“Don’t energize just yet,” Will said. “We’re going to need to find a way to cover our tracks first.”
“I have just the thing,” Vale said, rising from her chair. Troi glanced toward the exec in time to see a grin spread across her face as she moved toward Dakal’s station.
GORN HEGEMONY RECONNAISSANCE VESSEL SSEVARRH
Krassrr silently cursed the laws that only members of the sedentary castes—who threatened to overwhelmingly outnumber Krassrr’s own caste should his present mission fail—would think to invoke. The Ssevarrh’s ill-hatched law-caster contingent, no doubt annoyed by the summary execution that had been only narrowly thwarted by the Ssevarrh’s chief medical officer, were now insisting upon the strictest possible interpretation of the law and the warrior caste’s duty to it. So the tribunal had demanded that the traitor’s death sentence be carried out immediately upon the announcement of its final and irrevocable Decision of Condemnation. Unlike the informal execution that Dr. R’rerrgran had stopped, a formal, tribunal-ordered killing such as this one legally required the captain’s presence, regardless of how this might conflict with his many other duties.
The fact that a Federrazsh’n vessel had remained in the vicinity of Hranrar despite repeated warnings had mattered not at all to the blinkered law-clawers, whom Krassrr was imagining sending out to keep the traitor company.
Krassrr was in such a foul humor by the time he made it back to the command deck that he didn’t bother growling to encourage the two maintenance technicians who stood in his path to make way. Instead he simply swatted them aside with the backs of his leather-scaled manus and stomped between them the rest of the way to the tactical consoles, where a trio of junior officers had been assisting his Second in maintaining watch over the Federrazsh’n vessel during his brief absence.
“Report.”
“They’ve done nothing yet, Captain,” said Grezzsz, Krassrr’s Second. Grezzsz was also his most experienced tactician. “Other than hail us repeatedly.”
“Have you returned their hails?”
“No, Captain. Nor have we usurped your place by speaking with them during your absence. Per your orders.”
“Very good.” Krassrr turned his bulky upper body toward the communications console, which was attended by a much older but alert-looking warrior-caste female. “Open a channel.”
“Captain Krassrr!” Grezzsz roared. Krassrr turned back toward him in time to see the junior officer’s keen, sparkling silver eyes focus intently upon the incoming data being displayed on his personal console. “The mammalship has just launched several objects. They are moving at high sublight speed.”
“Alert status!” Krassrr rumbled, pitching his deep, cavernous voice at its loudest volume. Klaxons shrieked. The command-deck crew responded instantly, like a complex but well-maintained projectile launcher. “Lock weapons onto the Federrazsh’n vessel! Fire on my command!”
Grezzsz huffed his assent, then returned his full attention to his console.
A moment later, a wrinkle of surprise crossed the tactician’s twin sagittal crests. “Captain Krassrr, whatever the mammalship just launched is not heading directly toward us.”
It was Krassrr’s turn to feel surprise. A salvo of antimatter-tipped Federrazsh’n torpedoes he could understand. But this . . .
“They’re only probes, Captain,” said Trr’reriss, the tech-caster responsible for the command deck’s most technical scientific and engineering-related functions. “The Earthers didn’t launch any weapons.”
The scales across Krassrr’s jaw pulled involuntarily taut, resulting in what he knew was a formidable display of teeth. “No. They merely wish to spy on us. Grezzsz, track down each and every last one of those Federrazsh’n probes and destroy them. Trr’reriss, open a channel to that ship.”
U.S.S. TITAN
“The last of the probes is away, Captain,” Dakal said.
Riker nodded. “Very good, Ensign.”
“Wait for it. . . .” Vale said quietly.
As she continued watching the silent Gorn vessel displayed on the main viewer, Troi assessed the intensified hostility and fear that had just begun radiating from the other vessel’s bridge. Though these emotions remained as highly unpleasant as the first time she’d felt them, the distilled, almost refined quality of their psychic fingerprint made them easy to recognize.
“Captain Krassrr is about to work us back into his busy schedule,” Troi said. “One way or another.”
Her weapons ports and impulse engines aglow with barely restrained power, the Gorn ship suddenly began to move.
