Vulcan's Soul Trilogy Book One Read online

  Nara, the young Bolian woman who was his aide, hadn’t even flinched at his outburst. “No, sir.”

  He swiveled about in his too-comfortable chair to face her, accidentally sweeping a pile of printouts off his desk. “But did I not already duly fill out Form 24.l5, and in triplicate? Did I not transmit it myself? I didn’t ewen question the fact that Form 24.15 seems to deal vith farm animals, not starships. Nara, do you have any idea vhy ve are still using Form 24.15?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” She bent and gathered up the printouts. “Maybe someone at Starfleet Headquarters thinks pigs can fly?”

  Chekov started to reply, stopped, and stared at Nara. “Wery good!”

  In her spare time, Nara was studying twentieth-century American English. She beamed. “Proper old English idiom?”

  “Perfect tventieth century.” But then Chekov shook his head and sat back in his too-comfortable chair. “Ridiculous thing for an admiral to be doing, isn’t it? Before the var, I at least could train Starfleet captains. Now, I spend my days playing vord games and filling out archaic forms.”

  “I know, sir. It must be so frustrating. Especially when…” She stopped awkwardly.

  “Go on, Nara. I vill not bite.” At her blink, he added hastily, “Another Earth idiom, not a literal varning!”

  “Oh.” Nara was an excellent aide, but she did tend to blush easily. Right now, she was rapidly turning a charming deep sapphire. “Well, I, it must have been so, so splendid, sir, soaring through the galaxy like that, I mean, working alongside Captain Kirk on the original Enterprise and seeing all those new worlds and—”

  Chekov snorted. “You make me sound like an antique, young voman. I’m not that old.”

  By now, she was nearly cobalt. “Oh no, sir, I didn’t mean that!”

  “Never mind, Nara.”

  It’s true, though. I do feel like an antique. Taken out of active use and put on display to be admired. Or is that pitied?

  Dammit, though, it’s true: I’m not that old. There are active Starfleet personnel in the field who have decades on me.

  Well, years, at any rate.

  But me, oh no, I—I had to go and accept the honors.

  Idiot. I should have done what Captain Kirk did, get the title demoted right back down again to captain.

  I could still do it….

  Do what? The Dominion War was over, which was why they all had so much of that cursed paperwork, and right now everyone in the Federation was busy just picking up the pieces.

  Not much romance in that. No one needs any more five-year missions and boldly going anywhere, not just now.

  But, damn. What I wouldn’t give for one more adventure.

  At least he had actually managed to play a useful role during the Dominion War….

  2373

  At least, Chekov thought, I can still be useful even now, with the war almost at our figurative front door.

  He’d given up active command decades ago, tired of being assigned nothing but routine patrols. Ah yes, Starfleet’s tactful way of telling me to take a desk job, Chekov told himself. Sorry, gentlebeings, but ever since that little adventure with Khan Noonien Singh I’ve been a tiny bit, shall we say, hard of hearing.

  Even if he wasn’t commanding a ship, Chekov had avoided that desk job all that decade and made a new name for himself as a quick, efficient, and, yes, merciful trainer of young Starfleet officers. He looked about the holosuite that right now was a perfect mockup of an Oberth-class ship’s bridge, down to the sheen on the railings and a scuff mark on a panel. It perfectly hid the fact that it was really just part of a Starfleet facility on Garaita IV, and Chekov had to hide his grin before one of the youngsters who were sitting at the different control panels asked if something was wrong. A really good holoprogram, such as this one, which he’d helped design, got those using it completely lost in the illusion of flying a starship to the point that they’d be sweating and swearing before he let them go.

  But they would remember the lessons learned. And he didn’t have to risk a starship or its crew—or, for that matter, his own life—to teach them.

  Without warning, Chekov snapped, “A spatial anomaly has suddenly appeared, starboard, coordinates 21.52 by 623.5.” The words cued the holoprogram to instantly produce one. “At your current speed, you will intersect it in one minute. What do you do?”

