Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
Max Vasser felt the ka-thunk through the soles of her boots as the small probe shot out of the Rocinanté's dorsal tube.
"You sure this is going to work?" she asked dubiously. Fooling a Defiant class starship with such a simple trick seemed to her improbable at best.
"No problem," was West's confident guarantee. "I've used this a bunch of times. Sort of like tapping someone on the shoulder and then running the other way. Never fails."
"I won't even ask why you would regularly need to use tactics like this," said Max.
West studiously ignored her comment. "Besides, the decoy's holo-generator and fake warp signature only have to fool their sensors long enough for us to get off this asteroid and back into space. Speaking of which..."
West watched the sensor readouts on the console before him. "The decoy probe just went to warp... They've seen it what they think is the Rocinanté zooming away from here... And there they go, the fox after the hound!"
Instantly, he was a blur of action and efficiency that Max would never have suspected lay underneath the careless, undisciplined exterior. Within seconds, the subsonic thrum of the Rocinanté's engines was vibrating the deck underneath her feet, and moments later, her seat pushed up against her bottom as the ship quickly lifted from the asteroid and accelerated away.
"Setting course for the Black Gate -- ETA, one hour twelve minutes."
Max sat in the dim cockpit alone with her thoughts. West had gone aft some time before muttering something about the inertial bearings not sounding right, or something like that. It was still ten minutes before they arrived at their destination, the coordinates left behind twenty years ago by her father.
Her father. The man she barely knew. She felt nervous anticipation building inside her. How would she react if she actually found him now after so many years of thinking he was dead? She had a thousand questions for him. Why had he left her mother and herself? Why had he faked his death? Why hide inside a wormhole?!? And what did all this have to do with Omega and the Ancients?
Why, after twenty years, did he send a secret message to West and not her?
That, more than anything else, wounded her, thought she would never let West see her hurt and disappointment.
Did her father not trust her? Or was there a far worse explanation? Did he simply not have any feelings for his daughter?
No! Unthinkable! There had to be a reasonable explanation for every one of her father's actions no matter how cold and callous they seemed right now.
Max shook her head to dislodge the strangling tendrils of pessimism just in time to see West stroll back into the cockpit with Gromit riding on his shoulder like some bizarre pirate-and-parrot combo. West sat in the pilot seat and placed the tribble on the ledge beneath the forward window.
"Three minutes to the Black Gate," he said after a quick check of the Rocinanté's position. "Last chance to change your mind, sweetheart."
"I told you to stop calling me that," grumbled Max, though it was clear she was distracted by other concerns. Her eyes were glued to the view out the front viewports, searching for the first glimpse of the mysterious, artificial wormhole aperture that had been dubbed the 'Black Gate' for obvious chromatic reasons. Then there it was -- a faint warping effect of the background stars as though they were reflected off a giant funhouse mirror, a faint darkening of the already black sky, but all of it enshrouded by a faint glowing vortex of Hawking radiation making the gate not entirely black.
West took her non-answer as permission to continue. "Okay, we're going in at warp 5!"
Max knew they had to enter the wormhole at warp speed, but still looked at him as though he were insane and told him so.
West grinned and shrugged. "That's why you're crazy about me. Admit it."
Max snorted. "Dream on."
West's reply was a broadening of the infuriating grin, but there was no time for anything else. The Black Gate loomed before them, reaching out its gossamer tendrils of force to embrace the onrushing Rocinanté. Max clenched her eyes shut and tensed herself. She remembered all too well the disorientation, icy chill, and pain she felt during her last trip through the Gate -- a very different experience from the only other stable wormhole ever discovered, the Bajoran Wormhole, which was reportedly a very placid and calming affair. Of course, since they were barreling in at warp speed, she didn't really expect to survive more than another few seconds.
And then they were in! And they were still alive!
But there were none of the unpleasant effects Max remembered from last time. She opened her eyes to an awe-inspiring vision of complete astonishment and wonder outside the front window. Their little ship was surrounded by and zooming down a twisting tube of folded spacetime the boundaries of which were clearly delineated by a brilliant green gridwork of force lines. Beyond the lines of force, the normal lights of the universe could still be faintly glimpsed, though they looked distorted and tiny, like they were being seen from a tremendous distance and through a fisheye lens. The whole thing was something she would have expected to see in a computer-enhanced diagram of the inside of a wormhole, but she was seeing it with her own two naked eyes. It defied explanation.
At her left, West was splitting his attention between staring at the bizarre vista outside and the sensor readout on the console before him. He frowned and pounded the control top with his fist, that being his preferred method of adjusting something that was malfunctioning, but the strange readings persisted.
"What is it?" asked Max.
"The underside of the universe, sweetheart," replied West looking up at the curved walls of the wormhole above them. "The gridlines are the actual fabric of the spacetime continuum we live in -- the vacuum itself, and if these reading are right--" he pounded the recalcitrant readout again "--then the gaps between lines are exactly one Planck-length apart."
"What?!? That would make us--"
"--About the size of a quark nugget," finished West.
