by Ilsa J. Bick
“Samir, are we going to talk about it?”
Halak lifted his glass to his lips. “No.”
“Are you like this all the time, or do you practice a lot when you’re alone?”
“Actually, I save it all up for you,” said Halak, and then drained the rest of his drink. He craned his neck, peering around Batra for the waitress.
“Probably because I’m the only one aboard patient enough to put up with you.”
“No, you’re the only one aboard lucky enough.” Halak’s eyes swept the café. The interior was very dark and close, smelling of mint tea, sugary roasted almonds, and the sour tang of Trakian ale. Halak spotted one of the cafe’s waitresses: an Atrean, dressed in a tight weave of hip-hugging silver mesh that began below her be jeweled navel and ended at a spot barely brazing the underside of her buttocks; silver strappy sandals that threaded up to mid-calf; a mane of silver hair that coiled in strategic swaths over her breasts; and very little else. Halak whistled, and when she looked his way, he pointed to his glass and held up a finger.
“You really need another?” asked Batra.
“You’re not going to let us leave until we talk. I’m apt to get dry.”
“Uh-huh,” said Batra. She sipped at a tall glass of iced Molov mint tea. “Well, we could talk about your leaving Enterprise without me. Or we could talk about why we’re on a planet with no redeeming virtues.”
Halak snorted, a humorless exhalation through his nose. “I don’t like either of those topics.”
“Well, I ...” Batra began but stopped when the Atrean expertly tacked a napkin to the table with a fresh glass of brandy and retrieved Halak’s empty. The woman lingered a moment longer, bending so that her hair had to adjust by curling and rethreading itself, like a mat of snakes, to keep her breasts covered up. Even so, Halak got a good glimpse before the Atrean straightened, flashed a tiny smile to Halak, and turned on her heel, her long shank of hair flaring to reveal the small of her naked back. Halak’s head swiveled to watch her go.
“Well, I want to know,” said Batra, reaching across and taking Halak by the chin. She pulled his head around but let her fingers linger over the raised ridge of a thin white scar that skittered over his left jaw. “And I want us to make it to Betazed in one piece.”
Halak grabbed her hand and pressed his lips to her fingers. “We’ll make it. We would have made it faster if you hadn’t followed me.”
Batra retrieved her hand. “But I have and we’re here. You want to talk about that?”
Halak took a sip of the strong orange liquor, swallowed, and inhaled through his teeth against the burn. “Ani, if I had wanted to tell you, I would have. I know that we’ve been together now for some time ...”
“Six months. Half a year.”
“Half a year. But in every relationship there has to be privacy. Even telepaths have places in their minds they keep locked.”
“Everyone has a right to privacy. But there’s a difference between privacy and secrets. The way I see it, this is about you keeping secrets.”
“What secrets are you referring to, Ani?”
“You want me to make a list?”
Halak gave a mirthless laugh. “That many? We only have a week’s leave.”
“Okay, then how about you and I? Where do we go from here?”
Halak reached across the table and took her hands in his. “I know where I’m going—to Betazed with the woman I love. Now, as I recall, I asked you a question about two weeks ago. It was the same question I asked you several months ago. Both times, you said you wanted to think. Well, you’ve thought and I’ve waited. You want to tell me now?”
Even through the haze, Halak saw the color rise in Batra’s cheeks. “No,” she said. Her eyes drifted to the table. “Or, maybe ... I don’t know. It’s so sudden. When you asked the first time, we’d only known each other two months.”
“Ten weeks.” Halak gave her hands a squeeze. “Four weeks longer than I needed to know for sure. But I didn’t want you to think I was an impulsive guy.”
“Oh, never that.” Her eyes still didn’t meet his. “No, I know you’re not impulsive, Samir. You may be opinionated, and you’re lucky Captain Garrett ...”
“Let’s not talk about Garrett, all right?” Halak softened the admonition by running the fingers of his right hand along the back of her left. “We’re off duty, Lieutenant. Your hair is down, the choli’s on, and I’m sitting across from the most beautiful woman in the quadrant. Enterprise is far away, and I’d like to keep it there, if you don’t mind. This is supposed to be our time.”
