Star Trek - TOS - 79 - Invasion 1 - First Strike Page 14
Two of the creatures moved forward of the rest. They were both of the same species, each head heavy with arching horns, but one was a watercolor ghost of the other. Totally different colors. One had eyes of rum yellow and a complexion of bronze and rattan. The other was paler, with face of bony moon-gray and ivory slashes for eyes.
Kirk cleared his throat, but paused. Did they want to make the first gesture or not?
Stiff as a statue, McCoy managed to lean toward him.
"Come on, we got used to Spock, after all "
At
the doctor's mumble, the splendid golden demon moved
one of his elongated hands. At least he only had two
of those. So far so good.
The
heavy voice thrummed, the same voice they had heard
on the message over the Enterprise's comm system.
"Are
you having trouble.. seeing?"
What
a voice. Translators were working all right at the moment.
Any little reassurance in a storm.
Kirk
found his own voice. "Yes. A little."
The
creature turned his disturbing head. Fog rolled around
his horns. "Light."
A
mechanical sound, not a beep but more of a twinkle, chittered
in the background, though they saw none of these
creatures move. There must be others here too.
Almost
imperceptibly at first, the haze began to change.
Slow as dawn, the area around them became easier
to see. The sources of colored light intensified
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FIRST
STRIKE
gradually
until distinction came to the place where they stood
and the creatures before them gained dimension.
Like
the Enterprise's bridge, this bridge was a circle and
possessed two command chairs and a coffin-shaped helm console,
but there the resemblance ended. This place was
more like a voodoo temple than a mechanized vehicle's brain
trust. Forms were carved into the bulkheads of
animal-headed trumpet--might've been the alarm system
or just decoration. Shields and wheels and double-headed metal
masks, mostly of animal types separated by
scrolls, banded the ceiling all the way around. Other
facelike stone carvings stood in punch-outs in the
bulkheads themselves, empty eye sockets staring, with grotesque
head shapes and orifices barely notable as mouths
or noses.
"Skulls, Captain," McCoy
murmured without moving his lips more
than he could get away with. "Real."
Kirk glanced at
him. How McCoy knew those things were real and
not just carvings, he had no idea. Maybe he saw tracks of
veins or some other bio-clue. That was the doctor's
job and Kirk didn't question the call.
The skulls of
enemies, possibly? Not the best doorbell. The golden creature
took another step toward them. "I am Zennor,"
it said. "Vergo of the Wrath."
Kirk matched the
step forward, in case such a motion turned out to
be a custom of some kind.
"I am Kirk,"
he responded evenly. "Captain of the Enterprise." When the
aliens didn't say anything, he added, "We appreciate
your welcome."
The huge horns
bowed. "I cannot offer you welcome, until I know
you are not the conquerors."
Could be the
translator. Or use of the word. Zennor hadn't said "conquerors,"
but "the conquerors."
Kirk let that
one go. No sense claiming not to be the conquerors until he
had some idea who these people thought were the
conquerors.
"Then we offer
our welcome to you," he said instead. "You're new to
this space."
Diane Carey The creature like Zennor, with shell gray horns and a
banshee face, parted his lips and asked, "This is your
space?"
"This space is claimed by the Klingon Empire," Kirk
said, trying not to sound as if ownership would move the
moment. "My ship and I represent the United Federation
of Planets. Our space is not far from here."
He moved forward now, and squared off with the
white creature, then paused and with his posture asked
the unasked question.
Zennor angled to face them both. "This is Garamanus
Drovid, Dana of the Wrath."
Kirk started to respond, but only nodded, because he
now noticed something very quizzical as his eyes adjusted
to the eerie light. Each of these beings wore a
stuffed doll on a belt, each doll about eight or ten inches
long. Zennor's doll had little twisted horns and a bony
face with glossy snakish eyes, as did the dolls of each of
the beings who looked like him. Garamanus's doll was
the same height as Zennor's, but about twice as stuffed.
A horned wraith with a fat doll? What kind of day was
this turning out to be?
On the beings with the tentacles moving in their heads
were dolls bearing long wiry strings on their stuffed
heads. The creature with the rocky jade face had a doll
with a green face and the same kind of clothing. The
dolls had the same kinds of clothing the aliens wore,
right d own to tiny crescent necklaces and animal-head
brooches. The only trapping missing from the dolls
seemed to be the circular medallion on the long chain.
