“We can only remain firm in our resolve,” said the Coran brusquely. “And vigilant. We were pursuing a vessel which we suspected was smuggling beasts—certainly destined for blood sports in the arena. It attempted to escape by diving into the gravity well of an oxygen world—a proscribed world in Class 6.”
RyRelee thought carefully before asking: “You say, they attempted escape? One assumes they were therefore either captured or destroyed.”
“Utterly destroyed,” the Coran said. “They attempted to land using their stardrive, and the result was the predictable catastrophic failure.”
There was a power in the universe greater than the Cora after all, thought RyRelee, and it had just preserved him. “I could not wish for fellow citizens of the Federation to be vaporized, of course,” he temporized. “But in this case, the accidental result may have been that of justice. You perhaps would like me to make a reconnaissance of the devastated area—to ensure that no artifacts survived that might interfere in the development of a proscribed world?”
“Actually, we’ve taken care of that sufficiently, RyRelee,” said the Cora. “As you will see.”
RyRelee did see the events recorded next, but the images were received directly by the visual centers of his brain without being transmitted through his eyes. A landing shuttle spiraled out of a bay in the starship’s hull. The image was superimposed upon that of the chamber in which he stood. It was not a purely visual effect—a hologram projected across the chamber. The blue light and the rippling Coran were no less clear than before, but the outlines of the shuttle were a stronger presence. The scenes were in his mind—a recording transmitted directly through the communications nodes affixed to his skull. RyRelee stood very still as images tumbled and the Coran waited for him to assimilate the data.
It was a blue world, a water world, he saw as the shuttle approached, passing over the oceans to focus on an arid landscape. Abruptly the image concentrated on an area of limestone hillside. The russet stone was blackened and fused to chert in a long scar whose outlines blurred like those of a rope of seaweed. The point of view held at a constant but indeterminable height as it followed the line of destruction. RyRelee had no certain scale, but they must have tracked the scar for at least a mile. Plants with fleshy, dust-colored leaves were shriveled to either side of the blackened stone, and there were occasional highlights where molten metal had splashed and coated the rock, leaving a shallow depression in the hillside. There was no sign of any artifact. The point of view rose, panning more and more of the barren landscape. Even when the full course of the smuggler’s desperate attempt to land was visible as a tortured black ribbon, there was no hint of anything but total catastrophe.
“Their stardrive envelope began to collapse from the stern forward.” RyRelee spoke in part to organize events in his own mind, and in part to reconstruct the situation that he sincerely desired to have transpired. “Friction eroded the hull and everything within it. They could not possibly have launched a lifeboat under those circumstances.”
He paused to clear his throat before he concluded: “There is nothing here to affect the development of a world without stardrive. In fact, I don’t suppose you yourselves can be sure of the identity—for that matter, of what race the smugglers were.” His lips sucked in in a gesture that he would have suppressed had he been aware of it.
“Only in the second assumption are you correct,” said the Coran. Its voice was made dreamlike by the other events going on in RyRelee’s mind. “We did proceed to determine the opinion of the local inhabitants about the event. One cannot be too careful with a Class 6 world. But there was a delay, of course. A delay in deploying the atmosphere shuttle in the first place, a further delay in disrupting the locality ourselves except to the extent necessary. The delays proved to be unfortunate.”
The images the emissary saw this time were kaleidoscopic. They were still fully comprehensible, but muted through the sensory media of another organism. RyRelee recognized this as a recording derived through a memory scan of a living creature—presumably that of one of the planet’s autochthones.