Prynn passed the shuttle’s forward section and headed for the camp. She slowed her pace, trying to be quiet so that she would not wake Shar. He had come to this afternoon, and had been sheepish and apologetic for his outburst this morning. She had waved the incident away, then checked his injuries and provided him what little care she could. He had at least been able to eat and drink, which she hoped would allow him to retain whatever strength he had right now.
Prynn put down the beacon, stripped off her jacket, and flopped down onto her bedroll. Fatigue affected her both physically—she had spent a lot of effort digging through the shuttle wreckage—and mentally—the reconstitution of a working transporter had been far from a trivial matter. And she also supposed that she had been taxed emotionally, with the—
“Prynn?” Shar’s voice sounded very small in the night.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?”
“No…well, yes, actually,” he said. “I’ve been lying here falling in and out of sleep, thinking and dreaming.” Shar’s voice, though low, sounded fairly strong. Prynn squinted through the darkness in his direction. She had not yet extinguished her beacon, and he was just visible in the fringes of its illumination. He lay on his back, his head turned toward her, and though she could not tell anything about his complexion in the dimness, he eyes appeared more alive than she had seen them in the last day and a half.
She reached over to where she had set the beacon down. “I’m going to turn the light out,” she warned Shar.
“Would you leave it on?” he asked. “For a few minutes?”
“Oh,” she said, surprised at the request. “Sure.” She pulled a blanket over her body.
“Did you have any success with the transporter?” Shar asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I actually got it working, but because of the interference from the energy, the range is limited.” She told him the distances to which she had successfully been able to beam objects. “I’ve started to reconfigure the environmental suits as pattern enhancers in order to address that,” she continued. “It should help, but I’m not sure how much.”
“You’re trying to use the environmental suits as pattern enhancers?” Shar asked. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s not a common practice outside of flight testing,” she explained. “I also have another idea. I’ll need your help with it, though.”
“What do you want me to do?” Shar said.
“The primary power cell for the shuttle’s internal systems was destroyed,” she said. “The backup’s intact, but it’s not working, either. Fortunately, the secondary backup is working, and that’s what I’m currently using to power the transporter.”
“All right,” Shar said.
“If we can get the primary backup cell to function,” she went on, “then I think I might be able to construct another working transporter out of what’s left of the primary, its backups, and the environmental suits.”
“If one transporter won’t help us,” Shar asked, “then what good will a second one be?”
“We can beam ourselves and the second transporter and power cell,” she explained, “and then use the second system to beam the first one to our new location. Then we can keep doing that, sort of skipping across the planet until we reach the far side, where there are breaks in the cloud cover.”
Shar seemed to think about that for a moment—Prynn wondered whether he might have drifted back to sleep—and then he said, “That could work.” Even though his voice remained quiet, Prynn thought she heard some excitement in it.
“I think so too,” she said. “But the problem is that primary backup cell. I can fix it, but it’s going to take me a while to finish modifying the suits and piecing together a second transporter. I won’t have time.”
“I can do that,” Shar said. “If you tell me how to reconfigure the environmental suits, I can help with that too.”
“Good,” she said. “We’ll start on it first thing in the morning.”
Shar said nothing more, and the silence of this empty world pushed in on them. After a few minutes, Prynn reached out from beneath her blanket and switched off the beacon. The darkness descended at once, nearly suffocating in its completeness. Prynn closed her eyes, anxious for sleep to welcome her into its fold. To her surprise, though, she was still awake fifteen minutes later when Shar spoke.
“I wonder how Commander Vaughn is doing,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Prynn responded, and she heard a coldness in her voice she had not intended. “I don’t know,” she said again, holding her tone level.
“Whatever happened between you and your father,” Shar said, “I’m sorry. I know what it’s like to be at odds with a parent.”
Prynn laughed, a loud, ugly sound that she regretted at once. It seemed as though the tension of their circumstances had caused her to lose the full control of her emotions. “I’m sorry, Shar,” she said. “I didn’t really mean to laugh.”
“It’s all right. I’m sorry that I said anything.”
“No,” Prynn told him, not wanting him to feel bad. “It’s just…you don’t know what my father did to me.” Did tome? Prynn asked herself. She must have been tired to have misspoken like that. “I mean, what he did to my mother,” she amended.
“You’re right,” Shar said. “I don’t know.” He said nothing else, neither inviting her to say more, nor stopping her from doing so. Prynn did not like talking about this, but then…after tomorrow, she might never have a chance to talk about it again.
“My mother was a Starfleet officer,” she said. “She and my father worked together a lot before I was born, but then Mom decided that she’d had enough of a soldier’s life.” Prynn felt pressure behind her eyes, and the gentle sensation of tears forming. Still, she found herself wanting to go on. “She wanted children, but Vaughn…Vaughn could never let go of the job, even after I was born. We could never really be the family Mom wanted, but she and Vaughn never fell out of love.” She could see her mother in her memory—her mother and Vaughn. Tears spilled from her eyes now, sliding coolly down the sides of her face. “I loved them both. I missed Vaughn so much when he was away, and loved it when he came home. I always wanted to be closer to him. That’s why—” She stopped, stunned at the words she had been about to say. The revelation had come to her simply and powerfully. “That’s why I joined Starfleet,” she finished. “I just wanted to share more of his life.”
When Prynn paused, Shar said, “That’s nice, that you wanted be with your father that much. But I guess something happened.”
“My mother ended up on a mission with my father again,” she said. “He ordered her away team to…” Prynn wiped a hand across her eyes, trying to dry her tears, but smearing them across her face instead. She had not spoken about this—had not thoughtabout it like this—in such a long time. It was still hard. “The away team never returned. Vaughn knew the danger, but he made the decision to send them anyway.”
“Was it the wrong decision?” Shar asked.
The question astounded Prynn. Was it the wrong decision?It had resulted in the death of her mother; how could it be anything but wrong?
“I mean…are you angry with your father because you were almost killed when the Jarada attacked us at Torona IV?” Shar asked.
“No, of course not,” Prynn answered immediately. “That wasn’t his fault.”
“On his order,” Shar said, “we didn’t defend ourselves.”
“Because if we had, it would have put a hundred thousand Europani in danger. The Jarada would have attacked the convoy.”
“That’s right,” Shar said. “So maybe there was also a good reason for the order he gave your mother’s away team.”
No,Prynn thought. No reason could justify the death of her mother. But what she heard herself tell Shar was, “I don’t know.” And she realized that she had never known. Vaughn had never talked about his decision to dispatch the away team. He had always simply taken the responsibility for her mother’s death—and she had always let him take it. “I don’t know,” she said again, wondering for the first time whether Vaughn’s guilt had been because he had given the wrongorder, or because he had given the rightone.