THE CHILDREN OF HAMLIN

by Carmen Carter

  As abruptly as it had begun, the confrontation with the Choraii was over. The Enterprise had won. Captain Picard reflected briefly on his ship’s triumph, then moved on to the demands of the present. He looked over to the ambassador.

  “I’m just a passenger now,” Deelor said, divining the question in Picard’s mind. “You can drop me off at Starbase Ten, along with Ruthe and the Hamlin survivors.”

  “That will have to wait until after we have taken the Farmers home,” said Picard. “Our passengers have suffered enough inconvenience as it is.” He expected a protest, but Deelor only shrugged. The man had an uncanny ability to know which issues the captain would give way on and which were not worth the effort of contesting. “Helm, set a course for New Oregon. Warp four.”

  Data had anticipated the order and the necessary coordinates were already prepared. “Course laid in, sir.”

  Picard settled back in his command chair. The passage of a few uneventful days would be quite welcome after the recent turmoil. “Engage.”

  Geordi started the ship on its journey, then double-checked a number on his control panel. “Data, this can’t be right.” The pilot turned around to address Captain Picard. “Estimated time of arrival at New Oregon is thirty-six days.”

  “What!” The captain jumped up from his seat. “Mr. Data, explain.”

  “More precisely, thirty-six days, five hours, and twelve minutes.” Data puzzled over the agitation of his fellow crew members. “The Choraii ship towed us off course during the tractor lock.”

  “Yes, but over a month?” protested the captain. “The original rendezvous site was only a day and a half away from New Oregon.”

  “The B Flat reached a peak speed of warp nine-point-nine for several seconds,” said Data. “I can show you the exact distance/acceleration ratio of—”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Data,” said the captain. He sighed at the thought of prolonged contact with Ambassador Deelor’s entourage and over a hundred contentious Farmers. “Mr. La Forge, increase speed to warp six.”

  Data obligingly recalculated their arrival time. “Twelve days, ten hours—”

  “Understood,” said Picard, cutting Data off. The captain’s mood was not appreciably improved by the altered schedule, especially since the colonists would demand an explanation for the delay. Riker could provide it, decided Picard. One of the privileges of rank was the delegation of unpleasant tasks.

  None of the Farmers had been hurt when the Enterprise was jerked into motion by the Choraii ship. Enticed by second-hand reports of beguiling farmland, the entire community had packed inside the holodeck for a first-hand look at the simulated wonder. Most of the colonists were still exploring the meadows when they were thrown down onto the springy grass by the sudden lurch of the ground beneath their feet.

  A few of the more intrepid explorers had reached the cluster of wooden buildings, but the barn floors were lined with a thick layer of dry hay which padded their fall. Of them all, Tomas was the most unfortunate. He was rapped soundly on the back of his head by a swinging Dutch door and briefly lost consciousness.

  “Tomas, my son, my poor boy,” Dolora clucked, bending over the bulky form stretched out on the floor. She looked anxiously to the woman who was checking his pulse. A loose circle of Farmers were gathered around them, peering down at Tomas and waiting for Charla’s pronouncement.

  “I can’t even find a bump,” Charla laughed.

  The man’s eyes fluttered open and fixed on his mother’s face. He groaned.

  “Oh, don’t move!” cried Dolora when he sat up. She pulled at his arm, trying to keep him from rising, but Tomas struggled to his feet. “You’ll only make it worse, son.”

  “Please, Mother,” he said through tightly pressed lips. He tried to avert his gaze from the other Farmers, but the audience was ringed all around him. “I’m not a child.”

  “No, fortunately. You’re a grown man with a thick skull,” said Patrisha.

  Tomas ignored the jibe, but he brushed the straw off his clothes with great vigor and jammed a loose end of his shirt back under his belt. One by one the men and women drifted away. When Tomas looked up again, he caught sight of Dnnys and Wesley at once.

  “Earthquakes, what a lovely detail,” he cooed, mimicking his sister’s earlier praise, “Who thought of that?”

