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

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Certainly not. I won’t let her out of range of my control bracelet. Apprentice Nibar will remain here as an additional safeguard—as will Miss Ndiaye. I gather she is your security officer, so I can best control you out there if she remains here. But I trust Miss Zeheri’s ongoing presence by our side will serve to remind you of what’s at stake if you don’t cooperate.”

  “You son of an Undertroll,” Zeheri cursed.

  Chuckling, he lifted her exquisite chin with his finger. “Don’t be so ungrateful, my dear. Thanks to me, you’re about to go on a journey to where no Vanotli has ever dreamed of going before.”

  U.S.S. Zabathu AGC-11-09

  Zeheri had barely registered Vabion’s words about landing craft and beings from other stars, dismissing them as more of his empty excuses. She’d let herself hope, as Travis led the group out past the hold wall and into the stormbreak forest beyond, that he was just playing along with the industrialist’s delusions, leading him into some kind of trap.

  But then they had come upon the strange, stubby-winged, propellerless aircraft in a clearing too small for any plane to use. And then she had seen a pilot whom Travis called Karthikeyan, as pale as Rey and with unnaturally black eyes. And then they had somehow lifted into the sky and she had seen the ground falling swiftly away. Then the craft had effortlessly pierced the dense, turbulent clouds overhead, and before she knew it she was gazing down on the curve of Vanot with only starry black space around the craft. She had been too stunned to speak. But she had noticed the look of triumphant wonder on Vabion’s face, as though he’d expected this all along.

  And then a larger flying craft (was that even the word for this?) loomed over them and took them inside, and the people Travis spoke to were like nothing she’d ever seen, tall blue-skinned creatures with silver hair, their heads sporting strange, moving stalks that writhed and pointed toward her as if they could see her. She was terrified and bewildered and only wanted to go home and let Najola reassure her that it had all been a bad dream. But she was still an investigator, so she watched and listened as Travis ordered the blue people to set a course to intercept a pioneer at distortion six, whatever that meant. The blue people accepted his commands and spoke to him as a fellow officer, and she knew this was where he belonged. And she realized that the strangely rigid fins that Travis and Rey and Katrina had behind their ears were false, that their eyes must look the same as Karthikeyan’s—that they weren’t even Vanotli!

  Once the blue people had moved on, Travis came over to her, albeit under Vabion’s watchful eye. “You lied to me!” she cried before he could speak. “You manipulated me!”

  “I was only trying to protect you. Your people weren’t ready for this.”

  But she could see in his eyes that he didn’t find his own words convincing. “You protect people by giving them the knowledge to cope with what they may face. Hiding the truth endangers them.” She pointed at the lethal collar around her neck. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “I promise—I will get you out of this. Ganler, too.”

  “Don’t promise me anything! I don’t even know what you are anymore! You didn’t even trust me with that!”

  He looked at her helplessly. After all, there was nothing he could possibly say to her now.

  June 3, 2165

  U.S.S. Pioneer

  The Ware hub was not what Malcolm Reed had been hoping to find. Once it had been confirmed that the origin point for the drone ships had been a K-type star system, Reed had hoped they had found the homeworld of the Ware’s creators. Instead, they had simply found the mother of all Ware automated stations, drawing on the star’s light for power and its dense planetesimal cloud as a source of raw replication material.

  But once Pioneer had completed a quick flyby to take long-range scans and then reunited with Vol’Rala and the other ships, analysis had suggested that “mother” might have been an accurate metaphor. The hub was a honeycomb assemblage of dozens of the familiar polyhedral modules and expandable Chinese-puzzle docks, yet with the docks extending straight outward from the interconnected modules rather than athwart them, the better to fit within the dense framework. Many of the docks contained drone ships of various types undergoing construction or maintenance. Smaller drones flitted between the hub and nearby asteroids, shuttling raw materials for the warp ships’ construction. Tucker suspected that it must receive occasional shipments from the other stations, delivering the rarer supplies that alien ships traded for the Ware’s services—antimatter, dilithium, plasma injectors, and the like. Was that the reason for the Ware’s activities as much as the demand for living brains? And if so, Reed wondered, what was the ultimate purpose of it all, beyond mindless self-propagation?

