Out of the Cocoon

by William Leisner

  Abramowitz remained seated in the empty hall, trying to sort through the new impressions of the United Ficus colony she’d picked up in the past hour. Somehow, her view of the matter was more muddied than ever.

  Lense stared at the long tableau of computer readouts displayed across one wall of the lab, and pressed her hands to either side of her skull, as if trying to squeeze the inevitable conclusion out of her brain. The original text of Sandra Vallis’s meticulously detailed notes appeared in tandem with the da Vinci computer’s representation of the corresponding genomes, as well as the genome of the actual pathogen that had gotten loose in the Capital Complex. Presented this way, there was no question: the rop’ngor strain that had infected the Mariposans was not one Sandra Vallis had created.

  “Are you unwell, Doctor?” the EMH asked, standing just off to the side behind her. “Shall I bring you an analgesic?”

  “No, thanks,” Lense growled. “You’ve done plenty already.” The EMH had caught the contradictory data as soon as the file hit its matrix. Lense only wished she could feel better about the breakthrough.

  “Are you certain?” the EMH persisted.

  Lense whipped her head around to glower at the EMH as it ran its empathy subroutine. Like all the later-generation medical holograms, this one had been programmed to simulate actual concern for its patients. Seeing it offering her its faux-friendly sympathy was almost enough to make her miss the arrogant Mark I version that had originally been in use on the Lexington. “Yes, I am certain, dammit.”

  “Then is there anything else I can do?”

  “Yeah. You can go and…deactivate yourself.”

  The EMH nodded and did just that. Once it disappeared, Lense saw Kara through the transparency of the lab walls, waiting in sickbay. Lense got to her feet and waved the young woman in. Kara obeyed wordlessly, and stood just inside the door as Lense slid it shut. The two just stared silently at each other, Lense calling on every bit of strength within her to keep herself composed. After a long moment, Lense finally asked, in a low, pained voice, “What did you do, Kara?”

  “What do you—”

  Lense slammed the palm of her hand down on the console before she could get any further than that. “Don’t! You were Sandra Vallis’s assistant. You were one of the only people who knew about her secret work. You were the one she trusted with her backup files. She trusted you!”

  And she wasn’t the only one.

  Kara did her best to hold herself steady, although her eyes started to blur behind a layer of incipient tears. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Didn’t mean what?” Lense demanded. “The virus that got loose? It was a mutated strain, Kara. A cross-mutation between two different strains.” She jabbed her right index finger toward the displays on the wall. “Strain number 543, and strain number 467. Four-sixty-seven was the last from what Vallis called ‘a dead-end line of experimentation.’ It propagated too quickly and too uncontrollably, so she wrote it off, and confined the strain to cold storage.” Lense fixed Kara with a hard glare. “This was three years ago! How could those two strains have come in contact with each other?”

  “I didn’t mean for anyone to be hurt,” Kara said, through slow, controlled breaths. “I only wanted to stop her work.”

  Lense put a hand over her mouth and said nothing. Even though she already knew, she’d hoped she would have denied it, that she would have pointed the finger at some other unknown confidant of Vallis’s. Hearing her admit to the act so plainly, with more emotional restraint than Lense felt herself capable of at the moment, was more than she was ready for.

  She turned away from the young woman, tabbing the comm on the lab table behind her. “Lense to Gold. Please come to the diagnostic lab right away.”

  “Acknowledged,” came the captain’s response.

  Lense tabbed the line closed, and remained with her back to Kara, hands on the edge of the console supporting her entire weight. “Did you think I wasn’t going to be able to figure it out?” she asked.

  “I figured you would,” Kara answered. “Better you than Dr. Victor.”

  “Why?” Lense turned back around to challenge her. “Did you think Starfleet would go easier on you? Or that you could run away without having to face the consequences from the people who were affected by what you did?”

