The Dark Veil

by James Swallow

  It had become apparent that Romulus’s star was dying, Bordson explained, and within a scant few years, it would detonate in a nova effect that would consume the heart of the Romulan Star Empire. It was a bleak and appalling pronouncement, and Riker’s emotional response to it had been so strong that moments later his wife, Deanna, had raised him over the intercom. Five decks away, his half-Betazoid wife had sensed her husband’s shock and feared the worst.

  Later, while their son, Thaddeus, slept, they had talked it over. The boy dozed fitfully, picking up on the dismay of his parents even as he dreamed, and they spoke in quiet tones so they would not disturb him further.

  Bordson’s briefing presented the single greatest catastrophe in living galactic history, and Riker’s first impulse was to ask: What can we do to help?

  It came as no surprise for Will and Deanna to learn that Jean-Luc Picard had already taken that same intent to Starfleet Command. Of all the men Riker had ever known, there was no one more ready to take on the mantle of something as crucial and as difficult as this, and seeing his former captain’s name attached to the endeavor brought him hope. If anyone could find a way to offer aid to millions of displaced Romulans, to former sworn enemies, it was Picard.

  In days, Picard had given up command of the Enterprise-E to lead the gargantuan relief effort. Riker offered Titan and her crew, and there was work enough for everyone. More than they could manage, if he were honest.

  For a year, Titan went above and beyond, covering the gaps as other ships were diverted into Romulan-controlled space on refugee rescue operations, taking on more missions than they ever had before. His crew had made him proud, each of them rising to the greatest challenge of their generation.

  But it all went away within a day.

  Riker woke in the dead of ship’s night to find his wife standing over him, her dark eyes shimmering. Something awful has happened on Mars, she said. They’re saying it was a terrorist attack by a group of rogue synthetics. Geordi was there… No one knows if he made it out.

  He held her for a time, and then they both shuttered away their fears like Starfleet officers and went to work. Riker’s Enterprise shipmate Geordi La Forge would later be counted among those lucky few who had escaped the destruction of the Utopia Planitia shipyards as the atmosphere of Mars burned, but that tiny fragment of good news would be eclipsed by what came next.

  With the new fleet gutted by the terror attack, the rescue initiative was beyond overstretched, and with Federation member worlds up in arms, the inevitable happened. Starfleet withdrew its aid and the Romulans were left to fend for themselves. Unable to carry on in the face of such an order, Picard resigned his commission.

  Jean-Luc wasn’t the only one who wanted to resign, of course. Will wrote a letter to Bordson that would have seen him follow in his former commander’s footsteps, but he couldn’t bring himself to send it. As long as he still had a ship and a crew, a ship as good as Titan and a crew as good as his, there was still a chance to do what was right.

  I have to believe that.

  Riker blinked, and his reverie faded, bringing him back hard to the moment as Tribune Nadei’s booming voice rolled over the chamber.

  “To find certainty, we must first ascertain the human’s purpose here. What was his ship’s mission so close to our borders? To conduct espionage against the Empire? Undoubtedly. But what else?”

  “We’re not out here to spy on you.” Riker denied it automatically, and immediately regretted his abrupt retort. It was a lie. Every Starfleet mission within a few parsecs of the Neutral Zone involved scanning across the border to observe ship movements and intercept communications from the other side, and the Romulans knew it. He modified his reply. “We keep watch, but that’s all. You do the same.” And more, he wanted to add, but it would have been a cheap shot.

  The weight of every word he uttered in this room was clear to Riker, and he knew he could not afford to waste them. Relations between his government and that of Romulus were on thin ice, tensions edging toward the same heights as in the days of the first interstellar war between them in the latter half of the twenty-second century. In the worst-case scenario, what emerged from this hearing could have negative consequences across the entire sector.

  Riker had come here specifically to stop that from happening, and not for the first time he wished that his wife were standing beside him, lending him that bottomless well of empathy she possessed, and helping him navigate these difficult waters.

