by David Mack
“I see,” Huilan said, easing forward, his large ears twitching with interest. “What was your reason for building it?”
The chief engineer recoiled from what he inferred was an impugning of his motives. “I designed it and created it to help Melora live more freely and more fully aboard Titan.”
“I’m just curious, Commander. What part of interacting with holographic phantoms—or acting as one—is helping her live more fully? How is her life enriched by having her body weakened?”
Ra-Havreii held up his hands, palms facing Huilan. “Stop right there. What’re you talking about?”
“Melora seems to think that your clever invention has absolved her of the need to brave the ship’s one-gee spaces,” Huilan said. “Instead, she’s content to live and work in a centigee simulacrum of Titan. If she doesn’t occasionally push herself to stay acclimatized, the physical abilities she worked so long to acquire will atrophy.”
Getting angrier by the moment, Ra-Havreii shot back, “So what? When was the last time any of us one-gee natives tried to make ourselves function in a fifty-gee environment? Or even a ten-gee field? We can’t adapt to that any more than she can adapt to our standard gravity, so why try?”
Huilan was quiet for a few seconds. “You may be right,” he said. “But that still doesn’t explain why you went to such absurd lengths to build a holopresence network inside Titan.”
“I’m not seeing your point,” Ra-Havreii said.
“There are easier ways to help Melora adapt to Titan’s environment,” Huilan said. “All our shipboard gravity is artificial, so why not just program the graviton emitters to sense her combadge, or even her unique biosignature, and reduce the local gravity field wherever she goes?”
To keep from laughing, the chief engineer smiled. “That might seem like a good idea—until she and a regular-gravity crewmate step on the same deck plate at the same time, and the other person winds up embedded skull-first in the overhead. And may the spirits help her if the main computer gets overloaded or loses track of her—she’d be crushed under her own weight.”
“All right,” Huilan said. “I’m no engineer, but I’m sure you could equip Melora with a graviton-deflecting module for her uniform. You could make her immune to most of the ship’s synthetic gravity without affecting anyone else. Right?”
As much as he wanted to dismiss Huilan’s second idea, he had to think about it. Though it would be a tedious process to find exactly the right settings for such a device, it would be a fairly elegant solution to Pazlar’s gravitational vulnerability. “That’s not a bad idea,” he admitted. “With the right adjustments, it might even let her move freely on a planet.”
“Which brings me back to my earlier question,” Huilan said. “Why did you build the holopresence system? I’ll give you a hint: I don’t think you really built it for her.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Ra-Havreii replied. “Of course I did.”
Huilan shrugged. “I don’t doubt that you believe you did.”
“If I didn’t build it for Melora, then who is it for?”
“For yourself.”
The chief engineer crossed his arms. “This I have to hear.”
“I think the solution you concocted for her is just a proxy for your own issues,” Huilan said. “I know that Efrosians are a very empathetic people—not in the telepathic sense, of course, but definitely in the emotional one. It makes you keenly aware of others’ needs—but in this case, I think the need you’re responding to is your own.”
Ra-Havreii sighed. “Counselor, I have a lot of work to do, so if you’re not going to get to the point—”
“Melora’s vulnerability in the months after Tuvok assaulted her reminds you of your own emotional weak spots,” Huilan said, his manner more aggressive than Ra-Havreii would have expected from such a small being. “So you tried to help her cope in much the same way that you do—by keeping personal interactions at a figurative distance, so they’ll seem ‘unreal.’ You treat your emotional relationships like holograms—as purely superficial amusements—to shelter yourself from loss. To stay safe.”
“You’re half right about one detail,” Ra-Havreii said. “I was trying to help Melora. Speaking of whom—when you came in, you said this was about her. So how did this conversation suddenly become about me?”
Huilan flashed an unnerving grin full of fangs. “Isn’t everything all about you?”
“Well, yes—I can’t fault your reasoning on that point,” Ra-Havreii said, not too proud to accept the barbed compliment. “But tell me, do you counselors always try to make people feel bad about doing something good?”
