“What exactly are these females protesting?” Picard was asking Ronzel. “Perhaps if you promise to hear their grievances . . .”
“We have attempted it, Captain,” the commander-in-chief replied. “But they are intractable. Their leaders will accept nothing less than the dissolution of the government and the patriarchy. They are fanatics.” Ronzel sighed. “Return to your ship, Picard. We will attempt to arrange a more secure site for our negotiations.”
“If that is your wish,” Picard said. “But if there’s anything we can do to help mediate . . .”
“This is an internal matter, Picard! We are not formal allies yet. Remember your own laws against interference.”
Worf and Picard exchanged a look. The situation was more delicate than they had realized . . . but they were in no position to do anything about it.
• • •
The Talarian women’s protests continued the next day. Monitoring the situation from the Enterprise, Picard was struck to discover just how integral the females were to the functioning of Talarian society even while lacking a voice in government. With the women on strike, there was no one to perform food preparation, custodial work, transit driving, secretarial work, or other services, and so society was practically brought to a halt. True, not all females were joining in the strike, but the protesters continued to blockade government and military facilities, prohibiting the males from entering or using their places of business. Apparently the Talarians’ taboos against physical coercion of females extended to beaming them away without their consent, since that would be seen as a violation of their bodily integrity.
Privately, in his quarters with Beverly and their year-old toddler René, Picard was free to admit, “I admire what these women are doing. Without violence, they’re taking a potent stand against the status quo, and in the process are demonstrating just how vital to society their contributions are. I’m reminded of the strikes conducted by Indian nationalists during the waning days of the British Raj. As I recall, there were instances of Indian women employing much the same tactics we see here, paralyzing male soldiers through their own taboos against treating women roughly.”
“Hmm,” his wife replied, an amused grin on her face. “I wonder if they’re striking at home, too, if you know what I mean. A bit of the old Lysistrata.”
“Now, that would be a potent tactic indeed,” Picard replied, proceeding to express his gratitude that Beverly felt no need to withhold her affections. Although he had to wait until René had been put down for the night to express it in full.
On the third day, Ronzel’s government finally managed to secure a suitable facility for the conference. Perhaps the females felt they had made their point, for the protests seemed to be waning. Upon arriving at the conference site, Picard found that a number of females were once again at work providing food and drink to the delegates. “As you see,” Ronzel told him, “the protesters represent only an irresponsible fringe group. They managed to stir up many of our females to play along with their little statement for a while, to put on a pageant for our offworld visitors, but most of them soon remembered they had families and responsibilities to attend to. There should be no further disruptions, now that the novelty has worn off.”
“I see,” Picard said, keeping his tone neutral. Ronzel seemed to show no interest in actually listening to the protesters’ grievances or taking action to address the causes of the strike. He seemed content to dismiss it as a momentary aberration from the rightful status quo. But it was not Picard’s place to challenge that.
So he moved on to the matter he was here to address: finalizing Talarian membership in the expanded Accords. As the ambassador, Endar took the lead in presenting the Talarian side of the remaining issues: trade concessions, the sharing of improved defensive technologies (Starfleet would not share its weapons, but shields and tactical sensor improvements were on the table), Federation aid in resolving a lingering territorial dispute with the Cardassians and renegotiating raktajino import tariffs with the Klingons, and so forth. Endar proved a firm but reasonable negotiator, as he had been when he and Picard had first clashed over the fate of Jono sixteen years ago. Ronzel took a more rigid stance, but only because it let him and Talar save face while Endar did the real horse trading—with Jono’s assistance as an interpreter between Talarian and Federation value systems, helping bridge the gaps in understanding. Picard was confident that all three negotiators wanted this alliance to succeed, so long as they could ensure that Talarian interests were not compromised.
The negotiations ran for hours, and female servitors flitted about in their bright clothes, keeping refreshments at hand and clearing away empty plates and goblets. Picard found the Talarian cuisine too spicy and aromatic for his tastes, but he made a point of thanking the women who provided it all the same.
