PART III: LIMBO

Chapter 29

The day of their wedding is the day that Ilion VII finally falls, but they're still an hour away from finding out when they speak the words that join them in a small, non-denominational meditation room overlooking Horseshoe Bay. They are married by an old friend of Lori's father, and afterwards the wedding party retires to a function room on the second floor of Bozeman for orange juice and canapés before it's time to go back to work.

It's a dark, gray day in late November, and a vicious wind drives sheets of rain against the window as a string quartet makes a valiant effort to drown out the storm, and two dozen or so relatives and dignitaries mill about and try to find sufficient common ground to make polite conversation. Lori wears her dress golds, unornamented but for the unfamiliar circle of platinum on her left hand, but she moves like sunshine breaking through the clouds; Kirk is certain he could find her with his eyes closed, and, for a moment, he's content to simply watch her glide elegantly among uniforms and Sunday best, smiling her golden smile. He stands a little way apart, as the quartet moves from Pachelbel to Bach, and tries to wrap his head around the fact that, as of twenty-five minutes ago, he has a wife.

He wonders how he's supposed to feel about that. But that seems like a question for another day; today, he guesses, is for smiling and shaking hands.

His mother finds him in a quiet corner by the window, sipping absently from a beaker bearing the Xeno insignia and staring out over the slate gray and steel of the Bay. She slides into place beside him and raises her glass to his and, for a moment, they stand together, not speaking, watching the waves break restlessly against the cloud-frosted struts of the bridge.

"You know," she says presently, "your father and I had a billet in the Residences when we were first married. Did you know that?"

He was an Ensign; she was a cadet. She has told him many times. "Yes," he says.

"We got married in Riverside, though, of course." A reflexive pause while she sips at her drink. "February, it was. The snow was eight inches deep; I thought your Aunt Ida was going to freeze to death. You know she never knew how to dress for the weather."

"I remember," he says.

"It was a nice service," says his mother now, and it takes him a moment to realize that they're back in the present again. "I liked the reading her sister gave. 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds…' You know - it's not going to win any awards for originality, but I liked it. You can't go wrong with the classics."

He smiles into his glass as he takes a sip. "We talked about having a reading in Swahili," he says.

"Swahili?"

"An old…" He hesitates, looking for the word, and settles on, "…colleague. When she heard I was getting married - there's a poem in her language, In Praise of Love. She couldn't be here so she sent a tape. We talked about playing it during the ceremony."

"But you decided against it?"

Kirk is not sure why he brought it up; his mother misses very little - much like his wife, in fact. He's fairly certain that Lori only agreed to let the subject drop because Kirk presented her with a fait accompli, in the form of a sister and a Shakespearean sonnet.

"We were having an Argelian blessing," he says. "The poem seemed like overkill."

An eyebrow arches, but his mother only nods. "Well," she says. "It was a nice ceremony."

"I'm glad you could make it. I know you're busy."

She shrugs. "There are some things you don't miss. Besides," she adds, "I wanted to meet her. You know, I see it now, I guess. She's nice, I like her."

"You see… what now?"

"Hmm?"

"What do you see now, mom?"

She smiles, but there's a hint of something in her eyes that he can't quite place. "Oh, come on, Jim," she says. "All these years, and nothing - then you're getting married in three weeks? I'm your mother. I know you better than that."

He takes a sip from his glass to buy himself the moment he needs. Then he says, "Neither of us felt like waiting."

"She's nice, Jim," she says, and he bristles at the note of appeasement in her voice; he'd thought he'd buried his irritation. He guesses he should know better than to try and fool his mom. "You two look good together. If she makes you happy, then great. That's all I want for you, honey."

He huffs a humorless laugh. "Well, mom, that certainly sounds like praise…"

His mother rolls her eyes. "I said she's nice, Jim."

"Mom, you think Des Moines is nice. You think ranch dressing is nice. I'd hoped for something a little less lukewarm about my wife."

"What do you want, Jim?" she says, with an air of weary resignation. "I think she's brilliant. I do, I think she's one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I don't keep company with fools. I think she's kind, I think she's beautiful, I think she understands what makes you work and I think she knows how to manage that, and, God knows, there's not many who do. I think, of all the people you ever brought home, she's the best fit I've seen. I just…" She sighs, shakes her head, peers into her glass. Then she looks up and meets his eyes. "I just - never thought it'd be a woman for you, Jim. That's all."

Kirk blinks. His mother hated Gary with a passion she didn't bother to disguise; the two of them used to laugh about it later in bed, after Gary had worked out his frustrations in some spectacularly energetic sex. Kirk never got as far as introducing her to any of the others.

