“Mister Gog’resssh, I think you and I may be able to do business together,” Riker said.
“Then confer with your officers, Rry’kurr. I will call again in one of your hours to discuss specific plans. Gog’resssh out.”
And with that the fearsome, scale-covered visage vanished from the screen, replaced by a neutral blue UFP emblem.
Riker pushed his chair back from his desk and favored the others with an expectant look. “Well?”
“I do not trust him, Captain,” Tuvok said. “However, cooperating with him may enable us to take positive action on behalf of the Hranrarii—provided that action is concluded well before the arrival of the Typhon Pact fleet.”
“I agree on both counts,” Riker said. “Mister Keru?”
The big Trill scowled thoughtfully. “I can’t argue with any of that, but I have to bring up one critical additional fact: we still don’t have warp drive. If we try to save the Hranrarii by, say, blowing up Brahma-Shiva, then we’d better make sure we have our warp engines back online before we make the attempt. Otherwise we’re talking about a suicide mission, pure and simple, whether the Typhon Pact fleet is here by then or not.”
Riker’s combadge interrupted the silence that reigned following Keru’s simple but trenchant observation. “Rager to Captain Riker.”
“Please tell me you have some good news, Lieutenant,” Riker said with a sigh.
“I’m afraid I have both kinds of news, sir. It’s about the away team.”
“Give me the good news first,” Riker said, steeling himself for the worst.
HIGH ABOVE HRANRAR
The ancient thinker was both surprised and puzzled. The two groups, each confined to a single conveyance, were simply . . . talking. And more, they seemed to be working together toward a common cause. They both seemed to be trying to pool their respective feeble subspace communications abilities for the purpose of communicating with other smallminds on the surface of the world that turned far below the ancient thinker.
Pleased by this apparent amity, as well as curious about the eventual outcome, the ancient thinker decided to offer some unobtrusive assistance. . . .
HRANRAR
“Just keep cooperating with them, people,” Vale said, paying particular attention to Lieutenant Sortollo.
The big Italian appeared to have had his fill already of being, almost literally, frogmarched through the Hranrarii city by the dozen or so identically tattooed amphibious locals who surrounded the away team. All of them wore harnesses that bristled with Hranrarii tools that probably filled every function from communications devices to scanners to weapons. Unfortunately, those harnesses also contained some far more familiar-looking objects in addition to the enigmatic local ones.
“I’d feel a lot more cooperative if we hadn’t let them take our phasers, Commander,” Sortollo said drily as he continued walking quickly down an eerily quiet street that suggested the away team was being conducted along a prearranged, cordoned-off route. Despite the relatively traffic-free conditions, there was no shortage of wide, lanternlike eyes peering out of windows and over the edges of rooftops, prompting Vale to wonder whether Troi was picking up more curiosity than fear, more wonder than judgment.
Keeping her tone even so as not to alarm or annoy their captors, Vale said, “Stand down, Lieutenant. If we’d handled this encounter your way, we probably would have had a running firefight on our hands. We were outnumbered, remember? Besides, they haven’t tried to hurt us so far. Something tells me that won’t change unless we start making trouble for them.”
“So my empathic sense keeps telling me,” Troi said quietly, leaning close to Vale to make herself heard as the group walked briskly through the forest of spires. “But I wonder how you can be so sure.”
“Chalk it up to my pre-Starfleet law-enforcement career. I know cops when I see ’em, phylum notwithstanding.”
“We’ve been taken into custody by the local constabulary?” asked Ensign Modan. She sounded nervous, as though worried about where she might find the bail money necessary to secure her release.
“I suppose things could be worse,” Ensign Evesh said acerbically as she struggled to match the fairly quick pace the away team’s captors obviously desired. “We could have fallen into the hands—er, claws—of a squad of Gorn troopers.”
Vale nodded. “We can be thankful that Hranrar’s gendarmes seem to be a bit gentler than some other policefolk I could name. They haven’t seen fit to stun us or restrain us. All they did was take our weapons.”
“But I presume they also confiscated all the supplies we beamed down with when we bailed out of the Beiderbecke,” said Ensign Dakal.
“Probably,” Vale said.
“So why didn’t they take our tricorders or combadges as well?” Troi asked.
Vale shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me that, Deanna.”
The diplomatic officer brushed a stray hank of dark hair from in front of her face. Her dark eyes took on a strange, distant cast as she spoke. “I’m empathic, Chris. Not omniscient.”
Vale turned her head in time to notice that Dakal seemed to be expending a lot of effort to touch his com-badge without making a great show of doing so. A moment later he scowled and shook his head as he walked. “They might as well have taken the combadges along with the phasers, Commander. Something is still preventing us from contacting Titan. It’s probably because of some sort of comm-dampening devices our hosts are carrying. Maybe if we still had the big portable transceiver with us . . .” Dakal allowed the thought to trail off, incomplete yet completely understood.
And even if you could raise Titan right now, Vale thought with a glumness she worked hard to conceal, she probably couldn’t beam us out of here through all the atmospheric craziness anyway.
