Tiyanna walked to school, feeling very alone. It had been a few weeks since her father -- her second father -- had passed away unexpectedly. She missed him, and she felt very empty inside.
The crowd felt oppressive. She wanted to run home. She wanted to be anywhere but the corridors she and her father had walked so recently. Tiyanna had expected him to be there for a good long time -- maybe not as long as she would live, but certainly much longer than she'd had.
She narrowly avoided bumping into a man wearing Vulcan ceremonial robes. "I'm so sorry, honored one."
"Live long and prosper, my child," the robed one said in a soothing and familiar voice. "Your father is with you always."
Tiyanna looked down and saw a ring on her finger with a large green gem. She gazed into the gem, and saw her two fathers -- Tarik and her birth father -- standing together, Tarik wearing his dress uniform and her birth father wearing what she recognized as priestly garments of her people. They were shaking hands and she seemed to gain a great deal of peace from the image.
The Vulcan was nowhere to be found.
School could wait -- this once. Tiyanna rushed to her mother's shop.
Kassia waited behind the counter of her shop. It had taken her time to recover from Tarik's loss. Paul, Sikal, Wallace, everyone had helped as much as they could. The condolences and well wishes had taken days to go through just from sheer volume.
She looked at the scroll the Vulcan Science Academy had sent her, the prophecy that doomed her present but promised her future. A Vulcan walked into the shop.
"Live long and prosper," she said, giving the Vulcan greeting salute.
"Peace and long life, Madame Kassia," the Vulcan intoned, returning the salute. "I have an artifact which may be of interest to you."
Artifacts from Vulcan had not been a great priority for Kassia lately, given the consequences the last artifact she'd received from Vulcan had bore. "What do you have?"
The Vulcan placed a ring with a large green stone on the counter, then turned and left. "He is always with you," the Vulcan said in a familiar voice as he left the shop.
Kassia looked at the ring, and felt an impulse to place the ring on her finger.
She immediately had a vision...
A distant world, covered with ruins Kassia somehow recognized. This was her world, Albacete, as it existed now. Her people lived in holes in the ground, in caves, deep in primordial forests, hiding, barely remembering what they once were. Another race, cruel and misshapen with the genes of races long past, dominated them. She found their name. The Krel.
The Krel, not the Borg, had destroyed her people. Like the Borg, however, they assimilated their conquests, absorbing their genetic structures to enhance their own. The Tercerim, the female psi-mages who ruled the Albacetians, were defeated in battle and scattered to the stars, to keep their genes from being absorbed by the Krel. Kassia's and Tiyanna's forebears had been amongst this diaspora.
The remaining, mundane Albacetians eked out a barely nominal existence on their own homeworld. One of them looked up one day and saw a streak of light in the sky...
A humanoid being landed in the midst of the Krel's main city. It was arrayed in a suit of armor not unlike a secret weapon she had once seen in her husband's mind. But it was much larger and more powerful, unleashing ravenous energies that consumed the Krel and their works.
Ships appeared from the skies. Starfleet, Mulluran, Ferengi, Nausicaan, and freighters of all descriptions. From a ship named Hawking a shuttle departed and landed. Kassia saw herself, several years older, along with a fully grown Tiyanna accompanied by a Starfleet officer she did not know. Another man she didn't recognize was there... Tercerim spots with Romulan ears. A son? The name Sulok came unbidden to her mind.
This party and thousands of others continued the reconquest of Albacete, led by the strange being in armor. The armored being departed once the mightiest of the Krel works had been dispatched, leaving the Albacetians to win their own freedom and destiny.
So it shall be, in years to come, a voice told her. He has not forsaken you, and he shall always love you. Honor his life by living yours to the fullest.
The vision ended. Kassia could feel tears of sadness and joy coming to her eyes as Tiyanna entered the shop. Tiyanna also wore a ring exactly like hers.
Mother and daughter embraced. School and the shop could wait one more day.
Eugene and Lera Loomis had met with an icy reception from the Loomis family upon their arrival at the New Omaha starport. It wasn't the first time Loomis had reflected that the worst thing about his family -- and his homeworld -- was their utter refusal to admit to being wrong.