“Damn,” Will said. “I hope our little gambit didn’t just backfire on us.”
“Wait for it. . . .” Vale repeated, frowning at the viewer.
Troi felt an almost palpable tension enfold the bridge. Everyone present knew that Titan now stood only seconds, or perhaps fractions of seconds, away from becoming embroiled in a potentially lethal combat situation.
“The Gorn vessel is moving away from Titan,” Tuvok said in crisp, military tones. “She is firing her forward particle weapons—but only at the probes we just launched.”
Relief began permeating the tension. Suddenly aware that she hadn’t been breathing, Troi allowed air to resume coursing in and out of her lungs.
Vale turned to her and grinned. “I told you this was going to work, Counselor.”
Thanks to the universal translator’s high-fidelity positronic mimicry, the comm system’s speakers suddenly reverberated with deep, guttural tones. “Federrazsh’n vessel, this is Captain Krassrr of the Ssevarrh. We are presently destroying the spying devices you have deployed. If we find that you have chosen to remain here after that task is complete, then your vessel shall be our next target—and you will have to contend with every ship at my disposal at once. You will be warned no more.”
Troi felt Will’s gaze upon her, and she turned to look into his deep blue eyes. “There’s no sign yet that the Gorn have noticed any transporter activity aboard Titan,” she said in answer to his unspoken question.
“So far so good, then,” he said and rose from the captain’s chair. After he directed Lieutenant Rager to open a channel to the Ssevarrh, he said, “Captain Krassrr, this is Captain Riker. We have no intention of . . . further provoking you. We’ll withdraw immediately. Titan out.”
Lieutenant Rager and Lieutenant Lavena wasted no time laying in an outbound course. Moments later, Vela OB2–404 II—Hranrar—had disappeared from the screen as Titan began to retreat once again to the system’s periphery.
“The Gorn have just destroyed the last of the probes, Captain,” Tuvok said as his hands moved quickly across the face of his tactical station. “However, the probes yielded several gigaquads of scans of the artifact prior to their termination.”
“Good, Mister Tuvok,” Will said. “Get it straight to Commander Pazlar and the other science department heads. I want to know everything I can about that thing as soon as possible.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Captain,” Dakal said. “I’m picking up traces of alloys that strongly resemble the outer hull of that artifact.”
“Where?” Vale said.
“All around us,” the young Cardassian said. “Tiny fragments, ranging from dust grains to some the size of a ripe yamok. It’s as though another one of those artifacts, or at least something made of the same stuff, was destroyed out here. Probably eons ago.”
“Why didn’t we pick this up earlier?” Will asked, frowning. Troi felt his frustration—it was obviously inconvenient to make this kind of discovery while simultaneously trying to tiptoe away from an adversary as touchy as the Gorn.
“We approached the inner system on a very different trajectory sir,” Dakal said. “And our last departure heading was also very different from our current one.”
“We need to analyze this stuff as well, Captain,” said Ensign Crandall, who was running the main engineering console.
“Should I bring us to a stop, sir
?” Lavena asked.
Titan was still close enough to the Gorn fleet to enable Troi to feel the hostility radiating from it. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” she said.
Will nodded. “Continue to withdraw, Lieutenant. But keep us at high impulse. Mister Tuvok, can you lock onto some of that material and beam it aboard?”
“I believe so, Captain,” Tuvok said. Troi thought she felt an uncharacteristic uneasiness beneath the Vulcan’s outwardly serene manner. Then it was gone, vanished beneath Tuvok’s hard, disciplined exterior.
“Then do it,” Will said.
Vale rose from her chair and turned in Tuvok’s direction. “But try not to wake the dragon in the process, Commander.”
Will tapped his combadge as Tuvok busied himself at his console. “Riker to sickbay. Doctor Ree, how’s your new patient doing?”
“Unconscious, Captain. Other than that, he’s in surprisingly good condition, considering the ordeal he’s just endured.”
Once again, Troi felt a familiar emotional jolt. Confusion. Fear. Terror.
Only this time, it was coming from inside Titan. From sickbay, in fact.
