Star Trek - Double Helix, page 67
The door rattled as if someone had kicked it, but did not open at first. Then, it did. It blew open as if knocked by a hard wind.
A thousand times Zevon had seen this instant in his mind, played out in a dozen ways, and it still surprised him.
“Eric!” he gasped.
The years crumbled and dissolved as they stared at each other, comparing what they used to look like with what they looked like now. Zevon knew he must look different. His hair was longer, thonged with the tiny leather strips many Pojjana wore…but as a Romulan, eleven years meant less to him than it had to Eric Stiles.
Zevon’s long-ago friend looked like neither a rosy-cheeked boy nor a dying waif, the only two personae Zevon had ever seen. He was a healthy man now, more slender, less clumsy, his blond hair a shade darker, his face clean-shaven. He still wore a Starfleet uniform, but of a new design. There were unborn weed pods stuck to the side of his trouserleg, and drying muck on his boots.
Scarcely able to breathe, Zevon clasped the arm of his chair with one hand and the side of his desk with the other.
Eric’s chest heaved from running, from climbing the stairs, and whatever other trials had brought him here. Behind their communion of astonished gawking, the alarms rang and rang in the main complex.
“So I’m a little late,” he flipped. “So what?”
Zevon pushed himself around a little more to face him, but still could not find the power to stand up.
Seeing that, Eric simply stepped to him, took his arm, and drew him to his feet. “Let’s go.”
Zevon came to his feet and gripped Eric’s arms in a waltz of amazement and disbelief. “You look—you look—”
“Yeah, got a shave too.” Between his fingers Eric spun a piece of the fringe on Zevon’s decorated vest. “You look like one of those goofy dancers at the Spring Cotillion when they used to make us work the kitchen. I know you gotta get along here, but do you gotta wear their clothes?”
“I like these clothes.”
“Great. Bring ’em along. We’re leaving.”
Not really surprised, Zevon did find himself startled by the abruptness of the demand. How could he possibly begin to explain?
“No, I can’t go.”
“Yes, you can. Come on.”
“No—I must not leave the planet.” He drew back with some force as he realized the serious intentions of what seemed ridiculous. “Eric, I have plans—get your hands off me, Eric!”
“I haven’t got time to argue.” Eric let go of him, as requested, but instead raised his other hand and aimed a small black device directly at Zevon.
Zevon threw both hands up. “No, no!”
In the same instant a pop of yellow light blinded him. He felt his head snap back and his body convulse. His senses spun wild. His knees buckled, but he never felt the floor strike him. A jostling sensation—his eyes were still open enough to see the ceiling reel, the light flop about, and deliberate movement at his side. His own moan of protest boomed in his head. Voluntary movement sank away.
Through the thickness of semiconsciousness Zevon heard the voice that had come to him so many times in the broken hours of early morning.
“Plenty of seats down in front. Welcome to the opening night of ‘Prepare for the Worst,’ starring the always effervescent Eric John Stiles. Reset your phasers and enjoy the show.”
“Zevon…Zevon. Wake up. It’s only light stun. Come out of it. You’ll feel better in a few minutes.”
Some kind of bird cawed in the high tangled roots overhead. The surroundings were ridiculous, an oasis of picnic quality, trying to tell them nothing was wrong and they could just sit here and maybe take a nap.
In the distance, though, more than two miles away, the alarms of the prison still hooted through the open sky. They’d seen airborne patrols sprint from the city toward the mountains, and at least two spotter planes veer toward the valley. None yet angled toward the swamp. Most escapees had more sense than to come in this direction, at least not first.
Stiles glanced around to make sure there was enough root canopy over them that a spotter couldn’t easily see them. He knew that if a plane got close enough the infrared scanners would pick up the heat off the tops of their heads. There was nothing to be done about that if it happened.
Zevon lay in a cradle of velvet-coated roots, the kind that were about to plunge into the nearest puddle and release their spores. Till then they were a bony cushion that offered a few minutes’ rest. Stiles sat with him, absorbing the leather threads in his head and the Pojjana cardigan, pleased that at least Zevon didn’t seem to be starving anymore. They were at least clothing and feeding him for all he’d done for them.
Still drowsy, Zevon gazed at him warmly, with shieldless affection and relief that they were both alive to have this reunion.
“Eric…” He smiled again.
Stiles smiled back, knowing the drug of phaser stun was giving them this uncrystallized and uncluttered moment. His hand closed on Zevon’s wrist as it had that last day so long ago. For a moment there was nothing around them, no planet, no problems, no past or future troubles to distract them. Certainly nothing to drive them apart anymore.
Gradually, though, inevitably, Zevon’s perceptions cleared and he shifted his shoulders. They held onto each other, absorbing the wondrous confirmation that neither was dead, as each certainly had entertained in the troubling hours before sleep.
“I didn’t think you’d even speak to me,” Stiles attempted. His voice cracked on the last couple of words.
