The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek Read Online Free PDF Page A

fellow El-Aurians were safe on the Enterprise -B, and his parents were dead.
    He appreciated the irony. Here he was on another Enterprise. He should have felt safe, but he didn’t. Tyvan never felt safe, knowing the Borg were out there, somewhere. Waiting. Biding their time. Machines were patient. Machines didn’t know guilt, or fear. Machines could wait—forever, if necessary.
    “Please?” asked Bat-Levi again, her tone testy now, and Tyvan blinked back to the present.
    Darya Bat-Levi was no Borg. The woman sitting in the overstuffed beige armchair—the chair he reserved for patients—was in her early thirties, and Tyvan thought she’d once been beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful now. An explosion and long exposure to theta radiation had taken care of that. A taut, shiny pink scar ran from her right temple to the angle of her jaw and trailed down into the hollow of her throat. The scar was so tight the right corner of Bat-Levi’s mouth pulled down into a lopsided grimace. Tyvan knew from Bat-Levi’s medical files that her hair had once been black. Most of it still was, except for a wide, silvery-white swath that ran from just above her right eyebrow and streaked over her ear like the tail of a dying comet. Her spine, from thoracic vertebra four on down, was a titanium implant. And there were the artificial limbs made of titanium alloy and polydermal sheaths: Bat-Levi’s legs, and her left arm and hand, the one whose fingers had no nails.
    Her body mass was now sixty-six percent metal, thirty-four percent everything else, give or take. That’s the way Tyvan figured it. Bat-Levi didn’t move like a Borg, or even look that much like a Borg. She squealed when she walked, though this meant that she needed to get her servos adjusted. (Tyvan thought she let her servos go on purpose, and he would get to that, all in good time, and probably tonight. There was method to his madness, too.) The medical engineers hadn’t been able to restore much in the way of sensation, but he knew that Bat-Levi felt pressure, and she felt pain. She needed pressure sense, or else she couldn’t walk, and she needed to feel pain, or she’d never know to pull her hand out of a fire. Her skin was pink, not a sickly grayish-white; she had a soul and emotions. Her mind—imprisoned in the body Tyvan was sure she cherished—was her own. Tyvan knew that Darya Bat-Levi didn’t have the foggiest idea who the Borg were, or even that they existed. Few in the Alpha Quadrant did. Yet.
    “Sorry,” said Tyvan. His fear had made his underarms damp with sweat, and perspiration crawled beneath his collar. “My mind wandered a bit there. The hour, I guess. I apologize.”
    “If you’d like me to come back another time,” said Bat-Levi, her tone hopeful. “I know I’m tired and ...”
    “No,” said Tyvan, cutting her off. He watched her face settle into an expression just shy of sullen resentment. “I’m with you right now. This is your time.”
    “My time.” Bat-Levi mouthed the words as if they tasted bad. Her scar rippled as she clenched her jaw. “I hate when you psychiatrists couch things as matters of choice when there are none. Like I asked for this, like I came to you and said I really wanted to spend time in here.”
    “No one’s forcing you to talk about anything, Darya.”
    “Oh, no?” That tiny snick again, as she readjusted her spine, as if some bit of metal had snapped back into place. “I have to be here, don’t I? Five sessions, that’s the number, right? That’s as many sessions as you need to write up a report, recommend whether or not I can stay active. You and Starfleet and the Vulcan shrinks ... you all agreed. A precondition to my coming back to duty: Keep an eye on the crazy woman. Doesn’t matter that I do my job just fine. You’re all just worried that I’m still crazy.”
    “I don’t know if the Vulcans think you’re crazy. I didn’t speak with your physician.”
    “But you read his