Текст книги "The Sundered"

Lojur heard the doors hiss open behind him. He saw the huge reflection of the approaching Akaar an instant later.

“Computer, lower room illumination by seventy-five [163] percent.” At once, the lights dimmed and the reflections abruptly vanished, replaced by the endless vista of space. Lojur did not wish to allow anyone, even a close friend like Akaar, to watch him pining over things that could not be changed.

He turned and faced Akaar, who towered over him. The giant Capellan maintained his distance, his large hands clasped behind his back as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.

“I thought I might find you here,” Akaar said, his voice deep and resonant despite its muted volume.

Lojur offered his friend a wan smile. “You could have asked the computer to locate me.”

“A hunter should rely upon his wits,” Akaar replied. Despite their Starfleet training and their respective home-worlds’ diametrically opposite philosophies—Akaar was the product of a warrior society, while Lojur’s Halkan culture had inculcated total pacifism—Lojur knew that they both preferred not to use technology gratuitously. This shared eccentricity, as well as the mentoring they had both received over the years from Captain Sulu and Commander Chekov, had provided the initial impetus for their unlikely friendship.

“True enough,” Lojur said. Though Halkans did not hunt for game animals, they did gather wild plants as well as cultivate tame ones. Neither pursuit was very kind to idiots.

Lojur studied Akaar, who had adopted an even more stoic demeanor than usual. It brought to mind the grave-faced village Elders who had banished him eighteen years ago.

“You should know that Lieutenant Docksey died bravely,” the Capellan said at length.

Lojur nodded, feeling numb and blasted inside as he revisited, yet again, the brutal fact of Shandra’s death. He had already known that she was off duty during the battle with the Neyel; immediately afterward, photon torpedo specialist Pitcher told him most of the rest. Shandra had stepped into [164] the breach, first assisting in one of the torpedo bays, then taking over for an injured member of one of the forward phaser crews.

Then she’d been blown out into space when the final Neyel salvo tore through both the shields and the hull plating directly outside her temporary post.

“Chief Pitcher told me that Shandra died instantly, L.J.,” Lojur said. “She probably didn’t have time to become frightened.” At least I hope that’s so.

Tears of rage and shame stung Lojur’s eyes, prompting him to turn again toward the window. He stared at the Neyel ship, placing his hands behind his back, where they clasped one another as tightly as airlock seals.

Akaar could hardly have missed his roiling emotions. “You wish to punish them,” he said. It did not sound like a question.

Lojur shook his head. “Violence is not in the Halkan character. It has no place in the Halkan heart.” He turned to face his friend, fixing him with his most withering don’t-forget-that-I-outrank-youglare.

Akaar was undeterred. “And yet violence is the very reason you have no place on Halka.”

Lojur wanted to roar at the Capellan, but restrained himself. Barely. “That’s enough, Lieutenant.Dismissed.”

Akaar nodded, then walked back to the door. He paused a moment near the threshold after it opened. “I understand. I know I cannot compel you to discuss your loss, or what it might drive you to do.”

Why wouldn’t Akaar leave it alone? “That’s exactly right, L.J.,” Lojur said with an exasperated sigh.

“That is why I have asked Commander Chekov to do so,” Akaar said, placing his hand over his heart and extending his open hand. Then he departed, leaving Lojur alone with his fiercely churning thoughts.

A moment later, the intercom sounded. Lojur sighed, [165] resigned to what was to come. He pushed the button. “I’m on my way, Commander Chekov.”

“What are you bringing me now, battle trophies?” Chapel said as the med techs antigravved the corpse into the pathology lab adjacent to the main sickbay.

“Ensign Fenlenn beamed this body aboard after the sensors picked it up drifting in space right after the battle,” said one of the medics, a well-muscled human woman named Caitlin Bersentes. Chapel was pleased to see that she and her colleague, a human male named Beck, were treating the dead alien with apparent respect. “Evidently a few of the Neyel were blown out into space, like poor Shandra and the others.”

