Chapter Text
TWENTY YEARS AGO
The Ardennes Forest, Belgium
1916
Sarek could smell the bodies burning from 2.45 kilometers away.
Immediately, he ordered his driver to stop, then raised his hand out the window to call the small convoy to a halt.
“Sir?” asked the young lieutenant nervously. Sarek ignored him, stepping out of the lorry’s passenger seat and directly into the middle of the road. This, of course, forced the other drivers following behind to stop as well, or else risk running over one of the single most important diplomatic figures in the whole world.
They stopped; but they were not happy about it.
The white-haired man with spectacles who was called Hargreaves - special attaché to the American ambassador in London - climbed out of his own car, which had followed closest behind Sarek’s own, and a few of the cargo drivers followed. They approached the Vulcan warily, radiating confused annoyance. Sarek had expected as much. This cohort had developed a strong mutual respect over the course of their rather sensitive work together, despite the cultural differences among its members. Nonetheless, there were times - and Sarek suspected this was about to be one of them - where questions of jurisdiction became somewhat thorny. It was not always clear to Hargreaves, or indeed to Sarek, which of them had final authority on any given matter, and most of the time they worked it out with many polite gestures of deference; but neither were afraid of drawing a hard line when he believed himself best suited to make the proper decision. The lack of clear hierarchy was a source of continual vexation to Sarek, but this was the cost of diplomacy; it would not be received well were he to wield the might of Vulcan as a blunt instrument over the Englishman’s head every time he was incorrect.
And after all, this was not a Vulcan initiative. It was a human one, to which Vulcan had offered her aid and support. Their edict of noninterference did not permit them to take a side in combat - not even to draw this endless, bloody war to a halt for the preservation of human lives; T’Pau had been quite clear on this point - but it placed no restrictions on aid to civilians, and when Sarek had announced his decision to commit Vulcan resources to the cause of preventing famine, she had not stopped him.
The Commission for Relief in Belgium, formed by an international coalition of diplomats and financiers, was tasked with the challenge of getting emergency resources to towns whose entire stores had been appropriated by the occupying Germans. While British troops deliberately broke German supply lines to starve the troops at the front, Belgium - who only produced 21.24% of the food her citizens needed, and was dependent on German imports that were now cut off - teetered on the brink of outright famine. Any food grown, sold or produced in Belgium, or sent in by other relief agencies, was considered German property, and anyone with access to food was answerable to German soldiers. But CRB troops were not, and the supplies in their trucks were technically considered the property of the American ambassador in Belgium, which meant they were generally allowed to pass through occupied territories without egregious interference.
It was, however, entirely up to the occupying German soldiers whether or not they told CRB the truth about where the endangered villages were located; and it was plain that today they had lied.
“Why the devil have we stopped?” demanded Hargreaves. He was elderly, for a human, and rather hot-headed; Sarek noted with interest that vasodilation had already set in, causing his cheeks to flush pink with displeasure. His driver and assistant - a dark-haired young woman addressed as Miss Norwick who Sarek had come to respect very much - laid a rather quelling hand upon his arm.
“We were informed by the German liaison officer at Reims that this region was uninhabited,” Sarek explained. “Before the battle two years ago, there were five villages between here and the river. All were destroyed, and their citizens forcibly relocated.”
“Yeah, so?” called out a voice from the back of the crowd. American, by the accent. Sarek was becoming rather fluent in that large nation’s regional nuances. He was 83.2% certain this speaker hailed from the state called New Jersey.
“The liaison officer lied,” he informed them. “As a Vulcan, my senses are sharper than yours. If we divert from our planned route and continue east down this road, proceeding deeper into the forest, in a matter of minutes you will all know what I know: that somewhere in these hills, a village survived the Battle of the Ardennes, against all odds, and did not burn with all the others.”
“Your point?” pressed Hargreaves.
“It is burning now,” said Sarek. “I can smell it. You will too.”
Hargreaves looked a little sick. “You mean,” he began uncertainly, taking a step toward Sarek and lowering his voice, “that you can smell -”
“Yes.”
“Not just buildings and trees and things, I mean, but rather - that is to say -”
“They are burning their dead,” said Sarek. “And it is being done carefully, and deliberately. Probably in a structure which was designed for the purpose. You will notice, Hargreaves, that we cannot see the smoke. And no other signs could be detected from this distance by human senses.”
"Meaning nobody passing by would know a thing if they hadn't got a Vulcan with them."
"And no one who had sequestered themselves for two years at such a remote location, cut off from their environs, would be likely to know about the existence of the Commission and our work -"
" . . . and therefore would have no reason to imagine a Vulcan might ever happen by. They'd be thinking themselves entirely in the clear."
"That is also my conjecture."
The two men exchanged a long look full of meaning.
“Our orders were to continue on to Liège,” Hargreaves reminded him. "'No deviations.' The fellow was quite explicit."
Sarek nodded. “Affirmative.”
