“I know the leader he used to be. Now I just see another bureaucrat behind a desk.”
Janith-Lau tilted her chin back defiantly. For all her love of peace, she didn’t resist her confrontational urge this time. “Do you really want to test that?”
After a moment’s thought, Portia smiled. “Actually, I do. Finally, for the first time in my life, I’m fighting a real battle. Nobody goes into a battle knowing they’ll win. But that’s the point, isn’t it? To test yourself against the odds?”
Her smile widening, Portia drew nearer, almost sensually. “I don’t know if we can win this fight. But at last, I truly feel alive.”
Starfleet Academy
Zirani Kayros and Michael Ashrafi waylaid Horatio and Benedick outside of April Hall as they headed for class. “Did you hear?” Kayros asked. She and Ashrafi filled them in on the hostage situation, or what they’d been able to discern of it from static-laden, distorted news broadcasts and scuttlebutt.
Benedick shook his head, eyes wide. “I can’t believe even Portia would do something this reckless.”
“Reckless?” Ashrafi scoffed. “Reckless is trying to smuggle Romulan ale into your dorm, or not studying for your physics test. This is out-and-out berserk.”
Horatio looked down at the pavement. “I feared something like this. She turned away from our commitment, our discipline, to fight only for Arcturus. She was ready to fight for anything—I fear she now fights purely to fight.”
Kayros didn’t want to believe that. As difficult as Portia could be, there was a pride and integrity to her that Kayros respected. She even dared to consider Portia a friend.
She caught Horatio’s arm. “You have to go to her. Convince them to let you negotiate with her. If anyone can get her to calm down and talk this through…”
The soft-spoken Arcturian sighed heavily. “We have already tried. I urged her to stay in the Academy, to do nothing to confirm people’s fears of us. Instead, she’s chosen to reinforce them.”
“Horatio, you can’t just abandon her!”
He held her gaze. “I have a responsibility to those of us who remain. More fundamentally, I have a responsibility to Arcturus. As long as the Warborn are on Arcturus, we are a threat to its peace and stability. We must find an alternate path offworld, and I believe Starfleet is our best hope. Portia and the others have jeopardized that, so those of us who remain must counter her actions by proving that we are peaceful, loyal, and obedient. If we cannot, then we are a threat to the Federation as well.
“I am sorry, Zirani, but I cannot help her.” He moved past her, toward the hall.
“So that’s it?” Ashrafi cried, spreading his arms. “You just walk away from your sister-in-arms, or whatever?”
Horatio stiffened at his words. After a moment, he relaxed and spoke over his shoulder. “She walked away from us. There’s a difference.”
As he moved on, Kayros turned to Benedick, clasping his arm. “You’re okay with this?”
To be fair, he hardly seemed to be. “Sorry, Zirani. I wish I could help. But Horatio understands these things better than I do. I trust him.” He gave Zirani a brief, tentative hug, muttered an apology, and moved on.
Ashrafi called out after the receding group. “Yeah, well… there are more things in heaven and earth than you knew well, Horatio! Or however that goes!”
Kayros sighed. “Don’t be too hard on him. You know he always puts his duty to Arcturus first.”
Her human friend grimaced. “Yeah, and peace this and gentleness that. I’m all for peace, but it’s not the same as passivity.”
Ashrafi checked his data slate for updates, but it still displayed little more than interference. “Damn these flares! As if the first time wasn’t bad enough! It’s like the damn things followed us here. Are we cursed, do you think? Are curses a thing?”
She rolled her eyes. His frivolity was wearing thin. “I heard a rumor that they’re connected to Starfleet ship movements somehow. When it comes to Starfleet, all roads lead to Earth sooner or later.”
He glared at her. “And who convinced me to stick with Starfleet when I almost quit, Zirani?”
She paused. “Actually, it was Vekal.”
He was uncharacteristically silent for a few moments. “Do you think he and Targeemos were in there when the Warborn showed up?”
