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

by Christopher L. Bennett

  The refugee philosopher paused for a moment. “It is true that the issues facing you now on Vulcan are not the same. I need not restate the countless words that have been spilled over the merits of peace and the logical need for aggression, over the sanctity of the mind and the benefits of melding, over the purity of Vulcan thought and the ferment of alien ideas, over the right to stand alone and the need to stand with the Federation. You all know these debates, and most of you know where you stand within them.

  “But I submit that none of those are the debate you should be having. None of those are the right question. They are the questions that certain parties want you to dwell upon . . . so that you do not see the issue that truly matters.

  “Those who urge you to preoccupy yourself with the outsiders who threaten your world, or the others of your own kind whose practices endanger your way of life, direct your focus to the other in order to keep you from looking at yourselves—from seeing what you become when you turn against your fellow beings and live lives defined by fear and exclusion. They do not want you to notice how your own horizons grow more constrained as you agree to impose more limits on others. They do not want you to notice how much of your own freedom you are surrendering to those who promise to protect your way of life from the intolerable other.

  “This I have seen,” Iloja went on, his voice growing more quiet, but more angry. “When my government branded me a threat for saying that science should be free of military objectives, I was forced to go into hiding—though I did not remain passive. I loved my world and I was determined to fight for it. Aware that the state might threaten my family to force my surrender, I arranged for my wife and daughter to be safely hidden as well. But in time, I learned that my wife was a prisoner of the Obsidian Order, convicted of treason before her trial and condemned to death unless I surrendered. I did not understand how they had found her—until I learned that our own daughter had turned her in. Because she believed she must be a good and loyal Cardassian and betray her own parents, condemn her own mother to torture, for the good of the state.” He hissed the last word through clenched teeth.

  “Do not think this means Cardassians do not value family as Vulcans do. Family is everything to us. Family was all that kept us alive through the dark generations before the three-part state arose—though it was family that nearly ruined us as well. As I said, it is everything, and not all things are good. But the state had created a world in which it had become normal, even expected, for citizens to turn against one another. To define their righteousness by whom and what they stood against, rather than what they stood for. And so, in the name of protecting our people and our traditions, they had shaped a generation who thought nothing of condemning their own mothers to torture in order to punish their fathers. All our best efforts to raise our daughter to be good and righteous . . . were unable to prevent it. Because the state convinced her that it was good and righteous to betray those dearest to her. To devalue anyone who disagreed with her beliefs and judge them unworthy of love, of loyalty, even of acknowledgment as people.”

  Iloja needed some moments to gather himself. Dax was weeping openly by now, and T’Rama watched him do so without judgment. “This was why I did not resist when the Central Command offered me exile as an alternative to execution. Because I had already lost everything I had been fighting for. The state had proved stronger than even my love for my own child, my guidance and example as her father. I could not bear even to die on Cardassia after that. I accepted passage on one of the few alien ships that bothered to trade with our impoverished world. I began to run, and never looked back.”

  He gathered himself, eyes meeting the viewer again. “Now I find myself on Vulcan, and though I do not love it as deeply as I loved Cardassia, that is exactly why I can remain—why it does not hurt unbearably to see what your world threatens to become. But I love Vulcan enough—I respect Vulcan enough, if that means more to you—that I cannot simply retreat and leave it to its peril. I must take a stand once again.

  “And so I have told you what I have seen. I have told you what a world becomes under a military state that justifies its existence through the exclusion of the outsider, the denial of the different within itself. I have shown you how even the most reasonable of justifications can lead to tyranny and brutality—if you build a society based on how you judge others rather than how you judge yourselves.

  “I ask you, people of Vulcan: Do not choose your path because of the Federation; because of Starfleet; because of Romulans or Andorians; because of melders or liars; or even because of me. Look at yourselves. Decide who you wish to be, and what you will and will not do. That is the question that the tyrants do not want you to ask. But it is the only question that truly matters.

  “Think long on this question, my Vulcan friends. It is my hope that you will all live long and prosper. But only you can ensure that you do.”

  Dax was silent for quite a while after the speech ended, and T’Rama respected it. Finally he asked, “Do you think it’ll make a difference? What he said?”

  “I doubt it will change the minds of those who are already committed to V’Las’s cause,” she said. “What matters, though, is that it made a difference to Master Iloja. He acted to serve his conscience—as must we all.”

  She nodded deeply to him and left him to his thoughts.

  * * *

  Vokas had to admire the elegance of V’Las’s plan for the destruction of Endeavour. The administrator’s engineers had found an easily overlooked flaw in the backward, overcomplicated design of the human-made warp reaction system, one that exploited human psychological shortcomings as well as their engineering shortcomings.

  The burly young Vulcan had been gratified when V’Las’s agents had approached him shortly after his expulsion from the debate house some nights ago. He had made his interest in the traditionalist movement known to a member of his acquaintance some time before, and he had made his public condemnation of offworlders in the hope that it would demonstrate his sincere desire to play some role in the impending revolution. Little had he expected that he would be called upon to strike the very first blow, to initiate the action that would set the entire uprising into motion. Certainly he was aware it was because he was expendable—because he had no provable affiliation with the revolutionaries and could be disavowed as a lone operator if he were discovered. Two of the offworlders he had denounced in the debate house were aboard the vessel now, giving him a plausible motive.

