Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  15

  2254: U.S.S. Enterprise

  “…and in conclusion,” Pike said wearily, “…this Command Report will state that Talos contains absolutely no benefits to humanity. It is my recommendation that any and all Federation vessels be restricted from the region, and that no Starfleet vessel shall hereafter visit Talos IV…”

  The door buzzer sounded, and he finished quickly.

  “Captain’s log, stardate…oh, whatever the hell…Computer, enter appropriate stardate. End log. Come!” he said, raising his voice slightly, shutting off the log more than a little irritably.

  He’d had a hunch it would be Boyce, checking up on him, and his hunch was correct. The white-haired ship’s surgeon, bouncing on his heels like a much younger man, little black bag in hand, quickly made himself at home.

  “Skip the martini this time around, Phil,” Pike said shortly. “I don’t know if it’s wise for me to be drinking right now.”

  Boyce looked disappointed.

  “Well, I hate to drink alone,” he sighed, leaving the little black bag on the desk and settling into the cabin’s only chair. “You put up a brave front for the crew when we were leaving Talos, but you’re coming apart at the seams now. Want to talk about it?”

  “No,” Pike said testily. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But if that’s the only reason you’re here…”

  Boyce handed him a report.

  “Assessments on your yeoman and your first officer since returning from the surface of Talos. Disturbed sleep, restlessness, irritability, some anxiety in Yeoman Colt’s case. Classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “Not unlike their captain,” he finished dryly, rummaging in the black bag and retrieving, not the fixings for a couple of martinis this time, but a half-size bottle of Saurian brandy. It was exactly the shape of a full-size bottle, but small enough to fit in a medical bag, the curved neck and the tethered stopper and the markings on the label attesting to its authenticity. Pike found himself smiling in spite of himself as Boyce poured two shots and handed him one.

  Boyce finished his first and got down to business. “I’ve read the official report, but I want to know what the hell really happened down there to turn two hardened veterans—and a flighty young thing—into basket cases.”

  “In absolute confidence?”

  “Of course.”

  Studying the amber liquid at the bottom of his half-empty glass, Pike told him. When he’d finished, Boyce whistled softly and poured them both another drink, which they finished in silence.

  “So when Mr. Spock briefed us on just how dangerous pure telepaths could be, he wasn’t kidding,” Boyce said finally, pouring a third shot for each of them. Pike left his untouched.

  “Is that the mistake we make, Doctor?” he asked, as if he’d thought something through in his head and was only now voicing it aloud. “Do we always assume that every new species we encounter will be superior to us?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” Boyce said, though he did in fact, quite well. But he was a staunch believer in the talking cure.

  Pike got up and began to pace. “What I mean is, is it just because, as likely as not, we discover they do have something we lack—superior strength, let’s say, or the ability to see colors we can’t—that we inevitably feel inferior? Or is it the fact that the first species we encountered were Vulcans, and we couldn’t help getting the feeling they were at best humoring us, at worst viewing us as impetuous children?”

  “Is your second officer still making you that uncomfortable?” Boyce remarked, eyeing what was left in the bottle suspiciously, as if wondering where the rest had gone so quickly.

  “You know that’s not what I mean!” Pike sat on the edge of his bunk and scowled at him. Boyce had a fine range of tones from dry to sardonic; sometimes it was hard to tell one from the other. This one could be classified as Wry, with a touch of Sarcasm, Pike decided. It was like trying to describe a vintage wine. “I’m talking about the Talosians.”

  “In other words, Enterprise may have left Talos IV, but Talos IV hasn’t left you.”

  “All that intellect…telepathy, even, and they didn’t have the memory or the energy to tinker with an environmental control unit or clean up the nuclear sites on their planet’s surface,” Pike was musing. “What’s the point of being that smart if you don’t do anything with it?”

  “Maybe that’s where they cease to be superior to us and the tables are turned,” Boyce suggested. “And maybe a thousand years from now, when humans have learned to shield against their mental powers, we can develop some sort of trade agreement with them.”

  Which won’t do you any good, he thought, studying the captain over the rim of his glass as he decided to hell with niceties and knocked his fourth drink back in one gulp. If he was going to have a hangover—and there were plenty of remedies in sickbay if he did—he might as well enjoy the process of getting there.

  “It’s not really about the Talosians, is it, Chris?” he asked when Pike had gone silent too long.

  “What? No, you’re right, it isn’t. I keep thinking there must have been some way we—I—could have persuaded Vina to come with us. But there wasn’t enough time. My concern was with the ship, with my crew, in case the Talosians weren’t really giving up that easily. If they’d tried their power of illusion again before we could leave—”

  “You did the right thing, Chris,” Boyce said emphatically, putting his empty glass down on the table a bit too forcefully. There were still two shots left in the bottle, but he wasn’t going to have another. “Vina made a choice. The right one, as far as she was concerned. Stop trying to second-guess yourself…as usual.”

