Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Page 10

  All five Vulcans wore torn and bloodied shipsuits. T’Ruhi’s face was marred by a livid bruise, while Seyhan’s arm appeared to be bound up in a piece of his shipsuit’s sleeve. And all five also wore what looked like a kind of fighting harness and, around their necks, metal rings studded with glowing badges, too unsightly and too uniform to be anything but…

  “Now you see,” said Solor. “Slaves’ collars.” His voice was chill with disgust.

  “There is more,” Sarissa said.

  “Can anyone hear me?”

  “My drill thrall won’t stay unconscious all rest period,” whispered T’Sala. “I’ll keep watch. Hurry!”

  Karatek watched the young woman leave the group and flatten herself against a gray wall, eavesdropping.

  “I am Seyhan, a mining engineer from Vulcan transport Vaisehlat, once of Firestorm. We were bound through this sector on a peaceful mission. Can anyone hear us?”

  He broke off, turning toward one of his companions. “Before he died in the last pairs contest, Seroni said he thought his last modifications would extend our range. But there’s no way to tell. Quiet! There isn’t much time!”

  Seyhan’s name indicated that he had chosen to follow Surak, but impatience, even fear, quivered in his voice.

  “We have to get you out of here,” said T’Sala. “With one arm injured, I estimate you would last 3.2 minutes, if that, in the next free-for-all. I found a place where we can hide you, bring you food…Please, Seyhan…”

  “The needs of the many are more important.” Seyhan waved her off. “Please, any of the great ships—if you’re in range, move off! We had taken a shuttle, with an initial survey team of twenty, plus ship’s crew, down to an uninhabited planetoid, prospecting for pergium, but we found…”

  “Seyhan!” T’Ruhi hissed, in response to a gesture from her twin.

  “My colleagues and I have been taken prisoner, transported via a technology that we have not been able to explain. When we tried to fight, our weapons were deactivated, and we were overcome.”

  “Hurry!” T’Ruhi whispered. “You two, pretend to be working out. Perhaps that will buy us some time.”

  Refas and Aloran moved into the center of the arena and took up a fighting crouch, each on a separate arm of the triskele.

  “Do you recognize the forms they practice, Father?” Sarissa’s voice almost trembled. “Do you?”

  He recognized the emotion in her voice as outrage. It would have been illogical to correct it.

  The two prisoners were beginning the katas of Ke-tarya-yatar. It was one of the most difficult forms of Vulcan martial arts. And one of the deadliest.

  “They’re training us to fight!” Seyhan said. “I greeted them and said, ‘We come to serve,’ but they fitted us with these collars. Those who refused to fight died first.

  “Like this!” He held up another recorder. On its tiny screen, minute figures stood, struggled, fell, and died.

  Karatek magnified the image. Yes, there was a Vulcan in late middle age—T’Lera, by the very sands of Gol. As the weird creature—the alien, all scales with a crest and dorsal ridges that looked very sharp—advanced on her, she raised her hand in the gesture of peace.

  The alien cut her down.

  A young Vulcan stood on one arm of the triskele, his eyes flickering back and forth at his opponents. One had a net, the other a spear. He gave a good account of himself before he died.

  “You see,” Seyhan whispered into space. “You see. We have lost six.” He took a deep breath, restoring his self-command. “So many dead. Killed senselessly. Not just us, but so many others, fellow beings from a wealth of planets. And more are dying, every hour.”

  His voice barely shook. Even Surak would have pronounced his control beyond satisfactory. Soon, he would die.

  And Karatek spoke of time for himself, a leave to enable himself to rest and to think clearly once more? He had never made a less logical choice.

  “The Master Thrall is coming!” came T’Sala’s whisper. “Hurry! We have to hide you!”

  “The rest of us…”

  The badge flared red. Seyhan started to double up in pain. He fought it, whispering, “There is no pain,” then fought to speak as his face contorted. Green blood trickled from a corner of his mouth where he had bitten his lip in a vain attempt to control it.

