STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book One

by John Vornholt

  Brahms closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry, Geordi—I don’t know why I’m so negative. Well, I do know why, but I’m trying hard not to deal with it.”

  “If you want to talk, I’ll listen. Or you could see our counselor.”

  “I’ve seen your counselor, and she has enough patients to last her a lifetime. Every day, we pick up more.”

  “We’re letting them off, too.” La Forge shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know what to tell you. The loss of a spouse ... that’s something I’ve never gone through. It must be awful.”

  “I didn’t love him anymore,” she said softly, as if admitting it for the first time.

  [244] “What?” asked Geordi hoarsely.

  “I mean, he was a huge part of my life—my husband, my colleague, my partner—but he felt more like a partner than a husband. And I think he was seeing somebody else.” Leah sighed and looked down. Now her short brown hair framed a face that had lost its cherubic innocence; it was an adult’s face full of character and experience.

  “He certainly had the opportunity,” she said with a disdainful laugh. “Because I let him go his own way whenever he wanted. I just didn’t care enough.”

  Geordi didn’t trust himself to say anything, or even make a sound, so he just nodded slowly. He wanted to take her hand and assure her that she never needed to lack for love as long as he was alive, but he wasn’t courageous or uncouth enough to do it.

  Leah sniffed and rubbed her nose. “Now that he’s gone, of course, I see all the good about Mikel. And the bad. I see my life for everything it was, and everything it wasn’t. I need to try harder at living—to balance myself with work. I can’t think of any other reason why I was spared.”

  Trembling, Geordi extended his hand and was about to reach for hers, when the door whooshed open. The old Klingon was instantly on his feet, brandishing a knife. “Who goes there?”

  It was Dolores Linton, dressed in work overalls. She stepped sheepishly into the lab and glanced warily at Maltz. “Hi, Leah. You asked me to come at noon?”

  Brahms dabbed a sleeve at her eyes and jumped to her feet. “Dolores! Thanks for coming. Is it that late already? I had forgotten what time it was.”

  “It happens.” The geologist shrugged cheerfully. “Hi there, Geordi. You still owe me—”

  “I know.” He waved helplessly at her. “I heard you were heroic on the lines in Persephone V.”

  She smiled. “I used to be a bouncer. That’s how I put myself through the academy.”

  [245] Brahms made the introductions. “Consul Maltz, this is Mission Specialist Linton. She’s on our side.”

  The Klingon nodded.

  Leah motioned Dolores over to the situation monitor and tapped her finger on the screen. “We’ve got a lot of geology data, but we’re not exactly sure what we’re looking at. In open air, the interphase generators should work against the wave, and I’m not sure how far either one of them extends into the ground. I don’t want it to come up through our feet and get us.”

  “Interphase generators?” asked Dolores.

  Geordi jumped to his feet. “We really should spend some time bringing Dolores up to speed on the plan.”

  Maltz laughed out loud, and everyone turned to look at the grizzled old Klingon. “What is to explain? Throw down some sneaky Romulan devices, and hope for the best! This is just the kind of reaction you would expect to get from the Federation.”

  “We’ve sent a task force to Seran,” said Geordi defensively.

  The Klingon waved derisively and sat down, having said his piece.

  Dolores Linton glanced around at the desultory expressions in the room and put her hands on her hips. “When was the last time any of you were out of this room?”

  “Um—” Leah shrugged and looked at Geordi, who also shrugged.

  “That’s too long,” insisted the geologist. “It’s lunchtime, and the ship is relatively clear of refugees. I say we talk over food.”

  “Good idea!” barked Maltz, headed for the door. “We need our strength to confront the enemy. Have you ever tried rokeg blood pie, Mission Specialist Linton?”

  “One of my favorites, Consul Maltz.” She stepped back to allow the lanky Klingon to exit first, and he seized the honor.

  “Oh, great,” muttered La Forge to himself, “a double date.”

  “Pardon me?” asked Brahms, moving toward the door.

