The Returned, Part I, Page 4

  “Any of them have gods for ancestors?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then.” He put out a hand and helped Calhoun to his feet. “So . . . Bravo Station, then?”

  Calhoun looked skeptically at McHenry’s hand. “Are you planning to transport us there?”

  “That was the plan, yes.”

  “Forget it. A godlike creature is not shunting me around. I have the ship I came in about a kilometer from here. Why don’t we just take that?”

  McHenry thought about it. “Can I shunt you over to the ship and we fly from there?”

  “Why?”

  “I like shunting. It’s convenient and saves on boot leather.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Calhoun actually chuckled. “Fine.” Then he glanced at the unconscious officer. “Let me just leave a note.”

  iii.

  NUEVO’S HEAD WAS hurting as he slowly opened his eyes. The recent events that he had endured spun through his head and automatically he reached out for his phaser. He was surprised to see that it was lying right next to him, and he grabbed it up, climbing to his feet so quickly that he almost toppled over. He swung the phaser around, looking for a target.

  None presented itself.

  Instead, to his surprise, words had been carved into the dirt next to him, obviously courtesy of a thin phaser beam.

  It said, “YOU TALKED ME OUT OF GOING. WELL DONE.”

  He stared at the message, unsure at first of what it meant. Then everything that he had endured flooded through him, and he remembered the man he had fought and had tried to stop from using the Guardian.

  He had apparently succeeded.

  His combadge went off. “Sir, this is Santiago! I just came to! And we have an incoming message about a Mackenzie Calhoun! They suspect he was coming here, and I’m pretty damn sure that’s who knocked me out.”

  Moments later his other men were also reporting in, demanding to know if he was okay and what had just happened.

  “This is Nuevo,” he said briskly. “It’s okay. I handled it.”

  Bravo Station

  i.

  SHELBY’S OPTIMISM NEVER wavered.

  As she did every day, the admiral strode into the room where Soleta was laid out. For several weeks she had remained in the sickbay, but eventually the doctors there had informed Shelby that there was nothing more to be done for her. She remembered standing there hopefully as a succession of the Federation’s best minds attempted to extract Soleta from what Shelby had come to think of as her hibernation. Every single one had been unsuccessful.

  Soleta had simply lain there, unresponsive to every attempt to bring her out of her coma.

  Shelby had not been present in San Francisco when the accident had originally happened, although “accident” was too general a word. In a confrontation against one of the D’myurj—who had been disguised as Admiral Nechayev—Soleta had been Calhoun’s secret weapon. In a rare instance of using the Vulcan mind-meld as a weapon, Soleta had shoved her mind squarely into Nechayev’s in an attempt to shut her down. Her success had been more absolute than anyone could have predicted, and Nechayev had effectively melted down in the middle of the square outside Starfleet Headquarters. But the meld had had an impact on Soleta, causing her to fall into a coma, her skin turning so yellow that, had she been human, she would have been diagnosed with kidney failure.

  At first she had been brought to the Excalibur for care, but the ship wasn’t designed for long-term patient care. The sickbay was to aid the injured, not for a patient who seemed disinclined to come around, though her skin had eventually returned to its normal color. But no one wanted to transfer Soleta to a Federation hospital. It was a faraway and remote option, plus she would be surrounded by strangers.

  It had been Shelby who had recommended that Soleta be transferred to Bravo Station. Soleta had remained in sickbay for a month before the doctors had suggested she be provided private quarters with nursing care. The admiral had been glad to do so.

  Aside from a couple of planetscapes hanging on the wall, and a small table and chair next to the bed, there were no furnishings in the room. It wasn’t as if Soleta required anything, and yet Shelby felt as if something was lacking. As she stood for a while in the room, the admiral reminded herself—not for the first time—to look into acquiring something, anything else. Maybe lending it some normalcy might somehow help Soleta recover . . . or not.

  She walked over to Soleta and sat down next to her. She reached over and took Soleta’s hand, interlacing her fingers. “So . . . been an exciting few days for me,” she said conversationally. For a time she had wondered whether Soleta was capable of hearing her, but Shelby had stopped caring. She spoke as much for herself as she did for her Romulan-Vulcan friend. “I went to Xenex. Found Mac. Tried to talk him into leaving. Then we had sex and that was incredible. I’ll tell you this, Soleta, whatever disagreements I may have had with him over the years, the sex was never among them. And then I fell asleep, which is what I always do when I’ve had sex after being chaste for a long time. And when I woke up, poof. He was gone.

  “You ever have a man in your life who would do that to you, Soleta? Some man you were totally nuts about and when you were your most vulnerable, he would just up and leave you? Because I’m telling you, I really hated him when he did that. I really did. You just put yourself out there for someone, and he makes love to you and then takes off. What sort of man does that? What do you call a man like that?” She paused and then sighed heavily. “My husband. That’s what I call a man like that.”

  She squeezed Soleta’s hand. No response. That figured.

