The Fire and the Rose

by David R. George III

  “Captain,” Sulu said, “I can take my station.”

  Kirk assessed him for a moment, but though the lieutenant looked well, he had just been treated for heart flutter. “Negative,” Kirk said. “Yeoman Takayama, escort Mister Sulu to sickbay and inform the medical staff about what happened to him.”

  “Aye, sir,” Takayama said, and the two officers began toward the lift.

  As Spock headed back to the sciences station, Kirk peered over to the engineering console. “Mister Leslie,” he said, “how are the control circuits?”

  “Showing normal loads now, sir,” Leslie said. “Now that we’re avoiding the areas of instability, we should be fine.”

  As Kirk walked toward Uhura, he saw Wilson standing there, looking to him questioningly. Obviously he hadn’t come to the bridge expecting to be attacked. “Sir?” he asked. “We saw a warning light for the helm.”

  “We’ve got it on manual right now,” Scotty offered. “See if you can reroute the secondaries.”

  Wilson looked to the captain again, who nodded. Once the technician started for the helm, Kirk addressed Uhura. “Lieutenant, contact security,” he said. “See if they can tell where McCoy exited the turbolift.”

  “Aye, sir,” Uhura said.

  “Spock,” Kirk said, continuing over to where the science officer now worked his panel. “What information do we have on cordrazine overdoses?”

  “Checking now, Captain,” Spock said. “There appears to be very little in the literature. It may take a few minutes to collate all of the available anecdotal data we have.”

  “All right,” Kirk said. “In the meantime, I’m going to sickbay to see if anybody down there has any firsthand knowledge. You have the bridge.” Kirk strode back to the turbolift, the doors opening this time to reveal an empty car. He entered, took hold of a control wand, and ordered the lift to take him to sickbay.

  In his mind, he saw the feral expression on McCoy’s face, heard his delusional cries. Kirk knew of cordrazine from an incident that had occurred earlier in his career aboard the U.S.S. Farragut. After circumstances had resulted in a landing party having to hike three days over mountainous terrain in brutally hot conditions, an older officer had suffered a heart attack. The med-tech present had been left with no choice but to chance a minimal dosage of cordrazine.

  The officer had died instantly.

  When the turbolift doors opened, Kirk headed for sickbay, deeply concerned for his friend.

  Spock sat at the sciences station on the Enterprise bridge and pored through the library record tapes, searching for whatever accounts he could find relating to cordrazine overdoses. As he’d told the captain, the medical database contained almost no such information. The scientific data did, however, expose the perils of utilizing the drug at all. While it had proven exceedingly effective in treating heart-related impairments in humans and several other species under the right conditions, it also had a long history of fatal applications. Incorrect diagnoses and inexactly calculated dosages had often resulted in death to the patient.

  During the medical testing of cordrazine prior to the adoption of its use, the impact of an overdose of the drug had been believed apparent. Since it functioned as a strong stimulant for the cardiac muscles, an excess would likely damage the heart to the point of arrest, even in otherwise healthy patients. In most of the very few recorded instances of cordrazine overdose, that had been the case, with death typically occurring within seconds.

  Obviously, that had not happened to Dr. McCoy. Spock did manage to find several reports that chronicled the fate of individuals who had survived having massive amounts of the drug injected into their bodies. In addition to stimulating the heart, cordrazine apparently could have an effect on brain chemistry. In an incident on Earth, in Stockholm, Sweden, a researcher had accidentally ingested a large quantity of the drug. Apparently believing himself under attack, he had barricaded himself in his lab. When colleagues had attempted to push their way inside to help him, they’d found that a trap had been set for them. A chemical explosion had killed seven people—including the original researcher—and injured twenty-three others.

  In another incident, a disturbed individual had tried to use cordrazine to commit suicide, at least according to a note that he had left behind explaining his actions. Instead, he had survived, but had lost all knowledge of the people in his life. The condition had persisted for weeks, until he’d been found dead after putting a phaser to his own head.