She rose quickly from her chair. “Captain, I think we’d better get down there.” Her heart pounding in sympathy with the being Dakal had just snatched from the jaws of death, she made haste for the turbolift without even bothering to check if Will was behind her.
9
S’syrixx became aware of a pinpoint of light.
One of the cold, indifferent stars, perhaps. One of the last vestiges of reality his eyes had been able to resolve before consciousness had fled from him forever. Even accounting for his thick hide, S’syrixx imagined that his lungs must have burst just a little later, after his optic nerves had registered that terminal vision. He wondered if the subsequent effects of exposure to vacuum would have caused his eyes to burst from their sockets, or merely to freeze solid in their orbits as his cryo-stiffened corpse tumbled endlessly about the ill-fated planet Hranrar. . . .
The pinpoint of light steadily grew until it no longer reminded S’syrixx of the stars. Then it occurred to him that he shouldn’t be able to see anything, be it a distant star or the nearby light fixture that had slowly resolved into sharpness as his pupils adjusted to the somewhat too-bright chamber in which he now found himself.
A chamber filled with air—somewhat oxygen-poor, judging from his present somewhat lightheaded condition, but air nevertheless—that his tormented lungs were now hungrily taking in. And the place wasn’t merely filled with air and excessive illumination—it was also fairly crammed with technology: narrow beds that hardly looked sturdy enough to hold anyone, along with banks of improbably delicate-looking computers and visual displays. With considerable discomfort, he craned his neck straight up. Although he still lay supine on a flat surface—one of the narrow beds, he surmised—he could see part of a computer display mounted on the wall almost directly overhead. He supposed it was a display of his vital signs, though he wasn’t certain how to interpret the alien graphics beyond the obvious measurements of his cardio-pulmonary rhythms.
Where in the name of the S’Yahazah’s sacred ovipositor am I? he wondered as fragile hope warred with a rising sense of foreboding. It’s obviously an infirmary of some sort. But where? Surely not any of the other ships in Krassrr’s flotilla. None of their officers or troops—let alone their tech-caste specialists—would dare put themselves in the way of Krassrr’s wrath.
Moving with the utmost caution, he used his elbows very slowly to push himself up into a semi-recumbent position on the table upon which he lay. He froze in place when he heard the sound of something shifting elsewhere in the chamber, followed by an approaching shadow, evidently cast by whoever had made the noise. S’syrixx’s heart pounded in his chest like a war-caster’s blunt fist pummeling a heavy swampwood door. He braced himself for the worst.
“Hello,” said the reptiloid shape that followed the shadow into S’syrixx’s line of sight. “You shouldn’t try to move so much. At least not yet.”
S’syrixx experienced a rush of relief that he hadn’t been confronted by some Federrazsh’n mammalian-type. But even though it was not nearly so repulsively alien as those monsters that still lurked within his imagination, there was still a terrible strangeness about this creature, which resembled no Gorn he had ever encountered. S’syrixx could intuit from the long, gracefully shortclawed fingers at the ends of its upper limbs that it would have been a fellow member of one of the technological subcastes—were it a Gorn. But he’d never seen such highly articulated digits anywhere in the Hegemony, not even on the manus of highly skilled surgical specialists.
“Which . . . what is your caste alignment?” S’syrixx said, his tongue feeling too large and heavy to function properly. Had it frozen after he had been blown out the Ssevarrh’s airlock?
“My name is Shenti Yisec Eres Ree,” said the creature, which S’syrixx intuited to be a male from the sound of its voice. There was a slight mismatch between the motions of the being’s toothy jaws and the arrival of the sound of its voice, a barely perceptible echo effect as though he were speaking through a translation system in some language other than the Common Tongue. S’syrixx also noted that his—captor? host?—had come to a stop just beyond arm’s reach.
So you don’t trust me any more than I do you, S’syrixx thought. Paradoxically, this realization calmed him, possibly because it was a recognition of common ground. Perhaps an acknowledgment of mutual distrust could lead to an alliance of sorts.
“Shen’tree Yiz,” S’syrixx said aloud, aware that he was mangling the creature’s decidedly non-Gorn name.
“You may simply call me Doctor Ree if you prefer.”
