As her conscious mind began to shut down, she heard the ugly creature say, “All right, Christine. Go!”

  Then there was that funny sound that had accompanied the use of the alien’s wave weapon only somehow louder and less amusing.

  Then there was nothing. For the time being at least, Ch’ika’tik’s mind had gone away.

  “Wow,” said Vale as she slid down the rise and saw the enormous and formerly fairly intimidating soldier curled up in something very much like a fetal ball. “What did you do to it?”

  “Exactly what you asked,” said Troi.

  Vale held up the two phasers. Neither of them had wanted to kill these creatures unless it was warranted. Vale guessed that two phasers set on maximum stun might take them down without killing them, and she was right.

  Deanna’s part was harder, requiring her to use her empathic abilities in a way she normally didn’t or even couldn’t.

  “I wish you’d told me before that I was shunting my emotions into you when I got stressed,” said Troi. “It’s a possible side effect of the fertility treatments I’m undergoing with Dr. Ree.”

  “Sorry,” said Vale. “At first I didn’t know exactly what was happening, and then I didn’t want to pry.”

  “We’re family, Chris,” said Troi in a tone that pierced Vale to her core. “Whatever else happens, you should know that.”

  “Thanks,” said Vale, hoping she wasn’t actually blushing. “It’s a hell of a trick, but it looks like it worked too well.”

  “How so?”

  “Look at this thing,” said Vale. The Orishan was almost literally folded up into itself, having gone into some version of shock from the emotional overload. “It’s not going to be able to tell us where they took the others.”

  “It doesn’t need to,” said Troi. “I might not be able to read minds as well as a full Betazoid, but when one is screaming at me, I can certainly hear it.”

  “The Orishan told you the location?”

  “Some place called the Spire,” said Troi. “It’s not far from here, but I don’t think we would have found it on our own.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll see,” said Troi. “Come on.”

  Troi was right, they would never have found it on their own. Yes, it was massive, effortlessly towering over the jungle as well as its nearest neighbor. Yes, now that they were close, the tricorder could easily pick out the strange energy emanations pouring off the thing at intervals. But they would never have found the Spire on their own.

  The stalks that rose up out of the chaos of vines were many times the size of the biggest redwood on Earth, their uppermost reaches not only standing well above the jungle canopy but seeming to disappear into the clouds above.

  They were like the beanstalks in the old nursery story but without leaves or angry giants living in castles at the summit. This one, the Spire, had a few unique additions to separate it from its fellows.

  “The metal looks woven,” said Vale softly. “Like the watchdog ship.”

  “The tricorder says it’s some kind of resin,” she muttered, still trying to make sense of the readings.

  The Spire was important to the Orishans. After their terrible deity this might be the most important thing on the planet, but she still had no idea why.

  They had taken pains to camouflage the Spire, somehow making the technological additions to the stalk’s structure mimic as closely as possible the foliage around it. The woven metal Vale spoke of seemed to rise up out of the earth, winding around and through the great stalk, conforming to its color and contours, until she lost sight of it in the upper distance. There were openings dotting the thing all around that could be windows or lights or exhaust chimneys or even missile tubes, but each sported a sort of hood of artificial fronds, clearly technological from below but, at least on those she could see, from above the hoods were indistinguishable from the surrounding flora.

  She wondered if all their structures were made this way and if that might not be the reason for the absence of the obvious industrial footprint Orishan civilization had to have left on its planet.

  Looking down on the Spire, indeed, looking at it from any angle that wasn’t directly below, there was no way to make a distinction between it and the hundreds of thousands of other stalks jutting up from the sea of vines that covered most of the world.

  “Sneaky buggers,” said Vale. “What are they hiding it from?”

  “God,” said Troi. “I think they’re hiding from their god.”

  It was easy getting into the Spire. There were several apertures at the base of the stalk, one so large they could have flown the shuttle in had they been able to find it.

  There were no sentries, not on the ground level at least, and no warning system that they could detect. Inside, the place was alternately a maze of wide corridors and a series of large domed chambers into and out of which the corridors led. All of them were empty. Their good fortune made Vale nervous, but Troi thought she understood it a little.

  “They don’t have crime here,” she said softly. “They don’t have wars. They don’t even have any of the social chaos that we take for granted even on the most advanced worlds in the Federation.”

  “Hive mind?” asked Vale. The interior of the Spire, with its thousands of hexagonal facets and openings within the facets, did remind her very much of a wasp’s nest or possibly an impossibly large ant colony.

  “Possibly,” said Troi, fretting with the tricorders. “The known sentient insectile species do tend toward order and rigid social structures as a rule. There’s something more going on here. One moment.”

  There was indeed more to the Spire than met the eye. Though at the base level it seemed to be empty and its technological aspects were only hidden if looking down from the sky, the entire inner structure supported a network of force fields of some sort. The place almost hummed with the energy of these fields, though the tricorders could make no sense of their composition or purpose. It made scanning for Keru and Ra-Havreii very difficult.

  “Faith,” said Troi as they entered the third of the giant domed rooms. “Their faith in this Eye, their fear of it, it’s shaped their whole society.”

  “What society?” said Vale. “I watched the same footage you did. Those signals had to bleed off from somewhere. There should be cities here. There should be farms and, from the size of that space vessel, there should be a pretty large shipyard somewhere. There’s nothing out there but open jungle.”

  “I don’t know,” said Troi, frustrated with the device she held. She handed the tricorder to Vale to see if she could get something useful out of it. The lattice of force fields continued to confound her scans. “I think there’s something obvious here and we’re missing it.”

  As Vale adjusted the settings on the tricorder, Troi ran her fingers lightly along the nearest curved wall. It was not metal and it was not like any plant life she’d ever touched, even here on Orisha. It was a strange mixture of both.

   They fear their god, but they revere it just the same, she thought. They don’t care about exploration, but they built a giant space vessel. They built this tower, hid it, and then left it empty. Where did they go? Where could they have taken-

  “Deanna,” said Vale, her tense whisper breaking in on her thoughts. “I think I know where the Orishans are.”

  Turning away from the wall, Troi was about to ask Vale where when she also knew. They were impossible to miss after all.

  On the far side of their chamber several of the hexagonal facets had opened and from them a swarm of Orishan warriors, each with its own glowing lance, flooded in. In seconds there were fifty of the creatures there, training their weapons on the two women.

  “I don’t suppose you can do that fear trick on all of them,” said Vale. Troi shook her head. “No. Of course not.”