At first glance seemed like humans and Dolizet didn't have much in common.
The Dolizet were smaller than humans and mostly quadrupeds. After the manner of apes on Earth, they used their front limbs as arms and hands when they sat on their haunches, but they typically walked on all-fours. They had thick, tough hide which came in varying shades and patterns of gray and gold and short tufts of whisker-like hair in strategic places. Their eyes were small and sunken, but they made up for apparently poor eyesight by having several pairs of rotating ears on the sides of their relatively long, narrow heads. Rather than speaking through their mouths, they mostly addressed each other with various whistling and bugling sounds through their noses.
This last was a challenge for Hoshi, the third member of their landing party. According to Hoshi, it sounded like the Dolizet either didn't have vocal chords or else didn't make very good use of them. It was not the most exotic language Hoshi had been faced with, but it was clear she wouldn't be speaking it any time soon… assuming humans were even physically capable of producing the sounds.
Fortunately, the Dolizet seemed peaceable enough.
When the landing party first arrived, a small crowd of Dolizet had clustered around them in either curiosity or greeting, but the novelty had shortly worn off. The Dolizet were clearly accustomed to alien species visiting them, and most went about their business without a second glance at the strangers in their midst. Only a handful stuck around to talk to Hoshi, evidently gathering that she was trying to communicate with them and being invested enough in that to help her try.
Looking around, it was hard to recognize that they were in a city. The Dolizet were burrowers. The mounds they made for entrances rapidly became overgrown by the surrounding jungle so it mostly looked like rows of small hills. At first Jonathan thought he was looking at homes, but watching the interactions between the Dolizet around items outside of the burrows made it rapidly apparent that they were actually on a main street of some kind, in the middle of a market. The shops sold all of the usual amenities, food, clothing, knickknacks of one kind or another…
"You're sure we're not looking at a pre-warp culture?" Jonathan asked T'Pol with a nod towards a basket weaver hawking her wares to passerby.
"Many technologically advanced species prefer to live in simplicity," T'Pol replied dryly, "It is highly likely that, should we be invited into a Dolizet's home, we would see technology similar in function to that which is aboard Enterprise."
"Hard to believe," Jonathan said, because the Dolizet looked positively primitive, minimally dressed in clothing that barely qualified for the term and appeared to be made largely of woven grasses and animal skins; attire hardly befitting an advanced culture in Jonathan's mind.
Sort of wandering a bit, Jonathan noticed a side street, identifiable as a cleft between mounds. After looking at it for awhile, he decided it must be the entrance to a neighborhood area. The activity in front of the mounds didn't seem to be centered around trading and sale of goods. There was a Dolizet on what seemed to be their equivalent of a front porch, weaving an article of clothing, watching some others engaged in what looked a lot like soccer.
The Dolizet playing with the ball were less than half the size of the others Jonathan had seen, and covered in woolly gray fur. He concluded that they were children. Jonathan liked to think the weaver Dolizet that was watching them might be the parent of one or more of them.
He smiled a little. Perhaps the Dolizet weren't so different from humans after all. The first glance had seemed alien and forbidding, but they clearly participated in very human activities. Jonathan liked to think he could find a way to get along with anyone who liked ball sports.
"Captain," T'Pol's voice interrupted Jonathan's musing and exploration, and he turned, "Ensign Sato says the Dolizet are willing to speak with us about the spice."
At once, Jonathan left the side street and returned to where he'd left Hoshi. There were three Dolizet still hanging around her, whistling and bugling their way through a conversation that she was having to run through the translator before composing her own response, which the translator had to manufacture. The Dolizet seemed patiently amused by the process.
A half circle of wooden benches under a tree had been selected as the place to continue the conversation. The Dolizet seemed to perch on benches rather than sit on them, making Jonathan wonder if these benches had been built and put out for alien visitors (many of which were undoubtedly bipedal) to sit on. They didn't look at all suited to the physical needs of the Dolizet.
Hoshi started to stand up, but Jonathan waved her down.
"How's it going?" he asked, glancing at the three Dolizet.
"They're willing to negotiate a trade for the spice they have on hand," Hoshi replied, looking enormously pleased with herself.
"It's a start," Jonathan said cheerfully.
He was angling for a lot more than a resupply. He wanted to know how the spice was harvested and refined, and he wanted to find out if there was any way they could learn to grow it themselves. He wanted to make sure Star Fleet could independently produce the spice on their own. Trading with the Dolizet would be nice and all, but in the long run it wouldn't do to have to rely on them even for Enterprise's spice supply, much less what the people back home would need.
But one step at a time. He reminded himself that he needed to be patient. The Dolizet were friendly, but he had to build a foundation of trust and cooperation before asking them for more than that. It was almost certain that the spice was precious to them, and thus it was a lucky break that they were willing to discuss it at all with practical strangers they'd just met. It was important not to ask for too much too quickly. Let the Dolizet get comfortable with humans first.
Starting to build friendly relations with alien species was normally something Jonathan was all about. But just now, the crisis with the spice loomed over him and cast a heavy shadow on everything. It was hard to be excited about meeting and learning about a new species when he knew the spice situation aboard Enterprise was beyond critical. He hoped the Dolizet were keen on swift negotiations and willing to trade spice in bulk. Jonathan had over eighty crewmen who were eager for seasoning on their meals again. They'd gone without for long enough already.
Staring out the view screen at the planet below, Reed was at a loss for what to do.
The last day and a half or so had passed with unsettling normalcy. Aside from their high speed and the consequent business of the engineering crew trying to hold the ship together, everything had pretty much proceeded as it would any other time on Enterprise. And that was more unsettling than anything. Everyone acted just as they usually did. They worked at their stations, changed shifts, passed information back and forth, joked around, ate lunch in their typical way, went to movie night in singles, pairs or groups just as usual. Maintenance crews did what they always did, and first the department heads and then Captain Archer signed off on the reports that those things had been done.
