Hours later, in the vastness of the launch bay, T’Pol sat, cross-legged, her spine straight, eyes lightly closed. She was permitting herself to enter the first stages of meditation, though her mind would remain alert to all that was occurring around her.
It was evening again by the Enterprise’s Earth-based chronometers, and all about, the majority of crew members either leaned against the walls, lightly dozing, or curled up directly on the deck. Silence had fallen over the chamber, given that most of the personnel were exhausted. Even Captain Archer, who sat nearby in the company of Commander Tucker and Lieutenant Reed, their backs all supported by the nearest bulkhead, had fallen asleep, his chin dropped against his chest. In his lap, Porthos the beagle lay snoring, occasionally twitching as he dreamed.
T’Pol was aware that she had been spared a difficult decision concerning Wanderer: whether or not to help bring about the creatures demise. As it was, she was uncertain exactly how seriously the creature had been damaged by Commander Tuckers electrical pistol, but she fully expected Wanderer to recover and return.
[203] And once the Vulcan ship arrived, that would not solve the dilemma of how to deal with the creature. No doubt enough electricity could be generated in order to destroy Wanderer—but T’Pol did not consider that a solution, and she doubted the other Vulcans would find it to be one, either.
Interestingly, her mind kept wanting to return to the long-ago incident with Jossen, and the lecture she had attended, listening to the Kolinahr adept Sklar on the question of self-defense and peace. T’Pol did not believe in intuition or the subconscious; Vulcan minds were trained so that all was conscious, and nothing buried; intuition was merely a human concept, for those whose mental machinations were so foggy that they were unaware that their “flashes” were the product of logical deduction.
Or so T’Pol had always thought. Yet an image kept returning to her: a centuries-old vid, restored from Old Earth newsreels, of a small, gaunt bespectacled human wrapped in a simple white cloth. Gandhi-ji, the people had adoringly called him. The elderly, frail man, all bones and dark flesh, had smiled at the crowds, who had thrown flowers and called him Bapu, Father.
She wondered whether the ancient Vulcans, with their passionate hearts and penchant for emotional display, had similarly welcomed Surak.
[204] Somewhere, in the lesson of Gandhi, lay the solution for Wanderer. T’Pol’s instinct knew this, even as her conscious mind rebelled. The notion had gnawed at her from the time of her earliest realization that Wanderer meant the human crew harm.
Were this so, I would be able to logically deduce why I believe this. Thus far, I have been unable to do so. Therefore, this line of thinking is irrational.
Yet the image of Gandhi persisted.
As T’Pol meditated, the doors to the bay hissed open.
She opened her eyes at once. In the entry stood Lieutenant Meir’s reanimated body—possessed of an unnatural posture, the head listing with alarming limpness to one side—and in Meir’s grip was a phase rifle. Meir’s head and body swung about until they faced the captain and Commander Tucker, at which point she raised the phaser rifle and took aim at the electrical pistol, loosely held in the slumbering Tucker’s hand.
T’Pol’s keen vision detected that the rifle was set to kill.
“Commander!” the Vulcan shouted. She threw her body forward—enough to push against Tuckers thigh and startle him awake. Instinctively, he leapt up and raised the pistol in his hand.
Meir fired.
[205] At the same time, Tucker dodged the killing beam as best he could and fired back.
The stream of electricity caught Meir full on, emblazoning her torso with a lightninglike display of dazzling blue-white. She twitched convulsively, dropped her weapon, and fell; like a wraith leaving her body, Wanderer emerged, again spasming as if in agony, then vanished once more.
At the same time, the rifle blast caught Tucker’s hand; he cried out, sank to his knees, then dropped completely. The electrical gun dissolved in a brilliant burst, leaving behind the smell of molten metal.
Several things happened at once.
Captain Archer and Lieutenant Reed woke, and went to the aid of their friend, as did Dr. Phlox. The rest of the crew members woke as well, and the once-silent bay became a cacophony of sound.
“Trip, are you all right? My God, Doctor, hurry. ...”
“Good lord, Commander. ...”
