Orion's Hounds

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Deanna’s wanderings brought her to a case in point: the mess hall. Glancing inside through the windows inset in the doors, she resisted an urge to recoil at the sight within: the predators were feeding. It was hard enough for the members of a single species to agree on what constituted appealing cuisine and acceptable table manners, let alone the members of multiple species. But this was particularly so when several of those species were obligate carnivores.

  In the first weeks of Titan’s mission, Dr. Ree, the ship’s dinosaurlike Pahkwa-thanh chief medical officer, had asserted his predatory identity by putting on flamboyant public displays of his rather savage approach to ingesting large, bloody chunks of raw replicated meat (and sometimes real raw meat, courtesy of the Klingons whose vessels had accompanied Titan on the Romulan mission). It was a bold gesture of the kind Deanna would expect from a predator, a forthright assertion: This is what I am, and if you wish to accept me you must adapt to it. It was also typical of the doctor’s cutting sense of humor, the kind of wit that pulled no punches and shocked people for their own edification. And at first it had just been accepted as one person’s eccentricity—although Deanna had noticed that many in the crew took careful note of Ree’s routine and sought to schedule their dining at different times.

  But then the ship’s other predatory crewmembers, including the Caitian lieutenant Rriarr, the Betelgeusian ensign Kuu’iut, the S’ti’ach counselor Huilan, and the Chelon biologist Kekil, had begun to join Ree, making something of a ritual out of it, and a very messy one at that. Among most predatory species it was not only socially acceptable but virtually obligatory to play with one’s food; not only was there the instinct to play as practice for the real thing, but the metabolism of a hunter was geared toward a period of intense physical activity prior to feeding. (Back on the Enterprise, Data had discovered that playing with his cat Spot before dinnertime often improved her appetite. Worf, who had inherited Spot after Data’s death, had adopted the same practice when Deanna had mentioned it to him. Worf had been reluctant to take the cat at first, since Klingons as a rule were not fond of cute, furry things; but lately he seemed to have changed his tune. “The cat’s soft appearance is deceptive,” Worf had told her in a recent letter. “Spot is in fact fierce, cunning, uncompromising, and supremely self-assured. What she wants, she demands, or simply takes. She has the heart of a warrior,” he had concluded—high praise indeed from him.) The predators’ dining ritual gave literal meaning to the term “mess hall,” and made many other crew members increasingly uncomfortable—particularly those from herbivorous species, some of whom saw it as a deliberate act of intimidation.

  Huilan himself, one of Deanna’s assistant counselors, had worked out a solution, rearranging shifts so that the predators would have their mealtime at the quietest part of the night shift, and have the mess mostly to themselves. It had alleviated the problem, but Deanna wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. It seemed too much like the kind of “good fences make good neighbors” policy that this ship and crew were intended to challenge. But there were practical reasons for it, and at least it was an acceptable stopgap until something better came along.

  Deanna felt she should stop in for a few minutes and say hello—watch them eat, maybe even try joining in as Will had once or twice. It was something she’d have to do if she wanted to overcome her own revulsion at the sight, and come closer to truly connecting with these crewmates of hers. Yet when she saw them tossing bloody chunks of meat and bone at each other, wrestling them into imagined submission and tearing into them with their fangs and beaks and tusks, it was all she could do not to become physically ill. In the wake of her nightmare, the sight seemed to inspire in her a sense of identification with the prey, a visceral urge to flee and hide. Letting out a shudder, Deanna decided that bonding red in tooth and claw could wait for another time, and briskly strode away. Maybe she was being a bit of a hypocrite, but she was off duty and it was the middle of the night, so that was her prerogative. Besides, she thought, the bloodstains would never come out of this wrap.

  She wandered the corridors aimlessly for a time, greeting crew members when they went by but not seeking conversation. There were more people out than she was used to seeing on a starship’s “night” shift; but then, there was a greater range of diurnal cycles represented among the crew. Some species slept only every few standard days; aquatics like Ensign Lavena slept infrequently, generally with only half the brain asleep at a time; and several of the predators were adapted for short-burst activity and needed extended sleep periods. It had been a challenge reconciling duty cycles.

