Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Read online

  For my godchildren, Elly and Peter,

  who are the future…

  S.S.

  Dedicated to the Star Trek fans

  everywhere who are always

  happy to “boldly go” with us!

  J.S.

  The authors would like to thank Diane Duane for paving the way, Geoff Landis for invaluable assistance, and Marco Palmieri and Keith R.A. DeCandido for taking over.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  One

  Memory

  “We left Vulcan on the Fifth of Tasmeen. Since then, it has been a day of remembrance on all the great ships that survive.”

  Before embracing exile, Karatek had been a physicist at the Vulcan Space Institute in a ShiKahr he would never see again. Now that Vulcan was receding fast, both in fact and in memory, the Fifth of Tasmeen had become a day of meditation and reflection. Thus, it was Karatek’s duty to ask: Was it the fleet that needed the Fifth of Tasmeen, or Karatek himself?

  He glanced out into the long night. Here were few stars. No planets; therefore no new home. Beside the viewscreen were hangings woven in traditional designs. His consort had hung them in his meditation chamber to soften the severity of the bulkheads. They fluttered constantly as air circulated through the ship like blood through a heart.

  The air was cold. It smelled of chemicals, not the wild sweetness of the desert as the sun erupted up from the horizon, turning the cold into blazing heat and dazzling light, shimmering off the crimson sand.

  Karatek focused on the gleaming crystals and bloodmetal circuits of his coronet.

  Of all the tasks he performed as one of Shavokh’s leaders, Karatek thought the duty of remembrance was probably the most valuable. Certainly it was the one for which he was best suited. The thought, as it always did, brought some reassurance. He had reluctantly inherited the task of command, and it still came hard to him. Most of the people he would have preferred to follow were long dead.

  He adjusted the coronet. His hair was brittle from the air, even more arid than that of Vulcan. It had begun to gray earlier than it would have done on the homeworld, assuming he had managed to survive the battles that had been the Mother World’s daily lot.

  From years of making this record, he knew that the great green gems that were the coronet’s memory, created in an art banned by the adepts both of Gol and Mount Seleya, pulsed in time with the beat of the blood in his temples. Wrapped around the glowing crystals were fine-drawn unbreakable metal wires. Clad with bloodmetal, the wires formed intricate lattices that simultaneously ornamented the memory device and linked into his cerebral cortex through filaments almost too delicate to be felt.

  The tiny wounds those wires inflicted every time he set the coronet on his head stung for a moment longer as they healed. They would reopen when he removed the crown. But the pain did not matter. As Surak said, there was no pain.

  Certainly, there was not pain enough to interrupt the thoughts, memories, sensations, and even the emotions—for even after years of study of Surak’s disciplines, Karatek’s emotional control remained imperfect—that the memory device would capture and record for all the years of exile and afterward, when they finally found a new homeworld. If that day ever came in the long night of their exile.

  It was Karatek’s habit to combine meditation and memory. But the task that Surak had personally entrusted to him turned bitter every Fifth of Tasmeen when he recalled events from the past year and sealed them in the coronet’s memory.

  “I could make the calculation, if I chose, of today’s date on the Mother World. At our current speed, while 3.9 years have passed on board this ship and its consorts, 25.86 years have passed on Vulcan. Obviously, today is not the Fifth of Tasmeen back on Vulcan. Although some who follow Surak deem hope to be illogical, I cannot agree: Surak might have been ruthless, but he was never cruel. Therefore, I believe it is not illogical to hope that the homeworld has survived and that finally—after all the bloodshed—it may live long and prosper, as Lady Mitrani wished us. She may still be alive. I hope she is well.

  “On all the ships that have survived thus far, other memories occupy us today. It is with grief that I must record the loss of seven ships.”

  Karatek took a deep breath. He organized his thoughts, then marshaled all his courage before he made himself pour the memories of that loss into the coronet’s glowing green gems. He recalled faces that, from now on, he would see only in memory, and knew the crown would preserve them for all times. Tears blurred his vision before the veils flicked across his eyes, preventing precious moisture from evaporating in the dry air of this chamber where art from home fluttered in a ceaseless artificial breeze.

  Those ships that died had acted in error. They had paid for their error with their lives. And Karatek had failed to dissuade them. Their blood was on his hands.

  In the last council among all the ships that traveled like a caravan across the Forge through this greater desert of stars, Karatek had heard a propulsion model advocated by an unlikely, possibly unholy, alliance of technocrat party functionaries with two of the adepts from Gol. Much to the council’s not-well-concealed astonishment, they had even been joined by some of the te-Vikram who had found themselves trapped on board the great ships when they left at the start of what had to be, it just had to be, the last civil war on Vulcan.

  The new propulsion model, admittedly, had at first been intriguing. It fused technology with the arts of the mind in a way that Gol adepts had once condemned as blasphemy. Those same scruples, Karatek recalled, had caused the priestess at the shrine atop Mount Seleya to hand over to Surak the crown of memory that Karatek now held.

