Part 4 (1/2)
It took Riker a moment to pierce Ra-Havreii's unusually subtle wording. ”You want to salvage from the wrecked s.h.i.+ps in the nebula,” he said, nodding with grim understanding.
”Aye, sir. I know it must seem a bit ghoulish, but we need those parts. We've opened the shuttlebay doors using manual controls, and the Armstrong, the Holliday, and the Ellington are ready to begin recovery ops-on your order, sir.”
As distasteful as Riker felt it would be to plunder a fresh stars.h.i.+p graveyard, he knew that the chief engineer was right. It was an absolute necessity. ”Proceed, Commander. Do what you have to do, and keep me posted.”
”Aye, sir. Ra-Havreii out.” A barely audible click signaled the closing of the comm channel.
Riker walked out of the dead end and back to the corridor, turned right, and continued toward his destination.
The two female security guards posted outside the door watched Riker as he approached. To the left of the door was Senior Petty Officer Antillea, a Gnalish Fejjimaera. Aside from resembling a human-sized bipedal iguana, her most noticeable physical characteristic was the prominent fin on the top of her scaly, olive-hued head.
On the other side of the door was Lieutenant Pava Ek'Noor sh'Aqabaa, a statuesque and breathtaking Andorian shen who preferred to let her flowing white hair frame her blue face. The only parts of her that looked remotely fragile were her antennae, but Riker pitied the person who dared try to lay a finger on them without permission.
He looked to sh'Aqabaa as he arrived at the door. ”Any trouble, Lieutenant?”
”None, sir,” sh'Aqabaa said.
Riker nodded. ”Good. I'm going in to talk to her.” He keyed in a security code to unlock the door to the guest quarters. The portal slid open ahead of him, and he walked in.
Once he was a few meters inside the compartment, the door hushed closed behind him, and he heard the soft confirmation tone of it returning to its locked state. He remained still for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the dim illumination into which he'd stepped. Noting the cyanochrome hues that surrounded him, he realized that all of the artificial lighting was off. The only light came from the glow of the Azure Nebula outside the row of rounded-corner windows that sloped along one side of the living area. Silhouetted in front of them was t.i.tan's latest guest, Erika Hernandez.
She didn't look in his direction as she said with serene courtesy, ”Don't bother to knock, Captain. Come right in.”
He felt abashed at his faux pas and slightly wary of this peculiar stranger who had appeared without warning on his bridge. True, she had done him and his crew a great favor, but it still felt too soon to trust her. Feigning a casual demeanor, he sidled over to her in front of the windows. ”Now that my crew is able to work on repairs, I thought it was time we talked.”
”I figured as much,” Hernandez said.
Outside the windows, in the middle distance, shuttlecraft from t.i.tan maneuvered through the roiling cobalt mists and snared large hunks of stars.h.i.+p debris in tractor beams. ”We've been forced to scavenge, I'm afraid,” Riker said.
”Don't feel you need to apologize,” Hernandez said. ”Out there, it's just wreckage. In here, it's survival. That's just the way it is. If this had happened to my s.h.i.+p, I'd have done the same thing.”
Riker cleared his throat. ”Since you've brought it up, let's talk about your s.h.i.+p,” he said. Gesturing toward the sofa beneath the window, he asked, ”Can we sit down?”
”Of course,” she said. She settled in at one end of the couch, and Riker took a seat at the other end. She asked, ”What do you want to know?”
”You said your s.h.i.+p was the Columbia,” Riker said. ”You were talking about the twenty-second-century Earth stars.h.i.+p?”
Hernandez nodded. ”Yes, the NX-02.”
”That s.h.i.+p went missing more than two hundred years ago,” Riker replied. ”And according to our records, its captain was in her forties. You look a bit young for the part.”
The youthful woman flashed a bright, wide grin. ”I've had some work done,” she said with a playful lift of her eyebrows.
”Apparently,” Riker said, returning her smile with one of his own. ”Starfleet also discovered the wreck of the Columbia in the Gamma Quadrant, more than seventy thousand light-years from here and even farther from where we found you.”
