Текст книги "Orion's Hounds "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

He thrust his head forward further into Riker’s face, puffing out his feathers. “But if you cannot help us restore the balance, then there will be no purpose to anything anymore and I will kill you simply because you deserve it.”

Chapter Ten

VOMNIN SPACE STATION UDONOK, STARDATE 57188.5

The young Fethet was staring at Deanna again with hunger in his eyes. She couldn’t clearly sense whether that hunger was sexual or literal, and didn’t know which prospect would trouble her less.

The battle against the cosmozoans made strange bed-fellows, it seemed, but everyone did their part. The Fethetrit—massive red-furred bipeds with bear-wolf features, Ferengi-like ears, and vicious, hooked claws extending from their knuckles—were a race of warriors and conquerors, or so they had told her incessantly over the past two days; but here and now their task was to aid with the Shalra refugees. It was no doubt something they had done on numerous other occasions, and knew their part in quite well, but still they found it necessary to bluster and complain about how far beneath them it was. The other races in the alliance just indulged them and didn’t talk back, and Deanna had opted to follow their lead.

After all, there were more important uses of her flagging energy. Thousands of refugees still needed processing, still waited for places to be found for them to sleep. There was no question that a nomadic society had an edge when it came to battling spacegoing behemoths, but when it came to finding new homes for tens of thousands of refugees, their abilities were somewhat more limited. Will had readily volunteered Titan’s crew and and resources to assist in the effort, only to be told by Qui’hibra that they would have been impressed into helping anyway.

But the Pa’haquel and Shizadam supervisors were driving the crew extremely hard, and Deanna could sense that although necessity demanded no less, many of them saw it as punishment. Word had gotten out that Titan’s people were responsible for the star-jellies’ newfound ability to fight back, and although the supervisors and guards nominally protected them from retaliation, some were not as conscientious as they should be. A number of Titancrew members had needed Dr. Ree’s care after sustaining various “accidents.” Such incidents had diminished, though, after one attack had been attempted in Ree’s presence and the doctor had summarily bitten the Pa’haquel attacker’s forearm off. (When Riker had questioned his tactics, Ree had stated that he was simply doing what was necessary to safeguard the health of his crew—and besides, he already had the attacker down in sickbay with the limb being reattached. Most of the time, Ree was gentle as a lamb with his fellow crew members, but lately he had shown himself to be somewhat ruthless toward those who threatened them—first Tuvok, now this Pa’haquel. But in both cases he had hastened to repair the damage he’d inflicted. Troi was starting to wonder if he interpreted the Hippocratic Oath to mean “First, do no permanentharm.”)

Still, Deanna was grateful that Oderi seemed to have taken her under her wing. The Rianconi was not an intimidating presence by any means; she was a dainty humanoid with pale lavender fur atop her head, down her back and along the outsides of her arms and legs, and like most of her people, she wore nothing but a thong, footwear and a few equipment-bearing arm and leg bands. But she was a calming presence nonetheless. The Rianconi, a quiet, nonconfrontational race of herbivores, seemed an odd member of this community of hunters, but they had evidently made themselves indispensable. They tended to the needs of the other species in many ways, including medical and psychological treatment, food and recreation services, and even sexual services, which they considered an integral part of health care. (“A most enlightened people,” Ra-Havreii had predictably said upon learning of this.)

“We have traveled with the Pa’haquel for millennia,” Oderi had told her when Deanna had first asked about her people, during brief breaks in the refugee work. “Our world was near another major starbirth zone, the one to rimward of here. It was a place of glories, with great luminous nebulae whose like is unmatched in all the Arm.”

Deanna had recognized it from her description. “We call it the Orion Association. I’ve been there myself once—the near end, though, a star called Mintaka, only partway to the great nebulae. But you’re right, it is a magnificent place, so bright and beautiful that my father’s people named this whole arm of the galaxy after it. It’s very far from our home space, even farther than we are now, but we found it irresistible to travel to.”

“You are fortunate, then,” Oderi sighed. “To my people it is a memory only.”

“Is that where the Pa’haquel and the skymounts are originally from?”

