"If you can hear them, they can hear you."
"I want Mother to hear me, let her know I'm alive and well. I have to see, Spock. I just have to." David's voice was rising alarmingly. "What if it were your mother?"
"Let me go first," Spock said in surrender. "I move more quietly. And my hands are less scratched than yours."
David's mouth opened on a protest, then shut again. Was this Starfleet discipline? If it could force the irrepressible human to control himself, it had much to recommend it. "Go on," David whispered.
Careful not to touch any lichen, Spock crawled forward into what turned out to be a rock tunnel wide enough for even an adult. It dropped off precariously, and he whispered back over his shoulder, "Secure me."
David clasped his ankles. Did the human have sufficient strength to hold him if he slipped? Illogical, Spock told himself, to worry about what could not be helped. As he stretched himself down carefully, heat washed his face, growing ever stronger. Ahead, a flaring, uncertain reddish light was reflected in the slick stone surface. A fire? Spock strained out over the lip of the rock to see—then recoiled in shock, nearly banging his head against the side of the tunnel, and scrambled back up with David's help.
"Fortunate," Spock panted. "Fortunate you did not slide down that chute. You would have landed right in a very active pool of lava."
"Great," David groaned. "Did you see my mother anywhere nearby?"
"It is difficult to see or hear when lava is bubbling below you," Spock pointed out. "We must try another spot."
He rose, trying not to look as tired and stiff as he felt. Pain was only pain. He could, Spock told himself, master it. They moved perhaps ten meters, David pausing to listen at every promising crack or crater.
Spock hissed a sudden warning. "I hear them." Ignoring David's small sigh of relief, he investigated the new lava tube. "Less steep," he whispered up to David, "less slippery, and wide enough for both of us."
David wriggled down next to him. "That's my mother," the human whispered anxiously. "She sounds so hoarse! And she's coughing—Spock, we have to do something now. "
The two boys crept down the tube as far as they could, then lay flat, staring out and down. The lava pool was to the left, seething and bubbling restlessly, the air above it wavering with heat. By the pool stood a circular, rough-hewn stone altar, half-coated by hardened splashes of lava that didn't quite hide the worn carvings, sigils that made Spock gasp at their antiquity: they must date from centuries before the time of Surak. Crystals set into the stone gleamed a sullen red, reflecting the lava pool. On the altar, adding incense to the injury of burning sulfur, stood ancient bronze braziers with flanged handles, incised with glyphs too worn to be deciphered.
Then a figure stepped to the altar, and the ancient altar and even the seething, steaming lava pool faded from importance. This was Sered: a much-changed Sered. No longer was he the quiet scholar or the daring warrior. Now his robe shone crimson and bronze, embossed with metallic sigils. About his waist hung a heavy, jewel-encrusted belt supporting an energy weapon with a gem-bright hilt and an ancient steel knife, its curved blade marked with the ripples of water, folded and refolded a million times. In the ancient, terrible days of Vulcan history, such blades were neither drawn nor sheathed without a sacrifice.
Is there blood on this blade? Sered's blood? Or human?
As Sered moved, gems gleamed on a massive pectoral, and the sigils on his robe reflected the lava's uneasy fire. Spock struggled to read them. "Mastership of a Great House": that was easy enough to translate, but that other, with the infix that signified sacral mode?
Priest and king. A little shiver raced up Spock's spine as he realized what he saw. Save for the headdress, which presumably he would don later, Sered had dressed himself as befitted one of the ancient rulers of the te-Vikram caves.
Why? They were one of the most warlike and unstable of Vulcan cultures! If we had not turned to Surak's teachings, they would have done their best to destroy Vulcan.
David whispered, "Who's his tailor? And what's all that fancy stuff mean?"
The human's voice was almost cracking with the effort to remain light, flippant, even. His glance kept darting back to his mother, who now knelt beside the children lying against the wall. One coughed feebly. Two more simply lay there, their chests heaving as they fought for breath in the thin, noisome air.
