Vaughn reached down and dipped two fingers into the pooled fluid atop Prynn’s mangled midsection. He brought his fingers up to his face, and saw that they were red with blood. His daughter’s blood. The realization slammed into him with incredible emotional force. Anger, heartbreak, and guilt filled him.
Why are you doing this?he asked himself. Why are you reliving this?He believed that this could not be real. He had not traveled back six weeks to this moment, nor had the moment traveled forward to him. But no matter the explanation, he had no time for this; he had a mission to accomplish.
Vaughn stood up and peered down at his daughter. Peered pasther. Beneath Prynn’s body, the decking appeared as it should, covered with a light gray carpet. But just beyond her, the carpet faded away, blending along an irregular border into the surface of the road. Vaughn looked up and saw this dead and deadly planet stretching away from him in all directions. And yet he also stood on one small section of Defiant’s bridge, around the captain’s chair. And though he knew that Prynn would not die—had not died—and though he knew that this could not be real, his heart still grieved for the loss of his daughter. Grieved as it had when this had actually happened. He felt the familiar rage and anguish, the enormous guilt, and he wondered how this could have happened again.
It’s not happening again,he forced himself to think. Prynn was not dying—not almost dying—again. Ruriko was not dying again.
Vaughn pushed himself back into the moment, back onto the empty planet from which waves of destruction had been launched at the Vahni. He looked out at the vacant landscape, and with an effort, walked from the fragment of Defiant’s bridge and back onto the road. He examined his fingertips again, and saw them still wet and red with blood. He turned, expecting—not expecting; hoping—that the scene had vanished. But the incomplete center section of Defiant’s bridge sat incongruously in the middle of the road.
His mind reeled, vainly attempting to make sense of what he saw. Of what he knew. Of what he felt. For real or not, explicable or not, his emotions were genuine, more than mere echoes of what had come before. Profound sadness held him in its grip. Prynn had not died, and yet he felt as he had in that moment when he had believed that she had been killed.
Vaughn seemed trapped, encaged by his own sorrow. He had lost any sense of time, he realized, and conscious thoughts not born of his feelings had become difficult to manage. Everything had slowed down around him, as though this instant when he had thought Prynn dead would never end.
Is that what this is?he forced himself to think. An effort to slow him down, to prevent him from reaching the pulse and trying to shut it down? And if so, would not a phaser blast, or even a well-thrown stone, have sufficed?
Vaughn wanted to turn from the scene of Prynn’s near-death, but found that he could not tear his gaze away. He stood there for long moments, struggling. Finally, he allowed the kilometers that had passed beneath his boots to take over. Tired from the physical efforts of the last day and a half, Vaughn let his eyelids close. The heartache remained, but with Prynn’s still figure no longer visible, he found enough will to employ an old mantra and try to rein in his emotions: You have a mission.
Vaughn turned, then opened his eyes. The empty road extended away from him, and he started walking again.
The sky reached down. Vaughn watched as, maybe two kilometers ahead, the clouds swirled above and funneled down to the road like a tornado. He pulled out his tricorder, although he was no more certain of the device than he was of his own senses anymore. He attempted a scan, but the interference from the energy made it impossible.
As Vaughn walked on, he saw a piece of his past come alive. The whirlpool of gray clouds withdrew from the road by degrees, eddies of energy spinning the matter beneath it into a different form. The effect reminded him of a transporter or a replicator, but not working all at once, instead rebuilding from the bottom up.
Even when it was only partially completed, Vaughn recognized the structure the clouds were creating. Tall—and he knew it would grow taller still—it spanned the roadway and well beyond. A complex steel framework sat perched atop a concrete base.
So this is what’s happening,he thought. And this is how it’s going to be.Harriman, Ventu, Prynn, and now this—not time travel, not holograms, not illusions or delusions. Not real, exactly, not authentic,but real enough, the energy clouds somehow reorganizing matter into people and places and events from his past—and probably re-creating the corresponding sensor readings on his tricorder. Someone or something was peering into his mind, into his memories.
But why?
Vaughn walked on, determined to reach the site of the pulse. By the time he reached the steel-and-concrete structure, its construction had been completed, the funnel of gray energy withdrawing back up into the cloud cover. The gantry towered above him. The tangled mass of metal gave the impression of architectural confusion, but Vaughn knew that every beam, every conduit, every joint, had been meticulously planned and constructed. The launchpad looked no different now from when he had visited here as a teen.
Vaughn strode through the flame trench, the channel between the two huge concrete slabs on which the tower complex sat. When humankind’s early spacecraft had lifted off from here, taken into orbit by massive, controlled explosions of fuel, the initial fires had been diverted here. Up ahead, the huge steel wall that had directed the flames reached from slab to slab. At the bottom of one side of the wall, daylight peered through an open doorway. Vaughn headed there at a steady gait, determined to put this slice of his past behind him as quickly as possible.
Vaughn had read about this place as a boy, captured as he had been by the promise and wonder of exploration. But he recalled now that the joy he had expected to feel when he had first visited this place had never materialized, supplanted by his knowledge of the tragedy that had begun here. As it had then, melancholy now swept over him.
The heels of his boots clicked along the concrete that had replaced the roadway, the sound reverberating hollowly between the walls of the slabs. Vaughn tried to concentrate on humanity’s first steps out into the cosmos, many of which had been taken from this very place. But he could not remain focused on such thoughts, his mind being pulled back again and again to his first trip to Cape Canaveral. And back to Prynn lying nearly dead on the bridge of Defiant.And to Ventu, killed in the collapse of the tower. And to Captain Harriman, back on that fateful day.
Vaughn kept his eyes on the open doorway in the steel wall at the end of the flame trench. The rectangle of light sat dwarfed by the black wall. Vaughn felt insignificant amid his massive surroundings, and a sense of the helplessness and fear that must have enveloped the people whose deaths had begun here closed in around him.
As he neared the doorway, Vaughn told himself that he should not stop beyond it. That he wouldnot stop beyond it. He knew what was there, had seen it all those years ago, and he did not need to see it right now. You have a mission,he thought again, and began repeating the phrase over and over in his mind.
It did not matter. He passed through the doorway, saw the roadway reappear beyond the launchpad, and then peered to his right, as though he had no control over his own body. The plaque hung there on the concrete slab, brass letters raised on a darker background. Vaughn stopped and read it.
LAUNCH COMPLEX 39, PAD B
TUESDAY, 28 JANUARY 1986
1139 HOURS
DEDICATED TO THE LIVING MEMORY OF THE CREW OF