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I killed my mother today. It was logical. It was necessary. It was revenge.
Seven months had passed since my crew had quit Starfleet: Danise Simonson, a Human engineer from Earth; C’Mal ji Mara, a Caitian tactical officer from Ferasa; and me, Sovak, ostensibly Vulcan but Romulan by birth. Add to that, Qwaas, the Ferengi scientist who actually owned the starship we crewed and which I captained, the Talon. We four had earned a reputation as earnest and mostly honest problem solvers. Even Starfleet had hired us on occasion.
The work came sporadically. Unlike in Starfleet, the maintenance of the Talon was carried out by the Lethkaite nuns who had rebuilt her, not the crew. So I had lots of time on my hands. I read, I cooked, I ran. But, one needs external challenges. Thankfully, Qwaas received a job offer from a woman—a distraught older Human—who was looking for her son’s final resting place. Her son's shuttle had disappeared somewhere between the Gula Dari system and the Petite Azure system.
We embarked, warping away from Ziag, the world that served as our home base. (On Federation star maps, it’s called Zeta-1 Aquarii Gamma.) Soon we found the shuttle in question on a desiccated world orbiting a white star. Danise theorized that a planetary ionized dust storm, common on such worlds, had hid the presence of the shuttle from the previous Federation attempt at search and rescue. The temperature at the surface was 327 K, the equivalent of a balmy spring day on Vulcan, but far too hot for a Human or Ferengi. So, together, C’Mal and I strapped on oxygen masks and beamed down.
We materialized beside the shuttle, which was resting at the bottom of a shallow ravine surrounded by eroded pillars of rock. Plainly, the vessel had not crashed, but had landed. It appeared to still have power.
I comm’d the Talon: “Definitely the missing shuttle. I’m going to try the passkey we were given.”
Danise responded from orbit, “Okay. Keep in mind there might be a decaying body in there.”
“Understood,” I said, punching in the key sequence. The panel beeped: incorrect code. I tried again and was again disappointed.
C’Mal swooned. I caught and steadied her.
“The heat,” she said.
The moment I released her, the sound of a disruptor shot filled the air. I found myself on the ground, C’Mal lying beside me. She had taken the hit and now lay motionless. Perhaps I should have checked for life signs, but she was so very still. I knew she was dead. The ringing sound of the weapon continued to echo in the thin air. With my phaser in hand, I tried to stand but realized my leg had been clipped. Another pulse rang out. I scrabbled over rocks and sand, heading to the opposite side of the shuttle.
I slapped my comm badge. “C’Mal is dead,” I yelled, but the words choked in my throat. “She’s dead. We need immediate beam out.”
Qwaas answered. “Did you say C’Mal is dead?”
“This was a setup. A trap.”
Sounding panicked, Qwaas said, “Sovak, our shields are up, we can’t beam you out. We’re under attack—”
“Qwaas?” I hissed into my comm badge, but the signal was jammed.
I heard rocks fall in the distance and fired at what I thought might be the source, but the acoustics of the ravine meant I was guessing. I clawed at the sandy soil, trying to create a depression beside the shuttle for cover, firing at random at the towering columns of rock lining the perimeter.
Another shot rang out, hitting the shuttle and triggering its shields. The shields, snapping into place, flung me into the air and I landed with a grunt five meters away, with no protection.
Outsmarted, I knelt there, desperately searching the surrounding ground for my attacker. I could no longer stand. Through a burned-away hole in the fabric I saw that my thigh was now a mottled blue and black.
A silence fell. I crawled across the burning sand to the other side of the shuttle, where C’Mal lay. I could only stare at her. There was nothing else I could do.
“Sovak!”
A voice calling my name. Odd.
“Sovak, don’t shoot, I’m coming down!”
A mirage-like figure formed among the distant rocks.
I tried to contact the Talon again, but got no reply. I pulled C’Mal’s lifeless body closer and held it.
