“As far as it goes, yes,” Captain Zang acknowledged. “But hardly evidence of sentience. Many animal species, even insects, show behavior like this. There’s nothing to it that can’t be raw instinct.”
Najafi glared at him. “You know there’s more. Come on—what I want to show you is on the other side of the pond.”
It took several minutes to circle the resting copse of dryads, but in this oxygen-rich air, Sato hardly felt winded when they reached the other side. It was due as much to her sense of wonder at this world as to the oxygen in the air.
Najafi gestured widely to encompass the area before them, including a wide pile of boulders that formed one edge of the pond. “What do you notice about the pond?”
Cutler narrowed her eyes. “Nothing special. Just a widening of the brook, created by that rock formation acting as a natural dam.”
“Natural?” Najafi asked. “Look around, Lieutenant. Where did the rocks come from?”
The three women from Endeavour surveyed the area, but Sato could see no similar boulders. A moment later, Cutler confirmed, “There’s nothing in the immediate vicinity that matches. Maybe they were deposited by glaciation—but no, wait, the climate would be constant, barring a major change in stellar activity. And this doesn’t look like a glacially formed landscape.”
“Have you looked closely at the dryads’ tentacles?” Najafi said. “They’re strong and thick—and they end in three digits apiece. The minimum number necessary for fine manipulation.”
T’Pol’s brows went up. “Do you propose that the dryads constructed this dam?”
“I’m certain of it.”
Zang crossed his arms. “Even if that’s true,” he said, “beavers build dams. Birds build nests.”
“And people build things too,” Najafi countered with some heat. “You can’t assume they aren’t intelligent just because you don’t want them to be.”
T’Pol interposed. “With all due respect, Captain Zang, it does seem wise to err on the side of caution until we know more.”
Her calm delivery served to damp the tension between the two Boomers. Visibly gathering himself, Zang turned to her and asked, “Is it cautious, Captain T’Pol, to deprive the Federation of the medical benefits the dryads could provide us? And not just potential new pharmaceuticals. My people think that study of their neural tissues could lead to new nerve regeneration treatments. Imagine if we could regrow nerves from cuttings as easily as a, a tomato plant.”
Sato looked up sharply at that, thinking of Kimura. Could harvesting the dryads lead to a treatment for his impairment?
But would he be willing to be healed if it came at the expense of a sentient being’s life?
Even as Hoshi wrestled with her conflicting thoughts, T’Pol asked, “Can the beneficial compounds be synthesized without killing the dryads?”
“They’re very complex. We haven’t found a way to do it effectively. And it’s far more efficient and economical to extract them from the dryads’ own bodies.” Zang sighed. “Look, I’m not proposing we slash and burn the whole species. Obviously I want to do this sustainably. These organisms could be a cash crop for a long time to come. If anything, cultivating them—herding them, whatever you call it—could increase their population. We’d take good care of them.”
Najafi fumed. “Until the time came to murder them, suck out their innards, and dissect their brains.”
“A few stacked rocks don’t prove they can think.”
Sato touched Najafi’s arm calmingly. This atmosphere could indeed make sparks easier to set off, it seemed. “Look—the reason I’m here is because you reported there was evidence of communication. Why don’t we go back to base so you can show me your data?” She gave a sheepish smile. “I wouldn’t mind getting back into some more normal air. This is bracing, but the three of us aren’t used to it yet, so . . .”
The suggestion allowed the Boomers to save face, so both Zang and Najafi agreed to it readily. As they strode back toward camp, T’Pol sidled over to whisper at Sato. “You may have a future in diplomacy,” she said. “Still, I doubt it will be easy to convince either of these men they are wrong.”
Sato was tempted to speak out in Najafi’s defense; to her, the lanky young science officer seemed far more reasonable than the gruff captain. But she was learning to second-guess her impulses while under the influence of Birnam’s atmosphere. Was there some other reason she wanted to leap to the defense of the Boomer scientist? Perhaps that he was funny and charming and had a gorgeous smile, not to mention being rather fun to watch from behind as he strode eagerly and athletically back toward camp?
