The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (6 page)

“And that’s precisely my point,” said Batra, freeing her hand. “This was ... this
is
our time. And yet we’re here, on Farius Prime, where no one in his right mind goes, not if he wants to stay out of trouble. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? That you’re always in trouble?”

“That’s the rumor,” he said. It was as close a reference to his previous posting on the
Barker
—and the fact that he hadn’t been transferred to
Enterprise
under the best of circumstances—as she’d ever come. He’d given her the official version, but no one—not Garrett, or Batra, or anyone else on board—knew the whole story. Halak kept his face impassive. “You have a question?”

“No,” she said, her teeth nipping at a corner of her lower lip. “Well, yes. I know you’ve told me about that Ryn mission, right before you were transferred. ...”

“And?” he prompted when she hesitated.

“And I know it’s not the whole truth. Don’t bother to deny it; I’m not really asking you to tell me right now. But that’s just an example.”

Halak reached a hand to the scar along his jaw: a souvenir of that particularly disastrous mission. “An example of what?”

“Of how you approach things. You tell the truth, but only to a certain point. I feel it,” she bunched a fist over her heart, “right here.”

“You have something specific in mind?”

“Yes, I do. Why are we here?” Batra tapped a nail upon their table with a tiny click. “And why didn’t you want me with you?”

Halak blew out. “Damn, but you’re persistent.”

“Yes. So answer the question.”

“All right.” Halak took a pull of his drink, liking the way it burned a track down to his stomach before spreading out along his belly like fingers of liquid fire. “I’ll tell you what. I answer your question and you answer mine. Deal?”

She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Okay. You first.”

He put his hands on the table and laced his fingers together. “I’m here to see an old friend. Her name is Dalal. Dalal took care of me on Vendrak IV.”

“Where you were born. This was after your parents died?”

“Exactly.”

“Is she one of your relatives?”

“No. Just an old family friend. Actually, she used to work for my father.”

“As what?”

Halak shrugged. “Housekeeper, secretary, nanny ... you name it. My mother died first ... you know that, of course. From Denebian fever.”

“I know. But you never really talked about how that happened.”

“How does anyone get Denebian fever?” Halak put both hands around his drink but didn’t lift his glass. “Not enough food, terrible living conditions. We didn’t have it all that great, not until my father found steady work. But she got sick before he could and then she died. I was ten.”

Batra’s eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s so awful.”

Halak tried a smile that didn’t quite work. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” (Of course, he couldn’t really describe to her what it
was
like to watch his mother shrivel away bit by bit. And what she said to his father when she thought Halak couldn’t hear:
I’ll never see my children grow up
...)

He closed down the memory. “After that, my father ... he was never the same. For one thing, he just didn’t have a lot of time for me. At first, I thought it was because of my mother, but he’d never really been there. Always gone on business. A ... what’s the old saying?” Halak snapped his fingers. “A fly by night. That’s it.”

Batra’s brows met in a frown. “Fly by night?”

“Yeah, it’s an old nautical expression. This big sail,” Halak held his arms apart, gestured with his hands, “and you could rig it and forget it. But what it really means is someone who’s only interested in a quick profit. That was my father. Always some scheme. Except nothing panned out, not until ...” His voice trailed away.

“Until what?”

“Oh.” Halak blinked, refocused. “Until he got involved in some business ... I was too young to know exactly what.”

“And then?”

“A couple of things. One, he was gone for long, long stretches of time. Longer than before, but by that time, Dalal was there and she made sure I had food, clothes on my back. She even worked at trying to get me to go to school.”

“How did she do?”

“
Well,
except school.” Halak sighed, finger-combed his hair. “I was a pain in the ass. Always in trouble. I started stealing. Little things at first—you know, food, I was always good at stealing food, maybe because I always felt hungry, even when I had plenty to eat.”

“I don’t think a kid forgets going hungry.”

“No, but I think I did it to get back at my father. See, he took up with another woman not long after Dalal came to live with us, and this woman moved in. I never liked her much, and not just because she wasn’t my mother. You know, she tried to get me to call her Mom, must have been a hundred times. A thousand. I never could, and looking back on it, I think she did her best to make me like her. But I didn’t. Sort of a willful type of hate, if you know what I mean. Dalal didn’t like her either, but I never knew if that wasn’t just jealousy.”

“And you weren’t? Jealous, I mean.”

Halak ran a meditative finger over his scar. “Probably, though it’s only now that I see it. Back then, I was just an angry kid whose mother was dead and whose father was gone all the time but thought this other woman might solve all my problems. Eventually she left my father. Then, when my father died, Dalal took over. I was fourteen.”

