Fell’s pigmentation abruptly lightened by a noticeable gradation. “Of course, sir. I never meant to imply that—”
“Have any of the recovered fragments been positively linked with the alien artifact that now orbits Vela OB2–404 II?” Tuvok asked, interrupting. “And do any of the pieces your team beamed aboard contain traces of anything you recognize as high technology?”
While the Vulcan was speaking, Panyarachun turned away from the table and toward Tuvok, apparently listening attentively. Raising her tricorder, presumably to make the device’s readouts more visible, she approached Tuvok.
“I’d have to answer ‘yes’ to your first question, Commander,” Panyarachun said. “The specimens are definitely made of the same stuff as the orbiting artifact. As for your second question, that’s beginning to look like another affirmative as well, if only tentatively. We still have a lot more scans to run, but I’m already seeing what appear to be traces of microcircuit patterns. They’re all highly degraded, of course, since they’re at least hundreds of thousands of years old. But I don’t think these are the result of scanning aberrations. They look real.”
Tuvok raised an eyebrow in response, a mannerism that White-Blue had come to understand was as close as Vulcans generally ever came to making highly emotional interjections. However, the overall level of physiological agitation that White-Blue detected in this particular Vulcan made him question whether the vaunted emotional control of Commander Tuvok’s species really lived up to its reputation.
“So it’s possible that this debris might hold at least some of the secrets to the terraforming technology the Gorn have been attempting to wield,” Tuvok said. “If we are forced either to attempt to board the terraforming device or disable it from a distance, we will need to know as much about its underlying technology and composition as possible. Your scans might conceivably yield, for example, maps of circuit patterns related to the device. Or perhaps even some partially intact data-storage media.”
“I suppose that’s all at least theoretically possible, Commander,” Panyarachun said.
“But I wouldn’t bet the rent on it,” Bralik said.
According to White-Blue’s sensors, Commander Tuvok’s cardial organ had increased its rate of operation slightly but measurably. Clearly the ancient alien artifact was a source of great anxiety for the tactical officer.
At that moment, White-Blue experienced another flash near the ragged edge of its perceptual powers. Was he receiving an artificially generated EM signal? The sensation was not dissimilar to the three incidents he had already experienced in the stellar cartography lab—events he had since attributed either to scanning errors or to random spikes in the noisy background blanket of EM and subspace radiation—but it was also quite different this time, at least in terms of its “color,” or wavelength. With local impediments like Vela OB2–404 II’s powerful magnetic field distorting such weak signals almost past the threshold of detection, White-Blue could determine little else.
How satisfying it would be, he thought, to find the means of tracing these errant, intermittent signals all the way back to their sources?
But like the first three incidents, this latest pulsation had disappeared almost as quickly as it had attracted White-Blue’s attention, making him wonder yet again whether the signal had ever really been there in the first place. Was it simply what Commander Pazlar referred to as a “glitch?” Although he knew it was probably a futile gesture, White-Blue dedicated the bulk of the portion of his consciousness that had remained linked with Titan’s stellar cartography systems to finding any repetition of the most recent “blip.”
Panyarachun and Tuvok continued to discuss the scientific and tactical ramifications of the technological fossils the specialists were still busy analyzing. White-Blue continued to listen attentively, both to the humanoids and to the vast universe that lay beyond the confines of Titan’s hull.
Although White-Blue found Tuvok’s evident distress at the science team’s discovery puzzling, he was unsurprised by the sustained “white-noise” silence he heard as he listened for a repetition of the latest transitory signal.
Unsurprised, but also unsatisfied.
“May I, too, assist your team, Ensign Fell?” White-Blue asked, eager to focus more of his attention and resources onto a new scientific puzzle—and away from the disquieting new internal sensation he was coming to think of as “frustration.”
10
“What the hell just happened, Doctor?” Riker said.
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, Captain, my patient just fainted,” Ree deadpanned as Lieutenant Alyssa Ogawa, Titan’s head nurse, checked his new patient’s vital signs.
