by Peter David
Well . . . that was the sticking point.
Soleta’s righteous indignation over the freeing of Rajari had gotten her all the way to Titan, but now that she was there, she wasn’t entirely sure just what she was going to do. She couldn’t simply walk up to him and shoot him. Was she to warn him off, perhaps? Tell him to stay away from her father? That might work . . . right up until the point where Rajari laughed in her face, as he most likely would. Why should he care about her threats, or what she wanted? She was nothing to him. Nothing except the daughter of the woman whose life he had forever damaged.
So Soleta was in something of a quandary as she made her way through Catalina City. As she tried to figure out exactly how to handle Rajari, she also couldn’t help but register disappointment with the state of the city itself. What had once been a rough-and-tumble, hard-bitten frontier establishment had metamorphosed, over the centuries, into little more than a tourist trap. Tourism was Catalina City’s primary stock-in-trade, and even that was a dying one after all these decades. People who were new to space travel would come to Catalina City to see what was once the showcase, the jewel, of Federation exploration. But the years had long since passed it by, and the city was merely a shadow of its former glory days. She felt as if she could smell the decay in the air. Buildings were badly in need of repair, garish lights flickered on buildings throughout. There was a general seediness to the place that saddened her, for certainly the pioneer spirit which had created the city would never have wanted it to end up like this.
There was nothing, however, that she could do about that. Instead she needed to focus her attention on the problem at hand, and that problem was Rajari.
She headed for his apartment, having gotten the address off the records. It seemed to her that, as she drew closer to the area where Rajari resided, her surroundings became even more depressed-looking.
Then Rajari walked past her.
It was a fortunate thing that he was paying no attention to her whatsoever, because Soleta did a very obvious double-take. She stared after him, not quite believing that she had seen what she had seen. Not believing that the man who had just disappeared into a bar was the man she was seeking.
She blinked several times as if that might somehow correct the vision that was now embedded in her mind. Then she turned on her heel and backtracked, heading toward the bar into which Rajari had gone.
She stood at the door and peered in. Rajari was not only seated at the bar, but he already had a drink in his hand. She stepped gingerly into the bar, allowing her eyes to grow accustomed to the much dimmer lighting.
No one gave Soleta a second glance. That was largely because she was not wearing her Starfleet uniform. She had opted for less obvious civilian garb, believing that not attracting attention might be preferable (although she had taken the precaution of keeping her comm badge with her; it would provide a quick and convenient means of identification should she find herself in a sticky situation). Her relative anonymity would certainly enable her to get closer to Rajari in order to accomplish . . . well, whatever it was she thought she was going to accomplish, although she still didn’t really have an idea of what that was.
Yes. Yes, it was definitely Rajari, although she still had trouble believing it. It was nothing short of miraculous that she had recognized him at all. He looked nothing as he did in the transmission, and it made her wonder whether he was wearing some sort of disguise, or whether he had simply let himself go quite that quickly. Five weeks was not all that much time, but apparently he had used it well . . . or not well, depending upon one’s point of view.
His hair was quite long now on both sides and down the back. Whereas it had been black and gray when short, now that it was grown out it was almost entirely gray. His eyebrows had been trimmed. Thick beard stubble decorated his face. He still had the distinctive protruding forehead of a Romulan, but that was somewhat downplayed by the overgrown hair. More important—some might even say shocking—his ears were bobbed. What she could see of them through the over-long hair was as neatly rounded as any human’s had ever been. Indeed, as she stared at him, she started to wonder if she wasn’t totally imagining it.
But no. No, she was absolutely positive. Despite the hair, the stubble, despite the ears . . . it was definitely Rajari. She knew it in her bones.
Why had he done this, though? There was a fairly diverse ethnic mix in Catalina City. Did he think people would notice? Or if they did notice, did he think they’d care? She found it hard to believe that he was so determined to blend in that he had gone to such extremes. What other reason then?
Her mind still whirling, Soleta took a seat at a table in a far corner, where she could keep an eye on him without being particularly noticeable. A waitress came over and Soleta ordered a drink from her, which she then proceeded to nurse for several hours. Every so often the waitress would drift by the table, see that Soleta’s glass had not appreciably lessened in its contents, roll her eyes, and walk away. Soleta suspected that, had the bar been more crowded, they might well have chased her away. As it was, she was left alone to observe her target.
Rajari, paying her no mind at all, drank steadily and heavily. He spoke to no one. He looked at no one. Most of the time he stared into his glass, as if trying to divine the secrets of the universe that might be hidden within. Occasionally he would look up and look into a large mirror that was mounted on the wall opposite. It was as if he was trying to see some aspect of himself in that largely unrecognizable reflection. Soleta wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he hadn’t been able to see any. She knew who she was looking at, and she could barely see anything of the man he had been, either.
