Chapter 26
Andrew sat quietly in one of the armchairs in the main area of his family's quarters, unsure of what to do. He didn't particularly have anything he had to do. He felt antsy and wanted to get up and pace, to do something, but the silence in their quarters was so oppressive that he felt trapped by it. Both his mother and his sister were there with him and his brother asleep in the nursery. But it would have been less quiet if they weren't there. His mother had just become so different that he didn't know how to act around her, what to say or do. He knew his father felt the same way, if only because the captain had found more and more excuses to stay out of their quarters and buried underneath the protective shield of his work. Andrew shifted in the chair, trying to make himself comfortable when he felt something underneath the cushion. Holding in comments about Gracie managing to leave her things everywhere possible, he pulled out the padd that had worked its way beneath the cushion.
Ready to complain to Gracie by way of returning her padd, Andrew glanced at it to see what she'd been working on, if it would reveal anything about the way she was feeling.
Although originally bred as a draft horse, the breed is graceful and nimble for its size and later developed into a finer-boned nobleman's steed. During the Middle Ages, Friesian horses were in great demand as destriers throughout Europe since their size enabled them to carry a knight in full armor...
The padd wasn't Gracie's, it was Allie's. She must have lost it before they'd left for the vineyard and now she wouldn't need it at all. The padd dropped from his hand, clattering against the coffee table before thumping onto the floor. The sound caused his mother to look up in irritation from her work on the terminal, and her irritation only grew more evident when the sound revealed that it'd woken up Gabriel.
Andrew swore under his breath.
Beverly raised an eyebrow.
"I'll get him," he said.
"Please," she replied, not bothering to add that he should because it was his fault his brother had woken up in the first place.
Andrew was grateful for the escape. As soon as he'd placed his hands around his brother's body to pick him up, the crying ceased. Andrew scowled at Gabriel and his brother merely quietly studied him in reply. Walking over to the tall window in the room, he admonished his little brother in a gentle voice. "I don't see why you get all quiet only when I pick you up. I think you do it just to annoy me. You're not even two months old and you've already started. Did Allie out you up to this? 'By the way, I'm not going to be around, so you have to take my place to annoy the ever-living crap out of Andrew.' Is that what she said?"
He looked at his brother again, at his green eyes, reminding him of Nana. For his part, Gabriel stayed quiet.
"Oh, I see how it is. You won't break. She's not around anymore and you still know that somehow, she could do some damage if you told on her. Though, I know she'd at least wait till you were older. I wish you could have known her, you know." He lightly rested his cheek against his brother's head, amazed at how soft the baby's hair was. They both watched the stars outside. Andrew wondered if already, Gabriel was like him and like Gracie, called by the stars and not by the earth. "You like the stars, too?" he asked. "Allie wasn't like the rest of us, she couldn't care less about the stars. She was much more grounded than the rest of this family." This family. Tears threatened as Andrew realized once again how quickly they were falling apart without his twin. She couldn't have been the only thing holding them together.
He found himself continuing to talk, trying to distract himself from his own reactions. "She had this knack, she could almost immediately see the real issue, see whatever we were really feeling, and she'd just throw it right there in the open, whether we were ready to deal with it or not. She was so...level-headed. Maybe it's because she was the only one without red hair of any kind, aside from Papa. I mean, yeah, she had a temper like the rest of us, but still...I don't know. I thought I would be the only one who'd feel lost without her, I've always been a twin, and she's always been there. But now, watching everything happen between us all, I think we're all lost. It's like we've forgotten that we love each other and we're all adrift."
Andrew glanced back at the doorway, making sure no one was listening to him, aside from the brother he held in his arms, who couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. "At first, I was afraid of living without Allie. I still am, but I didn't know that something else could scare me more than that. It's our parents. I'm terrified that they'll tear each other apart and end up separated and then divorced, like in that future that Q had shown our father. They've already started the process. Not any official divorce proceedings or anything, but they're emotionally separated from one another. They don't talk anymore, not even arguing about things like the prime directive in them middle of the night. They'd keep all of us awake, arguing about that. I'd lay in bed wishing they'd shut the hell up, while Allie would just get up, walk out of her bedroom, and tell them exactly that. She was the only one of us who wasn't afraid of emotional confrontation. Without her, we're all just cowering in corners and throwing rocks at each other."
