Vulcan's Soul Trilogy Book One Read online

  Immediately, the invasion he had trained himself to accept assaulted his consciousness. He let his defenses fall: resistance would damage brain and synapses.

  There is no pain, he chanted silently. There is no pain.

  And then, there was not. Images and thoughts formed in his mind, flowed into the crystals, and would be preserved as long as their lattices survived.

  “I am Karatek, physicist, once of ShiKahr, a citizen of Vulcan-in-Exile, on board the Shavokh…”

  How sweet the rush of sensations was: the Forge at dawn, the sweetness of the desert wind, the sweep of a shavokh across the sky, the rustles, bells, cries of a procession of pilgrims—as if he stood in ShiKahr, watching the Gates. A tear slid down his cheek: the logical consequence of such memories.

  On such a day, Surak had walked out of the desert, wrenching Karatek’s life as well as that of the battered Mother World into new patterns.

  Karatek remembered…

  The swift, one-person riser brought Karatek to Vulcan’s surface just as the all-clear sounded. He stepped outside the Vulcan Space Institute’s defensive shields onto the sand, ochre shading into the true crimson of the deep desert.

  The sky was clear. In his thoughts, Karatek praised the foresight that had buried ShiKahr’s factories that labored to build the ships that would one day carry Vulcans from their own skies out to the stars. Not only had they reduced pollution to such a degree that, from the Gates of ShiKahr, Karatek could see the Forge more clearly than at any time since he had taken his kahs-wan, it had protected them from the sneak attacks that had turned similar facilities at ShanaiKahr into a glassy pit.

  The haze from those last explosions had subsided. Now, as Karatek began to record the daily test results for atmospheric radioactivity and biotoxins, his badge glowed the green of healthy blood. Today, he would not require decontamination treatments. The wind that had blown radiation from the new craters on the Forge had turned: it was safe to be outside without protective gear. No ash from battle or from Seleya, in its active eruptions phase once more, clouded his view, and the hot wind was sweet. Karatek glanced out again toward the distant Forge.

  A faint whine alerted him to ships patrolling overhead. He raised a hand to salute ShiKahr’s guardians. He had worked on those ships’ propulsion systems, the first generation of the mighty engines that he hoped would one day propel the Great Ships now under very slow construction. If only the funding continued to flow!

  It had been bad enough when only the te-Vikram priest-kings opposed the decision of the Vulcan Space Initiative to settle here in ShiKahr, the last city before the Forge on the road that leads past Mount Seleya to the Sea. Since ancient times, Karatek thought, pilgrims could count on robbers: the te-Vikram were only the latest, and possibly the worst, in a long line of predators. It was not their attacks on travelers that concerned Karatek about the te-Vikram; it was their assault on thinking minds.

  To Karatek’s mind, a greater problem was the new political party that was gaining power in the Vulcan Assembly. They were technocrats, which many thought made them the Vulcan Space Initative’s natural allies—but they were also utilitarian and pragmatic. They would fund the building of ships if they were warships or if they enabled Vulcan miners to exploit the resources of the outer worlds. But ships that could make the great voyages out beyond Vulcan’s star system, engines that might be developed at later times that could leap the speed of light: unless they saw a practical—indeed, a near-term financial—reason for such ships, the technocrats opposed them.

  The te-Vikram wanted to destroy the VSI. The technocrats wanted it to serve their own ends—bigger and better warships; bigger and better weapons. They were as bloody-minded as the te-Vikram, rational as they sometimes sounded in debate.

  The ships passed out of range, leaving Karatek in silence. Then the faintest of shadows fell across him, and he looked up. Night, day, and sweet water…why, it was a sundweller, its fragile, iridescent wings unfurled to take advantage of every possible breath of air, glinting as they reflected Nevasa’s light. Sundwellers spent their lives soaring through Vulcan’s thin atmosphere, mating in the air, dying aloft, with only fragments of their gleaming wings ever uniting with the desert. Not even the hungriest shavokh would hunt a sundweller. Karatek honestly had thought they were extinct, extinguished by time or poisoned by the wars raging on his beloved, beleaguered world.

