The door chime sounded.
“Come.”
The door hissed open and admitted Commanders Tuvok and Ra-Havreii. In response to the captain’s silent nod, the latter took a seat at one of the chairs in front of the desk, while the former remained standing at attention.
Something about the stiff manner of both men warned Riker that whatever his senior officers had to say was likely to be a mixed bag. “Report, gentlemen,” he said as he took a seat behind his desk.
“Why don’t you give him the good news first, Mister Tuvok?” the Efrosian chief engineer said wryly.
Riker flashed a hopeful smile at his tactical officer. “Don’t tell me—the Typhon Pact fleet has suddenly changed its heading.”
“To expect that would be excessively optimistic, Captain,” Tuvok said. “However, we just received a subspace burst transmission from the away team, per the mission profile. The signal was more attenuated than I expected, but with the help of the main computer I was able to reconstruct its message quickly.”
“And what did the message say?”
“Just that the away team has completed its passage to Hranrar without apparent incident. They seem to have eluded the detection of both the Gorn and the Hranrarii.”
At least so far, Riker thought with no small amount of anxiety. Sending Deanna into danger had never sat well with him, but he had always known that his command responsibilities sometimes demanded it. She was Titan’s chief diplomat, after all; even if the mission involved only a covert form of alien contact, it nevertheless fell within her purview.
“Meaning that Captain Krassrr’s terraforming fleet is still going about its business trying to repair the damage our resident Gorn did to Brahma-Shiva,” Ra-Havreii added. “As my simulations predicted, they’ve shown no sign of having noticed our people’s arrival on the opposite side of the planet.”
“Therefore it may also be safe to assume that Krassrr’s people failed to intercept the away team’s subspace burst,” Tuvok said.
Riker nodded. He hated being forced to rely so heavily on such brief “squirts” of information, but the interference that continued to foul so much of the subspace comm-spectrum throughout this system—not to mention simple prudence—gave him little alternative.
“Let’s hope the away team’s luck continues,” he said. “Now what’s the bad news?”
Tuvok’s silently raised eyebrow was clearly a missile aimed in Ra-Havreii’s direction.
“Besides the fact that the away team now has substantially less than a standard day to preserve whatever they can of a society that is all but marked for annihilation?” Ra-Havreii said.
Riker drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Go ahead, Commander. I can take it.”
Ra-Havreii pulled a padd from the front pocket of his uniform tunic and slid it across the uncluttered desktop toward Riker. “Here’s our preliminary tactical plan for boarding and neutralizing Brahma-Shiva.”
“ ‘Preliminary?’” Riker said as he picked up the padd and began scrolling through its contents. “I know that you and Commander Tuvok haven’t had much time to work on this, but I was hoping we’d be a bit past ‘preliminary’ at this point.”
Ra-Havreii shrugged, apparently unfazed by his CO’s underwhelmed reaction. “I had the same hope, Captain. But we have to look at this realistically. Despite the luck we’ve had with passive, short-range drone scans, the metal in Brahma-Shiva’s hull is extremely scan-resistant at a distance. And we can’t do any further scans without alerting Krassrr that Titan is still hiding in the weeds, watching him. That platform has the potential to completely destroy the Hranrarii civilization—or at least it will once the Gorn get done fixing it. Whether or not they succeed in that effort any time soon isn’t terribly relevant to us—assuming they don’t manage to fire the thing up while our away team is still on Hranrar—because we’re going to have to stay hidden or clear out of the system entirely when the Typhon Pact fleet arrives.”
Riker scowled. “It sounds like you’ve given up,” he said, addressing both men. He pushed the padd back toward the engineer.
“Not at all, Captain,” Tuvok said, his countenance unyielding, his posture becoming even more ramrod straight than it had been a moment earlier. “We have merely acknowledged reality. To do less would be entirely illogical.”
