by Peter David
“Aye, Captain.”
“Shelby out.” Then Shelby returned her attention to Si Cwan, standing before her. “Ambassador Si Cwan, I suppose that, out of consideration for the Prime Directive if nothing else, I should keep my mouth closed about this matter. But the Danteri . . . Si Cwan, their history . . .”
“History means nothing if they are truly willing to forge a new—”
“Their Senate speaker, Lodec, murdered my husband’s father. Are you aware of that?”
That brought Si Cwan up short. His eyes clouded. “What?”
“Yes, that’s right. The fellow who runs their senate—arguably one of the most powerful men on their world—murdered Captain Calhoun’s father. These are the types of people you’re going to be involving yourself with, Si Cwan. And we have an old saying back on Earth: If you lie down with pigs, you get up smelling like pigs.”
“A colorful sentiment. I am quite sure I would truly appreciate the splendor and insight of this aphorism,” Si Cwan informed her, “if I actually knew what a ‘pig’ was. As it stands, Captain Shelby . . . we all of us have darkness in our past. We’ve all done things that we are ashamed of, or things that we regret . . .”
“And you know that Lodec regrets it . . . how?” When she saw that Si Cwan did not respond immediately, she continued, “This was not an isolated incident, Cwan. This was not a freak happenstance. This was just another day of bloodletting and brutality perpetrated by a race with a long history of it. Is that who you want to attach your star to?”
He drew himself up, squared his shoulders. “I wish to attach my star, Captain, to a potential future for the Thallonian Empire to which I am committed. If you wish to continue your harangue, please inform me of your intent so that I can be certain to be elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you wish to extend your congratulations, I would be most happy to receive them.”
Shelby looked him up and down for a long moment. Then, stiffly, she said, “Congratulations, Ambassador. Congratulations on coming to an agreement with a race notorious for backstabbing and power-grabbing, in an endeavor to take a giant step backward in the development of this sector and quite possibly destabilizing it to the point of total chaos.” She shook his hand firmly, turned, and walked out.
A speechless Si Cwan turned and stared at Mueller, who smiled sweetly at him. “She’s thrilled for you,” she said.
iii.
Si Cwan realized belatedly that he should not have been surprised when he discovered Robin Lefler seated in his quarters. Nevertheless, he was. That she was able to obtain entrance was likewise not surprising; since she was there as his aide, he had given her full access to his quarters so that she could obtain things whenever she needed them, even if he was not around. What surprised him, then, was the look in her eyes. And not just the look. It was the eyes themselves. They seemed redder than usual around the rims, as if they’d been greatly irritated, and he could not figure out why that might be. Perhaps there was some sort of human virus going around, first with the captain’s clear head pain, and now this odd eye redness. “Robin . . . ?” he ventured.
“Kalinda told me your decision,” she said without preamble. “Have you gone to Captain Shelby with this yet?”
“Yes.”
“And what did she say?”
“Well,” and he walked slowly across the room toward her. She was seated in one of the chairs, looking stiffbacked and uncomfortable. He drew another chair across the room and sat opposite her. “The first time, she simply gave me a verbal tongue-lashing. Then she walked out. Then she walked right back in before I could leave to reiterate that she thought it was a mistake. Which it may be. She said that it smacked of ingratitude to people such as herself and particularly Captain Calhoun, who had gone to such efforts and extended themselves so greatly on my behalf. Which is true enough. I acknowledged that, and then told her that I had to follow my heart.” She snorted disdainfully at that. “Robin—?”
“Your heart?”
“Robin . . .” His concern was starting to grow, because she was trembling with barely repressed fury.
“Your heart?” Her voice rose. “You don’t have a heart.”
“Robin!”
And now she was on her feet, and he had never, but never, seen her so purely furious. Her rage was towering; she seemed several heads taller than he did, even though she was a head shorter. “You don’t have any kind of heart! Oh, ambition, yes, you’ve got that! And a capacity for revenge! And mercilessness and the ability to kill, yeah, you’ve got that. You’ve got tons of that! But a heart? You wouldn’t know what to do with the thing!”
Si Cwan was utterly flabbergasted. “How . . . how could you say that? You, of all people. You, who knows what the Thallonian tradition means to me . . . what my sister means to me!”
“All you care about is things that are a means to your own end!” she shouted. “You care about people so long as they can be of use to you! Your sister, too! She’s probably just a tool as well! You don’t really care about her happiness! That’s why you were so angry when she was getting involved with Captain Calhoun’s son, Xyon! Her happiness wasn’t half as important to you as your own selfishness! You’re such an idiot! Such an—!”
“All right, that is quite enough!” Si Cwan said with such iron in his voice that it brought her up short. “Aide or no, Starfleet officer or no, friend or no . . . you still have no call to address me in that way! Gods, Lefler, once upon a time I could have had you torn apart by wild animals for daring to raise your voice to me. I do not have to suffer this abuse! I have always, always, done what I felt needed to be done! This is no different! For a time, those actions and needs intersected with the needs of Captain Calhoun and the Excalibur, and during that time we shared a mutually beneficial relationship. But sooner or later, all relationships end.”
