It was happening again. Everything he loved would burn: T’Vysse, the children who remained to him and the one yet unborn; friends, associates, even antagonists like N’Keth. And Shavokh itself, the immensely precious, fragile metal shell that carried what was left of Karatek’s entire world from one planet toward whatever refuge they might one day find.
“Could you get any information on what…?” The ship’s officer running near him next to his own guards, warding off the curious, might easily be fifty years younger than he. But he had to strain to keep up as Karatek tossed the words over his shoulder each time he drew breath.
The guard shook his head, sweat running down a face flushed olive with effort. His denial could mean no word had come or it wasn’t safe to speak of it in this corridor.
The man flung up a hand. “This way.”
They turned and dashed into a lift, which descended with such apparent slowness that Karatek wanted to line up the ship’s engineers, shout at them, and never even think of the illogic and discourtesy of his action. Finally, the lift’s doors parted, and they were out and running down the corridor that led to the main docking bay. Karatek got a glimpse of Streon’s face before he hurled himself into the shuttle. Someone, at least, had received a full briefing, and the news was bad.
Karatek paused. He dropped his head, fighting to draw more breath in the ship’s air, thin even for a Vulcan, and decided that that would have to suffice as a bow of courtesy.
“Leave first; talk later,” T’Partha gasped. She flung herself into the shuttle before him, strapped down, and closed her eyes, trying for the rhythmic breathing that would help her restore her composure. She was too old to run races.
Logically, Karatek knew it took only 3.2 minutes for the shuttle to be turned on its landing cradle and released to return to Shavokh. It seemed to take far longer, forever, and no, you fool, this was no time to ponder relativistic time!
The shuttle hurtled out of the launch bay before it was fully unsealed. Karatek unstrapped. Securing himself by gripping each seat as he passed, he struggled toward the copilot’s seat.
“Give me the controls!” he demanded.
Who better than a propulsion engineer would know how to push the shuttle’s engines past the green line that signaled danger? And he could at least grant himself this small relief: he could fly.
Screens lit beneath his fingers: all systems operational. No, better than that: nominal. At least something was going right on this day of remembrance.
“Tell me what you know!” he ordered.
“You’re needed,” the pilot said. “Something about the te-Vikram, about the one who is—”
“N’Veyan, yes,” T’Partha, listening intently from her seat, interrupted. “Night and day, man, we haven’t time for talking around the Fires! I am a grandmother three times over. Do you think I remember nothing of the Fires?”
So, the problem was N’Veyan. N’Veyan, whose kinsmen had requested the use of a shuttle so that he could meet his betrothed at the appointed place. N’Veyan, whom Karatek had seen, guarded by kinsmen. The longer the Fires burned, the less rational their victim became. N’Veyan’s actions, his reasoning, his life processes themselves, would become more and more erratic until he entered the Plak-tow, or blood fever. And if that were not assuaged, convulsions and madness would burn him out from within, assuming his warrior’s conditioning made him so supremely unfortunate that his heart did not give way before his mind.
“I know that one, sir,” the pilot said. “Used to stand and just watch the shuttles. After a while, he started to ask questions. I think he’d gotten himself some training too.”
Karatek clasped his hand over his eyes so hard that green and blue flames leapt in them from the pressure.
“You think he stole a shuttle?” T’Partha’s voice was calm.
“I think he tried,” Karatek said. Streon nodded agreement.
Logic would have told anyone that for a shuttle pilot to leave a much larger ship traveling at near-relativistic speed, then match velocities and courses with another ship took rigorous training and composure. To say nothing of courage.
Well, N’Veyan had courage. Perhaps he still had a shred of sanity left too. The best Karatek could hope for was that he had holed up in the shuttlebay and was refusing to speak to anyone while his kinsmen tried to restrain him.
“I’m trying to reach Shavokh communications,” the pilot said. “Wait! Shavokh com, this is Shuttle Four, returning as ordered. Give me ship’s status.”
“We have a situation in the main shuttlebay.”