  Again he gasped, finally forcing out the words. “They use us as fighters in this arena. They wager on…” His voice choked off before he tumbled down beside the bench.

  “It’s the Master Thrall,” cried T’Ruhi. “I won’t let you take him!” Her voice arched up into a scream as Karatek heard her topple to the ground.

  “Four hundred quatloos on the two females. Once the one who has been punished wakes up.” A new voice rang out.

  “That voice is amplified, but I haven’t been able to locate its source,” Sarissa whispered.

  “Five hundred!”

  Karatek watched T’Sala’s hand. It was trembling, both with the agony induced by the torque and the trauma of knowing she would be forced to fight her sister, most likely to the death. It covered Seyhan’s image transmitter, then went limp.

  “Stay away!” she whispered.

  The message ceased.

  “They were abandoned,” Sarissa told her parents. “I discovered three additional messages from personnel on board Firestorm to some of the technocrats on board Shavokh. Clearly, our prior communications officer’s loyalties were not so much suspect as divided. At the very least, we can call this a conflict of interest.”

  “From where does this transmission originate?” Karatek asked.

  Sarissa repeated the coordinates. Karatek translated the numbers into a location approximately 2.8 hours away by a shuttle traveling at maximum speed, 3.9 hours if the shuttle was heavily armed and carrying a full complement.

  “We have to go after them,” Solor said.

  Did they? Could they? The prisoners were Firestorm’s crew, not Shavokh’s, some might argue: the same people who sent and received messages in secret, whose loyalties were more to their political party or ethnic identity than to Vulcan in Exile. The needs of the many, they would argue, outweighed the needs of the few. Or the one. Karatek could already hear their deliberative, reasonable tones. It was imprudent, illogical, even to go up against a culture that could, somehow, transport people instantaneously from one location to another light-years distant.

  Karatek could imagine the relish with which N’Ereon, one of the younger and most hostile of the te-Vikram who had been elected to council, would plant that barb. He would tell N’Ereon, he decided, that it was honorable. Assuming the council would listen to him at all.

  It made no sense to wish the honored dead to return, but for a moment, Karatek wished N’Keth were alive to roar at N’Ereon about honor and desperate battles. He only hoped that Solor wasn’t remembering that, too.

  “I agree with my brother,” Sarissa said. “And I think the commander is much of the same mind. Otherwise, why would he send me to brief you in advance?”

  “Simple equity: that I should have the same advantage as the technocrats apparently enjoy, of secret messages?”

  The Vulcans were becoming increasingly politicized, increasingly fragmented. Karatek suspected that the only reason that S’task had permitted his resignation was so that he could install S’lovan in his place. He could not imagine the man as a spy, but then, he would not have imagined that he himself could shirk his duty, as he had apparently done, in the name of logic.

  We did not leave Vulcan so we could replicate its worst flaws, Karatek told himself. He had been idle for too long. And if S’lovan didn’t like it, he could just go back to Rea’s Helm.

  Of the Vulcans trapped and forced to fight, there were no te-Vikram, and those surviving all bore either names that denoted followers of Surak or origins on the mainland, origins close to Karatek’s own.

  Did we make a mistake when we allowed people to remember that they were technocrats or te-Vikram o
r anything other than Vulcans, and exiled Vulcans at that?

  Could we have stopped them from remembering?

  They could hardly have stopped them from remembering that, or anything else, Karatek told himself. He certainly was a case in point.

  We cannot remember that these people called to us for help and we too abandoned them, he realized. Not if they wished to retain any shred of ethical behavior. Perhaps, too, for one ship to rescue crew from another, or at least try to, might make them one people again—at least for a little while.

  He removed the data crystal from the recorder. Its facets captured the light from the firepot, drawing his attention for a moment more. This too must be committed to memory.

  “I concur,” said Karatek. “But you will let me be the one to speak. And you will be guided by Shavokh’s commander. No more secret messages. Or plans for secret missions. The fleet has lost enough already. Are we agreed?”

