by Emily
on dozens of worlds—and he'd participated in more sorrows man he wanted to count
My life has been about death. In the name of preventing it, I've killed so many, and seen so many killed....
The civil war on Beta VI, where over eleven thousand men had beaten each other to death with sticks and rocks on one catastrophic afternoon, and all his team had been able to do was watch. The genocidal holocaust on Arvada DI. The Tomed incident, in 2311; he'd been a lieutenant then, only in his thirties, back when he'd still believed that evil was doomed to fail simply because it was evil.
Vaughn walked slowly through connecting corridors as he'd gone through the lower cargo bays, bis mind light-years from where each leaden step carried him. The desperate and hungry faces of Verillian children, orphaned by war. The mad, hopeless cries of tear and warning that had echoed down tae nails of the Lethean veteran asylum. The terrible assassin** tion of the Elaysian governor that he could have stopped, if only he'd known the truth even moments earlier....
Vaughn was so caught up in the barrage of memories that he was slow to recognize the change of light & wasn't until he stepped into the next bay mat he noticed; the dim red of the emergency lighting was different here, the massive hold bathed in a purplish glow.
It wasn't as important as the images that held his mind, that battered him mercilessly as he walked inside. A dying scream. A crying woman. Friends lost. Feelings of triumph and pride, hate and fear.
The light grew brighter, illuminating the faces of the
dead cast about like debris, and Vaughn stopped walking, trapped by a lifetime of memory.
On the bridge of the Enterprise they had very little warning before the giant wave hit them from behind, its intense burst of radiation shattering across their shields in a sparkling halo of light The truly powerful ones were very rare, and because the surges of energy traveled tike tsunami beneath the surface of their plasma ocean, they were hard to foresee; the sensors didn't pick it up until six seconds before impact.
"Sir, there's a sudden concentration of highly charged plasma radiation behind us at mark, ah, hitting us now."
Even as the words were leaving Lieutenant Perim's mouth, the Enterprise was reacting, struggling to spread out the concentrated phenomenon, cutting sharply into the ship's power supply as the shields automatically prioritized their energy use.
Picard knew what it was before Perim had a chance to finish her sentence. The experienced physical effect was surprisingly mild, lights brightening suddenly and then lowering in strength, less background noise as nonessential equipment powered down, but he wasn't encouraged. A shield drain big enough to tap into something as insignificant as the lights had potentially devastating consequences.
"Engineering, report," Picard snapped, nodding to Perim at the same time. "Hail the away team, and put the freighter onscreen."
Status from Lieutenant Achen in engineering was fast and mixed. The last of the concentrated energy flux had traveled past them and wasn't dragging a secondary current, which meant they weren't in immediate
danger of being hit again; all systems and their backups were suffering severe power shortages, but there was nothing irreversibly damaged except for the subspace communications array—it had been scrambled, and could take days to recalibrate and realign. Their shields were operating at substandard levels and wouldn't be up to par for several hours, which shouldn't be a problem so long as nothing else rammed them anytime soon—and the power to the tractor beam had been cut, releasing the freighter.
"No answer from the away team, sir," Perim reported, sounding tense and frustrated. "It looks like our short-range is down, too."
"Do we have transporters?" Picard asked.
"Negative, but that's temporary," said Achen. "They were just knocked off-line, so as soon as they've got enough power built up for the fail-safe, they'll automatically reinstate."
Picard watched as the magnified freighter settled across the main screen, weighing and measuring the possibilities. Nudged by the turbulence of the power wave, the freighter was slowly moving away from the Enterprise. Perim called out the approximate rate of four meters a second.
At their rate of movement... say, five to 10 minutes until they move far enough to completely dissolve the conflict of pressures, less if they're caught in a heated current.
Re-establishing a tractor lock would take too long. Factoring in the accompanying glitches to transport failure, Picard calculated that they'd need anywhere from four to nine minutes, assuming there was no trouble with the fail-safe charge.
"Get the transporters working immediately, priority one," he said. "Helm, can the sensors read anything beyond lifesigns?"
