“Yes,” John said. He glanced down for a moment, and he squeezed her hands when he did. When he looked back up, Sasine saw that his face had hardened—not in anger, but in an attempt to hold his tears at bay. She had been with John for sixteen years; she knew when something affected him. “I’m bringing the Cassiopeia to provide medical care for Demora and a home for the Excelsior crew. But I also mean to bring them back home.”
“But if the portal operates in only one direction . . .” Sasine let the question fade on her lips. John’s use of the word bring brought her up short. He’s going to take the ship through the portal himself.
“The Enterprise crew believe that there may be a way to reverse the direction of the portal’s flow,” he said. “Regardless, another solution exists.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Sasine said.
“I’m afraid that I can’t say more. It’s classified, but once I take the Cassiopeia through the portal, I may be able to bring Demora and her father and everybody else home safely.”
“John, you said you may be able to bring them home.” Sasine deserted her position as a Starfleet captain and stepped fully into her role as a wife. “That doesn’t sound hopeful.”
“I am hopeful,” John told her. “It’s true, though, that nothing is certain.”
“What happens if the prospective solution fails?” Sasine asked, clearly following what John told her, but unwilling to accept the implications. “Does that mean you’ll be trapped in another universe?”
John could only nod his head.
“Can’t somebody else take on this mission?” Sasine asked meekly, already knowing the answer, but having to ask anyway. “Somebody without a spouse?”
John threw up one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know if any such person exists who has possession of the classified information needed for this mission. But even if there is, how could I ask another person to take a risk I’m unwilling to take myself?”
It was Sasine’s turn to look down. She gazed at their hands, at the marvelous contrast between his flesh and hers, pale and dark, yin and yang, two halves of a whole. She didn’t even realize she’d begun crying until a tear dropped onto her husband’s hand. “What about me, John?” she asked in a whisper. She raised her head and peered at him. “What about us?”
“Amina, you know I love you,” he said. “I think I loved you even before we ever met. In my heart, I knew who you were, the fullness of your heart, the depth of your mind, the music of your laughter. I knew all that about you and more, and I had only to find you. And I did.”
“We found each other,” Sasine agreed, smiling through her tears.
“We found each other, and I don’t want to lose you,” John said, almost pleading with her, as though she planned to take on the mission and he wanted to stop her. “You mean more to me than anything else.”
She squeezed his hands. “If that’s so, then how can you do this? How can you take this chance?”
“Because I have to do this,” John said. “As far as I know, nobody else can. Even if somebody could, they might not be able to reach Demora in time to save her.” He reached up and wiped away Sasine’s tears. “Demora and I have been friends for more than a quarter of a century. Hell, I served with her aboard the Enterprise for eighteen years. That’s even longer than you and I have been together.”
“Demora is my friend too, but she doesn’t mean to me what you do.”
“I’m not saying that Demora is more important to me than you are,” John said. “But she was a fine officer in my crew, she served with distinction and loyalty, and she literally saved my life on more than one occasion. I have to do this because it’s the right thing to do.”
“I know,” Sasine admitted, both to John and to herself. “But how can it be the right thing if it takes us away from each other?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “I just know that we don’t do the right thing because it’s easy or convenient or what we want. We do the right thing because it’s the right thing. If I don’t do this, then I’m not the man you fell in love with anyway.”
Sasine examined her husband’s face, searching for a solution she knew she wouldn’t find. After a moment, he leaned forward and took her in his arms. They held each other like that for a long while.
Then John finished packing.
♦ ♦ ♦
Harriman sat at the desk in his office, studying his after-action report of the first mission he had ever undertaken with Demora Sulu for Starfleet Intelligence. He also pored over SI’s response initiative. It had taken sixteen hours for them to reply to his request and transmit the encrypted files to Helaspont Station from their nearest black site.
The admiral had hoped to find something of value to assist him with his upcoming mission aboard Cassiopeia. As he reviewed the material, though, he found no detail that he didn’t already recall from his and Demora’s encounter with the star they had called Odyssey. Starfleet Command had designated the region off-limits to space travel. Presumably because of the star’s proximity to Romulan space, or perhaps because of the tremendous risk, no attempts had been made to study the phenomenon.
At least, there have been no attempts that I’m authorized to know about, Harriman thought. Regardless, so far as he could tell, no other known contacts had ever been made with the mysterious star. Of course, anybody who did experience the effects of Odyssey might never have returned to our universe so that they could report it.
Commander Linojj had said that Demora wanted the admiral to know that she had “confirmed an Odyssey solution.” But what does that mean? From what Linojj had told him, Demora and two of her crew had been marooned with a pair of planetary shuttlecraft on an empty world. If that world actually orbited Odyssey, then Demora would have been able to attempt a return herself. That seemed unlikely to Harriman, both because Demora hadn’t made such an attempt, and because in none of the universes to which they had traveled did the star possess any planets.
Harriman therefore wondered how Demora could have confirmed anything about Odyssey, other than the simple fact of its existence. She couldn’t, he realized. She could only look to the right part of the sky and verify the color and magnitude of the star there. She would have no way of knowing whether or not the conditions that she and Harriman had encountered still existed—or if they had ever existed at all in that universe.