  Ancient legends held that seeing a sundweller was an omen. It meant your fate was changing, or dramatic times were coming, or some such superstition that Karatek, scientist that he was, scoffed at. He could explain the physics of a sundweller’s flight, the biology that powered its fragile metabolism; but he could not explain why seeing one gave him such a shock of joy, and he refused to analyze it.

  Overhead, the sundweller banked, turned, and swooped. Karatek watched it until even the faintest gleam of sunlight on its wings vanished. He would tell his wife, T’Vysse, about the sundweller tonight. She had a poet’s soul. She too would rejoice.

  He smiled at the Gates of ShiKahr, over which the sundweller had flown. The current cease-fire meant more people were passing through, either out to the shrines in the deep desert or on their way to the sea or on their way to those of the inland cities on this continent that still would receive guest-friends from afar. That too was a breach of custom that Karatek, modern as he was, regretted.

  Beyond the Gates, two immense flanged pylons of cracked green stone, half-buried in the sand, trudged a caravan, its cargo loaded onto guarded armored carriers that resembled nothing so much as gigantic metal versions of deep-desert myrmidex, creeping across the waste.

  Heading unescorted through the Gates was a group of pilgrims bound for the waters and the shrines at Seleya. Today, blue-white lightning danced on its snowcapped peak. Karatek checked the scanners once more: there was a 73.22 percent chance of an eruption in the next five days.

  Scientist though he was, Karatek liked to think that those pilgrims included a family, much like his own, Seleya-bound to give thanks that an only son born to older parents had survived his kahs-wan. He heard the tinkle of bells and the shrill ring of systra accompanying the ladies, veiled and deadly, who swayed on russet-furred vai-sehlaten gengineered for riding. Their fangs would be capped with bloodmetal and would glitter with inset gems.

  On a previous occasion, Karatek had seen a procession of priests, accompanying a penitent victor in a wedding challenge. He had watched maimed veterans wearing the sigils of captains of hosts or clan-heads, plus all their other honors, bearing jade or gold ritual weapons as they marched onto the Forge to surrender for the only time in their lives. He had even seen one of the heavily guarded wains of the te-Vikram, headed for the Forge and the Womb of Fire beyond it.

  One day, if the war ever ceased and if the ships ever got off the ground, Karatek hoped to cross the desert himself to Gol, to study the progress of the scholar-priests in unlocking the arts of the mind.

  But that would be another day’s adventure. For now, Karatek was happy building ships. Usually, he managed not to think of what the tremendous engines, the shapely hulls, and the raw power of the weapons would be used for.

  The day was quiet. Usually, he saw at least one group of protestors—anything from religious environmentalists to political fanatics to the te-Vikram, who combined both elements with a perversion of ancient Vulcan history and weren’t, Karatek thought, above some viciously effective terrorism. One more well-placed assassination, and the constant low-grade skirmishes could explode into total war. It might be the last war on Vulcan: no one knew better than Karatek how powerful the weapons were in both sides’ armories. Vulcan had seen far more than its share of war. How had the Mother World managed to survive this long?

  A shadow distracted him from the darkness of his thoughts.

  Right beneath the sundweller’s glide path, a tiny blur formed on the sand.

  Karatek narrowed his eyes: the blur shimmered, then resolved. Three men wearing hooded robes almost ra
gged with long use approached ShiKahr’s Gates on foot. They were not just unguarded and unarmed; they carried not so much as a water flask or a blanket against the chill of the desert nights.

  Only four types of men walked the desert thus: pilgrims, madmen, ritual suicides, and prophets. The groups were almost indistinguishable from one another.

  Had Karatek not just mused that the world had changed, and not for the better? Here was his opportunity to redress that in some small way.

  Slapping his palm against the sensors to signal that he was off shift, he hastened toward the security checkpoint beside the ancient Gates. There he found the newcomers. They were arguing with three guards. Though the guards retained the helms of ancient designs (enhanced by a heads-up display), their ceremonial lirpa s were stacked against a wall, and their ahn woon were wrapped about their waists beside their com gear. So far, none of the three had drawn shockers or stunners.

