Eleven
THE HUMAN'S SCREAMS brought Tal and two of his vanguard, with Kalor pulling on his boots and loping across the compound to keep up with them. He had abandoned his round-the-clock watch on his pointed-eared allies to catch a few hours' sleep and this had been his reward. Where the Roms went, he would go. This was still, nominally, his command.
Tal entered the cell first. He was met by Cleante who, praying she had read some compassion in his ancient and knowing eyes in their few encounters, threw herself into his arms and upon his mercy. The diplomat's daughter would use her talent for histrionics, would use anything she had, to save her friend.
"I must speak to your commander!" she said frantically. "My friend is ill; she will die without assistance. It is a matter for females. Let me speak to your commander, please!"
Tal quickly appraised the Vulcan's condition, then hesitated. Kalor was trying to push his way past the guards when an imperious voice froze them all in their tracks.
"Stand aside!" the Commander ordered sharply, and Klin and Rihannsu alike fell away instantly.
She had not gone near the prisoners, had not so much as looked at them for her entire stay here. She had been prepared to depart with the morning suns still thinking of them in the abstract, as two anonymous entities whose fate she could dictate from afar. She did not want to set eyes on the Vulcan, o any Vulcan, for the remainder of her days. Yet the human's screams had piqued her curiosity.
She quickly sized up the human as quite attractive for one of her species, then forced herself to look at the Vulcan. A female, plain of face and no more nor less like the Vulcan she had known than one Rihan was like another. Any number of strong emotions flooded her complex soul, but none was the loathing she'd expected. She took T'Shael by the shoulders and locked her eyes with her own.
T'Shael burned. The touch of the Rihannsu was like a current arcing through her. She writhed beneath it, arching her back and gnashing her teeth despite the gag, straining against her bonds and growling in her throat. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she frothed at the mouth, and all the while she was conscious of what she did, helpless to prevent it. The shame—
"I think I know what afflicts this one," the Commander said at last, taking her hands away. Her voice was almost tender, but reverted instantly to the voice of authority as she turned to Tal. "Instruct my physician to beam down with his strongest sedatives. And clear this place at once!"
"Ordinarily I would not remind you of our departure date—" Tal said a full day later.
"Then don't do so now!" the Commander said shortly. "We will stay until I know if the Vulcan lives or dies. Now go away, Tal. Go back to the ship and leave me in peace!"
She spoke as if to a lap pet whose presence she suddenly found irksome. Tal stiffened under her condescension. Subordinate he might be, but never subservient.
"Commander, we are under orders—"
"—to arrive at the Decian Outpost on such-and-such a stardate," she finished for him. "We can still do so if we delay our departure for a day or two or even three."
"Only if we risk overtaxing our engines," Tal said incisively.
"Then we will risk it!" the Commander almost screamed. "Tal, you are out of line and treading dangerously close to disciplinary action. Don't push me!"
The sub-commander chose his next words carefully.
"It seems I don't need to. You are pushing yourself. Or the Vulcan is."
T'Shael had been under heavy sedation for a full day, and her survival was still uncertain. The Commander had once done as much research as was possible on Vulcan biology for a very specific reason, and it was her opinion that if the introverted one could be kept unconscious and unable to respond to her drives until her distant male counterpart succumbed to his, she would live. It was Tal's opinion that something more expedient could have been done, and he said as much.
"I can't believe you would suggest such a thing!" the Commander said when she had heard him out, her voice hard and dangerous.
"In her present state will she know the difference?" Tal asked practically. "Any male will serve to quench her fire, fulfill her need. I don't suggest consigning her to a brute. Choose someone yourself from among your junior officers. One who is handsome and sensitive. One who writes poetry, perhaps, and has not yet killed. She might find pleasure in it. Certainly it would solve all of our problems."
The Commander gave him a frigid look.
"Perhaps you would like to volunteer your services, Tal," she said acidly. "Though I wouldn't have thought she was your type."
Tal's response was a bemused smile. The Commander was reminded—as if she, female officer in a warriors' society, could ever forget—what a philosophical chasm lay between male and female in some things.
"Try to understand," she said, her voice softer. "She is a Vulcan. It is different for them, almost sacred. For all that she is my prisoner and I hold discretion over her life or death, I cannot do what you suggest. And I can't believe you would respect me if I could."
She turned away from him, lost in her own thoughts as if he weren't there. Tal dared approach her.
"She reminds you of him, does she not?" he asked gently, prepared to understand.
"Of course not! She's just another Vulcan. Contrary to the old saw, they don't all look alike—" She stopped, giving him a long-eyed look. "You don't seriously believe I still concern myself with … with that other, do you?"
Tal's old and knowing eyes spoke for him. The Commander sighed.
"If he had a younger sibling, would I avenge myself on him through her?" she mused. "Wait, Tal. There is a method to my madness. You will see. For now we stay, until I say otherwise."
Unable to sleep with the intermittent sound of orbital thrusters aboard her ship, never able to sleep onworld, the Rihannsu Commander crossed the compound and entered the Klingon cage. The human, who sat on the edge of the bunk where the Vulcan lay drugged and unmoving, seemed not to notice her.
