Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies

by Miller, John Jackson

  The Selenean traced her fingers across the writings. Some messages were gouged into the porous stones with sharp rocks; others were in chalk. “Most of them are in Baladonian.”

  “As one would expect,” Tuvok said with a hint of impatience, “this having been the Ekorr’s base for many years.” He didn’t look up from his tricorder analysis.

  “But not all,” she said. She pointed at several fresher-looking scrawls. “These are in Ekorr. Here, here, and here.”

  Riker and Troi looked at each other. The counselor rose and joined Modan at the wall. “They’re more recent, all right,” Troi said. “On top of some of the others. What do they say?”

  “Not ‘happy to be here,’” Riker guessed.

  “None of them say that,” Modan said, nodding. “But the Baladonians’ messages are of disgust with being captured. The thrust of the Ekorr messages is more surprise at being put in their own jail.”

  Tuvok looked up, suddenly interested. “So whatever occurred to change the balance of power on Garadius did not happen all at once. Some Ekorr survived to see their base captured.”

  Modan knelt, pointing out, “The freshest message is this one, with the arrow.”

  Riker’s eyes widened. “Arrow?”

  “Yes. It says ‘Friend, find your freedom.’ And the arrow . . .” Her voice trailed off as she followed the scratching downward. It terminated at a stone that jiggled when she touched it. “Spines of the Mother! There’s something behind here!”

  The ensign pulled at the stone. It gave way easily—for the obvious reason that only half of it was there. The rest of the hollowed-out section revealed by the stone’s removal contained a small silver cylinder, little larger than a glass tumbler.

  “There’s an inscription,” she said, holding the object up to the weak light of the overhead fixture.

  Riker stood and walked over to her. He squinted at the item. “Is that an inscription in Ekorr? Looks like the same character over and over again.”

  Modan eyed the writing. “An excess of exclamation points, basically. The Ekorr are an excitable people in print as well as in person.”

  “I’ve noticed.” Riker shook his head.

  She read aloud. “Push . . . Ekorr . . . and be saved.”

  “Let me see.” Riker took the cylinder from her and shook it. He heard no sound. “Seems like there’s something in there.” But pressing the sides of it did nothing. “I don’t get it.”

  The linguist paused for a moment before brightening. “Wait! Maybe the secret’s not in Ekorr, but Elvish.”

  Riker looked puzzled. “Excuse me?”

  Tuvok rose and approached the others. “The ensign is referring to a constructed language found in the writings of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a human author.”

  Riker knew the name but not the relevance. “And so?”

  “So let me try something,” Modan said, picking up a straw from the ground. “If I may, Admiral?”

  Riker handed the cylinder back—and he and Tuvok watched as the linguist searched the text of the inscription. Finding what she was looking for, she pressed the straw into a tiny indentation. With a little hiss, the end of the cylinder snapped open.

  Seleneans did not blink involuntarily, but Modan blinked now. “I can’t believe that worked!”

  Riker stared. “What did you do?”

  Tuvok was impressed. “The Ekorr appear to have borrowed an idea from an ancient human novel.” He pointed at the cylinder. “The instruction was to ‘Push Ekorr,’ and so she pushed the glyphic character for the word. It appears that before the Ekorr emptied my people’s library here, they read some of the books.”

  Troi smiled. “How did you learn that, Y’lira?”

  “I had a long-distance cryptolinguistics tutor once—Bart Faulwell—who turned me on to Elvish as an exercise,” Modan said. “He figured if you learned an artificial language, learning Klingon should be a snap.”

  “Well done,” Riker said, grinning. The ploy made sense: A Baladonian wouldn’t have understood the language, much less the reference. It was a good way to slip a message to an imprisoned Ekorr, he thought. Riker wondered how they got the device into the prison wall to begin with. “What’s inside? A key?”

  Modan pried loose the tightly packed contents. She rolled the black object over in her hand. “A wristband.”

  Riker took it. “More like an old wristwatch.” But where the timepiece should have been was, instead, a small disk with a single red button. “A signal device, maybe?” When he pressed the button, nothing happened. “Tuvok?”

  The Vulcan took the wristband and analyzed it with his tricorder. “There are sensor workings on the underside of the disk,” he said. “I would speculate that it requires contact with a wearer’s skin to function.” He flexed the wristband. “It is designed for an Ekorr, but I may be able to get it to fit.”

  The Vulcan pocketed the tricorder and wriggled his hand into the wristband. Looking up at Riker for permission, he pressed the button—

  —and vanished!

  The remaining prisoners could only stand and gawk at the empty spot where Tuvok had stood. “He . . . just disappeared!” Troi said.

  Riker’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know,” Modan said, similarly mystified. “But I think they’ve gotten their Tolkien chapters mixed up!”

  Seven

  * * *

  Physical reality is consistent with universal laws,” Spock had once said. “Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality.”

  Tuvok had been in some strange situations before as part of Voyager’s crew. But becoming suddenly immaterial—and invisible to his companions—at the push of a button was something novel. It wasn’t just physics that depended upon constants, but his worldview. To see everything change in an instant: That was a troubling prospect.

