Kirk skipped down a little. “Never took a life partner,” he read out loud, realizing only after he had said the words how awkward they might make his companion feel.
But Orisa didn’t miss a step. “Was reputed to have a relationship with Third Minister Soren, though it was never substantiated.”
“Incarcerated in an Iach’tu labor camp,” said the captain.
“Who wasn’t?” she asked.
Kirk looked at her. “Were you?”
Orisa didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “That’s ancient history. Let’s move on.”
But now the captain had an inkling as to what had happened to her—and why she had changed. “I’m sorry,” he said earnestly.
“So am I,” came Orisa’s response. But it was mechanical, untouched by any real expression of regret.
He wished he had been there during the occupation. He wished he could have eased her suffering, or at least made the attempt. But he had listened to her and left her alone.
And now, Kirk thought, it was too late to do anything about it.
He scanned the rest of Mani Begron’s file. “There isn’t much else,” he concluded.
“Unfortunately,” Orisa commented. Then she went back to work, her slender fingers crawling over her input apparatus. “Maybe we need to try a different approach … check the database for violent crimes that exhibit the same basic modus operandi….”
The captain wasn’t terribly optimistic on that count. But in less than a minute, Orisa had come up with something.
“Felah Cuviq,” she said, reading the words off her screen again. “Stabbed to death, just a couple of days ago. And on the wall above his head…”
Kirk felt a little chill climb the rungs of his spine. “The name Estheen was scrawled in blood.”
Orisa looked up at him, the light from her screen casting a reddish glare on her face. “Felah Cuviq … you don’t remember him, do you?”
He shook his head from side to side. “Should I?”
“He was one of the bureaucrats with whom your captain spoke when he offered us Federation membership. “The darkness in her eyes seemed to flicker for a moment, as if she were recalling something from those days. “And lately, he became a diplomatic envoy to the Iach’tu.”
The captain felt his mouth go dry. “He was involved in the peace negotiations?”
“Yes,” Orisa replied. “Even more so than Begron. He was the leader of the entire Draqqi delegation.”
The implications hit Kirk like a tidal wave. “We’re not just talking about a single incident anymore. Everyone in that delegation is in danger of losing his or her life.”
“No doubt,” she said. She thought for a moment. “Unfortunately, we can’t postpone the talks.”
Again, Orisa sounded as if she were saying what her position demanded of her, not what she felt.
“So we’ll just have to find the Iach’tu who did this,” she finished, “and see that justice is done.”
Justice, the captain thought.
Orisa’s voice had been controlled when she said the word, but he could perceive the underlying emotion in it.
“Are we talking about justice,” he asked, “or vengeance?”
Orisa didn’t flinch. “In this case, it’s the same thing.”
Kirk shook his head. “It’s not the same thing at all—and we won’t be doing Draqqana any favors by pursuing a vendetta. We need to be objective about this. Unemotional.”
The irony of his speech didn’t escape him. Usually, it was his Vulcan first officer who felt compelled to impart that sort of advice—and most often it was the captain to whom Spock imparted it.
Orisa’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s the security professional, you or I?”
He returned her gaze. “A professional should know when her feelings are getting in the way of her work.”
She made a sound of dismissal. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t endure four years of bloody occupation. You didn’t stand by helplessly and watch while your family and friends were destroyed.”
Kirk stiffened. “Actually, I did.”
Orisa looked at him askance.
“When I was thirteen,” he told her, “I lived on a Federation colony world. There was a sudden, catastrophic food shortage, and the governor of the colony, a man named Kodos, had four thousand people put to death … so the rest could survive. Or so he told us.
“A few months ago, I ran into a theatrical troupe. A boyhood friend of mine suspected that the head of the troupe, who called himself Anton Karidian, was really Kodos. Shortly thereafter, my friend turned up dead.
“He wasn’t the only one,” said the captain. “I found out that at many of the troupe’s stops, people had died under mysterious circumstances. Clearly, it was more than a coincidence.
