Titan, Book Three Read online

  Ree interposed himself between them. “Indeed, they are remarkable prey, continuing to serve the Hunt even after their death. My colleagues and I are naturally eager to learn of their many gifts.”

  Se’hraqua was mollified somewhat. “You are a hunter?”

  “By biology and avocation,” Ree replied. “I am a doctor by profession, and I am fascinated by these great beings.”

  “For us, all professions serve the Hunt, and the Hunt serves all our needs.”

  “I am sure. With these creatures’ replication abilities, you can no doubt manufacture anything you need.”

  “Indeed so.” Se’hraqua folded his long, clawed fingers in a pious gesture. “Truly they are the divine source of our lives. They feed us, water us, clothe us, give us homes, give us wings to fly and claws to fight.”

  “To fight others of their own kind,” Keru countered.

  Se’hraqua bristled (literally, his crest feathers spreading outward) at Keru’s judgmental tone. “Thus is the balance sustained, alien. Do not presume that you speak for the skymounts. You know nothing of them. The Pa’haquel have been bound with them in the Hunt for thousands of generations. You are not the first who have sought to judge us in ignorance.”

  As they moved along the corridors, Deanna noticed that scattered among the work crews were a number of crew members from other unfamiliar species, including massive red-furred bipeds with feral features and simian tails; delicate, scantily clad humanoids with lavender fur on their scalps and backs; and long-armed, bronze-skinned humanoid variants with a gorilla-like gait. “Pardon me, but may I ask—does the name ‘Pa’haquel’ refer only to those of your own species, or does it include everyone on your ships?”

  Se’hraqua paused, still seeming disinclined to speak amiably with anyone but Ree. “They are valued allies in the Hunt, but they have their own names. They are crew, not clan.”

  “Thank you.” She tapped Ree lightly on the shoulder, and moved in close to his ear membrane. “You seem to be the only one hitting it off with him,” she said softly. “Why don’t you take the lead?”

  “Certainly, Commander.”

  The honey-colored therapodian went about his task enthusiastically, clearly fascinated by the star-jellies’ extraordinary anatomy. The “corridors” turned out to be their respiratory channels; as roomy as they seemed, Deanna again had to remind herself that for a kilometer-scale creature they were the equivalent of narrow arteries. Although the jellies lived in a vacuum and fed largely on energy, they were still carbon-based life-forms, requiring air, water, and nutrients, which they periodically hoarded from life-bearing worlds, or converted from the raw matter they found in cometary clouds. A parallel set of circulatory conduits carried their equivalent of blood; Se’hraqua explained how they were flushed and converted as a water storage and delivery system for the “skymount” crews. Control of their bodily functions was attained by tapping their nervous systems. Jaza was more interested in learning about their gravitic, warp-drive, and replication/ transporter abilities, but Se’hraqua either did not know the details of those systems or did not care to go into them for Jaza’s benefit.

  “Do you need to take special measures to preserve your kills from decay?” Ree asked.

  “A few. Purging the death toxins, halting the metabolic shock from propagating too far—these must be done quickly for a successful reanimation. But they are spacegoing creatures, after all. At times, if low on energy, they may need to drift for centuries in hibernation before finding a star system to replenish them. It is their nature to be durable.”

  “But I assume they do not last indefinitely, since you need to replenish them.”

  “They serve as they are needed.” Deanna sensed a predator’s reluctance to admit weakness—or simply that of a young, proud male.

  Before long, Jaza’s tricorder showed them to be traveling into the creature’s vast brain. Residual electrochemical potentials were still discharging within its mass, occasionally sending uncomfortable empathic spikes through Deanna’s mind, like being brushed by cold, dead fingers. Qui’hibra’s teams were hard at work under her direction; between Se’hraqua’s lecture to Ree and Jaza’s tricorder scan, it became evident that some teams were tapping into various neurological centers while others were performing efficiently brutal lobotomies, or rather lobectomies, cutting out components they didn’t need and having them taken away for later recycling. Deanna stared as fleshy hunks larger than she was were excised and carried away. There went the star-jelly’s memories, its galaxy-spanning experiences, its hopes, its capacity for love and delight—all chopped down into handy cubes of meat for easy disposal. Or perhaps consumption?

