Amanda entered her apartment feeling slightly faint. Her hand shook as she pushed the door closed behind her and leaned backward onto it. She dropped her shoulder bag from her shoulder around to her elbow and her knees gradually bent until she was sitting on the floor with her back resting on her front door. What had just happened?
A loud knocking startled her and she jumped forward and scrambled to her feet as the knocking persisted. "I know you're in there: I just watched you walk in," called Vera, her voice sly and cheerful.
Amanda scrambled to her feet, opened the door, and stared at her friend. Her hair was a new shade of vibrant red and she wore hoops through her eyebrows and nostrils.
"Ok, first of all, I've been calling you all evening and you don't answer, then I found out your pig of an ex got successfully elected after pummeling you, but you don't answer, then riots break out down the street and, what's that? You still don't answer. Then what do you know? I look out my front window and see you on the porch with last weekend's 'not a date' and you look surprised to see me."
Amanda said nothing but held the door open wide enough for her to enter, which she did.
"You know, I'm surprised you're even home," Amanda said a few moments later. "It'll be midnight soon; isn't that the time you sneak into people's windows and suck away their essences?"
"Today is Tuesday, I do that on Thursdays," she grinned. What a typical Vera tactic: fighting sarcasm with sarcasm.
"But seriously, it's Election Day: I figured you'd be at some kind of rally or maybe even participating in the riots, given how easy it is to get you going on politics."
"You wound me," Vera replied with faux shock. "What kind of person do you think I am? What is it that you think I do?"
"I don't know, actually," Amanda laughed. "What do you do?"
Vera thought quietly to herself for half a second before grinning, shrugging, and muttering, "Meh… So are you going to tell me or am I going to have to beat it out of you?"
"Sheesh, ok mom," Amanda snapped. "No, first, I need tea."
She hoisted her shoulder bag up and extracted her PADD and skimmed through the message traffic: ten calls and two messages from Vera, one message from her mother, and frustratingly, nothing from her father. She sighed and deftly moved to the kitchen and tea production got underway. Vera pulled one of the pub stools from the table around to her kitchen counter and Amanda recounted the details of the last several hours. Vera remained uncharacteristically quiet, but her face did all the talking.
"So you asked him out on a third date? You know, the third date is when even conventional, boring people tend to lose the clothes and-"
"Stop," Amanda said, holding up a hand to silence her friend and she poured tea into cups with the other. "The first two hardly qualify as dates and it's like I told you, I asked him and he seemed ok with it and then all of a sudden he got weird."
"What exactly did you say?"
"I asked him if he wanted to go to dinner next week. He said he couldn't because he'd be gone, but he would call the week after. I was probably acting nervous and stupid, actually I know I was, because I dropped my key cards, he picked them up, handed them to me, and then he... got weird. Well, as much as you'd expect a Vulcan to get weird."
"Maybe you're just imagining it."
"No, he was definitely very different. I mean, he's really hard to read, but not impossible. I don't know what I was thinking."
"I hope you don't think he's out of your league," Vera said. "You're a catch. I'd date you."
"I don't think we're even playing the same sport most of the time, to use your metaphor," she said dryly. "I mean, he's an ambassador. I teach children to do long division."
"You do all the stuff with the talking machine," Vera argued.
Amanda laughed at her goofy, oversimplified terminology before countering, "Yeah, more than twelve hundred linguists, computer scientists, and anthropologists have also. For all intents and purposes, my contributions amount to being manacled to my fellow oarsmen below decks, reminding the computer what the difference between a pronoun and a possessive verb is."
"You're being dramatic," Vera scowled.
Amanda sipped her tea and pouted but realized she was right. She was being dramatic, but the underlying doubt still remained.
Her doubts and anxieties grew as the days passed. She felt suspended in time by the constant noise of emotion washing back and forth between her thoughts. She continued to hear nothing from her father, which added to her worry, she heard a lot about John, which only added to her frustration, and heard nothing from Sarek, which only made her think about him more.
By Friday it had been a full week since he sent the strange message about his deposit box at the bank and his awkward reassurances that he loved her. She read the message several times each day, analyzing every word but unable to find some deeper meaning. He had said things were "getting tense" and that he "ran into some problems" but what did that mean? It could mean anything. She researched star charts on her PADD of his location. He said he was near Zetar? Or was it Zekar? She had never heard of such a planet or a star system and couldn't find anything remotely close to that name on any current star chart.
She thought of returning home to New Chicago and checking his deposit box, thinking there would be some significant clue there, but then quickly remembered she wasn't a character in some bawdy mystery novel. Her father was just a normal person, and normal people didn't leave a trail of mysterious clues to turn their children into amateur sleuths. In truth, she didn't want to find out what was in the deposit box because his instructions were to open it "if something happens." She couldn't be sure that anything had happened yet, and opening the box would be like admitting that he was… captured? Adrift in space? Stranded on an uncharted planetoid? Dead? She didn't know and wasn't ready to think about it.
Molineaux's ascendency to congressional speaker caused her more problems. Before the election she had made it almost two weeks without a call from a reporter or an inquiry from a total stranger off the street about "the punch." The volume of interest was only a fraction of what it had been before, but it was annoying because she thought she was past all of that.
She had watched his acceptance speech the morning following the riots and she rolled her eyes at his vague assurances. He swore to do what was "best for Earth" without stipulating what that might be and promised to be impartial in congressional sessions. He had won by a frighteningly slim margin and she discovered that the bulk of the protests and riots had centered on accusations that some of the polls had been rigged or tampered with. The planetary government was considering an investigation, but for now at least, the job was Molineaux's.
One peculiar thing she noticed was that he seemed changed somehow. In all the time she'd known him, he had exuded a profound, inherent confidence and a casual swagger that had been endearing while they dated but now seemed obnoxious in hindsight. Now it was mostly gone and he was more subdued. He looked thinner, more tired, and generally beaten in a way that didn't suit him. She supposed it was probably the stress of dealing with the fallout of the conference, and irrespective of her opinions on the matter, it couldn't have been easy for him.
The problem she had the most difficulty ignoring was Ambassador Sarek. She'd spent countless hours psychoanalyzing every interaction they'd had from the moment she met him at the aquarium to the point when he practically ran away from her when she'd asked him to dinner. The more she thought about it, the worse she felt. Every goofy comment, every awkward silence only felt amplified in her memory. She would work herself into a cycle of convincing herself that he probably despised her, then the rational part of her brain would tell her to stop being silly, and then she would recall something she'd said to him and the cycle would repeat.
When she started to suspect she had a little bit of an innocent crush on him at the deli, she had been fine with that. Everyone encountered passing infatuations now and again and since she'd felt confident at the time that any kind of relationship between them would be laughable, she'd just dismissed it. Now she found herself really considering him as a person, as a man, and as a potential partner and she never got very far into those kinds of thoughts before she'd start furiously blushing and return to cataloguing all of her embarrassing moments with him.
He popped into her mind for all manner of reasons, so it didn't help that the following Monday, the day that she knew he was leaving to return to Vulcan, she found herself in her classroom giving an introductory lesson on probabilistic logic. It had been in her lesson plan for over a month but felt like an ironic and irritating reminder of her predicament.
As she explained the differences to her students in additivity and multiplication through Venn diagrams, she examined her efforts and wondered if that was truly how he viewed existence: as little more than a series of statements joined by logical conjunctions like "and", "or", "either", "but", "if", and "then." It seemed a bleak and almost joyless way to approach life, and she hoped she was being unfair and oversimplifying it. Surely even Vulcans had to admit there was more to life than ideas such as "if this, then that, but also that."
That afternoon when the school day was over, she trudged out of the building and into the open courtyard at the center of the embassy complex. The sun was shining and it was a magnificent spring day. The thought of wasting the rest of it hiding down in the basement trying to force a capricious computer to assemble a coherent English sentence from only a few syllables of another Romulan sentence was depressing.
She walked along a footpath and debated her plans for the evening. Working on the translator was about the best distraction she had from her thoughts, but she was feeling burnt out by Project Rosetta. In the last two months, she'd logged the second highest number of volunteer hours of anyone at the embassy complex location. Top honors went to a retired Starfleet cryptologist named George Logan who always complained that his grandchildren didn't live closer and he had nothing else to do with his time.
"Hey, Amanda!"
She looked up from the ground to see Giles moving briskly toward her carrying a small, black parcel.
"I thought you were leaving for Vulcan today."
"Me? No," he said as he caught up with her. "I mean, the ambassador and some of his senior staff left. Wait, why do you know that?"
"Never mind," she mumbled.
"Ok," he replied. "Speaking of the ambassador, yes, he did leave pretty early this morning. He left this on my desk with instructions to give it to you at my earliest convenience."
He extended the package to her and she took it. It was wrapped in neatly embroidered, heavy black cloth quite similar to the cloak he often wore. It was a bit pliable, like a paperbound book.
"Are you going to open it?" Giles asked, crossing his arms and looking back and forth from the package to her.
"Yes, I will," she said, accepting his invitation to a staring contest.
"So… when?"
"When I feel like it," she responded.
Her hands were shaking slightly and she was afraid he would notice. Was the item she held intended as a gift? If so, why had he asked Giles to give it to her instead of giving it to her himself? Of course, he was probably very busy, and she didn't even know what it was yet. She dropped it into her shoulder bag casually, aware that the contents and his motivation in giving it to her would give her something new to pick apart and obsess over.
"So, I imagine you have a lot of free time?" Amanda said, trying to change the subject.
He scowled at her but said, "Yeah, Celeste and the kids came back from Oklahoma last night. I'm actually on my way home now. I forgot what my house looked like in daylight."
"Yeah, I was thinking of taking a little break from Rosetta too. Probably not too long; I just need a change of pace."
"If you're looking to branch out into a fun and exciting new field of study, you're welcome to come babysit," he chuckled.
She contemplated it for a moment and said, "Yeah, sure, ok."
"Really? I was actually kidding, but if you want, sure. Our anniversary is Thursday and it would be nice to-"
"You don't have to explain," she said with a genuine smile. "I love kids. Send me a message with your address and the time and I'll be there. Anyway, I have to run. It was great seeing you!"
She wheeled around and started to walk away hurriedly for two reasons. She was eager to find out what Sarek had given Giles to give to her, but she also noticed Ambassador Julan approaching from about twenty meters away on their left. She didn't think he had seen her and she had successfully avoided him all day. She was still unsure if he was lonely, pushy, infatuated, or some combination of all three, but she hated the discomfort of trying to perpetually hint that she wasn't interested in anything more than an acquaintanceship. Was that how Sarek viewed her, the way she viewed Ambassador Julan?
She walked faster, entering the main lobby from the courtyard. She saw the 419 Shuttle moving toward the appointed stop, raced to catch it, and arrived just before the door glided closed. She swiped her pass card on the terminal, greeted the driver warmly, and flopped into the seat just behind him.
She cautiously opened her shoulder bag and removed the parcel Giles had given her. She traced her fingers along the embroidery, admiring it briefly before sliding her index finger into a fold to reveal what was inside. It was an old book with black, embossed Vulcan script on the front that she instantly recognized at The Teachings of Surak.
She carefully opened the cover to find a handwritten note in Vulcan script, written in neat, vertical handwriting. She translated it to say, "For the mastery of language, just as the natives master it."
Sarek had been sitting for hours on the cold stone floor of the meditation room in his family's home on the outskirts of Shi'Kahr. The small property had been willed to Sarek after the death of his father. His younger brother Silek would have been entitled to half the estate, had he and Skon not formally parted ways over Silek's decision to pursue space exploration rather than a diplomatic career. Sarek had not seen his sibling in more than nine years, but did not bear him any ill will.
He was slowly emerging from a deep meditative state and felt a light relief in his consciousness. This evening's meditations had been his most successful since his return to Vulcan three days earlier. The atmosphere of Vulcan was refreshing, though it had taken a full day to reacclimatize to the heavier gravity and thinner air. Being back among Vulcans also provided a pleasing respite from the constant onslaught of emotive and cultural disorder that came from daily interactions with humans and other emotionally charged species.
His trip had been extremely productive. He'd already met with the Earth ambassador to Vulcan, the Science Council, and a delegation from an Earth colony at the outskirts of Vulcan-patrolled space. He had also already met twice with the senior members of the Vulcan High Council in his brief stay: first alone to discuss internal matters on Vulcan and once the day before with representatives of Starfleet, Andoria, and Coridan to continue discussions about the expansion of the Romulan corridor.
The interim Chief of Staff of Starfleet, Admiral Maxwell Bentham, had attended the session and not spoken a single word: he had merely passed along information about Starfleet's capabilities and listened as Vulcan and Andorian experts proposed strategic plans for exploring the sector of space that edged close to the Romulan Neutral Zone.
His private meeting with the Vulcan High Council had focused on only three issues: the lack of progress of the investigation into Ambassador Sulak's death, the possible breech of their databases at the consulate the week before, and the tense conditions following the Terran elections. The hacking inquiry had thus far turned up nothing: if someone had been attempting to access Vulcan's files on Earth, they did not appear to have been successful and there was no indication as to what they had been seeking. As for the riots, he had dutifully filed a report about his observations but had minimized most mention of Amanda Grayson.
She was the one thing keeping his mind from its more customary state of complete neutrality. He had given much reflection about what had transpired between them on her doorstep, and could arrive neither at a conclusion nor a means of resolution.
He enjoyed her friendship, nothing more. She was the only human female he had ever kept company with in an informal setting. He knew little of human courting rituals, but deduced from the behavior of both the woman Fredricka and his secretary Mr. Marcus that perhaps humans might perceive their connection to be more intimate than it was. He found himself unable to draw any logical conclusions on how she considered their relationship.
