by Greg Cox
“Well, I’ll be a Gristakean gutter-snail!” Neelix exclaimed. He and Torres hurried to catch up with Kes, even as her fingers touched the skull—
It was a peaceful sunny afternoon. The sky was a radiant pink, just right for this time of year. Loowo watched her children play in the field while she grinded the sweet roots to powder for their evening meal. They were healthy and strong. Her mate, Fleat, hunted for fresh mushrooms amid the swaying filaments of the tall grass, his glossy red fur brilliant beneath the noontime sunlight. Occasionally the wind brought the faint tantalizing aroma of the sea, many miles away. Birds chirped overhead and Loowo sung to herself as she worked. In the distance, she glimpsed other families, her friends and neighbors, all taking advantage of the warm afternoon. Loowo smiled, content with her life and her world. Perhaps, she mused, she and Fleat should have another child this summer.
Suddenly the birdsong ceased. Loowo heard a thunderous roar that sounded as if it were coming from the sky itself. She looked up in time to see something huge and black pass between her and the crimson glow of the sun, blotting out the very sky and throwing all the world into shadow. Loowo screamed and ran for her babies but she was already too late. The darkness crashed down upon them all, burying them forever, so that all that remained was endless suffocating blackness stretching on for year after year, century after century, trapped in the dark and forgotten. . . .
—Kes yanked her hand back as if shocked by an electrical current. Tears ran streaming down her face. “All dead. All gone,” she said, sobbing. “The ship smashed them all. It crashed right on top of them, carving out the harbor and burying them all beneath the waves. It was horrible!”
“Who was buried?” Neelix asked her. He hugged her against his muddy chest, comforting her and trying to understand. Kes was glad to feel his shaggy arms around her. She couldn’t have faced this nightmare alone. “The Ryol?”
“No,” Kes said bitterly. “Not the Ryol.” Reluctantly, she pulled herself away from Neelix’s warm and soothing presence, approaching the skeleton once more. Torres stood above her scanning the ground with the tricorder.
“Amazing,” Torres said. “I’m detecting partially fossilized organic remains beneath us in every direction. There must be dozens of bodies buried here, maybe hundreds.”
“A whole community,” Kes explained. “Wiped out in seconds.” She was afraid to touch the bones again, but she blew carefully upon the tiny stones and sediment covering one of the skeleton’s hands. She puffed the dirt away until they could see all six of the specimen’s delicate finger bones.
“Not the Ryol,” she said again. “The neffaler.”
CHAPTER
12
“FASCINATING,” TUVOK SAID.
“Remarkable,” The Doctor agreed. “There can be only one explanation.”
“Indeed,” Tuvok said. “The logic appears unassailable.”
“Well then,” Captain Janeway said. “Spit it out. What have you learned?”
Janeway stood waiting in the sickbay between the twin biobeds tending to Harry Kim and Susan Tukwila. She was relieved to see that both crew members appeared to be recovering nicely, and was glad that she’d had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with each of them. Music wafted through the sickbay as Kim sat up in the bed, practicing his clarinet, while Susan was concerned about missing her upcoming shift on the bridge. Morale problems or not, Janeway felt a lot better about her crew. Maybe the crew’s in better shape than I feared, she thought. Like Harry and Susan, we can take everything the Delta Quadrant has to throw at us and still come out fighting.
While she’d paid a call on her injured crew members, Tuvok and The Doctor had devoted themselves to analyzing the Ryol tissue Tuvok had extracted from Naxor. Now they emerged from the attached medical laboratory with the sample in hand and a padd full of answers she was anxious to hear. What’s the real story about our newfound “friends” on Ryolanov? she wondered. There was still no real proof that the Ryol had hostile intentions regarding Voyager, but Janeway was getting more suspicious by the moment.
Tuvok and The Doctor glanced briefly at each other, apparently unsure who should speak first. “Go ahead,” The Doctor said. “You snatched the DNA, you do the honors.”