“It’s Meir! She’s dead!”
Commander Tucker’s groans added to the noise level. T’Pol took care to leave Dr. Phlox room to examine his patient, but she was close enough to see his wound in detail: The blast had completely burned away the tops of his three longest fingers to the distal joints. No doubt the [206] electrical jolt he had received from firing the weapon had caused him to drop it immediately afterward—and Wanderer’s aim had been perfect, intended not to kill potential food but simply to destroy the weapon.
Captain Archer’s face, in profile, was deeply lined, a study in concern and suppressed fury as he knelt beside the wounded commander and asked Phlox, “What can you do for him?”
Phlox’s expression, equally concerned, was also doubtful. “He’s in shock. He needs pain medication badly, and antiseptic treatment for those burns. If I could get him to sickbay—or at least get him some medication ...”
In reply, Archer himself went to the bay’s double doors; they opened onto a darkened, airless corridor. He returned to Phlox’s side and said, looking down at the still-groaning Tucker, “We’re trapped. Wanderer’s made sure we’re not going anywhere.”
“Dammit ... all ... to hell ...” the commander swore between gritted teeth. “It killed ... our device. ...”
T’Pol wished, quite uselessly, that she could teach Commander Tucker the pain rules; however, it had taken her years of study to master them herself. She could hardly demonstrate to him how to relieve his own pain in a matter of minutes.
“The shuttlepod,” Phlox said suddenly. “It has [207] an emergency medical kit on board.” He hurried toward the craft.
Archer looked over at Lieutenant Reed, who was kneeling nearby with an expression of nauseated empathy. “Lieutenant. Do you think you could raid the shuttlepod for enough equipment to make another device?”
Reed looked uncertain, but he replied, “I can try, sir.”
“Do it,” Archer said. To Hoshi and T’Pol he said, “And in the meantime, let’s raid it for water and rations. Wanderer’s not the only one with an appetite around here.”
Fortunately, Dr. Phlox was able to find pain medication for Commander Trip, and Ensign Sato took advantage of Wanderers helplessness to once again open all communication channels. A message from a Vulcan vessel, the Satar, had been received stating that they anticipated arriving in eight-point-five hours; Sato replied in a recorded message, explaining Wanderer’s nature and sensitivity to simple electricity.
In the interim, the Enterprise crew ate and drank, then once again fell into silence, waiting.
T’Pol could only postulate Wanderer’s recovery time; however, she suspected that the type of electricity supplied by Commander Tuckers weapon was not the sort needed by the creature to survive. By this time, Wanderer would be hungry—[208] excessively so, if its previous feeding habits were any indication—and as soon as it was able, it would appear again, and pursue its prey aggressively.
She thought of the crowd of deceased Oani people who had been sitting cross-legged in the medical-facility waiting room. Perhaps they, too, had been herded there by Wanderer; perhaps they had awaited their death there patiently, unwilling to use any form of violence against the creature they had first thought their benefactor.
And once again, the image of Gandhi surfaced in her consciousness. Intrigued by its reappearance, T’Pol rose from her seated position and walked to where Lieutenant Reed sat leaning against a bulkhead. He worked with pliers and some pieces of circuitry pulled from the shuttle-pod, but from the scowl on his face, she suspected he was making no pr
ogress on generating an electrical field. She sat back on her haunches beside him, and said, in a voice too low to wake those who slept nearby, “Lieutenant.”
He glanced up at once, started to see that she was so close, then relaxed.
“Sub-Commander,” he said, clearly surprised. “What can I do for you?”
“I hope I am not interrupting you at a critical time.”
Reed let go a disgusted sigh as he gazed at the equipment in his hands. “It’s critical, all right.
[209] The fact is, what I need to make this work is over in engineering. Only I’ll suffocate before I can get there; but if I don’t try, Wanderer will kill us anyway. ...” He looked up again, realized that she was still waiting, then added, “No, no. You’re not interrupting me. Please. What did you need?”