The Romulan Commander, she whose Name of names was one of the galaxy's better kept secrets, studied the only other females on this ugly, forsaken world. Human and Vulcan, she studied them. She had been indoctrinated in a hatred for humans all her days, and had reason enough to find bitterness in the sight of a Vulcan. Yet why did this simple scene move her? She touched the human's shoulder lightly and was met with those Byzantine eyes, which were dulled with fatigue.
"Leave us," the Commander said shortly. "Get some sleep. You are on the verge of collapse. We have no expertise in curing human ailments, and I won't have you endangering your health while you are under my command."
Cleante eyed her suspiciously, instinctively drawing closer to the comatose Vulcan. T'Shael was no longer gagged, no longer bound except by the cord around her waist, and that only to prevent her from falling out of the bunk. The human held the long and elegant hand between her own as she had done since the Vulcan had first been sedated. The Commander took this in, weighed it.
"I have not spared her life thus far in order to forfeit it now," she answered Cleante's suspicions. "I have my orders, and a respect for our common ancestry. And I have other reasons."
Something in the tone of her voice made Cleante wonder. As fatigued as she was she could hear the almost-tenderness, incongruous in the mouth of this hard, disciplined female. She had heard the same voice when the Rihannsu first determined the nature of T'Shael's affliction. Cleante rose unsteadily from her place at the Vulcan's side, stumbling a little on the suddenly uneven floor. The Commander caught her by the shoulders and Cleante was startled at the fierce strength in those deceptively small hands. Of course, the Rihannsu kinship with Vulcans—
An exhausted human stumbled to her bunk and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep. The Commander took up the vigil.
Why do I bother with this exercise in futility? she wondered, loosing the last of the Vulcan's bonds; she would not awaken now, and at any rate the Rihannsu's strength was an easy match for hers. Why not let your race's pe
rverse rutting cycle destroy you as it surely would have if I hadn't intervened? I have discretionary orders from the Praetor himself to kill you both and end this ridiculous affair, blame it on the Klingons if I choose, and it may come to that yet. I have reason enough to loathe the very sight of a Vulcan. I am a warrior, hardened against mercy. Why do I continue to keep you alive?
Is it because I see your merit in the way the human cares for you? No one has ever cared for me in that way, nor I for anyone. Is it because despite what I told Tal you do remind me of that other, of that one who could have cost me my career if not my life but who spared me, leaving me instead with a wanting that—
Spock! The only thing in this universe I ever wanted and could not have, could not win by powerplay or subterfuge or simple sensuality, and because of that the only thing I wanted and continue to want with a longing that will never be entirely stilled.
Spock! What were you that you could do this to me?
That wasn't exactly just, of course, she forced herself to admit. He had never actually misled her, never made a single overt move. It was she who had pursued him, drawn to his alien magnetism panting and rabid as a she-bitch while he was ever cool, remote, only "carrying out his duty." Had she stopped to truly listen to any of his words she would have found the truth beneath their subtlety, but she had succumbed to the dark richness of his voice and the electrifying almost-touch of his fingers and had not heard.
"I hope that one day there will be no need for you to observe any restrictions," she had said to him, meaning that she would win him over to herself as well as to her Empire.
"It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable" had been his reply. And from that cold phrase she had mistakenly assumed her passion reciprocated.
What a godforsaken fool she had been! How humiliating to find her own emotions used so handily against her! It was why she had found it so easy to contemplate his execution once she discovered his true intent.
She was confident even now, so many years after her fury had cooled, that she would have had him executed without hesitation, could have garroted him with her own small hands without remorse to assuage the injury to her pride. Yet would that have succeeded in ripping him out of her heart?
Spock! Is it only because I cannot have you that I continue to want you? Spock the Unconquerable. Once conquered, would you hold as little interest for me as the countless males I have devoured and cast aside as empty husks since I encountered you?
She had contemplated innumerable variations on such conquest over the intervening years, as a way of keeping her sanity as she postured and smiled and served aboard others' ships as prelude to re-winning her own. The lonely hours in her empty cabin aboard her flagship, regained finally by dint of ferocious determination following the debacle with the Enterprise, were filled with evil fantasies of taking him captive, injecting him perhaps with some of the drugs her people used to augment sexual desire, or perhaps merely waiting, holding him until his next pon farr and watching with vengeful pleasure as he suffered something akin to the agonies she had suffered in his wake. But these fantasies had left her as unfulfilled as the males she had used as substitutes for him in the long months following her repatriation from the Federation. They resolved nothing.
It was all of a piece, really: her humiliation at his hands, the shame of being taken prisoner by the Enterprise, the theft of the cloaking device. She might have taken her own life. It was standard procedure among her kind in such circumstances; she had almost done so in the guest quarters on the Enterprise. Only Spock had prevented her. She would forgive him for that least of all.
"Such death would be a waste," he had said to her, and she had glared at him without speaking.
