STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael Read online

  She knew she couldn’t get both of them, but she sprang at the nearer one as they split to pass on either side of her. Her hands closed around his arm, hard muscle under the slippery jersey, and she turned and levered to stop him. He whirled, hand raised to strike her, and she caught his descending wrist and flipped him in a small, neat circle that ended with him slapping like a wet towel into the hard composite of the floor.

  She saw the second man’s kick coming at her head in time to roll with it but not in time to duck or block. It caught her across the cheekbone instead of the temple, knocking her staggering. The man scooped up his partner, who seemed to have recovered a little of his breath, and the two went pelting away down the hall.

  Uhura pushed herself to her feet off the wall where she’d fallen, but didn’t see much point in pursuit. She turned, her head stinging from the blow, and went back to where Sulu was bent over the body of the fallen victim.

  “How is he?” she asked, kneeling beside him.

  Sulu had turned him over; the thin Vulcan features looked sunken and drawn in the gray, shadowless light, reminding her with sudden poignance of Spock. “Bad. You think McCoy’s still at the bar?”

  She unhooked the communicator from her belt, touched the code-keys with that unthinking flicker of her thumb that becomes second nature to any trooper. “Dr. McCoy?”

  By the faint tinkling of the piano background she knew he was still where they’d seen him earlier that evening, quietly absorbing brandy alone at the corner table. Spock’s death, Uhura suspected, had hit McCoy far harder than he would admit.

  “McCoy here.” His accent had increased, as it always did when he’d been drinking.

  “Doctor, this is Lieutenant Uhura. We’ve got an injury on corridor ten, junction of 145. We’re calling Base Medical but I think you’d better get over here.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then a laconic, “Right,” and the click of the doctor’s communicator shutting off.

  Sulu glanced up from the unconscious Vulcan. “Are you all right?”

  Uhura grinned wryly, and touched the rapidly swelling lump on her cheekbone. “ ‘I got your footprints on my heart,’ ” she quoted a line from a currently popular song in the singer’s well-known drawl, which made Sulu laugh, and added in a normal tone of voice, “but I think I’ll live.” She tucked back the rumpled ends of her disheveled black hair, and touched the code buttons for contact with the Enterprise. “Uhura and Sulu here. Reporting in and requesting emergency extension of shore leave until 0500 hours. ...”

  “Zedrox.” McCoy tossed the half-empty plastic capsule down on the small bedside table. “The modern equivalent of the poisoned bodkin.”

  Kirk looked from it—an inch-long oval of soft plastic with a single thornlike needle projecting from one side—to the still face of Trae. The purplish color around the old man’s wrinkled lips was fading to the normal slightly greenish tinge, and his breathing seemed stronger. On the monitors above the bed, all indicators were rising to Vulcan normal. Still, he thought, looking down at that delicate profile against its frame of snow-white hair, the old man looked very fragile.

  McCoy went on, “Illegal as hell, of course—but also damn easy to smuggle in, especially if you have official connections.” Two heavy shots of trepidol had neutralized the effects of the alcohol in his system, but the Southern accent was still a little stronger than usual in his voice.

  “Like the Klingon imperial representative?” Kirk glanced across the bed at Kellogg, who had joined them a few minutes ago, her dark hair hanging in a loose, sloppy braid between her hatchet-sharp shoulder blades but otherwise not evidently worse for being wakened at 0430 by an emergency call. Irregular sleeping hours are the occupational hazard of being a base commander.

  She shrugged. “The imp rep says there’s some seventy-five Klingon male civilians in the private sector of the base, over whom he has jurisdiction but no direct control. He says he’ll inquire.”

  McCoy made a remark generally written as “Huh,” and went back to studying his feinberger readings of Trae’s metabolism. He loaded an ampoule into his injector and pushed up the sleeve of the dark, close-fitting garment that the old Vulcan wore under his flowing robes. There was the soft spang of the medi-gun, and the fluctuating green indicators on the monitors rose a fraction of an inch, then stabilized.

