by Dave Stern
“Some might say we’ve gone to a remarkable effort on your behalf, Commodore.”
Roan laughed. It was the first time Reed had heard him do that.
“Fair enough, Lieutenant. Let us see what the Vulcans know.”
The short answer to that was a lot. T’Pol’s memory was correct—there were mentions of the Anu’anshee throughout the database. Hundreds of mentions. Most of them they were able to scan and dismiss quickly as irrelevant, apocryphal, inaccurate—fragments of history handed down through the ages as religious texts, or mythology. References to the Anu’anshee as gods with fantastic powers, such as the ability to speak in many tongues at once, to travel great distances in an instant, to bring down mountains, change the course of planets, and so forth. All incredible feats, to be sure, but most of which Reed could have pulled off with the technology at hand on Enterprise.
Some of the claims, though, were a bit more fantastic.
“‘Even death would not defeat them, for they moved beyond the substance of this world at will, from one flesh to the next, their essence eternal and unchanging, a part and not a part of this world.’” Reed frowned. “I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
He looked up and saw Hoshi standing next to Roan.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“It’s all right.” Reed stood. “Here. Why don’t you handle the database? You’ve had more experience dealing with it.”
Hoshi took his seat, and moved the chair closer to the table. She frowned at the screen.
“Let me start by narrowing the query parameters.”
“We don’t want to miss anything, Ensign.”
“No, trust me Lieutenant. Things like this”—she nodded at the screen—“we want to miss. ‘They spoke as our leaders, with the voice of our leaders, in the flesh of our leaders, yet they were gods still.’” She shook her head. “Give me a minute.”
Her fingers flew over the keypad. The screen cleared for an instant—then suddenly filled with text again.
Reed smiled. “This is more like it,” he said, leaning over her shoulder.
He was looking at a list of perhaps three dozen articles now. Longer entries—more recent ones, with more detailed references to the Anu’anshee. An article reviewing recent Vulcan archaeological digs in the Kandoge and Camus systems—another discussing the etymology of the name Anu’anshee (from the Cyrean word for collector, though Hoshi insisted the correct translation of the word was “those who preserve”)—and at last, photos of other outposts the Anu’anshee had abandoned. More of the same oddly shaped buildings Reed had seen on the planetoid below. Hoshi set the images of the outposts to scroll by on the monitor, one at a time.
“Commodore?” Reed asked. “Anything look familiar?”
“It all looks familiar—the Anu’anshee had a very distinctive architectural style. But nothing exactly resembles…”
His voice trailed off.
Reed looked down at the screen just in time to see a picture of what looked like the ruins of a city flash by.
“Hold it,” he said, putting a hand on Hoshi’s shoulder. “Commodore? Did you see something? Recognize something?”
Roan was still staring at the monitor.
“Back up to the last picture, would you, Hoshi?” Reed asked.
The ruined city filled the monitor screen again. The devastation was terrible. Shell of building after building, blackened and broken beyond repair, jagged fingers of metal reaching up to the sky as if in supplication.
Only something was wrong with the image.
In the very middle of the picture, there was a splotch of silver and green.
“Hoshi,” he said, pointing.
“I see it,” she said, and zoomed in on the image.
The silver and green resolved into a handful of small buildings, untouched by the devastation around them, surrounding a cluster of trees.
“That’s not right,” Reed said.
Hoshi zoomed out on the image. Reed found another, smaller spot of green in the upper-right-hand corner of the picture. Hoshi zoomed in on that as well.
“A park,” she said.
The two of them exchanged puzzled glances.
They found several other patches of silver and green—representing similarly untouched areas of the city—scattered all over the map.
“What is this?” Reed asked. “What are we looking at?”
“The image is of the planet Ondahar VII,” Hoshi said, reading off the screen. “We’re looking at what was once its capital city, destroyed in a catastrophic explosion that occurred approximately six thousand years ago. According to these records, three hundred thousand people lived in the city at the time of its destruction. Most perished. This image is one of the few surviving records of the Ondahar civilization.”
“This has to be some kind of a mistake,” Reed said. It looked to him as if someone had taken before and after shots of the city—the attack and its aftermath—and randomly superimposed one on the other.
“No. No mistake.” Roan, who had been silent so long Reed almost forgot he was there, leaned forward between the two of them. “I have seen this pattern of destruction before.”
“But—there is no pattern,” Reed said.
“The energies the Anu’anshee harnessed are not—our scientists said they do not follow the rules of linear space-time. Unleashed, those energies act quixotically. They disperse at random. One building is destroyed—the one next to it survives. A mother might be holding her child’s hand one instant—and the next instant, nothing.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“The evidence is right here, before your eyes. And I have seen it up close—firsthand. I received burns, and two hundred of my soldiers vanished in an instant.”
“This is what happened at Dar Shalaan,” Reed guessed.
“That’s right,” Roan said. “Only on a much larger scale.”
