Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Page 15

  “Get out!” Sunheart’s commander abandoned all pretense of a decent, measured control. His ship, along with the ion trails of his two consorts, described extravagant hyperbolas as they fled.

  “Commander, we’re starting to feel an energy surge coming from the planet…”

  “Reverse course!” Karatek and S’lovan shouted in unison, and Karatek lunged for controls.

  Shavokh’s engines whined and labored to break free.

  “It’s building up!” he heard an engineer scream.

  “Augment engines!” Karatek ordered. “Hook in the test generators. Make sure the crystals are aligned, or we’ll have an explosion.”

  Maybe an explosion here in space would be better than being trapped, tugged down to a planet for which they had had the greatest hopes.

  “Do it!” Karatek shouted.

  “Do it now!” S’lovan backed him up.

  With a shudder, the test engine came online. Control boards shorted out, and the entire ship lurched as Shavokh struggled free.

  Ship-to-ship receiver in one ear, Commander S’lovan tensed as he listened to Sunheart.

  “Yes,” he barked. “We’ve lost track of Vengeance and Firestorm, too. Let’s go now!”

  Ending transmission, S’lovan turned to his crew. “I want an estimate of how soon you can get those fires out and damage repaired,” he said. “When I say ‘move,’I want us to be able to put as much distance between us and that world as we can, as fast as we can.”

  “Sir, why not accelerate now?”

  “Sunheart’s commander believes we are now out of range. The operative word is ‘believes.’ He wants to consult in person, and the other ships—those that survived”—the man visibly fought to retain his control—“are out of range. He estimates a 35.666 percent chance that both escaped whatever caused the other two to crash.”

  “So much for our new homeworld,” came a whisper from T’Velar, an associate of Avarak. “R’mor said the only place he’d seen energy like that was when he visited the healers. What if it’s not physical but mental?”

  “This isn’t the time for metaphysics!” the senior science officer rebuked her.

  Her speculation was unlikely to the point of absurdity, but it was all they had. And it looked likely to prompt a shouting match.

  “Kroykah!” ordered Commander S’lovan. “I want a senior healer to attend me at the shuttlebay. Sunheart’s commander is bringing over an adept for a consultation.”

  “It will be interesting to hear the adept’s views,” Karatek observed.

  “What views?” the commander asked as he rose. “She’s the last of Sunheart’s telepaths who was initiated to the rank of adept. Apparently she had an old teacher on board one of those…one of the ships we lost. They were close enough to communicate. She’s catatonic now. If our healers can rouse her, it may be that we can learn what happened.”

  Karatek ran after S’lovan toward the shuttlebay. Pushing through a crowded corridor, Karatek remembered a saying he had heard in his earliest days at the Vulcan Space Institute: The one thing we know that can travel faster than the speed of light is rumor. He could rationalize and call it intelligence, but there was nothing intelligent about a frightened ship.

  Karatek pushed past people whose rage and fear he could sense. What if they broke through? But security was there, forming a barrier. An even more effective remedy came with the approach of the chief healer, whose presence made them fall back somewhat. She had T’Olryn with her, and his daughter-in-law swept the shuttlebay with a glare worthy of Sarissa herself. Both healers wore the red and white robes of priestesses. T’Olryn’s robes failed to hide her pregnancy.

  Shouts echoed off the cold, high bulkheads.

  “We should go back!”

  “What about that planet you wouldn’t let us even land on?”

  “Admit it, we’ve lost too many ships…”

  “We’ll die here in space!”

  Karatek gestured the commander to proceed. He himself turned. He should speak to the crowd before the hotheads among them turned fear into anger. He had not thought so many on board had abandoned Surak’s disciplines. Nevertheless, it was his duty to try to wage peace.

  “We have the opportunity to serve,” Karatek said.

  A yell of outrage from someone who stood far in back.

  “We also have the opportunity to gain more information,” he added. “Please let the healers through.”

  T’Olryn caught Karatek by the arm and pulled him through after her toward the sealed doors of the shuttlebay. What ordinarily would have been a severe breach of protocol brought him a flicker of awareness: concern/cold/repressed fear.

