The Sky's The Limit Part 19

Mika gasped. "You're advocating armed revolt?"

"If it comes to that!" Otakay snapped. "I am an old man, but I have fought for my home and I will do it again if need be."

"Do you have weapons? Any defenses?" Beverly asked.

"A meteorite shield, some hand phasers and plasma shotguns," noted Sinta. "Toys compared to those of a real military."

"No one will shed blood over this!" Athwara's voice cut through the air, the old man's authority silencing them all. "It is not our way."

"It may have to be," said Wes grimly.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Wesley Crusher."

Wes turned to see Lakanta staring at him with a fixed, rigid gaze. A chill ran down his spine; something in his friend's manner rang a wrong note with him. The man seemed different somehow, as if the intelligence behind those sleepy eyes had suddenly altered. "Lakanta, we have to do something," he began, the night air around him abruptly still.

"Yes, you do," said the other man.

Crusher realized that they were surrounded by silence. No one was speaking, there were no sounds of distant chirping insects, no gentle wind through the streets. He turned to see Mika, his mother, the others, all of them statues frozen in a moment of gla.s.sy, solidified time. "What...? What's happening?"

Lakanta's face hazed and shifted like slow smoke. The man he had known for years re-formed into a familiar alien aspect of pale, silvery skin. "Wesley," said the Traveler, "h.e.l.lo again."

"Where's Lakanta?" Wes growled. "What have you done?"

"Lakanta is still here," said the alien, tapping his chest. "He has always been an aspect of me. Just like the owner of the store on Telegraph Hill, the captain on that freighter for Risa, the Ferengi who stole your guitar." He gestured at the others. "I haven't done this, Wesley. You have. You've come to this place, to this point of choice, and something inside you knows that it will be the most vital one of your life." The Traveler glanced around, taking in the township. "What you do and say here will lead these people down a path to dissolution or destruction." He smiled slightly. "The one called Otakay, he was correct. Your choices are all illfated."

"I don't understand," he said. But he did. There was a pressure in his mind, like a strange double image. Another set of memories flashed through him, of events from the life of a very different Wesley Crusher. A gray uniform, a girl who changed shape, incredible sights at the edge of the galaxy, a father figure, choices made, and a vision quest...

The alien was nodding. "You see it now. You understand why I followed you through this life, from the moment we first met aboard the Enterprise. I've been the steward of you, Wesley Crusher. Waiting for you to come to this moment, to understand the greatness inside you."

"I'm not great," Wes insisted. "I'm just a man. A musician, a husband. I'm nothing special."

The Traveler chuckled. "Humans. You have such potential, and yet you shackle yourselves with doubts." He nodded to Mika. "All these events are the skein of one possible time line, the evolution of a future from a moment in your past when you dreamed of leading an 'ordinary life'...A life where you were not someone with a destiny, where you were just a commonplace man."

Anger flared inside him. "You played games with my life? What gives you the right?"

"I did nothing but watch," said the alien. "You did this, Wesley. You felt the burden of your gift so strongly that it threatened to break you. For one moment, more than anything, you dreamed of living a life without such a responsibility. And so you have." He held out his hand. "Are you ready to go back?"

The frustration crackled through him, and Wes felt his hands contracting into fists. The decision he had made in that divergent moment was hard and dark there in his thoughts. "Why?" he shouted. "Why should I be forced to make that choice?" Full of undirected fury, he advanced on the alien. "Why can't I choose to live a life that doesn't have such great importance?" He shot a look at Mika and his heart ached. "Why can't I live in...in ordinary days?"

"My friend," said the Traveler, his words heavy with an infinite, solemn sadness, "I have lived for a very long time and I have learned a single, simple truth; there are no ordinary lives. Everyone has a path, and each person's journey affects the motion of the universe around him or her. The smallest of events ripple out to change things on a cosmic scale. This is life." He placed a hand on Wes's shoulder. "If you cannot embrace who and what you truly are, and the potential you represent, you will never be content."

The alien's candor struck any thought of argument from him. He could see the paths clearly now, if he closed his eyes and imagined them. The path he had trodden, and then this one, branching and diverging but ultimately leading toward darkness.

A darkness with a single point of light. "Mika..."

"She exists where you do," said the Traveler. "You can still find her there, if you choose to."

"And all this?" he asked. "What happens to all this, to the people, to Dorvan V?"

"Time and causality will return to their original form, if you allow it. The tragedy about to unfold will not occur." For the last time, the alien offered Wesley his hand. "Are you ready to go back?"

