Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire

by Michael A. Martin

  “Maybe,” Riker said. “But it might also be mandatory.”

  Tuvok’s eyebrow again vaulted toward the ceiling. “Sir?”

  Riker leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought since the first time we discussed our options vis-à-vis the Hranrarii. If they really are facing imminent extinction, then Titan has a legal, moral, and ethical duty to try to preserve their culture and language—at least to whatever extent that may be possible.”

  “As long as we do it without breaking the Prime Directive’s first-contact protocols,” said Troi. “As strange as that may sound in connection with a society that might soon be extinct.”

  “I believe I should caution you, Captain,” Ree said. “You seem to be exhibiting a reflex that I have found to be all too common in Starfleet.”

  “What reflex is that?”

  “The ingrained, knee-jerk belief that you can save everyone in the universe,” the reptiloid said in surprisingly mild tones. “And therefore the delusion that you must. But as Commander Troi has already pointed out, you may be pursuing a cause that is already lost.”

  The captain flashed one of his more dazzling smiles. “As a great man once said, ‘Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.’ “

  Vale couldn’t quite place the quote; Zefram Cochrane maybe, or President Archer. She decided it didn’t matter, since optimistic literary aphorisms never really stood much of a chance against the meat-hook realities of life.

  Vale took a moment to break the captain and Troi’s plan down into bite-sized practicalities. Though Riker’s argument in favor of saving some part of an otherwise doomed race was compelling, the results didn’t look promising, at least in pragmatic terms.

  “So all the away team has to do,” Vale said, “is tiptoe past an already pissed-off Gorn commodore and his six heavily armed ships, land a discreet distance away from the Hranrarii equivalent of Paris, then tell the natives, ‘Hello, we’re travelers from a far land. We’re here to sample your cuisine, language, art, and politics. Sorry, we don’t have time to stay for the apocalypse that we’re not allowed to tell you about.’ And then we tiptoe back to Titan and retrace our original steps right past Captain Krassrr. Did I leave anything out?”

  Riker shook his head soberly. “All you forgot was the native disguises. But the rest of it had the makings of an outstanding away-mission profile.” He grinned. “Which is why I’m putting you in charge of getting that option ready, just in case we come up short trying to stop this wholesale planetary engineering in its tracks. I want you put together a tactical plan for getting an away team on and off of Hranrar quietly while Commander Tuvok and Chief Ra-Havreii work out a means of either neutralizing Brahma-Shiva—or of taking it outright.”

  “Understood, Captain,” Vale said, before looking first to Tuvok, who appeared slightly skeptical, and next to Ra-Havreii, who looked as determined as she had ever seen him. Frog suits, she thought. Wonderful. She hoped Ra-Havreii could spare the away team that last indignity through the magic of holotechnology.

  “Of course, that’s an option we might not have to pursue if we can shut down the Gorn’s terraforming plans sooner rather than later,” Riker said, addressing the room.

  Vale was keenly aware that the resolution to this crisis would boil down to one person’s decision. Her heart went out to her friend and CO for having to ride the hot seat, even as she felt relief that the choice was not hers to make.

  Speaking directly to Riker, she said, “We’re cut off from Starfleet, thanks to all the local subspace interference. Whatever we do next—whether we turn tail and run, attack Brahma-Shiva, or stay here and sit shiva for the Hranrarii—will be up to you. If this were a democracy, I’d cast my vote for option ‘A.’ But whatever you decide, sir, I want you to know that you will have my complete support.”

  “Hear, hear,” Troi said.

  Murmurs of assent went around the table, then faded away into renewed silence as the senior staff collectively awaited the captain’s decision.

  “Thank you,” he said. “All of you. At the moment, we’re not exactly ready to do anything. So we’ll keep our powder dry for now. We’ll continue monitoring Gorn activity over Hranrar from the local Kuiper belt, via sensors and drones. We’ll watch, and we’ll plan. Let’s assemble again tomorrow, same time, to review those plans.” Riker rose from his chair, a signal that the morning briefing was at an end. “In the meantime, I want everyone to become as familiar as possible with the data we’ve gathered about Brahma-Shiva, as well as everything we’ve received so far from our new friend S’syr—”

  “Will!” Troi said, interrupting. “Something’s wrong down in sick—”

  The purring yet sibilant voice that exploded from Keru’s combadge interrupted the counselor in mid-syllable. “Ensign Hriss to Commander Keru.”

