Star Trek: Typhon Pact 02: Seize the Fire

by Michael A. Martin

Feigning calmness, he said, “I need to speak with Rry’kurr immediately. He is not in possession of all the facts.”

  21

  The damned thing is a sentient life-form, Riker thought as he made for Lieutenant Qontallium’s quarters at a dead run. God damn.

  Once he got inside, he lit into the Gorn without any preamble. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this the last time you were allegedly leveling with me?”

  “Because I was protecting something that many in my caste regard as holy,” S’syrixx said.

  “Holy? You’re telling me that an ancient machine intelligence of some sort runs and maintains Brahma-Shiva—and that it’s now somehow part of the Gorn religion as well?”

  “I have come to believe that the mind that resides in that machine is nothing less than S’Yahazah Herself.”

  “S’Yahazah?”

  “The Great Egg Bringer of Gorn prehistory. Our culture is extremely old, Rry’kurr, on the order of a million or more suncircuits. S’Yahazah, the progenitor of all the present-day castes, is the wielder of the awesome power of creation.”

  “And you believe this . . . S’Yahazah lives inside the artifact.”

  “It is the belief that has caused me to jeopardize both my career and my very life in order to protect an entire planet—even as I acted to safeguard the life and integrity of the intelligence that inhabits the ecosculptor. When I initially disabled the device, Rry’kurr, I could have simply planted explosives on board, or forced it to deorbit and burn up in Hranrar’s atmosphere. Haven’t you wondered why I did neither of those things?”

  In truth, he hadn’t; time for reflective thought had not been in great abundance since his first encounter with Krassrr. “I suppose I assumed you were only trying to slow down Krassrr’s mission—not destroy it.”

  “I was, but for reasons I could not reveal to you. Not without speaking of the ineffable before nonbelievers.”

  Riker folded his arms across his chest. “Well, you don’t seem to have any problem doing that now—and in front of a lowly mammal, no less.”

  S’syrixx sat on the edge of Qontallium’s hard bed and wrapped his arms across his chest, mirroring Riker’s body language. “It was either that or see S’Yahazah destroyed by those same lowly mammals, Rry’kurr. No offense intended.”

  “None taken, Mister S’syrixx. I like being a mammal. Now why should I believe there’s an AI living aboard that device, let alone a figure out of Gorn theology?”

  S’syrixx leaned forward, his cranial crests moving slightly up and down as though driven by some wheel that turned within the reptiloid’s great head. “When I was working aboard Krassrr’s fleet I measured its thought-output—that which your Doctor Ree might describe as ‘brainwave patterns.’ We have seen this thought-output—the will of the entity that dwells inside the ecosculptor, regardless of whether or not one believes it to be S’Yahazah’s own—manifest itself on many occasions.”

  Riker felt his brow furrow. “Manifest how?”

  “I believe that the large-scale subspace communications interference Tie-tan has encountered all across this system to be S’Yahazah’s handiwork, as well as the fortuitous instances of our breaking through it.”

  “You seem to be saying that a ghost in the machine—”

  “A goddess,” S’syrixx corrected, interrupting.

  “—a goddess in the machine is arbitrarily deciding which comm signals we can send and receive, and which ones we can’t.”

  “There is nothing arbitrary about it, Rry’kurr. S’Yahazah always follows a plan, even if its purpose is obscure to us. I believe that She is encouraging us to parley with our adversaries rather than fight them, and vice versa. That is why she has allowed us to speak with Krassrr and Gog’resssh, all the while barring our subspace signals from getting past the system’s periphery.”

  Riker nodded, though he wasn’t sanguine about accepting S’syrixx’s story just yet. “Which would explain why we had to send our shuttlecraft pretty far outside the system to establish contact with Starfleet. I suppose Titan would have to travel a comparable distance to get beyond the reach of . . .” He trailed off.

  “Of a goddess,” S’syrixx said with no evident embarrassment. “Krassrr doubtless had much the same difficulty in summoning the Typhon Pact fleet that now approaches.”

  “So I have to weigh a global civilization of millions against a single AI,” Riker said. Stated that way, the math still looked pretty straightforward. A simple case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.

