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“Don’t question me.” Koval’s voice, never warm, went colder still. One finger hovered over the toggle that would terminate the transmission. “I find it unpleasant. I don’t believe I need to remind you that you don’t want to give me the least bit of unpleasantness.”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” Cinchona muttered to himself, forgetting how acute the woman’s hearing was. “If he’d targeted a planetary leader, someone visible. It should be over by now…”

Boralesh paused in her kneading. “What’s that, husband?”

“The universe, my sweet,” he answered quickly. “The universe is against us. Some of us believe that there is an innate rightness in the way things work. That all we have to do is work hard and we will be rewarded for our labor.”

Boralesh dusted her hands with more flour and began to work the dough anew, repressing any rude comments she might be inspired to make. “Work” and her husband were not two words she could put together in the same sentence.

“The universe will reward you as you deserve, husband,” she said dryly, knowing her subtlety would elude him. “Give it time.”

“Got to release my data,” he murmured. “He has to understand; I’ve got to release my data…”

Boralesh smiled secretly. The morning light in her cheerful kitchen was kinder to him than it ought to be, softening his chronically furrowed brow, his lipless mouth and suspicious squint into something almost attractive. She reminded herself that if he hadn’t wed her no one would have, and she ought to be grateful. And yet, she’d grown up among the healers of her own country and had seen how their work shaped them. They became more open, more beautiful as they became more evolved in the practice of their craft. The saying “heal others and you heal yourself” had proven true among her own kind.

But the more her spouse labored over his mysterious methods in the cave below the village, the harder, the more shut down, the more furtive he seemed to become. He thrashed and moaned and ground his teeth in his sleep, his digestion troubled him, and even her best herbs had no effect.

She had crept to the mouth of his secret cave more than once and heard him speaking in tongues. Sometimes he seemed to be communing with some god or gods, because there would be silences and then he would answer. Whenever he returned to the house after one of those sessions, he was silent, moody, more impatient than usual with the children, and he couldn’t eat or sleep at all for days.

Did she love him? Boralesh wondered. Or did she cling to him because without him her children’s lives and her own would be meaningless? It was not a question she could answer. As her hands worked the dough for the homemade bread he loved so much, she added some herbs from her secret store and bided her time.

Chapter 9

The arrow whizzed past Tuvok’s right ear, tearing foliage off the trees behind him. Unperturbed, he drew the bowstring back as far as his left ear, and let fly.

“Incoming at five o’clock, husband,” Selar reported beside him, crouched below the tumble of rocks Tuvok had chosen as a defensible position when the attack started. She was picking up life-form readings on her medical tricorder, since Tuvok’s hands were occupied. “Bearing 13 degrees azimuth.”

Careful to aim above their attackers’ heads, Tuvok let a second arrow fly. It was greeted by a spatter of truncated Sliwoni arrows, released from short bows held sideways at the waist, making them far less accurate than Tuvok’s longbow. Two fell short, skidding to a halt in the dirt, another overshot the Vulcans, two more struck the rocks very close to them, sending stone chips flying, but doing no more damage than that.

Taking advantage of their assailants’ inferior weaponry, Tuvok responded with a third arrow, then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth in rapid succession. The response was two more shots from the attackers, then nothing.

“They are dispersing,” Selar reported before Tuvok’s last arrow had even struck home, embedding itself, they discovered as they made their way back to the ship,