"I almost married Ruth," he points out.

"Oh, Ruth," says his mother dismissively. "You were barely out of your teens, Jim. You weren't ever going to marry Ruth."

"We'd set a date," he protests. "I flew to Albany to ask for her father's permission."

"That's what I'm talking about," says his mother. "Jim… You remember when you were seventeen and you wanted to sit the entrance exams for the Academy? And your father and I said, no, wait a year, you can go when you're eighteen like everyone else?"

Kirk purses his lips. He's pretty sure he knows where this is going. "And I got Commodore Mallory to sign off on my aptitude forms and sat the exam anyway," he says. "What's your point, mom?"

"My point," she says, "is that, when it matters to you, when it's something so important - you don't ask permission, Jim. You just find a way to make it so that nobody has any choice but to say yes to you." A beat, and her eyes soften. "No. You weren't ever going to marry Ruth, honey."

He remembers sitting across a breakfast table, a cooling pot of coffee like a wall between him and his fiancée, listening to her explain why she was leaving. He tries to remember how it felt, but the memory is blunted by age; he remembers thinking that he ought to be more upset, but he can't for the life of him feel his way back there.

"For the record," he says, "I didn't ask anyone's permission to marry Lori."

She watches him for a moment, eyes narrowing: the close, evaluative scrutiny of a woman who has raised two sons with IQs in the top two percentile. Then she says, "Good. She's a nice girl, Jim. I'm happy for you. I'm glad to see you settled - I worry about you."

"I'm not Sam," he says.

"No, and you never were." She turns a warm smile on him. "I knew he was going to marry Aurelan the first time he brought her home. You were always just… looking for something else." She sips from her glass. "Couple of times, I thought you were close to finding it, but maybe… I don't know. I'm surprised, is all." She smiles ruefully, turns her eyes towards him. "It's just that it wasn't ever a woman who broke your heart, honey."

For a second, for a long second, he's sitting on the floor by his window, staring out across the Marin headlands, spine slack, forehead pressed against the cool pane… and his throat tightens, his stomach contracts, as something unwanted tries to rise up and choke him. But he's gotten good at this. Kirk drains his glass, twists his lips into a tight smile.

"No," he says. "And I intend to keep it that way, mom."

She watches him for a moment, and he can see a half dozen protests line up behind her eyes and burn themselves out. But, in the end, all she says is, "All right. Good." And then, "We'll be back in Iowa for a few weeks in the New Year - you should come by, show Lori the farm."

"In January?"

"Sure. Don't tell me she can't handle a little snow?"

"Mom, she grew up in San Diego."

"She's Starfleet, sweetheart; she's hardy. Isn't that right, dear?" she adds with a warm smile for her approaching daughter-in-law, who accepts her outstretched hand and leans in to kiss her cheek.

"Yes, ma'am," says Lori cheerfully. "I keep telling him, but he has this hero fantasy, I don't know."

"Tell him you outrank him."

Lori grins. "Oh, he knows that. Ma'am - I'm sorry to interrupt, but…"

His mother waves a hand. "I'm drinking orange juice, dear. I know it's a work day." She leans in, presses a quick kiss to Kirk's cheek. "Jim, I'm going to go talk to your father. Come find us later."

"I will, mom," he says.

"Admiral Kirk," says his wife in an undertone as his mother disappears into the throng, "I believe you're hiding."

He hesitates. "Not from you."

A gentle laugh. "Understood. But that's not why I'm here."

"No."

She sighs. "No. Chen's here. We need to disappear for a minute."

-o-o-o-

The mission belongs to neither Xeno nor Operations, though Admiral Wallace is old enough and smart enough to know how to use both departments. He is, like Lori, a career planetsider, but he has been in the shadows of just about every important decision Starfleet has taken in the past half-century; he knows better than anyone how these things work. Better than Kirk, in fact, as he's happy to admit: back-alley handshakes and coded whispers have never been his style. But what else is there?

Maybe nothing, in fact. He's pretty sure that's why they're here.

Wallace's offices are on the third floor of the Phoenix Building, at the end of a well-appointed corridor of blank, featureless doors where the air has the greasy consistency of constant electronic surveillance and a low level static charge spikes the fine hairs at the back of Kirk's neck. It feels like an engine room in the seconds before a malfunctioning warp coil throws the ship offline, but, apparently, you get used to it in time. It's done something for Admiral Wallace, anyway; the man is well into his eighties and has yet to give any indication, in Kirk's presence, that he's aware of this. He stands easily, with the grace of a much younger man, as they follow Chen into the private comms room off his main office, where the windows are darkened against the storm outside. A wide screen shimmers in the corner, scrolling a continuous line of text, abstract letters and numbers along the left panel, while the right displays a color-coded map of the quadrant, and, below it, a local map of a system that Kirk has cause to know very well.

