The Sky's The Limit Part 18

He was approaching seventeen when his mother announced that they were going home. Starfleet Medical offered her a posting in the San Francisco campus on Earth and she accepted. Things had become awkward for Beverly Crusher aboard Enterprise ever since the incident between Jake and Wesley, and in the aftermath as her son had become a self-made pariah among the youth community aboard ship, the doctor's relationship with Captain Picard had become stiff and professional to the point of brittleness. On his last night aboard Enterprise, Wes happened into an impromptu gathering taking place in one of the arboretums. Watching from a distance, he saw Jake Kurland dancing with Annette, the girl laughing as Jake made a show of his new cadet-gray bridge duty uniform.

Crusher crossed paths with Lieutenant La Forge. The engineer's easy and open manner had lessened in recent weeks, ever since the destruction of his android friend Data during a disastrous away mission on Vagra II. The mechanoid's remains would be accompanying the Crushers on the ship that would take them back to Earth.

"Hey, Wesley." La Forge nodded. "I didn't think I'd see you here."

"I'm not stopping," he explained. "I'm just...taking a last look around."

Geordi was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry things never worked out for you and your mom here."

"I'm not," Wes replied, and found he meant it. "Out here there's no room to breathe, Lieutenant. Out here it's all about being on the edge every second of every day, and if you make one mistake it can wind up ending you..." He trailed off, feeling a pang of guilt at reminding La Forge of his loss. "I don't fit that," he continued. "I just want an ordinary life."

"Yeah," said Geordi. "Well, good luck."

Eric was coming over, a questioning look on his face, but Wesley was already leaving.

A week later they were orbiting Earth and Enterprise was just a memory.

In a store off a side street on Telegraph Hill, Wes bought a battered reproduction of an old electric guitar and found something that could, for a little while at least, take his mind off things. The Telecaster was at least a hundred years old, modeled on an original instrument from the middle of the twentieth century. He picked up the ability to read music as easily as a plant drew in sunlight, and in the residential block where he lived, Crusher would sit on the balcony in warmer days and write music in his head, composing strings that bled out all the angry and the sad inside him. He played in coffee shops; he made, if you could call it that, something of a minor name on San Francisco's scene. People who came to see him left with their emotions stirred; the slight, moody teenager played with muted brilliance. He made the Telecaster sing. There were some girls and some good times, but mostly he was drifting, drifting with the music.

He didn't see his mother much. They couldn't stay in one another's company for long before conflicts and disappointments rose up and bred the same arguments, time after time. That they loved each other was never in doubt, but things had changed so much, to the point that Wesley and Beverly saw only the roads not taken when they were together.

Wes had been back on Earth for less than a solar year before his mother told him she was returning to s.p.a.ce. Planetbound duty had not agreed with her, and word from Picard had filtered back that Enterprise's post of chief medical officer was hers to take. He should have been happy for her. Seeing things through the eyes of a man, he knew now that the offer meant so much more to Beverly than just a better posting; it also offered a rapprochement with Jean-Luc. But on some level, despite all the growing up he had done in the past two years, Wesley was still a boy in many ways. He couldn't see past a fear that she was abandoning him, and to go back to Enterprise with her, to be forced to see Jake and Annette and the others all over again, it was more than he could take. He packed the Telecaster and what little he had, and on the same day Beverly Crusher boarded a starship for the Kavis Alpha sector, Wes was on a tramp freighter lighting for Risa.

"You know all this part," he said ruefully. "Risa, Lya Station Alpha, Rakon, and Kappa Depot."

Mika smiled slightly. "If you'd have stayed on the main colonial circuit, you would have been discovered."

"I didn't want that," Wes admitted. "I wanted to be rootless. I was sick of expectations." Her husband's fingers tightened around her hand. "You know how that feels."

She nodded. "I do." That was what had brought them together, that first time on Kappa, some shared experience. Mika's path, if one stripped the surface from it, had followed a similar road to Wesley's. Born into the family of ranking tribal elders, she too had gone through life with a raft of demands placed upon her head, of things she was to do and to say. Dutifully, Liso had bowed to the burden, but not Mika. Mika had fled, as soon as she was able, caught starry-eyed by a freighter captain who frequented the Dorvan system, a man by the name of Okona. He had turned out to be a mistake, but her ventures had not. In wandering, Mika gained an insight into the worlds beyond theirs that none of her kindred had, and when she met Wesley, somehow she had known that it was time to return.

