Captain's Blood

14

PROCESSING SEGMENT 3, STARDATE 57486.7

“We have to find Jim and McCoy,” Picard said.

La Forge nodded his agreement, but like Picard, kept close watch on the Reman doctor on the other side of the darkened infirmary. The two men stood beside an oversized examination table that was fitted with a pallet of autonomous medical devices. “Do you think we’re too late?” the engineer asked.

Picard held his hand over his mouth, as if covering a cough. “To stop the civil war?”

“If that’s what’s really going on,” La Forge said. For a moment, his eyes turned to Picard.

Picard returned his gaze without discomfort. The fact that the engineer’s eyes were artificial implants no longer registered with him. He had enjoyed friendship with a wholly artificial being in Data. He was presently taking direction, if not orders, from a holographic entity. More than any other person, Picard knew that the shell of an intelligent being had no bearing on what was truly important: the spirit that animated that shell.

“I’ve been wondering that myself,” Picard said, before he, like La Forge, returned his attention to the Reman.

“The third party,” La Forge said, and Picard knew the words La Forge wouldn’t say to identify that group. Words too dangerous to speak aloud in this system.

“Deliberately provoking a civil war,” Picard added. To him, that was the questionable theory that had driven this mission, but that now fit the facts. If custody of Joseph had truly been the sole reason for the attack on the Calypso, then why was the ship’s crew allowed to live? The intruders could just as easily have set their disruptors to kill. Surely, if the Calypso and all hands aboard had simply disappeared, the resulting situation would have been far more stable. As it was, with survivors to raise the alarm and push for an investigation, and with a father like Jim Kirk who could be counted upon to attempt to rescue his son without regard for consequences, it seemed the people responsible for this outrage could not have done more if they had wished to create further tension.

But with the Romulan Empire already on the path to war, why undertake a side mission to attack the crew of the Calypso? Picard still could not fathom the strategy involved, nor the purpose behind it.

“Can you see what he’s doing over there?” he asked La Forge.

The engineer blinked.

Picard waited patiently for his response. Blinking meant La Forge was shifting the frequency sensitivity of his implants, perhaps to look into the infrared.

“I’d say he’s preparing spray hypos.”

“Not an encouraging development, I’d say.”

La Forge folded his arms. “We could take him.”

“We might have to,” Picard agreed. “But what then? Beverly and Mister Scott are in whatever passes for surgery around here. And Jim and McCoy are in the burn unit.”

“Captain, this might not be the most welcome suggestion, but we are outnumbered down here. I think the best course of action might be to get back to the Calypso and call for the Titan.”

Picard was uncomfortable even considering that possibility, but knew he must. “It means leaving our friends behind.”

“The way they’ve been treating us so far, I don’t think they’d be in danger.”

Picard couldn’t argue that point. It was exactly what he had said to McCoy about why they shouldn’t fear the worst for Joseph. The boy had been beamed away by people determined to save the child from kidnapping. It did not stand to reason that Joseph’s rescuers would then wish to cause him harm.

“And with the Titan’s sensors,” La Forge went on, “we could find Kirk and McCoy, and Doctor Crusher and Scotty in…under a minute. Beam them aboard, and be gone.”

“What about Joseph?”

“Do you really think he’s still here?”

Picard had gone back and forth on that one, and in the end had decided the most likely outcome was that Kirk’s son was on Remus. He shared his reasoning now with La Forge.

“Whoever boarded the Calypso, they were too small to be Remans. Which means they were likely Romulans. Which makes it almost a certainty that Joseph was beamed out by Remans.”

“With a Starfleet transporter,” La Forge said skeptically, “through full shields.”

“When we resolve this situation and we’re safely back home, I look forward to your engineering report,” Picard said crisply. And that was all the time he wished to devote to thinking about the physical impossibility of what had happened to the child.

“Here he comes,” La Forge warned.

The Reman doctor, whose name was the same as his function, approached with a green metal tray, made of the same oxidized-copper-color substance as the cane he had given to McCoy. Picard could just make out the small cylinders of two spray hypos resting on it.

“I have prepared a medicinal compound for you,” Doctor said. His voice was an improbable cross between a Klingon growl and an Andorian hiss. Quite impossible to analyze for signs of threat or lies, or so it seemed to Picard.