Spock said softly, "He wears the robe of an ancient priestking of a particularly warlike culture. I think you would call their spiritual leaders ecstatics. They drugged themselves, then went out and performed . . . certain crimes, claiming that they had been . . . guided."
"Hashashiyun," David whispered. "Our very own Vulcan-style Old Man of the Mountain. We couldn't have gotten into worse trouble if we'd planned it."
"Look at the altar."
"What? Chinesey-looking braziers, and . . . ha, that looks like a Mark Eight tricorder. Communicators. And someone's torn-up medical kit—hey, that's tri-ox compound!"
"Evidently this is part of the off world 'pollution' Sered wants removed from Vulcan."
"Damn him," David hissed. "All that tri-ox compound just lying there doing no one any good. Doesn't he know this air could kill someone? Can't he hear those coughs? Even if Sered thinks this is war, there are still conventions governing prisoners! Doesn't he know that?"
Spock hesitated, trying to find the way to say what he must. "If he truly believes himself a te-Vikram priest-king, he may not think them prisoners, but . . . sacrifices."
David drew his breath in sharply. "No," he said softly to Sered, his voice cold and hard. "Oh no, you don't."
He started blindly down the tube. Spock caught him just in time, holding the human with all his Vulcan strength. "David, wait. Listen."
"That madman has nothing I wish to hear."
"Are our lives worth nothing? Are the captain's words worth nothing? Listen!"
"Your captives are ill," Captain Nechama Rabin was saying to Sered, as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted only moments ago. "You have not taken proper care of us. Some of us are sick."
"Those are weaklings," Sered returned, "unfit for rebirth from the Womb of Fire. None but the strong, the masters, must survive."
David growled. Spock saw Captain Rabin's face go rigid. "That has been said before," she told Sered with cold precision, "by people who thought themselves a Master Race. People who nevertheless fell and whose memory is still accursed."
"It is nonetheless true."
"Is it? Is it true, no, is it right that the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must? Have you discarded Surak's morality along with his logic?"
Sered never moved. "It is the way of the Womb of Fire. One must value what is. All else is illusion."
"Then let us treat this . . . illusion as valid," the captain countered. "Let us say your way is truth. That you are the thing whose guise you wear. You seek the expulsion of off worlders and our ways from your world. How? Do you need a hostage to exchange?"
"I have many prisoners, and it may be that I shall not choose to exchange them."
"What, then? Are you going all the way back to the Bad Old Days? Ah, that's just what you're thinking, isn't it? Well, then, if you seek a sacrifice, who will serve you best? Those"—Captain Rabin gestured at the sickly hostages—"or one who is strong and gives herself of her own free will?"
"No," David gasped. "God, no!"
"David, quiet!" Spock whispered fiercely.
Fortunately, Sered, lost in his own world, did not seem to hear either of them. "What logic do you see in suicide?"
Captain Rabin studied him with cool contempt. "Is it not truly said that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Or of the one?"
"And you offer that as a reason for me to release so many weaklings?"
"Not an offer. A demand."
A fit of coughing cut into her words, racking her body, and Sered . . . laughed, a cold, eerie sound. "How do you presume to de
mand anything? There is no logic in negotiating from a point of weakness."
Captain Rabin straightened slowly, face drawn but eyes blazing. "I trained to serve and to endure. It is my purpose to make that demand. It is my right. I do not bargain from weakness, but from my sense of purpose—and therefore from my greatest strength."
"Mother . . . no," David whispered, only Spock's grip keeping him from rushing down to her.
Sered studied the woman for a silent moment. "I must concede that you are a warrior born and trained," he observed at last. "But as a warrior, you must understand that it would be imprudent for me to release hostages able to reveal the location of the fortress from which . . ." Sered broke off.
"From which?" Captain Rabin prompted. Her voice was breathy; clearly she was having trouble putting enough air behind it. "The fortress from which you will betray your own people? From which you will lay waste a planet that has known nothing but peace for thousands of years? And you regard sick children as security risks?"
