nothing within the helmet—nothing past the shadow of the helmet’s pressure-seal ring—nothing as the suit slowly settled like a deflating balloon, completely, inexplicably, empty.
“All right,” La Forge said as he got to his feet. “Now I’m worried.”
Picard’s mind raced as he sought rational explanations for what they’d just seen. Had the occupant of the suit been beamed away by a silent, instantaneous transporter? Was the suit somehow equipped with miniature forcefields and actuators to create the illusion of an occupant? Could it contain a holoemitter, and a holographic being like the Voyager’s doctor, who had simply switched himself off?
Or were he and La Forge somehow still captives, held prisoner in a holodeck in which reality could be effortlessly controlled?
The answer came to him in the form of the sweetest voice he had ever heard.
“Jean-Luc…Geordi…honestly…I’m so disappointed in the both of you, I don’t know what to say.”
Picard and La Forge slowly turned to the source of that voice.
“Leah…?” La Forge whispered.
“Jenice…?” Picard said.
For in the pale glow of the passageway, a woman approached them.
Picard didn’t understand why his stomach fluttered, his pulse quickened. But then he realized what his subconscious must have already known: the woman was un-clothed in the half-light, her body so familiar, so alluring.
Beside him, La Forge took a half-step forward, as enraptured by the vision of what approached as he was.
That realization broke through the enchantment of the moment for Picard. No vision of his own lost love could similarly affect La Forge.
Vision…illusion…whatever they saw, none of it…of her…was real.
But she kept moving toward them, and Picard knew he’d been mistaken. This wasn’t Jenice, his first true desperate love at the Academy, merely someone who resembled her. Or rather someone who had resembled her in the shadows.
And neither was she without clothing, another misperception. Easily explained, Picard realized, given the extreme formfitting clothing the woman was wearing.
Beside him, Picard heard La Forge give a sigh of what sounded like relief. “I thought it was…but how could it be?”
Then the woman was before him, and she no more resembled Jenice than she did Beverly. She was Romulan, though her forehead was not as prominent as most, and the graceful sweep of her pointed ears was halfway between the straight line of a Romulan and the curve of a Vulcan.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the woman asked. Her voice was like a teasing song.
“No.” Picard resisted the desire to sweep her into his arms, having no awareness of where such an inappropriate thought had come from.
La Forge cleared his throat, as if he struggled with the same impulse.
The woman smiled at the engineer as if she had waited all her life to meet him, “How about you, Geordi?”
La Forge was reduced to shaking his head.
“Good,” the woman said with a small clap of her hands. “I would have been worried if you’d said yes, because we have never met. Until now, of course.”
She held out her hand, and to Picard it was exquisite. Delicately small, a precious object to be protected from all harm.
“I am Norinda,” she said.
The name seemed familiar to Picard, though he found it difficult to think, to remember where he had heard it. If he had heard it.
“And I have come to save you,” she said.
15
U.S.S. TITAN, LATIUM IV, STARDATE 57486.9
“Evacuate?” Will Riker said, astounded.
On the small screen on his ready room desk, Admiral Janeway looked ten years older than he had last seen her. She was no more pleased with the order she had given than Riker was to receive it.
“Every Federation mission and consulate on Latium,” Janeway said, continuing her orders from her office at Starfleet Headquarters. “Their respective governments will transmit directly to them the proper instructions for the destruction of all sensitive data and equipment. The diplomatic corps will have special baggage allowances for the removal of cultural artifacts. But consular personnel and support staff will be strictly limited to a single piece of luggage—basically, whatever they can hold in their arms when you beam them aboard.”
Riker still couldn’t believe what she had told him. “Admiral, is it really that bad? To have us abandon all the progress we’ve made with the empire these past six months?”
Janeway had the grace to look apologetic. “I know how close you are to what’s been going on there. I know half the Romulan initiatives we’ve developed since the coup are because of your efforts—your special relationship with the Romulan Fleet commanders. But we’ve lost them, Will. Do you understand? Jean-Luc and Kirk and everyone with them. Because of Kirk’s child.”
Riker sat back in his chair. He had brought it from his cabin on the Enterprise, as he had most of the decorations and mementos in this room, including Data’s idiosyncratic painting of Spot, the cat. He looked at that painting, remembering Data, the word Janeway had just used resonating within him: Everyone…
That meant she had lost the holographic Doctor, too, and Riker had no doubt the loss to Janeway was as great as Data’s loss had been to those who knew him.
“How did Starfleet Intelligence miss that?” Riker asked. He wasn’t really expecting an answer, but still, the simple, inconsequential presence of a child seemed such an unlikely detail to have derailed the Federation’s last- ditch effort to prevent a Romulan civil war.
Janeway rubbed the side of her face and Riker guessed she hadn’t slept for days. “We have so little available data on Remus. But the one thing we do know is that there are no families. Do you believe that? The way the Romulans…’manage’ the Remans—breed them is more like it—they don’t keep familial records. At one time, Kirk’s wife was a Federation representative for her colony world. We have a complete diplomatic dossier on her. But there’s nothing in it that connects her to Remus. Nothing.”
Nothing ventured, Riker thought. He leaned forward, folded his hands on his desktop, tried to sound causal. “It will take a few days for the personnel on Latium to prepare for evacuation, so why don’t—”
Janeway interrupted, smiling wryly through her exhaustion. “So why don’t you just take a joyride into the Romulan home system and poke around?”
“At this point,” Riker said, trying to sound completely neutral and reasonable, though he was neither, “with all reports saying war is inevitable, would it hurt?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Will. From the reports we’re getting out of Romulus, we could probably send in the Seventh Fleet and the Romulans would be too distracted to notice. But what you must keep in mind, and why you must follow these orders, is that you’re the only lifeline the people on Latium have. Without the Titan, they have no way home. So when hostilities start, they’ll be trapped behind enemy lines, to become prisoners, political hostages, or…victims. There’s a strong xenophobic streak in Romulans, and we can’t rule out an attack on the diplomatic quarter by a vengeful mob. The Titan has to stay put.”
But Riker felt there was something missing from Janeway’s insistence that the Titan stay at Latium. “Admiral, I understand the importance of giving our people a way home, but if the Titan is in no danger in the Romulan system—”
Janeway didn’t let him finish. “No danger as far as we can tell, Will. But we missed Kirk’s connection to Remus, and Starfleet’s not willing to risk your ship on the assumption that we haven’t missed anything else.”
