The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [100]
“How dare you!” Hek blustered.
Picard was placid. “There are a number of things our people are very good at, Presider Hek, and one of them is getting information into the right hands. Our people have a saying, Hek: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’”
Epilogue
IT HAD TAKEN TWO WEEKS to have a Federation negotiating team formally assigned and dispatched to the Lethanta-Krann negotiations, and another week to get the team properly briefed, but it was finally done. The professional diplomats were on the job, and the Enterprise was free to move on.
Captain Picard was in Ten-Forward, looking out the window at Nem Ma’ak Bratuna. Riker was standing next to him. “They’ll be fine, I think,” Picard said. “With Hek out of office, slightly more moderate people have come into power in the Fleet Congress. The emphasis here is on ‘slightly,’ of course.”
“Yes, sir,” Riker agreed. “They’ll have a lot to talk about. Many of the Krann, especially the younger people, want to settle in this star system.”
“And many do not,” Picard pointed out. “That puts a large part of a vast fleet on our doorstep, and the Lethanta are on the edge of developing warp drive for use in starships instead of doomsday weaponry. What if they should get together?”
“Let’s hope they stay friendly if they do.”
“Indeed. You know, there’s one thing—”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Ro Laren mentioned it to me during her convalescence, and I must confess I hadn’t realized it myself. She said she’d seen parked ground vehicles all over the capital city while she and Data were there. It bothered her for some reason, but it didn’t hit her until later what that reason was. There was something we had not seen parked, not anywhere. Something important.”
“And what was that, Captain?”
“The asteroids, Will—the asteroids the Lethantans arrived in. They’re not in orbit anywhere in this system, and if they’d impacted on the planet following orbital decay, we’d have seen traces of those impacts; those rocks were big. So where did they go?”
Riker thought about it for a moment. “I have an idea about that, sir.”
“So do I, but it staggers me to think about it.”
“Have you asked Kerajem about it?”
“No,” Picard said. “I won’t do that, Will. I won’t make him tell me his people’s most important secret.”
“Yes,” Riker said. “If all else fails—”
“Exactly,” Picard agreed, looking out at all those millions of stars. “I wonder if we’d have the courage to do the same?”
The cell was cold and uncomfortable, but Hek Portside Hull Patcher had grown used to discomfort since his unseemly departure from office. He had started out cold, broke and hopeless; if he finished up that way, well, it was all right by him. There was a bunk and a toilet and some insects, and that was it.
As a matter of fact, Hek was bored. They had given him nothing to read or write with for the nearly three weeks he’d been held here, and there had been no one to talk to or yell at. His was the only occupied cell in the entire block. If he was going to be executed, he wished they’d get on with it. They’d thrown him out of office for starting the war for no reason, and then they sentenced him to death in absentia for all sorts of crimes, not the least of which involved making a lot of his peers fearful of him while he was Presider.
Hek wondered if they’d make him take a walk into Hek’s Closet. That would be