  And yet it had happened. He had spoken and waved to the admiral and the women repeatedly: They were completely unaware of his presence.

  “Do you think he was teleported somehow?” Troi asked.

  “We didn’t see any signs of that,” Riker replied, agitated. “He just blinked out of existence!”

  That sounded hyperbolic, and in other circumstances Tuvok might have said so. But it was clear now that they could neither hear nor see him, and he was not given to repeated futile attempts. Worse, he was no longer entirely sure that Admiral Riker’s statement was incorrect. He stepped back to the wall where the cylinder had been found and put his hand to the stone surface. Tuvok could see the contact his fingertips made with it, but he felt nothing—and a moment later, he pushed his fingers, his hand, and then his full arm through the wall. It was immaterial.

  Or he was.

  He stepped back. Tuvok could feel the boots against his feet, his uniform against his skin, the bulge of the tricorder in his pocket, and the band against his wrist. He pushed the button again. Nothing appeared to happen, but then nothing had appeared to happen before. Removing the wristband also seemed to have no effect.

  Interested to test his new situation, Tuvok cast his eyes toward the doorway. He did not excuse himself to Admiral Riker in taking his leave, as instinct demanded, but he did walk around him. It didn’t seem polite to pass through the body of a superior officer. Reaching the prison door, he stepped through it.

  The Baladonian guards were here: two of them, seeming bored. Like his crewmates, they registered no awareness at all of his presence.

  “Phased,” the Vulcan whispered—even though he knew well there was no reason to speak softly. “I’ve been phased.”

  * * *

  Commander Troi had told of the rescue of the Romulan ship in her report of Enterprise’s botched mission years earlier to Garadius IV. However, Tuvok was already aware of the rescue, for it was legendary within Starfleet intelligence circles. Commander La Forge a
nd Ensign Ro were knocked out of phase with reality, during which time they experienced what Tuvok was going through now. An intense burst of anyon radiation returned them back to normal. Commander La Forge published a paper on the event.

  It set the scientific community abuzz. Some researchers began referring to the phased realm as the La Forge/Ro Continuum. The Enterprise engineer had initially resisted the colloquialism, and later, the Bajoran’s tenure with the Maquis caused official Federation science journals to quietly drop the reference entirely. It wasn’t clear that what La Forge had experienced was a separate continuum; rather, it appeared to be a new peculiar material state.

  Tuvok had been captivated by La Forge’s experience. Science wasn’t his professional calling, but he was as curious as any Vulcan, and it had implications for security. Phase research was controversial within the Federation: When the Pegasus incident finally came out it had resulted in the court-martial and conviction of Admiral Pressman. It stood as one of the few black marks on the record of William Riker, who as a green ensign had tried to protect Pressman from the mutiny that his illegal research into an interphase cloak had sparked. Tuvok felt it was correct that Starfleet had seen fit to spare Riker, a man who had been a credit to the service.

  But it was while serving on Voyager that Tuvok had occasion to consider the espionage possibilities. He had encountered the Voth, an advanced species whose members spied on his ship using a personal interphase cloak. Voyager’s interaction with the Voth was too brief, however, for him to learn any answers to his questions—and they were many.

  If a phased individual could pass through normal matter unaffected, Tuvok had wondered, how could he or she stand and walk on the decks of a starship? Further, what were La Forge and Ro breathing if the ship’s atmosphere was still in the “normal” realm? How were light waves from the real world reaching the phased observers? They shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.

  La Forge had developed some hypotheses in his paper, but little testing had been done. Even now, phased-matter research was still in that nether zone. A pun, I suppose, Tuvok thought dryly. But here he was now, in a live experiment, accidental or otherwise.

  He walked through the opposite wall of the dungeon hallway, emerging into a kitchen. No one was present; it looked like a quiet place for him to think things through. Tuvok brought out the tricorder and passed it across his own body.

  The readings gave him his first answers. The tricorder and all solid matter in contact with Tuvok when he disappeared now read as infused with chroniton particles. The disk on the wristband, he inferred, must have somehow directed an explosion of chronitons into his form, without affecting those around him. Perhaps that is why I cannot reverse the process, he thought. That would require an anyon emitter, operating on him from the nonphased world.

  The instrument also revealed that the process had not phased the atmosphere around his body. And yet, somehow, he was inhaling nonphased air. He closed his eyes, working to remember the exact words from La Forge’s report.

  “Chronitization changes the parameters for matter within a system, but the matter remains in the system,” the engineer had written. “Some nonphased world conditions influence phased matter, just as phased matter influences some nonphased particles.” La Forge’s rescue years earlier had proven the latter. His wraithlike state had created chroniton fields on Enterprise, which Commander Data had eventually noticed. Now Tuvok’s instrument was seeing proof of the former. Phased carbon dioxide was being added to the existence around him: His own breaths were converting nonphased air into phased matter.

  Yet his exhalations were not being explosively directed across an airless phased void. That too was a prediction implied by the Enterprise experience. The La Forge/Ro Continuum—if a continuum it was—might be empty, but it was something other than a vacuum. In the normal universe low-density matter such as gases apparently had a second quantum state allowing temperature and pressure to influence the phased realm.