He smiled and stroked her cheek, reading the memory in her face. "That was the best and worst day of my life." The smile fractured.

She remembered. His guitar, his precious Telecaster, had been stolen. Mika had come across him, dejected and sorrowful that the last unbroken link he had to his past was gone. Together they searched fruitlessly for it. Instead, the two of them found like souls in each other and something deep and powerful between them. He had asked her to marry him shortly thereafter, and Mika's joy when she said yes told her that no other choice she had made in her life was as right as this one.

"I saw him again that day," Wes said distantly. "Before I met you. I'd gone back to the landing field, looking to see if someone had seen anyone with my guitar. I was on the way back..."

Her eyes narrowed. "The alien from the Enterprise? The...Traveler?"

He nodded. "He didn't look any different. It was like no time had pa.s.sed."

"Wesley Crusher."

He turned toward the sound of the voice and the humanoid was there, on the side of the rough-hewn Kappan street, resting against a shuttered storefront. "You," Wes replied, "I know you. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you."

He blinked. "I'm trying to find my guitar..." His words sounded ineffectual and weak. He was a child with a misplaced toy.

"You know that you have already lost it," said the alien. "These actions you are performing serve only to fix a frame of reference for this event, so that you might justify the loss to yourself."

Wesley's lip curled. "And here I was about to ask you to help me find it." He resumed walking along the battered thermoconcrete roadway and the tall man fell in step with him. Evening was drawing in over the port town. In a couple of hours it would be twilight, lit in cold hues by the far distant blue companion star high on the horizon. Cooking smells and the clatter of nonhuman conversation washed over them. They skirted a party of grim-faced Klingon traders and he shot another look at the alien. "Where'd you say you're from?"

"A system your species knows as Tau Alpha C."

Wes picked the location from memory with careless ease. "That's a long way from here. And I thought I was far from home."

"You are." The alien's head bobbed. "Distance isn't only a matter of abstracts like s.p.a.ce-time, but also of emotion."

"Thanks," he replied, "that makes me feel a whole lot worse."

"I am sorry for that," continued his companion, "and I must apologize for what else I have to tell you."

A fist of ice formed in Crusher's chest. Something in the alien's manner stopped him dead. "What is it? Mom-?"

A slight shake of the head. "Your mother is not injured, you need not fear for her well-being." He sighed. "The other human, Captain Picard. His life has just ended."

Wesley's legs turned to lead and he halted in shock. "What? How?"

"The cause was a critical lack of hydration, brought about by the conditions on Lambda Paz, a moon orbiting the fifth world of the Pentarus system." Genuine sorrow was visible on the alien's face. "I regret bringing this news to you, Wesley, but I believed you would wish to know."

"What was he doing there?" he demanded. "Tell me!"

"There was a shuttle crash. The Pentaran pilot and a junior officer from the Enterprise died on impact. Picard survived but was unable to summon help."

Somehow, Wesley instantly knew the ident.i.ty of the other Starfleet crewman. "Jake."

The alien nodded. "Ensign Kurland perished instantly. His end was mercifully swift."

He sagged against the wall of a building and tried to take it in. Picard was gone. For all the distance from the man, for all the cross words between them, Wesley had always felt a connection to the captain that transcended those things. He was suddenly hollow inside, the Traveler's quiet words resonating through him. Years ago, when his father died on a mission, Wesley had been only a child and the full reality of the event had not been clear to him. Now, Picard's death brought all those feelings crashing to the surface, their power undimmed by the pa.s.sage of time. His vision swam with tears as he remembered Jean-Luc standing before him, his hand held out, the offer of sponsorship at the academy on the captain's lips.

"I am sorry, Wesley," repeated the alien. The pale-faced humanoid offered his hand, mirroring Picard's long-forgotten gesture. "Are you ready to go back?"