“Very well,” Tuvok said. “Captain, the evidence strongly suggests that the Ryol are not native to this planet. Their genetic structure bears no resemblance to that of any of the other life-forms present on what we have come to call Ryolanov. They are clearly the product of an entirely different evolutionary process.”
“Are you sure?” Janeway asked.
“Observe,” Tuvok replied. He guided her into The Doctor’s laboratory, where a large viewscreen displayed two-dimensional models of three different segments of DNA, with colored markers indicating the various amino acids involved. “The pair of segments on the left belong to, respectively, a small winged mammal and a flowering shrub; the segment on the right came from the ill-tempered Mr. Naxor. As you can clearly see, the first two samples have several sequences in common, which they share with all the other life-forms we have tested. In contrast, the Ryol DNA lacks these sequences, as well as including a few distinct nucleotides that are missing entirely from the other flora and fauna of the planet.” He pointed toward a series of amber-colored symbols upon the Ryol double helix.
“Yes,” Janeway said. She was more of an engineer than a biologist, but she could spot the discrepancies herself.
“Either the Ryol have come here from somewhere else,” The Doctor said, elaborating on the hypothesis that Tuvok had presented, “or everything else did, including the plants, insects, birds, monkeys, bacteria, and assorted varieties of fungus.” He glanced at his padd. “Frankly, I lean toward the former theory. The Ryol are immigrants.”
“Or invaders,” Janeway said, considering all the implications of this new discovery. She took the padd from The Doctor and inspected the data more closely; as she quickly scrolled through Ryolanov’s vast animal kingdom, the assembled data confirmed everything she had heard. “There’s nothing inherently wrong about colonizing an uninhabited planet—the Federation does it all the time—but why should they conceal this fact from us? What are they hiding?”
“It is possible,” Tuvok pointed out, “that the Ryol first arrived on this planet so many generations ago that their ancestors have long since forgotten their true origins.”
“Or,” The Doctor proposed, “they may simply regard it as none of our business.”
“I see what you mean,” Janeway said. Both explanations for the reticence of the Ryol struck her as equally plausible. While intriguing, the secret revealed by the Ryol DNA was not necessarily alarming. In light of recent events, however, she couldn’t help looking for a more sinister ulterior motive behind the secrecy of the Ryol. Were they afraid, she wondered, that Voyager would try to stake a claim on the planet if we knew that the Ryol had not originated here? That seemed unlikely; nothing she had done or said could have given the Elder and his people the idea that she and her crew had any sort of expansionist agenda. We said we were just passing through, she thought. If they didn’t want us to stay, why invite us to sample all the diverse pleasures of their world. Not exactly the best way to discourage a potential conqueror.
Genetic data continued to flash by on the padd in her hand; Tuvok had been exhaustive in his cataloging of the planet’s wildlife. As she glanced down at the padd, a sketch of a semi-humanoid figure appeared on the screen. “Wait a second,” she said, freezing the illustration.
A new idea occurred to her, along with the mental image of a small reddish primate carrying a tray full of hors d’oeuvres. “What if,” she suggested, “the planet was not uninhabited before the Ryol came along?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” The Doctor said. Janeway realized that The Doctor was probably the only member of the crew who had not been exposed to the ubiquitous “pets” of the Ryol. Perhaps the true inhabitants of this world, she thought, have been under our noses all the w
hile. Serves us right not to pay better attention to the room service.
Tuvok had no difficulty following her reasoning. “The neffaler?” he said. “An intriguing supposition, although it is unclear to me how that would change the nature of our relations with the Ryol. The Prime Directive argues against us interfering with the established social order, no matter how unsavory its possible origins.”
“I know,” Janeway said, “and yet I’m getting a very bad feeling about all this. How much have the Ryol not told us, and why?” If they can exploit one species, she thought, why not another?
Her commbadge chirped, distracting her from her suspicions. “Chakotay here,” came her first officer’s voice. “I have a transmission from B’Elanna on the planet’s surface. She says it’s urgent.”
