Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

The chief engineer knocked back a mouthful of his beer and replied, “None that give Starfleet discounts. What’s wrong? You don’t like music?”

After a timid sip of his drink, Torvin muttered, “I like music. Are you telling me that noise is music? I thought it was a sonic pulse for scaring rodents.”

Threx wiped white froth off his chin and said, “It’s called rock and roll, Tor. You get used to it.” Pushing his long, oily hair back behind his ears, he nodded to the bartender for a refill.

“Listen to Threx,” Ilucci told Torvin. “He knows music.”

The boyish engineer sat quietly, looking pensive while Ilucci finished his beer and called for another. Staring into his drink, he said, “I wonder if Sayna likes music.”

Ilucci rolled his eyes. Threx shook his head. They had heard far too much about Torvin’s unrequited love for the ship’s pilot, a stunning young Andorian zhen named Celerasayna zh’Firro. Clasping the younger man’s shoulder in a fraternal manner, Ilucci said, “You gotta let this go, buddy.”

“I know,” Torvin said, verging dangerously close to a whine. “But it’s so hard, seeing her every day, and she’s so—”

Shaking the younger man silent, Ilucci tried to bark some sense into him. “Let! It! Go!” Hooking a thumb over his shoulder at Threx, he continued, “You think it ain’t hard for Threx to spend his days lusting after Niwara? The only female on the ship hairier than he is, and she won’t even give him the time of day.” He turned Torvin to face him. “You think I don’t wish Theriault would throw a little love my way? Sure I do. But it’s never gonna happen, Tor. They’re officers, and we’re not. To them we’re just a bunch of sweaty tool-pushers. Get used to it.”

Threx pointed at Ilucci and looked at Torvin. “What he said.” Then he let loose a rafters-shaking belch and turned back to the bar.

Ilucci watched the burly Denobulan slam another shot of whiskey onto the bar and drop it into another pint of ale, enlarging the foamy pool on the bar counter in front of them. As Threx knocked back his boilermaker, Ilucci said to him, “Maybe you oughtta slow down. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

Setting down his emptied mug, Threx replied through his sudsy whiskers, “I’m fine, Master Chief. I could take that boat apart by lunch and have it back together by dinner.”

“Yeah,” Ilucci said, picking up his beer. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Sleeving the foam from his face, Threx asked, “Any idea where we’re goin’?”

“Like they tell me anything?” Ilucci sipped his drink and set it down. “All I know is we’re scheduled for a briefing with Xiong tomorrow at 0900, and we’re supposed to clear out the cargo bay to make room for some new gear.”

Talk of work seemed to engage Torvin’s interest in a good way. “Did they mention swapping out the sensor modules?”

“Yeah,” Ilucci said. “Why?”

“I want to make some upgrades on the starboard unit,” Torvin said. “It was running a little sluggish, and I thought it sounded like a problem with the heat exchangers, so I crunched some numbers. Well, I was right, and I think I can improve—”

“Fine,” Ilucci said. “Approved. Get it done.”

“Aye, Master Chief,” Torvin said, apparently aware that the chief’s approval was also a directive to shut up.

Ilucci swiveled his chair away from the bar and tugged at his olive-drab jumpsuit to make it less snug around his portly midsection. He scratched at his beard for a moment while he surveyed the bar. Seconds later, his gaze fell upon a table where four women in civilian clothes sat together, huddled over their drinks: two humans, one a blonde, the other a brunette; a short-haired Vulcan; and a smooth-headed beauty with an inviting smile who Ilucci hoped was a Deltan.

He got up from his chair and said to Threx and Torvin, “Gents—follow my lead, and let me do the talking.”

As the trio sauntered across the bar toward the fetching foursome, Threx said under his breath to Torvin, “Take notes, kid. Nobody works an angle like the Master Chief.”

They were halfway to the table of paradise when the bar’s front door opened and Senior Chief Petty Officer Razka, the Sagittarius’s newest field scout, walked in. The wiry-looking Saurian scanned the room in one quick turn of his head and moved to intercept the three engineers. “Shore leave’s over, guys,” Razka said in his nasal rasp of a voice, scuttling Ilucci’s plans for the evening.

