First Love

by Jane Seaton

Chapter 1

"What have you done now, butterfingers?"

Chekov looked shamefacedly at the frowning yeoman. "We have a class A intermix malfunction. This shuttle is no longer functional."

Rand relented. "I don't suppose it was your fault. What are they going to do about it? Are we waiting for a tow?"

"Mister Scott says that he will have the transporter fixed at about the same time as the tractor generators. Either way we have approximately thirty minutes to wait."

"I can't see the ship..."

"We're facing the wrong way."

"Oh. When you say 'no longer functional', you just mean it can't go anywhere, don't you? You're not talking about life support or anything like that?"

"We have sufficient air for half an hour."

"Oh." She rested her hand on his shoulder, absentmindedly, as if she'd mistaken it for the back of his chair. "It's funny, but shuttles don't seem claustrophobic when they're moving, or landed somewhere."

"Are you all right?" He twisted round to look at her. "You shouldn't worry. I could fix it, but it will take longer than thirty minutes, so we may as well just wait."

"I'm not worried, stupid. I've been in worse places than this."

She didn't take her hand away though. Maybe, he thought, she was reassuring him. He didn't need it, of course, even though this was the first time he'd been the most senior officer around in a potentially difficult situation.

"Enterprise to Galileo, come in please." Uhura's voice drifted pleasantly into the cabin. "What is your status, please?"

"Uh, this is Galileo. Our status is unchanged."

"Okay, sit tight." There was a momentary silence. "Shall I leave the channel open?"

"We will call you if we have anything to report, Enterprise." Chekov cut off the link himself. There was a limit to the amount of reassurance he could tolerate gracefully.

Rand raised her eyebrows. "What's the matter?"

"I don't need someone to hold my hand. It's not as if I haven't piloted a shuttle any number of times."

She ruffled his hair, making him scowl. "I'm going to miss you."

"Why?"

"Well, I got my transfer. I've been waiting long enough."

"I don't understand why you would want a transfer." Over the past year and a half, Chekov had sometimes wondered if it would have been easier just to offer his soul in exchange for a posting to the Enterprise. Now he was here, he couldn't imagine giving it up for anything less than a captaincy.

"Personnel incompatibility."

Chekov strove to make sense of this. Rand did her job so well it was sometimes difficult to realise she was actually doing anything. She certainly got on with everyone. In fact he'd thought from time to time that she and the captain...

"Oh."

"It's just hormones. Mine tell me that he's the most attractive man on the ship, to me, anyway. And given the sort of man he is, I know that sooner or later we'll, well, you know. And I'll feel really cheap afterwards. I'm old-fashioned like that. I want it to be forever, with children. So I'd rather go first."

"That doesn't seem fair."

"What, you think he should go?"

"No..."

"Well then. Look, the Enterprise wouldn't be the same without him, but that's the way he is. Complaining about it would be like... blaming chocolate for making you fat. Anyway, there's more to Starfleet than just the Enterprise. I'll get something else good. Maybe when I'm old and past it I'll come back."

"How old are you?"

"What a question! Nineteen. And you're twenty two, aren't you? I've seen your file."

"Do you see everyone's files?"

"Part of the job. I only tell people what they already know though. You were born in Kiev, you..."

"You memorise everyone's files?"

"Only the interesting ones... the ones that look interesting, I mean. I thought I was going to like you, though I thought you might be a bit too serious. You looked as though you took everything very seriously..."

"This is not fair. When can I read your file?"

"It's very dull. You know, we used to play a game when I was younger, if we had to sit around and wait for anything. It was called First Love, and we had to decide who we were going to first fall head over heels in love with. You go first."

"Well, you've already said you..."

"Oh, sorry. I meant, now we're older, you're supposed to say who you really did fall in love with, and how it happened. You can change names if necessary."

Chekov thought about it. "No, thank you."

"Spoilsport."

He checked the engine readings and their position. Rand was sounding rather more skittish than he was used to. It was, he supposed, just nerves. "Is there anything to drink?"

"Mm." She pulled the tab on a can of water and watched him drink it. "It's interesting watching how different people on the Enterprise eat... Have you noticed?"

Chekov had been aboard three months. He'd barely started noticing what he was eating himself, let alone other people's table manners.

"Because you'll get fat if you aren't careful. You never pay any attention to what you're eating."

Chekov wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before it occurred to him that that also might be the sort of thing she was talking about.

"Neither of my parents is overweight."

"Yeah. It's really cruel, isn't it? Your mother is a mathematician, your father is an engineer. Did you really have any choice but to be a slim navigator? My mother has a non-correctable tendency to fat. In ten years time, Captain James T Kirk won't be a problem."

Chekov stared out of the forward 'screen, visualising Rand's pleasant curves. "You might take after your father."

"I don't know him real well. That might be good, might not."

"I'm sorry..."

"Hey, pumpkin. It's not a big tragedy. Just because your Mom and Dad are the forever kind. Aren't they? Come to think of it, your file didn't say. I just assumed."

"They are still married. So far as I know they have never had any reason to consider parting. And they would not have done so anyway. Russians believe in a stable family background for children."

"And you'd really feel threatened if they split up. You'd have to xerox your letters home."

"Yeoman, are you feeling okay?" Rand was sounding less and less like her usual efficient, positive self.

"Oh, hell. I hate hanging around with nothing to do. I hate waiting for someone else to get me out of a fix. And I'm having second thoughts about leaving. Nothing to do with you, Mister Chekov. Just slap me if I get hysterical."

Chekov checked the chronometer. Twenty-eight minutes to go.

"I'll play your game. Let me think... When I was sixteen, nearly, the dacha next door to ours was rented for the summer by a new family. My mother was unwell, and did not want the trouble of making a courtesy call. She sent me in her place. It transpired that the new tenants were a noble family. A mother and daughter and... their household."

"Their household?" Rand interrupted.

"Yes. Aged hunchbacked retainers, kitchen maids," Chekov elaborated vaguely. "You know the sort of thing..."

"Well, since you ask, I don't. How many years ago was this?"

"The mother was Princess Zasyekin, and the daughter's name was Zinaida..."

"Hold on a minute. You fell in love with a princess?"

"Princesses are relatively commonplace in Russia. Although many do not insist on the title. May I continue?" At a nod from Rand, he folded his hands on the console before him and proceeded. "I met the mother first. She was elderly, badly dressed and frankly, not very well groomed. I did not form a favourable first impression. When Zinaida entered the room, however..."

"Oh, I've seen the vid. This is Turgenev, right? But she had an affair with your father, made a hasty marriage to conceal the scandal and later died in childbirth. He divorced your mother. And you..."

"I had to read it at school."

"The princess always seemed so helpless to me. So stupid. I mean, she's really mean, the way she leads the kid on, and then when his father hits her with his riding whip, she just looks at the mark, and it doesn't make a bit of difference to her. She's still so abjectly in love with him."

"That is typical of Turgenev. He thought love was a primal force, something sudden and overpowering, utterly irresistible. And by that standard, I don't think I've ever fallen in love with anyone."

"What? Never? Oh, come on. What about Veronique?"

Chekov considered the interesting question of Ensign Veronique de Luz. "What about her?" he replied noncommittally.

"Well, before her, I've seen you with other women..."

"I've found some women very attractive, and sometimes the same women have found me attractive, although on the whole, there's been a surprising degree of mismatching..."

"I know. It's terribly inefficient, isn't it?"

"But I don't think it has ever gone so far as being in love. For example, I've never truly felt the urge to give anything up, or lay down my life, or make any other dramatic gesture. And if anyone had asked me to do something like that, I should have told them they were talking to the wrong man. You see?"

"How sad. Wasn't there anyone you had to leave behind when you joined Starfleet?"

"But I left them, you see? Just as when..."

"Yes?" Rand pounced, scenting a true story this time.

"There was someone who wanted me to leave Starfleet when she did, and I was... surprised that she wanted to leave. And hurt that she wouldn't stay because I asked her to. But it never for a moment occurred to me to go because she asked me."

"How very single minded."

"Is that a criticism? So far as I know, no one's ever been in love with me either."

"That I cannot believe. I think you're rationalising it away. You're avoiding getting into the position where you might have to give up your career over your heart."

"Isn't that what you are doing?"

"I'm trying not to get hurt. Was she beautiful?"

"Exquisitely."

"Oh. I wish I was."

"Your parents again."

"Chekov! You're supposed to tell me I am. I'm not surprised no one's bothered to fall in love with you. They'd have to have the hide of a rhinoceros, as well as putting up with being warp widows."

Chekov glanced at the chronometer again. Twenty three minutes. "Excuse me, but are we just passing the time of day, or are you flirting with me? Because..."

"Of course I'm not flirting with you. I'd have thought even you could work out you're not my type. You're too..."

"Then I think I'll have a look at that intermix chamber after all."

"...considerate," Rand finished lamely after he'd gone. "Oh, hell, Janice. Why do you always fall for the wrong ones?"

She stared out at the heavens. An Earth assignment. It wasn't really what she wanted. Maybe that was why she was so nervous about it. A starship, although it seemed to be the ultimate in confronting the unknown, was from an administrative point of view a closed and ordered system. What if she couldn't cope? What if Kirk had given her that glowing reference only to hasten her departure, or as a consolation prize?

She went aft and apologised to Chekov's back view. He eased himself out of the narrow access space, smiling. "You were making me nervous."

"Can you do anything?"

"Yes, but it will take too long to help us. It will only save Engineering a few minutes work. So, do you want to assist me?"

"Yes, please."

It said something for Starfleet, Rand thought, that a navigator and a captain's yeoman could do anything useful to a warp engine. And it was exactly the sort of thing she wouldn't get to do anymore back on Earth...

"You need to reset the bridge voltages on the inductor coils," Chekov said, handing her a regulator that bristled with connections and potential adjustments.

"Does it worry you, to think about what this could do if we put it back together wrong?"

"We'll run a computer check before we turn it on," he stated matter-of-factly, missing her teasing intention. Sometimes his sense of humour seemed to evaporate into thin air, leaving you feeling you'd merely said something stupid. She picked up a tricorder to run a test voltage through the regulator.

"Chekov?"

"Yes?"

"Someone's scanning us."

"I wonder why they should do that?" He was concentrating on extracting an awkwardly sited component. "No, I don't wonder. Lieutenant Sulu is probably taking bets on how we are amusing ourselves while we wait."

"I'm not sure, but it doesn't look like a conventional sensor scan. No... it's gone."

Chekov pulled himself out of the hatch. "In what sense was it unconventional?"

"The radiation frequency and the interference fringes. I'll play it back..."

He hesitated by her side, unsure whether to be worried or not. He really didn't know how much she knew about sensors, but she seemed confident.

The radio coughed unexpectedly into life and he got to his feet to go and answer it. It wouldn't hurt to mention whatever Rand had noticed. The Enterprise had probably registered it as well, if it wasn't a routine scan of the disabled shuttle.

"Tell them to hurry," she said.

"Enterprise, this is Galileo."

"Mister Scott has completed the transporter repairs eighteen minutes ahead of schedule. Are you ready to come home?"

"Yes, but..." Chekov hesitated, unsure if whatever Rand had seen needed to be investigated now or could wait until they were safely back on the Enterprise.

"Go ahead."

"We picked up something on a tricorder, something that looked like a sensor sweep. Was that you?"

There was silence for a moment, then Uhura came back to him. "No. And we haven't picked anything up. We'd better get you back here. Bring the tricorder."

"We're going," Chekov announced, moving back into the main compartment to make transporting easier. Rand had slung the tricorder round her neck.

The transporter sparkled and a moment later, the Galileo was a ghost ship.

...