  “It’s not in the program,” protested Wesley, then lamely added, “but maybe there was a glitch somewhere.” He suspected the true cause of the motion but shouldered the blame rather than draw attention to another of the starship’s combat maneuvers. A programming error would be less likely to draw the wrath of the Farmers.

  “And what other surprises do you have in store for us, Ensign Crusher?” Tomas was starting to draw the attention of the bewildered colonists. “Barn fires? Tornadoes? Perhaps a flood of biblical proportions?”

  “Tomas!” cried his mother. “You go too far.”

  Her son flushed. “I’m very sorry, Mother. It must have been the blow to my head.” He edged his way out of the barn as he apologized.

  Taking advantage of the diversion, Wesley and Dnnys scampered up a tall ladder to the hayloft. From that dizzying height the concerns of the adults below seemed just as puzzling, but far less important.

  “So what was that all about?” asked Wesley. “What was he apologizing for?”

  Dnnys mumbled an unintelligible reply as they climbed over tightly corded bales of hay and waded through loose straw. Dust raised by their boots tickled their noses and set them to sneezing. They reached the hay doors and pushed them open, taking in great gulps of the clear air outside.

  “So tell me,” Wesley asked again, after they had taken a seat, dangling their legs over the edge of the loft. A late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the barnyard below.

  “We don’t talk about those things.”

  “What things?”

  To Wesley’s surprise, his friend turned bright red.

  Dnnys took a deep breath, then whispered the answer. “You know, religious things.”

  “Oh.” Wesley was careful not to show any sign of amusement. His exposure to a wide variety of cultures had taught him to respect an equally wide variety of taboos, and this prohibition was certainly no stranger than others. He changed the conversation to spare his friend any further embarrassment. “When does the decanting start?”

  Dnnys stuck a straw between his teeth and leaned back onto his elbows. “Tomorrow morning,” he said glumly, as if uttering a death sentence.

  Wesley understood. Once the animals were released into the holodeck, Dnnys would lose his excuse for working in the cargo deck. Which also meant losing his cover for roaming freely about the Enterprise. “Listen, if there’s anything I can do . . . “

  “There is,” said Dnnys. “I have a favor to ask. A big favor.”

  Wesley waited for an explanation, but Dnnys seemed reluctant to continue. “What is it, Dnnys? You know I’ll help.”

  “I have this plan.” The Farmer boy wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “But it’s got to be a secret.”

  Wesley listened carefully to his friend’s explanation. And as he listened, he began to frown.

  The medical isolation chamber had been cleverly designed for a wide variety of purposes. If a patient was contagious, the airflow seals locked the infectious agent within. For anyone with a depressed immune system, the same seals kept viruses and bacteria from entering. The low-intensity red lights were soothing to eyes weakened by fever and fatigue, while the soft cushions and lowered gravity were especially suited for burn patients in the last stages of healing.

  It was also the closest approximation to the environment of a Choraii ship that Dr. Crusher could prepare on such short notice.

  A diagnostic scanner monitored the patient lying inside, displaying a constant assessment of his physical condition and the effect of the last sedative injection, but the panel couldn’t tell her what she really wanted to know. She studied the sleeping figure of the man k
nown as Jason, searching for the answers to the disturbing questions raised by the deaths of the other adult captives. The skin over his knees and elbows was still raw. He had collapsed as soon as the transporter beam faded and his body lost the support of the buoyant liquid interior of the Choraii atmosphere. Here, his face was slack in repose, but her own mind superimposed an image from the transporter chamber when she had looked into his eyes and seen only a wild terror.

  Jason had plunged without warning into a vastly different world, and his cries had been strangled by the unexpected rush of thin air into his lungs. If he was one of the original Hamlin children, memories of that long-ago childhood had not eased the transition. Even Tasha, gone for only a few minutes, had been disoriented on her return to the ship.

  Had the rescue come too late for this man? Would he die like the others?

