Kuu’iut let out a whistle at the unusual order, but complied as he did so. A few dull orange beams lanced out at the attacking ships, with no apparent effect. “No good,” Kuu’iut reported. “Either their armor is too strong or it’s because they’re already dead.”
But Lavena had just about managed to wriggle free of the herding group. She flew after the rest of the pack, struggling to get the ship back between the hunters and their fleeing quarry. But despite her best efforts, Titan was still only one ship. And the Pa’haquel gunners were swiftly learning to compensate for the magneton deflection. A number of energy bolts got through, and jellies began to be struck. Troi and Tuvok gasped with the pain of every blow. When Tuvok screamed and Deanna sobbed in agony, it was clear that another jelly had taken a mortal hit.
“Deanna?” Riker asked.
She held her hands to her head. “Too much…overpowering, the grief…how could we let this happen?” Something in her tone, her face, made Vale realize that she was interpreting the jellies’ thoughts. “We told them we could help…yet we brought them here…betrayal!”
“Tell them we did mean to help, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Help…how? Tell us!”
“There is a way,” said Tuvok, and he lunged toward the science station, shoving Jaza aside.
Vale realized what was happening. “Jaza, stop him! If he gets that warp-signature data—”
But Jaza was already on him, trying to pull him from the console. With a surge of Vulcan strength, Tuvok threw him off, knocking him into the approaching Keru so that both men fell into a tangle of limbs and Keru’s half-drawn phaser went clattering across the deck. Vale dove for it…but just then a honey-brown blur whipped through the air, took Tuvok in the chest, and knocked him to the deck. After a moment, Vale realized it had been Dr. Ree’s tail. The therapodian leapt over the console to straddle Tuvok and injected him with a hypospray. “Apologies, Commander,” he said. “But I broke nothing I can’t easily fix.”
Once the commotion died down, Lavena turned to the captain. “The jellies have gone to warp, sir. The hunters have broken off their attacks on us.”
“Good. Dr. Ree, get Tuvok to sickbay, and get him back on that suppressant as soon as you safely can.” But Riker said this while facing the screen, on which the slowly spinning corpse of the Pa’haquel’s kill was displayed. The hunters’ ships were already moving in on it, deploying their tentacles. “No,” Riker said. “Not this time.” He strode forward. “Lavena, take us in. Tactical, I want a tractor beam on that star-jelly. Once it’s locked, fire wide-beam phasers at the Pa’haquel ships to blind their sensors, then helm, engage at warp eight, course at your discretion.”
Vale glared at him, but said nothing as the crew carried out his orders. The ship shook a bit as it strained to drag the jelly’s huge mass forward, and again as the warp field tried to compensate for its presence. “Any sign of pursuit?” Riker asked after a moment.
“No, sir,” Kuu’iut said. “They must need time to build energy for warp, like the jellies. They are hailing, though.”
“Ignore them. Let our actions speak for us.” He exchanged a look with Troi; her expression was one of deep gratitude. But there were no more jellies nearby for her to channel.
Vale stepped between them. “Captain, may I speak to you in your ready room, please?” she asked stiffly.
He studied her for a moment. “Very well. Commander Troi, you have the bridge.”
“Uhh, Captain?” Lavena asked. “How long do we continue towing…that?”
Riker gave it a moment’s thought. “Give it twenty minutes, and if there’s still no sign of pursuit, drop to impulse.”
“Aye, sir.”
“I think taking the star-jelly away was unwise, Will,” Vale said without preamble once they were alone. “The Pa’haquel are sure to see it as a gratuitous, hostile act.”
All right, I can’t fault her for candor, Riker thought, although he wasn’t in the mood to accept her argument. “I couldn’t just stand by and let them desecrate another corpse,” he told her emphatically.
“As they see it, you’ve probably committed a desecration. Made its sacrifice meaningless.”
“The Aztecs thought they had to cut out human hearts to make the sun rise every morning,” Riker said. “Some sacrifices are meaningless to begin with.”