"We can bring her in on tractors alone, or beam a repair team over," Scott was saying, as he stepped back from the innards of the transporter, leaving a crewman to put the cover back in place over the exposed circuitry. "Jenkins?"

"Calibration completed, sir. All systems report operational."

"You'd think we were jinxed," the engineer grumbled as he took charge of the console to bring the youngsters safely back aboard. With so many minor breakdowns in the last few hours of their two day stopover in orbit around Sigma Nine, he wanted to be there to compensate if something else, in defiance of all his precautions, went amiss.

"They're ready for transport, Mister Scott," Uhura came over the comsystem to tell him.

He pulled the levers and felt that little twinge of uncertainty that always assailed him at this moment.

Half a dozen displays flashed readings that were meaningless, or unbelievable. It looked for all the world like feedback, as if the transporter was cycling an already converted pattern through itself again and again. He reversed the process, knowing the buffers would have trapped the initial pattern. Only they hadn't.

...

"This doesn't make sense," Kirk objected. "If they're not here, or still in the Galileo, and you didn't beam them to anywhere else, what the hell happened to them?"

Transporters were great respecters of the laws of conservation. Generally speaking, whatever went in had to come out, somehow. Scott had occasionally witnessed the less acceptable consequences. It was no coincidence that his safety record was unparalleled.

"I don't know, sir. Mister Spock is reviewing the ship's sensor records for any clues. I'll double check the transporter log to see if I can pin down what happened but there's no evidence of any malfunction. It was more like what happens when two beams fix on the same object simultaneously."

"You mean another transporter may have taken them?"

"It was like that, Captain. I don't know."

"Have you checked the other transporters on board?"

"Aye, Captain. I have. They were powered down and unmanned. That's confirmed by the logs."

"Another transporter," Kirk mused.

"It's only an idea, Captain. The patterns were not conventional."

"If there's anything in that idea, will you be able to fix a heading?"

"No. But I could maybe..."

"Yes?"

"An estimate of the energy of the beam would give us an approximate range."

"Good. Do what you can." Kirk swiftly exited the transporter room, leaving Scott to his detective role. As he rode the turbolift to the bridge, he mentally listed the possibilities that needed to be eliminated. Another transporter - on the planet below, in another ship, or if powerful enough on one of the other planets or moons in the system. It was a well endowed G-type star with fourteen planets and numerous planetoids. It would take some time to search all of them.

"Scott thinks it's possible that there was interference from another transporter beam. Is there anything on sensors to support that, Mister Spock?"

"Not that I am aware of, Captain," Spock said, not turning away from his viewer. "However, the apparent sensor sweep that Chekov reported observing was registered, albeit faintly, on our sensors. It was an unconventional combined em and particle sweep, using a tight beam, targeted very precisely on the Galileo. Our sensors registered only reflections from other bodies and debris in orbit, and, to a limited extent, from the shuttle itself."

"Can you tell where it came from?" Kirk moved to stand behind Spock's shoulder.

"I have a direction; also a range calculated from the dispersal of the beam. However, the location thus pinpointed is empty space, and has been throughout the entire incident."

"A cloaking device," Kirk said.

"If you mean to imply the presence of Romulans in this sector, Captain," Spock objected, "that is improbable to say the least. I will correlate my results with Mister Scott's estimate of the transporter beam range, but at present I think we should concentrate on the planet. Looking for a cloaked vessel is likely to be unproductive anyway. The planet may yield clues as to the intentions of such a vessel, and hence its location."

The planet, Carter III, was about as boring as it was possible for something as large and complex as a planet to be. Its atmosphere was breathable, its climate shading evenly from pleasantly warm at the equator to moderately cold at the poles. It had evolved grass-like vegetation and a herbivorous life form that kept the entire planet looking like a lawn. Its mineral constituents were unexceptional. It merited a cursory visit as the home of a small party of research scientists, all of whom were healthy and had nothing unusual to report. If it hadn't been for Chekov's sensor ghosts, they'd have left orbit thirty hours ago.

The ensign had spotted something while on the long, mind-numbing night watch approaching the Carter system. He thought he'd seen something on visual, but subsequent review of the computer logs had revealed nothing. He'd been sure enough of himself to convince Kirk to follow it up. Nothing had been found. The captain had gone back to bed, ill tempered. Chekov claimed to have seen it again, and had had to endure a thorough overhaul in sick bay, more as a punishment for waking the captain twice in one night than because Kirk seriously thought he was suffering from anything more than an overactive imagination. After all, the young man had been aboard for three of the most boring months of duty a starship could conceivably pull. If he wanted to see things, it was understandable.

Once they'd reached orbit, other people had started seeing it too, whatever it was. They were, for the most part, very vague about their observations. In McCoy's opinion, the ones who could give details were the types who would see fairies at the bottom of their gardens, once the idea had been floated. Kirk gave in, although the very fact that he never saw it, and neither did anyone else if he was on the bridge, made him very suspicious. He was almost afraid he was having his leg pulled. He retaliated with a sensor test, and since, after Chekov, Yeoman Rand had been the person who recorded most sightings, despite the infrequency of her visits to the bridge, he sent her out in the shuttle with Chekov.

In retrospect, that looked like being a mistake.

Chapter 2

"Where are we?"

Chekov was turning in a slow three hundred and sixty degree sweep of the room where they had materialised. "We must have been transported to the planet's surface..." But as his eyes took in their surroundings, he already knew that wasn't the case. Carter III's inhabitants were human and exhibited the peculiar traditionalism of people a long way from home. There wasn't an artefact or a structure on the planet that couldn't have been lifted straight from Earth. This place was alien. "...or to another ship."

"What you mean is, all you know is this isn't the Enterprise."

"That summarises the available information quite concisely." Chekov was pleased that he managed to sound so calm. This was something different, this was a first contact.

The very alienness of the chamber was heightened by the effort someone appeared to have gone to to make it suitable for its present inhabitants. Underfoot, a shaggy green carpet mimicked grass. The walls were green too, shading up to paler grey/green and thence to blue. The floor was uneven, rising in a series of broad steps. At the lowest level was the only other feature of the room, a doorway. Beyond it was darkness. Unfortunately, it had been positioned in isolation, several feet from the nearest wall. Chekov resisted the urge to walk round behind it and look at the other side. From all the blue areas of walls and ceiling, an even illumination surrounded them.

"It's a little... creepy," Rand said, very softly.

Chekov made a point of speaking confidently at a normal volume. "Why? It's a safe environment. Whoever put us here has given us the appropriate gravity, atmosphere, lighting..." Whoever was responsible for this, it looked as if they were handling it with the right degree of intelligent caution too.

"Right, but who are they?"

Chekov took his communicator out and flipped it open. There was no response. "Try yours."

Rand obeyed and shook her head. "Sorry."

"Then shall we explore?"

She moved a little closer to him. "Fine, but let's stick together."

The "door" hummed audibly once they were within a couple of feet of it. Added to that, the blackness beyond it was impossibly complete. Chekov looked at it for a moment then took off his boot and pushed it part way through. It met no resistance but ceased to be visible as it passed through the device. It also returned unharmed when he pulled it back.

"I think it must be a static transporter. A very energy intensive method of moving from one location to another. It doesn't make sense..." Chekov tipped his head a little to one side as he tried to think through the implications of finding a transporter here.

"Unless you want to control what goes in and out."

"Hm, yes. Bio-filters, you mean."

"I mean us. Maybe we can't go out."

"Shall we try it?" He stood and looked at the black surface. It was difficult not to perceive it as an opening into a pit, an infinity of nothingness, but logically, he should try to go through. There was no reason to assume greater danger there than in their present location.

"I think you could quite easily persuade me not to..." She took his hand. "But I don't see what we can do here. Don't let go."

He stepped in, determined to keep moving steadily through the barrier. It felt like nothing at all, as if he was just stepping from lightness to darkness. And then he was staring up at a pale grey ceiling, lying flat on his back somewhere completely different. Out of sight, someone was talking. He didn't know how he recognised the sound as speech, but he did. It was purposeful, varied and breathy, as if the speaker was in a great hurry.

He tried to turn, but something applied a force to him in proportion to the effort that he made to move. He was stuck in place.

"Do not be alarmed. You are safe." This voice was mechanical and flat; a translator, and not a sophisticated one.

"Where am I?" No answer. "And who are you?"

He thrust against the restraining field again, hoping a sudden movement would fool it. "Please, who are you?"

"I am an observer."

The field seemed to respond with equal efficiency to gradual or violent movement. Even the slight rise of his chest, now that he thought about it, was met by an opposing reaction. It was becoming tiring to breath. "I don't know how you are restraining me, but..."

"Are you uncomfortable?"

"Yes. And... it makes me nervous, anxious."

"Nervous. Anxious. Your circulatory impulse rate increased when you became conscious and realised that you were restrained."

Chekov waited for a moment, but the observer appeared content to leave it at that.

"Well, could you release me? I'm not dangerous."

The original breathy voice resumed. Chekov caught movement out of the corner of his eye and then the restraining field was gone. He took a deep breath and sat up.

The room he was now in was recognisable at least as an enclosed space. Beyond that, there was nothing he could identify at all. There was detail, colour, form, but all so alien that he couldn't even judge where one object ended and another began. He shut his eyes, the disorientation making him sick.

"The circulatory impulse rate has increased again."

"Yes... yes. I can't make any sense of what I'm seeing. That is... frightening." He opened his eyes again and tried to pick out one thing to focus on. An almost square shape, just out of reach of his left hand. He stretched out to touch it, to bring another sense to bear. Eyes were too easily fooled. And they had been. The shape was further away than he had estimated, much further, he now realised. The whole room was larger. He closed his eyes in defeat.

"You are surrounded by a force field. You cannot touch anything beyond it. Wait."

He did, having no desire to confront the confusion out there. Something touched him, folded his hand closed around an object. He brought it towards himself and explored it with both hands. It was cool, solid, an arrangement of shapes that... was one moment pyramids and the next spheres. Now small enough to be cupped in his hands, and suddenly his hands were inside it and it was a closed space. He yelped and dropped it.

Voices whispered again and after a moment, the translator spoke. "Why are you nervous, anxious? It did not harm you."

"I don't understand it... I don't understand how it can exist..."

"We will return you. This is enough for now." A black door appeared in front of him. "Go through it."

At least he could imagine a technology that would explain the portal. He stood up and stepped into the darkness without hesitation.

This time the action was continuous. His foot met solid ground, and as his eyes broached the barrier he was back in the chamber where they had first found themselves. Janice Rand lay pale and motionless on the floor at his feet.

"Rand? Janice?" He shook her shoulder and was shrugged off as if she was merely asleep. "Wake up!"

"What?" She opened brilliant blue eyes. "It didn't work?"

"I got through, but you weren't there on the other side. I found you unconscious here when I came back. Don't you remember anything?"

"Oh, God, Chekov, let's not go through all this again." She mopped a loose strand of hair out of her eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"You keep coming back and not remembering that we've done this over and over again."

He stared at her. "We've had this conversation before?"

"This is the fifth time. I'd show you on the tricorder, but it isn't working. Chekov, I hate to be mundane, but I need to find a bathroom."

He looked round their prison automatically, his mind occupied in trying to make sense of what she was telling him.

She sat up, awkwardly it seemed to him. "You'd think the first thing Starfleet would teach you would be strategies for dealing with the lack of clearly labelled rest rooms in alien space ships." Smiling at her own attempt to look on the funny side of their situation, she pushed to her feet. Then her eyes suddenly went wide and she grabbed at his arm. "Oh, I shouldn't have got up so quickly. I feel faint."

She began to sway alarmingly and he pulled her in close to him.

"Ow! Be careful."

Chekov left his arm securely around her. "What's wrong? Did I hurt you?"

"No, not really. I'm just a bit... a bit tender. That's all."

