Part Thirteen
Ever since he had discovered what it was they were dealing with in respect to the alien influence that had possessed half the ship, Nathan had been trying to discern some method of removing the invasive entities from the minds of those affected. He had always thought that identifying a problem was the first step to solving it. However, as he stared into the face of Lieutenant Charlotte Richmond lying on top of the examination table in his SickBay, he could not even begin to imagine how he would eject the unwanted presence that had impressed itself upon her mind. He had kept her sedated knowing that she might be dangerous if conscious, hoping she did not mind being used as his guinea pig while he tried to find some way to free the other women on board.
Nathan had started in the last half-hour, pacing the floor of the room. Part of the reason for this was because he could not keep his mind wholly on his work. Even though he should be focusing on the problem at hand, Nathan was more concerned about the young lady and the friends who were attempting to reach the bridge at this moment. Vin, Rain and Ezra had been gone for quite some time now and Nathan knew that if normal ship functions had yet to resume, then it was because they had been unsuccessful in their attempt to penetrate the command centre of the Maverick. Their failure did not bode well for their safety and even though Nathan was trying very hard not to be distracted by personal matters, he could not help worrying about Rain.
He knew he cared about her. Even though they had known each other for barely a day, Nathan was perceptive enough to comprehend that much about his feelings. She was unlike any person he had ever met; symbiote not withstanding. Completely fearless, her unique perception of things allows her to view the world with something of a dry wit and thus allowed her to see past all the reservations that obscured most people from what was truly important in life. Nathan was a workaholic like most heads of department and, yet Rain was one of the few people who could penetrate the stolid boundaries of his existence and displace him long enough to enjoy life instead of working through it.
The very idea that anything should happen to her just when Nathan had stumbled upon the treasure that she was, made him sick to the stomach. It was a fear that Josiah, who was trained to interpret psychological response in all types of races, was able to notice quite easily. The Counselor had noticed the tendrils of anxiety creeping into the healer's manner in the last hour or so. It did not take an extreme leap of deduction to know what preyed so heavily on Nathan's mind. He had seen how the Rain had affected the normally reserved Chief Medical Officer and realized that he was witnessing the start of something special between the two.
"I'm sure she's fine." Josiah remarked from inside the force field that had been re-initialized after Vin and Rain had stepped out of its protective confines. He had been occupying himself for the last ten minutes with watching the dancing waves of energy moving through the air before him, swirling in place to keep them from harm. There was a certain beauty in its form, if one could look past the fact that it was merely a force field.
"They should have been there by now." Nathan stated as he looked up from his workstation.
"Perhaps," Josiah agreed but not about to entertain notions of defeat just yet. "However, we can't assume the worst. They might have encountered an unforeseen problem. With things the way they are, that isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
Nathan was aware of that, which was part of the reason why he was so worried. "I hope its something they can handle since we're doing very little here to help them." He rose abruptly from his seat and glared at the terminal briefly before averting his gaze to Josiah. "Its infuriating!" He grumbled.
"Give it time." Josiah remarked soothingly, taking his ire in good stead.
"Time is something we do not have a lot of." The healer retorted. "I know that their minds are being infected with this second energy signature, but I don't how to remove it. I've run simulations using the medical database, bombarding the cerebral cortex with every form of treatment I know to wipe out that second brain wave pattern. I've even resorted to some unorthodox methods that would get me banned from the medical community if I attempted it and still nothing works. However, this has infused itself into their cerebrum is beyond me."
Josiah let out a sigh. "Perhaps you're too close to the issue now." He suggested. "Take a moment to let your thoughts settle Nathan."
"We can't afford to do that." Nathan declared with growing frustration. "You heard Vin. We're moving at warp, which means they're going somewhere with the Maverick. We have no idea how far off course that could take us, not to mention what these aliens intend to do when they arrive."