“Doctor . . . Ree,” S’syrixx croaked. His throat felt drier than Gornar’s equatorial belt during High Summer; he supposed that his exposure to hard vacuum accounted for that.
“Doctor Ree, that’s correct,” said the strange not-quite-Gorn creature. “I hold the rank of lieutenant commander.”
Was this creature—this Dr. Ree—now trying to tell him he belonged to the military caste? That struck S’syrixx as highly unlikely, given his obviously technological-caste physiological adaptations. “Rank? Rank in what?”
“Why, in Starfleet, of course. I am this vessel’s chief medical officer.”
S’syrixx’s jaw fell open. “Sst’rfleet. You serve . . . aboard a Federrazsh’n vessel?” Doubtless the very vessel, S’syrixx suddenly realized, that Captain Krassrr had so obviously feared would prevent the ecosculptor from being used to remake Hranrar into a new warrior hatchery.
S’syrixx had been surprised at Krassrr’s obviously high opinion of the Federrazsh’n’s capabilities, no doubt because of the fluke that had enabled them to rout the recent machine-mammal invasion. Since it was common knowledge that the Federrazsh’n was largely run by humanoids and other mammalian types, S’syrixx had always viewed their technological prowess with a more jaundiced, skeptical eye.
But if they were placing their minority reptiloid species into key positions now, S’syrixx supposed he might have to rethink his earlier uncharitable appraisals of Federrazsh’n achievements. Perhaps this ship was entirely crewed and commanded by one or more species kindred to that of Dr. Ree. And why not? Who better for the Federrazsh’n to send into territory claimed by the Gorn? He had read several reliable reports on the existence of single-species Sst’rfleet vessels. Unless such a crew turned out to be as blinkered and hidebound as the Gorn warrior caste, they might not only be reasoned with, but might also offer a solution to the hatchery problem that didn’t require the casual destruction of an entire civilization at the order of brutes like Captain Krassrr.
The thought buoyed up S’syrixx’s flagging sense of hope.
“You’re aboard the Federation Starship Titan,” Dr. Ree said. “The captain just told me he’s coming down from the bridge to speak with you. Our senior diplomatic officer will accompany him.”
“Tie-tan,” S’syrixx said, doing h
is best to pronounce the strange syllables as he heard them. Soon he would meet this vessel’s commander. Although he knew that much would depend upon that individual’s mettle, the hope within S’syrixx’s chest flared ever brighter. Perhaps Hranrar’s chances of survival weren’t so dire as he had feared.
Keeping Dr. Ree’s warning about excessive movement in mind, S’syrixx carefully pushed himself the rest of the way up into a sitting position and allowed his bare, scale-covered feet to swing over the side of the surprisingly sturdy little infirmary bed. He was determined to make a good first impression with this vessel’s captain, as well as to demonstrate his gratitude to the person who was ultimately responsible for his rescue.
“My name,” he said, “is S’syrixx.”
Ree displayed an impressive assemblage of long, sharp teeth. “Welcome aboard, S’syrixx.”
S’syrixx heard a brief pneumatic hiss, which drew his attention to an open doorway that hadn’t been in his line of sight before.
A pair of uniformed humanoids entered the chamber and slowly approached the bed. S’syrixx suddenly felt unsteady. Had something gone wrong with the ship’s environmental systems, or its artificial gravity generators? His claws tore into the bed’s edges as he hung on, suddenly desperate to steady himself.
The room spun, and he felt long, scale-covered fingers and forelimbs pushing him gently back onto the bed.
“Mammals,” he muttered as darkness made another bid for him. “Why did it have to be mammals?”
GORN HEGEMONY WARSHIP S’ALATH
Z’shezhira had found precious little time to mourn her beloved. She had been far too preoccupied by the imperative of not joining him in death.
“The braking thrusters are firing too hot!” she said, shouting to be heard above the overstrained sublight propulsion system that seemed about to rattle the ship apart.
“Imbecile!” Gog’resssh roared as he swept the back of his thick, armor-scaled manus across Sk’salissk’s stupefied face. The young helm officer went sprawling over the top of the console and met the deck with a bone-jarring crash.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire Page 12