“And that’s precisely my point,” said Batra, freeing her hand. “This was ... this is our time. And yet we’re here, on Farius Prime, where no one in his right mind goes, not if he wants to stay out of trouble. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? That you’re always in trouble?”
“That’s the rumor,” he said. It was as close a reference to his previous posting on the Barker—and the fact that he hadn’t been transferred to Enterprise under the best of circumstances—as she’d ever come. He’d given her the official version, but no one—not Garrett, or Batra, or anyone else on board—knew the whole story. Halak kept his face impassive. “You have a question?”
“No,” she said, her teeth nipping at a corner of her lower lip. “Well, yes. I know you’ve told me about that Ryn mission, right before you were transferred. ...”
“And?” he prompted when she hesitated.
“And I know it’s not the whole truth. Don’t bother to deny it; I’m not really asking you to tell me right now. But that’s just an example.”
Halak reached a hand to the scar along his jaw: a souvenir of that particularly disastrous mission. “An example of what?”
“Of how you approach things. You tell the truth, but only to a certain point. I feel it,” she bunched a fist over her heart, “right here.”
“You have something specific in mind?”
“Yes, I do. Why are we here?” Batra tapped a nail upon their table with a tiny click. “And why didn’t you want me with you?”
Halak blew out. “Damn, but you’re persistent.”
“Yes. So answer the question.”
“All right.” Halak took a pull of his drink, liking the way it burned a track down to his stomach before spreading out along his belly like fingers of liquid fire. “I’ll tell you what. I answer your question and you answer mine. Deal?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Okay. You first.”
He put his hands on the table and laced his fingers together. “I’m here to see an old friend. Her name is Dalal. Dalal took care of me on Vendrak IV.”
“Where you were born. This was after your parents died?”
“Exactly.”
“Is she one of your relatives?”
“No. Just an old family friend. Actually, she used to work for my father.”
“As what?”
Halak shrugged. “Housekeeper, secretary, nanny ... you name it. My mother died first ... you know that, of course. From Denebian fever.”
“I know. But you never really talked about how that happened.”
“How does anyone get Denebian fever?” Halak put both hands around his drink but didn’t lift his glass. “Not enough food, terrible living conditions. We didn’t have it all that great, not until my father found steady work. But she got sick before he could and then she died. I was ten.”
Batra’s eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s so awful.”
Halak tried a smile that didn’t quite work. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” (Of course, he couldn’t really describe to her what it was like to watch his mother shrivel away bit by bit. And what she said to his father when she thought Halak couldn’t hear: I’ll never see my children grow up ...)
He closed down the memory. “After that, my father ... he was never the same. For one thing, he just didn’t have a lot of time for me. At first, I thought it was because of my mother, but he’d never really been
there. Always gone on business. A ... what’s the old saying?” Halak snapped his fingers. “A fly by night. That’s it.”
Batra’s brows met in a frown. “Fly by night?”
“Yeah, it’s an old nautical expression. This big sail,” Halak held his arms apart, gestured with his hands, “and you could rig it and forget it. But what it really means is someone who’s only interested in a quick profit. That was my father. Always some scheme. Except nothing panned out, not until ...” His voice trailed away.
“Until what?”
“Oh.” Halak blinked, refocused. “Until he got involved in some business ... I was too young to know exactly what.”
“And then?”
“A couple of things. One, he was gone for long, long stretches of time. Longer than before, but by that time, Dalal was there and she made sure I had food, clothes on my back. She even worked at trying to get me to go to school.”
“How did she do?”
“Well, except school.” Halak sighed, finger-combed his hair. “I was a pain in the ass. Always in trouble. I started stealing. Little things at first—you know, food, I was always good at stealing food, maybe because I always felt hungry, even when I had plenty to eat.”
“I don’t think a kid forgets going hungry.”