“How can it be over?” Ilucci protested. “We just got here.”

Razka’s vertical eyelids blinked twice in quick succession as he replied, “Captain’s orders. Back to the ship.”

Ilucci’s shoulders sagged in defeat. He heaved a tired sigh and wore his disgust openly on his scruffy face. “All right, boys,” he said. “You heard the senior chief. Back to the boat.”

As they left the bar, the Deltan woman waved at Ilucci and flashed him a pitying grin as consolation for the night that might have been. He returned her smile and fell into step beside Razka as they left the bar and hit the sidewalks of Stars Landing on their way back to the station’s core.

“I hate officers,” Ilucci muttered.

Razka glanced at Ilucci with gentle surprise. “I’m surprised to hear you say that, Master Chief. After all, the officers say such nice things about you.”

“Really?”

“No,” Razka said, and quickened his pace to leave Ilucci behind. Watching the reptilian scout’s back, Ilucci kept his next complaint to himself. I hate Saurians.

Diego Reyes stood up as Manón led his ex-wife to his table. He honestly wasn’t sure which of the two women looked more stunning to him. Manón was a member of an alien race that radiated gentle heat and possessed a delicate and preternatural beauty, at least by human standards. Jeanne, by contrast, was an athletic woman of intelligence, grace, and confidence—the exact same qualities that had attracted him to his current clandestine lover, Rana.

The radiant hostess and club proprietor lingered half a step behind Jeanne as Reyes circled the table to pull out her chair for her. Jeanne appeared to be in no hurry to sit down.

“Hola, Diego,” she said, staring at his eyes. “You can relax, I didn’t come to make a scene.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” he said, struggling to remain cordial. Her ability to read his surface thoughts had always bothered him. Though he knew that she couldn’t help it, every time it happened it felt like an invasion of his privacy. Blocking her from his thoughts was difficult and required a great deal of concentration—either to flood his mind with random mental noise or to quiet his surface thoughts altogether. Of the two, achieving peace was the more difficult option, so instead he found his thoughts agitated and muddled whenever he had to spend time with her.

After a few awkward seconds, he motioned to the chair. “Please, sit down.”

Jeanne continued to eye him with suspicion as she settled into her seat. Reyes gently helped nudge it forward under her as she made herself comfortable at their table. They were located a few tables from the stage, where a quartet featuring Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn on piano was playing mellow, sophisticated jazz for the club’s dinner guests. Jeanne turned her attention to the musicians while Reyes returned to his own seat. As soon as he was comfortable, Manón handed him a wine list and stepped away with a knowing smirk.

“Thank you for having dinner with me,” he said.

Jeanne tapped an index finger on the table. “Well, I seem to have the time, so I figured, why not?” Narrowing her eyes, she added, “My transport was supposed to leave an hour ago, but it seems we’ve been delayed by the station’s control center.”

“I guess I’m just a lucky man,” Reyes said as he read the wine list and cluttered his inner monologue with the names and years of one vintage after another. “I had a bottle of the ’56 Camigliano last month; it was excellent.”

Not yielding to his clumsy imitation of charm, she asked, “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with delaying our departure, did you?”

“Not in the mood for a Brunello tonight, huh?” He could see that she wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “Fine, you caught me. I wanted to make sure I had time to talk to you before you left. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a nice dinner.”

She shook her head as she unfolded her linen napkin into her lap. “Still can’t come at a problem straight, can you? There always has to be a secret, or a twist, or a bit of deception.”

Smoothing his own napkin into his lap, he asked, “If I had asked you to come to my office, would you have shown up?”

“Of course not,” Jeanne said with a venomous smile. “I’d have told you to go to hell. But at least that way we’d both have the pride of knowing we’d been up-front about it.”

“Touché,” Reyes said.

Manón returned to the table at that moment, clearly taking the emotional temperature of the former spouses before she said, “Can I offer you something from the bar before you order?”

Taking the initiative, Reyes said, “Bring us a bottle of that good Vulcan syrah, would you?”

“The ’59 Saylok?” Manón asked for clarification.