The awkwardness of what she was about to do did not escape T’Pol; there was no other way to describe it except the human term, making small talk. Nor could she deny that what drove her to do so was suspiciously akin to intuition. “Lieutenant,” she repeated. “You come from Great Britain. I assume you have heard of the twentieth-century leader Gandhi.”
“Yes,” Reed replied. “A truly great man.” He paused. “Rather a pacifist, like your Surak. He followed the principle of satyagraha, passive resistance, to overcome injustices. What would you like to know about him?”
T’Pol hesitated. She had not known, until that precise instant, what she had intended to ask, but the words came to her at once. “I know that he used nonviolent protest to shame the British into surrendering control of India. ...”
“Yes.” Reed nodded. “I’m not proud of that part of my people’s history. Thank God, they finally came to understand the injustice of imperialism.”
“I would like to know specifically how the protests convinced the British to leave, even [210] though no violence was used. Why did the protests shame them so?”
Reed’s expression darkened. “In the beginning, the colonials—the Brits—thought all they had to do was fire their weapons into a crowd to disperse them. But the Indians wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t run. Not only that, when one of them fell, another would come to take his or her place. They simply wouldn’t stop coming ... which would have forced the British into clearly immoral acts of gunning down innocent crowds.”
A fresh image surfaced in T’Pol’s mind, this time one of white-robed Indians, marching one by one against British soldiers, too many of them for all to be killed ... and then the image metamorphosed into that of white-robed Oanis, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Only these Oanis were not dead, but alive, their dark, luminous eyes open, and they sat with arms linked together. ...
The solution, T’Pol realized, was simpler even than electricity.
She did not mean to be rude to Lieutenant Reed, but the critical nature of the situation demanded it. There would be time, later, to make apologies. She turned away from him abruptly, without excusing herself, and walked over to where Archer sat, dozing.
“Captain,” she said urgently.
* * *
[211] Weak with hunger, Wanderer appeared again in the far corner of the shuttlebay nearest the airlock doors, by the ceiling, and swept gently downward toward the crowd like a sparkling blue-green tide rolling in to the shore.
There, on the deck, sat the Enterprise crew.
They sat in two large semicircles, cross-legged, pressed thigh-to-thigh, each one clasping the hand of two others; near the center of one half-circle, the wounded Commander Trip lay across the laps of his crewmates.
One of those crewmates was T’Pol; and as Wanderer approached, she called to it.
“You cannot feed on one of us alone. You must take us all together, or not at all.”
In response, the creature neared until its periphery hovered just beyond the reach of the last person seated at the end of the first semicircle—Lieutenant Reed, who had volunteered for one of the end positions. He raised his face, sculpted hollows beneath his cheeks cast in shadow, and gazed up defiantly at Wanderer.
“We’re conscious,” he said. “Just like T’Pol. Just like you. We’re not fodder to be eaten, and neither were the Oanis.”
Wanderer hesitated for an instant—whether it did so because of what Reed said, T’Pol could not judge—and then, slowly, hesitantly, it moved toward the lieutenant.
The edge of the creature closest to Reed flowed [212] forth like an amoeba, engulfing the human’s body. Reed shuddered, eyes snapping shut, jaw clamping, grip tightening on the hand of the crewwoman beside him. His body glowed from within, a phosphorescent blue-green. ...
Eleven
AND THEN the phosphorescence traveled down the row of linked bodies, lightning-swift, fading as it sped across the semicircle until, as it reached the crewman on the other side, it dwindled to nothingness.
T’Pol, in the center of the crescent with Commander Tucker’s head cradled in her lap, saw a flash of blue, felt the slightest surge of static electricity, and a mild dizziness that passed as quickly as it had come.
Abruptly, a transparent wisp of blue-violet ejected itself violently from Reed’s solar plexus; the lieutenant gave a loud gasp, opened his eyes, and looked at the remnants of the creature in surprise.
Archer spoke up with authority, sitting beside [214] T’Pol with Tucker’s torso across his knees; he held T’Pol’s hand firmly in his cool human grip. “We never meant to hurt you,” he told the creature. “You chose to try to hurt us—and T’Pol, whom you had said you would never harm.” He turned to the Vulcan and asked, sotto voce, “Is it replying?”