“The Pa’haquel, yes. I cannot say about the skymounts. But when our world was destroyed by starbeasts, the Pa’haquel saved many of us. We were frightened of them at first, as they are predators, and at first they saw us as a burden. They hunted alone then, and only wished to hunt, not to tend to the needs of the helpless. They spoke of abandoning us on another planet—but once we knew that planets could be destroyed, we had no wish to be left on one. So we chose to be helpful rather than helpless.”

“Why did you migrate from Orion to here?” Deanna had asked. “My people have found few starbeasts there. Did the Pa’haquel wipe them out?”

“No, but we harried them from it, drove them to seek other feeding grounds. We followed their migration for hundreds of generations, and in time they led us here, where we found another hunting ground as rich as the one we had first known.”

In modern times, the Pa’haquel alliance had clearly developed a more systematic and charitable approach to dealing with refugees, and Deanna wondered how much the Rianconi had had to do with that. There were certainly other voices in the alliance, but each species seemed to have its favored niche. The Pa’haquel and Fethetrit were the hunters and fighters. The Vomnin—long-armed, knuckle-walking quasihumanoids with bronze skin and wide, flat faces—were the scientists and engineers. The Shizadam—crocodile-scaled centauroids with small, weak forearms—were the bureaucrats and record-keepers. There was no strict species segregation, and these rules had exceptions, but they were few. The Rianconi, though, were the oldest of the Pa’haquel’s current allies, and those most committed to the alliance. They were never found in any role save the support and care of others, but Deanna suspected they had managed to wield considerable influence in their unassuming way.

Deanna feared, though, that the newest refugees would not be as successful at finding a place in the alliance. The Shalra were essentially large gastropods with long, ridged shells. Emerging from the front of each was a flower of four tentacular arms and four cabochon eyes around a four-beaked mouth. They were a people with minimal technology, no scientific knowledge and little physical prowess. Their culture consisted largely of intricate songs, linguistic experimentation, and abstract mathematical games, beautiful to hear and intrigung to Deanna as a student of alien cultures, but useless to the alliance. The consensus, Oderi had told her, was that there was nothing they could contribute to the Hunt. Most likely the Vomnin would find a place to settle them on one of their colony worlds. Unlike most of the alliance members, the Vomnin were not nomads or refugees, but an independent, multiworld civilization which had chosen to ally with the hunters against the cosmozoan threat.

But if nothing else, Deanna thought, the Shalra had demonstrated great resilience and adaptability. Certainly they were devastated by the loss of their world; even though they had known little of the world beyond their local bounds, they had still lost everything they had known, and many had lost family and friends. They were grieving as much as any being in similar circumstances. But the strangeness of their new environment did not seem to add unduly to their psychological burden. Two days ago they had not known of other worlds, had not even known the extent and nature of their own. By conventional Prime-Directive wisdom, they should have been so culture-shocked as to have been thrown into collective catatonia, if not racial suicide. But the Shalra were forcing Deanna to question that conventional wisdom, and her own kneejerk acceptance of it in the past. True, they had believed they lived in a world of magic and divine mysteries, but if anything that had made it easierfor them to accept the existence of aliens and other worlds. To them, most of the world was already an unknown, a realm beyond their comprehension where new discoveries could lurk over every hill. So accepting new wonders such as starships and aliens was relatively easy for them. Perhaps young societies, like young people, were better able to adapt to new ideas because they had not yet grown complacent in the conceit that they understood the world.

True, the Shalra were still inclined to see technology as magic and the aliens as supernatural beings; but the Pa’haquel and their allies made no attempt to persuade them otherwise, merely letting them define things however they wished. “Is it right to let them think of you as gods?” Deanna had asked Oderi.

“If that is what makes them comfortable, why not?” the Rianconi had answered. “Should it not be up to them to decide how to fit us into their worldview? If they call us deities, it is because deities are something they understand and know how to cope with. It gives them the power to manage contact with us, to define it in their own terms, rather than being forced to accept our definitions of ourselves, based on concepts they have no idea how to manage.”

“But if they believe you’re gods, it gives you the power to dominate them.”

Oderi had smiled. “I have found that most beings get upset when their gods do not do what is expected of them. And when that happens, they tend to overthrow them as false gods. Believe me, the alliance has learned better than to try it.” Deanna had reflected on what had happened to James Cook in Hawaii—and what had almost happened to James Kirk on Miramanee’s World—and realized the Rianconi had a point. Perhaps the Prime Directive was as much about protecting the explorer as the natives. And perhaps its assumptions about the fragility of pre-warp cultures were somewhat condescending.

