“Hoshi . . .”
She finished pulling on her boots. “Maybe you Denobulans have the right idea. Maybe it’s better to have three spouses, because it’s so hard to find any one person you can truly rely on.” She strode out of sickbay before Phlox could answer.
March 3, 2166
M’Tezir, Sauria
Maltuvis’s prison turned out to be as great a challenge as Tucker had feared. The doors were heavy and the locks were strong, and since the Saurians had always tended to rely more on their own inherent gifts than on technology, the locks were strictly mechanical, with no electronics for a former starship engineer to hack or hot-wire. By the same token, the prison’s security system consisted of live Saurian guards with superior strength and keen senses. Escaping would take considerable ingenuity—and that was the optimistic assessment.
For his part, Ruiz tried to appeal to the guards on a personal level, arguing that his cause would benefit their own freedom and that of their families. But either his grasp of the M’Tezir language was inadequate to convey subtle ideas, or Maltuvis selected his prison guards for their simplemindedness and lack of empathy. Ruiz’s exhortations fell on deaf earholes, earning nothing but threats and silencing blows from their captors. It was only when they started hitting Tucker in response to Ruiz’s urgings that he stopped trying.
After they had been left alone for a day with no provisions for their physical needs, Maltuvis himself finally arrived to gloat over them. “Please,” Tucker urged, “we need food. Water.”
The dictator scoffed. “You mammals. So fragile and needy. How unjust, that such an inferior breed should master the stars. One day, you will surely succumb to your betters.”
“It’s our cooperation that makes us strong,” Ruiz told him. “Our respect for each other. You’ll never understand that, Malvolio.”
“Cooperation. Is that what you call it?” His bulbous eyes darted to take in the two humans. “Your friend’s organization endorses the Orions’ efforts to sabotage Starfleet. He works against his organization to stop them. Even within your own race, you are fragmented by differing agendas. This is what happens when there is no singular will to guide all—when the masses are allowed to dissent and question. It is that same lack of unity that made it so easy for me to undermine the so-called Global League and bend its subjects to my will. That same tolerance of abnormal beliefs that permits the existence of groups such as the Untainted, who will make such convincing scapegoats for the impending disaster. Along with Starfleet, of course,” he concluded with a humorless smirk.
“How can you do it?” Ruiz demanded. “How can you be so willing to let millions of your own people suffer and die just so you can get ahead?”
“My people?” Maltuvis looked disgusted. “The Lyaksti, the Veranith, the Narprans? They are not my people. They are inferior breeds that, like yours, have managed through a fluke of history to gain an advantage over their betters and who imagine that this is their destiny for all time. You have seen how easily they were mastered as soon as fortune shifted back toward those with the strength to take advantage of it. For centuries, they undermined the greatness of M’Tezir—infecting us with their weakness, draining us through economic trickery, using the crutches of technology and industry to gain power that the truly strong would have taken by conquest. Now they are finally getting the punishment they deserve. In one stroke, I will break the resistance, discredit and humiliate your precious Federation, and prove the superiority of the Maltuvian Empire for all to see.”
“Yeah,” Tucker said, “thanks to all the help you’ve gotten from the Orions and Malurians. Make sure you don’t forget to give them credit in your victory speech.”
Maltuvis gestured to a burly guard who stepped forward and began to beat Tucker. An uncertain time later, the agent became aware of Ruiz shouting at the Saurian to stop. Tucker was filled with relief when the pain stopped—so much so that he hesitated to cry out in protest when Maltuvis gestured to the guard to begin beating Ruiz instead. Ashamed of his weakness, he tried to summon his voice, but he could barely catch his breath.
Then he realized that the fear of weakness was what drove Maltuvis to these atrocities, all out of the pathetic need to compensate for that fear. He realized that he needed to forgive himself for his vulnerability, that it was only human. It was his ability to face his own vulnerability that enabled him to empathize with others’ pain and dedicate himself to alleviating it. Ruiz was right—true strength came from cooperation, from recognizing one’s own limitations and the need to join with others whose strengths could balance them. If T’Pol’s voice were still in his mind, she might remind him of the Vulcan IDIC symbol representing diversity in combination. For all that Vulcans disdained the expression of emotion, there was a surprising depth of empathy underlying their core teachings. The love she shared with Tucker—the love that let him endure moments like this and keep on going—was part and parcel of her Vulcan nature, not a violation of it. That was what made it so extraordinary a thing for a human to be allowed to share.
Tucker might not be able to spare Ruiz from pain now. But by holding on to his empathy, he could still be there for his friend in whatever way he could.
For his own part, Ruiz remained defiant. “Torture me all you like, Malt Liquor,” he panted after a time. “I won’t tell you anything.”
Maltuvis looked confused. “Tell me? What does torture have to do with interrogation?” He pondered it for a moment, as if the idea had genuinely never occurred to him. “No, really, the two would only get in each other’s way. You couldn’t get reliable information from someone whose mind was addled with pain and fear, and you couldn’t get the most satisfaction out of inflicting pain if you had to keep the victim coherent enough to answer questions. Really, the ideas you aliens come up with.
