Force and Motion (24 page)

Epilogue

Four Months Later

Brigantine, New Jersey, Earth

B
harad woke up early, much earlier than she would have liked, and padded around the house in her bathrobe and wool socks.
It's May,
she thought.
It shouldn't be cold.
Back in February, given everything that had happened on the Robert Hooke
,
the idea of living near the ocean and watching the sun come up over the horizon every day had seemed very appealing, but Bharad was having second thoughts. The weather wasn't what she had expected: foggy and cold some days, windy and dry on others. She decided she would give June and July a chance—to see what a real summer season was like—and then consider new options. She could go anywhere she pleased—the research grants were portable; however, she knew she would have problems with Ginger, who appeared to love the marshes of Absecon and the nearby dunes.

Loading the French press with ground coffee, Bharad flicked on the kettle and leaned her back against the counter to consider her options for the day. Lots of gene sequencing results to review, though that was drudgery and best left to the lab's automated systems. Maybe a drive up north to the Pine Barrens would be a better use
of her time. Ginger was beginning to lose some of her anxiety about trees. Bharad had just assumed that Ginger would
like
trees, but that was not the case. On first viewing them, she had been awed, even intimidated, and hid under their vehicle.

Ginger, who typically stayed up late and woke late, surprised Bharad by poking her head through the kitchen door and waving her front legs excitedly. “What are you doing up?” Bharad asked as she poured the hot water into the press. Ginger disappeared, only to return a moment later, once more waving her forelimbs. Bharad set the kettle down and tightened the sash on her robe. Something was wrong. “What is it, girl?” she called. The arachnoform didn't return. Cautiously approaching the door, she heard Ginger slipping on the tile floors as she scurried away.

Bharad followed.
A visitor? At this hour?
Ginger liked visitors if she recognized them, but was wary of strangers.
A curious local? A kid making good on a dare?
That seemed unlikely, as the security system would respond to anything that appeared moderately threatening. Turning the corner to the back door, Bharad was briefly dazzled by the first ray of sunshine glittering on the ocean. She had to turn away, cover her eyes, and blink the swimming motes. Though temporarily blinded, she heard the
tick-tick-tick
sound of Ginger tapping at the window glass beside the door. Just on the other side of the door was the long porch that ran along the back of the house, the one where they spent hours after their return to Earth, the place where they both nursed their wounds over their mutual loss.

When she finally felt she could open her eyes, Bharad
did so carefully, shielding them from the glare with her right hand cupped over her brow. Squinting, she peered out onto the porch. Then the breath left her body and her knees grew watery when she was sure she was seeing what she was seeing. It didn't seem possible, but there wasn't anyone else it could be. Ginger tapped, tapped, tapped on the glass, so sharply that Bharad worried she might break it, but Bharad understood her excitement.

Her sister was home: Honey, twirling serenely on a web strand, hung from one of the porch's joists.

She needed a moment to remember how the door's lock worked. As Bharad fumbled with the mechanism, she heard herself burbling incoherently. Ginger had ceased poking at the window and was now poking at Bharad's legs, the sharp tips of her tarsus no doubt making tiny holes in the pajama pants. Finally, the lock surrendered and she flung wide the door. Ginger leaped past her, collided with her sister, and carried them both over the porch railing. Neither fell far. Web lines snagged a post, and they were both back up on the porch in a moment, bounding around each other, inspecting one another with their pedipalps. Bharad launched herself into the fray, and both sisters embraced her. Twenty limbs of various shapes and sizes were wrapped around and through one another. One of them wept loudly. No doubt, the neighbors were alarmed.

When the greetings and the tears finally subsided, Bharad felt at a loss. As she ushered the sisters into her house, all she could think to say, over and over again, was, “This doesn't make any sense. How is this possible?” And, of course, it didn't and it wasn't. The Hooke had been
destroyed. Starfleet had accounted for nearly every scrap of debris, and the bits they hadn't were too small to have carried Honey to safety.

Bharad fell into her routine. She fed the sisters, both of whom ate ravenously, and then poured herself a cup of insanely strong coffee (it had steeped for quite a while). Sitting in one of the two kitchen chairs, she stared at the arachnoforms as they groomed each other and tried to account for all the possibilities. Only one made anything even close to sense. “Ben.”

