Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Fifteen
Cirrus Station — Present Day
The air was leaving the chamber, and taking everything that wasn't fastened with it.
Vash had her back against the plinth and both arms locked around the Key. Dust and loose plating streamed past her toward the breach. Her ears hurt. Her lungs felt scraped out. At the edge of her vision, in the white roar of the vacuum, she could see three figures in black pressure suits pulling themselves through the gap on cables, weapons up, their helmets blank as eggs.
"Get to the door!" Worf's voice, flat and very loud, over the link. He had one arm around Dara's waist and the other hooked through a bracket on the wall. "Forty seconds to window!"
"How many?"
"I count nine. Possibly more."
Vash counted. The wind dragged at her clothes. She pushed off the plinth, and the pull took her. She went sideways across the chamber, hit the far wall with her shoulder, and grabbed the lip of the great door's frame with her free hand. On the other side, through the slowly turning rings, she could see lamplight. A silhouette. Kestrel, braced against the frame, one hand out.
"Vash!"
"Window in ten!"
She didn't know afterward how she managed it. She braced her boots on the bulkhead, clamped the Key against her ribs, and watched the seven black slots slide across the door's face, drifting, drifting. Nine seconds. Eight. A bolt of white light went past her ear and hit the ceiling. She heard Worf's phaser answer, a high dry crack.
Four. Three.
The slots aligned.
"Now!"
Kestrel's hand closed around her wrist and pulled. She shot through the gap like a cork from a bottle. The edges of the rings passed a hair's breadth from her shoulders. Behind her, Worf came through with Dara, fast, and on the far side Geordi's voice rose in a shout.
"Wait, don't, I can't hold the—"
"Geordi!" Tobin.
"I'm doing it!"
The door's rings stuttered. Vash, sprawled on the antechamber floor, looked back in time to see Geordi stab at the wall junction with a hand-wired cable, and the seven vast rings, which had been turning with the patient music of the harmonic series, lurched and ground to a discordant halt, each stopped at a different angle. The slots were shut. The great door was a blank wall of interlocking steel.
On the other side, muffled, absurdly distant, something hit it once, heavily, and was still.
Nobody moved.
"They are inside the core," Worf said at last. "With the vacuum."
"They're in suits," Geordi panted. "They'll have air for hours. But that door won't open for them unless they can play the chord." He wiped his forehead with the back of a shaking hand. "I'm sorry. It was the only thing I could think of."
"It was the right thing," Vash said.
"It's a door they'll cut through in an hour."
"Then we've got an hour."
They ran.
The spoke took ten minutes, in the dark, the gravity growing heavier at each step until they were no longer floating but sprinting, pounding down the long sloping corridor with the station groaning around them. Twice the floor tilted. Once a whole section of ceiling came away and crashed behind them in a cloud of dust. Kessel took a piece of shrapnel across the calf and went down with a cry, and Worf picked him up without a word and carried him.
At the docking ring, the two ships were still where they had been. The Consortium vessel lay at dock one, a sleek gray hull stamped with the circle-and-coin seal, its ramp retracted, its engines warm. They slipped past it in the shadows. Kestrel peeled off at dock three with Kessel, and stopped at the hatch.
"I'll follow you out," he said. "Keep on the Enterprise's flank. If they want a fight, I'll give them a reason to hesitate."
"Roan." She was out of breath. "You don't have to."
"I know." The hatch hissed open. "It's the first thing I've done in years that I didn't have to."
He turned away before she could answer.
She watched the Fair Weather clear the dock as the shuttle rose, a long battered tug with its mismatched pods flaring, pulling away into the light of the gas giant like a stubborn old dog. Behind it, in the dwindling distance, Cirrus Station was starting to come apart. A thin white line of debris trailed from the ring. The hub turned, very slowly, in a halo of vented air. The Consortium ship broke from dock one and fell away, engines burning hard, leaving its people behind.
"They abandoned their own team," Tobin said.
"They're not people to the Consortium," Vash said. "They're a line item."
She looked at the Key in her lap. It lay against her knees, pale and whole, singing, very softly, a chord she could almost name. Across the shuttle, Dara sat with her arms wrapped around her ribs, watching it, and the look on her face was so openly tender that Vash looked away.
"Voss found nothing," Sorokin said.
Picard had taken the call in his ready room with the door locked. The admiral's image was small and hard, her silver hair pulled back tighter than usual. Behind her, the window of her office showed the long gray towers of Starfleet Headquarters under a dawn sky.
"The Vantir liaison's inquiry came through an open channel. There's no record of a leak. No unauthorized transmission. No anomaly in my office's logs." A very slight pause. "I'm forced to conclude that the liaison was guessing."
"He mentioned the Enterprise by name."
"He mentioned a flagship operating in the Keldan Reach. It's not, Captain, a large leap. You are the only flagship operating in the Keldan Reach."