Josiah could not deny that things appeared grim now, but Nathan's pessimistic view was tempered by the fears he had for Rain's safety that were clouding his judgment. "Brother Nathan," the Counselor folded his arms and gave Nathan a serious look. "I'm giving you a professional evaluation of your present state of mind, care to hear it?"
Nathan straightened up and suspected that he was not going to like this but could see no reason to deny Josiah the opportunity to speak. Besides, he was panicking a little and needed to snap out of it or he would be no good to anyone. An objective view on his behavior might be what he required to snap his thoughts into focus. "Go ahead." He said reluctantly.
"I think you need to calm yourself." The counselor said first and foremost. "You care about this woman and that's a big step for you, its one I hope you will explore in the future but like every man and woman in the service, you know that risk is part of the job. We gamble with our lives when we come out here and if you choose to pursue a relationship with her, you have to accept that you could lose her."
The healer exhaled deeply and realized that Josiah was right. He suddenly wondered how Sarah Larabee must have endured her marriage to Chris. As a command officer, Chris was in the position of the highest risk of all the shipboard complement. Command officers went on Away missions, they stood in the line of fire when the ship went into battle and they were the face the enemy focused their rage upon. It was ironic that in the end, Chris had outlived his wife when all probabilities indicated he would have been the one would die first if tragedy should befall the family. For all the danger Chris must have faced on a regular basis, it must have been unbelievable that Sarah had died in a freak shuttle accident.
"You're right," Nathan met Josiah's gaze. "I've never been on the other end of a relationship like this before. It was always me that faced the risk, not the other way around."
"Turning tables is how we see someone else's perspective." He said stoically in that voice so filled with wisdom that it was hard to ignore.
"I can't say that you're wrong Josiah," Nathan admitted to that much. A small smile crooked at the corner of the healer's lip and he gave Josiah a warm look of thanks before turning back to his workstation.
It was time to put this aside and worked on their immediate problem Nathan decided as he sat down at his desk once more. "Maybe I'm coming at this the wrong way." He remarked as he studied once again, the readings that had given him so much consternation earlier on.
"How so?" Josiah asked, knowing when it was necessary to give someone a mental prodding when they needed it. If there was a way to find a solution to their present crisis through medical means, then Josiah was convinced that there was no one else on board who could accomplish this feat other than Nathan Jackson.
"I've been treating this thing like it's a disease and that hasn't worked. I've tried every medical way of ejecting the life force from our people and its failed. If I use more extreme methods I can't guarantee I won't be harming the patient."
"But it's not a disease." Josiah pointed out. "It's a life form and if it has a purpose, its not going to leave until it gets what it wants."
"A life form." Nathan mused for a moment and Josiah saw his eyes suddenly narrow in calculation as if he had latched onto a spark of something vague that had the potential to be more. When he raised his eyes to meet Josiah's once again, the counselor saw a serious expression on the healer's face. "You're right, we're dealing with a life form. A sentient being."
"Shall we assume that it is a life form with fully developed mental and emotional responses?" Josiah asked, seeing that his suggestions were laying the groundwork to give Nathan some ideas on how to proceed.
"Yes," Nathan nodded, running over his mind everything that had taken place in the last day. In seconds, the mosaic inside his head was forming something tangible with which he would work with. "They've immobilized the ship using subterfuge, lies and strategy. This isn't the behavior of a life from acting on instinct, is it?"
It was a rhetorical question, but Josiah answered nonetheless. "No, it isn't. They've displayed the actions of what could only be based as an intelligent, sentient life form."
"Exactly, so if we can't treat this thing like a disease, we have to start thinking about this as a life form. Thinking this thing is like a virus could very well kill the patient by our attempts to remove it that way. We have to attack this from another avenue." He stated forcefully, his voice growing in tempo the more his epiphany reached crescendo.
Josiah considered that course of action wise and then started doing as Nathan instructed by thinking about this in a broader scope. "If we were talking about territory or space that was being occupied by an invader, we would be engaging in negotiation and diplomatic channels to secure their release. Obviously, we can't do that here."