“It’s not our place to decide that—”
“Not our place? Christine, it’s our fault that star-jelly got killed! We invited it here.”
“Like you said, Will, intervention carries risks. You made the choice to intervene, this is one of the consequences. But how far are you willing to escalate that intervention? And when did we decide to take the star-jellies’ side in this?”
“I haven’t taken sides. If I had, I’d have let Tuvok give them that sensor data. But I had to do something to show that we hadn’t sided against the jellies either. Think of this as a show of good faith.”
“Was that what you had in mind when you gave the order, or did you only just come up with it now? Sir?” That last was spoken more softly, a concession that she’d gone a bit too far. But it was unnecessary; Riker had to concede that she was right about that. She saw as much in his face, and went on. “You were acting on impulse, Will. On emotion. Frankly, I don’t think you’re being objective about this. It’s obvious that Deanna has formed a strong bond with these creatures. What hurts them hurts her, and you can’t bear to see her hurt.”
He looked at her sharply. “When I offered you this job, I gave you my word that I would never let my personal feelings for Deanna affect my command judgment.”
“And you offered me the job because you knew I wouldn’t hesitate to call you on it if you ever did. Because you knew you needed me to help you keep that promise. Well, here I am.”
Riker met her gaze for a long moment. “You’re right. And I appreciate it. I do need you as a check on my conscience, Christine. But you’re off-base about this. Yes, this is personal to me, but it’s not about Deanna. Not mainly, anyway.”
“Then what?”
He began to pace, gathering his thoughts. “You know as well as I do that the Federation’s been through some dark times lately. Our principles, our ideals, they’ve taken a beating in the name of survival. The Ba’ku incident…the attempted genocide of the Founders…”
Vale nodded. “And Tezwa.”
“And Tezwa,” he confirmed with a heavy sigh. For a split second he was back in that dank, stinking cell beneath the floor, screaming from Kinchawn’s tortures. A part of him would always be there. And it was his own president, a man he’d voted for, who had made Kinchawn happen. “All of us who were there, who know what happened, Christine—we all made the decision that it had to end. That we wouldn’t accept any more compromises. That we had to regain the moral high ground, stand firm on our principles from now on.”
“I’m with you there, of course,” Vale said. “But what’s that got to do with this? How does meddling in a conflict we don’t understand reaffirm our values?”
“There’s more to it than that, Christine.” He turned to the window, gazed at the prismatic streaks of starlight warping past. “All this time we’ve assumed that the corruption rose out of the desperation of the past ten years…the Borg attacks, the Klingon conflict, the Dominion War. That we never would’ve compromised our ethics if we hadn’t been driven to it, if our spirits hadn’t been beaten down by all the horror and destruction.”
“Okay.” She waited for the rest.
“But the first time we encountered a star-jelly…sixteen years ago, back in the Golden Age,” he said with sarcasm, “it was being tortured, exploited. The Bandi starved it and brutalized it into obedience, forced it to transform into a starbase and replicate anything its occupants craved. And they did it for us, Christine. For the Federation.”
“We didn’t know that’s what they were doing.”
He whirled. “And why not? Why didn’t we? When this simple, primit
ive agricultural society, a people with a tiny population and no industry, came to us and told us they could produce a state-of-the-art facility in sixteen months, it was obviously too good to be true. But we shrugged our shoulders and told them ‘sure, go right ahead,’ when we should’ve been demanding to know more about how they proposed to achieve this miraculous feat.”
“Starfleet sent the Enterprise to investigate. They sent you.”
“But not until ‘Farpoint Station’ was already completed! Why did we wait so long?”
“Deneb is a remote world. Not much Starfleet traffic gets out that way. Not until we knew there was going to be a staging facility there for us to use, anyway.”
“That’s just it. It was a dream offer. A whole luxury frontier outpost built to order, prefab and ready to use without us having to lift a finger. A perfect launching point for opening up a whole new region of the Alpha Quadrant to exploration. We weren’t willing to look that closely, didn’t ask the questions we should’ve asked, because we didn’t want to jeopardize that prize. And so we allowed an innocent star-jelly to be tortured and abused for sixteen months, when we could’ve done something to prevent it.