  The engineer cleared his throat. “Nothing. I thought you were [246] getting somewhere ... talking about your feelings. Then we got interrupted.”

  “I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she answered. “Besides, this isn’t the right time to dwell on personal issues, is it?”

  “No,” said Geordi quietly. “I suppose not.”

  A padd in his hand, Captain Picard paced across his ready room, reading the reports from another world that had fallen, Sarona VIII. It could have been much worse. Although the Klingon fleet showed up with less than eight hours to spare, they had very efficiently saved four million lives, killing a few dozen rioters in the process. Unlike Starfleet’s rescue attempts, they reported no sites abandoned or overrun.

  “Maybe we’ve found the right party for that job,” Picard muttered to himself.

  His handheld device beeped, picking up an intraship transmission from the bridge. He glanced at the padd and saw that it was a coded message from Admiral Nechayev. It read simply:

  “We stand at Myrmidon. The Romulans will meet us there at fifteen-hundred hours. Need-to-know basis at present.”

  Picard nodded to himself, half-expecting this news. Myrmidon was moderately populous—almost fifty million—and it would be hit in about twenty-six hours according to their forecasts. That would be cutting it close, but wherever they tried to mount this operation, it would be cutting it close. This information was on a need-to-know security basis, and he knew someone who needed to know.

  He tapped his combadge. “Picard to Mot.”

  “Mot here!” said his favorite barber. “What can I do for you, Sir?”

  “Can you come up to my ready room for a moment?”

  “A trim, Sir? A shave?”

  “No, you don’t need to bring anything with you. It’s not business. [247] Picard out.” Mot was the unofficial head of the Bolian contingent on the ship, which hovered between ten and twenty in number at any given time. He had gone home at the height of the Dominion war, but he had come back to the Enterprise a year ago to reestablish his business.

  The blue-skinned humanoids with the bifurcated ridge in the center of their faces were some of the most personable, loyal, and competent members of his crew. Picard would gladly take more Bolians aboard the Enterprise, if he could find them.

  Myrmidon was a good choice. Although not the Bolians’ ancestral homeworld, it was declared their spiritual home five hundred years ago—after an ancient artifact, the Crown of the First Mother, was discovered there. A former paramour of his, Vash, had tried to steal the relic, so Picard knew all about it.

  The Crown of the First Mother bore a striking resemblance to the royal jewelry depicted in the Orezes Codices, the Bolians’ most sacred text. Its location and rediscovery also fit in with the origin stories and predictions. After numerous archeological expeditions to Myrmidon, the Bolians found they had much in common with a long-dead race who used to inhabit the planet, the Bolastre. There were intriguing indications of a common ancestor.

  Although the artifact was never proven definitively to be related to the Bolians, they were very happy to accept Myrmidon as their main religious shrine. It was a beautiful planet, by all accounts, and Bolians had relocated there in record numbers until now there were almost fifty million inhabitants. It was all about to tumble down—sacred archeological sites and modern cities alike. He only hoped their new plans wouldn’t result in a worse disaster than they had already witnessed.

  His door chimed, jarring him out of his worries. “Come.”

  Mot bustled in, and he was his usual jo
vial self in the face of what must be considerable personal anguish. The portly Bolian snapped to attention. “Good afternoon, Captain. Mot reporting.”

  [248] The captain put his hand on the blue-skinned barber’s shoulder and said, “You haven’t asked for any favors, Mr. Mot, but I know you must be thinking about Myrmidon. You have family there, don’t you?”

  The smile vanished, and the barber gulped. “Yes. My parents, in fact. Almost all of us on board have relatives there. We have big families.”

  Picard nodded sympathetically. “Keep this under your hat, Mr. Mot, but Myrmidon is where we’re making a stand. We’re going to try the phase-shifting plan there.”

  The barber put his hands together in applause. “Oh, thank you, Sir! Thank you!”

  “Don’t thank me, thank Admiral Nechayev. But we’re keeping this on a need-to-know basis for the time being. I think all the Bolians on the ship need to know.”

  “I agree,” said Mot with relief. “But why the secrecy?”