As she observed him, it gave her time to try and determine just what it was she was hoping to accomplish. She was rather annoyed to realize that, given all the time in the world, no plan was any more forthcoming than it had been before. This was most unlike her. Soleta was meticulous with planning the parameters of anything in which she was involving herself. One did not embark on an experiment if one did not know precisely how one was going to proceed. She started to wonder if perhaps the destruction of the Excalibur was factoring into her present course of action. Because the fact was that if she had waited until she had developed a specific plan of attack, she might never have come up with anything reasonable and, as a result, never embarked on this lunacy in the first place. But the loss of her ship had instilled within her—at least for the time being—something of a “live for the moment” philosophy. She was acting on impulse. She was going where the mood struck her. She wasn’t sure that she liked it, but she likewise wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t like it.
Perhaps those were the parameters of the experiment in which she was engaged. She had become her own test subject.
Lost in her reverie, she suddenly noticed that Rajari was gone.
She jumped up quickly, looking around, and caught a glimpse of him in the street, walking away from the bar with such a brisk step that it was hard to believe he had consumed as much alcohol as he had. Soleta quickly paid her bill and headed out the door. For a panicked moment (at least, as panicked as Soleta ever allowed herself to be) she thought she had lost him. But then she saw him just disappearing around the corner. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had been at all disconcerted. He simply seemed to be heading back to his apartment. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know where that was.
Nevertheless, she started after him, moving briskly. Considering that he wasn’t observing her, she wasn’t at all worried about him spotting her following him.
Still, there was no telling whether Rajari would head off in some other direction. Who knew? Perhaps he was preparing to leave Catalina City, and the bar was his way of passing the time until his shuttle left. If he never returned to the apartment, if he left the city at this point . . .
Her one fear had been that Rajari would leave Titan before she could get there. That they would cross in the night, as it were. She had checked beforehand, and there had been
no record of anyone by his name leaving the colony, but naturally that was hardly conclusive. She could not take the chance that, after having arrived on Titan while he was still in residence, she would then accidentally let Rajari slip through her fingers simply because she wasn’t moving quickly enough.
So Soleta picked up speed until she was practically sprinting down the street. She rounded the corner of a building and didn’t see Rajari on the street. She slowed, trying to figure out which way he had gone, and as she did so she passed an alleyway.
Before she knew what had happened, a dark figure stepped out of the alley and grabbed her by the throat.
The hand clasped around her, cutting off her air. Her eyes widened as she saw Rajari’s implacable stare, even in the alley made even darker by the darkness that was already descending upon the city. Soleta croaked helplessly, brought her hand up to try and apply the Vulcan nerve pinch. Her right hand clamped down . . . on a collar made of some sort of metal, hidden beneath the shabby cloth of his loose-fitting shirt. She couldn’t get into any sort of contact with the nerves of the skin beneath.
“A very convenient bit of armament,” Rajari told her, his voice low and even. She could smell the alcohol on his breath, but it had done nothing to weaken him as near as she could tell. His hand closed even more tightly on her throat. “Vulcans make excellent assassins, you know. There aren’t many of them . . . but the ones that exist are lethal. One has to be prepared. Now . . . there’ll be one less.”
He shoved his full weight against her, pinning her. She was crushed against the wall, his free hand holding her right arm stationary, her left arm immobilized by the positioning of her own body. She had a phaser shoulder-holstered inside her jacket, but she couldn’t get at it. She tried to push him away. No luck. He was too strong. The alley stank of decay and garbage, and she envisioned her body lying there for days without anyone noticing. Rajari adjusted his grip ever so slightly, probably to begin the final chore of crushing her breathing apparatus completely so that she would suffocate right there in the alley. When he did so, however, he inadvertently allowed one bit of air into her lungs, giving her the opportunity to blurt out just one word.
“T’Pas,” she managed to get out before speech was one again not an option.
But it was a name that snagged Rajari’s attention. He tilted his head. “What do you know of T’Pas,” he inquired sharply.
Soleta rasped at him, unable to say anything.
He glanced around as if checking to make sure that there was no one else around. When he saw that they were alone, he eased up slightly. “I said what do you know—”
“I heard you,” she rasped out. “She was my . . .”
Shut up!
The warning came unbidden in her head, but the moment she heard it she knew that it was good advice. Under no circumstance should she tell Rajari that she was T’Pas’s daughter. He would probably kill her right then and there as part of his campaign of vengeance. Of course, he would very likely kill her anyway. It wasn’t as if there was going to be a guaranteed answer in this circumstance. She was just going to have to play it instinctively. This, of course, might very well be a seriously foolish move, because thus far her instincts had gotten her into an alleyway with the hand of a killer Romulan on her throat.
All of this went through her mind in a split instant and then she said, “—my good friend. You . . . you sent her that communiqué . . . you—”
But he didn’t seem to register anything she had said beyond the first sentence. “Was your good friend? You’re not anymore?”
“She’s dead.”
He released her instantly.
Her hand went to her throat, rubbing it reflexively. She sagged against the wall, sucking air gratefully into her lungs. She was now free to go for her phaser, but she held off on doing so since he was making no aggressive move toward her. As a matter of fact, Rajari seemed about as far from threatening as he could possibly be. He looked as if she had smacked him with a hammer. He was gazing in her general direction, but she might as well not have been there for all that he was focusing on her. “Dead?” he said tonelessly. “How? She was . . . so young . . . ?”
