“Your holographic doctor,” Picard said to Janeway.
The Doctor looked up with a sudden expression of indignation. “I beg your pardon. I am not a possession.”
Picard smiled, approached the celebrated medical hero of the Voyager’s Delta Expedition. “Of course not, and I meant no disrespect. It’s just that…well, I have encountered other emergency medical holograms, but you, sir, stand apart from them all.” Picard saw the Doctor’s expression soften, decided he was on the right track, continued to lay on the compliments as he held out his hand. “It is a true pleasure to meet you, and to thank you for saving my life.” He looked at Janeway, who regarded him with a look that suggested he might be going too far with his praise. “Our lives,” he concluded, and left it at that.
“A pleasure to meet you as well,” the Doctor said as he shook Picard’s hand. “I’m sure.”
Picard was startled at the incredible sensation of contact with the holographic being. The flesh had just the right amount of give, the inner structure of the bones was solid, and there was even heat and a suggestion of sweat. Absolutely astounding.
“I’d been watching these two,” the Doctor went on. He removed a Starfleet medical tricorder from under his non-regulation shirt, pointed it at the unconscious Vulcan at his feet, frowned again. “Most curious. Despite his current condition, his life-sign readings are no different from when I scanned him ringside.”
Picard wasn’t certain he understood the Doctor’s point, but then the hologram knelt beside the fallen Vulcan. First, he ripped away the unconscious being’s tunic to reveal the armor on his shoulder that had protected him from the nerve pinch; then he found a small device hidden under his belt, and held it up for Picard’s inspection.
“Very clever,” the Doctor said. “Life-sign transmitter.” He pressed a control tab on the device, checked his tricorder again. “And very interesting.” He looked at Janeway and his smug attitude became serious. “This fellow’s Romulan.”
Janeway turned to Picard, and lightly tapped the button of her epee to his shoulder. “Touche,” she said, and Picard detected no sense that she was in any way enjoying what had just happened. “Looks like Starfleet’s not the only one who thinks you’re the right man for the job.”
Picard, at last, had run out of arguments to the contrary.
He was doomed, after all.
5
SOLTOTH CAVERNS, ROMULUS, STARDATE 57473.1
Even as the echoes of the distant explosion faded, even as the afterimage of the canteen’s extinguished lights remained burned into his eyes, Spock was up and moving with T’Vrel for the emergency equipment lockers on the far wall.
Neither Vulcan inadvertently collided with a bench or table. Their exact memory of the room’s layout, augmented by their sensitive hearing, made moving through the familiar area, even in total darkness, as unremarkable as if it had been well lit.
Spock heard running feet in the rock corridors outside the canteen, then the ionic hiss of an energy weapon he did not recognize. The sounds of one set of running footsteps ceased immediately, without the punctuation of a falling body.
To Spock, the logic of that was simple. The attackers’ weapons were set to full disintegration.
Spock heard T’Vrel open the locker, heard her hands move confidently, selecting the items they needed.
“Here,” she said, and that one whispered word was enough for Spock to pinpoint her, sweep his hand to meet hers, and take the first item that she offered him.
A thermal imager—Romulan fleet surplus.
He pulled the asymmetrical flat shield over his eyes, pressed the control switch at his temple and felt the restraint straps tighten in place. A moment later, a holographic image sprang to life before him, showing T’Vrel, the open locker, and the canteen in a blotchy smear of false colors, assembled from the emission of infrared radiation.
“Working,” Spock said quietly. That one word was enough to tell T’Vrel that he could see what she was doing, and that no more words were necessary.
But Spock knew that betraying their location by sound was the least of their worries. The invaders would also be wearing similar imaging devices to move through the darkened caverns.
Spock heard running footsteps again, this time much closer to the canteen. Two sets.
Both he and T’Vrel paused in their collection of equipment, but just for a moment. The footsteps were recognizable, not only from the familiar sound of Vulcan boot heels on the ribbed metal floor, but from the distinctive pace. Soral and T’Rem were approaching on the run, two of the team of sixteen Vulcans who were currently quartered in these facilities.
By the time the sounds of the young Vulcans indicated passage through the canteen doors, Spock and T’Vrel were equipped and ready for whatever had to be done.
In the false color generated by Spock’s thermal imager, the two Vulcans in the doorway appeared brighter than T’Vrel. The outline of their lean bodies glowed through the simple robes they wore. Both were overheated from running. Certainly not from fear, Spock thought. The two young Vulcans were Surakians, students of T’Vrel’s own s’url.
To both Spock and T’Vrel, Soral made a series of broad, though precise, gestures—combat sign language designed to be intelligible even in the low-resolution reconstructions provided by the thermal imagers.
His information was succinct: Invaders had beamed in at three different locations, three individuals to each team. Thus far, at least four Vulcans had been killed, and the facility’s own transporter room was under enemy control.
Spock’s first conclusion was that the invaders were Cardassian. The concept of a triumvirate was the centerpiece of their dominant culture. However, the Cardassian Union had been brought to the brink of destruction by the Dominion War, and Spock could not see any logical motive for its leaders to expend resources on an operation to manipulate Romulan politics.
