That's the point where we crew crunch into the negatives. In other words, that's how bad it is. Get me three academy expansions yesterday. And we'll be taking more losses in the GBZ so it's likely we're building Rennies we can't even crew.
Fair.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
That's the point where we crew crunch into the negatives. In other words, that's how bad it is. Get me three academy expansions yesterday. And we'll be taking more losses in the GBZ so it's likely we're building Rennies we can't even crew.
Fair.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Refitting a Miranda takes one year, I'm pretty sure.
But since that berth actually has two years open, we might as well just build a new Miranda-A instead. I'm okay with it taking a while to crew.
Edit: other possibility. Could we build a hospital ship or large freighter in that time? Might get us some pp, using a Starfleet berth to help build auxiliaries.
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We don't get to choose not to crew. We never have. We just run out one day.
I took a second look and we could probably get away with a Miranda-A if people really want to. It might mean delaying construction a few years down the line, but... eh.
Well, it's not clear what happens if we need to crew and don't have the personnel. My best guess is that it tacks on time at the end of the build, where the ship is technically complete but the crew needs to spend more time training before it can be launched. That seems most logical.
Same technology & principles as the Romulan Drone from Enterprise. Neet.
Why build new Miranda-As instead of more Centaur-As?
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Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Same technology & principles as the Romulan Drone from Enterprise. Neet.
Why build new Miranda-As instead of more Centaur-As?
Miranda A has the same C, H, and L as a Centaur-A, but is cheaper and requires less crew. It's our most efficient war-footing ship, at the cost of being less useful in peacetime.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Same technology & principles as the Romulan Drone from Enterprise. Neet.
Why build new Miranda-As instead of more Centaur-As?
Crew and sr costs.
I don't mind making a C-A actually, if we can afford it. We're good on T comparatively.
Honestly the Excelsior refit is a good option. Do we have any 5YM ending while that berth is open?
e: we do! take that opportunity! Otherwise we might have to send them out again!
Honestly the Excelsior refit is a good option. Do we have any 5YM ending while that berth is open?
e: we do! take that opportunity! Otherwise we might have to send them out again!
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Centaur-A has higher Presence & Defense. What do those stats do anyway? I would have thought the latter would be useful in war.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Presence is rolled for Diplomatic issues. Defense is rolled with S or P when applicable to determine if the ship attends the event when the event fires.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
You should probably read the Quest Mechanics tab on the first page. It has the answers to a lot of questions you are asking.
Defense is characterized more as reaction and endurance. The only time it is checked in war is when the ship tries to retreat. Or for if the ship arrives on time in the first place, if it's reacting to reach a fight.
Again, the refit is not available until 2314.Q4. I actually do have an Excelsior berth (LOCF Berth A) set aside for 2315 when we can refit the Courageous after its 5YM.
Okay, here's where we are on crew through the end of 2315. That is, the next two years.
With Crew, our crunch is in Officers. Right now if we start the 6 Renaissances, plus what's already in production, and we take no more Officer casualties we will have 2.35 Officers left over at the end of 2315. That means we could afford to build an extra escort in the SF berth. If we take even 3 more points of Officer casualties, we will run short on crew by the end of 2315.
So the question is, how lucky do you feel, pardner?
aeqnai
Nerdy Homu
- Location
- Laniakea Supercluster
- Pronouns
- She/Her
We need a million Academy Expansions, and we need them two years ago. Jesus Christ on a runabout.
- Location
- USA
Did you include the .1 crew from Yan-Ros becoming affiliates?
Academy expansions and satellite campuses it is.
I did. I also include that we're going to get another Academy Steering Committee vote this quarter, and I assume we'll do a maximum possible shift from Techs to Officers. I also assume that we will expand the Academy next Snakepit. I also assume that we'll finish that EPS Taps technology in 2314 for an extra .1 crew in extra category. All those things are assumed in the 2.35 Officers by end of 2315.
How lucky do you feel?
ClawClawBite
Mad Engineering!
- Location
- Seattle, WA
Based on the GBZ, I suspect we may need to delay a ship at some point at the rate we are going. So, not lucky at all
- Location
- USA
What about the research discrepancy you found
University of Betazed: 2310s Affiliates Research-2312
44 / 60 Recruiting Campaign III (Increase Academy intake from Federation Affiliates to 0.15 each)
34 / 60 Diplomatic Analysis III (+2 to the -Annual- Diplomacy Rolls)
34 / 60 Public Media I (Leads to further tech)
2313-assuming diplo anaylysis 3 received the inspiration plus the boost from dual ratifications. That puts the increase crew from affiliates next year as well, another .45 per category
52 / 60 Recruiting Campaign III (Increase Academy intake from Federation Affiliates to 0.15 each)
47 / 60 Diplomatic Analysis III (+2 to the -Annual- Diplomacy Rolls)
42 / 60 Public Media I (Leads to further tech)
Omake - The Psion's Riddle - Const
- Location
- unspecified
The Psion's Riddle
A/N: A captain's log several years ago involved some interesting characters we haven't heard from since. Let's catch up with them, shall we? Hope you like reading. This is a big one.
Emerald and sapphire clouds swirled in space, as wide as a billion worlds, and within each swath of color twinkled newborn stars. No planets orbited here, and only two people lived, each on her own tiny station - a pair of marbles drifting side by side.
At least, that was how it was supposed to be. Mialla Rati frowned through the transparent aluminum wall of her station, tracking the progress of a black speck moving against the glow of the nebula - a shuttle, she was almost certain, and that was bad, bad news. Starfleet wasn't scheduled to resupply her for another six months, and if the shuttle wasn't from Starfleet. . .
Mialla spun, searching through the clutter, shifting heaps of pens and papers, books and PADDs. With a scrabble of claws, a ball of fur dashed away from her onslaught, leaping onto a heap of Betazoid romance novels before turning to observe his owner, hooting in alarm. Mialla scratched the creature's ears.
"Drizi, have you seen that phaser the Starfleet people left me?"
In the familiar mishmash of Drizi's mind, Mialla sensed consternation over her strange behavior, and beneath that, she experienced his alien senses, her own face repeated a thousand times in his compound eyes. Through his nose, she smelled the dust and crumbs of the cluttered room, and faintly, the hint of a metal different from any other in the station - the metal of the phaser. With Drizi's nose, she tracked the phaser downstairs to where she'd stashed it on a shelf in the shuttlebay. Holding the weapon gingerly at arm's length, she shooed Drizi back up the staircase to safety before pressing a button to open the space doors. Even if the visitors were baddies, it would be better to deal with them here, because if they went back to their ship, they could probably vape her station as easy as blowing out a candle.
A shuttle whispered inside and settled next to her own, the door hissing open. Mialla gulped. If a Cardassian hit squad flooded out, well, Mialla had never fired a phaser before. Maybe she'd be really good at it?
A trio of hooded figures emerged - vulcan men. She slouched with relief, setting the phaser down on a shelf, but immediately snatched it back as it occurred to her they could be Tal Shiar pretending to be vulcans. She stepped toward them, jabbing the phaser at the lead vulcan's chest.
"Hold it right there! No one's authorized to be here but me, you hear?"
The vulcan raised an eyebrow, and Mialla's heart fluttered. She loved it when vulcan men did that.
"Ms Rati, I presume," the vulcan said. "Please lower your phaser. It is unsafe for a person without the proper training to operate such a weapon."
"Not until you turn around and fly all the way back home!"
"Ms. Rati, I believe you will find, if you observe closely, that you are holding the phaser such that the operative end points toward yourself."
Mialla squinted at the weapon.
"Oh," she said, "right."
"Now, as for our authorization, I trust you will find this satisfactory."
He passed her a PADD with a lot of security codes. She vaguely remembered an officer telling her to memorize some codes like this, but they'd been much too long, and she'd been binging through a series of novels at the time, which had been more important.
She nodded solemnly over the codes. Of course, she had to take security seriously, so while she was looking over the PADD, she read the vulcans' minds. She shuddered. Most betazoids avoided reading vulcans, and for good reason. The emotion was so clear and sharp it felt like it was cutting her.
Regret. Shame. Cutting shame.
She covered her mouth, trying to hide the gasp of sorrow that almost overtook her as she retreated from their minds. Their emotions were too strong to be anything but vulcan. That was good enough security for her.
"Yes, uh, indeed," she said. "The documents appear to be in order. Right this way, gentlemen."
She led them upstairs to the main room - the one with space windows. Drizi chittered savagely at the invading vulcans, but when it became clear that they weren't going to retreat, he bravely fled into a closet to hide under a pile of Mialla's clothes.
"Sorry about all this mess," Mialla said. "I never thought I'd have guests."
The vulcans glided to the window, looking out at the distant speck of the sister station. The tallest of them, who had spoken to her before, pressed his hand against the glass.
"Tell us about T'Anar," he said.
"Okay. Well, she's this psionic being Ka'Sharren rescued from a station full of rogue vulcan scientists. Her powers were too much for her to handle, and split her mind into a bunch of different personalities, some of which are a bit slaughter-y, so she'd actually killed all the rogue scientists except some guy called Jivor or Jivenn or something like that."
"Jivonn," the vulcan said. "We are aware of the basics. We wish to know when T'Anar will be freed."
Mialla narrowed her eyes. Maybe these vulcans were Jivonn's partners in crime. Where did she put that phaser again? She must have set it down somewhere.
"Hm," she said. "Just out of curiosity, why are you all so interested in my patient?"
The tallest vulcan faced her, removing his hood, his modulated voice gravelly with emotion. "Because T'Anar is our kin. We are the brothers of Doctor Jivonn, and T'Anar is his child."
Mialla swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to block out the vulcans' grief, and behind it, their indignation.
"We demand an explanation," the vulcan said. "Why is T'Anar imprisoned? Answer carefully, as we may deem it ethical to remove her without your permission."
"No no no no no, you can't do that. You wouldn't make it fifty light years!"
The vulcan raised an eyebrow, but Mialla was in no mood to appreciate it. He said,
"I had been under the impression that T'Anar's condition stabilized after her mind meld with an Enterprise crewmember."
"Stabilized, yes," Mialla said, "but not cured. The scientists Enterprise passed her to made that mistake. She seemed calm enough, then one day, she woke up on the wrong side of the bed or something, broke containment like it wasn't there, and. . . you know. . . she has one day like that about every six weeks. The only thing we're sure will stop her is fifty kilometers of vacuum, so here I'm stationed, sixty kilometers away."
The brothers turned away, murmuring amongst themselves. Mialla bit her lip, hoping they'd understand. She felt bad for T'Anar, and a little guilty, but what else could the Federation do? If the brothers took their niece away, and T'Anar killed more people, that wouldn't be good for T'Anar either. The brothers turned back to Mialla.
"We find your story. . . suspicious," the spokesperson said. "Consider that the station where T'Anar was created was of Federation make, and was equipped with a warp core. The reports contain no indication of special refits to make the warp core compatible with the station, as would be required for a Klingon or Yrillian core."
"Um, okay? What are you getting at?"
"That it is likely the warp core was also of Federation make."
"O-oh. You don't think. . . ?"
"There is insufficient evidence to form a solid conclusion," the vulcan said. "Suffice it to say that we find it curious that the Federation is now keeping T'Anar in a nebula, where long range communications, scanners, and transporters are nonfunctional. It is only logical to operate here when one does not wish to be observed, which would be the case if illegal experimentation was occurring."
Mialla scowled, jabbing a finger at the vulcan. "Now wait a minute, buster. I don't know who built that station for Jivonn, but don't go thinking I'm out here doing freak experiments on T'Anar. I'm her counsellor! I'm here to help her get better so that we can free her ASAP- we talk on the short range comm almost every day, and I really think she's improving. I sure hope she is, because seeing as we don't have any scientists specializing in psionics, I'm our best shot at saving her. She'll die in a few more years if she stays like this, and since I'm trying to stop that, I'm just about the opposite of that Jivonn guy. I'm the hero here, okay?"
"If you wish us to believe you, provide an alternative explanation for this stations' concealment."
"Alright, I will!" she said. ". . . let me think about this. . . ah, got it. . . So if I was some Fed bigshot and I heard about Ka'Sharren discovering Jivonn's operation, my first question would be 'who funded these guys?' I mean, a whole station, and a warp core, all put together in secret? It's probably funded by a planetary government at least, right? So as a Fed bigshot, I'm thinking Tal Shiar. Maybe Cardies, but probably Tal Shiar. In that case, T'Anar's a big breakthrough for the baddies, right? Only the Romulans never got the data from that breakthrough, because T'Anar killed everyone, so now they're going to be after her. If the Feds are thinking that way, it's only logical that they'd hide her as deep in a nebula as they can."
". . . A reasonable deduction," the vulcan said.
Mialla started to smile, but his next statement stopped her.
"But far from the only possibility. We do not trust your government. Therefore, I will go to T'Anar and assist her, one mind to another, in regaining control over herself."
The vulcan strode toward the staircase leading to the shuttle bay, but Mialla blocked his path, waving both arms. "Whoa whoa whoa, you can't just fly over there!"
"I believe you will find that I can. In addition, you will discover that you are powerless to obstruct me."
He caught Mialla where her shoulder met her neck, and she stiffened, terrified of a nerve pinch.
"As you can see, I will proceed with or without your agreement. Now, if we assume that my probability of assisting T'Anar successfully is greater than zero, it would be logical for you, as T'Anar's caregiver, to provide me with any information that might increase said probability, even if you believe my methods to be insufficiently cautious."
Mialla glared at him. "You're going to get yourself killed."
"Your opinion has been expressed already. Continuing to reiterate it will not increase its persuasive power."
"Why are you doing this?" She asked. "You're not responsible for what Jivonn did. I get that you're ashamed, that you're blaming yourselves for not being better influences or whatever, but shouldn't he be the one risking himself, if anyone? You're letting your emotions get the better of you."
The vulcan's face twitched, but his jaw was set. "The section of this conversation dealing with subjective opinions is finished. You will now provide useful facts, or we will leave without them."
"Fine!" Mialla said. "Ever since she stabilized, she only switches personalities when she sleeps. If you want to help her, the most important thing is to mind meld with the right personality, because any personality but the main one will probably break you like a twig for trying, and no, you can't get at the main personality by mind melding with the wrong one - the minds are totally separate. Even she can't get to the memories of her other personalities. Oh, and by the way, about half the personalities will maim or kill you, so it's just luck of the draw if you meet the main personality first or a psycho. And, and, there's a personality that's paranoid and likes to imitate the main personality, so just because she's being nice to you doesn't mean you've got the right one. Get it? You're odds of survival must be, like, one in six, max"
"Thirty nine percent, in fact," the vulcan said. "Acceptable odds, considering. The scenario you describe has the character of a logical riddle. How can one discern between the impostor personality and the main personality? How can one increase the probability of encountering the main personality before the violent ones? You will be relieved to know that due to the information you have provided, I will delay my attempt for several days to ponder these questions. Your assistance has been valuable."
Firmly, his hand guided her out of his path. The vulcans filed past her. She shook her head.
"If you die, you'll hurt her," she said. "The violent ones don't clean up after themselves. T'Anar will wake up one day and find your body."
The shortest vulcan paused, half-turning. "Even a traumatic path to freedom is preferable to captivity. Should Sutok fail, I will make extensive preparations, and assist T'Anar in his place."
The last vulcan paused as well. "And if Tulok also fails, I shall prepare, and assist T'Anar. We will not fail to rectify the damage our brother Jivonn has done. We will not forsake our kin. We swear this."
===============
Jivonn paced, scowling at the too-bright light, at the nauseating off-white of his apartment's walls - of his prison's walls. The asylum was still a prison, no matter how pleasant the Federation attempted to make it. No amount of pine scent in his living room or paintings on his walls could make up for the fact that the door locked from the outside, and he was caged like some kind of rabid animal.
