He patted a side pocket of his stealth suit. “Right here.”
“Then we should get back to the ship,” she said. “What’s our exit strategy?”
“The armory and this fuel network are full of spiders.”
K’Ehleyr grinned and put her mask back on. “Sounds like a plan.” As she started to fade away, Barclay cast a final, regretful glance down the passageway at Nechayev. “Don’t look so glum, Reg,” said the now-invisible K’Ehleyr. “You just saved Spock’s movement and the Terran revolution. You’re a hero.”
“I guess so,” Barclay said, pulling his own mask back down over his face. On some level, he knew that what K’Ehleyr said was true, but it didn’t make him feel any better about having taken a life or having shot a woman in the back.
He powered up his stealth suit. His HUD confirmed that he was once again transparent. He sighed and walked toward the south hatch. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”
The Solomon was two hours and half a light-year from the still-burning Klingon base, but Barclay’s guilty feelings continued to weigh on his conscience. Though the tiny Memory Omega scout ship was cloaked from Alliance sensors, Barclay found nowhere to hide from his memory of pulling the trigger and watching Alynna Nechayev die in a flash of light and heat.
K’Ehleyr occupied the Solomon’s pilot’s seat. She was relaxed behind the flight controls, guiding the ship toward its rendezvous with other Memory Omega teams at the movement’s backup headquarters. She and Barclay had doffed their stealth suits and changed back into regular clothes as soon as the Solomon broke orbit, giving their quiet journey the ambience of a routine jaunt.
Barclay had been trying, with little success, to distract himself by studying the master quantum transceiver. Liberated from its disguise, it resembled little more than a plain metal cylinder, roughly equal in size to his middle finger.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said, holding it up to the overhead light. “Thousands of quantum particles, vibrating in perfect harmony across unbreakable transdimensional strings with their sympathetic-twin partners, all over the galaxy.”
“I should’ve known you’d see nothing but a fancy gizmo,” K’Ehleyr teased with a grin.
He tucked the MQT back into a protective case. “I know it’s more than just a gadget,” he said. “It’s the gadget.”
“You still don’t get it.” Looking over her shoulder, she added, “That’s not just the key to the revolution you’re holding. It is the revolution.”
Chastened, he contemplated how close they had come to letting everything slip away. A century of sacrifices and secrets had nearly been lost because of one woman’s broken faith in the future. He rested his hand on the transceiver’s case and permitted himself a moment of hopeful anticipation.
“We’re going to live to see it, aren’t we?” he asked.
K’Ehleyr grinned and kept her eyes on the streaks of stars outside the Solomon. “That’s the plan, Reg. That’s the plan.”
Star Trek®: Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows Page 43
