The Trail: A Star Trek Novel (New Frontier Reloaded Book 1)

by ROVER MARIE TOWLE

  He knows what's to come, but he follows Ezri back to her quarters like a condemned man to a scaffold somehow convinced that a last minute call from the governor will stay his execution. He racks his brain for words, any words that can set this to rights; there has to be at least one word in his genetically enhanced vocabulary that can make this all go away, to restore the way things were or how they could be.

  Yet when Ezri's door swishes shut, Julian remains silent, no words to come from him.

  “There's really no easy way of saying this. . .” Then don't. “I've been having feelings for Lenara.” She waits and he says nothing. “Ever since she came to the station, I've just wanted to. . . be with her. I'm not—I'm not doing this on purpose and I don't mean to hurt you. The way I feel about Lenara. . . it's like a force of nature. I have no control over it.”

  “I see.” Julian crosses his arms. “Have you considered this might be another effect of your joining? You've been confused before.”

  “Julian, I'm not confused,” she snaps. “And, frankly, I'm a little surprised you could say something so bigoted.”

  “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. You know I didn't mean it that way. I'm simply worried about you. For something to come over you this quickly—”

  “Quickly? She was my wife.”

  “She was Torias' wife. You're Ezri. You're with me. We love each other, don't we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can get through this. You and me.”

  “I don't think there's any getting through this.”

  “Well, there has to be something we can do—“ Julian says, “that I can do to fix—”

  “Me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Like you fixed Melora and Sarina?”

  “What do they have to do with anything?”

  “Everything!” Ezri says, shouting in earnest for the first time. “I'm not a broken Trill doll you get to restore to mint condition.”

  “I never said you were! Ezri, I don't know where this is coming from.”

  “Well, maybe if we spent more time together as a couple instead of as Spartan soldiers, you'd have a better idea.”

  “You were the one who wanted to play with me.”

  “Because I wanted to be close to you, but all you want to do is tell me how I'm not as good as Miles. I'm sick of being everyone's consolation prize.”

  “And you don't think that's what you'll be to Lenara? You will always be Dax to her.”

  “I'd rather be Dax to Lenara than Jadzia to you.” She stomps over to door, which whooshes open at her command. “Goodbye, Julian.”

  He skulks to the doorway. “This is it then. It's over?”

  “Yeah. It's over.”

  He leaves without another word.

  –

  Ezri curls her arm protectively around her bottle of bloodwine, as if Worf could reach right through the screen to steal it away from her. “I thought you'd like to hear it from me first,” Ezri says, slumping on her coffee table. “I broke it off with Julian.”

  “I see.” Worf purses his lips. “Ezri. . . I still believe it would dishonor Jadzia's memory for us—”

  “No. Ew. No. That's not why I called. . . But now that you mention it, I find the whole premise that reassociation is dishonoring a previous host's memory to be really offensive. I mean, I'm not some living monument to Jadzia that you're all fouling with your genitals. I'm my own person and. . . and if Lenara wants to dishonor me, she can dishonor me all night long.” Ezri snorts into the mouth of her bottle.

  Worf raises an eyebrow but says nothing.

  “Anyway, I called to tell you that you were right. Julian is a child.” Ezri raises her bottle to Worf. “Qapla'!”

  He raises his prune juice in kind. “Qapla'.”

  And they drink.

  –

  Julian taps the bar. “Another.”

  Vic stops mid-pour. “You really think that's a good idea? Even you genetically engineered humans can't match drinks with a hologram.”

  “No, I'm fine. The minute I walk out that door all the alcohol in my system will disappear.”

  “Then what's the point?”

  Julian shrugs. “Same as any other hologram. Make us feel good for a while and forget who we are before we have to go back to our miserable lives.”

  “At least, you have a miserable life to go back to. Some of us don't even have that.”

  “You willing to trade?”

  “Pally, you have no idea.”