  Karatek had always been pleased by T’Olryn’s concern for Solor’s family. Her own mother had not made it onto the great ships, and her father’s system had proved unable to withstand the hardships of exile.

  She had meant him to feel her emotions. That was her way of reminding Karatek that he was past combat age, out of training, and that his duties did not include a warrior’s duty to put himself in harm’s way if the crowd turned hostile.

  This launch bay hadn’t just been repaired since the time N’Veyan had crashed a stolen shuttle in a suicidal attempt to reach his pledged mate, it had been upgraded. Hardened, the engineers assured the council. But, unfortunately, if the new bay was safer, it was also 10.5 percent slower to seal, depressurize, allow a shuttle or dagger to dock, then repressurize so people could enter. The procedure felt even slower, which was subjective, therefore illogical—unless, of course, one assumed relativistic effects were involved.

  Think, don’t babble, Karatek told himself. He really would have to spend less time remembering and more time in formal meditation.

  As controls darkened toward the green of safety, Karatek forced himself to stand as quietly as the healers while the shuttlebay repressurized and the hatches released.

  Now, finally, he could push into the echoing shuttlebay with its bronzed bulkheads. He ran after the healers and the other senior members of the ship’s crew and council, their footsteps echoing on the cold decks, as Sunheart’s vessel, frozen vapor drifting from its battered hull, turned on its landing circle and extended its ramp with painful slowness.

  Sunheart’s commander emerged before the ramp was fully extended. In his arms, he cradled his ship’s last healer. Now, that was a breach of propriety that could be explained only by his apparent unwillingness to risk additional passengers, or by the strong family resemblance between healer and Commander Sevennin. Both were tall and thin, even for a race that ran to ectomorphs. Both were pale from the many years of imprisonment within Sunheart.

  Since departing Vulcan, Sunheart’s commander had never left his ship, always sending a deputy to council and delegating even the most important missions to mining sites or potential homeworlds. He had never been in physical danger. It was illogical for him to blame himself for that, but he probably would, anyway.

  The healer lay limp in her father’s arms, not so much pallid as livid, except for the trickles of blood from the corners of her eyes.

  Formal greetings were bypassed: in any event, Sunheart’s commander didn’t have a free hand to raise.

  T’Olryn hissed, then looked down in apology before she stepped forward. Taking off her outer robe, she laid it on the deck, then helped her superior ease the woman down onto it.

  Karatek stepped forward and laid his own cloak over his daughter-in-law’s shoulders. There is no cold, he told himself.

  The healers knelt. Each extended a long-fingered hand, curiously similar. The elder’s hand was old, somewhat gnarled, while T’Olryn’s was tiny, well-kept, and bore the heavy bloodstone ring, shimmering with lines of deep crimson, that had been in Karatek’s House for generations.

  Very gently, T’Olryn brushed away the trickles of blood from the catatonic woman’s face. Her fingers lingered near the katra points, the nerve plexuses touched during a meld. More blood trickled down. Under the shuttlebay’s har
sh lighting, its deep green seemed even more shocking. Bleeding from the nose, even from the mouth were things Karatek understood, had seen—but bleeding from the eyes?

  T’Olryn’s face went grave. If an adept-level healer hadn’t the minimal biocontrol necessary to stop such a tiny flow of blood, the damage was indeed great. She turned toward her superior, who moved in, touching the other side of the woman’s face. Gradually, the bleeding ceased.

  Sunheart’s commander turned his face away. Healers, like other adepts, worked in concert only when the need was very great.

  “My mind to your mind,” the healer whispered.

  “My thoughts to your thoughts,” whispered T’Olryn.

  The woman struggled against the touch. Her mouth writhed. Only a whimper came out. Karatek had never heard such pain.

  Karatek wanted to leap forward and snatch the battered healer away.

  How could the healers violate a mind like that?

  T’Olryn raised her head. “This is surgical pain,” she spoke over her patient’s head to her father-in-law.