  But thoughts of another machine intelligence haunted him. The ghost of his late friend Data, a sentient being whose life had been no less valuable than that of any of Riker’s other friends or colleagues, wouldn’t let the captain resolve the conflict so simply.

  “I hope what I have told you causes you to revise your plan of attack,” S’syrixx said.

  “It will,” Riker said. “But I can’t sacrifice millions just to save one. And I won’t knowingly kill an intelligent being—even a machine intelligence—to save those millions.”

  “But what if you cannot rescue both? What will you do then?”

  “I’ll just have to find a way to split the difference,” Riker said. He felt a gentle smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Come with me, Mister S’syrixx.”

  Xin Ra-Havreii took his seat at the conference table along with the rest of his away team, Lieutenant Commander Pazlar, the captain, and Titan’s Gorn guest. He stopped trying to conceal his annoyance at the last-minute, unplanned gathering.

  “We’re more than ready for this away mission, Captain,” the chief engineer said with an impatient scowl. “I don’t think this meeting is strictly necessary, especially with the Typhon Pact fleet coming in just over five hours. We still have a terraforming platform to raid and disable, and there is such a thing as overpreparing.”

  The captain spoke with a calmness that belied the gravity of the moment. “Believe me, Commander, the last thing I want to do is hinder the mission. But some new information has just come to light, and your entire team needs to be brought up to speed.”

  Ra-Havreii listened with an escalating sense of incredulity as the captain and the Gorn began speaking in tandem, taking turns to spin a tale that seemed half ancient Gorn legend and half high-tech ghost story.

  Ra-Havreii shook his head after they had finished. “So all we have to do is find a way to neutralize Brahma-Shiva’s destructive capacity while sparing the existence of the AI that our guest claims dwells within it.”

  “That’s essentially it,” the captain said.

  “That’s assuming, of course, that there really is an intelligence of any sort aboard Brahma-Shiva,” Ra-Havreii said. “At the moment, the only evidence for this is the entirely subjective opinion of Mister S’syrixx.”

  “I speak only S’Yahazah’s plain truth,” growled the Gorn, who leaned forward slightly over the conference table in Ra-Havreii’s direction. Ra-Havreii saw that Lieutenant Qontallium, who was standing nearby, had tensed visibly, and hoped that he hadn’t flinched involuntarily himself.

  “Easy there,” Keru said.

  S’syrixx sat back in his chair, folding his long-clawed hands before him in a surprisingly graceful gesture. Then the Gorn lapsed into a silence that nevertheless seemed almost truculent.

  “Perhaps other empirical evidence of Mister S’syrixx’s assertion exists,” said SecondGen White-Blue, who hovered a short distance from the table at about eye level, courtesy of his elegant array of antigravs and pneumatic thrusters.

  “Explain,” Captain Riker said.

  “Mister Torvig and I noted a curious, nonrepeating anomalous reading on the subspace sensors,” said the beachball-sized artificial intelligence.

  Riker’s brows knitted. “Why didn’t either of you report this? We might have discovered this . . . intelligence a bit sooner.”

  “At the time we could not rule out our own instrumentality as the cause of our readings, Captain,”
White-Blue said, obviously unfazed by the captain’s chiding tone. “Except when viewed in retrospect—and in juxtaposition with other information of better provenance—such rogue data points cannot be regarded as indicative of anything. Did we err?”

  “I’ll review Titan’s data-reporting protocols with you and Mister Torvig later,” Melora told the AI.

  “Of course, Commander.”

  “Putting this cybergoddess business to one side for a moment,” Keru said, “I have to question whether it’s wise to send Commander Ra-Havreii off the ship right now. Our warp drive is still down, and we’re going to have a severe need for speed at about the time the Typhon Pact fleet arrives.”

  “If I thought there was anything that my engineering staff wasn’t already doing to speed up the engine repairs,” Ra-Havreii said, “then you’d need three wild sehlat and a couple of mugato to chase me out of that engine room. Don’t worry, Commander. When Titan needs to roll, she’ll be ready.

  “Now back to the AI. How could its alleged presence affect the mission we’re about to undertake?”

  Melora spoke up. “Ideally, we’d find a way to communicate with this intelligence. If we could enlist its cooperation in saving the Hranrarii, the AI could prove to be a huge asset. It might even make the destruction of Brahma-Shiva entirely unnecessary.”

