A strange encounter: you meet a character claiming to be your child. Is he or she a product of a brief liaison many years ago, or could they be something far stranger: a time traveler, or perhaps a trick of the enemy or one of Q's little pranks.
Personal log: Veronika "Ronnie" Grau, officer commanding USS Falcon NCC-93057
I'm sure I've mentioned before that red alert isn't my favourite way to wake up. I'm on my feet and out of the ready room at a dead run, though, without stopping to complain.
As I sprint onto the bridge, the lights flicker and the deck lurches beneath my feet. Not good. But the status lights on the shields are rock-steady, and there's no drop in structural integrity - uh-oh. Somebody is shooting at us with something exotic. And, judging by the way Commander Saval is very carefully maintaining the lack of expression on his bewhiskered Vulcan face, they're hitting us. Somehow.
"What've we got?" I snap at the bridge crew in general.
"It looks like a small commercial scout craft," my Andorian exec Tallasa reports. "It was passing us at low impulse speeds, and then it swung around and came after us, hard." The deck shudders again. "Still hitting us -"
"I can't get a targeting lock," Tallasa's sister Jhemyl chimes in. "And I can't shake it - I've tried every evasion trick I know, but -" Another wham cuts her off. Bad one, this time.
"Hailing on all frequencies," Leo Madena adds from the comms console. He would be. Leo's a good boy really. "No response."
"Saval." I turn to look at my science officer. "You're looking worried. What are you worried about?"
He does the Vulcan eyebrow thing. "I believe we are being targeted with an adaptive polymorphic virus program. It is infiltrating our systems, and it is highly effective. I am attempting to determine the parameters of its carrier wave - if we can block that channel, I should be able to purge the systems in due course. However -"
He doesn't get to finish that "however", because at that point the lights go out, and a terrific thump knocks all of us sprawling on the floor. Well, that's just dandy. No need for our attacker to faff around firing torpedoes and such, when he can monkey with the settings on the inertial dampeners and rattle us like a set of maracas.
Emergency lights come on. Saval's awful muttonchop whiskers don't really look any better when they're lit up in red from underneath.
"Helm control is down," Jhemyl says. Tallasa adds some commentary in Andorian which the universal translator avoids translating.
"Signal coming through, sir," says Leo.
"Oh, now they want to talk, do they?" I rise to my feet with as much dignity as I can muster. "On screen."
The main viewscreen flickers, and an image forms. For a moment, I don't know what it is - and then it sort of gells in my head. It's a human face, but surrounded by machinery, cradled in it. A transparent tube crawls up one nostril, there are what look like medical monitors plastered across the forehead... and the face is old, wrinkled and withered and fallen in, aged beyond almost anything I've ever seen before. Rheumy eyes regard me. They look as though they might have been brown, once.
I decide to break the silence. "Admiral Veronika Grau, commanding the USS Falcon, here. What the heck, call me Ronnie, everyone does. Well, you got us. What are you going to do with us?"
The eyes gleam. The wizened mouth curls into what might be a smile... and then the lips part, and a thin, rasping voice speaks.
"Hello, Mother."
---
I don't actually remember folding at the knees, but somehow I seem to be sitting down in the command chair anyway. The ancient face on the screen is still looking at me and smiling. I think everyone else is looking at me, too, only not smiling. More gaping, in most cases.
I find my voice. "Oh, this has got to be a joke."
"No joke," says the thin voice. "I've been looking for you, Mother. For quite a while, now."
There are a number of questions revolving around in my brain, now, and I decide to let the most urgent one out. "Who the hell are you?"
"I'm exactly who I say I am. Don't play games, Mother."
I stare at the ancient face grasped by machinery, and I think hard. "No. I've never had a child. Never had time, when I was younger... never had the chance, after I was older." After the Rift. After I was first displaced in time, and came back with an obsession about it, wanting to know what had happened to me... an obsession which displaced everything else, and which might not have been all mine, to start with.
