“Not even to celebrate a victory over the Romulans?”
Shran sniffed. Victory indeed. The Romulans had caught the Imperial Guard unawares, as though they were so many drunken tunnelers sprawled in the path of a school of ice borers. They had nearly succeeded in launching calamitous attacks on Andorian cities, and still possessed voluminous resources capable of bringing still more havoc to Andoria, at any time and from any direction. And Andoria’s first practical test of the pinkskins’ remote-hijacking countermeasures had been a failure of colossal proportions.
“I do not feel much like celebrating anything, Theras,” Shran said at length.
“Ah,” Theras said. “Forgive me, General. I smelled liquor, and apparently drew an entirely wrong conclusion.” The dead Aenar took another step toward the bed. The external starlight illuminated his gray eyes; they appeared to be directed at the infinite starscape that lay outside Shran’s window, even though they looked just as sightless as they had when Theras had been alive.
“I understand that you have duties to perform, and I can respect that,” Theras said. “But do those duties require you to raise your mental barriers against your own bondmates? Why won’t you at least allow Jhamel to speak inside your mind?”
“I do not want the ugliness of this war to touch her. Or Vishri. Or Shenar. Or our unborn child.”
Theras shook his head in the starlight. “You need not protect them from reality.”
“Of course I have to protect them from reality, Theras. They all practice pacifism, Just as you did.”
“Pacifism, yes, a goal to which you, too, have aspired, Shran. But pacifism does not make its practitioners children. Pacifism is not paralysis. It did not prevent me from taking action when the occasion required it.”
That action, Shran knew, had cost Theras his life, though it had saved many others. It had also given Shran a new lease on life, as Theras’s replacement in Jhamel’s bondgroup. And for the first time in his life it had motivated Shran to make a serious attempt to put the ways of war behind him forever.
But that was a luxury he could no longer afford. “War has a certain... corrosive effect, Theras. On everything it touches.”
“Of course it does, Shran. Jhamel knows that very well already. Don’t you think she experienced that corrosiveness in full measure when the Romulans killed her brother Gareb?”
Shran squinted into the most shadowy corner of the room, where the rest of the dead stood by restlessly. In a cluster among these he saw the pilots whose deaths he had caused yesterday, including Skav, Subcommander Nras’s dead son, as they leaned with silent insouciance against the hullward wall. Unlike the blind gray eyes of the Aenar, Skav’s starlight-reflected gaze was refulgent with accusation, as were the eyes of his peers.
Shran would not let himself flinch from it.
“Jhamel does not understand,” he said. Jhamel could never truly grasp this nettle. Not unless she been forced to put Gareb down herself, the way Shran had had to kill Skav as the means to the end of saving countless others.
And he was adamant that Jhamel never learn what that truly felt like, even vicariously. She needed no further tutelage in the ugly art of war.
“When will you try to make her understand?” said Theras. “When will you finally come home?”
Shran closed his eyes, trying to banish the unquiet dead, the corpses that never stayed buried. And he considered all the carnage that almost certainly lay ahead, thanks to the inadequacies of the Vulcan “protection” Andoria had accepted, and the Vulcan “diplomacy” that even now plied the high and the mighty in the political capital of Laikan with recommendations of appeasement and retreat.
“I may never be able to come home again,” Shran said. Then he reached toward the floor in the hope that a little Fesoan grainwine might remain inside the upended bottle.
FORTY-THREE
Middle of the month of Z’at, YS 8765
Wednesday, March 10, 2156
Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan
“BEHOLD,” MINISTER KUVAK SAID as he gestured broadly at the breathtaking desert vista that sprawled from the mountain’s foot to the eastern horizon. A pair of sha’vokh birds, desert carrion eaters whose wingspans exceeded the height of a tall adult Vulcan, wheeled lazily in the vermilion sky. Vulcan’s Forge was resplendent in reds and ochers beneath the rays of the newly risen Nevasa and the half-shadowed bulk of ever-watchful T’Rukh.
Surak’s Peak, the source of T’Pol’s present impressive vantage point, was among the highest elevations on Vulcan. Located near the summit of Mount Seleya, on ground that Surak had walked nearly two millennia ago during the Vulcan people’s painful transition from the chaos of barbarism to the discipline of logic, the peak was one of the most historic and revered places on the entire planet. It was used as a site for study and meditation, its ancient, rock-steady strength an anchoring force for the adepts who used the self-regulation of Kolinahr training to seize their passions and cast them out onto the desert’s cleansing sands.
This morning, however, T’Pol and Kuvak appeared to have the peak to themselves.
T’Pol looked to the east across the ocean of desolation that was Vulcan’s Forge. The venerable stone structures that comprised the aboveground portion of the T’Karath Sanctuary rose in the foreground, nearly thirty kilometers distant. Much farther off lay the skyline of ShiKahr, the desert heat already rippling and distorting the ancient city’s only faintly visible image despite the rarefied atmosphere. Apart from the many occasions when she had flown over this hemisphere of Vulcan in suborbital and orbital spacecraft, the last time T’Pol could recall having seen ShiKahr appear so remote had been some six decades ago. On the day before undertaking her kahs-wan—desert survival ritual—she had stood in almost this very spot, surrounded by her parents and the family pet, a large, slow-moving sehlat. Not long after she and her family had returned home to ShiKahr, her father had died from a sudden illness.
