Chapter 8 – Suffer the Children
"Yes, the jury may ask questions."
"How can you be sure that these … alien beings were telling the truth? How can you know they didn't manipulate you, or make you take decisions that were not yours? They were after all telepaths, and capable of capturing, transporting and silencing twenty-seven children, including a number of adolescents."
"I appreciate what you are trying to do, Commissioner. But in Starfleet we are told that 'the First Duty is to the Truth'. I learned that lesson harder than many, but I learned it well.
"And the truth is, any decisions that I took, and any representations and recommendations that I made to Captain Riker, were my own, made of my own free will. I take full responsibility for my actions. There was no manipulation.
"Just as importantly, though, I recognize the truth when it is spoken to me, or when I understand something to be true. And it is a very basic truth that made me take the decisions I did in the Trifid:
"If you can save the lives of children, it cannot possibly matter whose children they are."
Anxiously waiting for the all-clear signal from Flyer One that would indicate the children were safe, Tom scanned the cavern with a tricorder. The rock face was lined with dilithium crystals, but otherwise bare. A few other trace minerals were present, nothing remarkable; the only instruments present were those the Enterprise team had brought with them. Even the area where the children had been kept in stasis was completely free of any evidence of external manipulation, suggesting that their suspension – and probably their translocation – had been achieved by non-technical means.
Telekinesis? An unknown form of energy field manipulation? Tom had enough experience with unexpected powers to be open to all kinds of answers, from mind control and mass hallucination to Caretaker- or Q-like omnipotence; none of the possibilities appealed.
He scanned the aliens last. The good news was that they emitted no trace of the radiation the Enterprise had detected during the emergence. In fact, the radiation levels in the cave were so low that Tom decided to remove his protective face plate altogether; he had never been a fan of the night-vision overlay, and much preferred looking his opponents in the eye. The inappropriateness of that particular metaphor struck him even as he thought about it, but he managed to shrug it off. It would serve.
Consistent with prior findings by the ship's sensors, the aliens did not register on the tricorder as life forms, not even when he moved the range out of the carbon band. When he flicked the settings to energy readings, however, the tricorder unaccountably tried to default back into engineering mode, until he initiated a bypass. It simply did not seem to want to read the beings as life forms.
He again heard B'Elanna's voice in his head, "You mean, they're related to my warp core?" She hadn't been far off, he concluded – the energy the beings gave off was not unlike the matter-anti-matter reactions one would find in the warp core, with resonance readings coming from the dilithium crystals on the cave walls. Clearly, the crystals were a sympathetic environment the beings thrived on for some reason.
The dampening field generators continued to have a visible effect on the aliens, whose pulsating presence was a fraction of the brightness it had been when the extraction team had entered the cave. They were clearly incapacitated, clearly suffering their equivalent of considerable pain; it was written on Deanna Troi's ashen face as she held on to a rock outcropping, steadying herself against the onslaught from the empathic connection that linked her to the aliens.
But the impact the Enterprise's technology was having on the aliens now did not explain - not to Tom's satisfaction in any event - the ease with which his team had managed to overpower them in the first place. These were, after all, beings capable of entering a starship undetected, silencing its main propulsion system, locating and transporting a select number of its occupants onto this asteroid without anyone noticing or being able to stop them.
It was almost as if they had wanted to be found, wanted to return the children. But why put them all through this anguish? What was the agenda here? None of the answers could be found in physical evidence. There was only one way to get the answer – ask, and hope for the truth.
In the meantime, the aliens' suffering made him deeply uncomfortable, as did the ugly memory of his earlier vindictive enjoyment of it. Tom switched off the useless tricorder, snapped it back into its holster and impatiently hit his comm badge.
"Paris to Jorak. Status?"
"I was just about to comm you, sir. All children are accounted for, healthy and safe onboard Flyer One. We are ready to take off; Lieutenant Ayala is just finishing pre-flight checks." Jorak paused. "We have lift-off sir. Clearing the asteroid's atmosphere. Flyer Two remaining in orbit, ready for you when you are."
