Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Page 20

  The whispers hissed across the room and into space, weakened by static. A tech bent to adjust the communications hookups.

  For the past hundred and three days, S’task had lain ill. The only times he had spoken were to thank a healer for her expression of sorrow at the deaths of his wife and children and to demand that he be moved back to his now-empty quarters, leaving his space in Rea’s Helm’s medical facility for a person in worse condition than he.

  Since then, S’task had not been seen in the command center or anywhere else.

  What must it be like to lose one’s entire family? Karatek refused to think about it. Nevertheless, S’task had duties. He might have broken from Surak, but he too knew that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Or the one. Now that “few” was all that remained fleetwide, Karatek thought S’task would have made the effort to join this critical meeting. He had hoped.

  The whispers grew louder, turning disappointed as the navigator from Rea’s Helm slipped into the central chair. At least, however, each ship was represented by one or more members of what had been its council.

  Karatek nodded for order to be called. Systras rang out, the tiny bells painfully shrill in the thin, chill air.

  He glanced down at the screen set into the table. Online fleet councils were infrequent, meaning that long agendas built up. They might be here for hours.

  “T’Kehr!” came a cry from the highest row of the amphitheater. The tall man who stood, demanding recognition, was big-boned but not heavy.

  “N’Rayek,” Karatek recognized one of the te-Vikram. He suppressed a brief instant of frustration that N’Rayek had been first on his feet. These days, any te-Vikram looked like a potential rebel, no matter how Solor reassured him about how subdued the te-Vikram were, these days. The lunglock had hit them hardest of any group on board.

  “T’Kehr, may I suggest we wait to discuss…all this…this trash. Instead, I think we should focus on the most important question that faces us: Shall we go on at all? Back on the Mother World, when a warrior grew old, or was too sorely wounded to fight, rather than prove a charge upon his clan, he could choose to walk into the desert…”

  “I never thought a warrior would talk about giving up!” came a jeer from across empty space.

  Karatek braced himself for the predictable eruption of temper from the emotional members of the fleet. He had been here before: someone would erupt and be met by a stinging, logical reproof from someone else who had studied the Analects, but had not learned overmuch. Or a technocrat would ease in with a plausible solution that advanced only other technocrats.

  T’Vysse caught his eye and shook her head minutely. Clearly, this defeatism on the part of the fiercest part of their population concerned her. And she had never guided him wrong.

  “Kroykah!” Karatek called for order. Damn this lunglock to the Womb of Fire; there was no strength in his ordinary speaking voice. He took a deep breath and hoped his lungs would hold up long enough for one good shout.

  He rose and pounded his fists on the table.

  “Kroykah!” It came out as a strangled yell. He fell back into his chair, coughing, his mouth filling with the coppery taste of his own blood.

  T’Vysse was instantly at his side, pouring water, holding it to his lips, and—by all that was illogical—glaring into the screens. She signaled, and the systras rang out, their shrillness prolonged until even the people on the other ships flinched and fell silent.

  She eased Karatek back into his chair, then held up her hand.

  “May I reply to N’Rayek?” she asked.

  Te-Vikram might not be much for allowing women to speak in council, but the fleet’s law was that any citizen could speak. Whether people listened, however, was up to the logic and persuasiveness of a given speaker.

  “I find your logic flawed,” T’Vysse told the former warrior.

  “Yes, I know. I would say that. But consider the evidence. You speak of walking out into the desert. May I suggest that we already are in the greatest desert of all?”

  Solor rose to his feet. “I concur,” he told the te-Vikram. “Sir, I grew up on the Forge. During my kahs-wan ordeal, I met warriors. It did not seem to me that these men, even if they walked into the desert at the end of their lives, would simply sit on the nearest dune and wait for a wild sehlat to find them. Do your own legends not tell of the captain who lost a leg, a hand, and an eye, but who pushed on toward the Womb of Fire?”

  “I know that story!” T’Vysse glanced around the room, reaching for agreement with the skill of Lady Mitrani, by now long dead back on Vulcan, or Karatek’s lost friend T’Partha, painstakingly building consensus in a debate. “He was Captain of Hosts. His water ran out, and he pressed on. He fought off the sehlats with his crutch. A storm built up, and as the sand threatened to strip the flesh from his bones, he continued forward until, at last, he fought through the storm and reached the desert’s heart, Vorta Vor, where the water is sweet, and green plants always grow.”

  The man standing at the back of the amphitheater flung up a hand, the gesture of a warrior bested in a skirmish by a master teacher.

  “I say we walk on,” T’Vysse cried. “It may be that we walk toward our end. Or it may be that, like that Captain of Hosts, we will press on to a new beginning.”

  “My lady…” The words came from a new voice, hoarse, and long unfamiliar, but recognizable after a moment as belonging to S’task. “I second your motion. And I recommend it be carried. With profound acclamation.”

  S’task appeared in the viewscreen, with one arm flung over the shoulders of a man Karatek recognized as the flagship’s chief astronomer. His other arm was grasped by a healer whose glare of outrage seemed to burn through the distance. He was so gaunt after his long illness that his heavy cloak weighed him down and made it seem natural that he could not stand alone. His temples were hollowed, the bones of cheeks and forehead alarmingly prominent, and his skin was the color of white jade. Only his eyes blazed like their lost hearthsun.