It occurred to T’Pol that her youthful memories of her father were far less clear than were her recollections of the kahs-wan.
Pushing aside her unbidden memories as unworthy of this sacred place, T’Pol turned away from the vista to face the gray-haired bureaucrat who had brought her here.
“With respect, Minister Kuvak, what is the relevance of this place to the questions I have asked you?”
“As I have said, T’Pol,” Kuvak said, cinching his simple, unadorned travel robe tightly about his lean frame. “I have already given you all the answers I am authorized to give.”
T’Pol found that unsatisfying. So far, Kuvak’s answers had amounted to little more than the vague assurance that he had never sent any arms or technology to the Romulans.
Realizing she had little choice other than to engage in what Tucker would describe as “playing along,” she said, “You indicated a desire to show me something.”
He nodded. “Indeed I did.”
She watched him carefully, alert for any sign that he might be about to pull a weapon from his robe. Although her own robe appeared deceptively baggy, she felt confident it would not impede her ability to disarm the minister should he attempt anything violent.
But instead of pulling out a tricheq blade or a phase pistol, he merely raised his arms so that his sleeves billowed in the thin breeze. The large sleeves bunched up as he made another expansive gesture at the desert, as though intending to encompass the entire dry expanse of Vulcan’s Forge.
“Daughter of T’Les, what do you see when you look out across the desert?”
T’Pol frowned, not at all certain what he expected her to see. She studied his stony features carefully, though they gave nothing away.
“I see,” she said at length, “the land where Surak conceived the principle of IDIC.”
Kuvak appeared somehow disappointed in her answer, if not outwardly displeased. “Interesting. I see the land where Surak died from radiation poisoning. Look again.” He pointed back out across the sea of sand. “Do you not see the scars?”
Understanding dawned as T’Pol looked out across the russet sands again, more closely this time. A curved, broken ridge, no doubt the eroded remnant of a nuclear-spawned crater, suddenly resolved itself in her vision, as though someone had just drawn a city-sized, slightly foreshortened circle across the desert’s face.
“I believe I see one of them,” she said. Why, in all the times she had visited the desert, which had been many, had she never observed this before?
Kuvak seemed to sense her surprise. “Here you see what you can see from nowhere else. Only from this peak can one truly see the lingering blemish left by the war that claimed the life of Surak. The conflict between those who would follow his teachings and those who decided to march beneath the raptor’s wing. Those old scars could reopen more easily than one might think. Unless we remain on guard to prevent it.”
There was no question that it was an arresting sight. But it had little apparent relationship to the troubling questions to which Kuvak had yet to furnish any satisfactory answers: What was the Vulcan government covertly shipping into territory controlled by the Romulan Star Empire?
And, perhaps more important, why?
T’Pol’s sensitive hearing picked up a sharp noise almost directly behind her; it was the sound of gravel crunching beneath someone’s feet, at the range of only a few meters. In a rush she realized that she and Kuvak did not have Surak’s Peak to themselves after all.
Turning, T’Pol watched the approach of one slight, short figure, dressed in threadbare black monk’s robes of a cut even simpler than her own. Approaching from T’Klass’s Pillar, a nearby spire of ancient red rock, the interloper had either just surmounted the peak’s flat lookout area from the opposite side, or else had just materialized via transporter opposite the Pillar. The deep shadows inside the robe’s raised hood concealed its wearer’s identity as thoroughly as the shapeless robe muddled any resolution to the question of the newcomer’s gender. The figure walked straight toward T’Pol and Kuvak, apparently unconcerned with stealth.
“You may return to ShiKahr, Kuvak,” said a familiar voice from within the darkened hood. “We will... I will answer the commander’s questions as best I can.”
T’Pau, T’Pol thought, her eyebrows springing aloft in spite of herself.
Kuvak cast a doubtful glance at his superior, but obediently melted away into the shadows of the rocky spire after T’Pau’s gaze sharpened into something that came close to a warning glare.
“Administrator,” T’Pol said after the two women were finally alone on the windswept mountain. “Are you aware of the secret activities Minister Kuvak has conducted during your absence?”
T’Pau began walking toward the edge of the precipice beyond which lay the Forge and the distant Vulcan capital, forcing T’Pol to fall into step beside her. Although the Vulcan leader’s eyes were on the horizon, she appeared to have heard T’Pol’s every word.
“We are aware of a great many secret activities on Vulcan, among other places,” T’Pau said at length. “While you were conducting your searches, how did you find your mother’s garden?”
“Thriving,” T’Pol said, confused and taken aback by the irrelevancy of the question, at least for the moment it took her to realize that the slight woman walking beside her was really saying a great deal more than the face value of her words.
