The Black Shore

by Greg Cox

  He paused before answering. “The safest course would be to stay away from the beach for the time being. The mind is a powerful force and should not be underestimated. Unknown psychic phenomena should be approached with great caution, or dire consequences may result.”

  Kes felt her limbs growing weak. She held on to the edge of the table for support. “What sort of consequences?”

  “Madness,” Tuvok stated flatly. His stoic expression never changed. “Psychic possession. Mental impairment. Coma. Death.”

  “Oh,” Kes said. She glanced down at her plate. Her supper, hair pasta with a side order of fresh fruit, was largely untouched. Neelix would be disappointed, she knew, but all this talk of mysterious psychic forces had killed her appetite. “But what if those voices are trying to tell me something important?” she asked. “We can’t just ignore them.”

  “If you wish,” Tuvok volunteered, “I will also investigate the site of your experience, although I cannot guarantee that I will detect the same phenomenon. As I was explaining, telepathic abilities vary from species to species, and from individual to individual.”

  That’s not enough, she thought, grateful that Tuvok could not read her mind without “profound concentration.” As thrilling as it was to be rediscovering the ancient powers of her Ocampa ancestors, there were times she wished that she had never learned about her latent telepathy. This was definitely one of those times.

  “Thank you,” she said, even as she realized that, despite Tuvok’s warning, she would have to return to the beach herself. In her heart, she had always known this, but she wanted Tuvok to confirm her fears. The prospect of being trapped in the dark once again, with only those terrible screams to keep her company, horrified her. Part of her knew, however, that she would never truly know peace until she had discovered the origin of the screaming.

  I have to go back.

  CHAPTER

  7

  “I MUST APOLOGIZE, ELDER,” CAPTAIN JANEWAY BEGAN, “for the unfortunate incident at the dance club last night. I assure you that I have already reprimanded Lieutenant Torres for her part in the altercation.”

  Varathael’s face occupied the small screen on her desk. Janeway sat alone in her ready room, taking advantage of her privacy to have a frank discussion with the Elder. She hoped the Ryol leader was not too upset about yesterday’s brawl. The crew really needed some good shore leave. It would be a shame if she had to recall them all from the planet just because B’Elanna lost her temper.

  Varathael shrugged. The ruby gem around his neck reflected the lights in his office. “Do not concern yourself about such a trivial disturbance,” he insisted. “Young people are full of passion. The wine, the music . . . such things happen.”

  “Not with my officers,” Janeway said firmly. “I wouldn’t want you to think that this sort of behavior is typical of Starfleet officers. I can assure you it is not.” She chose not to mention that time, years ago at the Academy, when she was the last person standing after a free-for-all that pretty much leveled an oyster bar in Seattle. That hadn’t been a first-contact situation, after all. Besides, that Tellarite had insulted her dog.

  “You mustn’t be too hard on your Lieutenant Torres,” Varathael said. “I know the Ryol youth involved. Nimdir can be most annoying. I have no doubt that he provoked Torres beyond endurance.”

  So I gathered, Janeway thought. To her credit, B’Elanna had informed the captain of the incident as soon as she had returned to the ship. Tom Paris had backed up B’Elanna’s story, although Janeway suspected that Paris had played a larger role in the episode than he let on. She made a mental note to ask Harry Kim what really went on down on Ryolanov. If Paris was there, Harry probably hadn’t been too far away.

  “Well, I am greatly relieved that you are being so forgiving,” she said. The Cardassians would have demanded Torres’s immediate execution, she thought, while the Romulans would have used such a petty incident as an excuse to detain Voyager indefinitely, and the Ferengi would have hit the Federation with a truly enormous fine. Never mind how the Kazon or the Klingons would have reacted.

  “Please, Captain,” Varathael said. “I consider the matter closed.” He smiled warmly on the viewscreen, his ingratiating charm reminding her somewhat of Gathorel Labin of Sikaris. So far, however, the Ryol had proven more sincerely generous than the hedonistic Sikarians. “Now then, let us discuss more pleasant matters: when might I expect to enjoy a tour of your starship?”