The body the med techs deposited onto the examination table was large, gray, and unlike anything Chapel had encountered before. Though essentially humanoid in shape and size, its unclothed form was adorned with a muscular tail nearly as long as its body. Its torso was long and slender, and each of its four equally graceful limbs was equipped with opposable thumbs, recalling the hands and feet of a nonhuman Earth primate. The top of its head sported short, bristly black hair; its dark gray, coarse-textured epidermis had the approximate consistency of tree bark, though she noted that it was gracefully arranged in articulated, interleaved sections that Chapel guessed were as tough as the hide of a Vulcan dunewalker. Even the eyelids, closed in the repose of death, suggested apertures in the battlements of some impregnable wooden fortress.

“These folks are obviously built to last,” Chapel said, her researcher’s natural curiosity now fully roused. She reached for a medical tricorder and made a few cursory scans, noting that most of the vital organs—none of which showed more than the residual activity of the very recently deceased—didn’t seem overly mysterious. That wasn’t a surprise, since the humanoid body plan, including most of the internal [166] biological architecture it required, seemed to have arisen independently in so many disparate parts of the galaxy.

Next, she directed the med techs to set up the portable deep-tissue probe, which she carefully calibrated to focus on the creature’s unique biomolecular and DNA features. She tapped a few commands into the device’s keypad, instructing it to feed the results to her tricorder.

While the scanner worked and the results of the scans were being collated through the main sickbay computer and routed back to her tricorder, Chapel walked to the food slot in her office and ordered a cup of hot, black coffee. She sipped from her cup as she returned to the alien corpse. A green light on the portable probe reported that the first scans were finally complete. Still holding her cup, she thumbed the tricorder one-handed to see the results.

When she saw the initial readings, Chapel gagged on her coffee, almost dropping both cup and tricorder. She set them down on a nearby instrument tray while she coughed and sputtered, gently waving away Bersentes and Beck as they offered to help her. Those readings aren’t possible.After recovering her breath, she rechecked the settings on every piece of equipment involved in the scan, including the tricorder, which she replaced just in case it was malfunctioning.

This time accepting some assistance from her staff, Chapel ran the test four more times to eliminate any possibility of error. Nothing. changed. Her two assistants looked stunned, obviously having worked out the implications for themselves.

Chapel crossed to her office, where she tapped the intercom on her desk. “Chapel to Captain Sulu.”

“Sulu here.”

“I’ve just finished my initial examination of the Neyel corpse Fenlenn found. I haven’t even started the invasive autopsy yet, but I’ve already learned something rather ... startling about our alien friends.”

“And what’s that, Doctor?”

[167] Chapel nearly blurted out what she’d learned, then thought better of it. “Let’s just say that you and Ambassador Burgess are going to want to see this for yourself. Immediately.”

“I’ll be right down.”

“I really don’t think you have any reason for concern,” Lojur said.

“I certainly hope that’s so,” Chekov said, sitting behind the desk in his quarters. He gestured toward a guest chair, where Lojur took a seat. “But as executive officer, crew morale is my special area of responsibility.”

“Even when we might be under attack soon by some extremely territorial Tholians?” Lojur said quietly.

“ Especiallythen. I have to make sure the captain and I can count on you in a crisis, Commander. And I would be remiss if I pretended I didn’t know certain things about you.”

Lojur thought that Excelsior’sexec looked, as usual, far more comfortable dispensing photon torpedoes than advice. But he knew Pavel Chekov better than that. With Captain Sulu in charge of Excelsior’soverall operations, the welfare of the ship’s crew fell squarely on Chekov’s shoulders.

“Granted, sir,” Lojur said. “But I think Lieutenant Akaar overreacted when he asked you to ... psychoanalyze me.” Lojur felt tremendous gratitude toward Chekov, whose mentorship had been invaluable to him. Still, there were certain areas of Lojur’s life that he wasn’t eager to talk about, even with the man who had sponsored his entry into StarfleetAcademy.

