Bowing his head slightly, as if flattered, Alur poured himself a glass of something from a pitcher that sat on the corner of his desk and offered some to his guests, who declined. “Admiral Kirk is not incorrect. Which is why I am neither trying to threaten you, nor do I feel threatened by you, which is—forgive me if I assume too much—what you’d like.”
“I’m not sure it’s us you should be afraid of,” McCoy said.
“If not you, then…”
“Not the Pesh-Manut,” Kirk offered. “I’d guess there are as many of them in his pocket, Bones, as he has pockets.”
Alur chucked. “I am unfamiliar with the idiom but I think it clear enough.” He leaned forward and in the soft lighting his features grew harsh angles. “Please do not think me arrogant when I tell you that I do not merely have the pulse of Mestiko—I am her heart.”
Again Alur smiled and because Kirk realized he rarely saw a Payav’s teeth, even when they spoke, it was the most jarring thing about him.
“You will not find what you’re looking for here, Admiral. While it may have been suggested to you before that it was within your best interests to leave Mestiko, let me put it in terms you will understand. There is no benefit to you remaining on this planet. You have no starship in orbit, and the Zamestaad will bristle should one appear.” Alur leaned back in his seat as if he’d created something beautiful and wanted to take it in from a distance. “In fact, if anything were going to push the people to rekindle a relationship with the Klingon Empire, a useless show of Federation force might be just the thing to do so.”
Alur was right, on many levels. Not just about the Federation deploying a starship to Mestiko, but about Kirk not having one at his disposal. Not just a starship, but his starship. And all the people who went with her. Kirk wondered how different this mission might have been had he been commanding the Enterprise the last two weeks, or the last two years. Might he have meandered less across Indalo and Mestiko had Spock and Scotty been added to his counsel?
Kirk mentally shook off the doubt. This was neither the time nor the place for it. He could wallow in regret later, and second-guess himself on the way home. For now he had to push forward.
“You’re rich on the backs of your own people,” Kirk charged. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
Alur shrugged. “My prices are very fair, actually. And whatever I might make is poured back into the community. A strong Mestiko is… well, a strong Mestiko is in everyone’s best interests. You won’t suggest that the Federation doesn’t want us to be strong and independent, do you?”
“Strong with Klingon backing?”
“If you could prove that, we wouldn’t be talking. You’d have brought it to the Zamestaad and—” Alur paused as if in thought, then acted as if he’d suddenly remembered an important fact. “Oh, but so many members of the Zamestaad might be implicated that it would be difficult for the body to recover. That would be sad. Careers would be destroyed, the people’s trust betrayed. I can’t imagine what would be more destructive to Mestiko, can you?” He shrugged. “But again, if you could prove what you believe…”
“You’re a real son of a bitch, aren’t you?” McCoy snapped. “You’d doom your people for your own aggrandizement.”
There was quite a difference between having Spock along and having McCoy speak his mind, Kirk thought, and allowed himself the slightest smirk, not just at the doctor’s righteous indignation, but his willingness to be even more blunt than Kirk.
“This isn’t all for me, Dr. McCoy,” Alur said, his tone still mild. “I’m more using the Klingons than working for them. You see, there are other causes on this planet than those the Federation is concerned with. And—”
“And,” Kirk interrupted, Alur’s simple allusion to “other causes” making many puzzle pieces fall into place, “the weapons parts being delivered aren’t for you.”
That got Alur’s attention and he turned away from McCoy.
“The parts come to you, and you manufacture the weapons, but they go to a rival Payav faction of your choice. For later insurrection. It’s not about the strength of Mestiko,” Kirk said, eyes narrowed on Alur. “It’s about the strength of… who?”
Alur was silent, and Kirk knew he was on to something.
“I think I see it.” Kirk stood now and leaned down, his palms flat across the desk. “If it’s found out that offworlders—Dinpayav—are stocking antagonistic Payav factions with weapons, the Klingons have their tracks covered with your help. The Payav will only know that various Dinpayav are to blame and…” Another piece fell into place and Kirk wished he’d seen the big picture sooner. “A separatist faction? Mestiko for Payav and no one else? Except for you, who can supply them with the help of the Klingons?”
