Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (30 page)

There was a pause. Tuvok could sense her uncertainty, her fear of saying the wrong thing with Ree listening. This close to term, her hormones were intensifying her empathic projections. “After all,” he went on, prompting her, “with the imminent threat to your child gone, should not the impetus for his…protectiveness have subsided as well?”

She responded slowly. “I…assumed it was my anxiety at being held hostage that was feeding back onto him.”

“Except that the one thing he has surely made quite clear to you is that he will not harm your child. Have you not, Doctor?”

“It is my highest priority. The counselor is aware of that.”

Troi gave a heavy sigh. “He’s talked about nothing else for days.”

“As though,” suggested Tuvok, “he has something to prove to you?”

Silence filled the ward for a time. Troi’s emotions were ambiguous. “Tuvok, what are you saying?” she finally asked.

“The fact is, Doctor Ree did not save your first child, did he?”

“It was a spontaneous miscarriage!” Ree cried. “There was nothing I could do. I had no warning.”

“But you did have warning, early in this child’s term. You determined that she would die and might kill the counselor in the process.”

“Yes.”

“Counselor Troi. I would like you to answer my next question. What did Doctor Ree suggest as the solution?”

He felt her anger at him for dredging this up. “He wanted to terminate the fetus.”

“Which you refused.”

“Yes!”

“You could not bear to lose another child.”

“Yes!”

“And you hated him for wanting to kill the child.”

“I—no. No, Ree, I understood.”

“Did you?” Tuvok demanded, letting his own emotions color his voice. “Could any parent truly accept such a suggestion with total equanimity?”

“But the baby’s fine now. The Caeliar saved her.”

“Despite Ree’s best efforts to ensure her termination.”

Ree’s growl sounded from the other side of the door, disquietingly close. Next to him, Tuvok could see Hriss’s fur standing on end. “Commander, you are agitating my patient. I advise you to end this.”

But Tuvok was relentless. “It is not just your fear for your child that is influencing Ree. It is your fear of
him
. Subconsciously, you resent him for letting one child die and threatening another. As long as that resentment is within you, you are projecting it onto him. Filling him with the perception of himself as a potential child-killer.”

“
No!
” Ree cried.

“Yes, Doctor! You prove my point. Do you see, Counselor? To his instincts as a Pahkwa-thanh male, that is intolerable. He is driven to prove himself a worthy caregiver—to prove to you and to himself that he will not let your child down again. As long as your resentment is still inside you, he cannot be free of it—and you cannot be free of him.”

He felt her struggling with it, denying it. “No, Tuvok. No, Ree, I don’t resent you. It was months ago.”

“It was no longer ago than the death of my son,” Tuvok told her. “And that still burns in me as fiercely as ever. That is why I understand the anger and blame you must hold within yourself. Because when a parent loses a child, we need to blame someone. We need to blame the person responsible for their loss.”

He paused, having trouble controlling his voice. This was difficult for him. But it had to be done. “You yourself told me, Counselor…we cannot let go of our anger until
we identify its real target. I know now what you were trying to get me to confess. That I…” He glanced over at his team, reluctant to expose himself to them like this. But he saw only trust and support in their eyes. “That I blame Elieth for his own death. That I am angry at him for making the choice that took him from me. Angry at him for causing his mother to endure loss.

“I am ashamed of myself for feeling that. But you sensed it in me, and knew it was important that I face it. If that is so, then you must do the same. As long as we are in denial about our anger, neither of us can let it go.”

He was breathing hard, as though he’d just sprinted up a mountain. He could feel her turning inward, searching her soul. But for a time, there was no sound. He wasn’t sure if he’d done any good. If not, he had humiliated himself in front of his team for nothing.

But then he felt a hesitant pat on his shoulder. He glanced back to see Krotine there. “Whether it works or not, sir,” she whispered, “that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Deanna wept at the surge of emotion coming from Tuvok as he confessed his anger. The flavor of it was agonizingly familiar. She remembered how Counselor Haaj had elicited a similar confession from her, months ago: that she was angry at her first child for leaving her. That she had been afraid to admit it, to face it, because it made her feel horrible about herself. But Haaj had helped her understand, as she had tried to help Tuvok see in turn, that it was a natural, forgivable part of the grieving process.

