Star Trek: Enterprise - 017 - Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Tests of the fake one, sir.”

  “That’s the only one we have now!” Al-Rashid didn’t substantially raise his voice, but he didn’t have to. After an uncomfortable moment, he broke his hold on Archer’s gaze and resumed pacing. “And the Council shot themselves in the foot by designing such a fail-safe security system.”

  “Clearly not fail-safe, sir. It must have been switched somehow.”

  “But no one can explain how! Vulcan logic won’t allow them to believe in an impossible theft. And logically, if the security system is impenetrable, then the Kir’Shara there now must be the same one you found eleven years ago—which would mean that you and First Minister T’Pau perpetrated an enormous, I daresay blasphemous fraud against the Vulcan people.”

  “Sir, you know that’s absurd.”

  “I know, but I’m an illogical human. I can take leaps of faith. Vulcans require proof.”

  Archer rose. “Then let me take Endeavour to Vulcan, sir. We’ll figure out how the Kir’Shara was stolen. We’ll find the real one.”

  Those eyes locked on his. “If it hasn’t already been destroyed. That would be the logical thing for its thieves to do, wouldn’t it?”

  Archer’s heart sank at the president’s words. The loss to history would be incalculable. More, some vestige of the katra of Surak, the psyche and memories that Archer had briefly carried, still lingered in the depths of his soul. Some small part of him was Vulcan now, as horrifying as that notion would have been to his younger self. But that piece of his spirit fired him with a very human passion. “I’ll find whoever did this,” he swore through clenched teeth. “And if they’ve destroyed it, I’ll—”

  “Watch yourself, Jon,” the president cautioned, extending a meaty arm to point at him. “The Vulcan protestors have already insisted that you and Captain T’Pol testify before the Council to defend your actions. You’re not storming in there to hand down the wrath of Allah. Your job is to testify, calmly and convincingly, of the authenticity of your find and the impossibility of any collusion with the Syrannites to forge it.”

  The admiral reined in his frustration. “It would be a waste of time, sir. All we need to do is prove the Kir’Shara was stolen.”

  “You proved it was real years ago and that hasn’t prevented this. In politics—even Vulcan politics—reality is what you can sell the most convincingly. Even if it’s objectively, undeniably true, you still need good arguments and good spin to counter those who have a vested interest in it not being true.” Al-Rashid’s expression softened a bit, and he gave Archer a hint of a smile for the first time. “You’re better at that than you tend to realize, Jon. And I’ll be sending Soval to backstop you.”

  Archer controlled his frustration, accepting the reality of the president’s words. “I trust that T’Pol’s crew will still be free to investigate this mystery and find . . . what happened to the real Kir’Shara?”

  The president held his eyes. “I’m counting on it, Jon. Because we could lose Vulcan if they don’t.”

  8

  May 10, 2165

  Kyraw homeworld

  THE KYRAW STILL SANG great songs of the coming of the Ware.

  There were older songs, sagas of the times before the Ware when the Kyraw had flown from isle to isle, roosting for a season in each before flying on to the next. Sometimes the songs told of battles waged over the best breeding grounds and highest aeries, but the islands in the migration circuit were plentiful, so those flocks crowded out of the prime grounds could still find sufficient roosts elsewhere—except maybe for the weakest who were crowded out of the archipelagoes and forced to fly across great swaths of ocean, and few of them survived to sing or be sung about.

