The matriarch who had replaced T’Pau in this office was unremarkable in appearance, neither tall nor short, of an indeterminate age, a touch of gray at her temples all that was visible of hair swept up inside a wimplelike headdress that had not been in fashion for more than a decade. The best spies, it is said, are invisible, and Saavik allowed herself the luxury of wondering if T’Saan had worn the wimple when she was “on the job.” She suspected not.
Pay attention! she cautioned herself. You don’t have time for trivia. Every word you speak in this room must be precisely correct or it all collapses.
At their final meeting, she had argued with Narak about this part.
“I am to go to the offices of the V’Shar and announce that I have ‘come across’ sensitive material indicating that Ambassador Sarek is a traitor,” she’d repeated his instructions. “I am unskilled in lying. How am I to convince them? In what manner am I supposed to have ‘come across’ this information? How—?”
Narak had laughed and placed one finger on her lips. Of all the violations, this one angered her the most. Not for the first time, she wanted to rip his throat out, though first, she thought, she would break his fingers one by one.
“In addition to being treacherous, Sarek is careless,” Narak said, sounding as if he were reciting from a script. “He has made the mistake of occasionally allowing you to be in the room when he speaks to his contacts. It’s a form of psychopathology, a need to flaunt his accomplishments, and also a credit to his confidence in you and your loyalty.”
“No one will believe that of Sarek,” she had protested. “No one.”
Narak had sighed and shaken his head. “Poor naïf! People will believe anything of anyone if it’s spoken with enough confidence. I will tell you what to say when the time comes. You need merely repeat what you hear, but with the utmost sincerity.”
So she sat on the edge of the too-comfortable chair and, her untouched tea growing cold on the table before her, studied her hands and recited the script as Narak whispered it in her ear, telling T’Saan precisely where to find the incriminating data, both in Sarek’s personal files and in the archives at the Enclave. Her voice was low, her speech hesitant, as if it took all her courage to say the words, and in truth it did. It was doubtless that ring of truth that made the words believable.
T’Saan heard her out in silence. When Saavik was done, she said, “These charges are quite grave. You realize what will happen if they are verified?”
Saavik’s eyes met hers. “I do.”
T’Saan crossed to her desk, logging in the entry codes that allowed the V’Shar access to even the most private files of any Vulcan official, up to and including the ambassadorial level, and scanned the files Saavik had indicated, a slight frown bringing her upslanted brows closer together. When she had finished, she looked at Saavik thoughtfully.
Now, Saavik thought, it is ended.
She waited for T’Saan to speak, but the matriarch’s next words were not for her. Touching the comm toggle on her desk, she made a series of inquiries. When all of them had apparently been answered in the affirmative, she gathered her thoughts for a moment, then turned back to Saavik.
“I regret it took so long, but we wanted to be certain there were no loose ends. We have backtracked all of the trails you set and pinpointed the entire network, down to an ancient in the Ministry of Records who has passed for Vulcan for over a century, and has been issuing false documents to fellow operatives in all that time. There will be some green faces in the inner chambers of the Tal Shiar when this is over. You have done well, better than could be hoped. Kal-toh!”
Saavik exhaled in what might have been a sigh. It seemed as if she had been holding her breath since the day Tolek first accosted her in the market.
“This was no chance meeting,” he had said. “I sought you out.”
“For what purpose?”
“Because you and I were once close,” Tolek had said, and for the briefest moment Saavik had wished for that closeness again, no matter the adversity that had forged it. “And I wanted to warn you …”
… and simultaneously recruit me, she had thought.
She had left the market and, still carrying her basket, immediately repaired to the address Tolek had conveyed to her, finding herself face-to-face with T’Pau’s successor.
Unlike her predecessor who, while she might deny it as illogical, had cherished her place in the spotlight, T’Saan, like the operatives she ran, preferred to remain unobtrusive, and the average Vulcan would not have known who she was. But the complicated relationship between Sarek and T’Pau gave all of Sarek’s kin a specialized knowledge. Saavik had known immediately whom she was dealing with.
“There is no obligation on thee at this moment,” T’Saan had said at that first meeting, speaking formally, seeing the barely masked resentment in the younger woman’s dark eyes. “Thee knows nothing other than what thy friend has told thee in casual conversation. Thee are free to leave and give the matter no further thought.”
If anyone but Tolek had come to her, would she have done precisely that, or would innate curiosity have overcome her desire to avoid any such entanglement?
“I have not much time,” Saavik had said, then stopped herself.
Logically she should have told T’Saan what she had told Tolek, that she was leaving Vulcan with the dawn and could likely be of little use to the assignment, whatever it might be. But something—was it only her implied duty to Tolek?—made her decide quickly, perhaps recklessly, and she finished her thought not at all as she’d begun it.
“I have not much time,” she repeated, and T’Saan seemed not to notice the hesitation. “Lady Amanda knows I have gone to the market. I can perhaps tell her I encountered an … acquaintance … and stopped for tea, but too long away will raise questions.”