Perim shook her head, running able hands over the console pads. "Four living humanoids... no beacon read on Commander Data, no distinctive biosignature capacity from here."
"I can't get their combadge overrides to signal, sir," communications added.
For the well-shielded Enterprise, the random plasma tsunami had acted as an energy leech, no permanent damage done. But the freighter was no longer shielded by the tractor beam, had in fact been pushed toward possible danger by the beam's dying surge—and the away team might not even know it
We can't talk to them, and at the moment, we can't putt them out. There was also no way to easily dock a shuttle, not without someone operating the freighter's lockdown controls. Blowing out a chunk of bulkhead was possible, but it would take time to do it safely.
Will was due to report within the next few minutes, and was decidedly punctual as a rule; when he realized that the Enterprise couldn't be contacted, he'd have the team initiate their communicator emergency signals. The transporters should be working by then.
"Prep a shuttle, and have a rescue team standing by," Picard said, not liking mat he had to include it as one of the better options, knowing that he wanted as many contingency plans available as possible. "Security, send someone to transporter A, have them suited and briefed. Have Dr. Crusher standing by with a medical team as well."
Less than two minutes after the wave had come and
gone, Picard had done what he could to influence the outcome of the situation. He watched the freighter as it slowly drifted, away from safety, wondering what could be keeping the away team from noticing that their tricorder readings had changed.
Kuri Dennings had been thinking about her days at the Academy as she walked, feeling fondly nostalgic and a little irritated that she couldn't seem to pay attention to her surroundings. To see an Occupation-era Cardassian freighter as it had been during those years... it was the chance of a lifetime, and yet she couldn't stop reminiscing about people she'd known, remembering names and faces she thought she'd forgotten. She had signaled in at fifteen minutes or so without thinking about it, too intent on her memories to care much about what everyone else was doing.
Kelison, with that silly hat he always won to dinner, until Stanley hid it. The birds that nested outside the dorm. And Kra Celles, who could impersonate Lieutenant Ellisalda dead-on, from her facial mannerisms to that high, wavering voice....
When she finally stopped walking, she realized she had found the weapons store, directly beneath the bridge. It was connected to a yeldrin, a kind of hand-to-hand-combat practice room common on older Cardassian ships. In the corridor between me two rooms were a dozen dead men, all Cardassian—after thirty years of weightlessness, they'd been cruelly dumped to the floor by the Kamal's sudden gravity. She'd avoided looking at them, disturbed by the blank, ice-lensed gazes and stiff and awkward poses. They reminded her of the time she'd gone fishing with her brother on Catualla. They
had stored their catch in a refrigeration unit that had malfunctioned, turning the fish into blocks of gray, lumpy ice. At the time, it had been funny....
... and we joked about it, we called them ichthysi-cles, and Tosh was still laughing about it the last time we talked. When he called to tell me he'd met someone, a woman, and he thought he was falling in love.
> A transmission in the middle of the night from her father, seven months after their vacation to Catualla. She'd been half asleep until she'd seen his face, seen the horrible struggle not to break down in the way he blinked, the way his chin trembled. He was the bravest, strongest man she'd ever known, but his son, her brother, was dead at the age of 26, victim to a freak cave-in at one of the mines he surveyed.
"Tosh is dead, baby," and he'd wept openly, tears running down his tired, tired face.
Nine years ago, but the pain was suddenly as fresh as it had been that very moment, and Dennings slumped against the icy wall of Ae yeldrin and clutched at herself weakly, trying to hold herself against the terrible pain.
Tosh is dead, baby. Tosh is dead....
Ensign Dennings slid to the deck, sobbing, lost to the memory.
After Miles O'Brien had transferred to DS9, he'd kept in intermittent touch with the Enterprise—sometimes to say hello, to catch up with how the crew of the "D" and later the "E" were doing. In the early days he would contact La Forge just as often to complain goodnaturedly about his new job. DS9 had once been the Cardassian 'Terok Nor," a uridium processing sta-
tion—and, as Miles was quick to point out, Federation technology simply didn't function very well when plugged into machines built by Cardassians.
