“You need to apologize to Varis.”
“Apologize?”
“You heard me. I don’t care if you don’t think she deserves it. Varis needs to save face. So get busy face-saving. Get it done within the hour and let me know when it’s done. Brooking out.”
That was an easy request to make, Ro thought (although it could have been made considerably more politely), but how she was supposed to say sorry to a Romulan major who was steadfastly ignoring her attempts to communicate, Ro wasn’t sure. Still, she dutifully sent a subdued message that formally apologized for the offense, regretted that they had got off on the wrong foot, and hoped that Varis would be prepared to speak—and perhaps even come to Deep Space 9 to meet Pa’Dan and the rest. Ro would be delighted to offer her services as arbiter. The message was of course met with stony silence, although Brooking, when Ro reported back, seemed satisfied that she had done what was necessary. Perhaps the Cardassian diplomatic corps could now get on with its business and leave Ro out of this bewildering and strangely escalating situation.
Alas, it was not to be. Mhevita Pa’Dan, requesting another meeting, turned up in a state of barely suppressed and nervous excitement. Ro was immediately on alert. Something new was animating Pa’Dan; something must have happened in the hours since they had last met.
“I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t satisfied at the end of our last meeting,” Pa’Dan said. “I’ve been contacted by several senior politicians back on Prime. They listened to me with great sympathy and promised to get behind our cause.”
Ro sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Let me guess. Are these politicians by any chance opponents of the castellan?”
Pa’Dan frowned. “I suppose they are—”
“They’re using you,” Ro said bluntly. “They want to get to the castellan. He’s got a high-profile speech coming up and they want to embarrass him.”
“They’re willing to speak out on our behalf when the castellan isn’t,” Pa’Dan said fiercely.
“The castellan,” Ro said, not quite believing that she was defending a former member of the Obsidian Order (another unexpected bend in the Great River), “is doing a great deal, and you know it. I know it’s the Cardassian way, but making noise won’t solve this matter. Quiet diplomacy will.”
“The Cardassian way?” Pa’Dan looked at her in astonishment. “I won’t pretend to know what you must have suffered during the Occupation, but I thought that I had done enough to make it clear that I was hardly a supporter of that deplorable policy—”
“That didn’t come out right,” Ro said quickly. “What I meant was that making a fuss will only entrench the Romulans further. They already don’t want to talk because it looks like they’re backing down—”
“ ‘Making a fuss’?” said Pa’Dan icily, and Ro wished momentarily for her own personal diplomat to stop her from shoving her foot in her mouth. “Unfortunately, ‘making a fuss’ is the only way that I can get people to listen. It’s more than ten years since I’ve seen my son, and four years since I’ve even heard from him. I’m sick and tired of people not listening when I say this to them and brushing aside my grief and heartbreak as an inconvenience. I’m sorry to tell you”—Pa’Dan sounded breathless now as well as angry; she was well outside her comfort zone—“that there will be further demonstrations on DS9 until our cause is both heard and acted on.”
There were other voices behind this, Ro knew. Calmly, she said, “I can’t stop you, but you have to understand that if there’s any criminal activity on the station, we will be obliged to make arrests. I can’t make any exceptions to this, no matter how sympathetic I am to the cause. Please,” she said urgently, “think again.”
Pa’Dan hesitated—the idea of arrest clearly didn’t sit well with her. “I shall be glad if arrests happen.” Her hands were trembling. “It will only bring us more publicity.”
Yes, indeed, Ro thought as the nestor departed; publicity of exactly the wrong kind—embarrassing the castellan and the Romulans alike. She opened up a channel to the castellan’s office. The last thing he needed was to be blindsided by this.
* * *
Beverly Crusher’s word was utterly dependable, and so she had, as promised, been faithfully reading all the reports Pulaski had been sending her about the Athene Donald’s mission. Pulaski’s trials with Alden amused Crusher (and how typical of Pulaski to be frank about this in a log where others might have chosen to be discreet or equivocal). Did Pulaski always need a battle to fight? Poor Jean-Luc, the windmill at which Pulaski had tilted the whole time she was on the Enterprise. It must have been a sore trial. Crusher—who, like many reliable and decent people, was not instinctively jealous—found herself imagining, as she frequently did now that Pulaski had put the idea in her head, what the Picard-Pulaski marriage would have been like. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of those living quarters . . .
The hints at a thaw in the relationship with Alden intrigued Crusher, but the situation allowing this rapprochement interested her more. Pulaski’s account of the meeting with the new species was fascinating, taking Crusher back to the time on the Enterprise when exploration and first contact had been their primary concerns, before war after war had pulled them away. Consequently, she read the reports avidly, poring over the descriptions of the huge black ship, the grave visitors, and the sense of being in the presence of something powerful but remote. She smiled at Pulaski’s irritation at the tepid interest shown by the Chain throughout the meeting, and was touched by the other woman’s annoyance on behalf of her friend Tanj. Pulaski was not exactly a great prose stylist, having learned to write in order to communicate scientific findings as efficiently as possible, but there was nevertheless something in her description of the Chain that made Crusher uncomfortable. “Something nasty in the woodshed,” she muttered, reading the report of the chilly first meeting with the personnel (that seemed the right word, impersonal and technical) from the Chain ship. In fact, she was so absorbed and persuaded by Pulaski’s description that she overlooked the clues for some time. Only on a second reading, and trying to pronounce the name of the captain of the Chain ship, did Crusher see what she had been missing.
