Chapter 5 – Moving On
Mei-Wan looked over the last paragraph a
third time. There was something still not right about it, but she couldn’t
think of how to improve it.
She let her hand holding the PADD fall
to the couch.
Her team’s paper on the Ancient
Progenitors had consumed their lives for months, and over the last week since
they’d returned to Kel-j’na, Mei-Wan hadn’t given her
attention to anything else.
Dani walked into the room. “Are you
still reading through that?”
“It’s needs something more.”
“Is it possible you’ve gotten used to
that paper being a part of your life?”
Could that be it?
She placed the PADD on the couch. “Maybe it is time for me to move
on.”
“Are you worried this will be the last
work you do on the Ancient Progenitors?”
“A little,” Mei-Wan replied. “I guess I
need to eventually consider that possibility.”
“I suspect there will still be more work
to do on them.”
“But nothing as monumental,” Mei-Wan
said.
“Could it be it is time for you to
actually live?”
Mei-Wan looked down and smiled. “Isn’t
that what I’ve been doing?”
“You have been on a mission to uncover
the truth,” Dani said. “It’s hard to live a genuine life while doing that.”
“You think I need to…” Mei-Wan asked.
“Yes,” Dani replied.
Mei-Wan chuckled. She so loved how many
of their conversations didn’t require all the words to be spoken. Dani always
seemed to know where her heart was.
Dani sat in the chair across from the
couch. “Which brings me to something I have seen in you.”
“Okay,” Mei-Wan said, wondering what
this might be, but excited to learn something new about herself.
Dani hesitated a moment, then looked up
at Mei-Wan. “My current form… it makes our relationship difficult for you.”
“No,” Mei-Wan blurted out. “I love your
form. Your skin mesmerizes me every time light shines through it.”
“But the form,” Dani said. “It… does not
appeal to you.”
“You appeal to me,” Mei-Wan replied.
“And since this form is you…”
“This is a form I adopted five hundred
years ago,” Dani said. “I am not bound to it. I have had others.”
“I don’t understand. What are you
suggesting?”
“I love you, Mei-Wan. I never thought it
possible I might feel this way about a humanoid,” Dani said. “To my knowledge,
none of my people ever have.”
Mei-Wan leaned forward and took Dani’s
hand in her own. “I like that we are exploring this unknown territory
together.”
“I want to make this journey easier for
you,” Dani said. “I want you to be attracted to my physical form, and I know
the form I currently have does not do that for you.”
“You attract me.”
“As I mentioned before, my people are
attracted to intellect, to the mind of another,” Dani said. “Your mind is…” She
hesitated. “It’s the most attractive mind I have ever met.”
Mei-Wan couldn’t help smiling. “Thank
you. I feel the same way about your mind.”
“But your kind isn’t as singular. You
are also driven by physical features.” Dani looked at Mei-Wan. “While the
concept is very foreign to me, I do understand how important it is for you.”
“Are you suggesting…”
“Yes.”
“No,” Mei-Wan said. “You don’t have to
change for me.”
“It will be my gift to you.”
“No.”
“I do not want any barriers between us,
Mei-Wan. I want our love to be as bright as a star, but never eclipsed by
something else in our lives.”
“Please, you can’t,” Mei-Wan begged.
“You shouldn’t have to do this.”
“I don’t have to do it.” Dani
stood. “I want to.”
Dani stood in a clear section of the
living room. Her body began to shift as ripples flowed over her. Then, as if a
balloon had popped, Dani snapped into a new form, a very human form. She was
still female, but her facial features were now so human that…
Mei-Wan rose from the couch. “That face…
it’s so familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“It is one from deep within your mind,”
Dani said. “Not from any person you have met, but a constant in your
subconscious for many years.”
Mei-Wan nodded.
“Do you like it? Does it appeal to you?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“Oh…” Dani closed her eyes. “One last
thing.”
The top of her head began to ripple as
her entire body had moments before. Suddenly hair sprouted from her head, but
it was blue and translucent as the rest of her form.
“I have never attempted to adorn myself
with hair before,” Dani said. “It was one of the primary reasons, aside from
pleasing you, that I wanted to do this.”
Mei-Wan had to admit that Dani’s new
look was quite beautiful. “You look great.”
“Then you are pleased?”
“I told you I was before,” Mei-Wan
grinned. “But yes, I am pleased.”
Dani smiled wide. “I want you to be
pleased. I love you, Mei.”
Mei-Wan walked up to Dani, pulling her
into her arms. “You please me by being here.”
Dani looked at Mei-Wan. “Sorry to
distract you from your work.”
“No,” Mei-Wan said, returning to the
couch and the PADD. “You’re right. It’s time to move on. The paper is good.
We’ll present it at the conference then make a few adjustments here and there,
and finally submit it to the Proceedings of Federation Archaeology and await
the peer review response.”
“And after that?” Dani asked.
