Archer took the empty seat beside his tactical officer. “Looks like my speech must have come off as badly as I think it did.”
Reed turned toward him, displaying a bemused expression. “Sir?”
“You seem to be brooding, Malcolm. Just like the rest of my audience.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m exactly brooding, Captain,” he said in his clipped British accent. “I was just thinking about these Breen that Minister Soval mentioned.”
“Ah.” Archer nodded. “What about them?”
“I just wonder why the hell we’ve never heard of them before, sir.”
Archer had considered that as well, but had already decided that he had to place some limits on his capacity to worry about the future, the unknown, and what might be the unknowable.
“Perhaps the Breen are obscure to humans because so little is known about them,” T’Pol said. “Even the Vulcan Security Directorate possesses very little hard information about that species.”
Archer nodded, accepting T’Pol’s explanation at face value. “There’s no point in jumping at shadows, Malcolm,” he said. “For all we know, the Breen are really just Soval’s favorite breed of saber-toothed Vulcan puppies, and he was just jerking our collective chains. Besides, we’ve got the annual inspection of the Altair VI outpost ahead of us, and then it’s back to the commercial freight corridors to prowl for pirates, Romulans, or whatever else turns up. We’ve already got enough on our plate without borrowing any more trouble.”
Reed smiled ironically. “Worrying just might be the biggest part of a tactical officer’s job description, sir.”
Sir, he thought, nodding a silent acknowledgment of Malcolm’s commendable vigilance. Captain. When had his crew begun sounding so excessively formal in his presence?
It started after Trip left, he realized in a rush. Despite the fact that his working relationship with T’Pol had grown more close, open, and cordial than he had ever imagined possible, there was nobody aboard Enterprise who could fill the cold void created by Trip’s open-ended absence. Though he knew Trip’s death was merely a ruse—as did T’Pol, Phlox, and Reed—it felt real enough to inspire genuine mourning.
Captain. Sir. Captain. Nobody here feels comfortable just calling me Jonathan. Not even T’Pol, who had to have been grieving over Trip’s absence even more intensely than Archer was, her Vulcan emotional makeup notwithstanding.
He suddenly felt more disconcertingly alone than he had since he’d first accepted command of Enterprise.
THREE
Vulcan Year 8737 (2135 A.C.E.)
Trilan (Vulcan outpost settlement)
T’POL FLATTENED HERSELF against the moist wall, struggling to keep her ragged inhalations under control. She wasn’t certain what had happened to the others. It had been at least a quarter of an hour since she had heard any screams, or anything other than the sound of her own heartbeat and rushing blood—life-giving fluid that she felt certain might be betraying her even now.
She had been one of six agents of the V’Shar—the Vulcan Security Directorate—that had undertaken this mission, but she knew that their prey had already dispatched at least two of the others. Their squad’s leader, Denak, had disappeared down a hole in the ground; the fact that the hole had sealed itself almost immediately lent credence to the idea that Denak had been taken and had not fallen victim to a simple misstep.
The two other V’Shar agents had similarly disappeared as they’d made their way through the dank caverns that housed the Fri’slen, but T’Pol had nimbly managed to avoid capture. She tried to tamp down the voice inside her that fairly screamed, You haven’t been taken yet. In this context, the feeling of fear was less an emotion than a primal survival instinct. She allowed it to settle upon her like a warm but ill-fitting cloak.
To catch something as primal as these creatures, I must think like them, T’Pol reasoned. It was, in fact, one of the most basic lessons of intelligence and espionage work; to infiltrate, one had to learn to think like one’s opponent, even to the point of becoming one of them if necessary.
She knew that she could never become one of the Fri’slen, unless she contracted the contagion that had ravaged them. From what the Security Directorate’s files had indicated, that would require both intimate sexual contact and a significant blood-to-blood transfer; the majority of the Fri’slen’s victims were not transformed, however, but served instead as food for their cannibalistic appetites.