“It will help your liver metabolize the waste products created by your bodies’ stress response to the disruptor blasts.”

“Thank you,” Picard said, trusting the nuances of his voice were equally impenetrable to the Reman. “You are showing us a great kindness.”

Doctor hesitated, giving Picard a measured look. Picard returned it, wondering if Federation Standard did not easily translate into the Reman language.

La Forge’s intervention began as he stepped up to one side of the Reman, who towered over him by a head. “Should I roll up my sleeve?” the engineer asked, even as he began to tug up on the arm of his jacket.

“Here, let me hold that while you give us the shots,” Picard said, reaching for the tray as he approached Doctor from the other side.

The Reman was momentarily flustered by their double approach. “No, it is not necessary to remove clothing,” he said to La Forge. “Not necessary,” he said to Picard, withdrawing the tray, stepping back.

But the Reman’s withdrawal came too late. La Forge swung his already raised fist into Doctor’s face just as, from the other side, Picard used both his hands to swing the tray up and smash it into Doctor’s head.

With a shrill hissing shriek, the Reman stumbled back, and La Forge and Picard pressed their advantage, wrestling him to ground.

If the Reman had been a Klingon, the battle would have been over in seconds.

But the Reman had been born on a high-gravity world. The Reman had been raised tearing ore from rock with no tools but bare hands.

Once the surprise of the attack was over, two puny humans did not present a challenge.

From flat on his back, Doctor threw a single closed-fist punch upward at La Forge, knocking the engineer backward into a medical cart. Then, even as Picard, astride him, tried to close his hands around the Reman’s throat, Doctor swung up his knee to strike Picard’s back, sending him flying forward.

The Reman was on his feet in a single, fluid movement, growling, spittle dripping from his fangs.

With a console for leverage, Picard struggled against gravity and pulled himself up to see La Forge slowly getting to his feet a few meters behind the Reman.

The two of them moved as if they shared the same idea: Their only hope was to renew the attack, keeping it constant from two sides. This time they would not miscalculate their foe’s strength and fighting prowess.

As if reading their minds, the Reman abruptly spun and darted between two medical beds to the far side of the infirmary, forcing his pursuers to press their attack together.

Picard and La Forge immediately gave chase, but then Picard called out for La Forge to hold back—the Reman was heading for an equipment cabinet. They had no way of knowing what kind of medical instruments might suddenly be turned against them.

La Forge immediately lifted a tray by its wheeled stand, turned the stand sideways for use as a quarterstaff.

The Reman hissed, his large, pointed ears seeming to crinkle closed, as the tray and its contents clattered to the floor. Testing what he took to be a sign of possible Reman weakness, Picard grabbed a narrow cylinder from a workbench. A mouthpiece dangled from it—emergency oxygen, he guessed. The cylinder became his club as he approached the doctor warily, banging his weapon noisily against whatever hard surface was at hand.

But the Reman was not deterred by noise.

He whirled around from the cabinet with a small disruptor in hand.

“Get back!” he snarled.

La Forge and Picard slowed their advance, but neither of them stopped. In Picard’s experience, it was one thing for a noncombatant to draw a weapon, quite another to fire it at another living being. All it would take was a moment’s hesitation, and together he and La Forge could subdue their adversary.

His warning disregarded, the Reman quickly made an adjustment to his weapon, took aim at a workbench between Picard and La Forge, and fired.

Picard and La Forge ducked for cover as the workbench split in two, lab equipment shattering and flying in shards.

“Consider carefully, humans,” the Reman spat at them. “After I destroy you, honor demands I will have to destroy your companions, as well.”

After all the opportunities there had been to kill the crew of the Calypso, someone was finally making a death threat.

Picard motioned to La Forge not to advance again. Picard knew that neither he nor the engineer was willing to risk the safety of their friends. After the workbench demonstration, the Reman’s weapon was clearly set to kill.

Picard took a chance that even an alien doctor would be reluctant to cause harm if it were not absolutely necessary. He dropped the cylinder, held his hands up and open.

“No one needs to get hurt,” Picard said.

The doctor swung his disruptor at La Forge.

