“You think that the loss of those we share our lives with doesn’t affect us?” Sarek asked in a quiet voice. “It does. I too lost a wife as a young man, Kirk. Our son, though still living, rejected the Vulcan way and left our world—to where, I do not know. In my years, death has taken many I’ve known: family, colleagues, friends.”
Kirk studied the alien with a suspicious eye. While Sarek kept his expression properly stoic, Kirk could hear the shift in tone that, if the other man weren’t an alien, he would have interpreted as barely suppressed feeling hidden beneath his neutral words. “Friends?” Kirk repeated.
Sarek raised an eyebrow. “Certainly. One can regard an individual more favorably than others, even without an emotional aspect to the relationship. After all, is that not, in theory, what this current summit is about?”
Kirk decided not to comment on that. “You still haven’t told me why you’re so interested in me and my life story.”
“Because, Commander, you and I are of a kind. I do not believe Earth should unite with the Interstellar Coalition any more than you do.”
“Why don’t you think there should be a union?”
“The Interstellar Coalition has always been a very loose union, which exists due almost solely to each member’s support of Space Command, and its mission of providing them a strong common defense. There is a growing feeling among the Vulcan people that Space Command has exceeded its intended authority, much as the High Command had prior to the Syrrannite Reformation. They feel we should abandon the Coalition and strive to move closer to the peaceful path Surak laid out for us.”
Kirk didn’t understand Sarek’s reference to the Syrrannite Reformation, or the importance of a person with a name very similar to his own. Still, he got the unstated point. “You’re not just talking about keeping Earth out of the Coalition,” he said. “You want out yourself.”
Sarek nodded. “A union with Earth—the world that initially brought the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites together—will make the Coalition stronger than ever. It would make it politically impossible for Vulcan to secede. Especially given T’Pol’s role in the matter. Ironically, she plays to the emotional reasons for a union.”
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me.”
“I need to speak to T’Pol,” Sarek said. “Alone, without other ambassadors or diplomats listening. I ask your help in this, Commander. All I desire is to have the opportunity to make my case to her.”
“I don’t know…” Kirk said. He had far less love for the Coalition than Sarek apparently did, but what he was asking of him was to help undermine Earth’s purpose in asking for this summit—essentially, an act of treason.
“What if I were to tell you, Mister Kirk, that by preventing this unification, you would in fact be saving Earth?”
“I’d be skeptical.”
“Naturally,” Sarek said with a nod. He turned and began to pace slowly. “The Klingon Empire is growing restive. Since their defeat at Donatu V, they have contented themselves with picking away at minor worlds beyond either of our territories, such as Khitomer, Mestiko, and Organia. But a new generation is coming of age on Qo’noS, young warriors longing to earn honor in combat. Their High Council has been pouring more and more resources into the Defense Force.” He turned then to look at Kirk directly. “It is all but inevitable that they will launch a new offensive within the next five-point-four-three-seven years, either against the Interstellar Coalition, the Commonwealth worlds of United Earth, or, most likely, both.”
Kirk shook his head in confusion. “Then, you’re saying it makes no difference if Earth joins the Coalition or not, we’re still as likely to be attacked.”
“But as a member of the Coalition,” Sarek reminded him, “your Starfleet would be under the direction of Coalition Space Command. Say the Klingons launched a two-pronged attack, one at Aldebaran Colony, a world of approximately twelve million, the other against Betelgeuse, one with over eight billion inhabitants. Which do you think will receive the bulk of the defensive effort?”
Kirk blanched at that thought. Of course, they would put their strongest defense around a highly populated member world. But, with a foothold on Aldebaran, it would be an easy matter for the Klingons to then move on to Deneva, Ivor Prime, and then Earth itself. “But…like you said, the Interstellar Coalition is supposed to serve the mutual needs of all its members. They couldn’t just leave a world like Aldebaran defenseless.”
“No. But they would not be able to defend it well. Except for the occasional Orion raid or other isolated incidents, the Coalition has been at peace for the past generation. Any war would be devastating. The only questions are whether your people can make the choice how to fight, and my people can be allowed to choose peace instead.”
Before Kirk could offer any more counterarguments, Sarek pulled a bright green data card from the cuff of his jacket sleeve. “Here,” he said, handing it to Kirk. “This has the time and the coordinates where I will meet you and T’Pol tomorrow, as well as the codes which will allow you to beam down without triggering any security alerts.”
“Well, now, hold on,” Kirk said, still holding the small plastic square out at arm’s length. “I haven’t said I’ll help you yet.”
“Tell her whatever you must to have her accompany you,” Sarek said, ignoring Kirk’s objection, “but speak to no one else of any of this.”
Kirk started to repeat his protest, but was cut off by the oddly pitched hum of a non-Starfleet transporter beam. The Vulcan seemed to shift out of focus, then disappeared in a column of swirling energy. As soon as he was gone, the doors behind him opened with a swoosh, letting light from the corridor spill in.
Kirk hesitated for just a moment, trying to absorb everything he’d just heard and to sort through all the questions now swirling through his head, chief among them, what to do with this information the Vulcan representative had given him. He turned and headed back for the reception hall, determined to find some answers before making any decisions.