  Fortunately, Charles Tucker’s reaction was more pragmatic. “This could be our way in,” he told Reed and Captain sh’Prenni as they met in Pioneer’s briefing room with Olivia Akomo and sh’Prenni’s chief engineer, Silash ch’Gesrit. “We’ve had no luck with hacking our way into the Ware’s coding, finding some way to reprogram it or shut it down. Judging from the warnings we keep getting from that lovely voice we all know so well,” he went on, evoking wry and weary grins from the others, “its builders were crazy paranoid about industrial espionage. They didn’t want anyone deciphering their software secrets.”

  “So what makes this hub our ‘way in’?” Reed asked.

  Akomo picked up the account. “We’re seeing not only battleships in the hub’s docks, but seeder ships as well—ships that deliver Ware to planets like Vanot and bring back captives. It stands to reason that it also manufactures its own mining drones. So since this facility produces ships with a range of different programmed functions, it follows that its system must contain the root code that underlies them all. If we can break through to that level, it might finally give us the means to modify the Ware’s programming, get it to shut down its defenses.”

  “Just here?” sh’Prenni asked. “Or could we shut down the lot of it at once?”

  Tucker looked skeptical. “It doesn’t seem like they’re all networked that way. And they have pretty robust defenses. This won’t be a silver bullet if it works. But it’ll give us a weapon.”

  “Or an inoculation,” Akomo added. “A means of managing the Ware. I’m not sure we should be so quick to just take it all down. The more I study this technology, the more undeniable its potential becomes. The medical breakthroughs, the advances in transporter and fabrication technology, cybernetics . . . Just imagine what we could do if we could harness it. If we could protect living beings against capture, make the system truly safe—”

  “Would it even work?” sh’Prenni challenged. “Would it have enough brainpower to be functional at more than a basic level?” She shook her head. “And what about the consideration of the species it’s been preying on for generations? Would you want to profit from a discovery that emerged from the suffering and violation of thousands?”

  “For the majority of both our histories, Captain, there were few that didn’t. But what we learned helped us move toward a better world.”

  “A world where we no longer tolerate such moral compromises.”

  Akomo looked startled as she realized what she’d been saying. “I didn’t mean—I wasn’t saying we should just let them continue. I just meant . . . Just because knowledge came from a moral compromise, that’s no reason to blind ourselves to it. Refusing to use it for the greater good just makes things worse.”

  “In any case,” Reed interposed, “we first need to obtain the solution before we can decide how to deploy it. And for that, we need to get aboard that station.”

  “You should be old hands at that by now, Malcolm,” said sh’Prenni.

  “Yes, and that’s our advantage. But this will be an exceptional challenge given its size and complexity.”

  “And given,” Tucker added, “that we need to occupy it, not just raid it and blow it to pieces.
Not easy when the things can repair their own damage.”

  “Fortunately,” sh’Prenni went on, “you now have a whole fleet to assist you.”

  Reed smiled at her, telling her what he knew she wanted to hear. “And I intend to make considerable use of your services.”

  June 4, 2165

  Ware hub complex

  The first service was provided, ironically, by the only two ships that weren’t with the rest of the fleet. Thelasa-vei and Tashmaji rendezvoused some parsecs away and arranged their own raid on another, relatively close repair station—with the assistance of three low-warp Balduk defense ships that had been patrolling the region, the crews of which had been outraged to learn of the Ware’s true nature and grateful to the Andorians for returning their liberated officer. Not long after they reported freeing two more Balduk and a Tyrellian (whatever that was) and destroying the repair station, the hub complex launched four of its boxy-nacelled battleships to chase them down. The Ilthirin-class courier sped clear with the rescuees while the Kumari-class warship and its Balduk escorts stood ready to lead the battleships on a merry chase, keeping them distracted while Pioneer, Vol’Rala, Kinaph, Flabbjellah, and sh’Lavan tackled the complex.

