Instead, she simply nodded.
“Hello, Jefferson.”
“Good afternoon, Naria.”
Her eyes betrayed no fear, but her flesh was a warmer shade of purple than he usually found when they greeted one another.
She’s sensing your frustration, the Commander chided himself, as he extracted the hypospray from its case.
“Please lie down,” he requested.
Bowing her head, she raised her right hand and used it to sweep her long, straight black hair over her shoulder. He automatically lifted a gloved hand behind her, supporting her as she reclined.
“This won’t hurt, will it?”
“I don’t believe so,” he replied, forcing more confidence into his voice than he felt.
The Commander raised the hypospray to her neck, and a soft hiss accompanied the transfer of matter into her body. He braced himself for the sound of alarms.
Instead, he heard a soft keening sound from Naria. She had raised her left hand and stared at it in confusion. The Commander watched the back of it ripple unnaturally, as if it had suddenly been transformed to a liquid state.
“Jefferson?” Naria asked, wide pleading eyes meeting his.
“Wait,” he said. The room’s bioscanner was starting to trill, but its warning was not urgent. The Commander watched Naria’s hand settle again into its normal, solid state.
The Commander smiled, bending directly over Naria to be sure she could see his relief. Her eyes lost their terror. The corners of her mouth began to tip upward.
Suddenly, they drooped. The momentary shared delight in her eyes shifted to confusion, then fear.
The flesh of her face began to darken as it slid away from the bones beneath it. Obsidian lips opened wide, but what should have been a scream was reduced to a sickening gurgle.
Every critical system warning alarm began to blare at once.
The Commander did not hesitate. He moved back through the airlock to the room’s exterior controls. There he entered his personal code into a padd beside a transparent steel case and quickly depressed the single large control mechanism it contained.
A muffled boom met his ears as the room in which Naria lay dissolving was filled with instantaneous sickly orange light.
The Commander looked away, trying to calm his ragged breathing. When he looked back, fine black dust was scattered over the surface of the bed where Naria had greeted him only moments before.
Axum extended his left hand to Seven. She took it in both of hers and wordlessly raised it to her cheek, relaxing into the caress. She was surprised by the warmth she felt radiating from it. Clearly there had been recent advances in prosthetic limbs of which she was unaware.
Curious, she pulled it from her face and began to study it. Resting it in her right hand, she touched his palm gently with the fingers of her left.
As soon as she did so, she felt a curious spasm in her hand. Her fingertips began to tingle, but only briefly. Invisible fire shot upward through each finger and she turned her palm up automatically as her hand involuntarily stiffened.
The pain was too intense to scream. It simply enveloped her as her entire existence seemed to shrink to the size of her left hand. A deep groan escaped her lips.
“Annika?” Axum asked.
For an instant the heat of the fire expanded. It was as if she had been standing in the path of an explosion’s shockwave.
As soon as it had come, it vanished. Thankfully, it took the agony in her hand with it.
“Annika?” Axum asked again.
Seven started to fall, but Axum’s arms held her, lifting her with ease as she curled into his chest.
MONTECITO, CALIFORNIA
This is a mistake.
Tom Paris knew it. He’d made enough of them in his life to recognize the sick twist of his stomach combined with the odd clarity of his mind. It was the absolute certainty that made him pause. The worst mistakes he’d ever made had all been precipitated by precisely this cocktail of sensations.
So take a minute, a new, faint voice suggested. It might have been B’Elanna’s; Paris couldn’t say for sure. But in a radical departure from tradition, Paris stepped back from the front door of his mother’s home and moved to the large front window to its right, through which the family’s dining room was clearly visible.
The room was dark, but ambient light coming from the connecting hall to the kitchen cast the oval table that could easily seat a dozen in faint relief.
A shadow passed across that light. Straining, Paris thought he could hear his mother’s voice. It was impossible to make out her words, but as the light dimmed again, he realized she was pacing to and fro, likely addressing the comm panel she’d had installed on the stone island that occupied the center of the kitchen. He could remember her passing in and out of the panel’s camera sight as she prepared dinner while checking up on him when he was at the Academy, a lifetime ago.
“Kathleen!” his mother said clearly.
She was talking to his older sister, the professor.
Paris hadn’t made contact with either of his sisters. Shaw had ordered him not to. Truth be told, he had a hunch where their sympathies would lie in this case and he didn’t really want that confirmed.
Still, it rankled. She didn’t need to talk to Kathleen. She needed to talk to her son, the one whose life she was trying to destroy.
Indignant, Paris walked back to the front door. As he raised his hand to ring the bell he was suddenly conscious of motion behind him. His arms were grabbed in viselike grips and a hand was thrown over his mouth as he was pulled, none too gently, from the porch.
Naturally he struggled. Had his attackers been smaller or less intent on their purpose, he probably still wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, given their brute strength. His feet did not touch the ground until he had reached the far end of the large front lawn and been shoved unceremoniously through the natural wood gate that bordered his mother’s property. Roughly, the hands turned him to face a single, slight figure stepping from the shadows thrown by a large tree at the front edge of the yard.
