Dwellers in the Crucible

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  With a sudden quick aggressiveness T'Shael seized her by the collar, wrenching it back to expose the human's throat, which was covered with love bites. The Vulcan's hand trembled, the thin fabric tearing under the ferocity of her grip.

  Cleante tugged at her hand, trying to make her let go. She felt exposed, violated, more soiled by T'Shael's penetrating gaze than by anything Kalor could do to her.

  "T'Shael, let go of me! For the love of Allah, don't accuse me! And don't be angry. I can't bear it!"

  Never had she seen such intermixed pain and anger ripping through the Vulcan mask. T'Shael's voice was anguished.

  "Why?!"

  "To save your life, damn it!" the human shrieked. "What else could I do? Was I supposed to sit there night after night waiting for you to die? What right do you have to ask me to do that? What makes you think you're the only one capable of sacrifice?"

  T'Shael released the human from her grasp, withdrawing, trying to gather herself, soul-sick with what she suddenly comprehended, what she had been too blind to recognize before. She could only imagine the degradations Kalor had visited upon Cleante night after night while she remained safe and inviolate in this place. The injustice of it, the evil of it, should have screamed across the compound to her, but she had not heard. The ripple effect of one's actions upon the face of the universe: first Stalek's death, now Kalor's evil and her t'hy'la's sacrifice be upon her soul. This must not continue!

  "It's the only way, T'Shael," Cleante was saying dreamily, standing near the door as if she actually anticipated Kalor's arrival with some kind of pleasure. "It's the only way for both of us to remain alive and whole until they come for us. Can't you see that? You have to admit it's logical.

  "Besides, it isn't so bad. Kalor's quite sensitive, sometimes. I never would have expected that. I've convinced him that I want him for himself now, not just to save you. That can be a great advantage. For both of us."

  And I'm not being totally honest with you, my t'hy'la, Cleante thought. The truth is my feelings are so jumbled I don't know the truth anymore. I started out just trying to save your life, pretending, going through the motions. But now I find I almost welcome Kalor's touch. It's been a long time since I've held someone in my arms, responded to him, felt him responding to me. I can't say I love him, not after what he did to the Deltans, what he's done to you. But is it possible I'm no longer pretending, possible I actually find pleasure in him? Oh, T'Shael, I'm so confused! The only thing I'm sure of, the only thing that's real and true and honest is what I've told you—that this is the only way I know. It's the only pure and unselfish thing I've ever done, the only sacrifice I can offer you. Is it somehow less pure if it's no longer a sacrifice?

  She was so totally absorbed in the confusion of her thoughts that she did not sense T'Shael's approach, could not have heard her at any rate because of the Vulcan's feline stealth. The long and elegant fingers moved like lightning to the precise spot on the human's shoulder as T'Shael's other arm broke her unconscious fall. The Vulcan picked up her human burden effortlessly and placed her gently, gently on the floor of the shed, sheltering her with crates and boxes against the eventuality of groundquakes.

  No, my more-than-worthy, it is not the only way, T'Shael thought, composing the human's limbs as if in sleep, covering her tenderly with her own ragged blanket. My way may not be logical, but it is final.

  As she could have done for all these many nights but had foreborne because she had taken Cleante at her word, as she would blame herself for the rest of her life, she gathered her Vulcan strength and forced the flimsy lock on the door of the shed. With a purposefulness she had not had before—her task all these months had been to remain with the other prisoners, draw on her resources to try to keep them all alive; she had failed with the Andorian and the Deltans, and must not fail this time—she found the power source that electrified the fence about the compound, ripped it loose in a shower of sparks, and scaled the fence.

  Within moments, her long and effortless stride carried her in the direction of the hills, toward where her sixth sense told her would be the locus of the next tremors. If the cold did not claim her, the maw of the planet would. If Kalor came seeking her, she would force him to kill her. He must no longer use her to manipulate Cleante. The human would be free of him until the Rihannsu returned, and they must return soon. They must!

  T'Shael stopped only once, just as the compound was almost beyond range of her acute night vision. She turned and looked back, no longer feeling the vicious wind. She swept the lank hair out of her somber eyes with one hand and raised the other in the ta'al.