“We haven’t heard from them. I have to think they were.”
“Do you think maybe Vekal can use his Vulcan logic and talk the hostage-takers into laying down their arms?”
They exchanged a horrified stare. “No, you’re right,” Ashrafi said in response to her wordless response. “He’ll probably make it even worse.”
U.S.S. Enterprise
Rajendra Shastri paced the confines of the communications lab like a caged animal. Uhura, who sat at the main console with her favorite receiver nestled comfortably in her ear, couldn’t help noticing that the arc of his pacing tended to keep as much distance between them as possible.
“How long before we get to Earth?” Shastri asked to break the uncomfortable silence.
“About six hours. But we’re not supposed to be thinking about that.” She said it to remind herself as much as him.
“I know, I know. We’re gambling on re-creating Argelius to trigger some memory fragment left over in your brain. Well, forgive me for being skeptical about that.” He circled the central holo-table, tweaking its display parameters for the hundredth time as he peered at the multiaxial subspace spectral analysis graph hovering above it. “We might have a better chance of making contact once we get to their target area. They’re trying to get through to us anyway, so it makes sense to put ourselves where they’re already looking.”
“The flares won’t let us get close enough.” She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. “And our position won’t matter if the signal configuration and data reconstruction protocols are wrong.”
“That’s what I’m saying! If we can read their transmissions directly—in real time, not just recorded data—it would better our chances of deciphering those things.”
Uhura turned to glare at him. “Even if that’s true, it won’t get us to the Sol system any faster. We still have six hours to do everything we can to recover some fraction of my memory. It won’t hurt to keep this up, and there isn’t anything else we can do in the meantime!”
“Well—” Shastri broke off, unable to counter her argument. He gave a frustrated sigh and resumed pacing the lab.
I wanted strong emotions, she thought wryly. Following that thought, she spoke again, tentatively. “Did we… That is, when we were friends… did we have fights like this?”
He stared in surprise. “Not like this. Not at the slightest provocation.” He barked out a laugh. “You were certainly passionate about what you believed in. You didn’t take any crap from anyone. When I said something stupid, you put me in my place. But it was never malicious, never… bitter. There was trust there. Trust earned over years.
“Sometimes… we didn’t even have to talk. We could sit together in silence for hours while we studied, while we worked on making contact. But not this silence, not… avoidance.” His voice softened as his focus turned inward. “Just the opposite. The kind where two people are so much in sync that it’s like being with another part of yourself. Nothing needs to be said. It just feels so right to be together—it doesn’t have to be justified by saying something or doing something. It just is.”
He blinked moist eyes, and she could see his grief at what he had lost. “So no, Nyota. It won’t be that easy for you.”
“What won’t?”
“Asking if it was like this, here and now. You’re looking for a shortcut. An easy answer to get past this block of yours. If it were that bloody easy, don’t you think you’d have done it by now?”
“I’m open to trying anything at this point!”
“But your first impulse is to go for the easy answer. The least painful one. The one that doesn’t require you to think about w
ho you used to be any more than you have to. You’re too afraid to face it!”
“What would be the point?” she cried, rising to her feet. “I can’t reconstruct who I was. Even if I recover some fragments of it now, I can never find a protocol to put them together the same way. And I’ve grown so much since then. Learned so much, formed new friendships.”
“Work friendships! All you have anymore is Starfleet. No family, no romance… you’re a fragment of who you once were! These officers who put you back together again, they just taught you the parts that were useful to them!”
Her voice rose with her anger. “You have no idea, Shastri. They did everything to encourage me to become my full self again. My life isn’t incomplete just because you aren’t in it.”
“And your family? You hid from them too, let them think they were dead to you, until your work forced you to treat them as a resource!” He gestured sharply at her. “This is what I’m saying. You cling to duty and responsibility and Starfleet discipline because they’re what was around you when they put Humpty Dumpty together again. They’re your safe space. And for a dozen years, you’ve hid in it and wouldn’t let anyone in from your old life. Maybe you were afraid your new self wouldn’t measure up!”
