“Good.” Derak turned over to Thuvetha. “And if I find out this is some scheme of yours—”
“I don’t know these people,” Thuvetha snapped. “All I want is the payment I was promised.”
Derak puffed up his chest a little. “And you’ll get it, when there’s a buyer.”
“And this buyer isn’t good enough?” Thuvetha countered.
“That is none of your concern.” Derak glanced over at Troi. “Shall we?”
Troi nodded. She could feel Worf’s worry as she followed Derak across the room. He led her through the door, and then through the gallery.
“What’s in this for you?”
“Information,” she said. “The better we know our seller, the more—attractive an offer we can make.”
Derak glanced over at her. “If you are working with the Romulan,” he said, “it won’t matter.”
They had come to the far wall of the gallery: cave stone, dark and jagged and laced with delicate filigree mineral patterns.
“Why would we work with that Romulan?” Troi asked coyly.
“I don’t know.” Derak turned to the wall. “I don’t know why you’d care about Bryt’s secret. But I could see why the fe-male Romulan would.”
“Thuvetha only wants to be fairly compensated,” Troi said. It immediately sounded wrong; that wasn’t how a criminal talked. But Derak didn’t notice; he was busy tracing patterns into the wall with his finger. The patterns began to glow and then, to Troi’s surprise, they split, and the wall opened slowly apart in jagged, uneven segments. A false wall.
The wall ground to a stop. “This way,” Derak said. “Keep quiet.”
Troi stepped through the opening into a narrow, dimly lit corridor. Screens set into the walls showed the outside of the compound as well as the entryway: there was the Ferengi guard who had brought them down to the VIP room, the Orion woman at the front desk, the ruins, and more Ferengi patrolling the grounds.
Derak jerked his head for Troi to follow. The corridor ended abruptly at a sliding door that Derak opened with a retinal scan. Inside was a small, cramped room, a desk with a stack of padds, and a rather large screen filled with Ferengi writing.
“He’s just through that door there,” Derak whispered. “What can you sense?”
Troi moved over to the door and pressed her forehead against it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and concentrated.
She felt the presence in the room easily enough. She usually couldn’t read Ferengi, but she knew there was one in the room—and that there was something different about him. Troi couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“Well?” Derak hissed. “What is it?”
Troi looked over at him. He shifted his weight from side to side, nervous.
“No,” she whispered back.
He frowned, and Troi could sense he was weighing his options.
She focused on the presence in the room. It was undeniably Ferengi, but there was something unlike any Ferengi she had ever encountered. Something threaded through the presence. Different.
“This is taking too long,” Derak snapped, and grabbed Troi’s arm. His own presence flooded into her head, and suddenly the difference was illuminated, clear and sharp. Derak was male.
The Ferengi in the other room, Bryt the Baron, was a female.
Troi pulled away from the door, careful not to react, not to show her hand.
“Do you hav—”
A siren wailed out of the walls, and the room was plunged into red light. And then a voice, deep and distorted, boomed into the room.
“Derak,” it snarled. “What have you done? Who is this fe-male?”
Derak moaned, covering his face with his hands. “Noooo!” he cried. “He knows you’re here!” He grabbed at Troi, trying to pull her toward the exit, but she shook him off. Worf was not going to be happy with her.
“Bryt the Baron,” she said into the air. “I know your secret.”
Derak squawked in horror.
“Let’s make a deal.”
34
Crusher crested the dune and curled her hands into fists. The waterline had moved a little farther onto the beach, drowning the tide pools among the rocks. Riker was still stretched out on the sand.
She checked his breathing again. Still steady. Then she walked toward the slowly encroaching water. Was the entity here, in the water? Or was it in the sand? They had found traces of the fossils in both. Maybe it was in both. An organism with a cellular structure that appeared ancient when it was separated from its fellows and invisible when they were together. So unusual it had passed by unnoticed on the Federation’s most advanced scanners.
A wave crashed around Crusher’s stomach and she jerked her head up, realizing suddenly that she had waded out into waist-high water without realizing it.
“You’re reaching out,” she said, the sound of her voice reassuring, a reminder of who she was. “I’m ready to talk to you.”
Another wave broke around her, knocking her slightly off balance. She steadied herself, resting her hands on the surface of the water, concentrating on the chill of it against her hot skin.
Stay grounded. Focus.
Suddenly, the ground dropped away, and she was falling through the water. Bubbles streamed out of her mouth, spiraling up around her to the water’s surface that seemed light-years away. “You are not drowning.” The words echoed throughout the water, so that it rippled and shimmered. Crusher pushed herself downward into the darkness below her feet. “You can breathe,” she told herself. It was true, and each breath was a reminder that all this was inside her head. A dream.
Communication.
Crusher kept swimming down into the depths, telling herself over and over that she was really on the beach.
Then that’s where she was. On the beach while a storm crashed wildly overhead, rain falling in sheets.
Crusher sucked in her breath. “A dream,” she said, the words thudding inside her head. She turned to look down the beach and was startled to see not only Riker, but the entire team—Rikkilä, Muñoz, Solanko, Malisson, Talma. And Data. Everyone who had been affected.
