Dax looked away for a long while. Chapel let the silence linger. She could hear various soft mechanical sounds from the shuttle, many of which, even to her ears, were subtly different than they were supposed to be. It was a testament to Spock’s abilities that the unarmed Copernicus was still chugging along at top warp speed after an unprovoked sneak attack. As Dax’s silence drew out, it occurred to Chapel that perhaps the commissioner could face repercussions for the discovery of the slug. That didn’t seem fair, given that she was ill; but for all Chapel knew, maybe Trill were supposed to go off and die before letting an outsider learn about the slugs.
“Well,” Dax said, turning back to face Chapel, a dark look on her face. “Obviously, I had hoped to avoid this. Such transgressions are not taken lightly by my people.” Her expression softened. “But I did say I brought you as a last resort, so I can’t simply lay the blame on you. I put you in this position, and circumstances have overtaken us.” She shook her head.
Chapel crossed to the jump seat and sat. Then she put all of her complex questions into one simple word. “Why?”
“There are lots of reasons, some of which make sense, at least to Trill. Other reasons . . . who knows? ‘Because that’s just the way it’s done.’ They say it for centuries, even though no one knows why that’s the way it’s done.” Dax shrugged. “It is what it is. All you really need to know is that the symbiont—my passenger—is a sentient being, and its survival is the priority.”
Chapel hesitated. The need to reach the Troyval as scheduled had become more imperative even as it seemed less likely. She was relieved Dax hadn’t brought up the attack yet, but they would have to talk about its effects on their rendezvous plans. Nevertheless, Chapel wanted to learn as much as she could about this symbiont first, as she might be the only doctor available for Dax in the foreseeable future.
Chapel leaned forward. “Obviously I want both of you to be fine, but from my point of view, I’m your doctor. You’re the one presenting health concerns to me. Unless the symbiont is the one who’s truly sick, why should it get preferential treatment?”
“You have to understand, you’re treating both of us, we’re intertwined. Audrid is my given name and Dax is the symbiont’s name. Audrid Dax is our joined name, representing both of us combined. Our minds are linked, as our brainwaves show. We’re a single entity, physiologically bonded. But the symbionts are very long-lived. While Audrid is already in middle age, Dax has centuries left. Because of that, symbionts move from host to host as needed, and the survival of that legacy is more valuable than any single host.”
“Okay. All right.” Chapel was trying to wrap her head around this. It was a lot to take in, especially after the ambush and all the unanswered questions that had raised—like how long until their attackers caught up to them? And then what would happen? “So . . . wait. If your minds are linked, then you have mutual memories?”
“Yes.”
“You can remember things from previous hosts, and future hosts will have your memories—that’s what you mean by a legacy?”
“Yes.”
Chapel flopped back in her seat. “Well, I’m just . . . flabbergasted. I mean, the Vulcan mind-meld is one thing, but this . . . this is—” She stopped, her mouth still open, as she connected additional dots. It was an incidental thing, but they were in the eye of the storm and their future was uncertain; this might be their last chance for some much-needed levity. “Oh, wait a minute. Wait one country-doctor minute. When you said that Leonard knew a relative of yours, you meant that he knew a previous host of your symbiont. So . . . does he know?”
Dax glanced down, as if toward the symbiont. Chapel thought that she seemed a little embarrassed, which was a surprise in itself. Clearing her throat, Dax said, “They met about thirty years ago. And I may have let slip an intimate detail that revealed my familiarity with their time together.”
“Well, that explains that.” Chapel laughed. “No wonder he was so nervous around you. He can be awkward enough about relationships under normal circumstances. He’d have no clue how to behave in this situation. Who would? Outside of another Trill, I mean.”
Dax looked back up and shrugged, clearly over whatever indiscretion she might have committed. She looked tired. “That was one of the reasons I didn’t want him to come with me.” She lay back down. “I didn’t want to deal with all the questions.”
