The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [32]
“The Krann could not get over their hatred of you,” Riker observed. “Revenge is a powerful motive.”
“Your continued presence threatened them,” Worf guessed. “Your star system was not big enough for both peoples.”
“We think it was a little bit of both,” Kerajem replied. “Revenge and fear make a deadly mix. Whatever the motive behind it, the final attack devastated our world. The Krann had developed weapons designed to eradicate all life on our planet by sterilizing it with radiation. All of Eul Ma’ak Lethantana must have been dead within a week of the Krann bombardment.”
Picard held up a hand. “Yet you are here. You and your people live.”
“We do indeed,” Kerajem said, not without pride. “At the time of the attack, our people were mounting our first deep-space colonizing mission. The only other habitable world in the Ma’ak Terrella system was Ma’ak Krannag, and we surely weren’t welcome there. We needed to go to the stars.”
“Without warp drive?” Riker asked.
Kerajem nodded. “We lacked the ability to travel faster than light as you people do, but our population was increasing while our resources were diminishing. We had to do something to relieve the population pressure on our world. One plan involved building independent space-faring colonies inside hollowed-out asteroids. These asteroid ships were designed to sustain succeeding generations of colonists bound for the stars.”
“Hollow asteroids?” Troi wondered. “Wait a moment. I think I’ve heard of this.”
“So have I,” Picard said, nodding. “Many civilizations have briefly considered using such asteroid ships for one-way interstellar journeys, but by the time these cultures go about actually planning such ships, they either stumble across the secret of faster-than-light travel, or they become decadent and lose interest in interstellar travel altogether.”
“There is at least one exception, sir,” Data pointed out. “Consider the asteroid ship Yonada—”
“Thank you again, Mr. Data,” Picard interrupted. “What happened, Kerajem?”
“All we know is that the colony ships were launched some months before the ultimate crisis came for Eul Ma’ak Lethantana and Ma’ak Krannag,” the First Among Equals replied. “Perhaps someone in power saw the attack coming and tried to make sure that some of our people would survive. A story is told about the captain of one of the colony ships who looked back not very long after the launch, from many millions of miles away, to see Eul Ma’ak Lethantana suddenly glow with a fierce light of its own. Our homeworld is supposed to have died at that moment.” Kerajem paused. “Now we know what that captain might have been seeing. In any case, the story of the death of our homeworld and how it happened was brought to the asteroid ships by a handful of survivors who had managed to escape Eul Ma’ak Lethantana in high-boost conventional ships.”
“Didn’t the Krann chase the asteroid ships?” Riker asked.
“We think they would have if they could,” Presinget said. “Either they didn’t have ships with sufficient range to pursue our people, or they couldn’t find the asteroid ships to destroy them.” The labor minister laughed without humor. “The ships looked like asteroids, after all. Hard to sort them out from real ones.”
“How long did it take you to arrive in this star system?” Picard asked.
“The religious scrolls say only that we were in transit for ‘years upon years,’” said Klerran. “We think our people were on their way here for something like two thousand years.”
“My word,” Troi said.
“A flight time of approximately two thousand years for an eighty-seven light-year trip, given the level of technology one would assume for the culture