Margeret Bonanno - Probe

"We can probably beam several of you-"

"Captain," Spock broke in, "the Galtizh phaser banks are being deliberately overcharged, presumably in order to maximize their initial discharge."

"All transporters!" Kirk snapped. "Lock onto any life-forms you can on the Galtizh and-"

"Galtizh shields raised, Captain," Sulu reported.

So the transporters are gone. Nothing else for it, then. Kirk gritted his teeth, ignoring the knot that had suddenly formed in his stomach. "Mr. Sulu, lock all phasers on the Galtizh weapons systems. Fire when the phaser-charge buildup stops." And hope to God that's all we hit. A Federation starship destroying a Romulan cruiser. .

That could mean war.

He turned in his chair to face Uhura. "All transporters, be ready to pick up any survivors!"

"Captain!" It was Spock again. "The computer is producing a translation of the Probe's emissions."

Talk about timing! "Can we talk to it?"

"We can try, Captain. The modified tractor beams are-"

"Then talk to it, Spock! Warn it! Tell it to get the hell out of here-now!"

Spock's fingers stabbed at a half dozen controls. "You are in danger," he said, no more emotion in his voice than ever. "Remove yourself immediately from this area."

For a moment there was only silence. Suddenly a rumble, nothing higher than forty hertz, filled the bridge as the translation was sent not only to the tractor beam but to the bridge speakers and over the intercom. The upper frequencies, Kirk could hear. The lower, below the nineteen hertz his last exam had proclaimed as the low end of his hearing range, he felt, not just where his boots met the deck but throughout his body. If he spoke, he knew the vibrations would be superimposed on his words.

The sound, both heard and felt, was eerily beautiful, he realized, like George's song played on the lowestpitched pipes of a massive organ.

But it bore no resemblance to the Probe's emissions that he could discern.

And the Probe remained perfectly still, going nowhere.

And the Galtizh phaser banks continued to mass their deadly charge.

In sickbay, Dajan looked around sharply as the door to the ambassador's room hissed open and Jandra hurtled through.

"What-" he began, but he was startled into silence, first by the tear-stained anger in her face, then by her arms as she wrapped them tightly about him.

"Sib!" Her voice trembled.

His stomach knotted as he pulled free of her arms and stepped back to look at her face. "Kirk is sending us back to the Galtizh. "

"No! Some madman on the Galtizh is about to order an attack on that thing, and it will surely destroy us all!"

To his own surprise, Dajan felt a measure of relief. If the Federation had betrayed him and turned him back to Tiam, it would have meant the Federation was little better than the Empire, and that thought was suddenly intolerable to him.

"It will not come to that, certainly, Little Sister," he said, though he had no idea whether it would or not.

"I do not care!" she said, her voice filled with anguish. "I only know that, if it is our time, we must be ready. When our parents were driven to their deaths, we were not even allowed to say goodbye. I will not allow that to happen to us!"

For a moment, his instinct was to again protest. But he could not. For he knew she was right.

He held out his arms and she came into them. They held each other as tightly as ever in their lives.

And they waited.

And as they waited, their words and their feelings slowly filtered down to where Commander Kevin Thomas Riley and the four-year-old he had once been began to take them as his own.

!

Suddenly, yet another paradox assaulted the entity.

The mites that had first mimicked the True Language were mimicking it again, and yet they were not.

The energy they were producing was the same they had employed earlier, a short-range, painfully slow imitation of Speech, not the bewildering array of frequencies in which the other mites had buried their own mimicry of the True Language.

But the content could not have been more different.

It was not merely another echo of the message the entity itself had been continuously proclaiming for five hundred millennia.

It was something totally new, a warning of danger.

And it was carried not by the True Language in its entirety but by only one primitive aspect of it, the aspect its creators had employed before they had developed the power of Speech, when their voices had still been matter-bound. It was the aspect they had retained and continued to use, not because it was the most useful, because it was not; nor because it could communicate the greatest amount of information, because it could not. In truth, it could convey only the most elemental information, little more than the matter-bound languages of the thousands of primitives the entity had found and nurtured over the millennia.

It was retained because it was the first.

And now these mites had isolated that one most primitive aspect and had chosen to communicate through it.

Had they chosen to use more aspects, they could have communicated a thousand times more information: the source of the danger, the precise nature of the danger, all the ways the danger could be avoided, the reasons for the

danger, how long it had been present and how long it would remain-all these and a mass of other details could have been communicated in those same moments had they not chosen to limit themselves to this single, primitive aspect.

But perhaps it was all they were capable of.

After full milliseconds of consideration, it searched for the danger.

But there was none.

Even if these mites possessed the killing rays, the defenses the entity had discovered in its possession after the destruction around the blue-green world would keep it safe. If either of the mites' spacegoing bubbles used the rays, they would both be reduced to their component atoms within milliseconds.

There is no danger, it said:

Kirk stood by Spock's station, listening as the computer produced a translation of the Probe's response.

"It doesn't understand," he said frantically. He spoke again-directly, he hoped, to the Probe. "There is a weapon that is about to be fired at you. We do not want it to be fired, but we cannot stop it. If you can stop it, there will be time to explain, time to talk."

Silence.

Finally, the computer produced another eerie series of low-pitched tones and subsonics.

"Galtizh phaser banks leveling off," Sulu reported. "They could fire any second."

There is no danger. The words played themselves back as Kirk waited helplessly. No danger because the Probe could not be damaged? Because it could shrug off phasers and photon torpedoes like dust motes? Because

it could strike back, as it apparently had with the Henzu, and vaporize the attacker before any damage could be inflicted?

He couldn't take the chance. "Fire, Mr. Sulu."

. . time to talk.

The entity seized on that fragment of the message. For five hundred millennia, it had searched for those with which it could Speak.

Once, it had searched solely so it could bring word back to its creators, but now its creators were gone.

There was only itself.

And these mites-mites who spoke the aspect of the True Language that was the first its creators had ever spoken.

Mites who wanted to communicate. Mites who, no matter how mistakenly, had warned it of what they had perceived as a danger to it.

The entity reached out and gripped the spacegoing bubbles and the mites within them more tightly than it ever had before:

Everywhere in the Enterprise and the Galtizh, all motion stopped.

Sulu's hand was frozen centimeters from the firing control.

Jenyu's order to fire all phasers and photon torpedoes was frozen in his throat.