Falling…

The sky had opened up beneath Duffy. He tumbled downward, spiraling in tight circles beside the nowinert Wildfire device. He felt his weight increase with each passing moment, and his vision had long since blurred.

He was no longer in darkness; all he saw were washes of color racing past him—or perhaps he was racing past them. He sensed he was moving with tremendous speed, even though his pressure suit’s plasma thrusters were out of fuel.

Then the sensations changed. The pressure abated. He no longer felt the heat. Lense warned me about this, he remembered. Pressure psychosis. I’m losing it. He wondered which would come first—crushing implosion or asphyxia. He hoped for asphyxia.

He pulled a breath of thinning air into his lungs and struggled to focus his eyes. He was hurtling headlong through a vertical tunnel of multicolored light. He plunged past its spiraling walls toward a bright surface of shifting colors and swirling semiliquid gases.

The multichromatic wall rushed up to meet him. He braced for the impact. Instead, he broke through the luminescent barrier, penetrating it like a bullet.

Duffy emerged into a vast expanse of vacuum, a region of negative space at the heart of the gas giant. The pocket of vacuum was encased in a shimmering, hollow sphere of liquid metallic hydrogen.

At its center was a sphere of light.

The sphere wasn’t like a star, or some monochromatic orb; its surface was made up of what Duffy surmised must have been many trillions of individual beams of light with definitive beginnings and endings, collections of coherently ordered light that seemed to be their own source.

Hundreds of colossal tentacles of energy, which reached from the surface of the sphere to the shimmering wall above the vacuum, undulated and twisted around one another; they resembled tornadoes of light and moved in complex patterns that Duffy couldn’t help but think of as a dance.

The beams in the sphere and tentacles spanned more hues than Duffy could discern, in shadings and gradations too subtle for him to comprehend. He continued to descend, slipping through a narrow gap in two tentacles as they closed their double-helix into a single strand. He found it difficult to judge sizes and distances without the benefit of his suit’s sensors, but he guessed the sphere he was falling toward was at least eight times the size of the Earth.

The surface of the sphere dominated his field of vision; its horizon grew wider and flatter. Duffy felt like he was falling in slow motion as he neared the moment of impact.

He fell into the sphere and sank through its shifting layers of light and energy. The systems of his enhanced pressure suit flickered, then failed.

Duffy was oblivious to the shutdown of his equipment; he was far away, drowning in the deep, swift currents of memory.

*   *   *

The blades of grass prickled young Kieran’s neck as he lay on his back, arms folded behind his head. He stared up at the night sky from his parents’ backyard. His father sat beside him, listening proudly and only rarely pointing out minor corrections as Kieran named the constellations.

Only seven years old, Kieran already had memorized most of the stellar configurations visible from Earth with the naked eye, and he was well on his way to learning the stars’ names as they were known to those who lived on planets that circled them.

“I’m going to go there one day,” Kieran declared. “To all those stars and others you can’t even see. I’ll see them all.”

His father, who admired the stars but had always been satisfied with life planetside, responded by smiling and gently tousling Kieran’s mop of light-brown hair.

“Someday, son,” he said. “Someday. If you work hard. If you study. If you’re both smart and lucky, you might even get into Starfleet.”

Kieran gazed longingly at the stars. He wanted to be out there now, flying in the pure, empty space between worlds. School and Starfleet were so long and tedious; thinking about them made the stars seem farther away than he could stand.

His father seemed to sense his eagerness and the disappointment that followed on its frustrated heels.

“When you grow up,” he told Kieran in a wise and gentle voice, “you’ll find that the stars are an excellent school for patience.”

*   *   *

Duffy plunged through a wispy scattering of clouds tinted pink by the sunset. The gravity boots the lanky teen’s uncle had given him for his sixteenth birthday had propelled him skyward for months afterward. Each time Duffy left the ground he went a little bit faster, a little bit farther, a little bit closer to tempting fate.

His mother frequently wailed it would be only a matter of time before he’d go too far, or slam into something and break his neck. His father had been a bit more subtle, nicknaming him “Icarus” over breakfast one morning a few weeks ago.

