“Something told me you still lived, but how? I kept searching but found nothing.”
“Yet, you are here,” she said, meeting his eyes. Dark, like hers. Was he truly her father? He could be anyone. Did it matter? Was biology alone sufficient?
“Yes, I am here. And now at last your curiosity is piqued, because no mere coincidence can explain my presence. Perhaps it’s the very convenience of my presence and the neatness of my story that make you doubt me. Am I right?”
“Doubt that you are here to eliminate all trace of the survivors of this … Lebensborn program? No, that I do not doubt.”
“Not all,” he said. “I was given permission to spare one of that number. You see, as careful as I was, they found me …”
At last the bleeding had finally stopped, but what was left of his tunic, tossed into a corner by his interrogator, was so saturated it left virid smears on the terrazzo floor, and Narak wondered with an odd sort of clinical detachment (the first signs of shock, perhaps?) just how much blood he had lost.
He was never to learn the interrogator’s name, though her voice would worm its way into his brain more insidiously than a Ceti eel, painless but insistent, an echo behind every move he made until this exercise was concluded and he—perhaps—exonerated.
“My superiors initially instructed me to execute you,” the interrogator said as the Uhlan released him from his restraints at her nod, and he tried to remember what it felt like to have the use of one’s hands. “I spent considerable time persuading them that someone of your … skills could be of more use to us alive. Here is what you will do to earn your life back …”
“I confess I had to ask her to repeat my orders several times,” Narak said now, biting fastidiously into the portion of snake meat Saavik had offered him. At her gesture he had also been given permission to sit with her on the opposite side of the fire, and she studied his features—almost too familiar yet not in a way that resonated with her on some visceral level—as he ate and continued to talk. “I apologized, telling her the blood loss made me dizzy, but in truth I was so elated at the thought that you were still alive, and that I was in effect being sent to seek you out—”
“—in order to kill me.” Gli snake flesh was greasy, and she wiped her chin with the back of her hand.
He stopped chewing and sighed. “Only if you did not see the wisdom of the alternative. You’re still alive, are you not? You don’t suppose I’d have simply strolled into your camp if I’d intended to kill you? Or are you so sure of your own skills that you think you’d have sensed my presence, hm? Indulge me a while longer and ask yourself this: What would you have done in my place?”
Ever since the Kobayashi Maru she had plagued herself with questions like that, postulating countless no-win scenarios, studying the histories of the leaders of several worlds to learn what they had done against untenable situations. Terms like “Pyrrhic victory”—mental exercises for her classmates, an acknowledgment of reality for her—became ingrained in her vocabulary. Tolek’s crushed fingers had spared her punishment, Spock’s exaggerations had skirted the bounds of Vulcan integrity in order to mislead Khan and save the ship.
She had never lived on Narak’s world. How did she know what situational ethics she might have employed to stay alive there?
She shook her head, suddenly sated with the roasted meat, her senses dulled, her thoughts muddled. His words were like a drug, inducing her to see the universe through his eyes.
“I suppose,” she said, “I’d have done what I could to survive, so that I could find my offspring and spare her before someone else was sent in my place.”
His smile was benevolent. “Precisely!” he said.
The fire had died down somewhat by now, and the surface of the pool at her back had begun to shimmer as it did almost nightly, breeding the low-lying fog peculiar to this place and the reason she had chosen it. Her visitor seemed surprised to encounter fog in the desert and drew his cloak about him, apparently disconcerted.
“Does it always do this?”
“More often than not,” she replied, almost conversational by now, making note of the fact that he had not noticed the fog before, confirming her assumption that he had come to this place only hours and not days earlier. From where? she wondered, and where would he go when he left? Assuming, of course, that she allowed him to leave. Knife against disruptor, who would survive? Time to find out. “What do you want?”
“Succinct and to the point, hm?” He got to his feet a little too abruptly, so that again she almost went for the knife. But she saw that it was only because he felt the need to brush the sand off his garments, and relaxed. “I imagine you get that from your mother. Surely not from me, because as you’ve noticed, I have a tendency to talk too much. Do I see a glimmer of interest in those dark eyes? Surely you want to know who she was?”
“What do you want?” she said again, beginning to seethe. Would a knife to the throat be the only thing that would make him stop talking?
He sighed. “I thought we might take some time to get to know each other before we got down to work, but very well. I need an ally. I want it to be you.”
“An ally? For what purpose?”
“The discredit, disgrace, and ultimate dismissal as ambassador of Sarek of Vulcan.”
Fourteen
Her knife was at his throat.
“Excellent reflexes,” he observed. “Think carefully now.”
She’d recalled a simple trick taught her by a human martial arts instructor at the Academy.
“Catch them in midsentence,” Commander Nodurft had said. When the cadets had shifted their feet on the mats and exchanged glances, none wanting to be the first to ask her what she meant, she’d laughed at them.
“Think about every action movie you’ve ever seen. When does the fight start? After the Bad Guy says something that makes the Good Guy see red and he lunges at him. Why wait for him to get to the end of the sentence?”
