Riker put down the canister and clicked his combadge. “Titan, inventory those unusual particles you were finding. See if there are chronitons.”
* * *
Her name was Orica, Tuvok had learned. She was a veteran in the Ekorr guard corps. Orica had met several of the Federation envoys years earlier, so the Vulcan’s appearance had not surprised her. His ability to see her, however, troubled her greatly.
“Damn my troops!” she said as she examined the wristband Tuvok wore. “They were supposed to have collected all the unused canisters.”
“Am I to infer,” Tuvok said, “that your people have been distributing these wristbands to Ekorr everywhere? Including smuggling them to those in prison?”
“They were the last Ekorr we had left to reach,” she said, removing his wristband. “Zorrayn tells us it’s the end of the first phase—no pun intended.”
“What is the second phase?”
“Don’t know that there is one,” Orica replied gruffly. “Ah, well. You’re here, anyway. This is useless now.” She pitched Tuvok’s wristband away. It tumbled through a nearby wall and vanished out of sight.
“You said ‘the last Ekorr.’ Am I to understand that you have phased the entire Ekorr population?” Tuvok asked. “That seems impossible. You could not all survive here in this form.”
“Shut up and see for yourself.”
The Ekorr woman marched Tuvok upstairs into the great rectangular hall that had once been her people’s operational center. It didn’t take long at all for him to realize that it was still their base of operations. For even as Baladonians lumbered about, doing the bidding of Jakoh and Shayla and remodeling the building to suit their tastes, the Ekorr were here too, in phantasmal form.
Tuvok stopped counting Ekorr at twenty. Some were merely milling about, joking and making fun of their unsuspecting enemies. Others were closely shadowing the Baladonians, listening in on their plans and taking note of who was where. It was a surreal sight: For spies, they were taking no care at all to hide their presence. Ekorr were standing next to—standing partially inside—their enemies, watching as the Baladonians did their work.
A security chief’s nightmare, Tuvok thought. The little Ekorr scouts seemed quite facile in their motions; nothing about their phased condition appeared to unnerve them. Anyone else putting his face or his foot into a visible obstacle might flinch, but the Ekorr walked through doors, walls, tables, and chairs without any evident unease.
Tuvok turned to Orica. “Your people have been in this state for some time,” he said.
“Weeks, some of us,” she said. “Keep walking.”
As he continued through the room, a skinny redheaded Ekorr darted into Tuvok’s path. Tuvok stopped to let the little man pass—but the Ekorr kept on going, slamming into the Vulcan’s midsection. Crumpled on the floor, the Ekorr looked up with surprise and anger.
“My apologies,” Tuvok said. “But you tried to walk through me.”
“Sorry,” Orica said. “He’s phased with us. Somebody screwed up big time.”
“I can tell,” the fallen Ekorr grumbled. He began to dust himself off.
A futile gesture, Tuvok thought. There was no dust at all here, save for whatever skin cells the Ekorr lost.
Orica pointed to a gray wall up ahead, and Tuvok dutifully walked through it. He momentarily considered bolting while she was still on the other side; Orica could not see him through the wall, even though she could pass through it. But he knew her disruptor fire could pass through it too, and that it was still deadly to him. Thus far, she had been willing to speak. So he waited.
“We call this realm ‘exotic space,’ ” she said, emerging from the wall behind him.
“Quixotic space might be a better term—for you can affect nothing in the real world from here. And we are both very much in danger of starving or dying of thirst.”
“Oh, really? Well, have a look over here.” She gestured for Tuvok to turn to the left. A few steps and another wall later, he realized he was in a large, richly appointed bedroom within the Lyceum Garadius—only in the phased realm, the place was filled with sacks, crates, and kegs. Some overlapped in space with the real-world furnishings; it was as if a chemical film camera had created a double-exposure of both a bedroom and a warehouse, with the bedroom part of the image taking precedence.
