It occurred to him that were he one of them, he would do the same without thinking. In that moment, his world perspective gave a sudden, unwelcome lurch.
“Akarr!” Riker shouted, grabbing at his side as if he expected to find some weapon there, his gaze riveted above and behind Akarr as Worf came crashing back through the undergrowth. Arborata! Akarr whirled, drawing his trank gun—and found the arborata swooping down so closely that he squeaked—squeaked!—and fell on his bottom. But he didn’t lose the trank gun or his aim, and when the creature whooshed close overhead in the nadir of its dive, he squeezed the release—and for once, he saw the dart thunk home.
The arborata flapped its scaled, triangular wings and disappeared into the trees.
He couldn’t have been any closer. He couldn’t have been any more on-target. He hadn’t missed, not this time—
“Here it comes again,” Riker said, his voice rising into a warning shout as the thing increased speed, its barbed and prehensile tail lashing, preparing to strike— looking like a giant skik as it skimmed the air, tilting to maneuver with ease between the trees. It set itself at the group of wounded, and Gavare threw himself over Ketan’s litter as the Fandrean rangers both went to their knees, trank guns braced and aimed. Two almost inaudible phuts of noise, and the arborata veered off. Moments later, it folded into a limp black arrangement of long-scaled wings, floppy scooped ears, and drooping tails, crashing down through the undergrowth until it hit the ground with an audible thump.
Riker started after it.
“Commander!” Worf said, but hesitated at the look Riker gave him. Even humans, it seemed, had their daleura ranking. “With respect, sir, our priority is to return to the shuttle.”
“Humor me,” Riker said shortly, intent enough on the arborata to draw new energy from . . . somewhere. “It’s more important than you think. Get the others moving— I’ll catch up.”
And Akarr, though he wasn’t sure why, followed along behind Riker, Zefan in his wake. On the run and panting-hot, Akarr located Riker more by sound than by sight, batting giant leaves away from his face and ducking—at the very last moment—a huge sticky mess of an insect nest that seemed to materialize at eye level. Even as he straightened, he came upon Riker, crouching over the limp body of the arborata.
He hadn’t realized it was quite that big.
But its size didn’t seem to be what had Riker’s attention. There, buried in its plump breast, was Akarr’s dart— quite distinguishable from the Fandrean dart lodged in the muscle of one leathery gliding wing. Riker glanced up at him. “You might as well take trophy from this one before it comes around. It should have been yours.”
“I don’t understand,” Akarr said stiffly, though he was suddenly very much afraid that he did. “The creature didn’t go down with my dart. It’s not any more my trophy than—”
Than the skik claws he’d already taken.
“No?” Riker raised an eyebrow at him, a purely human gesture that Akarr associated with the wry Tsoran response of perking tightly cupped, streamlined ears. And then as Zefan joined them—without so much as a gesture of intent or request—Riker appropriated the trank gun from Akarr and shot himself in the thigh.
“Damn,” he said, hissing at the pain he’d brought himself—but still looking like he’d done exactly what he meant to do.
“Commander Riker!” Zefan snapped, his under-purr as harsh and angry as Akarr had ever heard in a Fandrean. “If you think we have the luxury of carrying one who could otherwise walk—”
And then he stopped, for by then it was evident enough that Riker wouldn’t need to be carried anywhere. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I, at first,” Riker said. “I thought that the sholjagg’s fur was too thick . . . and after that, that the Tsorans had simply missed the sculpers, in the dark. But Akarr’s people are well trained, and clear-thinking in a fight. And I nailed one of those skiks myself. I saw it jerk when the trank hit. So if we weren’t missing the targets—”
“Then the tranks were no good,” Zefan finished. “You couldn’t have found another way to test your theory?”
Riker pulled the dart out with a grimace. “Nothing came to mind. Nothing we could be sure of. I already had that.” He nodded at the arborata.