  He watched the crew scramble to it, pleased to see that the “captain,” a dark-skinned human with her long hair caught up in a coronet of braids, correctly ordered “Science,” a white-furred Tariik, to report and at the same time ordered “Helm,” another human who reminded Chekov of a young Hikaru Sulu, to take evasive action. “Helm” reacted properly, too: On a real ship, she would have used just enough power to turn them away to safety.

  You don’t get out of this that easy!

  Chekov snapped, “But engineering just reported an explosion!” The holodeck, cued in, obligingly provided the special effect, shaking the “crew” violently. “Sabotage? An accident? There’s little time—you have just lost most of your warp capability.”

  The “captain” was in instant communication with “engineering,” a part of the holoprogram.

  Good girl. Asking all the right questions. There’s hope for you after all, and maybe for Helm and Science as well.

  He gave the “crew” a slight breather before he hit them with the “hostile alien encounter” scenario as well. A good starship crew had to be ready to handle two or even three crises at the same time, and maybe even deal with a first-contact situation as well.

  So, now, maybe this wasn’t the same as some heroic “five-year mission of exploration” as it was in the days aboard the Enterprise, but it was good to know he was keeping today’s young hot-shots from getting themselves or their crews killed, or from starting a war.

  Even if the youngsters did tend to treat him like living history. Or maybe that was as a living antique.

  You did what you could with what you had. Besides, the youngsters did show promise. And at least he did get to go out into space aboard starships later in the training process. Besides, no matter what the youngsters thought of him, he had yet to lose one of his students.

  “What’s that?” he snapped.

  They picked up on the cue perfectly. “Captain! An alien ship is approaching, warp six…uh…seven—”

  Half-point deduction for that stumble.

  The “captain” uttered the words Chekov had heard so many times in his career: “Open hailing frequencies.”

  “No answer, Captain.”

  Now what are you going to do, eh, youngsters? No warp capability, an explosion in engineering, a singularity alarmingly close, and a rude alien approaching.

  But without warning, the projection wavered, then faded, leaving them back in the plain, black-walled, wire-lined holosuite. The students, now looking more like ordinary human and Tariik young men and women than an elite starship crew, murmured and blinked in surprise.

  “Program malfunction,” Chekov said. “Stay vere you are. Your lesson is not over.”

  Before Chekov could say anything else, though, his combadge beeped. With a grunt of annoyance at the new interruption, he slapped at it. “Chekov here. Vhat do you—”

  But before he could get any further, the voice at the other end murmured a code phrase: Information for his ears only.

  Now what?

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Chekov said. “But don’t go anywhere. As I varn, the lesson isn’t over yet.”

  With that, Chekov left the holosuite.

  “This way, sir,” an aide murmured, and led him to a private office.

  No window. No furnishings other than a chair and a desk with a viewscreen. Purely utilitarian—and, Chekov knew from prior experiences, secure.

  He sat at the console and keyed in his own private code, and then leaned back, waiting with a touch of impatience as the viewscreen went through the various Starfleet security screens, then finally came to full life.
r />   Then Chekov straightened, frowning, as he recognized the image of a tall, lean, pale-skinned man.

  “Thomas? Vhat’s wrong?”

  Admiral Thomas John Randall said shortly, “Sorry to drag you out of a lesson.”

  Chekov waved that off. “They’ll survive. Suspense is good for the young. Not for me. Vhat do you vant to tell me?” He paused uneasily, studying the man’s face. “Bad news, I take it.”

  Randall sighed and nodded. “I thought that you’d want to hear it before it goes public.”

  “Never mind the drama, Thomas. Vhat happened?”

  “The details are just starting to come in. It’s begun. Deep Space 9 is under Dominion attack.”

  Chekov stared at him in a second of sheer disbelief. “Bozhya moi,” he said at last. “My God.”

  “It’s official, Pavel: We’re at war.”

  I knew it was coming, Chekov thought grimly. I knew it as soon as I heard that we were mining the Bajoran wormhole. No way in all the hells that the Dominion was going to give them a chance to finish the job. And of course Starfleet couldn’t get help to them in time.

