Strange New Worlds X

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Suffice it to say that I have learned the lessons of history. When the Unimatrix blows, as it will soon, I and my temporal paradoxes will die with the Collective. Maybe a databank will survive somewhere to record that I, Admiral Kathryn Janeway, am the one who brought chaos to order.

  STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE

  The Dream

  Robyn Sullivent Gries

  Robyn Sullivent Gries has loved Star Trek since she discovered The Original Series in reruns when she was a kid. Trek introduced her to science fiction, which led to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Forbidden Planet and Outer Limits, Forry’s Ackermansion and a hefty collection of sci-fi books, DVDs, and film scores, not to mention her soulmate and husband, who is also nuts about the genre. In her spare time (ha!), Robyn indulges in her other love, needleworking. She is positively giddy that her first professional short story sale is for a Trek story. Becoming part of Strange New Worlds has been a grand adventure, and an experience that she will treasure. Heartfelt thanks to Dean, Margaret, and Paula.

  T rip didn’t want to wake up. His head hurt too much.

  He could hear voices. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they were upset. And there were alarms buzzing somewhere, insistently demanding attention. He heard the hiss of a hypospray, thunderingly loud.

  Would somebody just shut the damn noise off and let me sleep?

  “Wait a minute,” came a new voice. “Not so fast.”

  Trip cracked an eye open. Through the glare, he could see someone standing over him. “No more time for sleep,” the man said.

  Weirdly, the fellow looked and sounded just like Trip, except he was wearing a gray jumpsuit instead of Starfleet blue. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?” Trip asked.

  “You,” the man in gray replied.

  “Yeah, right.” Trip squeezed his eye shut again. “Never mind. Leave me alone—I need more sleep.”

  He felt a poke in the ribs. He was up and glaring hotly at the guy in an instant. “What’s your problem?”

  “You are.” The fellow didn’t seem at all intimidated.

  Trip massaged his sore side. “If you’re supposed to be me, you’re doing a lousy job. I’m not as annoying as you.”

  The man in gray smiled faintly. “You are when you’re right about something.”

  Trip rubbed the back of his head; it was pounding something fierce. “And what are you so right about?”

  “You don’t belong here.” The fellow pointed straight down. “You belong there.”

  Trip looked down—and sucked in a breath of shock. The two of them were hovering in mid-air, near the ceiling of Sickbay. Below them, Trip could see Phlox, swathed in surgical gray, feverishly working on a patient. Captain Archer was on the other side of the biobed, looking drawn and haggard, holding something over the patient’s face—giving him oxygen. Trip could still make out the patient’s features, though. He reminded Trip of—

  Holy hell.

  “That’s me,” he said in a stunned whisper.

  “Right now, it’s not much of anything,” the man in gray said. “Not with you up here, messin’ around.”

  What does that make me, then? Some kind of spirit? Trip couldn’t take his eyes off the ghastly scene below. “What happened?”

  The other man shrugged. “An engineering test went bad. You were performing one of your Tucker miracles to head off a reactor breach when you ran smack into a complication.” He glanced down at Phlox, who was attaching a cardio-stimulator to his patient. “The doc’s term for it was, ‘Blunt-force trauma to the posterior cranial fossa, resulting in cerebellar herniation and damage to the midbrain.’ You’ve been in a coma for ten days.”

  Phlox activated the cardio-stimulator, and the patient on the biobed lurched sharply. Archer, hovering close by with the oxygen mask, flinched as he watched, his face agonized. As the doctor administered another hypospray, Trip asked softly, “Am I going to die?”

  His double studied the bioscan monitors. “According to those numbers, you already have.”

  A wave of dizziness washed over Trip. I’m dead? No, this has to be some surreal, Alice-through-the-looking-glass dream….

  “And you’re gonna stay dead unless you get back in that body.” The man in gray was regarding him expectantly now.

  Trip felt groggy and confused. How the hell did this guy expect him to get back? Trip didn’t even know how he’d gotten out in the first place! “Who died and made you my keeper?” he said irritably.

