But if Tucker knew of such an advance and kept it to himself, Archer had wondered, was he that much more trustworthy?
The proposal Tucker and Reed had just spelled out to him had made him wonder the same thing. “This is an incredibly risky plan you’re proposing, Trip. Not just to yourself, but to the Saurians. If you know Maltuvis and the Orions are planning to stage a disaster and you don’t tell anyone—”
“If I did tell anyone, it’d tip Harris off that I’m working against him. And it’d tip off the Syndicate that we’ve tapped their communications. And then either one, or both, could find some other way to hurt the Federation without us having a chance to stop it. And Maltuvis’d just go on slaughtering his people anyway.”
“Still, you’re playing with fire. If your plan doesn’t go off just right, those deaths could still happen.”
“Sir,” Reed interposed, “it’s not as if we haven’t faced similar odds before. Trip knows what he’s doing. He has an asset within the Syndicate and an in with the Saurian resistance.”
“That’s right.” Tucker nodded. “Antonio Ruiz—the man who recorded that video of the capital attack. The fact that he’s survived this long means he’s even more resourceful than I knew.”
“All right, all right,” Archer said. “Even assuming you’ve got a realistic chance of pulling this off . . . have you thought about the effect it’ll have in the Federation? I’m already struggling to convince the rest of Starfleet, the government, and the public that noninterference is the right policy. If it comes out that an illegal conspiracy and the Orion Syndicate are both trying to stack the deck in favor of noninterference, how do you think the public’s going to react? Our efforts will be completely discredited!”
“That’s a risk, I know,” Tucker replied. “But maybe it won’t be as bad as that. There are good arguments in support of noninterference. Those won’t be erased by a single scandal. The people who really believe in the principle won’t lose faith.”
“They’re not the ones we need to convince, Trip!”
“I know that, Jon. But there are bigger things at stake.”
“Bigger than the whole future of how Starfleet interacts with other cultures?”
“That’s exactly what this is about!” Tucker cried. “If Starfleet’s gonna intervene in other worlds, let it be a Starfleet that does it openly, in the public eye, so it can be held accountable. Not a secret cabal that intervenes from the shadows and uses a nominal hands-off policy as a smokescreen. Jon, getting your directive passed won’t do any good if Section Thirty-one is still there to pervert it. Let’s cut the rot out of Starfleet first—then we can deal with how we treat other worlds.”
Archer stared at his old friend, holding back an equally angry response. He could see how committed Trip was to his cause—probably even more than Archer was to his, for this was personal to Trip. And in all honesty, Archer couldn’t think of a good counterargument. After a moment, he sighed. “I just . . . I’d prefer it if we could find a solution that didn’t require choosing the lesser of two evils.”
“We all would, sir,” Reed replied. “But in Section Thirty-one’s arena, there are rarely such clear-cut right choices—just one gray area after another. We’re playing on their turf, after all.”
Archer nodded. “All right. I’ll sign off on your plan, Trip. I’ll support you insofar as I can . . . and I’ll start thinking of ways to do damage control on the noninterference front.”
Tucker’s shoulders relaxed. “Thanks, Jon. It means a lot.”
“For me too, sir,” Reed added.
“Just be careful,” Archer advised, pointing at both of them. “Remember: if you’re playing on Thirty-one’s turf . . . that gives them the home field advantage.”
5
February 9, 2166
GJ 1045 system
FARID NAJAFI stared through the viewport, watching eagerly for the first glimpse of the planet’s surface as the shuttlepod descended through its dense cloud layer. Alongside him, the other members of the E.C.S. Jules Verne’s crew expressed similar anticipation. The yet-unnamed planet had been a font of surprises from the start. “This could be the find of a lifetime,” Najafi heard Alec Castellano saying from the pilot’s seat, for at least the sixth time since they’d left the Verne. The seventeen-year-old boy’s enthusiasm was difficult to contain at the best of times.