Chapel got up and helped Dax arrange her covers. The lighthearted moment was already gone. “Then I’ll keep it professional. Tell me about your condition. What’s the treatment?”
“There’s still nothing you can do. It requires specialized drugs that only Trill doctors have experience with.”
“But what about just now? My touch seemed to alleviate your symptoms.”
“I don’t know. Somehow you stimulated the symbiont, which in turn woke me through our bond.” Her eyes closed, but she kept talking. “Our bond is the problem. The changes of aging can sometimes interfere with it. It’s usually just a temporary discomfort, but this early onset I’ve had is worse. Are we almost to the Troyval?”
Chapel frowned. Dax asked the question so nonchalantly it was clear that she was disoriented and had forgotten about the attack. Chapel considered sparing her the distress, but there was still the chance that the urgency of their situation could convince Dax to reveal more details about her illness.
Taking the Trill’s hands in her own, Chapel was concerned at their returning warmth. “Audrid, I need you to listen closely. We were attacked, remember? They tried to board us, but we escaped. We might have to delay our rendezvous to avoid being captured. Anything you can tell me—”
Dax’s eyes fluttered open as she lifted her head from the pillow and squeezed Chapel’s hands. “Our bond . . . fading. If lost, we’ll both die.” Her head slumped back to the pillow and her grip went slack. She was in a deep sleep, on the edge of unconsciousness.
Chapel let go of Dax’s hands gently and ran a few tricorder scans. As far as Chapel could ascertain, Dax seemed stable for now. Chapel erased the scans from the tricorder’s memory and left the device at the foot of the bed, setting it to chime if there was a significant change in Dax’s vital signs. After redoing the upper bed restraints, Chapel got field rations out—she wasn’t sure how long it had been since either she or Spock had eaten.Then the shuttle lurched, causing her to stumble. She dropped the unopened rations and grabbed the overhead handrail.
The Copernicus quickly stabilized, but then the lights dimmed. Chapel held on tightly for a moment longer, looking around the cabin, expecting something else to go wrong. It did: The shuttle dropped from warp and the lights dimmed further. If their attacker was following them at warp speed, every second the Copernicus was at sublight brought the enemy exponentially closer. The lights flickered but didn’t go out. She hurried into the cockpit to find Spock kneeling between the pilot and copilot seats, one hand working furiously on each control panel, literally doing two people’s jobs at once.
“I was just about to call for your assistance,” Spock said, without slowing or looking at her.
Chapel slipped into the copilot’s seat. With a glance at the panel in front of her, she saw he was resynchronizing secondary systems with the standard protocols. The interface was clear and intuitive. “I’ve got this,” Chapel said. She took over as Spock got back in the pilot’s seat and redoubled his efforts. Seconds later the stars visible through the forward port distorted and elongated as the Copernicus returned to warp.
The Vulcan was shaking his head as she looked over at him. “I can do no more remotely. I need to pull up the deck plates and make direct mechanical repairs.”
“Which you can’t do while we’re at warp, I suppose.”
“Correct.”
“But we’re at warp already. Can’t we make it to the Troyval?”
“Unlikely. The longer I push the shuttle at warp speed, the greater the chance
that the next time it malfunctions it will require repairs beyond my abilities or available resources. We’ll be dead in space. The logical course of action is to stop as soon as possible for repairs.”
Chapel knew what he meant, but it felt better to keep moving than to stop, especially if they were being pursued. “And what about that other ship?”
“There’s still no sign of it, but my repairs to long-range sensors have been minimal. Logic dictates they are following our warp trail.”
“If they are, there’s nothing we can do. As soon as we drop from warp, they’ll be on top of us.”
“Perhaps. But I have formulated a stratagem.” He pulled up a star chart on the screen between the seats. “We are approaching an uninhabited system with the unlikely designation Rose’s Folly. Were I superstitious, I might find that off-putting; however, I am willing to be guided by the maritime adage of ‘any port in a storm.’ ”
Chapel smiled in spite of their increasingly tenuous circumstances and looked at the chart. “That Jovian planet has a crazy magnetic field.”