At a tap from the entrance, he whirled. Jivonn's youngest brother, Storn, stepped inside, the door hissing shut behind him. Jivonn rushed to him and clasped his hand, beaming.
"Storn. It's been too long."
"It has indeed."
Jivonn hesitated. Through the touch of their hands, he felt a flicker of his brother's mind, and found it aloof. He let go, taking a step back.
"You got old," Jivonn said.
"Likewise."
They fell into uncomfortable silence, and Jivonn wondered why it had taken Storn so long to visit him in the asylum, and why none of their other brothers had come.
". . . come in, sit," Jivonn said. "We have a lot to catch up on."
They sat on either side of a fireplace that was never lit, in armchairs that were bolted to the floor, and the silence resumed. Jivonn worried at the distance that had grown between them. To the casual observer, Storn was expressionless as usual, but Jivonn knew him well enough to read the downward cast of his eyes, the weight at the corners of his mouth. Storn was miserable.
"So," Jivonn said, "what's the plan?"
"I do not know what you're referring to."
"The Federationers don't bug these rooms - it's against their 'principles.' We can speak freely."
"I have been. I am not aware of any plan."
"Oh, come on. Don't you remember what we promised, all four of us? We'd do what was best for the family even if it cost us."
"Yes, we promised that," Storn said. "And then you abandoned us, and performed experiments that disgraced us all."
Jivonn shot to his feet, fists clenching. "Abandoned? I wanted you to join me. I did everything I could to persuade you, and it was the three of you who refused! You abandoned me!"
"Control yourself. You do not speak as a vulcan, as you used to. You have succumbed to emotion."
"Haven't we all? Hide your feelings if you like, but I have outgrown such petty games. It's my passion that drove me to greatness. It has not impeded my thinking as other vulcans fear - it's made me a genius."
"I would not have selected the word 'genius' to describe a scientist who led all of his research partners to their deaths, and whose primary subject's mind fractured into multiple personalities."
"Aha! I've got you now. I know what you are," Jivonn said. "If you've heard of T'Anar, I know you're working with the Federation; everything about her was classified. What, did they let you in here to brainwash me into a model citizen? Have the bleeding heart Federationers turned you into a liar as well as a betrayer? Shame on you, 'brother.'"
Storn opened his mouth, but Jivonn spoke over him, prowling back and forth, jabbing his finger. The softness of Storn's voice grated on him, the sight of Storn's face disgusted him.
"What's more," he said, "the 'failures' you describe were supposed to happen. The whole point was to make her unstoppable - of course I knew she would break containment, and when she did, she would act on the volatile passions inherent to untrained vulcans and kill us all. In order to make her more benevolent, I invented a machine called a synaptic differentiator to split her mind. Her homicidal urges would be contained in one personality, her paranoia in another. If circumstances ever gave her need of those emotions, she could activate the associated personality, and deactivate it when circumstances returned to normal. She would always be in control."
"It seems to have worked flawlessly," Storn said dryly.
"Oh shut up. Her loss of control was a minor misstep, which I could have rectified eventually if the Enterprise hadn't interfered. If anything, the differentiator worked too well. Her personalities were equals, and strangers. None of them were in control of T'Anar as a whole. Don't you see? I was breaking new ground, using dozens of machines and procedures of my own design with no help from the larger scientific community, only a few distant financiers who preferred to remain anonymous, even to me. I had thousands of engineering and scientific successes, but one misstep was all it took for the whole thing to go up in flames. And now you sneer, and in doing so you make yourself as ridiculous as a man who points out a fleck of misplaced paint in the greatest mural ever created, and claims that this means the painter was no better than ordinary people."
"Jivonn, unless you wish to remain in this asylum indefinitely, you need to recognize that your actions were both illogical and ethically indefensible."
Jivonn gave a shout of laughter. "Don't try to act like you're better than me. The difference between us isn't logic or morals - you were just too squeamish to experiment on sentients, even when that was clearly the logical course. People like you are the reason vulcans have been reduced to the glorified servants of the humans and their Federation, even though we're so obviously superior. People like you are mentally deficient, and morally deficient - yes, morally deficient."
Now it was Storn who shot to his feet, tight lipped and pale.
Jivonn grinned cruelly. "Careful, vulcan. You're emotion's showing."
"I merely wish to emphasize that you of all people are in no position to call anyone morally deficient. As you surmised, I have classified information about your case. I know T'Anar was based on your genetic material. She was your daughter, and you tortured her."
"It was necessary. I had to bring about a-"
"I do not wish to hear your justifications. It is enough to know that this asylum is precisely where you need to be, and that family means nothing to you."
Jivonn was ready to jump in with another rant, but Storn's last line hit like a blow. Jivonn groped for something to say. The thought flashed through his mind that he could apologize, or try to hurt Storn back. Finally, he said,
"Is. . . that really what you think?"
"She was your own family."
"No, not like that. Not like you three. I never. . . don't you understand what I was trying to do? Why everything was justified? Please, think about this, deeply - we call it moral to slaughter billions of germs to allow a single infected vulcan to live, because the vulcan is sentient, intelligent, because her capacity for greatness is superior to that of a germ, and if those germs could make choices, their attempt to destroy the vulcan would be unforgivable - they should allow themselves to starve rather than infect her. Do you understand? I set out to create a higher being, and before that goal, it doesn't matter what I do to other germs, even if every last one of us has to die! I did nothing wrong. And don't say I didn't care about T'Anar, either. I spent decades developing her. I assembled her over years and years, like a starship, engineering every cubic centimeter of tissue with teams of scientists, lacing nerves of exotic materials through every fragment of skin and bone. I put my heart and soul into her, and when she was complete, and she broke through the most high-tech containment devices in the alpha quadrant like they were made of dust, I wasn't afraid. I was proud."
Maddeningly, Storn raised an eyebrow, as if doing so constituted a counter-argument. Jivonn snarled.
"Have you come here just to mock me then? Are you going to moralize at me like all the others? We were brothers, Storn! How could you turn against me? The Storn I knew would have joined me in my research long ago, and if he visited me here, he would have freed me. Why did you even come?"
The lines in Storn's face seemed to deepen. "I came to see you, but also. . . our brother Sutok is dead."
The news deflated Jivonn. The room seemed to grow darker, colder. Jivonn slumped into a chair, turning away from Storn.
". . . How?" Jivonn asked.
"The details are classified."
It was Federation business, then - the Federation's fault. Jivonn expected a flood of hate, but there was nothing, only a heaviness in his chest. After a long silence, he said,
"Have you spoken to my captors? Will they. . . will they let me out to be at the funeral?"
"They believe you have made no progress toward rehabilitation, and may attempt to escape; therefore you will not be permitted to attend."
Jivonn did not trust his voice to reply.
"If you wish," Storn said, "I will return on the day after his burial, along with any of our kin who are willing to see you. We will hold our own funerary service. Would that be helpful?"
"Yes. . . thank you, Storn."
Storn rose. "In that case, I will return within the month."
He nodded down at Jivonn, and walked to the door.
"Storn," Jivonn said. "I am sorry that. . ." He sighed, shaking his head.
"For what you did on that station?" Storn said.
". . . that things ended this way."
"Nothing has ended, yet. Focus on your rehabilitation, and cooperate with your doctors. I wish to see our family free again."
===============
Attempt 1
Name: Sutok
Attempted to meld with Researcher personality, who deemed him a distraction requiring removal.
Death: telekinetic dismemberment
===============
Jivonn blinked into consciousness, and the hand that had been shaking his shoulder lifted away. He felt the disorientation of someone waking in an unfamiliar place. Instead of the mild cool of the asylum, the air here was cold enough to give him goosebumps, and it smelled of incense. He was kneeling, face numb where it rested against stone. Clambering to his feet, he saw the stars, and the deserts of Vulcan stretching as far as he could see, and at his feet, the altar he had fallen asleep against.
Ah, yes, he remembered now. Tulok was dead. Jivonn had not even had a full year to recover from Sutok's passing before a second brother was taken. This time, the doctors had deemed Jivonn rehabilitated enough to release for the burial, with a monitor around his wrist.
There had been no dirge for Tulok. They did not even have his body. And so they buried him in the ancient way, which required no corpse, only an altar of heaped stones in the desert, beneath the stars. For twelve days, the family would camp nearby, and visit the altar at all hours of the day and night, and then, on the thirteenth day, they would raise a mound of earth over it, and sing a farewell dirge, and depart.
"You appear exhausted, Jivonn," someone said. "You should return to camp and rest."
Jivonn turned to see the person who had shaken him awake. It was Storn, his only brother.
"You have been avoiding me," Jivonn said.
"Throughout the proceedings, you have displayed extensive emotionality. I did not wish my own emotional control to be compromised by association."
"Okay," Jivonn said.
They trailed off, both looking at the altar. Jivonn could feel an ache behind his eyes; he must have wept in his sleep, and there was a throbbing line across his forehead where he had rested against the stone. Remembering, he realized it had not been Tulok at the center of his nightmares, but Storn.
Into the silence, Jivonn asked, "How long until you join them?"
". . . Your question is illogical."
"Is it? Sutok and Tulok both go, not even a year apart. No bodies, no explanation. Everything is classified. Is it illogical to worry that whatever Federation business killed them will take you as well? Damn the Federation! Whatever they want from you, refuse them."
Storn stepped in front of his brother, and with bittersweet nostalgia, Jivonn realized Storn was recreating the way they used to converse long ago, the brothers' heads bowed until their foreheads nearly touched, speaking intently.
"I do not believe I will die," Storn said.
"But there is a risk, isn't there; you are working on the same project as Sutok and Tulok."
"Indeed," Storn said. "And I cannot cease to do so. I cannot bear. . . I cannot think it logical to allow a certain state of affairs to continue. One of our kin is in danger."
"Someday," Jivonn said, "the doctors will declare me rehabilitated, but what good will freedom be if everyone I am close to is dead?"
"Rest assured I will do everything in my power to complete the project with a minimum of risk."
"I have to know what threatens you," Jivonn said, "what killed our brothers. Do not shut me out." He raised splayed fingers toward Storn's face.
Storn caught his wrist. "The knowledge will only bring you torment."
"It cannot be more torment than my ignorance. I must know."
After a long moment, Storn's expression softened, and he allowed Jivonn to touch his face.
The mind meld felt like returning home. There was so much Jivonn had forgotten - Storn's passion for goat's milk, his phobia of elastic bands, a knot of emotions around a dark-eyed girl from Storn's academy days. Jivonn sifted through more recent memories, saw a younger version of himself ranting in a lab, trying to persuade Storn to accompany him on a new research project concerning psionics. He felt how close Storn had come to accepting, and Storn's pain at feeling he had to refuse on ethical grounds.
He saw through Storn's eyes, reading about Jivonn's arrest by the Enterprise. Jivonn felt Storn's shame, and for the first time, Jivonn burned with shame as well, and the suffering of both brothers compounded in the meld, and it was agony.
Finally, Jivonn saw the rainbow swirls of a nebula, and the pair of tiny stations silhouetted against it. He saw the black speck where his brothers had died - died attempting to save a girl Jivonn had imperiled. Jivonn shuddered, bile rising in his throat. It was not the Federation's fault that Sutok and Tulok had died. It was his.
Jivonn's fingers fell away from his brother's face. He turned and went into the desert, and managed to make it out of hearing range before the first sounds of anguish escaped him.
===============
Attempt 2
Name: Tulok
Attempted to observe T'Anar remotely by sending drones onto the station in his place. Multiple personalities thought this suspicious, and coordinated by leaving messages for each other, working together to fake recovery and lure Tulok to the station. The Romulan personality was awaiting him on arrival.
Death: natural causes (apparently)
===============
Jivonn attended Storn's funeral as a free vulcan. He gave a speech. He did not rant. He did not show emotion.
Sutok's ship was his now by inheritance, and he left in it, in a cockpit that still smelled faintly like Storn. The only light came from the viewscreens, which displayed Vulcan's sun - trillions of tons of superheated plasma, ready to reduce any complex matter into its constituent atoms. There was beauty in that. Purification through fire. A tap on his navigation panel, and he could be there. He could forget.
But one person still needed him. By his estimation, the rift in T'Anar's mind would finish killing her within the year. No doubt the Federation was attempting to develop a solution, but they had to catch up on decades of Jivonn's research, and do so without vivisecting betazoids as Jivonn had.
And if they trusted Jivonn's rehabilitation enough to accept his help, and created some device or procedure to save T'Anar, they would need someone to go to the nebula to administer it. As the situation was Jivonn's fault, that was Jivonn's risk to take. With a few words to the computer, he began sifting through the ship's records, looking for traces of his brothers' contacts in the Federation.
===============
Attempt 3
Name: Storn
Attempted to negotiate a solution acceptable to all parties. Made surprising progress, even convincing the Ruler personality not to kill him. However, the negotiations took too long, and after seven weeks, the Nihilist awoke.
Death: telekinetic shredding
===============
Mialla stormed downstairs into the hangar bay and smacked the button to open the space doors. Sure enough, when the shuttle landed, another damn vulcan got out, just like Sutok, just like Tulok, just like Storn. This time, she was not going to let him talk her into allowing him to go to T'Anar's station. Three dead vulcans was enough.
She whipped her phaser from her hip holster. She'd been practicing for this. She knew which end of the phaser was the shooty one.
"Freeze! Now listen here you pointy-eared numbskull! Don't move or I swear to Nuub I will stun you and lock you in a closet until the next Starfleet supply ship gets here to pick you up."
He sighed, rubbing his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was thick, almost slurred.
"I have. . . I. . . was ordered to come here."
"Yeah? Well your orders better be from Kahurangi or God."
Grumbling, she snatched the PADD he offered, backed off out of nerve pinch range, and scanned it. She knew all the proper security codes now, and sure enough, the vulcan had orders from Sulu's people, which was about as close as Starfleet got to a god. There was a note at the bottom addressed to Mialla, which basically said the formal equivalent of 'I know this seems weird, just go with it.' Mialla ground her teeth.
"Sorry, not good enough," she said.
The vulcan blinked in surprise. She glared at him.
"I'm not letting any more of you boys get yourselves turned into a meat smoothie on my watch. Do you have any idea how much therapy it took to get T'Anar out of the dumps after last time? Yeah, I know I'll get fired for obstructing orders, blah blah. Big deal. You're not going over there!"
"Will you at least hear me out?" He asked.
"NO!"
He raised an eyebrow, and Mialla felt herself melt a little, though she kept her expression angry.
"Well, maybe," she said, "as long as you understand that no is my final answer, I guess we can talk upstairs. I have to keep you here anyway until Starfleet drops by, since I don't have any way to stop you from flying to T'Anar's station if you get back to your ship."
She marched him up to the room with space windows, and let him sit in the only chair while she perched on a stack of books about six paces away - far enough that she'd have time to aim her phaser if he charged. Now that she got a good look at him, she saw he had the same odd, almost serrated ears as the other vulcans who had come here, and the same jawline. Definitely a relative. He was less handsome than the others, but maybe that was because he looked so sleep-deprived, with bags under his eyes, and rather than the usual blank expression of vulcans, this one's face seemed slack, despondent. She was careful not to contact his mind, as it was doubtless in an unpleasant state. When he talked, there was a desperation in his tone that put her on edge.
"Consider that-"
"You know what I don't understand?" Mialla said.
". . . What?"
"Why the Feds keep letting you guys come here. They have to know by now that you'll die."
"The reason seems obvious, to anyone with a modicum of intelligence."
"Oh really?" Mialla said.