  “Keru here, Ensign,” said the big Trill, who was still seated while others were starting to rise around him. “Talk to me.”

  “We have a security situation in sickbay, sir. It’s the Gorn.”

  Keru vaulted from his chair with surprising grace and ran for the door without waiting for a formal dismissal. “On my way.”

  “Right behind you,” said Ree, whose long torso was nearly parallel with the deck as he hastened after Keru.

  Vale wasted no time falling right into step behind them both.

  12

  S’syrixx willed his claws to stop shaking, but with only marginal success. I made my move too early, he thought, berating himself. His vocal cords had healed considerably since they’d been exposed to hard vacuum, but evidently not quite enough to pull off a completely seamless voice-imposture; he considered himself foolish ever to have thought that he might equal his great-granduncle Zsraszk’s storied facility with the Voice. I should have waited longer before making the attempt, at the very least.

  On the other manus, how much longer could he afford to wait? At any moment, he was bound to receive word of what seemed ever more inevitable with each passing heartbeat: Rry’kurr’s formal decision to deny his request for sanctuary aboard Tie-tan, in favor of returning him to his would-be executioners.

  Captain Krassrr wasn’t infallible, as S’syrixx’s survival of the first execution attempt attested. But neither was Krassrr known for repeating his mistakes. Next time he will make certain of his work, either with a disruptor pistol or cold, sharpened polysteel.

  The gold-skinned creature around whose disconcertingly soft neck S’syrixx had hooked his left arm screamed at an alarming volume. He belatedly realized that the claws of his right manus, which he had brandished primarily as a threat gesture, had nicked the creature’s unprotected flesh, producing an unintended trickle of translucent yellow fluid.

  S’syrixx growled a guttural warning into the right ear of the father-crowned creature—it called itself Dr. Onnta—who quivered in his iron grasp. “Be. Quiet.”

  “Let him go,” commanded one of the other Tie-tan crewmembers who had rushed into the room once he had decided he could no longer afford to await the captain’s decision regarding his disposition. No fewer than eight of them had crowded into the vessel’s infirmary. Five of these were armed with small, handheld weapons that S’syrixx had to assume were capable of delivering lethal particle-beam charges or disruptor blasts. He recognized one as one of the reptiloids who had greeted him after his second awakening here. The others were either mammals or belonged to species even more exotic, with epidermal colorations ranging from something roughly comparable to that of Rry’kurr all the way to cerulean blue and even Gorn war-caster green. One of these mammalian nightmares was even covered from crest to claw with a thick coat of fur!

  “Let him go,” the Sst’rfleeter repeated. This time S’syrixx was able to identify the speaker as the blue-skinned one. This creature, whom S’syrixx decided was a female, possessed twin cranial antennae that seemed capable of independent motion; they probed restlessly in S’syrixx’s direction, making his cloaca muscl
es clench involuntarily.

  S’syrixx tightened his grip slightly around Onnta’s throat, while taking care not to injure the delicate creature again. “You know I can’t afford to do that. You’ll just shoot me where I stand.”

  “Not if you release him now,” the hulking green mammal said. This one S’syrixx decided was a male.

  “There’s nowhere aboard Titan you can run, Mister S’syrixx,” said the reptiloid.

  Baring his teeth, S’syrixx said, “I know. That’s why I need this chamber sealed until I can negotiate my way off this ship. Let no one else in or out of here until that is accomplished.” S’syrixx paused to get his trembling manus under control again. Onnta yelped in pain. “Do this now, or your Doctor Onnta dies.”

  A brief tumult went up among the eight other beings who crowded the room. A small, unarmed, blue-furred creature that stood approximately knee-high relative to most of the others present was suddenly fighting its way through the quintet of armed—and suddenly very surprised-looking—personnel who stood in its way. The remaining two individuals who carried no visible weapons—one was the female medic Oh-Gow-uh, while the other was a portly, hirsute creature that bore an unseemly resemblance to a domesticated nonsapient mammal that every Gorn caste raised to serve as live food—tried and failed to stop the furry little being’s advance.

