Kirk at once pushed through to join McCoy, then swung the armored door closed, pulled the lever handle, and wrenched it as hard as he could.
As a babble of excited Romulan voices exploded within his helmet, Kirk felt McCoy tap his arm, looked to see that he was pointing at the airlock’s second door. Beside it a display screen had come to life.
This time, the symbol was simple to interpret. An amber lozenge shape began to fade to a transparent green on a purple screen. Kirk glanced at the symbols on the bottom of his virtual screen, and sure enough saw another amber lozenge, obviously the symbol for atmospheric pressure.
Kirk moved to stand before the second door, waiting for the lozenge to stop changing color, at which point he presumed the airlock cycle would be finished.
He gave McCoy a thumbs-up sign, and McCoy replied with the same, then reached for the cane, but Kirk held it back. He pointed to the second door, opened his hand in a questioning gesture.
There were now a great many urgent Romulan voices transmitting back and forth. If he and McCoy had inadvertently gone this far because their movements had coincided with a rest cycle or shift change, then another shift of returning workers might be waiting outside.
The lozenge on the screen reached its palest color, then flashed as the floor beneath their feet began to vibrate. Kirk didn’t hesitate, deciding its most likely cause was that the safety interlock was being released from the second door.
He reached out, pumped the door lever. His assumption was confirmed. The door moved easily.
He pushed it open.
There were three towering figures waiting inside the rock-walled chamber beyond, wearing thick red vacuum suits with heavy armor plating.
Remans.
Now there was no way back and no way forward.
Kirk and McCoy were trapped.
17
JOLAN SEGMENT, STARDATE 57486.9
“Farr Jolan,” the elderly Romulan said. “Welcome, Jean-Luc Picard. Welcome, Geordi La Forge. I am Virron, Primary Assessor of Processing Segment Three, follower of the Jolara, the name which means ‘She Who Leads Us.’ “
Picard bowed his head, remembering what Kirk had said about these people, seeing for himself the near- trance state they were in. “Farr Jolan,” he replied.
Beside him, La Forge said the same.
And then there was silence in the bright, wood-paneled chamber. At least twenty Romulan Assessors, transfixed by expressions of adoration, along with Picard and La Forge, stood in breathless anticipation, waiting for what the Jolara—Norinda—might say.
She passed through the Romulans, as graceful as a dancer, and they, just as gracefully, moved from her path.
There was a small dais of polished green marble in the center of the room to which Norinda had brought Picard and La Forge. Now, beneath the domed ceiling from which the brilliant light of day poured down, she stepped onto the central dais to be bathed in that radiance.
For a moment, Picard was almost certain the haloed figure on the dais was not Norinda, that another woman had somehow taken her place as she glided through her crowd of worshippers. His eyes narrowed to sharpen focus.
A trick of the light, Picard decided, remembering how in the darkness of the passageway, for only the briefest of instants, he had first thought Norinda might be a lost love from his youth. And then how her body had seemed to be without…Picard felt his cheeks flush. But it was true that her jumpsuit had been unnecessarily tight.
His next conclusion had been that she had Romulan ancestry, softened by finer, almost Vulcan features. But here in this chamber, he could see that she was most certainly full-blooded Romulan. Her forehead was high, her short hair space-black, her fringe of bangs cut with laser precision.
Like the others encircling her, Picard gazed at Norinda standing above them, and decided that his imagination had made more of her clothing than reality revealed. What he had thought was a too-formfitting jumpsuit was, in light of day, a standard-issue Assessor uniform, though crisp, and finely tailored. The uniform merely hinted at her alluring form. It did not expose it.
“Farr Jolan,” Norinda sang.
Before Picard had even time to think, he found himself replying with the same phrase, as did all the others, including La Forge.
Norinda clapped her hands like an excited, happy child. “We welcome guests today.” She held out her hand and all eyes turned to Picard and La Forge as a chorus of welcomes in Romulan and Standard swelled.
Norinda smiled beneficently at the guests, as if in the entire universe, only they existed, only they deserved her devotion.
To Picard, it felt almost as if the warmth of the sun above was being directly transferred to him through her, and he longed to be closer to her, to feel that warmth skin to skin, no uniforms, no barriers, no—
Norinda was speaking in Romulan now, her attention turned to others in the crowd. Picard wiped at his forehead, felt the drops of moisture there.
“Captain? Are you all right?”
Picard looked at his engineer, saw the sheen of sweat on his face. He tried to think of a way to phrase the question. “Geordi…are you…having unusual thoughts?”
La Forge nodded. “I’ll say.” He glanced over at Norinda, who sang now in Romulan. “All about her.” He blinked several times, resetting his vision, Picard knew. “She keeps looking different to me, but I can’t pick up any trace of a holographic screen, or optical camouflage. I think she really is changing as we watch her.”
How did I miss that? Picard chastised himself. There were many life-forms like that in the galaxy. Allasomorphs and chameloids that could change shape, sometimes even according to the unvoiced wishes of those around them.
Picard stared at the shining figure before him. But there was more to Norinda than just her physical appearance. Her force of personality was overwhelming. Even over communications channels, she could—
Picard rocked back on his feet and La Forge caught his arm as if fearing he was about to fall.
“Captain!” La Forge whispered.
Picard looked around, but none of the Romulans were paying attention to their new guests. All were looking at Norinda, only Norinda.
“Jim Kirk told me about this woman,” Picard whispered in reply.
“He knows her?”
Picard nodded as it all came back to him, as if whatever influence Norinda had exerted on him, to draw him to her, had also worked to block his memory of the story Kirk had told him last year on Bajor.
“He encountered her years ago, in one of his first missions as captain of his Enterprise. There was a contest. The Romulans won. And Norinda…was the prize.”
Kirk had told the story as the two captains had trekked across the Bajoran desert and faced death and mystery and, perhaps, the Prophets of the Celestial Temple themselves.
In the first six months of Kirk’s original five-year mission, Starfleet had tracked an alien vessel entering an unexplored system at an inconceivable warp velocity. The craft had come into range of deep-space sensors on a trajectory that was extragalactic.
Whatever the craft might have been—crewed vehicle or robotic probe—it was a technological marvel that Starfleet wished to study.
So the Enterprise had raced to the Mandylion Rift, and there had discovered Norinda and her ship, and many
