“What solution?” asked Se’hraqua. “To fight alongside live skymounts? That has been tried and failed. As we all knew it would, for it is out of balance. Our life needs and theirs must compete; for one to live, the other must die. That is the way of the Spirit, the way of life.”
“Life can coexist with life, as we do with our allies. We and the livemounts established a good rapport,” Qui’hibra said to the Conclave at large. “It was…inspiring. Miraculous. I wish I had the words. It is not something I am sure I wish to abandon completely.”
“But when you took them to the Hunt,” Aq’hareq replied, “it was a disaster.”
“They were untried. I admit I pushed them too hard, too fast. We cannot be certain it will never work.”
“And how long must we wait until they are ready? How long before their nature changes to suit us? And how many worlds die in the meantime?” Cunning, to use Qui’hibra’s own argument against him.
“We cannot afford to wait longer,” Aq’hareq said, raising his voice. “We have talked enough, now we must decide. I call for a vote! The matter: that we give hue and cry upon the vessel Titan,take it intact and forcibly extract the information we need to counteract the skymounts’ new advantages. And once we have that information, we make our kill, so that they can never interfere again.”
“I second!” Se’hraqua called, predictably. A third came swiftly.
The voting went swiftly as well, and decisively. Aq’hareq’s proposal passed with ease. Even many of the subordinates in Qui’hibra’s own fleet voted for it this time. Qui’hibra exchanged a regretful look with his daughter, but he knew he was obliged to accept the will of the Conclave. He would do so with regret for Riker’s people, and with concern for the future of his own. But he would do it nonetheless.
Still, there were other issues to be resolved, issues he wished he had managed to raise before Aq’hareq rammed the vote through. “I have already made arrangements with Titan’s crew and the livemounts. We are to rendezvous at the Proplydian tomorrow. Troi claims she has new ideas to help us work toward hunting together.”
Aq’hareq huddled with his advisors for a moment to discuss it. “Meet with them as planned, Qui’hibra,” he said. “To cancel would make them suspicious. Indeed, this will be advantageous to the hunt. They could detect a force coming to attack them, but since you are invited they will be off their guard. That puts you in a perfect position to attack. And at the Proplydian there will always be other fleets close by as backup. Perhaps you can even capture Troi and their other telepaths, and we can get the information we need from them. At least, it will give us leverage over Riker. A threat to his mate may persuade him to surrender.”
A matriarch raised a criticism. “If the livemounts can read our thoughts, will that not give the plan away?”
Reluctantly, Qui’hibra shook his head. “They cannot take what is not offered or consciously considered. So long as we guard our thoughts and emotions, we can retain stealth.”
“Excellent,” Aq’hareq said. “Then you are ideal for this task indeed, carved from stone as you are.”
A laugh went through the chamber. Qui’hibra could see the ancient elder’s malicious glee at making him the executor of a plan he had opposed. He burned with as much rage and shame as Aq’hareq no doubt wished upon him. But it was the Conclave’s will, and it was a good plan. And for all he knew, it might even work. Maybe there was a way the traditional Hunt could be restored. He just wished that there were another way besides betraying Riker, Troi, and their people, for whom he had developed a grudging respect.
But he was a hunter, and that meant doing anything that was necessary to fend off the chaos for another day. It meant being willing to kill beasts that he admired and loved. It meant taking his wives, sons and daughters into danger and knowing that many of them would not survive. Next to that, betraying Titan’s crew would be a small thing.
Over the past few weeks, Will Riker’s sense of the scale of living things had been broadened numerous times. He had grown somewhat accustomed to the idea of living beings a kilometer across. He felt he had made some progress toward wrapping his mind around the idea of a single organism the size of a small moon, such as the harvester. But nothing had prepared him for the sight of the Proplydian.
Well, not so much the sight itself; on the viewer, it appeared commonplace enough, an A-type giant star surrounded by a dense protoplanetary disk (“proplyd” in astronomer-speak). He had seen numerous such systems in his twenty-plus years in Starfleet.
But none of them had been a single life form.
Truth be told, he still wasn’t fully ready to accept that was the case. After all, it wasn’t a physically contiguous organism. But neither, Jaza had reminded him, were the thousands of chunks of matter that made up a Black Cloud’s “brain.” Though physically discrete, they interacted magnetically as a single collective organism. The Proplydian functioned on similar principles, with most of the planetesimals in its disk coated in bioneural compounds, exchanging stimulus and response through EM transmissions and functioning as a coherent nervous system. Together, they manipulated the systemwide magnetic field in order to turn the star itself into a propulsion system, triggering stellar flares and directing them as rocket thrust, ever-so-gradually altering the course and speed of the star, with the disk itself being pulled along for the ride by the star’s gravity. They also used mutual repulsion to keep the chunks evenly distributed in a disk, rather than accreting into planetary bodies.
Jaza had reminded him that some nebular cosmozoans were larger even than this. But to Riker, it wasn’t the same. A cloud of gas was one thing; this was a whole living star system,an organism with a sun as its heart. Trying to absorb that was making him dizzy.
The Pa’haquel or Vomnin could not quite say how such a life form had evolved, or where precisely it was motivated to go. This was the only such entity they knew of (fortunately for Riker’s mental equilibrium), and its travels were too leisurely to let them say much about its migratory patterns. It didn’t seem drawn to energy sources like most cosmozoans; after all, it had an extremely powerful energy source at its heart, as much radiant energy as it could ever hope for. If anything, it seemed to direct itself through the densest parts of the interstellar medium, and was heading in the general direction of a dustcloud rich in organic compounds; presumably it sought to replenish its supplies somewhat through accretion, although the erosive friction of passage through those clouds would cancel out much of the gain. Perhaps, Jaza had speculated, it had no particular reason to do as it did; perhaps it was simply an evolutionary fluke, the spawn of an accidental convergence of factors. “Or maybe,” the Bajoran had added, “it’s a sign of some deeper meaning in the universe.” Riker was content to leave that speculation to him.
There was always a Pa’haquel presence around the Proplydian, somewhere within a few light-years; they monitored it steadily, which was why Qui’hibra’s fleet-clan and others from the Hounding had wandered this way since then, rather than staying around Udonok. They showed no interest in destroying it, however. “For one thing,” Qui’hibra had explained when he had first told Riker and his crew about the Proplydian, “we do not know how.It is simply too vast. We know of ways we could detonate the star, but a supernova of that size would irradiate too vast a region. At least three inhabited worlds in range would be devastated.”
Besides, the Proplydian showed little interest in coming near other star systems, perhaps wishing to avoid the gravitational disruption of its neural disk. It occasionally shed planetesimals which might have been reproductive spores, or might have simply been ejected by the chaos of gravitational interactions within the disk; the Pa’haquel captured or destroyed those to prevent it from infesting other systems. They kept watch on it for that reason—and because the Proplydian supported a whole secondary ecosystem of cosmozoans, living within it as symbiotes or parasites. Many species were drawn to the nourishing energy and hydrogen of its flare exhaust, to the rich stew of organics that pervaded its disk, and to the heavy elements that remained accessible as planetesimals rather than buried deep inside planets. Starpeelers swam in its wake, stealing hydrogen from its exhaust. Sailseeds attached to its outer cometary ring like barnacles. Spinners used its powerful magnetic fields to give themselves accelerational boosts. Crystalline Entities and other predators came here to feed on the rest. And star-jellies came to bask in its glow and dance through its disk—and perhaps simply to gape at the sheer wonder of it.