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JUST A DREAM
Hoshi!
She shook her head, annoyed, and looked around for the source of the voice. Was someone calling her? All she saw were Amagadans, completely unaware of her presence.
Hoshi, please!
"What is it?" she said, whirling around. And still no face greeted her, no source appeared.
Hoshi...
"Where are you, Malcolm?" she cried, catching a slight tinge of British on the word. He did not answer, and she strained her ears, trying to hear where he was calling her from. "Malcolm?"
Grumbling at the interruption of her work, she reached out with her mind as Pyrrih had shown her and visualized Malcolm Reed. She expected to see the universe swirl and shift around her, but it stayed stubbornly still.
A little voice in the back of her head began to sound alarm bells. Hadn't the Betweeners said that they could go anywhere that they wanted, no matter what? Where was he?
She closed her eyes and tried again, and this time a wave of sensation swept into her head. When Hoshi opened her eyes she still stood in the Amagadan village, but she could feel a wisp of Malcolm, as she had felt Pyrrih's true name. His emotions, clear as if he had spoken out loud, tumbled back and forth from terror to panic to worry and back again.
"Malcolm, what happened?" she muttered to herself. She held tight to the thread that was her friend and pulled as hard as she could. In a rush he came Between, flooding her mind with his thoughts and sense of self; for a moment she reeled backwards, unable to comprehend the entirety of a whole other person suddenly shoved into her own mind. Then the tide pulled back and she found herself staring at the silver-blue eyes of the child Malcolm had become. He gazed at her, not blinking, and collapsed to his knees, staring in shock. If she had not known better, she would have thought he was dead, just a corpse staring into eternity.
Hoshi looked him up and down for a moment, watching him shiver, and then knelt and put her arms around him. His body stiffened and then relaxed; he looked up at her and shook his head. "You heard me," he said softly.
"What happened to you?" she asked, letting go and sitting back on her heels. His eyes still had that blank, dead look in them; she shuddered involuntarily.
"It doesn't matter. We have to get to Enterprise, if it's not already too late."
"What?" He didn't answer, just stood up and grabbed her shoulder. The Amagadans fizzled from view; Hoshi, gasping at the audacity, reached out and stopped him. "I've got an opportunity I'll never get again, Malcolm! What's the matter with you?"
"What's the matter with me? What's the matter with me? You really want to live without ever really touching anything again? You can hear and see but nothing else, and no one can hear you! What's the matter with me? What's the matter with you? Enterprise is in trouble!"
She could feel him straining to go; she clamped down on his wrist and held him fast. "We're dead, Malcolm, don't you understand? We're DEAD. And you said it yourself, we can't touch anything and no one can hear us. Forget about Enterprise. It'll hurt too much to go back there when we can't even talk to our friends."
He stopped struggling. "You do understand, at least a little," he said. Some of the dead look had left his eyes, replaced by smoldering, angry flame. "We'll be here, Between, able to watch anything but never do anything. It's like watching television. You can imagine you're in the show, you can imagine every character is your best friend and you're in every single adventure, but you're not really a part of it, ever. You can trick yourself into it for a while, but eventually the show is canceled, or the television gets turned off and you have to face the reality that you can never be a part of that world. Do you understand? Even if it's just instinctively?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she whispered. "Leave me alone, Malcolm." She let go of him and turned back to the Amagadans, willing the lieutenant away with all her strength.
"Enterprise is in trouble, Hoshi," he said. "I don't know how long... how long I was in the void, but we might still be able to save them. The Betweeners are taking our friends' lives away from them. Possessing them. Like those cloud creatures, but much more permanent. And we'll die for real, because they'll cut off the life support that's keeping our bodies alive. We might still get to go back, Hoshi, but I need your help."
She shook her head. "Go away, Malcolm. I'm happy here," she said, not turning around.
His anger reached into her mind; it hung in the air, almost palpable, even after he vanished. She shivered and sat down next to a woman who sang as she dug in her garden. Hoshi could not catch the words; the rhythm was too fast. She wanted to ask the woman what the lyrics said.
But of course she could not. She silently chided herself for forgetting, and stood up, running away in time with the beat of the music, running from Amagad and out into space, dodging the stars as she passed.
"You came," said Malcolm softly as she slowed and stopped. "I didn't think you would."
The darkness around them reminded her unpleasantly of the void; Malcolm, beside her, still trembled, and she could feel his fear as strongly as she had felt his anger. "What's happening?"
