Stargazer Oblivion

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “—and if you think Lieutenant Joseph is better officer material than I am,” said Pierzynski, “and you want to make him the permanent chief of security, I can live with that. But at this point, I don’t know what you, the captain, or Commander Ben Zoma have in mind for him.

  “And if you bring in somebody else and make Mister Joseph just a regular officer again, that makes me number three in the section. And under those circumstances, I think I may be better off asking for a transfer.”

  Wu wanted to give Pierzynski her undivided attention. But she couldn’t help thinking about Jiterica.

  The ensign didn’t appear to have a problem with the solitude—but Wu did. The last thing she wanted was for the Nizhrak to start feeling lonely again, especially after she had been making such excellent progress.

  “So,” said Pierzynski, “I’d just like to know where I stand.”

  Wu nodded. “I understand your concerns. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the captain has in mind at this point.”

  The security officer sighed.

  “On the other hand,” the second officer continued, “I can tell you that we’re all very pleased with your work, and would like you to remain on the Stargazer. And if you should decide to ask for a transfer, we will do everything we can to get you the kind of posting you deserve.”

  That seemed to make Pierzynski feel a little better. “Thanks,” he said.

  They spoke a little longer. Then the security officer picked up his tray and left Wu sitting there—wondering what she should do about Jiterica.

  The ensign was still sitting alone, still working on her padd. And her solitude still bothered the second officer.

  Wu considered the idea of rectifying the problem herself, by picking up her tray and sitting down next to Jiterica. However, she was due back on the bridge and she couldn’t have stayed very long.

  She was still considering the matter when Ensign Paris walked in—and gave Wu reason to feel relieved. She didn’t need to feel bad anymore. Help had arrived.

  Of everyone on board the Stargazer, Cole Paris was probably the individual closest to Jiterica. Nor was it a surprise to Wu that that should be the case.

  Paris had worked with Jiterica on the rescue of the Belladonna, which was caught in the grip of a deadly space anomaly. When they returned from their mission, there was a bond between them—or at least the beginnings of a bond. The second officer had seen it in their faces, and the realization had pleased her no end.

  After all, Jiterica hadn’t made any friends yet at that point, and she had needed one desperately. The rescue mission had presented her with at least the possibility that she would find friendship on board the Stargazer.

  And once the ensign got a glimpse of that possibility, she was able to interact with her colleagues in the science section on an entirely different footing. She was able to make friends of them as well.

  Ironically, Wu recalled, Paris didn’t end up seeing Jiterica for a while afterward, since they were on unavoidably different schedules. But when he finally did see her, they began spending much of their free time together.

  Wu glanced at Jiterica to see her reaction to Paris’s appearance. Indeed, the ensign seemed pleased by the prospect of having her friend join her, a ghostly smile growing behind her faceplate.

  Paris glanced in Jiterica’s direction, then headed for the food slot. Naturally, Wu expected him to join the Nizhrak as soon as he filled his tray.

  But he didn’t. In fact, he walked over to the opposite side of the room, where no one else was sitting, and sat down at a table all by himself.

  Strange, thought Wu.

  She didn’t know what to make of it. And a glance at Jiterica told her the ensign didn’t know what to think either.

  One thing was for sure—the second officer was going to have a talk with Ensign Paris.

  Enabran Tain left the last Zartani hotel on his itinerary with an irresistible desire to strangle someone.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t finally picked up a lead with regard to Demmix’s whereabouts. It was that the lead didn’t appear to lead anywhere.

  Granted, the glinn now knew where Demmix had slept prior to the plaza bombing—right there in The Heavenly Meadow. However, he still didn’t know where the Zartani was headed when he left the hotel. And the manager there, for all the apparent effectiveness of Tain’s increasingly open threats, seemed incapable of producing that information.

  Time was going by and he had snared neither Demmix nor Picard in his web. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all.

  Just then, he felt the buzzing of his com device. Taking it out, he snarled, “Tain.”

  “It’s Varitis, Glinn.”

  “I want good news,” Tain snapped.

  “I have some,” Varitis told him with undisguised eagerness. “I have spotted the two Cataxxans.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere, Tain told himself. “Where are they?”

  His underling told him.

  “I’m on my way,” said Tain.

  Gesturing for Beylen and Karrid to follow him, he headed for the location Varitis had given him—hoping their hunt would soon be over.

  Chapter Thirteen

  PICARD LOOKED AT the black-and-white-striped Dedderac who operated the footwear emporium on the transfer deck of an Athabascid deuterium tanker.

  “A Zartani?” he echoed.

  “Yes,” said Guinan.

  “I just came in a few minutes ago,” said the Dedderac. “But if you like, I can ask someone.”

  “By all means,” said Picard.

  The Dedderac called over one of his employees, a human with a shock of blond hair and a stubbly brush of beard on his chin. “Braddock,” he said, “did you wait on a Zartani today?”

  The fellow nodded. “Just a few hours ago. Sold him a pair of special-supports.” He glanced at Picard. “He said his feet hurt so much he couldn’t stand it another second.”

  “Did he happen to mention where he was staying?” asked the captain, repeating what he and his companion had asked so often that day already.