“And some never even start,” she said bitterly. “God, I . . .” Her fists were trembling. “You are just the most infuriating . . . aggravating . . .”
“Robin,” and he took her firmly by the shoulders. Every muscle in her arm was wound-spring tense. “Robin . . . you seem to be taking this decision of mine terribly personally. As if it’s a betrayal, a rejection of you and your crewmates. You have to understand: It’s not personal. Not at all.”
“Not personal,” she repeated tonelessly.
“No. Not at all.”
And to Si Cwan’s immense shock, she grabbed him by either side of the head and pulled his face down to hers. She did it with such force that their teeth collided, and for a moment there was pain shooting through his skull, and then her lips were against his, hungrily, greedily. Her hands slid down his back, and her right leg wound around his left one, and Si Cwan felt as if his body was on fire. He gasped as she bit down on his lower lip and then suddenly she broke contact. She stepped away from him, and there was incredible need in her eyes, but also a hard anger that wasn’t dissipating, and in a deep, husky voice she said, “You know what, Cwan? That was personal. Enjoy your new empire.”
He tried to get words out, but couldn’t find his breath, and she didn’t wait for him to find it as she turned and stalked out of the room.
Stunned, he sagged onto the bed, staring into space, and uttered a word that he’d picked up from Captain Jean-Luc Picard on one occasion when Kebron had inadvertently stepped on Picard’s toe.
“Merde,” he said.
EXCALIBUR
i.
WHEN THE TURBOLIFT DOOR slid open, McHenry was about to step in . . . and froze. Kebron was standing there, hands draped behind his back. Soleta was next to him. There was actually momentary surprise in Soleta’s eyes; Kebron, as usual, could have been carved from rock. McHenry cleared his throat, and then said, “I’ll wait for the next one—”
He took a step backward, but that was as far as he got before Kebron’s massive hand reached out, snagged him by the front of his uniform, and hauled him in. The doors hissed shut behind them.
“—or I’ll take this one. This one
is fine,” said McHenry.
“Kebron!” Soleta said with reprisal in her voice.
Kebron released him and McHenry stepped back, rubbing his chest and smoothing out the wrinkles. “So . . . how are you doing? How are your folks? I, uhm, notice that you have a kind of thing happening here,” and he rubbed the base of his neck. “Are you having that looked at? Or—?”
“You should have told us,” Kebron interrupted, glowering down at McHenry.
“What is this, an ambush?”
“Pure coincidence,” said Soleta. “Zak, McHenry’s been under a lot of pressure. This probably isn’t the best time to—”
“He should have told us,” repeated Kebron to her.
There was such condemnation in his voice, so much contempt, and McHenry suddenly felt very put upon, very annoyed, and very tired. “Lift, halt,” he snapped, and the turbolift glided to a halt. He looked straight at Kebron and said, “Great idea there, Zak. You’re absolutely right. Why, when we were first making introductions to each other back at the Academy, I should have said, ‘Hi. Mark McHenry. My great-great-great-grandmother was impregnated by a god, I had a goddess for an invisible friend and lover, and maybe, just maybe, I have glimmerings of some abilities myself. How you doing?’ ”
“Obviously, no reasonable person could have expected you to say all that, Mark,” Soleta said with what sounded like a soothing tone. “But still, in the interest of—”
“Of what? In my interest?” he said sarcastically. “When would I have brought it up? At what point could it possibly have seemed a reasonable jumping-off point in a conversation? Or maybe, just maybe, it was never anyone else’s business but mine.”
“But—”
“There’s no ‘but’ here, Soleta! I wanted to be normal! Don’t you get that? When I told Artemis I didn’t want to see her anymore, she tried to kill me! You think those bolts she tossed around in the bridge were a problem? Those were love taps compared to what she hit me with! I could barely move for weeks! She burned my eyebrows off!”
“You’re saying she didn’t take it well,” said Soleta.
“That’s putting it mildly. But I survived! And I joined Starfleet, and I made friends, or at least thought I did! But the suspicion, especially from you, Zak . . . investigating me . . .”
“I was right to do so,” Kebron said stiffly. “There were x-factors in your past . . . the fact that we found ourselves under assault by this ‘goddess’ . . .”
“I had no control over that!”
“You were the cause of it.”
“Zak,” spoke up Soleta, “let it go.”
He looked down at her. “He—”
“Zak . . . for me . . . let it go. There’s nothing to be done about it now. And we need to be together on this.” Soleta looked from one to the other. “Correct? Together?”
Kebron and McHenry stared at each other for a long moment.
Nothing was said, until the silence was broken by McHenry saying, “Lift, resume course.”
“You two are impossible,” said Soleta as the turbolift continued on its way. “Mark . . . look . . . if you really want to be of help . . . I’m still having trouble analyzing the energy emissions from this sector. They still defy analysis. I am proceeding on the assumption that your god friends are responsible, but the specific technical parameters . . . I’m still having difficulty with them. If you could ask—”
“My god friends? Soleta . . . they’re not my friends. They are the bane of my existence, all right?”
“I . . . apologize.”
“Never mind,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Moments later, it had reached McHenry’s destination on deck seven, and he stepped off. The last thing he saw was the suspicious way in which Kebron was watching him.