"You still feel faint?"

"No. That's gone." She put a hand across her middle. "The only thing that's different every time you come back is that I feel unwell in a different way."

"What? What exactly do you mean?" When the whole situation was beginning to be more frightening than interesting, it seemed inconsiderate of Rand to be feeling sick on top of everything else.

"Well, the feeling of having been kicked in the stomach is wearing off, at last."

Something flickered at the edge of his field of vision. He let go of the yeoman and turned to see what it was. Nothing. When he looked back, she'd seated herself on the floor, pulled her knees up and rested her forehead on them. "You didn't see a bathroom anywhere, did you? I think I'm going to be very ill..."

"Hold on... if you can."

He stood up and turned back to the portal. It had vanished, to be replaced by a doorway to a perfectly conventional bathroom. He looked at it for a moment. It seemed harmless.

"Your bathroom."

He leaned forward to help her up, but she snatched her arm away, muttering, "I hope this isn't like the last one."Again, she got to her feet, even more awkwardly this time, as if her balance was somehow disturbed. But all her body language said she didn't want any help. Chekov stood aside as she plunged through the door and it slid shut behind her.

Either he was suffering mental blackouts, with gaps in his memory so that he wasn't aware of repeating himself, and of other events at all, or Rand was imagining things... or both. He thought about the strange room where the observer had spoken to him. If space and perception could be that distorted, maybe time could too. Maybe he didn't remember things that Rand did, because they hadn't happened to him yet. He looked round the room yet again. It was perfectly normal - at first. When you looked closer, the illusion began to fail. That far wall didn't really appear to meet the one that should be perpendicular to it. At least, they were perpendicular if you looked at them there, but they both appeared to be parallel to that step in the floor.

He walked towards the false corner, planning to put his fingers into it and test it out that way, but was seized by a sudden panicky need to remain close to Rand. Too late. The door to the bathroom had vanished and the whole room had twisted into a new shape.

"Chekov?" It was Rand, seated on one of the small steps in the floor and looking delighted to see him. "Where did you go to? I followed you through the portal, or whatever, and just found myself back here, on my own..."

He focused on his own hands, to control the vertigo brought on by this visual trickery. As he brought them together, they passed through each other.

He snatched them apart again and started to count slowly to ten.

...

"Chekov? Pavel? Can you hear me?"

"Unnnh..."

"Come on! I'm tired of talking to myself. I'm frightened. Will you come round, please!"

"What's the... Yeoman Rand?" For a moment, he didn't remember where he was. Then he did. He poked one finger into the palm of the other hand experimentally. It resisted.

"The contractions have started again."

He looked up at her, wondering what she was talking about now. For some reason, she'd shed her uniform and wrapped one of the large, soft towels from the bathroom around herself like a sari. She was flushed.

"What's contracting?"

"Oh, hell, Ensign, don't you remember anything?"

"No, I... You went to the bathroom, because you felt ill, and I... I think I passed out. What happened to your uniform?"

Her face became very determined and controlled, as if having to explain this to him one more time would inevitably lead to a fight. "They keep taking you away. I think they're trying to communicate, but you remember less and less about it every time. They've given up with me. At least as far as that's concerned. Chekov. You have to pull yourself together. I need you now."

"Okay," he said willingly, shaking off the disorientation of waking in a strange place with an unexpected companion. "What do you want me to do?"

"I'm going to have a baby, I think. You'll have to deliver it."

He looked at her for a long, mutually embarrassed moment.

"Are you... are you sure?"

"I don't want to be, Ensign, but I'm afraid I am. I admit it's unexpected, but all the symptoms are pretty unmistakable. The contractions are about five minutes apart."

He looked at her, swathed in the towel, and realised that her figure, as far as he could make it out, was rather bulky.

"You said I seemed to be forgetting things that have happened, but... we haven't been here that long, have we?"

"I have no idea how long we've been here. I've completely lost track. No, it doesn't seem like nine months."

"And you weren't... when we arrived here, you weren't already..." He stopped. Her face was paling into a pain-wracked mask. "Try walking around. That should help to accelerate the process."

"I don't want it accelerated!"

"Yes, you do. A long labour will exhaust you. The pressure of the baby's head on the... on the..." The unpractised Standard vocabulary relating to childbirth eluded him.

"It will help to dilate the cervix. I'm glad you've read something about this."

Her manner now said 'back off, don't help, I don't want you around,' but that wasn't an option. He glanced towards the bathroom, thinking that more towels, and maybe a cold compress would be in order. But when Janice had shut that door before, she'd vanished and he'd been thrown from one time to another. This Janice needed him now.

"The tricorder is not functioning?"

"What?" Her face was relaxing again. "You know it isn't. You've spent hours trying to fix it. Why does it matter now?"

"We could use it to monitor the baby, to see what's happening..."

"Why, Chekov? What's the point? What the hell do we do if something happens that shouldn't? Call Doctor McCoy?"

"Sit down. You should try to rest between contractions."

She continued pacing up and down the small area in front of the bathroom door.

He kept his eyes on her, suddenly remembering that just turning away had been enough to dislocate the flow of time.

"Aaaah. Oh, God. Oh, it hurts." Suddenly she wasn't holding him off any more. She was looking to him to do something, to help. That didn't seem to be an option either.

He waited until the pain eased. "That wasn't five minutes. It was only two, or perhaps three."

"Okay, time to call the obstetrician." If she sounded a little hysterical he couldn't blame her.

"We'll be okay," he lied. "I know what to do. Most births don't require medical intervention."

"I bet you can put a percentage on that statement, Ensign."

He ignored her. Sixty eight percent sounded a good deal less cheerful than an old fashioned 'most'. "What are you doing?"

She was heading into the bathroom. "We'll need some more towels..."

"I'll get them. Sit down and rest."

He went and pulled an armful of towels off the shelf in the bathroom, glancing back nervously at her and checking for anything else that might be useful at the same time. There was a dispenser, presumably of some soap or detergent, but nothing else, not even a beaker to carry water. Angrily tightening his grip on the towels he turned back into the other room.

"What are those for?" A slim, uniformed Janice Rand cocked her head on one side. "Are you planning to bed down somewhere?"

"Yeoman..." He looked round wildly, as if the other Janice Rand might be hiding somewhere. Then focusing back on her, he asked carefully, "Do you feel anything... You said you felt as if someone had kicked you in the stomach, and then you felt sick, and when I... I held you because you felt faint, you said you felt..."

"My breasts felt tender. Yes. They don't anymore."

"Could you be pregnant?"

Her mouth fell open in surprise. "Well, I'm not sure it's any of your damn business, but no, I am not, Mister Chekov. Don't worry about that. I know for sure I'm not. Those symptoms are not exactly conclusive."

"But, we don't know what's been happening to us. I mean..."

"I'd know if I was pregnant, and I'm not. There's no way... Do you know something I don't?"

"Well, events seem to be occurring out of order... You've noticed that, haven't you?"

The colour seemed to have drained out of her blue eyes and he almost squirmed under her glare. "You wouldn't have... I didn't... I mean, we didn't... did we?"

"The reason I went into the bathroom to get these towels was because..."

"I agreed to sleep with you? We'd just had sex? I don't believe you."

"No. We have not had sex. But someone is keeping us here. We don't know why, and we don't remember everything that happens. There are other ways of making someone pregnant."

She looked at him icily. "You're getting fanciful, Ensign. Go and put those towels back."

...

He walked into the bathroom, shut his eyes and willed himself back to where Janice Rand was about to enter the second stage of labour.

Instead he found himself back in the laboratory. He wasn't sure when he'd started to think of it as that. This time he could move from the start.

"Nervous, anxious," the voice told him.

"Yes, I'm nervous and anxious. Yeoman Rand is in labour. She needs medical attention. She could die if she isn't cared for correctly."

"No. We are nervous, anxious. This has been an attempt to cross the boundary. It is not successful. We are under attack."

Chekov swallowed his anger. "Under attack from where? Are you sure? The Enterprise may simply be scanning you. They may want information. They won't try to harm you."

"This is not successful." As usual, the individual behind the voice, however convincing its speech, seemed to pick up almost nothing from what Chekov said in return.

"The Enterprise will not try to harm you unless you attack them." He tried speaking a little slower.

"We do not try to harm the Enterprise."

He told himself to calm down. This looked like communication at last and it didn't matter how long he was away. He could still get back before he was missed.

"But you are harming Yeoman Rand. She needs a doctor."

"Harming her? How? A natural process. It is not harmful."

"It may be."

"No. The young is born without harm. But it is not successful. The barrier is not crossed. This communication harms you. You are nervous, anxious. Go."

"Then put me back when..."

...

He was sitting with his hands full of tricorder guts. Rand was looking over his shoulder. Chekov felt his usual defensive irritation at being watched while he worked.

"I really like watching people doing things like this. It's very soothing. Even when they don't have a clue what to do..."

He turned to look up at her. "We have no way of knowing why the tricorder is not functioning. There is nothing wrong with it. How can I be expected to mend something that is not broken?"

"Okay, don't get cross. I know you're doing your best."

He deposited the tricorder on the floor. "Which isn't good enough."

Rand dropped to her knees beside him, still in uniform. "Hey, Chekov, I'm sorry. Don't let me get to you. I need you to keep me cheerful." She picked the offending instrument up and pushed it back into his hands. "Of course you can do it. Try another approach. Reverse all the connections..."

He put it down again. "I have already tried that. And recalibrating it, and altering the sensor cycle, and some other things that make so little sense I'm ashamed to admit I did them. It still tells me there's nothing here. We're not here."

"That's ridiculous," Rand objected quietly. "I can see you, hear you, touch you... I mean, if all this was an illusion or something, why wouldn't they just dream up a working tricorder?"

"I don't know, Yeoman. But of all the things which are not making sense here, the tricorder is the least worrying. Are you feeling well now?"

"Fine."

"Good."

He stood up and found himself where he'd wanted to be, emerging from the bathroom once again.

Rand didn't seem to notice that he'd been away. "D'you think you've got enough towels there?"

He looked at the stack. "I don't know. What am I supposed to do with them?" The words of the alien were echoing in his mind. Was it predicting that Rand would come through this experience unscathed, but that the child would not? Or was it the attempt at communication that was judged a failure? He decided to believe that. It seemed the least complicated outcome.

"Just lay them out in as thick a layer as you can. I want something soft to lie on."

He followed her instructions, wondering if her apparent calm signalled a storm about to break. "Is that what you mean?"

She nodded, stopping in mid-gesture to weather another contraction. It seemed the worst yet, or perhaps she was just tiring.

"Look, Ensign, I think... the next thing you have to do is check whether the cervix is fully dilated."

"Okay." Chekov carefully put two of the towels aside for emergencies. "How do I do that?"

"Internal examination."

He tried his best to keep an 'Oh, one of those,' expression on his face as he nodded..

"If I start pushing too soon, I might damage the cervix."

"And the baby," he added for her.

"I don't care about the baby, Pavel!" Her voice was loud and angry, then started up from a whisper again as she went on, "We don't even know if it is a baby. I just don't want to bleed to death. I want you to think about me, okay! You're to make sure I'm not hurt, that's all. You're not responsible for any... for any baby, understood? Oow!"

She crumpled to her knees, doubled over. The pain seemed to go on forever this time. He put his arms round her and held her as if the onslaught came from outside and he could ward it off.

"Now. You'll have to do it now, before the next one." She pulled away from him and lay down on her back, knees in the air, letting her sari fall aside. He shut his eyes.

"For God's sake, Chekov. I can't do this myself! Oh fuck! Why did I have to get into this with someone who's obviously never kissed a girl with the lights on..."

"I won't be able to see..."

