The Sky's The Limit Part 31

"...I mean, what do I say?"

Riker took a sip of his tea, Darjeeling with honey this time, and settled into his chair in Picard's ready room. He was going to miss a lot of things about the Enterprise, and his teatime with Picard was probably at the top of that list. Even if, in all his years aboard Enterprise, he hadn't managed to find a tea he'd liked.

Picard eyed him closely, then gave a smile. "I think that you're the one who should be answering that, Number One."

"Look, it's bad enough Deanna wants to have two weddings. Doubly bad that she wants the one on Betazed to be a traditional Betazed wedding, complete with nudity." Riker smiled wryly and patted his stomach. "h.e.l.l, I haven't had dessert in three months.

"But now," he said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, "she wants us to write our own vows for the Earth ceremony."

"And what's your problem with that?"

"First off, have you actually read my log reports?"

Picard grimaced and considered his answer. "You do have an interesting way of attacking syntax."

"Beyond how to say it, what do I say? How do I distill how I feel about Deanna into a few sentences? Sentences that I then have to read in front of everyone we both know."

"I see your quandary, Will," Picard said, then looked away, giving the matter some serious contemplation. He stood up and walked behind Riker, going over to his well-read volume of the complete works of Shakespeare, the one that had survived the destruction of the previous Enterprise on Veridian III. Although Picard denied belief in any sort of good-luck charm, Riker noted that he treated the book like a reservoir of strength, one to be dipped into sparingly. Riker turned to see Picard heave the book off its stand. He handed it to Riker.

"Well, Number One, you can never go wrong with Shakespeare."

Will Riker sat on the low wall that surrounded a reflecting pool holding his tricorder up so that it would record his face and the pool in the background. He had wandered through several rooms in the medical center looking for just the right place. He settled on what he figured was a waiting room, because he liked the relative tranquillity of its reflecting pool. That seemed the appropriate venue to record a final message.

He wondered if the room was typical of Fabrini architecture. The materials were ornate. Marble, stones, and polished metals, all of which had the familiar triangular shape to them that the Fabrini seemed to favor. The blast door that had covered the entrance, although a functional device, was still made of an ornate, polished metal. Each surface was inlaid with Fabrini writing and more triangles. Even the pool was three sided.

He had left Beverly to her research and came here to collect his thoughts so that he could then record them. He imagined that quite a few people before him had come to this room to do the same thing: think, reflect, and wait.

Riker was lousy at waiting.

He put the tricorder down on the wall, stood up, and paced around the pool. The Lifesaver, as he and Beverly had taken to calling the alien device, seemed to provide some of his biological needs. He knew, looking at the murky, algae-covered water, that he should be thirsty, but he wasn't. That was just as well, as the water had the same swampy, unappealing look as the ponds they'd seen just outside the facility on their way in.

"Besides," he said to himself, "the water would probably just pour right out of my chest." He smiled at that. He'd always wanted to laugh in the face of death.

Recording a message for his comrades hadn't gone well. In the Enterprise's first year, one of her crew, Tasha Yar, had died. Later, Tasha's friends learned that she had prerecorded a good-bye message to all of them. Riker admired her foresight. He even tried recording his own message. After his first attempt, all he came up with was "Well, at least you won't have to hear me play the sax anymore." The next year, when he considered updating it, he just deleted it instead.

He always figured there would be time enough for final messages later. Until now. Now he had to record his message. It was his last opportunity. But the urgency of the situation didn't make the task any easier.

He'd tried a couple times, the perfunctory "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve with you" sort of thing, but it seemed hollow. It just wasn't him. Riker had never gone in for the dramatic speeches and flourishes that Picard seemed to espouse so effortlessly. Instead, he kept things light. But there wasn't a lot of lightness to be found now.

The problem, as usual, was Deanna.

No matter how many times he tried to record one of those d.a.m.nable things, he stumbled when he got to her. It wasn't that he didn't know what he wanted to say to her. In fact, he always found himself saying too much.

Years earlier, when Riker had been stationed on Deanna's homeworld of Betazed, he and Deanna had been more than friends. More than lovers. They had been imzadi.

But their relations.h.i.+p ended abruptly and not well. Riker had left without even saying good-bye.

