STAR TREK®: VULCAN'S HEART

by Josepha Sherman

  All power for this, no lights, barely life-support enough to keep them breathing, the groan of the engines growing to a desperate roar—

  She touched her amulet. Do you see this? Record it for our honor!

  “Coward!” Charvanek heard herself shriek as Victorious, at the last possible moment, banked away. “Fire!”

  Energy blazed from Honor Blade.

  “Victorious hit!” someone yelled in savage joy. “No,” he corrected a second later. “A glancing blow. No real damage. And—Commander, we have no propulsion, no weapons. We can do no more.”

  Victorious was turning, the other ships backing off. It would be Volskiar’s kill.

  “Life to the emperor! We die for Romulus!” Charvanek shouted, and heard her crew’s answering roar:

  “We die for Romulus!”

  The first onslaught took out Honor Blade’s shields and sent her bridge crew hurtling across the deck. Three failed to rise. The second broadside disabled its warp engines. Whooping erupted in in-ship communications, heralding a major power leak. Honor Blade and its crew waited for the third salvo, which would surely send it to the Last Review. This was, at least, an honorable way to die.

  And waited while the distress calls from Narendra III died.

  And waited while their life-support faltered. The air grew thick and the smoke thicker.

  No! This shall not be! My crew deserves to die in battle, not of suffocation. Time to end the waiting.

  Charvanek uncapped a switch colored blue and green and marked with the sigil of the warbird. Light shot out, verifying her retina pattern. “Initiate Final Honor sequence on my mark. Now!”

  For one breathless moment, the sequence began. But then circuits exploded, fused, fell still. Charvanek bit back a cry of utter despair. She could not even release her ship!

  “My children,” Charvanek whispered, “I offer you my profound apology.”

  She held up her Honor Blade, kissed the gleaming ancient steel, and saw grief glint in her crew’s eyes—Is she going to abandon us after all the promises she made? Charvanek saluted them all, this once as equal to equal. “Did I not give you my word I would not abandon you?”

  Setting the gleaming blade gently down on the bloodstained, battered deck, she drew her sidearm and vaporized the ancient blade. It, at least, would not be stained by captivity.

  Violent red shimmers erupted directly in front of her command chair: Soldiers, enemy Romulans, materializing on her bridge. If she fired, she would get one, maybe two—

  No. They held not just pistols but disruptor rifles, and they guarded General Volskiar, who never could resist being in at the kill.

  One of Volskiar’s guards drew his disruptor and fired at the eagle on Charvanek’s bridge, defacing its imperial differences.

  Durnak broke. “You profane the Eagle!” he shouted, and vaulted over his duty station—to vanish in a crackle of disruptor fire.

  Charvanek never flinched. “Do you expect me to thank you,” she asked Volskiar coolly, “for giving my pilot an easy death?”

  Volskiar glowered at her. “You will beg me for death, Charvanek.”

  “Akhh, you always were a braggart.”

  “What I am is the victor! One who shall hear you plead for life before you die.”

  “Indeed,” Charvanek retorted. “My felicitations; you will be long-lived if you wait for that.”

  For a moment, she was sure he was about to strike her. But Volskiar contented himself with tearing the disruptor pistol from her, thrusting it into his belt. She heard him swear softly, and laughed. “That’s right, Volskiar. No Honor Blade left for you to disgrace.”

  With a snarl, he ripped her insignia from her uniform. She laughed, soundlessly, and this time he did slap her. Charvanek delicately touched the tip of her tongue to the blood of her torn lip, making that a silent blood oath: Give me the smallest chance, Volskiar, and you are dead.

  “My lord general!” a security guard cried. “We can’t maintain life-support much longer. Hull integrity is compromised.”

  Die swiftly, my Honor Blade, as I cannot.

  “Bring the survivors onto my ship!” Volskiar ordered.

  Charvanek had time for one last glance about Honor Blade’s ruined, smoky deck. Then the transporter beam caught her, red as the firefalls of Gal’Gathong . . .

