The sounds of the battle outside had diminished somewhat, but periodically, a fuel bomb exploding or the report of projectile weapons firing could be heard.
“I wish she’d stop doing that,” said Jaza, removing the tricorder from the cradle and shoving it into the pack he was building. “This hierarchical clan system is going to be a problem.”
“Commander-”
“Najem,” he said.
“Najem,” she repeated, fighting to stay calm. “Please tell me what’s happened.”
“I’ve told you,” he said.
“You haven’t,” she replied. “Nothing you’ve said has made me consider leaving you here in this planet’s past.”
“If I tell you I finally understand the vision the Prophets showed me, will you accept my decision?”
“I’m sorry, no,” she said. “That is irrational.”
“All right,” he said, sitting down beside her. “Rationally, then.”
In soft reasonable tones he explained his thinking to her, how Titanmight yet be saved from destruction and their fellows on the away team as well.
He talked about coincidence and the need to prevent paradox. Someone had to take the information about the tesseract’s exact contours back to their own time. Those contours couldn’t be mapped in their era by the tesseract’s very nature.
Lastly, but most important, someone had to stay here to ensure that the Orishans continued to develop as their history required.
“That person has to be me,” he said. “You don’t have the necessary background in the sciences to handle any trouble that might arise from Titan’s wreckage. Stabilizing the warp core was primary, but there are all sorts of tech and chemicals that might show up to plague these people. I have to be here for that.”
“But that creature,” said Modan. “It was kneeling. To you. Does it believe you are a god?”
He laughed. “She thinks I represent their god,” he said. “Like an Oracle.”
“Or a Prophet?”
“I doubt I’ll be quite so cryptic.” He smiled. “But I’ll disabuse her of that notion in time.”
She digested it. Most of it made a certain kind of sense, except for the bit where he stayed behind.
“Won’t you pollute the timeline if you stay?” she said. “Isn’t that why we both have to go?”
“It’s already polluted,” he said. “The crashed starship alone has already done catastrophic damage. I have to stay and make sure the society gets as close to its proper track as possible.”
“Starfleet will never condone this,” she said.
“This is bigger than Starfleet.”
“Then send the shuttle back on autopilot,” she said after some consideration. “I will stay also.” He shook his head. “I can be of help to you.”
“No, Modan,” he said. “Autopilot won’t work if there’s any trouble on the other end. This takes a living mind, and luckily, we have one to spare.”
She was silent for a time, still weighing arguments, still searching for the one that would compel him to leave with her or force him to let her stay.
“Najem,” she said slowly. “These beings, the Orishans, they are nothing like you, nothing at all.”
“That’s true.”
“How can you imprison yourself here, with them, forever?”
He smiled that familiar smile, the one that lit up his face when he was on the verge of some new and exciting discovery.
“Because I can help them,” he said.
“You will be alone,” she said, feeling the despair over his choice that he wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t. “All alone.”
“It’s my fate,” he said, taking her shoulders in his strong gentle hands. “I thought the vision meant I would die, but maybe it wasn’t meant to be a literal death, Modan. Everything that was Jaza Najem is dead in our time. It has been for hundreds of years. Here I’ll be something new. An ending and a beginning.”
They spent an hour fitting Titan’s flux regulators to the shuttle’s much smaller warp core, and then it was time to go. Modan had not been gifted with tear ducts, so her parting from him, while emotional for both, was a parched affair.
He had found a place in Titan’s wreckage where he could build a comfortable and mostly hidden shelter. The Orishans had already begun to refer to it as the Shattered Place because of its obviously destroyed nature and the random arcs of electricity that continued, from time to time, to erupt from a few of the components. Most of them gave the area wide latitude, a tendency he meant to cultivate.
They stood on the ground just inside the shuttle’s stealth field, saying the final good-bye. She couldn’t really comprehend his decision. Too much of it was based upon an esoteric understanding of reality that she had not been designed to process.
She told him that this experience was significant enough for her to share it with the other Seleneans at the next confluence and even with her Pod Mother. Perhaps future Y’liras would be capable of understanding faith in the way that he did.
“You understand it well enough, I think,” he said. Then he told her the final reason for her being the one who had to go back. She was a failsafe. “I need you to link with me the way you did before.”
“Why?”
“In case the computers fail or get scrambled in transit,” he said. “The information in my head can still be passed on through you.”
She saw the wisdom in that and came close to him, letting him hold her as he would a lover as her linking spines undulated around her head.
“What I take I can’t keep long,” she said. “A day or two at most.”
“Let’s hope it won’t be needed at all,” he said. Her spines attached to his skin and her mind burrowed into his, lifting out those bits he wanted her to take as well as a few more that couldn’t be avoided.
Sometime during the exchange he asked her for the last kiss he would ever have.
She gave it to him.
Modan couldn’t see the tesseract as Jaza could, not even with the memory of its image temporarily stored inside her, but she felt it when the shuttle crossed its event horizon.
Reality seemed to flicker and bend around the Ellingtonas it navigated the unseen contours of the immense four-dimensional object. There was no real sense of acceleration or of time passing, only the initial jolt, the bizarre light show, and then suddenly she was back in normal space in low orbit over Orisha.
The computer lit up immediately with the locator signals of three of the combadges of the missing away teammates, and she was elated. She wondered at the missing member of the team, whether he or she had been lost or if the absent signal was only the result of a damaged combadge.
She didn’t wonder long. As soon as the ship detected their signals, the emergency protocols initialized and beamed them all back to the hold.
Vale, Troi, Keru, and the largest Orishan she had seen yet materialized before her within seconds of her emerging from the tesseract.
Chapter Twelve
The three of them came away from the link as if hit with a mild electric shock. The entire exchange took only a second or two but Vale gasped and stumbled back from Modan when the latter released her linking spines.
“You just left him there!” said Vale, after regaining some composure. “Alone!”
“It was his wish, Commander,” said Modan.
“We’ll discuss this later, Ensign,” said Vale archly. She was only barely containing her anger over Jaza’s loss. She knew it wasn’t rational or professional but she couldn’t help it. She also knew that this wasn’t the time. “Right now you need to get down to the planet and do what you can to help Commander Ra-Havreii.”