The wind died down at last, and the fairy lights went out altogether. Two lost children slept chastely in each other’s arms, their breathing slow and synchronous, punctuated only by the silence of the tricorders placed now outside the shelter, set to recognize hostile plant life, and the static from Saavik’s open communicator, still awaiting a signal that meant their ship had returned.
With the dawn, they were not alone.
Eight
Was it the sound or the touch that woke her? Thinking about it later, she realized it was neither, for while both occurred simultaneously, the sound was lost beneath the sound of Mikal’s breathing, not a snore exactly but the deep rhythmic sound of someone at peace after a long day’s labor and a long night of the soul. The touch was gentle, velvety, slightly cooler than the surrounding atmosphere, slightly moist, inquisitive. Not strictly the touch of an appendage or that of a snout, it was both and neither. It also seemed to breathe somehow, as if more than nerve endings were engaged in its exploratory process. Through all of this, it simultaneously asked a question in her mind.
Who—?
I am called Saavik, she replied before she had even opened her eyes, then added, Saavik— why did she hesitate?—of Vulcan.
Even as she thought it, she wondered, Was she? No longer Saavik of Hellguard, and not only because Hellguard no longer existed. Saavik of Romulus? Never! But even as Vulcan held her at arms’ length, had she not done the same?
Pay attention! You’ve been asked a question by another telepath. This is no time for obfuscation!
And your companion? the mind at the other end of the touch asked. He cannot speak?
Saavik opened her eyes then to see a great wall of mucoid being looming over her, the very tip of its blind snout still caressing her face, ever so gently despite the size of the being it belonged to, precisely at the temple, one of the contact points of mind-meld. Coincidence, or had it somehow known? Slowly, carefully (Do not alarm the being, though it is twice your size … even as she thought it she could hear the laughter and realized it understood everything), she eased herself out of the sleeping bag and into a sitting position.
He does not speak as we do, she thought to it.
Orienting herself, she could see that there were several of them, four, to be precise, two smaller ones hanging back a bit, another of the larger ones touching Mikal’s face in the same way. Then, as he continued to slumber unaware, one languid tattooed hand brushing vaguely at his face as if something tickled him, the being withdrew its touch as if disappointed and joined its companion in studying her.
All four beings were balanced on the lower third of their bodies, bending at the clitellum—the smooth, thickened portion of their otherwise ridged bodies—just as they’d appeared in the live feeds from their cities that the crew of Chaffee couldn’t get enough of, forming a kind of S-curve or question mark nearly two meters tall, studying the two interlopers.
We mean you no harm, Saavik thought. Our intent was to study your world without disturbing you. We did not know your kind ventured this far from your cities.
Again there was that chuckle in her mind. We surmised you meant us no harm even before we touched your mind. You could not know we come here whenever the universe aligns itself in this configuration.
“If I understand you correctly,” Saavik said aloud, seeing Mikal stir and hoping he would hear her voice before he saw the Deemanot and did … what? He was Mikal first and a scientist second, and while the latter would remain calm in order to study the phenomenon before him, the former might do something impulsive. “You visit this place at a certain time and season?”
We are the forerunners, the being said. We come to assess, before the others …
Before Saavik could ask what that meant, the caress was withdrawn, and with it the being’s mind. All four visitors lowered themselves to the ground and, in a movement quite rapid for beings of their size, began to slither away. Their movement was all but silent, yet the sheer weight of the two larger ones caused a mild tremor that faded along the ground once they were out of sight.
Saavik scrambled to her feet, seeing that a low-lying mist had arisen during the night, obscuring the forest around them and swallowing up the visitors, though traces of the mucus that protected their otherwise vulnerable bodies formed trails in the soft moss. Her impulse was to follow them, but her tricorder indicated they had split off in four directions, moving so quickly that she might barely catch up with one of them at a run.
Suddenly they stopped registering on the tricorder altogether. Only the mucous trails and the readings she had saved proved that they had been there at all. The mist, meanwhile, hid everything beyond the clearing where she stood.
“So I didn’t dream it,” came Mikal’s voice behind her as he struggled out of the sleeping bag, rubbing his face briskly to wake himself up. “Do you realize what this means, Saavik? They were here!” His voice was as excited as a child’s. “They approached us. That means we’re free to reciprocate.”
“It means,” she said carefully, scanning for tunnels that might explain the Deemanots’ arrival but finding none, “that we will report their appearance to Captain Mironova, who will consult with Starfleet Command—”
“—and turn a simple first contact into a bureaucratic horror show.” He gestured it away, too excited about the encounter to concern himself just yet with what might happen next. “No, oh, no! We’re not letting them spoil this for us. We—”
“Mikal—!”
For a moment she wondered if he intended to go after them, barefoot and befuddled—his sandals had somehow found their way under the sleeping bags, and he could locate only one—but the sharpness of her tone slapped some sense into him.
“I … I …” He stopped, clapped his hands to his brow in amazement, his eyes wide. “They were here. They spoke to you. What was it like?”
