Pike blinked, and the face returned, unbidden: Vina.
He patted the doctor on the shoulder. “One existential crisis at a time, Doc. I’ve got a war to end.”
69
* * *
K’davu
Kormagan’s colleagues had once thought Starfleet’s transporter to be a fantasy. It was real. She had just watched several of her companions vanish from the bridge of Enterprise when she felt a tingle of energy herself. For an instant, she caught a glimpse of a different room—empty, antiseptic—until things shifted around her again.
K’davu, meanwhile, had been real to the Boundless, even though no living soul had ever visited. It was only when the transporter glow faded that she realized what the real fantasy was: the version of the world they thought they knew.
“Where are the glens?” Barson asked. “Where are the waterfalls?”
Where, indeed? Still unable to move, Kormagan looked in every direction she could—and tried to remember the images she’d been familiar with since childhood. She knew the cities of the Southern Masses looked different for each of the five original Boundless species. The tree-homes of the Jaulawa. The coral castles of the undersea Taaya. The manicured gardens of her own people, the sun-loving Phannak.
Standing on one of the middle terraces of an escarpment, she looked down into what had apparently once been a wide river valley. Now it was a canyon-laced desert, populated by immense towering shapes of bone. Enormous ribbed shells half a kilometer high and several kilometers long lay partially buried in the sand, resembling the bloated bodies of giant slugs. The structures stretched across the former floodplain, climbing hills and partially disappearing in gullies.
And scurrying betwixt and between: Rengru. Seeing them, she realized the edifices resembled gargantuan versions of their bodies—only with the limbs interlocking. Are these their temples, their hives?
“This is not K’davu,” declared Quadeo. “These are the abattoirs of the enemy. Pike is their agent!”
Kormagan had not seen the Starfleet captain on the terrace—until now. He materialized in front of her, still wearing Spock’s battlesuit. The miscreation he called Una arrived separately and approached to greet him. She looked different: more of the Rengru’s limbs wrapped around her, shielding her human frame from the sun.
“Enterprise, we’re all down,” Pike said. Kormagan heard those words—but not the response, as his headgear was deployed. “Pitcairn says he’s going to take the transporters on both halves of the ships offline for a few minutes,” he said aloud. “All the radiation out here’s giving the phase transition coils a stomachache.” He looked to his companion. “But we should be able to entertain ourselves. It’s your show, Number One.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Una nodded to him—and at the same time, the part of the Rengru crowning her head appeared to bow as well.
Pike pointed at it. “Should I call him One-and-a-Half?”
“It actually doesn’t have a gender—or a name. In a sense, all the Rengru in the area are with me, in gestalt. I must say the voices have gotten a lot louder here.”
“No surprise.”
Kormagan couldn’t understand Pike at all. “If you value your officer’s life, you should kill them both. She has become a monstrosity!”
“Pipe down.” Joined by Connolly and the other rescued Starfleet crew, Pike turned to address the assembled Boundless on the terrace. “Our engineers have sent commands to your battlesuits,” he said, “disabling your jetpacks and all weaponry. We’re not going to walk you around like puppets, but we will if we have to. And believe me, I won’t feel at all guilty.”
He gestured—and Kormagan found herself able to move her limbs for the first time in hours. Finally able to turn, she saw that the bluff rose behind her, with dark openings here and there on the higher levels—but there was no getting up there without her jetpack.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Pike said. “Forget it.”
Flexing her tensed muscles, she turned to face him. “Why do you remain hostile to us? You have the upper hand. Pettiness soils your victory.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
“We’re an honorable people, operating in a dire circumstance.”
“Circumstances that you extend to plenty of others who just happen by.” Pike’s tone was full of disdain. “We’ve got people in our part of the galaxy who’ll run you over to succeed in their crazy quests. We’ve had about enough of them too.”
“It was you who came to this nebula,” Kormagan said.
“That doesn’t mean we’re volunteering for your cockamamie—”
“Christopher,” Una said, interrupting his response. “This is not productive.”
Pike went silent for a few moments before asking something of his colleagues. “Godwin, how’s the weather?”
“Improving quickly,” Godwin said, holding some kind of instrument in her gloved hand. “That radiation shower is ending fast. We should be able to unbutton soon.”
“What’s that mean?” Pike asked.
“Stow headgear,” Connolly replied.
“Ah. It’s my first walking arsenal.” As Connolly and the other scientists set up their equipment, Pike strolled the wide ledge. “Una tells me this is K’davu,” he said to the Boundless. “Look familiar to any of you?”
“It does not,” Kormagan said. “We know the surface of K’davu from images in our database. This place looks nothing like any of them.”
“You saw it on approach. You all thought it was K’davu then.”
“That was an assumption. We know our world sits in a safe harbor within the nebula—”
“Like you saw.”
“—enshrouded by clouds, preventing transmissions. Our probes have never penetrated them. The Nest we passed is actually one of many Rengru space structures covering the approaches to the harbor. We use the singular because no Boundless has ever lived to see more than one and tell the story.”
