February, Year 20 of the Anglo-American Alliance
Christopher Pike did not often think what a wonderful group of people he had, but when he did, he thought so fervently and with all his soul. As he stepped off the stairs and into the basement he called home, he realized that this was one of those times.
For once, they were all home – no one was out looking for parts to beg or steal, no one was trying to get a bit of money through some honest employment. As the little band of rebels had grown throughout the years, the basement of the 21st Street Mission had felt progressively smaller and smaller, and with the addition of Jim Kirk and Gary Mitchell it felt smaller than ever, but no one complained. They all sat on upturned boxes, on chairs, on the floor, on whatever they could find, arguing and figuring and discussing in intense, hushed voices. Pike’s eyes fell on The Project, as he thought of it – the diamonds he had made Number One steal so long ago still at its center, with tubes and wires connecting pieces of metal scrounged from dumpsters and landfills, electric lights rigged up, circuits and conduits carefully fused together and magnets glued in place with home-made paste… that would not exist but for the men and women who sat poring over technical manuals and taking motorcar engines apart and endlessly calculating distances and variables.
Next to The Project, cautiously screwing something in place, knelt Scotty, squinting in concentration while Kirk handed him tiny metal pieces. Dark heads bent together, Spock, Sulu and Number One argued quietly just beyond Scotty while Kevin Riley and Uhura sat on the sofa and pored together over a large manual, Uhura occasionally pointing things out for Riley to underline with his pencil. Her tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration, Christine Chapel lay stretched out as far as she could on the floor, working sums on scraps of paper and handing them to Dr. McCoy, who checked them briefly before passing them on to Kirk, who told the results to Scotty, who accordingly adjusted his wires. And Gary Mitchell quietly helped Janice Rand to make and hand out sandwiches and coffee to everyone.
Pike allowed a broad smile to cross his face before going to collect a sandwich. Rand and Mitchell both smiled at him, Mitchell a bit nervously.
“You two are doing the best work of all,” he told them. They both nodded pleasantly, and he sat down to eat his sandwich, stretching out his stiff legs. He had just been on his hands and knees helping Mrs. Keeler scrub the floor for most of the morning, and he wasn’t as young as he had used to be… Pike remembered stories of the good old days in which people didn’t get arthritis until much later in life, but since the Alliance, all the pollution in the air had shortened the average lifespan by quite a bit. Not that Pike was about to die anytime soon, but he was aging. He could feel it.
Mitchell and Rand had gone back to making sandwiches, and Pike was amused to notice that Mitchell kept making their hands brush on purpose. Every time this happened, Rand would snatch hers back as if burned. Poor girl. Well, at least now Pike understood why Mitchell had been content to make food and not help Scotty or Number One.
Speaking of Number One, her voice was growing steadily louder, and Pike glanced over at her. Number One embraced logic, eschewed emotion, and tried to distance herself from the human race, but when she got angry… Pike rose and casually strolled over to stop the confrontation before it began.
“How’s it going, Number One? Sulu, Spock?”
Spock kept his mouth shut. Sulu pointed a finger at Number One and said, “She thinks that we would have to use a giant big tube to add steering power to a starship – “
“To channel the antimatter flow, one would necessarily – “
Pike held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, calm down! We haven’t even finished the engine yet! Can’t you wait until we have an engine and a ship to put it in before we start figuring out the particulars?”
Number One and Sulu looked at each other rather foolishly, and Sulu gave a small chuckle. “Sorry, Number One.”
“Quite all right, Mr. Sulu.”
Pike rolled his eyes at Spock, who raised an eyebrow and said in an undertone, “I attempted to point this out, but they will not listen to me as they listen to you.” Pike shrugged and moved on to Uhura and Riley, leaving Spock, Sulu and Number One to continue the discussion.
“There,” Uhura said quietly, pointing, and Riley circled a phrase in the manual they were reading. Really it was about rocket ships, and the principles were different – rocket power as opposed to matter/antimatter fusion – but according to Scotty, some of the ideas were transferable, and it was Uhura and Riley’s job to find those ideas.
Pike leaned over the back of the sofa to read over Uhura’s shoulder. In the sentence Riley had circled, Pike understood the words “the”, “and”, “should”, and “converter”. Pike shook his head. He was an excellent organizer, good at conflict resolution, morale-boosting, and balancing checkbooks, but he was not and would never be a scientist.
Pike moved on to Christine Chapel, who looked so focused that he didn’t dare disturb her. Besides, he was still angry with her; she had gone for a food run yesterday and come back with her long, wavy brown hair short, wavy and blonde. Pike hadn’t noticed until Number One had pointed it out, but then he had been forced to shout for the second time in a week. Their funds were precious enough, and never mind that Chapel had paid for the hairdo with money that she had herself honestly earned by returning a family’s lost dog three days ago; it was the principle of the thing. He passed over the young woman, turning instead to McCoy and Kirk. Kirk was currently showing McCoy something on a sheet of paper, talking quietly.
“This is wrong.”
“Well, excuse me.”
“I’m just saying – “
“I know. Lemme see.”
McCoy moved his finger down the column of figures.
“Christine must’ve added it wrong, and I didn’t catch it. Sorry, Kirk.”
“Jim.”
“Sorry, Jim.”
Kirk grinned and patted McCoy on the back. “It’s okay, no harm done. But stick to your day job, sawbones.”
McCoy laughed, making everybody look up at him. “Sorry,” he said, and after a beat everyone looked back down at their work. It was quite funny, actually, almost synchronized. Pike had to suppress a chuckle himself as he crouched down next to Scotty, who alone had not looked up.