“How did your father die?”

Halak’s fingers teased a corner of his cocktail napkin. The paper tore, and he rolled it into a tight ball. “Business deal gone bad. I really don’t know the specifics.”

“With all that, I’m amazed you made it into the Academy.”

“Makes two of us. But after my parents were gone and there was just Dalal, I think I realized that I had to do something to help myself. I’m not an institutional type of guy, but I also never felt a sense of belonging to a real family, and I guess I figured Starfleet was the place where I could. Find a family, have a sense of belonging somewhere. Anyway, that’s where Dalal fits in. I figure I owe her. So, she called,” Halak put his hands out in a gesture that encompassed the café, “and I came.”

“But she was on Vendrak IV,” Batra said slowly, as if she wanted to cement the details of his story in her mind. “And now she’s on Farius Prime. That’s a long way from Vendrak IV, Samir. How did she get here? Why?”

“Why does anyone come to Farius Prime?” Halak asked rhetorically. “They come for the money. The last I heard, Dalal was on Vendrak IV. I haven’t heard from her for years, ever since I left for the Academy. And then, you know, deep space assignments and all that,” Halak spread his hands, a
what-can-I-say
gesture. “Time passes.”

“So why does she want to see you now?”

“I’m not sure,” Halak said, relieved that this, at least, was true. “But I owe her, Ani. Dalal put up with a hell of a lot.”

“This still doesn’t explain why you had to sneak around.”

Halak sighed. “Look, Farius Prime isn’t the nicest planet in the galaxy. I didn’t want you exposed to that. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Ani.”

“I can handle myself.”

“I’m not saying you can’t. Hell, you’re better with a phaser than I am. But that’s not the point. Farius Prime is a rough place.”

“And how would you know?”

“Know that it’s rough?” Halak hiked a shoulder. “How does anyone know anything?”

Batra gave Halak a narrow look. “Stop playing games. You’ve been here more than once, and don’t bother to deny it. I can tell: the way you handle yourself, the fact that you seem to know where you’re going. You never once asked for directions.”

He felt a little clutch of anxiety in the pit of his gut, and he became aware that his fists were clenched. He forced his fingers to unfurl.
Relax, would you, she doesn’t know; none of them know.

He kept his features matter-of-fact, and opted for the truth—to a point. “Ani, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to
be
hurt. This isn’t about you handling yourself. It’s about being smart, not taking unnecessary risks. Now, whether or not I was right to keep where I was going from you, the fact is I did. On the other hand, you followed me, and I’d love to know how you managed that.”

“Is that your question?” she asked. Her voice was taut, and Halak gave her a searching look and knew she was hiding something, but he was damned if he knew what. But that just made two of them doing the same thing to one another.

“No,” said Halak, at last, reaching for her hands again. “That’s not my question. This is: the same question I asked you twice before.”

He felt her hands flinch, but she didn’t draw them away, and he felt a flare of hope. He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.

“Ani,” he said, trying to put everything he felt into that one word and wondering if she would ever,
could
ever know how very much he hated keeping secrets from a woman he loved as much as he did her. “Ani, will you marry me? Please?”

When Ven Kaldarren didn’t respond, Garrett leaned in closer to her companel. A little crazy, sure, but maybe, if she could close the physical divide just a little bit, this might be the ticket to bridging the emotional chasm that yawned between them like a black and bottomless pit.

“Please,” Garrett said again. “Please, Ven, don’t make me beg. You knew I’d want to speak with Jase if you called. If you wanted to humiliate me, you could’ve done the same thing in a prerecorded message.”

“No,” he said, and his voice was thick. (With anger? Sadness? She couldn’t tell.) “No, I didn’t call to humiliate you. You should know me better, Rachel. I would never do that to you. That’s a coward’s way, and I’m not a coward about most things.”

This was true. She was the one who’d always been gone on deep space assignments, the one who was conveniently away, or had somewhere to go if there was a personal problem. How ironic that she could face down phaser blasts, Klingons, and ion storms, but she absolutely withered,
cringed
when it came to dealing with her own emotions, or the feelings of the people she really, truly cared about.

Maybe that’s why I’m good at captaining, and crummy at everything else. When you’re a captain, there are rules and regulations and nice, safe codes of behavior. Everything’s so civilized.

She looked into Ven Kaldarren’s ravaged eyes and read his sorrow and hurt.
But there’s nothing civilized about love, nothing.