“I’m just trying to help you understand your own motives,” Huilan said. “You spent weeks building the holopresence system. Why did you go to so much effort for the benefit of one person? Why work so hard to reshape Titan just for her? What does it mean for you to make a gesture like that?”
Something about the question demanded a genuine answer and not just another flip remark. Ra-Havreii pondered it carefully, and then he said, “It makes this ship into something tangibly good that I’ve done for someone … instead of a reminder of a mistake I made that cost good people their lives.”
“To be honest, Commander, I don’t really fault you for what you’ve done here,” Huilan said. “But I don’t think you were trying to improve the ship—I think you were trying to improve yourself, and Melora’s a big part of the reason why. All I want you to think about is whether, in the long run, the holopresence module is really the best thing for her—and whether you might both benefit from a life that’s a little bit more … real.”
Huilan walked away, leaving Ra-Havreii to mull over what the S’ti’ach had said.
Have I made an illusion of my life? Did I just pretend to care about the women I’ve known? The notion that his many and varied fleeting romances might all have been as emotionally sterile as a holodeck simulation troubled him—no, it disgusted him. And yet, he couldn’t dispel it from his mind. In the passion of those moments, it all had seemed like harmless erotic fun, and he couldn’t bring himself to regret any of it.
But if Huilan’s right, he cautioned himself, if I have been reducing romance to a superficial game to isolate myself, then Melora deserves better than that. She deserves something real.
He began imagining all the ways he might express this revelation to Melora. Then his search for perfect words was interrupted as he stared blankly at a wall companel, across which raged the flood of data she had sent him.
In the moment he had stopped looking for it, he’d found a sudden flash of insight.
He saw the pattern.
“Ra-Havreii to Lieutenant Commander Pazlar,” he said, putting aside his personal epiphany for a professional one. “Please report to my lab immediately. We have a breakthrough.”
* * *
Most of Titan’s away team gathered around Christine Vale as they sat down in their common dining room to a late-morning breakfast, which had been provided to them by the Caeliar.
For the humanoid members of the team, the meal consisted of pancakes, fruits, nuts, and juice. Ensign Torvig’s plate, however, was piled high with fresh greens, a variety of raw tubers, and a colorful assortment of wildflowers.
The one member of the team absent from breakfast was Dr. Ree. He had been granted special permission by the Caeliar for a visit to the planet’s surface. There he was being allowed to hunt prey animals for his sustenance, because his biology couldn’t be sustained by the vegetarian diet that the Caeliar insisted upon within the confines of their city.
Chief Dennisar and Lieutenant Sortollo wolfed down their tall stacks of hotcakes with gusto. Vale arranged her two pancakes and wedges of sliced fruit into something that pleased her eye. She nudged Tuvok. “Pass the syrup.”
He handed her a small ceramic pitcher. She poured a small reservoir of the amber fluid into an open space she’d left at the edge of her plate. Then she cut off a small wedge of pancake with her fork,
speared it, dipped it in the viscous liquid, and tasted it. It was more like a clover honey than a maple syrup, but it was pleasant enough.
Across from her, Deanna Troi picked at her breakfast without actually eating much of it. Vale asked, “How did your meeting with the Quorum go?”
“They’re not interested in negotiating, if that’s what you’re asking,” Troi said. A small, pained grimace played across her face as she broke eye contact with Vale, who made a mental note to have Ree give Troi a medical exam when he returned.
Letting her die isn’t worth it just for the right to say “I told you so,” Vale mused.
“All right, we know they’re listening to everything we say,” Ranul Keru said. “And they’re watching us every minute. So what’s our game plan here?”
Vale swallowed another mouthful of syrup-drenched pancake. “Just like they taught us at the Academy,” she said. “It’s the Tanis scenario.”
Keru shot her a look that made it clear he recognized the reference. The Tanis scenario was named for a plan that had used sabotage as a diversion to enable the theft or recovery of a vehicle for making a fast escape from hostile territory.