Wes leaned close to Mika's cheek, taking in the scent of her skin, the warmth of her closeness. He kissed her gently and then stepped back from the static tableau.

"I'm ready," he said. "I've made my choice."

The Traveler smiled as the world around them became ghostly and insubstantial. "We have a long journey ahead of us. But the first step on any road is always the hardest."

"Where are we going?" Wes asked.

The alien's smile deepened. "You tell me."

'Twould Ring the Bells of Heaven

Amy Sisson

Historian's note:

This tale is set between "All Good Things," the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the feature film Star Trek Generations.

AMY SISSON.

Amy Sisson is an academic librarian living in Houston, Texas, with her NASA husband, Paul Abell, without whom "'Twould Ring the Bells of Heaven" would not exist. Her Trek fiction includes "The Law of Averages" in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds VII and "You May Kiss the Bride" in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 8. Short stories in her "Unlikely Patron Saints" series have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Irregular Quarterly. She is a graduate of the Clarion West cla.s.s of 2000.

In addition to library work, Amy regularly reviews books for Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA) and Magill Book Reviews. She also writes encyclopedia articles on random subjects ranging from Pixar Studios to Qantas Airlines to the Doobie Brothers, and tends to her collection of ex-parking-lot cats, which she only recently learned (from fellow Trek author Jim Johnson) can be termed a "clowder."

AS THE s.p.a.cE-SUITED FIGURES PULLED DATA THROUGH THE airlock, the android struggled to move, to speak-to simply understand what was happening. But the struggle was entirely internal. His brain sent commands that were not received; he lay limp and uncomprehending while he was dragged several meters and propped against a rocky outcropping.

One of the figures stooped down, placing itself in Data's unmoving line of vision. Its mouth moved, but even if Data's auditory input had been functioning properly, he dimly realized that he would have heard nothing, because there was no atmosphere. He tried to make sense of the mouthed words, but he was distracted by the face inside the helmet. It was attractive by humanoid standards, he knew. It was familiar.

And then it was gone.

As Data once again tried in vain to reestablish control over his motor functions, the departing ship crossed the edge of his field of vision, leaving only distant stars in its wake.

Ennis Outpost director Jarod Maher looked older in person than he had over a viewscreen. His pleasant countenance was frequently creased with anxiety, and his short, sandy hair was streaked with gray.

As Maher led the visitors from the shuttlebay into which they'd transported and down a crowded corridor, Commander Deanna Troi looked around with interest. The outpost was obviously in its infancy; packing crates lined every wall, with exposed power conduits peeking around the untidy stacks. It was easy to forget how luxurious life aboard the Enterprise was, she thought. s.p.a.cious private quarters for the senior crew, replicators programmed with an endless variety of food...Here, she was reminded that people were still willing to give up creature comforts in the name of frontier science.

Maher showed the away team-Deanna, Captain Picard, Will, and Chief Engineer La Forge-into a makeshift conference room with a large brown table surrounded by eight mismatched chairs. A viewscreen had been mounted carelessly on the bare metal wall at the far end of the room.

"Please sit down," Maher said. "Doctor Aaron will be here in a moment. Would anyone care for something to drink?"

As he pa.s.sed around cups of coffee, Maher thanked Picard for transporting over to the outpost. "As you can see, Captain, our supplies are a bit tight at this stage. We don't have transporters yet, and I think our shuttle is counting the days until retirement. Ah, Doctor Aaron," he said, as a tall man walked in. "This is the party from the Enterprise."

The newcomer had thick, untidy black hair and dark brown eyes, and wore a wrinkled lab coat. He sat near the head of the table, nodding at each of the visitors as Maher named them but never quite meeting their eyes. Deanna sensed both shyness and impatience; this man was ready to get down to business.

Picard seemed to come to the same conclusion. "Doctor Aaron," he said. "We've been looking forward to hearing about your work here."

"It's really quite extraordinary, Captain," said Aaron. For the first time, Deanna felt the man's enthusiasm. "Almost everything we need for this outpost can be found in Heaven's rings: water for life support and fuel; raw building materials that can be fabricated into shelter. Ennis is one of Heaven's more stable moons, in terms of orbit and geologic activity, so this is an ideal base from which to study Heaven's rings. This outpost will be very basic for quite a while, but in a few years I hope we'll have a first-cla.s.s research station."

Maher leaned forward. "Not to mention a larger settlement to accommodate the scientists' families," he put in. "We haven't been in this solar system for very long-the colony on Chandra is only eight years old-but we're eager to expand our presence."

"I take it you plan to shepherd ring fragments here to provide raw materials," Picard said.