“You know nothing,” Alur said with a sneer.
“I know you’re a fool,” Kirk barked. “If the Federation and other Dinpayav are asked to leave Mestiko, we will. All it will take is a formal request from the Zamestaad. And then you think that with your Klingon-supplied weapons you and yours can take control of this planet. But you won’t. Once the Federation is gone the Klingons will come in full force. And then what will you be? Head slave in the master’s house?”
Alur was silent. He simply stared at Kirk, and McCoy was doing the same.
“You’re making a mistake, Alur,” Kirk said. “You think you’ll survive this plan, but you’ll be the first to die once it’s known the weapons are from offworld.” He pointed right at Alur’s chest, driving his finger forward with every word. “You’re the biggest link to the Klingons’ involvement. You’re the one they’d need to make disappear.”
Kirk’s muscles taut with energy, as if bracing himself for Alur to rise and strike him, ached with inaction. If Alur didn’t want to hit him, he wanted to hit Alur.
McCoy sat, waiting, looking between the two other men. Silence draped the room until finally Alur found his composure and he slowly leaned forward toward Kirk as he pushed himself from his seat.
“I suppose,” Alur began slowly, “it would be easier to explain one dead Starfleet officer,” he nodded to McCoy apologetically, “and his doctor… than it would to deal with the exposure of your allegations.”
Kirk was almost sure he heard McCoy take an audible gulp. Sometimes a doctor who wore his feelings on his sleeve wasn’t the best thing when attempting bravado. “That’s great, Jim. You convinced him to kill us. Anyone else you want dead you can talk him into taking care of?”
Alur glanced at McCoy for a moment, and when he glanced back Kirk had his phaser out and aimed just under Alur’s chin.
Kirk’s free hand grasped Alur’s arm through his robes. “I’m not so easy to kill,” Kirk said. “Better men than you have tried.”
Alur was looking at the phaser only now. It was likely he wasn’t often personally threatened because Kirk could feel the Payav’s body tense just through his arm.
“Indeed?” he croaked out softly.
“Open the door,” Kirk ordered McCoy, and noticed the doctor now had his phaser out as well. It wasn’t hard, even for a doctor, to slip into Starfleet training in times like this.
The door opened, Kirk wrenched Alur forward and in front of him, pressing the muzzle of his phaser into the small of the Payav’s back. “You’ll see us to safety,” Kirk told him, and started him marching out the door.
McCoy brought up the rear, looking back toward the building as they all walked slowly away. When the first of Alur’s guards appeared, McCoy called out to Kirk in the most military way the doctor could muster.
“Jim, his thugs are on the move at twelve o’clock.”
Kirk twisted around so Alur was a shield to them. “I’m at twelve o’clock, Doctor,” Kirk said. “You’re at six.”
“You want this blasted information or not?” McCoy bellowed. “I’m not even in Starfleet anymore.”
Kirk nodded and quickened their pace but Alur was older than he looked—or could have been purposely slowing them down—and wouldn’t spe
ed up much.
“They’re running for us now,” McCoy said, and was far less panicked than Kirk might have thought.
“Is your phaser set the same as yesterday?” Kirk asked.
“It should be.”
It better be, Kirk thought. “Stand by—on my mark.” Kirk waited until Alur’s men were about a meter back, just far enough and just close enough. He stopped, and shoved Alur head-on into his own guards so they almost stumbled over him.
“Fire,” Kirk ordered and McCoy quickly thumbed the phaser’s trigger.
A green flash washed forward, bathing the Payav in light. They buckled, falling on one another, caught in the wide-beamed stun.
Kirk nodded to himself and grabbed McCoy’s arm. “Wide stuns don’t last long,” Kirk told him. “We have to move.”
Alur and his men were left, collapsed at the gateway to the house of Mestiko’s richest man.