  Karatek stopped and blinked so forcibly that the Veils almost covered his eyes. Immured as he was underground for most of the day, he actually recognized one of the men from those newsnets that still covered demonstrations. The cropped hair, lighter than the Vulcan norm; the thoughtful eyes that were the color of still water, deep-set in a face pale despite its exposure to the deep-desert sun; the fine features so in contrast with a warrior’s frame. Day and night, it was Surak himself.

  Karatek had read his monographs, written in the days when Surak had been a scientist rather than—depending on the speaker’s politics—a political nuisance, a zealot, or a philosopher. On a planet littered with creeds, philosophies, and factions, Surak’s party was one of the most recent, one of the smallest, and surely the most strange.

  He had last been spotted heading into the desert from an unauthorized exit point. A cursory search had been conducted, but official hopes were that he’d been eaten by le-matyas.

  Now, two guards approached him, electronic binders in hand. The lights that signified activation—albeit on the lowest pain threshold—winked green and blue. Creeping up behind them, quiet as a hunting le-matya despite his height, was a sallow, angry man. Taller and thinner than Surak, he had stretched arms out toward the guards in a violently businesslike way.

  “Do you know who we are?” shouted the third man, younger than the others.

  “Obviously, they do, Varen,” said Surak. “Or they would not seek to detain us. Skamandros, stand down: violence is simply illogic by physical means.”

  One of the guards (the one, in fact, holding the cuffs) whirled, horrified to find Skamandros almost upon him. Karatek stifled a laugh. This was like some of the stories he’d read as a boy, before his parents reminded him he had scholarships to win.

  No learning is ever wasted, he reminded himself before he drew a deep breath and shouted, “I offer these strangers guest-right!”

  Three

  Now

  JANUARY 2377

  ONE YEAR AFTER THE END OF THE DOMINION WAR

  It was, Spock thought, looking calmly about, quite a charming scene despite the distraction of the milling, noisy crowds. The grounds of Starfleet Headquarters were green with new grass and newly replanted bushes, and all the broken windows had been replaced. In fact, the whole complex looked as if there had never been a war at all, and the fountains were playing normally once more, their water sparkling in the sunlight.

  To one side of the great lawn, a large viewscreen had been set up, carefully placed so as to not block the guests’ view of the region.

  It was indeed a worthwhile view. From here, where all the guests stood, the land sloped gently down, giving them a clear sight out over the bay and the perfectly rebuilt orange arch of the Golden Gate Bridge, and on to the rolling brown and green hills of the old Marin County. Those hills bore only a few crater scars, already a fuzzy green with new growth.

  The weather was agreeable enough as well, Spock thought, the type of day that he understood was a normal one for autumn in San Francisco. It was a little chilly for a Vulcan, but his dark ambassadorial robes, gleaming with their Federation insignia and Vulcan sigils, kept him warm enough. “Normal” in this Earthly climate meant sun, clear blue skies, cool temperatures—pleasantly so, at least for the humans in the gathering—and, since it was early in the day, none of the fog that formed with almost precise timing out over the Pacific Ocean every day in the late afternoon.

  It was quite logical for Starfleet to have moved the event outdoors. Even considering the vast size of the headquarters’ main hall, it still would have been uncomfortably crowded. For this, Spock thought, was a sight that had never yet been seen in all the years of the Federation. There were ever-growing throngs of senior diplomats of many species in their robes, suits, flowing shawls, or their own fur—a rainbow of colors mixing, blending, or clashing—and officers of the Federation, also of many species, in their somber red dress uniforms glittering with insignia of rank.

  What made it out of the ordinary, though, was that this wild mixture of Federation members was joined by members of the Federation’s two uneasy imperial allies: the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire.

  The Romulans, as was typical dress for them in official functions, were a sober lot in their broad-shouldered uniforms of dull silver crossed by sashes of rank. The Klingons, by comparison, were a cheerfully gaudy group with their red, black, and bright silver House baldrics glittering with signs of clan and rank. A few of the Klingons were even bearing tall red and black House banners.