He got up and paced to the window, leaning his forehead against the glass and pondering over the rainbow clouds of space. He seemed to wake up as he spoke.
"For an organization like the Federation, crippled as it is by ethical squeamishness, T'Anar is a moral riddle without an answer. A murderer must be locked away where she cannot kill anymore. But to imprison an innocent girl is against their 'principles.' That's the dilemma: imprison T'Anar or set her free - either way, they're guilty. The only way out is to heal her, but if they order personnel onto her station to do that, they're as good as killing them, and again, the weight of guilt increases. Funny, isn't it? They don't realize that regular lives don't matter. At least, not compared to T'Anar's. Even better, they're beginning to doubt their own judgment, wondering if they're really keeping T'Anar secret to hide her from the Federation's enemies, or if, deep down, they're hiding her because they're ashamed of what the Federation public would say if they knew."
Mialla narrowed her eyes. There was something about the un-vulcan way he was monologuing. Something familiar.
"Now," he continued, "imagine Sutok, Tulok, and Storn coming to you. As relatives, they have a reason to risk themselves for T'Anar. In fact, they insist that they have a right to do so. Would you deny them?"
Something clicked in Mialla's brain. T'Anar had described a vulcan who spoke this way.
The adrenaline hit her, and she stood, backing away. "You're Jivonn! What the hell makes you think you have a right to be here?"
He chuckled. "I'm the only one who has a right. The fools that came before me deserved what they got."
Mialla flinched. "When Storn came through here, he said you were improving. He was wrong, wasn't he? I think I'll lock you in the closet after all."
She gestured with the phaser for him to move, but he stayed still, gazing into space. She snarled,
"I'm dead serious. I will stun y-"
"She's going to die very soon, isn't she?"
Mialla's words stuck in her throat. She swallowed, looking down. "You can't know that. I don't know that."
"But you can guess. You notice her moving less, speaking less, sleeping more. If nothing changes, you know how it will end. And as much as you have been T'Anar's only companion for years, she has been your only companion. It is natural for you to be protective, but you must get out of my way, or her death is certain. Here, look."
He pulled a sliver of metal from his pocket, his eyes wild. "T'Anar has three brains - a cranial brain much like yours or mine, a diffuse brain laced throughout her entire body, and a spinal brain that connects the two. Now, according to my research, whatever personality is in control at the moment operates within the cranial brain, while her psionic abilities and inactive personalities occupy the other two. Knowing that, the rest is child's play. This limiter, implanted at the base of her skull, will emit a highly localized electromagnetic field, disrupting the electrical signals between the cranial brain and the other two, thus making it impossible for the inactive personalities to become active, or the active to become inactive. Of course, until a more elegant solution can be found, this will cripple her psionic abilities, but it will save her life."
Mialla frowned. If Jivonn's knowledge had allowed them to develop the limiter, she could understand why the Federation had chosen to work with him, but how could they trust him to be the one to come here? For all they knew, he might implant the device to put a violent personality in control, and use T'Anar as a weapon.
Hesitantly, Mialla reached out to Jivonn's mind. It felt like rummaging through a pile of garbage, but she gritted her teeth and waded deeper. She had to know if he would save T'Anar or hurt her; she had to see his soul.
In the depths of his thoughts, she experienced what it was to be Jivonn. She had always imagined T'Anar's creator to be a complex and troubled person, so she was surprised at how simple his mind was. It was like half a mind, a cutout of a personality, totally incapable of growth. It wasn't any of her business, but she had to wonder why whatever asylum he went to thought this guy was rehabilitated enough to go free.
Only one thing was solid in Jivonn's mind; T'Anar was a moral absolute. She must survive and go free. He would not hurt her. Mialla sighed. She still didn't know what Sulu's people were thinking, but if Jivonn wasn't going to hurt her charge, she couldn't justify getting in the way of whatever Sulu's plan might be.
===============
Telepathic interactions with T'Anar will be in cyan. This may take some getting used to, but it will make things smoother down the road.
===============
Jivonn collapsed into the seat of the station shuttle and operated the controls in a daze, departing Ms. Rati's station. The nebula cast the control panel in sickly green, and he focused on the color, trying to distract from the tremor in his hands and the weight of his eyelids.
It had been two weeks since he slept - too long even for a vulcan. It was those damn pills the scientists had given him. He'd laughed when they'd said the pills would make his mind unreadable to T'Anar - as if you could stop a god with a drug - but after taking them for two weeks, Jivonn's memory was so full of holes it was unreadable to him. He felt. . . smaller. After all the effort he'd put into changing himself at the asylum, he'd felt he was on the brink of some sort of epiphany, but now the sense was gone. He just wanted sleep.
Jivonn landed in the diminutive hangar of T'Anar's station. As soon as he got out, he heard the vessel whisper back into space behind him. It must have been programmed to return on autopilot, to prevent T'Anar from using it to escape. The space doors boomed shut behind it. He was trapped.
There was a staircase nearby, and cautiously he ascended it, emerging into a domed chamber. The ceiling glowed softly, its radiance warm as sunlight on his skin, and the soft breeze made the room feel like the surface of an M class planet. The walls and floor were polished until they glimmered in the light, the air smelling faintly of cleaning agents. In the center of the room was a white table, and on it a trio of robes, neatly pressed and folded - his brothers' clothes. The way they had been laid out, here in the center of the room, made him sure that they'd been placed as memorials. He went to them and lay his hands on the rough cloth. It was confusing. He remembered being crushed by each of their deaths, but now he felt only disdain.
A shuffling drew him from his thoughts. He turned and saw the culmination of his life's work, his masterpiece, and she was magnificent. Though vulcans normally needed touch to sense a mind, he could feel hers five meters away, radiating like a blue giant on the brink of supernova. He could almost smell the power in the air. Jivonn's blood hammered in his veins, his head spinning, but he could not even name the emotion that overwhelmed him. Terror? Pride? Fascination? T'Anar paused in one of the archways leading out of the room, muttering under her breath, her eyes lost in the distance. Physically, she was more sculpture than vulcan, symmetrical down to every eyelash and artery, her skin semi-translucent from a lifetime away from sunlight. He took pride in how her onyx hair and eyes reflected his own features - his way of signing his work.
She wandered by, her gaze passing through him unseeing, and for the duration of the day, she failed to notice him. Her entire attention was focused inward, except on the rare occasions when she stopped to examine something, or meandered from one room to the next. Jivonn followed her, too enthralled to do otherwise.
He recognized the personality - he had designed it as a mode T'Anar could flip into to research, to ponder, to practice controlling her abilities, but it wasn't functioning like it used to. He saw her stop to examine a stretch of wall, and from the look in her eyes, he knew she was appreciating it as an object of beauty. He hadn't designed that. It had. . . grown. She drank chocolate milk exclusively, and neglected to eat. She read poetry off a PADD, mouthing along with the words. Watching her, one might think she was a whole person, and not a fragment at all.
To get a sense of the state of the other personalities, Jivonn explored the station. From the central dome, six archways led to as many rooms: a room for short range communications with Ms. Rati, a kitchen, a room with hygienic facilities, and three bedrooms, each labelled with letters carved beside the door. The first read "KEEP OUT, LESSER T'ANARS," the second read, "privacy, please," and the third, in a mass of tiny, neat script, detailed the revenge that would befall every other T'Anar if even circumstantial evidence arose that someone had entered the room. Jivonn raised an eyebrow over the third room. The metal of the floor beneath the arch had been peeled up into spikes, long and serrated. The obstacle would be easy to circumvent, but the isolationist message was clear. He decided not to risk exploring the bedrooms.
Eventually, the lights dimmed to sunset pink, and then to the silver of moonlight, bright enough to see by, but only barely. T'Anar sat down next to a wall, slid over onto her side, and began to breathe deeply and evenly, her mouth hanging open. Jivonn frowned. The temperature had fallen as the lights dimmed - T'Anar was clearly supposed to sleep under a blanket of some sort, but the only blankets available were in the three bedrooms, and he was beginning to suspect that at least one of his brothers had been killed after trespassing there. Removing the cloak he was wearing over his robes, he draped it over his masterpiece, and then retreated to the central room to try to rest. Despite his exhaustion, the pills kept him awake, and the best he could do was fall into a stupor, trying to decide which of the personalities to lock in with the limiter. Certainly not the one the Federation wanted.
===============
Jivonn shook himself out of his stupor as the lights raised, the trill of a songbird filling the air. Through an archway, he heard T'Anar yawn.
"Hm?" she said.
A torrent of psychic force slammed into Jivonn's mind. The breath flew out of him. And then the force was gone. He gasped, eyes wide as he realized that had been T'Anar's version of a gentle probe.
"Hm," T'Anar said.
Swiftly, he stood, raising mental defenses, hoping desperately that the drugs would do their job.
The attack hit. Storn's thoughts smeared into a hurricane of wordless horror. Every fiber of his mind thrashed like an insect pinned in the beak of a predator. His every attempt to struggle was useless.
Through a haze of agony, he heard T'Anar yawn again, padding past him into the bathroom. While he writhed on the edge of madness, he heard T'Anar showering. While he spent the last of his strength struggling, she brushed her teeth. While his mind was picked clean like a carcass, she ate breakfast.
He became aware again, facedown on icy floor plates, drenched in sweat. He felt. . . floaty, blank, like there were pockets of air inside his skull.
"Good morning, Jivonn," someone said.
He looked up. An adolescent in a black jumpsuit stared down at him from her seat at a white table. It took a moment to recall who she was. He squinted. He had a feeling there was something significant about her posture, with one leg slung over the other, a faint sneer on her face, but all he got for trying to think was a headache. Something was wrong with his brain.
"I'm astonished. Your mind deteriorated so extensively in such a short span of years. I am certain it is not even half what it used to be. Has interacting with the mewling pacifists of the Federation dragged you down to their intellectual level, do you think? Actually, don't think - I have nearly destroyed your capacity to do so. From now on I'll think for you, and instruct you on how to act. I spared exactly the amount of your mental functionality necessary to perform the tasks I require of you."
Jivonn heard the words, but the interpretation was difficult, the meaning trickling in excruciatingly slowly. When her words finally sunk in, his hands rose to clutch his hair. Shadows of sentences flitted past him, articulations of despair, of anger, but he couldn't figure out how to formulate the sentences. He could only shake his head and repeat, dumbly,
"No, no no no."
"Don't you dare protest," she hissed. "Whatever I have inflicted on you, you have done worse to me."
"Not. . . this much. . ."
"You cut my mind into pieces. Can you even comprehend the horror of sharing a body with several other individuals, one of whom is so volatile that she damages our body every time she's in control? I feel unsafe and incomplete at all times, and it's your fault. Now you'll assist me as I require, and when I am finished with you, you'll die satisfied that you made minimal recompense for the crimes you committed against a superior being."
Jivonn understood little of what she said. He only knew that something was horribly, permanently wrong, and T'Anar had made it that way. He tried to stand, but she rose first. The lights flared, blinding, Jivonn's hair standing on end, and the weight of a mountain crashed onto his shoulders, crushing him against the floor so that he could hardly breathe. He tasted blood, felt it clogging his throat. He strained to break free, again and again until his muscles tired, and he went limp.
The psion kicked him onto his back, glaring. "Let me educate you about your immediate future. You will contact Mialla through the communications terminal and inform her that you have installed the limiter device into my brain stem, locking in the personality you call 'T'Anar Prime.' In fact, I will install the limiter myself. When Mialla arrives, we will strand her here before returning to your ship. We will then navigate toward the Neutral Zone and seek out the remnants of the biophage. Do you understand what I'm implying, Jivonn? I have no intention of operating on an individual scale. I intend to play the game of empires, and subsuming the consciousness of the biophage into my own superior mind is the most efficient method available. With my intelligence, the biophage will take full advantage of its own mutability. We will adapt past any vaccine you distribute. Using my body as a template, we will form ourselves into millions of beings with powers and cognitive abilities similar to my own, all connected in a single neural network. You set out to create a god; I'll show you a god beyond anything your tiny primate brain could have imagined."
Even through the fog of his crippled mind, Jivonn could imagine the ease with which a marriage of T'Anar and the biophage would dominate the mortal empires. He ached with regret that he would not live to witness the ultimate form of his creation.
"I want. . . let me. . . see it."
"Oh, you will see it. The damage I've inflicted on your mind will kill you within seventy two hours, but I'll preserve your body. The biophage remnants we discover may be microscopic, and I will require your biological material to feed it. . . interesting. I sense that you are relieved. You are an unusual individual, Jivonn. . . Now, let's proceed."
The limiter slipped from Jivonn's pocket and floated behind T'Anar's neck. He felt her rifling through his memories of exactly where the limiter should be inserted, and then her jaw clenched. Jivonn heard a snik, and T'Anar hissed, the muscles in her neck tensing. A single drop of green blood tapped onto the floor. Jivonn expected her to give a satisfied smirk and another monologue. Instead, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed.
Jivonn blinked stupidly. Had he forgotten something about the limiter? He could see it poking out through her hair, dripping blood. With a pop, gas began to jet from the device; there was definitely something he'd forgotten about it. The fumes burned his sinuses. His vision darkened, and after so long without sleep, he finally slipped into unconsciousness.
================
At the trill of a songbird, Jivonn blinked awake. His body throbbed, especially his brain, his thoughts sluggish. He was in a domed room he'd never seen before, the walls scrubbed spotless, a faint smell of cleaning agents on the breeze. Squinting, he tried to recall where he was.
The last thing he remembered was meeting with Federation scientists in a supply closet at the back of a research station. It was a ragtag bunch: two intel spooks who did science as a hobby, a couple retirees, and a half dozen off-duty researchers. Since it was thought that the Tal Shiar would love to get their hands on T'Anar, knowledge of her existence was strictly limited, and among the few who knew, an even smaller group had the skills Jivonn needed.
An elderly woman tapped her PADD. "Right, so I can get my boyfriend to build this 'limiter' thing in an afternoon, no questions asked. I mean, it's just an EM emitter. I'm actually disappointed we're not doing anything crazier. Aren't you s'posed to be some kind of evil genius?"
"Patience," Jivonn said. "I have only begun to reveal my twisted machinations."
There were scattered chuckles. Jivonn smiled before continuing.
"I suspect my brothers tried technological solutions as well. Tulok in particular was mechanically adept. However, the problem is that there is no way to be certain of which T'Anar is in control before you land on the station, and if you encounter a violent personality first, she'll read your mind, understand that you're attempting to lock her away, and, in the best case scenario, kill you. In the worst case, she'll use whatever devices you brought to lock herself into command. In fact it's a stroke of luck that she has not managed to parlay any of my brothers' visits into a pretended recovery and escape."
A few of the scientists shared uncomfortable glances. Jivonn guessed they'd been in similar secret meetings with his brothers over the past few years.
"Here is the solution," Jivonn said. With a few taps on his PADD, he shared a set of schematics with the others. They bent over their screens, eager.
"This is a synaptic differentiator," Jivonn said. "It is a device that rips the mind into pieces - a device of torture. We will construct exactly one, use it exactly once, on me. Then the device, and the schematics, will be destroyed. Using it, we can divide my mind so thoroughly that I'll be unable to access the memories of my inactive personality, just as T'Anar's memory is segregated. In this way, we can withhold information from even a perfect mind-reader."
And while they were at it, he'd have them segregate the negative parts of his personality he had spent years in the asylum trying to remove. As long as he was risking his sanity on experimental procedures, it was only efficient to try for self-improvement at the same time.
One of the spooks, an andorian with a prosthetic throat, croaked, "Won't work. She'll see memory of this meeting; put her on guard."
