Grinning, Paris looked over her new crew. “You’re dismissed. Time to get back to work. After all, those new civilizations won’t seek themselves!”
Unregistered scout ship
Interstellar space
Tucker sat quietly in the cockpit’s pilot seat and brooded, as he had done ever since the subspace news broadcasts announcing Section 31’s exposure (though not under that name) had reached his ship. After a while, he started at the realization that Devna’s slender hands had begun kneading the tension from his shoulders moments before. Had he been that distracted, or was her approach really that subtle? Most likely, it was a mix of both. “Devna, don’t.”
“I only wish to help.”
“Well, it’s not helping.”
With a gentle sigh, she glided around him and settled gracefully into the adjacent seat, still dressed in the relatively modest garb she had resumed wearing once Garos’s people had smuggled the two of them back out to their scout ship the day before. “If you won’t let me ease your tensions with sex like any sensible person would,” Devna said, “then at least talk to me. You know I’m a very good listener. And something is clearly disturbing you. I would have thought you’d be happy to learn that your masters had been brought down.”
“I am. It’s something I feared would never happen. But Harris and his inner circle are still at large.”
“Their existence has been exposed, their resources stripped from them. A manhunt is under way. They are badly weakened, at least.”
“But they could still come back. This won’t be over until they’re in prison with the rest.”
Her deep green eyes studied him. “But that is not what troubles you so, Trip.”
There was something irresistible about her gaze—not in the usual way that Orion women were irresistible, but as a function of something deeper, the strength and sincerity he had sensed within her from the first time they had met. If nothing else, she deserved to know what troubled her colleague and shipmate.
“I’m . . . ashamed,” he told her. “I was so convinced that the only way to bring down Section Thirty-one was to play their game. To use lies and tricks and manipulation, to defraud the whole Federation, to gamble with the lives of a whole city’s worth of Saurians. I killed people. I got a friend, a good man, tortured and killed. I almost assassinated the person who was actually working to save those Saurians. And all because I convinced myself it was necessary for the ‘greater good.’ I thought I was rejecting Harris’s way of doing things, but I was justifying my actions in exactly the same way.”
“We discussed this back on Sauria, Trip. Garos and I used deception too. We made Harrad-Sar the scapegoat for our actions. I have no doubt he’ll be killed for it.”
“But it wasn’t lies and secrecy that made the difference. Yes, Garos used a lie to protect himself, his family—but what saved the Saurians, what scuttled the Sisters’ plans, was the one thing I’ve been hiding from for the past eleven years: an open, public assertion of the truth. It was the Starfleet team detecting the antimatter and telling people about it that saved the day, while I was keeping it secret and sneaking around planning to murder someone.”
Devna took his hand, her touch warm and soothing. “Hearing the news from Earth has intensified your doubts. Once again, it was an act of openness that succeeded where secrecy and deceit failed.”
“Exactly. I thought I was the only one who could bring the Section down. I came up with all these devious schemes to strike from the shadows and cover my own ass . . . and they did no damn good at all. What made the difference was a man of real conscience having the bravery to speak out, no matter the cost to himself. It was someone doing the right thing for the right reasons, not the wrong thing for the right reasons.”
“Aren’t you glad of that, Trip? It means your Federation’s ways are vindicated. The ideals you fight for actually work.”
“Yes,” he said bitterly. “But what worries me is that I couldn’t see that. I couldn’t see the better way that Marcus Williams saw, that Tony Ruiz saw, that even you and Garos saw.” He felt his eyes grow moist. “The man I used to be—the real Trip Tucker—he could’ve seen that. But I . . . I’ve lost that. The Section may be gone, but I’ll never escape from it. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life.
“And that means I can never go back to the life I had.”
