Copyright 2016
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Book # 1 of
NEW FRONTIER RELOADED
THE TRAIL
By
ROVER MARIE TOWLE
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE: LONDON CALLING
CHAPTER TWO: LOOKING UP
CHAPTER THREE: WARM DAY, COLD WAR
CHAPTER FOUR: UNTOUCHED
CHAPTER FIVE: SHOCK TO YOUR SYSTEM
CHAPTER SIX: ALL I’M LOSING IS ME
CHAPTER SEVEN: YOU’VE GOT SO FAR TO GO
CHAPTER EIGHT: PERFECT DAY
CHAPTER NINE: WHAT A GOOD BOY
CHAPTER TEN: SOMEONE NEW
CHAPTER ELEVEN: LONG NIGHT
CHAPTER TWELVE: TEMPTATION WAITS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CLAUSTROPHOBIA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: BARELY BREATHING
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: HOME
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SICK SICK SICK
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: I WANT YOU
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EVERYTHING HITS AT ONCE
CHAPTER NINETEEN: TROUBLE
CHAPTER TWENTY: SEEIN’ RED
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: KNOCKOUT
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: LIVE BEFORE YOU DIE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: I ONLY WANT A PLACE I CAN STAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: MOON
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: CRASH INTO ME
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: WHY CAN’T YOU BEHAVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: MOUTH
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: PUZZLE PIECES
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: KILL ALL YOUR FRIENDS
CHAPTER THIRTY: ANOTHER PERFECT DAY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: GOODBYE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: YOU’RE THE ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: PROMISE
EPILOGUE
Chapter 1: Something's Started Crazy, Sweet and (Un)known
They say there are moments that change your life—mere seconds of action or inaction that alter the course of destiny forever. Julian has never truly bought into that idea. Capable of seeing cause and effect to a higher degree than most humans, Julian doesn't divide life into discrete moments but rather sees it as a chain of related events all building upon each other to create the present.
There is one exception when all time seems to slow and the present solidifies into a single moment like a photograph taken by an antique camera. Even as it happens, Julian cannot deny the transformative power of the moment.
He and Ezri are walking down the Promenade on their way to lunch, discussing their latest trip to the holosuite. (“Discussing” is putting it lightly. More like “arguing.” After four months of playing the Battle of Thermopylae, Julian can't seem to stop comparing Ezri to Miles and Ezri can't seem to stop psychoanalyzing Julian's holosuite habits.) Ezri stops dead in her tracks. “Oh my god.”
Julian looks back at her. “Don't be like this. Just because I suggested you play a Persian—”
“No, look.” She points down to the level below where a crowd of people fresh off the latest transport are making their way through the Promenade.
“What?” Julian scans the crowd, picking up on a familiar face. “Is that. . .”
“My wife,” Ezri finishes.
Below, Lenara catches Ezri's eye and smiles. Ezri waves.
And that's it. That's when it all changes. A smile, a wave, and the world—two worlds, really—change.
The enormity of the moment is lost on Ezri, who tugs on Julian's arm. “Let's go down and say hi.”
He follows her silently, caught by himself in a temporal flow that makes seconds pass torturously slow (he can hear his heart beat and feel the blood coursing through his veins as they wait for the turbolift) and days fly past him (in three days, he will be sad and alone on a space station that no longer feels like home). As they inch closer and closer to Lenara, ominous drum beats of a Klingon opera pound in Julian's head, signaling his doom, his tragic downfall.
“Hi,” Ezri says.
“Hi,” Lenara responds.
“You look good.”
“So do you.”
“Oh, well, you know, new body.” Ezri titters nervously.
Lenara finally notices him. “Dr. Bashir.”
He nods. “Dr. Kahn.”
“It's good to see you again. Both of you.”
“Likewise. What brings you to Deep Space Nine?” But Julian's gut knows the answer. “If you don't mind me asking.”
“I do, actually. It's a very long story. It would bore you to tears, I'm sure.”
“You could tell us over dinner,” Ezri interjects. “Tonight.”
“I wouldn't want to impose.”
“Not at all. Julian and I were planning on Quark's tonight anyway.” She fails to mention that they are planning to visit Quark's holosuites, not eat dinner.
“That's sound great. What time?”
The minutiae of dinner arrangements blurs into the pounding of a dowel on a blank stage. This is the end. This is the end. This is the end.
–
Upside down, Kira stops just short of her desk. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Ezri grunts, blood pooling in her face.
Kira cocks her head to the side. “Who's telling you to do that?”
