Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno

Author:Margaret Wander Bonanno [Bonanno, Margaret Wander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Trek Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9781439102190
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 2010-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Sarek was speaking to her and she could not hear him. Her only thought was, What is he doing here, on Earth, at Starfleet? Surely the matter of my betrothal is not so urgent? The time, the place, are wrong. I cannot do this now, not with Mikal here, not with what I have just learned …

Mikal caught her as she stumbled.

“What is it? Saavik, what’s wrong?”

Later, in the long desert nights, she would have more than enough time to sort out the sequence of events, the hows and whys of Sarek’s presence and why the message from Tolek had come through on a coded frequency so secret it required her to report to the comm center in person. For now, she recalled it this way:

Chaffee’s crew had been debriefed and granted shore leave while Command decided what to do next about the matter of Deema III.

Mikal suggested sightseeing. For all his time on Earth, he had never been to San Francisco. They were crossing the grounds on the way to the tram that would take them into the city when they heard the announcement.

“Lieutenant Saavik, please report to Comm Center Main immediately. Lieutenant Saavik, please report …”

“Go,” Mikal said, squeezing her hand, “I’ll wait for you in the tram station.”

There were retinal scans and several locked portals and long corridors to traverse before she got to where a perky little human yeoman took a palm print and examined her clearance level on a screen.

“Urgent message for you from Nah’namKir on Vulcan,” the yeoman said unnecessarily before pointing her to a booth where she could ostensibly read the message in semiprivacy. Concealing her puzzlement, Saavik remembered to thank the yeoman, then waited for her to go back to whatever it was she had been doing when she had arrived before activating the screen.

She did not recognize the name of the city at first but, recalling a child’s long-ago lesson on Vulcan geography, she remembered that it lay within the northern polar region. It could only be the “minor city you’ve never heard of” that Tolek hailed from. It took her a moment to realize that the communication was not from Tolek at all but from the healer who had performed the autopsy.

Performed the autopsy. The words did not make sense at first. Had Tolek finally managed to find a healer who saw things his way? Somewhere between concern and annoyance, it took Saavik a moment to realize that the victim was Tolek himself.

The healer’s message contained the proper Vulcan mix of fact and compassion. “You were given as his next of kin … a search of all databases indicated that there was no one else … details follow … disposition of the remains upon your reply …”

Somehow she managed to maintain her composure long enough to read through the “details,” such as they were. If she’d had any doubt that the previous five dead had been murdered, Tolek’s death erased it even before she got to the words “unknown etiology.”

If

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