Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself

by James Swallow

  “We can’t go on like this,” he said. “Ensign Weeton is correct. We need to shift our strategy.”

  “Strategy?” echoed Nathal. “Did it escape your notice that this is a cargo barge, Lieutenant Saru, not a warship? The only tactics we have to hand are run and run faster.”

  He raised a hand. “Respectfully, I disagree.” Saru glanced at Hekan. “Before, you talked about this ship’s multiple tractor-beam arrays. Can you activate them?”

  “You want me to channel power away from our shields and engines?”

  “Yes.” Saru gave a brisk nod. “And also, I am going to stop rolling the ship.”

  “You’ll be handing that Tholian an easy target,” said Nathal. “They can blow through the hull, target this deck! Kill us all with a single shot!”

  “That is precisely what I hope they will attempt.” He turned to Weeton. “Ensign, conserve your fire on all dorsal plasma turrets. Stand by to trigger them in unison on my order.”

  To his credit, Weeton didn’t hesitate to follow the command. “Aye, sir. Reconfiguring.”

  “The Peliar makes a good point,” snapped Madoh. “Have you suffered some kind of neural damage, outworlder?”

  “Please, trust me.” Saru took another deep breath and held it. “Here we go. Halting roll program . . . now.” He feathered the thruster controls to make it look like there had been a system failure, and the Tholian spinner took the bait.

  The attacker bore down toward the bow, angling for a kill shot at the upper decks, just as Nathal had warned.

  “He’s coming in fast!” called Weeton.

  “Hekan, the tractor beams,” said Saru. “Calculate for the mass of the Tholian ship and snare it. Use every emitter you can!”

  “That will overload our field coils,” said Nathal.

  “We don’t need to hold it for long . . .” Saru looked back to Weeton. “Do we, Ensign?”

  A wild grin broke out on the junior officer’s face as he got what Saru was doing. “No, sir, we don’t.” His hands flashed over the weapons controls, copying Hekan’s tractor target coordinates straight into the firing solutions for the plasma cannons.

  “Brace for it,” called Hekan as the Tholian ship dove at them. “Ready . . . ready . . . now!”

  Bright emerald lines of light stabbed out from tractor beam emitters all along the upper fuselage of the star-freighter, converging on the slick silvery hull of the spinner and stopping it dead. The energy effect locked hard on to the crystalline vessel and the shock of momentum transfer resonated through the cargo ship’s hull. Power regulators blew out in chugs of hot white smoke, and the bigger craft moaned.

  Saru wondered what the Gorlans down in the cargo pods were thinking. Was the fear smothering them? Did they feel this, hear that, and believe that their end was at hand?

  “Not today,” Saru muttered.

  On the main screen, the Tholian craft struggled against the pull of the tractors, the intercooler grids on its drives burning crimson as it tried to tear away.

  Hekan coughed through the smoky air. “I can’t hold it much longer!”

  “Ensign,” said Saru. “Fire all turrets.”

  “Firing!” Weeton slapped the flat of his palm over all the plasma-gun triggers, and they lit off in a bright ripple of light that converged on the shape of the Tholian attacker.

  The alien craft splintered, and whole sections of the outer hull cleaved off, exposing glittering innards that resembled seams of glowing magma in a rock bed. It could have shrugged off one or two hits from the plasma cannons, but a strike from all of them at once, and with no way to avoid the impacts, doomed the spinner.

  Hekan finally deactivated the tractors before their grids could overheat with the strain, but it had been enough. The Tholian attacker fell away from the star-freighter, a trail of glassy pieces glittering behind it as it tumbled and spun. Saru heard a ragged cheer go up across the compartment as the other two spinners—one damaged and limping, the other still intact—swept past their companion ship and snagged the wreck with yellow web beams.

  “They’re breaking off . . .” said Nathal, stepping closer to his station. “Very impressive, Lieutenant Saru. I’ve never heard of the Tholians retreating before.”