Soon, after a particularly pungent dish was served, it seemed to Picard that Endar and Ronzel found it as distasteful as he did, for they both faltered and began to cough. But he soon realized that both Talarians—indeed, all the Talarian males in the chamber—were suffering from something worse than bad flavor. “Endar!” Jono cried as the ambassador choked and slumped in his seat. “Father!”
The captain’s hand flew to his combadge. “Picard to Enterprise. Medical emergency!”
Moments after Picard explained the situation to her over the comm, Beverly materialized along with one of her nurses, Crewman Huang. She wasted no time on preliminaries before taking scans of the shuddering, retching Talarians. “Food poisoning,” she said. “Some kind of biotoxin. How soon until local medical care arrives?”
“I . . . I’ve notified them,” Jono said unevenly. “They should be here in minutes.”
“Minutes!” Beverly shook her head and muttered, “Spare me from stoic warrior cultures and their disdain for decent medical care.” She thought for a moment, then began tapping on her tricorder. “Luckily, we don’t need their help. Jean-Luc, I’ve just uploaded the toxin’s parameters to the biofilters.” Picard nodded, and Beverly tapped her combadge. “Crusher to transporter room. Beam myself, Huang, and every Talarian male in this room to sickbay, full biofilter protocols. Shunt the biofilter output to the medical lab.”
Jono grew agitated as his father and the other Talarian males in the room disappeared in a shimmer of light along with the medical team. Picard noted that all the females had already disappeared through more conventional means, before or during the incident. “What’s going on?” Jono demanded of Picard.
“The transporter will cleanse the toxin from their bodies,” Picard assured him. “Then Doctor Crusher and her team will assess and repair whatever damage it’s already done.” He placed a hand on Jono’s shoulder. “Be assured, they’ll receive the best of care.”
Picard could see the struggle on Jono’s face to accept his word. It must have been difficult for him to trust in the skills of a female doctor. Particularly under these circumstances. “Poison in the food,” Jono growled. “It is a woman’s weapon.”
The captain nodded, thinking back on Ancient Rome and other patriarchies where females adopted their own subtle tools of self-defense and coercion. Talarian females lacked the bulk to take the males on physically, but that clearly did not make them powerless.
“So much for protests and mediation,” Jono snarled. “This has now become a war.”
• • •
The biofilter trick successfully purged the toxin before any of the Talarians were fatally affected, but it had been a nasty piece of work, doing a lot of damage. Beverly Crusher was adamant that Endar, Ronzel, and the other poisoning victims would need several days to rest and recuperate. Predictably, they tried to take the warrior’s line that pain was merely a test to overcome, to which she replied, “Yes, and in this case it’s an intelligence test. You can be smart and conserve your body’s resources for healing, or squander them foolishly and get yourselves killed.” Luckily, they were feeling ill enough to see the wisdom of her words—their condition was not lif
e-threatening so long as they remained under care, but it would be a while before their stomachs settled sufficiently to keep any food down.
Crusher could tell that Jono wanted to stay by his father’s side, but he clung to his sense of duty. “I know you will serve Talar well in my stead,” Endar told his son from his sickbay bed.
“I hope I can, Ambassador,” the younger man said. “This should not be my place. I only escaped illness because I am human.”
Endar placed a hand against his son’s cheek. “Because you are strong. You have always risen to every challenge.”
Crusher remembered the determined set of Jono’s jaw the next day when negotiations resumed—with more security in place and with Crusher and a medical team on hand just in case. It had taken this to get the Talarians to agree to let a female chief medical officer participate in any capacity, though they didn’t exactly make her feel welcome. And Jono wasn’t much friendlier. Before, he had done his best to serve as a bridge between the cultures. But now that Jono felt the weight of Endar’s job fall on his shoulders, he clung to a much harder line.