Captain Archer had spent the time harassing Subcommander T'Pol with his version of Are We There Yet? And Travis had mused about what the planet might look like, while Hoshi clearly fantasized about what language the Dolizet might speak. During their off hours, Travis had made up a thousand different ideas about what the spice planet aliens might look like, and Hoshi rolled her eyes at his more lurid descriptions, while at the same time clearly trying not to envision them as monstrous. If Phlox had any thoughts about the planet and its potential inhabitants, he kept them to himself.
Phlox had also been acting perfectly normal, inasmuch as he ever did. Smiling at the more florid tempers of some of his patients, using his peculiar but calming bedside manner on the more skittish ones, and feeding his menagerie between times. It was a nonstop party in Phlox's office since he only slept about once a year, meaning he was in Sick Bay virtually all the time, even during his official off duty hours. Phlox continually had his own maintenance to do on himself, his patients, and his countless live animal specimens, the majority of which he claimed were vital to his work, but Reed had seen and experienced only a fraction of them… which was still far too many for his liking. He was pretty sure he still had a Regulan bloodworm somewhere inside him. Phlox claimed that wasn't the case, that the worm had found its way out as promised, but Reed had never been sure he believed that.
Regardless, Phlox had finally allowed Reed to return to active duty, with the provision that Reed come in for a regular shot of allergy medication, which had the dual drawbacks of being damaging with long-term use, and only being effective for a short time before another shot was due. Phlox claimed it was necessary for two reasons. One being that Reed seemed to react to mere exposure to the spice. The other being that he apparently had a tendency to eat it by mistake.
The latter Reed had trouble taking responsibility for. Pretty much everyone else seemed to want the spice. It was probably hard to remember that less than a dozen people out of eighty three didn't want spice in and on everything they ate. Besides which, as Reed was a member of the command crew, priority had been placed on ensuring that he got his share of the stuff. The new protocol was probably as confusing for Chef and his team as it was for Reed himself. Besides, with food all being prepared in the same kitchen, mistakes might easily happen in terms of getting spice on something you didn't mean to and then thinking it was only a little and no one would notice. Anyway, the upshot was that Reed had a good chance of not being entirely successful at avoiding the spice altogether.
Now he'd been left in temporary command of Enterprise, but he knew he didn't have any real authority. Aside from Travis, Reed hadn't encountered anybody on board who had any questions about what they were doing here or why they were doing it. Even if he'd wanted to stage a mutiny (and he didn't), he didn't have anyone to back him on it. The rebellion would be over before it began.
So there wasn't much he could do, except go along, try not to make waves, and hope for an opportunity to… do what, exactly? That was the part he hadn't figured out. Even if the opportunity presented itself, Reed didn't think he'd be able to recognize it, because he hadn't the slightest idea how to stop this.
The crew was being affected by something. Reed was sure it was the spice, despite Phlox's reassurance that it wasn't. But even if Reed got the chance to cut off the spice supply, and he didn't see how he could do that, he had no means of knowing if this was a temporary effect of the spice, or if some sort of permanent change had taken place. He needed some kind of cure, but so far he and Travis had spent most of their nights trying to determine what they had in common that nobody else on board did, and the only thing they'd come up with was that the repair station some time ago had done medical procedures on both of them. And that was very thin indeed, particularly as what it had actually done with each of them was drastically different.
"Sir," Haynem, at the tactical station for the moment, interrupted Reed's thoughts, "The Armory is requesting permission to take phase cannons offline."
"All of them?" Reed asked, annoyed by the vagueness of Haynem's report.
"It seems so," Haynem replied.
That didn't make any sense. Only the forward phase cannons were being affected, the issue wasn't related to any other systems. And now certainly wasn't the time to be taking all of their weapons offline. Despite Archer's report of a positive First Contact with the Dolizet, the scanners indicated that the people on that planet were potentially heavily armed. If things turned ugly, as they so often did, having the Enterprise with her weapons offline was the last thing they would need.
"Tell Commander Tucker that if he wants to take the weapons offline, he'll have to give that order directly," Reed said after a moment.
The Commander could of course give his order over the comm, but Reed knew him. Tucker would view this as a challenge to his authority in the absence of Captain Archer and T'Pol, not a strictly professional adherence to protocol. But actually it was a delaying tactic.
Reed knew Tucker would come storming up here to give him a chewing out. If he was feeling especially polite, Tucker might ask Reed to join him at the far end of the room away from everyone else before doing it. More than likely, Tucker would be angry enough that he would begin yelling at Reed immediately without giving a direct order. So long as Tucker was too busy raging to get to the point, it would give Reed the chance to argue with him.
In fact, Reed was counting on just that.
Keeping the weapons online as long as possible was Reed's objective, though he knew he wouldn't be able to do it indefinitely. But the longer the weapons remained operational, the safer the landing party would be. It would only be a few minutes, but Reed knew how quickly things could turn sour. Of course, there was a good chance that nothing would go wrong, and this little gambit of his would serve only to get him in trouble. But... if something happened to go wrong on the planet in those few minutes Reed could have bought and he didn't try, he'd never be able to live with it.
Unfortunately, those minutes were going to come with a cost. Nobody knew better than Reed how severe the consequences for being on Commander Tucker's bad side could be.
And nothing put you on the Commander's bad side faster than interfering with his work.
Haynem said, "The Armory says Commander Tucker is on his way to the Bridge."
"I thought he might be," Reed sighed.