Unification - Jeri Taylor [71]
Picard looked at Spock. The ambassador’s face looked gray and worn, as though he bore the full brunt of this calamity. Exhaustion showed in every line of his craggy face; defeat seemed to be crushing him.
;’How could they know of this location?” Pardek was beseeching Spock. “Someone betrayed us.”
“Yes.” Spock’s voice was flat. “You did.”
Picard’s look snapped toward Spock. The ambassador was boring into Pardek, and the senator was trembling. “Spock,” he said, aghast, “we’ve been friends for eighty years.”
But, unmoved and stolid, Spock gazed back at him. “It is the only logical conclusion. You invited me to Romulus. You arranged the meeting with the proconsul. And you knew that Picard and Data had returned to the surface with new information.”
Pardek shook his head, trying to maintain the innocent front, but Sela’s throaty laugh obviated the effort. “The great Spock,” she said, not without admiration. “Very well. Senator Pardek, your service to the Romulan people is noted and appreciated.”
Pardek seemed to deflate a little. He looked right into Spock’s eyes.
These men have been j?iends for eighty years, thought Picard. Has Pardek been using Spock all that time, lying in wait, hoping for the opportunity to take advantage of that J)’iendship? Was that all it ever was?
Spock and Pardek were holding a look. It must have connoted nearly a century’s relationship. It culmi-nated when Pardek said ruefully, “Jolan tru, Spock.” There was no sense of discomfort, or of acknowledgment of the long friendship. Pardek had simply severed the bonds. Nothing more.
“Do not be distressed,” Sela said to Spock. The ambassador was not looking at her, Picard observed, and she spoke to his ear. “Your dream of reunification is not dead. It will only take a slightly different formrathe Romulan conquest of Vulcan.”
She nodded to the guards, and they prodded the trio up the ramp.
D’Tan would never be able to say what it was that cautioned him to take refuge in the ground-level storage unit he had discovered years ago. It was nothing tangible, just a sense of unusual anticipation in the hot, heavy air; a kind of compression as though distant explosions were felt, rather than heard.
Others had premonitions, too, he was sure. There was a restiveness on the street, little eddies of scurry-ing activity that sprang up and dissipated in random patterns. A Circassian cat that belonged to a shop-keeper prowled her window restlessly, arching her back and spitting.
D’Tan’s hiding place had a grate that opened on to the street and provided a view. When he was a very small boy he had discovered that he could wriggle into this space between the storage unit and the facade of the building and lie undetected for hours, watching the panorama of the streets unfold before him. Now that he was older, it was becoming a tighter fit; and he had realized sadly that in another year or two he would have to give up his childhood retreat.
He had had an aimless day, first wandering the neighborhood for several hours, looking for Mr. Spock, hoping to show him the language blocks. After Spock left to go to the caves, D’Tan spent some time with his friend Janicka, helping her clean her family’s store. They had given him a meal and a piece of fruit to take with him.
It was that indefinable heaviness in the air that finally sent him crawling into the hiding place. He was uneasy; his stomach felt sick and he wondered if the fruit he had eaten was spoiled.
Sitting cross-legged in his hiding place calmed him down; it always did. He loved watching the passersby on the street, the little dramas that played out before him. There was a heady feeling of omnipotence that he could see without being seen, though D’Tan knew that if his parents discovered this little activity, they would probably not approve.
D’Tan saw Janicka walk from her parents’ shop toward the