Part Four
Sunek was lost.
Nothing made sense any more.
He was seeing thoughts and memories and experiences, and feeling a veritable cavalcade of emotions. But nothing was aligning quite as it should have been.
It was his birthday, two years ago, on the Bounty, and he was about to tuck into an enormous slice of Deltan passionberry cheesecake. And he felt suspicious.
He was in the pilot’s seat of the Bounty, desperately steering the ship through the middle of a pitched battle. And he felt aroused.
Now it was a school day, back on Vulcan, and he was studying with his friends. And he felt ashamed.
He was in bed with T’Len, when he had temporarily reconnected with his wife nearly a year ago. And he felt irritated.
He felt nervous, and he felt relief. He felt jealousy, and he felt exasperation. He felt contentment, and pride, and hope, and dread, and worry, and exhilaration.
He felt everything.
And it was terrifying.
Then, all of a sudden, he found himself back in the rear section of the Betazoid supply ship, shackled to the metal table raised vertically up in the middle of the room.
He heard himself gasping for air, feeling substantially weaker than before. His body was aching like he’d just run the Tellar Prime Ultramarathon. The heavy metal helmet still adorned his head and he could feel the needles piercing into him like stinging pincers.
It took him a moment to take in the rest of the room. But he soon saw the six Betazoid women, all slumped on the floor or propping themselves up against the metal walls of the room.
Each of them looked like a Trellium-D junkie, surfing the crest of a wave of bliss. Like Sunek, they were all panting breathlessly, and their eyes were glazed over above vacant, happy smiles.
It was Lyssa that recovered first, pushing herself away from the bulkhead she was propping herself up against and staggering over to the trussed-up and terrified Vulcan with quivering legs.
“Oh, Mr Sunek,” she gasped in delight, “That was everything we dreamed it would be.”
She reached his side and tapped the controls on the side of the helmet, as Azaria picked herself up from the deck and looked over at them.
“And more,” she panted in agreement with her colleague, “Such a rush of feelings. He is a fountain of emotions.”
Hearing the tapping sounds on the controls, and having no idea what Lyssa was doing, Sunek’s panic levels rose higher all over again.
“W—Well, that was really fun and all, yeah? It’s not every day you get to satisfy six women at once, you know what I’m saying?”
He offered a weak chuckle, but got nothing back from the Betazoids.
“Um,” he continued, “But, I guess it’s time to get going, hmm? Back to the colony?”
“Oh no,” Lyssa retorted, her usually calm tone carrying a slight edge to it all of a sudden, “We’re just getting started, Mr Sunek. With this device, we can increase the level of brain stimulation as much as we desire. To take us to an even greater high.”
“Y—Yeah, but, I mean, that was already pretty intense. I mean, you don’t wanna kill me, right?”
He asked the question as casually as possible, but the long, telling pause that followed didn’t do anything to calm his panic levels. He gulped audibly.
“We don’t want to, no,” Lyssa replied eventually, “But…sometimes it cannot be helped.”
With that, she stepped back and nodded at the other Betazoids, who all gleefully prepared for round two to begin. Sunek felt the pressure from the needles building. He tried to prepare himself, not knowing how he was going to be able to handle the emotional chaos he was about to be hit with.
And then he remembered. He was a Vulcan. And what were Vulcans good for if not controlling emotions?
Granted, he would be the first to admit that he hadn’t really had control of his own emotions for some time now. If, indeed, he ever had. But he was sure he still had the ability, somewhere inside him. So, as the intensity of the pain increased from the needles in his skull, he focused on controlling the sudden surge of emotions that came with it.
Like a good Vulcan should.
He strained against the feelings of jubilation. He fought the sudden rush of agitation. He stared down the entirely misplaced sense of relief.
And suddenly, he was somewhere else entirely.
He was sitting cross-legged in the sand, on top of the Cliffs of Surak on Vulcan, looking out across the expanse of Lake Yuron.
He remembered coming here on a pilgrimage during his brief and entirely unsuccessful attempt to undergo the Kohlinar ritual. He had sat here for hours on end to try and master his emotions. And everything looked how he remembered from back then.
Except, as he started to really take in the scene in front of him, maybe not exactly how he remembered.
It was hard for him to describe what he was seeing in a way that made sense, even to himself, but as he looked down at the dusty sand beneath him, he saw that the grains were made of envy.
And when he focused down on the lake below, he saw that it wasn’t filled with rust-tinged water, but pride.
And the red-tinged sky was a perfect snapshot of unfiltered dismay.
“Well,” Sunek managed, as a shavokh bird made from pure hysteria flew gracefully past and settled on the branch of a tree made from remorse, “This is new…”
****************************
The Bounty’s cockpit was a picture of calm.
