Vulcan's Soul Trilogy Book One Page 14

  Karatek moved out into the center of the pilgrims’ track, his boots scattering sand that clearly had not been disturbed for what looked like days. A few days more, perhaps, and the ancient road would disappear. The idea disturbed him.

  The flyer hummed overhead, lowering until it hovered perhaps the height of three men above them.

  Abruptly, Karatek gestured at it. “If they’re going to keep us under surveillance, why not simply offer us a ride home?” he demanded.

  Surak raised an eyebrow. “If we are honest pilgrims, we would not accept it. If we are decoys for a strike force, they will not risk themselves.”

  Varekat would say the flyer was already vulnerable to a ground-to-air strike, but Varekat was not here, and Surak’s irony was getting as oppressive as the heat of the sun. Karatek shrugged and trudged onward. He wanted to wave the flyer down, or run toward his home, demanding to know what was wrong; but he knew better than to waste his strength.

  Nevasa, sinking toward the west, made it hard to see the road ahead. Now, though, they could smell the smoke, all the more so as the wind changed. It was a profanation of the clean desert, and Karatek checked his badge again. They would all need injections as soon as they reached ShiKahr.

  An hour later, and Nevasa’s slanting rays were no longer painful. Through them, he could see first the pillar of smoke Skamandros had discerned from far off, then the Gates.

  What barbarians had knocked a flange out of the one to the left? In place since the legendary First Dynasty, it had been buried in the sand for generations, only to be uncovered and restored time and time again. Now, a white gouge marked where the ancient stone had been ripped away from its base. Karatek would rather someone had broken his arm.

  Home, he thought. What in the name of my mother’s katra has become of my home?

  As they neared, he saw the faint shimmer of a forcefield outside the gate, reinforcing a metal barrier set up outside it. He had never seen so many guards patrolling the Gate—or so many people, some carrying banners, some chanting, contained behind the forcefield. Noisy they might be, but it was an angry noise, not the joyous tumult Karatek remembered from his childhood.

  You should see my city as it used to be, he started to tell Kovar and Sarissa, then held his tongue. Illogical to taunt them with what they could not have, with what he could not have. In a sense, Vulcan’s wars had rendered them all homeless, refugees from more peaceful lives.

  “Stop right there!” Subcommander Ivek’s voice, amplified by microphones in his helmet, boomed over the desert. “Hands on heads. Don’t move!”

  Karatek paused instantly. Daring to defy the order, he produced his identification as Surak had suggested. As if summoned to provide reinforcements, the flyer descended. Its engines whipped up the sand until Karatek and his companions could barely see. Sarissa began to raise her hood.

  “Stay as you are!” came the order.

  Guards poured out from behind the metal barrier and scanned first him, then his companions.

  “This is Surak!” a man behind him called to the subcommander just as another guard’s scanner lit, and Karatek shut his eyes in despair.

  Torin’s weapons. Of course.

  Karatek held his arms out from his side.

  “The blaster is unregistered,” he said. “It belongs to T’Kehr Torin of the Vulcan Space Initiative.” He was hot. He was exhausted. And now he was deeply frightened. Where fear walked, Surak had said in his Analects, anger was its companion. Surak was right.

  “Night and day, Ivek,” Karatek complained. “You know I report to Torin at the VSI. Call him.”

  “I’m going to have to,” the subcommander said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to wait in the holding area.”

  He gestured. “You still answering for these two troublemakers? Where’s their friend?”

  Immensely tired, Karatek sighed. “We lost Varen to a te-Vikram ambush. How many does that make this year? We’re back from Seleya.”

  Ivek dipped his head. “I grieve with thee,” he said, with a conspicuous lack of sincerity. “What about the two young ones?”

  “Refugees. I’m taking them in charge. They need medical attention.”

  “All in good time.”

  “May I at least call my consort?” Karatek asked. The Ivek he knew had been quick to make a joke, with a lively sense of irony at his own expense. This was a more somber man, almost intimidating in his efficiency.

  “She’s been called,” Ivek said. “If Lady T’Vysse speaks for you, it might do you a lot more good with the High Command than Torin, for that matter. They’ve already said they want to see you.”

