“No!” the supervisor cried, but it was too late. “You…should not have done that,” he gasped through the pain of his shattered leg. “We need all our strength.”
“We are stronger without a monster like that,” the Vomnin cried. “And you are in no position to dictate to me, Pa’haquel.” She aimed her weapon at the supervisor’s intact leg, and the avian clenched his teeth and bowed his head in acceptance. The Vomnin holstered her weapon and strode proudly away on all fours. Silence and the stench of burned fur remained in her wake.
Reinforcements arrived just then and took charge of the wounded supervisor. Deanna merely sat there quietly for a time, head in her hands; then she let Oderi lead her away. “The alliance…isn’t always this tenuous, is it?”
Oderi shook her furry head, blinked her huge loris-like eyes. “Now that no more skymounts can be taken…the others begin to fear that the Pa’haquel will no longer be able to protect them. Their fear makes them angry. And there are many old tensions. The Fethetrit’s boasts are not entirely bluster. They did conquer and enslave dozens of worlds before starbeasts shattered their power, and some were Vomnin worlds. And the Vomnin feel they should be in the lead; they see nomads as rather primitive. But the skymounts have always given the Pa’haquel the edge.”
Deanna nodded. “Alliances based solely on a common enemy are always tenuous. They never resolve the preexisting conflicts, only repress them and let them fester. I—”
A piercing alarm began to sound, interrupting her. Wincing, Troi turned to Oderi, who was back on her feet and consulting the status-display band she wore about her wrist. “What is it? What’s going on.”
“The station is under attack by branchers.”
“Branchers?”
“A very, very deadly form of starbeast. Huge living crystals. They fire beams that disintegrate living matter and absorb its bio-energy. They—”
“Oh, my God. Can you show me an image?”
Oderi nodded and tweaked her status band to project a small hologram of the scene outside the station. Deanna gasped at the sight of the familiar, ramified blue forms closing in on their position. They were the same kind of Crystalline Entity that had destroyed Data’s homeworld decades ago.
And there were three of them.
“Shields up!”
The words came unbidden to Riker’s lips the moment he glimpsed the approaching Crystalline Entities on the viewer. The sight awakened painful memories of Melona IV, a nascent colony destroyed before it had even gotten started, when the Crystalline Entity—or rather, aCrystalline Entity—had swept down upon it shortly after the Enterprisehad dropped off the first set of colonists. Most of the colonists, along with Riker’s away team, had survived by retreating into caves lined with protective refractory materials. But two had not. Carmen Davila had not. Riker had grown close to her during the journey to Melona; the charming engineer and he had shared a love of fine cuisine, as well as numerous intimate “desserts.” He had been drawn to her courage and generosity. But those same qualities had led to her death, when she’d gone back to try to help an older man reach the caves. She and the old man had been reduced to ash before Riker’s eyes.
Now he stared at the screen. “Arm phasers and torpedoes.”
“Sir,” said the ensign at security, “we still have people on the station.”
“I’m aware of that!” Riker snapped. Imzadi,he sent, and felt an echo back. Don’t worry about me,came her thoughts. Protect the ship.
Still, Riker turned to Qui’hibra, who had been aboard to consult with him (or dictate to him—opinions still differed) about the relief operations. “Can the station’s shields handle those things?”
“If we do our part defending it,” the elder said. On the screen, several fleets of Pa’haquel skymounts were already moving to engage the Entities, along with the few Fethetrit ships that had deigned to assist with the refugees rather than flying off in search of battle or plunder elsewhere. “Lower your shields, Riker! I must return to my skymount.”
“I’m sorry, Elder, but I will not compromise the safety of my own ship. You’ll just have to monitor from here.”
Qui’hibra didn’t waste time arguing. “Very well. I trust my daughter and Huntsmaster to manage.” He spoke into his communicator for a moment, advising Qui’chiri to proceed without him. Then he turned back to Riker. “I take it you will join the battle?”
The temptation was strong, but he held back. “Not yet. Not unless it becomes necessary to protect the station.”
“Very well. With you on station defense, it frees one more skymount for the battle. You may yet be needed, though. The branchers are a mighty foe, hard indeed to kill. In some ways they are worse than the harvesters; at least those take generations to travel between worlds. The branchers are fast, elusive, cunning. And they are more often the hunters than the hunted.” He said it with a hint of admiration. “But I doubt your phasers would do much good. Break one in two and you only double the number of your enemies. Break it into a hundred and you win the day, but the fragments will grow into a hundred more to menace you in years ahead. The only way to beat them is to pound at them until every last growth node is destroyed. You must practically grind them into powder.”
Onscreen, the skymounts and Fethetrit ships were matching their actions to his words, firing dense barrages at the Entities. The vast crystal life-forms rolled like sapphire tumbleweeds to dodge the attacks, and fired back with their familiar disintegrator beams. “My people have encountered one of these creatures in the past,” Riker said. “I never knew they travelled in groups.”
“Normally they do not, but they are canny beasts, and drawn to the scent of blood. They must have come in response to the Hounding, to feed on the organic matter blown into orbit and on the carrion we left. But first they wish to finish us off, so they may feed freely. They know we are weakened by the Hounding. But my fleet is still fresh and near full strength,” he finished with pride.
The Fethetrit’s shields fluctuated and sparked under the impact of the disintegrator beams, but held for now. When the beams struck skymount armor, they left gouges that looked shallow, but must have been meters deep. The struck ships shimmered, their armor re-forming, but Riker knew they could only do that so many times before running out of biomass.
“Extraordinary,” Jaza said. “Those beams, they somehow convert the chemical energy of carbon bonds into EM form and channel it into the Entities’ bodies. It’s not unlike how the cloud-shimmers feed.”
“They are too fragile to land on planets, so they leech their life-force from the skies,” Qui’hibra growled. “They can strip a whole planet bare in hours.”
“I know,” Riker said, his voice hard. “I’ve seen it happen.”
The elder studied him. “You bear a grudge. Good—if you channel it well. By your survival I take it you have effective weapons against the branchers?”
Riker recalled a vision of the Crystalline Entity shattering like a wineglass, shaken apart by the graviton beam which Data had designed as a means to communicate, but which Dr. Kyla Marr had turned into a weapon to avenge her son. The beam had shattered the creature uniformly, leaving nothing behind that could regenerate. To his Starfleet principles it had been horrific, an act of murder rather than self-defense. But nonetheless he had felt satisfaction at seeing Carmen avenged. And this time it would be self-defense, and defense of his crew, his wife….
No, Imzadi.Her presence, still in his mind, cautioning him, calming him. She was right, of course. He wasn’t about to hand over any more knowledge which could affect the local balance of power—not before he had more information about its consequences. He’d done enough damage already.