  Diplomatic officer or not, she felt compelled to ask the question. “Are you sure that the skymounts see your…relationship in the same way you do? Is it possible they have a different view of being preyed upon?”

  Se’hraqua fixed her in his aquiline gaze, blinking once. “Of course they flee the Hunt. All beings strive to live. But we must live as well. Such is the balance of creation. If we succeed in the hunt, the skymounts die. If they succeed in escape, we cannot sustain ourselves, and we die.”

  “There are other ways of fulfilling your needs,” Jaza pointed out.

  “It would not be the same. It would not be from them.” Se’hraqua stroked the wall with reverence.

  “But if you cherish the skymounts so much,” Deanna asked, “why must you kill them? Is there no way you could cooperate, achieve a symbiosis?”

  “You do not begin to understand. We honor their sacrifice. When we strike them down, we do so with deep gratitude and reverence.”

  “I don’t see much reverence around here,” Keru interposed.

  “This is a time for haste,” Se’hraqua snapped. “The rites are performed in their proper time.” He returned his gaze to Deanna. “Yes, it would be uplifting if we could share our life-forces, but such is not in the balance. What feeds us drains them. If we occupy them while they live, their immune systems teleport us away.”

  “How did your…relationship with them begin?” Jaza asked. “You must have had another means of space travel before you encountered them.”

  “Clearly your worlds have not been blessed by the skymounts. They breed on planetary surfaces. Quelha was such a world, once. Their sessile young burrowed their roots deep into our world’s skin, feeding on its warmth. With their gifts, their granting of desires, they drew in animals to live atop their shells, to roam and swim and fly among their tendrils and membranes.” He recited it as though quoting scripture. “When those animals died at the end of rich and happy lives, they gave their flesh unto the skymounts who had sustained them, and thus the mounts grew larger.

  “We were savages when we found them, little more than animals with spears, struggling to survive. With their plenty, we were able to build a civilization, to devote ourselves to art and learning. Yet we grew greedy, and demanded too much from them.” He closed his eyes. “Many mounts did not survive. Fewer and fewer came from space to lay their eggs. To sustain ourselves, we had to learn to follow those few that remained when their time came to rise to space. While they lived, it could not be. But we were able to redeem their deaths, to make them live again and let us live as well. We found the balance, and thus the Pa’haquel way was born.”

  Deanna granted him a moment of respectful silence before asking, “And what of Quelha? Do others of your kind still live there?”

  “Quelha is long dead. Those who stayed were struck down by divine wrath, because they could not find the balance.” Deanna had to wonder: Had the starfaring Pa’haquel taken it upon themselves to be the agents of that wrath?

  “Attention!” came a call from Qui’hibra, and Se’hraqua whirled to face his elder. Deanna sensed a twinge of hope that he was about to be assigned a less tiresome duty, but that quickly subsided when it became evident that the elder was addressing the entire crew. “Processing phase complete. All crews, confirm readiness for reanimation!”
/>   One by one, reports came in, confirming their ready status. “Consider yourselves blessed,” Se’hraqua told the away team. “But stay silent and do nothing to interfere. This is a holy moment.”

  The final reports came in. “All crews, stand ready,” Qui’hibra said, then spread his arms. “O Spirit of the Hunt, hear me! We pledge this kill to the holy balance. We took its life, not for malice, not for greed, but for the preservation of life, within our clan and among all those whom we protect.” His tone was matter-of-fact, not grandiose or florid; but neither was he merely parroting a script. Deanna felt sincerity in him, if not passion. He had done this many times, but it still meant something real to him.

  “O spirit of the kill, accept our thanks for your life, and grant us the boon of your body. Let your death serve life, and thus maintain the balance as the Spirit wills. Let this reanimation show us your forgiveness. Our lives to the Spirit,” he finished, and all the others echoed it. “Now!”