  “Believe me, you don't want it. If you had any idea of what it's like. . . Imagine—imagine you meet this woman. This amazing, wonderful woman so beautiful and clever and so untouchable. You're willing to do anything to be with her, but it never happens. She gets married, gets ready to start a family, and even then you still have the smallest bit of hope that one day she will turn around and see you. But before she does, she dies. Then owing to some miracle, she returns to you and finally after all those years, you get together with the woman of your dreams.” Julian takes a swallow of his gin. “Four months later, she leaves you for the woman of her dreams.”

  “Julian, Ezri's not Jadzia.”

  “I know that!” He slams his glass onto the bar. “She's not Jadzia, she's not Miles, she's not Sisko, she's not Odo, and she sure as hell isn't Worf.”

  “You miss them.”

  “More than—it's like I have this giant, gaping hole inside of me that I keep trying to fill with Spartans and Ezri and more Ezri. And all of that—all those distractions and self-delusions are gone now and I'm left to face the fact that—that—”

  “What?”

  “That. . . for the first time in seven years, I don't have a family.”

  –

  With the help of a few hyposprays begged off of Dr. Girani before Julian's shift started, Ezri's bloodwine hangover slowly leaches away over the course of the day. By the time her shift ends, the only trace of last night's festivities left in Ezri's body is that earworm of a song Worf started singing in Russian at four in the morning. Her mind is running through the chorus (something about snowshoes by a fire) for the hundredth time since this morning when she catches Lenara's eye from across the Promenade. Ezri nods at her and Lenara seems to understand that there's nothing—not a single thing—keeping them apart now except a few meters of recycled space station air.

  Closing the distance at a sprint, imagined admonishments from Odo are drowned out by images of a thousand lovers in a thousand Human holovids running to each other like Ezri and Lenara are right now. It's all very romantic until Ezri trips, falling literally at Lenara's feet.

  Lenara makes no attempt to stifle her laughter as she bends down to see if Dax is alright. “This isn't funny,” Ezri says, even as her own laughter gives her away.

  “It's a little funny.”

  Ezri playfully smacks Lenara's arm away, earning her a pinch to her side and two arms wrapped around her and two lips pressed to her own. Ezri's not Julian, so she doesn't ponder the statistical probabilities of these two new bodies fitting together as perfectly as they had hundreds of years prior. It's enough that they do.

  Locked together like puzzle pieces, wild horses couldn't drag them away (to borrow the human expression), but a severe-looking vedek glaring at them for feeling each other up in front of the Bajoran shrine sends them, red-faced but still giddy, back to Ezri's quarters.

  Chapter 3: Give Another Number to Me

  As a child, whenever Julian became upset or saddened about things out of his control, his mother would always rub his back and say, “You won't feel this way forever.” As an adult, Julian realizes what his mother meant was, “Eventually, you will grow so accustomed to this feeling that you'll forget it's even there.” The trick is surviving long enough to get to that point.

  After Ezri leaves him, Julian spends all of his off-time holed up in his quarters, the privacy allowing him to be mournful in a way he'd never express in public. (Stiff upper lip. Keep calm and carry on.) After two weeks,
the pain has dulled to the point where he feels equipped to brave the social niceties required by the world outside his cabin, and, in fact, he is looking forward to spending time with someone besides himself and the ghosts of every woman to ever love/leave him.

  Once his shift has ended, Julian goes round to Kasidy's to see how she's doing—as her friend rather than as her doctor. (It's fair to say that since his break-up with Ezri, Julian hasn't been performing either role as well as he could.)

  “Julian!” Kasidy exclaims. The Bajoran women surrounding her on the couch part like the Red Sea as she stands. (Julian supposes the wife of the Emissary has that power.) “It's good to see you out and about.”

  “Thanks, er. . .” His eyes follow a tray of beets across the room. “What—Excuse me.” He steps around a cluster of Bajoran women, all of whom are holding plates of dirty rice and—“Is that shrimp creole?”

  Kasidy nods. “Lysia made it.”

  “Lysia? The jumja vendor?”