Max was thinking furiously. "When we entered the wormhole at warp speed, we must have punctured the wall. You can't traverse a space fold while in subspace. Our warp field actually poked a hole in the quantum foam and now we're flying through some sort of temporary universe bubble -- a quantum-level extrusion out the side of the Black Gate. Our normal metric is unbelievably expanded in here--"
"--Or we're unbelievably tiny," interjected West.
"Yeah, s'what I always suspected about you," said Max after making sure he saw her cast a quick glance at his pants. The corners of her lips turned imperceptibly upwards at West's ill-suppressed indignation. She continued her theorizing. "So right now the only thing protecting us from the environment outside and keeping us from disappearing in a puff of ghost particles is our own warp bubble."
West thought about Max's words. "Makes sense to m--"
Just then, the proximity alarm sounded. West checked the readout, then peered out the front window. "There's a ship approaching from three-hundred-thousand miles deeper inside the wormhole. Raven class, just like the one Claude flew."
He tuned the comm system to a general hailing frequency. The communications viewscreen on the front console crackled to life. At first it was filled with random static, interference from the quantum turbulences outside, but the image wavered and coalesced into a recognizable human face. West's eyes went wide, and at his side, Max let out a shocked gasp.
"Daddy!" she whispered.
The grim-visaged man stared out through the communication screen at West ignoring Max completely. At first there was no friendliness in his eyes, only suspicion and unspoken threats, but then his jaw unclenched into a tight smile in recognition of his former partner.
"Hello, West. You're looking careworn these days."
"Hi, Claude. You sure led us a merry chase," replied West in a neutral tone of voice. It seemed to him that there was something not right about Claude Vasser's face, or this entire situation, but West couldn't put his finger on whatever it was.
"Yes, well, couldn't make it easy on Section 31, could I? Plus, the Orion Syndicate was sniffing around too. I assume you got my message."
"Yeah, I got it," said West.
"Did you find-- it?"
"Yeah, we found it," said West. He held up the precious black box that contained the Omega power source in one hand for Claude to see.
At the word 'we', Claude seemed to notice for the first time the woman sitting by West's side. "Who've you got with you?" he asked, his former suspicion making a quick reappearance in his eyes.
Max had sat in silent torment all through West and her father's little reunion, but now she could contain herself no longer. "Daddy, it's me! It's Maxine!"
Claude's suspicious frown intensified. He regarded the unfamiliar woman for a few long seconds, then turned back to his old partner. "What are you trying to pull here, West? I know I was never the best father, but you think I wouldn't recognize my own daughter?"
"Apparently not," shot back West.
"Dad, don't you recognize me?" cried Max. Her tough shell was rapidly cracking and crumbling to dust under the assault of her father's perceived cold and heartless indifference.
But the image of Claude Vasser remained stolidly unaffected by the hurt in Max's brimming eyes. "Young lady, I don't know who you are or what your stake in this is, but my daughter is nineteen years old and attending Starfleet Academy back on Earth, two thousand lightyears from here."
Max and West looked at each other in confusion.
"That was twenty years ago, daddy!" exclaimed Max. She was about to go on, but West placed a hand on her shoulder.
He suddenly realized what it was that had been bothering him about Claude Vasser's appearance -- the man didn't look a day older than he did the last time West had seen him, twenty years ago! "Claude," he ventured cautiously, "do you know what year it is?"
"What?"
"Just humor me and answer the question."
Through a skeptical scowl Claude said, "Twenty-three-sixty-six. October twentieth to be exact."
"Well, it is October..." began West, but Max interrupted him.
"Dad, it's twenty-three-eighty-six! I did go to Starfleet Academy, but I graduated a long time ago. I'm a Starfleet fighter pilot now." She could tell the man on the viewscreen wasn't buying her story. "Your wife is Claudia Farmer. You had one child, me. We lived in Martian Colony 3 until I was eight, then we moved to Chryse. You said the schools were better there. I--"
"All that is in the public records, young lady," said her father stubbornly.
Max wiped away a single stray tear that had somehow managed to sneak through her emotional shield, furious at herself for showing even this tiny weakness and forcibly pulling herself back together. She had to convince her father of the truth. She gathered her strength and tried again. "When we moved to Chryse, the other kids in school would pick on me -- the new kid. I would come home in the afternoons with bruises and black eyes because I'd gotten into yet another fight. Mother would comfort me, but scold me for letting the bullies win. She would tell me to be strong, to make my father proud. Be strong and the bullies will leave me alone. Never show them any weakness, never cry, never show any soft emotions, be tough, show them what Vassers are made of! It was the best advice mother could think of to give her young daughter, because she knew that child would have to grow up without hardly ever seeing her father and would have to learn to take care of herself.
"So I did. I learned to be the toughest kid in school. Soon it was the other kids who picked on me who were the ones going home after school with the bruises and black eyes. My father would have been so proud of me. He was never home though, always away on another long cargo run, but that was okay. He was being strong, working hard to provide for mother and me. Or at least that's what he told us and what I believed, but I always looked up to him as my role model, the man who made me what I am today.