"No," the doctor shook his head and began pacing once again, only this time it was not because he was nervous about Rain but because an idea was forming inside his head that could very well end this conflict without any bloodshed. It just needed a little more collaboration between himself and Josiah to let it come to fruition. "They've been locked up for almost half a million years. Whatever they're doing now, they've been waiting a long time for the chance, not to mention had ample time to plan it. I mean think about it, trapped inside that artifact, hurling through space for thousands of years, what does that do to a normal intelligent mind?"
Josiah's eyes flared, and he immediately stood up from the edge of the examination bed he had been sitting on. "That's it Nathan!" He looked at the healer, feeling a spark of inspiration himself. " That's it!"
"What?" Nathan looked at him, uncertain of what he had said.
"Fear!" The Counselor cried out exuberantly. "What is the one thing you would be afraid of most after being imprisoned that long? Dying? Of course not," Josiah declared, his words moving in rapid succession now that his mind was racing with possibilities. "Death is a release, not a threat after that kind of incarceration. They've been trapped so long inside that artifact, waiting for a ship to come along and here we are. We pick it up and they're free. For the first time in so long, they're free to do more than just drift like space flotsam! You say that we need to appeal to them to get them to release Mary and the others, I say we scare them into leaving."
"Scare them into leaving?" The healer exclaimed. "If they're not afraid of dying, what else is there?"
"That's easy," Josiah said with a smug smile, more than prepared for that seemingly impossible question. "Being trapped again."
"That's good," Nathan started to smile, admiring Josiah's logic but not the practical application. "But how do we managed to scare them into believing that?"
"I'm not sure," Josiah answered, his genius did not have the limits to breach that point. His shoulders sagged with disappointment; having hoped that one idea would give way to another. Unfortunately, it appeared that he had gone as far as he could with this notion.
Nathan found himself standing over Charlotte Richmond's body and stared into the unconscious woman's face. She was somewhere inside her own mind, unable to do anything while some creature had free use of her body. Not that her body was much use to the alien in its present state while strapped to an examination table and so filled with drugs that it can do nothing but lie there helplessly.
Lie there helplessly. Drift though space helplessly.
The situation was the same, only the prison had changed. Instead of being encased within the walls of a crystal artifact, the entity inside Charlotte Richmond was now finding its jail to be one of flesh and blood instead. The power produced by that piece of reasoning filled his mind with staggering potential and suddenly without even questioning all the stray beads of random thoughts that had allowed this discovery, Nathan knew what they had to do.
"You're right Josiah," the healer spoke in a hushed voice, almost as if he dared not believe that they had found their answer and that speaking it out loud might jinx it somehow. "They aren't afraid of dying but they are afraid of being trapped again and we're going to do that."
"We are?" Josiah asked, unable to guess what Nathan had in mind by that enigmatic look on his face. "How?"
Nathan smiled faintly. "By trapping them in the bodies they've stolen."
Chris Larabee felt numb.
When Julia/ Salya had calmly indicated that the cargo hold had been decompressed with all its contents now taking its place as space debris, Chris was overwhelmed with an overpowering sense of déjà vu. He remembered when he had been told about Sarah and Adam. He had sat in the office of Captain Patterson, staring blankly at the man, unable to feel anything but this deep sense of loss that would soon break out of the confines of his disbelief and sent him spiraling into the blackest hole he had fallen in all his life. Through the abyss of darkness that had ensued in the months after that tragic event, Chris had remained in that constant state of detachment until Buck's stubborn refusal to let him wither away had pulled him back from the path of self destruction.
Losing people was a part of the job and while it was understandable for him to grieve the loss of a wife and child, Chris knew that the death of three crewmates should not have hit him as hard as it did. How many had been lost during the last battle with the Dominion? While Chris knew exactly the number, all their deaths did not make him feel as terrible as knowing that Vin, Ezra and even Transporter Chief Rain was dead. Vin and Ezra were his friends. They were apart of the Magnificent Seven who rode together in that holodeck program and that bond was more than just some simulated game but one that existed.