  “There is no pain,” said Sevennin, as if reminding himself.

  Given the speed of rumor on board Shavokh, there would be whispers that it was the father, not the commander, who had broken his own rule of never leaving his ship in an attempt to save his child. The commander met those accusing gazes with composure.

  “I would have taken her katra, if I could, and freed her,” he confessed. “But my daughter knows what happened to our other ships. She has to know. Perhaps Shavokh’s healers can obtain that knowledge. She would want me to try….”

  Karatek looked away.

  “It may even be that they can heal her,” he offered.

  The other man’s eyes went bleak.

  “Thy hope belies logic.”

  The clamor outside the shuttlebay grew so loud that it could be heard even with the hatches sealed. The healers’ faces grew as drawn as the face of the adept lying on the deck. Her eyes had begun to weep blood again.

  “You know that memory scanner we’ve been developing?” asked T’Veran. “It might help.”

  Commander Sevennin’s gaze grew terrible. “I did not bring my last child here so you could ravage what remains of her mind but to help save our people,” he told her. Their eyes locked, and it was T’Veran who looked away.

  “Hunger!” cried T’Olryn. “So much hunger, years of…Bring me food!”

  Night and day, the healers had made contact. Her sensitivity heightened by pregnancy, T’Olryn had gone to the deepest levels, relying on the immense strength and experience of her teacher to bring her back safely.

  “Lure it…lure it to us…ahhhh…”

  For a moment, both healers’ faces ignited with a fierce greed. They sighed, their features relaxing into satiation that made Karatek feel unclean. Commander Sevennin turned away. His shoulders quivered once, then became motionless.

  “More…on the way…good…” T’Olryn purred with satisfaction. Karatek vowed that he would never tell his son about the look, half lust, half starvation, that contorted his wife’s lovely face.

  The noise outside the shuttlebay rose. Shavokh’s commander murmured, and armed guards poured in. It was, he supposed, logical, but he regretted it. Those who boarded the ships never had been a unified people. As the years went by, they had become increasingly fragmented.

  Vulcan would draw on Vulcan again. One day, war would break out, and all their journey, all the sacrifice, suffering, and toll of years would have been for nothing.

  “Have you learned nothing?” A voice like that of a Shavokh, belling in triumph after a hunt, ripped across the shuttlebay. “No caution, no control…warn off, warn off…”

  The voice arched up in a raw scream that echoed off the high bay until all below flinched.

  “They’ve broken the lock code!” one of the guards shouted. “Commander, shall we fire?”

  “No!” Karatek shouted.

  “More food!” came another cry from the woman lying on the deck.

  As the shouting, frightened crowd poured into the shuttlebay, the injured healer had struggled to sit up. Shavokh’s healers pressed close, supporting her as she wavered. Slowly, the woman’s eyes opened. They were so dilated that pupil and iris alike were drowned in green.

  “Would you see?” she demanded in that terrible voice. “Well, would you see? Behold the Eater of Souls!”

  She opened her mind and projected hunger, intelligent and ancient past their comprehension. The hunger raved like a le-matya, like an entire planet of le-matyas with kits to feed. But this was a hunger glutted by living minds and spirits. Whatever possessed Sunheart’s dying healer had fed on the Vulcans on board those ships. Then, before torpor followed satiation, they had…night and day, they had cleaned up after themselves. A flick of those supernally powerful intellects had brought the ships down into…Why, the world they had circled had not been a paradise, after all, but a methane bath. They had manipulated ships’ instruments as well as minds.

  All shouting ceased. So, blessedly, did those anguished screams.

  The strength went out of the dying adept. Eyelids bleached almost white with her agony dropped over those blood-filled eyes for the last time. The healers eased her back onto the deck.

  Sevennin took off his own cloak and covered his daughter’s face.

  For a moment, Karatek’s eyes dazzled.

  “I grieve with thee,” said Commander S’lovan.

  “We have all lost kin,” Sevennin bowed away the ritual words.