"He also mentioned Doria Minor."
"There are two hundred systems in the Reach. Some of them are named Doria."
Picard said nothing. He had been a captain for a long time. He knew the tone of an officer who had decided, for reasons of her own, to stop looking.
"I've been told by my staff that your progress is significant," Sorokin said. "I've been told that you now hold three artifacts, that you're in possession of evidence of financial manipulation on an enormous scale, and that you have been pursued by a cloaked vessel which, I understand, you have declined to engage."
"It has not attacked."
"It will."
"Yes," Picard said. "I believe it will."
"The Sarek arrives in fourteen hours." Her voice did not change. "I will need the orb, the Keys, and all associated data transferred at that time. Your seventy-two hours expire when she arrives. I'm not discussing an extension."
"Admiral—"
"I said I'm not discussing it." She was looking at him, he realized, with a kind of dry exhausted patience, the look of a woman who had said the same sentence to herself for several days. "Do what you can, Captain. Do it quickly. And for God's sake, don't get that archaeologist killed."
"I shall do my best."
"That," Sorokin said, "is what I'm afraid of."
The screen went dark. Picard sat looking at it for several seconds. The thing that troubled him was not her order. It was the quickness with which she had closed the subject of the leak. He had known Sorokin for twenty years. She did not stop.
Riker came to the ready room an hour after the call, uninvited, with two cups of coffee and the air of a man who had rehearsed an apology in the turbolift and abandoned it by the second deck.
"Sir."
"Number One." Picard looked up from the desk. "I did not send for you."
"No, sir. I'm here on my own authority. It's a very small authority. It won't take long." He set one cup in front of Picard and kept the other. "May I sit?"
"Please."
Riker sat. He turned the cup in his hands, and looked at it, and said, with the carefully blank expression that Picard had learned over many years to read as concern, "I've had eleven reports on my desk since we left Cirrus. Crusher's logged thirty-one cases of insomnia and nine of what she's calling auditory fatigue. Two of the engineering crew have asked to be reassigned. Mister Hale's been taking headache tablets like candy since Ke'Thara. And the whole ship is humming."
"Humming?"
"Not the tone. Humming. The crew. Little tunes, in the corridors. They don't know they're doing it. I caught myself in the turbolift yesterday." He looked up. "I don't think it's the same seven notes. But it's close."
Picard was silent.
"That's one thing," Riker said. "The second is, we've got an admiral's order to turn over the orb in fourteen hours, and a captain who has found, very creatively, a way not to. I've got no quarrel with that. I think you're right. But I'd like you to know that I'm the one who's going to be standing on the bridge when the Sarek arrives, and I'd like to know what I'm supposed to say."
"You will say that I have the situation in hand."
"Do you?"
It was said without heat. It was the sort of question that only one man on the ship would have dared to ask. Picard looked at his first officer for a breath, at the steady blue eyes and the slightly rumpled collar and the faint, patient, unmistakable loyalty, and found that he did not want to lie.
"No," he said.
"Okay."
"I do not have the situation in hand. I have an artifact I cannot move, an investigation I cannot stop, a crew that is slowly being sung to, and a civilian expert whose judgment I have decided to trust above my own." He drew a breath. "I do not regret any of it. I should like to be clear about that. But I am aware that I am not doing this the way I would have done it five years ago."
"How would you have done it?"
"Correctly."
Riker laughed. It was a short, warm, startled sound, and Picard found, to his surprise, that he was smiling too.
"Sir," Riker said, when it had passed. "I'm going to say one more thing, and then I'm going to drink this coffee and go back to the bridge."
"Please."
"I've watched you for years. I've watched you with Admirals and Romulans and Q. I've never seen you look at an artifact the way you look at her." He held up a hand. "I don't mean that the way it sounds. I mean that when she says something, you listen, and I think it's good. I think you've been too careful for a very long time and it's not been good for you. But I'm also the guy who's supposed to tell you when you're about to walk off a cliff. So."
"So."
"If she asks for something you can't give, tell me. Tell me first. And I'll say no, so you don't have to." Riker raised his cup. "I'd like it on the record that you asked."
Picard looked at him. He was aware of a feeling in his chest that he did not at once recognize, and then did. It was gratitude. It was the plain, uncomplicated gratitude of a man who has been very much alone in a decision and has just been informed, with great tact, that he is not.
"I am asking," he said.
"Noted." Riker drank. "And sir? Eat something."
"Is that an order?"
"It's a suggestion from the man who has to scrape you off the bridge." He rose. "I'll be on it."
Troi found him there an hour later.
She came in without announcing herself, a small dark figure in the soft gray of her duty uniform, and took the chair opposite his desk. She did not speak at first. She sat with her hands folded, looking at him with the calm, steady, unhurried attention that most people found unnerving and that Picard had long ago learned to treasure.