“This road is the only route the German soldiers approved for the convoy. Go off map, and we’ve no idea what’ll happen. They won’t care that the Americans have sent a Vulcan with us. They won’t care that all we’re carrying is food. We’ll have a target on our backs just like anyone else who crosses that border into occupied territory. They could shoot us on sight.”
“They would perceive such an act as well within their rights. The risk to our lives increases by 782.4% if we diverge from the route as established between the Commission's board of trustees and the German government."
"So you're asking us all to follow you on a potential suicide mission."
Sarek opened his hands in a gesture of acceptance. "Kaiidith."
The Englishman nodded briskly. “Good, then. We’ve said it out loud so we know it’s been said, and we can’t pretend later that we didn’t know what we were doing." He signaled to the other men to return to their vehicles and prepare to continue on. "Now get back in your lorry, Ambassador. We’ve got to follow your Vulcan nose through the woods until we find out what the devil is going on, and it sounds like time is of the essence.”
Sarek gave the man an approving nod as they both returned to their vehicles, and the convoy turned sharply to the east, leaving the main road behind and disappearing into the thickly forested hills. Nobody fired at them from the cover of the trees as they did so, which seemed as auspicious a beginning as they might realistically expect; but it would only grow worse from here.
The lorries picked up as much speed as they dared through the narrow openings in the rough terrain, guided by the keen eye of Hargreaves' driver Miss Norwick, who Sarek had been informed was raised in an exceedingly rural corner of England and was therefore skilled at navigating such landscapes. Under her leadership, no one in the convoy had experienced so much as a punctured tire yet. Still, it was slow going, and he found it a challenge to suppress his mounting impatience and concern.
Not for the first time, Sarek found himself in disagreement with his grandmother's inflexibility on such matters as shared technology; with a Vulcan aircar, this journey could be completed in minutes, irrespective of road conditions. But T'Pau held firm; food and medicine were permissible, "because the humans cannot turn them to their own ends and adopt them as tools of warfare," but his requests for a starship with a human and Vulcan crew had not been granted. As yet, she insisted repeatedly, no human of her acquaintance could be trusted at the helm of such a vehicle without succumbing to temptation and using it to forcibly dominate the rest of Earth. The Andorians and Tellarites were ready to begin exploring negotiations for some form of interplanetary alliance; the humans, she believed, were not. They had not yet developed the technology of space travel, they were ravaged by preventable social ills, and their civilization was in its infancy.
It was fortunate that Spock's education only required him to reside with her on Vulcan for half the year; without regular, sustained periods of immersion in his mother's culture, Sarek suspected his son might have been taught by his House Mother to fear, disdain or resent it, rather than truly seeing its possibilities for greatness if only the right visionary human leaders could be found.
On and on, the convoy plunged deeper into the ancient, tangled depths of this largely uninhabited wilderness, and even the proliferation of lush greenery all about them could not suppress the ever-worsening smell. Judging by his own driver, who barely managed to keep one hand on the wheel as the other frantically clutched a handkerchief to his nose in distress, they had passed the point at which any of them could possibly deny what they would find when they arrived at their still-unknown destination. Sarek himself, of course, was able to muffle his own olfactory senses in order to minimize the unpleasantness, but he could hear choking noises from the men in the back of his lorry. They could smell smoke now, acrid and bitter, but somehow still preferable to the other stench it helped to conceal.
Sometimes the smoke smelled only of burning wood and plaster. The clamor of panicked human minds around him always eased, for a few seconds, at that - as though they could pretend that nothing was on fire more sinister than a few buildings.
But the reprieve never lasted for long.
Sarek consulted the map they had been provided. “TARSUS,” it said in square block letters, just a dot buried in the hills of the Ardennes and ringed on all sides by outposts of German troops. If an error had, in fact, been made - if this village had been reported destroyed with all the others but had somehow, quietly, survived - then they would not have received a single morsel from the past two years of emergency supply shipments. They would be living off only what they could forage without coming down from the hills far enough to alert the Germans to their presence.
He wondered if the humans were prepared for the scale of what they might find.
The dirt road wound deeper and deeper into the forest, leaving the open fields and farmland behind. It was early afternoon, and the sun shone high and bright in the summer sky, but they lost it quickly, with the height of the trees. In the abrupt onset of darkness, Sarek’s driver did not see the mud-streaked young man who leaped out of the bushes into the road, flagging them down, until they were very nearly on top of him.
"Sprechen Sie Englisch?” he called out, waving frantically, as the lorry ground to a halt. “Parlez-vous Anglais?”
“You’re in luck, boy,” called Hargreaves, motioning for the rest of the convoy behind him to stop. He climbed out of the lorry, followed by a couple of uniformed officers, hands dropping to the holsters at their hips just in case; but the Vulcan, stepping out of his own vehicle and following them into the road, already knew they would not be needing them.
At least, not for the fair-haired young man with the wild eyes and mud-streaked face who stood presently before them with an expression of desperate, overwhelmed gratitude. His emotions buffeted Sarek’s shields with such relentless urgency that he was obligated to pause and reinforce them before approaching.