"Good. Let me know when you're onboard the Enterprise. We'll be in touch as needed from here." Jorak would know that the absence of a formal sign-off meant that the comm links were to remain open; he would in turn patch the line into the Enterprise's system where it would be monitored to enable an intervention if necessary.
Tom wanted to make sure that whatever transpired, the ship would know instantly. Once the Lumen were no longer subdued it was unlikely that the comm links would be able to transmit clearly, but there was a god chance the Enterprise would know if they were in serious trouble. Tom also knew that Riker would be concerned about his wife – just as B'Elanna would be about him – and that the open link, if things went well, would go a long way to relieve unnecessary pressure on the Captain.
Tom turned to Deanna, raised a questioning eyebrow even as he silently pointed to his comm badge. She nodded, touched it, opened the link. Yes, she was ready.
Tom crouched down by one of the dampening field generators, and disrupted the link with a determined click. Immediately, the two light beings shuddered, seemed to expand and contract in a curious approximation of a human stretching after the lifting of a heavy burden. Their luminescence quickly returned to its previous levels. Deanna, too, heaved a sigh of relief, and the colour returned to her face.
Tom straightened himself to his full height – fortunately the cave ceiling was sufficient to accommodate it - and addressed the beings directly. He suspected he would most likely have to speak through Deanna as intermediary, but that did not have to mean loss of immediate contact. It would be easy enough to determine whether they could understand him, even if it was already pretty clear to him that he could not receive any messages directly from them.
Tom's voice rung through the cave, for the second time that day in what still surprised him as a frighteningly close approximation of his father's sharpest command tone.
"Explain yourselves. Why did you attack our ship and abduct our children?"
Deanna gasped a little in surprise at the response she received, and the manner in which it was given.
"They understand you, I can feel it, although whether it's direct or through me I can't tell. But they understand your question. The answer though … they think … it's hard to explain. Colours. They think … in colours, somehow. I can feel them in my mind, but it may be hard to translate into words. I'll try."
She stopped, unsure of herself, listening inwardly. "They say it would be easier if one of them could touch me." She looked at Tom for permission, who in turn cast her a questioning glance. "I don't get a sense of threat, or duplicity. Yes, I'm willing to do it."
Tom had a near-absolute faith in Deanna Troi's abilities; despite the warm and deceptively soft exterior she was one of the toughest officers he knew. And so he
nodded slowly, despite the deep sense of unease he always felt when exposing someone under his command to a risk he could neither share nor control. This was too important to say 'no' - he knew that with absolute clarity, but the decision, his responsibility for her life, made him clench his jaw in apprehension regardless of Deanna's consent and apparent confidence.
Immediately one of the light beings floated over to Deanna. A delicate tendril extended from its glowing body, reaching towards her, hesitating. The half-Betazoid hesitated only for a second, then extended her hand in welcome. The glowing tendril wrapped itself around her finger, and for a moment Tom was absurdly reminded of a famous painting he had seen as a teenager, on the ceiling of the restored Sistine chapel in Rome. The original had been lost to the devastation of the Eugenics war, but even the replica had exuded a power that affected him deeply. While most of his classmates had giggled, red-faced, at the nakedness of the central figure, he remembered being overwhelmed by what he thought the artist had been trying to convey: The creation of life? The granting of knowledge?
At the touch of the being's pulsating essence, Deanna's black Betazoid eyes opened wide in an expression of surprise and amazement. A delighted smile briefly touched her lips. Rainbows of crystalline hues swirled through her mind, a million sparkling pixels coalesced into images both strange and familiar – feelings made colour, color made thought, thought made … understanding.
As the pictures she received shaped into ideas she could recognize and to which she could give voice, Deanna's features morphed into a mixture of shame and remorse that were clearly not her own. The words she chose were drawn from a darkening light, deeply felt.
She turned to Tom.
"Regret. They … regret causing pain. Regret taking …" Deanna searched for the right word to match the image she was receiving. " Your hope. Your … future."
