The deck rocked beneath Taes’ feet.  Those erratic movements stole any semblance of balance from the strength of her legs.  Taes fell to the deck and Doctor Marl Trojet did too, landing eye-to-eye with her.  Gasping for air, the antiseptic smell of the deck plates filled her nostrils.  Overpowering sense memory took her back to a previous time and place.  Bizarrely, the more she remembered, the more she recognised none of the memories as her own.

The heady mixture of Vulcan telepathy, Deltan empathy and Trill isoboramine had landed Captain Taes into a psionic mindscape intertwined between Lieutenant T’Kaal, herself and Marl Trojet.  Taes somehow knew she was laying on the deck of the escape pod that had rescued Trojet from the dying starship Sef.  Having already revealed so much of herself in their mind meld, Taes felt some small victory at piercing further into Trojet’s thoughts.

After nearly a quarter century in Starfleet, Taes had developed a familiarity with the movement of a starship’s deck.  She had a knack for feeling the tension between an impulse engine, the inertial dampers, and external forces.  The swaying of the escape pod felt nothing like she had ever felt before.  Scrabbling to her hands and knees, Taes crawled across the deck to reach for the porthole in the side of the pod.  Because the blast shield was retracted, she could see through the porthole and what she saw drained away every last bit of victory she had felt.

“Kunhri Three,” Taes groaned.  Trojet’s memory of the escape pod had landed deep into one of Taes’ experiences as captain of the USS Dvorak.  The escape pod was floating on one of Kunhri III’s seas.  Through the porthole, Taes spotted what looked like a campfire on the shore, where Taes and her senior staff had seeded an algae farm for the starving Reman population.

“I read your proposal, Doctor Trojet,” Taes said without looking at him.  “The Starfleet Science Academy retained it in their archives even after they rejected it.  I think I can see what Fillian was talking about.”

Taes shifted herself into one of the acceleration seats, and she asked, “How would you respond if I suggested your proposal relied on theoretical modelling of the Bajoran wormhole that our understanding of science doesn’t fully comprehend?”

“I’ve heard it all before,” Trojet said dismissively from the chair opposite.  “They were wrong and Fillian was wrong and you were wrong.  I proved it.  I created that wormhole and you never did.  If that wormhole unlocked a door to where the Dominion fleet was being held prisoner, then you should be looking at Fillian.  He was the one operating the controls.  He must have manipulated the transkinetic vectors.”

“Wouldn’t you have noticed?” Taes asked.

“Not with certainty.  Not an absolute guarantee,” Trojet said, his intensity translated into his sudden defensiveness.  “The experiment was decentralised.  None of my advisors, none of my technicians, saw more of the experiment than was necessary.  The experiment only ever cohered together in my mind.  Still, I could only spare to look at so many monitors at once.  Fillian had every opportunity to recalibrate the probes or the deflector dish.”

“You took a risk with stark compartmentalisation,” Taes said.  “It’s little wonder the experiment led to unimaginable, disastrous results.  Millions of people have died, Marl.  You could have relied on your compatriots for support–“

“What support?” Trojet retorted.  “I was rejected.  Me!  I could not believe.”

As incoherent as dream-logic could be, the shoreline appeared very far away from the lifeboat, and yet very near the lifeboat, simultaneously.  Even though their pod was still swaying on the water, the porthole revealed a view into a memory of Taes and Yuulik laying side-by-side in the grass around the campfire.

Looking up at the stars, memory-Taes said, “You can’t be afraid to be wrong when you have nothing.  You have to do something.“

Trojet waved a hand at the porthole.  “You said it yourself, captain.  When one is bereft of support, one can’t wait for the perfect day.  There is virtue in action.  One must do something.”

Overcome by vertigo for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three: it felt to Taes as if the recollection of that memory had cost her something.  She felt like days had been shaved off the end of her lifespan.

Breathlessly, Taes asked, “Did you… do something?  Did you evoke my own memory?”

