“We don’t have time to stroke their egos over this,” Gromek said. “Figure out how to get their attention, Captain Picard, and then get those charts.”
“Understood,” Picard said, and nodded, holding position until the screen blanked out. Then he pivoted away from the desk to go look at the rippling stars. Understood, by damn. Better than either the admiral or Atann would be pleased with, no doubt—thanks to Ekenn and the tour, and the chance to absorb a great deal of daleura in action.
But first ... the web-probe project. He’d expected a report from Barclay and Duffy before this. And since he hadn’t gotten one ... this was one project he wanted to check out in person.
Picard found Barclay hunched over a schematic on deck nine, occupying a cartography work alcove, frowning deeply and utterly unaware of his entrance. As he hesitated, searching for the right moment to speak without sending the skittish diagnostics engineer across the room, Duffy came charging in from the direction of the torpedo launch bays.
“The launch log shows everything went—” he said, and faltered to a stop. “Captain!”
Barclay jolted upright. “Captain!”
“Lieutenant Duffy, Lieutenant Barclay,” Picard said evenly. “You were saying?”
Duffy completed his entrance in a much more restrained manner. “I was just checking the launch logs. Didn’t want to check them through the system, because that would be traceable, and we’re trying to keep a low profile.”
“I appreciate that. Is there some problem?”
Duffy looked at Barclay, and Barclay looked at Duffy, and finally Barclay said, “Well, you see, Captain, we’re trying to—that is, we need to . . . well, yes.”
“Yes, there’s a problem,” Picard confirmed in question, never quite sure when Barclay started to ramble.
“I’m sure we can handle it,” Duffy said. “Lieutenant Commander La Forge’s new program is a work of art, Captain. It’s just that—”
“I’m sure,” Barclay interrupted firmly—and then stopped short, as though he’d startled himself, “I’m fairly certain, I mean, that, uh, given time—”
“Time,” Picard said, “is the one thing we don’t have. If I didn’t make that plain enough before, let me do so now. Whatever the problem, gentlemen, I suggest you address it.”
“Just a minor adjustment in the probe synch tracking,” Duffy said. “I still think it happened in the launch. We’ll take care of it, Captain. Right away.”
“See that you do,” Picard said, giving them each a hard look. And, turning to stride out of engineering, reminding himself that Geordi La Forge had placed his trust in these two men. He would have to do the same.
And move on to other problems. “Picard to Data.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Mr. Data, please contact Atann’s estate. Don’t waste time trying to raise Atann himself, but see if you can determine if he’s within earshot.”
Moments after Data’s acknowledgment, Picard sat at his desk to face one of Atann’s many social secretaries.
“Captain,” the Tsoran started, before Picard was even fully seated. “It is always a pleasure to speak with you. The ReynKa, however, is unavailable—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Picard said, interrupting with startling rudeness. Startling to a Tsoran of this one’s daleura, in any event, which got just the results Picard wanted—a moment of stunned silence, which he wasted no time filling. “We need to talk to the ReynKa. The ReynKa has made himself unavailable to us despite a stated commitment to the negotiations that brought us here, and our own good-faith efforts to fulfill the favors we offered to his son. Our patience is at an end. Therefore, we will make the ReynKa available to us in our own way.”
“I—I don’t understand—”
“No, you wouldn’t. Let me explain. Each time we beam someone up with our transporters, as we have done with your ReynKa, our transporter system makes a record of that individual’s molecular pattern. With that molecular pattern, we can search for, find, and beam up anyone who’s been aboard the Enterprise.” Picard didn’t elaborate on the time involved in carrying out such a procedure with a population the size of Aksanna’s. Need to know information, and the Tsorans definitely didn’t. “We have every intention of prevailing upon the ReynKa in just this manner. However . . .” and he let the word trail off most thoughtfully.
“However . . .?” the secretary obligingly repeated, a bit of a squeak in his under-purr.