Zevon rewarded him with a kind of glow in his eyes. “Why would I not?”
“Well, I am a little late….”
“Yes, you are.”
“I swear, I thought they got you out.”
“I know you did. Why did you stun me?”
“Oh, because you resisted my charms.”
Taking a better grip on Zevon’s arm, Stiles helped him sit up and lean against a particularly large and ancient root. Nauseated, Zevon closed his eyes briefly, fielding a wave of dizziness from the change of position.
“Are you okay?” Stiles asked.
Zevon leered at him with unfocused eyes and finally a clearing head. A perception of irony brought the faintest of smiles.
“Yes, Eric, I’m okay.”
The buzz of distant aircraft funneled down to them from the foothills. Stiles didn’t look away as the awkward moment passed between them.
“So,” he began, “how y’been?”
With a grimace of irony and another smile, Zevon sat up and shook pods from his hair. “I’ve been busy.” His face patterned by the shadows of roots overhead, he blinked into the sinking sun. “Where have you taken me?”
“We’re out on the swamp flats. Cuffo Lake’s a mile or so that way. I was hoping you’d come around so I didn’t have to carry you any more. We’re under cover, at least.”
Another shadow came over them, this one long, crisp, and near. Stiles didn’t look around. He knew.
“This is Ambassador Spock,” he said to Zevon.
Zevon peered up at Spock, fitted the puzzle pieces into place, and accepted what he saw. He bowed his head courteously. “Your fame precedes you. I am honored.”
Spock returned the gesture. “As am I, your excellency.”
“Centurion, please.”
“As you wish.”
As Spock came to sit beside them on a fat root, Zevon said, “Royalty is the mantle I was born to. Centurion is the rank I earned.”
“Then Mr. Stiles’s report is correct? You are fourteenth in line for the throne?”
“Thirteenth, now.”
Spock paused. “Yes, of course. Pardon my error. If you will indulge me for a few minutes, Centurion, I shall explain our problem.”
Zevon glanced at Stiles, then back to Spock. “Explain.”
“So they’re dying. So what?”
A shaft of guilt ran through Eric Stiles at hearing Zevon using affectations of language he had obviously learned during their incarceration. He felt as if he were looking into a curved mirror. Even after all these years, Zevon sounded like Stiles, and it was both nice and weird.
“I understand,” Stiles allowed. “They didn’t come for you. But it’s important, Zevon. And you’re the only one.”
“I hardly believe that. I am the convenient one.”
Stiles winced inwardly. Better let that go for now. “What happened after I left?”
“Once Orsova came sober again that day, he thought about what you said, that we might be able to predict the Constrictor waves. He came to me and wanted to know how. I told him. He understood none of it, of course, yet I suppose it sounded to him as if I understood something. He went to the authorities and warned that a Constrictor was coming.”
“I’ll bet they listened hard,” Stiles chided.
“They hardly listened,” Zevon confirmed, his frustration long scabbed over. “Then the Constrictor did come. Millions died. And the people thought Orsova was a genius.”
“Ugh…what people won’t swallow….”
“Orsova used his new influence to get me more equipment. He became the ‘head’ of the Constrictor project.”
Spock clarified, “The science of which he knew nothing at all?”
“Are you kidding?” Stiles said. “He doesn’t have a clue.”
“Nothing,” Zevon confirmed. “He manipulates the power, I tell him what the science can and cannot do.”
“You’ve been working at the pharoah’s counting house while he gets the glory.”
“I could never have had the glory, Eric. Don’t mourn it. If the population had ever found out I was the one who started the Constrictor, they would’ve killed me. I cannot be replaced in Red Sector. If I am not here to do this, all the Pojjana will suffer. I would gladly slit my own throat if I thought that would stop the phenomenon. Orsova is the umbrella shielding me from the limelight. He can have the attention.”
Witness to humility and guilt taken to the extreme and somehow transmorphed into a positive, Stiles glanced at Spock and noted the Vulcan’s unmistakable respect for a much younger and much less accomplished scientist. That caught Stiles in a grip between Spock’s generosity and Zevon’s humility.
Damn, was this confusing.
“Also, one must say,” Zevon began again, “Orsova was most tricky and skilled at playing the politics, in which I had no interest at all except what he could get for me. The Constrictors were coming every few months and I quickly became very busy. Everything depended upon my predictions becoming more accurate. The more accurate, the more people thought Orsova was a genius. He developed a network, he controls many resources and lives like a king—”
“And how do you live?” Stiles asked.
“That matters not at all, not in the least,” Zevon warned, hearing a defensiveness that wasn’t necessary for him. “He’s welcome to it. My purpose is served. The Pojjana would never have accepted a Romulan as the genius of the Constrictor. Orsova allowed me to succeed much earlier than ever would have been possible. I invented new types of antigravs, compression suits, architectural implements, metallurgy—many things that Orsova has parlayed into a huge Constrictor-survival industry. He has the power to decide where all the resources go, all the revenue, new materials, technology, the buildings—and I tell him what to say. He wields so much power now that he is the de facto head of the government. As he works his plans and I work mine, fewer and fewer people die with each Constrictor. In the last one, only six thousand planetwide. Six thousand, Eric!”