  In a third episode, a physician at the University of Alpha Centauri had suffered an overdose of cordrazine, though under what circumstances had never been determined. She had been found unconscious and taken to a hospital, from which she had subsequently vanished. Five months later, her corpse had been found halfway across the quadrant, in a public lodge in the city of Eglantine on Stygian III. An autopsy had failed to pinpoint the cause of her demise.

  On Rigel II, a woman who danced regularly at a cabaret had been found lifeless in her dressing room. A postmortem examination had revealed that an extreme amount of cordrazine had been introduced into her body over a period of time. A criminal trial had later seen a jealous patron of the cabaret convicted of poisoning her with the drug.

  In all, Spock found thirty-seven documented occurrences of individuals who had experienced a cordrazine overdose. Of those, only three had survived and returned to a normal life. Eight-point-one percent, Spock automatically thought, calculating Dr. McCoy’s chances for a full recovery.

  Poor odds, he concluded. Poor odds indeed.

  Four

  2293

  Alexandra Tremontaine walked along the wide hall that circled the complex of conference rooms located in the political center. Her low heels hammered along the slate floor, sending echoes reverberating through the open, empty space. She would reach the negotiating session late, nearly half an hour after it had been scheduled to begin. Familiar with the punctuality and the punctiliousness of the Frunalians, she could not imagine that the Federation delegation would have been able to delay the start of the meeting for more than a couple of minutes, if for even that long. Despite that she’d made the trip to Orelte all the way from Earth and that she’d arrived only earlier today, she knew that the Frunalian ambassador, Jalira Tren, would not consider that sufficient reason for her tardiness.

  In fact, Tremontaine counted on it.

  She stopped before the pair of brushed stainless steel doors that led into the conference room being utilized for the summit. Before entering, she peered down at herself, smoothed the hunter green fabric of her conservative dress, adjusted on her bodice the small pin that described the insignia of the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs. She consulted the data slate she carried, reviewing the names of the members of the Frunalian and Federation contingents. She’d met everybody present at one time or another, save for the new UFP ambassador, Spock. There had been ample time and opportunity to do so within the last couple of hours, but she’d decided that it would be more advantageous for her to appear at the conference fundamentally unknown to him.

  Finally, Tremontaine deactivated her slate, then pulled open one of the doors and strode into the room. Inside, chairs rimmed the oval space, both along the walls and around a similarly shaped table at its center. A large screen dominated the long curve of one wall and currently displayed an image of mountainous, craggy terrain, which Tremontaine assumed to be an area on the planet nearest the Frunalian sun. A ruddy vein of exposed rock likely revealed the presence of the valuable and rare rubindium ore that the UFP had for some time now been seeking the rights to mine.

  As Tremontaine paced toward the table, all five individuals present looked over at her from where they sat. Ambassador Tren stood up at one end of the table, and Ambassador Spock followed suit at the other. The one Frunalian aide and the two Federation aides—a Trill woman and a human man—remained seated. “Ambassador Tremontaine,” Tren said. “Welcome back to Orelte.” Tren spoke her words evenly, but Tremontaine knew that the gracious
greeting was in no way meant to excuse her lateness.

  “How good to see you again, Ambassador,” Tremontaine said. Tren stood several centimeters shorter than her own one-point-eight-five meters, although the fleshy comb that ran from the Frunalian’s brow, across the crown of her head, and down her spine added to her height. That sensory appendage indicated that Tren had already undergone her Shift. She’d also lost both the ridges that had once risen from the backs of her shoulders, along with the entirety of the exomembrane that had covered her sage skin. As well, her four breasts had developed, all of them clearly defined beneath the formfitting metallic suit she wore.

  “I’m afraid that this meeting started—” Tren glanced at a chronometer in the center of the table. “—twenty-seven minutes ago. Your appearance here at this time is a disruption.” She did not sound angry or argumentative, but simply as though stating the facts as she saw them.

