Chapter Twenty
STILES PRESSED FORWARD, aiming for the shadowy protection of the rock-lands ahead. He could hear the distant murmur of the plane’s engine, recognized the type of aircraft, and made his bets.
“They’re still miles away,” he gasped, pulling Spock along, “but even if they spot us they can’t land on this terrain. They’ll have to send a recon hoverscout with a patrol team to flush us out. If we can make it to the hills—”
“Commander?”
“Don’t worry, I can take more of your weight. We can’t slow down. If we can make it to—”
“Of course, Mr. Stiles, but I do have a question.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“From whom are we hiding?”
“Watch that rock—don’t trip!”
“From whom,” Spock repeated, “are we about to hide?”
“The authorities. They’ll be here any time—”
“And to whom…did we come here to speak?”
Stiles dragged the ambassador along another five or six steps before this sank in.
As the drone of the aircraft drew closer to the bomb site, he felt his face screw up in a frown of confusion and doubt. Something just didn’t seem right about this.
The ambassador tentatively put more weight on his injured leg.
Stiles shifted back and forth on his own feet and finally met Spock’s eyes. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
Spock bobbed an eyebrow, flattened his lips, and charitably avoided nodding.
While digesting that little nugget, Stiles lowered the ambassador onto the first sitting-sized rock they’d come upon, a harbinger of the fact that they could’ve made it to cover if logic hadn’t gotten in the way.
They remained still, unresisting, out in the open, as the Pojjana aircraft buzzed the scene of the explosion and Stiles thought his arms and legs were going to fall off with the urge to run again, hide, defend—
The plane strafed the flattened beam emitter for several seconds before veering abruptly toward them. His spine shriveled. They’d been spotted.
‘They’ve seen us,” Spock said with quiet satisfaction.
“How are we going to explain blowing up their emitter?” Stiles circled behind the ambassador and came around the other side as if stalking the plane on its approach. “We had to do it. I couldn’t let it pull my ship down—”
“Of course not.”
The plane soared over them, one wing tilted low, and they could clearly see the pilot in his helmet looking down at them. He was contacting the Pojjana security forces.
They’d never get away now. Stiles battled inwardly, wrestling with the idea that getting away wasn’t the best idea, wouldn’t get them where they needed to be, wouldn’t find Zevon.
“You needn’t call me ‘sir,’” Spock told him, as if they were sitting over a dinner table or playing badminton. “I have no Starfleet rank any longer, and you are the commander of the vessel that matters in our lives today.”
“Yeah, well…well, it’ll be long time before I can think of you as anybody other than Science Officer Spock of the Enterprise.”
The plane circled the area, keeping them inside its surveillance area while no doubt calling for backup. Stiles never let his back turn to the plane, moving constantly to stay between the aircraft and the ambassador, a shield of vellum against rockets if they decided to open fire. Each step drove him deeper into his troubled thoughts.
“Do you know,” he began, “do you realize how many hours on end I rehearsed calling you ‘Ambassador’ before that evac mission? I just knew I’d get down to that planet and call you ‘Mister’ or ‘Captain’ or ‘First Officer’ or ‘Your Honor’ or ‘Your Highness’—something stupid was waiting to pop out of my mouth and I could just taste it. All the way in Travis and the evil twins kept saying, ‘Eric, will you quit mumbling the word ambassador?’I’ll bet…I just bet Captain Kirk never had that kind of problem.”
Spock paused a moment. His eyes never flinched nor did his expression change much. He peered solemnly into the past and seemed to enjoy what he saw.
“No,” he said. “He had others. Those were excellent days. But they are passed now.”
Despite the circumstances, Stiles found himself sighing. “Maybe for you. Not for the rest of us.”
Looking up now, Spock said, “Because you feel you must live up to them?”
