Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  The layers of snow, always present in a terrain that has repeated snowfall, were readily apparent. Tom used his gloved hands to push on the pit wall to test the relative hardness of each layer. So far, so good. None of them seemed terribly soft, and all were well bonded together. He noted the top of what looked like a layer of hoarfrost at the bottom of his pit, and grabbed a handful. Its grains were reasonably cohesive, a good sign. Something in his mind nagged him to dig a little deeper and check that layer out more thoroughly, but he decided on a shear test instead.

  Using the shovel, he carved a column of snow from the wall of the pit, about a shovel head’s width on all sides. Then, he inserted the shovel at the back of the column and tugged gently. He was already encouraged because the column didn’t collapse when he was cutting it, which would have indicated a weak layer that might give way. He was pleased when the gentle tug had no effect on the column, either. He increased the force of the pull and, finally, the column fractured at the level of the hoarfrost. But it had taken a solid tug to make it happen, which indicated a relatively stable snow pack.

  Bolstered, he climbed out of the pit and reported the good news to the others. But instead of sharing his relief, they seemed to be troubled.

  “We should call it a day for now, Tom,” said Odile. “We had a good run and there’s no point in risking avalanche. We can plot another course when we get back to the shuttle.”

  “But—I tested the snow layers. They’re stable. There’s no need to stop.”

  “Odile’s right,” chimed in Bruno. “The smart thing is to find another course.” Tom felt anger rising in him as he turned to Charlie, who, somewhat abashedly, shrugged at him. “We really don’t have enough information about this environment to be relying on old-fashioned tests. I’m with the others.”

  Tom took a breath, trying to still the fury he could feel overtaking him. These cowardly quitters were going to cost him his feeling of well-being and plunge him back into the well of despair he’d been in for so long. How could they do that to him? Indignation flanked anger and they began to fuel each other.

  “I can’t believe this. You call yourselves Starfleet cadets? I thought courage was one of the attributes we’re supposed to have.”

  “Common sense is another,” said Bruno, unfazed by Tom’s sarcasm. His unruffled demeanor provoked Tom even more.

  “I call it cowardice. I wouldn’t want anyone flying next to me who was going to back off because they imagined there might be danger ahead.”

  Even good-natured Charlie took affront at that. “I guess I wouldn’t want someone flying next to me that was going to put us at unnecessary risk.”

  The fact that Charlie, his friend since childhood, sided against him cut Tom to the quick. His fury returned in full force, and his voice was venomous when he spoke. “Then go on back. I’ll finish the run by myself.”

  “Tom,” he heard Odile say, imploringly, as he carved into the snow, but he neither answered nor looked back. He’d made one turn when the snow suddenly seemed to settle, a dusting of white rising from its surface. Startled, he came to a stop and looked back up the slope.

  The snow had fractured fifteen meters below Odile, Charlie, and Bruno, who had realized it and were staring at him. “Move!” yelled Tom, and turned to ski out of the path of the descending slab of snow.

  The sound was terrifying, a massive rumble like a thousand volcanoes erupting. Tom’s heart pounded heavily in his chest, but he thought there was a good chance he could get to the side of the avalanche and avoid it.

  A second later, the full impact of the descending snow slammed into him, upending and completely engulfing him. His poles were ripped from his hands as he was tossed about like a dandelion puff in the thundering snow, and the noise level suddenly subsided: all he could hear was a surprisingly gentle whoosh.

  As the snow enveloped him, it took his breath away and he gulped for air, a mistake he instantly regretted, for his mouth immediately filled with snow, a phenomenon he’d read about and remembered now he should have avoided by keeping his mouth closed. His mind raced to recall the other survival techniques associated with avalanches.

  Swim, he thought, and began moving his arms and legs as best he could while being carried down the mountainside by what had to be kilotons of snow. The sensation of speed was incredible, and the realization that he could be slammed into a rock, or a tree, and broken like a piece of balsa threatened to panic him once more. The snow in his mouth had quickly condensed into a hard ball that he couldn’t expel, and he felt as though he were drowning.