“How’s it going?” Pike asked softly.
“Shut up!”
His eyebrows shooting up, Pike stood and stepped back. All right then. He picked his way through carefully laid out tools and parts, going back to get the sandwich he had neglected.
As he went back over to McCoy, intending to help him check the important calculations himself, Rand followed him with some sandwiches. She tried to give one to Scotty and was rebuffed the same way Pike had been, and then went over to Kirk. Pike suddenly remembered a look she had given the young man and became very interested in the calculations.
“Mr. Kirk – why don’t you eat something?” she whispered. “You’ve been working very hard.”
“Thanks, I’m not hungry.” Kirk slapped a wrench into Scotty’s open hand.
“You need to keep up your strength. You didn’t eat breakfast either – you’re starting to get like Mr. Spock!”
“She’s right, Jim,” McCoy whispered absently. “The human body needs nourishment in order to… Christine, I can’t read your handwriting. What’s this say?”
The young woman looked up in surprise, blinking in disorientation. “What?”
McCoy sighed and scooted over to her to explain, and Pike went back to pretending he wasn’t listening to Rand and Kirk.
“I made them myself,” she wheedled.
“I’ll have one later. Thank you, though.” Kirk passed Scotty a piece of copper wire and what appeared to be a computer chip.
“Coffee, then?”
“Miss Rand – Janice – I am in the middle of – “
Something sparked and fizzled on the warp drive. Scotty yelped. White smoke billowed in the room. Everyone stood up and began talking at once.
“Fire!” Riley said, losing his head.
“My papers!” Christine cried.
Pike ran to open the door to the alley, passersby be damned, and tried to waft the smoke out with his hands. After a moment, it became obvious that there was no fire; the smoke smelled nasty, but there were no flames and no heat.
When the room cleared, they found that Scotty’s dark hair was sticking straight up, but he was grinning from ear to ear. When Uhura rushed forward to see if he was all right, he pointed to The Project.
A low humming came from the device; a faint blue light seemed to pulse in one of the Plexiglass tubes, almost as if it was moving through the tube. Holding his breath, Pike crept closer, his eyes wide.
“Scotty…” he breathed.
“Aye, sir?”
“Scotty!”
Pike seized Scotty’s shoulders, shaking him wildly. “Is it done? Is it done?”
“Sir!” Half-laughing, the engineer pulled free of Pike’s grasp. “I wouldna say done. It should work, but it isn’t safe – I’ll need time to reinforce it, clean it up, find a way to safely combine the matter and antimatter – “
“Scotty,” Pike said weakly, falling into a chair, “you’re a genius.”
“Aye, sir. Thank you, sir.”
And then suddenly Spock had closed the door, and everyone started to cheer and laugh and congratulate each other, and Pike didn’t have the heart to tell them to be quiet. After all, it was a Sunday, and the mission was closed.
Number One fought her way through everybody and stood beside him. Her lips curved upward in a small smile as she looked down at him.
“Christopher, are you all right?”
“I’m fine… just overwhelmed. I never really thought about what we would do when it was done.”
“It’s not done, not yet. We need to make it safe, make it clean, find a way to put it into an actual ship – “
He cut her off abruptly. “I know.” But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was sitting down on the arm of his chair and smiling at him.
“I never told you my name, did I?”
“Nope.”
She glanced at the others, and Pike followed her gaze, but they were still talking excitedly, eating sandwiches, clapping each other on the back – except for Spock, of course, who was eyeing The Project closely. Pike grinned fondly at the sight of them, his people who had worked so hard…
“It’s Jemima,” Number One said suddenly. “Jemima Hortense van Oldenmark.”
He looked back at her, still grinning as he took her hand. For once she didn’t object.
“You know what? That’s a beautiful name.”
--
Amanda…
Amanda…
How many times had she heard his voice in her mind?
Amanda…
But it was never anything more than her name, though she thought at him with all her might. Come for me, my love. Save me, for I am lost…
Amanda…
She was never sure if it was actually him calling her or if it was her own mind supplying his voice. She wondered if she was finally going insane.
Beloved, she had heard him say once, but that didn’t count; that was just her name translated. T’hy’la, she thought she heard him say, but again, it was still her name… if the word “t’hy’la” had any English equivalent, it would be “beloved”, whether or not the love was romantic. In her case, she hoped very much that it was. She hoped also that she was not dreaming, that his voice was really his voice and not her mind trying to comfort itself as she languished in her heavily guarded, solitary-confinement cell.
Languished! What a wonderful word that was! “It sounds like what it is,” she had often told her parents when she was small. She had said that of words like “balloon”, “chatter”, “poison”… though not all words sounded like what they were… in fact, she remembered the first time her father had told her that they were having company over for dinner, she had supposed that “Company” was the name of a woman.
And she was going insane. Of all the things to think of, why that silly memory?
Well, why not? It was dark. It was boring. It was, quite frankly, smelly, though the writer in her protested that it was effluvial. And the psychologist in her again insisted that she was going insane.
Restlessly, she paced the cell. She had tried breaking out. She had tried communicating with the prisoner in the next cell. She had tried faking sickness in the hope that she would be taken to another sympathetic doctor, but the rather unsympathetic doctor who had come to her had seen through that. She wished she could really get sick. She yearned even for the torture of the awful experiments – anything to break the monotony of sitting in this dark, boring, effluvial cell.
My husband, she called with all her strength, praying that by some accident of fate he was near. My love.
Amanda-Beloved-T’hy’la, she heard – her name, why was it only ever her name? – and then one word, one word she may or may not have thought herself.
Soon.