by Ilsa J. Bick
Star Trek™:
Corps of Engineers
Turn the Page by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Troubleshooting by Robert Greenberger
The Light by Jeff D. Jacques
The Art of the Comeback by Glenn Greenberg
Signs from Heaven by Phaedra M. Weldon
Ghost by Ilsa J. Bick
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4975-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4975-7
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Beside a dead person is a living ghost.
—Chinese Proverb
The underworld, and the woman without a child; the earth which never has enough water, and the fire which never says, Enough.
—Proverbs 30:16
PROLOGUE
She is hot, so hot; the oppressive heat smothering her body; its sticky fingers tugging her flesh into thick molten runnels…
…can’t be…
…and she hopes she’s fallen asleep; that this is all a dream because she’s oiled her skin and spread her aching body to bake on a blanket on a beach somewhere—and maybe so because there’s a hollow roar in her ears, an ebb and flow. And she thinks of a time, long ago, when her uncle pressed a conch with nacreous lips and a briny salt smell to her ear and said: That’s the sound of the Earth before you were born.
But then there’s the smell. Not salty. Wrong. Nauseating as rotten eggs and it hurts to breathe. Every inhalation scorches her throat, and she is so thirsty. Her tongue is swollen and huge. She has to wake up, she has to…
…wake up…
…because maybe her dream has taken her to Vulcan, the Womb of Fire, a barren black landscape of pillow lava, punctuated by steam geysers hot enough to boil the flesh from bone…
…wake up…
…and the darkness has given way to a ruddy glow because she’s still human, only the color is wrong; it’s amber; it’s…
…open your eyes…
Her lids ease open. Her brain is wooly. Her vision swims.
Focusing is an act of will, maybe the last she’ll ever know, and this frightens her even more than she is already because now she remembers and a fist of dread squeezes her heart and she lets loose a long moan of despair. “No no no…”
She is naked, spread-eagled, and restrained by a force field on a modified biobed. Her skin glistens; her slick hair is matted to her skull. The air is sour with her fear. The room is very bright. Light globes stud the high rock cavern deep within this uninhabited planetoid—a place forgotten by its builders. A reflective polarity shield directly overhead captures the minute fluctuations in the bed’s quantum field generators. That accounts for the roar in her ears because the bed is active and now she picks up a slight increase in the generators’ hum.
An instant later, her skin prickles, and she gasps and then gives a hoarse, agonized cry as a bolt of white-hot pain shudders up and down her limbs. There’s the stink of ozone and singed hair.
“Please.” Something rips deep in her chest because there’s a bubbly taste of rust and then she’s panicking because she’s choking. Her eyes bulge; she bucks against the force field and then coughs a sludge-spray of what passes for her blood now, golden and thick and inhuman. “Please…st-stop…please…”
A click. Then his voice from the observation booth: “You know I can’t do that. It’s too late to go back, anyway.”
“I-I’m not…not t-talking about go-going back.” The prickling along her belly is shifting, concentrating itself over her womb. “Ju-just…you could stop…you could…just kill me, please, just…just kill…”
“Not right now.” His voice isn’t cruel. He’s not insane. If he were, maybe this would be easier to forgive. “There’s more work to do. Just…there, I think that has it.”
She can feel her skin rippling and now she strains against the force field to lift her chin, not wanting to see, knowing she must.
Her abdomen is moving, undulating. Her skin balloons then tents as something tries to push its way out. A hand, fingers spread wide, and then a thin stalk of wrist as if she’s sprouting a third arm that’s lengthening, unspooling…
She wails, a high long rope of sound that rebounds and echoes and doubles until there is nothing but her screams and this thing struggling to be born. “Nooooo! Nooooo…!”
“Stop that,” he says. “You’re giving me a headache.”
And an instant later, she feels that familiar stabbing pin-prickle as the cells of her face break apart and then realign—and her voice, the last thing that is truly hers, cuts out.
Mute, strangling on her horror, she stares at the shifting reflection over the biobed of a woman, with a third vestigial arm and a spider’s jointed leg sprouting from her belly.
A thing trying to scream with a mouth that’s no longer there.
CHAPTER 1
She was beat after a night of the kid doing the rumba on her bladder; the runabout smelled of too many people crammed into a too-small space. Scotty was just getting warm, telling Bart Faulwell the one about the Jenolen—“though it was Franklin who came up with the notion of locking the system in a continuous diagnostic”—and all Lense wanted was to crawl into a nice ice-box somewhere far, far away and catch sixty winks.
That, and maybe her job back.
Hunh. Lense let go of a long, slow sigh. That is so not going to happen.
Eight months pregnant and she was gonzo. Hasta la
vista, babee, and turn off the lights on your way out, sweetheart, that’s a love. Starfleet regs were very specific about the billets that would allow an officer to raise a newborn child, and Sabre-class vessels weren’t on the list. She could keep the kid or keep the job, but not both.