It’s the oxygen, Hoshi told herself, forcing her eyes down to her fingers as they stroked her engagement ring reassuringly. It’s just the oxygen.
February 28, 2166
Akleyro, Sauria
Whatever his issues with Charles Tucker, Antonio Ruiz had chosen to cooperate with him for the good of the cause, at least to the extent of supporting his persona as the arms smuggler Victor Lund, with the modification of presenting Devna (or rather, Elevia) to them as his partner rather than his property. Commander Mullen, Lieutenant Kelly, and the rest of the Essex team had seemed to accept him on the recommendation of Ruiz and Garos, and none of them seemed to be enough of a Casablanca fan to notice anything familiar about his alias.
But Mullen and Kelly had little time for him, since wrangling the Saurian resistance factions was a full-time job. Saurians were a confident, self-reliant people on the whole, an understandable attribute given their great physical robustness. They had evolved in response to a harsh, dangerous environment, and that response had essentially amounted to “Oh, yeah? Take your best shot!” They had unusual strength, endurance, and robustness; heightened senses including infrared vision; and the ability to withstand extreme temperature shifts and toxic gases. They could even function underwater for extended periods. Their evolutionary ancestors had made one concession to the planet’s fierce conditions, adopting a nocturnal lifestyle to avoid the searing heat and overpowering storms that often swept the planet in the light of day. Nonetheless, the Saurians had shown great ingenuity in overcoming the limitations of a nocturnal species in order to develop technology. After initially relying on the planet’s abundant volcanic vents and hot springs as their main sources of heat, they had eventually realized that sheets of volcanic glass could shield their sensitive eyes enough to allow them to harness fire. Their civilization had literally begun with the invention of sunglasses, which was not a bad symbol for their attitude as a culture.
That attitude made it a challenge for offworlders like Mullen and Kelly to convince the Saurians to respect their ideas. Even those who nominally rejected Maltuvis’s xenophobia often had an unconscious perception of offworlders as intrinsically weak—though the no-nonsense military manner and combat prowess that Morgan Kelly had demonstrated in her training drills had gone a long way to counter that perception. But it looked like the greater challenge might be getting the different Saurian factions to find common ground. While Maltuvis had many foes, they had been pursuing separate resistance campaigns in service to distinct priorities and ideologies, and on several occasions, they had gotten in each other’s way or even come into conflict over their old grudges. It had taken until now for the Starfleet advisors to convince the heads of several resistance groups to meet and discuss coordinating their efforts toward a common goal—specifically, a joint operation to destroy one of Maltuvis’s new shipbuilding factories before it went online. Such a blow against the emperor’s ability to construct the ships that let him oppress and terrorize the entire planet would be a major military victory as well as a propaganda victory, proving to the Saurian people that Maltuvis’s power was not absolute and that resistance could succeed. The hope was that the very public destruction of one factory would inspire the slave laborers at the other factories to commit their own acts of sabotage, if not to destroy the other factories, then at least to slow them down or introduce exploitable
flaws into the ships they built. Surely this was a plan that all the resistance groups could get behind—which was presumably why Garos and the Three Sisters considered it the ideal bait for their trap.
The summit, however, was not going smoothly. When Moxat, the presider-in-exile of the Global League, spoke of following up the raid with an outreach campaign to the oppressed masses within Maltuvis’s home nation of M’Tezir, both to inspire the sabotage of military facilities therein and to provide relief and rescue for those suffering worst under the dictator’s heel, it provoked an angry response from K’vizhano, the head of the resistance faction from the conquered nation of Veranith. Tucker recalled from his previous visit that Veranith and M’Tezir had been traditional enemies for centuries. “You’re fools to waste your sympathy on those people,” K’vizhano insisted. “They’ve accepted dictatorship for generations because it suits their character—rigid, intolerant, authoritarian, paranoid. They could have risen up against their monarchy long ago, but instead they welcomed it. They’re all part of M’Tezir’s military machine, indoctrinated from birth and fanatically loyal. They supported the previous Basileus, even gladly cooperated, when he expelled or executed all Veranith immigrants during the Third Oceanic War. Hostility and cruelty are the nature of all their kind.”