Ra-Havreii nodded as he recovered his padd. “Without the insight of somebody who really knows Brahma-Shiva inside and out, we’re still only guessing at this thing’s vulnerable spots. Even with the benefit of Mister S’syrixx’s diagram, we’re still not completely sure which parts of the beast’s belly are safe to use as beam-in sites for Mister Keru’s tac team.”
Riker’s combadge chirped, prompting him to tap it. “Riker here. Go ahead.”
“It’s Lieutenant Qontallium from security, sir,” came the reply. “Commander Troi asked me to inform you the moment Mister S’syrixx made any sort of friendly overture.”
“I take it he’d like to show his rescuers a little more gratitude?”
“I believe so, sir. Specifically, he’s just offered to do whatever he can to help save the Hranrarii.”
After signing off, Riker allowed himself to experience a brief surge of hope that the Hranrarii cause might not be lost after all. Despite the impressive package of information S’syrixx had produced before he went off the deep end and tried to return to Krassrr, Riker had felt from the beginning that his Gorn guest had been holding a great deal back. And why shouldn’t he? He was, after all, a stranger in a strange land. Trust wouldn’t come easily for the Gorn, and Riker knew he’d have to use every tool at his disposal to cultivate it—including guile.
When he considered how his decision to exploit S’syrixx’s anxieties had led to a nearly disastrous encounter, he felt more than a little guilty about continuing to employ guile, however the exigencies of the moment might justify it. But Alyssa Ogawa and Dr. Ree had reported hearing S’syrixx talking in his sleep about a lost love, and Deanna had devised a plan to foster the Gorn’s cooperation by keeping him in close proximity to Lieutenant Qontallium, who had suffered a similar loss during last year’s Borg assault. Riker had felt uneasy about using such a manipulative technique on someone under his protection—even on an adversary, such as a Gorn national—until Qontallium himself had volunteered to do the job, despite being reminded that the task would force him to revisit his intense, still-healing grief over losing Senior CPO Sar Antillea during a Borg attack.
Riker rose to his feet. Addressing both Tuvok and RaHavreii, he said, “Have Lieutenant Qontallium set up a meeting with our guest, ASAP. I have a feeling he’ll get your Brahma-Shiva assault plan past the ‘preliminary’ stage fairly quickly.”
14
Vale felt a tingle of awe as she crested the hill and saw the forest of towers, minarets, tubular bridges, and glistening, raised waterways that lay beyond it. Spread like a prized collection of jewels beneath cloud-streaked, cerulean skies, the Hranrarii city rose from the endless marsh that surrounded it, extending to the limits of her vision toward the eastern horizon, and probably a good deal farther. A mighty river bisected the city, whose waterways sported a profusion of vehicles that gleamed in the golden afternoon brilliance of Vela OB2–404, which was making its inexorable march toward the western hills, at the away team’s back.
The Hranrarii city, from its sky-piercing vertical scale to its vast network of natural and constructed subterranean water-channels that served as personal and vehicular transit connections to its nearest neighbors, was easily the equal of anything that any Federation world might have produced. But when Vale considered the likely future of this city—the probable fate of all Hranrarii constructs, everywhere on the planet—the awe the vista inspired quickly plummeted into a downward spiral of grief. All of this could be reduced to quarks at any moment, she thought. Just to give the Gorn warrior caste a new place to lay its eggs.
Ensign Modan, the cryptolinguist, was the first to break the silence that had reigned ever
since the city first came into view. “Soon it’ll be as if none of this ever existed,” she said. Like everyone else on the team, she now could pass—unless scrutinized very closely—for one of the green, gilled, moist-skinned, sentient amphibians who built and maintained the city.
“Whatever might become of the Hranrarii,” said Troi, gesturing broadly toward the city with her webbed, lime-hued hands, “we have to make sure that all of this—everything they’ve achieved as a civilization—is never forgotten.”
