“The damn Partnership, I know. I’ve screamed at them for hours about my rights, and all I get are excuses.”
“How’s the rest of your crew?”
“They’re fine. Well, they’re in cells, but they’re no worse off than I am.” She gave his shoulders another squeeze. “Please tell me you’re here to get us out.”
Reed sighed. “Thenar . . . the reason we’ve taken so long to come here is that we’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks helping to provide emergency relief to Etrafso—the planet whose Ware you deactivated.”
The Andorian captain stared at him. “Emergency? I know what they’ve claimed about the consequences there, but I took it for propaganda.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “But I’ve been there. Seen for myself, and heard the details from Kulef, who’s been dealing with it even longer.”
Her antennae folded back in alarm as she studied his expression. “Tell me.”
So he did. It was at once a relief to unload the burden of the horrors he’d seen and an ordeal to force sh’Prenni to hear the full consequences of her actions. “Things are getting under control now,” he finished. “Other Partnership worlds have provided relief supplies and evacuated the Nierl and Xavoth surv . . . survivors to safe environments. The Tyrellians have agreed to set up a regular supply line to help sustain the rest of Etrafso’s population. It’ll be some time before things are normalized there, but . . . at least the deaths have stopped.”
It was some time before she spoke. “I thought . . . I knew losing the Ware would be a hardship, but I thought, let those spoiled, self-indulgent people have to work a little for the needs of life. It’ll teach them character. Admiral Shran always taught me, it’s only the things you struggle for that have any real value. He really drilled that in, since everything always came so easily to me.” She shook her head, her antennae curling downward. “I was starting to think this was easy too, letting myself get careless. I should’ve investigated more closely before I acted.”
Reed moved forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You thought you were helping them. We’ve all seen the damage the Ware has done.”
She stared. “You think I don’t know that, Malcolm? Of course this is ultimately the Ware’s fault! One more atrocity to lay at the feet of its creators, when we find them.” She paced the austere but spacious visiting area. “But I let myself get drawn into one more layer of their deceptions and manipulations. They’ve made their clients so dependent that you can’t even free them without killing them! And I should have seen that. I should not have underestimated the enemy.” Growling through her teeth, she spun and pounded the wall with one sharp, ferocious blow. The guard, one of the burly humanoid Monsof, stepped closer.
“Thenar,” Reed cautioned in a soft voice. She turned, saw the guard, and gathered herself. The human continued: “I didn’t come here only to give you bad news. The Partnership says you’ll have a fair trial. And I’m to be your advocate. I’m working with their legal counsel to study their laws and prepare a defense. And Endeavour’s coming with a diplomatic team. They may be able to negotiate an agreement for your release.”
Her antennae took on a skeptical twist. “And the Partnership swears they’ll play fair—even while they cozy up to Vabion and Lokog. Do you believe them?”
“Two weeks ago, I would have said no. But now . . . I don’t think they saw any other recourse. They need the Ware to survive, more than we ever could’ve anticipated.”
“They’re still addicts, Malcolm. And addicts will do anything if their supply is threatened.” She took a deep, controlled breath. “How’s Vol’Rala?”
“Still under impound. They won’t let us see her.”
“Well, that’s something,” she said. “I was afraid they’d just destroy her. The poor girl took an awful pounding from the Klingons, but she survived. I would’ve hated to think she’d end so ignominiously.” She started pacing again. “Though I’m not much happier to think about Vol’Rala just sitting there somewhere, her wounds untended, with no one to keep her company.”
“Who knew you were such a romantic?” Reed asked. “Though I suppose ships named Enterprise will do that to you.”
“Well, it could be worse,” she said. “The Klingons could’ve taken her as a prize ship. I’d have blown her cores myself before I let that happen.”
She stopped pacing and faced Reed gravely. “Still . . . what matters most is my crew. If you’re my lawyer, then my instructions to you are not to worry about me. I’ll take responsibility for everything, just so long as they let my crew go free.”
“Thenar, don’t be noble. There may still be a way to get you out. Travis and Pioneer are still searching for the Ware’s creators. If we find them, if we can prove their intentions are malevolent, maybe we can convince the Partnership you were acting in their defense.”
