Thanien was taken aback. He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Is that . . . a realistic concern, Captain? This is not a matter for science to resolve. This is a military conflict.”
“He’s right, Captain,” th’Menchal said. “Who knows how fiercely the Mutes will fight on their own territory? Consider the danger to our crews.”
“I am, Commodore. If the aliens are brought aboard before we can secure them and place them in restraints, they could endanger the safety of our vessels and their personnel.
“Not to mention,” she went on, “that their atmospheric and environmental needs evidently differ from ours. If they aren’t in protective suits when beamed aboard, they could suffer brain damage or death before we could gain any useful information from them. I think we can all agree that would be . . . counterproductive.”
After a moment, th’Menchal nodded. “Very well. We shall prepare a boarding party of our own. Vinakthen out.”
Thanien turned to T’Pol. “I volunteer to lead our team.”
“Commander, if you seek to exact revenge . . .”
“I will obey Starfleet rules of engagement to the letter,” he replied tightly. “I just . . . want to look them in the eye.”
T’Pol restrained herself from pointing out that they did not appear to have eyes in the conventional sense. It wouldn’t help resolve whatever tension had arisen between the two of them. She simply nodded and said, “Very well. And Commander—be careful.”
“Mute” ship
The capital ships used tractor beams to slow the alien vessel to a safer velocity before launching the boarding shuttles. The vessel presented no evident docking ports, so the shuttles had to blast through the hangar-bay hatch on the vessel’s dorsal spine. The bay proved to be unoccupied when it was blown open to space, though it would have made little difference to Thanien if it had been otherwise.
Commander Kimura brought Endeavour’s shuttlepod to rest between two of the Mutes’ piscine black shuttles, with its sister shuttle and the two from Vinakthen landing close behind. The Malurians from Rivgor, satisfied with the safety of their own transporters, would beam across once the Starfleet teams had secured a position.
The boarding teams poured out of their shuttles, particle rifles at the ready. The humans wore the bronze suits of Earth Starfleet, while Thanien wore his own silver suit, whose boxy, high-domed helmet gave his antennae room to move. Only the UESPA and Endeavour patches on his suit distinguished it from those worn by Vinakthen’s party.
The Vinakthen team found an airlock hatch and forced it open, leading the others into a vestibule containing a rack of the Mutes’ carapace-like EV garments, which reportedly generated some form of force-field helmet around their heads. The vestibule automatically repressurized with air that read substantially denser than Andoria or Earth normal, with lethal levels of carbon dioxide. Once the environment was stabilized, Thanien cued the Malurians to beam over.
The teams split up as they made their way into the interior of the ship. It reminded Thanien of an ice-borer warren, a maze of narrow tunnels with no light sources beyond the team’s helmet lamps.
“Are they blind as well as deaf?” Kimura mused.
“They sense something,” Thanien replied, his antennae twitching at what they perceived. “There are electromagnetic variances as we move through the corridors, in some sort of ordered pattern. I think it’s how they navigate. Perhaps they ‘see’ EM fields.”
They reached a node where the corridor widened, with new tunnels branching from it in three dimensions, sloping to connect to higher and lower levels. Some form of consoles adorned the walls, and a pyramidal protrusion on the ceiling was giving off shifting magnetic fields that Thanien could sense but not interpret.
“Sir!”
Even as Kimura spoke, Thanien registered soft swishing, tapping sounds from all around them, and he spun to bring his lights to bear, as did the others. Two of the aliens dropped from the upper shafts, two more from side tunnels, surrounding the party. The descriptions hadn’t done justice to their strangeness—tall, unnaturally lanky beings with extra joints on their limbs and hideous gray-green heads with small antenna-like stalks in place of eyes and horrific vertical slits for mouths. The party was momentarily shocked by their emergence from the darkness. Crewman Money recovered quickly, but before she could finish raising her rifle, one of the creatures had downed her, moving too fast for Thanien to see how, and knelt to pull at her helmet. Thanien fired his own rifle, bothering the creature only a little. It wore a simple gray and brown jumpsuit, with no carapace; evidently their resistance to energy weapons was due to more than the shielding alone. Were their nervous systems so alien that it gave them an immunity?
