“An assassin.” She looked at him curiously. “Why would you be concerned about assassins?”
“One who has been in my profession for so long need always worry about such things.”
“And the unfinished business? And the comments about the afterlife?”
He actually seemed amused by her. “You ask a good number of questions. You should be a scientist. My ‘unfinished business’ will remain my concern alone, if you do not mind . . . or, for that matter, even if you do mind. As for seeing her in the afterlife, well . . . that was not a threat intended to indicate that I was going to send her into it. So you need not have been concerned in that regard.” He laughed softly to himself. “You must have been quite a good friend to her, to go to all this effort on behalf of her memory and her still-living mate. That must be why you’re here, of course. It is the only possible explanation. If she is dead, as you say, then you must have been concerned that my unquenchable desire for vengeance was going to extend to her mate. You are truly here on his behalf rather than hers. Rest assured, child, he faces no danger from me. It is over. I am over. All of it . . . all of it . . . is over.”
He walked away from her, shaking his head slowly, seemingly having forgotten that she was there at all. Let him go! the voice in her head said again, but this time she ignored the advice. There was something in his manner, his attitude, that prompted her to call, “What are you talking about? What’s over? What did you mean about the afterlife?”
He stopped walking, but did not answer immediately. Instead he simply stood there for a time, then squared his shoulders and turned back to face her. “When I spoke of the afterlife, child, I did not do so meaning that I was going to send her there. I meant that I was going there and was simply going to await her . . . although I suppose now she is awaiting me. She’ll very likely be setting up a warm welcome for me. Yet another disincentive for proceeding in that direction, but unfortunately I have not been given much choice in the matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Must I spell it out for you, child?” He grimaced. “Very well. I will simplify it. The reason I said I would see her in the afterlife was because I thought I was going to predecease her. I am dying, child. The incurable, degenerative bone disorder called Hammons syndrome. Do not let my little display of strength just now fool you; the rigors of even the mildest space travel right now would send me into oblivion even faster than I am already going. I am a prisoner of this dying body, and it in turn is a prisoner of this world. I am not going anywhere except into the grave. And I will have no one to mourn for me, no relative to care in the least about my passing. I will look back upon my life, see only the acts of brutality and torment that I have performed, with nothing of consequence to show for my time on this sphere. At the end of my life, I have accomplished nothing of which I can be proud. That is what I have come to realize, that is what motivated me to send a message to T’Pas. Your journey here from wherever it is you came from has been as great a waste as the entirety of my life. You, however, are still relatively young. You will have more chances to accomplish things of worth. I will not. There, young woman. Does that answer your question?”
With that he turned on his heel and strode away from her.
And Soleta knew at that point that everything he had told her was true. She had no reason to believe it . . . but she did. Which meant that her task here was done, the job settled. She could depart Titan, never look back, and never concern herself one bit with the monstrous brute that had sired her. He was dying? Fine. Her mother would have been happy to hear that. Her father would be happier still. And Soleta was happy. Yes. She was. It didn’t matter that he seemed more scared and pathetic than anything else. Whatever was happening to him now was well deserved. She should feel no bit of remorse, no dreg of pity. Under no circumstance should she feel sorry for him, for he had led a foul life. If he was paying for that now, it was certainly no concern of hers.
He stopped.
He turned.
He walked back toward her, and she braced herself. Her hand strayed in the general direction of her phaser, although she made no move to pull it from concealment. Rajari stopped several feet away.
“Would you care for a drink?” he asked. “I noticed you sitting in the bar, staring at me, for a small eternity. In that time, you had exactly one drink. I thought you might like another. It might ease your throat.”
“Considering you did the damage, it is hardly generous of you to make the offer.”
“Very well.” He shrugged, turned and walked away.
Let him go! If you have an ounce of brains in your head, let him go! Have nothing more to do with him! Depart Titan immediately and do not look back.
She headed after him.
He presented an interesting subject. If she could detach herself from the emotional turmoil of the situation—which she should certainly be able to do, as a Vulcan—then she had to admit that he presented a potential for an interesting psychological study. Which was, admittedly, a bit far afield for her. Then again, one does not learn and grow if one isn’t willing to take chances.
She caught up with him within a block. He seemed surprised to see her . . . but perhaps not too surprised. “You have reconsidered my offer?”
“You remain a vile and contemptible brute. I will accompany you for a brief time only to get a greater peace of mind in ascertaining whether you pose a threat to the mate of T’Pas.”
“Very wise,” said the dying Romulan. And they headed back to the tavern.
McHENRY & KEBRON
ZAK KEBRON WAS NOT particularly happy. He was not especially inclined to verbalize about it, for it was not Kebron’s way to articulate that which annoyed him. However, it was very clear to McHenry that Kebron was getting somewhat impatient.
No less so, obviously, was Adulux, and as the moons shone down upon them, he was far less reticent than Kebron when it came to making his feelings known.
