by Dayton Ward
Counting off the seconds in her head, Bridy sprinted for the compound’s gate, dozens of meters from the operations shack. Behind her, the screeching of disruptors tapered off and was replaced by the agonized groans of the dying. Her shadow stretched away ahead of her, preceding her to the gate. Then another shadow arced toward hers. She dodged left and dove for the ground.
A javelin-tipped tentacle of shimmering fluid shot past her, close enough for her to feel its rush of displaced air. The Shedai’s pointed appendage tore a long, ugly divot into the ground ahead of her.
I set it free and this is the thanks I get? She rolled away while firing her phaser back at the wildly flailing creature. Talk about ungrateful.
Quinn’s ship, the Dulcinea, appeared from behind a nearby ridge and sped toward the compound’s main gate. Bridy pushed herself up from the ground and ran flat out toward the gate while using her thumb to increase her phaser’s power setting to maximum. The droning of Dulcinea’s engines was drowned out by the Shedai’s roar, an unearthly noise like a thousand rusty horns. The din overwhelmed Bridy, who felt it like needles being stabbed through her skull. Her stride faltered. She fell to her knees and instinctively covered her ears. Then the shrieking was replaced by thunderous impacts that shook the ground.
Bridy looked back. The Shedai was free of the Conduit and pummeling the structures inside the Klingons’ compound into rubble and dust.
She forced herself back into motion and staggered toward the gate. Her gait was sloppy, like that of a drunkard, and as she lifted her arm to aim her phaser, she could barely keep it pointed in the gate’s general direction. Pressing the trigger, she hoped she wouldn’t hit Quinn’s ship by mistake.
A blinding flash of phaser energy vaporized more than half the metal gate and a significant chunk of the reinforced thermocrete wall to its right, creating a gap more than wide enough for Bridy’s escape. She stumbled through, careful not to touch the glowing-hot metal or stone with her bare hands. As she cleared the phaser-cut passageway, the Dulcinea touched down directly ahead of her. Its starboard-side hatchway was open, and its ramp had been lowered.
Through a pane of the cockpit’s windshield, Bridy saw Quinn beckoning urgently, and she heard his voice over the open communicator in her hand: “C’mon, sweetheart! We gotta go!”
Bridy all but threw herself onto the ramp and used its railings to pull herself inside the ship, a state-of-the-art Nalori argosy that Quinn had “inherited” from his late rival, Zett Nilric, after killing the assassin in self-defense a few months earlier. The ramp lifted shut behind her, pushing her the rest of the way into the vessel’s main living compartment. The deck and bulkheads thrummed with vibrations from the ship’s engines as she moved forward to the cockpit. Its door slid open ahead of her, revealing a slowly rolling view of the distant horizon.
“We’re clear,” Quinn said. The lean and weathered former soldier of fortune had one hand on the ship’s flight controls and one on its sensor panel. A small display on the center console between the pilot’s and copilot’s stations showed the Shedai laying waste to the few Klingon structures still half-standing and slaying the remainder of the base’s personnel. Quinn nodded at the image of the berserk Shedai. “Any idea which one it is?”
“The Warden, I think.”
“Not a friend of ours, then.”
The Conduit on the surface crackled with violent energy, and the Shedai transmuted into a serpent of black smoke. Intense white light flashed in the Conduit’s center, and when it faded the black smoke had dissipated, leaving no trace of the homicidal alien hegemon. Quinn shook his head. “Great. Now that thing could be anywhere in the Taurus Reach. God help whoever finds it next.”
Bridy laid a reassuring hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Let’s just hope it’s not us. The Shedai tend to hold grudges.”
“No kidding.” He glanced toward the planet’s surface as he guided the Dulcinea through a steep, banking turn. Except for the Shedai Conduit itself, nothing remained of the Klingon research base except debris and ashes. “Looks like our work here is done,” he said. “Let’s call in the cavalry and have dinner.”
2
Ganz curled his hand into a fist as he stared at the comm display.
“Where is he?”
Kajek, a Nausicaan bounty hunter, shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You said you’d found him.”
“No, I said I found his ship.” Kajek uploaded a series of images to Ganz’s screen via the subspace comm link. “It was on Zeta Aurigae IV two days ago.”
The Orion gangster studied the photographs and paid close attention to their details. The markings on Zett’s vessel were unmistakable, as was the unique bit of battle damage visible on its dorsal hull, just behind the cockpit canopy. “That’s his ship,” Ganz said. Then the image switched to one showing the vessel’s registry. “Those aren’t Nalori markings. Those are human symbols.”