"So use a finger. You should be able to feel. You should be able to feel the... the head, and the cervix round it. Just try and see if it's ten centimetres..."

He could tell he was hurting her, terribly, or was it just the next contraction?

"I think..."

"What?"

"I think it's about ten centimetres. As far as I can tell. I'm not sure."

"Oh, damn it. I don't think I can stop myself." She took him completely by surprise by suddenly getting up onto her knees. "Oh hell. Oh... oh."

She looked so precarious that he moved closer, to let her hold onto him. When her fingers clamped onto his arms, he regretted it bitterly. "Janice, you're hurting me..."

Her eyes seemed to be popping out of her head. He decided that it didn't matter if he acquired permanent dents in his upper arms. "Okay? Is it okay?" he asked urgently.

"How should I know?"

Suddenly, everything had gone still. For a moment, he wasn't sure he hadn't made another unexpected jump in time.

"Oowwww!"

He clasped his arms around her back, under her arms, so that she could relax onto him and he was taking her weight.

"It can't be meant to hurt like this, can it?" she asked, sounding frightened and lost.

He tightened his grip on her with one arm and reached over with the other for a towel. "I think I should be checking to see if the head is visible yet."

"Okay. You do that."

"It would be easier if you were lying down..."

"No, it wouldn't." Her tone didn't encourage further argument. Still supporting her, he used touch again to check the progress of the child towards independence.

"I think you can just keep pushing."

"Ooow!"

"No. Stop now! Stop for a moment..." Janice, or nature, ignored him, and a head emerged into his hands. He didn't look, but he could feel ears, a nose, wet and waxy.

"Let me check the cord. Don't push any more for a moment, for God's sake, Janice."

"I can't... fuckin'... help it... Mister Chekov." But she did, somehow, and the baby's neck was clear.

"A little push for the shoulders and it's all over."

His grasp slithered over minute arms, seized fast on tiny feet at the end of little, bowed legs. He scooped the child into his arms and stared, speechless, at the unmoving mask of its face. It didn't breathe.

"I still have to... uhhn... push out the placenta."

"Janice, he's not breathing. What do I do?"

"Mmmmhh... oh!"

"Should I...? What should I do?"

"I don't care. If they want a live baby they should have laid on a doctor."

"What about mouth to mouth resuscitation?" He felt for the heart with two fingers, suddenly grotesquely large against the baby's chest. Perhaps the child was simply waiting for some stimulus to start its lungs drawing in air, but he couldn't find a heartbeat. Well, he had to do something. He turned the body over and gave a slap to the buttocks that he felt was worthy of McCoy. Nothing happened. He couldn't bring himself to do it again.

"You have to check if the whole placenta has come away. Otherwise I may just keep bleeding."

"And what do I do if it has not?"

"Um. I don't know. Okay, forget checking it."

He was torn between stubbornly disinterested mother and equally stubbornly unresponsive child. An idea occurred to him.

"Can anyone hear me? Is anyone watching this? We need help. We need help from our ship, or from someone... The child will die without help, and Yeoman Rand may be in danger too. Are you listening?" He laid the child down on the towels and stood up, as if that would help get the message across. "Can anyone hear me?"

Nothing. No response. Whoever had put them in this cage seemed to have lost interest.

"I feel cold now. Shivery."

He began to cover her with towels. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Can I do anything else?"

"Cut the cord. You have to cut the cord." He couldn't see why. The baby was plainly stillborn and while he'd always thought of the cord as being a link between child and mother, at this point it wasn't of course. It was a link between a dead baby and the somehow alien, red-blue afterbirth.

"You have to cut the cord, Chekov. Please. I just want this to be finished. Please." Obviously Janice, tired and confused, had the same erroneous idea he did.

"I don't have anything to cut it with. And it doesn't matter. The baby was stillborn. He's not breathing."

As he reached for another towel, his hand knocked against the baby and it gave a soft, deep breath, almost like a yawn.

"No. I was wrong. He is breathing."

"He's breathing? It's a boy?

"Yes, it's a boy."

"A proper, human boy?"

Chekov was now occupied in wrapping the child up in the last of the towels. "I think so." He looked thoughtfully at the cord. After a moment, he pulled the case of the tricorder open, disconnected a circuit board and sawed through the umbilical with its half-sharp edge. Blood went everywhere. He pinched the cut end tight and managed to extract a cable clip from the tricorder case with his other hand. It made a neat but incongruous seal to the short length of cord still attached to the baby.

"Well, you know what that means."

"What?" The ensign arranged the child with his hands outside the covering and wiped his blood-smeared face with a corner of the towel. When he'd done that, he slipped his own finger into the child's palm, to see if he would grip. He didn't. A knuckle in the baby's mouth didn't provoke an attempt at sucking either. Perhaps he was just sleepy.

"Well, depending on how clever they are, it probably means they used you as well. They used both of us."

"Oh." Chekov didn't feel like reacting to this idea for the moment. He retrieved an additional towel from Janice's bedclothes and made a makeshift nest out of it.

"Or did you know that already? Do you remember any of that?" She sounded as if she was blaming him now. He told himself that mothers were frequently irrational after the stress of giving birth. He was feeling quite irrational himself.

"I don't know how you became pregnant. I am having difficulty keeping track of most things that have happened here."

"You knew I was pregnant before I did, though, didn't you? Remember? They must have told you something."

"No. That isn't what happened. Things are happening out of order. One moment I was with you and you were very pregnant. The next..."

"I was only a bit pregnant and denying it like fury. Okay. I'm sorry."

"Are you comfortable there?"

"Not really, but do you see anywhere better? I am thirsty..."

Chekov went into the bathroom, washed his hands and came back with them cupped full of water. Rand drank as much of it as she could. "Thank you."

"Would you like some more?"

"No. What do you think this is all about, Chekov? Who's doing this to us?"

"I don't know. I have a theory..."

"Go on then."

"Maybe it's a life form that is a little out of phase with us. Not quite in the same space, or the same time. Perhaps they are from another dimension. That makes communication difficult, or even realising that the others are there..."

"They might be better at seeing us than we are at seeing them."

"Yes. They do seem to know more about us than we do about them. But some humans can - almost - see them. I could, a little, and so could you. And once other people started looking, they began to. But not enough to get through, to communicate. So they decided to try something else, to bring us here and do things that would make it easier. Only I don't think whatever they tried really worked. I thought I was understanding what they were saying, but... it hasn't led anywhere. It's like an old fashioned phrase book. They say things that sound quite sensible, but they don't seem to be able to translate the answers."

"'This-yeoman-is-in-labour. Kindly-drive-us-to-the-nearest-obstetric-centre.'"

"I don't have a phrase book at all," he said apologetically.

"So why did they... do this to me?" she prompted him.

"Perhaps they thought they'd solve the communication problem if they found out more about how we worked first. After all, what does bio do immediately it gets a new specimen? Tries to breed it."

"Only very simple life forms," Janice objected.

"Maybe we are a very simple life form." He glanced away from her to the sleeping baby. "Do you want to..?"

"No. I don't want to. If you weren't here I'd get up and drown it. Whatever their reasons for doing this, I'm not going to give them the least little cooperation. I don't think you should, either."

"I... I'm not sure that's a good idea. We're supposed to be here to make contact..."

"When you were little, did your mother tell you you always had to share your toys with visitors?"

"Yes," he agreed. "What has that..."

"And would that rule have applied to burglars? No, it wouldn't. I'm going to go to sleep now. You won't... you'll try not to go away, won't you?"

"I'll do my best. What if he... What if he wakes up?"

"I'm going to go to sleep so that I don't have to think about that, and so that this can all be a bad dream by the time I wake up."

She lay down and closed her eyes, terminating the conversation.

Chekov did his best to clear up, something first aid training hadn't been particularly strong on. He worked around the sleeping infant and eventually sat down, feeling tired himself and terribly hungry.

***

It seemed irresponsible to sleep. He checked on Janice as best he could, making sure that she was not feverish, that her pulse was steady. She was so deeply asleep that his touch didn't provoke any reaction. Then curiosity drew him towards the baby. Unlike his mother, the little boy opened his eyes when Chekov touched his face lightly. They were hard metallic blue, but didn't babies' eyes change colour? A faint down of mouse blond hair covered the whole child. Was he human? Or some half and half combination that the aliens had hoped would be able to communicate with both its originating species? That seemed most unlikely. If things in this place had no proper physical form, no past, present and future, how could they manipulate the chemistry of reproduction?

"Are you my son?"

The baby's gaze was quite steady, although it didn't seem focused. Was that natural? Was this child only doing what any human baby did within a few minutes of being born? Surely it was supposed to suck, and to grip. But was it supposed to stare?

"And if you are, what does that mean?"

Chapter 3

"The planet has yielded nothing, either by direct inspection now, or through examination of the Research Station logs." Spock made the negative report briskly enough, but one of the two members of his science staff who'd been assisting him for the last three hours interrupted, "Mister Spock..."

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"Bearing three nine four, mark six."

"Do you concur?" The Vulcan turned back to his station and the young ensign who was staring into the monitor with enough concentration to supply the entire bridge staff on a normal shift.

"Yes, sir."

"Mister Scott, bearing three nine four, mark six. I will be needing the phaser modification within the next ten minutes."

"It'll be ready, Mister Spock."

"You think you have some way of cracking their cloaking device?" Kirk asked doubtfully. He'd been off the bridge for most of the last three hours, ever since McCoy had suggested his scepticism was preventing anyone seeing whatever Chekov and Rand had been so successful at detecting.

"I am not convinced that it is a cloaking device in purpose. It may not be a deliberate attempt to conceal themselves but simply a by-product of their form. I analysed common traits of personnel who had observed the phenomenon and formulated detection strategies accordingly. The last two approaches were not successful. We are about to attempt a third."

"What sort of traits? Brain waves?"

"Neural modulation cycles, yes. Unfortunately we do not have typical readings for Ensign Chekov or Yeoman Rand on record, but everyone else who claims to have seen the phenomenon exhibits these patterns to a greater or lesser degree, and those who have not been subject to the disturbances, without exception, do not. I am therefore hopeful that there is a connection. All that remains is to translate this knowledge into a practical investigative tool."

"And how long will that take, Spock?"

"That is difficult to quantify, Captain. What is your latest bearing, Lieutenant?"

Kirk decided to leave Spock to his researches. "Mister Sulu, did your inspection of the Galileo reveal anything?"

The helmsman turned in his seat. "Only that there was absolutely no reason we could see for the power failure."

"They took our bait and got clean away," Kirk said, to no one in particular.

"On the contrary, Captain," Spock corrected. "They are circling the boat, if I read your metaphor correctly. "

...

A noise that Chekov couldn't interpret woke him from what seemed like the deepest sleep he'd ever experienced. He lay with his eyes closed, trying to place the noise. It seemed to travel straight to his stomach, without reference to his ears or his brain. He rolled over, cursing the hardness of the surface under him, memory awakening. The lights had been dimmed while he slept but the baby was easy to find in his nest of white towels. He'd wriggled himself clear of his wrappings and was making small, half-hearted flailing gestures to accompany his crying.

Chekov picked him up. "Ya zdes, malenki. Nye plach zhe." The child calmed, but the instant Chekov laid him down again, meaning only to pick up a towel and wrap him in it, the baby began to struggle once more. His cries were soft and the effort of making them had turned his face near purple. "You don't want to be left lying on your own? Well then..." He held the baby closer to his chest and picked up the towel with one hand. Again, the crying gave way to mere hiccuping sobs, then to nothing at all.