"Not fragments, Captain," Aaron said. "A fragment. A moonlet, in fact. We're going after Bell-B."

Aaron tapped the padd he'd brought with him, activating the viewscreen on the wall. A graphic representation of a section of the rings appeared, as viewed from above. On the left side was a curved, orange section of Heaven, with concentric ring segments radiating outward to the right.

"You can see that the rings are labeled A through H, with A the innermost ring. Heaven's rings are similar to Saturn's: bright, lots of water ice, and very well defined, especially the inner rings. The outer rings, F, G, and H, are broader and more nebulous; in fact, it's difficult to see H with the naked eye, because the particles are dark and widely dispersed, but it's very much there."

"Where in the rings does-you called it 'Bell-B,' is that right?-come from?" Deanna asked.

Aaron tapped the padd again and the screen zoomed in on Ring D, which was thin and sharp. "These two moons are called the Bell Twins, or Bell-A and Bell-B," he said. "Actually, we tend to just call them Alpha and Beta when we're feeling lazy. They lie on either side of Ring D, so they're not quite embedded moonlets, as opposed to Ares, which falls right in the middle of Ring C. But the Bell Twins are interesting because they're compositionally similar to each other, at least on the surface: rocky with a great deal of water ice. And they're obvious shepherd moons-you can see the well-defined gaps on either side of the ring, here and here. The Bells don't usually sit at the same point in their orbits like this, of course. Alpha is closer to Heaven than Beta by almost fourteen thousand kilometers, so its...o...b..tal period is more than two hours shorter."

"But why are you going after such a large moonlet?" asked Geordi. "Wouldn't it be easier to shepherd smaller fragments in batches rather than move something so large?"

Doctor Aaron smiled. "Yes. But it's not just the raw materials we're after. There's still a lot we don't know about planetary rings. On cosmological time scales, rings aren't stable, so they have to be replenished. New material can come from moons that are geologically active, or from meteoritic bombardment that creates new ring particles through impacts, and so on."

His eyes shone. "By removing Beta from the equation entirely, we'll have an unprecedented opportunity to observe how a well-developed ring system responds to a major upheaval. Once Beta is out of the picture, we'll observe how the ring material redistributes itself and see how Beta's absence affects the ring's edge definition. It's even possible that a 'replacement Bell' will gradually accrete, if the system decides it really needs a shepherd in that location."

"You almost make it sound as though the rings have a mind of their own," Picard remarked. "I didn't realize that changes could take place quickly enough to observe in a short time frame."

"A new accretion would take a long time," Aaron conceded. "But over the next few years we should see enough signs to be able to predict what will happen. You'd be surprised, Captain. Back when Earth's early probes observed Saturn, they recorded significant changes in the rings between the Voyager flybys and the Ca.s.sini observations, and they were only about twenty years apart. And those changes happened without any external interference."

"Hadn't you already started the shepherding process?" Picard asked. "What happened?"

Aaron switched the viewscreen to an animated diagram. "The plan was to land several dozen remote thruster units on Beta to propel it up and away from the ring plane in a perpendicular direction, disturbing the surrounding ring fragments as little as possible," he said, pointing. "Once it was clear, we began a slow thrust to move Beta toward Ennis and planned to reverse the thrusters to decelerate Beta on this end. But even though our sensors say the probes were working, Beta has veered off the expected trajectory several times. We've tried to correct by reprogramming the thrusters remotely, but Beta is still acting up and we're losing valuable time. We don't know if the thrusters are at fault, or if there are gravitational factors in this system that we haven't accounted for."

"We really should have replaced the thruster units, just in case," Maher said in apology. "But this is a bare-bones operation in terms of resources. Some of the colonists on Chandra feel that we shouldn't have tackled this project before the settlement was more fully established."

Riker spoke up for the first time. "What can we do to help?"

"I'd like to start over with our gravimetric mapping of Beta and then work outward to the rest of Heaven's ring-moon system if necessary," said Aaron. "From what I understand, your sensors are more sensitive than ours. Then we can adjust our propulsion strategy based on the results."

Maher broke in again. "Also, Captain, if it's not too much of an imposition, I wonder if you might be able to smooth things over with the colony administrators. Would you consider making a side trip to Chandra? And maybe mention just how important you consider this pursuit of scientific knowledge to be."

Picard smiled at Maher in understanding, then turned to Riker, who seemed to read his thoughts.

"What about using a runabout for the survey?" Riker said. "It could get a lot closer to Beta than the Enterprise could. We could send a small team with Doctor Aaron on the Colorado and take the Enterprise to Chandra."