  “Fascinating,” Tuvok said, and he heard his word aloud. His sound waves rippled through a medium that existed only in the real world, altering the quantum states of its molecules in a way perceptible only in the phased realm. He could hear his voice—and the voices of the prison guards outside the kitchen door—but no unphased person would hear him. A like thing was happening with light waves: Nonphased photons reached his eyes in a secondary state perceptible to him and continued in the real world unaffected as they passed through his phased form. He could see, but he could not be seen.

  It was fascinating. Tuvok contemplated the wondrous nature of the universe: home to particles leading secret lives, acting on and partially perceptible in multiple dimensions at once. It was a symphony of science, performed in an endless auditorium that no one else could perceive. But to Tuvok’s tactical mind, it also held security implications. The seepage of air into the phased plane might help protect against phased spies in the future. Real-world observers wouldn’t notice the disappearance of a little air from a starship deck, but a ship’s internal sensors would.

  Garadius IV was a planet; therefore, no one would notice the extra consumption of oxygen. Riker and the others were aware that Tuvok was missing, but the Vulcan worried about straying too far from the cellblock. He walked back through one wall, and then another, to his former prison. He’d expected Riker might be discussing his disappearance with Vale. Instead, the husky Baladonian jailers were inside, carrying water for the prisoners. They seemed to be having a crisis of arithmetic.

  “No, seriously. Weren’t there four of you?” the first jailer said. He was new to the shift.

  “Not unless someone counted twice,” Riker said.

  The second jailer was also new. “Wait. If someone counted twice, shouldn’t there only be two of you?”

  “That’s if they counted all of us twice. They counted one of us twice.”

  “Which one of you?” asked the confused first guard.

  “That is a puzzler,” the admiral replied. “I can see how it would make a difference.”

  The debate took a turn into nonsensical algebra, losing the jailers entirely. Tuvok had already known the Baladonians were no geniuses, but the exchange told the Vulcan something else: The admiral knew something had happened to Tuvok, but he didn’t think the Vulcan was in imminent danger.

  He thinks he has a “hole card,” Tuvok thought, remembering what he knew of the admiral’s favorite game. Unfortunately, there was no way to provide confirmation. He wouldn’t be able to contact his colleagues as La Forge and Ro had, by passing his hand through objects and leaving telltale chroniton fields. Their only tricorder was with Tuvok.

  He stared at Riker, and then the empathic Troi. Was it possible to mind-meld with someone who was in a different phased state? It shouldn’t be possible, Tuvok knew. But the mind was an unusual and surprising thing, and mental energy multifaceted and infinite.

  He quickly dismissed the idea. If it did work, it was potentially dangerous, and a link with an unprepared and unsuspecting mind violated Vulcan morality. There were footsteps coming down the hall. Someone who knew how to count?

  Tuvok stepped into the corridor to see a squat bipedal figure at the end of the hall, holding a disruptor. Another appeared at the other end, to his right. He knew they represented no danger to him in his state, but nonetheless he instinctively jumped through the wall before him, back into the kitchen.

  Standing embedded in a food-preparation table, he looked back to see two gun-toting females emerging from the wall behind him.

  “That’s far enough,” one said in a shrill voice. “We see you. And we promise—these work here. Don’t move.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” he said calmly. “You are Ekorr, I presume.”

  Eight

  * * *

  Well, there’s one thing for sure,” Troi said, looking at the bluish glob in the tin bowl. “The food hasn’t i
mproved. This is the same slop they were serving seventeen years ago.”

  Modan paused between bites. “The same recipe?”

  “No, the same exact batch of stew,” Riker said, smiling wanly. “I recognize the aroma. But I’m glad you like it.” He’d declined to touch the food at all, but the linguist was devouring it hungrily. Seleneans must have stronger constitutions, he thought.

  Riker returned to the problem at hand. After the befuddled guards trundled out of the room, he’d reported Tuvok’s disappearance to Titan, still orbiting overhead. Its life-sign sweeps had shown no evidence of the Vulcan anywhere on Garadius IV.

  And Tuvok wasn’t the only person Titan’s sensors couldn’t discover. Vale had tried to recalibrate the long-range instruments to pick up any indication of Thot Roje and his movements, but the Breen armor was hiding its wearer’s presence well.

  “I still don’t understand those guards,” Modan said, putting her empty bowl down. “Did they really fall for that double-talk?”

  “You’re not used to seeing an admiral who’s a flimflam man?” Riker asked, grinning.

  Troi laughed. “I hate to tell you, Will, but it wasn’t all you. I sensed that the jailers weren’t at all surprised at the possibility that someone might disappear from the prison here. In fact, I think they almost expect it—and they don’t really care.”

  “Then they should let us out,” Modan said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Troi said. “Let’s say the Ekorr have been disappearing—for whatever reason—as Jakoh claims. Eventually, even their prisons empty out. Given their opinions about Ekorr, they wouldn’t care.”

  “But we know it’s these devices, smuggled in somehow,” Riker said, picking up the empty canister from the wall. Stroking his beard, he thought for a moment—

  —and then remembered something from years earlier. It was a fact that he had completely overlooked in all his reviews of his previous Garadius visit.