The ensign glanced worriedly at Janice, surprised she hadn't stirred. She looked very pale. He knelt down, clutching the baby tightly to himself, and touched the sleeping yeoman's brow. It was cool and clammy. Her hair looked damp. Clearly she'd been feverish but now her temperature had fallen close to normal. She was obviously exhausted. Neither his touch nor a soft whisper of her name woke her. He hesitated then decided to be businesslike. The towels under her were not any more bloodstained than they had been earlier, so presumably she wasn't slowly bleeding to death. Not that he could have done anything if she were.

"We need a doctor and food," he listed aloud. "We would like to talk to our ship. We are..." What had the alien said? The one idea that seemed to have got through. "We are nervous and anxious. We want to go home."

"Not nervous and anxious. Normal metabolic activity." The alien's response took Chekov by surprise. He glanced round to see if they were still alone in the room and the movement woke the child, setting it whimpering.

"I'm too tired to climb the walls, but we do need help. We need a doctor. Someone of our kind who looks after people who are injured, or sick."

"Which of you is injured? Who is sick?"

"Yeoman Rand may have been injured while giving birth. I think her temperature has been elevated..."

"Internal body temperature now within normal range."

"Yes, now. I know. But she may have an infection or... you just don't know, I don't know whether she needs help. And the baby. He's not well. He's not reacting the way a healthy new born child should. They may both be in danger. Why won't you let me at least talk to our ship? Why are you doing this to us? What do you want?"

"Nervous, anxious."

Chekov could feel his accelerated pulse pounding. "No. This is angry. This is angry and frightened." The baby squealed piercingly as he hugged it too tight.

"Do not harm the child."

"I wouldn't... I have no intention of harming him." He forced himself to relax...

...and found his arms empty. "What have you done..?"

Janice Rand, uniformed, her hair still piled high in its usual complex architecture, was staring at him with wide frightened eyes. "What's the matter, Chekov? What are you shouting about?"

"I was holding the... And he just..."

She watched him, waiting for him to finish a sentence. He watched her in turn, unwilling to tell her what was about to happen.

"There's blood on your tunic, Chekov. Whose blood is it? Are you all right?"

"Yes. I am all right. So are you. You are going to be fine."

"Why shouldn't I be fine? Is that my blood? Chekov, what's happening?"

Suddenly, he couldn't cope. He turned his back on Rand and shut his eyes. The silence stretched to breaking. He felt her put her hands on his shoulders. "Should I be frightened about something that's going to happen to me?" She didn't sound alarmed, just curious.

"No. I don't think they intend to hurt us. But I am not sure what their intentions are. I'm not sure we can understand them. We talk, but... we don't seem to communicate." He faced her and took her hands. "I do not know what they want. I will do my best to look after you. This is not your blood. Nor is it mine." He told himself he wasn't lying. "How long do you think we have been here?"

She looked for a moment as if she was going to come up with an answer, then she shrugged unhappily. "Forever and no time at all. Something in between. It feels like I should be hungry, but I'm not. And there seem to be blanks, as if I've been switched off." Her expression was apologetic. "You look bushed, Pavel. Why don't you try to get some sleep?"

He nodded. The temperature of the room was warm enough to make him feel lethargic anyway. He pulled his tunic off, folded it into a pillow and lay down. "Be here when I wake up, please."

"I'll do my best."

...

Rand was sitting up, leaning against the wall of the room. She'd let her hair down, removing the last few pins. She'd plainly washed her face too and put her uniform back on. She looked across at him and smiled determinedly. "Someone brought in clean towels. Maid service. Not one thing here makes sense and we get maid service."

"The baby..."

Chekov realised he could hear the infant whimpering somewhere.

"He wouldn't shut up. I didn't want to disturb you. I put him in the bathroom."

The ensign turned and opened the door, which proved to be well soundproofed. The noise was immediately very much louder. "He must be hungry."

"I don't see why it must be hungry," Rand objected when he came out of the bathroom with the child. She didn't look at it. "I'm not hungry. Are you?"

"No, but... why else would he be screaming?"

"I don't know."

He tried to hold the bundle in its towelling cocoon in a neutral, impersonal manner. "Janice..."

"You think I'm going to feed it? No."

"You cannot propose to allow him to starve."

"Yes, I can. I'm sorry, but I can."

He stared at her. Her face remained impassive. Eventually he walked over and held the child out.

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Hold him, while I work out a way to give him some water."

"Chekov..."

"Do as I tell you!"

She jutted her chin in the air. "Your right to give me orders only extends to legitimate Starfleet business, Mister Chekov."

"Legitimate Starfleet business includes providing aid to refugees. Or whatever you want to classify him as."

Rand accepted the bundle, holding it as if it was a tray of tea cups while he fetched two clean towels from the bathroom, one dry, one wringing wet. He tried dripping water into the child's mouth but it spluttered and coughed, unable to control the flow of moisture. Its screams grew louder. He found a corner of the towel and pushed an inch of it between the baby's pink gums. Its lips closed and it relaxed.

He knelt down on the floor, the better to handle child and wet towel, but a second corner was met with indifference, then fresh cries.

"Why are you so bothered about it? He's not yours. You didn't want a baby."

"You said he probably was mine."

"Well, genetically, maybe. But so what? Next you'll be pretending he looks like you."

Chekov reflexively transferred his gaze to the baby's face.

Rand laughed shortly. "Babies never look like anyone. How can they? They've had their heads squashed seven ways, and all the muscles and cartilage and bone that make faces are only half-formed. You know why everyone crowds round new babies and says they've got their father's nose, and grandpa's chin, and uncle's eyes? It's because the mother and all her female relatives are terrified the father won't think it's his. Well don't worry. It's not yours. And it's not mine either."

"He's got the same colour eyes as you."

"All babies have blue eyes."

"Janice, if you and I don't help him, he's going to die. If you found him abandoned in the street, you'd help him, wouldn't you? He has nobody but us. Our relationship to him is surely irrelevant."

"Look, I don't blame him or anything. But... he's not our responsibility. Whoever is holding us here has to take care of him... of it. If they can do what they've done so far, they can feed it too. They wanted it, they can look after it. You said you can't seem to communicate with them? Well, don't you think you're in danger of giving them the message that what they did is acceptable? That you're prepared to tolerate it? I'm not going to give them any excuse to believe that about me, or about the next person they do this to. You should put him down, Chekov, and just leave him."

"I don't think I could do that."

"Well, that's your problem, not mine."

He tried the wet towel again. The baby lay there, unresponsive.

"You really feel obliged to take care of it, don't you?" Janice pushed to her feet and came and sat down on the floor, looking curiously at the child.

"Who else is going to take care of him if I don't?"

"You know, he does look a little bit like you. Or perhaps I'm imagining it."

"That's not the point. It wouldn't matter who he was. I'm responsible for him. Exactly as I am for you."

Rand pulled back a few inches from them. "And that's it, is it? He's just part of the job?"

He glanced at her, picking up a note of complaint in her voice. "Not just part of the job. You know that. Caring for each other is important. I wouldn't want to be in some of the situations we've been in with people who only thought I was some sort of - luggage to be watched over."

"I don't understand."

"What don't you understand? That I can feel responsible for a... an innocent victim of whatever is happening to us?"

"We don't know where we are, we didn't ask to be here, we didn't ask for this to happen to us, we didn't ask to be landed with a baby, it may not even be ours, mine or yours. There's nothing... there's no reason for you to give a damn about him. But you're trying to persuade me I ought to feed him. And I bet if someone threatened him you'd risk your life to protect him. I just don't understand why. I don't understand why you're so protective towards him."

"I've done everything I can for you too. I have to try and take care of both of you." Chekov couldn't translate her injured hostility into anything that made sense. Had he neglected her, somehow, in favour of the unwanted child?

"No. That's not the point. I want to know why you're so worried about him. I'm not saying you've let me down. I just want to understand."

He shrugged. It seemed so obvious to him. "Well, there are two reasons. One, I'm an officer, responsible for you and... well, since there's no relevant civil authority, I imagine I'm responsible for him too. And two, the human race wouldn't be here if our instincts didn't tell us to protect infants, particularly infants that carry, or might carry, some of our genetic material. I don't think I have any choice."

Rand started crying, soundlessly.

"What have I said now?"

"My... my father walked out on my mother when I was two days old. He just vanished. He took everything they had of any value - of any value to him. He even took her wedding ring. How can you say that you don't have any choice? How can you pretend you care so much about him, when he didn't care at all about me? You're such a liar, you're such a goddamn liar..."

Whatever she wanted to say next was swallowed up in convulsive sobbing.

"I think you must be experiencing post-natal depression," he ventured, once she seemed more under control.

"Oh, shut up!"

"I can't help it if I come from a culture with a different expectation of male behaviour."

She swiped her eyes dry with her sleeve. "I bet your daddy was just perfect."

"He was..." His throat tightened. He'd never had reason to pass an opinion on his father before. "He was always there, and I knew that he..."

"Loved you?"

"Yes."

"How did you know he loved you?"

"I don't know. I never thought about it. I..."

"I bet you thought he loved you because your mother told you he did."

He started to deny this, then decided it was none of Rand's business anyway. "I really don't remember."

The child stirred again and began to cry once more.

"I can't feed him. I wouldn't know what I was doing and he doesn't know what he's doing, and he doesn't seem to know how to suck. We just wouldn't get anywhere." Rand sat down, turning her back on the baby.

Chekov leaned over the infant and offered him the wet towel again. The pale pink gums worked delicately on the selvage of the fabric. "You could try."

"No."

"It is true that he's not sucking, or gripping. He feels cool to me. I'm not sure he is well..."

"Are we ever going to get out of here?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Maybe they have some more experiments lined up to try out on us. Maybe now they know we'll breed in captivity..."

"The captain will find a way to rescue us. He will not leave this system until he has..."

"Maybe we aren't in this system any more."

Chekov had already considered that possibility but he wasn't prepared to admit that that in itself would be enough to slow up James T Kirk. "He will find us."

"How do you know?"

He shrugged. "Experience. The captain won't let us down."

She scrunched herself up small, wrapping her arms tightly round herself. "My experience is that people let me down all the time."

"Fine," he snapped angrily. "Then, since he cannot let you down without letting me down, and I am your superior here, we shall rely on my experience, shall we?"

A moment's awkward silence followed, then he apologised.

"My fault," she conceded quietly. "You know, being the captain's yeoman, I suppose it's a bit like having a father..."

He looked at her worriedly. "I thought you..."

She coloured. "Haven't you ever heard of Freud? Anyway, I didn't mean that. I mean, people have a public face and a private face. I probably see him lose his temper, or his patience, or his nerve more than... well, none of the rest of you do. He's always perfect. Like your father."

"I'm not stupid, Janice. I know Captain Kirk is human. I know he can make mistakes. He's the captain, not God. I simply happen to... well, in my experience, he is a very good captain. I am reasonably confident that he will find us."

"I'd find it easier to be confident," she said slowly, "if I was with him being confident and we were looking for someone else. Maybe it is just hormones."

Chekov picked up the baby and rocked him gently. "Let me tell you about Captain Kirk, who will certainly be coming to rescue you..."

"When I was a little older, around four or five, I always believed my father was going to come and rescue me."

"Rescue you from what?"

She looked at him blankly for a moment. "Oh, you know. From school, and spinach, and having to wear a red dress I hated, and having my hair cut and getting teased in the playground..."

"But he never did?"

"For a while he used to turn up once or twice a year. With presents, and take me somewhere wonderful, and bring my mother armfuls of flowers... And then he'd go away again. And then it just stopped. When I was about ten. He was so... handsome, and capable, and in control. I could understand why he didn't want to be bothered with us."

Chekov considered privately that Janice's father needed lessons in child psychology and a kick up the backside. From one handsome, compelling man too busy to notice Janice to another... At least for Kirk and Rand it was a non-relationship between consenting adults. And Kirk had duty, a career, a mission to excuse his behaviour, and he was quite honest about it. Janice's father sounded more like a lying, self-absorbed loser.

