STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered

by Michael A. Martin

  Sulu saw the emotion in Chekov’s eyes, no doubt brought upon him by the memories of what he personally had endured at Khan’s hands, and the certainty of the greater horrors that had been only narrowly averted all those [197] years ago. Sulu’s anger suddenly fled as he reminded himself that his old friend understood responsibility and guilt very well indeed.

  Sulu took his seat again, emotionally deflated. “What do you think I should do, Pavel?” he said, keenly aware of the enormous responsibilities that both he and his old friend now shouldered. Unlike those long-ago days when they’d served literally side by side aboard the Enterprise, no senior officers were behind them, ready to make the hard decisions. Whatever was to come next, success or failure, plaudits or blame, life or death, depended on them.

  On me, Sulu thought, feeling desolate inside.

  Chekov’s anger appeared to soften as well, and a reassuring smile replaced his scowl. “You see the Neyel as sundered members of the human family, so you feel responsible for what they do, and for whatever happens to them. It’s understandable that you might think you owe them something. Save them if you can.”

  Sulu nodded. “That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  “I know, Hikaru. But just remember that taking responsibility for a family member sometimes means having to decide against them when they go astray.”

  Then Chekov turned and exited, leaving Sulu alone to wrestle with his conscience.

  Chapter 16

  “Watch out for the tail!” Akaar shouted.

  Boyer managed to roll to the side just ahead of the angry whipcrack of the Neyel’s rear appendage. Rogers, who was a split-second slower, went sprawling across the corridor, where he lay unconscious beside his phaser.

  Akaar leveled his own weapon at the creature’s midsection and fired. The Neyel recoiled slightly, but continued running away down the corridor and straight into an open Jefferies tube. Though the tube was extremely narrow by Capellan standards, Akaar threw himself into the upward-sloping crawl space without hesitation. Glancing upward, he saw the Neyel’s tail disappear around a corner as the creature hastened away.

  Still following, Akaar pulled out his communicator. “Akaar to Gold Team. Fugitive has gone to ground in Jefferies Tube Eight-Eleven on deck Twelve, just beneath the port-side impulse engine housing. I am right behind him. Seal off sections K and L, and you will corner him.”

  “Acknowledged, Lieutenant,” said Ensign Cahill, one of the security officers Akaar had assigned to the Gold Team.

  Pocketing the communicator, Akaar clambered quickly upward, following the Neyel. Around the corner, the well-illuminated Jefferies tube leveled out and widened. Power relays and EPS conduits ran behind metal grillworks set [199] along the floor, walls, and ceiling. Though the space was now considerably wider than the tube’s entryway, Akaar still had to stoop to avoid smacking his head on the ceiling.

  Moving forward, he looked up and saw that a meter-wide section of the overhead grating had been pulled aside. The Neyel was obviously trying to slip out undetected, possibly by doubling back the way it had come, only this time concealing itself by crawling along the top of the ceiling grate.

  Something clanked behind Akaar, and he turned toward the sound, phaser at the ready. No one was visible.

  An object struck him in the back, hard and painfully. Akaar stumbled forward, his head bouncing off the grillwork of one of the walls. His massive body landed on the floor, and he found himself without enough room to reorient himself. His phaser skittered away, falling through a gap in a deck grating. Akaar turned his head and saw the snarling Neyel advancing on him. It shouted something that he thought he almost recognized.

  Then a phaser beam sliced the air, striking the Neyel full in the chest and filling the air in the cramped chamber with the acrid stench of ozone. The creature jumped back a meter before it came to rest on the floor and lay still, a smoking scorch-mark inscribed diagonally across its rough gray thorax. Akaar turned his head toward the origin-point of the beam.

  Lojur stood in the Jefferies tube, a phaser clenched in his bone-white fingers. He must have picked up the weapon Rogers dropped, Akaar realized.

  With considerable effort, Akaar pushed himself into a crouch and slowly regained his feet. With a brief sidelong glance, he verified that the Neyel remained immobile. However, a slight oscillation of its chest revealed that the creature was still alive. That is a relief, Akaar thought. The captain needs him interrogated, not executed.