"You disappoint me, Mother. Perhaps I should try cutting off your life support, to see if it jogs your memory."
Tallasa is looking at me hard, now. Andorians... Andorians are big on family. But Tallasa knows me, she knows I've never had a child... doesn't she?
Don't I?
"There are nearly a thousand people on this ship." I decide to play for time. "You'd put their lives at risk just to make a point? I don't know who you are. Nothing you can say will change that. Something weird is going on, here, so why not work with me and find out what it is?"
The rheumy eyes narrow at me. "More games, Mother? I'll give you an hour. Think things over. Then we'll talk again."
"Wait. One thing." I stare at the face, trying to find some connection, some spark of recognition... and failing. "What's your name, dammit? At least tell me your name!"
The eyes blink. "Simon," the rasping voice says, and then the screen goes blank.
---
My ready room doesn't look at its best in emergency lighting. My bridge officers are dark silhouettes against the dim red glow - they look almost sinister, somehow. Tallasa's antennae are twitching.
"Leaving the family reunion to one side, for the moment," I say, "what the hell is our situation, anyway? Saval?"
"Computer operations are completely subverted," Saval reports with his typical Vulcan urbanity. "We are locked out of all command functions; weapons, shields and drives are offline. Thus far, all my attempts to circumvent the software intrusion have been unsuccessful. It would be helpful to have more data regarding the nature of the intrusion."
"Yeah, right. And there's one person, and one only, who can tell us about it. Our friend Simon."
"Do you have any idea who he is, sir?" Tallasa asks.
"Not a clue." I can't meet her gaze in this light. "I've never had a child. Look, you know damn well I'm erratic, but my memory is good enough, and I'd certainly remember something like that! No, this is some sort of set-up. But I don't know what sort."
"We are able to run read-only queries on the ship's database," says Saval. "Perhaps, sir, we could check your service record, to confirm this?"
"What's the point? Baby boy out there has complete control over our computers. By now, he's probably rewritten my service record and family history all the way back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule. You'll get whatever answers he chooses to give you."
"Still," says Saval, "it might be useful to know what those answers are."
"Go ahead, if it'll make you feel any better."
"A possibility, sir." Jhemyl speaks up. She's no happier than Tallasa, I bet, at even the possibility that I might have abandoned a child. "Suppose this is some kind of temporal event? An alternate timeline, bleeding over into this reality? Suppose this Simon is a child you might have had, in some other possibility framework?"
"Well, if that sort of finagling is going on, hell, anything's possible. How could we possibly check?"
"Subquantum scan for anomalous chroniton signatures," Tallasa replies promptly.
"Yeah, right. Fancy spotting those by eye? Because we use the computer for identifying things like that, and guess what, we don't have control of the computer. We are only going to get the answers this guy wants us to have."
"Simon Grau," says Saval. "Mother, Veronika Grau; father, Simon Kriegmayer. Born 22nd September 2164 by Earth reckoning. Not Starfleet personnel, so I have no other details." I can't really see his eyebrow quirking, but I know it does. "No date of death recorded, but... one would expect there to be one."
"That's the year before you took command of the USS Goshawk, isn't it, sir?" says Tallasa.
"And vanished into the Stygmalian Rift the first time, yes," I say. "But I've never even met a Simon Kriegmayer, much less - Besides, if any of that were true, I'd still have been on maternity leave instead of taking over the Goshawk."
"Unless you took extreme steps to conceal the birth," says Saval. "Which, of course, might account for feelings of abandonment, and thus resentment, in your offspring."
"Who is, according to that piece of fiction, getting on for two hundred and fifty years old. Human beings don't last that long, Saval! Hell, Vulcans don't last that long!"
"Experimental advances in geriatric medicine, perhaps," says Saval. "We can see that he is functioning only with the aid of extensive mechanical life support."