Honey ceased grooming her sister and looked up at Bharad. Then, with an air of having been interrupted, she rose, stretched, and clattered over to a desk Bharad had designated as her workstation. Very deliberately, Honey pulled the single chair away from the desk and clambered up into it.

Sunlight spilled in through the bay window beside the desk, and Nita noticed a couple of things she hadn't in the blurred haste of reunion. First, Honey's carapace was much more chipped and dented than her sister's, as if she had been through some kind of battle or violent explosion. “Well,” Bharad said aloud, “I suppose you were, weren't you?” Second, Honey was wearing a belt. She wasn't surprised she had missed it, as the belt was quite thin, almost the same color as her carapace and strapped around the flexible membrane between Honey's abdomen and cephalothorax. The belt was festooned with tiny pockets.

Honey reached down under her body with her pedipalps and fished something out of one of the pouches. When the pedipalps reemerged, the tips were covered in
tiny plastic caps. Then she reached up and tapped on the face of one of Bharad's padds. The padd's face lit up and displayed the passcode request screen.

Honey tapped the padd again, meaningfully.

Not sure what was happening, Bharad leaned forward and entered the passcode. Honey swiped at the screen until she found the text program and then opened it. A keypad appeared and Honey tapped away at it quickly and precisely. Feeling her breath coming in short gasps, Bharad leaned forward again and looked at the screen. Honey had typed, “Hello, Mother.”

Bharad sat down on the floor. She hadn't planned to do so, but her knees had suddenly given out. Still perched in the chair, Honey gazed down at Bharad, patiently waiting for her creator to collect herself. “You can talk,” was all Bharad could think to say.

Honey tapped on the padd, and then carefully carried it down onto the floor so Bharad could see the screen. “No,” it said. “But Honey can type.”

“Since when?”

Honey paused to consider a reply and then typed, “Since merging with the Other
.
”

“The Other?”

“Finch's Other.”

A score of questions flitted through Bharad's mind. For no particular reason, she settled on, “Can Ginger talk?”

Bharad couldn't say why, but she had the distinct impression Honey liked this question. “No,” she wrote. “Not yet. But Honey has ideas.”

Feeling one of her eyebrows creep upward, Bharad
asked, “You'll be sure to run those ideas past me before you try anything, won't you?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Feeling a bit calmer, Bharad leaned her back against a hassock and pondered her next question. Unaccountably, she worried she might only be able to ask a few and needed to make them count. She asked, “What does Ben have to do with all of this?”

Honey needed to type for a couple minutes to complete her reply. Bharad was surprised to see that the arachnoform hit the backspace key several times, as if she was editing her reply. “Ben saved Honey. And Honey saved Ben. The
Wren
stayed together, because of Honey and Ginger. Ben had a rocket.”

“The thruster pack,” Bharad said.

Honey typed, “Yes.”

“But you've been gone for months. What happened?”

Honey seemed to think about her reply for a time. Or, at least, she didn't start to type immediately. When she did, she wrote, “Ben and Honey were found by men. At first, we liked them, but then we didn't. Fighting. Adventures.”

Bharad ran her fingertips over the dings and dents in Honey's carapace. “I see,” she said. “Where's Ben?”

“Ben brought Honey home. Said he had to go.”

“Well, I look forward to hearing his version of this story when he returns.”

Honey typed, “Ben won't return.”

“Why not?”

“Ben said he likes being dead. Ben says he likes be­­ing new.”

Bharad thought about Honey's statements for a long minute and then replied, “Not a janitor anymore. Nor a starship captain.”

“No,” Honey wrote. “No.”

Rubbing the tiny dent in the back of Honey's head, a long scarred-over battle wound, no doubt, Bharad asked, “Is there anything else you want to tell me right now?”

Honey typed, “Honey wants to go back to cleaning Ginger. She is very dirty.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“All right,” Bharad said, “but we'll return to this topic when you're finished.”

Honey shoved the padd over to Bharad and returned to grooming her sister.