Now, Deanna studied the flowerlike faces of the Shalra who waited in line for her handouts of food, breathed in the heady aroma of their grief, anxiety and determination to survive, and reflected that if Starfleet had been in charge and had followed the letter of the Prime Directive, all of them would be dead now, along with their whole beautiful, intangible culture. But on the other hand, Will’s refusal to abandon the star-jellies to their fate may have placed countless more worlds in jeopardy. Both the choice and the refusal to intervene had an impact.

So which would be the least damaging option here, she wondered: To help the Pa’haquel regain their ability to hunt and kill star-jellies? To abandon them to work it out for themselves and hope for the best? To require them to adopt a different way of life, if a viable one could even be found? There seemed to be no option that would not result in devastating loss of life on at least one species’ part. But was it right to sacrifice the needs of the few for the needs of the many? Deanna recalled Jean-Luc Picard’s impassioned opinion on the subject: “I refuse to let arithmetic decide questions like that!”

At the moment, she was glad to leave that question for a later time. Right now she had people to help on an individual level, Shalra who knew nothing of these larger issues but were concerned simply with where they would live, whether they could obtain enough food, or whether they would ever see their mating-circle partners and children again. And one Vulcan,Deanna added. T’Pel was here too, at Deanna’s recommendation, and she was a dynamo. Having charges to take care of again had given her a renewed sense of purpose. She tended to the refugees with great efficiency and unwavering calm, but with a gentle and reassuring touch and unexpected patience for their emotional distress. It was not what Deanna would have expected of Vulcan motherhood…but on reflection she felt that it was what she shouldhave expected. Compassion was a logical trait in a caregiver.

A heavy growl from nearby disrupted her reverie. The Fethet’s patience had finally run out, it seemed. His tail twitching violently, he shot to his feet and upended the table of nutritional supplements he was meant to be handing out. The Shalra slithered back from the disruption as best they could, but there was little room to spare. “This is intolerable!” the Sasquatchian youth bellowed. “The Fethetrit are not meant to servethe needs of primitive slugs! You, all of you, should serve us!” He swung his head and hands around to encompass everyone in the spacious chamber. “Once we ruled this sector! We raped worlds until they screamed for mercy, then we raped them harder until they begged for death! We gnawed on the bones of their kings and philosophers! We turned the likes of you into our livestock, devoured your worlds till nothing was left, then cast the husks aside and found new worlds to feed on!”

The Pa’haquel supervisor was not intimidated by his bluster. The lanky avian strode over to the twice-as-massive Fethet, puffed his feathers to their fullest and barked, “Sit back down and clean up your mess.”

“I am a Fethet! I do not take orders from birds like a mewling Rianconi. I devour them as my dinner!” Deanna had heard boasts like this before. The Fethetrit bantered about sophontophagy even more than Dr. Ree did, and unlike him, many seemed sincere in the desire. But this time it went beyond boasting. The angry male clenched his fists, bringing his knuckle-claws into position, and swung at the Pa’haquel. Even without the claws, the mass of his fist alone would have been enough to cave in the supervisor’s skull, if the latter hadn’t been alert and dodged the blow. But one claw struck glancingly and tore a livid gash in the side of his head. Feathers broke free and fluttered heavily to the ground, weighted by blood. The Pa’haquel ignored the injury and lashed out with a kick, his own splayed talons taking the Fethet in the gut. But the Fethet’s dense red fur cushioned him, and the blow was not serious. He caught the supervisor’s leg and squeezed. Deanna heard several loud cracks.

But she was too busy moving to think about it—moving swiftly and silently behind the Fethet, positioning herself for a disabling kick at the back of his left knee, which she delivered with precision. She’d studied mok’baraunder Worf for years, and fought against Jem’Hadar in the years since; it had been a long time since she’d needed to rely on breaking pots over people’s heads.

But the Fethet merely staggered and let out a roar of pain. He was limping, his left leg barely responding, but that didn’t stop him from whirling around and beginning a lunge at Deanna. Fleetingly, she wished there had been a pot handy after all.

