Текст книги "The Sundered"

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: Michael Martin
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“What a delight to get away from Tholian food,” Russell said. “ Plomeeksoup isn’t my personal favorite, but at least I don’t have to handle it with waldoes.”

“Scott made it from my own private stash of plomeeks,” Shandra said, grinning at Tuvok, who looked nonplussed, at least for a Vulcan. “It’s the real deal, I promise.”

“Where did you get fresh plomeeks,Lieutenant?” Tuvok asked. “We haven’t been to Vulcan in over two years.”

“No, but we didmeet some Vulcan traders on Sigma [32] Ceti about eight months back. And Dr. Chapel lent me some space in one of the medical stasis chambers. Happy birthday, Tuvok.”

What a beautiful soul,Lojur thought, marveling at how the woman he loved never ceased thinking of others. As ever, her smile illuminated his own soul’s darkest corners in a way he had never dared hope for.

Rand took a seat at Chapel’s table just as Tuvok and Lojur had finished bussing their own table. Rand watched as Lojur and Docksey walked away arm in arm, clearly lost in each other.

“Ah, young love,” Chapel said after the four younger officers had departed from the mess hall. The doctor sipped carefully from a mug of black coffee; rumor had it that this particular variety was grown on the Klingon Homeworld, yet another benefit of the Khitomer Accords. “Romance sort of puts a spring in your step, doesn’t it, Janice?”

Rand chuckled, regarding her infinitely blander cup of Altair water. “Maybe. But I’ll bet it can’t compare to your coffee.”

Chapel’s smile made deep furrows around her eyes, reminding Rand of just how long she had known Excelsior’schief medical officer, and just how far both had come in their respective careers since those early days. “Come on, Janice. Romance is always exhilarating. Even when it’s somebody else’s.”

“Hey, if I weren’t so impressed by those two, I wouldn’t have agreed to be Shandra’s Slave of Honor,” Rand said.

Chapel almost did a spit-take with her coffee. “Isn’t that Matronof Honor?”

“You obviously haven’t been dragooned into as many wedding parties as I have, Christine. It’s funny, though. I can remember a time when shipboard romances were discouraged.”

Chapel shook her head. “Wrong. Shipboard romancesweren’t discouraged. Ourshipboard romances were discouraged.”

[33] Rand laughed and raised her cup. The two old friends clinked their drinking vessels together as though in a toast to the paths best not taken, but only fantasized about.

I just hope Lojur and Docksey have better luck than the kids who tried to get married on theEnterprise, Rand thought after their laughter had subsided. Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson had barely made it to the altar when a Romulan attack separated them forever. Ever since the Tholians had come aboard, Rand hadn’t been able to get either of their young, hopeful faces out of her mind.

Rand set her cup down. “I think I’m going to need something stronger before the diplomatic business starts up again.”

The door to Sulu’s quarters had just barely closed behind her before Burgess asked, “Just how badly do you want this mission to fail, Captain?”

Sulu took a seat on the sofa and gestured toward a chair. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Ambassador. Please have a seat and tell me what’s on your mind.”

Burgess didn’t sit, but instead grasped the back of a chair, her knuckles white. It was obvious that she was in a highly agitated state.

“I think you already know what I’m talking about, Captain. What do you think will happen if the Tholians find out that you’ve sent probe-drones deep inside their territory?”

Sulu attempted to mask his surprise at her question, but wasn’t sure he’d done it very well. She had very nearly caught him flat-footed. “What exactly are you talking about, Ambassador?”

Her fingers dug deeper into the upholstery. “Please, Captain. Don’t try to be coy about this. You know as well as I do that there are diplomats who know Starfleet business just as there are Starfleet officers who work my side of the street. So I have it on very reliable authority that you have been [34] ordered to spy on the Tholians at the same time I’m trying to negotiate with them.”

Sulu knew that she might not really know anything of the sort. It was possible that she was only fishing. On the other hand, it wasn’t inconceivable that someone close to Admiral Nogura had intentionally leaked word of Sulu’s covert surveillance mission to some member of the diplomatic corps. Especially if the tension between Starfleet’s brass and the Federation Council was really getting to be as bad as Sulu feared.

“All right, Ambassador. Please sit down.” Still seated on the sofa, he stared at her until she complied. He considered offering her something to drink, but her serious demeanor made it clear that creature comforts were not uppermost on her mind at the moment.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d share with me exactlywhat you’ve been told about Excelsior’smission vis à vis the Tholians,” Sulu said.

She eyed him with evident suspicion. “That hardly seems fair, Captain. After all, I have no reason to expect that you’d be as forthcoming with me about any covert assignment you might have. Especially if Starfleet Command wants it kept secret.”

