Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Cradle — Present Day
They came up out of the dark with seven minutes left.
Picard carried her. He had told Worf that he would, and Worf, who had not been consulted, had looked at him for a breath with his bloodied temple and his bent cane and said nothing at all. So Dara Liang rode up the long black spiral in the captain's arms, light as a coat, her hair swinging against his sleeve, and he did not feel the weight. He felt only the slow dull ache of a thing he had no name for and would not try to name until he was alone.
Behind him, Vash walked with the notebook pressed to her ribs and her eyes on the floor. Data went last, with his phaser held loosely at the shoulder of a small gray-coated man who climbed in silence, and did not look up, and did not speak. Grethis had not said a word since the chamber. He walked like a man in a dream. Twice, on the stairs, he stumbled, and Data's hand closed on his arm and steadied him without a sound.
The spiral shook. Dust sifted down from the stone. Ahead of them, through the mouth of the passage, a faint white light was growing.
"Captain," Data said, "I should advise that the collapse is accelerating."
"Thank you, Mister Data."
"Six minutes, thirty seconds."
"I am aware."
They came out into the open.
The plateau was singing no longer.
That was the first thing Picard noticed. There was no chord, no tone, no vast low swell pressing against his chest. The sky was the color of old brass, and the light of the star fell flat and quiet across the gray stone, and the silence was so complete that he could hear his own boots. It was the silence of a hall after the last guest has gone.
The seven towers were dissolving.
They stood in their ring against the sky, four kilometers high, and as he watched, the nearest began to open. The crystal rings turned slowly outward, one by one, like the petals of a closing flower played backward, and the soft pearl light within them brightened and ran upward in thin bright threads. In the threads, drifting free, he saw the figures. They had not been destroyed. They were rising. A Romulan in a technician's tunic, a woman in the green of the Tal Shiar, a young man with a surveyor's case still clutched in his hand. Each one hung for a moment in the golden air with its face turned toward the sky, calm, luminous, entirely at ease. Then each one lifted, like a spark from a fire, and was gone.
"They're free," Tobin said, behind him. His voice was a whisper. "Oh, God, look. They're free."
"I do not know that," Data said gently. "I do not know what they are, or were, or are now. I know only that they have gone where the Choir went."
Picard looked up. He watched the last of the figures rise. And he thought of Vrenna Tal on the bridge of her warbird, who had not heard a note of any of it, and who would see her eleven people go as faint white lights in the sky.
A hand closed on his sleeve. Worf.
"Captain. The shuttle."
It stood where they had left it, three hundred meters from the ring, with its hatch open and its engines warm. Beside it, in a ragged line along the ridge, a dozen figures in dark green waited with their disruptors lowered. Their commander, the lean gray man with the sash, stood a few paces ahead of the others with his helmet off. He looked at the dissolving towers. Then, slowly, he looked at Picard, and at the woman in his arms, and bowed his head.
"Captain," he said. "We heard nothing. But we saw."
"Thank you for holding the perimeter."
"It was my honor." He glanced at Dara. "She is not—"
"No."
"I am sorry." He said it quietly, as to a colleague. "The Empire does not say this often. We are sorry."
The shuttle lifted at four minutes.
Picard sat in the rear compartment with Dara laid along the bench beside him, her head on a rolled jacket and a blanket drawn up to her chin. He had closed her eyes. He had arranged her hands. He had done it with great care, and a small stubborn corner of his mind had observed that it was exactly how he would have wished his own to be arranged, and had not found that consoling.
Vash sat opposite, with her knees drawn up and the notebook in both hands, looking at nothing. She had not spoken. She had not wept since the dais. She sat in the plain gray light of the shuttle's overheads with her hair in her eyes and her mouth set in a line that was almost a smile, and he could not look at her for very long.
Through the viewport, the plateau fell away.
It went in a single long slow collapse. The central ring first, the great concentric terraces of black stone folding inward, tier by tier, into the pit they had descended. Then the towers, dissolving to dust. Then the plateau itself, forty kilometers of dead gray rock, buckling and sinking and breaking apart along lines of old fracture, a vast disc of stone slipping softly into its own heart. A plume of white rose from the wound. In the white, for an instant, a pale blue light shone, a candle seen through fog, and was gone.