Then a flash of light hit the Fethet from behind. He staggered and toppled, and she rolled aside before his weight crushed her. Behind him, she saw a Vomnin female in a tripedal pose, one arm still with its knuckles on the ground while the other held a disruptor. Deanna was about to thank her when the Fethet stirred again. Clambering to hands and knees, he prepared to lunge at his newest assailant. The Vomnin changed the weapon’s setting one-handed, and before Deanna could say anything, blasted the Fethet’s face off.

“No!” the supervisor cried, but it was too late. “You…should not have done that,” he gasped through the pain of his shattered leg. “We need all our strength.”

“We are stronger without a monster like that,” the Vomnin cried. “And you are in no position to dictate to me, Pa’haquel.” She aimed her weapon at the supervisor’s intact leg, and the avian clenched his teeth and bowed his head in acceptance. The Vomnin holstered her weapon and strode proudly away on all fours. Silence and the stench of burned fur remained in her wake.

Reinforcements arrived just then and took charge of the wounded supervisor. Deanna merely sat there quietly for a time, head in her hands; then she let Oderi lead her away. “The alliance…isn’t always this tenuous, is it?”

Oderi shook her furry head, blinked her huge loris-like eyes. “Now that no more skymounts can be taken…the others begin to fear that the Pa’haquel will no longer be able to protect them. Their fear makes them angry. And there are many old tensions. The Fethetrit’s boasts are not entirely bluster. They did conquer and enslave dozens of worlds before starbeasts shattered their power, and some were Vomnin worlds. And the Vomnin feel they should be in the lead; they see nomads as rather primitive. But the skymounts have always given the Pa’haquel the edge.”

Deanna nodded. “Alliances based solely on a common enemy are always tenuous. They never resolve the preexisting conflicts, only repress them and let them fester. I—”

A piercing alarm began to sound, interrupting her. Wincing, Troi turned to Oderi, who was back on her feet and consulting the status-display band she wore about her wrist. “What is it? What’s going on.”

“The station is under attack by branchers.”

“Branchers?”

“A very, very deadly form of starbeast. Huge living crystals. They fire beams that disintegrate living matter and absorb its bio-energy. They—”

“Oh, my God. Can you show me an image?”

Oderi nodded and tweaked her status band to project a small hologram of the scene outside the station. Deanna gasped at the sight of the familiar, ramified blue forms closing in on their position. They were the same kind of Crystalline Entity that had destroyed Data’s homeworld decades ago.

And there were three of them.

“Shields up!”

The words came unbidden to Riker’s lips the moment he glimpsed the approaching Crystalline Entities on the viewer. The sight awakened painful memories of Melona IV, a nascent colony destroyed before it had even gotten started, when the Crystalline Entity—or rather, aCrystalline Entity—had swept down upon it shortly after the Enterprisehad dropped off the first set of colonists. Most of the colonists, along with Riker’s away team, had survived by retreating into caves lined with protective refractory materials. But two had not. Carmen Davila had not. Riker had grown close to her during the journey to Melona; the charming engineer and he had shared a love of fine cuisine, as well as numerous intimate “desserts.” He had been drawn to her courage and generosity. But those same qualities had led to her death, when she’d gone back to try to help an older man reach the caves. She and the old man had been reduced to ash before Riker’s eyes.

Now he stared at the screen. “Arm phasers and torpedoes.”

“Sir,” said the ensign at security, “we still have people on the station.”

“I’m aware of that!” Riker snapped. Imzadi,he sent, and felt an echo back. Don’t worry about me,came her thoughts. Protect the ship.

Still, Riker turned to Qui’hibra, who had been aboard to consult with him (or dictate to him—opinions still differed) about the relief operations. “Can the station’s shields handle those things?”

“If we do our part defending it,” the elder said. On the screen, several fleets of Pa’haquel skymounts were already moving to engage the Entities, along with the few Fethetrit ships that had deigned to assist with the refugees rather than flying off in search of battle or plunder elsewhere. “Lower your shields, Riker! I must return to my skymount.”

“I’m sorry, Elder, but I will not compromise the safety of my own ship. You’ll just have to monitor from here.”

Qui’hibra didn’t waste time arguing. “Very well. I trust my daughter and Huntsmaster to manage.” He spoke into his communicator for a moment, advising Qui’chiri to proceed without him. Then he turned back to Riker. “I take it you will join the battle?”

The temptation was strong, but he held back. “Not yet. Not unless it becomes necessary to protect the station.”

“Very well. With you on station defense, it frees one more skymount for the battle. You may yet be needed, though. The branchers are a mighty foe, hard indeed to kill. In some ways they are worse than the harvesters; at least those take generations to travel between worlds. The branchers are fast, elusive, cunning. And they are more often the hunters than the hunted.” He said it with a hint of admiration. “But I doubt your phasers would do much good. Break one in two and you only double the number of your enemies. Break it into a hundred and you win the day, but the fragments will grow into a hundred more to menace you in years ahead. The only way to beat them is to pound at them until every last growth node is destroyed. You must practically grind them into powder.”

Onscreen, the skymounts and Fethetrit ships were matching their actions to his words, firing dense barrages at the Entities. The vast crystal life-forms rolled like sapphire tumbleweeds to dodge the attacks, and fired back with their familiar disintegrator beams. “My people have encountered one of these creatures in the past,” Riker said. “I never knew they travelled in groups.”

“Normally they do not, but they are canny beasts, and drawn to the scent of blood. They must have come in response to the Hounding, to feed on the organic matter blown into orbit and on the carrion we left. But first they wish to finish us off, so they may feed freely. They know we are weakened by the Hounding. But my fleet is still fresh and near full strength,” he finished with pride.

The Fethetrit’s shields fluctuated and sparked under the impact of the disintegrator beams, but held for now. When the beams struck skymount armor, they left gouges that looked shallow, but must have been meters deep. The struck ships shimmered, their armor re-forming, but Riker knew they could only do that so many times before running out of biomass.

“Extraordinary,” Jaza said. “Those beams, they somehow convert the chemical energy of carbon bonds into EM form and channel it into the Entities’ bodies. It’s not unlike how the cloud-shimmers feed.”

“They are too fragile to land on planets, so they leech their life-force from the skies,” Qui’hibra growled. “They can strip a whole planet bare in hours.”

“I know,” Riker said, his voice hard. “I’ve seen it happen.”

The elder studied him. “You bear a grudge. Good—if you channel it well. By your survival I take it you have effective weapons against the branchers?”

Riker recalled a vision of the Crystalline Entity shattering like a wineglass, shaken apart by the graviton beam which Data had designed as a means to communicate, but which Dr. Kyla Marr had turned into a weapon to avenge her son. The beam had shattered the creature uniformly, leaving nothing behind that could regenerate. To his Starfleet principles it had been horrific, an act of murder rather than self-defense. But nonetheless he had felt satisfaction at seeing Carmen avenged. And this time it would be self-defense, and defense of his crew, his wife….

No, Imzadi.Her presence, still in his mind, cautioning him, calming him. She was right, of course. He wasn’t about to hand over any more knowledge which could affect the local balance of power—not before he had more information about its consequences. He’d done enough damage already.

“We relied mainly on our shields for defense. And…we made attempts to communicate with it. To make peaceful contact.”

Qui’hibra gave a curt, squawking laugh, the first hint of humor he’d ever evinced in Riker’s knowledge. “Branchers are not interested in discourse with their meals. They are gluttonous beasts, needing much energy to sustain their life processes, to power them into warp. Sources of bio-energy are sparse in the void, so they must take whatever they can find, and there is no talking them out of it. It is instinct, the overriding need to survive and grow. If you survived your encounter with this brancher without killing it, then it must have only recently fed and been sated enough not to press its attack. We will not be so fortunate today.” He gestured to the screen, where two of the Entities were ganging up on a skymount, bombarding it from both sides until its hull ruptured at last. Other ships were systematically blasting away at them, breaking off snowflake chunks and pounding them into fragments, but they were only small pieces of the whole. Once the skymount was inert, the Entities made short work of it, disintegrating it until only a diffuse cloud of dust remained. Qui’hibra’s timeworn crest drooped, but his voice remained level. He had just lost family, Riker realized, but it was a loss he knew from long experience how to bear. “See how they coordinate their efforts. They must have only recently split off from each other, to be so inclined to cooperate rather than vie for advantage. Mitosis depletes their energy, so they will be ravenous. More of my clan will surely die today. But we will make sure the branchers die as well.” He stepped away, issuing more instructions into his communicator.

