Thankfully, sensors had been restored long before the crew had recovered. The rest of the incident played out like a nightmare.
The configuration of the sphere began to shift, elongating until it settled into a rectangular shape. It seemed possible that the energy waves that had done so much damage might have simply been a necessary side effect of this transformation. Janeway suspected this because for several minutes following the shift, the alien vessel had begun to transmit a great deal of information toward the fleet using photonic waves. Lights along the entire visible and invisible spectrum flowed over the surface of the ship. It was eerie and beautiful in its way, but this hardly seemed to be the point. Data at rates of exaquads per millisecond flooded the ship’s sensors as the blinding lights cascaded over the data screen. Janeway was anxious to examine the data, but that could wait until she had committed every moment of this dire event to memory.
The lights finally ceased. For several seconds, the alien vessel maintained its position. Waiting for a response, perhaps? Janeway wondered but said nothing.
Finally, a single, blindingly bright pulse of energy had been emitted from one end of the alien ship directly toward the Galen. The small special-missions ship was the fleet’s dedicated medical vessel, staffed largely by experimental holograms, including the Doctor.
Janeway held it together as best she could. She was not the only person in the room for whom the next moments were unbearable to witness.
Galen’s shields had been restored, likely automatically, and for a few moments, they held against the onslaught of energy her crew had yet to analyze but was apparently several orders of magnitude beyond any normal directed-energy weapon. Eventually, they gave way and in a massive explosion, Galen vanished.
U.S.S. DEMETER
“Anything, Atlee?”
Commander Liam O’Donnell’s XO, Lieutenant Commander Atlee Fife, did not pull his gaze from the sensor scan he was reading as he replied, “No, sir.”
“Any response from Lieutenant Patel?”
“No, sir,” Fife replied.
O’Donnell considered asking Fife for the odds that either of these answers would change in the next few hours and decided against it. Fife, like every other member of the Full Circle Fleet, was undoubtedly still processing the sudden traumatic loss of their sister ship, the Galen, at the hands of an unknown alien vessel. Given the chance, Fife would most certainly add the word hostile to any description of the alien vessel. Since Fife was responsible for, among other things, Demeter’s security and tactics, and was naturally inclined to view the unknown with suspicion even before it killed dozens of innocent people without warning, O’Donnell understood this proclivity. That it was reductive and ultimately not terribly useful if one’s goal was to understand the unknown was a problem, just not one O’Donnell was going to force Fife to confront right this second.
They need time to move beyond their grief.
O’Donnell didn’t.
He needed answers.
Life had ceased to be a mystery to Commander Liam O’Donnell in his early twenties. The traits of life, as it was understood by biologists, were reasonably simple and clear. Living things were composed of cells or cell-like units, they could transform energy to maintain homeostasis, they could grow, adapt, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. These were the essential physiological functions attributed to life-forms at the most basic level. When these functions ceased, death was said to have occurred.
In O’Donnell’s experience, death was a little more complicated. So vivid had been his sense of connection to his beloved wife, Alana, even decades after she had passed away following the miscarriage of their child, that he could have argued successfully that in every essential way, she remained alive within him. When he had finally accepted her death, that sense had solidified, even as its indicators—constant conversations between them that had taken place entirely in his mind—had ceased to occur.
What he and his fellow officers had discovered on the surface of DK-1116 had been something new: a significant number of organisms that appeared lifelike but scanned as dead until damaged, at which point they regenerated themselves. Admiral Janeway had suggested the classification zombie. It remained as accurate now as any other description O’Donnell could conjure.
O’Donnell understood that all the evidence currently at their disposal suggested incontrovertibly that several Starfleet officers had just been killed and a unique experimental vessel destroyed. But as absolutely nothing he had encountered since Captain Chakotay had first reported the existence of DK-1116 fell within the normal bounds of reality as he had heretofore understood it, he had a hard time believing that what they knew at this moment was all that was to be known on the subject.
He doubted that Galen’s crew had been transformed by the powerful beam of light that impacted it. He didn’t believe that the beam had somehow imbued them with its ability to exist between life and death. But he did believe that ever since the fleet had made orbit around the planet that wasn’t a planet and discovered the life that wasn’t life, trusting old ideas of what was possible was a mistake. Something had clearly happened, but he wasn’t ready yet to say exactly what. Until he knew more, he wasn’t even inclined to theorize. All he could do was collect data and hope that it would lead him in a more fruitful direction than grief, toward actual understanding of the miracle that had been wrought here millennia ago by the Edrehmaia.
O’Donnell could have spent the rest of his life attempting to understand how this miracle worked. He was a genetic botanist