“Put her through,” Janeway ordered. A second later she heard Torres speaking. The transmission was faint and full of static, as if Torres were trying to send the message through several layers of shielding. Janeway wondered just where B’Elanna was calling from.
“Captain,” the engineer said, “you won’t believe what we’ve discovered down here!”
“Try me,” Janeway said.
• • •
“Alone at last,” Laazia said with a throaty chuckle. Her velvet cloak was draped over her shoulders, concealing her body within its capacious folds, as she inspected Paris’s quarters. In the dim lighting selected by the young officer, Laazia’s eyes appeared to shift from green to black to green again. Paris sat upon the edge of his bunk, transfixed by those eyes.
His mind still felt foggy, confused. On some level he knew what he was doing was wrong, that Laazia wasn’t supposed to be here, but he couldn’t bring himself to defy her. He felt like a passenger in his own body, unable to halt this chain of events and break free from the disastrous path the Elder’s daughter was leading him along.
As promised, her entourage had waited outside during this unplanned detour to his personal quarters. How long had he been with Laazia? he wondered. Ten minutes? Thirty? He found it hard to remember his original mission; it felt like ages since the captain sent him to turn Laazia away. I failed again, he thought. Just like I always fail.
“Alone,” she repeated, “and far from prying eyes. Perfect.” She swept her cloak back over her shoulders, then knelt down in front of Paris until her eyes and lips were only centimeters away from his face. “Now then, I want you tell me everything you know about the bridge and its defenses.”
Huh? Whatever Paris had been expecting to happen here in his quarters, this wasn’t it. “The bridge?” he asked. Despite his surprise, his thoughts felt mired in the haze that had enveloped, his mind like each idea was traveling through his brain at far less than impulse speed. A momentary spark of alarm flickered weakly amid the haze.
“Yes,” she said, speaking slowly as if to a child. Her eyes were as black as the cores of dying suns. “Start with the security systems in place on the bridge, then proceed to the shipboard communication network. Tell me everything, Tom.”
No! his mind protested, but his lips refused to speak the word. A terrible weariness descended upon him with the force of a phaser blast. Every muscle felt drained of vigor. Gravity seemed a hundred times stronger. It took all his strength just to keep from collapsing backward onto his bunk. He tried to look away from Laazia’s mesmerizing black eyes, but she took hold of his chin, her sharpened nails digging into his flesh, and kept his gaze aimed directly at her. I should stop her, he thought helplessly. I should call Security.
“Emergency phasers,” he began, “are located at four convenient locations on the bridge, including Tactical, Security, Science, and Engineering. The phasers are kept set at stun, but can be adjusted by . . .”
Stop it, he thought. Stop it. But the words slipped past his lips, betraying both Voyager and himself. Despair overcame alarm, then sunk back into the numbed recesses of his mind.
Tilting his chin upward so that his eyes remained fixed at hers, Laazia rose confidently from her kneeling position. A predatory smile materialized on her face. “Tell me more,” she said.
• • •
Flying frogs flapped overhead while Torres informed the captain of their discovery. Kes and Neelix looked on as she spoke. “The ship must have crash-landed here generations ago,” she said, “completely destroying a neffaler community in the process. According to Kes, the original neffaler were definitely sentient, although probably pre-industrial.”
The captain didn’t sound too surprised, although her signal was frustratingly faint and choppy. Several layers of subterranean starship, not to mention the shielding the Ryol had put in place above the harbor, weren’t helping the transmission get through. Once the tide comes back, Torres thought, it will be a miracle if we can get through at all.
“The ship definitely belongs to the Ryol,” the captain said. “That fits in with some other data The Doctor and Tuvok have uncovered. It’s all starting to make sense now. The Ryol must have been stranded here when their ship crashed.”
Until we came along, Torres thought. A chill ran through her. You don’t have to be half-Klingon, she mused, to know a dangerous situation when you see one. “Captain, I think we had better get back to Voyager as soon as possible. Can you beam us out of here?”
“I’ll see,” Janeway answered. “Tell Neelix to bring back some of those bones for testing.”
