Vulcan's Soul Trilogy Book One Page 2

  T’Pel raised an eyebrow. “Inspecific,” she commented, then turned away. But T’Pel had insisted on bringing her own aide; any message for her would certainly come through what humans called “proper channels.”

  Sarek extended his hand for the padd Shinat had brought him in lieu of a properly calligraphed communiqué. Taking it with a nod of thanks, he tilted it so that Spock, too, could scan it.

  It was a recall order.

  “You are requested to contact Vulcan immediately upon receipt of this message,” Shinat added.

  “Both of us cannot be spared,” Sarek said softly. Their departure would shatter the conference past any hope of reviving it at a later date. T’Pel lacked the ability to reach out across the gulf of thousands of years, while Fox, although a satisfactory negotiator, was neither Vulcan nor had the deep understanding of Vulcan tradition that had allowed some outsiders to win an acceptance that, even now, some Vulcans still begrudged Spock. Starting with the one seated beside him.

  Protocol and courtesy required Spock to allow Sarek to decide which of them should answer this summons. He lowered his eyes, lest his father see how much Spock wanted to be the one to return.

  When he raised his head, Sarek caught his eye and raised an eyebrow. Was that indulgence Spock read in his glance? Sarek had always read him far too well for his comfort. It was illogical for Sarek to weaken Vulcan credibility by reprimanding Spock in public, however.

  Sarek bent toward him. “You earned this,” he told Spock. “You therefore should be the one to go.”

  Spock rose with not-quite-unseemly haste. If he thanked his father, he knew Sarek would rebuke him: there was no sense in thanking logic.

  He bowed to the people seated around the great table. “I am recalled,” he said. “I ask forgiveness.”

  Fox concealed surprise beneath what humans called a “poker face.” T’Pel’s eyebrows rose before she looked away, skeptical and somewhat offended that she had not been consulted. Offense seemed her natural manner. She would be a disagreeable colleague for his father.

  “Coincidence?” Admiral Mendak suggested with the silken irony characteristic of him. Perhaps his intelligence sources—or the human captives Spock suspected he controlled—had acquainted him with the human adage about coincidence and enemy action that Spock had recalled 3.56 minutes ago.

  Pardek, by contrast, seemed amused. He whispered to Commander Toreth, who shrugged, sly humor in her face.

  Spock took one deep breath. Perhaps Pardek had the right to mention Spock’s consort. Had hostilities not existed between the Federation and Romulus, he and Pardek would have been guest-friends. But his speculation about why Spock was being recalled was as inaccurate as it was inappropriate.

  Spock bowed and turned to go. When Shinat made as if to accompany him, Spock signaled for him and Uhura’s security forces to remain, so emphatically that the room was shocked to silence.

  “You’re the one irreplaceable piece of this puzzle,” Uhura had told him when the conference had started to take shape. But no one was ever irreplaceable, and some things took precedence over his old friend’s schemes. This call had a 97.63 percent probability of being what Spock expected. That being the case, Sarek, T’Pel, and Ambassador Fox would have to manage damage control as well as the negotiations themselves without him.

  He knew Sarek liked to dismiss hope as a human construct, but if that is indeed the case, why did you agree to these talks, my father? Spock thought, however, that if Sarek knew what he hoped to hear, he would have to concede that it was logical for his pulse rate to rise to a breathless 350 beats per minute. Nevertheless, because the physiological reaction stemmed from emotion, it was unacceptable.

  Spock steepled his fingers briefly and subvocalized a mantra of control. Then he sealed himself into the secure privacy zone Uhura’s staff had set up in a rock alcove.

  He tapped the screen and found himself facing his consort’s image. Spock’s heart and respiration accelerated once more. Logic demanded, he told himself, that he feel…satisfaction at seeing his wife.

  “My husband,” Saavik greeted him, meeting his eyes, then lowering her own. For 3.02 seconds, they kept silent. His consort’s eyes brightened, and Spock felt his own eyes warm in response.

  After a moment, Saavik looked decorously away and downward.