She gestured across the blighted landscape. “I thought, judging by the landforms we saw from orbit, this might be the fertile valley of Drissh. It’s clearly not that.” Kormagan shook her head. “I don’t understand why the Rengru would protect this world if it were not K’davu.”
“It is K’davu!” Barson yelled.
Kormagan looked back at the old wavemaster. “What?”
“Don’t you all get it?” He walked before the others and gestured to the enormous structures, lesions on the land. “This must be K’davu. That is what you have brought us here to see, isn’t it, Pike? The Rengru have deformed this world, remaking it in their own beastly images.”
“No,” Quadeo said. “I refuse. This is a twin planet, one of the other worlds in the harbor. He wants to fool us into thinking our cause is lost!”
“I told you I was tired of quests,” Pike said. “If I can actually resolve one, I’ll do it.” He gestured to Una. “Or rather, she’ll do it. Are you ready?”
“I am,” Una said. “We are.”
She walked down the rise to the next level. Reaching a plateau, she stood alone, arms and Rengru limbs raised. Seconds later, many of the Rengru that had been wandering about below bolted up the ridge toward her.
“Move, fool!” Kormagan said, reaching for a weapon that was not there. “You’ll be killed!”
But Una was not killed. The herd slowed as it approached her. Joining her on the terrace, the Rengru circled about the human, occasionally touching tendrils with the creature connected to her.
Una looked out on her growing herd—and faced the Boundless. “They say it is time. And they say there is someone to see you.”
As if in response to her words, the ground quaked. Across the lands visible from the terrace, one giant shell after another ruptured down the middle, yawning open. Some of the structures released bursts of gas, which curled up into the air as clouds.
Other shells, it could now be seen, were composed of giant interlocking ribs. They curled backward until they we
re entirely vertical; then the ribs descended into the ground, revealing new landscapes previously hidden within the shells. Geysers erupted—and resolved into fountains, their gushing water flowing into the former river basin through orderly canals.
It took mere minutes for a new world to take shape. Yellow here, orange there, green everywhere: the arbors of the Jaulawa, the pinnacles of the Vis-kals.
And, yes, the gardens of Kormagan’s kind.
“They’re cocoons,” Pike said. “For whole civilizations. We’ve spotted thousands of these things, spread all across the planet. They’re in the oceans too.”
“The solar maximum cycle here is measured in days,” Una said, “and changing all the time. The desolation you saw before is what this world would look like—without intervention.” She turned to watch as the Rengru retreated from her side, dashing off into the newly revealed lands.
Kormagan looked back at her companions. They had seen it too—and were as thoroughly agog as she was.
Shaking, Gavlor pointed. “There.”
Half-orbs within many of the settings yawned open, revealing first individuals, then multitudes. People, spreading outward to inhabit the new landscape. Kormagan increased her interface’s magnification, trying to see what they looked like. Her eyes settled on a single figure stepping onto a hexagonal surface. It floated into the air, carrying the rider aloft—and was soon joined by others, rising from other places. One even rose, dripping, from the new stream.
Una climbed back up to Kormagan’s level and stood in wait for the platforms. The five shapes levitated to a stop on the patch behind her. The bipedal riders who dismounted looked like her, only different: more fully enshrouded by the Rengru arms, to the point where their faces were almost completely covered. Kormagan was mystified—
—and baffled further when one of them spoke in the language of her people. “It is safe, now. Show yourselves, those that may.”
Pike looked to Godwin, who consulted her instrument and gave a hand signal. In response, the captain stowed his headgear. After testing the air, he nodded to his companions and to the Boundless. “Go ahead.”
Kormagan was too fascinated to object. After her headgear withdrew into her armor, she took a deep breath. It nearly intoxicated her: the air of a world she had never known.
No. A homeworld. “This is K’davu,” she said.
“It is,” said the arrival that had addressed them. “I was told true. I have waited so long—and you have come at last.” Rengru limbs peeled back, revealing the face of another of Kormagan’s kind. “My name is Eudah.”
70
* * *
K’davu
Una had planned for this moment for weeks. It had been the goal ever since her joining with the Rengru, since coming to understand what they were, and what they wanted. There was only one way, she had concluded, that the Boundless would ever accept what she had learned.
They had to be shown.
“The Rengru cannot communicate normally with others not of their kind,” she said. “It requires a physical union. They told me of what existed back here on K’davu, and how it had changed. When Lieutenant Connolly told me of your message from Eudah, Wavemaster Kormagan, I thought it was only right that the Rengru ask her to attend.”
Kormagan gawked at Eudah—and the other four riders, all Rengru-joined, each representing one of the five founding races of the Boundless. It could not be that Eudah, not possibly. But she had to find out. She spoke tentatively, voice quavering. “Thank you for what you are doing, daughter. The Rengru are destroying our lives.”
“Your duty honors all of us,” replied Eudah. She smiled. “I wrote those words. Long ago, to Virell, my beloved daughter, as she went off to space.”
Kormagan fell to her knees. “Greatmother?”