  Live long and prosper, Cleante alFaisal, my more-than-worthy, she thought. If it could have been otherwise, I might have deserved to be your t'hy'la. Forgive me my failure. Kaiidth! As I have endeavored to teach you, and as you have succeeded in teaching me—

  Tears stung into the Vulcan's eyes, but it was only the wind. She turned her back on the compound and loped purposefully toward the hills.

  Jim Kirk rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and adjusted his seat to an upright position. He looked across at Spock, who was exactly as he had been when the Admiral began to doze, piloting the shuttlecraft at maximum speed, unerring and tireless.

  "A matter of hours now, Jim," Spock replied to the unasked question. "And, Jim—" Would the information he was about to impart alleviate the Admiral's uneasiness or exacerbate it? "We are being scanned, at regular intervals, by a vessel which remains beyond our sensor range."

  "They know we're out here," Kirk mused.

  Out here and at their mercy, he thought but did not say.

  Back home on Enterprise, five pairs of eyes watched Sulu's monitor until the blip that was the shuttlecraft disappeared.

  "Out of range now, Mr. Scott," Sulu, restored to his customary place at the helm, reported unnecessarily.

  "Aye," Scotty sighed, shifting his weight in the command chair. "Looks like it's us that does the waiting now."

  "Some of us have done the waiting all along, Mr. Scott," Uhura reminded him softly, leaving the comm con at last to sit on the steps behind him.

  "Aye, lass, that's true enough," Scotty acknowledged. "And none of us are denying that's sometimes the hardest of all."

  "Dammit, I should've been allowed to go with them!" McCoy exploded into the silence, pounding the guardrail he was leaning against and making Saavik jump. "I'm just as much implicated in that cloaking device business as they were, and there might've been something I could do!"

  "You've done what you could, Leonard," Scotty tried to assure him, nodding in the direction of Sulu's ears, clapping a hand over his own arm where McCoy had implanted the ethanol-inhibitor. "And I'll swear in my case you did too good of a job. I haven't gone on a tear since."

  "That's the thanks I get!" McCoy grumbled. "I just wish I could get a look at the two survivors before Jim and Spock have to bring them all the way back here. What if they're sick or injured? What if—?"

  His voice tapered off. For one thing there was no one around to argue with him, for another he was merely voicing what all of them were thinking.

  "Funny, isn't it?" Sulu had said when he'd first gotten back. "Funny, how we've all gotten involved in the lives of people we've never met."

  He had by now shed most of his Rihannsu mannerisms and the thinking that went with them, though he still affected the ears, and he might continue to dream in Rihan all his days. His return to the human realm had been a kind of culture shock.

  He'd been lionized by the Prolificom media (though all requests for interviews had been answered with anonymous press releases in order to preserve his cover), showered with accolades in absentia by the diplomatic community and the public at large. He'd received a commendation and a handshake from the head of Special Section himself, then had slipped back into his uniform and his place at the helm to become just Hikaru Sulu, Commander Reactivated, helmsman extraordinaire and something of a swashbuckler, but in all other respects just one of the crew.
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br />   No one on Enterprise had made a fuss over him; he hadn't expected them to. Heroism was the norm for these people, and Sulu had accepted their business-as-usual attitude as the best welcome he could ask for.

  The others had murmured their agreement, all but Uhura, who spent her life getting caught up in the lives of people she'd never met, and in worrying about the people she saw every day who insisted on trying to get themselves killed in one fashion or another.

  She had put the comm con on automatic at last. Nothing of significance would come through at this distance until Spock hailed in from the shuttlecraft three days from now, and her usually mellifluous voice was hoarse from thanking all those people, from the ones she knew personally like Tam and Mai-Ling to the anonymous voices of the Floaters. She needed to rest now. She sat on the steps of the command well, warming her soul at the metaphorical campfire, knowing Jim and Spock and the Warrantors would come home safe because they must.

  "Funny," Sulu had said, having shaken off the Prolificom reporters at last, a little dazzled at the larger-than-life figure they'd made of him in "Operation D'Artagnan" as they'd headlined it.

