Boralesh dusted her hands with more flour and began to work the dough anew, repressing any rude comments she might be inspired to make. “Work” and her husband were not two words she could put together in the same sentence.
“The universe will reward you as you deserve, husband,” she said dryly, knowing her subtlety would elude him. “Give it time.”
“Got to release my data,” he murmured. “He has to understand; I’ve got to release my data…”
Boralesh smiled secretly. The morning light in her cheerful kitchen was kinder to him than it ought to be, softening his chronically furrowed brow, his lipless mouth and suspicious squint into something almost attractive. She reminded herself that if he hadn’t wed her no one would have, and she ought to be grateful. And yet, she’d grown up among the healers of her own country and had seen how their work shaped them. They became more open, more beautiful as they became more evolved in the practice of their craft. The saying “heal others and you heal yourself” had proven true among her own kind.
But the more her spouse labored over his mysterious methods in the cave below the village, the harder, the more shut down, the more furtive he seemed to become. He thrashed and moaned and ground his teeth in his sleep, his digestion troubled him, and even her best herbs had no effect.
She had crept to the mouth of his secret cave more than once and heard him speaking in tongues. Sometimes he seemed to be communing with some god or gods, because there would be silences and then he would answer. Whenever he returned to the house after one of those sessions, he was silent, moody, more impatient than usual with the children, and he couldn’t eat or sleep at all for days.
Did she love him? Boralesh wondered. Or did she cling to him because without him her children’s lives and her own would be meaningless? It was not a question she could answer. As her hands worked the dough for the homemade bread he loved so much, she added some herbs from her secret store and bided her time.
Chapter 9
The arrow whizzed past Tuvok’s right ear, tearing foliage off the trees behind him. Unperturbed, he drew the bowstring back as far as his left ear, and let fly.
“Incoming at five o’clock, husband,” Selar reported beside him, crouched below the tumble of rocks Tuvok had chosen as a defensible position when the attack started. She was picking up life-form readings on her medical tricorder, since Tuvok’s hands were occupied. “Bearing 13 degrees azimuth.”
Careful to aim above their attackers’ heads, Tuvok let a second arrow fly. It was greeted by a spatter of truncated Sliwoni arrows, released from short bows held sideways at the waist, making them far less accurate than Tuvok’s longbow. Two fell short, skidding to a halt in the dirt, another overshot the Vulcans, two more struck the rocks very close to them, sending stone chips flying, but doing no more damage than that.
Taking advantage of their assailants’ inferior weaponry, Tuvok responded with a third arrow, then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth in rapid succession. The response was two more shots from the attackers, then nothing.
“They are dispersing,” Selar reported before Tuvok’s last arrow had even struck home, embedding itself, they discovered as they made their way back to the ship, a hand’s-breadth deep into one of the old-growth trees in the grove from which their assailants had tried to cut them off from the ship.
Their arrival on Sliwon had been uneventful enough. The Sliwoni had a taboo against orbital vessels and so, against Sisko’s better judgment (“I just hope I can get her off the ground again!” he’d muttered), Albatrosshad followed the authorities’ instructions, crossed atmosphere, and come to land.
Sisko had set her down in a clearing not far from the highway leading to one of the larger communities, backing her around so that her stern was all but flush with a sheer cliff face dropping more than fifty feet to the sea. Because of Sliwon’s exceptionally large moon, the tides here were extreme, varying as much as thirty feet from low tide to high. That and crosscurrents and quixotic winds made the cliff face virtually unassailable even by the local hovercraft. All the same, Sisko stayed with the ship, content to tinker with his engines while the others went about their research in town. Their cover story that they were traveling merchants had, just as on the two previous worlds, been readily accepted.
But something had happened while the Vulcans were away. Rumors arrived with the great rumbling convoys bringing produce to and fro, or beeped and chattered along each citizen’s personal comm unit, worn permanently affixed to the left ear for constant communication. Something heard from somewhere else had turned the Sliwoni suspicious, and hostile looks followed the outworlders. Tuvok and Selar had wisely decided to curtail their visit, only to find that a party of villagers armed with traditional weapons had gotten back to the clearing before they did, and cut them off.
It had been agreed from the beginning that the away team would not carry phasers, which was not to say that Tuvok was unarmed. Though they were advanced enough to have in-system spaceflight and fairly sophisticated communications and transportation technology, the Sliwoni held an anachronistic reverence for knives and archery as personal weapons. Tuvok had fashioned a longbow and some arrows from native materials, and found he had need of them now.
Clearly not expecting that one lone outworld archer could outfire them, the villagers had retreated.
“My thanks for your assistance, wife.” Tuvok lowered the longbow, which was almost as tall as he was, to his side, but nocked another arrow at the ready, just in case.
“What you need is an infrared scope,” Sisko said, opening the Albatross’s hatch, which he’d sealed off when the attack began, and seeing them safely aboard. “Or maybe heat sensors embedded in the arrowheads.”
Tuvok waited while Selar stepped through the decontamination beam, then repaired to the lab with the day’s specimens, before stepping off the transporter pad and out of the beam himself.
“Since it was my goal notto hit any of the villagers, I fail to see how a heat-seeking sensor would be of benefit,” he said dryly. “I assume you are joking.”
“Yes and no,” Sisko said. “But you have to admit the infrared scope would be a good idea.”
“Indeed, given a warm-blooded species.” Tuvok headed for the sleeping quarters to put the bow and his few remaining arrows away. “But it would not work for Gorn, for example.”
“Granted,” Sisko said, following him to continue the conversation, “but give me the specs, and I could probably design one that could read even cold-blooded species…”
“Boys and their toys!” Tuvok heard Uhura murmur.
“Well, no one had the courtesy to give me an exterior visual to watch the fight,” McCoy grumped. “But from what I hear, that ‘toy’ may have just saved your away team.”
“Has the ship sustained any damage?” Tuvok asked, ignoring both Uhura and McCoy. Unless they were holding an official briefing, the away team was so accustomed to the holos’ background chatter by now that they usually worked around it.
“She’s fine,” Sisko reported of Albatross.“They may have been intent on vandalizing her, but they didn’t get very far before you all arrived. I just battened down and waited until I picked you up on sensors. May I?”