  That I shall never see again.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NEUTRAL ZONE, YEAR 2344

  Charvanek glanced up from where she knelt by Takvi’s side. A warbird’s image glared down at her and those who remained of her crew from a bulkhead of Victorious’ brig. She suspected that the glowing spheres representing the homeworlds were actually spy eyes.

  He profanes an honorable symbol, she thought wearily, but then, I should hardly be surprised at that.

  At her side, Takvi bit back a groan, and Charvanek winced and turned her attention back to him, struggling to keep from showing her despair at the sight of his broken form. So badly injured . . . why had he awakened? Why couldn’t the Fates have given him the mercy of a swift death? And there was nothing she could do to help him . . . no medicine, no bandages more than strips torn from uniforms.

  In a flash of pure fury, Charvanek feigned a lunge at the guards there beyond the forcefield, and watched them draw sidearms.

  Go ahead. Fire into a forcefield and let me watch the ricochet kill you. I would relish the sight!

  She had already all but begged them for medical supplies, and been mocked: no aid for traitors.

  “Commander . . .” Takvi’s voice was a whisper. “Commander, I beg you, do not . . . do not demean yourself.”

  “There is no dishonor for any of us.” Reaching for his left hand (the right was wadded in a tunic so smeared by now with green that she wondered how much of the hand remained), she clasped it as firmly as she dared.

  He shuddered. “A damn shame the engines didn’t hold out just a little longer. We’d have had the bastard.”

  “Next time,” she murmured and saw his face twist. Night and day, was that a smile?

  “The youngster told me . . .” He fought to bring the words out. “M’ret said you destroyed your Honor Blade.”

  “I could not let it be taken.”

  “Too bad.”

  Agony blazed in his eyes. Charvanek bent over him so none but he could hear. “Takvi . . . I can still grant you the Final Honor. Do you consent?”

  “Yes, Noble Born.” Relief filled his voice.

  “Guard us,” she ordered over her shoulder. The men and women who clustered around Takvi’s pallet, keeping death watch, turned their backs. A shadow fell across her: M’ret, blocking the guards’ view with his body.

  Charvanek traded her grip on Takvi’s hand for one on his shoulder, then rested her other hand against his face.

  “Thank you for these many years, Takvi,” she whispered as intimately as if they had been lovers, not commander and officer, all that time. “I will honor you as long as memory remains. Go before me now. Tell them in Erebus of the Honor Blade. And when they ask whom you serve, tell them: I am herald for Charvanek. For Liviana.”

  As Takvi’s eye widened in amazement that she confided her secret name, she snapped his neck.

  The others helped her lift his body, laying him gently to rest against the wall. Charvanek straightened the slack limbs and brushed her fingers across his eyelids to close them, wishing she could do more, then stood and saluted, fist to chest.

  Who would say the Rites for her? Narviat, perhaps . . . Narviat, she thought with a touch of regret, who had always wanted so much more of her than she had given him. Now they would never be able to resolve . . . anything.

  A commotion in the corridor beyond the forcefield brought her to stark alertness. The field hummed, then snapped inactive as a man wearing a commander’s insignia stepped in: Volskiar’s Fleet Second. The guards greeted him with chest-thumping salutes. Ostentatious, thought Charvanek.

  Then he removed his helm, and only by the sternest will d
id she keep from crying out.

  “Tal.” For an instant his name was all she could say. “Subcommander Tal.”

  He was still thin, kept lean by impatience and an anger that fed on him as much as it fueled him. The wavy hair was silvered now, but the eyes, intent on hers, had not changed in all the years since he’d stood at her right hand.

  Since I betrayed him, Tal and all my crew, for Spock.

  “It is Commander now, Commander. Fleet Second.”

  All she could think to say now was an inane, “You look well, Tal .” As though we were merely meeting at court. “Careerism agrees with you.”

  “What else was I to do?” The smoldering temper she remembered was still there, just below the surface. “What do you think would be left to a subcommander whose commander had . . . disappeared? Even one who brought safely home the fleet you abandoned?”

  “Tal . . .”

  “I secured a position at the Academy on Bardat. As a junior adjunct lecturer. It was the best I could do, as far as I could safely get from Romulus. Then, in the last purge, my loyalties were considered suspect.”

