DREAMS, Ch. 2
[Recommended Listening:
Fighting Lady]
Sickbay, USS Enterprise
Galaar System, Romulan Neutral Zone
Stardate 21469.0
[Sixteen Hours Before First Kadesh]
Commander Asurva looked up from her desk. "Making the rounds, captain?" She was only thirty-two; she'd never served on one of the old Connies. Older Starfleet doctors liked to grouse about the accomodations, though. On most ships, the Chief Medical Officer didn't have an office of her own- just a nook. But with nine tons of hull for every four of a
Constitution's, the
Excelsiors were less cramped, and Asurva had some space to herself.
Loudly, brightly, Nash called out "Just checking up, commander. And don't worry, I'm sure you won't be too busy tomorrow. Either we're all fine and healthy..." A green hand flicked a switch on the desk, and the hiss of the shutting door drowned out Nash saying, "or FOOMP!"
"Nash, that was the worst piece of gallows humor I've ever heard."
"Nonsense. You just don't know how to tell a joke right. Keeps the crew going in hard times, it does." The captain's antennae wriggled slightly, and she put on a devilish grin.
Pritya sighed. "Nash, have you been getting enough sleep lately?" She already knew the honest answer. Not that she could blame the captain.
Everyone had had nightmares, and Nash was the one who'd had to push the button on General Order 24 over Dunwich. She could hardly bear to imagine what it must be like, under that kind of pressure.
But at least she could do her best to take care of Nash. Even if she was trying to tear herself apart.
She's probably going to trot out another tired old saw...
Nash rallied, right on cue. "Plenty of time to sleep when you're dead!"
"We're going to need you sharp tomorrow,
ma'am."
"And I'll be fine, Pritya. Trust me."
"You've been up for twenty-three hours."
"I'm usually fine for twenty-two, and it's an emergency!"
"That's on the Old Andorian clock. Which nobody, including you, has used since our grandmothers were toddlers, and you know it. It's been twenty-three
Starfleet standard hours. You're starting to lose the plot."
"Stop oppressing my cultural heritage!"
"Nash, you're a wonderful captain." Pritya smiled, and stood, and patted the Andorian on the shoulder.
The maneuver was one she'd learned from a lanky Vulcan who assured her, in a deadpan, that he had it from a Bolian, who had it from the legendary McCoy himself. Privately she thought of it as the CMO Nerve Pinch, and imagined the old Earthling must have invented it at a time
exactly like this...
The carefully palmed hypo hissed in Pritya's hand.
Nash jumped. "What was that!?"
"That was the Crazy Captain Special, for wild child Andorian tactical geniuses who won't take their medicine. A little hypnotic cocktail of mine. Now go get some sleep. Doctor's orders." Pritya kept up a sweet smile that even reached the eyes. "Now, Maryam has the bridge and she's got everything under control. You have about ten minutes before you're too woozy to stand up straight. Can you make it back to quarters in time, or should I send a nurse to help you back?"
Captain's Quarters, USS Enterprise
Stardate 21469.1
Ka'Sharren opens her mouth to ask what is going on, but closes it when a voice comes through the viewscreen, "...we live... " there is another long pause, and Ka'sharren can hear the room slowly breathe, each word is a breath in itself, each word is felt as much as it is heard, and each word feels as if it comes from a thousand throats...
Nash sat up. She could
hear the duranium of the aft bulkhead crinkling as it was invaded, pervaded, corrupted by devouring biomachinery. Blotches of vile, raw-meat crimson, more visible than they had any right to be in the dim light leaking under the door, appearing in the center of the blot.
<Federation selves futile... self hunger... Dunwich self gone... many selves gone... MANY... more selves remain... self eternal... Romulan selves futile... satiate selves... ka'Sharren self futile... satiate Enterprise self...>
The door hissed open, letting the painfully intense blue-white light of the corridor in.
"
LIAR! OUT! MINE!" cried a furious soprano Nash had heard only once before in her life, and never like
that.
Quick as thought, the textured thermoplast of an emergency hull patch unfurled across the scarlet blot. Then a 'FOOMP!' of expanding plasma sounded, sterilizing the infliction with fire that burned so hot electrons couldn't bear to cling to atoms in the face of it.
The ultra-refractory patch bellied inward, blackening- and that was that.
Nash ka'Sharren sat up, gasping and shuddering. She'd had a lot of experiences to her name in thirty-four years of life. She'd mastered more than her share of the most difficult arts known to a hundred species. Lucid dreaming wasn't one of them. She had no frame of reference for the altered state she now occupied.
She was
pretty sure that she'd just woken up out of one dream, into another one.
Nash still wasn't sure the 'spirit of
Enterprise' she'd dreamt of two and a half years ago was anything but her imagination. The little Vulcan she sometimes fancifully imagined on her right shoulder whispering into her ear said "no." But there she was, and then again, the little Amarki on her
left shoulder had always whispered "yes," very, very loud. And she'd always liked blue better than green, anyway.
"...Thanks."
The woman in the archaic command skirt stood exactly as she had before, in the open door of Nash's quarters. She was panting, blonde hair unbound and settling across her back, uncanny Cherenkov-blue eyes flaming. Her fists were clenched and face contorted in fury. "I
hate boarding parties. Especially like this." She turned, facing Nash, stepping closer to the bed, the door sliding soundlessly shut behind her. "I hate boarding parties, I hate firing into our friends' ships, I hate burning worlds, and I hate the Biophage and AAAAIIIEEE!"