He scowled again. "Even Gracie. She used to be this happy-go-lucky little kid who'd just announce whatever was on her mind. And now she doesn't talk about anything and pretends that she doesn't feel anything. She's acting so much like Mom right now that it hurts and I don't know what to do. Allie and I, we'd always looked out for her, you know? And now it's just me and I don't have the slightest idea how to make her feel better. I'm afraid to even ask, because she'll just snap at me, like Mom would. It's weird, too, because usually it's Papa who closes off and chases everyone away. For once, I don't think he's closed off, not like he used to be. That was Allie's doing, too. But I can't pin him down, he's avoiding us all. Not that I can really blame him. It's like a hornet's nest in here and that's the sort of thing you stay away from. I'd stay away, too, but I don't know what to do with myself." He stopped talking, unsure of what to say anymore. His brother's head had fallen to lay on his shoulder and he knew the infant had fallen asleep at some point in his monologue.
He sighed, knowing he'd have to put his brother back to bed, and that he wasn't going to be talking to anyone else. "I miss her...and we could really use her right now," he said.
"Andrew."
He spun around at the sound of his mother's voice. She stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. "How long have you been standing there?" he asked, fear surging through him that she'd heard any of what he'd said.
"You have a message from Earth that's marked priority. I'm done with the terminal for now if you'd like to read it."
He took note that she didn't answer his question and was content to let it go and pretend she hadn't heard a word. "I would," he said. "Just let me put him back down." Carefully, he placed his brother back in the crib and crept out of the room. His mother had already disappeared in her work again, going through a stack of padds spread out on the coffee table. Allie's padd was still on the floor where he'd dropped it. At least no one else had noticed it.
Sitting down, he called up the message, wondering who would be sending him one. He supposed it could be Starfleet, asking him if he was accepting their offer or not. Officially, he still had another week to decide, but he was certain that candidates didn't normally take this long to notify them of their acceptance of an offer.
But he wasn't sure if he was going to accept it. He didn't know anymore.
The message appeared on the display and it wasn't from Starfleet. It was from Cécile. Marie had woken up briefly and given a preliminary statement to the investigator. Marie had said that there had been a man inside the winery, it was why Robert had gone inside in the first place. She'd heard odd sounds from the building and had gone in, Rene following despite her telling him not to. Inside, she'd found Robert unconscious and what she thought could be a man, but she couldn't tell for certain, because it seemed to move with the background, like a chameleon. The man had fired on her and Rene and they were both hit. The next thing she remembered was waking up, the fire and smoke around them all, hearing the others moaning as they woke up the same way as she had.
The rest of Cécile's message consisted of her sympathy and he didn't much feel like reading it right then. Almost viciously, he stabbed at the button to close the message and turn off the display in front of him. There'd been a man there, it had been arson. Soran had known about the fire. But Soran couldn't have been the man there. As for the chameleon thing, Andrew knew they had camouflage suits they used for first contact reconnaissance missions. But Soran...he couldn't figure out how Soran figured into it. Why the hell would he care about his family so much? Why would he instigate that fire?
"Is this what you dropped earlier?" he heard his mother ask.
Andrew looked up and saw the padd Beverly held up with her hand. "Yeah." He didn't need to wonder if she'd read it and recognized it as Allie's, he could see the fresh pain in his mother's blue eyes and knew she had. Allie was right there, waiting to be brought up, but he didn't want to do it. Already, he was doing his best not to squirm even thinking of the prospect. But Allie would have brought it up immediately, put it out there in the open without a second thought, like shouting to them all about the elephant in the middle of the room. And Allie wasn't here to do it for them anymore, someone else would have to. "It was Allie's," he said, willing himself to keep looking straight at his mother.
"I know," she said. "I turned it on. I thought it was yours."
"It's not. It's not anyone's anymore."
Beverly blinked at her son's statement, one that acknowledged aloud that Allie was gone. She changed the subject. "What was that message about?"