Three hundred thousand people had died in the catastrophe on the screen before them. Reed was beginning to rethink his earlier estimate of what sort of powers the Anu’anshee might have been capable of. What their machines were capable of doing. What they had done, perhaps, to Alana.
He thought again of that smell he’d noticed inside the pyramid—ozone, the odor of electricity. But he had seen no machines there, only the stones. And Archer’s tricorder readings had revealed nothing either.
So what had happened?
He heard Phlox’s voice in his head—
“We need to get back down there,” the doctor had said. “See if we can discover what caused this.”
—and suddenly he saw the doctor, waiting for him just inside the sickbay doors, concern written all over his face.
Eighteen
SICKBAY
1/13/2151 21:54 HOURS
“LIEUTENANT,” PHLOX said. “This way, please.”
He led Reed past the diagnostic beds (there was a curtain up around one of them—Alana’s, Reed presumed) and into his office. The large monitor above Phlox’s desk showed Alana sitting up in one of the diagnostic beds, still in her Starfleet uniform. As Reed watched, she ran her hand along the length of the bed, then touched the diagnostic sensor next to it curiously, as if she’d never seen anything like it before.
The sight brought a smile to his face. When Phlox had called up to the bridge and told him to come to sickbay, Reed had expected the worst.
“She’s all right,” he said. “Thank God.”
“Physically, she is fine. Now that the seizures have stopped.”
“The diaphragen did the trick.”
“No. By the time I got her back here to sickbay, the diaphragen had ceased working. The seizures had returned—her body temperature was five degrees above normal, elevated heart rate, blood pressure at unsafe levels, muscle fibers were on the point of collapse—” Phlox shook his head. “I was most concerned.”
“So what did you do?”
“I should call the bridge.” Reed reached for the com, thinking the captain would be pleased to hear some good news after a day like this one. Archer had sent the lieutenant down on his own—T’Pol had found some references to the Sarkassians in the Vulcan database she wanted to discuss with him.
“That’s the good news,” Phlox said. “He’ll want the bad as well.”
Reed froze where he stood, his hand halfway to the switch.
“Go ahead,” he told Phlox.
“Ensign Hart appears to have amnesia.”
“What?” Of all the things Phlox could have told him were wrong with Alana, that was about the last one Reed expected to hear.
“Amnesia—she’s lost her memory. She has no recollection of her life aboard this ship, or her friends, her relatives, the places she’s lived—”
“I know what amnesia is, Doctor. I just—I find it surprising that Ensign Hart has it.”
“It is not entirely unexpected. The condition is symptomatic of an underlying neurological trauma—as were the seizures.”
Reed remembered what Phlox had said back in the shuttlebay, when they’d first returned from the planet’s surface:
“Her brain is short-circuiting, and I cannot find the fault in the wiring.”
“You couldn’t find any trauma before.”
“Not with the tricorder, no. However, here in sickbay, using the imaging chamber and noninvasive scanning beams…I hoped I would have more success.“
“But you didn’t.”
“No. And I am puzzled as to why—especially given the extent of her memory loss.”
“No trauma sounds like good news to me, Doctor.” Reed frowned. “Isn’t it possible the amnesia was caused by something else?”
“That’s not the way memory functions, Lieutenant.” Phlox sat down, and pulled his chair close to the desk. “Here. Let me show you.”
The doctor keyed in a series of commands, and the image of Hart, still taking in her surroundings, disappeared, to be replaced by a diagram.
“The human brain, Lieutenant. I won’t bore you with a detailed lecture on its anatomy, except to say that the cortex,” he tapped the topmost portion of the diagram, “is where most of the higher brain functions are consolidated. We are concerned with a portion of the cortex called the hippocampus”—he pointed to the bottom part of the diagram—“which is central to all memory functions. Information taken in by the senses is sent here for cognitive association, and then, if appropriate, passed along elsewhere in the brain for further storage. You may be familiar with the concepts of long-and short-term memory?”
Reed nodded.
“Well, to drastically oversimplify the process—”
“Which I appreciate.”
“Short-term memories are stored here”—he pointed to the hippocampus—“and long-term memories, by and large, throughout the cortex.”
“What does all this have to do with Ensign Hart?”
“I’m coming to that,” Phlox said. He cleared the diagram from his monitor, and Alana reappeared on it. She was standing next to the diagnostic bed, studying the display above it intently as if she’d never seen one before.
Phlox swiveled in the chair to face him.
“First of all, there was apparently no damage to the hippocampus. So her ability to form new memories, to retain information, is intact. Already, in the time since she has awakened, I’ve seen this process occur. I can’t stress how important this is for her long-term prognosis.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Reed said.
“You are correct. The ‘but’ is the extent of her long-term memory loss. She does not recognize me, or the ship, or pictures of the crew, or her parents, or any images I was able to show her from her past.”
“It sounds like she’s forgotten everything.”
