Intellivore - Diane Duane [43]
Picard had thought about it. He grimaced and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We have to start somewhere. We’ll maintain our distance until we’re ready to take a closer look; then we’ll make further plans.”
Picard rose. “Meanwhile, the rest of you will want to go over this information in more detail. If there’s any light you can shed on the work Mr. Data will be starting, please do so—and don’t ignore any possibility, no matter how unlikely it seems. I’d like to see a written report and discussion of the topics we’ve been working on within a few hours.”
Picard spent the next few hours in his ready room, taking care of “housekeeping”—the kind of ship’s business that always tends to pile up during busy periods.
It was an escape, and he knew it. Those empty mats on the floor of the cargo bay, the quiet, somehow accusing look in Crusher’s eyes—those were beginning to haunt him.
When he came out of the ready room, he found that Data was missing from the bridge, and Troi as well. “They’re down in engineering, Captain,” said Riker, heading to Data’s console to look over the shoulder of the officer manning it, keeping an eye on their course. “Data’s building the probe.”
“Already?” Picard said.
Riker gave him a wry look. “You know Data. Wave a new theoretical problem in front of him, and stand back! But he had some help. He and Deanna came in here together talking a mile a minute after the meeting broke up, and they went out again talking faster.”
A couple of hours later, the combined science staffs’ report was waiting for Picard on the bridge. The word conjecture was all over it: it was full of disclaimers and hedgings, and it raised the hair on the back of his neck, regardless.
The picture it drew was one of a long history of terror in this dark fringe at the edge of the galaxy. There were more references to planets that traveled, planets that killed, in the Chrestomathie. Some of them were in the records of the oldest races. They seemed to indicate that this phenomenon had been occurring, on and off, for certainly hundreds of years, possibly more like thousands. Some of them were probably just stories; some were almost certainly caused by the intellivore.
That name, the translation of the Romulan word, had stuck in the report. Here, too, some of the references were unsubstantiated legends, and some of them were true. The interesting thing about the true stories was that all such life-eating species had been wiped out a long time ago—or at least had managed to “never be seen or heard of again.” One of the Oraidhe science staff suggested that at least one of these vanishings might not be genuine, that perhaps one species somewhere decided to find itself a lifestyle that was a little more mobile, probably after repeated attacks on it.
Picard shifted uncomfortably in his chair and reflected on this enormous source of power that had not been used to its full potential. If the intellivore planet or species was a predator, it was a somewhat passive one, or, at least, it seemed to have been so for most of its history. It would more or less tiptoe out of the darkness, slip into orbit around some star, and wait for orbital mechanics in the area to calm down. There it would linger, waiting for travelers, for colonists … and it waited in places that suggested it knew people were coming. If it was responsible for tampering with the Enterprise probe, that was probably a good example of its preferred modus operandi. It would discover who was coming, be there ready for them, and when they arrived, it would suck their lives dry.
In the middle of reading the report, Picard had to stop, go into his ready room, and get himself a cup of tea. For a while, he stood across the room, gazing at his desk and the screen on it.
Finally, he put the teacup down and strode decisively toward his desk. It was time to finish studying