Vinx grinned. “We get to pump the dolly, huh?” With a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin, he added, “I love this job sometimes.”
Groaning, Corsi wished that she had brought Hawkins along instead. One of these days, I need to find out why Iotians were ever allowed into Starfleet.
Inana Skanda lay back in the cot she shared with Gabe, her head pounding to a drumbeat all its own. The cot wasn’t much, just enough room for the two of them, but that was all she wanted. She could hear the conversations going on outside, and almost wished she had the strength to go and welcome them herself. But all of her strength was going toward fighting the headache. After the nearly-fatal allergic reaction she’d had to the yenara-root tea, the last thing she wanted to do was try another Icarian folk remedy. Grabbing Gabe’s pillow, she draped it over her forehead and eyes, willing the thrice-damned headache to seep out of her head and into the pillow.
There was always a possibility that it could work. Stranger things had happened since they’d arrived. Nana trying to give me cookies when she’s been dead for over a decade definitely makes the list.
Deciding she couldn’t take the pounding in her skull any longer, she reached to the set of boxes they used as a makeshift nightstand and grabbed the aspirin. It wasn’t much, and it hadn’t worked yet, but it was a remedy that had a track record, and that was all she needed.
She tried to clear her mind, to focus as her meditation instructor had taught her so many years ago. Focus. Focus attention on your head. Relax.
Slowly, she began consciously relaxing the muscles in her body, starting at the top of her head and ending at the tips of her toes. Focused relaxation, her instructor had said, often allowed the brain to access areas that consciousness wouldn’t. She felt herself hanging in that limbo state between wakefulness and sleep for a brief moment. Until finally, she heard a voice.
“Inana, sweetie?”
“Gemma?”
When she opened her eyes, the tent was gone, replaced by the soft pastel greens of her grandmother’s bedroom. What got her attention more than anything else were the smells: tea roses mixed with the aroma of baking cinnamon rolls—Gemma’s specialty—in the air.
She flipped the fluffy down comforter back, and realized that she was in her favorite lavender flannel pajamas. But she hadn’t worn those since childhood. “Gemma?” she asked. Her voice suddenly sounded very young to her ears, too young.
Her heart raced in her chest as she pushed herself out of the bed and ran toward the stairs that led down to the kitchen. “Gemma!”
She got down the stairs and nearly stepped on a hot cinnamon roll. A trail of eight more led to her grandmother; lying face down on the kitchen floor. Gemma’s left hand was underneath her, and her right arm was out to the side from where she’d fallen. The baking sheet that had held the rolls was on the floor about a half-meter from her right hand. She couldn’t tell if her grandmother was breathing.
Inana ran to the communicator in the dining room. “Emergency! Emergency! Call the rescue unit!”
The screen flashed the Federation logo, and then a dark-skinned man in the black-and-gold of a Starfleet security officer. “Federation Security and Emergency.”
“My grandmother’s having a heart attack! Help!”
“We’ll be right there, young lady,” the man said. His voice was so calm, it almost got her to relax, but she knew it was too late. Even then, she’d known.
It was only a few seconds, but it felt like years, before she heard the site-to-site transporter bring the emergency medical techs to the house. Tears rolled down her face as she turned around, watching them work as hard as they could, but it was to no avail.
“I’m sorry,” one of the techs said. It was an older woman, with a streak of gray hair that stood out from her black ponytail. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
Inana balled her hands into fists, burrowing them against her eyes. She wished she could push the image of her grandmother’s corpse from her mind. She wished she had woken up just a few minutes earlier.
When Inana opened her eyes, she was standing at the door of her tent. The smell of cinnamon was gone. She leaned against one of the tent’s supports with as much weight as she thought it would bear, feeling the tears streaming down her face. When she’d cried herself out, she ducked outside, heading toward the office. If she couldn’t sleep, maybe at least she could get some work in.
When Carol finally found Gabriel, he was in what Inana had called his “office”—more like a tent filed to the brim with every tool, map, guideline, reference, or even an old scrap of paper that might have had half a clue to something on it. Gabriel himself, though, was hunched over a table covered in old journals, padds, and a few data crystals that looked like they dated back to the early days of the Federation. She feigned knocking on the tent flap, but when that failed to get his attention, she simply said, “Gabe?”
When his eyes lifted to hers, there was a distance there that Carol couldn’t recall seeing, well, ever. “Carol? Come here. You’ve got to see this.”
“Inana’s worried about you,” she said, not moving from the doorway. “And, quite frankly, so am I. Just a few hours ago you were fine and sociable. She said you’ve been back in here ever since we started treating the wounded. Are you okay?”
A lopsided smile appeared on his features. “I’m fine,” he said, backing it with a shrug. “She can worry about nothing sometimes, I swear.”
All it took was a glimpse of the darkening circles under his eyes to tell her that was utter garbage. “Why are you ignoring your wife, Gabe?”
His expression turned bewildered. “Ignoring her?”
“Yes,” Carol said. “Inana sent me a message. I’ve never seen her so worried, Gabe. She was afraid you’d lost yourself to this dig. She said you kept going on about some artifact.”