All Karatek’s life, officialdom termed every alert, every warning, hells, every attack a “situation.” What kind of situation? As he had his life long, Karatek managed not to ask.
“There is nothing to gain from haste but error.” Surak’s Second Analects.
Logic be burned.
“N’Veyan…” Shavokh com this shift was a woman trying to sound dispassionate and succeeding—the last logical portion of Karatek’s brain told him—admirably.
“How far gone is he?” T’Partha had thrust herself into ops and leaned over the console, one hand clutching the back of the pilot’s chair.
Women, Karatek knew from overhearing conversations in his own household, were often disastrously frank in speaking to one another, especially about the Fires. The tips of his ears heated.
But, was that an indrawn breath of relief he heard across the immense distance that separated him from his ship?
“After you left, word came that N’Veyan grew increasingly agitated,” communications said. “Even though we told him that as soon as you returned, the shuttle would be available.”
“Plak-tow?”
“We think so. Of course, his kinsmen shielded him. The healers say it’s hard to know how long the cycles last out here; something about the time shifts. But N’Veyan grew worse. And then all the te-Vikram—well, you know how the fever sometimes makes a man’s attendants behave almost as if they too…Sorry, sir.”
The pilot Karatek had replaced shot him an almost shamed glance. They were both adult males. They knew how the Fires burned, how overpowering the longing and the physical need for the mates to whose minds they had been attuned in childhood became. They knew the stories of miraculous feats of strength, desert crossings, nighttime raids. And madness, followed by violent death.
Karatek thought back to his own marriage. The 2.23 hours he had had to wait before the guards and systras had finally, finally arrived to lead him to the appointed place had seemed as endless as this journey back to Shavokh. He remembered how time, suffused with flame, seemed to stop. He did not remember, until he was told, that he had wept and slammed his fists against the walls until they bled.
And then he had seen T’Vysse, accompanied by a healer priestess. Seen her, taken her hand, sipped blessedly cool water, and touched his mate, in mind and, much too long afterward, in body…
The next morning, she had bandaged his hands herself, kissing them with her fingertips.
And now T’Vysse was in deadly danger.
Karatek drew a ragged breath and knew that the pilot, too, struggled for composure. It was not only the male and his attendants who grew erratic in these situations.
Meanwhile, T’Partha was interrogating the communications officer.
It wasn’t that the te-Vikram had gotten tired of waiting. They had become afraid. N’Veyan had had his first convulsions. If he had entered the final stage of the Fires, the madness, they were out of time.
Drugs existed to slow the decline in emergencies, although they were held to represent weakness of character. There was even stasis. But the te-Vikram’s customs called medical intervention during the Fires an abomination.
“It would have seemed logical to me simply to direct N’Veyan and his attendants to one of the other shuttles rather than wait,” T’Partha observed. She turned to Karatek and the young pilot, then snapped, “Are you two fit to fly this shuttle, or must I?”
&nb
sp; T’Partha was no pilot, and they all knew it. She would probably crash into Shavokh, if she didn’t miss it altogether. But her tart question restored their self-command.
“Maintenance schedules.” Communications’s voice was low, ashamed. “More: none of the men in the shuttlebay are qualified pilots. The shuttle would have been lost.”
“Along with the men in it!” Karatek interrupted.
“It was feared that if the shuttle were lost, the te-Vikram might…”
Karatek shut his eyes. He could just imagine the discussion, the debate between generosity and cruelty. Why waste a journey on one te-Vikram warrior? What was the loss of one te-Vikram, a potential troublemaker at that, against the loss of a valuable shuttle? It wasn’t as if the te-Vikram had wanted to leave Vulcan. The only reason there were any te-Vikram on board was that they had attacked just at the moment of another, greater attack. Karatek had never known whether they had followed the exiles on board the shuttles to continue to fight or to save their own lives.
He doubted if the te-Vikram remembered either.
