Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

The Star Beagle Adventures                                                
Episode 12: Close to the Edge Part I - The Solid Time of Change
Scene 9: The Summoning

Crossed the line around the changes of the summer…

Reaching out to call the color of the sky…

12.9

The Summoning

Again, the sound of dripping water. 

While Rhonda Carter very much appreciated the gift of silence, the silence was also beginning to drive her mad. Still, it was much better than the howling roar that had been her constant companion from the time Krank had deafened her until the last dream had freed her from the noise.

This time she realized that she was in a dream. In her favorite place in the caverns of Cloudland Canyon. A place that very few people could get to. And General Krank was not one of them.

“You’re not Krank,” said Carter. “Who are you?”

“You are listening.” It was the soft whisper of her wife’s voice. Coming, quite disturbingly, from an elderly klingon general. “You are listening now, not hearing. But you will… Because you so want to hear…”

This wasn’t the cavern in Cloudland Canyon State Park. There was a pool, and a stalactite from which water (or some liquid) was dripping. 

“What are you? How are you getting into my dreams? Why me?” Rhonda Carter was far more used to being barraged with questions instead of being the one asking them. “I’ve had weird ghosts of genocidal machines leaking into my dreams with their death wish… Bizarre silicone aliens making me paint my fingernails black and put on green eyeshadow… Giant sacred ants singing to me waking and sleeping... And now you…”

Only the dripping of water in this cavern. No other sound answered her.

“Mushrooms? Are you those mushroom things we’ve been playing cat and mouse with?” Carter reached out to touch the stalactite. It was smooth, hard and slick. “Yeah, that’s right… The mushroom grows inside the rock. Those nasty ferengi mushrooms got inside my first officer’s head, took control of him, and nearly killed me.”

She stalked around the cramped, tiny cavern, grousing quietly to herself. “Mind-stealing mushrooms… Morose murder machines… Silent silicone sirens… Sactimonious insects…” She rapped her knuckles lightly against the stalactite. If this had been a real stalactite, the vibration would have affected the dripping, shaking more water loose. But this was a dream stalactite and Rhonda knew from long experience that dream items did not respond normally to the dreamer.

“A lifetime working in space. Ever since I was 16. I always slept like a rock. A hundred alien species. Thousands of light years. Three entire wars. Then I turn 50 and bang, weird alien consciences are barging into my dreams… Crawling around in my skull…”

She was grousing as she got up and ran her fingers along the inscriptions she had scrawled across the walls in her cabin. Every spell her research could find to restore her hearing. She never expected any of it to work. But this one had worked. The only one she had not cleaned off the wall. Because it was the only one she had carved into the wall and then filled with metal-based paint. 

At the moment she couldn’t recall exactly how she had carved an inscription into a triluminum wall, but that didn’t matter at the moment. 

This was a summoning spell.

That’s who was visiting her dreams. Something she had summoned. She could hear it breathing. The sound raised the small hairs on her arms and the back of her neck.

Still dreaming. 

Rhonda Carter sat up with a shout. 

And for just a second, she thought she heard herself.

12.9