Andrew knew that the message wasn't going to change the subject, it would only make the conversation more emotionally loaded that it already was. He plunged into the deep end, repressing the shiver at the cold that enveloped him as soon as he did. "It was from Cécile, about the fire. Marie woke up and gave her statement. At least, she gave a preliminary statement."
Gracie's door opened, the sustained conversation drawing her out of her room. None of them had held any sustained conversations with one another in awhile. "What did Aunt Marie say?" she asked.
Andrew glanced at his mother, then back at his younger sister. He didn't want to discuss the contents of the message with Gracie around. She was too young to be able to deal with it. Hell, he was too young and he didn't think his mother was old enough for it either. He looked at his mother again and gave her a slight shake of his head to tell her he wouldn't be talking about it right then.
"You aren't going to say because I'm right here," said Gracie.
Andrew looked right at her. "Exactly."
He'd meant for the honesty to placate her a little bit, at least enough so she'd know he didn't want to lie to her. But it only served to make her more angry. "I don't want you to hide things from me," she said.
"I'm not really hiding things from you," he said. "I'll tell you when you're older."
"I don't want to be left out!" she shouted at him. "She was my sister, too!"
"You're not old enough," he said, trying to keep an even tone, though he felt his own anger bubbling to the surface.
"I'm old enough not to be left out. I want to know what happened. I deserve to know."
He blinked. "You deserve to know? How about—"
Beverly cut him off. "Andrew, she became old enough to know the day she found out her older sister died in a fire. Just say what was in that message."
He turned to face his mother, his ability to filter his words completely gone, the anger flying outwards at the nearest targets. "I'm not sure if you're old enough to know either. You're acting the same way as Gracie and she's five years old."
The doctor stood up, leaving the padd on the sofa next to her. "Young man, you have no right to make that judgement about any of us, nor do you have any right to hold back whatever Cécile has told you about Marie and what her statement was."
"I have every right," he said. "She—"
"You have no right to keep that information to yourself. She was my daughter," Beverly said, once again cutting him off.
Out of the corner of his eyes, Andrew saw the doors to their quarters open and his father step inside. No one else noticed his presence and Andrew didn't much feel like acknowledging it. "She might have been your daughter, but she was my twin," he replied, the loudness of his voice matching his mother's.
"I'm not going to play the game of whose emotional ties were closer than whose," said the doctor.
"We don't need to," he said, still ignoring the door. "Mine was the closest. None of you have had a twin, none of you know what it's like to feel that lost. There's no debating about it, because the answer is already there."
"And you have no idea what it's like to be a mother," Beverly said, her cold eyes holding him in place as surely as ice picks. "You have no idea what it's like to carry a person around in your body for nine months, to see them born, to watch them grow up, only to lose a part of yoursel—"
"But you didn't see that, did you? Not with me, not with Allie. So I don't see how that argument has any meaning, not that part. You didn't watch us grow up. And now you're upset with yourself that you missed it and now you'll miss everything else that could have been her life."
"You have no idea what I went through when I left—"
"No, but I have every idea of what it was like to grow up without your parents. Your parents didn't choose to leave you, they were killed. Mine, they chose to leave me, to leave us. You knew what you were doing when you chose to leave us with Nana, you knew how it would make us feel, and yet you still did it. Allie wasn't a constant in your life, she was a constant in mine and I've lost the closest relationship I've had in my entire life, past, present, and future. You've lost someone who's skipped intermittently through your own life. The longest time she was a part of your life before this past year was when you were pregnant with us. And then, what if Nana hadn't died? Would we still be living on Caldos, having no idea who our real parents were, thinking that they were dead? It was easier, then. We thought they were dead, we thought that they were taken away from us, not that they had chosen to leave us."
When he paused to take a breath, Beverly jumped in. "That wasn't a decision I came to easily and I'm not going discuss it with you again. What needs to be discussed is what Marie had to say about the fire."