The approaching figure slowly coalesced into a tall Orion woman, laboriously dragging another body behind her. I perceived that the Orion was Syron, a competitor of mine. Winded, she tossed her baggage onto the ground before me: a Vulcan or Romulan female in dark civilian clothing, face to the ground.
“She was trying to kill you. I struck her hard upside the head with the butt of my phaser rifle. She’ll be out for a while.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked breathlessly.
She replied indignantly: “I was trying to steal your bounty! Trying to return the favor of you stealing mine a while back. Saved your life instead. Guess you owe me one.” She peered at C’Mal, whose dead body I was now cradling. “Is the Caitian dead?”
I nodded. “She was…my mate.”
“Sovak, what just happened here?”
In a daze, unable to think, I shook my head.
Syron turned the unconscious Vulcanoid figure over and gasped.
“Sovak, she looks just like you. She’s your twin.” Then she looked closer. “No, wait…she’s…grayer. She’s older than you.”
As we watched, my twin dematerialized, probably beamed away to orbit somewhere.
Syron opened an old style communicator and someone from her crew reported, “That cloaked ship that was attacking Sovak’s ship has just warped away.”
“Were you able to place the tag?" asked Syron.
“Yes. We can track them anywhere in this quadrant. But they’re sure to discover and deactivate the tag once they drop from warp.”
“Do your best.”
Syron knelt beside me. I could feel her eyes on me.
She said, “I’m starting to cook. I have to go back to my ship. Listen, on the Kel’gri, we have a stasis pod. I’ll freeze the Caitian and take her to a Starbase. She’s ex-Starfleet, isn’t she? They’ll do whatever they can to save her. We can get your leg fixed up there too.”
My comm badge chimed.
“Status?” I asked.
Danise answered. “We’re here, but just barely. The ship’s going to need patching up, but Qwaas and I made it through. Captain, is it true…about C’Mal?”
“She is dead,” I said. “Who attacked you?”
“We never saw. They were cloaked the whole time. In fact, we’d probably be dead if not for the assist from Syron’s ship. Who attacked you on the ground?”
“I think…,” I said, “that it must have been my mother.”
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I was unable to see C’Mal after her body was placed in suspension. The chief physician at Starbase 510, a Human named McHugh, explained to me that the process of reviving C’Mal would involve doing scans and taking tissue samples, then replicating her destroyed organs and surgically implanting them, and finally, the least reliable step, restarting her Caitian nervous system. All this would take weeks and involve various specialists from across the Federation. Then he took me aside and explained that it would probably be better just to let her go.
This suggestion sent a chill through my spine.
“Why?” I asked.
“You know why,” he replied.
“No,” I said, “you tell me why you think she is better off dead.”
“I remember when your file came through,” McHugh said, suddenly changing the topic. “I went back just now and reviewed it. Sovak T’Lon, former captain of the U.S.S. Churchill. Severe axonal nerve damage. Vulcans don’t recover well from that sort of injury. I followed by the usual recommendations: autologous nerve grafting, regenerative stimulation therapy, and so on. But I knew you would never walk again. Yet, here you are. What magic did you use? And why can’t you use it on her?”
“I’m not in Starfleet anymore. And I certainly don’t answer to you,” I said. “But I am the closest thing that woman has to family. And I’ll tell you why you’ll work to save her. Because she still has shit to do in this world. And you and everyone else will be the better for it.”
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After Syron returned me to Ziag and the convent, I spent several weeks hiding in the tiny room that C’Mal and I had shared when not aboard the Talon. I listened each day to the nuns outside singing their songs, reciting their prayers, and doing their many chores. I thought about how that daily structure, that scheduled and regulated life, really did make them all sisters in a sense. Each of them knew what the other’s day would be like—except for their interior life, which they mostly hid.
Unmotivated, I neglected doing the recommended stretches as my leg healed. My stacks of books gathered dust, my bed remained unmade, and dishes collected in nasty, unstable towers.