  “I did, I guess.” The man with his face gave him a familiar, lopsided smile. “And if you think I’m gonna let it all go to waste, you don’t know you very well.”

  Trip rubbed his temples, trying to quell their throbbing. The word games were making his head hurt worse. “Who are you, anyway? My guardian angel? My conscience?”

  “Technically, I’m the guy who saved your life,” his counterpart replied. “You might say I have an investment in you.”

  “Come again?”

  The fellow smiled as he tapped Trip’s head. “You owe me one.”

  Below them, Phlox was shaking his head at the flatlining biomonitor gauges, stepping away from the patient. Archer, his face filled with desperation, seized the doctor by the shoulder. “Keep trying!”

  “There’s nothing more to try, Captain!” The doc was more upset than Trip had ever seen him. “The body either responds to stimulation, or it doesn’t. Commander Tucker is not responding.”

  The man in gray was staring at Trip, uncomprehending. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

  Trip’s head felt as if it were about to explode. “Pipe down, will ya? It’s hard to think with you yelling at me.”

  The other man gestured to the motionless body on the biobed below. “There’s nothing to think about! Get back in there!”

  “I don’t know how!” Trip shot back. He wanted to scream, Didn’t you hear? Don’t you get it? “It’s not too late anyway. If I’m dead—”

  “It’s not too late, dammit!” his double said in frustration.

  Trip glared at him. “Okay, Mister Know-It-All. Show me how to get back.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Then how does it work?” Trip demanded.

  Suddenly he and his twin weren’t up above Sickbay any longer, but down on the floor. Trip was staring at the body—his body—on the biobed, pale and unmoving. “Try just a little longer,” Archer was asking Phlox, his voice drained by despair. Trip could see now, by the dark circles under the captain’s eyes, that he had hardly slept for days. But there was something more in those eyes than worry for a dying friend … something haunting him, eating away at his soul.

  “Cap’n’s a mess,” the man in gray observed from behind Trip. “He’s had a hell of a week, and I expect it’ll get even worse for him. He’s going to need his best friend.”

  There was another disorienting change of scenery, and Trip found himself in engineering, looking down from the upper catwalk to the warp core. He gaped at the ragged hole torn in the outer housing, with a big chunk of the EPS and coolant conduit systems blown away. The engineering crew swarmed around the open wound like ants, tending to it with blowtorches, replacement parts, and scanners.

  “Who the hell did this to my engines?” he said in outrage.

  His look-alike, leaning on the catwalk rail beside him, looked almost apologetic. “You did.”

  “Me?”

  “During your warp test, the ship entered a nucleonic particle field. Particles flooded the manifold, triggered an injector flare … and led to this.” The man nodded toward the wrecked warp core housing. “At least you got the reactor shut down before the system overloaded. It could’ve been worse.”

  Not much, Trip thought miserably. It looked from here as though every system in engineering was in the process of being rebuilt or replaced. “How are the repairs coming?”

  “Slowly,” the fellow said. “Nobody knows these systems better than you do. Add to that all the modification
s you’ve made on the fly to compensate for being in the Expanse….” He eyed Trip. “Makes things all the harder, without you down there.”

  Trip ran a hand through his hair. This was bad, very bad. Every hour the ship remained crippled, the entire mission was put at greater risk. Earth was at greater risk.

  He was hit by another sensory shift—damn, it was even more unsettling than being inside a transporter beam—and the deep thrum of engineering faded away, replaced by the quiet beeps and blips of the bridge. Nothing seemed amiss here, but Trip sensed an edgy expectancy in the air.

  He looked more closely. Malcolm was pacing from the tactical station to the situation room and back, checking and rechecking the various diagnostics on the walls, but mostly just looking uncharacteristically nervous. At the helm, Travis fiddled with different readouts, as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Hoshi was scanning Xindi text on one of her comm screens, but her eyes kept wandering down to her board, which remained dark: no incoming calls.

  In the center chair, T’Pol looked cool and collected in her ice-blue jumpsuit as she calmly perused a padd in her hand.

