A woman no longer young, but still marvelously fit and supple, approached a small crucible. She kept her eyes fixed upon the shimmering metal, and her lips moved in what Saavik recognized with a start as the most ancient memorial incantations—originally of Vulcan. The woman drew a blade that glittered with the subtle, watery sheen of the most treasured ancient Vulcan weapons and cut a lock of her own hair. She threw the hair into the molten metal, in token of personal mourning, then slashed her palm and let the blood flow.
The Noble Born’s ceremonial chant was replaced by martial music as the screen went blank, only to have the image replaced by a view of the Valley of Chula as the moons rose. A chorus of children’s voices rose, celebrating the valley’s flowers.
Does the Federation know—no, of course they don’t—I must get word out—
The former centurion cleared his throat, startling her out of her stunned thoughts.
Then Dralath’s guards had arrived, to take her to him—and it was then Saavik realized that there must be much more to her mission than simply locating and extricating Spock.
I am Saavik, daughter of Vulcan. I am Saavik, Commander, Starfleet. I will withstand the Fires in my blood for as long as it is logically possible. Regardless of the Fires, I will complete my mission.
I will do what I have sworn to do.
Somehow.
TWELVE
KI BARATAN, ROMULUS, DAY 6, SECOND WEEK OF TASMEEN, 2344
Ruanek let out his breath in a long, shuddering sigh. Why had Avrak loaned him to protect Dralath’s latest favorite? Oh yes, granted, the senator would have seen an ideal chance to better his standing with Dralath.
But . . . assigning me, here, now, to . . . guard the lady . . .
The Fates seemed to be pushing him this way, no matter what he wished. And their humor was as twisted as ever.
But—one’s honor, even one’s life, was a small, small thing when balanced against the future of a people.
Whatever must be done, Ruanek told himself resolutely. To Kharik, he said quickly, “The lady has been out there alone a little too long. I doubt there’s a problem, but I’m just going to check, be sure that all’s well. You stay here to guard the doorway.”
He hurried out before Kharik, blindsided for once, could summon an argument.
Evaste stood leaning on the smooth black stone balustrade. The balustrade of the terrace that hung out so nicely over the ground so far below . . .
Fates, oh Fates, I have killed before, but never murdered . . . certainly never a civilian. She is blameless. . . .
Is she?
“Lady? I do not mean to disturb you. I merely wished to see if you were well.”
Oh, you hypocrite! You murderous hypocrite!
The lady glanced coolly at him, showing not the slightest sign of alarm, and he . . . akhh, how could she not hear the pounding of his heart? He froze as she returned to leaning on the balustrade, her profile wonderfully clear against the sky, the beads in her many braids glittering in the light of the one risen moon, her wild, bright robes like the petals of some exotic flower. . . .
If he didn’t act now, he never would. “Lady Evaste . . .”
She turned back to him with the smallest sound of impatience. “Yes? Subcommander . . . Ruanek, is it?”
“Yes. Lady, the . . . the drugs you’ve brought and the ribosome transfusions.” He nearly stumbled over the technical terms.
“What of them? You seem far too healthy to need their aid.” That charm again, directed now against him, disarming him.
“Then . . . they . . . do work.” Say no, oh say no, say that you’re a fraud, that you’re a liar, anything to let me spare you!
But she, unheeding, asked, “Do you think I’d risk my life on a sham?”
“Lady Evaste, do you—you can’t know—you can’t give them to the praetor.”
“Strange words from a subcommander! Is this treason, Ruanek?”
“No! I only . . . please, you come from a frontier world, a dis tantcolony, you can’t know what life is like here. . . .”
But anything else he said really would be treason, so Ruanek contented himself only with, “Just believe this, lady. For your sake, for all our sakes, get back on the ship that brought you, go home with your drugs and don’t ever, ever return.”
She didn’t need this, Saavik thought, she truly didn’t need this, particularly not now when she had just barely managed to will herself back under control. But this wasn’t merely a political matter. Subcommander Ruanek was showing far too much anxiety about Evaste’s mission, and his stance was far too alert for someone simply on guard duty.