Duffy wouldn’t let their fears hold him on the ground. It felt too good to be free, to be on his own, to make his own rules in a wide-open stretch of sky. Flying without the aid of a spacecraft or even a simple glider, with the air rushing against his skin and through his hair, was about as close a thing to real freedom as the impetuous teenager could imagine.

I should have been a bird, he thought as he soared upward with the wind and sun at his back.

*   *   *

The German shepherd reared up on its hind legs and was nearly twice Kieran’s height. Alone with the beast in his family’s backyard, Kieran feared the dog’s leash would snap, or that the animal might simply pull up the tree to which it was lashed.

Kieran’s father had named the animal Alexander—in honor of Alexander the Great—and it barked and yelped with exuberance born of hunger. Kieran recoiled from Alexander, an exceptionally large and spirited example of its breed. Its eyes gleamed with desperate anticipation for the bowl of foul-smelling dog food that the petrified, nine-year-old Kieran had brought for its dinner but was now too scared to put down within reach of the writhing bundle of fur and fangs.

The dog had made a truly lasting impression from the first moment Kieran’s father had ushered the slobbering beast out of the transport pod and into Casa Duffy. The dog had spied Pearl, the family’s ornery, old, white longhaired cat. Pearl always wore an indelible expression of utter contempt for the world. She was a tough old cat who had survived all manner of indignities, and she certainly wasn’t keen on sharing her home with a big, smelly dog.

Alexander, for his part, wasn’t going to allow some cat to besmirch his new master’s abode, and immediately sprang into action. He galloped toward Pearl, barking and flinging saliva with wild abandon. Pearl sat, stoic as a golem, watching Alexander’s frenzied approach with cold eyes.

When Alexander dared to push his barking snout into her face, she stood up on her haunches and swatted his wet nose like a Klingon beating a piñata with a bat’leth.

The dog yelped like a squeaky hinge and scampered back behind Kieran’s father, its head drooped in remorseful failure. To avoid further humiliation for the dog, Kieran’s dad agreed to tie it to a tree in the backyard.

Now the dog strained against its tree-tethered leash with such might that Kieran was afraid it would either strangle itself or break free.

Breaking free was what this dog did best. It did it so often and well that Kieran’s mother had nicknamed it “the Houdini of dogs.” Kieran didn’t know who Houdini was, but he guessed he must have been someone who once was good at getting out of things. Within a few weeks of its arrival, the dog had proved repeatedly that there was no chain, no leash, no lock, no fence that could hold it. The only activity Kieran dreaded more than feeding the dog was walking it, because that inevitably led to the slender young boy being dragged through the neighbors’ shrubbery just before losing his grip on the leash.

Before long, Kieran’s father was forced to admit the dog was too clever and free-minded to be contained in a single backyard. Kieran would always remember the bittersweet look on his father’s face the day they delivered the dog to an apple orchard in New England. His father seemed genuinely sorrowful to give up the dog to a new owner, but couldn’t hide the joy he felt as he watched the golden canine leap away in long strides, bobbing wildly through fields of tall grass and dodging with lightning grace between stands of Granny Smith and Golden Delicious trees silhouetted against an orange-and-indigo sunset.

As the Houdini dog escaped his last cage, Kieran’s father looked down at him with the same wistful expression and tousled his hair. “Come on, son,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

*   *   *

Duffy stretched his legs out in front of him and curled his toes in the cool grass. He glanced over at Gomez, who, like him, was attired in civilian clothes. It had been a long time since he and Gomez had had an opportunity to wear civvies, been able to shed their uniforms and ranks and just be together.

A cool spring breeze moved across the lawn, silent and gentle, bearing the perfume of new blossoms on the trees. The band playing under the shell beside the lake was spinning out a cool, bluesy jazz number, strong on bass and piano and wire-brush percussion. Groups and couples surrounded Duffy and Gomez on the wide, upward-sloping expanse of well-manicured grass.

Duffy had almost forgotten how thrilling real, live entertainment could be. Like many people who spent long stretches of time on starships or starbases, he had become accustomed to taking his recreation in holodecks. But after dealing with the holographic constructs of the Enigma Ship, Duffy had had enough of holograms for a while.