“You’ve known all along that I was here on Vulcan, seeking you out,” T’Pol said.
T’Pau nodded soberly. “And not only on Vulcan. You and your colleague Denak have made a number of offworld excursions, during which you apparently never stopped searching for us... for me.”
Despite her puzzling use of the plural pronoun, T’Pau’s equanimity seemed all but impregnable, even by Vulcan standards. Presented with such a smooth and unclimbable emotional wall, T’Pol was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain her own calm, centered state. That serenity became doubly difficult to maintain as she realized that she finally had an opportunity to pursue her original mission on behalf of Captain Archer and the Coalition.
At long last she had a chance, however slim, to try to persuade Vulcan’s foremost decision-maker to enter the fight against the Romulans.
“There are urgent matters I must discuss with you,” she said with as much tranquility as she could muster, which at the moment felt like precious little; decades-old memories of her late mother, T’Les, chiding her for the uneven quality of her emotional control, rose unbidden to the forefront of her mind until she forcibly banished them.
“And equally urgent questions,” T’Pau said. “Or so Kuvak has informed us.”
T’Pol nodded. “Yes.”
“You confronted him yesterday about our secret shipments into Rihannsu territory.”
“He left me little choice, Administrator. It would appear that answering my questions forthrightly was beyond the scope of his authority. I presume that is why he brought me to you.”
“You are correct,” T’Pau said with a nod.
“And am I also correct in being concerned that Vulcan may be supplying armaments to a deadly enemy of the Coalition?” Now seemed the perfect time to come to the true nub of the matter. “That would be consistent with Vulcan’s decision to abandon the humans during their time of greatest need, would it not?”
T’Pau stopped walking abruptly and lowered her gaze from the horizon. She fixed her dark eyes squarely upon T’Pol’s as she appeared to weigh and measure with the greatest of care whatever response she was contemplating.
T’Pol allowed herself some small degree of satisfaction at the glimmer of anger she thought she saw behind the young woman’s stern gaze.
“It would appear that our decision to enter the Kolinahr cloister here at Mount Seleya was indeed the correct one,” T’Pau said after a lengthy pause.
She never left the planet, T’Pol thought. She lied to keep her true location concealed. Or Kuvak lied, or maybe they both did.
But why?
“I am a Syrrannite, T’Pol,” T’Pau said, stepping into the lacuna opened up by T’Pol’s momentary speechlessness. Her eyes were aflame. “Syrrannites are followers of Surak’s tenets of peace. Our government was founded upon Syrrannite principles, which is why our first official action after the fall of the V’Las regime was to reverse every existing initiative to make war on our neighbors, the Andorians. We will not make war, nor will we abet war.”
Although T’Pol appreciated the administrator’s vehemence, she knew she could not afford to accept it uncritically. “Perhaps Minister Kuvak has violated those Syrrannite principles on his own authority. He may have sent war matériel to the Romulans without your consent or knowledge.”
The storm clouds of anger T’Pol had thought she’d seen behind the other woman’s eyes now were nowhere to be seen, replaced by something that might best be described as vague amusement, had she been human. “Kuvak has neither the desire nor the ability to do anything without our knowledge.”
T’Pol still wasn’t quite convinced. “But his ties to the last administration—”
“Those have served us well in ensuring continuity and institutional memory, and have helped greatly in our ongoing efforts at department-by-department reform. Had Kuvak been capable of the sort of base betrayal you suggest, V’Las would never have let him rise as high in the governmental hierarchy as he did.”
T’Pol felt the scowl on her face intensify. “And yet a number of secret deliveries of weaponry and related technology have left Vulcan for Romulan space. That is at odds with what you have told me.”
“So it would appear. But frequently things are not what they appear to be.” Seeming satisfied with the answer she had given, the administrator resumed walking with all the calm of Surak himself conducting a peripatetic desert colloquium for T’Klass and the other early Adepts of Gol.
T’Pol stood and watched the other woman walk away for a moment. She found T’Pau’s belief in both herself and Kuvak impressive, and had never felt more certain of the solidity of
the administrator’s Syrrannite convictions. But she also believed in the objective evidence she had collected.
Illicit shipments had left Vulcan, bound for some point beyond the Romulan border region. That much was incontrovertible, regardless of appearances.
Trotting to catch up with T’Pau, T’Pol said, “I suppose your government could have been sending arms to some distant adversary of the Romulans, rather than to the Romulans themselves. Doing that would give you a way to avoid actually abandoning our human allies to whatever fate the Romulans have in store for them.” It would also account for the shroud of secrecy, since supplying offensive weapons—even to an ally—would be a violation of Surak’s very essence. Helping to set up warp-detection grids was one thing; providing actual ordnance was quite another.
“We... I have faith in the human species,” T’Pau said. “And it’s surprising that your belief in their capabilities isn’t even greater. After all, you have worked among them extensively.”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 39