Uhura gaped at him. “That’s rich! Maybe you’re forgetting that I did reach out to you after Nomad. I was still lost, fragile, looking for answers, and you were so cruel. You called me a liar, met me with such fury that I couldn’t understand. How the hell was I supposed to reach out to you after that? How could you expect me to trust you?”
He opened his mouth to riposte, but she wouldn’t let him. “You don’t have the right to act like the wronged party, Shastri. You got mad because you thought your new girlfriend had dumped you. Oh, the horror.
“I had just lost everything! I woke up surrounded by strangers—none more so than the face in my own mirror! All I had were feelings of familiarity I couldn’t understand, bursts of emotion I couldn’t contextualize. I couldn’t trust my own reactions. I felt I could instinctively trust the people around me, but how could I be sure that was genuine? It was a relief when they proved it through their actions.”
She moved closer, circling the table to confront him without the holograms in the way. “Then I got a message from you. Another stranger, but the name filled me with such warmth, such assurance. With the same kind of trust I felt for my crewmates, but there was… joy as well. So I reached out, trusting you with my plight, expecting you to be as understanding as everyone around me had.
“Your rejection was the first breach of trust I remembered in my life. It shattered my innocence. You tear into me for not having the courage to reach out to my family, my friends. Well, whose fault do you think that was?!”
He stared at her for long moments, stunned—or shamed—into silence. Uhura allowed herself to take satisfaction in that. “You can’t know,” she told him, more softly but relentlessly. “You can’t possibly know what it’s like to lose everything.”
After a long, loaded silence, he lowered his gaze and spoke very softly. “Yes… in a way, I can.” He met her eyes again, not without difficulty. “Because I lost you.
“For years, Nyota, you were my life. You were the best of my friends, and that’s always been a short list. I’ve always been an introvert, but you invited me in. You were patient with me, unjudging. You… you gave me the confidence to be the person you saw when you looked at me.”
Uhura stared back, startled by his words. They sparked a memory—not of her life before Nomad, but a more recent time, when she had worked with Willard Decker on a program to increase Starfleet’s diversity by promoting nonhuman recruitment. So many of her recruits had told her how grateful they were for the encouragement she gave them, for the sense of acceptance she created. She had believed that she had done it to pay forward what the Enterprise crew had done for her after Maluria—making Starfleet feel welcoming, familial, and accepting despite any impediments. It had never occurred to her that she might have done the same even before the memory wipe—that she had merely continued being the person she had always been.
Shastri went on in an elegiac tone. “I loved you before I even realized it. It just felt so natural, so comfortable, that I never noticed a moment when it started. It just became, without me even putting it into words in my mind.”
His voice shook with emotion as he continued. “Why do you think I was so happy to drop whatever I was doing and fly across sectors to meet up with you on your shore leaves, all to help you in your mad quixotic quest? That was your passion. Mine was to help you fulfill it. All I wanted was to see the joy light up in your eyes, to see that blinding smile when your dream finally came true. All I needed for myself was to know I’d been there for you, to help you pull it off.”
Uhura’s emotions roiled. The warmth his words evoked in her was uncomfortable, unwelcome in the midst of her anger, her pain. How dare he say these things? But her own emotions in response were so confused that she was paralyzed, unable to know how to react.
He blinked away tears. “Then, at Argelius, you finally caught up with your impossible dream—and right after that, so did I. When you told me you loved me too… I couldn’t believe it. I feared it was too good to be true.
“So when the very next message I got was you telling me you didn’t even recognize my name…”
Shastri fell silent, aside from several deep, shuddering breaths. The silence boiled between them like the quantum vacuum, until his next words finally resolved from out of so many possibilities.
“I know I had no right to be so cruel, Nyota. It was petty and unfair, no matter how hurt I was. And knowing now how much harm I did you… I’m ashamed.
