“The people you’ve killed are still human, Yamasaki. No different from you or me. In fact, much the same as you are now.”
“You evidently know about the Lords. Then you should know that a hunter came to me the night before the peace talks. He and the Lord within him revealed the truth about the New Humans and the Aenar.” His cool, calculating expression grew colder, his voice tinged with disgust. “As I knew all along, their mutations were not natural. Just like the Suliban Cabal, they were experiments, genetic augmentations created by an enemy power to undermine the Federation from within.
“Created by the Medusans,” he finished.
“What?” DiFalco shouted. “That’s insane!” Terrell touched her shoulder, and she fell quiet, reminded of her place.
Yamasaki frowned at her. “Your eyes … but you’re not one of us.”
“I’m one of your Lords’ targets. Inhabited by an incorporeal being of the same species as the Lords—but hunted by them, persecuted and murdered as political dissidents. Forced to flee to this universe and hide within corporeal brains to protect themselves from extermination.”
A disbelieving smirk formed on Yamasaki’s face. “You can’t possibly think that lie will sway me. I share my consciousness with my Lord. We have no secrets from each other, only total truth. It’s very refreshing.”
“Do you really think beings who call themselves ‘Lords’ would be so egalitarian, Haru?” Terrell asked. “How do you know you’re not only hearing the thoughts it wants you to hear?”
“Haven’t you felt how your Lord is draining you?” DiFalco challenged. “Aging you by forcing you to use its powers constantly?”
“Judging from your eyes, your … occupant is doing the same. I consented to it for the sake of our mission. I’m willing to pay any price in the defense of humanity.”
“The difference is, I had to convince my Spectre to stay active. It didn’t convince me.” She shook her head. “Look, I’m not crazy about the fact that it was hiding in me my whole life, making me think its powers were mine. But after seeing the brutality of your Naazh buddies toward the Aenar—after seeing them murder my friends, my crewmates—I understand why it had no choice but to hide. Your Lords are genocidal monsters, and they’ll tell you whatever lies will convince you to let them use you. Trust me, they won’t stop until it kills you.”
Yamasaki shook his head. “All you’re doing is convincing me I was right. Let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that you’re telling the truth. I’m a fair man, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But if that’s so, doesn’t that mean you’re still a product of alien intruders altering humans into something unnatural and dangerous? Either way,” he went on with smug self-satisfaction, “whether you’re the creation of the Medusans or of these ‘Spectres,’ doesn’t that still make you a danger that I cannot allow to exist?”
Chekov rose from the science station. “It won’t be that easy, Yamasaki. We have the means to defend ourselves. And we have the will.”
Yamasaki laughed. “I admire your conviction, Commander Chekov. Really, I do. But you have only the barest inkling of the Lords’ power. I’m afraid you’re ten thousand years too early to take them on.”
“Nice to hear,” Terrell said. “I always like being ahead of schedule.”
Yamasaki smirked again. “Very well.”
His helmet rematerialized, and his voice went on through its filtering, finally void of its usual pretense of courtesy. “Then you will be glad to know the date of your death has been moved up.”
U.S.S. Enterprise
“Captain Spock?”
All Lieutenant Palur had to do was call Spock over to the science station and gesture at the simulation on its upper display screens. It took him only moments to digest the results, which confirmed what he had already suspected. Nodding to the Argelian lieutenant, he returned to stand by his command chair and opened the channel to the surface. “Enterprise to Admiral Kirk.”
“Kirk here.”
“Enough of the Naazh satellite array is now in place that we can determine their likely number and effect. The pattern being formed is most consistent with an array of twelve emitter satellites arranged as a spherical dome centered on a position sixteen to twenty kilometers underground, directly below the settled portion of Ceto.”
Kirk sounded puzzled. “Why so far below the surface?”
