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 12: An Inside Job

Leaving all the changes far from far behind

12.12
An Inside Job

“My mind to your mind… Your thoughts to my thoughts…” The words sounded odd when spoken with a thick, West Texas accent.

It had taken Captain Rhonda Carter nearly 10 minutes to regain her composure and calm down to the point that Ensign John Sevork could attempt a mind meld. 

Before it had fallen out due to radiation poisoning a little over a year ago, Rhonda Carter’s hair had been brown and fell long and perfectly straight almost to the back of her knees. It had grown back gray and coarse, no longer perfectly straight. Now dyed a number of shades of bright blue, her hair fell to the middle of her back. 

She sat on the edge of her bed, bright blue eyes staring intently into the dark brown eyes of the dark-skinned young vulcan, seated in the only chair in her quarters. Sevork’s human ancestry was Mexican. He had recently shaved the sides of his head and dyed his thick hair a dark purple, arranged into a spiky mohawk. His fingers framed his captain’s face.

The elderly klingon, General Krank, was still seated next to Carter on the edge of her bed. The bolian first officer, Lt. Cmdr. Zizira Gross, having yielded her seat to the young vulcan, had hopped up onto the captain’s desk, her legs dangling, Star Fleet issue boots not quite reaching the floor.

Rhonda Carter was not the type of person who yielded control easily. It helped that John Sevork was a powerful telepath and, oddly, it helped that he was quite young, only 24 years old, pretty much a teenager for a vulcan. Carter felt more as if he were joining her and asking questions. He had a pleasant personality and that seemed to come through even in the mind meld.

First they walked together through the various monsters Carter had encountered over the past year. A giant, bloodshot eye, the size of a baseball, looked around the bridge of her ship, then slammed into the forehead of her former first officer, Lt. Cmdr. Straiv, a vulcan whom she had rescued from the jem’hadar and who had served as her strong right arm from that moment until his death. The creature that had taken him over had made him shoot both her and General Krank with a phaser set to kill. A wound that had very nearly killed both of them.

It was only shortly after that she had been dragged, in her dreams, across a thousand light years, into the dreaming consciousness of deadly machines that had been constructed to end a civilization. Some time later, the telepathic influence of some benign, but powerfully telepathic silicon-based lifeform had reached into her mind, causing her to unconsciously paint her fingernails and eyelids to match the colors used by a lance corporal of the United States Marines.

Carter had taken her ship and crew out of the Milky Way and into the Jar Galaxy while under the spell of giant, singing aliens who bore an odd resemblance to ants. She had stood with them on a planet as they used their songs to battle some horrifying, barely defined monster in the skies. And now, having been deafened to protect her from their songs, she had somehow summoned something in her desperation to hear again.

It was only after having reviewed all these experiences with her that Ensign Sevork ventured into Carter’s memories of her recent dreams. The grotto that was, and yet was not in Cloudland Canyon State Park. The impossible appearance of General Krank inside the cave that the minuscule captain had only barely been able to squeeze into. The elderly klingon general speaking with the voice of her now long-deceased wife:

“You do not understand. You are not listening. But you will.”

“You are listening now, not hearing. But you will… Because you so want to hear…”

Now new dream details were coming up. Things she dreamed but had not carried into her waking memory. The kite-shape of the pupils of General Krank’s eyes - had that been a reflection of her fears of the creature she had seen in the sky? Or was it a harbinger of the thing that had reached out to her?

The stalactite in the grotto - oddly shaped like the land thorns that housed the trans-dimensional mushrooms they had just escaped from - was that a harbinger or a reflection of her own fears?

There were really no concrete clues as to what was coming. Even in its words to her - it hadn’t said it was coming. 

But somehow she knew it was.

Somehow, John Sevork was able to validate that instinct. 

Something had reached out to her in her dreams.

It had changed her, silencing the roar of her deafness, giving her some peace.

It had communicated with her.

And it was coming…

12.12