Dwellers in the Crucible

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  "Yes, Commander," Tal said evenly, watching her face relax.

  "Well, it could be worse," she said, shaking her soft and burnished hair off her shoulders with an impatient gesture. She swung the big chair idly, smiling for the first time. "We're very formal today, aren't we, Tal? 'Commander'?"

  "This is an official briefing, is it not, Commander?" Tal asked a little archly. "Further, I cannot remove the Klingons from my mind. They infuriate me! They're so bestial. I find them offensive under any circumstances, but this arrogant indifference to our purposes—"

  The Commander allowed herself a laugh then, a rich, breathy sound that ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  "You're such an aristocrat, Tal. I've always liked that about you." She came around the desk and put her arms about his waist. "Have a drink with me? We'll wash the taste of Klingons out of your mouth."

  "Perhaps later," Tal said, softening a little.

  She could still captivate him after all this time. He had passed up endless preferments, a command of his own, to remain with her. To remain in her shadow, actually, since she would always exceed him in command ability. It was one of many complex reasons why she had been able to regain her flagship after the debacle with the Federation spies and the cloaking device. Unless he extricated himself from her orbit he would live and die a sub-commander.

  Nor was hers the only shadow across Tal's life. There were the myriad small shadows of her many casual lovers, but he was not disturbed by them. They were by definition temporary, and none could prevent her from returning to him as she always did. But there was one other shadow, perhaps the longest of all, most difficult to dispel, the shadow of a Vulcan who had presumed to touch her heart. To the best of Tal's knowledge no one else, not even he, had succeeded in doing that.

  He stroked her soft and burnished hair, a slight smile playing across his aristocratic lips. He marveled that there wasn't so much as a single strand of gray in her hair. His had started to gray when he was still quite young; it had always made him seem older than he was. She had always found it appealing. Even now, her small fingers twined about one of the curls at his temple. Tal felt her sigh as she broke the embrace.

  "You're right, of course," she said. "Duty first."

  Again she tossed the soft hair off her shoulders, galvanizing herself.

  "If this Klingon requires a show of force—" Her voice was hard now, steely, the voice of a Rihannsu Fleet Commander. "Set the fore phasers for tight range and lock onto his quarters. We will see how he cares to deal with me!"

  Changes were being made. Krazz growled and foamed and gnashed his teeth and turned colors, but even he would not defy a flagship's phasers aimed between his beady eyes. He acquiesced.

  The Rihannsu ignored him.

  Tal supervised the repair of walls damaged by groundquakes, the installation of private sanitary facilities complete with a sonic shower, the provision of luxurious Rihannsu toiletries. There was a food synthesizer programmed for Terran and Vulcan cuisine, a rich carpet for the cold floor, soft new civilian clothing to replace the drab uniforms, even a small library computer. The Rihannsu flagship had very little in the way of tapes security-cleared for Federation prisoners, but for two who had had no such diversion for over one hundred days this much was an extraordinary boon.

  While Krazz sulked, Kalor supervised Tal's supervisions. He had orders not to let the Romulan out of his sight, and for once he did not chafe under his lord's paranoia. If Subcommander Tal moved like a shadow, then Kalor was the shadow's shadow.

  It was T'Shael who thanked the Rihannsu sub-commander. Cleante was strangely quiet in the presence of these newcomers, as if puzzling out what their arrival could mean. T'Shael also presumed to make two requests.

  "If it is permitted," she addressed Tal in her careful manner. "There are perhaps additional computer tapes to which we might have access. These are so few."

  Politics aside, Tal had no particular loathing for Vulcans, and he had noted this one's quiet dignity from the first.

  "These are all we have in your Standard language," he said, not unkindly.

  "I am a student of other tongues," T'Shael said in flawless High Rihan, and the aristocratic Tal was both startled and impressed. "Comparative study would be of great value."

  "I shall mention this to my commander," Tal replied in the same tongue. He suspected she had more to say, but reverted to Standard to keep Kalor from fingering the weapons at his belt. The Klingon had begun to glare and shift his feet the instant he heard a language he did not recognize. "There is something else?"