  “I saw what happened when you fired on it,” Lojur said. “Heavy stun didn’t even slow it down. It seems to take the [200] kill setting just to knock it unconscious. And that makes me think that the disrupt or dematerialize settings should be able to send this horror back to whatever hell it crawled out of.”

  Akaar looked into Lojur’s eyes, which remained fixed on the insensate Neyel. The Halkan’s face was a study in pain and grief, bordering on madness.

  “Lojur, what you are doing mocks everything your world stands for. You cannot take part in such an act.”

  Lojur laughed, an unpleasant sound in Akaar’s ears. “I already did ‘take part’ during the battle, didn’t I?”

  “That is different. You and everyone else who manned a battle station acted to save the ship, as well as the lives of the people the Neyel were attacking. What you are contemplating now is vengeance.”

  “The Elders of my village never appreciated such fine distinctions, L.J.” Lojur raised his weapon. “Maybe they were right about me all along.”

  “Please, Commander,” Akaar said, extending a large hand. “Give me the phaser.”

  “I will, L.J. After I’m finished with it.” With a flick of his thumb, Lojur changed the setting on the weapon. Akaar could see from the weapon’s flashing red telltale light that he’d turned it all the way up to its maximum energy output.

  “The captain wants to question this creature,” Akaar said, keeping his deep, voice level and calm. “If you fire that weapon, you will vaporize him.”

  “That’s the idea, L.J. He’s part of what took Shandra from me. And for that, he’s going to die.” Lojur’s hand trembled noticeably.

  Akaar walked slowly toward his friend. His large frame made him impossible for the weapon to miss should Lojur attempt to make good his threat.

  “Stop right there, L.J. That’s an order.”

  Akaar paused, then continued moving forward slowly. [201] “No, Lojur. You cannot pull rank on me when I am acting on the captain’s direct orders.”

  “I’m going to rid us of that thing.” Lojur’s voice sounded brittle, like a rotten tree limb about to snap in a stiff wind.

  “Then you will have to kill me, too.” Akaar continued his advance, slowly but relentlessly. He recalled the stories his mother had told him of his late father’s killer and first successor, Maab, who had also once challenged a phaser-wielding man. That man, a treacherous Klingon soldier named Kras, had burned Maab down where he stood. Akaar felt that to show less courage than the usurper Maab would dishonor his father’s memory.

  Lojur’s hand and voice both shook visibly. But the phaser remained aloft and deadly. “I don’t want to hurt you, L.J. I don’t—”

  “Neither my birthworld nor yours are Federation members as yet,” Akaar said as he came to a stop less than a meter from his friend. “Capella remains unready to enter the fold largely because of vendettas such as this. Your people, however, do not wish to join because they cannot condone the Federation’s willingness to defend its interests.” He paused and smiled before continuing. “I think our respective peoples would agree that we have both assimilated very well to this culture’s extremes of war and peace.”

  The quaking in Lojur’s gun-hand grew steadily more pronounced. “Stop trying to save this ... monster.”

  “Except for my duty to follow the captain’s orders, this creature’s existence is incidental to me,” Akaar said, shaking his head. “The only one I am trying to save right now is you. What would Commander Cheko
v say if he could see you now? Or Shandra? Look me in the eye and tell me that she would have wanted this.”

  Tears streaming down his face, Lojur lowered his arm and allowed his fingers to go limp. The phaser clattered to the floor grating, and the grief-stricken Halkan collapsed [202] sobbing into Akaar’s arms. The Gold Team arrived a few moments later and prepared to bring the unconscious Neyel to a security cell, where members of the medical staff had already been summoned to see to his injuries.

  After informing his people that Lojur had been knocked unconscious by the alien, Akaar gently carried his traumatized friend to sickbay.

  “Apparently, our genes aren’t the only things we share with our tough-skinned friend here,” Lieutenant Hopman said, turning away from the shimmering blue forcefield that prevented the agitated Neyel from leaving the security cell.

  “Explain,” Sulu said, flanked by Hopman, Commander Rand, and Ambassador Burgess. He stepped away from them, toward the barrier, and studied the creature, which in turn regarded him. The Neyel, which wore a heavy, sashlike bandage diagonally across its chest, seemed to be utterly without emotion and looked almost completely inhuman. The sole exception was its eyes. Sulu hoped those eyes might provide a window to a soul not terribly unlike his own.

