Aftermath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Well, what is it?”

  “We can reduce our interface with normal space to zero dimension.”

  Gomez’s eyes widened. “But that would mean pinching the warp bubbles off completely—severing your connection with our universe. You’d be trapped in here forever, adrift in subspace.”

  “It is the only way,” Varethli said.

  “But sooner or later your resources will run out,” O’Brien cried. “You’ll die!”

  “We can place most of our people into temporal-stasis pockets, increasing the resources for the rest. Those will search for ways to reconnect us.”

  “Once we lose our link, it may be impossible to restore,” Rohewi said. “But there are other sources of energy in subspace. We may be able to tap into them and prolong our existence indefinitely. Perhaps even expand our pocket universe to greater size and complexity.”

  “But you’d still be alone,” said Gomez. “You’ve only just discovered the universe, and now you have to lose it. You never even got the chance to know what it’s like.” Just like I never got the chance to know…

  Varethli took Gomez’s hand in one of her own very alien ones. “Your sympathy moves us. But do not grieve. The universe does not always let us move in the direction we wish. So we simply move forward in another direction. It is still progress. It is better than standing still, yearning for the path we cannot take. Only the dead stand still.”

  “Systems ready,” announced Rohewi. “Collapse is imminent. If you do not wish to be trapped with us, leave now!”

  “Go,” Varethli told them. “Go forward in your path, as we will in ours. Go forward and live!”

  Something in Sonya still resisted. She needed time, it demanded, time to linger in her memories, absorb her losses, indulge her regrets to the fullest. Anything less would seem like a betrayal of those she was losing, had lost. But now another part of her spoke up—the real betrayal would be to lose herself along with them. Life pulled inexorably forward, and staying in one place, letting herself be trapped in the past, wasn’t living at all. She had to move. “Move. Move, move, move, people!” And she ran, faster than she’d ever run in her life. And it was exhilarating.

  “You’re crazy. It’ll never work!”

  “The equations are basic. Brilliantly simple. There’s little that can go wrong.”

  Stevens grimaced. “Famous last words.”

  “Besides,” Tev said reasonably, “you’ve seen the proof of concept yourself, with the Rubicon’s subspace compression.”

  “Yeah, but that was down to toy size, not subatomic size!”

  “That’s the only scale on which the Van Den Broeck equations can work. Besides, it means we can slip right out through their hull like a quantum black hole, at most leaving a tiny leak they’ll barely notice. Since they don’t have full shields, we can get away cleanly.”

  “Yeah, but we won’t be able to see where we’re going.”

  “We only need to go a few kilometers.”

  “But generating this field would collapse the Cabochons, guaranteed! You want to just kill Scotty?”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone. But if we use this, it means that either Scotty’s neutralized the danger himself, or the Cabochons are collapsing anyway and we have a split second to escape.”

  Stevens stared. “Tev, you are depressingly pragmatic.”

  “I thought you preferred solid realities over intangibles like theories and ideals.”

  “So I contradict myself,” Stevens shrugged. “I’m not as large as you—well, as your ego—but I contain multitudes.”

  Suddenly a strident alarm sounded outside. The two engineers tensed. “Are the fields collapsing?” Stevens asked.

  “I can’t get a reading. Even the interference is gone! I can’t read the Cabochons at all!”

  “What does that mean?”

  Suddenly there was a knock on the window. They looked up—to see Scotty making urgent faces at them, mouthing Let me in! Hurry!

  Stevens wished shuttle hatches wouldn’t open so slowly. But Scotty, showing unexpected spryness, clambered onto the hatch before it touched the ground. “Have ye got an escape ready?” he demanded.

  “Yes, sir!” Tev replied crisply.

  “Then use it now!”

  “But the Cabochons—” Stevens began.

  “Not a problem. Go!”

  The shuttle jerked as Tev applied the new field equations. The warp engines weren’t designed to shape this kind of field, and the crew felt every instability. But then it snapped into place, and everything was calm. Stevens didn’t feel any smaller—but there was nothing outside but blackness, with a few intermittent flashes as the odd high-frequency gamma ray fluoresced against the warp envelope. After fifteen or so seconds, the shuttle began to vibrate again. “Field’s destabilizing,” Tev said. “Shutting down.”

  And the Haley popped back into normal space just a kilometer or so off the da Vinci’s starboard flank. Tev showed no surprise as he angled the shuttle around on a docking approach. “Oh, don’t you dare tell me you meant to do that,” Stevens moaned.

