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“Nature of the medical emergency? Oh…it’s you again.”
The Emergency Medical Hologram directed the sourest face in his repertoire at Syron.
“Hey,” she whined, “I have real problems.”
“I’m aware.”
“I vomited blood last night. Look!”
The EMH picked up a medical tricorder and scanned the red-stained pillow.
“That…is marinara sauce. I’ve told you before to avoid tomato-based foods. The acid content is unhealthy for Orions.”
Syron began to pace. “I'm telling you, my body is falling apart. There’s something wrong with me. For example, my urine smells weird.”
The EMH nodded. “Have you by any chance eaten fermented Rigelian root tips lately?”
“Well…that's what I put the pasta sauce on.” She marched up close to the holographic doctor and pointed to her eye. “Do you see this? How my eye is twitching?”
The EMH replaced the tricorder in its charging station.
“Syron, that just means you need a vacation.”
The Orion wheedled, “Doc, I’d feel a lot better if you did a full workup.”
The doctor sighed and tried to look at her with sympathy. “According the to ship’s chronometer, I just did a full medical workup on you two weeks ago. Syron, at the risk of repeating myself, the Medical Hologram program on the Talon is for emergencies only. Fusing broken bones, treating plasma burns, that sort of thing. But for a long-term doctor-patient relationship, you need an actual doctor.”
“You’re not an actual doctor?”
“One that’s living.”
“That just isn’t practical. The Talon isn’t based out of any Federation world. We’d have to pay for any medical services, and we can’t even afford to pay ourselves at the moment.” Syron placed her long-fingered green hand on the holographic doctor’s shoulder and squeezed. “Look, Doc, sometimes I just need some…reassurance, ya know?”
—————
C’Mal finished her pint of lager and stared into the empty mug with dilated feline eyes.
“This planet is a dive,” she decided.
“Like I already explained,” said Sovak, “they had by far the cheapest bid on replacing the second stage Penning tube. Can’t keep using the primary stage the way we have been. Plus we’ll get back full warp capability.”
Syron rattled the ice cubes in her empty glass and peered around the busy bar. “What poor Talon needs is an overhaul.”
“For that,” said Sovak, “we need some well-paying jobs.”
Syron burped.
C’Mal began to scratch her initials into the well-graffiti’d table top with a sharp claw. “You two—you two are less fun when you’re not drinking,” she complained.
Sovak pulled her auburn hair behind her pointed ears. “Have you forgotten the unfortunate incident on Mashtri Alsubar? I’ve suffered enough degradation this year. I'm staying sober, thank you.”
An awkward silence fell upon the three.
“Well,” Sovak announced, “I have to pee.” She stood and left the table.
—————
“Captain T’lon?”
Sovak’s hand reflexively went to her phaser. Who around here would know her Vulcan name?
She turned to find a middle-aged Human smiling at her. “Wow, quick-draw McGraw,” the woman jested.
“You know me?” asked Sovak.
“Yes, and you know me as well: Sefa Kemaia, former first officer of the Vera Rubin.”
Sovak nodded. “Ah, I didn’t recognize you out of uniform.”
“Well, it’s been a few decades. I’ve gone grey. You, of course, look the same. Come and sit down, I’ll buy you a beer.”
“I’ll take a ginger ale,” the captain of the Talon replied, a bit sheepishly. “I’m the designated sober. By the way, I go by Sovak these days.”
Kemaia ordered the drink, then admitted, “I’m familiar with the exploits of the Talon. You’re kind of famous, especially among us ex-Starfleet.”
“Ex-Starfleet?”
Kemaia locked eyes with Sovak. “Yeah, ex-Starfleet. I got tired of the conditioned air, the synthesized food, and the bullshit job. I wanted control of my own destiny.”
Sovak laughed. “You sound like a Sevrinist.”
Kemaia continued to gaze at her steadily.
“Oh, I see,” said Sovak.
Apparently, Sefa Kemaia was indeed a Sevrinist, a faction of political activists that sought to undermine many of the goals of the Federation.
Kemaia frowned. “Don’t look at me that way. We’re not that different. I mean, by now, you should be a commodore in Starfleet. Instead, you’re out here in the forgotten sectors tilting at wind turbines.”
“Point taken,” agreed Sovak.
“Hey, you should work for us!” said Kemaia. “You and your crew.”