Yet now Tuvok forced her to confront the possibility
that she had not exorcised all her anger after all. Even as she drank in his catharsis, she was compelled to look inward and examine her own soul.

Ree was coming toward her, hands spread placatingly. “Counselor…Deanna…please. You must know I have your child’s best interests at heart.”

“Yes,” she told him, her voice rough, its tone warning him to stop. “I know that. But there’s what I know, and there’s what I feel.

“You can’t know, Doctor. You try so hard to prove yourself, to go through the motions of a caregiver. But you’ve never had a child, never lost a child of your own. You can’t imagine what that does to a parent. Even just once. And to be told it has to happen a second time…

“God, yes, I was angry. Angry at you. Angry at the baby for leaving me alone again. Angry at Will, angry at myself for letting it happen to another child. Angry at the whole damn universe for putting me through this!”

Ree had lowered his head. “I thought…you had forgiven me.”

“So did I. But that pain, it stays with you. And the anger. And the fear.

“The fear, Doctor. Do you have any idea? You
attacked
me. Back on New Erigol, you told me you wanted to end my baby’s life, and then you attacked me. You
bit
me!”

“I injected you with venom to slow a life-threatening hemorrhage.”

“That doesn’t change how it
felt
, Doctor! You joke about how dangerous you are, tease others about their fear of you, but you can’t imagine what it’s like to feel like your prey!

“My God, Doctor!” she went on, her voice growing
louder with each sentence. “How could you think I could
ever
trust you to care for my child after that? How could you imagine you could
take me hostage
, terrorize a whole hospital, and somehow prove to me my baby will be safe with you?!”

“I
will
keep her safe! Always!”

“
No!
” she screamed. “You can’t have her! I won’t let you take my baby from me!” This was not the hysterical rage she had met him with in her delirium on New Erigol. This was the self-possessed fury and determination of a loving mother. “This is
my
child, and I will give birth to her where I wish, raise her how I wish. And
I
will keep her safe, Ree. Safe from anyone who would hurt her—safe from anyone who would take her from me. Including you!”

For a long moment, Ree was silent, gazing downward, breaths rasping slowly in and out. She couldn’t tell if he was chastened or furious; her own emotions were too chaotic at the moment, her hormones on overload. Finally, he raised his head. “Counselor…”

But at that moment, her insides convulsed and she felt hot wetness spilling onto her thighs. “Oh, my God,” Alyssa gasped. “Doctor, her water just broke.”

The contraction worsened, growing more painful until she moaned aloud. “It hurts!”

Alyssa was at her side. “You’re too tense. You need to breathe, Deanna.” She glanced over at Ree, who stood taut, ready to act, but keeping his distance. “Deanna, you need the doctor.”

Once the contraction subsided, she met his eyes, trying to control her breathing. “The baby is mine,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“You know how I feel now.”

“…Yes.”

She held his gaze. “Do your job, Doctor. Prove yourself.”

His tension eased. “Yes. Thank you, Counselor.”

As he moved forward, a throat cleared. The Lumbuan nurses had come forward, the senior nurse at the head of the group. “We can assist,” she said. “Doctor.”

Ree studied them. “You would help a monster?”

The senior nurse fidgeted. “Monsters have babies too, it turns out. And we help babies.”

“Very well,” he said, not wasting time. “Prep for delivery and begin sterilizing the necessary equipment.”

The nurse paused. “Is there anything…different…I need to know about?”

“Nothing of substance. Your experience should serve.”

“Counselor!” Tuvok called from outside.

“Tuvok!” Deanna called back. “The baby’s coming! You can come in!”

“I appreciate the invitation, but I must decline. According to our signal intercepts, the local police have discovered the officer we incapacitated upon our entrance, and are preparing to storm the facility in response.”

“Tuvok, don’t let them get near her! Protect my baby!”

“That is what we all wish, Counselor. We shall protect her. You have my word.”

“Yes,” Ree said. “We will all protect her.”

