Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [64]
Archer spoke up with authority, sitting beside T’Pol with Tucker’s torso across his knees; he held T’Pol’s hand firmly in his cool human grip. “We never meant to hurt you,” he told the creature. “You chose to try to hurt us—and T’Pol, whom you had said you would never harm.” He turned to the Vulcan and asked, sotto voce, “Is it replying?”
T’Pol shook her head. “Negative, Captain.” She was not sure that it could; she could not help wondering, however, what the creature was thinking.
In the launch bay, Archer stood in front of the open hatch of the shuttlepod and smiled faintly at Hoshi Sato as she walked toward him across the now empty-feeling chamber.
The Vulcan ship had departed several hours ago, with a special electrical chamber designed to contain the very weakened Wanderer; however, the Vulcan engineers assured the Enterprise captain that they would find a mechanical way to feed the creature. It would not be released until it could be educated and trusted to rely on its new form of nourishment, and not on humanoids.
Archer wondered whether that day would ever come—or whether, in fact, it should ever come. But he had been far too grateful to his Vulcan rescuers to argue the point; he was grateful, too, to have his ship back, and know his crew—and Earth—were safe. Trip Tucker’s burned fingertips were currently being regenerated in sickbay, and Archer was free of his concussion and accompanying headache, thanks to Dr. Phlox.
Most of all, Archer was grateful for the experience of defeating Wanderer. It was more than the fact that the Oanis’ deaths had been avenged, and that the Enterprise crew had been saved. The act of joining with his people against a common foe—and doing so in such a simple, meaningful way—had moved him.
It had not escaped his notice that T’Pol had instigated the linking of hands and touching of bodies together, or that she had later explained her reasoning for doing so as inspired by the passive resistance of an Earth leader, Gandhi. That she so unabashedly established physical contact with humans—an act Archer knew made Vulcans profoundly uncomfortable—and admitted to the fact that she had done so from intuition, and the example of a human, one that she actually admitted to respecting…Well, Archer thought, wonders never cease.
As for himself, he was beginning to rethink T’Pol’s stance on refusing to carry a weapon. All the phase pistols in the world, as well as jury-rigged devices, had ultimately proved useless against Wanderer. What had worked was the willingness of people to join together. Of course, that didn’t mean Archer himself was willing to turn entirely pacifist; faced with a horde of Klingons, he’d be the first to reach for a pistol. But any anger he had nurtured against T’Pol for not wanting to bear arms had entirely evaporated.
If only the Oanis had known…
The Shikedans, at least, now knew the truth, as did the mysterious traveler who had met Wanderer, communicated with it, and been convinced by the energy creature that the Oanis were dying from a microbe. The Vulcans had contacted the Shikedans and made sure that all of them—including the traveler, who, contrary to Wanderer’s insistence, had returned home to his people—were now aware of the danger the entity actually posed.
Hoshi finally reached Archer and paused at the pod’s entry to show him the plaque she bore in her arms. It was of iridescent white shale, beamed up from the planet Oan, which they once again orbited.
“It’s beautiful,” Archer said. The soft stone had been allowed to remain in its irregular shape, but its surface had been polished, and beneath an alien inscription, the legend in English read:
In memory of the Oani people
Destroyed by the entity known as Wanderer
May their legacy of peace
Live on in the hearts of others
Hoshi smiled a brief, sad smile, then said, “That’s in Oani script at the top.” She paused. “I’ve finished downloading their history into our databases. But I thought it’d be nice to leave a disk containing it at the memorial site as well.