  But, ultimately, the new system was bad politics and worse science, Karatek had decided. He had refused to consider it for Shavokh. And he had argued against its implementation on any of the ships with all the authority of his training as a physicist and his experience as a propulsion engineer.

  What had become of the logic of the adepts who advocated its use? For them to abandon their former scruples—Karatek shuddered. Seven ships went against the council’s vote and installed the new propulsion system.

  How triumphantly they must have raced ahead, Karatek imagined. You see, the augmented drive works! When we return to the fleet, we shall tell Karatek how wrong he was! And then, we shall bring the ships home.

  Those ships had raced off like boys who dashed ahead of their friends on a dare, looking back to laugh or jeer, only to find that their mad dash forward had taken them to the le-matya’s den or to the edge of a precipice with no time to stop, no rock or root to grab to save themselves.

  They had left themselves no margin for error and therefore no escape.

  Karatek shook his head: how illogical it was of him to seek to deny his memory and the evidence of his own ship’s sensors. But, in strict honesty, let the coronet record his denial too. Something hot trickled down his temple: he had jarred loose one of
the filaments that bound him to the coronet.

  In the most ancient rites, blood had been used as a sacrifice to appease the katras of travelers lost in the desert, spirits blowing on the wind until they dissolved.

  You, alone of all on board this ship, traveled with Surak. Though your journey now is greater, that is still no reason to lose control, he chided himself. The coronet would capture his self-recrimination as well as his mourning.

  His memories would be preserved, but what of the thoughts and emotions, even the katras of the people on board those lost ships? For the initial acceleration trial, the Gol adepts had been linked to brother and sister adepts on other ships. Some of those adepts had burned themselves out. Some had died as hearts and blood vessels burst from the strain.

  Others survived, if one wished to call it life. Of the survivors, some howled, while others sat or lay soiled, mindless, and silent, a burden on family and healers who would tend them gently until their lives’ ends, for there was no desert into which they could walk, had they been able to move. And it was thought blasphemy to assist them out into the Long Night.

  As for the seven lost ships—Karatek hoped that gravitic strains would have made their engines explode. There had always been that possibility. The minute structural weaknesses he had distrusted would, at least, have given the people within a quick, merciful, and sane death before the black hole that had opened before them sucked them into a night devoid even of stars.

  Perhaps if Karatek had argued more forcefully, if he had explained more clearly to Commissioner T’Partha how risky that drive was, the ships now lost to the exiles’ fleet would still be traveling alongside Shavokh across this trackless forge of stars.

  The catastrophe had caused some of the scientists who followed Surak to theorize that a chance—perhaps 1.3 percent, perhaps even less—existed that at least one of the ships might have survived a transit through the madness of space, light, and gravity into which they had plunged. Perhaps, if an exit were possible, such a ship might emerge in some other place, near some other star that might possess even one Minshara-class world and, in this second exile, finally find itself a home. The mathematics of that theory were dubious: cold comfort, if logic could be considered comfort. What was, was.

  Karatek’s eyes scalded. This much of his own disgrace he could spare future generations, he told himself.

  He pulled the coronet off. A brief warmth, almost as hot as the tears he fought to suppress, spread at his temples as the filaments withdrew. His biocontrol healed the tiny wounds almost instantly. The pain of memory lingered.

  The coronet glowed in his hands, the flicker in the crystals almost as subtle as the whisper of micrometeorites and dust as they brushed against the ship’s hull. Useful finds of tritanium and duranium had enabled the surviving engineers to strengthen the ships’ hulls in case they had to last well beyond initial estimates of one hundred years.

  For all the emphasis on safety, the obsessive care the exiles took to strengthen their ships in case the journey lasted past even the most pessimistic estimates, they had made no advance that wasn’t accompanied by accidents. A barrage of delta rays, two years ago, had taken out half of one ship’s population and exposed the remainder to radiation that would, no doubt, shorten their lives, make their deaths more painful, and reap a deadly harvest among any children they dared to have.

  Among the survivors had been a cadre of the fiercely independent te-Vikram, whose priest-kings had plunged Vulcan into at least three wars and constant border skirmishes in the past hundred years. A raid on the shuttles that carried the exiles to their ships had resulted in te-Vikram coming on board. They had never wanted to be there.

  The surviving te-Vikram had seized the opportunity of catastrophic crew loss to stage a mutiny, wrest control of the ship from its surviving crew, and turn back. Karatek had watched that ship explode as its engineers, loyal to the fleet, staged a desperate, final rebellion. He himself had trained at least two of them. In physics, not in logic.

  Karatek remembered the explosion as well as the pain of recalling it. The gems that were his coronet’s eternal memory flickered, the rainbows buried in their depth shimmering, and he realized that his tears had fallen on them.

  Where is your control?

  Karatek tightened his hand on the artifact. Even though crystals and metal pressed into his skin, the coronet felt agreeably warm in his hands. At the last council, a vote had been taken to decrease some elements of life support. Vulcan’s air had been thin; it was no sacrifice to reduce oxygen content. And a slightly lower gravity actually made them feel stronger than they were and gave them greater ease in manipulating heavy engine components or hull plating.

