Return to Part Five
“Is that alcoholic?” Sulu asked his Chief Medical Officer as he approached the shaded veranda in front of the Dispensary building where she was standing drinking some sort of iced beverage.
Lian Rendell answered with a fluttery hand gesture. “Technically. Are you on duty?”
“Technically,” Sulu replied, mimicking her ironically. The porch was provisioned with an insulated chest full of ice and two beverage dispensers – one of water and one of a native drink akin to a mild rum punch. “We’re supposed to be doing flight training with the Calumbrian machines, but Del found something he didn’t like, so now we’re on hold.”
“Any idea how long?”
“Asking Del for a time estimate on repairs is akin to asking Michelangelo how long it’s going to take to finish the Sistine Chapel,” the captain replied sourly.
Rendell snorted. “When you plan to climb into the Sistine Chapel and dive off a cliff…”
“I hope Michelangelo showed a little more restraint in telling the Pope to go screw himself, too,” Sulu grumbled. “So, I’ve probably got an hour… Maybe two…”
“Then I prescribe 15cc. Stat,” the doctor said, pouring him a glass of the punch. “Good for relaxing the muscles in preparation for cliff-diving.”
“Thank you, doctor.” The drink was, at least, cool and soothing on his parched throat. “I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“My time has been 100% filled with the “New Arms for the Army” project.” Rendell gestured in the direction of the hut she was using as a surgical theater. “Which -- I feel constrained to point out -- was not mentioned at all in the 68 page outline of priorities for Sagron that was prepared and agreed upon before landing.”
Sulu smiled and shrugged. He, himself, was quite pleased to see fewer empty sleeves, pants legs, and eye sockets with each passing day. “You’ve got to admit that once we arrived, it quickly became obvious that that was going to be a necessity.”
The Haven crossed her arms and raised a dubious eyebrow. “I observed the project rapidly working its way up the priority pipeline as the natives went from not seeming to notice a certain someone was alive to calling her “Teacher Beth” or “Arista, the Learned One.”
The captain grinned. “You think her head is being turned?’
“I think it’s a good thing the Calumbri are as earnest and guileless as she is, because if this was some kind of strategy to get more resources from her…”
“…She’d already given them the Drake’s command codes and we’d be walking home,” Sulu agreed with a laugh.
In the distance, there was the sound of raised voices. After a moment, it became apparent that Dylan Paine had dared to ask for an update on when the repairs might be finished. Instead, he was being treated to an explicit set of suggestions of physical impossibilities he could perform on himself elaborated upon at some length with a variety of highly creative, almost lyrical, verbal flourishes.
“Del seems fully recovered.” Sulu observed mildly.
“Well…” Rendell made a face at her rum punch before draining the cup. “We’ll see.”
The captain frowned. “You’re afraid your cure didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked.” The Haven poured herself another cup of the mixture. “We’ll have to see if it worked well enough.”
“Well enough for him to complete this mission?” Sulu asked, suddenly concerned by the thought of an ill-timed relapse.
Rendell rolled her dark eyes at him as if he were being purposefully dense. “Well enough for the two of you to continue to avoid resolving the problems between you.”
The captain sighed. There was a big difference between being purposefully dense and deciding to take a vacation from thinking about certain things for a while so you could get on with your life and career.
“…Which he started…” the doctor added a bit belatedly to preserve her careful neutrality in the matter.
Sulu crossed his arms and frowned, feeling resentful that somehow after all that Del had done to instigate and perpetuate this mess, somehow he was at fault and was the one who needed to be doing something about it. “After all he’s been through, I don’t see why a fight with me would send him over the edge.”
Rendell nodded. “I’m sure he’s had lots of run-ins with other captains…”
“I’m sure he has.”
“… who have been his friends that he’d been partnering with and competing against and screwing around with since he was fifteen,” the Haven finished pointedly.
Sulu closed his eyes and sighed again deeply.
