Orion's Hounds

by Christopher L. Bennett

“So, about this mount-wedding custom,” Troi went on. “What about children? With a dangerous lifestyle like yours, wouldn’t mount-wedding remove a lot of potential mothers from eligibility?”

  “Oh, no. Part of our responsibility is to mate with low-status males who cannot win brides of their own. Myself, I have had eleven…no, twelve children for other lines.”

  “ ‘For other lines?’ They’re raised in the father’s family?”

  “Of course, how else?”

  Troi’s eyes were wide. “So you’ve had to give up a dozen children?”

  “Well, they are incubated in artificial marsupia once they are born, so I never had a chance to become attached to any of them. Just as well—I had too much work to do anyway.”

  The Betazoid seemed sad for her. “I guess it’s easier that way,” she said, sounding far from convinced.

  Qui’chiri looked her over. “And how about you? How many children have you had?”

  Troi grew wistful. “Well…technically, one. In a strange way. An alien energy being impregnated me so that it could be born as a corporeal being and learn about us. It…it was all over in a matter of days. Ian…the life-form was unable to survive for long in that form.”

  “I am sorry,” Qui’chiri said. “Some of my offspring did not survive to term. And I have lost siblings who were very young. The Hunt exacts its price.” She found herself growing somber. She tried to shake it off, but it lingered, calling up feelings of loss that she hadn’t been bothered by for many years. Perhaps changing the subject would help. “So you have had no children yet with your husband?”

  “No…no, not yet.”

  “Is that not the point of marriage in your culture?”

  “Not the exclusive one. I mean, it’s part of it, yes, but we’ve only been married a few months…it isn’t the right time yet.”

  “How long must you wait?”

  “Until…until the time is right.”

  Sensing her unease, Qui’chiri backed off. “I apologize. If I have impinged on some taboo…”

  “Oh, no,” Troi reassured her. “Nothing like that. It’s just…not something I’ve given a lot of thought to yet. Although lately it seems to keep coming up.” Troi smirked at something.

  Qui’chiri found it amusing herself, somehow. “Then perhaps the Spirit is trying to tell you something.”

  Troi glared. “I thought you weren’t spiritual.”

  “Of course I am. I just do not think about it much.” She laughed. Just then the mount lurched again. “Oh, no! Are the ticklers at it again?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said her assistant, who seemed very amused by it. Qui’chiri would have chastised her, but she could see the joke.

  Troi was grinning too, but she seemed concerned as well. “Something strange is going on,” she said. “All of you—your emotions are changing with the jelly’s! When I grew sad, I felt it sadden in sympathy, and all of you grew more somber as well. And now the other jellies have come in to cheer it up, and we’re all laughing!”

  Qui’chiri started to laugh at that, but stopped herself. “How can that be? We are not telepaths!”

  “I know. But there’s no question—you’re all emoting in synch with the star-jelly.”

  “Hormones,” Dr. Ree explained, once he had concluded his examination of Qui’chiri and several of her crewmates. Now Riker, Troi and Qui’hibra had joined them in sickbay for his report. “I would call them pheromones, except they are internal to the star-jellies. Apparently Pa’haquel hormonal receptors are sensitive to the jellies’ own hormones. I would imagine they shared their homeworld with the jellies for much of their evolutionary history, long enough for their biochemistries to be influenced.”

  Qui’hibra was puzzled. “The legends say our history began elsewhere on Quelha. That we only discovered the skymounts during our migrations.”

  “But your ancestral ecosystem could still have been affected by the jellies’ breeding grounds—perhaps by runoff from their hotsprings.”

  “I’m more concerned with the here and now,” Riker said. “Why did it take so long to detect this?”

  Ree clacked his teeth thoughtfully. “The Pa’haquel have not cohabited with live jellies for millennia. Maybe it took time for their systems to reacclimate.”

  “Or maybe,” Troi said, “it simply seemed natural for their emotions to correlate. The Pa’haquel would have expected to feel irritation or concern when they were having trouble working with the jelly, and satisfaction when things were going more smoothly.”

  “More importantly,” Qui’hibra said, “what do we do about it? How can we do our jobs if we cannot avoid breaking into fits of giggles?”