Despite their savagery, the Fri’slen were apparently not without technological defenses, as the V’Shar team had learned shortly after disembarking here. A targeted electromagnetic pulse had rendered not only all of their scanning and communication equipment useless, but their weaponry as well. The pulse should have been their cue to leave, as T’Pol and Eskren had reasoned, but Denak had ordered them to move into the caves that apparently housed the Fri’slen. They were armed now only with smaller weapons barely suitable for hand-to-hand combat, although T’Pol knew that she could throw the hand-length tricheq on her belt with deadly accuracy. Once, at least.
T’Pol felt her boots come into contact with something on the floor, and she crouched defensively, peering into the darkness around her. One hand moved forward, and her fingers connected with something crust-covered and tubular. Further exploration told her that what she had stumbled upon was the skeletal remains of…something. She couldn’t be certain what it was. It wasn’t humanoid, but it was too large to be one of the smaller creatures that were indigenous to this world.
A sehlat, she finally reasoned, exploring further and finding not only clumps of fur and gristle, but also the sharp tusks that were indicative of adolescent-to-fully-grown members of the urso-feline species that this forbidding world’s Vulcan settlers had brought with them.
Her mind racing, T’Pol quickly began removing certain parts of the sehlat’s skeletal structure. She winced as she broke several of the bones—the sound of the cracks was like cannon fire in the tunnels—but her fingers told her that she had guessed correctly about the brittle condition of the remains.
A short while later, T’Pol heard sounds nearby. She couldn’t tell from which direction they had emanated, but she assumed she was now being stalked anew. Crouching lower, curled almost into a ball, she quickly finished making her preparations, then stood. Shaking, she used a bone fragment to scratch the top side of her shoulder, where the fabric of her sedmah had already been torn. She felt the blood well up immediately; she had been cut deeply enough to bleed, but not enough to cause nerve damage—nor, she hoped, to affect her defensive abilities.
Knowing that the Fri’slen could detect her scent even more strongly than before, T’Pol sprinted forward into the darkness, barely able to see the tunnels around her. She sensed movement behind her, but dared not whirl around to face her pursuers. The only thing she knew for certain was that the farther into the caves she got, the closer she would come to their nest.
The floor abruptly gave way in front of her, and she pitched forward, falling into a shallow fissure or ravine—or a trap—and she felt the creatures leap on her the next moment, their hands pummeling her over and over again, their nails slashing at her. She struggled against their powerful limbs, but after an indefinable length of time allowed herself to go limp. She focused her conscious mind inward, ready to wake up fully with the speed of a charging le-matya from behind her meditative shield against both mortal terror and physical pain.
They carried her with them instead of dragging her, and she was grateful for that, even as she continued to focus herself on what was to come. Eventually, she heard screams she could identify as coming from Vekk’r, but as they came closer, the wailing subsided into guttural cries and moans. She hoped silently that if she should survive the mission, she would be able to find the strength to deliver a painless death to any of her comrades who had become infected.
She remained limp as a rag doll as her captors unceremoniously dumped her against something hard, allowing her to land in a semiseated
position. Vekk’r was mostly silent now, though in her meditative state, T’Pol could hear several of the other sounds that were reverberating through the dark, rocky chamber. Within her mind, she withdrew, as if she were a hungry, ravening Underlier waiting to strike from below the baking sands of Vulcan’s Forge.
A rough hand grabbed her face, its jagged fingernails digging into her chin. T’Pol allowed herself to come back to full consciousness, but willed herself not to tense up into a defensive posture that the creatures might notice. She opened her eyes, however, and found herself staring into the ravaged face of what appeared to be a female humanoid.
Her features were vaguely similar to those of Vulcans, but her eyes were more prominent and seemed to have multiple lids, nictitating from the sides as well as from top to bottom. The woman’s ears tapered to graceful points at their tips, but everything else about her external pinnae struck T’Pol as less than aesthetically pleasing; they were flattened backward, were roughly the same size as the woman’s entire face, and were covered in bulging greenish veins.
In a movement that might have been a smile had she had lips, the Fri’slen woman allowed her mouth to tilt upward on the sides as she noticed T’Pol studying her. Four rows of rotted teeth—which included sharpened, predatory incisors—filled her oral cavity.
