STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered Page 4

  [31] “You know my Shandra,” Lojur said. “She probably became enmeshed in a conversation on her way down here.”

  “Let us hope she does not also keep you waiting on the appointed day,” Akaar said, allowing a small smile to cross his broad face.

  Lojur returned the smile. “I don’t think that’s a danger. Our wedding is all she talks about.”

  “Indeed,” Tuvok said dryly. “I have noted that your coming nuptials seem to be the primary topic of conversation for both of you.”

  Before Lojur could reply, the mess hall doors opened again. Lieutenant Shandra Docksey, Excelsior’s principal helmsman and the love of Lojur’s life, strode in. She was followed by Scott Russell, the ship’s dapper young head cook. Russell carried a tureen topped by a silver cover.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Shandra said, kissing Lojur briefly before taking the seat beside him. “But I think you’ll forgive me, considering what day it is.”

  “Day?” Lojur said. Tuvok and Akaar both stared at her blankly, then looked at one another.

  “Come on, Tuvok. I looked it up, and triple-checked the calendar conversions. There’s no mistake.”

  Lojur felt as confused as Tuvok looked. Then Russell set the bowl down on the table in front of the science officer and removed its gleaming lid. The aroma of steaming orange plomeek soup immediately began wafting through the room.

  “What a delight to get away from Tholian food,” Russell said. “Plomeek soup isn’t my personal favorite, but at least I don’t have to handle it with waldoes.”

  “Scott made it from my own private stash of plomeeks,” Shandra said, grinning at Tuvok, who looked nonplussed, at least for a Vulcan. “It’s the real deal, I promise.”

  “Where did you get fresh plomeeks, Lieutenant?” Tuvok asked. “We haven’t been to Vulcan in over two years.”

  “No, but we did meet some Vulcan traders on Sigma [32] Ceti about eight months back. And Dr. Chapel lent me some space in one of the medical stasis chambers. Happy birthday, Tuvok.”

  What a beautiful soul, Lojur thought, marveling at how the woman he loved never ceased thinking of others. As ever, her smile illuminated his own soul’s darkest corners in a way he had never dared hope for.

  Rand took a seat at Chapel’s table just as Tuvok and Lojur had finished bussing their own table. Rand watched as Lojur and Docksey walked away arm in arm, clearly lost in each other.

  “Ah, young love,” Chapel said after the four younger officers had departed from the mess hall. The doctor sipped carefully from a mug of black coffee; rumor had it that this particular variety was grown on the Klingon Homeworld, yet another benefit of the Khitomer Accords. “Romance sort of puts a spring in your step, doesn’t it, Janice?”

  Rand chuckled, regarding her infinitely blander cup of Altair water. “Maybe. But I’ll bet it can’t compare to your coffee.”

  Chapel’s smile made deep furrows around her eyes, reminding Rand of just how long she had known Excelsior’s chief medical officer, and just how far both had come in their respective careers since those early days. “Come on, Janice. Romance is always exhilarating. Even when it’s somebody else’s.”

  “Hey, if I weren’t so impressed by those two, I wouldn’t have agreed to be Shandra’s Slave of Honor,” Rand said.

  Chapel almost did a spit-take with her coffee. “Isn’t that Matron of Honor?”

  “You obviously haven’t been dragooned into as many wedding parties as I have, Christine. It’s funny, though. I can remember a time when shipboard romances were discouraged.”

  Chapel shook her head. “Wrong. Shipboard romances weren’t discouraged. Our shipboard romances were discouraged.”

  [33] Rand laughed and raised her cup. The two old friends clinked their drinking vessels together as though in a toast to the paths best not taken, but only fantasized about.

  I just hope Lojur and Docksey have better luck than the kids who tried to get married on the Enterprise, Rand thought after their laughter had subsided. Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson had barely made it to the altar when a Romulan attack separated them forever. Ever since the Tholians had come aboard, Rand hadn’t been able to get either of their young, hopeful faces out of her mind.