"Deanna."
"You wanted to ask me something," she said. "You've wanted to ask me since Ke'Thara."
"Yes." He folded his hands. "It concerns Ms. Liang."
"I know." She took a breath. "I wish I had something to give you. I don't. Not in the way you want. I can tell you what I feel, and I can tell you what I don't, and neither is evidence."
"Tell me."
"She is not lying to you." Troi said it carefully. "I'm as sure of that as I am of anything. When she speaks, there is no deception in it. No concealment. She feels what she says she feels. But there is something underneath it that I cannot place. I've felt it from the first day, and it's gotten stronger each time she's been near the orb. It isn't fear. It isn't guilt." She searched for a word. "It's closer to devotion. The feeling you get from a person in prayer."
"Prayer."
"I don't mean it as a metaphor. I was at the bay doors when the shuttle came in, Captain. When she stepped off it with the Key, the whole of her, for about three seconds, was relief. A deep, simple, enormous relief, as though something she had long been afraid of losing had been kept safe."
"And then?"
"And then it went. It closed. As if she had noticed it and put it away." Troi tilted her head. "I don't think she's a villain. I think she's a believer, and I can't tell in what. And I'm afraid that whatever it is, it has been there for a very long time."
Picard sat with his hands pressed together, and did not look at her.
"I have nothing I could show Vash," he said.
"I know."
"She trusts her absolutely. She has for four years. If I go to her with this, she will ask me what I can prove, and I will have to tell her that I have a counselor's impression and a captain's suspicion and nothing whatever that a court would accept." He exhaled. "She would never forgive me."
"She might."
"Deanna."
"She might not. But the alternative is letting her find out some other way." Troi's voice was very gentle. "I'm not telling you what to do, Jean-Luc. I'm telling you that I've been watching a woman learn to trust a captain, and watching that captain decide not to give her the one piece of information that would let her trust him fully."
"That is unfair."
"Yes," Troi said. "It is rather."
She rose, and touched his shoulder once on her way out, and he sat alone with the door still locked, looking at the small dim blue light on his desk that marked an open channel to the cargo bay and the silent orb beyond.
She found him on the observation deck near midnight.
Vash had not slept. She had showered, and eaten, and failed to lie down, and finally walked the long curved corridor with her hands in her pockets until she came out under the stars. They wheeled slowly beyond the great glass. The gas giant was a dim amber curve at the lower edge of the port, and beyond it, very small, a thin white trail marked where Cirrus Station had burned.
Picard stood at the rail with his hands behind his back. He did not turn when she came up beside him.
"You were going to say something," she said.
"I was going to say several things." A faint dryness. "I have not yet decided which."
"Try the first."
He considered it. "I was going to say that I am sorry I did not write."
She hadn't expected that. She turned her head and looked at him, and found that he was looking at the stars. "When?"
"After the last time. After Sherwood." He said the word with the faintest flinch, as though it had cost him something. "I wrote three letters. I did not send any of them. They were, I think, rather good. They were also entirely dishonest. I kept finding ways to tell you that I admired you without telling you that I missed you."
"You could have sent them."
"You could have answered."
"I didn't know they existed."
"No." His mouth twitched. "But you never answered the ones I did send."
It was a fair point. She let it stand. It sat between them in the dark glass and starlight, plain and uncomfortable, like something set down on a table.
"I leave," she said, at last. "That's the thing. I know it. I leave before anyone can ask me to stay. I've been doing it since I was twenty, and I've gotten very good at it, and every time I do it I tell myself I'm being practical." She breathed out. "It's the same thing Roan does. It's the same thing I hate him for."
"And I retreat into duty."
"You retreat into procedure. You hide behind whatever rule you can find and call it principle. It's maddening."
"Yes," Picard said. "I imagine it is."
They stood together for a moment, not touching.
"I'm not saying it's going to change," she said. "I'm saying I know."
"That is more than most people manage."
"It's not a compliment."
"Not entirely." He turned to look at her then, finally, and the light from the stars made his face older and plainer and more tired than she remembered it. "Vash. I am going to say one more thing, and I would like you to hear it as a captain speaking honestly and not as something more. There may come a point in this investigation where I will be forced to choose between your judgment and my caution. I would like you to know, now, that I intend to choose your judgment. I do not say it lightly."
"Why?"
"Because it has been better than mine."
It was, she realized, the first time in their long and tangled acquaintance that he had said that aloud. It took her a moment to find her voice.
"That's a dangerous thing to tell a thief," she said.
"Yes." He smiled, very slightly. "I am aware."
They stood there until the stars had turned a little further. When she finally went back to her quarters, she realized that somewhere in the last hour she had stopped hearing the tone. Not because it was gone. Because it had, for the moment, become part of the silence, and she had, for the first time in days, been able to forget it.