“I’m not certain it was such a good idea to keep me out of sight after he started to regain consciousness,” Ogawa said after she’d finished confirming that the creature on the biobed was in no immediate danger of expiring.
“I am inclined to agree with you, Alyssa,” said the doctor, hissing out the sibilant phoneme in his head nurse’s name.
Deanna, who stood at Riker’s elbow, was regarding the unconscious Gorn with remarkable poise. “But I can certainly understand why you might take that precaution. He must have found the sight of a reptiloid face reassuring.”
Ree nodded, his long forked tongue darting out and disappearing again. “Unfortunately, his seeing only me at first might have led him to believe he had come aboard a ship populated entirely by reptiloids.”
Riker looked down at the insensate Gorn and felt a peculiar mixture of wonder and revulsion. Like many humans, he wasn’t overly fond of terrestrial reptiles. Why so much of H. sapiens shared this general predilection was something that had always intrigued him. Since the notion of the “evil snake” figured so prominently into so much of his world’s mythology, he’d always assumed it to be a deeply ingrained attitude—perhaps too deeply ingrained ever to be excised entirely, whatever level of enlightenment humanity might attain. He’d been forced to confront that ancient prejudice directly almost immediately after taking command of Titan, when Dr. Ree had come aboard to assume his duties as chief medical officer. Riker had talked very proudly then about the unusually high degree of diversity—even by Starfleet standards—that characterized Titan’s crew.
But it wasn’t until he’d found himself standing toe-to-claw with his new CMO, a creature whose brilliance and expertise was housed in a form that strongly resembled a two-and-a-half-meter-long velociraptor, that he came to understand just how shallow his understanding of “diversity” really had been. After that initial encounter, Riker began to wonder whether Ree had to work just as hard to overcome an equally visceral anti-mammalian bias.
“Then Commander Troi and I sauntered into sickbay,” Riker said, “and scared the hell out of him.”
“Your analysis is essentially correct, Captain,” said Ree. “The Gorn are well known for being xenophobic and territorial, of course. Their Linnaean-class-specific prejudices may be less well documented than are their more general hostilities, but they are every bit as real. It’s a strange thing, too, since humans bear no genetic relationship to any mammal-analog species native to the Gorn homeworld of Tau Lacertae IX, nor are any such species kindred to any other humanoid race known to the Federation.”
“Go figure,” Riker said with a shrug. “Appearance and perception sometimes matter a lot more than the actual facts. That’s probably why fear has always been such a handy way to manipulate the masses throughout my planet’s history.”
“This creature is a lot different from any Gorn I’ve ever seen,” Deanna said.
Riker nodded in agreement, recalling the failed political coup that he and the rest of the Enterprise-E crew had helped to stop on the Gorn homeworld about eight years ago, and the Gorn treaty negotiations Captain Picard had undertaken near the end of his tenure aboard the Enterprise-D.
“His body is . . . slighter,” he said. “And take a look at his hands.”
“Almost the claws of a surgeon,” said R
ee, lifting one of his patient’s slender-yet-deadly-looking manus with his own claw-tipped hands.
“And right before he collapsed, he locked eyes with mine,” Deanna said. “Just for an instant.”
Although those eyes had since retreated behind a pair of leather-scaled lids, Riker had seen them as well, if only for a split second. “He doesn’t have the same multifaceted silver bug eyes that I’ve seen on other Gorn,” he said. In fact, the newcomer’s eyes were different from those of any Gorn he’d ever encountered before, and during the Gorn coup attempt he’d seen more than enough Gorn to last him a lifetime. The golden orbs not only appeared to carry only one lens each, they were split vertically by dark pupils that reminded Riker of a Terran lynx, or a Capellan power-cat.
“Are you certain this creature is actually a Gorn, Doctor?” Deanna asked. “It’s almost as though he belongs to a different species.”