Chris remained where he was, still shell shocked, swearing inwardly that he would end this one way or another but end it he would because he was losing no one else to these invaders. Neither was he allowing himself to sit here on the floor of his own bridge, wondering why this was happening to him and ship when the answers waited for the asking.
"Where are we going?" Chris rose to his feet and demanded, caring for none of the consequences.
Beside him, Buck and JD had been equally silent. They too, were reeling from the fact that Vin and Ezra were possibly dead. Like Chris, they consoled themselves with the idea that perhaps somehow, the trio had survived because they needed that hope to remain strong for what was required of them to resolve this crisis.
"You are not in a position to ask questions." Narita paused long enough in her vigil to retort sharply.
Chris did not back down, even though she raised her gun to fire, ignoring the fact that she looked like Mary because it was not Mary standing before him, but some creature that had stolen her body. "Then go ahead." He hissed calling her bluff. "I know you disabled the self-destruct program, so you don't have any use for me but right now I don't give a damn about any of that! Either you tell me what the hell is going on or else pull the trigger and stop wasting my time little girl!"
Narita glanced over her shoulder at X'hala, waiting for her leader to give her permission to fire. Since the death of the three officers who had attempted to beam onto the bridge, the captain had become rather unmanageable and increasingly difficult to control. Narita preferred that he dispensed with once and for all. She waited in anticipation of the order when suddenly, X'hala pushed herself out of the command chair and stood up slowly. The creature wearing Casey Well's body like a suit of clothes closed the distance between them in seconds. Upon reaching Narita, X'hala placed her hand on the gun barrel and indicated for it to be lowered.
"We owe them nothing!" Narita hissed in protest "They would not do the same for us!"
"That is true." X'hala nodded, her voice still cold. "But we always claimed we were better than his kind so we will prove it."
She faced Chris and let out a sigh and Chris saw something in the young woman's face that could have been interpreted as resignation and perhaps even a hint of weariness. "You have questions Captain," she looked at him with a raised brow. "Ask them."
Chris glanced at Buck who was just as puzzled and wondered whether this sudden acquiescence was a trick. However, even if it was, there was little he could do about it and since he had forced the issue with them, he might as well give them the benefit of the doubt.
"Who are you?" He asked first.
"You know our names." X'hala answered coolly with Narita's frown, deepening with intense hatred, standing guard behind her. The woman kept her gun poised to fire and showed her distaste at the present course of events.
"What race are you?" He demanded again, realizing that she was not going to make it easy for him.
"Our race were called the Accrans but our kind is known as the Undaia." She responded after a second of hesitation. Behind her, Narita grimaced at the revelation.
"You mean that was what females were called in your language." Buck ventured a guess, his voice still raspy as he spoke.
"No," X'hala shook her head. "That was the name we were referred to in our society. We are Undaia and those of your kind are Daia." She answered.
"I don't understand," Chris wrinkled a brow in confusion, wondering if it was just him that could not grasp the concept or she was explaining it badly. "Undaia is not the name of your gender but it is a classification given to all women?"
"X'hala, if you would allow me?" Alex rose from helm control and joined in the conversation. X'hala gave a nod of approval to continue and the Alex entity bowed her head in graciousness. With Alexandra Styles' memories and because of her position as science officer, the creature inhabiting her body was able to understand this culture much better than the others. "You call yourselves males and us females, is that correct?"
"Yes," Chris nodded, hoping she could shed some light on what X'hala had tried to say.
"In Accra it was the same but in addition to that classification we were also Undaia." She explained.
"What does that mean?" JD asked X'hala, forgetting that she was not Casey even though she was in every respect, the girl he loved.