“Possibly,” Chekov said. “But you’ve just suffered a tremendous, sudden loss. And don’t forget, I know Akaar’s background about as well as I know yours. He’s been able to smell pent-up violence ever since he was a little kid.”

Lojur smiled in spite of himself. “I find it hard to believe that L.J. was ever a ‘little’ anything.”

“He was cute as a bug. But not even your lieutenant [168] commander’s bars will save you if you ever say that to his face. Don’t forget, Akaar was born to rule the Ten Tribes of Capella. That’s why his mother is still financing the ongoing construction of a huge tomb and monument for him on their homeworld, to let everyone know that he’s the one who has the rightful claim to the title of Teer.”

Lojur had first heard of the Tomb of Leonard James Akaar back in StarfleetAcademy. He had been appalled then at the Capellan obsession with death.

But a lot had changed since those carefree days.

“Akaar was only five when the coup happened,” Chekov continued. “And it was his warning that prevented a nasty Cossack named Keel from murdering him and his mother in their tent. You might ask him to tell you about that sometime.”

Despite Akaar’s renowned laconic manner—Lieutenant Tuvok must have envied it—Lojur already knew these details about his friend. It was no secret to anyone that Lojur, Tuvok, and Lieutenant Akaar had been close colleagues and friends for more than three years now. So Commander Chekov must have been well aware that he wasn’t “telling tales out of school,” as humans sometimes described the practice of repeating gossip.

Lojur merely nodded, contemplating the violence that had such an impact on Akaar’s life, and his own.

He was halfway through his eighteenth summer, an adult on the cusp of becoming eligible to marry and establish his own Freehold, when the Federation rock-buyers first arrived in KothaVillage.

The first thing that impressed Lojur about the Starfleet negotiating team was their clothing. Maroon jackets and black trousers, very precisely assembled and tailored, looking nothing like the motley congeries of homespun robes and cloaks that adorned most of the people of Halka. The Halkans of Kotha Village favored slow, tranquil, farm-tethered lives, and [169] that had not changed appreciably in several millennia. By contrast, the men and women who came to bargain for Halka’s energy-saturated crystal formations dressed in a uniform fashion that spoke of progress, change, efficiency. They went to far places and brought back knowledge beyond any Halkan former’s wildest dreams.

Lojur found it simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

He watched for days as the four Starfleeters moved about the village, whose people welcomed them with open arms and huts. The visitors repaid the village’s generosity in kind during their stay, helping with an irrigation project, and providing medical aid to some of the outlying families whose fortunes had been ruined by the recent unseasonable floods and the grainblight that had caused so much devastation during the last Harvest.

Judging from the long faces the Starfleet people wore toward the end of their stay, they—like the handful of other Federation negotiating teams that had preceded them in earlier decades—had ultimately failed to persuade the Council to allow them to mine the rocks they sought.

On the night before the Terrans’ vessel was to return to Halka to retrieve them, KothaVillage threw a great feast for its honored visitors, replete with song, dance, and the traditional tribal story pantomimes. Lojur exchanged shy glances with Kereleth, a girl two summers his junior. She was as yet betrothed to no one, as far as he knew. The future stretched before them both, promising anything and everything.

It was a joyous, hopeful time to till the soil and breathe the air.

Then the green men came, with their rifles and pistols. They shot at everything that moved. Lojur wasn’t certain how many of them there were. But they made it clear that they wanted the rocks as well. And they employed a very different bargaining style from that of the Starfleeters.

“Orions!” one of the Starfleet people, a woman, had [170] shouted just before one of the invaders’ dreadful weapons vaporized her. The remaining three Terrans raised weapons of their own in defense of KothaVillage, despite the protestations of lathen, the Village Elder, who deplored the notion of using violence in order to curb violence.

Lojur hated the idea as well, was sickened by it. Peace was all he knew.

