Death in Winter

by Michael Jan Freidman

  And they hadn’t. They had continued to have their breakfasts together, looking forward to the time they shared even more than before. They had allowed the emotions that drew them to ripen like plump, dark grapes, unhurried and undisturbed.

  The captain might have been content to let life go on like that forever. Then, without warning, Beverly pulled the rug out from under him. She informed him that she was taking an assignment on Earth as head of Starfleet Medical, in which capacity she had served once before.

  Picard was hurt by Beverly’s decision, no question. But he couldn’t have stood in her way, any more than he could have stood in Riker’s or Troi’s or Vale’s. If that was what Beverly needed to be happy, he would accept it and carry on.

  Brave words, the captain thought.

  Little had he known how lost he would feel without Beverly, how hollow and uninspired. That realization waited until she was already in San Francisco, immersed in her new job, and it was too late to see if she would change her mind.

  Apparently, Picard’s feelings for Beverly were as powerful as ever. He just hadn’t been compelled to examine them as he was examining them now.

  Of course, he could still talk to her. With the Enterprise so close to Earth, communications would be virtually instantaneous. It would be almost like speaking in person.

  Yes, the captain thought, that is what I will do. He activated his computer, work on which had been completed only the day before. And since there was no com officer on duty, he punched up a channel to Starfleet Medical on his own.

  Almost instantly, a face appeared on the screen—that of a thickset officer with a dark beard. “Starfleet Medical,” he said. “With whom would you like to speak, sir?”

  “Doctor Beverly Crusher,” said Picard.

  “Just a second, sir.”

  A moment later, Beverly’s face appeared on the screen. She was even more beautiful than the captain remembered, and he hadn’t seen her so very long ago.

  “Jean-Luc,” she said, “how nice of you to call!”

  Her voice was different from the way he remembered it. There was more laughter in it. It bothered him that he could have forgotten in so short a time.

  “You must be bored up there,” Beverly said. “You were never one for sitting in spacedock.”

  “A little bored,” he confessed. But he wanted to know about her. “How is Starfleet Medical? Still the way you left it?”

  “Not in the least. For one thing, there’s an internship program here now—a way of encouraging young talent.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he observed.

  Beverly rolled her eyes. “You can’t imagine them, Jean-Luc. They’re kids!”

  He could, actually. He had his share of young officers on the Enterprise as well. But he was so pleased to see and hear her, he didn’t comment.

  “All with advanced degrees in xenobiology,” Beverly continued, “and out to conquer every disease in the quadrant.”

  Picard couldn’t help smiling. “Reminds me of a young doctor I used to know.”

  “They’re running me ragged,” she told him. “Nothing but questions day and night…I love it!”

  He should have been happy for her without reservation, but instead he felt a pang of resentment. After all, she had never told him how much she loved serving with him on the Enterprise—though she must have, if she had spent all that time doing it.

  “Come to dinner,” she said, her eyes sparkling, “and I’ll tell you all about it. There’s a Bajoran band playing at the officers’ mess this evening.”

  Picard was touched that Beverly recalled his appreciation of Bajoran music. He had only mentioned it once before.

  Still, his better judgment told him that he would do well to turn down the invitation. It was difficult enough trying to move on with his life. It would make it that much more difficult if he reminded himself of what he had lost.

  “I would love to,” he said, “but I have so much work to do here.”

  Was that a glimmer of disappointment in her eyes? Or was it merely his imagination?

  “Soon then,” said Beverly. “I’ll save the last dance for you.”

  Again, he smiled. They weren’t quite the words he wished to hear at this juncture, but they warmed his heart nonetheless.

  He was still drinking in the sight of Beverly when she ended the transmission. Her image was replaced by the Federation insignia—leaving the captain feeling worse than if he hadn’t called in the first place.

  Damn, he thought.

  He shook his head, then crossed the room to look out his observation port. He had a good view of the single-man vehicles that were swarming around the Enterprise, continuing the refitting of sizable sections of her hull.

  Taking notice of Picard’s scrutiny, one of the technicians waved at him. The captain waved back.

  It reminded him that what he had told Beverly was the truth—he did have work to do. Perhaps as much as Riker would on the Titan. Picard didn’t have a new ship to break in, but he did have what was largely a new crew.

  Of course, some positions were already spoken for, Worf’s and Geordi’s among them. Picard was grateful that they had decided to remain with him. Both had received offers to go elsewhere—tempting ones, no doubt—but they had seen fit to turn them down.

  On the other hand, a number of other posts had yet to be assigned. And conspicuous among them was the rather significant position of chief medical officer.

  It wasn’t that there was any shortage of applicants for the job. Picard had a padd containing more than a dozen of them, each one eminently qualified. Any of them could have come aboard and hit the ground running.

  But the captain couldn’t bring himself to choose one over the other—because in doing so, he would have been compelled to acknowledge that Beverly was gone.

  So he had procrastinated—for days, and then weeks. However, it was time a decision was made. And if Picard couldn’t do it, he would have to delegate the job to someone who could.