“You gave so much of yourself to Yuulik,” Trojet said, his dark eyes locked onto her.  His eyes felt like they were boring into Taes, seeing into her at a subatomic level.  “And yet Yuulik only took more from you.  She took and took and took.  Just like Fillian did to me.  Just like all the others before him.”

Taes shifted in her seat and she heard a splashing at her feet.  Looking down, she saw the escape pod had flooded up to her ankles.

“We’re sinking!” she said.

Looking up, she saw her reflection in the porthole, but it was T’Kaal’s reflection looking back at her, rather than her own.

“Lieutenant,” Taes asked, “What’s happening?”

T’Kaal’s reflection winced at Taes and she said, “The willpower of… the symbiont is unpredictable…”

“Oh no no no no, captain,” Trojet said, but this time his tenor was thick with menace.  “I was wrong.  T’Kaal saw it all.  You were the one who disregarded Yuulik even after she proved her capabilities.  You tossed her aside again and again.  On the Dvorak, at Kunhri III, you selected an inferior mind to serve as your science chief.”

“You’re nothing like me,” Trojet went on insistently.  “You’re just like every institute trying to stifle my research.  So you can hoard all the glory for yourself.  You put your puppet Priya in command to sideline Yuulik’s research.”

“Priya tried to lift Yuulik up,” Taes said, refuting his very premise.  The water inside the pod had risen to the level of Taes’ waist.  She dashed to the opposite end of the pod, patting down the escape hatch with the palms of her hands.  

Incensed by Trojet’s evasion, Taes kept saying, “Priya gave Yuulik every opportunity to do the work and Yuulik took every one of those opportunities to criticize Priya publicly.”  Frustrated that she couldn’t locate the manual release handle, Taes cried out, “Even after Priya died, Yuulik still insulted her to prove she should have been chief all along.  That’s no way to foster loyalty in a crew!”

Taes bashed her fists against the escape hatch, as futile as it was.  She punched the duranium panel until her knuckles bled and the water had flooded up to the level of her neck.

“Who could blame her?” Trojet roared back at Taes.  The taller man easily kept his head above the waterline, but he made no effort to escape the pod.  “After you humiliated Yuulik and ground her into the mud, she had to fight her way back to her feet.  Just like my wormhole project.  Maybe the Jem’Hadar dished out a few bloody noses, but Daystrom and Starfleet won’t forget my name now.  My proposals will never line the bottom shelf again!”

“You’re right; you’re just like Yuulik,” Taes gasped out, tilting her head back and desperately paddling to keep her face above the water.  “The hubris!  You’re unnecessarily secretive and you cut out all your peers.  You say it’s because you know better, but you just want all the credit to yourself.  You’re a creature of emotion, doctor.  You’ve made a terrible mistake out of a moment of need and that fundamental need was denial.”

“You’re lying about Fillian,” Taes said.  There was so little air left in the escape pod, her lips were practically touching the overhead.  “You’re scared of the Dominion, you’re scared of this mind meld, you’re scared about what’s… happening to you.  It’s natural.  So you lied!”

“All right, you caught me, captain,” Trojet allowed.  “Fillian isn’t worthy of being joined.  How could he possibly know even the first step in sabotaging my work?  It was me.  It was all me.  I created the artificial wormhole to rescue the lost fleet.”

The water overtook them; the pod sank to the bottom of the sea.

“- – and the winner of the Okuda Award for 2401 is… Doctor Marl Trojet!”

In his finest formalwear jumpsuit, Marl Trojet ascended the stage of the Daystrom Institute’s Graves Ballroom.  He accepted the crystalline award in one hand and he accepted a microphone in the other.

“It was me,” he said into the microphone.  “It could only have been me.  No one but I could have summoned the dark cloud of the Dominion to galvanize the Federation.  The reduction of war will allow us to cast all distractions aside.  Science will lead the way for the Federation to become the greatest power in the galaxy!  Wormhole travel will eliminate the need for warp drive, for dilithium.  Our people will know no boundaries!”