  And if Scotty didn't answer him right away, it was because he was more preoccupied with people he had met, and with how they had changed.

  Unlike Sulu and his VIP courier, Scotty had slipped back aboard weeks ago with no noticeable fanfare and had gone back to his engines and the routines around which he'd built his life, but the encounter with Korax still haunted him. Whatever concrete value his small role in the larger operation might have led in aggravating the friction between the strange bedfellows that were the Empires, its residual effect on him personally had been profound.

  He found himself studying his face in the shaving mirror of a morning, counting the age lines, wondering what it must be like to be a Klingon and have it all past you by the time you were thirty. No wonder they were rapacious, violent; it was all over for them so quickly. It was a strange and uncanny feeling, this sudden duality, this ability to see through the eyes of a Klingon.

  And Saavik, silent Saavik, no stranger to duality, sat at her post as navigator dunsel, unneeded really while they idled at station-keeping off Rator, which was as far as the Rihannsu would allow them to go. She had had the least active role of any here, yet she, too, had not been unchanged by events. For one thing, she had never had to listen to so many anti-Romulan slurs in all of her brief life.

  Most humans knew nothing of her background. They saw her in the Starfleet uniform and took her for Vulcan, forgetting how well she could hear when they occasionally felt free to make disparaging remarks in her presence. These remarks had always been rare, originating from those of narrow mind and unexamined opinion whom one might suspect of bigotry in any event. But with the tensions created by the Warrantor situation, the slurs seemed to be on everyone's lips, even if they only went so far as, "Well, what else can you expect from a Romulan?"

  Saavik had gritted her teeth and become all the more Vulcan, fighting the urge to judge as she and hers were being judged, to return bigotry for bigotry. Insults are effective only where emotion is present, Spock would say—Spock, who all his life had borne the bigotry of human and Vulcan alike, invoking the personal mantra he had bequeathed Saavik from the beginning: Tolerance. Tolerance is logical.

  Indeed, my mentor, Saavik thought in his absence. But it is difficult.

  So deep was she in her personal thoughts that she hadn't realized the others were talking around her, joking the way humans did when they were anxious, when a silence had gone on too long and threatened to engulf them.

  "… and not another day goes by without we do something about those ears, D'Artagnan," McCoy was saying. "You're attracting entirely too much attention."

  "Aw, Doc, do I have to?" Sulu fingered them nostalgically. "You have to admit I've grown sort of—attached to them."

  The others groaned, and Saavik glanced at Sulu quizzically, to find him grinning at her, inviting her to share the joke. Humor, she thought. It was a difficult concept, but one that could warm the heart in the dark night of space.

  Fourteen

  THE FIRST OF the tremors brought Cleante around. She tried to sit up, but the room spun around her, and the pounding in her head—

  Memory returned slowly. She had been arguing with T'Shael in the storage shed, trying to make her understand. A sense of falling …

  What had T'Shael done to her, and where was the Vulcan now?

  Cleante sat up in spite of the headache. She was in Kalor's quarters, on his cot, still fully dressed, but—Her hand went to the collar of the tunic where T'Shael had torn it. She looked up to see Kalor standing over her.

  He had been drinking, still held the bottle in his hand. He seemed not to notice that the room swayed with tremors, perhaps thinking his inability to keep his feet was a result of the alcohol and not external events. His mood was surly.

  "Your green-blooded friend has finished me," he slurred. "Escaped, khest her! Don't ask me how. She dies and the Roms kill me. Some bargain! Treachery and deceit—from a Vulcan. The universe has gone mad!"

  "We can still find her!" Cleante said, springing off the cot. "She may still be alive. If we can bring her back—"

  Kalor squinted at her. The drink may have clouded his vision. There might be two of her. Which one could he trust? The floor beneath him bucked again and he struggled to keep his feet.

  "You and I as allies?" he growled,Klingon suspicious. "The universe is askew! Or is it you and the Vulcan in connivance against me? That I would sooner believe!"