“I know,” Deanna said. Right now, they all shared a single priority: the safe delivery of the child inside her.

But what would happen afterward?

TITAN

R
a-Havreii was surprised when Melora came to see him in engineering. “Commander,” he said with wary civility.

“Commander,” she replied. “I, ah, need your help.” His brow rose, and she continued. “Cethente and Kesi have developed a particle field that can neutralize the disruptive charge in the asteroid dust. We’ve exposed samples of the dust to the field and achieved a total dissipation of the stored energy.”

“Excellent,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“Deployment.
Titan
’s main deflector can project the field from orbit to deal with the dust in the stratosphere, but reaching the deep ocean is another matter.”

“Yes, I see,” he said, speaking over her last word. “The most practical way would be to replicate a series of deep-sea probes that can descend to the dynamo layer and permeate it with the field. The techniques we used on Cethente’s pod should serve to protect them from the pressure.”

Melora stared. “But that would take hundreds of thousands of probes. The dynamo layer has a volume of over thirty billion cubic kilometers, and the field can only penetrate so much water!”

“The probes can move through the dynamo layer, each one covering a fair swath over time.”

“But they might only last a few hours each at those pressures.”

“Yes, we’d need redundancy. But we could make do with maybe a thousand. The industrial replicators should be up to it. And we can always harvest the asteroid field for extra raw materials.”

“Deploying a thousand probes would take every available hand we could spare! It’d take days!”

“Have you got a pressing appointment somewhere else? I’m sure Commander Vale would be happy to leave this world to its doom so you don’t have to be inconvenienced.”

Her gaze hardened. “Oh, don’t start with me now, Xin. This isn’t the time.”

“
I
am being entirely professional. Unlike you, we Efrosians have the knack for objectivity toward our sexual liaisons.”

“Says the man who said he loved me!”

Everyone close enough to hear—meaning everyone in engineering, for she had said it rather loudly—turned to stare at them. Refusing to acknowledge their distraction, Ra-Havreii pulled the Elaysian into his office, her light build and antigrav suit making her almost weightless. She didn’t resist, though. Once they were in private, he pointed angrily and opened his mouth. “I—”

After a moment, she crossed her arms. “You?”

“Well, you said it too.”

“I did.”

“It was the heat of the moment. The distress. Look, we really should get back to these probes—”

“Xin, what are you so afraid of?”

There was no hostility in it. Her emotional armor fell before his eyes. This proud, defensive woman had left herself vulnerable to him by choice. In response, he felt his own guard falling away. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said.

“That we love each other?”

“Yes! I—I never expected that to happen. I don’t know how to deal with it. I’m not ready for…for that.”

She frowned. “For what, Xin? I thought Efrosian men didn’t form commitments.”

“Well, no, it’s—Just because we don’t pair-bond for child-rearing doesn’t mean we don’t form emotional bonds. We just consider them something separate from parenting. An Efrosian female has the support of her entire community in raising her children. That can include male lovers, although generally not the seed donor.” He shrugged. “Our society evolved in difficult conditions, with a limited population. That made it necessary for males to father each child with a different mate, to maximize gene pool diversity. It’s a matter of necessity. It doesn’t mean we’re incapable of emotional commitment.”

Melora was silent for a time. “So are you saying…you want to commit with me?”

“No! I mean…I don’t know. Don’t you?”

“Is that what you think?”

“You said you love me.”

“I do.”

“And your people…you
do
commit.”

“Usually,” she confirmed.

He tried to think of something clever to say, but all that came out was, “I’m afraid to. I don’t think I’m ready.”

Melora took his hand and smiled. “What makes you think I am?”

His eyes widened. “But…what we said…”

She nodded. “I love you. You love me. Isn’t that enough?” She moved closer. “We’ve been fighting because we’ve both been afraid of the same thing: that being in love meant having to escalate things, to make a commitment. But why mess with a good thing? If we’re both happy just…being together, having good times together, then why can’t that be what love means to us?” She kissed him. “This ship is all about embracing different ways of living and being. So why force ourselves to conform to some set of expectations about what being in love requires? Let’s make it what
we
want it to be.”