Claws 19

Tylha

"I know it can't be the same ship." Ronnie's voice, over the comm link, sounds ragged and strained. "The Chloe was decommissioned, scrapped, after the Romulan War. I know that."

"So - some kind of duplicate, then?" I ask.

"Must be. Must be. We have tech teams aboard now, doing scans, reading logs, all that good stuff. No life signs aboard. No bodies, yet, either...." Ronnie's voice trails off. The strain is obviously telling on her. "Listen, I'll talk to you later. Local dawn's coming up, right? You're allowed outside again? Talk to you once I've got some more facts." She closes the channel with a beep.

I look down the length of the dormitory room. The strain is telling on my people, too. Most of them have managed to achieve some fitful sleep... T'Shomep is still awake, methodically checking the useless scanners in case they become useful again... and Rrueo is awake, crouched on a bed, silent, watchful, and twitchy.
 
Something is bothering that Ferasan.

Zodes Andeteph is awake, too - like me, she doesn't need regular sleep periods. Her blind eyes seem to be turned to the shuttered windows; her antennae are twitching. "I haven't detected any movements outside in... a while, now, sir," she murmurs.

Neither have I. I check my replacement tricorder. The sun should be coming over the horizon... just about now. I walk over to Rrueo. "Sunrise," I say.

"Safe to move?" she replies. "Good. Rrueo was starting to feel restless." She unfolds herself from the bed in a single fluid motion. "Let us see what has happened, then." She strides for the doorway of the building. We have barred that door on the inside with a single baulk of timber; Rrueo lifts it from its place and sets it down, then flings the doors wide.

We step outside into fresh, cool air and watery dawn light. My antennae twitch, and Rrueo's ears fold flat to her head. "That is different," she says.

Yesterday, the khala plants were a mass of green stalks, higher than our heads. Now, the fields are stripped bare, the plants mere stumps protruding a hand's breadth above the deep brown earth. Rrueo lopes forwards, her tricorder in her hand. I follow, warily.

The soil is churned, deeply disturbed. By the footprints, perhaps, of whatever came here? Rrueo kneels on the ground, her eyes intent on her scanning. "Human idiot!" she yells. "Come here!"

Harley Haught, blinking and yawning, stumbles out of the door behind us. "Dr. Haught," I say, "I believe you're wanted."

"I need you to confirm something," says Rrueo. "Scan. And compare those scans with the ones we took yesterday."

Haught has his tricorder out. The sleepy look fades from his face, to be replaced by one of puzzlement. "That's... weird."

"All of a piece with what we have seen before," says Rrueo. "Those plants were not cut down. The stalks have merely - retracted themselves - back down into the underlying tellurium-compound mass." She fingers the top of one stalk. "But the pods, the seed pods or whatever they are, have been taken away. Why? And where?"

Unexpectedly, a voice answers. "The servitors take them to the old building."

We all spin around. The child, Nejje, is sitting perched on a fence beside the field. She looks bright, happy, cheery. She jumps down as we turn to her. "When there is a harvest, they take the pods to the old building. I can show you, if you like."

"That - that would be very kind," I say. "Thank you." She smiles artlessly up at me.

"This way, then!" she says, and skips off. The three of us follow, tricorders in hand.

"It was a good harvest," says Nejje, as she leads us around the corner of the main hall and down a well-trodden dirt track. "I am glad! Another good harvest, and the overlord will let my parents have another child. I would like to have a little brother -"

Rrueo and I exchange shocked glances. There are, to be sure, planets where the pressure of population requires that level of social control - and the people of those planets endure it. But this is a spacious world... and these people are Klingons. Or were.

"Over here!" The building is partly screened from view by a row of trees. It is not like the others - it is cylindrical, weathered metal and concrete, a prefabricated housing module, the sort of thing a colony expedition might use. The old building. It must date from the colonization of Tiaza Zephora.

"Are you sure we are permitted here?" Rrueo asks, as we approach the double doors at one end of the building.

"Oh, yes," says Nejje. "So long as you don't break anything, I suppose. The overlord would be angry if his things got broken. I would think."

"We won't break anything," I assure her. "But we'd like to look."

The doors slide open on well-worn metal tracks. They are not locked. We step inside.