Crusher shoved away the outstretched arm and pushed off the wall. "Leave me alone," he grated, his voice thick with emotion. "Just get away from me."

"I don't know how he could have known," Wes explained. "We were light-years from Pentarus, and Starfleet didn't get to Lambda Paz until much later. Somehow, he knew it the moment it happened.... And it was as if, when he told me, I knew it too, almost as if I had been there."

"You can't blame yourself for Captain Picard's death, or Jake Kurland's or that pilot's." Mika shook her head. "Wes, you left that life behind years ago. All of those men knew the risks they were facing. They could have made the same choices that you did, but they didn't."

Crusher's eyes were fixed on the cup in his hand. "Jake had just been accepted into Starfleet Academy. The Pentarus mission was going to be his last a.s.signment with the Enterprise before he shipped back to Earth." He gave a bitter chuckle. "He always swore to Annette that he'd command his own starship one day. Instead, he died for nothing in some alien wilderness."

Mika heard severity in Wesley's voice. "He was your friend once."

"He wasn't good enough!" spat her husband. "If he hadn't been aboard Enterprise, with everything that ship ran into, he would never have made the cut! Jake Kurland wasn't good enough to be an ensign! He never would have seen the signs, he wouldn't have been ready for it to all go wrong! Picard would still be alive if-" The sudden tirade faded out as fast as it had come.

"If what?" she asked him. "If you had been there, is that it? If Wesley Crusher had been a Starfleet ensign, he would have kept Jean-Luc Picard alive?"

"Yes," Wes growled, and he fixed Mika with an intense look. "I know this as clearly as I know how much I love you. It's my fault, Mika. I could have prevented it, if only I had made a different choice. I see it like one of Liso's weavings, the threads of time and past in different colors..."

She backed away a step. "Wesley, you're scaring me. I've never seen you this way."

His face fell. "Oh, no, please. Mika, no." The outburst melted away and he came to her, took her in his arms. "Mika, I love you. I'm sorry. It's just...Sometimes, the regret..."

She kissed him into silence. "If you had not been on Kappa that day, if you had been on Lambda Paz, what would have happened to me?" Mika grasped his hands. "To us? Do you regret that?"

He shook his head. "No. Meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me. You've given me something I never had before. Focus. Purpose." Wesley cupped her hand in his. "I love you, wife. Never doubt that."

She was trying to find the right words when a discreet knock sounded at the front door.

It was late, and he was already forming a stern rebuke to give to Lakanta for interrupting them at this hour. The wooden door creaked open, and he kept one hand on it, ready to push it closed at a moment's notice.

His mother stood there on the wide stone step, her hands knotted at her waist, a fragile smile on her lips. "h.e.l.lo, Wes," she began. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"Mom." He blinked and glanced around. There was no sign of Jellico, Lieutenant Teku, or anyone else.

"I came alone," she said by way of explanation. "I asked Geordi to transport me down."

Wesley's mouth opened, but the thoughts he had so easily marshaled moments before fled from him. He was at a loss for what to say. Another surge of old, long-buried feelings turned over inside him, threatening to break the banks of his silence.

Just then the door was taken from him and Mika pushed it all the way open. Beverly Crusher's eyes widened at the sight of the athletic, tawny-skinned girl with her bright smile and her open, elfin face. "Wesley," she said gently, "you're being rude." Mika stepped forward and took his mother's hands in hers. "Welcome to our home, Doctor Crusher. My name is Mika. I'm your son's wife."

He heard the small gasp from his mom's lips. "h.e.l.lo, uh, Mika. Call me Beverly, please."

Mika inclined her head and gestured into the house. "Come in, Beverly. We have tea brewing."

Wes went to the kitchen to search for an extra cup, and it took him a few moments to find a clean one. He remembered how his mother took her tea and brought the steaming drink back into the room to find the two women sharing a smile over something. Mika was like that; she had a warmth about her that could disarm anyone.

"There's a lot I want to tell you," he said as he sat. "A lot of things...that I'm sorry for."

His mother clasped the cup in her long-fingered hands, and her smile wavered a little. "I'm pleased for you, Wes. You've found someone to share your life with. The only thing I was ever afraid of is that you would be lonely out here."