"Hope?" Tom was puzzled. Then it came to him. "Our children." His own mind called forth the image of Miral. He smiled briefly. Yes, 'hope' and 'future' were appropriate enough terms.
He focused his thoughts again. This was supposed to be an interrogation session, not an exchange of philosophical pleasantries. "Tell us about you. Who are you?"
"We are …" Again, the search for words. In Deanna's mind, images of light formed, changing, shifting, pulsing. Life out of light. Luminous, incandescent, scintillating, shimmering brightness. "They think of themselves as light. Their life is light. That's the best I can do, Tom."
Tom chewed his lower lip. It was always easier to deal with something once you could give it a name. The Emerri of Cygnus 3 believed that knowing someone's name gave you power over them; it could take years of building trust to get one of them to tell you theirs. Tom had always thought that there was a grain of truth to the Emerri's belief. With a name comes not only understanding and easy identification, but also the ability to label, to judge, to dismiss. He had lost count of how often - in his youth, at the Academy, in Auckland, his early days on Voyager - he had wished to be called something, anything other than 'Paris', and how he finally, after all these years, was starting to feel like he was settling into his family's name.
Yes, names were powerful things, for good and ill. He would have to think of an appropriate name for these ... beings, if only for his own peace of mind. The image of the Sistine Chapel came back to him. The light. Deanna spoke.
"Yes, you can call them 'the Lumen'."
Tom looked at her, startled. Had they read his mind? His father had insisted that he take Latin for a year, since it formed the basis for much of scientific and technical nomenclature. He hadn't realized that any of it had actually stuck though, until this moment. And to have it given back to him now by Deanna, who had never studied the old, dead Earth language…
"Yes, they can sense your thoughts. Not as clearly as they can mine, but yes, they do hear you."
Great. So much for my sophisticated interrogation techniques. Tom sighed, and tried to draw a curtain around his thoughts, just as he had tried to do when Tuvok had initiated a mind meld after the incident on Banea. He had never been quite sure whether he had succeeded, especially since he had been barely conscious at the time, but Tuvok had never said anything and Tom lived in hope that the blackest of his private hells had not been accessible to the Vulcan. He was pleased when the image of a dark curtain drawn over his thoughts resulted in a slight frown on Deanna's beautiful features.
But whatever the source of the beings' decision to provide him with a name for themselves - presumably they had done so in order to enhance his comfort level with them - 'Lumen' seemed appropriate enough.
Need more information. Best to move to neutral ground.
Don't think too hard, Tom. They'll hear you..
"Can you ask them why they have come to the Trifid?" Surely that was a question the K'rikians would like to see answered, that peaceful race whose worlds had been blighted by the Lumen's arrival, and who had been forced to turn to war to survive.
The images Deanna painted, with soft brushstrokes using colours the aliens dripped into her mind like pearls of silver and gold, were of a race of nomadic, space-dwelling creatures. Their children were born briefly to hold corporeal form, needing certain external conditions to transform into the beings now before them.
Having been driven from their original homing grounds by a chain of supernovas, the Lumen had found these conditions again, after much searching, in the asteroid belts and eccentric planetoids of the Trifid nebula. The new birthing places would allow their children to flash into light, to soar into space.
Of course. They needed dilithium.
Deliberately now testing out the ability of the Lumen to read his thoughts, Tom focused his mind on the sparkling crystals, imagined their catalytic matter-antimatter conversion matrices.
Deanna nodded eagerly. "Yes, that's why they come here. For the dilithium caves. They … give birth here and leave their young, so they can … transform."
Images of Earth's sea turtles came unbidden to Tom's mind; creatures laying eggs in the heated sands of tropical islands, thousands of kilometers from their usual habitat in the great oceans of his home world. Smooth round shells, something quite different emerging from within after a time, and returning to the sea to begin the cycle anew. The aliens began to pulse a little more rapidly, and Deanna smiled at their apparent response to Tom's thoughts, but gave no voice to what she received.
