STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered Read online

  Over the next thirty years, Aidan had changed. Her marriage to Ramon hadn’t lasted long, and she had found a new calling, working her way up the ladder through the Federation’s diplomatic service, discovering as she did so that the exploration of new cultures and new civilizations always brought her back to the things she loved.

  She eventually remarried, but Shinzei, her beloved [42] husband, was by now a decade dead, and she had been alone ever since his passing. Her parents were now both long gone. She had no forebears and no children. Her legacy was her work, and of late, even that was wanting.

  During her college years, she had come to despise the militarism that Starfleet represented. Now, as the century counted down ponderously toward its end, she wondered if too many years spent working alongside that blunt military instrument had hardened her, turned her bitter. She wondered how any diplomat could accomplish anything of lasting value in Starfleet’s heavily armed shadow.

  Am I just marking time until the end of history, when the Federation—in all its well-intentioned beneficence—finally engulfs and devours every other technological society in the galaxy?

  In her guest quarters aboard Excelsior, Aidan Burgess unpacked a special box. There, atop a velvet lining of deep indigo, lay the bracelet she had gotten as a child. Beneath the top layer of cloth was a collection of dozens of stones, bones, and shells, representing every planet she had visited.

  Burgess held the bracelet up and moved to the mirror. Looking through her beloved keepsake, she stared at her reflection. She looked at her image and tried to find a glimmer of the girl from the park, or the woman from the rainforest, or the accomplished diplomat who had brokered momentous peace agreements on Epsilon Canaris III and Dreyzen.

  But she could see no sign of them.

  All she saw was a tired, bitter woman who had lost her dreams of exploration to a system of rules and regulations that too often seemed to value conflict over peace.

  She closed her eyes, wishing she could break the rules and ride her purple bicycle off to adventure once again.

  Then she came to a decision.

  * * *

  [43] A low-pitched chime announced her arrival at the door to the special reception area on Deck Eight that was still human-compatible. A narrow walkway, kept separate from the adjacent Tholian-friendly environment by a complex series of interleaved forcefields—their boundaries tinted orange so as to be easily visible—ringed a portion of the room. Although the gravity and atmosphere within this walkway were kept to M-class specifications, the oppressive heat from the artificially maintained Tholian atmosphere was stifling. Burgess hadn’t been anywhere this hot since the rainforest.

  The Tholians were, of course, out of the environment suits they had worn when they’d first beamed aboard. Their scant clothing—chiefly flowing, bannerlike triangles of Tholian silk or some similarly tough fiber—seemed to exist purely for adornment’s sake. Their large, polygonal heads were composed of numerous triangular and pentagonal shapes. Their six-limbed, moist-but-hard-looking bodies were all planes and angles, colored in every shade of gold, red, green, and white. However, the light refraction caused by the hot, high-pressure Tholian atmosphere and the surrounding containment forcefields made their actual hues difficult to determine.

  Just like humans, Burgess thought, these people can be judged only in terms of their own environment and experiences.

  She touched the small vocoder she wore around her neck and called out to a Thalian who was diligently engaging three of his insectoid limbs in some repetitive task over a blocky, crystalline machine; Burgess surmised that he was typing up a report. “Junior Ambassador Mosrene. I greet you in friendship.”

  “As I receive you,” Mosrene said, clambering toward her on his lower four appendages. “What purpose does your visit serve?”

  “I wish to speak to Admiral Yilskene. Please contact him for me.”

  [44] Mosrene cocked his polyhedral head to one side, rotating it oddly. “You cannot contact him yourself?”

  “I don’t believe it is wise for me to do so,” Burgess said. If Sulu’s crew intercepted her message, they might cut her off before she’d had her say. The captain might even have her arrested. He might do that anyway.

  Moments later, an apparently bewildered Mosrene had dragged a large viewscreen-communication device—apparently hewn from some sort of stone—closer to the forcefield, and keyed in the codes for contacting Yilskene’s flagship. The screen quickly produced an image of both Yilskene—whom she had not yet met face to face—and Ambassador Kasrene, who had evidently returned to the flagship to confer with the admiral for some reason or other.