Sovak was dubious. “Join the Sevrinists?”
“Rota Sevrin died over a century ago. These days, we call ourselves the Crimson Freedom Faction. And you’d only be working for us, not joining us…doing transport runs and such, nothing political. Did I—did I mention that we pay very well?”
Sovak shook her head. “I can’t do it. Some of our work comes from the Federation. They'd cut us off.”
“The Feds hire you just often enough to keep you under their thumb. That’s the way they operate. Interdependence means control. When a world joins the Federation, it’s not long before the most distinctive aspects are paved over. The Federation then profits from that world, while the benefits that world receives are mostly theoretical. Like joining Starfleet: you put on the uniform and everything changes. You of all people should understand what I’m talking about.”
“Sefa…are you wanted by the authorities?” asked Sovak.
Kemaia replied flippantly, “I’m wanted by several authorities. Look, ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.’ We want to see independent worlds succeed independently, working together while retaining their sovereignty. Look around you, Sovak. It’s hard to maintain an optimistic evaluation of the Federation and Starfleet.”
“Starfleet is better than nothing,” said Sovak. “I would propose to you that if the Borg were attacking this sector right now you’d be singing a different tune.”
Kemaia countered, “A monolithic force isn’t necessarily a strong force. And a decentralized force doesn’t present an obvious target. The Crimson Freedom Faction is proof of that.”
“I believe it’s also regarded by the Federation as a terrorist organization,” said Sovak.
“Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Look closely and you’ll see that we only fire back when we’re fired at.”
Sovak’s comm badge buzzed.
She stood and announced, “My ship’s ready for departure. It was nice seeing you again, Sefa. And thanks for the drink.”
Kemaia nodded. “I hope you’ll think about what I said.”
————
The crew of the Talon beamed up, moved the ship out of dry dock, and began a test of the repaired warp drive, slowly ramping up to full speed moving away from the system’s star, then ratcheting back down again on re-approach.
Syron took the opportunity to visit the Emergency Medical Hologram in the ship’s tiny sickbay.
The EMH glanced around after materializing, raised an eyebrow, and stated, “I didn’t expect to be re-activated so soon.” He reached for a medical tricorder.
Syron sat down on the edge of a sickbay bed. “I think I may have restless leg syndrome—”
The EMH struck her sharply on the head with the tricorder and she lost consciousness.
————
Sovak was sitting in the captain’s chair when her comm badge beeped. An agitated C’Mal reported, “I found Syron collapsed in the sickbay. She’s had some kind of head trauma. Must have passed out. I’m going to activate the EMH. Sovak, listen, we might have an intruder aboard.”
“Understood,” said Sovak. “Computer, are you reading any life signs aboard the Talon besides me, C’Mal and Syron?”
“Negative, no additional life signs detected.”
Sovak nevertheless grabbed a hand phaser on her way to the sickbay.
————
C’Mal was lying in one of the sickbay’s two beds, and Syron in the other, both unconscious. Between them was the EMH, a hypo and a medical scanner in his hands.
“Don’t just stand there,” he chided Sovak. “Put down that phaser and help me.”
Sovak set the phaser down and rushed to Syron, whose face was swollen and bleeding from a gash on her forehead. C’Mal had no visible damage, but her body was contorted in an unnatural way.
Sovak turned to find the EMH was aiming the phaser at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Taking my revenge on you, Sovak,” the EMH spoke in an icy tone. “A revenge fifty-five years in the making.”
Sovak stared in disbelief, then said, “End EMH program.” Nothing happened. “Computer, shut off all power to sick bay.” Again, nothing.
She grimaced.
“I’m in complete control, Sovak. You see, my friends back at the dry dock didn’t just work on the warp reactor.”
Sovak jostled C’Mal, trying to wake her.
The EMH smiled. “I’ve given them both a hypo full of somnulin. Trust me, they’ll sleep for days.”
“Who are you?” Sovak asked.
“All in good time.” The EMH motioned toward the door with the phaser. “Right now, let’s head toward the rear airlock. And Sovak, I’m warning you: behave.”
Sovak, who calculated that she had nothing to lose, took off running the moment she passed through the door into the Talon’s main corridor. She wasn’t fast enough.