“Given the power readings of each satellite and the likely magnitude of the dimensional disruption they could create, the discrepancy would hardly matter. Simulations show that the disruption will be sufficient to destroy everything within a spherical volume approximately two hundred kilometers in radius around the focal point.”
It was a moment before Kirk spoke again. “You mean they’re going to tear a chunk out of the planet?”
“If we are unable to halt the completion and activation of the satellite array, Admiral. Five satellites are already in place. Fortunately, there are only four Naazh ships emplacing them, and they divide their time between assembling the grid and fending off our vessels. Whenever we have attempted to destroy or displace one of the satellites, its onboard defenses and at least one of the Naazh ships have prevented us.”
“Intensify your efforts, Spock. We have to keep them from completing that formation, no matter the risk.”
Spock’s lips compressed as he contemplated the likelihood that Kirk’s order would mean sacrificing some lives to save others. Vulcan sayings about the needs of the many offered little solace to the commander ordering the few to their deaths. As McCoy had said in the briefing room the other day, it was less morally challenging to choose to be the one sacrificed than to choose others for the role. This was one of the aspects of command that had deterred Spock from pursuing it for so long. But he reminded himself that it was the Naazh who were forcing the choice—and that everyone in Starfleet had chosen to accept that risk when they had joined the service.
However, more pragmatic concerns occurred to him. “Doing so will be difficult, Admiral. The Enterprise’s weapons are only partially repaired. Mister Scott has restored the Asimov to full mobility, but its armaments are less than ours. And the Medusan craft have little offensive capability.”
“I have some ideas about that,” Kirk replied. “If the Medusans are willing to lend their skills, we may be able to use some of the Naazh’s own tricks against them.”
U.S.S. Asimov
“Ah, it’s no use,” Montgomery Scott groaned as he fine-tuned the tractor beam controls on the Asimov’s bridge engineering station. “No matter what I do, I just can’t get a lock on this blasted satellite. It’s using some dimensional trick to refract the beams around it.”
“So towing it away is out,” Captain Blake said as she paced the front of the bridge, “and blowing it up is out.” The armored portions had regenerated after every phaser bombardment and torpedo hit, and the crystal portions had simply swallowed up the weapons fire like an open door. By now, the Naazh had emplaced eight of their satellites and not one had been destroyed or knocked out of formation. “What’s left?”
Scott pondered the question unhappily. There was nothing he loved more than a good engineering problem to solve, but he wished the universe wouldn’t keep sticking them in the middle of time-sensitive, life-or-death struggles. It took the joy out of them.
Still, it did have a way of focusing the mind. “If they can use their dimensional warps against us, maybe we can use a modified warp field against them. Configure the shuttles’ engines to generate a field to disrupt the satellites’ dimensional distortion, remote-pilot them into place.”
“Wouldn’t the Naazh just shoot the shuttles down?” Uhura asked from the science station.
“If we had enough of them, and kept up covering fire … No, it’d take too long to configure that many.”
“Any way we could project the disruption field from here?”
After a moment’s thought, he smiled. “Aye, lass … maybe if we rig the deflector dish, we co
uld do something similar.”
Blake nodded. “Get on it, Mister Scott. Commander Uhura, brief the other ships on the plan. If we all do this, maybe we can stop enough satellites to save the planet.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Scott blinked. He’d gotten so used to working alongside Uhura as the science officer on this mission that it was odd to see her performing something like her old communications role. But it made sense for the science officer to brief the rest of the defense fleet on the specifics of the procedure they would be attempting.
Scott programmed in the first draft of the modifications, starting a simulation to model results and refinements, while Uhura briefed the Enterprise and the Medusan defense ships to stand by for his numbers. Moments after she finished, she touched a finger to the receiver in her ear—a familiar gesture that warmed Scott’s heart—and turned to Blake. “Captain, the Stheno is incoming on vector seventy-one mark nineteen and requests we divert to give them a wide berth. Their Medusan personnel are attempting a maneuver suggested by Admiral Kirk.”