"Admiral Kirk. Admiral Ciana," says Wallace, reaching forward to grip their hands in turn. "I'm sorry to break up the party. Congratulations to you both, but you could have picked a better day."

"There's no such thing as a better day in Starfleet, sir," says Lori, and he nods, though his smile is thin.

"That's true," he says. To Chen: "Commodore? I want that secure line to the Entente please. Buzz me when it's open."

"Yes, sir," says Chen, and slips out the door. Kirk hears the soft hiss of the privacy lock sliding into place, the hum of a sound-dampener descending.

"The Entente?" says Lori. "We're speaking to Admiral McGarry?"

Wallace lowers himself into his seat, gestures to them to take the chairs on the opposite side of his desk. "And Admiral Atuaia," he says.

Kirk looses a puff of air. "Damn it," he says quietly.

Wallace nods. "Yes." He sighs. "You read this morning's briefing?"

"Yes, sir," says Lori. "Sporadic hostilities along the borders of Aleth, a planned incursion into the occupied sectors, nothing out of the ordinary. Admiral Kirk expressed some serious concerns about their advance strategy; Commodore Chen has the report."

"For what it's worth, I agree with you, Kirk," says Wallace. "But that's not our biggest problem. That intel was four days old."

"Four days?" says Kirk.

"Eighty-seven hours. That's the trouble with fighting a war through intermediaries," says the Admiral. "But even that's not our biggest problem right now."

"Something's happened," says Lori.

Wallace leans back in his chair, folds his arms across his chest. He says, "We don't have anything concrete yet. The Entente has been hailing Hevarus IX since 1130 hours this morning. I think even they don't know what's going on yet. Best we can get is that they think there was some kind of subterranean explosion in eastern Vai in the small hours of this morning, local time."

"That's maybe 30,000 square miles," says Lori. "Is there any way to be more specific, sir?"

"We're working on it. Intel is maybe thirty minutes old right now."

"Is there anything but tundra east of Ki'Shanah?" asks Kirk.

"Other than the headquarters of the central resistance cadre on the northern continent?"

"Yes, sir," says Kirk. "Other than that."

Wallace fixes him with a stare. "No," he says.

"Well," says Kirk quietly. "I guess we don't need to wait for the exact coordinates."

"Goddamn it," snaps Lori. She stands quickly, one fluid movement, but there's fury in her speed; he knows her well enough to recognize that need for motion. She crosses the length of the room, then circles back to stand behind her chair, hands gripping the back, knuckles white in the half light from the screen. "If they've hit the central cadre…"

"It's over," says Kirk.

"Goddamn it!" she says again. She looks up. "When can we expect an update, sir?"

"Admiral Atuaia is working through the usual channels," says Wallace. "The trouble is…"

"The trouble is, if central HQ is gone, we don't have any channels left on the planet," she finishes. "What are the Hevarians saying?"

"They're frustrated. They're worried this opens them up to attacks on their homeworld."

"We have half the fleet in Hevarus," says Kirk. "It's the safest system in the quadrant right now."

"You tell me how much of a comfort that's supposed to be to them right now, Admiral Kirk." Wallace's eyes are like stone. "They most likely just lost another two thousand men. In a fight that we asked them to take."

A soft breath of humorless laughter from Lori. "With friends like the Federation, who needs enemies, huh?"

"Hevarus stood to gain from this too, Admiral Ciana," says Wallace.

"Yes, sir," says Kirk. "But it wasn't their battle. We can arm them, we can advise them, but… they've never had the heart for this. The Federation can't strong-arm a people into fighting a war for us."

"Sure we can," says Wallace. "We just can't make them win it for us."

He's right. It was always a long shot. Best case scenario - best case, now - is that they haven't led a Federal ally into a war with the Empire that they'd never have started by themselves, and which Starfleet has to pretend not to notice again. This cannot be the spirit of the Treaty… but he's spent a lot of time thinking about that lately, and he can't think of any good way to test that hypothesis. Nogura is right: you cast those dice, and you have no idea where they fall.

