At the heart of the city, concealed by a ring of delicately complex interlocked towers and slashed with stray beams of late afternoon sunlight, stood an intimidating, colossal pyramid of dark crystal and pristine metal, the Council hall.
Mickind walked with Captain Stork as he escorted him to the chamber. He followed his guide down a cavernous thoroughfare that cut all the way through the pyramid. The Council chamber had four towering smoky crystal walls. Four tiers of seating surrounded her, one sloping down from each wall, each suspended more than a dozen meters above the main level, which was open and empty except for him and Mickend.
A masculine voice resonated in the cathedral like space. "Welcome, Captain Blaine Stork." He turned until he saw the speaker, a Malkin, standing in the middle of the lowest row of seats on the eastern tier. He continued. "I'm Demo, the leader of the council of the Malkins."
He nodded his understanding and then addressed Demo. "Thank you for meeting with me."
Demo's reply was cool and businesslike. "Are your accommodations and provisions acceptable?"
"They are, but our captivity is not." Stork said.
"We regret that such measures are necessary." Demo said.
Keeping his anger in check was difficult for Stork. "Why are they necessary? We pose no threat to you."
"Your arrival on the surface left us little alternative, Captain. As Mickend already told you, we greatly value our privacy. Once it became clear that you were aware of our world, we were forced to choose between banishing you to a distant galaxy and making you our guests. The latter option seemed the more merciful of the two."
Stork rolled his eyes and let slip a derisive huff. "Don't take it personally, but we don't see it that way."
"That's not surprising." Demo said.
Reining in his temper, Stork said, "If it's isolation you want, we can arrange that. I could have your system quarantined. None of our people would ever return."
"Not officially." Demo said. "However, in our experience with other species and civilizations, we have often found that telling people not to come here inevitably attracts visitation by those who disregard authority, hardly the sort of guests we'd want to encourage. I'm certain you can understand that."
"Yes, of course." Stork said. Diplomacy had never been Stork's strong suit, and the Malkins were making this overture more difficult for him than he had expected. Through gritted teeth he said. "What if I swore my crew to secrecy?"
"When you reached your people, they would expect an explanation for your absence. And you and your crew would still know the truth, Captain. Coaxed by threat or temptation, one of you would talk."
"Then erase our memories!" He knew he was getting desperate, but he had to press on. "We can't reveal what we don't know. With all this crazy technology of yours, I bet you've got something that could whitewash our minds, make us forget we ever saw you. You could erase everything since the ambush of our ship, send us back, make us think we blacked out…"
"And what of the time that has passed since then? How would you and your crew react to that, Captain? Would you accept a circumstance so bizarre without seeking an explanation?" And if you did, who's to say that once taken back to that moment, you wouldn't make the same choice you did before, and set course once again to our world?"
Stork felt tired, of arguing, of plotting, of all the little battles that had marked every hour of his command since the ambush. Softening his approach, he started. "You make good points, Demo. I really can't refute them, so I won't try. But I just don't understand your motives. You cite this need for privacy as the reason my crew and I are being held prisoner. Why are you so afraid of contact with other races?"
"Our impetus is not fear, Captain." Demo said. "It's pragmatism." He looked at Mickend and Stork did likewise.
Mikend turned to him and explained. "When less advanced species become aware of us and what we can do, they tend to respond with either intense curiosity or savage aggression, and sometimes both. In the past, alien civilizations have inundated us with please for succor, expecting us to deliver them from the consequences of their own shortsightedness. Others have tried to steal the secrets of our technologies or force them from us. Because we will not take sentient life, even in self-defense, it became increasingly difficult to discourage these abuses. Some sixty-five thousand of your years ago, we concluded that isolation and secrecy would best serve our great work, so we relocated our cities and people here, to what was, at the time, a relatively untraveled sector of the galaxy. However, the development of starflight by several cultures and your arrival on this planet have reminded us that while changes are never permanent, change is."
