by Peter David
Still, she looked rather lonely. Tobias could sympathize. She certainly had had her share of bumps and bruises as a Starfleet officer. She was, as one Starfleet officer had commented, “damaged goods.” Calhoun had taken a chance on her and put her at the conn of his ship. She would be eternally grateful for that, and if that man believed in Kalinda enough to take her at her word, then that was sufficient for Tobias to invest some time and energy in Kalinda.
Deciding to make a move before she thought better of it, she made her way over to Kalinda, who looked up at her curiously. Kalinda frowned. “Do I know you?”
“Tania Tobias. Lieutenant. Conn officer.”
“Oh, right. Right. You replaced McHenry.” Kalinda shook her head, a pensive look on her face. “I never knew what to make of McHenry. Very curious fellow, he was. He wasn’t quite of this world.” Then Kalinda studied Tobias, as if finding her suddenly interesting. “Give me your hand.”
“What?”
“Your hand. Give it to me.”
“Can it remain attached to my wrist?” She said it with what she intended to be humor, but the look on Kalinda’s face remained solemn. Not understanding, but feeling the need to cooperate, she extended her hand and Kalinda placed it between the two of hers. She closed her eyes, as if she were reaching deep into herself, and then she opened them and gazed at Tobias. There seemed to be some sort of new understanding reflected in them.
“I see,” said Kalinda softly, “that you have a touch of other worldliness about you, do you not? A spark within you. It was not there when you were born. Whence did it come?”
Tobias yanked her hand away. Part of her wanted to bounce up from the chair, turn, and bolt from the Team Room as quickly as her feet would take her. Instead she remained where she was, staring in fascination at Kalinda. “How were you able to tell?” she whispered.
“I keep saying, but no one quite believes, once you have been on the other side, things become clearer. Your own Shakespeare said it best: There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“I don’t know about that. My dreams are pretty far-reaching.”
“And they’ve tormented you. Dreams are the worst. Especially when you have them while you’re awake.”
Tobias nodded slowly. “You understand.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been…” Her eyes began to tear up and she fought them back with effort. “I’ve been wishing I could find someone who understood.” Her voice was so soft that Kalinda leaned forward to hear her better. “How could I? I have to pretend that everything’s all right, and I’ve gotten so good at it. If I said what was really going through my mind, they’d all think I was insane. A lot of them already think that. Starfleet thought that. If it weren’t for Captain Calhoun—”
“Yes. Exactly. And he accorded me the same latitude. There is no one else in Starfleet quite like him. The things he has done and experienced grant him a unique perspective. Just as you find it difficult to believe in me, others would find it difficult to believe in you. Yet Captain Calhoun is, at the very least, open to possibilities. You see, Tania Tobias, how much we have in common?”
“I…I guess…”
“No, you don’t guess. You know,” said Kalinda with a smile. “It’s just a matter of admitting it to yourself.”
It was at that point that Tobias realized Kalinda was still holding her hand. Then she realized a number of people in the Team Room were looking in her direction with expressions ranging from mild interest to outright bewilderment.
Tobias withdrew her hand quickly, feeling her cheeks flush. She had no idea what she had to be embarrassed about, and yet she was. She put her hands down flat on her legs.
“It’s all right. I understand,” Kalinda said again. “More than you can believe. More than perhaps you’re even comfortable admitting.”
“I have to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do,” she said and got up so quickly that she banged her leg on the underside of the table. She bit her lower lip to prevent herself from crying out and managed to say, “It’s been nice talking to you.”
“We shall do so again and soon. I have no doubt.”
She headed quickly out of the Team Room, trying to ignore the eyes upon her. Just as she got to the door, she glanced back at Kalinda, to see if she was looking her way. She was not. Instead she was staring in front of her, and Tania Tobias would have given anything if she could have seen things from Kalinda’s point of view. Then the doors hissed shut, closing her out from sight.
The Spectre
A field of blackness slowly began to dissipate as Selar started to come around. It was the child’s cries that summoned her back from unconsciousness. Slowly she opened her eyes and, as illogical as it may have been, she briefly hoped that she would discover herself waking up in sickbay, just as she had when she first had the dreamlike connection with the alien entity. No such luck this time. Reality had overtaken her dreaming mind and, yes, she was still lying on the floor in the brig.
Cwansi was wailing piteously. She shook off the lethargy that begged her to just close her eyes and surrender yet again to the darkness, and forced herself to her feet.
She made her way to the bottles of nourishment she had brought along, prepared one quickly, and moments later was feeding the grateful infant. Liquid bubbled out of the edges of his mouth and he almost choked a couple of times, because he was fighting down the remains of his sobs so that he could focus his attention on consuming sustenance.
As she fed him, she tried to assess her situation. She glanced toward Rulan and saw that s/he was as s/he had been before: unmoving. The fact that her attempt to meld with Rulan had yet again met with failure prompted her to conclude that there was more going on than just inadequacy on her part. Something was actively blocking her attempts. The first time she had been interrupted by the vision that had spurred her onto this course of madness. The second had been far more direct, the mental equivalent of a slap in the face.