Behind Alec, his mother, Maya, leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder. “And we made it, not those Starfleet know-it-alls,” the raven-haired biologist said. “They wouldn’t even have bothered taking a chance on a world like this.”
Najafi wasn’t sure that was true, but his fellow scientist was right that coming here had been a long shot. Dim red dwarfs like GJ 1045, an M4 star a parsec or so beyond Alpha Arietis, were by far the most abundant stars in the galaxy—yet finding habitable worlds around them was iffy at best. They had protracted, slow, and turbulent infancies, long enough for stellar flares and tidally induced volcanic activity to strip any habitable-zone planet of its water. Many a space pioneer had followed the siren lure of an oxygen signature to an M-dwarf system to find only a fossil layer of oxygen surrounding a barren, desiccated planet, a remnant of its original water supply after its hydrogen had been burned away by radiation. Sometimes a Neptune-like world would migrate into the habitable zone and lose its hydrogen atmosphere gradually enough to let its rocky, icy core become warm and livable once the star had settled down to a gentler phase, but the size and the timing had to be just right. And M dwarfs were prone to heavy flare activity throughout their lives, often enough to strip bare any remaining atmosphere and moisture unless the planet’s orbit was sufficiently inclined to dodge most of the coronal mass ejections.
Even a planet that withstood all those challenges would still be close enough to the star to be tidally locked, with one side perpetually lit and the other forever dark. Without a dense enough atmosphere and large enough oceans to circulate the heat, such a world could end up with only a narrow habitable band around the day/night terminator, bracketed by fierce heat on one side and a hemisphere-smothering ice cap on the other. Any life that got a foothold might be snuffed out when plate tectonics carried it out of its comfort zone.
But this time, Captain Zang’s gamble had paid off. This planet’s evolution had proceeded just right to leave it with oceans and oxygen, survivable radiation levels, and a livable climate over the majority of its surface. The permanent cloud layer over most of its sunward half mitigated the excess heat and rendered the entire hemisphere habitable, although the substellar pole was engulfed in a vast, slow, perpetual hurricane. Orbital scans had confirmed an abundance of plant life, though it tended toward dark, purplish colors, its chlorophyll equivalents adapted to absorb the infrared light that was its star’s primary output. Farid and Maya had spent hours debating the question of how plant life could thrive on a planet where the sun never moved in the sky, where any shade created by taller plants or geological features would be a constant. How would they compete to maximize their exposure to sunlight? How could smaller plants hope to survive at all? Were they like the dark-adapted floor-dwellers under a rainforest canopy? Could they simply draw on ambient infrared from the environment? And what animal or insect life might exist? Would any be able to survive the star’s frequent flares—moderate enough to let an atmosphere survive, but intense enough to be problematical for nonbotanical life? But if there were no animals or insects, how did the plants distribute and fertilize themselves?
Thus it was an eager crew that gazed out the shuttlepod’s ports as the clouds finally cleared. Soon, the pod approached a low rise near a river, covered with spongy, dark bluish growth. It was flanked on one side by a stand of stiff, bamboo-like grass and on the other by slender trees resembling asparagus stalks with their “scales” open wide and angled to catch the sunlight. Alec brought the pod in above the rise and activated the landing thrusters—and the planet delivered yet another surprise.
Below them, the spongy growth
on the hillock was moving—not just trembling in the thrust from the shuttlepod, but actually migrating away from the disturbance. When the pod touched down, it did so on bare dirt.
As this happened, the asparagus trees folded up their scales before the survey team’s eyes. “And look,” called Maya Castellano as she pointed out a window. “The bamboo-like plants have folded down against the ground.”
“Bent over by the wind,” suggested Captain Zang.
“No, they’re too stiff. Look!”
Young Alec had cut the engines and the wind had subsided. The stalks began to rise again, but not like bent reeds springing upright. Instead, they remained rigid, rising in a controlled, hesitant manner.
Farid grinned. “With plants like these, who needs animals?”
