Star Trek: The Next Generation - 115 - The Stuff of Dreams

by James Swallow

  “Father, are you all right?” Kolb’s son grabbed at the bottle to right it before all the tea glugged away into the dirt. The boy turned to follow Kolb’s panicked gaze and saw the Starfleet officer approaching him. His expression soured. “Is that man here to take you away again?”

  “No,” Kolb said firmly, getting to his feet. “There’s a mistake!” He strode out to meet Picard before he could come too close.

  “Kolb—”

  “I am not going back!” he snarled, and before Picard could say more, Kolb was prodding him angrily in the chest. “You can’t make me! You shouldn’t even be here!”

  Picard kept his expression and his tone neutral. “I’m here because of you,” he said. “What did you expect, old friend? That I would just let you go?”

  “Yes.” The reply seemed small and weak. “Why did you have to interfere?”

  The captain’s manner hardened. “Because you committed an act of willful sabotage aboard a Federation starship—an act that directly led to the loss of innocent lives.”

  Kolb’s frame seemed to sag under an invisible weight, and he cast a worried look back at his family, who were proceeding with their picnic, unaware anything was awry. It was almost as if Kolb were terrified that they would dissipate like vapor if he didn’t keep watching them.

  “I’ve done a terrible thing,” he said, swallowing a gasp. “And I swear to you, Jean-Luc, I never meant to hurt anyone, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

  Picard nodded toward the wife and son. “The Borg?” He didn’t need to say any more.

  Kolb’s lip trembled and he nodded. “Delka and Mortod were here when the invasion struck. Delka was visiting a former teacher. She was looking for a new publisher for one of her monographs, and we both thought Mortod would enjoy a trip to another world. I couldn’t leave. I was busy.” He almost choked on the last words. “They perished here along with every other living being on Deneva. My life was destroyed in that instant, Jean-Luc. All of it shattered.”

  The bright, cloudless day faded, becoming darker, as if Kolb’s words were shifting the mood of the world around them. Picard found he could say nothing. Like Soran, Kolb had been robbed of all the joy in his life by the predations of the Borg, and he had not healed from the grief. For a moment, Picard tried to conceive of the dimensions of the pain he would feel if it were Beverly and René that had been taken from him, and his mind shrank from the monumental horror of it. He put himself in Kolb’s place and felt a pang of incredible sorrow, a vulnerability that made his heart pound against his ribs.

  When he spoke, his mouth was dry. “You never told me.”

  “I never told anyone,” Kolb replied. “Not all the details. In the chaos after the Borg assault, there was so much confusion. It was months before the Federation got back on an even footing. You know, you were there. After they were gone, I was just . . . numb. I threw myself into my work. I tried to lose myself in it.” He shook his head. “At first I was crippled with survivor’s guilt. I contemplated suicide. I couldn’t go on without them.” He shot another look toward his wife and child. “But then by chance I came across a file, part of a top secret research program.”

  “Project Nexus.”

  Kolb nodded again. “Imagine my surprise when I saw my old friend Jean-Luc Picard’s name on the log records and reports.” He glanced up at the captain, and there was a flicker of new passion in his gaze. “I pored over every word you wrote. I knew that this phenomenon was a chance for me to find them again.” He grabbed Picard’s arm. “They are parts of my soul, Jean-Luc! Pieces of me that I lost. You understand that, don’t you? Perhaps not before, but you understand now.”

  Picard found himself nodding. He wondered how Kolb had managed to fool Starfleet’s evaluation board; someone who had suffered such a trauma would never have been allowed to go anywhere near a temporal anomaly without passing a battery of psychological tests.

  “I kept the memory of them locked up in here,” said Kolb, tapping a finger on his forehead, guessing Picard’s thoughts. “I would only weep when I was alone and unseen.” The scientist’s hand dropped away. “I planned it so perfectly. Years to get myself involved with the project, and then many months building my scheme, making it airtight and infallible. I was going to cause a transporter accident, make it look like I had been lost in transit.”

  “When in fact you would enter the nexus.”