7
“Lieutenant Penda?”
Nyota Uhura muted her earpiece, but made certain she was still recording all the comm traffic to and from the Coalition vessels Shallash and Kuvak before turning in her seat. “Yes, Commander,” she asked, looking up at the Enterprise first officer with wide, innocent eyes.
“Pulling double shifts so soon after your transfer?” Kirk asked, offering a small sympathetic grin.
Uhura—or rather, “Penda”—nodded and explained, “Lieutenant Palmer had some personal business she wanted to take care of.” An easy half-truth, since everyone on a starship crew always had personal business that needed attending to, and never enough off-duty time to take care of it. However, it had been Uhura who offered to let the beta-shift communications officer have the evening off—ostensibly so that “Penda” might have the chance to “get better acquainted” with the handsome young relief helm officer. Palmer was happy enough to comply, and fortunately discreet in her brief knowing glances between “Penda” and Kevin Riley. Of course, Uhura had zero interest, romantic or otherwise, in the lieutenant; life in Starfleet Intelligence didn’t allow for such indulgences, particularly not in her section.
“So,” Kirk said, leaning his right hip against her console, “how are you enjoying your new assignment so far?”
“Just fine, sir,” “Penda” answered with a smile, while behind that façade, Uhura silently snarled in annoyance. Who knew what kind of vital, time-sensitive information she could be missing while engaging in patient small talk with her supposed superior officer.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Kirk said, flashing a boyishly winsome smile. The hell of being an attractive young female in the service, Uhura considered, was having to endure being chatted up by every self-styled charmer in uniform. At least Kirk wasn’t as obnoxious as some others in their flirtation.
“Lieutenant…” Kirk said, hesitated, then continued, “I was…wondering if you…if I might ask…off the reco
rd, unofficially…”
“Sir?” she prompted. She wondered that someone with Kirk’s looks would be so bad at this, before recalling that he was a recent widower, and likely just out of practice.
Kirk lowered his voice, leaned in almost imperceptibly, and said, “Wondered if you had picked up any recent chatter about the Klingons.”
Uhura blinked. “Excuse me?” That was the absolute last question she had expected.
“I know a lot comes through your board,” Kirk explained. “Things that don’t necessarily make their way into Command reports and dispatches. I’m just curious if there’s been any uptick in talk about the Empire?”
For the briefest of moments, Uhura felt a flash of disappointment that Kirk had not, in fact, been flirting with her. That disappeared as she wondered whether he was being candid about his reasons for asking her, or if he in fact knew who she really was and what her real mission was aboard Enterprise.
It only took a moment to decide that it didn’t matter either way. “Well, I did just happen to notice the Guadalcanal, which has been on border patrol the last six months, has been sending a large number of transmissions back to Earth.” Uhura knew that Kirk’s security rating was high enough that he could access all except Captain Padway’s classified logs. It wasn’t generally a good idea to give personnel outside of Intelligence access to raw unanalyzed data like this, but if it let her get back to her work, Uhura had no misgivings as she pulled a freshly encoded data card from her console and handed it over to the commander.
“I appreciate your help, Miss Penda,” Kirk said, grinning once again before turning and ducking into the turbolift directly behind him.
The moment he was gone, Uhura turned back to her monitoring boards and keyed a new set of variables into her search parameters. Now, on top of everything else her superiors had expected from her here at Babel, she needed to find out how the Klingons figured into whatever had been discussed at the opening reception. She was looking at a lot more deep research work now.
Well, I guess I know what I’ll be doing during gamma shift, she thought to herself.
T’Pol watched as the candle flame guttered and drowned in its surrounding lake of melted wax. She sighed and pushed herself up off the deck, giving in to the realization that meditation was not possible in her current mental state.
She could not understand why the reception had left her so unsettled. Other than Sarek’s snub, and some sort of altercation involving Commander Kirk, the evening had gone relatively well. Her impression from those she had spoken with was that a closer and more friendly relationship with United Earth would, generally speaking, be a welcome development.
“But would that be a good thing?”
T’Pol took pause. Of course it would, she told the contrarian voice. It is the goal toward which we worked for so many years.
“Is it? From what I’ve gathered, Winston and Hedford and Tarses aren’t much interested in the captain’s goals so much as their own.”
They ultimately have the same goal: to partner with the other powers of the galaxy…
“Yeah, but not in the same spirit,” Trip’s voice said. “Granted, youneed people like them: the practical, political minds to deal with the nitty-gritty details. But the captain brought more than that to the table. Could he have convinced the Andorians and Vulcans to start talking in the first place if all he cared about was how it affected Earth? Where is Jonathan Archer’s spirit, his dream, in any of this?”
Before she could formulate an answer to that self-posed question, her thoughts were disrupted by the sound of the door chime. T’Pol opened her eyes and glanced at a nearby chronometer, which read 0446 hours. The conference proper was not scheduled to begin for another four hours and fourteen minutes, and thus anyone directly involved should currently be asleep, and would have no reason to deprive her of the same. As this suggested an urgency on the part of whoever was on the other side of the door, T’Pol called out, “Come in,” as she slowly and carefully pulled herself to her feet.