“Okay,” he said. “Assume you’re right. We’re still stuck with a Pollux IV situation.”
“True,” Vale said, understanding that the security chief was talking about Titan being held by the Caeliar. “But Starfleet didn’t gather laurel leaves then, and I don’t think we ought to start now.” In other words, we’re getting the hell out of here, no matter what it takes.
Lieutenant Sortollo leaned forward, to look past Chief Dennisar at Vale. “Sir? Maybe we should hold off on making plans until we see if the captain has anything in the works.”
“No,” Vale said. “We have to assume we’re on our own.”
Ensign Torvig craned his long neck forward, mimicking Sortollo. “Erika Hernandez has lived with the Caeliar for a very long time,” he said. “And we know she has some of their abilities. Maybe we should ask her for advice.”
Tuvok replied, “That would be inadvisable. She seems to identify more readily with them than with us. For now, we should consider her an agent of the Caeliar.”
“I disagree,” Troi said firmly. “She’s a prisoner like us, and I think we ought to reach out to her—for her sake, as well as our own.”
Keru shook his head. “She may be a prisoner, Counselor, but she’s definitely not like us. I have to concur with Tuvok—she’s been compromised, and she can’t be trusted.”
“Agreed,” Vale said. To Troi she added, “Leave Hernandez out of the loop. Until further notice, we need to stay focused on the Tanis scenario.”
Another tiny wince at the corner of Troi’s left eye made Vale suspect that a profound discomfort was continuing to plague the counselor. Vale wondered if anyone else at the table was noticing it. Then Troi set down her utensils on her plate, stood, and said to Vale, “Can I speak to you in private?”
“Of course,” Vale said, pushing away her own plate and rising from her chair. As soon as Vale was on her feet, Troi was already walking away, out of the dining room and across their residence’s great room, toward the terrace.
As she stepped outside and followed Troi to the far end of the broad balcony, Vale squinted against the bright morning sun and took a deep breath of the crisp, cool air.
What a lovely day for an argument, she mused, stepping with false confidence into Troi’s harangue.
* * *
“You’re being an idiot,” Troi said. She had meant to take a more diplomatic tack with Vale, but the pain in her stomach had left her with a short fuse—which Vale had unwittingly ignited.
Vale continued smiling, but her narrowed eyes and furrowed brow belied her pleasant façade. “Care to rephrase that?”
Troi leaned with one hand on the terrace’s low barrier wall and rested her other hand as casually as she could over her aching abdomen. “You’re making a mistake, Chris.”
“I’m doing my job, Deanna. If you don’t approve, I’m willing to hear your objections, but once I’ve made my decision, the discussion’s over.”
Irked by Vale’s sudden display of authoritarian behavior, Troi couldn’t help but frown. “You haven’t spent any time with Hernandez, and neither have Tuvok or Keru. None of you know her, and none of you can sense her emotions the way I do. So why are you dismissing my opinion?”
“I can’t speak for Keru or Tuvok,” Vale said, “but I’m worried your judgment might be a bit impaired right now.”
Pointing at her belly, Troi snapped, “Because of this?” Vale looked away, visibly discomfited. Troi pressed on. “If you think a few cramps are enough to wipe out twenty-six years of Starfleet experience and cloud my empathic senses, you’re sorely mistaken, Commander.”
“Cramps aren’t the kind of pain that worry me, Deanna.”
If there was a glib retort for that, Troi couldn’t think of it. She paused, took a deep breath, and quelled her temper. “Let’s not make this personal,” she said. “We need to be careful what we do. The Caeliar’s technology is extremely advanced. A mistake could have disastrous consequences for all of us. And it seems like a violation of Starfleet ethics to use force against a race of avowed pacifists.”
Vale rolled her eyes. “They can call themselves pacifists if they like,” she said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re holding us, our ship, and Hernandez against our will. No matter how they try to excuse it, that’s a hostile act, and one that merits a proportional response.”
“The Caeliar make a compelling case for their right to protect their privacy and territory from outsiders,” Troi said. “They believe they’re acting in self-defense.”