  “Correct. I would be listed as dead, and no one would ever know where I had gone.”

  “Bryant ruined all that, though, didn’t he? You had no idea he was planning to suggest the dissolution of the nexus to Starfleet Command.”

  “No.” Kolb’s face soured. “With one order, everything I had set in motion was rendered useless. My carefully engineered plan was in tatters. Then you arrived with the Enterprise and I panicked. I had to stop you from destroying the nexus, so I interfered with the power regulator and sabotaged the subspace pulse.” His voice rose. “ I miscalculated! I never meant for people to be hurt—not Bryant or Vetro or anyone else! Please, you must believe me!”

  Picard didn’t answer. He was trying to square the memory of the compassionate man he had first met during the Styris emergency with the fretting, conflicted person standing before him. Once again, he looked at Kolb and saw a warped reflection of Tolian Soran. “I cannot remain here,” he told him. “And neither can you.”

  “No,” Kolb shook his head, “No. This is what I want.”

  “Is it?” Picard glanced at the illusory versions of Delka and Mortod, who seemed content and carefree. He felt a shock of empathy, and for the briefest of moments, the faces of Kolb’s family seemed to shift and reform into those of Beverly and René. Picard forced himself to look away before the nexus could read into the fears and hopes in his thoughts, and find a way to entice him to stay. “We leave so many things unfinished in our lives.” The words came to him across the gulf of memory, and they sounded odd coming from his lips. “Kolb, all this around you is ephemeral and unreal. It is the stuff of dreams, an illusion.”

  “A perfect illusion!” Kolb retorted. “Better than the reality could ever be.”

  “But a falsehood nonetheless,” said Picard. “I never met Delka and Mortod, but I know that you loved them dearly. I can see that now, in every word you say.” He pointed. “But that is not them. They are gone, and their loss is what makes you love them even more. Our memory of the ones we care for defines them when they leave us, and it defines us in turn. If you choose to live in this moment, in this timeless space, you do them a disservice. Delka and Mortod become nothing more than images, replicas. They will truly cease to live, Kolb, because you will cease to live. You will exist here, suspended in the past, and both you . . . and their memories . . . will be gone forever.”

  For a long moment, the scientist said nothing. He tried to find the words to express himself, but he failed. Then, Picard watched his friend slowly crumble, the energy that had animated him fading away; and finally Kolb wept, releasing his pain.

  “It is a hollow victory,” he said, composing himself. “I always knew that. All I wanted was to be with them, at the end.” Kolb looked up, and the pure anguish in his eyes aged him decades in moments. “They died and I wasn’t there with them, Jean-Luc.”

  “You could not have saved them,” Picard said gently. “You cannot blame yourself.”

  “I know,” he replied. “But of all the things I have left unfinished in my life, that moment corrodes my very soul.” Kolb looked back at his family once more. “I was so lucky to share my life with them,” he said. “And each time I think the pain can cut me no deeper, a greater depth is revealed.”

  “Will you come back?”

  “You are right, Jean-Luc. I must not stay here.” Kolb began to walk away, back toward the towering white stone sculpture.

  “Husband?” Delka called out to him as Picard fell into step with the scientist. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s all right,” Kolb called back. “We�
�ll be together.” He turned toward the captain and opened a fold in his robes. “Jean-Luc, before we leave here, there’s something I would like you to have.” The scientist pulled his custom tricorder from an inner pocket and pressed it into Picard’s hands.

  The captain glanced down at the device. The screen was alight with trains of complex readings and data strings. “What is this?”

  “The nexus,” said Kolb, as they walked along the park’s stone pathway, “as seen from within as well as without. Take this back to Enterprise, to La Forge. It’s everything I was unable to get from all the probes sent into the ribbon, a true window into the structure of this phenomenon.”

  Picard halted and paged through the memory store, which was filled almost to capacity with dense fields of information, enough raw data to keep the analysts of the Daystrom Institute busy for years. “This will fill the gaps in our knowledge. We could use it to complete the equations for your energy membrane. . . . We could lock the nexus shut.”

