The guest house is a long, low building, connected to the main house by a covered passageway. Most of it is taken up by a single long room, with many wooden beds. There are mattresses stuffed with straw. I have slept in worse places, but I think I may beam back to the Anar rather than rest here.
There is room, at least, for a number of us, both my people and Shohl's. All of a sudden, there seem to be black uniforms with blue shoulder stripes everywhere: Starfleet scientists. And a number with red shoulders instead of blue, because Shohl, whatever her other vices, is no fool. The Betazoid is there, and the Vulcan... and the scientists include the ghost-white presence of the Aenar....
The Anar's science division is not as numerous as I would like it, and I have only three officers on the surface now: Toriash, my Gorn head of the division, the Nausicaan biologist Nulnis, and the big Lissepian doctor, Siowxayer. Perhaps I can borrow more people from R'j, who has returned to her ship with a great deal of ill grace.
Or perhaps it does not matter. I walk out into the fields, squint up at the early afternoon sun, sniff the air with its sweet scents, and try to work out how much of this world is a stage property created by the power that has brought us here. Tiaza Zephora's "overlord". Or - a phrase of Grau's has stuck in my mind. She called it a "sleeping giant". Perhaps it is apt.
The scent is strange. I have never smelled anything quite like it, and it comes from the plants. They are tall, perhaps three metres tall, with stems that I can barely close my thumb and forefinger around; their leaves are broad and spatulate, and at the top each plant swells into a bulbous pod. Some of these pods, it seems, are ripening, their green surfaces splitting open to reveal many dark oval shapes, close packed within - seeds, perhaps? I walk between the rows of plants, my eyes narrowed. Grau said something about the roots....
Before I can turn my attention to the roots, though, something catches my eye. One of the Starfleet scientists, a dark-haired, light-skinned human male, is also in the field of plants, and I see him reach up to one of the splitting pods. He prises out a seed, or whatever it is, and I watch almost in fascination as he draws it down to his mouth -
Then I spring, my muscles driving me forward in a prodigious bound, and I slap the thing from his hand as I reach him -
"Human idiot!" I snarl.
He turns to face me, his mind-tone full of confusion, mild hurt, outrage and a pleasing whiff of fear. "What the -?"
"What do you think you are doing?"
"I just - well, I just wondered how they taste...."
"Human idiot! Suppose they taste like death?"
"Hold on," he says. His face is starting to turn a deeper shade of pink. "Look, humans and Klingons are more or less biologically compatible, so I can eat anything these guys can eat, right? So -"
"Three things to consider," I hiss at him. "First, the Tiazans have changed from the Klingon base genome through genetic drift and planetary acclimatization. Second, there are many plants which need careful preparation before they can be safely eaten. Third, we do not know if the Tiazans even use this plant as a foodstuff! - Do you see now why you should exercise caution? Do they even bother to train you at that Starfleet Academy?"
"I -" His face is bright pink now. His mind-tone is one of abject mortification. "I... wasn't thinking. I'm sorry. Thank you."
"Rrueo did not do it for you. Rrueo simply does not want the inconvenience of having to explain to Shohl why you dropped dead at Rrueo's feet."
"Rrueo? You're the Klink - er - KDF commander? Oh boy." He shakes his head ruefully. "Well, I'm Harley Haught, if you need to know."
"Harley Haught." I give him a forbidding glare. "That name was given you at birth, yes? In Rrueo's culture, names are earned. Rrueo will refer to you by the name you earn, which so far is human idiot."
He swallows hard, but holds in a flash of anger. "Actually... I guess that's fair enough."
"Good." I hold out my hand. "Let me see that thing you tried to kill yourself with."
He drops the - seed, for want of a better word - into my palm. I pull out my scanner and wave the sensor over it. "Complex organics," I mutter, more to myself than to Haught. "And... tellurium compounds. Plentiful. Probably not enough to kill you... certainly enough to make you wish they had."
Haught frowns at that. "Tellurium?"
"You have heard of the metal? Rrueo does not believe even Starfleet Academy is that deficient."
"Yeah, but...." Haught looks around, and breathes in deeply. "This stuff, how does it smell to you?"
"Pleasant. Your point?"
"Well, I don't know how Ferasan noses work, maybe... but it smells nice to me, too, and if it's loaded with tellurium compounds... they should reek. To a human."
"Hmm. That is a point... and I did not know human noses were even that sensitive." I kneel down in the rich, dark soil. "Your Admiral Grau said something about the roots of these things," I say. Haught kneels down beside me, and we brush at the soil beside the stem of one plant.
"That is odd," Haught says. "I mean, I'm no botanist, but...."
"Neither is Grau." I smooth my whiskers with one claw. "What is your speciality?"
"Geology, mainly. That stem doesn't even look like it has roots. It just... goes straight down."
I dig my fingers into the dirt, bring it out in handfuls. A few centimetres further down, I feel something... I brush away more earth. "A leaf. What sort of plant is it that grows leaves beneath the surface of the soil?"
"A very odd one," says Haught. He pulls out a tricorder. "I'm reading... hmm. What does that look like to you?" He holds the device out to me.
I take it from him. "Stupid Federation interface," I mutter, peering at the display. "But... it is clear enough. There is a mass, perhaps twenty metres down. And the plants... grow out of it." I hand the tricorder back, pull out my own scanner. "Rich in tellurium."
"This is crazy," Haught says. "Why the hell are they growing this... whatever it is... if they can't even use it? I mean... they haven't drifted that far from the basic Klingon genome, have they? To the point where they can digest tellurium compounds?"
"They would have to drift away from oxygen-breathing life, in that case." I frown. "That Starfleet gadget - you claim to be a geologist, yes? Can it close-scan molecular structures?"
"Well, sure, it's got full dimensional crystallography imaging - why, hasn't yours?"
"Not this unit. Scan the tellurium compounds. Rrueo wants to see these molecules."
I access the data library on my scanner while Haught fiddles with his device. "Think I've got it," he says. "There.... Hmm. Maybe I haven't."
"Or maybe you have," I say.
"I don't know. It looks - well, off - somehow."
I look from the image on his tricorder to the one on my scanner, and back again. "Rrueo suspects," I say, "that it looks off, because it is off. It might even explain the smell." The molecule on Haught's tricorder has the same components as the one on my screen... and they link together in the same way, they cannot do otherwise... but Haught's image is bent, distorted, some bonds lengthened, some shortened, the shape of the molecule twisted out of true. "Rrueo will tell you two further suspicions," I say. "First, that the isotopes in that compound do not match the normal pattern of isotopic abundance for this world... second, that that difference does not account for the distortion of the molecular structure."
Haught is frowning in naked bewilderment. "So what is causing it?"
"Rrueo's guess? A giant." More bewilderment. "Grau's phrase. The sleeping giant - the overlord of Tiaza Zephora. The giant is sleeping on this world, and the weight of his slumbering frame is bending these molecules out of shape." I look the human straight in the eye. "Rrueo thinks we should be very, very careful not to wake this giant."
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