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.