Infinity's Prism

by Christopher L. Bennett

  The rest of the short ride into the city passed in silence. As they climbed the Berkeley Hills, T’Pol stared out the rear window of the small vehicle, back toward the San Francisco Bay, and beyond, the city of San Francisco itself. Much of the city’s skyline was still familiar from her time at the Vulcan Consulate. The Transamerica Pyramid and Rincon Hill Towers still stood as they always had, proud survivors of both the Third World War and the 2109 earthquake. But much had changed over the last century as well. The current Golden Gate Bridge, though it strongly evoked the original twentieth-century landmark span, was clearly different from its historic predecessor. Its towers were slightly taller, painted a slightly brighter shade of orange, and of course, the Marin County end of the new span was several hundred meters farther to the west, away from the crater John Frederick Paxton had created with his weaponized verteron beam.

  T’Pol closed her eyes, her face turned away from Grayson, and focused all her mental energies on keeping her emotional controls in place. Still, she couldn’t hold back the massive surge of memories now returning…

  They saw the smoke plume before they’d even reached Earth orbit.

  T’Pol had reluctantly left her child, Elizabeth, in Phlox’s care, pushing aside the illogical idea that her constant presence might keep her daughter from dying. Trip seemed no more willing to leave his daughter, but it was his homeworld that had been attacked, and his human emotionalism compelled him to witness the devastation for himself. Together they went up to the bridge, where the main viewscreen displayed the carnage.

  Even though Paxton had been impossibly accurate—managing a direct hit on the center of the Starfleet Command Complex from a distance of over one hundred million kilometers—the damage was nowhere near as limited as he had implied it would be. The verteron beam, with enough energy to pull massive comets out of orbit or to vaporize a starship, hit Earth with the power of a high-yield fusion bomb. A black column of toxic plasma residue, mixed with millions of metric tons of debris, had been thrown into the atmosphere, blotting out both ends of the Golden Gate and spreading east over the bay. Through the black cloud, orange flames could be seen burning across the peninsulas both north and south of the narrow strait.

  “Oh, my God,” Hoshi Sato whispered from her station, tears streaming down her face. She had been left in command of Enterprise while Archer and the rest of the bridge crew took a shuttle-pod to the Martian surface to rescue T’Pol and Trip. It had been Sato’s responsibility, if the captain failed to reach Paxton’s command center, to take out the facility and stop him from carrying out his threat against Starfleet and the alien delegates gathered for the Coalition of Planets negotiations. Archer had managed to shut down the verteron beam once, but Sato had been caught completely off guard when it was reactivated.

  The rest of the crew, as well as Minister Nathan Samuels, simply stared at the screen in stunned silence while Sato continued to repeat, “Oh, my God,” over and over. At some point, the screen image switched from the Enterprise’s own sensors to news coverage being transmitted from the surface. The northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge had toppled, and fires raged from Sausalito to the Presidio. “It’s like the Xindi all over again,” Malcolm Reed croaked from his station—a hyperbolic comparison, T’Pol had thought at the time, considering that the Xindi attack the previous year affected an area nearly three thousand kilometers long and killed seven million.

  “No,” Minister Samuels disagreed. “It’s worse; we did this to ourselves. We’re supposed to be beyond this!” he shouted as he waved his hand wildly at the images of destruction before him, and then he sagged. “The demons of our past…have won.”

  “Lady T’Pol?”

  T’Pol forced herself back to the present, and turned an impassive face back to her host. “Yes?”

  “We’re here,” Grayson said, just as T’Pol registered the fact that their aircar had stopped and settled to the ground near a tall, decorative green copper gate. Silently chiding herself for getting so lost in her memories, she fell in step beside Grayson as they walked onto the campus.

  T’Pol had thought, after so many years among humans, that she could no longer be surprised by any aspect of their world or their culture. But her introduction to the Berkeley campus defied all her expectations. Casually dressed young people milled along the broad paved pathway past her and Grayson; none of them seemed in a particular hurry to be anywhere. Numerous others populated the grassy quadrangles on either side of the walkway, and while some appeared to be reading and studying from padds, the majority were engaged in athletic games and other leisure activities. “Are these students?” T’Pol asked.