Sered lowered his hand to the blade at his belt. "That peace," he said the word bitterly, "has weakened Vulcan. It is time and past time to restore our heritage of battle, the beauty of blades quenched in blood, the blaze of energy that consumes a rival power, the oath of kinship renewed with those from whom this world has too long held itself aloof—too long held itself aloof from victory!"
David gestured at his temple. Spock understood easily enough. The human was right: Sered had deteriorated into total, hopeless madness.
Incongruously, David's stomach took this moment to rumble. Could Sered hear that? The human glanced wildly at Spock, biting his lip against laughter that could all too easily burst free and kill them both.
Hastily, both boys scrambled back up out of the tube. David collapsed in a fit of giggles, frantically trying to stop. "I wish I could eat that lichen!" he gasped. "Get something in my stomach, stop its complaining. The thought of being betrayed by my own stupid innards!" He sat up. "Maybe the lichens wouldn't hit me as hard because I'm human. What do you think? Worth a chance?"
Spock stared at him. "What do I think, David? I think you may have just saved your mother's life and those of the others. Quick, help me scrape up as much of the lichen as we can. Be careful not to crush it! And do not let any touch any open cuts."
It was a delicate, dangerous job, made worse because they both were trying to hurry. "Now what?" David asked.
Spock gestured. "That vent. The one over the lava pool. No, wait, this one is more level. It still will overlook the pool without threatening to pitch us in."
They hurried down the vent. David's mother, caught in a fit of coughing, straightened just in time to glance up and spot them. Her eyes widened, but she continued hastily, covering for the boys, "You others—the ones this renegade calls 'cousins'—you seem to be warriors as well, bred to arms and to honor. Does that honor demand warfare against sick children?"
"When they are hostages for their rulers' word," one of the strangers said uneasily. Another shook his head.
"You seem to have some doubts . . ." Coughs exploded from her, and she bent double.
"Mother could keep this up for hours," David whispered, "if she could only breathe!"
"We should have tri-ox for her in the next few moments." Either that, Spock thought, or we shall be in worse trouble than we are already. "Drop the lichen!"
"Releasing photon torpedoes," David muttered.
They hurled the lichen down the rocky tube—right into the lava pit. A cloud of incinerated dust swirled up, a wild, sickly green haze, caught in the draughts of hot air, dizzying, dangerous.
And in that moment, Spock, feeling the edge of the hallucinogenic peril, knew with an eerie, not quite drugged certainty that all reality was about to be destroyed.
SIXTEEN
Obsidian, Deep Desert
Day 4, First Week, Month of the Shining Chara,
Year 229S
It was cool in the rock shelter, a touch too cool for Vulcan tastes, though Spock refused to acknowledge anything as petty as mild discomfort. Outside, the nomads were quickly and efficiently setting up camp. Their tents were ingenious, he thought, both quickly assembled and lightweight for easy transport: over a framework of springy poles of precious wood went coverings of woven chuchaki hair, dyed the exact brownish tan of the desert floor. A flap of hide formed a door, another flap in the arched hide roof could be pulled aside to form a smoke hole, and the coverings could be raised during the day's heat to let air circulate or lowered during the night's chill to hold in warmth.
Quite ingenious. indeed.
The tents were laid out with what seemed a casual lack of organization but, judging from the way no one got in anyone else's way, was probably a planned arrangement of family groupings. The entire encampment, uniform desert-color as all the tents were, would be virtually invisible to outsiders.
Or, Spock suspected, seeing hands never straying too far from weapons, to rival clans.
It would be interesting to investigate the camp, he decided, to see what further adaptations these people had made to their environment. But until the nomads actually offered an invitation, logic insisted that he and Rabin stay where they had been directed. Logical, too, for the nomads to put them here; not only was the cool shelter a compliment to the two unexpected "guests," its solid walls were also a casual way of insuring that those "guests" could not wander away.
