Caretaker - L. A. Graf [22]
And now, years and years later, Stadi finally did see. She saw an admiral with a great mane of white hair scowling down at her with fatherly disapproval--a woman with warm, smiling eyes too wise and patient for her years--a man and a dog tumbling together in the overlong grass, with a lover's amused voice admonishing them to be careful, or they'd get dirty. But it was other people's memories, other people's lives, swimming to surround her in that eternal nowhere moment that marked their disappearance from the Badlands and their arrival at--she didn't know. Death?
Was this the fabled instant when one's life flashed before your eyes?
And here I am with someone else's life, Stadi thought with startling clarity. Just as Crisa had warned. Just as Stadi had feared for herself all those years before.
Not just their lives. Aunt Shenzi's voice tickled her thoughts as though she were standing right by Stadi's ear, petting back her hair.
Their lives, and your life, and all of you blessed because of it. Aunt Shenzi had died seven years ago, when she and the human woman she'd lived with for so long were on a passenger ship destroyed by the Borg.
Come tell me all about it, dear.
It would be like going home, Stadi thought with a shudder of relief.
She could leave all the noise of human panic behind, and embrace an emotional quiet she hadn't known since leaving Betazed for the Academy.
She'd miss the humans' lively inner chatter, but she would welcome Aunt Shenzi's promised peace even more.
All right, Aunt Shenzi, I'm coming. She felt the ship burst suddenly out of its darkness, into a light so bright and burning she could feel it blasting through her face, her hands, her chest. Surely this was Voyager's death throes, and what she felt jolting beneath her was the explosion that threw it to pieces.
The searing light seemed to throw her upward, out of herself, away from all the noise and terror, away from all the fear and pain. Smiling, Stadi reached out to embrace her Aunt Shenzi, and they moved away together, into silence.
* The viewscreen was filled with tracers of light. Like ribbons of the plasma they were trying so hard to avoid, First Officer Cavit thought.
Or the ion trail of a dying ship, reaching out to entangle them and drag Voyager and everyone aboard her down its mouth to a nowhere place that even the Maquis couldn't escape.
Stars ceased to exist, time almost shattered to a standstill, even the powerful forward momentum of a starship in warp drive seemed to thin out into nothingness until it faded from Cavit's senses like the falling Doppler shift of a retreating scream.
They were suspended in amber, pinned in place against the motionless velvet of a space-time anomaly.
Then, with a crash, reality spun into wild motion again, and that transcendent moment of timelessness was lost.
Cavit felt a wash of killing heat as the helm panel at the front of the bridge exploded with a booming roar. Quite unconscious of his movements, he turned toward the sound. A million fears fought for prominence in his head--fear of an oxygen-stealing fire, fear of a gas leak, or, worst of all, a total hull breach--but he never had the chance to find out which of those many deaths was the true one. A hard wall of violently compressed air swatted him over the bridge railing, onto the upper deck, and all the breath rushed out of him as though he'd been punched by a giant's invisible hand. He hit the floor on his shoulder, felt the socket push against itself with the force.
Whatever had racked the ship before still held her, flinging her the way a dog would fling a helpless rabbit, and Cavit struggled to stop himself when the rough pitching rolled him