  “So you were dismissed?”

  “Oh, hardly. The praetor ordered me back to ship duty. Assigned me to General Volskiar. ‘He’s used to ground assignments; advise him,’ they ordered. Mine was to obey. I never expected . . . this . . .” He hesitated, and for a moment his eyes were those of the Tal she’d known, empty of bitterness. “I have heard that you asked for aid for your crew. And I . . . bear you no hate, Commander, not any longer. I want you to believe that.”

  “I do.”

  “I would do more if I were able. But . . . this should help.”

  He’d palmed a small, carefully wrapped, packet. As he warily unwrapped a corner, Charvanek caught a trace of a familiar, pungent order.

  Turath. Quick, painless suicide. Almost reluctantly, Charvanek shook her head. “There is not enough here for all my crew.”

  Tal flushed as awkwardly as young M’ret. “If I could . . .”

  “No need. We are dying already. Do you remember Engineer Takvi?”

  Tal glanced at the engineer, laid out with what honor prisoners could manage, and sketched a reverence. “I shall send guards for the body and perform the Rites myself.” But then he paused. “Is there truly nothing else I can do?”

  Angling her body to avoid the spy-eyes, Charvanek broke the chain holding her amulet. As she’d hoped, Volskiar, mocking her for her superstitions, had allowed her to keep the “childish trinket.” The trinket that held the true record of Narendra III.

  The trinket that might help save her people’s honor.

  “An offering for the dead,” she told Tal, pressing the amulet into his reluctant hand. “It is all I have, and I—I would like a kinsman to have it if possible.” She saw by his slightest of starts that he knew she meant Narviat. Charvanek met his eyes in the way that had always meant “pay attention” when he had served her. “Do what you will with it. Do what you must. For the Empire.”

  He would, of course, puzzle out the truth about the amulet’s contents once he was back on Romulus. What he would do with that knowledge . . .

  I can still trust him, Charvanek assured herself. And wondered if she was a liar. If so, then her last hope had just come to nothing.

  No. She would not permit such self-defeating worry.

  Casting a wary glance at the raptor guarding the brig, Tal gave her the briefest of hand-to-chest salutes, then put his helm back on and left. The forcefield shimmered into life behind him.

  But in only a short time, it went down again as sullen guards lugged in emergency rations and rudimentary medkits. Almost apologetically, they bore Takvi’s body away.

  Almost before they were out of sight, a party of heavily armed guards pushed new prisoners into the brig. Charvanek’s first thought was a weary, We shall be crowded now. Then she saw one of the prisoners fall, leaving a smear of red blood on the deck, and amended her thought to, Maybe not. Not for long.

  Red blood, though?

  Her crew stirred, someone muttering, “A disgrace, thrusting humans in among us.”

  Charvanek raised her hand, freezing her crew in place. “There is no shame in sharing quarters with humans from Enterprise. They fought well.”

  But a ship like Enterprise carried a full complement of approximately seven hundred beings. Only ten survivors . . . ? Captain Garrett was not among them. Not surprising.

  Charvanek’s glance fell on a tall, dark-haired young man whose eyes gleamed with almost Romulan fire. At his side stood a fair-haired woman who carried herself like a trained fighter.

  Guessing, Charvanek nodded to the young man. “You command now that your captain is safe in the Final Honor?”

  He dipped his head in hesitant courtesy. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But, yes. Sir.”

  Alien stared at alien until noise outside the brig made them all turn around.

  Escorted by his guard, Volskiar strode in.

  Once again, in at the kill, eh, Volskiar.

  The guards in the brig snapped to rigid attention. Ignoring them, he . . . smiled at Charvanek. She forced herself to unclench her hands, to not even think of how much she would enjoy cleaning her sullied name in his blood.

  “You know where you are headed,” he told her. “Back to Romulus and public execution. I will see that noble blood of which you boast shed, and be honored for it.”

  “How boring you are, Volskiar. The humans have a saying, ‘He won the battle, but not the war.’ I may have lost this battle. But the war remains to be won.”