  Spock permitted himself the tiniest upward crook of one corner of his mouth, in pleasure. What made this event unique was the fact that all were gathered here in peace and even good spirits.

  Perhaps there is yet hope even for Unification.

  A subclan of five small Oriki, looking like bipedal, chittering meerkats in cheerful red and yellow robes, scurried past him, then stopped short in recognition and, all five of them, gave him a credible imitation of the Vulcan salute. Spock, who had served a major role in bringing their planet into the Federation, politely returned the salute, and heard their delighted chittering continue as they scurried on.

  The Oriki are always in good spirits, Spock thought, regardless of the situation. Fascinating.

  Two Andorians, their blue faces standing out against their startlingly scarlet ambassadorial robes, nodded to Spock with professional courtesy, their antennae tipping in his direction. One Andorian was a tall, lean thaan, the other a tall, lean zhen. “Ambassador Spock.”

  He recognized them after a split second. “Ambassador th’Telos, Ambassador zh’Shaav.”

  Th’Telos, clearly attempting the unfamiliarity of small talk with an effort, quipped, “It is truly amazing to see no fighting in so large and mixed a group.”

  And zh’Shaav added, her antennae rippling as she spoke, “Will it last, I wonder?”

  “There is, as the humans say, always hope,” Spock replied.

  Accepting the logic of his observation, the Andorians walked off without further comment.

  “Ah, Ambassador Spock!”

  Spock, his robes sweeping about him in dignified folds as he turned, saw the reason for their retreat. It was George M’beni, tall and lean as the Andorians, but as always eager as a child. M’beni was Earth’s ambassador to Nikari, and made a perfect ambassador to the perpetually optimistic Nikariki. But right now, as he practically beamed at Spock, his intense cheerfulness seemed almost as overwhelming to the Vulcan as the endless chittering of the Oriki.

  “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” the human exclaimed. “I’d say every dignitary who could wangle an invitation is here, from all the Federation worlds, as well as the delegations from Romulus and Qo’noS. It’s the first time I’ve seen Headquarters look downright crowded. Fortunate that everyone’s on his, her, or its best behavior.”

  “It is,” Spock agreed politely.

  They would, logically, all be minding their manners, given that they were all gathered here to commemorate the war and celebrate what everyone here honestly hoped would
be a bright future. But Spock had already been waylaid by enthusiastic Klingons, enthusiastic Starfleet officers, the Oriki, the Andorians, and now, it would seem, enthusiastic fellow ambassadors.

  Fortunate for me that I have had those years of training in self-control while serving aboard the Enterprise. Dealing with Jim and Dr. McCoy—especially with Dr. McCoy—has stood me in good stead.

  A slender figure in a Starfleet captain’s red collar moved to Spock’s side: Saavik, rescuing her husband from the emotional M’beni, who politely bowed and moved away. Ignoring the undeniably emotional little thrill of pleasure suddenly warming him at Saavik’s hand on his arm, Spock murmured to his wife, “Should you not be with the other Starfleet officers?”

  “Marriage to a Vulcan ambassador overrules Starfleet protocol.”

  Their different careers took them away from each other for far longer and far more frequently than either would have wished. But separations had never yet weakened their bond for each other.

  Parted and never parted.

  Never and always touching and touched.

  The words of their marriage vow echoed in Spock’s mind.

  “Amazing,” Saavik said. “No one has so much as threatened to draw a weapon on anyone.”

  “Nor has anyone begun shouting for better terms.”

  “It won’t last.”

  Spock raised an eyebrow. “You, my wife, are becoming what humans call a cynic.”

  One corner of her mouth curled up in what only another Vulcan could have identified as a grin. “And you, my husband, have already become what humans call a cockeyed optimist.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. My wife, let us, as the humans might say, simply watch the show.”

  “Gentlebeings,” a clearly amplified voice proclaimed with professional good cheer, “look up!”