Bentham seethed but maintained an outward calm true to his nature, despite the fact that he was alone and no one would see his outburst. He sat in his lake cabin and continued to scan Molineaux's confession, realizing his cards were down and all that was left now was to see what hand everyone else had to play.
Molineaux had betrayed him. The sniveling, self-important, conniving, manipulative, racist idiot had sold him out. Of course everyone had flaws. It was an ironic fact that many of the flaws he relied on in people as a means of exploitation worked both ways: to be willing to betray the Federation, first one had to be capable of betrayal, and once a person was capable of betrayal, well… they tended to repeat the behavior. It was too late to dwell on that now.
He had long suspected he had made an error in trusting Molineaux and had even planned to get rid of him after the Romulan isahhae'edh device was online but until then, Molineaux was critical to contingency plan beta. Now that Molineaux was out of the picture, the only choice left was contingency plan gamma. Bentham would have been a terrible military strategist indeed if he had put all his eggs in one basket.
Molineaux had been under the mistaken impression that he ran some kind of global conspiracy and Bentham had never bothered to correct him. The man had actually thought that he ran the Earth Autonomy Movement, which as far as he knew was little more than a bunch of terrorist kooks and xenophobes. Not even he knew who or what the EAM was or the extent of its power, but Molineaux had asked him once and he had simply just not denied it.
Molineaux thought Bentham practically owned the SFPD, when he really only had one loyal mid-ranking lieutenant. The rest of the illusion just relied on the centuries' long tradition of brotherhood within law enforcement agencies to do favors from time to time.
Of course Bentham knew many people and cultivated a diverse number of personal relationships, but that didn't mean they knew anything. Most of them simply provided secondary or tertiary benefits. Making friends in high places was essential to his work, because friends don't suspect friends. So just because he played golf once a month with the head of the Federal Investigation Service didn't mean he had recruited him into his plan, and especially didn't mean he had the whole FIS under his thumb.
In total, he only had about fifteen people he trusted to any real degree and maybe thirty more that he intimidated into doing smaller, compartmentalized tasks. Sure, he had killed a lot of people either directly or indirectly in the last dozen years to make this all possible, but he had always been careful they would never tie back to him. Unfortunately his mission and timeline had forced him to grow sloppy in recent months by killing a number of high-profile individuals. While the deaths of people like Sulak and Winters had raised a lot of suspicions and had been terribly handled, it just couldn't have been helped.
And so, the appearance of power was power itself. The real key to it all wasn't building a massive, private army of thugs and murdering anyone who got in the way: it was the judicious exercise of patience and planning and relying on people to invent their own versions of the truth.
He perused the confession again with some relief. The truth was, Molineaux didn't even know the half of it.
That was the other half of the power equation: delegating and compartmentalization. Molineaux didn't know about contingency plan gamma, and that was to be the only saving grace of this whole thing. He was grateful at least one of the Romulans on board was still alive. Of course, switching to gamma also meant that he was back to needing the helium-3, and fast.
He had maybe a day, two at most. MacFarland left to pick up the Grayson woman from the Vulcan ambassador's house forty-five minutes ago. Putting that tracker in her bag at their shared breakfast those months ago had seemed superfluous at the time and really had more to do with his keeping tabs on Molineaux, but it had ended up being extremely useful. Now he had to hope that she knew something. He had a strong feeling that she did. It was a lot to gamble on a hunch, but he was almost always right.
His first task was to contact his six-person crew on the Tafv, the captured Romulan vessel that he had taken great pains to conceal in Earth's orbit for the past two days. He needed to get transported aboard to begin contingency plan gamma, and the clock was ticking. He could only transport during a very short window every 90 minutes, as the vessel had to uncloak to activate the transporters and the Tafv had to be in synchronous orbit with Earth's moon to briefly obscure it from Starfleet sensors for the three seconds it would take to transport.
He was about to notify the Tafv when he received a message from Kerns, the man he had appointed to captain the ship. MacFarland had been killed but they had not only managed to get Amanda Grayson on board, but the new Vulcan ambassador as well.
He smiled to himself. Things were looking up.
He started to type out his instructions when he received another message from a friend at the FIS, reading only, "Agents en route. Get out NOW."
