Shadows of the Indignant

by Dave Galanter

  When Kirk approached him on the large platform that was dock seventeen, he was standing with an older-fashioned data slate, poking in commands to its interface with a short, dirty stylus that probably used to be white but had turned grubby with time.

  “Dedir orTola?”

  The Payav man looked up slowly, connected with Kirk’s eyes for a second, then looked back down. “What?”

  Again, English, no need for a translator.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions—”

  “I don’t got time for no questions,” Dedir snapped, and began walking toward an office cubicle at one corner of the bay.

  “You speak well,” Kirk said. “You’ve mastered the double negative, at least.”

  Dedir turned a half step, and Kirk could see his expression was confused. “What?”

  “I’ve heard good things about you,” Kirk said. “I wanted to offer you a job.”

  Chuckling, Dedir turned away again and made way for his office, and Kirk followed him. “I have job,” he said. “Get missing.”

  “Get lost, you mean.” Kirk stood in the doorway of Dedir’s office as the chubby Payav folded himself into the seat behind his narrow desk. “You’ve not even heard how much the job pays. It might be much more than you make here.”

  “Get lost, I said.”

  “At least you learn quickly.”

  “Whatever, a’sloointa Dinpayav,” he said, this time all in his own language.

  Every person Kirk spoke to was different and each required his own brand of finesse. With Dedir, Kirk moved quickly across the room and pressed his hand down onto the arm of Dedir’s chair, pinning his right hand down. “I’m going to assume,” Kirk said, easily blocking a useless, leverageless blow from Dedir’s left hand, “that ‘a’sloointa’ isn’t the nicest thing you could say to a person on this planet.”

  “Let me up,” Dedir struggled, and Kirk pressed down harder on his wrist.

  “I have questions, Dedir,” Kirk whispered. “Starting with who pays you.”

  “I work for the people who own this dock—”

  Kirk shook his head and spun the chair fully toward him. With his right hand he pinned down Dedir’s other wrist to the arm of the chair and now a look of fear truly fell across the Payav’s hairless brow. He struggled, to no avail.

  “You might work for them in name, but I want to know who you work for in deed,” Kirk said, and leaned close. “And don’t lie to me.”

  “Get your furry hands off me!” Dedir insisted.

  “No.” Kirk pressed harder still, putting as much of his body weight on Dedir’s wrists as he could. “Who is paying you to get fat?”

  Finding straining useless, Dedir eventually gave up. He sank back into the chair and his face furrowed into what seemed more mentally than physically pained. “They will kill me,” he said slowly, through gritted teeth, “and they will kill my family, and most pleasant of all they will kill you.”

  “Who?” Kirk demanded. “Who?”

  “Alur,” the Payav spat. “Now leave me to take my family away before they know I told you.”

  “Alur who?”

  “Everyone knows Alur, now let me go!”

  Kirk released him and instantly the man jumped up, knocking Kirk out of the way as he scrambled his plump form out of the office.

  Moving faster than Kirk would have thought possible, Dedir was halfway across the docking bay as Kirk managed to get to the office doorway. He certainly hoped everyone knew who Alur was, because if not, his talk with Dedir was going to be just another dead end.

  When Kirk went back to the ship, McCoy was waiting for him.

  “I was beginning to worry,” the doctor said.

  Kirk raised his arm and pointed to the wrist communicator as his jacket sleeve fell away to reveal it. “I was a communicator signal away.”

  “Like I’m going to learn how to use this blasted thing.”

  Over a meal, Kirk told McCoy what he’d learned about a fat Payav named Dedir and his boss, Alur, which wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long to bring the doctor up to speed.

  “I’m not sure which of us had the more interesting day,” McCoy said.

  “How is Dr. Lon?” Kirk asked, shunning the terrible coffee in favor of bottled water.

  “Different.” McCoy took a bite of his roast beef, then looked at the packet again as if to be sure it was, in fact, what it claimed to be. He shrugged and took another bite.

