“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
Gerda Idun shrugged. “How lovely the stars are.”
She sounded so childlike, he had to smile. “More so than the stars in your universe?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never really had a chance to study our stars. I was always too busy looking out for the enemy.”
“The Klingons,” Nikolas suggested.
“And the Cardassians.”
“You know,” he said, “as I recall, you were pretty dedicated to the resistance—pretty determined to get back to it. But I haven’t heard you complain even once about being here.”
Gerda Idun slipped her hands over his. They weren’t soft, like the hands of other women he had known. They were rough with the toil of fighting an oppressor.
Nikolas remembered being surprised at the feel of her hands back on the Stargazer. But of course, he wasn’t surprised about them anymore.
“What’s the point?” she asked him. “There’s no way for me to return to my universe.”
There might be. Though he wanted very much for her to stay, he couldn’t ask her to do so under false pretenses.
“Brakmaktin brought you here,” he pointed out. “If we can find him, talk to him, we may be able to convince him to send you back—and maybe me along with you.”
Nikolas could see Gerda Idun’s face only as it was reflected in the observation port. But strangely, she didn’t seem excited about the idea.
“I thought you wanted me to stay here,” she said.
“I do,” he told her. “More than anything. I just want you to be aware of all your options.”
She turned and looked at him askance. “All your options…you sound like Captain Picard.”
He laughed. “You serve under someone, you start to pick up their expressions.” He remembered a question he had asked himself more than once since Gerda Idun’s departure. “What’s your Captain Picard like?”
“A lot like yours,” she said, turning in his embrace to face the port again. “But not nearly as polite. After all, he wakes up every morning wondering if he’ll survive the day.”
“Just the way I pictured him,” said Nikolas. He looked around the room. “I bet he would have felt right at home living here with Brakmaktin.”
Gerda Idun patted his hand. “Maybe so.”
“And your second officer was Mister Joseph?”
“He told you that? Your Pug Joseph, I mean?”
“Uh-huh. He thought it would help if he talked to me about your being gone. But it didn’t. Nothing did.”
Gerda Idun sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said, holding her a little tighter. “We’re together again. That’s all that matters.”
He recalled the last time he had seen her on the Stargazer—trying to take Simenon, the ship’s chief engineer, back to her universe. It had been her mission all along to kidnap him, so he could help her people develop a new kind of propulsion system that would give them an edge over their enemies.
“I hope you and your comrades did all right without Simenon,” Nikolas said.
“Well enough,” said Gerda Idun. “We’re still fighting, still keeping the cause alive.”
“Did you make any progress,” he asked, “on that new propulsion technology?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept gazing at the stars.
Nikolas craned his neck to look at Gerda Idun directly. “You all right?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. Again, she turned in his arms. But this time, there was concern in her eyes. “I can’t remember anything about that propulsion system.”
He tried to understand. “You mean the technical details?”
“No. I mean anything. What it was supposed to do, how it was going to help us…it’s all a blank.”
Nikolas’s mouth went dry. Was it possible that in bringing Gerda Idun over, Brakmaktin had damaged her mind?
It made him angry to think so. He would never have yearned for her if it meant her getting hurt. He would rather have endured the pain of being without her.
“Listen,” he said, grasping at straws, “maybe you never knew that stuff in the first place.”
“I had to,” Gerda Idun insisted. “I was a helm officer.”
Nikolas knew that. She had mentioned it to him when she was with him on the Stargazer.
He swallowed. Maybe it was true that she had lost something when Brakmaktin brought her there. And if she had forgotten about something as important as the propulsion system, she might have forgotten other things as well.
“Is anything else blank?” he asked.
Gerda Idun looked at him, pain etched on her face. “What kind of question is that?”
Nikolas cursed himself. How stupid can I be? How can someone say what she can’t remember?
“Ask me questions,” she told him.