  “Vhat about Sisko and his people?” he asked. “Are they all right?”

  “As far as I know, yes. All Starfleet personnel evacuated the station. Unofficial word has it that almost all of them are safe.” The man shook his head. “As safe as they can be under the circumstances. But the Bajorans are facing a second occupation.”

  “Vhat does Starfleet vant of me, Thomas?”

  “To put it bluntly, Pavel: With a war on its hands, Starfleet has suddenly found itself needing all the trained starship personnel it can get, and needing them fast.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’re not surprised.”

  “Vell, I had hardly expected to be sent into battle. Ve both know damned vell that captaining a starship in combat is a younger person’s game. So, let me guess. You vant me to go right on training the youngsters—but you vant me to speed things up, and to cut out anything but the military side of the training.”

  Randall held out a helpless hand. “Official Starfleet orders. Get them ready as fast as you can.”

  “Vone, two, three, shove them out into space and hope that some of them surwive.”

  “Do you think I like it? It’s not the best way to do things, everyone knows it, and it hurts like hell to think of how many we’re going to lose, but dammit, Pavel, what else is there for us to do?” Randall suddenly pretended to be very busy studying a padd. “You have just been issued passage aboard the U.S.S. Arcturus, which will be headed back to Earth in three hours.”

  “Three, eh? You don’t give a man much time, do you? Someone had better go tell the students the lesson is over. I left them vaiting for me on the holodeck. How did Starfleet vord it? ‘Necessary but not essential personnel’ or vas it ‘baggage, human, aging’?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  Chekov sighed. “Don’t bother answering that, Thomas. And don’t vorry, I’m not going to throw a childish fit. I knew this day vas going to come. It’s just that knowing it doesn’t make it any less of a shock.”

  “To both of us, I assure you.”

  Chekov shook his head. “That doesn’t change the way things are. So. Tell me, who is the captain of this U.S.S. Arcturus?”

  “Captain Alan Roberts.”

  Chekov snorted.

  “What?”

  “I trained him.” Young Alan Roberts already a captain. Young? Bah, any younger, and he wouldn’t even need to shave!

  But seeing everyone else as young was supposed to be another one of those cursed warning signs of age everyone insisted on quoting to him, so Chekov merely gave Randall a wry grin.

  “Vell, let’s just hope the young man has learned his lessons and learned them vell.”

  2377

  “Sir? The news feed just came in and it’s marked urgent.”

  Chekov, jarred abruptly back to the present, groaned. “Oh hell, now vhat?”

  It was beautifully ironic that as soon as he’d stepped back onto Earth again, he’d been rewarded for his time in the war effort with the very thing he’d been fighting so long to avoid: a damned desk job. He could still see the bright and shiny officials in their spotless uniforms and their charming smiles, meeting him in the spaceport where they knew he wouldn’t make a scene, offering him the nice, shiny lure of the admiralty—and the strings that came with the title.

  I fell for it. And no one ever said that life was fair.

  Chekhov switched on the news feed, and as the image formed, dimly heard Nara’s soft, stunned “Oh,” and himself swearing in horrified Russian.

  After that, Chekhov and Nara watched in utter silence as the delayed broadcast played across his vidscreen. They both saw the destruction of the Romulan colony and the savage claim by the…the Watraii.

  The Watraii? Chekhov frowned slightly, prodding his memory. Something about that name…a vague recollection of…

  Yes. Same name, same mask, same species.

  So much for picking up the pieces.

  Chekov didn’t doubt that the news feed wasn’t giving him all the facts—but he knew where to get them.

  “Nara, get me Admiral Uhura—no, never mind, don’t bother, I’ll do it myself.”

  As he waved her out, Chekov entered the proper code with the proper automatic scrambling. Almost at once he saw the image of a familiar face with a halo of silver hair.

  “Pavel,” she said. “How nice to hear from you.”

  “Uhura, vhat the hell is going on?”