Spock glanced up at her with a small smile before continuing. “Indeed. We will drop out of warp and enter into orbit of RF III. Our sensors will not function properly within that field, but neither will theirs. Of the several predictable outcomes, there is a distinct chance that our pursuers will not immediately realize what has happened. The odds are small but encouragingly within the realm of possibility that they will warp past the system.”
“You’re quantifying getting a lucky break.”
Spock only paused a second before saying, “Yes.” He raised an eyebrow as if daring her to further critique his plan, but Chapel motioned for him to continue. “I will effect the minimum necessary repairs, then we’ll leave the system on a different course. I believe that I will be able to repair and modify the communications system sufficiently to get a message through to the Troyval, even if we are still being jammed, to notify them of a new rendezvous point. They should be able to compensate for the course change with minimal delay.”
Chapel nodded. “We just need to do whatever we can to get to the Troyval as soon as possible. If you think this is the best way to accomplish that . . .”
“I do. However, I have to point out—and I tried to raise this issue earlier, but Commissioner Dax required your assistance—that the final decision is yours.”
“What?” Chapel looked at Spock. She must have misheard him. “You’re the ranking officer.”
“Then my concern that this was not made clear in the rush to get under way was justified. This is a medical evacuation, and as the medical officer, you are in command of the mission regardless of our respective ranks. I have made a number of proactive choices under the circumstances, but you need to give full consideration to the plan I have put forth, as it is not without risks to your patient.”
Chapel slouched back in her seat. “Yes, of course.” I can’t believe I let that slip my mind. So easy to fall back into old habits, always the one taking orders. Now she sat up straight. She trusted Spock implicitly, and his plan made sense. “Plot a course for Rose’s Folly, Commander. You’ve got repairs to make. I’m going to check on my patient. Notify me if anything changes.”
Spock nodded, a subtle smile on his face. “I can say something only rarely spoken by me during the five-year mission: Yes, Doctor.”
Chapel chuckled as she got up and headed aft, but she quickly turned serious as she entered the cabin and again examined Dax. Although the Trill’s breathing and heart rate remained steady, her dual brainwave patterns had become increasingly asynchronous. The bond with the symbiont was clearly deteriorating. If Chapel didn’t think of a treatment option soon, Audrid Dax would slip into a coma, and perhaps die, long before the rendezvous.
Chapter 5
Doctor Christine Chapel paced around the aft cabin, repeatedly looping by Dax, past the door to the cockpit, down along the opposite bulkhead, past the drop-down ramp in the stern, then alongside her patient again: an unconscious patient for whom she had no helpful species-specific knowledge, medicine, or procedures.
“Let’s talk this through,” she said. Chapel found that sometimes talking out loud could help sort through a difficult problem because it forced her to focus on and articulate one thought at a time, getting a jumble of ideas under a semblance of control.
She kept walking and tried to ignore that the overhead lights were flickering and the shuttle’s flight was getting wobbly, as though it were a rowboat on a windy lake. Soon they would drop out of warp and she wouldn’t have to worry about a poorly configured warp field. Instead she’d have Spock’s makeshift repairs to worry about.
“Okay, not helpful. Let’s focus on Audrid.” She stopped pacing beside the bed and looked down at her patient. “She’s bonded with a symbiont. Both physically and, more important, mentally. More important, because I can see by the brainwaves that it’s the psychic link that’s fading. Their brainwaves are simply going out of sync, like when a Vulcan is winding down a mind-meld. Soon there’ll be no overlap at all, and then the bond will be broken—and both will die.
“The key is that bond, but how can I fortify a failing telepathic link? It seemed to help when I palpated her abdomen, but I need more than guesswork, I need practical knowledge of—”
She stopped talking as inspiration struck, needing to let her mind race ahead faster. Her thoughts bounced back and forth between events of the five-year mission, the dispersal of the crew afterward, and what was happening to Dax right now. Doctor Jabilo M’Benga. He’d done his internship on Vulcan, and his specialized knowledge had served Spock well on several occasions. He’d done extensive research on mind-melds throughout his career, continuing after he left the Enterprise. She recalled that he’d done a paper on nontelepaths treating telepathic disorders.