Just what I didn’t need: a rebel.
And what would Evaste of Anat-Vorian, provincial medic from a backwater world, do? Scream? Run? Not know how to fight like a Starfleet officer, that was certain. For that matter, would a scream bring help, or only wagers on her likelihood of survival? She was hardly about to let Ruanek kill her—but she could hardly “break cover,” either!
Stall, Saavik told herself. Don’t let him get a hand near that dagger. Don’t let him get between you and the doorway, either.
Too late for the latter. He’d already maneuvered himself between her and escape; he hadn’t risen to the rank of subcommander by chance.
Not surprising that the warnings of Pon farr had utterly subsided; violent emotion could have that effect. And there was nothing like suddenly confronting a would-be assassin to stir up violent emotions, even in a half-Vulcan.
“It’s very charming of you to worry about my safety,” Saavik began warily, watching him for any telltale tightening of muscles, the warnings that he was about to move, “and I do appreciate your concern, but I assure you—ah, look!” The relief in her voice wasn’t feigned. “Here comes your colleague.” Unless he was in league with Ruanek . . . ? No. Not with that look of utter hatred for the subcommander. “Why, Centurion Kharik,” Saavik said with Evaste’s lightness, “did you think my honor was in peril?”
“From him?” Kharik snapped. “From that boy?”
“I am,” Ruanek reminded him curtly, “your senior.”
“An accident of birth.”
“No accident surrounded my birth. Or my engendering!”
“Are you insulting my—”
“I am insulting you, Kharik, only you!”
No male posturing here: genuine hatred blazed behind the insults on both sides, just barely kept in check.
Your problem, soldiers, Saavik thought, not mine.
They weren’t paying the slightest attention to her. Not sure if she was angry at being suddenly forgotten or wildly amused, Saavik hurried back into the Ministry of Science. There, the dangers were merely those of being revealed for what she was, of being killed or captured—and right now, something so plain and uncomplicated was almost welcome!
Ruanek knew what was happening; he knew that he was taking out all his anger and despair over Evaste—and what he’d almost done, would have done—on his cousin. He also knew that this was a damnably stupid time and place to be doing it.
But all at once he simply didn’t care. After all the long years of subtle taunts, of hatred kept fiercely in check, it felt so savagely wonderful to spit out bitter words, enemy to enemy, to know that at last there would be no one to say, “Enough!”
“Keep your voice down, fool!” he snapped at Kharik. “We don’t want the others rushing here to stop us.”
“You fear them seeing us!” Kharik snarled. But at least he didn’t shout it. “You slimy coward!”
“I am no coward, Kharik! You and I both know that well! My honor is strong, Kharik—while yours is the weak, stained falseness—”
“I call doubt upon your courage!”
“I call doubt upon your honor!” Ruanek retorted. Blazing with the years of suppressed rage, he snapped out the ritual words: “Hear me, heed me: I call Declaration of Challenge upon you!”
“I accept!” It was a roar. “I accept!”
“But I,”
a sudden cold voice cut in, “do not.”
The cousins whirled as one. Spock! Ruanek thought. Yes, and—Commander Charvanek!
Vulcan and Romulan . . . together? Allies? These two?
Yes, and both of them looking cold as Death itself. “This,” Spock snapped in a voice sharp as the edge of a blade, “is not the place for a Combat of Honor.”
Ruanek, shaking with the sudden release from tension, bowed in reluctant submission to Spock—and to the equally cold-eyed Commander Charvanek. And after a moment, so did Kharik.
“It seems the scholar you tended intervenes to save your life. Another time,” he snarled at Ruanek, straightening. “Another place.”
“So shall it be,” Ruanek snapped.
With a second curt bow at Spock and Charvanek, Kharik stormed off.
Ruanek, still shaking, struggled to get himself back under control and not present such an undignified image to a Romulan commander of the emperor’s House. How could anyone expect a man to go in one instant from a death challenge to—nothing—and not react? Still, they had been quite right to stop the duel before it began: Now that his head was clearing of rage, Ruanek had to agree that the Ministry of Science was certainly no place for a duel.