“Emony.”
“The gymnast?”
Ezri tries to nod her head but that doesn't seem possible from her position. “Standing on her head helped her calm down.”
“What about you?”
“Not really, but I thought this would work because this is a Dax problem, not an Ezri problem.”
“Is it working?”
“A little bit. I don't feel like puking anymore.”
“That's good. I don't want to give Sisko back his office with stained carpets.” Kira leans back on her desk, resting her hand on Sisko's baseball. “What's the matter?” She tosses the baseball once, twice, three times in the air.
“Guilt. I have eight lifetimes of guilt, including my own.”
“Eight? Shouldn't that be nine?”
“Joran was incapable of remorse. That's probably for the best. I mean, not for the people he murdered obviously, but for me. . . That's probably a little selfish.”
Kira smiles. “Just a little.”
“That's the problem. . .” Ezri rolls out of her headstand, sitting slumped on the floor facing Kira. “I'm horribly selfish for a Trill. I want Lenara when she doesn't want me when Julian does want me and—”
“Lenara? Your wife Lenara? You're having feelings for her again?”
Ezri nods. “I don't think I ever stopped. But when I saw her today, I just—”
“She's on the station?”
“—wanted to grab her face and kiss the living daylights out of her. Right the
re! In front of—”
“Wait, on the station?”
“—Julian! And Lysia, the jumja vendor!”
“So, she is on the station?”
“Yes! She says she'll be here indefinitely, so I can feel nauseated constantly for the foreseeable future. Ugh!” she groans. “I am so mad I died.”
“Which time?”
“Torias. I was so stupid! I had everything, but I had to go and fly that stupid mission knowing the shuttle wasn't ready and now he's dead and I'm alive and Lenara and I can never be together and I'm left with nothing.”
“Except for Julian.”
“Right. Except for Julian.”
–
“Jesus, Julian! Were you raised in a barn? It's two in the morning here!”
His ears ringing, Julian turns down the volume of the subspace transmission. “Sorry, Miles. I—”
“You're damn right you're sorry. I have to get Molly ready for school in a few hours. And then I have class until five at night. The whole bloody station better be burning down for you to call me like this.”
Julian smirks. “I thought you said we weren't allowed to call you with engineering problems anymore.”
Miles snorts. “That's right. So, you've got no reason to be waking me up with a high priority transmission.”
“I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I. . .” He runs a hand through his hair. “I'm going out of my mind about Ezri.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing's happened, but there was a moment today when I was convinced with absolute certainty that she was going to leave me.”
“What? Did Captain Boday come swooping into the station reciting Klingon love poetry?”
“No. Lenara Kahn.”
Miles' lips droop into a frown. “Oh.”
“We're having dinner tonight.”
“The three of you?”
“Yes.”
“That's bound to be awkward.”
“It's bound to be hell! I'm going to spend the entire night imagining the two of them together.”
“If it makes you feel any better, Quark'll probably be doing the same thing.”
“I'm serious, Miles. I. . . I've tried calculating the probabilities and the only answer I've come up with is that I'm terrified, and however irrational this all is, I need someone to tell me that I'll be fine. That I'm overacting.”
“Julian. You'll be fine. You're overacting. Better, now?”
“Actually, yes.”
–
“So. . .” Ezri drums her fingers on the table—the same table Jadzia, Lenara, and Julian sat at for their dinner date all those years ago. They are even sitting in the same seats. That does nothing to quiet the damning percussion in Julian's head, but Ezri's awkwardness seems to drown it out. “How's your research going?”
“Good. Things have slowed down significantly since the war ended, but it is nice not having to fulfill military contracts. The bureaucracy is maddening.”
“That's Starfleet for you. One big, interstellar bureaucracy.”
“Have you ever considered leaving?”
“Starfleet?” Ezri shakes her head. “I may complain about the PADDwork, but Starfleet has been good to me. They've believed in me times when I didn't even believe in myself. I mean, I never would've been joined if Starfleet didn't think I could handle it. Not that they had much of a choice. The symbiont would've died if we hadn't been joined, but during those first three days—” Ezri leans in closer to Lenara. “—when I was convinced the symbiont would reject me, everyone on the Destiny had such confidence in me. I never thought of myself as being worthy of being joined, but my crewmates. . . It's like they saw a part of me that I was too close to see.”
“It sounds to me like you owe as much to Starfleet as Starfleet owes to you.”
Ezri grins. “I can only hope.”
“Well, I don't think either of you would be where you are today without each other.”