“You know,” Rendell pointed out pragmatically. “If you would fill that personnel requisition that Medical keeps turning in for a psychiatrist, they could help you work through this sort of thing. I’m just a surgeon. You just pay me to cut…”
The captain narrowed his eyes, feeling those cuts a bit keenly at the moment. “And just what did you threaten to cut off this time to get Del to agree to write an apology to Jilla?”
Rendell opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment, a pager signal sounded from the communicator she’d left laying on the table holding the beverages. “I’m afraid that story will have to wait,” she apologized as she retrieved the device, then paused before heading towards the surgical hut. “But here are the three important items you can take away from this consultation, Captain. First, the surest way to get what you want out of Beth Arista is to cruelly deny praise for a couple weeks then flatter her ass off. Second, the Drake needs mental health staff if for no other reason than just to help you sort through your problems with your friends and lovers, and third, no one makes Noel DelMonde do anything until he’s good and ready to do it.”
“Wilkins!” DelMonde called into his headset as he snapped closed the control panel in front of him. “Batten down them number nines!”
“Finally.” Sulu sighed and rolled his eyes. Having this engineer between him and the controls of a vessel he was itching to launch was an experience that was as familiar and – if he had to admit it, yes, as reassuring as the feel of a favorite shoe... It was also about as irritating as having a smelly, worn-out, old boot waved repeatedly in your face... “Are you finished?”
“You blow that aft transduction coil an' you th' one that gonna be finished,” the Cajun warned over his shoulder as he reached across the tight space to adjust another series of levers.
The final checks before takeoff with one of DelMonde’s vessels always seemed extra long – because they were extra long. Sulu tried to check the chronometer to see how long the engineer was forcing them to bake in the sun on the runway above the cliffs before he’d clear them for their initial dive, but his view was rather solidly blocked by the Cajun’s hand that was perhaps-not-quite-accidentally resting over that device as he worked.
“What are you doing now?” the captain asked, exasperatedly.
“Savin' your life… again -- You’re welcome,” the engineer retorted sharply.
Sulu sighed loudly. However, his blood was singing in his veins in a way that it hadn’t done in years… And it wasn’t just because he was about to dive headfirst off a cliff in an essentially untested alien vessel. Despite their current estrangement, the experience of working together on the Calumbri vessels was recalling to Sulu the most pleasant elements of their time at the Clave when the two of them had worked together on his beautiful ship, the Kamikaze. Despite the terrible feelings of regret and dread he now connected to so much of his time at that place, those memories would always be precious to him. He and the Cajun had connected so passionately – not primarily in a sexual way – but on the level of a profound appreciation of each others’ abilities. It had been such a perfect creative union that had come along at just the perfect time for them both…
“Now listen up, Vale.” DelMonde had tapped his headset so he could be heard by the officer stationed in the gunner’s nest. “I not care what this here genius bastard says or does, but if you hit 9 gs, you cut in them forward arrays, you hear me?”
The Indiian’s voice crackled over the com unit dryly in response. “I am well aware of procedure, Lieutenant Commander.”
The engineer snarled and made a rude gesture at his earpiece. “One of these days, I gonna teach that prissy lil’ silver-assed son of a bitch some manners,” he warned Sulu.
The captain crossed his arms impatiently. “Cajun, are you going to get out of my cockpit or are you planning to ride in my lap all the way down?”
DelMonde made a face at him. “Oh, you’d get thrill outa that, non?”
Sulu upped the ante with a leer. “Not as much as you would.”
Although he’d thought of their connection as being not primarily sexual, he did not by any means think of it as being non-sexual.
As he had when they were teenagers, Del relented with much eye-rolling and a deep 'God, I am not even gonna try to compete with that level of incorrigible' sigh and began to gather up his tools.
“All right, ya’ll,” he announced into his headset after punching the button that would open a line to the whole crew. “Clear the runway. His Majesty 'bout to take flight.”