“Thinking like a spy already!” T’Saan was clearly pleased, and she dropped her formal tone. “Very well, then, there is something you must know that even Tolek does not. We believe this is about far more than a few unexplained deaths …”
She had thought it odd that T’Saan seemed pleased that she was going offworld. Unaccustomed to the ways of espionage, she had accepted it at the time. Since she was needed only to do research, was it not logical?
It was only at Tolek’s death that she began to see it in another light. The rage she had experienced when asked to confirm the identity of his body had been only partly feigned. It was not until then that she was told the full extent of the operation.
For, yes, she had received instructions from T’Saan or another senior operative even on Deema III. At first she’d assumed that everything she knew Tolek also knew, but gradually she became aware that each of them had knowledge that the other did not, and there were others along the skein who knew other things, each operative’s knowledge carefully compartmentalized from the others, in case there was a breach.
And, yes, her rage at Sarek at Starfleet HQ had been feigned, acting under instructions, because by then it was clear not only that she was to be a target of the killer or killers but also that she was but a stepping-stone on the path to get to Sarek.
Thus, her every action taken, from at first taking herself out of harm’s way by leaving for Deema III to setting herself out as bait by the brackish pond in the desert, and every step along the way, had been deliberate. The only glitch had been Tolek’s murder.
“He overstepped his instructions,” T’Saan explained now. “He understood that we could provide protection only to a certain point—every operative onworld had backup; you were the only one, because we had vetted every member of Chaffee’s crew, including the civilian, who was out on the rim alone, and it appears Tolek calculatedly stepped beyond that point.
“He came to realize we intended to use you as bait, so to speak, and he resented it. His tendency to protect you in childhood, often to his own detriment—oh, yes, we knew about that—muddled his thinking. We will not disgrace his memory by calling it illogical, but it wa
s unclear.”
“Is there anything about us that the V’Shar does not know?” Saavik presumed to ask.
It was obvious her role in this was not ended. Even as they spoke, T’Saan busied herself about the room, sending communiqués, locking down files, as if she planned to be away from the office, which she seldom left, for an undetermined amount of time. She and Saavik would be traveling … to apprehend Narak, apparently.
T’Saan responded to her question not unkindly. “It is a sad commentary on even the most evolved of societies that there will always be a need for our kind. The polite Vulcan pretends we do not exist and yet is grateful for our service and equally grateful not to have to examine our methods too closely.
“As for outworlders, they cannot begin to understand the complexities entailed in subscribing to a tradition of truthfulness while yet retaining possession of certain truths that are more powerful when unspoken. Yes, of course we vetted you prior to bringing you into our midst. And when it was ascertained that you had chosen to return to your duties with Starfleet, we at first considered sending another operative with you, but there was no time. Instead, we assured ourselves, inasmuch as we could, that no one aboard your vessel, including the civilian scientist, was a danger to you.”
Even before they met, Saavik had been made aware of Mikal’s hazy past, his ability to disappear for long periods of his personal history, his quixotic approach to his work and to his life. Perhaps that had colored their relationship even before it began. She would never know.
But when she had seen him loitering outside the wall this morning, she had not stopped. She could not. She had to see this through and done before she could see him clearly, unencumbered by the roles she had been playing these past months. Only then would she know what future, if any, lay in store.
• • •
Mikal, meanwhile, had found the one human-run bar on Vulcan that never closed and was getting himself drunk. Mironova tracked him down.
“That didn’t take long,” she remarked, stepping daintily over a Thermian’s tentacles and settling in beside Mikal, elbows on the bar. “Single malt, neat,” she told the bartender. “Jameson, if you’ve got it. Now, then,” she said after her drink had arrived and Mikal hadn’t said a word. “Lovers’ quarrel, or did she just not speak to you? Which was it?”
“What it is, is none of your business!” Mikal growled, hunched over his drink like a dog with a bone, and Mironova wondered if he’d snap at her if she tried to take it away from him.
“Right. Assumption: It did not go well, and here you are.”
“Never so much as knocked on the door,” he mumbled, “but after she breezed past me like I was invisible, I walked back to the port. Was going to just beam back up to the ship and lick my wounds, but guess who’s just beaming down? Sarek his own self, just back from Coridan. Trading pleasantries, must come for dinner sometime, talk about my work, blah blah blah.”
“Oh, I doubt he was that talky. That’s just you extrapolating.” Mironova sipped her Jameson. “Maybe he just doesn’t want you dating his daughter.”
Mikal gave her a sour look, finished his drink, motioned to the bartender for another.
“On me,” Mironova said. “And it’s his last. Mikal,” she said before he could object, “there’s something you should know. Everything that’s happened … it may not have been her fault. In fact, I’m almost completely certain it wasn’t.”
She gave him a brief précis of what she knew, that “certain authorities, which shall not be named,” had meticulously gone over her crew manifest and Mikal’s background and her own as soon as Saavik had accepted her assignment. Mironova had thought at first that it was because of the importance of Sarek’s family and let it go. Hers not to question why, and so on. As events had unfolded over the ensuing months, and she’d followed Saavik’s course of action as best she could through Starfleet scuttlebutt, she’d drawn very different conclusions, and she shared those conclusions with Mikal now.