  Janeway had given the matter a lot of thought, eventually agreeing with Chakotay’s recommendations. Although the Ryol showed remarkably little interest in developing their own space program, perhaps not too surprising given the desolate and unpromising star systems surrounding their world, they displayed no sign of xenophobia or technological chauvinism. There was no evidence to suggest that their culture and worldview would be threatened by a mere visit to a starship. As long as key technical regions, such as the warp cores, were kept off-limits to the visitors, a friendly diplomatic tour seemed harmless.

  “I look forward to having you aboard Voyager whenever is convenient,” she told Varathael. “It’s the least we can do after you and your people have been so very hospitable to us.”

  “Excellent,” Varathael said. “You can’t imagine how exciting your vessel sounds to us. An actual starship from the other side of the galaxy! My daughter Laazia can hardly wait to ‘beam aboard,’ as you say.”

  “We will be honored to receive her,” Janeway said. I had better warn Tom Paris, she thought. The last thing she needed now was another diplomatic incident.

  • • •

  Me and my stupid temper, B’Elanna Torres cursed herself silently. She was mortified for having embarrassed the captain and for bungling her assignment from Chakotay. She went looking for dilithium and found trouble instead. It’s this damn Klingon blood, she thought ferociously. I can’t help myself sometimes. She wondered if the full humans and Vulcans on board realized how lucky they were, not having to constantly wrestle with a primitive barbarian inside them that was just waiting to erupt at the worst possible moment? Some people said that the Klingons were an honorable and civilized people. She knew better. They were animals, all of them, and so was she.

  A small growl escaped her lips. Horrified at her slip, she bit down hard on her bottom lip to silence the growl, then looked around her furtively. Had anybody heard her?

  Fortunately, the bridge was operating on a skeleton staff. The captain was in her ready room, behind closed doors, while a mixture of Starfleet and Maquis personnel were stationed at various consoles around the bridge. She wondered for a second where Chakotay was. Could he be down on the planet, perhaps romancing one or more of those shameless Ryol women? A pang of jealousy stabbed at her heart, adding to the shame and anger she felt for letting that idiot Nimdir unleash her Klingon fury. She fought back another snarl of frustration.

  Stop it, she told herself. You have a job to do. She was determined to redeem herself by finding out, once and for all, if there was any dilithium to be had on this useless party planet. She stared at the glowing display screen in front of her face, searching the sensor readings for the telltale energy spike that would alert her to the presence of dilithium crystals. Ordinarily, she manned the starboard engineering station on the bridge, but for this mission she needed the sensors she could access at the port forward science console, on the other side of the bridge. So much for the subtle approach, she thought, tired of trying unsuccessfully to extract a straight answer from one of the planet’s feckless inhabitants. The high-tech approach was more her style; she’d track down some dilithium if she had to scan every square meter of Ryolanov.

  She took a few seconds to calibrate the planetary observation sensors to the specific energy signature of crystallized dilithium. There was no point in scanning for the uncrystallized forms, not as long as the theta-matrix compositing system remained on the blink. For about the thousandth time, she wished that there had been a chance to salvage some equipme
nt from the Maquis ship that had originally carried her to the Delta Quadrant. She had personally kept the compositing system on that ship running in peak condition. Unfortunately, that ship—and all its technological resources—had been reduced to space dust above the Ocampa homeworld.

  Still, Voyager had plenty of potential in her own right, as Torres had quickly learned. She focused the lateral sensor arrays on the planet’s surface, starting at the equator and gradually working their way toward both poles. It only made sense to begin with the more populated regions of the planet, since that was where any power-generation facilities were likely to be located. Given Ryolanov’s own rotation, and Voyager’s steady orbit around the planet, it would take a while to scan each hemisphere, but Torres vowed to keep searching for as long as it took.

