Stardate 2258.43
Dagny gazed out over the emptiness of Cargo Bay 1, wondering how it had held more than a thousand people just two hours ago. The Vulcans had been very tidy and gracious guests and picked up every bandage, every ration wrapper, and practically every strand of hair they'd shed before disembarking the Albret. The blankets and clothing the Albret had lent them were neatly folded and placed in immaculate rows, like little formations of soldiers marking the places where people had been.
They were gone now, down to the surface of Andoria for refugee processing and most of the ship's crew and family members had gone with them. The Albret's systems had been badly damaged in the fighting in Vulcan's orbit and the vessel was in serious need of repair. Life support was hanging by a thread, the warp core was held together by electrical tape and hope—at least according to Arvid, the ship's chief engineer—and several sections of the hull were being reinforced with energy shielding.
Because the Albret was no longer structurally safe, Andoria was to be their home for the next several weeks, a prospect both intriguing and terrifying. Aside from her year-long paramedic course at Deneva Station, she'd never spent more than three days on the surface of a planet, and she didn't exactly count Deneva Station, since it was a massive underground colony. Even though the surface had been terraformed by the turn of the century, Dagny had only ever gone up there twice—when arriving at and leaving from the planet.
She had no idea what was going to happen now. The damage to the Albret was severe and she didn't want to think about how much it would cost to make it operational again. Not only that, they'd jettisoned their entire cargo to make room for their Vulcan passengers. It was all gone—two million kilograms of duranium, tritanium, neutronium and countless other commodity metals and components they'd salvaged over a span of eight months from wrecked vessels near the Briar Patch. They had the shell of a ship and no obvious way to afford any repairs to it.
She heard a metallic ping and then a series of subsequent repetitions, not loud, but real and unexpected enough to startle her.
"Hello?" she called.
"Ingrid?" a voice replied. Her father.
"No, it's Dagny."
She wandered through a narrow doorway but didn't see him. She turned full circle and said, "Papa?"
"In here. In the vent."
Only then did she notice one of the panels was off the wall and resting on the floor. She walked over cautiously and stooped to see her father sitting inside the cramped vent, his posture contorted by the conduit's circular shape. Emil Skjeggestad wasn't a large man, but he looked like a giant curled up in there.
"What are you doing here?"
"What are you doing here?" his lethargic voice replied.
"I'm doing one last sweep of the ship to make sure no one left anything behind. What about you?"
"I'm the captain," he murmured. "The captain always disembarks last."
She scoffed. "You've never stood on that much ceremony."
"For whatever reason, I think ceremony matters today." His head rolled along the curved wall to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot; it almost looked as if he'd been crying. Dagny felt compelled to look away. She'd never even thought about the possibility that her father could cry, and seeing that kind of vulnerability started to make her feel like crying again too. She shook her head, crawled inside the hot and horribly uncomfortable vent, and took a seat next to him.
"So, why are we in here?" she asked, staring straight ahead at the shiny duranium wall.
"Did you know the Federation government is going to cover the entire cost of refitting and resupplying the ship?" he replied.
"No. Wait… what?"
"Yes, for to our 'exceptionally meritorious service for coming to the aid of Vulcan.' I just found out ten minutes ago."
Dagny didn't know what to think about that. No one gave away anything for free, especially not a whole refitted ship. "Well, that's good news, yes?"
"We were one of the only ships who responded to the distress call. There were dozens of others in orbit, but the moment the Romulans showed up, they started going to warp."
She inhaled deeply and held her breath, wondering what she was supposed to say. "Well, I'm glad we-"
"I could have stayed longer, you know," he interrupted. "I could have gotten a few more, but we were about to lose impulse engines and that giant Romulan ship was coming about and I thought they were about to fire on us so I turned and left too."
"You did what you had to do," Dagny tried to reassure him. "We saved thousands of people."