Chapter Nine
The capital city was more confusing at night than when light cascaded through the pressurized dome. With the help of a few good-hearted Payav—who didn’t know why Kirk and McCoy were running but also didn’t seem to care—they made their way back to the Zamestaad by daybreak.
Maybe it was paranoia, but along the way there had been several Payav they avoided. Men and women talking into small ear-worn communicators. Possibly they were Pesh-Manut, and possibly they were Alur’s own agents—but to be honest, Kirk wasn’t sure what the difference would have been. That several normal Payav could be woken from their beds in the middle of the night to show Kirk and McCoy the underground passages that led to the city center said much about these people. As much for them as Alur’s treachery said against them. It really was no surprise—people everywhere could be kind or cold depending on their personal stories and manners—but it was heartening nevertheless.
Along the way McCoy couldn’t help but treat a few Payav for vitamin deficiencies and they assumed he was part of the “Doctors without Borders” organization that had visited Mestiko frequently.
When Kirk and McCoy found Raya in her personal chambers, she was already awake, already dressed, and ushered them both quickly into the central room that seemed to serve as kitchen, dining room, and sitting room, and not with much space for any of it.
“Please,” she implored, “keep your voices low. My elor is still sleeping, as is Blee’s husband in their bedroom.” She motioned for them to sit.
Kirk noted the contrast between the chosen planetary leader, the Jo’Zamestaad, and Alur orJada. Both could claim to be the most powerful Payav on Mestiko. One lived in relative wealth and comfort, with an entire building to himself. The other lived with her grandmother, her assistant, and her assistant’s husband, in what would be considered—back on Earth—a small efficiency apartment.
Looking shaken, and not just because she was surprised to see Kirk and McCoy this early and in her home, Raya moved back and forth, pacing nervously, unwilling or unable to sit.
“We’ve talked with Alur,” Kirk said, and Raya instantly began shaking her head back and forth in a lolling motion that could have been—well, Kirk didn’t know what it meant. She looked almost dizzy.
“Raya?” McCoy rose and helped her into a chair opposite Kirk. He took out his medical tricorder, rolled a scan around in front of her and looked up to Kirk with a shrug.
“Alur is dead,” she said suddenly. “I just got word.”
“Dead how?” Kirk asked, and found he’d moved to the edge of his seat.
Raya lolled her head about again. “Murdered. His home destroyed.” Her voice was riddled with a fear Kirk had never heard from her. It was disconcerting. Raya was a strong leader, a person of incredible will and determination. But his first inclination when he met with her two days ago was correct: she was captive to a set of circumstances and didn’t know how to escape.
“Raya,” Kirk said softly. “How much did you know?”
She pulled in a deep breath. Then another. Then a third. Finally, she began, her decision to tell it all giving her a rush of vocal strength. “I—Alur, even before the Pulse, had been an entrepreneur in my district. He is—was—an important man and a generous man to the city and the people. After the disaster he helped as much as any community leader, perhaps more, to help Mestiko recover. He embraced the new ways and technology of the Dinpayav who offered Mestiko help.”
So far, Kirk thought, Raya was selling him on how wonderful Alur was, which was set up for how she’d been fooled by him, and it didn’t ring true. He prodded her: “How long have you known he was working for the Klingons?”
Her eyes met his, and the distrust they’d both recently demonstrated to each other melted away. “I became aware that Alur was receiving much of his inexpensive goods from Klingon-dominated areas some eighteen months ago,” she said evenly, the words gathering individually on her lips, then falling sadly. “I had used Alur for my own ends, previous to his Klingon association. He supplied my constituents with goods they needed to survive, and I supplied him political cover and connections in exchange.”
“But when you learned he was in bed with the Klingons?” Kirk asked, and her nose wrinkled at what in the Payav language must have been an odd metaphor.
“When I became aware… of that,” she began again slowly, “Alur explained that we had been also,” she shrugged and her hands drew up in confusion, “in bed together?”
