by David Mack
5
Reality was a muddy blur as Cervantes Quinn blundered through the cobblestone lanes of Stars Landing, a cluster of residential and commercial buildings tucked inside the expansive terrestrial enclosure that occupied the upper half of Vanguard’s saucer hull. Every step he took was a dare to the station’s artificial gravity to pull him down and drop him on his face. His vision and his memory both were dulled by bourbon, a result entirely of his own design. For a few blessed seconds, he could neither see where he was nor remember where he was going.
Such moments had become all that he lived for, the holy grail of his existence. In the months since he had come back from the mission that claimed his beloved Bridy, he had become a surgeon with a shot glass, and whiskey was his scalpel: He used it to carve away his sorrows.
Stumbling half-blind, he relished the near-constant sensation of free fall, the feeling that at any moment he might plunge down a rabbit hole into endless darkness. He longed for such oblivion, for a total divorce from his memories. Then he recalled where he was going: back to his apartment, a depressing hovel adorned by only a few meager furnishings and an ever-growing number of carpet stains. There he would slip into a dreamless and fitful slumber and pray this might be the night when he finally choked to death on his own vomit.
Best not to get my hopes up, he cautioned himself. Otherwise I’ll just be sad when I wake up tomorrow, alive and feeling like hammered crap.
He was in no hurry to get home—or anywhere else for that matter. Most of the reputable drinking establishments in Stars Landing had long since eighty-sixed him for one thing or another. Starting fights, or not paying his tab, or urinating on the bar; it was always something.
Bereft of hope as well as a destination, he spent most of his days hiding from the station’s simulated daylight, and most of his nights dragging his sorry ass from one joint to another in an ever more difficult search for someone who’d serve him a goddamned drink. Morose and at a loss for any other reason to go on, he drifted alone through the twisted wreckage of his life, turning in steadily shrinking circles while waiting for the Great Drain of Time to suck him whole into its infinite abyss and put an end to his misery.
Quinn’s toe caught on the edge of a cobblestone. His elbows hit the road, followed a moment later by his face, and he thought perhaps he’d finally gotten his wish. Then the sharp pain of impact faded to a dull ache of bruises and the steady throb of a fresh gash on his chin. He reached up with one dirty hand and palmed away the bright red blood running in a thick stream over his Adam’s apple, and he chuckled at the hopeless stupidity of his life.
He was still gathering the will to stand when a pair of feet edged into his sharply limited field of vision. A few hard blinks and a deep breath improved his sight from triplicate to duplicate, and he lifted his head to see who was looming over him. It came as little surprise to find freelance journalist Tim Pennington looking back at him. “Hey, Newsboy,” he slurred.
The fair-haired, Scotland-born writer looked annoyingly fit, in a yogurt-and-yoga kind of way. His smile felt condescending. “Quinn. I see you found the fast track back to the gutter.”
“Yeah, but I’m looking up at the stars.”
Pennington looked up. “Those are holograms.” Back down at Quinn. “Can you even see them through those whiskey goggles you call eyes?”
“No, but I know they’re there. And they’re lookin’ back at me.” And laughing.
The younger man kneeled and tried to snake his hands under Quinn’s armpits, but the grizzled old pilot and soldier of fortune shook him off with a violent spasm of twists and jerks.
“Let me help you up,” Pennington said. “We need to get you home.” He reached out again, and this time Quinn was too tired to struggle, so he let his body go limp and transform into dead weight in Pennington’s hands. “Come on, you stupid tosser, get up.”
Drool spilled from the corner of Quinn’s mouth and ran down his shirt as he mumbled in a pathetic monotone, “Leave me here.”
Pennington’s voice cracked from exertion. “Not a chance.”
Exhibiting a degree of stubbornness Quinn hadn’t known the man had, Pennington snuck under Quinn’s arm and draped it across his shoulders, then forced him to his feet. Despite thinking he would passively resist, Quinn found his feet keeping step with Tim’s as the writer lurched forward and led Quinn down a street of blurry lights and murky shadows. “You’re doing great, mate,” he said. “Just a bit farther.”
