Dark Allies

  "Tell you what? I don't understand—"

  "Well, first I decided to tell Si Cwan that I have strong feelings for him and that I wanted to accompany him on the mission to Montos… except by the time I did it, he was gone. And then I offered to conduct the entire reception, arrange everything, set it all up, mostly to make him happy… and it became a huge misfire. Maybe somebody up there," and she pointed, "is trying to tell me something."

  Morgan looked up to where Robin was pointing. "Up there? You mean on the bridge?"

  "No, Mother!" she said in exasperation. "I mean 'up there.' You know. Divine intervention may be trying to get a point across."

  "You're overthinking it, Robin."

  "No, I'm not. Nothing goes right for me."

  "Now you're just dissolving into self-pity, Robin. I won't have it," Morgan said sternly. "You're made of better and stronger stuff than that. So instead of complaining about how everything goes wrong for you, just pull yourself together, and be the officer and the woman that I know you can be. Clear?"

  Robin's jaw twitched in irritation, but finally she sighed heavily and said, "Clear."

  She went into the bathroom and took a shower. By the time she came out, she was sneezing and her temperature was starting to climb. As she blew her nose, she looked daggers at her mother. "Thanks, Ma. I'm sure the cold you've apparently just given me will serve me as well as your advice."

  Morgan rolled her eyes and pulled the covers over her head. As one, they sneezed.

  Xyon sat in his quarters, chair tilted back, whistling softly. He was bare to the waist, having cleaned up after the debacle originally intended as a welcoming banquet for Rie—for Kalinda. He had to keep reminding himself that her real name was Kalinda. His long blond hair was newly cleaned and hanging around his muscled shoulders. There was a chime at his door. "You can't come in," he called. "Apparently I have misbehaved and am in isolation."

  The door slid open and Mackenzie Calhoun was standing in the doorway. "Actually, what with being the captain and all, I can come and go as I wish."

  "That is what you excel at, isn't it? Going? As you went from Xenex after leaving my mother pregnant with me?"

  Calhoun sighed deeply. "Xyon… grow up. Whatever disputes you have with me, they don't begin to excuse what took place at the banquet."

  "I'm not looking to excuse myself to you, Captain. I don't care what you think."

  Calhoun shook his head. "That's not true. If you didn't care what I thought, you would not have acted, and reacted, as you did. You would have ignored me, or brushed me off. You would not have taken a swing at me, certainly, and tried to hurt me."

  "I didn't try. I did hurt you."

  "No. You couldn't. Particularly if I'm ready for you."

  Xyon's eyes flashed. "Is that a challenge?"

  "No. Simply a statement of fact."

  Instantly, Xyon was out of his chair. It was an impressive burst of speed. Anyone else would have been very hard-pressed to get out of his way.

  Calhoun sidestepped and drove his knee up into Xyon's midsection. Xyon gasped and Mackenzie slammed him in the back of the neck, sending Xyon to the floor. Xyon lay there, momentarily stunned. He couldn't understand it. He was as formidable a fighter as they came, and had handled any number of opponents with facility. So what in hell had just happened?

  As if reading his mind, Calhoun sat down next to him and said, "You rushed it. Also, you were probably a bit daunted by the fact that I am your father."

  "I wasn't… daunted."

  "My mistake, then," Calhoun said, sounding oversolicitous.

  There was dead silence in the room then for an uncomfortable period of time. "How is Cattine?" Calhoun asked finally.

  "My mother is fine. I'm sure she hardly thinks of you at all."

  "That's… good."

  "How could you have done it?" He was shaking his head in slow disbelief.

  "Xyon… certainly you must know the circumstances of your conception?"

  "I know, I know. Mother wanted to continue the family line, her late husband had been dead a year, and you, as Warlord of Xenex, in keeping with tradition, accommodated her by producing me. Hurray for you. Hurray for tradition."