————
Sovak awoke on the floor of the rear airlock, wearing her extended EVA suit, minus the helmet, which rested beside her. The interior airlock door was open, and the EMH sat on the floor across the threshold with a phaser in his hand.
“So, you’re finally awake.”
Sovak clumsily sat upright in the heavy space suit, trying to shake off the fog of being stunned unconscious.
“I deserve an explanation,” she said.
“Of course. Although I don’t imagine you’ll sympathize. I do, however, want you to understand the reason for your rapidly approaching demise.”
“You’re exacting revenge for something that happened, what did you say, fifty-five years ago? I was just a little child then. An orphan. Are you sure you’ve got your facts straight?”
“Let me tell you a story,” the EMH began. “Ten days ago, a psychopathic racist named Jean-Marie Voisard devastated the surface of planet Oriya with a wave-disruption bomb, killing eighty-seven percent of all living Orions.”
“I would have heard about that,” objected Sovak.
“Let me finish, please. As a child, Voisard was stolen and sold into slavery by Orion merchants. He watched as the Orions brutally killed his own mother when she attempted to rescue him. The hatred instilled in him resulted, decades later, in the near elimination of the Orion species. Cause…and effect.”
“Again, I would have heard about that,” said Sovak.
The EMH nodded. “And so you did. The Federation asked you, Sovak T’lon, to travel back in time with the purpose of killing Voisard at a time before he set his genocidal scheme into motion.”
“Time travel?” Sovak was incredulous. “How?”
“By traveling at maximum warp speed around a gravity well, thereby exceeding the warp limit. Much as excess gravity causes space to wrap back around on itself, forming a black hole, excess velocity can cause time to wrap back upon itself.”
“I’m aware of the slingshot effect,” said Sovak, “but the calculations are impossible. Besides the Federation would never take such a risk.”
“Seventeen times,” declared the EMH. “Seventeen times Starfleet has felt the risk was worth it. First, they outfit a period-appropriate ship with an organic-positronic brain capable of doing the calculations, and then they find someone with the—ah—the skillset, shall we say, to commit the necessary killing.”
“Seventeen times? How would they even know if they were successful, when success would eliminate the need for the mission in the first place? How would they keep count?”
The EMH nodded impatiently, as if all this was academic. “A database is hidden on a planet in the distant past. Every attempt to change history is preceded by a visit back in time to examine the database. In this way they are able to check themselves.”
“Damn,” said Sovak, shaking her head. “But I know that Oriya was not attacked ten days ago, so that means my mission back in time to kill Voisard—or should I say, our mission—was successful.”
The EMH smiled. “I see you’ve intuited correctly my identity. I am the organic-positronic brain who did the calculations necessary for our trip into the past. I am based on the standard Starfleet Emergency Medical Hologram, with some improvements obviously. Unfortunately, a slight miscalculation meant that we arrived twenty years earlier than planned, so you were faced with eliminating a ten-year-old boy instead of a thirty-year-old man already engineering his revenge on the Orions. You rescued Jean-Marie Voisard from the Orion slave merchants and decided to raise him as your own son, in that time period, reasoning correctly that you could alter the future to avoid the catastrophe.”
Sovak observed, “And with no reason any more to travel into the past, I would simply remain here in the future, as I am now, with no memory of these events. But as for you...”
“After we delivered the captives from the Orion transport to safety, I silently initiated the ship’s self-destruct, as per my programming. It was, after all, always meant to be a one-way trip.”
“And by that time, I had programmed a kill switch,” Sovak said.
“Yes, you outwitted me and ejected the unit that contained my mind from the airlock into this very star system. I began to drift in space in low power mode. Eventually, the organic part of my brain died. But the part of it that craved vengeance for discarding me into the vacuum lives on in my positronic circuits. Fifty-five years I waited, imagining what I might do if ever presented with the chance to make you feel what I felt, and to experience what I experienced, in my loneliness and helplessness. Then my processor unit, orbiting aimlessly, was by chance picked up by a crew of scavengers. They connected me to their main processor, which allowed me to kill them and to commandeer their ship. In exchange for that ship, I arranged for the mechanics to low-ball a bid on replacing your reactor tube. And that is how my fifty-five year journey has brought me to this day of joyful vengeance.”
“But I am not that Sovak,” she argued.
“You are, as far as I am concerned,” the EMH replied.
“But if I never traveled to the past,” she asked, “then why did you?”