“This is getting us nowhere!” Adulux said in exasperation. In truth, McHenry couldn’t entirely blame him. Every night, for a week, the odd trio of McHenry, Kebron, and Adulux had come out to the spot where Adulux’s wife had last been seen. Initially, they had simply remained right where they were. Over time, however, they had expanded the parameters of their search area, although “search” might have been too strong a word. McHenry wasn’t actually searching. He was simply waiting. McHenry’s nature was such that he could have gone on doing the same thing for months, but Adulux was not quite as sanguine. “Nowhere!” he repeated. “How is this going to get Zanka back?”
“Patience,” McHenry said calmly. He was seated on a rock, gazing serenely at the sky. “These things require patience.”
“You can afford patience!” Adulux told him. “You do not have the Sentries coming around your home, questioning you over and over! They still believe that I inflicted some sort of evil against Zanka!” He put his hands to his head and shook it in frustration. “I should simply have jumped off the roof when I wanted to!”
“You still can,” Kebron pointed out.
“Kebron, that’s not helping,” said McHenry.
Adulux let out a grunt of frustration and stomped off to a far side of the clearing. Kebron now moved over toward McHenry and said in a low voice, “He’s right. This is getting us nowhere.”
“This is a stakeout, Zak,” McHenry replied, equally softly. “You’re a security head. I’m surprised you know nothing of old-style police procedures.”
“I do know of it. I know of projectile vomiting as well. That does not mean I’d care to experience it,” Kebron replied.
“Look, you asked me to come along on this. I wasn’t looking for this assignment. I was ready to be a bum, remember? You’re the one who came to me. You said you wanted backup on this. That you wanted someone who would be the ‘brains’ to your ‘brawn.’”
“And this is using your brains?”
“Yes!”
“Tragic,” Kebron said
with a shrug. Then he looked at his shoulders in mild surprise, still unaccustomed to having a body that did such things as shrug in a noticeable manner. It was the little things that he was still having trouble adjusting to. For instance, although he did not have much of a neck, it was still there nevertheless. But he still wasn’t in the habit of turning his head; instead he angled his entire torso when he wanted to look around.
“Perhaps you’re right,” McHenry said finally. “Perhaps we’ve been too complacent. There might be patterns that we can detect. If nothing happens tonight, we’ll speak to more of the locals during the day, and see what else we can find.”
“Joy,” said Kebron.
“If it really bothers you, Zak, we can just go back to Nechayev and tell her that some idiotic students from a university noted for its arrogant student body got the best of two Starfleet representatives.” He squared himself off against Kebron and said challengingly, “Do you want to make the call . . . or should I?”
Kebron stared at him for a long moment. Then he grunted.
The rest of the evening passed without incident, and when the sun came up the next morning, Kebron and McHenry set to work.
KALINDA
SI CWAN HAD ALMOST DRIFTED to sleep when he heard her scream.
He had been up rather late this night, pacing the quarters that had been so generously provided by the United Federation of Planets. No one had forgotten that he had wound up as ambassador on the Excalibur through a rather dubious series of events, including stowing away. But he had more than proven his worth since that time, and the spacious suites that the UFP had given him as a place to reside on Earth had been more than kind. Gods knew it was not remotely as luxurious as what he had been accustomed to on Thallon. On the other hand, Thallon was now little more than floating bits of space dust, and his suites were a substantial cut above his accommodations on the Excalibur.
Nevertheless, he’d felt a bit at loose ends, still trying to determine these past weeks just how he might serve in some useful capacity. This night he had been up rather late, staring restlessly out at the stars, dwelling on the fact that he had roamed them practically at will. He sorely wanted to get back out there, continue in his endeavors to pull back together the scattered worlds of the fallen Thallonian Empire. Until such time that a ship was assigned there, however, he quite simply lacked the backing to do so. So he was left to ponder his future role in life.
He had drifted to sleep while doing so, sitting upright in a fairly comfortable chair as the starlight danced in the night sky. His last thought before falling asleep was how, when one was out in space, the stars didn’t twinkle at all. It was a totally different experience out there, one that seemed purer somehow. To those who continually resided on a planet’s surface, a star’s twinkling was inviting. To those such as Si Cwan who had strode among them at all, twinkling was an abomination, a corruption of the purity of a star’s light.
Then the scream had ricocheted, like a thing alive, down the short hallway that led to Kalinda’s room.
Si Cwan had snapped to full wakefulness in a little under five seconds. Interestingly, before those five seconds had passed he had already leaped to his feet, charging down the hallway while his brain worked frantically to catch up with his body. “I’m coming, Kally!” he shouted, absolutely positive that someone had broken into their home. His mind started ticking off lists of enemies who might be making some sort of strike against them. Kalinda had been missing in the wilds of Thallonian space for so long, and they had only recently been reunited. There was no way that Si Cwan was going to allow his little sister to be snatched from his bosom once more. There was absolutely no question in his mind: Whomever he found in her room, he would put the intruder down like a wild animal if any harm were done to Kalinda.
He thundered into her room, poised and battle-ready . . .
. . . and found a frightened young woman, and nothing else.