Good idea, he thought. “Who are the other resistance fighters, the people who work with you on your Stargazer…starting with Captain Picard and working your way down?”
Gerda Idun shrugged. “Ben Zoma is the first officer. After him comes Joseph. Then Vigo, our weapons chief, even though he’s a Pandrilite and Pandril is loosely allied with Cardassia. Scott is our engineer…”
So far, it sounded right. “Go on.”
“Greyhorse runs sickbay pretty much by himself. Wu leads sabotage teams. Chang takes care of our small craft.”
It still made sense. Maybe it was only the propulsion system that had slipped Gerda Idun’s mind. Nikolas certainly hoped so.
“Navigator?” he prompted.
“A lot of people do that. Kochman, Paris, Shockey, Iulus…”
Nikolas felt a chill in his belly. “What did you say?”
“Iulus?”
“No, before that.”
“Shockey?”
“Yes. Shockey.” The woman whose corpse he had found after he woke on the Iktoj’ni and ran into Brakmaktin.
When he met her, just a day into their cargo run, it occurred to him that she would have made a good resistance fighter for Gerda Idun. He had even pictured Shockey in that mold, working a bridge console as the Stargazer battled the Cardassians.
But it seemed unlikely that Gerda Idun would have run into her on her Stargazer. After all, Nikolas had met Shockey in a very different walk of life. And if he hadn’t left the ship, he would never have met her at all.
He shook his head. Too big a coincidence.
“What is it?” Gerda Idun asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But he had his suspicions. “Tell me about your parents.”
She made a face. “My parents…?”
“Yes. Their names, their occupations, where they lived, that kind of thing.”
Gerda Idun started to speak—and couldn’t go on. As Nikolas watched, her expression turned to one of horror. “I can’t remember,” she moaned.
Because neither can I, he thought.
If she had told him about her parents back on the Stargazer, he had forgotten. He didn’t know their names or their occupations or where they lived. And if he didn’t know something, Gerda Idun had no way of knowing it either.
Because it wasn’t Gerda Idun in his arms—not really. It was a fake, a simulacrum, a duplicate.
Brakmaktin hadn’t snatched Nikolas’s dream girl from another universe. Evidently, even he wasn’t up to a task of such magnitude. So he had done the next best thing—he had created Gerda Idun from whole cloth, endowing her with whatever knowledge and memories he could pluck from Nikolas’s brain.
Just as he had plucked the identity of the world he had meant to destroy.
“Why can’t I remember?” Gerda Idun wanted to know. Her eyes were full of pain, whether she was the genuine article or not.
Nikolas felt a lump in his throat. It wasn’t her fault that she was what she was, and not what he wanted her to be.
“Nothing,” he said gently. “It’s like I said…you’ve lost a few memorie
s. But we can work on them. It’ll be all right.”
“I want to believe that,” she said.
“Trust me,” Nikolas told her, drawing her close to him—because in some ways she was Gerda Idun, and he couldn’t stand to see her suffer. He stroked her soft, golden hair. “It’ll be all right….”
“G’day,” said Tricia Cadwallader, placing her food tray on the table already surrounded by four of her friends.
“You know,” said Refsland, the ship’s transporter chief, “I love that Aussie accent. Have I told you that?”
“Not since late yesterday,” said Cadwallader, pulling out a chair and plunking herself down in it. “And don’t think I haven’t missed hearing it.”
“I said I liked your accent maybe fifteen minutes ago,” recalled Iulus, who had started out on the Stargazer in security but had transferred to engineering. “Of course, I said it beneath my breath, so no one heard it.”
“I didn’t say it,” admitted Kirby, a big, ruddy-faced ensign assigned to the science section. “But I definitely thought it. Several times, in fact.”
Refsland looked at him askance. “You did not.”
“I did,” said Kirby. “I swear it.”
“If I were still in security,” said Iulus, “I’d see you in the brig for lying to an officer.”
