Intellivore - Diane Duane [50]
They found Clif sitting in his command chair, as they had seen him last: braced, hunched forward, fingers interlaced, now leaning quite far forward, like a man who had fallen asleep in his seat. Riker gently lifted the captain up, looked him in the eye. His eyes were open, but there was no one behind them. Everyone else—his exec, his science officers—families, children—all were silent, eyes empty, having seen what they could not tell, and now would never be able to.
Much later, Picard sat in his own command chair, his own bridge crew silent around him. He did not want to go near sickbay just now, knowing who would be them, and what she would be thinking.
And emphatically he did not want to go down to the holodeck and sit under a Caribbean sunset. The voice that had told him two beings’ worth of terrible jokes under that sunset would not be speaking to anyone again, except in memory.
He looked at the starry dark—the stars sparse here, sliding away past Enterprise as she continued slowly on the course after the planet. He had ordered that they drop back a little—not far enough to lose the planet, but just a little. Oraidhe was on tow, on tractor beams; the slowing up was reasonable enough.
Picard looked into the emptiness. This will not happen again, he thought. I swear it won’t.
But all around him he heard the echo of an oath that he might not be able to keep.
Chapter Seven
THE COMMAND CREWS of Enterprise and Marignano met again in the morning. To say that the mood was somber would be putting it mildly.
“It was a message,” Maisel said, “what happened to Oraidhe. That creature out there has been in this business for a long time. It considers itself a match for us … and it’s daring us to do our worst.”
She paused and smiled, not a pleasant look. “We’re going to have to,” she said, “if we’re going to survive.”
Ruefully, Picard said, “I agree with you. It knows, I think, that we’re locked into this pursuit … though whether it understands the reasons, I have no idea. It knows that sooner or later, it will have its opportunity to come at each of us.”
“Why hasn’t it done so now?” Riker said.
Data looked up. “I would conjecture,” he said, “that it may be gorged. This is a bigger ‘feed’ than it, or they, have had since Boreal or the pirate vessel previous. I would suspect we have a little time.”
“We’re going to have to make best use of that time, then,” Picard said. “Let me be clear: I am still open to the possibility of communicating with this creature or creatures, even now. We cannot forget our mandate, which is contact with new life. If that contact proves to be inevitably fatal, that’s one thing; but the inevitability is not yet proven, and we must keep the option open if there’s any way we can.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Captain,” said Maisel, “but I think you’re wasting your time. I think we had better postulate worst case.”
Picard rested his chin on one hand and stared thoughtfully at Maisel. “All right. Though I’d prefer to see this resolved some other way, I agree we must postulate worst case. We must turn our minds to a way to destroy this creature or creatures, if it cannot be stopped otherwise. And we must act in ways that will encourage it to return to its more normal modus operandi.”
“You’re saying we should back off the chase?” said Ileen.
“If there were a way to cause it to think that we weren’t even now interested in chasing it,” Picard said, “possibly a way to lay a false trail—I would do that.”
“There’s something else we should be thinking about, Captain,” said Riker. “The question of communication. From the evidence we have, the intellivore plainly understands our forms of communication well enough to read them. It can tell when ships and colonists are coming its way. Its translation facilities must be fairly well developed. All it should take would be one message in the clear, stating our intentions clearly, and then we can watch what it does. If it backs off, that’s great. Or if it returns a communication in a reasonable time, then we can start working out what it wants to do.