  His navigator rose from the table, almost stumbling in his haste to ease S’task into his own chair.

  S’task waved him away.

  “We have made a discovery,” he said.

  His voice lost volume, and he gasped. The healer holding his arm all but pushed him into the chair held out for him.

  Whispers eddied, rose, then fell into complete silence, broken only by the static of the ship-to-ship transmissions.

  Regaining control, S’task gazed out into the eyes of the remaining members of his fleet with the intensity of one of the proscribed disruptor weapons that Karatek knew for a fact had been tested on a passing meteor just 18.3 days ago.

  “I recognize S’rivas of Rea’s Helm.” With a shaking hand, S’task pointed to the chief astronomer. The man was even taller than his commanding officer, but not nearly so thin.

  “We finally succeeded in refining our astrocartographic scanners,” the astronomer said. “Magnification is up 38.6 percent. Just enough”—his eyes blazed; he tried to suppress it, but an immense grin of triumph spread over his face—“to allow us to see…”

  A gesture, and S’task’s face, the amphitheater on board Rea’s Helm, all disappeared, to be replaced by the eternal, too-familiar desert of stars of which T’Vysse had spoken with such passion.

  “This is what you see with normal resolution,” S’rivas’s voice rang out over the view of what Karatek knew was empty space and uncharted, useless stars.

  “Now, with the augmented magnification, we can see this….” The viewscreen shimmered, then seemed to come into focus.

  “Observe,” the chief astronomer said. A red light shaped like an arrow appeared on-screen. “Look out here,” he said. “Past the orange binary system…”

  The arrow moved, edging toward what appeared to be a rosette of stars. “Here!” he said. “Here, in this cluster of dwarf K-type stars.” His voice shook, as did the arrow with which he indicated stars that Karatek had never seen.


  “If we had not managed to improve our scanners, we would have missed them,” the astronomer went on. “Only imagine: We would have missed them.

  “The instant I was able to study this star field closely, I went to T’Kehr S’task. These stars—that one, over here”— again, the arrow flickered, then homed in on a point of light—“could possess planetary systems! I have my staff working on modifying our scanners to see if we can detect such worlds from here.”

  Someone—not Karatek—coughed. It was the only sound heard on board any of the ships.

  Karatek made himself breathe deeply, risking the possibility of another spasm. Not just planets, but possibly Minshara-class worlds.

  The transmissions erupted in cheers, stampings of feet, poundings of tables. At the back, three te-Vikram shouted the warriors’ cry Karatek had not heard for years. To his own barely concealed astonishment and disapproval, Solor joined them. He had his arm about T’Olryn. The former healer appeared to be weeping. Perhaps wind in her hair, sun on her face, would restore her courage. Karatek hoped so.

  Meanwhile, Sarissa and Serevan joined hands and looked as if they would embrace, right out there, for all the fleet to see.

  Karatek tightened his lips, preparing to disapprove, but T’Vysse shook her head at him.

  “Surak,” he said huskily.

  “Surak never lived to see a moment like this,” his consort told him serenely. “He was my guest-friend too, remember? He would have said the provocation was great.” Her eyes returned to Sarissa and her chosen mate. “Think, Karatek. Their children could be born on a homeworld of their own. Their children!” Her dark eyes filling, she looked away until she could control herself. “I ask pardon,” she whispered.

  Karatek couldn’t quite bring himself to laugh, not out in public. “You yourself said the provocation was great.”

  Then, from Rea’s Helm, systras jangled for quiet.

  “Listen to me, listen to me!” came the chief astronomer’s voice. “You have not yet heard all the data!”

  “Why does it matter?” cried a voice from Sunheart, young enough for optimism, old enough to know better.

  “Because,” the astronomer said, his voice suddenly old and heavy, “not all the data favor us. By our calculations, it will take us ten years to accelerate, and another ten to slow sufficiently to let us enter the system.”

  Serevan, looking extremely grave, had released Sarissa’s hand. He appeared to be solving equations in his head. Karatek remembered a maxim from his period of compulsory service back on Vulcan. “Anything that looks too good to be true probably is.”

  This definitely was. He did not need the other scientist’s next words to know how bad the news was, all the worse after the moment of unbridled excitement.

  “Those twenty years put us outside the fleet’s envelope of viability. By the time we reach there, we will all be dead.”

  “But we will have gotten there!” came S’task’s voice.

  Just for that instant, it was the voice again of the fiery young man Karatek remembered from Vulcan, the man who had inspired the building of the fleet and persuaded Vulcan’s bravest and strongest—or, in some cases, least fortunate—to embark on this mission of exile.

  The fleet council erupted again into a hundred conversations, speeches, and side-eddies of sheer noise.

  Just as the technocrats on board Vengeance shouted for recognition and began to denounce Rea’s Helm for bringing such cruel truths to light, Serevan rose to his full height.

  “Why are you still talking?” he demanded. “We have work to do!”