“We were selfish, Christine. We knew something didn’t smell right, but we looked the other way because it suited our interests. And we didn’t even have the excuse of fighting a war! The Cardassian border wars had fizzled out, the Tzenkethi War was over, things were as peaceful as they ever got. Opening up the Cygnus Reach was going to be a bold adventure, a reaffirmation of our grand ideals of peace and learning—a lot like Titan’s mission is meant to be. And we started it out with an act of callous neglect for another being’s suffering.”
Out of breath, he paused to gather himself, then spoke again more quietly. “At times, I’ve wondered why Q chose Farpoint Station as a test case for whether humans had outgrown savagery. Why he chose that place and time to challenge our right to expand further into space, when we’d already been at it for centuries. Maybe he was trying to show us that we weren’t as evolved as we thought. Maybe he put us on trial because of the exploitation of that creature—and judged us on whether we chose to end it or sanction it.”
“If so, we passed the test. We made the right choice.”
“Picard made the right choice. The Federation—I’m not so sure.” He shook his head. “The hell of it is, we never really did that much exploring of the Cygnus Reach anyway. The Enterprise was supposed to be the flagship of this new long-term venture into the unknown…but after the Farpoint incident, with no base that far out, it never really took off. The Bandi tried to rebuild Farpoint, but they just weren’t up to the task. Then Starfleet’s priorities shifted and the Enterprise spent most of its tour closer to home, conducting diplomatic or relief missions. In the end, everything that creature suffered, it was all for nothing. We compromised our principles for nothing, and all in the name of an ideal.
“Well, not this time, Christine. Not again. This is our second chance, and we have to learn the lessons of the first. We let the star-jellies down the last time, and we let ourselves down in the process. It can’t happen again.”
Vale took it in, nodding in acknowledgment. “Okay, Will,” she said, crossing her arms, “so what, then? Do we destroy the Pa’haquel’s whole way of life just to assuage Starfleet’s collective guilt? Or yours?”
He threw her a disbelieving look. “Giving up one custom doesn’t destroy an entire culture. I’m descended from people who built their nation on slavery and genocide, but giving those up didn’t destroy our culture—if anything, it brought it closer to its ideals.”
“Your ancestral culture also had a bad habit of telling other people how to live, saying it was for their own good, and practically wrecking their civilizations in the process. That’s part of why we have a Prime Directive in the first place.”
“So we should slink away and leave the star-jellies to their fate?”
Vale spread her arms. “You want the Pa’haquel to adapt—maybe it’s the jellies who need to adapt. Only their taboo about firing on their own is keeping them from evening the odds.”
“And how much would that change their culture? Christine, the last thing I want is to start another interstellar shooting match!”
“You think I do? I just don’t want to see more of my people get killed in someone else’s crossfire!”
That brought them both to silence. Riker was reminded of how many members of Vale’s Enterprise security staff had died in recent months, on Delta Sigma IV and Tezwa. A pall hung over the ready room for a moment. “Sorry,” Riker said, and Vale’s apology overlapped it. He gave her a small, sheepish smile before starting again. “Look. These are both intelligent species. That means they’re both capable of acting on more than instinct and raw survival. I believe there must be some way they can reach peaceful coexistence. Everything I believe, everything this ship is about tells me that there has to be. If this mission is to mean anything, I say we need to try to help them find that path, rather than abandoning them to bloodshed.”
Vale absorbed his words. “Okay. Granted, your motives are valid.”
“And I’ll grant that maybe my approach has been a little one-sided. Maybe I am commanding too much from the heart in this case…and I’d be a liar if I said that seeing Deanna in so much pain didn’t have at least a little to do with that.” He smiled. “So I’m grateful to have such a cold and logical exec.”
She glared at him, and they shared a chuckle, the tension fading. “Glad I could help. I still think you’re wrong, though.”
“And I think you’re wrong,” he replied in equally amiable tones. “So maybe between us we can hammer out a compromise both species can live with.”