"There," pointed Malcolm. "This is the portal where Between and our universe become one. When people pass through this portal they are open to the Betweeners. I don't think they've done too many people yet." He didn't say, and she didn't ask, how they'd get the Betweeners out of the people who were already possessed. There was enough to think about without adding that to the list.
"Look! The captain!" he said, grabbing her arm. Leading the way into the cave with gleaming flashlights were Captain Archer and Commander walking as if he were only half-awake. Now she saw the Betweeners waiting just beyond the portal, and she wondered if they were aware of the two of them. Pyrrih stood at the front, with Thetik directly behind him.
"They told me that they get Trip and Captain Archer," said Malcolm. "Come on, quickly, we have to stop them." He vanished and reappeared directly inside the portal; Hoshi followed in an instant, and behind them a shocked cry went up as the Captain and Trip Tucker stepped Between.
"Leave them alone!" cried Malcolm, moving in front of them. He stepped backwards as Thetik advanced on him, animosity rolling off of him in waves.
"You dare to steal this from us!" cried the painted Betweener, reaching a hand out to strike Malcolm away. The child and the adult faced off, frozen for an instant.
And then Trip Tucker stepped through Malcolm and fell to the floor with a sudden gasp. Thetik gave a great gusty screech and faded away; gone but not dead. Hoshi glanced from Pyrrih to the captain. Both she and Pyrrih moved at the same instant, but Hoshi was quicker.
The captain's self invaded her much the way Malcolm's had only a few minutes ago. She struggled and felt his consternation--Captain, I'm saving your life, you know-- and settled in beside him, looking from his eyes at the darkness of the cave around them. She felt his legs go limp, and made his arms shoot out to break his fall.
Trip shouted, "Hey! Stop! Everyone get out of this cave, now!" She turned Archer's eyes to look and saw a pale light shining from the commander's face.
The spell broke, and the crew suddenly realized where they were. Hoshi felt Archer's query, and said silently, Bear with me, Captain. He did not relax at all, anxiously demanding to know what was happening to his crew.
She could not see the Betweeners, but she knew they were there, so she made Archer's legs walk clumsily toward the entrance. His body was a good deal larger than her own, and she did not know how to make it work.
I'll do it, Hoshi, said Archer, and she felt his body break into a sprint. He blinked as they burst into the sunlight outside, shaking his head to rid his eyes of the afterimages.
"No one is to go back into that cave," Hoshi made him say. "That's an order." Sorry, sir, don't write me up for impersonating a senior officer.
You sound like Malcolm, he thought. I think I must be going crazy.
No, sir, you're not. It's really me.
A delusion would say that, wouldn't they? To make me believe it was real?
She could see Trip Tucker, standing stiffly at attention, and wondered if Malcolm was letting him have any control at all. That expression and posture were pure Lieutenant Reed, and it looked very odd in place of Tucker's normal easygoing slouch.
"Captain Archer, I must speak with you immediately," said Trip. Hoshi felt the captain shudder involuntarily at hearing Reed's clipped British accent come out in Trip's slow drawl of a voice.
"Malcolm, it's me," said Hoshi. Archer struggled to regain control of his own words, but she kept a firm hold on him.
"Hoshi?"
Hoshi, what the HELL are you doing? said Archer furiously.
"Yes. What are you planning to do?"
"To be honest, I wasn't expecting to possess the bodies of our superior officers," he said. His face spasmed for a moment, and then Trip's own Southern accent came pouring out of his (their? thought Hoshi) mouth.
"Get him out of my head, he's in my head, get out!" he shouted. Hoshi looked around through Archer's eyes and saw nearly the entire crew watching them. Hardly a surprise, she thought, because they were stuck down on a planet with nothing else to do.
Hoshi, let me handle this, said Archer. That's an order, Ensign.
She relinquished control and simply floated, feeling, hearing, and seeing everything he did, but doing nothing about any of it. Archer rushed over to Trip and grabbed his arms, shaking him roughly. "Trip, snap out of it. They're not going to do anything to us"--in his mind Hoshi felt his doubt: was this really her? Or Malcolm?-- "so don't struggle with him." He looked up at Trip's forehead. "Lieutenant Reed, you give Trip control at once. That's an order and if you don't follow it I'll bust your ass down to second class crewman and make you swim across one of the lakes on this planet!"
"He said, aye, sir," said Trip, still tense but not panicked anymore. "And he said, that was a low blow, sir. What low blow?"
"Never mind," said Archer. The entire crew was grouped around them, gaping. Hoshi, gazing out of Archer's eyes, saw six crewmen standing just at the fringes of the group, and saw the Betweeners in them.