  But he kept his legs and arms moving as best he could, flailing at the snow as though it were a flume of water, and he felt himself rise in the rushing snow and managed to get himself into a kind of sitting position, legs in front of him.

  He had no idea how long the headlong plummet down the mountain would last—not until the slab of snow reached a leveling of the ground—nor whether its breakneck descent might carry it, and him, over a cliff, plunging him to his death.

  But he must be ready to thrust for the surface the second he sensed the snow slowing, because once it slowed and stopped, the weight of the snow would become like concrete, packing him in, unable to move. He would have just a few seconds to try to get his head above the snow pack so he could breathe, or an arm free so he could dig out.

  Down, down he plunged, for what seemed endless minutes. He paddled furiously in the snow, trying to swim up, where it was lighter, for that way lay air, and freedom.

  The mass began to slow almost imperceptibly, and Tom redoubled his efforts, thrusting upward, straining toward the surface, for he knew in just seconds the avalanche would run out and the massive weight of the snow would bury him solidly. He strained like a swimmer streaking for the surface and thought for an instant he was going to make it when suddenly he slammed into something unyielding. Darkness overwhelmed him.

  Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, kissed the girls and made them run . . .

  It was Charlie, chanting the old rhyme and laughing with glee as he did, running ahead of a hard-charging Tom, who was running full speed to catch him and throw him onto the grass, making him stop.

  They were five years old and the world was new. The hills of the Portola Valley stretched for kilometers, green from the winter rains, a vast playground for the two best friends, who’d first encountered each other when they were six months old and just crawling. Their mothers had described the first visit, when the babies, plopped down on the floor, had first stared in some amazement at each other, unable to categorize this creature who, unlike everyone else in their lives, was not a giant.

  Baby Tom had extended a tentative hand to Charlie’s plump cheek and touched it, as though to verify the reality of this vision. Then he’d let out a whoop and started crawling away, immediately followed by a smiling and chirping Charlie.

  They’d been friends ever since. They’d played, fought, teased, nagged, defended, and trusted each other for over twenty years. Charlie and Tom, Tom, the piper’s son . . .

  His head hurt and his throat burned. Why was Charlie teasing him?

  His eyes fluttered open and he looked into Charlie’s eyes. Odile and Bruno also hovered over him, looking pale and concerned. He struggled to orient himself, but it was hard to shake off his vision of childhood.

  Odile was passing a medical device over him, and gradually his head cleared. Now he realized he was lying on the floor of the shuttle, and he remembered everything, his anger at his friends, his determination to traverse the snowfield, the avalanche . . .

  Shame and embarrassment welled in him, but he subverted those vulnerable feelings into hostility. “Let’s get out of here,” he snapped, and those were the last words he spoke to them on the journey home.

  A week later, Tom’s black mood hadn’t dissipated, but lay lodged in him like a heavy meal he couldn’t digest. He knew he was acting like a surly child, but the worse he behaved, the more tenacious the angry feelings became, until he was a s
eething mass of resentment and fury.

  It was in this mood that he took his team of small attack vehicles—piloted by himself, Odile, Charlie, and Bruno—to practice strafing runs in the Vega system’s asteroid belt.

  The exercise, developed for the purpose of dislodging comets, planetoids, or asteroids on a possible collision course with Earth, was a routine one. The lead pilot dived toward the chosen asteroid and fired a glancing phaser shot at one edge of the target, then pulled up and out, to be followed in succession by each of the others. The successive impact of the four shots would nudge the asteroid off its previous path. This maneuver would be performed as many times as necessary to deflect the object from an Earthbound trajectory.

  In reality, there were easier ways of dealing with errant asteroids, and the exercise was merely a structured method of taking target practice. Timing was critical to its success, and the maneuver was considered valuable in terms of strengthening coordination among the four-vessel teams.

