T’Pel saw her unease. “Perhaps I could be the one to meld with him.”
“Thank you, T’Pel, but no. Neither you nor any of the other psi-sensitives in the crew has the necessary training in shielding techniques. And you’re all on the inhibitor drug. It has to be me,” she finished, a bit shakily.
Tuvok studied her quizzically. “You would do this for me?”
“I would.” Of course it was for the mission as well. But diplomatic officer or no, she was still a therapist first.
“That is…most generous of you, Counselor. But are you certain it would be safe? My last meld with a Betazoid…”
Deanna glared. “Was with a homicidal sociopath. I can’t say I’m flattered by the comparison.” She smirked. “Don’t worry, Tuvok. My only unhealthy obsession is chocolate.”
Tuvok quirked a brow. He exchanged a look with his wife, who simply nodded. “In that case, I agree. And I hope Dr. Ree is also a skilled dentist.”
Chapter Twelve
Melora Pazlar stood at the workstation in her quarters, studying astrometric scan data on pre-main-sequence stars in the RCW-33 region. She had been standing there for hours, enjoying the freedom to do so. Here, in her native gravity, standing was as comfortable as any other posture. Gravity was little more than a handy reference vector, a way to ensure that loose objects would eventually settle themselves against a single surface. The deck was just a convenient perch, kissing her feet with only the gentlest pressure to say “Here I am,” ready to serve as a pushing-off surface when needed but otherwise not imposing. In here the deck would never be forced up against her, compressing her spine and her joints, making her stiff, making her ache all over. In here it would never rise up to slam into her with enough force to smash her bones.
In here it could not attack her. And neither could anyone else.
The door chime sounded, and Melora jumped, the small convulsion of startlement enough to launch her slowly upward. She caught herself on a handhold and sighed. “Yes, who is it?”
After a moment a voder-generated voice came over the intercom. “It’s K’chak’!’op, Lieutenant. I was wondering if I could come in for a moment.”
“Uhh, I’m kind of busy right now. What’s it about?”
“Well, I brought over those new cosmozoan-tracking subroutines I was working on for stellar cartography. I thought you might want to take a look at them before our new guests come aboard. I know you’re still on light duty, but I’m sure you must be bored with it by now.”
Indeed, she was bored out of her skull, but she hesitated. “Couldn’t you have just uploaded those to me?”
“Well…yes…but the truth is, I wanted to see how you were doing. I…well, I feel terrible that I wasn’t able to do more to prevent your injuries, and—”
“All right! All right, just—just a moment.” She pushed off the wall and drifted in a low arc toward the door, catching herself on the modified antigrav sled that rested there, and throwing a resentful glare at it as she did. Dr. Ree had mended her bones as best he could, but he had told her that the regeneration process could only be accelerated so much. An osteostimulator took only minutes to restore a broken bone to sufficient strength to function in the gravity it had evolved for, but getting it strong enough to function in substantially higher gravity took substantially more time. A week after the attack, she was still undergoing daily stimulator treatments along with low-g physical therapy in sickbay, and was under medical orders to stay off her feet in ship-normal gravity for at least another few days. Taking a cue from Enterprise’s mission to Dokaalan last year, Dr. Ree had had an antigrav cargo sled modified for her as a makeshift hoverchair. She hated the thing. She had always hated having to be seen dependent on a chair, unable to move under her own power. She couldn’t stand to appear helpless. She had thought that over the past dozen years or so she had reached the point where that didn’t bother her so much anymore. But that was before she really had been rendered helpless. Before she had been smashed to the deck, flopping uselessly like a dying fish, unable to prevent Tuvok from wrenching control of her mind and body away from her and forcing her to give up secrets she was sworn to protect.
She didn’t hate Tuvok for what he had done. She couldn’t blame him, any more than she could blame sensitive little Orilly for helping him. But she hated herself for the shudder of panic that went through her every time she was reminded of the assault, of the violation—of her true and inescapable helplessness.