  Volskiar’s laugh sounded almost genuine. “I give you my oath: I will hear you scream on Romulus before you die.”

  “And to think that I cautioned myself against self-indulgence!”

  Volskiar turned his back on her and rounded on Fleet Second Tal, one step behind him. “Have you discovered why the human ship exploded?”

  Had it? Then there would be no hull segment bearing the number NCC-1701-C in the Hall of State at Ki Baratan. A pity: So brave a ship should have been memorialized. At least, though, Volskiar had been denied the triumph.

  “The matter-antimatter feed in the ship’s engines degraded catastrophically,” Tal said. “The ship’s explosion took the prize crew with it. I beg forgiveness.”

  Only Charvanek, knowing him all those years, could have caught the faint edge of contempt in that.

  Volskiar glanced at Tal a bit too long, then grumbled, “At least we have Federation prisoners. Have you questioned them?”

  Tal came to attention before his general. “They fought almost to the last, as the general can see. That one”—he pointed at the tall young man—“assumed command. He is called Castillo.”

  “And that woman?”

  Ah yes, the golden hair. Always predictable, our Volskiar.

  “She was found at Enterprise’s tactical station,” Tal said. “She is called Tasha Yar.”

  The blond woman did not even shrug. Charvanek had seen that fatalistic expression before, on prisoners who had faced death so long that they almost welcomed it.

  “It would be well,” Tal added hastily, reading the same signs, “if I questioned her about Federation tactics.”

  “Well thought, Tal, for once,” the general said. “I indeed wish to question her. Privately.”

  Tal met Charvanek’s eyes, saying plainly without words, Outmaneuvered.

  But Volskiar’s smile at the young woman was amazingly free of lust. Fascination, Charvanek thought, or maybe, bizarre thought, even a stirring of something far sweeter. He had always been a creature of impulses. Now, he reached out a hand to touch that golden hair—

  “Let her alone!” Castillo snarled.

  Dodging one of the guards, he hurled himself at the general’s throat.

  Oh, you young idiot.

  Another guard, not bothering to draw his sidearm, slammed his fist into the young man’s temple, and hurled him against a bulkhead. As the human crumpled, red blood trick
led down the metal.

  “Richard!” The young woman’s voice and training broke as she shook off Volskiar’s hand and flung herself on her knees at the young man’s side. Blood poured from Castillo’s mouth and ears, and his neck was twisted at an impossible, fatal angle. “Richard . . .”

  “Carelessness,” Volskiar snapped at the guard who had killed the human. “You are reduced two grades in rank. Now, see that the dead are removed. I wish the living still healthy on our arrival!” Approaching the human woman with what might actually have been genuine gentleness, he murmured, “Come away. Here is no place for you.”

  With the Romulan strength that humans could not withstand, he compelled her to her feet, then toward a waiting guard. “My orders are that she be tended. Gently. Then bring her to my quarters. See that we are not disturbed.”

  The woman turned, looking about the brig as if the Romulan and human prisoners were the last thing she would ever see. For a moment, her glance locked with Charvanek’s. In that instant, differences of race and culture dropped away. They were only two women, in perfect understanding.

  In war, all men were women’s enemies.

  For a bewildered moment, Tasha Yar had no idea where she’d awakened. Then she saw the blues and greens of a Romulan eagle glaring at her from a bulkhead, and memory returned in a rush.

  The battle . . . the deaths . . . and this . . . Romulan. The “private interrogation” by General Volskiar had ended as she had suspected it would.

  The body lying next to her, one arm flung possessively across her chest, was inhumanly warm. She froze beneath its weight, glancing about the cabin: large, austere, only the bed (with its silky sheets), a supply locker (elegantly black-lacquered), a desk welded to the floor, and that damned warbird welded to the wall—nothing that could be used as a weapon.

  What difference does it make? a bitter little voice in her mind asked. After all, she had already struck so many hard bargains in the past few days that she was almost numb. Traded one Enterprise for another. Bargained away a life to which she was not entitled in a doomed timeline for a chance at a death that might mean something. This was just one more trade: the lives of her adopted crew in return for her place in the general’s bed.