There’d been nervous laughter, mutters of, “Yeah, I knew that!” until Cadet Saavik politely raised her hand.
“Yes, Cadet?” Nodurft had acknowledged her.
“Your suggestion is logical, Commander, but I submit it is incomplete.”
Nodurft had stood there with her hands on her hips, feet planted firmly, exuding the kind of confidence that enjoyed a challenge.
“Explain.”
“Logic suggests, sir”—in the flick of an eyelash she had pinned Nodurft to the mat—“that the Good Guy can also launch an attack while in the middle of her own sentence.”
A ripple of sound reverberated around the gym. Ordinarily Cadet Saavik was quiet to a fault. Once the male cadets realized there was no point in flirting with her, she went largely unnoticed in training classes, just as she’d learned the hard way not to dominate all of the academic classes. Murmurs from surprise to amusement to, “Oh, she’s gonna catch it now!” reached her sensitive ears as Nodurft picked herself up from the mat and made an elaborate ritual of dusting herself off.
“Not bad, Cadet.” She’d grinned, no harm done. “Not bad at all. I’ll take your observation under”—now it was Saavik’s turn to hit the mat—“consideration from now on.”
And she did.
So did Saavik. Narak had no sooner mentioned Sarek’s name than she reacted as he’d expected her to, with one variation.
“You cannot be serious!” she had cried with just the right amount of outrage. “You expect me to betray the one who took me into his home and”—without so much as taking a deep breath, she became a whirlwind, knocking him facedown in the sand and straddling him, pinning his arms at his sides, her knife at his throat as she relieved him of his disruptor, flinging it into the thicket of cacti. She grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back to give the knife a better purchase against his throat. Only then did she finish her sentence—“and made me a member of his family?”
Narak spat sand out of his mouth and did something extraordinary for someone in his po
sition. He yawned.
“Did you really think I came all this way just for you?” He laughed, though his inability to draw a full breath with her sitting on him made it difficult. “Excellent reflexes. Think carefully, now.”
She did, tying his hands behind him with her sash and his ankles with his own belt before dragging him across the sand to the stand of cacti and propping him against one.
“Strong as well as quick,” he commented, flexing his shoulders, feeling the cactus spines finding their way through the fabric of his cloak and deciding he was better off sitting still. “What do you suppose happens now? What if I’m not alone?”
She stood over him, hefting the knife from hand to hand, waiting for the anger to subside. “Then your companions apparently consider you expendable, or they’d have intervened when it appeared as if I might cut your throat.”
He gifted her with his best sardonic smile. “Of course I’m expendable, but so are you. If you do not hear me out and follow through, someone else will. That someone else might not have the same … compassion for the ambassador that you do. Not content merely to compromise his career, they might choose a quicker course of action.”
Suddenly drained of energy—the weeks of desert living and the stressors that had come before had taken their toll—Saavik allowed herself to return to her seat on the flat rock, though she kept the knife at the ready.
She breathed deeply. “Start from the beginning.”
Narak shifted his weight again, found a position where the cactus spines didn’t poke him. “I am but one of many on Vulcan. Some of us have been here for decades—”
“Sleeper agents,” Saavik supplied.
“‘Sleeper agents,’” he repeated, canting his head to one side as if to study the concept. “This is not a term I have heard before, but then I have not been on this side of the Marches for very long. Very well, then, sleeper agents, who watch and wait for opportunities to undermine Vulcan, and the Federation, whenever we can. Those who set the greatest store by honesty are those most easily misled. We are drawn here by the gullibility of Vulcan authorities, who think that peace is a real possibility, despite the fact that the innate forces of the universe dictate otherwise.”
“You subscribe to the Elements, then,” she observed. “I did not take you for the religious type.”
“Say rather I am the pragmatic type. If there are gods who intervene in mortal endeavors, it doesn’t hurt to stay on their good side. If there aren’t, there’s no harm in ingratiating oneself among those who believe there are.”
“Go on.”
“As you might surmise, Ambassador Sarek has been of interest to us throughout his distinguished career. But word of his preliminary negotiations with the Klingons on behalf of the Federation has of course reached the Romulan Senate, causing much consternation. If anyone can bring the Klingon Empire and the Federation to the same table, it is Sarek, and the threat that these two powerful entities, combined in an alliance, would pose to the Romulan Empire is simply not acceptable.”
“You intend to assassinate Sarek?” Saavik asked with far more equanimity than she felt.
Narak’s smile widened. “Of course not. Any overt action—a military or terrorist attack, an attempt on Sarek’s life—would be obvious and could lead to war. But if Sarek himself proved to be not what the Klingons, or even his own people, thought him to be, negotiations could be called off indefinitely.”
Saavik seemed to be weighing this. “As you say, however, we are all expendable. Even Sarek can be replaced.”
“But not easily. And not by another with such finely honed skills. In the inevitable search for a replacement, other actions can be implemented.”
Saavik had a glimpse of it then, a plot as elaborate and full of twists and turns as the mandalas she had been drawing in the sand. How many sleeper agents, at what levels of Vulcan society, assigned to wreak what havoc? And all of it, right now, hinging on whether or not she gave consent to her assigned role.
