Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [44]
“I had to,” Gerda Idun insisted. “I was a helm officer.”
Nikolas knew that. She had mentioned it to him when she was with him on the Stargazer.
He swallowed. Maybe it was true that she had lost something when Brakmaktin brought her there. And if she had forgotten about something as important as the propulsion system, she might have forgotten other things as well.
“Is anything else blank?” he asked.
Gerda Idun looked at him, pain etched on her face. “What kind of question is that?”
Nikolas cursed himself. How stupid can I be? How can someone say what she can’t remember?
“Ask me questions,” she told him.
Good idea, he thought. “Who are the other resistance fighters, the people who work with you on your Stargazer…starting with Captain Picard and working your way down?”
Gerda Idun shrugged. “Ben Zoma is the first officer. After him comes Joseph. Then Vigo, our weapons chief, even though he’s a Pandrilite and Pandril is loosely allied with Cardassia. Scott is our engineer…”
So far, it sounded right. “Go on.”
“Greyhorse runs sickbay pretty much by himself. Wu leads sabotage teams. Chang takes care of our small craft.”
It still made sense. Maybe it was only the propulsion system that had slipped Gerda Idun’s mind. Nikolas certainly hoped so.
“Navigator?” he prompted.
“A lot of people do that. Kochman, Paris, Shockey, Iulus…”
Nikolas felt a chill in his belly. “What did you say?”
“Iulus?”
“No, before that.”
“Shockey?”
“Yes. Shockey.” The woman whose corpse he had found after he woke on the Iktoj’ni and ran into Brakmaktin.
When he met her, just a day into their cargo run, it occurred to him that she would have made a good resistance fighter for Gerda Idun. He had even pictured Shockey in that mold, working a bridge console as the Stargazer battled the Cardassians.
But it seemed unlikely that Gerda Idun would have run into her on her Stargazer. After all, Nikolas had met Shockey in a very different walk of life. And if he hadn’t left the ship, he would never have met her at all.
He shook his head. Too big a coincidence.
“What is it?” Gerda Idun asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But he had his suspicions. “Tell me about your parents.”
She made a face. “My parents…?”
“Yes. Their names, their occupations, where they lived, that kind of thing.”
Gerda Idun started to speak—and couldn’t go on. As Nikolas watched, her expression turned to one of horror. “I can’t remember,” she moaned.
Because neither can I, he thought.
If she had told him about her parents back on the Stargazer, he had forgotten. He didn’t know their names or their occupations or where they lived. And if he didn’t know something, Gerda Idun had no way of knowing it either.
Because it wasn’t Gerda Idun in his arms—not really. It was a fake, a simulacrum, a duplicate.
Brakmaktin hadn’t snatched Nikolas’s dream girl from another universe. Evidently, even he wasn’t up to a task of such magnitude. So he had done the next best thing—he had created Gerda Idun from whole cloth, endowing her with whatever knowledge and memories he could pluck from Nikolas’s brain.
Just as he had plucked the identity of the world he had meant to destroy.
“Why can’t I remember?” Gerda Idun wanted to know. Her eyes were full of pain, whether she was the genuine article or not.
Nikolas felt a lump in his throat. It wasn’t her fault that she was what she was, and not what he wanted her to be.
“Nothing,” he said gently. “It’s like I said…you’ve lost a few memories. But we can work on them. It’ll be all right.”
“I want to believe that,” she said.
“Trust me,” Nikolas told her, drawing her close to him—because in some ways she was Gerda Idun, and he couldn’t stand to see her suffer. He stroked her soft, golden hair. “It’ll be all right….”
“G’day,” said Tricia Cadwallader, placing her food tray on the table already surrounded by four of her friends.
“You know,” said Refsland, the ship’s transporter chief, “I love that Aussie accent. Have I told you that?”
“Not since late yesterday,” said Cadwallader, pulling out a chair and plunking herself down in it. “And don’t