* * *
“Yes, that’s right,” said Oioli. “We are the same. We shared a common sunrise.”
“But you’re so different!” On some level, Crusher had been expecting a denial (“Chain? Who’s that? Never heard of them”), but everything was there for someone who looked carefully: the height and the tapering fingers, the markings on the skin, the oddly formed names that rolled around the mouth like marbles, the unblinking eyes that seemed to fix you in place and demand something more of you. Even some of the descriptions of the Chain’s hardware, as much as Pulaski had been allowed to see, were familiar—black and silver and functional. The leaders of the People of the Open Sky were the same species as the crew of the Chain.
“We’re less alike than similar now,” said Ioile. “We’ve taken different pathways.”
“But you came here deliberately. Are you on an exploration mission?” Crusher said. “Is that why you’re here?”
Ioile laughed. “Missions, captains, uniforms—does that sound like the People?”
Crusher looked around at the chaos of their quarters. It was as if someone had started unpacking, then changed their mind partway through and decided it was easier simply to rummage through the cases and pull things out as and when they were needed. “No, I guess not. I’m simply trying to understand what brought you here . . .”
“Yours were the next lights that we saw,” said Oioli softly. “Need there be more reason?”
“What you see is what you get,” said Ioile with another laugh. “We do not hide our purpose!”
“You look like adventurers, I suppose,” said Crusher. “Travelers.”
“Travelers? Or wanderers.” Oioli paused for a moment’s thought and then nodded. “Those words, I think, come closest. The People of the Open Sky exist to see what’s out there.”
“So you’re not on a formal exploration mission,” Crusher said. “You’re traveling, wandering. That sounds like exploration to me, but we’ll call it whatever you prefer.” She sighed. “You have to understand that I’m a doctor. My choices are always guided by what will help someone who is sick or injured. Going from Pulaski’s descriptions of the technology the Chain has, there’s some pretty impressive hardware at their disposal. May I ask why you haven’t been home? You could easily have cured some of the ailments your children had simply by popping home . . .” Crusher trailed off as she saw the look that Oioli and Ioile were exchanging. “If you’re exiles,” she said quietly, “it’s possible that we can help. The Prime Directive limits our ability to involve ourselves in the affairs of others, but no captain would ignore a direct appeal for sanctuary, and I think you’d find that with her history, Captain Ro would be particularly receptive in that respect.”
Oioli gave her a sunlit smile. “We are not running, Beverly. We sail because we want to. Not all journeys seek an end. Some are their own purpose.”
Crusher nodded. “We understand that in Starfleet. We’re explorers too, at heart.” She sighed. “Although we seem not to have done any exploring for a long time.”
“I see,” said Oioli gently. “I understand. That’s often what can happen. People set out to explore and find that years have passed them. Standing still, they reach a point and cannot push on farther. The love of traveling dims and fades. They never travel onward.”
“Is that what happened with the Chain?” pressed Crusher. There was obviously some reason why the People would not return, and it had to be good enough for them that the health of these much-loved children had become secondary.
“If people cannot move ahead, their homes will end up stagnant,” Ioile said.
“But you continued to travel?”
“What else would we do?” Oioli gestured outward. “We have no other purpose. But more than that: the traveling brings joy to us, and meaning. The People of the Open Sky could never choose stagnation.”
Perhaps not, thought Crusher, but for the first time in her interactions with them she felt something was being concealed. There must have been a reason that Oioli, Ioile, and Ailoi had left home. Could it simply be that they didn’t like it there? Was that enough to keep people wandering, year after year, even when the health of their children was at risk? To be fair, there had been nothing life-threatening, and they had jumped at DS9’s medical facilities the moment they were offered, but there was still that barrier to returning that Crusher didn’t understand. And surely there would be a pull back home, eventually? A pull to whatever family was there?
“Who else,” Crusher muttered as she reread the last missive from René, smiling and waving at her from the view screen, “are you going to show the holiday pictures to?” Who was she to question people who had made their lives a permanent journey? She’d moved around as a child after her parents died and had chosen travel as a way of life when she signed up for Starfleet. And her husband and son—her family—were light-years away from where she was now.
* * *
“You think they’re the same people?” Pulaski was intrigued.
“Only some of them,” Crusher replied. “There are numerous species on board the People’s ships. They take on new members from the worlds they visit. But the core three adults are definitely the same species as the ones you’ve encountered.”
“Fascinating,” said Pulaski. “And yet they’re clearly culturally a million kilometers apart.” She laughed. “Well, I suppose that’s true for any world. Just because you’re from the same species doesn’t mean you’re culturally monolithic. Not everyone on Earth is a white male Westerner, no matter how it seems sometimes.”