“You will be mine, I think,” the woman said, speaking in a perfect Vulcan Standard dialect.
T’Pol was less interested in what the statement meant than she was in keeping the woman talking. As naturally and fearfully as she could—she didn’t really have to feign the trembling that had overtaken her—she peered around the woman into the dimness of the cavern beyond. She saw three more of the Fri’slen, as well as the remains of Yekda, and the body of Vekk’r, on top of which lay a fifth Fri’slen, who was moving languidly, almost as if in a drunken state.
“What are you planning to do with us?” T’Pol asked, hearing the quaver in her own voice.
“You will be mine,” the woman said again. “That one belongs now to Grom’stl,” she said, gesturing toward the creature atop Vekk’r. “The others,” she added, sweeping a clawed hand toward a grate in the floor that apparently covered a prisonlike pit, “will be food. Or fun. Or they will belong, too.”
T’Pol understood that the woman’s emphasis on the word “belong” meant that she intended to infect T’Pol.
“Why are you preying on the people here?” T’Pol asked.
The woman tilted her head, a scabrous tongue sliding against one of her forward rows of sharpened teeth. “To survive. To feed. To procreate. To be a reminder, always.”
T’Pol didn’t know what the woman meant, but needed to keep her talking until the time was right to move. “A reminder of what? That savagery exists in the worlds we inhabit? That sentient beings can debase themselves to the level of carnivores or parasites?”
The woman pushed T’Pol’s head back roughly and rose to a crouch as she released a noise that might possibly be interpreted as laughter if it hadn’t sounded so much like howling. She looked around at the others, then returned her gaze to T’Pol, who had gathered her arms close in around her torso, clutching herself the way a frightened child might.
“Perhaps one of these days we should allow someone to return to tell the others what we really are,” the woman said. “The origins of what you call the ‘Fri’slen.’ Before the experiments, the mutations, the banishment.”
The woman leaned in close, fixing T’Pol with her dark, predatory eyes. “They would tell how we were once you.”
In that moment, T’Pol allowed her entire being to suffuse itself with every bit of energy she had kept in reserve. Flashing her arms out, she pulled the broken sehlat ribs out from where she had concealed them inside her sleeves, tight against her forearms. With a quick slashing motion, she used the jagged tips of the bones to cut the throat of the woman, rolling herself aside even as the ichorous green blood began to spray.
As the dying Fri’slen woman clutched at her throat, T’Pol drew the short tricheq from the boot where she had hidden it and threw it at one of the other creatures in the cavern. It pierced his forehead, dropping him instantly.
T’Pol had barely managed to regain her footing before one of the remaining Fri’slen roared toward her, on the attack. She swiped her foot out in a wide kick, hoping that her second makeshift weapon would work as well as the first. The sehlat tusk she had strapped to the side of her boot sliced through her attacker’s torso, and before his forward momentum had entirely spent itself, the Fri’slen’s innards were spilling out upon the rough cavern floor.
A keening sound swiftly filled the chamber, and T’Pol whirled again, expecting to be attacked by the other two creatures. But the one making the sound was exiting the room through a tunnel, his body slipping effortlessly into the darkness. The other one, the creature atop Vekk’r, seemed neither alarmed nor particularly conscious of what had just transpired nearby.
T’Pol noticed only now that she could hear the voices of Denak and Ych’a calling out to her. Pushing aside the still bleeding body of the Fri’slen woman whose throat she had cut, T’Pol looked down into the pit below the grate. Despite the darkness that enfolded the pit, she could see her comrades, at least in silhouette. She quickly cut through the improvised twine that held the grate in place, moved it aside, then reached down to grasp the hand of Ych’a.
The green blood that still rained down on them from the dying Fri’slen woman made getting a grip difficult, but within a minute, T’Pol had finished extracting both her fellow agent and her mission leader.