  “Our mission in this sector was one of peace,” Riker went on. “My ship was doing something very simple, when you cut to the heart of it. We were taking someone home.”

  SIX DAYS EARLIER

  TWO

  Deanna Troi’s errant charge deliberately slowed his walking speed until they were practically going backward, lingering by the Starship Titan’s observation windows as they moved down the port side of the vessel. Elongated stars, distorted by the effect of faster-than-light warp speed travel, scudded past on the far side of the portals. The impression was that she was walking against some invisible wind.

  Certainly, what she was doing right now felt like an uphill struggle. “Thaddeus…” She injected a note of warning into the boy’s name, drawing it out to show him that her patience was starting to thin. “Stop dawdling.”

  “I’m not.” It was a poor fib. Troi’s son was, in point of fact, the dictionary definition of dawdling, literally dragging his heels as he followed in his mother’s footsteps. It had taken an age just to get him dressed, an eon to march him out of their quarters, and now she was beginning to wonder if she would get the boy to his classes before the heat death of the universe. “I just don’t want to walk fast,” he added.

  “Really?” She reached a slender finger toward her combadge. “I can have you beamed right to school, you know. I’m a commander, I can do that.”

  “No!” Thaddeus made an animated show of moving, somehow doing it without actually advancing that far. “I’ll walk. I am walking.” He let his shoulders slump melodramatically, as if this was the absolute worst imposition he could possibly have endured.

  Troi hid a smile from him, admiring the performance. Maybe he’ll become an actor when he’s older, she thought. He needs to learn a little more nuance, though.

  Her mother had been quite amused when Deanna mentioned Thaddeus’s theatrics during their last holo-communication, and Lwaxana Troi took great delight in telling Deanna that the behavior of her grandson was the precise echo of hers at his age. Troi refused to accept that, of course, and offered the boy her hand.

  He eyed it like it was poisonous, and did not accept. “Do I have to go to school today?”

  “It’s a school day,” she told him. “What do you think?”

  “Urlak sek farah.” He pouted, saying the words into his chest.

  Troi eyed the boy. “In Standard, please.” Since the age of three, Thaddeus had been refining his own invented language, a dialect he called Kelu, and sometimes he would slip into it just to make a point. His parents had first thought it was a phase the bright youngster was going through, but as he got older he added more and more to it, all too often scribbling down notes on it when he was supposed to be doing his schoolwork.

  Other kids build model starships or plant gardens, Will had noted, with a smile. Ours is writing his own language.

  Which was fair enough, but recently Troi had learned that some of the Titan’s junior crew was adopting Kelu words as a kind of informal shipboard slang, and she wasn’t sure if she should be pleased or perturbed by that.

  “Okay, fine.” Her son made a face like a grumpy Lurian and finally fell in step with her, admitting defeat but still determined not to go gracefully. He made a grunting, wheezing noise with each footstep he took.

  Troi nodded to a couple of lieutenants from the astrometrics division who passed them going in the other direction. She wondered if it would be detrimental to her reputation as ship’s senior counselor to be observed as the mother of
such a recalcitrant child.

  She sighed, stopped and crouched so that they were both on the same level. “Is something the matter at school? Is that why you don’t want to go today?” Troi reached out and straightened Thad’s hair.

  “It’s just… My project… It’s going to be boring now.”

  “But you like languages.” Troi continued to be quietly impressed with her son’s ability to soak up dialects of all kinds. Along with his Kelu project, he already knew enough French to read the copy of Le Petit Prince that Jean-Luc Picard had given him as a birthday gift, and only a couple of nights ago, he had burped the entirety of the Klingon alphabet and reduced Will to tears of laughter.

  Suddenly, the floodgates opened, and her son began to talk a mile a minute. Thad explained he wanted to do something clever to impress his teachers in Titan’s kindergarten, as part of an assignment to pick a sentient species and learn all about them—and he had boldly chosen the Jazari as his subject.

