Captain's Glory

38

AFTERMATH

Most of the abductees returned from Norinda’s dark realm. Exactly how, no one could say. But the colonists of Delta Vega, once an old mining station, awoke the morning after the events on Vulcan to find almost a thousand newcomers standing in confusion in the fields and forests surrounding their colony’s Central City.

Starfleet Command came to the conclusion that Delta Vega had been chosen to receive the abductees because, in the Alpha Quadrant at least, it was the closest Class-M planet to the galaxy’s edge and thus to the galactic barrier. Though this assumption implied that some intelligence had done the choosing, Starfleet did not address the issue. At least, not in their public analysis.

With reports of other abductees being returned to the Klingons and the Romulans, researchers were now expecting, over the decades and centuries ahead, to hear similar stories from cultures with whom the Federation had yet to make first contact.

Some abductees were still unaccounted for. As Spock had said, some of the personalities he encountered in the realm of dark matter apparently accepted the invitation to go deeper within the Totality. None of those people had yet returned, the captain and crew of the U.S.S. Monitor among them. They were explorers, so perhaps their decision was understandable.

Initial follow-up reports suggested that perhaps as many as four hundred Starfleet personnel had been replaced by projections. But more than five thousand replacements occurred on Vulcan. Strategists were arguing vehemently over why Vulcan had been singled out by the Totality for such extensive infiltration. The majority view was that the Totality, in its blind faith in its mission, had decided that logic alone would encourage Vulcans to accept their invitation.

Not one Vulcan did. Each of that world’s abductees returned.

There was interest also in what happened when the Enterprise and the Belle Reve succeeded in their gravity attack on Shi’Kahr: When Norinda was reabsorbed and vanished, every other projection, whether in Starfleet or other agencies, dissolved. For a few months, at least, Starfleet intended to continue random gravity increases on starships and starbases, just to be sure no new projections attempted to infiltrate. However, there was reason to believe the Totality could never again attack: Readings from hundreds of subspace observatories confirmed that the galactic barrier had undergone a dramatic change in just a matter of days, becoming stronger than ever before, as if it had somehow been recharged. Quick calculations indicated that the increased negative-energy range of the barrier was enough to prevent the opening of any new portals to the dark-matter realm.

Privately, Starfleet Command was beginning to consider the barrier in a new light. Rather than a navigational nuisance that kept Starfleet vessels in, it was seen as a welcome phenomenon that kept something out.

While Starfleet’s public report did not address the issue of how the recharging of the barrier might have occurred, a small handful of Starfleet personnel, active and retired, felt they knew the answer.

A month after the events on Vulcan, the group gathered in a small clearing on an ocean world named Chal. In the clearing was a half-built cabin, an old tree stump still buried in the ground, and a simple grave marked with a polished stone and the dedication plaque from a starship called Enterprise.

A new marker had been added near the grave. It was inscribed in four languages: Standard, Vulcan, Klingon, and Romulan. There was no body beneath it because no body had been found, and neither did anyone expect to find one.

In one of those languages, the marker read simply:

JOSEPH SAMUEL T’KOL T’LAN KIRK OF CHAL

WITH LOVE

For those who knew, it was memorial enough.