  “His speech appears to be based on one of Federation Standard’s root languages,” Hopman said. “But that’s hard to see until you get past the strange syntax, the extreme vowel drift, and all the highly unusual constructions. The changes are so radical, in fact, that it’s no surprise that the universal translator had trouble parsing it. Working backward along the common linguistic tree, I’d venture a guess that their ancestral primary language has absorbed at least two centuries of cultural isolation and memetic drift. So now it’s about as different from Standard as, say, Basque is from Spanish.”

  Rand, who was standing at Sulu’s side, looked impressed. “You figured all of that out just by conversing with our ... guest?”

  “No, unfortunately,” Hopman said. “The recordings of our earlier interactions with the Neyel ship’s commander [203] were actually far more helpful. Our guest is only just now becoming talkative.”

  “Maybe he’s starting to realize that he’s out of options unless he voluntarily talks to us,” Rand said, nodding. “He may have decided to cooperate, at least a little.”

  “Let’s find out,” Sulu said, motioning to the two security officers who flanked the brig entrance. One of them lowered the cell’s forcefields, while the other kept his phaser trained on the prisoner.

  Good thing Pavel’s up on the bridge, Sulu thought. He’d have fribbles if he saw this. Then he stepped into the spacious cell, followed by Rand, Burgess, Hopman, and a single phaser-carrying guard.

  The Neyel remained crouched in a corner, from which he regarded Sulu with obvious suspicion. However, the creature’s tail was coiled limply at its side, convincing Sulu that it wasn’t preparing to attack. Trying to appear both nonaggressive and confident, Sulu moved to within a meter of the Neyel. Though it was sitting on the floor, the tall being scarcely had to look up to meet Sulu’s gaze.

  “My name is Hikaru Sulu, commander of the U.S.S. Excelsior.”

  The Neyel hesitated for a moment, as though trying to decide just how much or how little to say. “My clade-given desig is Jerdahn,” it finally said in sepulchral tones. Sulu wondered if exposure to vacuum had damaged the creature’s ability to speak.

  “Welcome aboard, Jerdahn,” Sulu said. “You are my guest.”

  Jerdahn snorted in apparent derision. “Usually do you shoot and cage your guests, Hikarusulu?”

  Sulu spread his hands. “Please forgive us. Before you woke up in our sickbay, we thought you were dead.”

  “Neyel are not so easy to kill,” Jerdahn said, chortling and exposing two even rows of white, quite human-looking teeth.

  Burgess stepped forward, the security guard hovering at [204] her side. “I’m Aidan Burgess, a special envoy from the United Federation of Planets. We’re relieved to see that you survived being blown out of your ship, Jerdahn.”

  “Hah. I was blown out into space because of your weapons.”

  “You were attacking innocent Tholian civilians,” Sulu said. “Not to mention firing on us. We couldn’t permit either action to continue.”

  “You acted to protect your allies. The crystalline Devils.”

  Here we go again, Sulu thought, barely resisting an urge to roll his eyes. “The Tholians—the ‘Devils’—think you’re our allies, Jerdahn. Soon, they’ll try to kill us all if we can’t persuade them that they’re wrong about that.”

  “We are neutral parties in whatever dispute exists between your people and the Tholian Assembly,” Burgess said. “We favor neither you nor the Tholians.”

  “Yet you attacked us,” Jerdahn said. “You killed many of us.”

  Sulu shook his head. “We acted to preserve as many lives as possible. Both Neyel and Tholian lives.”

  “The Devils’ lives are not for preserving. Even the greatest Neyel minds understand that these creatures cannot be reasoned with. They are a scourge, fit only for eradication.”

  Sulu shuddered inwardly, as though he’d glimpsed a ravening monster leering back at him from his shaving mirror. This is my cousin?

  Burgess answered the Neyel with a wolfen grin of her own. “There was a time when my people thought the same thing, about many races in the galaxy. We’ve been proved wrong. Many times.”

  “If you’ve spoken truly to me,” Jerdahn said, “then the Devils intend to prove that my people have judged them aright.”

  “For the moment, we seem to share a common adversary,” Burgess conceded.

