Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Page 25

  The commander froze. “Ask rather whether it was the expulsion from their former homeworld that turned them into what we are today. There is no time, no place, no room for softness in our lives.”

  “But why come here? Why to this harsh planet?”

  “Can you not guess, clever Vulcan? When we were driven out from our home, our own worlds, we chose a world as inhospitable as possible to punish us for our loss of our former home and to forge us into a weapon fit to regain it. We spend our lives in a quest for worthiness.”

  The truth was in every word.

  The truth, at any rate, Spock thought warily, as the current Watraii believe it.

  Very carefully, he began, “Vulcan belongs to an interplanetary organization known as the Federation. If you brought your case before the Federation, it would be heard.”

  “I cannot believe that.”

  “Why not? Your fight is not with the Federation. Hear me out. I know that you are concerned for your people. I saw that when the shuttle crashed. I know that you ache for your children. I heard that in your voice. For the sake of your people, for the sake above all of your children, believe me. Take your quarrel to the Federation.”

  The commander was silent for a long while. Then, almost reluctantly he said, “Tell me more.”

  Chekov started as the cell door slid open, and his heart began to race. Spock…?

  No. It was merely a small pack of four Watraii.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” he said wearily. “It’s time for my daily bout of exercise. Mustn’t let the prisoner get flabby.”

  But as he walked down the corridor between them, Chekov realized with every step that he no longer felt like the tired old man he’d been ever since the Watraii took him.

  Hope is an amazing thing.

  Of course there was also that slightly lighter gravity, and his slightly greater bone mass helping him as well. Yes, and there was also the fact that after the mind-meld, his brain was clear again, clear enough to realize one useful little fact: The Watraii had come to take him for granted.

  Your mistake, gospoda.

  He groaned and staggered slightly, hand going to his chest, contorting his face in feigned agony. Did the Watraii understand heart attacks?

  They understood that something was wrong. They closed in, supporting him with strong grips. “Do you require medication?” one of them asked warily.

  Oh, I can just imagine what Watraii medics are like! No, thank you! “Too late…” Chekov moaned piteously. “I will talk…to the commander…get my mind clear…before I…before I…”

  He slumped in the Watraii guards’ arms. Ha, yes, should have been an actor because they were accepting his act as real. Far more credible than that old “nuclear vessels” routine had ever been. They were half carrying him in the direction of that central command room he’d seen so many times—good! Just what he wanted. Before they could figure out that he was faking, though, he’d better have a plan. Get himself and Spock out of here.

  Really? One old man against so many warriors?

  Yes?

  Oh yes.

  Head drooping, hiding his face, Chekov smiled ever so slightly. And, sagging in the Watraii arms as he was, he looked directly at the holster of one guard’s sidearm, there within such easy reach.

  “Helm!” Saavik shouted as the Alliance swerved out of the enemy’s way. “Keep us clear. Weapons, fire at will.”

  Those ships must not get by us. They must not sound a warning.

  She and her chosen enemy captain played a swift, deadly game, sending their ships on sharply darting, twisting evasive courses. The Watraii ship took a direct hit that sent it slewing sideways in space. The Alliance followed, but the Watraii managed to get off a glancing hit that shook the Alliance. Saavik’s breath caught in her throat. “Damage report,” she ordered.

  “Minor damage, deck five,” came the quick reply. “No casualties.”

  “Follow the enemy—”

  No need. Whatever damage they’d already done was enough. The Watraii ship suddenly tore apart in a violent burst of flame. The shock wave hit the Alliance, but Saavik, prepared, warned, “Hold it steady…steady.”

  Even at that moment, the Klingon ships got in two direct hits on their chosen targets, damaging two Watraii ships badly enough to start a series of explosions that ended with the Watraii ships disappearing into a white-hot cloud. The Klingons let out earsplitting howls of triumph.

  But Lieutenant Suhur warned, “Captain, I believe one ship did have just enough time to send off a message burst to the surface.”