He looked up at the stars. The constellations looked very different from here on Betazed. He thought of how he had longed as a boy to roam free between those distant points of light in the sky, how romantic the adventure and exploration had seemed. His uncle Jim—who had given him the gravity boots—had actually tried to talk him out of joining Starfleet the following year. “If you want to fly, fly free,” Uncle Jim had said to him. “Being on a starship is being in jail, with the chance of being sucked out into space.”

Duffy had ignored his uncle, and enrolled in Starfleet Academy a year later. He had never regretted his decision. But now he felt it was time to choose a new path.

He reached down and held Sonya’s hand. Their fingers meshed together easily. Everything with her felt that way—effortless and natural. She turned her head slightly and shared a smile with him. He admired the perfect slope of her nose in profile, the warmth of her hand in his, the way her dark curls framed the subtle perfections of her face.

He imagined a new life, one lived not in the cold empty reaches between the stars, but in a place like this—rich and lush and peaceful, far away from the disasters, battles, and emergencies that came with wearing a Starfleet uniform. A life in which he could spend long summer nights listening to music under the stars, with Sonya by his side.

His future became clear to him.

I’m gonna ask her to marry me.

*   *   *

Second-year cadet Duffy stood at attention, his dress uniform still so new and crisp that it chafed against his skin. The sun pounded down, baking the sweat off his skin and almost blinding him. His mother clung to his left arm, her grip tighter than the jaws of a Kryonian tiger. His sister Amy couldn’t stop crying.

Duffy watched his father’s coffin descend into the ground. Most of the other mourners had already departed for the post-funeral reception. Duffy had insisted on staying to see the coffin lowered so he could toss a handful of dirt into the grave afterward. The funeral director had tried to discourage him, calling the fistful-of-earth tradition “archaic” and “morbid.”

“Try and stop me,” Duffy had said to him.

The coffin settled with a muffled thump into the bottom of the grave. The cemetery worker operating the hydraulics under the casket stepped away to give the family a few moments of privacy. Duffy gently lifted his mother’s fingers from his arm and stepped around the other side of the grave, into the generous shade of a large, Y-shaped tree.

He lifted the dark-green tarpaulin off the mound of cool, black soil heaped next to the rectangular pit. His mother clung with both hands to Amy. Together they watched as he closed his fist white-knuckle tight around a clump of dirt, turned, and extended his arm over the grave.

Duffy let his fist open into a hand.

The shower of dirt rained down and spread, fluid-like, across the dark lacquered wood of the coffin, falling with a finality that Duffy found wholly surreal.

Good-bye, Dad.

*   *   *

Lt. Commander Duffy was trying very hard not to feel like a fraud during his first real turn in the captain’s chair of the U.S.S. da Vinci, but, considering the beating the ship had just taken from the Tholians, it wasn’t easy.

All he’d had to do was sit quietly in the captain’s seat while Commander Gomez and Captain Gold led an away team into the interspatial rift to retrieve the Constitution-class U.S.S. Defiant, which had been trapped there since 2268.

Then, without warning or apparent provocation, the Tholians had attacked the da Vinci and transformed this into one of the worst days of Duffy’s life.

He’d barely succeeded in disabling the attacking Tholian vessel, which had moments ago escaped to rally reinforcements for a rematch with the badly damaged da Vinci. If Domenica Corsi was right—and she usually was—the da Vinci could expect to be surrounded by Tholian battle cruisers in just a few hours.

When the Federation Diplomatic Corps hears about this, my career in Starfleet will be over. If I’m still alive, that is…

No time for that now. Get it together, Duff.

“Our first priority is to get the Defiant out,” he said. “Fabian, reestablish the tractor be—”

His voice shrank as he stared in shock at the main viewer.

The interspatial rift had vanished, taking with it the captain, the away team, the Defiant…

And Sonya.

*   *   *

Duffy’s muscles convulsed as he continued to pinwheel toward the center of the sphere of light inside Galvan VI.

His jury-rigged pressure suit hung about him like a dead weight. His body was numb. A bitter taste filled his mouth. Dark spots swam across his vision, interrupted by bursts of intense color unlike any he had ever seen before. A low rumble echoed in his bones as much as in his ears.

More fragments of memory flickered unbidden through his mind.