The admiral checked the time, then closed the files and deactivated the communications-and-computer interface on his desk. Cassiopeia would arrive at Helaspont Station shortly, and he would have to have a difficult conversation with the ship’s captain. After that, he would depart the station, prepared to find out if Odyssey really did exist in Demora’s universe, and whether it could send them all back home.
2319
* * *
Enterprise
* * *
* * *
9
* * *
Seated at the main console on Pytheas, Captain Hikaru Sulu checked the proximity alert, as well as the sensors that, in the right circumstances, should trigger that alert. He also ran his own scans. He’d done all of that periodically since he’d landed the shuttlecraft. Such examinations had become a habit over the years, though up until the last four days, he’d had to utilize a tricorder to check for indications of the arachnoids. As he knew too well, deposits of various elements all around the planet often masked the subterranean bio-signs—and sometimes even the movements—of the deadly creatures. He defended against that by frequently verifying the integrity of the ground in the immediate area.
For eleven years, the arachnoids, as Excelsior’s crew had come to call them, had been a bane. The ship’s complement had numbered seven hundred thirty-two. As best they could tell, twelve died in the collision with the portal, and another eight perished when their escape pod failed during its descent and crashed. That meant that seven hundred twelve of Sulu’s crew made it safely to the surface of the unknown planet. Since then, one hundred forty-
seven had succumbed to various maladies and dangers—the majority of them killed by the arachnoids, either as the direct result of injuries suffered in an attack, or from venom injected into their bodies. Most of those casualties had occurred early on during their time on the planet, but Janet Whistler, one of the crew’s medical technicians, had died just eight months prior, when she’d gotten too close to what she’d thought had been a freshly killed creature. Ironically, she’d been attacked by the nearly dead arachnoid while attempting to harvest its venom for use in producing antivenin, a necessity since their remaining stock would soon lose stability and potency.
Satisfied with the state of terrain around and below the shuttlecraft, Sulu turned in his chair so that he could see his daughter—even though seeing her in her present condition broke his heart. In her crew’s battle aboard Amundsen with four of the grotesque arachnoids, one of the creatures had driven its envenomed front appendage into her abdomen. Christine Chapel, Excelsior’s chief medical officer, had been able to remove the section of the barbed limb from Demora’s body and treat her wounds, thanks in part to medical equipment—and antivenin—that the Enterprise crew had sent through the portal, but the doctor could only do so much. Demora’s condition had stabilized for the time being, but she required surgery and support that would be better, safer, and more effectively carried out in a Starfleet sickbay.
Sulu regarded the unconscious form of his daughter, laid out on an antigrav stretcher in an aft corner of the shuttlecraft. Chapel and one of her nurses, Vigo Eklund, tended to her. On a chair behind them, on the other side of the cabin, Demora’s torn and bloodied uniform tunic lay in a bunch. He noted the captain’s insignia, and despite his concerns for his daughter’s health, he took great satisfaction in her rank. With everything else that had taken place over the previous four days, he hadn’t had much of a chance to think about her promotion. The last time he’d spoken with Demora before his disappearance, she’d been serving aboard Enterprise as Captain Harriman’s executive officer. It didn’t surprise him at all that, in the time since, she’d made captain and taken over command of the ship. He felt abundantly proud, which just made the situation all the more difficult.
Sulu almost couldn’t bear what had happened to his daughter, not when they had, against all odds, ended up in the same place years after he had forsaken any chance of ever seeing her again. After Excelsior had collided with the portal and passed through it, he had been the last member of the crew to leave the dying vessel. Blasting away from the mortally wounded ship by firing the explosive bolts on his escape pod, he successfully fled Excelsior, but discovered on his trip down to the planet that his emergency vehicle had been badly damaged. As the pod plummeted wildly through the atmosphere, Sulu worked feverishly to gain flight control. He managed to do so only at the last possible moment, leveling off just above a forest. His pod plowed through trees that slowed it enough to avert his death. When it finally struck the ground, it dug out a long trench, leaving him buried in the escape vehicle eight meters beneath the forest floor, battered and unconscious. Since he came down nearly a thousand kilometers from the rest of his crew, it took them days to find him.
After Excelsior had been destroyed, Sulu had championed all attempts to escape the planet and return home, although he privately concluded that they had involuntarily traveled to another universe. The patterns of stars in the night sky told the crew that they’d ended up incalculably far from the Federation. It had taken months, and in some cases years, but they had all ultimately accepted their aggregate fate to one degree or another. They still took what few actions they could to foment their rescue, although, as time wore on, their expectations diminished to almost nothing.
When Sulu had come to realize that he might never again see his daughter, it had for a time beaten him down. He missed her terribly, but worse than that, he understood that his disappearance—and the eventual presumption of his death—would cause her great pain. He hated to think of Demora mourning him, of her hurting and sad, with the endless ache of uncertainty preventing her from ever achieving closure.
And then when I heard her voice . . .