And yet, people are dying right in front of me.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur. Two dozen villagers, vaporized, blown apart, or maimed. Kereleth gone, her fate never discovered. Two more Terrans dead, and another lying injured, pierced through the shoulder by fragments of a hut blown asunder by an Orion explosive device.

The injured Terran’s weapon, lying discarded in the dirt. People continuing to die, everywhere Lojur looked.

No more. No more of my people will die.

Lojur remembered crawling through the dirt, grasping the cold weapon with shaking hands. Hiding behind a charred stump as he aimed the hideous deathtool at a cluster of brutally laughing Orions, coarse, evil men who had expected no protest from the Halkans and thus had not made the slightest preparation for it.

And then Lojur was firing and running, running and firing, tumbling into a blood-red haze. His heart burned, ached, exulted, wept.

More people died, many more. But none of these were residents of KothaVillage.

Afterward, Lojur remembered little of the horror, at least consciously. He still thanked Halka’s gods every night for that gift of forgetfulness. But there were also the other nights. The nights when the awful truth of what he had done exhumed itself from its shallow grave and visited him in his dreams.

After the bodies were interred—Halkan, Terran, and Orion—KothaVillage turned its entire attention toward [171] rebuilding itself. Though injured, the sole surviving Terran, along with a few others from his newly returned vessel, assisted with the physical reconstruction. Winter was descending quickly, so every remaining Kothan was grateful for the help.

The injured Terran, tended by his own medical people as well as by a Kothan Healer, never asked for so much as a single crystal in return.

But he could not help the village repair the damage that had been done to its spirit. Only the Elders could do that.

Gray, sad-eyed lathen still led KothaVillage, despite the loss of his right arm during the Orion attack. And though most of the people stood by listening, lathen’s harsh words on that cold, long-ago morning were clearly intended for Lojur alone: The violence you have done does not belong in the Halkan heart. We repudiate it. We banish it. We send it into exile.

“And the same we do with you.”

“But I helped save your lives,” Lojur said. No one responded. Of course not. It doesn’t matter. Halka would rather embrace its own death than soil its hands with the blood of others. Even the blood of those who would kill us without a second thought.

The Elder’s pronouncement settled upon Lojur like a millstone tied about his neck. Bleakly, he stared across the village square as Elders and rank-and-file villagers alike waited for him to say something in his own defense. He didn’t bother. What was the point? They’re right: I have raised my hand in violence. I have taken lives.

Then, in a solemn ritual, the Elders began turning their robed backs on him. Looking on from farther down the main dirt thoroughfare, women, young men, and even the children followed suit. Lojur called out to them, his voice thick and heavy as though he were caught in the grip of some horrible dream.

“I savedyou! You would all be dead now if I had not acted!”

[172] But no one would acknowledge him. No one would tell him whether Kereleth had died, or if she yet lived and was merely avoiding him. He was now a cipher. A non-person. A ghost.

Where will I go now? How will I stay alive?

Nothing moved in KothaVillage, save the gathering chill wind and the door of the Healer’s hut. The injured Terran emerged, the rest of his colleagues evidently having returned to the skies. How much had he seen and heard of what had just transpired?

The shorter man’s eyes were dark and piercing. Angry. But Lojur sensed that he was not the target of that anger. The Starfleeter extended a hand in Lojur’s direction. Lojur approached the Terran silently, and no one in the village made a move to block his path.

The wind was kicking up leaves and dust, its icy fingers cutting right through Lojur’s thin robe, making him shiver. He had never felt so cold and alone before in his young life.

The Terran was glaring at the crowd, which regarded him with wide-eyed curiosity. Then he slowly and deliberately removed his maroon uniform jacket, placing it gently around Lojur’s narrow shoulders. The Elders remained standing statuelike in the square, their faces impassive.

The human removed a small device from his belt and spoke into it. As long as he lived, Lojur would never forget the peculiar lilt and inflection of the man’s speech.

“Chekov to Reliant. Two to beam up.”