Flashback - Diane Carey [29]
Maybe this was one of the reasons Captain James Kirk stayed alive long enough to retire with honors. Maybe Captain Sulu stuck his neck out in answer to all those times Kirk had done the sticking and the risking.
Would anybody do that for me? she wondered.
As the unbidden thought roiled in her mind, Tuvok started talking again, pushing his luck.
"Sir," the young Vulcan went on, "that is a most illogical line of reasoning."
Sulu shifted in his chair with a dismissive manner. "You'd better believe it. Helm, engage."
The bridge crew collectively turned away from Tuvok, canceling out his protest, his presence, his potency. He was left standing alone, embarrassed, in the middle of the bridge. No one would look at him.
Slowly he turned and came back to his console. Was the embarrassment attached to the moment, or to the memory? Was Janeway looking at reality or regret? Would Tuvok do it again if he had a second chance?
A real second chance?
Janeway met him at his post.
"You know," she said, feeling obliged, "you did the right thing."
Troubled by this unrequested memory, Tuvok murmured a pitiful, "Perhaps."
"Tuvok, help me!"
Staring suddenly, Tuvok sucked a breath and held it.
Beside him, Janeway went numb as her mind was suddenly flooded with dread.
And she heard the cry-
"Tuvok!"
CHAPTER
10
"DOCTOR! IT'S HAPPENING TO HIM AGAIN!"
Kes held her hands out to her sides as if to balance herself, and she stared past the Doctor to the shivering body of Mr. Tuvok, still locked in the mind-meld with the captain.
"Kes?" The Doctor hurried to her. "Are you involved? Do you feel as if you're integrating into the vision again?"
"I can see some of it... but there's someone else there now. It's the captain... I can see the captain ... on the plateau . . . something's happening to Tuvok ... we have to help him! We have to help him!"
She shoved past the Doctor and plunged toward Tuvok and the captain, but the Doctor caught her. "No!" he said sharply. "Don't touch them! Don't!
We have to do this with medication. Kes, do you understand?"
He shook her rather harshly, until the pain of his grip distracted her from what was happening in the recesses of her mind, and she drew back from the captain and the Vulcan.
"Yes ... I'm sorry. Tell me what to do."
"Fifty milligrams cordrazine!"
Even to people who didn't really know what it was, cordrazine caused a wince of intimidation and fear. Very touchy medication, this. Almost as dangerous as the things it cured.
Kathryn Janeway reached out to help Tuvok hold the girl, to pull her back over the top of the plateau . . .
A child, a Vulcan female child-dangling over a precipice, with a Vulcan boy clasping her desperately with one hand. The other hand was braced on the chipping edge of the plateau. He wasn't strong enough to hold on.
The girl-maybe six or eight years old-had no Vulcan reserve blocking the terror in her face. She was fully aware of what was happening to her, and she was blatantly horrified. If anyone ever believed a child couldn't absorb the full meaning of not being alive anymore, the look in her eyes would shatter that.
Below the rocks were jagged, toothy.
Janeway reached out, but her hand was little more than a fuzzy blur at her hip. She couldn't step forward. This was like one of those dreams where
the goal kept getting farther away no matter how much she ran and ran-
When Janeway heard her ship's doctor call for cordrazine, she wasn't sure anymore where she was or what had happened. She saw Tuvok's face before her, glazed and shocky, staring, but not seeing her. His fingertips were on her face, trembling fitfully against her cheeks and temples.
Then his touch fell away, and his face drifted backward. He was falling.
She sat stunned, watching as Voyager's doctor appeared in her periphery.
The meld . . .
Broken.
And Tuvok lay before her, convulsing slightly.
What had broken the meld? The shock of the little girl falling?
In her mind she saw a wash of blue . . . tumbling