"So where's he been in the meantime? Why didn't he pop out of the woodwork back in the 23rd century, while I was there? Then. Whatever. And what does he want? Back child support? Two centuries' worth of birthday presents?"
"The only way to find out," Tallasa says, "might be to ask him."
"Um, sir." Leo Madena. Well, Leo's a nice lad, maybe he will have something nice to say. "I'm, um, puzzled about the computer attack. You'd need - well, you'd need very sophisticated systems to hack our main computer, for a start -"
"Evidently," murmurs Saval.
"But - well, I can't shake the feeling, um, you'd need more," Leo continues. "You'd need to, well, really know our systems, from the inside out, kind of thing."
"Perhaps he worked on the initial software design teams," Tallasa says. "He's had time, the Infinite knows."
"Time. Right." I stand up. I hope it looks decisive. "Time's something we ain't got. Leo, Saval, put your tricorders together and see if you can hack some way through his hack. The rest of us -" I shrug, helplessly. "Deadline's coming up. Let's get back to the bridge and see what his next move is."
---
The ancient face doesn't look any more familiar. "So," he says, "you've had time to consider. What are your conclusions?"
"What are your demands?" I snap back. "I'm assuming you've got demands."
"Is a mother's love too much to expect?" The withered lips twitch into a ghastly parody of a smile. "But, yes, I suppose there are other things I want."
"So name them, and we'll go from there."
"You'll just give in? Like that? You disappoint me, Mother."
"I said I'll listen. Never said I'd agree. And if I'm your mother, Simon, where's your filial respect, anyway?"
"It died. A long time ago. Very well, Mother. I want something, yes. I want what you have."
And what's that? A wonky left eye, a lot of aches and pains where my Borg implants used to be, a stash of Saurian brandy that I hope Tallasa doesn't know about? "Specifics," I snap at him.
"I want your ship, Admiral."
"You've got my ship, already."
"No. I've got control of your main computer, yes, but that's a long way from having the ship. I need... intelligent cooperation. I need a crew, a competent crew, to work the ship. I can't do it all by software subversion, no matter how good I am." Horrible smile again. "And I am, though I say so myself, very good."
"You know I can't just turn over my command. And why my ship, anyway?"
"Because you owe me, Mother." I don't think he's smiling now. More of a snarl. "I'm restoring basic ops power to your ship. No drives, shields or weapons. And then I'm transporting over to you, and we will get my systems installed on your bridge. Make no mistake, Mother, I am taking over."
---
The transporter pad whines and glows, and a column of lights in the air resolves itself into a solid form.
In the flesh - in person, rather - Simon is something like two and a half metres tall, and massively bulky. Most of it is mechanical exoskeleton. He lumbers off the pad in a hissing of hydraulics and a clanging of metal on metal, his withered face looking like an afterthought, perched on top of that terrifying mechanical carcase. He reminds me a lot of... things I'd rather not be reminded of.
Zodiri, my grouchy Trill medical officer, steps forward with a scanner. Simon raises one huge mechanized arm and pushes her aside.
"Look," Zodiri says, "if you're coming aboard, I need to do some baseline scans, okay? I'm the CMO here, which means if you suddenly drop dead, I'm the one who gets stuck with the paperwork. So don't make my job any harder, okay?"
Simon spares her a quick sneer, then turns to me. "No welcome aboard, Mother?"
"You're here. Not much I can do about it." I give the exoskeleton a quick once-over with my mark one eyeball. Plenty of mechanical power in those massive augmented limbs, but I'm not spotting any built-in weapons systems. Of course, there's a lot of machinery and stuff that I don't recognize at all, but I'm guessing most of it's medical stuff. At his age, he must need all the medical machinery you could imagine. Ignoring Zodiri fussing around him, he lumbers off towards the turbolift.
"So," I say. "Where have you been all my life, anyway?"
"Let's just say busy," he replies.
