The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [14]
That winter, more of the Ikkabar died than were born.
Despite the continuing drop in numbers, T’Sara could not convince her colleagues that this was not part of the normal fluctuations of population growth. There was ample precedent for the wisdom of leaving a preliterate culture in strict isolation, so the expedition withdrew.
As decades passed, one after another of the observation probes malfunctioned, stressed beyond tolerance by the brutal weather. Mounting tensions between the Federation and its enemies channeled Starfleet resources in other directions, so the probes remained silent for several years.
When the Federation was finally free to turn its attention back to Ikkabar, the children of Iconia had lost their battle to survive on this third world. All that remained of these long-suffering people was one hungry child found huddled by the coals of a fading fire.
The boy clung to his alien saviors with a desperation born of fear and loneliness. With what little they knew of his language the crew of the USS Clements learned he was called Kanda Jiak. T’Sara could have explained the importance of this name, but she had left Vulcan to continue her search for the Ko N’ya, and the news never reached her.
Fourteen years and a few months after he was rescued from Ikkabar, young Kanda Jiak took his first trembling steps toward reclaiming his lost Iconian heritage.
The decision to set off on this quest had been made on the eve of Jiak’s departure from his second home on Redifer III. Perhaps it had been made even earlier, because he was one of the few students on that world who applied to an off-planet college. In either case, the trip to Terra Sol University had provided him with a convenient cover for leaving Redifer, one that would not arouse any opposition from his parents.
His resolve held firm throughout the first week of travel away from home, but when the passenger liner actually docked at Starbase 75, Jiak cowered in his cabin for the first hour of the brief shore leave. It would be so much easier, so much safer, to continue on to Earth as everyone expected him to do.
His quest could wait until he was older.
Yet somehow the last survivor of Ikkabar suspected that if he failed to act now, he would never walk down this path in the future. After a few more years, Kanda Jiak would be fully assimilated into his life as a citizen of the Federation. The tattered threads of his origins were already worn too thin for memory; what little he knew of his people came from reading the ethnography reports from the crew of the Galeone.
So, just a few minutes before the passenger recall sounded, Jiak walked off the transport liner.
He had half-hoped someone would stop him, but the ship’s first officer had smiled perfunctorily at the request to permanently disembark, and a harried crewman had ushered him to the docking gate. Evidently passengers frequently changed their itinerary midway through a trip.
Jiak faced a second trial of courage when he walked through the series of interconnecting domes that formed the main terminal. Overwhelmed by the massive complex and the jostling crowds that surged in currents around him, he felt like a small boy about to drown in a treacherous sea.
Rooted in place by fear and indecision, he automatically scanned the stream of alien faces for one that matched his own in color and shape. It was an old habit, a holdover from his early childhood when he still believed that someday his own people would miraculously appear to whisk him back to Ikkabar. Over the years he had grown to love his adopted world and his foster parents, yet the impulse to search persisted. On all of Redifer, and even here where over a dozen different races were passing by him every minute, Jiak was unique.
That would change soon.
“Hey! Are you lost?” The question was followed by a sharp jab to his arm.