“None of the tranks,” Akarr said slowly, “are any good.” Not just one of them, or a small percentage of them. None of them.
“You might as well take trophy,” Riker said, standing and nudging the black-scaled arborata with one foot. “You’ve earned it. You’ve probably earned it many times over—you and your men.” He was angry, as deeply angry as Akarr had ever seen him despite Akarr’s own knack for clashing fangs with him—and it took Akarr an instant to realize that this time, the anger was on his own behalf.
“Someone,” Riker said, “wanted you dead.”
Treachery? Akarr rejected the thought in an instant, too aware of what would happen to his father were such a thing to be known. Only an ineffective ReynKa allowed such treachery to develop. Only a weak ReynKa allowed it within his walls. Akarr mustered a glare. “You will say nothing of this.”
And then his mind’s eye flashed back to the night before his departure, the kaphoora fete he’d had. How pleased he’d been that Takarr, younger by several years, had not displayed any of the poor humor so common to his presence at Akarr’s daleura events. Takarr? He’d always wanted more than his life allotted, in a sullen way, even though the second son of the ReynKa lacked for nothing. Nothing but a few final points of daleura, and the chance to earn a place in history.
But the system held choice. The ReynKa would pick one of them over the other. Although the traditional choice raised the older up over the younger, Atann himself was by no means tied to tradition. If Takarr wanted to rule, he had had—and still had—many legitimate opportunities to prove his worth over Akarr.
Riker made an impatient gesture, indicating the out-of-sight men who waited for them at the shuttle. “What do you mean, say nothing of it? And leave your men thinking their own tranks are of any use whatsoever?”
“Shefen and I can replenish your tranks with our own,” Zefan said. “They are interchangeable. But we must have a reason for doing so.”
“The truth would work nicely,” Riker said shortly. He gave the useless dart a look of disdain, and Zefan took it from him, tucking it away in the section of his pack meant for carrying out disposables.
“It is not the truth,” Akarr said, his fur rising. He glared up at Riker. “It is not the whole truth. Who has done this and why . . . these things, we don’t know. Until we do know, partial truths could hurt those who have no part in it.” His mother, if Takarr was implicated. She would take any treachery on her younger son’s part badly, and Akarr would not have her thinking it until he knew it was true.
“Fine,” Riker said, exasperated and cranky. “Zefan, tell them that you suspect the animals have adapted to the Tsoran trank chemicals, and until the Fandreans can perform tests to confirm or negate this, it’s best to use Fandrean darts. Tell them you meant to offer the darts as soon as you caught up with us in the first place, but that the skik attack distracted you.”
Zefan stared, caught in surprise at the change in tactics. Then he moved his hand in Fandrean agreement. With a hint of admiration, he said, “That’s good.” He smiled, teeth covered. “That’s very good.”
As one, they turned to Akarr, waiting for his reaction. “Akarr?” Riker prompted. “You have to tell them something—”
Akarr found himself caught up in fear of the implications of the useless tranks, envy at the way even the Fandreans responded to Riker—he hadn’t failed to see how even some of his own men admired the human, oh no!— and pure turmoil over how to proceed. His hair stood on end, his lips drew back from his teeth—
And Riker did the one thing Akarr never expected. The one thing that got his attention and got it fast. He dropped to one knee, lower than Akarr, and twisted his head to the side and back, exposing his t
hroat.
Akarr’s flaring temper deserted him, a response to the submission display all but hardwired into the Tsoran system. Confused, he could only stare—not a daleura stare, just a blank look.
“We’ll handle it your way,” Riker said, his voice strained by the angle of his neck, “as long as your men are protected.” Slowly, while Akarr recovered his composure, Riker got to his feet.
“Your idea is acceptable,” Akarr said, finally recovering his composure, and finding himself acutely aware that Riker had not submitted out of fear . . . not out of lack of courage. Out of wisdom. “Although they are probably to the shuttle by now.”
