Though he couldn’t see it directly for all the leaves and vines, he did catch a glimpse of what looked like one massive segmented eye and maybe a set of feathery scales running along the creature’s side. It was enormous, whatever it was, and he was happy Modan had chosen to give it a wide berth. The jungle seemed to hold its breath as the thing went by; the sound of insects and the larger creatures that fed on them died to a whisper until the monster had passed.
After what felt like a collective exhalation, Modan said very softly, “It’s a predator. I saw it kill one of the big avians yesterday. I’m sorry, but we will have to go the long way around.”
“It’s okay, Modan,” said Jaza. “I can make it.”
She looked at him then; her large blue-green eyes seemed filled with sadness and, despite her changed appearance, served, as did her voice, to remind him that she was still the same young woman he’d been flirting with for the last few days on Titan.
“No,” she said sadly. “It’s not okay and I am sorry for what you’ll have to see. Come.”
So he followed her lead as they trudged in silence through the lush and occasionally hostile alien jungle. He asked her at one interval about her fierce metamorphosis, and she said that once the Seleneans had all looked as she did now but that, since joining the Federation, they had taken to breeding crиche siblings to mirror as best they could the dominant races of the UFP. Rather than an effort to blend in with those societies-the golden metallic skin prevented this in any case-it was an attempt on behalf of the Pod Mothers to put their new neighbors at ease.
However, the Mothers did not want their children to be defenseless in the wider galaxy and so allowed the primary DNA, that which accounted for this more durable and lethal form, to remain. In cases of imminent physical attack, a Selenean would revert to her feral aspect until the danger had passed.
“It’s not as if we keep our nature secret, Najem,” she said as they fought their way through yet another hyper-dense thicket of ten-meter leaves and six-meter blades of ochre grass. “All this is in the Starfleet medical database.”
“Good thing your minds don’t go feral along with your bodies,” he remarked, thinking how dire his current situation might be had that been the case. “I wouldn’t want to have to fight you like this.”
“The Mothers are wise,” said Modan in the sort of reverent tone that Jaza had only heard in the voices of Bajoran vedeks when talking of the Prophets. “And, no, you wouldn’t want to fight me.”
“Which is your natural form?” he asked her, wondering if he could manage to shove this vision far enough away to remain attracted to her. The banter was only a cover in any case, something to keep his mind off the fates of his friends both on the away team and Titan. Plenty of time for the worst news later.
“Both forms are mine,” she said. “I am as I am.”
She had pulled farther ahead of him while ascending another of the steep little hills and now disappeared completely behind a particularly thick clump of the giant fronds dominating the summit.
“Modan, wait,” he said, wincing at the strain on his battered skeleton. “Let me catch up.”
She said something that was eaten by the noise of animals chattering in the brush all around. The smell was different here somehow; the normal all-pervasive musk of decaying organic matter and flowers in heat had given way to something unpleasantly acrid and metallic.
Smoke.
Something had burned here recently and might still be burning. With all the explosions from the incendiaries being employed by the Orishans in their battle, it stood to reason that there would be many burnt or burning areas to navigate.
This sort of destruction was also, unhappily, familiar to him. As he climbed the last few meters, the smell of soot and metal triggered yet another memory from his days fighting on Bajor.
He was running through the streets of Ilvia, desperately pushing his way between bodies in the flood of his people going in the opposite direction. The bomb he’d set had gone off hours too early. A problem with the timer? A faulty circuit? He never found out but, just at that moment, didn’t much care. The cause wasn’t a priority.
His father was in there, tending to patients in a makeshift clinic only a hundred meters from the ordnance storage facility that had been his target.
He had hinted, obliquely of course, that it might be best, for that day at least, not to see patients or to see them elsewhere, but his father either didn’t or wouldn’t understand the soft warning.
“Someone in this family has to do the Prophets’ will, Najem,” Jaza Chakrys had told him.
It was a familiar refrain and produced a familiar effect. The two of them had spent the next few minutes screaming at each other. What have the Prophets ever done for us, Father? If you have to ask, then you’ve strayed too far from your path, Najem. I don’t stray from my path, Father, I reject it-But by then his father had had enough and had left him there alone, seething in the dusty street.
Had the bomb gone off as programmed, his father and the patients would all have been long gone, back to their homes and hovels, far away from the town center. But it hadn’t and they hadn’t and he had to find his father.
“Jaza Chakrys,” he called out to anyone in the stampede of people. “Has anyone seen Jaza Chakrys?”
It was no use. The plume of ugly smoke spewing up behind them from the ordnance depot coupled with the noise of the Cardassian civil alert system- Culprits and their families will be found and punished!-had transformed these people into a herd of fleeing beasts.
He’d fought his way through them, almost literally in a few instances, until he managed to break through only a few meters from the empty shrine that his father used as his hospital.
He remembered being thrilled that the temple’s front faзade, a long stone wall with a large stone ring with a sculpture of an Orb at the crown, was only scorched a bit, its windows only shattered by the force of the nearby explosion.
He’d burst in, kicking the remains of the destroyed front door away and screaming for his father to show himself if he was present. Jaza Chakrys was not there. No one was. Aside from Najem, the shrine was empty. Under its new covering of shattered wood and glass there was hardly a sign that anyone had been there at all. He had allowed himself to think that maybe his father had actually listened to him for once.
It was then that he had heard that strange sound, like wind chimes in chorus, and his head had begun to ache.
“Najem,” said Modan, gently shifting him from the place where he’d fallen unconscious. “Are you all right? Can you continue?”
“Fine for now,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“No,” she said softly, an incongruous gentleness from something that looked so fierce. “I’m sorry. For you.”
She helped him rise again and this time let him lean on her as they made their way back to the top of the hill. She shoved the leaves away or cut them with her talons as they pushed through and then, as they emerged in the open again, he saw the reason for her sadness.
“Caves of fire,” he said, incredulous.
There before them, lying in a billion smoldering pieces at the end of the deep gash its impact had cut in the terrain, was a starship. Or what was left of one anyway.
Though nearly none of the bits were intact enough to identify, the ones that were told the story. There was one of the nacelles, sticking up out of the dirt, still glowing faintly. There was the long sloping arc of a saucer disk, oddly pristine among the charred and burning wreck, the remains of the saucer section. The wreckage was spread over kilometers, the groove it had dug even longer.
There were bodies in there as well. Hundreds of broken sentients peppered the destroyed machine’s carcass, each bent or shredded or contorted horribly and all of them burnt to charcoal by what had obviously been a hideous explosion. It wasn’t hard to ferret the source of the conflagration. The ship’s warp core, still dangerously intact despite its scorched and battered state, continued to belch plasma and to radiate so much energy that he could feel the warmth from where he stood tens of meters away.