“We are not unmindful of the undignified position in which this would place your ReynKa. The purpose of this communication is to offer him the choice to make the beam-up arrangements himself.”
Silence. The Tsoran simply stared at him, his under-purr filling the silence as its squeaky quality intensified, until his gaze darted off to the side and he said, suddenly and so quickly his words spilled out over one another, “Pleasestandby.”
The viewscreen filled with the official Tsoran seal of orange, red, and purple, a complex thing full of glyphs and images. Picard blinked and looked away, but a smile lurked around the corners of his mouth, and he didn’t expect to wait long.
He didn’t.
The Tsoran returned, cleared his throat, glanced off-screen once, and said, “As it happens, ReynKa Atann has just contacted me with a request to arrange boarding. He considers it convenient that this seems to be a good time for you.”
“It is indeed convenient,” Picard said, keeping his expression neutral. “I have great expectations for our next conversation.”
If only the ReynKa knew.
* * *
“Tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk!”
Now, there was a sound to brighten anyone’s day. Whatever it was.
Whatever it was, Riker didn’t like it. And it was getting closer.
“Doesn’t anything ever sleep in this place?” he muttered.
Akarr heard him, and offered a grim smile—his teeth covered, but a mocking look in his eye. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t earn so much daleura,” he said. “The harder it is, the better for me.”
Riker eyed him a moment. “And just why is that?”
Startled out of his posturing, Akarr fumbled around like any teenager caught off his guard. “It’s just the way it is,” he managed, after a moment of looking for words.
A simple enough answer, if it had been simple for Akarr to come up with. But that he’d had to search so hard to find those words that said so little . . .
“I don’t think so,” Riker said. “The prime kaphoora is meant to be hard . . . not impossible. It’s meant to challenge you, not kill you.”
“As if you’d know anything about it.” Akarr watched as Rakal and Takan returned to the clearing, moving warily and dragging two long and reasonably straight lengths of flexible vine.
Not, Riker noted, vine with thorns or sticky sap, though he had to wonder what this particular plant might have in store for them. “I know enough.” He tried to keep his voice neutral, to dampen his naturally assertive manner—a manner this environment had done nothing but reinforce. “I can read. Do you really think I’d be a party to this expedition, even just as pilot, without knowing some details? I’ve seen enough data to know that fatalities are unheard of, and serious injuries are rare—your minimal med kit speaks to those facts. It seems everyone else has had better luck using the tranks than we have.”
“There is always one,” Akarr said in a low voice, words which didn’t quite make sense on their own.
Riker didn’t try to clarify them. He waited.
“One person that historians remember, one person whose deeds can’t be surpassed. We had one such on Tsora, before we hunted out our kaphoora species there. An ancestor of mine. My father, Atann, is named for him. There are others—those who excelled in dueling before it was outlawed, those in the past who led their warriors to victory against the face of great odds. They made their names stand out against all the others . . . they secured their places in society. And in history.”
“I’ve got news
for you,” Riker said, still of the feeling that something had gone unsaid. “Plenty of times, the historians write history how it suits them.”
Akarr looked away from his men to give Riker a hard stare. “You mock us again.”
“No.” Riker drew his tired frame up, an emphasis for his words as he looked into the cave; Takan shifted restlessly, the dark purple of his blood seeping to the surface of the bandages around the sculper bites. “I think you hunt for impossible honors, and your men are paying the price. In my world’s history, we do not honor leaders who earn their . . .”—well, why not use the word—“daleura this way.”
“Words that might matter to me if you had any true concept of what daleura is.” Akarr gave a dismissive sniff. Through talking to the outcast, apparently.
Didn’t matter. Riker walked away from the cave with more information than he’d had a moment earlier. He knew that something drove Akarr beyond normal expectations for a kaphoora, and he knew it probably had something to do with a Tsoran named Takarr, whoever that was. He knew—Akarr’s own men knew—that it was affecting Akarr’s judgment, and that it would continue to do so.
