Orion's Hounds

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “And if death came to one of you tomorrow…would you feel you had been cheated?”

  “No. I would’ve been happy even to be his wife for only a day, if that had been all we could have.” She gave a small, wistful smile. “Although my mother would be sorely disappointed if I failed to give her grandchildren.”

  Qui’hibra stood silently for a moment, studying her, and something slipped through his mental armor. She realized that the guilt she’d sensed was not about the past…but about the immediate future.

  Fortunately, she and Tuvok still had a partial mind-link, which he had been using to help him manage the jellies’ emotions. She had been gradually weaning him off of it, letting his own mind learn to take up more of the slack, but enough remained to allow communication. Qui’hibra’s plotting something, she told him. Move discreetly behind him and be ready to act.

  Acknowledged.

  “What about you?” Deanna asked. “You must have many grandchildren by now.”

  “And some of them have grandchildren. I have been blessed.”

  “No doubt you want your grandchildren’s grandchildren to grow up in a galaxy where the Pa’haquel are prosperous and the chaos is kept at bay. I believe that the star-jellies can still help you achieve that. And they’re willing to try…if you are.”

  “We all do what we believe is best for those we care about. I hope you understand that.” Without warning, he whirled, and his taloned foot struck Tuvok’s phaser from the hand that had just begun to draw it, leaving deep emerald gashes across the brown. Keru and his team began to draw their phasers, but Qui’hibra moved with uncanny swiftness, seizing Deanna before she could react. “Now,” Qui’hibra barked into his communicator.

  A second later, she felt a star-jelly transporter effect engulf her, and she and Qui’hibra rematerialized aboard his ship. He shoved her into the arms of a Fethet guard. “Bind her. Watch her. She is tougher than she appears. Propulsion team, move us out of the mounts’ transporter range, now! Use the planetesimals as cover. Sting team, fire a few blasts to occupy them.”

  His team efficiently carried out his orders as the Fethet roughly wrenched her arms behind her and slapped shackles upon them. On the sensation wall, she saw the jellies recede as they retreated from the hunters’ fire and as the hunters pulled away. Rescue would not be forthcoming.

  Qui’shoqai, Qui’hibra’s son and huntsmaster, came up to him. “Elder. The watchfleets have detected Titan on the far side of the Proplydian. It is apparently being pursued by a quartet of branchers.”

  The elder looked at him sharply. “Branchers! No doubt intending to communicate. He is a fool. Propulsion team, engage maximum warp and proceed to intercept. We must get there while there is still a Titan to seize. Are the watchfleets in range to rendezvous with us?”

  “Not for some time, Elder. The prize will be ours alone.”

  Deanna felt the energy rumbling through the jelly’s body as the distortion generators built up the warp field. Qui’hibra came over to her. “You can end this now if you give me the sensor and shield information which you gave to the skymounts. Show us how to counter their advantages and I will do what I can to see that your lives are spared.” She said nothing. “As I expected. I apologize, Commander Troi. I must now take your husband’s ship before he gets it destroyed by the branchers. I will pray for the Spirit’s forgiveness…and I would hope you can grant me yours.”

  Her gaze seared him. “We were trying to help you, Qui’hibra. We are not your enemy.”

  “Not mine, no. But I am but one in the Conclave, and I abide by its judgments. This is how the balance falls.”

  “Then you’d better pray it doesn’t lead to the downfall of your people, and countless others.”

  He held her eyes. “I already have.”

  Rage!

  Tuvok reeled under the force of the star-jellies’ anger. He had been largely insulated from their fear when the Pa’haquel fired on them; but now, with Counselor Troi being warped out of range, he felt the mind-link fading. Some telepathic effects (he reminded himself, striving to cling to analytical thought) were nonlocal quantum phenomena, acting independently of distance; but his link with Troi was not one of them, requiring the direct contact of a mind meld to initiate and attenuating with distance.