She described it to him as best she could, finding words inadequate to encompass what happened when two very different telepathic species interacted for the first time, even on as light a level as the Deemanot had communicated with her.
“They’re telepaths, then? Of course, they’d have to be.”
“It is logical. It explains how they were able to overcome such a simple body habitus in order to develop a complex culture.”
“I envy you,” he said, then quickly amended his words. “I mean, I envy any telepath. When I think of how much is often lost in translation between species who can communicate with only the spoken word …”
Indeed, she thought, mindful of the many words that had passed between them the night before, leading now to a kind of awkwardness neither wanted to address. Where before their relationship had been adversarial, as much an opposition of personalities as of research styles—Saavik saw now why Mironova was so eager to have them work together, point and counterpoint—it was now an indefinable dance of elliptical phrases punctuated by nervous silences.
Why did I tell you all of that last night? Mikal wondered, studying Saavik with renewed appreciation even as he finally located his missing sandal. Ordinarily a graceful man, flamboyant of gesture but always calculatedly so, he suddenly didn’t know where to put himself. Was I only trying to distract you, keep you from pulling the knife again? Or did I really mean to comfort you?
I only wanted to comfort you! Saavik found that thought disturbing. She kept her back to Mikal as she focused with inordinate concentration, even for a Vulcan, on her tricorder readings, trying to ascertain whether the Deemanot had tunneled here or traveled over ground, and from where? Something about them, possibly the slime, confused the tricorder, which would have to be recalibrated against … well, what, exactly, since they didn’t have a Deemanot to compare against? I have never voluntarily told anyone my story until now. Even Amanda had to draw it out of me, based on what Spock told her, over the course of years. What made me decide to trust you? Why you?
Why you? Mikal was refolding the sleeping bags, fiddling with comm, though truth be told
he half hoped the ship would never come back for them. It’s not as if I haven’t bared my soul to women before, but the results have been universally disastrous. In fact, it’s the quickest way to drive most of them away, and it’s not as if I haven’t used it for just that reason, but the last thing I want to do is drive you away …
It is essential that we comport ourselves as professional colleagues and nothing more, Saavik told herself, not believing it for a minute, but I am uncertain of the proper course of action now …
I’ve never been at such a loss before, Mikal thought, wanting to reach out to her where she stood in the clearing, the mist dissipating now, only a few tendrils coiling about her ankles, rendering her more elfin than ever. He gestured helplessly, the words caught in his throat, grateful there was no one else here to see him behaving this way. I’m not used to not knowing what to do …
Their thoughts flew past each other; the silence remained. When it became unbearable, Mikal cleared his throat.
“What was it they said to you again? ‘We are the forerunners.’ The forerunners for what?”
“Or whom?” Saavik turned toward him at last, though still unable to meet his eyes, grateful for the distraction from the distraction of what she was feeling. It was past time to get back to work. “I do not know. I am more concerned with how they got here. Their nearest metropolis is over one thousand kilometers away, and I find no evidence of tunneling.”
“We can ask them when they return, or send these ‘others’ in their place,” Mikal decided, thinking out loud. “And I intend to stay right here until they do.”
“Captain Mironova may decide otherwise.”
“Then there’s no need to tell her just yet, is there?”
“Tell me what?” Mironova’s voice issued crisply from Saavik’s communicator, left on an open frequency all night. “Anyway, belay that for now. We’ve finally got a fix on you. Stand by to beam up …”
Tolek sat at his desk in the adjudicator’s office, wondering how long it would be before his activities were detected. He had just enough skill to decode T’Saan’s messages and return them on a carrier wave below standard frequencies, but so did most of Vulcan. Sooner or later, someone would wonder why he spent more time than even the most dedicated subaltern working at odd hours, particularly since his output was no better than anyone else’s. Only the fact that no one would have
reason to suspect him of any clandestine activity had protected him thus far. Not for the first time, he recognized how truly unsuitable he was for this sort of thing and wished there were some way out.
“Status ch’kariya?” T’Saan’s first message asked. Translation: “Have you heard from Saavik?”
A ch’kariya was a small burrowing mammal. Some V’Shar functionary had thought it a suitable code name for someone silently searching Starfleet’s files, though Tolek found it as ludicrous as much of the rest of this operation. His own assigned name was aylak, a flat, mud-colored reptile adept at camouflage. Also inapt, he thought, since it seemed to him he was acting in plain sight and vulnerable to being caught at any moment.
“No response,” Tolek replied to T’Saan’s query. “Migrated out of range.”
Translation: “Subspace messages take too long; we’re communicating with data squirts only, and there haven’t been any for several days. She is doing fieldwork on a distant world, remember?”
T’Saan’s comeback was almost immediate. “Unacceptable. Communicate to ch’kariya that habitat is about to be … endangered.”
What in the Elements was that supposed to mean? Tolek was sweating. Several strings of numerical code followed, giving him precise instructions for what to do next. Before he could even begin to decipher them, much less object to his new orders, T’Saan had not only severed the connection at her end but also rerouted her server, rendering her unreachable until such time as she chose to contact him again.
