“Some people?”
“Well, like Portia. She’s got a temper and she’s not afraid to express it. She was really angry when we found out Rakatheema wanted us to fight for Starfleet. Said he was as bad as the Arcturians who exploited the Warborn of the past. But I didn’t take her seriously. It’s just the way she talks. They say it’s good to talk about your feelings, right? That it’s a healthier way to work through them than acting on them. Or so they said in psych class.”
When Horatio’s turn came, his concern was for Janith-Lau. “There is no way that woman is a killer, Captain. You should stop wasting time pursuing her and find the real culprit.”
Sh’Deslar took in his gentle urgency. “What makes you so sure?”
“She is a woman of peace. It defines every thought she expresses, every action she takes. The very reason she opposed Rakatheema’s advocacy of us was her fear that we might be exploited for martial ends. It would be contradictory for her to commit violence in the name of peace.”
“But isn’t that your whole purpose? The Warborn? To fight to preserve the peace of Arcturus?”
“To preserve the life and safety of Arcturians through our sacrifice. And yes, when necessary, through violence. That is the compromise of our existence. But Doctor Janith-Lau walks another path. A narrower, more difficult path, but one she is as firmly committed to as I am to mine. Of that, I am certain.”
“In that case, can you think of anyone else who might have been hostile to Rakatheema? Perhaps even a fellow cadet?”
“I cannot believe that of anyone who seeks to join Starfleet. To choose that calling is to commit to the highest ideals.”
Sh’Deslar cocked her head, her antennae shifting. “Some of your fellow Warborn seem less comfortable with that choice than others. Perhaps they aren’t as committed to those ideals.”
“I can’t believe any of them would turn on a fellow Arcturian.”
“Even one they saw as a threat? An exploiter, perhaps?”
“Our mission is to battle threats to Arcturus, not to ourselves.”
“And none of you have questioned that mission?”
Horatio sighed. “I suppose some of the students must have told you about Portia’s outburst a couple of weeks ago. All right—I can’t deny it. I’m sure she won’t either. She’s very… forthright. Well… when it suits her to be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The soft-spoken Arcturian hesitated. “She can be very private too. We’re used to living and working communally; even though we now reside in separate dorm rooms, we tend to congregate together between classes. But Portia has been prone to wander off by herself at times, increasingly of late. When we ask where she’s been, she tells us to mind our own business.” He chuckled. “I suspect she might be experimenting with sexuality. It’s not something we normally contend with, but our whole purpose here is to expand our horizons, and she’s the most daring of us. But I don’t know who she might be doing it with. You’d have to ask her.”
The captain leaned forward. “Do you remember if she ‘wandered off’ two nights ago?”
Horatio stiffened. “I’d really rather not confirm that, Captain.”
“Shall I make it an order, Cadet?”
He sighed and spoke reluctantly. “Yes. She was absent for some time.”
Finally the time came to speak to Portia, and this time, sh’Deslar saw no need to be circumspect. Indeed, she asked Kirk to join her in the room; as commandant of cadets, he should be on hand for whatever was to come next.
The security officer got right to the point. “Where were you two nights ago, Cadet Portia?”
The cadet stared back angrily. Kirk was struck by how physically similar she, Horatio, and most of the others were, yet there was no mistaking the intensity in her eyes or the raptorlike alertness in her body language. “I was by myself. Walking along the shore.”
“Can anyone corroborate that?”
Portia bristled. “Why should they need to? Isn’t my word good enough?”
“Just answer the question.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
Portia grimaced. “I mean that no one can corroborate it. I go out there to be alone. Get away from everyone looking at me like I’m about to snap and kill someone.”
Sh’Deslar’s antennae darted forward at her choice of words. She activated a data slate and pushed it over. Portia glanced down at the video file it played. “What’s this supposed to be?”
“Don’t you recognize the person in that file?”
“It looks like me. I’m walking across campus. So what? I do a lot of that.”
“This was taken by a surveillance imager at the edge of the Academy campus two nights ago—the night you claim to have been down by the shore. It shows you leaving campus in the other direction—toward Presidio Heights.”
“Impossible. I wasn’t there.”
“You just said that was you.”
“I said it looks like me. Most of us look like me.”
“The bandolier pattern matches yours.”
“Must be a trick of the light.”
“It isn’t. Image analysis confirms it. What’s more, gait analysis shows it to be consistent with your movements.”
Portia leaned forward and spoke insistently. “It wasn’t me. Your computers are wrong.”
“We also have eyewitnesses confirming the presence of an Arcturian cadet wearing your bandolier in the vicinity of Rakatheema’s apartment.”
“Then they’re lying. What is this, some kind of plot to discredit us? Prove we’re as savage as they say we are?” She looked up at Kirk. “How are you part of this, Admiral? You said you were our advocate.”
Sh’Deslar went on relentlessly. “We also looked more closely at the DNA evidence from the murder scene. Arcturian genetics are… complex, but once we filtered out Rakatheema’s own DNA, we found genetic traces consistent with an Arcturian female, with the epigenetic configuration unique to the Warborn. The only female Warborn cadet whose recorded DNA profile is consistent with those traces is you, Portia.”
