Its Hour Come Round Page 2

  We are, Raya thought, back where we were before the Pulse came, haranguing each other over petty things, our decades of suffering all but forgotten. Have we learned nothing from the experience?

  In the past she had almost always welcomed Kirk’s presence. The sheer brute force of his persuasiveness had kept her people and his from each other’s throats, had even prompted them to clasp hands on more than one occasion. Without him…Raya sighed, dashing tears out of the corners of her eyes with both sets of thumbs.

  Alone as she had felt once leadership of Mestiko fell on her narrow shoulders, she could always depend on the wisdom of her elor and the support of James T. Kirk. Now that they were both gone, she truly was alone.

  She remembered the day she had returned home after Elee’s funeral—the formal state funeral, not the lighthearted balloon trip she had shared with Kirk in memory of a woman who loved any form of flight—and found that the last of the sacred noggik trees was dying. A gift from Sulu, cloned in Enterprise’s botany lab, it was the only true specimen known to have survived the Pulse. Once power had been restored to her part of vosTraal, she had kept it in a special environmentally controlled case, watered and fed it and made sure it got enough artificial light.

  Even this had been something her people had squabbled over. People were dying, they argued, yet the Jo’Zamestaad wasted resources on a tree, however sacred. Still others had argued that it wasn’t just an indulgence, that the tree symbolized the Payav people and its existence gave them hope.

  Once communications were restored, Raya had fostered this second opinion by providing weekly newsfeeds about the young sapling as it grew and flourished. When she had been driven into exile on Kazar, she had entrusted the tree to Theena’s care, and her young protégé had kept it hidden through those desolate years so that the mar-Atyya wouldn’t find it and destroy it, for it was a symbol of Raya’s regime, which the mar-Atyya had taken great pains to subvert.

  Restored to its proper place in Raya’s office on her return and apparently none the worse for wear, it had just begun to show evidence of new buds which, it was hoped, could be self-pollinated to produce seed that would breed true. But Raya had returned to work immediately following Elee’s formal state funeral, where, knowing that the eyes of the planet were upon her, she had kept her composure. After all, there was not a family on Mestiko who had not lost loved ones, and few had had the luxury of dying peacefully as Elee had. So Raya had not lost control at the funeral, but remained dignified and contained.

  She had not felt her control slipping until she had locked herself in her office to go over some paperwork, and saw that the tree was dying.

  In the time she had been away—overcoming her fear of heights to scatter Elee’s ashes from a balloon over S’rii Tuuliie with James Kirk at her side; turning the event into a celebration, not a funeral; then bidding Kirk good-bye and countenancing the state funeral a week later—the tree’s blossoms had shriveled and dropped off, the leaves had turned yellow and the branches had begun to droop the way they ordinarily did only on very ancient noggik trees. The attempt to clone the tree had failed. It was dying, and there was nothing Raya could do.

  It was too much. She’d broken down then, curled up in a little ball, her arms wrapped around her delicate-looking skull as if to ward off blows, shaking with sobs as she hadn’t since she was a child. After all those deaths, culminating in her elor’s, and after not being able to cry in public because of who she was, she could at least cry in private at the sight of the last living thing on the planet that could be said to be unchanged by everything that had happened.

  She had been ready to give up, to step aside and let someone else decide her planet’s future and savor the victory, such as it was. She could not go on.

  Only a subspace message from Kirk that very afternoon, sent from wherever he was about his duties in the quadrant, telling her how much he’d enjoyed the balloon ride, had brought her out of her misery. He was always thoughtful enough to keep track of what time it was in her part of the universe before he called, even if it meant communicating at some ungodly hour where he was, and she’d always appreciated that.

  So it had continued over the years, despite the times they had not seen eye to eye on the future of her world; and not only officially, not only due to Kirk’s sense of responsibility to Mestiko, but because he valued Raya’s presence in his life. That was why this last time he had contacted her ahead of the official communiqué, to let her know that Mestiko’s time had come.