“The woman, Evaste,” he began in an awkward attempt to explain, then stopped at Charvanek’s frown.
“The woman,” she said, “over whom you were fighting.”
“Commander, pardon, but it wasn’t quite like—”
“Silence! Do you know how close you came to causing a public scandal?”
No, he hadn’t. Caught up in the heat of the pending battle, he hadn’t realized a thing other than blood lust. But if he’d happened to embarrass his patron, embarrass Avrak—oh yes, Avrak, who was probably already furious with him for that blurted remark about genetic variants.
Suddenly overwhelmed by constraints of patron, rank, lineage, and a system that seemed designed to keep him trapped, Ruanek erupted, “But the woman! The Lady Evaste is a threat—”
“The Lady Evaste,” Spock cut in, his words clearly as much for Charvanek as Ruanek, “is an ally.”
There was a moment of startled silence. Then the commander, eyebrow raised ever so slightly, murmured, “What a fascinating . . . complication.”
Too much was happening too quickly—with too little hard data behind it. Ruanek snarled at Spock, “Someone pledged to tell me the truth. Someone should begin to do so now, or I may make another mistake.”
Was that, could that possibly be, the quick flash of answering anger in Spock’s eyes? Oh no, that was impossible—
No more impossible than everything else happening this day.
Charvanek’s hand closed on his arm before he could react, the firm, strong hand of a commander used to calming warriors in battle. “Peace.”
One did not argue with a commander’s order. Ruanek bowed his head, letting himself submit for the moment, and Charvanek nodded in satisfaction and released him. “Subcommander, I agree: It is wrong to keep an ally in ignorance. We shall tell you as much truth . . . as you can stomach.”
Complications, Charvanek thought. When has my career—my life—been free from them?
She led her unlikely allies, Spock and Ruanek, careful that no one followed, to a quiet, unornamented little room. “This is one of the Ministry storage chambers. Rarely used,” she added, brushing dust off a sleeve.
“Safe, I assume?” Spock commented.
“It should be,” she assured him with the faintest wry upward quirk of her mouth. “I debugged it myself, just as I’ve debugged a great many rooms in recent years. Now you, warrior, are Subcommander Ruanek, in service to Avrak, Senator Pardek’s own sister-son. You do, I assume, know who we both are?”
He nodded, still young enough, for all his military experience, to be flushing slightly that a commander—or was it awe over her Imperial lineage?—should know him. How he and Spock should know each other, Charvanek mused, was another matter—but she had learned long ago not to be surprised by anything Spock might accomplish. Still, she was certainly impressed that he’d already managed to find one of the best of the younger generation!
So, now. “Subcommander, are you loyal?”
She’d snapped that out too quickly for him to think about his answer. “To our people and the emperor, yes, I so swear it!”
“I see.” She had noted that careful omission. Intriguing . . . Spock was right, then, about him. Very delicately, Charvanek suggested, “There are those who are not happy with things as they are,” and saw by the slightest of flinches that he was one of those. “A clever man might manage to hold to honor by . . . ever so slightly altering the way he sees the world. By . . . ever so subtly shifting sides. By serving . . . my cousin. Both my cousins.”
“The emperor,” Ruanek said with an archaic little gesture of reverence. “And . . . your pardon if I guess wrongly, Commander, but do you not refer to Admiral Narviat?”
Charvanek glanced at Spock, saying with a glance, He is clever! “And . . . ?”
“And I—I am trusting you, both of you, with my life, Commander.”
“Understood. And what,” she added dryly, indicating Spock, “do you think we do?”
She saw him register the fact that just being seen with a Vulcan—and one already under a death sentence—would condemn them both. “Ah. Yes. Well.” Ruanek hesitated a moment longer, then admitted in a wild rush, “I am with a—a certain group, Commander, a secret group, those who seek to replace the praetor.”