  “My apologies, Ambassador,” Tremontaine said. “As you know, I reached your world only today. I did not intend to get to this conference late, but I was unavoidably detained.”

  At the other end of the table, Spock spoke up, and Tremontaine peered over at him. “I’m certain that you can provide an understandable reason for your delayed arrival,” he said. “Nevertheless, it is inappropriate for you to interrupt these proceedings.” Lean and tall, about her own height, the Vulcan had a narrow, weathered face, rather handsome, she thought. He wore gray slacks and a loose, dark blue tunic, down the right side of which marched a series of silver glyphs.

  “Actually,” Tremontaine said, holding Spock’s gaze, “my disturbance of this meeting is not only appropriate, but necessary.” She turned to face Tren once more. “Ambassador, I bring word from the Federation that we are withdrawing from these negotiations.”

  “What?” the Frunalian aide said, coming up out of his chair. Tren fixed him with a glare and he quickly sat back down without saying another word.

  Looking back at Tremontaine, Tren said, “I do not understand. Is the Federation no longer interested in mining our rubindium?”

  “My understanding is that we’re as interested as ever,” Tremontaine said. “It is simply that these discussions have continued for quite a while, last year with Ambassador Pelfrey and over the last month with Ambassador Spock. By all appearances, the talks seem to be at an impasse. Consequently, the Federation believes that it can allocate its diplomatic resources to better effect elsewhere.”

  “Ambassador Tremontaine,” Spock said with Vulcan calm, “I have received no word of this.”

  “I am carrying that word to you now,” Tremontaine said. “I’m sorry that we didn’t have a chance to speak before this session.”

  “I cannot offer an official response at this time,” Tren said, clearly unprepared for the turn of events.

  “How could we possibly expect you to?” Tremontaine said. “But I’m authorized to remain on Orelte for several more days if you wish me to do so. When your government is ready, I will communicate your message back to the Federation.” She waited for just a moment, and when neither Tren nor Spock said anything further, she turned on her heel and headed back toward the room’s double doors. Before she could exit, though, the Frunalian ambassador called after her.

  “Alexandra,” Tren said.

  Tremontaine stopped and looked around. “Yes?”

  “Can there be no movement on this?” Tren asked. “All of us—” She raised a hand to include Spock and his two aides in her statement. “—have worked hard to reach an agreement, and even though we haven’t to this point, we have made a great deal of progress.”

  “I’m sorry, Jalira,” Tremontaine said. “I was given no leeway to allow continuation of these talks.” She paused, as though considering the situation, as though searching for some means of accommodating the Frunalians. She peered for an instant at Spock, whose expression remained impassive. At last, she told Tren again, “I’m sorry.” Then she turned and left the conference room.

  Back in the quarters she’d been assigned at the Federation Embassy, Tremontaine waited for the fallout of the unauthorized action she’d just taken.

  Spock rapped his knuckles on the dark wooden surface, then listened for a response. He heard nothing, but a few seconds later, the door opened to reveal the ambassador. “Mister Spock,” Tremontaine said, raising her hand in the traditional Vulcan salutation. “I’ve been expecting you. Please come in.”

  As Tremontaine stepped aside, Spock held his hand up in reply, then walked past her and into the suite. The large sitting room had been laid out nearly identically to his own here at the embassy, though its appointments reflected human aesthetics rather than Vulcan ones. He waited for Tremontaine to close the door and come farther into the room.

  “May I offer you something?” she asked.

  “Only information,” Spock said. The news that Tremontaine had brought with her, that the Federation had chosen to remove itself from talks with the Frunalians, had been wholly unexpected. Spock and his two aides had been on Orelte for a month, working daily to reach an accord on rubindium mining rights, and as Ambassador Tren had stated just a short while ago, they had made significant strides. To simply abandon all of that forward movement seemed wasteful to Spock, and unnecessary.

  “Information, of course,” Tremontaine said. “Well, to begin with, we haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Alexandra Tremontaine of Earth.”