  But Karatek had never quite accustomed himself to the cold. They could drape the bulkheads with weavings created here on the looms built for the workshops psychologists had deemed necessary to help ease the bleakness of the ship’s environment. They could fill compartments with art: a geode found on a mining expedition; a ceramic representation, made by his adopted son Solor, of the Shavokh for which this ship was named. They could wear warmer tunics and cloaks over their shipsuits. But the ship was still cold.

  An incentive, of course, to find a new homeworld and find it soon. Illogical to have mixed feelings about that idea. Illogical to admit to feelings at all.

  “If I forget thee, O Vulcan…” Karatek murmured. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to form a mantra of control before resuming the coronet and the torment of memory.

  Sunlight on the sands outside ShiKahr, where the flanged gate had stood for millennia, where he had watched for pilgrims and caravans ever since he was a boy. Where he had seen Surak and two of his disciples emerge from the desert, take his life into their hands, and weave it, like a thread of bloodmetal, into the tapestry of their hopes and dreams for their people.

  A soft chime sounded. Karatek’s lips softened in what would have been, in the days before he met Surak, a smile as his consort T’Vysse slipped into his study. On this Fifth of Tasmeen, she wore the dulled blood green of mourning. The color did not suit her. But she was always beautiful to him.

  Karatek rose as T’Vysse entered the room. She pressed one hand to the small of her back. She was pregnant now with what would be the fourth child of her body.

  With the door open, he could hear shouting in the corridor outside their quarters.

  “Your pardon, my husband,” she said, with the impeccable manners that had been hers since childhood: the formal training of a well-born Vulcan. Their eldest daughter, dead these many years, had had similar manners, as did Sarissa, their adopted child, who combined them with the control she too had learned from Surak.

  By now, their grandson—stranded back on Vulcan with his parents in the last dreadful moments of violence before the final shuttles lifted off the Mother World—might well have children of his own.

  Children I shall never see. Descendants of my House.

  There was some satisfaction in knowing that his House, if nothing else, would continue. Assuming that Vulcan itself survived.

  As if sensing his thoughts through their bond, T’Vysse stepped close to him. Karatek held out joined fingers to touch her free hand, then used their handclasp to ease her into his chair.

  This child-to-be, however, this child of their exile, would have everything that Karatek could provide despite the healers’ concerns about the health of a child born in the long, radiation-filled transit between star and star. Healers, like physicists, adepts, and warriors, had been wrong before. They could be wrong again.

  With T’Vysse present, her fingers brushing his, the tiny chamber held all the warmth of home.

  “Thee has word?” he asked her, gazing into her eyes.

  “The shuttle awaits. Its pilot begs pardon if thy meditations were interrupted, but he asks that thee come swiftly. To avoid further controversy.”

  Karatek raised a brow at his wife’s choice of words. T’Vysse was a mistress of understatement.

  The
decision taken at the last council to limit travel between ships and postpone transfers of people or families from one ship to another had been unpopular. But “limit” and “postpone” were words that the exiles, like the Vulcans left so far behind them, had grown to distrust. As a result, any time a shuttle took off from any one of the ships, Karatek heard protests and charges of favoritism.

  If Shavokh was cold, the shuttles would be colder. Karatek had helped modify their design, diverting most of their energy to propulsion lest they fall behind the fleet and, lacking the power to catch up, be marooned alone in the night—another reason that councils were infrequent now.

  But there was another reason still, one that was barely whispered. After te-Vikram rebels had commandeered one ship, the council had calculated a 47.1 percent chance that too-easy transfers could allow factions to concentrate themselves in individual ships and gain power again. Would a te-Vikram ship willingly keep company with one crewed by Surak’s disciples or Seleyan adepts?

  “I will come now,” Karatek said.

  He would finish the recording later, he promised himself. Assuming he survived this meeting. And if he did not, T’Vysse had informed him that she would take up the burden of memory. The crown had been given to him. Well enough, then: the task was his. But if he laid it down, she was a historian and logically the one to take it over—even if Karatek hated to see her further burdened. Logically, however, if T’Vysse inherited the burden of memory, he would not be alive to see anything at all.

  Draping a heavy ceremonial cloak woven in shades of muted crimsons over the dulled green of his mourning clothes, Karatek entered the larger cabin where his family spent much of their time. Solor and Sarissa waited for him there. So did Commissioner T’Partha, wrapped in an even heavier cloak of her favorite bronze, along with two members of ship’s security.

  Karatek remembered them well: Streon, a slim, intense man who played the flute when he was off duty, and tall, foursquare T’Via. They had been handpicked as recruits and specially trained for the exile by Karatek’s old friend Commander Ivek. If no one had assassinated Ivek, he was probably many times a great-great-grandfather by now. If he were dead, well, Karatek only hoped that someone had managed to convey his katra to the Halls of Ancient Thought. Ivek had had the integrity of a man who had studied no philosophy but his duty.