  Sarissa inclined her head, the model of docility, but Karatek saw the fire in her eyes.

  “Then let us go. I need to announce to the council that, like it or not, I am back from my leave of absence. And then, I shall help S’lovan make the council see reason.”

  Eight

  Now

  EARTH STARDATE 54104.3

  “There is one more who will be joining you.” Even as Uhura said the words, the door chime to her office rang out. Smiling, she added, “And here he is now. Come in.”

  At the keyword, the door slid aside to reveal a stocky, rather overweight but still-familiar figure striding into her office. “Welcome, Scotty.”

  “The pleasure’s mine, lassie—Admiral Lassie, I should say.” He beamed a full Montgomery Scott smile at her, and Uhura smiled back. “Ah, and Ambassador Spock,” Scotty continued warmly. “’Tis good to see you again, as well.”

  “I too find it quite agreeable. Ruanek, this is Captain Montgomery Scott, with whom I served on the Enterprise captained by James T. Kirk.”

  Ruanek bowed politely, but Spock caught a glint of wonder in his eyes: another of Spock’s old shipmates!

  Even though time—and the strange out-of-time period that Scotty had spent in a transporter loop—had indeed added weight to the once-slender figure, his eyes were as bright and clever as ever. “I’ve taken on a new job,” he told Spock. “I’m running things over at the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.”

  “And it’s the perfect job for him,” Uhura added. “The S.C.E. is running more smoothly than it has in years. Still, Scotty, we could use your expertise on this mission. You understand that we will need the use of Romulan cloaking technology.”

  “Aye, of course. And I’m the closest that you have to an expert.”

  “I’m certainly not,” Ruanek muttered.

  “You do understand the situation,” Spock said. “You will be risking your new job and indeed your entire career if you join this mission.”

  “Spock, you know me better than that. If you think I’m going to turn down the chance to help rescue an old friend and colleague just for a job—well, you have another thought coming!”

  Spock raised an eyebrow. “I never doubted you.”

  As always, Spock felt a little thrill of approval at the sight of the U.S.S. Alliance, which was by any standards a sleek, almost elegant ship. Any scars that it had acquired during the Dominion War had been smoothed away, and the ship gleamed in the reflected Earthlight like a new vessel.

  The young man who greeted Spock, Ruanek, and Scotty as they came aboard had that “fresh from Starfleet Academy” look to him, complete down to the as-yet uncreased and just too perfectly clean uniform. His eyes were perhaps a little too wide, with a little too much wonder in them, too. But his voice was properly steady as he said without a moment’s hesitation, “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. Captain Saavik asks you to meet her in her ready room. I shall escort you there, sirs.”

  “Excellent,” said Spock.

  The thrill that he’d felt at the sight of the ship heightened into something much warmer at the sight of his wife. She was seated at the ready room’s desk, studying the image on a console screen, a tranquil figure in a tranquil room with walls of calming pale blue. Saavik, Spock thought with a touch of what he knew was illogical but very real pride, was a trim, slender figure, standing out against the soft blue of the walls with her black hair and deep red–and-black-and-gray captain’s uniform. She was, he thought as well, the very image of a Starfleet officer.

  Saavik looked up as Spock, Ruanek, and Scotty entered—and for a bare instant, her attention was all for her husband. She got to her feet.

  “Spock.” Only another Vulcan could have read the world of warmth hidden behind the name.

  “Saavik. It is agreeable to see you again.” The words were formal, as was proper in such surroundings, but he knew that she would read the same warmth in his voice.

  He stepped forward and they touched hands briefly and, touch telepaths that Vulcans were, shared a moment of private joy. But in the next instant, Spock took the barest half-step back again. They both knew and accepted that Saavik was the captain right now, not the wife.

  “Ruanek,” she said. “Welcome. It is agreeable to see you, too. Ah, and Captain Scott, too.”

  “Captain,” Scotty returned with a polite bow. “You’re looking quite well.”

  “I assume, Captain Scott, that you are here to assist with the rescue.”

