The Rift. My mouth is dry, my heart is pounding. The Stygmalian Rift. Damn it, I thought it was gone, I thought I was done with the damned thing.
But apparently not. "Approaching the perimeter of the Rift's coordinates now," says Jhemyl crisply.
"Right," I say, "right. All stop. Dead stop. Hold us, umm, as close as you can get without getting us in it." I tried that once before. It didn't work. Damn it.
"Sir," Tallasa asks, "are you all right?"
"Yeah, sure," I tell her. "Never better. I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and all that."
Tallasa stands up, comes up to the command chair, and puts her hand on my shoulder. "Ronnie," she says, "are you all right?"
"Of course I - waitaminute, what?"
She never uses my name. She always calls me "sir", usually with a subtext of I am about three seconds from outright mutiny unless you get your head together, but always "sir". But now she's calling me "Ronnie", and she's looking at me with honest to God concern in those icy Andorian eyes. I suddenly feel about three inches tall. What the hell have I ever done for Tallasa, that she should care about my feelings?
"I'm... OK," I answer her, eventually.
"It can't be easy for you," she says in a quiet voice. "I mean... we all thought it was over and done with. And for it to - to come back, like this -"
"You went through it too," I say.
"Yes," Tallasa says, "once. And I'd already lost everything - well, except Jhemyl." She glances briefly at her sister, sitting prim and alert at the helm as usual. "We might even have gained from passing through the rift - the family scandal was half forgotten after twenty-four years. But you -"
"I lost everything the first time through," I say. "The next ones... sort of didn't matter. Well," I tap my Borg eyepiece, "except for this, of course. Didn't care for that bit much at all."
I'm lying, of course. I think Tallasa knows it. But she doesn't call me on it, and I'm grateful for that.
I twist around in the chair and look at Saval. "What about you?" I ask. "What do you think about being back here?"
He doesn't so much as blink. "In some respects, the situation is disagreeable. Our previous encounter did have deleterious effects on my personal relationships. In other ways, though - well, sir, I have always had an abiding curiosity as to what it was that you saw in the Stygmalian Rift. I appreciate that the Tiaza Zephora incident gave me some incomplete idea -"
"Curiosity," I say. "Know what that did? Killed the cat."
"So I have been told, sir," says Saval. "I am given to understand, though, that satisfaction brought it back."
And it's evidently time for me to gawp again, because that is perilously close to being a joke. Saval with a sense of humour? Tallasa being concerned for my feelings? What's next, Two of Twelve cocking out with a speech in defence of the rights of the individual?
*/*don't hold your breath---*/*
Uh-oh. "Tell Zodiri to get up to the bridge," I say.
"What's wrong?" Tallasa asks sharply. Oh, the scolding tone is back - that's actually a relief.
"Plenty. Two of Twelve is growing a personality again. Last time that happened, it was down to the Tiaza Zephora entity - somehow. Zodiri ran medical scans at the time, I want to know if they match up to anything that's happening now. Leo, get me a channel to King Estmere and Tapiola."
"Uh, the channels are on hot standby already, sir. Bringing them on now."
"Very good, Leo, you are learning. Tylha, T'Pia. Things are starting to happen."
There are two faces on my viewscreen, now, and both of them look concerned, too. In T'Pia's case, as concerned as Vulcans ever get, granted, but still concerned. Whatever I'm doing to encourage all this support and affection, I should bottle it. I'd make a fortune.
"What's going on?" Tylha asks.
"Two of Twelve is getting sassy on me. I think it's the proximity of the Rift, or maybe of the Rift entity. If anything else weird starts kicking off, I'll let you know. What are you guys planning on, anyway?"
"Same as you," says Tylha. "Holding station at the perimeter of the Rift."
"We are conducting intensive long range sensor scans," says T'Pia. "So far, the results are not useful, but of course we have had no time to process and integrate the data."
The turbolift doors hiss open behind me, and Zodiri comes in. The sour-tempered Trill medic barely nods at me before she starts waving a medical scanner over my temples.
*/*hey, that tickles---*/*
"Keep it up," I tell her, "it's annoying Two of Twelve." Zodiri rolls her eyes at me theatrically.
"Are you suffering from a medical condition?" asks T'Pia.
"Well, of course I am, we're talking about me here. But not half as much as I'm suffering from my doctor," I add, with a glower at Zodiri.
"Getting the usual problems from her combination of mule DNA and a head full of rocks," says Zodiri. "I'll process the rest of my results down in sickbay. I'm not seeing anything unusual yet, but then I didn't see a whole hell of a lot at Tiaza Zephora -"
"Oh, god," I say, and start fiddling with my chair's controls. The faces of Tylha and T'Pia disappear, to be replaced by the starscape of the Rift. "Seeing. Seeing. You reminded me -"
The sky is filled with rippled veils of light, an aurora frozen in motion. "The visual aberration you got in the, umm, the whatever it was - spatial anomaly - in Tiaza Zephora orbit?" asks Zodiri.
"Is it back?" asks Tallasa.
"You tell me. What can you see?" I wave a hand at the screen.
"Stars, sir," says Tallasa bleakly.
"She's right," says Zodiri. "Nothing but stars."
"Then it's back," I say. "My own private light show. Whoop-de-doo."
"Ronnie," says Tylha's voice. "You're seeing the same things you said you saw -?"
"Yes," I say loudly. "And when T'Pia asks, yes, same bloody thing. I'm seeing what looks like... veils, curtains of light." I frown. "It looks almost like they're folded into some sort of... pattern. This time."
"The logical course of action," says T'Pia, "is to advance into the Rift according to your perceptions, and to try to correlate those with sensor readings of actual conditions in the region."
"Sir, that didn't work before, in the anomaly," says Tallasa.
"The comparison is inexact," says T'Pia in a carefully neutral voice that somehow manages to be completely crushing. "The anomaly at Tiaza Zephora was a manufactured situation managed entirely by the Rift entity. The Stygmalian Rift itself, on the other hand, is a real location with real phenomena. It is entirely possible that real phenomena will be more susceptible to analysis than the phantoms produced by a Rift entity. I do assure you, any real phenomenon can be examined by the Tapiola's sensors and science teams."
So that's science division putting us humble tactical officers in our place, then. "We're going in then?" I say.
"It would seem the available logical course," says T'Pia.
I look at the frozen folds of light on the screen, and the more I look, the more they seem like the petals of some vast, poisonous, alien flower.
"OK," I say, "so we're going in. But do me a favour, will you? Follow my lead, and go carefully."
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