  "You don't know… you can't understand what it was like for me, Xyon. It was not something I desired to do. But I had my duty—to tradition, to your mother, and to my title as warlord. Frankly, it should have been my brother, since he was the ranking…" He waved it off. "No, it doesn't matter. Because I also had a duty to myself. I was going to be leaving Xenex, attending Starfleet Academy. I couldn't put that aside because of—"

  "Of a son."

  "It was what your mother desired. She wanted to raise you on her own. She didn't want to hold me back."

  "That may be what she told you, but it wasn't what she desired."

  "What do you mean?" When Xyon didn't reply immediately, Calhoun repeated shortly, "What do you mean?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Obviously, it does. To you."

  Xyon looked at him levelly and said, "She always hoped you'd come back some day. She could never ask you herself, tell you herself, because she didn't want to force you. But she hoped that someday… you'd return. Or send for us."

  "I…" Calhoun looked stunned. "She never said…"

  "Of course she never said. She felt it had to come from within you." Xyon leaned back against a wall, hands draped over his legs. "She has too much pride. And optimism: She hoped, sooner or later, your thoughts of us would become so overwhelming that you'd feel the need to return to her… to me… to us."

  "That's not how we left it between us," said Calhoun tonelessly.

  "Things are never as we think they are. But I knew. I am your son, after all," he said bitterly. "I know your mind as well as I know my own. My guess is, over the years, you never thought of us. Did you? And the idea of returning, of being with her, with me… you never considered that at all. Did you?"

  "No," was his soft reply. Then he looked over at Xyon with his hard, purple eyes. "I won't lie to you. The answer is, no, I never considered coming back to stay with her, not really. I had my own life to lead. I thought she was living hers."

  "You said I had no idea what it was like for you," Xyon told him. "Well, you had even less what it was like for me. Living in the shadow of my father, the legend. The man who cared so much about his people that, by the time he was the age I am now, he had liberated an entire planet. Do you have any inkling what it was like… knowing that you cared that much about Xenexians in general," and he raised his hand, flat and horizontal, high above his head, "that you would do all that for them… and that you cared for me so little," and he placed his other hand just above the floor, to indicate the disparity in distance, "that you didn't come back to Xenex, or contact me, or …anything."

  "I did come back… once. And I tried to find Cattine… but she had moved out of Calhoun. No one knew where she was."

  "And you made oh-so-much endeavor to find her. Strain yourself mightily, did you? Use all your resources? Or was the challenge of finding one woman and one child on a small world too much for the re-doubtable M'k'n'zy."

  "I took her absence—her 'disappearance'—to mean that she did not want me as a part of her life," Calhoun told him.

  "No. That was what you wanted to think. And what she knew you wanted. And deep down, you knew it, too. But pretending otherwise made it that much easier for you to go on with your life."

  There was a long silence then.

  "So what have you been up to?" Calhoun asked.

  It caught Xyon off guard. Still on the floor, he angled himself around to look at the captain. "What do you mean?"

  "It's a fairly straightforward question. What have you been up to? When you're not rescuing princesses. Or is that all you do?"

  "Captain…" Xyon felt as if he were back in the nebula. "Didn't you hear anything of what I said? I don't like you. You're not someone I feel like discussing my life with."

  "Yes, you've
made that clear. And if all you want to do is dwell on that which can't be changed, then that is entirely your privilege. But I can tell you that the 'legendary' M'k'n'zy of Calhoun didn't help free his world from its oppressors by obsessing about what had been. Instead I thought only about what could, and would, be. If the only future you see for us is one of hostility, fine. We've gotten along just fine without each other to this point, and we can continue to do so, I would imagine. It's one thing to learn from the past; it's another to be a prisoner of it."

  "Do you always speak in aphorisms?" Xyon asked.

  "Depends on my mood. Aphorisms, riddles, rhyming couplets… whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment."

  He headed toward the door and didn't even bother to look over his shoulder as he said, "I'm lifting your isolation to these quarters. Feel free to go where you choose, barring standard security protocols. Try not to slam anyone around. Oh, and you may want to tender an apology to Ensign Lefler; you made quite a mess of her little gathering."

