Star Trek™ Corps of Engineers: Remembrance of Things Past Book One

by Terri Osborne

  “Ma to Vale, do you copy?”

  With another deep breath, she realized that the damned turbolift doors just weren’t going to allow her out of this. Tapping her combadge, she said, “Vale here. I’ll be right there, Commander.”

  When Corsi reached Christine Vale’s tent, she found the younger woman standing in front of her tent door, staring back at the tent as though she were waiting on a turbolift to arrive.

  “Christine?” Corsi said.

  There was no response.

  Corsi put a little more force behind her voice and said, “Lieutenant Vale, can you hear me?”

  Again, there was no response.

  Corsi looked back at Konya. “Can you sense anything from her?” She knew it was probably a futile gesture, as Konya just wasn’t that strong a telepath, but she didn’t have much else at that moment.

  Rennan stared at the unmoving Vale, seeming to focus intently on her for a few moments before shaking his head. “Her body language doesn’t match the stimulus around her. She’s reacting to things that aren’t there.”

  “Lights are on, but nobody’s home,” Vinx said, wandering over and waving a hand in front of Vale’s face.

  Corsi tapped her combadge. “Corsi to Sarjenka.”

  Silence answered her.

  She tried again. Still, all she got in response was silence.

  “Damn. The comms are out. Vinx, go back and get Sarjenka. If she’s busy, get Falcão. Something’s going on here.”

  “You got it, boss,” the Iotian said, hefting his phaser rifle and setting off on a run through the greenery back in the direction they’d come.

  As soon as Makk was out of sight, Corsi turned to Rennan. “You’re sure?”

  Konya nodded. “The only time I’ve ever gotten this kind of a sense was when I was in the room with someone having a lucid dream.”

  “She’s sleepwalking?”

  “It’s a possibility.” The rolling of thunder echoed in the distance. Konya looked up. “We should get inside, Commander. It sounds like it’s going to rain.”

  Corsi nodded, turning to grab Vale’s shoulders to lead her back into her tent. But Christine was faster than she’d expected. Vale turned on her heel and walked right by Corsi. Domenica caught the glazed look in Vale’s eyes. She was out of it, all right. But Corsi had never seen, let alone heard of, someone sleepwalking with their eyes open.

  “Konya,” she said, “get the evacuation going. Go to a five kilometer radius for the moment. If you see signs of the field expanding, take it to ten kilometers. I’ll keep an eye on our sleepwalker.”

  Christine reached the doors to the security chief’s office, but it still took her a minute before she could press the door chime. When she finally hit the button, Ma said, “Come in.”

  “Reporting as ordered, ma’am,” Vale said as the doors parted.

  Christine entered to find the chief staring at the viewscreen on her desk, a look of distaste on her angled features. “Can you believe this?” she said. “They found a changeling infiltrating Starfleet Headquarters. God, if they’ve gotten that far into our infrastructure, they could be anywhere—or anyone. This is not good. Not at all.”

  “Or any thing,” Vale offered. “They can—”

  Before she could finish the thought, the door chime to Ma’s office rang again. “Ah, that should be Dr. Kyril. Come in.”

  The O’Keefe’s CMO walked in, his white hair sticking straight up in about a hundred different directions, crows feet growing deeper in the corners of his eyes, and a medkit on each shoulder. “Ah, yes, Christine,” he began, his Slavic accent mangling her name only slightly. It was improvement. At least he’d finally realized her name wasn’t Krasmira, which he’d called her for the first three weeks of her stint on the ship. There was a look in his gray eyes, one that she had only ever seen with the manic nature of the man on his way through the multiple tangents of thought that often lead to a moment of pure brilliance. She remembered describing him to someone—possibly Dr. Crusher on the Enterprise—with these words: if there was a fine line between genius and insanity, the man was using it for jump rope. “Good. I need your help. I believe I have streamlined the method for detecting changelings.”