“I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Modan said as she momentarily broke her stride, and thus that of the entire group. She was pointing toward a narrow swatch of the purpling, late-afternoon northern sky framed in the gap between two of the Hranrarii city’s mighty towers.
Stopping along with the entire group, Vale watched in silence as something traced a silent, elliptical line of fire near the horizon, throwing off gouts of plasma and debris as it finished its ballistic descent.
“Oh, shit,” said Sortollo.
Vale turned toward Troi, silently asking her what she knew had to be on everyone’s mind.
“I can still feel my connection to Will and Natasha,” Troi said at length.
Thank God, Vale thought, though she realized she was holding in her breath. Pointing at the pyrotechnics, she said, “Now please tell me that isn’t Titan.”
Troi said nothing. As the Hranrarii police gently nudged the group back into motion, her face looked like a study in fear and uncertainty.
19
U.S.S. TITAN
S’syrixx found that he was growing not to mind Lieutenant Qontallium’s company. Perhaps the respective losses they had suffered had forged something of a bond between them. This quiet collegiality made the fact that S’syrixx was always being watched closely at least somewhat bearable. Between the presence of Qontallium, the hulking mammal Keru, or one of Tie-tan’s other armed security personnel, S’syrixx was never left entirely alone, whether he was walking the ship’s corridors, visiting a recreation area, eating an inadequate (and sadly nonliving) replicated meal, or even seeing to his personal hygiene.
That utter lack of solitude made what he had to do difficult, but not impossible. As he sat on the edge of the bed in Qontallium’s quarters, his long, clawed fingers working the controls of a Sst’rfleet padd, he silently thanked Great S’Yahazah that there seemed to be limits to the extent of his guard-cum-companion’s vigilance.
And for the fact that in the correct manus, a Sst’rfleet padd could be used to gain remote access to other systems aboard Tie-tan. . . .
GORN HEGEMONY WARSHIP S’ALATH
Ever since her initial engineering training as a youngling in the Techademi
e, Z’shezhira’s singular gift for pattern recognition had placed her near the top of her training cohort. This talent enabled her to perceive patterns where others did not. Sometimes those patterns went undetected by her peers because of their own relative obtuseness. Other times, those patterns were merely products of her own overactive imagination, artifacts of her innate but constant desire to impose order upon chaos.
The moment she noticed the repetitious regularity of the infrared pulsations coming from Tie-tan’s impulse exhaust manifold, she was convinced they were not a byproduct of the other vessel’s engines.
Feverishly working her console on the command deck, she isolated and amplified the patterns, parsing them. She paused and looked about the command deck, where a pair of Gog’resssh’s junior officers were examining their own consoles in desultory fashion.
Both war-casters looked listless, as though the radiation exposure they had suffered at Sazssgrerrn were finally about to catch up with them in terminal fashion.
Z’shezhira knew she couldn’t count on any such luck. But she was more willing to accept a smaller particle of good fortune: the fact that neither war-caster seemed to have noticed the careful modulations that someone had so cleverly hidden beneath the surface chaos of Tie-tan’s waste-heat emission stream.
Someone who was using a Techademie pulse-code that any sufficiently adept Gorn tech-caster could easily translate to, say, Z’shezhira, I am safe here among the mammals. What is your condition?
How should she reply? Tapping into the S’alath’s waste engine heat in the manner S’syrixx had evidently done aboard Tie-tan might prove both time-consuming and dangerous, since it would force her to risk rousing suspicion by accessing secure engineering systems. Instead, she opted to reply by flashing several of the running lights on the side of the S’alath’s hull that faced Tie-tan.
I am safe for the moment, beloved S’syrixx, she keyed, speaking with her right manus, one coded linguicharacter at a time. But I cannot be certain how long I will remain so. Be strong. We will be reunit—
“Do you believe me to be a fool?” thundered an enraged male war-caster directly behind her. His breath was nearly as evil as his temperament.
Her heart tried to rise through her jaws to flee her body as she turned to face the voice’s owner. How could she have let herself be so unforgivably absentminded as to fail to hear—or smell—Gog’resssh’s approach?
The war-caster’s first blow landed before she even saw it coming.
20
HRANRAR
Now that the away team was finally standing before someone who obviously had more authority than the arresting officers who had brought them to the courtyard at the top of the tower, it occurred to Vale that she had finally received the opportunity to use the line she’d wanted to try since she’d first joined Starfleet:
“Please take me to your leader.”
Vale was gratified to note that each member of the away team stood at attention, and that nearly everyone had adopted a poker face. The only exception was Lieutenant Sortollo, who was working visibly to suppress a grin.
The froglike, grasshopper-legged being into whose presence the constables had conducted the away team regarded its prisoners with wide, curious eyes. Unlike the local cops—as Vale had come to think of them since they’d confiscated the away team’s gear, including the storage modules they had filled with Hranrarii data—this creature wore a sort of shawl made of a dark material whose texture looked to be somewhere between sharkskin and seaweed. Vale figured the shawl for a badge of office of some kind, though the “office” into which the away team had been herded more closely resembled a marshy meadow whose limits seemed to be the same as the tower-roof upon which it had been constructed. As the afternoon slumped into evening, those unfenced boundaries—and the kilometer-long drop that lay beyond them in every direction—seemed to be creeping inexorably inward, coming uncomfortably close.