  There were songs, too, of battles over the prime fishing zones, the wealth and sustenance of the flocks. These battles had driven the great inventor heroes of legend—like Chai-hawra, who had learned to use her wing-claws to sharpen sticks that could spear rivals’ wings as well as fish; or Mraak-twao, who had first persuaded the kwieekawn to allow the Kyraw to ride their backs and guide them in their own fishing, trading the Kyraw’s aerial vantage and thoughtful strategy for the kwieekawn’s strength, endurance, and dexterous tentacles. These inventions made the battles fiercer, calling for more innovation from those who elaborated upon Chai-hawra’s craft. Some even attempted to tip their spears and daggers with bits of the metal found on a few rare islands, that strange rock that could be softened by fire and shaped. But metal was too rare and precious to risk losing in a foe’s body when it fell beneath the waves—especially when it could be better crafted into jewelry and art that could be traded for fish or better roosting grounds. And fish were abundant enough that it was better to retreat and settle for a less ideal fishing zone than to risk the death or crippling of your best hunter-fighters. Oh, songs were sung of deaths noble and heroic and shameful and tragic, but it was their rarity that made them worthy of verse.

  But most of these songs were remembered only in fragments, for the world had changed when the Ware fell from the sky. Although the gods of sun and storms had surely sent them, the white temples had built themselves on some of the largest islands and remained there without moving. The Kyraw had given up their migrations once the bounties of the temples, the miraculous artifacts they summoned from the air itself, had made it unnecessary to wander. Those who had roosted where the temples fell refused to give up their grounds, and those flocks who had no temples had fought to claim them. And the flocks who held the temples had asked them for better weapons with which they could defeat and subjugate the rival flocks for good.

  Moreover, as time passed and Kyraw supplicants sometimes disappeared from the temples or were found inexplicably dead, it came to be understood that the Ware demanded sacrifices. So captives had to be taken, slaves and outsiders whose loss would cost the growing cities nothing. And thus wars had been waged and empires built to provide tributes for the great white temples, along with the foodstuffs and rare metals that the aloof, unforgiving voice of the Goddess (for now it was known there was only one) demanded in exchange for Her bounty.

  Then the empires grew beyond the archipelagoes, spreading across the vast oceans on Ware-built ships in search of new wealth to feed the temples’ ever-growing demands. And so they came upon other empires and fought to claim their territories and wealth for their own temples. They had prayed to the Ware for mightier weapons to defeat their foes, and the Ware had provided. The language of the Goddess was often cryptic and beyond the ken of the Kyraw, but in time their wisest priestesses had discerned that the Goddess offered weapons more powerful than the lightning itself, weapons that could bring down the power of the sun and shatter an entire nation in one blow. The temples, they knew by now, could survive almost anything, so with such weapons they could conquer an empire in a day, claim its temple and its lands, and enslave its survivors as sacrifices. And so they summoned these weapons, and the Ware delivered, and the fury of the sun was unleashed on their enemies.

  But their enemies had already sought the same boon from their temples. The fire had ravaged all the empires within half a season. Most of the Kyraw had died. The islands had been laid waste and the oceans poisoned; fish were sparse, and if any kwieekawn survived, it had only been by fleeing to the depths beyond where Kyraw could dive.

  So now, few new songs were sung. Few were left to sing in any case, and they had little to sing of. All they had was the struggle to survive, to scrounge up what little metal they could gather and offer what few sacrifices they could capture in exchange for untainted food from the Ware. They knew now that the Goddess had cursed them, and they hated Her, yet She was all that kept them alive.

  This was the history that Lieutenant Samuel Kirk had reconstructed after several days of interviewing the scraggly survivors of the Kyraw race, meter-tall corvid bipeds with blue-black feathers and semi-opposable claws on their wingtips. They had gladly told the historian and his
Pioneer crewmates anything they wanted to know in exchange for food and supplies that had not come from the evil Goddess within the Ware temples. The saga of their world had been compelling and exciting for Kirk to discover, yet the concrete reality of it horrified him. Death and violence, even cultural extinction, were part of the study of history, but what had happened to the Kyraw had been shocking—perhaps because they had not brought it on themselves. A Bronze Age people at best, accustomed to only minor, limited warfare with infrequent fatalities, had been rushed into an urban, imperial age and given access to weapons of mass destruction before they were ready to understand the consequences of their use. And the result was a dying world with only a few thousand scattered survivors, scrounging and fighting over the remaining scraps while those Ware ground facilities that had survived the wars had given less and less in exchange for the more meager payments the Kyraw were able to provide. Even if Captain Reed and his team found a way to defeat the Ware, Kirk realized, this species would be unlikely to survive another century.