  But Vokas also had the benefit of being a legitimate employee of Vulcan Space Central, and he had been able to persuade a colleague assigned to Endeavour’s spacedock berth to swap assignments with him off the record, so that the colleague could attend to an ailing relative. With the access and clearances his colleague had innocently granted him, Vokas had been able to board the Federation starship without suspicion and make his way here to the command processor bay for the deuterium conditioning and injector assembly. It had been quite simple to penetrate the security on the system, for who would expect a saboteur seeking to destroy a warp reactor to target the matter side of the reaction rather than the antimatter? Or that it would be as simple as bypassing a few low-level safeguards and substituting a few control chips dedicated to thermal regulation?

  It only took Vokas a few minutes to complete his work and ensure that the sabotage would go undetected. He then made his way off the ship quite casually, assured in the certainty of its inevitable annihilation.

  23

  June 10, 2165

  Ware control ship

  DASKEL VABION WAS SURPRISED by the limited performance of the Ware battleships. Given that their technology was generations beyond that of Starfleet, and that the Starfleet personnel were inhibited in their attacks by the presence of the hostages aboard the drones, he had expected it to be easy to retake the hub facility. But the automated ships had revealed limitations Vabion had not expected. For one thing, he had failed to con
sider the enormous accelerations required for travel across the great distances of space—or at least had overestimated the tolerance of humans and Andorians for such accelerations, on the assumption that their more robust bodies could withstand them better than a Vanotli frame. In retrospect, given that he and Zeheri had been able to withstand travel aboard Zabathu, he should have surmised that the vessel employed some kind of inertial cancellation field, perhaps as an aspect of its gravity generation system. Since Ware battleships were not designed to accommodate living occupants (for any live adjunct processors were kept aboard control ships like the one he now rode aboard), they were not equipped with the necessary acceleration dampers. Thus, they had to limit their accelerations to avoid killing the hostages, which put severe restraints on their maneuverability.

  Which meant, logically, that they should have compensated by pursuing an aggressive strategy to neutralize the Starfleet vessels. However, they only seemed to fire on enemy ships that fired on them first or that came between them and the hub they were attempting to retake. It was as if they were programmed only for the defense of their territory or property, unable to adopt a fully aggressive stance.

  “Can you do nothing to alter their engagement patterns?” Vabion demanded of his escorts.

  The two aliens who flanked him were far stranger than either humans or Andorians. They were stout, rotund creatures with teardrop-shaped bodies tapering to smallish, tubular heads with elongated snouts; their shape suggested a parasitic insect, although their cream-colored fur and warm breath marked them as mammalian in origin. They each crouched on a single pair of thick, bent legs, and their arms and torsos were encased in sophisticated armor of Ware design. At the ends of their forearms were intricate manipulative digits that appeared fully mechanical. They called themselves Pebru, but they had told him little else as yet—at least, not intentionally.

  “The Ware operates as it is designed,” said the larger of the two Pebru, Govar by name. “It is sufficient; we have already neutralized two of the smaller battleships.” Indeed, two Andorian craft had been crippled and forced to fall back, but an equal number of drones had sustained significant damage thanks to the precision fire from the Starfleet vessels, particularly the one with the half-disk forward hull and the two rear tubes, evidently the lead ship Pioneer. Vabion was impressed at their ability to neutralize the battleships’ propulsion and weapons without costing the lives of the hostages; however, both automated ships were already in the process of self-repair.

  “But you could modify its operations to achieve more. Your inflexibility is compromising our advantage.”

  “The Ware has suited us for generations,” Govar insisted. “Should these drones fail, we shall simply summon more.”

  “We now have an opening,” said Zixin, the second Pebru. “We do not need reinforcements. We can push through into teleport range of the hub and remove the infestation.”

  “But surely they’ll be in the data core, which is shielded against teleport rays,” Vabion replied.

  “Why?” asked Zixin.

  Vabion stared. “Because their goal is to decipher your programming code and gain control over the Ware. Didn’t you review the data from the scan of Travis Mayweather’s brain?” It had been necessary to sedate the powerful human before he could be placed back into interface with the command ship’s data core, for he had fought quite ferociously, managing to break Vabion’s left arm in the process—a minor inconvenience that the Ware had swiftly repaired. But once the neural interface had been installed, Mayweather’s knowledge could be scanned without the need for him to be conscious. Vabion had reviewed the data pertaining to the Starfleet engineering team and the equipment they had brought aboard Pioneer at the start of the mission, giving him an idea—filtered through Mayweather’s non-expert perspective—of the equipment’s potentials.

  “No one has ever gained the ability to reprogram the Ware,” Govar said.

  “No one?” Vabion challenged.

  “There is no danger of it.”

  “Still, you can’t teleport them away so long as they remain in the core.” He considered. “I suggest you teleport me aboard the hub.”