Her piercing green eyes met his intently. “You think good faith matters to the dead? No, Malcolm. Whatever my intentions, my methods were reckless. My crew was just following my orders, but those orders were issued in excessive haste.” She smirked. “Admiral Archer cautioned me once—he said I was paradoxical because I was a creature of impulse, yet I tended to act at warp speed. It confused me until I learned English better; the pun doesn’t work in Andorii. Perhaps I got so distracted by the wordplay that I missed the underlying point.”
Sh’Prenni moved closer, looming over Reed. “Now, though, I’m the distraction. You mustn’t make this about me. Yes, find the Ware’s creators, prove to the Partnership the trap they’ve fallen into. But do it for them, not for me. Convince them to free themselves. Convince them the Federation will help. Let me accept my fate as a show of good faith.”
“I can’t ask that of you, Thenar!”
“I’m asking it of you. If that’s what it takes to save my crew and the Partnership, I’m willing to pay that price. Would you do any less?”
He met her gaze with sadness, but with the deepest of respect and admiration. “I haven’t told you how honored I am to call you a friend.”
She clasped his arms again. “You’ve shown me. Every day. It’s been an honor to serve under you, Captain Reed. I only wish I could have been as fine a captain as you.”
“We’re well-matched as captains, Thenar,” he told her. “Because we both refuse to give up on anyone under our command.”
• • •
“No!” Ramnaf Breg lunged at sh’Prenni after the captain relayed the news about Etrafso to the rest of her crew, gathered together for their daily exercise session. Most of them were in Ware-gray tank tops and shorts, barely standing out from the institutional-white walls that surrounded the yard and the overcast sky above. The blue of their skin—and the orange of Breg’s and the ruddy brown of Banerji’s—provided the only color to the place.
But Breg’s face now flushed bright red as Giered Charas and Zoanra zh’Vethris grabbed her arms and held her in place. “How could you?” the young Arkenite screamed at her captain. “I thought Starfleet were liberators! You made us mass murderers! Monsters!”
“Control yourself, child!” Charas barked. “Even in these rags, she is still your captain!”
“It’s all right, Giered,” she said. “She’s just saying what a lot of us are thinking.”
“But it . . . it was all a mistake,” Hari Banerji said. “We couldn’t have known. Could we?”
Breg whirled on him. “And you. You’re as much to blame as she is! You made the shutdown code into a weapon. Something we could fire without thinking, without stopping to ask! You and your pinkskin impatience!”
“That’s enough!” Charas roared. “No one insults Hari but me, have you got that?”
Breg slumped, her fury spent, and Banerji threw Charas a look of appreciation that the first officer did not acknowledge in any way. Zh’Vethris took the weeping Arkenite in hand and led her away to a more private
corner, stroking her smooth-skinned head and kissing her gently.
“Banerji is right,” Charas went on to the rest of the crew. “We are not to blame here. The Ware is a scourge to the galaxy. These Partnership people are its victims whether they admit it or not. Their dependence on it was their own mistake.”
“Yes,” Tavrithinn th’Cheen spoke up, stepping forward. Even in his drab exercise clothes, he carried himself with all the dignity of his clan. “Let us not forget, we are on a mission to defend the Federation against an unfeeling enemy. Any collateral damage falls into its ledger, not ours.”
“How are we defending the Federation?” Silash ch’Gesrit countered, his engineer’s skepticism fully engaged. “We’re two moons’ travel from the nearest Federation border. We’re meddling in the affairs of total strangers.”
“We are extending the benevolence of our protection to our neighbors.”
“They didn’t ask us to get involved.”
“Enough,” sh’Prenni said. “You’re to stop thinking in terms of ‘us’ right now, and that’s an order. I gave the commands. The responsibility of all of this, right or wrong, is mine.”
They immediately gathered closer. “Don’t ask us to abandon you, Captain, because we won’t,” Charas insisted. “We stand together or not at all.”