  Saru tried to reach for a fraction of the elation that showed on the faces of Weeton, Vetch, and Hekan, but he found nothing but a grim certainty. “That is not a retreat.” His hand drifted to the back of his scalp and the threat ganglia that still twitched there. “Have no doubt. They’re coming back.”

  12

  * * *

  Saru’s eyes widened as he studied the waveband readout on the shuttle’s subspace radio panel. The message he attempted to send from the Yang was reflecting back at him in a shower of garbled echoes, his words broken up and distorted before the signal could even travel a few light-seconds.

  He sighed and slumped back in the pilot’s chair, looking out of the canopy but not really focusing on the view beyond. It was a near miracle that the shuttlecraft had survived the engagement with the Tholians and remained clamped, limpet-like, to the hull of the Peliar star-freighter. Close by, a particle cannon blast had ripped open a section of the transport ship’s maintenance decks. Had it been aimed a few degrees to the starboard, the beam would have cut the Yang in half.

  Still, the familiar confines of the shuttle were doing nothing to meter Saru’s turbulent mood. He had not exaggerated when he told Commander Nathal that the Tholians would be back for another round. It was a known trait, a familiar battle tactic of their species, sending in a probing attack in the first instance to gain the measure of their enemy and following it up with a more heavily armed strike.

  There were additional Tholian ships out there, he was certain of it. Saru squinted at the darkness outside, peering through the debris from the battle a few hours earlier, as if he might be able to pick out some sign of the glittering crystal ships from his vantage point.

  The lieutenant couldn’t see them, but the disruption of his attempts to contact the Shenzhou meant only one thing. The Tholians were broadcasting a scattering field throughout the system, blocking outgoing subspace radio signals and fogging long-range sensors. Three spinner ships would not be enough to do that, and he lost himself in contemplation of what size of flotilla the Assembly might have sent to the sanctuary system. Five ships? Ten? How many combat craft did a cargo vessel and a warship merit by the standards of the Tholian military?

  “I have the unpleasant certainty that we’re going to find out, sir,” said a voice behind him.

  Saru jolted with surprise and twisted in the seat to see Petty Officer Yashae climbing into the Yang’s rear compartment. He had been so deep in his own thoughts that he hadn’t heard her cat-footed approach. “Was I speaking aloud?”

  “Yes, sir.” She managed a halfhearted smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” Yashae’s milk-pale face and her blue uniform jumpsuit were blackened with smoke and grease, but she seemed unfazed by it.

  “Report,” said Saru, giving her his complete attention. If they made it through all this, the Kelpien was going to enter commendations in the log for Yashae, Zoxom, and the rest of the rescue party. Under the petty officer’s guidance, they had evacuated the unconscious Saladin Johar and the rest of the people being held in the mess hall when the freighter’s fire-suppression system had failed during the Tholian attack. The Vok’sha woman explained it all in a plain, matter-of-fact manner, but it was clear to Saru that she had deliberately put herself in danger several times in order to get the team and several of Nathal’s crew to safety.

  “The chief engineer is in the medical bay,” she concluded. “Zoxom is there now with Subin. Last I saw, he was complaining about the Peliar doc-bots and patching up whoever needed it.”

  “You did well,” said Saru.

  She frowned. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get to you, Lieutenant. I know you could have used more hands on deck up there.”

  He nodded. “We made do.”

  Y
ashae jutted her chin toward the communication panel. “Any luck reaching the Shenzhou?”

  Saru met her gaze. He saw no point in being anything less than honest. “We are on our own.”

  “Can we warp out of here?”

  He shook his head. “There is extensive damage to the engineering deck.”

  Yashae made a soft, spitting noise in her throat, a sound that Saru knew was a Vok’sha curse word. “All that work we did to get this ship up and running, undone in a matter of minutes. Johar is going to be really pissed off when he wakes up.”

  “He will be.” For a second, Saru flashed back to what Ensign Weeton had previously suggested—that someone else be in command of this sorry situation—and contemplated how it would feel to give up the burden of this responsibility to an officer of superior rank.