  The creature bounded to a stop right in between S’syrixx and the weapon-carrying crewmen. “Negotiate?” the fur-covered one said. “You say you wish to negotiate?”

  S’syrixx stared at the being, both fascinated and horrified. Aside from one of the armed mammals, he had never seen so much fur adorning any one creature. The creature’s eyes were enormous, and it sported a respectable array of teeth and claws, though nothing that any Gorn should have any reason to fear.

  His manus shook anyway as he wondered what other weird surprises this ship might spring upon him at any moment.

  “My name is Huilan Sen’kara,” said the little blue being, whose gender S’syrixx couldn’t immediately identify, though by now such distinctions were beginning to seem trivial, or at least academic. “I am a junior counselor.”

  “Counselor?” S’syrixx asked.

  The furry blue head nodded. “I advise members of the crew regarding their . . . personal problems. At this moment you appear to be in desperate need of my help, Mister S’syrixx.”

  “You want to help me?” S’syrixx said. “Then help me get off this ship.”

  The fur above the little counselor’s eyes knotted into a distinctly mammalian-looking frown. “Yesterday you petitioned the captain for asylum. Have you withdrawn that request?”

  “You and I both know that any request I might make of your captain is entirely irrelevant. The outcome is a foregone conclusion.”

  The blue-furred head tipped slightly to the side. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because your Federrazsh’n distrusts my people.”

  “That isn’t necessarily so, Mister S’syrixx. Though I must admit that the Federation government wasn’t very pleased by your government’s decision to cut its diplomatic ties with us and become part of the Typhon Pact.”

  “I am not part of the political caste. Such things do not concern me. All I know is that your Captain Rry’kurr has yet to answer my request, even after I provided him with exhaustive information about Hranrar and my people’s activities there. His intentions are therefore clear to me.”

  “Captain Riker is a very busy man, Mister S’syrixx—and since he received your information, he’s no doubt become a great deal busier.”

  “I’m sure he’s not too busy to save the life of a member of his crew,” S’syrixx said, giving Onnta’s neck another quick, yelp-generating squeeze for emphasis. “Rry’kurr plans to send me back to Captain Krassrr, who would execute me.”

  “If you were to leave this ship, Mister S’syrixx, where could you possibly go where Krassrr couldn’t find you?”

  How little they understand a properly authoritarian power structure, S’syrixx thought, amazed at the unsophisticated nature of the mammalian thought process. Aloud, he said, “That’s not my plan, small one. I would go straight to Krassrr. But I would not come to him with an empty manus. This ship must have a number of auxiliary vessels. Get me to one of those, and secure me safe passage with it back to Krassrr’s fleet.”

  “Release Doctor Onnta. Please. Afterward, I will argue on your behalf before the captain regarding your asylum request.”

  S’syrixx experienced a moment of vertigo as he questioned the wisdom of his actions. Would Ry’kurr really consider his case, even now? Could any mammal really be that naïve?

  Snorting a derisive laugh, S’syrixx lifted Onnta entirely off the deck for a moment, shaking him as though he were a bag of feed intended for consumption by meatbeasts. “You have heard my terms. I give your captain ten of your minutes to meet them—without any attempt at trickery of any kind—or I will bite this creature’s throat out.”

  S’syrixx’s stomach heaved at the thought.

  The effort of keeping up with Ree’s powerful sprinting strides had left Vale mildly winded by the time she reached the closed doors to sickbay.

  Somehow, Keru had beaten both Vale and Ree there. The big Trill stood before the doors with Crewman Ellec Krotine, one of Keru’s junior security people. Both officers had drawn their phasers, and the AI Blue-White hovered at eye level about a meter away from both of them.

  “It’s no good, Commander,” Krotine said to Keru; the female Boslic had pulled her shoulder-length violet hair back into a ponytail that swung slightly when she shook her head. “The doors are locked from the inside.”