  “Ben gave her a copy of his cookbook a few years ago. After hearing how much I missed his cooking, a few of the women down at the shrine decided to fix me dinner.”

  “That's nice.”

  “It is, isn't—” Something catches her eye by the replicator, and she hollers, “Don't let Roana get into that Sazerac; you know what happened last week!” The room erupts into laughter while one brunette (Roana?) turns as red as the beets on her plate.

  “What—what happened last week?” Julian asks over the chuckling.

  Kasidy takes a step closer to Bashir and explains quietly, “Roana spent the entire night sipping Sazerac trying to work up the courage to talk to me and when she finally did—” She makes a heaving noise. “Right on my shirt.”

  “Wow. Is she okay?”

  “She's fine. Right after I changed my shirt, I took her to Girani to get checked out. I think her ego took more of a pummeling than her liver.” She turns, checking back up on Roana to see her talking animatedly with a few of the other women. Kasidy smiles at Julian. “I joke about it a little bit so she knows I'm not planning to have her excommunicated.”

  “Could you do that?”

  “I don't know. I've never tried.”

  “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  “Kasidy!” Lysia calls from Sisko's makeshift kitchen. “The beignets are done.”

  Despite his nutritional training as a doctor, Julian's stomach rumbles at the smell of fried dough and powdered sugar. “Those smell great. Do you mind if I—”

  Kasidy's smile fades. “Actually. . .”

  “Oh. Right. I didn't mean to—”

  “I don't mind, but this is kind of a Bajoran thing.”

  “And I'm not Bajoran.”

  “And you're not a woman.”

  “Right.” Julian eyes the door. “I guess I'll be going then.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Julian is almost to the door when Kasidy calls to him, “Before you go. . . Was there a reason why you came over here?”

  “No. Just checking to see how you're doing.”

  “Thanks. I'll see you around.”

  “Right.” Julian nods and takes off for Quark's, knowing that at this hour the bar will be empty enough for Quark to spend at least a few minutes commiserating with Julian on their lack of “females.”

  Yet, when Julians walks in, he finds Quark not at the bar idly chatting with Morn, but rather standing with Jake in front of a small group of patrons, each of whom is holding a PADD.

  “Right,” Quark says. “Orak.” He glances down at his stylus. “In the first act, when you say, 'I'd kill for that kind of latinum,' try to be a little more. . . uh. . . reverent of that latinum. It's not just currency; it's your ticket into the Divine Treasury.”

  “How should I say it?” a young Bajoran man about Jake's age asks.

  “Well, maybe more like—”

  Jake grabs Quark by the bicep, cutting him off. “Don't give him a line reading,” Jake says quietly.

  “Why not?” Quark whispers.

  “I don't know. The book just said not to do it.”

  “Fine.” Quark looks back down at Orak. “Say it as if you're standing in front of the Blessed Exchequer and he's about to throw you into the Vault of Eternal Destitution if you don't give him one more bar of latinum. Does that help?”

  “I guess?” Orak responds.

  “Good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go check on the bar.” He points to Orak. “Always keep one eye on your profits. Write that down.”

  Bashir trails Quark back to the bar. “What's all that about?”

  “You haven't heard?” Quark pulls out his inventory PADD. “Jake was supposed to circulate the audition notice to everybody.”

  “I haven't been checking my personal messages. . . Auditions? For what?”

  “Dinner theatre. Jake wrote one of those hewman murder mysteries and we're putting it on here at the bar.”

  “A play? I never knew you were interested in the theatre.”

  “I'm not. I am interested in turning a profit. According to my projections, this show will double my quarterly earnings.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. My overheads are practically nothing.” Quark leans over the bar conspiratorially. “Did you know you can pay actors in food?”

  Julian chuckles. “I wasn't aware.”

  “It doesn't even have to be good food. Sometimes even just the promise of food will do it. You tell an actor a pizza is fifteen minutes away, he will work for hours.”

  “Seems like you've found your next racket.”

