The other man nodded. “I get it. This is a rough gig. And if we were the type who could just turn off our feelings about it, well, I guess we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Ruiz gave a hollow chuckle. “I guess you’re right. Um . . . I’m Antonio. Antonio Ruiz.”
“Albert Sims. Call me Al.” They shook hands. “You look like you could use a cup o’ coffee. How about it?”
“That’d be good, thanks.”
Once they were in the cantina, away from the abundance of full cots and the overabundance of freshly empty ones, Ruiz was able to relax somewhat. “If you don’t mind my asking,” Sims said, “those don’t seem like the hands of a medical professional.”
Ruiz rubbed his callused fingertips together. “Good catch. I came here as a mining engineer. But all the mining countries got the plague and then M’Tezir moved in and kicked us out. I could’ve just gone back home to Cuba, but . . . well . . . I couldn’t just leave these people.”
“I get it.” Sims studied him. “Cuba, huh? Was . . . is your family from . . .”
Ruiz sensed what he wasn’t saying. No one from Earth would ever forget that day in March 2153 when the Xindi weapon had carved a path of devastation through Florida, Cuba, Jamaica, and parts of Colombia and Venezuela. “No, my family’s from farther west, near Havana.” He lowered his gaze. “But I had a girl in Santa Clara.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“You lost somebody, too, huh?” Ruiz asked. He had noted a trace of the American Southeast in Sims’s voice.
“No, I . . . I knew people who did,” Sims replied. Ruiz found it hard to believe that the haunted look in his eyes could have come at second hand. Well, maybe he was just that compassionate. He’d come here, after all.
Ruiz tried to avoid sending a bitter thought Laila Alindogan’s way. She had been unable to cope with the spreading plague and the growing hostility from the Saurians, so she had left two weeks ago for an asteroid-mining job in the Vega system. He couldn’t decide if it was because she’d lacked the compassion to stay or been too empathetic to bear any more of it. Either way, whatever relationship they shared hadn’t meant enough to Laila to make her stay. One more casualty, he thought, before chastising himself for such an insensitive comparison.
“I’ve done a bit of engineering myself here and there,” Sims was saying. “Well, spaceship maintenance. I came here on an ECS freighter, nursemaiding the computers. Saw what was goin’ on here and decided to lend a hand. Besides, I may have had a bit of a . . . flirtation goin’ with the first mate’s wife, and it woulda made the return trip pretty uncomfortable.”
The man made the latter confession a bit too easily, making Ruiz suspect he was downplaying his own selflessness. Or maybe Ruiz just needed to feel optimistic about something. “Well, good for you, friend. The Saurians need all the help they can get.”
Sims frowned. “Yeah, about that. This Maltuvis guy’s supposed to have a cure, right? So why hasn’t he spread it around? Shared it with everyone on the planet?”
Ruiz grimaced. “Well, first, it’s just a treatment—it keeps the symptoms at bay, but you have to keep taking it. Which, according to el Rey Maltuvis, means it’s awfully expensive to make enough to treat everybody. So it’s only practical to give the cure to countries willing to pay for the privilege—and willing to accept M’Tezir troops on their soil to ‘coordinate’ their missions of mercy.” He scoffed.
“Well, if that don’t just . . . Why not just share the damn formula with the rest of the planet?” Sims demanded.
“He says it’d take too long to train other doctors in the necessary skills.”
“He also says the countries have to kick aliens out so we won’t re-infect people. You buy any of that?”
Ruiz sighed. “I don’t know. Doctor Lucas, Doctor Sobon, all the others, they insist there’s no evidence of cross-species infection. But somehow the disease keeps cropping up in the cities where offworlders are living—and the places that have kicked them out are doing okay. That’s why so many countries have agreed to Maltuvis’s terms. They can see how fishy it looks, but they’re afraid to take the chance. And you know how people get when they’re scared.”
Sims puffed breath through his lips. “Damn. I’m amazed they even let us stay here in Veranith.”