“That’s the one, thanks,” Reyes confirmed. Manón nodded and left to procure the wine. The commodore looked at his dinner companion and said, “Where were we?”

Feigning a difficult search of her memories, she said, “Let’s see…I was calling you a duplicitous, overly secretive jerk…and you were ordering wine.”

“It’s just like we’re married again,” he said with a sarcastic grin. A server in a black-and-white uniform appeared from the shadows, filled their water glasses, and vanished without a word.

Jeanne watched the server depart, then she asked Reyes, “Why don’t you tell me what we’re really doing here?”

“You’re an esper,” he said. “Don’t you know?”

She swallowed a bitter chortle and wrinkled her grin into a grimace. “It doesn’t take a telepath to guess this is about the protectorate treaty for my colony.”

“Things are moving fast out here, Jeanne,” Reyes said. “The Klingons have already set up shop on your happy little planet. And unless you let us give Gamma Tauri IV official status as a Federation territory, we won’t be able to do a damn thing when the Klingons walk all over you.”

“At least I know why the Klingons are there,” she said. “Conquest is what they do. But if you want me to trust Starfleet, try telling me the truth.”

“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” Reyes insisted.

She traced the rim of her water glass with a fingertip. “It’s part of the truth, not all of it. Why is the Federation so interested in Gamma Tauri? There are lots of UFP colonies that need your support more than mine does. Cygnet’s been asking for help finishing its spacedock for almost a year, but you’ve had your S.C.E. team digging ditches around New Boulder for a month.”

“I prioritize based on need,” Reyes said. “The president of Cygnet XIV assured me just last week that her people can finish their own spacedock. Your colony is trying to get a high-yield crop planted on one of the hottest M-class planets in the sector, and you’re already behind schedule.” He picked up his menu. “The seafood is very good here, by the way.”

She stewed for a few seconds while he filled his mind with the appetizer list. Lifting her own menu, she asked, “Have you ever met a subject you didn’t change?”

“Sure I have,” he said. “I recommend the fried Vulcan mollusks. You’ll love the pepper-aioli dip they come with.”

Manón returned to the table with their bottle of wine. She showed the label to Reyes, who nodded his approval. While she worked at uncorking the bottle, Jeanne peeked over the top of her menu at Reyes. “I know there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said, as if that would be news to him.

“Of course there’s something I’m not telling you,” Reyes shot back. “I’m a flag officer running a starbase in a frontier sector. I have three starships and more than three thousand people under my command. There are probably a couple hundred things I’m not telling you.”

Conversation paused as Manón filled his glass a couple of centimeters deep with dark red wine. He placed his fingertips on the base of the broad tulip glass and jogged it in a small circle, swirling the wine inside the glass to aerate it. Then he lifted the glass, inhaled the wine’s sweet, almost floral bouquet, and sampled a mouthful. Complex yet subtle, it was light enough to mesh with seafood but strong enough to be paired with meat. He swallowed, then said to the ravishing hostess, “Excellent, thank you.”

Manón filled Jeanne’s glass and then Reyes’s and set the bottle on the table. “Are you ready to order?”

His ex-wife’s glare told him all he needed to know. “Give us a minute,” he said. Manón gave a small nod and stepped away to attend the seating of more dinner patrons.

“Diego,” Jeanne said, “you and I both know we don’t want to eat together. So do us both a favor and get to the point.”

Words caught in his throat. Much of the bitterness of their divorce had stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t wanted it. Ending their marriage had been Jeanne’s idea, and he had fought against it. Even though he had known it was likely for the best, letting go of their shared life had been excruciating for him. For his own emotional self-preservation he had given free rein to his resentment of her, but deep down part of him really did just want to sit here tonight and have dinner with her, for old times’ sake. I’ll be damned if I tell her that, though.

“You just did,” she said under her breath, and as soon as the words registered in his ears, he realized that they both were blushing, him for shame at being found out, her for knowing that his torch for her still smoldered, however weakly. She closed her menu and put it down on the table. “Just ask me to sign the protectorate agreement so I can refuse and get out of here.”