“No,” she said finally. “You aren’t, and ...” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Ven. That was unfair of me. Please, I would like to speak with Jase. No excuses; I won’t ask him to forgive me because he has every right to be angry, too ...”

“He’ll never hate you, Rachel,” Kaldarren said. “He loves you. He always will, no matter what happens.”

And no matter what you do,
Kaldarren hadn’t said it, but he might as well have; Garrett read it in his eyes. And did she see something else there? Something about her?

She brought herself sternly.
Don’t go there. That’s over and done with.

He broke the silence first. “Let me get him. He ... I think he’d like to hear from his mother.”

Garrett opened her mouth to thank him, but Kaldarren’s body swiveled to one side as he turned in his chair, and then he was gone. Staring at the emptiness where her ex-husband had been, Garrett waited, her head throbbing, her heart aching. She tried not to think. Not now. Maybe she would think later, or maybe she wouldn’t think at all because there were a lot of things pressing in on her, a lot of responsibilities. For now, though, she had to focus on Jase.

There was a blur of movement on the companel, and she blinked, plastering an automatic smile on her face before she’d even registered that Jase had slid into Kaldarren’s empty seat.

“Sweetheart,” she said.
Too bright, too chipper, tone it down, you sound like a chipmunk.
“How are you, honey?”

“Fine.” Jason had Kaldarren’s black hair, though it was much shorter, and the same black eyes, though he had Garrett’s paler coloring and the same oval cast to his face that made him look fragile as fine china. “How are you, Mom?”

“I’m okay,” she said, lying. “I missed your birthday. I’m sorry. That was wrong.”

Jase hiked his shoulders. “S’okay.”

“It’s not. A boy doesn’t have his twelfth birthday every day.”
Not so cheery; you can’t smooth this over.
“I promised you I’d be there, but I wasn’t. That must’ve made you angry.”

“No,” said Jase, though his voice broke a little and Garrett couldn’t tell if it was from the lie, or that he was growing up. “It made
Dad
angry.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He didn’t say anything,” Jase added, as if worried Garrett might think that Kaldarren was goading the boy into taking sides. “He never says anything. He doesn’t talk about you much, not even when Nan wants to. He won’t. I know because I’ve heard him tell her to be quiet; that it’s not right to talk about you. Then sometimes they get really quiet, and they aren’t talking, but they still are, you know? The way the room gets really still and the air is hard, like ice, and I just know that they’re
thinking
at each other, real loud.”

Garrett could imagine that this was exactly how an argument between two telepaths might seem to someone who couldn’t read minds, and she ought to know.
Excluded
was the word that came to her mind, and that was the way she’d felt whenever they visited Ven’s mother, as if they and all telepaths were part of a club to which she was denied admittance, maybe for her own good. She’d always nurtured the sneaking suspicion that Ven’s mother, an imposing and somewhat imperious woman named Molaranna, made cutting little telepathic jibes about Garrett. To Garrett, the atmosphere always turned frosty whenever she and Ven visited, and sometimes the pauses in the conversations weren’t empty at all but felt full of things being said in the air above her head.

She gave Jase a small smile. “But you said Dad was angry. If he didn’t tell you, how do you know how he felt?”

That shoulder hike again. “I just do. It’s hard to put into words. But Dad’s feelings ... they kind of come off in waves. Like heat shimmers off hot sand, the way you can see them in the air. You know?”

“Sure,” said Garrett, remembering those cold pregnant silences. “What about you?”

“What about what?”

Garrett gave him a look. “I mean, how did you feel? When I couldn’t ...” She broke off, and rephrased. “When I
didn’t
come for your birthday after I promised I would?”

“It made me sad,” Jase said, with the simple, unflinching directness that only children who love their parents have. “You promised, and you didn’t show up. You didn’t call.”

It was on the tip of Garrett’s tongue to tell her son about all the things that were going on with her crew, the ship. But she held back. He was a boy. She was the parent. It wasn’t Jase’s job to comfort her.
No excuses.

“Yes,” she said, “and I’m sorry, and it’s not okay. It’s never okay to break a promise.”

Jase nodded. His eyes fell, and he blinked. “But there was a good reason, right?” he asked his hands. “I mean, you’re a captain and all, and so you must have had a lot to do, stuff that’s really important.”

Oh, yeah, duty rosters are really important. Letting your first officer go on R and R because you’d rather not have him around is really important.

“You’re important,” said Garrett, and that was the truth. She couldn’t bring herself to say that he was more important than her ship; he’d see through that because, after all, she hadn’t made the choice to be there for him. But she told him the truth.