The victory in Zevon’s voice and the emotion in his expression cut Stiles to the core. He pressed Zevon’s arm in approval, knowing what that meant to him.
“I knew we had to control energy to survive,” Zevon went on. “I have an energy division, a school of physics, a school of mechanical science, defense division, deflection-grid network all over the continent….”
“Why a defense system?” Spock asked. “Have you had problems with the Bal Quonott?”
“Not yet. And they’ve had no interest in us. Yet. We have no spaceborne fleet with which to defend ourselves. I knew I could never develop conventional weapons sitting trapped on a planet. Instead I’ve used tricks I learned while trying to read or deflect the Constrictor waves. Using the mass of the planet as an anchor for—”
“The composite beam that almost killed us, I bet.”
“Killed you…?”
“Well, how do y’think we got here? Magic? We came in a ship that got sucked into that damned thing!”
“Oh—” Zevon moaned as if he’d just remembered, just realized. A sheet of pallor drained across his face. “I never imagined you might come yourself….”
Now that he’d gotten his pound of flesh, Stiles gave him a light punch in the chest. “That’s okay, we got out of it. Come on, let’s get moving. We’ve got work to do.”
He pulled Zevon to his feet, while at their side Mr. Spock also stood up and scanned the horizon for trouble.
The trouble, though, was right here.
“Eric, I want to go back to my lab,” Zevon announced. “I don’t want to go with you.”
Stiles huffed out his disbelief. “I’m serious, Zevon. Don’t kid around. Lives are at stake. The stability of a hundred star systems are at stake, the Romulan Empire’s—”
Zevon squared off before him. “I want to go back to my life. This is where I belong now, where I do good work. I refuse to go.”
“Sure, refuse. I’ll just stun you again and carry you the rest of the way if I have to.”
“Commander,” Spock began, “perhaps we should—”
Stiles waved his stun-set phaser demostrably. “Sir, I’m sorry, but there’s no time. I want my ship away from this planet. We can talk while we move. That’s the direction. Go on, Zevon, unless you want another dose.”
“Eric, this is not at all like you.”
“Too bad. Ambassador, which way?”
Hesitating only a moment, Spock said, “Follow me, please.”
The traipse through the root swamp was messy, tedious, and most of all uneasy. Stiles didn’t like holding a phaser on Zevon, but he never let it waver. Whenever Zevon looked at him, he brandished the phaser and made sure his thumb was on the fire pad. How many times did he look at the weapon himself, making good and sure it was set on stun and nothing worse. It had been years upon years since he’d been in a position to use a hand weapon against another person. The idea of making a mistake absolutely petrified him to the bone.
Before him, Zevon’s moss-green cardigan flickered in the rays of the lowering sun through the huge twisted roots overhead and around them. He endured delirious joy that Zevon was still alive and here with him, tempered by the obvious tension of Zevon’s resistance. He’d been brainwashed or something. He’d given up on being rescued and, surviving any way he could, had conditioned himself to live here, convinced himself it was right.
I’ll talk him out of it. Now that I’m back, everything can go ahead and change. I’ll walk him through it. He’ll like it in a week.
“Eric, I don’t wish to go,” Zevon attempted again after a half mile. “How can you force me?”
“You’re a Romulan, you understand force, right?”
“Orsova will do everything he can to keep us from leaving the planet. If you let me go, I can convince him to allow you to leave Red Sector. He wants no outside—”
“What’s wrong with you?” Stiles blazed, pulling up almost to Zevon’s side so they could look at each other between steps. “Don’t you understand? Of course he doesn’t want outside interference! I saw the looks in those soldiers’ faces. The Pojjana see Orsova as if they wouldn’t survive without him, like he’s holding up the planet all by himself. If you or the Federation or anybody manages to stop the Constrictor, suddenly he wouldn’t be the great savior anymore. That’s why he stuck Mr. Spock and me in a cell and wouldn’t deal. He doesn’t want anybody to stop it!”
“I have to stay here, Eric, I have to be here every day. We have succeeded in reducing the effect of the waves, but my system requires almost daily adjustment and no one else can do that. I have no one thoroughly trained enough yet to take my place. Every day I breathe, I extend to the Pojjana the chance of someday outdoing my expertise. That has been my goal. I have arranged for Orsova to sponsor engineering and science colleges, apprenticeships and clinics so that some day the Pojjana can go on without me. That day has not come.”
“You’re taking this self-blame too far, Zevon.” Stiles tripped on a cracked root and almost fired the phaser by accident. Ahead of them, Spock glanced back while Stiles recovered, then moved on.