“Well, the Veranith are old enemies of M’Tezir. They don’t trust Maltuvis and they’re not about to let his troops on their soil.” Ruiz stared at his coffee cup for a moment. “But not everyone here feels the same. They’re scared, too.”
“That explains the protestors outside.”
“Well, at least they keep their distance. If they get too close, we just have to cough at them and they back away.” The two men shared a chuckle.
“If you ask me,” Sims said, “this whole disease sounds awfully convenient for Mister Maltuvis.”
“Yeah, most of us have thought that. But how to prove he’s behind it? He’s got an answer for everything. And the fact is, the docs are sure the Saurians don’t have the medical knowledge to create a disease like this.” He drained the dregs of his cup. “But I’ll tell you this: If Maltuvis didn’t cause the plague, he’s sure got a handle on how to profit from it. The vulture.”
Sims pondered his words. “Isn’t there anything the Global League can do about it? Or the Federation?”
“Like what? There’s no proof. Every country M’Tezir’s sent troops to has invited them in, and frankly they look pretty heroic saving all those lives. For every Saurian who thinks Maltuvis is behind the plague, there’s one or two more who’d say he was right all along and the Global League was foolish to invite aliens in.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Sims said. “Maltuvis was just as eager for the trade deal as the League was—he just wanted to be the one that got the most out of it.”
“Yeah, well, people have short memories.” He snorted. “Half the politicians in the galaxy depend on it.”
• • •
The man called Albert Sims—or, as he was still known to certain intimates, Charles “Trip” Tucker—pondered Antonio Ruiz’s words. The man’s account tallied with others he’d heard during this fact-finding mission. Tucker found it inconceivable that Maltuvis hadn’t deliberately engineered the disease as a tool to occupy other nations and sever their ties to the Global League. The Saurians were so unaccustomed to disease on this scale that it was a perfect tool for gaining leverage through terror—but terror toward others rather than M’Tezir itself.
The irony was that it didn’t seem to be hurting Federation interests. While the open democracies of the Global League were susceptible to the growing popular pressure to sever ties with aliens—a direction in which even Veranith seemed to be heading—the autocratic Maltuvis could maintain his own trading ties with the Federation by fiat, while also assuming control over the trade goods from the other countries he allied with. So even as the Basileus of M’Tezir gained greater power on Sauria, he made the Federation increasingly dependent on him for the resources a growing interstellar nation demanded.
The question was, how? Ruiz was right—as far as Tucker could determine, there was no way the M’Tezir could’ve engineered a plague so alien to Saurian experience yet so resistant to Federation medical knowledge. It seemed likely that Maltuvis had help from aliens, but who, and why? It was possible the Basileus had hired some offworld contractor with medical expertise, such as Ajilon Prime. In that case, identifying the source and cutting them off could cripple Maltuvis. But what if Maltuvis was simply a pawn in some interstellar power’s great game? Was this another salvo by the Orions and the Malurians? Could the Romulans be trying to make an end run around the Neutral Zone and the treaty that had created it? But what would any of them have to gain, given that helping Maltuvis gain power wasn’t hurting Federation trade? If not the Federation, who was being targeted? Indeed, how would any offworlders benefit from turning the Saurians against offworlders?
Tucker gave his head a convulsive shake
, drawing a glance from Ruiz. “Are you all right, Al?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Just tired.”
“Yeah, this place does that to you. How long till your shift ends?”
“A few hours yet. And I should really get back to work now.”
“I guess I should, too,” Ruiz said. “I lost a friend today . . . but there are still others I can help.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Tucker headed back out to the treatment ward with determination. He’d shaken off his earlier thoughts out of disgust at himself for treating this like some cosmic chess game when real people were suffering and dying here on the ground. That was the kind of attitude he was trying to keep Section 31 from succumbing to.
Meeting Antonio Ruiz had been a valuable reminder of what he was fighting for. Like Tucker, the Cuban had lost someone he cared about in the Xindi attack, had seen his community overshadowed by fear and loss. And it had motivated him to do what he could for other victims of loss and tragedy. How could Tucker do any less, if he wished to honor the memory of his sister? As painful as it was, he needed to go out there with the sick and dying Saurians, to look each and every one of them in the eyes, and to remember what he was really fighting for.
