Chapter 10
"You are talking about the mind leeches," the grey-skinned alien told them. Kathryn Janeway, Emily Ellrose, B'Elanna Torres and Libby Kim had arrived at the last planet they had been on according their logs. They had been cordially greeted by the Prime Ahge of the planet. When they had presented their problem to it (the spesies was gender-less), they had been assured their problem was not their doing, nor was their case unique.
The Prime Ahge remembered Voyager and the Deadalus from a month ago. According to it they had traded and the two crews had spent about a week on shore leave here. The whole crew, men and women. This concurred with the logs as well as their memories: memories that were becoming clearer every day.
"Mind leaches?" Janeway asked.
"Yes," the alien replied. "We have heard many tales of ships abandoned or ships stripped of one half of the spesies."
"The male half?" Janeway prompted.
The alien shrugged. "We are not..." and he spread his hands in the sign of universal denial of knowledge. Janeway supposed they were the one spesies who could not be asked to know the difference. She wondered how they procreated. Probably some way she did not want to know about.
"So where do we find these mind leeches?" B'Elanna asked; violence in her voice. Janeway had noticed this new aggression the moment the younger woman had started to remember her lost husband. She would probably do these leeches serious harm if Janeway wasn't to keep a close watch on her.
"We are not sure," the Ahge replied. It frowned, but Janeway had early on noticed that their facial expressions were not the same as the visitors', and they were not consistent from one moment to the next.
"Could you at least point us in the right direction?" Ellrose asked. The Ahge smiled and Janeway wondered how Ellrose's question had translated into their language. The alien clasped its hands behind his back. "Up," it said, looking at the sky. It definitely had not understood the question the way it had been intended.
"Do you have charts we could look at? Charts of the region?" Libby asked. She was turning out to be great at diplomacy. "Perhaps there is a way we could determine the planet these Leeches live on."
The Ahge seemed to think about that for a moment, and then it clasped its hands together. "Yes, we might. Come, this way."
The four visitors, the Prime Ahge and two Lesser Ahge (Ahges? Ahgai?) slowly made their way into another room – one even more lavishly appointed than the one they had been greeted in. The central theme here, as elsewhere, seemed to be a tree that resembled a weeping willow. The windows were shaped in it and everywhere statuettes and art representing the same motif adorned the rooms and corridors. Even the curtains and carpets were leafy and delicate.
"These trees are beautiful," Libby said, admiring a delicate jewel cut into a tree. The Ahge clasped it hands once more.
"It is the tree of our birth," it replied.
"Birth? I'm sorry, I am not sure I understand?" Janeway remarked. The statement could have a religious meaning, or it could mean something else entirely. Especially in the Delta quadrant one could never tell at first glance.
The Ahge spread its hands. "We are birthed by it. How else would one procreate?" Janeway heard B'Elanna cough behind her – probably trying to hide her shock.
"Like fruit?" the half-Klingon managed at last. Not very subtle, Janeway thought, but sometimes her straightforwardness cut through a lot of diplomatic runaround.
"You find that peculiar?" the Ahge asked. "Yes, we have seen peoples surprised by this. How else would one procreate?" it repeated.
"Well, we do it a little differently," B'Elanna said. She seemed embarrassed. Janeway couldn't resist the urge to have a little fun with the younger woman.
"Yes, do tell us how else one would procreate?" she asked, crossing her arms. The engineer scowled at her. Fortunately this line of conversation was ended when Libby suddenly pointed at a dot on the tree-dimensional projection of space that hovered at one end of the room. One of the lesser Ahge had activated the map when they had entered a few minutes ago. But the conversation with the trees had sidetracked them.
The dot Libby was pointing at was inside a brilliantly coloured nebula. This, however, was not what had drawn her attention. All the planets under the control of the Ahge was coloured in blue. All other planets were coloured according to the nation it represented. Only this one planet was a plain white dot.
The Ahge looked at it. "That is a planet that used to be part of our civilisation. But now it is not."
"Why not?" Libby asked. The Ahge looked up at the ceiling, then back at them. Janeway really wished she could figure out their body-language.
"The people of another system killed all trees on the planet. Now we cannot return." The Ahge looked at the star. "The last time you were here you asked the same question."
"About the star?" Janeway asked. This seemed important.
"Yes. You asked why the other people would do that."
"And what did you answer?" The Ahge might be willing to cooperate, but she had to drag every drop of information out of it: it did not really volunteer anything.
"There are large deposits of trilithium – a source of energy that fuelled their ships – on the planet." The Ahge looked at her, its head thrown back slightly and thus squinting in her direction. She smiled at it. Then she looked at those who had come with her.
"I think that might just be the planet we're looking for," she told them. She could see they had come to the same conclusion. Once more their lives – along with that of Ellrose – consisted out of constant worry and scampering to find the necessary provisions to stay alive. And though Starfleet engines used dilithium, trilithium could easily be converted into the former – a good reason they might have gone to the white-dot planet.
"It is uninhabited," one of the lesser Ahge told them. It, too, was squinting at them.
"Perhaps," Janeway said thoughtfully. "But somehow I think the answer to what happened to our crews is on that planet."
The Prime Ahge crossed his arms on its chest, hugging itself. "As you think best," it said.