Kirk felt completely baffled. Here he stood, among
horrific beings with a strong ship and heavy weapons
who wore soft little toys on their belts. And why was
Zennor's doll skinny? Was Garamanus's fat doll a rank
thing? Social order?
Suddenly he started paying more attention to who said
what, and why Zennor had included Garamanus in a
conversation barely begun. What was "Dana" of the
Wrath, and in what designation compared to "Verge"?
122 FIRST STRIKE
Made a difference.
As the questions flashed through his mind, he decided
to lay some questions at the aliens' feet too.
"This is Leonard McCoy, Chief Surgeon of the Enterprise,
and Lieutenant Uhura, of Communications.
When you appeared in this space," he began, "there
was a drop in mass to zero. A solar system was completely
disrupted. The Klingons assume this is a
weapon."
"We have no such weapon," Garamanus rumbled.
"Then can you explain what happened?"
"To your solar system?" Zennor spoke. "No. We have
nothing to change mass."
Kirk paused. One plus one usually equaled two, but
when things came down to push or shove, was there any
way to prove correlation between the mass falloffand the
appearance of this ship?
They said they couldn't do such a thing. There would
be no point in insisting they had.
"Then," he began carefully, "perhaps you should tell
us why you're here. Tell us what you want. We may be
able to help you find it."
Zennor and Garamanus stared at him like wall paintings
for a moment; then Zennor simply said, "We have
; come from a great distant place to this place to see if it is
OURS."
His deep voice took on an abrupt tenor of threat.
It could have been his imagination, just those shining
marbled eyes, or the firedog horns scuffing the ceiling.
"If it's yours?" Kirk echoed, then realized he had
spoken too sharply. Instinct had made him match that
sense of threat. At once he was glad Kellen hadn't come
here, or there'd be another incident. "We have a history
of more than two centuries in these areas of space."
Garamanus dipped his rack once, slowly. "Our history
is more than five thousand years."
Kirk felt his eyes widen. The translator got that one all right.
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Diane Carey
Five thousand years. That was a lot of years.
If that's what impressed them, he had a few extra
centuries to pull out of his back pocket.
"We do have a history of over a hundred thousand
years on our various home planets, proven by detailed
archeological and cultural evidence. Perhaps we're better
served by your telling us where your home planet is?"
"We do not know it," Zermor said again. "We know
only where we have been for five thousand years."
"Jim.. 2' McCoy murmured, but when Kirk looked
at him he said nothing more. His face suggested a
troublesome suspicion, though he seemed not to be able
to back it up now, and remained silent.
Making bets with currency he didn't have yet, Kirk
turned to Zennor, taking "Vergo" for what he guessed it
was. Command couldn't be done by committee, so he
addressed the one he thought was the captain, and would
let Zennor handle the affront.
"Why don't you tell me your story?" he asked, and
held out a beckoning hand.
Perhaps it was the hand, perhaps his tone of voice.
Zennor's strange eyes moved this time as he pondered
what he heard, then blinked slowly, and Kirk suddenly
realized he hadn't seen Zennor or Garamanus or the
other one with the horns blink at all until now. That,
possibly, was why they appeared more like engravings
than living creatures.
Zennor looked at Garamanus and for a brief time the
two seemed alone here, though they said nothing to each
other.
Then Zennor turned a shoulder to the being he called
his ship's Dana and faced Jim Kirk instead.
"Five thousand years ago," he began, "there was a war
between two developed interstellar civilizations. When
the war ended, one civilization lay in defeat. The survivors
of the vanquished, many races from many planets,
were banished to a far distant place in the galaxy,
'relocated' well away from the victors, dropped in the
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FIRST STRIKE
barren middle of nothing, with nothing. No technology,
no science, no supplies.
"Many millions perished in the first few decades. The
civilization fell apart, fell back to barbarism, splintered,
regressed to the primal. There were plagues, wars, and
ultimately a massive, extended period of dim, raw survival.
"As they began to crawl out of this thousand-year
dimness and to populate three of the planets to which
they were banished, a belief emerged about another
place, the home space, where they were meant to be. As
society and science clawed upward again, the splintered
spumed began to draw together under one common
belief.
