And perhaps someday, if the Spirit willed, he would be free to do the same to Riker and Troi and not need to hold himself back.
Chapter Thirteen
Christine Vale sat in a corner of the mess hall, nursing an orange-banana smoothie and monitoring the mood of the room. Jaza had been forced to postpone their just-friends lunch date—something she realized she was more disappointed about than she would’ve expected—but she’d chosen to remain in the mess hall anyway and keep an eye on things. It didn’t quite feel right to be essentially spying on her own crewmates, but her peace officer’s instincts died hard. Tensions were high in here right now. Several of the Pa’haquel visitors had gotten together with a number of Titan’s carnivorous crew members, including Ree, Huilan, and Kuu’iut, and were sharing a pair of tables, telling hunting stories in loud voices and laughing raucously. Many of the other crew members in the mess hall, particularly the herbivores, were acting disturbed and uncomfortable. A few minutes ago, Tylith, a Kasheetan engineer, had requested that they lower their voices, but as was usual in such cases, their compliance had lasted only a few minutes. Now Tylith was at a table on the far side of the cavernous room, trying to carry on a conversation but periodically glaring over at the carnivores. Vale expected that her silence wouldn’t last; Kasheeta might be herbivores but they were not known for meekness.
Indeed, after another few moments Tylith and her tablemates rose and came over toward Vale herself. Vale noted that those with her were also herbivores: Lonam-Arja, the Grazerite sensor tech, and Chamish, the Kazarite ecologist. “Commander,” Tylith said, “we’d like a word with you.” Her wide-set yellow eyes stared out from under high bony crests, and the lips of her protruding red-brown snout were curled, giving her a haughty and irritated look. To some extent all Kasheeta looked like that by default, but in this case Vale could tell the illusion was accurate.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“I thought the carnivores had agreed to limit their mess hall activities to late night. They’re not abiding by that agreement.”
“They choseto do that as a courtesy to their crewmates,” Vale told her. “It’s not a formal policy. They have as much right to be here as you do. Besides, they’re not eating.”
“No, but they’re talkingabout eating, and killing, and torturing helpless animals. It’s put me quite off my appetite.”
“And it’s not just about eating,” Chamish said. “Should we really be encouraging those Pa’haquel like this? Indulging their tales of brutality to nature’s creations, laughing in celebration of their triumphs? I don’t think the predators are serving Starfleet’s ideals very well by doing that.”
Vale stared at him. “Serving Starfleet’s ideals? Listen to yourself, Ensign. ‘The predators’? Is that any way to talk about your own crewmates?” She stood. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to watch this crew get divided on some sort of carnivore-versus-herbivore lines. I mean, look at them,” she said, gesturing at the Rianconi aides who sat near the Pa’haquel, listening politely to the stories. “Those herbivores don’t have any problem coexisting with predators. So why are you standing here complaining about sharing the mess hall with your own crewmates? Come on, people. We’re Starfleet. We should be the ones showing themhow to get along.”
Tylith and the others were lowering their heads abashedly, but that wasn’t enough for Vale. She started moving toward the raucous crowd, gesturing to the others to follow. “I said come on. Let’s not be rude to our guests.” The steel in her voice got them moving.
As they approached the table, Vale registered that the Pa’haquel huntsmaster Chi’tharu was regaling the others with the tale of how his fleet had battled a Hoylean Black Cloud. “How do you kill a nebula?” Kuu’iut was asking.
“Ahh, it is not easy. You must destroy or scatter enough of the planetesimals that comprise its brain so that it cannot continue to function. But getting to them is the hard part. A Cloud contains immense voltages and can send vast lightning discharges against a fleet, as powerful as any technological weapon you have ever encountered. Even the gases that make up its body can hit you with devastating force when accelerated and concentrated by the Cloud’s internal fields. The key is to infect its circulatory streams with radioisotopes. Injected in the right parts of its structure, they can interfere with its neural processes, leave it weakened, confused. But only if you can keep it from isolating the flow. It can cut off a damaged section from its neural network and keep functioning on the rest.
“For us, the slaying of this Cloud was a delicate, lengthy operation. We would dart in to make a strike, to inject isotopes or fire on key neural nodes, to pierce through magnetic barriers and allow cross-contamination. But then we would have to race back out again before it could retaliate. It took us months of harrying the beast, wearing it away by slow attrition. But it wore away at us as well, sometimes getting in a fatal blow with its lightning, and it became a race to see who would run out first. It was a testament to our skill,” he finished proudly, “that we only lost five mounts before the Cloud became too crippled to fight back anymore.”
“Is that really something to celebrate?” Tylith asked in a challenging tone. “All that death and destruction?”
“We celebrate that there was not more,” Chi’tharu explained.
“Still,” Lonam-Arja said in his slow, deep voice, “all those people dying—isn’t it hard to think about?”
The Pa’haquel hunter looked evenly at the Grazerite. “Those people were my siblings, my cousins, my friends. I lost a wife and my firstborn child. Of course their deaths came hard. But how can I honor their lives if I do not think about what they gave them for?”
Lonam-Arja lowered his bovine head. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you ever wish there was a better way, though?” Vale asked. “A way that didn’t result in so much death?”
“In the long term, the quantity of death is always the same. All that matters is the quality of it, and the purpose.”
“The quality of death,” Tylith echoed. “As though it were a wine to be appraised and enjoyed. Necessary or not, bringing death, to yourselves or to others, is nothing to tell boastful stories about.”
“Oh, really?” Counselor Huilan said with a small, mischievous smile showing around his tusks. “Tell us again, Tylith, about what you did during the Dominion War?”
His request was not hostile; he knew as well as Vale that the Kasheeta had been awarded the Medal of Valor for devising the means to destroy a Jem’Hadar fighter that had left her own vessel defenseless. But Tylith glowered at him anyway. “That was different. I only acted in defense, not aggression. And I take no pride in it.”
“Oh, but it was such a clever solution to the problem! How did it work again…?”
At Huilan’s prompting, Tylith sat down at the table and began to spin her tale of how she had rigged her ship’s tractor emitter to send false information to the enemy fighter’s inertial damper relays, throwing it out of synch and causing it to amplify the fighter’s accelerations rather than cancelling them. The result had been a messy but intact prize for the Starfleet Corps of Engineers to study. Chi’tharu reacted with interest, asking about the Jem’Hadar’s skills as fighters, about which Tylith had little to say. But the Pa’haquel female with him asked some cogent engineering questions, and soon she and Tylith were deep in shop talk, while the others at the table became engrossed in their own tangents to the discussion. After a few more moments, Vale slipped quietly away from the table, smiling. And the lion and the lamb shall lay down together. And no help needed from Deanna.