by Dave Stern
“Why does that not surprise me?” Trip said. “We sure we want to go to this place right now?”
Archer ignored him. “What are the practical consequences of the Confederacy’s disintegration?”
“Unknown. Much of the territory they control is not familiar to us. We have no way of telling how critical their presence is in those areas. Within the parts of space we do know—the territories closer to the Barcana Sector—the effects are expected to be minimal. Trade will continue, of course.”
“The Confederacy just won’t get its cut anymore.”
“Correct.”
“So Sen won’t get his cut anymore.” Trip smiled. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Archer frowned. “I can think of one possible negative effect that your source didn’t mention. These attacks, like the one that happened to us—if the Confederacy collapses, that may lead to more of them.”
“We have only Sen’s word that the aliens are aggressively expansionist,” T’Pol said. “We do not know what their true intentions are.”
“No,” Archer agreed. “Not yet we don’t.” He told her then of his decision to go to Procyron, and then added, “Brief Travis on the substance of what we’ve discussed, if you would. I’m going to want him in on the landing party. Hoshi too.”
“Ensign Mayweather I will talk with immediately. Ensign Sato…I would prefer to brief her tomorrow, on shift. I have sent her to her quarters for the day.”
“Oh?” Archer asked.
“She was working too hard,” T’Pol said.
The captain frowned.
“Told you so,” Trip said.
Six
Procyron was old. Very old, and very, very dirty.
Part of that was because of the sky, of course; what they’d first taken for cloud cover was now revealed, halfway down to the surface, as pollution, a brownish haze that dulled everything, the streams and lakes that came into focus as the shuttle descended, the bright light of Procyron’s sun as it sank beneath the horizon, and most of all the city they were fast approaching. Tura Prex was a mega-megalopolis; that was the only way that Archer could think of it. Its towering structures spanned what had to be dozens of kilometers in either direction, but he’d actually mistaken it for a geologic formation from a distance, that was how completely the pollution obliterated the normal gleam and sparkle you would expect to see given the size of the city. What truly impressed Archer, though, was that, according to Sen, it was only the third-largest city on the planet.
Procyron—Procyron Seven, actually, but as the other six planets in the system were nothing more than balls of rock, too close to Procyron’s sun to permit establishment of any sort of colonies, this world was the only one that rated a name—was a Minshara-class planet somewhat bigger than Earth, surface area split almost equally between land and water. Four larger landmasses, dozens of smaller ones, including the one they were currently gliding over. Gliding over fast, rapidly approaching Tura Prex.
The console beeped.
The captain looked down at his instrument panel (the viewscreen was useless, the cloud cover was so thick) and frowned.
“Proximity warning,” he said. “Multiple readings.”
“I’m on it.” Travis, next to him in the pilot’s chair, eased their speed. The ship hiccoughed.
“Commander Tucker was right. Controls are a little sluggish,” he said.
Archer nodded. Trip had told them the shuttle was overdue for maintenance, which he had been trying to get around to for a week, but because of Hess being out…
“Six ships.” That was Malcolm, manning the console behind him. “Heading right for us.”
They were coming fast, ridiculously fast.
“Weapons, sir?” Reed asked.
“Not yet,” he replied. “Let’s give them a chance to stop.”
Which they did…a scant fifty meters short of the shuttle. A split-second later the cloud cover broke, and the dots on the panel became small ships arrayed in space around them. Half a dozen ships, each approximately the size of the shuttlecraft, but far more streamlined in construction. Pointed. A lot of sharp edges. A lot of what looked to him like weapons emplacements.
“No life-signs. My guess is those vessels are under computer control. Remote control,” Malcolm said. Which explained their ability to start and stop so fast—g-forces were not a factor to worry about when there was no crew.
“Plenty of weapons, though,” Reed continued. “Phased energy sources, multiple warheads…”
“Got a signal coming in,” Hoshi, the fourth—and final member—of the landing party, spoke from the back of the small ship, alongside Reed. “Thelasian standard. These ships are our escort; we’re to follow the lead one down to the planet’s surface.”
As she said that, one of the ships broke formation, and dropped like a stone toward ground. At a nod from the captain, Travis followed.
Tura Prex rapidly took shape before them.
But even as they finally got close enough for the captain to pick out individual structures, the ship in front of them veered sharply and disappeared into a gap between two huge towers at the edge of the city. The shuttle followed and, after a series of sharp turns and one very near miss with another of the automated craft, lurched downward and came to a sudden stop.
Travis sat back from the controls and exhaled noisily.
“That was not fun.”
“But we’re down,” Archer said. “Nice work. Hoshi, let Enterprise know we’re down.”
“Ah, I wouldn’t say down exactly, Captain.”
That was Malcolm.
Archer looked at the control panel more closely and saw what he meant.