Kimura added his fire, while Teska and Curry fired at the others. The Mute finally fell before it could breach Money’s helmet seal, but Teska fell before a second creature, which staggered under his fire but was relentless in its approach. Thanien brought it down, then turned his fire to the other two, joined by Kimura, Curry, and the dazed but recovering Teska.
Outmatched, the other two Mutes retreated down one of the downsloping passages, one too narrow for the EV suits to fit through. “We’ll have to mop them up later,” Thanien said. “For now let’s get Money and these captives back to the hangar bay.”
U.S.S. Endeavour
“Securing the ship is proving more difficult than we thought,” Thanien reported. “The Mutes are relentless. They refuse to surrender or communicate in any way. More, there doesn’t seem to be a single command center, just stations distributed throughout the ship. I can’t imagine what kind of command structure they have. We may have to take down every Mute aboard before we can secure the ship. And three of our teams have already sustained casualties, though none fatal so far. The Malurians have already retreated. They beamed back to Rivgor with three captive Mutes.”
“Captain?” Cutler said, drawing T’Pol’s gaze to the science station. “It’s worse than that. I’m reading power starting to return to engines and weapons systems.”
“That’s not all,” Sato added. “I’m getting subspace emissions . . . I think they’re sending a distress signal.”
“At least they’ll talk to someone,” Cutler muttered.
On the main screen, Commodore th’Menchal stepped forward. “Taking the ship would be too costly. The Malurians have the right idea—let’s secure the prisoners we have and withdraw. That’ll give us leverage and an opportunity to study these creatures. Hm, I would have liked to study their weapons and drives at our leisure, but the boarding parties’ scans will have to suffice. Captain, get your team out of there, and quickly, before reinforcements arrive.” He sighed. “As much as I hate to withdraw from a fight, Endeavour and the Rigelians are too badly damaged for another engagement so soon, and we don’t know how many reinforcements may be coming. As soon as your people are aboard, go to warp. We’ll regroup at Zeta Fornacis.”
“Acknowledged,” T’Pol said.
“At least we finally have our hands on a few of the ghikkiths. Let’s see how long they hold their silence now.”
U.S.S. Pioneer
“I’ve got Travis and Alan stabilized,” Therese Liao reported to the captain. They stood at the threshold of the makeshift medical tent her orderlies had erected around her in the catwalk even as she and her medics had performed emergency surgery on the two men. Now the medics were taking care of the other, thankfully more minor injuries. “Travis should make a full recovery, but under these conditions, that’s only going to happen if he stays sedated for a few days to let his body heal.” She sighed heavily. “Alan’s a different matter. He’s stable for now, but he’s in a coma and there’s only so much I can do for him in here. Ideally we need to get him back to civilization so he can get the long-term treatment he’s going to need.”
Reed appreciated how much it took for the space-boomer CMO to confess there were limits to what she could do aboard ship. Sheehan’s condition must be grave indeed. “Unfortunate
ly that may not be an option,” he told her. “According to Grev, communications are one of the many nonfunctional systems. Whatever happened to us, it’s burned out every subspace field coil on the ship—even the distress beacon. Worse, it’s sent us considerably off course. We weren’t supposed to go anywhere near a planetary system. So Starfleet won’t know where to look for us.”
The doctor stared at him. “That means our only hope is to get our engines up and running—or at least the thrusters. But that would mean leaving the catwalk . . . and even the EV suits would only give an hour’s protection against this radiation at most. What are our odds of getting the repairs done before we spiral down into the planet?”
“Just focus on taking care of your patients, Doctor,” Reed said, wishing he could come up with something more reassuring to say. Unfortunately, the person who was good at that was lying unconscious behind her.