"In our language, Undaia means weaker. We were called the Weaker." Narita snorted her voice unbidden in the bitterness she felt as she gave that translation and suddenly Chris began to suspect that these aliens might have very good reason to hate anything male.
"God," Buck whispered, not about to hide the disgust at that statement. He hated the thinking that would brand one group as inferior simply because of what they were. Inwardly, the attitude of such bigotry towards the fairer sex always infuriated him. His own mother had raised him alone, with little education and not in the best of circumstances but she had managed because she was strong and she loved him. Anyone who claimed that a woman was weak had never met one that was strong and did not know any better.
X'hala's brow shot upwards as Buck made that depreciating remarks. She was mildly surprised by his reaction and continued speaking after a moment. "In our culture, Undaia have no rights. From the moment we were born, we were taught that our place was secondary to Daia. We had no say in the politics of our government and we were not allowed to read or write nor did not have the right to refuse Daia in anything. We lived and we died without the right to choose."
"Jesus Christ," Chris whispered under his breath. "That is cruel."
"You think so?" X'hala almost laughed. "You have not begun to know the extent of what is cruel. We lived our lives as slaves to whatever man chose to claim us as his mate. Not wife as your kind know it but mate and he may choose as many as he likes and discard us if he requires us no more. Discarded wives often considered themselves fortunate if they were not ejected from the home completely for we are not allowed to work or have any vocation in which financial support is assured. It is a shame to be born Undaia for the only reason that we were not eradicated completely is because our saving grace was to produce new Daia."
Chris did not know what to say because Earth culture had similar chapters of such ugliness in its history books. Until the twenty-first century, many women were still being regarded as property and were most often the victims of the wars fought during that period. Since its inception, Christianity had preached women were to be treated as second class citizens, casting them as greater instigators of mischief than any other force in the Bible. It was not to say that it was the only offender, most Arabic religions had deemed women in the same way, robbing them of the most basic freedom, conducting brutal punishments if they did not obey. As much as Chris was disgusted by the behavior of the Accrans, he could not scream outrage when his own race was similarly guilty of such cruelty.
"How did you end up in space?" Chris finally asked, since that was the safest question.
"Our culture was highly advanced," the Alex alien answered. "We had achieved interstellar travel not too different from your warp field method of propulsion. The Daia left our world and explored, discovering many other races and soon it came to pass that outside influences were opening the eyes of the Undaia to what they always believed in their hearts to be the truth, that they were just as capable as any Daia. We began to see that we were not alone and there were worlds beyond ours where things were different."
"And for that they put you in space?" JD exclaimed; unable to believe that such a short-sighted people existed. He had grown up in a society of equals and could not fathom a culture with such restrictive parameters for its female members. Other than the obvious differences, JD could see no reason why a woman could not do as well as a man. His mother had certainly proved that much anyway. It was by her that he judged every woman he met and those were loft standards indeed, high enough for JD to know that a woman could do anything if she set her mind to it.
"No," X'hala shook her head and the men in the room noticed a somber expression on their faces as if a dark secret, seldom spoken of was about to be revealed. "There came a time when something happened to us. It mostly arrived with the onset of puberty. At first, we had no idea what it was. The authorities believed it to be a mutation of some sort and that was all the excuse they needed to start imprisoning us. They quarantined those of us displaying the symptoms and then they subjected us to sterilization."
"Oh my god," Buck gasped at the atrocity of "What exactly was this thing that happened to you?"
"We are not certain and in retrospect, it matters little." The alien inhabiting Alex sighed. "However, to satisfy your curiosity, I will try to elaborate. We were beginning to undergo a physiological change. Heightened awareness, extra sensory powers, some of us could start fires, others had power to move objects and those who were in extreme stages of the condition were able to alter their physical matter into pure energy. Those who did that often left us and went into the stars. Those of us, who were remained, escaped the camps, X'hala was our leader. Narita here was our infiltrator. Salya was our thinker and strategist and I was the information gatherer. We liberated other camps, prevented as many of the forced sterilization's as we could."