"Look. I know I've been kind of an absent parent, what with time warps and all that, but how come I never heard from you when I wasn't stuck inside the Stygmalian Rift? You've had years, decades, when you could have made contact -"
"I was busy," he repeats. The turbolift doors hiss open, and he steps into the capsule. I follow him in. Just hope the damn thing will take his weight. Zodiri stays behind. I hope she's got a plan. It'd make one of us.
"Busy doing what? If I'm your mother, I'm allowed to nag."
"For most of my childhood, trying to survive neglect and abuse in an Earth orphanage," he says with evident bitterness. "And then - well, I had a career, and it led in an interesting direction. Eventually, it led to a biological research station on Eta Palinuri IV." The withered face twists. "I was one of their successes. You wouldn't want to see the failures. No, you wouldn't like that at all. Bridge." The turbolift responds to his voice. I feel a bit aggrieved about that.
"I've never heard of Eta Palinuri IV," I say.
"You were never meant to. It's on the fringes of Federation space, and it is a very private and very illegal research station." The turbolift doors open. Simon strides through them, out onto the bridge.
"Your attention." The exoskeleton comes with amplifiers; Simon's voice blares across the bridge. "I am taking command of this vessel. We will proceed at cruise speed to the Eta Palinuri system." The deck plates groan as he marches over to the command chair. There is a hiss, and spear-tipped cables slide out of his forearms, to sink into my command and tactical consoles. He is taking over, and he's making it clear. "There is an extra-legal research facility on the fourth planet of that system. This ship's mission, now, is to locate, expose, and reduce that facility, with maximum force." He seats himself in the command chair.
---
"Out of his tiny mind," I grumble.
I'm standing in a corridor on deck six, talking to Saval and Tallasa, because I suspect he's monitoring the ready room and probably my quarters as well. Heck, he could be monitoring anywhere on the ship - but I'm guessing he can't keep his attention everywhere, and an anonymous stretch of corridor might be something he'll overlook.
"If he's right about the biological research at this lab -" Tallasa begins.
"Oh, you think he's telling the truth about that? I got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you."
"His biological and biomechanical augmentations must have been done somewhere," Saval points out.
"And somewhere that doesn't worry much about ethics," Tallasa adds.
"Even so," I say firmly, "I am not about to blast some research station into slag on the say-so of some nutcase who claims he's my long-lost son. So we need some options, and we need them before we get into phaser range of Eta Palinuri. Tactical options don't look good, am I right, Tallasa?"
"That exoskeleton is well-protected," says Tallasa. "A group of us could probably jump him, but we'd take casualties, and we would not be able to take him down before he compromised the ship's systems with his computer controls. Phaser fire would take him out, if we could get an armed team within range without him noticing -"
"Which is not likely," I finish for her. "So, that leaves the technical side of things. Saval, ball's in your court."
"We are still locked out of the main computer and all its distributed networks and subnets," says Saval. He would definitely be sounding gloomy, if that was allowed. "We have prepared simulations of back-door intrusion methods which would allow us to regain control - but our tricorders and non-networked portable computers do not have sufficient capacity to enable us to be certain of success. And failure would definitely alert our captor, and provoke immediate retribution."
Damn and blast. I scratch irritably at the skin by my eyepatch, where my optical implant used to be. Then I have a thought, and it's not one I like. "What's the actual bottleneck?" I ask Saval.
"Essentially, it is a factor of speed and coordination. We would need to override the main computer's input processing at certain precisely coordinated points in its cycles -"
Damn and blast. Again. "Thought as much." I heave a deep sigh. "Listen. You know where you can still get some additional processing power? That's set up for peer-to-peer coordination and sneaky systems infiltration? OK, so a lot of it got burned out, and most of the rest is decidedly second-hand, but still -"
---
So now I'm dangling over the main computer core with a bunch of tricorders strapped to my waist, and wondering why in hell I forgot the first rule of the damn military, never volunteer.
