The look in those fathomless black eyes was pure Deanna. “All right, Will, don’t oversell it. For the moment we’ll set aside the issue of our dead. And we’ll try this plan of yours.” She turned to point at Qui’hibra. “But we’ll be watching your people closely. So you’d better not try anything. Now that we know who you are, we remember when you first infested our young. You were greedy, taking too much from them, stunting their growth.”
Qui’hibra nodded. “We were young too, and foolish.”
“Your words now suggest that you’ve learned better. We’ll be holding you to that expectation.”
“And I will hold my people to it as well. I swear it to the Spirit.”
“Very well.” She/they paused. “Prepare your people. We will follow Deanna’s ship and meet with you later. For now, Deanna is weary, so we need to leave her mind.” Deanna made her way back to the exam table, where she sat while Tuvok placed a hand to her temple. Qui’hibra looked around, nodded to Riker, and left wordlessly.
After a moment, Tuvok slumped, and Ree helped him to another table. Deanna breathed hard as though exhausted, rubbing her temples. Will was by her side in an instant. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “It was…intense…but exhilarating.”
Riker grinned. “You’re blushing.”
“It was…embarrassing. But I felt safe with them, so it’s all right.”
He fidgeted. “You, uhh, said some things….”
She shook her head, touched her fingers to his lips. “Don’t worry about that. That’s not really what embarrassed me.”
“What, then?”
“It’s just…all too often in the past, it seemed my job was just to be the mouthpiece for somebody’s emotions. To tell the captain what a rival ship commander or negotiator was feeling. I’ve tried so hard over the years to become more than that—to be valuable for skills that weren’t just an accident of birth.”
“And you’ve succeeded. You’re invaluable to this crew in many ways.”
“I know that. But letting the jellies take me over like that, being just a conduit for them…it felt like a step backward.”
“I don’t see it that way. And neither should you. You are a woman of many talents, and your empathic ability is one of them. It’s just part of the greater whole. Nobody can doubt that. And it’s invaluable to me on this mission, along with all your other talents.” He paused. “But…on the other hand, it was a little creepy. Will you, umm, have to do that again?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The Pa’haquel will still need me to interpret for them, initially at least. But I can do that without becomingthe jellies. That only happened because Tuvok was, er, borrowing my mental shields. I’m not sure if that will be necessary again.”
Riker turned to his tactical officer. “Tuvok? What’s your status?”
“Nominal for now, Captain,” he reported from where he sat on the exam table. “However, I am not currently under emotional pressure from the jellies. It remains to be seen how well I can function once direct interactions resume. But I am reluctant to subject Counselor Troi to such an ordeal again. Perhaps a more limited mental link would be sufficient to shore up my defenses while allowing the counselor to retain her own.”
“I hope so,” Riker said. “I’m going to need every crew member at their best.” He threw a grim look at Deanna. “This was probably the easy part.”
Chapter Fourteen
STARDATE 57202.1
The hardest thing to get used to was the heartbeat. Ever since Qui’chiri had been beamed into this live skymount, it had been there: the slow bass pulsation of the vast creature’s circulatory system, a relentless reminder that she was now inside the guts of a living animal with a will of its own and, as yet, little patience for her presence. At first she had assumed she would grow accustomed to it in time. Instead, it was driving her crazy, so relentless was it. And it did not remain steady. It varied subtly as the skymount exerted itself at propulsion or transformation, changed with the skymount’s moods. And so every time she had almost reached the point of not noticing it, the rhythm would shift just enough to draw her attention back to it. She was starting to think the great beast was doing it on purpose to drive her and her fellows into abandoning this mad scheme. But none of her other clanmates or crew members seemed as troubled by it as she was.
On the other hand, Qui’chiri thought, it was probably a good sign if the acoustical ambience was the hardest thing for her to adjust to psychologically, because there were far more important adjustments she had to manage.
Certain problems had been immediately evident. In a live skymount, it would not be possible to excise unnecessary organs and brain components to create occupancy space, or to modify the circulatory and endocrine delivery systems for clan and crew use. Thus each skymount could not sustain as large a population as normal; Qui’chiri estimated a hundred fifty, two hundred at most.
Indeed, the clan and crew would have to share their space with other forms—the skymounts’ internal maintenance and immune “cells,” multitendriled gray-brown blobs near the size of a Rianconi, which swam through the circulatory passages and crawled over the vital organs. Working around these creatures would require revising a great many procedures. Then again, the maintenance cells did much of the work normally performed by crew. Thus crew sizes could be reduced, compensating somewhat for the occupancy reduction and allowing a larger number of clan members per skymount. But how would the Fethetrit, Shizadam and others react to having their numbers cut—particularly since many had nowhere else to go? They were useful allies in other ways, and it would be unfortunate to alienate them.
The skymounts’ transformational abilities could prove another problem. Sometimes they would restructure their own innards to aid in a certain task—say, changing the distribution of respiratory corridors to provide more oxygen to their distortion generators or digestive systems. It would be difficult for clan and crew to navigate such a changeable environment.
But the biggest problem would be how to control the beasts, to direct their movements. It would no longer be possible just to press and stimulate the proper nerve endings to trigger the desired responses. Indeed, when she and her work crew had made their first attempt at a propulsion test—nothing invasive, she had thought, but merely a test of its sensitivity and responses—the skymount, shocked at being made to move against its will, had reflexively beamed all its occupants away. At least it had shown enough presence of mind to beam them to Titanrather than empty space. Qui’chiri supposed she should take that as a sign of its willingness to cooperate. But it showed they would have a long way to go to learn each other’s boundaries.
After that incident, Troi had reminded her that the skymount was a living, telepathic creature with the innate ability to respond to the desires of those who lived in symbiosis with it. All they had to do was think of what they wanted, and it would oblige. That was the theory, anyway. Initially Qui’chiri had managed to make good use of Troi’s advice. Rather than rewiring the sensory cortex to install a sensation wall, she had simply asked the skymount to replicate one in a conveniently large open space chosen as the command center. It had taken the specifications from her memory, and the sensation wall had materialized within seconds.