They might have been lumbering along for seconds or minutes—Quinn couldn’t really tell—but he lost hold of his anger and sank into maudlin gratitude. “Thanks.”
Pennington’s voice was taut from the strain of carrying Quinn. “You’re welcome.”
Not certain he’d made his point, Quinn added, following a wet and odiferous belch, “No, really, I mean it, thanks. I’m glad you found me instead of . . . instead of those security goons.”
Pennington guided Quinn around a corner. “They aren’t looking for you.”
“The hell they ain’t. Busted up some shit real good down at Shannon’s.”
“I squared that, mate. Paid for what you broke. Got the charges dropped.” As they started up some stairs, Quinn’s head dipped forward, and he found himself hypnotized by the off-sync spectacle of their moving shoes. Pennington’s feet stepped straight and sure, Quinn’s splayed in a pigeon-toed pantomime of alcoholic ineptitude.
Weaving and staggering down an open-air promenade, Quinn began to recognize familiar details of the residential building in which he lived. Even in his deeply sotted state, he knew that without Pennington’s guidance, he would never have been able to tell one of the station’s prefabricated living modules from any other, much less have found his own door in this rat’s maze from hell. Then he caught up with the conversation of a minute earlier. Newsboy’s probably the only reason I ain’t in the brig right now. “How ’bout my other bar tabs?”
“Settled,” Pennington said.
They stopped in front of a door that Quinn assumed must be his own. With effort, he swiveled his head toward Pennington, only to find the man’s face too close for him to focus on. “So, does that mean I can go back to Tom Walker’s place?”
“No. It just means he won’t press charges.” The door opened, and Pennington dragged Quinn inside. He led him to a sofa whose upholstery had already suffered a terrifying number of indignities caused by Quinn’s headlong plunge off the wagon of sobriety, and then he slipped out from under Quinn’s arm and let him collapse onto the sofa.
“Home sweet home,” Quinn mumbled into the cushion.
Pennington took a moment to prop Quinn on his side, using pillows to prevent him from rolling onto his back. Then he fetched a small trash can from the kitchenette and placed it next to the sofa. He ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. “Need anything else?”
Quinn thought he should find some way to thank Pennington, some way to reward him for playing the part of his guardian angel despite all the stupid crap Quinn had said to him, for being such a good friend to him despite all the misery Quinn had brought into his life, most of it unintentional but a catastrophe nonetheless. Of all the people he had ever known, Pennington was one of the few he still knew who hadn’t written him off as a lost cause. That deserved some kind of recognition. At the very least, it merited a sincere word of thanks. Something.
“Tim . . . ,” he began.
His stomach twisted in a knot, his chest heaved, and he puked a gutful of half-digested food and bile that reeked of sour mash, all over Pennington’s feet.
He was almost grateful to lose consciousness before having to say he was sorry.
Doctor Carol Marcus was on the move and in no mood to stop for anyone or anything. She passed one of her colleagues after another as she circled the main isolation chamber located in the center of the Vault. The recently rebuilt, state-of-the-art top-secret research facility lay deep inside the core of Starbase 47, and it was the most heavily shielded and
redundantly equipped section of the entire Watchtower-class space station.
“Watch those power levels,” she said to Doctor Hofstadter as she passed his console. “We can’t afford a spike.” The dark-haired, bespectacled researcher nodded once in confirmation of Marcus’s instruction, then he resumed his work. Striding past another station, Marcus paused long enough to lean past Doctor Tarcoh, a spindly, soft-spoken Deltan man of middle years. She activated a function on his panel. “Remember to keep the sensors in passive mode. I don’t want to feed this thing any signals it can use. You saw what happened last time.” Tarcoh continued his work, duly chastised for his error.
The “last time” Marcus had spoken of, and which every scientist on her team recalled all too vividly, was a disastrous attempt to make contact with a Shedai trapped inside a Mirdonyae Artifact identical to the one still housed inside the Vault’s main isolation chamber. The steps that had been necessary to transmit a signal through the artifact’s baffling subatomic lattices had also enabled the creature snared inside it to replenish its power and exploit damage the Federation researchers had unwittingly wrought in the artifact. That error had led to an explosive episode of escape and the violent destruction of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel U.S.S. Lovell.
