Brooks nodded. She strongly suspected that Naquase, who had never ventured any farther from Earth than Lake Armstrong on Luna, felt precisely the same way, even if she would never admit it to a rival reporter.
“But I also recognize that not everybody feels the same way I do,” McEvoy said, still staring broodingly at the padd. “And I’m grateful that at least some people are willing to go out and meet whatever scariness is out there head-on.” He looked up at her then, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose so that his gray eyes looked almost cartoonishly large. “People like that guy you told me you got involved with for a while on Draylax. The one who later got a piloting job on Enterprise under Archer.”
“Travis Mayweather,” she murmured.
She conjured a fond memory of the easy smile of her old flame, with whom she had renewed her acquaintance just six months ago, though with bittersweet if unsurprisingly impermanent results. Brooks had first met Travis around a decade before that, during one of the E.C.S. Horizon’s many brief stopovers on one of the frontier planets she had been writing about at the time. She had noticed right away that they both possessed a kindred wanderlust, though that very trait they held in common could only pull them in different directions, literally putting a light-years-deep gulf between them. And Shakespeare thought he knew all about star-crossed lovers.
Awareness suddenly returned to Brooks that Nash McEvoy was still talking. “But mostly,” he was saying, “I’m glad that people like you aren’t afraid of what’s out there, in the Deep Dark Big Bad. Because that’s why I chose you. But if anything happens to you because I sent you out there...”
As he choked audibly and trailed off, Brooks nodded, his unexpectedly sincere and sober tone taking her by surprise. While she had always acknowledged the mortal danger that might await her during her imminent outbound tour of humanity’s interstellar frontier zones—some of which had already become hot spots in Earth’s rapidly escalating conflict with the so-called Romulan Star Empire—she had been looking forward to her departure with far more anticipation than fear. It had simply never occurred to her that her editor might feel only fear on her behalf.
McEvoy’s voice returned, gathering just enough strength to let him say, “Maybe you’ll come to your senses and come back here where it’s safe during your first layover at Bradbury Spaceport.” His eyes looked huge and moist, and it wasn’t because of the glasses.
“Hey, Nash,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “If we don’t get out there into space and get our arms and heads around whatever dangers might be waiting for us out there, then whatever Big Bad we might be hiding from now will eventually come to us.”
She glanced at her own wrist chronometer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hopper to catch and an interview to conduct.”
As she exited Nash McEvoy’s office, she wondered if her editor’s vivid imagination and worrywart tendencies might inflict far more terror upon him than anything she was likely to encounter out on the far fringes of human habitation.
But somehow she tended to doubt it.
TWELVE
Gordon Cooper Interplanetary Spaceport
Upham (Sierra County), New Mexico, Earth
MARTIAN REPRESENTATIVE QALETAQU already knew how Chief Katowa was going to react to the news he was about to bring them from Earth, the land of his tribe’s ancestors. But he didn’t feel quite prepared to share that knowledge candidly with the woman who sat facing him in the next row of chairs in one of the private spaceport’s small transit lounges.
Gannet Brooks, the journalist with whom he had agreed to speak while he awaited the arrival of his interplanetary transport, adjusted the controls on her ear-mounted cam as she finger-combed her long brown hair. Despite the noisy presence of the dozen-plus other travelers in the lounge—many of them parents shepherding young children—the female journalist remained focused on Qaletaqu like the rubidium lasers on a Martian mohole-borer.
“Representative Qaletaqu, I would like to assess the Martian take on today’s news,” Brooks said. “How do you expect the Martian Colonies to react as a whole?”
Trying to maintain his best media “game face,” Qaletaqu sighed thoughtfully, stroked his smooth chin, and gazed out the broad, curving windows that faced the vast expanse of spaceport tarmac, upon which a pair of shuttlepods sat. A silver dot cleaved the clear sky above a flat desert beyond the landing field, a landscape that reminded him of the Sinai Planum just southwest of his tribe’s settlement, nestled deep in the Valles Marineris.
“What news are you talking about specifically?” he asked at length.
Her brow striated slightly into a gently scolding frown, as if to indicate that she hadn’t followed him all the way here on the continent-hopper from San Francisco just to quiz him about the number of fouls called during yesterday’s football match in Buenos Aires.
“I am referring to the news that the Vulcans may have just decided to throw us collectively to the wolves,” Brooks said. “Or to the Romulans, take your pick.”
Who have these journalists been talking to, anyway? Qaletaqu wondered, though he decided asking her that would be an exercise in futility. Like spies, newsfolk usually developed their own informal anonymous intelligence networks, some of which included people with access to classified information, and perhaps even to a covert record that someone had made of a supposedly secret closed-door meeting.