June 14, 2164
Planetoid “Babel,” orbiting Gliese 283 B
Director Sedra Hemnask of the Rigelian Trade Commission surveyed the barren surface beyond the viewport of Babel Station’s reception dome: an expanse of cratered rock and regolith dimly illuminated by the tiny red dwarf it orbited, half of an obscure, unclaimed binary system whose primary star had long ago sloughed off its atmosphere and left behind a white-dwarf corpse and a smattering of burned, lifeless worlds. “An unlikely soil,” she mused, “for sowing the seeds of new nations.”
“I see what you mean,” Jonathan Archer told the Zami Rigelian as he gazed out the port with her. “But it’s got quite a history behind it.”
“Really?” Her large green eyes lit up with interest.
He smiled and began to tell the story. Interstellar histories that were half-legend told of a pair of starfaring civilizations, Menthar and Promellia, locked in an intractable holy war for generations. Some eight centuries ago, after their worlds had been devastated and their populations reduced largely to refugee fleets, a last-ditch peacemaking effort was undertaken. Both sides recruited a neutral race to build an outpost on a lifeless subplanet in a small, dead star system hundreds of light-years from either species’ territory—a place that neither side would have any reason to fight over, and where they could negotiate far removed from factions seeking to co-opt them or sabotage their efforts. This outpost, they hoped, would be the site of a decisive peace conference that would save both civilizations from extinction.
Yet before the outpost was even completed, the Menthar and Promellian fleets had converged almost by accident around the final surviving colony, in an as-yet-undiscovered system that the histories called Orelious. The resultant unplanned battle had escalated to the point that both sides had gone all in, every surviving ship called in as reinforcements. Even the peacemakers had been grimly obliged to join the fight in defense of the few survivors. “And nobody in local space ever heard from them again,” Archer finished. “Some legends say they both got caught by a doomsday weapon that destroyed the planet they were fighting over. Some say one deliberately destroyed itself to take the others with them.”
“How awful.”
“Well, some historians think the survivors just scattered, finding new homes and taking new names. I hope that’s the case, but nobody knows for sure. All we know,” he said, gesturing around them, “is what they left us. A grand creation that fell apart because its creators couldn’t get along. Like the Tower of Babel in Earth mythology.”
“Ahh, hence your code name for it,” Hemnask said. Pausing for thought, she smiled. “I can guess—this site is used for diplomatic talks as a reminder of the cost should those talks fail.”
“Exactly,” Archer replied, impressed by her sharp mind. “Starting about four centuries ago with the Ramatis Choral Debates. The people of Ramatis succeeded in staving off war and are admired as great diplomats to this day. Since then, a number of civilizations have used Babel as neutral ground to hash out their differences and negotiate treaties. Like the Andorians and Tellarites a decade ago, when they asked Earth to mediate a trade dispute.” He told her how the Romulan stealth attacks intended to disrupt that conference had backfired, prompting Earth, Andoria, Tellar, and Vulcan to come together against their common foe. Those first Babel talks had led to the formation of the Coalition of Planets the following year; then, after the war, the planetoid had hosted the preliminary talks for the formation of the Federation—although the final signing ceremony had been held on Earth, since founding a nation here would have undermined the sanctity of this neutral ground.
“It’s wise to have such reminders of history’s grim lessons,” Hemnask told him. “The Governing Board is based in Tregon for much the same reason. Centuries ago, it was the site of a great massacre of my Zami ancestors by the Jelna. My people had only been on Five for a few generations then, and when Rigelian fever spread across both our worlds, the Jelna came to see aliens as unclean and drove us from their cities. The fact that the fever ravaged Four even worse mattered little to them. And by driving us out, they probably delayed a cure, for it was Zami physicians who eventually discovered how to treat the fever with ryetalyn. Tregon has stood ever since as an object lesson for tolerance and cooperation. It reminds us that all our people are equally Rigelian, whatever world they come from.”