Mei-Wan smiled. “Live happily ever
after.”
Dani looked down at herself then back to
Mei-Wan.
“What is it?” Mei-Wan asked.
“I think I should try some new clothes.”
***
Jack had decided to remain for a week to
see if anything changed. But as they proceeded to learn more about the Davellans and their world, his crew found they were as they
appeared—a peaceful and very friendly society.
After returning to the ship, Jack had
asked Doctor Preston to give Zaylie a full physical, and also had the science
department put her through an intensive set of scans. She was in perfect health
and showed no signs of temporal displacement.
Jack had gone over the sensor logs, questioned Loftus and the
other officers who had encountered the attack, but nothing added up. He had set
Sunita to the task of determining if it might have been a natural phenomenon, a
temporal distortion caused by something else in the system. So far, she had
found nothing.
And there was no chroniton
signature which usually appeared with any sort of time distortion.
Jack sat brooding in his command chair,
unhappy with not finding anything to explain what had happened.
“I found them,” Melissa announced from
the Ops station.
Jack spun about. “Who?”
“The Zhukov,” she replied. “They
are just leaving a nebula fifty light years from here.”
“Can you raise them?”
“Not yet,” Flanora
said. “The nebula is still causing interference. But we should be able to
contact them within the next hour.”
“How the hell are they all the way over
there?”
Sunita turned to Jack. “It is possible
they could have travelled from this location to the nebula, but it would have
required them to leave before the distress signal was sent.”
“Another mystery?” Jack asked with a
frown.
“Sorry, sir,” Sunita said. “Usually I’m
good at solving them, but this one is a bit beyond my capabilities.”
“Beyond all our capabilities,” Jack said
with a smile. “Sometimes the universe doesn’t let go of its secrets.”
But there was an organization whose
secrets he might be able to pry open.
***
Jack arrived at Marie’s quarters.
“You want me to what?” she asked, a look
of shock on her face.
“I need you to get into the Zhukov’s orders
and see why they came to this system,” he repeated.
“Why haven’t you already done that
yourself?”
“Because aside from a summary about a
mineral survey, their orders are sealed,” Jack replied. It had been the first
clue that there was more to all of this.
“And you want me to break that seal?”
she asked with a grin.
“Not break so much as simply take a
look. If there’s nothing out of the ordinary, and their mission here was
something standard, I’m not really interested,” Jack said. “However, the fact
their orders were sealed makes me suspicious. And given we have evidence of a
temporal event, you are more than justified to do so…
Admiral.”
Marie frowned at the mention of her new
rank. “What would you have done if I hadn’t happened along?”
“I’d have contacted another admiral and
seen if they’d take a look.”
“But this is quite convenient for you,
isn’t it?”
Jack smiled. “Convenient to keep a
temporal event sequestered on this ship, making it less likely Temporal
Investigations would become involved. But then I’m always looking for ways to
make sure they aren’t made unhappy.”
“That’s a good policy,” Marie said as
she sat at the desk in her quarters. “Give me a minute.”
Jack sat in the couch at the other end
of the room and waited. His mind drifted back to when he and Marie were dating.
Spending time with her had been a lot of fun, and he had to admit he regretted
not having kept in touch with her.
Roads not taken, he thought to himself.
There wasn’t much point to beating himself up over that given all the paths in
his life which he’d never trodden upon. He had too many regrets already. No
sense in adding to the list.
“This is odd,” Marie murmured from the
desk.
Jack remained in the couch. There might
be things in those orders which he wasn’t cleared to see, and he didn’t want to
put Marie in a difficult situation.
“Something interesting?” he asked.
“They were sent to Davella to follow up
on an earlier survey which had reported large deposits of a mineral called Kerdathracite.”
Jack thought a moment. “Never heard of
it.”
“Me either,” Marie said. “And when I
asked the computer for information on the mineral it told me it was classified,
and I’m not authorized to see the information.”
“A mineral so secret an admiral can’t
know about it?”
“Evidently,” she mused as she read on.
“They were supposed to find out how large the deposit was, and immediately mine
as much of it as they could fit into their cargo areas and shuttlebays.”
“And then what?” Jack asked.
“They were to deliver it to Velromal.” She turned to Jack. “Never heard of that
either.”
“It’s a planet,” Jack said. “My former
science officer resigned his commission and went to that world. Some religious
order is based there.”
“Monks of some kind?”
“No idea,” Jack replied.
“What the hell would a religious order
need with a mineral an admiral doesn’t have clearance to know about?” Marie
asked.
Jack smiled. “Sounds intriguing, doesn’t
it?”
“My guess is this is tied up with some
delicate diplomatic situation,” Marie said. “Probably nothing more than that.”
“Did their orders tell them how to scan
for the mineral?”
Marie returned to the display on the
desk. “Yes.”
“How about we have Sunita see if she can
find it?”