  “Just what I was going to tell you.” Uhura smiled slightly, charming as ever, but with the steel beneath the smile. “I don’t have to ask if your office is secure, do I?”

  “Secure as the best communications officer in Starfleet could make it,” he retorted. “For which I thank her.”

  She gave him a true grin at that, no subterfuge or hidden meanings. But almost at once the coolness returned to her face. “Pavel, listen to me. I have a little…vacation for you.”

  He straightened. Uhura in her role as chief of intelligence never contacted anyone about leisure activities. Considering what he had just viewed, there didn’t seem to be much doubt about why she’d contacted him.

  Chekov shrugged. “One of the perks of being an admiral,” he said, “is that I can take leave vhenever I vant, and pretty much no one of any lower rank than another admiral is going to challenge me. Hello, other admiral.” He paused. “Ve’re talking about that destroyed Romulan colony, aren’t ve?”

  Nothing changed in that elegant mahogany face. Uhura only answered obliquely, “Come see me, Pavel. We need to arrange a few details.”

  Her very careful, casual wording gave him the clue: Yes, it was about the colony—and no, this wasn’t going to be a Starfleet mission that she was proposing. Not surprising, Chekov thought quickly. Starfleet wasn’t going to want to get caught up in Romulan affairs, not right after a war, and not with alliances still so new and shaky.

  Chekov surprised himself by suddenly grinning like a kid—no, like the green young ensign he’d once been.

  “Yes sir, Captain Kirk!”

  You idiot. The mission is going to be something covert and dangerous, and it’s probably going to get you busted back to ensign, assuming that you even survive it. Whatever it is.

  But even so, he still couldn’t stop grinning.

  Twelve

  Memory

  The sun hammered down as Surak led them toward Mount Seleya in a file as ragged as their sandsuits, stumbling down the last dunes to stagger as they reached flat ground once more. Beneath his hood, Karatek felt the very intensity of the light trying to crush him into the sand. If he fell, he might not be able to summon the strength to fight the sun and rise. Then he would die, gazing up at the blazing sky until his eyes dried long before death came.

  Avert, Karatek wished it. His scratched fingers moved in a gesture that had been old even in the First Dynasty. Nor did he mind that Surak had seen hi
m indulge in superstition.

  In another life, Karatek reminded himself, he had been an engineer. He had sat, comfortably alert, at a workstation in a climate-controlled room and sipped tea. For him, the rigors of the kahs-wan, of reclamation work, or rebuilding were memories of service done and long since delegated to others. Now, those ordeals seemed like so much play. He was no longer privileged, softened by city living. And he had children to protect.

  Day after day on the Forge, Karatek learned how to fight against breaking into the dreamy, rhythmic stride that would make him drift out of time and awareness into a doze that could tumble him down a slope to smash into hidden rocks with edges like knives. They could shatter bone, those rocks, or slash so deep the blood would not stop flowing. Or, even if he kept his footing, an unwary slide into just the wrong place on a dune could start a sandfall, alert any stray te-Vikram, or even wake the creatures that, legend whispered, swam beneath the sand as if it were one of Vulcan’s shrunken seas.

  Left foot. Right foot. Pause. Drag. And onward until each muscle ached and beyond.

  After days of this slow walking in which he was agonizingly aware of each sound and each muscle, he became sure it would be easier to climb up a rock face. Climbing, Karatek reminded himself, was what they would do soon, if all went well. Mount Seleya never seemed to get any closer.

  Karatek’s lips cracked and blackened with thirst. Often now, he bent over the children who slouched at his side, Sarissa trying to ease her brother’s path as if she were mother, not sister. Surak, by contrast, seemed to move as effortlessly as if he walked within the walled gardens that Karatek could scarcely believe belonged to him in what now felt like another life. Karatek shot a furious glance at him and brought himself up sharply before the two of them collided.

  “You must drink your water yourself, not give it away,” the philosopher rebuked him. “There is no logic in giving your children your water if you die of thirst and leave them unprotected when they have come to trust you.”