A stuffed toy, his favorite, fell from his three-year-old hand, dropped deliberately out a window. It receded toward the distant ground in hyper-real slow motion.

The light…it’s the light…

His collarbone had broken with a sickening wet snap when he ricocheted off the tree. “Just because you’re sixteen years old doesn’t mean you’re invulnerable,” his mother said with a wagging finger, before she confiscated his gravity boots for a month.

My memories…the light…

Home on midsemester break from the Academy, Duffy awoke on Saturday morning to the aroma of French toast and bacon cooking in his mother’s kitchen….

Young Kieran waited patiently beside the signal beacon, staring at the patch of sky above his parents’ backyard….

Running late for an engineering staff meeting aboard the Enterprise, Lieutenant Duffy passed a young woman with dark curly hair in the corridor. She wore the gold of engineering or security. Who’s she? he wondered….

It’s playing my memories. Like bioelectric recordings.

An intense surge of energy rippled through Duffy’s body. His present became distant and obscured, like a coastline shrouded by a gathering fog, until all he was aware of was the continued sensation of falling.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Duffy strode quickly toward the Enterprise arboretum on deck seventeen. Lieutenant Gomez had invited him to join her for a symposium on exobotany at 1900 hours. She met him outside the aft door to the arboretum, and they walked in to find the enormous tree nursery devoid of other personnel.

“I guess we’re the first ones here,” Duffy said as the door swished shut behind them. Gomez reached up, and, using her thumb and forefinger, gently turned and lowered his chin toward her.

“Kieran,” she said with a smile, “there’s no symposium.”

She pulled him into their first kiss. Her lips were softer than he could have imagined. Her hand pressed gently against his cheek, then slowly migrated behind his neck to pull him closer.

It was several seconds before Duffy remembered that his arms still worked. He wrapped them around her, thanking his lucky stars that she had made the first move.

*   *   *

Lt. Commander Duffy’s first thought was:Where the hell am I?

His second thought was: Oh my God, I’m blind.

He reached toward his eyes. He felt the blindfold and pulled it off, then wished he hadn’t. The bright morning glare stabbed tiny needles of pain through his eyes into the back of his skull. Lifting his arm to block the revoltingly golden glow of sunrise, he examined his surroundings.

Unless he was badly mistaken, he was in the worst room of the seediest hotel on Freyar. Tattered curtains sagged in front of a grime-encrusted window, outside which shrieking hovercar traffic blurred past. The floor was littered with empty and broken bottles of Romulan ale, Klingon bloodwine, and foul-tasting cheap Ferengi synthale. The matted, dank-smelling carpeting was stained so badly that Duffy could no longer discern its original pattern.

Duffy coughed and spit something out of his mouth that was either a half-chewed fruit stem or a particularly tough insect leg. He lay alone in the filthy bed, his stomach growling with hunger even as his lower intestine gurgled its displeasure with the gluttonous feast he and his new best friend, engineer Fabian Stevens, had wolfed down last night in the hotel bar.

The pair also had made time last night to get filthy stinking drunk, in between losing round after round of dom-jot to a sneaky pair of alien women, neither of whose species the two humans had recognized. Stevens had taken a shine to the redhead, however, leaving Duffy to work his charms on the petite gray-skinned girl. Duffy vaguely recalled something fun happening afterward.

He lifted the bedsheet. He was naked. He sat up and realized just how much his head hurt. Then he noticed that nowhere in the room did he see any sign of his uniform.

Oh, you gotta be kidding me. He grunted as he stood, and groaned as he forced his stiff, aching limbs to shuffle forward. There was only one other part of the hotel room to search.

He opened the door to the bathroom. The stench hit him a split-second after the clamor of a rasping snore. The odor was just bad enough to make him wince, but not enough to make him retch. He glanced at the filthy steel commode, sink, and ancient-style bathtub and hydro-shower. The snoring was coming from behind the closed shower curtain. He pulled it open.

Stevens was sprawled inside the bathtub, also completely au naturel. Duffy stared down at him with a mixture of amusement and irritation. Duffy flipped the shower toggle to its “on” position and opened the valve for the hydro-shower’s cold-water supply. Seconds later, an icy spray sputtered, then streamed out of the shower nozzle, drenching Stevens.