"Need to be closer," I subvocalize into the throat mike, and Saval and Tallasa pay out another metre or so of line, and I drop down that much nearer the top of the core. I could have just gone through the door like a normal person, but we figured Simon would spot that. So. Jeffries tube and ventilation duct time. Why is it always ducts?
I reach out with my still-Borged-up left hand. A normal human shouldn't be able to feel the computer core's processes, but I can... a sort of indescribable tingle along my nerves and my shoddy neural cabling, a whispering in my ears like a rapid conversation half-heard in the next room. I shut my eye and try to concentrate, try to feel my way into the system.
"Launching nanoprobes," I whisper. No, we're not using our standard networked combadges for this stunt. The throat mike works just fine. Has done so far.
Invisible motes stream from their launch sites on my fingers. The tingling and the whispering both intensify as the induction field picks up more of the core's activity. I concentrate. I am in a black, black void, hanging upside down, listening to the data as the core sings to itself, and the data is rushing over me, and I can hear it and feel it, and I want to be a part of it -
Somewhere, faint, on the edge of hearing, there is a voice saying */*reconnect--- priority--- reconnect--- reconnect--- reconnect--- */* Two of Twelve. My former Borg identity. I thought I was free of her, damn it.
"Synchronizing," I gasp, feeling how slow and squishy and imprecise my organic voice is. "Preparing payload." The programmed routines in those tricorders are at my command, now, and I need only watch and wait, wait for the right moment in that rushing data stream, the right moment to -
"Activating."
Something clicks. Not a physical sound, just a sudden sensation of change - change and rightness. Like when you throw a dart at a dartboard, and the movements of your hand and arm, the weight of the dart in your hand, the sudden lightness as it leaves your fingers, they all come right, and you know it's a good one, and the thump of the dart into the treble twenty is just a confirmation of what you knew already. We're in, and it's worked. Good for Saval.
"Disconnecting." If I can, because a part of me still wants to be submerged in all that data... but I tell it no, I doggedly go through the routine of turning off the nanoprobe stream and pulling my hand back from the datacore and saying, no, I am not part of this, I am just me, Ronnie Grau, shut safely away inside my own skull and not connected to anything. Two of Twelve's whimpering dies away and she is silent, once again. I wish I could believe it will be forever.
"Get me out of this," I mumble, and I am suddenly rising. There are a few bumps and bashes as I'm dragged back through the ducts, and I am painfully reminded just how many sharp edges there are in these things. Not that I mind the pain, so much. Pain is personal, pain is private, pain is human.
I'm out of the tube. Tallasa and Jhemyl are helping me to my feet. I am bruised and shaking and slick with cold sweat. Saval is studying a tricorder readout. "It worked," I tell him.
"I believe so, sir."
"I know so. Come on. Let's get to the bridge and get my darling boy disconnected, before he notices what we've done and starts figuring a way round it." There's another figure in the corridor, now, though, and I have to blink and focus before I realize who it is.
"Yeah, well." Zodiri is holding a PADD towards me. "I think I've worked out what he is."
---
The turbolift doors hiss open and I stride onto the bridge with a confidence that I don't entirely feel. Lieutenant Haloy is at the helm. "Course change," I tell him. "Away from Eta Palinuri, back to our scheduled patrol pattern. You'd better make it warp seven, we've got time to make up."
"Ignore her," says Simon's rasping voice. "I am in charge here, Mother."
"Oh, you are so wrong about both those things." I nod to Haloy, who taps at the helm console. On the screen, the streaking stars wheel and settle into a new configuration as the ship turns. I march across the bridge, to turn and glare at the half-human thing squatting in my command chair.
"Mother, Veronika Grau. Father, Simon Kriegmayer. Absolutely right. Only my CMO, well, she may have a worse bedside manner than Jack Kevorkian, but she's got a brain and she knows how to use it. And once we got the computer back, we even bothered to make some checks. Simon Kriegmayer, born 2368. So how could I have had a kid with him, back in 2164? I mean, I'm good, but I'm not that good."