  Rand set her cup down. “I think I’m going to need something stronger before the diplomatic business starts up again.”

  The door to Sulu’s quarters had just barely closed behind her before Burgess asked, “Just how badly do you want this mission to fail, Captain?”

  Sulu took a seat on the sofa and gestured toward a chair. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Ambassador. Please have a seat and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Burgess didn’t sit, but instead grasped the back of a chair, her knuckles white. It was obvious that she was in a highly agitated state.

  “I think you already know what I’m talking about, Captain. What do you think will happen if the Tholians find out that you’ve sent probe-drones deep inside their territory?”

  Sulu attempted to mask his surprise at her question, but wasn’t sure he’d done it very well. She had very nearly caught him flat-footed. “What exactly are you talking about, Ambassador?”

  Her fingers dug deeper into the upholstery. “Please, Captain. Don’t try to be coy about this. You know as well as I do that there are diplomats who know Starfleet business just as there are Starfleet officers who work my side of the street. So I have it on very reliable authority that you have been [34] ordered to spy on the Tholians at the same time I’m trying to negotiate with them.”

  Sulu knew that she might not really know anything of the sort. It was possible that she was only fishing. On the other hand, it wasn’t inconceivable that someone close to Admiral Nogura had intentionally leaked word of Sulu’s covert surveillance mission to some member of the diplomatic corps. Especially if the tension between Starfleet’s brass and the Federation Council was really getting to be as bad as Sulu feared.

  “All right, Ambassador. Please sit down.” Still seated on the sofa, he stared at her until she complied. He considered offering her something to drink, but her serious demeanor made it clear that creature comforts were not uppermost on her mind at the moment.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d share with me exactly what you’ve been told about Excelsior’s mission vis à vis the Tholians,” Sulu said.

  She eyed him with evident suspicion. “That hardly seems fair, Captain. After all, I have no reason to expect that you’d be as forthcoming with me about any covert assignment you might have. Especially if Starfleet Command wants it kept secret.”

  Sulu chuckled. Until this moment, he had entertained the faint hope that Burgess might provide him with new intelligence about the Tholians, information that might help him interpret the data still coming aboard via Excelsior’s long-range sensors and probe drones. “Fair enough, Ambassador. So where does that leave us?”

  “Still on the same side, I would hope. On the side of peace.”

  “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” Sulu said. “But I’d say that peace depends largely upon what the Tholians decide to do. After all, it takes two sides to fight a war.”

  “Just as it takes two sides to wage peace,” she said, nodding.

  [35] “You’ll get no argument from me there. But you know how difficult it can be to create a lasting peace. Especially when there’s already so much suspicion on both sides.” Unfortunately, Ambassador, that’s as candid as I can afford to be with you right now, he thought with a twinge of genuine regret. He didn’t enjoy having to spy on a potential ally any better than she evidently did. But he also wasn’t sanguine about giving a species whose warrior caste had once tried to kill him a potential opportunity to attack the Federation. Starfleet simply had to discover the reasons behind the Tholian military buildup. It was, at least potentially, a matter of survival.

  Burgess rose, evidently sensing that he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—take her any further into his confidence than he had already. But she seemed anything but d
efeated. Her green eyes flashed like a pair of warp cores.

  “Granted, Captain. Suspicion is a difficult beast to tame. You may have more of a gift for diplomacy than I’d given you credit for.”

  “Thank you,” he said, surprised by the compliment.

  Burgess continued. “So I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that the Tholians’ next actions will no doubt be greatly influenced by whatever they may discover about your activities here, in their sovereign space. If you are spying on them, Captain—and if they catch you at it—you could very well touch off a war.”

  Sulu bristled at that. “That’s a lot of ‘ifs,’ Ambassador.”

  “Good diplomacy is largely about managing contingencies,” she said, her emotions now seeming to be under far better control than they had been when she’d first come in. “And one of the contingencies I now must plan for is the possibility of a tragic error on Starfleet’s part. A mistake that may frighten the Tholians back into belligerency and isolation.”