The guard in the red shirt stationed unobtrusively outside her quarters reported that she was refusing food and all attempts to see to her comfort; she forbade anyone to so much as cross her threshold. They were three days from the starbase where she would be held for interrogation when Spock dared defy her restriction. He stood in the open doorway, respecting her space but making his presence felt.
She would not respond to him, would not give him the satisfaction of admitting that he knew enough of her—their minds had touched but briefly in their encounter aboard her ship, but she had yielded up to him far more than he to her—to know what she was contemplating.
"You were not searched as a matter of courtesy," he said. "Nevertheless, it is known to us that every Rihannsu officer carries a suicide capsule. I would advise against its use."
"Why?" she spat at him, coming alive for the first time. "Don't you realize that if I get back my command—assuming I am not executed for bringing disgrace to the Praetor by losing the cloaking device—I will use every cell in my being to destroy you and your precious Federation? Before this I was opposed to the Federation as a matter of duty, like any loyal Rihannsu. But you have inflamed that duty into fervor. I will destroy you!"
"Will you truly be in danger once you are repatriated?" he asked, seeming not to hear the rest of what she said or, knowing it already, choosing to disregard it. "Our intelligence reports indicated you were highly placed in the Praetor's favor. If you do in fact face the possibility of punishment—"
"Oh, don't worry about me!" she said bitterly, tossing her soft burnished hair off her shoulders. "I still have the Praetor's favor. He finds me beautiful. I have used that to advantage before, and I will do so again."
Spock looked thoughtful.
"It is unfortunate that this must be the way of your people," he said sincerely.
"Unfortunate?" She came toward him, her gray eyes flashing. If she could trust herself to get close enough to him … the wanting came over her despite her rage, bringing a warm flush to her flesh, a fever to her body. If she took one more step she would be unable to stop herself from tearing at his clothing, seizing him to her. "We all have our gifts. Why not use them? Do you find the idea distasteful?"
He did not answer immediately.
"It is disquieting that one so gifted must permit herself to be used in such a manner," he said at last.
"But you don't find it—personally—upsetting?" she demanded.
"No," he said, not quite honestly, and she saw the briefest flicker of something in the deepness of his eyes, remembering what he had said to her in the turbolift on the day of her capture. Had she underestimated her effect upon him? Had she reached some part of him after all?
"I would have had you killed, you know," she said.
"I have no doubt of that," he replied.
"Yet you care what becomes of me?"
"Yes."
"If I decided—in a moment of pure insanity—to seek political asylum in your Federation—" She hesitated. It was not in her to beg. "It would change nothing between us, I suppose?"
She knew, for their minds had touched, what his answer would be before he uttered it.
"I think not, Commander," he said somberly. "I believe we both recognize that."
"Of course." She turned her back on him, shaking her soft hair off her shoulders in resignation. "You have my word that I will not attempt my life. But I do not wish to see you again. Ever!"
"Understood," he said, and was gone.
Gone but never gone, the Commander thought, keeping her vigil at the bedside of the plain-faced one. If he had a younger sibling, you might have been she. If you live, how shall I use you for my purposes?
On the planet Vulcan, in the metropolis of T'lingShar, in the place of the Masters, a messenger waited.
Master Stimm contemplated the messenger, a priestess of the betrothal rite. Her message was contained in her very presence, yet the Master would permit her to speak out of deference for the distance she had traveled to bring it to him personally.
"The one called Stalek is dead," she said in her honeyed voice. They all had these voices, these keepers of the betrothal rites; the Master had always found them unsettling. "Before his ordeal ensued he requested that you be informed, out
of respect for your place in the life of his betrothed."
The Master nodded. It was not required that he express gratitude for information he would prefer not to have received, information that could mean only that his deepest student was also dead. The priestess acknowledged the Master's silence and took her leave.
The Master entered a state of deep trance, for what could have been days or only a moment. The meditative reaches that were his owned no time nor place; they were as fluid as eternity.
The Vulcan knows that there is a time for everything. The Master was an old one. There was no longer anything to sustain his tenuous link with this reality. With no noticeable ripple in the continuum of the universe he made his choice. Kaiidth! What was, was.
But even a Master is not omniscient.
T'Shael did not so much as open her eyes. By every logic she understood she should be dead; nevertheless she lived. She dared to move her hands and found them no longer restrained, felt tentatively for the cord about her waist and found it also had been removed.
She reached inside herself and found only silence. Her longtime link with Stalek, a kind of chronic undertone in her consciousness transformed in recent months into a cry and then a roar and at last an agonized scream, was gone. How was this possible, and she still alive?
T'Shael turned outward at last, listening. There was the sound of her own heartbeat, and the quiet breathing of another. Someone sat beside her on the narrow bunk; she became more aware of the presence as her senses were restored to her. She raised one enervated hand, reaching without quite touching.
"Cleante—" she whispered hoarsely, her throat constricted.
"She sleeps," said an unfamiliar voice. "As you should."
Baffled, T'Shael opened her eyes at last to seek out the human, who slept the sleep of the dead in the bunk across the cell. She tried to prop herself up on her elbows and was restrained by a small, strong hand.
Dwellers in the Crucible Page 24