"The orb," Vash said. It was the first thing she had said in twenty minutes.
"Destroyed, I believe," said Data. "The structure had no further function. It has collapsed in on itself. I read no residual signature."
"And the Keys?"
"The same."
"Everything."
"Yes."
She nodded. She did not look away from the window. He watched her watch it, with the look of a woman who has spent twenty years digging up the past and has just seen the greatest find of her life go back into the ground.
"No survey," she said, quietly. "No dig. No plinth. Nothing for a museum. There's a hole in a dead world, in Romulan space, and a notebook, and that's the whole of the record."
"There is your testimony," Picard said.
"A civilian's testimony. About something that doesn't exist." She laughed, one breath of it. "I wanted my name on this. Do you know that? Right at the start. I'd written the title." She turned the notebook over in her hands. "Isn't that funny."
He was silent. He had learned that she did not want to be answered.
The shuttle cleared the atmosphere. Above them, huge and green and bronze against the dark, the warbird Khazara hung in the light of the dying star, with its two sister ships fanned out behind it. Its weapons were live. And at the center of its prow, a small blue light had begun to pulse.
"Captain." Data's voice had changed. "The Romulan flagship has armed its device. The countdown reads four minutes."
Picard stood.
"The six hours," Vash whispered.
"They expired eleven minutes ago." Data's head tilted. "Commander Tal has not yet fired. I do not know why."
"Mister Data. Open a channel."
"Channel open."
"Commander Tal." Picard did not raise his voice. "This is Picard. It is finished."
For several seconds there was only the hiss of the carrier. Then Vrenna's voice came through, level, clipped, entirely without inflection. It was the voice of a woman who had been standing at attention for six hours.
"I observe that the star is dimming."
"Yes."
"I observe that the plateau has collapsed. That my people have been, how shall I say, released. That the signature has ended." A pause. "I have a device armed in my hands, Captain. I have been told that if the signal completed, it would be necessary to use it. I am attempting to determine whether the signal completed."
"It did not. It was refused."
"By whom?"
"By the Choir itself. At the end. With a great deal of help from a woman who is no longer with us." His voice caught, very slightly. "You were right, Commander. It was a conversation. It has been answered."
Silence.
"Captain." The voice had altered. It was lower, rougher, with something like uncertainty in it. "I must tell you something. I do not know how to explain it to you."
"Please."
"Four minutes ago, I was standing on my bridge with the cylinder in my hand. I had decided, I believe, to fire. The star was beginning to gutter. I could not tell whether it was ending or beginning. I thought of eleven thousand of my own people on the nearest colony. I thought of my duty." A long, slow breath. "And then I heard it."
Picard went still.
"A chord," Vrenna said. "Only for a moment. A single, vast, soft chord, rising out of the floor of my ship. I have no word for it. Four of my officers heard it. One fell to her knees." Her voice shook. "I have waited all my life to know what we were guarding. And in the last second, in the very last second, before it went, it let me hear."
"Commander."
"It was not a monster, Captain." Very quietly. "It was not a weapon. It was the sound of someone going home." She stopped. "I have disarmed the device."
He closed his eyes.
"I will say one thing more," Vrenna said, and now the iron was back, thin and bright and level. "I have been instructed by my superiors to use this weapon, if the need arose. I will tell them, in my report, that the need did not arise. I will tell them it was a matter of my judgment. They will not like it. I do not think they will be able to punish me. They will be too busy asking what I heard."
"I am very glad."
"I am not glad. I am something I do not have a word for." A faint dry exhalation. "Captain. The Consortium's vessels. They attempted to flee, when the star began to fail. My second ship has disabled all four. Their crews are in my custody. I will, of course, expect to keep them."
"Of course."
"And Mr. Grethis?"
"He is in my custody, aboard this shuttle."
"Ah." Another pause. "The Federation will prosecute him for the colonial losses."
"Yes."
"The Empire will request the right to question him. For the sake of the Senator he bribed."
"I believe that can be arranged."
"Good." Her image resolved on the shuttle's small screen, a gray, tired, upright woman in a dark green uniform, with iron eyes that had, for the first time, a faint shine in them. "Captain Picard. I do not expect that we shall meet again. I will not say it has been a pleasure. I will say that I am glad it was you."
"As am I, Commander."
