Star Trek: The Lost Era - 08 - 2319 - One Constant Star

by David R. George III

  The bridge crew seemed to hold its collective breath. The quiet of Enterprise’s drive systems spread as the silent crew operated fewer controls, the various consoles issuing fewer chirps. Everybody waited.

  And still nothing happened.

  The captain stood from the command chair. “Admiral?” she said.

  Harriman worked the helm. “We’re here,” he said, frustration creeping into his voice. “We’re here, but . . .” He did not finish his sentence. He didn’t need to.

  Sulu paced to the navigator’s station, where she tapped Aldani on the shoulder. The lieutenant glanced up, surprise evident in her face, but she quickly recovered and surrendered her position. As the captain sat down at navigation, Aldani moved to a secondary console on the periphery of the bridge.

  “Do you see?” Harriman asked Sulu as she operated her panel.

  “Yes,” she said. “This should be the location.”

  Tenger felt a mixture of relief, vindication, and anxiety. He did not disbelieve that both the captain and the admiral had in the past approached the star in the center of the viewscreen—or one like it—and found themselves thrown from one universe to another, but the notion that the same star existed in all realities seemed to the security chief like a tenuous assumption. At the very least, Tenger disliked plotting their entire strategy to get home around that unproven belief. Learning that Sulu and Harriman’s Odyssey plan would not work, while removing one potential solution, would free the crew to pursue other ideas.

  But what other ideas? Tenger asked himself. From his long experience, he knew that Starfleet officers had traveled to parallel universes and returned home by a number of different means. As far as he knew, though, such journeys had involved the same method of transportation, in the same place—essentially as though walking through a doorway from one universe to the next, and then returning through that same doorway. But with the apparent destruction of the portal, the door through which the Enterprise and Excelsior crews had traveled no longer existed.

  At the helm, Harriman looked to the captain. “We need to institute a search plan,” he said. The frustration that Tenger had heard in the admiral’s voice remained, but it had been joined with doubt.

  At the navigator’s station, Sulu nodded and operated her controls. “A tight spiral,” she said, “centered at the previous transition point, maintaining the same distance from Odyssey. One percent of overlap.”

  Harriman reached up and rubbed the bottom of his face. Tenger recognized the gesture, and he wondered if the admiral had at one time sported a beard and mustache. “At what speed?” Harriman asked. The two senior officers spoke only with each other, lending substance to the claim that they had together previously experienced a similar situation. The sight of a Starfleet admiral and captain working the helm and navigation stations seemed surreal to Tenger.

  “One-eighth impulse to start,” Sulu said. “As the radius of our search pattern increases, we can accelerate.”

  “Agreed.”

  The captain continued to work her panel. After a few moments, she told Harriman, “Course laid in.”

  “Engaging impulse engines,” said the admiral.

  The familiar beat of the sublight drive rose in the bridge. Tenger usually found the sound comforting, but at that moment, it felt like a lonely cry in the desert, an inconsequential drop in the ocean. He tried to determine how long it would take, traveling at impulse velocity, to exhaustively search every point a specified distance from a star. Too long, he concluded when the numbers began to ran incalculably high.

  Enterprise traced its spiral through space, and the captain stayed at the navigation console. Twice, on the hour, Yeoman Plumley arrived on the bridge for the captain’s signature on a status report. Other than the few brief words he exchanged with Sulu, nobody spoke.

  As alpha shift progressed, Tenger’s attention wandered. He would review his instruments, but then his mind would drift to the crew’s predicament, to the solution that wasn’t a solution, and to the improbability of Enterprise ever managing to find its way home. He was gazing forward at the viewscreen, mired in his own thoughts, when he saw the stars blink.

  At first, it didn’t register, but then Commander Linojj said, “Captain.” The one word carried her excitement in it. Tenger studied the viewer, but the stars appeared as constant as ever.

  At the helm, Harriman looked to the captain. “Where are we?”

