Chapter Text
“Does she know?” Pavel asked.
“She will never know,” Flint said. His face hardened, all friendliness instantly gone from it.
“Chekov, we must go,” Spock said. He flipped open his communicator.
Flint’s words landed like stones. “You will stay.”
“Why?” McCoy demanded.
Spock’s voice was weary and sad. “We have discovered what he is, Doctor.”
McCoy leaned forward in his chair, anger apparently giving him a brief respite from his exhaustion. “And what he is hardly matters anymore. Phoebus Apollo is teaching Classics at Oxford and reviving ancient Greek musical forms, last I heard. Isho Naziri has been working for Doctors Without Borders for over a century. Heck, there are two immortals serving in Starfleet, last I heard.”
Flint seemed unimpressed. “So, not unheard of, but still rare enough to be a curiosity. I will not become an exhibit. My privacy was my own. Your trespass was your doing, not mine.”
“We can remain silent,” Spock offered.
The stubborn old fool wouldn’t budge. “I have put too much time and effort into creating this refuge. I will not risk its compromise.” Pavel couldn’t help but feel he was punishing them for his behavior with Rayna. The thought made his hands ball into fists. He deliberately settled into parade rest, clasping them behind his back.
Spock pulled out his communicator. “Spock to Enterprise.” Nothing happened. “Mr. Scott, do you read?” His words had grown more clipped. They didn’t have time for this. Uhura and Scotty didn’t at least, and by now Giotto was probably no better.
The look on Flint’s face was sad but implacable. “They cannot respond, Commander.”
“What have you done to them?” Pavel lunged forward, but Spock caught him across the chest with his forearm, stopping him from rushing Flint.
Flint tapped a button on the remote in his hand and a miniature Enterprise appeared on a table beside them. Spock flinched perceptibly, then moved to examine it. “It does appear to be the Enterprise,” he told them. Suspended in time and space.”
“No time will pass for them until I wish it to,” Flint confirmed.
McCoy forced himself to his feet, keeping one hand on the arm of the chair for support. “If you could have done this from the beginning, why not do so then, rather than leave the crew to suffer while we processed the ryetalyn?”
“I had no desire to show my hand too soon. Thank you, by the way, young Chekov, you have done Rayna and me a great service, though I doubt she will see it that way immediately.” He took a couple of steps away from them. “It is time for the three of you to join your crew.”
“So we can be displayed like the rest of your decorations?” Pavel protested.
“I am a merciful man. I could kill every one of you. I have tossed many enemies into the fire in my long years. You will not die, merely rest in suspension.”
“For how long do you intend to hold us thus?” Spock’s gaze kept straying toward the ship on the table.
“A millennium, perhaps two. Until you have been forgotten and I am ready to move on from this world.”
McCoy spat his words. “You have known and created such beauty, witnessed so much history, watched your species evolve out of cruelty and barbarism through your enormous lifetime and now you would do this to us?”
“The flowers of my past pale before the nettles of my present. Perhaps, Doctor, I am merely a product of my time. I must see to my own needs.”
“What needs?” McCoy pressed.
“Tonight I have seen something wondrous, something I’ve waited for, labored for. Nothing may be allowed to endanger it. At last, my Rayna’s emotions have stirred to life. Now they will turn to me in this solitude I preserve.”
*
Rayna had hoped to catch sight of the men from the Enterprise one last time before they returned to their ship. She might be obligated to remain after all Flint had done for her, but they would go on to have adventures she could only dream about.
Hearing her name piqued her curiosity and she’d crept closer. She heard Flint declare that he would hold the men and their ship in stasis in order to preserve his little haven—the cage he’d built to keep her in.
Something seemed to break inside her, a dam holding back an aching hugeness she couldn’t contain. She crept forward, first fearful that Flint would condemn her for listening in, and then more purposefully. The ship rested on the table like one of Flint’s works of art.
A word worked its way up her throat. “No.”
“Rayna.” Flint seemed genuinely surprised to see her.
“You must not do this to them.”
“I must,” he said, his voice equal parts gentle and firm.
The Vulcan tilted his head just so. “What will you feel for him when we are gone?” he asked her. The question was unanswerable. She felt as though claws were digging into her chest.
“How do you think it will affect her if you harm the first real friend she’s ever had?” McCoy said.
Spock looked at the doctor, who was now holding himself upright with both hands braced on the chair and the table. “We have kept greater secrets than this, Mr. Flint. Return our ship to us and no one will ever need to know you are here.”
Flint looked from Spock to Rayna and back. His shoulders dropped a little. The ship on the table shimmered for a moment and disappeared. Rayna caught Pavel’s eye. He gave her a sad half-smile and a shrug.
“This is why you delayed the processing of the ryetalyn,” Spock said calmly. “You realized what was happening between Rayna and Ensign Chekov.”