As he watched the silver dot grow steadily larger and lower until it resolved itself into a gleaming, squarish transport vessel on its landing approach, he wished he could choose the wolf over the Romulans, just as Brooks had suggested. After all, he could at least imagine the prospect of understanding the wolf, with whom the human race might stand a chance of coming to some sort of accommodation. But the Great Spirit only knew whether or not the faceless aliens known as the Romulans reasoned the way human beings did, assuming that such a thing was even knowable. After all, during his forty-one years Qaletaqu had known more than a few human beings who had not been particularly good at reasoning.
Turning away from the window, Qaletaqu smiled at Brooks, practicing the manner in which he planned to deliver his formal report to his father and the assembled members of the tribal council once he got back to Mars. “I think you might be overstating matters at least a little,” he said. “After all, Vulcan has agreed to provide significant material support for the defense of both the Sol and Alpha Centauri systems.”
“You’re referring to the systemwide warp-field detection grids the Vulcans have offered to help us install, both here and at Alpha Centauri,” she said. “Although some in my profession have described these measures as mere burglar alarms.”
Burglar alarms, Qaletaqu thought, shaking his head sadly. He was already willing to bet money that this early description of Vulcan’s defense initiative was going to stick. That did not bode any better for the future of Coalition unity than did Vulcan’s disconcertingly hands-off reaction to the growing Romulan threat.
“What the Vulcans are providing is significantly more sophisticated than a ‘burglar alarm,’” he said. “Would I rather have half the Vulcan fleet posted across the system to discourage the Romulans? Of course I would. But that’s not going to happen. And politics is the art of the possible, after all.”
“Still, I imagine most people on Earth are going to be profoundly disappointed by Vulcan’s decision,” Brooks said. “Do you expect the people you represent in the Martian Colonies to react any differently?”
With Mars significantly more vulnerable to any outsystem attack simply by virtue of its being millions of miles closer to the edge of human habitation in its native solar system—Jupiter Station was currently the only outpost of any significant size between Mars and the Alpha and Proxima Centauri settlements—the people of the Martian Colonies, from high officialdom right down to the grunt-level terra-forming laborer, were all but certain to be furious. Though Qaletaqu knew that Brooks hailed from San Francisco, he also knew there was little c
hance that she could be ignorant of this simple reality.
“Can I assume that was a rhetorical question?” he asked.
She nodded, conceding his point. “Perhaps the proper question is this one: What will the confederated government of the Martian Colonies do in response to Vulcan’s decision?”
He chuckled. “Just what do you think we can do?” She had to know as well as he did that Mars, though nominally autonomous despite the bloody, half-century-past war for independence that had preceded the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, had become over the years essentially a political satellite of the United Earth government. The recent signing of the Coalition Compact had only further marginalized Mars in favor of the far more populous political centers on Earth and Centauri III, earning the Red Planet such sardonic sobriquets as “the cosmic Canada.” The voice of the people whose ancestors had once rocked Earth’s economy by initiating the Gundersdottir’s Dome Rebellion and a series of Red Planet general strikes had become simply another voice in humanity’s ever-expanding interstellar choir.
Hell, we’re so unimportant that even our official Coalition delegates have to take commercial flights, Qaletaqu thought wryly.
“All right,” she said, nodding. “I know that Mars isn’t in any position to twist Administrator T’Pau’s arm with gunboat diplomacy, or even trade sanctions. But some of your countrymen have a lot of political clout just the same. For example, Katowa, your father.”
He sighed again and turned back toward the window. The transport vessel he had seen approaching earlier was on the ground now, and was making its way toward the jetway that connected with the transit lounge. An announcement on the public address system confirmed that the vessel would shortly be ready for boarding even as the other passengers present began to queue up before the counter that stood beside the jetway door.
“Katowa is the chief of the independent Martian Hopi-Pueblo nation you come from, isn’t he?” Brooks prompted.
Qaletaqu nodded. “He is. But the Assembly of the Martian Colonies is not a dictatorship, and neither is our tribal government.” Like the Iroquois confederacy of eastern North America, Mars’s Hopi-Pueblo nation—an amalgam of southwest tribes that had found relocating to austere Mars preferable to surrendering their hard-fought sovereignty to the United Earth—could have taught even the Jeffersonian-era founders of the Enlightenment a thing or two about the democratic process and fair, responsive governance.
“True enough,” Brooks said. “But Chief Katowa wields a considerable amount of influence with the Martian population.”
And Qaletaqu knew that Katowa was going to be anything but pleased by the report he was about to make about Vulcan’s actions visà-vis the Sol system’s defense. Troubled by thoughts of what his father might do, he rose from his seat. He took a couple of steps toward the boarding line before stopping and facing the journalist, who had also gotten to her feet.
“No comment,” he said. “Thanks for letting me speak my piece for the record, Miz Brooks. Now if you’ll excuse me.” And with that he slung his small carry-on bag over his shoulder and strode toward the jetway counter, past which most of the boarding queue had already moved.