  “There’s a method for detecting them now?” Christine asked, half-remembering something about Deep Space 9’s CMO—Julian Bashir, if her memory of the station’s record was correct—having concocted a blood test for them, but her mind wouldn’t give up more than that.

  Still, Christine knew why she’d been summoned. Commander Ma had never been one to do the dirty work herself. She’d always been the “tactical command” type of security chief: never putting the wrong person in position, and always believing that she was the wrong person to take point on anything. Tactical drill scenarios were par for Ma’s course, although Vale had long since developed the theory that she only instituted them when she was really bored.

  “Normally,” the security chief began, her soft voice taking a harder edge as she realized it was show time for her, “protocols would have me leading this testing, Christine. But I think, with that new hollow pip, you’re ready to take point on a tactical project.”

  Vale’s stomach did another back-flip. “Take point, ma’am?”

  “Yes. I want you to take charge of testing the entire crew of the O’Keefe for changeling infiltrators. Consider it your first taste of mission command.”

  Sonya Gomez was up to her ears in replicator parts when she heard footsteps padding into the work tent. Clearing their throat first, a male voice asked, “Commander Gomez?”

  She leaned backward from where the equipment rested on the floor and turned her attention toward the door, her eyes raising to find a tall, slender man in an olive-drab tunic and black pants standing in the doorway. His left arm was crooked over a spot in his shirt, and when he moved just a step toward her, she saw the hole and bloodstain of a projectile weapon injury on his lower left side. “Yes? Has Sarjenka treated you for that wound?”

  The man nodded. “Her assistant did. I’ll be fine.”

  He came down to sit beside her, and she began to notice an oddly familiar look in his coal-black eyes, almost as though—

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked. Running a hand through shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair, she realized that he was right. That café au lait complexion, the elongated nose, the intense dark eyes, they were familiar, but she couldn’t place them. The wound suggested he’d been recently injured, but the man looked nothing like the images she’d looked up of Heyerdahl, Davis, and Cunningham after they’d been reported injured. Something—

  A white-hot spike of pain drove through her right eye, burrowing deep into her brain. Sonya closed her eyes and curled into a fetal position on the tent floor, her right hand pressing her forehead just over that eye as though she could push the pain away. But that only made it worse, shooting in tiny fingers out to every corner of her brain. She fought the urge to claw into her skull and drag out whatever it was by hand.

  Sonya wasn’t sure how long she spent lying on the floor of the tent, but the smell of saltwater managed to surprise her enough to open her eyes.

  There she saw the same man, with the same salt-and-pepper hair, and the same olive-drab tunic and black pants, but no projectile hole or bloodstain on his clothes anywhere. The sun was bright overhead, too bright. It was almost as though—

  Home? Sun Bay?

  He was fussing over her with towels, and she could hear her mother yelling in the distance. “¡Mija! ¡Rescate a mija! Sonya, it’s Mama!”

  In angry, mocking tones, she heard her sister Belinda’s voice, just barely loud enough to make it over the din of the splashing waves and their mother’s cries, “¿Por qué no eres més como Sonya?”

  The spike of pain brought her back to Icaria Prime, and the floor of the tent.

  Sonya pried her eyes open, only to discover that she was, in fact, alone. A faint mist came through the tent’s porous walls. Her right hand returning
to place gentle pressure over her right eye, she slowly pulled herself to her feet and stumbled to the door. No sooner did she get there than a burst of rain blew through, hitting her square in the face.

  This time, the briny smell of the ocean’s spray wasn’t there. It was the verdant aroma of rain in the forest outside.

  She opened her mouth to call for someone, but quickly the sound of feet splashing through a puddle made its way to her ears. “Commander Gomez?”

  It was another member of the dig, a wet bandage encasing his right thigh. His shoulder-length dark hair was soaked from the rain. It was definitely one of the academics. Only they would have been able to get away with that haircut. “Commander Gomez,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  One corner of Sonya’s lip turned in what she thought was an upward direction. It was more a noncommittal look than she wanted, but all she could say was, “I think so.”