  He knelt, pulling his daughter into his arms again, then rising.

  “We will return to the ship now,” he said. “I have been too long away.”

  Karatek stepped to the commander’s side.

  “May we offer thee fire, water…?” he asked. His words were inadequate, but they were all he had.

  The elder healer started forward, her hands outstretched. There was more knowledge yet to be gained from an examination of the dead woman’s mind.

  How could the woman even consider asking permission to do an autopsy now? T’Olryn started forward, but her knees buckled, and Karatek caught her.

  “How much more does your sister adept owe you?” Sunheart’s commander asked. “You have her katra, all that she was, damaged as it is. I shall give the rest of her to a star.” He started toward the shuttle. “But not this one.”

  He strode up the ramp into the shuttle. Supporting T’Olryn, Karatek led the others beyond the barrier as the small craft retracted its ramp. The shuttle turned on its launch circle, then darted back out into the night.

  Let me guide her, came the whisper within Karatek’s consciousness: Rovalat’s katra, protective past death.

  Fourteen

  Now

  WATRAII HOMEWORLD STARDATE 54107.1

  The newly dubbed Alexander Nevsky with its crew of four slipped smoothly from space into the Watraii atmosphere—and was instantly converted from a smoothly operating flying instrument into one that was tossed roughly about like a toy in a child’s unsteady hands. Data, at the controls, fought with the savage winds to at least keep the shuttle upright.

  “Good thing…we have full…shoulder and chest…harnesses,” Scotty managed to gasp out as the ship lurched and shuddered and lurched again, fighting its way down through the storm clouds and wild gusts of wind. “Trip’s giving…whole new meaning…to the word ‘turbulent.’”

  Data said, “I do not believe that such a word needed to be given a new meaning. Surely the original definition suffices.”

  Scotty gave a choked laugh. “As if Vulcans…weren’t literal-minded enough…now we have a third member…of the Logic Brigade!”

  Data frowned slightly. “Ruanek, Spock, and I obviously cannot be related. I do not see why—”

  The ship lurched again, more violently than before, and blue-white crackles of electricity shot around and through it.

  “Lightning strike,” Data said succinctly, fingers racing over the controls in a
blur of speed. “Main systems off-line.” As the ship lurched and shuddered, he added, never taking his gaze from the controls, “I have manual control of secondary systems.” The wild lurching steadied ever so slightly. As the ship seemed to hesitate for a moment, then drop, he added, “I cannot guarantee a smoother trip.”

  “He did that once before,” Ruanek murmured to Spock. “While he was serving on the Enterprise-D. He told me about that.”

  Spock, clenching the armrests just to stay seated, the safety harness cutting into him as the ship struggled, raised an eyebrow. Being what he was, Ruanek was clearly enjoying the rough ride, lips peeled back from teeth in an unabashedly fierce Romulan grin. That Ruanek and Data should have shared stories of their various adventures seemed no more unusual than anything else about this mission.

  “Damn!” That came from Scotty, who suddenly had his hands full with the uneasy interface between the ship and its cloaking device. The wild jolting about wasn’t helping him, since it was jerking his hands away from the controls. Scotty muttered to himself and in language he would have been embarrassed to know the others could hear, cursing over a system that first of all was Romulan and second of all, as he had warned, was not operating particularly well on a ship this small. “And this thrice-damned weather that won’t let a man work!”

  Refusing to let himself be distracted by the others, Spock returned his full attention to the small tricorder he held, holding it steady as best he could, and continued refining the scans that the Alliance had made from space. Ground readings were not affected by how the ship was being tossed about. Life-forms were finally showing up on these new scans…not as clearly as he would have liked, not enough to let him locate one human among the Watraii.

  Odd. There did not seem to be anything on the planet in the way of true cities. In fact, there seemed to be only one major installation on the entire planet. But then, if the climate was perpetually this violent, that wasn’t so surprising. Presumably, the Watraii lived underground in facilities that were as yet unscannable.

  Or else…the other possibility was a surprising one, and that was that their population was abnormally small.