  Dr. Crusher laid a hand on the clear window. Her touch darkened the glass, granting Jason privacy in the confines of the chamber. He would remain unconscious for another few hours, but she stole out of the room as if afraid she might wake him.

  In the room next door, a second isolation unit also held a sleeping form, but the child was deep in a natural slumber. His toffee-colored skin and curly black hair were a stark contrast to Jason’s pale complexion.

  “He’s finally cried himself out,” said Troi, who was keeping vigil over the boy. She followed Dr. Crusher’s sharp glance at the blood-sugar-level indicator. “He was too upset to eat, but he’ll be hungry when he wakes up. I’m certain I can tempt him with some food later.”

  Crusher nodded in automatic agreement, then shook her head. “It’s not going to be that simple, Deanna.” A brief review of the Hamlin medical records had made that much clear. “He’s been raised in a liquid environment. A complete rehabilitation will be necessary to teach him how to function in our world.”

  “Which means he’ll need constant supervision,” said Troi. “So how will we explain him to your department?”

  “Good question.” Only a few people had seen Crusher whisk the child into the isolation chamber, and Troi had taken over primary responsibility for his care when the doctor had been called away, but his presence could not be shielded for much longer. The unannounced appearance of a two-year-old boy, one unknown to her medical staff, would give rise to a host of questions. “For that matter, how do we explain Jason?”

  “Survivors of a shipwreck,” suggested Troi. “It’s unoriginal, but not too far from the truth.”

  “Good enough, I suppose,” sighed the doctor. “Only we’d better make sure the rest of the bridge crew gives out the same story. Nothing will draw attention faster than conflicting accounts of how they got here.” She moved toward the room’s door. “I’ll stop by later and we can discuss what to do when he wakes up.”

  “Beverly,” called out Troi as the other woman reached the threshold. “We can’t keep calling him ‘the boy’ and ‘the child.’ He needs a name.”

  “What about Moses?” suggested Crusher, and stepped out of the room to continue on her rounds.

  Striding down the corridor, the chief medical officer shoved aside the distracting demands of the Hamlin captives and focused her attention on her next set of patients. Sickbay was at near capacity, and the heavy caseload meant she would be working through the night.

  Captain Picard’s warning announcement before the Enterprise was dragged off course by the Choraii ship had been brief, too brief to prepare every one of the thousand people on board for the sudden acceleration. A few people never heard the crew alert and were hurled through the air without warning. Others were simply a shade too slow in reacting. The extent of their injuries depended on what part of their body connected with the nearest solid object. Those with broken bones and lacerations reached sickbay quickly on float stretchers with paramedics in close attendance or were carried in by fellow crew members. Over the following hour, a gradually increasing stream of people had hobbled in to sickbay on their own, seeking relief for bruises and sprains.

  “Duncan is doing very well,” said the supervising nurse in critical care. He called up an encouraging pattern of regenerating nerves on a computer screen. Crusher was relieved to see that the astronomer’s spinal cord had been bruised rather than cut by the telescope that had swung into his lower back.

  “What about Butterfield?” The most badly injured of the crew had been a botanist who had crashed headfirst into a potted caudifera. Butterfield would be the first to laugh at the irony of being attacked by one of his own plants, if he ever regained consciousness. Dr. Crusher had mended the scientist’s fractured skull, but only time could tell if his brain would function with its previous brilliance.

  Doswell shrugged. “No change.”

  Recovery was out of her hands at this point. Dr. Crusher reacted to her impotence with a rage—and found a focus for that rage waiting in her office.

  “Captain, I have a sickbay filled with casualties and because of Deelor’s damn security restrictions, they don’t even understand why they were hurt. This wasn’t their fight, but they’re the ones paying the biggest price.”

  Her harsh words echoed Picard’s own thoughts, intensifying his guilt. He alone was responsible for the people lying in the medical wards.

  “These are passengers. They should never have been taken into a situation that you knew would be dangerous!” Crusher said bitterly. “You should have separated the ship.”