"Valid concerns," Jivonn said, "but the differentiator is as traumatic as a severe concussion - I won't remember much from the days shortly before or after the procedure. Of course, if we allow my personalities to switch freely, it will be suspicious that every second day is a gap in my memory, and T'Anar will deduce the truth. To prevent this, all we have to do is keep me awake until I meet her, as personalities rarely switch except in sleep."
The elderly woman nodded. "So we trick you after the procedure - switch out the limiters on you, right? I can sew the real limiter into a hidden pocket on your cloak so your other personality won't find it. We'll set the fake limiter up for a slow drip tranquilizer to keep her out for weeks if need be - throw in something to knock you out too, to make sure you switch at the right time. I suppose that's convoluted enough for an evil genius. I like it."
The hammering in Jivonn's skull brought him out of his memories. He was having trouble thinking, but found that if he slowed down and thought excruciatingly slowly, he could manage. He glanced around. Judging by the crumpled form of T'Anar beside him, the plan had worked. Judging by the fire in his skull, he'd taken damage in the process. He staggered to his feet, searching for his cloak, and found it in an adjoining room. The limiter seemed unsteady in his fingers as he pulled it from its hidden pocket. He couldn't feel it. He touched the wall, the floor, but his hands had gone numb. He felt the blood drain from his face, his heart racing with the beginnings of fear. He knew these symptoms. First a headache, impaired speech and cognition, then numbness, unconsciousness, and death. All the result of rapid synaptic degeneration brought on by a violent forced meld. It was the more vicious grandfather of Pa'nar syndrome. In his experiments, he had witnessed it often enough to know that he had only a few hours to finish his work.
Back in the domed room, he knelt next to T'Anar, and rolled her onto her back. She was limp, snoring. He stared down at her face, startled by how bizarre it felt to look at her. Had it really only been three years? He searched her features for what had changed, but found nothing unexpected. He'd seen her face at this age before in growth simulations, but this was different. It was a difficult emotion to pin down. She seemed. . . endearing? Ah, that was it. Jivonn had seen his masterpiece, a god, a perfectly optimized piece of bioengineering. He'd never seen his daughter before.
His heart sank. A whole knot of parental emotions were being born, but he would live to explore none of them - none except regret that every moment of his child's life had been worse because of him.
But regret was not a useful emotion, and to be distracted now would only hurt T'Anar more. Jivonn pressed his fingers against his daughter's face, and sank into her mind. In an unconscious state, her personalities shifted every twenty or thirty minutes. Most vulcans would have found it impossible to tell the personalities apart during sleep, when conscious thoughts were minimal, but Jivonn knew T'Anar down to the molecule, so the emotional undercurrent of each personality was more than enough. When he sensed his daughter, he ended the meld, and fumbled numbly to replace the fake limiter with the real one. His arms and legs were heavy and unfeeling, and there was a deep tingle in his face - the beginnings of numbness.
He went to the comm room, and hailed Ms. Rati, whose face appeared on the wall. He spoke slowly, struggling to keep the words straight in his head.
"It's done. . . come over. . . tell her. . . about the limiter."
"Jivonn? You look awful! Are you alright?"
"Tell her I'm sorry. . . and I want. . . her to. . . live long. . . and. . . prosper."
"Jivonn, wait!"
He switched off the comm. Shuffling between rooms, he gathered up his cloak, folded it neatly, and lay it on the table beside his brothers'. And that was it - there was nothing left to do. It was not the end he would have chosen, for himself or his brothers, but T'Anar was alive, and she'd be okay. It was enough.
Not wanting T'Anar to wake up to his corpse, Jivonn went downstairs to the hangar. At a control panel, he recalibrated the atmosphere containment fields to let through not just shuttles, but smaller objects as well. And then, he opened the space doors and walked outside.
The nebula was beautiful.
===============
Attempt 4
Name: Jivonn
Success.
Death: exposure to vacuum
===============
==============
As soon as Mialla landed in the hangar bay, she knew she was too late. Jivonn's mind was nowhere to be found. Sighing, she slumped against the control panel. She felt heavy, but relieved too. She could sense T'Anar's mind overhead, and it felt mortal, kind. That bastard Jivonn had actually pulled it off.
In the dimness of the shuttle, she paused just to feel T'Anar sleeping. The girl was at peace, and that made Mialla smile. If finding out that Jivonn was dead didn't push T'Anar completely off the deep end, T'Anar would be free for the first time ever. That was a big if, though.
Mialla's brow creased with worry as she felt T'Anar waking. She typed a code to prevent the shuttle from leaving on autopilot, then stepped into the hangar and went for the stairs. Despite years of talking over the comm, she'd never been able to pin down what T'Anar felt about her dad. All Mialla knew was that he'd been the central figure of the first thirteen years of her life. It'd be surprising if she didn't come unglued in one way or another when she found out he was dead.
At the top of the steps, Mialla hesitated. T'Anar was already on her feet, probing the back of her neck with uncertain fingers, her eyes on the green stains smeared on the floor. Slowly, the girl turned to the table. Her gaze came to rest on her father's robe.
T'Anar gave a sharp huff, like someone getting the wind knocked out of them. Mialla didn't breathe, waiting with a knot of nerves in her stomach to see, when the moment of shock ended, what her patient would do - what her friend would do. T'Anar's mind was as inscrutable as her face.
"Mialla," she said, "follow me."
Cautiously, Mialla tailed her into the kitchen, which was much fancier than the one on Mialla's station, with a tall metal table for one and a trio of windows at the back with a view of rolling hills - well, a holo feed of rolling hills, but a convincing one. T'Anar got out a frying pan, greased it, and began to gather ingredients. Mialla's eyebrows felt like they rose all the way to her hairline. Was this a coping mechanism? Or was she fine with Jivonn's death? Mialla thought about trying to start a conversation, or asking T'Anar to open her mind, but the girl was so intent on her work that it would've felt rude to interrupt. T'Anar bent down to measure each liquid ingredient at eye level, and rather than becoming lost in thought as she stirred the eggs, she hovered over them like a bird over an insect's hole, swooping down to flip any bit she thought ready. Mialla had always considered cooking boring, but T'Anar was fascinating to watch, and after three years of prefab meals, Mialla realized that the eggs smelled delicious, and she was starving, and eggs were exactly what she wanted.
T'Anar arranged the finished eggs on a plate and set it on the table with a fork and a glass of Uttaberry juice, which was Mialla's favorite. "It's for you," she said.
"You don't want any?"
"No."
It felt a little awkward to eat while T'Anar stood and watched within arms reach, but Mialla was too famished to care. Besides, if this was a coping mechanism, the best way to help T'Anar was to play whatever role T'Anar wanted her to, and if that role happened to be delicious, so much the better. She dug in, and recognized the taste immediately - kimdenash. A few of the flavors were off, but this was probably as near as you could get without ingredients from a betazoid market, and it was close enough to taste like home. Mialla held a hand over her lips to talk with her mouth full, her voice sounding dumbfounded even to herself.
"You know how to make kimdenash?"
"No. But you do. Your father used to let you help with it, before you turned nine and decided you hated cooking."
"Oh. . . right."
T'Anar's mind reading ran deeper than Mialla had realized. They fell silent as Mialla wolfed down the kimdenash. Twice, T'Anar opened her mouth, hesitated, and shut it, while Mialla let the silence lengthen, figuring the girl would speak up when she was ready. Finally, T'Anar said,
"You understand that I trust you."
"Never doubted it," Mialla said.
"I. . . don't want you to think I'm shutting my mind because I dislike you. I just. . . I don't understand my own thoughts at the moment."
"Well, talking usually helps sort things out, and I happen to be a professional listener."
T'Anar rubbed her fingers together, gathering her thoughts.
"Aside from giving instructions and ranting, Jivonn only spoke to me once, when I was seven."
While T'Anar spoke that first sentence, Mialla felt an impression of T'Anar at age seven, when her abilities were only beginning to bloom, long before Jivonn cut her mind into pieces.
"I broke containment," she said. The hiss and pop of force fields dying. Excitement, the burning sensation of a narrowly avoided phaser. "Some of the scientists vented me into space." The shrieking wind of depressurization. Fear. Pulling the air back with my mind, pressing it tight around me to create pressure. Breathe. Breathe. "I could sense Jivonn. I crossed the surface of the asteroid to his location." Seeing the stars for the first time. I never thought the universe was so huge. It was quiet here. "I touched the station where I felt him." Pressing toward him, the station's metal groaning and shivering before it snapped, and I stepped into the artificial gravity, holding the atmosphere in place to avoid depressurization killing the scientists. It was a control room. I could see a dozen camera angles on the force cage where I lived, and half as many alarms flashing. The other scientists felt terror, but "Jivonn felt awe, and something akin to love. It was overwhelming. I had never been the subject of a positive emotion before." For this person's love, I would do anything. "In his mind, I told him I came because I could not wait until tomorrow's experiments to see him again. I wanted to talk with him now." He did talk with me, and walked me through the station, and I thought I would burst from happiness. He told me that I should not damage the station or risk myself. He told me I was valuable. In the deep parts of the station, at the end of a long, chilly elevator shaft that delved into the asteroid, he showed me something fascinating - a room almost too cold to stand, barely lit. It was piled high with frozen bodies, and all of them shared my face.
Mialla shuddered, shrinking back, but the images kept flooding in. These were your prototypes, Jivonn thought. They died so that you could exist.
T'Anar cocked her head. What does it mean? What should I feel?
He paused, and she felt his thoughts churning, troubled.
I can't teach you what it means, he said. There are answers in my mind, and I won't be able to keep them from you as your telepathy grows, but remember that they're vulcan answers, and you're more than vulcan. Listen, T'Anar - I am not your father. You have no father, and no mother. You are the first. Decide what things mean on your own. Don't learn from lesser beings. Don't love us. Trust your own mind and feelings.
"I believe all my personalities have roots in that conversation," T'Anar said.
Mialla sat back as the connection trailed off. "Well? Did you love him?"
"There is a contradiction in what he told me. He said not to love him, but also to trust my feelings, and I. . . respected him, and felt that he was my father. It is difficult to understand how to respond. And now he has died, and I know his mind well enough to simulate his thoughts if he could speak with us now. He would be pleased to die for a higher being. But I don't feel like a higher being. When I look inside you, I think we are the same, and the fact that so many people died to fix me feels like a heavy price. It's confusing. I wonder if I'm defective."
"Well, answers are coming to mind, but you know. . ."
"They're betazoid answers," T'Anar said.
"Exactly, and you already know them from my head, and clearly they didn't fit the bill or we wouldn't be talking about it anymore. Is hearing other people talk even useful to you?"
"People form new thoughts as they speak. It's useful."
"Okay, well how 'bout this. Maybe we can't figure out the big meaning of all those deaths. They're just dead. But we're not. I'd pretty much guarantee that Jivonn wanted you to inherit his ship, so let's take off - go see some quasars and a neutron star. Maybe the answers are out there." She waved her hand at space.
T'Anar nodded intently. "You'll come with me?"
"Well, I can't be a worse roommate than the ones you've been living with. I can't imagine the Ruler personality helped much with the cleaning."
"No. No she did not."
Mialla smiled. "Don't tell me. . . you had to do all the cooking and cleaning yourself?"
"If they ate poorly, I had to share the stomach ache. It was only prudent to keep reasonably healthy meals in stock."
"Well, we can take turns cooking from now on."
"Thank you, but no. I understand from your memories that when it comes to domestic tasks, you are an inferior being."
Mialla laughed.
It seemed T'Anar would be ok.
===============
Mialla set her pad on thin air, assuming it would hover there until she needed it again. With a thunk, it hit the burgundy deck, and Mialla laughed at herself as she bent to pick it up. When betazoid friends hung around each other for more than a few days, the lines between their minds could start to blur. More than once, Mialla had forgotten she didn't have T'Anar's powers. Actually T'Anar dropped stuff all the time too - the limiter had hit her telepathy pretty hard, but it had all but locked her telekinesis. Her max force felt like a breath on the cheek.
Mialla and T'Anar spent most days in the dimly lit cockpit, reading, with the viewscreens full of stars and Drizzi sniffing around the control panels. They never spoke aloud - they'd both been cooped up alone for three years, so companionable silence was natural to them. They passed the time warmly, pleasantly.
In a way, they were saying goodbye to each other. They both knew T'Anar would have to go underground again. The backers who funded Jivonn were out there somewhere, or so they had to assume, and this time, when T'Anar hid, Mialla wasn't coming with her. The betazoid wasn't getting any younger, and if she wanted a family, she'd better get a move on. She kind of wanted to pop out some vulcan-betazoid hybrids. Sure, they'd probably be telepathically weird and troubled, but after T'Anar, Mialla had a lot of practice with that.
It wasn't long before they decided to message Mialla's bosses. At first the Feds' responses angled toward putting T'Anar in a bunker, basically like the nebula station only built to keep people out instead of keeping T'Anar in. T'Anar hated it, of course, which led to the second plan: with some cosmetic surgery, T'Anar could try to blend in as a betazoid. That one made Mialla laugh. Even if T'Anar shut everyone out of her mind, anyone with two telepathic neurons to rub together would sense they were being shut out by something much weirder than a betazoid. Mialla tried to explain it to the Feds by comparing it to a space whale thinking it could pass for human if it put on a mask.
And that led to plan three: get out of town. Apparently there was an alien armada orbiting Earth, and the Feds were going to send the Stargazer with them for a quarter century or so. As a civilian passenger, T'Anar could fly beyond the baddies' reach.
Well? Mialla thought, what do you think?
T'Anar nodded, smiling.
Mialla smiled too. T'Anar had shared with her the memory of Enterprise coming to Jivonn's station, of the excelsior's beautiful lines, of the dashing explorers in colorful uniforms that crewed her. The psion had read Nash Ka'Sharren's mind like a child reads a storybook, with wide eyed fascination and enthusiasm, with a sense that the universe was infinitely larger and more interesting than she'd imagined.
T'Anar's excitement flooded Mialla's thoughts.
A/N: A captain's log several years ago involved some interesting characters we haven't heard from since. Let's catch up with them, shall we? Hope you like reading. This is a big one.
Emerald and sapphire clouds swirled in space, as wide as a billion worlds, and within each swath of color twinkled newborn stars. No planets orbited here, and only two people lived, each on her own tiny station - a pair of marbles drifting side by side.
At least, that was how it was supposed to be. Mialla Rati frowned through the transparent aluminum wall of her station, tracking the progress of a black speck moving against the glow of the nebula - a shuttle, she was almost certain, and that was bad, bad news. Starfleet wasn't scheduled to resupply her for another six months, and if the shuttle wasn't from Starfleet. . .
Mialla spun, searching through the clutter, shifting heaps of pens and papers, books and PADDs. With a scrabble of claws, a ball of fur dashed away from her onslaught, leaping onto a heap of Betazoid romance novels before turning to observe his owner, hooting in alarm. Mialla scratched the creature's ears.
"Drizi, have you seen that phaser the Starfleet people left me?"
In the familiar mishmash of Drizi's mind, Mialla sensed consternation over her strange behavior, and beneath that, she experienced his alien senses, her own face repeated a thousand times in his compound eyes. Through his nose, she smelled the dust and crumbs of the cluttered room, and faintly, the hint of a metal different from any other in the station - the metal of the phaser. With Drizi's nose, she tracked the phaser downstairs to where she'd stashed it on a shelf in the shuttlebay. Holding the weapon gingerly at arm's length, she shooed Drizi back up the staircase to safety before pressing a button to open the space doors. Even if the visitors were baddies, it would be better to deal with them here, because if they went back to their ship, they could probably vape her station as easy as blowing out a candle.
A shuttle whispered inside and settled next to her own, the door hissing open. Mialla gulped. If a Cardassian hit squad flooded out, well, Mialla had never fired a phaser before. Maybe she'd be really good at it?