  "You mean that's it?" demanded Xyon. "That's all you have to say to me?"

  This prompted Calhoun to turn and look questioningly at his son. "What else is there to say?"

  "I don't know."

  "What…" Calhoun actually looked astounded at the notion—"you're not… actually expecting me to say I love you or some such, are you?"

  "Of course not," Xyon said stiffly.

  "Good." Once more Calhoun started to leave, and suddenly Xyon said, "Did you love her?"

  This time Calhoun did not turn quite as quickly. "You mean your mother?" he asked.

  "Yes. Did you love her?"

  "Xyon," he said heavily, "you probably don't know this… but your mother was the first."

  "The first woman you got pregnant?"

  "No. The first woman."

  "Oh." Xyon cleared his throat uncomfortably. "I didn't… uhm… no. No, she never mentioned that."

  "I love… that she was good to me. That she didn't make me feel self-conscious. That she understood that there could never be anything between us other than that. I love those things about her. But I don't love her. For the most part, I didn't even know her. I don't know you. You can't love someone you don't sufficiently know; it's just not possible."

  "You know…" Xyon said with a touch of defiance, "I bet you've never 'known' anyone enough to love them… truly love them. Not ever. Because to get that close to them, you'd have to let them get that close to you. And you never have."

  Calhoun appeared to be considering the concept. After a long, thoughtful pause he said, "You know what? You may very well be right. Then again, I should point out that, while you're busy judging me … I notice that you didn't feel compelled to remain on Xenex, with your mom, any more than I was. And I was about your age when I left. So before you're too quick to judge me… you may want to think about judging yourself. Enjoy the rest of your day, Xyon." With that, he walked out into the corridor and left Xyon behind, thoughtful, in his quarters.

  II.

  MEDITA, THE AREA OFTULAANIV wherein most of the Redeemers resided, seemed even less hospitable than usual. And considering that the temperatures there never rose much above freezing, and that during the night a steady wind called "monster breath" ripped constantly across the already battered ground, saying that Medita seemed even less welcoming than it usually was was going quite a ways in characterizing it.

  In the Great Hall wherein dwelt the Overlord, the Overlord was not in his usual place—namely, his throne. Instead he was standing on the roof. The fact that he was doing so caught the attention of more than one of the Redeemers as they gathered at the bottom of the building, looking up and muttering to one another about the possibility that the Overlord had undergone some sort of mental breakdown and was contemplating hurling himself to his death.

  He was, in fact, thinking about no such thing. His great black cape fluttered briskly around him as he stood at the foot of the statue representing the great God Xant, He Who Had Gone On, He Who Would Return. He knew in his heart, of course, that the statue was not divine in and of itself. It was simply a representation of the Great One himself, built by all-toomortal hands of Redeemer acolytes many years before. It felt cold to the touch of the Overlord's obsidian hands, and his eyes glowed cold red in the chill of the night air.

  "Great Xant," he whispered. "Help me in this…your followers' darkest hour."

  Truthfully, he was not at all sure what he was hoping to accomplish. Nothing, probably. Anything that happened as a result of this impromptu "communion" with the great statue would come out of his own mind, rather than some actual link to the departed Xant.

  He waited.

  No response from Xant. No response from his own mind. Just the whistling of the wind… and the increasing volume from the nervous acolytes below as they obviously wondered whether their fearless leader had utterly lost his mind. He would have found it amusing if the circumstances were not so tragic.

  He looked down upon his people one more time, and then stepped away from the statue and headed back to the door that led up to the roof. Several minutes later, he was in his throne room as the top Redeemers in his select council grouped around him. There were a dozen of them. None of them had names, or at least names that they discussed. The only one who had a separate designation was Prime One, the Overlord's second in command.

  They stood silently and waited patiently for the Overlord to speak. At such times, that traditional wait could stretch for hours… even days, on one memorable occasion. This time, however, the Overlord spoke almost immediately. The fact that he did so was more than enough to add gravity to an already difficult situation.

