Captain's Blood

17

JOLAN SEGMENT, STARDATE 57486.9

“Farr Jolan,” the elderly Romulan said. “Welcome, Jean-Luc Picard. Welcome, Geordi La Forge. I am Virron, Primary Assessor of Processing Segment Three, follower of the Jolara, the name which means ‘She Who Leads Us.’ “

Picard bowed his head, remembering what Kirk had said about these people, seeing for himself the near-trance state they were in. “Farr Jolan,” he replied.

Beside him, La Forge said the same.

And then there was silence in the bright, wood-paneled chamber. At least twenty Romulan Assessors, transfixed by expressions of adoration, along with Picard and La Forge, stood in breathless anticipation, waiting for what the Jolara—Norinda—might say.

She passed through the Romulans, as graceful as a dancer, and they, just as gracefully, moved from her path.

There was a small dais of polished green marble in the center of the room to which Norinda had brought Picard and La Forge. Now, beneath the domed ceiling from which the brilliant light of day poured down, she stepped onto the central dais to be bathed in that radiance.

For a moment, Picard was almost certain the haloed figure on the dais was not Norinda, that another woman had somehow taken her place as she glided through her crowd of worshippers. His eyes narrowed to sharpen focus.

A trick of the light, Picard decided, remembering how in the darkness of the passageway, for only the briefest of instants, he had first thought Norinda might be a lost love from his youth. And then how her body had seemed to be without…Picard felt his cheeks flush. But it was true that her jumpsuit had been unnecessarily tight.

His next conclusion had been that she had Romulan ancestry, softened by finer, almost Vulcan features. But here in this chamber, he could see that she was most certainly full-blooded Romulan. Her forehead was high, her short hair space-black, her fringe of bangs cut with laser precision.

Like the others encircling her, Picard gazed at Norinda standing above them, and decided that his imagination had made more of her clothing than reality revealed. What he had thought was a too-formfitting jumpsuit was, in light of day, a standard-issue Assessor uniform, though crisp, and finely tailored. The uniform merely hinted at her alluring form. It did not expose it.

“Farr Jolan,” Norinda sang.

Before Picard had even time to think, he found himself replying with the same phrase, as did all the others, including La Forge.

Norinda clapped her hands like an excited, happy child. “We welcome guests today.” She held out her hand and all eyes turned to Picard and La Forge as a chorus of welcomes in Romulan and Standard swelled.

Norinda smiled beneficently at the guests, as if in the entire universe, only they existed, only they deserved her devotion.

To Picard, it felt almost as if the warmth of the sun above was being directly transferred to him through her, and he longed to be closer to her, to feel that warmth skin to skin, no uniforms, no barriers, no—

Norinda was speaking in Romulan now, her attention turned to others in the crowd. Picard wiped at his forehead, felt the drops of moisture there.

“Captain? Are you all right?”

Picard looked at his engineer, saw the sheen of sweat on his face. He tried to think of a way to phrase the question. “Geordi…are you…having unusual thoughts?”

La Forge nodded. “I’ll say.” He glanced over at Norinda, who sang now in Romulan. “All about her.” He blinked several times, resetting his vision, Picard knew. “She keeps looking different to me, but I can’t pick up any trace of a holographic screen, or optical camouflage. I think she really is changing as we watch her.”

How did I miss that? Picard chastised himself. There were many life-forms like that in the galaxy. Allasomorphs and chameloids that could change shape, sometimes even according to the unvoiced wishes of those around them.

Picard stared at the shining figure before him. But there was more to Norinda than just her physical appearance. Her force of personality was overwhelming. Even over communications channels, she could—

Picard rocked back on his feet and La Forge caught his arm as if fearing he was about to fall.

“Captain!” La Forge whispered.

Picard looked around, but none of the Romulans were paying attention to their new guests. All were looking at Norinda, only Norinda.

“Jim Kirk told me about this woman,” Picard whispered in reply.

“He knows her?”

Picard nodded as it all came back to him, as if whatever influence Norinda had exerted on him, to draw him to her, had also worked to block his memory of the story Kirk had told him last year on Bajor.

“He encountered her years ago, in one of his first missions as captain of his Enterprise. There was a contest. The Romulans won. And Norinda…was the prize.”