The face was difficult to make out in the faint light of the moon. The voice, however, was familiar.
“Are you out of your mind?” Lieutenant Garvin Shaw asked.
Paris’s shouted response was muffled by the hand still covering his mouth.
“Quiet!” Shaw hissed.
It took a few moments for Paris to relax, but finally he did. A nod from Shaw freed his mouth. Paris looked briefly at the hulking officers still holding his arms before turning his fury on Shaw.
“What are you doing here?” Paris asked.
“Your personal file acquainted me with your predilection for rash idiocy, Commander,” Shaw replied. “Frankly I’m a little surprised it took you this long to try such a boneheaded move.”
“I can’t talk to her in front of Ozimat. I can’t say what I need to say if I have to weigh every word. It just comes out wrong,” Paris said.
“And what were you planning to tell her tonight?” Shaw asked.
Paris paused. It surprised him to realize that, even now, he wasn’t exactly sure.
Shaw looked to the large man on Paris’s right and said, “It’s all right now. Let him go. And thanks, guys.”
The two men did as Shaw had asked but continued to stand at attention beside Paris.
“Do these two work for you?”
“From time to time,” Shaw replied. “I engaged them the moment I was assigned your case. You should know that they’ll never be far behind you as long as you’re on Earth. Try as hard as you like, Tom. I’m not going to let you screw this up.”
“The JAG corps really is a full-service branch, isn’t it?” Paris asked.
“Let’s take a walk,” Shaw said, ignoring the barb.
The Paris family ranch was located in a secluded valley. Familiar tree-lined paths snaked throughout the forest surrounding the house that had been cleared centuries earlier. Shaw’s goons didn’t follow to
o closely behind, but Paris was still conscious of their steps in the distance as he and his attorney melted into the forest.
“You could have just transported in and stopped me yourself,” Paris said, still smarting from the humiliation of the last few minutes.
“I’m fifty-seven kilos dripping wet with two rocks in my pockets, Commander,” Shaw said. “I know my limits.”
Shaw’s honesty took Paris by surprise and he laughed before he could stop himself.
“I know this is tough for you,” Shaw continued. “But you have to trust me. This isn’t the way. You go after your mom outside of mediation and Ozimat is going to find for Julia before we even finish making our case.”
“She’s winning,” Paris said softly, finally giving voice to the fear that had brought him to his mother’s door.
“Are you a lawyer now?” Shaw asked. “You don’t know that.”
“She’s winning because she’s right.”
Shaw stopped and turned to face Paris. “See, if you were a lawyer, you’d know that doesn’t matter.”
“I try to do the right thing,” Paris said, as if he hadn’t heard. “I try to follow orders. I try to live up to my own expectations, now that I finally know what those are and how good it feels to meet them. But she’s right: Too many times in my life I’ve come up against problems the truth won’t solve. I have to do what my conscience, or my fear, or my heart demands, and damn the consequences.”
“Everybody does that, Tom,” Shaw said.
“Maybe. But not everybody ends up in jail, or in the brig for thirty days, or staring at their mother across that damned table. It’s like I have a special gift for screwing things up.”
“What you did to protect Miral was not wrong,” Shaw insisted. “The problem is it came after all those other choices that were less defensible.” After a moment, Shaw asked, “Why didn’t you tell your parents what B’Elanna was really doing on Boreth?”
“She asked me not to.”
“Didn’t she trust them?”
“She didn’t even know them at that point. And in fairness, I hadn’t painted the best picture of them for her. She didn’t want them to see her weak. She barely lets me see that. And the issue with her mom, it had been building her whole life. She had to confront it when and how she did. But there’s no explaining that to my mom. It’s a Klingon thing.”
“I dated a Klingon woman once,” Shaw said. “She was amazing.”
Paris laughed again. “You don’t say. What happened?”
“She left me. Got tired of sending me to sickbay. It was probably for the best.”
“If you say so,” Paris said. After a long pause, he added, “B’Elanna’s pregnant again.”
“What?”
“She’s going to have our son in about six months.”
Shaw’s silence grew unnerving in short order. Finally he said, “No wonder you’re such a wreck.”
“Actually, this is pretty much just me,” Paris said.
Shaw cracked a smile and shrugged. “This helps us. You should have told me sooner.”
“I hoped this wasn’t going to take more than one meeting with my mom.”
“How many friends do you have around here these days?”
“Not many,” Paris replied, wondering at the abrupt change of subject.
“I need some good character references for you.”
“That’s going to be a challenge. For good references you have to go to the Delta Quadrant,” Paris said.
“Make a list. Don’t contact them yourself. Give it to me and I’ll do that.”
“Okay.”
“Tom?”
“What?”
“Don’t contact them yourself.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“I also told you not to contact your mother outside of mediation.”
“I remember.”
“But here we are.”
Paris sighed. “Don’t worry. I’m done thinking.”
“Good.”
“But you’d better be right about this,” Paris added. “My wife is only half-Klingon, but she won’t put me in sickbay. She’ll put me in the morgue.”