“Ah, a secret group,” she murmured, more to Spock than to him. “With, no doubt, a charmingly dramatic name: Fighters for the Way, perhaps, or—no, Subcommander, I am not mocking you.” Quite. It is just that you are still, underneath all that harshwarrior façade, so . . . young.
“You must understand,” he stammered earnestly, “w-we are not seeking the overthrow of everything! I can ask no better than to live and die for the emperor.”
“Then,” Charvanek said, “we are on the same side. Most . . . convenient.”
Spock straightened. “But our friend clearly has another question. What?”
“Who is she? Evaste, I mean. Who is she?”
Charvanek turned to study Spock. “A most excellent question. Who is this Evaste?”
“Her true name is Saavik.” The briefest of pauses, then: “My wife.”
Only by stern self-control did Charvanek keep from echoing that—at a shout. Contenting herself with raising an eyebrow, she murmured, “A complication, indeed.”
Very much of a complication. Studying Spock, she knew, ah, she knew just how much of his old attraction toward her still lingered—but she also had seen quite plainly just a short while ago that he was even more strongly drawn to the woman he’d just named as his wife.
The woman who, if Romulan Intelligence was correct, was an officer in Starfleet. A half-Romulan Starfleet officer . . . yes, of course. There could only be one such Saavik.
Bah. The Empire was foolish to abandon her. Just another sign of how far we have slid.
Ruanek glanced from her to Spock. “Your pardon,” he said with just a touch of anxiety in his voice, “but while the world may yet change about us, right now the truth of the matter is that I cannot stay away from my duties too long. Kharik will already have alerted our patron to my absence and I—”
“Need a good excuse. Understandable.” Charvanek pulled a tiny silver box from her belt, carefully opening it, seeing from Ruanek’s start that he recognized the tablets inside.
“Turath, Commander? Do you . . . mean to poison me?”
Charvanek was busy breaking off the smallest corner of one pungent tablet with a precisely placed thumbnail. “Not with a . . . dosage this . . . ah! . . . small. All you will get from this, at worst, is a dense sleep—and from the look of you, Subcommander, a little enforced rest won’t hurt you. Yes, and anyone finding you will get a telltale whiff of turath and know that you weren’t shamming.”
She saw what might almost have be
en ironic humor glint in Spock’s eyes. But, Vulcan that he was, he wasn’t about to help her fabricate a lie. So be it.
“You have been poisoned in the line of duty, Subcommander,” Charvanek said, as Ruanek, grimacing at the taste, swallowed. “You were heroically trying to protect the lady from would-be assassins. She fled back into the Ministry of Science, but you attempted to follow the assassins. Unfortunately, before you could summon help, the poison overwhelmed you. Fortunate for you, the assassins were in a hurry, and the dosage wasn’t . . . ah, yes, turath works swiftly.”
Together, she and Spock lowered the unconscious Ruanek to the floor, then stood for a second watching him tensely.
“Breathing,” Charvanek said after a moment.
Was that actually a sigh of relief from Spock? “He will not betray us.”
Charvanek gave Spock a wry glance at that. “You sound as though one could carve that in stone.”
“One could, if one wished. It is, nevertheless, the truth.”
“Ah well,” Charvanek said, almost lightly, as they left. A wary glance this way, that: Safe. “If you are mistaken, there is at least this comfort: Neither of us will be worrying about it, or about anything else, for long!”
THIRTEEN
KI BARATAN, ROMULUS, DAY 6, SECOND WEEK OF TASMEEN, 2344
Outside, Romulus’ twilight was slowly deepening into true night, and one moon had already begun its climb into the sky. Within Charvanek’s estate, artificial lighting was automatically switching itself on, the pools of sudden illumination startling the insects and small, chirping hataki. It would have been agreeable, a corner of Spock’s mind noted, to be no more than a visitor, free to wander out there in the evening. With . . . Saavik.
Impossible.
“. . . and so,” Spock concluded to Charvanek in the secure room in her mansion, “Saavik and I agree that I must be present when she meets with Dralath.”
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