The wait for the final environment check felt interminable, though it was less than half a minute. Zang Liwei took the first steps onto the planet, as was his right as Verne’s captain, but Farid and Maya were close behind, followed by the rest of the team. They couldn’t wait to sample the nearby flora—assuming they were flora and not some kind of strange animal life.
Maya had the honor of spotting the first flying creature, a wispy sylph that mainly drifted on the strong winds but occasionally flapped its wide, translucent membranes to maneuver and achieve extra lift. Spectroanalysis showed that it, too, was a plant. Farid and Maya followed it until it took in its sails and drifted down to alight on a small pond, where it began absorbing water through its “wings.”
Moments later, a set of indigo tentacles breached the pond’s surface and yanked the sylph into its murky depths. Here, it seemed, even the predators were plants.
“They are essentially plants, not animals,” Maya Castellano was able to confirm once the party had finished setting up their camp. This planet may have had no day or night, but humans still needed sleep—as well as a place to shelter from stellar flares. “Their composition is plantlike, they photosynthesize, they have root systems or root analogues. Their contractile fibers are more like plant cells than animal, and their internal signals are more chemical than electrical; but these are the functional equivalents of muscles and nerves.”
“I still can’t wrap my head around it,” Alec breathed, shaking his head. “Moving plants.”
“Earth plants move,” Maya reminded her son. “Flowers open their petals in the morning, close them at night, and turn to follow the sun as it moves across the sky.”
“But . . . the sun never moves here.”
“Exactly why the plants need to,” Farid Najafi realized even as he said it. “How else would they get out of the shadow of a taller plant? This answers so many questions.”
“Oh, but they lead to so many more interesting questions,” Maya replied, her broad, olive-skinned face splitting into a grin. “The hybrid cell structures are remarkable, but they’re nothing compared to what I’m seeing on the molecular scale. So many novel compounds—I can barely begin to imagine the commercial possibilities. New classes of pharmaceutical. New types of textile—imagine a material like cotton that could contract like muscle. New crops with the nutritional value of both plants and animals. Or—or imagine the value of crops that could move themselves to maximize solar exposure or dodge harmful weather.”
“Now, there’s a topsy-turvy idea,” Farid said.
“What’s that?” asked Alec.
“Corns with feet on them.” The boy groaned.
Hoping to forestall further corny jokes, Zang asked, “Did you find anything at all that you’d call an animal?”
“Not yet,” the biologist replied.
“Not even insects?”
“Not a one.”
“So how do the plants fertilize each other?” Alec asked his mother.
“You’re still thinking in conventional terms, kid,” Farid said. “If the plants can move, insects are redundant. They can take care of their own fertilization.”
The boy chortled. “You mean the plants have sex? Okay, now I’m interested.”
“Hold it,” Maya said.
“Aw, Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. I can talk about—”
“No, not that,” Maya said, holding up a finger and listening. “What’s that rumbling?”
Her hearing was very sharp, but the others picked it up soon enough. Seismic readings showed its origin several kilometers away and slowly approaching. Verne was in the wrong orbital position to observe, so Zang sent Alec up in the shuttlepod to investigate.
“What does it look like?” the captain asked over his wristcom once the youthful pilot had reached the site of the disturbance.
A pause. “Like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, sir.”
Zang frowned. “I’m glad to know you’re keeping up with your Shakespeare studies, Alec. But I also appreciate clear reports.”
“Yes, sir. Um, it’s a group of treelike organisms—I don’t know whether to call it a herd or a grove. I’d say about fifty of them, ranging from, oh, five to twenty meters tall.”
“Twenty?” Maya exclaimed.
“I said they were treelike, Mom. They must be pretty heavy; they’re really mangling the undergrowth.”
“How fast are they moving?” the captain asked.
“Mmm, about walking speed, say five, six klicks. That’d bring them to the campsite in about two hours. And, Captain, they’re headed directly for the camp.”
Farid turned to the captain. “Then the camp had better make like the local trees and—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Zang said, irritated as always by Farid’s puns. “Just start packing up. Alec, get back here now.”