March 14, 2166
Orion homeworld
The Three Sisters stared at their wall screen in shock and horror as it showed Harrad-Sar being put slowly to death before a massive crowd of Saurians. There was nothing they could do to affect what they saw, for it had taken two days for the subspace signal to reach them across parsecs. Maltuvis had chosen to make the execution of the Sisters’ longest-serving, most loyal slave the centerpiece of this propaganda broadcast to his people and to the galaxy at large—and the Sisters were no doubt his primary target audience.
“Now all may see the truth about the outrageous, false allegations that have been made against this government over the past several days,” the dictator intoned as Harrad-Sar continued to choke in the transparent-walled gas chamber behind him—itself a propagandistic statement, highlighting the vulnerability of other species to the volcanic gases that Saurians could easily endure. “Only offworlders would be so callous as to jeopardize countless Saurian lives through the construction of antimatter generation plants so near to populated areas. These Orion creatures managed to infiltrate our shipbuilding facilities—no doubt hoping to steal the secrets of our superior engineering prowess. The antimatter that the Federation-backed resistance claims to have been smuggled out of our Veranith factory was, in fact, being smuggled in as part of a malicious Orion plot to destroy the plant—just one more act of alien sabotage against our noble people. So foolhardy are these alien interlopers, so divided, that they cannot even avoid disrupting each other’s efforts.
“But we cannot always rely on their own incompetence to foil their plans,” Maltuvis went on. “The offworlders are many, and they all crave the wealth of our homeworld and the products of our inventive genius. So we must remain ever vigilant and ever strong. We must rededicate ourselves to the enlargement of our planetary defense fleet. To this end, I am ordering a fifty percent increase of our spacecraft factory workforce, which shall be accomplished by lowering the minimum age of employment by an additional four years beyond the previous reduction. I know the strong people of Sauria will rededicate themselves to this arduous task, knowing that they sacrifice for the defense of our world and our future.”
Through a remarkable feat of timing, Maltuvis wrapped up his speech just before Harrad-Sar gave off his final death rattle. A massive cheer went up from the assembled crowd, even as Navaar wailed and tore her hair and D’Nesh screamed, cursed, and hurled breakables at the nearest slaves. For her own part, Maras curled up against Navaar’s side and shed tears that she did not need to feign. She had known Harrad-Sar for nearly her entire life, and he had served Maras and her sisters well, even back when they were junior operatives in the Syndicate, pretending to the galaxy that he was their master instead of their slave. Their relationship had endured its rough patches over the course of their rise to power, but he had always been unflinchingly loyal, which was why these events were so difficult to comprehend.
Maras let that genuine confusion feed into the naïve persona that came as second nature to her, even—perhaps especially—at times like this. “I don’t understand,” she keened. “We liked the purple lizard man! We helped him! Why did he kill Sar like that?”
Navaar hugged her closer, something Maras took comfort in. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. Maltuvis did it to send us a message.”
“What message?” Asking the question was Maras’s way of offering comfort to her sister in return. Navaar was a skilled problem solver—not on the same level as Maras, but practiced after decades of hard work and scheming to get the Sisters to the top. Guiding her to focus her mind on the problem, and on what to do about it, would help
her manage her grief.
Navaar stroked Maras’s bare back as she replied. “We were supposed to help him make the Federation look responsible for killing many Saurians, so he could make his people angrier at aliens. That way, when he sent his ships out to conquer other worlds, the people would think he was doing it to protect them, so they’d believe it was the right thing to do. Since Harrad-Sar failed to do that, Maltuvis is punishing him—and punishing us by using the Orions as the target for his people’s anger and blame instead of the Federation. So he still gets what he wants, what we spent years helping him achieve, but we get none of what we were promised in return.” Her voice grew angrier and her nails dug into Maras’s back. Maras indulged her without protest; she’d endured far worse pain in her day, often by choice.
“I can’t believe that gisjacheh Sar!” D’Nesh snarled as she pushed over an antique end table. “Funneling off antimatter for his own use? What was he thinking? How could he be so stupid?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Navaar said. “But you know how males are. Irrational creatures, all slaves to their lust and aggression. When they desire something badly enough, their brains shut down. That’s why they’re so easy to control.”