“I am Ambassador Sarek,” he said to the man - no more than a boy, really, by Earth standards; perhaps a few years younger than Spock - as he stepped forward. “This convoy represents an alliance of English and American diplomatic efforts, aided by the Vulcan embassy in London, commissioned to deliver food to Belgian citizens who are suffering from the effects of the German blockade.”
The young man’s face lit up. “You’re CRB?” he exclaimed, sagging in relief. “My God, I’m glad to see you. So am I. It’s how I got stuck here. Midshipman First Class James T. Kirk of the United States Navy,” he added, with a crisp salute. “Honored to meet you face to face, Ambassador Sarek. You spoke at my commencement ceremony at Annapolis. I don’t mind telling you how happy I am to see a Vulcan face right about now. We’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.” He looked from Sarek to Hargreaves and back again. “I see you’ve got weapons, because you’re peacemakers but not fools,” he said dryly. “Our convoy had to cross the same enemy lines you did. The real question is, have you also got medics?”
“Six,” said Sarek, gesturing to one of the lorries at the back of the convoy, “and my own skills at healing are not insignificant.”
Kirk nodded. “Then I think the trucks had better go up the hill to Tarsus, or what’s left of it. You won’t like what you find up there, and it’ll take all hands. And every gun you’ve got. Who’s good with children?” Miss Norwick stepped forward to volunteer, and Jim nodded at her. “Good. That’s plenty. You, ma’am, and you, Mr. Ambassador, come with me. I’ve got people injured about half a kilometer west of here, and a truck will never get near them. We’d better divide and conquer.”
“Will the task when they arrive be self-explanatory,” Sarek inquired, “or will Mr. Hargreaves require your presence in order to direct him?”
A dark cloud passed over the boy’s face. “You’ll get all you need to know based on who runs toward the trucks and who runs away from them,” he said grimly. “And if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’m not sure I could stomach the sight of them again. I was there when the slaughter began, and our group only just got away with their lives. There were people up there I knew, I can’t -” He stopped, swallowing hard. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said again, “I would rather not remember them like that. But if you request it, sir, of course I’ll go wherever I’m most needed.”
“Slaughter?” Sarek repeated. “So there are armed combatants?”
“That's what we were running from,” said Kirk. “With your Vulcan senses, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m guessing you followed your nose here, and you’ve already figured out the same thing we did. It’s a cleanup job now. Burning the evidence. They’ve got guns, and plenty of them, but you’ve got something in your trucks which will keep you safer than any of us. Something I’d have given anything to get my hands on six months ago.”
“What is that?” asked Hargreaves, but Sarek was already ahead of him.
“A radio,” he guessed. “Someone in that village has gone to great lengths to conceal their presence, not merely from the German fortifications at the base of the hills, but from the American outpost nearby which might have sent assistance long ago. We are well within communications range, and may find surrender easier to negotiate if the perpetrators believe mass reinforcements are following us shortly.” At Kirk’s relieved nod of agreement, Sarek turned to Hargreaves. “I will see to the injured with Midshipman Kirk,” he said. “I leave the greater task ahead in your capable hands. Take the radio, and do not hesitate to contact the American army base should assistance be required. Authorization Sarek seven alpha bravo seven zero. At top speed they are no more than 3.43 hours away.”
The elderly Englishman looked troubled, but he only gave a nod, whistling to the trucks to continue winding along the dirt road up the hill. Hargreaves’ young driver, who'd gone into one of the lorries to retrieve a medical kit, hopped gracefully back down again and followed the two men into the forest.
“This is Martha Norwick,” said Sarek to the young man, by way of introduction. “A botanist with expertise in the field of agriculture. She has been working with a team of British, American and Vulcan scientists to develop a new strain of wheat which would regenerate quickly after suffering fire damage.”
“War-proof wheat,” said Kirk, with a grim chuckle. “Wish I could say I didn’t think we’d need it ever again, but after what I’ve seen . . .”
He fell silent for a few moments as they picked their way over fallen tree roots. The damp, rotted smell of old leaves was not pleasant; but it helped, at least, with the fouler aroma which was far more palpable on the road. The young man had sought his refuge wisely.
“Are you able,” Sarek began in a careful tone, after a few minutes made it clear that Kirk knew his way and was perfectly capable of navigating while making conversation, “to tell us what happened?”
“He happened,” said the American bitterly, and the raw emotionalism in his voice would have shocked any other Vulcan but Sarek, who was familiar with the depths of raw, unfiltered human feeling. It was plain that in his natural state, Kirk was expressive and dynamic; those three words encompassed a vast range of sentiments, from anger and hatred to a grief tinged with self-recrimination. This young naval cadet had apparently rescued a significant number of hostages from the massacre of their village, and kept them alive in the woods, an impressive feat even without the presence of enemy troops so nearby; yet it seemed he held himself responsible for not having done more.
“To whom do you refer?” he asked.
The young man’s voice turned cold and dark with fury.
“Governor Kodos,” was all he said.