She had appeared extremely uneasy at Fredricka's suggestion that they were mates, and he initially assumed she detested the idea. Yet he also knew humans, along with most other species, had a curious habit of projecting the opposite impression of their true intentions based on social courtesy or embarrassment of being discovered. Of all human failings, he considered the tendency toward duplicity as a means of politeness to be the worst.
Though he understood little of human romantic entanglements, he did know about Vulcan bonding, and his knowledge on this subject was what troubled him most. It had seemed to him that in the fraction of a second their fingers had connected, he felt aware of her presence, much the same way he had once felt attuned to T'Rea's. Yet the contact with Miss Grayson had been so brief and had caught him so unawares that he hadn't had time to explore its boundaries in the moment. It was likely they shared a weak empathic bond over their few shared experiences, but that certainly didn't imply anything more significant.
What was significant was the fact that he lacked a mate. For Vulcans who had not been bonded as children or no longer had a mate, seeking a new mate was a tenuous process. Following his divorce from T'Rea, he had given serious consideration to undergoing kolinahr, but had forgone the ritual to perform better as an ambassador.
His choice meant that he would need to find a mate in less than two years, but Earth lacked a ready supply of unattached Vulcan females. He returned to Vulcan a minimum of four times annually, which would give him several opportunities to seek out and begin courting a new mate. His current visit to his home world was only due to last another six days, but he vowed to begin his search during his next quarterly briefing when he would once again return to Shi'Kahr.
There was still the lingering question of Miss Grayson, and he reasoned the only logical thing to do would be to distance himself from her. He would regret the absence of her company, but it seemed evident that some unintentional bond, however weak, had formed between them. Immediate personal extrication would prevent any such bond from forming more deeply and would spare her the unfair burden of such a union. It was logical… yes, logical.
He rose from the stone floor and extinguished the candles, satisfied that he had reached a resolution over his personal affairs and could focus more easily on diplomatic endeavors. He had a meeting with the Vulcan Security Council to more fully discuss the development and actions of the Earth Autonomy Movement early in the morning and required rest.
The next morning he awoke, having been unable to achieve a desirable quality of sleep. He dressed slowly and methodically, ate a light bowl of plomik soup, and proceeded to the city's government district by car.
As he arrived at the building that accommodated the Vulcan Security Council, he received a message on his secure PADD connection that his private meeting had been cancelled and he was summoned instead to an emergency meeting in a different wing of the same building. He altered course and discovered a conference room with a handful of other Vulcan governmental personnel.
He seated himself at the far end of the table without speaking a word to any of the others, and soon the room was at capacity. More people arrived and with all available seating taken, they were forced to stand in the wings of the room. He counted 37 individuals in all: he recognized Savar from the Vulcan Ministry of Science and Sevek, the Chief Minister of the Vulcan Communication Agency, as well as two members of the Vulcan Advisory Council and representatives of the Vulcan Ministry of Information. It was illogical to extrapolate the possible details of this meeting based solely on the individuals assembled, but he understood that of the people he could identify, all of them were certain to possess the highest level of security clearance, just as he did.
A short time later the door to the conference room was sealed and Chief Minister Sevek stood to speak.
"Six hours ago, a Vulcan probe 3.6 light years from Celes intercepted an encrypted Klingon message. The contents of this message follow an unknown encryption pattern and were received on a low-band Starfleet channel. The intended recipient is unclear based upon the trajectory of the signal. This information was relayed to Starfleet immediately and they have launched a joint effort to decrypt this message."
Sarek contemplated the information. The Federation had not heard anything from the Klingon Empire in more than two years after having come to the brink of war one four separate occasions in the last decade.
As Sevek completed his briefing, the door opened and Sorel, the Vulcan Minister of State entered the room along with a man who was most likely his aide. All seated parties rose to their feet in unison out of respect and remained standing until Minister Sorel reached the head of the long table to speak.
"Four hours ago, the Vulcan research vessel T'Mal received a distress signal from Captain Melvin Grayson of the Comstock, a civilian Terran survey ship in the Bolian sector."
A number of individuals in the room turned their heads to look at both Sarek and Savar as the two people for which the burden of this crisis would primarily fall upon.
"The T'Mal located the source of the signal near an uninhabited planet designated Ivor Prime. Upon arriving at the location, only traces of debris were visible. Two other ships in the sector have been rerouted to assist in search and rescue operations, and Starfleet will be notified. The T'Mal's initial scans of the area detected high levels of antiprotons, consistent with large scale, type 3 Romulan disruptors."
Sarek began processing Minister Sorel's words and the numerous implications of a Romulan attack in Federation space. First among his thoughts was whether or not Grayson was a common Terran surname…