  From around an intersection just ahead, coincidentally enough, Deanna heard the distinctive gurgle of water draining from the entrance lock to Lavena’s water-filled quarters. Rounding the intersection, she was surprised to see, not the Pacifican flight controller, but Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii, Titan’s designer, and now her chief engineer following the death of Nidani Ledrah during the Romulan affair. The Efrosian was wearing a robe and toweling off his long, white, dripping-wet hair and mustache, and Deanna realized he must have been engaged in an affair of another sort. She would have turned away and left him his privacy, but he spotted her and gave a wide, unabashed smile. “Counselor Troi, what a welcome surprise to see you!”

  “Doctor,” she replied, keeping her tone casual.

  “I hope you’ll pardon my appearance. Ensign Lavena and I were having the most intriguing…discussions. Selkies have such lovely speech, don’t you think? So musical, so nuanced, much like Efrosian languages. You can’t truly appreciate it out of the water.”

  “Yes, so I’ve heard.” She was not that surprised to see him emerging from a female crew member’s quarters; Efrosian sexual ethics did not generally include the concept of monogamy, and he was an attractive, charismatic individual. She was sure that Lavena was not the first to reciprocate his wide-ranging interest in the ship’s female crew members. But she was gratified that Ra-Havreii had demonstrated a tendency to be discreet about his liaisons; if she wished to satisfy her curiosity about how an air-breather could engage in sexual relations with the water-breathing ensign, she could always ask Will. (Well, that wasn’t quite right; Lavena had been in the amphibious phase of her life cycle when Will had known her nearly two decades ago. In a sense, Will had been in a different life stage then as well, and today he was more uneasy about the tryst than Deanna was.) That aspect of Ra-Havreii’s behavior, at least, was not typical of Efrosians; a people with an extensive oral tradition, they tended not to consider an event fully real until they’d spoken of it to someone else. Ra-Havreii was evidently willing to accommodate more conventional mores in that respect if not in others. Though she had no doubt he kept a detailed audio journal of his encounters.

  But that was not something she wished to dwell on. “Actually I’m glad I caught you,” she said. “I’d been hoping we could schedule a talk in the near future.”

  He spread his hands wide. “I’m at your disposal, Counselor. If you’d like to accompany me back to my quarters, then once I get changed I can offer you a drink and we can discuss whatever you like.”

  “That’s very gracious, Doctor, but I was thinking of a discussion along more formal lines.”

  Ra-Havreii grimaced, without losing his good humor. “In your office, no doubt. I saw quite enough of counselors’ offices following the Luna incident, thank you. They’re all so calculatedly nonthreatening, so self-conscious in their attempts to put one at ease that they become oppressive.” Ra-Havreii, Deanna knew, had blamed himself for some time after the fatal accident aboard his prototype ship. For a time she had been concerned that Ledrah’s death from an engine-room explosion would have reignited the doctor’s guilt, but instead he seemed to have handled it constructively, embracing his new post as an opportunity to make amends for his past and move forward with his life. The problem now was that it wasn’t the only thing he was interested in embracing. “If you wish to discuss my personal life, where better than in my personal abode
, where I can truly feel at ease?” he asked in a reasonable yet jaunty tone. “And where I will do my very best to make you feel equally at ease.”

  Deanna didn’t need her empathy to sense the seductive undercurrent in his words. “Doctor, you know perfectly well that I’m a married woman.”

  “A condition which the Betazoids I’ve known have been rather flexible about.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them. And you’re not fooling me, you know.”

  “Ahh, as perceptive as you are beautiful. What am I not fooling you about, my dear?”

  “Efrosian or not, you know better than to seriously try to seduce the wife of your own very human captain. You’re only trying to distract me.”

