“And what’s that, Doctor?”

[167] Chapel nearly blurted out what she’d learned, then thought better of it. “Let’s just say that you and Ambassador Burgess are going to want to see this for yourself. Immediately.”

“I’ll be right down.”

“I really don’t think you have any reason for concern,” Lojur said.

“I certainly hope that’s so,” Chekov said, sitting behind the desk in his quarters. He gestured toward a guest chair, where Lojur took a seat. “But as executive officer, crew morale is my special area of responsibility.”

“Even when we might be under attack soon by some extremely territorial Tholians?” Lojur said quietly.

“ Especiallythen. I have to make sure the captain and I can count on you in a crisis, Commander. And I would be remiss if I pretended I didn’t know certain things about you.”

Lojur thought that Excelsior’sexec looked, as usual, far more comfortable dispensing photon torpedoes than advice. But he knew Pavel Chekov better than that. With Captain Sulu in charge of Excelsior’soverall operations, the welfare of the ship’s crew fell squarely on Chekov’s shoulders.

“Granted, sir,” Lojur said. “But I think Lieutenant Akaar overreacted when he asked you to ... psychoanalyze me.” Lojur felt tremendous gratitude toward Chekov, whose mentorship had been invaluable to him. Still, there were certain areas of Lojur’s life that he wasn’t eager to talk about, even with the man who had sponsored his entry into StarfleetAcademy.

“Possibly,” Chekov said. “But you’ve just suffered a tremendous, sudden loss. And don’t forget, I know Akaar’s background about as well as I know yours. He’s been able to smell pent-up violence ever since he was a little kid.”

Lojur smiled in spite of himself. “I find it hard to believe that L.J. was ever a ‘little’ anything.”

“He was cute as a bug. But not even your lieutenant [168] commander’s bars will save you if you ever say that to his face. Don’t forget, Akaar was born to rule the Ten Tribes of Capella. That’s why his mother is still financing the ongoing construction of a huge tomb and monument for him on their homeworld, to let everyone know that he’s the one who has the rightful claim to the title of Teer.”

Lojur had first heard of the Tomb of Leonard James Akaar back in StarfleetAcademy. He had been appalled then at the Capellan obsession with death.

But a lot had changed since those carefree days.

“Akaar was only five when the coup happened,” Chekov continued. “And it was his warning that prevented a nasty Cossack named Keel from murdering him and his mother in their tent. You might ask him to tell you about that sometime.”

Despite Akaar’s renowned laconic manner—Lieutenant Tuvok must have envied it—Lojur already knew these details about his friend. It was no secret to anyone that Lojur, Tuvok, and Lieutenant Akaar had been close colleagues and friends for more than three years now. So Commander Chekov must have been well aware that he wasn’t “telling tales out of school,” as humans sometimes described the practice of repeating gossip.

Lojur merely nodded, contemplating the violence that had such an impact on Akaar’s life, and his own.

He was halfway through his eighteenth summer, an adult on the cusp of becoming eligible to marry and establish his own Freehold, when the Federation rock-buyers first arrived in KothaVillage.

The first thing that impressed Lojur about the Starfleet negotiating team was their clothing. Maroon jackets and black trousers, very precisely assembled and tailored, looking nothing like the motley congeries of homespun robes and cloaks that adorned most of the people of Halka. The Halkans of Kotha Village favored slow, tranquil, farm-tethered lives, and [169] that had not changed appreciably in several millennia. By contrast, the men and women who came to bargain for Halka’s energy-saturated crystal formations dressed in a uniform fashion that spoke of progress, change, efficiency. They went to far places and brought back knowledge beyond any Halkan former’s wildest dreams.

Lojur found it simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

He watched for days as the four Starfleeters moved about the village, whose people welcomed them with open arms and huts. The visitors repaid the village’s generosity in kind during their stay, helping with an irrigation project, and providing medical aid to some of the outlying families whose fortunes had been ruined by the recent unseasonable floods and the grainblight that had caused so much devastation during the last Harvest.

Judging from the long faces the Starfleet people wore toward the end of their stay, they—like the handful of other Federation negotiating teams that had preceded them in earlier decades—had ultimately failed to persuade the Council to allow them to mine the rocks they sought.

On the night before the Terrans’ vessel was to return to Halka to retrieve them, KothaVillage threw a great feast for its honored visitors, replete with song, dance, and the traditional tribal story pantomimes. Lojur exchanged shy glances with Kereleth, a girl two summers his junior. She was as yet betrothed to no one, as far as he knew. The future stretched before them both, promising anything and everything.

It was a joyous, hopeful time to till the soil and breathe the air.

Then the green men came, with their rifles and pistols. They shot at everything that moved. Lojur wasn’t certain how many of them there were. But they made it clear that they wanted the rocks as well. And they employed a very different bargaining style from that of the Starfleeters.

“Orions!” one of the Starfleet people, a woman, had [170] shouted just before one of the invaders’ dreadful weapons vaporized her. The remaining three Terrans raised weapons of their own in defense of KothaVillage, despite the protestations of lathen, the Village Elder, who deplored the notion of using violence in order to curb violence.

Lojur hated the idea as well, was sickened by it. Peace was all he knew.

And yet, people are dying right in front of me.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur. Two dozen villagers, vaporized, blown apart, or maimed. Kereleth gone, her fate never discovered. Two more Terrans dead, and another lying injured, pierced through the shoulder by fragments of a hut blown asunder by an Orion explosive device.

The injured Terran’s weapon, lying discarded in the dirt. People continuing to die, everywhere Lojur looked.

No more. No more of my people will die.

Lojur remembered crawling through the dirt, grasping the cold weapon with shaking hands. Hiding behind a charred stump as he aimed the hideous deathtool at a cluster of brutally laughing Orions, coarse, evil men who had expected no protest from the Halkans and thus had not made the slightest preparation for it.

And then Lojur was firing and running, running and firing, tumbling into a blood-red haze. His heart burned, ached, exulted, wept.

More people died, many more. But none of these were residents of KothaVillage.

Afterward, Lojur remembered little of the horror, at least consciously. He still thanked Halka’s gods every night for that gift of forgetfulness. But there were also the other nights. The nights when the awful truth of what he had done exhumed itself from its shallow grave and visited him in his dreams.

After the bodies were interred—Halkan, Terran, and Orion—KothaVillage turned its entire attention toward [171] rebuilding itself. Though injured, the sole surviving Terran, along with a few others from his newly returned vessel, assisted with the physical reconstruction. Winter was descending quickly, so every remaining Kothan was grateful for the help.

The injured Terran, tended by his own medical people as well as by a Kothan Healer, never asked for so much as a single crystal in return.