Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“Darya.” Tyvan was on his feet, cursing himself for his timing which was rotten, rotten, he should have paid closer attention to the time, what an idiot! “Darya, wait, I don’t want you to leave like this…”

“But I do.” Bat-Levi glanced back, her face contorted into a mask of rage and grief. “I do, and I will. It’s my life, Doctor, and I will do with it as I please. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back, but when it’s my time and not a second before. For now, write whatever you have to, say whatever you want, but I’ve put in my time, and there’s no regulation in the universe that says I have to sit here one second more.”

“Darya, please,”Tyvan said, but she had turned aside and was through the door. Her servos squealed, the door hissed, and then she was gone.

Tyvan let out his breath in an explosive sigh. “Great,” he said to the air, to no one in particular. Sinking back into his chair, he propped the points of his elbows upon his knees and held his forehead with both hands. “Good job, Tyvan, you idiot, bravo. That was perfect timing, just perfect.”

He sat then and listened to the ticking of his clock and thought long and hard about life and cycles and time.

Chapter 3

Perfect timing.Commander Samir al-Halak dragged his forearm across his face, mopping away sweat with the sleeve of a camel-colored tunic that was open at his throat and showed off the olive color of his skin. Just perfect. Somebody, please, tell me, whatwas I thinking when I detoured to Farius Prime? I could’ve been swimming in Lake Cataria. Ani and I could be making love, right now, in the grass under a cool night sky. So what in God’s name was I thinking?

Halak hadn’t wanted to come to Farius Prime at all. His plan had been to spend his R and R with his lover, Anisar Batra; their plan had been to leave Enterprisetogether and go to Betazed. He and Batra had planned the trip for weeks; she’d coordinated her leave with Enterprise’s other paleogeneticist, and he’d gone to Garrett with his request for R and R a good month before. Their plan had notincluded a detour to the Maltabra City bazaar on Farius Prime, and the plan most certainly had not involved coming to Maltabra in high summer, when the weather was more miserable than usual and the air so humid Halak felt as if he were pushing through soggy gauze curtains. That the plan had changed—that he’d snuck off the ship early and that Batra had, somehow,tracked him to Farius Prime and was dogging his heels at this very moment—just made Halak hate everything about Farius Prime more than he already did.

The central bazaar of Maltabra City stretched for two kilometers in every direction, so there was no way around it: precisely what the city’s planners had in mind. The bazaar was always packed, and the air heavy with the mingled aromas of sweat, mint tea, rancid broiled kabobs that had sat for so long under a hot afternoon sun that the vendor had more bluebottle flies and Terellian swarmmogs than customers. An occasional breeze carried a metallic odor of salt and wet aluminum from the Galldean Sea, six kilometers due east. There was the overlapping babble of humans and humanoids and assorted aliens all shouting in different languages and at the top of their lungs; the whispered exchanges of drug dealers looking to score; the pleas of their clientele, desperate for a hit of that planet’s prime commodity, red ice. And there were colors: the brilliant turquoise sky and the searing white of sand and stone so bright Halak blinked back tears, and the customers, who ran the gamut of the “naturals”—Orions in their native green and the sky-blue of the Andorians—to more ambitious (and audacious) body dyes, fur, or scales.

Halak dodged around a Katangan merchant haggling with a jade-green Orion man about the cost of a liter of alpha-currant nectar– “But at that price, you’re asking me to take food from my children’s mouths, no, no, what do you take me for?”—and planted his right foot squarely into a stack of beaten copper pans spread on an indigo blanket. The pans belonged to a wizened Bilanan woman (from the northern continent, so she had seven facial knobs, not four) wrapped in a blood-red caftan with gold embroidery. The stack collapsed with a resounding crash, and Halak staggered, felt his ankle twist, and then a bolt of pain rocket to his knee.

“Herenow!” the Bilanan said, outraged. Even her facial knobs quivered. “There’s people trying to make an honest living!”

“Sorry,” said Halak, not really meaning it but just wanting to make the woman be quiet. Digging into a leather pouch he wore around his waist, he tossed the Bilanan a few coins. “That covers it, right?”