“That could be the solution.” She froze in place. “If I have it.” Aboard the Enterprise the paper would have been easily accessible from the main computer, or Chapel could have even contacted M’Benga directly. She didn’t have those options at the moment. Here’s hoping for some luck, Chapel thought as she activated the viewscreen above the diagnostic bed. Since the diagnostic scanners had been off limits to her, she’d had no reason to turn on the bed’s systems—until now. The unit’s computer had an extensive medical database, including research papers not yet fully integrated into standard diagnostic protocols.
As she keyed in search parameters, the overhead lights flickered and went dark. The diagnostic bed had its own power source, however, so the cabin remained lit by the screen as it filled with an index of authors and titles. Chapel tried not to think about the shuttle’s failing systems as she scrolled through the information on the screen. Finally, there it was: M’Benga, Jabilo. “An Overview of Telepathic Challenges and Solutions for the Nontelepathic Caregiver.” She selected the entry and glanced at the abstract, which mentioned “nonstandard treatment modalities that bridge the gap between nontelepath and telepath.” She was already sold. Pulling up the text of the full article, she delved in.
Although the increasingly rough flight of the Copernicus was distracting, it didn’t take long for Chapel to find the data she needed to support her working theories and point the way toward a course of treatment. There were examples of telepathic species that maintained constant mental links, and they provided her with insights thanks to M’Benga’s meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship, which even included surprisingly in-depth information on the Tholians. However, the most relevant information related to Vulcans and other touch telepaths.
Jabilo wrote that “the nontelepath often has much of the same physical structure of the touch telepath, but only uses those conduits of the nervous system for their intended purpose. The touch telepath has, in effect, upgraded the nervous system for dual-purpose use. The nervous system of a touch telepath functions as the communication relay between brain and body, but it can also facilitate a
communication link with the nervous systems of other beings, thereby allowing the touch telepath to tap into those beings’ thoughts. . . . Under appropriate conditions, a nontelepath’s nervous system can augment an ailing telepath with therapeutic results.”
It seemed clear that when she had palpated Dax’s abdomen, stimulating the symbiont, her own nervous system had provided a boost to the failing bond. If she were to act as a human shunt, Audrid and Dax should be able to stabilize, even shore up, their bond until the Copernicus reached the Troyval.
Before she could start the treatment, Spock paged her over the intercom. I guess that still works, she thought as she joined him in the cockpit after checking Dax’s vitals. Both the Trill woman and symbiont should be fine while Chapel spoke briefly with Spock, but she was anxious to return to her patient.
Spock looked grim. “As you may have noticed,” he said, with a gesture toward the darkened overhead lights, “we are having some technical problems. In order to ensure our safe arrival at Rose’s Folly, I need to stabilize some systems immediately. If you could assist me by once again monitoring the systems from the copilot’s station, I will get started.”
She responded with a grim look of her own. “Spock, I need to start treating Commissioner Dax or we’ll lose her.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Doctor, I am obligated to remind you that Trill cultural mores do not allow that.”
Somehow his formality made the statement less imposing. Chapel shrugged. “Commissioner Dax and I reached an understanding of sorts. Even if we hadn’t, I wouldn’t just watch her die.”
Spock tilted his head. “Under the circumstances, I will focus on the former statement and avoid the ethical debate implied by the latter. Nevertheless, the situation puts us at cross-purposes.” He thought for a moment. “I should be able to attend to these repairs on my own, but I would appreciate the safety net provided by your supervision. Would it be possible for you to monitor my progress and your patient’s condition simultaneously? I could route the data to your diagnostic display.”
Star Trek: The Original Series: The More Things Change Page 4