  “That’s assuming we can trust the thing to consider us the good guys and Krassrr’s people the bad guys,” Keru said. “In terms of the immediate safety of the Hranrarii and the Federation’s long-term security, that could be just as risky as deciding to do nothing at all.”

  “So we’re still following the basic outline of the original plan,” Ra-Havreii said. “We sneak a shuttlecraft to within transporter range of Brahma-Shiva, now that our good friend Gog’resssh has demonstrated that Krassrr’s fleet appears to be blind to small, stealthy craft on certain inbound trajectories. Then we beam aboard with Mister S’syrixx’s guidance, copy out all the data we can from Brahma-Shiva’s onboard systems, set our timed charges, and get the hell out.”

  “That’s right,” Riker said.

  “The possible presence of a machine intelligence complicates things a bit, Captain,” Melora said. “A functioning AI is a lot more than the sum of its files. Consciousness as we understand it is an emergent property of complex networks of neural connections, or reasonable analogs thereof. As such, the ‘essence’ or ‘soul’ of a conscious entity can’t always just be copied as though it were merely a holodeck program.”

  “Really?” Riker said. “Copies of Starfleet’s early-model Emergency Medical Holograms are routinely passing the Turing Test. Some of them are even demanding full civil rights under the guarantees of the Federation Constitution. There’s nothing ‘mere’ about that.”

  “I can serve as a vessel to contain such a cybernetic consciousness,” White-Blue said. “At least on a temporary basis, my function would be similar to the holographic systems that house the sentience of Starfleet’s Emergency Medical Holograms.”

  “Maybe,” Melora said. “But we can’t be sure it will work. Certain artificial consciousness matrices seem to resist being copied, the way latinum resists a replicator. For example, the Daystrom Institute has been trying to recover the mind of Lieutenant Commander Data for almost three years now, with nothing to show for it so far.”

  Ra-Havreii winced slightly. He was aware that the captain and Data had been close friends, so the shadow of sadness that passed across Riker’s face didn’t surprise him nearly as much as Melora’s surprising insensitivity in bringing the subject up.

  Still, he couldn’t argue with her point. She was right.

  “Indeed,” Commander Tuvok said. “This aspect of the mission may be academic. Titan’s main computer still contains all the information it did after White-Blue accidentally caused it to achieve sentience. Since the time Titan’s emergent consciousness opted to sacrifice itself to save the ship, every attempt to recover that consciousness has met with failure.”

  Riker acknowledged the difficulties with a melancholic nod. “If anything inside that artifact is conscious,” he said at length, “then we have to at least try to save it.”

  Tuvok said, “The needs of the many, Captain—”

  “I know, Commander,” the captain said, interrupting. “That’s why you’re still going on this mission. I’m not about to let Krassrr wipe out millions of lives, and neither are any of you.” Then he stood, signaling that the meeting was at an end.

  Ra-Havreii stood, following Riker’s lead, as did everyone else save the hovering White-Blue. “We’re ready, Captain.”

  From his command chair on the bridge, Riker watched an aft view of Titan, framed by the length of the starship’s nacelles, beyond which lay a brilliant pink and amber aurora and the dim curve of the planet’s cold northern reaches. The aftmost portion of Titan’s secondary hull, at the bottom of the central viewer, disgorged a small bright object that quickly dwindled in size until it was lost in the radiant taffy pull of local geomagnetic forces.

  The shuttlecraft Gillespie was under way.

  “Lieutenant Rager,” he said. “Any sign that the S’alath has noticed the launch?”

  “Not as yet, Captain,” replied the senior ops officer.

  “Time until the Typhon Pact fleet arrives?”

  “Approximately five hours and five minutes, Captain,” Rager said, sounding justifiably uncomfortable at the prospect of cutting things so fine. “Give or take.”

  What the heck am I supposed to do with all this excess time? Riker thought wryly as he settled in and awaited Gog’resssh’s next scheduled call.

  “The S’alath is hailing us, Captain,” Rager reported a scant three minutes later.

  Gog’resssh is nothing if not punctual, Riker thought. “Put it up, Lieutenant.”