  “Ah.” Troi gave a knowing nod. To a child, it must have seemed like a brilliant idea. But it was doomed to fail.

  Titan’s current mission was taking the ship to the Jazari star system near the Romulan Neutral Zone, and a party of Jazari diplomats were their guests down on deck eight. There was even a member of the species serving as an active crewman in the medical department, a young lieutenant named Zade, one of very few of his kind in Starfleet. The Jazari were not part of the United Federation of Planets, but they had an associate status, a kind of halfway house between unaffiliated independence and a formal application for UFP membership.

  What Troi’s son had failed to reckon with was the Jazari’s strict rules about personal privacy. To call them reclusive was like saying Tellarites were stubborn: technically correct, but also a massive understatement.

  The Jazari had shared practically nothing of their culture with the wider Federation, beyond details of their complex codes of personal conduct. Their home planet was off-limits to visitors, just like their quarters and private spaces aboard the ship; they never conversed in anything but Federation Standard; and they had extremely exacting guidelines about medical matters and death rituals.

  They were an enigma, but a very polite one. In return for a modest trade in the mineral ryetalyn—a vital component in certain vaccines—the Federation accommodated the Jazari’s desire to see more of the galaxy and quietly held open the door of friendship. The prevailing hope was that as they saw more of what the Federation had to offer, they would let down their guard and come into the fold.

  That hadn’t happened, though, not in the century since their ships first made contact, not after trade and diplomatic missions had been set up, or even the inclusion of a handful of their people into Starfleet. It was widely accepted that the Jazari would come around when it suited them, if ever, and not before.

  “I thought it would be really neat if I could learn some Jazari words,” Thad concluded, his expression glum. “I asked Lieutenant Zade, and he was nice but he said he couldn’t help me.” He looked up at his mother, thinking it through. “You could order him to do it. You’re a commander, you can do that. Or Dad? He’s captain, and—”

  “Sorry, kiddo, but that’s not how it works. If the Jazari want to keep some things private from other people, we have to respect that. You wouldn’t want everyone knowing every little thing about you, would you?”

  “No,” he admitted, reaching up to take her hand as they walked. “But we don’t know anything about them at all!” Thad made the face he did when he was thinking hard. “Maybe they don’t even have their own language.”

  Some theories about the Jazari agreed, speculating that they communicated telepathically, like the Cairn or the Aenar. But Troi had never once sensed even the slightest hint of a psionic aura from Zade or others of his kind.

  “It is a mystery,” she noted. “But remember what your father said, that’s why we’re out here in space, to learn things. We might not be learning much from the Jazari right now, but we are always learning something.” She smiled at him. “Every day is a school day for the Titan. You’re lucky, you get the weekends off.”

  “I suppose.” Thad gave an elaborate sigh as they approached the kindergarten, where the rest of his class were gathering prior to the start of lessons.

  The commander noted another parent with a similarly reluctant child across the corridor, an El-Aurian officer with Titan’s diplomatic team. The two mothers exchanged a brief look of mutual sympathy.

  “How about this?” she said, thinking on her feet. “That’s Lieutenant Commander Phosia over there. She’s an El-Aurian, and they have a very interesting language structure. I could talk to her. She might be able to help you with your project.”

  Her son’s eyes lit up at the idea. “Okay! That would be cool!” And in that instant, all his morose mood evaporated and he was beaming from ear to ear. Troi couldn’t help but be taken by his infectious grin, and it filled her heart. She gave him an impulsive hug and he squirmed.

  “Mo-o-om,” he said, drawing out the word. “Don’t be clingy.”

  She deliberately gave him an extra squeeze and then let go. “I’m a commander, I can do that.”

  As the children streamed into their schoolroom, Troi intercepted Phosia and put the request to her. The other woman was thin and lissome, with large eyes and hair in a short purple bob, and always with a warm smile to offer.

