The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [2]
“I’ve been keeping busy, Captain,” Will Riker said, handing Picard a padd. “Here’s the correlated environmental data on the third and fourth planets of ‘452. Thought you might want to see this sooner rather than later.”
Picard smiled, took the padd, and leaned back in his chair. “Thank you, Will,” the captain said as he began to scan the display. “With the ton of work we’ve yet to get through, I didn’t feel right in making this a priority item. It was thoughtful of you to run this on your own.” He tapped the padd with a finger. “Ah, here’s what I was hoping to see.”
“Let me guess. The ambient radiation spike on Planet Three?”
Picard nodded slowly. “Precisely. As we thought, it’s coincident with the date of the formation of the ruins, within the margin of error—that is, the spike agrees closely with the date we’ve established through other evidence. Whoever wiped out this civilization came quickly, struck hard, and didn’t leave much behind.”
“Everything suggests that Planet Three suffered a massive thermonuclear bombardment from space,” Riker agreed. “Whoever it was used weapons designed to scatter as much killing radiation as possible. Everything on Planet Three was intended to die, and the planet is dead for all practical purposes. All that’s left are bacteria and insects, a few hardy plants, and not much else.”
Picard read further. “We estimate that it has been six thousand years since the bombardment,” he said, “yet the planet is still badly contaminated. What remains of the ecosphere is extremely fragile.” The captain picked up one of the padds on his desk and handed it to Riker. “The geological survey has identified several areas that could have been the sites of ground-based launching facilities on Planet Three,” the captain told him. “Spaceports, more or less. Large ones.”
Riker read the display. “I agree,” he said. “They had to have been launching facilities, given their size and proximity to the sites we’ve established for Planet Three’s major cities. Think the natives could have escaped?”
Picard shook his head. “The ruins suggest a native population of more than two billion humanoids at the time of the bombardment. The launching facilities—if that’s what they are—would be inadequate to handle that number in anything like a reasonable time, and I doubt the natives had time. What do we have on Planet Four, Will?”
“Our analysis of the ruins there confirms that Planet Four was not as technically advanced as Planet Three,” Riker said. “However, the natives of Planet Four seem to have had space travel of some sort. As for the plague virus we found during our orbital bioscans, Dr. Crusher’s still working up the schematics,” Riker replied. “To quote the doctor, ‘I’ll have it soon. It’s complicated. Please go away.’” He grinned and then grew serious. “Beverly’s theory is that the virus might have been tailored to kill off all higher animal forms on Planet Four.”
“Tailored, you say? It was purposefully designed?”
“She says it might have been, sir,” the first officer said. “The virus is still present in Planet Four’s ecosystem, and its effects remain potentially devastating. Beverly says, from what she’s already seen, that the odds against a virus like this one evolving naturally and then remaining relatively stable for six millennia are prohibitively high. Viri just don’t work like that.”
“But Planet Four is ecologically stable at present,” Picard pointed out. “It actually seemed quite lovely.”
“Yes, sir. Higher forms of animal life are not present on land, but lower forms are prospering, and plant and marine life seem to have been completely unaffected.”
Picard read quickly through the report from the exobiology section. “What about that lifeform Bergeron located just before we left?” the captain asked. “That brightly colored slithering thing that looked a bit like a Centaurian bhobb? It seemed to be the most highly evolved land-based lifeform left on the planet. Any worthwhile