"And then he died and was buried on some Godforsaken planet out on the edge of explored space before we could even attend the funeral. Or so I thought! Now I find out my father is still alive, that he deliberately deceived me, and that he doesn't even recognize me anymore!"
During her impassioned plea, Max had undergone a startling transformation from the overwhelmed, frightened little girl longing for her father's love into an angry young woman demanding justifications for the wrongs of the past.
The silence in the Rocinanté's cockpit was thunderous. West sat motionless on his seat, darting nervous glances between the image of Claude on the comm screen and his strong-willed daughter sitting in the chair beside his. Even Gromit had stopped kvetching.
On the viewscreen, Claude Vasser squinted at the woman who had just berated him. There was something of the tone he recognized, the defiant clench of her jaw. The same he had seen on his daughter during those very few occasions his work had permitted him to return home. "Maxine? Is that really you?" he said, unsure of what was real anymore. "How can that be? You're grown up!"
"Yes, it's me, dad." A tremulous smile found its way onto Max's face. "It's... It's good to see you again."
"It's good to see you too," said Claude, breaking in to a warm smile of his own, "though I'm beginning to suspect it's been a little longer for you than it has for me. We have a lot of catching up to do... and I have some explaining to do," he added almost apologetically after a moment's more thought.
"The twisted metric of this quantum wormhole must be affecting time as well as space," said West. "I wonder how much time has passed by outside while we've been in here. Will we get out to find everyone's aged another twenty years?"
The image of Claude Vasser wrinkled his brows in thought. "I knew there was some time slippage, but I had no idea it was this much." He turned his face towards Max. "I'm so sorry, Maxine. I never meant to be gone for so long -- I just wanted a place to hide for a little while until Section 31 gave up the search. That's why I faked my death. But I was going to come back to Mars and get you and your mother as soon as the coast was clear."
"Working for Section 31 wasn't all it was cracked up to be, eh?" said West somewhat snidely.
Claude smiled ruefully. "At first it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I had unlimited resources at my disposal. I actually felt sorry for you for not having joined." He chuckled at the memory. "But after I discovered the Ancients' power device, I also found out that Section 31 was building a fleet of black ships in the Scorpio Sector. They were going to reverse-engineer the Ancient device I had retrieved and use it to power those ships, and then use that fleet to stamp out everyone they saw as a threat to the Federation. I realized then that Section 31 was totally evil and that I'd made a terrible mistake. I also knew I couldn't let them get their hands on the device so I came up with a plan to 'disappear'."
Max searched her memories. "The Scorpio Sector was destroyed by subspace weapons fifteen years ago. The whole place is a radiation-filled deathtrap. It's off limits."
On the comm screen, Claude Vasser nodded his head knowingly. "Section 31 covering their tracks. After I 'died' and they lost their chance to acquire the Ancient device, they destroyed the whole operation so no one would ever find out about it."
West picked up the story now. "So you faked your death, hid the Omega battery in plain sight where no one would suspect it to be, found a place for yourself to hide where no one would ever think of looking, and sent me that cryptic subspace email to retrieve it for you and bring it here."
"I was very careful. Plenty of witnesses saw my ship get blown up. Planted DNA evidence proved beyond doubt that it was my burned body in the wreckage. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to suspect that I wasn't really dead, so no one ever checked my empty grave. The only thing I didn't count on was the message taking twenty years to climb out of this damn wormhole," added Claude.
"But why, dad?" asked Max. "Why bring Omega here?"
Her father raised a surprised eyebrow. "Why, to destroy it, of course!" he said as if that fact should have been evident. "At first I thought it would be enough to hide it and hide myself for a while, but I've thought about it and realized that won't be enough. It needs to be destroyed. It's the only way to keep it from falling into Section 31's hands."
"Or the Orion Syndicate," added Max.
Claude waved a hand in dismissal. "They're nothing. Section 31 is the real threat. They tell themselves that everything they do is for the good of the Federation. I'm sure they justified their black fleet in the name of protecting the Federation and everything it stands for, but their very existence is an affront to the ideals of the Federation, of peace, honesty, integrity. If they get their hands on that device, they'll become an unstoppable juggernaut and the Federation as we know it will cease to exist."
Claude was cut off by a brilliant explosion of light outside, and the Rocinanté's deck heaved underneath West and Max as the shockwave hit. They managed to hold onto their seats, but Gromit went flying across the room and smacked into the back wall like a wet beanbag. He came to a rest in the corner, squeaking weakly.
West grabbed the controls and sent the Rocinanté on a wild series of evasive gyrations, though the twisting walls of their little Planck-scale wormhole made maneuvering difficult. Max meanwhile had switched to a rear view on one of the control console's viewscreens. There, outlined against the writhing green gridlines of vacuum energy was the unmistakable outline of a Defiant class starship.
"Section 31!" she hissed. "Looks like we didn't outsmart them after all."
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