  “Why?” Zixin challenged.

  “To examine their work and determine whether they have made any progress. I know, no one has ever reprogrammed the Ware, but these are aliens from far away. Who knows what new abilities they may have? If they have gained any ground at sabotaging your technology, we need to know so we can repair it.”

  Govar considered. “How would you protect yourself from harm?”

  “Let me take the hostages who are aboard this ship. Leave Mayweather in place, of course, but I will need the Starfleet man Sangupta as hostage for his crewmates’ behavior—and Miss Zeheri as a hostage for Sangupta’s behavior.” He held up his bracelet. “As you know, I have her firmly under my control.”

  Govar stared. “You have an inordinate fondness for hostages, Vabion.”

  “I’m a businessman. I value leverage.”

  “The Starfleet ships are regrouping,” Zixin said. “Our access to the hub will not last long.”

  Govar fidgeted. “All right. We will send you. But this had better work.”

  It was the most amateurish threat Vabion had received from a business partner since his apprenticeship. But, like so much else, it told him volumes about the Pebru.

  U.S.S. Pioneer

  “Taking heavy damage, sir!” Valeria Williams called over the crack and thunder of weapon impacts against the hull. “Thruster arrays one and four are down. We’re down to hull plating on ventral starboard, and the ventral phase cannons are out.”

  The hull shook again. “Target that ship with dorsal cannons and fire at will.”

  A few moments later, the drone ship was spinning and adrift on the viewer. “Hostage’s life signs holding,” Williams reported with relief. “But, sir, that ship’s just going to regenerate again. Either we need a way to free the hostages . . . or we need to consider what they’d want us to do.”

  Reed caught her subtext. “You mean sacrifice them.”

  It was the last thing Williams wanted to suggest. Her determination throughout this mission had been to ensure that no more Starfleet personnel lost their lives. But as the battle raged and the casualty reports came in from sickbay and the other ships, it was becoming increasingly clear that there would be no way to prevent fatalities unless drastic measures were taken. She would have readily given her own life to protect the rest of her crew and comrades. But with that certainty came the realization that every one of the hostages aboard those ships would want the same.

  Sh’Prenni made her opinion known over the open channel to Vol’Rala. “We’re taking heavy damage too, Malcolm. It may be the only way to turn the tide. And they’re all trained soldiers.”

  “That’s a last resort, Thenar.”

  “And we’re close to needing it.”

  “We don’t need to sacrifice all of them, sir,” Williams said. “That seventh ship, the one holding back—it’s clearly controlling the others.” She hesitated, aware that the control ship was the only one with human biosigns aboard—no doubt two of their missing personnel from Vanot, including at least one of her good friends and possibly one of the captain’s oldest friends. But duty compelled her to go on. “It . . . it’s the only one we’d have to take out.”

  “Sir!” called Achrati from the science station. “A transporter signal has just been relayed from the control ship through one of the drones . . . terminating on the hub. They’ve boarded it.”

  “Life signs?”

  “One human, two Vanotli.”

  Only one human. Meaning one was still aboard. So much for fate sparing her from the awful choice.

  But that one remaining reading was faint, detectable only because Collier had devised a way to scan through the Ware data core shielding. Meaning that whoever was in there�
��whether it was Commander Mayweather or Rey or Katrina—had been plugged into the machine, used to help kill their own crewmates.

  She knew none of them could tolerate that burden any more than she could. “Sir,” she said, “the ship’s vulnerable if we target it now.”

  “Wait, Val,” Reed told her. “Let’s find out what’s going on first.”

  Ware hub complex

  The security team had come instantly alert when the newcomers had beamed into the corridor adjacent to the data core. But at the prompting of the lean, shaven-headed man from Vanot, Rey Sangupta filled them in on the situation: That man, Vabion, would kill the Vanotli woman with him if he found himself threatened or disobeyed. Charles Tucker’s intelligence training told him that the woman could be sacrificed for the sake of the mission; but whatever part of him survived from before Section 31 argued otherwise. He instructed the security team to escort Vabion and his hostages into the data core.

  “Don’t cooperate with him,” Sangupta protested. “He sold Commander Mayweather out to the Ware’s builders! Helped them plug him back into the data core, even showed them some improvements on the interface! They’re using the commander’s brain to coordinate the attack!”

  Tucker stared at Vabion, filled with fury. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to him?”

  “Rather better than you do, I imagine, sir,” said Vabion. “Indeed, I’m rather better informed than you about a number of things, which is why I have the upper hand here. Now, if you please.”

  Grudgingly, Tucker permitted the Vanotli man to study the team’s equipment and quiz him and Akomo for a time on their findings. “I see,” he finally said. “You have made excellent progress. Although you’re headed for a dead end I encountered myself in my first year of analysis. The code has numerous such traps built into it. It took me another year to learn how to circumvent it. You’ve come remarkably far in mere days, no doubt from being closer to the root code and, well, having an equipment advantage. But I doubt you’ll be able to escape the trap without my assistance.”