“Yes,” he said, brightening, “the Krialta. Carol, it’s like nothing we’ve ever gone after before.” He began rifling through the papers on his makeshift desk, until he pulled out one with a flourish that was roughly the length of a photon torpedo. “Here. Look at this. It’s from an obelisk on a Gretharan battlefield memorial. Inana did the rubbing herself.”
“She did a rubbing?” Carol asked, genuinely surprised. “What for? Doesn’t Cambridge have the money for holocameras?”
Gabe gave her a half-smile. “Inana occasionally likes to go the old-fashioned route. She likes to have the paper to work with instead of a holo-image.” He turned his eyes back to the scattered papers, books, and chaos strewn on the table. “I guess it rubbed off on me.”
Carol groaned at the bad joke as she studied the dark chalk marks on the page. “The blocked style of the glyphs definitely suggests High Gretharan. Have you been able to translate it, yet?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Bits and pieces. What little we can get makes no sense. Why?”
“Abramowitz to Faulwell,” she said, tapping her combadge. “If you’ve got a minute, can you come by the office tent and give us a hand? We could use that brilliant head of yours.”
Static edged Bart’s reply. “Flattery will get you everywhere. It’s almost a shame you aren’t my type.”
“Just almost?” Carol asked raising an eyebrow.
“I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. Faulwell out.”
When Faulwell was finally able to give the rubbing a look, he immediately said, “Of course you can’t. It’s in High Gretharan characters, but it looks like there might be an encryption at work here.”
Carol patted Bart on the shoulder. “And we’ve got just the man to decrypt it.”
“I don’t know,” Faulwell said, cautiously raising one eyebrow. “Let me get all of the letters, and I’ll have some of my algorithms take a whack at them.”
“Uh, you might not want to put your computer against anything,” Gabriel said. “Our computers have been a bit tetchy lately. Yours—”
“Then I’ll do it myself if I have to,” Bart said. Pointing a finger toward his ri
ght temple he added, “It’s been a rough last couple of weeks, but I think the old brain is still up to it.”
Sarjenka stared at the unconscious Jean-Luc Picard with disbelief.
“Doctor?” Data asked. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes,” she replied, although she wasn’t quite as sure as she sounded. Her heartbeat was hammering in her ears, and every boom was accompanied by a question in her mind. Too many things felt off. Sure, after saving her world, Picard could have had the computer pull up any information if any Dreman ever entered Starfleet. That was always a possibility. But Data?
What bothered her most was how familiar being around the android felt. She took a step back, trying to distance herself from Picard’s bed. Her stomach was churning. She knew that Captain Gold and Captain Picard had been at the Academy together. Perhaps the captain had given Jean-Luc Picard an update on his crew since she’d joined? But that didn’t explain Data’s knowledge.
“Doctor?” Data asked once more.
Sarjenka couldn’t stop staring. Something felt wrong about the situation. She couldn’t put a finger on the problem, but her entire subconscious was screaming at her to get away.
And her entire conscious was yelling back that she had to know.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Data replied.
Sarjenka walked out of the tent, and into the warmth of the forest that surrounded the dig. Data followed, but she noted that he was allowing her to remain a step or two in front of him the entire time.
“Sarjenka?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
She turned on him, not quite sure whether to be angry, or frightened. “How do you know me?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice level. “How does Captain Picard know me? I’m beginning to feel like the butt of the biggest practical joke in history.”
Data opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again.
“What?” Sarjenka asked. “Why can’t you tell me? Does it have something to do with when Captain Picard saved my planet?”
Data’s eyebrows quirked.
“So it does,” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The android’s expression turned deathly serious. “I am not at liberty to share that information.”
“Why not? I’ve read the reports, Commander. I know what the Enterprise did. You responded to a distress signal from my planet.”
Data simply stared stalwartly ahead, which only annoyed Sarjenka more.
“Commander,” she began, “my people have no record of a distress call being sent. None. Yet Starfleet’s official report says there was one. What’s the truth?”
“I am not at liberty to share that information,” he said.
“You know, don’t you?”
Data remained silent.
“You can’t even give me ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”
“I cannot.”
Sarjenka abruptly turned away from the android, wanting to be anywhere else at that moment. But before she could get two steps away, an image flashed in her mind: a man—a human—who had called her “that,” and who had made her quite afraid. In all her time at Starfleet Academy, she’d never seen this man, but he was as clear in her memory as if she’d seen him yesterday. He’d had short, curly hair, wore a uniform that, now that she thought about it, looked like that of a Starfleet operations officer, spoken with an accent she still didn’t recognize, and looked nothing like anyone she’d encountered in her life.
But why could she remember him so clearly?
She stumbled over a tree root as she walked, falling to the grass. Thanks to the planet’s lowered gravity, she didn’t even scrape her knee, but the memory was still rattling her much harder than the fall.
Until a hand touched hers, helping her to stand. A cool, comforting, familiar hand. “Are you injured?”
She looked down to the ground beneath her, only to find a padded gray floor covering. When she looked up, walls surrounded her, walls with light panels at the bottom, gray areas, and a panel that shone like black dilithium.