Archer’s appreciative reply was drowned out by shouting from nearby. He turned to see Rogra jav Baur, the Tellarite ambassador, engaged in a vocal confrontation with his counterpart from Mars, Mikhail Kamenev, while the Earth and Alpha Centauri delegates stood on their respective flanks. “Excuse me,” he said to Hemnask, embarrassed that the representatives of his own Federation evidently needed a refresher in that same lesson.
As he approached, Archer could hear the gist of the argument. “Racist!” Baur was crying. “You just can’t stand letting more nonhumans into the Federation. You’re no better than Terra Prime or those fanatics on Alrond!”
“How dare you?” Kamenev shouted back.
“Just like a Federalist to demonize the opposition,” chimed in Ysanne Fell, the prim and shrill-voiced Centaurian ambassador. “Can you blame the Lechebists for their fear of cultural assimilation? Hopefully the Rigelians won’t be fooled into surrendering their autonomy to the state.”
“Yes, cultural assimilation is exactly the issue,” Kamenev insisted. “Our worlds will lose their uniqueness if too many are blended together in one homogeneous mass.”
“Yet you don’t seem to object to letting Vega Colony join!” the Tellarite riposted.
“Because they deserve to stand on a level playing field, not as a dependency of Earth! I feel the same about any colony world, such as Alrond or Iota Pegasi.”
“Oh, really? And would you flirt with their representatives the way you have with that girl from Vega?”
“You leave Tamara out of this!”
Sensing that words were about to give way to blows, Archer moved forward—but before he could interpose himself between the two large men, he saw that someone else already had. A rather small someone else, in fact: a Vulcan woman several centimeters shorter than T’Pol. Yet her stance made it clear that she was not to be moved from where she stood. She held each ambassador’s gaze coolly and firmly for several seconds, and each man in turn stood down. “Gentlemen,” she said in a soft, serene voice that contrasted with the coiled-spring poise of her body. “I submit that the conference table is a more appropriate venue for policy debates. Perhaps you will grasp each other’s positions more clearly without the influence of distracting libations.”
Deciding to back up her peacekeeping effort, Archer stepped closer. “Is there a problem here?”
The ambassadors proffered various mum
blings about the absence of problems and returned to the havens of their respective factions, which seemed equally matched, with three ambassadorial parties in each. He turned to the Vulcan. “Thanks for your help.”
She studied him. “I believe your characterization is inverted. Your assistance is appreciated . . . albeit unnecessary.”
He tilted his head in concession. “Point taken.”
“Both of you deserve thanks.” It was Director Hemnask, coming up alongside Archer once again. “Admiral, would you introduce me?”
Archer studied the Vulcan’s refined features, trying to place her name. “I . . . know you’re with Ambassador Solkar’s delegation, but . . .”
She rescued him from further embarrassment. “T’Rama. Formerly of Administrator T’Pau’s security detail.”
“That would explain it,” Hemnask said. “You are here to protect the ambassador?”
“I retired from security once my husband and I committed to starting a family. The ambassador is my husband’s-father, however, and he required a personal aide when he chose to come out of retirement to participate in this conference.”
“I understand,” Archer said. “He’s . . . had quite a storied career.”
T’Rama gave him a frank look that was not entirely ungrateful. “You mean he is quite elderly. Yes. But he intends the admission of Rigel to the Federation to be the concluding achievement of his career. I intend to help him see it through.” She threw the ambassador a look across the room, a look that Archer would have called affectionate if she weren’t Vulcan. “Our family has produced statespersons and diplomats for generations. Yet Solkar’s only offspring, my husband, Skon, found his calling in mathematics instead.”
Archer snapped his fingers, trying to remember. “Skon. I’ve heard of him. I read his English translation of The Teachings of Surak.”
She nodded. “Yes, linguistics is his avocation.”
Star Trek: Enterprise - 016 - Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel Page 10