"You were resistance fighters." Chris stated.
"Yes." X'hala nodded. "We were resistance fighters." She said the words with a little smile, liking how that sounded even though the events she was describing was so far into the past, it was doubtful whether the Accrans still existed as a race or a civilization. "The Daia believed that if we were sterilized, it would contain the situation. For you see it was only the Undaia who were subject to these changes. There were no Daia who ever developed the symptoms. They were so accustomed to being stronger that the very idea that we may usurp them, that they may become Undaia themselves, was so terrifying that they were willing to commit any atrocity to prevent it."
"Chris," Buck suddenly stated. "It was not a mutation but rather the next phase in their evolutionary growth. Think of it this way, the only freedom the Undaia had was their minds. They developed their minds because the Daia had restricted them from everything else. Their mental abilities escalated because they no longer needed their physical abilities."
"Are you meaning to say what happened to us was natural?" Salya muttered with more than a hint of astonishment. "That it was part of our genetic evolution?"
"We have encountered other races that have this kind of evolutionary pattern. Ours for instance took place in the same fashion," Chris answered, ever mindful that these people had killed Vin and Ezra but also reminded that after what he had just heard, could understand why they were so enraged and violent. They had been subjected to cruelties beyond description and if there was still apart of him that wanted to resolve this peacefully. "We descended from simians' ancestors during long periods of constancy between short bursts of change at which we would evolve further. Its called punctuated gradualism."
"It doesn't matter what its called!" Narita erupted angrily; unable to believe they were discussing the past like it was the subject of a debate. Did the others remember nothing of those terrible days before their exile into a living death? "Shall I tell you what they did to us human? Shall I tell you in the hard-unblemished truth?"
"Narita," X'hala barked sharply. "Be still."
"No!" Narita shouted back defiantly. "They want to know? Let us tell them." She turned back to Chris and glared at him with nothing less than hate. "After the Daia took away that which allowed us to give life to the future, they gathered together five hundred of our sisters still in the camps and told us that if we did not surrender, they would be put to the death. We had no choice, we had to turn ourselves in."
"I'm sorry," Chris said softly, feeling genuinely sorry for these creatures and the hardship they had endured but he still felt anger at the death of his friends and that did not allow him to be as sympathetic as he liked.
"Your platitudes are worthless to us," Narita growled. "There are just words, no different from that used by the Daia to whom we surrendered ourselves, who killed the five hundred prisoners anyway. With us in their custody, they accelerated the mutation process, destroying our bodies by converting its matter into energy and then encasing what was left of us in that crystal tomb you brought on board. They ejected us into space like we were refuse and allowed us to drift for five hundred thousand years! Do you even have the slightest conception of what that is like? Do you!"
"Narita," X'hala spoke more firmly this time. "You have spoken enough. You will remain silent and do what is required."
Narita glared at them with smoldering eyes and then raised her gun in a position of attack, a warning to them that no other allowance would be given after this. Chris had no doubt that she would take great pleasure in shooting everyone on the bridge if they gave her a reason. In any case, he would not be calling her bluff any time soon. He had his answers, now it was time to consider their options at what they were going to do with this information.
After X'hala had sent Alex and Salya back to their posts, she faced Chris again. "So now you know that we are. We mean to go home Captain. If they are still there, the Daia will pay. We will take this ship and reduce their descendants to radioactive ash and then we will go home to start again."
"What about my female crew members?" Chris demanded, aware that they could do nothing without the bodies they had stolen and that observation led him to a conclusion that was not at all palatable or acceptable for that matter.
"We need their bodies to fight our war." X'hala stated automatically.
"You have no right to steal their lives!" JD shouted angrily infuriated by the idea that X'hala was not going to relinquish Casey's body even when they arrived at their destination.
"The women of this vessel are soldiers, captain," X'hala said as she turned away and returned to the command chair. "And in all wars, there are casualties. They will die for a just cause."