So. Karatek thought he could reproduce the thinking among some of Shavokh’s council. There were te-Vikram in the shuttlebay, almost incapacitated by blood fever. There was little harm they could do if they were sealed in. If worst came to worst, they could be vented into space. Sound the alarm, and order Karatek back from Rea’s Helm to deal with it. He might fail. And if he did, the ship would fall into other, far more ambitious hands. Worthier hands, as they calculated.
Karatek felt his lips peel back into a snarl.
“To the Fires with that,” he swore.
As delicately as he had touched T’Vysse’s face with his battered hands that first morning after he woke, blessedly sane again, to find her watching him, without fear and with considerable tenderness, Karatek touched the controls, coaxing more speed from the ship. He did not at all like the vibration he felt from the deck, but they would reach Shavokh soon, or it would not matter.
“No!” communications cried. “They can’t! Tell them…”
“What is it?” T’Partha shouted, as if sheer volume could keep the people on board Shavokh focused.
“Patch me through to the shuttlebay,” Karatek ordered. “Main bay, what is your status?”
The language of technology, of control came so naturally to him that he was shocked to hear the shrill cry of systras in response.
“We can wait no longer!” The reply came in a husky, deep-desert accent. Karatek didn’t know the voice, or, more likely, couldn’t identify it.
“Is N’Keth there?” Karatek demanded. N’Keth and Solor had always enjoyed a rapport that Karatek had, at first, considered highly illogical. Over the years, however, he himself had become acquainted with N’Keth and developed a wary but respectful relationship.
“The old man? He tried to stop us. We challenged, and he fell…”
Dead, then? Karatek realized that he would grieve for the te-Vikram elder, not just because he had been a voice of restraint among the te-Vikram males, but because he had proved himself to be worthy of respect.
“We would not have his blood on our hands. We left him outside. It is no matter if you speak to him. He is useless.”
“Main bay, listen to me. Do you have a pilot there?”
A long pause.
“There was a female. At first, we thought…no. She said she belonged to another. We follow all our laws despite temptation. So, before we sealed the bay, we put her out.”
“Out of the bay or…” T’Partha could not bring herself to express her worst fears, that they might have spaced the woman.
“Here is no place for her!”
The proper place for a pilot, male or female, was in a shuttle.
“T’Rya’s young,” said their own shuttle pilot. “Not three years bonded.”
That answered that question. A bonded woman. Tempting, but not available to serve N’Veyan’s need, even if he could accept her.
The te-Vikram were violent, but, by their own standards, rigidly moral. Far more moral, they thought, than other Vulcans. And that skewed morality held, even when one of their own convulsed in Plak-tow.
“Can’t you let another pilot in there?” Karatek demanded.
“You fool, we sealed the bay,” came the voice. “Welded it shut. By the time…” A long pause, with the sounds of screaming in the background.
“We’re out of time. He’s shaking…. Don’t let him bite his tongue!”
“Shuttlebay.” T’Partha leaned over Karatek, shouting. “Hold on! We’re coming in!” she cried. “Our pilot can take you to the other ship. Or”—she drew a deep, shaky breath—“if there is no other female…”
Karatek set a hand on her shoulder, shutting his eyes almost in awe. Back on Vulcan, the unbonded tended to be very young, their health and sanity a priority of the Seleyan order of healers. T’Partha was no priestess of the unbonded, but she was offering herself.
T’Partha was in late middle age, while N’Veyan, even weakened by the Fires, was a young man with as much warrior training as the te-Vikram could manage in envirosave. If her offer were accepted, she might not survive it.
The needs of the one, Karatek thought.
But which one? His old friend and colleague, or a young man who might live to help build a new world?
The choice was not his, but T’Partha’s. And she had made it.
“How long?” he whispered to the pilot.
“Six-point-four minutes,” the other said, hands flattened on auxiliary controls as if he could soothe the strain in the engines, the growing vibrations in the hull that threatened to tear the shuttle apart.
“Hold on!” Karatek cried out into space toward Shavokh.