  Spock, Saavik thought. Ah, Spock.

  But there was nothing she could do to help him.

  “…and so if you are willing,” Spock continued to the Watraii commander, “a Federation emissary could speak with the Watraii and—”

  A sudden commotion started up near the doorway. As Spock broke off in surprise, a Watraii rushed into the room. At the commander’s signal, he approached and murmured into the commander’s ear. Spock’s Vulcan hearing caught “…attack on Watraii ships…”

  Saavik. What just happened out there?

  “So,” the commander all but snarled at Spock, “is this your idea of peace and truth?”

  At that moment, the door flew open. To Spock’s utter astonishment, Chekov burst into the room like an image out of some impossible Terran adventure vid, an old man with young eyes and armed with a Watraii sidearm in each hand.

  “Everyone stay where you are! Except you, Spock. Come on, man, we’re getting out of here!”

  Were Spock wholly human, he might have thought, Oh hell, not now! Instead, he merely reminded himself that it would be illogical to regret regaining one’s freedom.

  Together, they hurried from the room.

  Twenty-Seven

  Memory

  “Sarissa and her mate have returned from surveying the second planet, a world of fire and ice. Although their mission returned with considerable information, five members of their crew were lost. Some council members have already called this expedition a disaster and are demanding a formal inquiry. I am attempting to prevent an investigation from becoming a trial.

  “I find it exceedingly unlikely that my children would demonstrate that level of negligence or incompetence. I have, however, no further information. Thus far, their records are sealed, and the healers have quarantined them and their surviving crew members for additional decontamination procedures. It would be not only illogical to expect my daughter-in-law T’Olryn to break confidence, it would be unethical. Being responsible for those of us who survive, S’task has requested permission to listen to today’s council session via private communications link with me.”

  Karatek, along with many of the crews’ families, had been waiting by the main bay when, to everyone’s more or less concealed surprise, it had been Sarissa who had landed the shuttle. In fact, she had been the only member of the mission to have walked away from it. Serevan had been carried out unconscious, along with the rest of the surviving crew. There were also four bodies, one sealed in the sort of bag used to store materials contaminated by radiation. And one person was missing.

  Seeing the blind, pain-filled expression on Sarissa’s face, Karatek had started forward. He wanted to comfort his daughter as he had the night he had found her and her brother hiding outside the ruins of their home, but the healers had intervened. Working with practiced, compassionate skill, they had separated the shuttle crews’ families from the general ship’s population. They attended the families of the dead to meditation chambers, and took the children of the one crew member whose body had not returned into their protective care. They handed out badges and medications against radiation sickness, even to bystanders. Engineers in protective suits moved in to decontaminate the shuttle or, if they were unable to, to put it on autopilot and jettison it.

  Although T’Vysse had joined their daughter and her mate in quarantine, Karatek could not be spared. Since then, he had seen none of the shuttle crew. No one
knew more than the fact that five people had died on the mission to the world of fire, shadow, and ice; and one body was missing.

  The truth was bad. The rumors were worse.

  Released, finally, from their isolation, Sarissa and Serevan marched in, shoulder to shoulder. From his seat behind the council table, Solor made as if to rise and join his brother and sister, but a characteristic elder-sister glance held him in his seat.

  Although Karatek was certain from the way Solor held his arm that he had shed the protective sling too early, he seemed to be making a good recovery.

  Sarissa looked pale. Not surprising: Karatek knew what the antiradiation drugs could do to even a healthy system.

  The real damage she had taken showed in the wariness of her eyes and in her body language, as if at any moment she expected to have to fight. Serevan, head and shoulders taller than she, stood at her back as if guarding it. His eyes flicked about the room, showing him to be at least as hyperalert as his wife. He sported remarkable bruises around both eyes, as if he wore a mask. From time to time he started, as if nervous—and this from a man who had studied passion’s mastery since childhood!

  What had they encountered on that two-faced world, half ice, half forge?