“Yes. Which means you would expect to see massive neurological trauma somewhere in the brain. Perhaps evidence of the electric shock you suggested took place.” Phlox shook his head. “It is quite puzzling—and disturbing.”
“How so?”
“If there is no damage, Lieutenant, then there is nothing to heal. And that suggests that whatever process has caused this memory loss is not reversible.”
“So the memory loss is permanent?”
“I cannot say for sure. The seizures stopped of their own accord. Her memories may spontaneously return as well.” Phlox shrugged. “The literature suggests the next forty-eight hours will be critical.”
“Can I go in there?” Reed asked, nodding to the monitor. “Talk to her?”
“Ah.” Phlox held up a warning finger. “Another problem. Among the things Ensign Hart has lost is the ability to speak.”
“She can’t talk?”
“No, though I stress that there is nothing physically wrong with her vocal cords. She’s simply forgotten how to speak English—which is another puzzling aspect to the injury, as the literature shows that the mapping of declarative and procedural memories is not—”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Reed interrupted. “I’ll go in now, if that’s all right.”
“Of course. But Lieutenant—”
“Yes?”
“I know the two of you were close. You may be expecting that seeing you will jog her memory, cause her to come back to herself, as it were. Perhaps it will. But if it doesn’t,” Phlox’s voice hardened here, “please do not react in any sort of negative manner to Ensign Hart—her actions, or lack thereof. Our support and positive reinforcement is vital to her chances of recovery.”
“I understand, Doctor,” Reed said.
“Good.” Phlox turned back to his workstation. He tapped on the keypad again, and the screen filled with the smallest type Reed had ever seen. “You know the way. I’ll be here if you need me.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Reed stood at the curtain around Alana’s bed, and pulled it gently aside—just enough to peek in and watch her.
Alana was lying down on the bed again, staring up at the ceiling. Brow furrowed, eyes half-closed, concentrating intently. It was the same old Alana he was seeing, looking just the way she had during those first few firing drills in the armory, when she was trying to work the kinks out of her reflexes. To remember the way her body used to work. The thought made him optimistic. All the things she’d forgotten—the names, the people, the places—they might all come back to her just as easily.
He drew the curtain wide, and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me.”
At the sound of his voice, she started, and looked up quickly. Their eyes locked.
At that instant, Reed realized that he was completely wrong—it wasn’t the same old Alana at all.
The person sitting on the diagnostic bed was someone else entirely—a total stranger to him. Someone who had no memory at all of their relationship, someone who didn’t know him from Adam or any other person on the ship. Someone who, right now, regarded him with only suspicion and alarm.
He remembered what Phlox had said, and forced the smile to remain frozen on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how much of what I say you can understand—I didn’t mean to startle you. My name is Malcolm Reed.”
Her expression remained guarded. He took a step forward, hesitantly.
“Can I come in—talk with you a moment?”
She sat up suddenly. The movement startled him—not so much because of its speed, but the way she did it. Totally unlike any way he’d ever seen Alana move, as if she’d forgotten the way her body worked.
“I’m glad to see you’re better. You had us all worried.”
Her expression remained suspicious.
“You and I,” he said, pointing first to himself, then her. “We were good friends. We worked together—in the armory.”
She stared at him curiously a moment.
“Armory,” she said hesitantly.
“That’s right.” Reed smiled at her. “Armory. Good.”
She smiled back.
It looked forced, unnatural. As if the expression was somehow completely alien to her.
Reed felt his own smile waver then, and cleared his throat, searching for something to say.
Far off in the distance, he thought he heard the com sound. He turned to answer it.
But there was no com on the wall next to him.
The room around him wavered, like an incoming transmission suddenly disrupted by static, and disappeared.
He took a step back, and wobbled on his feet.
Nineteen
SCIENCE LAB E-DECK
1/17/2151 1100 HOURS
“LIEUTENANT REED? ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”
He blinked, and suddenly he was back in the lab, with Roan staring at him curiously. Hoshi turned in her chair to look at him as well, concern on her face.
Being in sickbay, with Alana again—that was just another memory, shooting to the surface of his mind. More intense than before though—as if whatever mechanism was prompting these recollections was increasing in urgency. He should go see Phlox, tell him about it. And he would.
After.
“Malcolm?” Hoshi asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, trying not to sound snappish and—he suspected—failing. “Just a little tired.”
The com sounded again.
“Repeat, T’Pol to Lieutenant Reed. Lieutenant, are you there?”
He crossed the room and opened a channel.
“Right here, Sub-Commander.”
“Commodore Roan is with you?”
“He is. We’re going through the archives.”
“We need you in launch bay two now. We are ready to proceed.”
“The binary star provides us with our window of opportunity,” T’Pol said. “As the two stars approach perihelion—their closest distance to each other—there is a flare-up of radiation across the EM spectrum, lasting approximately two hours. This should create a pattern of interference strong enough that their sensors will be unable to register the shuttlepod’s approach.”