“I noticed many of the same differences when he was beamed aboard,” Ree said. “Once Alyssa and I had stabilized him, I ran several quick genetic scans. Although it’s still possible that he belongs to a species separate from that of other Gorn the Federation has encountered so far, his DNA overlaps with known Gorn DNA almost completely. While he obviously differs from other Gorn we know of in terms of phenotype, his genetics are clearly linked to theirs, and bear no resemblance either to my own or to the other reptiloids who serve aboard Titan. The creature’s relationship to the other Gorn could be analogous to that of the various sentient Xindi races, each of which sprang from a common biology despite some of them being on evolutionary pathways as far removed from each other as humans are from orcas, or reptiles from insects.”
As fascinating as all of this was, Riker wasn’t eager just yet to get lost in the weeds of scientific detail that were already springing up so swiftly around this strange creature. “We already have intelligence indicating that the Gorn civilization is split up into many more castes than we knew about previously,” he said. “So far, we’ve only had direct encounters with their military and political castes. Maybe he”—Riker paused as he gestured toward the being on the biobed—“is a member of one of those newly discovered castes.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Ree hissed. “After all, they can’t all be warriors and prime ministers.”
“Whatever his caste affiliation might be,” Deanna said, “we still don’t know why he was . . . thrown overboard.”
“Maybe his shipmates thought he was dead,” Riker said, spitballing, though without much conviction. The Gorn had always struck him as methodical to a fault, and thus extremely unlikely to make any mistake of that sort. “It’s possible we interrupted a burial at sea, so to speak.”
Ree shook his great scaly head. “With respect, Captain, I find that doubtful. Judging from his rather impressive dentition,” the doctor said, pausing to make a brief display of his own oral cutlery, “not to mention the size of his brain’s olfactory region, this creature is the product of a long line of hunting carnivores, just like his warrior cousins. Such species are unlikely to confuse ‘alive’ for ‘dead,’ or vice versa.”
“So the Gorn were evidently executing one of their own,” Deanna said.
“Given his abrupt ejection into hard vacuum,” Ree said, “and his ostentatious lack of protective gear, I would tend to concur.”
“You would,” Riker said. “But you don’t.”
“I’m not yet certain.”
“Why?” Deanna said.
Ree moved sinuously to a monitor on a nearby wall. In response to a few quick taps of his razor-sharp claws, the darkened screen lit up and displayed what was obviously a highly magnified view of a complex molecular form, its toroid surface studded with innumerable side chains; it reminded Riker of one of the perceptually deceptive drawings of M. C. Escher.
“Because of this,” Ree said. “I found this substance in the creature’s blood. It’s a drug, apparently designed to slow down certain Gorn metabolic functions. I can’t think of any reason for the Gorn to have administered this drug, unless their intention was to prolong their . . . victim’s survival time in hard vacuum.”
Riker turned his gaze away from Ree and back to his slumbering patient. “So you’re saying that in spite of appearances, he might really be a spy. That his apparent execution may have just been a cover. Maybe Captain Krassrr wanted us to ‘rescue’ our friend here.”
Ree spread his claws in a reptilian shrug. “I’ll admit that’s a possibility. However, there’s something wrong with that hypothesis as well: the drug seems to have been administered too recently to have taken full effect in time to have offered our guest any significant protection from being ‘spaced.’ It’s almost as though he received this drug as an afterthought. I know none of this makes much sense, Captain. But there it is.” His long tail snaked toward the biobed and its occupant in much the same way a humanoid might have made a hand gesture.
“I don’t believe this Gorn has come aboard to spy on us, Will,” Deanna said.
Riker turned to face his wife. “Why not?”
“Because of the intense hostility I picked up from the Gorn fleet.”
“Gorn hostility is to be expected, Deanna. It’s a well-established fact that they don’t like us very much.”
“No, Will. I’m talking about the hostility I felt being directed inwardly—toward him when he was still aboard Krassrr’s ship.” She pointed at the patient on the biobed. “Hostility that’s largely evaporated now that everyone in the Gorn fleet believes he’s been executed.”