A trio of hooded figures emerged - vulcan men. She slouched with relief, setting the phaser down on a shelf, but immediately snatched it back as it occurred to her they could be Tal Shiar pretending to be vulcans. She stepped toward them, jabbing the phaser at the lead vulcan's chest.
"Hold it right there! No one's authorized to be here but me, you hear?"
The vulcan raised an eyebrow, and Mialla's heart fluttered. She loved it when vulcan men did that.
"Ms Rati, I presume," the vulcan said. "Please lower your phaser. It is unsafe for a person without the proper training to operate such a weapon."
"Not until you turn around and fly all the way back home!"
"Ms. Rati, I believe you will find, if you observe closely, that you are holding the phaser such that the operative end points toward yourself."
Mialla squinted at the weapon.
"Oh," she said, "right."
"Now, as for our authorization, I trust you will find this satisfactory."
He passed her a PADD with a lot of security codes. She vaguely remembered an officer telling her to memorize some codes like this, but they'd been much too long, and she'd been binging through a series of novels at the time, which had been more important.
She nodded solemnly over the codes. Of course, she had to take security seriously, so while she was looking over the PADD, she read the vulcans' minds. She shuddered. Most betazoids avoided reading vulcans, and for good reason. The emotion was so clear and sharp it felt like it was cutting her.
Regret. Shame. Cutting shame.
She covered her mouth, trying to hide the gasp of sorrow that almost overtook her as she retreated from their minds. Their emotions were too strong to be anything but vulcan. That was good enough security for her.
"Yes, uh, indeed," she said. "The documents appear to be in order. Right this way, gentlemen."
She led them upstairs to the main room - the one with space windows. Drizi chittered savagely at the invading vulcans, but when it became clear that they weren't going to retreat, he bravely fled into a closet to hide under a pile of Mialla's clothes.
"Sorry about all this mess," Mialla said. "I never thought I'd have guests."
The vulcans glided to the window, looking out at the distant speck of the sister station. The tallest of them, who had spoken to her before, pressed his hand against the glass.
"Tell us about T'Anar," he said.
"Okay. Well, she's this psionic being Ka'Sharren rescued from a station full of rogue vulcan scientists. Her powers were too much for her to handle, and split her mind into a bunch of different personalities, some of which are a bit slaughter-y, so she'd actually killed all the rogue scientists except some guy called Jivor or Jivenn or something like that."
"Jivonn," the vulcan said. "We are aware of the basics. We wish to know when T'Anar will be freed."
Mialla narrowed her eyes. Maybe these vulcans were Jivonn's partners in crime. Where did she put that phaser again? She must have set it down somewhere.
"Hm," she said. "Just out of curiosity, why are you all so interested in my patient?"
The tallest vulcan faced her, removing his hood, his modulated voice gravelly with emotion. "Because T'Anar is our kin. We are the brothers of Doctor Jivonn, and T'Anar is his child."
Mialla swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to block out the vulcans' grief, and behind it, their indignation.
"We demand an explanation," the vulcan said. "Why is T'Anar imprisoned? Answer carefully, as we may deem it ethical to remove her without your permission."
"No no no no no, you can't do that. You wouldn't make it fifty light years!"
The vulcan raised an eyebrow, but Mialla was in no mood to appreciate it. He said,
"I had been under the impression that T'Anar's condition stabilized after her mind meld with an Enterprise crewmember."
"Stabilized, yes," Mialla said, "but not cured. The scientists Enterprise passed her to made that mistake. She seemed calm enough, then one day, she woke up on the wrong side of the bed or something, broke containment like it wasn't there, and. . . you know. . . she has one day like that about every six weeks. The only thing we're sure will stop her is fifty kilometers of vacuum, so here I'm stationed, sixty kilometers away."
The brothers turned away, murmuring amongst themselves. Mialla bit her lip, hoping they'd understand. She felt bad for T'Anar, and a little guilty, but what else could the Federation do? If the brothers took their niece away, and T'Anar killed more people, that wouldn't be good for T'Anar either. The brothers turned back to Mialla.
"We find your story. . . suspicious," the spokesperson said. "Consider that the station where T'Anar was created was of Federation make, and was equipped with a warp core. The reports contain no indication of special refits to make the warp core compatible with the station, as would be required for a Klingon or Yrillian core."
"Um, okay? What are you getting at?"
"That it is likely the warp core was also of Federation make."
"O-oh. You don't think. . . ?"
"There is insufficient evidence to form a solid conclusion," the vulcan said. "Suffice it to say that we find it curious that the Federation is now keeping T'Anar in a nebula, where long range communications, scanners, and transporters are nonfunctional. It is only logical to operate here when one does not wish to be observed, which would be the case if illegal experimentation was occurring."
Mialla scowled, jabbing a finger at the vulcan. "Now wait a minute, buster. I don't know who built that station for Jivonn, but don't go thinking I'm out here doing freak experiments on T'Anar. I'm her counsellor! I'm here to help her get better so that we can free her ASAP- we talk on the short range comm almost every day, and I really think she's improving. I sure hope she is, because seeing as we don't have any scientists specializing in psionics, I'm our best shot at saving her. She'll die in a few more years if she stays like this, and since I'm trying to stop that, I'm just about the opposite of that Jivonn guy. I'm the hero here, okay?"
"If you wish us to believe you, provide an alternative explanation for this stations' concealment."
"Alright, I will!" she said. ". . . let me think about this. . . ah, got it. . . So if I was some Fed bigshot and I heard about Ka'Sharren discovering Jivonn's operation, my first question would be 'who funded these guys?' I mean, a whole station, and a warp core, all put together in secret? It's probably funded by a planetary government at least, right? So as a Fed bigshot, I'm thinking Tal Shiar. Maybe Cardies, but probably Tal Shiar. In that case, T'Anar's a big breakthrough for the baddies, right? Only the Romulans never got the data from that breakthrough, because T'Anar killed everyone, so now they're going to be after her. If the Feds are thinking that way, it's only logical that they'd hide her as deep in a nebula as they can."
". . . A reasonable deduction," the vulcan said.
Mialla started to smile, but his next statement stopped her.
"But far from the only possibility. We do not trust your government. Therefore, I will go to T'Anar and assist her, one mind to another, in regaining control over herself."
The vulcan strode toward the staircase leading to the shuttle bay, but Mialla blocked his path, waving both arms. "Whoa whoa whoa, you can't just fly over there!"
"I believe you will find that I can. In addition, you will discover that you are powerless to obstruct me."
He caught Mialla where her shoulder met her neck, and she stiffened, terrified of a nerve pinch.
"As you can see, I will proceed with or without your agreement. Now, if we assume that my probability of assisting T'Anar successfully is greater than zero, it would be logical for you, as T'Anar's caregiver, to provide me with any information that might increase said probability, even if you believe my methods to be insufficiently cautious."
Mialla glared at him. "You're going to get yourself killed."
"Your opinion has been expressed already. Continuing to reiterate it will not increase its persuasive power."
"Why are you doing this?" She asked. "You're not responsible for what Jivonn did. I get that you're ashamed, that you're blaming yourselves for not being better influences or whatever, but shouldn't he be the one risking himself, if anyone? You're letting your emotions get the better of you."
The vulcan's face twitched, but his jaw was set. "The section of this conversation dealing with subjective opinions is finished. You will now provide useful facts, or we will leave without them."
"Fine!" Mialla said. "Ever since she stabilized, she only switches personalities when she sleeps. If you want to help her, the most important thing is to mind meld with the right personality, because any personality but the main one will probably break you like a twig for trying, and no, you can't get at the main personality by mind melding with the wrong one - the minds are totally separate. Even she can't get to the memories of her other personalities. Oh, and by the way, about half the personalities will maim or kill you, so it's just luck of the draw if you meet the main personality first or a psycho. And, and, there's a personality that's paranoid and likes to imitate the main personality, so just because she's being nice to you doesn't mean you've got the right one. Get it? You're odds of survival must be, like, one in six, max"
"Thirty nine percent, in fact," the vulcan said. "Acceptable odds, considering. The scenario you describe has the character of a logical riddle. How can one discern between the impostor personality and the main personality? How can one increase the probability of encountering the main personality before the violent ones? You will be relieved to know that due to the information you have provided, I will delay my attempt for several days to ponder these questions. Your assistance has been valuable."
Firmly, his hand guided her out of his path. The vulcans filed past her. She shook her head.
"If you die, you'll hurt her," she said. "The violent ones don't clean up after themselves. T'Anar will wake up one day and find your body."
The shortest vulcan paused, half-turning. "Even a traumatic path to freedom is preferable to captivity. Should Sutok fail, I will make extensive preparations, and assist T'Anar in his place."
The last vulcan paused as well. "And if Tulok also fails, I shall prepare, and assist T'Anar. We will not fail to rectify the damage our brother Jivonn has done. We will not forsake our kin. We swear this."
===============
Jivonn paced, scowling at the too-bright light, at the nauseating off-white of his apartment's walls - of his prison's walls. The asylum was still a prison, no matter how pleasant the Federation attempted to make it. No amount of pine scent in his living room or paintings on his walls could make up for the fact that the door locked from the outside, and he was caged like some kind of rabid animal.
At a tap from the entrance, he whirled. Jivonn's youngest brother, Storn, stepped inside, the door hissing shut behind him. Jivonn rushed to him and clasped his hand, beaming.
"Storn. It's been too long."
"It has indeed."
Jivonn hesitated. Through the touch of their hands, he felt a flicker of his brother's mind, and found it aloof. He let go, taking a step back.
"You got old," Jivonn said.
"Likewise."
They fell into uncomfortable silence, and Jivonn wondered why it had taken Storn so long to visit him in the asylum, and why none of their other brothers had come.
". . . come in, sit," Jivonn said. "We have a lot to catch up on."
They sat on either side of a fireplace that was never lit, in armchairs that were bolted to the floor, and the silence resumed. Jivonn worried at the distance that had grown between them. To the casual observer, Storn was expressionless as usual, but Jivonn knew him well enough to read the downward cast of his eyes, the weight at the corners of his mouth. Storn was miserable.
"So," Jivonn said, "what's the plan?"
"I do not know what you're referring to."
"The Federationers don't bug these rooms - it's against their 'principles.' We can speak freely."
"I have been. I am not aware of any plan."
"Oh, come on. Don't you remember what we promised, all four of us? We'd do what was best for the family even if it cost us."
"Yes, we promised that," Storn said. "And then you abandoned us, and performed experiments that disgraced us all."
Jivonn shot to his feet, fists clenching. "Abandoned? I wanted you to join me. I did everything I could to persuade you, and it was the three of you who refused! You abandoned me!"
"Control yourself. You do not speak as a vulcan, as you used to. You have succumbed to emotion."
"Haven't we all? Hide your feelings if you like, but I have outgrown such petty games. It's my passion that drove me to greatness. It has not impeded my thinking as other vulcans fear - it's made me a genius."
"I would not have selected the word 'genius' to describe a scientist who led all of his research partners to their deaths, and whose primary subject's mind fractured into multiple personalities."
"Aha! I've got you now. I know what you are," Jivonn said. "If you've heard of T'Anar, I know you're working with the Federation; everything about her was classified. What, did they let you in here to brainwash me into a model citizen? Have the bleeding heart Federationers turned you into a liar as well as a betrayer? Shame on you, 'brother.'"
Storn opened his mouth, but Jivonn spoke over him, prowling back and forth, jabbing his finger. The softness of Storn's voice grated on him, the sight of Storn's face disgusted him.
"What's more," he said, "the 'failures' you describe were supposed to happen. The whole point was to make her unstoppable - of course I knew she would break containment, and when she did, she would act on the volatile passions inherent to untrained vulcans and kill us all. In order to make her more benevolent, I invented a machine called a synaptic differentiator to split her mind. Her homicidal urges would be contained in one personality, her paranoia in another. If circumstances ever gave her need of those emotions, she could activate the associated personality, and deactivate it when circumstances returned to normal. She would always be in control."
"It seems to have worked flawlessly," Storn said dryly.
"Oh shut up. Her loss of control was a minor misstep, which I could have rectified eventually if the Enterprise hadn't interfered. If anything, the differentiator worked too well. Her personalities were equals, and strangers. None of them were in control of T'Anar as a whole. Don't you see? I was breaking new ground, using dozens of machines and procedures of my own design with no help from the larger scientific community, only a few distant financiers who preferred to remain anonymous, even to me. I had thousands of engineering and scientific successes, but one misstep was all it took for the whole thing to go up in flames. And now you sneer, and in doing so you make yourself as ridiculous as a man who points out a fleck of misplaced paint in the greatest mural ever created, and claims that this means the painter was no better than ordinary people."
"Jivonn, unless you wish to remain in this asylum indefinitely, you need to recognize that your actions were both illogical and ethically indefensible."
Jivonn gave a shout of laughter. "Don't try to act like you're better than me. The difference between us isn't logic or morals - you were just too squeamish to experiment on sentients, even when that was clearly the logical course. People like you are the reason vulcans have been reduced to the glorified servants of the humans and their Federation, even though we're so obviously superior. People like you are mentally deficient, and morally deficient - yes, morally deficient."
Now it was Storn who shot to his feet, tight lipped and pale.
Jivonn grinned cruelly. "Careful, vulcan. You're emotion's showing."
"I merely wish to emphasize that you of all people are in no position to call anyone morally deficient. As you surmised, I have classified information about your case. I know T'Anar was based on your genetic material. She was your daughter, and you tortured her."
"It was necessary. I had to bring about a-"
"I do not wish to hear your justifications. It is enough to know that this asylum is precisely where you need to be, and that family means nothing to you."
Jivonn was ready to jump in with another rant, but Storn's last line hit like a blow. Jivonn groped for something to say. The thought flashed through his mind that he could apologize, or try to hurt Storn back. Finally, he said,
"Is. . . that really what you think?"
"She was your own family."
"No, not like that. Not like you three. I never. . . don't you understand what I was trying to do? Why everything was justified? Please, think about this, deeply - we call it moral to slaughter billions of germs to allow a single infected vulcan to live, because the vulcan is sentient, intelligent, because her capacity for greatness is superior to that of a germ, and if those germs could make choices, their attempt to destroy the vulcan would be unforgivable - they should allow themselves to starve rather than infect her. Do you understand? I set out to create a higher being, and before that goal, it doesn't matter what I do to other germs, even if every last one of us has to die! I did nothing wrong. And don't say I didn't care about T'Anar, either. I spent decades developing her. I assembled her over years and years, like a starship, engineering every cubic centimeter of tissue with teams of scientists, lacing nerves of exotic materials through every fragment of skin and bone. I put my heart and soul into her, and when she was complete, and she broke through the most high-tech containment devices in the alpha quadrant like they were made of dust, I wasn't afraid. I was proud."
Maddeningly, Storn raised an eyebrow, as if doing so constituted a counter-argument. Jivonn snarled.
"Have you come here just to mock me then? Are you going to moralize at me like all the others? We were brothers, Storn! How could you turn against me? The Storn I knew would have joined me in my research long ago, and if he visited me here, he would have freed me. Why did you even come?"
The lines in Storn's face seemed to deepen. "I came to see you, but also. . . our brother Sutok is dead."
The news deflated Jivonn. The room seemed to grow darker, colder. Jivonn slumped into a chair, turning away from Storn.
". . . How?" Jivonn asked.
"The details are classified."
It was Federation business, then - the Federation's fault. Jivonn expected a flood of hate, but there was nothing, only a heaviness in his chest. After a long silence, he said,
"Have you spoken to my captors? Will they. . . will they let me out to be at the funeral?"
"They believe you have made no progress toward rehabilitation, and may attempt to escape; therefore you will not be permitted to attend."