Taking deep breaths, Melora gathered herself, and hit the door panel. Despite herself, she couldn’t help pulling back a bit at the sight of the massive Pak’shree looming in her doorframe, tentacles writhing, mouthparts gnashing. “Ahh, there you are! Mind if I—whoa!” K’chak’!’op made a move to come in, but reared back as her forward segments crossed the threshold into the centigravity field.
Melora realized she’d retreated behind the antigrav sled, and cursed herself for it. Nonetheless, she said, “Maybe it’d be better if we talked like this.”
“Oh, yes. I’d be helpless in there. I wouldn’t want to smash into you by accident.”
“Uhh, look, you said you had those subroutines for me?” A fringe effect from the corridor’s gravity was pulling her gently toward the door, she realized. She caught herself on the sled, again resenting the need to depend on it.
“Ahh, yes.” A tentacle reached back and retrieved a padd from the utility pouch she wore attached to the back of her carapace. An exoskeletal being, she wore no clothes, instead having her forward body segment painted in sciences blue. “But I also wanted to make sure you were feeling all right, and ask if there was anything I could do for you. I’ve been meaning to see you ever since the accident, but you’re so hard to find. When you’re not in sickbay you’re always cooped up here in your quarters.”
“Is that so bad?” Melora challenged. “It seems to work pretty well for you.”
“Well, I thought so before, but it does get rather lonely. Just me and my fears.”
Melora stared. “Fears? You mean like claustrophobia?” When K’chak’!’ op had finally emerged from her seclusion a couple of weeks ago, she had explained to Melora how cramped the ship made her feel.
“Well, that was part of it, but it wasn’t my real fear. Mainly I was afraid of hurting someone. You little endoskeletals, you’re just so fragile.”
Melora snatched the padd from her tentacles. “I’m not fragile!”
“Oh, no more fragile than any other endoskeletal. It’s all relative of course. Why, if Vale or Troi or, Goddesses forbid, dear Captain Riker or Mr. Tuvok were to fall down in my planet’s gravity, they’d shatter too. It’s simply a matter of physics.”
“Okay, I get what you’re trying to do, Chaka. But I’m not afraid. I’m just giving myself—giving my body time to heal in its natural environment.”
“Nonsense. You’re trying to cut yourself off from other people again, deal with your problems in seclusion, just like you always do.”
Melora gaped. “What brought that on? What happened to Miss Nice and Considerate?”
“I don’t mother grown females, Melora. You’re strong enough to take the truth. Or you should be. Maybe it will take a little time for you to rebuild that strength, but I know you have it in you. So I intend to help you build it up again. Why don’t we start by going to the mess hall for a bite to eat?”
Melora threw a look at the sled. “I’d really rather not.”
“Why? Because you don’t like being dependent on a machine? Look at me. Listen to me. We couldn’t even communicate without this machine I’m wearing. And we couldn’t breathe without the machine we’re standing in. Or floating in, as the case may be.”
Melora realized that the big crustacean wasn’t going to let her off the hook. But she admitted to herself that Chaka had a point. “All right. Let’s go to the mess, talk over these subroutines.” She began clambering into the sled. “But why are you taking such an interest in me, anyway?”
“Oh�
��just passing a favor forward.”
“So—how are our guests settling in?”
Christine Vale chewed on a forkful of eggs while she formulated her response to the captain’s question. Riker had invited her to breakfast (which he cooked himself), since Troi had an early appointment with the Pa’haquel delegation. The group consisted of a few dozen clan and crew members, mostly from Qui’hibra’s fleet-clan, which would serve as a skeleton crew for the attempt to coexist with a star-jelly, if an agreement was reached. (A live star-jelly, that is; she found herself and others starting to fall into the habit of using “star-jelly” for the live beasts and “skymount” for the reanimated dead ones.) This morning, Qui’hibra had summoned Troi to discuss—or rather, argue about—the fine details of the negotiations they were preparing to attempt with the jellies. Riker hadn’t been happy about the scheduling, but the Pa’haquel were impatient, and he and Troi both wished to avoid alienating them when their relationship was tenuous enough already.