  “Paris to SAV team beta-nine. We’re approaching the target.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” came Charlie’s response, tinged with sarcasm in reply to the formality of Tom’s announcement. They’d flown together for a long time, and were accustomed to more easygoing communications, but Tom hadn’t felt particularly friendly ever since the botched ski trip the week before, and had reverted to by-the-book procedures.

  “Disengage automated systems.” The highly sophisticated attack vessels could of course perform this maneuver and many others without intervention from the pilots, but in keeping with Starfleet’s rigorous insistence on self-reliance, pilots were taught to be able to function without their vaunted technology. In the event of a systems failure, pilots had to be prepared to go to manual controls and follow visual flight rules.

  “Check two.”

  “Check three.”

  “Check four.”

  Charlie, Odile, and Bruno in succession reported that they were now in manual control of their vessels. Tom could see the asteroid field looming ahead, and at its periphery, the intended target, a huge chunk of rock some six kilometers in diameter.

  “Target at heading three-four-one mark two-nine-zero.” Again, the others signaled their acknowledgments. “We’ll take an echelon formation for the approach.” In this formation, a part of aerial combat for hundreds of years, the ships deployed in a diagonal behind the leader, each of the following planes stepped slightly down from its predecessor. This allowed all the pilots to observe the target, and the vessel immediately in front.

  Trust and cooperation were at the heart of this maneuver. Each pilot kept eyes glued to the ship immediately ahead of him, depending on that vessel for timing. In a well-coordinated run, the lead ship would fire and pull up, the next ship wouldn’t fire until the first ship had pulled away, and so on.

  Tom felt energized by the prospect of combat practice. This was where a pilot’s skills were honed; this was where expertise counted. Anyone could pilot a ship intent on exploration and scientific inquiry; it took genuine skill to go up against an experienced adversary. Tom secretly regretted having missed the Cardassian conflict, where he was sure his abilities would have been tested and proven in heroic style. But those hostilities were over. And he wasn’t going to be posted to the Enterprise. He’d likely pull duty on a science vessel and spend his career chasing nothing more exciting than a dust nebula.

  So he created a small fantasy, hoping to channel his venomous mood into a diverting exercise. He wasn’t performing a routine maneuver on an asteroid; he was in a strafing run against a Cardassian warship, one that could blast him and his team into bloody bits. They’d have one chance to destroy it, only one, so each part of the maneuver had to be performed with precision timing.

  Tom felt his mind focus, like a crystalline lens, and for the first time in days he felt in control of his destiny. Ahead of him lay the dangerous Cardassian warship, coiled like a rattlesnake, ready to annihilate him. He glanced to his left and saw Charlie’s ship, just behind and below him, ready to follow him in.

  “Let’s do it,” he said to the comm, and nosed the ship in a dive toward the asteroid/enemy.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw the Cardassian ship open fire, hitting his shields, continuing the barrage. He kept his nose down, judging the speed of the target and the angle of his deflection, in order to gauge his one shot. One shot, right at the warp nacelle. This was one Cardassian ship that wouldn’t attack Federation borders again.

  Down he plummeted, eyeing the nacelle, waiting until the last possible second so his shot would be as accurate as he could make it, so it would have maximum impact. Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . .

  Now! Tom unleashed his phaser volley and then pulled up. Only then did he realize he’d taken the formation too low, held the dive too long, caught up in his fantasy, determined to score against the Cardassian ship. He barely escaped slamming into the asteroid.

  Charlie, following him, was doomed. He had only Tom’s example to go by, Tom’s timing determining his own. The margin of error increased with each following vessel, and the precious second that allowed Tom to escape impact was lost to Charlie.

  And to Odile, whose ship plunged into the asteroid right behind Charlie’s. Bruno, the final ship, stood some chance of pulling out in time, but was caught in the violence of the antimatter explosions that the other two ships produced, and his ship cartwheeled out of control until it, too, erupted in a massive detonation.