Hell, Gold hadn’t even waited until she was gone-gone. And she had trusted him. That little heart-to-heart, his damn therapy, all that talk about family: You’re not alone. You’re part of a family here. Gold had known just how to manipulate her. And yet…
And yet, for a time, Lense had actually been happy. Not merely content. Happy. Part of the family, a little. That had meant a lot. After Saad, Lense hadn’t been sure she’d ever be happy again.
A lump pushed in her throat as she thought about that last hour onboard, when Gold steered her into the mess hall, crammed with the da Vinci’s crew: a surprise going-away party before she left for Starbase 375 with Faulwell and Scotty.
The sight of all those people absolutely floored her and she’d gotten teary, embarrassing herself, but she’d just been so bowled over between her anxiety for Faulwell and then surprise that she hadn’t really
seen the party for what it was.
She was gone. This was good-bye.
Actually, there was more to it than that. Ironically, just as she was leaving, she also got a promotion. Gold did it himself, removing the hollow pip and replacing it with a full one to match the other two. Commander Elizabeth Lense.
And she couldn’t delude herself about it any longer now that Faulwell didn’t need her full attention. A sly sideways glance at Faulwell—wan, twenty kilos lighter, hollow-eyed—and she knew that whatever healing happened now was out of her hands. Faulwell had come a millimeter away from death before she—and, okay, Sarjenka, She of the Amazing Fame, Gold’s new Golden Girl—beat it back.
But there were wounds of the body and those of the soul. Lense suspected Faulwell’s healing was a long time coming.
The baby twisted and flipped. She was absolutely certain that if she pulled up her tunic, her stomach would look like two Vulcan sehlats fighting in a gunny sack. One thing was for sure: The kid was as completely pissed off about having to take the slow boat as she was.
Well, don’t beat me up; it’s your fault, you little squirt.
Under any other circumstance, she’d have been happy to beam down to Earth, except she couldn’t. The baby’s father, Saad, had been unique, his cells antigenically neutral. While this made him the perfect candidate for Idit Kahayn’s experiments, this also had allowed her system to adapt well to the fetus, something that couldn’t always be counted on with an interspecies pregnancy.
Yet the baby’s mixed antigenic status and the sheer amount of its unique DNA circulating in her blood meant that, theoretically, the transporter’s pattern buffers would have difficulty resolving the two matter streams. Julian Bashir had confirmed her suspicions: use the transporter, and the fetus’s transporter pattern might easily “bleed” into Lense’s own, killing them both. She’d risked it a couple of times earlier on, but once she got into the final trimester, she couldn’t chance it.
So now after this good long ride on a runabout as Scotty held forth, she couldn’t even hope for a quick escape once they came into the Sol system. They had to go through the entire nonsense of landing…
So what now? The da Vinci was no longer home, not with The Amazing Sarjenka loitering about and she’d be damned if she was going to let that Kewpie doll deliver her kid.
Actually, she had been tempted not to go ahead with the pregnancy. Did she really need a child to complicate her life even more?
Then she kept remembering what Julian said: But above all, be…happy. Because this is rare, and very precious. It’s like something out of the ashes. Maybe you won’t want it in the end. But maybe you will, because it’s a gift of things past and a possible future. It’s a gift.
She was appalled when her eyes stung with sudden tears.
For crying out loud, stop this. One disaster at a time, okay? Just what I need, a hormonally induced crying jag…
She told herself to relax. The little snot had been pretty active most of the night, deciding that a little after two A.M. was a great time to roust Mom for a game of belly ball. Lense had tolerated it for about ten minutes and then, groaning, she’d thrown in the towel, called for lights and then lay propped on pillows, her hands lightly on her belly, watching the kid’s bum skim the underside of her skin. There’d been a moment when he—okay, it was habit; she just thought of the little squirt as a boy—pushed and her skin tented with the outline of the heel one little foot.
It was hard to be angry after that. Damn it.
They were Earth-bound: Scotty finally back to Starfleet Command after joining in the hunt for Rod Portlyn and the mission to Ardana; Faulwell for R&R after being impaled by an Ardanan trap; and she to…well, because she had to.
So now what? Working the kinks in her neck, she blew a frizzle of hair from her eyes. While she had to choose a new assignment that fit Starfleet regs, her record and reputation meant she could have her pick of the ones that did. Julian had nudged her, gently, about considering DS9. She’d been tempted. Yes, they were close friends; after what they’d gone through together, maybe more than that. But best not to push it. Not. Right. Now.
One step by one step…
So, Earth. The kid in a month or so (depending; due dates were tough with interspecies pregnancies). Figure out what the hell to do next. Maybe get assigned to a Galaxy-class vessel? Not wild about that. She could use the support a starship offered, but she really felt a holodeck was no way for a kid to learn about a sun and sky, what grass felt like underfoot, how the sea churned in a storm.