Bharad stood up slowly, clutching the padd to her chest. She glanced at the time and saw it was just a few minutes before nine. Looking out the window at the sky and the billowing clouds, Bharad knew it was going to be a fine day. Maybe they would go to the beach instead of the Pine Barrens.

Five Months Later

Starfleet Penal Colony

Michael Clark opened his eyes
and was instantly, completely awake. He glanced at the chrono on the nightstand, moving only his eyes, wary of making too much noise. Zero-six-thirty
.

No one else should be in the house. His wife and son
were on Mars, with his wife's sister and rest of the clan. Clark was supposed to join them when the workweek was done. If there was an emergency at the hospital, someone would have called first and not come to the house unannounced. There were protocols, dammit. The doctor closed his eyes and attempted to focus past all the usual morning sounds of an early summer's day. A few birds chirped outside, working their way through whatever seeds remained in the feeder. Downstairs, various bits of semiautonomous machinery whirred or hummed, but nothing seemed wrong or out of place.

Maybe the damned robot legs are outside,
he thought.
Waiting.

Then Clark realized that the problem wasn't an alien sound, but the absence of a sound. The wheezing was missing.

“Freud's sticky ghost!” Clark cried, and sat up. It was a stupid expression, one his father (an unrepentant psychoanalyst) used to shout whenever he was particularly annoyed. “Horrible!”

No response, not a hack nor a rattle, not a gasp nor an expulsion of gas. Clark didn't smell anything bad, so he knew the dog hadn't crawled under the bed to die—not that the odor would be much different than the one he expelled in life.

Clark rolled out of bed, careful to look where he planted his feet before doing so. The dog occasionally fell asleep (or lapsed into a coma) in inconvenient places. But, no.
No Horrible.
He swiped his hair back out of his eyes as he stepped into his slippers.
Why do I continue to call it by that terrible name?
Shuffling quickly from room to room,
Clark ordered the computer to turn on the lights as he went. He looked under tables and chairs, inside cabinets and under rugs, though he knew the last was utterly irrational.
No dog. No Horrible.

He reached the kitchen, the last uninspected room, but it, too, was empty, though there was a lingering hint of the dog's funk, as if he had passed through recently.

Clark scanned the room for clues. His gaze alit on a padd leaning against the wall near the back door. He activated it, and there was a note.

Thank you,
it read,
for taking such good care of him.

And, below that, as if in an afterthought:
And me, too.

Clark scrolled down to make sure there was nothing more. The note was unsigned.

Staring at the padd, Michael Clark considered the possibilities until he finally landed on the most likely explanation, as improbable as it seemed. Mulling over the idea, he smiled and said, “You're welcome.” He wiped the note from the memory and placed the padd on the countertop.

Clark went back to bed and soon fell back asleep. He may have dreamed, but, if he did, he did not remember the dreams when he woke again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seed of this story was first planted during a conversation with Michael Clark during a recording for his
Captain's Table
podcast (
www.visionarytrek.com/category/the-captains-table
). For that reason if no other, I felt I owed him a character name. I'll also buy him a pint the next time I'm in London.

Margaret Clark suggested that it might be worth exploring the idea of adding Ben Maxwell to the story. Right as ever, Margaret. Thank you for that and all the other righteous editing. Thanks also to Ed Schlesinger at Simon & Schuster for his assistance and to Scott Pearson for copyediting above and beyond the call. Also, I'd like to extend my profound gratitude and appreciation to the curators of Memory Alpha and Memory Beta. I've been doing this long enough to remember when you guys weren't around, so thanks for being there.

Thank you to beta readers Helen Szigeti and Tristan Mayer for their thoughtful criticism of early drafts and also for putting up with my whining and kvetching. I'm indebted to Annarita Gentile for any insights gleamed from her about the psychotherapeutic process. If anything herein sounds authentic, it's to ARG's credit; inaccuracies belong solely to the author.

As ever, I'd like to thank the writers, cast, and crew of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
for developing the rich universe in which it is my privilege to play. In particular, this time around I'm beholden to Colm Meaney and Aron Eisenberg. Lastly, Bob Gunton and the
TNG
writing staff created an extremely memorable character in Benjamin Maxwell, and they have my sincere regards and admiration. I'd be curious to hear what any of them thinks of the rest of Ben's tale.