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, then pulled it to his chest and closed his eyes. They sat that way for what seemed like an eternity before she said, "Maybe we should get out of here. I'm sure mama is wondering where-"
"This is where they died, Dagny," he said, his voice caught in a whisper.
"Who?" It was a stupid question. She knew exactly who.
His chin trembled as he drew in a sharp breath through his teeth. "I killed them. I killed my own boys."
The first tear hit his cheek and Dagny felt herself losing control. "What are you talking about, papa?"
She hadn't called him "papa" since she was about five years old, but that was exactly how she felt in that moment, tucked away in a cramped plasma vent with her father. She was a helpless little child.
He gasped and nodded to himself. The silence was a heavy burden and just as she started to stammer another plea for him to come away from the plasma vent, he said, "One of the primary starboard plasma ejection ports failed, and Benjamin went to manually override the system. We still didn't have warp and we couldn't risk losing the impulse engines too. The deuterium was starting to overheat and the impulse reaction chamber was about to ignite. The whole thing was going to go, you see? Benjamin couldn't release the port by himself so Arvid sent Aksel to help him and they got the port cleared, but we couldn't wait. The pressure buildup had already fried the driver coils and the reaction chambers were seconds away from a meltdown. I was about to lose my impulse engines and the entire engineering crew. So I gave Arvid the order to vent the plasma."
His words ended in a shaking sob. She was dumbstruck. She wanted to be angry with him, to scream and yell and tell him she would never forgive him, but on a deeper level she understood. He'd been facing an impossible choice—the lives of his two sons versus the lives of seventy people down in engineering, which included two of his other sons, plus cousins and nieces and nephews and lifelong friends.
"I'm so sorry, papa," she breathed, wrapping her arms around his neck. He returned her embrace and they sat there soaking in their mutual sorrow and disbelief for what felt like an eternity.
"Does mama know?" she eventually asked. "That you- you had to do that?"
"Not yet, at least, I don't think so. How did she take the news that they were gone?"
"About like you would expect," Dagny sniffed, recalling the hour of hysterical wailing before Dagny had finally sedated her.
"She's never going to forgive me."
He was probably right but there was no point in saying so. She leaned her head on his shoulder and sighed. It seemed appropriate to cry, but she didn't have any tears left; she'd spent them all too soon.
"She was never quite right for this life, you know," he muttered.
"Who, mother?"
"Yes. She's a lot like Frida: she loves people and things and seeing new places. She wanted to get off this ship the day she turned eighteen."
"So, what happened?"
"Well, Aksel happened," he sighed. "We still had plans to move to Utopia Colony after he was born, but then your grandfather died and your Uncle Knut needed help running the ship. It was only supposed to be for six months, but then Benjamin came along, and then you, and then Daniel and Ingrid and Frida and you know the rest of the story. There was never a right time to leave."
Dagny frowned. She'd never thought about her parents being young and having dreams about a life away from the Albret and salvaging and raising a cohort of messy babies.
"I know you want to get away from this ship," he added.
"I- I don't know," she stammered. "This is my home. I don't know what I would do."
"No one really knows what they would do until they're doing it," he replied, looking at her. "I want you to do what you want to do, Dagny. I don't even care what it is, as long as it's honest and it makes you happy."
She sat up and gazed at him. "I don't know how I could ever leave. I'm the closest thing to a doctor this ship has."
"Do you know how many times I heard your name today? People admire you, Dagny. You saved a lot of lives and earned a lot of respect in these last hours."
"So did you," she insisted.
"The point is, if you want to go to medical school, we'll find a way to get you there. It might not be tomorrow or even next year, but we'll find a way."
"How did you know I wanted to go to medical school?" she mumbled, trying to fight back a new variety of tears.
"Out of all my kids, you've always been the hardest one to figure out. You grew up faster than you should have, always taking care of everyone else and never complaining. And you're also really bad about clearing the search history on the clinic computer. I know you've been researching how to apply to medical school ever since you came back from Deneva."
