New Frontier

by Peter David

  “Obviously you decided to return to Starfleet.”

  “Obviously, yes, considering that I am sitting here in a uniform. But it was not, to me, an obvious decision to make.”

  “What prompted you to make it, then?”

  “It was my mother’s dying wish.”

  Selar lowered her eyes. “I am . . . sorry . . . for your loss. She must have been quite young.”

  “All too young. Vulcans have a long life span under ideal circumstances, but that is no guarantee.”

  “I know that, I assure you,” Selar said. Had Soleta been less self-involved, she would have detected the slight ruefulness in Selar’s tone, but she did not.

  Instead Soleta found herself staring at the Memory lamp which Selar had burning in her cabin. “I asked to be assigned as a teacher upon my return, and considering my lengthy departure, Starfleet saw no reason to deny my request. I was more comfortable with that situation than with the thought of continuing to wander the galaxy. However, circumstances arose so that my presence was required here.”

  “And you never told Starfleet of what you had learned, about your true parentage.”

  “No. Technically, it is withholding information. I imagine that they could make matters difficult for me, were they to learn of it. But . . . in the grand tradition of my family . . . they did not ask, and so I have had no need to lie. Convenient, is it not?”

  “Very.”

  Soleta said nothing for a time, appearing to consider something. Finally Selar told her, “For what it is worth, Soleta . . . I do not consider you ’impure,’ as the humans might say. A tortured soul, yes. But impure? No. I consider you a person of conscience and integrity. No matter what happens in the future of this vessel, I will always consider it an honor to serve with you.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that. Truly, I do. And in your saying that, you’ve enabled me to make up my mind about something.” She clapped her hands briskly and said, “Clear your mind.”

  “What?”

  Soleta waggled her fingers and indicated that Selar should bring herself closer. “If you still desire that I probe your mind . . . that I meld with you . . . I will do so. After your sitting here patiently and listening to my life’s story . . .”

  “I do not wish your help out of some misplaced sense of gratitude,” Selar told her.

  Soleta looked at her skeptically. “Pardon me, but as I recall, a short time ago you were endeavoring to force me into aiding you through a binding blind promise, am I correct? And now you are concerned about the ethics involved in my helping you?”

  “Matters are different now. You were,” and clearly she hated to admit it, “you were correct before. I was . . . ’desperate,’ if we must discuss the situation in human terms. I did not wish to depend on such relationships as friendship in order to accomplish what I felt needed to be done. But now that you have unburdened yourself . . .”

  “You feel closer to me?”

  “Not particularly, no. I simply feel that you have more problems than I do, and it is probably unjust to burden you with mine.”

  This once again prompted Soleta, in a most shocking manner, to laugh out loud. It was not something she had great experience in doing. It was a quick, awkward sound, closer to a seal bark than an actual laugh. “Your consideration is duly noted,” she told her. “But I tell you honestly now, Doctor, that if you are comfortable with the situation—knowing about me what you now know—then I will assist you in your self-examination. If I say to you that it is the least I can do, I ask that you accept that in the spirit in which it’s given.”

  Selar nodded briefly. “Very well.”

  She drew a chair over to the couch and sat down, facing Soleta. She cleared her thoughts, her breathing slow and steady, relaxing into the state of mind that would most facilitate the meld. Soleta did likewise, almost with a sense of relief.

  Soleta did not have a tremendous amount of experience in the technique of the mind-meld, but she was certain that Selar’s experience and superior training would more than make up for whatever Soleta might herself lack. Slow, methodical, unhurried, she waited until she sensed that her breathing was in complete rhythm with Selar’s. Then, gently, she reached out, touching her fingers to Selar’s temples.

  “Our minds are merging, Selar,” she said.

  Their minds, their thoughts, their personas drew closer and closer to one another. The tendrils of their consciousness reached toward each other, gently probing at first . . .

  . . . and then . . . contact was made . . .