  “I was able to manage it with an effort,” Qui’chiri said. “I am sure the will of all Pa’haquel is at least equal to my own.”

  “No doubt,” Ree said. “Still, perhaps some form of hormonal antagonist could counteract the effect.”

  “I will have my medical staff research it,” Qui’chiri replied. “Although it would be so much easier if we could just convince them to let us hunt them again.”

  “Ahh, I have had the same thought,” Ree told her. “But I have had no luck finding volunteers among the crew.”

  Ranul Keru couldn’t tell up from down right now.

  Free fall was one thing. That he could handle, having trained for it extensively as part of the all-encompassing security drills he required for his people. But the play of gravity fields around a star-jelly’s distortion generators was much more confusing. Along the equatorial plane of the jelly, where the gravity vector reversed, one was technically weightless, but there was a sort of inverse tidal effect, a sense of one’s head and feet being pulled in toward one’s belly. It was particularly pronounced for a large man like himself. And right around the generators themselves, the gravity became considerably more problematic. Essentially each of the jelly’s seventy-six generator nodes was the center of its own local gravity field, and “down” was toward it from any direction. As one drew nearer a node, the gravity vector shifted more and more toward it. It would be easy to get lost, except that all the respiratory “corridors” in the area fed into the nodes. Keru was assuming that the gravity shifts he was feeling meant that he was getting closer to a node, rather than getting turned around and heading away from the equator. But he could only hope it was the right node.

  Truth be told, he wasn’t even sure what he was doing here. Counselor Troi had suggested that he might be able to help the jellies adjust to the idea of living symbiotically with other sentient beings inside their bodies, by telling them something about the Trill experience with symbiosis. He did not consider himself an ideal choice for this, since he had never been joined. True, he had tended the symbiont pools for a few years, but his communication with the symbionts had been limited and intuitive at best, and he had no firsthand insights from the host’s perspective. But there were no joined Trills on Titan’s crew, so it came down to him. Troi had heard his objection that he would have little to offer, but had asked him to do what he could anyway.

  So right now he was tracking down a telepath. The jellies could read any thoughts he had to offer, but he could not sense theirs without an interpreter. Since the other psisensitive crew members were occupied, he had been assigned to work with Lieutenant Chamish. The Kazarite ecologist could only register their emotions, not their cognitive thoughts, but Troi felt that would be enough to allow basic feedback, and apparently in their case the distinction was blurred anyway.

  Keru was happy enough to work with Chamish, since he’d been trying to persuade the Kazarite to help train his security force in tactics against telekinetic attack. The gentle ecologist had shown no interest in combat exercises, and had demurred that his powers were too feeble to present much opposition. Riker and Vale had not seen the proposal as important enough to make it an order. Still, Keru hoped to change the lieutenant’s mind, feeling that any further edge he could give his people, however slight, would be worthwhile. Maybe it was
impossible to save them all, but the more prepared they were, the fewer he’d have to lose.

  A little TK might be useful for maneuvering right now, Keru thought as he stumbled onto the generator node at last. “Onto” was indeed the word, for he stood on the curving surface of the node, a seven-meter-wide sphere which glowed a warm red as the intense energies swirling within it shone out through its fleshy surface. The respiratory passages were wide and open here. The effect was something like being a giant standing on the surface of an ember-hot brown dwarf, though fortunately the node’s surface was only warm. Keru started to walk along it in search of fellow crew members, and tried not to stumble as he went. To his eyes, it looked as though any step he took would take him downhill, and he reflexively adjusted to compensate; but the gravity field shifted with each step so that he was constantly on the “top” of the imagined hill. The conflict between expectation and reality made it hard to adjust. The red-on-red lighting scheme didn’t help much either.

  Soon enough, another crew member came into view around the curvature of the node. It was not Chamish, though, but Torvig. The cyborg cadet was traipsing along easily, no doubt using his bionic enhancements to compensate for the bizarre environment. “Oh, hello, Commander Keru! Am I in trouble for something again?” he asked, though his tone was affably inquisitive.

  “Uhh, no. I was looking for Lieutenant Chamish, actually.”