Not without a lot of rewiring, and some very imaginative bypass work. It wasn't that the technology was that much more or less advanced—only a two-point difference on the Weibrand logarithmic developmental scale, at least when the Kamal was built. But the fundamentals were distinct, from the positioning of warp engines to the computer's defense capabilities, and La Forge found himself appreciating O'Brien's troubles, seeing them in a whole new light Even the mission last year to Sentok Nor hadn't prepared him for this. He was having a hell of a time figuring out how to get around hi the freighter's most basic systems. It wasn't helping mat he couldn't seem to get anything to power up properly.
/ should get Data back up here, see if he can make sense of some of these translation disparities... La Forge scooped a .06 laser tip out of his tool case and sparked it, deciding to weld two of the console's EPS processing wafers together, see if he could boost efficiency—and hardly aware that he was doing it, he found himself thinking about how Lean would tackle heKamal.
She'd be able to get a handle on this, no problem. Together, they'd be able to manage it easily... if it was the Lean he'd known on the holodeck, his own personal version of the engineer....
La Forge felt a sudden flush of shame, remembering how she'd found his private program, his small fantasy of working with the brilliant engineer cruelly exposed. He'd never exploited her image, using the
holographic program as a kind of confidence-builder—-but he had made Dr. Lean Brahms much friendlier than she was comfortable with. He remembered the look on her face when he'd walked into the holosuite, too late to keep the real Lean from seeing the Leah-projection... he remembered the anger and embarrassment in her eyes, remembered thinking that he had caused those feelings, that she probably thought he was some kind of perverted miscreant when all he'd wanted was to be with her, to work side by side with a woman who respected him as much as he respected her—
La Forge frowned and shook his head, wondering why he was rehashing that particular aspect of their relationship. He'd found out she was married, she'd realized he wasn't a creep, and they'd ended up parting on friendly enough terms....
This place is getting to me. Old ship, old feelings.
He'd been daydreaming since they arrived, running through all kinds of personal history as he worked. No harm done, he supposed, although he was usually better at focusing himself.
He lowered the bright torch tip to the processing chips, concentrating on the fine web of filaments. There was a spark, a wisp of smoke, the gentle swirl claiming his awareness.
—Mind and alone, the smell of smoke thickening—
He'd been five years old, still too young for the VISOR implants that would allow him sight, and the fire had been started by a short in his bedroom's heating unit
/ didn't call out at first. I thought that if I stayed very still and quiet, it would go away. A blind child alone in
his room at night, fists clenched and sweating, silently praying as hard as he could mat there was no smoke smell, the air was clean, and that wasn't the crackle of flames, wasn't-wasn't-wasn't—
It wasn't until he actually felt the building heat that the little boy had screamed finally, screamed until he'd heard running footsteps, his father's gasp and mother's curse and more running. He'd burst into tears when he'd felt strong arms lift him up and away, the voice of his excellent fattier soft and soothing in his ear, it's okay, Geordi, shhh, everything's okay now, shhh, my son, it's over and everything's okay...
Feelings of love and remembered terror welled up hi his heart and stomach, reminding him of how he'd loved them, of how dark his Me had been except for their light, remembering...
After her hurried briefing, Deanna Troi reached the bridge as quickly as she could, the intensity of me atmosphere immediately setting her teeth on edge. The Enterprise was shadowing the freighter, which was apparently only minutes from hitting a strong current that would toss menu unshielded, into the whirling, deadly spumes of light. Will's report was officially overdue, and the transporters were still off-line... mere were still too many variables for exact predictions, but simply, if they couldn't make contact with the away team soon, they would be lost
Deeply frustrated, the captain was listening to an engineering update and leaning over the helm's console, watching stats. Deanna took her seat, breathing deeply as she opened herself up, first acknowledging and then tuning past the people directly around her. She felt for
Will, searching for the familiar presence in a radiating arc of awareness, but couldn't find him; she couldn't find anyone. She hadn't really expected to, the Badlands disrupted all sorts of sensors, even her innate empathic sense, but she'd had to try.