  “I believe so,” Kolb told him, an unreadable cast to his gaze.

  He suddenly had the sense that his old friend was burying something deep once again, but this time it wasn’t emotion or sorrow, but intent. Kolb backed away, gathering his robes to him. Picard raised his hand. “Wait,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “What I should have done all along,” said the Styrisian. “Don’t follow me, Jean-Luc. This isn’t for you.”

  “Kolb, stop!” Picard reached out for the other man, but suddenly a white flare of light erupted from the very air itself, right in front of the scientist. Impossibly, the curtain of brilliant energy opened and became a shimmering, glassy portal. Picard tried to peer into the hazy glow. The light-force buffeted him back, as if it were a solid presence, but Kolb seemed unaffected by it. He summoned it, Picard realized. The nexus is psychoactive. It responds to us.

  “No more illusions,” said Kolb. “I’m going to be with my family.” He gave Picard a rueful smile and stepped across the threshold, into another identical Denevan park, on another perfect day.

  * * *

  A shadow passed over the sun, but it was only the shade cast by a cloud, high up and caught by the wind. The shadow drifted away and the warm touch of the Denevan sun returned.

  Kolb couldn’t help but smile and then laugh as he stepped out from behind the copse of tall trees above the knoll. His wife and son looked up at the familiar sound, and the mingled looks of delight and surprise on their faces were the most perfect thing he had ever seen. He wanted to weep, but this time for joy. All the years of loss that had passed were gone in a moment, undone.

  Delka came to him, sharing his laughter. “Husband! What a surprise! I didn’t know you were going to be on planet!”

  “I decided that I couldn’t be away from you two a moment longer.” He pulled her into an embrace and reached out to tousle Mortod’s dark hair. “Hello there.”

  The boy was happy, but he was a little nonplussed. “I thought you were at home, on the other side of the quadrant. . . .”

  “I was,” Kolb admitted, “but now I’m here.”

  Another shadow, this one angular and slow, began to inch its way across the parkland. In the far distance, the faint howl of emergency sirens sounded, and closer at hand, the voices of other people in the park were becoming agitated and fearful.

  Kolb drew his wife and son close, holding them to him so that they did not look up and see the end approaching.

  “This is where I am supposed to be,” he told them.

  5

  One instant he was reaching out to Kolb; the next there was an intense feeling of motion, of dislocation, and Picard’s senses were briefly overwhelmed by a wash of brilliant white light.

  When the glow died, he stumbled forward a step, blinking as his eyes readjusted, and he felt the firmness of a solid deck beneath his feet. Doors hissed open at his approach, and the captain found himself stepping out of a turbolift and onto the bridge of the Enterprise.

  Home. The thought pulled at a faint smile on his lips; but then the moment went away as he realized that the ship was in the middle of a Red Alert, sirens keening and his crew engaged at their duties.

  Worf turned to see his arrival. “Captain on the bridge!” he called.

  Picard had a hundred questions, but he held off for the moment and strode toward his first officer. If the nexus had released him here, then it had been by his will, conscious or not. “Report, Commander,” he demanded.

  The Klingon gestured toward the viewscreen. “We were about to commence the subspace pulse when the Newton suffered a main power failure across the board.” The science vessel was visible, listing and adrift off the Enterprise’s port bow. Some distance ahead, the turning mass of the nexus continued its unhurried progress across the void. “Initial scans suggest the malfunction was caused deliberately.”

  “It was,” Picard confirmed. He suddenly remembered the tricorder he was holding in his hands, and gave it a brief look. “Number One, what are the whereabouts of Doctor Kolb?”

  “Who?” The furrows on Worf’s brow deepened. “I don’t know the name.”

  “The Styrisian astrophysicist.”

  Lieutenant Elfiki looked up from her console, sharing the commander’s confusion. “We don’t have any natives from Styris on board the Enterprise, sir. Neither does the Newton.”

  “No . . .” Picard nodded to himself, thinking aloud. “Of course. He was never here. He never interfered with the pulse.”