  “She could have come back with us,” Pike said half to himself. “There are advanced techniques that could have…no, you’re right.” Though he’d drunk almost as much as Boyce, he didn’t seem at all affected. “I’ve almost learned to distance myself from most of the missions where things went wrong, instead of spending weeks afterward thinking of what I could have done differently…”

  Boyce bit his tongue to keep from reminding Pike about a conversation they’d had about the Kaylar on Rigel VII in this very room only moments before they’d beamed down to Talos.

  “…but Vina…” Pike didn’t finish. He put his glass down too, rubbed the back of his neck. The captain’s quarters suddenly seemed claustrophobic, like a cage.

  “Something about its being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all springs to mind here,” Boyce suggested.

  Pike gave him a skeptical look. “You’re drunk, Doctor. And I’m going to send you packing in a few minutes, because I want to make sure you get back to your quarters without my having to carry you there.”

  Boyce tried to look indignant, but it wasn’t working. He closed the medical bag and retrieved the report from where Pike had tossed it aside after he’d signed it.

  “I’m recommending some short-term trauma therapy for Number One and Yeoman Colt,” he said, back in his official capacity. “Colt will go for it; Number One will balk unless you make it official.”

  “All right then, it’s official,” Pike said dismissively. He was frankly tired of the entire conversation, tired of all conversation. He wanted to be left alone to brood a while longer.

  “And when she asks why you’re not undergoing therapy?” Boyce asked.

  “You remind her who’s the captain of this ship!” Pike was angry. “Nice try, Doctor, but I’ve had enough others poking around inside my head recently. I’ll thank you to stay out!”

  He realized then what had brought Boyce to his cabin, when the doctor might as easily have sent his medical assessments to Pike’s computer instead of delivering them in person. He’d lost his temper on the bridge, something he couldn’t remember ever doing before.

  What had set him off was the two women bickering. They’d begun the minute Colt had been assigned to him. Number One would deny it, but she saw the “flighty young thing,” as Boyce
described her, as a threat, and not just to the safety of the ship. And Colt herself could be…distracting. Their sniping had been nothing more than background noise—no more annoying than the whir and bleep of the consoles, the hum of the engines beneath the deck plates—until he’d returned from Talos.

  Maybe it was the layover at the Vega Colony, the endless meetings and debriefings that had him on edge, Pike told himself at first, though he knew he was lying. The real reason was the fact that he couldn’t get Vina—or something Number One had said about her—out of his head.

  “‘An adult crewman’?” He’d asked to see her in his quarters and repeated her words back to her.

  “Sir?”

  “When we were in the cage…you said something about Vina’s being an adult crewman on Columbia.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Meaning you did some research on the Columbia while I was…being held down there.”

  He had tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible. Just want to know what steps you took—officially—to effect my release. Any little bit of information you could glean from the record tapes—officially, of course—would have helped, and you’re to be commended for it. Nothing more behind my question than that.

  “It’s in my report, sir.” Number One was watching him carefully. No one knew, likely no one would ever know, what took place between Pike and Vina during those days he was held prisoner, much less what finally transpired between them to make him so certain she would want to stay behind. “I accessed everything in the library computer about Columbia, her crew, last known coordinates, date of disappearance…”

  “Of course.” Pike closed his eyes wearily for a moment. “I haven’t had a chance to…so many reports. I should have realized you’d have been…thorough.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  And eager to point out the difference in age between the “real” Vina and the illusion of a woman the Talosians presented us with. Purely officially, of course.

  “Thank you, Number One. That will be all.”

  It wasn’t, though. The door had barely whooshed closed behind his first officer when Pike accessed the library computer. He told himself he would just read the crew manifests and the log entries. Yet the first thing he did was bring up her image. Then he found he couldn’t turn away.

  Soon Columbia’s records weren’t enough. Armed with a last name, date and place of birth, he’d had to search further, back as far as the records would allow him. By the time he knew everything there was to know about her—education, where she’d lived, what she’d done with her life before she boarded Columbia for its last fateful mission, even her parents’ names and professions, Pike found he was only hungry for more.

  Why had he embarked on this fool’s errand? What was he trying to prove? In trying to put Vina out of his mind—codify her, put her in a little box with a label that said “unattainable,” he’d only allowed her further in.

  Would Number One know he’d been poking around searching for more information? Was it any of her business if he had? Pike wasn’t unaware of his first officer’s feelings for him, how ever well she tried to disguise them. He’d never know if her remark about Vina’s age had been made purely to convince him of the illusion, or if she’d had an ulterior motive.

  Well, what was he supposed to do about it, anyway?

  What he ended up doing was losing his temper.

  “I wonder how they reproduce?” The question had been Yeoman Colt’s, obviously. The woman seemed to live in a constant hormonal haze. “The Talosians, I mean.”

  “Judging from their median age and the absence of any offspring, I’d say they haven’t, at least not for a very long time,” Number One shot back. “None of our business anyway.”

  “But imagine their thinking they could keep the captain prisoner in their little zoo, and he’d just naturally want to mate with…with that woman,” Colt finished with a giggle. She didn’t realize her voice was carrying.

  Number One might have been on the verge of silencing her, but Pike beat her to it.