  “You’ll receive official communiqués from both the Federation Council and the Klingons,” he’d told her, his smile strangely shy on such a powerful man. “But I wanted to be the one to surprise you. Ambassador Spock will forgive me a little…self-indulgence.”

  “Ambassador Spock now?” Raya had responded, her own smile warm. “How wonderful! I look forward to seeing you…all of you…once more.”

  She had considered what the outcome of the Summit could mean. The future was heady, full of promise, the much-deserved reward for their struggle. She would savor announcing it to her people, regardless of the inevitable disgruntlement from a few corners. She would also calculatedly not announce the demise of the noggik tree, and if anyone asked she would change the subject, saving the bad news for a time when it could be slipped in as inconsequential in light of all the good news she had to share about the future.

  She had immediately thrown herself into a frenzy of preparations for the event. When she stopped to think about it, she did not honestly know which choice she would make, if the choice were hers alone. For ultimately, of course, it would be her people who decided.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Assuming her people ever stopped squabbling over who would sit where at the conference table. At least Kirk’s conspicuous absence distracted them from that momentarily. But count on the representative from the Tralva Nation to raise a ruckus from the start.

  “Where is Captain Kirk?” Deman elKramo demanded in a voice that carried from the back of the crowd of representatives as he elbowed his way to the front. “We were told he would lead the delegation. Is he delayed? Too busy to attend? Ashamed at last for his part in Mestiko’s suffering?”

  His was not the only dissenting voice.

  “Truly, Jo’Zamestaad, Kirk called this Summit, and he doesn’t have the grace to appear?”

  There were further murmurs, both of agreement and dissent.

  “…Kirk is a busy man….”

  “…not the only world under his aegis…”

  “If he hasn’t the time to attend, neither do we….”

  “Doubtless there’s a reasonable explanation….”

  “…not going to tolerate this nonsense…important matters to tend to in our home provinces…”

  “We will be on the next transport home!”

  Raya counted to twelve before she trusted herself to speak.

  “Captain Kirk is dead!” she shouted, her voice breaking at the end. In the stunned silence that followed, she added, “You disgrace yourselves with this behavior! Go home, then! I will find other representatives from your districts who at least have some manners!”

  Where she found the words or the voice to carry them through the crowd she would never know. Just as she ran out of words and voice, and before any of her fractious people could demand to know how long she had known and why they hadn’t been informed, the sight of a transporter beam—different from the familiar Federation one, and totally noiseless—stunned everyone into silence.

  When it ended, a phalanx of seven Klingons stood in their midst. At their head was the most formidable woman Raya had ever seen.

  Chancellor Azetbur herself had come to Mestiko.

  Flanked by two of her ministers and four bodyguards, each one larger than the next, Azetbur was nevertheless the focus of power within the group. Without saying a word, she commanded. The several dozen Payav ministers, so vociferous moments before, seemed scarcely able to breathe. Even Raya took
a moment to remember herself.

  “Madam Chancellor,” she managed, hoping her voice didn’t sound as strained as it felt as she held out her hands in the traditional Payav greeting. “Welcome to Mestiko.”

  Azetbur, resplendent in a gown that was equal parts leather, metal, and some sort of stiff glossy fabric that might have been satin and that rustled when she moved, stepped forward, taking Raya’s hands in her own. The gesture was accomplished—she had studied her hostess’s world and its traditions—and the chancellor neither startled at the feel of the two-thumbed Payav hands in her own, nor showed her teeth when she smiled.

  “Jo’Zamestaad,” she replied flawlessly and with a slight bow. Almost a head taller than Raya, she made it elegant. “I hope we can learn much from each other.”

  Azetbur then drew back slightly, letting Raya’s hands slip out of hers as she acknowledged the other Dinpayav.

  “Ambassador Spock, we meet again.”