He didn’t need magnification to see the ship now.
A scream answered him.
“We can’t hold him!” he heard, followed by other screams.
“He’s going to…”
“Nooooo!”
A rush of sound, like the winds blowing across Mount Seleya, only magnified, tremendously magnified, blasted across the communications system.
Fire and debris erupted from what had been Shavokh’s main shuttlebay. Panels of the ship’s hull peeled back, twisted by the blast as the shuttle, piloted by a dying madman, crashed into it.
The choice had not been T’Partha’s, after all.
N’Veyan would never meet his mate at the appointed place now.
At least, Shavokh survived.
“Stay back, stand off!” A scream of near panic erupted from Shavokh’s control system and matched the scream of the shuttle’s engines, of the small craft itself, as it bucked and lurched, struck by fragments.
Murmuring invocations under his breath, his eyes wide, Streon helped Karatek evade the worst of the debris. It took both of them to keep the shuttle from tumbling out of control.
When the shockwave subsided, the younger man slumped forward until his brow rested on the control panel. Karatek set a hand on his shoulder. T’Partha slipped off her cloak, spread it over the pilot’s trembling shoulders, and went to find water.
Karatek looked out at Shavokh. Its damaged panels, still glowing from the explosion, peeled back and curled up, almost in the shape of a kylin’the blossom, but one that brought only death, not healing. If Karatek hadn’t persuaded the council to reinforce the hull after the last mining expedition, they would be turning back to Rea’s Helm for refuge, assuming that they could find the heart to go on.
“Shuttle…calling Shuttle One! Karatek, are you alive in there?”
“The ship!” T’Partha said.
Streon lifted his head. The veils flickered across his eyes, then drew back, leaving them quite calm.
“We came through.” Karatek leaned over the pilot. “Streon’s skill was…” In the Analects, Surak had always said there was no higher praise than “satisfactory.” Surak, however, could be wrong. “He saved us.”
Right now, though, Streon was suffering from shock and reaction
. Karatek opened his mouth to continue when the man pushed him gently aside.
“Shavokh control, this is Streon, pilot and security officer for T’Kehr Karatek and T’sai T’Partha. Is the auxiliary bay prepared to receive us? We are coming home.”
“We shall be with you shortly,” T’Partha called into communications.
“Three-point-eight minutes,” corrected Streon.
“Thank you,” T’Partha said. “And please tell the te-Vikram, ‘I grieve with thee.’”
As they made their final approach, they saw suited figures, tiny crafts, and even the rudimentary ’bots that the technocrats were testing, issuing from their injured ship, to begin repairs.
Almost before the shuttle quivered to a stop in the nearest of Shavokh’s auxiliary bays, Karatek was struggling out of his harness. Then he was up and making for the hatch. Alarms shrieked in the embattled ship’s thin air, their pitch rising and falling until it took real restraint for him not to clasp his hands over his ears.
A guard ran up to him, the elegant upcurve of her own ears hidden by a protective headset. She thrust another such set at Karatek, along with a radiation badge. “You need to come to decontamination,” she ordered.
“T’Partha, you go,” he replied. “There’s something else…”
“Logic requires we monitor any radiation exposure you incurred when the shockwave hit,” said the guard.
Logic be damned, Karatek wanted to tell her, but shock silenced him. Shock, like anger and grief, was an emotion, he realized. Either he would have to confront those emotions in meditation—and soon—or he would have to revisit the entire subject of emotional control. The day Surak had walked out of the desert and become Karatek’s guest-friend, he had worn a radiation badge too. It was not a phase of his life he wished to relive.
“Not now!” he repeated. He brushed the guard’s hand away from his arm. She was younger than he and quicker: if she decided to make him accompany her, she probably could. But he was counting on the Vulcan respect for elders to forestall her.
He was right. But the guard was a stubborn guard and knew her job. “I want your word of honor that you will receive medical assistance as soon as possible,” she told him. “Or I will carry you to the healers now myself.”
Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Page 6