  Picard leaned forward, his voice low. “I’m not the admiral, but I know she’s concerned about how some of the past evacuations have gotten out of hand. We don’t want to raise anyone’s hopes, because there may be extenuating circumstances. We might not be able to pull it off. As soon as possible, we’ll alert the populace and the rest of the crew.”

  Mot nodded thoughtfully and cast his eyes downward, increasing his double chins. “Thank you, Captain, for telling me. However, I should warn you—my people believe strongly in assisted suicide.”

  “Yes, the double-effect doctrine. I’m familiar with it.” The captain frowned deeply, not having considered this complication. That was all they needed—mass suicides—as they were trying desperately to save lives.

  “Any act that relieves suffering is acceptable, even if that act has the effect of causing death,” said Mot. “The philosophy and history behind it are very complicated, but that’s the kernel of it. We’re a very religious species.”

  [249] “Understood,” said the captain somberly. “I may need your help to convince your people that the Genesis Wave is a swift way to die, with very little suffering. So even if things go wrong—”

  “Is that true?” asked the Bolian.

  “It’s definitely swift,” answered Picard with a pained expression. “Your remains become fused with the surrounding earth. There’s no way we can measure the suffering, but if you knew it was coming—”

  “Count on me, Captain,” said Mot, sucking in his stomach and sticking out his chest. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Okay, Geordi, let’s do it again with the same modulation,” ordered Leah Brahms. “But see if you can get everything lined up this time.”

  She peered through a shaded, triple-paned window into the dimness of the test chamber, where La Forge was tending the equipment. He wore goggles and a lightweight environmental suit, although force-fields were supposed to offer protection, too. The shielded chamber was about ten meters long, which was big enough for their immediate purposes. Once they reached Myrmidon and got their hands on the large generators, they could test their plan under the real conditions.

  This experiment was simple but crucial. They were shooting a narrow beam of protomatter at a beaker full of organic material, which was protected by the tiny interphase generator pulled from Leah’s radiation suit. She wanted to see exactly how the Genesis Wave, as represented by the beam, managed to “miss” the material. With each variation of the test, Geordi changed the modulation of the interphase generator, trying to find the perfect setting. The generator had originally been optimized to avoid fatal varieties of common radiation found in an engine room. It had worked against the Genesis Wave, but there was room to tweak it.

  It was Geordi’s job to set up the various components of the [250] experiment—the beaker, target, generator, and beam emitter. Each time, he dutifully lined them up along a guide beam that represented the stream of protomatter, but he wasn’t doing a very good job. Occasionally the protomatter beam missed by enough to throw off the results. The beams were always absorbed harmlessly into a damping field at the other end of the chamber, but it was time-consuming to keep running the experiment over and over again.

  “I swear,” said Geordi, his voice going over the comlink, “something keeps bending those beams each time.”

  “What?” asked Brahms. “The beam can’t be affected until it gets in range of the phase-shifting. Look, I know we’re all tired, and it’s hard to keep doing this—but we’ve got to bear down.”

  “I am bearing down,” murmured La Forge helplessly. He snapped his fingers, or at least tried to in the bulky suit. “Maybe it’s the force-fields. I should turn them off for one test, and see if it’s any better.”

  “Then you’ll have to get out of there each time,” said Brahms with an impatient sigh. “It will slow us down even more.”

  “Humor me,” insisted Geordi. He rechecked all his calculations and ran his ocular implants along the guide beam. When he was satisfied that everything was in readiness, he shuffled out of the test chamber and quickly sealed the hatch.

  “See, it only took me a few seconds to get out,” he said, panting. La Forge stepped in front of Brahms, taking over the control panel and making a slight adjustment. “Okay, force-fields off.”

  “Computer,” said Brahms, “log test one-hundred-thirty-seven.” She pushed a panel, and there was a bright flash and a clicking sound, which quickly subsided.

  She bent over her readouts. “Hey, not bad. Right on target. Maybe we can make an engineer out of you yet, La Forge.”