“It says ‘Dulcinea’ in Federation Standard. I have no idea what it means.”
“It means someone stole Zett’s ship. Who has it?”
More images appeared on Ganz’s screen, narrated by Kajek. “Two humans. A man and a woman. I suspect he is the pilot and she a passenger.”
“You’re half right.” Ganz massaged his left temple to stave off a nascent headache induced by the bass-heavy music resounding from the gaming floor outside his office. “The man is Cervantes Quinn, and he’s almost certainly the pilot. But that woman is no mere passenger—she’s a Starfleet agent. I suspect they’ve been working together for some time now.”
It had been over a year since someone—Ganz had never been entirely certain who—had cleared all of Quinn’s debts with Ganz’s operation. All his attempts to trace the money to its source had proved futile. The only fruit of that labor had been a stern warning, delivered through intermediaries, that Quinn was to be left alone unless Ganz wanted to awaken one day with his throat cut.
Since taking that advice to heart, Ganz had suspected Quinn was working with Starfleet Intelligence, but until he had seen evidence of Zett’s stolen starship, he would not have believed Quinn bold enough to risk inviting Ganz’s wrath.
The Nausicaan interrupted Ganz’s somber reflection with a loud grunt. “Am I finished, then? Or do you have a new commission for me?”
“Hang on, I’m thinking.” He put the comm on standby and looked past its display toward his lover, Neera. She reclined in a seductive pose on the sofa, her raven mane spilling wildly over her jade-hued shoulders and concealing the choicest bits of her bare torso. “What do you think?”
She fixed him with a cold stare. “You know what I think.”
“The situation has changed.”
“No, it hasn’t.” She finger-combed a thick fall of hair from her eyes. “Quinn still has powerful friends. The only difference is that now he also has Zett’s ship.”
“Which means he just spat in our eye.”
“Your eye, maybe. I never liked Zett. He was a disaster waiting to happen.” She shot a diabolical smirk at Ganz. “Mister Quinn might have done us a favor.”
Ganz suppressed an angry sigh. Though he played the part of the boss aboard the merchantman Omari-Ekon, he was merely a figurehead for Neera, the organization’s true mistress. At times such as this, he had to remember not to let his role go to his head lest Neera decide to recast it with someone more pliable. “I agree that Zett’s knack for bloodshed was a liability at times, but he was a loyal employee and a good earner.”
“So what?”
“It’ll set a bad example if we let him get killed and do nothing about it.”
Neera regarded him with faint amusement. “You’re afraid our hired guns will start to feel expendable?”
“They aren’t loyal just because we pay them well. They stick with us because they think we’ll back them up when times get tough—and avenge them when things go wrong. Zett was my right-hand man. If we don’t settle this score, nobody worth having will ever be willing to watch our b
acks again.”
His lithe mistress got up and walked toward him in slow, elegant strides. “And if Starfleet should decide to avenge Mister Quinn’s death in return?”
“That’s why I’m farming it out to the Nausicaan.”
She stopped beside him and traced his jutting chin with one exquisitely manicured fingernail. “If this comes back at us, you’ll take the hit. Understood?”
“Yes, mistress.”
Walking away, she threw a dark look over her shoulder. “Good.”
He waited until she had left the room through her private portal, and then he reactivated the comm channel to Kajek. “Kill Quinn, but don’t hurt the woman.”
“What if she defends him?”
“Not even then, so pick your moment well.”
“As you wish. The price is fifty thousand.”
“Thirty.”
“Fifty. Half in advance.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Do you want this human dead or not?”
Ganz half sighed, half growled. “Fine. I’ll transfer the retainer now. The Bank of Bolarus should confirm the transaction within the hour.”
Kajek nodded. “A pleasure doing business with you. I will let you know when the human is dead.” He ended the transmission, and the screen went dark.
Sitting alone in the dimly lit office, Ganz wondered whether he’d ordered the assassination of Cervantes Quinn as a substitute for a different murder that he wished for but which Neera had refused to sanction.
He got up and stepped outside to a small balcony that overlooked the gaming floor of the Omari-Ekon. Below him, beautiful escorts of various species and genders mingled with his patrons, most of whom were Federation civilians passing through Starbase 47, also known as Vanguard, on their way to new lives on colony planets throughout the Taurus Reach. Cheers from players with winning hands infrequently rose above the steady beat of synthetic music.