  “Oh. He’s on the other side of the node.”

  “All right.” He paused. “What are you doing here, Cadet? I wasn’t aware you were assigned here.”

  “I had some ideas I wanted to share with the star-jellies. Ways they could enhance their distortion generators to accelerate their warp field initiation cycle. Shielding enhancements for combat scenarios. Ways of reallocating interior space to accommodate larger populations. It seems to me they have a number of body parts they could do without, or simply materialize on an as-needed basis.”

  Keru frowned. “Well. How did the jellies take your…suggestions?”

  “Mr. Chamish says they’re wary, but curious to learn more. I’ve got the schematics running as a subroutine in my brain so they can review them in depth while I work on other things.”

  “I see. Very well,” Keru said with a harrumph. “Carry on, then.”

  Torvig blinked at him. “Commander, your tone of voice conveys disapproval. Do you now think I’m doing something wrong?”

  “No. No, Cadet, it’s not that.”

  “May I ask what it is, then?”

  At least Torvig was learning to couch his relentless nosiness in slightly more polite terms. Keru sighed. “I just…don’t like seeing this done to the jellies, that’s all. Having their bodies altered to serve another species’ purpose. It feels like…”

  “Like Borg assimilation?” Torvig’s gaze on him held steady.

  “Frankly, yes. It just doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “We know the jellies have probably been upgraded by others before. We are standing on one of the components added to their design.”

  “Yes, but if that’s so, whoever did that to them isn’t around anymore. And the jellies have been living free for as long as they can remember, which is probably millions of years. So I think if they were used by others, they probably weren’t very happy about it. I think they decided they’d rather be free. Do we have the right to change that?”

  Torvig looked surprised. “I don’t follow your logic. Just because the Great Builders didn’t stay with them doesn’t mean they weren’t wanted. They just moved on to other projects—the way they did after the Great Upgrade of my people.”

  Keru stared. “You mean…you assume this was done to them by the same race that made you into cyborgs?”

  Torvig lowered his cervine head. “Apologies, sir, I should’ve couched that as a hypothesis rather than an axiom. I’m aware that the Federation doesn’t share our belief in the Great Builders as the creators of all things.”

  “I thought Choblik didn’t believe in anything that wasn’t supported by empirical evidence.”

  “It is empirical that we were Upgraded to our current state millenia ago by some technological agency. It is also empirical that the galaxy contains many other life forms, worlds and phenomena that could not have come into being without technological intervention. And many of the fundamental mysteries of the universe can be resolved by postulating it as a construct of some entity or civilization existing on a transcendent plane. Given the power and pervasiveness that such a creative agency would require, it’s logical to interpret all lesser creative agencies in the universe as aspects of the ultimate Builders.”

  Keru absorbed his words. “You mean…engineering is like a religion to you?”

  “As I understand the term, I suppose so, although most religions seem to have less empirical bases and are hard for me to grasp yet. But yes, it’s how I serve the legacy of the Great Builders.”

  “All right. But if you don’t mind an…empirical question…”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “How do you know these Builders had benevolent intentions when they ‘Upgraded’ you? How do you know they didn’t intend to use you as slave labor, or just as some kind of experiment that they abandoned when they’d learned what they needed?”

  Torvig looked up at him and spoke softly. His synthesized voice was far more expressive than Keru had realized at first. “I can’t see any logic in that hypothesis, sir. We owe everything we are to the Builders. In our native form, we are not fully sentient—simply relatively bright animals, small and weak herbivores who roamed the forests of Choblav, trying to avoid being eaten by various large predatory species. We had no speech, no arms, nothing but a simple prehensile tail.” He waved his tail forward and flexed the bionic hand on its end, a smaller counter-part of the intricate, versatile grippers on his bionic forearms. “The Great Upgrade gave us language and reason, plus the ability to build and create, to protect ourselves, and to improve our lives. And the Builders stayed with us long enough to establish the infrastructure that lets our civilization continue, that lets us pass on these gifts to our young.”

  Keru suddenly realized he was curious about that. “How does that work, anyway? How can bionics be hereditary?”