  “Believe what you will,” Tev replied cheerfully.

  Scotty reviewed the console readouts. “You made your own microbubble! Very clever, lads.”

  “Well…” Stevens decided to be big about it. “I can’t take the credit. It was the commander’s idea. Tev, I have to admit, I could never have pulled off anything like that.”

  “Well, of course. I am a craftsman. You are a mechanic.”

  Stevens stared at Tev for a moment, then shrugged it off. “Fine. If you need me, I’ll be at my anvil, pounding horseshoes.” He moved over to Scotty, throwing him a what’s a guy to do? look, but the S.C.E. chief just shook his head and chortled. “So tell us, Scotty, how’d you solve the Cabochon problem?”

  “Och, I wish I could take credit, but all I know is, they just suddenly shut down. The interference vanished and all that was left”—and he reached into the pocket of his old-style uniform jacket and pulled out a handful of Cabochons—“was a pile o’ pretty baubles. I managed to salvage a few for the museum. The Nachri are welcome to the rest—they went to all that trouble for ’em, after all,” he laughed.

  “But sir, how did you get away from the Nachri?” Stevens insisted. Scotty just glared at him as though it were a stupid question.

  Chapter

  8

  “I was a fool,” Cemal Iskander said as he gazed up at the Shanial dome, now the only physical evidence, aside from the empty Cabochons, that they had ever existed. “I can’t believe I was so blind.”

  “It’s understandable, Cemal,” Scotty told him. “You had no way of knowin’ who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.”

  “But I was far too quick to condemn the Shanial. I presumed them guilty, accepted the Nachri’s lies that supported my prejudice, and refused to listen to the true innocents. Maybe if I had, they wouldn’t have had to make such a sacrifice. At least some of them could’ve been evacuated in time.”

  “Or maybe not. They only had minutes to spare by that point.”

  Iskander shook his head, unappeased. After a long pause, he sighed. “You know that jihad doesn’t truly mean ‘war,’ right? It’s the struggle to defend what’s right. Sometimes, yes, that means defending your community against invaders or oppressors. But the greater jihad is the one we wage every day against the weakness, doubt, and folly in our own minds. Scotty, I got so caught up in the lesser jihad that I failed in the greater. And so I violated one of the most basic commandments of jihad, never to strike against a nonaggressor. That makes me no better than the fanatics of past centuries who twisted the rhetoric of jihad to justify their betrayals of it.”

  “Cemal, you’re bein’ too hard on yourself. Aye, you made a mistake. We’re all entitled to a few. What really matters is what you do afterward. You can wallow in regret and second-guessing, or you can move forward and build something new out o’ the ashes, better and wiser than you were. From what I�
��ve been told, that’s likely what the Shanial are doing right now—tryin’ to build their pocket universe into something bigger and better. Who knows? There are other domains in subspace, whole other universes we cannot even reach yet. Maybe the Shanial will be able to travel between ’em, invent a whole new type of exploration.”

  “Maybe,” the director said quietly.

  “And look around you—folks are rebuildin’ this city, just as they did before. ’Tis a cliché to say that life goes on, but the fact is, it does.”

  “And you should know, eh, Scotty?” Iskander teased, smiling a bit at last.

  He looked up at the structure again. “I’m going to propose keeping this here permanently, as a monument to the Shanial’s sacrifice, and to those who were tragically lost.”

  “That’d be a real mitzvah,” said Captain Gold, coming up alongside them. “You should make it a museum of their world—send archaeologists there, learn what their civilization was like before the Nachri attack.”

  “You’re right. I’ll talk to Admiral Ross, see what can be arranged.”

  “And what have we heard from the Nachri about all this mishegoss, anyway?” Gold asked.

  “They insist Zakash is a rogue,” Iskander told him. “That their legitimate government and military had no involvement in the attack. They’ve asked us to return him to Nachros for trial. Given Zakash’s own claims to be leading a revolutionary movement, I suspect they’re telling the truth.”

  “About that, probably,” Gold said. “But people generally don’t revolt against just, benevolent, fairly chosen leaders. If you ask me, the Federation should send observers to that trial, make sure it’s fair, and do some general fact-finding—and think about whether we really want them as allies.”

  “I’ll see to that myself.” Iskander nodded.

  “What’s so funny?” O’Brien demanded, breaking off from recounting his adventures.

