Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (24 page)

Chastened, Marcus reclined and crossed her arms, symbolically disengaging herself from the conversation. Xiong held up an open hand in an apparently cautionary gesture. “Be that as it
may, Admiral, my team and I need a lot more information before we can proceed. And not just about the array, or the artifacts, but the entire theory behind what makes it work. We need a big-picture understanding of it, as well as the nuts-and-bolts details.”

It was a reasonable request, but the thought of any setback rankled Nogura, who knew the Starfleet brass and Federation politicos would give him hell over the delay. “How long do you think you’ll need to get the data you need and bring the array on line?”

Apprehensive looks passed between Xiong and Theriault. “It’s impossible to say,” he replied. “In this case, I have to agree with Doctor Marcus that caution is vital. When we were experimenting on just two of these things, we accidentally blew up eleven worlds—”

“None of them inhabited, thankfully,” Theriault interrupted.

Xiong continued, “—all before we realized what we’d done. But now we have thousands of these artifacts, sir. Making them work in unison will take a lot of power—which means the risks of our making a catastrophic mistake are exponentially worse than before. At this stage, I’d recommend operating on the assumption that we have little to no margin for error.”

Nogura could tell the problems at hand weren’t mere issues of personal motivation that he could rectify with a stern look or a forceful command; he was up against hard numbers and cold realities. “How many members of your team have reviewed Lieutenant Theriault’s records of the Eremar mission?”

“All of them,” Xiong said. “We’ve been working the problem from every angle, but because of the interference caused by the pulsar, her tricorder was only able to make basic visual scans. Which means we have no detailed nuclear imaging or spectral analysis.”

The elfin redhead added, “We have enough data to build a frame to hold the artifacts, but no idea how to make it start. It’s like having hardware with no operating software.”

“In other words,” Nogura grumped, “a very expensive piece of junk.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Xiong said.

Nogura was about to tell the scientists to do their best and then dismiss them, when T’Prynn looked down the table at him and spoke up from the far side of the room.

“Admiral . . . I might be able to help.”

Quinn awoke to the sound of two sets of footsteps, the cold touch of a hard surface under his bruised and stubbled cheek, and the grotesque sensation that his guts were filled with boiling mud and rotten eggs. A man’s voice announced with bored hostility, “Wake up. You have a visitor.” Then one set of footsteps walked away. The angry buzz of a force field generator in Quinn’s ears made it clear to him where he was.

He rolled over and regretted moving. A deep pounding ache felt like a lead weight trying to ram its way out of his skull. Each throbbing beat of his pulse made him fear that his abused brain had grown nerve endings just so it could protest what he’d done to it the night before. He groaned pitiably.
Why can’t I ever have a coma when I really need one?

Squinting against the cold, white light of one of Vanguard’s numerous, immaculate brig facilities, he labored to focus his eyes. Then he sat up on the edge of the bench and cradled his head in his hands. Hunched over in misery, he realized he’d put his bare feet down in a broad splatter of spilled soup. He hoped it was soup.

“I can hear you breathing, Newsboy,” he mumbled, through a vile taste human mouths were never meant to know. With effort, he turned his head. “If you’ve come to—”

Words failed him as he realized his visitor wasn’t Tim Pennington, who had bailed him out so many times that he figured he’d be in the Scotsman’s debt for the rest of his natural life. It was T’Prynn, who had recruited him years earlier as a covert civilian operative of Starfleet Intelligence. She stood at ease, hands folded behind her back, exuding a quintessentially Vulcan neutrality. “Hello, Mister Quinn.”

He narrowed his eyes in tired contempt. “You’re dead to me.” He winced at another crushing throb in his temples. “But if it makes you feel any better,
I’m
dead to me, too.”

“The arrest report indicates you were ejected from no fewer than six establishments for drunken and disorderly behavior before you were taken into custody.” She arched one eyebrow. “You do appear—what’s the expression? ah, yes—
worse for wear
.”

Her gingerly mocking didn’t make him feel better, but it gave him a reason to be mad, and that helped him focus on something other than how awful he felt. “Goddamn, lady, you got a gift for understatement. I spent all my credit and wound up feeling like phasered shit. It’s like I mugged myself, except someone else got the money.” Massaging a vicious crick from his neck, he shot a one-eyed glare at the Vulcan woman. “What do you want with me, anyway?”