Orica chuckled. “That ninny Shayla has been running around directing the other Baladonians to search for us—when we’ve been using her own quarters as a storehouse!”
A three-member Ekorr work crew entered the room through the far wall. Tuvok watched as the workers each located a barrel and rolled it back through the wall from which they’d emerged. “Very clever,” he said. “You chronitized the supplies you required. I infer that you have a larger interphase generator for this process, hidden in the nonphase world of this city. The wristband is insufficient. It only contains the necessary reactant to phase an individual. The power and the activating irradiative source comes from elsewhere.”
“You’re a nosy one, aren’t you?”
“I seek only to understand. And this would explain both the missing foodstuffs and the power drain that Jakoh ascribed to—”
Motion caught his eye, and he recoiled. The Baladonian leader’s daughter entered the room through the doorway. Shayla passed through both Tuvok and a pile of boxes on her way to her dresser. Finding a change of clothing, she turned back to close the door.
“Let us move on,” Tuvok said, knowing the disrobing Shayla could not hear him. “I may have legitimate questions, Orica, but I have no desire to play voyeur with the rest of you.”
Orica laughed heartily. “Believe me, no Ekorr gets excited about seeing a naked Baladonian. I wouldn’t know about your kind. It doesn’t look like the Vulcans really lived it up when they were here.” She started Tuvok moving again.
Outside the bedroom/warehouse, Tuvok heard a loud chirp. He turned to see Orica pulling back her long sleeve, revealing a metallic armlet. A high, shrill voice emanated from the device. “Are you coming this year, guardian? The Vulcan will die of old age—or I will!”
“Just a few minutes, Peacebreaker,” she replied. Tuvok recognized the title of the Ekorr leader—and also took note of the armlet communicator. The redheaded Ekorr with whom he had collided wore one, he now remembered; like Orica’s, it had a large blue button mounted in one section. Noticing Tuvok’s gaze, she quickly covered her arm again. “We’ve wasted too much time talking. Let’s take a shortcut.” She grinned at him. “You haven’t seen anything yet!”
Another two wall breaches and they were outside in a narrow alley looking out on the plaza. When he had walked through it short hours before, it was filled with triumphant Baladonians, building their new world atop the one left by their absent enemies. But he now saw even more Ekorr there, sharing the same physical space. Hundreds of them, if not thousands. Tents and bedrolls dotted the rectangular mall, and many Ekorr celebrated as if it was a holiday. The entire civilization had gone on a phased picnic!
At the center of the plaza, he saw the figure from Admiral Riker’s briefing, standing atop a makeshift stage built on empty barrels.
“Ah, the Federation-man,” called the flinty voice Tuvok had heard over the communicator. Peacebreaker Zorrayn smiled broadly at the Vulcan. “Step over here. You’re just in time to hear my speech . . .”
Nine
* * *
We’ve lost a couple of our dance partners,” Ezri Dax reported via the comscreen in Commander Vale’s ready room. “Two of the Breen landing craft, quite suddenly. They may be coming your way.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Vale said. “We’d heard company was coming. Give the residents of Zellman’s Find our best.”
“And mine to the admiral.”
“When we see him again.”
“Aventine out.” The communication ended.
Dax had seemed unruffled about maintaining her orbital vigil; Vale was somewhat less sanguine about hers, waiting for instructions from her imprisoned admiral. Maybe Ezri, a joined Trill with a much older symbiont, had simply seen it all before. Vale had not—and neither had the unjoined Trill in her office: her security chief.
“This is ridiculous,” Ranul Keru said, pacing. He rubbed the back of his spotted neck in agitation. “There’s no reason at all we shouldn’t go down there with a team and get the admiral back. The Baladonians may have modern weaponry, but I’ve studied their records. Their tactical scheme involves stomping on whatever’s in front of them.”
“I know,” Vale said, slumping back in her chair. “We should be able to distract them by throwing candy bars. But we’ve got our orders.”
“I don’t understand why he didn’t take down a security team to begin with!”