The timing was close; it took nearly two hours to break camp and get the shuttlepod back off the ground. The survey team watched from the hovering pod as the herd of tree-things shambled—or, as Farid was determined to think of it, lumbered—directly toward their former campsite.
And then changed course and missed it altogether.
Not by much, actually; they completely trampled the folding grasses east of the hill. The stalks had apparently evolved to bend flat as protection from the planet’s high winds, but that naturally proved no defense against the walking trees. “But why did they bypass the campsite?” Zang asked.
Farid shrugged. “Hospitality?”
February 12, 2166
U.S.S. Pioneer NCC-63, Earth orbit
“There you go, Lieutenant Kirk,” said Doctor Liao as she finished securing the osteogenic brace. “Just stay off this leg for the next few days, and your tibia should heal up nicely.”
Sam Kirk sighed. “Thanks, Doc,” he said with little cheer but as much gratitude as he could manage. “I’ll do my best.”
The diminutive, gray-haired doctor smiled at him, then nodded at Val Williams and Bodor chim Grev, who bracketed the sickbay bed where Kirk lay, the former holding his hand and the latter clasping his shoulder. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bug Commander Tizahr about those power grid upgrades she’s been promising for a week. If I’m not back in an hour, call security.”
“I am security,” Val reminded her.
“And I make the calls,” Grev added.
“Fine,” Liao said on her way out the door. “I wouldn’t quit those day jobs if I were you.”
Once she was gone, Grev turned to Kirk and shook his porcine-featured head. “Sam, Sam, Sam,” the Tellarite ensign intoned. “I don’t know what I find more unbelievable: that you finally let Val talk you into skydiving lessons, or that you broke your leg on your very first jump.”
“I’m afraid I find the latter all too believable,” Kirk replied. “What was I thinking?”
“Your problem was, you thought too much,” Williams told him. “You hesitated instead of trusting your instincts. I warned you about that.”
“I know, I know. But . . .” He sighed again. “I don’t really have instincts. It’s not that I have anything against being impulsive, I’m just really bad at it. Whenever I try to make a snap decision, it tends to be t
he wrong one.” He winced. “Like deciding to surprise you with my newfound interest in spacewalking in an atmosphere.”
“Sam, we’ve been in life-or-death situations together. You handled yourself pretty damn well back on Rastish.”
“That’s different. When it’s an emergency, when I have to think fast for others’ sake, then the adrenaline kicks in. Otherwise, I struggle to find the right choice. I hoped that skydiving would be intense enough to help me think fast, but I guess it didn’t.” He smiled up at her sheepishly. “Maybe because I was too nervous about wanting to impress you.”
Val studied him closely. “Was it me you wanted to impress, Sam? Or my dad? You know it doesn’t matter to me if he approves of you or not.”
“But it should. I don’t want to be a source of tension between you and your family. Especially when your father is Admiral Archer’s right-hand man. Besides—” He hesitated.
“Besides, what?”
Grev stepped in. Despite his habitually kindly, soft-spoken delivery, he could be as blunt as any other Tellarite. “Sam thinks it’s not just your father who wishes he were tougher and more assertive. He can tell you get impatient with him sometimes.”
Williams stared at Kirk. “Sam, is this true?”
He gazed back. “You tell me.”
She let go of his hand, but only so she could pace sickbay while she gathered her thoughts. “Okay, look,” she finally said. “Yes, I admit, I’m used to a more . . . intense lifestyle than you prefer. I’m used to dating people who like the same. So this—the quieter times we spend just talking, or walking on the beach, or playing chess, or going to museums—it’s a new gear for me. But it’s not that I don’t enjoy it.” She came closer and took his hand again. “It’s actually pretty refreshing. To slow down with you, take the time to listen to myself think and get to know myself better. It’s soothing, and reassuring, and safe, and that’s important to me with the life we lead.
“If I occasionally show impatience, if my attention wanders . . . it’s not a judgment of you. It’s just that it’s not easy for me to drop out of warp. You help me find the quiet within me, but it’s . . . a finite supply.
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