“He’s right, Thenar,” Banerji said. “We’re more than a crew. We’re a family.” He glanced sadly toward Breg. “Or a sia lenthar, as Ramnaf would say.”
“I’m not sure she’d extend me that courtesy anymore,” sh’Prenni told the elderly human. “Or that I deserve it. The impatience was mine. And so are the consequences.”
Th’Cheen sighed uncomfortably. “If Zoanra weren’t . . . otherwise occupied . . . I imagine she’d offer some pithy insight reminding us that we’ve survived worse together.”
“Would she?” ch’Gesrit asked. “Considering that what we’re enduring is trivial next to what we’ve inflicted?”
“I can still hear you!” zh’Vethris’s voice carried loudly from across the yard. “And my pithy insight is to shut up, stop fighting, and just hold on to each other! The rest will sort itself out in time! And we’ll need each other no matter what happens!”
Despite the incongruous roar in which it was delivered, the young navigator’s sentiment was hard to deny. The crew stood together quietly, uneasily, for some time afterward.
But they stood together.
August 24, 2165
Nierl home system
Samuel Kirk stood on a plain of hardened lava, staring down at a set of bone fragments half-embedded in the surface beside the boot of his EV suit. The fragments were in the rough shape of a humanoid arm. A few dozen meters beyond, a jagged chunk of wall, now gray with dust but no doubt white underneath, jutted out of the ground like a misplaced grave marker.
“The Manochai’s bombardment was thorough,” said Tefcem var Skos, Senior Partner for the planet Etrafso. The large-eyed, rodentlike Enlesri stood by Kirk in an EV suit that barely came up to the chest of Valeria Williams, who stood behind them both. “After all, Ware can self-repair from even a small surviving portion, so they made sure to leave no fragments large enough. This moonlet was once entirely covered in Ware habitations, supporting over a hundred thousand Partners of half a dozen races. The Manochai did not stop blasting until the surface was molten. Over the many rotations that followed, as the surface cooled and hardened, fragments blasted into space gradually re-accreted. Most sank into the molten crust, or pulverized on impact once it had hardened. But some . . .” He gazed wordlessly at the remains before them.
He did not need to say anything more about the near-featureless white globe that loomed above the horizon—actually thousands of kilometers below the captured asteroid on which they stood, orbited by the asteroid while orbiting a mighty Jovian in turn. The spherical moon had been the homeworld of the Nierl—a larger version of Titan, with a thick crust of water ice and a methane-ethane atmosphere. Hundreds of millions of Nierl had lived on its surface in vast urban complexes made of Ware. Now the atmosphere was all but gone, the surface a nearly pure, smooth layer of ice—refrozen after the Manochai’s bombardment had melted the planet’s crust into an ocean. Planetary genocide had never looked so pristine.
“You are not the first to mistrust our peace with the Ware,” var Skos went on after a time. “Others have decreed that the Ware must be exterminated for the good of all—all except those who rely upon it. The Manochai did not even let the populace evacuate, for our only ships were Ware. They would have done the same to all of us . . . had the Ware not manufactured enough drones to turn back their fleets at last.” The lithe brachiator lifted his head in its compact white helmet. “I hear now that the Klingons conquered the Manochai—nearly wiped them out when they resisted, and turned the survivors into servitors. Only the first of the services they have done for us.”
“The Klingons only serve themselves,” Williams told him. “You’ll learn that lesson the hard way if you aren’t careful.”
“Better their selfishness than the aggressive benevolence of you or the Manochai.”
Var Skos clearly felt no love for the Federation. Kirk knew that Reed’s orders were to attempt to persuade the Partnership of Starfleet’s good intentions, but that was evidently a lost cause where this Senior Partner was concerned. His homeworld had suffered badly in the wake of Vol’Rala’s actions, however benevolent their intent.