Can you see that, sir? she asked.
I don't know what you're looking at, said Archer.
They're possessed already. Harris, Vinich, VanHammond, Sepanik, York, and Wright.
He ordered the six crewmen to come. They glanced at each other, then suddenly broke into a run away from the group. Phase pistol blasts took two down immediately, and then Trip sprinted off after them, half of the engineering team following in his wake. They fell one by one; Harris nearly made it to a large outcropping of rock, but finally fell as well.
So how are we supposed to get out of here? asked Hoshi. Everyone's down on the planet.
I remember a shuttle, thought Archer. It's all a haze, like someone told me to do something and I can't remember what. "Find a shuttle!" he yelled, and the crew scattered out across the planet.
"We've found it!" came the yell a few minutes later, and Archer jogged towards them. Trip, sweat beading on his forehead, loped up and matched their stride.
"I'm going to kill that snotty British bastard!" he growled at Archer. "Just keeps taking control away from me."
"Well, it's just lucky they were dumb enough to let you come down here with a phase pistol," said Malcolm in Trip's voice.
"AAGGHH! Stop doing that! I'll tell them what you want to say!"
"In that accent?"
"Malcolm," said the captain warningly, although Hoshi could feel him snickering under his breath. She wondered if he had always had that talent, and how often he laughed at all of them.
Trip breathed a sigh of relief as they reached the shuttlepod. "Get them in first," he said (in his own voice), beckoning to the crewmen carrying the stunned Betweeners. "Malcolm says it would probably be faster if we transported people up rather than made lots of shuttlepod runs."
"Where's the doctor?" asked Archer. "Ah, there you are, Phlox. You go up too. We've got stunned crew here." The doctor nodded, glancing quizzically at Trip.
"Did you say that Malcolm said it would be faster?" he asked, eyebrows raised.
"I did," said Trip, hefting one of the stunned crewmen into the pod. "It's a long story. I'll tell you on the way up, Doctor."
Hoshi did not envy Trip that explanation. She knew neither man liked this one bit; Archer's own frustration fizzed through her consciousness like bubbles from a glass of soda. Of course, had it been her being possessed by the captain, she would have felt exactly the same way. But Trip and the captain were their friends and their commanding officers, and they were loyal enough to put up with Hoshi and Malcolm for a while.
She hoped it would be only a while, anyway. Her thought must have reached Archer, because he said silently, I'll do everything I can to get you back, Hoshi. Perhaps it was simply a captain's reassurance. She wasn't sure.
I know you will, Captain. But she didn't say it to him, just to the part of his mind that she occupied at the moment. He did not hear.
"Okay, have we got a transporter operator?" called Archer out loud, and Trip nodded to him from inside the shuttlepod hatch, and tossed him the phase pistol. The captain nodded back and gave a thumbs-up, and Trip pulled the door closed. "Get up there quickly," Archer added as the pod lifted off from the surface. Hoshi was not paying attention to the shuttlepod, though, but to the images she saw through Archer's peripheral vision.
She saw the Betweeners moving around, like mist in the air, and shuddered. Archer asked, "What's wrong?" but she did not answer. How easily had they gotten her and Malcolm to come down to Falling Rocks? They could reach through and grab ahold of their thoughts from the portal.
One of them turned and looked directly at her: Pyrrih, his eyes glowing golden and indistinct against the shining sand of the desert planet. "You have committed a grave crime against us, Hoshi Sato," he said. "Once we have your crew, you will pay."
She seized control of the captain; he protested and fought, but could not wrest it back from her. "Get away from there!" she shouted, seeing several crewmembers start towards the cave entrance. "That's an order!"
They jerked upright, as if they had been sleepwalking, and stared at the captain. "Everyone move away from the entrance, where we can't see it," she ordered, struggling to restrain a furious Archer. "Hold hands and if you feel someone start to move towards that cave shake them as hard as you can."
The crew moved into a line, and Hoshi sighed, gripping T'Pol's hand on one side and Lieutenant Hess' on the other. "Wait for the shuttle to contact us before you move," she said. "No one moves from this line. No one."
Pyrrih's ghostly eyes met her own. "You will not escape us, Hoshi Sato. We have waited too long for life." He glided away, throwing one last comment over his shoulder.
"And when the time comes, you will pay."
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Whew! Sorry it took so long to get this chapter up, but I have been insanely busy this week. You'd think that school would end and I'd get a break, but no, of course not. Oh, well.