“It’s a mixed bag,” she finally said. “The Vomnin envoys are friendly enough; I think they’re mainly curious about our technology. A lot of theirs is just as good, but they seem eager to learn for its own sake.”
“Good.”
“And the Rianconi, well, they’re just eager to please. Enough said there.” Certainly the scantily clad humanoids had drawn considerable attention from the crew when they had come aboard, and had done nothing to discourage it. One of the males, observing that Vale seemed tense, had even offered to provide for her needs on an overnight basis. She had politely declined. Not that she had any great problem letting a man wait on her hand and foot (and in between), if he freely chose such service and saw dignity in it; she’d done as much on Risa and Argelius in her day. But when she did so, she preferred the man to be less dainty and fragile than these Rianconi were, so that she didn’t feel she was taking advantage. Well, and for other, more shallow reasons. Besides, a lot of her tension involved her uncertainty about Jaza, and taking another male to bed when she would rather be with him hadn’t struck her as the best way to relieve it.
“But the Pa’haquel…well, they don’t like us, they don’t trust us, and they insist on acting like they own the place. A lot of the crew aren’t happy with the way they think they can boss us around.”
“Neither am I,” Riker said. “But let’s face it—we’re the visitors, they’re the home team. They’re the ones who understand this part of space—and if it comes to that, they’re the ones who can call for backup and blow us out of the sky. We’re a long way from the Sixth Fleet.” He nursed his coffee. “Maybe it’ll do the crew some good to be reminded of that. Out here maybe it’s best if we learn a little humility.”
“Maybe. But on the other hand…”
“On the other hand?” Riker prompted when she opted to have a slice of melon instead of finishing her sentence.
When she was ready, she went on. “I’m just not so sure about what we’re doing. I know I was the one saying we shouldn’t interfere in their way of life, and I’d defend to the death their right to, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m not crazy about actively helping them perpetuate it either. To tell you the truth, Will, I hate hunting. Back on Izar, you know, there’s a sizeable sect of traditionalists, descendants of the early colonists who had to live off the land. And they think it’s this grand, noble tradition to carry on the ways of the first settlers. Which they think means hunting for sport and having the unrestricted license to own archaic, lethal weapons—plasma rifles, projectile weapons, crossbows, anything without a stun setting. Never mind that they live in cushy houses with replicators and tended lawns and don’t need to hunt for their food or defend themselves against predators in the bush. It’s all about ‘tradition’ and ‘pride’ to them. But to me, as a cop, as the daughter of a cop, it was more about having to call in the coroner when somebody wasn’t careful enough with the damn things and blew their kids’ heads off. Or when somebody lost their temper or got scared, and pulled a trigger before they had a chance to think about it, to stop themselves. I lost family to those weapons, to the ‘noble hunting traditions’ that kept them legal.
“Now, I freely admit that makes me biased. Looking at it objectively, I understand that in some cultures, some environments, you have to hunt to survive. I understand that humans did it for a million years or more. And of course I can’t deny that the things the Pa’haquel are hunting—monsters like that harvester….” She blinked; the image of the Shalra homeworld’s demise was still seared on her retinas, right on top of Oghen’s. “Well, something has to be done to stop them from destroying whole inhabited worlds.
“But it still doesn’t seem right to me, what we’re doing.” Will just watched her patiently as she went on. “I mean, we’re going to try to make the star-jellies into their hunting dogs. To take these beautiful, sensitive creatures and make them into weapons. It doesn’t seem right. Violence as a first resort…that shouldn’t be the Starfleet way, not anymore. Even the harvesters or the Crystalline Entities, they’re just animals following their instincts. Killing them for it—that’s just not the Starfleet I signed up for.”
Riker tilted his head in acknowledgment, clearly not offended. But he did offer a counterpoint. “Starfleet has its rules, but so does nature. Letting animals do what comes naturally—that means killing, and being killed. It’s no different for the star-jellies. They’re wild animals, Christine. They already have to fight to survive. And we’ve seen they have no qualms about killing when they have to.”