But Riker wasn’t convinced, at least not yet. “You may be detecting a lot less emotional intensity from the Gorn because the distance between them and Titan is increasing at a pretty fast clip.”
She folded her arms across her chest, a clear sign that she was prepared to dig in and defend her assertion. “I’ll admit that the emotional ‘volume level’ is dropping off quickly. But it’s like the singing of a distant choir. It might be faint, but I can still hear every note, every chord.”
“All right.” Turning back to face Ree, Riker said, “I suppose there’s only one way to get at our . . . guest’s real intentions. Can you wake him up, Doctor?”
“If I work quickly to neutralize the drug in his system,” Ree said. “Otherwise he may soon slip into a coma. Should that happen, I have no way to determine precisely how long it may be before he again becomes conscious and lucid enough to interview.”
With a nod, Riker said, “Do whatever you have to do.”
“In the meantime, I’d like to gather an assemblage of bedside faces he might find friendlier than either of ours,” Deanna said. “Or even Alyssa’s.”
Riker could guess where she was going with this. There was no good reason, after all, not to do whatever was possible to put their guest at ease once he regained consciousness.
“Since you’re this ship’s chief diplomatic officer, first-contact specialist, and senior counselor, I’ll defer to your judgment,” he said. “At least until our unexpected passenger does anything that might endanger Titan.”
The light returned yet again, dazzling S’syrixx’s eyes.
And with the renewed brilliance the room—no, the infirmary—also sprang back into being. Though S’syrixx couldn’t yet see anything with absolute clarity, he was immediately quite certain that this was the same room in which he remembered having awoken once already. He tried to rise.
Claws reached for him. He tried to bat them aside with his own, but found he couldn’t muster the strength to do so effectively.
“Eassssy,” said a soothing, sibilant voice as those other claws eased him back down.
Three shapes resolved themselves around his bed, as did their faces. Reptiloid faces, to be sure, yet all three were still something other than Gorn. But at least there were no mammals in sight this time. Was this place really infested with such creatures, or had he merely had a nightmare?
“Doctor, he’s regaining consciousness,” shouted one of the three strange-yet-almost-famili
ar beings who stood surrounding S’syrixx’s bed.
A fourth shape suddenly hove into view, one that he had seen before. The physician.
“Ree,” S’syrixx croaked.
“Very good,” the doctor said. “I’m delighted to see you again, Mister S’syrixx. Once again, welcome aboard the Federation Starship Titan.”
S’syrixx wondered how the doctor knew his name, but supposed he may have mentioned it to him before his most recent lapse into unconsciousness. “Federrazsh’n. Tie-tan,” he repeated, still unused to the slight echo-like lag between speech and hearing that this vessel’s translation system was apparently causing.
Titan.
“How am I . . . alive?” S’syrixx asked.
“You mean after being jettisoned from your vessel,” Ree said. “Do you remember what happened to you before you came aboard Titan?”
“Of course I remember, Doctor,” S’syrixx said acidly. “Being blown out into space is not an experience one soon forgets.”
“So you were ejected deliberately?”
“Quite so,” S’syrixx said, then paused to cough. He marveled that he wasn’t experiencing more pain, that his lungs were in such relatively good condition after the ordeal he had just endured.
“Why?” Ree asked. “Why did your shipmates . . . space you?”
“Captain Krassrr grew . . . annoyed with me.”
Ree fixed him with a penetrating stare, making it clear that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with S’syrixx’s answer. S’syrixx decided to say no more on the subject for the moment, at least until he’d figured out the reason for his unlikely survival. Had the pain-suppressant that R’rerrgran gave him just before his enforced departure from the Ssevarrh had anything to do with it?
Apparently realizing he wasn’t going to learn much more any time soon, Ree took a step back and said, “While you’re a guest aboard Titan, Mister S’syrixx, I’d like you to get to know a few members of our crew.”
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire Page 14
