Chapter 17: Freedom II
2409
ARTALEIRH
There was a kali-house in town, popular with the university crowd, sporting a fairly nondescript front and a hipster-utilitarian interior; the owner, an émigré from some nowhere colony, had brought throw pillows to cast about on the spare Imperial benches and added touches of rustic wood and iron to the metal-fab walls, embellishing the loyalist art with splashes of colonial paint (“Only on Artaleirh,” the traditionalists would cluck, moving on to a more respectable establishment).
On Friday afternoons, this particular kali-house usually became an impromptu salon for the hugely popular archaeology professor Ahnar tr’Veras and the students that waddled after him like baby dhael. He would speak rapturously of the temples of the Debrune and the mysteries of the Iconians; he would discuss politics without pushing illegal agendas, shutting down any talk of reunification; he would, instead, ask the students how they planned to serve the glorious way of D’era. The police had looked at Ahnar tr’Veras many times, due to his parents’ background and his refusal to serve in the military past the required time. They had never found anything untoward, and figured him for a loyal milquetoast.
Ahnar, however, had picked the kali-house for more than the decoration, or the place's penchant for serving cheap student-grade liquor.
During her last period of leave, Aurelia had discovered a fault in the kali-house’s billing program, and noted that she was able to hack a line of text printed on the online receipt from her own computer. She hadn’t expected to need to use it; but, she’d noted quietly in the silence of Ahnar's tiny studio apartment, there were strange things happening aboard the ships she was serving on, and she’d wanted to be able to reach him outside the censors in case something happened.
So he went to the kali-house regularly.
He’d received only two messages over the two years she’d been aboard Irix.
ALL GREEN MISS YOU A
and, six months later:
YELLOW – WATCH
This Friday, Ahnar paid for his drinks, went home, checked his receipt and received a third message.
ALL BLACK FOR 2 – 394.203.911 ECURAI
He sat in his grey little studio, blinking at the receipt, before he connected the word Ecurai with a journal article he’d read once about an independent Romulan colony that had incorporated interesting takes on common areas throughout, including an amphitheater that had been particularly admired by traditionalists and modernists alike. He ran the numbers through a search engine and noted that they corresponded with an asteroid field a number of light years from the colony.
His sister was asking for a ride, and she had a passenger.
He then called the shuttle-share service.
The police had looked at Ahnar tr’Veras many times, yes. They had looked at his politics and his parents and his past. They had rooted through his lectures and his salons and his students. They were right about much of his life and his leanings.
But they were wrong about two very important things:
Ahnar tr’Veras had never given up on Reunification.
And he was certainly not a milquetoast.