Luck of the Draw

The desert... silent, sifting, sprawling as far as the eye could see... settled towards night.  Over the horizon the orange disc of the sun descended pink as it had since prehistory.  Bony black fingers carved rivulets of shadow like molasses into the crevices and dune valleys, tinting the golden sands brown.

At either end of the timeless world sat two ends of time.

Southwest: the pyramids, worn symmetrical mountains jutting from the wastes, carefully preserved.

At the northwest end: Cairo, a blazing metropolitan forest of gleaming steel towers and lights, rising to life against the night.

The desert spanned eons.  It saw the emigration of the first humans to Asia; it led conquerors from Ramses to Napoleon and back.  It supported nomad caravans for two thousand years before the Federation.  It predated the works of man, and would one day erase them as if they never were, as it had all history's tracks through the region.

One singular track pierced the desert this evening.  A thin, oscillating incision across the timeless sands, stretching fast and straight, evaporating as quickly as it was made.  Descending from the windswept sky on the source of this speeding arrow, one would begin to hear a roaring whine.  Motorized fuel injection accompanied throttled jerks of black rubber handles, as wheels flashed, spinning sandy sprays... a red-robed rider, long red veil trailing under a white turban... coming to focus on the face of the rider, seeing only black goggles and red veil covering hints of tired, weathered features.

Mounting the top of a dune, the whining protest of the engine soothed to contented idle.  The machine sputtered and growled, awaiting the decision of its master.  Booted feet pushed into soft dirt.  The scarfed face turned slowly, surveying the horizon, eyes unreadable through dark goggles at sunset.

Finally set on the destination straight ahead, the rider yanked in the clutch and kicked the mechanical beast to life once more, tearing off down the dune hill, legs hugging its sides.  Destination: pyramid.

The red-robed figure dismounted from the hog now quiet as the sands.

Tugging down the veil, peeling off the goggles, exposed a black beard and hardened gray eyes, keen and flickering; a hawk's eyes.

Hand raised to remove the white turban, Stephen April paused, breath taken by the monster arched before him.  His hand fell.

Studious and alert, the eyes still squinting from the day's earlier sun lifted to the stone shape of the pyramid, grim yet appreciative.

April felt sapped.  Weak.  Maybe it was the desert heat.  Maybe something else.  Jallez would tell him not to sulk, but he didn't feel what April felt.  He stopped in the middle of the desert, halfway between the carnival he'd just attended with Jenna, and the nearest of the pyramids on the horizon.  Centuries ago the pyramids were scarcely visible from el-Qahira.  Cairo had expanded since to a metropolis, the largest urban area on the northeast tip of the African continent, stretching almost to the pyramids themselves (and towering higher with some skyscrapers).  And yet, it was a long desert space to those pyramids.  Egypt was a vast land.  The carnival sat on the southern edge of the mega-city.

He didn't deal with loss well.  He hadn't dealt with it well as a child, when his little brother was declared dead.  He hadn't taken it well when his mother was declared dead, then his father.  Perhaps because there was so much of it.  Outwardly he was stern, stoic as ever, but inside – that was a different matter.  Various other deaths afflicted him over the years, from Guy Carson to Cassy Evans.  Every death, a hammer blow.  Vor'ok Nir was a paradise of blissful ignorance: there, he had been programmed to turn off his feelings and be a machine.

Then Jen & Jal brought him back.  Jenna reawakened the love in him.

He stared again up into the blue Egyptian sky, eyes forced to slits against the glaring sun.

And now she had left him.  It didn't make sense, it was irrational & illogical & he knew it, but part of him was angry at her.  He loved her.  He'd never stopped loving her; only been allowed to ignore it for a time.  He was angry.  She brought him back from the abyss, then left him.  It was a natural reaction, and he immediately felt guilty for it, knowing she would not approve.  He still had Arcadia, she said.  She wanted him to do what his heart told him to do.  Whatever it told him to do... anything but follow her.

How did she know what he would do?

All the advice he heard over preceding days struck with the same hammer force as the deaths he'd endured, and all pointed to one goal, one purpose, one destination for Stephen April: Arcadia.  Command.  Command.  Command.  Someone said he wrote the book on Arcadia.  It was "his" ship.  And duty selected him, not the other way around.

He flung off his black uniform shirt, replaced the gray outer vest and continued in the stifling heat, panting, sun beating his bare arms and half-exposed chest as feet plowed tufts of sand, trudging towards the pyramid.  Where was he going?  Why was he going there?  These weren't the same pyramids he'd once ruled.  They were on a world half a galaxy away.  He had no intent to go in and explore these pyramids, if he could.  Scheduled tours only, and they were not the pyramids he was interested in.

He wanted to explore the pyramids with Jenna.  One more chance shot in the ass.  One more opportunity he could have taken and didn't.  She might blame herself for upsetting him, but in fact, he had only himself to blame.  He pushed on.  He needed to see if he would make it to the end of the path.  If he could make that final destination, while walking through the valley of pain... then maybe he could make that other final destination orbiting far overhead, beyond the blue sky.

Hours passed.  The sun began to set.

Some peoples of the Earth still lived the primitive lifestyle, as their fathers and forefathers before them.  He chanced upon the Bedouin family, parched and faint from water depletion, about ready to collapse.  He should have already.  The determined steel will uniquely Stephen April's possessed him to keep going.  Stumbling and catching his hand on the camel's side, he ignored the creature's uneasy twitching and peered up at the rider on humpback.  A leathery, brown-skinned Arab man stared back down, perplexed at the sight of a Starfleet officer out on foot, unprotected against the elements, unprovisioned.

Then his eyes caught April's com-badge, glittering in the sun.  April had it as a last resort – deactivated.  Had he fallen, he would have called the ship, beamed up.  He wasn't that far off yet.