  “Night and day, Ivek, what’s been happening?” Karatek demanded. He felt Surak’s and Skamandros’s presence at his back, reassurance and curiosity combined. “What was that explosion?”

  “You had a colleague named Varekat? Arms expert?” Ivek waved his guards back.

  “All right, move it out, you men!” he shouted.

  Men. No women in the Guard now. When had that happened? So, here too, they returned to the ancient ways.

  “Varekat, yes,” Karatek said. “But he resigned.”

  “Apparently, he didn’t,” Ivek said. “At least, not immediately. What I heard was that T’Kehr Torin told him to take some time, think about it.”

  Karatek shut his eyes. He could see where this was going.

  “The VSI’s been working with the Northerners, haven’t you?” Ivek’s voice changed.

  He is interrogating me, Karatek realized. Ivek had always been pleasantly wry, self-deprecating, not grim. He had never assumed this type of authority before. It became important to find his old schoolmate again. He had to be concealed somewhere within this angry, driven man.

  “Building ships for them,” Karatek admitted.

  “Well, the Southern Hegemony took extreme exception to that.”

  “Why? We had agreements of neutrality with them!”

  “Sir!” a trooper shouted to Ivek. “This one—it’s Surak himself!”

  “Yes, I know,” Ivek yelled back, removing his helmet so his voice was no longer amplified. The cheekpieces left dark marks on his face, which was no longer agreeably rounded, but haggard with many sleepless nights, even for a Vulcan. “Run him through scan!”

  “I did, sir! And look at this!”

  As his fellows closed in on Surak and Skamandros tensed, awaiting a command to attack that Karatek prayed would never come, the trooper jogged up to his commander bearing the coronet Surak had taken from Mount Seleya. Ivek took it in both hands and began unwrapping it.

  “You would be wise not to tamper with that,” Surak said. “It was a gift to me from the high priestess at Mount Seleya. You may report it as ‘experimental equipment.’ ”

  “It’ll have to be checked, sir,” Ivek said.

  “Who will you trust to check it, Ivek?” Karatek demanded. “Torin? You’ve already implied he’s under a cloud.”

  “You should have seen the clouds around here, Karatek,” Ivek told him. “Wasn’t bad enough we had a te-Vikram raid. Those sonless wonders took out a chunk of the Gate. And here I thought they’d proscribed technology.”

  Karatek sighed. “They do use blasters. And you don’t need to use firepower to break something.”

  “They didn’t. They had some sort of engine. Threw rocks at it. Right through the force shields. That was when we tripled the guard.

  “Meanwhile, the Northeastern Alliance declared war on the Southern Hegemony, and the High Command had to choose which one to stay allied to. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a new party started getting votes in the High Command. It canceled your ship contracts with the Northeasterners and pressed for weapons buildup. Something about warships: that would sound logical, wouldn’t it?”

  There was a world of bitterness in the way Ivek said “logical.”

  Karatek sighed. “I designed the engines for those ships,” he admitted. “Even the engines could serve as weapons.”

 
; He could see it now. They would want to mount Varekat’s most secret projects on those ships, press him to manufacture larger and larger—His blood chilled, and his heart raced until it was a thrum in his side. Karatek pressed his hand against it.

  “What did Varekat do?”

  “That’s right, you knew the man,” Ivek said. For the first time, his voice softened. Only a trifle, but it was a start.

  Knew. So Varekat had died.

  Night and day, how many others had died with him?

  “Torin told him to think over leaving the Initiative. Well, Varekat thought it over, all right. He and his assistants. Apparently they destroyed their records, at least, that’s what they said in their announcement. Then, they blew their lab. None of them survived.”

  Karatek bowed his head, thankful for the pressure of Sarissa’s head against his shoulder, Kovar’s weight against his side. Skamandros came up behind him, his shadow falling protectively across the sunlight to ease him.

  In a civilized world, Karatek thought. How was this possible in a civilized world?

  “I grieve for thee,” said Surak.

  “Isn’t grief an emotion?” Ivek asked.