It wasn’t until he had moved onto the jetway itself and was passing through the open passenger airlock hatchway that he noticed Brooks following a few paces behind him.
He stopped abruptly on the airlock threshold and faced her, a hard frown of annoyance involuntarily creasing his forehead.
“I’m sorry, Miz Brooks, but the interview is over. I really have to get back to Mars now, and I’d like to do so in peace, if you don’t mind terribly.”
It was only then that he noticed that she, too, had a small duffel slung over her shoulder.
“Sorry, Mister Representative,” she said, looking slightly abashed. “I promise to leave you alone. But only until our transport reaches Bradbury Spaceport on Mars.”
His eyes widened involuntarily. “Our transport?”
Grinning, she said, “Like I said before, I want to assess the Martian reaction to Vulcan’s decision. And after that, I’m heading out to see just what it is we’ve been hoping the Vulcans would help defend us from.”
Be careful what you wish for, Qaletaqu thought as he sighed and shook his head yet again. Then he continued through the hatchway and began searching for his seat.
It was going to be a long, long flight home.
THIRTEEN
Middle of the month of re’T’Khutar, YS 8764
Monday, July 28, 2155
Outer ShiKahr, Vulcan
“TELL MINISTER KUVAK THAT I HAVE an urgent matter to discuss with him,” Silok said to the minor functionary who had appeared on the other end of the visual connection. A matter so urgent, in fact, that Silok did not wish to wait for the span of time it would take for him to travel from his austere home office on the quiet outskirts of Vulcan’s capital to the busy cluster of administrative offices that comprised the core of the city’s government district.
Almost immediately, the young woman’s affectless visage vanished from the screen, presumably because she was summoning the official with whom the recently installed head of Vulcan’s V’Shar intelligence service sought an audience. Silok waited as the moment stretched, trying without success to force his mind into a neutral, meditational state. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, patience had never come naturally to him, and today was no exception, despite the outer appearance he so carefully maintained.
Unfortunately, the official post he had occupied since the earliest days of the T’Pau administration had done little to ameliorate his own perceived dearth of forbearance, even as his expertise and knowledge had grown. Although more than half a year had already passed since he had replaced Stel—whose tenure as Vulcan’s intelligence chief and head police investigator had ended abruptly and in disgrace along with the rest of the corrupt V’Las regime—Silok felt no more in control of the evershifting landscape of interstellar intelligence now than he had on his first day on the job.
But at least today he knew that he had solid news to report—news of such importance that it had to be brought directly to the attention of the highest available officials in Vulcan’s government as quickly as possible.
The image of Minister Kuvak, his dark eyes attentive beneath a bowl of graying hair, appeared on Silok’s desktop screen.
“Silok,” Kuvak said with no other preamble than a curt nod. “I am told that you require my assistance.”
“Is this channel secure?” Silok said, wishing to waste no more of either his time or the minister’s than was absolutely necessary.
“A moment,” Kuvak said, looking down as he entered a command into his own communications terminal. His sharp gaze meeting Silok’s yet again, the minister said, “You may speak freely now.”
Silok nodded. “Thank you, Minister. One of my field operatives has discovered conclusive evidence of Romulan shipbuilding and related research activity in a clandestine facility located near the Achernar system.”
Kuvak appeared to mull the revelation over momentarily before he replied. “Indeed. Achernar is rather remote, even from Romulus.”
“Not so remote, evidently, to prevent an expanding Romulan Star Empire from having grown dependent upon Achernar’s resources, particularly in the agricultural and mining sectors. Acquiring new outlying provinces also means acquiring new material obligations, prime of which are hungry new imperial subjects. However, Achernar’s relative remoteness from the imperial core worlds of Romulus and Remus no doubt served to obscure it from the V’Shar before now. And it may also keep it from receiving undue attention from the domestic dissident factions that we know to be operating presently within the Romulan Star Empire.”
“What kind of research are the Romulans conducting there specifically?”
“Sources indicate they are close to a high-warp breakthrough. Should their research initiatives succeed—and eventual success is inevitable given the resources the Romulans are dedi
cating to these efforts—they could be mass-producing vessels capable of speeds of warp six or even warp seven within the year.”
Kuvak absorbed Silok’s grim assessment stoically, with only a slight crease in his forehead betraying the intensity of his reaction.
“We must neutralize this Romulan facility,” he said at length.
“I agree completely, Minister. The only question is whether to do it overtly, using the Vulcan Defense Force, or to employ subtler means as an alternative.”
“Administrator T’Pau is still en route to Vulcan from Earth,” Kuvak said. “She is expected back in ShiKahr in ten days’ time.”
“Then the decision is yours pending her return, Minister.”
“Administrator T’Pau’s philosophy regarding the use of the military could not be more plain, even in her absence. And a Vulcan military strike on a Romulan facility could only draw Vulcan directly into the conflict that Earth presently faces.”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 14