"This belief has become the driving force of our
culture as we evolved once again to high technology.
Because of the thousand-year dimness there are no
records with facts of locations, but only words passed
from descendant to descendant. On the parent's knee
every offspring learns of the fury to regain our place. It is
our unifying purpose--to reach out and repossess the
section of space from which we were evicted.
"We are the unclean, the out of grace, ill-bidden
castaways with the fury in our minds, disowned and cast
down, thrown together by our collective loss of war, with
only one thing in common--our singular commitment
to find the way back. It is a culture-wide investment...
and we are here to spend it."
Jim Kirk had stared at a lot of inhuman creatures in
his life, but somehow none of those moments ever
exactly repeated itself. This one was completely new.
Evidently there was an invasion of sorts going on, but it
was the most polite invasion he'd ever witnessed.
He shifted his feet, stalling for a moment to think, to
bottle and distill all he had just heard and decide what to
say back. "So you aren't sure you're in the correct
area?"
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Diane Carey
"We are sure," Garamanus spoke up. "Our Bardoi and the Danai have studied for centuries."
"Studied what?"
"Legends, history, biology, customs, and the designs
we saw in the skies. The positions of stars in the galaxy as
they have moved over the centuries."
"Of course, stars lying on the fabric of space," Zennor
said, "may appear side by side while being lifetimes
apart. I would like hard proof."
Garamanus glared fiercely and the others in the alien
crew stared at their captain.
Kirk looked from one to the other and sensed Zennor
was taking a mighty risk. But Zennor hadn't said anything
any sensible spacefarer wouldn't know. Why were
they staring at him that way?
To keep distraction on his side, he elected to take the
wildest, least predicted step available to him--the one
McCoy would really hate.
"Let me invite you to our ship," he suggested, "where
there are extensive historical and scientific records more
easily at hand."
Ignoring Garamanus's silent assault, Zennor gazed at
Kirk for a moment, during which the sulfurous eyes
seemed not to see. The Vergo and his Dana could easily
have been etchings on these bulkheads. But for the
undulation of the tentacles on the heads of those other
creatures, the whole gathering might have been merely
fresco.
"You may find our ship too cool. We'll go ahead of you
and prepare the atmosphere so you'll be more comfortable.
I'll inform our various divisions and labs. Join us
on board and we'll... look."
"Morien, when they take us to their ship, I want you to
analyze this beam of theirs. Find out how it is done, to
adjust the body and make it travel through open space.
Then make sure our adjustments to the ship's surface
cannot be brought down unless we bring them down.
One mistake, and we could be destroyed from within.
126 FIRST STRIKE
Centuries of scientists designed this ship to be invulnerable,
and within minutes of arrival we found ourselves
vulnerable. What other surprises await us? We must
anticipate everything."
Morien gazed at him in rapt appreciation, then uttered,
"I will check it all, Vergozen!"
With his tentacles twisting excitedly, he rushed away
into a clutch of other technicians, who also gazed at their
leader with disclosed awe at his suspicions.
Zennor nodded to them modestly, then freed himself
by turning away, and found he had made the mistake of
turning toward Garamanus. "And we should send the
analysis back through the wrinkle, so it can be studied
and copied. Then our people will also have the ability to
go through open space without a vessel."
"You are intelligent to think of that," the Dana said.
"It is my role to think of it," Zennor responded,
looking at the ships on the curved screen before them. "I
must imagine ways for the enemy to use his own talents,
or he will think of it first."
"Are they our enemies, then? These people with whom
you speak so freely?"
Zennor looked at him without turning his head, sliding
his eyes to the side as far as they would go. "Until it
becomes proven that they are not."
His judicious answer apparently satisfied the Dana, or
at least even Garamanus was inclined to wait for a
different moment before designating enemy status. Now
began a struggle for the hearts of the crew, Zennor knew,
between the day-to-day leader and the leader of cons,
between the Vergo who made the mission real and the
Dana whose spiritual strings had kept the people unified
and motivated. The crew would be devoted to Zennor
for the crude purposes o f the mission, but these were the
most fervent of the fervent and would follow Garamanus
too, should Zennor falter.