Star Trek: The Original Series: The More Things Change by Scott Pearson

then coming back on again, sometimes repeatedly. He was obviously taking slow, careful steps and testing his repairs as he went. Erratic energy signatures smoothed out, and some flat-lined systems began powering up for the first time since the attack.
    “At least one of us is making progress.” Even as she said that, Chapel felt the stirrings of the symbiont. Her downward pressure met with resistance as the symbiont arched its wormlike body. The sensation didn’t surprise her as much this time, and she made an effort to replace her original thoughts of parasites with the idea of a fetus moving within its mother’s womb. She continued her gentle massage and was soon rewarded with the strange electricity of the undulating being tickling her palms.
    She was certain this was the mental energy of the symbiont. Chapel didn’t expect any actual communication with it; the creature was so alien to her that she suspected a deeper bonding would be necessary for that. But communication wasn’t the goal, only the facilitation of the link between symbiont and host. Still feeling the static bursts on her hands, Chapel lifted one hand slowly from Dax’s abdomen. Chapel concentrated on her palms, envisioning the path between them, up the nerves of one arm, into the spinal cord, and back down to the palm she was moving toward Dax’s forehead.
    She hesitated, her left hand hovering over Dax’s face, a subtle tingling still playing across the palm, an echo of the strong sensation in her right hand resting above the squirming symbiont. Chapel glanced at the monitor. Dax’s vital signs were stable. The various feeds from Spock’s repair work also appeared under control. Everything’s fine , she told herself. Chapel looked back down at her patient—patients—and placed her left hand firmly upon Dax’s forehead.
    Instantly there was a burst of static along her left palm. Chapel felt as if there were a magnetic pull between her hand and Dax’s forehead. Dax twitched once, her body jerking slightly as if startled, then relaxed. Chapel felt an odd sensation moving up one arm and down the other, similar to getting IV fluids and feeling the cool liquid move through your bloodstream. But this was the neural energy of Trill and symbiont linking through her own nervous system, their natural reaching toward each other facilitated along an external pathway.
    For a disturbing moment, Chapel lost all sensation in her arms. The numbness began spreading down her spine, but Chapel reasserted herself by moving her arms—without breaking contact with Dax’s body—and again envisioning the pathway from palm to palm, as if emphasizing the course of the detour to her patients. Feeling returned to her arms, and the tingling sensation of the Trill neural energy stayed confined to the appropriate route—at least mostly. Although she kept picturing the route as moving straight from one arm to the other through her spinal cord, wisps of neural energy strayed upward toward her brain, causing a sensation of whispers she couldn’t quite hear. She forgot to blink, almost forgot to breathe. Her perception of time stretched, melted, evaporated. Chapel knew she should check on Spock. Spock needed her. She was his backup. He was counting on her, as she had counted on him innumerable times over the years. But these thoughts were hazy, glimpsed through a fog, and insubstantial themselves, ghosts she couldn’t grasp, stirred into chaotic patterns as her fingers passed through them, she was lost in a desert, trying to scoop up the water of a mirage, her hands coming up dry, sand spilling from her palms . . .
    Chapel wrenched herself away from Dax and staggered away from the bed. She inhaled deeply, gasping, as if surfacing after having held her breath far too long. The monitor displayed Dax’s brainwaves largely resynchronized, at least for now. Chapel stared at the waves arcing up and down across the screen, drawn to them, but slowly her senses expanded.