  That was the cause. The effect was the rapid loss of his ability to insulate himself from the star-jellies’ emotions [fury/betrayal/disbelief/despair]. No, not all his ability; this had been a weaker link than the first, allowing Troi to retain much of her own shielding ability while Tuvok used the rest to supplement his. He reminded himself that he still had some control of his own—even while the despair building within him fixated on Ree’s prognosis that his control would never again be what it was.

  Keru touched his shoulder, and Tuvok jerked away reflexively, not wishing to have to cope with the Trill’s emotions as well. “Tuvok!” the burly security chief cried. “Come on, focus. We have to get after them!”

  The words resonated with a desire he now felt crystallizing in the jellies. Pursue! Pounce! Save Deanna! Sweep the parasites from our dead [avenge their treachery]! He felt, both in body and mind, their distortion generators powering up for warp.

  “Pursuit…is under way,” Tuvok managed to get out. “Now leave me! I must concentrate.” Wait, he told the jellies. Restrain yourselves. There is danger there, both from the Pa’haquel and the Crystalline Entities.

  Don’t care [afraid/going anyway]! We must save Deanna [sister/self]!

  Fascinating. The star-jellies had accepted Counselor Troi as part of their collective identity. And because of that identification, they were willing to launch an attack to liberate her, even against enormous odds. When properly motivated, they could be fighters.

  Tuvok felt in them the same manic determination and clarity that had driven him when he had attacked Lieutenant Pazlar and stolen the data. That same conscious choice not to care about the fear or the consequences because they simply did not matter as much as that one overpowering desire to act. In this case, though, the emotional imperative was acting in Tuvok’s favor, in his crewmates’ favor. Perhaps instead of fighting it, he could use it to his advantage. There would be no harm in letting it take him over.

  No. Not again. Letting them have free rein would mean the Pa’haquel would suffocate in hard vacuum. It would mean ongoing conflict between the two species, and possibly untold death in generations to come if the cosmozoans were allowed to propagate too far. Tuvok would not accept that. He would not allow anyone else to suffer from his failures of control.

  But how could he fight this? His mind was too weak, his shields inadequate.

  Don’t fight—yield. Deanna’s mind, not through the link but an echo of memory. Something she had passed along to him in the meld was the concept that resistance was not the only form of strength. Sometimes being strong meant knowing when it was safe to yield, to trust in another’s power and give oneself over to it. That trust could be hard to give if one had been hurt before. But without that trust, that yielding and acceptance, there could be no partnerships, no marriages, no crews, no federations.

  But that was the key, wasn’t it? Cooperation. The yielding went both ways. If he fought the jellies, they would fight him, and the struggle would deplete both their energies. But if he yielded to their passion, let it be a part of him, then his reason and judgment could be a part of them as well.

  Very well, he thought. We will pursue the hunter fleet. We will save Deanna. But we will do it my way. We will not beam the Pa’haquel into space. Instead we will disable their vessels.

  We will not fire on our dead. The jellies were adamant on that.

  He shared their revulsion, and did not fight it. It did not matter, because he could still achieve his goal through reasoned strategy. That may not be necessary, he told them.

  He spoke the rest aloud for the security team’s benefit. “Mr. Keru, hail Titan. Use the jelly’s console; it will be out of communicator range.”

/>   Keru made the attempt, but only static came back. “I can’t reach them. Too much subspace interference.”

  “Very well. We will make do. Here is the plan.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Riker was beginning to think Qui’hibra had been right about the Crystalline Entities. There was no mind here, no will to communicate—just pure, ravening hunger.

  As Titan had neared the Entities, he had ordered Jaza to proceed essentially as Data had a dozen years ago aboard the Enterprise-D, generating a series of discrete graviton pulses from the tractor emitters, beginning at ten per second. The results had been the same as last time; the Entities had changed course and come to investigate the signal. Once he had felt they were close enough, he had ordered the pulses ramped up to twenty hertz, and as before, the Entities had come to a stop, seeming to look them over inquisitively. Riker had ordered the next phase, an increase to thirty hertz, at which point the vast crystal creatures had begun to respond with graviton pulses of their own. At this point twelve years ago, Captain Picard had grown hopeful that communication would indeed be possible, but Dr. Marr had sabotaged the effort, switching to the continuous beam that had destroyed the Entity. Afterward, Data had done his best to decrypt the signals they had received before its demise, but the translator had not had a sufficient baseline to work with. Riker had been hoping that this communication would add enough data to allow a viable translation matrix to be constructed.