She seemed unfazed by his blunt challenge. “During your last mission for SI, you witnessed what you described as a ‘huge, moving equation’ that the Apostate said was the key to the Tkon array. But your final report contained no specific details of that equation.”

“I know.” He turned his head, growled the foulness inside his mouth into a wad, and spit it on the floor. “Like I said, it was all just a blur. I don’t remember the details.”

T’Prynn edged closer to the invisible force field that separated them. “I think you could remember much of that equation, Mister Quinn, perhaps even all of it, with my help.”

This didn’t sound as if it was leading anywhere good. “I know I’ll probably be sorry I asked, but what’re you driving at?”

“I need you to consent to a Vulcan mind-meld with me.”

“Go to hell.” He tried to turn away and lie down.

The urgency in her voice stopped him. “Please, Mister Quinn.” She waited until he looked back at her, then she continued. “I would not ask you to permit so profound an invasion of your privacy if the security of the Federation and the safety of its people were not at stake.”

“Like I give a shit?” Confronted with so much national
security claptrap, it was hard for Quinn not to vent his scorn as laughter. “You assholes have been runnin’ around out here for years, breakin’ rules, wreakin’ havoc, gettin’ good people killed—and for what? What’ve you got to show for it?
Nothing
. ‘Federation security,’ my ass. What a joke. Hell, for a while there, you even had me playin’ your stupid game, flyin’ all over hell and creation, lookin’ for your little bits o’ junk and trackin’ down your runaway monsters. I’m
sick
of it.”

She looked taken aback by his tirade. “In light of the personal loss you suffered, I can understand your animosity toward Starfleet and the Federation, but that—”

“Dammit, you’re not listening to me. I ain’t sayin’
no
because I got a grudge with the Federation, and I ain’t saying
go to hell
because I give a damn about you invading my privacy. What I’m sayin’ is, I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to do it because I never want to think about that day ever again, as long as I live. All I’ve done since I got back was try to forget it.”

There was sympathy in her voice. “Have you?”

“Have I what? Tried?”

“Forgotten.”

He slumped against the metal wall and stared at the light on the ceiling. “Not yet. But I plan to keep drinking till I’ve killed so many brain cells, I lose my own name.”

T’Prynn reached over to the control pad beside the cell and with a few deft taps deactivated the force field. She stepped inside and looked down at Quinn. Her dark eyes had a quality that he would never before have thought to ascribe to a Vulcan: soulfulness. “I understand why you want to forget that day. But I don’t need you to recall all of it—only the moments when you saw the machine. Nothing more. If you grant me this request, I will try to help you in return.
Please,
Mister Quinn.”

He was too exhausted to argue with her. What harm could it do? He responded with a grudging nod. “Fine, all right. But first, get me someplace else.”

“Time is of the essence,” T’Prynn said. “This place will serve as well as any other.”

“No, it won’t.”

His defiance seemed to irk her. “Why not?”

“Because right now, you’re standing in my puke.”

She looked down, confirmed his claim, then met his bleary gaze with her level stare. “You make a reasonable point.”

T’Prynn led Quinn inside a plain-looking compartment on an infrequently used level of the station. Everything inside the narrow room was the same shade of Starfleet standard-issue blue-gray. It had no window, being an interior compartment, and its furniture consisted of an uncovered bed atop a platform with drawers, a desk, a chair, and a computer terminal. A small door at the back of the room led to the toilet and sonic shower.

The disheveled ex-soldier-of-fortune edged inside as if expecting an ambush. “Cozy. Who lives here?”

“No one,” T’Prynn said. “These are unassigned guest quarters.” She locked the door behind Quinn and guided him toward the bed. “Sit there, at the end.” As he settled onto the corner of the bare mattress, she pulled the chair from the desk, rolled it to the foot of the bed, and sat down. “Do you understand what a Vulcan mind-meld entails, Mister Quinn?”

“Kind of. It’s telepathy, right?”

“It is far more than that. It is a fusion of two minds, a sharing of memory, feelings, and consciousness. Within the meld, we will become one.” She lifted her left hand and reached out to touch his face. As she expected, he recoiled slightly. “It will not hurt, I promise.”