“No, but I think I did it to get back at my father. See, he took up with another woman not long after Dalal came to live with us, and this woman moved in. I never liked her much, and not just because she wasn’t my mother. You know, she tried to get me to call her Mom, must have been a hundred times. A thousand. I never could, and looking back on it, I think she did her best to make me like her. But I didn’t. Sort of a willful type of hate, if you know what I mean. Dalal didn’t like her either, but I never knew if that wasn’t just jealousy.”
“And you weren’t? Jealous, I mean.”
Halak ran a meditative finger over his scar. “Probably, though it’s only now that I see it. Back then, I was just an angry kid whose mother was dead and whose father was gone all the time but thought this other woman might solve all my problems. Eventually she left my father. Then, when my father died, Dalal took over. I was fourteen.”
“How did your father die?”
Halak’s fingers teased a corner of his cocktail napkin. The paper tore, and he rolled it into a tight ball. “Business deal gone bad. I really don’t know the specifics.”
“With all that, I’m amazed you made it into the Academy.”
“Makes two of us. But after my parents were gone and there was just Dalal, I think I realized that I had to do something to help myself. I’m not an institutional type of guy, but I also never felt a sense of belonging to a real family, and I guess I figured Starfleet was the place where I could. Find a family, have a sense of belonging somewhere. Anyway, that’s where Dalal fits in. I figure I owe her. So, she called,” Halak put his hands out in a gesture that encompassed the café, “and I came.”
“But she was on Vendrak IV,” Batra said slowly, as if she wanted to cement the details of his story in her mind. “And now she’s on Farius Prime. That’s a long way from Vendrak IV, Samir. How did she get here? Why?”
“Why does anyone come to Farius Prime?” Halak asked rhetorically. “They come for the money. The last I heard, Dalal was on Vendrak IV. I haven’t heard from her for years, ever since I left for the Academy. And then, you know, deep space assignments and all that,” Halak spread his hands, a what-can-I-say gesture. “Time passes.”
“So why does she want to see you now?”
“I’m not sure,” Halak said, relieved that this, at least, was true. “But I owe her, Ani. Dalal put up with a hell of a lot.”
“This still doesn’t explain why you had to sneak around.”
Halak sighed. “Look, Farius Prime isn’t the nicest planet in the galaxy. I didn’t want you exposed to that. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Ani.”
“I can handle myself.”
“I’m not saying you can’t. Hell, you’re better with a phaser than I am. But that’s not the point. Farius Prime is a rough place.”
“And how would you know?”
“Know that it’s rough?” Halak hiked a shoulder. “How does anyone know anything?”
Batra gave Halak a narrow look. “Stop playing games. You’ve been here more than once, and don’t bother to deny it. I can tell: the way you handle yourself, the fact that you seem to know where you’re going. You never once asked for directions.”
He felt a little clutch of anxiety in the pit of his gut, and he became aware that his fists were clenched. He forced his fingers to unfurl. Relax, would you, she doesn’t know; none of them know.
He kept his features matter-of-fact, and opted for the truth—to a point. “Ani, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to be hurt. This isn’t about you handling yourself. It’s about being smart, not taking unnecessary risks. Now, whether or not I was right to keep where I was going from you, the fact is I did. On the other hand, you followed me, and I’d love to know how you managed that.”
“Is that your question?” she asked. Her voice was taut, and Halak gave her a searching look and knew she was hiding something, but he was damned if he knew what. But that just made two of them doing the same thing to one another.
“No,” said Halak, at last, reaching for her hands again. “That’s not my question. This is: the same question I asked you twice before.”
He felt her hands flinch, but she didn’t draw them away, and he felt a flare of hope. He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.
“Ani,” he said, trying to put everything he felt into that one word and wondering if she would ever, could ever know how very much he hated keeping secrets from a woman he loved as much as he did her. “Ani, will you marry me? Please?”
Chapter 4
When Ven Kaldarren didn’t respond, Garrett leaned in closer to her companel. A little crazy, sure, but maybe, if she could close the physical divide just a little bit, this might be the ticket to bridging the emotional chasm that yawned between them like a black and bottomless pit.