  Saru gave a faint shake of the head, dismissing the traitorous thought. The Kelpien had been in charge of personnel before, in training at the Academy, sometimes in task groups aboard the Shenzhou. But never like this. Never in a state where so many lives hung in the balance, where sentient beings would either survive or surely perish based on the choices he was making. Saru knew himself well enough to recognize that he could be arrogant at times, but this wasn’t one of them. A good commander needed to be many things, to show strength when it was required, along with humility and compassion. He had never thought it would be so hard to strike a balance between those things, but now here he was, learning that lesson the hard way. Burnham had once spoken to him of a human axiom, something about being careful what you wished for, and now he saw the truth of it.

  How does Captain Georgiou make this look so effortless? Saru wondered. He resolved to ask her.

  If you live to see her again, said the faithless inner voice.

  His communicator beeped, interrupting his train of thought. He snatched it up from his belt, flicking it open. “Saru here.”

  “Lieutenant, this is Weeton on the command tier.” The ensign’s voice was tense. “Sir, you better get back up here. War is about to break out!”

  Saru thought he heard the sound of raised, angry voices in the background. “Have the Tholians returned?”

  “Negative,” said Weeton. “It’s the Gorlans and the Peliars. They’re not listening to anything I say, and I think fists are gonna start flying any second!”

  “On my way.” Saru snapped the communicator shut and vaulted out of the pilot’s chair, toward the hatch in the floor.

  “What should I do, sir?” said Yashae.

  Saru gave her a follow me gesture. “I think I will need all the support I can muster.”

  • • •

  “You are going to do the Tholians’ work for them!” spat Nathal, cutting at the air in front of the Gorlans with the blade of her hand. “This will make things worse!”

  “Do not speak to us like we are fools,” snapped Madoh. He cast around, indicating the additional Gorlans who had arrived from the lower decks to fill the empty operator stations on the freighter’s bridge. “You need us to fly this barge if there is any hope of evading the Tholian counterattack!”

  “Everybody just calm down,” said Weeton, trying to interpose himself between the two groups. “Madoh’s right. With the Gorlans rounding out the numbers up here, we can pilot this ship properly. React faster, maybe get through this in one piece.”

  Nathal growled, looking to her second-in-command for support. “I agreed to accept help, but not from inexperienced neophytes. Has any one of them ever crewed a ship of this tonnage?”

  “These men are former colony-ship crew,” insisted Kijoh, her voice rising. “They can handle themselves.”

  “I do not share your confidence, Gorlan. We’ll be killed by their incompetence before the Tholians fire a shot!”

  Weeton didn’t respond to Nathal’s retort, partly because—if he was honest—he agreed with her. Twice already, the Gorlans had accidentally set off potentially lethal system conflicts in the big ship’s control matrix by working the consoles incorrectly, and the ensign was afraid that when the shooting started again, any such mistake would prove fatal.

  “Then get your own people to fly this Creator-forsaken hulk!” spat Vetch. “That’s if your doting father will allow it!”

  That was exactly the wrong thing to say, thought Weeton, and he saw Nathal’s expression turn stony. “Commander, listen . . .”

  She looked right through him, glaring at the Gorlan speaker. “The crew of the carrier have their own repairs to address. Their ship was hit much harder than this one.” Nathal advanced on Vetch. “But as for my father, do you wish to prove him right? Gorlans are obstinate and primitive. Is that true? Are you too dense to be told what to do?”

  All four of Vetch’s hands came up to jab at Nathal. “Arrogant Peliar—”

  “Stop right now!” Weeton turned to see a gangly figure emerge from the elevator, pointing his hand at them. The ensign had never heard Lieutenant Saru yell at anyone before, and his voice had a whip-crack edge to it that was hard to ignore.

  Saru strode into the middle of the command deck with Yashae a couple of steps behind him, scanning the room with a hawkish glare. When the Kelpien unfolded to his full height, his hairless scalp was almost touching the ceiling of the compartment, and Weeton realized that all this time Saru had been purposefully slouching in order to bring himself closer to everyone else’s eye level. Not so now; now Saru wanted all attention on him.