“That’s what I hope you can understand. What I’m not sure I really faced until just now. My bitterness at having all this dredged up again… It’s not the same resentment or insecurity I felt before. I… I came through that all right. I rebuilt, the same as you. I met Sudo, we built a life, had a son… I’m happy with what I have.”
She felt a pang at his words. Of jealousy? Of envy? Of loss?
He went on regardless. “So the anger I feel is not… it’s not toward you. What makes me so upset is that… that I couldn’t be there for you when everything had been taken away. All I ever wanted was to be there for you. And when you needed me most… you didn’t remember me. And that felt like a failure and a rejection and… I refused to believe it because it broke my heart either way, so if my heart was going to be broken anyway, I decided I should at least be mad about it.” He wept freely now. “I got so mad at you because the alternative would hurt too much. But all I did was hurt you more.”
Shastri moved convulsively, wiping away tears with his sleeve, then turning around to take in the room. “All of this… it’s so screwed up. When we were there, on Argelius, we were in sync like never before. We both felt we were on the brink, and all we could think about was working together to cross the finish line. Nothing could come between us and that goal, or each other. And I would’ve done anything to help you achieve it.”
He shook his head. “How can we ever hope to get that back now? With so many scars in the way?”
Uhura struggled to sort through the quantum foam of emotions within her, jostling between different states, unable to decohere into a single understanding. “Tell me. Jen. What happened between us? After the breakthrough? When we… what did we say? What did we do?”
He gave a convulsive laugh. “You want me to go into graphic detail? I’d rather not go there. I’ve tried not to think about it much. And I’m happily married now.”
“Not… that part. I mean… what did I say, about what I felt for you? What did we talk about afterward?”
Shastri struggled with the words—or with the associated memories. “You… we were so happy, we just fell into each other’s arms, and the rest came so naturally, like we were already together. Like I said before, maybe being on Argelius gave us permission. There was no doubt, no hesitation… we w
ere best friends, we trusted each other implicitly, and we just… didn’t see any reason not to do as the Argelians did.
“So we did. And I told you I loved you, that I’d loved you for years. And you said… not to sound vain, but you said you were relieved to hear it, because you felt love for me too and weren’t sure if I returned it. I was so shy about expressing it—I didn’t want to distract you from your quest, or risk our friendship.
“You told me that nothing—” His voice hitched. He cleared his throat before going on. “You said nothing could hurt our friendship. That becoming lovers was a natural outgrowth of it, a deepening of the bond we’d shared for so long. That it should’ve happened sooner. I agreed wholeheartedly.
“But you said we’d have plenty of time to make up for it. That you intended to make up for it, that you… wanted to build a future with me. Maybe take a ground post at a Starfleet research institute once we went public with our work.” He chuckled. “Or at a university somewhere if they kicked you out of Starfleet. But the important things were that we’d continue refining contact with the plasma beings… and that we’d do it together.”
Uhura realized they’d been drawing closer to each other as he spoke. It wasn’t out of desire, but from a different kind of need. His words made her realize that Nomad had not only taken her past from her—it had stolen her future as well. A future she’d never had the chance to mourn, for she’d never known she’d lost it until now. And that knowledge clarified a feeling of loss that had been looming over her mind since she had first heard Shastri’s name.
The new solidity of that feeling hit hard, and she burst into tears.
Weeping openly along with her, Shastri took her into his arms. As he held her, a rush of emotions flooded through her, and with them a jumble of sensory impressions. Countless touches—friendly hugs, jovial backslaps, mutual shoulder massages in cram sessions. Jen clasping her hand, stroking her hair as she wept herself to sleep after hearing of her father’s death.
And there was more. The press of his lips, the warmth of his bare chest against hers. The joyous exhaustion as they lay together after trying to make up for years of inaction in a single night. The comfortable ease with which they’d begun their romance, in the afterglow of a triumph that made them feel all things were possible for the two of them as a team.
Living Memory Page 24