  . . . drawing closer still, and their thoughts began to overlap, and it was becoming hard to determine where one left off and the other began . . .

  . . . and Soleta had a sense of herself, she did not lose it, it was still there, still vibrant and alive, but she had a sense of Selar as well, she was Selar, and Selar saw herself through the view of Soleta, outside her own consciousness, looking inward . . .

  . . . and Selar felt uncertain and fearful, and she wasn’t sure whether the insecurities rose from herself as Soleta and the knowledge of her true lineage or from herself and her concerns over her own state of mind, and she fought past it . . .

  . . . and Soleta saw images flashing past her, images that were herself but not herself, images and sensations and experiences that were as real for her as they could possibly be, except none of them, absolutely none of them, had ever happened to her . . . and she began to scrutinize herself with an expertise that she had never before possessed, except it was not herself that she was scrutinizing, and yet it was, and it was with a facility that she had never had, except she did . . .

  . . . and Selar felt herself slipping deeply into her own consciousness, gliding into Soleta’s mind and using it as an ancient deep-sea explorer would use a bathysphere. Waves of her own thoughts and unconsciousness rippled around her as she descended further and further, moving through her psyche, and she felt waves of light pulsing around her. No, not light . . . life, her life, spread all around about her . . .

  . . . and Soleta felt pain, waves of pain, and she heard voices crying out, and one of them was her own, her very own voice, and one of them was not, it was a male, it was someone she had never met in her life, and his name was Voltak, and she knew him with greater intimacy than she had ever known herself, and she could feel him moving within her . . .

  . . . and Selar felt him slipping away, and Soleta called out his name, and Selar felt his loss ripping at her, and then Soleta was suddenly yanked downward, further downward, left looking upward at Voltak in the way that a swimmer trapped beneath a frozen lake sees the face of someone above, on the ice, staring down at them . . .

  . . . and Selar’s mind was left naked and exposed, Soleta probing with Selar’s expertise, burrowing down to the core of her psychic makeup, seeking, searching, and buffeted with wave upon wave of heat, red heat that washed over her in delicious waves of agony that she could not ignore, that swept into every pore of her skin, enveloping her, caressing her, and she moaned for the exquisite torment of it all . . .

  . . . and she felt something calling her, driving her, and it was voices, not just hers, not just Soleta’s and Selar’s, not just Voltak’s, but Vulcans, hundreds, thousands, millions of them, driving her toward the heat, toward the red waves, as if they were trying to pound her into an inferno shore, and she welcomed it, she welcomed the heat and the waves, she could not, would not turn away from it, she embraced it, wanted it, wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything, and her breath was coming in short gasps, their minds slamming together . . .

  My God . . .

  The separation was violent. Soleta yanked away from her, and Selar tumbled backward, the chair overturning and spilling her onto her back. Soleta fell over, rolled off the couch and onto the floor. She lay there panting, gasping, her fingers still spasming as sensations shook her body. Sweat was dripping off her forehead, spattering onto the floor. With supreme effort she managed to look over at Selar, who didn’t appear to b
e in much better shape. Selar was lying on her back, her arms outstretched, sucking in air gratefully, as if she had forgotten to breathe for however long they had been joined. It clearly took tremendous effort but slowly Selar turned her head and managed to look at Soleta. Soleta, for her part, felt embarrassed, like a voyeur, even though it had been Selar who had asked for the probe.

  Selar was trying to mouth a word. Soleta propped herself up on one elbow and angled herself closer to Selar, just close enough to hear her say it:

  “Impossible” was the low whisper. Selar had now actually managed to muster enough strength to shake her head, and again she murmured, “Impossible.”

  “Apparently . . . not.” Soleta was surprised, even impressed, with the calm in her voice. Ever since learning the truth of her background, stoicism had not been something that she had always been able to maintain. Here, though, she was clearly capable of rising to the occasion. “Apparently it’s not impossible at all.”

