* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardrive Section
Cloud Complex Zedra
“What the—?”
Reading from a data slate, Una did not look up. “Is there a problem, Doctor?”
“When you said you had a patient for me to see,” Boyce said, “this isn’t what I thought you had in mind.” The white-haired doctor stepped around the four guards armed with phasers to see the alien stalking around inside the stardrive section’s brig. “It’s positively grotesque!”
“It’s a Rengru,” Colt said, nonchalantly studying a tricorder.
“The things attacking us?” Reluctant to get too close to the force field, Boyce peered at the creature. Two and a half meters long, the ivory-white alien tromped about on dozens of multiple-jointed appendages. Before each wall, it stopped and curled its frame, slinking halfway up the bulkhead and probing with the tiny pincers at the end of its limbs. “It looks different from the things outside,” Boyce said. “Slimmer.”
Una nodded. “The whole flight apparatus appears to be artificial, riding piggyback,” she said. “We beamed those portions into an engineering lab.”
“And beamed this fellow here, I suppose.” Boyce edged closer. The Rengru did not respond to his movements. Instead, it curled back down onto the deck and went exploring underneath the cell’s sleep platform. “How did I not know about this?”
“I decided it was best to keep its presence aboard need to know,” Una said, noting where the Rengru had gone. “The crew have enough worries.”
Boyce’s lower lip went sideways. “Yeah, this wouldn’t win you many fans.”
“I’m not trying to win a popularity contest.”
In fact, matters of morale had entered Una’s thinking. Too much time had passed since the ship separation, with too many deprived of their regular quarters and personal effects. It had worn on everyone. “I suppose we should feel fortunate that a brig was placed in this section,” she said. “I’m not sure where we would have put the Rengru otherwise.”
“Well, it’s not rooming with me.”
“Funny thing,” Colt said, gesturing to the handful of items sitting about in the cell. “We were billeting people in the brig until about five minutes before it arrived.”
“I think I’d move out too,” Boyce said.
“We had to work in a hurry, or we’d have cleared the room entirely,” she said, noting the clothing articles the Rengru was curiously clawing. “I don’t think Ensign Zepton is going to want his laundry back.”
Boyce watched the Rengru warily. “Is that all it’s been doing?”
Una glanced at the creature. “If you’re looking for it to snarl and crash into the force field, don’t. It hasn’t reacted to us at all. It was dying when we brought it aboard—and while it’s improved since, I don’t think it’s at a hundred percent.”
“How do you know what one hundred percent even looks like for—for one of these?”
“That’s why you’re here,” Una said, approaching the doctor. She passed him the slate with her observations. “I want to know anything about it you can tell me.”
Boyce gawked. “I’m not an exobiologist.”
“We have seventy-four people aboard, Doctor. Name me anyone who’s closer to being one, and I’ll have them brought here.”
Boyce scratched his head and grumbled. “I knew I got stranded on the wrong section.”
“That’s just because you left your cognac over there,” Colt piped in.
It had suited them, Una noted, to speak and act as though the saucer section still existed. At least Boyce understood the circumstances well enough that he was no longer hounding her to search for Pike. She still intended to do that, of course—if the Rengru would ever let her.
Sorting through the images on the slate, Boyce asked, “How were these scans taken? The force field would block all but visible light.”
“Sam Yamata recorded the transport pattern and dumped it into a file,” Colt said. “Easier than an X-ray.”
“Ingenious,” Boyce said. After a few minutes of study, he looked up. “Well, I can tell you this: it doesn’t eat people.”
Colt looked to Una. “That’s refreshing.”
“I mean I can’t find any trace of a digestive system at all.” He stepped to Una’s side and pointed at the image displayed on the slate. “Look at these complexes here and here. That looks like a thylakoid membrane—but what it’s attached to is completely different.”
“Photosynthesis?”
“Or something like it.”
Una pursed her lips. “What if they harvest energies from the nebula itself?”
Boyce raised an eyebrow. “How would that work?”
“I’m not sure exactly. But there’s obviously background radiation here of a kind that they flourish on.” She stepped closer to the force field. “When we were parked in a cool zone earlier, it seemed downright sleepy. Now that we’re moving through a cloud complex, it’s livened up some.”
Boyce frowned. Una knew he wasn’t one for following lines of conjecture overly far. “Let’s say you’re right,” the doctor said. “That whatever it needs is out there, and neither the hull nor a force field can stop it. We can use a process of elimination on the sensor data to find out what it does like.”
“That would tell us how to keep it alive, certainly.”
“But to what purpose? There are no sensory organs that I can see on this thing at all—except maybe touch, with all of those extrusions on each appendage. I assume you’re looking to communicate with the thing.”
Colt looked over at the Rengru. “We’ve tried talking to it—but I’m not sure it hears, much less understands.”
Una couldn’t accept that beings that had achieved spaceflight had no way of communicating. Might as well have another go, she thought, approaching the cell.
“My name is Una,” she said. “Can you hear me? Do you see that I am trying to communicate?”
The Rengru wandered about, dragging Ensign Zepton’s pants.