Having nothing to report, Deanna stayed silent, watching the freighter, hearing status revisions and possible solutions to the problem—but her concern for her lover and friends wouldn't allow her any real objectivity. She gave into it instead, recognizing her own need to feel productive in the face of such frustration.
Nothing to lose, anyway.
Deanna closed her eyes for just a few seconds, seeing herself, seeing a sense of warning expanding from her presence, mentally speaking words of alarm. Will, you're all in danger, look out, receive, understand that you're in trouble. She knew mat it was probably useless, she wasn't much of a sender outside her own species, but her faith in their connection gave her hope—that by some chance he would feel the fear in her thoughts and understand what was happening, before it was too late.
Riker walked until the silence got to him, and then he remembered. He remembered, and was afraid.
There was death everywhere, Cardassian bodies stiffly jumbled like stick dolls and no sound but the sounds of his own body, his heart and respiration, the rustle of his uniform against the inside of his suit. It was as though the ship was holding its bream, waiting, in between what had come before and what was coming next, the silence a secret in the empty space.
Quiet and secret, secret and hidden...
He'd reached the living quarters. The Kamal had small, individual rooms for her crew, the entries dark and open, the bodies here all heaped at the end of the main corridor. He was at the opposite end, his back to a corner where another hall intersected the one filled with bodies, his hand on his phaser. He shouldn't be afraid, he knew mat, and so he wouldn't draw his weapon... but Ms envelopment in the memory was complete, his outrage and horror was new.
They'd come for him at night, to perform medical experiments. Years ago. Secret experiments conducted on the sleeping crew by a secret race, the constant, random clicking of their voices or claws like insectile rain, like a black, evil thaw. They'd been solanagen-based entities, and they'd killed Lieutenant Ha
gler, replacing his blood with something like liquid polymer, and surgically amputated and reattached Riker's arm for no reason he could ever know or comprehend. ...
... and I volunteered to stay awake, to cany the homing device so that we could seal the rift between their space and ours. I took the neurostimulant and I waited, waited for them to take me, knowing that they would dissect me awake and not care as I screamed.
Laying there in bed, seconds like hours in the dark, twitching from the hypospray, waiting hi perfect silence, wondering if he'd make it back. And then the abduction, and feigning semi-consciousness as they'd clicked and muttered from me darkness, telling their secrets in an alien language....
He knew he had to act, he had to do something, but
the feelings were overwhelming. Paralyzed, Riker hunched further into the corner, listening to the past
Data stood in the Kamal's communal eating area, accessing seemingly random personal information. Although he had experimented with daydreaming in the past, the spontaneous nature of the experience was unusual, particularly under the circumstances. A self-diagnostic did not inform him of any problem. Still, it was perplexing; the occurrence of memory recall did not normally interfere with his ability to function, but he found that his designated task—to observe this specified section of the Cardassian freighter—did not seem as important as the examination of his previous experiences and aspects thereof, which seemed to occur to him in no particular order.
Hie sentience of Lal, Stardate 43657.0. Learning to dance, Stardate 44390.1. Meeting Alexander, son of Worf, Stardate 44246.3. Deactivating Lore, Stardate 47025.4. His attempt at a romantic relationship with Ensign Jenna D'Sora, Stardate 44935.6. His return to Omicron Theta, Stardate 41242.4. Commanding the U.S.S. Sutherland, Stardate 45020.4. Sarjenka, Stardate 42695.3. Kivas Fajo, Stardate 43872.2...
Data's understanding of each memory's relevance to his current situation was lacking, and the only common element was mat he seemed to be present for each one. He decided he would return to the Kamal's bridge and speak to Geordi about it—but thinking of Geordi called to mind an entirely new set of experiences, and he paused to consider them, interested in his apparent ability to direct the focus of his memories.