Kalinda had remembered the visions she’d suffered when the Quiet Place had called to her, in the way that one might remember something that happened to someone else. She had literally been another person at that time, brainwashed into believing that she had another name, another identity.
They had not come to her while she was awake . . . at least, not at first. Instead they had haunted her dreams, first occasionally and then every single night. Her days slowly developed into long, tortured witnessing of the sun as it passed inexorably through the sky, bringing her to the inevitable night of more writhing about, knotting of sheets, profuse sweating and torturous sessions of dreams. As time had passed, even her daylight hours began to lose their safety. The visions would dance just below her subconscious, and she knew they were there if she chanced to turn her mind’s eye in that general direction.
Finally, unable to resist the siren call, she had gone to the Quiet Place. She had been confronted with the secrets and curiosities of that most mysterious of worlds, a place that some felt was haunted by the tortured souls of the dead. She had never quite been sure of the truth of that, or even the truth of what she had fully experienced. What she had known, though, was that once she had come through that place, she thought she would never have to deal with it again.
She had been right . . . to a certain degree.
But every so often, she would wake up in that sort of cold sweat that told her she had seen True Things in the night. True Things that were happening, or were going to happen.
Tonight . . . tonight she awoke with a True Thing dream that was more violent, more frightening than anything she could recall.
The blood pumped so violently through her that not only could she feel her heart, but also she sensed the synchronized thudding of the veins against her forehead.
A hand rested on her shoulder and it startled her so that she let out a yelp of alarm. She swung a small fist and tried to knock the hand away, but the hand was joined by a second on her other shoulder, and now she twisted violently against it. “Let me go!” she cried out, “let me—!”
“Kally!” It took a few moments for Si Cwan’s voice to penetrate a mind numbed with terror. “Kally, it’s me! Calm down! Kalinda!”
“Cwan . . . ?” She managed to find her voice.
“Yes.”
“Oh, gods,” she said, clearing her throat since it was so choked with emotion. She threw her arms around him tightly, trying to steady the shuddering in her chest. “Oh, gods, I’m so glad . . .”
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
She looked him in the eye and said, “A dream.”
Clarification might well have been required for someone else. After all, to awaken in a state of near panic simply because one has had a bad dream is generally considered to be within the province of a small child, not an adult young woman. But Si Cwan knew immediately, from the great significance she had attached to that simple word, that there was more at stake here than just a simple nightmare that a slumbering id might have conjured.
“A dream,” he said. “One of those kinds?”
She nodded, looking a bit forlorn.
“I was unaware that you continued to have any along those lines.” He sat on the edge of the bed, her immediate intense anxiety clearly having passed. “You had said nothing to me of them.”
“I did not wish to worry you,” she told him. “No harm was resulting from them. They were minor, affording me no true fear. It wasn’t as if the Quiet Place was summoning me back . . .”
She had had to say it, of course, because that was naturally going to be his first concern. She knew she’d been right when she saw him, ever so slightly, let out a sigh of relief. Even so, he said, “You’re certain about that?”
She nodded.
He ran a sympathetic finger along the underside of her chin. “Do you wish to tell me about it?”
She said slowly, “I am not convinced enough that I fully understand it myself to be able to explain it properly.”
“You can only try.”
“I know. What I
saw was the vision of . . . of a man. There were many Thallonians around . . . but he himself was not. He was . . . I do not know what he was, truthfully. He was quite short, and yet seemed taller, for reasons that I do not understand. He had the oddest hair, it was . . .”
“A ring.”
She blinked in surprise. “Yes! Almost like a crest that circled his head perfectly. It was white. And he had a mustache that was as white as his hair, with long ends. He looked a bit human, but he had sort of . . .”
“Fins. At the sides of his head. And red eyes.”
“Yes!” She couldn’t quite believe it. “Very red. I could see from the way they were staring.” She had been sitting in bed, but now she was on her feet, too amazed to remain in bed like a child. “Who was he, Si Cwan? Obviously, you know him . . .”
“He was not a Thallonian, you were correct in that,” Si Cwan said. “His name is Jereme, he was from the race known as the Kotati, and he was our teacher.”
“Teacher?” Then her face cleared. “Yes! Yes, I remember now!”
It was not unusual for Kalinda to have difficulty recalling things that happened far in her past. Those who had brainwashed her had done a superb job, and there were some things that were simply a massive effort for her to recall. Original memories had been damaged, unfortunately, and Kalinda was working a sort of catch-up effort to pull them together. “He was our self-defense teacher. Well . . . yours,” she amended. “I was so young . . . I was allowed to sit in on some of your classes, though.”
“Jereme was the only non-Thallonian individual who ever acted in any sort of teaching capacity for the royal family.” Si Cwan smiled. Clearly the memories alone were enough to fill him with a warm, nostalgic glow.
“You look so happy,” Kalinda told him. “You always look happy when you’re thinking or talking about the past.”
“I am. Sometimes I think that’s the only time I am happy.”
“That’s so sad,” said Kalinda. “You should be able to draw happiness from looking toward the future. If you don’t, and if you can’t, then what’s the point of living it?”