  “Not where we were,” Sulu said, and though she kept her voice level, Tenger perceived a sense of anticipation in her. “The pattern of stars has changed. Reversing course.” A moment later, the stars on the viewscreen jumped, one arrangement disappearing in favor of another. “All stop,” the captain said.

  “Engines answering all stop,” Harriman said.

  On the main screen, the collection of visible stars changed again, and again, and again.

  Sulu exchanged a look with the admiral, and then she stood up and moved back to the command chair. Slowly, she gazed around the bridge at the crew. When she made eye contact with Tenger, all the doubts he had harbored about what they were attempting dwindled to nothing. He had followed Captain Sulu for eight years, and he knew his confidence in her was well-founded.

  The captain finished looking around the bridge by facing forward, toward the continuously changing array of stars on the viewscreen. “We’ve taken the first step on our way home,” she said.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Ensign Hawkins Young reached up to the small panel beside the door, but then hesitated to tap the control surface. Maybe I shouldn’t do this, he thought. By ship’s time, the new year would arrive shortly, and he knew that many members of the crew intended to mark the occasion in some way. It had been four months since Enterprise had arrived at Odyssey and begun its journey through myriad universes, paradoxically by remaining in place, and the long, unsure path the ship traveled would doubtless temper much of the celebration. Still, if Nurse Veracruz has plans for the evening—

  The single-paneled door glided open before him, revealing the pixieish form of Rosalinda Veracruz. She stood not much more than a meter and a half, with dark, wavy hair and dark eyes. “Oh,” she said, clearly surprised by his presence in front of the door to her quarters.

  “Sorry,” Young said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just about to tap the door chime.”

  “Were you?” Veracruz asked. In the months Young had visited her for counseling sessions, she had almost never spoken to him in anything but questions.

  “I was,” he said. “But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to bother you. I thought you might have plans tonight.”

  “Is there something you wanted to talk about, Ensign?” Veracruz asked.

  Young shrugged, then scolded himself for the tentative gesture. The counseling sessions he’d had with the nurse after his rescue from the planet—the planet that wasn’t Rejarris II—had helped him tremendously, both with the survivor’s guilt he’d felt and his confidence in re-assimilating into the Enterprise crew. She had brought him around to see, and to truly believe, that he was not responsible for everything that had happened, for all the ills that had befallen his crewmates, for the horrible injury to Commander Linojj, for the death of Galatea Kostas, for the continuing separation of the crew from the Federation. Veracruz had allowed him to conclude on his own that if he hadn’t chosen to climb atop the portal, where a tractor beam had then pulled him through the device, that a shuttlecraft sent down to the planet to investigate would likely have carried several members of the crew to the same fate. He had done nothing wrong, and he couldn’t reasonably blame himself for the events that had followed his falling through the portal.

  And if I did hold myself responsible for everything, he thought, then I’d have to demand credit for rescuing the Excelsior crew. None of it, he had eventually come to realize, bore up under scrutiny. He had discharged the duties of his rank and position, if not with distinction, then at least with competence. The captain and first officer had mad
e the same point to him, but it had taken numerous sessions with Nurse Veracruz for him to believe it himself, and to internalize that belief in an organic, meaningful way.

  After a month of intense counseling, Young’s daily talks with the nurse had become twice-weekly events, and after two months, she’d released him from any obligation to continue seeing her. He appreciated all that she’d done for him, and he’d told her so, but he had studiously avoided her after that. He knew that if he suffered guilt or doubts, he could and would make another appointment with her, but he also continued to be mindful of what he’d endured, and to deepen his understanding of all the emotions that had come with those experiences.

  “Yes, there is something I wanted to talk about,” he told her, forcing the words out in a rush.

  “Are you uncertain, Ensign?”

  “No,” Young said, too quickly and without conviction. He decided to admit the truth. “Actually, yes, I’m not certain about this. But I don’t want to keep you if you’re going somewhere.”

  “I was headed to the mess for dinner,” Veracruz said, “but I’m happy to make time for you, Ensign.” She stepped aside so that Young could enter.

