The Darkness Drops Again

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “The people have been lied to! Swayed and led astray by ambitious, shortsighted fools. We have to set them straight!”

  “We’ll do whatever we can to help the Payav make an informed decision for themselves. But our options are limited. The new regime has demanded that all offworlders leave the system, and we have to respect that.”

  “And what about the Klingons? With no Starfleet presence, they will sweep right in!”

  “The previous Klingon regime has been overthrown,” Spock told her. “The Empire seems to be concerned with internal consolidation at the moment and is not likely to pose a threat.”

  “Not likely. That’s all you can tell me?” She stared at Kirk. “You once gave me your word that your people would do everything you could for my people.”

  “Yes, I did. Unfortunately, we may have done everything we can already. Aside from finding a good place for your exiles to take up residence,” he added. “The Kazarites have volunteered to take you in, along with any other Payav refugees. They have a large uninhabited region on their world that they’d gladly allow you to settle.”

  She studied him for a long moment, then rose. “I was mistaken, it seems. I have been betrayed by two old friends today.”

  After she left, Kirk pounded the arm of the couch. “Damn! I can’t blame her for being angry. I wish there were more we could do!”

  “Unfortunately, I can think of nothing,” Spock said.

  “You enumerated the limits on our options most effectively.”

  McCoy rolled his eyes. “Spock, you still have a lot to learn about offering comfort.”

  “Doctor, I—”

  “Send me back down.”

  Kirk spun. He’d almost forgotten Dr. Lon was there, since the scientist had been so uncharacteristically quiet. “What?”

  “I won’t abandon my work. I’ve put eight years of my life into this project, poured my blood into this planet. I’m not going to walk away from that. I have to do whatever I can to defend it.”

  “Have you seen what’s going on down there?” McCoy asked. “If they see a human daring to defile their blessed ground, they’ll reinvent human sacrifice right there and then!”

  “Shave my head, then. Depilate my body, lighten my skin, give me tattoos and prosthetic thumbs. It’s been done before. And my neck is long enough to pass.”

  Kirk spoke carefully. “Dr. Lon… don’t take this the wrong way, but… there’s more to passing as a Payav than looking like one. And you’ve never been particularly prone to seeing things from a Payav point of view.”

  “Even Starfleet’s precontact team sought to minimize direct interaction with the populace,” Spock added. “You propose a full-immersion undertaking, by yourself, with no ship to retreat to, no wherewithal to repair damage to your prosthetics…”

  “I know the risks, and they’re mine to take. You can’t stop me from doing this.”

  “That is incorrect, Doctor,” Spock told him. “As Starfleet officers, we are responsible for the safety of Federation citizens. So long as you remain on this vessel, we are within our rights to detain you from entering an actively hostile zone. And to refuse you the use of our medical technology to change your appearance.”

  “Then I’ll renounce my Federation citizenship! Or I’ll just let you drop me off at a starbase and make my way back here. But who knows how much of my work may be lost in the meantime?”

  “Even if you salvaged some of your work,” McCoy asked, “what would you do with it? If these mar-Atyya see any alien moss growing, they’ll burn it without a second thought! Along with anyone caught planting it!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I have to do something. I’m not willing to let this planet die!”

  Kirk looked into his eyes and made his decision.

  “Dr. McCoy… can you recommend a good tattoo artist?”

  Mestiko

  Marat Lon ducked into an alley and flattened himself against its shadowed wall. He struggled to quiet his rasping breath, hoping the mob would go past without spotting or hearing him. In his life as an ecologist, he’d spent too much time in the wilds of Mars, away from the cities and their artificial gravity. And in his six years on Mestiko, he’d been too busy with his work to bother getting in shape. His doctor had warned him he needed to exercise for his health. Lon imagined even his physician would not have expected her warning to come true in such a drastic way.