“If the people of Talar cannot unite their efforts,” Jean-Luc was telling him, “you can provide little benefit to the alliance—and draw little benefit from it. It is in all our best interests if you can resolve this unrest. Let the Federation mediate your dispute, help you establish a dialogue with—”
“No!” Jono banged his gloved fist on the table. “These are internal matters, for Talarians to resolve in a Talarian way. The Federation does not understand what that means. You do not understand, Captain. I know that better than anyone.”
Picard concealed his reaction like the master diplomat he was, but Crusher could see how it wounded him—not so much the charge itself as the fact that Jono would strike such a personal blow.
During a break in the talks, Beverly took Jono aside. “Don’t you think you’re overcompensating?” she asked. “It’s one thing to try to maintain a strong bargaining position, but what you said to Captain Picard back there was simply spiteful. We all want the same thing here, you know.”
“Do we?” Jono challenged. “We’re supposed to be banding together against the Typhon Pact. Instead, your captain seems more concerned about liberating our females. Even after they commit an atrocity like this!”
“Not all of them,” Beverly reminded him.
“But enough. Enough to endanger the life of our commander-in-chief . . . and my father. How are we to know who to trust? Give them license and it will give these terrorists an opening to strike again!”
“So what do you propose to do?” she countered. “Lock up every woman on the planet? It looks to me like your civilization would grind to a halt without them. And maybe if you’d acknowledged that fact, you wouldn’t be in this position now.”
“Take care, Doctor. You have no political role here. I only listen to you at all out of respect for your husband.”
“I wasn’t seeing a lot of respect for him at that table. You crossed a line. Made it personal.”
“I thought he had learned! Learned to respect our ways, accept us without judging. But I see now, he is still the same man who looked down on us and found our ways unworthy. The same man who accused my father of beating me and tried to take me from him. I must stand firm against that. My people rely on it.”
Beverly winced. “Jono, you’re being too hard on him. You need to know . . .”
Suddenly they were interrupted by a loud whine, like that of a transporter beam, only sharper, more shrill. It seemed to come from multiple places at once. Beverly spun to see several small objects materializing around the room. A moment later, a series of loud bangs heralded the release of clouds of gas into the chamber. The delegates and the Enterprise party were caught in the densest concentration, with Beverly and Jono spared the worst of it by their more peripheral position. It was clear that whatever toxin was being used this time, it affected the Enterprise party as well as the Talarians. And enough of it was reaching Beverly to burn her throat.
She pulled Jono down to the ground and cried, “Hold your breath!” She opened her kit and began to ready a tri-ox injection for him even as she tapped her combadge. “Crusher to Enterprise! We’re . . . under gas attack! Beam . . . gas . . .” Her voice dissolved into choking.
But the personnel aboard must have understood her intent, for a moment later, the gas sparkled and faded away. Crusher felt her ears pop as the pressure in the room decreased. She looked around. The others appeared to be unconscious, but breathing—at least some were. She tried to gather her strength to go to them, but she was growing numb, her vision blurring. The gas she’d inhaled was still in her system.
The doors banged open and people rushed in. Talarian security? No, they wore bright garments and wide-brimmed hats. But these women were no servitors. They moved with speed and determination—and below their hat brims were veils that looked to Beverly like gas filters.
The women—the terrorists—closed in around her and Jono. “The gas is gone!” one cried.
“These two must have contacted the ship,” said the oldest female, golden-haired and tall for her species and sex (though still short of Beverly’s height). “Their people will be here in moments.” She looked Beverly over. “Come with us, sister. For your own good.”
“I’m . . . doctor. Need . . . help injured!” Anesthetic gas delivered so crudely, with no control over dosage, could easily be fatal. Starfleet anesthizine contained a built-in antagonist that prevented it from exceeding a safe dosage in most beings, but she doubted the same went for Talarian knockout gas.
The woman shook her festively filtered head. “Not my orders. Take them both!” she told the others.
They pulled the barely conscious ambassador’s aide to his feet—it took two of them—and bound his hands behind him. Beverly tried to struggle as two more did the same to her. But one of the women crushed a capsule under her nose, and a strong medicinal smell was the last thing she sensed.