  "What difference does it make?" Cleante demanded, thinking fast, "As long as T'Shael is alive when the Rihannsu return. Think, Kalor! Once we've found her you can make her stay, but if you leave her out there she'll certainly die. And so will you!"

  Kalor's lizard eyes shifted uneasily. He could tell the Roms the Vulcan had committed suicide. Would they buy that after the Deltan business? Or was it better to say she'd escaped? How could they believe that after he'd managed to hold her all this time? Panic was new to Kalor; he didn't like it.

  The drink had certainly clouded his wits; he could see no clear plan of action before him. Only one thing was certain: the human was still here, still desirable. If he must die for the loss of a Vulcan, let him snatch what pleasure he could from his final hours.

  "I have to think about this," he said, taking a final swig from the bottle, slamming it on the table. A tremor sent it crashing to the floor; the room reeked of the vitriolic stuff. Kalor ignored it, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and looming over Cleante. "First things first."

  "All right," Cleante acquiesced without thinking.

  She did not take time to bargain, to exact his promise that they would search for T'Shael after. She might have insisted they find T'Shael first, so great was Kalor's need, but she did not. She would never know why. Was she afraid of pushing her luck and angering Kalor in his dangerous state? Could it be a fulfillment of her own needs as much as his? She did not analyze it; she simply began to undress.

  You'll have to bear the cold a while longer, T'Shael, she thought, loosening her hair and slipping out of her clothes. I'm sorry. Or, maybe I'm not. I didn't force you to run away; the decision was yours. Maybe this is my experiment in xenopsychology now, my way of humanizing a Klingon—if that isn't a contradiction in terms. Maybe it's my final atonement, my hairshirt. Maybe I'm just tired of apologizing.

  She shivered a little at the sound of the wind, hugging herself as she lay there waiting for him. The tremors seemed to have died away for the moment. Cleante looked up at Kalor, who could not know the turmoil in her mind and would not have cared, knowing only that she was here and she was for him.

  The Commander preferred her private scoutcraft to the transporter for surprise visits. It made for a grander entrance, and its power dampers rendered it absolutely silent. It touched down in the darkness of the compound as if it were part of the night wind. If Kalor had not been otherwise engaged he still could never h
ave anticipated what happened.

  The Commander stepped out of the scout and moved about the compound soundlessly. Within seconds, she had assessed the situation, and acted.

  Her hand was on her disruptor as she seemed to materialize in the doorway. She fired from the hip with deadly accuracy and Kalor crumpled without a sound.

  "No Klingon defies me!" the Commander said in a voice that made it clear how she, female in a warrior society, had come to be what she was. She grabbed Cleante's wrist and yanked her unceremoniously off the cot. "You seem none the worse for wear. Get dressed. You'll have to lead me to the Vulcan."

  Cleante allowed Kalor one stunned, incredulous glance before she stumbled into her clothes. Within moments she and the Commander were locked in side by side in the scout. There were no guards, no ideological barriers, only two females, born under different stars, united on a single point: the need to find the third, who held a different meaning to each.

  "She would head for the epicenter, in the hills, there," Cleante said suddenly and with absolute certainty.

  The Rihannsu acknowledged without question and pointed the scout's nose toward the ragged hills.

  The ground had begun to rumble again as the scout set down in the last level place before the hills clawed their way upward. Loose rock from fist-sized chunks to great boulders rattled erratically down the slopes.

  "Stay here!" the Commander ordered, clambering out of the scout's hatch and strapping on emergency climbing gear. "You're only a hindrance without boots!"

  "I must go to her!" Cleante shrieked into the wind, and though the Commander knew it would slow her down, she consented.

  They did not have to go far.

  "There!" Cleante pointed, her other hand covering her mouth as she choked down pure horror.

  T'Shael was pinned against an outcropping by a huge boulder, arms outstretched as if in supplication, unconscious if not dead. There was no way of knowing how long she had been like this. A trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth had almost congealed in the cold; her flesh was devoid of color and colder than any living thing Cleante had ever encountered. The human scrabbled frantically at the huge rock with her bare hands until the Commander pushed her aside.