Denak quickly counted the corpses, and listened as T’Pol told him about the Fri’slen that had escaped into the adjoining chambers. “There are many more of them than we’ve seen so far,” Denak said gravely, pointing toward numerous cavelike openings that could have served as berths for sleeping or hibernation. “We probably don’t have much time before we’re beset again. And they’ll be angry this time, instead of merely hungry.”
He pointed to some fabric remains that still clothed skeletons in a shady corner. “Get some torches going with those scraps.”
As Ych’a scrambled to comply, T’Pol retrieved her tricheq from the Fri’slen’s forehead. A quick scouting of the cavern revealed several of their party’s other fallen weapons: both the useless depowered component devices and a few other tricheqs and bladed weapons.
As she returned Denak’s weapon to him, she saw him holding one of the sharpened sehlat bones over the back of the Fri’slen who lay atop Vekk’r. The creature hadn’t even noticed that anyone else was nearby, much less the danger that loomed above. Under its form, a bloodied Vekk’r lay unconscious, or worse.
Denak stabbed the weapon down through both figures, piercing through their hearts almost simultaneously. The creature atop Vekk’r thrashed for a moment, then twitched in its death throes; T’Pol’s ravaged comrade hadn’t moved at all.
“Even had Vekk’r lived, he would have been infected,” Denak said simply to T’Pol. “He would have become one of them.”
Ych’a came over with torches, and the dry fabrics ignited quickly.
Weapons in hand and torches held aloft, the trio swiftly plunged into the caves and, T’Pol hoped, toward their freedom. Should they make it, T’Pol knew that Denak would probably call in a military air strike on the region, to bombard the caves with some kind of contained plasma fire. Nothing that lived down here would survive such an attack, nor would any trace of the Fri’slen—or their crimes—remain.
Sparing one final glance backward as they departed, T’Pol pondered exactly what the cryptic words of the Fri’slen woman had meant.
“They would tell how we were once you.”
How different was the statement from Denak?
“He would have become one of them.”
Even from her brief time in the Vulcan Security Directorate, T’Pol knew that the Vulcan people had buried many dark secrets in their past. As they moved through the blackness, she understood with
perfect clarity that the Fri’slen woman had believed herself to number among those secrets.
What other secrets have we hidden? And when will another one come out of the darkness to consume us?
T’Pol shivered, telling herself that she might never discover the answer to that question if she didn’t concentrate on getting out of this place, now.
Sunday, July 13, 2155
Enterprise NX-01
Though she knew it was illogical, T’Pol shivered slightly. She finally moved over to her bed and pulled the neatly folded gray blanket from the end of it, wrapping it around her shoulders. She returned to stand near the viewport, outside of which the blackness of space and the bright streaks of stars had become almost monotonous in their constancy.
Although the temperature in her quarters was certainly high enough that she needn’t have bothered with the blanket, its presence around her provided an immediate and undeniable sense of comfort. The feel of the finely woven synthetic fabric between her fingers evoked a vivid tactile memory of Trip and the time they had lain together on her bunk, the sweat cooling on their naked bodies after they had made love; Trip had pulled this same blanket up, over the pair of them, though he’d smilingly lamented all the while having to remove any portion of her beauty from his vision.
The Vulcan science officer and the human engineer, the High Command and Starfleet, a highly unlikely pair. “The ice princess and the good ol’ boy” were among the nicknames she had heard whispered more than a few times, as they walked through the corridors of Enterprise, though she thought that the Starfleet and MACO personnel who had uttered them would have been both appalled and embarrassed had they known that she had heard them. And she sometimes wondered whether they might have been more appalled and embarrassed still had they known that she and Trip had actually consummated their now-undeniable mutual attraction.
The self-absorbed direction of her own ruminations surprised her, though she couldn’t deny having had similar thoughts before. But today she could identify no convenient infirmity or injury upon which she might blame this private lapse, no obvious reason behind her increasing fixation on the irrecoverable past. She knew that her emotions were always close to the surface, however deeply she had meditated last evening. She could only wonder whether that night with Trip had had a far more profound impact upon her than she could have known.
Kobayashi Maru Page 4