  "Our gratitude for your provision of additional clothing," T'Shael said, giving Cleante a warning look before she finished her thought. The soft Rihannsu-style garb lay neatly folded on one of the bunks; with the constant traffic of the repair crew neither prisoner had had opportunity to change. "But with all due respect, we prefer to retain our prisoners' garb."

  Cleante opened her mouth to protest that she had not been consulted in this, but T'Shael's look silenced her. The exchange was not lost on Tal, who wondered at it.

  "And why, may I ask?" He reverted again to High Rihan, ignoring Kalor, curious to see how much of this esoteric and difficult tongue the Vulcan knew. "Our Empire will continue to hold you until a satisfactory conclusion has been reached with your Federation. But you are not criminals and should not be treated as such. If the styles are not pleasing—"

  T'Shael lowered her eyes slightly to indicate that this was of no significance.

  "We are still prisoners," was her answer to Tal's question. "It is illogical to pretend otherwise."

  "I see," Tal replied, not entirely pleased with the answer.

  If the looks exchanged between human and Vulcan were not lost on Tal, neither were they lost on Kalor. He made a mental note for his xenopsychology file and continued his shadowing of the shadow.

  "Would you invite Krazz's attention with such colorful and attractive garments?"

  Cleante's Byzantine eyes stopped blazing. Of all the amenities the Rihannsu had brought with them, she had been most eager to discard the coarse, threadbare uniform for bright civilian clothing. Now she understood T'Shael's logic.

  "I didn't think," she said, smiling a little now that her cold sores were healing. "Typical human hedonism, I guess. I'm sorry."

  "Do not disparage your humanity," T'Shael said distantly. "It may be of more advantage than you know."

  Tal watched his Commander rise from their couch as if in a dream. He lay back among the cushions in the same position in which they'd finished. Even in love she needed to assume the dominant position; Tal understood and made no objection. It pleased him that she occasionally consented to give herself to him, regardless of the terms she chose.

  She had slipped into a diaphanous gown which served to enhance her ripe beauty, and Tal studied her through half closed eyes, trying to muster enough passion to pleasure her yet again. It was impossible. He was sated, exhausted, close to sleep. She, on the other hand, seemed to have acquired new energy from their encounter, as if she had taken his strength and added it to her own. Where moments ago she had floated aimlessly about the room, sipping at her drink from the corner of a square goblet and shaking her hair idly off her shoulders, now she quickened her pace, electrified.

  "I've worked it out, Tal," she said, her voice sharper than it need be in the intimate half-dark. "The Klingons have given me an opening to pin this whole matter on them and save face for the Praetor yet again. Let us hope this time he appreciates it." She looked at her sub-commander, her sometime consort, who was drowsing. "Tal, pay attention!"

  "Yes, Commander," he said with sleepy irony. His aristocratic fingers hid a yawn. "Perhaps before this is over the Praetor will have overreached himself for the last time," he suggested, knowing that to voice this in public was high treason, but confident that here he was entitled to his opinion. "The Consul's displeasure is no secret. And the Federation's response to this stupid ploy with the chamberlain—The opposing faction
s had begun to close on him while we were making our departure. I half expected someone to stop us."

  "The factions are still only factions," the Commander said, dismissing them. "None is strong enough to act alone, and they will never resolve their differences long enough to join forces. The Praetor will somehow manuever around the Consul and restore himself in the Emperor's favor as always, and perhaps it's just as well. At least we know what to expect from the Praetor. Let us be grateful he is still the Praetor."

  "And we are still his pawns," Tal said, propping himself up among the cushions. "How I wish we were shut of this business!"

  "As do I," she admitted, sitting beside him on the couch, letting her eyes and then her hands stray over his long-muscled body.

  Like most males of his caste he had anold fencing scar across one shoulder, a mark of honor, and her small fingers traced its familiar contours with uncharacteristic gentleness. There were newer scars across his chest and back where her nails had scored him in their love-play; whether these were marks of honor or not none could say. They would heal quickly, leaving no evidence of whatever other marks she might have left upon his soul.