Somehow there was no right answer to that question. Damned if he did, damned—
Apparently the ambassador didn’t expect an answer, because he kept talking himself. “If James Kirk’s mission logs are the barometer against which you measure yourself, you set too high a task for yourself. You must temper your awe. You can never attain so high a standard.”
Even though a patrol scout craft now appeared over the mountains and streaked toward them across the meadow flats, Stiles turned to Spock and didn’t bother to look at the patroller as he heard its humming engines approaching.
“Oh, is that right?” he challenged. “I always admired you for the things you did and the—I guess ‘style’ is a good way to say it…I never got the idea you were filled up with yourself. Till now, anyway…. Why are you nodding? I just insulted you.”
“Rather, you just complimented yourself,” Spock corrected. “And you must not expect me to argue with the ship’s commander.”
His tone was somehow cagey, manipulative, carrying palpable ulterior messages. And that eyebrow was up again. Stiles scoured him silently, wondering what to make of the ambassador’s expression. Was he being teased?
“Are you feeling ill?” Spock asked him then.
Stiles flinched. “What?”
“You’re very pale.”
“Well…it…isn’t easy getting needled by a…by a…”
“A super-eminence?” Spock supplied.
Stiles peered at him, able for a moment to ignore the approach of the Pojjana security scout. Was Spock smiling? Was that a little smile? Was it?
As the Pojjana scout came to a hover over them with its warning lights flashing, its containment field snapped on to enshroud them in red spot-light—they could no more walk out of it than through a vault wall.
“Stay quite still,” the ambassador warned. “They will assume we’re armed.”
With the flat of his hand Stiles shielded his eyes from the containment field’s glare. “We should’ve been. I botched it.”
His hands were ice. Emblazoned on the flank of the scout, the Pojjana symbol of a gray lightning bolt crossed by a red arrow seemed alive to him, a swollen symbol of his captivity. Those terrors and miseries rushed back at him. His legs trembled so violently that he could barely stand. Only Spock’s steadying presence kept him from bolting, a spontaneity which would’ve fried him to a flake at the edge of the containment field. Strange—he knew that if he were the senior “eminence” here and his crewmates were with him, he wouldn’t be so shaky. He would never let them bolt. How there could be two men in one suit—
“HOLD POSITION!” the scout’s broadcaster boomed, so loud it knocked Stiles back a step.
Spock held up both hands in a surrendering gesture. Stiles couldn’t manage that. His hands were frozen at his sides, his chest heaving, his leg muscles bound up.
“Relax, Mr. Stiles,” Spock called over the scout’s hum as the craft nestled into the crusty burned stubble, his dark eyes squinted into shafts.
Without looking at him, Stiles gulped, “Remember what happened last time you told me that?”
The Pojjana craft settled completely and gave off a loud hiss as its anti-gravs equalized. The sight of Pojjana guards lumbering down the hatch ramp as it crashed down gave Stiles a cramp in the middle of his gut. All four guards and a sergeant came thundering out and leveled firearms at them.
“Our sidearms are completely drained,” Spock stated in passably fluent Pojjana to the sergeant who came to face them down. “We wish to speak to the planetary authorities.”
“You are aliens,” the
sergeant said with malice, and confiscated their phasers instantly, drained or not. “This is Red Sector. We’re supposed to be left alone.”
Beside Stiles, the ambassador struggled to stand despite the fact that everyone could see his leg was bleeding. Spock faced the sergeant at eye level.
“Things change, Officer,” he said. “I am Ambassador Spock of the United Federation of Planets, former emissary to the Pojjana Assembly. This is—”
“Don’t tell them,” Stiles whispered.
Spock instantly revised. “This is the commander of the transport ship you nearly brought down. We destroyed the emitter in self-defense. We have no aggressive intentions. We have a proposal for the provincial exarch.”
“We have no exarch anymore. That position was eradicated.”
“Who is in charge?”
“The provost of the works.”
Spock tipped his head. “That is the supreme authority on the planet?”
“That’s right.”
“Please take us to this person.”