“Please,” Garrett said again. “Please, Ven, don’t make me beg. You knew I’d want to speak with Jase if you called. If you wanted to humiliate me, you could’ve done the same thing in a prerecorded message.”
“No,” he said, and his voice was thick. (With anger? Sadness? She couldn’t tell.) “No, I didn’t call to humiliate you. You should know me better, Rachel. I would never do that to you. That’s a coward’s way, and I’m not a coward about most things.”
This was true. She was the one who’d always been gone on deep space assignments, the one who was conveniently away, or had somewhere to go if there was a personal problem. How ironic that she could face down phaser blasts, Klingons, and ion storms, but she absolutely withered, cringed when it came to dealing with her own emotions, or the feelings of the people she really, truly cared about.
Maybe that’s why I’m good at captaining, and crummy at everything else. When you’re a captain, there are rules and regulations and nice, safe codes of behavior. Everything’s so civilized.
She looked into Ven Kaldarren’s ravaged eyes and read his sorrow and hurt. But there’s nothing civilized about love, nothing.
“No,” she said finally. “You aren’t, and ...” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Ven. That was unfair of me. Please, I would like to speak with Jase. No excuses; I won’t ask him to forgive me because he has every right to be angry, too ...”
“He’ll never hate you, Rachel,” Kaldarren said. “He loves you. He always will, no matter what happens.”
And no matter what you do, Kaldarren hadn’t said it, but he might as well have; Garrett read it in his eyes. And did she see something else there? Something about her?
She brought herself sternly. Don’t go there. That’s over and done with.
He broke the silence first. “Let me get him. He ... I think he’d like to hear from his mother.”
Garrett opened her mouth to thank him, but Kaldarren’s body swiveled to one side as he turned in his chair, and then he was gone. Staring at the emptiness where her ex-husband had been, Garrett waited, her head throbbing, her heart aching. She tried not to think. Not now. Maybe she would think later, or maybe she wouldn’t think at all because there were a lot of things pressing in on her, a lot of responsibilities. For now, though, she had to focus on Jase.
There was a blur of movement on the companel, and she blinked, plastering an automatic smile on her face before she’d even registered that Jase had slid into Kaldarren’s empty seat.
“Sweetheart,” she said. Too bright, too chipper, tone it down, you sound like a chipmunk. “How are you, honey?”
“Fine.” Jason had Kaldarren’s black hair, though it was much shorter, and the same black eyes, though he had Garrett’s paler coloring and the same oval cast to his face that made him look fragile as fine china. “How are you, Mom?”
“I’m okay,” she said, lying. “I missed your birthday. I’m sorry. That was wrong.”
Jase hiked his shoulders. “S’okay.”
“It’s not. A boy doesn’t have his twelfth birthday every day.” Not so cheery; you can’t smooth this over. “I promised you I’d be there, but I wasn’t. That must’ve made you angry.”
“No,” said Jase, though his voice broke a little and Garrett couldn’t tell if it was from the lie, or that he was growing up. “It made Dad angry.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He didn’t say anything,” Jase added, as if worried Garrett might think that Kaldarren was goading the boy into taking sides. “He never says anything. He doesn’t talk about you much, not even when Nan wants to. He won’t. I know because I’ve heard him tell her to be quiet; that it’s not right to talk about you. Then sometimes they get really quiet, and they aren’t talking, but they still are, you know? The way the room gets really still and the air is hard, like ice, and I just know that they’re thinking at each other, real loud.”
Garrett could imagine that this was exactly how an argument between two telepaths might seem to someone who couldn’t read minds, and she ought to know. Excluded was the word that came to her mind, and that was the way she’d felt whenever they visited Ven’s mother, as if they and all telepaths were part of a club to which she was denied admittance, maybe for her own good. She’d always nurtured the sneaking suspicion that Ven’s mother, an imposing and somewhat imperious woman named Molaranna, made cutting little telepathic jibes about Garrett. To Garrett, the atmosphere always turned frosty whenever she and Ven visited, and sometimes the pauses in the conversations weren’t empty at all but felt full of things being said in the air above her head.