The moment McHenry was gone from sight, Soleta said with thinly veiled annoyance, “That could have gone better. Happenstance places the three of us together in a turbolift, and we wind up sending off McHenry angrier than he was before. He needed us, Zak. He needed his friends.”
“He has new friends.”
The turbolift slid to a halt. The doors opened and Soleta started to walk out . . . but she paused in the door, turned to Kebron, and said, “Tell me, Zak . . . if someone isn’t entirely forthcoming about themselves . . . if they’re something other than people think they are . . . does that automatically make them a threat to the ship? For instance . . . if I were other than I appeared to be . . . then I would be a threat?”
“But you’re not,” he said.
“But if I were—?”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Are you saying you are?”
“I’m not saying anything, Zak,” she said evenly. “It would be nice if I could say anything. That is, after all, what friends are able to do with one another. Perhaps you should start investigating me, just to be sure.”
She stepped back and allowed the doors to close, leaving Kebron alone.
He stood there in the center of the lift as it sped down to the security work out room, where he was originally heading. As it did so, he tapped his combadge. “Kebron, requesting direct link to computer.”
“Working,” came the computer’s voice.
“Access personal log, Lieutenant Zak Kebron.”
“Accessed.”
“Memo to self,” he said neutrally. “Investigate Soleta.”
ii.
Mark McHenry was wondering how things could possibly get any worse when he walked into his quarters . . . only to see Artemis standing there. She had one hand on her hip, the other upraised. Her cape was hanging off one shoulder. Otherwise, she was naked. The curves of her body, her breasts, all of it was exactly as he remembered from years gone by. And his reaction was also just as he remembered from the very first time she’d appeared to him that way: barely restrained panic.
“Remember when men carved statues of me appearing this way?” she asked.
Quickly he crossed to his bed, yanked the covers off, and tossed them around her shoulders. She didn’t seem to pay any attention as he did so, speaking as much to herself as to him. “They would linger over every detail,” she said wistfully. “Every sinew, every line. They would treat it lovingly, attending to it as if their lives depended upon getting everything exactly right . . .”
“Yes, those were the days,” he said, and then moaned as the cover slipped off her to the floor. So he got his bathrobe from the closet and drew that around her. She seemed more amused than anything else over his attempts to cover her nakedness. “Artemis, what are you doing here?”
“I am here to seduce you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Am I succeeding?”
“You shouldn’t be here. If there’s things you want to discuss, you should be discussing them with Captain Calhoun . . .”
She made a dismissive gesture. “That one? He is so . . . dull! So pompous, so serious . . . and scheming, always scheming. I can tell. Zeus was like that sometimes.”
“Was? He’s not around anymore?”
She didn’t bother to clarify what she’d just said. Instead she drew the robe more tightly around herself. It accentuated the lines of her body that much more. Quickly trying to keep his mind off her body, he said, “Uhm . . . Soleta . . . our science officer. She’s trying to analyze this section of space and having no luck.”
“I have very little interest in such matters,” she said, looking utterly bored. “If you wish, I will ask Thoth to speak to her.” And before he could pursue that offhand comment, she looked at him with a tinge of sadness. “I will be honest with you, Marcus. In some ways . . . you seem unhappy to see me.”
“Only ‘some’ways? Artemis—”
“You know . . . you were so adorable in the days when you called me ‘Missy.’ ”
“Yes, I remember those days,” he said sharply. “They were the days when you drove my father out of the house and out of my life.”
She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to decid
e whether she should say what was on her mind. Finally, very softly, she told him, “He would have left anyway, Marcus. Eventually. He was unhappy. He had a wandering soul . . . much like yours, truth to tell. You, however, managed to channel it into positive and useful directions.”
“Have I?” he asked sourly. He leaned against the wall, hanging his head. “I’ve been doing some reading . . . on your brother. On the earlier known encounter with him. You seem much more powerful than he was.”
“I am,” she said simply. “As are the others.”
“Why is that?”
She tilted her head, regarded him with an expression both curious and amused. “Why do you care?”
He took a deep breath. Lying wasn’t his strong suit. He knew he was walking a fine line: trying to determine the things that the captain needed to know, without wanting to seem too labored in his inquisitiveness. “You go and tell the captain you want me to be your ‘ intermediary.’ Your representative. Well, representatives get asked questions. Lots of them. If there’s things I don’t understand, then there’s gonna be things that other people don’t understand. And if I can’t come up with reasonable answers, then people will figure that I’m either ignorant, or that I’m hiding something. Neither attitude is going to do any good.”
She considered that for a long moment. As she did, he found his gaze drawn to her. Damn, she was attractive. He had always been able to perceive her, even as a young boy, even when she was invisible to others. But the full, soulaching beauty of her . . . that was something he’d only been able to appreciate when he’d gotten older. There had been a time when the merest thought of her was enough to cause him to tremble with desire right down to his very core. He had thought that time was long gone, but now he was wondering just how wrong he might have been.
“He . . . stopped believing,” she said finally.
McHenry couldn’t help but feel that was an odd thing to say. “Believing . . . in what?”