The smell of the fire, which had long since died to ashes, lingered in her nostrils. To the east, the false dawn brightened the horizon. Whatever decisions were made would have to be made soon, before the day’s heat made them moot. Narak seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“Time to get down to business. You’ll find a listening device in my left boot,” he said casually. “You see what I mean about Vulcan trust and gullibility? Well-trained Starfleet officer that you are, you relieved me of the weapon you saw, but it never occurred to you to search for others.”
It was smaller than an earring and irregularly shaped. At first glance it might have been taken for a small, flat stone, which was of course the point. It could be dropped in a flowerbed or lost in the desert, depending on the circumstances.
So. Their entire conversation had been overheard, or at least that was what he wanted her to believe.
“I wouldn’t destroy it if I were you,” Narak advised mildly. “If you do, you won’t get out of the desert alive. May I?”
At his nod, she brought it closer to his face. He spoke what sounded like a code into it, then nodded again. “Now. A good whack with a rock should do it, but stepping on it is usually best.”
The whole rigmarole was so ludicrous she might have laughed. Instead, she did as he’d suggested, feeling a bizarre satisfaction at hearing it crunch between the flat rock and the heel of her sandal.
“Now what?” she demanded, after first retrieving the disruptor from among the cacti and searching him more thoroughly for weapons this time, finding nothing further.
“You might start by untying me.”
“I might,” she acknowledged.
Instead, she went about building up the fire. She could see the puzzlement on his face. False dawn had faded, and the genuine predawn blush meant 40 Eridani would shortly loom over the horizon. There would be no need for a fire’s heat then, and if it were meant as a signal, it would not be seen in sunlight. What was she up to?
Seeing that she could continue to surprise him was strangely satisfying. When the fire was crackling pleasantly, she drew her knife once more and studied him. His expression of puzzlement had changed to one of mild alarm. He was still bound, she had all the weapons, he’d destroyed the listening device by prearranged signal. If she killed him now, the others in his cell would eventually track her down and destroy her and the mission would go forward, but he would still be dead.
Had he misjudged her? he was wondering. Was she desperate enough to destroy them both?
She watched him consider his error—perhaps accountants did not make good spies after all—and cherished it far longer than a Vulcan would.
“I can tell you your mother’s name.”
Did she only imagine a tremor in his voice?
She shrugged, once more hefting the knife from hand to hand, as if wondering where she might begin if she chose to eviscerate him instead of making a clean kill.
“Perhaps you can. Assuming you weren’t lying. And I am not prepared to make that assumption yet.”
With that she took a handful of her own hair where it was most damaged from sun, dirt, exposure, and lack of grooming, and began to hack it off, tossing the shorn locks methodically into the fire where they hissed and vanished, giving off a ritual smoke not unlike incense. When there was nothing left but the practical cap of curls with which she’d first appeared in Sarek’s household as a child, she ran her fingers through it and seemed transformed, another person entirely from the one who had crossed the desert. Only then did she untie her captive.
“What happens now?” she asked.
Access to Sarek’s office in the Enclave at Vulcan High Command had been granted far too readily. Impressed as she was with the technology that allowed Narak to alter her palm prints, ear prints, even retinal patterns, she wondered how it was possible that no one had so much as hesitated, much less questioned her presence. Was it true, as he’d told her, that those like him were leavened everywhere throughout Vulcan society?
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She had not, of course, simply accepted her role in this mission without numerous questions, which she saved for when they were both strapped in to the two-person skimmer he’d left amid a scattering of boulders half a day’s walk from her camp.
“The rocks in this region show high amounts of titanium,” he informed her.
“Clever,” she acknowledged. “Long-range scans would likely not detect a craft of this size obscured by the background metals.”
“I am nothing if not thorough,” he said with a touch of pride.
Able to study him at close range, Saavik was again struck by the physical resemblance between them, whether real or contrived. Still, she felt nothing other than a mild annoyance at the smugness she sensed would easily transform itself into obsequiousness in the presence of those he saw as his “betters.”
“Say everything you have told me is true, and I have no choice but to follow your instructions,” she said over the whine of the skimmer’s powering-up. It was a standard rented skimmer, she noted, unlocked by thumbprint scan, so she was unable to learn what name her captor, now coconspirator, used while he was on Vulcan. “What happens to me when I have done?”
“I must confess the idea of taking down a Starfleet officer, especially such a visible one, at the same time as the ambassador was enticing,” Narak mused, almost to himself, his gaze focused on the windscreen as the skimmer rose only high enough to clear the ground, following the contours of the terrain. (Also clever, Saavik acknowledged silently. Unless someone were actively looking for him, their flight would also go unnoticed.) “But I had to remind myself that you and I are family. That had to count for something, after all, and it was the one point I was able to negotiate with my superiors. As it turned out”—here he made a face that might be sincere chagrin or not—“they did not trust me to manage two such feats in a single mission. I am, after all, only an accountant at heart.
Star Trek: TOS - Unspoken Truth Page 21