“And we have to cram that task into the span of a few hours,” said Ensign Evesh, her brusque Tellarite manner setting her apart from the rest of the team despite the fact that everyone present looked almost indistinguishable from one another, thanks to Commander Ra-Havreii’s specially modified isolation suits. Unlike an earlier generation of such suits, which used holographic technology to create a kind of functional invisibility—a sort of personal cloaking device—the chief engineer’s variant model used that same technology to create a three-dimensional holographic disguise for its wearer.
“Let’s stop here and check our holosystems for glitches before we go on,” Troi said. “This could be our last chance before we get close enough to any of the natives to really put these suits to the test.”
“Good idea, Deanna,” Vale said. Hoping to lighten the team’s dour mood, she approached the counselor, turning her ungainly amphibianoid body in a quick circle as she moved. “What do you think? Does this hologram make my butt look big?”
“Let’s hope your butt is precisely as big as it needs to be so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention while we’re down here,” Troi said, speaking sotto voce as the junior officers began checking one another’s suits. “Remember, Chris, it could always be worse.”
Vale snickered quietly as she looked Troi’s frog-and-grasshopper-chimera form up and down. “When have you ever looked worse than this?”
“About twelve years ago, aboard the Enterprise-D. I was probably a little more recognizable than I am now, but I certainly felt a lot worse.”
“I take it you’re not describing a typical bad hair day.”
“It was more like the worst hair day imaginable,” Troi said. “A mutant virus turned me into an ancient Betazoid amphibian. But maybe we ought to put the coiffure conversation aside. We’re supposed to be passing ourselves off as natives, remember?”
“It’s a little hard to forget,” Vale said. She held one of her own holographically webbed hands before her eyes, which she knew looked just as oversized and yellow as Troi’s now appeared to be. She tried to avoid catching sight of her hologram-enhanced lower body, which seemed to sport the grasshopperlike Hranrarii feature of redundant forward-and-backward knee joints; while this characteristic looked every bit as genuine as the rest of Vale’s amphibious persona, she knew that it couldn’t withstand a thorough inspection, such as a body search. And then there was the (potential) problem of the team’s (perhaps) conspicuous lack of the tribal tattoos that S’syrixx had added to his visual depiction of the Hranrarii form, a decision Vale had made in an effort to sidestep the possibility of inadvertently offending any natives who might be aligned with a differently-tattooed social group. . . .
For those reasons, Vale had ordered the team to avoid close contact with the natives as much as possible. Her own law-enforcement experience told her that it would be particularly wise to avoid the local constabulary.
“I still don’t understand why Olivia couldn’t have beamed us down closer to the city,” Evesh grumbled through her thick, fishlike lips once each and every one of the away team’s isolation suits, along with their main and reserve power cells, had passed muster.
“I thought we already went through all that,” Ensign Dakal said as he unhooked a tricorder from the belt that bisected his simulated native clothing, which consisted of little more than a complicated harness that seemed to have been designed for the express purpose of carrying things. With a deftness and grace that belied his large, webbed, and apparently three-fingered hands, the Cardas-sian activated the scanning device, pointing it toward the city.
“You don’t have to be patronizing,” Evesh said querulously. “I know that these holo-disguises won’t stand up to close scrutiny, any more than a standard invisibility-equipped isolation suit would. And I’m more than passingly familiar with the Prime Directive, thank you very much. I understand that we’re not supposed to frighten the pre-warp-drive natives by seeming to appear out of nowhere right before their eyes.”
“So what’s the problem?” Modan asked.
The Tellarite sighed. “Well, suppose a few natives did happen to see us materialize? How much damage could that really do here? What’s the harm, really, when we’re all operating under the assumption that this entire civilization probably won’t be here by this time next week? Isn’t following the letter of the Prime Directive in this situation a little like fretting about the sodium content of a condemned prisoner’s last meal?”
Vale had to admit to herself that Evesh had made a good point. But in the interests of proper order and discipline, she wasn’t about to agree with her out loud. “The Prime Directive doesn’t give us that kind of leeway, Ensign. We don’t have the discretion to say, ‘these people will all be dead soon, so to hell with the rules.’ “
“Besides, whatever might happen to this civilization tomorrow, they’re here today,” Troi said. “And until the Gorn actually do wipe them out, there’s always the hope that they’ll survive this crisis somehow. The Prime Directive has to err on the side of optimism.”