"You said you wanted children. What sort of father do you want them to have?"

Her eyes went misty. "Not too handsome: successful, but not desperately ambitious. He's got to have time for them and for me. Time to do things together. Going for walks and reading books. Making things. Drawing pictures. Telling stories."

"Perhaps when you get back to Earth you'll meet someone like that."

"Someone like your father."

He shook his head.

"Didn't he do all those things with you?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, he was... He spent a lot of time with me."

"So?"

"Well, it's just that... There must be more than one way to be a good father. Or a good mother. That's all."

"You think I'm cutting down my chances by being too prescriptive? Um. Maybe. I'll probably fall for someone utterly unsuitable. A genetically incompatible alien... Someone who already has nineteen children from a previous relationship... A complete bastard who vanishes..."

"Janice..."

"They do say you make the same mistakes your parents made."

"Janice..."

"What?"

"You don't choose your parents. You just have to make the best of them. He didn't choose us."

"How do you know?"

"What?"

She pointed accusingly at the now sleeping infant. "He... it could be a mature sentient alien, choosing to latch on to your misplaced paternal instincts. You'll carry it back on board the Enterprise and hey presto, the end of the human race." She looked hard into Chekov's brown eyes. "I say, you're taking an unacceptable risk. Captain Kirk would kill it while it's helpless."

"No, he wouldn't."

"He can be quite ruthless."

"No." Chekov adjusted the position of the swaddled baby. "If you had proof, maybe he'd insist we left him here..."

"You're hooked. You'll do almost anything to keep it alive. Even risk the ship."

"Janice..."

"Okay. I'm sorry. Why don't you want to talk about your father?"

Chekov stared at her. "Pardon?"

"Every time I ask about him, you get tongue tied."

"Well, I... There's nothing to say. I mean, he did all the things I would expect a father to do... But you expect a father to do something completely different. We don't have a common basis for discussion."

"It's a language thing."

"It is?"

"Oh, yes. You see, to you, the word means your father, and other fathers more or less fit into the same category. Whereas to me, it means my father. And the two definitions don't overlap much, except biologically. A father is someone who can make you feel like a princess - a proper princess, not a Russian one - but you find out that's all he's going to do. It's an illusion. You aren't really a princess after all. And he's got... He's got other things that are more important."

After a few moments' silence, Janice stretched out her arms in front of her and straightened her legs. "There you go, not talking about your father again."

"He was..."

"Oh, was he?"

"I think I bored him."

"Come on! Parents are never bored by their children. I mean, even you..."

She stopped, her mouth frozen. Chekov looked at her, watching as the colour rose in her cheeks. According to mood and circumstances, yesterday he would have been either amused by her discomfort or wounded by her inadvertent admission that she found him boring. Today the pain he felt was a second hand sympathy with her embarrassment. And he never remembered experiencing before this clarity in observing his own or anyone else's emotions. It was as if he'd grown up overnight. Before today, he'd never realised quite what the source of the awkwardness between himself and his father was. Now it seemed obvious.

"This isn't fair," he said.

"I'm sorry," she apologised, but he shook his head at her.

"I meant - what they are doing to you. You should be with someone you love, feeling very happy and... hopeful. And safe."

"So should you. Maybe..."

He leaned back against the wall behind him and wished she would go to sleep, so that he could be alone.

"...You must have been pretty wrapped up in getting into the Academy. Maybe he just wasn't interested in that. Maybe he wanted you to be a footballer, or a musician."

Chekov couldn't help smiling at these unlikely images of his father, a tone deaf intellectual, impatient with unproductive activities of any kind.

"It's only a sexual thing, anyway. The right man could talk knitting patterns and I'd listen. You do the same things as Captain Kirk, you've been to the same places, worked with the same people... It's just that I find him attractive."

"Do you think the captain thinks I'm boring?"

"Well... I don't know. He'd probably rather you were, anyway. From his point of view, he needs someone who always turns up and gets the job done. He wouldn't want you to be too outrageous... You know I... After my father had stopped coming for a while, when I was about thirteen, fourteen, I seriously considered getting pregnant, or doing something really dreadful, to make him come back. Did you ever get into trouble like that? Deliberately? To get attention?"

"No... it didn't occur to me."

"You do it now."

"I do what now?"

"Go over the top, to get the captain's attention. You do it all the time."

"I certainly do not. That would be most unprofessional."

"Oh, you don't do it when it would hurt. But you do. Like this thing with the sensors. Most people wouldn't have woken him up. Not without more to go on. Certainly not twice."

"I just did what I thought was appropriate."

"Oh, I know. I'm not saying you do it deliberately. Just that your judgement is... coloured by wanting to make an impression on him."

"And if I hadn't made that mistake, we wouldn't be here now, is that what you think?"

"I don't think the captain is going to complain about anything you've done since we got here. I'm certainly not." She balled a towel up into a pillow and stopped with it in her hands. "Does he look blue to you? I'm sure he didn't look that blue before."

Chekov pushed past her to pick up the baby. "I'm not sure. Perhaps it's just the light. He's breathing. I don't know."

"I'm probably imagining it," she said, and lay down with her head on the towel. "Anyway, what can you do about it?"

"Nothing," the ensign admitted resignedly. "Nothing." But he didn't leave it at that. He began to walk around the room with the child in his arms. "Can you hear me?"

"Of course I..."

"Quiet, I'm not talking to you. Can you hear me?"

"You are nervous and anxious."

"Yes, we..."

"The child is not fulfilling expectations."

"He's ill."

"He is not functioning properly. We will investigate."

The baby vanished out of Chekov's arms, leaving the swaddling towels to fall unheeded to the floor. "What do you mean by investigate?" he asked helplessly. "What do you mean?"

There was no response to the rising anguish in his voice.

"What are you going to do?"

Rand had already sat up again. Now she caught at Chekov's arm. "Look, Pavel, they're probably just going to help him, if they can. I mean, why would they have gone to all this trouble if they didn't want a live baby at the end of it?"

"He is not functioning as expected and we cannot correct. We will use this as material for research..."

"No!" In the frustration of not having any visible to talk to, Chekov faced first one wall of the room and then another. "No. Give him back. We'll look after him. If you want someone to..."

"Chekov, no!" Rand protested.

"Yes," the alien voice said casually.

The infant reappeared, superficially unharmed but flailing his naked limbs unhappily. Chekov scooped him up and looked around for his wrappings but they'd vanished. He retrieved his Starfleet tunic instead and cocooned the child in that.

"No," Janice repeated softly. "They can't take you..."

A tremor ripped through the room. Chekov pushed up onto his feet, ready to respond to a red alert that never came.

"What was that?" Rand didn't move, except to place her hands flat on the deck either side of her, bracing herself for more trouble.

"I don't know. If this was the Enterprise, it would be incoming fire, or a.g. failure... I don't know."

The lights dimmed down. A few seconds later they darkened again, until Chekov could only make out his companions by the pallor of their faces. "Maybe they've found us..."

"This might not be the best way to get us back."

The structure around them shook again. The furthest wall began to dissolve, revealing meaninglessness beyond. Chekov moved closer to Rand. "Shut your eyes, Yeoman, and hold onto my arm. Let's hope..."

...

"We can modify our sensors sufficiently to obtain readings, using a condensed phaser beam and our warp field generator."

Spock announced it out of the blue, having been standing virtually motionless at his station ever since his last report to Kirk an hour or more ago.

"How? ... No, never mind how. Can you use transporters as well?"

"They can be modified in the same manner. But that is no guarantee that we can obtain a fix on our personnel. There may be shielding."

"Well, we can only try." Kirk hit the button on the arm of his chair. "Mister Scott, standby to transport. Spock will give you general coordinates..."

"Aye, sir."

Kirk reproached himself silently for trying to do the engineer's job for him.

The phasers whined just faintly, as if they were being asked to deliver a great deal. Nothing visible emanated from the weapon banks though, nothing showed up in space, in the centre of the viewscreen, which Kirk assumed Spock had located on the relevant spot. Knowing him, it was quite likely that he hadn't bothered. After all, it made no difference to the outcome whether they could see it as it happened, whatever it was.

The blackness of space crumbled, like ice melting, like a window shattering, like a light going out... and all of that at once, until Kirk had to realise he wasn't seeing it. But how else could he be perceiving it? And beyond it, was... nothing? In the sense that it wasn't a thing, or a quality, or a state of being that he could put a name to, it was nothing.

"I have..." Spock began.

"Transporter lock achieved," Scott capped him.

"Phasers are reaching overload, at ninety seven percent of capacity, sir." The engineering ensign almost apologised for the frailty of the weapons, but he was ignored.

"I've got them, sir. And they look fine to me." Scotty didn't try to hide his pleasure in being able to deliver the news.

Before Kirk could begin to feel relieved, the nothingness transformed, folded, melted, exploded... how could anything in this space change in so many ways without ever passing through a recognisable state?

"The phenomena is gone, sir. No evidence of it remains, either on normal sensor readings or using the new techniques."

Spock sounded regretful but Kirk felt only profound gratitude that it was gone, and that it had left his crewmen behind.

"I'm going down to the transporter room. Inform me if you see any further sign of it..." His voice was cut off by the lift doors closing.

"What was it, Mister Spock?" Sulu asked. "Can we see the recordings of that?"

There was a moment's hesitation then Spock turned rather apologetically to the helmsman. "The computer has not recorded anything."

"But how can that be?" Uhura objected. "We saw something, even if it made no sense."

The Vulcan shook his head through a minuscule arc. "Whatever signal was received, it was not in a form susceptible to digital analysis. The sensors are capable of switching to analogue operation, in the event of computer failure, and what we saw... we saw. But the computer could not process it and record it."

...

McCoy was already in the transporter room, one arm around the yeoman who sat on the step of the transporter pad. Having seen so many wounded crewmen struggle back to the ship only to sink down and collapse in that first safe location, Kirk immediately assumed she was injured. He squatted beside her and took her hand. "How is she, Bones?"

"Fine, by this thing. Tired and stressed, but..." He trailed off as he obviously did find something that bothered him.

The captain swivelled to look at Chekov. "And you?"

Chekov had lost his tunic somewhere. The solid black of his undershirt and pants made him look pale and drawn. "The same, Captain. We weren't injured, exactly."

"Ahem, Cap'n..."

"Mister Scott?"

"We didn't just get the two o'em back."

For some reason, Scott had the ensign's missing uniform in his hands, wrapped round something that he was holding like one of the more delicate assemblies out of his engines.

"I locked onto all the human readings. I thought I was picking up a reflection, or a distortion, but... we picked up this wee... item."

"What is it?" Kirk asked, crossing over to his engineer.

Scott looked as embarrassed as if he'd been caught stealing a book from the ship's library. "A bairn."

...

Ten minutes later, Spock, Kirk and Chekov were in briefing room A. McCoy had muttered and been overridden. Chekov wasn't hurt, Kirk pointed out, and what looked like the Federation's first tangible contact with another dimension was fast evaporating into memory, unless it decided to come back and protest an act of abduction. He needed to debrief the ensign, now. The doctor took the two patients he had off to sickbay.

"Mister Chekov, I'm sorry not to give you a moment to collect your thoughts but we need information fast. Can you just start at the beginning, give us every detail?"

"Yes, Captain," the ensign agreed willingly enough. Then he clenched his fists hard as if nerving himself for something he didn't want to do. Kirk decided abruptly that McCoy had been right. He touched the intercom button on the table lightly. "Doctor McCoy, can you join us as soon as possible?"

"But there isn't a beginning," Chekov said, correctly ignoring an aside not meant for him. "Various things... happened, but not in any particular order. Some of them happened more than once. Sometimes they happened differently or as if we were seeing them from a different point of view..." He trailed off.