Picard nodded and La Forge tossed his tray stand away, then also raised his hands.

“But we need to see our companions,” Picard said. He wondered if his analysis of their situation was correct. Were they being kept alive to guarantee there would be further complications? Or were Reman motives simply too alien to predict?

“They are being treated.”

“We can help.”

“You are not medical personnel.”

Picard considered his options. If the doctor was not part of whatever conspiracy brought them here, then perhaps he could be an unwitting source of information. At least we have a dialogue going, he thought. “We are concerned that we and our companions are being held prisoner,” Picard said, hoping that the doctor might confirm or deny that supposition.

Instead, the doctor looked at him with an expression of confusion so strong that it easily crossed the divide between their species. “You are on Remus. Everyone is a prisoner here.”

“But we’re Federation citizens,” La Forge said, picking up on what Picard had started. “When we’ve been treated, won’t we be allowed to return to our ship?”

The doctor shook his head, as if he couldn’t understand what La Forge had said. “You are on Remus,” he repeated.

Picard tried again. “But can we leave?”

“No one leaves.”

Picard couldn’t decide if the doctor was referring to some decree concerning the kidnapped crew of the Calypso or if he were simply incapable of understanding that not everyone on Remus had to remain there.

Yet among the Remans, the legend of Shinzon was grounded in the almost religious belief that someday freedom would be obtained for all Reman slaves. Picard essayed a new approach.

“Can we leave once the new Shinzon comes to Remus?”

The doctor’s stern expression became beatific, the change accompanied by a slight shift in his body, as it relaxed.

Picard exchanged a glance with La Forge, recalling Kirk’s mention of the reverential attitude that had come over the Romulan Assessors as they discussed what seemed to be their religion—the Jolan Movement.

“When Shinzon comes,” the doctor murmured, “all Remans shall have freedom.”

“Doctor,” La Forge said suddenly, “what is ‘freedom’?”

The engineer had noticed something in the doctor’s answer. Something important. Something I missed, Picard thought.

The Reman’s bliss faded. “It is what we will have when Shinzon comes.”

“But what is it?” La Forge pressed him. “What will your life be like when you have freedom?”

The doctor took a long time to answer, and even then all he said was “Better.”

Picard was suddenly overcome with sorrow, then anger, because this alien being, so long a slave, so long crushed beneath Romulan oppression, was unable to even grasp the concept of freedom. How could any so-called intelligent species force another into such abject servitude?

For a moment, he wondered if a deliberately manipulated civil war might actually be what the Romulan Star Empire needed, and for just that moment, Picard’s thoughts matched his emotions. If so, let them reap the destruction that they’ve sown here. Let the Romulans suffer as they have made their Reman brothers suffer.

But the rational side of Picard knew better.

A Romulan civil war would not remain the problem of the empire alone.

Another way had to be found.

“Doctor,” Picard said calmly, remaining absolutely still and nonthreatening. “My companion and I apologize for attacking you. I thought you were trying to hurt us.”

The doctor regained his troubled expression. Picard guessed there was no Reman equivalent for the concept of “apology.” And on second thought, Picard decided that it was likely the doctor had intended to harm them in some way with whatever had been in the spray hypos.

“Will you resist the medication?” the doctor asked.

“Let us see our companions, and then…we will accept the medication.”

The doctor carefully readjusted his disruptor, taking it down to a lesser setting. “Conditions are resistance.”

Picard saw that the doctor was determined to follow his orders. He and La Forge would be stunned, and then the medication would be administered without need of their cooperation.

Faced with an intractable problem, with both tactical alternatives leading to the same unwanted outcome, Picard found himself considering how Kirk would face this dilemma. It was one thing to say, “Change the rules,” but there were precious few rules at work. Unless…

“Doctor,” Picard said quickly, “we do not resist the medication. It is not necessary for you to stun us. But we are concerned that the medication is not suitable for humans. It might render us unable to perform our work here. That would be a waste of resources which the Assessors would notice.”

The doctor appeared distressed by such a possibility. He was obviously prepared to take action against the prisoners left in his control, but Picard guessed that the Assessors were equally prepared to take action against any Reman slave who interfered with productivity.

“Has the medication been tested on humans?” Picard asked. He gambled that if it had been tested, the doctor would have dismissed his earlier question.