Through the towering windows behind Trojet, the Okinawa cliffside was nowhere to be seen.  The vast night of space was all that was waiting on the other side of those windows.  Jem’Hadar battleships swept by, circling the ballroom in a holding pattern.  Further out, the unholy pyramid of the artificial wormhole burned in the distance.  By all appearances, the ballroom was free-floating in the Iauna system.

On the ballroom floor, another Marl Trojet stepped out of the crowd, wearing the same tattered jumpsuit he’d been wearing aboard the escape pod.  He raised two flutes of sparkling wine and he handed one of them to Taes.  Taes had found herself in her dress uniform, somewhere far deeper into Trojet’s thoughts and experiences than before.  The flute was the only thing she was accepting from him.

“I don’t believe all that,” she said.

Pressing himself into Taes’ personal space, Trojet asked, “Do you deny history?  The story of the Federation is littered with scientists of hubris.  You said it yourself.  You’ve been mentoring one for the past year after all.  We make it possible.  You wouldn’t be travelling the galaxy without scientists who overreached.  Even your failed colony on inhospitable Nivoch must have been a bold scientist’s experiment only a couple of centuries ago.”

Trojet clinked his glass against Taes’ and he took a sip.

“War has a way of clarifying priorities,” Trojet said.  “No one will ever reject my proposals again.”

Sighing, Taes shook her head at him.  She handed off her glass to a passing waiter.

“That’s too easy,” Taes said.  “It’s a story you’re telling me.  How deep is the need inside of you that you could knowingly unleash such a terror on the galaxy?”

Trojet scoffed at her.  “How could you?” he asked and he gestured at Yuulik with the wave of a hand.

Behind Yuulik, through one of the tall windows, the USS Sarek passed into view.  Directly in its path of travel, a temporal vortex swirled out of the nothingness of space.  Despite the protestations of the Sarek’s impulse engines, the Sutherland-class starship went tumbling into the maw of the temporal vortex.

Memory echoes of Lieutenant Yuulik and Captain Taes were seated at a table by the window.  Taes was tucked into the table in her captain’s chair.  A bridge science console protruded from the dining table surface where the echo of Yuulik was sitting.

Raising an eyebrow in mild irritation, that other Taes asked Yuulik, “What have you done?”

Through a self-satisfied smirk, Yuulik answered, “I couldn’t risk asking for permission.  I’ll beg for your forgiveness instead.”

With only the table between them, the other Taes fixed Yuulik with a disappointed stare.  Other Taes raised her chin and she huffed out a breath.  

Looking back on that interaction from the start of the year, Taes literally saw herself from a new angle.  She had spent the past couple of months punishing Yuulik with silence.  In that moment between them, the prolonged silence grew heavy, almost unending.

“Say something,” Taes said to her other self.

Silently, Other Taes blinked at Yuulik a couple of times.

“Say something!” Taes shouted at herself.

Other Taes rubbed the back of her neck, her gaze starting to wander to another diner around the table.

“Say something!” the voice of T’Kaal chimed in from the very air around them.

Another Trojet interjected, “You said she was my mirror.”  He moved out from the crowd of partygoers and he sashayed in Taes’ direction.  He was leading a companion by the hand.  

Another Yuulik followed Trojet’s lead, shufflying in an obedient manner.  Yuulik was dressed in a hospital gown and there was a hypospray hanging absurdly from the side of her neck.  Taes hadn’t seen Yuulik in such condition since their mission to the Delta Quadrant.  In fact, this Yuulik hardly appeared conscious, despite remaining on her feet.  She seemed more like a twisted mirror of what might have happened after Yuulik experimented on herself to uncover the secrets of blood dilithium.

“She’s secretive like me, you said,” Trojet intoned to Taes.  “She trusts nothing with her peers, you said.  She’s confident in her abilities, but you say that means she wants all the credit for herself.”

Trojet shook his head at Taes, making a “tsk tsk tsk” sound as he dropped his chin to look down at her.  “What has this war done to you,” he asked, “to make you distrustful of your closest confidants?  Your crew?  Aside from dearly departed Kellin, Yuulik is essentially your only family, isn’t she?”