  With a heavy battlecruiser and four light cruisers, it was not difficult to take out the complex’s numerous repair docks, and in some cases the ships within them. One battleship got clear before its dock was reduced to scrap, making things complicated for Pioneer until Kinaph came to its rescue and joined it in finishing off the robot ship—adding one more debt that Reed now owed to nd’Orelag.

  The three Sevaijen-class cruisers bracketed the complex with transporter interference while Vol’Rala sent boarding teams in three of its shuttles. Lieutenant Williams’s tactical team and Tucker’s engineering team were part of the assault, but the Andorian shuttles were better armed and armored than their Earth counterparts, and thus safer against the complex’s retaliations. Once aboard, the tactical teams used their accumulated knowledge of Ware systems to trace the complex’s transporter/replicator circuits and destroy them systematically, neutralizing the complex’s ability to replicate weapons and replacement parts or to transport the boarders into space. But it was a race to take out all the transporter systems before the surviving ones could restore the damaged ones. At one point, a swarm of mining drones attempted to ram sh’Lavan and forced it to raise its shields, cutting off its transporter beam; the gap in the interference pattern enabled the complex to beam two Andorian security troops into space. Fortunately, the entire team was in full EVA gear, and Kinaph was able to deploy a shuttlepod to retrieve the two guards.

  Once the teams reached the complex’s data cores (it had six), the grim business of triage began, the determination of who could be saved and who was too far gone. But Charles Tucker was grateful to leave that task in the hands of Williams and her team. His job, along with Olivia Akomo and Commander ch’Gesrit, was to analyze the complex’s data network and locate the data core containing the root code, or at least determine the minimum amount of the complex’s computer network that needed to be preserved in order to reverse-engineer the programming. With that determined, the starships could destroy the complex’s other modules and reduce the amount of potentially self-repairing systems they needed to watch out for.

  In time, the grungy data core had been cleared of captives, corpses, and those in between, leaving it a slightly less macabre place for the engineers to work. Only Commander ch’Gesrit dared to broach the question that had already been on Tucker’s mind: “How do we know there aren’t important parts of the program encoded in the captives’ brains? What might we be missing by disconnecting them?”

  “They have to swap out . . . the captives so often,” Tucker replied, careful not to call them components, “that any basic programming must be backed up in the cores.”

  “Right,” Akomo said. “The . . . the brains are probably used for random-access memory. Sensor data, temporary pattern storage, real-time processing, and the like.”

  “I hope so,” the Andorian replied. “Just so I don’t have to listen to you squeamish civilians stammering every time we bring them up.”

  Civilians, Tucker thought. If only he knew.

  Though their main objective was to reach the root code, the immediate priority was to locate the control circuits for the transporter and self-repair systems and ensure they were deactivated. As they tapped the data core and studied its activity patterns, Akomo shook her head. “A pity to treat technology this elegant as something to be shut down or destroyed. Imagine if we could incorporate these self-healing systems into our own ships. Not to mention the technologies for healing living tissue.”

  “Technologies they don’t care to apply to their own captives,” ch’Gesrit sneered.

  “That’s just what I’m saying. Maybe if we could take control of the medical systems, they could help us repair the brains of the captives who are otherwise past saving.”

  “Watch out for temptation, Doctor. That’s the trap of the Ware. Our job is simply to find a way to shut it down. Those are our orders, and civilians or not, you’re pledged to follow them.”

  Akomo conceded the point with a sour, silent look. Satisfied, ch’Gesrit moved to examine another part of the chamber. Once he was out of earshot, Akomo leaned closer to Tucker. “Okay, so we need to find a way to shut it down. But I trust you’re still keeping an eye out for useful knowledge along the way.”

  He studied her, recalling her earlier words in the briefing. “Sounds like you changed your mind about my priorities.”