Kirk had told the story as the two captains had trekked across the Bajoran desert and faced death and mystery and, perhaps, the Prophets of the Celestial Temple themselves.

In the first six months of Kirk’s original five-year mission, Starfleet had tracked an alien vessel entering an unexplored system at an inconceivable warp velocity. The craft had come into range of deep-space sensors on a trajectory that was extragalactic.

Whatever the craft might have been—crewed vehicle or robotic probe—it was a technological marvel that Starfleet wished to study.

So the Enterprise had raced to the Mandylion Rift, and there had discovered Norinda and her ship, and many other suitors—Andorian, Orion, Klingon, and Tholian. Starfleet had not been alone in tracking the alien vessel’s arrival and rushing to claim it. But Norinda made no claim to be master of her extraordinary vessel. She and her people, the Rel—whom Kirk was never shown—were refugees, she said. Escaping a dire threat they called the Totality, which was somehow responsible for the fate of the Andromeda Galaxy. Picard was aware that at the time, Kirk and Starfleet had no way of knowing that that part of Norinda’s story was true. But as Kirk would later discover for himself, Andromeda was dying in an onslaught of rising radiation levels, and other refugees—most notably, the Kelvan—were also seeking escape to the Milky Way.

Faced with so many demands for her amazing ship’s technology, Norinda had organized a bizarre and deadly competition among the assembled starship captains, offering herself, her ship and its secrets, to whoever could triumph over all others.

Spock said her tactic was logical. Norinda feared the Totality and claimed it would come to this galaxy next. Her goal was to identify the spacefaring culture that could best use her ship to develop defenses against that threat.

But Kirk freely admitted to Picard that logic and an unproven alien menace had little bearing on his interest in Norinda’s contest. He’d viewed Norinda as much a prize as her ship. And a Klingon was his rival.

Years later, on the Bajoran desert, Kirk labeled this response of his as wrong and typically egocentric to Picard. But more important now, he had also described at length the disturbing physiological effect Norinda had had on every male on his Enterprise, including Spock.

Doctor Piper, the ship’s surgeon on that mission, had hypothesized that some remarkably effective form of low-level telepathy was at work. Norinda could influence male minds even over subspace channels, though recordings of those communications had no effect at all.

In the end, facing certain defeat, and for the first time losing a crewman as a direct result of an order he had given, Kirk felt driven to enter the contest himself. He won. But he could not claim victory.

Norinda had one last surprise for him, and while he had played the game within the rules she had set, she had apparently changed those rules altogether.

Kirk’s victory in the contest was hollow.

Norinda gave herself and her ship to an opponent the Enterprise could not detect, nor could Kirk see.

A few years later, after Kirk had become the first Starfleet captain to make visual contact with the Romulans, Starfleet analysts determined how Kirk had lost his prize. At the time of Norinda’s competition, a cloaked warbird had been in the Mandylion Rift, completely unnoticed.

The analysts deduced that Norinda saw the cloaking device as evidence of superior capabilities and awarded her ship and its technological secrets to the culture that had developed it: the Romulans.

But as more years passed and Starfleet detected no truly startling or unexpected advances in Romulan technology, the matter of Norinda and the mysterious Rel and their ship faded further into the background, eventually becoming yet another unexplained event of the past with no connection to the present.

Until now, Picard realized.

After the ceremony—and Picard felt certain that was what the gathering with Norinda and her followers had been—Picard and La Forge were invited to a private audience with the leaders of the Jolan Movement.

They were ushered into yet another large chamber, once again featuring a dazzling cascade of light spilling down from an immense ceiling dome.

This chamber was hot, and extremely humid, filled with near-forests of lush purple-green plants and towers of large and elaborate blooming flowers.

“I expect you have many questions,” Virron said pleasantly.

“That is an understatement,” Picard said. He drew a deep breath with some difficulty. The perfumed air was heavy, cloying. “And if I may, my first question is where can I find a subspace transmitter?”

As if Picard hadn’t spoken, Virron introduced to him and La Forge a white-haired female Romulan, Sen, and a younger male Romulan, Nran.

Norinda, who had somehow found an instant of time to change from her Assessor’s uniform into a daringly sheer white gown, required no introduction. Nor did she seem to have any interest in the discussion between Picard and the others. Instead, she moved along the banks of flowers, and Picard could almost swear those blossoms moved to follow her, as if she were the sun.