  Sulu reflected that Excelsior’s human crew members had [205] a great deal more than Yilskene’s enmity in common with the Neyel.

  Neyel. Something about the name sounded familiar. Sulu tried to recall what it was, but failed to retrieve it. Neyel.

  “You seem to need my trust,” Jerdahn said, his thick eyelids narrowing his gaze to twin slits. “But I will be a challenging winover while I remain caged. And while your soldier stands here, ready to burn my hide again.”

  Burgess nodded. “You’re right, Jerdahn.” Turning to Sulu, she said, “I want everyone out of this cell except for you, me, and Jerdahn.”

  Hopman, Rand, and the security guard looked toward Sulu, all nonplussed. The Neyel wore a guarded expression.

  Sulu considered it for a protracted moment before deciding that Burgess was right. Playing it safe wasn’t going to get them anywhere. There wasn’t enough time left for anything but bold strokes. Pavel is really going to have fribbles when he hears about this, he thought, and nodded his assent to the guard.

  A moment later, he and the ambassador stood unaccompanied and weaponless before the Neyel. Neyel. The almost-familiar name echoed frustratingly through his mind yet again.

  Jerdahn’s gray-rimmed eyes widened. “I did not truly think you had the bolides to face me gunless. You have at least some courage.”

  “We’re not your enemies, Jerdahn,” Burgess said. “It’s vital that you and your leaders understand that.”

  “A pity it is you still cannot prove it.” Jerdahn gestured toward the cell door, across which the forcefield continued to ripple. Rand, Hopman, and the security guards watched anxiously from the other side. “I remain your prisoner.”

  “Don’t forget, Jerdahn,” Sulu said. “So far you’ve given us precious little reason to trust you.”

  “We’ve arrived at an impasse, then,” Jerdahn replied, folding his arms.

  [206] “Not necessarily,” Burgess turned toward Sulu, adding, “Could you give him a look at what his ship and ours are facing together out there?”

  Sulu nodded. Good plan, he thought as he crossed to a far wall. After he placed his hand on the dermal recognition interlace, a large hidden panel slid aside, revealing a recessed viewscreen and companel.

  “Sulu to bridge.”

  “Chekov here, Captain.”
/>
  “Pavel, I’m in the main brig with our ... guest. I’d appreciate it if you could pipe down an exterior view of our current dilemma.”

  “Understood, sir. Right away.”

  Seconds later, the viewer displayed full views of both Excelsior and the crippled Neyel vessel, undoubtedly provided by the new sensor drones Tuvok had recently launched to analyze the Tholian energy web. The potent, crackling energies of that web were visible, forming an apparently impassable, lethal-looking cage about both ships.

  Burgess gestured toward the viewer. “Whatever you may suspect about us, Jerdahn, the Tholians obviously regard us as enemies at the moment. Just as they do the Neyel.”

  “Your images might be false,” Jerdahn rumbled. “Treachery and hydrogen are the two most abundant things in this universe. That’s why Neyel always think it safest to regard all Outsiders as enemies, until proved either harmless or useful.”

  “That’s a pretty bleak philosophy,” Sulu said.

  Jerdahn shrugged. “It is reality. It has kept us alive ever since the sojourn into the Outer Darks first began. Such has been the Neyel way since the times of our helpless, soft-bellied Oh-Neyel ancestors.”

  Neyel, Sulu thought. Oh-Neyel?

  Sulu felt a sensation of déjà vu suddenly descend upon him. And just as abruptly, a memory, a very old memory, [207] clicked into place. And the seemingly impossible—yet undeniable—shared genetic heritage of humans and Neyel suddenly began making sense, albeit sense of a far-fetched sort.

  Oh-Neyel.

  “O’Neill,” Sulu whispered, stunned by the implications of those two mythology-encrusted syllables.

  He noticed that both Jerdahn and Burgess were regarding him with obvious curiosity.

  Facing Jerdahn, Sulu said, “It’s clear to me, Jerdahn, that your people and ours are bound to one another. We really do have a great deal in common—besides being trapped by the Tholians.”

  Jerdahn still appeared skeptical. “What could our two species have in common, truly? You do not even look like us.”

  Sulu smiled. “For one thing, there was an asteroid colony, long ago. A great rock in space known as ... Vanguard. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”