  “I calculated that Sarek would cede the recall order to you. I am pleased to know that I was correct.”

  Spock tried to suppress the tiny smile he reserved for her.

  “They have completed the preliminary translation,” Saavik added. “Your presence is vital.”

  “I will requisition a shuttle from Admiral Kaghvahr,” Spock said.

  “Transport has already been arranged,” Saavik informed him serenely. “I have already spoken with the admiral’s staff. His ship has a lock on you and will beam you out once we end this conversation. The shuttle will plot a course toward the next starbase, where convoy to Vulcan has been arranged.”

  “Superfluous,” Spock said.

  Saavik raised her brows. “Attacks have now occurred on both sides of the Neutral Zone. We still do not know their cause, and I assign a 75.669 percent probability to Captain Picard’s hypothesis that the Romulans do not know either. Therefore, I consider the risk level unacceptable.”

  Disputing security with Saavik, especially his security, was usually futile.

  “I shall depart immediately,” said Spock.

  “I shall await you at the appointed place,” Saavik told him. Her eyes went smoky.

  Spock touched the screen as if it had been her face. They would finish that conversation in private.

  Then the Federation seal replaced the familiar, beloved features, and Spock scrambled all records of the encrypted message.

  As he stepped out of the privacy zone, the crimson of Klingon transporters engulfed him, to re-form him slowly on board Kaghvahr’s private shuttle. Cloaked, it left the asteroid at warp seven. Approximately 8.67 hours later, the shuttle was surrounded by the convoy Saavik’s vigilance had provided.

  Even before Spock materialized outside the most secure installation of the Vulcan Science Academy, the heat of his homeworld rose to welcome him.

  Saavik stood before him, a cool shadow in the oppressive light. Too quickly, she strode from the deeper shade of an overhanging roof onto the ruddy sand to meet him. Too briefly, she touched his fingers and gazed into his eyes.

  “They are waiting for you,” she said, and led him within.

  The translation team he expected to see was assembled: philologists, archeologists, computer scientists, a Seleyan adept, and Ruanek, their resident expert on the Romulan language. Characteristically, he had appointed himself guardian of the artifact. Spock agreed with the Romulan’s decision: Ruanek definitely had the curiosity; and, as an exile from the Two Worlds, he had the right.

  Seeing Spock, Ruanek hastened forward, his eyes blazing with all his old impulsiveness. Twenty years on Vulcan sufficed—barely—to allow Ruanek to keep his face impassive; within the privacy of his thoughts, the Romulan exile was probably dancing with eagerness and the curiosity that Vulcans and Romulans, even this long after the Sundering, still shared. His wife, Healer T’Selis, who served as the representative of the adepts, philosophers, and priests on Mount Seleya to this project, touched Ruanek’s sleeve with two fingers. Presumably, she was suggesting more control. Presumably, she would have little effect.

  “Your father’s suggestions helped us break the encryption algorithms,” Ruanek told Spock, making a laudable effort to speak more slowly. “Once we completed the translation, we knew the time was right to contact you.”

  Spock nodded. Combined with the artifact’s own arcane and ancient technology, the encryption algorithms that concealed the artifact’s message had been so complex, so elegant that they had earned even Ambassador Sarek’s admiration before he set off for the…Even in the heart of the Vulcan Science Academy, Ruanek would not permit himself to mention the secret conference
from which he had extracted Spock. Even after twenty years of exile, he retained a respect for secrets.

  Nevertheless, Spock felt his eyebrow rise before he could suppress it. It was too much to have expected that either Ruanek or, for that matter, Saavik herself could have withheld any information from Sarek that he wished to have. Both owed him too much and both cared for him too much. Besides, withholding information from Sarek would not just have been illogical, it would have been unkind. Sarek had found this new type of data storage fascinating.

  Spock made a mental note to meditate on the subject so that he could regard any input from his father as beneficial: no doubt, Sarek would give him a private critique when he returned to Vulcan.