Plunging, plunging, hard, fast… Jesus, Buddha, Aema…! This was exactly what he needed…!
The thing about atmospheric maneuvers was that you could feel every damned, beautiful, gloriously aching inch of thrust…
Plunging, hard, wrapped in sweetest silver…
Image of the vessel merged into reflections on the beloved woman – delicious, proud yet supple… Sweet naked silver body bending to his will… All that noble beauty at his command… Delicate yet with a spine of the purest and finest metal… All his – all gloriously, nakedly his to command… Responsive to the thrust, the plunge… The two of them as one… intertwined intimately, enveloping…
“Tristan?”
Lieutenant Vale blinked his eyes rapidly and gave himself a slight shake to clear his head of the onslaught of alien thoughts that had suddenly filled it as they had made their descent from the clifftop. “Sir?”
“You okay?” his commander’s voice crackled over the headset.
Still feeling stunned and shaken from the abrupt, unexpected, and unprecedented mental intrusion, the Indiian’s Star Fleet training kicked in as he forced himself to check the instrument panel in front of him. “Yes, sir,” he replied, though rather uncertainly.
“You sure?” his captain queried. “You’re glowing. Really glowing. I can see it from down here.”
“Oh.” Vale glanced down at his arms, which had gone quite vividly phosphorescent.
“Check the oxygen mix,” Sulu suggested. “It may be off.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied numbly, his fingers moving over the controls as his brain tried to wrap itself around the fact that for some reason his captain’s mind seemed to have forced its way into to his and blasted out an erotic daydream about having sex with his wife while piloting some kind of one-man spacecraft.
“Just keep taking deep breaths,” his captain ordered. “We’ll have you back to base soon.”
“Yes, sir.” Vale thought that when he recovered from feeling like he’d been slapped in the face, punched in the stomach, and kicked in the head, this experience might prompt him to take some other actions that would be reasonable and normal for an Indiian under such circumstances – such as screaming or vomiting for example. Until he got back on solid ground, though, he decided it was wisest to do as Star Fleet and his captain would advise and therefore he kept as steady an eye as he could maintain on his instruments and continued -- carefully and slowly -- to breathe.
"On the ten."
“Check,” Ensign Yves Owusu replied calmly as he and his partner thundered down the runway towards crystal blue waters.
“Engage on three,” Lieutenant Tsing’s voice crackled in his ear as they jumped impossibly high into the bright sunlight.
“Aye.” His soul soared like the bird from which he’d taken his racing name. “On three. Mark.”
“Mark,” his partner replied as they metamorphed their heavy walker into a sleek aircraft that converted their screaming plunge off the cliff into a graceful arc over the sea.
“Got it.” Despite the professional blandness of their conversation, a broad smile stretched the corners of the ensign’s face to their limits. Although he could not see her, he knew the same was true of his flight partner.
Everyone loved the cliff dives… Everyone except poor Lieutenant Vale, that is, who seemed to be getting spacesick. Owusu had never heard of an experienced space pilot getting spacesick during atmospheric maneuvers, but there it was…
He could see why the Calumbrian attached religious significance to these vessels. The cliff dives were an almost spiritual experience. They brought forth something wonderful from inside you. It was like all your favorite things wrapped in a great big sandwich… “
We are in the zone, Lieutenant,” he said into his headset as they glided over a sparkling beach. “I can feel it.”
“I can feel the pit of my stomach,” Tsing replied. “Are you hungry, Kori?”
“Starved,” Owusu replied with a laugh…. Then he paused. When had he told her his racing handle? Strangely, it seemed very natural for her to know... as if after sharing the extraordinarily intense experience of cliff diving together, none of the pilot teams should have any secrets from each other any more…
“I keep having these incredibly vivid pictures of some kind of braised meat dish…” Tsing was saying.
“Toasted okeempa! That’s exactly what I’ve been craving all morning!”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“They made if for us three days ago.” Maybe she knew his Clave nickname because she was an ex-racer herself. That wasn’t exactly unheard of…
“Oh, I didn’t like it that much.”