Helpless, furious, Tolek clenched his fists to keep from pounding something; only the throbbing in his damaged hand made him stop. He hadn’t thought it was possible to hate anyone more than the creature who’d damaged that hand, but in the case of the V’Shar, T’Saan in particular, and his own role in this charade, he might be willing to make an exception.
Even through the ion storm’s interference, the crew had seen the unsettling phenomena occurring on the ground, apparently the result of tiny “rips in the fabric of space,” as Captain Mironova would describe them in her log. Plants, trees, even rock formations had begun to vanish; some reappeared after a few moments but in different locales, others disappeared entirely, with new varieties appearing in their stead. All of this activity occurred in a circle around a central locus—the clearing where Saavik and Mikal had last been located. Nothing in the clearing, or for a radius of not quite three kilometers, had been disturbed.
“Until the storm cleared, we half wondered if those rips hadn’t snatched one or both of you.” Mironova wasn’t even pretending to keep the concern out of her voice once the two of them were safely on the bridge. “Ensign Graana, bring them up to speed.”
Graana had been filling in for Saavik at the science station. “A lot’s been happening in your absence, Lieutenant. Some of the material being moved around started showing the same peculiar outputs that the long-range scans showed initially. The same readings as the portulaca did initially.”
“Initially?” Mikal asked.
“Died in the lab,” Mironova explained, “the best horticultural technology known to Starfleet notwith—”
An alarm went off somewhere.
“Captain!” helm interjected, sounding more than a little alarmed. “More turbulence at seventy-mark-four and two-oh-three-mark-seven.”
“Dammit! Back us out of here,” Mironova ordered, locking the restraints on the center seat. “Give us some distance until we figure out what this is!”
Chaffee reversed engines and retreated to a safe distance. Spectral analysis revealed that the Deema system was passing through what appeared to be small interspatial black holes too unstable to trace to a point of origin.
“Can we seal them off?” Mironova asked.
“Affirmative, sir,” Saavik reported, having relieved Graana at the science station.
With every seat on the bridge taken, Mikal stood uselessly between comm and the science station, feeling left out of the conversation. “Galina, you might not want to—”
“Not now, Mikal! Do it, science officer!”
“Those rips are almost definitely the source of everything that’s popping up on the surface!” Mikal watched helplessly, throwing up his hands in disgust. “They could lead anywhere!”
“Exactly right!” Mironova snapped. “A large enough one could grab hold of us and drag us anywhere. Not in the mood to take that chance just now, thank you.”
“Rips contained and sealed off, Captain,” Saavik reported after a few tense moments.
All she had done was follow orders. Where was this hypothetical leadership quality Spock insisted she possessed?
“For all you know, you’ve just shut us off from another quadrant, maybe another galaxy!” Mikal raged.
“Mikal, do shut up. For all we know, we arrived in the nick of time to keep those rifts from endangering the inhabitants.”
“They could also be a normal, maybe even essential, part of their environment!” he shot back.
Mironova rotated her chair in his direction.
“And now that we’ve sealed them off,” she said very calmly, enunciating each word precisely, “we have ample time to study them while we notify Starfleet Command and await further instructions. As for you, you can either stop flapping your arms and shouting and participate in that study, or get the hell off my bridge. But before you do either, you can tell me what you found downplanet that Saavik wanted to share with me and you didn’t.”
They followed Mironova into the ready room, and she heard them out.
“They found us, Galina,” Mikal insisted. “Both Federation law a
nd Starfleet regs state that that constitutes a valid reason to reciprocate. You know I’m right.”
Mironova deferred to Saavik. “Science officer?”
“No doubt the Deemanot are discussing us even as we are discussing them,” she said carefully. “They did not seem surprised by our presence. In fact, they seemed almost to have been expecting us.”
“All the more reason—” Mikal began, but Saavik was not finished.
“There is no immediate danger to the Deemanot from either of the empires or any of the other … usual suspects, and we will not know without further study whether or not these rifts pose a danger. Therefore I see no harm in awaiting Starfleet’s assessment while we continue the study we came here for.”
Mikal threw up his hands in disgust, muttering, “Who’s side are you on, anyway?”
Naturally she heard him. “The side of science, obviously.”
Mironova had been enjoying the show. She’d already made her decision, anyway. “Your team still has one more biome to study. If we’re all very lucky, Starfleet will have gotten back to us by the time you’re done. Dismissed.”
“No tunnels.” Mikal slapped his tricorder shut a little more forcefully than necessary. “And no anomalies, either. Just sand and shale, cactus and creosote. Two of us can cover this biome all by ourselves. We don’t even need the rest of the team.”
“The better to prolong our study in the hope that either Starfleet or the Deemanot will intervene before we have completed it,” Saavik suggested, more than a little irritably. There had been another communiqué from Tolek awaiting her the night before.
“Two more, in the same manner. What little I could glean from the documents available follows. Thank the Elements you are far removed from whoever is doing this, but I am now more apprehensive than ever. If there is anything, anything you can do …”
Was there any remnant of the courageous boy who had defended her under far more dire circumstances in this desperate and illogical adult? What more did he expect her to do?
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 12