  Sulu was growing weary of the ambassador’s Starfleet-as-the-villain perspective. He considered pointing out that some of the most accomplished diplomats in Federation [36] history had begun their careers in Starfleet. Then he decided that his life’s work, and the ideals it embodied, needed no defense. It was time to turn the tables.

  “The outbreak of war is often seen as a failure of diplomacy, Ambassador,” Sulu said.

  She paused as if to consider his words. If they roused her anger, she concealed it well. Finally, she said, “If diplomacy fails because of the actions of the warriors, Captain, then whose failure is it, really?”

  And with that, she crossed to the door and departed, leaving Sulu alone with his growing misgivings about the prospects for peace with the Tholians—and with Burgess.

  She’s on the same side I am, he reminded himself. But the Tholians are definitely hiding something, whether she wants to face that or not.

  Chapter 4

  Aidan Burgess carefully unlocked the purple bicycle which was chained to a post in the cramped alleyway between the townhouses. She made sure that it didn’t clink as she laid it on the ground in the darkness. Since it was summer, the windows to her parent’s bedroom were open, and she knew that Mama Maére and Mama Diana would punish her if they knew she was sneaking out this late.

  But Aidan was ten years old, and there were lots of things she did that were secret. She had been coming out at night for two weeks now, pushing her bicycle up the steep incline of San Francisco’s Lombard Street, and coasting on it all the way back down the other side. The first time, she had just wanted to see what the city looked like after everyone else had gone to bed.

  The second night, she had ventured all the way out westward to Golden Gate Park, and had seen two people sleeping there, in bedrolls, under the stars. She watched them from a distance for a while, then crept closer. Eventually, one of them, a girl in her late teens, spoke to her.

  Ever since then, Aidan had returned to the park nightly to have conversations with her new friends, Lynna and Cal. They were traveling across the country, seeing the sights, exploring the world around them. They had little that they [38] took with them, but people took care of them along the way. Sometimes their benefactors were fellow travelers, sometimes they were locals.

  Lynna and Cal told Aidan all about their adventures, good and bad. A few spots in North America, they’d said, still hadn’t been put quite right after World War III, and that had happened over two hundred years ago. And while some areas had rebuilt their sprawl of cities, other sections of the country—just like here in the San Francisco Bay Area—had reverted to a greener, more natural state as portions of Earth’s population traveled to the stars.

  Aidan wanted to accompany them as they explored the country, but they told her it wasn’t right, it wasn’t her time. When she was older, she could make such decisions about her life. She could explore the world, meet people, perhaps even join Starfleet and see the galaxy. But for now, she had to be content with listening to her new friends’ stories of life on the road.

  One warm summer night, Aidan rode up to the usual meeting spot, but found that the sleeping bags and packs were gone. Lynna and Cal were missing as well. Aidan called for them, but no one answered. She sat in the grass where they had always sat together, and waited. Eventually, she decided she had to go home. But as she turned to go back to her bike, something at the base of a nearby tree caught her eye.

  The small package had a piece of paper with her name on it, and the words “fellow traveler” written underneath. She opened the package to find a bracelet inside. Holding it up in the moonlight, she saw that it wasn’t a fancy one made of metal, but was instead constructed of multicolored strings. None of the stones—which were strung like beads on the bracelet—matched. But Aidan knew that each one came with a story. Lynna and Cal had picked up the rocks on their travels—turquoise in Montana, an agate from somewhere in the Southwest, polished conch shell from the Florida Gulf [39] Coast, an Oregon sunstone—and Lynna had carried them with her in a sack.

  Aidan came back to the park the following night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Each time, she wore the bracelet left for her by Lynna and Cal.

  One day, Aidan’s mothers took her to the beach, and she found some small seashells in the wet sand. Mama Diana went swimming in the ocean, and emerged with some seaweed or kelp draped atop her head. Aidan threaded two of the small shells onto her bracelet that evening, and vowed to remember the story about her day at the beach when she saw Lynna and Cal again.