“You attacked us,” Una continued. “Can you tell us why?”
Nothing.
“This is insanity,” Boyce said. “You’re not getting any change in behavior at all.”
“There’s already been at least one, Doctor.” Una turned away from the cell. “When we grabbed it, it was actively trying to destroy the ship. Now, it’s inside—and doing nothing.”
“Maybe it doesn’t know where it is,” Colt said. “If it’s never been transported anywhere before.”
“Maybe.”
Staring blankly at the far wall, Una tried to bring her mind to a restful state. Illyrians didn’t sigh and didn’t get frustrated. They focused and solved problems. She was not born one of them, but she had tried to emulate them. There were countless tiny details to consider in any crisis; each one had to be evaluated, prioritized, and filed away so as not to interfere with the others, clouding the thinker’s path. After over a year in the Pergamum, her mind was becoming more like the nebula: strewn with debris, the debris of too many considerations. It was getting more and more difficult not to feel overwhelmed.
That was when Boyce interrupted her thoughts with a surprising bit of nonsense. A detail she would never have noticed—and, as it happened, one that would make all the difference.
48
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardrive Section
Cloud Complex Zedra
“Commander,” Boyce said, “the baby has a banana.”
“What?” Startled, Una turned to see the Rengru back in the middle of the cell, contemplating the yellow fruit in its grasp. “Oh, I didn’t know that was in there.”
“Ensign Zepton likes his bananas,” Colt said. “Probably had it in stasis all year, and brought it out to celebrate getting the warp drive working.” She shook her head. “He won’t like this.”
Una stared at the creature. “Is it me, or is there something off about that?”
<
br /> “Well, that’s not how you eat a banana,” Boyce said. “Those pincers are just poking holes in it. He’s going to make a mess.”
“No,” Una said, squinting. “Computer, reduce room lighting eighty percent.”
When the room dimmed, the others saw what she had seen. “Are—are the spots on the banana glowing?” Colt asked.
Boyce chuckled. “I guess they are. We were just speaking of photosynthesis, weren’t we? Banana spots come from the degradation of chlorophyll. They’re harmless—but they also fluoresce in ultraviolet light.”
“Yeah,” Colt said, “but where is ultraviolet light coming from?”
Una stared. Then insight struck. “The Rengru isn’t just touching with its appendages. It’s seeing.” She took back the slate from Boyce and found the proper image from the earlier transporter scan. “The ‘palms’ of its ‘hands’—each pod breaking down into smaller limbs—they’re bioluminescent. We can’t see the light it’s emitting because we’re human.”
Colt held up her tricorder. “And this device can’t see it because of the force field.”
“But things fluoresce in the visible spectrum,” Boyce said, “which means we can see the spots.” He looked to Una. “Does this mean the Rengru can’t see us?”
“Very possibly.” Una restored the room lighting. “Our audio’s piped into the cell beyond the force field so we can converse with prisoners. The fact that it’s never responded could mean that it can’t hear—but it also just might not know who’s talking. And since it can’t see us out here, we wouldn’t be able to run any of the first-contact visual language protocols we’ve got.” She looked to the guards. “Can we take the UV blocker out of the force field?”
“I don’t know,” one replied. “I don’t think so.”
“We’ve got a ship full of engineers,” Boyce said. “Surely somebody can come up with something.”
“Probably not without deactivating the force field,” Colt replied. “I guess we could beam it someplace else and then back.”
This is too much, Una thought. We’ve been running for months. We have to take a chance sometime.
In a firm voice, she said, “I’d like everyone to step back to the doorway.”
Boyce gawked. “What?”
Colt stared at her, stupefied. “You’re not suggesting letting it out?”
Even the guard who had spoken earlier shook his head. “Commander, that’s not a good idea.”
Una put up her hand. “I know what I’m doing. If I’m right, the Rengru has no context within which it can place us.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Boyce said.
“Enterprise was its target—and those Boundless warriors. I don’t look like either one. There’s a chance if it gets a good look at me, I’ll be no more interesting than Ensign Zepton’s pants.”
“He dragged those across the deck!”
Una fastened a phaser to her belt. “Philip, we’re never going to be able to search for the captain and the others—much less get home—unless we get past the Rengru. Not this one, but the hordes out there. They haven’t given us any peace. Somebody has to take a chance. It’s on me.”
Boyce prepared to object—and then the wind went out of him. “Fine. But get Pitcairn on standby, ready to beam that thing back into space.”
“Done,” she said, picking up another device. “I’ll let it have a look at me—and then run it through the universal translator’s sequences. All the batteries—audio, visual, sensory. Maybe there’s something it responds to.”
Rank having won out, Colt and the guards retreated, with Boyce right behind them. Una stood several meters back from the Rengru. She brought her mind to rest and deactivated the force screen.
The Rengru immediately noticed—and noticed her. For several moments, it remained in position, facelessly facing her.
“My name is Una,” she said, holding the translator in one hand, with her left near to her phaser. “I am a commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise of the United Federation of Planets.”
Several of the Rengru’s limbs lifted from the deck and pointed in her direction, their pincers splayed.