Abruptly, the music from the stage faltered, the piano going silent first and the other instruments rapidly falling away after it. Reyes looked up as T’Prynn walked away from the piano without a word to anyone and marched out the door. What the hell was that about? Resolving to follow up with the intelligence officer later, he looked back at Jeanne.

“I won’t ask you to sign the treaty,” he said, calmly setting aside his own menu. “You made it clear the colonists don’t want it, and I won’t ask you to betray their trust.”

She eyed him with a confused expression—a rare look for her, in his experience. “Then what is it you want?”

“Don’t go to Gamma Tauri,” he said, purging his mind of all words and images, leaving only his focused, sincere concern for her well-being. “When the Terra Courser ships out, stay here.”

Jeanne’s mood altered in response. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a genuine acceptance of what he was saying. “Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, continuing to focus on imparting the verity of his words. “Not even vaguely. But you know I won’t lie to you, I never have…. Don’t go.”

Fear softened the resolve in her eyes, but she shook her head. “I want to believe you, Diego,” she said. “But how can I when you won’t tell me why? I know you never lied to me, but I know you’ve kept things from me, too.”

“Never anything that would hurt you,” he said. “Only what I had to, for the uniform.”

A cold and bitter glare returned to her gaze. “So you always said. But how could I ever know, Diego?”

“If you don’t know that about me,” he said, “then I guess we were never really married.”

Stung by his words, she got up from her chair. “You want to know why I divorced you?” She flung her napkin into his lap. “It wasn’t ’cause I stopped loving you. It was ’cause I realized you loved your secrets more than you loved me.” She started to leave, then turned back. “I’m touched that you care enough to try to save me, Diego, but I’m hurt that you don’t care enough to tell me the truth.”

“It’s not that simple, Jeanne.”

“Sometimes it is.”

He sat stunned as she turned and walked away, carrying herself with pride and power between the clustered tables and out the front door, into the faux twilight of the station’s massive terrestrial enclosure.

Alone at his table, Reyes picked up his wine. He took a sip, then looked across the table and noticed that Jeanne had not picked up either her water or her wine. As Manón returned, he handed her the napkin that Jeanne had hurled at him.

Manón asked, “Dining alone this evening, Commodore?”

He frowned. “Why should tonight be any different?” The hostess offered a comforting smile and reached out to start clearing away the table’s second place setting. “Wait,” Reyes said, feeling the word burst from his mouth before he could stop it. I’m tired of living like a prisoner on my own station, he decided. Jeanne was right. I keep too many secrets. Maybe it’s time to let one of them out into the light. “Do me a favor?” he said to Manón. “Contact the station’s JAG office and see if Captain Desai is available to join me for dinner.”

Raising a curious, slender eyebrow at the commodore’s request, Manón inquired, “Shall I tell the captain this is a professional summons?”

“No,” Reyes said. “Definitely not. Just tell her…it’s my turn to buy dinner.”

T’Prynn poured herself into the music, felt her troubled mind release itself in a flood tide of notes and chords, heard the song flow from the piano and force the hungry ghost of Sten’s katra deeper into her mind for just a few minutes.

Opportunities to play had been scarce of late. Her duties had become all-consuming since the Endeavour’s mission to Erilon. Lacking the regular outlet of playing the piano to ease her agitated thoughts, she had become profoundly tense and withdrawn in recent weeks. Adding to her stress was Sandesjo’s increasingly ardent attachment to her.

I see the hunger in your eyes when you come to me at night, Sandesjo had said, her words pointed with accusation. There had been no denying her observation; T’Prynn had known it was true. It was the honesty of it that most gave her pause. The first night she had ravished Sandesjo, the first time she had fed the fires of her tortured katra with the pleasures of the other woman’s flesh, she had lied to herself; she had blamed Sten’s katra for goading her, for pushing her to indulge her appetites as part of his campaign to undermine her psychic defenses. She had told herself the lie again, after the second and third nights she spent in Sandesjo’s arms. But when she had continued to return to her from then on, she had known without a doubt that it was her own doing and not Sten’s. Sandesjo’s voice still haunted her: You burn for me just as I burn for you.