As she moved around the laboratory, checking status gauges and second-guessing all her colleagues’ work, her Starfleet counterpart, Lieutenant Ming Xiong, fell into step beside her. “He’s still waiting for you in your office,” Xiong said.
The reminder turned her mood into thin ice—cold and brittle. “Let him wait.”
Marcus kept moving, and Xiong followed her. “He’s showing you a courtesy by coming down here. He could’ve had you hauled up to his office.”
She ignored Xiong’s warning and took a moment to sidle up to Doctor Koothrappali. “Keep an eye on the plasma capacitors. If they redline, dump the charge through the station’s main deflector dish. Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait to be told. Just do it.”
The longer Marcus pretended nothing was wrong, the more apparent Xiong’s anxiety became. “This isn’t a joke, Doctor. And it’s not some mere formality.”
“When did you become such a stickler for rules and regulations?” As soon as she’d said it, she felt a pang of regret, because Xiong’s reflexive wince told her she’d struck a nerve. The young lieutenant had once enjoyed a reputation on Vanguard as a maverick and iconoclast. The last few years, however, had broken his spirit by slow degrees; the final straw had been the recent demise of his friend Lieutenant Commander Bridget McLellan, known to her friends as Bridy Mac. The former second officer of the Sagittarius, McLellan had been reassigned to Starfleet Intelligence as a covert operative attached to Operation Vanguard. Xiong had often spoken of her as his “big sister.” Her death in the line of duty, while on a mission to which he had assigned her, had left him emotionally devastated for weeks.
She reached out, gently grasped his upper arm, and stepped away from the workstations with him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to say that . . . you know . . .”
“I know what you were trying to say.”
Realizing there was no quick fix for the hurt she’d just inflicted, Marcus chose to change the subject. “All right, you win. Let’s go talk to him.” Over her shoulder, she called to the other scientists, “Everyone, I’ll just be a minute. Don’t start the procedure till I get back.”
Neither she nor Xiong spoke as they walked to her office. The door whished open ahead of her, and she entered her tidy private work space to find the station’s chief of security, Lieutenant Haniff Jackson, standing in front of her desk, facing the door, waiting for her. The broad-shouldered man looked decidedly displeased by the prolonged wait she had inflicted on him. “Doctor. Nice of you to join me. I was beginning to think you’d fled the station.”
“Are you kidding me?” She edged past him to get behind her desk and reclaim the room’s sole power position. Turning back to face him, she continued. “This whole place has been turned into a fortress. Armed guards at the only entrance, weapons systems inside the lab waiting to unleash holy hell, all on the word of someone up in ops. I doubt I could escape if I wanted to.”
The zeal with which she’d delivered her harangue seemed to have embarrassed Xiong, who avoided her gaze, choosing instead to stare at his shoes as if they were the most interesting things he had ever seen. Jackson, meanwhile, seemed not the least bit put off by her tirade. “Doctor, I understand that the enhanced security measures we’ve installed here in the Vault might seem a bit excessive—”
She was livid. “A bit? Reactor-grade reinforced bulkheads? Fast-acting antimatter self-destruct packages built into the floors? Why would I find that excessive?”
“I appreciate your sarcasm, Doctor. Really, I do. But you need to understand that Admiral Nogura doesn’t share my carefree sense of humor. Especially when it comes to violations of the security protocols regarding off-station communications.”
“You mean when I decide my rights to free expression trump your right to censor me.”
Palms upturned, Jackson said, “That’s one way of putting it.”
“I am so sick of Starfleet and its euphemisms,” Marcus said. “Call it what it is: censorship. I, for one, won’t stand for it. I have rights as a Federation citizen.”
Her declaration left Jackson looking pained. “Actually, ma’am, out here, you don’t. Right now you’re on a Starfleet base, which means you need to live and work by our rules.”