  “Aye, ’tis true—and I think after all these years, lass, you can call me Scotty.”

  Saavik dipped her head in acknowledgment. After all, the two of them had known each other since her early days training on the Enterprise. “It is well that you have joined the mission.” Saavik’s glance took in all three of them. “I have a feeling, illogical though such things as feelings might be, that we are going to need all the help that we can get.”

  As their captain and her three visitors returned to the bridge, Saavik’s crew couldn’t quite hide their surprise, but they were all too well-schooled to say anything untoward. The seasoned veterans accepted the visitors without much reaction. But Spock could almost feel the younger ones’ awed thoughts, That’s Ambassador Spock! or That’s Montgomery Scott!

  Scotty felt it, too. “At least no one’s said, ‘I read about you in the history books,’” he murmured wryly.

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Suhur, the dark-skinned Vulcan at communications said, “a general message is coming in from Starfleet.”

  “Let us see it,” Saavik ordered. “On-screen. Decode if necessary.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Ah, here comes the official smokescreen,” Ruanek said in Spock’s ear.

  He’d said that in Standard since there was no equivalent word for “smokescreen” in Vulcan. Spock raised a brow at him. “You learned a great deal while in service on Earth.”

  “Indeed I did,” Ruanek retorted, absolutely without expression.

  The man delivering the message was, rather to Spock’s surprise, Admiral William Ross, who had been in command of military operations during the Dominion War. Although some of the lines of stress had faded during the time of peace, he still looked grimly determined. He was not, Spock thought, very happy about what he was doing now. And the wording of the official Starfleet message he delivered was, as Ruanek had predicted, both precise and very careful:

  “On Stardate 54104.2, we received information from reliable sources that the Romulan Star Empire has suffered the loss of a valuable and historic artifact. In the interests of mutual appreciation and cooperation, this will be a joint Starfleet–Romulan mission to recover that stolen artifact.”

  “Which translates as,” Ruanek murmured, “‘Maybe this will help the Romulans trust the Federation.’ But no wonder no one knew at first just why the Romulans left Earth in such haste—it took some time for the news to reach Starfleet.”

  Admiral Ross continued. “Understand that the artifact is irreplaceable and extremely valuable—not in the monetary sense, but in the sense that we may not have a
nother chance for such cooperation. All care must be taken, repeat, must be taken, to ensure the artifact’s safety. This will be a recovery of incredibly important historical data. Ross out.”

  This time Ruanek said nothing. But Spock and he both knew that this statement, too, had both a covert and an overt face: The entire Federation would know by now that the artifact might well hold proof of real atrocities committed by the Romulans against the Watraii.

  At least Uhura had managed to keep the rescue of Chekov out of the official Starfleet order. Nor did that order include any command about landing—or not landing—on the Watraii homeworld.

  Small blessings, as the humans might say, Spock thought.

  The official word from the Klingon High Council came in soon after the Federation announcement, predictably announcing that they could not spare any Klingon Defense Force vessels. In the aftermath not only of the Dominion War but of continued conflicts both internal and external to the Empire in the year since, Chancellor Martok simply did not have the ships to spare—especially not to send in aid of their ancient enemies, the Romulans.

  “Open a shipwide channel,” Saavik ordered. “This is your captain speaking. As of this moment, shore leave has been canceled. Unfortunate, yes, but that is the way of things. But now I have a more important message for all who serve aboard this ship.

  “Most of you were with me when we fought back the Watraii—without Starfleet permission. You know without my having to say it how close we came to court-martial then. Now I must ask you—not order you, ask you—to risk your careers yet again.”

  Quickly and clearly Saavik summed up the situation and the need to rescue both Pavel Chekov and the Romulan artifact as swiftly as possible, and without involving Starfleet. “You do see the reason why we must move in swiftly and privately, I assume. And I understand that some of you may not wish to take the risk. There are, after all, those of you who are only beginning your professional careers. If any of you wish to leave, you will be free to do so, without penalty or fault. I ask only that you keep silent about our mission.”