  “It is an assessment of fact,” Surak said. “And of threat. There will be more to come.”

  Ivek shrugged. “They say you’re wise. So, tell me something I didn’t know. I’m going to save my grief for the people who don’t have the luxury to preach subversion and leave their posts. Those of us who will defend their homes to the last.”

  Being wise, Surak kept silent in his turn.

  “My husband!” T’Vysse’s voice in Karatek’s ears felt like water after a long desert crossing. He held out his hand to touch her fingers. How coarse and dark his hand had become compared with hers. Life pulsed through her hand like pale green shoots in Vulcan’s brief spring.

  “Please, Subcommander, let my companion through,” T’Vysse was saying to Ivek. He gestured, and Torin came up, shouldering through the guards with respect, but no trace of fear.

  To Karatek’s surprise, his old supervisor turned first to Surak, who inclined his head.

  “T’Kehr Torin, I have returned your man to you.”

  Now Torin rounded on Karatek, looking him up and down before he clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Well done!” he said to both of them. Karatek shook his head. Torin acted as if he were a commander—were still a commander—who had dispatched a young, promising officer to hard duty, so that he would do or die.

  Surak, Karatek saw now, had received him in the same spirit. Warriors were ruthless. Intellectuals, he understood, were even more so.

  “How much trouble did Varekat let you in for?” Karatek asked.

  Torin shrugged. “Good thing your lady here came to pick me up. I doubt they’d have let me through the lines. Smartest thing you ever did, bonding to her.”

  Karatek breathed a faint laugh. “It seemed the logical thing to do.”

  T’Vysse had moved from his side to the children. Without a word, she seemed to understand who they were and what Karatek had done. Reassurance resonated in the bond between them as she knelt and took their hands in hers.

  “Could be worse,” Torin said, drawing Karatek’s attention. “Varekat’s prototypes could have survived. Not to mention his notes. So we can’t replicate his results. At least we won’t have that on our consciences.”

  “Never mind that!” T’Vysse interrupted them. “Besides, these children need medical care. They need their beds, too. Husband, help me get them home. And our guest-friends too! You and Torin can go back to work tomorrow.”

  She flashed a glare at Torin, who drew himself up.

  “Lady Mitrani says you have been away for three days, and asked me to ask you if it is your will that she forget the sound of your voice?”

  As Torin threw up a hand in surrender, T’Vysse’s smile seemed lovelier than a sundweller riding a fair dawn wind.

  Discreetly, Surak lowered his eyes. Ivek shook his head as if dazzled. He even saluted as T’Vysse led her captives away.

  Sixteen

  Memory

  Karatek pounded his fist against the ancient, hardened clay of the passages beneath ShiKahr’s Old Town, trying to visualize the map he had consulted. The sun-blasted things were a veritable maze, and he was no eidetic. The wretched tunnels were remnants of the days, five hundred years past, when the occasional cloudburst would cascade from the Forge across hardened ground to flood the city. Those floods hadn’t happened often, but when they did, damage and loss of life had been immense before the tunnels were hacked into the rocky ground and hardened, in the days before lasers, by building fires within them.

  Should he turn here, double back, or take the right fork in the tunnel? It was hard to remember.

  Had his time in the desert dried his brains?

  Bad enough he had been fool enough to leave his house about the same time each day. But today, of all days, when he was to speak at the VSI’s symposium on repurposing ships of war for long-range space travel, what madness had made him decide to avoid the day’s high pollution index? Cutting through ShiKahr’s Old Town with its unruly crowds, complicated now by security checkpoints, would have been bad enough, but taking the covered ways left him isolated, and that was worse.

  Fool! One moment, Karatek had been hurrying along, rehearsing the arguments he was going to use to convince the VSI to turn warships into generation ships. The next, as he paused to make a note, he heard the pad-pad-pad of feet. Several pair. A friend would have called out a greeting, at least for the pleasure of hearing the echoes distort his voices. But no one had spoken. Therefore, Karatek decided, he would have to conclude that whoever was following him could not be his friend.

  His conclusion might be logical, but it chilled Karatek’s blood and made him break out in a rare sweat of fear.