"Tell your archaeologist..." She stopped. "Tell her she has done what none of my people could. And that the Empire will not forget it. Though it will never say so aloud."
The screen went dark.
She was waiting in the sickbay when Vash came in.
Not Dara. Dara lay in the cold room two doors down, under a white sheet, where Crusher had gently, and with great kindness, arranged her. Vash had sat with her for an hour. She had held her hand until it was no longer a thing that could be held. Then she had risen, and walked through the long, bright, silent corridors of the Enterprise to the place where the living were kept.
Kestrel lay in the farthest bed.
He was very pale. The right side of his body was bandaged to the shoulder, a thick white cocoon of dressing and regenerator field, and where his arm should have been, the sheet lay flat. His face was gray under the stubble. His eyes were closed. A monitor beside him beat a slow steady rhythm.
Kessel sat beside the bed in a straight-backed chair. He rose when she approached.
"Ms. Vash."
"Kessel."
"They had to take it. Above the elbow." The boy's voice cracked. "Dr. Crusher says it's a clean job. She says he'll be fitted for a, for a new one. In a few weeks. If he wants." He swallowed. "He's been awake twice. He asked for you."
"What did he say?"
"He said..." Kessel stopped. His face worked. He looked down at his hands. "He told me, before. Before he did it. He said to tell you something. I told Tobin I'd say it when you were out." He raised his eyes. They were bright and wet and very young. "He said to tell you it wasn't a transaction."
Vash stood quite still.
It was a small plain sentence. She had heard it before, nearly word for word, in a dim cramped cargo bay on a dead world, from a man in a coat with a patched elbow who hadn't known yet that he meant it. She felt it go into her like a splinter. She felt something give way, very softly, under her ribs.
"Thank you, Kessel," she said. "Would you give us a minute?"
"Yes, ma'am."
He went. She sat down in the chair, which was still warm. She looked at the thin gray face on the pillow. She looked at the flat place where an arm had been.
She took the hand that was left. It was cold, and perfectly still, and a good deal more careful than she remembered.
"Roan," she said.
His eyes opened. They were a pale, tired, unfocused gray, and they found her face after a moment as a man finds a landmark in fog.
"Did it work?"
"It worked."
"Dara?"
"Gone." Her voice was steady. She was proud of that. "She held the note. She did the thing the woman in the dream did. She saved all of us."
"Ah." His eyes closed, and opened again. "I'm sorry."
"So am I."
"I'd have liked to have, to have said something to her. I never did. I thought she was..." He stopped. A thin ghost of the old crooked smile touched the corner of his mouth. "I suppose it doesn't matter now."
"It matters."
"Does it?"
"It does to me." She tightened her hand on his. "You cut the cable, Roan."
"I did."
"You had a good reason."
"I had several." He looked at the ceiling. "I'd always thought that when I finally did something decent, there'd be a... I don't know. A feeling. A weight lifting. It wasn't like that. It was only very bright. And then it was over, and I was lying on a floor with a woman I'd gotten killed standing over me saying she was going to hit me." He laughed. It hurt. "I think I rather liked it."
"Selk?"
"She's all right. She came through. She's in the brig, I think, on Picard's very reasonable orders. I'm told she asked to be." His eyes slid to hers. "I'm going to be in some trouble, Vash."
"I know."
"A great deal of it. Years, probably. They'll want testimony, for Grethis. I'll have to say what I did, in full, on the record. All of it. The pings. The advance. Doria Minor." He swallowed. "I'm going to do it."
"I know you are."
"Will you..." He stopped. He looked at the sheet. "That's too much to ask."
"Ask."
"Will you come and see me? When it's... Wherever they put me."
She regarded him for some time. She thought of eleven years. She thought of a tomb, and a ledger, and a Tuesday. She thought, with great clarity and no bitterness, of all the exits she had ever made, one after another, quietly, before anyone could ask her to stay.
"Yes," she said.
"You don't have to."
"I know." She smiled. It was a shaky, crooked, unpracticed thing, and it hurt her face. "That's why it's yes."
His eyes closed. His hand, in hers, relaxed.
She sat beside him for some time, listening to the slow sound of the monitor and the quiet hum of the ship, with the notebook in her lap and the weight of a hundred dead worlds lifting, very gradually, off her shoulders, like a coat she had worn for too many years.