“I’m not saying what really happened, Kirk. I’m simply trying to explain why Dr. Rowhn believes Nilan was murdered.”
“Destroying the communications gear suggests a deliberate action,” Picard said. “And denying the enemy communications is a military tactic.”
Kirk could see that Sedge was growing annoyed by their questioning of him. “Picard, Kirk, if you’re determined to imagine the fantastic, why limit yourselves to what Dr. Rowhn believes?”
“Do other people think Nilan was murdered?” Picard asked.
“Corrin Tal, for one.”
“Who does he think the murderer is?”
Kirk admired the way Picard was keeping up the pressure.
“Religious fanatics,” Sedge said. “Followers of a Pah-wraith cult, perhaps. Or anyone else who believes that the ruins of Bar’trila should not be disturbed.”
“Isn’t that what Prylar Tam is here for?” Picard asked. “To be certain that any religious artifacts are not disturbed?”
“Exactly, Picard. Of course, to Corrin, that means that Prylar Tam is a suspect. Dig deep enough, you could probably find reason to suspect anyone at the camp of Nilan’s murder.”
“Including you?” Kirk asked, just to see what Sedge’s reaction would be.
The Bajoran businessman stared at Kirk, as if Kirk had made an accusation instead of merely asking a hypothetical question. “Including me.”
“What would people say your motive would be?” Kirk asked, doing his best to sound like a disinterested Vulcan.
Kirk saw that Sedge fought to kept a flash of anger under control. Kirk knew the feeling, recognized the struggle. “It is no secret that some people of Bajor question the legitimacy of my…business ventures. Some claim that I engaged in war market trading with the Cardassians. Others claim I embraced the Dominion. The end result of all the different claims is the same, however: That I built my fortune on the suffering of Bajorans.”
“Did you?” Kirk asked.
Sedge’s eyes widened in barely controlled anger, but Picard was the first to voice an objection.
“Jim! That is completely uncalled for.”
“I’m not suggesting that’s what really happened,” Kirk said, using Sedge’s own words against him. “I’m only trying to understand why people think the way they do about our host.”
Picard looked to Sedge as if willing to offer an apology. But Sedge waved him off. “No, it’s all right. Kirk knows what he’s doing.” Sedge held Kirk’s eyes again. “The occupation has left many bitter scars on the Bajoran pagh, Kirk. Look deep enough, you’ll find them in every one of us. In Corrin Tal. In Prylar Tam. Even in me. But just the fact that any Bajoran might be roused to commit murder to defend our faith, our world, and our way of life, does not mean that murder was committed in this camp last night.”
Sedge looked up at the sky again. Following his lead, Kirk saw that other constellations had come into view. The sun of Bajor was an eruption of red on the horizon, striped by glowing gold streamers of cloud. “We should go in.” Sedge shifted position, turned around to slide back to the propulser controls.
All Kirk’s instincts told him that Sedge was holding something back.
“What about Lara?” Kirk suddenly asked. He wasn’t thinking of a strategy the way Picard might. He was simply acting on instinct. The cook and her child had been one of the few topics they hadn’t discussed with Sedge. Was it because of oversight? Or because it was a topic Sedge deliberately wished to avoid?
“The cook?” Sedge asked. He was pulling up the inertial anchor and didn’t even look back at Kirk.
“And her child,” Kirk added, silently grateful that Picard was letting him proceed without interruption.
“Melis,” Sedge said. “That’s the girl’s name.”
“Would Lara kill for her child?”
This time, Sedge did look back at Kirk, and he seemed puzzled by the question. “Can you think of a parent who wouldn’t?”
“Would she kill Professor Nilan?”
Sedge was standing beside the control wand now, but he made no move to switch on the propulser. “Very perceptive, Kirk.”
Kirk deliberately avoided looking at Picard and kept his expression blank, a useful trick Spock had overtly taught him. If he was being perceptive, he didn’t know about what, but it seemed his instincts had been right. The cook was a sore point with Sedge.
“If Nilan’s death was murder. And if the murderer was someone from this camp. Then I would say the most likely suspect is Avden Lara.”
