The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [159]
“I do not feel much like celebrating anything, Theras,” Shran said at length.
“Ah,” Theras said. “Forgive me, General. I smelled liquor, and apparently drew an entirely wrong conclusion.” The dead Aenar took another step toward the bed. The external starlight illuminated his gray eyes; they appeared to be directed at the infinite starscape that lay outside Shran’s window, even though they looked just as sightless as they had when Theras had been alive.
“I understand that you have duties to perform, and I can respect that,” Theras said. “But do those duties require you to raise your mental barriers against your own bondmates? Why won’t you at least allow Jhamel to speak inside your mind?”
“I do not want the ugliness of this war to touch her. Or Vishri. Or Shenar. Or our unborn child.”
Theras shook his head in the starlight. “You need not protect them from reality.”
“Of course I have to protect them from reality, Theras. They all practice pacifism, Just as you did.”
“Pacifism, yes, a goal to which you, too, have aspired, Shran. But pacifism does not make its practitioners children. Pacifism is not paralysis. It did not prevent me from taking action when the occasion required it.”
That action, Shran knew, had cost Theras his life, though it had saved many others. It had also given Shran a new lease on life, as Theras’s replacement in Jhamel’s bondgroup. And for the first time in his life it had motivated Shran to make a serious attempt to put the ways of war behind him forever.
But that was a luxury he could no longer afford. “War has a certain... corrosive effect, Theras. On everything it touches.”
“Of course it does, Shran. Jhamel knows that very well already. Don’t you think she experienced that corrosiveness in full measure when the Romulans killed her brother Gareb?”
Shran squinted into the most shadowy corner of the room, where the rest of the dead stood by restlessly. In a cluster among these he saw the pilots whose deaths he had caused yesterday, including Skav, Subcommander Nras’s dead son, as they leaned with silent insouciance against the hullward wall. Unlike the blind gray eyes of the Aenar, Skav’s starlight-reflected gaze was refulgent with accusation, as were the eyes of his peers.
Shran would not let himself flinch from it.
“Jhamel does not understand,” he said. Jhamel could never truly grasp this nettle. Not unless she been forced to put Gareb down herself, the way Shran had had to kill Skav as the means to the end of saving countless others.
And he was adamant that Jhamel never learn what that truly felt like, even vicariously. She needed no further tutelage in the ugly art of war.
“When will you try to make her understand?” said Theras. “When will you finally come home?”
Shran closed his eyes, trying to banish the unquiet dead, the corpses that never stayed buried. And he considered all the carnage that almost certainly lay ahead, thanks to the inadequacies of the Vulcan “protection” Andoria had accepted, and the Vulcan “diplomacy” that even now plied the high and the mighty in the political capital of Laikan with recommendations of appeasement and retreat.
“I may never be able to come home again,” Shran said. Then he reached toward the floor in the hope that a little Fesoan grainwine might remain inside the upended bottle.
FORTY-THREE
Middle of the month of Z’at, YS 8765
Wednesday, March 10, 2156
Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan
“BEHOLD,” MINISTER KUVAK SAID as he gestured broadly at the breathtaking desert vista that sprawled from the mountain’s foot to the eastern horizon. A pair of sha’vokh birds, desert carrion eaters whose wingspans exceeded the height of a tall adult Vulcan, wheeled lazily in the vermilion sky. Vulcan’s Forge was resplendent in reds and ochers beneath the rays of the newly risen Nevasa and the half-shadowed bulk of ever-watchful T’Rukh.
Surak’s Peak, the source of T’Pol’s present impressive vantage