"Describe where you were."

"Um... we had a breathable atmosphere..."

Kirk felt himself begin to be annoyed, until he remembered what he'd seen on the viewscreen.

"Was it light, or dark..?"

Chekov shook his head. "No, I can describe it, or some of it, Captain. It became more confusing towards the end, but at the beginning, we were in a space which I think had been designed to accommodate us. It appeared to be cuboid, although later that turned out to be an optical illusion, or an interpretation that our brains imposed on it..."

"Did anyone there attempt to communicate with you?"

"Yes. They could communicate quite clearly, in Standard."

"Using conventional sound transmission?" Spock interrupted.

"I think so. At the time... I didn't question it." But clearly he did now. Kirk suppressed a sigh. After all, what had he expected? What could they have made of somewhere their senses weren't designed to register? He might as well have asked Spock's opinion of a funfair.

"What did they say?"

"That they were observers. That we were safe... That was all really. But they said it again, and again..."

"Could they understand what you were saying to them?"

Chekov blinked. "Yes. But it didn't seem to register. It didn't lead anywhere. Their answers made sense, a sort of sense, but our attempts to communicate didn't seem to progress as... as time passed. But I don't think time did pass."

Kirk glanced at Spock. "You've been gone for a little over twenty nine hours. Is that your impression too?"

At this, the ensign shook his head. "No."

"Longer or shorter?" Spock prompted.

"Neither."

Kirk frowned. This was ridiculous. He should have let Chekov take a break, get something to eat. The kid was barely out of the Academy and he was expecting him to make sense of a first contact that defied anyone's experience.

"Did anything happen?" When Chekov didn't immediately respond, he prompted further. "Where did the child come from?"

"Yeoman Rand gave birth to him, sir."

Kirk made a point, for the psychological advantage, of not being surprised by things. But he blew it this time.

Chekov didn't seem to notice. "That's why I can't say how long we were there. She wasn't pregnant when we... I mean..."

"Does she know how this happened?" Kirk asked, as neutrally as possible.

The ensign shook his head apologetically. "We both experienced repeated episodes of unconsciousness. She assumed they'd intervened medically..."

"If they find it difficult to communicate with us by any other means," Spock broke in, sparing Chekov from further speculation, "they might have wished to synthesise an intermediary. An individual who somehow bridges the gap between them and us."

Kirk looked doubtful but interested. "That's a myth that crops up all over the Galaxy."

"On Vulcan and on Earth," Spock agreed. "It's apparent that Mister Chekov can make very little sense of what happened to him. Perhaps we will have to wait until the child is mature, before we have answers."

The door slid open and McCoy wordlessly took a seat at the table. He openly aimed a mini-scanner at Chekov but didn't seem too upset by whatever he read there.

"Can you tell us anything about the child, Bones?" Kirk asked once the doctor was satisfied and had pocketed the device.

"He's human."

"I see. And Yeoman Rand?"

"She's very distressed. Chekov told you..?"

"Yes," Kirk confirmed.

"Well, as I said, she's distressed by the whole experience. She doesn't really remember much else, which isn't unusual. It wouldn't be unusual for a mother experiencing a normal gestation and parturition to be a little vague about other details."

"But physically, she's okay?"

McCoy looked at the captain, as if wondering if he was sounding just a little more concerned than a commanding officer had a right to be. "It looks like it was a straightforward delivery and the midwife kept his head. And gets the award for most novel use of a Starfleet cable grip."

"You delivered it?" Kirk demanded of Chekov, sounding surprised and outraged, and pleased that his officers could cope with even the unlikeliest of emergencies.

Chekov managed a half-hearted smile. "Yes, Captain. There wasn't anyone else."

"Well, it looks as if any answers we get out of this incident are going to come from studying that infant. Obviously Ensign Chekov or Yeoman Rand may remember more, or may be encouraged to recall details that don't make any sense to them, but could be interpreted by someone with more experience..."

"I don't think there is anyone with any relevant experience, Captain," Spock broke in bleakly. "Possibly a mathematician with a background in multi-dimensional studies, a philosopher or..."

"A science fiction writer," McCoy suggested.

"I take your point, gentlemen. McCoy, contact Starfleet. That child will need to be looked after by someone properly qualified. They'll need paediatricians, xeno-psychologists, First Contact specialists. I'd imagine they'll want it at the Vulcan Science Academy, or maybe the Bettelheim Institute on Earth..."

"Hold on a moment, Captain," McCoy interrupted. "This isn't..."

"No."

All three senior officers turned to Chekov, who swallowed, then went on. "I'm sorry, Captain, but you can't do that."

"Why not?" Kirk's frown was one of genuine inquiry, rather than an invitation to Chekov to shut up, but the ensign still looked as if he'd prefer not to have to say this.

"I don't want my son shipped off to Vulcan, or..."

"What makes you think this child is yours, Chekov? And even if it is..."

"He is, Jim. I've checked him out. Genetically, we have the parents right here."

"Well," Kirk went on, "I suppose they had to start from somewhere. But it doesn't make any difference. This isn't your child in any real sense. You can't tell me you wanted this to happen..."

"No, I didn't want it to happen. But it still has happened. And he is my child. I don't want him to... to be taken away and brought up in a laboratory."

Kirk shook his head. "I'm sorry if it sounded like that. I'm sure that's not what they'll do. They'll want to keep an eye on it... on him, but probably through a supervised fostering arrangement. I'm not an expert on these things, but I imagine..." The captain glanced across at McCoy, waiting for the doctor to help him out. McCoy didn't seem to notice. Kirk plunged on alone. "Genetically, there is a link, but the same's true for Yeoman Rand. If you want to regard this thing that's been imposed on you as something you have rights in, have you considered that that would also mean you have responsibilities? Do you really want to go back to Earth and be a full-time father? And what about Janice? What about both of you? Are you a couple all of sudden?"

"No, sir. Of course not. I have considered this. I don't want those rights and responsibilities. I have them, whether I want them or not. I can't transfer them to you, and I can't protect Yeoman Rand from them."

Kirk took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Ensign, but you're mistaken. I deeply regret that this has happened to you, but I see no reason for you to be involved in it any further. Doctor McCoy, will you contact Starfleet, please, and inform them of the situation..."

Chekov stood up and came to attention. "Captain, would you explain to me please on what authority you are depriving me of my rights under Article 349 of the United Federation of Planets Convention on Sentient Rights?"

At that Kirk froze. People had often accused him of throwing his weight around but he'd never been confronted with it quite that baldly, not by anyone under the rank of Admiral. He wasn't sure which Article 349 was, but he thought he could guess.

"Article 349 is concerned with the integrity and security of family units, Captain," Spock informed him anyway.

"You can send me where you wish, Captain, and I will go. But you can't force me to send him away, or to..."

"Yes, you have a point. I hadn't thought of it like that." He took another deep breath. "You are making a mistake, Chekov. I respect your motives, truly, but I think you're going to end up being hurt... being much more hurt than you already are. The child will not be 'brought up in a laboratory'. You know that really. Look, we're talking about all this much too soon. You don't have to make any decisions right away."

"Well, I'm afraid he does." McCoy usually appeared to enjoy contradicting people but this time you could see that it didn't give him any pleasure.

"Doctor?"

"There's a medical problem with the baby. One of several, in fact. His heart isn't properly developed. I need parental consent to give treatment. There aren't any circumstances that would justify me proceeding without that. So..."

"What about Yeoman Rand?" Kirk asked, although he knew that was beside the point. Once one accepted that either or both of these two innocent bystanders were parents, the damage was done.

"You'd be proud of her, Captain. She's taking exactly the line you recommend. She was assaulted. The fact that it's related to her is the result of unauthorised manipulation of her genetic material. She won't even admit being involved to the extent of giving me a medical free hand. And if she did, I'd still have to ask Chekov here. As far as she's concerned, it's a foundling, and it's up to you what happens to it."

Kirk noticed that in relation to Rand, the child was an it, but where Chekov was concerned he was a baby. In every sentence, McCoy was supporting Chekov and absolving Rand.

He gave in. "Keep me informed."

McCoy thanked him with weary smile. "Ensign, I need to see you down in sickbay anyway. If you just get along, I'll be down in a moment to explain the situation to you."

"Thank you, sir." Chekov hesitated at the door. "I'm sorry, Captain..."

"Don't worry about it. I understand." He said that, but he wasn't sure he did. He was pleased that McCoy lingered behind. "I was trying to act in his best interests, Bones..."

"I know, Jim. But I think you're doing what you'd have wanted your CO to do if this had happened to you twelve years ago. That isn't necessarily what's best for Chekov. He's a very different person to you, from a very different background. You can't impose your..."

"No. Of course. But this... this child could be something very important..."

"I don't think anyone's arguing that, Captain."

McCoy looked as if he was about to say something else and then thought better of it. After he'd gone, Spock said it for him anyway.

"All children are very important to their parents, Captain."

...

Once down in sickbay, McCoy took Chekov into the room where Rand had been resting. At the back of his mind was a desire to see how they behaved together, how much support they would be to one another over this.

"How are you feeling?" Chekov asked, rather stiffly.

"Okay, I guess," Rand responded. Then they both looked at McCoy. So much for that.

"I think you may already have guessed what I'm going to say next." McCoy wished he knew what was really going through either of their minds. Rand was still maintaining her pose of severe disinterest. Chekov looked... tired, McCoy decided. More tired than seemed reasonable in someone of his age.

"Chekov, Yeoman Rand's told me pretty well what happened. What you noticed when you examined the... the baby, the lack of certain reflexes, the slightly lowered temperature, are all borne out by what I've observed since. They speeded up the maturation process and they didn't do it very competently. His whole metabolism is breaking down. Now, I can do something about it. I can maintain him, although I'm not an expert in perinatal care. It may be possible for a more fully equipped hospital, people who've more experience, to manage some, or even most of his problems. If that's what you want, he'll get all the support I can give him. But I can't guarantee the outcome."

"Why are you telling me this? It's not as if I'm... I don't feel this decision is anything to do with me. That is what you're doing, isn't it, asking me to decide whether you should keep it alive or not?" Rand's voice was very calm. She did nothing to acknowledge the presence of the young man at her side.

If she felt this was something they could deal with as two individuals, McCoy thought it best to let her. "I have no ethical problem with either doing everything I possibly can for him, or helping him to slip away as easily..." He realised that tears were rolling down Chekov's face. The ensign seemed unaware of them. "...as easily and painlessly as if he was just going to sleep. But if you don't have the right to decide between those two options, I don't know who else does."

"I don't want to decide."

Janice didn't wait for his reaction to her answer. She got up from the day bed and walked out of the room, head high and back stiff.

"So it is my decision?"

"Yes. I'm sorry. A moment ago it sounded as if that was what you wanted, but I realise you weren't thinking of it in quite these terms."

"What is the best he can hope for?"

"I don't know, Pavel. Medical science doesn't stand still. I'm probably not up to date in this field, if it is a field, and something like this is a matter of judgement and experience, not reading the journals. You know how many systems there are in a human body? His are all flawed in some way. The effects will be cumulative, one system putting strain on another. The only thing that's basically okay is the underlying genetic material. It was what they subjected it to that caused the problem. I think there's a good likelihood that we could clone specific organs later, to replace non-functioning or damaged ones."

"What they did to Janice was worse than what they did to me, I know, but... she doesn't seem to care about him at all. After all, she's his..." He stopped short of saying it.

"I don't think you can force her to feel something she doesn't want to... If you wanted to walk out of here, I'd understand. The captain did have a point. You need to think about yourself."

"Cloning... That seems even more wrong."

"Why? It's quite normal medical procedure."