“There’s something to that,” Riker said. “Take your trophy before it wakes up, and let’s join them.”
But Akarr turned his back on the arborata. He would not take trophy from that which had brought him awareness of betrayal.
* * *
“I don’t like the looks of this.” La Forge frowned at the Fandrean version of a padd, on which was displayed the most recent series of yet-unexplained Legacy shield surges. “I’ve got confidence in the modified shields the Collins is carrying, but I sure didn’t want to put them to this sort of test.”
Yenan reclaimed the display and stared mournfully at it. “Since you’re working on the communications problem, I’ve released my best engineers to apply themselves to the shield surges. I regret to say they have not yet suggested any solutions.”
La Forge nodded at the displayed chart. “They’ve got plenty of data to work with after that. When did you say it happened?”
“Early this morning.”
“And no way to know if it affected the Collins, because I don’t have my part solved yet, either,” La Forge said. He raised his voice slightly, glad for his connection to the Enterprise, and for Data’s unfailing pattern of check-ins. “You getting this, Data?”
“Everything but the padd display, although I can infer its contents.” Data paused, then added in a practiced tone, “It is just peachy.”
“How’s that?”
“Another twentieth-century colloquialism. I am drawing from a wide range of years. The point is not to see how familiar people are with any single time period, but to get a general sense of how much of the language lingers from generation to generation—despite the usual loss of the origin of each phrase.”
“Ah,” La Forge said, for the moment distracted—and willing to be distracted—by Data’s latest foray into the nature of being human. “Okay, but have you considered—”
“For instance, do you know the origin of the word okay?”
La Forge hesitated. “Well, no,” he said finally. “I never thought about it.”
“In 1839, it became common to facetiously spell ‘all correct’ as o-l-l k-o-r-r-e-c-t. Later this was shortened to the initials O.K., which eventually became the word okay.”
“Which brings me back to my original point. I was going to say—okay, but have you considered that your previous, um . . . explorations into language have exposed the crew to an unusual amount of this sort of variety in phrase and language usage?”
There was momentary silence from the other end— Data, in his quarters, most likely sitting at his complex computer science station with Spot in his lap and a puzzled look on his face. “You are suggesting that I have skewed my sample population. In essence, created my own red herring. A phrase, by the way, which originated in the late seventeenth century, and which refers to the practice of using smoked herring as a method to draw hounds off a trail.”
“No kidding,” La Forge said, smiling a quirky one-sided smile. Yenan looked at him in utter incomprehension, but La Forge didn’t make any effort to explain, and the Fandrean moved off to present the surge figures to his engineers. Up until now, things had been altogether too intense in the Legacy’s underground warren of communications panels. “That’s what I’m suggesting, all right.”
“I shall have to consider it,” Data allowed. “Not that I have much time to devote to this project, at the moment. Things are about to come to a head here.”
“Why? What’s going on?” La Forge asked. Once again sitting on the floor rather than trying to adjust to Fandrean chair ergonomics, he leaned forward and prodded idly at the open communications panel before him, waiting for an idea to strike—as they so often did when he let one part of his mind talk with Data while the other considered the matter at hand. Then he stopped short and said, “Wait. You did it again, didn’t you? That was a good one—I’ll bet most people wouldn’t even notice it.”
“You are the first to do so, and I suspect your awareness is heightened by this very conversation. The phrase dates all the way back to the 1340s, and references boils, and the way they—”
“That’s all I need to know about that one,” La Forge said hastily. “What is going on?”
“I am not sure.” Data hesitated. “I would have to say . . . I think Captain Picard is up to something.”
La Forge thought that if he asked, he could probably get the history behind up to something, but decided against it. “Up to what?”
“Unknown,” Data said. “The ReynKa is apparently coming back on board; it is a sudden development. And Captain Picard looks . . . I would have to define his expression as determined.”
“That’s good news, then,” La Forge said, by way of a prompt. “Is the probe web still functioning?”