3
GLINTARA, ROMULAN STAR EMPIRE
STARDATE 59898.1
T’Ryssa Chen soon decided that having to wear a Romulan haircut was the least of her worries. It was actually a bit liberating to have her hair no longer covering her ears and forehead, especially once she reached Romulan space and knew that nobody would look at her and expect her to act aloof and emotionless. “But the clothes!“ Trys had moaned to Jasminder Choudhury more than once during their preparations, lamenting the need to wear the heavy, quilted attire with the broad, squared-off shoulders that seemed to be an enduring fashion among the Romulans. “I look like a stone slab. At least Starfleet uniforms have some color. And don’t completely hide my figure. I need to make the most of what curves I’ve got, you know.”
Somehow, Jasminder managed to make even Romulan attire look graceful and flowing, but her tonsorial choice had made Trys more content with her own new haircut. Jasminder had chosen to adopt the same Vulcanesque appearance as Trys, eschewing the heavier brow ridge of the currently dominant Romulan ethnic group, so that they could both pass as working-class Romulans from a remote colony world, which would explain why their Imperial Romulan was a little stilted. Knowledge of major galactic powers’ languages was part of Trys’s contact-specialist training, and Jasminder had picked up Romulan during a weeks-long captivity on T’Met back in 2369, a skill that had enabled her to negotiate the release of her shipmates at the time and possibly avert a war. But they were both out of practice, and didn’t dare risk being caught using translators. In keeping with working-class custom, Jasminder had taken the radical step of completely shaving off her luxurious black hair and adorning her scalp with mourning tattoos. It was a striking look, and Trys had to resist doing a double take every time she glanced at Choudhury. But if nothing else, it served to distract attention from any imperfections in her prosthetic ears.
The need to avoid giving clues to their origins had precluded Trys from picking an undercover name she would’ve liked—something like
Matahari, or maybe Sirenn after the lead character from her favorite spy holoserial. Instead she’d been saddled with Janil, a perfectly decent name but one with no private joke about it to amuse her. It and Jasminder’s identity, Del’oda, were part of the cover created for them by Jasminder’s connections in Starfleet Intelligence. Their infiltration had been arranged in intricate detail, but it had almost seemed unnecessary; upon contacting the Unificationists and requesting to join their Kinshaya mission, they had been welcomed readily. Trys had wondered about the lack of security, since it seemed to leave the Unificationists wide open for infiltration by government spies and saboteurs; but Jasminder had assured her in private that their identities had surely been checked by subtler means. The Unificationists had only been legal for a year and a half or so, and had plenty of experience from their years undergound to teach them caution. Also, Jasminder reminded her, their leader was Spock, a man with decades of Starfleet training.
The Unificationist mission was led by a man named Vranien, himself a working-class Romulan with a heavily lined face and a bald, tattooed pate like Choudhury’s. “Whom do you mourn?” he asked her when they were introduced.
“My family,” Jasminder told him. “They were lost in the Borg onslaught.” She looked away. “And I was lost for a time thereafter, to anger and despair. Finally I heard the word of Surak and found some measure of peace in it. Now I hope that by promoting peace in others, I may truly achieve it within myself.”
Trys remembered the Ferengi saying, “A near-truth is an economical lie.” She’d had plenty of occasion to learn the principle in her own checkered past. But she realized that for Choudhury, it was more than that. She was trying to achieve something positive for herself and others, and no doubt felt that honesty, to the extent that she could safely practice it in this context, was the best way to go about it.
“And you, Janil?” The question came from Vranien’s aide, a young Romulan named Lorrav who bore the familiar brow ridge and a full head of hair worn a few centimeters longer than fashionable. It took a moment for T’Ryssa to respond, not just because she didn’t immediately recognize her assumed name, but because he was quite possibly the most adorable Romulan she’d ever seen.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within Page 3