  “Perhaps I’m only trying to distract myself. Even without serious intent, flirtation with a lovely, intelligent lady is a worthy entertainment in its own right.”

  “If you say so,” she told him. “But taken to excess, or where it’s unwelcome, it can be disruptive. Lately your flirtations have been growing more frequent, and there have been one or two complaints. From Ensign Panyarachun, for example. She has to work with you every day, and she’s told you more than once that she finds your attentions distracting.”

  “Ahh, but would she be so distracted by them if she weren’t intrigued? I’ve made it clear there’s no pressure on her to respond. I’m simply…expressing my admiration.”

  “But she’d like to be admired for more than just her looks.”

  “And she is! I find her skills to be exemplary. I wouldn’t be so intrigued with her otherwise. If I only wanted a beautiful face and body, the holodeck is at my disposal.”

  “Then if you respect her mind, Doctor, you should respect her wishes as well, and keep your relationship strictly professional.”

  “As you do with the captain?” At her glare, he said, “I meant no disrespect, dear Counselor—I simply have trouble determining where you think the line should be drawn. It’s a strange way of thinking to me. Where I come from, it’s considered somewhat rude not to flirt with someone of your preferred sex. And the concept of a professional relationship being asexual by definition…well, back home we feel very differently. Sex among colleagues is encouraged; it’s an excellent way to learn to respect each other’s needs and work together for mutual gain.”

  “It’s different for humans like Tasanee Panyarachun. Surely you’ve been in Starfleet long enough to know that.”

  “Long enough to find that the lines are more ambiguous than is generally claimed. Besides, isn’t this ship all about encouraging cultural exchange, getting past the dominance of human ways of doing things? Who’s to say my way isn’t worth trying, hmm?” he asked with an impish leer. “It seems to work well enough on the command level.”

  “Maybe your way would be worth trying, if everyone agreed to it. But for now, just leave the ensign alone.”

  “All right,” he agreed grudgingly, “but I guarantee you she’ll regret it.” He furrowed his snowy brows. “On the other hand, maybe there’s something to be said for playing hard to get. It might get her to chase me. And nobody could object to that, could they?”

  He stopped at a doorway, which slid open on his approach. “Well. Here we are at my quarters. So either we can end this fascinating discussion on coworker sexual relations, or you can come in so we can explore the issue in greater depth.”

  “In that case, Doctor, I’ll leave you alone with your thoughts.”

  He clasped her hand in a gentlemanly manner. “Rest assured, my dear, they will be mainly of you.”

  She smirked. “So long as they’re about what I said, not what I’m wearing.”

  “I daresay clothing will not enter into them at all.”

  Glaring at him, she extracted her hand from his. “Good night, Doctor,” she said, and strode away. Once she heard the door slide closed behind her, she dropped the stern act and let out a chuckle. She’d actually found his flirtations rather amusing—purely as entertainment for their own sake, as he’d said—but she hadn’t wished to encourage him.

  The chuckle turned into a long, massive yawn, and Deanna decided it was time to get back to bed with Will. I think I’ll file this conversation under doctor-patient confidentiality, she said to herself. Will might be very tolerant of cultural differences, but there were limits.

  And this was supposed to be a quiet, late-night stroll, she thought. Serving on this ship is going to be quite an adventure.

  Chapter Two

  STARDATE 57146.4

  Melora Pazlar had decided that the stellar cartography lab was her favorite part of the ship. There was no other place on Titan where she could feel so free. True, in the privacy of her quarters the Elaysian lieutenant could escape the ship’s oppressive gravity, shed her motor-assist armature and cane, and drift in the cozy few centigees of her homeworld. But that was a small, enclosed space, comfortably vertical but without the airy openness of home. She’d decorated it with crystal sculptures evoking Gemworld’s lapidary spires, but that didn’t diminish her awareness of the walls, or of the crushing weight beyond them.

  In stellar cartography, though, she routinely left the gravity off completely, the better to soar among the simulated stars. In this holographic realm, the walls and the ship could be completely forgotten, and Melora could drift unencumbered through the heavens, dancing gavottes with planets, bathing in nebular mist, cradling newborn T Tauri stars in her hands, communing with the eloquent silence of space.