Even more daunting was the suspicion—well founded, she suspected—that her most recent mishap had been a warning. It could have been far more cataclysmic. Instead of dumping a psychic wall upon her, she could have been—what? Impaled? Beheaded? Experienced some vast psychic trauma from which she would not have recovered?
If she had to, she would try again. But it was the last thing she wanted to do, because she might well not survive the experience.
Although, really, would that be so terrible, if you did not survive? What do you have to return to?
Then her nostrils wrinkled. She smelled something.
She realized what it was instantly. It was the stench of death. As a doctor, she had experienced it enough times, particularly on occasions when she had strode through a battlefield, shaking her head as she looked at the remains of those who had annihilated one another for no damned reason.
The scent wafted to her, and she quickly discerned the origin. She didn’t have to move from where she was, nor did she have to disturb the infant’s feeding. She could see from where she was sitting the pool of green blood on the floor. It was copious, coating the floor, and she was forced to conclude that Lucius was the source.
Her eagerness to determine what had happened ate at he¶ war, but she didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the child since he had finally calmed down sufficiently to eat. So she remained where she was, minutes passing like hours, until Cwansi had had his fill. He did not drift off to sleep as she had thought he might. Instead he looked up at her with interest. She found herself staring down at him. “What is going through your mind?” she asked. She remembered how she had considered embarking on a mind meld with Xy when he was an infant, just to get an idea of what the world looked like from his point of view, but she had never been able to bring herself to do it. Infants were little balls of pure emotion and need, and she had been daunted by the prospect of experiencing that firsthand.
She got to her feet and, still c
radling the child in her arms, moved toward the door. She stopped just short of the door, though, and tentatively extended a finger. Energy crackled where the tip of her finger touched it.
“Perfect,” she said, coming as close to annoyance as she ever allowed herself. She moved to the right, trying to get a better angle, and she was rewarded with a clearer view of Lucius’s unmoving body. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to make out the cause of death, aside from the obvious: all his blood being on the outside of his body.
Then she spotted it. There was a slash across his throat. As near as she could tell, his jugular had been severed.
“That would do it,” she murmured. “But how—?”
Then she realized.
There were only three possibilities.
The first was that Lucius had taken his own life. That seemed unlikely. He had no reason to do so, and furthermore there was no sign of a knife nearby. Granted, he might be lying on top of it, but it didn’t make a good deal of sense.
The second was that an unknown intruder had gotten aboard the ship, killed Lucius, and then departed leaving Selar, the baby, and Rulan unmolested. Possible.
There remained a third and far likelier option.
Rulan had killed him.
Selar, better than anyone, knew what Hermats were capable of and of the formidable claws they possessed.
She turned away quickly and went over to Rulan. Instantly she saw telltale flecks of green on the tips of hir fingers on hir right hand. The claws had retracted, as they typically did when no threat presented itself. But the evidence of the damage they had inflicted was clear for her to see. Rulan had come to long enough to kill Lucius with one swipe of hir hand and then collapsed again.
Selar had no idea what had brought hir out of it and it frustrated her. Moreover, she had to consider the possibility that Rulan could, at any given moment, come out of hir coma and turn against Selar. Should that happen, Selar would be the only thing that stood between Cwansi and death.
Selar’s mind raced, trying to conceive of some plan of attack, some means of getting out of the brig. Lucius, in a final display of perversity, had apparently made his dying act to reactivate the force field. Surely they were still on a direct course to AF1963, presuming they weren’t already there. She had, as before, lost all track of time.
There would be no point in repeatedly slamming into the field in hopes of overloading it. Her shackles allowed her to reach the door, but she couldn’t go beyond. Perhaps she could find some means of tapping into the ship’s computer and ordering it to shut down the force field. But she had no idea how to go about it. Soleta might well have been able to, but Soleta wasn’t there. Thanks to Selar, she had been rendered unconscious back on Bravo station. A squad of firefighters could not begin to extinguish all the bridges she had burned in the past few days. And besides, there was still the matter of the shackles.
How could you have done this to yourself? How could you have—?
She forced herself to stop dwelling on such things, because there was no point. She had to focus on making things better, rather than contemplating how she had made them so much worse.
And then, as she continued to try to devise a way out of her predicament, something caused the ship to shudder. Had they hit something? As far as she knew, the ship was moving on autopilot. Ordinarily if there was something in the ship’s path, the computer would know to avoid it, but what if that was not the case? What if they had just wandered into a meteor field and were about to be repeatedly pummeled? She had no way of raising the shields, no way of controlling anything.
Then there was a loud noise, and it sounded metallic, as if something were banging up against the ship. Cwansi stirred in her arms, and as she looked around confused, she held the child closer to her. “Everything will be fine,” she said to the baby, issuing assurances that she herself did not remotely feel.