  The man in gray looked from Trip to T’Pol. “Honestly, I don’t know how you could be all right about leaving her.”

  “T’Pol?” Trip didn’t know what the guy meant. “She doesn’t need me.” He approached her … and realized she wasn’t reading the padd at all, but looking right through it, without seeing it.

  To the rest of the bridge crew, she undoubtedly appeared composed, but Trip had learned to recognize tiny nuances of her expression and body language, after weeks of neuropressure sessions and the familiarity that had grown between the two of them. He saw the tense set of her shoulders, the too-tight grip of her hand on the padd. And her face … to Trip, it was an open book of concern, a breath held and waiting for an outcome yet unknown.

  She worries … for me? The discovery was so amazing, so unexpected, that it left Trip shaken. He hadn’t even thought it possible.

  Suddenly, he saw with stunning clarity what he hadn’t seen before … or hadn’t let himself see. His feelings for T’Pol, which had begun three years ago as antagonism, and painstakingly evolved into respect, then friendship, had become something far deeper and heartfelt over the past several weeks. There was a connection building between them, fragile and unique, that Trip yearned to explore further, especially now.

  “Take me back to Sickbay,” he told the man in gray.

  Nothing happened. Trip turned to the guy—and stopped short. He was looking at T’Pol too, with a wistfulness that sent a chill through Trip from head to toe, and made him surprisingly angry at the same time.

  “Now,” Trip told him bluntly. “Right now.”

  “Why?” the man asked, without looking away from T’Pol.

  “Because I’m through sightseeing!” Trip declared.

  He saw the ghost of a smile on the fellow’s face—and then, in another jarring lurch, T’Pol and the bridge were gone. Trip halfexpected to wake up inside his own body again, with Phlox looking down at him, one of those impossibly wide Denobulan smiles splitting his face, while Captain Archer beamed beside him.

  But as sickbay materialized around the two men, Trip saw that it had all gone terribly wrong.

  Phlox stood over the lifeless patient on the biobed, shoulders slumped in defeat. His chin trembled as he pulled off his gloves and threw them on the surgical tray beside him, amid the litter of hyposprays, empty ampules, discarded cardio-stimulator and scanner. Archer had backed away from the biobed, putting a hand to the wall for support. His expression was a mixture of disbelief and horror, and tears glittered in his eyes. Beside him, the biomonitor gauges all lay deathly still at zero.

  Trip’s head felt as though it were going to split open. They gave up on me. They think I’m gone—

  “No!” he shouted in a panic. “I’m here! I’m right here!”

  There was no reaction from either the doctor or the captain. Phlox reached for a sheet and slowly drew it over his lost patient, as Archer turned away from the finality of the sight, looking sick.

  Trip didn’t know if he was more terrified or furious. “No! Don’t you give up on me. I won’t let you, dammit.” He strode to the biobed, looking from Archer to Phlox, as the man in gray watched silently behind him. “I have to go back. I need to. For you, Cap’n—for the ship, and the mission—and for T’Pol! I am not leaving you behind!”

  The biomonitor gauges sprang abruptly to life, startling Archer and Phlox. At the same moment, sound and movement, very faint, came from under the sheet.

  Phlox tore the cloth away. His patient was still pale as ashes, unconscious, but most definitely alive and struggling for a breath.

  Archer was beside the doctor now, hope shining through the tears in his eyes. “Doc?”

  Phlox scanned the steadily rising bioreadings, the disbelief on his face giving way to cautious optimism. “Oxygen,” he said, as he administered a stimulant. Archer grabbed the mask and secured it over the patient’s face.

  Trip felt lightheaded, even euphoric. His head wasn’t hurting any longer. The fuzziness that had jumbled his thoughts and senses was gone, too. And he felt a subtle force tugging at him, pulling him toward his body on the biobed.

  The man in gray gave him a lopsided grin. “Looks like you figured out the ‘how’ part.”

  Phlox ran a hand scanner over his patient, then prepared another hypospray. “Vital signs are stabilizing,” he said briskly.

