Spock watched for his opening, acted, thrust his hand forward to grab at the shoulder of Soral’s attacker, trusting his instinct and training. The Vulcan nerve pinch would require no more than half a second.
And yet, in that half second, incredibly, Soral’s attacker sensed Spock’s presence as well as his attack.
Almost simultaneously, the invader blocked another strike by Soral, then ducked and twisted and spun to face Spock.
Spock responded without conscious thought, whipping his free arm out to block the barrel of the attacker’s rifle as it swung for his head, to make it fly from his attacker’s grasp. At the same time, Spock changed his target from the attacker’s shoulder to his face, determined to rip off the attacker’s imager, reducing him to blindness.
But the attacker did not block Spock’s hand as it closed like a vise—on a cold metal mask without image inputs or eye slits of any kind.
At the bottommost range of Spock’s own imager, the attacker’s leg and boot rose up and struck backward into Soral’s chest.
Spock heard bones crack. Saw Soral drop to the canteen floor.
In the same instant, the attacker’s hands were around Spock’s throat. Spock’s head was slammed forward.
Spock reached up, grasping, his hands slipping to one side of the metal mask. His fingers raked across bare flesh, and into the soft ridged muscles of a batlike ear.
And at his contact with that ear, even as taloned hands squeezed his throat and shut his senses down, Spock had his answer.
The attackers had no need of imagers, nor could they be blinded by light through the metal masks that shielded their eyes, because they perceived their surroundings by sound.
The advantage of night had always been theirs because all in their world were born in darkness.
The identity of the other group who wished to interfere in the fragile politics of Romulus was no longer unknown to Spock.
His attackers were the other lost children of Vulcan.
Remans.
6
S.S. CALYPSO, STARDATE 57480.3
There was no center chair.
Kirk paused on the scuffed metal deckplates outside the single turbolift, and looked at what passed for the bridge of the commercial astrogation vessel, Calypso, in more detail.
In particular, he stared at the center of the bridge, at the deck, trying to see any marks in the traction carpet that might indicate the captain’s chair had been temporarily removed for repair.
But he couldn’t easily find the center of the bridge.
It wasn’t even circular.
It was boxlike, rectangular, more like an inflated interior of an old-style shuttlecraft.
On the main level, four steps down from the elevated deck on which the turbolift opened, along each side of the bridge were three duty stations, each with two chairs, and two sets of displays and control boards cantilevered out from the bulkheads. But instead of the displays being aligned flat to the bulkheads, so that command staff in the center of the bridge could see each duty station at a glance, all controls faced ahead, like desks in a classroom.
And what they faced wasn’t a large, central viewscreen—there were three of them, side by side on the sharply inward-angled forward wall. The rightmost screen displayed an engineering schematic of the Calypso— little more than a blunt-nosed, cylindrical main module about the same size as a single nacelle from an old Ambassador-class ship, with a slight, tapered bulge at the rear of the ventral hull, and two swept-back, outboard warp nacelles, also cylindrical, suggesting technology that was decades removed from state-of-the-art.
A dozen other smaller displays angled down from the ceiling of the bridge, and a handful more were arranged in what seemed to be a random fashion on the port and starboard bulkheads. Brightly colored conduits threaded among stark switching boxes made the rest of the exposed bulkheads resemble the outside of a Borg cube. Behind Kirk, also on the upper level, was a small room with a deck-to-overhead transparent wall. Inside the room was a wide black desk, apparently bolted to the deck, covered with scattered padds, and ringed by more displays on the bulkheads and overhead, all angled so they could be seen only by whoever sat behind the station.
And the air had a damp and musty smell, as if the ship recently had been used to transport livestock and the ventilation system had yet to be purged.
Kirk wondered what Spock would say when he told him about this sad excuse for a starship.
And then he remembered.
The shock of loss was just as strong as it had been the first time he knew Spock was dead. Just as strong as it had been every other time these past ten days when he had realized he would never again be able to share anything with his friend.
“Not quite Starfleet specs, is it, Captain?” Admiral Janeway smiled warmly at Kirk as she approached him from the lower level.
Kirk almost gasped. He had been so discomfited by his thoughts of Spock, so bothered by the bridge’s layout and condition that he hadn’t even noticed Janeway’s presence among the other technicians on the bridge. The fact that she wore a drab civilian outfit of tan jacket and gray trousers didn’t help. All the technicians were civilian, as well: three humans, two Bynars, and a Tellarite with a bad cough. They all seemed to be working on the same disassembled control console, arguing over which circuits to tear out next and throw onto the deck with the others.
Kirk tried to ignore the unprofessional chaos, held out his hand to shake Janeway’s as she came up the steps. “Admiral.” He looked around again. There were scrapes on every pale green wall, gouges and nicks on every piece of equipment. He could picture the way Spock’s eyebrow would rise at the sight of such disrepair. “She is spaceworthy, is she?”
Janeway’s smile grew wider, as if she had no sense of what Kirk was feeling, what he was hiding. “Mister Scott and Commander La Forge are in the engine room, determining that even now. But I don’t think they’ll find anything surprising.” She gestured to the room behind the transparent wall. “Care to join me in your office?”
“Office?” Kirk repeated.
Janeway waved her hand past a sensor patch and a section of the wall slid to the side. “After you,” she said.
Kirk took a breath, stepped into the room, and knew he would be damned before he would ever call it his office.
“When Captain Riker told me Starfleet would be providing a ship…” Kirk began.
“You expected a Starfleet vessel,” Janeway concluded for him. She still hadn’t lost that all-knowing smile, and she waved her hand again to close the sliding door.
“I expected a ship.” Kirk was determined to make Janeway understand this wasn’t a training run he had agreed to. A man was dead. A great man. And his unknown killers lived. “One worthy of the mission.”
With those words, Janeway finally seemed to sense what lay behind the steel in Kirk’s tone. Her smile faded. “I understand. And your expectations have been met. This is a Starfleet vessel.”
Kirk frowned. “Admiral, the noncertified shuttlecraft that first-year engineering students take apart and reassemble at the Academy are in better shape than this…barge.”
“Which is what makes it perfect for espionage missions.”
That stopped Kirk. “Espionage?”
Janeway paused, as if mentally testing different replies before committing to speak one aloud. At last, she chose her approach.