Jivonn did not trust his voice to reply.
"If you wish," Storn said, "I will return on the day after his burial, along with any of our kin who are willing to see you. We will hold our own funerary service. Would that be helpful?"
"Yes. . . thank you, Storn."
Storn rose. "In that case, I will return within the month."
He nodded down at Jivonn, and walked to the door.
"Storn," Jivonn said. "I am sorry that. . ." He sighed, shaking his head.
"For what you did on that station?" Storn said.
". . . that things ended this way."
"Nothing has ended, yet. Focus on your rehabilitation, and cooperate with your doctors. I wish to see our family free again."
===============
Attempt 1
Name: Sutok
Attempted to meld with Researcher personality, who deemed him a distraction requiring removal.
Death: telekinetic dismemberment
===============
Jivonn blinked into consciousness, and the hand that had been shaking his shoulder lifted away. He felt the disorientation of someone waking in an unfamiliar place. Instead of the mild cool of the asylum, the air here was cold enough to give him goosebumps, and it smelled of incense. He was kneeling, face numb where it rested against stone. Clambering to his feet, he saw the stars, and the deserts of Vulcan stretching as far as he could see, and at his feet, the altar he had fallen asleep against.
Ah, yes, he remembered now. Tulok was dead. Jivonn had not even had a full year to recover from Sutok's passing before a second brother was taken. This time, the doctors had deemed Jivonn rehabilitated enough to release for the burial, with a monitor around his wrist.
There had been no dirge for Tulok. They did not even have his body. And so they buried him in the ancient way, which required no corpse, only an altar of heaped stones in the desert, beneath the stars. For twelve days, the family would camp nearby, and visit the altar at all hours of the day and night, and then, on the thirteenth day, they would raise a mound of earth over it, and sing a farewell dirge, and depart.
"You appear exhausted, Jivonn," someone said. "You should return to camp and rest."
Jivonn turned to see the person who had shaken him awake. It was Storn, his only brother.
"You have been avoiding me," Jivonn said.
"Throughout the proceedings, you have displayed extensive emotionality. I did not wish my own emotional control to be compromised by association."
"Okay," Jivonn said.
They trailed off, both looking at the altar. Jivonn could feel an ache behind his eyes; he must have wept in his sleep, and there was a throbbing line across his forehead where he had rested against the stone. Remembering, he realized it had not been Tulok at the center of his nightmares, but Storn.
Into the silence, Jivonn asked, "How long until you join them?"
". . . Your question is illogical."
"Is it? Sutok and Tulok both go, not even a year apart. No bodies, no explanation. Everything is classified. Is it illogical to worry that whatever Federation business killed them will take you as well? Damn the Federation! Whatever they want from you, refuse them."
Storn stepped in front of his brother, and with bittersweet nostalgia, Jivonn realized Storn was recreating the way they used to converse long ago, the brothers' heads bowed until their foreheads nearly touched, speaking intently.
"I do not believe I will die," Storn said.
"But there is a risk, isn't there; you are working on the same project as Sutok and Tulok."
"Indeed," Storn said. "And I cannot cease to do so. I cannot bear. . . I cannot think it logical to allow a certain state of affairs to continue. One of our kin is in danger."
"Someday," Jivonn said, "the doctors will declare me rehabilitated, but what good will freedom be if everyone I am close to is dead?"
"Rest assured I will do everything in my power to complete the project with a minimum of risk."
"I have to know what threatens you," Jivonn said, "what killed our brothers. Do not shut me out." He raised splayed fingers toward Storn's face.
Storn caught his wrist. "The knowledge will only bring you torment."
"It cannot be more torment than my ignorance. I must know."
After a long moment, Storn's expression softened, and he allowed Jivonn to touch his face.
The mind meld felt like returning home. There was so much Jivonn had forgotten - Storn's passion for goat's milk, his phobia of elastic bands, a knot of emotions around a dark-eyed girl from Storn's academy days. Jivonn sifted through more recent memories, saw a younger version of himself ranting in a lab, trying to persuade Storn to accompany him on a new research project concerning psionics. He felt how close Storn had come to accepting, and Storn's pain at feeling he had to refuse on ethical grounds.
He saw through Storn's eyes, reading about Jivonn's arrest by the Enterprise. Jivonn felt Storn's shame, and for the first time, Jivonn burned with shame as well, and the suffering of both brothers compounded in the meld, and it was agony.
Finally, Jivonn saw the rainbow swirls of a nebula, and the pair of tiny stations silhouetted against it. He saw the black speck where his brothers had died - died attempting to save a girl Jivonn had imperiled. Jivonn shuddered, bile rising in his throat. It was not the Federation's fault that Sutok and Tulok had died. It was his.
Jivonn's fingers fell away from his brother's face. He turned and went into the desert, and managed to make it out of hearing range before the first sounds of anguish escaped him.
===============
Attempt 2
Name: Tulok
Attempted to observe T'Anar remotely by sending drones onto the station in his place. Multiple personalities thought this suspicious, and coordinated by leaving messages for each other, working together to fake recovery and lure Tulok to the station. The Romulan personality was awaiting him on arrival.
Death: natural causes (apparently)
===============
Jivonn attended Storn's funeral as a free vulcan. He gave a speech. He did not rant. He did not show emotion.
Sutok's ship was his now by inheritance, and he left in it, in a cockpit that still smelled faintly like Storn. The only light came from the viewscreens, which displayed Vulcan's sun - trillions of tons of superheated plasma, ready to reduce any complex matter into its constituent atoms. There was beauty in that. Purification through fire. A tap on his navigation panel, and he could be there. He could forget.
But one person still needed him. By his estimation, the rift in T'Anar's mind would finish killing her within the year. No doubt the Federation was attempting to develop a solution, but they had to catch up on decades of Jivonn's research, and do so without vivisecting betazoids as Jivonn had.
And if they trusted Jivonn's rehabilitation enough to accept his help, and created some device or procedure to save T'Anar, they would need someone to go to the nebula to administer it. As the situation was Jivonn's fault, that was Jivonn's risk to take. With a few words to the computer, he began sifting through the ship's records, looking for traces of his brothers' contacts in the Federation.
===============
Attempt 3
Name: Storn
Attempted to negotiate a solution acceptable to all parties. Made surprising progress, even convincing the Ruler personality not to kill him. However, the negotiations took too long, and after seven weeks, the Nihilist awoke.
Death: telekinetic shredding
===============
Mialla stormed downstairs into the hangar bay and smacked the button to open the space doors. Sure enough, when the shuttle landed, another damn vulcan got out, just like Sutok, just like Tulok, just like Storn. This time, she was not going to let him talk her into allowing him to go to T'Anar's station. Three dead vulcans was enough.
She whipped her phaser from her hip holster. She'd been practicing for this. She knew which end of the phaser was the shooty one.
"Freeze! Now listen here you pointy-eared numbskull! Don't move or I swear to Nuub I will stun you and lock you in a closet until the next Starfleet supply ship gets here to pick you up."
He sighed, rubbing his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was thick, almost slurred.
"I have. . . I. . . was ordered to come here."
"Yeah? Well your orders better be from Kahurangi or God."
Grumbling, she snatched the PADD he offered, backed off out of nerve pinch range, and scanned it. She knew all the proper security codes now, and sure enough, the vulcan had orders from Sulu's people, which was about as close as Starfleet got to a god. There was a note at the bottom addressed to Mialla, which basically said the formal equivalent of 'I know this seems weird, just go with it.' Mialla ground her teeth.
"Sorry, not good enough," she said.
The vulcan blinked in surprise. She glared at him.
"I'm not letting any more of you boys get yourselves turned into a meat smoothie on my watch. Do you have any idea how much therapy it took to get T'Anar out of the dumps after last time? Yeah, I know I'll get fired for obstructing orders, blah blah. Big deal. You're not going over there!"
"Will you at least hear me out?" He asked.
"NO!"
He raised an eyebrow, and Mialla felt herself melt a little, though she kept her expression angry.
"Well, maybe," she said, "as long as you understand that no is my final answer, I guess we can talk upstairs. I have to keep you here anyway until Starfleet drops by, since I don't have any way to stop you from flying to T'Anar's station if you get back to your ship."
She marched him up to the room with space windows, and let him sit in the only chair while she perched on a stack of books about six paces away - far enough that she'd have time to aim her phaser if he charged. Now that she got a good look at him, she saw he had the same odd, almost serrated ears as the other vulcans who had come here, and the same jawline. Definitely a relative. He was less handsome than the others, but maybe that was because he looked so sleep-deprived, with bags under his eyes, and rather than the usual blank expression of vulcans, this one's face seemed slack, despondent. She was careful not to contact his mind, as it was doubtless in an unpleasant state. When he talked, there was a desperation in his tone that put her on edge.
"Consider that-"
"You know what I don't understand?" Mialla said.
". . . What?"
"Why the Feds keep letting you guys come here. They have to know by now that you'll die."
"The reason seems obvious, to anyone with a modicum of intelligence."
"Oh really?" Mialla said.
He got up and paced to the window, leaning his forehead against the glass and pondering over the rainbow clouds of space. He seemed to wake up as he spoke.
"For an organization like the Federation, crippled as it is by ethical squeamishness, T'Anar is a moral riddle without an answer. A murderer must be locked away where she cannot kill anymore. But to imprison an innocent girl is against their 'principles.' That's the dilemma: imprison T'Anar or set her free - either way, they're guilty. The only way out is to heal her, but if they order personnel onto her station to do that, they're as good as killing them, and again, the weight of guilt increases. Funny, isn't it? They don't realize that regular lives don't matter. At least, not compared to T'Anar's. Even better, they're beginning to doubt their own judgment, wondering if they're really keeping T'Anar secret to hide her from the Federation's enemies, or if, deep down, they're hiding her because they're ashamed of what the Federation public would say if they knew."
Mialla narrowed her eyes. There was something about the un-vulcan way he was monologuing. Something familiar.
"Now," he continued, "imagine Sutok, Tulok, and Storn coming to you. As relatives, they have a reason to risk themselves for T'Anar. In fact, they insist that they have a right to do so. Would you deny them?"
Something clicked in Mialla's brain. T'Anar had described a vulcan who spoke this way.
The adrenaline hit her, and she stood, backing away. "You're Jivonn! What the hell makes you think you have a right to be here?"
He chuckled. "I'm the only one who has a right. The fools that came before me deserved what they got."
Mialla flinched. "When Storn came through here, he said you were improving. He was wrong, wasn't he? I think I'll lock you in the closet after all."
She gestured with the phaser for him to move, but he stayed still, gazing into space. She snarled,
"I'm dead serious. I will stun y-"
"She's going to die very soon, isn't she?"
Mialla's words stuck in her throat. She swallowed, looking down. "You can't know that. I don't know that."
"But you can guess. You notice her moving less, speaking less, sleeping more. If nothing changes, you know how it will end. And as much as you have been T'Anar's only companion for years, she has been your only companion. It is natural for you to be protective, but you must get out of my way, or her death is certain. Here, look."
He pulled a sliver of metal from his pocket, his eyes wild. "T'Anar has three brains - a cranial brain much like yours or mine, a diffuse brain laced throughout her entire body, and a spinal brain that connects the two. Now, according to my research, whatever personality is in control at the moment operates within the cranial brain, while her psionic abilities and inactive personalities occupy the other two. Knowing that, the rest is child's play. This limiter, implanted at the base of her skull, will emit a highly localized electromagnetic field, disrupting the electrical signals between the cranial brain and the other two, thus making it impossible for the inactive personalities to become active, or the active to become inactive. Of course, until a more elegant solution can be found, this will cripple her psionic abilities, but it will save her life."
Mialla frowned. If Jivonn's knowledge had allowed them to develop the limiter, she could understand why the Federation had chosen to work with him, but how could they trust him to be the one to come here? For all they knew, he might implant the device to put a violent personality in control, and use T'Anar as a weapon.
Hesitantly, Mialla reached out to Jivonn's mind. It felt like rummaging through a pile of garbage, but she gritted her teeth and waded deeper. She had to know if he would save T'Anar or hurt her; she had to see his soul.
In the depths of his thoughts, she experienced what it was to be Jivonn. She had always imagined T'Anar's creator to be a complex and troubled person, so she was surprised at how simple his mind was. It was like half a mind, a cutout of a personality, totally incapable of growth. It wasn't any of her business, but she had to wonder why whatever asylum he went to thought this guy was rehabilitated enough to go free.
Only one thing was solid in Jivonn's mind; T'Anar was a moral absolute. She must survive and go free. He would not hurt her. Mialla sighed. She still didn't know what Sulu's people were thinking, but if Jivonn wasn't going to hurt her charge, she couldn't justify getting in the way of whatever Sulu's plan might be.
===============
Telepathic interactions with T'Anar will be in cyan. This may take some getting used to, but it will make things smoother down the road.
===============
Jivonn collapsed into the seat of the station shuttle and operated the controls in a daze, departing Ms. Rati's station. The nebula cast the control panel in sickly green, and he focused on the color, trying to distract from the tremor in his hands and the weight of his eyelids.
It had been two weeks since he slept - too long even for a vulcan. It was those damn pills the scientists had given him. He'd laughed when they'd said the pills would make his mind unreadable to T'Anar - as if you could stop a god with a drug - but after taking them for two weeks, Jivonn's memory was so full of holes it was unreadable to him. He felt. . . smaller. After all the effort he'd put into changing himself at the asylum, he'd felt he was on the brink of some sort of epiphany, but now the sense was gone. He just wanted sleep.
Jivonn landed in the diminutive hangar of T'Anar's station. As soon as he got out, he heard the vessel whisper back into space behind him. It must have been programmed to return on autopilot, to prevent T'Anar from using it to escape. The space doors boomed shut behind it. He was trapped.
There was a staircase nearby, and cautiously he ascended it, emerging into a domed chamber. The ceiling glowed softly, its radiance warm as sunlight on his skin, and the soft breeze made the room feel like the surface of an M class planet. The walls and floor were polished until they glimmered in the light, the air smelling faintly of cleaning agents. In the center of the room was a white table, and on it a trio of robes, neatly pressed and folded - his brothers' clothes. The way they had been laid out, here in the center of the room, made him sure that they'd been placed as memorials. He went to them and lay his hands on the rough cloth. It was confusing. He remembered being crushed by each of their deaths, but now he felt only disdain.
A shuffling drew him from his thoughts. He turned and saw the culmination of his life's work, his masterpiece, and she was magnificent. Though vulcans normally needed touch to sense a mind, he could feel hers five meters away, radiating like a blue giant on the brink of supernova. He could almost smell the power in the air. Jivonn's blood hammered in his veins, his head spinning, but he could not even name the emotion that overwhelmed him. Terror? Pride? Fascination? T'Anar paused in one of the archways leading out of the room, muttering under her breath, her eyes lost in the distance. Physically, she was more sculpture than vulcan, symmetrical down to every eyelash and artery, her skin semi-translucent from a lifetime away from sunlight. He took pride in how her onyx hair and eyes reflected his own features - his way of signing his work.
She wandered by, her gaze passing through him unseeing, and for the duration of the day, she failed to notice him. Her entire attention was focused inward, except on the rare occasions when she stopped to examine something, or meandered from one room to the next. Jivonn followed her, too enthralled to do otherwise.
He recognized the personality - he had designed it as a mode T'Anar could flip into to research, to ponder, to practice controlling her abilities, but it wasn't functioning like it used to. He saw her stop to examine a stretch of wall, and from the look in her eyes, he knew she was appreciating it as an object of beauty. He hadn't designed that. It had. . . grown. She drank chocolate milk exclusively, and neglected to eat. She read poetry off a PADD, mouthing along with the words. Watching her, one might think she was a whole person, and not a fragment at all.