Kirk now caught Picard’s eye and nodded imperceptibly for his friend to take the baton from him.
“Why?” Picard asked.
“For the reason Kirk suggests,” Sedge answered. “Her child is dying. And I’m sure that in her troubled mind, she blamed Professor Nilan for that sad state of affairs.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Kirk thought. For the first time, it felt as if Sedge had said something he truly believed, hiding nothing.
“Was Nilan responsible for her child’s condition?” Picard asked.
“Of course not.” Sedge checked the controls on the end of the wand. “F’relorn’s Disease is rare, it is incurable, but it’s a disease of the environment, and its cause is understood. Still, how can one blame a mother for wanting a reason to explain her misfortune? Why would the Prophets inflict such suffering on a child? Much easier to accept that a person is responsible. A person who can be punished.”
There was more to Sedge’s words than just their surface meaning, Kirk knew. He could feel something constrained in the man, but whether it was frustration, or disdain, or something else entirely, wasn’t yet clear.
“Is it possible that Lara did something to sabotage the converter?” Picard asked.
Sedge seemed to be having trouble with the propulser controls. He tapped one of the controls twice, but nothing happened. “Is it possible? Of course it is,” Sedge said. “Most things are. But did she do it? Did anyone do it?” He looked directly at Kirk. “Did I do it? No, Kirk. I did not.”
Then Sedge twisted the control wand and for Kirk, time slowed.
For just an instant, he thought he was spinning, because he saw the sun setting where Sedge Nirra stood at the back of the boat.
Then he realized—the ball of red light was not Bajor’s sun. It was a disruptor cascade. Dead center in Sedge’s chest.
Even as Sedge uttered an endless drawn-out cry, even as the light melted him, traced the contours of his outstretched arms and waving d’ja pagh to transform him into an incandescent plasma field of disrupted molecules, Picard slammed into Kirk.
Sweeping them both off the side of the boat, to be swallowed by Bajor’s darkening green and living Inland Sea.
Chapter Seventeen
BAJOR, STARDATE 55596.5
KIRK’S EYES STUNG. His nostrils burned. He felt a sharp snap in his knee as his foot caught under the edge of the gunwale, then pulled free as Picard’s hurtling form drove him into the depths.
All this in an instant, an eternity.
Then he felt the tug of his shirt under his shoulders, and the muffled sound beneath the water’s surface flared into sharp intensity.
Kirk coughed, wheezed in air. Saw Picard treading water beside him, one hand still clenched over Kirk’s collar.
“I’m all right,” Kirk sputtered just as Picard’s face blurred with crimson fire as the boat exploded.
The propulser’s hit, Kirk thought, even as he and Picard both dove beneath the surface again.
Kirk paddled his hands to keep himself submerged, all the while glancing up, eyes burning from the sharp salt and dissolved metals of the Bajoran sea. Picard was a shadow floating beside him. Above both, the splash and flare of flaming debris hitting the water’s surface, fractured shadows as metal sank in oddly tumbling motions, but all in utter silence.
Another shadow moved in the dim reaches of the cloudy water nearby. More debris? Kirk couldn’t be sure.
Picard pointed
up.
Kirk made a circle of his thumb and index finger, signalling agreement. The boat hadn’t been big, there wouldn’t be enough of it to burn for long. The surface would be safe.
They kicked together and Kirk grimaced as his knee flashed with pain. He denied its hot demand, concentrated instead on the cold water slipping past him as he rose upward.
A moment from the surface, his foot struck something.
Debris was his first thought.
Then something struck him back.
Then Picard sank beside him, faster than a man could swim, and an instant later, Kirk felt himself pulled down, as well.
He felt his lungs strain as the light of the surface dimmed. All the air in the world, only two meters above him…only three….
A hand caught his ankle.
Kirk looked down, saw Picard, his face pale. And below Picard, a writhing shadow, an eclipse of the ocean, something unseeable in the murk and blurred vision of the water.
Then something else, hard and grasping, wrapped around his leg and pulled again.