  “Different how?”

  “I’m not sure. More mellow isn’t quite the word for it. A little more sympathetic, maybe? That doesn’t quite fit either. I think he likes these people more… maybe as pets.”

  Kirk coughed out a chuckle as it interfered with a swallow of potato salad. “You’re being too hard on him.”

  McCoy paused for a moment and seemed to consider the possibility. “I dunno. How do you spend all this time on a planet and talk more about its ecology than its people? Wouldn’t you make some connections with the natives?” He looked at Kirk, then said, “Well, you would, if she were pretty enough.”

  Kirk ignored the dig and changed the subject back to Mestiko. “And how’s the planet doing? The air looks more clear, but readings I took as we were landing tell me looks are deceiving.”

  “Nitrogen oxide levels are down a lot since Lon’s satellites were put into operation. They’ve upgraded the original satellites, too, and added some to replace the ones that got blown up. Most of the acid rain is gone—or at least is more on par with what you’d expect for mid—to late-industrial societies. Oxygen levels are up enough that the ozone layer’s under repair, and UV radiation is going down, too.”

  “That all sounds very good,” Kirk said.

  “Well, it’s not all hearts and flowers.” McCoy took his half-finished tray of food, its package, and his empty coffee cup and stowed them in the trash bin. “The planet’s natural biomass was and is in steep decline. Massive flora and fauna extinctions, Jim. What the radiation didn’t wipe out, the smog got. What the smog didn’t kill, the falling temperatures destroyed, which is why other than what the Norrb can contribute, and some municipal greenhouses under the domed portions of the city, Mestiko is getting most of its food from off-planet.”

  Kirk nodded and McCoy continued.

  “And while the air is clearer now, increased ice and snow cover is reflecting too much sunlight back into space. Temperatures are still way below normal. The ice caps are larger than as far back as Payav records go, because the last several hundred years Mestiko was on a warming cycle, coming off an ice age a few millennia back.”

  Stowing his own dinner remains, Kirk shook his head, remembering the devastation of the initial pulsar disaster, and then a few years later the ramifications of what to him always made him think of a massive planetary attack, as if the pulsar was an enemy that Kirk had failed to defeat.

  It was probably a mistake to look at it in those terms—natural disasters weren’t evil, they just were. Perhaps that was why the Payav sometimes looked for a scapegoat in the Federation. They needed someone to blame, someone to curse other than nature, and the Federation had been there since the beginning—Dinpayav who appeared when their world became an icy, poisonous rock. Who could fault them for coping in the easiest way they could?

  Kirk felt McCoy’s hand on his shoulder and he turned toward the doctor.

  “Jim, you still listening?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kirk said. “I guess I wasn’t toward the end.”

  McCoy looked at him, his brows knitted with worry. “I asked what you want to do now.”

  “Talk to Raya.” Kirk opened a panel in the bulkhead to the right of the galley and revealed a keypad. He punched in a code, and the keypad gave way to a retinal scanner.

  “Access,” he told the computer.

  “Identify for retinal scan.”

  “Kirk, James T.”

  “Identity confirmed.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  With a slight hiss,
a safe door opened. “Just in case the ship was searched at some point, I didn’t want this found.” Kirk pulled out a card holder and showed it to McCoy. Out came a flashing ID card, showing his name and rank. “I don’t think Jim Temple and Dr. Davis will get an audience with the Jo’Zamestaad. But I’m guessing this will get us past security.”

  It actually had not been that long ago that Kirk had first met Raya elMora. She’d appeared on the forward viewscreen of the Enterprise, the new leader of a ravaged planet, her position chosen by default of who survived the initial pulsar devastation. From the moment they met Kirk had the oddest feeling that he should’ve been protecting her, and had never quite been able to.

  They kept in touch from time to time, but she was busy, he was busy, and subspace letters were never Kirk’s strong suit.