  Kellogg came around the bed to stand beside him. “What I wonder is why they’d have tried to kill him in the corridors?” she asked. “They could have gotten into either his quarters or his study just as easily.”

  “Could they?” said Kirk.

  She thought about it. “Well, maybe not his quarters, but certainly his study.”

  “Do you really think you could be sure of overpowering and killing someone—particularly a Vulcan—in that study without disturbing something? Something that might be noticed by someone who knew the way things in that room are ordered?” Kirk touched the zedrox capsule gingerly with the back of one fingernail. “My guess is that they wanted to find out what he might have known about Khlaru’s work—whatever Khlaru’s work had uncovered—and that the men who were sent to bring him for questioning only panicked and tried to kill him when Sulu and Uhura caught them. Have you notified Khlaru that his colleague has been injured, by the way?”

  “If Khlaru didn’t know it already,” remarked McCoy sourly.

  “I don’t think he did,” Kellogg said. “He was recalled to Klinzhai at 1500 hours yesterday. That was just about an hour after you put through your request, Captain, for a forty-eight-hour extension of base leave for the Enterprise. He was kept incommunicado in the Klingon sector of the base and left on the shuttle when the Klingon cruiser Schin’char came through at 0300.”

  “Interesting.”

  Kirk looked down, startled at the murmur of the old Vulcan’s voice. Trae was looking up at him, the dark eyes beneath their wrinkled lids weary-looking but perfectly clear.

  “What’s interesting?” Kirk asked.

  “The timing,” said Trae. “Historians are always interested in timing, Captain, even that of their own murder. Khlaru told me that he had been assigned here for five years—that all of his obligations upon his homeworld were nullified for that time. There was no time for a message to go from this base back to Klinzhai itself, of course; so the recall must be on the authority of the imperial representative himself.” He sat up, with the slow care of one who doubts that his body will obey him.

  “It seems that I was incorrect in my assessment of my position vis-à-vis the conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire,” he remarked softly. “Let us go.”

  Kirk regarded in some surprise the fragile, blue-veined hand extended to him.

  “Go where?”

  The wrinkled lips tightened momentarily at this slowness of wit. “To my study, of course,” Trae said thinly. “There are matters to discuss.”

  Chapter 10

  “AARON.” Ishmael came back into the house, three nights after their return from San Francisco, and took off his heavy jacket and shook the rain from his long hair. He had just gotten back from walking Biddy Cloom home to the dormitory, as he had these last two nights.

  Biddy, never one to let well alone, had taken it upon herself to come up to the house by the mill and do the cooking for the two bachelors as soon as she’d heard that Stemple was laid up with a sprained ankle. Aaron had to admit to himself that the girl could cook—and, later on the first evening, had realized that her scatterbrained fluttering concealed an ability to remember a thousand tiny details of a conversation and a cutthroat knack for cribbage. At first he had only suffered her to be around him because of Ish’s kindness for the girl, but he had to admit to himself that on closer acquaintance, she wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d thought. He even found himself thinking, as Ish had escorted her out that first evening, that she probably wouldn’t make a half-bad wife for Jason Bolt, if only Bolt would have the wits to see it.

  Ishmael came over to the fire where Aaron s
till sat with his swollen foot up on a hassock, the cribbage board laid out before him like the picked-at remains of an abandoned meal. “May I ask you a favor, Aaron?”

  “Sure,” he said equably. “What ... ?”

  “Do not press Jason Bolt on your bet.”

  Aaron looked up at him, shocked. “What? Now, Ish, I know you’re a friend of Josh Bolt’s, but ...”

  “My—friendship”—he spoke the word as if it stuck in his throat—“with Joshua has nothing to do with it.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. Finally he said, “The bet should never have been made, Aaron. You have no right to do what you are doing.”

  “Nonsense, Ish,” Stemple said briskly. “Bridal Veil Mountain will double our profits. And it was a fair bet. I put up capital, money I couldn’t well afford, to pay Captain Clancey for his trip around the Horn with those girls. You know what that cost me, and what it costs me every week to feed and house the lot of them. I’m supporting a—a harem of twenty young women in that dormitory. That’s what the profits from the mountain, when I get them, are going to pay for. Bolt knew what he was doing when he made that bet.”

