Chapter Seven · The Threnody

USS Enterprise-D — Present Day

"He asked for you by name," Picard said. "He declined to speak to me."

"Of course he did." Vash set her coffee down on the briefing room table. She had slept two hours in the borrowed guest quarters, woken to a tone that wasn't quite there, and lain for what felt like minutes looking at the ceiling. "He thinks I'll say yes."

"Will you?"

"I'll say yes. I just don't want him to know I've already decided."

The Fair Weather had hung in high orbit for nine hours without moving. Kestrel's ship was a long, ugly salvage tug with a pair of mismatched drive pods and a hull that had been repainted so many times that it had developed a grain. It hadn't fired on the Enterprise. It hadn't fired at all, after the Consortium shuttle went down. At dawn by ship's time, Kestrel had opened a channel and asked, politely, whether Captain Picard would permit a single unarmed man to dock in his shuttlebay, for the purpose of speaking to a civilian.

Picard had said he would consider it. He considered it for nine minutes.

"If I refuse, he goes away," Picard said now. "If I accept, I am inviting an armed rival aboard a flagship, against the express wishes of an admiral, in order to hear what he says to a woman he once loved."

"You don't have to put it like that."

"I am a precise man."

"You are a pedant." She almost smiled. "Let him come. Put Worf in the room. Put the whole security department in the vents if you want. I'll still learn more in five minutes than you'll learn in a week."

He regarded her for a moment. She thought he would say something, and found she wanted to know what. Then he nodded, once, and touched his badge.

"Mister Worf. Mister Kestrel will be received in Cargo Bay Two. I want him searched to the skin."

"With pleasure, Captain."

Cargo Bay Two was cold and bright and smelled of packing foam. They had cleared a corner for the meeting. Two folding chairs, a plain table, a pitcher of water no one had touched. Worf stood ten paces off with his arms crossed, looking like a wall that had taken offense.

Kestrel walked in alone. He had changed his coat. The new one was plainer, black canvas, patched at one elbow, and it made him look less like a man who sold things and more like one who had once dug them up. A single bruise was fading along his jaw. He stopped at a comfortable distance and held out both hands, palms open.

"Nothing in them," he said.

"Worf checked your boots," Vash said.

"He checked my boots twice. I think he enjoyed it." Kestrel glanced at Worf, who didn't move. "Commander. Thank you for not breaking anything."

"There is still time," Worf said.

Kestrel laughed, a short real laugh, and sat. Vash took the other chair. The table between them was a meter wide. It looked, she thought, like a great deal more.

"You look terrible," he said.

"You look like you slept on your ship."

"I slept in a chair." He rubbed his jaw. "You've cut your hair."

"Eight years ago."

"Has it been that long?" He looked startled. She didn't answer. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a door she kept shut had moved a half inch in its frame.

"What do you want, Roan?"

"To talk. About the Consortium. About what I'd like to say to your captain, if he'd stop pretending he isn't in the room." Kestrel tilted his head toward the ceiling vent and raised his voice a little. "Captain Picard. I can see the camera. It's a very good camera."

The comm panel above the door clicked. "Mister Kestrel," Picard's voice said, cool and dry. "I am pleased to hear it."

"Then you won't mind my asking you to turn it off."

"I will mind very much."

"Fair." Kestrel shrugged. "Then I'll say it for both of you. Shuttle two was sent by a Vantir Recovery Office. Not Sera, not me. I never saw their orders, and I wasn't meant to."

Vash nodded. She had worked that much out herself.

"Here's what I hadn't worked out," Kestrel said. "The shuttle's lead had a second board open on my bridge relay, routed through my own comm array, because I'd been fool enough to give him access. When your ship was still four hours out, I heard a burst come in. A course. A warp speed. An arrival time to the minute." He leaned forward. "It carried a Starfleet command header. Nobody outside Starfleet has that. Nobody outside a very small room."

Vash felt something go cold and clear at the base of her skull. "They had the Enterprise's heading."

"They had it before I did. Nobody told me a flagship was coming, Vash. Nobody told me it was Picard. Whoever fed that burst knew where your ship was going within hours of your deciding to go."

Silence. On the far side of the bay, Worf's arms had come uncrossed.

"Five people knew," Vash said, before she could stop herself.

"Then one of them can't keep quiet." Kestrel's eyes flicked to her, sharp and sympathetic. "I'm sorry. I know it's not what you wanted to hear."

"Why are you telling us?"

"Because I'm a businessman," Kestrel said. "Something has gone wrong with my business."

He told it badly, and she recognized that as a good sign. A man who told a story well was usually lying. Kestrel had taken an advance from a Vantir brokerage seven weeks ago, a modest sum, for a modest task: locate and secure the anomaly that a dead mining consortium's charts had apparently hidden. He hadn't asked why. He hadn't been told. It had been the kind of job he'd done a hundred times.

Then he had been sitting behind Doria Minor's second moon for an hour when the first breach pulse came through his instruments. The tone. The drift. His people had begun to bleed. Nobody had warned him.

"And the escort?" Vash asked.

"Was not in my contract. I didn't know it was aboard until it launched." He shook his head. "I've worked for some people in my time, Vash. I haven't worked for anyone who didn't tell me what I was carrying."

"You've always carried things you didn't ask about."

"Yes," he said simply. "I have."

It wasn't the answer she had expected. She had prepared for half a dozen. She hadn't prepared for agreement.