"You were snooping through my things?" she scoffed, trying to sound offended.
"Not on purpose, but it happens. Not a whole lot of secrets-"
"…on a ship," Dagny finished, twisting her lips into a thin smile. "I do want to go to medical school, but there's-"
"I wondered what we would do when Birgitte died, but then you came along and took over the clinic," he interrupted. "That's the thing; it's easy to feel obligated because you don't know how everyone would get on without you, but people are more resilient and resourceful than you think. You're almost eighteen, Dagny. You only get one chance at life."
He glanced down the dark vent toward the port far in the distance. She thought of Aksel and Benjamin and wondered if they'd ever had dreams that went beyond the confines of the Albret. It didn't really matter much now.
"We need to get out of this vent before it drives us both crazy," she groaned.
"You go," he replied. "I just want to be with them for a few more minutes."
She winced, grabbed his hand again and squeezed it, and then left the vent. She stood in the hallway watching him for a few seconds when he added, "I'll be along, I promise. Just leave me be."
She roamed the corridor on autopilot, making her way to the transporter room several decks above without even thinking about where she was going. She thought about grabbing some things for the stay on Andoria, but the children had ransacked all the rooms looking for supplies. There was no telling where anything was, so she decided to leave in the most dramatic way possible—with nothing but the clothes on her back.
She could hear voices coming from the transporter room and wandered through the door to find Dr. Sevek speaking with Oliva Nygård, the Albret's primary transporter technician.
"There she is," Olivia said, nodding in Dagny's direction before crawling back underneath a console on the floor.
"What can I do for you, Dr. Sevek?"
"I have the final data for your records," he declared, extending a large PADD to her.
She took it and looked over the loopy, scrawling numbers. "I- I don't understand."
Sevek pushed a button at the top right corner and the text converted into Standard characters. Her heart sank. It was a careful accounting of life and death, all neatly tucked into dispassionate rows and columns.
In total, the Albret had transported a total of 3,353 Vulcans from the planet's surface, but of course not all of them arrived safely on Andoria. 457 had died en route, many from injuries sustained on Vulcan or down in engineering and some from "unspecified causes." Dagny thought of Tolik and took that to be a euphemism for suicide. Eleven had died in transporter malfunctions; they'd been able to rescue so many using the industrial salvage transporters, which weren't rated to transport living organisms but could do in a pinch. Line after line told a story and held damning implications.
3,353 Vulcans rescued, 2,896 still alive. Of the survivors, 191 were listed as critical, 305 we remained in fair condition.
1,557 males. 1,339 females. They ranged in age from 1.1 months to… 191 years? What was the average lifespan of a Vulcan, anyway? 616 were twelve years of age or younger. Her heart felt heavier with each number she read.
"Miss Skjeggestad?"
"Yes?" she mumbled. "I'm- I'm sorry. 2,896 people sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, is it?"
"It is a number that exceeds zero," he responded. "I have already extended my thanks to several members of this crew, but I wished to thank you personally, and to return this." He pulled the laser scalpel from his pocket and offered it to her.
"I left the remainder of the supplies in Cargo Bay 7," he continued. "Though I could not complete a proper accounting without an initial inventory for reference."
"Thank you so much, Dr. Sevek," she sighed, not taking her eyes from the data on the PADD in her left hand. "And don't worry about the supplies. A lot more of these people would be dead if it weren't for you."
"It is illogical to speculate upon what might have been," he replied. "Yet it is undeniable we would all be dead were it not for the actions of this ship and its crew."
She nibbled on her bottom lip and nodded. "What will you do now?"
"I do not know. The Federation is already searching for a suitable planet to establish a colony for the survivors. What it will come to be is impossible to determine."
Dagny powered down the PADD and tucked the laser scalpel into her front pocket, but her hand brushed Tolik's book.
"Here," she said, pulling it out and offering it to him. "Um, this belonged to Tolik; he's the man who took my hypospray. I think he put it in my pocket to weigh it down so I wouldn't notice the hypo was gone. You should probably take it."