  Ruanek gestured toward the worktable on which the artifact rested. Resembling a priestly crown from the days before Surak, it gleamed with green gems, wound with wires of copper, gold, and hyponeutronium. It was no ornament, though, but one of the most sophisticated recording devices he had ever encountered: it recorded thoughts, memories, sensations, and emotions without harming its wearer.

  Ruanek handed Spock a padd, and Spock scanned the long-awaited translation. The original language, he saw immediately, was indeed Old High Vulcan. Fascinating.

  Some of the awkwardness of this initial translation had to be attributable to the difficulty in penetrating the artifact’s encryption. As for the rest of it—whoever had created this message used language in extremely private ways, as if the words themselves were codes for the emotions Spock sensed roiling beneath.

  This preliminary translation was not satisfactory! Spock wanted to say. He wanted to know so much more, and he wanted to know instantly.

  Before Saavik or Ruanek could stop him, he reached out for the coronet and set it on his head. As filaments darted out from its bloodmetal flanges and pricked his temples, he stiffened in shock, but restrained himself from crying out.

  Spock had shared his mind before. He had carried Kollos’s mind for a time, and melded with everything from humans to a Horta with only minimal discomfort.

  Now, however, a rush of sensation and emotions assaulted him. He steeled himself to endure the barrage. Because this record dated from before the great success of Surak’s teaching, it was only logical that its author was not just emotional, but passionately so.

  This must be what McCoy had endured in carrying his katra, Spock deduced in a second of revelation. Then, the message in the ancient coronet overpowered all other thoughts.

  Dimly, as if his eyes were already in someone else’s control, he saw Ruanek and Saavik race forward. T’Selis stepped in between them and Spock.

  “Kroykah!” she commanded softly.

  She brought up a medical tricorder and scanned Spock before meeting Ruanek’s anxious eyes and Saavik’s face, which had frozen into a mask of control. The Healer shrugged. It was all the reassurance she could in conscience provide.

  Disappointed that you didn’t volunteer first? Spock thought at his wife and his friend. He knew them so well. Why hadn’t they volunteered? Because they hadn’t dared? Not likely.

  Because he would never have forgiven them? Also unlikely. He wanted to find an answer, but he was finding it harder and harder to pursue his train of thought, harder to…

  Where was he? This didn’t look like the Vulcan Science Institute he remembered.

  Who were these people? Why was one of them shouting? How strange they sounded. Surely, they could not be native to ShiKahr. They had no legitimate cause for alarm, not on his account. He tried to tell them so, but so many thoughts were warring in his head that he could not speak.

  He managed to raise an ironic eyebrow before his consciousness was engulfed.

  And Spock remembered…

  Two

  Memory

  Karatek took up the recorder, admiring its ambiguous beauty. Its inventors had wrought it in the form of a coronet of the te-Vikram priest-kings, blood-green gems and precious metal concealing a highly effective technology that the rest of Vulcan would have warred over, assuming they had known about it.

  The coronet’s sensor panels were hotter by far than the heat of his body, bred as it had been on the deserts of the Mother World, which he would never see again if all went well.

  “If I forget thee, O Vulcan, let my eyes lose their fire, my blood lose its flame, and my intellect its keenness.”

  The coronet’s heat was as welcome as Karatek’s ship, the Shavokh, was cold. In the last pirate attack, three decks had suffered hull breaches and been repaired at tremendous risk to those who survived, as his youngest child—Lovar, even his katra lost!—had not.

  Because supplies were short and the Exiles no longer needed the space, those decks were put on envirosave, and life-support throughout the entire ship had been reduced. Now every person on board who wished to maintain even a minimal level of fitness had to exercise for hours daily to preserve body mass and strength. Their breath chilled their lungs as they fought for it, and no one remembered what it was like to be truly warm.

  But what did physical discomfort matter when Vulcan-in-Exile was still alive? Even if that was a rhetorical question, Karatek thought with a warming spasm of resentment, it was an important one and needed to be considered.