To get a sense of the state of the other personalities, Jivonn explored the station. From the central dome, six archways led to as many rooms: a room for short range communications with Ms. Rati, a kitchen, a room with hygienic facilities, and three bedrooms, each labelled with letters carved beside the door. The first read "KEEP OUT, LESSER T'ANARS," the second read, "privacy, please," and the third, in a mass of tiny, neat script, detailed the revenge that would befall every other T'Anar if even circumstantial evidence arose that someone had entered the room. Jivonn raised an eyebrow over the third room. The metal of the floor beneath the arch had been peeled up into spikes, long and serrated. The obstacle would be easy to circumvent, but the isolationist message was clear. He decided not to risk exploring the bedrooms.
Eventually, the lights dimmed to sunset pink, and then to the silver of moonlight, bright enough to see by, but only barely. T'Anar sat down next to a wall, slid over onto her side, and began to breathe deeply and evenly, her mouth hanging open. Jivonn frowned. The temperature had fallen as the lights dimmed - T'Anar was clearly supposed to sleep under a blanket of some sort, but the only blankets available were in the three bedrooms, and he was beginning to suspect that at least one of his brothers had been killed after trespassing there. Removing the cloak he was wearing over his robes, he draped it over his masterpiece, and then retreated to the central room to try to rest. Despite his exhaustion, the pills kept him awake, and the best he could do was fall into a stupor, trying to decide which of the personalities to lock in with the limiter. Certainly not the one the Federation wanted.
===============
Jivonn shook himself out of his stupor as the lights raised, the trill of a songbird filling the air. Through an archway, he heard T'Anar yawn.
"Hm?" she said.
A torrent of psychic force slammed into Jivonn's mind. The breath flew out of him. And then the force was gone. He gasped, eyes wide as he realized that had been T'Anar's version of a gentle probe.
"Hm," T'Anar said.
Swiftly, he stood, raising mental defenses, hoping desperately that the drugs would do their job.
The attack hit. Storn's thoughts smeared into a hurricane of wordless horror. Every fiber of his mind thrashed like an insect pinned in the beak of a predator. His every attempt to struggle was useless.
Through a haze of agony, he heard T'Anar yawn again, padding past him into the bathroom. While he writhed on the edge of madness, he heard T'Anar showering. While he spent the last of his strength struggling, she brushed her teeth. While his mind was picked clean like a carcass, she ate breakfast.
He became aware again, facedown on icy floor plates, drenched in sweat. He felt. . . floaty, blank, like there were pockets of air inside his skull.
"Good morning, Jivonn," someone said.
He looked up. An adolescent in a black jumpsuit stared down at him from her seat at a white table. It took a moment to recall who she was. He squinted. He had a feeling there was something significant about her posture, with one leg slung over the other, a faint sneer on her face, but all he got for trying to think was a headache. Something was wrong with his brain.
"I'm astonished. Your mind deteriorated so extensively in such a short span of years. I am certain it is not even half what it used to be. Has interacting with the mewling pacifists of the Federation dragged you down to their intellectual level, do you think? Actually, don't think - I have nearly destroyed your capacity to do so. From now on I'll think for you, and instruct you on how to act. I spared exactly the amount of your mental functionality necessary to perform the tasks I require of you."
Jivonn heard the words, but the interpretation was difficult, the meaning trickling in excruciatingly slowly. When her words finally sunk in, his hands rose to clutch his hair. Shadows of sentences flitted past him, articulations of despair, of anger, but he couldn't figure out how to formulate the sentences. He could only shake his head and repeat, dumbly,
"No, no no no."
"Don't you dare protest," she hissed. "Whatever I have inflicted on you, you have done worse to me."
"Not. . . this much. . ."
"You cut my mind into pieces. Can you even comprehend the horror of sharing a body with several other individuals, one of whom is so volatile that she damages our body every time she's in control? I feel unsafe and incomplete at all times, and it's your fault. Now you'll assist me as I require, and when I am finished with you, you'll die satisfied that you made minimal recompense for the crimes you committed against a superior being."
Jivonn understood little of what she said. He only knew that something was horribly, permanently wrong, and T'Anar had made it that way. He tried to stand, but she rose first. The lights flared, blinding, Jivonn's hair standing on end, and the weight of a mountain crashed onto his shoulders, crushing him against the floor so that he could hardly breathe. He tasted blood, felt it clogging his throat. He strained to break free, again and again until his muscles tired, and he went limp.
The psion kicked him onto his back, glaring. "Let me educate you about your immediate future. You will contact Mialla through the communications terminal and inform her that you have installed the limiter device into my brain stem, locking in the personality you call 'T'Anar Prime.' In fact, I will install the limiter myself. When Mialla arrives, we will strand her here before returning to your ship. We will then navigate toward the Neutral Zone and seek out the remnants of the biophage. Do you understand what I'm implying, Jivonn? I have no intention of operating on an individual scale. I intend to play the game of empires, and subsuming the consciousness of the biophage into my own superior mind is the most efficient method available. With my intelligence, the biophage will take full advantage of its own mutability. We will adapt past any vaccine you distribute. Using my body as a template, we will form ourselves into millions of beings with powers and cognitive abilities similar to my own, all connected in a single neural network. You set out to create a god; I'll show you a god beyond anything your tiny primate brain could have imagined."
Even through the fog of his crippled mind, Jivonn could imagine the ease with which a marriage of T'Anar and the biophage would dominate the mortal empires. He ached with regret that he would not live to witness the ultimate form of his creation.
"I want. . . let me. . . see it."
"Oh, you will see it. The damage I've inflicted on your mind will kill you within seventy two hours, but I'll preserve your body. The biophage remnants we discover may be microscopic, and I will require your biological material to feed it. . . interesting. I sense that you are relieved. You are an unusual individual, Jivonn. . . Now, let's proceed."
The limiter slipped from Jivonn's pocket and floated behind T'Anar's neck. He felt her rifling through his memories of exactly where the limiter should be inserted, and then her jaw clenched. Jivonn heard a snik, and T'Anar hissed, the muscles in her neck tensing. A single drop of green blood tapped onto the floor. Jivonn expected her to give a satisfied smirk and another monologue. Instead, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed.
Jivonn blinked stupidly. Had he forgotten something about the limiter? He could see it poking out through her hair, dripping blood. With a pop, gas began to jet from the device; there was definitely something he'd forgotten about it. The fumes burned his sinuses. His vision darkened, and after so long without sleep, he finally slipped into unconsciousness.
================
At the trill of a songbird, Jivonn blinked awake. His body throbbed, especially his brain, his thoughts sluggish. He was in a domed room he'd never seen before, the walls scrubbed spotless, a faint smell of cleaning agents on the breeze. Squinting, he tried to recall where he was.
The last thing he remembered was meeting with Federation scientists in a supply closet at the back of a research station. It was a ragtag bunch: two intel spooks who did science as a hobby, a couple retirees, and a half dozen off-duty researchers. Since it was thought that the Tal Shiar would love to get their hands on T'Anar, knowledge of her existence was strictly limited, and among the few who knew, an even smaller group had the skills Jivonn needed.
An elderly woman tapped her PADD. "Right, so I can get my boyfriend to build this 'limiter' thing in an afternoon, no questions asked. I mean, it's just an EM emitter. I'm actually disappointed we're not doing anything crazier. Aren't you s'posed to be some kind of evil genius?"
"Patience," Jivonn said. "I have only begun to reveal my twisted machinations."
There were scattered chuckles. Jivonn smiled before continuing.
"I suspect my brothers tried technological solutions as well. Tulok in particular was mechanically adept. However, the problem is that there is no way to be certain of which T'Anar is in control before you land on the station, and if you encounter a violent personality first, she'll read your mind, understand that you're attempting to lock her away, and, in the best case scenario, kill you. In the worst case, she'll use whatever devices you brought to lock herself into command. In fact it's a stroke of luck that she has not managed to parlay any of my brothers' visits into a pretended recovery and escape."
A few of the scientists shared uncomfortable glances. Jivonn guessed they'd been in similar secret meetings with his brothers over the past few years.
"Here is the solution," Jivonn said. With a few taps on his PADD, he shared a set of schematics with the others. They bent over their screens, eager.
"This is a synaptic differentiator," Jivonn said. "It is a device that rips the mind into pieces - a device of torture. We will construct exactly one, use it exactly once, on me. Then the device, and the schematics, will be destroyed. Using it, we can divide my mind so thoroughly that I'll be unable to access the memories of my inactive personality, just as T'Anar's memory is segregated. In this way, we can withhold information from even a perfect mind-reader."
And while they were at it, he'd have them segregate the negative parts of his personality he had spent years in the asylum trying to remove. As long as he was risking his sanity on experimental procedures, it was only efficient to try for self-improvement at the same time.
One of the spooks, an andorian with a prosthetic throat, croaked, "Won't work. She'll see memory of this meeting; put her on guard."
"Valid concerns," Jivonn said, "but the differentiator is as traumatic as a severe concussion - I won't remember much from the days shortly before or after the procedure. Of course, if we allow my personalities to switch freely, it will be suspicious that every second day is a gap in my memory, and T'Anar will deduce the truth. To prevent this, all we have to do is keep me awake until I meet her, as personalities rarely switch except in sleep."
The elderly woman nodded. "So we trick you after the procedure - switch out the limiters on you, right? I can sew the real limiter into a hidden pocket on your cloak so your other personality won't find it. We'll set the fake limiter up for a slow drip tranquilizer to keep her out for weeks if need be - throw in something to knock you out too, to make sure you switch at the right time. I suppose that's convoluted enough for an evil genius. I like it."
The hammering in Jivonn's skull brought him out of his memories. He was having trouble thinking, but found that if he slowed down and thought excruciatingly slowly, he could manage. He glanced around. Judging by the crumpled form of T'Anar beside him, the plan had worked. Judging by the fire in his skull, he'd taken damage in the process. He staggered to his feet, searching for his cloak, and found it in an adjoining room. The limiter seemed unsteady in his fingers as he pulled it from its hidden pocket. He couldn't feel it. He touched the wall, the floor, but his hands had gone numb. He felt the blood drain from his face, his heart racing with the beginnings of fear. He knew these symptoms. First a headache, impaired speech and cognition, then numbness, unconsciousness, and death. All the result of rapid synaptic degeneration brought on by a violent forced meld. It was the more vicious grandfather of Pa'nar syndrome. In his experiments, he had witnessed it often enough to know that he had only a few hours to finish his work.
Back in the domed room, he knelt next to T'Anar, and rolled her onto her back. She was limp, snoring. He stared down at her face, startled by how bizarre it felt to look at her. Had it really only been three years? He searched her features for what had changed, but found nothing unexpected. He'd seen her face at this age before in growth simulations, but this was different. It was a difficult emotion to pin down. She seemed. . . endearing? Ah, that was it. Jivonn had seen his masterpiece, a god, a perfectly optimized piece of bioengineering. He'd never seen his daughter before.
His heart sank. A whole knot of parental emotions were being born, but he would live to explore none of them - none except regret that every moment of his child's life had been worse because of him.
But regret was not a useful emotion, and to be distracted now would only hurt T'Anar more. Jivonn pressed his fingers against his daughter's face, and sank into her mind. In an unconscious state, her personalities shifted every twenty or thirty minutes. Most vulcans would have found it impossible to tell the personalities apart during sleep, when conscious thoughts were minimal, but Jivonn knew T'Anar down to the molecule, so the emotional undercurrent of each personality was more than enough. When he sensed his daughter, he ended the meld, and fumbled numbly to replace the fake limiter with the real one. His arms and legs were heavy and unfeeling, and there was a deep tingle in his face - the beginnings of numbness.
He went to the comm room, and hailed Ms. Rati, whose face appeared on the wall. He spoke slowly, struggling to keep the words straight in his head.
"It's done. . . come over. . . tell her. . . about the limiter."
"Jivonn? You look awful! Are you alright?"
"Tell her I'm sorry. . . and I want. . . her to. . . live long. . . and. . . prosper."
"Jivonn, wait!"
He switched off the comm. Shuffling between rooms, he gathered up his cloak, folded it neatly, and lay it on the table beside his brothers'. And that was it - there was nothing left to do. It was not the end he would have chosen, for himself or his brothers, but T'Anar was alive, and she'd be okay. It was enough.
Not wanting T'Anar to wake up to his corpse, Jivonn went downstairs to the hangar. At a control panel, he recalibrated the atmosphere containment fields to let through not just shuttles, but smaller objects as well. And then, he opened the space doors and walked outside.
The nebula was beautiful.
===============
Attempt 4
Name: Jivonn
Success.
Death: exposure to vacuum
===============
==============
As soon as Mialla landed in the hangar bay, she knew she was too late. Jivonn's mind was nowhere to be found. Sighing, she slumped against the control panel. She felt heavy, but relieved too. She could sense T'Anar's mind overhead, and it felt mortal, kind. That bastard Jivonn had actually pulled it off.
In the dimness of the shuttle, she paused just to feel T'Anar sleeping. The girl was at peace, and that made Mialla smile. If finding out that Jivonn was dead didn't push T'Anar completely off the deep end, T'Anar would be free for the first time ever. That was a big if, though.
Mialla's brow creased with worry as she felt T'Anar waking. She typed a code to prevent the shuttle from leaving on autopilot, then stepped into the hangar and went for the stairs. Despite years of talking over the comm, she'd never been able to pin down what T'Anar felt about her dad. All Mialla knew was that he'd been the central figure of the first thirteen years of her life. It'd be surprising if she didn't come unglued in one way or another when she found out he was dead.
At the top of the steps, Mialla hesitated. T'Anar was already on her feet, probing the back of her neck with uncertain fingers, her eyes on the green stains smeared on the floor. Slowly, the girl turned to the table. Her gaze came to rest on her father's robe.
T'Anar gave a sharp huff, like someone getting the wind knocked out of them. Mialla didn't breathe, waiting with a knot of nerves in her stomach to see, when the moment of shock ended, what her patient would do - what her friend would do. T'Anar's mind was as inscrutable as her face.
"Mialla," she said, "follow me."
Cautiously, Mialla tailed her into the kitchen, which was much fancier than the one on Mialla's station, with a tall metal table for one and a trio of windows at the back with a view of rolling hills - well, a holo feed of rolling hills, but a convincing one. T'Anar got out a frying pan, greased it, and began to gather ingredients. Mialla's eyebrows felt like they rose all the way to her hairline. Was this a coping mechanism? Or was she fine with Jivonn's death? Mialla thought about trying to start a conversation, or asking T'Anar to open her mind, but the girl was so intent on her work that it would've felt rude to interrupt. T'Anar bent down to measure each liquid ingredient at eye level, and rather than becoming lost in thought as she stirred the eggs, she hovered over them like a bird over an insect's hole, swooping down to flip any bit she thought ready. Mialla had always considered cooking boring, but T'Anar was fascinating to watch, and after three years of prefab meals, Mialla realized that the eggs smelled delicious, and she was starving, and eggs were exactly what she wanted.
T'Anar arranged the finished eggs on a plate and set it on the table with a fork and a glass of Uttaberry juice, which was Mialla's favorite. "It's for you," she said.
"You don't want any?"
"No."
It felt a little awkward to eat while T'Anar stood and watched within arms reach, but Mialla was too famished to care. Besides, if this was a coping mechanism, the best way to help T'Anar was to play whatever role T'Anar wanted her to, and if that role happened to be delicious, so much the better. She dug in, and recognized the taste immediately - kimdenash. A few of the flavors were off, but this was probably as near as you could get without ingredients from a betazoid market, and it was close enough to taste like home. Mialla held a hand over her lips to talk with her mouth full, her voice sounding dumbfounded even to herself.