And that they had no true recourse. They wanted to survive—but they had to do so in a way that allowed them to live afterward, as well, and Tsoran discipline for mutiny and insurgence was harsher than any Federation penalty.
“Tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk!”
So close that Riker instinctivly ducked this time, though he saw nothing. It was overhead . . . that meant not a sholjagg, not a sculper . . . presumably not the snake-thing he’d run into earlier. And fast-moving, too fast—looking up, he snapped his head around to follow the sound. Still seeing nothing.
And then there they were. Black, darting between the trees, coming down for a quick strafing run on the newly created miniature clearing. Akarr stood in the cave mouth, staring . . . squinting up at them with no sign of recognition on his face. Riker took a step forward and then stopped, having no idea what to do in response to the flock. It moved like a school of fish, changing direction as one entity, swift and agile and hard to follow as it flashed behind high leaves at one altitude and reappeared only a short distance later at a totally different altitude. “What . . .?” Riker said, confusion finding its way out of his mouth, and his grip tightened on the bat’leth—almost a part of his hand at this point—but he didn’t know what it could do against anything so small and quick as the members of this flock. Reptilian? Avian? They reminded him of streamlined miniature pterodactyls.
And then the flock was upon them, in a rush of air over leathery wings, no longer tk-tk-tk’ing, but making horrible hacking sounds that immediately brought Spot’s unfortunate hairball incident to Riker’s mind. And just as quickly, Rakal and Takan were down, writhing in the depleted woodpiles; Takan screamed and babbled, clearly more seriously affected as they both batted and clawed at themselves, as if trying to brush off—
Spitting. The things were spitting.
Spitting something as nasty as it gets, and the trailing members of the flock drew up short and reversed course in what might have made a perfect hammerhead stall in an aircraft.
Coming back for another run. Riker started a run of his own, dashing for the giant rubbery leaves still intact at the edge of their clearing; the bat’leth sliced a handful of them in one stroke, and he grabbed them as they fell, sprinting for the men Gavare was now trying to haul to the safety of the cave. “Here!” he bellowed, throwing the leaves—leaves almost as big as the average Tsoran torso, and thick enough—
Maybe they’d work. Maybe not.
“Tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk!”
Gavare had to drop Takan in order to snatch the leaves, so Riker went for the fallen Tsoran, shoving the flexible shelter over him, trying to shield himself with another, crouched protectively over the writhing being— and here they came, shooting over the clearing in a flattening dive—
That noise again, the hairball noise; a gooey substance splashed to the earth beside him, and Riker grunted with surprise and shock as some landed on the back of his exposed arm. In an instant it turned to liquid fire, soaking through his uniform, eating at his skin; he jerked in reaction as a splatter worked into his shoulder blade. Beneath him, Takan’s struggles slackened; above him, the flock sounded off again, coming around for another run.
Riker grabbed the trank gun from its holster within Takan’s stiff hunting vest, and, digging his fingers into the leaf midvein to wield it before himself like a literal shield, he twisted around to meet them, firing the tranks point blank and close enough to see one of the creatures jerk back from the blow; several of them wheeled away from the flock.
And then the trank-gun chamber was empty and Riker was down to the bat’leth and a scored, floppy leaf, his arm burning so hot he thought he’d feel it forever— burning right through his skin and into his brain, scattering any useful thoughts far and wide. That the attack would return meant nothing to him—that was a concept, and agony was the only concept for which he had room.
He threw himself against the nearest tree like a bear with an itch, mindlessly trying to rub the pain away; when two Fandreans grabbed him, one on either side, he didn’t know or care who they were or how they got there, he just fought them. When a Klingon roar filled the air, he didn’t care who’d made it; he’d already flung one Fandrean into a bush and was close to dislodging the other, all so he could throw himself back against that tree and rub the fire off, and keep rubbing even if he had to go all the way to the bone.