“No, I have all the information I need about your pathetic resistance thanks to the Malurian toady in their ranks. Your torture, Mister Ruiz, is merely what you deserve for being such a nuisance—exposing my disease gambit, stealing the cure, fomenting resistance with your propaganda campaign, and just generally being a piece of alien filth that keeps evading my efforts to cleanse you from my world. Your companion here shall be punished as well for his involvement in your troublemaking, once he has played his role in his upcoming trial. But you have been an irritant to me for far longer, so the—irritation—I cause you in turn shall be commensurately greater. Nothing you might tell me would alter that in any way.
“The only thing I hope to learn from your torture is just how much punishment humans can take before they die. I don’t expect it will be very much, but it’s important to know these things for the future.”
“Why?” Tucker asked. “What do you have planned for the future?”
“Isn’t it obvious, you stupid creature?” Maltuvis replied. “I already said your kind would inevitably succumb to your betters.” He gestured to himself. “Who else did you imagine I was talking about?”
11
March 4, 2166
Oakland, California
EVEN THOUGH MARCUS WILLIAMS had made it clear that he found Sam Kirk unworthy of her, Valeria Williams had continued to bring the historian with her when she visited the captain’s home. After all, her father had not raised her to retreat from a challenge. Both of the men made an effort to be civil when they were together, out of regard for Val’s wish to have them both included in her life, but there remained a distance between them that Val feared she might never find a way to bridge.
Still, she tried her best. “You should come with us to Sam’s lecture at the university next week,” she suggested to her father at dinner one evening.
Captain Williams looked skeptical. “This is that presentation you said he’s been working on?” he asked. “About the Partnership of Civilizations?”
“That’s right, sir,” Sam replied. “An overview of their history and culture, based on the accounts we managed to gather during the mission, plus a discussion of the questions t
hat . . . well, that we may never be able to answer now.”
“Hm,” the captain said. “Accounts. Based on their Ware databases? How trustworthy do you think those were?”
“Based on that, on written histories we managed to document, and on oral interviews with Partners of several different species. Naturally no source is ever presumed to be absolutely trustworthy by itself, sir, but it’s still important to preserve every account we can for posterity.”
“It’s actually a pretty interesting process when you get to know it, Dad,” Val said. “It’s like detective work, gathering evidence and witness statements and building a theory of the case.”
“It’s more than that,” Sam added. “A whole civilization has died. Partly due to our mistakes. We have an obligation to do whatever we can to preserve their voices—to make sure they aren’t forgotten.”
Val clasped his hand across the table. “It’s been pretty rough going for Sam, facing that loss every day. I think it’s very brave of him to stick with it and make sure the stories get told.” Kirk smiled at her and squeezed her hand back.
“Well, sure, no question it was a tragedy,” her father said. “But it’s not like some good hasn’t come of it. If it leads to Starfleet adopting a noninterference policy, so nothing like it ever happens again, then it’s better in the long run for the Federation and a lot of others.”
Val felt the sudden tension in Sam’s hand. “Better, sir?” he asked. “How can you say that? Millions of people died. Billions more have been stripped of their whole way of life, their ability to create a culture and travel the stars and communicate with one another.”
“I’m not denying that. But it’s like I’ve said before—sometimes sacrifices are necessary for the greater good.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re not the one who has to make the sacrifice,” the historian went on with rising heat. “Especially when you’re the one who benefits from it. But the Partners weren’t allowed to make that choice for themselves. Try to see it from their perspective, sir. Imagine your entire civilization was stripped away overnight, and you had no way to rebuild it or even preserve the knowledge of it. Imagine you no longer had a way to give your children an education or protect them from predators and disease. Would you see a ‘greater good’ in that, sir? Would you call that sacrifice justified, just because someone else you’d never know, someone who’d lost nothing in the process, got to learn a moral lesson from it? Would you take any comfort in their conviction that the sacrifice of your children’s future was worth it?”
“But how much did they really lose, Sam? Their culture wasn’t their own, it was sold to them by the Ware in exchange for their bodies and brains.”
“Their mechanisms for creating culture came from the Ware. What they created came from them. From their history, their beliefs, their own unique ways of thinking and relating to the universe.”
Kirk went on to tell Williams about the amazing cities and communities he and Val had walked among during their time in the Partnership, and about the diverse and fascinating individuals they’d conversed with in their investigations and striven alongside during the Klingon invasion. The Monsof, humanoids of limited manual and verbal dexterity who had lost their homeworld to the enemies of the Ware, but who had been taken in by the avian Hurrait, repaying their kindness by providing them with the hands they lacked and forming a symbiotic relationship that let them both achieve more than either could alone. The Sris’si, a sightless aquatic species of solitary predators, appearing at first to be lacking in social instincts, but capable of surprisingly selfless effort on behalf of those with whom they shared common goals. The Krutuvub, tree-grazing herbivores who saw all members of a herd as fragments of a single soul, and who had instinctively extended their definition of their herd to include the other Partnership species.