  He didn’t move. “Actually, Nurse . . . um, I mean . . . Rosalinda . . . I was wondering if you might want to have dinner with me.”

  For the second time, Veracruz appeared surprised. “I—” she started, but then she stopped. Young waited. He understood the concept of transference, the redirection of a patient’s feelings onto a counselor. It had been for that reason that Young had stayed away from Veracruz for two months after his sessions with her had ended. He wanted both to confirm his genuine feelings for her, and to demonstrate to the nurse that she needn’t worry about the true nature of his emotions.

  When Veracruz didn’t answer, Young offered her a smile and asked, “Are you uncertain, Nurse?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “I’m not certain about this at all.” Young’s heart sank, but then she smiled back at him. “But the new year is coming, Ensign, so why not try new things?”

  “Please call me Hawk,” Young said. He held out his arm to her, and she took it. They walked like that all the way to the mess hall.

  * * *

  13

  * * *

  All at once, a welcome sense of peace washed over her.

  Captain Demora Sulu sat back in the command chair on the Enterprise bridge and regarded the dizzying tableaux of stars dancing on the main viewscreen. When she had first witnessed such a display seventeen years earlier, it had represented a forfeiture of virtually everything she held dear, an incalculable loss of all that she used to define herself: people and places, career and accomplishments, memories of the past and dreams of the future. She remembered being overwhelmed by the enormity of her deprivation only moments before her entire life—by some process she didn’t understand, by a seemingly indifferent randomness—had been given back to her.

  As Sulu watched one pattern of stars after another appear on the viewer, she wondered what had changed for her between then and now. She could see the simple answer. When she and Harriman had unexpectedly been whisked away from their universe by Odyssey and unceremoniously deposited in another—and then another, and another, potentially ad infinitum—she’d been sitting on a shuttlecraft with her commanding officer, rather than on the starship on which she’d lived for a decade, among a crew of hundreds, many of whom she counted as friends. She and John had also become friends by then, but they hadn’t yet developed the closeness that they ultimately would. She had other, closer friends back on Enterprise, and in other places, too. Though she could not recall whom she’d been seeing at the time, she did remember that she’d been in a romantic relationship.

  And, of course, there had been Dad.

  The first time that Odyssey had robbed her of her place in the universe, it had taken away so much: the place she lived, most of the people she called her friends, a budding romance, and her family. It had taken away everything.

  But this time . . .

  Odyssey hadn’t pulled Sulu from her universe; the portal at Rejarris II had. In the end, it had also brought Enterprise back to her, the place she’d called home for the past twenty-seven years, which amounted to more than half of her life. Almost all of her closest friends lived aboard the ship with her, and the portal had delivered to her one of them who didn’t in John Harriman. She didn’t have much of a love life at the moment, but she hadn’t before everything that had happened in the previous eleven months.

  And, of course, there was Dad.

  Prior to encountering the portal, Sulu had lived with the grief and the never-ending sense of loss that had come with losing her father. Remarkably, he had been returned to her—or she to him. Either way, she once again had a parent, a man she admired and respected, a man whose company she enjoyed, a man she loved as she had loved no other.

  And Odyssey represented only possibilities to her, and more than one. She and her crew—and the recovered crew of Excelsior—might one day find their way back to their own universe, but they might also find another in which they would settle. Perhaps they would find someplace spectacular.

  That was the simple answer. The first time, Odyssey had taken everything from her. The second time, she had everything with her.

  Sulu had never been a scientist, but she understood Occam’s razor, the principle that, among competing theories, the simplest one is considered more likely to be true. But as she sat on the bridge of Enterprise, among not only her crewmates but some of her closest friends, with her father restored to her life, she didn’t believe the simple answer. She didn’t think that the pain she’d felt at Odyssey seventeen years prior, and the peace she felt at that moment, depended at all on what she had lost in the past and what she possessed in the present.

  I think it’s me.

  Such a formulation sounded egocentric, perhaps even egotistical. Sulu didn’t mean to discount her friends or her family; they meant more to her than she could put into words. She didn’t mean to ignore the reality of having a home; she loved Enterprise and had no desire to leave it.