  “Madam Chancellor,” he replied.

  “My condolences,” she said. “Kirk was a great warrior, and a man of honor.”

  How she knew, no one asked. But if the gathered Payav still had doubts, Azetbur’s words quelled them.

  Spock inclined his head in gratitude. It was the only public acknowledgment he would make of his private pain.

  “Inflicting my thoughts on others will not bring the captain back” was how he explained it to McCoy when the doctor brought it up, as Spock knew he inevitably would.

  “No, but it might help them get a little catharsis,” McCoy suggested.

  “As you have?” Spock asked dryly.

  He had a point, and both men knew it. Ever since they’d shared the same brain, McCoy hadn’t been able to bluff him.

  “I’ll grieve when I’m ready to, Spock. I’ll thank you to mind your own business in the meantime.”

  “As I would expect the same from you.”

  Impasse, then, only one of many. Then McCoy brought up what he’d come here to say in the first place.

  “You don’t need me on this mission. Uhura caught me in a moment of weakness and dragged me along. There’s still time for me to beg off.”

  Spock arched an eyebrow. “And do what?”

  “It isn’t really necessary to bring McCoy along,” Uhura did not ask Spock so much as tell him. “Dr. Lon—er, Dr. etDeja—has enough staff by now, supplemented by Starfleet Medical personnel, to do a final assessment of Payav health to be submitted to the steering committee.”

  She waited for Spock to respond, and he waited for her to finish her thought. “For that matter, the Payav have done a pretty thorough job of restoring the communications grid. Anyone with comm training can help them synch with Starfleet systems. There was no real reason to bring me along to double-check them, except that I might have wanted to see the place again.”

  “Indeed,” Spock said.

  Uhura came straight to the point. “You want me to keep an eye on him.”

  “I am concerned for his emotional state,” Spock said. “It has been my observation that he will express his grief either through immersing himself in his work or in less…salutary activities.”

  “So if we can keep him busy…”

  “Precisely.”

  “Which would also keep me busy.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And what about you, Spock?” Uhura remembered how she’d sat very quietly when she got the news, tears flowing down her cheeks, the room growing dark around her without her realizing it. They’d all been close to Kirk, closer than any ordinary crew. But none of them had been as close to him as Spock.

  The Vulcan’s face was as somber as ever. Not unreadable to those who knew him well, but whatever grieving he would do, he would do alone. Getting no answer to her question, Uhura had the wisdom to let it go.

  “I’ll do my best to keep Leonard out of trouble,” she promised.

  How often over the next few weeks would she regret promising that?

  She’d had to literally get him out of bed so they’d be on time for the rendezvous with Excelsior, overriding the lock on the door to his quarters, then running the shower and banging cabinet doors to make enough noise to rouse him from his stupor. It was the sound of breaking glass from one of several bottles of exotic liquors he’d lined up by the replicator to finish off one at a time that finally got him out from under the covers, a baleful look in his eye.

  “Goddammit, why can’t you let a man die in peace?” he muttered.

  “You don’t have time to die, Doctor. You’ve got an assignment and a deadline,” Uhura said crisply, returning his glare with one of her own, but handing him a mug of hot coffee at the same time. “Let’s get it in gear.”

  He managed to stagger from Excelsior’s transporter platform to his assigned quarters without more than a nod to anyone, only to find that someone had programmed the replicator in his suite so that it wouldn’t deliver anything alcoholic. By the time they’d gathered in the officers’ lounge to memorialize Kirk, he was sufficiently dried out to function, but he still wasn’t talking.

  Except to try to weasel out of the assignment.

  “I am afraid your presence is nonnegotiable, Doctor” was all Spock had to say on the subject.

  “Man doesn’t even get a chance to grieve….” McCoy muttered under his breath, then caught himself, remembering Vulcan hearing. By the time they’d made orbit around Mestiko, he was grumbling, for which Uhura was grateful. The quiet McCoy worried her; the grumbling one she could deal with.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Summit began the following morning with Jo’Zamestaad elMora’s opening remarks.