  Not all the generation ships that had abandoned Vulcan 80.45 years ago had survived this far. This far from Vulcan—and from refit capabilities—the great ships had worn out faster than any of the defense scientists and other experts, himself included, had projected. And, Karatek estimated, pausing to make the calculation, there was a 76.99 percent chance that none of them would survive for the time it would take to reach the next planetary system with Minshara-class planets. In the privacy of his thoughts, he preferred not to calculate how long that journey might take.

  Logic and exact calculations aside, planetfall seemed impossibly far off. So everything must be preserved, from recycled parts to the emotions of this exile—the anger and the hope and the bitterness. Let the future and more distressingly logical generations toward which Surak’s true followers strove to diminish their people study this record and see from what rough beginnings they had evolved.

  Holding the glittering recorder, Karatek indulged himself in the sensation of warmth that spread from it out along both of his hands. Ironically, the recorder resembled a coronet from the most ancient of days when all Vulcan, not just a few tyrannies, had Ruling Kings.

  The crown’s sparkling blood-green crystals were set in hyponeutronium. The treated alloy, a spinoff from the weapons program that had been the focus of Karatek’s own career, was not just incredibly durable, but capable, when treated properly, of super-conductivity. Gems and metal, combined, however grudgingly, with the science of the adepts at Seleya and Gol, formed part of a psionic system that fused machine and wearer.

  United to Karatek’s mind, this recorder could enable him to create the most vivid record possible of his comrades, his life, and his acquaintance with Surak, the visionary whose teachings had sent 85,974 Vulcans off into the eternal night into Exile.

  It was logical that Karatek, as one of the 694 surviving members of the Exiles’ Council, be one of those who risked themselves to leave such a record. Logical, but not wholly without risk. Captured documentation from some of the scientists—assuming the magi and inquisitors of the renegade te-Vikram priest-kings deserved the title “scientist”—who had invented this recorder’s prototypes had been grisly. Some early versions of the recorders had melted, their metal fusing to experimental subjects’ skulls. Other subjects had been lost, their minds trapped forever within the gleaming crystals that now housed their memories in the Hall of Ancient Thought where not even the te-Vikram could be denied access.

  Did the Halls of Ancient Thought still stand? Did Vulcan still exist as more than a collection of radioactive asteroids and dust, in orbit around its bloody sun?

  Even though Karatek knew those questions would never be answered, at least not in his lifetime, he could not stop himself from asking them. Now, ho
wever, there was no logic in looking into the recorder’s glittering crystals without taking action—and even less logic in further delay.

  He drew in three deep, rhythmic breaths. This latest model of the recorder had enhanced fail-safes built in. If a circuit showed signs of malfunction or sensors detected severe psychic distress, the recorder would shut down. The peril, their last surviving Healer-adept had trained him to remember, lay only in overuse. Although Karatek had used the recorder before, he had never worn it for as long as he now planned. He thought he remained well within his physical and mental endurance levels. If he did not, however, well, the need was sufficient.

  Karatek shut his eyes, preparing his mind. He recalled Vulcan. The embattled world that circled its huge, angry red star so far from them might not survive. That thought had waked him on the lonely watches of the ship’s night more times than he wished to recall. But even if the Mother World had died, the soul of Vulcan—these people, this heritage, these memories—would last if Karatek had to pour his own blood into the ship’s engines in a final sacrifice.

  His hope, his willingness, and his furious desire to survive might be illogical, but they were so.

  And if the Exiles were not the only Vulcans in the galaxy, if the warring tribes and factions fortunate enough to remain on the Mother World managed not to reduce it to radioactive asteroids in their ceaseless, senseless civil wars, it would be the duty of Vulcan-in-Exile, one day, to leave whatever refuge they had found and bring these memories home. His duty and that of his descendants.

  Even if they never survived to make planetfall, some other race, more logical in its choices, might find the Shavokh, or one of the other surviving remnants of Vulcan’s exile fleet, derelict in space and, finding these records, learn from them.

  As Surak had taught them, what was, was. But there were always possibilities.

  Surak himself had seen that. Karatek had been with him for some of that time. He remembered, and now it was time to pass on those memories. Yielding to the logic of this situation and the decision he had made, Karatek placed the recorder on his head.