Eudah stepped forward and touched Kormagan’s forehead. “I see your face, and I see my child, from long ago.”
Kormagan looked up, eyes tearing. “How is it possible? You—”
“Should be dead by now. It could be said of this entire planet.” Eudah turned to look out at the alluvial plain. “After the First Wave left K’davu, the Rengru grew ever more frantic, rushing our continents. They knew something we did not: that our star above was about to enter a period of greater, more frequent radioactive emissions, intense even for this nebula. K’davu would have been completely cleansed of life—had it not been for the Rengru.”
“This has happened before,” said one of her companions, whose golden features were vaguely avian. “Many times, long before our recorded history. Our historians learn more about those times every day. The Rengru are driven now, as they were then, to find us when they know the time is coming—and to protect us.”
“Nonsense,” Quadeo snarled. One of the Vis-kal species, the wavemaster had vaguely lupine features, Una thought—and a temper. “Why would the Rengru do anything for us? What do they get out of it?”
“Your survival,” Una replied. “That is all they want. To help their neighbors in need.”
“It’s coadaptation,” Ghalka said, mesmerized. “Two species adapting, cooperatively, to deal with a change in the environment.” She looked to Eudah. “I’ve never seen it happen in so short a time frame. How long has the solar cycle been hostile to life?”
“Hundreds of years. I was here then. Our southern peoples came together as one to battle the Rengru, not knowing what they intended. When they did bond with individuals,” she said, clearly horrified, “we killed them before they could communicate. It takes months—sometimes much longer—for the bond to take hold. Few have minds organized well enough to adapt quickly.”
Pike chuckled. “They’d never met anyone who grew up with the Illyrians.”
Una moved past the praise. “It was an accident that they tried to bond with me at all. I have two legs. They just didn’t know the difference.”
Eudah went on. “After the space travelers departed, our defenses fell at last. They charged—and bonded with us. Enshrouding us, protecting us. Not in time to save all from the sun, but many. They have spent the last decades helping us rebuild our world so we can live on it.”
One of Eudah’s other escorts gestured to the Boundless battlesuits. “The Rengru are our own armor against death. When the rays are bad, they protect us doubly, with the structures you saw before.”
“And the joining offers other benefits,” Eudah said, “such as long life. But I must say I feared I would never see the day when our children returned.” She reached for Kormagan with one of her Rengru limbs.
Kormagan swatted it away. “No.”
She got to her feet. “I am not Virell. We are not the First Wave! Five hundred and more have come since, all trying to get back to you. All opposed by the Rengru!”
“Whom you were organized to fight,” Una said, thinking it was her responsibility to speak for them. “The Rengru don’t recognize much nuance on their own. There are only bipedal beings to be saved—and bipedal beings trying to stop them. Their initial fear had been that you would disrupt their work to save those left on K’davu. Once you had killed enough of them, they began building defenses—and extending their boundaries ever farther beyond K’davu. They constantly tried to bond with one of you, to communicate—”
“But you kept killing anyone that they ‘compromised,’ ” Connolly said.
Kormagan looked sharply at him. “You were with us.”
“Only to keep you from hurting people. And then to help my own.”
“Same difference.” Kormagan turned her wrath back on the natives. “The Rengru have technology. Why did you not have them send us a message?”
“Messages, here?” Pike asked. “You know how well they travel in this nebula.”
“And the Rengru would never understand the mission,” Una added. “They communicate like everyone else does in the Pergamum—locally. The will, the drive to transmit something like that would never have made it far. They had to find an agent.”
Kormagan wasn’t
accepting it. She railed at Eudah. “Why didn’t one of you make the trip yourself? You could have found your daughter—before she gave her life in your name.”
Eudah gasped. “Did she? I had hoped—”
“She was one of the first to fall. She inspired all of us!”
“I—” Eudah’s words caught in her throat. “I would have left if I could. But the Rengru joining causes biological changes—changes that mount over a long term, binding us to this place. We could never survive parting from this world.”
“The Federation has medical experts,” Pike volunteered. “We could help with that.”
“Someone would have to ask. We are happy here.” Eudah nodded to her companions. “Our communion with the Rengru has enriched all our lives. No one has ever asked to be freed.”
“Of course not!” Quadeo grew enraged. “Who would, with eternal life on the line?” She faced Eudah. “So you left us out there to die, trying to save you from them!” She pointed to the Rengru crowning Eudah. “This has all been a mistake. It’s all been for nothing!”
“Not for nothing,” Eudah said, visibly unnerved by the conflict. “Yes, the war is a mistake—but it can end now. And you can all come home, and live with your people again!”
“Join you?” Quadeo spat. “Not if it means becoming like you. I would never accept existence in such a disgusting form!”
“You could not live here otherwise,” one of Eudah’s companions said. “Not unless you remained in your armor during the storms. Could you live like that?”
Connolly laughed. “They’ve done it for decades.”
“Silence,” Kormagan said, clearly fraught. “We will decide this ourselves!”
In unison, Pike and Una nodded to Connolly. This was a time to stand back. A family matter.
The Enterprise War Page 33