  “Honored Guests, Members of the Zamestaad, People of Mestiko,” she began from the dais in the Zamestaad’s Grand Hall as video feeds captured her from all angles and broadcast her words to every place on the planet that had comm. “Permit me to welcome you all to these proceedings, and to show you what has transpired on our world in recent years.”

  There was pride in her voice and her demeanor, but also something else not easy to read—hesitancy, perhaps, or even regret, though it was difficult to see, at first glance, what the leader of this battered but emerging world might have to regret.

  As she spoke, a series of holos appeared around the room.

  “Gentles, you can see here the rebuilding everywhere in our cities and our agricultural regions as our people once more remember what it is like to go out under a sky that is welcoming and a sun that is warm, to breathe fresh air, to smell the scent of growing things, and to feel the rain on our faces. For those who have come of age underground, it is almost as if they have been transported to a new world.

  “In fact,” she said, her face and voice going solemn, “it can be said that, to almost all Payav, this is a new and not always welcoming world where we find ourselves living.

  “In the nearly three decades since the Pulse ripped away our world’s ozone layer, plunging it into a new ice age and destroying virtually every living thing, the tireless efforts of many, both Payav and Dinpayav alike, have reclaimed our atmosphere, replenished our food supplies, and restored most of Mestiko to habitability. We cannot begin to express our gratitude to Dr. etDeja and the many who have done this mighty work. However…”

  She paused, the years of diplomacy thrust upon her by the passing of the Pulse having taught her perforce how to play to a crowd for maximum effect.

  “This is not, nor will it ever be, the Mestiko that we who grew to adulthood before the Pulse remember. We can rebuild the cities leveled in the disaster. We can dredge our waterways and restore our shorelines and reforest and plant crops on purified soil, and we have done so. We can find new and creative ways to utilize the vast regions of topography altered in the original disaster, and we have done so. Ours is now a flourishing world. But while the flora and fauna have been almost completely repopulated, they are…different.

  “Wherever possible, Dr. etDeja and his team have been able to preserve and/or replicate
genetic samples of the known species on the planet, down to insects, wildflowers, even blue-green algae. But the cloned species tend to have shorter life spans than their donors and, in the more complex species, they often don’t even resemble the donors at all.”

  Again Raya paused. Before the Pulse, she had been a gifted teacher, and the years that followed had only augmented her ability to hold an audience’s attention.

  “Before the disaster, nearly every Payav child had a beloved pet laanur.…” The screens around the room showed a series of images of something with a feline body, lustrous fur in a distinctive blue-and-silver striped pattern, webbed back feet and prehensile forefeet, with the luminescent dark eyes of a lemur, some of the pets gamboling about in a garden, others being cuddled affectionately by children or adults. “But most succumbed to cold and lack of sunlight in the shelters in the early years. Recent attempts have been made to replicate them from stored DNA, but the fuzzy newborn pups have grown into vicious, untamable creatures who live only a few months and more often than not have to be destroyed.”

  The screens showed several wild-eyed feral creatures with matted fur and bared fangs being held at bay by trained handlers attempting to capture them before they hurt anyone.

  “Our revered noggik tree, once native to all of the temperate regions, a religious and cultural symbol sung of in story and legend and featured on many nations’ flags, has been replaced by something which, at the genetic level, may be identified as a noggik tree. But what grows on the reforested hills and plains of modern-day Mestiko does not look anything like the trees we remember.

  “Dr. etDeja will tell you that native species have been supplemented and interbred with carefully screened imports from other worlds, mostly successfully,” Raya concluded. “Except for a few places, all abandoned now, where the scars will take centuries to heal, Mestiko has by and large been restored to a comfortably habitable planet. But as my people emerge at last from their underground shelters, many feel like exiles on a world they barely recognize.