"No. I mean, it's the mixture, her and me, that they had no right to... To go back and do something more with it..."

"But he's here now. They aren't your genes any more, they're his." McCoy was having difficulty reading Chekov as the ensign silently sorted his thinking. He didn't want to make this decision for him, but he did want to help him to a decision that he could live with.

"When he's eighteen, if he wanted to join Starfleet, and you were responsible for his medical appraisal, would you recommend accepting him?"

It wasn't a question to which there was an answer, and it was rather a demanding standard to set for judging whether a human life was worth living.

"I'd be very surprised if things turned out well enough for that to be an option."

"But if they did."

"We're not talking about that kind of future. He will almost certainly be severely physically handicapped. He will probably have learning difficulties. He is never going to be the sort of child you or Janice were. We might struggle to keep him alive and lose him in a matter of days - or hours. It's too complex to predict."

"Can I see him?"

"Of course. You don't have to ask. But... you might be making it harder for yourself."

"Well, whatever I decide, I have to be able to look at him when I do it."

The baby lay in an improvised incubator, obviously not intended for nursery use. It had no adaptations to make it accessible for parents to do anything for their child. McCoy gestured the night shift nurse out of the ward.

"He looks cold."

McCoy glanced at the diagnostic display. "No, just right."

"But I thought small babies liked to be wrapped up."

An infra red lamp was giving the sleeping infant just the right environment, and it was easier without blankets to monitor the tubes and sensors that clung to his tender skin like ivy.

"Yes, of course," McCoy cursed himself and wished not for the first time that Christine was here. Not that she was the obviously maternal sort, but she'd have thought of that. He thumbed open a locker and fished out a lightweight blanket.

"He does, anyway, and he likes to be held, not..." For the first time, it looked like Chekov was going to lose his self-control.

McCoy unclipped the cover of the incubator, rolled the baby in the blanket and handed the child to his father. Throughout he had half an eye on the diagnostics to be sure he wasn't causing him any discomfort. Then he detached the oxygen feed from the bed and propped it near the baby's face. "There, keep an eye on the blood oxygen indicator, that blue one. If it falls or rises more than five percent, move the tube nearer or further away."

"Is that good enough?"

"Plenty, so long as you're here to watch him."

Chekov shifted the little bundle in search of a position that wouldn't quickly become uncomfortable. McCoy realised now that he must have spent a lot of hours holding the child. There was no new-father nervousness.

"He's not so blue any more..."

"We've been feeding him oxygen at a much higher partial pressure than normal. His lungs are only about forty percent functional, and his heart is malformed, so his circulation is compromised."

"I see."

"You've made up your mind, haven't you?"

"Mm." The ensign didn't seem to trust himself to speak, or even to nod.

"Okay. I don't know how long this will take. Do you want to stay?"

"." No sound came out at all this time.

McCoy made a few adjustments to the life support monitor. He could feel his own eyes beginning to water. It wasn't sorrow exactly. He was sure Chekov was doing the right thing, that the child would have been more a medical curiosity than a viable person. It also seemed easier on the two of them to be able to close the file on this whole incident. What he was feeling was more a dark obverse of that poignant, optimistic emotion that stirred at weddings and births.

"Please, could you go away?"

Well, why not? He could monitor the child just as well from his office. "Call if you want me."

...

The night became a vigil, father watching child, doctor watching both. And the rest of the ship seemed to take on an uneasy, wakeful quality. Kirk started to prepare for bed but changed his mind and went down to sickbay.

"Bones?"

McCoy glanced away from the monitors. "Captain?"

"How are they?"

"The baby is very sick. I've ceased any active medical intervention. We're letting things take their course."

"You can't do that! You can't just stand by and do nothing. Who gave you the right to take a decision like that?"

"I didn't take it. Chekov did. I agreed with it, from a medical point of view, and for their benefit. This is a child that's..."

"That wasn't wanted, so you're going to abandon it? Then what was Chekov making such a fuss about? A point of principal?"

Kirk wasn't sure why he felt so indignant. Perhaps it was just that he relied on McCoy not to be a quitter, or Chekov either, for that matter.

"Whose decision should it have been? Yours?"

"Bones, now the child is here, it has the same rights as any other baby, damaged or otherwise. Are you sure you're not all just trying to sweep a painful situation under the carpet?"

"Look." McCoy gestured towards the monitor on his desk. Janice had come back an hour or so ago. The two of them were taking it in turns to hold the baby. "I think you can trust them to make the right decision, for them, for him. Not for you. Probably not for Starfleet."

Kirk admitted to himself that he'd been assuming Chekov and Rand had left the child in the care of sickbay staff, physically and metaphorically turning their backs on it. The two were sitting side by side on a diagnostic bed. Chekov was holding the baby in the crook of his left arm, his face shadowed. Rand was turned towards the two of them, so her back was towards the camera.

"What if that child was intended as a link, a channel for communication? Maybe they even did this deliberately, made it vulnerable so that it would only survive if we demonstrated that we were able and willing to keep it... to keep him alive?"

McCoy looked down at his desk. "Are you casting me as Herod?"

"No. I'm sure you're just trying to take care of everyone, but... people don't join Starfleet so that they can be protected from the rest of the universe. They're here to meet it head on. That child... He's a message from beyond anything we've ever imagined. And you're allowing them to tear it up before we've even read it."

"Or it may just have been a casual, amoral piece of research into human biology."

"A good number of people are conceived by accident, even today, Bones. It isn't generally regarded as an excuse for infanticide."

"I have, with the child's parents, made a decision to not to offer radical medical intervention," McCoy said stiffly. "That is in line with current professional guidelines."

"Okay, I shouldn't have used that particular..."

McCoy blew out a long sigh. "I'm not offended. I will be if you start using that sort of language to Chekov."

"I'm not going to do that. But if I talk to him..."

"Please, Captain, don't. It's a child. A very, very sick little boy. That's more than enough for them to deal with."

After a moment, Kirk tried a different tack. "It's a hell of a decision for them to have to make, however you look at it."

"So support them through it. Let them know you respect their choice."

Kirk looked at the monitor again. "I'm responsible for their well-being. If they make the wrong decision..."

"And what makes you think you can take it any better than they can?"

"Nothing. But at least it would be my responsibility."

McCoy recognised that this was after all just a variant on the blues that inevitably followed any sort of misfortune befalling a crewmember, the it-should-have-been-me-syndrome.

"Was Spock right, did Chekov and Rand have the mental patterns that all the others had?" Kirk knew he was just trying to change the subject but McCoy was willing enough to let him get away with it.

"In spades, Jim. I haven't the faintest idea how that enabled them to see this cross-dimensional stuff, but they were practically in a class of their own. Whoever did this probably thought we'd put them out there as an invitation to come talk." Kirk didn't react to that, whether it was intended as information or accusation. McCoy started again. "The only higher reading I've seen is the child's. And that could be straight inheritance or engineered. I can't tell which at the moment."

"And you never will. Between the two of you, you and Chekov are closing the door on this whole thing."

"There are limits beyond which people aren't prepared to go. Those two have reached theirs. This isn't something we have to know at any price... is it?"

Kirk glanced back at the monitor. "No. It's just so damn frustrating. Chekov couldn't find anything to say about what he'd seen at all, just that it made absolutely no sense to him. How could something that fundamentally different..."

"Maybe they could perceive us better than we can perceive them. I don't know. It's over, anyway." McCoy snapped the monitor off, so he wouldn't see the moment when that realisation hit Janice and Pavel.

Kirk paused a few seconds, to control his own feelings before continuing. "Are they going to be all right?"

"Rand's exhausted, and the stress on her, physically, has been considerable. She wasn't that bright before. She's been waiting too long for this transfer. She has some leave first, doesn't she?"

"Yes," Kirk agreed unwillingly. He knew full well why she wanted to go, why, in the end, he'd had to let her go. The trouble was, she was the best yeoman he'd ever encountered. He'd kept telling himself he was waiting for someone as good to be available.

"Strictly she's entitled to six months maternity leave, and while it wouldn't be tactful to put it that way, she needs some time off just to recuperate physically."

"Of course. And Chekov?"

McCoy shook his head unhappily. "I think he'll be fine for a day or two, then he'll go to pieces for a while. One thing I'm fairly sure of, is they won't want to be round each other particularly."

"They're friends..."

"I wouldn't put it that strongly. And however close they were, they didn't have any desire to become parents, singly or together."

"No..."

A soft knock on the office door interrupted whatever Kirk had meant to say. Chekov just stood in the doorway. "Doctor?"

"Okay. I'm coming." McCoy came round his desk and put a hand on Chekov's shoulder to turn him and steer him out of the room.

Kirk hesitated, weighed down with the feeling that he should be there, that he should be shouldering some of this, all of this for them, held back by fear that he'd say the wrong thing, or find nothing to say at all. When he stepped through the door to the side ward a moment later, Janice was standing like a lost soul by the bed, staring down at the child, swaddled in its blue Starfleet medical blanket. Chekov was a few feet away, equally isolated. The closeness of the image in the monitor had utterly evaporated.

A hard, cold anger, at whatever beings had done this, began to ache in the captain. It had nowhere to go, though. Not even a mental image to hang onto. McCoy caught his eye. "I'm putting them both on the sick list, Captain. And Yeoman Rand should stay here, for the time being."

"Yes, of course," Kirk agreed, smothering a paternal urge to order hot milk and bed for his two prodigal children. They both looked up at the sound of his voice, blue and brown eyes heavy with tiredness and tears. Janice's gaze was direct. Chekov glanced away after a moment, as if he'd seen disapproval and recrimination where Kirk intended only sympathy.

"Captain, I don't think I'm going to be able to give a very coherent account of what happened..."

"Don't worry about that now, Janice. It really doesn't matter."

"Well, this does matter. I want you to know that Ensign Chekov looked after me... looked after both of us, really well."

"I know he did."

"And I think he made the right decision for... for..."

"Yes. He did." Kirk took her hand and turned her away from the child. He collected up a second hand at the same time and pulled both youngsters into his arms. "I'm proud of you both. I was stupid to send you out there, but you didn't let me down."

Rand gave way to tears that shook her whole body. "He was so beautiful. I didn't want him... and now I just wish... I just wish he'd been all right... It wasn't his fault."

"No. It wasn't his fault. He is a beautiful child. It's all right to feel sad about it. There aren't always happy endings. Don't worry. You'll cope with it, both of you."

Chekov pulled away first, blinking back tears. But he stopped dead when he realised Kirk's face was as wet as his own.

McCoy stepped into a silence that threatened to last forever. "Captain, they both need some rest."

"Of course." Kirk detached himself gently from Rand. "I'll see you tomorrow. Don't worry about anything for now."

"Not a princess at all," Rand said softly, once he'd gone with McCoy close behind him.

"You are," Chekov told her. "Even if some people don't see it."

She looked up at him. "I didn't mean... thank you, but I didn't mean that. I meant the baby. I feel sad about it, and I feel sorry for you, and him, but... you loved him, didn't you?"

"No..." His mind went back to their earlier conversation in the shuttle. "I don't think so. I don't know. I let him go..." He took an impulsive step towards the child, reaching out for him. "What if I was wrong..?"

"Imagine never being well, never being able to look forward to being well, not being able to remember a time when you weren't dependent on doctors. You didn't hear everything that was... all the problems he had. You didn't do anything wrong. Believe me, you didn't."

He forced a smile onto his face for her. "I'm glad you believe that."

"Look, I'm... I'm going to go and get some sleep now. I'll see you around... I guess." She couldn't quite bring herself to walk away from him while he looked so defeated. "I think there's only one thing you really have to worry about."

"What?" he asked, leaving the smile in place as if he'd forgotten about it.

"How the hell are you going to explain all this to Veronique?"

The End