The Entropy Effect

He ordered the lights out again and lay in the darkness trying to get back to sleep. But he knew that in the morning he would not forget the dreams he had tonight.

In her darkened cabin, Hunter looked up from the backlighted reading screen and shivered. Had she dozed off? She did not think so. She leaned back, stretched, rubbed her temples, and returned her attention to the reader. The paper it displayed was hard going, all these years past her formal physics training, but the work was bizarre enough to interest her. She had always thought Georges Mordreaux was a little crazy, and this work confirmed her suspicions. The fourth paper in a series of five, it had a publication date two years past. Hunter could find no reference to any succeeding monograph, to paper number five.

She wondered what had happened to Mordreaux after he quit the Makropyrios in a fit of pique and bruised ego. He always signed his papers, but never added any location.

Hunter felt too restless to concentrate on physics. She turned off the reader, folded it against the wall, and went up to the cockpit to prepare Aerfen for docking with Aleph Prime.

Her crew needed replacements even worse than Aerfen needed fixing, but Starfleet had her request and had not yet deigned to answer. Every time Hunter ran into the bureaucracy, which she did more and more frequently the more responsibility she earned, she daydreamed about resigning. She could always join the free commandoes. Or just go home and stay for a while. She was not due for a sabbatical for two more years; the best she could hope for in the meantime was a few weeks home with her family, with her daughter; and a few days by herself, in the mountains, to renew her friendship with the phoenix eagle who had watched over her while she found her dream-name.

Hunter shook her head. She could get hopelessly sentimental sometimes; if she got any more maudlin she would start thinking about Jim Kirk, and that would bring on a bad case of “if onlies.”

If only he were a completely different person, Hunter thought. If only I were, too. Then it would have worked out perfectly.

Strolling toward his office, Ian Braithewaite stopped and stuck his head into the office of Aleph Prime’s public defender.

“Hi, Lee, how you feeling today?”

“Better,” she said. “I must have started to get a bug, but it’s gone now.”

“Good.”

“Anything interesting coming up?” she asked. “I’m tired of pleading fines for drunken miners. Why don’t you turn up a good smuggling case?”

“Don’t I wish,” he said.

“Want to go for coffee later?”

“Sure,” Ian said. “I’ll meet you after court.”

He went on down the hall and to his office, to start in on his moderately heavy load of massively boring cases, day after day, always the same.

Without a sound, without a motion, Mandala woke. She went from deep dreaming sleep to complete wakefulness in an instant. She felt cold, with the sweat of fear.

Almost as quickly as she awakened, she remembered where she was: her own cabin, on the Enterprise , her new assignment. Not back in the patrol, not in the midst of a fire-fight. She rubbed the ache beneath the scar on her left shoulder. She must have strained the old break during a workout. She really should find time to regrow the bone. It was silly to put up with the discomfort. And this time the twinge of pain had prodded memory and brought on her nightmare.

But it was just a nightmare. She had faced and overcome its dangers just as she had beaten other perils, real ones, and the struggle and victory had suffused her with a fierce joy.

Hikaru slept peacefully beside her. The faint light gleamed on his shoulders. He lay face-down with his head pillowed on his arms, turned toward her. Yesterday, they had both realized they wanted, and needed, to spend as much time together as they could, even if he were soon to leave the Enterprise .

He was so gentle ... Mandala did not like to think of him hardened by the violence he would encounter in his next assignment. But she could not say so to him. Her reasons were too selfish; and she would, in effect, be telling him to give up his ambitions.

He might be strong enough to come through the experience unchanged. It was possible. But it was about as likely as his chances of advancing farther without making the transfer at all.

She pushed away the depressing thoughts, for she still felt exhilarated by her dream. Her heart beat quickly; she was excited. She leaned down and kissed the point of Hikaru’s shoulder. She kissed the corner of his jaw, his ear, his temple. His eyes opened, closed, opened.

He drew in a long breath. “I’m glad you woke me up.”

“I’m glad you woke up.” She brushed her fingertips languorously up and down his back. He shivered. “You got me out of some nightmare,” he said.

Bad?

“It seems like it... but I can’t remember anything about it, now.”