He immediately stood and briskly walked to the door and switched to talk to text on his PADD and dictated to Kerns, "FIS en route. If unable to transport on next pass, leave orbit and initiate gamma. Get helium at any cost."
He opened the door to three FIS agents materializing from a site-to-site transport on the portico of his wooded summer retreat. Their phasers drawn. His thumb clicked "send" on the message and he dropped the PADD, shattering the screen glass.
He stomped hard on the broken remains of the PADD. Of course they would eventually intercept and decrypt the message without the hard copy of the device, but by the time they got around to it, the Tafv would be long gone.
He raised his hands in surrender and fell to his knees. No point in fighting. He was a practical man. He could wait out the next few days in custody. After all, what good was revenge if he didn't get to see it unfold?
Sarek's first surprise upon waking was to discover that he was alive. His consciousness flooded back quickly but he did not have any concept of how much time had passed. One moment he had used tal-shaya to snap the tall man's neck just below the skull and the next moment he was here, lying on his left side and staring at an onyx wall with a repetitive geometric pattern.
His head and back ached and he had a peculiar, lingering feeling of dread that took enormous effort to repress. During his youth he had studied at the Vulcan Institute of Defensive Arts and had been rendered unconscious many times during his intensive ten-month training period as he learned to master techniques central to Kareel-ifla and Suus Mahna. Being stunned into unconsciousness with a phaser was a completely different experience: his mind had essentially been shut off, which had removed all frames of reference for his present surroundings.
He impulsively wanted to locate Amanda but reflexively surrendered to logic instead. He did not know how long he had been here, where he was, or who had brought him here. Obviously it had been people in Bentham's employ, but he could not know how many there were and what capabilities they had.
He also could not know what would happen to Amanda, but if Bentham's men planned on killing her, she could already be dead and there was nothing he could do about that. If she were still alive however, it was improbable her ultimate fate would be decided in the next several minutes, and he needed those minutes to collect his thoughts and bearings.
He remained motionless on the cold floor with his eyes partially closed and ears open. The room was dimly lit and unfurnished, cold even by human standards but extremely dry. There was the faintest thrum of energy, reminiscent of either a faraway plasma generator or a nearby force field. Given the small dimensions of the room he currently occupied, the latter seemed a more logical candidate. It was reasonable to assume he was in a cell of some kind.
If that were true, it was logical to assume the men who had captured him wanted him alive. The most obvious reason for keeping him alive would be to extract information, and if Molineaux's account held any truth, Bentham's people had ways of doing that. Information was most certainly the only thing that would prevent them from immediately killing Amanda as well.
Bentham had allegedly killed three close family members of the Comstock crew, presumably after they'd failed to give him information on the location of the helium-3. Given he and Amanda had both been abducted, that information almost certainly still escaped him. If her suspicions about Zetar were correct however, that information might not elude him for much longer. Amanda Grayson was a remarkable woman with many excellent qualities, but he doubted her ability to withstand torture for any length of time.
He slowly sat up sideways and looked behind him. The three-sided room was slightly less than three meters by three meters in dimension. The open wall revealed a narrow and dark corridor outside, slightly offset from its true dimensions due to a refraction of the light. He had been right about the force field.
He felt a sudden pain spread throughout his chest cavity and slowly fade, leaving only a fleeting feeling of fright. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of being stunned by the phaser. A minute later, the pain renewed with an increased intensity and it momentarily took his breath away and allowed the terror reached a staggering pitch. He slowed his breathing and fought to get it under control, and it quietly slipped away.
The fear was perplexing: fear was irrational and would not alter his circumstances. The suppression of fear was one of the earliest lessons Vulcan children received. He breathed methodically and pushed it into a remote corner in his mind and rose to his feet.
He approached the force field and reached the back of his hand out to where he approximated its location to be. It was warm and he could feel the gentle pulse of the energy from ten centimeters away. Direct contact with it would be extremely painful and sustained contact would probably kill him.
The open wall of his cell led into a very narrow hallway just one meter wide. The angle was shallow but he could see into four other similar cells on the other side. He could see a pair of feet from a person sitting and leaning up against the wall but could not see beyond the occupant's knees. The other cells appeared empty but he could not be sure from his vantage point.