“As captain of the Enterprise, I pursued my friend’s theory about Karidian. And as time went on, I was more and more certain that he was right—that Karidian was Kodos—and that I would make him pay for all the misery he had caused.”
“And?” Orisa prodded. “Was this Karidian the man you thought he was?”
Kirk shrugged. “He died before I could determine that for sure. But I found out who was killing people wherever the troupe staged a performance. It wasn’t Karidian. It was his daughter, who believed her father was Kodos and was trying to protect him from his enemies.”
She pondered the story for a moment. “And the moral?”
“If justice is blind, revenge is doubly so. I try not to worry about abstractions anymore. All I care about these days is keeping innocent people from getting hurt.”
Orisa’s dark eyes blazed. “When I was in that labor camp, the only thing that kept me going was the hope that someday I would see justice done. Now I have the chance to do that. Some old-line Iach’tu monster thinks he can spill Draqqi blood with impunity—as if we were still his slaves—and I’m going to show him otherwise.”
The captain could see he wasn’t going to make any headway with her. On the other hand, there was a lot more than her feelings at stake here.
“Look at it any way you have to,” he told Orisa. “But be advised—I’ve got orders to see a peace treaty signed, and I’m not going to let anyone stand in the way of that—you included.”
It wasn’t easy for him to speak to her that way. Not after what they had had together. But as always, his duty came first.
Orisa didn’t seem to mind his declaration. For the first time since they had been reunited, she smiled—but it wasn’t a pleasant smile, not by any stretch of the imagination.
“Consider me warned,” she said. “But you should be warned as well—when I lay eyes on the murderer, he’ll be sorry he ever contemplated the idea of killing Draqqi.”
On that note, Orisa dug into her people’s database again. And this time, she came up with a really interesting bit of news. Their involvement in the peace initiative wasn’t all Mani Begron and Felah Cuviq had had in common.
At one point during the occupation, they had been incarcerated in the same labor camp.
Kirk considered Yor Praddic in the bright sunlight that bathed the Draq’s little garden.
Praddic was a handsome man with blue eyes and silver-gray hair. He was a member of the Builders Guild. He had two sons and a daughter, all of them by a wife who succumbed to a deadly disease months before the beginning of the Iach’tu occupation.
Most importantly, Yor Praddic had spent a year and a half in the Sadj Monh labor camp … along with Mani Begron and Felah Cuviq.
“We have a picture of the crime scene,” Orisa said.
Their host looked discomfited. “Unfortunately, my stomach hasn’t been very good since the occupation.”
“It might help a great deal,” Kirk told him.
The Draq sighed. “Very well.”
Orisa brought up the image in question on the tiny screen of her handheld dataset, which reminded the captain of a general-purpose tricorder. Then she handed the device to Praddic.
He winced as he perused the little screen. “Seven gods,” he breathed.
“You recognize the name?” Kirk asked.
Praddic looked up from the dataset and regarded him. “Yes. Estheen … she was a prisoner like me. It’s been so long since I thought about her….”
Orisa frowned. “And do you have any idea why someone would scrawl her name on a wall in blood?”
Praddic thought for a moment, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you remember about her?” the captain asked.
Praddic sat down on a wooden chair and a wistful smile emerged. “She was beautiful, I remember that. Full of life. The camp was hard, the kind of place that could break you, but it never broke Estheen.”
“Did anyone dislike her?” Orisa wondered.
Praddic shook his head emphatically from side to side. “All of us loved her … right up to the day she disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Orisa echoed. “What do you mean?”
Praddic shrugged a little sadly. “A guard asked her to come with him. That happened a great deal, guards taking people away for one purpose or another. Once in a while, the person they took didn’t come back to the barracks. That was the case with Estheen.”
“Do you have any idea why?” Kirk asked.
