Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [13]
Suddenly the thought that whoever had entered might be an officer swept into his head, and he began to turn, ready to offer a salute and an apology if necessary. But he had barely begun to spin around when he caught a flash of a red uniform sleeve coming toward him. He tried to raise a hand to dodge but he was too late. An impact, a bright flash of light, and then Lars Gunnarson’s world went dark.
Sleep, in the weeks and months after the attack on Starbase 311, had been a virtual stranger to Kyle Riker. When exhaustion finally overtook him and he succumbed, dreams almost invariably followed-nightmares that left him thrashing about and screaming, waking up in a bed drenched in cold sweat, heart hammering, throat dry. Then another extended period of wakefulness would occur, when closing his eyes and drifting off seemed almost as terrifying as being back on the starbase during the assault. Finally, the cycle would repeat; sleep would come, and with it the dreams.
Under the skillful care of Kate Pulaski, his physical injuries were healed, bones knitted, internal organs mended on a cellular level. Meters of damaged veins had been replaced by synthetic ones, and one ruined kidney was removed, with an artificial one substituted in its place. The body, Kate had explained, is basically a complex machine, and machines can be fixed. Sometimes they were better than they had been, when all their parts were strictly organic.
But the mind, she had said, is a different story altogether. Certainly there were specific physical repairs that could be made to the brain, but there were limits to what those could accomplish. And Kyle fought against some of those. Memories of the most terrible parts of the Tholian attack, for instance, could have been wiped from his memory by careful surgical manipulation of his brain. Kyle had refused. He was a military strategist, and the lessons learned from the Tholian attack-and the disastrous, limited defense-on Starbase 311, were not lessons he wanted to forget. He would, he insisted, learn to live with the memories, but he would not lose them.
And he was right. It took time, and a hellish amount of hard work, with Kate and a whole team of counselors and therapists, but he eventually made a kind of peace with his own inner turmoil and as he did, the bad dreams became more and more rare. He learned, once again, to welcome sleep, to accept it as a refuge from the demands of the day, and to consider dreams a kind of nightly vacation from real life and concerns. Some nights, still, it was harder to achieve sleep than others, and some nights the nightmares returned. But they were unusual, now, and not the norm.
This night, because of the stresses of the day, Kyle had suspected that it might be hard to let go and allow sleep to come, and he’d been correct. But it had come, finally, and he had slipped into a solid slumber, without dreams. When he heard the familiar hum of a transporter beam, he thought at first that it was a dream. He was groggy and thickheaded, and he tried to just roll over in his bed, away from the sound.
But his eyes flickered open as he did, and he saw the glow reflected on the wall near his bed. Instantly awake, he shot up and looked toward where the beam was just fading away, expecting to see another attacker coming at him. The room was empty, though. Maybe it had just been a dream, after all. He blinked a couple of times, trying to see through