"Perhaps," Sevek said, eyeing the book. "But I believe he might have had another purpose in bequeathing it to you. I cannot accept it."
"He said it was a philosophy book, one that's very important to Vulcans. I'm sure it's in all kinds of databases, but I imagine books like these are going to be a bit harder to come by from here on out. Besides, I don't even know how to read your language."
"The work in your hands is titled, The Teachings of Surak. You are correct—it is a very important text to my people and it is in numerous Federation databases, but most Vulcans maintain a physical copy. There is a tradition of passing Surak's teachings to a favored relative upon one's death and when Tolik gave it to you, it was likely because he presumed he had no remaining family to give it to."
Dagny set the book on top of the PADD and sighed mightily. Sevek stepped aboard the passenger transporter pad just as Olivia stood and dusted off her slacks. "Are you ready to go?"
"Yeah, I guess so," Dagny answered, joining Sevek on the pad.
"Have you seen your dad?" Olivia asked.
"He's…" She faltered. "He'll uh, he'll be along shortly."
Olivia transported them to an expansive, well-lit building that had been set up as a reception area for the Vulcan refugees. Dagny was dazzled by the size of the room and the bright, white, reflective surfaces. The high glass wall to the left was the most impressive feature. The Andorian landscape was stained white, gray, and blue with a soft purple sky and towering mountains in the distance. Snow fell from the sky, slow and steady. Dagny had seen rain a few times on Aldebaran and Capella IV, but never snow.
She didn't know how long she stood there with her mouth open and staring at the beautiful weather phenomenon, but Sevek interrupted her childlike wonder by saying, "I believe it is time to bid you goodbye."
She started to extend her right hand to shake Sevek's hand and wish him good luck, but he formed his hand into the same V-shape that Tolik had made and said, "Live long and prosper, Dagny Skjeggestad."
She stared at his hand. "I'm so sorry, I'm not really sure how to…"
"It is often customary to return the gesture," Sevek explained patiently. "When one anticipates a short parting, it is typical to reply with 'live long and prosper.' When the separation is expected to be long or permanent, it is more appropriate to respond with 'peace and long life.'"
She frowned. Peace and long life? Hadn't that been what Tolik had said? If she'd have known that, maybe she could have done something to prevent his suicide. She swallowed hard.
She slid her middle and ring fingers apart and extended her thumb quite easily and considered what to say. "I guess I probably should say the second one, because I'm not sure when or how we'll ever cross paths again. But I really do hope you live long and prosper, Dr. Sevek."
He nodded and then he was gone. Dagny turned her attention back to the snow but Sevek's departure had stolen much of its magic.
"We're processing humans over here," called a singsong voice.
Dagny whirled around to see a slender, elegant Andorian woman staring at her in a mildly suspect way. Her wispy white hair was parted artfully around her antennae and her white dress didn't sport a single wrinkle. Meanwhile, Dagny was wearing a dingy medical smock covered with green bloodstains and crumpled pajamas underneath. She suddenly felt very self-conscious.
Beyond the woman was a second glass wall, cutting off a separate room that looked like the main entrance to the building. It was full of people, clamoring and shouting words she couldn't hear amid flashing lights and frantic pushing.
"The media," the woman mused, the corners of her mouth turning into a tiny frown. "They've been told to keep their distance, but… they do like to get their story."
"The media?"
"Oh yes," the woman replied. "Your little ship's rescue of three thousand Vulcans is the one tiny bright spot in a sea of terrible news. Everyone wants to hear about it."
"2,896," Dagny corrected her. "Not three thousand."
The woman's handsome face fell into a more serious expression. "Of course. Can you come with me? We just want to make sure everyone has the necessary vaccinations and checkup; there's been a terrible outbreak of Andorian shingles this summer, and your species is particularly vulnerable."