  “But it was . . . it was barely two years ago . . . I . . . I went through it . . . not time . . . not for years, it is not time . . .”

  “Perhaps it’s because of the way that it ended the first time,” Soleta said reasonably. “The urge was never truly satisfied, but because you were mind-melded at the time . . . it sent you into a sort of psychic shock . . . numbed you . . . but it’s finally worn off . . .”

  “You . . . you do not know . . . what you are saying . . .” Selar’s face had gone dead white.

  “Maybe not,” agreed Soleta. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m saying at all. Maybe I’m completely crazy . . . except I know what I saw, Selar. I know what I felt and experienced. Whether you like it or not, whether you want to admit it or not . . . what you’re going through right now is the first stages of Pon farr. Your bad experience the first time threw your system off, but now the mating frenzy is back with a vengeance. And I have absolutely no idea what you’re going to do about it.”

  And Selar had the sick feeling that, somewhere in the ship, Burgoyne was sniffing the air and grinning. And she wasn’t far wrong.

  VII.

  THROUGH THE CORRIDORS of the Kayven Ryin, Si Cwan moved with the utmost care, flexing his arm to work out the kinks in his shoulder.

  He was alone.

  He had given Zak Kebron the slip, for Kebron had quickly made it clear he had no intention of letting Cwan handle matters the way he wanted to. The idea of not using any of the hand weapons, for starters, was intolerable to Kebron. In his arrogance—at least, arrogance the way Si Cwan saw it—Kebron felt that he himself did not have to depend on weapons. But he was of the forceful opinion that if Si Cwan had the opportunity to use a weapon on Zoran, he should take it. That nothing was going to be accomplished by treating the situation as a grudge match.

  But this had gone far beyond grudges. Si Cwan knew, beyond any question, that he was going to kill Zoran. He simply had to. Honor would not allow anything less. And he had to do it with his bare hands. This was not a question of honor allowing anything less, but rather his simple determination to make Zoran’s punishment as painful as possible.

  So Si Cwan had, moving quickly, left the Brikar behind. He’d been subtle about it; give him some credit. He’d darted down a corridor at a faster clip than the Brikar could maintain, and then run off down a connector, slid through a maintenance tube, and next thing he knew, he was on his own. And if he should live long enough to be in a position where he need make excuses, he could always simply claim that they had become accidentally separated from one another. Accidents, after all, did happen.

  He heard a noise.

  It was definitely not Zak Kebron. He already knew that rock-steady footfall. No, it was quick, extremely light-footed. He would almost have thought it was the movement of a small animal, so fast and nearly insubstantial was it. But Si Cwan wasn’t fooled, not for a moment.

  He crouched down and moved like a giant spider, arms and legs operating in perfect synchronization. He presented as minimal a target as possible, should it come to that.

  He moved past one room, the door to which was closed, and from within he thought he heard something. A quick footfall, or perhaps something on a table within that was slightly jolted and sent skidding. Something. He paused outside the door, crouching to one side, trying to determine whether or not he should burst into the room. It could very well be that someone was waiting for him to do precisely that, and had a vicious weapon aimed squarely at the door.

  Or perhaps they had anticipated that he would think entry through the door was a trap . . . and were instead aimed at the ceiling, or at a vent, hoping that he would make his entry that way.

  He still had the plasma blaster slung across his shoulders, and practicality began to rear its ugly head. He still had every reason to want to throttle Zoran . . . but by the same token, he had a few more reasons to want to continue to live.

  Well . . . perhaps using the plasma blaster wouldn’t be such a crime after all, as long as the killing blow was struck by hand. That was, after all, the important thing.

  He unslung the blaster, aimed it squarely at the door, and fired. At such close range, the plasma blast plowed through the door like acid through paper, and Si Cwan leaped headlong through the door, shoulder rolled and came up to face . . .

  . . . nothing.

  He was inside a laboratory, and there was no evidence of anyone else there. There was a beaker rolling across a table. Other than that, nothing.