Chapter Nine
THE FIRST WORLD
Counselor Hugh Cambridge had begun to sense the shift in the Confederacy’s representatives several days before. Until then, the presider and her people had lived secure in the knowledge that they rested atop the pinnacle of social, cultural, and technological achievement. The Federation had been viewed as little more than an amusing, if slightly backward, distant cousin. Initially, the Starfleet officers who engaged their diplomats were met with unfailing hospitality, great courtesy, and polite condescension.
The ground had begun to shift as soon as the Vesta had entered orbit around the First World. Cambridge had monitored the public news feeds. They had wasted no time in beginning the comparison game, all of which inevitably concluded with conviction of the Confederacy’s superiority. They seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that they were the only ones engaging in this debate. Starfleet didn’t contact alien species to feather their own nests or bolster their self-esteem. They did it to expand their knowledge of the universe. To encounter a species or civilization more advanced than the Federation was not a source of humiliation; it was simply another wonder to be studied and, when possible, embraced.
The tour of the Vesta had cemented the sea change, at least as far as the delegates were concerned. Naturally, they did not rush to public microphones and proclaim their astonishment at the technology of the Federation. For now, it remained a dark and festering secret. The saddest part was that the admiral had chosen to reveal relatively little of the Federation’s true technical capabilities. Cambridge could only imagine how it would wound the Confederacy to learn of their transporters, transphasic torpedoes, their role in the transformation of the Borg, or their fledgling attempts to understand catomic matter.
The presider seemed determined, however, to regain sure footing in the eyes of her Federation guests. The morning had been spent walking the wide halls and standing beneath the vaulted ceilings of the capital city’s largest museum and central library. A wide variety of fine and decorative arts was on display, and while they weren’t the most interesting or beautiful Cambridge had ever seen—their paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and collage constructions shared a flat, realistic preoccupation and their furnishings tended toward the baroque—they certainly possessed intrinsic beauty and were worthy of admiration.
Dreeg accompanied the group, along with his translator, Grish, but kept his own counsel as the presider regaled Admiral Janeway with the story of the Confederacy’s beginning. Decan walked behind them, beside Cambridge, with Psilakis and Lasren bringing up the rear. The Betazoid lieutenant was clearly learning quickly to regulate his empathic input. He seemed calm and focused as Cin spoke.
“Was it difficult for the Djinari and Leodt to set aside their previous grievances and work together?” Janeway asked.
“Less so than you might imagine,” Cin said, “at least if our records of that journey are to be believed. What we learned when we joined our efforts against a common enemy was that in many ways, even after years of conflict, we were one people at heart.”
Cambridge had already surmised that this was the case. Although the physical similarities between the two species were few, their DNA was another matter. It was likely that hundreds of thousands of years earlier, these two disparate peoples had shared a common ancestor, which made one thing very difficult for the counselor to understand. He had yet to meet a single Djinari or Leodt of mixed heritage.
“I would guess, Presider Cin, that when your people began their journey, the issue of rebuilding a sustainable population was not at the forefront of their minds, but once the Great River was discovered and its streams led you to the First World, that must have changed,” Cambridge ventured.
“It did,” the presider said, nodding. “Our
reproductive rates plummeted aboard the colony ships. They traveled for more than forty years, and although procreation was encouraged among any and all willing to accept the inherent risks, very few of those brave women managed to carry their children to term.”
“Were attempts made to mingle your gene pools?” Cambridge asked.
“It had been accepted biological fact for centuries that the Djinari and Leodt were not compatible in that way,” Cin replied. “I cannot state to a certainty that some did try,” she said, smiling demurely, “but our species cannot reproduce with one another even to this day, nor have there been any productive intermarriages between our people and any of the other species that have since joined the Confederacy.”
“Is that something your people would like to change?” Janeway asked.
Cin shook her head again. “Thank the Source, it is not necessary. In fact, though many had come to believe that a higher power was leading us to our salvation, it was not until we arrived on the First World that we knew this to be true.”
“Your people did not worship the Source before they arrived here?” Cambridge asked.
“It is said that the first to travel the Great River were the first to know the Source. As soon as the streams were discovered and began to carry us far from the reaches of the Borg, many began to tell stories of dreams in which the Source spoke to them. But few embraced the Source until we discovered the First World. The Source revealed itself to us in all of its glory. Only then did its purpose in saving us become clear.”
“How did it do that?” Janeway asked.
“The first people to land on this world knew that it was unique. It was the first planet suitable for colonization we discovered where no evidence could be found of other sentient life ever inhabiting it. Given its age, that puzzled our scientists. Now we understand that it was created for us.”
“Did the Source tell you this?” Cambridge asked.
“In a way,” Cin replied. “In the five years prior to our arrival here, the few children conceived of either Djinari or Leodt parents carried to full term were stillborn or died within hours of their birth. Despair had poisoned them. Our people had struggled for so long to find a new, safe world on which they could rebuild their civilization. But that hardly mattered if no future generations would exist.”
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