“Don’t you think that makes everything all rosy,” said the woman, snatching up the coins. Reeling in a leather cord that dangled around her neck, she dragged a pouch from some nether region of her caftan, dropped in the coins, closed the purse tight by tugging at the cord with her teeth, and let the pouch fall back into the folds of her garment—and so quickly the money was gone before Halak blinked. “Don’t you go thinking…”

Halak didn’t stay to hear the rest. Hobbling away from the woman, he elbowed his way deeper into the crowd, his right ankle complaining with every step.

Behind, he heard Batra say, “Samir, you’re limping.”

“It’s nothing.”

“But don’t you think you ought to take it easy?”

“No,” said Halak, throwing the word over his shoulder. “I don’tthink. And right now I don’t want to know what youthink either.”

Instantly, he was overcome with remorse. He stopped, turned, and looked down at his companion. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t ask you to come, I didn’t want…”

“Well, that’s just too bad,” said Batra, her voice sounding a little watery. “That’s just too damned bad. How dareyou treat me that way? Only cowards bully.”

Halak bit back a reply. She was right, and, not for the first time, he marveled that she was the only woman he knew who could make him feel as if he were about ten years old. It wasn’t that she was very imposing. Anisar Batra was a tiny woman, with a long shock of shimmering raven-black hair that she wore up when she was aboard ship, and almond-shaped eyes the color of chocolate. Normally, those eyes held nothing but love. (Sometimes she got a little annoyed with him, and then they seemed to shoot phaser beams, set to kill. All right, maybe that was when she was a lot annoyed. What she saw in him was anyone’s guess. Halak knew he wasn’t particularly handsome or tall. In fact, he had the compact build of a well-muscled wrestler, something that came in handy when a man had a temper, and Halak hada temper. On the other hand, they’d been lovers for six months, and Halak didn’t intimidate her in the slightest. It was one of the things he loved about her.)

But he didn’t want to fight with her, and Halak saw that her eyes were liquid with unshed tears of surprise and hurt. But she was good and blistered, too; her copper-colored skin was turning a shade the near side of maroon.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, chastened. “It’s just that you don’t understand.”

“Don’t I? Well then,” Batra said, folding her arms over an emerald-green, short-sleeved choli that showed off her trim waist and a sparkling garnet tucked in her navel, “maybe you’ll just explain it to me.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

Batra gave a breathy laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. “Oh, no? Let me refresh your memory, Commander.What Irecall was that we—emphasis on the we—made plans to take our R and R together,”she said this very distinctly, as if she were speaking Vulcan to a Klingon tourist who hadn’t the foggiest. “As I recall, we had no intention of setting one toe on Farius Prime, much less traipsing around a dusty bazaar, under a hot sun. We said Lake Cataria. Betazed? That ring a bell?”

“I’m not stupid, Ani.” Halak scooped a hand through his crop of close-cut black curls and blew out. “I was going to meet you on Betazed sooner or later.”

Batra arched one black eyebrow, her left. “Emphasis on later, I’m sure. We were supposed to leave together. We were supposed to be having that serious talk two people who supposedly love each other usually have when they’re trying to decide if they can stand each other’s company for the long haul.”

“I can stand your company, Ani.” Halak’s lips twitched, and he tried not to smile. (God, no, then he’d get a lecture about how he wasn’t taking her seriously.)“You’re just a pain in the neck.”

She didn’t smile. “Yes, I am your particular little pain, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. So you want to explain why you’ve been looking to ditch me ever since I showed up at Starbase 5?”

“Because I wasn’t expecting you. And how did you find me, anyway? I didn’t leave word where I was going.”

“Woman’s intuition.”

Halak barked a laugh that sounded as if he’d cracked a dry branch over his knee. “Farius Prime is the firstplace a woman thinks about? Come on, Ani, that’s no answer, and you know it. How did you find out?”

Batra licked her lips, and for an instant, it crossed Halak’s mind that she might be getting ready to lie.

“Well, I just did,”she said, tersely. She mopped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Look, it’s too hot to stand here, arguing. What difference does it make, anyway, and especially now? I’m here, I’m hot, I’m thirsty, and my mouth has so much sand my teeth are getting a nice buff and shine. I think it’s high time we get someplace cool, and I buy you a drink. Don’t you agree?”

“No.” His ankle was killing him. “I don’t want a drink. I just want to…”

“Good,” said Batra, linking her arm through his. She pulled him toward the nearest café. “I’m parched.”

They made Halak check his phaser at the door. Batra’s eyebrows headed for her hairline when she saw the weapon.

“Personal carry. No regulation against that.” Halak gave a half-shrug. “You never know.”

She didn’t reply. They ordered then drank in silence, and Halak had almost finished with his second Saurian brandy when Batra said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

Halak shook his head. “They’re not worth that much.”

“Samir, are we going to talk about it?”

Halak lifted his glass to his lips. “No.”

“Are you like this all the time, or do you practice a lot when you’re alone?”

“Actually, I save it all up for you,” said Halak, and then drained the rest of his drink. He craned his neck, peering around Batra for the waitress.

“Probably because I’m the only one aboard patient enough to put up with you.”

“No, you’re the only one aboard luckyenough.” Halak’s eyes swept the café. The interior was very dark and close, smelling of mint tea, sugary roasted almonds, and the sour tang of Trakian ale. Halak spotted one of the café’s waitresses: an Atrean, dressed in a tight weave of hip-hugging silver mesh that began below her bejeweled navel and ended at a spot barely brazing the underside of her buttocks; silver strappy sandals that threaded up to mid-calf; a mane of silver hair that coiled in strategic swaths over her breasts; and very little else. Halak whistled, and when she looked his way, he pointed to his glass and held up a finger.

“You really need another?” asked Batra.

“You’re not going to let us leave until we talk. I’m apt to get dry.”

“Uh-huh,” said Batra. She sipped at a tall glass of iced Molov mint tea. “Well, we could talk about your leaving Enterprisewithout me. Or we could talk about why we’re on a planet with no redeeming virtues.”

Halak snorted, a humorless exhalation through his nose. “I don’t like either of those topics.”

“Well, I…” Batra began but stopped when the Atrean expertly tacked a napkin to the table with a fresh glass of brandy and retrieved Halak’s empty. The woman lingered a moment longer, bending so that her hair had to adjust by curling and rethreading itself, like a mat of snakes, to keep her breasts covered up. Even so, Halak got a good glimpse before the Atrean straightened, flashed a tiny smile to Halak, and turned on her heel, her long shank of hair flaring to reveal the small of her naked back. Halak’s head swiveled to watch her go.

“Well, I want to know,” said Batra, reaching across and taking Halak by the chin. She pulled his head around but let her fingers linger over the raised ridge of a thin white scar that skittered over his left jaw. “And I want us to make it to Betazed in one piece.”

Halak grabbed her hand and pressed his lips to her fingers. “We’ll make it. We would have made it faster if you hadn’t followed me.”

Batra retrieved her hand. “But I have and we’re here. You want to talk about that?”

Halak took a sip of the strong orange liquor, swallowed, and inhaled through his teeth against the burn. “Ani, if I had wanted to tell you, I would have. I know that we’ve been together now for some time…”

“Six months. Half a year.”

“Half a year. But in every relationship there has to be privacy. Even telepaths have places in their minds they keep locked.”

“Everyone has a right to privacy. But there’s a difference between privacy and secrets. The way I see it, this is about you keeping secrets.”

“What secrets are you referring to, Ani?”

“You want me to make a list?”

Halak gave a mirthless laugh. “That many? We only have a week’s leave.”

“Okay, then how about you and I? Where do we go from here?”

Halak reached across the table and took her hands in his. “I know where I’mgoing—to Betazed with the woman I love. Now, as I recall, I asked you a question about two weeks ago. It was the same question I asked you several months ago. Both times, you said you wanted to think. Well, you’ve thought and I’ve waited. You want to tell me now?”

Even through the haze, Halak saw the color rise in Batra’s cheeks. “No,” she said. Her eyes drifted to the table. “Or, maybe…I don’t know. It’s so sudden. When you asked the first time, we’d only known each other two months.”

“Ten weeks.” Halak gave her hands a squeeze. “Four weeks longer than I needed to know for sure. But I didn’t want you to think I was an impulsive guy.”

“Oh, never that.” Her eyes still didn’t meet his. “No, I know you’re not impulsive, Samir. You may be opinionated, and you’re lucky Captain Garrett…”

“Let’s not talk about Garrett, all right?” Halak softened the admonition by running the fingers of his right hand along the back of her left. “We’re off duty, Lieutenant. Your hair is down, the choli’s on, and I’m sitting across from the most beautiful woman in the quadrant. Enterpriseis far away, and I’d like to keep it there, if you don’t mind. This is supposed to be ourtime.”

“And that’s precisely my point,” said Batra, freeing her hand. “This was…this isour time. And yet we’re here, on Farius Prime, where no one in his right mind goes, not if he wants to stay out of trouble. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? That you’re always in trouble?”

“That’s the rumor,” he said. It was as close a reference to his previous posting on the Barker—and the fact that he hadn’t been transferred to Enterpriseunder the best of circumstances—as she’d ever come. He’d given her the official version, but no one—not Garrett, or Batra, or anyone else on board—knew the whole story. Halak kept his face impassive. “You have a question?”

“No,” she said, her teeth nipping at a corner of her lower lip. “Well, yes. I know you’ve told me about that Ryn mission, right before you were transferred….”

“And?” he prompted when she hesitated.

“And I know it’s not the whole truth. Don’t bother to deny it; I’m not really asking you to tell me right now. But that’s just an example.”

Halak reached a hand to the scar along his jaw: a souvenir of that particularly disastrous mission. “An example of what?”

“Of how you approach things. You tell the truth, but only to a certain point. I feel it,” she bunched a fist over her heart, “right here.”

“You have something specific in mind?”

“Yes, I do. Why are we here?” Batra tapped a nail upon their table with a tiny click. “And why didn’t you want me with you?”

Halak blew out. “Damn, but you’re persistent.”

“Yes. So answer the question.”

“All right.” Halak took a pull of his drink, liking the way it burned a track down to his stomach before spreading out along his belly like fingers of liquid fire. “I’ll tell you what. I answer your question and you answer mine. Deal?”

She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Okay. You first.”

He put his hands on the table and laced his fingers together. “I’m here to see an old friend. Her name is Dalal. Dalal took care of me on Vendrak IV.”

“Where you were born. This was after your parents died?”

“Exactly.”

“Is she one of your relatives?”

“No. Just an old family friend. Actually, she used to work for my father.”

“As what?”

Halak shrugged. “Housekeeper, secretary, nanny…you name it. My mother died first…you know that, of course. From Denebian fever.”

“I know. But you never really talked about how that happened.”

“How does anyone get Denebian fever?” Halak put both hands around his drink but didn’t lift his glass. “Not enough food, terrible living conditions. We didn’t have it all that great, not until my father found steady work. But she got sick before he could and then she died. I was ten.”

Batra’s eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s so awful.”

Halak tried a smile that didn’t quite work. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” (Of course, he couldn’t really describe to her what it waslike to watch his mother shrivel away bit by bit. And what she said to his father when she thought Halak couldn’t hear: I’ll never see my children grow up…)

He closed down the memory. “After that, my father…he was never the same. For one thing, he just didn’t have a lot of time for me. At first, I thought it was because of my mother, but he’d never really been there. Always gone on business. A…what’s the old saying?” Halak snapped his fingers. “A fly by night. That’s it.”

Batra’s brows met in a frown. “Fly by night?”

“Yeah, it’s an old nautical expression. This big sail,” Halak held his arms apart, gestured with his hands, “and you could rig it and forget it. But what it really means is someone who’s only interested in a quick profit. That was my father. Always some scheme. Except nothing panned out, not until…” His voice trailed away.

“Until what?”

“Oh.” Halak blinked, refocused. “Until he got involved in some business…I was too young to know exactly what.”

“And then?”

“A couple of things. One, he was gone for long, long stretches of time. Longer than before, but by that time, Dalal was there and she made sure I had food, clothes on my back. She even worked at trying to get me to go to school.”

“How did she do?”