  “I want you to know,” she continued, as if Soleta had responded to her, “that you have a home here for however long you need it. You’ll probably outlive me, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve already spoken with Starfleet, and whoever comes here after me will attend to you. Which is not to say that you’ll never come back to normal. I’m positive you will. But in case you don’t . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, and she sighed heavily. “I am totally screwing this up. You’d think, after all this time, I’d be able to speak with you without saying stupid things. Perhaps you should have stayed on the Excalibur. I felt we had superior medical facilities here, and we could be of more help to you, but we’ve come up empty. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for so many things.”

  Her combadge beeped. “This’ll just take a moment,” she said, and tapped it. “Shelby.”

  “Admiral, Cambria in receiving. We’ve had a ship land that I think you’re going to want to meet.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s your husband.”

  The response was so unexpected that it took her mind a few moments to process it. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “It’s Captain Calhoun.”

  “Are you sure?” She mentally kicked herself for her incredulity. “I mean, has it landed yet?”

  “Just settled into docking bay two, Admiral.”

  “All right, hold them down there. I’m coming.”

  “Or we could come up.”

  Shelby jumped back and shrieked, which she belatedly realized was not remotely how a Starfleet admiral should react to an unexpected situation. Yet that was how she had responded to Mark McHenry, who had appeared literally out of nowhere with a somewhat-startled Mackenzie Calhoun standing next to him. Calhoun swayed slightly on his feet before recovering. “You really need to stop doing that,” he said to McHenry before turning to face Shelby. “Eppy. Looking good.”

  She was unable to restrain herself. She strode forward and slapped him as hard as she could across the cheek.

  Truthfully, she was surprised she’d struck him. She’d assumed that Calhoun would be able to snap his head out of the way before contact was made. Instead he simply stood there as her hand struck his cheek, and the resulting slap was so loud that i
t was almost as if a brief discharge of thunder had gone off.

  He simply stood there, absorbing the impact. Then he said calmly, “Feel better?”

  She didn’t. Impossible as it was to believe, she’d actually managed to hurt her hand. How that could be, she couldn’t even begin to wrap her mind around. Her urge was to shake out her hand in order to rid herself of the pain, but she didn’t want to show that she’d injured herself. “Yes,” she said, and then in addition punched him in the shoulder. That was even worse; it was like punching a rock. “You ran out on me.”

  “I had somewhere to go.”

  “And you had to go there without me?”

  “I was going to the Guardian of Forever in order to change time.”

  Her face paled. “I knew it! I warned them you’d be coming! I knew that’s what you were going to do! You can’t do that!”

  “Beginning to understand why I left you behind? Calm down,” he continued before she could say anything. “I didn’t do it.”

  Shelby let out a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s good to hear, that you came to your senses.” Then she understood and turned to McHenry. “He didn’t come to his senses. You stopped him.”

  “It was kind of a mixture,” said McHenry.

  She stared at him in confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  “I understand you have someone in a coma. I’m thinking I can help you with that.”

  For the first time in weeks Shelby felt hope. “Are you serious? Is he serious?” she asked Calhoun.

  “He certainly seems to be. With your permission, of course.”

  She was about to tell McHenry to get immediately to it, but then she stopped and stared at him. “Why now?”

  “Why now what?”

  “Why did you show up now? She’s been lying here for months. You could have come at any time.”

  McHenry shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair. “Because, honestly, Admiral, I live on a much bigger scale than you do. I didn’t get pulled into this because of Soleta. I got pulled into it because of him.” He nodded toward Calhoun. “I had to stop him from crashing the entirety of, you know, reality. And he needs something to keep him busy. So I figured that bringing Soleta back to the real world would be a way of keeping his mind off the prospect of doing something monumentally stupid. Understand now?”

  “I guess,” she said, although she still sounded suspicious. Then she shook it off. “Okay, fine. So go to it. Bring her back to us.”

  “Fine.” McHenry walked toward Soleta and sat on the edge of her bed. “Man,” he sighed, “she’s been through so much since I first met her. We went to Starfleet Academy together. I didn’t know she was part Romulan back then. Nobody did. All I knew was that she was going to be a great science officer. No one could have guessed the direction her career would take.”

  “I’ve seen Starfleet make some monumentally stupid decisions,” said Calhoun, “but their forcing her out because she lied on her application has to be one of the most idiotic. They were convinced she was a spy.”

  “They forced her out, and she became a spy as a result. That was good thinking,” said McHenry. He put two fingers to her temple. “Okay,” he said softly. “This shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Have you ever done anything like this?” asked Shelby.

  “Never had to.”

  “Do you know you can?”

  “No.” He smiled raggedly. “Exciting, isn’t it.”

  ii.

  NECHAYEV PUSHES BACK with her mind, and Soleta meets the challenge, and their consciousnesses collide. Soleta is on the verge of destruction, just that quickly, just that easily, and she focuses all her will, all her essence, her ego, her id, everything, into one great vicious destructive spear and she drives it forward with as much force as she can. As she commits this incredible act of determination, she wonders why she has done this, why she has, time and again, risked herself to serve, whenever possible, an organization that tossed her away, that treated her so very, very badly, and it is at that moment that she is struck with the thoroughly astounding realization that she is totally, madly, and completely in love with Mackenzie Calhoun. She has just enough time to think, Well, of course you are, how could it be anything else? You should have realized that ages ago, and that is when everything goes black . . .