Chapter Seven
Jaza Najem realized it would be inappropriate to regard the violent death of a star-jelly as a stroke of good luck. But with the jelly’s corpse only a few dozen meters away in Titan’s tractor beam, Jaza had his best opportunity yet for a detailed sensor scan of the creature’s anatomy. It would have been better to have a live creature whose biological functions he could observe in action, but having a static subject to scan at leisure allowed him to build up a clearer picture of its anatomy. And since this one was in its translucent-shelled default mode rather than armored up, its innards were much easier to scan. To take full advantage of the opportunity, he’d moved from the bridge to the exobiology lab, where he could consult with its staff.
The jelly’s anatomy, as displayed in the lab’s main holotank, followed a basically toroidal structure, a series of concentric rings. The central core apparently contained the creature’s brain—“comparable in size to Titan’s whole saucer section,” Lieutenant Eviku had said with awe. There were sensory organs at both ends of the axis, close to the brain. The dorsal one took the form of a parabolic dish with a central spike, and also served as the weapon emitter, though it was covered by the translucent shell in the creature’s default mode. The ventral sensory organ was a dome at the center of the larger concavity in which the tentacles could rest. The scans suggested it bore some similarities to a transporter scanner/emitter, as well as a subspace transceiver. “Maybe we should have an engineer here too,” Kent Norellis muttered.
The two rings of red lights, one halfway out, the other along the outer rim, seemed to be analogous to warp reactors. It was hard to tell in a dead creature, but their residual activity and sensor profile revealed a fair amount. They were apparently the jelly’s main sources of metabolic energy, and also served as continuum-distortion generators, producing the gravitic and subspace fields which the creatures used to go to warp and maneuver at impulse. A network of wave guides within the creature, wispy and invisible on this scale like its respiratory and circulatory networks, distributed its internal gravitic fields into a planar shape; essentially anything above or below the equatorial plane would be pulled “down” toward it. The two hemispheres of its body would have opposite gravitational vectors, and any conduits right along the equatorial plane would be i
n free fall—not unlike the “sweet spots” of early starships’ gravity fields. Jaza felt it would be an interesting environment to live in, though Norellis wasn’t so sanguine.
The young human was more concerned with other issues, though. “These have got to be artificial creatures,” Norellis said. “Why else would they have internal gravity?”
“It seems to be a side effect of their propulsion systems,” Jaza said. “A kind of gravitic leakage that’s shaped by the wave guides.”
“But why shape it to be planar like a planet’s gravity?”
Eviku tilted his long, tapering head thoughtfully. “They do have a sessile phase on planetary surfaces,” the Arkenite pointed out. “It stands to reason that their metabolism might require a gravity field aligned that way. It could have evolved naturally.”
Norellis studied the image skeptically. “It sure looks artificial. The way the distortion generators are arranged in regular rings.”
“I’ve seen deep-sea organisms on Arken and Earth with similar arrays of lights.”
Cadet Orilly reared up onto her hind legs for a moment to get a different angle on the holotank display. It wasn’t something Jaza saw her do very often, except to fit into a turbolift. “The generators themselves are clearly organic.”
“True,” Jaza said. “And they don’t function like any warp engines I know about.” How they actually did work was still something of a mystery, as with most of the cosmozoans that possessed FTL or subspace capabilities.
“But how could warp drive evolve naturally?”
Jaza pursed his lips. “Our findings as we approach Vela support the hypothesis that cosmozoans originate in star-formation zones. Those zones can be turbulent in subspace as well as normal space, and that can weaken the boundary between the domains. It’s possible some life-forms could evolve to take advantage of those conditions.” Some cosmozoans seemed to exist partly in subspace to begin with. There were some, like the “vampire cloud” that had destroyed the Farragut in the 2250s and a similar creature battled by the Klingons in the 2310s, which had the ability to change mass and composition, implying that they extended into higher dimensions. For a being that existed partly or mostly in subspace, evolving warp capability didn’t seem quite so implausible. Jaza was still skeptical, but he had to admit his initial certainty was starting to waver.
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