When they met again, serving together aboard the Enterprise, they always said they were just friends. It was true enough. But it was also, in many ways, the worst kind of lie. What they meant to say was that they were only friends, and in his own heart, whether he could admit it to himself or not, Riker knew it wasn't true.

Riker had his share of relations.h.i.+ps with women after Deanna, but he never committed to any of them. He couldn't commit knowing she was still in the universe. He may have convinced himself that their relations.h.i.+p was over, maybe even believed it, but there was always a part of him that hoped they might reconnect somehow.

But he'd acted as if they were just friends. Nothing more. When Deanna revealed her betrothal to Wyatt Miller, Riker could do little more than watch and take out his frustrations on a hapless holodeck. But it was the firebreak he needed to bury those feelings for her.

Even so, when Deanna began her relations.h.i.+p with Worf years later, it strained his friends.h.i.+p with both of them. He wasn't sure what would have happened if the Klingon hadn't transferred to Deep s.p.a.ce 9.

But recently, on Ba'ku, they had rekindled their romance. Riker realized he had to let Deanna know that he still thought of her the same way he had so many years ago, that they were far more than just friends. Since telling her, he now wondered what the h.e.l.l had taken him so long.

Riker returned to his tricorder, positioned it so that the pool was behind him, and thumbed its recording tab. "Deanna," he said into the tricorder, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't come back, and I'm sorry that I waited so long to tell you how I felt. And I'm sorry that...this is such a lousy message."

Riker swore in disgust and hit the tricorder's Stop and Delete contacts in one fluid motion. He'd had enough practice with the maneuver; this was his fifth aborted farewell. But one more false start hardly mattered. He simply couldn't let his last words to Deanna be a litany of "I'm sorrys."

He buried his head in his hands. It just wasn't fair to get so close and then have it all taken away. He didn't want this. He didn't want to die.

He wasn't ashamed to admit it. Worf and he had discussed death on occasion, and the Klingon seemed unaffected by the concept. It was just part of being a warrior to Worf, and as long as it was a good death, an honorable death, he would welcome it.

Riker's death may have been honorable, but it was far from good. Despite what Worf would say, one month before your wedding was a terrible day to die.

He had faced death early when his mother died and secretly thought that if she'd fought harder, if she'd wanted it more, she'd still be alive. And just as secretly, he hated himself every time he thought it.

Riker railed against the grim reaper every chance he got. In his time on the Enterprise, he'd avoided certain death any number of times. Maybe he had gotten used to it. Maybe he had become so comfortable with the concept of avoiding his own death that he just couldn't believe it could happen to him anymore.

"Speak for yourself, sir," he'd once told Picard. "I plan to live forever." Picard had smiled at the joke, but in Riker's mind, it wasn't meant to be humorous. Even though he knew it wasn't possible, he meant every word.

The fact that death might finally best him, that bothered him. h.e.l.l, it infuriated him.

Death wasn't something to be accepted, it was something to be fought.

Riker had fought a few losing battles before and found himself thinking back to the Kobayas.h.i.+ Maru from Starfleet Academy. "Everyone loses," his instructor told him afterward. "But I've never had a cadet order an EVA suit be brought to him so he could fight an enemy s.h.i.+p by hand."

There was nothing wrong with losing, Riker figured, as long as you didn't give up.

With that, Riker opened his tricorder and made sure his face would be squarely in the center of the recording field but that the reflecting pool would not be seen. This was about just him and Deanna, nothing else. He knew what he had to do. Both for Deanna and himself.

And then he smiled.

"Don't smirk at me, Will Riker."

Deanna Troi threw a pillow at her fiance, which he allowed to hit him. He then picked it up from the floor and rushed headlong at her, pus.h.i.+ng them both onto the bed. He leaned over her, pinning her to the mattress. "Is this what our marriage is going to be like? You throwing things at me, and me dodging them?"

"You didn't dodge that one."

"I let it hit me."

"Of course you did."

Riker stared into her brown eyes. He could have easily got lost in them, but just as he was losing his focus, Deanna's eyes narrowed. "You're serious about this?" he asked more in dismay than seeking information.