Summer? Dagny glanced back at the snow falling outside and wondered what an Andorian winter looked like, but she followed the woman into a side room off to the right without complaint and found everyone from the Albret sitting in long rows of overstuffed gray chairs.
Half the children were sleeping and the other half were terrorizing those in the waking world. Most of the adults looked dazed, depressed, and exhausted, and Dagny was sure she didn't look much different.
She saw her family at the far end of the room. Her mother was asleep with her hands on her belly and sitting between Daniel and Ingrid, and Frida, Martin and Johan were trying to entertain Olav, Hedda, Sigurd, Sigird, and Henrik. So many brothers and sisters, but not as many as there once were. It suddenly occurred to her that she was the oldest now.
A man at a desk in the corner scanned her retinas and gave her a small, rectangular device printed with the number 106. He offered her a voucher for food from the replicator and told her to come get him if she needed anything or had any questions.
She wandered through the crowd of familiar faces, nodding and waving to a few people as she passed before slumping onto a wide bench facing a holographic projector. She figured it would be appropriate to sit with her family, but she knew the second Hedda or the twins caught sight of her, they would squeal and probably wake her mother and she wasn't ready to face Sofie Skjeggestad's grief at the moment, particularly knowing what her father had had to do to save the lives of the engineering crew.
She'd seen holographic projectors before but none of this quality. The picture was huge, at least three meters tall and a meter deep. The colors were so vivid and the sound was so clear that she almost felt like she was standing in the middle of the action.
The news came from San Francisco, or what was left of San Francisco. Half the city lay in ruins, devastated by… she didn't know. She eventually figured it out, even though it took her half an hour to piece together the whole story from the reporters talking and the text scrolling by at the top of the screen.
A rogue Romulan ship had obliterated Vulcan and then headed to Earth but had been stopped by a lone Starfleet vessel. Though the ship called Enterprise had kept the Romulans from destroying Earth the same way they'd destroyed Vulcan, Earth hadn't gotten away unscathed. Somehow the Romulans had caused a series of earthquakes along the west coast of the North American continent and the devastation was ongoing.
The Federation capital of San Francisco got the worst of it when the initial earthquake that measured a 9.2—whatever that meant—hit the city center. Eighteen million people lived in San Francisco and the surrounding cities, and current estimates suggested about 750,000 of them were dead or missing. More major earthquakes had occurred near places she'd never heard of—Cualican, Monterey, Astoria, Juneau—and resulted in approximately 400,000 more deaths from things like landslides, tsunamis, and fires.
Arvid had once told her a lot of people were scared of traveling into space because they were afraid of decompression in the cold, dark vacuum, but from everything she was seeing on the holographic projectors, people should have been more terrified of living on a planet where the ground could just crack open and shake at any minute.
The death toll also included the crew of eight Starfleet vessels sent to defend Vulcan—the Antares, Armstrong, Farragut, Hood, Mayflower, Newton, Truman, and Walcott. The presumed Starfleet casualty count was 2,912, an afterthought really, all things considered. It felt strange to think the Albret had waded through the battle largely untouched; perhaps the Romulans hadn't considered them a threat. They hadn't been.
"Mind if I have a seat?"
She turned her head to see Erik Larsen standing just off her left shoulder, hands in the pockets of his coveralls. She offered him a sad smile and a shrug and moved the PADD and Vulcan philosophy book for him to sit next to her.
"They say we might be going to war with the Romulans," he said, staring at the holo image ahead.
"Isn't six billion dead people enough, give or take a few million?" Dagny spat.
"I'm thinking of joining Starfleet," Erik admitted. "It sounds like they're a little short-handed."
"Have you lost your mind?" she sneered. "Your mother would kill you."
"I'm nineteen: she can't stop me."
She gave him a pleading, bewildered look. "After everything we've lost today, I don't want to lose you too."
His eyebrow flicked upward and a half smile spread across his face. "You really mean that?"
"Of course I do," she snapped.
"Then come with me," he urged.