  What tipped them off? he asked himself for the fiftieth time. Did McCoy bungle the operation? Was there a spy on the ship? But he could afford little mental effort to worry about that now. Instead, he needed to find a way out of this alley before that mob of xenophobes found him and burned him at the stake or whatever they did on this planet. Wearily, he ran a hand across his bare scalp. I miss my hair. There wasn’t much left, but it was something.

  Suddenly, a hand clamped over his mouth, and he found himself being dragged backward, deeper into the alley. He struggled, but he was too exhausted to accomplish much. “Calm yourself,” a female voice hissed. “Stay quiet, or you’ll alert the mob!”

  It began to get through his head that his attacker might be an ally. And he was just too weary to keep fighting. So he allowed her to pull him down the alley and through an open metal grate in the ground, which she closed behind them. Soon they were in a cramped, dripping drainage tunnel. He attempted to speak, but she clamped that hand over his mouth again, looking up toward the grate. Lon heard the voices and footsteps overhead and decided to take her advice and stay quiet.

  As they waited, he tried to get a look at her. She was a lanky, slender Payav with an elegantly curved skull and a delicate profile. A lot stronger than she looks, though, he thought ruefully. But he found himself unable to look away from that profile. It was perhaps the most pleasant thing he’d seen in some time.

  Her expression was not too pleasant when the noise from above finally subsided and she turned to glare at him. “You’re a fool, you know that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you even make the slightest attempt to understand the Payav before attempting to impersonate us? Did you have a death wish, coming among us and advertising your Dinpayav ways?”

  “Wait a minute, whose side are you on? I thought you wanted to save me!”

  “Only because I recognized your voice, Dr. Lon. We need your knowledge if we are to salvage your work, keep your plants and animals alive while the mar-Atyya try to burn them all to ash.”

  “’We’?”

  “We, the people of Mestiko who still have a grain of sanity left. We’re not all dupes to the mar-Atyya, you know.”

  “No, of course not.”

  She glared at him. “Do not patronize me, Lon. If you want to pass as one of us, you will have to learn to cloak your ego better. Now, come.”

  She led him down the tunnel, and as they passed under patches of dim light from above, he got a better look at her. Her eyes were large and dark, her lips full and mobile. Her tattoos were unusual in their patterns and color. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Daki. Daki orGalya.”

  He blinked. “An or prefix for a woman?”

  “I’m Gelta. There aren’t many of us left. Only those who were abroad when the Pulse hit.”

  “You were lucky.”

  She glared. “I was abroad. My family and my betrothed were not.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have much to learn about us, human. To start with, for your own protection, learn to think before you speak.”

  He bristled. “I’m not a fool! I’ve lived among you people for six years. I know the language, I know the customs.”

  “’You people’? You only know us as animals you study, an element in the biosphere you engineer. You’ve never lived among us, never gotten to know us. That much is obvious to anyone, as that large mob should have proven to you.”

  “I don’t understand. What did they notice?”

  “To start with, you’re too careless about showing your te
eth when you talk. Only a few remote tribes are so crass, and they wear scars, not tattoos. You keep scratching your head as though you’re missing something that was there. You barely use your outer thumbs. Can those fakes even move?”

  “They’re surgical implants, state-of-the-art.” He wiggled them to demonstrate.

  Her face screwed up. “And you haven’t learned how to move them naturally. Put those down.” He lowered his hands to his sides.

  “Most of all,” Daki went on, “you carry yourself like someone who’s never known hardship or loss. You carry yourself like someone utterly assured of his place in the universe. No Payav can do that anymore.” She came up short, turned, and got in his face, her eyes captivating him. “And neither can you, from now on. Your place in the universe has just changed, Doctor, and if you want to have a hope of surviving the new regime, you will have to start by accepting that you are as lost as the rest of us.”

  Jarol Desert, Kazar

  Raya stared out at the barren wasteland where the Enterprise’s transporter had deposited her. “This is it?” she demanded, whirling to face Kirk. “This is where the Kazarites condemn our people to live?”