Her throat tight, Taes said, “She danced on the knife’s edge of Federation law against genetic experimentation.”

“When she did this,” Trojet said, “did you invade her mind?”  He side-stepped Yuulik and took hold of her by both shoulders.  Trojet pushed Yuulik to face Taes, forced Taes to stare deeply into Yuulik’s vacant eyes.  

“Did you visit her intentions?” he asked.

“No, I had no reason to do so,” Taes retorted.  “There were no risks to Federation security.  She was only a danger to herself.  I insisted on mandatory counselling for Yuulik and I consulted with JAG to ensure she had broken no Federation law.”

Out of nowhere, T’Kaal was standing by Taes side.  She asked, “Did you discipline her?”

Taes blinked at that question.

“Ahhh, no,” Taes said hesitantly.  “Yuulik had broken no laws, given the grey areas of epigenet–“

“Captain, you have altered the conditions of my question to you,” T’Kaal evenly said.  “Technical matters of law aside, did you overlook Yuulik’s conduct unbecoming of a Starfleet officer?”

“Nuh– No,” Taes replied. “I recognised her faults.”

T’Kaal’s voice raised by an eighth of an octave.  “And then you chose to keep that recognition to yourself?”

“No,” Taes said more sternly.  “I recognised her faults.  Yuulik knew how I felt about her mistakes.  She’s been attending mandatory counselling for–.”

“Captain,” T’Kaal said, “If you issued no discipline, no controls for further misbehaviour, logic would dictate you condoned her faults.”

Snapping back, Taes said, “You’re twisting my words, lieutenant.  I recognized Yuulik’s faults and I recognized the mitigating circumstances.  Under the Brenari influence, Nune had manipulated Yuulik.  Manipulated her need to prove herself.  She was desperate to prove herself, just like Trojet, to prove she should be the chief science–“

In a pique of unearthly rage, T’Kaal snarled, “I do not care if Yuulik felt bad!”  

Every circling Jem’Hadar battleship fired torpedoes on the ballroom in thundering pathetic fallacy.  It took less than five seconds for the Graves Ballroom to explode in an inferno of fire and splinters and smoke.  

Taes, T’Kaal and Trojet remained.  

Unharmed.  

Alone together.  

They floated in an empty patch of space.

“I didn’t ignore them.  I recognised them.  We all did,” Taes whispered.  “We’re all experts at recognizing the faults in others.  It can be rather more difficult to recognize our own responsibility for those same faults we see in others.”

Considering Trojet, Taes said, “You wanted absolute control over your experiments.  No input; no oversight.  Those scientific institutes clearly overlooked the genius in your wormhole design.  You encouraged their rejection by holding your experiment so close, so tightly, you refused to take in their feedback.  You wanted to be the famous wormhole inventor so strongly, you’d rather take credit for the lost fleet than admit you brought this terror into the universe by accident.“

“Six years,” Trojet said.  “Fourteen failed proposals.  It can’t have been for nothing.  It can’t.  It can’t.  I won’t get another chance.  I’m dying… aren’t I?”

Taes nodded.  “You didn’t know the Jem’Hadar would be on the other side of the wormhole.  You never worked with the Dominion.”

“I didn’t,” Trojet said.

“He didn’t,” T’Kaal confirmed.

Taes supposed, “You imported too many unknowable, trans-dimensional theories from the Bajoran wormhole in your designs without understanding why they work.  Without advice from those fourteen institutions.  It attracted your unstable, artificial wormhole into the very fabric of the Bajoran wormhole.  All because you hoped your wormhole would be better than Kahn’s.”

“I did,” Trojet said.  “You rejected Yuulik’s behaviour fourteen times, but you never stopped it.  You didn’t make her better.  You tacitly condoned it.  Every second chance you gave her was another opportunity to make the same mistake again.  You only hoped she would be better.  Better than her own worst instincts.  Better than you.”

“I did,” Taes said.

“You did,” T’Kaal confirmed.