“There’s something else too. Some tension between them. I couldn’t get Oioli or Ioile to be specific—they have this vague singsong way of talking that makes them difficult to pin down sometimes. But it has to be a good reason. They love those children too much to make them suffer unnecessarily.”
“Are they on the run?” Pulaski said.
“They pretty much said no when I suggested that. They said the journey was their way of life and they had no need to return.”
Pulaski grunted. “Sound like a bunch of goddamn hippies.”
“Of course, they might lie if they didn’t feel safe enough, particularly once I said that we were in touch with others from their species. I’d like to think we’d done enough to show that we were trustworthy.”
“They could simply have different value systems. Perhaps we have walked into a dispute between the hippies and the authorities.”
“Oioli did say something about ‘stagnation.’ That the Chain was stagnant in some way. Does that sound right?”
“They’re certainly sticklers for protocol and not much fun,” Pulaski said. “From what I saw of the People while I was on DS9, I don’t think their laid-back approach would sit well with Aoi and the rest.”
Crusher laughed. “That’s certainly true! All those kids! I take it you haven’t seen any children on the Chain ship?”
“We haven’t been on board yet, but I imagine it’s a blissfully child-free zone. Send across your notes on the People. I’ll see if anything strikes me as relevant.”
“And then?”
Pulaski shrugged. “If I’ve got any questions—well, how about I ask them?”
Pulaski spent a happy few hours reading through Crusher’s reports on the People: the medical data, the notes and conjectures about their social structure. She admired Crusher’s clear style, the care with which she made her observations, and the restraint she showed making assumptions based on them. One or two of the species traveling with them seemed vaguely familiar to her, so she went hunting back through her own files to see whether there was anything there. She wasn’t pleased with what she discovered.
* * *
“I’m sorry to summon you both in this rather dramatic way,” Pulaski said to Tanj and Delka, “but somebody has been rifling through my files.”
It was very late at night. Both women had nonetheless come straight to Pulaski’s quarters when she’d called and asked them to come on “a matter of some delicacy.”
“Your files?” Tanj frowned. “Which ones?”
“Files related to my current research. Someone has been trying to get into them.”
There was a silence as both of her guests tried to consider the likeliest candidates.
“I suppose,” Delka said slowly, “that the Chain might not be as friendly as they seem—”
“They don’t seem particularly friendly at all,” Tanj said. “As much as it pains me to say it, we’re not really getting much in return, are we?”
“But that’s exactly my point,” said Pulaski. “We’ve welcomed them with open arms. We’ve not hidden anything, and we’ve promised them free access to pretty much the whole kit and caboodle. So why bother hacking into my files? If they asked me what I was doing, I’d tell them. At length. In detail. If they weren’t bored before, they would be after.”
“But they haven’t shown any reciprocal openness,” Delka pointed out. “What we’ve seen points to a culture of secrecy. Even with the People of the Open Sky—I gather from Crusher’s logs that they have avoided answering specific questions about their reasons for traveling. Not all cultures are as open as the Federation or the Ferengi Alliance.”
“And not even the Federation is as open as it once was,” said Tanj. “I know that Alden is worried about the access we’ve given the Chain to the Athene Donald. Metiger too.”
“Alden,” muttered Pulaski darkly. “Now there’s a name to conjure with.”
Tanj looked at her in surprise. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“That he’s my chief suspect? You bet.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Kitty!” Tanj fell impatiently back in her chair. “I thought the two of you were coming to an accommodation.”
“He might well be a frustrat
ed xenolinguist dying to fly free,” Pulaski said roughly, “but first and foremost he’s Starfleet Intelligence—”
“If you think it’s unlikely that the Chain would break into your files, how much more unlikely is it that Starfleet Intelligence would?”
“I don’t know what goes on in the heads of those people!” Pulaski cried. “I don’t think they know themselves half the time!”
Delka gave a polite cough. “I do rather feel that I’m intruding on family business. If this is now a discussion about your security services, perhaps I should go?”
“No,” said Tanj firmly. “Kitty is being ridiculous.”
“You say ridiculous,” Pulaski said, “but I bet if we asked Alden who’s been at my files, he’d say Metiger. I bet he’d think she was using the convenient presence of the Chain as cover for her own nefarious activities. Here’s my guess,” Pulaski said, jabbing the air with her finger. “Alden’s Tzenkethi came on board exactly as planned on DS9. She’s somehow been able to conceal herself. She’s been observing us—more specifically, Metiger—the whole time.”
“And having gone to these extreme lengths to conceal herself—and I’d like you to tell me how—she’s now decided to reveal her presence by having a poke around your medical files?” Tanj shook her head. “There’s a simpler explanation, as Delka said. Someone from the Chain is responsible. Perhaps it’s even been authorized.”
“But this brings me back to my original question: what do they want with my files? They’re obviously more advanced than we are. Why bother?”
“Perhaps they aren’t advanced as they seem,” said Delka. “Or as advanced as they would like us to believe. And while we’ve seen a lot of hardware, we know nothing about their medical science.”
Pulaski hesitated.
“Go on, Kitty.”
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