Blake’s bright eyes turned to Scott and widened inquisitively. He shrugged, having no idea what the Medusans could do. Certainly they had an impressive ability to transfer ships between dimensions, but only at close range. He doubted they could withstand the Naazh ships’ fire long enough to get close enough to one of the satellites.
Still, Blake ordered the helm officer to move the Asimov, while Uhura put the Stheno’s incoming trajectory on the main screen. As the squat, sphere-headed Medusan ship barreled toward one of the satellites at high velocity, Scott briefly wondered if it was attempting to get past the Naazh with sheer speed and chutzpah. It seemed like a suicide run.
But then a cloudy dimensional distortion formed around the Stheno, expanding outward several hundred meters …
… and when it faded, there was a decent-sized asteroid in its place!
The Stheno veered off as the asteroid plunged the final few hundred kilometers to its target satellite, barely giving the Naazh ships enough time to target it and open fire. Their shots only grazed it, failing to knock it sufficiently off course before it struck its target satellite and vaporized in a quick, bright flash and a swiftly dissipating cloud of dust and debris. Once sensors reacquired the satellite, Scott saw it tumbling, its armor half-vaporized and its crystal cracked and flickering.
“It’s starting autorepair,” Uhura reported after a moment, “but it can’t maintain altitude. I don’t think it’ll be able to repair itself before it crashes.”
“Target zone?” Blake asked.
“Fourteen hundred kilometers downrange, Captain. No danger to the settlement.”
The bridge crew cheered, but Blake made a tamping gesture with her hands after a moment, quieting them. “That’s one win, but we need more. We don’t know how many spare satellites they have, or how many gaps it will take to cripple the array. And Mister Scott’s disruption beam is only a defense, not an attack.” She clapped her hands together. “So let’s keep looking for creative solutions, people!”
Scott chuckled to himself. My favorite order.
Ceto
Something seemed wrong.
Kirk was gratified to see that the Spectres, Medusans, and other defenders were holding their own against the Naazh. The cavern entrance was a nicely defensible position, a high ground and a bottleneck at the same time. The transmuted barriers were holding, and the telekinetics had managed to bring down part of the mountain face on the Naazh horde—an unpleasant reminder of Kirk’s final battle with Gary Mitchell, but undeniably effective. The small avalanche had buried three of the Naazh and inflicted heavy damage on two more.
The Medusans were doing their part as well. Their ships in orbit had taken out two Naazh satellites and seriously damaged or displaced two others with asteroid attacks—though at the cost of attracting a fiercer response from the Naazh ships, with the Stheno having been destroyed and two other ships badly impaired with multiple casualties—including more than a dozen Medusans, who had refused to retreat from this fight even at the cost of their lives. Here on the surface, the Medusans had unleashed a chilling multidimensional attack on several of the Naazh hovercruisers. Kirk had not been able to watch the Medusans in action, of course, but he had seen the aftermath—the bikes’ remains twisted and warped as though turned inside-out in multiple dimensions. The bloody fragments of Naazh armor around one pile of wreckage suggested its pilot had met the same grisly fate. It was never in Kirk’s nature to take pleasure in a sentient being’s death, but he found himself unable to mourn the Naazh’s suffering. Whoever had worn that armor may well have been a Federation citizen, but they had voluntarily renounced everything the Federation stood for and chosen a path of hate and murder.
Even the disembodied Spectres had gotten in on the action. It was hard for them to focus their psionics to manipulate physical objects without sharing the nervous system of a corporeal host, but they had attempted to target the Naazh mentally instead, projecting illusions to confound their senses. One Spectre had succeeded in turning two of the Naazh against each other, making each believe the other was a New Human; only one of them had survived the fight, but not without injury. Another Spectre had telepathically persuaded a swarm of small local flying creatures, resembling oversized rhinoceros beetles with dragonfly wings, to converge around the Naazh’s hovercruisers by the thousands, blinding their pilots and forcing them to crash.