But T’Vrel had already jumped beyond Spock’s line of reasoning.
“Cardassian mercenaries,” she said in a low voice, beside Spock.
Spock did not contest her conclusion. There were certainly enough dishonored Cardassian soldiers in the quadrant unable to return home. Their connections to the Obsidian Order would only guarantee a war crimes tribunal which, by Cardassian tradition, would try them only after they had been found guilty. Such soldiers would be eager for employment by whoever could pay the price, and would have no motivation to question their assignments.
Spock considered the small cylindrical device that T’Vrel now held up. It was a Romulan sunpod flare, designed to explode in two distinct phases. The first phase would generate an encrypted electromagnetic pulse that would selectively switch off—for one-half second—the thermal imagers the Vulcans wore. Less than a millisecond later, the second phase of the explosion would produce a broad spectrum of infrared radiation and visible light powerful enough to overwhelm the circuits of the invaders’ thermal imagers.
In the seconds it would take for the enemy imagers to reconfigure themselves, he and T’Vrel and the two younger Vulcans would have a decided advantage. Yet given that Soral and T’Rem were Surakians, schooled in the most ancient Vulcan combat arts, whoever dared enter this room was most unlikely to last more than a heartbeat, even without the deployment of countermeasures.
The only variable that Spock could not adequately incorporate into a logical prediction of the outcome of this attack was the invaders’ use of disintegration weapons. But from the increasing sound of the approaching footfalls, an empirical answer would soon be furnished.
Soral and T’Rem exchanged another set of rapid hand signals with T’Vrel. Then T’Rem leapt lightly onto a bench, from there onto a table, and finally sprang to a position above the entrance door, clinging to the wall like an enormous insect.
Though the details were too fine for Spock to see in his imager, he recalled a wiring conduit that ran along the wall above the doorway. It apparently was all the support T’Rem needed to hold herself in pos
ition. Her display of agility and strength was impressive.
Now Soral made a twisting movement and Spock saw the smeared orange outline of the student’s long cotton vest flutter to the floor to the side of the door, still incandescent with his residual body heat. The young Vulcan then slipped behind a food dispenser, flattening his body against the carved rock wall so he would be unseen when the invaders entered.
It appeared Soral had determined that the rapidity of the invaders’ advance through the corridors indicated they were not using sensing devices to map an area before entering. What they lost in precision, they gained in speed. The tactic also meant they gave no energy signals to their enemies that could be used to locate them. Cardassian tactics once again, Spock concluded.
T’Vrel gestured to him, and Spock took his place beside the open equipment locker, a countermeasures case slung over his shoulder, and in his right hand a Romulan disruptor. The weapon had no stun setting, so Spock had switched it from lethal neural disruption to molecular decohesion. If he had to, he would take another’s life to preserve his own. But, he calculated, blasting loose rock from the room’s low ceiling might be enough to repel the invaders without causing unnecessary fatalities.
Then he waited.
He heard more boots running and the hiss of two more weapon discharges, one of them followed by a crashing of rock and metal.
Spock noted the direction of the noise and judged that one of the facility’s geothermal power converters had been destroyed. The invaders clearly wished to prevent any circuit reconfiguration that would divert life-support power to the lighting grid. That also suggested the invaders were counting on the darkness continuing.
The thought reassured Spock. It meant the sunpod flare would likely be an effective, nonlethal weapon. The enemy entering the canteen would be temporarily blinded, and in those few seconds they could be captured. Alive. Learning the invaders’ identity would certainly reveal their motives, and that knowledge in turn would open other logical pathways to victory through negotiation, escape, or combat.
The sounds of footsteps slowed as the unseen enemy approached the canteen door from the corridor.
Spock’s sensitive hearing caught the faint metallic snick of the sunpod flare being armed by T’Vrel.
Then three large humanoid forms of false yellow rushed into the doorway, halted, and swept the room with an ungainly and unidentifiable rifle-like weapon.
Spock had just enough time to note that the invaders did not have the distinctive, cobra-neck silhouette of Cardassians before his imager switched off. A moment later, he felt the heat of the sunpod’s release of blinding light.
Spock bolted for the doorway, fully expecting Soral and T’Rem to have subdued the blinded invaders in the few seconds it would take him to get there. But when his imager switched back on again, less than three steps later, he saw a different outcome.
Soral was trading a flurry of deadly hand strikes with one of the invaders, weaving and ducking to avoid being shot by the attacker’s rifle.
Spock quickly reached a new conclusion: The fact that the enemy was engaged in hand-to-hand combat instead of using disintegrators strongly implied they intended to capture whoever was in this room.
Then T’Rem dropped from the wall above the other two invaders, striking one with her fists and the other with her feet. As both were thrown off balance, stumbling forward, the young Vulcan tucked into a roll as she reached the floor, and leapt in an instant to her feet.
One of the invaders whirled about, awkwardly brandishing his rifle as a staff. But T’Rem simply flipped over it and struck him once again with her feet. The force of her blow sent him flying backward into a bench.
