Star Trek Enterprise Bk. 02 - Inherit Ch. 14

"What do you want to do?" This question caught her off guard and once again she hesitated to answer.

"Honestly," Danaë tried to conceal her smile, but it showed anyway. "I would like to be in engineering. I love working with different technologies and making things work."

"The warp reactor. Break it down for me. Name the eight components." Without even a thought she told him each of the components and proceeded to give detailed descriptions of what each of them did. She did have to concede, however, that her information was slightly outdated since she was only familiar with the warp-5 engine and technology had changed since then. "Perhaps you should switch your field of study."

"Nobody would listen if I tried. I'm a Picard, and as such, I will command. I suppose it could be worse, I could have been born a Kirk." Declining a refill on her tea, she rose from her stool and walked over to the old man "Speaking of names, what is yours?"

"Jon." His hand shook slightly as he extended it.

"Pleasure to meet you, Jon. I'm Danaë" She clasped his hand and politely shook it unaware of how much it meant to him to simply touch her hand after nearly two centuries of waiting. He was far from ready when she casually slipped her fingers from his grasp, but was pleased when she took up a seat across the table from him. "You said I remind you of someone?"

"Yes."

"Who?" she pressed him.

"I had a wife once and like you she was... very smart... very stubborn... and beautiful." A memory of the Danaë that he knew came to his mind. He could see her there in the command center a few days before they successfully ended the Xindi conflict. Her head was pounding and she had barely slept in days, but she was determined to hack into the redundant memory core taken from one of the spheres no matter what and put an end to it all.

"Was she a member of Starfleet too?" To this he nodded. "So what were your ranks and what ships were you on? It's possible I've heard of them."

"You may have, but it doesn't matter." There were a thousand things that he could tell her, but nothing that he should. She would never believe any of it. How could he explain that she would be transported through time, saving his life and end up serving aboard his ship? Were he in her shoes he would have found it all too fantastic. "Next you're going to ask me what happened to her."

"No." she said to his surprise. "Call it a gut feeling, but I suspect that I don't want to know. I'd rather hear about one of your adventures."

Her request was a difficult one. There were so many things he had gone through that only now he would even call an adventure. Most of them included her. Where would he begin? Archer told her some small things, like the time the artificial gravity temporarily went offline while he was in the shower and then coming back on within a few minutes dropping him on his rear end. He spoke of crossing the Forge on Vulcan, carefully crafting the story to make it as generic as possible so she would never know who he was or when it all happened.

Danaë enjoyed listening to his stories, but every time she tried to learn anything specific about him, he wouldn't answer. She checked her time and realized that it was nearly time for her to go to her last exam. She apologized for needing to leave and thanked him for his time. To her surprise the old man suddenly grabbed her hands and held them tight, his expression desperate. Titus stepped out from behind the counter, concerned about Danaë. Sadness suddenly crept into his eyes and for a moment he couldn't stop his heart from speaking.

"I have often thought that if I had the power to change the past I would make certain that my wife and I never met. Not because I wouldn't want her, but to give her a longer life and less suffering."

"Perhaps she wouldn't want that. Longer doesn't mean fuller or better. If you could ask her she might tell you that she would prefer the life she had." To this he nodded and managed to summon a smile. With a polite 'good-bye' she left and quickly jogged off to her last exam. He turned and watched her through the glass.

"Don't be in a hurry, Dani," he said softly to himself as he finished his cup of coffee. "The fates will call you to your destiny soon enough and I'll be there waiting for you when you find it" As she disappeared from view he rose and smiled to himself as he started for the door.

Stardate 729373.3749177799 (May 16, 3052)

Archer stood there with the napkin in his hand, so carefully preserved. From the moment that he had opened his eyes and found Danaë had passed away... no, even before that he had felt driven to keep living. He didn't know why, but it had started that day when the parade of doctors filed through their bedroom to run tests. She had been showing the early symptoms of Irumodic Syndrome and when Dr. Phlox had been unable to do anything, Archer opened the door for doctors from every known, trusted, star system to come and examine her.

Among them was a man he didn't recognize right away. He was tall, elderly with short cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes. Archer watched patiently as various devices (none of which he had ever seen before) were used on his wife's brain. The man gave no real results other than to say that he had gotten everything he needed as he packed up his things. The whole visit seemed bizarre.

As he was leaving he turned and gave Archer a 'cat-that-ate-the-canary' grin and he suddenly realized that it was Arik Soong. This was both an intriguing and frightening possibility and he immediately ran out into the hall to catch him, but he was too late. The man was gone. A gifted geneticist, he had created a cure for Sharat Syndrome, and although the methods were questionable, it gave Archer a measure of hope that he was trying to cure this disease too. In truth, he was supposed to be incarcerated, but it would seem that once again he managed to escape. That was fine with Archer because if Arik Soong could cure Danaë then his freedom was only a drop in the bucket of what he would owe him.

Unfortunately he was never able to find even a trace of him. After that incident, and the death of his wife, something inside of Archer kept driving him to survive. It was as if there were simply too many questions that needed answers and he couldn't stop until he had them. When he had met Danaë at Doohan's that day he had expected it to be what he was looking for, but it wasn't. In fact, that same day he had received a tip regarding a descendent of Arik Soong and a new suspicion as to what the old geneticist had been up to that day in his wife's room. Seven hundred years later he was even more convinced now than ever that somewhere out there was a complete mapping and neural image of Danaë's brain substrates.

Archer set the napkin back down and went through a doorway then down a corridor to another doorway. This one was locked and could only be opened through a combination of retina scan and fingerprint verification. Placing his thumb on the pad and peering into the lens, the computer recognized him and opened the door. He stepped in and stood before a perfectly recreated AI body that looked exactly like Danaë. All he needed was to transfer the neural information that Arik Soong had stolen into it. Provided it hadn't already been used or destroyed. Something deep inside kept telling him that it was still out there. If not, then what else was driving him on?

"One day I will find you again," he vowed.

The end of Bk 2