  Swallowing hard, Burgess cleared her throat and said, “Admiral Yilskene, Ambassador Kasrene, I believe that only an honest and truthful exchange will help our peoples reach an accord.”

  Because of their lack of easily readable facial expressions, Burgess had trouble fathoming the emotions of the pair. Still, she thought their body language suggested intense interest.

  “We concur on this,” Kasrene chorused in reply.

  Burgess took a deep breath. “Then in the interests of honesty, truth, and peace, I must tell you something that I know you will find greatly disturbing. ...”

  Chapter 5

  In the near-darkness, Lieutenant Tuvok could feel the calm that had been slipping away from him ever more frequently over the past several days. The ritual candles that burned before him—the room’s only illumination—gave his spartan quarters a warm glow.

  Tuvok sat cross-legged on his meditation mat on the floor, his tunic and high-collared turtleneck laid carefully on his bed. His boots lay beside the bed. Shirtless and shoeless, he could feel even the slightest whisper of air in his room. Wriggling his toes, unfettered by footwear, was an indulgence for him, one of the few he allowed himself.

  On the low table in front of him was a keethara, with many of its component blocks laying about nearby. He had begun assembling this particular “structure of harmony” two weeks prior, and had worked on it during each of his daily meditation sessions. Today it still remained unfinished. Each new block he added seemed unharmonious.

  The purpose of the blocks was to focus his thoughts and help him to hone his mental control. Instead, they were causing him anxiety and frustration. No. The keethara blocks are not the cause of my concern.

  His emotions had been building in intensity for some time now. More and more he felt tainted by the emotions of [46] his crewmates. It had always been so, even from his first day at Starfleet Academy. With cold, dispassionate logic, he could fathom the most complex scientific questions; he had excelled in his studies, most especially the tactical sciences. But he could never understand—or perhaps allow himself to comprehend—the emotional attitudes of his teachers and fellow classmates.

  Upon graduation, Tuvok had been assigned to the U.S.S. Excelsior, just four years after entering Starfleet Academy. Prior to embarking on this posting, Tuvok had consulted with his most trusted teacher and advisor, a middle-aged Vulcan named Xon. Professor Xon had confided to him that life aboard a starship full of emotional beings could be extremely difficult, especially if one was the only Vulcan among them.

  Tuvok had had no problem believing Xon’s words then. After all these years, he was still inclined to agree with them.

  Though five years had passed since he had lodged his protest against Captain Sulu’s ill-advised attempt to rescue a pair of colleagues during the Khitomer crisis, Tuvok remained bothered by the capricious emotions that so often seemed to guide the conduct of Excelsior’s captain and crew. Even with the current mission, Tuvok sensed that both Captain Sulu and Ambassador Burgess were basing their decisions regarding the Tholians mostly on what humans liked to refer to as their “gut instincts.” The dispassionate logic that so often provided the key to survival in a chaotic universe was, as usual, being given short shrift by humans.

  Tuvok carefully picked up a keethara block and held it over a section of the small structure
on the table. He knew he could not blame his difficulties with human emotions entirely on his crewmates; it had been a part of him since his earliest days. Though he had been called brilliant as a child, his penchant for constantly questioning his teachers had exceeded the expected norms. More than once, his instructors had tried to impress upon him the importance of [47] occasionally simply accepting their experience, erudition, and authority. Instead, he had responded with volleys of interrogatives that had bordered on insubordinate. And yet, despite his alleged deficiencies in tact, Tuvok had remained convinced that his questioning spirit was logical. How could the teachers have allowed themselves to react so emotionally to it?

  Then, at the age of nine, Tuvok first grappled with his own emotional demons. And they had almost destroyed him.

  Returning home from the primary seminary, young Tuvok was faced with bad news from his father, Sunak. The family sehlat, Wari, had stumbled into the path of a ground car. “Her injuries were too severe to be repaired,” Sunak had told him in measured tones. “She had to be euthanized.”