He left the medical tent, climbed upon the raised metal walkway that ran down the center of the long cylindrical space, and passed through the door into the next catwalk segment, where most of the crew was housed. It was easier to fit Pioneer’s forty-six-person complement, plus the six-person engineering team, into the nacelle than it had been with Enterprise’s eighty-three a decade before, but things were still hectic as the crew strove to set up usable equipment, food and water distribution, waste reclamation, and the like using what few resources they’d managed to scrounge together in the rush. It didn’t help that the surfaces within the catwalk, along with the air itself, were still uncomfortably hot so soon after coil shutdown. Reed had almost burned his fingertip activating the door control.
Members of the crew gathered around him as he entered the compartment. “Captain! How’s the chief? And Mister Mayweather?” Reed recognized the burly, florid-faced speaker as Alex Tatopolous, one of the junior engineering crewmen.
“The doctor has them stabilized,” Reed told them. “We’ll know more later.”
“How are we going to get out of here, sir?” asked Adeola Osunwoke from life support. “Without the chief, how are we going to fix the engines?”
“Doctor Dax’s team are evaluating the problem even now.”
“Them?” Tatopolous protested. “Sir, we wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for them tampering with our technology.”
“That’s enough of that,” Reed barked. “We’re still investigating what happened, and at this point we need whatever expertise we can bring to bear. I expect you to treat our guests with all due respect, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” a chastened Tatopolous murmured.
“What was that, Crewman?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Very well. I assume you have duties to attend.”
The crewmen went back to their tasks, obedient but hardly reassured. Reed found himself longing for Mayweather’s expertise as much as they longed for Sheehan’s.
Finally he reached the nacelle monitor station at the forward end of the catwalk, where the bridge crew was attempting to set up a workable control interface with the bridge and main engineering—a difficult thing to achieve when they hadn’t had time to prepare from the other end. “How’s it coming?” he asked.
“We’ve managed to tap into sensors, sir,” Sangupta told him, “but there’s a lot of interference from the radiation. I’m pretty sure I know where we are—just a couple of parsecs off course, really, but it’s an uncharted system, no habitable planets. Nobody here to help us, and slim odds of anyone finding us.”
“Any luck regaining thruster control?”
“Sorry, sir, nothing.” Tallarico sighed, brushing back a blond strand that had come loose from her ponytail. “We’ve established a command interface, but all we’re getting are error messages. I think the radiation has damaged the RCS quads.”
“Well, better them than us,” Grev ventured, trying to put a positive spin on things.
“Without them, we’re doomed anyway,” the helm officer countered.
“Does anyone have any good news?” Reed asked.
Tobin Dax lifted a tentative hand. “Um, I think we’ve figured out what happened.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I’m still not quite sure how it happened. I mean, yes, theoretically, that kind of metric transformation is possible, but the coil configuration shouldn’t have been able—”
Sensing the captain’s building impatience, Sangupta interposed, “We fell through a wormhole, sir.”
Reed stared. “A wormhole? You mean one of those shortcuts through space, like a Xindi vortex?”
“Well, no, sir, those subspace vortices . . . well, they were a side effect of the altered physics of the Delphic Expanse, which is why the Xindi can’t use them anymore now that, well, you know. No, this was a good old-fashioned Einstein-Rosen bridge.” He shook his head and laughed. “Which is pretty remarkable, sir, when you think about it. We’re the first humans—and Trill, et cetera—ever to create an artificial wormhole and pass through it!”
“He, he’s right,” Dax said. “If, if we can figure out how this happened, learn to duplicate the effect . . . and stabilize it . . . it could revolutionize space travel.”
“That’s all well and good, but does any of this help us get out of here now?”
Dax and Sangupta traded a look. “Ahh, no, I’m afraid not,” the Trill said. “Sorry. As it is, we’re lucky the wormhole exited in normal space, instead of terminating in some subspace domain whose physical laws would disintegrate us in seconds. Or just collapsing in on itself and crushing us. Or—”
“I get the idea, Doctor. In that case, I suggest you set the wormhole theory aside for now and focus on getting our impulse engines up and running.”
“Yes, sir,” a chastened Dax replied. “But from up here, it’s hard even to diagnose what’s wrong with them, let alone fix them. And with Mister Sheehan injured, there’s only so much we can do. . . .”
“Doctor Dax. When you came aboard, you were given command authorization second only to Mister Sheehan in order to perform the necessary engine modifications. Modifications that you and your team know better than anyone else on this crew. Under the circumstances, that makes you my chief engineer. And I’m ordering you to fix the engines. Understood?”
Dax bowed his head. “Understood. Sorry.”
“And stop apologizing!”
“Sor— Yes, sir.”
Wonderful, Reed thought. Our lives are in the hands of this terrified little sad sack. He turned and gazed at the wall, imagining the people and the lost opportunities that lay beyond. Well, it’s not as if I was going to leave much of a legacy anyway.
U.S.S. Endeavour
“I’ve succeeded at replicating the aliens’ environmental needs,” Phlox reported to the captain and Thanien as they stood in sickbay along with Hoshi Sato. “I’ve coordinated with the other ships to ensure they use the same environmental settings for their, ah, guests.” The main monitor displayed a night-vision image of the two captive aliens in the darkened decon chamber, which Phlox had configured based on the boarding party’s scans of the environment aboard the alien ship. Alongside the live feed was a computer reconstruction of the aliens’ anatomy, which T’Pol studied with some fascination. They were neither entirely vertebrate nor invertebrate. Their body surface was a transparent layer of flexible chitinous material, thinnest where it covered the eyestalks and fingers, thickest and most rigid over the head and torso. Beneath it was a layer of wrinkled, gray-green tissue that was itself faintly translucent, with the shadows of internal organs barely visible within. It suggested the dark was their natural environment; they did not need an opaque skin to protect their internal organs from solar radiation.
The captives had been placed in force-field carapaces for transport back to the ship but had been divested of them once secured in decon, then allowed to revive on their own. “Their atmosphere is not dissimilar to ours in chemistry,” Phlox went on, “but it’s much denser, with levels of carbon dioxide that would be quickly fatal f
or most humanoids—while our own atmosphere would be too low in oxygen and humidity to sustain them for long. I imagine that’s why they like it so dark—their homeworld must be far from its sun in order to avoid a runaway greenhouse effect.”
“Wouldn’t a dense atmosphere carry sound better?” Sato asked.
“Perhaps too well,” T’Pol suggested. “Silence may have been their best defense against detection by predators.”
“Or perhaps there’s simply too much competing noise in their environment, so they found another way to communicate,” Phlox added. “They are apparently sensitive to infrared radiation, as well as the magnetic fields you sensed aboard their ship, Commander. Normal lighting includes enough of an infrared component to obscure their vision.”
“What are they doing?” Thanien asked, leaning forward. On the monitor, the aliens were moving around the decon chamber, probing its surfaces with the palms of their four-fingered hands held centimeters away from them.
“Much of their magnetic and thermal sensitivity seems to be concentrated in their hands,” Phlox replied. “I’ve removed their gloves, which appear to contain an array of more powerful sensors and transmit their readings directly through the palms.”
The aliens came together in the center of the room, reaching their palms toward each other, standing still briefly before resuming their examination. “I think they’re talking to each other,” Sato said.
“Yes, I noticed that before,” Phlox said. “They’re exchanging infrared and magnetic pulses. That must be how they communicate. However, as you can see, their moments of loquacity are brief. And they haven’t, ah, said a word to me or to the guards outside—only to one another.”
T’Pol turned to her communications officer. “Commander, do whatever you can to establish communication. Coordinate with the other ships. We need to find a way to open a dialogue with these beings.”
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