The sand is warm as it squeezes between my toes, each grain a tiny silicon cell of heat creating a golden hot plate that stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can see, east and west. Baked in the afternoon sun, it hums with a pleasurable warmth, the temperature barely tolerable as I’m cooled by the salty air wafting from the purple-hued sea, its cresting waves thundering quietly a few metres away. It is calm, I am happy. 

“Janza!” I hear my wife call from the safety of her awning near the dunes “Don’t let yourself get burnt!” I wave to acknowledge that I heard her, enough to allay her concerns. We both know I will be whining tomorrow as she reaches for the ointments and lotions, my pink shoulders glowing angrily. She cradles her round belly as she waves, mother of my first child. She smiles. I smile. My symbiote smiles. We three smile together. 

It is the first of many memories we will share, the first joining of this new symbiote’s millennia-long life. 

The sun is hanging low over the horizon, the tendrils of yellow light melting into oranges and reds as they reach across the cosmos uninterrupted, only to be twisted at the final moments by invisible manipulators that hang in the planet’s atmosphere. The purple waves melt into the distance, disappearing into the void of the amber horizon, now pinpricked with the brightest of our nearest stars. A surreal twilight when time becomes a meaningless word, there is only now, only the pleasant warmth of the sand and the smile on my lover’s lips. 

Trill is peaceful, Trill is calm, I could live in this moment forever. 

I hear the screaming, a blood-curdling screech that cracks my teeth and melts my dreams. The pleasurable orange glow of the sun is replaced by the vicious twitching neon of a rapidly spreading inferno as I turn to look back to the cabana. I lift my feet to run but the ground is sharp and my feet are heavy with the day’s activities. I stumble, but push forward, the heat growing on my face. It laughs at me, cruel and wicked. It pushes me back, planting its great fist into the centre of my chest, ‘try harder’ I hear it taunt. 

I cannot reach her, she is lost within the flames that buffet me like panicked bulls, racing from the rising inferno, forcing me back. She is alone, out of reach.  

I will live forever in that moment.

I saw the transit, the moment that we were dragged through the chomping maw of the ambushing portal, its toothy grin cracking across the orange backdrop of the Badlands. It raced across the thin boundary of space and subspace, a hair width at first, twisting the eye like rising heat, distorting the angry clouds of plasma that inhabited the region like heat rising from the cooked tarmac. Through the hazy ribbons of gravimetric distortion I can see Helios, her oval hull dotted with points of light as my crewmates go about their day, eating dinner, running diagnostics, and calibrating relays. Why has no one noticed the barely hidden threat, looming large in front of their nose? Then I remembered that the sensors were offline for the test. Everyone aboard was blissfully unaware of the predator that floats in front of their face. 

It hovers, sipping in a long breath before it springs its trap. I have a moment to catch it off guard, to warn Helios of the danger. I reach for the comm button. I have never known a subspace anomaly to be psychic but it bursts open at the thought, unfurling petals a mile wide that spark and dance with energetic discharges, lighting up the already violent orange sky. 

“Pheobe, emergency recall. Emer…” Oyvo is cut off, her voice silenced by a screech of interference across the channel. I heard enough and with a press of my feet to engage the throttle we are racing full speed towards home, taking the smallest arc possible around the blossoming subspace aperture, its head thrown back revealing a cackling maw. Beyond it is madness, all dancing shadows and sprinting silhouettes. Down its gullet lies a yellow river made of plasma, slipping across its electrified lips, lapped up by an invisible tongue formed of gravimetric sheers and electromagnetic eddies; it drinks in plasma from the surrounding storms, supping destruction as if it were water. 

My knuckles are white as I grip the controls, pressing with all my might into the shuttle forward aspect, my will pushing even harder against the cockpit’s window. 

Foward. Forward. 

But I am stuck, the promise of safety ahead of me, the shape of Helios suspended alongside me, the cackling portal behind. I fear I might be trapped in amber for an eternity. 

I choke back the blood wine, the burning sensation spreading down my throat like acid, etching a valley into my oesophagus with its bitter tang. It is my turn as an honoured guest to make the toast. They’re watching, I cannot flinch. I raise the tankard as high as my short arms allow, barely lifting it above the heads of the assembled Klingon Bekk’s in the dining room, its grey rim barely peeking over their creased foreheads and gigantic quaffed hair. I am suddenly aware of the number of eyes upon me, leering across shoulders, peering through gaps in dark manes of hair and gazing from shadowed doorways, as the silence falls on the room. 

I can hear the symbiote in the back of my head, ‘nothing fancy’ it urges. It rarely speaks, content to watch and learn, to collect memories for its future. I am only a second host, its wisdom is limited. For now, it speaks with my own voice, tinny as it bounces off my brainpan. I pray to anyone who is listening that I do not sound so weak out loud. 

The heat in the room is almost overwhelming, combined with the smell of a hundred men crammed between the bulkheads, all moisture is chased from my leaden tongue, even the acidic blood wine cannot dampen my mouth. I am doubly warm under the gaze of the crew, their focus bathing me in expectant gazes as their tongues slip across their lips awaiting the next opportunity to drink. The men and women of the warship Ch’Tang have been my comrades and friends for 6 months of war now, why do I fear speaking to them? 

‘Because it matters, they matter’ the symbiote answers, its tinny mimicry more knowledgeable than my own mind. 

I swallow once more, attempting to irrigate the channels of my desert mouth. 

“ nltebHa’ ” I cry, thrusting the tankard a few inches higher, feeling my arm stretch beyond its reach. 

There is silence. A gulping breath of an endless moment. Then there is a cacophony.

Cries and shouts pour into the empty air, guttural roars flexing the bulkheads of the dining room, one hand smacks my back in comradeship, another pours more battery acid wine from a jug into my empty tankard, a third shakes my shoulders in pride, still more wait to congratulate the simplicity of my toast. 

I wasn’t to know in a few weeks all those cheering voices would be gone save my own, recalled to a Starfleet ship before the final push. I wasn’t to know that they would repeat my toast through the corridors as they charged into the mouth of the Dominion above Cardassia Prime. 

Together.

My head rings and aches, if I didn’t know better I would swear I had spent the night emptying blood wine barrels. The sensation is only reinforced by the feeling of warm blood rolling down my cheeks from a sizeable laceration on my left temple, I can see the mark where I hit the canopy support, a flat oval of red on the metal where my head must have rested for a time. My helmet remains nestled in the small cubby behind my headrest, quickly forgotten in my hurry to reach the safety of Helios. I chide myself for ignoring regulations in the first place, they exist for a reason. Beyond the transparent canopy, its integrity mercifully still intact, I can see the hulking shadows of jagged objects, blocking out the sun and stars that lie far off in my hazy concussed vision. It looks metallic, my heart stops. Debris?

‘You are awake.’ I feel the symbiote stir in the back of my belly, at least it was safe. I quickly examine the flickering screen set into the nearby panel, minimal batteries, and basic life support. I too am, in the most basic sense, safe. 

‘Do you remember what happened?’ I ask to the empty cockpit, pressing my temple with the hem of my flight suit to stem the flow of blood. ‘I… might have blacked out.’

‘Yes.’ It whispered with dual voices, the juxtaposed cadences both sounding tired.

Satisfied the blood flow has been suitably staunched I turn my attention to the blackened consoles, there must be something more than air and heat. ‘Are you going to let me in on it?’ The symbiote rarely speaks and when it decides to offer its youthful wisdom, I often found it useful to keep a large jar of salt handy.

‘We saw the stars engulfed by an insatiable maw. What started as a slender wound, finer than any scalpel stroke in the fabric of space, spread open and swallowed us whole, along with our family and the deathly poison of the badlands.’ I can feel the panic in the symbiote rising, it turns my stomach as it twists with my own increasing concern, the screens remain black and the power plant appears completely offline. 

‘Continue.’ I whisper. Talking distracts it, allowing my mind to continue working on the problem at hand. Symbiosis is a union but at times I feel like a caretaker rather than a collaborator. I knew I should’ve waited for an older symbiote. ‘What did you see next?’ 

‘A rolling sea of subspace, shades of brown and black, of light and dark, racing past the window as we bounced through the rapids of a corridor. We saw Helios drifting away, sliding back down the river, slowed by its own wake in the current. We saw you beat the walls in frustration. We heard you cry for help.’ I vaguely remember that, seeing Helios slip away, taking with it our best chance of survival. 

‘We watched other beings pass by us as we floated in the stream, dancing shoals of tiny tan minnows and great whales of green and blue light, swimming along the currents of invisible energy, tinged orange with the plasma storms of our origin.” I beat the panel with my fist, as cold and useless as the rest of the dead shuttlecraft. ’We watched as the new sky twisted and turned, as we bounced and skipped like a stone carried on the undertow, scooped up and cast into an endless secret river. We watched your eyes close as gravity took its toll on your body and then we saw darkness.’ 

With no hope of power and only a few hours of usable air left, a distress call was the next option. I began reaching beneath my chair, my hands grabbing blindly for the emergency pack where two short-range distress beacons should lie. ‘I’m sorry.’ 

‘Why?’ the voices whispered. 

‘It must have been scary.’ 

‘It was wonderful, we glimpsed a mystery of the universe. We shall treasure it forever Helena.’ I can feel it smiling. I’m glad someone is. 

‘Well, you better hope that one of your minnows finds us rather than a whale, or worse a shark.’ I twist the beacon, activating its long-life battery pack. ‘Ideally Helios.’ It continues to be dark beyond the cockpit windows, the shade of the nearby debris blocking out much of the sun and starlight as it rolls slowly in the airless void. I quietly pray it won’t turn to reveal familiar numbers and letters. ‘Until then, I’ll see if I can get some more juice.’

‘Would you like a distraction whilst you work?’ the symbiote asks. Had it heard my earlier comment? 

‘Always.’ I lift the emergency batteries from the pack and begin pulling sets of ODN relays from the forward console. 

A singular voice rose from the pair that hovered perpetually at the back of my mind, Janza. ‘My wife loved to travel, I preferred to stay home…’