  Archer hovered close beside the biobed, looking so nervous that he was practically shaking. “What happened?”

  Phlox allowed himself a small smile as he answered, without looking up. “He responded, Captain. To what, I’m not sure.”

  “What else can I do?”

  The doctor injected his patient. “Hope for the best.”

  With each passing second, Trip felt better, stronger, more—more alive. But he resisted the pull; he had a few things to get straight with his mysterious companion. “You told me you saved my life … and you died. Who are you?”

  “Think of me as a casualty of war,” the fellow answered simply.

  Trip studied this mirror-image of himself, whose face and voice and mannerisms were eerily similar to his own. “I know you’re me … and not me. But I don’t understand it.”

  His counterpart shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” Trip said. “My life isn’t worth dying for.”

  The other man had a look of peace about him. “Now you’ve met somebody who thinks differently.”

  Trip felt his throat tightening, and his eyes tearing up—or maybe it was just the light getting brighter behind the guy, making it hard to look at him.

  Trip was being pulled insistently toward his body now; he couldn’t stop the process any longer. The man in gray watched with satisfaction. “Have a good life,” he said. “Do me a favor—make it a long one.”

  He wasn’t making any move to follow. Trip felt an unexpected pang of concern. “You’re not stickin’ with me?”

  The fellow shook his head. “I did what I came to do.”

  “What’s gonna happen to you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” There was somebody else with the fellow now … a woman. It was hard for Trip to make her out, with all that light behind them. She moved closer to the man with Trip’s face, slipping her arm through his, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As she nestled her head comfortably on the man’s shoulder, Trip was able to make out her long, golden-blond hair and sunny smile.

  Of course. It was Elizabeth.

  It felt right, seeing them together, though Trip couldn’t exactly figure out why. For a moment, he thought he saw the sparkle of tears in the fellow’s eyes…. Perhaps it was a trick of the light.

  As Elizabeth and the man in gray receded rapidly into the distance, he gave Trip a final smile. “Take care of T’Pol for me.”

  Trip smiled back. “And you look after Lizzie fo
r me.”

  From the foot of the biobed, Jonathan Archer watched Trip open his eyes … and for the first time in ten days, the captain began to breathe easily again.

  Archer watched his friend blink carefully, as if learning the skill for the first time. Trip looked fuzzily around, then finally fixed his gaze on the first face he found: that of Phlox, standing beside him. He worked his mouth for a while before forming a word, barely more than a whisper. “Doc.”

  Phlox smiled warmly at his patient. “Welcome back, Commander. How do you feel?”

  Trip seemed to consider the question for a long moment. Faintly, he smiled. “Alive.”

  Archer felt giddy. Trip was processing images and information, using memory recall, speaking lucidly. Phlox had cautioned the captain that it might be days before the transplanted neural tissue had properly integrated. Leave it to Trip Tucker to work another miracle.

  Trip’s eyes were wandering again. They found Archer, and carefully looked him up and down. A frown creased his brow. “Cap’n … you are mess.”

  Archer laughed, realizing he must look like hell—unshaven, exhausted. Suddenly, he was blinking back tears of relief. “I wouldn’t talk, if I were you,” he replied.

  “I didn’t say it,” Trip remarked mildly. “He did.”

  Archer traded a puzzled glance with Phlox, who shrugged. “Who?” the captain asked Trip.

  “The guy.” Trip looked around foggily. “The man who looked like me. He was right here in sickbay….”

  Phlox raised an eyebrow as he exchanged another look with Archer. “Strange dream to have,” he commented quietly.

  Trip fixed his gaze on the ceiling above them for a long moment, his brows knitting thoughtfully. Finally he relaxed, settling back into his pillow. “Huh. He musta left with her.”

  The captain and the doctor looked curiously at each other again. “Her?” Phlox echoed.

  “Elizabeth.”

  Archer knew that Trip had dreamed often of his sister, but they had been horrific nightmares of the Xindi attack, the cause of his insomnia. This time, he didn’t seem disturbed at all. But why would he dream of himself with her?