  “The years have been good to you.” Kirk flirted when he first greeted her, clasping her arms in the traditional Payav handshake, and then giving her a good old warm human hug.

  Raya smiled and greeted McCoy in the same manner. “Doctor, I trust you’ll be treating the admiral’s eyes at his next physical.” She motioned for them to sit in front of her poorly organized, messy desk.

  “If memory serves,” McCoy said, lowering himself into one of the three plain chairs that adorned her austere office, “he has an allergy to the standard cure. We’ll have to work out something else. But I suspect he’s fine for now, because he’s right: you’re looking radiant.”

  “I see Starfleet still has training programs in flattery,” Raya said. “I’d hoped it would. As Jo’Zamestaad I am treated more to diatribe than adulation.” There was a confidence in her that Kirk had seen somewhat in their first meeting, more in their second, and now it was fully in bloom. “I am surprised to see you,” she continued. “Pleasantly so, of course. But I received no subspace connect that told me you would be visiting.”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” Kirk said, and watched her brows knit with confusion.

  “James,” Raya said in an admonishing tone. “I thought we were to be—I thought you of all people would know better than to be coy with me.”

  Kirk smiled. “Of course. We’re here unofficially, however, so we need to be discreet.”

  She nodded. “That would explain why there was no record of your having arrived planetside, and no record of a Federation ship in orbit.” When McCoy looked as if he was about to ask a question, Raya offered: “I would have been advised by Space Central had either event occurred.”

  A woman came into the room and handed Raya a data slate that looked much like the ones Starfleet used some years back. In fact, it might have been an old surplus item. “Thank you, Blee,” Raya said, handing back the signed slate to the woman.

  “You have an appointment you’re late for, Jo’Zamestaad,” Blee said on her way to the door. “The subcommittee on housing is to deliver its report.”

  “I promise not to be too late, thank you,” Raya called after her. When Blee was gone, Raya leaned forward as if sharing a secret. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. She practically runs the government despite me, and the two years she was a councillor in her own right I was lost without her.”

  Kirk nodded and smiled politely, but something was wrong. He could feel it. Raya was different. Warm and yet distant. Despite an odd misgiving not to, he was frank with her about his reason for being on Mestiko. He explained in detail his belief that shipments from Klingons were covertly finding their way to her planet, that someone was going to some amount of trouble to keep people from knowing about it, and that by asking questions at Indalo Station about Klingons and their shipments, a lot of very non-Klingon feathers had been ruffled—which was in itself unusual if there was nothing to hide.

  Finally, he told her about his conversation with chunky Dedir and the name he’d given Kirk as his boss: Alur.

  She listened, hands clasped before her, the appropriate amount of shock registering in her pale expressions, until he was finished, when she steepled her fingers in a manner reminiscent of Spock, save when he did it there were not two sets of thumbs.

  “This is very disturbing,” Raya said, finally. “I will have the Pesh-Manut look into this immediately, and I appreciate you bringing this to me, finally. I only wish you might have come to me first—I may have been more help.”

  “I didn’t know enough to bring you until now,” Kirk said. “Can you help me find out who Alur is?”

  Raya seemed to shrug. “I will be in contact once the Pesh-Manut have investigated this to the fullest, I assure you.”

  “Well,” Kirk said, “do you think I could talk to someone named elFizda in the customs office?”

  Her features becoming ashen, Raya hesitated for too long a moment. “The woman of whom you speak was killed upon leaving orbit yesterday,” she said solemnly. “I am told it was an accident. An imbalance with the engine.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Kirk shared a look with McCoy.

  Raya stood, came around the desk, and gave Kirk a brief hug again. “I fear I am running too late at this point and Blee will not allow me to hear the end of it. But I am always glad to see you, and perhaps if our mutual schedules allow we can all have a meal together before you depart?”

  Despite being suddenly ushered out, Kirk smiled politely and gave Raya the information she was looking for. “We should be here long enough for that. Dr. McCoy needs to meet with Dr. Lon for a bit.”