  “Spock of Vulcan,” he said, leaning slightly forward in an abbreviated bow. Tremontaine need not have identified herself. Even before she had entered the conference room earlier, even before Spock had been notified by the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs that she would be joining his team, he’d been familiar with the ambassador—or at least with some of the work she’d done. Tremontaine had served the Federation in her current capacity for more than twenty-five years, in a career that had provided quite a few noteworthy accomplishments, including mediating an end to the war on Epsilon Canaris III, convincing the Gorn Hegemony to enter into a long-term ceasefire with the Federation, and establishing a far-reaching program that supplied medical aid to nonaligned worlds.

  “Let’s sit,” Tremontaine said, and she moved around a low, square table to take a seat on an ornately crafted settee. Spock sat down on a matching piece opposite her. Although he had over the years viewed numerous holos of Ambassador Tremontaine in which she’d sported a variety of looks—short hair, long, blonde, brunette, redheaded, and in diverse styles—he had never before seen this particular configuration of her appearance: her lengthy fair-haired locks had been pulled back from her face and gathered behind her head in a complicated bun. She had bright blue eyes and delicate features, and physically, she reminded Spock of a woman he had once known in the cloud-city of Stratos. “So how is Jalira taking the news?” Tremontaine asked. She projected a confident air.

  “If by ‘the news’ you mean the Federation’s withdrawal from the negotiations,” Spock said, “Ambassador Tren seems to be at a loss to understand it. I must confess that I am as well.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Tremontaine commented.

  “When I was informed that you had completed your dealings with the Medusans and would be joining our delegation here,” Spock said, “I was told that the decision had been made as a result of your familiarity with the Frunalians in general and with Ambassador Tren in particular. Why then would you be sent here simply to terminate the conference?”

  “I probably wouldn’t be,” Tremontaine said.

  The assertion puzzled Spock. “I am uncertain how to interpret that statement,” he said.

  “I probably wouldn’t have been sent to Orelte just to pull the Federation out of these talks,” Tremontaine said. “The reality is that the UFP position hasn’t changed: we still want to mine the rubindium in this system.”

  “As you indicated to Ambassador Tren,” Spock noted.

  “What I mean is that I was not instructed to withdraw from the negotiations,” Tremontaine said. “I was ass
igned here to assist you in reaching an agreement for those mining rights.”

  The revelation astonished Spock. “Then your announcement to Ambassador Tren was a lie,” he said.

  “If you must categorize it in such a way, I would suggest the term prevarication, or better yet, subterfuge,” Tremontaine said. “But really it was merely a diplomatic tactic.”

  “I do not deem dishonesty a legitimate tool of diplomacy,” Spock said. Although he had sometimes practiced deception in his life, most often as a Starfleet officer engaged in combat and other dangerous situations, he believed in the sensibilities of his people. As a rule, Vulcan culture held lying to be anathema. Further, the forging of relationships, whether between two individuals or two societies, required trust, and trust required truthfulness.

  “In theory, Mister Spock—and perhaps even in practice—I agree with you,” Tremontaine said. “But the reality is that I did not lie today.” She stood up and made her way from the sitting area over to where a mahogany hutch stood against a wall. “Are you sure I can’t offer you something to eat or drink?” she said.

  “Quite sure,” Spock said.

  Tremontaine shrugged, selected a data card from a shallow drawer in the hutch, then slipped the thin red slab into a nearly invisible slot. Spock heard a muffled whir, not unlike that of a transporter, and then the sound faded back into silence. The doors of the hutch, engraved in graceful swirls, slid open to reveal the interior of a food synthesizer. On the materialization platform sat a porcelain cup. Tremontaine picked it up and the doors glided closed. She returned to the settee, but rather than sitting down, she stood behind it and peered across at Spock.

  “You told Ambassador Tren that the Federation was withdrawing from the negotiations,” he said to her, “but you just told me that you were not sent here for that purpose.”