  Kara’s only reply was to look down at the deck and hitch her shoulders a couple of centimeters. Before she knew what she was doing, Lense’s hands were on those shoulders, her long fingers pressing into the flesh under the thin yellow sundress. “Did you?!” she demanded. “Over two hundred people dead! Half the population sterile! And here you are, ready to run off into the big universe, with dreams of being a doctor yourself?”

  “I swear, if I knew what would’ve happened—”

  “But you knew what you wanted to happen! You didn’t know you were killing Sandra Vallis, but you knew you were killing her chance to ever…and for all the Mariposans!”

  Kara wrenched herself out of Lense’s grasp, and backed away toward the opposite side of the lab. “But that’s why I had to stop her!” Kara shouted, tears now rolling down her cheeks. “They already see me as a lesser person. If their infertility was cured, what would I be to them then? The only reason they let the Bringloidi come was because they needed someone to have their babies. All I would be to them is a uterus—”

  “And what about the women who want to have babies? What right do you have to make that decision for them?” Lense was full-out shouting now, feeling the restraints of her well-honed emotional self-control snapping loose. “That’s their choice, isn’t it? To bring a new life into the universe, to commit to raising a child—that’s a personal choice, one that we have to make for ourselves! How dare you…”

  Suddenly, she felt like a balloon with all its air let out. She panted and blinked at the Bringloidi woman standing in front of her, almost in a state of disorientation. As she mentally flailed about, trying to find her center, she felt a hand fall on her back, between her shoulder blades. “Doctor?” a gentle voice close to her ear said.

  Lense straightened, instantly finding herself before turning to face David Gold. “Captain.” She had absolutely no clue he had been in the room, or for how long. The lab door had closed behind him, which was some small comfort. “Captain, in the course of my analysis of—”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, his hand still on her back. “Good work, Lense. Ms. McClay,” he then said, the gentle voice gone, “step out into sickbay, and wait for me.”

  Kara did as ordered, leaving Lense and Gold alone in sad silence.

  “She sabotaged Vallis’s work?”

  Lense stared out through the transparency, where she stood with her back to the lab. “Yeah.”

  “Positive?”

  “She admitted it.”

  Gold sighed. “All right. I’ll see how we have to play this out. Again, good work, Lense.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And,” he added in a whisper, “mazel tov.”

  Lense turned to face the captain, eyes wide, perfectly aware that he was not congratulating her on any of what had just transpired. “Excuse me?”

  “Six times a father, nineteen times a grandfather, you’d think I’d have recognized the signs by now.” He shrugged, and walked out into sickbay to join Kara. Lense watched them walk out into the corridor. Once she was sure she was alone, she collapsed into a chair, completely limp, feeling for the first time in months the sweet release from tension.

  Chapter

  12

  Breeding stock.

  Gold cringed as those words echoed in his mind. They had been there in the Enterprise’s mission recordings all along, but being familiar as he was with Kate Pulaski and her blunt, plainspoken personality, he’d let the phrase roll right over him. But taken by itself, and disregarding the rationalizations and justifications that had surrounded it, the ugliness of the phrase struck hard.

  “Are you telling me that you think this girl’s actions we
re justified?” Wilson Granger asked, his jaw slack in disbelief. Brenna Odell, sitting to his left on one side of their kitchen table, made a valiant attempt to shoot phasers out her eyes at both Gold and Abramowitz.

  “I absolutely am not arguing that her actions were justified, and she will, of course, have to face justice for her actions.” How such justice could be carried out, Gold wished he knew. “But, I am telling you that the fears that drove her to her actions are real.”

  “Captain, I may not be a young girl anymore,” said Brenna Odell, “but I daresay I’m more familiar with their feelings than you. I wasn’t all that keen back then on the idea of taking three husbands and bearing them all children. But that was what we needed to do.”