“When they have to. But to make a whole lifestyle of it….” She shook her head. “It just seems like suddenly we’ve taken the Pa’haquel’s side here, trying to change the jellies to be like them.”
“Weren’t you the one who suggested that the jellies needed to change?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. As a rhetorical device, I guess. Hell, let’s face it, I’m all over the map on this. I wanted to stay out of it because I don’t know what the right side is. I think everyone’s entitled to their own way of life, ideally, but when it starts to hurt other people then I’m not so sure. How do we know the Pa’haquel can be trusted with the power that live star-jellies could give them? How can we say they’re the ones best qualified to deal with the cosmozoan threat? How do we know they’ll only use that power against cosmozoans? And what about the other intelligent cosmozoans out there? The Pa’haquel don’t seem to discriminate much where their targets are concerned.”
Riker grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Christine. I don’t think this is an ideal solution either. But it’s what I’ve got right now. At the moment, my top priority is to help end the conflict between the star-jellies and the Pa’haquel. The jellies asked for our help, then we let them take it from us, and as a result another species’ way of life is endangered. I want to fix those problems, the ones I’m directly responsible for. Dealing with the bigger issues, that comes later.” He shrugged. “Who knows? If this works, the star-jellies will have a say in the alliance too. Maybe they can add some compassion to it, offer some alternative solutions.”
“Except they have no qualms about killing when they have to,” she echoed.
“There is that.” Riker furrowed his brow. “Maybe that’s the whole problem here. The reason we’ve had so much trouble figuring out what to do according to the Prime Directive or Starfleet policy. Those policies are geared toward dealing with technical civilizations, structured governments, laws and treaties—maybe it doesn’t prepare us well for dealing with the wilder kinds of intelligent life. Beings that only live by the laws of survival and need. So this is something we’re making up as we go.”
Vale nodded, finishing up her eggs. “And right now, our continued survival depends on not ticking off the Pa’haquel too badly. So we’re pretty much acting out of necessity too.”
“Right. But I’m hoping to find a way to move beyond that. Successful negotiations between the Pa’haquel and the jellies—even if it does mean turning the jell
ies into fighters, it still means that former mortal enemies will have learned to work together, will have found an alternative to killing each other. And that’s a good start. Maybe it’s the first step toward a world of cushy houses and manicured lawns where deadly force is an anachronism.”
“Maybe.” Vale saw the Shalra world again, saw her aunt’s coffin being lowered into the ground with full police honors. “But even in a world like that, anachronisms happen.”
“Yes. They do.” She looked in his eyes, and saw Tezwa.
The Pa’haquel were furious. Deanna could sense it pouring off them in waves before she even entered the observation lounge. She strove to maintain a calm and relaxing presence as she entered the room, but Qui’hibra’s cold, raptorlike gaze upon her made it difficult. Somehow his unwavering calm was more intimidating than the more overt rage of Chi’tharu and Tir’hruthi, the other two Pa’haquel he had brought to this meeting. His fury was something that would never overwhelm him, never cloud his judgment or diffuse his energies; it was something he wielded with stern efficiency, always a strength and never a weakness. All three of them wanted to snap her neck right now, but Qui’hibra would channel that urge into his words, his strategies, his arguments. That made him far more of a threat in her mind. She took some slight solace in the gentle warmth projected by Oderi, who had been brought along as an aide.
But Qui’hibra didn’t even let Deanna sit before he spoke. “You will explain to me,” he said, “how it is that the very telepath who handed the skymounts the means to defeat us is now being included on this mission.”
Deanna’s eyes widened. She resisted asking a question like “How did you find out?”; it would only serve to make them angrier if she treated it as a secret. Besides, Oderi’s apologetic glance and empathic aura told the tale. Deanna looked at the little Rianconi in a new light and wondered which Titan crew member had allowed him- or herself to be seduced into revealing the facts about Tuvok’s actions. She couldn’t blame Oderi for being loyal to her allies, though. And she had intended to tell them anyway when the time was right.
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