Noticing the change in their appearance, Tom in turn was almost tempted to smile back at them, through her, but then recalled the agony of the last few hours. There were a number of question he needed to have answered first, before he would even remotely consider getting chummy with these creatures.
"Why? Why did they take our children?"
Deanna's forehead wrinkled in visible concentration. It was clear that too many images assailed her at once, in a form that even a trained empath had difficulty sorting out. Her face settled into an expression of pain, an unbearable sorrow even as the glow emanating from her interlocutors seemed to dim a little. A tear rolled unbidden down her cheek.
"Their children are being killed as they are being born."
In short, small gasps Deanna conveyed the images she was receiving from the adult Lumen, who continued to envelop her hand in tendrils of light. Lacking the direct empathic link to the alien Tom did not, could not receive the images as clearly as Deanna did, and for that he was grateful. But between the half-Betazoid's tortured voice, his own highly visual imagination - for once more curse than blessing – infused with his own memories from another cave, he was left with a crystal clear picture of the nightmare they were painting for her.
Small bodies, torn to shreds, dark fragmentary shadows against the bright crystals meant to bring them to soaring life. Broken shapes, thrown against the sheltering caves or crushed, agonizingly slowly at times, under falling rocks meant to keep them safe. Sometimes, not often, light extinguished mercifully quickly, by the mere concussive effect of a device sown to reap a harvest of death.
And always, always the agony of their parents, feeling and witnessing everything, linked to the thoughts and minds of their dying children.
Helpless to prevent the dimming of the light.
Hopeless.
Deanna's tear-stained face looked up at his. Whispered the words.
"They want our help."
Tom's mouth went dry as he felt again, in memory, the crushing weight of the stones on his chest; saw the small, crumpled body, light and life draining away in that other cave, not so long ago.
But with his mind still raging from the terror of the last few hours, his anger refused to be stilled. He swallowed hard, tried to find eyes in the vaguely humanoid light shape, finding only rainbow whirls. How do you look something in the eye that has none?
"They have a really funny way of asking for it," he rasped. "I understand their suffering, probably better than most – but given what they just put us through, and with our ship still half-dead in space thanks to their … night time visit, I think we'll need a little bit more than a sad story and a 'pretty please' before we stretch out a helping hand."
"They were afraid to ask directly. They saw the K'rikian ship alongside ours, thought we were … allies. And they needed to make us understand." She looked up at Tom, the look in her eyes now coming from Deanna, not from another being's thoughts.
"And kidnapping my daughter is going to make me want to help them with their problems how, exactly?" Tom had recovered a little now, and his voice had acquired a cold, even tone Deanna recognized as barely banked fury; nor did she miss the sudden personal under-current in his question.
"Tom, they think in images, in feelings. And they have an image of us … wanting to protect our children, so they wanted to draw that for us more strongly. To make us see what they are going through, losing their children. To make us understand. Through our children, to make us want to … protect theirs."
Deanna paused, raised her black eyes to Tom's blue ones, understanding his need to find the truth in someone else's. "I know it's not how we would approach things, but their thought processes … they're not like ours. There was no malice. I would feel that."
Tom shook his head, his natural skepticism still on red alert.
"How did they know? How we feel about our children? Those feelings they tried –rather successfully in my case, I admit - to replicate for our … benefit."
"They are giving me an image of … of you, Tom. In that first cave. When you almost died, saving that young ensign, Mitchell. They saw that. They … felt you, your driving instinct, your need to protect her."
Her voice softened; this was Deanna, speaking to Tom. "And when you thought you were dying, you thought of Miral, didn't you?"
Tom swallowed again. His face told Deanna what she needed to know.
"The … alien child you saw in that cave, before it died in the blast, it saw your actions, saw what happened, and read your thoughts. And because the Lumen were watching, because of their link to their own dying child, they did too."
Deanna's black eyes focused on him with an intensity he had not seen in them before.
"It's you they were trying to reach, Tom. They believed – they still believe - that you would understand. That you would help save their children."