“I am sorry, sir,” Pavel said.
“You could not have known the cost.”
“You put us together so we would—so you could—” Pavel shook his head in disbelief. “You thought you could make her fall in love and then just take over?”
Flint stared at Rayna with an expression she had not seen before. It frightened her almost as much as when M-4 threatened Pavel. “I will take what is mine when she comes to me. We are mated, of a kind. Immortal. You must forget your feelings in this matter. You are young, and many other women will catch your eye.”
Pavel started forward so he stood a handspan from Flint’s chest. “You are a monster! You think, you think this is about having Rayna to myself? After I see how you treat her? After you used me like a—like a software patch?” He got off one hard shove before Flint barreled into him and they fell, scrambling, to the floor.
Spock grabbed Pavel by the collar of his uniform shirt, pulling him away. “Ensign, desist from this behavior.”
Pavel raised his head to meet his superior’s gaze. “Get Dr. McCoy and the ryetalyn to the Enterprise, sir. I will not leave her with him.”
“Ensign, she is an android. Not human,” Spock said quietly. An android? What could he mean? That had to be a lie! She remembered growing up, she remembered Flint teaching her everything she knew. She remembered—but did she, really? Why didn’t she know how old she was?
Pavel’s words cut through her paralysis. “Neither are you, Commander! If you think that makes even a tiny amount of difference to me, sir, then you do not know me at all.” Rayna was an android. Flint said so. Spock confirmed it. Not a human. Not--a person? How could Pavel say that didn’t matter to him? She shook her head, trying to think. Did it matter or didn’t it? Was she a thing or a person?
“Rayna is mine! I made her and I will have her!” Flint shouted. He dove at Pavel and Spock, knocking them down, grabbing Pavel by the front of his shirt. Rayna gasped at his violence.
Once Spock was clear of them, he opened his communicator. “Mr. Scott, beam Dr. McCoy up immediately.” The doctor shimmered, became a glittery cloud, and disappeared.
Flint got Pavel trapped under his body and slammed him, hard, into the floor. Rayna staggered as though she were the one caught. “I cannot be the cause of this,” she said, so quietly only she could hear. She found her voice. “I will not be the cause of this!”
Pavel squirmed and gasped. Flint’s hands crept up toward his throat.
“Please, stop!” she shouted. “Do not!”
Spock stopped in his tracks, a couple of steps from Pavel and Flint. Flint froze in place.
“I. Choose.” She balled her hands into fists. Something fought her, every word, every motion that defied Flint’s wishes. “Where I want to go. What I want to do.” She might not be human, but she was not a thing to be fought over or traded like a piece of art. “I choose.”
Flint sat back but kept his hands planted on Pavel’s shoulders. Pavel looked on, a smile lighting up his face despite the blood coloring his lips. Flint scowled. “Rayna!”
“No,” Rayna said, getting used to the feel of it in her mouth. “Do not order me. No one can order me.”
Pavel took advantage of Flint’s distraction to break the older man’s hold and try to sit. “Yes! You’ve got it! Go on.” He turned back to Flint. “Her spirit is free now! You cannot own her.”
There was a whirling storm, anger and joy, fear and hope clashing inside her, so huge and sudden she couldn’t contain it all. The Vulcan took another step toward her. “Ensign, Flint, I urge you to stop.”
Flint stepped up between them. “No man usurps my place.”
Pavel struggled to his feet. “It’s not your place, not now. It never was. Rayna is not your toy. She is your child. And she is growing up. She can make her own choices.”
Flint nodded. “That is what I’ve worked for. She will choose me. She must choose me.”
“You could come with us, if you wanted,” Pavel said. “You don’t have to be alone.”
“Stay with me, Rayna.” Flint’s voice had softened, but the words still felt like an order. How long until that gentleness was replaced with stone? Her mind wanted to go so many directions that she couldn’t make her thoughts move from one to another, from axiom to conclusion. It hurt.
The Vulcan’s measured voice cut through her confusion. “Ensign, remember the risk you take.”
“The threshold cascade,” Pavel said. He scrambled to his feet to gently put his hands on Rayna’s shoulders, but the look in his eyes sent her spinning even faster in her mind. She couldn’t think, it hurt— "Look at me, Rayna. Match your breaths to mine.” She was an android. Why did she breathe?
“Rayna, I made you, you love me—” Flint said in her ear.
Pavel snapped, “Just wait, Flint. Rayna, take your time.” She shook her head, trying to clear it and Pavel seemed to see something in her eyes because he held her still, searching them. “Commander, I can do this, but I need help. I know you melded with Nomad. You can help her, hold her until I can fix this.”
The Vulcan approached them both. “I can make no promises.” Their voices were growing difficult to understand. A sound like wind howled in her ears. Pavel lowered her gently to the floor.