Stevens shrieked like a soprano bat and leapt to his feet, dancing gingerly on his toes for a few seconds before hopping awkwardly out of the shower. Dripping wet and shivering, he wrapped his arms around his torso and glared at Duffy, who turned off the water. “What the hell’d you do that for?” Stevens said through chattering teeth.

“They stole our uniforms,” Duffy said angrily.

Duffy continued to glare at Stevens for several seconds. Stevens struggled to suppress a chortle, but his mouth was already contorting from the effort of holding in his laughter. Duffy was trying to play this straight—he was the ship’s second officer, for crying out loud, and Stevens was an enlisted man—but Stevens’s attempts not to laugh made their predicament even funnier.

Duffy guffawed first, and before long both men had laughed until their stomachs hurt. Exhausted, they sat facing each other—Duffy on the commode, Stevens on the edge of the tub.

“How the hell are we going to explain this to Captain Gold?” Stevens said. He opened their one remaining bottle of Klingon bloodwine and took a swig. Duffy shook his head and took the bottle from Stevens.

“Dunno,” Duffy said, then downed a mouthful of the tart, potent libation. “But if I were you, I’d be more worried about explaining it to Commander Salek.”

“That’s the problem with Vulcans,” Stevens said, wiping a dark-purple bloodwine stain from his chin. “No sense of humor.”

*   *   *

Lieutenant Duffy stood at the airlock gate, blocking Lieutenant Gomez’s path. She had a standard-issue Starfleet duffel bag slung over one shoulder. She was leaving the Enterprise.

“This is it, then?” he said.

“Kieran, please,” she said, her tone all-business. “I need to go. The Oberth is waiting for me.”

“I know.” This was a great opportunity for her; he knew that. She had received a promotion to full lieutenant, and because the Oberth was a smaller ship than the Enterprise, she’d be on a much faster track to career advancement.

But it killed him to see her go. He wouldn’t admit that to her; it would only make this more difficult, for both of them.

“I didn’t mean to hold you up,” he said. “I just wanted to say good-bye.” He was lying. They had said their farewells more than two hours ago. There was nothing left to say. Except that he had come to the airlock with a half-formed plan to ask her to stay, despite the fact that he knew she’d have to say no.

She kissed him softly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Kieran.” She gently pushed past him and walked resolutely down the gangway toward the Oberth.

Toward her future. Out of my life.

“Sir, are you going aboard?” The voice came from behind Duffy. He turned to see a stoutly built, middle-aged human, a Starfleet chief petty officer, looking at him. “I have to seal the gangway, sir.” Duffy nodded and moved away down the main corridor. He kept walking until he reached one of the observation lounges.

Duffy positioned himself in front of the twenty-meter-tall transparent aluminum windows and watched silently as the Oberth cleared its moorings and powered up its navigational thrusters. The compact starship pulled away from the spacedock and allowed Starbase Control to guide it through the massive space doors.

She’s gone, he thought. She’s really gone.

The Enterprise was scheduled to remain here at Starbase 67 for nearly a month to undergo major systems repairs following a rather brutal encounter with a quantum filament. Without Sonya, however, Duffy was certain it would seem much longer than that.

*   *   *

I’m never going to see you again.

The auxiliary shuttle-bay door slid closed, separating Duffy from Gomez. His departure from the da Vinci was only seconds away. Once he passed through the force field, there would be no coming back. He knew that the chances of the da Vinci and her crew escaping the atmosphere were dismal. He also knew that beating long odds was what this crew did best.

He turned and faced the force field. To step through it, to leap alone into the darkness, would mean releasing his hold on everything and everyone he cared about. His knowledge of what he was about to lose held him back. This would be no accidental death, no calamity met in the spur of the moment.

This was a calculated sacrifice.

Duffy closed his eyes and thought of Sonya.

If I don’t go, we’ll both die for certain. If I succeed, at least she’ll have a chance.

He opened his eyes and faced the dark tabula rasa beyond the force field. He imagined all the people and things he treasured as a tenuous clump of cold dirt clutched in his fist, stretched out over a dark chasm. He pictured his fist opening, his handful of dirt falling away in a slow earthen cascade, vanishing into the abyss of time.