  “Thanks,” he replied with a weary smile. Geordi was about to say something else, when his combadge chirped, sending the thought scurrying from his mind.

  [251] “Bridge to La Forge,” came the captain’s voice.

  The engineer quickly pulled off his helmet. “La Forge here.”

  “We’ve just entered orbit around Myrmidon,” said the captain. “And the Romulans and Klingons are already here. I’d like to have yourself, Dr. Brahms, and Consul Maltz as part of the greeting committee. To answer questions.”

  “Yes, Sir,” answered La Forge, looking sheepishly at Dolores Linton, who had taken over the situation monitor. The geologist shrugged, as if to say she would keep on working.

  “We’re not going to have much time to make ourselves presentable,” said Geordi.

  “This isn’t a reception—it’s a briefing session. I’ll come by to get you. Picard out.”

  “Now it gets interesting,” said a gravelly voice. La Forge turned to see Maltz grinning as he ran a sharpening stone over the long center blade of his three-bladed knife. Then he stuck the d’k tahg in its sheath and straightened his gleaming sash. The old Klingon looked better prepared for this meeting than the rest of them, because he’d had the presence of mind to get new clothes from a replicator.

  “Let’s get it over with,” said Leah Brahms, leading the way out the door.

  twenty-two

  Captain Picard led his considerable entourage into the Saucer Lounge on the Enterprise, the only room big enough to handle the surprising crush of people. The lounge was the observation deck at the widest part of the Saucer Module. It had a broad expanse of windows, showing endless space on the starboard side and a beautiful yellow-green planet on the port view. Myrmidon was a planet with large continents and vast webs of rivers and deltas. One emerald river snaked around most of the planet at its equator—that was the Mother Vein, according to their charts.

  This gathering looked suspiciously like a reception, thought the captain, instead of the briefing he had envisioned. There was a large contingent of Klingons—a dozen or so—who were busy raiding the food and drink. At least that many Romulans stood in haughty isolation, reading handheld devices and conversing in low tones among themselves. There were also plenty of Starfleet officers and local Bolian dignitaries, not to mention the servers. To Picard’s observant eye, the beefy young servers looked like security personnel, ready for a s
cuffle to break out. Admiral Nechayev was nowhere to be seen.

  [253] Oh, well, he supposed they all had to get acquainted, providing they did it quickly. Right now, the room was big enough that the various groups could ignore each other, except for the blue-skinned Bolians, who were eagerly making friends wherever they could. The captain looked back at his party to make sure they were accounted for. There was Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, Commander La Forge, Dr. Leah Brahms, Consul Maltz, and Mr. Mot, the barber.

  The only one who even seemed remotely glad to be here was the old Klingon, who bounded in front of the captain. “I am taking my leave, Sir, to report in. I may be reassigned, but I would like to stay aboard your vessel until that happens.” He glanced pointedly at Leah Brahms.

  “Certainly, Consul, you’re always welcome.”

  The Klingon strode off, waving his hands as if he were greeting old friends, although his fellow Klingons regarded him warily. Maltz paid them no mind as he began to introduce himself in loud tones.

  Riker grinned. “Captain, I think I know one of those Klingons. Can I go over?”

  “Go ahead, Number One.” He turned to his staff. “All of you, feel free to mingle.”

  “I’ll just see how my people are holding up,” said Mr. Mot, puffing out his chest bravely.

  “Captain Picard!” called a stern male voice.

  The captain whirled around, expecting to see an admiral with some complaint to air. Instead he saw the regal gray uniform of a Romulan commander, topped by a craggy face etched with cruelty but also honor and intelligence. It was Commander Tomalak, an old adversary from numerous encounters, none of which had proven fatal. He was accompanied by a much younger commander—a tall, thin, cadaverous sort.

  “What is going on here, Picard?” asked Tomalak. “Can’t you people be trusted with your own toys?”

  The captain scowled and lowered his voice. “Believe me, I never [254] believed in Project Genesis until now. Our intentions were good, but we failed to foresee the consequences.”