When she’d finished, his shoulders were shaking.
She’d expected rage, cursing, and throwing things, was prepared to make it up to the bartender for whatever damages were incurred, but it didn’t come. Instead he pounded his fist once on the bar, hard enough to rattle glasses on the back bar, then relaxed his hand and put his head down on his folded arms. When the bartender set a fresh drink down and crept away, he didn’t even notice.
“You might have told me!” he accused Mironova after a long moment, wiping his nose inelegantly on one multicolored sleeve.
“I couldn’t until now, and you know it. It’s still all speculation,” she said crisply, motioning to the bartender that she would pay for the drinks, and slipped one arm around Mikal’s shoulders. “Come on, baby,” she said, pulling him unsteadily to his feet. “Mum will see you home …”
At T’Saan’s signal, Saavik followed her down a passage that had opened out of the wall behind her desk, amid much sliding and rotating, at the touch of a button. The passage led to a turbolift that took them down a considerable depth to a network of tram tunnels deep beneath the city of ShiKahr.
“Begun in ancient times,” T’Saan answered the unasked question. “Originally as shelters during the bombing. Extant beneath every major metropolis where the seismic profile is sufficiently stable. Expanded and interconnected over the centuries. One never knows when one will need to get somewhere quickly without drawing undue attention.”
“Where are we going?” Saavik wanted to know as a single tram whooshed into view with uncanny quietness, given its speed, and its doors slipped open to admit them.
“Back to the beginning,” T’Saan said mysteriously, buckling the shoulder harness that would keep her from being squeezed up against the bulkheads on the curves, and indicating that Saavik was to do the same.
The best way to roll up a network such as Narak’s, the V’Shar had learned from generations of experience, was to first trace it out to its farthest ends, noting as many of the smaller operatives as possible and assigning a watcher to each, surreptitiously moving up the nodes until the spider at the center of the kal-toh sphere was reached.
Even as they traveled beneath the surface of Vulcan at incredible speeds, T’Saan stayed in communication with her operatives from time to time, speaking in a coded language Saavik could not begin to understand. The strength of a signal that could reach beneath kilometers of rock and not fade or break up even when maintained under such speeds was impressive.
And stronger than the signal of her own cochlear implant, Saavik realized almost immediately. Narak would assume his signal would be blocked once she’d entered T’Saan’s office, but was he trying to communicate with her even now?
“It is not possible to remove the implant just yet,” T’Saan had told her as they’d stood in the lift going down to the tram platform. “It is hoped that the spider will assume we are skeptical of your information and are subjecting you to interrogation, so he will not expect to hear from you for at least a day. Have you any idea what he had planned for you if his ‘mission’ were successful?”
“I have not. Only that he intended me to resume my duties in Starfleet as if none of this had happened.”
“He really is quite fond of you,” T’Saan said, watching the younger woman carefully as the lift deposited them at their destination. “We’ve intercepted some of his comms to his other operatives, particularly T’Vaakis. He addresses her as his daughter much as he does you, but he always speaks of you with affection, no matter whom he is speaking to. It is quite possible that this much is true.”
Saavik, perhaps thinking of the sneer in his voice when he spoke to her, said nothing.
“Once he is captured, we will be able to ascertain this for certain. Do you wish to know?”
“I will address it when he is captured,” Saavik said tersely, thinking, perhaps not even then. “It is better for now that nothing cloud my judgment.”
“Indeed.”
As rapid as the underground
tram was, there was still a considerable distance to travel. It was not long before Saavik’s inner directional sense gave her an idea of where they were going.
“May I assume that you are using the signal from the cochlear implant to backtrack him?” She could not bring herself to say his name.
“Negative,” T’Saan said. “We did attempt that at first, but the device is too sophisticated. There are numerous switchbacks, and they alter over time. Just as we ascertain one location, it switches to another.”
“Nevertheless, we are headed in the direction of the shrine at Amorak.”
T’Saan’s glance was appreciative. “You are perceptive. It grieves me that we cannot make you a full-time operative, but I know better than to ask. Your first, best destiny lies elsewhere. We are returning you to Amorak only because there is less surface-to-surface signal noise that far out in the desert. We are hoping it will help us narrow the radius of his likely
location.”
“No need,” Saavik said. “I know where he will be.”
At her suggestion, T’Saan altered the tram’s course.
It was sunset, and the bats were beginning to stir. It would be some hours before the mist rose from the surface of the lake, but the cactus blossoms, their circadian rhythms unaltered for a million years, began inexorably to open, at a pace so slow it could not be observed by the naked eye and yet, if one looked away and then glanced back, one could swear each furled trumpet had altered in that eyeblink, if only a little.
In all his life, Narak had never known such tranquility. For one mad moment he wished he could undo everything he had done in the past year or more, leave Sarek unmolested, throw himself on the mercy of Vulcan authorities, explain why he had been sent here, and hope he would be believed. But the moment passed and, alone in the climate controlled shelter he had brought with him this time for what he assumed would be a long wait, he poured some mineral water and reminded himself that he should have thought of all that at the beginning. Too late now.
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 26