Days began, passed without incident, then ended. I had no trouble sleeping as that was the only time I didn’t hurt.
Some time later, Danise visited.
“The damage to the Talon is nearly fixed, but she needs a test flight. Chiri has been working day and night to make her more maneuverable, which was our main problem last time. She’s coming along on the shakedown to test the practicality of the new helm controls.”
Danise viewed Chiri as her protégé. The young Ferengi woman was a talented engineer and programmer, just like her.
“We leave at 0800 tomorrow morning,” she added.
“You don’t need me just to fly to the next system and back,” I said.
“But you’re the captain.”
“Danise, you are the acting captain for the time being.”
“What?”
“Danise, please…just get the hell away from me.”
She left without another word.
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I awoke the next morning after Qwaas, Danise, and Chiri had beamed away to fly the Talon out of the star system. Lately, a wave of disappointment would wash over me as I opened my eyes of a morning. I would find myself lamenting, Not another day. But today instead I felt unsettled, I felt a kind of unfocused tension.
Leaving the dormitory, I ascended the stairs and emerged onto the roof. The clay pots containing the various fermenting foods surrounded me. I walked to the edge of the roof and surveyed in the fields behind the convent the nuns weeding the crops. As they sang their work song, their far-away voices were carried on the breeze. Everything seemed normal. But still, I was haunted by disquiet. Something was about to happen, I knew it.
I retrieved my comm badge from my robe pocket and pressed my thumb against it.
“Sovak to Lethka.”
“Lethka here.”
“Are you down in the fields with the other nuns?”
“I am.”
Lethka, a young Tellarite, had inspired the entire Order of Ferengi nuns to leave their faith (which had been tied to the cult of the Grand Negus) and to create a new path for themselves. She had gone straight from acolyte to abbot. The other nuns’ skills at programming and engineering had developed from their former duty of managing the Nagus’s sharemarket stocks. These days, the nuns used their skills to maintain the Talon, while the crew of the Talon did their part to support the convent.
What can I say? It’s a living.
“Lethka, I suspect that we are in danger. Gather the nuns in the refectory. Don’t forget Belga. Send them down the hatch to the underground bunker. I’ll meet you there, okay?”
“Why? What are you expecting?” Lethka asked.
“Remember what happened to the last nunnery?”
For the record, the Order’s previous nunnery was pulverized by the Ferengi military.
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Our home planet, Zeta-1 Aquarii Gamma, was young and quite geologically active, so shielded safe rooms were a necessity. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, and tidal waves were not unknown, and for an underdeveloped planet such as Ziag, some things are easier to endure than to control.
I waited to activate the bunker’s rudimentary shielding and inertial dampeners until the first salvo hit. I wanted it to appear to the hostiles that I found scanning us from orbit that we had died in the attack. Otherwise they might keep firing, or worse, beam down. Many hours later, long after the ground had stopped shaking, a confused Qwaas signaled from orbit that the Talon had returned.
“What happened?” he exclaimed over the channel.
“My mother,” I said.
We emerged from the bunker to find various emergency response vehicles and earth moving machines outside the charred perimeter of what had formerly been the convent. The complex had been leveled.
My crew beamed down.
Qwaas was pale and visibly shaking. The moment he saw that Belga, his daughter, was in one piece, he shrieked involuntarily, ran to her, enveloped her in his arms and cried. Danise approached gingerly, brushed my graying hair from my eyes, and hugged me. She also was shuddering.
From a distance, I saw Chiri, the nun who had accompanied my crew on the trip to the nearest star, wandering about, looking lost and fragile in her long white habit.
“It’s gone,” she was saying to herself. “It’s all gone.”
Lethka gathered the nuns. The emergency workers began to hand out water bottles and care packets. Many of the Ferengi women had wailed loudly while in the dusty underground shelter during the attack, but now they appeared collected and stoic. It was a front meant for the outsiders, but I wondered how much of their typically peaceful and reserved demeanor was also a mask.