  Four hours later she felt ready to explode. Patience was another quality that her half-Klingon heritage had shorted her on. How dare that planet spin so slowly! It would be faster, she decided, to blow the whole blasted planet apart and sift through the ashes rather than endure this slow plodding survey of the planet’s unremarkable surface. Meter by meter, sector by sector, Voyager scanned Ryolanov, but without any success. If there was any dilithium on that planet, the inhabitants seemed to have gone out of their way to hide it. Just to spite me, Torres thought. As nearly as she could tell, the Ryol derived the bulk of their energy from such safe, sane, and unexciting sources as geothermal and hydroelectric power. They probably have windmills, too, she thought, disgusted. How was she supposed to find anything a starship could use on such a benign and backward little world?

  She yawned loudly, drawing stares from the handful of crew members staffing the bridge. Torres ignored the stares. All she cared about now was locating some dilithium so she could go and get a good night’s sleep. The captain frowned on eating on the bridge, but she was sorely tempted to get a cup of coffee from the nearest replicator. This is a waste of time, she thought. There’s no dilithium here. There never was.

  She was about to give up when she noticed something odd about the readings from one small sector of the planet. The computer was reporting no available data from any of the various scans that had been directed at that region. Just a programming glitch, she wondered, or something more intriguing?

  Torres interrupted the progress of the automatic mapping and survey scans and redirected the lateral sensor arrays at the area in question. Again, no new data was reported; the sensors declared themselves unable to complete the scans requested. Interesting, she thought, feeling a rush of excitement. She was definitely on to something here. She tried the active magnetic interferometry scanner, but to no avail. The high-energy proton spectrometry clusters flunked out, too, as did the gravimetric distortion mapping scanner, the fixed angle gamma frequency counter, the wide-angle EM radiation imaging scanner, the quark population analysis counter, the Z-range particulate spectrometry sensor, the low-frequency EM flux sensor, the localized subspace field stress sensor, the parametric subspace field stress sensor, the hydrogen-filter subspace flux scanner, the linear calibration subspace flux sensor, the variable band optical imagining cluster, the virtual aperture graviton flux spectrometer, the high-resolution graviton flux spectrometer, the very low energy graviton spin polarimeter, the passive imaging gamma interferometry sensor, the low-level imagining sensor, the virtual particle mapping camera, and even the life-form analysis instrument counter. Give me a break, she thought. She knew there were life-forms down there, even if she had doubts about their relative intelligence.

  It was impossible that this was a system failure on Voyager’s part. That many discrete and differing sensors would not malfunction simultaneously unless a Q was involved. Besides, the sensor arrays were having no trouble scanning the rest of the planet. It was only one small portion of Ryolanov, roughly one square kilometer, that seemed impervious to her scans. They’re hiding something, she concluded. The Ryol had to be using a sophisticated and highly effective system of force shields to protect this region from observation.

  “Why?” Torres muttered aloud. What did the Ryol have on their tropical playground that was worth hiding? As nearly as their earlier scans could tell, they didn’t have even a rudimentary planetary defense system, let alone any military installations worth defending. And if they were concerned enough about their privacy to erect this formidable a barrier, why shield only this single little sliver of their world? Thinking like both a Klingon and an engineer, it didn’t make any sense to her—unless maybe the site had some bizarre religious significance to the Ryol. She considered notifying the captain or Chakotay about her discovery, but decided to wait until she had a firmer understanding of the facts involved. She’d made a fool of herself once already on this mission, and that was more than enough for one stardate. There was no need to disturb them just yet, not over a few anomalous readings.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant.” Torres looked up. It was Ensign Erin Jourdan, a blond Terran assigned to the port aft Ops console when Harry Kim was off-duty. Jourdan watched her quizzically; Torres wondered if she’d been growling again. “Is there anything I can help you with?” Jourdan asked.

  “Yes,” Torres snapped. “Get me a raktajino. I’m going to be here for a while.”