Fair enough. Ignoring Rabin, who was pacing about uneasily, Spock turned to study the pictographs painted on the rock shelter's walls: they were of some natural red pigment, ocher, perhaps, outlined with charcoal. The repeated designs were almost certainly sun spirals, the same symbols used by many sentient desert peoples; with each spiral were lines that looked very much like warding-off signs. He had been correct, then. This deep, thick-walled cave was one of the emergency shelters used by the nomads to protect themselves from minor solar flares. They must have some deeper shelters for the more perilous flares.
"Low-tech, "after all, does not necessarily mean low intelligence.
The faintest of whispers alerted him. He turned to find himself confronted by a solemn, wide-eyed line of nomad children, boys and girls together. They were, he guessed from their gawkiness and lack of adult proportionings, still somewhere in preadolescence, dark-haired and oliveskinned like their parents. All were a little too thin, perhaps, for youngsters their age—these were, after all, the children of desert hardship—but they showed no signs of illnesses and were scruffy not from neglect but in the way of healthy, active youngsters everywhere.
They were also . . . Neoteny, Spock told himself, is merely a species' logical way of insuring its continuance. But his mind added in McCoy's voice, Go ahead, Spock, admit it: They're cute.
He was obviously meant to say something. "Greetings," Spock began tentatively.
No answer. The children continued to watch him in solemn wonder.
Of course I intrigue them. The young of all sentient species are curious. And I can hardly resemble anyone these young ones have ever seen.
Since he had no idea what else was expected of him, Spock nodded to his audience with equal solemnity and raised his hand in the split-fingered Vulcan salute.
Aha, this seemed to be the right course of action. The children tried to imitate him, bursting into giggles when their small hands wouldn't hold the proper finger positions. Spock kept his face properly impassive, but the smallest spark of enjoyment flicked within him at their cheerfulness. The children kept glancing from their hands to him, grinning openly at him by now, some of them, like human or Vulcan children, showing gaps where milk teeth had fallen away and adult teeth not yet grown.
"No doubt about it," Rabin murmured in amusement from behind him, "you're a hit."
Spock bit back a reflexive but I have not struck anyone, recognizing the idiom just in time. And it did seem to be accurate. The children had clearly accepted him as a friend, a fact that he found rather pleasant. Not an illogical reaction, he told himse
lf, not at all. On the contrary, it was quite logical to be pleased that a younger generation of rational beings should be in such good mental and physical shape despite their harsh surroundings.
"It is also a good sign that the nomads trust their children near us. And that they have children with them."
"You got it. Not a raiding party, then, with warriors with quick trigger fingers, just a clan hunting fresh pasture or whatever it is nomads like this need."
The children were growing impatient. They didn't want these amusing strangers to ignore them! One boy daringly darted forward to tug at Spock's robe, chattering something about "Again, do it again."
Without warning, Spock's communicator beeped. The boy yelped in alarm, and he and the other children scattered like so many frightened wild things. Even Captain Rabin started, stammering, "What—who—"
But Spock was already thumbing the communicator open. He and Rabin exchanged quick glances, the human with hope beaming on his face, Spock refusing to allow himself more than a raised eyebrow. They heard a faint whisper: McCoy!
"Spock . . . are you there?"
"Dr. McCoy, yes. It is Spock."
"Well, thank God for that! You okay?"
"Quite. What of you, Doctor? Your signal is faint. Are you injured?"
"Only in my pride. And in this blasted communicator, which is losing power rapidly." A pause, and then, voice not quite steady, "We've got a lot of injured people here."
"Do you know where 'here' is, Doctor?"
The faintest of sighs. "Good question. Can't give you any definite coordinates, but I'm in some blasted big cavern with the most incredible metal doors, huge things, barring it from the outside." A pause, as though McCoy was trying to boost the communicator's power. "The cavern's linked by what looks like a network of shiny black lava tubes, so it's got to be somewhere in the mountains. They got me here without using any transporter, and it's been . . . mmm . . . I think only a couple of days, so whatever mountains they are can't be too far from where we crashed."
Vulcan's Forge Page 17