She blinked several times, trying to absorb his odd statement. "You mean you want me… to join… Starfleet?" It seemed inappropriate to laugh, but she couldn't help it.
"You wouldn't have to join if you didn't want to, I guess. But you could come with me."
She felt a tickle on her hand and looked down to see his pinky finger gently tracing along the meaty part of her hand. Her stomach twisted into a ball of nervous energy and she couldn't help the awkward smile that emerged. She didn't dare look down at the innocent flirtation, but she did find the ability to say, "You have lost your mind, Erik Larsen."
Voris crept along the rubble, trying to avoid the safety sweep teams that had stopped him at Guerrero Street. They told him the area wasn't safe and survivors were supposed to be making their way to Union Square for evacuation from the Bay Area.
He tried explaining he needed to get back to his apartment six blocks over, but they'd refused to let him through. He agreed with their assessment: the area certainly wasn't safe, but he was willing to take the risk. Even though he'd explained his purpose for returning home, they assured him he was wasting his time.
His apartment was further down on 17th Street, away from the worst of the damage. He could see in the distance that some of the taller buildings in his neighborhood had collapsed and a major fire had claimed the historic Catholic Church temple on the corner, but it certainly seemed possible his apartment building could still be standing.
The sun glinted overhead, casting small shadows as he walked. He stopped a few more times to avoid the safety inspectors, ducking into dark doorways or hiding behind cars. The further he walked, the clearer the roads became.
Despite several cracks running up the western wall, the apartment building seemed structurally sound. Still, he took the stairs carefully until he reached the second-floor landing. He stared at his door, knowing full well sentimental attachment to inanimate objects was illogical, but then he decided he didn't care.
He pushed through the front door, intending only to collect the meditation candle T'Sala had given him, but he quickly realized he might as well don clean clothing while he was here. He stripped away his dusty clothes that were covered in the blood and bodily fluids of at least eight different species, including the urine of a human child, and put on a fresh black shirt and a pair of black trousers. He put on the silvery tunic vest his mother had given him when he'd departed Vulcan for Earth, tucked T'Sala's candle into the wider, inner breast pocket, and left the rest behind.
He walked across the breezeway, glancing over his shoulder for any safety patrols, and rang the buzzer on Mrs. DePaulo's door. No answer. He tried several more times and then resorted to knocking and calling her name. He knew when she didn't stick to her strict medication schedule she often got confused and wandered off—it had already happened twice this year—and since her daughter Cynthia hadn't come home the night before, Voris suspected it might have happened again.
He was just starting to wonder how far she might have gotten on foot and considered the possibility that she'd been evacuated when he heard a soft, gravelly voice utter, "Vernon?"
He glanced around but couldn't see her. "Mrs. DePaulo?"
He saw rustling in the rose bushes at the base of the stairs and found her sitting in a heap of pink flowers she'd cut from the shrubs. She was wearing what looked like sleeping attire and had her hair bound in a net-like device. Stranger still, she wore badly applied red paint on her lips—an affectation human females called makeup—and a string of white beads around her neck.
"What are you doing down here, Mrs. DePaulo?"
"I was going to go out dancing," she explained, picking up one of the wilting flowers from the pile. "But then I thought, a girl's got to have a nice corsage if she wants the boys to look at her. Will you help me?"
Voris wasn't sure what a corsage was, but judging from the flowers she continued to present to him, he presumed it was some kind of floral ornamentation.
"Mrs. DePaulo, you require your medication. Will you allow me entry into your apartment so I may administer it?"
"Oh, Cynthia gives me my medicine."
"Mrs. DePaulo, your daughter Cynthia has been killed."
"No, I don't think so," she smiled. "I just saw her. Say, what happened to your friend from the service? He was so nice."
Voris uttered a small sigh, marveling at the complexity of the human mind. She couldn't understand that it wasn't the year 2168 or even remember that his name was Voris, but somehow she remembered a very brief encounter with his father from the morning before.