  “Well, yes, of course,” Grayson answered, sounding a bit surprised at T’Pol’s query.

  T’Pol very slightly shook her head. She herself had attended several different learning academies during her young adulthood on Vulcan, as she pursued her studies in sciences, diplomacy, and military security. And while she hadn’t expected the same stolid, highly disciplined atmosphere at a human university, neither had she expected the resemblance to a resort town on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet. “And this is typical of human institutions of higher learning?”

  Grayson laughed. “I don’t think many people have ever accused Berkeley of being ‘typical.’ We have a long and proud history of breeding movements that run counter to the social and political status quo, going back three hundred years.”

  Grayson continued her lecture on Berkeley’s history, but T’Pol’s attention was caught by the sound of a chanting chorus, so faint that she was sure it hadn’t reached Grayson’s human ears. It echoed from the old brick buildings and over the shouts and music that otherwise filled the campus air, repeating over and over: “We don’t need no Vulcan lies! Send T’Pol back to the skies!”

  “Who is that?”

  Grayson blinked, confused. “Who is who?”

  T’Pol pointed. “Those chanters. Over that way, around the far end of this building.”

  Grayson blanched. “You can hear them?”

  “I believe I just indicated that I can.”

  The professor shook her head sharply. “Please, don’t pay them any mind. They’re just a vocal minority—the price we pay for living in a free society.”

  “Students?”

  “Yes. And young.”

  T’Pol nodded, and started to move toward the sound of the protesters. “Lady T’Pol!” Grayson herself protested, moving quickly after her, and putting a hand on the Vulcan’s elbow in an attempt to gently guide her back the other way.

  But T’Pol jerked her arm away without breaking her slow but determined stride. “You invited me here as part of an educational program. It would be unfortunate if these students were denied the benefit of my experience because of their prejudices.”

  Understanding that she wasn’t going to stop the elder woman, Grayson walked with her until they reached the corner of the building, at which point she then stepped out into the lead, putting herself between T’Pol and the small assemblage opposed to her presence on campus, and on Earth. They numbered ten or so, male and female, mostly unremarkable looking. Some held signs reading “Vulcan Go Home” and “Keep Earth Human.” Other signs merely sported a simple graphic design, a representation of the globe inside a triangle.

  The emblem of Terra Prime.

  Given their enthusiasm, the protesters did not immediately notice the two older women who had joined the small semicircle of curious onlookers. One by one, though, they either noticed the stooped and wrinkled figure, or had her pointed out to them, and their chant gave way to awkward silence.

  “You haven’t stopped on my account, have you?” A quiet current of laughter rippled through the group of spectators, whose numbers were already growing well beyond what the protesters had attracted on their own.

  A petite young woman with Asiatic facial features and sharp green eyes took a step toward her. “What do you want?”

  “You seem inordinately upset by my presence here,�
� T’Pol answered. “I am curious as to why.”

  “Because you don’t belong here, that’s why.”

  “I was invited here by the chairperson of your history department.”

  One of the young men of the group scoffed. “Chairperson Herberta. Us and her, we don’t reach.”

  “Yes, clearly, you are at odds,” T’Pol agreed. “However, this does not explain why my presence is so offensive.”

  “You want to know why, sister?” the green-eyed woman asked, pulling herself up to her full height. “Because your people came here when we were set to soar, and you held us back. For a hundred years all we got was the hard lip from you. And when you couldn’t cross us anymore, you wormed in, came on our warp-five ship, and got us knotted up into your bad scenes, like P’Jem. It wasn’t until we kicked you aliens out and started making our own way that it started to chime for us humans.

  “But now here you are to give us your slant, trying to swing us from the truth. And we say no go!”

  The other young protesters picked up this cue. “No go! No go!”

  T’Pol raised a hand, and the chant subsided slightly. “My slant, if I understand your use of the word, is what I personally experienced. And it should not surprise you that my perspective on the first warp-five mission is a bit more complex than your simplistic summarization of the last two hundred years.”