Owusu gave a little laugh deciding that the whole thing wasn’t worth worrying about on a beautiful day like this. “Your stomach must have liked it better than you thought you did…
“I guess so,” Tsing replied. “I can’t get it out of my mind now…”
Sun-warmed brown skin over rock hard muscles…
“Day-umn…” the voice over Sulu’s headset said, stretching out the syllables as if reacting to the little erotic daydream/memory he was having.
“What is it, Tara?”
“Nothing, sir,” his flight partner replied as they glided over glittering waves crashing against a golden beach. “Just thinking about somebody who would love it here.”
Sulu grinned, somehow half-knowing the answer to his question before he asked. “Anybody I know?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah…” Ryan admitted with a chuckle. “Really well.”
“Paget,” they concluded in unison.
“Jer would be crazy about this place,” Sulu concurred. “Everything we’re doing…”
“This mission is just made for him,” Ryan agreed.
The captain smiled and gave a wistful sigh. It would be nice for once to be able to requisition his friend because the setting was wonderful and the situation perfectly meshed with Jer’s skills instead of sending out a distress signal because things were so hopelessly screwed up Paget was needed as part of a desperate last line of defense.
Things did seem to be going pretty smoothly at present. There had been no technical problems with the cliff diving… Just Vale’s spacesickness… which Sulu privately thought might be a little overblown… but if experience had taught him nothing else, it was that telling an Indiian that they were over-reacting was one of the most counterproductive activities in the galaxy…
“When Jer and I were kids, we used to live on the beach,” he reminisced as they took a turn back towards the base. “All day… All night…”
Tara gave a husky chuckle. “I’ll bet you did.”
Sulu’s memories shifted to a harmless fantasy of the three of them together – their strongly muscled frames supporting and embracing his...
Through his headset, he heard his flight partner give a long, sensual sigh as if her thoughts too had turned to such imaginings…
He chuckled wickedly as they glided in the warm sunlight. “Daaayum…”
It had been going on all day… He’d been getting brief, vivid flashes of the two of them together. At last, the odd specificity of these fragmentary images began to convince him that perhaps he wasn’t the one who was obsessing about the relationship…
The latest intrusion into his thoughts was the most disconcerting. It was like being suddenly plunged into a psychocin tailor-made for someone else.
“C’mere, girl,” he felt himself saying in his lover’s voice, those rich tones even deeper and more intense as they vibrated inside his head as if they belonged there. “Bring me that drink.”
The woman was naked – as she always was in these memories/fantasies/whatever they were. Her eyes were half-lidded and her expression pleasantly vacant as if she were under the influence of a strong intoxicant.
He could feel the whiskey slide down his throat and love its bitter burn in a way he never had before. “Have you a li'l sip, babe,” he heard himself croon, pulling the woman’s warm, unresisting flesh onto his lap. “Just a taste.”
He felt himself chuckle – a sensation even more delicious from the inside out – at the wry face the woman made. “You not like it, do ya? Well, you not need to worry. I not gonna make you drink it, if you not want to. I not no monster… Well, not much o' one, leastways…”
He was shocked by the amount of guilt his lover carried in these flashbacks. Outwardly, he always seemed avowedly -- if not even somewhat self-righteously -- amoral. Inwardly, though, something about these odd, fetishistic encounters tormented his conscious.
“You not got a bit o' curl in your hair, do you?” A feeling of disappointment filled the mind he inhabited as his paramour’s fingers ran through a strand of the woman’s limp ash blonde tresses, “Not much color neither…”
This melancholy slid the cover off a vast, aching emptiness that stood like a gaping wound inside the heart of his lover. More than grief, more than loneliness, it was a weeping, malignant hole inside the soul of the man – something that had been torn open repeatedly and now screamed out to be filled.
