Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Twenty-Eight
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
"I can't authorize it," Sorokin said.
"I have not asked you to."
"Don't be clever, Captain. It is beneath you and I haven't the patience." Her image on the ready room screen was small and gray and very tired. She had aged a year in two days. "The Neutral Zone isn't a line on a map. It's a treaty. It was written in blood and kept for sixty years by every officer who ever stood on a bridge and wanted to cross it and did not. You are asking me to say that this once, for good reasons, a flagship of the Federation may go eleven light-years into Romulan space on the strength of a dream."
"On the strength of a measurement, Admiral. Mister Data's analysis of the site ring is sound. The Cradle is the terminus. If we do not reach it before the damper fails, there will be no colony left on New Beltane to cross a border to defend."
"I know."
"And the Consortium's fleet is already on its way. You have the intelligence. Three ships, possibly four. They will not stop at the line."
"I know that too." Sorokin rubbed her eyes. "I've spent the better part of a day on a channel with the Judge Advocate General, the Council's security committee, and a man from the Diplomatic Corps who used the word incident nine times in four minutes. Every one of them tells me the same thing. We do not cross. We hold at the border, we request a conference through the proper channels, and we wait."
"And if we wait?"
"Then the damper fails and New Beltane is lost, and the next colony, and the next." She dropped her hand. "I'm telling you what I've been told. I'm not telling you what I believe."
He waited. He had learned, over a long career, that there were conversations in which the correct response was silence.
"If you cross without authority," Sorokin said, "you're on your own. I will not be able to protect you. I'll make every argument I can, and I'll lose, and you will be relieved of command and quite possibly court-martialed. Starfleet will say it never gave the order, and it will be telling the truth."
"I understand."
"I don't think you do." Her voice dropped. "I think you've known for days. I think you made up your mind at Ke'Thara."
"Perhaps."
"Then why are you asking me?"
"Because," Picard said, "I wished you to know what I intended before I did it. It seemed the least I owed you."
Sorokin looked at him for a breath. Then, very slightly, her face gave, the stiffness of a woman who has made a decision and wishes someone else had made it first.
"You will go to the border," she said. "You will hold position at the line, as ordered. You will await developments." A pause. "I'll be unavailable for approximately six hours. I've a great many meetings."
"Admiral—"
"That is all, Captain. Sorokin out."
The screen went dark. Picard sat looking at it. After a moment he realized his hands were not entirely steady, and he folded them on the desk until they were.
Dara's quarters had been stripped of everything she could use to hurt herself, and she had made them look like a place where someone lived.
Vash noticed it at once. The bunk was made. The tray from the night before was gone. On the desk, laid out in a neat row, sat a half dozen sheets of blank paper and a single stub of pencil that a security officer had allowed her, after some argument. The paper was covered in small marks. She had been drawing.
"Come in," Dara said, without looking up. "I've been waiting for you to ask."
"Ask what?"
"About the second line." Dara set down the pencil. "I heard it too. Under the silence, at the Kettle. For three seconds, the whole ship heard it, through the hull. I was sitting on this bunk. I listened to a voice I'd never heard in my life, and I'm sorry, I know you came here to say something else."
"I came to ask you something."
"I know."
"I need to see the margin."
Dara opened the notebook, which lay at her elbow. She turned it, without a word, to the last page, and held it out.
The curl was there, in the margin, a dozen times, pale and fine in the lined paper's edge. A loop that turned back on itself, and curled again, and in its heart a smaller curl, and in that one a smaller still. Vash looked at it for a while. She felt a slow, cold, wonderful certainty gather in her chest, the feeling of a long argument arriving at its conclusion.
"You wrote decorative," she said.
"Yes."
"You drew it a dozen times."
"I draw it everywhere." Dara's voice was quiet. "I've done it for ten years. In the margins of lecture notes. On napkins. In the dust of a dig. I thought it was a habit. A tic." She took up the pencil again, turning it in her fingers. "The first time I saw it carved, at Doria Minor, on the plinth, in the groove pattern, I felt the way you feel when someone says your name in a crowd. A little curl at the end of a phrase. I copied it automatically. I didn't know why."
"It's on every Key."
"On every one I've seen. Ke'Thara. Cirrus. The Kettle. The fragment at Ashfall. Always the last ring, always at the end of the phrase. It's very small. You'd pass it a hundred times and take it for a scribe's flourish." She looked up. "I think it's the second line. I think someone wrote it into the structure and made it look like nothing. And I think I've been drawing the shape of it, without understanding, for most of my adult life."
Vash stood perfectly still.
"I didn't understand it until last night," Dara said. "Until I heard the voice through the wall. It sounded like the curl. A little song that turned inward and came back. I lay on that bunk with the whole thing running through me and I thought, that's what the loop is. It isn't decoration. It's a tune."
"What's it for?"
"I don't know." A pause. "But I know what it isn't for. It isn't for the homecoming." She laid down the pencil. "The first line goes outward. Every phrase of it, every step, reaches. It wants to be heard, to be answered, to be finished. It's the sound of someone calling across a gulf. The second line goes the other way. It goes in. It turns back. It does not want to be answered. It wants to be let alone."
The room was quiet. Outside the door, very faintly, she heard the shift of the guard's boots.