  McCoy glanced at Kirk but said nothing about the lie until Raya was gone and they were both on their way back to the ship.

  “You don’t trust her,” McCoy said matter-of-factly, not asking a question.

  Kirk wanted to trust her. He needed to at some level. “She has a look in her eyes that I’ve seen before, Bones. I know a hostage when I see one.”

  “A hostage?”

  “Of circumstance.”

  McCoy was silent for a moment, waiting, and finally he said. “You going to explain what you mean? I thought the reason I was here was for guidance. That’s a damn hard thing to do if I don’t know what the blazes you’re talking about.”

  Nodding, Kirk took in a long breath and began. “Her assistant coming in and telling her she was already late for some meeting was a dodge. I’ve used it myself when someone’s made an appointment with me and I didn’t want the meeting to run too long.”

  “That could just mean she’s busy—”

  “It’s not just that.” Kirk shook his head and thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “She knows there’s more to elFizda’s death than meets the eye. Did you see how quickly she wanted to leave after I mentioned her? And she’s going to have the Pesh-Manut investigate.”

  “Yeah, what is that?”

  “It’s a conglomeration of intelligence organizations from several different Mestiko factions,” Kirk said. “It’s a mess. It was formed just after the disaster and it’s too hard for all those once separate agendas to mesh well together. Raya herself has complained about them to me in letters.”

  “I didn’t know you two kept in touch.”

  Kirk shot him a glance. “We do.”

  “So why did you lie and tell her I’d not seen Dr. Lon yet?”

  Pulling a hand out from his pocket, Kirk wagged a finger at the doctor. “Ah, now I didn’t say that. I said you had to meet with him for a bit.”

  McCoy grunted with disdain. “See, you’re as much a politician as she is.”

  “Didn’t you always tell me to be more diplomatic?”

  “You’re thinking of Spock.”

  “Must be.”

  “So,” McCoy began as they found the entranceway to the underground part of the city where the docking platforms were protected. “Why did you tell her I needed to see Dr. Lon again?”

  “Because I need more time. Dedir said everyone knew Alur. Maybe that means that Raya wouldn’t, and maybe it means she would, but when I said the name there was a flicker of recognition.”

  “You know, you’re basing a lot on t
he reactions of someone from a different planet and culture as you,” McCoy said. “Who’s to say you know her well enough to read her every twitch?”

  They approached the location of their ship and Kirk said, “Who’s to say I don’t?”

  McCoy was about to argue but Kirk used one hand to stop McCoy from moving forward and with his other hand he pulled the palm phaser out of his pocket.

  “What’s wrong?” McCoy whispered.

  “Someone’s on the ship,” Kirk said, and indicated a light flashing on the keypad that gave one egress to the craft. “Internal sensors detecting motion inside.” He motioned to McCoy. “Get your phaser out.”

  As he did so, McCoy protested. “Jim, I’ve not qualified with a weapon in over two years.”

  “Set it on wide angle stun,” Kirk snapped as he cautiously approached the hatchway, “and try not to get me in front of the muzzle.”

  Chapter Seven

  “How do you know you don’t just have mice?” McCoy asked in hushed tone.

  Kirk ignored the question and punched a series of commands into the console next to his ship’s hatch.

  “We could lock him in and call the authorities,” McCoy offered.

  That wasn’t what Kirk wanted, however. Every time someone approached him he learned more. While McCoy may not believe it, someone waiting on their ship, even if their goal was to try to kill them, was a good thing. Besides, Kirk wasn’t sure which “authority” they should contact. “The port and customs authorities may be in on this up to their eyebrows,” he said.

  “They don’t have eyebrows,” McCoy muttered.

  “Come on. Let’s find out who’s inside.” Kirk tuned his phaser to a new setting, then hid it from view in the cup of his hand. “Bring out your weapon if you need to, but otherwise let’s see what develops.”