“Is there a problem with me using a transmitter?” Picard said crossly. He was running out of diplomacy. As impossible as his mission might be under current conditions, until the Romulan civil war actually started, he refused to give up.

Virron looked apologetic and actually answered him this time. “Ah…communications within the home system are…erratic, Picard.”

Picard was beginning to get the man’s measure: He was a senior bureaucrat with no power to agree to anything.

“That’s not the only thing that’s erratic,” Picard said. It was definitely time to be forceful, to push Virron into going to the next in command—someone who could make decisions. “My friends and I came to this system to visit Romulus. Instead, we were ‘escorted’ to Remus, held on orbit, viciously attacked by unknown intruders, then held captive in a mining compound, until Norinda somehow rescued us and brought us here, where we still feel like prisoners.”

All three Romulans looked appalled by the anger Picard displayed.

“As a Federation citizen, I demand the right to contact the consulate on Latium,” Picard added for good measure.

“And that is where you give yourself away, Captain.”

At the sound of Norinda’s voice, Picard felt all anger leave him. He didn’t need to contact Will. He didn’t need to call for the Titan’s assistance. He didn’t need to find Jim and McCoy and Beverly and Scott. He didn’t even need to stop the Tal Shiar from provoking a Romulan civil war that would engulf the galaxy.

There was only one desire that filled him.

Picard swept Norinda into his arms, crushed her lips against his, felt himself melt into her embrace, losing himself, losing—

Picard gasped with sudden pain as La Forge’s fist slammed into the side of his ear, crushing the cartilage. He spun around to see his chief engineer and three cowering Romulans staring at Norinda.

“Stop it!” La Forge shouted.

Norinda faced La Forge calmly, opened her arms to him, and even through the pain of his mashed ear, Picard felt a terrible pang of jealousy.

“Stop what, Geordi?” she asked.

Picard couldn’t understand how anyone could be so angry with Norinda. Didn’t La Forge understand? But all he seemed to be doing was blinking rapidly, as if resetting his vision, over and over.

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” La Forge yelled out, no sign of his outrage abating. “Telepathy, pheromones, direct stimulation of the amygdala—I don’t care what you’re doing, just stop it now!”

“Geordi…Geordi…” Norinda crooned soothingly.

Picard stared in fascination as her sheer white gown evaporated, leaving her exposed and achingly beautiful as she offered herself to La Forge. And then his fascination became unease as her straight black Romulan hair moved as a living thing, changed to brown and took on waves and grew longer to spill enticingly over her naked shoulders, as her flawless skin kept its perfection, but deepened slightly in shade, and her pointed ears rounded and her forehead grew smaller until Picard knew he was looking not at Norinda, but an exact, idealized replica of Doctor. Leah Brahms, the woman La Forge had long loved from afar.

La Forge pressed his fingers to his temples as if contending with severe pain. His eyes watered, as if crying. But he did not look away from the vision before him. Neither did he move toward it.

“Forget it!” he screamed. “Deal with us as we are or let us go! No more deception!”

By now, the three Romulans were on their knees, fists to their chests, eyes averted, murmuring as if reciting prayers, urgently and repeatedly.

The creation that had been Norinda, that was now Leah Brahms, shifted again, to become the slender Jenice from Picard’s memory, then Beverly, as she’d been when he’d first met her, and fallen so desperately, improperly, and completely in love with her.

With a force of will that seemed to spring from that Vulcan echo of Sarek still within him, Picard followed La Forge’s lead and raked his nails down his aching ear. The shock of pain brought tears to his eyes and his stomach knotted into nausea, and though it had been a day since he could last remember eating, he brought up bile and gagged.

But when he could look up again, there were no more visions to torment him. Instead, before him stood a gray-skinned, large-eared Reman female whose eyes were hidden behind a visor of solid black. Her long leather cloak shimmered with iridescent colors like the shell of a scarab.

“Very well,” the Reman said. Her voice was harsh and guttural. But even then Picard knew she was Norinda. At last in a guise that elicited no unwanted response. “Ask your questions, Picard. Whatever you want to know, I will tell you.”