T’Vrel was at the invader’s side at once. Spock didn’t have to see what happened next. The touch of two of the Vulcan healer’s fingers in the appropriate katra point, and the invader would be paralyzed.
Soral and the third invader battled on in silence. Both combatants’ movements were so fast they strobed across Spock’s computer-generated vision.
Ignoring his disruptor, Spock held his hand ready to strike, using his other senses to answer the last question he had about Soral’s attacker: Which species of humanoid was attacking them?
He smelled the sharp hot scent of the emitter node on the invader’s recently used energy weapon. Then sweat, not as pungent as a Klingon’s, not as sour as a human’s, insufficient in character to identify the species.
He listened to the sounds of the attacker’s uniform, creaking as if made from actual animal hide and not military fabric engineered for silence. He heard the attacker’s steady breathing, controlled and focused, through his nostrils, not his open mouth, despite his strenuous exertions.
Spock processed all these impressions in less than a second, but none led him to a logical identification of Soral’s attacker.
But just as he had been a teacher of James T. Kirk, so Spock had been a student of the human captain. Logic was not the only way to approach a challenge.
Spock watched for his opening, acted, thrust his hand forward to grab at the shoulder of Soral’s attacker, trusting his instinct and training. The Vulcan nerve pinch would require no more than half a second.
And yet, in that half second, incredibly, Soral’s attacker sensed Spock’s presence as well as his attack.
Almost simultaneously, the invader blocked another strike by Soral, then ducked and twisted and spun to face Spock.
Spock responded without conscious thought, whipping his free arm out to block the barrel of the attacker’s rifle as it swung for his head, to make it fly from his attacker’s grasp. At the same time, Spock changed his target from the attacker’s shoulder to his face, determined to rip off the attacker’s imager, reducing him to blindness.
But the attacker did not block Spock’s hand as it closed like a vise—on a cold metal mask without image inputs or eye slits of any kind.
At the bottommost range of Spock’s own imager, the attacker’s leg and boot rose up and struck backward into Soral’s chest.
Spock heard bones crack. Saw Soral drop to the canteen floor.
In the same instant, the attacker’s hands were around Spock’s throat. Spock’s head was slammed forward.
Spock reached up, grasping, his hands slipping to one side of the metal mask. His fingers raked across bare flesh, and into the soft ridged muscles of a batlike ear.
And at his contact with that ear, even as taloned hands squeezed his throat and shut his senses down, Spock had his answer.
The attackers had no need of imagers, nor could they be blinded by light through the metal masks that shielded their eyes, because they perceived their surroundings by sound.
The advantage of night had always been theirs because all in their world were born in darkness.
The identity of the other group who wished to interfere in the fragile politics of Romulus was no longer unknown to Spock.
His attackers were the other lost children of Vulcan.
Remans.
6
S.S. CALYPSO, STARDATE 57480.3
There was no center chair.
Kirk paused on the scuffed metal deckplates outside the single turbolift, and looked at what passed for the bridge of the commercial astrogation vessel, Calypso, in more detail.
In particular, he stared at the center of the bridge, at the deck, trying to see any marks in the traction carpet that might indicate the captain’s chair had been temporarily removed for repair.
But he couldn’t easily find the center of the bridge.
It wasn’t even circular.
It was boxlike, rectangular, more like an inflated interior of an old-style shuttlecraft.
On the main level, four steps down from the elevated deck on which the turbolift opened, along each side of the bridge were three duty stations, each with two chairs, and two sets of displays and control boards cantilevered out from the bulkheads. But instead of the displays being aligned flat to the bulkheads, so that command staff i
n the center of the bridge could see each duty station at a glance, all controls faced ahead, like desks in a classroom.
And what they faced wasn’t a large, central viewscreen—there were three of them, side by side on the sharply inward-angled forward wall. The rightmost screen displayed an engineering schematic of the Calypso—little more than a blunt-nosed, cylindrical main module about the same size as a single nacelle from an old Ambassador-class ship, with a slight, tapered bulge at the rear of the ventral hull, and two swept-back, outboard warp nacelles, also cylindrical, suggesting technology that was decades removed from state-of-the-art.
A dozen other smaller displays angled down from the ceiling of the bridge, and a handful more were arranged in what seemed to be a random fashion on the port and starboard bulkheads. Brightly colored conduits threaded among stark switching boxes made the rest of the exposed bulkheads resemble the outside of a Borg cube. Behind Kirk, also on the upper level, was a small room with a deck-to-overhead transparent wall. Inside the room was a wide black desk, apparently bolted to the deck, covered with scattered padds, and ringed by more displays on the bulkheads and overhead, all angled so they could be seen only by whoever sat behind the station.
And the air had a damp and musty smell, as if the ship recently had been used to transport livestock and the ventilation system had yet to be purged.
Kirk wondered what Spock would say when he told him about this sad excuse for a starship.
And then he remembered.
The shock of loss was just as strong as it had been the first time he knew Spock was dead. Just as strong as it had been every other time these past ten days when he had realized he would never again be able to share anything with his friend.
“Not quite Starfleet specs, is it, Captain?” Admiral Janeway smiled warmly at Kirk as she approached him from the lower level.
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