So you do what you can. He doesn't like it, not one bit - it feels like the biggest kid in the playground twisting a little kid's arm until he breaks into the principal's office and steals the keys to the cafeteria - but if that's all you've got, you do it. You take it and you go with it. You do what you can.

And then you run away as soon as the kid gets caught. Yeah, he needs to get an analogy that doesn't make him wonder whose side he's on.

In the heavy, loaded silence, Wallace's terminal buzzes, and Chan's voice says, "Sir, I have the Entente. Admiral McGarry is standing by."

"Thank you, Commodore," says Wallace. "And Admiral Atuaia?"

"Admiral McGarry has him on a separate line, sir. He's going to conference him in."

"All right, Commodore. Put him through."

There's a hiss of quantum static, and Wallace's terminal screen flickers, but stays blank. "Starfleet Command, this is the USS Entente," says McGarry's voice, tinny with distance. "I have Admiral Atuaia on a secure line from Haven 12."

"Admiral Atuaia," says Wallace. "This is Admiral Vaughn Wallace, Starfleet Defense. Do you have an update on the situation on the ground?"

"Admiral Wallace, this is Atuaia," says a second voice, twisted down the octaves by a burst of subspace distortion. "I have an update from Hevarus IX."

"Thank you, Admiral," says Wallace "What can you tell us?"

"The Hevarian Central Defense council has just received word from their contacts in the system," says Atuaia. "Sir, it's confirmed. Ilion VII has gone dark."

-o-o-o-

It's late evening by the time she shows up at his office. The storm has blown itself out, but the moisture hasn't left the air; it's just settled into a wispy, insubstantial mist and a frosting of water on his window that twists the elegant lines of Fleet Command into abstract whorls and shadows. As darkness sucks the last traces of the day from the sky, he stands by the cool glass, cradling an empty cup of coffee, and tries to find some way to be wrong about what they learned at lunchtime.

"Hey," she says quietly, and he turns over her shoulder to see her stepping inside, door shutting gently behind her. She's changed into fatigues, and he can't blame her - he's done the same himself - but it feels as though a little of the sheen has worn off the day. "Did you hear the news? It's all over the commissary. The Chief of Operations got married today."

Kirk feels a weary grin tug at the edges of his lips as he crosses the room to meet her halfway, feels the strength of her slim, narrow arms as they circle his waist, feels the warmth of her mouth as he bends down to press his lips to hers. "Lucky man," he says.

She flashes her sunshine smile, the one he loves. "Damn right," she says. "She's way out of his league, I hear." Her arms slide up to grip the back of his shoulders, and she pulls back, looks into his eyes. "You're beat," she says. "Did you eat yet?"

It takes him a moment to remember, which is an answer in itself and she knows it. "Not since lunch," he says.

"Jim, you didn't eat lunch." One hand smoothes a stray hair from his face. "We were getting married at lunch, remember?"

"I ate before."

Gentle laughter. "Liar. You are such a liar, James Kirk, and you think I don't even know." Her hand moves down to cup his cheek, thumb tracing the swell of his lips. "Let's go home, huh? Let's go home, let's get drunk, and let's have the rest of our wedding day. What do you say?"

"Just the two of us?"

"Just the two of us. There's nobody else left, Jim; they went home hours ago."

An eyebrow arches. "That was quite a party we threw."

"That's the beauty of inviting Starfleet, honey. No one bats an eyelid when the bride and groom disappear."

Kirk drops his head to hers and kisses her softly - a light press of lips - then steps out of her embrace to move to his desk, where his terminal is still spitting out data from the other side of the quadrant. "I'm waiting for a couple of reports from Travis and Holeczek," he says. "Go ahead; I'll catch up with you."

"Ha! No chance," she says cheerfully. "I've heard that before. I'll wait right here until you're done."

He turns his head sharply, biting back on a flash of irritation as he opens his mouth to speak, but she meets his gaze with equanimity and faint amusement, and it turns out there's not much you can do to counter that.

So, instead, he says, "Nogura sent down a bottle of Armagnac…"

"Yeah, a '43?" she says. "I got one too. Is it in the cabinet?"

"Second shelf. There are glasses in the cupboard. He sent you a bottle too?"

She straightens, a tumbler in either hand. "Hands off, mister - that's the Xenorelations bottle. You want some, you come to my office."

He offers her a lopsided grin as she sets the glasses on his desk, untucking the carafe from the crook of her arm and passing it to him across the table. "We're on duty," he points out.

"No, we're in your office," she says. "Duty ended four hours ago. Now we're on our honeymoon."

"This wasn't quite what I had in mind for the start of our married life."