“I do not know,” the doctor admitted.

“Take us to McCoy. He is a doctor.”

“I know,” the Reman said, distraught.

Picard remained calm, offering his conflicted captor a way out of his predicament. “Tell McCoy about the medication, and he will know whether it will allow us to perform our work, in accordance with the Assessors’ orders.”

The doctor looked from Picard to La Forge, his eyes hidden in the deep shadows of his prominent brow and the darkness of the room, keeping his thoughts equally unknown.

Then he reached a decision. “As we walk,” the Reman said, “you will remain two meters in front of me. If you attempt to escape, I am authorized to kill you.”

“So you will take us to McCoy?” Picard asked.

“So you may perform your work for the Assessors.”

As the doctor reached behind his back to close the equipment cabinet door, Picard took that moment to look over at La Forge. The engineer gave him a look that said, Good work.

And then the infirmary door shuddered and slid open with a squeal of torn metal. A small dark humanoid silhouette stepped into the doorway, outlined by the green glow of the corridor.

Picard and La Forge moved as one as they dropped to the floor. The silhouette was far too similar to the intruders who had boarded the Calypso.

But the doctor swung his disruptor toward the figure.

“Escape will not be permitted!” he shouted.

In response, the figure raised its weapon, convincing Picard that he and La Forge were right. This was just like the Calypso.

The doctor fired first.

But his disruptor’s low-power beam flashed harmlessly over the intruder’s armor.

Then the intruder fired and a bolt of lethal energy slammed through the space above the doctor just as he ducked and ran for cover.

Picard and La Forge could only watch as the doctor scurried through the lab and the intruder called out, “Down! Down! Down!”

Two more blasts of energy singed the air.

Then Picard saw the doctor jump up from behind an equipment console, taking aim once again.

Too late. The intruder’s final shot seared into the doctor’s chest and the Reman died at once. The choking smell of disrupted flesh spread through the infirmary.

Picard and La Forge rose shoulder to shoulder to face the doctor’s killer.

The intruder was already before them, his weapon held to the side, pointed at the floor. Picard had remembered the other intruders were smaller than Remans. But this one was smaller still. The top of his helmet was barely up to Picard’s eye level.

“Follow me,” the intruder said, his words still generated by his external helmet speaker. The artificial voice brought back memories of the attack on board Calypso.

“What about our friends?” Picard demanded, though he had no means to force a reply.

“If you help us, we can save them all. But we must hurry.”

The intruder started to step away, but Picard persisted, grabbing his shoulder, and then was shocked by the speed of the intruder’s response—instantaneously wheeling and grabbing and twisting his arm, so that the slightest move on his part would result in a fractured arm at best. At the same time, their captor aimed his disruptor point-blank at La Forge.

Picard’s frustration boiled over. Nothing made sense here. People were missing. And people had died. For what? “Why should we believe you? We’re here because of you!”

“I did nothing to bring you here, Picard. But there are others who will think nothing of killing you and your friends. And that we must not let happen. Do you agree?”

Picard could hardly believe an answer was necessary, but the intruder did not lessen his grip or lower his weapon. Waiting.

“I agree!” Picard said.

The intruder let go, turned away from both of them. “Move quickly, stay close.” He sprinted toward the open door.

Picard and La Forge exchanged a baffled look before they followed their liberator. Our own personal Shinzon, Picard thought wildly.

The figure in black armor ran swiftly to the left, then stopped in front of a blank section of corridor wall. He placed a hand on one spot indistinguishable to Picard from any other spot, then tapped his black-gloved fingers.

Amazingly, as if a holographic curtain were in place, a sharp line appeared in the wall, then grew wider—a hidden door opening.

The intruder jumped through, Picard and La Forge right behind him.

There was another, narrower corridor on the other side of the hidden door. The intruder moved to close the door behind them.

More like an engineering passage than a corridor, Picard thought as he checked out their surroundings with some difficulty. The glow here was even duller than in the main corridor. One wall was completely covered with pipes and conduits—nothing labeled, everything the same drab green-gray color.

He found La Forge watching the door close as both sides came together to form a single vertical line, and then the line vanished as if the door had never existed.