“So are we,” Vale said, cutting off Troi’s reply to add, “Not another word about this, Counselor. And don’t talk to Hernandez or the Caeliar—that’s an order.”
A surge of resentment and anger left Troi feeling tense, as if her body wanted to defy her mind and lash out at Vale. She clenched her left hand into a fist behind her back. “Yes, sir.”
The XO started to move back toward the residence, but then she turned around. “One more thing. If you’re wondering whether I’ve noticed you’re in pain, I have. As soon as Ree gets back from his morning hunt, you’re getting a checkup.”
Vale walked away as Troi protested, “I don’t need one.”
“It wasn’t a request, Counselor.”
Before Troi could reply, Vale went back inside.
Alone on the terrace, Troi watched sunlight shimmer across the titanium-white towers of Axion. The city was so beautiful but so cold—she couldn’t imagine being confined to it for even one lifetime, never mind the hundreds of years that Hernandez had dwelled there. It would be enough to break anyone’s spirit.
I don’t care what the others say, Troi decided. Erika’s not the enemy. If we get a chance to escape, we have to at least try to bring her with us. She deserves a chance to go home, too.
* * *
Will Riker entered the Deck 1 conference room. His eyes were bleary and his hair was slightly tousled. He was met by Commander Ra-Havreii and the holographic avatar of Lieutenant Commander Pazlar.
“It’s three minutes past 0400,” Riker said. “Why doesn’t this crew ever make any progress during alpha shift?”
The chief engineer shrugged. “I wish I knew, Captain.” Nodding to Pazlar, who turned and activated the wall companel, Ra-Havreii added, “But I think you’ll forgive us this time.”
“We’ll see about that,” Riker said, settling into his chair at the head of the table. “What have you got?”
Pazlar called up a screen of complicated and very colorful diagrams and equations. “The energy pulses we detected from the Caeliar’s planet are soliton waves that have been tightly focused and amplified to a degree we never thought possible.”
Ra-Havreii interrupted, “The soliton pulses, as we’re calling them, tunnel through subspace.”
“Drilling might be a better metaphor,” Pazl
ar cut in.
The Efrosian nodded. “Quite right. They bore through the fabric of subspace much like a wormhole punches through normal space-time.” The door slid open and a young, male Bolian yeoman entered. He moved toward the replicator as Ra-Havreii continued. “We believe that each tunnel is held open by a sub-harmonic resonance between the frequencies of its apertures.”
Over the musical whoosh of the replicator, Pazlar said, “The same resonance also compresses the distance between the apertures by folding them toward one another across a subspatial curvature.” She paused as the yeoman handed Riker a mug of piping hot raktajino. “We thought you might like to have a quick jolt before we got too deep into this,” Pazlar said.
“I’d prefer a peppermint tea,” Riker said. With speed, agility, and silence, the yeoman spirited away the mug and returned to the replicator.
“Despite the astronomical energy levels we’ve been reading, the tunnels being generated by the Caeliar are minuscule in diameter,” Ra-Havreii said.
The replicator hummed again with activity as Pazlar said, “The passages would be barely large enough for a person to move through, so we know they aren’t being used by the Borg fleet.”
Accepting his mug of mint-flavored tea from the yeoman, Riker asked the engineer, “Then what are they for?”
Ra-Havreii raised his white eyebrows. “They’re just large enough to transmit a compressed data stream.”
Riker set down his tea without taking a sip. “A subspace crystal ball,” he muttered.
“Exactly,” the Efrosian replied. “A perfect espionage tool. Point it anywhere in the galaxy and see anything you want, in real time—and be all but undetectable while doing it.”
“All right, I’m impressed,” Riker said. He got up and stepped between Pazlar and Ra-Havreii to study their schematics on the companel. “Is there some way we can tap into this, see whatever it is the Caeliar are spying on?”
An anxious look from Pazlar drew a frown from Ra-Havreii, who said, “Maybe, but it won’t be easy.”
“It never is,” Riker said.