All right, so maybe Earth? She couldn’t see herself leaving Starfleet. That was her only family, really; a stab at one anyway. Or…
“And then Franklin,” Scotty said, “know what he said?”
“I can’t imagine.” Faulwell’s drawn features pulled into an expression Lense read as half-catatonia, half-interest. Not terribly surprising: Nothing like a little near-death experience to take the wind out of your sails.
Faulwell’s hand absently drifted to a spot over his abdomen, a little left of center where Lense knew the spike had first pierced then skewered Faulwell to the cavern wall. “What did he say?” Faulwell asked.
Scotty either didn’t notice Faulwell’s fatigue, or chose to ignore it. Or maybe he’d decided that his mission en route was, in Scotty-speak, to buck up the lad and lass. “He said, ‘Scott, ya idchit, you’re worried about how old you’re gonna be before they haul your ass out of the pattern buffer? Didcha fergit the laws a physics?’”
The kid picked that instant for a really swift kick to the bladder—and Lense flinched, put a hand to her bulging belly, and let out a little “hah” of surprise before she remembered that she really didn’t need any more attention than she’d gotten already.
“Here now, lass.” All concern now, Scotty leaned forward. His teeth showed in a wide smile and his eyes were—yes—twinkling. This was something Lense would’ve thought physiologically impossible except she’d caught that look in just about everyone’s eyes right around her fifth month, when she really started to show.
That, and absolute strangers seemed to think that she was their private Buddha, giving her belly a little pat-pat. (And the outright gawking from species for whom a pregnancy like hers was worth a quick picture…gah.) One of the few good things Lense would admit to saying about Sarjenka was that the little twit actually respected her privacy and her pregnancy.
Scotty threw her a quick wink. “Acting up now? Showing you who’s boss?”
“Mmmm.” It was something she’d never quite gotten used to, how people seemed to, well, change around her. What was it about a pregnant woman that made normally level-headed people go a little gooey? She scooted back in her seat, both to resettle her weight (hoping like hell she could float the kid off her bladder) and move out of range just in case Scotty was seized with the same impulse to rub her tummy for good luck. “You’d think the little parasite would have more respect.”
Laughing, Scotty slapped his thigh. “You think things are bad now, just wait until he’s bawling his lungs out at all hours, wanting something to eat and only his mum will do. Then you’ll know who’s really in charge.”
“Gee, Scotty, I can’t wait.” She felt her belly gather and bunch as the kid balled and then flexed and did a back flip. She managed a grin. “I guess it’s a good thing they’re cute.”
And later, as the runabout rolled and began its approach decel, Scotty asked, “So, lass, I hear your mother’s gonna be on hand to meet you. Quite a woman, that.”
“Ah.” Lense swallowed, as much to forestall further conversation as concentrate on keeping her breakfast where it belonged. Funny how being pregnant changed a lot of things. Decels used to be a snap. Not that they were falling like a stone, but the blur of stars smudging into atmosphere was nauseating. “Didn’t know you knew her.”
“Och, everyone ever had anythin’ to do with the Tholians has heard of Jennifer Almieri.” To Faulwell: “The Peckman, the Nobel, and
the Voltak.” Ticking the prizes off on his fingers. “Maybe two, three more.”
“Yeah?” Across the aisle, Faulwell pulled out of his slouch, sudden interest lighting his wan features. “Your mom is Jennifer Almieri? You never said anything about that.”
Yeah, because she’d never said anything about her family, period.
“She and I aren’t exactly close.” An understatement. Like the reply message she’d received when she sent word ahead that she was returning to Earth: Message received. Will be on hand but must leave in forty-eight. Probably to flit back to whatever dig she had going. Typical Jennifer.
“Really?” Scotty’s eyebrows crawled for his hairline. “When was the last time you two saw each other?”
Lense debated a half second. The kid bunched, like he was waiting, too.
She looked Scott square in the eye. “About fifteen years.”
That pretty much killed the conversation the rest of the way down.
Making their way toward the waiting area at the shuttle dock in San Francisco, Lense halfheartedly searched for Jennifer. Never occurred to her that they might not recognize each other. One thing Jennifer Almieri was not: vain. Give her the same dusty pair of jeans, work boots, and plaid shirt, and Jennifer was set.
“Is she here?” Faulwell asked. He didn’t seem to be looking for anyone.
“Mmm-mmm,” she murmured. Odd. She’d assumed Anthony Mark would be on hand, but a quick glance around didn’t reveal a single blond-haired, blue-eyed Adonis in sight.
On the other hand, a knot of Starfleet personnel standing along the wall to the extreme left did snag her attention. From their uniforms, she counted two security guards; a doe-eyed, slight man in blue she pegged as a Betazoid, and three humans, two men and a woman.
The woman and one of the men were older. The woman was handsome, mid-fifties, with bronze hair. Seemed familiar.
The older man had blond hair now going white and sun-weathered skin. He was lanky, maybe two meters and change. Good-looking.
