Within You, Without You
"Did Counsellor
Lothar consume my daughter?" asked Captain
Storvik, as Doctor
Mib Khan operated his medical tricorder and the counsellor continued to wrestle with himself.
"I can't say," Khan replied. "Our sensors are unable to penetrate to his interior, since it is not completely contained within this dimension. If he did, it would explain why the ship's sensors were unable to find her…"
Counsellor Lothar could only control the right side of his body. Unknown to the others, the captain's seven-year-old daughter
T'Sorvik had climbed through an access panel and squeezed inside Lothar. She was attempting to repair him, as he had been unable to move since shortly after his arrival at
Starbase 668; but she was still manually operating his left side through an internal control system. She had one more idea. It was certainly a risky one; but after all she had already done to Lothar, she did owe it to him to try to finish the job. Since each of them had physical control over half of his body, perhaps the next step was to … join their minds.
T'Sorvik had never performed a mind meld with either of her parents, Storvik or his alternate-universe analog
Evil Storvik, because they had told her that it might harm her. However, she had joined minds with her "Auntie'Vit", Storvik's wife, on two occasions - it was part of the thorough and regular examinations they had given her during their isolation on the Ankh. Even though all of them were Vulcans, she still thought she had sensed some relief when they found out that she did not have the defect in her cerebral development which made mind melds so dangerous for her parents.
She traced the control leads to where they interfaced with a portion of Lothar's spinal cord which lay at the border of the interior extradimension volume. Placing her left hand directly on his spine, while her right hand remained on the internal control panel, she began…