Kirk had found it surprising that a Senior Partner of an entire planet, particularly one in the throes of a disaster, would be free to escort the Pioneer team like this. But apparently the Senior Partners were more like Federation councillors than chief executives, representing their planets in the Partnership’s collective debating and decision-making process. Their Ware-based lifestyle was so automated that it required little hands-on attention as a rule. Of course, Etrafso’s current emergency was another matter. But evidently var Skos was the subordinate half of a mated pair, speaking on behalf of Etrafso’s real Senior Partner, his “overmate” Wylbet Skos. She had remained to tend to their world in its crisis while he served as her spokesperson abroad, representing Etrafso in the proceedings against Vol’Rala’s crew. He had volunteered to supervise Pioneer’s officers as they conducted their investigation for the defense.
Williams turned away from the grisly ejecta before them. “You’ve made your point, Partner. Are we done here?”
Var Skos glowered at her for a bit, but he could contrive no excuse not to lead them back to the Ware transport ship that had brought them to the moonlet. Williams took Kirk’s arm, guiding him across the surface with care. His boots were magnetic, but he had little experience walking in gravity this low.
As they trudged carefully along arm in arm, Williams switched to a private comm channel and spoke far more softly than she needed to with vacuum surrounding them. “It’s not guilt,” she said.
“What?” In the context of the dreadful aftermath around them, it was initially unclear to Kirk what she was talking about.
“I’m not just taking an interest in you because I’m guilty about Rigel. I mean, I’m not guilty about Rigel. I mean . . .” Her sigh was a sharp burst of static from his speaker. “It’s not about Rigel at all. It’s about . . . the year since then. Keeping my distance, waiting for you to be ready to be friends again . . . it made me realize how much I missed having you around.” She stopped walking and turned him by his shoulders until their eyes could meet through their helmet visors. “Sam . . . we just click, in a way it took me a long time to recognize because it was so . . . effortless. I’m used to a certain amount of drama and turbulence in my relationships, so I didn’t quite realize what I was feeling until . . . until it went away.
“Sam . . . Oh, I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to talk about this,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s just say I really want to continue this conversation someplace where we can take our
EV suits off.”
Kirk winced. Once, this conversation would have been the stuff of his fantasies—present circumstances notwithstanding. Now, he hated that she’d made herself vulnerable to him when he had to let her down. “Val . . . it’s kind of amazing to me that you feel that way. You’re an amazing woman, and you’re way out of my league.”
“Don’t say that. You’re smart, and kind, and strong in ways I didn’t understand before I met you. And you’ve got the sexiest—”
“Val.” He closed his eyes. “You’re also an armory officer, and you’re very, very good at your job. And that job . . . sometimes it forces you to choose your duty over your personal feelings—your relationships. Like saving a stranger instead of a friend.”
“Sam . . .”
“No, listen—it’s not that I still blame you for that. It’s that . . . it made me understand that your duty will always come first. Val, I would love to be involved with you. I’ve wanted that since the first time we spoke. Probably sooner,” he admitted. “But if I were . . . I’d never know when you might have to put someone else’s safety ahead of us. And . . . I’d never know when you might have to risk your life . . . even lose your life . . . to save someone else.”
He stepped away, pulling free of the anchor she provided. “I’m sorry, Val. I’m just not brave enough to take that kind of risk. I don’t know if I could bear it.”
Var Skos had finally noticed that they’d stopped. “Is something wrong?” his voice intruded on a separate channel.
Williams stared into Kirk’s eyes a moment longer, then turned away sharply and switched back to the wider channel. “Nothing’s wrong,” she told him. “Minor misunderstanding. Let’s just get the hell off this rock.”
9
August 26, 2165
I.K.S. Krim IKC-1050, orbiting Mempa VII
LANETH HAD THOUGHT this would be a bad day when she’d learned that the ship had run out of qa’vIn beans. The bitter, black brew they produced may have been an invention of the weakling humans, introduced to the Empire through the looting of Terran cargo ships, but Klingon agronomists had bred a far more potent strain of the beans, making them a stimulant worthy of a warrior when properly brewed. Yet today, Laneth and the rest of her twenty-five-Klingon crew had needed to settle for the instant stuff, which was nowhere near strong enough for warriors who needed to stay alert to danger. The entire crew had gone through the day surly and irritable . . . but only half as much as they should be.
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