  “Actually, it really wasn’t,” Abramowitz said, frowning. As unhappy as she was about the Enterprise’s interference here before, now her disdain for the legacy Picard had left on this world was completely undisguised. “The establishment of the three-spouse arrangement served only one purpose: to allow for the proliferation of Mariposan genes in this new society. The Bringloidi genome was—and is—broad and healthy; there was no reason they couldn’t continue monogamous relationships. But a united colony requires a uniform set of rules, morals, and mores, so polygamy was demanded across the board. With the inability of Mariposan genes to propagate, however, there is no justification for this social arrangement.”

  “But,” said Granger, “you can give us that ability. You said Sandra’s research could still hold promise.”

  “That’s right, I did,” Gold said. That was one of the few questions he’d bothered Lense with before beaming down here. “The question is, should we?”

  “What?” Granger slammed his hands on the table and launched himself up out of his chair. “You can’t be serious! You would bring us right back to where we were eleven years ago? You would let us all just die?”

  Gold stayed seated, and in a calm voice said, “You told me earlier that you regretted what you’d done to the Enterprise officers in the name of preserving yourselves. That with your wife and her children, you’d found an aspect of your humanity more important than what was encoded in your DNA.”

  Brenna Odell raised an eyebrow at that, while her husband answered, “Yes, Captain, but—”

  “Then think about what you’re passing on here, Mr. Granger,” Gold said. “You’d be passing on the idea that Mariposan genes are superior to Bringloidi genes. That a Bringloidi woman’s most important function is to help propagate the Mariposan race, no matter her wants, talents, or abilities.”

  As Granger mulled that over, Abramowitz leaned in, eyes on Odell. “And you—”

  “What, me?”

  “The one thing the Mariposans have been able to pass on to your children is their knowledge. You strip that from this world, what have these young people left? The gang that attacked our people did so because they were afraid of what they were going to lose.” Odell looked unmoved, though she did give her husband a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. “You’d be putting the same kind of limits on these young people’s potential, where the best they can hope to do is scratch out the same hard simple life your people were so eager to put behind you over a decade ago. Do you really want to leave them with that kind of hopelessness?”

  And in Odell’s eyes, Gold saw the first cracks in the hard shell of her resolve. It was a look he was all too familiar with—the look of realization that everything you thought or believed up until that moment was mistaken. She found herself with nothing to say, her eyes moving around the room as if searching for her fading certitude.

  Gold relaxed his facial expression, and waited for Odell to glance back his way. “I know you only want to do what’s best for your people,” he said, addressing Odell and Granger both. “That’s what we all want. Let us help you figure out how to do that. The Federation owes you at least that much, after getting you to this point.”

  “How did Da make this look so easy?” Odell whispered to herself, just barely audible. Then she lifted her head, and looked from Granger to Gold. “What if they say we should split the two colonies up again?” she asked.

  Gold reacted to that with surprise, but not quite as much as Granger did.

  “They couldn’t force you to be isolated from each other, not if you didn’t want to be,” Abramowitz answered, registering no small amount of surprise herself.

  Odell looked to Granger again. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to hear these diplomats out?” she said, then offered him a wisp of a smile.

  Granger returned her smile. “I can’t see how it would,” he said, placing his left hand on her right.

  For the first time since their arrival at Mariposa, Gold felt hope that the union would be preserved.

  “Captain, this has been an emotionally trying day for me; maybe we could put this off another day or two?” Lense laughed at herself, the sound echoing off the narrow walls of the extendable gangway tunnel linking the da Vinci to Starbase 73. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

  The airlock hissed, and she reboarded the da Vinci. She took the left corridor, heading for the captain’s quarters, even though she felt she would have been perfectly justified in begging off their appointment, given the task she’d just performed.

  Between Gold and the prime ministers, it was decided any kind of trial or criminal proceedings against Kara McClay would only incite more ethnic conflict. So the decision was that she would be exiled, forbidden to return to Mariposa for at least twenty years, such travel restriction to be enforced by the Federation.

