retiring to my quarters if you have no further need of me. I must admit that I’m feeling surprisingly tired. I suspect that the interruption of my annual hibernation cycle must have affected me more than I realize.”
Archer’s voice filtered back through. “Of course, Doctor. You’ve earned your rest.”
Indeed, T’Pol thought. Phlox had just finished two consecutive shifts of duty, something that was difficult for most humans. Apparently, it was difficult for Phlox as well; shadows had appeared beneath the doctor’s deep-set eyes, and his facial skin appeared a shade paler than normal.
“Ensign Cutler has promised to notify me if anything out of the ordinary—” Phlox began, but Archer interrupted him.
“You’ve done all you can do. You know we’ll call you if we need you. Now, go to bed, Doctor.”
“With pleasure, Captain.” The Denobulan turned his broad, stocky body toward T’Pol and Wanderer, and gave a small nod to both of them—a very human gesture, the Vulcan noted. It had taken her years to master the finer subtleties of Terran nonverbal communication, but Phlox was already a master of it. “Good night, Sub-Commander ... Wanderer.”
“Good night, Doctor,” T’Pol said, following the prescribed protocol. Phlox, too, was prey to [83] emotion, just as humans were, though he possessed a Vulcan-keen penchant for observation and investigation. T’Pol heard the heaviness in his tone—one that matched the captain’s. She postulated that the cause for their ill-hidden despair was their fear that the crew had in fact been fatally exposed to the rare radiation.
T’Pol could not understand such dread. Some emotions were vaguely understandable, but worry always left her perplexed. Either they were all going to die or they were not, and since there was nothing any of them could do about it, it seemed quite foolish to expend emotional and mental energy thinking about it. If time were limited, would it not be best to spend that time doing more constructive things? Yet, as she watched Phlox exit sickbay, she noted that even his shoulders sagged more than normal: his emotional reaction of concern affected even his posture.
Star Trek: Enterprise - Surak's Soul Page 6