  The frosty planetary vista on the main viewer abruptly vanished, replaced by a leering, lizardlike countenance that bore only a passing resemblance to that of the Gorn technologist who had accompanied the just-departed second away team.

  “The S’alath now stands ready to commit to a joint assault on the ecosculptor, Rry’kurr,” Gog’resssh rumbled. “We will leave immediately after your arrival aboard my vessel.”

  “Come again?” Riker said.

  “Have we not already agreed to act as partners in this venture?” said the Gorn warrior, whose gray, diseased-looking facial scales gave him a decidedly sinister appearance—even for a razor-toothed, insect-eyed reptiloid.

  Riker felt a cavern of dread open up deep in his guts. “Thank you for the invitation, First Myrmidon Gog’resssh. But I’d be a more effective partner running Titan from here.”

  “You will beam aboard the S’alath, Rry’kurr,” the reptiloid said, his gray-green lips pulling back to display a veritable dental abattoir. “Unless, of course, you wish Captain Krassrr to become aware of your fortuitous survival.”

  Riker paused for a moment to do the math, and almost immediately realized he had no good alternatives—at least not without all but guaranteeing the deaths of millions of innocent people. To say nothing of the likely destruction of Titan.

  “Send us the exact transporter coordinates,” he said. “I’ll beam over in a few minutes.”

  The Gorn’s grin widened, and Riker resisted an impulse to shudder only through a sheer act of will. “Excellent,” Gog’resssh hissed an instant before he vanished from the screen.

  Riker turned toward the main engineering console, behind which the gamma-shift officer of the watch was looking askance at him. “Mister Gibruch, you have the bridge.”

  “Sir, you can’t be serious about this,” said Lieutenant Commander Tamen Gibruch. A native of the nonaligned planet Chand Aad, his bassoonlike voice was an amalgam of the sounds generated by the columns of air contained in the trunks—they were sometimes described as “tails”—that dangled loosely from his cranium.

  “If I refuse, he’ll tip our hand early to Krassrr before the Gillespie team has a chance to do its job on the
terraforming device.”

  “He’s got to be bluffing, Captain. He knows that if he contacts Krassrr he’ll be placing his own ship in harm’s way as well.”

  “Stand down, Commander,” Riker said, sharpening his tone to indicate that the matter wasn’t open to debate. “I’ve dealt with the Gorn during a couple of previous diplomatic crises. They’re big on bluster, but they also value courage and trust. If I refuse Gog’resssh’s . . . request, he’ll interpret it as bad faith on my part.”

  Sounding somewhat chastened, Gibruch said, “Sorry, sir. It’s just that his ‘request’ sounded more like a non-negotiable demand to me. And I’m not sure he’s really crazy enough to risk revealing his own hiding place to Captain Krassrr.”

  Riker couldn’t argue with any of that. But that didn’t necessarily matter, given the particulars of the situation. “Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t. But the stakes are too high to risk calling his bluff. I’m not playing for poker chips, Commander. The stakes are millions of lives.”

  “But you’ll be walking into a trap!”

  “Very likely.” The captain began moving toward the turbolift. “But I don’t appear to have a better alternative.”

  “You’ll be Gog’resssh’s hostage!” Gibruch fluted, the pitch of his bellows-driven voice rising again, moving in lockstep with his emotions.

  Riker paused momentarily on the turbolift’s threshold and looked over his shoulder back at Gibruch. “No, I won’t, Commander—because in that eventuality, I expect you to blow the S’alath out of the sky.”

  After the shimmering light-curtain of Titan’s transporter beam enfolded him, Riker felt as though he had just embarked on the longest transport of his life.

  In point of fact, he had; so intense were the twisting, tangling lines of local geomagnetic interference that using the transporters of both Titan and the S’alath in tandem had turned out to be the only way—other than using a shuttlecraft—to safely traverse the few kilometers that separated the two vessels. He was conscious during his passage through the matter stream, like an orbital skydiver leaping through a turbulent storm system. The transit brought to mind recollections of a similar travail experienced by his Enterprise colleague Reginald Barclay, as well as a holodeck program in which he had spent a harrowing ninety seconds passing through a simulation of the mid-twenty-second-century prototype transporter that Dr. Emory Erickson had built with his own hands.