Sulu chuckled. Until this moment, he had entertained the faint hope that Burgess might provide him with new intelligence about the Tholians, information that might help him interpret the data still coming aboard via Excelsior’slong-range sensors and probe drones. “Fair enough, Ambassador. So where does that leave us?”

“Still on the same side, I would hope. On the side of peace.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” Sulu said. “But I’d say that peace depends largely upon what the Tholians decide to do. After all, it takes two sides to fight a war.”

“Just as it takes two sides to wage peace,” she said, nodding.

[35] “You’ll get no argument from me there. But you know how difficult it can be to create a lasting peace. Especially when there’s already so much suspicion on both sides.” Unfortunately, Ambassador, that’s as candid as I can afford to be with you right now,he thought with a twinge of genuine regret. He didn’t enjoy having to spy on a potential ally any better than she evidently did. But he also wasn’t sanguine about giving a species whose warrior caste had once tried to kill him a potential opportunity to attack the Federation. Starfleet simply hadto discover the reasons behind the Tholian military buildup. It was, at least potentially, a matter of survival.

Burgess rose, evidently sensing that he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—take her any further into his confidence than he had already. But she seemed anything but defeated. Her green eyes flashed like a pair of warp cores.

“Granted, Captain. Suspicion is a difficult beast to tame. You may have more of a gift for diplomacy than I’d given you credit for.”

“Thank you,” he said, surprised by the compliment.

Burgess continued. “So I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that the Tholians’ next actions will no doubt be greatly influenced by whatever they may discover about youractivities here, in their sovereign space. If you arespying on them, Captain—and if they catch you at it—you could very well touch off a war.”

Sulu bristled at that. “That’s a lot of ‘ifs,’ Ambassador.”

“Good diplomacy is largely about managing contingencies,” she said, her emotions now seeming to be under far better control than they had been when she’d first come in. “And one of the contingencies I now must plan for is the possibility of a tragic error on Starfleet’s part. A mistake that may frighten the Tholians back into belligerency and isolation.”

Sulu was growing weary of the ambassador’s Starfleet-as-the-villain perspective. He considered pointing out that some of the most accomplished diplomats in Federation [36] history had begun their careers in Starfleet. Then he decided that his life’s work, and the ideals it embodied, needed no defense. It was time to turn the tables.

“The outbreak of war is often seen as a failure of diplomacy, Ambassador,” Sulu said.

She paused as if to consider his words. If they roused her anger, she concealed it well. Finally, she said, “If diplomacy fails because of the actions of the warriors, Captain, then whose failure is it, really?”

And with that, she crossed to the door and departed, leaving Sulu alone with his growing misgivings about the prospects for peace with the Tholians—and with Burgess.

She’s on the same side I am,he reminded himself. But the Tholians are definitely hiding something, whether she wants to face that or not.

Chapter 4

Aidan Burgess carefully unlocked the purple bicycle which was chained to a post in the cramped alleyway between the townhouses. She made sure that it didn’t clink as she laid it on the ground in the darkness. Since it was summer, the windows to her parent’s bedroom were open, and she knew that Mama Maére and Mama Diana would punish her if they knew she was sneaking out this late.

But Aidan was ten years old, and there were lots of things she did that were secret. She had been coming out at night for two weeks now, pushing her bicycle up the steep incline of San Francisco’s Lombard Street, and coasting on it all the way back down the other side. The first time, she had just wanted to see what the city looked like after everyone else had gone to bed.

The second night, she had ventured all the way out westward to Golden Gate Park, and had seen two people sleeping there, in bedrolls, under the stars. She watched them from a distance for a while, then crept closer. Eventually, one of them, a girl in her late teens, spoke to her.

Ever since then, Aidan had returned to the park nightly to have conversations with her new friends, Lynna and Cal. They were traveling across the country, seeing the sights, exploring the world around them. They had little that they [38] took with them, but people took care of them along the way. Sometimes their benefactors were fellow travelers, sometimes they were locals.

Lynna and Cal told Aidan all about their adventures, good and bad. A few spots in North America, they’d said, still hadn’t been put quite right after World War III, and that had happened over two hundred years ago. And while some areas had rebuilt their sprawl of cities, other sections of the country—just like here in the San Francisco Bay Area—had reverted to a greener, more natural state as portions of Earth’s population traveled to the stars.

Aidan wanted to accompany them as they explored the country, but they told her it wasn’t right, it wasn’t her time. When she was older, she could make such decisions about her life. She could explore the world, meet people, perhaps even join Starfleet and see the galaxy. But for now, she had to be content with listening to her new friends’ stories of life on the road.

One warm summer night, Aidan rode up to the usual meeting spot, but found that the sleeping bags and packs were gone. Lynna and Cal were missing as well. Aidan called for them, but no one answered. She sat in the grass where they had always sat together, and waited. Eventually, she decided she had to go home. But as she turned to go back to her bike, something at the base of a nearby tree caught her eye.