"There's a second site," Kestrel said. "That's the other thing. The Consortium filed claims on a reef system in the Orsak Deep sixteen days before you broke into that chamber. Nobody files on a reef system. It's water and rock and a few thousand people who fish. But someone did, and someone paid for exclusive rights, and whoever did it was certain those rights would matter."

"Ke'Thara," Vash said slowly.

He blinked. "You know it?"

"Data told us this morning. It's one of eleven." She watched his face change. "You didn't know that."

"I didn't." For the first time his composure cracked. Not much. A line of surprise across the forehead, and then something wry and bleak underneath. "Eleven. So it's not one orb. It's a network."

"We don't know what it is."

"That seems to be the general problem." He looked at his hands. "Whatever this is, Vantir knew about it months ago. They bought rights across a hundred systems that nobody wanted, on the off chance that some of them would suddenly be worth something. And they were right."

"It's a market," Picard's voice said. "They are trading in a catastrophe before it happens."

"Captain, in my experience that's the only way anyone has ever made a real fortune." Kestrel didn't smile. "I'm telling you because I don't think they're going to stop at buying. I think they're going to help it along."

Vash's stomach went tight. "Help it?"

"I don't know. It's a feeling." He looked up at her. There was no charm in it now, none of the crooked old smile. He looked like a man who had been tired for a moment and had only just been permitted to notice. "That room made my people bleed, Vash. And my backer wasn't frightened. He was pleased."

In the small gray room behind Cargo Bay Two, where the security console kept its single dim screen, Picard stood with Troi and watched.

It was a strange way to watch a man he had never met. The camera sat high in the corner of the bay, its lens wide and flattening, and from it the two figures at the table looked small and curiously theatrical, like a pair of actors in a very old play. He could see the angle of Kestrel's shoulders. He could see the set of Vash's jaw. He could hear every word, and none of the rest.

"Tell me," he said, quietly.

Troi had been silent for some minutes. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes half closed, in the attitude that the crew called her listening face, and her brow was slightly drawn, as if over a puzzle.

"He is frightened," she said. "That is the first thing. It is very deep and very old, and he has been carrying it for a long time. He is frightened of her. Not of what she might do. Of what she might say."

"Is he lying?"

"Not now. I would know. There is a good deal he is leaving out, and I think that is not lying so much as habit. He is a man who has told the truth in pieces for so long that he has forgotten how to do it any other way." She paused. "He's ashamed, Jean-Luc. Very ashamed. And underneath that, there is something I did not expect."

"What?"

"Relief." She opened her eyes. "As though he had been waiting a long time for someone to ask him the right question, and he has just heard it."

Picard watched the screen. On it, Vash leaned a little forward, and said something that made Kestrel laugh, a short helpless exhalation, as if the sound had been surprised out of him.

"Do you trust it?" Troi said. "What he is telling us."

"I trust that he believes it. I do not yet trust that he is complete." Picard folded his arms. "A man who has sold information for thirty years does not give any away unless it is worth more to him than the price he would have got for it. I should like to know what he has been paid."

"Not in money."

"No." He watched the small, distant figures a moment longer. "I begin to think that is the whole difficulty."

Vash walked him to the shuttle herself. It was a long corridor and nobody spoke until the hatch.

"You can keep the Fair Weather in orbit," she said. "Picard won't stop you. He can't, not legally. But the moment you move toward Ke'Thara—"

"I'll move where my contract says. That's the agreement." He touched the hatch frame with two fingers, lightly, like a man touching a wall he wasn't sure would hold. "I'm not on your side, Vash."

"I didn't ask."

"I wanted it said." He met her eyes. "I'm not on theirs, either. It's a new feeling. I don't entirely trust it."

"It's called a conscience. It tends to pass."

"Does it." The crooked smile returned for an instant, thin and faint. "You'd know. You were the one who sold the Varan lamps."

She stopped breathing.

"That was a Tuesday," he said softly. "The crew hadn't been paid for four months. You sold them to a man you knew would melt them down, and you told yourself the ledger justified it, and then you told me I was the one who'd sold the Hadrel Vault ledger for the exact same reason, in the exact same week. We've spent eleven years each holding half a truth and calling it the whole." He took his hand from the hatch. "I'd like to put mine down. I don't know how. But I'd like to."

She stood still. She was fairly sure the whole bay had gone silent to listen.

"Go, Roan," she said. It came out rougher than she meant. "Before somebody changes their mind."

"Somebody always does." He stepped through the hatch. "Be careful at the reef. If it's the same kind of thing as the chamber, it will want to be found by someone patient."

The hatch closed. She stood in the corridor with her hand flat on the cold bulkhead. Then she turned and found Picard standing at the far end, hands clasped behind his back, where he had plainly been standing for some time.

"You were not supposed to hear that," she said.

"I heard very little." His voice was gentle. "I heard a man say he would like to put something down."

"Don't."

"I am not going to say anything."

"That's worse."

"Yes." He came down the corridor to stand beside her. "I've found that's usually the case."

They stood there a moment, and Vash thought about a door that had moved half an inch. Then she straightened.

"Data said he'd finished the third parallax. Ke'Thara's one. How long to get there?"

"Six hours." He studied her. "Vash. The sound. I've noticed it is stronger in the evenings. Tell me honestly whether you've been sleeping."

"Not well." She met his eyes. "But when I do, the dreams are very clear."

"What kind?"

"The kind I'd rather not tell a captain about." She did smile then, thin and tired. "Give me until after the reef."