“Because right now, you’re standing in my puke.”
She looked down, confirmed his claim, then met his bleary gaze with her level stare. “You make a reasonable point.”
T’Prynn led Quinn inside a plain-looking compartment on an infrequently used level of the station. Everything inside the narrow room was the same shade of Starfleet standard-issue blue-gray. It had no window, being an interior compartment, and its furniture consisted of an uncovered bed atop a platform with drawers, a desk, a chair, and a computer terminal. A small door at the back of the room led to the toilet and sonic shower.
The disheveled ex-soldier-of-fortune edged inside as if expecting an ambush. “Cozy. Who lives here?”
“No one,” T’Prynn said. “These are unassigned guest quarters.” She locked the door behind Quinn and guided him toward the bed. “Sit there, at the end.” As he settled onto the corner of the bare mattress, she pulled the chair from the desk, rolled it to the foot of the bed, and sat down. “Do you understand what a Vulcan mind-meld entails, Mister Quinn?”
“Kind of. It’s telepathy, right?”
“It is far more than that. It is a fusion of two minds, a sharing of memory, feelings, and consciousness. Within the meld, we will become one.” She lifted her left hand and reached out to touch his face. As she expected, he recoiled slightly. “It will not hurt, I promise.”
Quinn looked less than reassured but nodded for her to continue. T’Prynn pressed her fingertips to several key points on his face, tentatively at first, then with a firm but gentle touch. She looked into his eyes and said in a low monotone, “My mind to your mind.” He closed his eyes, and she felt him relax—but then, at the first inkling of true contact, his mind withdrew. “It is natural to resist at first,” she advised him. “Breathe deeply and let go of your fear. . . . My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.” He did as she’d instructed, and she synchronized her breathing with his. “Our minds are merging.” Closing her eyes, she opened her own psyche to his and lowered her formidable psionic defenses. When she felt the primal undertow of his emotions pulling her deeper inside his consciousness, she knew the meld was complete.
“Our minds are one.”
Partly by training and partly by instinct, she interpreted their shared mindscape as a virtual world, an ever-changing theater of memory complete with physical sensations. Focusing her attention on Quinn’s mind, she found herself in a shifting panorama of half-perceived drinking binges punctuated by bouts of despondency, physical pain, or self-loathing.
“We need to go back now, Cervantes,” she said, gently coaching him. “Take me back to that world where you saw the Apostate’s machine.”
All at once she and Quinn were inside his last ship, the Dulcinea, as it struggled to an emergency landing on a snow-covered mountain ledge. Events melted and bled together, like watercolor paintings being revealed one beneath another as stormy cascades swept away the layers. A hard march knee-deep in snow across a frozen lake . . . an ice cave of dark blue shadows . . . a deep, perilous crevasse into which Quinn’s partner and lover, Bridy Mac, had fallen . . . a wall of ice rendered into vapor by a phaser blast . . . and then . . . the machine.
“Slow your perceptions,” T’Prynn said. “Let me see the details.”
The moment stolen from his mind slowed to a crawl. She stepped past his self-projection to study the complex machinations of the Apostate’s creation. Every element was in motion. Each revolved around the core, turned on its own axis, or orbited another piece of the machine. All the pieces seemed to be composed of the same silvery crystal, and they varied in shape from organically curved blobs to aggressively angular and symmetrical polyhedrons. Ribbons of multicolored light snaked through the open spaces, traveling chaotic paths through the mesmerizing order of the machine. At the core was an object that repeated a cycle of transformation, transitioning through multiple complex stellations that all were extrapolated from—and every few seconds reverted to—a basic icosahedron.
Just as Quinn’s report had described, waves of warmth radiated from the massive device, which T’Prynn suspected actually had been more of a projection than a physical reality. As she moved closer to it, a galvanic charge rushed over her, tingling her flesh from head to toe.
The scene became blurry as Quinn said, “I think this is what you came to find.”
T’Prynn turned to face him as his memory regained focus. A spectral image took shape above Bridy’s and Quinn’s heads. It was a slowly rotating twelve-sided polyhedron. Circling it were long, complex strings of data—alien symbols, Arabic numerals, equations, and fragments of star charts. Looking more closely, T’Prynn saw that each face of the dodecahedron was etched with a unique alien symbol, all of which she committed to memory.
After a few minutes, she was sure she had found all there was to know from Quinn. Not wanting to prolong his pain any more than necessary, she made the first attempt to pull them both away from this moment and retrace their steps to separate consciousness. To her surprise, Quinn resisted fiercely, as if his mind had chosen to anchor itself.
She turned to ask him if he was all right. He stood in the midst of his own halted memory, gazing at the projection of the late Bridget McLellan. She was leaning against the cavern wall beside the machine, her broken leg wrapped in a crude splint. Quinn was literally beside himself—or the projection of himself—gazing mournfully at his lost love. His grief hit T’Prynn like a crushing force, overwhelming her hard-won stoicism.
“This was the last time I ever saw her,” he said, on the verge of tears.
His heartbreak was an abyss, opening wide to devour him, and his pain was so deep that he yearned to let himself plunge into it, to lose himself in it and never return. There was more than sorrow in his heart; there was guilt, and regret, and rage at his own powerlessness—all of it churning into a toxic brew that would eventually consume him from within or drive him to self-destruction just to be free of the torment.
Sharing his pain, T’Prynn felt her own guilt rise like the tide. So much of Quinn’s sorrow and heartbreak was her fault. She had coerced him into her service years earlier, used him to hurt innocent people, and even when she had freed him, she had tempted him with a promise of a new life full of adventure and heroism and self-respect.
I could have simply let him go. Starfleet Intelligence did not have specific need of him. Had I not enticed him, he might have been spared this loss.
He shook his head, and she knew he was responding to her thoughts. “Don’t think like that,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. I wanted this life.”
“I can help you,” she said.
Her suggestion made him angry. “I don’t need your help.”
“You need to let her go, Cervantes. You need to make your peace with this loss.”
The machine and the cave vanished in a storm of fire rolling up the mountainside while the once-frozen lake boiled far below, swallowing five Klingon warships into its bubbling froth. T’Prynn realized she was reliving Quinn’s memory of the explosion that killed Bridy Mac. At the cliff’s edge, Quinn crouched behind a cluster of jagged rocks, hiding from the flames. “Screw you! You don’t know what I’m feeling! How could you? You’re a goddamned Vulcan!”
She reached down, took him by the collar of his jacket, and yanked him to his feet.
As they snapped to a standing position, the mountainside vanished, and they stood facing each other inside an observation lounge overlooking Vanguard’s main docking bay. “Do you want to see what I know about this subject?” She grabbed his shoulders and spun him around so that he would see what she saw. Half a second later, the Starfleet cargo transport Malacca was split nearly in half by an orange fireball, and it was all T’Prynn could do not to scream.
Quinn stood transfixed, hypnotized as he watched the fiery aftermath of the bombing of the Malacca, the bodies and debris tumbling in slow motion as if in a dream, through the airless zero-gravity of the docking bay. His lips moved in tandem with T’Prynn’s as she whispered with sad remembrance, “She burns for me.”