"Absolutely. I want us to write our own vows."

Riker got off of her and sat on the edge of the bed. "What's wrong with the traditional ones? I like tradition."

"Typical military man."

"I'd like to think I'm anything but typical."

Deanna draped herself over Will's shoulders, breathing into his neck. "That's certainly true. But my mother once shared her memories of her wedding ceremony with me, and my parents wrote their own vows. I always thought it was romantic."

Will sighed. "But Deanna, you, better than most women in the universe, know exactly how I feel about you."

"You're right, I do. I feel how much you love me every time I see you. It just pours out of you." Since they had gotten back together, they had reestablished the slight mental connection they had once shared. They were again truly imzadi. On rare occasions they could even pick up a stray thought or two. But the emotional bond, that was strong as could be. And it had become so effortless that they no longer knew how much of it was intuition and how much was their empathic connection. "But our wedding, it's when we stand in front of our friends, our family, and the entire universe and declare our love for each other. Declare. We can't just say"-she lowered her voice, dropping her jaw into her chest, to do her best impression of her husband-to-be-" 'Hey, you know how I feel.' "

Riker c.o.c.ked his head and smirked. "Was that supposed to be me?"

"Do I need more facial hair?"

"I don't think I'd ever say that."

"Will, when you live among a race of telepaths, the things you choose to say are as important as...no, more important than the things you think."

"I'm not really a man of words, Deanna, I'm more a man of action."

She leaned over him and kissed him. "Fine, then show me."

Riker closed the tricorder, saving his message. He strode into the main chamber, where Beverly was standing at a podium computer, buried in the displays in front of her. "How's it going?" he asked, trying to sound casual.

She shook her head. "Not well. Several hundred years separate these Fabrini from the ones on Yonada. Their language evolved a bit over that time. The universal translator and I can make out a lot of words but not all of them. Maybe if I were aboard the Enterprise ...It's got a larger database of linguistic algorithms. And I'm having particular issues with certain nouns."

"Such as?"

"There are words like 'cavity' and 'vein' that translate fairly easily because of context. But there are other words, like 'ventricle' and 'hypothalamus,' that are more just designations. We use centuries-old Latin to name a lot of these things, so there's no telling what the Fabrini used." Beverly looked at Riker, trying to gauge what effect her words were having on him. "I'd hate to be someone a couple of thousand years in our future trying to translate our medical databases."

Riker stared at his tricorder, remembering the problems he had just had trying to record a final message, then placed it on the table. "Words are nothing but trouble. I'm done with them."

"I wish I had something more for you to do, Will, but working on this database is fairly arcane at this point. I don't know how much you could really help me."

"I'm not looking for something to do, Beverly. I have something to do." Will started looking around the chamber, obviously not finding what he was searching for. "Where are our phasers?"

Beverly pulled them out of her medical bag. "They won't work, Will."

"Not in here, sure..."

"Actually, not anywhere. I had to pull out the power cells to energize this console."

Will stood in front of Beverly and placed his hands on the podium. "What?"

"The facility uses geothermal power to fuel itself. That's why most of the systems are still working. But the power conduit from this console to the main source was decayed. I couldn't reconnect it, so I replaced it." Beverly paused for a moment. "Why did you want the phasers?"

"Because I'm going out there."

"Will, you can't. It's too risky. The Enterprise will find us..."

"Beverly, I know they will, but we don't know when. There's so much interference that we don't know when they'll be able to locate us. And they don't know that they'll be walking into an environment with a hostile Tellarite who's already shown no compunctions about killing Starfleet officers."

A wave of realization hit Beverly. "You have a plan."

Will smiled a confident smile. "You bet I do."

"Is it a good plan?"

"I can't say that. Let me show you something." Will led Beverly out of the chamber and into the waiting room. He pointed at the pool. "Anything look familiar?"

"The architecture?"

"The pool." Riker sat on the edge of the pool and scooped up a handful of water. "I thought it was a simple reflecting pool, until I recognized this. It's the same ratty, algae-encrusted muck that we saw in the ponds outside. But there's no vegetation in here. So I scanned the pool. It's not a reflecting pool, Beverly, it's a moon pool. It connects to that pond outside of here. There's a pipe goes on for about a kilometer. Too long for me to hold my breath..."