Praddic nodded. “There was a rumor that Estheen was pregnant with the child of another prisoner—a fellow named Idra, who had been tortured to death months earlier. It was never proven, of course, but the commandant didn’t … take kindly to pregnancies.” He looked away suddenly, tears standing out in his eyes.
Orisa put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, rest Praddic. You’ve been very helpful.”
He nodded, but he didn’t say anything more. And since Kirk and his companion had no more questions for him, they left.
But Yor Praddic wasn’t the only survivor of the Sadj Monh camp that they visited. There were three others.
Most of them provided the same information as Praddic. Some recalled a little more, some a little less.
Heenan Vonakh, a woman who dealt in precious stones, recalled that Estheen had a beautiful singing voice. Lurt Rebbis, a corpulent fellow who had suffered a stroke weeks earlier, said Estheen had disappeared shortly after his arrival in the camp, depriving him of the opportunity to get to know her better. And Nes Aavo, a prosperous clothing manufacturer, said the security net was in error; he had been imprisoned at Pelos Otryn.
That left Kirk and Orisa with only one place left to turn.
Iach’tu Prime was a dark sepulcher of a world, its cities a series of barely illuminated passages and immense chambers carved into mountainous piles of rock. Little grew on the planet’s surface, which was why the fertile valleys of Draqqana had seemed so tempting to the Iach’tu.
It had taken the Draqqi government three days to secure what Kirk and Orisa needed—and even then, Iach’tu permission had been granted grudgingly, with a long and rigid list of parameters.
For instance, the Enterprise would be allowed within transporter range for only a few seconds. Kirk and Orisa would be beamed to a predetermined set of coordinates, from which point they would be blindfolded and escorted to their final destination. They would be prohibited from carrying weapons, portable sensors, or communications devices of any kind.
And they would have the equivalent of twenty-five minutes with the object of their desire, not a second more.
Jim Kirk regarded the Iach’tu who sat opposite him in the rough-hewn stone chamber, his craggy gray features thrown into stark relief by patches of luminous yellow lichen.
“Have they told you why we’ve come?” asked the captain.
Ussata Dornic shook his massive head from side to side, his lidless black eyes unblinkingly returning the human’s scrutiny. “They have told me nothing,” he grated.
“We’re investigating two murders,” Kirk explained. “The victims’ names were Mani Begron and Felah Cuviq. Both of them were incarcerated in the Sadj Monh labor camp—the one you administered. We were hoping you might be of some help to us.”
Dornic eyed him with an arrogance that belied his surroundings. “A Starfleet captain and a Draqqi station commander … doing the work of the planetary police? These must be unusual murders indeed.”
“The victims were key contributors to the peace process,” Orisa noted. “That’s what makes them unusual.”
The Iach’tu grunted. “The peace process … a quaint name for a remarkably onerous and demeaning activity. Why we would ever want to make peace with an inferior species like the Draqqi is beyond me.”
The muscles writhed in Orisa’s jaw, but she kept her emotions in check. “There was a name scrawled on the wall at both of the murder scenes. The name was Estheen. We understand she was a prisoner at the camp as well.”
Dornic’s mouth pulled up at the comers. “Estheen,” he said, rolling the name off his tongue like a fine liqueur. “Yes, she was a prisoner there. A very popular prisoner, at that.”
“What connection might she have with due victims?” asked the captain.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the Iach’tu. “And even if I did, why would I share my speculations with you?”
“Your government,” said Orisa, “has agreed to reduce your sentence if you cooperate with us. I trust that’s of some value to you?”
Dornic’s tiny black eyes twinkled. “Ah. You’ve gotten my attention now.”
“Tell us what you know of the victims,” said Kirk.
The prisoner looked at him. “I remember them both rather well. They were incarcerated at Sadj Monh, as you say.” His smile deepened. “What’s more, I find it interesting that they should have played important roles in your peace process. One might even call it ironic.”
“Why is that?” asked Orisa.
Dornic’s expression hardened with something strangely akin to pride. “At my labor camp, they were informants.”