Andrew found that he didn't care anymore how much it would hurt any of them to find out more of the truth about the fire. "Fine, you want to hear it? There was a man there, he shot Robert with a phaser when he went inside the winery to investigate. Then Marie went in after when she heard the phaser. Rene followed her, even though she told him not to. So the man shot them both and when Marie woke up, the fire was already blazing, the smoke was already choking, and they were all already screaming. Is that what you wanted to hear? More confirmation that it happened? More confirmation that they all suffered because of some meaningless act—"
"Stop!" Gracie shouted. At some point, she'd picked up the sextant from the shelf behind her and she threw the metal object between her mother and brother as she yelled at them. "Stop fighting!"
The sextant sailed over the sofa and landed on the glass-topped coffee table, shattering the table with a crash, the sextant landing with two soft thuds on the carpet below, in two pieces instead of one, and the shards of glass raining down around it.
Gabriel let loose a cry from his room.
Andrew didn't feel like getting him, he was too worked up to be able to relax himself, much less his younger brother. Perhaps his father would get him. His eyes flicked over towards the doorway and found that the captain had departed at some point during the argument. He looked slowly back at his mother.
"Why did you look at the door?" she asked him.
"No reason," he replied. He might argue and fight with his mother and sister, even his father, but he wasn't going to be the one to hammer in that wedge between them any further then it already was.
"No reason," she repeated.
Gabriel continued to cry. Andrew glanced over at the doorway to his brother's room. "You should get him," he said, looking back at his mother.
"I should," she said, starting to walk in that direction. "After all, I shouldn't choose to miss out on any moments of his life, especially seeing how it's affected you."
Andrew had nothing to say to that, absolutely nothing. So he walked out the door without another word, leaving the shattered table and broken sextant behind him, the shards tiny representatives of his family's shattered lives, the broken sextant an embodiment of how they'd lost their direction.
After wandering aimlessly around the ship, he found himself in stellar cartography, the room empty due to the time of night, the scientists that usually made use of it having no need of it while near an observatory with information to cull from partially destroyed computer banks. He called up his old program, the one of that had kept track of the Enterprise while he lived on Caldos. Then he stretched out on the deck, looking at the stars and galaxies above him and around him, finally seeing nothing else outside of it. The universe had become his world and somehow, it was so much smaller and fraught with far less danger.
One by one, his senses faded, leaving him only to sit and think, which was what he didn't want to do in the first place. He wanted to distract himself from them, not to think of what had happened and what had changed. Obviously, he'd have to find something else to do. As he started to get to his feet to switch off the program, the doors to the large room opened. "I'm just leaving," he said, tapping at the controls.
"You're were just the person I was looking for," said Guinan.
He turned around, not yet finished terminating the program. "I haven't done anything."
"Well, I heard about your program and I'm curious," she said.
He raised an eyebrow. It was all too convenient for Guinan to find him right at this moment, after he'd had a huge fight with his family and wanted to get away from it. "Now?" he asked.
"Why not?"
Andrew frowned, but he couldn't think of a reason to the contrary. He motioned around the room with his hands. "Well, this is it."
"Tell me about it," she asked.
"Tell you about it," he repeated, dubious.
"If you're going to repeat everything I say, I can just say it twice so we can skip that step."
She'd caught his stalling and he allowed himself a slight smile. "Okay," he said, going back to the control panel and highlighting Mars. "The ship started from there, on the Utopia Planitia Shipyards. Then it went..." he tabbed another control and it sent a red line up on the display around them, tracing the ship's route. "To Farpoint Station." He continued talking, his fingers working the controls without his mind having to tell them what to do. He was telling Guinan about each other place the ship had been—at least the more interesting ones—but he wasn't thinking about those places.
He'd gotten stuck on Farpoint Station. A thought had struck him, another what if, but this one different from the rest, not one of regret because of Allie's death, but one of curiosity. What if his parents had stayed together, even before he and Allie had been born? What if they had gotten married, and instead of just Wes going to Farpoint Station with their mother to meet the Enterprise, if it had been all four of them?