  Except at times like now. “ ‘Gum,’ ” said Kenneth Norellis, breaking her train of thought. “What kind of name for a nebula is ‘Gum’?”

  Melora sighed and threw a look at the boyish astrobiologist, who stood on the control platform with the Irriol cadet Orilly Malar, both held there by a gravity field about twenty percent of standard. At first, the whole holotank had been routinely kept in freefall for Melora’s benefit—except for that two-week stretch when Admiral Akaar had taken it over as a command post prior to the Romulan negotiations—but some crew members had found it difficult to adjust to the free-fall environment, so this refinement had been added. It took advantage of the fact that Starfleet gravity stators emitted virtual gravitons which could be calibrated to decay at short distances, so that starships’ internal gravity fields would not disrupt their warp-field geometry. That principle had already enabled her to soar free here or in her quarters unaffected by the gravity from the decks below; it had been simply enough to tweak it so she could do so unaffected by the balcony’s local field. “It’s named after the human who discovered it. It’s just a name, like any other.”

  “Yeah, but…‘Gum.’ It’s kind of an unimpressive name for something so, so huge.”

  Melora figured she could see his point. The Gum Nebula was one of the largest astronomical landmarks in the Orion Arm. It was a gigantic supernova remnant, a shock front from the death of a star over a million years in the past. It was now over a thousand light-years across and expanding, highly attenuated but still impressive in scale. The volume inside it was large enough to hold the entire Federation and its neighbors with room to spare—and almost all of it was terra incognita. Its nearer reaches had been ventured into by the Catullans and the Klingons, and impinged on by earlier Starfleet vessels on Beta Quadrant surveys, such as Excelsior and Olympia. But the majority of this vast bubble of space (she’d heard some crew members joking that it should be the “Bubblegum Nebula,” though she’d needed the reference explained) had never been systematically explored—until now. Titan’s mission was an open-ended survey of the region within the Gum Nebula—or rather, the coreward half, with her sister ship Ganymede taking the rimward half. The ship was now several dozen parsecs past its edge, and the holotank displayed the surrounding space from that vantage point, so that the faint wisps of the Gum Nebula, enhanced for the display, surrounded them in all directions.

  Melora had trouble seeing why this region was still uncharted (at close range, that is, rather than telescopically), since it was an astrophy
sicist’s dream. A lively, turbulent region of active star formation, it encompassed numerous lesser supernova remnants, stellar nurseries, HII regions, OB-star associations, cometary globules, the whole celestial bestiary. At its heart was the Vela OB2 Association, one of the biggest, liveliest star-formation zones in the Orion Arm, and the source of the energy which excited the Gum Nebula’s hydrogen into luminescence, like the candle inside a Japanese paper lantern. Though she supposed that might make it a bit less of a priority for Starfleet, which was generally more interested in seeking out new life and new civilizations. Star-formation zones were extremely turbulent; the birth processes of stars—and the death throes of the short-lived, supermassive stars that died before they could travel very far from their birthplaces—gave off intense radiation, interstellar-medium shock waves, and subspace disruptions, all of which could prevent habitable planets from forming in the first place or wipe out those nearby biospheres that did happen to form.

  Of course, if there was one thing two centuries of Starfleet exploration had proven beyond a doubt, it was that life always proved tougher and more resourceful than science generally supposed, and cropped up in the most unexpected places. Besides, the volume inside the Gum Nebula was immense; even with all those star-formation zones, there was still plenty of room for more hospitable planets. Plus there was a better-than-even chance that exotic life-forms would be found on planets bathed in radiation and racked by cosmic turbulence, employing weird and wonderful strategies to survive. That was why Norellis was here, accompanied by Cadet Orilly, who majored in exobiology. Their assignment was to identify likely places to search for life, and hopefully some less likely but more interesting ones as well.