  “I’m sorry, Miles,” Keiko chuckled. “It’s just…I know how you feel about being small. After the Rubicon thing,” she told the S.C.E. team, “he had Dr. Bashir measure him every day for a week to make sure he was back to normal.” The others laughed, and O’Brien fidgeted. “Don’t worry, honey,” Keiko teased wickedly. “You know I’d still love you whatever size you were.”

  After a moment, O’Brien gave in and accepted her good-natured teasing. Then he led her aside from the others. “The thing is, Keiko…I haven’t exactly been big in other ways today. I’m…sorry about this morning.”

  “No, Miles, that’s okay, I—”

  “No, I mean it. I’ve been thinking about this. You’re right, sweetheart—I haven’t been spending enough time with you and the kids lately. I’ve been forgetting how precious the time we have is—how we need to make the most of every moment. So I’m going to be a different man, starting now. No more volunteer work—my time is for my wife and children.” He broke off. Keiko didn’t seem as happy as he’d expected she’d be. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Miles…the fact is, I’ve realized something too. I don’t begrudge you the time you spend helping people. On the contrary, I admire it! I just felt bad that I couldn’t do the same. So I…I’ve applied for work at an agricultural lab. They’re working on engineering fast-growing crops, high-yield oxygen producers, and other new flora for the planets that were hit hardest in the Dominion War, like Cardassia Prime and Gaylor VI. It’s a way I can make a tangible difference, help rebuild the same way you do.” Those beautiful eyes gazed at him apologetically. “But it means I won’t have as much time for you and the kids.” She studied him, waiting for an answer. “Miles? Are you okay with this?”

  “Well…I mean, sure, it’s…” He hugged her. “Keiko, I’m proud of you.”

  “And I’m proud of you.”

  “It’s just…are we ever going to manage to have that nice quiet life together?”

  She smiled. “Life always seems to have its own plans. We can only make the most of what time we do have.”

  O’Brien smiled. “I’m free tonight. What did you have in mind?”

  Her smile was much wider, and promised a greater adventure than the one he’d just lived through.

  Gomez gazed wistfully at the hastily departing O’Briens. “I’m glad somebody’s had a happy ending today.”

  Corsi studied her. “And what kind of ending has your day had, Commander?”

  Gomez pondered. “Bittersweet, I guess. I’m sad for all the people who lost loved ones today, and I’m sad for the Shanial. But they’ve all shown me something.”

  “What?”

  “How to rebuild. How to start putting the pieces together. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what they’ll be when they’re assembled—you just have to go ahead and start doing it, or you’ll never find out.”

  Corsi pursed her lips. “I’m starting to think we’re driving the engineering metaphors into the ground here.”

  Gomez laughed—her first laugh in quite some time. “You’re right. That means it’s probably time to wrap this up and go home.”

  “One more thing, though—did they ever find that last Cabochon?”

  Gomez shook her head. “Could be anywhere. Buried underground where we’ll never find it; sitting on some construction worker’s shelf somewhere; blown out into the Pacific when the first Cabochon erupted. Maybe it wasn’t even still on Earth. It doesn’t matter now; it’s just a harmless crystal.”

  “I know…but I hate loose ends.”

  “You’ll just have to live with this one.”

  “I guess so.”

  Corsi and Gomez then beamed back up to the da Vinci, both of them ready to face the S.C.E.’s next mission.

  About the Author

  At the age of five-and-a-half, CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT saw his first episode of Star Trek, believing it to be a show about a strange airplane that only flew at night. As he continued watching, he discovered what those points of light in the sky really were. This awakened a lifelong fascination with space, science, and speculative fiction. By age twelve he was making up Trek-universe stories set a century after Kirk’s adventures (an idea years ahead of its time), but soon shifted to creating his own original universe. He eventually realized he did this well enough to make a career out of it. Years of rejections failed to disabuse him of this arrogant notion, and the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact fed the delusion by publishing his controversial “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” in November 1998 and “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele” in December 2000. Meanwhile, Christopher made two separate passes through the University of Cincinnati, thereby putting off real life as long as possible, and earned a B.S. in physics and a B.A. with High Honors in history in the process. Aftermath is Christopher’s first novella-length publication and his first eBook. His second work of professional Trek fiction, “…Loved I Not Honor More” in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change anthology, will be published in September 2003. At this rate, he may never recover from his delusions.