The engineering construction and design of the prison were wholly unfamiliar to him and did not resemble anything he had ever seen within the Federation. He started to examine the walls of the cell and believed them to be either a polished duranium or tritanium alloy with meticulous laser etching.
The only other items of note in the cell were two air ducts with unusual hexagonally patterned grates. He assumed the force fields extended across the grates, though it wouldn't have mattered as the ceiling of the cell was three meters above his own head and even with a running start, he wouldn't be able to jump and reach that high to find out. He ran his fingers along the seams of the walls and found none.
He was just concluding that this cell was probably inescapable when the pain hit him again in the chest and a new thought occurred to him. The pain wasn't coming from within him as a residual effect of a hand phaser: it was Amanda's. They were hurting her. He could not allow himself to succumb to emotion now despite the anger welling inside of him.
He formed his hands into a steeple and breathed deeply. There was nothing he could do to stop her pain or comfort her. He recalled how her mind had touched the edge of his when they kissed and he now tried to do the same by reaching out to her mind through plat-vok. He fought with all the concentration he possessed but… nothing. They were not formally bonded and since she was human, he wasn't sure how complete of a bond was even possible between them.
He continued to focus on his breathing and knelt down onto his knees to focus all of his energy in stabilizing his emotions. He was very nearly down to two breaths per minute when the pain hit him again and the anger resurged briefly. He continued on in this way for fifteen minutes when his ears detected a noticeable shift in the hum of the force field.
He opened his eyes to see a human male of average-height and very plain appearance standing with his arms crossed. He was dressed oddly, with a white dress shirt tucked in to black work pants and bloused into heavy boots. Around his waist was a pistol belt with a Starfleet issued hand phaser, a communicator, and what appeared to be a remote activation device of some kind.
Sarek neither spoke nor moved. They watched each other watch each other, and Sarek was cognizant of the fact that he no longer felt Amanda's suffering, though he could sense somewhere at the threshold of his consciousness that she was still alive.
"Ambassador Sarek, right?" asked the man, taking a step toward him in the extremely narrow hallway until his face was only centimeters away from the force field.
Sarek remained motionless.
"You killed one of the better men I ever had work for me. It might come as a surprise to you, being Vulcan and all, but it's harder than you'd think to find guys that have no conscience and will obey any order you give them."
Sarek continued to kneel on the floor and made direct eye contact with his presumed jailer.
"You know, I always imagined underneath that boring exterior you people were probably psychos. I heard you broke his neck with one hand. I mean, wow," the man laughed.
Sarek blinked and continued to breathe calmly.
"Not in the mood to talk. That's ok. I didn't think you would be. But I don't doubt that you're listening, and I bet that logical brain of yours is probably clocking a lot of overtime right now. So I'm going to stop beating around the bush and just come out and say it. My boss thinks that you know where we can find some helium-3. Ringing any bells?"
Sarek judged by the man's casual tone of voice that he was accustomed to coaxing information out of humans and wondered if he had been the one interrogating Amanda. The fact this man was asking him for the helium's location meant that Amanda had not yielded the information.
"You know, I don't like to hurt people," he said frowning. "I really don't. It's just a job, and I'm good at it. The Romulans on the other hand… whoa, I gotta tell you, you wouldn't believe the stuff they have. See, I thought I wrote the book on suffering, but those people… they're artists. I found things on this ship that I wouldn't use on my worst enemy."
Sarek wondered when the man was going to arrive at his point or if he had already made it when he asked for the location of the helium.
"But you see, there's a pool going around. My guys say there's no point in torturing Vulcans. I mean, we tried it. The last ambassador I killed from your planet… that guy had a will made of neutronium. Not gonna lie, it was kinda inspiring. Anyway, I digress. So we've got this bet, and I'm looking at you and I'm thinking, why did we even bring you along? You just can't get anything out of a Vulcan, like I've been saying."
Sarek could hear a struggling from somewhere very far away down at the end of the narrow hallway which caused the man to turn and look. His smile was suggestive of something worrisome, and he quickly turned back to Sarek.
"But then I look at your little sweetheart and I think, wow, she's a peach. Tougher than you'd think too: I like that in a woman."
Fear again. Not Amanda's this time, but his own. Sarek willed his rational mind to ignore the emotions as he stared at the man, stood, and cautiously approached the force field.
A human man even larger than Sarek walked into view, dragging Amanda with him. The man was of such a substantial bulk that his broad shoulders very nearly blocked the walkway. Her arms were behind her back and she was slightly bent forward at the waist in a completely submissive position. She appeared to be struggling against her captor, but her posture and significantly smaller size rendered her completely helpless.
Her face was oriented toward the floor and she would have had to crane her neck at an extremely awkward angle to be able to look up at him. He could see small streams of blood trickling from her nostrils around the corners of her mouth and down her chin. Anger began to dwarf his fear.
"When I first saw her I thought it would be easy to get her to talk," the man continued. "I mean, look at her. She looks like such a sweet person that I thought maybe I could even just ask nicely. Turns out I was wrong."
The man holding Amanda's arms behind her back looked completely indifferent to his present occupation. Bored, even. Sarek noted Amanda's legs were shaking and could not decide if it was from fear or muscular strain.
"So I give her a little incentive to talk, and still, she says nothing. Andros here was getting impatient and just wanted to give up and really have a go at her, but then I thought, it seems like you two are pretty close. Then it really hit me. I bet I know how I can make a Vulcan talk."
Sarek watched Amanda stiffen and try to look around. The man holding her, who Sarek concluded was Andros, pulled down hard on her arms, forcing her back into an upright position. She was breathing heavily and her eyes grew wide when she saw him, but there was something fixed in them that he could not identify. She looked frightened yet determined. Her eyebrows furrowed and she squinted at him. Still the anger rose.
"So Ambassador, first let's start with the helium-3. Where is it?" he asked.
Amanda stared hard at him and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Sarek knew they had already lost. Amanda had not told them and neither should he. For this defiance, they would both be tortured and then they would die. If they gave in they might be spared the torture, but they would still die.
It only mattered whether Bentham could still stumble upon the helium in some way before Federation authorities caught up to him. The Tellarite star charts were still at the embassy and therefore would have not been seized when he and Amanda were kidnapped. Given that most of the Federation was now aware of Bentham's activities, either Bentham believed he could still prevail against dwindling odds or their captors had not been apprised of Molineaux's confession. Or didn't care.
If the helium were on Zetar and the weapon was stored on Iota Eridani near the Klingon border, it would take days for them to just travel between the two planets, and that was without mining and extracting it the helium. Of course Bentham could have some other contingency plan Sarek could not anticipate, which was a serious possibility if his impressions of the admiral were correct.
So the logic in him demanded silence regardless of the complex probabilities due to a much simpler mathematics: what were his and Amanda's lives compared to billions? Was that not a fundamental tenet of Vulcan philosophy? The needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few, and their case could be no exception. So though Sarek knew what must come next, he was unprepared for what actually transpired.
"So that's it then, Ambassador? Nothing to say? Ok, Andros, got my clippers?"
The man holding Amanda shifted his grip to restrain her with one arm and pulled a pair of what looked like gardening shears from a utility belt around his waist.
"I figured I could start small so I don't leave her too disfigured if you change your mind and start talking. What do you think? Pinkie fingers first?" he asked, looking from Amanda to Sarek.
The man holding Amanda ripped one of her arms from behind her back and spread out her hand. The fury in Sarek threatened to boil over, and the look on Amanda's face was unrecognizable. Her eyes were wide and wild, a perfect concoction of terror, determination, and rage. She didn't cry or scream or beg. Instead, she fruitlessly fought again the giant holding her down as the smaller man moved the shears toward her hand. Then the last shreds of Sarek's logic fell away.
He threw himself against the force field with the full weight of his wrath. More pain than he had ever experienced flowed into him and it seemed as though his heart would burst and his nervous system would rupture. It was illogical and excruciating, but it was effective.
It bought her four seconds, four precious seconds for the man with the shears to jump in surprise and the man holding her to forget himself and loosen his grip. She twisted and bit into his forearm like a vicious animal, and he lost his grip entirely as he shifted his bulk to strike her with the other arm. He missed because she was already in motion, diving at the waist of the smaller man and reaching for the activation remote swinging from his belt.
She had deactivated the force field.
Sarek still reeled from the agony and his heart was pounding erratically as he stumbled forward for the larger man. The big man had turned his body to step backward into a wider and sturdier stance, and Sarek was lucky enough to catch him with his foot in midair. He shoved his right elbow up into the man's chin and knocked him completely off balance. He was big, but he still had delicate human bones. Sarek felt the man's jaw crunch as he reached around with his left arm to grab the man by his hair and shove him headlong into the reinforced wall.
He reeled around to see Amanda in a violent struggle with the other man. They were on their knees grappling awkwardly in the small space. She was smaller but had the necessary leverage to force a deadlock because the man's right leg was twisted awkwardly beneath him. He had drawn the phaser from his pistol belt and was attempting to aim it at her, but both of her hands clutched his wrist tightly to prevent him from doing so.
In two swift steps Sarek descended on him, striking him in the throat and causing the phaser to skitter down the long hallway. Amanda fell back onto Sarek's legs, but he stepped around her and put his fist into the man's face with alarming force and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Then he kept going and only stopped when he felt he was on the verge of losing consciousness.
"Sarek?" Amanda croaked, her voice raspy and surprisingly calm.
He released the man's collar and his lifeless body slumped to the ground. He quickly came back to his senses and felt horrified as he looked down at his fist and saw it awash in both of their blood.
"Sarek?" she asked again with more confidence.
Sarek's head was swimming and his heart flopped around fitfully in his chest. He took a deep breath and clutched his side and hobbled over to her. She was trying to stand by pushing her hands off the floor from an awkward crouching position. She reached out her hand for his arm for support but they were both unsteady on their feet. He took another step to find himself half hugging her, half holding her upright.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said shakily. "What just happened? Where are we? How-"
"I do not know enough of our present circumstances to adequately deduce answers to your questions," he interrupted. "But it is logical to conclude we are not yet out of danger."
The communicator on the smaller man's belt chirped. Sarek made sure Amanda could stand on her own and turned to pick it up but stopped short. About five meters away, a very gaunt and shaggy Vulcan man was picking up the phaser that he had knocked from the smaller man's grip. As he pointed it at Sarek's chest, he spoke, and Sarek was surprised to find he was unable to understand him.
"We mean you no harm," he started to explain in Vuhlkansu, raising his hands in innocence. "We were prisoners here; I presume you also were."
A look of confusion crossed the man's face and he spoke the same unintelligible words again. The harsh, choppy sound of his language sounded almost familiar, and then Amanda said what he was beginning to suspect.
"He's speaking Romulan."
The man barked the same phrase for a third time, gesturing with the phaser.
"He wants to know who we are and where we are," Amanda said quietly. "What do I tell him?"
The Romulan was clearly uncomfortable with them speaking in a language he didn't understand. He began yelling menacingly and squared his shoulders to take aim with the phaser.
Author's Note: For those coming to Star Trek from the 2009 Reboot, the end of this chapter might be a bit odd because it seems as if Sarek and the Romulan are confused by their common ancestry. In the Original Series and Enterprise, the relationship between the Federation and Romulans was pretty canonically vague.
In the TOS episode Balance of Terror, Commander Spock explains that following the Earth-Romulan War that ended in 2160, the Romulan Neutral Zone was established. That conflict was fought with more primitive technologies and supposedly no ship-to-ship visual communication occurred, and therefore the two races never actually saw each other until 2266. The timeline of this story occurs in 2226, therefore it will be another 40 years before Kirk and the gang make this a widely known fact.
It is my theory however that at least some individuals on both Romulus and Vulcan had to be aware of their common link, as evidenced by the relationship between V'Las, the Head of the Vulcan High Command in the mid-22nd century, and Talok, an undercover Romulan spy in Enterprise.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a huge shout out to Nyotarules for pointing this out in some earlier reviews on this story. When I drafted the outline, this Romulan/Vulcan relationship wasn't really at the forefront of the plot, but those reviews really helped me alter the course of my story to bring it to this point and will continue to remain important throughout the rest of the story. So thank you so much to Nyotarules. :)