Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [41]
Stiles blinked, surprised. “Me? What’d I do? I’m barely an assistant. Don’t treat me like that.”
“I would never bother to patronize you,” Zevon said, giving him a glare of inarguable clarity and conviction. “You are nothing like the young man in the pit. That boy, yes, he died there. But the boy in us always fades, Eric, if we’re fortunate. Now you’re a different man, a better man. Look at what you’ve learned in four years. I know technical things, but you’re the one who had the breakthrough with the flux meter. You’re the one who told me to check for invisible phase shifts in the infrared. I told you how ridiculous that was, but you insisted I check, and you were right. Look what you and I have done here, with tricks and dirt and screwdrivers. I explain what I’m doing, and you provide the leap of imagination that sends us to the next step. We… Romulans and Vulcans, even Klingons, we were all in space before Terrans, but look at you. Look how fast your progress has been… You’ve caught up in a century and charged beyond us. You are the people who see things the rest of us miss. One day together, with real facilities… your people and mine, working together… some day we’ll stop shooting at each other, and think what we can do then!”
Now Stiles did look at him, and did not look away. Zevon’s dark umber hair had long ago lost its polished-wood gloss, his complexion its glow of youth, and his face was creased now with weariness, starvation, physical stress, and the unending worry that their time would run out, yet still his brown eyes held a glimmer of purpose and hope that had never once flagged in all these years. Zevon had been in the pit with Stiles. Together they had crawled from the lowest place a man can go, the place of worthlessness and damage, and they had made something of it. They had made a bond with each other, and they had achieved a breakthrough that could save a billion people. if things went right… just a little more right.
“If I go,” Stiles murmured, “we’ll never see each other again.”
The words struck them both with the force of a physical blow. It was the one thing they’d never mentioned. Excuses, platitudes, hollow reassurances dodged through his head. The Federation would make peace with the Romulans. There’d be a treaty. Most Favored Systems status. Mail. Visits. The curtain rising so the two of them would be able to… see each other.
No matter how the story played in his mind, the final scene was the same. None of that would happen. He and Zevon would never see each other again.
He held on to Zevon in mute torment, the light touch becoming a sustaining grip, and he didn’t know what in the universe to say.
“You must go,” Zevon quietly insisted, “because you must live. You must live because I have to get off this planet so I can save these people even against their will. If I leave, I will come back. If you leave… you must never come back.”
The faucet dripped, the computer clicked, and with a palpable crack Eric Stiles’s heart broke in half for the second time in his life. In Zevon’s angular features he saw the blurred echo of the face of Ambassador Spock, calling him from the distant past, beckoning one more act of Starfleet honor from the carved-out gourd of failure.
Zevon squeezed Stiles’ hand again and thumped it placidly against the edge of the cot in punctuation, as if instructing a child about something which must, absolutely must, be the choice of the day. “Go home, Eric,” he summoned. “Go home, and live.”
Chapter Eight
“THAT’S NOT A STARFLEET SHIP. What is this? Who in hell’s coming for me?”
Stiles wrestled back against the grip of Orsova and one of the prison guards. They had him by the elbows, and there was