Miracle Workers (SCE Books 5-8) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [89]
However, I noticed, as time went on, that the owners looked weaker and gaunter—and that there were fewer and fewer of them. My best guess is that they succumbed to some kind of disease. After a certain amount of time, they were gone.
If the shii—the protectors had taken on a large-scale version of the form of shii when they arrived on Sarindar—had any notion of what had happened to the owners, they gave no indication of it. They simply continued carrying out their duties.
Those duties included gathering food. The owners, I soon realized, fed on the cranial matter of animals.
This explains the hoarding of heads and the discarding of the bodies. In their minds, they’re still gathering food for their masters, despite the fact that those masters are never going to return.
Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53288.9
I’ve been working on a way to try to communicate with the “shii.” I’ve moved to my tent, since the doleful looks from Dolahn (pardon the pun) have gotten tiresome.
The work Bart Faulwell did in upgrading the universal translators to understand Bynar speech, when they commune with computers or with each other, has turned into a boon. Most of that work was programmed into my da Vinci-issue tricorder, so I was able to start building a language algorithm for the shii.
Razka came by to give me a report, and asked me what I was doing. I explained it to him—including what I’d learned about our attacker.
“Why do you want to talk to it?”
“To convince it to stop. It doesn’t realize that it’s doing anything wrong. If we can explain to it that its masters are dead and it doesn’t have to hoard food for them anymore, maybe we can get it to leave us alone.”
“To what end? Commander, this is pointless. These are simple automatons. You no more ‘killed’ anything last week when you shot the first shii than I did when I crashed my father’s hovercraft when I was a child.”
“Razka, I appreciate—”
“Commander, you are an engineer. So are most of the men working here. When a piece of equipment malfunctions, you turn it off.”
“No, you try to fix it. Razka, I really do understand what you mean, but I can’t just condemn this thing without giving it a chance to stop. I killed the first one in self-defense—maybe if I can talk to it—”
Razka laughed. “You’re even calling the creature ‘it.’” Then he grew serious. “Let me put it another way, Commander. You are in charge of this project. This project has been endangered by these two creatures. Don’t you owe it to the men you’re responsible for to do whatever you can to safeguard them? Yes, it’s true, this thing has been left without any kind of guidance, and it’s simply following its programming. But Kejahna, Rimlek, Entorr, G’sob, D’Ren, and the others are all dead. You yourself commended their mazza to the Shigemos. What of them?”
I found I didn’t have an answer to that.
He left.
I went back to work. Maybe he was right. But the next time I saw that thing, I was going to try to talk to it.
Him. Her. Whatever.
First officer’s log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53289.1
All requests to the Nalori senate have gone unanswered. There is also no reply from the da Vinci or anyone else from Starfleet.
The sonic barrier that we erected around the camp has failed. The sonic rifles issued to the Nalori were not designed for such sustained use. One of them had a breakdown in the control unit when the coils overheated. The fact that they even use coils instead of an EPS system is an indication of how substandard they are.
Unfortunately, the breakdown of one converted rifle caused a cascade reaction, and now it doesn’t work. I have managed to reconstruct parts of the barrier, but that makes it all but useless. Unless the barrier is “airtight,” as it were, the shii can get through with ease.
The only way to properly fix the barrier is to cannibalize the remaining sonic rifles, but—even if I could convince the