These were the same experiences on which he would base his upcoming lecture, but right here and now, he did not have to keep a scholarly distance. So he was able to imbue it with all the emotion he had felt at the time—the wonder at the extraordinarily different civilizations and the ways they had devised to live together, and the pain he felt as the individuals he had spoken with, dined with, and traveled with over his months in the Partnership had been stripped of their homes, their cities, their ability to communicate with one another, and even their lives.
Val joined in once he spoke of the destruction of Oceantop City, an ordeal the two of them had endured together. Before, she had spoken of it to her father only to refer to Sam Kirk’s heroism in the evacuation and the courage he had shown in their joint rescue efforts, leading to their first kiss and the onset of their love affair. Neither she nor Sam had wanted to dwell on the lives they’d failed to rescue, the thousands of Partners they’d seen drowned or crushed by debris or vaporized by Klingon disruptor fire. Now, though, Sam refused to shy away from those memories any longer. And that gave Val the courage to speak of them as well. She hardly remembered the words she used. All she remembered was the catharsis of pain and anger, her fury at the injustice of a galaxy that had allowed these things to happen. And she remembered ending up on the couch, crying onto her father’s big, strong shoulder while Sam held her from behind, crying with her.
“Philip Collier may have thought he was helping the Federation when he gave the Klingons the means to destroy the Ware,” Val said at length, “but in the end, he only hurt it. We saved our civilization by becoming accomplices in the murder of another, and that original sin will be with us from now on.
“Should we learn from that? Should we dedicate ourselves to never doing it again? Absolutely. But we can’t do that if we just wash our hands of what we did and chalk it up to a learning experience. We need to do something to atone.” Breathing raggedly, she shook her head. “But for the life of me, I don’t know what we can do.”
March 5, 2166
M’Tezir, Sauria
Maltuvis had apparently not been lying about using the torture of Tucker and Ruiz to assess humans’ physical vulnerabilities. The two men were stripped naked and hooked up to various sensor leads as they were subjected to excessive heat, freezing cold, drowning, electrocution, and other torments over what felt to Tucker like days or weeks, though he had no confidence in his sense of time under these conditions. Section 31 training had conditioned him to resist breaking under torture, but it was based on the assumption that the goal of the torture would be to extract information, not simply to be an end in itself (even though torture was always ultimately an end in itself, whatever the excuses offered to justify it). Tucker’s nominal ability to withstand the ordeal was moot when he had no specific goal for which to withstand it—beyond simply being there for Ruiz, helping him through it as best he could, and watching for some chance to help the younger man escape, whether or not Tucker managed to get away with him.
At times, Tucker found his thoughts turning to Devna, in whom he had invested such high hopes, but who had ultimately failed both him and herself. He had thought she really understood the ideas he’d tried to share with her, but in the end, she’d fallen back on the habits she’d been programmed with, obediently serving her masters in spite of everything. He’d tried to forgive her, to tell himself that Garos had blackmailed her, but it didn’t erase the fact of her betrayal. He’d been betrayed by allies before—it was part and parcel of the espionage game—but he had let himself believe that Devna was different, that there was a bond of understanding between them. In the end, he’d been as gullible a mark as any of the numerous men and women she’d seduced.
He had to admit, though, that Devna’s conditioning to find physical pain pleasurable was something to envy in his current situation. Perhaps that, more than resentment, was the reason his thoughts kept turning to her.
So when he saw Devna’s lovely green face floating before him as he lay naked on the cold stone floor of the cell after a torture session, when he heard her soft, whispering voice calling his name, it seemed like just one more hallucination. As
he felt small but strong hands shaking him to consciousness, as the impression of her presence strengthened rather than faded as he recovered his reason, he gradually realized that Devna was actually with him in the cell. “Here . . . to see your handiwork?” he managed to get out.
“I deserve that,” she said, “but this is not the time, Charles. We have a limited window to escape.”
He blinked as she moved over to assist Ruiz. She lifted his head and held a small flask of water to his lips; Tucker realized his own throat was less parched than before, suggesting he’d been conscious enough to drink already but had forgotten it. “Escape?” he managed.
“Yes. I would have come sooner, but I needed to arrange this in a way that won’t expose my betrayal to Navaar. Helping Garos betray you was the only way to preserve my cover.”
He was recovered enough to muster annoyance as he said, “Well, thanks ever so much for your loyalty.”
“My first loyalty is to my mistress Maras. That is why I help you now—we still need to carry out your plan.”
Once she got the two men on their feet, she handed them a pair of guard uniforms and helmets meant for Saurian proportions. The black garments fit poorly but were better than nothing, aside from the lack of shoes. “Where did you get these?” Ruiz asked.
“From the guards I killed outside. We must leave before they are found.”
Ruiz winced. “Did you have to kill them?”
“Maltuvis would torture them to death for their failure anyway. I at least spared them pain.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Ruiz said, and Tucker admired him for his reflexive compassion for those he had every reason to hate.
“It was necessary,” Devna said. “Now we must go, or it will have been for nothing!”
The Orion spy led the humans swiftly through the prison corridors, seeming to know the route by heart. “How did you get in here?” Tucker asked.
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