  It was really the best Kara could have possibly hoped for—and Lense, too. Despite all that had happened, despite all her conflicting emotions, Lense genuinely did hope the young woman would be able to fulfill her potential, and somehow find a way to atone for what she had done.

  Kara had been quick to accept all the terms of her exile, but the reality of her sentence didn’t truly dawn on her until they’d reached the heart of the starbase. Suddenly finding herself in the middle of a surging ocean of aliens and other strangers, Kara realized how totally alone she now was, and that there was no going backward. Lense sympathized.

  She reached the captain’s door, and hesitated before pressing the door chime. A second later, the door slid open, and she entered Gold’s quarters. “Good afternoon, Captain.”

  “Good afternoon, Lense. Come, sit.” Lense took a seat as the captain stepped to the replicator. “Get you anything?”

  “Tangerine juice?”

  He keyed his requests into the pad, and a moment later handed her a chilled glass while he held a steaming mug of green tea. Sitting, he raised the mug in a toast. “To the mother-to-be.”

  Lense hesitated, then touched her glass to the captain’s mug. “You know, Captain, I was planning to tell you…”

  “Sometime before the kinder’s high school graduation, I’m certain. The question I have: Who have you told? Your mother, at least, I hope.”

  Lense shook her head, and the captain “tsked.” “So far it’s just you, and Julian Bashir.”

  “Well, you didn’t tell me so much as I found out in spite of you.”

  “Yeah, that’s actually pretty much how Julian found out, too,” she said with a small laugh. “I just…first there was just this shock, and disbelief. Then reality slowly seeps in and you realize you have to face it—”

  “And you do all you can to avoid thinking about it. Rachel, she would cook. You never saw such meals.” Gold smiled as he revealed this memory, but then shifted to a more serious mien. “With you, though, Elizabeth, you do the same to avoid any personal grief. It took a direct order for you to open up, after two years, about Commander Selden. To this day, I don’t know what happened with you right after Galvan VI. And I find it disconcerting that, after all the time you put in on that Shmoam-ag ship, you’ve talked so little about the boy.”

  “Sir? I did an entire paper on Dobrah and the Pocheeny virus,” she reminded him. It was that paper that earned her the nomination f
or the Bentman Prize, and set this whole thing in motion.

  “Yes, a paper,” Gold said. “A cold, professional paper with big, impressive, award-worthy doctor words. But you don’t talk about the boy.”

  He was right, of course. The time she spent with that lonely little boy (two hundred years old, yes, but still very much a child) had touched her like nothing in her life ever had. Her third day there, she’d had to wake him to run some tests, and in his half-sleep, he’d looked up at her and said “Mama?” That had hit her right in the heart.

  Now reflecting on Gold’s words, reflecting on an entire lifetime of pushing her own emotions away and doing everything she could not to deal with them, she felt a new pain growing there.

  As if he were reading her thoughts, Gold reached over and put a hand on her forearm. “Elizabeth…I know it’s your nature to be concerned about everyone except yourself. That’s what makes you a good doctor, and part of what is going to make you a wonderful mother.” He leaned back into his chair and picked up his tea again. “That’s also what will make you meshuggeh ahf toit. You’re not alone. You’re part of a family here. You just have to decide not to be alone, hiding in that shell of yours.”

  Lense smiled a tiny smile, even though she’d always taken a bit of a jaundiced view of calling any group of nonrelated people a “family.” Friends, maybe. People she’d put her life on the line for, definitely. But the da Vinci was not a Galaxy-class ship or a starbase. It was not designed for families. When the time came, she knew, Starfleet would have her somewhere else, and this “family”…

  “So,” the captain said, switching to a lighter tone, “when do you plan on sharing the good news with everyone?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I haven’t even thought…”

  She trailed off, and Gold shrugged slightly. “This hasn’t been a very happy mission for anyone. The engineers stuck most of the time sitting on their hands, Abramowitz all bent out of shape, and now having to turn the whole megillah over to another ship without having resolved any of the big issues…we could all use something to get together and celebrate.”