“You’d change it fo' me, though, A final swallow took care of the remains of the whiskey – as if any amount of alcohol was sufficient to cauterize the festering gash inside him.
“What you say, let’s us get down to business, non?” he said, brushing the woman’s uninspiring hair from her face and coming into easy contact with her benumbed brain. “Let’s see what gonna get your li'l motor runnin’ today, my girl… ‘Cause I sure as hell need a charge. I purely runnin' on batteries an' my levels are just a hair above stone cold dead… What it gonna be, baby? What you want us to playact today, huh? Let’s get your lil’ synapses revved up an' kicked into high gear, honey.”
Scenes of the woman in sexual encounters immediately begin to flip through his mind like ads for a mildly pornographic holo.
“If you tired o' ol’ Del, I not have to be me,” he reminded the woman gently as he moved yet deeper and deeper and dangerously deeper into her unresisting mind. “Up in our heads, we not tethered to reality no more. I can be whoever you need me to be to get you goin'… man, woman… hell, whatever kind of creature turns your li'l motor on…”
The images got a little more creative… but only a little more…
“Hmm… well… if we’ve kinda run through your catalogue…” He continued to mentally probe more and more profoundly as he thoughtfully chewed his lip. Finally, an inspiration hit and he headed for a hidden point in a normally untraveled byway of her subconscious where he knew his own thoughts would be reflected back on themselves. “If I angle this jus' right…” He pushed an image experimentally. “…We could do one o' my memories…” Seeing he’d reached the right spot for his projection to have the sort of “echo chamber” effect he was going for, he added more detail and color to the memory. “….’Cause I sure had me some wild times back in the day…”
The woman suddenly blinked. Her mental energy completely changed. It was as if she were waking up inside the dream he was producing within her mind.
“Oh, you see somebody you know…” he said, delighted by his success as her dream energy continued to bloom in to something vibrant and glowing with radiant power.
He grinned as her dream face transformed into that of a very familiar young Asian man and her unsatisfyingly nondescript hair became thick and black.
“Lord, he would kill us…” he breathed, stroking that handsome bronze cheek and running his fingers across those full lips that were now smiling wickedly as the brain he was feeding greedily sucked in information about all the very exciting things the body they were collectively recreating could do.
He wavered for a moment, feeling that this might be taking this damned thing too far… but the dream energy in front of him continued to build so deliciously… and there was nothing but emptiness and pain behind him…
“Well, if Kam gonna be a prick, screw him,” he growled, hungrily reaching for the dream body in front of him. “Come on, mon cher ami, the two of us gonna have us some big fun…”
“I will not be pacified!”
“Well, of course not,” Dr. Rendell said reasonably as she poured the Indiian a glass of rum punch in the portion of the surgical center that she had claimed as her office space. “You do need to calm down though, Tristan. It will throw off the readings otherwise.”
Vale, whose cheeks were still effused with a blazing silvery glow from the tantrum he’d just thrown with her subordinates, crossed his arms and frowned. “If I consume an alcoholic beverage, won’t that skew the readings as well?”
“You have a valid point, Lieutenant,” the doctor granted easily, reaching for the other pitcher of drinking liquid available and setting the punch aside. “Well, then, you can have this lovely ice water and I’ll take care of this nasty thing.”
Vale narrowed his eyes stubbornly. “Why do Havens insist on treating all Indiians like children?”
“Because we are baffled by how you can maintain your purity in a corrupt universe,” Rendell returned, sipping her drink.
The Indiian rolled his eyes. “Havens are flatterers.”
“Yes, and water is wet, space is cold, and you should never hire a Vulcan as your sex therapist unless you just want to quit screwing around,” the surgeon retorted pointedly. “Now sit down and tell me about your problem.”
“I won’t be called a liar,” Vale asserted, remaining obstinately upright.
“No one’s calling you a liar, Tristan,” Rendell assured him, taking a seat wearily.
The lieutenant leveled an accusing finger at her tricorder. “That machine is.”