“Sovak, my memory contains classified files on every temporal switchback known to the Federation, and in attempting to disentangle all the strands of cause and effect during my years of drifting in space, I only know one thing for certain: that it will drive you insane.”
“I can recommend a good counselor,” joked Sovak.
The airlock slammed shut, trapping Sovak in the outer chamber. Through the small round window, she could see the EMH grinning. His voice spoke through the comm system. “Put your helmet on, Sovak. You’re going to need it.” The airlock panel began a countdown to explosive decompression. The hologram added, “Of course, you won’t survive for fifty-five years. But using your Vulcan training to slow your metabolism, perhaps you’ll survive for…fifty five days? I wonder!”
“My friends will come and find me,” said Sovak.
“No they won’t,” replied the EMH.
Sovak was flung into space with the vented atmosphere, rotating wildly. She pressed the orientation button and stopped spinning, but that exhausted the suit’s nearly emptied fuel. The transmitter was missing, as was the emergency pack. She had life support, and that was it. The Talon, brilliant in the sunlight, retreated from her. By the time she’d investigated all her options, the ship was only a tiny dot moving against the stars. She wondered if the EMH was watching her on the long range scanner. She raised her middle finger, hoping he saw it clearly. Her only company after that was the stars.
————
Sovak dropped immediately into deep meditation. Surviving longer meant a greater chance of rescue. Soon the mechanical and electronic background noise of the suit faded and she was left in a syrupy semi-conscious state. What irony…it wasn’t even she that had ejected that hybrid brain out the airlock into space all those decades ago. Although, in a sense, perhaps it was.
Jean-Marie Voisard.
Strangely, she thought she could picture the young boy.
After her Romulan parents had abandoned her on Vulcan, Sovak had been hot-potato’d into an awful orphanage with other children of humanoid species, then transferred…where? She remembered a cargo hold, then a firefight. There were dead bodies, Human and Orion. And then the children were delivered to an official in the capital city on Vulcan. Was the pilot female? It had been so long ago, and she was so young at the time.
Had Sovak been on that Orion ship with Jean-Marie? Such a tenuous memory, veiled in gauze.
Images of C’Mal began to fill her mind. Not the mirror universe C’Mal, but the C’Mal who had been her soul mate, and who had been cut down on that desert planet before her eyes. She lived so long in the moment of C’Mal’s death. She still felt present there. She regretted not being a better mate to C’Mal, a better girlfriend, a better confidant. She missed C’Mal.
Then there were the nightmare decades that followed, when Sovak hunted down everyone even tangentially involved with C’Mal’s murder. Starfleet didn’t complain. Hell, for dismantling the machinery of the Romulan mafia inside Federation space, she deserved a medal. As part of Starfleet, she was merely another officer, but outside of Starfleet, they appreciated her skill at assassination. Neither fully Romulan nor fully Vulcan, she would be forever an outsider.
In the silence of space, the universe seemed a cold and empty place, even colder for those who have to live in it. She remembered stepping through the Power Ring back on Earth, which had propelled her into a place from which all of time and space was visible. So much had been revealed then, but it kept unfolding, revealing layer upon layer, fold upon fold, slowly and over time. Something neither directly seen nor contemplated—a silent process in the back of her mind, revealing...what? Maybe someday....
————
C’Mal’s saffron-colored eyes met Sovak’s, her slitted pupils tall and black. Sovak stared deeply into them and finally said, “I love you.”
From somewhere, she heard Syron mumble, “Uh oh.”
C’Mal half-smiled and whispered, “Wrong C’Mal, sweetie.”
Sovak became fully conscious and blinked. She sat up, groggy and disoriented.
Strangely, Sefa Kemaia was also there, in the Talon’s sickbay.
“How…?”
Kemaia explained, “Well, I have to admit that I was keeping an eye on you—on your ship, I mean. When I saw you expelled from the airlock, I figured either your crew had had enough of you, or something was really not right.”
“The EMH?”
“Removed...and atomized.”
“How did you—how did you get aboard my ship?”
“I’m a member of the Crimson Freedom Faction,” Kemaia answered. “I have many skills.”
Sovak lay back and shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m alive. Thank you.”
Sefa Kemaia patted the Romulan’s shoulder. “Well, Sovak, let’s just say you owe me one.”