by S. D. Perry
She put out her hand, and this time he did not freeze or step away as he had in her apartment. She placed her palm on his chest, searched for his heart, but was unable to find it. He stood still for a moment, and then shifted his weight almost imperceptibly backward. She pulled her hand away.
“It is common among humans, to ? to engage in physical contact as a sign of affection,” she said. “Or friendship,” she amended quickly.
Spock replaced his hands behind his back. “I cannot experience affection,” he told her, and she felt her heart ache a little. “But,” he added, “it is agreeable to me that you would consider me to be your friend.”
She smiled, shifted her gaze to the ground. “It is ? agreeable to me to hear you say so.”
Still looking down, she caught sight of her timepiece. She was late, she had to go.
“I’m sorry, Mister Spock.” She worked to keep her voice even. “I have to leave you now. It has been a pleasure, a great pleasure, to have made your acquaintance.”
She extended her hand again before remembering the awkward moment in her apartment, but this time he took her hand, grasped her fingers gently. His skin was very cool. She knew that his home planet was much warmer than Earth; was it cold for him here? Scarcely realizing what she was doing, she moved closer to him, nearly embracing him, as she would have done to a friend in farewell. He endured it stiffly, and she quickly stepped back.
“Mister Spock, again, I hope I haven’t ? when we say good-bye on Earth—”
“Please, Miss Kalomi. There is no need for an apology. Our cultures are disparate; misunderstanding is inevitable. It is no fault of either of us.”
The two walked down the path in silence. Leila fought away tears as the transporter came into view. This could be the last time that she would ever speak to Mister Spock in person. As brief and confusing as their time together had been, she had grown quite attached to him.
If only I could tell him ?
Tell him what, exactly? She didn’t know, wasn’t sure.
Spock bowed again as Leila stepped into the transporter, this time a more formal bow made from the waist. “Miss Kalomi, I am indebted to you for your generosity. I would hope that if you were ever in need of anything from me, you would not hesitate to contact me on the Enterprise.”
He raised his hand, spread his fingers apart. “This is a traditional gesture on my planet,” he told her. “A well-wishing.”
Leila imitated the gesture, forming a V between her ring and middle fingers, extending her thumb.
“May you live long and prosper,” he said.
“May you live long and prosper,” she repeated, her voice breaking on the last syllable. The hum of the transporter enveloped her and she watched him disappear, his hand still extended in farewell.
Kent’s head was throbbing. Another headache, ill timed as usual, but with what Preston Sadler was telling him, perfectly understandable. He’d been back on Mars for less than a day.
“An injunction for something like this—it’s just not worth the effort,” the lawyer said. “Even if I could get a judge to sign off on it, it wouldn’t hold up under any kind of appeal.”
“So how much time can we buy?” Kent asked.
Sadler sighed. “You’re not listening to me, Thad. Even the proviro arbiters don’t want to bother with this one.”
The lawyer hesitated, then added, “I don’t mean to sound apathetic, but this experiment is really pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things.”
Kent chose his words carefully. “The grand scheme of things is exactly why this experiment is harmful.” He squinted at the too-bright screen, pulled back his aching head. He tapped the monitor’s control panel, trying to tone down the yellow, but he only succeeded in turning Sadler’s face a strange shade of magenta.
“I understand where you’re coming from. Believe me, I do. But to get the courts to act, we’d have to be able to prove that Kraden means to irreversibly alter the landscape or atmosphere. All they’re doing is testing some compound, in a small, contained plot of land.”
“You just told me the compound was highly unstable.”
“Yes, but it’s Federation approved. We can’t say boo about it.”
“Can’t we argue that this constitutes a first step in an irreversible process?”
Sadler shook his head, the motion sending shockwaves through Kent’s line of vision. He blinked, tried to adjust the brightness once more.
“I’m sure the applications of their experiment will be contentious, but at this stage, we’ve got nothing.”
“But they’re changing the atomic structure of the soil—” Kent began.
“—and it’s all under ground-level force field. Might as well try to stop someone from planting a dome garden.”
“The unstable compound, then. Couldn’t that pose a threat to the environment? Not to mention the people? The public at least cares about the safety of other people, don’t they?”
“The Federation wouldn’t have approved it if there was any real danger. I’m sorry, Thad, but I think this one is a waste of our time. We need to let it go.”
Kent closed his eyes, tried to calm himself. “A waste of our time,” he repeated, trying to sound neutral. His head was killing him. “Well. That’s it, then.”
Preston’s face was still up, his expression a mask of uncertainty and a trace of sympathetic concern, but it was clear that the call was over. Kent snapped off the comm without saying good-bye. The attorneys could give up, he decided. They could all give up. But there were other ways to get things done, to raise awareness, to incite people to act. He would go to the source, find a way to talk to the scientists themselves.