“Cheeky little beast.” The Haven gave the device a reprimanding smack for good measure. “It doesn’t know everything. That’s why they still keep me around and don’t just pin the rank bars on it. So, why do you think you’re sick?”
This silly gesture seemed to finally start to calm the Indiian. Vale took a deep, unsteady breath. “I’m… I’m having… hallucinations….”
“That is disturbing.” Rendell nodded sympathetically. “And might make you feel as though you were quite ill… and might have causes that would escape this little device. You said hallucinations – You’ve had more than one?”
“It’s happened twice. The first instance I tried to dismiss as just a product of the heat and the excitement of piloting the Calumbri craft, but when it happened the second time…”
“Are these visual hallucinations?” the doctor prompted. “Auditory?”
“Psychic,” the Indiian admitted.
The Haven blinked in surprise. “What?”
“It’s as though I was receiving…” Vale shuddered slightly in remembrance. “Thoughts.”
“Well, you are an empath,” Rendell blurted out, knowing it might set him off – but he did seem to be overlooking a very obvious explanation. “It could have been a particularly strong emotional impression.”
“NO!!!” the lieutenant cried, raising both fists before his face and shaking them. His gleaming red locks flew about his glowing features -- making him look like a sort of a small silver volcano.
Rendell held up a belaying hand. “Tristan, I’m not doubting you. I’m trying to find an explanation of what happened.”
“It wasn’t just emotions. It was …” The young man’s face twisted into an expression of distaste. “…Thoughts. Words. Images. Graphic images…!!”
The Haven chewed her finger thoughtfully. She loathed broaching the topic, but it was starting to look like he might have gotten some sort of impression that violated some religious taboo for him. She stifled the urge to sigh. She had long ago given up taking Indiian lovers for just this reason. They were absolutely adorable little silver gems in bed, but their sensitivity made them a little too sharp and/or earnest for normal conversation and above all there were inevitably those moments when you had to deal with the sheer, inescapable irrationality that their religion seemed to be unable to avoid arousing in them … “When you say “graphic” – is that sex-graphic or blood-and-guts-graphic?”
“Sex,” the lieutenant confessed. “…and food with Ensign Owusu… And the mechanics of operating the vehicle, of course.”
A bad idea about why Vale, a non-telepath, was suddenly having telepathic impressions immediately occurred to Lian Rendell. “The vehicle?” she repeated numbly. “These incidents happened while you were piloting the Calumbrian machines?”
“Yes.”
She tried to keep her breathing even and her heart rate from spiking, hoping her next question would prove her dangerous working hypothesis wrong. “Primarily or exclusively?”
“I suppose they were only while I was piloting…” Vale tilted his head to one side. “You think that’s significant?”
“It’s an avenue we need to explore,” Rendell replied very professionally. She had to get him out of here immediately. He was still pretty wrapped up in his own tantrum, but she was about to have an emotional reaction to the conclusion she’d just drawn that a rock would be able to read accurately. “You’ve said nothing to the captain?”
The Indiian frowned, his look of extreme distaste to whatever it was he’d seen in his telepathic vision returning. “No!”
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” she said, gesturing him to the door. “I’ll handle this from here.”
Vale obeyed, but frowned discontentedly as he did so. “You’ll speak with the captain?”
Rendell paused and considered carefully before speaking so that nothing she was about to say to the Indiian would be an outright lie.
“I need to get more readings,” she said, firmly ushering him to the door and forcing herself to remain calm. “We don’t want to cause a panic. You’ve seen how sensitive the Calumbri are about these droids.”
The Indiian paused before exiting. “But you don’t think I have anything to worry about?”
“No, Tristan,” she forced herself to smile and did not even think about the very, very, very difficult subspace call she was going to somehow have to find a way to make until after the door was very firmly shut behind him and she’d had time to sink into a chair and drain her glass of rum punch. “I think we all have something to worry about.”