“Sure,” said Jase, still staring into his hands.

Garrett waited a beat. “Where are you all headed, by the way? I forgot to ask your father.”

Jase shook his head. “I don’t know. Dad didn’t say. We’re just,” he made a helpless-looking gesture with his hands, “on a ship.”

“Are there other scientists on board?”

Jason nodded. “Yeah, one other, and the pilot. He’s Naxeran. And another kid. His name’s Pahl. He’s Naxeran, too.”

“Oh,” said Garrett. “Well, that’s good. I mean you’ll have someone to talk to.”

“Yeah,” said Jase, without much conviction. “It would be okay if we stayed home, though.”

Home, as in Betazed, Garrett translated silently. Betazed was home for Jase. She could count on one hand the number of times he’d visited her family on Earth. That was okay, though; she didn’t much enjoy seeing her family either.

“Are you getting tired of going off with your dad?”

“Only a little.” Jase looked wary. “Why?”

“How many expeditions does this make this year?”

“This is only the third.” That same defensive tone again. “It’s not so bad.”

Garrett let it go. She didn’t have a better alternative anyway, though maybe she ought to talk to Kaldarren about not agreeing to so many trips. Uprooting Jase and traipsing across the galaxy at every turn couldn’t be any better for him than following her to every starbase. In fact, when she thought about it, Kaldarren’s dragging Jase with him wherever he went wasn’t all that much different from packing a family aboard a starship—not that anyone did that, of course. Whether you were on a starship or a science transport, space was dangerous.

“Okay,” she said. She paused, at a loss to know what to say next. “Did you get some nice things for your birthday?”

Jase’s face lit up. “Yeah. I got this really cool easel and some new paints from Dad and Nan. You should see ...”

Garrett listened as her son rattled on about his painting, and she felt a tug at her heart. Jase was so sensitive, she knew. He was more like his father. Kaldarren’s work was xenoarchaeology, but what he loved was art. Jase had the same soul, the same ability to appreciate and create beauty, and these were abilities she lacked. Oh, she liked art, all right. But make something? Hell—Garrett almost shook her head—she’d been working on the same piece of bargello embroidery for the past three years.

“I’d like to see your work,” she said, when Jase paused for breath. Her keen eyes picked up how much color there was in his cheeks, how his eyes sparkled with excitement.

Oh, my son, you’re going to be an artist someday, I can feel it, and one day when you’re grown and not my little boy anymore, you’ll have your first show and I’ll be there. I promise.

The shrill edge of a hail sliced into her thoughts. “Wait, Jase,” she said. Muting the audio so Jase couldn’t hear, she punched up another channel. “Yes, Mr. Bulast?”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” said Bulast, still sounding a little shell-shocked, “but you asked to be notified when astrocartography wanted to steal some power from the deflector array for their long-range mapping, and it would have gone all right, but engineering’s having fits because of some problems with circuit overloads and ...”

Yet another thing a first officer would have attended to. Garrett suppressed a sigh. “All right, thank you. Give me a minute, Mr. Bulast. Tell engineering I’ll be right down.”

“Aye, Captain.” Bulast signed off.

“You have to go,” said Jase, when she’d turned back and switched on the audio.

Garrett nodded. “I’m sorry, Jase. There’s something I have to take care of down in engineering. Honestly, they’re like kids, and they need me to ...” She heard what she was doing, stopped herself. “I’m sorry, Jase. I just ... I have to go.”

Jase’s eyes were solemn. They looked very black and much too large for his face. “Okay. When will I see you, Mom?”

“Soon. I don’t know when,” she said, truthfully. “Soon, I hope. When you and Dad get back.”

“Okay.”

“Can I speak with your father?”

“I ...” Jase’s eyes flicked to somewhere off-screen, and then it came to Garrett that Kaldarren must be there, just out of sight. Then Jase looked back at her. “He’s busy right now.” Jase’s hand moved forward to break the connection. “Bye, Mom.”

“Bye-bye, sweetie.” Then she had a thought. “Jase, wait ...” But she was too late. Her companel winked, and went black.

Damn.
Garrett stared at the empty screen. How bad had this day been?
Let me count the ways.
No first officer on board; duty rosters out the wazoo; a justifiably pissed-off ex-husband; her son and his father headed off for God-knows-where; and a headache that was leaking out of her ears.

Enough.
The light was too damned bright, and she’d had enough badness for one day. She just wanted to be alone, a couple of minutes. Just. Alone.

“Lights, out,” she said. And then Garrett sat, alone, in the dark.