"You know how to make kimdenash?"
"No. But you do. Your father used to let you help with it, before you turned nine and decided you hated cooking."
"Oh. . . right."
T'Anar's mind reading ran deeper than Mialla had realized. They fell silent as Mialla wolfed down the kimdenash. Twice, T'Anar opened her mouth, hesitated, and shut it, while Mialla let the silence lengthen, figuring the girl would speak up when she was ready. Finally, T'Anar said,
"You understand that I trust you."
"Never doubted it," Mialla said.
"I. . . don't want you to think I'm shutting my mind because I dislike you. I just. . . I don't understand my own thoughts at the moment."
"Well, talking usually helps sort things out, and I happen to be a professional listener."
T'Anar rubbed her fingers together, gathering her thoughts.
"Aside from giving instructions and ranting, Jivonn only spoke to me once, when I was seven."
While T'Anar spoke that first sentence, Mialla felt an impression of T'Anar at age seven, when her abilities were only beginning to bloom, long before Jivonn cut her mind into pieces.
"I broke containment," she said. The hiss and pop of force fields dying. Excitement, the burning sensation of a narrowly avoided phaser. "Some of the scientists vented me into space." The shrieking wind of depressurization. Fear. Pulling the air back with my mind, pressing it tight around me to create pressure. Breathe. Breathe. "I could sense Jivonn. I crossed the surface of the asteroid to his location." Seeing the stars for the first time. I never thought the universe was so huge. It was quiet here. "I touched the station where I felt him." Pressing toward him, the station's metal groaning and shivering before it snapped, and I stepped into the artificial gravity, holding the atmosphere in place to avoid depressurization killing the scientists. It was a control room. I could see a dozen camera angles on the force cage where I lived, and half as many alarms flashing. The other scientists felt terror, but "Jivonn felt awe, and something akin to love. It was overwhelming. I had never been the subject of a positive emotion before." For this person's love, I would do anything. "In his mind, I told him I came because I could not wait until tomorrow's experiments to see him again. I wanted to talk with him now." He did talk with me, and walked me through the station, and I thought I would burst from happiness. He told me that I should not damage the station or risk myself. He told me I was valuable. In the deep parts of the station, at the end of a long, chilly elevator shaft that delved into the asteroid, he showed me something fascinating - a room almost too cold to stand, barely lit. It was piled high with frozen bodies, and all of them shared my face.
Mialla shuddered, shrinking back, but the images kept flooding in. These were your prototypes, Jivonn thought. They died so that you could exist.
T'Anar cocked her head. What does it mean? What should I feel?
He paused, and she felt his thoughts churning, troubled.
I can't teach you what it means, he said. There are answers in my mind, and I won't be able to keep them from you as your telepathy grows, but remember that they're vulcan answers, and you're more than vulcan. Listen, T'Anar - I am not your father. You have no father, and no mother. You are the first. Decide what things mean on your own. Don't learn from lesser beings. Don't love us. Trust your own mind and feelings.
"I believe all my personalities have roots in that conversation," T'Anar said.
Mialla sat back as the connection trailed off. "Well? Did you love him?"
"There is a contradiction in what he told me. He said not to love him, but also to trust my feelings, and I. . . respected him, and felt that he was my father. It is difficult to understand how to respond. And now he has died, and I know his mind well enough to simulate his thoughts if he could speak with us now. He would be pleased to die for a higher being. But I don't feel like a higher being. When I look inside you, I think we are the same, and the fact that so many people died to fix me feels like a heavy price. It's confusing. I wonder if I'm defective."
"Well, answers are coming to mind, but you know. . ."
"They're betazoid answers," T'Anar said.
"Exactly, and you already know them from my head, and clearly they didn't fit the bill or we wouldn't be talking about it anymore. Is hearing other people talk even useful to you?"
"People form new thoughts as they speak. It's useful."
"Okay, well how 'bout this. Maybe we can't figure out the big meaning of all those deaths. They're just dead. But we're not. I'd pretty much guarantee that Jivonn wanted you to inherit his ship, so let's take off - go see some quasars and a neutron star. Maybe the answers are out there." She waved her hand at space.
T'Anar nodded intently. "You'll come with me?"
"Well, I can't be a worse roommate than the ones you've been living with. I can't imagine the Ruler personality helped much with the cleaning."
"No. No she did not."
Mialla smiled. "Don't tell me. . . you had to do all the cooking and cleaning yourself?"
"If they ate poorly, I had to share the stomach ache. It was only prudent to keep reasonably healthy meals in stock."
"Well, we can take turns cooking from now on."
"Thank you, but no. I understand from your memories that when it comes to domestic tasks, you are an inferior being."
Mialla laughed.
It seemed T'Anar would be ok.
===============
Mialla set her pad on thin air, assuming it would hover there until she needed it again. With a thunk, it hit the burgundy deck, and Mialla laughed at herself as she bent to pick it up. When betazoid friends hung around each other for more than a few days, the lines between their minds could start to blur. More than once, Mialla had forgotten she didn't have T'Anar's powers. Actually T'Anar dropped stuff all the time too - the limiter had hit her telepathy pretty hard, but it had all but locked her telekinesis. Her max force felt like a breath on the cheek.
Mialla and T'Anar spent most days in the dimly lit cockpit, reading, with the viewscreens full of stars and Drizzi sniffing around the control panels. They never spoke aloud - they'd both been cooped up alone for three years, so companionable silence was natural to them. They passed the time warmly, pleasantly.
In a way, they were saying goodbye to each other. They both knew T'Anar would have to go underground again. The backers who funded Jivonn were out there somewhere, or so they had to assume, and this time, when T'Anar hid, Mialla wasn't coming with her. The betazoid wasn't getting any younger, and if she wanted a family, she'd better get a move on. She kind of wanted to pop out some vulcan-betazoid hybrids. Sure, they'd probably be telepathically weird and troubled, but after T'Anar, Mialla had a lot of practice with that.
It wasn't long before they decided to message Mialla's bosses. At first the Feds' responses angled toward putting T'Anar in a bunker, basically like the nebula station only built to keep people out instead of keeping T'Anar in. T'Anar hated it, of course, which led to the second plan: with some cosmetic surgery, T'Anar could try to blend in as a betazoid. That one made Mialla laugh. Even if T'Anar shut everyone out of her mind, anyone with two telepathic neurons to rub together would sense they were being shut out by something much weirder than a betazoid. Mialla tried to explain it to the Feds by comparing it to a space whale thinking it could pass for human if it put on a mask.
And that led to plan three: get out of town. Apparently there was an alien armada orbiting Earth, and the Feds were going to send the Stargazer with them for a quarter century or so. As a civilian passenger, T'Anar could fly beyond the baddies' reach.
Well? Mialla thought, what do you think?
T'Anar nodded, smiling.
Mialla smiled too. T'Anar had shared with her the memory of Enterprise coming to Jivonn's station, of the excelsior's beautiful lines, of the dashing explorers in colorful uniforms that crewed her. The psion had read Nash Ka'Sharren's mind like a child reads a storybook, with wide eyed fascination and enthusiasm, with a sense that the universe was infinitely larger and more interesting than she'd imagined.
T'Anar's excitement flooded Mialla's thoughts.
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lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Then let's hope a ship gets destroyed and we recover some crew
(aka the worst way of scrapping a ship)1) Regarding BR and SR, Oneiros touched on this already when he shot down my request to pay for starbases with such resources: BR and SR are actually starship-grade resources, not resources that are used for constructing "stationary" structures like starbases and shipyards. Berths don't need fancy compact equipment that starships require and could make do with, for ex, fusion reactors instead of M/AM cores (warp cores). They also don't need rarer duranium or tritanium and could instead use the modern equivalent of concrete with steel girders.
2) There may be economies of scale, however at the scales we're talking about, they're probably not significant enough or otherwise abstracted away. Otherwise, we should be making the same economy of scales argument for starships. Patricia Chen's bonus may exemplify this, but she's a very exceptional case, since before (and likely after) her tenure, we're not going to get that same bonus.
3) There's a political tug of war behind each major world (ones with Council representation) wanting nearby infrastructure, alongside the infrastructure centralization vs decentralization factions. I'm not surprised that Councillors may get disgruntled if we're continuing to expand a larger shipyard at world A instead of the smaller one at world B, especially if world A doesn't even think they particularly need a larger shipyard yet (and thus won't argue strongly for it). Utopia Planitia is probably going to be the special shipyard that doesn't get this expansion penalty for a while because Starfleet explicitly sold the Council on its very expandibility, and it being so close to the Council headquarters themselves can't have hurt that much.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Forgot to reply to this...
I thought about trying to shift things around to parallelize that lone Renaissance, but realized that would actually be counter-productive with the crew situation.
Only feedback is that you should start a Miranda-A refit in SF 3 mt-A in 2314.Q1 instead of one in the 40E 1mt-2 (or 40E 1mt-1). That staggers the refits a bit and gets one out 2 quarters quicker.
There's also little need to align the refits in the 40E berths because: a) there's no build speed bonus for refits; b) we expect them to be free after their series of refit jobs; and c) the refits only take a year anyway.
I thought about trying to shift things around to parallelize that lone Renaissance, but realized that would actually be counter-productive with the crew situation.
Only feedback is that you should start a Miranda-A refit in SF 3 mt-A in 2314.Q1 instead of one in the 40E 1mt-2 (or 40E 1mt-1). That staggers the refits a bit and gets one out 2 quarters quicker.
There's also little need to align the refits in the 40E berths because: a) there's no build speed bonus for refits; b) we expect them to be free after their series of refit jobs; and c) the refits only take a year anyway.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Const, I'm impressed by the sheer scale of that omake and would love to read it, though I may not have time this minute, since I think something's going to call me away.
Then when others pointed out that this is not the case, you said it should be the case, because you are assuming that economies of scale make it cheap to build many berths all at once. There are many very good reasons why this might not be true.
For instance, it may well be that building a berth (which includes heavy specialist equipment) requires the use of facilities that have limited availability (to make the specialist equipment). Producing many berths at the same time may require us to place unusual demands on the limited number of trained construction workers, machine tool fabricators, and other specialist infrastructure in a given star system
If you abruptly order twenty skyscrapers all at once, in a city that is accustomed to building only one skyscraper at once, there is no assurance that it will 'only' cost 10 or 15 times as much as building a single skyscraper would. Economies of scale don't always work that way. Indeed, it is quite realistic to suppose that the cost of building the extra skyscrapers will increase drastically, once you bump up against the practical limits of available manpower and construction equipment in the area.
This is additional to the political issues already raised, namely that once you build several berths of the same type in the same place, you have politicians from other parts of the Federation arguing "Why not put some of that industry around my homeworld? Why is Starfleet building all its ships in Sol system? What's so special about Sol system?" This creates an entirely new category of political opposition that must be overcome in order to keep doubling down and building more and more berths in the same place.
That being the case, there's not really much we can do with explorers at that berth in 2315 except refit a regular fleet Excelsior. Such as, oh, Excelsior herself. It'd be sort of thematically appropriate, since you're bringing her back to the shipyard she was built in... And she's the oldest of our Excelsiors, nearly a decade older than almost any other explorer in the fleet, to the extent that even the Enterprise-B (commissioned 2294) has significant modifications compared to the original Excelsior.
Under normal circumstances, we would definitely be refitting Excelsior, Enterprise, and Courageous first, as soon as the dockworkers can get their hands on her.* They're the ones that are frankly due for what a normal navy would consider a mid-life overhaul, although Courageous probably got overhauled pretty heavily after the mine incident.
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*This is based on the assumption that the order of completion for 23rd century Excelsiors was: Excelsior, Excalibur, Enterprise-B, Courageous, Sarek, with Excalibur being the 'missing' NCC-2001.
Refits maybe, but if we're already this hard up for officers, we probably can't afford to commission any new construction over and above what Briefvoice has planned.
Your entire argument is based on the premise that a certain mechanic works exactly the opposite of the way you quoted. You started out with the assumption that by ordering one cruiser berth at Utopia Planitia, we could get "four more berths for 20pp."
Then when others pointed out that this is not the case, you said it should be the case, because you are assuming that economies of scale make it cheap to build many berths all at once. There are many very good reasons why this might not be true.
For instance, it may well be that building a berth (which includes heavy specialist equipment) requires the use of facilities that have limited availability (to make the specialist equipment). Producing many berths at the same time may require us to place unusual demands on the limited number of trained construction workers, machine tool fabricators, and other specialist infrastructure in a given star system
If you abruptly order twenty skyscrapers all at once, in a city that is accustomed to building only one skyscraper at once, there is no assurance that it will 'only' cost 10 or 15 times as much as building a single skyscraper would. Economies of scale don't always work that way. Indeed, it is quite realistic to suppose that the cost of building the extra skyscrapers will increase drastically, once you bump up against the practical limits of available manpower and construction equipment in the area.
This is additional to the political issues already raised, namely that once you build several berths of the same type in the same place, you have politicians from other parts of the Federation arguing "Why not put some of that industry around my homeworld? Why is Starfleet building all its ships in Sol system? What's so special about Sol system?" This creates an entirely new category of political opposition that must be overcome in order to keep doubling down and building more and more berths in the same place.
Thaaat is an interesting possibility. We probably can't fit one of our Rennie-based hospital ships in there, though; it'd take two years and Chen's bonus would not apply. Not sure what the build times are for freighters; I know it's been published but I don't remember.
We have S'harien's five year mission winding down... no wait, that's at the start of 2314, not the end. So we'd have to delay the beginning of her next five year mission by not just one year, but two, to fit in a refit there. Right?
That being the case, there's not really much we can do with explorers at that berth in 2315 except refit a regular fleet Excelsior. Such as, oh, Excelsior herself. It'd be sort of thematically appropriate, since you're bringing her back to the shipyard she was built in... And she's the oldest of our Excelsiors, nearly a decade older than almost any other explorer in the fleet, to the extent that even the Enterprise-B (commissioned 2294) has significant modifications compared to the original Excelsior.
Under normal circumstances, we would definitely be refitting Excelsior, Enterprise, and Courageous first, as soon as the dockworkers can get their hands on her.* They're the ones that are frankly due for what a normal navy would consider a mid-life overhaul, although Courageous probably got overhauled pretty heavily after the mine incident.
________________
*This is based on the assumption that the order of completion for 23rd century Excelsiors was: Excelsior, Excalibur, Enterprise-B, Courageous, Sarek, with Excalibur being the 'missing' NCC-2001.
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Can't do it. Remember, we're stretched really tight right now and starting a refit means taking the Miranda out of service. I don't want to start the refit until Q2 when we actually have new ships out to replace Mirandas going into refit, and I'd prefer not to until Q3 when we have lots of new ships. That's the real reason I waited until Q3 to start any refits. Remember, if you put a ship into refit you have to look at the hole it creates and figure out what to fill it with.
Heck, if we get more ships blown up we might decide not to refit any Mirandas, just so they can be kept in service. Trying to be very cautious about taking ships out of service for refits.
Oh sure; it was just convenient to put them there.
That would be great, but... again, can't do it. Right now all we have on the RBZ is the Excelsior and an Oberth. I don't know where we'd get the 6D to fill that hole if we tried to send the Excelsior in for a refit.
I think people don't realize how tight Starfleet is stretched. We sent everything we could spare to the GBZ, and as Sousa said in her message... the pantry is bare.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Given that we're scraping the barrel for crew... Do we want the Constie refit even if now isn't an ideal time? Doing Challorn to help keep her experienced crew safe would be nice.
Also, I wonder if a deal with the Hawks could let us super-duper expand the Academy.
Also, I wonder if a deal with the Hawks could let us super-duper expand the Academy.