DREAMS, Ch. 3
Recommended Listening:
Veteran of the Psychic Wars
Ready Room, USS Enterprise
Stardate 22806.4
"Come in!" Nash looked up from her console as the door hissed open, admitting a familiar green face atop a uniform of medical white. "You look worried, Pritya; what's wrong? Outbreak of Levodian flu? Tragic plague of hangnails? Sirian sniffles?"
Pritya Asurva smiled, but didn't- quite- laugh. Maybe Nash needed to practice her delivery a bit more; that would have worked a month ago.
"It's not the crew, ma'am. It's you."
"Me?"
"Stress. We can tell. Captain, what's wrong? Sam's noticed, Leaniss is worried sick about you..."
"I've- okay. I've been, ah, having nightmares." Nash rubbed the back of her neck. "About 33 Fujit."
The CMO looked honestly surprised at that- and why shouldn't she?
She didn't remember the ship getting the hell shot out of it dozens of times! But to her credit the Orion's face turned suddenly, instantly sympathetic.
Ghosts flashed before Nash's eyes, a score of dead faces blurring into each other- some of them Pritya's. Faces she'd failed over, and over, a dozen different ways. Faces that now walked and talked. The ghosts of her twenty-times-over dead crew- her students, her friends, even a onetime lover- now lived. They walked the
Enterprise's corridors, smiling and chattering and
congratulating her for her
brilliance. As if she'd saved them by being some sort of hero, instead of having gotten them all killed over and over and again and again...
Pritya got more and more worried as the seconds ticked by. "Nightmares. That's understandable. I'm no tactics expert, but it could have been pretty bad, couldn't it?"
You have NO IDEA! "Yeah."
"You know what I've told you about getting good rest. If you need to talk to someone about it..."
Inwardly, Nash cursed the message from Temporal Investigations, classifying the whole incident one-triple-A. Yeah, that'd be nice. Someone to talk to about it.
Right.
Outwardly, the captain nodded slowly. "If it gets bad enough, I will. And... just in case, mix up another of those Crazy Captain Specials."
Captain's Quarters, USS Enterprise
Stardate 22806.8
Her eyes focused again on the PADD; she stopped for a moment to wonder why the file of poetry seemed so... weird. Some of it was nice, but it was weird.
Okaaaay, I'm reading "Selected Earth Poetry, Northwest European, Transitional Age." In the original pre-atomic English. Brain must be shot if I'm picking stuff from another planet. Time for sleeps.
She laid the PADD aside, and muttered something the ship's computer took as a sign to kill the lights. A fragment from the last piece she'd read flashed through her mind, on its way out of short-term memory and into nothingness:
Perchance to dream...
USS Enterprise
Corridor Outside the Brig
Stardate 22806.9
Huh? I don't remember us taking any prisoners was Nash's thought as the brig door slid open. Behind the glimmering security force field and its grid of reinforcing bars, were Cardassians. Very glum looking Cardassians. She was pretty sure she recognized one of them as the thug who'd told her he was Mila Lang's cousin- then shot her. Another was probably the captain of the big battlecruiser, the
Lorgot she thought it was. Some others.
Faces she remembered, not only from the endless battle, but from the dreams
after the battle.
Two security men, their faces... oddly bland, forgettable, none she recognized, stood at the back of the brig, facing the containment cell and the door at once. Their hands hovered close to their phasers, in case the Cardies managed some trick to slip loose.
And closer to her, in a red officer's tunic, was the third guard. A tall, blonde-haired human, her back turned. The
old rifle held easily in her hands proof that told Nash, instantly, where she was and who she was seeing again. It was the first good thing to happen since the Indorions had called on
Enterprise to help sort out their skirmishes with
Karnack and
Trager.
The vision Nash dearly hoped wasn't just a figment of her overstrained imagination whirled, smiling joyously, the Cherenkov light in her eyes flashing as she set the rifle down on the desk. She paused only to glance back at one of the security men, who nodded back at her. Then she moved, as only the embodiment of a starship could, and Nash found herself swept along in the wake of her dream's long strides.
"How do I look?" Nash's dear, cherished,
recurring dream spread her arms. She was gorgeous in the red jacket,
gorgeous, especially now. Still...
"Great- but what happened to the miniskirt uniform?"
"It was getting old. So I figured, time to move on, and hung it up with the jumpsuit and the WAVE uniform."
"Since when do waves have uniforms?"
"Don't ask. Anyway, that's not important." The blurring corridors shifted, Nash's dream leading her back to her quarters. "What's important is that you've got Glinn This and and Gul That running around inside your head, and the dream-version of poor Jennifer is spending so much time getting phasered that she's about to file for overtime pay. From your own brain! And out
there on the outside of your pretty blue head, half your senior officers are worried sick about you and you can't tell them why. Because temporal paradoxes!"
The Starfleet dream rolled her eyes, in a silent curse on all panicky bureaucrats, as Nash's door slid open. The two walked through, the captain not thinking to ask why her dream had led her back here.
"Intelligence said-"
"Whatever. You won't tell Sam or Pritya, fine. But you can tell
me. And don't you give me any nonsense about getting caught in a time loop being under triple-A classification, captain! I was making time jumps when you were a gleam in your mommies' eyes!"
"You- you remember!?" Nash gasped. Maybe she shouldn't be comforted by the idea that one thing she might be imagining agreed with
another thing she thought she might have imagined... and yet. And yet. She sank to sit on the bed.
"What? Of course I do! I was in it with you! Don't
you remember?" Her love smiled, stepping across the distance and taking her hand. Nash looked up at the vision in red, wondering. "That whole thing, it was us- together. Remember, we only got caught in the loop if you died... or if
I did. I was with you the entire time-" she reached out to touch the captain on the shoulder. "As many times as it took. You did good."
"I
stank! I got us killed so many times!" Nash found herself crumbling, sobbing. She'd never do this in front of the crew. Or the public. Hell, she'd probably never even do it alone. Arms made of something rather more- or at least something
other- than atoms wrapped around Nash, as her dream sat down on the bed beside her.
Nash shuddered, finally able to admit to
someone what had happened. "I don't know how I stood it. I don't know how
you stood it!"
The vision nodded. "I understand. I like a good dance as much as the next girl, but that whole thing, taken together? Not an experience I want to repeat." She shivered a little, a counterpoint to her captain.
Nash gulped. "I'm sorry-"
She shook her head, Cherenkov-blue eyes flaring. "No! You were the best part of the whole thing! I was so proud of you by that last time, I'm lucky
that didn't make me explode, we'd have had to start all over again
again. So you stop apologizing and hush. I said you did good-" and her expression took on a wicked twist at the corner of her mouth. "And I
meant it, oh captain my captain. These things happen."
"What things?"
"Boarding. Bad luck. Very bad days. I should tell you about that time with the Klingons. Or those punk kids. Or, oooooh, that
other time with the Klingons." She grinned, looking almost cruel as she reminisced. "Nobody knows about that little story except me, but the look on their faces was to
die for. Ah... Sorry. Bad joke." The dream flinched a little, and snapped back to herself.
Nash still had to wonder if the woman she saw might be a hallucination, however much she might hope otherwise. But if she wasn't... Under the strain of all those horrible hours, she felt something welling up inside her again. As it had, on her next-to-last run through the time loop. A question she never normally asked herself, let alone anyone else. Had
promised herself to never ask, a promise she wouldn't have needed at any other time- and now broke.
"What would Jim Kirk have done?"