  Great, now I’m having the hallucinations, too?

  Swallowing hard, she pulled herself into a seated position. The boat, her sister, her mother’s screaming, it had all seemed so real. Yet, there was something wrong with it somehow. Sonya shook her head hard, trying to clear the image of her sister’s mocking eyes from her mind. Belinda hadn’t mocked her, not once. It had been Belinda who’d pulled her out of the water.

  But, where had the man with the salt-and-pepper hair come from? Had he been on the boat that day? Why couldn’t she remember him?

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” the man asked again, concern very evident in his voice as he reached a hand out to her elbow and helped her to her feet. “You were screaming.”

  “I was?” She certainly didn’t remember that. “I…I don’t know.”

  “You saw something from your past, didn’t you?”

  Sonya tried—and failed rather spectacularly—to hide her surprise. “How did you know?”

  The edges of the man’s lips quirked up. “We haven’t met. I’m Paul Cunningham. Seen a few things from my past the last few days, myself. Did everything you saw seem right to you?”

  Sonya took a step back. “How do you mean?”

  That was when she saw the haunted look in Paul’s blue eyes. “Things you thought you knew, suddenly they’re different from how you remember them? And not always in a good way?”

  She thought it over for a moment. Something certainly had been different all right. Sonya felt a tickle in the back of her mind, as though something was trying to break through. It didn’t feel like a telepathic connection—at least none that she’d ever experienced—but she remembered some of the counseling sessions she’d had with Deanna Troi shortly after being stationed to the Enterprise. The empath’s abilities had always felt like a feather rubbing across her thoughts, enough to sense, but not enough to do anything more.

  This? This felt like more. Sonya was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a Betazoid a lot stronger than Konya hiding out among Gabriel Collins’s team.

  A strong telepath would certainly explain the memory hallucinations. Sonya winced as her brain gave her a quick spike of pain. Though why invoke traumatic memories in the dig team and then lump equipment failures on top of that. Isn’t one form of torture enough?

  Torture. From what she knew of the Letheans, that wasn’t outside of the realms of possibility. And telepathic attacks certainly were their modus operandi. Tapping her combadge, she said, “Gomez to Corsi.”

  Static filled the line.

  “Gomez to Corsi, do you read?”

  Great. Of all the times for the comms to go. That line of thought sprouted an idea. “Paul, could you please take me to see some of the things you’ve found on the dig? I have a feeling the Letheans might have left a surprise behind.” But before they left the tent, Sonya knew they needed one thing. “Did you manage to get any of the projectile weapons from the attackers?”

  He nodded, walking toward a small trunk. “We managed to kill three of them before the others ran. I think Christine put the guns in here.”

  Sonya sighed. “Please don’t tell me it’s locked.”

  Cunningham leaned forward and rapped on one side of the trunk with his left elbow. With a clunk, the metal flap that had housed the built-in lock flipped open. “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  Making sure they had guns and as much ammunition as was available, Gomez headed out, with Cunningham right on her heels.

  Sarjenka returned to Picard’s side to find him once again unconscious, but his pupils remained responsive. He didn’t stir at her light in his eyes. The aroma of the small burner and nutrient broth warming didn’t even faze him. To her, though, it almost smelled good.

  “Sarjenka,” Data’s voice sounded from behind her.

  The familiarity of his tone turned her stomach into knots. She reached into the pocket of her uniform and grabbed the singer stone, allowing it to perform its usual function of calming her nerves. Closing her eyes, she briefly gave herself a moment to be back at home, curled up with her Kakerna Krana doll on her big, cushioned bed. She was safe there; nobody could harm her at home. Taking slow, deep breaths, she willed herself to calm. She could almost feel Jenkara, her pet reeka, curling up with her in the bed as it had done most of her childhood, its long, thinly-scaled tail curling around it and over her as they both slept.

  Home. After her years in the Academy and at Starfleet Medical, everything she had ever wanted, how could the memory of home be so compelling?