I won’t stop fighting, Jess, he promised himself, promised her through the pain in his head, his fingers already at the keys, calling up names and numbers. They might not listen to him, but they’d listen to the people, they’d have to—and he was just the man to make it happen.
Eight
The trip to Mars was uneventful. The team was excited and full of chatter, though Carol found it difficult to relax with them, spent her time ostensibly buried in a collection of data slates as star-filled darkness whipped past the chartered shuttle. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
She tried to shake off her guilt as they prepared to dock at Mars’s main station, a Federation terminal. It connected directly to Starfleet’s shipyard facility, from where they would be beaming down. She had known about the baby for four days now and had not spoken to Jim in person once. Carol felt like she was hiding from him. It didn’t help that she’d figured out exactly nothing in that time. She kept thinking that she had to get herself ready, to be prepared. But for what? She still didn’t know what she wanted to do.
I’ll see him soon enough. Once the experiment is set, we’ll have plenty of time to talk. The thought was bittersweet. She wanted to put an end to the agony of indecision and longed to see him—but she was all too aware that their days of carefree romance were over the very second she told him that she was carrying his child.
Until then, there was work to do, a lot of work; she needed to focus. She shifted her mind back into its proper gear and unfastened her safety harness, her hand grazing her belly as she did so, resting there for a beat.
The shuttle’s captain appeared in the passenger hold before Carol and the others could exit. “May I have your attention, please?”
“What is it?” Carol asked. Her team members looked at each other, murmured their curiosity.
“I’ve received a communication from station security. There is a protest going on just outside the Starfleet facility ? aimed at you, it seems. They’re suggesting that you might want to consider staying aboard the shuttle until the situation is controlled.”
There was a burst of anger, of indignant surprise from the other team members. Carol shushed them with one raised hand. She was also surprised but could guess what it was about; hadn’t she been teasing Jim about it, just the other day? Environmental issues. I
t was ridiculous. Inception was an extremely limited soil study with no planetary implications, not at this stage.
“Aren’t they on private property?” Mac asked.
The captain sighed. “A Martian court recently upheld that the pedestrian conduits are to be considered public domain.”
Troy Verne broke in. “That’s right. People are allowed to gather peacefully in the pedestrian tubes. It’s happened before.”
“But who are they? Why are they protesting us?” Leila asked.
“Since the government here voted to lease out land and approve resource tapping, there have been a lot of protests,” Alison Simhbib answered. “There has been particular concern about anything to do with terraforming.”
The captain nodded. “According to the communication, it’s sponsored by an environmental concern called Redpeace. They were trying to bring an injunction against Kraden concerning your experiment, but it fell through.”
It was the first Carol had heard of it, and from the exclamations of the others, she wasn’t the only one.
Except Troy Verne seemed awfully unruffled. When she caught his gaze, he shrugged.
“Did you know about this?” Carol asked him. She knew that it wasn’t professional to call him out in front of the team, but his look of resigned indifference was suddenly very much on her nerves.
“There’s always somebody protesting something,” Verne said. “Kraden is a popular target.”
It wasn’t an answer, but it told her enough: he had known and hadn’t seen fit to pass the information along. Carol bit back her response, turning back to the captain.
“If they are allowed to be there, then security can’t do much to make them leave,” she said.
“They can if there’s any concern about overcrowding,” the captain said. “There was a situation last year during a tube protest that got ugly—three people were smothered.”
There was a collective gasp.
“That happened only because they were cornered by security officers,” said Verne.
The captain frowned. “The way that I understood it, the officers were preventing people from entering the tube for safety reasons. Those conduits were designed to withstand a certain amount of traffic; the engineers never anticipated mass gatherings. A few of the protesters who weren’t allowed in became aggressive and blocked the way of several others. There was a panic, and things got out of hand very fast.
“Of course,” he added, “Starfleet has increased security measures since then, so a repeat of that situation is very unlikely. If too many people show up, they’ll be dispersed. To err on the side of caution, you may want to wait—”
Verne interrupted the captain again. “But Starfleet has no jurisdiction over people who are peacefully gathering in a common area, as long as nobody does anything to violate UFP codes. We could be here for hours.”
Carol actually agreed with him. “The sooner we can get started, the better,” she said. “I would prefer not to waste any time. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve seen enough of this shuttle. Any objections to running the gauntlet?”
There were none.