  The Pa’haquel workers squeezed the walls and worked the equipment they had attached to exposed brain tissue. After a moment, the chamber began to shudder, and the gravity fluctuated. Jaza set his tricorder to show an exterior view from Titan’s sensors. The star-jelly corpse had moved away from its killer and was accelerating.

  Over the next few minutes, the Pa’haquel tested the various systems of their astrocoelenterate zombie, putting it through maneuvers, testing its replication systems, and so forth. They “reeled in” its remaining tentacles, curling them up in a spiral pattern in the ventral recess, and then activated its armored mode. On the tricorder screen, its translucent skin rippled with light and grew slowly opaque, soon achieving the dull metallic hardness of the hunter ships. At Qui’hibra’s next order, pulses of magenta light began to flow through its eight meridional fissures, slowly at first but then accelerating. Then a single, sustained burst of energy shot outward into open space.

  At that, the other Pa’haquel ships fired bursts of their own in salute. The processing team gave a cheer of joy. Qui’hibra turned to the other male who had been with his party and made a ritual gesture. “Ieq’hairu, loyal cousin, you have the blessings of the Spirit and your kill. I name you elder of this skymount, a status you have earned through loyal service to the clan. May this mount bring you many more kills, in service to life.”

  The others cheered—all save Se’hraqua. From him, Deanna felt resentment and envy directed at the new elder, as though he wished he were the one accepting command rather than being relegated to public relations. Nonetheless, he kept up a stoic front. “You see?” he said to Deanna. “If the hunt were not in balance, it would fail. Their bodies die, but their souls live on in ours. The transition is painful, yes, but birth is always so. A successful reanimation shows that healing has been achieved, the divine balance preserved.”

  “There’s no doubt of their sincerity,” Deanna Troi reported to her crewmates as they sat in the forward observation lounge. From where she sat across the table, Christine Vale could see that Troi was harrowed by her experience within the star-jelly corpse; though her tone was level and professional, her eyes were haunted. “The Pa’haquel and their allies clearly believe that their actions are necessary and righteous, not merely for their own survival but for the sake of divine balance. They believe that without this balance, the universe will collapse into chaos. They express a reverence for their prey, of a sort not uncommon in traditional hunting cultures.”

  Vale looked down, absorbing her words…but she couldn’t help being distracted by her reflection in the table. She still wasn’t used to seeing herself with black hair. She liked to change her look from time to time; she’d gone through many different lengths and shades over the years, arriving most recently at a short, sandy bob that she’d liked well enough to keep for some time. But once their new mission had begun in earnest, she’d suddenly been struck by the urge to go pure raven, blacker than she’d ever been. The first dye she’d tried had been a bust; although completely black in human-visible light, it appeared a downright ghastly shade to those crew members who saw in ultraviolet. So the ship’s stylist had concocted a dye that was guaranteed to absorb every wavelength of light visible to any Titan crew member, from terahertz microwaves up to high UV. It let her get through the day without the Caitian, Syrath, and Zaranite crew members laughing uncontrollably (or the equivalent) when she walked by. Yet it seemed to her—though it was most likely just her imagination—that all the EM energy her hair now absorbed was making her head unusually warm.

  “That may be,” Riker replied, bringing her attention back to the briefing, “but from what you and Tuvok tell me, their prey definitely doesn’t see things the same way.”

  “No. The star-jellies are horrified and confused by this. From what we saw, I don’t think they’re even capable of attacking their own kind.”

  “Their failure to return fire is not conclusive,” Tuvok said. Now that there were no live jellies in range, Riker had seen fit to return him to duty. “Perhaps, as Mr. Jaza speculated, the astrocoelenterates can only fire while in armored mode. It appears to require significant time and energy to make the transformation—time and energy which they instead chose to focus on generating warpfields for escape.” Vale was amused by his reluctance to call them by such a frivolous name as “star-jellies.” Sometimes she was tempted to ask the Vulcans she met where the logic was in wasting breath on so many unnecessary syllables.