  If the reports were accurate, at least five people on the dig had been dealing with memories so compelling, yet so disconcerting, that it had affected their brain function.

  That was when an idea struck. Forcing herself back to the reality at hand, she said, “Data, could you please hand me the medkit?”

  The android silently obliged.

  “Thank you,” she said. Pulling out a hypospray, she loaded an empty sample collector and drew a vial of Picard’s blood.

  She walked over to where Dantas had set up their small lab, mentally going over the list of reagents she’d brought along. Yes, embrivite. That should tell me if this is what I think it is.

  Sarjenka started the test, grabbing a transparent aluminum slide and placing a few drops of Picard’s blood on it, along with two drops of embrivite. She grabbed a spreader slide and used it to disperse the mixture over the entire slide, then placed it in a small, vacuum sealed container to allow the reaction, whatever reaction it would be, to happen.

  “If I may,” Data began, “what are you thinking?”

  Sarjenka looked up at the android. “In Starfleet Medical, we studied some of the medicines and medical techniques used by various species; Vulcan birthing methods, Andorian blood transfusions, and even substances used by the Cardassians for memory control.”

  Data’s eyes widened. “Do you believe the Cardassians are behind what is happening?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. They barely have a homeworld anymore, let alone the resources for something like this. What reason would they have to be out here now? This does remind me of one of their methods though.”

  “Desegranine,” rasped Picard, still flat on his back, but with an arm over his eyes. “Desegranine has the same—” Anything he might have said was interrupted by a coughing fit.

  Sarjenka brought the captain a warm cup of broth. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Please, drink this. It will help replenish the nutrients in your body as well as soothe your throat. Desegranine is what the Cardassians use to reverse memory loss. Usually, it’s just the Obsidian Order using it on deep cover agents so they remember who they were, but if you’ve got it or anything like it in your blood, we need to know where it came from. I only know of one instance where it’s been used on a human, but the symptoms were similar.”

  When she returned her attentions to the blood sample under her microscope, the embrivite had stained the blood an almost Vulcan shade of green. Sarjenka was unable to hide her surprise at the results. “It’s negative?”

  “Negative?” Data asked.

/>   “Yes. Captain Picard, sir,” she began, “I need to get you back to the da Vinci. The phase discriminators we brought down don’t appear to be negating the energy field that’s affecting our equipment. Are you able to stand?”

  Picard leaned forward, only to have the teacup fall from his hand with a clatter.

  “That would be a ‘no,’ then,” Sarjenka said. “Let me consult with Commander Corsi, see if we can’t get some people to take you back to the shuttle.”

  “What about the others?” Data asked.

  “If they want treatment for this,” she matter-of-factly said, “we can take them as well. If they insist upon remaining here? The only thing I can do appears to be give them palliatives. There’s an underlying cause here, but I can’t test for it with this field in place.”

  The android walked over to where she stood, looking down at her with that same unsettling familiarity. “How may I render assistance?”

  She stared up at him, and an image flashed in her mind. It was Data, with the same expression on his face, looking much larger as he looked down at her, trying to console her as she ducked behind him to get away from a dark-haired woman.

  “Tell me how you know me,” Sarjenka finally said. “Ever since Dantas and I came into this tent, you’ve both been looking at me as though you know me. How did you know my name?”

  A groan emanated from Captain Picard’s cot, catching Data’s attention. “Captain, is something wrong?”

  Picard gestured for the android to come over, and Data obediently did just that, bending over so he could hear his captain’s words. While Sarjenka watched, Picard said something into Data’s ear. Data appeared to consider whatever it was carefully before walking back to her.

  “We should return him to the da Vinci first,” Data said. “His condition is not optimal.”

  “I know that,” she said. “And we’ll get you back to the ship as soon as possible, Captain.”

  No sooner did the words leave her mouth than Makk Vinx walked into the tent. “Hey, Doc. The boss needs you. Her friend ain’t acting right. Thinks you might be able to help.”