"There was someone," Vash said slowly. "In the dream. In the hall. A woman in the front row, with her hands stained to the wrist. She was the only one who didn't sing."
"I saw her too."
"You saw her?"
"Twice. Once at Ke'Thara, the night after the dome. Once after the Kettle." Dara's eyes were bright. "She doesn't speak. She only looks. I think she's very old, and very tired, and I think she was trying to tell us something for a very long time, in the only way she could."
Vash sat down on the edge of the bunk. It was a plain narrow thing, with a thin gray blanket. She was aware of her own heartbeat, quick and light.
"I need you to show me every instance," she said. "Every curl you've drawn. Every Key, every site. I need the order, and the positions, and what each one's attached to."
"I can do that."
"I'll need you to help me read it."
"I'll do anything you ask." Dara's voice was steady. "I want you to know that. Whatever you decide, however it ends. I'll do it. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to use me."
Vash regarded her. She was thinking of a woman on a gravel road in the dying light, dragging an old teacher out of a burning hall by the wrist. She was thinking of a good deal else besides.
"I'll talk to Picard," she said.
"Thank you."
"Don't." She stood. "Don't thank me. I haven't forgiven you. I may not. But I need your hands, and I need your ears, and I need that notebook." She paused at the door. "And Dara?"
"Yes?"
"I'd rather you drew it for me than for them."
Dara smiled, and it was the smile of the first day, the quick unguarded one, and it broke Vash's heart a little.
"Always," she said.
The warbird decloaked off the Enterprise's starboard bow at 2204 hours, six minutes from the border.
It did not do it quietly. It uncoiled out of the dark in a long soundless unfurling of green and bronze, vast as a cathedral, wings swept forward and down in the old Romulan fashion, the great raptor's head of its prow gleaming in the starlight. Every weapon on it was live. Every one of them was aimed at the Enterprise. Picard felt the bridge go quite still around him.
"Shields up," he said quietly. "Red alert. Hold fire."
"Hold fire," Riker repeated. "Sir, they've locked every emitter on our primary hull. Eleven of them."
"I counted."
"They're hailing."
"Open a channel."
The face that resolved on the main viewer was calm. That was the first thing he noticed. A Romulan woman, in her fifties, with cropped dark hair threaded with silver and the faint ridge of the Romulan brow shadowing deep-set eyes the color of cold iron. She sat in the command chair of a warbird the size of a small city, with her hands folded on the armrests, and wore the uniform of the Tal Shiar like a woman who had stopped noticing its weight a long time ago.
"Captain Jean-Luc Picard," she said. Her Federation Standard was flawless. "I am Commander Vrenna Tal of the Imperial Romulan Star Empire. I have followed your vessel for seven days."
"I had begun to suspect it."
"I imagine you had. Your Commander Data is very good." A faint dry flicker that might have been humor. "I am authorized by the Praetor's office to speak with you. I am also authorized to destroy your ship. I would begin with the first."
"I would prefer that."
"Then we are agreed." She inclined her head. "Captain, I know where you are going. I know what you carry. I know what you believe it to be, and I know a good deal about what it actually is. I have waited seven days to find out whether you were a fool." She paused. "You have proved, to my modest satisfaction, that you are not. I am therefore prepared to extend, on behalf of the Empire, a formal invitation to your vessel to cross the Neutral Zone."
The bridge was silent. Picard heard Riker draw a breath.
"An invitation."
"A courtesy. Under Article Nine of the Treaty of Algeron, a vessel of the Federation may enter the Zone at the express invitation of the Empire, for purposes of mutual security, without breach." Her eyes did not leave his. "You will find the clause obscure. It has been invoked twice in sixty years. But it exists. And it is, I think, the one thing that will keep your Admiral Sorokin out of a very long meeting."
"You know about the Admiral."
"I know about everyone, Captain. It is my profession." She smiled, a thin and cold and not entirely unfriendly smile. "I will make you a second offer, and then I will let you decide. I am not your friend. I do not believe I will become your friend. But I have a great deal at stake in what lies at the end of this road, and I believe that I will be better placed to defend it if you are alive to help me."
Picard looked at Riker. Riker, to his credit, did not move a muscle. Beside the helm, Data's head had tilted a very small degree to the left, and Picard knew without being told that the android had already checked the clause.
"Mister Data?"
"Article Nine exists, Captain. Its language is accurate."
"Admiral Sorokin is unavailable," Riker murmured. "For six hours."
"So I understand." Picard drew a long breath. He thought of a child's drawing of a woman with her arms raised. He thought of a white hall ringing in the wind. "Commander Tal. On behalf of the Federation, I accept your invitation."
"Excellent." She rose from her chair. "I will lead. You will follow at a distance of two hundred kilometers. If your vessel's weapons come on at any point, I will assume the worst and respond in kind. It is not personal."
"I would not assume that it was."
"Good." Her image began to dissolve. "Captain. One more thing."
"Yes?"
"I cannot hear it," Vrenna Tal said. "The sound. None of us can. We have spent two thousand years guarding the places where it sings, and not one of us has ever heard a note." She studied him with those cold iron eyes, and for a moment something moved behind them that was not calculation. "I should very much like to know what we have been guarding."
The viewer went dark. The warbird turned, a great slow bronze wheel, and began to move.
They crossed the Zone at 2218.