  Now, as Kirk stood with Travis Mayweather on one of the high, rocky island crags where the Kyraw had once built their teeming breeding colonies, they could only gaze out in sorrow at the barren, fusion-blasted expanse below. “This was insidious,” Mayweather grated, as angry as Kirk had ever seen him. “The Romulans destroyed worlds, but at least they were open about it. This . . . the Ware got them to destroy themselves.”

  “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” Kirk said.

  Mayweather nodded. “ ‘Beware Greeks bearing gifts.’ Because you may just get your whole city burned down.”

  “The Kyraw’s songs have their own versions of Laocoön or Cassandra,” Kirk said. “Those who warned of the evils of giving up their migratory ways for dependence on the Ware, and who were ignored or exiled for it. But maybe those are just interpolations after the fact—a bit of foreshadowing for the moral of the story.”

  “I’m sure there were people who resisted change,” Mayweather said. “There always are. And they’re usually wrong.” He shook his head. “But even they could never have imagined this.”

  “It’s something I never wanted to see,” Kirk said. “The end of a world’s history. Before long, there will be no more songs . . . except those I’ve managed to record.” His voice broke. “I really need to try to capture more, preserve more—”

  “We don’t have time,” the first officer declared. “The captain says there’s nothing more we can do here.”

  “There are still survivors. There must be something—”

  “We need to find out who’s behind the Ware and stop it at the source.” Mayweather clenched his fists, clearly uneasy with the orders he passed on. Kirk suspected the taller man was unaccustomed to anger this deep, unsure what to do with it.

  “We still have no idea where to look,” Kirk said. “Or even why this is happening. They’ve devastated this world . . . but nobody’s come to claim it. Nobody has gained anything from this.” He furrowed his brow. “How do we know what to look for when we can’t even find a reason behind it?”

  The taller man studied him. “Are you saying you don’t believe in pure evil?”

  Kirk looked at him in surprise. “I never would’ve thought you did, sir.”

  Mayweather’s eyes skimmed the barren landscape, coming to rest on the one remaining structure: the gleaming industrial ziggurat of the Ware surface complex, surmounted by the trademark embedded sphere at whose heart a few Kyraw were still imprisoned, their minds too far gone for rescue even if they could be removed without condemning the rest of the Kyraw to starvation. Something very like hate and fear burned in his gaze. “I never would have—if not for the Ware.”

  May 21, 2165

  U.S.S. Pioneer

  The second Ware-infested planet Pioneer found had a thriving civilization built almost entirely from Ware-generated technology. When Reed and Mayweather tried to alert its natives to the predatory nature of the automated facilities, they ran up against the elaborate system of ritual and dependence the locals had built around the Ware, in which it was considered an honor to be selected for sacrifice so that one’s family and neighbors might thrive. Reed’s warnings had been heresy to them, and they had unleashed the automated orbital drones that the Ware had given them to defend their planet from raiders. Pioneer had been forced to retreat, and there had been no point in calling in Vol’Rala or any of the other Andorian cruisers for backup; even a fleet of eight ships couldn’t overthrow an entire government, and there seemed to be no one on the planet who wanted them to. For the second time running, Travis Mayweather left a strange new world feeling only bitterness and frustration. So far their mission was getting them practically nowhere. A few starship crews they’d contacted had taken their warnings to heart and promised to spread the word through the region, but others had dismissed their concerns or, like this planet’s natives, deemed the price in lives minor enough to be worth paying. And when entire pre-warp civilizations were under the thrall of a technology beyond their ability to grasp, their cultures and religions shaped in response to its relentless demands, the problem seemed almost intractable.

  The third Ware-infested planet they found was at an earlier stage of occupation. Its humanoid natives were far enough along in their industrial era that Ensign Grev was able to monitor their radio transmissions, revealing a culture that reminded Mayweather of the Earth seen in the classic mid-twentieth-century movies he had watched so often back on Enterprise.