They weren’t actually down on the ground at all. They were still almost a thousand meters above the planet’s surface.
The captain followed Reed out of the shuttle and onto a docking pad—a relatively small docking pad. Ships—most of them just like the one they’d followed here—flitted above. They flitted below, too—far, far below. Little dots that could have been people or could have been other kinds of ships moved beneath them as well.
Malcolm pointed toward a walkway—not much wider than one of the corridors aboard Enterprise, perhaps ten meters long—leading from the pad into the nearest building.
“I assume we’re to take that.”
“I assume so,” Archer said.
Travis clapped Reed on the shoulder.
“It’ll be fine. Just don’t look down.”
Hoshi eyed the path nervously as well. Archer walked around the edge of the docking pad, and tried to get a better look at the city below. A gentle force-field pushed him back from the edge.
“Safety feature. Wouldn’t do to have our guests tour the city that way, would it?”
Archer turned. A man was coming down the walkway toward them. Actually, the walkway was moving, carrying him in their direction. The man wore a blue and green uniform, held something that looked like a padd against his chest, and was smiling.
He stepped off the walkway and onto the docking pad.
“I’m Gemel Prian. On behalf of Governor Sen and the Thelasian Confederacy, welcome to Procyron.”
“Thank you. Jonathan Archer. I’m captain of the Enterprise. These are members of my crew Ensign Travis Mayweather, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, Ensign Hoshi Sato.”
“Welcome, all of you.” Prian bowed to each in turn. “I want to apologize on the governor’s behalf—he wanted to be here to greet you personally. Unfortunately, he was called away on urgent business.”
“I understand, of course,” Archer said. “Should we return another time, or wait for him, or…”
“No, no, I’m sorry, I’m not being clear. The urgent business the governor had to deal with—it concerns you as well.” Prian’s smile of welcome disappeared. “The entire Trading Confederacy is meeting now, in the Assembly Chamber. You’re to come as well. If you would follow me…”
Prian stepped back on the walkway. Archer and his c
rew followed suit.
For the next five minutes, they were conveyed—slowly at first, and then faster—through the city. Past, around, and sometimes even through tall gleaming spires, between huge dirty-orange buildings, each the size of a starship, and finally through a short tunnel of gleaming metal before emerging into a large, bright, open space, dominated by three tall towers directly in front of them, ringed by a half-dozen shorter buildings.
Hundreds of people were walking back and forth within that space—no, “people” was the wrong word, “beings” was more accurate, because though the vast majority of them were humanoid, the variety of races Archer saw at a glance made the Xindi Council look homogeneous by comparison. Insectoid, reptilian, non-carbon-based, aquatic, some in environmental suits, some practically naked, and not a single species the captain recognized.
It made him realize, all over again, how big the galaxy was, and what a small portion of it Starfleet had explored.
“This is the government complex,” said Prian, stepping off the walkway, which Archer only now realized had come to a stop a few seconds earlier. “We walk from here.”
The captain stepped off too, and followed the Thelasian, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to pick a hole through the crowd, in the direction of one of the three towers. The Trade Assembly,” Prian informed them, pointing—which was, Archer saw, slightly different in appearance from the two towers flanking it: more windows in its surface, a more impressive entranceway (in front of which Archer noticed quite a number of humanoids in similar uniforms—guards?), and atop it what looked to be a clear glass dome.
Archer shielded his eyes and squinted upward to study that dome further, at which point he realized they weren’t outside at all, they were in fact underneath a much larger version of the dome atop the building, in an entirely self-contained atmosphere. The dirty, rust-colored sky they had flown through in the shuttle was barely visible through its surface, which was inset with a number of small bright light sources. Ships—they looked identical to the ones that had escorted them down to the planet’s surface, albeit, the captain thought, somewhat smaller—buzzed above them, and Archer saw now that atop the other two buildings were what looked like weapons emplacements as well, and the funny thing was, those weapons weren’t pointing up toward the sky, as he would have expected, but down, toward the ground.
Food for thought, given the briefing on the Thelasians’ internal political troubles T’Pol had given them.
Archer glanced behind him and saw Malcolm’s eyes focused in the same place.
At that instant, a woman—humanoid, yellowish skin—stepped in front of Prian and began yelling at the Thelasian.
Prian nodded once, then again, the picture of understanding, and began talking as well, obviously trying to calm her down.
Archer couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He turned to Hoshi, who already had her translator out and was entering data.
“Interesting angle on those guns, wouldn’t you say?” Malcom had stepped forward and spoken quietly in the captain’s ear.
“Absolutely,” Archer replied.
“What I also find interesting,” Malcolm went on, “is how far away from here we had to land. The number of ships they had escorting the shuttle.”