If anything, Riker thought, it seemed the Fethetrit ships had the edge over the Pa’haquel, since they had shields, and their torpedoes rivalled the skymounts’ plasma stings in power. But the Entities’ blasts wore away at their shields until they started to give way. The viewscreen tracked one ship as its shields gave out entirely and the feeding beam played across it. The ship, being inorganic in construction, did not explode or vaporize, but once the beam had passed, it appeared to coast along on momentum alone. “Zero life signs registering aboard,” Jaza reported. “Even the polymers have been disintegrated.”

“Tactical, assessment of the Fethetrit shields,” Riker ordered.

Kuu’iut was at Tactical, since Tuvok was still confined to quarters. “Inferior to ours, sir,” the Betelgeusian replied. “Perhaps fifty to sixty percent of our shields’ power at maximum, and at least seventy percent less energy-efficient.”

“Fethetrit prize attack over defense,” Qui’hibra said. “Look at them. See how they throw themselves headlong into battle, no caution, no judgment, just berserker fury. See there!” He gestured as a Fethetrit ship accelerated headlong into a feeding beam until its shields flared out, then continued as a ballistic projectile until it slammed into the Entity and exploded, fragmenting it into three large chunks and thousands of shards. “They throw their lives away at every chance, it seems. Yet they seem to like it that way. And better for us, perhaps, that they keep their numbers low. Still, we commend their souls to the Spirit just the same, though Spirit only knows whether It would want them.”

“I take it that the fragments are still a threat?” Riker asked.

“It will only take them a moment to adjust to the separation, and then their hunger will drive them again. But they are smaller now, and weaker. And the more of them there are, the more chance there is of one slipping through our lines. Keep your weapons hot, Riker.”

In quick succession, two more Fethetrit ships were wiped clean of life, and one skymount had a chunk sliced off its edge and quickly digested by the beams. It continued to move under intelligent direction, though; presumably it had a means of sealing off the damaged section. “Have them retreat to station defense,” Qui’hibra ordered his huntsmaster. “Send out mount Ieq’Fha to take their place.”

“Is it wise to send organic ships up against these things?” Riker asked. “It just gives them more sustenance, more energy to fight back with.”

“Only if they catch us. And we are taking more from them than we are giving up.”

Indeed, the two remaining intact Entities were significantly smaller than before, their branches robbed of symmetry as though trimmed by a blind-drunk topiarist. But they continued to fight cannily, and Riker realized one was using its beams to herd the last Fethetrit ship toward the other. “Order them to veer off!” Qui’hibra instructed his people, but apparently the Fethetrit were not inclined to listen. “Rrraa.All their fellows have died and they are jealous. At least tell them to die usefully!” he added into his communicator.

But his huntsmaster apparently had other ideas. Qui’hibra’s own mount—Riker realized he was starting to be able to tell them apart—swooped in and fired a barrage of stings at the Entity’s core, snapping it in two. Coordinating with the Fethetrit, they proceeded to dissect the halves further, rather than chipping away at them from the outside as before. “Let us cut them down to harmless size first,”came the huntsmaster’s voice. “We can then crush the fragments at our leisure.”

But the Fethetrit were not as careful in their aim and were less successful in breaking off fragments. And one that they did break off, given momentum by the Entity half’s rotation, flew right into them, the collision damaging their shields and leaving them vulnerable. They dove almost eagerly into a kamikaze run, but the Entity dodged and took only a glancing blow. The impact was enough to destroy the last of the Fethetrit, however. “Useless fools,” Qui’hibra cursed-but he muttered a prayer for them anyway.

It seemed the Entity half was retreating now, perhaps spooked by the efficiency with which Qui’hibra’s mount was chopping up the rest of its former self. But the remaining Entities—one large, three small—continued to keep the rest of the Pa’haquel fleet at bay. One of the small ones managed to slip through the line and made a dash for the station. “Block it!” Riker ordered Lavena. “Tactical, fire a warning shot, try to scare it off.”

“You cannot think that will work after what you have seen?” Qui’hibra demanded.