For a time, she heard nothing. And then, footsteps in the distance. They were moving smoothly, rhythmically, as if they were marching in unison. For a moment she had hoped, prayed, that they had been intercepted by a Federation vessel, perhaps even the Excalibur. She dreaded the prospect of having to look into the hurt, betrayed eyes of Burgoyne and Calhoun, and even Xy for whom she had done all this. That, though, would certainly be preferable to the prospect now facing her: some militaristic, extremely advanced race that had taken possession of the ship and would be doing who knows what to her and the baby. There was simply no way that the steady cadences she was hearing would be indicative of Calhoun or any Starfleet crew. And they had to be advanced, because they had been able to detect the undetectable Spectre.
She was worried the infant would sense the jeopardy of the situation, and perhaps even start crying. Selar stepped back against the wall, flattening against it, hoping that perhaps whoever it was would walk past the brig hastily without spotting her. It seemed unlikely, but it was the only thing she could think of under the circumstances. Her heart was pounding furiously against her chest and she willed it to slow. There would never be a better time to exercise all her discipline and Vulcan training.
The marching came closer, and then stopped right outside the brig.
Not good, she thought.
Selar did the only thing she could think of. She put the baby down behind her and then turned to face whoever or whatever was about to enter the brig.
A massive humanoid figure appeared, clad in plated blue body armor, from head to toe.
She had no means of defense, no…
Then she spied something protruding from under Rulan’s body. Her eyes widened. It was the butt of a disruptor.
He must have dropped it. Lucius must have dropped it.
Her action matched her thoughts as she lunged forward and yanked Rulan’s body back without caring whether s/he suddenly came to life and tried slashing at her. Fortunately, Rulan remained insensate. She pulled the disruptor out, turned, and aimed it at the armored figure, which still hadn’t moved.
There was no point in firing because the force field was still activated. At least she now had some firepower when it shut down the field, as it inevitably would.
The armored figure paused and then walked forward, not deigning to bother with the force field controls. The field crackled furiously around it and blew out.
Even as her heart sank, Selar opened fire. As she suspected, the disruptor did not slow down the armored figure in the slightest.
It ignored her and went straight for Cwansi.
“Keep away from him!” shouted Selar, violating her own resolve not to waste her breath in such endeavors. She kept up a steady blast, disruptor waves cascading along the back of the creature’s armor. It didn’t cast a glance in her direction.
A second one and then a third walked through the archway that had previously been protected by the field. The one in the forefront went straight toward Selar. She whipped the disruptor back around. The advancing entity swung its armored hand as if it had nothing but time, and it struck Selar on the side of her skull. Selar went down, her head spinning.
Something slammed her in the small of her back. It was another one of the armored beings, kicking her savagely. She tried to roll away from it, but now its associate had stepped in on the other side and kicked her back in the other direction. There was nowhere for her to go, nothing for her to do. Now it was just about survival, as she curled herself into a ball and brought her arms up over her head.
The two figures converged, continuing their assault. She kept her teeth clenched, her lips tight, determined to do the one thing that was still within her abilities: Selar would not cry out. And she did not, even as she felt bones breaking beneath the impact.
The pounding continued for, by her reckoning, fifty-three seconds. Then they withdrew. She peered out from between her arms and saw that Rulan was still on the floor, but the baby was gone.
Although there was technically no way she had of knowing for sure, she was nevertheless positive that these…these monsters…were c
onnected with the alien who had appeared to her. The alien whose blandishments had preyed upon her obsession, had tipped her over into a forbidden state of mind.
One of their kicks had caught her across the face. Now, with her lip swelling and her mouth filling with blood, she managed to say, sounding as if she had marbles in her mouth, “What about my son? You said you would help him! I gave up everything for him! What did the Hermat have to do with any of this?” And it all surged within her, the frustration, the anger, the despair, and not all the training in the world could prevent it from bursting and pouring out of her as she howled, “What about my son, you bastards?! I’ve given up everything!”
Not yet, you haven’t.
The words were in her head as a soft glow filled the air in front of her. It seemed to be humming with power, crackling into existence, except it wasn’t via a transporter. Or if it was, it was some sort of technology that she had never seen before.
The general outlines of the being she was perceiving were instantly familiar to her. It was the alien whom she had seen in her vision on the Excalibur. She was almost relieved to see him, for at least it was the final proof that she had not simply been hallucinating back in sickbay, embarking on this disastrous course because her mind had completely cracked and sent her sprinting down the road to damnation.
But then its body began to shift as it became more substantial. The outlines filled out, the face filled in, smiling at her, and Selar felt as if her sanity were slipping away.
Her son, Xy, was standing before her, apparently genuinely happy to see her. He was brimming with understanding and compassion, and this time his lips were moving as he said again, “Not yet, you haven’t. But do not worry, brave Selar. There will be time enough for that. There will be time enough for everything…and understanding of it all.”