  He muttered a curse as he slung the plasma blaster over his back. The noise of the plasma blaster would undoubtedly attract Zoran or his compatriots there. Or else Kebron himself, which would leave Si Cwan with explaining to do and an undesired ally at his back. Si Cwan felt that if there was one thing he did not need, it was someone watching out for him.

  He thought that up until the moment that the ceiling crashed in on him.

  It caught him completely by surprise as an overhead grating slammed down onto him, driving him to his knees. A split second later, Zoran dropped down from his hiding place overhead inside one of the engineering service ducts, and landed squarely on Si Cwan’s back.

  He drove a vicious blow to the base of Si Cwan’s neck, to the hard cluster of muscles situated there, and by all rights it should have paralyzed Si Cwan from the neck down for approximately five minutes. In the short term, it did the job. Si Cwan thudded to the ground, unable to feel anything in the rest of his body. The fall spilled Zoran to the floor as well, but Zoran rolled away and came quickly to his feet. Si Cwan struggled furiously, trying to regain command over his movements, as a sneering Zoran approached him.

  ’Too easy. Much too easy,” he said.

  The humans had a phrase for it: mind over matter.

  The mind belonged to Cwan, and the matter was—in this instance—his own body. He refused to acknowledge the physical reality that he was helpless. He would not allow himself to die helplessly in a paralyzed condition. It simply could not, would not be done. His brain sent commands to the rest of his body to respond, sending synapses roaring through him like photon torpedoes.

  Against all odds, against anything that Zoran would have deemed possible, Si Cwan’s legs slammed upward. They did not do so with all the force that they usually possessed. But it was sufficient as his legs scissored around Zoran’s at the knees. Before Zoran could move, Si Cwan forced himself to twist at the waist. He felt sluggish, torpid, but slow for Si Cwan was still lightning for most anyone else. The move was enough to collapse Zoran’s leg, and Zoran went down to find himself on the floor, face-to-face with the enraged Si Cwan.

  Si Cwan rolled over, half leaping and half lunging toward Zoran. He landed squarely on his opponent, grabbed him firmly by the ears, yanked upward and then down, slamming Zoran’s head onto the grated floor. Zoran’s head rang from the impact, and with a roar and an effort fueled by the explosion of pain behind his eyes, Zoran shoved Si Cwan off himself. Si Cwan rolled over toward a table, saw an opportunity, and quickly upended the table, sendin
g it tumbling toward Zoran. Zoran barely managed to scramble out of the way, and by the time he was on his feet, so was Si Cwan.

  They stood there for a moment, catching their respective breaths, their chests heaving, their hatred almost palpable.

  “It’s been ages, Si Cwan,” snarled Zoran.

  “Where are the other two? Rojam and Juif, they must be nearby.”

  “You don’t think I’d give away our strategic position, do you?” In point of fact, they were nowhere nearby. The confrontation was strictly between Zoran and Si Cwan, which was how Zoran had wanted it.

  Yet Si Cwan smiled with thinly veiled contempt and said, “Did you embark on this stupidity on your own? Or, even better . . . did they accompany you on this endeavor and then take the opportunity to abandon you? Is that it? Have your cheerfully domineering ways managed to grate on them after all these years? That would not surprise me. No, not in the least.”

  Rallying himself, Zoran said, “Tell me, Si Cwan, what it is like knowing that you are a complete and total failure?”

  Si Cwan did not even deign to answer the question. He merely tossed a disdainful look at him.

  “I see you have a weapon on your back,” continued Zoran. “And yet you would not use it.”

  “I’ve known you too long, Zoran. I knew that you would desire to settle this hand-to-hand, between the two of us. In many ways, you’re sadly predictable.”

  “In many ways, so are you. The difference between us is, I make use of that predictability . . . and you don’t.”

  And Zoran snapped his arm forward in what seemed an oddly casual gesture, as if he were endeavoring to shake hands.