“It is too soon in the criminal adjudication process for you to appeal to the higher levels of Hranrarii government,” the creature said evenly, making Vale thankful that the away team’s universal translators, at least, could be relied upon. “I am Senior Watcher Ereb, in charge of maintaining order in the Ghoziv Connurbation.”
“Commander Christine Vale,” Vale said, keeping her hands at her sides since the Hranrarii magistrate was making no move to employ any sort of greeting involving physical touch. “Executive officer of the Federation Starship Titan.”
Senior Watcher Ereb tipped its head almost sideways in apparent curiosity. “Federation?”
“The United Federation of Planets,” Troi said. “We are a galactic civilization whose capital resides on a world more than three thousand light-years from here. The Federation consists of more than one hundred fifty member worlds, all working together for the common good.”
“That sounds very noble. But your story so far does not comport with the sabotage charges of which you stand accused.”
“Sabotage?” Vale said, confused.
“Our biometric recorders have positively identified members of your group,” Ereb said, pausing while gesturing toward Ensigns Dakal and Evesh, “as being responsible for destroying Outer Information Node Nine Nineteen Green.”
Since the local surveillance technology had evidently trumped the team’s holographic disguises, Vale decided it was pointless to deny what had happened. It would make more sense, and probably curry more favor, to point out the mitigating circumstances. “Believe me, Senior Watcher, we had no intention of destroying anything.”
“Yet destroy you did. Your unauthorized datatap killed Node Nine Nineteen Green’s caretaker.”
A sick feeling seized the pit of Vale’s stomach. Dakal had mentioned the presence of organic components in the data hub. Evidently the organic mass that had governed the information hub’s data traffic had been a good deal more complex than a mere gel pack. Perhaps it had even been a sentient being.
“When a Node falls, all of Hranrar is poorer for it. The damage will be reversed as soon as is practical, of course. But we cannot make the node operational again until we breed another caretaker.”
“I had no idea,” Dakal said.
“We intended no harm,” said Evesh, sounding offended, as though the magistrate had unjustly impugned her motivations.
“Belay that, both of you,” Vale snapped at the ensigns. Addressing Ereb, she said, “Whatever harm resulted from the team’s actions is my responsibility. I ask that you save whatever penalties or punishments you have to mete out for me, and me alone.”
“An interesting philosophical sally,” Ereb said in tones the translator rendered as mild and contemplative. “But we Hranrarii believe in self-responsibility for each sentient creature. We do not regard responsibility as a transferable function.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t do anything about that,” Vale said. “But we didn’t come here to commit crimes, or to plead them out in your judicial system.”
Ereb began walking in silence before the Starfleet officers, who had arranged themselves in a shoulder to shoulder line, like cadets being reviewed by a fleet admiral. At last the magistrate came to a stop directly in front of Vale, upon whom she focused two golden, owlish eyes. Several of the nearby cops edged closer, like outfielders approaching the baseball diamond in anticipation of a weak batter.
We must be the most exciting thing to come across this burg’s police blotter in years, Vale thought.
“All of you do indeed appear to be something other than Hranrarii,” Ereb said.
“We’re human, Tellarite, Cardassian, Betazoid, and Selenean,” Troi said. “As such we represent only a small sampling of the diversity that comprises the Federation.”
Vale scowled at the diplomatic officer; now was probably not the best time to make a hard-sell Federation membership pitch.
“Very well,” Ereb said. “If you have not come to destroy, then why have you come?”
“We’re explorers,” Vale said. “Our vessel’s
principal mission is to gather knowledge. In carrying out that mission we have learned that your world is in grave danger.”
“Danger. I assume you refer to a danger other than a mortal threat to our global information network.”
As badly as she felt about that, Vale was beginning to tire of the subject. After all, if Captain Krassrr and the Gorn fleet carried out their plans, the global information network would very soon be the least of the Hranrarii’s worries.
“There is a huge alien object orbiting your world,” Vale said, looking up to the darkening sky. She wished she could see it and point it out for emphasis, but she knew that the object was keeping station somewhere over Hranrar’s opposite side. “This object contains extremely dangerous energies. As we speak, members of a species called the Gorn are trying to release those energies. If they succeed, your planet will be scoured of every living thing. And the Gorn will simply move in and take what was once yours.”
Though Ereb had listened with apparent patience, she—Vale had arbitrarily decided that the senior watcher was a she—did not seem convinced.
“I have seen the object that you speak of,” Ereb said. “It is visible from the ground, even without a farseer. But it hasn’t yet given anyone a reason to fear it.”
“Trust me,” Sortollo said. “When it does give you a reason, your people probably won’t have time to be afraid.”
“So you say,” Ereb said. “And who created this . . . fearsome object? Surely not your benevolent Federation.”
Vale gritted her teeth. “Of course not. All we want to do is learn as much as we can about it. And make sure it isn’t misused as a weapon against the Hranrarii or anybody else.”
“Ah. Hence your urgent need to speak to our planetary leaders.”
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire Page 29