  What’s more, he had just the individual in mind. Glad that he was finally taking action of some sort, the captain looked up at the intercom grid hidden in the ceiling. Then he said four words that he would no doubt repeat many times before his stint on the Enterprise-E was over…

  “Picard to Commander Worf.”

  “Worf here,” came the response.

  “I have a job for you….”

  Praetor Tal’aura took a sip of the wine brought to her only the day before, shifted her lithe, long-legged form in her gilded, high-backed chair, and regarded the individual on the viewscreen in front of her.

  His name was Braeg. Until recently he had been an admiral in the Imperial Defense Force. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and good-looking, with a strong jaw and piercing hazel eyes. And though he had made a career of winning space battles, which implied a certain degree of ruthlessness, every word he spoke in public seemed to reek of fairness and common sense.

  A compelling combination, to be sure.

  “You know me,” Braeg began in a deep, resonant voice, as he addressed a crowd in one of the capital’s busier public plazas, “and you know also that my loyalty to the Empire is beyond question. I have demonstrated that in a hundred battles in more than a dozen star systems, risking all I have for the enduring glory of Romulus.”

  Perhaps not a hundred, Tal’aura thought, but close enough. And the admiral had certainly been unstinting when it came to valor.

  “Yet now,” Braeg continued, moving across the dagger-like shadow of a nearby obelisk, “there looms a threat greater than any posed before. Greater than the Federation, greater than the Klingons—greater even than the once-mighty Dominion. Because this time, it is no foreign enemy clawing at our borders. This time, the Empire threatens itself.”

  “He doesn’t waste any time,” said Tal’aura, “does he?”

  “No, Praetor,” said her companion, a slender, unattractive nobleman named Eborion.

  “On our farthest outworlds,” sai
d Braeg, “places like Daasid and B’jerrek and Sefalon, natives dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of Romulus have for some time huddled in secret, whispering of rebellion and secession. But in recent days, my friends, they have done more than whisper. They have taken their objections to the streets and challenged imperial authority.”

  Tal’aura winced. In filling the power vacuum created by the demise of the Praetor Shinzon, she had been prepared for any number of challenges. The situation developing on the outworlds had not been among them.

  “The praetor,” Braeg continued, “has amply demonstrated her inability to deal with the growing list of rebellions. Perhaps she hopes the problem will take care of itself, given enough time. But as you and I know, that will not happen. It will fester like a badly treated wound and grow worse.”

  Eborion made a sound of disdain. “His rhetoric is crude, to say the least.”

  “You think so?” asked Tal’aura. She didn’t. In fact, she thought it was most impressive.

  So did the crowd, apparently, or what she could see of it on the screen. The Romulans nearest the admiral shook their fists and roared their approval of Braeg’s remarks. The display struck an unexpected chord of envy in the praetor.

  She had come to power by using the political allies she had acquired as a senator, and by wooing families like Eborion’s. Or rather, not the families entire, but the individual in them who would most covet association with a praetor. It was they who had delivered the people of Romulus to her.

  However, a part of her wished she had done it on her own. It would have been infinitely more satisfying that way.

  “Shall we allow Tal’aura to lose the outworlds and diminish the Empire?” Braeg demanded of his audience. “Or shall we advise this praetor of the people’s displeasure?”

  The crowd’s enthusiasm jumped a notch. Tal’aura took another sip of her wine and found she didn’t like it so much after all. She made a mental note to take her wine purveyor to task for it.

  Eborion leaned closer to her. “You know, Praetor, it would not be an especially difficult thing to eliminate this admiral-turned-insurrectionist.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “But if Braeg were to meet with an untimely end, the people would know it was an assassination—and that would make a martyr out of him. Then someone else would come along to stir up the masses in Braeg’s name.”

  Eborion made a sound of disgust. “So he’s to proceed unfettered, free to say and do as he wishes?”

  Tal’aura glanced at him sideways. “That is a most patrician way of looking at it.”

  Eborion smiled, though his long, narrow features were clearly not made for it. “I am a patrician, Praetor.”

  “So you are, Eborion.” Tal’aura herself had come from humble beginnings, being the daughter of an innkeeper. But Eborion’s family was one of the Hundred—the five score clans whose wealth was almost as old as the Empire itself.

  She watched Braeg lift both of his hammerlike fists in the air, bringing his diatribe to a crescendo. Then she rose and turned her back on the screen.

  “We’ll allow this upstart to have his day,” she said. “Then, when he feels most secure, we’ll cut his legs out from under him, and his movement will collapse under its own weight.”

  Of course, even if there were no Braeg, the outworlds would still be a matter of heated debate. They were critical components in the imperial economy, keys to a thousand fortunes.

  And their continued submission to Romulus was in jeopardy, just as Braeg so eloquently proclaimed. Tal’aura acknowledged that, if only to herself. It was why she had sent her best operative, the half-blood, to Kevratas—the outworld where the currents of rebellion ran the strongest.

  The half-blood would hunt down the rebel movement and attack it like a hungry warbird. She had done such work before, for Tal’aura’s predecessors, earning a name for herself with her cold and ruthless efficiency. Surely the Kevratan rebels, crude as they were, would prove no match for her.