“I think he was trying to make life miserable for as few people as possible. And that he knew exactly what we just said—that he wouldn’t have any trouble escaping.” Vale knew Riker wanted the engineers to have time to discover what had happened to the Ekorr—and then Tuvok’s disappearance had altered the timetable. That was fine for Riker but hell for her. How far would she go, having lost an admiral on one of his first diplomatic missions?
“Okay, Ranul,” she said, sitting up straighter. “Get your plan going. I won’t disobey an order, but there’s nothing wrong with stationing one of your teams in hiding down there, for when we need them.”
“Now you’re talking.” The security chief turned to leave—only to see the chief engineer, Xin Ra-Havreii, standing in the doorway.
The white-mustached Efrosian put up his hand. “Whatever you’re about to do, I’d hold off.” He looked in at Vale. “You’re not going to believe what we’ve found.”
* * *
“. . . this place, our promised land!”
Tuvok looked up wearily as Zorrayn pronounced the last word. The Ekorr leader’s speech contained no more than three minutes of content, and yet he had been speaking for three hours. But he’d hit the high note—an almost inaudible squeak, given Zorrayn’s voice.
“But that is not the end! No, at last, your patience will be rewarded with rewards, my fellow Ekorr. I have tolerated the same delays as you, lived with the same abominable abominations. For years, we have all waited, and waited, and waited, and waited . . .”
Tuvok closed his eyes and took a deep breath, centering himself. The Ekorr leader was as Riker and Troi recalled, to be sure. Tuvok, at least, had the training to tune him out.
He opened his eyes and looked about as the speaker rattled on. Very few of the Ekorr seemed to be paying attention to the speech: a learned response, and one that reflected well upon them.
He had deduced that the Ekorr were a structured and regimented society—they would have to be, to all undergo the phasing process. Every single member of the race on Garadius IV had undertaken the same interphase exodus. And they all were in close contact with their leadership; he could see they all had the same armlet communication devices worn by Orica.
Yet Tuvok had also realized something else while talking to Orica during the speech: that the Ekorr’s political structure was designed to reward stagnation. Debates were won not by the better argument, but by whoever was last to concede. That had put power into the hands of whichever Ekorr had the healthiest vocal cords—and, seemingly, the least to say. It was why the politicians so often repeated things, he surmised.
But the rank-and-file Ekorr, like Orica, seemed reasonable.
He watched the people. This was why the conflict had gone on so long: Concession was antithetical to those who made decisions, because that was not how they came into power. The Baladonians, for their part, simply seemed to enjoy brutality—striking back when struck. He could see why Captain Picard had called it an intractable conflict.
His thoughts were interrupted by the lightest smattering of applause. Zorrayn clambered off his perch and called out: “Now that was some speech—wasn’t it, Federation-man?”
“I can confirm that it was a speech.”
“Darn right.” Zorrayn took a vial of water from an underling. “Imported from the real world,” he said, and he drank thirstily. “Ahh.” He cast the empty vial to the ground, where it came to rest on the pavement without breaking.
Tuvok looked down at it. “There is something I do not understand, Zorrayn: gravity.”
“Ha! You sound like a Baladonian! They don’t know which way is up.”
“No. Mister La Forge speculated that it was the artificial gravity and the inertial dampers on Enterprise that somehow worked on his phased state, keeping his feet to the floor. Yet we are outdoors on a planet. How is it working now?”
Wiping his face, the Ekorr looked keenly at the Vulcan. “I . . . think I’ll leave that one to you to figure out.”
“I see,” Tuvok said. “Then you do not know.”
“Smarty-mouth!”
Irritated, Zorrayn looked back at Orica. “He was the only one you caught?”
“All the remaining wristbands have been retrieved and accounted for,” she said.
“It’s just as well. I saw you all when I came in—you brought that fool Riker-man with you, and the woman with the hair.” Zorrayn, now bald, snorted derisively. “You people are wasting your time here,” he said. “You can see we have achieved the most peaceful peace.” He started to lope toward the lyceum.