“Your fire sprays too widely,” objected Porsalis of the R’Ganik, a Global League nation belonging to the same lilac-skinned ethnic minority as the M’Tezir, yet with its own long history of enmity with that state. “It is not their ‘kind’ that is to blame—it is the antiquated culture that the Basilic line of rulers has kept alive long after the rest of us embraced modernity and democracy. If all you see when you look at them is the hue of their flesh, how does that make you any less intolerant?”
“How dare you accuse me of only seeing the surface?” K’vizhano shouted. “I am not some Clear Light cultist with my membranes cut out!”
Next to him, the representative of Clear Light made an outraged noise. “I am sitting right beside you! I should have known. Why did I think we would receive any respect here? Your nations have never welcomed us any more than Maltuvis did.” Apparently Nekze’s sect was a philosophical fringe group (few Saurians held religious beliefs per se, at least not of the theistic variety) that practiced a form of self-mutilation, severing the nictitating membranes that allowed them to block out visible light and see purely in infrared. Tucker wasn’t entirely clear on why they did this, though he gathered it had something to do with finding it invasive to see inside others’ bodies. But most Saurians saw the practice as an induced disability, finding it repellent—even abusive, since the procedure was performed on children in infancy. Lightists generally had to hide their nature from other Saurians, though Nekze’s faction had been openly campaigning for acceptance in the Global League, arguing that its inclusiveness meant nothing if it didn’t extend to every group.
“The M’Tezir are far worse,” K’vizhano insisted. “They execute your kind for their disabilities.”
“While you merely outlaw us and attempt to ‘cure’ us of our purity!”
“Purity?” The disbelieving cry came from Kobekla, the spokesperson for an even more extremist sect called the Untainted. “You corrupt the purity of the body, weaken yourselves as much as those who rely on cities and guns and spaceships. At least these others merely use such abominations—you turn yourselves into abominations!” Most Saurians tended to rely more on their own robust abilities and less on technology than humans typically did—which was why they were not a starfaring power despite having a much older civilization than Earth’s—but the Untainted took it to an extreme, rejecting all advanced technology and relying on their own innate abilities or on tools they built from natural materials. Kobekla and her supporters didn’t even wear clothing aside from a few handmade straps and carrying pouches. Nonetheless, they had managed to wage a long-running guerrilla campaign to prevent civilization from encroaching on their territories, using their own resourcefulness and strength to drive out or kill intruders and smash their technology—sometimes siccing predatory animals on them or redirecting herds of megafauna to smash their outposts. The Untainted could be formidable allies, but even getting them to the table had taken all of Mullen’s diplomatic skills, with help from Garos—who had cooperated in recruiting the more extreme sects like the Untainted and Clear Light as potential scapegoats for the impending terroristic catastrophe.
K’vizhano simply ignored the Untainted leader’s protest. “The point,” he went on, “is that we must not hobble our ability to strike at Maltuvis’s seat of power because we fear harming the civilians around him. Now, I wish no more loss of life than necessary, but all M’Tezir should be considered legitimate military targets.”
“We can’t define the enemy by ethnicity!” Porsalis objected. “Already some R’Ganik citizens have been subjected to violence by those who mistook them for M’Tezir. The resistance must take a stand against such profiling!”
“You’re too preoccupied with your own sense of victimhood! This is about saving our world!”
“Saving it for whom?”