“If you were still in security,” said Urajel, one of Iulus’s fellow engineers, “the Ubarrak would have taken over the ship a long time ago.”
“Yes,” said Refsland, “and Cadwallader would be speaking Ubarrak with an Aussie accent.”
Iulus winced. “Now that’s something I’d rather not hear.”
Cadwallader was glad to hear Iulus join in the fun. He had been on the away team that explored the Iktoj’ni, and what he saw there had dampened his spirits for a while. But from all indications, he was back to his old self.
“You’re all too kind,” she said, taking them all in with a glance. “At least, I think you are.”
Cadwallader had served on another ship—the Goddard—for a little more than a year, but she hadn’t liked it as much as she liked serving on the Stargazer. Of course, the Goddard was a Korolev-class monster with a huge crew, and she had always felt comfortable in more intimate surroundings.
But her affinity for the Stargazer went beyond that. On the Goddard, she had felt like everyone’s kid sister—one of the hazards of being a nineteen-year-old whiz kid. The worst of it was when she had to speak with Captain Muirchinko, who was going on one hundred and five. He never seemed to know whether to give her an assignment or a lollipop.
Then Cadwallader had heard about Jean-Luc Picard, the fleet’s first twenty-eight-year-old captain. Some of her colleagues had expressed doubt that someone so young could do the job. She, on the other hand, had requested a transfer the same day.
And she hadn’t looked back. Part of that was due to the gentle touch of her superior, Lieutenant Paxton. Part of it was due to the friends she had made.
And part of it…Cadwallader couldn’t put her finger on it. She just wanted to be there.
Unlike the bulky behemoth sitting in the corner of the mess hall, watched from a discreet distance by Lieutenant Joseph. Foremost Elder Dojjaron had opted to eat in public instead of in his quarters, but his body language still declared unequivocally that he wanted to be left alone.
And the crew seemed happy enough to oblige him.
“Strange sort,” said Refsland, “isn’t he?”
Turning to him, Cadwallader saw that the transporter chief was studying Dojjaron too. “I suppose so,” she said.
“Maybe he’s just preoccupied,” said Kirby.
“Maybe we should be preoccupied too,” Urajel remarked. “After all, he’s the only one here who knows what Brakmaktin is capable of.”
“Not the only one,” said Iulus, a shadow crossing his face. “Some of us got a sense of it on the cargo hauler.”
Cadwallader was sorry Iulus had been reminded of it. She tried to think of a way to steer the conversation elsewhere. But while she was thinking, Kirby dug them in deeper.
“What about Mister Nikolas?” he asked. “What could it possibly be like for him?”
Refsland shook his head. “Not good.”
“If Brakmaktin has actually taken him along. There’s no proof of that,” said Urajel.
“His name was on the crew manifest,” Kirby pointed out. “And his body wasn’t identified.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Iulus maintained. “He could have been thrust out an airlock. Or hidden in a place where we couldn’t find him.”
“Or just obliterated,” said Urajel.
It sounded to Cadwallader as if the others wanted him to be dead—as if they saw it as a better fate than what Brakmaktin might have had in mind for him. And maybe they were right.
Cadwallader hadn’t met Nikolas prior to the Gerda Idun incident, so she had never seen him as anything but morose and withdrawn. But the others had. And judging by the affection they showed him, she regretted not knowing the guy better.
Of course, now it was too late. Even if Nikolas had escaped the doom that befell the Iktoj’ni’s crew, it didn’t seem likely he would be alive to tell the tale.
“Maybe when we find Brakmaktin,” Kirby proposed, “we’ll find Mister Nikolas too. And—”
Iulus, who was sitting next to Kirby, put his hand on the ensign’s shoulder to make him stop. And a moment later, Cadwallader saw why.
Lieutenant Obal was ambulating by their table on his way out of the mess hall. The Binderian had been a close friend of Nikolas—the closest he had on the Stargazer—and it might have upset him to hear them talking about his pal’s chances.