  "Tell me," she said now, conversational, stroking him. "Do you believe this nonsense about the Deltans?"

  "Of course not!" Tal snapped, rousing himself from among the cushions to throw a richly brocaded dressing gown—a gift from her—over his shoulders; her touch made him shiver sometimes. "Treacherous Klin butchers! They dispatched the Deltans as handily as if they'd done it with table knives. They were bored with looking at each other and sought diversion in torturing their zoo specimens. You know the sort of experiments they conduct on their slave planets! They'd have found a way to kill the other two as well, barring our arrival. They have no concept of the political implications, none! How can even Klingons be so abysmally stupid?"

  "Regardless, both their superiors and ours accepted their version," she said.

  "I take it the encounter with Tolz epetai Kenran was a distasteful one?" Tal suggested with some irony. "You have not spoken of it since your return."

  The Commander, known for the usual restraint of her language (angry she might be and frequently was—enough to keep her crew constantly on the alert; the proper degree of unrelieved tension gave her the results she wanted—and as strident as she was angry, but she was never profane), uttered a single vicious curse, one of the most vile she could have chosen. Tal, surprised, had not even known she knew that one.

  "If you don't wish to elaborate—" he tweaked her, risking her anger; he had always found it stimulating.

  "Oh, 'elaborate!'" she mimicked him. "I shall elaborate. The Klingon may be half again my size and so much the louder, but he has lost this match and does not yet realize it!"

  She had spun away alone in her personal scoutship the instant she'd finished reading Kalor's report on the Deltans, intent on bearding Tolz Kenran in his den, demanding to know what manner of handpicked incompetents he had selected for this assignment and what exactly he proposed to do about the indiscriminate destruction of sixty percent of their bargaining chips. To his credit, Lord Tolz did hear her out before attempting to bite her head off. To her credit, the Commander did not give him time to bare his back teeth.

  "These things happen!" Tolz roared at her. Not an excuse, not an explanation, a statement of fact. "They happen!" he roared again for emphasis.

  At least it sounded like roaring. The Commander, having never dealt with Tolz Kenran before, having guided her scout into his vessel's shuttlebay only moments before and marched in unannounced to see him, could not know that this was his normal decibel level. Nor had she been quite prepared for his appearance. He was possibly the ugliest thing on two legs—gnarled and knobbed, grizzled and rheumy-eyed and missing most of both hands; she'd seen her share of Klingons in the years since the Alliance, but it was all she could do to look at him.

  He, on the other hand, did not look at her at all, but pontificated out of the side of his slack and slobbering mouth, his attention taken up by an audvid screen on which the Year Games were being broadcast. They were a rerun, especially for her benefit, the Commander was certain, of last year's match where the visiting Allied team, comprised mostly of Rihan, had been so badly beaten. Tolz had positioned the screen so that she could not look at him without having it always in the corner of her eye; he had the final freestyle battle sequence on ultra slo-mo and the screen was awash with green blood and falling, twitching bodies.

  "My Lord—" the Commander began again. Her first tirade had dried her throat, and the sight of him casually sipping chilled fruit nectar when he had offered her nothing (not that fruit nectar would have helped her; she was in need of something far stronger) taxed her to the limit of her patience.

  "Seems to me—" Tolz cut her off, riveted on the screen, gloating as the Rihan team took yet another casualty, "—seems to me it was your ones made the first kill. What's a few more after that?"

  "That is not the issue here, my Lord!" she said sharply, trying at least to remain civil. Tolz had also insisted they speak only in 'aase and without translators. It was the only language he knew. Why bother learning those of other worlds which would someday be crushed by his own? Unfortunately, it was one she found more difficult than Terran Standard. "The one was accidental. The three were deliberate and calculated murder!"

  "We are Klingons!" Tolz Kenran roared, and this time it was a roar. His clawlike prostheses gripped the arms of his chair and propelled him half out of it. "Not babysitters, not errand boys. Get that straight! I acquiesced to this because I was promised a substantial portion of the ransom! Now your ones have khest me out of that. So tell me why I'm still involved?"