"Will you show me where your daughter keeps your medication?" he insisted.
"No, I need to make a corsage. No one will help me."
Voris steadied his frustration as best he could. He was exhausted and his ability to repress his emotions was waning. How could he reason with someone who had such a distorted view of reality? He took a deep breath and replied, "I shall help you make a corsage if you show me where your medication is located."
Her face lit up and she struggled to her feet. Voris stabilized her, noting a lingering pain in his left arm, and helped his elderly neighbor up the stairs. He knew Cynthia DePaulo was an organized individual, but the interior of the home looked like it had been ransacked. He had wondered how Mrs. DePaulo had coped by herself in the apartment all night; the scene before him gave him a rough indication.
Her auto-injectable hypospray pack happened to be sitting on the entryway table and Voris picked it up and read the prescription. She required thirty ccs of varazine and an additional ten ccs of serotonin. He fed the metered dose into the hypospray and looked around, but she'd disappeared.
He walked down the narrow hallway, stepping over women's undergarments and dry cereal and found her sitting on a perfectly made bed. She clutched a rectangular object in her hands, and as he approached, she asked, "Isn't he handsome?"
"Who?"
"Jason, of course." She held out the rectangular object in her hands, revealing a photographic portrait of a young human couple standing in front of a shuttlecraft. The man was tall and stocky with white teeth and curly, black hair, dressed in the one-piece suit of a laborer or maintenance worker. The woman wore a yellow dress and tall, impractical shoes. She had dark hair, dark eyes, bright red lips, and a necklace of white beads around her neck. They both looked familiar in a subtle way.
Voris glanced at Mrs. DePaulo, realizing the image had been taken of her in her youth. Based on the black curly hair and the thin lips, he supposed the man was Cynthia's father, and therefore likely to be Mrs. DePaulo's deceased mate.
Her entire face stretched into a broad smile. "He's going to take me dancing, you know. You can't be here because he's coming to pick me up. He might get jealous."
"I am going to administer your medication now," Voris explained, holding up the hypospray.
She took the dose without complaint as she continued to gently stroke the photograph. The varazine helped her cognitive functions and the serotonin balanced her mood, but nothing more could be done to improve her memory processing. From what he knew of her condition, she had difficulty forming new memories and making sense of recently learned information. When her daughter had accidentally introduced him to her as Vernon, she'd been unable to correct the mistake in her memory and he'd been Vernon to her ever since.
Even with medication, at times she believed she was reliving a moment from her past, and did so with vivid clarity. When she went too long without her medication, she made up things in her head and those things tended to get committed to memory even though there was no basis for them in reality, thus leading to further confusion even in her more lucid moments. He supposed if she were alive in ten years and ever encountered his father again, she would call him "Vernon's friend from the service."
She was only eighty-nine years old. Anti-aging therapies and medical advancements had extended the average human lifespan to 120 years and many medical professionals theorized it might go as high as 140 years in another generation, but those therapies had come too late for Mrs. DePaulo. She'd undergone cellular regeneration at age fifty against medical advice, and the result was a physically healthy body and a slowly deteriorating mind.
He waited twenty minutes to see if the medication would help settle her before asking, "Mrs. DePaulo, will you come with me?"
"Where do you want to go, Vernon?"
"To Union Square."
"I really should wait for Cynthia. She'll be home at 1800 hours."
Voris glanced at the clock on the wall. "Do you remember me telling you about Cynthia?"
"No."
She seemed to be regaining some of her mental faculties, so Voris took a chance. "Mrs. DePaulo, there was a severe earthquake and Cynthia has died. We need to go to Union Square so they can evacuate us to a safer location."
He could see the whites around her dark eyes. "I don't want to leave. I have to wait for Cynthia."
He suppressed a hint of irritation. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get her to accept that her daughter wasn't coming back to their apartment. Eventually he resorted to less ethical tactics and coerced her into dressing into more suitable clothing, packing a small bag, and going with him to Union Square to meet Cynthia. Lying was rarely logical, but it seemed the best course of action under the circumstances.