They shouted back and forth at one another, the first Fandrean charging back in to rejoin the second, and this time they pushed his back up against the massively wide trunk of the very tree he so savagely sought, trying to hold him there—why? wondered the still rational corner of mind, why and who and how had they gotten here— but it was a tiny spot indeed, and quickly chased away by the agony of the burning.
Still, for that moment, for that single instant, they kept him shoved tightly against the tree and in relative safety, even as the flock—no longer moving as one, but fractured and crisscrossing the clearing in random patterns—continued the attack. As several swooped past at Riker’s head level, dark blurs of leathery movement, the Klingon roar sounded again, followed instantly by the thunk of heavy metal sinking into wood.
The impaled flyer drooped around a Klingon knife next to his head—close enough to brush his cheek—was finally enough to get Riker’s attention, to create a break in his struggle. Enough of a break that the clever Fandreans somehow levered him around so his face pressed into smooth, lichen-covered wood as they took his very own shield, broke the leaf at the mid-rib, and glopped the sap all over his back.
Relief.
Instant relief.
And what an incredible . . . smell.
Riker closed his eyes and slowly unclenched his fingers from the tree, becoming aware of the wood jammed under his fingertips, sorting out the tingling pain of the burns from the actual process of the burning—now that that process had ceased. In the background, he heard the discharge of several trank guns, and then . . . quiet. When he opened his eyes, it was to see Worf’s face, much closer than he was accustomed to viewing those dark, craggily sculptured features. Worf jerked his knife from the tree and let the flyer slide to the ground as if it were inconsequential—as if just anyone could have pinned the thing in midflight, and had the confidence to do it centimeters from his ranking officer’s face. “Are you all right, Commander?”
“All right,” Riker said slowly, “is a relative thing.” Slowly, he straightened, pushing himself away from the tree. “Compared to a few moments ago, I’m outstanding.” Compared to the day before he’d first spoken to Akarr . . .
Carefully, he settled his shoulders back, rotating the injured arm. Perfectly functional, even if it didn’t want to be, even if his body wanted to stagger away somewhere in shock. Then he eyed the scene around him— the discarded leaf, milked of all its pungent juices, and the two Fandreans, still straightening themsel
ves out, wiping their hands off against the ground. Takan lay just exactly where Riker had left him, while Gavare and Akarr worked over Rakal at the mouth of the cave, a pile of flaccid, milked leaves beside them.
Of the flyers, there was little sign. The dead one at the base of this tree . . . the two flopped limply on either side of Takan. Tranked, Riker saw. He straightened his uniform and cleared his throat. “I wasn’t expecting to see you quite this soon, Mr. Worf.”
“We hurried,” Worf said.
Riker took the statement in, mulled it over, and nodded. “I commend you for your hurry, Mr. Worf. In fact, I will downright worship your hurry if you still have a functioning shuttle to go along with it.”
“The Collins is running low-tech and heavily shielded, sir, but it is running.”
One of the Fandreans plucked the tranks from the two downed flyers and gently tossed the creatures into the woods.
“Giving them a chance to come back for another try?” Riker asked, easing over to join them at Takan’s body— for there had been no mistake, not even as Riker fought the flyers away over the Tsoran, that Takan had died during the battle. Riker winced now to see him—his fur was patchy and matted, and the exposed skin beneath peeled back to muscle. Did his arm look like—? He brought it around, trying to see, and couldn’t.
“We stopped the digestion in your arm, but it will need treatment,” the Fandrean said. “And yes, we will give the skiks every chance to live. They have done nothing wrong here; this is their home, and they only hunt it as is their nature.”
“This is Zefan,” Worf said, somewhat belatedly. “He commands the Legacy rangers. He and Shefen volunteered to assist us.”
“You have my gratitude,” Riker said. “We can use the help—in case that’s not obvious.”
“What I don’t understand,” Worf said, “is why you left the Rahjah at all. It was perfectly good shelter—”
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