  "You are involved in this, my Lord—implicated, as we all are—in ways you cannot begin to understand!" she said loudly against his deafness and the roar from the audvid screen, facing him down, though she had to look up at him to do it. "The first one's death has been appeased, in ways it makes me ill to contemplate. But the deaths of the three will fall upon your head, unless—" She waited until he had resettled in his chair, fumbled for the audvid control with his mangled, fingerless hands, trying to shut her out again, "—unless we can find a … a scapegoat."

  Tolz fumbled and cursed and dropped the audvid control, glowered at it where it lay just out of his reach on the carpet. Before he could summon a servitor to fetch it for him, the Commander stooped with a singularly graceful movement and retrieved it, holding it where he would have to reach toward her to get it.

  "What the khest are you talking about?" he slobbered at her, slack-jawed and baleful. "A scapegoat? What?"

  "I'm not gifted in your language, my Lord. Perhaps that's not the word I want." She held the audvid control out toward him, tantalizing. When he refused to reach for it she flicked the screen-off mechanism, deliberately. "But you take my point. Someone must be found to exonerate both our Empires and satisfy the Federation. As I understand Klin philosophy, he who dies for the honor of his Empire automatically earns a place in the Black Fleet."

  "Rom breast-beating," Tolz mumbled. "Exoneration. Keep it to yourselves!"

  "Your functionary on the planetoid, this Krazz," the Commander persisted, pretending she hadn't heard him. "Consider him forfeit. You may execute him yourself or permit me the honor. Or perhaps we will just leave him to the Federation."

  "Never!" Tolz roared at her, snatching the control mechanism away from her at last.

  Could she tell he was laughing at her, laughing at the universe for the tricks it played on one in one's old age? Hadn't eliminating Krazz been his object from the beginning, an old score to settle, part of a malodorous plot fermenting in his brain from the moment his superiors handed him the sealed orders to assist the Roms in this silly kidnapping caper? Could she tell he was laughing at her? Probably not. Roms had no sense of humor to begin with, and could never distinguish among Klin moods because all of them had teeth.

  "Never!" he roared again, reactivating the audvid screen, addre
ssing himself to it. "You will not dictate to the disposition of my officers, I don't care what your rank in your Empire. Go away!"

  He signalled for a servitor to bring him another fruit nectar and shut the Commander out completely, chuckling evilly at some sadistic slapstick transpiring on the screen in a dialect she could not understand. The servitor, of unknown species and indeterminate gender, fluttered and squeaked about its nervous ministrations. The Commander waited for it to finish and scuttle out.

  "He is forfeit," she repeated, loud enough to be heard above the mayhem on the screen. "Either that or it falls on you!"

  "Hah!" Tolz epetai Kenran roared, though whether at her or at the screen the Commander couldn't tell.

  "So. That's my story," she said to Tal, shaking the soft, burnished hair off her shoulders and pouring herself another drink. Now it was she who must wash the taste of Klingons out of her mouth. What must the crew think of their less-than-secret assignations, knowing that she and Tal were cross-caste and could never mate? Did she care? She came and sat beside him again, her small hands soothing him as before. "And what is yours? The care and feeding of our remaining prisoners. They are in good repair now? Healthy? Contented with their captivity?"

  "Hardly 'contented,'" Tal answered, and it was he who mimicked her this time. "But better off than they were. And safe from predators for the present."

  "That's the best we can hope for, isn't it?" She studied his face carefully. "You're concerned about them, aren't you? Why?"

  "It disturbs me when these things affect innocents," he said honestly. "They've done nothing. I don't see—"

  "No one is an innocent, Tal," she said pointedly. Poor Tal, all aristocratic sensibilities! Would she ever succeed in hardening him to life's little realities? "No one. Accept that, or you'll never be more than what you are, Sub-commander."

  "I know my place, Commander," Tal said coldly, and she drew back as if he'd slapped her.

  "I see," she said, taking her hands away and wondering how he'd react to what she was about to say. "The entire abduction party was implicated in the Andorian's death, you know. Commander Delar and his guards were executed. Garroted."