  Twenty

  Now

  WATRAII HOMEWORLD STARDATE 54107.2

  As the Watraii fanned out to surround him, Spock stood motionless, offering them absolutely no resistance, still standing with his hands open and held away from his body. The biggest danger to him just now was that one of the Watraii would take any movement on his part to be a threat and open fire. At such close range, that would be fatal.

  The Watraii said nothing. One of the group might be the leader, since the others kept looking his—or possibly her—way, although he or she looked precisely like the others. At least that particular Watraii did seem to be the one the others were looking to for guidance. It was worth the attempt.

  But when Spock spoke directly to that individual, beginning, “I offer no hostility,” there was no reply. He bit back what would have been a facetious and most illogically useless order: Take me to your leader. Jim Kirk had once told him of those ancient “esseff” movies from twentieth-century Earth in which such words were always said by visiting aliens.

  There was a certain logic to the words. Who else but a leader would a visiting alien wish to see? And in this case, there was a reasonable probability that these people actually would take him to their leader. Spock passively allowed the Watraii to fasten restraints about his wrists—although, he thought with the slightest touch of sardonic humor, if they intended to fasten him to that metal pole, he was definitely not going to remain passive about it.

  But they evidently had already decided without words that he was not going to be another electrical victim. After a few murmured consultations that were too soft and muffled by the masks for even Vulcan hearing to make out, the Watraii abruptly began marching him instead toward what at first looked like nothing more than a mass of boulders.

  No, Spock realized after a few moments…the Watraii had merely made use of the boulders as a convenient way to add a natural element of protection to their installation. It was from that installation that they would have had to come; there was, he knew, no other nearby.

  Were there really no others on this planet at all? Where were the Watraii warships? This installation seemed to be mostly underground. Logic said that warships, too, would need to be sheltered from the harsh climate and fierce winds in underground bunkers.

  That truly is not the issue right now. More fortunately, I believe that we were correct. This is their main installation, the one that we spotted from space—the installation in which Chekov is being held and in which the Watraii commander almost certainly resides.

  As Ruanek might put it, I have just won this part of the gamble.

  As Ruanek and Data hurried deeper into the wilderness of rocks, both of them moving with practiced skill, Ruanek suddenly realized that he was clenching both his teeth and his fists as he went. He fought an inner struggle with himself, trying to force himself to relax—

  Akkh, useless. All those years of warrior training had made him what he was despite the intervening time on Vulcan, all those years of never abandon a comrade, never let a comrade be taken alive by the foe—

  All at once he stopped short, overwhelmed by utter frustration. “I can’t do this.”

  Thanks to the android’s quick reflexes, Data stopped short with him, and turned to look at him quizzically, head tilted slightly to one side in surprise. “What is it, Ruanek? Are you injured or overly weary?”

  “No! Data, think about what we’re doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no honor here. We can’t abandon Spock and Chekov just to save our own skins.”

  Data blinked. “I do not claim to fully understand the Romulan concept of honor. However, what you claim is happening—the deliberate and cowardly abandonment of comrades—is certainly not what we are doing. Of course I, too, wish to rescue them, but we both know that our primary mission right now is precisely what Ambassador Spock said: We are to recover the artifact.”

  “Bah.”

  “Ambassador Spock is no fool,” Data continued. “I assure you, he knows what he is doing.”

  “Of course he does. I’ve seen him in action, Data, under circumstances that would have destroyed any lesser being, and I mean that without any melodrama. I trust him, and I trust his judgment. It’s the Watraii I don’t trust! They’ve already proved to all of us that they don’t give a damn about diplomacy.”

  “Ruanek, please, listen to me. I
know that you are not Starfleet personnel, but you did tell me that you were once a soldier on Romulus. You do understand orders.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I do, but—”

  “We are not the only ones in this situation. Captain Scott has orders to take the Alexander Nevsky offworld after twenty-four ship hours if we do not return, and Captain Saavik must leave orbit soon after that.”

  “Do you truly believe that they will do so?” Ruanek challenged.

  “I would understand if they do,” Data countered.

  “They will not,” Ruanek said firmly. “They would not abandon us. And I will not abandon them.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Data—ah, I assume that you can worry?”

  “You may rest assured that I quite understand ‘worry.’”

  That had been said in what Ruanek could have sworn was a wry tone. “So, I will go on with you and recover the artifact, because, as you have so emphatically reminded me, those are our orders. And then, if you like, you can return to the Alexander Nevsky and take off with Captain Scott. But I will not. I will not leave this planet without saving my comrades.”

  “I quite agree with that,” Data said. “But before we…worry about performing heroic and honorable acts, first we must figure out where, precisely, the artifact is being held, and how we are to recover it.”

  “Ah. Yes. There is that little issue.” Ruanek glanced about, trying to orient himself. “I don’t want to risk running a scan that might be detected now that we’re so near the Watraii. I don’t suppose that you can…”

  “Locate it without using a scanner? As it happens, I have already located it with my tricorder.”

  “How—when—?”

  “While the Watraii attention was focused upon the execution.” Data paused. “I do not need very much time to absorb information. The artifact is in part of the main installation.”

  “You,” Ruanek said in genuine appreciation, “are quite amazing.”