As instructed, each of the ship’s crew were nestled into their own individual oases of serenity, doing their best to quell their emotions to allow Palia to work on detecting the others.
The ship itself remained at a dead stop, with even the ever-present sound of the warp core reduced to a barely-perceptible hum as a result.
Behind his console, Klath was in the middle of a hunt. He was a child, barely tall enough to grip his first dagger, stalking through the forests of Qo’noS in lockstep with his father, hunting a pack of wild mIl'oD.
He was moments away from feeling the blood lust coursing through his veins for the first time, and from slaying his first kill.
Such was Klath’s happy place.
Sarina found herself picturing her garden back at the colony on Corvin III.
She was still sure her future lay elsewhere. But there was no doubt that, among everything else she had been through in her life so far, she found that sitting under the central pavilion watching the suns set to be as peaceful an experience as she had ever enjoyed.
Denella was the most experienced in finding a zen-like moment, thanks to her meditation sessions in the Bounty’s cargo bay.
When she wanted to find a moment of inner peace, she had always used to picture a moment from her childhood, sitting on an old fallen tree trunk and talking with Sarina as they ate lunch. Two best friends, enjoying a quiet moment together.
But secretly, she had recently found a new image of happiness. One from a few months ago, when she and Juna Erami had shared an impromptu picnic onboard the Bajoran’s shuttle, in the pink and purple glow of the Kervala Nebula*.
Granted, she had only been there because Erami had knocked her unconscious and essentially abducted her from the Kervala spaceport. But that was only to aid their escape from a group of angry Pakleds, after all. And, in a more simplistic way, that picnic had proved to be the first genuine moment of romantic connection she had enjoyed since the Syndicate had taken her.
Still, in trying to help Palia’s search for calm in the cockpit, Denella elected to hide that scene away in this instance. She feared that she would give off too strong a sense of guilt otherwise, both for abandoning her usual image of friendship with Sarina while the other Orion was barely five feet away from her, and also because of the stack of unanswered messages from Erami back in her cabin.
So, to keep things straightforward, Denella was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, swinging her legs below her and laughing with Sarina.
In the front of the cockpit, Natasha found herself troubled. Because every time she tried to retreat to a happy memory, she found herself thinking about Jirel. Which couldn’t be right.
Still, whichever moment she tried to pick to relax in, past or present and fact or fiction, there he seemed to be. Smiling back at her in that stupid cocky way he often did when he knew he had something to smile about.
Feeling any effort at finding inner calm giving way to inner annoyance, she decided to keep things entirely simple. And she pictured a double cheeseburger (with all the trimmings). That seemed to do the job. Even if the distribution of the sesame seeds on top of the bun bore an unerring resemblance to a certain Trill’s face.
And like that, the Bounty’s cockpit became an ocean of calm. And Palia was able to channel herself into her work. Scanning for the others.
It wasn’t easy. Betazoid empathy had a limited range, and there was a lot of traffic in the sector. But she also knew, based on how the ion trail had gone so cold so quickly, that they must be nearby.
She concentrated intensely, sensing for the telltale flavour of curious Vulcan emotions across the local area. And while she couldn’t muster anything precise, she definitely began to sense something.
“They are here,” she whispered.
Feeling slightly ridiculous, Denella maintained her calm state as best she could, keeping her eyes closed as she responded.
“Where?” she whispered back.
“I cannot be entirely certain,” the Betazoid admitted as she strained for more information, “But they are close. And…they are moving.”
“They would not need to move inside a nebula,” Klath pointed out, feeling equally ridiculous as he communicated in a low, becalmed growl.
“Wait!” Natasha screamed out suddenly, ruining the oasis of peace and causing Palia to flinch from the sudden emotional rush, “That’s it!”
The others refocused on the cockpit, even as the woman in the pilot’s seat powered the Bounty back up fully and swung it around back the way it had come.
“Where are we going?” Sarina asked.
“Klath,” Natasha called back as an explanation, “That star system we just skirted around. That was where we lost them. And what was in it?”
The Klingon looked down at the readings in front of him, still not entirely getting it.
“A G-Type star, five planetary bodies, several thousand smaller asteroids and meteoroids, and…a type-3 comet.”
His expression switched to one of understanding as the Bounty shot forwards at warp, back towards the system itself.
“A type-3 comet with a tail large enough to hide a ship inside?” Natasha added.
“More than enough,” the Klingon affirmed.
Denella smiled in satisfaction at the speed of the deduction, before she glanced back over at Palia.
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me yet,” the Betazoid cautioned, “If I was able to sense his emotions with that much clarity, from this range, then…we may already be too late.”
The implication of that statement brought an end to the last remnants of calm inside the cockpit.
* - A scene from Star Trek: Bounty - 11 - "Love, but With More Aggressive Overtones".