  Karatek’s children reached the council table and bowed respect. They nodded refusal of the seats offered them—grudgingly, in some cases. Witnesses sat; prisoners stood. It appeared that Sarissa was indeed standing upon something: not just her dignity, but a considerable outrage.

  “I offer my apologies,” she spoke first, as she usually did. “We would have reported earlier, but the healers had us under observation.”

  “Their quarantine procedures were both appropriate and thorough,” Serevan added. “On our trip back, the entire shuttle’s complement was exposed to zenite fumes. They produced extremely aggressive responses, especially from those not in control of their emotions.”

  “We had a mutiny!” Sarissa interrupted. It was clear from the way her voice rose, high and hard, that her mastery of her own emotions was still incomplete. “We had already suffered one casualty. Teveron died when he ventured too far out onto ice before its thickness could be tested. It broke, and he plunged into a pool of liquid nitrogen. We had to leave him there.

  “T’Reni was caught in a rockfall. She survived extrication after 3.2 hours, but received such severe radiation burns that she refused all but palliative care. We brought her back to her family and have taken appropriate prophylactic measures for our own radiation exposure.”

  A little blindly, Sarissa flung out her hand, and Serevan touched fingertips to hers. “Tell them, husband,” she said.

  “The other deaths were the result of exposure to zenite fumes, which cause paranoia, fear, and violence,” the tall engineer took up the story. “Three of the crew tried to mutiny on the trip back to the ship.” He paused, allowing the enormity of their loss to sink in. “I hold myself personally responsible.”

  “That is illogical,” snapped Sarissa. “After Adenkar used talshaya on Healer Salvir, you went down there to try to restore order or at least control the damages. I sealed myself in the pilots’ compartment and made maximum speed back to the ship.”

  “I should have succeeded,” Serevan looked down out of those bruised eyes. He turned toward the council. “I did indeed control the crew. And I secured our samples. But I too was exposed to the zenite past the ability of my own meditations to control it. I should report myself unfit for duty, but I cannot see how my people can get along without my work. That is, I admit, self-centered and potentially a side effect of my own exposure to the zenite. I do not offer that as an excuse, but as data to aid the council in making its decision.”

  “You’re calling yourself mad because you have emotions, man, and you let them loose once in how many years?” cried Evoras, who headed up bioengineering. He was a small, intense man whom no one had ever accused of mastering his passions. Throughout the long journey, however, he had consistently turned in superb work. A pragmatist, he voted sometimes with Karatek and sometimes with the technocrats, and even, sometimes, with the te-Vikram blocs.

  “Now, to borrow a word you seem fond of overusing,” Evoras continued, “if you want to accuse yourself of illogic, I’d call that illogical, too. To me, it sounds as if you made the best of a very bad situation. If you hadn’t gone down there and been successful beyond what anyone on board this ship had a right to expect, we’d be mourning your death. Unless, of course, you are enjoying your overreaction…”

  Serevan turned toward Evoras, then stiffened as if, finally, he revealed just how much damage he had taken in the fight to preserve the shuttle.

  “Once the surviving crew were all adequately restrained and medicated—” Karatek assumed that meant Serevan had personally beaten them unconscious, then kept them drugged. “—I succeeded in sealing the laboratory so that air circulation would not contaminate the entire ship. I suited up, vented atmosphere in the compartment, and sealed the zenite samples. About that time, one of the onboard computers failed and…” He paused. “I must confess that I screamed and wrecked it. When I finally succeeded in controlling my emotions, I realized I had become unreliable. So I documented my reactions, then injected myself too with my suit’s tranquilizers. I am told you saw Sarissa bring the shuttle back in. My wife saved us.”

  “Highly satisfactory performance,” whispered S’task in Karatek’s ear through the tiny metal bead that transmitted the council’s proceedings to Rea’s Helm. “No blame. Tell them. Tell them now.”

  “T’Kehr S’task instructs me to say that he considers your performance highly satisfactory,” Karatek repeated.