  In fact, his first instinct had been to order the detachment of the stardrive section from the main disk. He had been swayed by Deelor’s arguments against that action. Or was it that he hadn’t been willing to fight hard enough for his own command decision? What would have happened if the saucer section had been left behind—would the crew of the battle bridge have returned to find these people uninjured or to find all the passengers slaughtered by the wandering Choraii? “I chose not to,” said Picard curtly.

  “Tell that to my patients.”

  “I stand by my actions.”

  “At least you’re still able to stand, unlike Butterfield and Duncan.” She regretted that remark as soon as she said it—but Picard didn’t give her time to retract the statement.

  “It’s your job to redress my errors in judgment,” he said harshly. “Be thankful you can wash the blood from your hands.”

  “Jean-Luc, I’m sorry, I should never have said that. It was unfair of me.”

  “Never apologize for the truth, Dr. Crusher,” said Picard, unwilling to accept absolution for his sins. He stalked out of the office before she could speak again.

  One by one the senior officers had scattered to other parts of the ship until Geordi La Forge was left in charge of the bridge. Trading his position at the helm for the captain’s chair, even during the prevailing tranquility, inevitably led to dreams of command. Having observed Picard in action against the Choraii, the lieutenant questioned how he would react to a similar emergency. Not that he would get the opportunity to find out any time soon.

  “Geordi?”

  Starting at his name, La Forge looked up to see who had called him. “Oh, hello, Wesley.” He hadn’t noticed the boy’s entrance onto the bridge. Geordi was relieved that an ensign rather than an officer had caught him lost in thought. “You can use any of the empty duty stations . . . ”

  “I’m not here to work,” said Wesley with a shake of his head. “I have a favor to ask.”

  “So ask,” urged Geordi, sensing an unspoken urgency in the young ensign’s somber expression.

  “Well, it’s not really ship business,” apologized Wesley. “But a friend of mine needs some information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Wesley looked nervously over his shoulder, then bent down and whispered in Geordi’s ear. Once Geordi heard the request, the identity of Wesley’s friend was fairly obvious. “The best person to ask for that information is probably Logan.”

  “Oh.”

  Geordi grinned at the boy’s unenthusiastic response. “Hey, I know ou
r chief engineer isn’t your biggest fan, but I bet he’ll answer your questions. After all, it’ll give him a chance to give you some answers for a change.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said Wesley, turning away.

  “And Wes, tell Dnnys . . . I mean, your friend, that I wish him luck.”

  “Thanks, Geordi,” the ensign called out as he raced off the bridge ramp to the aft deck. “He’s going to need all the luck he can get.”

  * * *

  Riker had been on his way to his cabin when the haunting melody pulled him off course, sending him through a welter of corridors searching for the source of the music. He turned one corner and the sound strengthened, turned another and it faded to a faint whisper. Doubling back on his trail, he picked up the soft strains of the flute filtering down from an access chute in the ceiling. He stood listening for several moments, letting the sorrowful notes wash over him like falling tears.

  Grabbing hold of a rung at the hole’s entrance, he hoisted himself into the tunnel above. His shoulders brushed against the sides of the narrow, curving walls. He kept climbing, hand over hand up the ladder, until he reached a service chamber halfway between decks.

  Ruthe was sitting cross-legged on the metal ledge that circled the opening like a catch basin. Her music trailed away when Riker climbed out of the chute, then stopped altogether when he sat down beside her. She dropped the flute onto her lap but didn’t seem to resent the intrusion.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, frowning at the line of dried blood that ran down her cheek. He brushed aside a lock of her hair and uncovered a purplish bruise on her forehead.

  She shook off his touch. “Sharp edges and hard metal. That’s what ships are made of.”

  “We’ve brought Jason on board. I thought you should know that.” Picard had described his confrontation with the translator and her resistance to the rescue. “Dr. Crusher will do everything—”

  “He lied,” said Ruthe abruptly.

  Riker almost asked her who she meant, but there was really only one person that she could be talking about. He let her continue.