“It’s a saying,” McCoy explained. “Politics makes strange bedfellows—strange agreements between people with different agendas.”
Raya nodded and continued. “I believed we had the same agenda at first.”
“And by the time you realized differently,” Kirk said, “you were in over your head.”
This metaphor she understood. “Yes. If I exposed Alur I was exposing myself and all the contacts in the Zamestaad that I had given him.” She sighed. “I’d have not ruined only his standing, but my own and those of my political—” Raya gasped, noticing that Elee had stepped into the room.
Kirk turned to see she was in the doorway between the sitting room and her bedroom, wearing a simple dressing gown and an expression of extreme disappointment. “Continue, child,” she said.
With another slow intake of breath, Raya did. “I convinced myself that doing so—revealing Alur’s… and my involvement—would also cut off a vital supply of much-needed goods for our people.” Locked in a shared gaze that took in both Kirk and Elee behind him, Raya’s voice cracked a bit now. “I deluded myself. And I also feared Alur’s threats if I revealed what I knew.” Looking away, she whispered more to herself than the others, “But I duped myself into believing I did it more for the greater good.”
“Greater good,” Elee repeated, and she sounded bitter. Two words wielded with such frequency both for good and for ill.
“I do not know what to do,” Raya admitted and looked to her elor for guidance.
“Be your mother’s daughter,” Elee whispered. “You must.”
Whatever that meant to Raya, it seemed to bolster her. She sat a little straighter, breathed a touch easier, and nodded to some internal decision.
“The Pesh-Manut are useless to protect me,” she said, looking squarely at Kirk. “I am not a military leader. I have no personal security. I believe if the Klingon agents we both suspect killed Alur and elFizda are aware of my involvement, they will seek to end my life as well.”
“That sounds just about right,” Kirk said gravely.
“I need your protection, James,” she said, and took his hand, her thumbs squeezing him more tightly than he expected. “I must reveal to the public, to the full Zamestaad, the extent of this ignominy. I cannot prove conclusively Alur’s involvement with the Klingons, and that may actually save my career, but my career is less important than ongoing Klingon intrusion into Payav affairs.”
“You can prove it,” Kirk told her, and pulled his hand from her grip.
She looked at him with perplexity as he wrenched a bracelet from his left wrist and placed it in
her hands.
Raya looked at it, seeing it was obviously more mechanism than adornment, and she held it up between the thumbs of her right hand. “I do not understand.”
“It’s a communicator, as well as a recorder. Transcribed for proof, on it is my conversation with Alur. He’s very clear about his relationship with the Klingons, and his threats to the politicians—none mentioned by name—whom he could implicate.” Kirk gestured to the communicator. “I’m assuming your people can verify his voice. It should be all the proof you need.”
Studying first the device, as if it were a magical contrivance, and then Kirk’s face, Raya nodded, stunned at the speed of events.
“This will mean political chaos,” she said sadly. “I’ve brought political chaos to my people.”
Kirk grabbed her shoulders and lifted her to her feet. “Any political bedlam is better than civil war,” he told her.
“Or any war,” McCoy said.
Epilogue
Kirk and McCoy stayed with Raya another week and on their voyage back to Earth Kirk went over her speech to the Zamestaad again and again. He was very proud of her. How often did politicians completely own up to their mistakes and take the political fallout solely on their shoulders?
The speech did exactly as expected, and the storm of political pandemonium would certainly cause her star to fall a bit. But power wasn’t everything, and at least the Zamestaad agreed to allow an intermediary body to monitor shipments to Mestiko as well as trace previous consignments in the hopes of collecting any Klingon weaponry already distributed. Those councilors in the Zamestaad who protested were targeting themselves as members of groups who’d received such weapons, and would likely be the first under investigation.
“You think she’ll be okay?” McCoy asked as he and Kirk played a round of cribbage and put the ship on autopilot through open space.
“Raya?” Kirk looked up from behind his cards. “She’s a strong woman. She’ll bounce back.”
“’Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them,’” McCoy said.
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