The building is full of equipment - hoppers, vats, a complex tangle of piping and wiring. Rrueo's nose twitches. "Chemical engineering," she says.

I nod. "Maybe if we look around, we can find out what it's for...."

Rrueo's brow is furrowed, her eyes half-closed. "But why? The sleeping giant can manipulate reality, why would it need a chemical engineering plant?"

"What makes you think it can manipulate reality?"

Rrueo says nothing for a moment, and when she speaks, it is not exactly an answer. "Rrueo is thinking aloud.... Let us imagine that the sleeping giant came here, and set itself up as this world's overlord. What is its nature? The telluric masses, underground, they must have some purpose - perhaps some purpose that makes sense as part of the biology of this being. A biological process. And - well, there are taboos about such things, yes? There are aspects of our own biology that we can attend to if we must... but would rather not deal with if some alternative can be found." She takes a step towards the machinery. "Old. Klingon standard, well over two centuries old. The seed pods, the processing, they are some biological process - and the sleeping giant employed the Klingon colonists to handle this part of it."

"We have to keep the machines in good order," Nejje volunteers.

"You're suggesting," I say slowly, "that the entity employs an entire planetary culture just to - to -"

"To wipe its backside," says Rrueo. "Perhaps.... We must find out what this equipment does. You are an engineer, what do you make of it?"

"I'm not a chemical engineer," I mutter, but I start scanning with my tricorder, walking beside the maze of pipes that runs from vat to vat. "Looks like... maybe some sort of fractionation, or distillation, process."

Rrueo is poking around at something, her tricorder buzzing in her hand. "There is something in the works, here," she says. "If Rrueo can get a clear scan -" She reaches into the machinery.

I don't see what she touches, but the effects are immediate. A vent opens in the side of one long tube, and liquid fountains out of it, black and glistening, in a thick spray. It gushes over the Ferasan with pinpoint accuracy.

I jump forward while Rrueo screams and splutters. The stuff is thicker than water, and it smells, a foully sweet, cloying smell. I have only the vaguest picture of the layout of the equipment, but I manage to find a shutoff valve, and twist it, hard. The flood slows to a trickle and stops.

Rrueo stands in a widening puddle of the stuff, black and dripping from head to foot, making noises which might be Ferasan swearing, or might just be inarticulate spitting.

Haught is scanning with his tricorder. "Looks like the tellurium compound," he says. "It's, um - well, it's mildly toxic, but it's got very low bio-availability. So long as you don't swallow any of it -"

"Human idiot!" Rrueo screeches. "Does Rrueo look like she will swallow any of this - this -" The universal translator can't cope with what she calls it. Over to one side, Nejje is doubled over, shaking with laughter. I'm trying hard not to smile myself.

I look around, at the unfamiliar Klingon signage. There are some facilities you have to have, in any chemical works - I find it. "Over there. Hose. Let's get you washed down."

The hose fitting is stiff from disuse, but it turns as I wrench at it, and water shoots out. I aim the jet at Rrueo, and she yowls as the water hits her. I play it up and down her body, washing the black goop away, and eventually she emerges, cursing, spitting and sneezing, her midnight-blue fur soaking wet and bedraggled, drops of water falling from her drooping whiskers. I am trying very hard not to laugh.

Haught is scanning the black stuff as it drifts, lazily, across the floor and into a drain. "Huh," he says. "Now that's kind of interesting...."

I turn off the hose. "What is?"

"This stuff." He holds up his tricorder, taps the image on the screen. "The distorted tellurium compound? The molecule's chiral. Only this stuff... this is homochiral."

"Ah!" says Rrueo. I don't know if something's clicked with her, or if it's just another exclamation of disgust. She wriggles and twitches inside her wet Klingon leathers.

"Chiral compounds?" I look at the machinery. "That does make some sort of sense...."

Chiral molecules exist in two forms, mirror images of each other in shape. But the glop on the floor is homochiral - it only has one form. And that implies -

"This machinery," says Rrueo, "is for processing out one of the chiral isomers. Presumably, this -" she spits "- is the form they did not want. And I can well understand it! - The mirror image molecule... has been taken away."

"That'd make sense," I say. "By the servitors.... But taken away where?"

"Well, don't you know?" says Nejje. She is wiping her eyes, still giggling. "The overlord's tower is only a few kellicams away."