Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [21]
The captain wasted no more time in arguing against the opportunity. “Tell it to come.”
T’Pol nodded; this time, she merely unfocused her gaze for an instant, then bent over her viewer. After a time, she straightened and said, “Unusual energy configuration approaching. Currently located twenty-five hundred kilome-ters from the ship at coordinates seven-oh-five-zero.”
It had moved with warp speed. Just to make sure, Archer stood behind her and tried to peer into her viewer; she sensed him and, without taking offense, stepped aside so that he could get a better look.
“Sir,” Malcolm Reed interjected, his voice filled with tension. “Are you sure you don’t want to activate the hull plating?”
T’Pol turned toward him. “It would do no good, Lieutenant. At any rate, the creature is benign.”
“Claims to be benign,” Reed corrected her. “And you can’t be sure that activating the plating would do no good.”
“Not yet, Lieutenant,” Archer said. “If this thing meant us harm, why would it be asking our permission for anything?” He paused, then bent forward over T’Pol’s viewer, his vague and private relief that his science officer truly wasn’t mad mixing with a sudden intense curiosity. “Will you look at that?” No image appeared on the viewer, only a digital readout of various forms of harmless radiation, mixed with electromagnetic pulses, which had gathered into a dense cloudlike formation.
“Sentient,” T’Pol said, studying it alongside him, clearly fascinated. “Yet totally amorphous.”
“On screen,” Archer told Mayweather, who obliged immediately.
The sight of it caused Archer to rise from his chair. Whatever he had expected to see, this was not it: a roiling play of energy that looked like dappled light on breaking turquoise waves of water; for an instant, he thought of the island planet and its seas below.
Conscious energy. Why does it surprise me so to find it in the universe? Archer wondered. The physicists have always said we’re just light in frozen form…
To the screen, he said aloud, “Greetings from the crew of the starship Enterprise. We appreciate your offer of help in discovering what killed the inhabitants of”—he paused, struggling to remember what Hoshi had called the planet—“Oan.”
“The entity returns your greetings, Captain,” T’Pol answered immediately behind him. Her gaze, too, was fixed on the screen. “It asks permission to come aboard to work directly with Doctor Phlox. I will serve as translator.”
“Why does it need to come aboard?” Archer asked. “It seems to communicate just fine from this distance.”
“It can ‘hear’ us, but it cannot see our diagnostic equipment or know the results of any tests Doctor Phlox has run. Nor can it examine the tissue samples.”
“But it’s huge,” Archer said, still staring at the viewscreen. “Look at it. How many hundreds of kilometers across is it?”
T’Pol paused, then replied, “It says that it can condense itself to humanoid size in order to facilitate working with us. It is not easy for it to accomplish this—it will take it some time in order to do so. But once in condensed form, it can remain thus indefinitely.”
The captain hesitated. He had no reason to deny letting this creature aboard his vessel, especially if it had already been exposed to the illness and was immune, as it claimed. Yet breaking quarantine left him enormously uncomfortable.
At the same time, he realized that they were being offered an incredible opportunity, not just in terms of communicating with a radically different species with a great deal of spacefaring knowledge, but also in terms of learning more about the Oani’s medical disaster.
And that’s what Enterprise was here for.
“Very well,” he said finally. “Tell it to come aboard.”
Four
ARCHER HAD SCARCELY uttered the words when the shimmering vision on the viewscreen disappeared, leaving in its place the blue-green island world, Oan, against the backdrop of space, and the glow from the more distant sun the humans had labeled Kappa Xi.
Yet by the time the captain blinked and opened his eyes once more, the roiling blue-green