I had been shocked when Lethka, the strictly pacifistic champion of social justice, had sat down beside me inside the bunker and questioned me about my mother. I truly realized then that I had no answers. Why was my mother, a Romulan intelligence agent, drawing attention to herself in Federation space? Decades ago, she had been expelled from Vulcan when she was revealed as a spy. She took her husband and son back to Romulan space with her. Why was I left behind, to be secretly adopted by my Vulcan parents?
Why was my mother now intent on destroying me?
I didn’t even know her real name.
Lethka said, “You know more about her than you think. You knew she was in orbit. Your life has stopped, Sovak. Unless you fix the problem with your mother, you will never move forward again. For all of our sakes, fix the problem.”
“I don’t know how,” I admitted. “How do I do that?”
She spoke quietly but resolutely. “Any way you can.”
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A transport removed the nuns of the Order and little Belga to a community in the middle of the continent run by Verlatrian monasts. Chiri insisted on remaining with Qwaas, Danise, and I on the Talon, although the plan at that point was far from clear.
When Lethka had reminded Chiri of her vow of pacifism, Chiri had shaken with rage and asked Lethka to look around her at their ruined home. Lethka then gave Chiri a dispensation, telling her that she would soon learn the price of violence. After that, Chiri ditched her robe and donned civilian clothing, looking tiny and cute.
I stepped onto the bridge of the Talon. The crew were sitting at their stations: Chiri at helm, Simonson at tactical, Qwaas at engineering. I keenly felt C’Mal’s absence. It felt like a constant reminder of a bad dream.
“Good morning,” I said. “Syron has sent me the coordinates for the destination of my mother’s ship. It dropped out of warp and proceeded to an industrial complex orbiting a planet called Sibby’s Gateway, also known as 53 Aquarii-A Delta on the charts. It communicated briefly with an office complex on the surface before the tracking tag was discovered and deactivated. I assume that my mother is operating out of that star system.”
“Any word about C’Mal and her recovery?” asked Danise.
I shook my head.
“I don’t know exactly how to say this,” I began, “but I am going to Sibby’s Gateway with or without you guys. Qwaas, this is your ship, and there certainly will be no profit in going after this woman. And Chiri, you also are under no obligation. I don’t want to toss you out of the frying pan and into the fire. Danise—”
“I vote we get this woman and bring this to an end,” Danise said.
Qwaas nodded. “Sovak, my ship is your ship.”
Chiri spoke as well: “I just want to help.”
Sovak nodded solemnly. “Good. Set course for Sibby’s Gateway, warp seven. We leave now.”
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Sibby’s Gateway was a far flung and barely-Federation world with two frozen polar caps, two bands of supersonic storms, and a central region of temperate land and sea.
“The complex on the surface is shielded from transport. I’m having trouble getting any readings,” said Qwaas.
“Open a channel,” I ordered. A humanoid attendant, looking somewhat perplexed, appeared on the screen.
“I’m back,” I announced.
The humanoid, dressed in business attire, peered into the screen. I stared back at him.
“Well?” I said.
“You’re…running without a cloak?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you run without a cloak.”
“It’s no longer necessary,” I replied.
“Oh.”
“Lower the shields,” I said. “I’m coming down.”
“Acknowledged.”
I closed the channel.
Chiri was amazed. “What just happened?”
Qwaas explained, “Don’t you see? She just passed for her mother. They’ve never seen her mother’s ship when it’s not cloaked.”
I checked that my phaser pistol was fully charged.
Qwaas asked, “Where do we beam you down?”
Scanning the now unshielded complex, Danise noted, “Near the top of the complex is a large office space, with huge windows and a garden terrace. That’s where I’d put my office if I had a choice.”
“Figure out a way to permanently deactivate the shielding,” I ordered. “I’ll call if I need help.” I held up my phaser, nodded to Qwaas, and said, “Site to site transport.”