The small package had a piece of paper with her name on it, and the words “fellow traveler” written underneath. She opened the package to find a bracelet inside. Holding it up in the moonlight, she saw that it wasn’t a fancy one made of metal, but was instead constructed of multicolored strings. None of the stones—which were strung like beads on the bracelet—matched. But Aidan knew that each one came with a story. Lynna and Cal had picked up the rocks on their travels—turquoise in Montana, an agate from somewhere in the Southwest, polished conch shell from the FloridaGulf[39] Coast, an Oregon sunstone—and Lynna had carried them with her in a sack.

Aidan came back to the park the following night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Each time, she wore the bracelet left for her by Lynna and Cal.

One day, Aidan’s mothers took her to the beach, and she found some small seashells in the wet sand. Mama Diana went swimming in the ocean, and emerged with some seaweed or kelp draped atop her head. Aidan threaded two of the small shells onto her bracelet that evening, and vowed to remember the story about her day at the beach when she saw Lynna and Cal again.

Ten years later, Aidan Burgess had more stories to tell if she ever ran into her friends from the park again. She knew it wasn’t likely, but stranger things had happened. Her explorations of the world had shown her that.

She and her fiancé, Ramon Escovarre, had come to the rainforests of the Amazon a few weeks earlier. Those forests had flourished during the two centuries following World War III. Now that the miners, factory farmers, and loggers were gone, most of the land was green again. There was little to explore here that technology had not laid bare in some fashion, though; sensor sweeps and mapping had shown exactly how many neo-hunter-gatherer tribes now lived within the jungles.

Although most of the tribes had frequent visitors from the outside world, many of them lived in relative isolation. The concept fascinated both Aidan and Ramon, the notion that there were humans living, loving, and thriving on Earth who had deliberately absented themselves from modern culture and technology.

So they had embarked on this journey of exploration, bringing with them as little of the outside world as possible. They had communicators and transponder tags, just in case of emergency; should they need medical aid, they could quickly be beamed or shuttled to safety. But they had [40] debated whether or not to bring a universal translator and a hand-phaser. Finally, they had agreed to bring both, but remained determined to use them only in the direst of emergencies.

On the tenth day, Aidan could feel other presences in the trees and shadows around them. They were being watched, studied, measured, scrutinized ... She called out to them numerous times, but an answer did not immediately come.

That night a response came, as shadowy forms approached from outside their encampment. Ramon saw them first, past the flickering flames of their small campfire. And then Aidan saw them, too. They were nearly naked, with dark skin and even darker hair. Aidan motioned them closer slowly, proffering the hand signs she had learned from explorers who had visited other indigenous tribes.

The tribespeople left later that night, but were back again in the morning. They led Aidan and Ramon to a village, where more of the natives viewed them with wide, curious eyes. Aidan allowed them to prod and touch her, feeling her clothing and her skin and her hair.

The natives maintained a communal house in the middle of the village, which Ramon identified as a shabono,of the type used by the Yanomami tribe. Whether or not these people were part of that tribe was unclear, but the geographical location of the village made it distinctly possible.

Over the following days, Aidan grew extraordinarily close to the aboriginal tribe. She never needed to use the universal translator, since she was quickly picking up bits and pieces of the tribe’s language and customs. She listened to their stories, to their history, to their gossip, to their hopes, and to their fears. They knew of the world beyond them, and some had-even departed to explore it, but most chose to stay safely within the bosom of their tribe.

One day, as Aidan was at the river with the other women, a great outcry came from the village. Two of the men—and [41] Ramon—had been mauled by a pair of jaguars who were intent on stealing the red brocket deer the men had brought down for food. By the time Aidan and the others reached the village, one of the wounded hunters had died.

Ramon and the other man were stable, but by nightfall, they were feverish. Although the decision caused her almost physical pain, Aidan used her communicator and activated an emergency beacon. She explained to the tribespeople that she had to get medical attention for Ramon, but they argued that their ancestral medicines were adequate to heal him.

Aidan wasn’t willing to take the chance. She offered to help get the other injured man to safety, but he refused, staying with his family and his tribe. Weeping, Aidan gathered up all the things which she and Ramon had brought into the village and repacked them. Moments before the Federation Forest Service shuttle beamed them to safety, she took the bracelet off her wrist and untied a knot.

Removing one of the two timeworn seashells she had gathered as a child, Aidan knelt and gave it to Omëbe, the sturdily built little girl who had always paid the most attention to Aidan’s stories of exploration. Aidan smiled as she closed the little girl’s hand over the tiny shell, then hugged her. As she stepped away, she saw tears in Omëbe’s dark eyes. Then the golden beam of the transporter took Aidan away.

She never found out if the villager had died from his wounds, or if the ancient tribal remedies had saved him. She never learned what became of Omëbe, but she hoped that the girl might one day explore the world herself.

Over the next thirty years, Aidan had changed. Her marriage to Ramon hadn’t lasted long, and she had found a new calling, working her way up the ladder through the Federation’s diplomatic service, discovering as she did so that the exploration of new cultures and new civilizations always brought her back to the things she loved.

She eventually remarried, but Shinzei, her beloved [42] husband, was by now a decade dead, and she had been alone ever since his passing. Her parents were now both long gone. She had no forebears and no children. Her legacy was her work, and of late, even that was wanting.

During her college years, she had come to despise the militarism that Starfleet represented. Now, as the century counted down ponderously toward its end, she wondered if too many years spent working alongside that blunt military instrument had hardened her, turned her bitter. She wondered how any diplomat could accomplish anything of lasting value in Starfleet’s heavily armed shadow.

Am I just marking time until the end of history, when the Federation—in all its well-intentioned beneficence—finally engulfs and devours every other technological society in the galaxy?

In her guest quarters aboard Excelsior,Aidan Burgess unpacked a special box. There, atop a velvet lining of deep indigo, lay the bracelet she had gotten as a child. Beneath the top layer of cloth was a collection of dozens of stones, bones, and shells, representing every planet she had visited.

Burgess held the bracelet up and moved to the mirror. Looking through her beloved keepsake, she stared at her reflection. She looked at her image and tried to find a glimmer of the girl from the park, or the woman from the rainforest, or the accomplished diplomat who had brokered momentous peace agreements on Epsilon Canaris III and Dreyzen.

But she could see no sign of them.

All she saw was a tired, bitter woman who had lost her dreams of exploration to a system of rules and regulations that too often seemed to value conflict over peace.

She closed her eyes, wishing she could break the rules and ride her purple bicycle off to adventure once again.

Then she came to a decision.

* * *

[43] A low-pitched chime announced her arrival at the door to the special reception area on Deck Eight that was still human-compatible. A narrow walkway, kept separate from the adjacent Tholian-friendly environment by a complex series of interleaved forcefields—their boundaries tinted orange so as to be easily visible—ringed a portion of the room. Although the gravity and atmosphere within this walkway were kept to M-class specifications, the oppressive heat from the artificially maintained Tholian atmosphere was stifling. Burgess hadn’t been anywhere this hot since the rainforest.

The Tholians were, of course, out of the environment suits they had worn when they’d first beamed aboard. Their scant clothing—chiefly flowing, bannerlike triangles of Tholian silk or some similarly tough fiber—seemed to exist purely for adornment’s sake. Their large, polygonal heads were composed of numerous triangular and pentagonal shapes. Their six-limbed, moist-but-hard-looking bodies were all planes and angles, colored in every shade of gold, red, green, and white. However, the light refraction caused by the hot, high-pressure Tholian atmosphere and the surrounding containment forcefields made their actual hues difficult to determine.

Just like humans,Burgess thought, these people can be judged only in terms of their own environment and experiences.

She touched the small vocoder she wore around her neck and called out to a Thalian who was diligently engaging three of his insectoid limbs in some repetitive task over a blocky, crystalline machine; Burgess surmised that he was typing up a report. “Junior Ambassador Mosrene. I greet you in friendship.”

“As I receive you,” Mosrene said, clambering toward her on his lower four appendages. “What purpose does your visit serve?”

“I wish to speak to Admiral Yilskene. Please contact him for me.”

[44] Mosrene cocked his polyhedral head to one side, rotating it oddly. “You cannot contact him yourself?”

“I don’t believe it is wise for me to do so,” Burgess said. If Sulu’s crew intercepted her message, they might cut her off before she’d had her say. The captain might even have her arrested. He might do that anyway.

Moments later, an apparently bewildered Mosrene had dragged a large viewscreen-communication device—apparently hewn from some sort of stone—closer to the forcefield, and keyed in the codes for contacting Yilskene’s flagship. The screen quickly produced an image of both Yilskene—whom she had not yet met face to face—and Ambassador Kasrene, who had evidently returned to the flagship to confer with the admiral for some reason or other.

Swallowing hard, Burgess cleared her throat and said, “Admiral Yilskene, Ambassador Kasrene, I believe that only an honest and truthful exchange will help our peoples reach an accord.”

Because of their lack of easily readable facial expressions, Burgess had trouble fathoming the emotions of the pair. Still, she thought their body language suggested intense interest.

“We concur on this,” Kasrene chorused in reply.

Burgess took a deep breath. “Then in the interests of honesty, truth, and peace, I must tell you something that I know you will find greatly disturbing. ...”