  “Except,” the soft-spoken young Tellarite reported to the others around the situation table, “it seems they’ve had a spate of amazing technological breakthroughs in the past few years. A corporation in the dominant nation, Worldwide Automatics, has taken credit for inventing these pioneering new technologies, in concert with their government.”

  “Yeah,” put in Rey Sangupta, “but the Ware satellites orbiting the planet pretty much argue otherwise.” Pioneer was currently holding station behind one of the planet’s two small asteroidal moons to avoid detection by whoever might be monitoring those satellites’ sensor feeds.

  “I think we’re going in the wrong direction.” The comment came from “Phil Collier,” as Charles Tucker insisted on being called now. The bearded, red-haired engineer went on: “Each planet we’re finding is at an earlier stage of infestation. We may be going on a tangent past the Ware’s sphere of influence.”

  “Not necessarily,” Mayweather riposted, his voice cold. “Expansion into space isn’t a perfect sphere. The Boomers reached Sauria and Delta long before Starfleet even got as far as Andoria. Ware infestation could easily have jumped to distant worlds and then expanded out from them in all directions, filling in the gaps.”

  “Possibly. But we should try heading on a different course to see if the pattern holds.”

  “And just forget about these people?”

  “Travis, we’ve talked about this,” Captain Reed put in. “We can help them best by going to the source.”

  “Captain, you’ve seen the reports. The Ware’s only starting to get a foothold down there. It’s early enough that we could stop it before it’s too late. I could lead a team down—”

  “The captain’s right, Commander,” Tucker said. “We have to look at the big picture.”

  “And just let the little guys suffer? That’s how it is for you, isn’t it? You talk about big, lofty goals and don’t notice how much you’re hurting individuals along the way. Well, there is no big picture without the pieces that make it up! Somebody has to pay attention to them, or have you forgotten that?”

  “Travis!” Reed barked. Mayweather caught himself, realizing that the others were staring, unused to such anger from their first officer. “In my ready room,” Reed went on, moving past Mayweather and drawing him in his wake.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Mayweather said once the ready room door had closed behind them. “You know this is personal for me.” />
  “I know that, Travis. But how much is what the Ware did to you and how much is what Trip did to you? Or what I did?”

  Mayweather fidgeted. “I’m not angry at you, sir . . . not anymore. I know how seriously you take your obligations, both professional and personal. You wouldn’t reveal a secret that you didn’t think was yours to tell.” He sighed. “But Trip . . . Honestly, sir, I don’t know who Trip is anymore. The Charles Tucker I knew would be champing at the bit to go down and help those people. Sir, if they find out what the Ware is really doing to them, I know we could save them.” At Reed’s skepticism, he went on, “And maybe we could learn something that could help us deal with the Ware out here too. If it’s still new down there, below full strength, then maybe we can get through its security and learn something about what makes it tick.”

  Reed considered his words for several moments. “That is possible,” he granted. “But you know how risky it can be to make contact with a pre-warp civilization.”

  “Sir, that civilization’s already been contacted by something that doesn’t have its best interests at heart. They’re already being damaged. We have a chance to stop it.”

  “Are you sure that’s what this is about, Travis? That it’s really about them, and not some personal vendetta against the Ware?”

  Mayweather sighed. “You know me, Captain. I’m not the vengeful type. And really . . .” He gave a rough chuckle. “Whatever I might feel about whoever’s behind the Ware . . . the stuff itself is just machinery. I outgrew getting mad at machines when I was twelve and doing my engineering rotation aboard the Horizon. Sir, I’m just worried about the people down there. The people who are getting abducted and turned into living data drives. The people mourning lost loved ones that might still be alive to save. They shouldn’t have to go through that, and I’d like the chance to help them.”

  “All right,” Reed conceded after a moment, “but what about the other elephant in the room?”