“A virus. Unexpected.” Her voice was still raspy, and she suspected it would remain that way for some hours.
“When?”
“Five years ago.”
He shook his head and then laughed softly. “Five years. It’s not as if I just missed her. Still . . .” He looked up at her. “Her friend, you say? You are . . . were . . . her friend?”
“Yes,” she rasped.
“And you came all this way just to tell me that she was dead.”
“No. I came here because of the communiqué . . . the message you sent.”
“Oh yes. So you said.” He sounded quite distracted. “How foolish that must have sounded. Endeavoring to make amends and apologies to a woman long dead.”
“Amends and apologies?” Despite her raspiness, there was fire in Soleta’s voice. “You threatened her.”
“Threatened her? Are you insane?”
There was no hint of duplicity in his voice. His face was open and, amazingly, sincere-looking. Mere moments ago he had worn the dead-eyed expression of one who not only was capable of killing, but would do so with no second thought, no doubt, no regrets. Now he seemed . . . vulnerable somehow. It was hard for Soleta to figure out which one was the real Rajari . . . or if either of them was. “The message you sent . . . you spoke of unfinished business . . . of seeing her in the afterlife.”
“You cannot be serious. You thought that a threat?”
“What else could it have been?”
“Child, you know nothing.” Now there was a bit of the sharpness in his voice. “The contents of the message were not for you. You know nothing of—”
“I know you raped her,” she blurted out.
He seemed taken aback, and his face clouded. “So . . . you do know that. She told you that, did she?”
No, you told me that, she wanted to shout at him. It was painfully obvious that he did not recognize her, did not remember her from years back on the Aldrin. It wasn’t surprising. The circumstances were very different. She herself was different. How innocent she must have looked back then, how clueless. She was also wearing her hair quite differently from the way she had been then, and she had taken the precaution of removing the IDIC hairpin. If he’d seen that, he would have been far more likely to make a connection.
“Yes. She did.”
He backed away from her, bumped up against the other side of the alley, and simply stood there. She said nothing. She wasn’t sure what there was to say.
“I was trying to apologize to her,” he said.
She blinked in confusion. “What?”
“Apologize to her . . . for what I had done to her.”
“I . . . do not understand,” said Soleta. “If that was your desire, why didn’t you come right out and say it.”
“Because I didn’t know who might see the message,” he said. “What if her mate saw it before she did. I have no idea whether she ever told him or not. What would you have had me say? ‘My dear T’Pas, I very much regret I raped you.’ How could I do such a thing to her, particularly if she had managed to conceal it from her husband all these years? So I endeavored to be vague.”
“You were so vague that you convinced me you wanted to hurt her.”
“That is unfortunate. I would never hurt her . . .”
Soleta’s temper flared, and she reined it in. Nevertheless the edge to her voice was still very evident as she said, “You would say that? You, of all individuals?” Unfortunately it came out with more of a croak to her voice than she would have liked.
Rajari looked chagrined. “Yes. Yes, of course, I can see why you would react in that fashion. I, who hurt her so badly, now speak of consideration and feelings. My apologies. I . . .” He shrugged helplessly. “I do not know what else to say.”
Nor did Soleta, who had to admit to hersel
f that she was feeling a bit flummoxed at the moment. She had built up this encounter, or one similar to it, in her mind in any variety of ways, but she had never envisioned it going anything like this. She had to remind herself that this person she was facing was a lifelong liar, a vile creature. “You spoke of unfinished business, and of seeing her in the next life. How else was any reasonable person supposed to interpret those comments other than that you were intending to come after her and, very likely, terminate her.”
He frowned, and it seemed to Soleta as if he were running the words through his head, reviewing the comments, breaking down the sentences and seeing them through her eyes. “Yes. Yes, I can see where you might think that. Language is such an imprecise business, isn’t it. I told her that she deserved more than I gave her. That I was unable to attend to her as I should have, and that I should have handled her differently. I intended it to mean that I should never have treated her so badly in the first place, but I see now that an offensive, even attacking posture could be interpreted from those words. In attempting to leave a situation better than the way I found it, I instead made it worse. What a botched attempt at reparations.” He looked closely at Soleta, as if truly seeing her for the first time. “You know . . . you remind me of someone.”
“Do I?” Soleta kept her cool. “And who might that be.”
“Let me think . . . yes. My sister. You look quite a bit like her, around the eyes and mouth.”
“I am not your sister,” she said tersely.
“No, of course you are not. She is dead. As dead as T’Pas, I fear.”
She had no idea why she said it, but she said “I am sorry for your loss” nevertheless.
“Considering I was trying to strangle you a few minutes ago, that is very generous of you,” he said with no hint of irony. “Hopefully my apology to you now will not be as botched as my similar endeavor to T’Pas, but I am sorry that I tried to hurt you. I thought you were, well . . .”