It all reminded her of being on a Starfleet vessel, but it was like no other vessel she could recall.
She looked up at Data, only to find that he seemed so much taller than he had just moments before.
Sarjenka’s heart began to hammer in her chest. She’d never had hallucinations before, only read about them in her textbooks, but this, this felt like the perfect example of all that she had been taught hallucinations could be. “Don’t take me to sickbay,” she said, her voice sounding so much younger. “Please, no.”
Data’s eyes widened. “I will not, Sarjenka. You are not injured.”
She forced her eyes closed, softly telling herself that she was just seeing things, that she was really in a warm forest, and the tent was just a few feet away, and Data wasn’t really part of her past, and she really wasn’t losing her mind.
Yanking her arm away from the android, she went back to Picard’s tent, hoping that some form of normalcy might help her forget.
Christine Vale stared at the computer screen, willing it to come back on.
“Computer, report cause of viewscreen failure,” she said, for the hundredth or so time—she’d long since stopped counting.
“Unable to comply,” was all she received in response, in that same irritating, superior, know-it-all tone that was grating on every one of her remaining nerves.
“Still functioning within normal parameters, computer?” she asked, thankful the computer couldn’t pick up on sarcasm. Although, truth be told, she wouldn’t have put it past Geordi La Forge to try to program it in there anyway.
“All systems are functioning within normal parameters.”
“Then why has the viewscreen failed?” she asked through clenched teeth. It was beginning to feel like the Peace Officer stations on Izar all over again.
“No viewscreen failure found.”
“Can you even see the damned viewscreen in the system?”
A blip-blop sounded as it apparently pinged the screen for a signal. “One viewscreen found. All readings are within normal parameters.”
Vale’s chin fell to her chest. She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then said, “I’m not an idiot, computer. Everything’s hooked up the way Geordi told me to hook it up. You just found the viewscreen yourself. It’s getting a data feed from the portable central core. I’ve checked everything twice. It worked just fine before we left the Enterprise. Now, computer, if you don’t want me to take a phaser to your isolinear chips one…by…one, you’ll tell me why the viewscreen has failed.”
“No viewscreen failure found.”
With a groan of frustration, Christine reached forward and unhooked the viewscreen from the central processor. Tapping her combadge, she said, “Vale to Data.”
No response came.
What was it with the systems around here?
“Vale to Data, come in, please.”
Still, there was no response.
Every computer on this planet hates me, even Data.
She looked down to check her uniform, just to make sure she hadn’t hallucinated the whole time at Starfleet Academy. No, the uniform of an Izaran peace officer really had been replaced with that of a Starfleet security chief. If she’d hallucinated Starfleet Academy, she was still living in that fantasy world.
“Okay, viewscreen’s down. I can’t contact Data.” Tapping her combadge one more time, she said, “Vale to Picard.” Maybe, just maybe, his combadge was still working.
When even the captain didn’t respond, an alarm went off in the part of Christine’s mind that had become quite good at sensing trouble.
“It’s okay, Christine,” a voice said from behind where she sat.
That voice was entirely too familiar for her liking. She turned to look toward the dark burgundy of the tent’s flap door, and a strange glow was coming through. There was something familiar to it, almost like the red alert lights on the Enterprise. Val
e got out of her chair and walked to the door, pulling it aside—
—to uncover the bridge of the U.S.S. O’Keefe, Captain Tamppari still in the center seat. “It’s okay, Christine,” the captain said, her voice like a calm breeze in the middle of a hurricane. The entire ship was on red alert, and Vale fought to keep the memory of why in that corner of her mind where things that were better forgotten resided.
“The chief needs you on deck nine.”
A knot of dread formed in her stomach. You’re hallucinating. Turn around, walk back into the tent.
But when she turned around, all she saw were the turbolift doors behind her.
Walk through the doors, Christine. Something’s very wrong.
“Lieutenant Vale,” Tamppari said, her voice taking on a more commanding tone. “Deck nine. Commander Ma needs you down there. She has new orders for you.”
Vale’s stomach threatened to divulge its contents at the memory of exactly what those new orders had been, overwhelming what she knew she should have been feeling: pride at her recent promotion to lieutenant junior grade.
A chirrup of the comm sounded, followed by “Utopia Planitia Control to O’Keefe, do you read?”
Vale had hated her stint on the Mars Defense Perimeter with every fiber of her being for one reason, and one reason alone. She’d tried so hard to force it into the “forget this” box of her memory that she’d almost thought she’d succeeded.
“This is the O’Keefe,” Captain Tamppari responded, her voice returning to that peaceful calm that had somehow always reassured her crew. “We’ve received the new orders from Starfleet Command and are proceeding with the tests accordingly.”
“Understood. Remain at alert status and report in when you’ve finished testing. Utopia Planitia out.”
Vale stared at the turbolift doors, praying for them to open back onto Icaria Prime.
“Ma to Vale, do you read?”
Every muscle in Vale’s back began to tighten. She took a deep breath, concentrating on relaxation.
Star Trek™ Corps of Engineers: Remembrance of Things Past Book One Page 5