  The firelight rippled in an uneasy dance of shadow over the angular, alien face, and repeated itself, infinitesimally tiny, in Ish’s dark eyes. “I did not mean that you are being unfair to Jason Bolt,” said Ishmael quietly. “You, and Bolt, have no right to do what you are doing to the girls themselves.”

  Stemple looked away.

  In that dry, logical voice, Ishmael continued, “You know the kind of man Jason Bolt is, Aaron. You knew that when you signed the papers legalizing the bet. You know his charm, his single-mindedness, and the force of his character, and you know that he uses them to achieve his ends. Few of those girls have the maturity or experience to resist when he pressures them to accept some proposal or other of marriage, from one or another of his men. They, too, are strangers in a strange land, dependent upon him, and some of them are very young. He will push marriage at them, and they will marry.”

  Aaron shrugged uncomfortably. “All women want to get married.” There was neither conviction nor innocence in his tones.

  “Do they?” Ish said dryly. “I have been talking to Biddy. ...”

  “Oh, Biddy.”

  “Do not judge her, Aaron. For myself I cannot understand the prejudice against her, perhaps because I understand neither beauty nor desire. But I know that very little passes among the girls that she does not know. They confide in her. I do know that at least Candy Pruitt is uncertain about marriage—does not, in fact, know whether she wishes to wed or not. You know she loves Jeremy Bolt, but she does not trust her own heart.”

  “That’s no concern of mine,” grumbled Stemple.

  “Perhaps not. But logically, you know, and she knows, that she will marry him. She must, in the end, to save the mountain. But she will always wonder, if she does not act freely. No amount of love can eradicate the seeds of bitterness. You have no right to do that to her, no right to do that to Jeremy, who never harmed you, nor to their children.”

  Stemple was silent, understanding what Ish meant and unwilling to admit the truth of it, even to himself. The sense returned to him again, that he had felt after the rescue of Jeremy and Candy from the flooded mine and had felt even more strongly when he first had found this strange man, unconscious in the unmarked dew of the ferns—a sense of standing at the beginning of a long chain of circumstance that reached out long years past the time when the deed to Bridal Veil Mountain had any importance to anyone. He muttered defensively, “Bolt signed the papers. We need the money to recoup our losses.”

  “There is always money, Aaron,” said Ishmael quietly. “What you are taking from these girls is time, and choice, and with those you have no right to tamper, for they are irrecoverable.”

  Stemple sighed, and pushed at the cribbage board discontentedly. Biddy had beaten him last game, too, which hadn’t improved his temper any. But he knew Ishmael was right. Did every action, every person, stand at the beginning of such a chain of circumstance? His own decision to save Ishmael, to let the alien into the life of Seattle—what would the final repercussions of that single choice be? The marriage of some young New England girl to a man who loved her, instead of to the first man who asked? A child born of love instead of resentment?

  Mushy sentimental consideration, he told himself bleakly. It wasn’t eyewash like that which got you where you are today. But the words rang false in his mind. What would he himself have been, he wondered, if his parents had loved instead of resented one another?

  “Well, I won’t back down in front of Jason Bolt,” he grumbled at last. “But I tell you what I will do. I’ll offer to let him buy his way out of the bet, for a fair price. Will that satisfy you?”

  “Indeed,” replied Ishmael. He felt a curious, nagging sliver of shame somewhere within him, not so much for having taken the girls’ part against his uncle, but for having understood their feelings—for having understood anyone’s feelings. Why shame? he wondered.

  Aaron settled back into his chair, and winced at the movement of his hurt ankle. He growled, “All I have to say is, for a mathematician who’s always talking about logic, you’re getting damn sentimental in your old age.”

  Ishmael raised an eyebrow at him. “Perhaps I am.”