  “Then I will smash them down,” Ree growled, sounding like a predator who was both ready and eager to defend his territory. He pulled his powerfully muscled tail back, as though cocking a spring-loaded battering ram or siege engine.

  “Stand down, Doctor,” Vale said, getting her breathing back under control as she stepped between the CMO and the sealed doors. “I need a sit rep first.”

  Ree relaxed his aggressive posture with obvious reluctance.

  Answering a nod from Keru, Krotine turned to face Vale. “Our . . . guest has taken Doctor Onnta hostage and sealed the sickbay doors. He’s threatening to kill Onnta in ten minutes unless we give him safe passage off of Titan aboard one of our shuttlecraft.”

  “Oh, is that all he wants?” Vale said drily. In her peripheral vision, she noticed someone approaching.

  “This seems completely out of the blue,” Troi said as she came to a stop in a deliberate and decidedly un-winded manner.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too,” Vale said.

  “Interrogative,” SecondGen White-Blue said as he bobbed gently on his antigravs. “Question. Inquiry. ‘Out of the blue’?”

  “It’s an old human idiom,” Troi said. “We use it to refer to circumstances that completely surprise us.”

  “Understood,” said the AI. “Perhaps it is an inapt metaphor in this particular instance.”

  “Why do you say that?” Vale asked.

  The levitating robotic life-form seemed to be enjoying the attention it was receiving. “I noticed that Lieutenant Qontallium had taken the precaution of bringing a security team to sickbay approximately seven-point-five of your minutes ago.”

  “Why?” Keru wanted to know.

  “Because someone tried to gain unauthorized remote access to one of the shuttlecraft in hangar bay one, using a sickbay computer terminal,” Krotine said. “The suspected perp very nearly succeeded, too, from what I can tell.”

  “ ‘Suspected perp,’ Mister Krotine?” Vale said. “We’re talking about S’syrixx.”

  Glaring at Krotine, Keru reddened. “Why wasn’t I informed about this?”

  “Evidently events overtook Lieutenant Qontallium’s full attention before he had an opportunity to make a formal report on the shuttlecraft incident,” White-Blue said.

  Krotine nodded, though she looked embarrassed and chast
ened. “I just reviewed the security log about this, Commander Keru. Mister S’syrixx claimed to be Captain Riker when he tried to grab the shuttle.”

  The pieces of the puzzle were coming together in Vale’s mind. “He must have planned to beam himself and his hostage out of sickbay using the shuttlecraft’s transporter. Then he’d get clear of Titan and be under way before we could stop him.”

  “Probably figured we wouldn’t pursue him,” Krotine said.

  “Or at least that we wouldn’t get too grabby with our tractor beam,” Troi said. “So as not to endanger Onnta.”

  “Those gambles sound like good ones, at least from a Gorn perspective,” Vale said. “Chasing or tractoring S’syrixx would probably let Captain Krassrr know that we’re still hiding in the weeds.” It wasn’t hard to imagine S’syrixx playing chicken with Titan’s tractor beam, stubbornly overdriving a stolen shuttlecraft’s engines until he was either set free or ostentatiously destroyed.

  Either way, it probably wouldn’t be long before the ever-irritable Krassrr’s fleet once again moved Titan into a fight-or-flight posture.

  “Damn,” Keru spat. “My people seriously misjudged how desperate our Mister S’syrixx is.”

  “Let’s not burn any calories right now on blame,” Vale said. “At the moment we have a problem to solve.”

  Keru nodded in agreement, though he still looked miserable. He clearly blamed himself for the events that were now unfolding—and just as clearly dreaded what might yet happen. “Of course, Commander.”

  “Our Gorn ‘friend’ must have made a quick study of our computer’s remote command overrides,” Ree said. “Getting as far as he did by putting manual commands into a sickbay computer interface is quite an achievement.”

  Krotine shook her head, once again making her pony-tail swing like a pendulum. “But that’s not what he did, Doctor. He used the standard voice interface. Even made a print match with the captain’s voice. Damn near fooled the shuttlebay watch officer, from what I can tell so far.”