crack. He lasted a whole… what would you say, Mac? Twenty minutes?”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen minutes before he gave you up.”
Nechayev’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You’re bluffing, Ed. I can always tell. Calhoun is unreadable, but you have a lousy poker face. Furthermore, if you had any proof of these… these outrageous claims, then you wouldn’t be here, the two of you. You’d be here with security guards, ready to take me in.”
“We are.” Jellico snapped his fingers and, pointing behind her, said, “Take her.”
Nechayev spun, startled, expecting to see Starfleet security guards right behind her.
Should that have been the case, she would have killed them instantly. Her carefully designed, meticulously manufactured hybrid body had that capability for emergency situations, and this would certainly have qualified as such.
But she didn’t see a guard. Instead, she found herself looking into the face of Soleta.
She hesitated, caught up in a moment of confusion.
The moment cost her.
ii.
Soleta’s hand speared forward, clamping onto Nechayev’s face as if she were about to tear it off.
Vulcans were forbidden from using the technique of the mindmeld in any manner that even vaguely resembled that of employing it as a weapon. Such a use would have been considered an abomination, a perversion of the sacred techniques that had developed the mindmeld in the first place.
During the time in her life when Soleta had thought she was pure Vulcan, she would have been as appalled as anyone else over the notion of utilizing the mindmeld as one would a spear or a club.
But Soleta knew her heritage, and had come to grips with it, accepting it and herself for all that she was.
Consequently, she was a good deal less delicate about it.
She slammed her mind into Nechayev’s, having no idea what she was going to find. She was determined not to give Nechayev the slightest opportunity to fight back.
And a barrage of images comes at her, fast, relentless, so many, so much, that Soleta cannot discern or individualize any of it; she has never encountered anything like it, a mind so different from hers, so impossible to understand, that she cannot even conceptualize it, and she sees that Nechayev wants to attack her, she has some sort of neuralizing toxin built right into her DNA but she has to use an act of will and Soleta shoves that act of will back, back, back into the recesses of Nechayev’s brain, or the thing that says it is Nechayev, and it may be her or may not be, whatever it is, wherever, it’s overwhelming, and Soleta has no idea how long she has been inside Nechayev’s mind, it must be hours, days, weeks, she is lost in there and will never find her way out, and she cannot let herself be taken down, there is too much riding on it, and Nechayev pushes back with her mind, and Soleta meets the challenge, and their consciousnesses collide, and Soleta is on the verge of destruction, just that quickly, just that easily, and Soleta focuses all her will, all her essence, her ego, her id, everything, into one great vicious destructive spear and she drives it forward with as much force as she can, and as she does this, as she commits this incredible act of determination, she wonders why she has done this, why she has, time and again, risked herself to serve, whenever possible, an organization that tossed her away, that treated her so very, very badly, and it is at that moment that she is struck with the thoroughly astounding realization that she is totally, madly, and completely in love with Mackenzie Calhoun, and she has just enough time to think, Well, of COURSE you are, how could it be anything else but that, you should have realized that ages ago, and that is when everything goes black…
iii.
Calhoun had not known what to expect when Soleta had agreed to force her mind into that of Nechayev so that they could discern just what it was they were dealing with. What ultimately happened transpired so quickly that it was hard for him to believe anything had occurred at all.
From the moment that Soleta clamped her hand onto Nechayev’s face to the time that it all ended horribly, it was scarcely the blink of an eye. And then Nechayev screamed, and it was not a scream that sounded like anything remotely human or, for that matter, anything that Calhoun had ever heard before. It started low and then got louder and louder, escalating until it