The sergeant shook his head. His helmet reflected light from the clearing sky. “You’ll be incarcerated in the provincial prison until you come to trial for invasion.”
“We must be allowed to see the senior authority. This is a matter of interstellar importance.”
“I’ll put you where I want to put you,” the sergeant said. “Then I’ll wait to be asked what happened.”
Stiles beat down a shudder. “Nothing really changes.”
“We cannot wait,” Spock told the sergeant. “If you withhold us, you will be blunting advancement of a critical mission. Do you wish your name to be prominent when the provost discovers that he was not informed?”
The sergeant stood with an unreadable expression for a few silent seconds, then gestured them toward the scout’s ramp and the four other guards waiting to funnel them inside.
“Clear them for energy signals,” the sergeant ordered to his men, and one of them came forward.
The guard lowered his firearm, whipped out some kind of scanner, and ran it over Stiles from ears to toes, then over Spock, front, back, and both sides.
“No active energy or signals of any kind,” the guard confirmed. “No readings.”
“He told you we were unarmed,” Stiles complained, knowing that he wouldn’t have believed it either.
The sergeant stepped aside and leveled his own weapon. “Go in.”
Obviously there wasn’t much more to be done here. Stiles’s jaw ached to speak up, spit who he was and insist on some kind of instant retribution, but a thousand warnings clogged his throat. He was in command of the ship, not the mission. If they found out who he was, would they take offense or insult? Stuff him back in a cell and start auctioning beatings again?
Stiles started toward the scout, pausing only when the ambassador took a step on his injured leg and crumpled to one knee. The sergeant stepped forward to assist. Stiles met the uniformed guard with a fierce shoulder butt to the chest.
“Back off,” he snapped, and took the ambassador’s arm himself.
None of the other guards made any attempt to touch them further. Stiles escorted the ambassador into the scout and to the first of only three passenger seats. They were in custody.
Stiles straightened and maneuvered to take the next seat. As he raised his eyes to scan the interior of the scout while the guards came aboard, he found himself no longer seated but rather standing ramrod straight and staring at a mounted photograph in a gilded frame on the port bulkhead.
After a wicked choke, he blurted, “Who in salvation is that!”
The sergeant, just coming aboard, glared at him as if he and the ambassador were complete idiots. “That’s our provost of the works. He saved half the planet from the Constrictor. He developed a way to predict the waves. He sponsored engineering schools and guided architectural renovations all over the planet. Don’t you even know who you came to see? We owe him our lives.”
The idling engines of the scout roared in his ears as Stiles stood riveted to the carpet. His voice gravelly, he managed, “I owe him a couple things too….”
Spock surveyed the picture briefly, seeing that something more than a portrait of a guy beside a tiger oak desk was going on here. “Mr. Stiles? Do you have something to say?”
Confused, demolished, Stiles blinked at him, at the sergeant and finally again at the picture.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I know how we can get in. Tell the ‘Provost’…that Eric Stiles is back.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“STILES. ERIC STILES. You didn’t die. They cured you somehow.”
“Orsova. Somehow, it figures.”
In one withering instant, all of Eric Stiles’s fears and visceral reactions bonded into a single living form. There, behind an enormous orange-and-black desk carved out of that wood that reminded Stiles of tiger oak, except even stronger, backdropped by polished paneling and a dozen plaques and awards, there sat the drunken mess that had represented misery to him for four years.
Orsova was less slovenly than before, indeed had lost weight, though he still carried the wide shoulders and stocky build that came naturally to so many native Pojjana. His black hair was now shot with gold—their idea of getting older—and he no longer wore the uniform of the prison hierarchy but the tweedy suit of a Pojjana planetary official. Stiles had only seen that uniform twice before in person. A long time ago.
Orsova sat behind his huge desk, which had hardly any work upon it, and scoured Stiles with the look of a man who was being shown both the past and the future in one picture.
How could events turn this way? How could a devious slob like that become somebody with a title?
