Flashback - Diane Carey [22]
Vulcan or not, there was a touch of awe and amazement at the detail of this vision all around them. To actually step back in time and relive a key moment-even he couldn't keep the emotion out of his voice.
No matter how accurate, stimulating, or fun, this memory was the wrong one.
"Why did you bring us here?" Janeway asked.
"I did not intend to."
"Can you take us to the precipice?" She tried to keep focus in spite of her own fascination. "To the girl?"
"That is precisely what I attempted to do," he said, perplexed.
She moved through the smoke to his side. "The memory is within you. Focus on it. Take us to the girl."
He paused, held still a moment, closed his eyes, then opened them and looked around again.
"It is no use, Captain. I cannot."
The ship vibrated fiercely under impact of disrup-tor fire, and Janeway fought the elevator-drop feeling until the ship compensated under her. Well, that was certainly real enough!
The ship's crew dashed around them, without noticing her. However, they did step over the dead lieutenant's body and obviou sly veer to miss hitting Tuvok.
So they saw him, at least.
She watched the activity for a moment, and couldn't help hoping the ship survived and the crew made it all right. Of course, she knew they had made it. Still. . .
"There must be some reason your mind brought us here," she pursued. "Maybe this memory is connected to the girl in some way. Were there any children on this ship?"
"No. It was a standard Starfleet crew. No families."
"Were there any similar incidents on board? Did anyone close to you die?"
Tuvok turned, and looked down at the body of the young lieutenant, whose blood and skin fragments still clung to Tuvok's hands and clothing. "Lieuten-
ant Dimitri Valtane was killed in a plasma blast... he was my cabin mate."
I'd call that a big yes, Janeway thought, but kept it to herself. This was a long way from a little girl on a Vulcan plateau, though.
"Do you sense a connection with the girl?" she persisted. "Similar feelings of anxiety? Fear?"
He looked at the dead crewman and tried to concentrate, but there was no hope in his expression. After a moment he said, "No, I do not."
"There must be some reason your mind brought us here," Janeway insisted. "How long ago is this?"
"Stardate nine-five-two-one. Approximately eighty years ago."
"Who are you fighting?"
"The Klingons."
Janeway grasped his arm. "Klingons! Before you passed out in engineering, you thought we were approaching Klingon space. Remember?"
"Yes . . ."
Another shake tore through the ship, and Captain Sulu had to clasp the console he was operating to keep from being thrown sideways. He looked up, seemed to look right through Janeway at the upper subsystems screens, then looked down again.
"Let's stay with this memory for now," Janeway suggested. "See if we can find any more commonalities. Any psychological connections to the death of the girl. Tuvok, why are you fighting the Klingons?"
He thought for a moment, sifting through myriad instances in his memory from which his mind had to choose.
"This battle began with an incident that took place three days before."
"Can you take us there?"
"Captain, this is not simply a shuttle ride in which I program the navigational computer."
"I understand that," she said, experiencing her first touch of impatience with him. "I'm doing my assignment. Yours is to let me suggest the pattern of focus. Try to focus on what happened three days ago. There's some connection here, and I'm going to find it. Concentrate. Three days ago . . . where were you?"
She glanced around the battered bridge, then looked again to her side, but Tuvok was gone.
Then the bridge also was gone, and she was blinking into bright, shadowless artificial lighting. Strange that her eyes had needed to adjust to different fragments of memory. Strange indeed how very physically real all this seemed. The floor she was standing on, the scent of the starship air, the aroma of tea . . . particularly