What Tuvok had called the anterior chamber was just ahead. Pava and Rriarr flanked their captain as he surged forward, while the other two brought up the rear.
As predicted, their little corridor opened up a few paces on into a much larger chamber whose every surface was covered in crimson and gold hexagons.
There were no computers visible, no workstations or control panels. The chamber was just that, an empty room, but for the one odd, vaguely oval shaped object that hung from the ceiling, supported by thousands of glowing microfilaments.
It was mildly translucent, obviously containing something suspended in what appeared to be fluid of some kind. It was very large, more than two meters from end to end and half as wide.
At first they supposed that it was just some damaged bit of the ship that had been shocked free of its normal position by the vessel’s wrenching return to normal space. On close inspection it turned out to be the farthest thing from that that was possible.
Tiny sparks of light traveled along the translucent filaments, disappearing into the strange, vaguely plasticine oval. It was soft to the touch, almost leathery in fact, which Rriarr found out when he prodded it gently with his finger.
Whatever was inside shuddered when he sustained the contact longer than a few seconds.
“Relax,” said Riker, feeling Pava tense beside him. “Everyone, relax.”
As they watched, a seam opened wide along the bottom of the oval container, allowing the thing’s viscous internal fluid to spill out on the floor below. When the thing was empty, the skin rapidly dried to the point of brittleness and simply flaked off in large clumps before their eyes. When it was gone, Pava stifled a gasp.
Inside what everyone present now realized had been a cocoon, suspended by and intertwined with the thousands of microfilaments, was an Orishan. Or rather, most of one.
All six of its limbs had been removed at the second joint and replaced with caps composed of some organic resin into which tightly bound clusters of the filaments disappeared.
There were similar, albeit smaller, versions of the caps attached to the creature’s head and corresponding to where its eyes and antennae had been. Three thick cables, also translucent and also carrying streams of unknown glowing particles into the Orishan’s body, were connected to its spine, with a similar one running into a plate on its abdomen.
It shuddered again, though none of them touched it, its mouth and lower mandibles flexing uselessly.
“It’s alive,” said Rriarr, holding up his tricorder for a quick scan. “Higher brain functions are active.”
“It’s trying to speak, sir,” said Pava.
Ignoring the warnings of his subordinates, Riker moved close to the shuddering alien. He had come here full of rage, not knowing until this instant what he might do to the person he held responsible for all this, for Deanna.
His thoughts had frightened him, so he had put them in a box. He knew he would do something and that he might regret it and he hadn’t cared. Of all the fears he’d ever had to master, the loss of Deanna, the real permanent loss of her touch and smile, of her presence inside him, was the worst he could imagine. So he didn’t. He put it in the box as well and sealed it tight. It was the only way he could live this life and live with her at the same time.
After all their escapes and adventures he even began to think that maybe, just maybe, they had the sort of luck that would always allow them to cheat the reaper.
Then they decided on making a child and the boxes opened their lids, spewing all that fear inside him again like an uncapped geyser. Some days it was so awful he couldn’t look at her.
He knew it was irrational and he knew he couldn’t ever let her feel the brunt of it. So he had used techniques he knew to keep her out, techniques she had taught him.
It had opened a chasm between, and if he relaxed for one moment, he knew he would fall in. The idea of losing her or, worse, losing any child they had made, hung over him like a headsman’s blade, and nothing he did could make it dissipate.
Now it had happened. She was gone. These Orishans and their dangerous tinkering had done to her what they had done to Charon, and someone would answer for it.
Only, looking at this mutilated creature writhing gently in its web of cables, all he could feel was pity.
What sort of mind could have conceived something like this and then made it acceptable, even desirable? What sort of fear had these Orishans felt to do this to one of their own?
He lowered his phaser and reached out a hand to gently caress the Orishan’s cheek. It shuddered again dramatically, perhaps unused to physical contact, but then grew still.
“You are just flesh,” it said in its low clicking voice. “Only flesh.” It seemed surprised. What had it expected?
He bent close to it then, stroking it gently as he would an injured child. He tried to speak to it, to make it understand that all this could have been avoided, that there was still the danger of the expanding wave to thwart and the rest of his crew to save. Could it, would it, help them?
“Titan to away team,”came Tuvok’s voice in his ear.
“Go ahead, Commander,” said Riker.
“We are receiving a signal from the Orishan vessel, sir,”said the Vulcan. “ I believe they are logs. Sensor data, schematics-the vessel is uploading its entire datastore toTitan.”
“Thank you,” said Riker, smiling down into the Orishan’s destroyed face.
“Fear,” it said. “Why is there always so much fear?”
The Orishan convulsed, a bone-wrenching tremor that set its body shaking as if caught in a storm, and then went still. Rriarr scanned it and confirmed that it was dead.
There was no mistaking the cheers that rippled through Titanas her systems, most significantly her warp core, returned to nearly fully operational status.
The Orishan database was full of information that was either totally alien or, if not alien, impossible to implement with Titan’s technology, but what they could use, they did, and to amazing effect.
The condition of quantum flux that existed in this system that so confounded Starfleet technology was simply the norm for Orisha. Almost all their science was based on manipulating or drawing power from the flux in some way, and many of the tricks they learned served Titanas well.
The consensus from his officers was to evacuate as soon as possible, to get Titanwell clear of this system and its effects. Then they could contact Starfleet and any local spacefaring races about how to check or reverse the expansion of the wave of quantum flux.
The Orishan database had given them some ideas on the subject of collapsing the wave in on itself with a series of counterpulses directed at what some were now calling the Eye of the storm.
Leaving was the right thing to do. Orisha was gone. Charonwas gone. The Ellingtonwas gone. Once the flux wave reached its sun, the rest of the system would go too. In fact, Titanwould be cutting its escape close to the bone if they left within a few hours.
Riker knew the prudent course, what the manuals required him to do, but as he and Doctor Ree examined the body of the dead Orishan pilot, he wasn’t sure the prudent course was the one he wanted.
“Suicide, sir,” said Ree, looking up from his autopsy. “This female released poison into her body from her own stores of venom.”
“She killed herself,” said Riker. Ree only cocked his head and watched his captain mull. “Why? The fight was over.”
“May I suggest, sir, that this may be precisely why she did it?”