  “Tuvok,” said Troi, “you felt what I felt. Did it seem to you that the jellies were even able to contemplate returning fire?”

  “The most I can say is that their emotions were dominated by grief and panic rather than aggression. However, I am not as skilled in the interpretation of emotions as you, Counselor.” Though the words were an acknowledgment of deficiency, his voice conveyed it as a point of pride.

  “Whatever their reasons,” Riker said, “I’m not willing to just stand by and let them be slaughtered. I think what we need to do is establish a dialogue between the species. Maybe if the Pa’haquel can hear directly from their victims, it’ll shake up some of their self-righteous assumptions. Meanwhile, we should do what we can to defend the star-jellies from further attacks. We won’t destroy any Pa’haquel vessels, but we’ll do whatever else we can to preserve star-jelly lives.”

  Vale gave him a sharp look. “But Captain, the Prime Directive—”

  “Does not prevent Starfleet vessels from responding to distress calls.”

  “But there’s a difference between answering a cry for help and taking sides in a conflict.”

  “This isn’t a war between sovereign states. This is the one-sided slaughter of innocent life-forms. Life-forms which have overtly requested our aid. In my opinion, we have not only the legal option, but the moral obligation to intervene.”

  Vale looked down, pondering his words. Certainly she sympathized with his desire to help the jellies. She’d been trained as a peace officer, latest in a long line of Izarian peace officers, and it was second nature to her to serve and protect the innocent. And she certainly agreed that the star-jellies were magnificent, awe-inspiring creatures that should be cherished, not killed and gutted.

  But her Starfleet training told her to be cautious about even the most well-intentioned interference in others’ affairs. By the letter of the law, Riker was correct. The Prime Directive, as it applied to starfaring powers, only forbade active interference in unaligned cultures’ wars and politics. It didn’t forbid giving humanitarian aid to those who requested it directly, or offering help in negotiating peaceful settlements. It allowed the granting of asylum to political refugees—something that could be construed as political interference, but was allowed under the Directive on the principle that it didn’t actually force any change on the foreign state itself, merely removed certain consenting individuals from that state’s influence. (Indeed, on Titan’s first mission, a Reman named Mekrikuk, who had helped Tuvok escape from a Romulan prison, had sought asylum and was now living comfortably back
in Federation space.) Theoretically, protecting star-jellies from the hunters would be a similar act. Still, it felt more complicated than that.

  As if confirming her thoughts, Jaza spoke up. “Can we be sure of that? Clearly the star-jellies can’t be entirely natural. Their internal gravity and lights, their warp and replication capabilities…even the shape of their internal passageways, the perfectly smooth floors, is too artificial.”

  Riker furrowed his brow. “I always figured the attacking star-jelly we beamed to sixteen years ago was deliberately mimicking a ship, both inside and out, as some sort of protective camouflage.”

  “But why would the creature trapped on Deneb have done the same? I read your report—that creature was hoping for rescue, not trying to hide. For that matter, the attacking creature had no reason to mislead you about its true nature. You posed no significant threat to it. And what we’ve seen here confirms that those corridors are part of their normal anatomy. I think it’s clear they’ve been artificially engineered, modified if not created by beings who wanted to use them as starships.”

  Vale realized she was smiling at Jaza’s endearingly bookish enthusiasm. She immediately assumed a more detached expression and focused her gaze on the captain. She didn’t want to go down that road with Jaza again. At least, she hadn’t decided yet if she did. After her brush with death in the evacuation of Oghen, she had chosen to seize the moment and taken Jaza to bed. That night, in the warm afterglow, it had seemed so easy—if Riker and Troi could balance career and relationship, then so could she and Jaza. But with the clarity of the next morning had come doubts. Could she really treat the rest of the crew fairly if she had a relationship with him? Could she serve the demands of both her time-consuming job and a blossoming romance without compromising one or the other? And how did she really know Riker and Troi themselves could pull it off? So far they’d managed fairly well, but they hadn’t really faced a test yet, a situation requiring a choice between personal and professional priorities.