  “There will, nonetheless, be a full hearing,” said Avarak.

  Another fault line in the accord among the ships, Karatek thought. It was one thing to question his own judgment: he had inherited responsibility for the ship, not trained for it. But to gainsay praise from S’task, who rarely spoke these days and even more rarely praised was very interesting indeed. And potentially quite dangerous.

  Sarissa looked down, flushing olive. “We thank T’Kehr S’task for his generosity. We are honored.”

  She handed the record of their mission to the council.

  “We have other mineral specimens as well. The planet is…as we hypothesized. You will receive T’Neveith’s report. She remains immobilized with spinal injuries and sends her apologies, along with her observation that she has never encountered anything like the richness of the pergium deposits and duranium lodes we found less than three meters beneath the surface of the ice.”

  “The dilithium crystals—” Serevan reached into his belt pouch and scattered a precious handful upon the table, before producing a sealed envelope of crystals that seemed to glow. “These crystals are unprocessed. I must ask you not to open the sealed crystals. The inclusions they contain are radioactive, so you will want to check your badges at the completion of this meeting. But they should boost power production by a factor of at least 3.5.”

  “So, in other words,” Vorealt interrupted, “we have finally found the Treasury of Erebus. I may have to admit I have found a use for planets after all, or at least this one world.”

  Serevan raised an eyebrow at Vorealt, but refused to take up his fellow engineer’s challenge. He was tiring visibly, but he waved away the offer of a chair, even of water, now that S’task had indicated his approval. “The myth of an ice demon hiding in the perpetual snows at Mount Seleya’s peak strikes me as even more illogical than most myths. This is a Quaris-class world, and an outlier even for such worlds in terms of mineral deposits. One expects conditions to be extreme.”

  S’task’s whisper sounded in Karatek’s ear. “Ask about life downworld. What of biospecimens? Ask if their healer found any. Did they…?”

  Had they found any specimens of life on a world that was half furnace and half ice? And did the specimens survive the attack that killed the healer and could have destroyed the shuttle?

  Now, Sarissa steppe
d forward.

  “Before coming here, Serevan and I went over the shuttle. No,” she held up a hand, thinner than Karatek remembered seeing it. “We were escorted by security. But I—we—found Healer Salvir’s last report. He filed it just before Adenkar struck him.

  “There was life,” she went on. “Nothing large: I should not like to confront a large creature that could survive in that waste. But as his report indicates, he found fossils from three separate species, which argues that there might logically be more. He found them preserved in ice. Then, he indicated he had observed at least thirty-six separate kinds of extremophiles, mostly by the volcanic vents beneath the ice.”

  “So life can exist on that world.”

  Sarissa shrugged. “Extremophiles can be found almost anywhere, even in the Womb of Fire, although I understand that the Fire Plains of Raal, at the center of Vulcan’s Forge, are said to be truly barren. So this discovery is not as surprising as the creatures’ rate of evolution or, as the late T’Kehr Salvir preferred to term it, mutation. In 9.3 days, he observed several tens of thousands of generations. Enough to see changes in their genetic makeup as well as physical transformations.”

  She projected creatures that resembled algae and diatoms on one wall, then flicked through a series of images. Even with his unassisted eyes, Karatek could discern subtle differences in pigmentation, in morphology.

  “I’d like to see a long-term study of this world’s impact on species native to Vulcan,” said Avarak.

  “You would sacrifice…”

  “You yourself constantly tell us how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In the interests of science—”

  “In the interests of getting down to that hell-spawned world and pillaging it for dilithium and rare metals to repair your precious ships!” snarled N’Evran.

  “Are you afraid of it?”

  The te-Vikram, a physical match for Serevan himself, rose slowly from his chair. “I was born in the Womb of Fire. On Vulcan, we te-Vikram were used to living on the edge of radiation-poisoned lands. I do not fear that world. It is a place of danger, a test of strength.”