“But they’re supposed to desire us!”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe Sar was away too long and his conditioning started to weaken.” Navaar sighed. “Unfortunately, we’ll never know. I wish Maltuvis had at least had the courtesy to let us torture him to death, to get the truth out of him. He was ours, after all—it was our right.”
“Oh, I would’ve enjoyed that,” D’Nesh moaned with regret. “Remember, I wanted us to kill him years ago, after he bungled the Enterprise operation and left us stranded. If you’d let me finish him off then, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
Navaar glared at her more volatile sister. “I’ll excuse that because you’re upset. You know we never would’ve regained our status without his loyalty. Whatever mistakes he finally made on Sauria, they shouldn’t erase the debt we owe him for all his years of obedience.”
D’Nesh folded her arms over her ample bust and glowered at the now-blank viewscreen. “Maybe. But that doesn’t help us figure out what to do now. We didn’t embarrass the Federation or get them to swear off interference. We’ve lost Sauria as an ally. We can’t count on Garos anymore. So where do we go from here?”
Navaar rose from the couch, glided over to D’Nesh, and pulled her reluctant sister into a commiserating embrace. “We can talk about that tomorrow, dear. Tonight, we should just process our grief. Find a way to work through it and restore our balance.”
D’Nesh nodded, thinking it over. “All-male slave orgy?”
The eldest Sister laughed. “That’s your solution to everything. Still—count me in.”
Maras jumped up and clapped in excitement, following her sisters from the chamber. But inwardly, her mind was racing. Navaar’s dismissive explanation for Harrad-Sar’s evident betrayal did not satisfy Maras. He had naturally engaged in the degree of self-enrichment and skimming that was typical and expected in the Orion Syndicate, but he was discreet enough in his personal corruption that it had never come at the detriment of the Sisters’ plans. It was also an implausible coincidence that he had smuggled out the antimatter at the exact time that Starfleet had been observing the plant. Maras sensed the hand of Garos behind that—and all the most likely scenarios Maras could model involved the Malurian using Devna as an intermediary.
Devna’s failure—and her probable hand in Harrad-Sar’s fate—was the most disappointing aspect of this for Maras. She had been genuinely fond of the lithe, pale-skinned slave, impressed by her quiet intelligence and hidden depths and enthralled by her delicate beauty. She and Devna had been magnificent together in bed, and it had been deeply refreshing to have someone with whom she could be herself, someone who could think and discuss and debate on an intellectual level close to her own. Maras had even considered letting Devna earn manumission one day, perhaps promoting her to a full partner, a surrogate Sister to fill the void once D’Nesh was disgraced or executed.
But perhaps Devna’s yearning for freedom had been stronger than Maras realized. The human agent Tucker had offered it to her, and perhaps that was why she had betrayed Maras to help him save the Saurians. Or perhaps it was the heightened sense of empathy she had learned from the Deltans, a sentiment that would have made her unable to tolerate an atrocity of the magnitude that Navaar and Maltuvis had plotted. It was easy to deduce that Garos would have been equally unwilling to allow the sacrifice of so many beings that he would have identified with as fellow victims of oppression, no matter how much Maluria would profit from their demise. It seemed most likely that he and Devna had been equally motivated to spare the Saurians and had worked together to find a way. But Maras was content to let Garos keep that secret; punishing his family would do nothing to alter the failure of the plan. And Maras was willing to concede there was merit in Devna’s argument that cruelty should not be inflicted needlessly. Indeed, Navaar’s plan might have failed precisely because it had relied on excessive cruelty and disregard for life, thereby provoking a stronger counterreaction than a more subtle plan might have done.