  Night and day, were T’Vysse and the children safe?

  He stumbled over a chunk of hardened soil and grit, lying on the tunnel’s floor. This whole wretched place was collapsing. In a century or so, it might even be time to repair it, assuming ShiKahr survived as anything but a ruin, contaminated by the war that ended not just all war, but all life on Vulcan.

  Picking up the masonry, he pressed back against the curved wall of the tunnel and waited, patient as a le-matya waiting by one of the Forge’s rare water holes. Karatek had kept himself in full training since his desert trek with Surak: perhaps he had lost his wits, but at least he could protect himself.

  As his first stalker passed him, Karatek slammed the debris he held over his head and brought the man down, following the blow with a hard kick to his belly. Karatek’s personal time seemed to slow, giving him the chance to steady himself, then whirl on his second attacker before he could fire the weapon he held. Kicking again, Karatek heard a cry before the second man toppled. He had been aiming for the belly, but hadn’t kicked as high as he had planned. He managed not to flinch in reluctant, incongruous sympathy before he brought his joined fists down on the man’s head. That hurt! After all, he wasn’t really a warrior even if he had been training with T’Kehr Torin ever since he had returned from the desert. His assailants had been overconfident, expecting a timid, sedentary engineer. And Karatek had been lucky.

  As he paused for a moment, panting, a third man, who had cleverly hung back, jumped out at him. He was expecting Karatek to recoil. Instead, he lunged forward and grabbed his attacker, pulling away first his cloak, then a strip of fabric from his tunic.

  Evidence, he realized as the third…assassin lunged at him again.

  Fool, don’t ever put your head down! Torin’s voice echoed in Karatek’s memory.

  He did not want to kill. He had hated killing those te-Vikram on the Forge, and Torin had long since reclaimed his blaster. But talshaya was a method that would let Karatek kill quickly, efficiently, and mercifully. He struck out as he had been taught, and the man’s neck snapped. The sound turned Karatek sick and weak. His knees buckled.

  Conqu
ering the nausea that threatened to overpower him where the assassins had failed, Karatek dragged the man he had killed to lie against the curved tunnel wall. He might have killed, might still be in danger of his life, but he was still a civilized man, and there were still certain decencies….

  A power cell attached to an ancient torch holder cast subtle light on the dead man’s face. Why, Karatek remembered him! He was one of the political officers sent from the High Command to observe when the seminar on how to reconfigure the VSI’s ships was first announced. Metallic embroidered sigils on the fabric strip he held confirmed it: this was an agent of the High Command.

  In that case, Karatek was as dead as he. It was just a matter of time. He turned to the others. Not dead, but unconscious and—Karatek peeled back eyelids—probably concussed. They would need medical attention. Hating himself for the petty thefts, he ransacked their pouches and came away with a gemmed dagger, a light, sedatives in an injector, and a small blaster. No stun setting.

  Karatek shivered, not from the shade in the tunnels. The idea of finding himself subject to the coercive mental technology of the te-Vikram or the drugs he knew his own people could concoct made him as dizzy as if he had spent too long staring up into the sun. But the High Command hated the te-Vikram. At least, Karatek thought it did. Why had it leagued itself with them?

  Only one thing was certain. Karatek had to get out of here.

  He ran down the corridor, searching for a skylight, a ramp, any means of exit. There was no telling how quickly reinforcements could be sent.

  Light poured down through a jagged opening one hundred meters away. Karatek sprinted toward it, building up enough momentum to let him leap, catch the jagged edge in both hands, and hoist himself up onto the surface of the old waterway. Mother Sun beat down on him, but he was used to the pressure, and, even if the day’s air quality would probably earn him yet another injection against radiation, the light glittering off the desert floor was clean.

  He glanced at his badge. Well within acceptable levels. Well, readings could be faked. Badges could be damaged. That was always a signal for people conscientious about their health to go to the health center and be tested. Karatek wiped his bloody palms against the inside of his cloak, pulled up his hood, and, drawing on all the control he had learned from Surak, slowed his pace. Now he appeared to be just another pedestrian conserving his energy under the sun’s assault as he walked to his place of work.