  But if I didn’t have these people, or this ship? Would I stop being me?

  When Sulu had graduated from the Academy, she could have been assigned to any vessel in Starfleet. Her posting to Enterprise had been the result of her superior performance, but there had been other Excelsior-class ships out there, ships with distinguished records. If she had ended up on Challenger or Constitution or Paris, would she have had a substantially different life? Would she have been a substantially different person? She would have had a different home, and different friends, but she thought that she would still be Demora Sulu, a woman happy with her choices, contented with her life, and at peace with herself. She worked hard each day to be the best version of herself that she could be, open to learning new things, to exploring fresh perspectives, and to growing.

  That didn’t mean that she didn’t understand loss. On the contrary, she had experienced it from an early age. But that first loss of her mother hadn’t ended Demora’s life; she had gone on. And when she thought her father had died, she’d hurt, but she’d also gone on then, too.

  Life is what you make it, she thought. Happiness is a choice.

  Actually, maybe Occam’s razor did apply.

  The sound on the bridge shifted. Sulu felt rather than heard the characteristic vibration of the impulse engines as they engaged, and then the familiar thrum permeated the air. “Ensign Syndergaard?” the captain said, even as she studied the main viewscreen.

  “It’s not me, sir,” said the helm officer, excitement raising the level of his voice. He tapped at several control surfaces on his console. “It’s the navigational routine.”

  On the viewer, the stars shined steadily. In the center of the screen a grouping of seven stars looked to Sulu like a backward question mark. She smiled, though she thought not so much for herself as for everybody else aboard.

  Well, maybe for everybody but Jo
hn and Amina, she thought, understanding that the husband and wife would have been happy wherever they’d ended up, as long as they’d ended up there together.

  A boatswain’s whistle sounded. “Captain Sulu to the bridge,” came her father’s voice. Demora reached to activate the intercom on the arm of the command chair when she heard a second signal.

  “Admiral Harriman to the bridge.”

  “Captain,” Kanchumurthi said, “we’re being contacted from all over the ship. Commander Buonarroti in engineering, Doctor Morell in sickbay, Lieutenant Ved in the transporter room.”

  Sulu stood up, a smile on her face. She appreciated everybody’s excitement. “Sort them out, Ramesh,” she said. “Tell everybody I’ll be with them shortly.”

  “Captain, I can confirm from the observable stars that we have returned to our universe,” Aldani said at navigation.

  “Thank you, Gaia,” Sulu said. “Lay in a course—”

  “Captain,” said Fenn, “something’s wrong.” Sulu turned toward the science officer, but she felt no panic, no disruption in the calm that had come upon her. “The locations of some stars aren’t right.”

  “Why is that, Borona?” Sulu asked. “Have we not returned to our universe?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Fenn said, obviously trying to make sense of her readings. “The collection of stars is right, the luminosities and spectral types are right, but—” Fenn’s head suddenly snapped up from her panel. “It’s not the right time.”

  “You mean it’s not eleven months since we arrived at Rejarris Two?” Sulu asked. She knew that the program written to analyze the star patterns as Odyssey moved them from universe to universe contained a time component in it. She and John had determined seventeen years ago to do that when they’d been in the shuttlecraft, and she’d made sure of it that time, too.

  “No, sir,” Fenn said. “It’s three weeks before we arrived at Rejarris Two.”

  Sulu laughed. “Well, then,” she said, “I guess we haven’t missed anything.” She heard some of the bridge crew chuckle, but more out of relief than amusement, she thought. “Gaia, set a course for Starbase Twenty-Three, but keep us out of any shipping lanes or populated regions. I don’t want to come into contact with any other ships. Torsten, I want low warp speed. Get us back to the Federation in a month, after Admiral Harriman and Captain Sasine have left Helaspont Station for Rejarris Two. We’ve done enough traveling from one universe to another. The last thing we need to do is alter the timeline.”