But that was all the more reason to be disappointed that Devna had failed to give Maras the means to eliminate D’Nesh. She was the cruelest Sister, always pushing Navaar toward greater excesses of violence and brutality. Perhaps Navaar’s repeated failures to tear down the Federation had frustrated her enough to make her receptive to the middle Sister’s more extreme approach. As long as D’Nesh was still in play, that pattern was likely to escalate. Maras would have to devise an alternative plan for her elimination—but it was difficult without a confidante like Devna, the most intelligent and capable of the very few slaves to whom Maras had entrusted her secret.
So how do I deal with Devna? Maras wondered. She had never been betrayed before, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She could understand Devna’s reasons for the act, after all. She even admired the spy for her cunning and independence, her skill at causing such massive disruption through such subtle and undetected action. But at the same time, Maras realized that if Devna was using that skill as a free agent instead of in her mistress’s service, then that made her a threat. She knew secrets that could destroy Maras if they were exposed. And Navaar would be devastated by the revelation that her beloved idiot sister had been lying to her all these years. Maras wasn’t sure which prospect dismayed her more—losing her life or losing Navaar’s love.
Either way, Devna was a threat that would have to be dealt with. In some way, Maras would have to track her down, capture her, and punish her. Whether that punishment entailed ending Devna’s life was something she would decide when the time came—but it seemed likely that it would.
After all, Devna was hers, so it was her right.
16
March 16, 2166
Vicinity of Lambda Serpentis
THE ATMOSPHERE aboard Charles Tucker’s scout ship had been quiet and uncomfortable for the past several days. Tucker had continued to brood, unsure where to go from here. He longed for T’Pol’s comfort and counsel, but he was too ashamed to face her—too afraid that he had lost the last surviving pieces of the man she’d loved. Yet he had rebuffed Devna’s efforts to offer him comfort and support, afraid that he would succumb to his current sense of nihilism and take her to bed. If he did that, it would be like admitting that he could never return to T’Pol. The fact that he wasn’t quite ready to take that step was the one remaining shred of hope he had—but every day, the temptation of Devna’s presence grew stronger. For Devna’s part, she had recognized his conflict and thus kept her distance, not wishing to make it harder for him. But Tucker would be grateful when he could finally drop her off at Stameris and go on his way—even though he had no idea where to go.
But as they drew closer to the Lambda Serpentis system, Tucker came to realize that he was not the sole source of anxiety aboard the ship. Devna was troubled t
oo, and eventually his conscience would not let him avoid asking her about it any longer.
“I feel I must return to my mistress,” she explained. “I owe that to her.”
“To Maras? Are you kidding me? She’ll kill you for sure.”
“Perhaps not. She is a far more complex woman than she appears. She listens to me. She might understand why I had to betray her.”
“You’re property to her. She’ll never accept your right to make your own decisions, especially not at the expense of her plans.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I have a pretty good idea.” He sighed. “Like I told you, some of my ancestors a few centuries back were slave owners. I’m not proud of that part of my heritage, but I’ve faced it, tried to understand it. Many of them . . . they thought of their slaves like pets, felt something like affection for them and showed them kindness as long as they were obedient and kept to their place. But if those slaves disobeyed or tried to act like equals, their masters would be outraged and they’d be punished severely. Because the masters’ whole worldview was built around their right to own other people and have absolute power over their lives. Any fondness they felt for their slaves evaporated if they thought those slaves were challenging that right.”
Devna sat quietly for a few moments, absorbing his words. “I do not know what other options I have. You clearly do not want me to remain with you. And if Maras would not take me back . . . I do not believe I would want another master.”
He looked up at that. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Look . . . maybe we could skip Stameris and keep on to the nearest Federation outpost. I’m sure you could find help there—”
A strident tone from the proximity detector interrupted him. Tucker rushed to the cockpit and took the pilot’s seat, with Devna staying close behind him. Examining the readouts, he told her, “There’s a ship closing in on us. It just neutralized warp—from these readings, it was going damn fast for a ship that size. Not much bigger than ours, but it’s powerful.”
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