She sighed. ”Yes, I know. When Erigol's star went supernova and created this nebula in 2168, the Caeliar took off in their city-s.h.i.+ps. Most of them didn't make it. I was in the capital, which did escape, but it wound up a few hundred years in the past. My s.h.i.+p stayed in the present and entered another pa.s.sage; it got tossed across the galaxy, and my crew was probably incinerated by the radiation inside the subs.p.a.ce tunnel.”
Riker was about to ask another question when she cut him off. ”Why the third degree, Captain? Can't you just take a sample of my DNA and use that to see if I am who I say I am?”
”I did,” he confessed. ”My chief nurse recovered traces of your DNA from the bridge consoles you touched and from some of your hairs we found on the deck. I already know you're the real Erika Hernandez-and the way you turned Lieutenant Rriarr's phaser into dust when you came aboard tells me you're also something more. What I want is to know more about your history, so I can understand why you helped us escape.”
Her disarming smile returned. ”You could have just asked.”
”What fun would that be?”
They laughed for a few seconds, and then Hernandez looked away and became serious. ”You really want to know why I helped you? The truth is, there's no one reason. I've wanted to get away from the Caeliar pretty much from the first moment they told me I couldn't leave. I also spent the last several hundred years feeling I let down all the people I was supposed to protect. The convoy the Romulans ambushed...my crew...Earth...my friends in exile.” Hernandez became quietly introspective for several seconds, and Riker let her collect her thoughts.
She continued, ”Anyway, when the Caeliar took your people on the planet prisoner, it was like seeing it happen to myself all over again. Then I saw those black cubes destroy your fleet, and I remembered how much I wanted to be there for Earth when the Romulans attacked. I figured you'd feel the same way about this.” She looked up at him, and her expression conveyed a deep sadness. ”I'm so sorry I couldn't save your landing party. Especially your wife. But there was no other way.”
”It wasn't your fault,” he said, and he meant it. ”I made the decision. You have nothing to apologize for.” He hesitated to ask what he really wanted to know, but his need was too great to be denied. ”Can you just tell me...is Deanna all right?”
”She was pretending to be, but I noticed signs that she was in pain-and when I listened in on the Caeliar, I heard them say she was in some kind of medical distress.”
Riker wrapped his left hand over his fist and clamped down, focusing his thoughts on remaining calm. Hernandez cast her eyes toward the floor, away from his obvious emotional turmoil. She said, ”I'm sorry the news isn't better.”
”I'm all right,” he said, and he pressed his fist over his mouth for a second. It was an effort to lower and unclench his hand. ”One more question: If you were able to open a pa.s.sage and bring us here, why couldn't you take us back to Earth?”
”Because I didn't create the pa.s.sage we traveled through,” she said. ”I only widened it, by amplifying the power to the machine that generated it. If I had tried to open a new pa.s.sageway, the Caeliar would have detected it and shut it down. As it was, the gestalt was about to collapse the tunnel that pointed here. So it really was this or nothing.”
”Good enough,” Riker said. He stood. ”Thank you for your patience, Captain.”
”My pleasure,” she said. He started to leave but turned back as she asked, ”Now that you're home, what's your plan?”
He flashed a rueful smile. ”I plan to call for help.”
Jean-Luc Picard stepped back onto the bridge of the Enterprise, expecting an update on the s.h.i.+p's repairs. Instead, Worf rose from the command chair and said, ”Captain, we are being hailed.”
”By the Aventine?” Picard wondered what could have happened in the minutes since he had left Captain Dax's s.h.i.+p.
Surrendering the center seat to Picard, Worf replied with an uncommon gleam, ”No, sir, by the t.i.tan.”
The name of the s.h.i.+p was enough to provoke a double-take by Picard, who cast an incredulous stare at his first officer. t.i.tan was supposed to be thousands of light-years away, months from Federation s.p.a.ce. ”What is the signal's point of origin, Number One?”
Worf said, ”Directly ahead, sir. Inside the Azure Nebula.”
”Do we have a visual?”
”Affirmative.”
Picard stood tall and smoothed his uniform. ”On-screen.”
Sickly colors fluctuated on the main viewscreen, and an oscillating whine stutter-scratched through the speakers. Then the signal resolved into an unstable image with mildly garbled sound, and Picard recognized the haggard face of his old friend and former first officer, William Riker. ”Captain Picard?”