"...if you still had to breathe," Crusher finished.

"Exactly," Riker said while pressing the keypad on his tricorder.

Beverly looked at the indicator light on Riker's Lifesaver. Riker didn't need to look to know it was blinking noticeably faster; he could feel the pulses the Lifesaver sent through his body. He also knew Beverly feared that the alien device's power supply would never be able to withstand whatever he had planned. He figured she'd look for a way to talk him out of his plan, and he was preparing his counter.

"But the blast doors," Beverly said in protest. "Surely, there's a door in the pipe, and I doubt I can isolate just that one..."

Riker cut her off. "You won't have to. It's been underwater for six thousand years with n.o.body to repair or replace it. Look." Riker held up the tricorder so that Beverly could see the screen. "The mechanism rusted through. When the shutdown occurred, the blast doors in that pipe couldn't even close."

"Even if you can get out, Will, then what?"

"I figure I'm dead enough that our Tellarite friend won't be able to scan me, no matter what kind of instruments he's got. So maybe I can get the drop on him. Even if I can't, I can make enough of a distraction for you to open the doors of the facility and make a break for the shuttle."

Beverly couldn't hold herself back any longer. She pointed to the flickering light on the Lifesaver. "Will, stop. We don't know how much power that thing still has. As your doctor, I can't..."

Riker waved her off. "I may be your patient, Doctor, but I'm also a superior officer." Riker straightened to his full six-foot-four-inch height and put all the authoritarian air he could muster into his next statement. "Consider it an order, Commander." Then he gently put his hands on her shoulders and added, "Beverly, if I'm going out, I'm going out the same way I came in."

"I can't talk you out of this?"

"Good-bye, Beverly." And with that, he plunged into the pool.

Riker slowly poked his head out of the water, letting just his eyes surface over the waterline. His tricorder indicated that the Tellarite was near the front entrance of the medical facility, but given all the interference, Riker wasn't taking anything for granted. He'd chosen to walk rather than swim the length of the pipe so as to disturb the surface of the pond as little as possible. The walk itself through the drainpipe and into the pond had gone remarkably well. The hardest part was fighting the urge to breathe. It was like breaking a habit.

Slowly, Riker began to pull himself out of the pond. He moved carefully to keep the water from dripping off of him and back into the pond. He wanted no noise to alert the Tellarite. He pushed himself onto the muck-encrusted ground. Even though the blinking device in his chest reminded him how short his time was, he forced himself to creep forward with disciplined motions. After freeing his back foot from the last of the sticky mora.s.s, he surveyed the area more carefully and decided that this area had probably been a tropical paradise before the polar s.h.i.+ft. Now it was a swamp, and a particularly unpleasant one at that. Some of the hardier vegetation had managed to survive, and even thrive, overrunning the area surrounding the facility.

Riker kept low, crouching to stay behind the unkempt bushes that ringed the facility. He moved closer to the vegetation, using it for cover but careful not to rustle it too much. Between that and the florid trees, he was able to work his way to the edge of the building. Along the way, he managed to find a decent-sized branch that he might be able to use as a weapon.

He took a quick glance around the corner of the building, taking in as much information as he could of what lay in front of the facility. He could see the Tellarite fifty meters away. He was overweight, even for a Tellarite, but for a being whose girth indicated inactivity, this Tellarite was anything but sedentary.

He was pacing near the main entrance of the medical center, waiting for whoever was inside finally to emerge so that he could attack. He moved back and forth with quick, agitated steps that caused the wire connecting his cargo gun to the backpack to bounce up and down. Occasionally, he would strike the blast door with his fists or probe it with the barrel of the cargo gun, looking for a weak spot. When his blows proved ineffective and his probing accomplished nothing, he returned to his pacing, more frantic than before. The waiting seemed to be killing this Tellarite. Good, Riker thought grimly. Turnabout is fair play.

The Tellarite still held the cargo gun at the ready, poised for action. But the backpack that held the gun's transporter buffer was large and unwieldy, and Riker figured it would make the Tellarite relatively awkward. It was his only advantage and he intended to press it. He definitely didn't want to get shot with that device again.