“No, I guess not.”
They share a smile. Julian coughs. “Shall I get us some more drinks?” Lenara and Ezri nod wordlessly at him and as he gets up from the table he realizes that he may have squashed one intimate moment between them, but he'd also left them alone to have countless more.
He approaches the bar; the drinks can't come fast enough. “Quark! Another round.”
“Coming up.” But Quark pauses pouring to leer at Lenara and Ezri. “How's the beginning of the end going?”
“Dinner is going fine, thank you. . . Can you hurry with those drinks?”
“A little anxious to get back, are we? Afraid by the time you sit down they'll be married and with a Bajoran war orphan on the way?”
Julian fixes him with a particularly menacing glare, which considering the general symmetry of his facial features is not too intimidating. Even to a Ferengi. “That's coming out of your tip.” That ought to do it.
“Hey, I'm only looking out for you. From one Dax admirer to another, I think we both know how this ends.”
“Because it's happened before. . .” Julian mutters bitterly.
“Exactly.” Damn Ferengi hearing. “She's as good as gone. Better to cut your losses now than—”
“I'm not losing anything!”
“So, you think it's a coincidence that Lenara chose this station of all places to make her humble home.”
“We're next to the only known stable wormhole in the universe and she's a wormhole scientist. The fact that Ezri is here is just. . . But even if Lenara was willing to take the risk and reassociate, Ezri would never. We're together! She has me.”
“Oh, and what a prize you are. DS9's most eligible confirmed bachelor.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“To put it simply, you don't have the lobes for keeping a female.”
“I don't 'keep females.' I. . . I respect them!”
“You 'respect them' so much that they flee from your embrace like a barkan out of hezmana.”
“A what out of where?”
“How many successful relationships have you had? How many relationships have you had that lasted longer than a week?”
“I was with Leeta for months!”
“And then she left you for Rom. If that doesn't speak to how desperate you make females, I don't know what does.”
“It's different with Ezri. We've been together for four months.”
“But how much longer can you give her. A year? Two? At best, you can give her one lifetime. That's nothing to a Trill, but Lenara. . . I'd hate to play the species card, but let's face it, you're not Trill. You're barely even human.”
“For who could ever learn to love a mutant?” Julian retorts.
“Exactly.” Apparently, hewman sarcasm is the one thing Ferengi ears can't hear. “Here's your drinks.” He passes the tray to Julian. “You know, I could've had a waiter bring them to your table.”
“And have me miss out on your stunning conversational skills and sunny disposition? Never.” Satisfied with his parting shot, Julian heads back to the table where Ezri and Lenara are still deep in conversation.
“And what about your sister?” Ezri asks. “How is she doing?”
“Good. She's doing well. She just graduated from the Murona Institute of Rian'kora.”
“Wow. That's amazing. Don't they only take a few dozen new students a year?”
Lenara nods. “It's a very selective program, but Nulat has always been gifted. Practically from birth.”
“That's so strange, because you and your brother are both scientists and she's—”
“I know! Bejal and I don't have an artistic bone in our bodies between the two of us—”
“But she's a trained rian'kora!”
“What's funny is that she's really not the odd one in the family; me and Bejal are. My parents are both artists. . . I actually think they were quite relieved when she started performing.”
“Pardon me,” Julian says. “What's a rian'kora?”
Ezri and Lenara g
lance at Julian, then back to each to each other to converse briefly in Trill before Ezri turns to him. “It's like a mime. A talking mime.”
“So, like a clown?”
Ezri and Lenara share an amused look, giggling sightly. “It's a little more complicated than that.”
“Oh.” Julian stares down at his salad.
“Rian'korii are more. . . prestigious than clowns.”
“Oh.” He stabs his fork through an Andorian olive, splattering its juice across his plate.
Lenara leans closer to him. “Rian'koran is maybe the definitive Trill artform.” He feels like he should know that.
“And what exactly does one do with a degree in rian'koran?” He's scrambling, pulling out the stock question he asks of anyone in a “softer” field who intimidates him. It's juvenile.
“Well.” Lenara wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Nulat is working as a cultural ambassador for Trill with the Federation Artists Corps.”
“I'm surprised that's up and running already,” Ezri says. “It was only in the preliminary planning stages when I was at the Academy.”
“From what I hear,” Lenara starts, “once the Dominion War started in earnest, a group of artists in San Francisco decided enough was enough and began organizing and building the corps without Starfleet.”
The Trail: A Star Trek Novel (New Frontier Reloaded Book 1) Page 1