  The young woman frowned and put her hands to her temples as she shook her head. “Complex, complicated, confusing—no more smoke, Herberta! You want to tell us the Frisco Blast wasn’t your fault, tell someone else!”

  T’Pol’s eyes widened. “My fault?”

  “If you aliens would’ve left Earth when Paxton told you to,” the young woman snarled, “a million humans wouldn’t have been killed. My great-grandpop’s first wife, his first-born son, his entire family—they were all killed in that scene, because of you—”

  “Your ancestor’s family,” T’Pol interrupted, “were victims of John Frederick Paxton’s mindless prejudice and hatred. And you dishonor their memories by perpetuating that hatred today.”

  At that point, Grayson moved to position herself between the two. “Lady T’Pol…Takako, please, let’s keep some degree of civility—”

  T’Pol spun on Grayson. “Civility? This woman is spreading ignorance and misinformation on your campus, and your only concern is that she’s treated civilly?”

  “She’s got the right to speak, Herberta,” one of the other young men holding a Terra Prime sign shouted.

  T’Pol caught herself before suggesting that right should be revoked. Still staring down Grayson, she pointed at the woman she’d addressed as Takako and asked, “You know who this person is?”

  The professor nodded. “Miss Sulu has made quite a reputation for herself in her years here.”

  “She is one of your students?” It was all T’Pol could do to tamp down her surprise and outrage. “Does this university have no standards whatsoever? Or is her ignorance about one of the worst incidents of human violence of the twenty-second century due to your incompetence as an educator?”

  Grayson took a step toward the older woman. “You’re upset. I understand—”

  “I am a Vulcan! I do not get—”

  T’Pol clamped her mouth and her eyes shut tight, and after a moment to re-collect herself, spun on her heel. The crowd of young spectators quickly cleared a path as she stormed off, back the way she had come.

  “Lady T’Pol…” Amanda Grayson called, quickly catching up with the older woman.

  “I should never have agreed to come here,” T’Pol said, as much to herself as to Grayson. “I should have known better than to hope—”

  Grayson jumped in front of T’Pol, forcing her to stop just before passing back through the gate at the edge of campus. “Please, Lady T’Pol. I apologize. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry for this altercation.”

  T’Pol sighed. “I wish I could believe that, Doctor Grayson,” she said, as she stepped around her toward the aircars. “And I wish that it mattered.”

  Chief Engineer Scott piloted the shuttlecraft dePoix in slow circles around the Enterprise, which sat tethered to the bare-bones drydock facility at Vega Colony. They’d managed to hobble back here from the border at warp two, and as they inspected the ship’s exterior, Pike was surprised that they had managed that much. “It looks worse than it really is,” Scotty assured the captain as they passed along the underside of the saucer section. What had once been an unblemished, brilliant white hull was now marred, from one edge of the saucer to the other, by what looked like large gray bruises. Pike knew Scotty was right in saying it wasn’t as bad as it looked; this was cosmetic damage, caused when the individual shield generators beneath the plating overloaded and burned out. An actual weapon hit on the hull would have left a darker, uglier mark…

  And then the dePoix passed over the edge of the saucer, and Pike was given a clear view of the black scar etched on the rear of the ship’s bridge. The captain clenched his jaw tight and forced himself not to look away from the spot. Station engineers in bulky silver EVA suits were removing plasma-burnt panels and replacing them with brand-new ones, creating the impression of a small bandage taped over a deep wound.

  Scotty sat silent a moment, then said softly, “Ann Mulhall was a fine lass. Hers is a terrible loss.”

  Pike simply nodded. They were all terrible losses, he thought, but then pushed that thought aside, before he went mad remembering all the terrible losses over all these terrible years. “How much longer until we can be back under way?” the captain asked, changing the topic.

  “Shouldn’t be more than an hour or so,” Scotty answered, then added, with an exaggerated shrug, “We can’t get much more done here than basic patchwork repairs.”