They looked around, spinning in place, looking past one another. Each caught in their own versions of the dream.
Lightning arced behind the clouds.
Crusher’s breath quickened. It’s working. She concentrated on the lightning and sent it bolting down at the sand, a meter away from Riker, who jumped and tried to run. “Stay.” He was back where he started.
She sent the lightning around him, spinning the sand into a circle with Riker at the center. She imagined black lines cracking across the sand, and they appeared.
And then she lost the lightning. It went off on its own, veering in her direction. Her breath caught and she remembered: This isn’t real.
She braced her body, digging her heels deep into the sand, as the lightning raced toward her—
And stopped.
It stopped midstrike, a shiny, jagged line connecting the sand to the sky, lines fractaling out against the dark, rain-swept beach.
“Hello,” Crusher whispered.
The lightning sucked down into the sand, giving it a silver, vibrant glow. The grains trembled and moved, piling on top of each other, forming legs, then hips, a torso, a head. Crusher smiled a little when she saw the sand-figure was her, the sand sliding over itself in constant motion.
The sand-figure made a barking sound. A laugh?
Crusher touched her chest. “I am Crusher. I am one.” She pointed behind the sand-figure, to the others. “They are different. We are one, not many. But you had discovered that already, hadn’t you?”
The sand-figure nodded. It understood. Crusher knew this the way you discover things in dreams.
It tilted its head, the sand still sliding in a constant flurry of movement. Then it exploded, sand glittering as it fell, coating Crusher with each fine grain. She screamed in surprise, and brushed the sand away. It fell to the ground, inert.
“Yes, we are separ
ate,” she said, trying to picture the words, trying to shape the dream so that the life-form would understand. “We are alive. We don’t have to be together.”
The sand drew itself back up, this time into two forms: one in her shape, one in Data’s.
“One,” said the sand-Data, in the same way.
“Data?” Crusher whispered. “Do you want to speak with Data—”
The two sand forms dissolved into a whirlwind of glittering light. It wrapped around Crusher, pulling her upward, away from the beach, toward the black storm clouds. She felt herself pulling apart like taffy, blending in with the life-form—life-forms. She could feel their voices inside her head. Images. Impressions. They lived in the sand and the water and the air, billions of them, tiny diatoms swirling in a constant, surging movement. And dreaming. This dreamscape was their civilization. She listened, and as she let herself sink into their movement, she saw it: a city glittering with glass and light, thrumming with bright music. A city wasn’t what they had experienced. What they experienced, she couldn’t understand. They were using her own memories.
Welcome, they were saying. Welcome Another One.
Crusher drifted down, among the tops of buildings, their sides glittering like diamonds. A shared dream. “Was this what you were trying to show us?”
Yes. It wasn’t a word so much as an understanding of affirmation. Welcome. Welcome.
Crusher lifted her gaze to the sky, which was not violet but the brilliant blue of Caldos. She wondered what they saw.
And then, the sky began to shift and roil until it was an ocean, dark and dotted with millions of tiny lights. Suddenly, the city below was sand and rocks filled with glowing, brilliant swirls. Crusher understood she was seeing a tiny glimpse of their dream.
She drifted downward and landed in the sand, beside a tide pool brimming with multilegged creatures scrabbling over the rocks, tiny flecks of light darting like fish. Then she looked closer and saw the creatures were made of other, smaller creatures, compressed together so that their many legs propelled them through the shallow water. The creatures of light moved in tandem, flickering to some internal rhythm Crusher couldn’t hear.
“If I separated any of you from the others,” she said, “you’d die. That’s what you were showing me earlier?”
Affirmation. One of the knots of multilegged creatures skittered out of the tide pool and balanced on a rock, eye level with Crusher. It said in her voice, “You are one mind, alone. The others? Not here in our place.”
“Where are they?” Crusher asked.
“Dead, we thought.” The creatures teetered sideways, fell, and scattered across the rocks in a liquid movement, like water. Then they surged back into a knot. “But really—lonely.”
“No,” Crusher said.
“Even connected minds, lonely.” The creatures unwound themselves into a bridge across the tide pool and joined with another knot of creatures, who surged up, twisted around the first knot until they were indistinguishable. They’re all indistinguishable, Crusher reminded herself. They only looked like shiny black sea urchins and glittering spots of light because that was how her brain interpreted them.
“Connected minds?” she said, watching as the new knot of creatures splashed into the tide pool and swam furiously around, gathering the light flecks like motes of dust to a feather.
“Yes.” Her voice, again, but this time from the light swirling over the sand. It coiled around her shoulders like a scarf. “Strange minds. Stranger than yours. Connected but separate.”
The equipment in the station.
“You tried to invite our technology here,” she said. “The replicator, the station computer—”
“We found your minds, full of images, like ours.” The thread of lights settled into the nape of Crusher’s neck; there was a warmth to it, like a tiny candle flame. “Too few, at first. Those minds dead. Then more came—but still not connected.”