  “We have nanotech chromosomes which are passed on in our gametes and allow the self-replication of many of our internal components. Further enhancements are surgically installed in our young as soon as they are ready. We receive several successive suites of upgrades as we grow toward maturity.”

  Keru shuddered. “Sounds unpleasant.”

  “Oh, no, sir! It’s a wonderful experience, to gain new intelligence and abilities, to metamorphose into a new phase of being. These are celebrated rites of passage among my people.”

  The feeling in his voice surprised Keru. “I…didn’t think you were the sentimental type.”

  “Less so than most, sir. But this is who we are. Is it sentimental to cherish the core of one’s existence?”

  “Hm.” He was silent for a moment. “Even so, you can’t assume that other species will have the same reaction to the idea of being…upgraded.”

  “Of course, sir. I understand. It’s much like the Trill people’s concerns about how symbiosis would be perceived. The fear that it would lead to rejection or persecution of the symbionts if other humanoids learned of them.”

  “Uh, that’s not really what I meant. And it didn’t turn out that way after all.”

  “Didn’t it? Maybe not among other humanoids, but it seems that there was some serious intolerance toward the symbionts on Trill itself. I mean, considering the attempt to exterminate them and all.” He paused. “That was about the time I entered Starfleet Academy, in fact. My family was reluctant to let me join, because they were afraid I might face persecution. We had only recently been contacted by the Federation, and their response to us had been…mixed. When the news about Trill came, many of us feared a similar genocide. But my studies of the Federation convinced me that you were b
etter than that. Well, most of the time.”

  Keru was chastened. So many of the symbionts in his care had died because of the hatred of a few fanatics, because some people just couldn’t accept their right to live the way they did. How could he stand here now and judge Torvig for the way he was? “I guess you must be pretty disappointed in us, then. Or at least in me.”

  “Oh, no, sir! I knew some discomfort and adjustment were inevitable. And you haven’t tried to have me killed or anything. Indeed, I’ve learned quite a lot from our interaction. So it’s all for the best, sir.”

  The big Trill stared at the little Choblik for another long moment. Then he reached out to shake the cadet’s bionic hand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Captain’s Log, Stardate 57207.4

  We are now four days into training, and the star-jellies and Pa’haquel appear to have established a comfortable working relationship. After the initial disruption, the Pa’haquel seem to be managing the jellies’ hormonal influence on their moods effectively. Apparently the effect is not as strong as their telepathic influence. Meanwhile, more jellies have allowed themselves to be boarded by Pa’haquel, and practice maneuvers have been going well. This morning, Elder Qui’hibra led the school of jellies in a practice hunt of the plantlike sailseed creatures that pervade the region. The jellies took to it surprisingly well, tracking down two in the course of a few hours and destroying them both quite efficiently. So far, it looks as though the jellies will make excellent hunting dogs.

  Now if only I could decide whether this is a good thing or not.

  Qui’hibra looked around the control center, still unable to adjust to how empty it was. Normally, almost any place he went on a skymount was bustling with activity, as clan and crew carried out the tasks that the live creatures’ own metabolism had done originally. But now the skymounts they occupied were live, and fully capable of managing their own functions. Indeed, now that they had adjusted to the collaboration, they could respond to a hunter’s thoughts faster than he could speak them, making for a greatly improved reaction time. He had been able to spread out his skeleton crew, already only a fraction of any one mount’s normal complement, among six livemounts (as many were now starting to call them). The livemounts’ performance in the hunting drill against the sailseeds had been freakishly efficient, despite—or perhaps because of—their frivolous attitude toward it. They had chosen to treat the experience as a form of play, and had taken to it quite eagerly. Qui’hibra was not troubled by that; indeed, he welcomed their enthusiasm as a sign that they would take well to the Hunt. And the enthusiasm they had induced in their occupants had been good for morale, heightening the hunters’ alertness and energy rather than distracting them. The few people with Qui’hibra in the control center had been a bit distracted by his uncharacteristic good humor, though, so he had done his best to restrain his enthusiasm and maintain a properly stern visage. But inside, he’d revelled in a sense of youthful predatory glee that he thought he’d lost ages ago.