  Kirk looked apologetic, but that expression no longer seemed sincere to her. “Try to understand, Raya. There are only so many places on Kazar that can accommodate a large influx of refugees. The Kazarites are concerned about the ecological disruption it could cause elsewhere. As I understand it, the Jarol Desert only formed within the past century or two, after a natural shift in wind patterns deprived it of moisture from the ocean.”

  “So everything that was here died of thirst. And now they strand us here to suffer the same?”

  “They’ll share every resource they can spare for you, Raya, just as they did before.” He put a hand on her shoulder, but at her glare, he retracted it sadly. “I promise you, we haven’t given up. And I know you won’t, either.”

  “That’s the first true thing you’ve said in a long time, James. I will never stop fighting for my world. The Kazarites wish to strand my people in this… savage land? So be it. We will survive, and we will make it our own. We will make it the ground from which we stand and fight to reclaim our homeworld.” Her thoughts turned to Elee and Theena elMadej, as they had many times during the journey here. She wished she could have her wise elor and her dear young friend by her side to cheer her through these trying times. But Elee’s fate remained unknown, and Theena had insisted on staying on Mestiko, completing her studies as far as the new regime would allow, and perhaps beyond. That was how she believed she could best help her world. Raya admired her courage and envied the fact that, as someone with no official ties to the government, she was exempt from exile and probably safe so long as she kept quiet about her personal affiliations. She prayed that Theena would be able to find Elee and keep her safe, as Raya no longer could. Still, she would have been happier if Theena and Elee could have been safe with her, even in this forbidding waste. Or better yet, if they could all be safe together on Mestiko. But then, there had been no safety since the Pulse, had there? And if not for the Pulse, Raya and Theena would never have met.

  Neither would Raya and Kirk. Right now, the thought appealed to her. “So go, James Kirk. Go off in your shining starship, and have adventures undreamed of, and shunt my people aside into this threadbare patch of this uncivilized world. That’s fine. Because I was a fool to try to rely on you for help. We don’t need your help. The Payav will endure, and we will triumph, and we will do it without you. Now, go! Go away!”

  Kirk had a wistful look in his eyes as he raised the com device on his wrist and called his ship for beam-up. But again, Raya found it unconvincing. For behind that wistfulness, in the moment before the transporter beam took him, she could see smug satisfaction on his face, and the hint of a smile.

  Part II

  Stardate 7969.2 (November 2279)

  Starfleet Academy, San Francisco

  “I have a job for you.”

  Kirk tried not to show his surge of excitement at Admiral Morrow’s words. Morrow had found him at the Academy’s track, completing his morning jog, and there were too many students around. Kirk didn’t want to give any of them the impression that their commandant was unhappy with his job; that was bad for morale. True, it was no secret that Kirk would still be out there exploring if he had his way. When the refitted Enterprise had completed five years of service, Starfleet had insisted that the Corps of Engineers give it a thorough, months-long diagnostic to see how its prototype systems had held up. Kirk had requested transfer to another starship, but there was none available, and the Academy had needed a commandant.

  Jim Kirk was a soldier, so he went where he was ordered, and he strove to execute his tasks to the fullest of his ability. And there were many rewards to the Academy posting—the opportunity to mold young minds, to get to know cadets who were the first of their species or subcultures to enter Starfleet, and, most important, to pass along the hard lessons he’d learned so that future Starfleet officers would not have to make the same mistakes.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if he was completely out of the saddle. That was another mistake he’d learned from. This time, he’d had enough clout to persuade Nogura to sweeten the deal: in exchange for accepting the Academy posting and the renewed admiral’s rank that came with it, he’d gotten the Enterprise assigned as his personal flagship, with Spock promoted to its captaincy. Starfleet had come to appreciate his abilities in the field, and thus, once the Enterprise had completed its testing, they allowed him to take her out on special assignments from time to time, with Spock commanding the ship but Kirk in charge of the overall mission. In the past year, the two of them had undertaken a number of interesting missions, with other members of their old command crew accompanying them when feasible. In between, the Enterprise served as a research vessel, a test bed for prototype technologies, and sometimes a cadet training vessel—a contemplative, scholarly mission profile that suited Spock well. All in all, it was a good balance, a way for Kirk to advance in his career and assume new responsibilities without being completely cut off from the thing he did best.