Silently, Carol and the others exited the hangar and made their way into an adjoining pedestrian conduit, the shuttle captain leading the way. The tubes were very broad, with enough room for twenty people to walk comfortably shoulder to shoulder, but it was easy to see how they could quickly become claustrophobic if too many people entered at once. The transparent ceilings had enough clearance for even the tallest of humans but were still lower than those of an average living space. The closeness of their reflections above them as they made their way down the corridor made Carol uneasy.
Shouts of Keep Mars Red echoed from the adjacent corridor with ghostly timbre, directly ahead and to their right. Carol’s pulse quickened as the chants became louder, and the reflection of activity ahead of them was cast across the curved ceiling of the tube joint. A handful of people milled around on their side of the connector, perhaps taking a break from the heart of the commotion. Carol was relieved to see a trio of Starfleet security guards stationed with them, waiting, it seemed, for Carol’s group.
Two of the guards stepped into the tube joint ahead of them, the third falling in behind as they walked into the adjoining area. The temperature rose abruptly, the noise and activity a huge intrusion on her senses after the long, subdued shuttle trip. Carol ducked her head and pinched her shoulders in as they made their way through the crowd.
They pushed past animated holosigns and a cacophony of hoots and chants. Much to Carol’s relief, the mostly youthful group was enthusiastic but not wild. Their well-meant but misplaced views were shouted almost good-naturedly at the team, more in affirmation of their opinions than actual condemnation of the scientists. Carol realized that most—if not all—were probably entirely ignorant of the exact nature of Inception. They were young and passionate and had likely only wanted an excuse for a social gathering. Kraden posted the field experiment schedule on their net sites; someone had seen the term “soil alteration” and drawn all the wrong conclusions.
There was a row of uniformed Starfleet security officers guarding the entrance to the shipyard facility. Carol let herself relax further; a few more steps and her first activist conflict would be over. Several of her colleagues had endured similar run-ins.
She was within two meters of the doors when a tall man stepped into her path, blocking her way. He was well dressed and seemed far too old to be at such a protest, but he held a Redpeace sign in one hand.
“Are you Doctor Carol Marcus?” he inquired. Carol was taken aback. Of course, anyone who’d gone to Kraden’s site would see her name and could find a bio and image of her easily enough. Still, it was disconcerting to be addressed by someone she had never seen before, especially in this setting.
“Please, let me through,” she said, looking around for help. The trio of guards that had walked them in had moved away, were busy pushing the crowd back, and those on the steps probably couldn’t hear her.
“Doctor Marcus, please. My name is Thad deus Kent. Just a moment of your time. I have a few things to discuss with you that I believe you will find interesting, please. Just a moment.”
“I’m sorry, Mister Kent, but I really don’t have a moment.” Carol attempted to shoulder past the man, but he sidestepped her and she could not move any farther.
The shuttle captain was suddenly at Carol’s side. “Let us through, sir. Now.”
“Doctor Marcus,” Kent said, his voice polite and pleading. “I just want to discuss some of the greater implications of your work. Do you understand what your experiment will ultimately lead to? This is the very first step down a slippery slope that will irreversibly alter the landscape—”
“Mister Kent,” Carol said, her tone flattening, “I really don’t have time to discuss my work with someone who clearly has no understanding of what the implications are.”
Kent was beginning to sound agitated. “. . . Because once you start tampering with ecosystems that you don’t fully understand, there is no way to replace what has been lost. If you could just spare a minute, one minute—”
Only seconds had transpired, but it felt like an eternity in the closeness of the tube. More and more of the protesters were crowding in to listen, jostling and pushing to hear.
People were smothered.
“Let us go!” Carol shouted. “We are scientists, Mister Kent, if that means anything to you! We’re not working for personal gain; we are trying to make things better for people!”
He tried to interrupt her, and Carol’s voice rose an octave. “You talk about loss, you forget the gains! Don’t you understand that sacrifice and risk are sometimes necessary to solve problems? Who are you to decide what’s best for everyone else? What have you sacrificed that gives you the right?”
But Kent could no longer hear her. Security had stepped in. Several people were restrained, pulled away while the crowd reacted with a growing pandemonium, some fleeing,
others trying to incite by pushing at the guards, shouting for action. Shaken, Carol accounted for her team and hurried them to the double doors that would lead to the safety of their work.
Spock’s eyes would not stay closed. He opened them, regarded the sparse furnishings in his quarters from his seated position in the center of the room. He was having difficulty settling his mind into a meditative state. Disruptive thoughts excluded him from the calm he desired, an extended reflection of oneness. He decided that music might be helpful and stood, moved to retrieve his lute.
He adjusted the pitch of the instrument, stroked his fingers across the strings, but after a short time set it aside. The disruption continued, and it became clear that the most logical course would be to explore these thoughts in order to interpret their significance. Experience had shown him that this was often the only way to put such things to rest.