“Not to mention the roundabout path we took to get here,” the captain said. “I’m not sure I could find my way back if my life depended on it.”
Malcolm held up his padd. “I think I could help in that regard, sir. Should it become necessary.”
Archer caught a glimpse of a small video still—the image of the path before them—realized that Malcolm had been surreptitiously recording their journey through the Prex, and smiled.
“Excuse me, Captain.”
Archer turned to see Hoshi, frowning at the UT in her hands.
“Nothing, I gather.”
“No, sir. I get one cluster that could be a name—probably the governor’s name, if I had to guess—but besides that…”
“All right. Keep at it.” He offered a smile of encouragement, to which Hoshi gave a rather woeful nod in return. He could imagine her frustration—particularly given what Phlox had told him earlier—but this was neither the time nor the place for a pep talk.
“Forgive the interruption,” Prian said, and Archer saw that he and the yellow-skinned woman, who had stepped out of their path and was now deep in conversation with two other females from her race, had finished their business. “This way, please.”
He led them up to the Trade Assembly’s entranceway—past an awfully substantial armed detail—and into an elevator, which bulleted upward the second the doors closed behind them. A moment later, the doors opened again, and they walked through another armed detail and into a huge assembly hall that the captain thought at first was open to the sky, then realized was in fact underneath the dome he had seen earlier from outside. Light—much brighter than the natural sunlight that had shone through the shuttle windows coming in—poured down from above.
Then, suddenly, people poured down as well. Aliens, of all different varieties, all the species they had seen outside and then some, coming toward them, jabbering all at once, looking angry and impatient. Archer got a brief, better glimpse of the Trade Assembly—they had entered onto the lowest level of the hall, which was stepped like an Earth-style auditorium—before the crowd reached them and they had to give way, backing up till they could go no farther, till the captain felt the wall that served as the closed end of the half-shell-shaped structure at his back.
“Very enthusiastic greeting,” Malcolm managed.
“I don’t think it’s for us,” Archer said.
Prian had his hands up in the air, and was practically shouting, struggling to be heard. The captain managed to turn just enough to catch Hoshi’s eye. She had the UT padd pressed up against her chest and her neck craned in what looked like a very painful position.
“Sen again, I think,” she said, reading off the screen. “That’s it.”
Archer nodded. That didn’t surprise him. Everyone was obviously looking for the governor. He and his crew were just caught in the middle.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, turning his head and waving Malcolm forward. He wanted to get himself and his crew to a place where they could at least hear themselves think, maybe even have a conversation without shouting.
He lowered his shoulder and pushed forward. The crowd gave way.
The crowd pushed back.
Archer found himself slammed back up against the wall.
“Oof.” He frowned, took a deep breath, and readied himself for another try. “On my count: one, two—”
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Malcolm.
“Easier this way, sir.” Reed nodded to his left. The captain saw Travis and Hoshi, backs pressed tight to the wall, sliding away from Prian and the mob crowding Prian.
The captain nodded and joined them.
“This place is a madhouse,” Archer said, jamming himself in between one particularly large yellow-skinned humanoid and the wall. “It’s like the 602 Club on St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Worse,” Malcolm said.
“What do you mean worse?”
“I doubt there’s a bartender like Ruby waiting on the other side of this crowd,” Reed said.
Archer smiled.
A hand clamped down on his wrist, stopping his progress.
The hand was blue.
“Pinkskin,” a voice said. “Your kind are far from home.”
Archer looked up and found himself staring into the scarred face of an Andorian officer.
“Oh joy,” Malcolm muttered.
Seven
The Andorian officer was named Quirsh. Nominally a sergeant, he was now in command of his planet’s trade legation to the Confederation, and had thus adopted the honorific “ambassador.” It didn’t suit him. Quirsh was perhaps—with the exception of the few Tellarites she’d encountered—the most undiplomatic being Hoshi had ever met in her life.
The captain and the Andorian didn’t need her help understanding each other, so Hoshi had her UT focused on one of the aliens haranguing Prian—a yellow-skinned man who looked to her to be of the same race as the woman who’d stopped Sen’s deputy outside the Assembly. The machine was making note of similar syllabic clusters, assigning them arbitrary meanings from a list of possibilities in its data banks, and testing those meanings in sentences. Hoshi was doing the same thing herself, albeit in a less rigorous, more instinctual fashion. It seemed as if they’d be able to translate this language, which was good, as failing the captain twice in one week would have been too much for her.
Though she supposed she’d better get used to failure. The deeper into space they got, the more often it was likely to occur, at least according to Doctor Teodoro, who’d taught a seminar at the Training Institute on this very subject. An advanced seminar, fourth year, very exclusive, Toward a Universal Translator: Alien Grammars and the Limits of the Possible. Hoshi had been one of only five people admitted to it.