That is why the attacks—the communications—hadn’t occurred before. There hadn’t been enough people.
“We found the connected minds. Bright minds, filled with images. And we found the one mind.”
“Data,” Crusher breathed.
“Bright mind, but lonely. Not dead. Strange! Tried to speak. To know more.”
They had been trying to speak with Data. The one mind that didn’t fit into their understanding of the world, and they tried to reach out to him.
“Why’d you try to speak to me?” Crusher asked. “Even though I was a one?”
“Curious. One mind not dead? A test.”
More light had come swirling around her, and Crusher felt a splatter of rain across her cheek. Odd, that they would imagine rain.
But then she saw raindrops fall into the multilegged creature, and become multilegged creatures, and she understood they were showing themselves as rain too.
“Our minds,” she said, “are different. Not just because we aren’t connected.” She took a deep breath. “To see this place, to hear you, we have to sleep.”
The light uncoiled itself and soaked up the rain, and Crusher had the sense that the entities did not understand.
“We rest, retreat into our minds. That’s how I’m here now,” she explained.
“Bodies drift on sand,” the entities said. “Like ours.”
Crusher pressed her mouth into a flat smile. “They sleep. The connected minds, our technology, it is broken.” She hesitated. “Dead.”
A surge of panic rose up from the entities, and the world turned dark and stormy. Crusher felt the entity’s panic. Regret.
“Stop communication with the connected minds,” she said. “We can repair the connected minds.”
The entities all swirled together, light and rain shimmering into an indistinguishable mist.
“Bring back the dead?” The question was asked with a surge of fear.
“Only them,” she told them. She wondered if they rested. Most biological life-forms they had encountered needed sleep. Perhaps these life-forms, who created entire worlds inside their shared minds, lived in dreams.
“The ones.” The chittering arthropods in the tide pool splashed across the sand. “Even the strange one. No communication. You communicate. Why you?”
Crusher took a deep breath. “I learned. I will share. We will communicate. We will speak. That’s how my people share their minds.”
“Tell them welcome?” the entities said. “Welcome.”
“I will tell them.” Kota could never be a colony. Even this conversation could be considered a Prime Directive violation, but she had been given no choice.
The entities swirled around her, and she felt a sense of warmth, of comfort. Before there was confusion, sickness, and panic.
“Show them ours,” the life-form said. “Can you show?”
“Yes,” Crusher said, the words for what she saw floating into her mind: the beach, the tide pool, the constant motion.
“They cannot add,” the life-form said. “Show. Be like you. Then can add.”
Crusher smiled a little. No one would be adding anything to this place. It was not theirs.
“It is,” the life-form said, “sharing our mind.”
Crusher’s smile deepened. “Thank you.”
The life-form seemed satisfied. They lifted up, each tiny creature glittering as it floated toward the blackened sky.
The rocks lifted up, the water left in the ocean. The rain fell up. Everything receded into the black storm clouds. The world became brighter and brighter and—
* * *
Beverly Crusher opened her eyes.
Her face was hot from the sun, but her feet were cold. Water splashed up around her legs.
She sat up, pushing against the side of the dune, blinking. The tide had come in, lilac water turning plum as it stirred up the sediment.
She scrambled to her feet, splashing sea foam.
“Finally! We were starting to worry.”
Riker’s voice was clear, strong, sure. Crusher wh
irled around and found him sliding down the side of the dune. His face was red, his uniform coated with sand.
“You’re okay,” she said.
Riker nodded.
A shadow moved across the dune; it was Data. “Are you all right, Doctor?”
“Fine. How are you?” Crusher was reaching for her tricorder, but it wasn’t there. Riker laughed.
“I already got checked out by Ensign Rikkilä.”
“Did she find anything?” Crusher squinted up at Commander Riker.
Riker shook his head. “No. Although I’ve got some bad news—the station came down while you were out.”
Crusher took a deep breath. “That’s fine. We can scavenge the tech we need.”
Riker frowned.
Crusher started climbing up the dune. “I know what caused it,” she said, and then she told Riker and Data everything she had discovered.
The rest of the team were pacing around in the sandy strip where the grass was sparse. When Rikkilä saw Crusher, she let out a whoop and started racing toward the edge of the dune.
“They were attempting to communicate using me,” Data said.
“They were,” Crusher said, just as Rikkilä reached the top of the dune.
“I’m so glad you’re all right!”
“I’m fine.” Crusher smiled. “We’re all fine.” Then she turned to Data. “You were their introduction to the concept of the singular. But I think they were interested in communicating with all of us.”
“So everything that’s been happening…” Riker started.
“Communication,” Crusher said.
“Who are they?” Rikkilä asked.
“They don’t have a name,” Crusher said. “They don’t have a spoken language. They communicate through dreams.”
Rikkilä frowned with confusion.
“Doctor,” Riker said, “the illness, the technological breakdowns, that was all caused by these life-forms creating dreams?”
“A shared dream. It didn’t happen before to the science team because they didn’t have enough members. Once our away team beamed down, the numbers were right. They’re a hive mind.” She tried to find the right words. “They live inside their minds.”
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