Only after Obal had left the mess hall did Kirby say, “And if we do find him, maybe he’ll still be alive.”
Unfortunately, Kirby was the only one who thought there was a chance of that.
Turning her attention to her dinner, Cadwallader reached for her customary glass of apple cider—and realized she had forgotten to get one. Where’s my head? she wondered.
Excusing herself, she pushed her chair out and headed for the replicator. But she had barely left the table before she found Kirby at her side, empty glass in hand.
“Going for a refill?” he asked.
“Actually,” Cadwallader admitted, “I forgot to order one in the first place.”
She might have felt embarrassed telling that to one of the more veteran officers. However, Kirby was only a year or two older than she was. She was sure he had done some equally silly things.
A moment later, he confirmed it. “I’ll race you,” he said, a distinct twinkle in his eye.
“I beg your pardon?” Cadwallader returned.
“I’ll race you to the replicator. Ready? Go!”
There was no time to think about it. There was only time to do it or decline—and being who she was, she chose to do it.
Of course, it wasn’t a straight path to the replicator. It required her to weave among the intervening tables, of which there were six or seven.
But she had always been agile, and she believed she was in the lead—if only by a step—when she bumped into someone. It was only a glancing contact, not nearly enough to injure anybody, but still she felt compelled to stop and apologize.
It was only then that she realized the identity of her victim. Looking up into Dojjaron’s shapeless face and shiny black eyes, she was prepared to find indignation there, even a little annoyance. But she wasn’t expecting raw, red-faced fury.
“Filth!” he gargled.
“I didn’t mean—” she began.
“I’ve been soiled!” the foremost elder shouted, his voice a clashing of stones.
Cadwallader didn’t understand how she had soiled him, but it didn’t matter. Clearly, she had managed to give offense. She would never have considered accepting Kirby’s challenge if she had suspected that this might be the result.
The ensign didn’t want to be responsible for some kind of incident—
not when the Nuyyad was so important to the success of their mission. Lowering her head, she tried to walk away.
But Dojjaron didn’t seem eager to let her off the hook. “Where do you think you’re going?” he bellowed.
Sensing that any answer she gave would only make things worse, Cadwallader remained silent and kept walking. And instead of heading back to her table, she made a beeline for the exit.
Please, she thought, let him settle down.
But Dojjaron didn’t settle down at all. “Stop where you are and face me!” he rattled.
Cadwallader was tempted to keep going despite the foremost elder’s instructions. But for better or worse, she decided to do as he insisted.
Seeing her stop and face him, Dojjaron advanced on her, his mouth spread wide to expose his peglike teeth. But Cadwallader held her ground. It was too late to retreat now. Whatever the alien had in mind, she was compelled to endure it.
But before he could reach her, Kirby intervened. “Don’t you touch her,” he told the Nuyyad.
Dojjaron didn’t even slow down.
“I said don’t—” Kirby began.
Before he could get the rest out, the Nuyyad backhanded him across the face, sending him flying into a bulkhead. Then he bore down on Cadwallader, unimpeded.
She swallowed, wondering what Dojjaron would do to her. But she didn’t want to mess things up for the captain, so she lifted her chin and braced herself.
“No, you don’t!” came a voice.
Turning toward it, Cadwallader saw Lieutenant Joseph go after the Nuyyad. Though the security chief was armed, he had to that point left his weapon untouched.
Seeing Joseph’s approach, the foremost elder pulled his arm back to swat the human away. But unlike Kirby, Joseph was ready for him. Ducking under the backhanded blow, he plowed his shoulder into Dojjaron’s shins.
The Nuyyad swayed for a moment, arms pinwheeling, and then toppled. The deck shivered with the impact of his fall, and for a fraction of a second, Cadwallader believed that Dojjaron would no longer be a threat—to her or anyone else. Then, more quickly than she would have guessed, the Nuyyad scrambled to his feet and lowered his head.
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