  But to the best of Jaza’s and the computer’s ability to determine, there had been little to the Entities’ gravitic calls beyond a simple sense of acknowledgment and curiosity. After a few moments of hesitation and contemplative twirling in place—which Jaza suggested to be a means of scanning Titan through different facets to gain variant spectral readings—the Entities had begun to advance on the ship. “Try modulating the beam again,” Riker had ordered. “Try forty per second.”

  The Entities had paused for another moment, then resumed their advance. It was no use—they were too hungry, and had nothing of substance to say to their dinner. Riker had ordered a retreat, and the Entities had pursued. Now he was leading them away from the Proplydian and the star-jellies, wondering what to do next. The fact that they were closing so fixatedly on Titan when the Proplydian offered a richer feast for them suggested to Riker that they were not guided by much in the way of intelligence, only instinct and immediate gratification.

  He resisted the thought, though. Accepting that they were dumb animals would be too comforting, make it too easy to embrace his desire to lash out and destroy the things. What if he was wrong? What if their pursuit of Titan suggested just the opposite, that they were intelligent enough to be motivated more by curiosity than the prospect of a large meal?

  On the way here, Riker had reviewed the research and records on the Crystalline Entities, and found only uncertainty. The first Entity had been brought to Omicron Theta by Lore, Data’s twisted and malevolent prototype, who had then lured it to attack the Enterprise upon his discovery and reassembly. Lore had given the appearance of conversing with the Entity, but there was no other evidence to suggest that the life form was capable of understanding verbal communication. Only the graviton-pulse method had gotten any response from it at all. In Data’s logs, he had speculated that Lore had actually used some other means to train the Entity to respond to the sound of his voice, in much the way that a dog or horse was trained—although given Lore’s proclivities, Riker doubted his training methods had been particularly humane. Did that mean it lacked intelligence, though, or simply that its intelligence was not a type geared toward verbal communication?

  Either way, though, it suggested that there was a way to train these beasts. Maybe it was time for a little negative reinforcement. “Activate the graviton beam again,” he ordered. “Give them a continuous, oscillating pulse for five seconds. The same frequency Dr. Marr used.”

  Jaza and Vale looked up at him sharply. “Five seconds, sir?” Jaza asked.

  Riker nodded in reassurance. “I just want to swat them across the nose.”

  “Swatting, sir.” On the screen, the Entities wavered in their pursuit and came to a dead halt.

  “All stop,” Riker ordered. “Let’s see what they do.”

  The Entities hovered there for a moment, then resumed their approach. “Jaza, another two seconds.” This time they came promptly to a halt.

  “It seems to be working,” Vale said. “Now that we have the stick, should we try the carrot?”

  He looked at her. “You mean the energy beam we tried before? I’m not sure I want to risk that yet.”

  Before she could answer, a beep came from the tactical console. “Multiple ships approaching,” Kuu’iut reported. “It’s Qui’hibra’s fleet. Arrival in seventy seconds.”

  Damn. The subspace interference must have hidden their approach. But what are they doing here? “Hail them. Lavena, move us away from the Entities.”

  A moment later, Qui’hibra’s face appeared on the screen. “Elder Qui’hibra,” Riker said. “You were supposed to be meeting Commander Troi at the Proplydian.”

  “We saw you taking on the branchers, Riker. It is an unwise thing to do alone.”

  “We’re managing just fine, thanks.”

  “So it would seem. I am curious to know how you got them to stop. Once we arrive, you can demonstrate your method.”

  Riker was reluctant to show them something that could so easily be used to kill the Crystalline—oh, hell, the branchers. “I think it’s more important to resume negotiations with the star-jellies. Commander Troi will be—”

  Will! She was there, in his mind. She was nearby. They have me. It’s a trap!