Voris grabbed the photograph of her late husband and her medication on their way out the door, but Mrs. DePaulo wouldn't follow him. "We have to take Harold," she declared. "And Maude."
He knew Harold was her cat, but he had no idea who or what Maude was. He had no desire to leave an animal trapped in a vacant apartment where it would certainly die, but he didn't see how they could travel with a cat. She refused to leave without him though and it took Voris half an hour to locate a small animal carrier in the disheveled apartment and another ten minutes to find Harold.
He managed to corner the skinny, striped feline with the milky eye in the kitchen amid an angry series of growls and hisses, and for the price of a few shallow scratches on his hands and wrists, managed to trap him in the small plastic crate. Maude turned out to be a small, orange colored fish. Also, Maude was dead.
Mrs. DePaulo had stuffed the creature into a plastic bag with insufficient water while he had been tending to Harold. She presented Maude proudly to him, and despite his protestations over carrying around an animal corpse, Voris left his apartment building with an entourage that consisted of an eighty-nine-year-old human woman suffering from a rare form of dementia, a cat that continued to howl indignantly over his captivity, and a dead fish in a bag.
They didn't walk far before they were collected by a team of safety patrols and chastised for not leaving during the evacuation order the night before. Voris explained the situation, which was painfully evident the moment Mrs. DePaulo opened her mouth, and they were taken without further incident to Union Square.
He waited patiently with her for several hours while they tried to locate any of her relatives. She insisted she had none and wanted to know where Cynthia was, and finally by 1900 hours, they determined they would send her to a facility for aging adults with special medical needs in Phoenix. In a rare moment of lucidity, she cried and begged Voris not to send her away, but legally, he had no say in the matter.
They wouldn't allow her to take Harold, so Voris promised her he would, as she put it, "take good care of the sweet kitty." As he bid her goodbye, she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug and thanked him. When he asked her the source of her gratitude, she'd already forgotten.
He then found the processing center for off-world Federation citizens and checked-in. The Tellarite woman working the computer didn't even look at him as she accepted his identity card. She scanned it, entered some information, and began a series of questions.
"How long have you been on Earth?"
"Five years, fifteen days," he replied.
"Do you claim Earth as your permanent home of residence?"
"No."
"Do you wish to seek temporary relocation on Earth or on your home plan-" She managed to stop just before uttering the final syllable. She glanced in his direction and in a very uncharacteristic move for a Tellarite, began blustering through a series of apologies before Voris interrupted her to say, "Accommodations on this planet will be adequate, thank you."
He took a seat in a long row of chairs and set Harold in the empty seat next to him. He would need to feed the animal soon, but he knew nothing about caring for a Terran feline. He would have researched the matter on his PADD, but it had gone missing following the initial earthquake.
He considered inquiring at the information desk about his father to see if he had come through this processing center, but a long line stretched around the room. Silek was either alive or he was not, and Voris' logical discipline was all but gone. He wasn't sure he possessed the patience to wait in a line full of highly emotional people, so he decided news of his father's ultimate fate could wait.
He turned his attention to the large screen on his left, which ran news feeds from several Federation planets. There was no accompanying audio—the noise in the lobby was far too loud to hear it anyway—but one story in particular caught his eye.
The title at the bottom read, "Hero scrappers save 3,000 from Vulcan." The feed switched from a human reporter to a young human female with odd, blood-spattered clothing and reddish hair standing in the middle of an open room speaking with an Andorian woman. The girl's eyes shifted and for a brief moment, she looked right into the camera. It seemed like she was looking directly at him and the effect, however illogical, was mildly haunting.
Harold meowed angrily from his tiny plastic prison, breaking Voris' concentration. He fit his fingers through the wire front of the cage to soothe the animal and was bitten for his trouble. He had never felt more alone in his life.