  Ten years later, Aidan Burgess had more stories to tell if she ever ran into her friends from the park again. She knew it wasn’t likely, but stranger things had happened. Her explorations of the world had shown her that.

  She and her fiancé, Ramon Escovarre, had come to the rainforests of the Amazon a few weeks earlier. Those forests had flourished during the two centuries following World War III. Now that the miners, factory farmers, and loggers were gone, most of the land was green again. There was little to explore here that technology had not laid bare in some fashion, though; sensor sweeps and mapping had shown exactly how many neo-hunter-gatherer tribes now lived within the jungles.

  Although most of the tribes had frequent visitors from the outside world, many of them lived in relative isolation. The concept fascinated both Aidan and Ramon, the notion that there were humans living, loving, and thriving on Earth who had deliberately absented themselves from modern culture and technology.

  So they had embarked on this journey of exploration, bringing with them as little of the outside world as possible. They had communicators and transponder tags, just in case of emergency; should they need medical aid, they could quickly be beamed or shuttled to safety. But they had [40] debated whether or not to bring a universal translator and a hand-phaser. Finally, they had agreed to bring both, but remained determined to use them only in the direst of emergencies.

  On the tenth day, Aidan could feel other presences in the trees and shadows around them. They were being watched, studied, measured, scrutinized ... She called out to them numerous times, but an answer did not immediately come.

  That night a response came, as shadowy forms approached from outside their encampment. Ramon saw them first, past the flickering flames of their small campfire. And then Aidan saw them, too. They were nearly naked, with dark skin and even darker hair. Aidan motioned them closer slowly, proffering the hand signs she had learned from explorers who had visited other indigenous tribes.

  The tribespeople left later that night, but were back again in the morning. They led Aidan and Ramon to a village, where more of the natives viewed them with wide, curious eyes. Aidan allowed them to prod and touch her, feeling her clothing and her skin and her hair.

  The natives maintained a communal house in the middle of the village, which Ramon identified as a shabono, of the type used by the Yanomami tribe. Whether or not these people were part of that tribe was unclear, but the geographical locati
on of the village made it distinctly possible.

  Over the following days, Aidan grew extraordinarily close to the aboriginal tribe. She never needed to use the universal translator, since she was quickly picking up bits and pieces of the tribe’s language and customs. She listened to their stories, to their history, to their gossip, to their hopes, and to their fears. They knew of the world beyond them, and some had-even departed to explore it, but most chose to stay safely within the bosom of their tribe.

  One day, as Aidan was at the river with the other women, a great outcry came from the village. Two of the men—and [41] Ramon—had been mauled by a pair of jaguars who were intent on stealing the red brocket deer the men had brought down for food. By the time Aidan and the others reached the village, one of the wounded hunters had died.

  Ramon and the other man were stable, but by nightfall, they were feverish. Although the decision caused her almost physical pain, Aidan used her communicator and activated an emergency beacon. She explained to the tribespeople that she had to get medical attention for Ramon, but they argued that their ancestral medicines were adequate to heal him.

  Aidan wasn’t willing to take the chance. She offered to help get the other injured man to safety, but he refused, staying with his family and his tribe. Weeping, Aidan gathered up all the things which she and Ramon had brought into the village and repacked them. Moments before the Federation Forest Service shuttle beamed them to safety, she took the bracelet off her wrist and untied a knot.

  Removing one of the two timeworn seashells she had gathered as a child, Aidan knelt and gave it to Omëbe, the sturdily built little girl who had always paid the most attention to Aidan’s stories of exploration. Aidan smiled as she closed the little girl’s hand over the tiny shell, then hugged her. As she stepped away, she saw tears in Omëbe’s dark eyes. Then the golden beam of the transporter took Aidan away.

  She never found out if the villager had died from his wounds, or if the ancient tribal remedies had saved him. She never learned what became of Omëbe, but she hoped that the girl might one day explore the world herself.