  • • •

  Dozing in the shade beneath the lush purple foliage of his favorite tree, Harry Kim could barely keep his eyes open. His memories of last night’s activities were foggy, although he was pretty sure he had sampled too much Ryol wine. He wasn’t even sure when he had returned to Voyager last night, just that he had woken up in his own bed sometime after noon, badly in need of a shower and fresh coffee. Searching his memory, he came up with vague images of watching a crimson sunrise in the company of two very friendly Ryol women. He couldn’t recall their names at the moment, but he remembered their eyes: green at first, then darkening to midnight blackness. . . . He yawned loudly, then let his eyelids droop again. A nap was sounding better and better.

  Something landed heavily a few centimeters away from him, rousing Kim from half-sleep. He saw a scruffy red figure shambling toward him and recognized the young neffaler he had met a few days ago in this very same park. “Hi there, little guy,” he said. “I was hoping I’d run into you again.”

  The neffaler chirped in reply. It appeared to recognize Kim as well. There was no sign of the shyness or trepidation it had displayed during their first encounter. The neffaler plopped down in the grass beside Kim, its large eyes searching the Starfleet officer expectantly.

  “Are you looking for the clarinet?” Kim guessed. “Is that it?”

  The neffaler chirped again, but Kim could only guess what the small creature was trying to say. His Universal Translator had its limits, alas, and talking to animals was beyond it. The verbal translation algorithms needed an actual language to work with. Still, Kim thought he had a pretty good idea what the neffaler wanted.

  He stuck his hand into a pocket and withdrew a shiny white object. “Here,” he said, offering the object to his visitor. It was a plastic flute, about five centimeters long, with twelve tiny holes drilled into the top of the instrument, one for each of the neffaler’s twelve fingers. A thin white cord hung in a loop from one end of the flute. “I made this for you especially.”

  The neffaler grasped the flute eagerly. Kim smiled; the little whistle had cost him one replicator coupon, but it was worth it to see the little creature’s obvious delight. The neffaler had a good memory, too. This time it did not waste any time blowing into the wrong end, but located the proper mouthpiece immediately. Its whiskered little cheeks swelled as it puffed energetically on the whistle, producing a string of loud toots. Kim let the creature improvise for a few minutes, then reached out slowly and rearranged the neffaler’s fingers, showing it how it could produce different notes by covering one or more of the holes along the top of the instrument. He was amazed at how thin and fragile the little animal’s fingers were. They were nothing but skin and bone and bristles. “Boy,” he said, “I’m not sure they�
�re feeding you guys enough.”

  Again, the neffaler caught on quickly, shifting its fingers along the length of the flute to vary the sounds its new toy emitted. Pretty soon it was coming shockingly close to playing something like an actual tune. Kim shook his head in amazed appreciation. “You’re a little monkey Mozart,” he said out loud. “Who would’ve guessed it?”

  He wondered momentarily if teaching a domesticated primate to play the flute violated the Prime Directive in some manner, then decided not to worry about it. The Prime Directive concerned itself with sentient cultures, not their pets, and, judging from last night’s busy dance floor, the Ryol already knew plenty about making music. Besides, he thought, watching the young neffaler play happily with his new flute, the little guy was just too cute to resist.

  Yawning despite himself, Kim leaned back and rested his head against the trunk of the tree. He closed his eyes and drifted off, the sound of the neffaler’s freshly invented music playing in his ears.

  • • •

  Kes heard the waves before she saw them. Night had fallen and the lamps illuminating the beachside path were not bright enough to cast their light all the way to the water’s edge, but her shell-shaped ears detected the soothing susuration of the waves lapping against the shore. The breeze blowing off the harbor was just cool enough to be refreshing. She peered into the darkness, looking for the water and dreading whatever ghastly secrets it might hold. How can such a peaceful setting, she wondered, hold such terror for me?

  Tuvok would not approve of this nocturnal expedition, Kes knew, but she could not forget the voices that had called out to her. She had felt a similar compulsion years ago, when the Ocampa Elders forbade her to leave their underground city and seek out the world above. She had ignored their warnings, as she now ignored Tuvok’s sound advice, and encountered danger, yes, but also a universe of wonders that she had barely dared to dream about. She had no idea what awaited her beyond the black shore, but she knew she had to find out.