Empty-handed, Duffy stepped forward through the force field and surrendered himself to the darkness.

Good-bye, Sonnie.

*   *   *

Falling…

Duffy felt weightless, disembodied. He listened to his own shallow breathing, which grew weaker with each labored ebb and flow from his desperate lungs. I’m not dead…yet.

He opened his eyes.

He drifted slowly into the center of a hollow space within the sphere of energy. He guessed that this empty space was also spherical, but without a reference point he couldn’t be certain. He knew only that he was surrounded by a vacuum, beyond which pulsed an unbroken surface of radiant energy. Logically, Duffy knew he should be alarmed; his air supply was reading empty. His suit was out of power. Suffocation was only moments away. Yet he felt peaceful…serene…unafraid.

They were reading my memories. Duffy sorted through the episodes of his life that he had vividly relived moments ago, as well as countless others that had flickered by so quickly as to be nearly subliminal in their effect. Memories of flight…memories of loss, of separation…of Sonya…

…memories of them. Duffy searched his mind for several newly made memories, hidden in the fractured puzzle of his own past: Life formed on an unfamiliar world beneath a reddish star; a saurian species rose through stages of evolution; they mastered symbolic thought, built civilizations, waged wars; they soared away to the stars; they evolved, as many other corporeal species before them had done, into non-physical beings.

They were giving me their memories as they read mine.

The Ovanim. They call themselves the Ovanim. Duffy marveled at how much the Ovanim had been able to impart to him in images and mathematical concepts, without ever resorting to spoken words. The Ovanim had long since abandoned physical bodies, and, disdaining contact with physical beings, chose to make their home here, deep within a gas giant, an environment so hostile to corporeal species that they had expected to enjoy their solitude for at least several more millennia. The subatomic legerdemain they’d had to concoct to make this domain a reality was more complex and subtle than anything Duffy had imagined possible.

Too bad I won’t live long enough to study it.

The light around Duffy began to dim. He looked around, confused. An image nearly a hundred kilometers tall took shape on the curved inner surface of the hollow sphere in which he floated. The image that formed was that of Galvan VI, as seen from space. Then a new shape appeared—the U.S.S. Orion, silhouetted against the glowing, bluish gray gas giant. The ship disappeared into the planet’s atmosphere.

Moments later, the flash of the planet igniting into a nova blinded Duffy. He squeezed his eyes shut, and held them closed until the glare subsided.

He peeked cautiously at the newly forming image. It was a short series of quick images, rendered in what, to Duffy’s failing vision, looked like the impressionistic stipple of a Monet painting: The da Vinci navigating through the hazardous atmosphere; the Work Bugs inspecting the wreck of the Orion; Corsi and the warhead; the collision of the Orion and the da Vinci…

Duffy’s vision blurred. He struggled to shake off quickly growing feelings of panic and disorientation.

Have to focus…have to fo—

—cus… Duffy snapped back with a start. Passed out. Not much time left.

The image that now towered over Duffy, larger-than-life, was himself, disarming the Wildfire device. The image melted into the likeness of Sonya, shining in violet light as Duffy had last seen her…then it became his air gauge, flashing EMPTY on his visor moments before his suit lost power.

The thoughts that whispered in his mind were not his own.

…disruption…light…death…defend…

I understand, he thought. You defended yourself.

Duffy focused on making himself heard and hoped his efforts now were not futile. This was going to be his last first-contact mission. He was determined to make the best of it.

We didn’t know you were here. It was an accident.

…understand…accident…forgiveness…peace…

Yes. We, too, wish to live in peace. We’re sorry.

…duffy…rescue…death…sacrifice…

It was my duty. My life for yours.

…understand…grateful.

The images on the inner sphere shifted again. Duffy found himself surrounded by images of Sonya: as he had first seen her that day when he walked past her on the Enterprise; smiling at him as she pulled him into their first kiss; running toward him on Sarindar, sun-browned and scarred but also defiant and fearless and beautiful; laughing hysterically at one of his stories of drunken misadventure; graceful in repose under starlight on the night that he knew he wanted to marry her.

Sonnie…

Duffy drew a pained, shallow breath, then exhaled and felt his life slip away, like a fist opening into a hand.