Qwaas switched his panel to transport mode and nodded back.
The bridge of the Talon around me was replaced by a richly-appointed office, drenched in ambient light, with no one in evidence. I wandered behind an immense wooden desk. The display came to life and I was scanned.
The computer spoke: “Welcome, Kitron Mashota.”
Exploring a bit, I realized I had full access to all my mother’s accounts and to the databanks of whatever business she was running.
I comm’d the Talon.
“I’m in. A biometric scan gave me full access to my mother’s system. She is going by the name Kitron Mashota. She sells commodities, probably smuggled through the neutral zone from Romulan space. She has a file on each of her competitors, and how she plans to extort them or put them out of business. She’s not in the spy business any more. She’s running a business syndicate…backed up with organized crime.”
Qwaas interrupted. “Sovak, if the biometric scan gave you access, that means you’re not her daughter. You’re her duplicate. You’re a genetic clone.”
This hadn’t occurred to me, although it should have.
Danise added, “My god, no wonder she wants you dead. You’re a loose end from her Vulcan assignment that now represents a very real threat to the security of her enterprise. People could use you against her. You could use your own body against her. She can’t risk having you around.”
I heard the heavy wooden doors slide open and glanced up just in time to see a figure dart out of the room.
“Someone was just here,” I said.
“Shields are back up,” replied Qwaas. “We can’t scan and we can’t transport to your location. Can you lower the shields from down there?”
The wooden doors slid open again and four men ran into the room, targeting me with phaser pistols. I crouched behind the massive desk, trying to avoid the flaring heat and flying dagger-like shards of desk that accompanied each hit. The force-shielded windows behind me were shimmering from badly aimed shots. I turned, closed by eyes, and fired a continuous beam directed at the windows until the shielding overloaded and discharged a burst of photons. The flash caused the men to start firing blindly, and I picked them off quickly. I bolted through the office and out the doors, passing through the outer office and reception area, just in time to see a stairwell door slide shut.
Inside the stairwell, I heard footfalls from both above and below.
“Mother!” I screamed up the stairwell, running up the stairs after her as fast as possible with my stiff, barely-healed leg. Below me I could see another group of suited men ascending. Crouching, I fired my pistol at the joints between the wall and stairs, causing a large section of the structure to collapse on top of the men. They cried in agony. I phasered away another section of stairs. Unless they knew how to fly, they would not be following me up.
Above, I spotted a flash of daylight and heard a heavy door slam shut. I scurried upward, my damaged leg aching like hell.
“I could use some help, guys,” I comm’d the crew.
“We’re trying!” Qwaas responded.
I peered carefully through the swinging door at the apex, onto the flat roof outside. A utility corridor situated behind me extended toward another section of the building. I realized she could have opened the door as a diversion and gone the other way. But the roof, with its many large shield generators and subspace repeaters would give her an advantage. It’s the route I would have taken.
I dove outside through the opening and simultaneously heard a disruptor blast ring through the air. Part of the door began to smoke and turn black. A disruptor blast won’t kill you instantly—it scrambles your cells then fries them as you die. Huddled behind a bulky environmental unit, my eye began to sting as green blood traced the curve of my face. I realized some shrapnel from the desk in the office must have nicked me.
I surveyed the roof, spotted what I thought might be the very edge of my mother’s head, and took a shot.
She cried out, probably more in surprise than pain. I smiled.
“Guess you didn’t know your daughter was such a good shot!” Silence was the response. The sound of thunder rolled in from the gray, occluded distant horizon.
Then, as she darted away using the peripheral shield generators for cover, I saw a flash of her darkly dressed body. Two security shuttles were hovering just outside the complex’s shield perimeter, unable to enter. I wondered why the Talon didn’t open fire on them, but perhaps the last thing they needed right now was a distraction.
“Why couldn’t you have just left me alone?” I screamed, my voice growing hoarse. “Answer me, Mother!”