  “As fascinating as it is to see sentients bickering in their natural habitat, it does not solve any of our current problems,” he snapped, and Weeton thought he heard an echo of the Shenzhou’s captain in the lieutenant’s delivery. “The fact that we are standing here proves that you are capable of working together in the face of a greater crisis! Like it or not, we are in an alliance. Starfleet, Gorlan, and Peliar. The Tholian Assembly considers all of us to be alien intruders. Division now will result in our destruction.”

  • • •

  A weighty silence fell across the bridge in the wake of his words, and Saru let the moment stretch, let them all dwell on the harsh truth behind what he had said. For Nathal and Hekan and the other Peliars, there was only their individual sense of the fear that simmered beneath the surface; but for Saru, the undercurrent of anger-terror-frustration was raw and real and present. He could feel it in the dissonant aura-fields being projected by every one of the Gorlans. The ghostly sensation of their emotional states made the spiracles in his skin itch. He felt their dread prickling the air, akin to the pressure of a far-off thunderstorm. Saru was the only non-Gorlan who could consciously sense it.

  The Peliars might pick up on it in some subliminal way, unknowingly reacting in opposition and feeding the negativity, but they could never know it as he did. The intimacy of it, the sense of creeping doom that would sustain itself if they let it.

  The fragile coalition that had formed in the face of the Tholian threat was in danger of crumbling. That could not be allowed to happen.

  “I do not doubt the commitment of the Gorlans,” said Nathal, reeling in her earlier irritation. “But I am afraid this task may be beyond them.” Kijoh was about to answer, and Nathal pressed on. “You are all civilian spacers. You are not battle trained, as Peliar Zel crews are. This ship may be a transport vessel, but every one of my people aboard it is a graduate of our military college.”

  “We are not warriors, this is true,” admitted Madoh. “But Gorlans are fighters. If the Creator had not made us so, then we would not have lived to carve out colonies on dozens of unyielding worlds.”

  A thought formed in Saru’s mind, and he took a deep breath, preparing himself. All through this ill-fated mission, the Kelpien had been struggling against the tide of events, trying time and again to find the right path, to do the right thing—and each time he found himself trying to convince others to go against their innate natures. Can I make them see? The question weighed heavily on him. Do I have a choice?

  “Madoh. Kijoh.” He looked down at the Gorlans
. “Nathal is right, and as much as I wish it were so, no amount of sheer will is going to suffice. There needs to be unity here. Your people need to work as one, not as individuals.”

  “No . . .” Madoh raised his arms. He already knew what was coming. “You cannot ask that of us. Do not say the words, Saru. Do not!”

  But he did. “You must bring Ejah up here. You must bring the hub to this place and let her do what she does best. Unify the will of the Gorlans.”

  “No!” Madoh’s rage flared crimson in his cheeks, and he gestured with the red bands around his wrists flashing. “You know what this means, don’t you? I protect her! I will not put her in harm’s way!”

  “We are all in harm’s way,” Saru replied, keeping his voice level. “And we will all die, the hub along with us, if the Tholians are not driven off. You know this.” He looked to Kijoh. “I know you can sense my aura just as I can sense yours. Does it shade toward duplicity? Do you believe that I am lying to you?”

  “You do not lie,” said Kijoh at length, sighing deeply. “But what you ask . . . Ejah is our most precious gift.”

  “I know.” Saru’s head bobbed in a nod. “But you need her here more than you need her to be isolated away in some hidden chamber down below.” He spread his hands, tipping back his head a few degrees. For a Kelpien, this was the ultimate gesture of submission, of openness, showing his naked throat and offering no defense against an outsider. “Ejah can help us all. Her abilities . . .” Saru struggled to find the right words. “They’ll give us an edge against the Tholians.”

  “She is holy to us,” Madoh retorted. “She is a living link to the Creator. She must not be sullied by such things!”

  Two of Kijoh’s hands reached up and touched her comrade’s shoulder. “You have sacrificed so much for our people, brother. Have you done so only for us to die here, in this nameless place? Saru is right. This is a matter of life and death for our colony, and for the Peliars and these Starfleet officers.”