“Exactly,” Vale said. And sometimes even foolish optimism.
Dakal apparently finished a sequence of scans and was reviewing the results on his tricorder’s display. “Besides, Evesh,” he said, “the best way to use our time is to tap directly into one of the city’s data nodes. This city keeps its major data trunks near the outskirts, just like all the other cities we scanned from orbit. Which means we’re better off approaching from the outside.”
Evesh folded her froglike arms across her chest, her finned feet splayed in an aggressive stance. “The orbital scans weren’t that clear-cut, Zurin, and you know it. There are more than a hundred cities like this one all across this planet, and each of those has hundreds of multiply cross-linked data hubs. You interpreted the readings to indicate that all the data hubs are located at the edges of the cities. But those energy readings coming from deep in the city cores created a lot of interference. The intensity of the planetary magnetic field could have distorted the readings as well.”
“Enough to throw off Ensign Dakal’s estimate about the location of the nearest data hub?” Vale wanted to know. This could be a problem.
Evesh drew her own tricorder and activated it. “I’m still picking up those interference readings. They’re registering a lot more strongly here on the surface than they did when we scanned from orbit, and they’re still muddying things quite a bit.”
Dakal shrugged. “Which I suppose stands as proof that the nearest data hub is either precisely where I said it was,” he said, “or somewhere else.”
Vale sighed. Pointing toward the still-distant towers, she said, “There’s only one way to find out who’s right.”
The energy readings Dakal had associated with a critical Hranrarii data hub turned out to lie about two hundred meters from the precise spot his tricorder had selected, as well as some thirty meters off the ground; the young Cardassian attributed the slight gap between theory and the real world to the combined effects of Hranrar’s magnetic field and the interference-generating energy pulsations Evesh had detected coming from the deep core of the city. Dakal didn’t let the slight discrepancy between his estimate and empirical reality discourage him. Factoring in Evesh’s interference and local magnetism, the readings on Dakal’s tricorder represented a highly fine-tuned estimate at best.
Dakal took the point climbing the narrow, apparently deserted tower that led to the node itself, with Evesh and Modan following close behind
while the away team’s nontechnical personnel—Vale, Troi, and Sortollo—remained at the bottom of the tower to serve as lookouts, just in case a curious native should happen by.
Getting inside the small chamber that housed the node—the confined space was barely big enough to admit the entire trio at once—had been surprisingly simple, a mere matter of forcing a metal hasp open with brute strength. Dakal supposed the Hranrarii were an extremely honest people, materially speaking, since they seemed to have little use for complex locking mechanisms.
Once the team had crawled inside, Dakal wasted no time exposing the interior mechanism of the Hranrarii information node, which resembled a two-meter-long Cardassian cavegrub covered in a centimeter-thick layer of slimy, mucouslike material.
“It looks like organic technology,” Evesh said. “Not unlike the bioneural gel packs that Starfleet uses to enhance computer performance. You were right, Ensign.”
“Too bad I’m not a betting man,” Dakal said as he opened his toolkit and began extracting a high-performance ODN cable that was already hooked into a series of high-capacity data modules, collectively capable of storing several hundred teraquads of information. “I could have collected a tidy sum.”
“Don’t count your leks just yet,” Evesh said, still running tricorder scans. “You still can’t explain the interference coming from the city’s interior any better than I can. And you don’t know yet whether or not anything in your toolkit is compatible with the Hranrarii’s information technology.”
“I’ll have a look at the interference issue later,” Dakal said, preferring his own investigative approach to the Tellarite’s more scattergun methodology. “As for the compatibility question, I can think of only one way to settle it.” He raised the end of the ODN cable and brought it toward the slimy mass of the Hranrarii data hub’s core, his eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to watch himself touch the odious-looking thing.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire Page 21