  Tuvok felt pain stab into him, an agony unlike any he had ever felt before. Wari had been his pet all his life; she was older than he was, and had treated him like one of her own cubs as far back as he could remember. He used to hold onto her fangs and she would shake him gently from side to side. Sometimes, he had slept curled up next to her, warmed on desert winter nights by her thick covering of russet-colored fur.

  Now, she was gone. His parents had already made plans to dispose of her body, but he had screamed until they allowed him to see his pet’s corpse. T’Meni, his mother, had stood nearby as Tuvok ruffled Wari’s fur and stroked her ears, unmindful of the verdant blood that matted it in spots.

  Tuvok had squatted low, on the same level with Wari’s lifeless head, and pried open her eyelids. The eyes were dark and glassy. “It’s not here,” he said, sobbing.

  “What are you looking for?” his mother asked, her voice steady and emotionless.

  “Wari’s katra.”

  Sunak had come into the yard, and spoke then. “Wari did not have a katra. Animals are without katra.”

  [48] Tuvok heard his father’s words as a betrayal. He knew what he felt from Wari. She had loved him without reservation, in a way that he had never felt even from his own parents. She had protected him, played with him, touched him, cared for him.

  “If Wari does not have a katra, then neither do either of you!” Tuvok screamed, tears scalding his cheeks. He hugged the sehlat’s head tightly.

  T’Meni crouched, lowering one knee to the ground so that she could look Tuvok in the eye. “That isn’t logical, Tuvok.” She folded her arms and looked at him serenely, as if the truth of her statement was obvious.

  Irrationally, Tuvok wanted her to hold him, to feel his mother and father embrace him the same way his pet so often had, to protect him and soothe away his pain. But she wouldn’t. That was not the Vulcan way.

  His hand clutching a few long hairs from Wari’s coat, Tuvok ran out of the yard, pushing past his father. That night, with Vulcan’s co-orbital world of T’Khut dominating the sky, he stole out of their home with a pack full of provisions and a thin, curved knife. The ritual blade—a sessilent—was his father’s.

  Tuvok had gone on a ten-day-long Kahswan ordeal when he was seven, but as he departed through the ceremonial grounds of ShiKahr and eastward toward the punishing heat of the Plains of Gol, he knew that ten days would not be enough to heal him. Now he was embarking on the ritual of tal’oth, making his way over the desiccated wasteland of Vulcan’s Forge, across the jagged mountains that marked its eastern boundary. And back, if the gods willed it so.

  Four months later, Tuvok returned to his home, slightly taller and much thinner than when he had departed. He spoke to no one of his journeys, except to tell his mother that he had learned to grow orchids in the parched desert, where no flowering plant should have been able to thrive.

  But during his ordeal, Tuvok had forced himself to purge [49] the emotions he had felt. By ridding his mind of the need for affection, of the pride in his accomplishments, and of the sense of loss that had come with Wari’s passing, Tuvok believed that he had come to feel nothing at all, other than the spiritual exultation of dispassionate, affect-free logic.

  Over the following years, his path toward Kolinahr was interrupted again. At sixteen, he fell in love with a visiting Terellian girl named Jara, and his infatuation had almost consumed him. Another trip across the desert wastes—and months spent under the tutelage of a Vulcan Master—helped Tuvok to extirpate his emotions yet again.

  Since that time, as he’d left adolescence and entered adulthood, Tuvok became better able to master and suppress his emotions, to channel his mind’s energies into the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of logic. He had entered Starfleet only at the urging of his parents, and his decision to bow to their will had led him inexorably here, now, to this ship so filled with self-contradictory emotion.