Music was T’Prynn’s solace, her sacrament, her salve. It gave voice to her conflicted states, her surging passions, her darkening moods and fiery rages. As her fingers moved with fluid precision across the black and white keys of the piano, the resulting music gave her thoughts order and clarity, focus and tranquility…but only in fleeting doses too soon lost.

A rare break in her schedule had afforded her an hour to play tonight in Manón’s, and she had taken advantage of it without hesitation. The scheduled quartet’s regular piano player had graciously permitted her to sit in for the first set, and she had paid for his dinner as an expression of her gratitude.

From time to time she stole glances at the crowd, not to gauge their reactions to her music but just to remain aware of her surroundings; her profession demanded that she be ever attentive and take no detail for granted. Most of the patrons tonight were civilians. A fair number of station personnel filled in the gaps at the bar. The nondescript nature of tonight’s audience made the VIP guest seated close to the stage all the more notable: Commodore Reyes. As T’Prynn neared the end of the slow-tempo Paul Tillotson classic “Chartreuse,” she noted the arrival of the commodore’s former wife, Jeanne Vinueza. The human woman’s body language as Reyes greeted her suggested that she was not in a receptive or trusting frame of mind.

T’Prynn did not envy the commodore. She expected that his attempt to sway Ms. Vinueza’s decision about the political independence of the Gamma Tauri colony would prove futile.

She was less than a minute into Gene Harris’s arrangement of “Black and Blue” when it became apparent to her that the commodore’s dinner was taking a turn for the embarrassing. Despite being unable to hear what had been said at the excouple’s table, T’Prynn surmised that it had been connected to their now-defunct marital relationship.

She was considering trying to soften her attack on the keys and mute her playing slightly so that she could eavesdrop when Manón seated another couple directly in her line of sight. As the hostess stepped clear, T’Prynn saw that the female diner was Anna Sandesjo. At the table with her was a civilian man, whom T’Prynn recognized as Roger Shear, an executive for a Mars-based mining concern that had been aggressively expanding its holdings by buying up hard-to-work claims in the Taurus Reach. The openness of Sandesjo’s pose toward the man, coupled with her submissively lowered chin and the way she idly stroked locks of her auburn hair behind her ear, made it obvious that she was flirting with him. From T’Prynn’s elevated vantage point on the stage, he appeared quite mesmerized by Sandesjo’s exhibitions.

Sten’s elbow crushes against my temple—

A jolt of psychosomatic pain tore through T’Prynn’s head. Her hands stopped on the piano’s keyboard, halted by the ferocity and power of Sten’s focused katra attack.

Willpower alone kept her eyes open, though her face tensed with the effort of masking her agony. Without preamble or apology she closed the keyboard cover, pushed the bench away from the baby grand, stood, and walked off the stage without another look at Sandesjo. Every step brought another stabbing psychic assault, pushing her deeper into herself. Only her most consuming effort enabled her to see the narrow stretch of path ahead of her as she hurried across the manicured lawn of Vanguard’s vast terrestrial enclosure.

I feel Sten’s pain as the blade of my lirpa takes three of his fingertips.

Meters fell away under her long strides. Sten’s attacks came more quickly than they ever had before.

A kick to my solar plexus leaves me begging for air.

I hear Sten’s teeth crack as my knee slams his jaw shut.

Rising through the middle of the expansive, circular park that occupied the interior volume of the station’s upper primary hull, the broad cylindrical core of the starbase was all that T’Prynn could focus on. One labored step after another, she marched herself toward the bank of turbolifts where the core met the enclosure’s lowest level.

He buries the blunt end of his lirpa in my abdomen. My dagger slashes the tendon above his knee.

She didn’t know how or why Sten’s mental battery had become suddenly so emboldened, particularly when she was playing music that normally kept his katra at bay. She stumbled into an empty turbolift car and grasped its control handle. Her mind flashed for one brief moment on the image of Sandesjo flirting with the man in the cabaret; the memory vanished in a flurry of psionic jabs that coaxed a low whimper from her throat.

Sten’s demand echoed in her deepest thoughts as it had for fifty-three horrible, strife-ridden years: Submit!

Her answer was as it had ever been: Never.