All in all, the battle was going slowly, but well. “But something’s still wrong,” he told Spock over his communicator. “The Naazh are taking heavy casualties, but they aren’t retreating. They’re digging in for a long siege. Why would they do that if they plan to blow apart this whole chunk of the planet with their satellite array? Why not just teleport away and cut their losses?”
“A good question, Admiral. Our progress at disabling the array has not been sufficient to require them to rely on their ground forces as their primary strategy. Indeed, they have succeeded in repairing or replacing two of the satellites, while we have only succeeded in taking out one more, and at this rate we may not have enough ships remaining to implement Commander Scott’s disruption field when the time comes.”
Kirk frowned. “We’ve seen the Naazh survive explosions before. But there’s no way they could withstand destruction of that magnitude, is there?”
“Given that the disruption would disassemble local bulk spacetime at a fundamental level, nothing possibly could,” Spock replied. “Jim … are you proposing that this is a suicide mission?”
Kirk shook his head, though only for his own benefit. “I don’t see fatalism in the Naazh’s attitudes. If anything, they’re enjoying this.” He shrugged. “And why would they even need to send more than thirty Naazh to fight us? There’s little we could’ve done against the satellites from down here. And it wouldn’t take this many to keep us busy. This is a wholesale extermination force—but that’s redundant if the Lords are planning to devastate the whole area with one shot from those satellites.”
Even as he laid out the problem, envisioning its facets in his mind, it all came together. “That’s it, Spock! Not a suicide—a sacrifice.”
“I see. You believe that the Lords intend to eliminate the majority of the Naazh along with the Spectre refugees and their hosts.”
“Of course,” Kirk replied bitterly. “They’re just tools to the Lords—inferior corporeal life-forms. Once they’ve served their purpose, naturally their masters would throw them away.”
“But the Naazh in the ships emplacing the satellites—”
“May not even have been told about the Naazh on the surface. The Lords may have another plan in mind for disposing of them.”
“Perhaps if we inform them of the Lords’ duplicity …”
“We could try, but I doubt they’d listen. The Lords have corrupted them, turned them savage and irrational. In my experience, people blinded by hate are the hardest ones to convince of anything, even when they don’t have aliens alteri
ng their minds from within. They’d never believe us.”
Spock was quiet for a moment. “There may be one person we have a chance to convince,” he said. “And if my suspicions are correct, she could offer us a way to reach the others.”
Twenty
U.S.S. Enterprise
T’Nalae crossed her arms and stared at Spock through the force field of her cell. “I don’t believe you.”
“Is it so unlikely that the Lords would dispose of their corporeal agents as ruthlessly as they have had you extinguish the sleepers’ hosts?” Spock countered.
“The ones you so benignly call ‘sleepers’ exploit their hosts as mere vessels. Our Lords gave us the choice, and they gave us the crystals and armor to protect us from the damage of a full merger.”
Spock peered at her. “Doctor McCoy’s examination of you following your capture showed evidence of accelerated aging and neurological deterioration. This is a consequence of having an active Spectre exerting its powers within you. Your crystal interface did not protect you from that.” As she absorbed that, he went on. “But it did protect the mental privacy of the Spectre Lord. Without a complete merging of minds, it would have been able to conceal its true intentions and goals from you.”
T’Nalae rallied her defiance. “I wasn’t the only one in that cargo bay with graying hair. Doctor Jones showed signs of the same deterioration.”
“Recently, yes. But not during the first forty-three years of her life. You met her when she came aboard last year, so you surely recall that, if anything, she looked young for a human of her age. How do you reconcile that with your Lord’s claim that her Spectre was actively influencing her throughout her lifetime?”
She shook her head. “You’re trying to deceive me.”
“I am pointing out a logical contradiction in your own stated knowledge and beliefs. If you refuse to acknowledge that contradiction, you only deceive yourself.”
The Higher Frontier Page 29