Suddenly Picard’s body shot up past Kirk, free of whatever force had dragged him downward.
Picard grabbed Kirk’s hand, pulled tight as he kicked and pushed with his free arm.
Kirk kicked violently and, then he, too, broke free.
Together they swam for the surface, racing the last bubbles of escaping air that trickled from their mouths.
We’re not going to make it, Kirk thought clearly, dispassionately.
How many times had the story been told of a drowning man, but a meter from the surface, opening his mouth to breathe as if he were already saved?
Breathing was what Kirk’s body cried out for. Breathing was all that could end this agony.
The water above grew brighter. Kirk was closer. He saw Picard beside him. Both men rising. The bubbles led the way.
Only three meters now.
A dark shadow swooped between them. A sense of something sharp and spiked. Kirk kicked harder, faster, his knee not forgotten, but ignored.
Two meters.
Kirk fought as he never had before to keep his mouth closed, his body’s urgent need for air in check.
One meter.
He gathered strength for one last kick.
Then saw Picard drop suddenly, stunningly, hands outstretched, already too far down for Kirk to reach.
Kirk’s first impulse was to change direction, chase his friend to whatever fate awaited both below.
But momentum bore him upward to the surface and, once through the water barrier, he instinctively breathed in a great, ragged gasp, choking on the liquid that streamed over his face.
He needed to dive again. He could not abandon Picard to some underwater nightmare. He would not.
But his body would no longer be denied. Kirk’s heart pounded, his lungs demanded another breath, and another, and when he could finally place his head beneath the surface again, the sea below was a soft cloud of shadow, no sunlight remaining to trace the dunes of the sea floor. No way to distinguish a moving shadow from the night darkness of unknown water.
Kirk broke the surface again, cried out, “Jean-Luc!”
Because there was nothing else he could do.
The dive masters from the camp reached him with the diving platform a minute later, as he came up for another breath of air, as he continued his useless, desperate search.
One of them used a pike to hook the fabric of Kirk’s sodden shirt, and hauled him from the water to the diving platform’s deck.
“No,” Kirk protested, but he didn’t have the strength to resist his rescue. “Picard…he’s still down there…”
Which of the two Arl brothers had saved him, Kirk didn’t know, the name lost in confusion. But he now stared over the side as if it were possible to see the hidden sea floor. “How long?” the diver asked.
Kirk knew the answer, knew what it meant. “Since…the explosion…”
“Too long.” A death sentence.
Kirk forced himself to his feet, slipping once on the wave-washed deck, weighed down by the soaked Bajoran garments that clung to him, chilling him in the early evening breeze. “It’s not too long! We have ten minutes before irreversible tissue changes even begin. If the water’s cold enough, and we get tri-ox to him within forty, even sixty minutes, he can still recover!” Kirk looked around frantically for the life-support station. “Where’s your revival gear?”
The diver’s voice was quiet but firm. “Mr. Kirk, remember where you are. We don’t have tri-ox. We don’t have revival gear. No transponders. No transporters. Nothing. Do you understand?”
“Hand beacons then!” Kirk demanded, frustrated, so unused to having to ask—to beg—for anything. “We’ll suit up. Search for him! He’s down there, damn you!” He searched his memory for the divers’ names, found them, used them. “Kresin…Picard is down there. As much a brother to me as Trufor is to you.”
Arl Kresin studied Kirk seriously, as if debating with himself, then nodded curtly and shouted out in a Bajoran dialect to his brother in the platform’s small wheelhouse.
Arl Trufor came forward then, clearly not pleased. But Kresin seemed to have said whatever was necessary to make his argument. The two Bajoran brothers went to an equipment chest, not completely closed, in which Kirk could see Bajoran-style rebreathers and diving masks.
They were going. A rush of relief filled Kirk. Then he felt his knee go out with another sharp shock of pain. He caught himself, halfway to the deck, pushed himself up to lean against the railing and peer into the water again.
It might as well have been ink.
Stars reflected on its black surface along with the two moons he had seen earlier, their reflections shimmering, shifting, impossible to pin down.