Ancient eyes stare at me; the withered mouth twists.
"Zodiri found genetic markers when she did her scan. Epigenetic degradation, codon fragments, all indicative of something. Synthetic biogenesis techiques. You weren't born in 2164, Simon. You were never born at all. You were made, in a test tube somewhere, using tissue samples, de-differentiated and then reverse-engineered into gametes. No problem getting hold of the samples, I guess. Dunno about this Kriegmayer, but with all the samples the medics have had off me over the years, there must be enough to build a spare." I fix him with a glare. "You were made. Somehow, they aged you, super-aged you into that. Somehow, they put two centuries plus of false memories into your head. I'd rather not even think about how they did it. But that's what they did. You're somebody's weapon, aimed at - what? Eta Palinuri? What is there at Eta Palinuri, anyway?"
He rises to his feet, looming, his face contorted. His metal arms make abortive clutching motions towards me - then his knees buckle, and he falls to the deck with a crash. For one moment he kneels there in front of me, then he slumps face-forward along the deck.
"Medical to the bridge," someone says urgently into the communicator.
"No point." I nudge the inert shape with my foot. Now he's gone, I can feel sorry for him. "He really was two hundred plus years old - physiologically, at any rate. He was hanging on to life by his fingernails. Being told he wasn't really alive at all... just the shock of that was enough to kill him."
---
I make my way back to my quarters. It's been one hell of a day.
I start to unfasten my uniform tunic, and then I notice the tabletop console flashing. Incoming message. No origin code. What a surprise.
I turn the screen on. "Hello, Frankie."
The scarred face with the yellowish eyes looks at me, not in a remotely friendly way. "You were expecting me?" asks Franklin Drake.
I shrug. "It makes all kinds of sense, doesn't it? A completely unethical experiment, that's right up your street. And Leo Madena was right, the computer attack was made by someone who knew all my ship's systems - prefix codes, security gateways, the works. So either Starfleet's security is hopelessly compromised, or, well, it was an inside job. Besides, we read Simon Kriegmayer's record - it's so perfectly consistent, it just has to be phony. One of yours."
The spokesman for Section 31 nods, slowly. His expression is still unfriendly.
"So what is at Eta Palinuri?" I ask.
"Nothing significant. We'd have stopped the test if it had come to your ship actually firing on the planet."
"It was just a test." A funny feeling is coming over me - a mixture of weariness and disgust. "And you picked me - why, exactly? Still sore over that Sheliak affair?"
"Not in the least. You should take it as a compliment, Ronnie. You and your crew are efficient, capable, highly adaptable. So we picked you to test a - scenario. If we could rattle you and yours, break your effectiveness, we would know that our psychological approach could work."
"Yeah, well. Sorry to disappoint you."
Drake shakes his head and chuckles. "It's still a useful data point."
"Data point?" That feeling isn't going away. "Whatever else he was, once you'd made him, Simon Grau was alive. A real person, Frankie. Maybe with a phony past and a head full of fake memories, but he was a living being, not just some - some unit of Section 31's resources, something you could use up -" My voice is shaking.
"And how many living beings have you killed, in the course of your career?" Drake asks.
"I didn't make them just for that!"
"Perhaps you should. It might be preferable, ethically speaking. Like the Founders and their Jem'Hadar."
I glare at him. "Don't talk to me about ethics. You don't have the right."
"I have my duty. And I don't need your approval, Ronnie."
"You're not getting it. And I promise you this, Drake. If I ever run into you in the flesh again, I'll throw something a damn sight heavier than a chess set at your head."
"I'll bear it in mind, Ronnie. I'll add that one to all the other threats I've heard." He smiles. He actually smiles. "Goodbye for now, Ronnie. I'll be in touch."
And the screen goes blank.