There was enough hesitation that La Forge knew the answer before Data finally offered it. “There have been some data positioning synchronization problems,” he said. In the background, Spot’s short, querying mrrrp? came through. “Lieutenant Barclay appears to have pinpointed the problem and solved it, but the delay was unfortunate. By the time we have a rudimentary chart from the results, many Ntignanos will have died. Still, I believe it is our current fallback.”
“Well, then, determined is good. With any luck, Captain Picard is up to something.” He looked again at the open panel before him. “I wish I were up to something. You know, when I went to sleep late last night, I really expected to wake up with the solution to this mess waiting for me. Like a side dish at breakfast.”
“It is possible that you have a hole in your head.” Data sounded pleased with that one, though Geordi heard him only in distraction, thinking about the probes and his own problems here on planet.
“I’ve considered meshing frequencies,” he said, “and fine-point broadbanding transmissions—similar to what Commander Riker did—and I’ve explored pulling the interwoven shields apart separately—putting a little air between the layers, so to speak—to allow a transmission to weave its way through. But none of those have any real promi—Data, what did you say?”
“It was an attempt at humor, Geordi. I was implying that you had actually thought of the solutions, but that you had lost them again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” La Forge said impatiently, his inner eye searching frantically for the elusive image that had flashed by at Data’s words. “But what did you say?”
After a short hesitation, Data told him, “It is possible that you have a hole in your head. The origin of the phrase is somewhat murky—”
“No, no, don’t you see? That’s it!” The image settled before his mind’s eye, the opaque forcefield, the opening portal . . . the huge whine of the shield generators, choking down power, limiting the portal to so few moments of existence, to so few openings at all. They’d already gone past one of the timed openings for Worf’s return; he had only two, and then everyone on the Collins would have to wait through the recharge cycle.
“What is it?” Data asked. He must have stood, because Spot made an aggrieved noise and padded away; almost immediately, La Forge heard the crunching of feline supplement. Number 221, if he remembered correctly.
“My idea is the hole in my head,” Geordi said, up on his knees and disappearing into the comm panel, going to set everything back to rights, to the way it was before he started poking around. “Gotta go, Data—I’ll let you know if this works!”
“Good-bye, Geordi. If I see Captain Picard, I will inform him that you are up to something.”
La Forge grinned into the dark recesses of the comm panel innards. Up to something. That he was, and he hoped it was something big.
* * *
Picard stood outside a deck eleven turbolift, down the corridor and around the corner from the holodeck where Atann waited for him, putting on a display of impatience and disgust at this new interruption. Picard himself was not eager to delay the impending confrontation, but when requested in stellar cartography—only two decks and a few corridor turns away—he’d deemed it worth the trouble.
“Be quick about it,” he said shortly, sweeping into the same work alcove where he’d earlier found Duffy and Barclay at work. Startled, they looked up from the console as one—and their expressions put him right on alert. Triumph. Even on Barclay’s face, totally over-whelming his usual hesitation. “Good news?”
“We figured it out, sir,” Duffy said. “We were right about the launch problems—these Class Five probes have a history of minor physical damage at launch, it’s just usually not an issue.”
“But with this job, we had to be so precise, so perfect—” Barclay brought his thumb and index finger together to indicate an infinitesimal amount of leeway, and in doing so caught a glimpse of Picard’s impatient expression; abruptly, he dropped his hand. “Well, that is, it made a difference. Once we found the sensor displacement and compensated for it—”
Picard felt a surge of hope; how much easier it would be if the Ntignanos’ fate didn’t rest in his next hour with Atann. He searched their faces. “The probes are functioning?”
Neither of them showed any reticence; Barclay nodded emphatically—overemphatically—and Duffy said, “Yes, sir!”
“And will we have the results in time to resolve the evacuation problems?”
Duffy looked momentarily confused; he exchanged a glance with Barclay and said, “Well, sir, we’ll certainly have the results before that sun goes nova.”
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