  “Not exactly,” said Braddock.

  “Not exactly?” Guinan echoed.

  “He asked directions to the Emperor’s Eye. That’s a hotel not too far from here. But he was a Zartani, so I didn’t think he was actually going to stay there.”

  Picard exchanged looks with his companion. “Do you know where the Emperor’s Eye is?” he asked.

  Guinan nodded. “As our friend here said, it’s not far. All we have to do is—”

  Suddenly, she fell silent. Her eyes, it seemed, were fixed on something behind the captain.

  He turned to see what might have drawn her attention, but all he saw was a multilevel display full of children’s footwear—and a colored ball lit from within, a child’s toy used to add interest to the display.

  That was it. But for some reason, Picard’s companion couldn’t seem to take her eyes off it.

  “Guinan?” he said.

  It was then that the captain realized she was weeping. The notion came as a shock to him. To that point, he had barely seen her display any emotion at all.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  Guinan nodded, then turned to him—with what seemed like a certain amount of effort. “Fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I said I was fine,” she told him.

  Picard felt the need to probe deeper, but forced himself to respect the woman’s privacy. If she wanted to tell him what had happened, she would do so. And if she didn’t…

  He put his hand on her arm. “You were telling me how to get to the Emperor’s Eye…?”

  “Right,” she said. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring. “No problem.”

  Picard thanked the store manager and the human called Braddock. Then, keeping a close, concerned eye on Guinan, he followed her out into the shopping area’s main thoroughfare.

  Guinan brushed away a lingering tear as she led Picard in the d
irection of the Emperor’s Eye.

  Odd, she thought, the way things work out. She had been on her guard for so long, avoiding anything that might have reawakened the feelings she had worked to submerge.

  And in the end, what had brought those feelings rushing back like a river in full flood? A child’s toy. A simple Tellati child’s toy.

  But it was exactly the color of sunset in a place Guinan had never really visited—at least not in the sense one usually visited places. She knew that didn’t make sense, but the entire experience was still such a confusion to her, defying her attempts to attach words to it.

  It had happened when she was on a ship called the Lakul—one of two ungainly transport vessels crawling through the vault of space, each one packed to the bulkheads with her people. But it wasn’t by choice that any of them had come that way.

  They were refugees, the last of their kind, stripped of everything and everyone they had held dear by a half-living blight called the Borg.

  For months, Guinan and the remnants of her once-numerous species had gone from vessel to vessel, all the while mourning their planet, their loved ones, and the lives they had left behind. Their destination? A world called Earth at the heart of the Federation.

  Guinan had been on Earth before, hundreds of years earlier. But since her last visit, the place had changed quite a bit—or so she had heard. It was no longer a world of soot-belching chimneys and hard-grinding engines. It had become a calmer and gentler world, regaining much of its pristine splendor.

  The El-Aurians—Guinan’s people—had been told they could build new lives there on Earth. And they clung fiercely to that hope, for it was all they had left.

  Then they ran into the Nexus—a twisting, blindingbright ribbon of anomalous energies floating imperiously through otherwise empty space.

  How she wished they had taken some other route, or traveled at a different speed, and thereby avoided even seeing the thing. But Fate placed it directly in their path.

  At first, their captain hadn’t thought much of the phenomenon. He considered it a curiosity, nothing more. But he changed his mind when the Lakul began to shear toward it, caught in its wildly powerful gravimetric distortion field.

  Their sister ship, the Robert Fox, tried to assist the Lakul. But in extending that assistance, she was snared by the phenomenon as well.

  When the Lakul’s captain realized what kind of straits they were in, he sent out a distress call. Later, they would find out that it was received by the Enterprise, an Excelsior-class starship just out of space dock, not far from Earth.

  But after a while, neither Guinan nor her fellow refugees were concerned with the possibility of being rescued. In fact, it was the furthest thing from their minds.

  Because by then, the Nexus had claimed them.

  Guinan couldn’t have said how long she was in that odd, timeless place. Just a few hours, apparently, judging by the timing of the distress call and the Enterprise’s arrival. But it seemed like a lot more—and also, a lot less.

  Then again, how does one measure bliss? How does one quantify complete and utter peace?

  Guinan’s family was there, or at least she thought it was—and her friends were there as well. All the people she thought she had lost forever to the metal appendages of the Borg…they had miraculously been returned to her.

  Even Jevi.

  The daughter who, of all Guinan’s daughters, was most like her. The child she had borne when all the others were grown and gone.

  Jevi was there in the Nexus, in all her beauty and innocence, in all her brilliance and simplicity. She was there for Guinan to see and hold and hear and smell, every bit as sweet and solid and full of giggles as the day the Borg had taken her.

  Guinan knew in her heart that Jevi wasn’t real. She couldn’t be. But Guinan didn’t care in the least. She was home again. She was free from sadness and stuggle. She was a mother, loved and loving, cradling her baby in her arms.

  And she never, ever wanted to leave.

  In time, however, the Enterprise arrived. Her captain saw that both the Lakul and her sister ship were gradually coming apart, savaged by the terrible forces exerted by the Nexus.