  “Yes, Mister Scott,” Pike said wearily. For months, since the incident at Draylax, Scotty had been advocating a return to Earth and Bozeman Station, where the Enterprise could get the kind of overhaul it had been in need of, in truth, since long before the current chief engineer signed aboard. Pike silently cursed the bureaucratic geniuses at Starfleet HQ who decided they didn’t need fully-equipped bases on the frontier, then said, “Plan to be under way in an hour, then. Bring us in, Mister Scott.”

  Once they’d returned to the shuttlebay, Pike headed for sickbay. There had been eighteen casualties, in addition to the seven who had been killed. All terrible losses, the small voice in the back of the captain’s head repeated. He forced it aside again. Christopher Pike realized years ago, not long after the ambush they’d suffered at Rigel VII, that he could not take the weight of every casualty on his shoulders and still continue to function as a starship captain. And so he started to grow emotional calluses, convinced himself that the lives lost were acceptable when weighed against the number of lives saved because of their sacrifice.

  Pike found Doctor Phillip Boyce, his chief medical officer and longtime friend, in the intensive care ward. He was standing at the bedside of Lieutenant Alden, who had suffered severe third-degree burns over the right side of his face and upper body. The younger man was propped upright in his bed, and though his neck had been immobilized in a hard plastic brace, his eyes followed the captain as he entered the room. “Good to see you awake, Mister Alden,” the captain said, giving him a tight smile. “Doctor Boyce isn’t boring you with old war stories, is he?”

  Alden stared silently at Pike. On the bedside table, on which the lieutenant’s one bare, unscarred hand rested, he tapped his fingers once, then twice.

  “No,” Boyce said. At Pike’s curious look, he explained, “Alden’s larynx turned out to be burned pretty badly, too. I’ve asked engineering to rig him up a speech synthesizer of some sort.”

  Pike looked from Boyce to Alden. “I’m sorry,” he said. What a nasty irony, for a communications officer to be reduced to taps for “yes” and “no.” “Well, we should be under way in about an hour; Scotty will be able to take care of that then.”

  Alden’s brown eyes flit
ted from Pike to Boyce, and the doctor stared back, as if some kind of silent conversation were going on between them. Boyce then broke contact and turned to Pike. “Captain, if I could speak to you in my office?”

  “Of course.” Boyce stood, urged his patient to get some rest, and then led the captain into his small private refuge. “Will he recover?” he asked as they both sat on either side of the doctor’s desk.

  “If we can get him back to Earth, then yes,” the doctor told him.

  Pike sighed and nodded, having anticipated that answer. “Well, seeing as we’re not going to be heading there any time soon, I suppose you’ll want him transferred to the colony’s hospital.” From there, Alden could either be put aboard a mercy flight or the next regular shuttle back to the Sol system.

  “Well, yes…,” he said.

  Pike waited. “And?”

  “And…” Boyce looked down at the edge of his desk. “I’d like to transfer off, too, Chris.”

  Pike’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Phil?” Boyce had served as Enterprise CMO since Pike first took command fourteen years earlier, and over the course of those fourteen years, the older man had served as trusted friend, confidant, adviser…and of course, bartender. “What brought this on?”

  Boyce lifted his head and looked straight at the captain. “You and I have been friends a long time, Chris. Too long for me to give you some canned pap about how I’ve decided I’m getting too old for this job.”

  “Especially since you’ve been saying that for the past ten years,” Pike said, trying to lighten the suddenly thick mood of the office.

  Boyce cracked a polite smile. “I owe it to you to be completely straight with you.” He drew a breath, then said, “I don’t like what Starfleet has become…and with all respect, Chris, I don’t like what it’s made you into.”

  Pike stared back at the doctor blankly for a moment, and then shook his head slightly. “You’ve lost me.”

  Boyce stood up and turned to the cabinet behind his desk, from which he withdrew a bottle of Irish whiskey. “I joined up in ’43, right after the Klingon attack on Sherman’s Planet,” he said as he turned back, set down a pair of glasses, and began to pour. “I was assigned to the Excalibur, and I was with her during the Battle of Donatu V.”