Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [15]
Her species, the Nizhrak’a, was native to Nizhara, a gas giant in the Sonada Sin system. They were lowdensity, plasmalike life-forms held together by powerful psychokinetic forces, nature’s response to the crush of gravity and atmospheric pressure—not to mention the vicious and volatile radiation fields—that prevailed on the ensign’s planet.
The Nizhrak’a were also immense—in some cases, almost as big as the Stargazer herself. But they could condense themselves when necessary. The ensign, for example, could pour herself into a containment suit and move through what must have seemed to her a warren of tiny spaces.
According to Jiterica’s medical file, she possessed all of the biological systems—nervous, digestive, ambulatory, circulatory, sensory, and so on—found in any humanoid life-form. However, the configurations of charged particles that comprised these systems were so spread out and seemingly unrelated as to render them unrecognizable to the sensors in the biobed.
The only part of Jiterica that approached the description of a solid was the particle membrane that served as her outer skin. It gave her body shape and definition, and kept it from being ripped apart by her world’s arsenal of savage, high-velocity winds.
Like every other part of her anatomy, she could psychokinetically control this membrane down to the subatomic level. That was what allowed Jiterica to assume a more or less human form and facial features, which she had been advised would minimize the differences between herself and the rest of the crew.
So why did she need a Starfleet containment suit? For several reasons, Greyhorse had learned.
First, Jiterica couldn’t maintain her condensed form for long. The suit, which was specially equipped with an electromagnetic reinforcement field, enabled her to remain in a tightly packed state indefinitely without placing undue strain on her resources.
Second, the ensign’s physiology was designed for maneuvering in the roiling, nightmarish atmosphere of a gas giant, not the relatively narrow corridors of a Federation starship. The suit enabled her to move as her fellow crewmen moved—on foot, in a predictable direction, and at a reasonable rate of speed—thanks to a sensor-motor technology developed specifically with the Nizhrak’a in mind. All Jiterica had to do was generate an electrical shock in a particular part of the suit’s sensor net, and its motor grid would do the rest.
The containment suit’s third virtue was that it maintained a felicitous environment for its wearer, simulating the kind of gravity, air pressure, and atmosphere one was likely to encounter on her world. Jiterica could have survived without these benefits, especially for a short period of time, but over the long haul it made her existence on the Stargazer much easier to bear.
Last, the suit enabled Jiterica to communicate. By stimulating her vocalizer with a variety of electrical shocks—much as she did to achieve locomotion—the ensign could make use of a limited vocabulary. If the doctor recalled correctly, she had more than two hundred Federation-standard words and phrases at her disposal.
Likewise, a device under her helmet received the spoken word and translated it into electrical signals. That way, Jiterica could “hear” information as well as convey it.
Of course, she could have achieved neither speech nor movement without hours of rigorous training at Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco. Greyhorse could only imagine how difficult those hours must have been. How exhausting.
How utterly frustrating.
He asked himself if he could have learned to live among Jiterica’s people, amid the hellish, howling tumult of a gas giant. Not even for a moment, he decided.
So why had Jiterica put herself to all this trouble, exposed herself to all this pain? What did she hope to gain?
The answer, like many answers, lay in the always arcane realm of interstellar politics.
As Greyhorse understood it, Nizhara wasn’t a Federation member world. However,