T’Pol shook her head. “Negative, Captain.” She was not sure that it could; she could not help wondering, however, what the creature was thinking.
In the launch bay, Archer stood in front of the open hatch of the shuttlepod and smiled faintly at Hoshi Sato as she walked toward him across the now empty-feeling chamber.
The Vulcan ship had departed several hours ago, with a special electrical chamber designed to contain the very weakened Wanderer; however, the Vulcan engineers assured the Enterprise captain that they would find a mechanical way to feed the creature. It would not be released until it could be educated and trusted to rely on its new form of nourishment, and not on humanoids.
Archer wondered whether that day would ever come—or whether, in fact, it should ever come. But he had been far too grateful to his Vulcan rescuers to argue the point; he was grateful, too, to have his ship back, and know his crew—and Earth—were safe. Trip Tucker’s burned fingertips [215] were currently being regenerated in sickbay, and Archer was free of his concussion and accompanying headache, thanks to Dr. Phlox.
Most of all, Archer was grateful for the experience of defeating Wanderer. It was more than the fact that the Oanis’ deaths had been avenged, and that the Enterprise crew had been saved. The act of joining with his people against a common foe—and doing so in such a simple, meaningful way—had moved him.
It had not escaped his notice that T’Pol had instigated the linking of hands and touching of bodies together, or that she had later explained her reasoning for doing so as inspired by the passive resistance of an Earth leader, Gandhi. That she so unabashedly established physical contact with humans—an act Archer knew made Vulcans profoundly uncomfortable—and admitted to the fact that she had done so from intuition, and the example of a human, one that she actually admitted to respecting ... Well, Archer thought, wonders never cease.
As for himself, he was beginning to rethink T’Pol’s stance on refusing to carry a weapon. All the phase pistols in the world, as well as jury-rigged devices, had ultimately proved useless against Wanderer. What had worked was the willingness of people to join together. Of course, that didn’t mean Archer himself was willing to turn entirely pacifist; faced with a horde of Klingons, [216] he’d be the first to reach for a pistol. But any anger he had nurtured against T’Pol for not wanting to bear arms had entirely evaporated.
If only the Oanis had known ...
The Shikedans
, at least, now knew the truth, as did the mysterious traveler who had met Wanderer, communicated with it, and been convinced by the energy creature that the Oanis were dying from a microbe. The Vulcans had contacted the Shikedans and made sure that all of them—including the traveler, who, contrary to Wanderers insistence, had returned home to his people—were now aware of the danger the entity actually posed.
Hoshi finally reached Archer and paused at the pod’s entry to show him the plaque she bore in her arms. It was of iridescent white shale, beamed up from the planet Oan, which they once again orbited.
“It’s beautiful,” Archer said. The soft stone had been allowed to remain in its irregular shape, but its surface had been polished, and beneath an alien inscription, the legend in English read:
In memory of the Oani people
Destroyed by the entity known as Wanderer
May their legacy of peace
Live on in the hearts of others
Hoshi smiled a brief, sad smile, then said, “That’s in Oani script at the top.” She paused. [217] “I’ve finished downloading their history into our databases. But I thought it’d be nice to leave a disk containing it at the memorial site as well.”
“You’ve done a wonderful job, Lieutenant,” Archer replied warmly.
As he spoke, Lieutenant Reed and T’Pol entered the launch bay within two seconds of each other—Reed first, who stepped aside and motioned for the Vulcan to pass in front of him. It did not escape his notice, or Archer’s, that the sub-commander wore a phase pistol at her hip.
Archer gestured for Hoshi and Reed to enter the shuttlepod, then stared pointedly at T’Pol’s pistol and gestured with his chin. Softly, he said, “What’s this?” His tone was good-natured, but inquisitive; he had no desire, after all that had happened, to put her in an awkward situation.
She gave him a look of cerebral coolness; at the same time, he fancied he detected the faintest hint of good humor beneath it. “A phase pistol, sir.”
Star Trek: Enterprise - Surak's Soul Page 15