Part Three — The Spreading Silence · The Threnody
Chapter Twenty-Five
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
She didn't go to see Dara until the third hour.
It was the wrong thing to do, and Vash knew it, and she did it anyway. She walked the long curved corridor on Deck Eight in the false daylight of ship's morning, past a row of dark doors and a single lit one, and stopped outside it. A young security officer stood at the end of the passage. He looked at her, and at her face, and looked away.
The door was not locked. Dara's quarters were a plain room with a bunk and a desk and one small window showing stars. She sat on the edge of the bunk with her hands in her lap. Someone had brought her a tray. The food on it was untouched.
"I didn't think you'd come," Dara said.
"Neither did I."
"Would you sit?"
"No."
"All right." Dara's voice was hushed. "Is Renata...?"
"Alive. Her hand's gone. Crusher says it isn't spreading."
"Thank God."
Vash watched her. She had meant to be angry. She had spent three hours preparing it, walking the ship, turning it over and over like a stone in a pocket. She found that it wasn't there. What was there instead was something larger and far worse, a long flat terrible ache, like the feeling in a limb that has been asleep.
"I need to ask you one thing," she said. "And I need you to not lie."
"I won't."
"In four years. Was any of it... Did you ever say a thing to me that you didn't mean?"
Dara was silent a moment. "Never once," she said. "That's what makes it so hard. I loved working with you. I loved being taught. I loved the sound your voice made when you found a wall that shouldn't have been there." Her eyes filled. "It was all real. Every bit. I just had something else that was more real, and I didn't know how to put the two down."
"That's the worst thing you could've said."
"I know."
"I'd rather you'd been lying."
"I know." Dara bent her head. "I'm sorry."
Vash stood there for a time. Then she turned to go. At the door she stopped, with her back to the room.
"She threw the child," she said. "Renata. She was turning to glass and she threw a nine-year-old girl across a doorway. And you came in after her, and you took her by the wrist, and you pulled." She didn't turn. "You didn't have to do that."
"Yes, I did."
"Why?"
"Because it was wrong," Dara said simply. "Because I saw it, and it was wrong. And I'd have pulled her out of it if I'd believed everything else in the world."
Vash closed her eyes.
"I hate that you did that," she said, and went out.
Picard found her on the observation deck.
It was the same place. The same long curved glass, the same scatter of stars. But the light was different now, pale and thin and dawn-colored, and below the rail New Beltane turned in a haze of gold and green and a long pale scar. She stood with both hands on the rail. She did not look round.
"I am going to say something," Picard said. "I would like you to let me finish."
"You knew."
It stopped him. It was not a question. It was flat, cold, exact, like a coin laid on a table.
"I suspected," he said.
"For how long?"
"Since Ke'Thara. A little before." He drew a slow breath. "I watched her remove a glove at the door. I saw her face when she touched the orb. Counselor Troi told me, after Cirrus, that what she felt from Dara was not deception but devotion, and that she could not tell in what. Mister Worf reported two observations at the Vault. Mister Data told me that her arguments required nothing of their premises." His voice was very level. "I had an impression, three observations, and a remark about a logical structure. Not one of them would have survived your first question."
"So you didn't tell me."
"No."
"You let me stand next to her." She turned then. Her eyes were red-rimmed and absolutely dry. "You let me work beside her for five days. You let me go into the Kettle with her. You let me put her in the lead on a lava bridge, with Worf behind her. Jean-Luc, you watched."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was afraid you would never forgive me for being right."
It was so simple that for a moment she could not answer. He stood with his hands at his sides, straight-backed, unflinching, and the thing in his face wasn't a captain's composure. It was the plain, naked, exhausted honesty of a man who had been rehearsing this for days and had found it no easier for the practice.
"I was wrong," he said. "I told myself it was prudence. It was cowardice. I would have rather been wrong about Dara Liang than have you look at me the way you are looking at me now. That was not a reason. It was a weakness, and I am sorry."
"Don't," Vash said. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Make it so I can't be angry."
"I did not intend—"
"I know you didn't. That's the trouble." She laughed, a short cracked sound. "You're so honest. It's infuriating. You keep doing it. You keep laying the thing out on the table, with all the parts labeled, and I can't even get a good grip on it to throw."
"You are welcome to throw it."
"I'd miss."
He almost smiled. It didn't quite reach his eyes. "You are extremely accurate," he said. "I have seen you hit a moving anchor with a bolt driver."
She turned back to the glass. The silence between them was long and strange. After a time she felt him come to stand beside her, not touching, a careful hand's breadth apart.
"I built my whole life on reading people," she said quietly. "It's the only thing I've ever been good at. A look, a shoulder, a hand on a cup. I can tell you in thirty seconds whether a man is going to sell me out. I did it to Roan. I did it to a dozen dealers. And I stood next to that woman for four years and I never once saw it." She swallowed. "I taught her. I vouched for her. I put her name on the survey permit. What does that make me?"
"Someone who loved a person."
"That's not a virtue. It's a blind spot."
"Yes," Picard said. "It is both."
She turned her head.
"I have known you for a long time," he said. "And in that time I have seen you misread nothing that was hidden. You read Kestrel. You read the Consortium's buoy before any of us understood it. You read the floor at the fifth gate. What you did not read was a woman you had chosen to trust, and you did not read her because reading her would have meant asking whether you were wrong to trust. That is not a failure of judgment, Vash. It is what judgment costs, when it is exercised by someone who is capable of affection."
"That's a very generous interpretation."
"It is the accurate one. I would not offer another."
She looked at him for some time. The light on his face was thin and gray. He looked older than he had at Doria Minor. He looked, she thought, like a man who had decided to stop being careful.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
"I need you to read the sequence."
"I can't. I'm not a linguist."
"You are an archaeologist who read a seven-ring lock at Cirrus before our engineers did. You found the inversion at the fifth gate before Dara could." He held her gaze. "I do not ask you to replace her. I ask you to lead. Mister Data will check every line. Mister La Forge will build the hardware. But the question of what the Makers meant is not a question of grammar. It is a question of how they thought. I know of no one else aboard this ship who has spent twenty years learning to think like the dead."
The words settled on her like a coat. She felt them settle, one by one, and recognized, with a slow and strangely painful surprise, that they were true.
"Fifteen hours," she said. "Maybe eighteen."
"We have eighteen. The front will cross the ocean in about that time."
"Then I'll need the notebook."
"It is yours."
She took a breath. It shook on the way in. She let it out, and found, in the ache beneath her ribs, a small hard point of steadiness, like a keel.
"I'll do it," she said.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." She turned fully to him. "Jean-Luc. I need to say this once, so it's said. I'm furious. I'm going to be furious for a good while. It's not going to be fair, and it's not going to be finished, and you're going to have to stand in it."
"I shall."
"I mean it."
"So do I." His voice was hushed. "I have been standing in worse. I find I do not mind."
She nodded. She didn't look at him. Somewhere below them, New Beltane turned in its gold haze, and the pale scar at its southern end lay like a thumbprint on the glass.
Troi found her in the science lab at ten.
Vash had moved the notebook to a corner bench, in the pool of light from a single lamp. She sat with the Cirrus Key's calibration notes spread in front of her, three padds, a pencil, and a cup of tea that had been cold for two hours. She didn't look up when the door hissed. She didn't need to. She knew the quality of that silence.
"If you're going to tell me it's not my fault," she said, "I'd rather you didn't."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good."
"I was going to say that it is not your fault and it is not nothing." Troi crossed the room and sat on the stool opposite, without being asked, folding her hands in her lap. "I thought you might want someone who could tell the difference."
Vash set down her pencil.
"Did you know?"
"Know what?"
"About Dara."
"I knew something." Troi's voice was gentle. "I told the Captain on the day we returned from Cirrus. I did not know what. I could only say that she was devoted, in a way I could not place, and that it was very old. I wish I had said it to you."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I wasn't certain. Because it was not my place. Because you were her closest friend, and I am an empath, not an oracle, and I did not trust my own impression enough to put it between you." She paused. "Those are all reasons. I do not think any of them is good enough."
Vash almost laughed. "You're the third person this week who's apologized to me for not telling me something."
"It's a very popular activity."
"I'm sick of it."
"I know." Troi smiled slightly. "You're allowed to be."
They sat in the lamplight. Somewhere in the walls, the ship's old engines made their steady background murmur. Vash picked up the pencil and put it down again.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"You felt her. Every day. Did she ever, even once, feel like a person who was lying to me?"
Troi was silent a moment. She was choosing her words, Vash saw, with care.
"No," she said. "That is what I find hardest to explain. She was never lying to you. Whatever she felt for you was real. I felt it, every time she looked at you. Warmth. Respect. Something very close to love." She leaned forward. "She was also keeping a thing from you that she believed was larger. Both of those were true at once. I do not think she knew how to put them down."
"That's what she said."
"I believe her."
"I don't know what to do with it." Vash's voice cracked. "I keep trying to make it simple. Either she was my friend and she was lying, or she was lying and she was never my friend. I can't make either one fit. I keep trying to hate her and I can't find where to put my hands."
"That's because it isn't simple."
"I want it to be."
"I know. Everyone does." Troi's eyes were very kind. "But I think it would be a mistake to try. You are going to carry two things for a long time. That she loved you, and that she betrayed you. You will not be able to resolve them. You will only be able to learn how to hold both without dropping either."
"How?"
"Slowly," Troi said. "And not alone."
Vash regarded her hands. They lay on the bench in front of her, scarred and chapped, with the dirt of four continents worked into the lines. She thought of a lava bridge. A cold tent at dawn. A trowel handed over in the rain.
"I'm going to need a very long time," she said.
"You will have it."
"I'm not good at this."
"You are better than you believe." Troi rose. At the door, she paused. "Vash. I will say one thing about the Captain, and then I will leave you to your work."
"Go on."
"He is not good at this either." The corner of her mouth moved. "He is learning. I think it's costing him a great deal. I think he would like you to know that he is trying."
"I know he is."
"Good."
The door closed. Vash sat alone in the lamplight, with the notebook open in front of her to a page of small neat pencil and a margin full of small neat curls, and for the first time in days she didn't feel entirely alone in the room.
The message came at noon.
She was in the science lab with the notebook open on the bench and Data at her elbow, three hours into the work, the room around her littered with padds and scraps and cold cups of tea. Geordi was somewhere behind her, cursing softly at a coil. It was the first time in days she hadn't heard the tone. She had been too busy to listen for it.
"Ms. Vash." The comm. A crew member, very young, very correct. "You have an incoming subspace message on the private band. The sender has asked that I route it to you directly. He would not give his name."
"Put it through."
The screen above the bench flickered. It resolved, slowly, through static, into a face she knew: long, tired, unshaven, with a bruise fading along the jaw and a coat with one patched elbow. He was sitting in the dim, cramped cockpit of a salvage tug, and behind him, through the forward port, she could see a single pale moon.
"Vash," Kestrel said.
"Roan."
"I'm sorry about Doria Minor." He rubbed his eyes. "And Cirrus. And a good many other things. I heard what happened at the colony."
"Where are you?"
"Orbit of Kessen's Drift. A day and a half behind you. I've been trying to catch up." His voice was hoarse. "I have something. I've had it since Cirrus, and I didn't know what it was. I think I understand it now."
"Go on."
"You've got a leak. I think I can tell you whose."
The room was quiet. Data turned his head. Behind her, Geordi's muttering stopped.
"How?"
"The burst. The one I overheard on my relay, with the Starfleet command header. I recorded it. It's been sitting in my files for a week." Kestrel looked straight into the screen. "Yesterday I finally had it decoded. The Consortium's Office Nine uses a cipher that I know, because I've used it myself. It took me six hours." He paused. "It's signed."
"Signed."
"By a man who was writing to his handler. A man who thinks he's very clever." He took a slow breath. "I'd like to see your face when I tell you. But I'm a day and a half away, and I don't think you have that long."
"Roan. Tell me the name."
"Not over an open band." His eyes were steady. "I'm coming in. I'll be there in thirty hours, if the engines hold. I'll give it to you in person. And Vash..."
"What?"
"I'd like a favor in return."
She felt something cold and wary move, slowly, in the pit of her stomach. "What kind of favor?"
"I'll tell you when I get there," said Kestrel. "But I'd like you to say yes first."
The screen went dark.