“We don’t need promises, we just need time,” he said.
Her eyes slipped closed. Pavel’s arms wrapped tight around her. “Rayna, hold on for me. Mr. Spock, I have an analog capture matrix with me. If we can integrate it into her neural net, it will stabilize her subspace neutrino field.”
More hands on her, cool and softly tingling with something new. Spock’s voice, clearer and more resonant than Pavel’s. “Rayna, may I join your mind? Your life is in danger.”
If I am an android, do I have a mind? Do I have a life to endanger?
The voice insisted, “You have a self. It is sufficient.”
What do I do?
“Be still. There is no past. There is no future. There is only now.”
She tried to obey. She fell through a nothingness shaped by gravity fields drawing her this way and that, at their center a whirling darkness that dragged and tore. She caught at silvery threads of light and they held her so that she swung suspended over nothing, a horrifying fascination pulling her down and down and Not there. Here. Focus.
Above and around her were shapes, felt rather than seen, smooth lines and clean, sharp facets, triangles on triangles, stable and secure. She traced them, following the Vulcan’s guidance, and held on.
*
Chekov spoke quickly into his communicator. “Kevin, I need a microcircuitry repair kit beamed down as fast as you can. There should be one behind the transporter console.”
“Coming right up, Pavel,” Riley said. Spock was kneeling behind Rayna, supporting her body with his, one hand pressed against her forehead, the other wrapped around her body to hold her in place.
Flint loomed at Pavel’s shoulder. “There is nothing you can do, young man. Once the process begins, it cannot be stopped.”
“We can do this, Mr. Flint.”
Flint scoffed. “You really think you can do better than I can? I have been researching positronic matrices for several decades. I designed Rayna. I have watched earlier versions fail.”
A red metal box sparkled into existence on the floor beside Pavel. “You did not have a Vulcan to stabilize her neural patterns, and you did not have an analog capture matrix to keep them stable.”
Flint crouched next to Spock and Rayna. “This should not be possible.”
“Mr. Spock has melded with artificial intelligences before.” Intelligence. One. So far as he knew. “Mr. Flint, how best do we connect this to her neural interface?”
“Either way I lose her,” he muttered.
Pavel didn’t have time to deal with Flint blue screening. He pulled a fine strand of wire out of the repair kit and wrapped it around the lozenge of amber three times, then twisted the ends into a small loop at the top to create a medallion that could be hung on a chain. That accomplished, he found a short range transmitter button, affixed it to the back, and turned back to Flint again, hoping the man might be useful for something.
“What’s her frequency range? Unless you want to open her head up a two-way transmitter’s going to be the quickest way to add the analog capacity.”
Flint stood a couple of meters away, facing away from them. “This is futile. Let her go.”
Some father he was. Pavel would have to test frequencies until he found a match by trial and error. “I will give up if and when Mr. Spock does. If there was no hope, he would tell us.” The Vulcan was still curled protectively around Rayna, tense and muttering.
Pavel pulled out another piece of fine wire. He ran the wire through the loop at the top of the medallion, knelt next to Rayna, and placed it so it sat at the base of her throat, then wrapped the wire around her neck and twisted the ends together so that it rested there like a makeshift necklace. He held the frequency modulator in one hand, first setting the transmitter to a common midrange frequency.
Almost there, except for the hard part. “Mr. Spock?” he said, not too loud, hoping he’d be heard. “I need to set the transmitter frequency.”
There was no response. He took one deep breath for courage and settled his free hand over the one on Rayna’s shoulder, then repeated his request. The Commander twitched, then tugged Pavel down, hard, and reached for his face. Pavel swallowed his panic long enough to say, “Yes, okay, we do this.”
His disorientation was as sudden and shocking as though he had been flung into empty space, but he was quickly caught and held in place, an abstraction beside him he identified as his commander, who held tightly to a silvery brightness like a grenade caught in the act of exploding.
He blinked, and found himself able to see his own hands and the modulator, though shattering brightness and tilting, spinning vertigo still dragged at his mind. He moved the dial with his thumb and pursed his lips to blow through queasiness. After a few seconds, he felt a prompt to move the dial again, and then again, and then the shattering grenade brightened, dimmed, and settled into a steadier glow. The modulator fell out of his hand, clinked, and rolled when it hit the floor.
The grip on his thoughts relaxed and fell away, leaving him unmoored. He collapsed across the both of them, breathing through nausea and a headache like an ice pick through his left eye.
“...they are both stable enough to transport, but require further medical attention,” Spock’s voice said behind him. “Ensign Chekov has not yet received the antitoxin, and Miss Kapec requires further management of her condition. I intend to transport them to the Enterprise. Miss Kapec’s schematics would be helpful.”
Flint’s voice was poised between anger and agony. “Go. Just go!”
The ornate room faded away.