He looked up at the city skyline and its flickering lights. Even the weather seemed to be changing, a cold wind picking up. His thoughts went out to Spock, Uhura, and Scotty on the Enterprise, to Chekov with the defense fleet. If anyone could find the answer before the Earth was engulfed, it was his old crew.

He knew he was needed here—that he had made a difference here tonight. Yet his eyes lifted to the sky, and he wished he could be out there with the Enterprise—even as it flew into the heart of the storm.

Chapter Twenty

United States of Africa

M’Umbha Uhura walked among the elephants, trying to keep them calm. It was the wee hours here, shortly before sunrise, but elephants in their natural habitat slept only a couple of hours a night as a rule, and only when conditions were calm and the temperature, wind, and the like were just right. Now, with a distant flicker in the western sky and the very air feeling charged and agitated, the elephants were in much the same mood.

At a time like this, M’Umbha would have liked to be back home in Nairobi, with Omar and her friends and neighbors. But the elephants were her community too, and they needed someone here to watch out for them. So she had come to them and explained as best she could through her universal translator. The device could allow near-perfect comprehension between civilized humanoids, but elephants were different in many ways and led simpler, more basic lives. For all their raw intelligence, they lacked the context to understand the situation fully.

What she could try to offer instead was comfort and reassurance. She had advised them that the faint, flickering haze growing larger and brighter in the starry sky was an oncoming storm, a different kind than they had seen before, but one that could hurt like lightning if it hit them. She did not have to explain that there was no shelter; to elephants, that was a given with any storm, any threat from predators. They did not have the luxury of civilized beings to feel entitled to exemption from nature’s hazards; they merely endured them as best they could, and supported one another to ease their pain afterward. M’Umbha had promised that she would do the same for them; she and her team stood ready to offer medical aid if any of the herds were struck.

The matriarch of the herd had asked a question: Is this another pain humans have brought onto us?

There had been no accusation in the question, merely a resigned acceptance of reality. It had been generations since the age when humans had routinely enslaved, abused, and killed these magnificent giants, but the clichés about their memory were not exaggerated, and even now their trust was provisional at best.