  "I will say now, for your mutual benefit, that which most—if not all—of you probably already know," the Overlord said. "The Black Mass is swarming from the Hunger Zone… and its target is this system."

  The Redeemers did not quite manage to stifle the outburst of excited and frightened talk among themselves. It was an utter breech of protocol to do such a thing, to babble that way in the presence of the Overlord, and it was to their credit that the Redeemers realized this almost immediately and reined themselves in. But the Overlord could see it in their faces: They were afraid. They had no idea what to do, or what was going to happen, and they were looking to the Overlord for answers. Unfortunately, he had none to give.

  "That is why you were speaking to the statue of Xant," Prime One said suddenly. "You were hoping that he would speak to you and give you guidance."

  "Yes."

  "And did he?"

  "Did he?" "Tell us, Overlord, we beg you." The comments came from all over, the inquiries, the pleadings, and he knew at that point that he was in an excellent position. All he had to do was lie to them, tell them whatever wisdom Xant had "imparted" to him, and they would take it as gospel. They were so anxious to believe, so desperate to know that there was some plan, some alternative, that they would have swallowed whatever he tossed to them, gobbled it hungrily and begged for more. If he told them that Xant had said they should abandon their world, they would do it. If he told them that Xant wanted them to die, they would do that, too.

  So much power he possessed.

  And yet so little.

  For he was bound by the truth. There were other religious leaders, he knew, who would not hesitate to say whatever was on their mind, to fabricate some sort of personal dialogue with their respective almighty for the purpose of guiding, even misleading the flock. Such leaders, however, were to be held in contempt. To be pitied. They did their followers no service, and they had no business calling themselves leaders. For it was their job to convey to the followers the true word of their deities. In the case of Xant, in many ways the Overlord was no different from the other Redeemers. He drew Xant's word and beliefs from the writings and teachings of Xant, back when the Great One walked among them in his mortal form. But that was the only true means of communication he had. It would be so easy… so easy… to make himself out to have more, for that was how e
ager they were to find options.

  Not for the first time, the Overlord wished that he was evil and bereft of morals, so that he could make the lives of others that much easier.

  "Xant speaks to me every day in his philosophies, as he does to you. But no more than that, I fear," said the Overlord.

  The Redeemers took in that response without comment. Then one of the Redeemers stepped forward and said, "Overlord… we have no choice. None can withstand the might of the Black Mass. Even the Thallonians, at the height of their power decades agone, could not deter them."

  "What would you recommend?" inquired the Overlord.

  Emboldened by the quiet, open manner in which the Overlord asked his advice, the Redeemer said, "We must leave Tulaan IV." The others gasped once more, exchanged hurried comments. The Redeemer glanced at the others from the corner of his eye, and then gamely continued, "Our touch is upon dozens of worlds. There is no reason to cling to this one."

  "No reason… save that this was the birthplace of Xant," the Overlord reminded him. "He departed from here to begin his great journey. It is to here that he will return. And does Xant not say that this world is sacred?"

  "The Overlord is right," Prime One said. "It may very well be that this is a test… a precursor to the return of Xant. If we abandon this world, Xant might very well consider us unworthy of witnessing his return. We must have faith."

  "But does faith mean that we are to simply sit here and wait to die at the hands… or the whatever… of the Black Mass?" asked another Redeemer.

  "Of course not," Prime One replied. "Xant helps those who help themselves. We must try and take steps to forestall this horrible calamity. We must try to do what no one else has done: We must try and stop the Black Mass."

  There were murmurs of approval, nodding of heads. It was hardly a plan, but at least it seemed like the beginnings of one.

  The Redeemer who had advocated leaving, however, was not so quick to agree. "And if the steps we take fail, as—based upon the lack of success that others have had—they most likely will? What then? Do we remain on Tulaan out of some sort of loyalty to Xant? Or is it at that point that we leave for safety?"