  She shook her head. “It was just the initial shock of it. As I said before, every advance has come at a cost. We just have to focus on turning it into something positive.” Her dark eyes roved uneasily. “It’s for the good of the Federation, right? The most good in the long run. So let’s get to work.”

  Tucker had thought he would be pleased to hear Akomo finally agreeing with him. So why did it give him a sense of loss?

  18

  May 30, 2165

  ShiKahr Business District

  TOBIN DAX WAS ALMOST feeling sorry for Soreth. The lanky Vulcan had returned to the debate house this evening with the intent of resuming his argument against melding, but the reemergence of V’Las had forced him into a debate over the prospect of armed rebellion. “Is this how you would preserve the integrity of the Vulcan mind?” young T’Zhae demanded of him in her rebuttal. “By condoning acts of terrorism and advocating armed insurrection against the Federation?”

  Soreth floundered, aware of how many eyes were upon him. The room was packed tightly tonight; the bombshell had the whole planet talking, and Tobin was sure that they were streaming to debate houses like this all over Vulcan to sort through their reactions to the news. “I do not . . . I do not find the prospect of violence desirable,” he finally managed. “But the High Command, which I take pride in having served, played a valuable role in defending Vulcan and its allies against invasion and internal strife.”

  “By ‘internal strife’ you mean the liberty of our allies to make their own choices.”

  “Freedom of choice requires responsibility—the maturity to judge wisely.” He paused for a moment, then spoke more resolutely. “We can respect the independence of younger civilizations while still recognizing their need for guidance, for protection against the cost of their own folly and aggression.”

  “Good recovery,” Iloja of Prim murmured to Tobin and Phlox, who again shared the same table. “The sentiment is dangerously condescending, of course, but his delivery is improving. The lad has a future in politics.”

  Tobin declined to respond, for the Cardassian poet’s words drew more glares from adjoining tables than they had last week. It seemed tonight’s patrons were less inclined to hide their disdain for aliens in their midst.

  “Should we not protect ourselves first from our own folly and aggression?” T’Zhae ripost
ed. “We assume we have the superior wisdom, the greater maturity, and that this entitles us to dictate the correct direction for other races. But we cannot even recognize truth when we hear it. V’Las is a traitor and a terrorist whose lies nearly brought Vulcan to ruin, yet now that he returns with more lies and attempts to lead us back to the ways of violence that Surak gave his life to save us from, Vulcans across the planet declare their open allegiance to him. How can we have so completely forgotten what we are?”

  A new voice spoke from the crowd. “We cannot preserve what we are if we allow aliens to destroy it!” A burly Vulcan male of about Soreth’s age rose from his table and strode forward to the debate stage. This was Vokas, who had spoken earlier in favor of V’Las’s faction but apparently had now decided that the polite conventions of the debate house no longer applied to him. “V’Las saw the threat that offworld intrusion posed to Vulcan purity of thought and culture. He attempted to resist the erosion of our influence abroad, the influx of alien ideas and individuals onto our planet.”

  “The Vulcan way is to celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” T’Zhae countered.

  “An idea corrupted by the Syrannites to excuse the contamination of our world with foreign influences.”

  “How can it be interpreted in a way consistent with the exclusion of diverse influences?”

  “How can you claim to respect diversity,” sneered Vokas, “yet reject the right of those who stand with V’Las to defend our beliefs in Vulcan integrity?”

  “The rights of the one do not include the license to disregard the rights and dignity of others. Those who speak of ‘rights’ to defend their own self-interest at others’ expense have no understanding of what the word means.”

  “Brava,” Phlox cheered under his breath.

  But Vulcan hearing was keen, and it drew the attention of Vokas regardless. “Look,” he said, pointing to the three offworlders’ table. “Look how much alien influence is among us everywhere we go. The constant influx of new species, bringing their emotion and their chaos, confusing our youth with ideas that run counter to what Vulcan is. This is a quiet invasion, an occupation so insidious we have not seen it until it was too late. We have a right to take action against it!”