  So, as a rule, he tried not to advertise the crushing boredom he felt when he wasn’t out there among the stars, with Spock at his side and the Enterprise deck under his feet. Still, he allowed Harry Morrow to see a small, private smile of thanks. Morrow, Nogura’s second-in-command, had been an ally in persuading the Old Man to accept Kirk’s terms, not only allowing Kirk to go out on missions but sometimes even bringing him ones, like now. “What have you got for me, Harry?” he asked as he toweled the sweat off his neck.

  “You remember about ten years ago, when Minara and Beta Niobe went supernova within six months of each other?”

  Kirk chuckled. “Remember? Harry, I was there both times. I still have the singed tail feathers to show for it.”

  “That’s right, that was you, wasn’t it? Small universe.” Kirk couldn’t blame Morrow for forgetting; the man had been a captain himself at the time, embroiled in his own crises and disasters. “Anyway, there are over a dozen inhabited star systems close enough to those supernovae to be at risk of lethal radiation exposure. The Federation’s been scrambling to protect them all.”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Well, the situation’s trickier than we like to advertise. Luckily, the wave fronts only expand at the speed of light, so we’ve had years to prepare, but with so many looming disasters, we’ve been stretched pretty thin. Especially since some of the worlds are precontact, and we have to try to shield them clandestinely, without any local help. Like you tried to do when that pulsar hit Mestiko, what was it, about eighteen years ago?”

  “Fourteen, actually.”

  “Right. Sorry—you know I’m terrible with dates.”

  “I do keep up with the news, Harry. It’s hard to miss it, what with the Verzhik disaster still making headlines.” Verzhik was one of the more advanced planets endangered by the supernovae—early warp era but unaligned. Its
people had worked jointly with the Federation to shield their planet, but despite that, they had failed to do enough in time. Although the population had successfully retreated underground, their ecosystem had been badly damaged. The footage of Verzhik’s smoggy brown skies and UV-burned animal life had been like a Mestiko flashback for Kirk. “So, what are you dancing around?”

  “Your ties to Mestiko are why we need you, Jim,” Morrow said. “The Verzhik are an advanced civilization, enlightened, artistic. We’d like them as a member, so we want to do right by them. And they’ve requested our top experts on terraforming and environmental recovery.”

  Kirk saw where this was going. “And the Federation’s leading expert is Marat Lon.”

  “Right. Who went to ground on Mestiko three years ago—”

  “Five.”

  “—five years ago, and hasn’t been heard from since.” Morrow’s expression grew stern. “Because a certain starship commander decided to let him.”

  “He was a free citizen of the Federation. I didn’t think I had the right to force him to go.”

  “But you didn’t have to use your ship’s medical resources to help him disguise himself.”

  Kirk shrugged. “Since he was determined to go, I did what I could to ensure his safety.”

  “All right, we won’t argue this now. The point is, Verzhik needs Dr. Lon. And we aren’t willing to let them down.” He fidgeted. “No reflection on you, Jim, but the Federation’s failure to protect Mestiko was not one of our finer moments. Of course, you did everything you could, but… well, the point is, we’re determined not to let it happen again.”

  Kirk stared at a patch of ground for a while, not seeing it. “I can understand that.”

  “Good. Because your orders, Jim, are to go to Mestiko, find Marat Lon—if he’s even still alive—and persuade him to go where he’s needed.”

  “He’s still needed on Mestiko,” Kirk said, an edge in his voice. “From the reports that have trickled out, the situation is getting progressively worse there. The glaciers are advancing, the air’s hardly breathable…”