"Yeah, life is hard." Stork said. "Cry me a river." While the scientist struggled to parse his sarcastic idiom, he aimed her ire at Demo. "So let me get this straight, my ship, my crew, and myself are doomed to spend the rest of our days here because you don't like getting hassled?"
The angrier he became, the calmer Demo seemed. "It's not quite so simple a matter, Captain. These conflicts tend to escalate, despite our best efforts to contain them. Often, as we take bolder steps to defend ourselves and our sovereignty, several less developed civilizations will band together out of fear or avarice. When that happens, we often must take extreme measures, up to and including their displacement."
Stork held up a hand to interrupt him. "Displacement?"
"A shifting en masse, of an entire civilization and its people, often to another galaxy. To use an analogy from your own world, it's like catching a spider in your home and expelling it to the outdoors rather than killing it." He paused and grew more somber. "It's a tactic we find distasteful and distressing. Having been forced to it in the past, we now choose to conceal ourselves rather than risk provoking another such travesty."
Begging and pleading both had proved ineffective. All that Stork could do now was try to lay groundwork for a future opportunity. "If my people and I have to stay here, we'd at least like to get to know more about your culture." He said.
Mickend looked up to Demo. "With the Council's permission?"
Demo nodded. "Granted."
Meanwhile, in the shade of a tree by the lake, violent ideas were taking root. Most of the crew were asleep in their new rooms. The rest, mostly security officers, some others in the science and command divisions, had risen at dawn, stolen away in silence, and gathered here. They circled around Lieutenant Keeling, who used a twig snapped from a low branch to draw designs in the dirt.
"Our biggest challenge right now is the scattering field around the city." He said, etching a circle in the dirt. "We can't transport through it, and we can't get signals out."
Lieutenant Thomas tumbled three small stones in his hand while he stared at the circle Keeling had drawn. "Depending on our objective, we need to either get outside the field or collapse it. It's about a hundred or so meters to get clear so I'd suggest we focus on knocking out the field."
"That's a good plan." Ensign Vail said. "Except we have no power in our gear."
Keeling waved away the complaint with his twig. "There are ways to fix that. Worst case scenario, we can use solar power to recharge our weapons."
"That could take time." Vail said.
"Are you going somewhere, Ensign?" Keeling shot back. "The city has some kind of power generator. Maybe we can find a way to tap into it. We can talk to Lieutenant Stebleton about that, but let's remember that we have options. The rifles and tricorders might be out cold, but we still have flares and our hands."
Ensign Vail spoke up again. "I don't want to be pessimistic, but close quarters combat with the Malkins sounds like a bad idea."
"Except that the Malkins are pacifists. They're like Vulcans." Thomas said.
"Not on purpose." Keeling said, feeling the urge to clarify the situation. "But accidents happen. Just because they aren't trying to kill us doesn't mean they have to save us when we make mistakes."
"I assume we're trying to get back our ship?" Vail asked.
"Yes." Keeling said. "And from there, out of orbit, then home."
"Then we have to take down the scattering field." Thomas said. "That's job one. Then we need to neutralize the Malkin's ability to hurt the Thunderchild. Once that's done, we activate the remote transporter and get the hell out."
Keeling nodded. "It sounds like there's a good chance we could achieve the first two goals by causing a major disruption of the city's power supply. Do it right, and we might gain a useful distraction while we're at it."
"A useful distraction?" Thomas asked. "An explosion?"
"Correct." Keeling said. "Is there a problem?"
The young Lieutenant in the operations division looked troubled. "We don't know what kind of damage we might do with demolitions. We might be talking about a lot of collateral damage." His jaw clenched and he swallowed. "I don't think the captain will go for that."
"No." Keeling said. "I don't imagine he will. Which is why we're treating that part of the plan as need to know information until further notice, and the captain doesn't need to know."
That seemed to mollify the officers, but Thomas looked away to hide his agitation and Vail had a cautious air about her as she asked. "What if he finds out anyway?"
"Funny thing about collateral damage." Keeling said. "It can happen to anyone. Even captains."