“Well,except school.” Halak sighed, finger-combed his hair. “I was a pain in the ass. Always in trouble. I started stealing. Little things at first—you know, food, I was always good at stealing food, maybe because I always felt hungry, even when I had plenty to eat.”

“I don’t think a kid forgets going hungry.”

“No, but I think I did it to get back at my father. See, he took up with another woman not long after Dalal came to live with us, and this woman moved in. I never liked her much, and not just because she wasn’t my mother. You know, she tried to get me to call her Mom, must have been a hundred times. A thousand. I never could, and looking back on it, I think she did her best to make me like her. But I didn’t. Sort of a willful type of hate, if you know what I mean. Dalal didn’t like her either, but I never knew if that wasn’t just jealousy.”

“And you weren’t? Jealous, I mean.”

Halak ran a meditative finger over his scar. “Probably, though it’s only now that I see it. Back then, I was just an angry kid whose mother was dead and whose father was gone all the time but thought this other woman might solve all my problems. Eventually she left my father. Then, when my father died, Dalal took over. I was fourteen.”

“How did your father die?”

Halak’s fingers teased a corner of his cocktail napkin. The paper tore, and he rolled it into a tight ball. “Business deal gone bad. I really don’t know the specifics.”

“With all that, I’m amazed you made it into the Academy.”

“Makes two of us. But after my parents were gone and there was just Dalal, I think I realized that I had to do something to help myself. I’m not an institutional type of guy, but I also never felt a sense of belonging to a real family, and I guess I figured Starfleet was the place where I could. Find a family, have a sense of belonging somewhere. Anyway, that’s where Dalal fits in. I figure I owe her. So, she called,” Halak put his hands out in a gesture that encompassed the café, “and I came.”

“But she was on Vendrak IV,” Batra said slowly, as if she wanted to cement the details of his story in her mind. “And now she’s on Farius Prime. That’s a long way from Vendrak IV, Samir. How did she get here? Why?”

“Why does anyone come to Farius Prime?” Halak asked rhetorically. “They come for the money. The last I heard, Dalal was on Vendrak IV. I haven’t heard from her for years, ever since I left for the Academy. And then, you know, deep space assignments and all that,” Halak spread his hands, a what-can-I-saygesture. “Time passes.”

“So why does she want to see you now?”

“I’m not sure,” Halak said, relieved that this, at least, was true. “But I owe her, Ani. Dalal put up with a hell of a lot.”

“This still doesn’t explain why you had to sneak around.”

Halak sighed. “Look, Farius Prime isn’t the nicest planet in the galaxy. I didn’t want you exposed to that. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Ani.”

“I can handle myself.”

“I’m not saying you can’t. Hell, you’re better with a phaser than I am. But that’s not the point. Farius Prime is a rough place.”

“And how would you know?”

“Know that it’s rough?” Halak hiked a shoulder. “How does anyone know anything?”

Batra gave Halak a narrow look. “Stop playing games. You’ve been here more than once, and don’t bother to deny it. I can tell: the way you handle yourself, the fact that you seem to know where you’re going. You never once asked for directions.”

He felt a little clutch of anxiety in the pit of his gut, and he became aware that his fists were clenched. He forced his fingers to unfurl. Relax, would you, she doesn’t know; none of them know.

He kept his features matter-of-fact, and opted for the truth—to a point. “Ani, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to behurt. This isn’t about you handling yourself. It’s about being smart, not taking unnecessary risks. Now, whether or not I was right to keep where I was going from you, the fact is I did. On the other hand, you followed me, and I’d love to know how you managed that.”

“Is that your question?” she asked. Her voice was taut, and Halak gave her a searching look and knew she was hiding something, but he was damned if he knew what. But that just made two of them doing the same thing to one another.

“No,” said Halak, at last, reaching for her hands again. “That’s not my question. This is: the same question I asked you twice before.”

He felt her hands flinch, but she didn’t draw them away, and he felt a flare of hope. He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.

“Ani,” he said, trying to put everything he felt into that one word and wondering if she would ever, couldever know how very much he hated keeping secrets from a woman he loved as much as he did her. “Ani, will you marry me? Please?”