The young Arcturian’s eyes widened in disbelief. “That’s impossible.”
“Do you deny that you’re capable of killing?”
Portia glared. “Of course I can kill. That’s what I was designed to do. But I wasn’t there.”
“Eyewitnesses say you resented Rakatheema. That you believed he wanted to exploit the Warborn.”
“He did. He as good as admitted it.”
“So he was a threat to you and yours. And as you said, you were designed to eliminate threats to Arcturians.”
“You’re twisting it!” Portia took a deep breath, gathering her wits. After a moment, she spoke more carefully. “I may not have approved of all of Rakatheema’s goals for us, but his support still benefitted us. I didn’t have to like him in order to go through the doors he opened. He got us off Arcturus, worked to convince people to give us a chance to be more than just cannon fodder.”
She looked up at Kirk with a touch of pleading in her eyes. “I’ve enjoyed that chance, Admiral. I’ve only just started to explore the freedom to become who I choose to be. I don’t want to lose that. You know the first thing I thought when I heard the commander had died? That we might not get to stay at the Academy without his advocacy. That all the new possibilities I’ve discovered could be taken away.
“If people think one of us killed him, that will just strengthen their belief that we’re too dangerous to be in Starfleet—or even to be let out of our cryopods. His murder could cost us everything we’ve gained. I’d have to be crazy to kill him. Any of us would be.”
Kirk wanted to believe her. As strong as the evidence appeared to be, he recognized the mentality of a soldier in Portia. She was capable of violence, he was sure, but in a disciplined, directed way, with purpose and precision. It was a tool to her, one to be wielded where it would do the most good.
Still, the case sh’Deslar and Sulu had built
was too strong to ignore. “I’m sorry, Cadet Portia. But I can’t deny the evidence.”
She met his eyes with betrayal in hers, then turned to sh’Deslar. “Am I under arrest?”
“You’re not a civilian. You’re still bound to perform your duties as assigned by your commanding officer.” She looked to Kirk.
“However,” the admiral told Portia, “you are to be held subject to certain restrictions pending an official hearing. You’re forbidden to leave Academy grounds except under official supervision. You’re to report to me on a daily basis. And you’re not to be allowed any access to weapons or to pilot any vehicles.”
That last part seemed to be the one that hurt Portia the most. Kirk recalled Sulu telling him how well she had taken to flying.
Still, she quickly gathered herself and met his eyes again. “Fine, sir. The sooner I get to make my case at that hearing, the better. Whoever killed Rakatheema is targeting us. I won’t let that happen without a fight.”
As he met her gaze, Kirk had no doubt she was up for any fight that came her way. But would that free her or convict her? And would the rest of the Warborn share her fate?
Chapter Fifteen
U.S.S. Enterprise
Less than a day after the flare strike on the L5 community, the Enterprise had received a transmission from Rajendra Shastri of the Penthara IV colony, addressed to Nyota Uhura. “When you contacted me earlier, I knew it had to be connected to these flares, but I ignored it anyway. I let my… my personal feelings blind me to how serious the problem was. Now, after Denobula and L5… I can’t pretend anymore. I’m ready to talk.”
As it happened, the Enterprise had already been en route to Penthara IV in hopes of locating Shastri, their sole remaining lead. Captain Spock arranged with the colony’s leaders to place Shastri on their fastest interstellar craft, on course to rendezvous with the Enterprise. Twenty-nine hours later, Spock and Uhura stood in the transporter room and watched as Commander Scott beamed the man aboard. Uhura was still confused but no longer surprised by the surge of complex, intense feelings she experienced at the sight of Shastri, the same feelings that every mention of his name had evoked. She hoped his presence would resolve that mystery as well as the other, greater ones.
Rajendra Shastri was not a particularly striking presence—a man about her age, average in height, with features consistent with the South Asian origin of his name. Those features were pleasant enough, but not compelling to her. Whatever lay beneath these powerful emotions was nothing so superficial.
In the briefing room, once Spock and Uhura had explained the entire situation and their reasons for seeking him out, Shastri shifted uneasily in his seat as he absorbed it. He had trouble meeting Uhura’s eyes. “So you really did lose your memory,” he finally said.
“I had no reason to lie about that,” Uhura told him, unable to keep a touch of resentment out of her voice. “Did I?”
He wrung his hands together. “I didn’t… I didn’t know what to think. It was such a… so hard to believe. And coming so soon after everything that happened on Argelius…” He was visibly wrestling with deep emotions of his own. Finally he met her eyes. “I guess I was afraid it was too good to be true. That you’d had second thoughts and… and gave me a feeble excuse for breaking things off with me.”
Uhura was stunned. It explained everything she felt, yet it fit none of the facts. “We were lovers?”
Shastri winced and let out a painful laugh. “Well… only barely. We’d only just started. I mean…” He took a deep breath. “At the Academy, and afterward, we were just good friends. I certainly thought you were beautiful, I would’ve been open to that, but you were always seeing someone else. Or I was, or we were both so caught up in exams and simulations and field training that we didn’t have time for personal lives.”
“So what did we do together, Rajendra? What did we work on at the Academy? And what’s the connection to Argelius and the other planets?”
He shook his head. “So strange to hear you use my full name. To see you look at me like a stranger.”
“Mister Shastri,” Spock interposed, “there will be time to process your emotions later. For now, it is urgent that you tell us what you can about your researches with Commander Uhura.”
“Of course, Captain. I’m sorry—I left Starfleet discipline behind a long time ago.”
He took a breath and straightened his shoulders, then began again, turning to Uhura. “You and I bonded over the fact that we were both subspace hams in our youths.”
She nodded. “My family told me. It’s how we found you.”
“Did they tell you about the musical patterns you thought you heard in the subspace noise?”
“Yes. But they said I abandoned it because I realized so many signals from random points in space couldn’t share a common origin.”
“You did, but…” He let out a nervous laugh. “So strange to be telling you about your own words. You never forgot anything!”
“Please, Rajendra.”
“Right, right. Sorry. What you told me was that you knew intellectually that it didn’t make sense, but you could never completely shake the feeling that there’d been something there. You were embarrassed about having so much trouble letting go of a—of what you thought was a childhood daydream.”
“You make it sound as though it wasn’t.”
A brief, convulsive grin. “You always wanted to rush through a good story, Nyota. I’ll get there.
“What I told you was that I trusted your instincts. If you felt there was really something there, you shouldn’t have given up on it. And you’d gotten me curious as well. I wanted to hear this… this music of the spheres for myself.
“Anyway, you agreed, but you were still a little embarrassed about it. You were so driven then. Trying to live up to a family of overachievers. So you swore me to secrecy. You didn’t want anyone to know if it turned out to be nothing.
“We had to find some… creative ways to get time on the Academy’s subspace equipment.” Shastri spread his hands and shook his head at the looks on the officers’ faces. “Nothing larcenous, just allocating an hour or two of buffer time here and there when we requested the equipment for our formal studies. You mastered things so fast anyway that you usually had plenty of time to spare.
“Before long, you were able to track down more of the signals—or at least what you believed were signals. I wasn’t as convinced I could make out patterns in the noise as you were, but I never had your ear. Still, with Starfleet equipment, we were able to verify a nonrandom structure to the patterns. Elements of rhythm, harmony, recurring motifs… like music, as you always said. Or like math—the kind of fundamental mathematics often used to establish a translation baseline starting from first principles.
“We tried sending replies on the same frequencies, to test whether there was really an intelligence behind the signals, something that might react to our response. If there was someone there, we wanted them to know they were being heard and that we wished to communicate. When we analyzed the patterns that followed, we did extract more information—hints of linguistic structure, densely packed, but too fragmentary, too alien, for the translators to parse. But we weren’t sure if we were getting results because they were actually responding to us, or just because our decryption algorithms were improving.
“As we analyzed the emissions, we determined they had attributes consistent with quantum wormholes. The kind that pop up naturally out of the quantum vacuum all the time.”
Spock and Uhura traded a look. Finally, this was starting to connect. Still, Uhura was puzzled. “Natural quantum wormholes come and go almost instantaneously. To persist long enough to transmit meaningful information…”
“Yes. We knew how unlikely it was, but that made it a mystery worth pursuing—as well as one we were both determined to keep to ourselves until we could be sure we weren’t missing some embarrassingly obvious explanation.
“After all, your original reason for giving
up on the search was still there: How could the same signal come from so many unconnected points?”
Spock leaned forward. “If I may interpose, Mister Shastri… I presume you both considered the fact that wormholes’ points of exit can be quite distant from their points of origin. Thus, a single source could transmit wormholes to any number of widely distributed coordinates.”
“Naturally, Captain Spock. That was the first thing we looked at. But the wormhole signatures didn’t fit. The spatial gradients, the EPR tensors, the transkinetic vectors… at least, the ones they’d have to have to match what we were reading… they didn’t converge in any number of dimensions. If anything, the signatures suggested that each individual quantum wormhole spanned hardly any distance in space.”
Spock’s brow lifted. “You stress ‘in space.’ ”
Shastri nodded heavily. “As opposed to time. Yes. Eventually Nyota and I realized there was only one explanation for how signals from all over space could have a common origin: because the whole universe had a common origin.”
Uhura’s eyes widened. “The Big Bang.”
“Or just after it. When all the matter and energy of our universe—even the very space of our universe—was still compressed into a single impossibly dense, hot mass. Under such intense energy conditions, quantum wormholes would’ve been spontaneously forming all the time—and with such intense energies driving them, the wormholes’ other ends could come out anywhere in space and time. Including our time.”
“But that’s… that’s incredible. How could anything alive or sentient have existed in those conditions? Or for such a brief time?”
Shastri chuckled. “You asked that exact question back at the Academy. Fortunately, there are a lot of professors at an academy. We posed it as a hypothetical question to our astrophysics instructor. You remember Doctor Sitko, right? Lanky guy with a beard and—” He broke off. “Oh… sorry.”
Living Memory Page 20