  But because Tal’aura was no longer an innkeeper’s daughter, she had also dispatched a second operative to Kevratas—a veteran spy, who was there without the half-blood’s knowledge.

  Between the two of them, the praetor told herself—and only herself—firebrands like Braeg would soon have precious little to rant about.

  Beverly Crusher sat in the ruddy light of a wall torch at a scarred wooden table, huddled in a nyala-skin coat like everyone else, and sipped at her pitted metal mug. It contained a frothy, bitter liquid as dark as her son’s eyes, and vaguely reminiscent of a beverage she had sampled on Delos IV when she was doing her medical internship with Dalen Quaice.

  But Delos IV had been an arid, dusty place. Rainfalls there had been few and far between, and her throat had sometimes been so parched that she would have drunk anything at hand—even her own perspiration, she had joked on occasion.

  Kevratas, where Beverly now found herself, wasn’t even remotely hot and dusty. In fact, it was the coldest, bitterest, most snow-clogged frozen vault of a world on which she had ever set foot, a vicious snowstorm shaping and reshaping its powdery white terrain every day for half the year.

  My luck, she thought, it had to be this half.

  Still, she continued to sip at the beverage—something the natives called pojjima—because every other patron was doing the same between exhalations of thick white vapor, and she didn’t want to stand out from the crowd. Besides, if she held her mug up high enough she could peer over its brim at three of the tavern’s four entrances—one directly before her, one to her right, and one a little farther back to her left.

  Beverly didn’t know why the place had been built with so many doors. Maybe the people she had come to meet would be able to explain it to her.

  Of course, she had never met them before, so she didn’t know what they would be able to do. If not for the information she had received regarding their appearances, she wouldn’t even have been able to identify them.

  Nor would they be able to identify her. After all, the doctor thought, allowing herself a shadow of a smile, I’m not quite myself these days.

  It was a corny joke, the kind her husband Jack might have made. Strange—it had been so long since his death. When did it stop seeming like yesterday?

  She was still pondering the question when the door directly in front of her swung open, affording the doctor a glimpse of swirling, diamond-dust snow. Then a couple of Kevrata came in and pulled the door shut behind them.

  It’s them, Beverly thought, as she saw the colors of their coats. One was a rich blue with silver highlights, the other black with red patches. Though there were others in the tavern wearing the same colors, there weren’t many—and none of them, as far as Beverly could tell, had walked in together.

  No, these were her men—or rather, her Kevrata. She would have staked her life on it. In fact, she added musingly, I will be doing just that.

  For their part, they had been told to look for a female of their species, one who would be unremarkable except for the color of her facial fur. Whereas most Kevrata were pure white, a few had brown or black streaks mixed in. Beverly’s streaks, which were black as pitch, were located just under her eyes, making it look as if she had been crying black tears.

  She thanked Macrita Helleck, her immediate predecessor at Starfleet Medical, for coming up with the subdermal holoprojector technology that allowed field personnel to impersonate a different species without undergoing surgical alteration.

  Until a few years ago, anyone who wanted to go unrecognized in an alien milieu—either to study it or spy on it—had been forced to go under the laser scalpel. In the course of Beverly’s Starfleet career she had been on both ends of the procedure, performing it as well as having it performed on her.

  She hadn’t liked it in either case. It was a time-consuming operation, and the surgically implanted prosthetics never felt quite right. That was why assignments that entailed surgical alteration had become such objects of dread among the r
ank and file. And though the patient’s original features were restored when the mission was over, that required surgery as well.

  Now, Beverly was pleased to say, it was different. All one had to do was come up with an alien image, and a network of projectors the size of dust motes, strategically inserted under the skin, did the rest. And they didn’t just create an appearance; they generated a tangible surface, using electromagnetic fields.

  The basic technology wasn’t new. It had been employed in holodecks for nearly twenty years. But Helleck had miniaturized the emitters, making the idea a practical one.

  Good thing, Beverly thought, as she considered her reflection in the rounded surface of her mug. Building brow ridges was one thing. Fur implantation was quite another.

  And it wasn’t just the fur. It was the obsidian skin underneath it, invisible except under close inspection. Surgically altering her to look like a Kevrata would have been a nightmare for one of her colleagues, no question.

  It took the males in the blue and black coats a few seconds to pick her out from the crowd. Once they did, they waddled purposefully in her direction, jostling a dozen or more of their fellow Kevrata on the way.

  No one seemed to mind. But then, the Kevrata liked physical contact. Beverly had learned that a long time ago.

  The males stopped in front of her, pulled their hoods back, and sat down. Like all their kind, they had sloping foreheads and wide, flat noses with gaping nostrils.

  But it was their eyes that drew Beverly’s gaze. They were riots of color, their irises dark purple at the fringes, green farther in, and a ruddy gold around the pupils.

  Just like the eyes of the Kevrata who had crash-landed on Arvada III. Beverly could still see Jojael peering imploringly at her through the haze of her illness, begging her for something she couldn’t give them.

  But with a little luck, she would be able to give it to these Kevrata. That was why she had come all the way from Earth, wasn’t it? To do as an experienced physician what she hadn’t been able to do as a helpless teenager.