It was then that Picard noticed the intruder had not just used his hand to control the door. He was holding a small mechanism. And right now, he was looking down at his equipment belt, opening a small pouch, apparently trying to put the device back inside.

Picard had worn enough environmental suits to know how difficult it was to look directly down in a helmet. For precisely that reason, most critical controls were placed on a suit’s forearms.

For just these few moments, their captor was vulnerable, distracted, especially since he would not expect his two captives to offer any more resistance.

Surprise, Picard thought.

He brought both fists down on the back of the intruder’s helmet, counting on the impact doubling as the force of the helmet struck the back of the skull, and the faceplate rebounded to slam into the intruder’s nose.

La Forge jumped to help, snapping the intruder’s disruptor from its adhesion patch.

The intruder sagged to the floor, and for a moment, Picard heard an odd hissing noise, almost as if he had broken an air-pressure seal on the intruder’s suit.

He had a moment of panic as he suddenly feared the intruder might require a different atmosphere. But there was no way to predict how long the intruder might remain stunned. He had to act now.

“Quickly,” Picard said, and together he and La Forge rolled the intruder onto his back, propping him against the wall.

Picard felt a twinge of unease. The intruder seemed too light, almost as if he weighed little more than his armor.

La Forge popped the seal on the helmet, Picard pulled it free, and both of them gasped in shock as they saw nothing within the helmet—nothing past the shadow of the helmet’s pressure-seal ring—nothing as the suit slowly settled like a deflating balloon, completely, inexplicably, empty.

“All right,” La Forge said as he got to his feet. “Now I’m worried.”

Picard’s mind raced as he sought rational explanations for what they’d just seen. Had the occupant of the suit been beamed away by a silent, instantaneous transporter? Was the suit somehow equipped with miniature forcefields and actuators to create the illusion of an occupant? Could it contain a holoemitter, and a holographic being like the Voyager’s doctor, who had simply switched himself off?

Or were he and La Forge somehow still captives, held prisoner in a holodeck in which reality could be effortlessly controlled?

The answer came to him in the form of the sweetest voice he had ever heard.

“Jean-Luc…Geordi…honestly…I’m so disappointed in the both of you, I don’t know what to say.”

Picard and La Forge slowly turned to the source of that voice.

“Leah…?” La Forge whispered.

“Jenice…?” Picard said.

For in the pale glow of the passageway, a woman approached them.

Picard didn’t understand why his stomach fluttered, his pulse quickened. But then he realized what his subconscious must have already known: the woman was un-clothed in the half-light, her body so familiar, so alluring.

Beside him, La Forge took a half-step forward, as enraptured by the vision of what approached as he was.

That realization broke through the enchantment of the moment for Picard. No vision of his own lost love could similarly affect La Forge.

Vision…illusion…whatever they saw, none of it…of her…was real.

But she kept moving toward them, and Picard knew he’d been mistaken. This wasn’t Jenice, his first true desperate love at the Academy, merely someone who resembled her. Or rather someone who had resembled her in the shadows.

And neither was she without clothing, another misperception. Easily explained, Picard realized, given the extreme formfitting clothing the woman was wearing.

Beside him, Picard heard La Forge give a sigh of what sounded like relief. “I thought it was…but how could it be?”

Then the woman was before him, and she no more resembled Jenice than she did Beverly. She was Romulan, though her forehead was not as prominent as most, and the graceful sweep of her pointed ears was halfway between the straight line of a Romulan and the curve of a Vulcan.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the woman asked. Her voice was like a teasing song.

“No.” Picard resisted the desire to sweep her into his arms, having no awareness of where such an inappropriate thought had come from.

La Forge cleared his throat, as if he struggled with the same impulse.

The woman smiled at the engineer as if she had waited all her life to meet him, “How about you, Geordi?”

La Forge was reduced to shaking his head.

“Good,” the woman said with a small clap of her hands. “I would have been worried if you’d said yes, because we have never met. Until now, of course.”

She held out her hand, and to Picard it was exquisite. Delicately small, a precious object to be protected from all harm.

“I am Norinda,” she said.

The name seemed familiar to Picard, though he found it difficult to think, to remember where he had heard it. If he had heard it.

“And I have come to save you,” she said.