  “Someone did,” Worf retorted. “Captain, do you know what is going on?”

  “I have an idea,” he replied. “Hail the Newton.”

  “Opening a channel,” called Lieutenant Chen.

  The screen switched to a view of the other ship’s bridge, and Thom Bryant. Very much alive and clearly annoyed, he shot Picard a hard look. “Enterprise, can it wait? We’re a little busy here.” Over Bryant’s shoulder, the Newton’s command center was in chaos as Rhonu and the other officers tried to get their vessel back on line. Dim emergency lighting cast the compartment with long, deep shadows.

  “It can’t,” Picard snapped, rolling over Bryant’s dismissive tone. “Listen to me. Your priority must be to restore your shields and motive power immediately.” If history had been altered and Kolb was no longer present on the science vessel, then there was only one other explanation as to who was responsible for the Newton’s condition. “You have an infiltrator on board your ship, sir. An Orion agent, disguised as an Arkarian named Een Norgadd.”

  “Norgadd?” Bryant shot Rhonu a look, but the Betazoid was already calling up data on a flickering console.

  “Our internal sensors are still operable,” Rhonu was saying. “Tracking. . . . Found him.” Her expression changed to one of alarm. “That’s not right. He’s in the shuttlebay, but that area is off-limits to civilian science staff. Captain, I think he’s trying to access the runabout!”

  Bryant slapped at his combadge. “Security to Shuttlebay One, on the double. Lock down that compartment. No one leaves!” He looked back at Picard. “An Orion spy? How the hell did you know that?”

  “Captain Bryant,” Picard insisted. “Your shields. Otherwise Norgadd will be transported off your ship by his employers and he’ll escape with data on Project Nexus. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

  The other captain grimaced. “Vetro is working on it now, but it’ll take a few minutes. We could use some help.” The last he added with great reluctance.

  La Forge spoke up from his engineering station. “I can extend the Enterprise’s deflectors to patch the gap until they’re ready.”

  “Do it,” said Worf. Picard’s first officer turned to study his captain as La Forge set to work. His eyes narrowed. “Captain Bryant’s question stands, sir. You seem to suddenly be in possession of knowledge the rest of us do not share.”

  “Explain yourself, Picard,” added Bryant.

  Picard held up Kolb’s tricorder. “The short answer is . . . temporal anomaly.”
<
br />   “The nexus? You went back in there?” Bryant was incredulous.

  “He did,” offered Rhonu, reading Picard’s expression and his surface thoughts across the distance between them. “Against his will, I think.”

  Worf regarded him, grim-faced. “Did the ship get destroyed again?”

  “Not this time,” admitted Picard. “I will be making a full report to both Starfleet Command and the Department of Temporal Investigations once we are secure. But for the moment I must beg your trust.” He crossed to La Forge’s station and handed him the tricorder. “Geordi, can you download the contents of this device’s memory? It contains readings of the inner workings of the nexus phenomenon.”

  The engineer nodded and slotted the tricorder into an input port; immediately the torrent of data gathered by Kolb began to unfold on one of the tertiary panels. La Forge gave a low, appreciative whistle. “This is the mother lode,” he said. “More than we could have gleaned from years of external scans.”

  “You’ll also find a set of equations in that memory core, projections to create a self-regenerating verteron membrane—”

  Picard’s words were cut short by a cry of alarm from Lieutenant Faur. “Kinshaya warships approaching at attack speed, three-one-six mark three!”

  “On-screen!” He spun as Worf gave the order.

  Spherical vessels rippled into clear view from beneath the haze of emission cloaks, and the two alien craft let fly with a cascade of energy bolts. The bright spears of power cut through the darkness and creased the Enterprise’s shields, but the main body of the barrage was clearly aimed toward the Newton.

  “Jackals!” spat Worf. “The Kinshaya always seek the weakest targets first.”

  “Return fire,” said Picard. “Warn them off.”

  “Engaging attackers,” reported Lieutenant Šmrhová from the tactical station.