They would've been nine at the time, waiting on that station to meet their father's ship. Wes had told him enough of the story, how standoffish Beverly had been with Commander Riker at first. Either because she'd assumed Will had been hitting on her in some way or if not that, then trying to curry favor with the captain by being overzealous in his duties before he even reported aboard ship. Or how the captain had snapped at Wes when he'd been on the bridge, at the reluctance the captain had shown about even letting Wes on the bridge in the first place. Andrew wondered if his father would've been like that if he already were a family man and not a captain focused only on his captaincy. He wished he knew, that things had happened that way, and not the way they turned out.
"Wishes aren't what drive the universe," said Guinan.
Her statement brought him back to reality, his daydream gone. "What?"
"You said 'I wish' so I thought I'd tell you that while you were busy wishing."
He frowned. "What else did I say out loud?"
"Oh, that was it. You were saying something about Rutia Four, then said that you wished, then went on again about that mission."
"Sorry," he said. "My mind wandered off and I was trying to chase it down." He tapped another control and then looked sideways at El Aurian. "You really don't care about the program, do you?"
"Not the program in particular, no. What were you thinking about?"
"Wishes," he said, abandoning the controls. "But those aren't what drive the universe, it's the truth that does. But...I don't much like the truth."
"No," she said. "You don't like reality. There's a difference."
Andrew crossed his arms, studying the red line of the ship's journeys. It would be so easy to just tell Guinan everything right then, lay it at her feet and get her to help him fix it. But he didn't want to talk about the argument, didn't want to admit the awful things he'd said to his mother out of frustration, anger, and hurt. He'd struck out at her like a cornered, hurt puppy and knew he'd hurt her. "The reality is that the fire was arson, and not just arson, but someone stunned each of them with a phaser before the fire even started. They wanted them to die that way. And it all still has no point, it's just as meaningless as it was before. I don't even know who—"
"It was Soran."
He shook his head. "I thought of that, but he was on the observatory at the time, so it couldn't have been him. He just...somehow knew about the fire, like how you just know things. Isn't that an El Aurian trait?" he asked, looking at her, waiting for the answer.
"It's an El Aurian trait, that knowing, it comes from being a race of listeners. However, that's not how Soran knew about the fire. Just because he wasn't the man who stunned your family doesn't mean he wasn't the one who set the plan in motion for that fire to occur. And he had his reasons. One reason, actually."
"And what would that reason be?" He disliked it when Guinan did this, making him fish for the real meaning in her conversations with people.
"I would tell you, but you need something to do, don't you?" she asked.
Surprise flashed through his eyes, practically waving hello to the woman who stood beside him.
She nodded. "I'm sure information has been uploaded to this room's computer banks from Data's work on this matter and I'm sure you can make use of the information to figure out why Soran's doing the things he's doing."
"Why me?" he asked as she turned to walk out the door.
Guinan glanced back at him. "Because," she said. "As I told you before, I know that you need something to do." And she was gone.
He would have followed her, but the opportunity she'd presented him with was too good of one to less pass by without grabbing it and holding on. He needed something to do and she'd given him a puzzle to solve and a purpose in the sense of finding the purpose behind his sister's death. Calling up the new information in the computer, Andrew saw that she'd been correct in assuming Data had found new information. Guinan had known Soran, they had escaped their homeworld as refugees when the Borg attacked. They had been on the same transport ship when it was destroyed by an energy ribbon and they had been rescued by one of the predecessors of the ship he stood on now.
Energy ribbon. One of Data's notes said that Guinan had called that ribbon the Nexus. Andrew realized that it must also be connected to Soran. Leaving the display of the galaxy and the last known position of the ribbon on the display around him, Andrew called up Soran's information on the small terminal display near the controls. "You lost your entire family," Andrew whispered. "How could you take away anyone else's after you went through that?" He read on, noting the annotations made recently by Guinan, about Soran's suicidal tendencies prior to his run-in with the Nexus, and that afterward, those tendencies had disappeared. It still made no sense. Frustrated with this black hole who was Soran, Andrew darkened that display and pulled up the other information Data had sent.
Behind him, the door opened again. Andrew realized Guinan must have returned for some reason, a reason that could only be understood by Guinan. "I hope you've come to help," he said, not bothering to look up.
"I can certainly try, but you'll have to tell me what you're doing first before I can do so," came the strong voice of his father.