“God in a box,” Stiles chafed, “what am I seeing?”
His words barely scratched from his throat. As he stood staring, he thought perhaps that only Ambassador Spock, standing with some effort at his side, had heard him at all.
He felt Spock’s peripheral glance. But the ambassador never said a thing to him about his reaction to the person they were both standing before. This was crazy. This was a dream.
Spock stepped forward, favoring his bloody leg, to draw the provost’s attention away from Stiles and onto himself.
“Provost, I am Ambassador Spock of the United Federation of Planets. Fifteen years ago I was the emissary to your government. We are here to negotiate the greening of Red Sector. Circumstances have caused the Romulans to need Federation assistance. On an Interstellar Temporary Pass, we have come here to make an offer. The sector can be reopened, allowing for trade, assistance, technological exchange, and limited diplomatic relations without requiring membership. We can help the Pojjana in many ways—agricultural efficiency, technological—”
“We don’t want help.”
Orsova stood up behind his big desk, and there was something prophetic and distant about him. The desk sprawled like an emblem—tiger oak. That was something Zevon had talked about a long time ago. The memory sparked to life.
“What do you want?” Orsova asked.
“We wish to negotiate for custody of the Romulan prisoner named Zevon.”
Please let him still be alive, please let him still be alive, please—
Orsova said nothing about Zevon, clearly determined not to give anything away. Instead, he simply asked, “Why do you want one of our prisoners?”
“Damn you,” Stiles grumbled.
Spock looked at him.
In frustration and contempt Stiles wagged a hand at Orsova. “What am I—chopped cabbage? He damned well knows Zevon’s not just ‘one of their prisoners’ to me! Is he alive or not, you bastard?”
At Stiles’s single step forward, two of the four guards launched forward from the sides of the office, blocking his way to Orsova. The guard closest to him drove the butt of his rifle into Stiles’s stomach, and he was driven down.
Spock grasped the guard’s arm, avoiding the weapon, and pushed him back in such a way that somehow the movement wasn’t threa
tening. As Stiles gasped at the ambassador’s feet, battling crying lungs and a bruised rib, Spock spoke again to Orsova.
“If the Pojjana strike a deal with the Federation, the Bal Quonott and all others in the sector will be pressured to deal with you on favorable terms. That would give the Pojjana substance beyond just your planet. Indeed, you would be a power to be reckoned with in the entire sector. Certainly that offers some value.”
Orsova’s round bronze face tilted a little like a ball rolling. Maybe he was trying to think. Looked like it hurt.
Stiles’s legs were watery as he waited. He had to force himself to stand still, not flinch or shift around, to bury the cloying nervousness, cloak the haunt of old terrors.
“You’ll be held,” Orsova ultimately decided, “as part of the foreign ship that invaded our planetary space. You’ll be held as hostages until the rest of your ship up there surrenders. The ship is mine now, property of the Pojjana people. The crew will be turned over to your government after a healthy fine is paid for destruction of property, violating our space…and any other things I think of.”
This was Orsova’s playing ground. That showed clearly, as he stood up behind his big fancy desk, made of the wood Zevon had long ago discovered did not compress during Constrictors. He came around the bright orange piece of furniture, touching it only lightly along the edge. At the corner of the desk he paused, only steps from Stiles. His eyes burned into Stiles’s eyes.
“Except you,” he said. “I’ll keep you for the memories.”
Cued by some secret signal or habit, two of the four armed guards in the room came forward as Orsova moved out from his desk and paused again at Stiles’s side. The guards were close enough to threaten against any attempts to attack the provost, so Stiles was careful to remain perfectly still. Being frozen into place by past horrors helped some.
Orsova’s eyes drew tight. “It was an insult to me when they took you away. I promised the planet I would get you back. I kept your cell waiting. Didn’t even clean it. Part of the promise.”
With eyes flat and still as a doll’s, Orsova motioned to the guards.