  “Yeah.” Quark slides his PADD back under the bar. “If we survive rehearsals.” Quark steps out from behind the bar, brushing past Julian. “Excuse me.” He rejoins Jake and the actors, leaving Julian to himself.

  Julian strums his fingers on the bar, frustrated at striking out twice in one evening. He follows the sound of Kira's laughter up to the second floor of the bar, the friendly sound of his friendly friend acting like a homing device.

  “—in your pants?” Kira guffaws.

  “In my pants,” Nog repeats. “It's hard to believe, but I got an entire cellar of Andorian cider out the front door that way.”

  “You think that's hard to believe. . .” Julian rounds the corner and finds the two of them sharing a table covered with forgotten engineering diagnostic diagrams. “. . .when I was sixteen, I smuggled twenty pounds of explosives out of a Cardassian military warehouse by stuffing them under my shirt.”

  “No way! How did you not get caught?”

  Kira shrugs. “I think the guards figured I was just another pregnant Bajoran woman, littering the face of the planet. What's ironic. . .” Kira takes a sip of her drink. “. . . is that during the occupation, the Cardassian government used to refer to pregnant Bajorans as 'ticking timebombs.'”

  Nog howls with laughter and Julian can't see any foray he could make into their conversation turning into anything but becoming a third wheel on another person's relationship. Good god, that is happening to him a lot lately.

  He sighs, turning tail for the one place he's sure to get a warm welcome precisely because it was designed to do so. Yet, when Julian walks into Vic's, there's no maitre'd greeting him, no Vic giving him a wink from onstage, no busty showgirls on their night off. The place is deserted. Julian is about to head back to his quarters to comm Felix about a possible program malfunction when he notices Vic sitting alone at the end of the bar.

  “Hey, Vic.” Julian sidles up to the bar. “Where is everyone?”

  “Show's cancelled,” Vic murmurs into his scotch.

  “What? Why?”

  Vic glares up at him like he's the most inane, irrelevant person in the universe (which is, frankly, how Julian feels right now). “The President's dead.”

  “Oh. I'm sorry I hadn't realized. . . Wait, which president?”

  “JFK.”

  “JFK? That's not
possible. Kennedy was shot in 1963. This program is set 1962.”

  “Not anymore.” Vic slaps a newspaper down in front of Julian. The date reads November 22, 1963.

  “Good god.” Julian collapses on a barstool. “Do you know what this means?”

  “LBJ is president?”

  “Even my hologram has moved on without me!”

  –

  Lenara nearly knocks over that Ferengi lieutenant on her jog up the stairs. Running late again as usual. A penchant for tardiness is just one of many gifts passed down to Lenara through the Kahn symbiont. But, as Nilani would say, better late than never—a statement all too relevant to her newly resumed relationship with Dax.

  The last two weeks have been amazing. For both of them, she hopes. With Jadzia, it was like picking up where they left off, but with Ezri, it's like they're newlyweds again. (And she's not just talking about the sex, which has been. . . suffice it to say that the Dax symbiont has picked up a few new tricks since Torias.) Every night, back in the arms of her Dax, holding and talking and exploring and laughing, counting each other's spots. . . It seems almost too good to be true that they could have this happiness together after so many missed chances. Lenara's half-convinced she'll wake up tomorrow morning to find Ezri gone. At any moment, Ezri could cut ties and beg the Symbiosis Commission for forgiveness or drop Lenara like the other million impulsive commitments Dax has broken, like quitting the neighbor's book club or giving up on giving up meat.

  And perhaps that's partly why Lenara is running so late tonight. She has to admit some nervousness to having dinner as a couple with Nerys. Reassociating in private is one thing; putting such a relationship out in public to be judged by family and friends is another. Lenara has no doubts about her intentions for Ezri, but she's uncertain whether their budding relationship can stand up to the harsh light of day.

  As she reaches the second floor of Quark's, Lenara takes a deep breath, readying herself for the evening ahead, trying to not to think too fatalistically.

  “—going between you and Kahn?” Kira asks somewhere across the room.

  Lenara stops dead in her tracks.