  Nechayev pushes back with her mind, and Soleta meets the challenge, and their consciousnesses collide, and—

  “Soleta.”

  . . . how could it be anything else but that, you should have realized that ages ago, and that is when everything goes . . .

  “Soleta.”

  . . . meets the challenge, and their—

  “Soleta!”

  . . . when everything goes . . .

  “Soleta! It’s over!”

  And Soleta stops and looks around, she’s standing in San Francisco with the towering edifice of Starfleet Headquarters gazing down at her. Nechayev is standing there facing her, her hands in combat position . . .

  “She’s gone. Nechayev is gone. It was all over months ago.”

  She knows that voice. It is so familiar to her, where does she know that voice from . . . ?

  “McHenry?” She is astounded. It cannot be McHenry. Mark is gone.

  No.

  He is there. He is standing in the fountain, near the outer edge, and water is cascading around him but he is not getting wet because, wait, is there a fountain near Starfleet Headquarters, she does not think so, but what is it doing there—

  “Soleta, can you hear me? It’s me. Right here.” He waves to her, and it seems such a casual, ordinary thing that McHenry is standing there and waving, but that is impossible, what is he doing here, he was never there before, how could it be that—

  “I know it doesn’t seem possible,” he says as if reading her mind, and he is walking toward her, hands outstretched, this must be an illusion, or a trick of Nechayev’s. That’s it, it’s a trick. “No, it’s not a trick.” He is in her mind. “Yes, I’m in your mind and so are you, you’re no longer in San Francisco, you’re in a room in Bravo Station, and Captain Calhoun and Admiral Shelby are with me and hoping that I’m going to be able to pull you back.”

  What is he saying? This is impossible, he can’t be here, he’s off roaming the galaxy. “I came back, Soleta, I came back to help you, well actually, to be truthful, I came back to help Mac, and bringing you back into the world is the way that I’m going to help you. I need you to take my hand now.”

  Others have tried to approach you and told you similar nonsense, they are all tricks of Nechayev’s mind, they are all trying to convince you to break off your fight with her—

  “There’s no more fight. You don’t have to break off anything. You won. This is what happened to her. Look.”

  She is afraid to turn around.

  “Oh for god’s sake, Soleta, would you turn around and just look?” McHenry has stopped walking and is just standing there with that somewhat-distracted expression and that vaguely annoyed tone of voice typical of McHenry. Soleta gulps deeply, turns, and looks, and she cannot believe it. Nechayev is melting away, there is nothing but a puddle of flesh and liquid bones, she is astounded. “Of course you are. You didn’t see this. You were unconscious, and you have been since that day. You’ve been reliving it over and over again, you’re stuck in a loop, but it’s time to come out of it now, okay?”

  She stares at him uncomprehendingly and very tentatively asks, “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You won, Soleta.” He extends a hand to her once more. “Come on out and take your bow.”

  For one final moment Soleta is sure that this must be some kind of trick, but the more she stares at McHenry, the more she becomes convinced that this is him, her old friend, that he is there to rescue her. It would explain this odd feeling of déjà vu sh
e’s been having. She considers the notion that Calhoun and Shelby are waiting for her to come out of this whatever-she’s-in, and for an instant she thinks about her realization of her feelings toward Calhoun, and she is deathly embarrassed, because she doesn’t want Calhoun to know, and she sure as hell does not want Shelby to know. Fortunately no one knows except her and oh my . . .

  “They’ll never hear it from me,” says McHenry, “I swear.”

  His hand is right in front of her, and she reaches out for it . . .

  iii.

  SOLETA CRIED OUT so abruptly that Shelby jumped back and collided with Calhoun.

  Soleta pulled instinctively away from McHenry and rolled off the far side of the bed. It was obviously her intention to strike some manner of defensive pose, but that was gone the moment her feet hit the deck; her legs, which hadn’t been used in months, promptly gave way. Having exactly zero muscle control, Soleta had one choice and that was for her legs to collapse beneath her as she fell straight down and hit the deck quite loudly.

  “Grozit! Help her up!” Calhoun said immediately, even as he ran to obey his own command. It was uncertain whom he was ordering at that moment: Shelby outranked him, and McHenry was no longer Starfleet. That didn’t deter any of them from bolting around the bed and hauling Soleta back up onto the mattress.

  Soleta was looking around in total confusion. “Where’s Nechayev?” she gasped out.

  “The one you fought is dead,” Calhoun told her.

  “Yes. Right. Of course. McHenry told me that.”

  Calhoun stared at McHenry in confusion. He was a bit unclear on what the hell had just happened. McHenry had only pressed his fingers against her forehead five, ten seconds ago. Calhoun had been sure that a meld with someone whom so many others had tried to revive would take quite a while. In no time at all, Mark had brought Soleta back to the land of the living. It seemed unlikely, and yet that was what had happened.