“Hold it!” The forceful shout from Morgan Kelly silenced all the Saurians. “Debating which of you is more oppressed won’t get you anywhere. It’s what Maltuvis wants! The only way this alliance can advance is if you recognize that your concerns are intersectional. The dynamics of one form of oppression or intolerance are the same as the dynamics of another, even if the specific excuses are different.” A couple of the Saurians attempted to object, but Kelly continued to speak in loud, relentless tones. “And a key part of that dynamic is pitting different oppressed groups against each other so they won’t recognize their common ground and unite. You need to stop dwelling on the ways you’re unlike each other and recognize that you all share a common fear of being punished for your identity, marginalized for your way of life. Those ways are different, but the fear of losing them is the same. And the threat Maltuvis poses to all of your independence is the same.”
“What do you know of it, outsider?” Kobekla demanded, her own stridency rivaling Kelly’s intensity. “You, who are further removed from your nature than any of us. You, who are not a part of this world and can leave it as you choose.”
“My nature is what I choose to make it. Who we are isn’t some accident of birth, it’s a creation of our will.”
Now Antonio Ruiz stepped up. “She’s right. I am part of this world. I may not have been born here, my people may not have evolved here, but I’ve made it my home. The gravity’s too high for me, the climate’s too hot, my eyes are weak in the dark, but Sauria is where I feel I belong, and its people are my family. And I’m not the only one. Many offworlders have chosen to live here, and Maltuvis is killing us just as he’s killing you. Yes, I’m an alien, but I’m also a Saurian. We aren’t all just one thing.”
Kelly nodded. “Are there no Clear Lightists in Veranith? No Untainted in R’Ganik? There were even Veranith in M’Tezir once—and how can you protest their expulsion,” the armory officer challenged K’vizhano, “if you don’t believe that dual identity was the way it should have been? If those Veranith chose to live in M’Tezir, then they made that part of their identity as Veranith! Just as all your groups intersect with other identities, whether national, ethnic, or philosophical. If you look for the ways members of your own groups and causes are different from you, then you can see that those differences don’t keep you from working together. And that helps you to recognize that your differences with other groups are not insurmountable.”
Tucker sensed Devna moving alongside him as Kelly spoke. “A surprise,” the Orion said, “to find that Lieutenant Kelly is as adept at discoursing on the politics of resistance as she is at drilling fighters and field-stripping plasma rifles.”
“Yeah,” Tucker replied with a chuckle, “especially since she talks more like a drill sergeant than a professor.”
“I do wonder how you humans know so much about these matters, though. You pride y
ourself so much on your freedom and equality.”
“Only because we had to fight so hard to achieve them. Or—well—some had to fight the rest of us.” He grimaced. “The ugly truth is, not much more than three centuries ago, my ancestors might’ve owned her ancestors as slaves.”
Devna stared at him. “You had slavery that recently?”
“Afraid so. And even after we outlawed it, the attitudes that had evolved to justify slavery—the beliefs that some humans were genetically inferior to others—those went on poisoning our society for almost another two centuries.”
“How did you finally overcome them?”
“It took a lot of hard work. A lot of courage and resistance from people who refused to have their rights denied. A lot of sacrificed lives, too.”
Devna absorbed that quietly. “And was it worth the suffering and dying . . . to win those rights?”
He held her emerald gaze. “They already had those rights. We’re all born with them. They were fighting for the recognition of something that was always theirs.” He looked back at Kelly, Mullen, and Ruiz. “And folks like them . . . like my brother Albert and his husband . . . they wouldn’t be free to exercise their rights today if their forebears hadn’t fought those battles.”
“But the battles are won. You have the privilege of being your own masters. Why, then, do you not simply enjoy the fruits of your victory?”
“Because if we ever forget what we owe to our ancestors . . . if we take our freedoms for granted . . . then we can start to lose them.” He turned to her. “And because there are always others who have their own freedoms to fight for. The Saurians, the Partnership, the Orions . . . if we don’t stand up for all of their rights, then we’re forfeiting what our ancestors fought so hard to win. Ultimately it’s all the same fight—only the battlefield shifts.”
Devna looked within herself. “On Delta . . . they taught me that all beings are part of one another. That we share a common spirit, a common dignity. That what hurts one hurts us all.”
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