Marcus felt a wave of heat prickle her scalp and knew her face had flushed with anger. “That is not what I signed on for, Lieutenant. I never agreed to those terms.”
“It doesn’t matter what you agreed to or think you agreed to. I’m just telling you how it is.” He leaned forward and tapped a data slate that he had left in the center of her desktop. “This is an official warning from Admiral Nogura. Do not share any of your research data with anyone off this station, no matter how innocuous or generic you think that data is.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She looked to Xiong, hoping, perhaps irrationally, that he might leap to her defense if prompted. “Xiong, explain to this man that independent peer review is an essential component of all serious research.”
Xiong lifted his eyes from the floor long enough to glance sheepishly into Jackson’s unyielding stare, then he cast an apologetic look at Marcus. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I have to agree with Starfleet on this one. We can’t let even one shred of this data out of here. Not yet.”
Jaw agape, Marcus shouted at her colleague, “Are you serious? That’s it? You’re just going to roll over and play dead? I thought you were a scientist, Ming!”
An awkward hush filled the room. Jackson cleared his throat and stiffened his posture. “Please read the memo from Admiral Nogura, ma’am. If you violate the station’s security protocols again, we’ll reserve the right to impose punitive measures in order—”
“Screw your security protocols. And get the hell out of my office. Now.”
Jackson forced a polite if joyless smile onto his face. “As you wish, Doctor.” He dipped his chin toward Xiong. “Lieutenant.” Then he turned on his heel and left the office.
The moment the door closed behind him, Xiong looked up at Marcus with pleading eyes. “Are you crazy? What the hell are you thinking, provoking him like that?”
Disgusted with Starfleet in general and Xiong in particular, she flashed an angry look as she marched past him on her way back to work. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to get fired.”
The night life in Stars Landing was winding down as Pennington ambled homeward, stopping every few paces to kick some newly discovered fleck of Quinn’s emesis from his shoes.
It was late, just after 0215 according to the station’s chronometer, to which he’d synchronized his wrist chrono. Most of the commercial businesses in Stars Landing had closed hours earlier, and now the restaurants and drinking establishments were ejecting their patrons, the courtesies of l
ast call fulfilled. Watching the ordinary folks of Vanguard—enlisted personnel, civilian residents, transient colonists waiting for a chance to depart for some new life—he imagined that Quinn must once have counted himself among their number. Watching his friend and former accomplice in adventure accelerate into a downward spiral saddened him. Quinn’s grief was so raw that it resurrected Pennington’s memories of Oriana D’Amato, his own lost love, who had perished years earlier when the Tholians destroyed the U.S.S. Bombay.
He had thought his own experiences would give him some insight into Quinn’s state, some clue how to guide the man through his labyrinth of mourning and back to the world of the still-living. Instead, he’d discovered the hard way that each person’s path through the valley of the shadow was as unique as their own soul, and that everyone had to make the journey alone.
All I can do is be there and keep him from ending up dead or in jail, he decided. The rest has to be up to him.
Submerged in his own thoughts, he almost failed to notice the faint echo of music from somewhere nearby. He stopped and looked around, and saw that he was outside the front door of Manón’s cabaret, an upscale establishment that had become one of Stars Landing’s most popular nightspots as well as Vanguard’s de facto officers’ club. The cabaret was closed and dark, and its front entrance was locked when he tried it. Then he put his ear against a window and listened.
Through the glass, he heard a few awkward notes from the cabaret’s baby grand piano. Plink. Plunk. There was no melody, no rhythm to them. They conjured for Pennington the image of someone who didn’t know how to play tapping distractedly at the keys. Despite the haphazard nature of the sound, he was certain he could still sense some kind of emotion behind it—a quiet despair, a longing. He lifted his ear from the glass and tried to peek inside, but the interior blinds were drawn shut, denying him a view of the player.
His curiosity aroused, Pennington circled the building and slipped down the alleyway that ran behind it. Moving in careful, light steps, he approached the restaurant’s rear service entrance and was pleased to discover it slightly ajar. He pulled the door open just wide enough to slip inside, then he eased it back to the way he’d found it.