CHAPTER ONE
U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 57137.8
"No!!"
Deanna Troi bolted upright in bed. For a moment she felt adrift in the dark, in a void whose emptiness chilled her bare flesh. She wasn't sure where she was, or even who she was. She felt terrible fear, but did not know why.
But then she felt his arms embracing her, bringing her home. Will. Her imzadi. Her husband. Her captain. Her anchor. When he touched her, she was never lost.
She relaxed against him, and they stayed that way for a precious moment. Then he spoke softly. "The nightmare again?"
"I'm not sure," she said. "The same sense of...intrusion...yet different. Not as malevolent." Talking about the recurring nightmare brought unwelcome flashes of memory. It had been over three months since Shinzon of Remus and his viceroy Vkruk had raped her, using Vkruk's telepathy to place themselves in her mind while she made love with Will; yet although the nightmares came less frequently of late, her memory of the event remained as vivid as ever, and she knew it always would. What made it worse was that it had been her second telepathic sexual assault, the first being at the hands of the Ullian historian Jev nearly a dozen years ago. He too had usurped Will Riker's place in her perceptions, forcing her to relive an erotic memory which he twisted into a violation. It was a testament to Deanna's love and faith in Will that she was still able to take joy and comfort from his touch today.
Sometimes it took a little work, though. Reliving those memories intensified the fight-or-flight impulse the dream had triggered, and suddenly she felt a desperate need for personal space. She clambered out of bed and moved to the windows, not stopping to don a gown first. Over the past few months, Will had grown accustomed to her occasional need not to be touched, so he didn't follow. "Not as malevolent?" he asked, his voice gentle. "You seemed pretty scared."
Deanna stared out at the stars, gathering her thoughts. "I don't remember. It was as though...something else's fear was being forced into me."
"Something? Not someone?"
"It felt very alien. Yet...somehow distantly familiar." She shook her head, giving a slight, nervous chuckle. "Never mind. It was just a dream. A bit of undigested chocolate."
"You sure of that, Ebenezer?" She didn't have to turn to see the smirk on his face. "You've been contacted through dreams before. Eyes in the dark," he intoned in a spooky voice that made her laugh.
"Anything's possible, I suppose, but there's too little to go on." She gazed out at the stars. "Something alien, but familiar...probably some symbol my brain pieced together, representing anxiety at the unknown. A natural enough response, considering our mission."
She could feel his excitement at the mission that lay before them, and she shared it even without her empathy. Titan and her crew had been meant for pure exploration, but had been forced to defer that mission when Starfleet had assigned them to head a diplomatic task force to Romulus, assisting with the rebuilding efforts following Shinzon's bloody coup and subsequent self-destruction. Right afterward, Titan's aid in the search for a lost Romulan fleet had led to a fall down an extradimensional rabbit hole into the Small Magellanic Cloud, over 200,000 light-years from home. In theory, that had been an explorer's dream come true, but dealing with the destruction caused by the Red King entity and the rescue of the Neyel from their disintegrating homeworld had left no chance for real exploration. And then it had been back to Starbase 185 for two weeks of repairs and debriefing, and another two weeks and change moving out beyond Federation space, past Beta Stromgren, past Kappa Velorum, and finally, last night, past the farthest benchmark laid by Olympia on its Beta Quadrant survey eight years ago. From this point on, nobody knew what lay ahead.
It was not an unusual experience for an explorer, of course, and it was a welcome one; yet it naturally brought trepidation too, as any new undertaking did. Perhaps that was all there was behind her sense of alien-yet-familiar dread. Maybe it was heightened because from here on, they were completely on their own -- no real-time contact with Starfleet Command, no starbases to offer rest and replenishment, no other starships able to reach them in a hurry. She had gotten a taste of that during their recent sojourn in the galaxy next door. But in an odd way there was something even more daunting about doing it on purpose.
She felt Will's gentle skepticism, reminding her that she sometimes overanalyzed, an occupational hazard. "Probably," he said aloud. "But keep a mental eye out, just in case."
Now she did turn to him. "Aye, aye, Captain," she said with an insouciant salute.