She was not surprised when she saw Commander Kirk enter the cabin. The first officer would be a logical choice to alert her to any type of shipboard emergency or similarly vital information. However, there was no suggestion of stress in the man’s expression; or rather, the stress he did convey appeared to be anticipatory, rather than the result of something that had already happened. The two stared at each other for what seemed to be a very long and uncomfortable time.
Finally, Kirk said, “Miss T’Pol, I need to ask you to come with me.”
T’Pol fought back the sudden surge of irrational fear she felt trying to overwhelm her. “Where?” she asked the young human.
“Down to the planet.”
“Indeed?” she replied. “I assume, given your placid demeanor and the lack of any alerts, this is not a life-threatening emergency. And the absence of Ambassadors Hedford and Tarses leads me to question your intentions.”
Kirk reacted with a prickly scowl and said, “Well, your logic is half correct, at least: we’re not in a life-threatening emergency, no.”
“Then I am curious as to what possible reason you would have to be here in the middle of ship’s night, with the intent of removing me clandestinely from the ship.”
“Councillor Sarek wants to speak with you, privately. He asked me to arrange for you to meet with him.”
T’Pol cocked a single eyebrow at him. “I find that highly improbable.”
“I honestly don’t care if you find it probable or not. Now please, either come with me or—”
T’Pol did not care to find out what followed “or.” Neither did she care to learn what the first officer had in mind for her down on the planetoid surface.
And so, she let out a moan and pitched forward.
Kirk instinctively put his arms out to catch her, no doubt believing the frail old Vulcan woman had succumbed to some debility or stress-induced shock. T’Pol steadied herself against his chest, took a couple of short breaths, and in an apparent effort to right herself, brought up her right hand and laid it on Kirk’s shoulder, just where it began to curve up to his neck…
“Ouch,” Kirk said quietly, taking hold of T’Pol’s arms and in doing so, pulling her hand away. Were she human, she would have cursed her aged muscles and their inability to exert enough pressure on the junction of nerve cells to knock the younger, stronger man into unconsciousness.
“Are you okay?” Kirk asked, his hands still on her arms, holding on to her as if she might swoon again.
“Let go of me!” T’Pol rasped, straining to pull away. Kirk acquiesced, and T’Pol backed away across the stateroom until her back was to the bulkhead, eyeing him warily. Anger, fear, and frustration all welled up within her as it became clear she was at this man’s mercy.
Kirk remained where he was, standing staring at the old woman. “I understand you don’t trust me,” he said quietly. “And given the way Sarek snubbed you, I doubt you trust him much, either. Since I don’t much trust any of you, I guess we’re all on even ground together.”
“If this is supposed to be leading someplace, Commander,” T’Pol said, “may I suggest a less circuitous path?”
“All of that aside…I am a Starfleet officer,” Kirk said, pointedly. “I know you know what that means. And I give you my word, as an officer and a gentleman, that I have no hidden motives or sinister intentions here. I’m simply passing on a request that you come and listen.”
T’Pol considered Kirk anew. She of course knew what it meant to be a Starfleet officer—or rather, what it meant to be one a lifetime ago. She also knew the significance of Kirk’s vow, which harkened back to those days, and indeed to long naval tradition predating Starfleet by centuries. Finally, she pushed herself away from the wall, dipped her head slightly, and said, “Very well, Commander.” Kirk returned the nod and gestured for her to precede him out of the cabin.
The gamma-shift transporter chief was caught off guard by their arrival. As beaming down to Babel was g
enerally prohibited, he had been spending his quiet watch playing a colorfully animated game on a data slate. He was so abashed at having been caught at this by the first officer that he didn’t even raise the slightest protest when Kirk handed him a data card and ordered the two of them beamed down to the encoded coordinates.
Moments later, T’Pol found herself in a dusty, warm, and dimly lit space, filled with a constant rhythmic thrumming and the scent of industrial lubricant. As her eyes adjusted, she realized she and Kirk had beamed into the Babel facility’s physical plant, buried beneath the surface of the planetoid and housing its energy generators, air and water circulators and purifiers, and waste recyclers. Large pipes and conduits wound like jungle vines throughout the cavernous space, giving it the impression of a labyrinth, with her at the center.
“I appreciate your promptness, Commander.” The voice came from a short distance ahead of them, though the echoing surfaces around them confused Kirk’s less sensitive ears, causing him to whip his head wildly in all directions. Then the speaker emerged from behind a squat piece of machinery, faced T’Pol, and raised his left hand, fingers spread. “Live long and prosper, T’Pol of Vulcan.” T’Pol returned the salute, but upon being addressed in such a way, found herself momentarily unable to speak.
Sarek lowered his hand and turned to the human. “You have proven yourself a friend of my people and our cause, Kirk. You have my gratitude.” Kirk, too, seemed to have no response to his words. Sarek then said, “You may return to your ship now. I would speak with T’Pol alone.”
Kirk seemed a little put off by this brusque dismissal, but he said nothing as he pulled a communicator from his hip pocket, spoke to the transporter operator, who had been instructed to stand by, and moments later disappeared in a swirl of sparkling energy.
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