"It's a nice little settlement," Maher put in, his tone hopeful. "Some of your crew might enjoy a short visit, Captain. And on your way back, perhaps you could bring some supplies from the colony that have been delayed."

"A short sh.o.r.e leave certainly sounds tempting," said Picard. "Why don't we take Doctor Aaron back to the Enterprise with us this afternoon? He and Mister La Forge can look over the sensor equipment on the runabout and make any necessary modifications. Doctor, you're welcome to stay onboard as our guest tonight. That will let you get an early start first thing in the morning.

"Commander Troi," Picard continued casually, "you'll lead the away team on the Colorado. Choose a science officer to work with Doctor Aaron, and a pilot, preferably one with engineering experience."

Deanna's eyes widened slightly, but she did not otherwise let her surprise show. "Yes, Captain," she said.

"Thank you, Captain." Aaron beamed. "I just need about twenty minutes to get my equipment together. If you'll excuse me, I'll meet you back in the shuttlebay." He rushed out of the room.

"Yes, Captain, thank you," said Maher. "This outpost has had a bit of a rocky start-no pun intended-and we're very grateful for your help. If you'll excuse me as well, I'm going to consult with my operations officer so she can start working up a requisitions list for the colony administrators."

When Maher had exited, Picard turned to Deanna. "I hope you'll enjoy this a.s.signment, Commander," he said. "It should be fairly routine, but it's a good chance to stretch your wings. Any thoughts on your crew?"

"Can you spare Data, Captain?" asked Deanna.

"Excellent choice," said Picard. "With Data as science officer, I would even suggest you choose one of our younger officers as pilot-this kind of survey is just the thing for eager young ensigns. And with Mister Data aboard, you'll have plenty of backup piloting experience."

After the group had rematerialized aboard the Enterprise, Deanna arranged to meet Doctor Aaron, Geordi, and Data for a working dinner at nineteen hundred hours. She turned to leave, with the intention of reviewing crew files and brushing up on away mission protocols, but as she exited the transporter room she found Will waiting for her just outside. He checked to make sure she was alone, then bowed deeply, sketching an exaggerated sweep with his arm and trying to hide a pleased grin all the while.

"Well, well. Your first away mission command," he teased.

Deanna couldn't help but smile back. "Let's hope it goes more smoothly than yours did."

Will groaned and pretended to stagger, hands clutched over his heart. "Ouch! Don't remind me."

Deanna laughed as they turned to walk down the corridor. "Well, it would take a lot to top that one, wouldn't it?"

"Commander Troi," called a voice behind them, cutting off whatever reply Will was about to make. They turned to see Geordi jogging toward them. "Sorry, I wanted to catch you before you left. Data is showing Doctor Aaron to his quarters now. I wondered if you would mind a suggestion for that pilot a.s.signment?"

"Whom did you have in mind?" asked Deanna.

"Ensign Taurik," Geordi said.

"I'll look at his record," said Deanna. "Any special reason for recommending him?"

Even if Deanna weren't an empath, she could have sensed Geordi's sheepishness. "Well, it's just...he's kind of driving us crazy in engineering right now. He's been volunteering for everything and we're running out of 'extra credit' a.s.signments for him."

"Looks like the after effects of those crew evaluations still haven't worn off," commented Riker. "I've seen the same thing with some of the junior bridge crew."

"You're not kidding," Geordi said, shaking his head. "It's been a month and a half, and all the junior engineers are still looking over their shoulders like they expect to see me with a clipboard and a whistle. I never thought I'd apply the term 'eager beaver' to a Vulcan, but-"

"I think there's a little more to it in his case," said Deanna. "Taurik and Sam Lavelle and Alyssa Ogawa were particularly close to Ensign Sito, and they're still dealing with her death. For Taurik in particular, throwing himself into his work isn't just practical, it's almost the only socially acceptable way for Vulcans to react to grief-which they're not supposed to be feeling, of course."

"You may be right, Counselor," said Geordi. "But that aside, I wouldn't recommend Taurik just to get him out of my hair. He's an excellent pilot and a d.a.m.n good engineer. I think he'd be a good member of your team."

"Thanks, Geordi," said Deanna. "I'll talk to Taurik and let you know what I decide."

"My pleasure. I'm gonna meet Doctor Aaron in engineering in a little while. Guess I'll see you at dinner."

Geordi turned off at the next juncture, and Will looked down at Deanna, impressed. "Maybe you've been right all along," he teased. "Maybe command officers do need more counselor training. I have a feeling it's going to be a real a.s.set in your case, Deanna."