He looked her over, reminding her that she was thoroughly out of uniform. "Must be cold over by the windows. Wanna come back to bed?"
"No, thanks," she replied after a moment. Somehow she didn't feel chilled anymore; it must have been a relic of the dream. "I don't think I could get back to sleep right away. Maybe I'll go for a walk to clear my head."
"All right, then." She sensed the disappointment that he quickly reined in. She knew he regretted that he couldn't always be the one to make her feel better, to take care of her. But she also knew he understood how it was for her. Not long before her ordeal with Shinzon, Will had suffered his own ordeal, held hostage and tortured by the dictator Kinchawn of Tezwa. He still had his own occasional nightmares, and though he'd cherished her comfort and support, still there were times that he needed to deal with them on his own. After all, in the wake of being victimized, degraded and depersonalized, it was healthy to reassert one's independence, to find one's own inner strength.
Deanna went to the closet, slipped on a light blue wrap and a pair of sandals, and headed out the door. She sent a light mental caress Will's way, only to find that he'd already drifted off again. Still, his serenity in slumber was a pleasant sendoff.
Strolling the corridors of Titan felt somewhat like an exploration in itself. It was still a fairly new environment to her -- a new class of ship, a new set of crewmates. More importantly, that crew was the most diverse one in Star-fleet's history, including many species Deanna had never personally met before. The Federation had always striven for diversity in principle, but in practice had tended toward fairly segregated crews. It wasn't a formal policy; people generally just preferred to work among those with similar customs, outlooks, and environmental needs. Even in the absence of outright prejudice, segregation tended to result from simple complacency, the unresisted impulse to seek the familiar. So maintaining true equality took conscious effort, and sometimes the effort fell prey to other priorities, or to simple neglect. There had been occasional attempts to challenge that status quo, most notably Wil-lard Decker's Enterprise experiment of a century before. But reconciling the needs and attitudes of radically different species posed many challenges, and with the loss of Decker on his crew's maiden voyage, some of the impetus for greater diversity had been lost. The technology for balancing so many species' environmental and medical needs had been less advanced then as well. So over the ensuing years, things had settled back into a less challenging status quo. Certainly some progress had been made; during Deanna's tenure on the Enterprise-D and -E, over a dozen species had been represented among the crew. However, it was still fairly unusual for humanoids and nonhumanoids to crew together routinely.
The minds behind Titan's mission had wanted to change that. This new generation of Luna-class explorer ships -- a prototype design mothballed when the Dominion War had forced a shift toward more combat-oriented starships -- had been revived after war's end, promoted as a reassertion of Starfleet's core ideals of peaceful exploration and diplomacy. For years, Starfleet had been forced to focus on mere survival, and many of its ideals had needed to be compromised in pursuit of that goal. Some had been compromised without so great a need -- as Deanna and Will knew better than most, after their experiences on the Ba'ku planet and Tezwa. Many in Starfleet felt it was essential to reaffirm a higher set of values than survival alone, to remind the peoples of the Federation that it was more important to live for something than simply to stay alive. Hence the ambitious new mission of Titan and its eleven sister ships -- emissaries to the unknown, questing out in all directions, hands extended to friends not yet met.
But if these ships were to represent the Federation, it was resolved, then they must represent it in all its diversity. If they stood for peaceful coexistence with future neighbors, then they must stand for peaceful, eager coexistence among the Federation's members. Hence the Great Experiment was spawned, reviving Willard Decker's dream and going it one better -- or twelve better.
Will Riker had been a natural choice to carry forward that dream -- even aside from the striking similarity of their names and aspects of their life histories. For as long as Deanna had known him, William Thomas Riker had been a passionate xenophile, not merely tolerant of others' differences, but positively delighted by them. He took an unabashed, childlike glee in learning about other cultures, sampling their cuisine, their customs, their music, their art -- and in his bachelor days, their sexual customs as well. (Which didn't trouble Deanna in the least; on the contrary, his range of experience in that regard had benefitted her greatly. Though she couldn't always say the same about his experiments with alien music or cuisine.) The chance to captain a crew with so many different species on board, many of which he'd never worked alongside before, had been a dream come true for him.
Will had been a gregarious first officer on the Enterprise,...