Andrew stood up straight and turned. "It's nothing," he said. "If you need the room, I can go." He wasn't sure if he could stand to be in the same room with him, not with not knowing how much the captain had heard earlier.
At first, Picard didn't answer, instead he looked at the galaxy displayed in the room around them, the appearance of them standing in the middle of it restored once the doors closed behind him. "Well, you're already looking at the information I'd intended to look at when I came here," he said, looking at Andrew. "I don't see why you'd have to leave. Maybe you can help me." He motioned towards the display. "What have you figured out so far?"
Andrew looked down at the panel again, grateful to be able to look somewhere other than directly at his father. "According to Data's information, the ribbon is a conflux of temporal energy that travels through our galaxy every..." he found the exact calculation. "Thirty-nine point one years. So this would be the third pass since the Borg attack on El-Auria."
"So it's already back?"
Andrew nodded. "Yeah. It's already entered the galaxy and will pass through this sector in about thirty-one hours."
The captain started to pace on the short catwalk from the doorway to the middle platform. "Guinan said Soran was trying to get back to the ribbon. If that's true, then there must be some connection with the Amargosa star," he said, musing aloud.
"The star's destruction has had numerous astrophysical effects within this sector. So far, none of them appear to have a connection to the energy ribbon." Andrew started to dig deeper into the list of effects.
"Can you get a list of those effects? I want to know every single thing that's been altered or changed, no matter how insignificant," said Picard.
Andrew raised an eyebrow. Apparently he and his father were already thinking along the same lines. "It'll take the computer a few minutes to compile the information."
The silence wrapped around them as they waited, the only sounds the ones in their minds, bits and phrases from the argument earlier passing between them, unspoken. When the computer beeped to let them know it was done compiling, they were both grateful.
"According to our current information, the destruction of the Amargosa star has had the following effects in this sector." Andrew started reading the list, "Gamma emissions have increased by five percent. The starship Bozeman was forced to make a course correction. A research project on Gorik Four was halted due to increased neutrino particles. Ambient magnetic fields have decreased by—"
Picard cut him off, voicing the beginnings of a thought with a question. "Wait. The Bozeman...why did it change course?"
Andrew frowned at the display. "The destruction of the Amargosa star has altered the gravitational forces throughout the sector. Any ship passing through this region will have to make a minor course correction. The Enterprise did earlier as well." Realizing that the energy ribbon would had to have done the same, Andrew entered that information in the panel so it would show on the room's display.
"A minor course correction. Where is the ribbon now?" asked the captain.
Andrew pointed to where its avatar blinked. "It's right there."
"Can you project its course?"
"Maybe," he said, frowning at the more complicated set of mathematics that task required. "Give me a second." As he entered the numbers, the red line of the ribbon's path moved in an arc through the starfield.
"Enhance grid A-Nine," said Picard as soon as the arc started moving. "Where was the Amargosa star?"
Andrew tabbed the star's avatar to blink. "There."
"Now...you said the gravitational forces in this sector have been altered. It would have affected the course—"
"Of the ribbon," Andrew finished for him. He tapped the console and the red line shifted away from the Amargosa star. "Soran's changing its course. But why? Why try to alter its path...why not simply fly into it with a ship?"
His father turned to him. "Every ship which has approached the ribbon has either been destroyed or severely damaged," he said, his voice level.
"He can't go to the ribbon, so he's making the ribbon come to him." Andrew couldn't keep the anger out of his voice, that Soran could be so selfish as that. That he would do something as paltry as to kill his sister in order to help him on whatever quest he had with this energy ribbon.
For the moment, Picard ignored his son's anger. "Is it going to pass near any M-class planets?" he asked.
Attempting to keep focused, Andrew found the information. "There are two in the Veridian system," he said, keying a command to project the information around them. Four planets, a star, and the red line that denoted the ribbon's course appeared on the starfield.
The captain pointed towards the third planet. "It's very close to Veridian Three, but not close enough."
Andrew knew where Soran was going and what he was going to do now. He tapped in a command and the Veridian star darkened and went out. A cause—and the effect was the red line shifting to intersect with the third planet. "That's where he's going," he said. "He's going to destroy that star." Already, he was doing one more small calculation in his head and the anger came back, indignant, shouting to be let out. Allie had been chosen for no other reason than because her father was the captain of the nearest galaxy-class starship, for that slight gravitational difference.