"Well, it looks as though you've certainly done all right for yourself. At least you're not a burden to the family," his father commented in a private moment. "But how could you have done such a thing?"
"Done what, Father?"
"You've married a nonhuman! You know how we feel about these things!"
Loomis felt, not for the first time, an impulse to withdraw. "Lera is the finest woman I know. She was there for me when very few other people were. I don't see what your justification is for being like this."
"It's just not natural!"
Finally, he'd had enough. "And what is natural? For a person's own family to disown him on hearsay? If the way people around here behave is supposed to be proper human behavior, then I'm ashamed to be a part of my own race!"
"How dare you say that! We've always been there for you!"
"I've had enough of the bigotry, Father. Lera is mine and I am hers and that's all there is to it. And where were you when I was trying to appeal my dismissal from the Academy? 'You squandered your one good shot, Gene!' is all I heard. My good fortune over the past year is due to some fine people, not all of them humans. In fact, most of them weren't. A Romulan and a Vulcan helped me to appeal the dismissal. A Bolian became my wife. And I now hold a reserve commission in the G'kra forces, along with honors from Starfleeet for what I've done!" One of Tarik's last acts had been to recommend a reinstatement for Loomis in light of his services to the covert operation against the Mullurans. It had resulted in a very unusual arrangement: honorary discharge as a lieutenant commander in Starfleet Intelligence with a pension for services rendered. Unfortunately Tarik hadn't lived to see it.
"And what have you done besides run a general store at the ass-end of space?"
"Read my book -- you'll learn everything. I helped bring the Mulluran Empire to its knees, and established a pretty damn profitable business in the process. I would have loved to have had you along for the ride, but you apparently didn't think I was good enough."
"Is that why you came back? To berate us? To belittle us, now that you're so high and mighty?"
Loomis thought. "Not at all. If you're willing to be a part of my life, you're welcome. I forgive you. In a way you helped me to become stronger. But if you want into my life, you need to accept all that it is, without reservation."
"I don't know if we can do that... it's all so different..."
"The whole universe is different, Father. And I've helped make it so. The choice is yours."
And with that, Eugene Loomis walked out the door.
Loomis Senior suddenly had a tremendous headache. He experienced the pain, the heartache, the disappointments his son had experienced over the past several years. The taunting, the bullying by a psychopath who had no other mission in life. He also saw the love and compassion his son had received from others. And he saw the great work his son had done: funding and serving as a conduit for funds to a massive underground resistance movement, helping miners down on their luck when their company devalued its scrip, outfitting farmers and settlers for most of the sector. Hours in the gym and credits spent for charity. Mulluran spies assassinated. Information passed one way and another. And he saw it from another man's perspective.
Immediately the elder Loomis rushed out the door and embraced his son.
A man in Vulcan robes stood unnoticed outside the block of apartments where the Loomis family resided. He disappeared without comment.
Richard Wallace settled into his new office in San Francisco as part of the Starfleet Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was the largest desk he'd ever commanded.
Yes, he had unparalleled responsibilities now. He was responsible for intelligence estimates for the entire Gamma Quadrant. He was also responsible for at least two dozen clerks in the outer office, all of whom had come to him at least twice looking for his input on something. Just another damn desk job...
One of those clerks announced a visitor. "Sir, there's a Vulcan gentleman outside who's very insistent upon seeing you."
"Did he give a name?"
"No, sir."
"If he won't give me his name, I won't give him my time. Next!" Wallace turned around to find the Vulcan in full robes standing in front of his desk.
The Vulcan deposited a PADD on his desk. Wallace looked down at the PADD. When he looked up, the Vulcan had vanished as quickly as he'd come.
The PADD contained a massive datafile entitled
'ERIARTI EMPIRE -- CURRENT TACTICAL AND INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES'
Wallace switched on his comm. "This is Admiral Wallace. I need to speak to Admiral Zultok immediately!"
He didn't notice until later that he was wearing an unfamiliar green ring.
You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles marks a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution.
We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, of making winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times...
And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight...
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war..."
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.
I bid you farewell.
---General Douglas MacArthur, 1962, and perhaps the most apt final words for General Tarik, 2386.
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