  Riker cursed himself for letting it throw him off. Qui’hibra’s raptor eyes missed nothing; he knew Riker had been alerted. “Commander Troi is my prisoner.” He gestured to someone offscreen, and a Fethet guard appeared, pulling Deanna roughly into frame. “This can be easy, Riker, if you give me the sensor and shield data you gave the skymounts.” He paused, and proceeded with a grimace. “Refuse, and Troi will suffer. Continue to refuse, and she will die, and we will take your ship. You cannot beat all of us, Riker. This will end with us having the information we want. Your choice is only of whether you, your crew and your wife are still intact afterward.”

  “I can’t believe you’d hide behind a hostage, Qui’hibra!” Riker barked. “You’re a hunter, a warrior. This kind of cowardly tactic is beneath you.”

  That might have worked on a Klingon, but not here. “I am a hound of the Spirit. I do whatever I must to survive and to stand against the chaos. And I will kill your wife today if it will save worlds in the future.”

  Imzadi! Riker wanted to do anything to save her. But he saw the look in her eyes. If he traded the star-jellies’ lives for hers, she would never forgive herself. Her thoughts came to him. It’s all right, Imzadi. Even a day together would have been enough.

  Steeling himself, he spoke. “Starfleet officers are trained to accept death before putting innocent lives in danger. I will destroy this ship myself before I let you have that information.”

  “Your nobility is foolish, Riker! Survival trumps all else. That is why I do this. That is why you should give me what I want, rather than letting your wife endure what I must otherwise inflict on her. It may interest you to know that the Fethetrit consider it an art form and a sport to dismember and consume their prey while prolonging its life and consciousness as long as they are able. Riathrek here has won trophies.”

  Riker traded another aching look with Deanna. “Please give me a moment,” he asked Qui’hibra.

  “Do not take long. Riathrek is impatient.”

  “Mute audio,” Riker said, then turned to Kuu’iut. “Can we beam her out?”

  The Betelgeusian shook his hairless blue head, gnashing his teeth. “They’re generating a lambda hyperon field. Transporters won’t work.”

  Their Vomnin scientists must have devised a countermeasure to the jellies’ teleport beam
s. What if they could figure out the rest on their own, Riker wondered? What if he sacrificed Deanna and his crew for nothing?

  But then another beeping interrupted his deliberations. “More contacts approaching,” Kuu’iut said. “It’s the star-jellies!”

  “Elder!” called Qui’shoqai. “A school of armored skymounts has just emerged from warp! They are closing on us!”

  Deanna didn’t need to hear the words. She had sensed their arrival. Sister/Self! We have come for you!

  No! Don’t endanger yourselves! But they were determined—and very confident.

  Qui’hibra was confident too. “They can do nothing. The hyperon field will block their teleport beams, and they will not fire on their dead.”

  “Still, they approach,” Qui’shoqai said. “Should we fire?”

  “Let them try their attack first. Let them see how futile it is. Hail Titan.” A moment later, the channel opened again. “Riker—do not use this distraction as an excuse to strike. Remember what fate awaits your wife.”

  It frustrated Deanna to be so helpless. There was a time to yield, and this wasn’t it. “Qui’hibra, you know this course is wrong. Let me go, and we can still work out a peace with the jellies.”

  “Silence her!” At the elder’s command, Riathrek clapped his huge hand over her face, with nearly enough force to break her nose. She struggled to breathe.

  “What are they doing?” That was Se’hraqua.

  “They are bracketing us, above and below,” Qui’shoqai reported. “It is like…”

  “Like their funeral rites,” Qui’hibra roared. “Fire on them! Break free, now!”

  But it was too late. Even as the elder spoke, Deanna felt the jellies’ somber satisfaction as they linked with the distortion generators aboard this one and began drawing out their energy. Almost immediately, the shipboard gravity field began to fluctuate and diminish, causing many of the hunters to lose their balance and fall. Luckily for them, the fall was growing gentler by the moment. Those who retained their balance grabbed at their controls, but the skymount’s power was fading, the controls giving little response.