Picard had yet to make the same determination. Instead, he followed the path his duty dictated. "The collapse of the Veridian star would produce a shock wave similar to the one we observed at Amargosa."
"And destroy every planet in the system," said Andrew, entering another command and making the four planets in the system disappear from view.
"Are any of them inhabited?"
Andrew glanced at the small display. "Veridian Three is uninhabited, but Veridian Four supports a pre-industrial humanoid society." He paused, unable to hold back his sarcasm. "But really, what's two hundred and thirty million more people to Soran?"
His father ignored the comment. "Picard to Bridge."
"Worf here, sir," came the disembodied reply.
"Red Alert, Mr. Worf. Set a course for the Veridian system, maximum warp."
"Aye, sir," Worf replied, then closed the comm channel.
Andrew waited for his father to leave, holding his breath, afraid to let himself think. When his father didn't leave, and his own lungs started a meaningful protest at Andrew not breathing, he let out that breath slowly. He'd figured his father would go straight back to work, not acknowledging anything that had happened before, or anything they had just discovered about Soran. Instead, he stayed, and stayed long enough for Andrew to lose the ability to hold in his thoughts. "Is it really as meaningless and stupid as that?" Andrew asked, standing and looking at Picard. "You happened to captain the closest Galaxy class ship."
The captain frowned his inability to understand immediately. "What do you mean?"
"If this ship hadn't been in the Amargosa system when its star was destroyed, then the Nexus would have skimmed across Veridian III's atmosphere and not gone through the planet itself." Andrew paused, tapping in the commands to display what he'd discovered on the starfield. "Soran needed the exact gravitational mass of this ship."
Now it was the captain holding his breath, staring at the solar system in front of them with its darkened star, only the third planet highlighted. He made his comment without turning to Andrew. "You know he caused it."
He didn't have to explain further, that 'he' was Soran and 'it' was the fire.
And Andrew knew what he meant. "For awhile I thought, maybe if it were arson, then it would have some meaning. But this, it's just as meaningless. He chose this ship for its gravitational pull, no matter how slight it is. Nothing more."
"There are other Galaxy class ships," said Picard.
He didn't think he'd overlooked any of the current courses of Starfleet vessels. "None as close as th—"
"There was another one closer. The Trinculo." The captain reached out past Andrew's hands and hit the control pad himself, adding the avatar of the other Galaxy class vessel.
Andrew couldn't argue with it. His father captained a Starfleet vessel, he'd have the most accurate information of the other ships in this sector. So now it made even less sense. If Soran were so focused on getting to this Nexus for whatever reason, to choose a ship farther away placed that mission in jeopardy. "Then why—"
As he'd anticipated his son's objection, he also anticipated his question. "The Borg," Picard answered.
"What?"
His father studied him, his eyes very serious. "I think he decided on the Enterprise because her captain lived through assimilation. And not only did he live, but his family did as well."
Andrew was struck by the image of himself on this ship as an eleven-year-old, watching as his father was taken aboard a Borg ship, made into a Borg, and threatening all Federation life. Certainly not a wish he'd want fulfilled, to have witnessed that. "You didn't know about your family," he said, his eyes not quite focused, vaguely fixed on a star behind his father's head.
"I don't think he cares."
He didn't want this death, his sister's death, to be attributed to his father's assimiliation by the Borg. Enough deaths had been handed over to that cause already. "Plenty of other people died," he said.
"But no one so personal as a man's family. His died. Mine didn't. It's a punishment that he's decided to mete out."
Acceptance slowly came into being as his father refused to give in to denial. "So he killed my sister and tried to kill me...because you lived?"
Picard didn't look away. "And it was convenient," he said. "A nicely wrapped package."
Andrew couldn't look at him anymore, couldn't keep placing the blame at the feet of the people around him. "As stupid and meaningless as that," he said, blinking back tears, doing his best to ignore those same tears reflected in his father's eyes, and walked out the door.