  Sunday tea at the dormitory, the gray light of the afternoon already fading behind the curtain lace, firelight and lamplight warming the faces of the men and girls gathered there. Candy, cheeks pink with steam, was pouring tea; the soft murmur of talk formed a muted background as some of the girls worked at their mending and others crowded around Dulcie Wainright, planning yet another simple marriage ceremony in the white pine-box chapel on the edge of the woods.

  Jeremy Bolt, seated on a hassock, was playing his old guitar, and the voices of men and girls joined his in the blending of old tunes:

  And it’s three-score and ten boys and men

  were lost from Grimsby town,

  From Yarmouth down to Scarborough

  many hundreds more were drowned ...

  Lottie and Clancey shared the room’s worn plush love seat, Aaron Stemple sitting, his injured foot still enthroned on a small footstool and a pile of pillows, nearby. Joshua and Ishmael flanked the chimney breast like bookends, watching and listening to the run of the voices, the smooth flow of the guitar and the light glitter of Biddy’s hammer-dulcimer dancing like a child around the main flow of the melody.

  From his seat in the wing chair Aaron surveyed the room, and smiled a little to himself at the homeliness of the place. The dormitory was a barnlike building, long and narrow, thrown together more or less at random after Clancey’s ship had sailed away for New England to fetch the brides. He had to admit that the lumber he’d donated to the project was stuff he couldn’t have sold elsewhere—the men from the mill and Jason’s loggers, in an excess of sentiment, hope and frustrated desire, had knocked the place together with amazing speed.

  Still, it was built with care and enthusiasm, and the simple decorations the girls had contrived gave it a kind of beauty; that elusive quality known as “a woman’s touch” that comes of caring and comfort. There wasn’t a girl who hadn’t brought something from New Bedford: some knickknack, lace curtains, a braided rug. Clancey had run in some old furniture from San Francisco—a couple of battered wing chairs and the love seat—Biddy, bless her inventive heart, had framed prints from Godey’s Lady’s Book to hang on the walls. Since last January, it was all the home these girls had known.

  They’d done well, he thought. Less than half the original thirty were left. Sheila Meyers had married last week, and was sitting across the room with her new husband, talking with her former roommates, teasing the stolid Miss Wainright to unaccustomed giggles and blushes. Katy Hoyt, Robin Manderly, Elizabeth Darrow were engaged this week. Jason was encouraging them to marry before Christmas—not, thought Stemple, looking at the shy Miss Hoyt holding hands with her equally shy beau, an enormous, silent Norwegian logger, th
at they needed much in the way of encouragement.

  Yes, thought Aaron, the girls have done well. Well for themselves, and well for the men they’d wed. And having spoken to Jason, he himself felt better in their presence than he had before.

  Jeremy’s voice shifted into an old defiant tune, the girls’ joining his in sweet, rising chorus:

  One word more, a signal token,

  Whistle of the marchin’ tune,

  For the pikes must be together

  At the rising of the moon ...

  Captain Clancey’s voice joined in, a buzzing bass rumble from a true son of the Rebellion. Aaron looked across at him, holding Lottie in the circle of one brawny tattooed arm. They were like an old husband and wife, content with one another, lovers of long standing and faithful as married; happier, Aaron knew, than many licit couples he’d seen. When Jeremy finished Clancey raised his teacup, and asked, “And will you be knowin’ ‘The Minstrel Boy,’ buck-o?”

  Jeremy shook his head, and leaned one arm over the slim waist of the guitar.

  Clancey hummed a tune, rumbling but recognizable through his faded whiskers.

  “Oh!” Jeremy began to pick the notes, a wild, oaring, archaic tune, like an old hymn.

  “Aye, that’s the song.”

  “Isn’t that something about the crimson blood of the Lamb?” inquired Biddy doubtfully, tapping at the strings of her dulcimer.

  “Bah! An Orangeman’s puling hymn they made of it, that was a song for warriors and bards.”

  Guitar and dulcimer blended, and Clancey picked up the tune, his voice graveling over the climbing surge of the notes:

  The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him.

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  His wild harp slung behind him ...

  His voice faltered, uncertain, as he forgot the words, which he could generally be counted upon to do. Ishmael’s deep voice rose to support him: