Part Three — The Spreading Silence · The Threnody
Chapter Twenty-Six
New Beltane — Present Day
"The fifth ring is wrong," Vash said.
She said it to the empty chamber, in the dim gold light of the great tree, with the notebook open on her knee and a cold cup of tea at her elbow. It was three in the morning by the skimmer's clock, and she had been awake for thirty-one hours. The Cirrus Key stood on a portable stand at the foot of the tree, a small pale thing beside a cathedral, its seven rings turning in their tilted orbits. The great Key above it sang. Around them both, the roots ran out across the floor like the veins in a leaf.
"Clarify," said Data.
"The sequence." She tapped the page. "Dara had the phrases in order, one through seven. Forward. That's what the lintels showed. It's what she read. It's what you'd expect, and it's what the first four rings need." She turned the notebook so he could see. "But at Ke'Thara, the fifth gate didn't open for the forward phrase. It opened for the first phrase reversed. It's in the floor. I swept the silt off it myself. The ring was the score written out in full, and the fifth phrase was the opening turned backward."
"I recall."
"She sang it in reverse without a pause. She knew." Vash's voice was flat. "She'd have known here, too. She wrote the forward order because the forward order is what the majority read. What accelerates. She knew the fifth ring was a mirror, and she wrote it straight."
"That would account for a four percent deviation," Data said slowly. "A reflection of one phrase would shift the resonant frequency of the whole sequence by about that amount."
"Then we set the fifth ring backward."
"I will calculate the angles."
It took forty minutes. She sat on the cold stone with the notebook and watched him work, his hands moving on the padd with a speed that was no longer quite human, and felt the quiet in the chamber gather around them. Geordi and Tobin had built a rig of clamps and motors around the small Key, seven tiny drives, each one aimed at a ring. She checked them twice. She checked them a third time. Then she sat back on her heels and looked up at the tower of rings above her, turning, singing, patient, and understood that she was about to do something for which no one had ever trained her.
"Captain," she said into the comm. "We're ready."
"Understood." Picard's voice, small and calm, from the ship above. "How long?"
"Three minutes to spin the rings. Then we start the chord."
"Who will sing it?"
She hadn't thought about that. She looked at the little Key on its stand, and at the great one above, and heard in her head the low humming in the corridor, the seven notes, the long question at the end.
"I will," she said.
She stood at the tree's foot with her hands at her sides.
She had no training. She had a thin, true, unremarkable voice that she used chiefly for arguing. She had listened to the tone for six days. She had heard Dara sing it through seven arches and down a cavern of fire, and the pitch was in her ear like a nail in a board. She closed her eyes.
She opened her mouth.
It came out crooked. A thin sound, wavering, a half-step flat. She felt her face heat. She stopped. Breathed. Began again, lower, from the diaphragm, the way Dara had, with her weight settled on both feet.
The first note rose, steadied, and held.
Beneath her, in the stone, the small Key answered. Its rings spun up. She sang the second phrase, and the third. The great tree above her took up the sound. The whole chamber began to ring, a low vast resonance, and she felt it in her ribs and her knees and the roots of her teeth, a cathedral of sound standing up around her.
The fifth phrase. She sang it backward.
It was the strangest thing she had ever done. The notes came out of her in the wrong order, a tune unwinding into its own beginning, and as she sang, the little Key's fifth ring swung against the current of the others, and the great tower above her caught. She felt it. A click, a long soft shudder, like a door finding its latch.
The chord changed.
It dropped. It fell by a half-step, then a whole, then a fifth, slowly, like a great held breath let go. The tree's singing thinned and slowed. The chamber's gold light dimmed to amber. The vast pale rings above her began to turn more slowly against one another, slower, slower, and the roots in the floor, which had been shivering, went still.
Silence.
It was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. It went on, and on, and she did not want it to stop.
And then, beneath it, very faint, in the quiet the chord had left, she heard something else.
It was a line of sound. A single low voice. It did not belong to the chord. It was slower, lower, stranger than anything in the score, and it moved under the silence like water under ice. It had no words. It had a shape. It turned, and curled back, and turned again, each turn a little smaller than the last, each one folded inside the one before.
It lasted three seconds.
"Did you hear that?" she whispered.
"I did." Data's voice, from somewhere very far away. "It was not in the sequence. It was not in any score we have recorded. It had a recursive structure, each phrase containing a smaller copy of itself." He paused. "I could not reproduce it if I tried."
"It sounded like—"
"Yes?"
"Like someone answering."
Nobody said anything.
The silence came back. The amber light held. Above her, in the tower of rings, nothing moved at all.
"The drift front has stopped," Geordi said over the comm, an hour later. His voice was cracked with exhaustion and something very like awe. "Stopped dead. It's been stationary for fifty-one minutes. It's pulled back by four kilometers on the coast. The tone's down by nearly an octave everywhere on the planet. Vash, you've done it."
"Not done," Data said. "Delayed."
"Data."
"I wish to be accurate, Geordi. The damper is holding. It will continue to hold for approximately thirty-eight hours. Then the orb's broadcast, which has not been reduced, will begin to re-synchronize the receiver. The tree will recover. The front will resume." He paused. "I estimate the recovery will be gradual at first and then abrupt."
"So we've bought thirty-eight hours."
"Yes."
"That's not nothing."
"It is thirty-eight hours," said Data. "I am not certain it is something."
Vash sat on the cold floor of the chamber with her back against a root the thickness of her waist. Her throat was raw. Her hands shook. She looked up at the tower of rings, turning slowly in the amber light, and thought about the small curling line under the silence. A voice that had been waiting a very long time for someone to stop singing.
"Data," she said. "The eleven points. The sites. You have ten of them. Have you looked at the shape?"
"I have."
"And?"
"They form a ring. Not perfectly. It is an irregular loop, approximately sixty light-years across. The sites are spaced along it like the marks on a clock." He didn't pause. "I have calculated the center."
She looked up.
"It is a dead star, Ms. Vash. A red dwarf, long since cooled, with a single planet. There is no record of any survey. It lies eleven light-years inside the Romulan Neutral Zone." He tilted his head. "If the ring is a score, that is where the last note is written."
"The Cradle."
"I do not know that name."
"It's what the dreams call it," Vash said. "I think."
Kestrel came aboard at fifteen hundred hours the next day.
She watched him come down the hangar ramp from behind the forward bulkhead, where she had stood for ten minutes with her arms crossed and her heart going like a hammer. He was thinner. The bruise along his jaw had gone to yellow. His coat was the same, the black canvas with the patched elbow, but the way he wore it had changed. He came down the ramp like a man carrying something he hadn't been sure anyone would want.
Worf was waiting at the bottom, still in a brace, leaning slightly on a cane he would have denied existing. "Mister Kestrel."
"Commander Worf. I'm glad to see you upright."
"I am glad to see you unarmed."
"There's nothing in my pockets but a padd. You can search them."
Worf searched them. It took four minutes.
Picard was waiting for him at the end of the corridor.
He had come without his uniform jacket, in shirtsleeves, with his hands clasped behind him. He stood in the pool of light under a bulkhead lamp as if he had happened there by accident, and Kestrel, who had spent thirty years learning to recognize the difference, slowed to a halt a few paces short.
"Captain."
"Mister Kestrel." Picard did not offer his hand. "I should like a few moments before the meeting, if you will permit it."
"I'm in no position to refuse."
"That is not why I asked." They stood a little apart in the empty passage. Somewhere behind them, Worf's footsteps receded. "I wish to say something, and I would prefer to say it plainly. I do not trust you."
"That's fair."
"I do not trust you, and I am nonetheless prepared to rely on you, because Vash has told me that I may. I want you to understand that this is a matter of considerable weight to me." He paused. "I have known her a long time. She does not offer her confidence lightly."
"I know it."
"I do not think you do." Picard's voice was very level. "I think you have a version of her that you carried for eleven years. A younger, quicker woman. I do not say it is wrong. I say that the woman who is aboard my ship at present is not that person. She has been hurt a great deal in the last few days. She has been betrayed by someone she loved. She has been, in her own phrase, furious. And she has chosen, in the middle of all that, to give you a second chance."
Kestrel made no reply. His eyes were on the captain's face.
"I would ask you not to waste it."
"You think I'd hurt her."
"I think you might. I think you are, by temperament, a man who does what is easiest and calls it necessity. I have known several. Some of them were very charming." A faint, dry edge. "I would very much like you to prove me wrong."
"I'm the least likely man in the galaxy to hurt her," said Kestrel, slowly. "And the most likely. I've been thinking about that for about six days."
"Yes."
"I won't say I'll be good. I've never been good. I've been useful and I've been loyal when it paid, and I've been right about three things in my life." He looked at the floor. "I'll say that I'm going to try. And that if I fail, it won't be because I didn't know what it would cost."
Picard studied him. It was the long, level, unhurried look of a man who had once been asked to judge a good many people across a good many tables.
"That," he said, "is the first thing you have said to me that I find I believe."
"Is that good?"
"I do not yet know." He unclasped his hands. "I will tell you one more thing, Mister Kestrel, and then I will take you to the meeting. I have been, in my time, very near your position. Not in the matter of the law. In the matter of having done a thing, and been ashamed, and wished to be forgiven by someone whose forgiveness I could not ask for." A beat. "I would not wish it on anyone. I should like to help you out of it, if I can."
For the first time, Kestrel's composure faltered. A very small movement at the corner of his mouth, as though something had been placed on a surface he had thought was bare.
"Why?"
"Because she asked me to," Picard said. "And because I have found that I would rather have been generous and been taken advantage of than the reverse." He turned. "Come. The Admiral is waiting."
The meeting was held in Picard's ready room. He sat behind the desk. Vash took the chair at his right. Kestrel took the chair opposite, and Data stood behind him with the still, attentive, unreadable posture of an instrument. On the wall monitor, small and crisp, sat Admiral Sorokin, who had asked to be present.
"Mister Kestrel," Picard said. "You have information. I will remind you that the damper on the receiver has twenty-six hours left."
"I do." Kestrel set a padd on the desk and slid it across. "It's a recording. The burst I overheard on my relay at Doria Minor. I copied it, for the lack of anything better to do with a spare channel. It carries a Starfleet command header. I told you that. What I didn't know is that the header is part of the signature."
"The signature."
"Office Nine's people sign their tips. It's a professional habit, Captain. A little flourish at the end of the transmission. The Consortium uses it to tell its informants apart." He nodded at the padd. "I know the cipher. I've used it myself. It took me six hours to break the layer that hides the name."
Picard picked up the padd. Vash watched his face. It did not change. He read for a long while.
"I see," he said.
"Captain?" Sorokin's voice, from the monitor. It was thin.
"Admiral." Picard put the padd down, very carefully. "The signature reads EV. Below it, in the same hand, is a transmission key matching a credential issued by Starfleet Command eleven years ago. It belongs to Lieutenant Commander Emeric Voss."
The room was silent.
"No," said Sorokin.
"I have verified the header against the Starfleet registry. It is authentic."
"That's not possible. He's—" She stopped. Her face on the monitor had gone the gray of old ash. She looked at something off-screen, and then at Picard, and then, with a slow terrible dignity, at her own hands. "He has been my aide for six years. I've trusted him with everything."
"I know."
"I sent him to the Sarek. I put him in the middle of it." Her voice was hollow. "I gave it to him."
"Admiral," Data said quietly. "Dr. T'Sai reported an anomaly in the Sarek's communications log three hours ago. A very brief burst on an unregistered band. She traced it to a console in the liaison's quarters. Captain T'Vel has already placed Lieutenant Commander Voss in custody."
Sorokin closed her eyes.
"I had not been told," she whispered.
"She was waiting for confirmation." Data's voice was very gentle. "Vulcans are careful. I believe she did not wish to accuse an officer on a single anomaly."
"Yes," Sorokin said. "That is what a good officer does."
"There were five names in that room," Picard said gently. "Director Halvane—"
"Cleared this morning. I had his office audited before I had my breakfast." Her mouth twisted. "I did not enjoy it. He thanked me for being thorough. I don't think I'll ever forgive him for that."
They put Voss on the screen an hour later.
He sat in a bare gray cell aboard the Sarek, hands folded on the table, in a rumpled uniform with no insignia. He was a slight, tidy man in his thirties with thinning hair and a face that would have gone unremarked in any crowd. His eyes were very tired. He looked at Sorokin on the screen and didn't look away.
"Admiral," he said.
"Emeric."
"I'm so sorry."
"Tell me why."
"It began with the notes." His voice was dry and level. It was the voice of a man who had been telling himself the story for a long time. "Eleven months ago. A broker at the Consortium approached me at a conference. A young woman. She told me there was a coming market event, and that insiders were investing. It was a small sum. I put in a little from my wife's estate." He stopped. "She died, Admiral. Six years ago. I had the money and nothing to do with it. I thought it would be a kind of..." He searched for the word. "A memorial. Something to make it mean something."
"You invested in the catastrophe."
"I didn't know it was a catastrophe. I thought it was a mining claim. A salvage opportunity." He shook his head. "Then the first site was found, and the first payment came in. And then they asked me for information. Small things. Where the Enterprise was going. What Starfleet knew. It seemed harmless. It seemed... It was only data."
"Seven people are dead."
"I know." The mask cracked, for the first time. "I know. I didn't think—" He put both hands over his face. "I never thought anyone would die."
Nobody spoke. The little gray room was silent. On the monitor, Sorokin sat still, her face the color of ash, and looked at a man she had trusted for six years, and Vash saw in her eyes something that she thought might be the beginning of grief.
"I'll see you in a court," Sorokin said at last. "Captain T'Vel, he is to be held until I can arrange transport. I'll require a full transcript." She drew a slow breath. "Captain Picard. I owe you an apology."
"You owe me nothing, Admiral."
"I closed the inquiry. When you told me about the leak, I closed it, and I told you it wasn'thing. I did it because I couldn't bear for it to be someone I knew." She watched him. "You were right to be afraid of it. I'm very sorry."
"Thank you, Admiral," Picard said gently. "It is accepted."
The monitor went dark.
"You said there was a favor," Vash said.
They were alone in the observation lounge. The stars wheeled slowly beyond the glass. Kestrel stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the pale scar on the planet below, and didn't turn.
"I did."
"What is it?"
"I want to come with you." He said it quietly. "To the end. To wherever the last of these things is. I know where it is, Vash. The Consortium has the coordinates. They've had them for months. It's a dead star, inside the Zone, with a single planet. They're sending a fleet."
"Data's already found it."
"Then you know." He turned. His face was very tired, very plain, stripped of everything but the asking. "I'm not asking to be trusted. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I've got a ship with a call on it, and a backer who'll take it the moment he learns I'm not his. I'll have nothing left when this is over. I'd like to be somewhere it matters, when the last of it happens."
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to have been there." He smiled, crookedly, and it was the old smile, the boy's smile, worn thin and real. "I'd like to have done one thing, all the way through, without asking what it paid."
She regarded him for a while. She thought about a tomb on a dead mining world. She thought about a man in a lamplit antechamber, saying I already told them where it is, and then, with his whole ruined face, I'd like to put mine down.
"Yes," she said.
"Yes?"
"You said you wanted me to say it first."
"I did."
"Then yes." She held out her hand. "But you take orders from Picard. And you don't lie to me again. Not about a single thing."
He took it. His hand was cold, and steady, and a good deal more careful than she remembered.
"It's the first time anyone's ever made me a promise I wanted to keep," Kestrel said.