She shrugs, but she doesn't misunderstand him. "We did what we could do, Jim. You sitting here at your desk until tomorrow morning doesn't change what happened. We'll figure this out, but you can't make this your problem. You can't make this your fault."

He purses his lips as the stopper comes free with a pop of escaping air, and the warm scent of good brandy spills out into the circle of lamplight above his desk. "Where do we go from here, Lori?" he says. "What's the next move? Because I've been trying all afternoon…"

"You've been staring at a terminal screen, scrolling through memos and directives and fleet depletion reports, looking for the magic words that make it all go away, and all the while wondering how the hell you screwed up so badly." She accepts a glass from him, raises it to his. "And there's nothing I can say right now that's going to make you see that you didn't, this wasn't you - you're not the only goddamn admiral in Starfleet, Jim. We all got this wrong, and a whole lot of people who didn't deserve it got screwed, and some of them aren't going home again, and the rest of them just lost their home. It's the worst possible way this thing could have played, and it's not the way you wanted to play it, and there's nothing you could do about that. And there's nothing I can say to make you see that. So instead, I'm saying, come home. Be married for a couple of hours. We will figure this out, but it's not getting fixed tonight."

"If we'd approached Hevarus sooner…"

"Yeah, maybe. But we didn't. And you know what? The fact that we approached them at all is because of you." She folds herself into a chair across the desk from him, tucking her legs beneath her and burrowing backwards into the cushions. "Jim - you're tired, I'm tired. It's been a long day, a hell of a day. There wasn't anything about it that we wouldn't have done differently if we could." A beat, and the corners of her lips twist upwards. "I told you we should have eloped."

Despite himself, he feels an answering smile tugging at his mouth. "There were a few parts of today that I enjoyed," he says.

"You mean, those fifteen minutes between the vows and the party?"

"I was including the vows as well," he says.

"You liked those?"

"I liked…" he says, and hesitates. "…The sentiment."

"Why, James Kirk," she says, and beams. "You're a closet romantic."

The smile breaks free. "I'm told I have my moments."

"Want to forget about those reports and show me?"

"Lori…"

"All right, I know, I know. I know who I married. You know, I had this idea that when you stopped working for me, your crazy workaholic masochism stopped being my problem."

"Bones could have told you that was a pipe dream."

She laughs. "I'm pretty sure he did."

There's a moment of silence, and Kirk glances up from his screen to see that she's holding her glass away from her body, twirling it silently between her hands. Lamplight flashes amber on the mobile surface; she watches as it spills up the edges, staining the crystal with a thin, ocher film, sliding back into the bowl. He thinks he knows what's coming next, and he opens his mouth to head it off, but she knows him better than that, and she speaks before he can get the words out.

"They were all my guys today," she says quietly. "At the party. At the wedding. They were all my guests."

Kirk purses his lips, sucks in his cheeks. "My parents were there," he says.

"Yeah, and you need to call them before they fly out tomorrow, by the way. But that's not what I meant."

"We talked about this…"

"No," she says. "We didn't."

"We said we'd keep it small. I kept it small."

Her eyebrows twitch, a gesture of reproach. "That's for sure…"

"Lori, my brother and his wife are dead. Peter's in school. And I've spent five of the past six years in deep space; anyone I'd have chosen to invite is on the other side of the galaxy. We talked about this."

"I know," she says softly, and her voice is conciliatory. "It's just… I felt bad for you today, that's all."

"Well, as it turned out, I didn't have to spend too much time shaking hands after all."

"I saw you talking to your mom, and I realized - there wasn't anyone else in that whole room that you'd voluntarily spend time with. It was supposed to be your wedding, Jim."

"I got married just fine, thank you."

"Jim, God…" A soft noise of exasperation and she rolls her eyes. "That's not what… All I'm saying is…" The glass tilts forwards into the light, backwards into shadow. Her eyes don't leave the unquiet surface as it surges, recedes. "…It's just that there were some faces that should have been there today," she says. "And they weren't there. That's all."

Kirk runs his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, folds his hands together on the table, stares down into his own drink. "Bones would have been there if he could," he says.

Her eyes flicker upwards, fixing on him with a stare that he refuses to return. "'I'm not talking about Bones," she says.

He stands up. "I'm going home."

Her eyes are relentless. "So - what?" she says softly. "We're not even saying his name now?"

His hand strikes the table with a force that surprises even him; his glass jumps, spilling brandy over the sides and onto the table. She looks up, startled, and he still can't meet her eyes.

"Goddamn it, Lori," says Kirk quietly, and strides to the door.