Tuvok followed, under Orica’s watch. “I wonder if you even realize what you have done here,” the Vulcan said. “You’ve happened upon a way for two rival parties to share the same coveted geographical location at the same time. Blood has been shed by countless billions who could not find a way to coexist. But you have taken coexistence to a new level. Or, more precisely, to a new quantum state.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Zorrayn said. “You blather like the Breen.”
“You are aware of the Breen?”
Zorrayn paused and looked back. “We see him.”
“Thot Roje has been counseling the Baladonians, you must know.”
“Maybe.”
“What have they discussed?”
“The Breen can only be understood when he wants to be.” Zorrayn quickly turned back toward the building. Spotting the burly Baladonian guards in front of the Lyceum Garadius, the Ekorr leader strutted up to them. He began kicking their rears with his phased foot—a pantomime that soon reduced Zorrayn, and the Ekorr around him, to tears of laughter.
“This is childish,” Tuvok said.
“And yet it never grows old!” Catching his breath, he looked back and grinned. “That’s not even the half of it: We’ve located one of our latrines in Jakoh’s bedchamber!”
Tuvok shrugged.
“I forgot,” Zorrayn said, the sneer returning to his face. “Your kind never laughs. Well, let me show you a cause for solemnity.”
Zorrayn led Tuvok and his guard through one wall and then another, arriving in the great rotunda the Vulcan had visited earlier. “The Altar of Bothmune,” Zorrayn said.
“Yes, your anvil—”
“Altar!”
“As you wish.” Tuvok crossed his arms. “But it brings up a valid point: You have phased supplies so that you can live in this realm—and perhaps, if you have brought enough materials, you might even become self-sufficient, drawing only upon the light, air, and heat of the physical world.” He gestured to the giant hunk of metal, taller than either of them. “But this—this can never truly be here with you. It is, to you, a phantom reminder of what you have left, is it not?”
Zorrayn stood to the side of his beloved relic. “You’re not so smart. Touch it.”
Tuvok raised his eyebrow. He stepped up next to the anvil and reached out with his hand. It wasn’t impermeable. Something was there. It wasn’t metal, but the anvil had mass. He looked to Zorrayn. �
��How?”
“What does it feel like?”
He felt about along the anvil’s surface, his hand partially vanishing into a blur here and there. “You have fashioned a doppelganger altar from your cargo containers. But what you have built cannot be seen, because the real-world visual is superimposed on it here.”
“That’s where we’ve been storing our empty containers,” Zorrayn said. “It keeps the place neat, and it wouldn’t do for Ekorr to walk through their own altar. Something that matters should have substance.”
“Not all things that matter require it,” Tuvok said. He looked back and clasped his hands behind his back. “Zorrayn, while this is not how I expected to meet you, I am tasked by my admiral to negotiate—”
“There is nothing to negotiate! We are here, and done with the Baladonians forever and ever. And ever!”
“Then I am also beholden to learn how this has taken place. You did not have this technology when Enterprise last visited—”
“Enterprise!” Zorrayn clapped. “How is old Pick-nose?”
“Picard. How did you learn about this technology? Did it come from the Breen?”
“We knew long before that snout-face showed up!”
“Then how?”
Zorrayn began pacing around his altar. Emerging on the other side, he stared at Tuvok. “You would look better with a beard,” he pronounced. “Yes, I demand you grow one, this instant!”
“You are attempting to put me off the subject by misdirection, as you did with the Enterprise crew. I assure you it will not work with me.”
“Pshaw! We confused your silly android.”
“But I can discriminate between your non sequiturs, and topics you actually intend to engage upon. I am sure Commander Data would have learned how to cope with you as well, had he the advantage of my years dealing with the illogical. A dubious advantage. But I repeat, how did you learn of the technique at all?”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Zorrayn said, reaching for something inside his greatcoat. “Catch!”
Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies Page 6