Quinn looked less than reassured but nodded for her to continue. T’Prynn pressed her fingertips to several key points on his face, tentatively at first, then with a firm but gentle touch. She looked into his eyes and said in a low monotone, “My mind to your mind.” He closed his eyes, and she felt him relax—but then, at the first inkling of true contact, his mind withdrew. “It is natural to resist at first,” she advised him. “Breathe deeply and let go of your fear. . . . My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your
thoughts.” He did as she’d instructed, and she synchronized her breathing with his. “Our minds are merging.” Closing her eyes, she opened her own psyche to his and lowered her formidable psionic defenses. When she felt the primal undertow of his emotions pulling her deeper inside his consciousness, she knew the meld was complete.

“Our minds are one.”

Partly by training and partly by instinct, she interpreted their shared mindscape as a virtual world, an ever-changing theater of memory complete with physical sensations. Focusing her attention on Quinn’s mind, she found herself in a shifting panorama of half-perceived drinking binges punctuated by bouts of despondency, physical pain, or self-loathing.

“We need to go back now, Cervantes,” she said, gently coaching him. “Take me back to that world where you saw the Apostate’s machine.”

All at once she and Quinn were inside his last ship, the
Dulcinea,
as it struggled to an emergency landing on a snow-covered mountain ledge. Events melted and bled together, like watercolor paintings being revealed one beneath another as stormy cascades swept away the layers. A hard march knee-deep in snow across a frozen lake . . . an ice cave of dark blue shadows . . . a deep, perilous crevasse into which Quinn’s partner and lover, Bridy Mac, had fallen . . . a wall of ice rendered into vapor by a phaser blast . . . and then . . . the machine.

“Slow your perceptions,” T’Prynn said. “Let me see the details.”

The moment stolen from his mind slowed to a crawl. She stepped past his self-projection to study the complex machinations of the Apostate’s creation. Every element was in motion. Each revolved around the core, turned on its own axis, or orbited another piece of the machine. All the pieces seemed to be composed of the same silvery crystal, and they varied in shape from organically curved blobs to aggressively angular and symmetrical polyhedrons. Ribbons of multicolored light snaked through the open spaces, traveling chaotic paths through the mesmerizing
order of the machine. At the core was an object that repeated a cycle of transformation, transitioning through multiple complex stellations that all were extrapolated from—and every few seconds reverted to—a basic icosahedron.

Just as Quinn’s report had described, waves of warmth radiated from the massive device, which T’Prynn suspected actually had been more of a projection than a physical reality. As she moved closer to it, a galvanic charge rushed over her, tingling her flesh from head to toe.

The scene became blurry as Quinn said, “I think this is what you came to find.”

T’Prynn turned to face him as his memory regained focus. A spectral image took shape above Bridy’s and Quinn’s heads. It was a slowly rotating twelve-sided polyhedron. Circling it were long, complex strings of data—alien symbols, Arabic numerals, equations, and fragments of star charts. Looking more closely, T’Prynn saw that each face of the dodecahedron was etched with a unique alien symbol, all of which she committed to memory.

After a few minutes, she was sure she had found all there was to know from Quinn. Not wanting to prolong his pain any more than necessary, she made the first attempt to pull them both away from this moment and retrace their steps to separate consciousness. To her surprise, Quinn resisted fiercely, as if his mind had chosen to anchor itself.

She turned to ask him if he was all right. He stood in the midst of his own halted memory, gazing at the projection of the late Bridget McLellan. She was leaning against the cavern wall beside the machine, her broken leg wrapped in a crude splint. Quinn was literally beside himself—or the projection of himself—gazing mournfully at his lost love. His grief hit T’Prynn like a crushing force, overwhelming her hard-won stoicism.

“This was the last time I ever saw her,” he said, on the verge of tears.

His heartbreak was an abyss, opening wide to devour him, and his pain was so deep that he yearned to let himself plunge
into it, to lose himself in it and never return. There was more than sorrow in his heart; there was guilt, and regret, and rage at his own powerlessness—all of it churning into a toxic brew that would eventually consume him from within or drive him to self-destruction just to be free of the torment.