  “I’ll trade you,” she said, indicating the little girl she had dropped off. “My daughter Hanee wants to study up on Betazoids for her project. She’s fixated on the idea that your people run around naked all the time.”

  “Not all the time,” said Troi, and as she spoke she sensed a background note of frustration in the other woman. It was a rare emotion to find in as good-natured a species as Phosia’s. “How are things with you?”

  The other woman gave a shrug. “Is it that obvious?” Phosia was in charge of the team assigned to making sure the needs of their Jazari visitors were all taken care of, and she explained that as much as she tried, the guests wouldn’t let her. “Every day it’s the same thing. I go to the quarters we assigned to them and meet someone in the anteroom. I ask them if they need anything. They tell me they don’t. I ask if everything’s fine. They say it is. I offer them a tour of the ship, some holodeck time, or a dinner with the command staff. They say thank you but no, thank you. And repeat.”

  “They haven’t come out since we picked them up at Vega,” noted Troi. “Perhaps the Jazari have a very high threshold for boredom.”

  “They’re not even eating,” said Phosia. “Or at least, not our food. None of the replicators in their rooms have been activated. I think they brought their own supplies.”

  “I suppose they could be stargazing.”

  “They’re reading, I think. We can’t exactly spy on them, but we’ve seen some use in the computer system, calls for database information, but nothing that isn’t on the interstellar public record. Other than that…” Phosia made a vague motion with her hand. “Commander, I was seriously thinking about asking Captain Riker if I can offer them a spin in his chair. Anything to try and tempt them out of there.”

  “Don’t take it personally. You only had a week. Federation ambassadors have been trying to get them to open up for decades.”

  “They’re distant, but they’re just so pleasant about it,” said Phosia. “They’re like Vulcans, if you replaced the philosophy of logic with one of… politeness.” She exhaled, in a little gasp of exasperation. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. They’ll all be off the ship by day’s end and that’ll be that. I suppose it’s a better class of problem to have, when you think of certain other diplomatic missions we’ve been involved in.”

  Troi sighed deeply. “No one is going to forget the Pakled delegation’s visit in a hurry.”

  “Yes.” Phosia frowned. “I confess, I don’t understand how a species that achieved space travel couldn’t grasp the basics of a rudimentary waste-management system.”

&n
bsp; A two-tone bosun’s whistle sounded, cutting through their conversation. “Commander Troi, report to the captain’s ready room.” The crisp diction of Titan’s Izarian first officer, Commander Christine Vale, sounded around them. “Commander Troi to the ready room.”

  “Duty calls,” said Troi, and tapped her communicator to affirm she was on her way. She took a step toward the turbolift, and a thought occurred to her. She called after Phosia. “If in doubt, you could try offering the Jazari a chance to sample the chocolate desserts up in the ship’s lounge. Who could say no to that?”

  Phosia chuckled. “If that doesn’t work, then they truly are a species like none we have ever encountered.”

  * * *

  Riker leaned forward, absently running his fingers through his beard. He’d been letting it develop, growing it a little longer these days, flouting the grooming regulations. Partly because he liked the way it framed his face, and partly because it gave him something to do while he was thinking.

  “Chris, what are we seeing here?” He gestured at the holographic panel hanging in the air above his ready room’s desk, like an untethered window into a dark sky.

  “You already know the answer to that, sir.” His exec stood on the far side of the desk, her slender arms folded across her chest. That hawkish look in Christine Vale’s eyes gave her a severe air, the same no-nonsense glare that must have served her well in her original career in planetside law enforcement.

  Vale was a fast-moving officer rising up through Starfleet security and into the command track, and Riker had selected her for the post of Titan’s first officer soon after getting his captaincy. He’d had to work to persuade her to take the role, a fact that, if anything, had convinced him she was the right one for the job. Vale would make an excellent captain herself one day, but she was determined to put the work in and earn it by merit. That was fine with Riker. Any officer who went for the shortcuts wasn’t someone he wanted on his bridge crew.