  Tragically, he was too late to save the Robert Fox. As he and his bridge officers watched in horror, the Nexus crushed the transport’s hull—killing all of the two hundred and seventy-five El-Aurians aboard.

  But the Lakul was a little sturdier—or maybe just a little luckier. She wouldn’t yield to the Nexus until forty-seven of her passengers had been beamed from her buckling decks to the safety of the Enterprise’s sickbay.

  The starship herself suffered only one casualty—a retired Starfleet captain named Kirk, who was only supposed to have been a guest on the vessel. He perished helping the Enterprise free herself from the phenomenon.

  Guinan was one of the forty-seven El-Aurians who came through the ordeal alive—twice a survivor. But at first, when she was milling about in the Enterprise’s sickbay, she wished that hadn’t been the case.

  That’s how much it hurt to have the joy and contentment of the Nexus ripped from her without warning. That’s how much it tore her up to lose Jevi and the others a second time.

  When she left that junction of infinite possibilities, it felt as if she had abandoned a part of herself. And in her grief, she couldn’t help feeling that it was by far the best part.

  The Enterprise took Guinan the rest of the way to Earth, but she wasn’t aware of the voyage. She was too disoriented, too much in shock.

  The other El-Aurians were the same way. They wandered from place to place without purpose, babbling about colors no one had ever heard of and the sound of time—or so Guinan was told in years to come.

  Eventually, with the help of Federation counselors on Earth, she and all the other survivors of the Lakul regained their equilibrium. They became capable of functioning and fending for themselves again.

  It wasn’t easy. For years, Guinan barely spoke, barely raised her eyes to look into someone else’s.

  But little by little, she reclaimed herself. She redis-covered the points of contact between herself and the real world. With patience and slow, painstaking effort, she rebuilt the Guinan she had known.

  The hardest part was accepting that she would never again feel what she had felt in the Nexus, that she would never again know that unmitigated joy and contentment.

  But somehow she did it. She moved on.

  Then, a little less than a year ago, Guinan had felt the Nexus’s siren call again. The phenomenon was passing through the Alpha Quadrant on its thirty-nine-year loop, tugging on the invisible bonds in which it had bound her.

  She could see it from the observation ports of a half-dozen different hulks—a majestic ribbon of fiery energies, undulating through space less than three thousand kilometers from Oblivion. It was almost as if it had known where to find her.

  The sight of it reopened all her wounds, reminding her of the terrible depth and breadth of her loss. And she was tempted—so terribly tempted—by the joy she had known in the Nexus’s embrace.

  The effort to resist its lure left Guinan weak, withdrawn, dispirited—hardly any better off than when the Enterprise had rescued her. And when the Nexus went away again, taking that sweet, undefinable portion of her with it, her outlook didn’t improve.

  If anything, it got worse.

  Once again, Guinan had a hard, steep road ahead of her. But this time, she didn’t have any Federation counselors to give her a hand. All she had was herself, and the few good friends she had made in Oblivion.

  They tried to bring her out of her malaise, Dahlen and the others…they tried as hard as she could ever have expected of them.

  But she couldn’t feel. She couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of feeling. All she could do was move from day to day and darkness to darkness, surviving but not really living—not anymore, not the way she used to before the Nexus laid its claim to her.

  And that was the state Guinan had been in whe
n Picard sat down next to her at the bar—without even knowing who she was, as if Fate herself had taken a hand again.

  And he had done for her what no one else could, because he was different from anyone else. He was the man from the future. He was the man from her past.

  He was her salvation.

  Guinan resisted the urge to look back at the Tellati ball. How strange, she thought again, that a child’s toy should evoke such joy and misery in her. Such memories…

  Not so long ago, they would have buried her beneath the weight of longing and despair. But not with Picard at her side. With him there, she could—and would—go on.

  Tain found Varitis right where he said he would be—in front of a shadowy Tyrheddan restaurant in the midst of a large, bustling shopping area.

  The glinn had only one question when he arrived at Varitis’s side: “Where?”

  His underling lifted his chin to point across the shopping area’s main thoroughfare. “There, Glinn. In that footwear shop across the way.”

  Tain eyed the place. It had display windows, but he couldn’t see anyone inside. “You’re sure they’re in there?”

  “Yes, Glinn.”

  “For how long now?”

  “Several minutes,” said Varitis.

  Several minutes is a long time, Tain reflected. Had the visit been an unproductive one, the Cataxxans would likely have emerged a good deal sooner.

  Unless they really went in to buy footwear, he thought. The glinn might have laughed if he hadn’t been so intent on snaring his quarry.

  “Your orders?” asked Varitis.

  “Spread out,” said Tain, “so it’s not quite so obvious that we’re surveilling the place. But be alert for the moment when the Cataxxans leave. That’s when we’ll—”

  Before he could finish, he saw two figures emerge from the footwear shop. A pair of Cataxxans—a male and a female, just as Varitis had said.

  At least, they appeared to be Cataxxans. But no one knew better than Tain, who had studied the arts of espionage back on Cardassia Prime, how deceiving an appearance could be.