Torres was turning toward Neelix when she heard the sound of a bone snapping somewhere behind her. She spun around, drawing her phaser, as gravel rattled in the shadows, several meters away. More vermin, she wondered, or something more serious? Her eyes strained to penetrate the gloomy recesses of the cargohold. “Neelix,” she called out. “Over there!”
The Talaxian directed his light crystal in the direction she indicated. The beam fell upon three tall figures standing at the base of the stairway. Golden manes framed their faces. Bronze skin covered muscular bodies. One of the men stepped forward. A multifaceted red gem glittered upon his chest, suspended by a silver chain. Torres heard Kes gasp when she recognized the Elder.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Varathael said. “There was no need for you to see this just yet.” Two younger Ryol males flanked him. Torres thought that one of them looked like the beach guard she had toppled earlier. Hope he’s not holding a grudge, she thought. “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to leave now,” Varathael said.
“Stay back,” Torres commanded, aiming her phaser at the Elder. “Captain, we have a situation here.”
“What is it?” Janeway asked through the commbadge. “We’re having trouble getting a lock on you. Are you underground?”
“And then some,” Torres said, remembering the shielding over the harbor. The Elder and his guards advanced toward her, seemingly unconcerned by the phaser pointed at them. Maybe he doesn’t know what a phaser is, she thought. “This is a weapon. Keep back or I’ll fire.”
Varathael smiled cruelly. With a languid gesture, he tapped the ruby gemstone upon his chest. A crimson glow appeared around the Elder and his associates, outlining their bodies against the towering walls of the wrecked cargohold. The glow moved with them as they came within a few meters of Torres and the others. I don’t like the looks of this, she thought.
Torres fired. A beam of destructive force leaped from her phaser, only to splash against the crimson radiance surrounding the Ryol. The glowing force-field absorbed the phaser beam, diffusing its power. “Damn,” Torres cursed. She upped the setting on her phaser, switching it to maximum power, but the brilliant red shield continued to resist her phaser’s efforts.
“Fine,” she said, switching off her phaser and returning it to her belt, “we’ll do this the hard way.” She raised her fists in front of her. “Three of us, three of you. Sounds like pretty good odds to me.”
Frankly, she would have preferred Chakotay and some of the other Maquis at her side; neither Neelix nor Kes had struck her as very threatening fighters. She wasn’t about to mention that to Varat
hael, however. Besides, she thought, when was the last time any of these pampered Ryol fought anything tougher than a bunch of undernourished monkeys?
Thank goodness none of the Ryol had brought along a weapon of their own!
“Torres!” the captain called via the commbadge. “B’Elanna! What’s happening? Report!”
Varathael raised an eyebrow. “Is that Captain Janeway?” he asked. “We had an unfortunate misunderstanding a few hours ago. Please give her my regards.”
“Torres here,” she said, keeping her eyes on the Elder. “We’ve encountered some Ryol, including Varathael, and are taking defensive measures.”
“Is that what you call this?” Varathael said, sounding amused. His unworried confidence was unnerving. Torres tensed her muscles, hyped on adrenaline and poised to strike the instant Varathael or any of the other Ryol took action against her. She glanced quickly at her companions. Neelix had one arm wrapped around Kes’s waist while his other hand held the light crystal aloft. Both looked apprehensive, but ready to defend themselves. Too bad, she thought, that Kes didn’t know how to employ her psychic gifts offensively. She recalled that the delicate-looking Ocampa had once almost incinerated Tuvok with a burst of psionic fire; unfortunately, that had turned out to be an isolated incident beyond Kes’s powers to repeat. We could really use a telepathic zap or two now.
She waited for Varathael to make the first move, but to her surprise the Elder stopped short only less than ten centimeters in front of her. The crimson shield pulsed around him. Torres backed up involuntarily, nervous about coming into contact with the unknown energies of the forcefield. Varathael did not pursue her. He merely glared at her with his strange green eyes. Torres watched him, puzzled and on edge, as his pupils dilated with incredible speed, blacking out his eyes instantly. What the devil? she wondered.
