The Red King - Michael A. Martin [12]
“One might accurately describe them that way,” Tuvok said. “Despite their alien outward appearance, the Neyel were—are—entirely human at the genetic level.”
“According to Excelsior’s reports,” Riker said, “the Neyel were the descendants of the scientists and engineers who worked aboard one of Earth’s early L-5 colonies.”
“One of the hollow-asteroid spacehabs that Zefram Cochrane’s team used to develop his prototype warp drive?” Vale asked.
“The same,” Riker said. “The Vanguard colony had been thought destroyed in an accident during a warp-field test several years before First Contact. Instead, its imploding warp fields sent it on a very long voyage. Of course, no one on Earth knew that at the time.”
“The Neyel had been cut off from Earth for nearly two and a half centuries when Excelsior first encountered them,” Tuvok said. “However, they had already evolved into a form that bore almost no outward resemblance to the mainstream branch of humanity that went on to participate in the founding of the Federation.”
“But how can that be?” Vale said. “How could they have evolved such a fundamentally different physical form in such a short time?”
“Genetic engineering,” Riker said.
Akaar nodded. “Apparently born of rather urgent necessity.”
“Amazing,” Vale said, her eyes widening. “You’d think their ancestors would have remembered the lessons of the Eugenics Wars at least as well as we do. I mean, those times had to still be within the living memories of at least some of the Neyel’s ancestors when they left Earth.”
At least for those who’d managed to survived the nuclear strikes and bioweapons attacks of the Third World War, Riker thought. He would never forget the devastation that had still been evident on his home planet only a decade after the outbreak of that horrible conflict, having seen it up close during the Enterprise’s mission to stop a Borg attack on twenty-first-century Earth.
“Do not judge them too harshly, Commander,” Akaar said to Vale. “From what little we were able to glean from their history, the progenitors of the Neyel found basic survival to be an extreme challenge after they were cut off from your homeworld.”
Tuvok nodded. “Indeed. Had they not used gene manipulation—to add microgravity-adapted grasping tails and feet to their phenotypes, for example, or to increase their resistance to hard radiation or accelerate their maturity to reproductive age—they might have died out more or less immediately, or at least been rendered sterile.”
“Right after we first arrived here, you said something that struck me as fairly ominous, Commander Tuvok,” Vale said. “You compared the Neyel to the Romulans. Since we might find ourselves stuck here in Neyel territory for at least a little while, I hope you were just being melodramatic.”
“Vulcans are never ‘melodramatic,’ Commander,” Tuvok said, tipping his head in what might have been either curiosity or umbrage. “We found the Neyel to be highly aggressive, ethnocentric, territorial, and paranoid in the extreme.”
“That’s understandable, considering the lousy hand they were dealt,” Riker said. “Their ancestors were a relative handful of humans who were suddenly forced to live on their own in a totally unexplored universe, dependent on an L-5 habitat that wasn’t designed to be completely self-sufficient. Yet they left the Sol system years before Archer did—hell, before Cochrane did—and settled a huge swath of space that no other human would visit for centuries. Along the way, they must have faced all sorts of dangers no human had ever seen before.”
Riker wondered momentarily what he would have done in their place. Though the forebears of the Neyel had been presumed killed, they had survived and persevered, utterly isolated from the relentless march of human history. And while they had been preoccupied first with survival,