  In a few weeks, his original five-year assignment aboard the Excelsior would be completed. If not for the persuasion of T’Meni and Sunak, who had believed that exposing their son to non-Vulcan cultures would prove beneficial to him, Tuvok would have resigned his commission and returned to Vulcan immediately after the Praxis-Khitomer affair had concluded. But now that he had fulfilled his promise to his parents to finish out his Excelsior posting, he saw that things weren’t quite so simple. Now that he was a valued senior officer, loyal to his captain and his shipmates, he truly didn’t know if he wanted to stay aboard the ship, accept another assignment with Starfleet—or perhaps pursue an altogether different path.

  Staring at the keethara block he still held in his hand, Tuvok wondered idly if the meditation aid was attempting to tell him something. A keethara structure was supposed to reflect the state of its creator’s mind. I have been unable to [50] build a cohesive structure from these blocks. Does this then mean that I cannot guide my life in a cohesive fashion either? Have the emotions so rampant aboard this ship infected me to such an extent?

  A computer chime interrupted his reverie, signaling that it was nearly time for him to attend another Tholian diplomatic function. As he put the block down on the table amongst a jumble of others, he knew only one thing with certainty: If I remain aboard this ship, whatever serenity I have worked to acquire could be lost.

  And if that occurs, I will fall prey to emotions.

  The voices of the diplomats droned on across the red-hued conference room under the watchful eyes of Lieutenant Akaar and his discreet security contingent. Sulu sat in the back of the room, studying the Tholians closely. Back when he had first encountered them, Sulu had only seen Commander Loskene on the bridge viewer. There had been much debate afterward about whether the multifaceted image they had seen had been a helmet, or the Tholian’s actual head. Because their features were obscured by their bulky environment suits, Sulu still wasn’t completely sure.

  But from the conversations and negotiations that had unfolded so far today, Sulu had come to understand a number of things about the alien race. Biologically, they were almost living mineral formations. Their cells were mostly crystalline, although they must also have contained fluid media in order to carry out metabolic processes. Their skins appeared to be faceted, and each Tholian he had seen so far—whether through the faceplate of an enviro-suit or from behind an environmental forcefield—seemed to bear a unique color scheme. Like humans and their almost infinitely varying colorations of hair, eye, and skin, so too did the Tholians possess an apparently endlessly variegated array of tones.

  For a fleeting moment, Sulu managed to forget that the [51] Tholians might represent a potential threat. Watching their utterly inhuman shapes and movements, he recalled the wonder and anticipation with which he had anticipated such encounters during his childhood. It felt wonderful to be free of fear and suspicion, if only for an instant. They’re so different, he thought, exultant. So exotic. Meeting creatures like this is what being in S
tarfleet is supposed to be about.

  The Tholians all wore their protective amber-colored enviro-suits, garments fashioned from the same Tholian silk from which Ambassador Burgess’s special gown had been made. The Tholians’ suits were cool to the touch on the outside, but Ambassador Kasrene had explained that they were broilingly hot internally. The atmosphere on their home world was caustic and superheated, almost like that of Venus. Since nitrogen, oxygen, and the cool temperatures characteristic of class-M environments were deadly to the Tholians, the suits were an absolute necessity on occasions in which humans and Tholians needed to mill about together in the same environment.

  Even more peculiar than their biology, though, was Kasrene’s explanation of the social structure on Tholia. The lifespan of a Tholian was generally six to eight months from birth to maturation to natural death. Their knowledge could be shared from one to another, and from generation to generation, in a process which seemed roughly analogous to a “crystal memory upload.” This allowed the newly matured Tholians to continue the work and lives of their predecessors, with only a minimal amount of learning having to be accomplished by means of the old-fashioned trial-and-error method.

  Maybe their short lives explain why they’re such clockwatchers, Sulu thought, recalling Spock’s observations about the Tholians’ famed punctuality.

  Responding to a question from Dr. Chapel, Kasrene explained that although memories were shared between generations or familial structures, the process did not quite create [52] a “hive mind,” since each Tholian chose the individuals with whom he would share his memories. There was a kind of shared memory archive for their species known as “the Lattice,” but it contained more general, species-specific knowledge and history, and operated on an almost instinctual level.