The captain saw the Draq’s face drain of color. “Informants?” Orisa repeated numbly.
The Iach’tu smiled at her discomfort. “Draqqi who spied on their comrades to obtain certain privileges. Certainly, you knew such people existed.”
Orisa didn’t answer him. “Were there other informants?”
Dornic appeared to ponder the question for a moment. “Quite a few, actually, considering how loudly you Draqqi tend to trumpet your virtues. As it happened, I found your people relatively easy to turn.”
Orisa’s eyes blazed and she bit her lip. Clearly, she was on the verge of lashing out at the Iach’tu.
“What were their names?” Kirk demanded, effectively preempting any unwanted displays of violence.
The prisoner gazed at Orisa a moment longer, deriving as much pleasure from her anger as he could. Then he returned his attention to the captain.
“There were three others,” he said slowly and deliberately. “Heenin Vonakh, Lurt Rebbis, and Nes Aavo.”
The captain glanced at Orisa, whose expression had changed to one of disgust. She and Kirk had spoken to these people only a few days earlier, and they had given no clue as to their treachery. Aavo had denied even having seen Sadj Monh.
Orisa turned to Dornic. “Aavo told us he had never heard of Estheen. He said he wasn’t even incarcerated in your camp.”
The Iach’tu made a bubbling sound deep in his throat—something akin to laughter. “Then he was lying through his teeth. He was there. He knew her. Everyone knew her.”
It sounded like the truth. After all, Aavo and the other informants stood to lose everything if their duplicity came to light. But despite all that, none of them could have been the murderer. They were Draqqi—and McCoy had determined that the killer was Iach’tu.
“Our investigation of Mani Begron’s murder scene shows the killer was one of your people,” Kirk told Dornic. “Why would an Iach’tu decide to murder Draqqi informants?”
The prisoner scowled. “Why indeed?”
&n
bsp; “We need a theory,” Orisa told him.
Dornic regarded her. “Just as I need my sentence reduced. So rest assured, I will come up with one.”
He thought a moment longer. Then his frown lifted. “There is one possibility,” he concluded.
“And that is?” Kirk prodded.
“An Iach’tu named Sanda—though in all likelihood, he’s dead.”
“Tell us about him,” said Orisa.
Dornic made a gesture of dismissal. “Sanda was a guard in my camp—a turncoat, like Aavo and the others. He worked against the Draqqi informants, on behalf of the prisoners—if you can imagine such a thing.”
“I can imagine it,” said the captain. “Go on.”
The Iach’tu took a breath, then let it out. “Before Sanda could do much, he was exposed by my informants. I had him seized and sent back to Iach’tu Prime for sentencing. But before the vessel could reach its destination, it was attacked by so-called Draqqi freedom fighters.” Dornic held his hands out. “All hands were reported lost—though Sanda’s body was never found among the wreckage.”
“Did Sanda have a relationship with Estheen?” Orisa asked.
The prisoner shook his head. “I doubt it. Mind you, he was probably taken with her. The majority of my guards were. But the notion of a liaison with an Iach’tu must have been unthinkable to her, no matter how much Sanda tried to help her people. Besides…”
“Yes?” said Kirk.
For just a fraction of a second, Dornic seemed lost in regret. Then his lip curled again and his air of disdain was restored.
“Estheen became pregnant—at which point I arranged for her to ‘disappear’ from my roles,” he recalled. “So she must have had a lover in the camp—a Draqqi lover. As Commander Orisa will be happy to confirm, our species are incapable of cross-breeding.”
The captain looked to his partner. She nodded.
“What did you do with the baby?” asked Orisa.
Dornic frowned. “As I recall, I gave orders to have it destroyed. It was Draqqi, and I had orders to discourage procreation.”
Kirk saw Orisa swallow back whatever emotions were roiling inside her. Looking weary and drawn, she got to her feet and made her way to the door.
“Will that be all?” the Iach’tu inferred.
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 12