“I am not your mother!” she screamed back.
I could not localize her voice—it was bouncing from a taller section of the building behind me, where deserted balconies rose to meet a shuttle port at the top. I shuffled quickly toward the units at the periphery, phaser at ready.
“Mother!” I screamed again.
Lightning struck the shielding, shaking the whole edifice. I rushed behind an array of field generators but found she was no longer there. Quite stupidly, I hit the closest unit with my phaser, thinking it might collapse the shields around the complex. The energy fed back and knocked me off my feet. My phaser arm was suddenly useless and numb, pins and needles.
Her voice called out to me: “What’s wrong?” I sat silently for a second, trying to restore my bearing and balance, breathing raggedly. “Why did you come here?” she continued. “Things were finally going good for me…when I thought you were dead.”
“Fuck you,” I yelled back.
“Who’s it going to be,” she sing-songed. “You or me?”
I picked up the phaser with my left hand and began to move around the perimeter of the roof.
“Mother?” I called, trying to spur her to reply, but she remained silent. Unable to locate her, I eventually worked my way back to the entrance of the stairwell and hid beside it in the rain.
Again her foolish sing-song voice called to me from the periphery.
“I…will…kill…you,” she sang.
I yelled back: “You already killed the woman that I love, on the desert planet. I’m pregnant, mother! How much blood will you have on your hands?”
“Hybrids don’t count,” she said, then chuckled cruelly.
I wiped more green blood from my face, trying to keep my vision clear. I noticed my right hand and arm was turning black and blue.
Suddenly her voice was closer, clearer.
“Sovak?”
I glanced around the corner to see her standing there in the rain, sopping wet, no weapon in sight. Her hands were raised, palms open. She appeared weak and slender. And she appeared in pain, perhaps crying.
“What now?” I demanded.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. She shook her head and added, “No tricks. I just…I just…need you to know something.” For the first time I was able to examine this woman, ostensibly my mother, but really just….what? What was she to me?
I raised my phaser, aiming at her head, and limped closer, vigilantly peering about, not really expecting this to go my way, but unable to shoot an unarmed woman. I stopped three meters from her, watching her.
“What?” I screamed.
I always knew when someone was watching me behind my back. I whipped around and instantly shot the figure several stories above me. Along with his phaser rifle, he fell and hit the deck with a loud slap like a bag of wet cement. More green blood poured from the phaser wound in his chest than I would have thought possible.
My mother stumbled toward the body, ignoring me, and fell awkwardly beside it, as though she had forgotten how to walk. She took his hand in hers and rubbed his shoulder. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.
“You killed my boy,” she sobbed. “You killed my boy.”
I watched her for a moment as she blinked repeatedly, looking lost. Then she stood and began to stumble toward me.
“I am going to break your fucking neck,” she growled maniacally.
I fired my phaser, hitting her directly, but she did not stop.
“Solani genetic therapy,” she smiled, twitching. “You can’t hurt me. Surprise.”
In the distance, I saw the Talon chase away the two smaller security shuttles.
Danise then materialized five meters away and immediately began to fire a continuous phaser stream at my mother. My mother didn’t even bother to look at Denise, but kept coming at me.
“Don’t make me do it,” I pleaded. The look I saw on her face—on my face—made me realize that there was a place I can never go, not without losing everything.
I fired, kept firing.
I knew that even with the genetically encoded Solani ability to process photonic energy into negative energy, there would be a saturation point.
“Stop,” I pleaded. “Please stop.”
Fire engulfed her. Intense energy, causing a large portion of her chest and torso to immolate. What remained fell to the ground in a pool of green.
I collapsed. How much pain can one person take? How much regret? How much loss? On my knees, I screamed until I couldn’t scream any more. Danise approached, but was afraid to touch me.
The rain carried away the blood of my mother and brother…an expanding sea of green, the only thing I could see around me.