Sulu still had difficulty believing that he wasn’t experiencing some sort of hallucination or dream—or nightmare, considering Demora’s condition. Four days prior, Ryan Leslie had visited the last of their escape pods still under power. Excelsior’s emergency craft had been designed to keep a full load of passengers alive while adrift in space, or, if necessary and possible, to safely land them on a nearby world. Each pod carried a month of provisions, along with enough supplies and battery power to maintain life support, communications, and rudimentary helm control for the same amount of time.
Once the Excelsior crew had landed on the planet, they’d rationed everything they had. After eleven years, only a single escape pod retained a functioning battery. Where they had initially transmitted distress calls on a daily basis, they had, over time and in the interest of conserving power, reduced that to once a week, and finally to once a month.
Sulu had promoted Leslie to first officer just after the destruction of Excelsior, when Beskle Crajjik’s escape pod had failed during its descent, crashing and killing all eight crew members aboard. Still the security chief, Leslie took on the task of regularly sending out a distress call. He had just finished doing so when he unexpectedly received a message—one delivered in Federation Standard. He listened as a woman issued a call to any Excelsior survivors. Leslie replied at once, but he received no response. The message, clearly on a loop, then repeated, and the speaker identified herself as Captain Demora Sulu of U.S.S. Enterprise. According to Leslie, he had almost knocked himself cold bolting from the escape pod to find Hikaru.
When Sulu had returned to the pod with his first officer, the two men had listened to the message together. The captain recognized his daughter’s voice immediately, and it filled him with an odd mixture of potent elation and a peculiar sense of dislocation. He then realized that Demora’s presence on the planet could mean that she had traveled through the portal and become stranded as well—a disheartening thought he hoped would turn out not to be the case.
Sulu had repeatedly tried to contact his daughter, unsuccessfully. He didn’t know if environmental or meteorological conditions caused the problem, or if the transmitter in the escape pod had failed, or even if Demora might have equipment issues of her own. Since the pod could still fly, though, Sulu formed a team—essentially a planetary version of a landing party—and set out to locate her.
At dawn the next day, they’d found Amundsen. But as Sulu and his team flew toward the shuttlecraft, the ground swallowed it whole—an occurrence that, through the years, had stolen a number of the Excelsior crew’s escape pods. The arachnoids would sometimes carve out large cavities in the earth, essentially creating sinkholes that would trap their prey and allow them to attack.
Sulu had set down the escape pod a safe distance from the opening in the ground. Armed with phasers set to kill, he led his team to the edge of the hole—and then down into it. By the time they had scaled the earthen walls, Amundsen’s hull had been wrecked, its bow staved in, its roof perforated and mangled. One arachnoid had been crushed dead in front of the shuttlecraft, and the legs of a second hung motionless where it had been trapped between the stern and a rock wall. Inside the cabin, two more of the creatures lay lifeless, as did a young female ensign. Another ensign, a young man, had been badly injured, but still breathed. Demora had collapsed to the deck, a disembodied alien limb protruding from her abdomen, her respiration shallow, her color ashen.
Removing the injured personnel from beneath the ground had not been easy. While Doctor Chapel treated Demora and the ensign at the scene, Sulu and the rest of his team excavated parts of the hole, blasting boulders into dust with their phasers and ensuring a clear path for their escape pod. They then flew down into the hole, where they used antigrav stretchers to carry out Demora and the ensign through the compromised roof of the shuttlecraft. They also retriev
ed the body of the female ensign.
Sulu had then returned to the camp that the Excelsior survivors called home, a collection of dwellings constructed primarily of native materials. They kept the powerless escape pods in various nearby locations, mostly for use as emergency shelters in the case of extreme weather or an attack by the arachnoids. Limited by their lack of medical facilities and supplies, Chapel and her medical staff did what they could for Demora and the ensign.
Later that day, the surviving ensign—Hawkins Young—had regained consciousness. He explained what had happened—to him, to Demora and Ensign Kostas aboard Amundsen, and to the portal, which the Enterprise crew had found not in space, but on the surface of Rejarris II. Sulu wondered if Excelsior’s collision with the alien device had activated some sort of retrieval protocol that had brought it back to the planet for repairs. Young also revealed the plan of the Enterprise crew to restore power to the portal by hauling it back into orbit.
In anticipation of that taking place, Sulu had ordered Leslie to monitor for messages. The next day, he intercepted one sent to Demora by Commander Xintal Linojj, one of the names that Sulu’s daughter had uttered before losing consciousness, and whom Ensign Young identified as Enterprise’s first officer. Transmitted by a probe that had been directed through the reenergized portal and down to the planet, the message provided instructions on how to respond: by recording a reply onto a scrolling padd and then taking it into orbit, to a specific set of coordinates, and holding it up against the forward viewport.
Sulu and several of his crew had flown their escape pod to the second Enterprise shuttlecraft on the planet, where they’d found the scene Young had described to them: Pytheas, surrounded by a probe, two log buoys, and the decaying body of an arachnoid. Sulu found the scrolling-enabled padds aboard the shuttlecraft, and he recorded his own message onto one of them. He identified himself and told an abbreviated account of the events that had resulted in him and his crew being stranded.
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