From the doorway behind the guards, Colt reported what her tricorder was seeing. “I can’t believe this, but it just started emitting low-power ultraviolet laser beams at you. From its hands.”
“Echolocation. Lidar—radar with lasers. It’s harmless.” Una brought her free hand away from her phaser and raised it to the air. “I am not your enemy. Do you understand me?”
If the Rengru had coiled its body in an attempt to spring, she did not see it. She only saw it launch itself across the space between them, and the phaser blasts from the doorway ripping through the air. The universal translator clattered away as she lost her footing, knocked backward by a being that was heavier and more energetic than she had imagined.
“Tell them to beam it out!” she heard Boyce shout.
“Don’t shoot!” Colt yelled. “You’ll hit her!”
The Rengru writhed with her on the deck, trying to envelop her with its dozens of limbs. The whole thing was a hand, she realized, with hands at every fingertip. It existed to grasp and to hold—even as the guards and others tried to pry it off her.
“What the hell is keeping Pitcairn?”
“I can’t get a lock!” a voice said—
—then she felt it. A sharp lance at the back of her neck, near the base of her skull. She felt her hair grow wet with blood.
“No!” Colt screamed.
The world swam—and then her whole body sagged against the frame of the Rengru. It had become a second spine, its limbs wrapped around her midsection and growing tighter by the second.
“She’s losing consciousness,” she could hear Boyce say.
Colt, again. “We’ve got to get this thing off her!”
“It’s a dead weight!”
Una didn’t recognize the speaker. She didn’t recognize anything anymore. She felt intoxicated, dizzy, drained—a dozen emotions at once, all connected to fatigue in one way or another. She only wanted to sleep—and she knew she would have her way, perhaps forever.
But not before her eyes opened long enough for her to speak a single word to her companions:
“Wait.”
49
* * *
Combat Module Carrier 539-Aloga
Varadah System
I guess I’m in trouble again.
Connolly felt as if he’d been called into the commandant’s office at the Academy. Kormagan sat high on a platform surrounded by the nearer parts of the Pergamum nebula, or at least that was how the background appeared in Connolly’s interface. He had heard from Baladon of the existence of such a staging area aboard the lead carrier, but he had never been inside. He had no idea what he’d done wrong, but life had lost its ability to surprise him.
“Enter, Bluesub.” Kormagan turned her chair. “Would you like to hear a little of what you’ve done?”
Not really, Connolly thought. But he stared upward and saw a familiar sight.
“The Dandy, a ship of escapees from a penal facility called Thionoga,” Kormagan said. The images shifted to display moments from the Boundless boarding party’s assault. “Desperate characters. They’d booby-trapped an entire wing to explode when our people entered—but you not only disabled the mechanism, you convinced them further resistance was pointless.”
I was scared out of my wits, he did not say.
The picture changed again. “Then there was the ground exfiltration of those short blue things that had set up a colony inside the nebular boundary. They went underground and would have suffocated when their scurry hole collapsed—but you were able to get the troop module’s sensors to figure out where they were in time to reach them all.”
“It’s the actual thing I was trained for,” he said, choking on all the irony that entailed.
The image changed again. “Then another group of prisoners—you people outside the nebula are big on prisons. They were being
transferred by someone called the Enolians. Their guards decided your ship had been hired to set the convicts free—and released poison gas into the detention area.” An image flashed past of an armored Connolly carrying convicts, one over each armored shoulder. “You located and destroyed the gas jets, hauled out half the unconscious on your own, and administered aid aboard the troop module before the exfils even got to Processing.”
“These things are problems?”
Kormagan laughed, and the stars and clouds returned. “Since you started doing exfiltrations, Krall-Three Blue Squad has seen a zero casualty rate for exfils. And the other squads’ rates have gone down to zero, too, due to your example.”
“We’re all competitive. I just suggested something else to compete over.” He began to think this was what he was being called on the carpet for. “Baladon says unless we break a skull now and again he’ll get a bad name, but I just can’t do that.”
“Well, he’s not getting a bad name. In fact, he’s getting a commission. I’m naming him captain of Carrier Urdoh.”
“Captain?”
“Recruit to captain in less than a year. I wouldn’t have believed it either. It turns out that all Baladon needed to be an ‘exemplary pirate,’ as he put it, was a crew that knew what it was doing.”
Connolly nodded. The Boundless as an organization might be many things, mostly bad—but Connolly had to admit that it was an unparalleled engine for recognizing and rewarding merit. Even better than Starfleet, where he had nearly died of boredom in Academy classes he hadn’t really needed, and on officer details that didn’t put his talents fully to use. He knew the reason, of course: the frenetic churn rate of personnel. War was the great organizational accelerator, and constant war was the defining feature of Boundless life.
He wondered if the conflict with the Klingons had changed anything at home.
“There wouldn’t have been an opening on Urdoh,” Kormagan said, “but Gallous is getting past his prime, and they’re trying to launch the Six-Ohs.”
That puzzled Connolly. “I’d heard that new waves never had anything to trade. What would you get for a captain?”
The Enterprise War Page 24