He glanced at his wife. "I was for a while."

She put down the cup. "I have to tell you something. I came here tonight because I wanted to see you, but I'm here against Captain Jellico's orders."

"Jellico? He's wasting his time here, Mom. Nothing's changed. n.o.body will evacuate, not now, not in two days."

Beverly nodded. "He knows that. He's not even going to try to convince you otherwise. The captain is already making plans to remove everyone down here by force."

Mika's jaw dropped in shock. "He can't do that! It's illegal!"

"Apparently he has orders from Admiral Dougherty that allow him to suspend certain clauses of colonial law in this situation."

Wes nodded grimly. "We did declare ourselves outside their jurisdiction. There's nothing to stop Jellico acting first and dealing with the consequences later." He stood up. "We have to take this to Athwara and the other elders, right away."

Mika pulled a shawl over her bare shoulders and followed Wes and Beverly toward the lodge hall. Despite the seriousness of the moment, she found a peculiar elation coursing through her at meeting Wesley's mother. The other woman glanced at her. "My son has grown up. He's truly become a young man, and you've made him very happy," she noted. "I can't remember the last time I saw that look in his eyes."

Mika frowned. "He wanted you there when we were bonded," she told her, "but the Enterprise couldn't be reached. Starfleet wouldn't tell us why.... We heard there was an incident involving the Romulans. Your ship was incommunicado for weeks."

"I understand," said Beverly. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be!" Mika insisted. "You're here now, and that's all that matters. What you've done today, going against your captain's orders for us...I see where my husband gets his strength of character from."

Wesley's mother looked away. "Edward Jellico isn't a bad man. He's just not..."

"Not Jean-Luc Picard?"

She frowned. "No."

There was a commotion up ahead, and Mika saw Athwara and the other elders outside the lodge talking over one another.

"Jellico's going to take us out of here no matter what we do," Wes was saying. "I'll bet he's calibrating the Enterprise transporters to beam as many of us up as the ship can manage in a single go. I doubt he'll give us much warning."

"How can we stop him?" Sinta asked.

Wes glanced back at his mother. "I can try to rig a transport inhibitor to fake out the sensor lock. If we get everyone into the lodge hall, or as close to it as we can, I might be able to project a field bubble they can't beam through."

"You know how to do that?" said Otakay.

"I travel. I've picked up a few things along the way." He touched Beverly on the hand. "Mom. Thank you for what you've done, but you should go. I don't want you to get hurt."

The other woman's eyes glittered. "I've only just met my daughter-in-law. I think I'd like to stay."

Mika's heart leaped when she saw Wesley smile at his mother's words. It was like the sun coming out, all the old hurts melting away.

The lodge door banged open and Lakanta was there, his face grim. "Wes!" he shouted. "We have a big problem!"

"Great Spirit, what now?" Otakay grated.

"The sensors," he bleated, stabbing a finger at the simple grid of scanner antennae on the lodge's roof, "they've picked up another ship entering orbit."

"Another Federation ship?" said Athwara. "A transport for us all, perhaps."

Lakanta shook his head. "Not Federation, elder. A Carda.s.sian Galor-cla.s.s warship, the Reklar."

Beverly's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, no. Wes, this is bad. Captain Jellico has a history with Gul Lemec, the Reklar's commander."

"I'm guessing they're not well disposed toward each other?"

"Last time we crossed paths with him, it was a stalemate and we had to back down. Jellico won't let that happen this time. He won't let Starfleet-or himself-lose face over Dorvan V."

"This changes things," said Sinta. "Even if Wesley's idea works, what happens then? These Carda.s.sians, this alien Lemec, they come here with weapons and hold us at gunpoint?"

"I will appeal to both commanders for calm," began Athwara. "We can resolve this through clear and honest discourse."

Wes shook his head. "Forgive me, old grandfather, but I think that what matters to us will carry no weight with Lemec or Jellico."

"Then what choices are open to us?" demanded Otakay, his color rising. "Deportation is unacceptable, we all agree on that. Occupation of our world by the Carda.s.sians? We have all heard the stories of their death camps and their persecution of other races, like the Bajorans and the Lyshani! We will have to resist them!"