  In horror, Tom turned his ship back to the point of impact. “Paris to SAV team . . . Charlie . . . Odile . . . Bruno . . .”

  No response, as he’d known there couldn’t be. A burning debris field clustered just over the surface of the asteroid, no chunk of which was more than a meter long. There was no sign of his friends, who would have incinerated in the violent explosion.

  A terrifying silence enveloped him as he stared at the drifting remnants of the SAV ships, already spreading into space, dispersing among the asteroid field that had become his friends’ graveyard. For a moment nausea enveloped him and he thought he would throw up, but he took some deep breaths and regained control.

  Tom wondered what their last thoughts had been. Were they of betrayal, of the awful perfidy of their friend? Did they die hating Tom for what he’d done?

  These were the questions that ate at Tom as he flew his lone ship back to Earth. He didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. He sat at the controls, frozen in place, imagining the last moments of Charlie, Bruno, and Odile. He fantasized every possible emotion, felt the panic and the terror they must have experienced as they realized they were going to die, the anger they must have felt that Tom Paris had been the cause.

  By the time he got to Earth he felt like a dead man himself. He was gaunt and hollow-eyed, devoid of emotion, unable to feel anything. He thought he would probably never sleep again, and that seemed entirely reasonable. He was in a state of suspension, almost noncorporeal, a consciousness in near total shutdown.

  He could live like that.

  The faces of his family swam before him, his mother radiating concern, holding him tightly, crying with relief that he was alive. His father was pale and quiet, his eyes reflecting a pain Tom had never seen there before. The admiral put his arms around Tom, enveloping him, squeezing hard as though to make absolutely certain he was there. His sisters couldn’t keep their hands off him, tears in their eyes, love and empathy shining from them.

  But Tom himself felt nothing.

  “So this was nothing more than routine target practice?”

  “Yes, sir. There was nothing extraordinary about it at all.”

  Tom’s jaw was beginning to ache. He’d held it so tightly clamped since the hearing began that little rivulets of pain were spreading from the hinge of his jaw toward his ears. In a way, the pain was comforting. It gave him something to anchor himself to this reality, because otherwise, he might believe himself to be in an alternate dimension.

  Admiral Brand sat at a table before
him, flanked by Admiral Finnegan and Captain Satelk. Aides to the admirals sat to one side of the small, windowless room, paneled in old wood from another era, a close, boxy room that reminded Tom of a cell. It felt difficult to breathe, as though the air weren’t being circulated.

  Tom sat alone, on a chair facing the array of admirals. The room was stark and unadorned, devoid of any humanizing touch, its walls gunmetal gray, the carpet a similarly neutral hue. Tom imagined that a tomb might look like this on the inside.

  Behind him sat his father, Admiral Owen Paris, the sole spectator. Tom couldn’t see him, but his presence was charged, as though he emanated some kind of potent forcefield, his eyes drilling into Tom’s back like tiny phaser beams.

  They’d been here for about twenty minutes so far. Tom had given a painstakingly detailed description of the relationships between himself, Odile, Charlie, and Bruno. The latter three had been solemnly remembered in services at the Academy and then privately in their home cities. Their bodies were now among the stars, whose exploration they would never experience.

  “If you were the team leader, why was Cadet Katajavuori leading the strafing run?” This from Admiral Finnegan, a friendly-looking man with once-red hair now shot with gray, and kindly blue eyes.

  Tom clamped his jaw together once again and took a deep breath. He would tell them what he had told everyone informally, what he had told his family, Charlie’s family, and Odile’s and Bruno’s, what he was almost coming to believe himself was the truth.

  “We frequently switched roles. I thought it was important that each member of the team have the opportunity to take charge, to get experience in the leadership position. And this was a routine exercise, one we’d performed many times. It seemed the perfect time to let Bruno—Cadet Katajavuori—head up the team.”