  “I’ll thank you both to belay the chatter!” he snapped, loudly enough to make Colt jump. “Save it for the ladies’ sewing circle!”

  The first statement was a clear order, and well within bounds. The second raised a few eyebrows, not least of which Number One’s. Pike compounded the bad judgment call by storming off the bridge for no stated reason. He returned a few moments later, after he’d cooled down, but by then there was an unnatural quiet on the bridge, which lingered until the end of shift.

  The fact was that, in his current state, he found the presence of any woman oppressive. Usually gregarious, dropping by the various lounges whenever he was off shift, he now retreated to his cabin on deck five instead. He hadn’t even gone to the gym—a favorite haunt—since they’d left Talos.

  Alone in the dark of his cabin he thought of Vina, alone for eighteen years before his arrival. He couldn’t imagine that kind of solitude, wasn’t sure he’d have been able to survive it. Yet she had. And the first thing he’d done was attack her for the compromises she’d made in order to do so.

  “…they can’t read through primitive emotions,” she’d told him. “But you can’t keep it up for long enough. I’ve tried! They keep at you and at you, year after year, tricking and punishing, and they won. They own me…I know you must hate me for that.”

  “Oh, no!” he’d responded, with the first genuine feeling he’d had for her. “I don’t hate you. I can guess what it was like…”

  Tossing and turning, mindful of the sound and feel of the ship’s engines in a way he hadn’t been since he was a cadet still getting his space legs, he wondered where he’d found the gall to say that. How could he possibly have guessed what it was like? No one who hadn’t experienced it possibly could…

  “You see now why I can’t go with you?” she’d said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster in the face of the barely concealed horror on his face. “They found me, a lump of flesh in the wreckage…dying. They ‘repaired’ me. Everything works. But they had never seen a human before.”

  She had not been exaggerating. It was pure fluke that helped her survive the crash—pure fluke and the love of Theo Haskins—and an incredible fortuity of time and place that brought the hurtling piece of fuselage to ground under the only circumstances under which the Talosians could have saved her life.

  One minute the scientists were gathered in the rec room, laughing, celebrating, the sample bags in their quarters bulging with specimens, eager to head back into known space and publish their research, in the interim enjoying the fact that the head of the expedition and his favorite assistant were about to enter a partnership of a different sort. The captain was off duty and had broken out a case of champagne from his private store when the ship suddenly jolted and the red alert snapped on.

  Vina would never know exactly what caused the malfunction. The captain conferred with his first officer on the bridge and then quickly rushed away, ordering the expedition members to stay where they were until the crisis was over, too hurried to offer any further explanation. The scientists did as instructed and remained in the rec room, the safest part of the ship, lashing themselves and their equipment to chairs, tables, anything secure. The captain had accidentally left the intercraft open and they could hear reports and orders and confirmations flying back and forth. There was nothing for them to do but listen helplessly.

  Theo tried to calm them, his voice soothing, his manner tranquil, as if he knew somehow that all would be well. At one point he saw the terror in Vina’s eyes and reached one hand out across the distance between their chairs. She clung to his hand as if it were a lifeline that would pull the ship back on course.

  From what they could glean from intercraft chatter, one of the engines had apparently failed, though because it had been struck by something or simply malfunctioned, they would never know. The ship was unable to right herself, and she began to yaw, then to pitch forward at a steep an
gle, taxing the artificial gravity, inertial dampers straining. A forgotten champagne bottle tumbled past, spraying them all with vintage wine before crashing against a bulkhead, glass spattering in all directions. The voices on the intercraft became more and more frantic.

  There were escape pods, but Columbia was the only ship out this far, and they were too far from a known system to risk simply scattering them like dandelion seeds into the void. Seeking refuge in the pods would most likely only prolong death. When it was clear that the ship could not be saved, the helmsman simply yanked her around toward the nearest star system, where there was one planet with an oxygen atmosphere, and they all held on and prayed.

  As Columbia plummeted toward the planet’s surface, streaking across the sky like some erratic meteor, g-forces increased incrementally, so that simply turning one’s head became difficult. At the same time, thought processes seemed to speed up, so that even as Vina found it almost impossible to move her arm, her mind was free to toy with the dilemma of whether it would be preferable to burn to death or be crushed to death, since both seemed to be the only current options.

  What gave Theo the strength to free himself and her from their chairs, and all but carry her across the rec room to the built-in refrigeration unit under the wet bar from which the captain had produced the champagne? Love is not scientifically quantifiable, which is not to say it is not one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

  “What are you doing?!” she remembered screaming, or trying to; it was as difficult to speak now as it was to move or breathe.

  Theo didn’t answer. He somehow forced the door of the unit open and shoved her inside.

  Vina was tiny, and Theo had calculated that with her legs folded under her she would just fit into the space. The power had gone off, so it wasn’t unbearably cold, and with the ship’s outer hull now reaching incendiary temperatures, it would remain comfortable—solidly built, insulated—longer than the room outside. The rec room was situated in the very center of the ship. If any part of Columbia survived atmosphere and impact, it would be the rec room. And if any part of the rec room survived intact or nearly intact, it would be this small space.