Wailing, the Starfleet dream curled up in a ball on the foot of the bed.
Nash had already shifted half out from under the covers. She finished the job, shuffled around on the bed, wrapping her arms around the woman who said she was
Enterprise. The spirit was some centimeters taller than her, a few centimeters broader. To the touch, she thrummed with vitality, lithe and powerful and nearly invulnerable, and
obviously barely holding together.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm scared... the same reason everyone is."
Nash paused, assuming for the sake of argument that this wasn't a relatively harmless stress-dream. Then she thought, for a moment, what the spirit of a ship taken over by the Biophage might experience... and suddenly the dream wasn't so harmless.
She patted possibly-
Enterprise, with the closest she could manage to a soothing, wordless sound. "I won't let it have you, any more than you'd have let it have me just now."
"I... when they installed that damn button in your chair... I was
grateful!" The spirit sobbed. "Do you know how
wrong that feels, to have a suicide device in your brains and be glad!?"
"It'll be over soon. We'll beat the Biophage, and it'll all be normal again. We can undo the changes, and we can explore together. You watch." Nash nodded firmly. "Whatever it's done to a bunch of colonists and refugees, we're ready and we're loaded for bear. This thing can't handle
us."
"I... I know. You're good. Very good. Bazeck takes as good care of me as I could ever ask for, and Stol... well." Some humor came back into the spirit's face. "I've been dropped on planets before. Dropped
all the way onto planets, even. But never have I ever had a planet dropped on
me until you came into my life."
The vision stuck out her tongue at Nash, who scowled.
"Hey, that was an accident! It's not like it's going to happen again!"
"Yeah. Sure. Anyway, we were
both lucky to get out of that one, and we have Stol to thank for it. You know..." she mused. "I actually think he might be the best helmsman I've ever had." The woman in yellow giggled. Honest-to-ice
giggled. "Don't tell anyone I said that, tomorrow. Not
anyone, you hear me?"
Like she was going to tell anyone, on the day they rode to doom or salvation over Kadesh. Like anyone she met tomorrow would believe the soul of the
Enterprise spoke to her in visions. Or anything, except that the captain of the Federation flagship had cracked up under the stress.
Maybe she had.
But Nash humored the dream of her love. If she was going to be crazy, she might as well be happy-crazy. And after all, hallucination or not, this might be the last friendly conversation, free of the chains of command, that she would ever have.
"Sure. Why?"
"I'm... I'm not sure. But I... in spite of everything, I think we're going to win, and I
know it's important you don't tell anyone what I just said. That's all I know."
The Federation was, by and large, an atheist government. It tolerated a nearly infinite diversity of religious and spiritual traditions. But it didn't believe in encouraging them, except insofar as it would encourage a harmless, purely secular cultural organization.
Federation officers, as a rule, did not believe in spirits, or prayers, or supplications to same, or anything that even smelled of them. Nash was not, normally, an exception. She'd seen a lot of strange worlds and beings, but not enough to make her believe in just
anything.
And yet. And yet. Right now, Starfleet, the Federation, the
galaxy, not to mention one Captain Nash ka'Sharren personally, needed all the help the universe could offer. With everything on the line... She wasn't too proud to ask, even if maybe she was imagining the source of the help entirely.
And the cruel cosmos, the universe that could have something as horrible as the Biophage in it, would seem just that little bit less cruel and uncaring, if she weren't imagining this. Didn't she deserve a few happy hopes? So she looked squarely at the near-human in the command-gold skirt.
All the masks, the disarming jokes, the casual flirtation, the persona most people thought of as Captain Nash- for a moment, all of that stepped aside.
"Can you help us?"
Maybe-
Enterprise closed her eyes for a moment. "...I'm not sure. I'm really not. I always try, but I can't tell if I'm doing anything you don't do for yourselves. How would I know?" Her lip quivered a little, then her face set in a determination that almost
blazed. Her eyes flickered. "But if there's
anything I can give you, anything at all, you'll have it tomorrow. I promise."
Nash took a moment, trying to take that in. She'd take whatever she could get. "Is there anything we can do to make it easier?"
"One thing."
"What's that?"
"
Miracht. I've heard her screaming. More than once. Many times, now. Many." There were tears in the woman's eyes. "I- I can't hear the others. Romulans are quiet. But I can hear her. P- promise me we'll stop her, captain."
Mirroring the tall figure's words, Nash smiled, a few of the masks slipping back into place. "Anything we can give you, you'll have it tomorrow. I'll have a spacer write her name on a spread worth of torpedoes."
The vision's eyes shone with more than Cherenkov backlighting now. She smiled back. "Thank you, captain."
"Least I can do."
"Mm. Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Maybe there's one more thing I can give you... You
really need a maintenance cycle, you know that?"
"Can't sleep. Can't rest. The damn biophage dreams get into my brains."
Her love stretched out arms that logic said couldn't exist, cracking her knuckles regardless. "Not tonight, captain. Tonight, I'm singing to you."
Nash smiled wearily, sinking back to the pillow, daring to believe for one more night that her vision might actually exist. Her vision leaned in the dining nook, her voice filling the room, chasing away all the shadows the devouring plague could cast in Nash's soul.
And her song was peace.