Then bright shafts of light flashed over the dark water and Kirk looked up to see Trufor and Kresin walk awkwardly to the platform’s dive ladder, each with an underwater search beacon in hand. The dented orange pods of their rebreathers were high on their backs. Adjustable buoyancy tubes threaded around their shoulders and their waists, attached to the weight vests each wore over their formfitting, rust-colored thermal suits. A flat air hose ran from the top of each rebreather pod to the sides of the brothers ’triangular diving masks that covered their eyes and mouths with single flat plates of something transparent.
Though Kirk understood the mechanics of the brothers’ equipment, it was so primitive he thought they might get just as far holding their breaths. To dive without pressure force fields, personal propulsers, antigrav buoyancy vests…without even emergency hypopacs of tri-ox strapped to their arms to provide oxygen in the event the rebreathers failed…Kirk felt he was looking at a scene from centuries past. But at least they were going. At least they were trying.
The two Bajorans stood at the opening in the railing by the dive ladder. Each held a pair of trivaned flippers in his free hand.
Kresin turned to Kirk, tugged his mask to the side, said, “The water’s not as cold as you would hope. So, we’ll find him in thirty minutes, or…after thirty minutes, it would be best not to attempt revival.”
Kirk nodded. Without McCoy, without a starship’s sickbay, another thirty minutes would be the absolute boundary for Picard’s chances of full recovery. Beyond that time, the body might still be revived, but the mind would be gone forever.
Two quick splashes followed, and Kirk saw the beams of the search beacons rippling beneath the surface as the two divers paused to slip on their fins. Then the beams shrank and faded as the divers descended.
Kirk shivered as the evening breeze became an offshore wind. After twenty minutes had passed, he wasn’t certain if he trembled because of the cold or the shock.
After thirty minutes, he knew in his heart he had failed his friend. He still clutched the railing with stiff, cold fingers, unable, unwilling to move, overcome with loss, regret, despair. Jean-Luc Picard was dead, and Kirk knew he had not done enough to save him.
After forty minut
es, he forced himself upright, flexed his hands, and felt the chill of the night become even more hostile.
And by then he knew that the divers were not coming back, either.
Kirk looked up into the night, saw the Five Brothers blazing now.
Five Brothers, Kirk thought. Five murdered victims. Professor Nilan, Sedge Nirra, Arl Trufor, Kresin….
…and Jean-Luc Picard.
He had no doubt the murderer still stalked the camp.
And by all he held dear, beneath those stars he served, Kirk swore that the murderer of Jean-Luc Picard would not escape justice.
Kirk’s justice.
Chapter Eighteen
BAJOR, STARDATE 55597
KIRK RAN THE DIVING platform aground on the moonslit shore, steering by the glow of the distant orange bubble tents lit softly by their pale camp lights.
The three young scholars were waiting for him: Freen Ulfreen, Rann Dalrys, and Exsin Morr, the one whom Picard had said once met Ben Sisko.
They splashed awkwardly into the surf to secure the platform. Freen tied a rope to the railing, using too many knots, none of them appropriate for the sea. Rann and Exsin helped Kirk off the platform, supporting him as a swell in the water made him misjudge the height of his jump, causing his injured knee to slip out again.
Wrapped in a heavy robe, Aku Sale stood back from the water’s edge. Though he appeared desperately worried and anxious to question Kirk, he first offered Kirk a small carafe of something hot that smelled like sweet vinegar. Kirk tried to talk to the man, but couldn’t. His teeth were chattering too violently.
“Shh,” the ancient scholar said. “We all saw…we all saw…Drink this, hey? Torlan wine, heated.”
Aku filled a metal cup from the carafe, but Kirk’s hands were shaking too much to hold it steady. He allowed the old man to place it against his lips.
Kirk felt no sensation of heat or cold, only the pressure of the cup, understanding that his lips must be numb. But once across his tongue and down his throat, the hot wine burned.
“I lost him,” Kirk rasped. His voice was so rough it seemed that of a stranger to him. As unfamiliar as the words he uttered.
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