Ganz looked up. Through the transparent-aluminum dome that served as the casino’s roof, he saw the towering majesty of the Federation starbase looming over his ship, simultaneously providing it with protection from Ganz and Neera’s rivals while posing the most immediate threat to its continued free exercise of commerce.
Standing on another balcony at the opposite end of the gaming room was the root of Ganz’s anxiety, the cause of his broken sleep patterns, the irritant he had been forbidden to remove: Diego Reyes, the former commanding officer of Vanguard, now a fugitive from Starfleet justice who resided on the Omari-Ekon thanks to a grant of political asylum and the technicalities of Orion extradition law.
The tall, weathered-looking human flashed an insincere smile at Ganz.
The burly, muscular Orion returned the empty gesture. Keep smiling, you clever bastard, Ganz fumed. Sooner or later, you’ll stop being useful. And when that day comes, I’ll be waiting to toss you out an airlock.
3
Lieutenant Ming Xiong leaned forward and looked with a stunned expression across the conference room table at Bridy Mac. “You let it get away?”
“It’s not as if I had a choice,” Bridy said. “Once the containment system failed, the entire op went pear-shaped. We were lucky to get out alive.”
The other officers attending the classified debriefing aboard the U.S.S. Endeavour didn’t try to mask their disapproval. Captain Atish Khatami, the ship’s commanding officer, showed the greatest discretion, limiting her reaction to a thin frown. Her first officer, Lieutenant Commander Katherine Stano, let slip a barely audible sigh. The ship’s chief science officer, Lieutenant Stephen Klisiewicz, registered his opinion with a deep grimace and a slow swiveling of his head.
Xiong picked up a data slate and glanced back and forth between it and Bridy Mac as he continued. “According to your report, the containment system failed after you fired your phaser into the control panel for its main generator.”
Bridy’s face warmed with embarrassment and anger. “That’s right.”
Stano asked, “Did you forget that capturing the Conduit with the Shedai still inside it was one of the mission objectives?”
“No, Commander, I didn’t. But that wasn’t possible, so I—”
“Why wasn’t it possible?”
It had been Bridy’s experience that answering such a question truthfully and in detail would likely come back to haunt her the next time her name came up for promotion. Had she been the sort of officer who gave a damn about such things, she might have censored herself. Instead, she clenched her jaw and drew a deep breath. “The mission profile was flawed, sir. Whoever wrote it underestimated the number of Klingon troops by a factor of four. The map of the compound was labeled incorrectly, and the intel on its security grid was out of date. As a result, Mister Quinn and I lacked the appropriate resources to carry out the nonviolent capture of the Klingon personnel and the Shedai entity. It should also be noted that the Klingons have broken the encryption on cipher Seven-Tango-Red, which is how I wound up being ambushed shortly after I breached the base’s perimeter wall.” She paused, flashed a hostile smile at Stano, and added, “Sir.”
A tense, awkward silence followed Bridy’s critique. Then Captain Khatami cleared her throat. “Let’s move on, shall we?” She pushed a data slate across the table to Bridy. “You and Mister Quinn have new orders from Starfleet Command.”
Bridy reached for the tablet. “Another monster hunt?”
“Not this time,” Khatami said. “A black bag operation.”
Stano nodded to Klisiewicz, who used a small keypad on the table in front of him to activate one of the room’s wall displays. He nodded up at the screen, which showed a montage of star charts, log excerpts, and transcripts of signal intercepts. “Thirty-four hours ago, the Treana, an Orion freighter, was crippled by an unknown gravitational anomaly on the edge of Gorn territory. The Treana sent out an SOS and was rescued by a Gorn cruiser, which took the freighter into ‘protective custody’ on Seudath, one of its border worlds.”
Stano glanced at Bridy. “The Gorn say they’re repairing the freighter as a courtesy, but it’s obvious they want it for military analysis.”
Xiong entered a command on the keypad in front of his seat and activated the three-screen monitor in the middle of the conference table. The device displayed a series of waveforms. “Endeavour’s long-range sensors picked up these fragmentary energy readings from the Treana’s coordinates at the time of the incident.” He shot her a wan, knowing smile. “Look familiar, Bridy?”
She nodded. “The Jinoteur Pattern. Last time I saw it, I was with you on the Sagittarius. All traces of the pattern vanished after the Jinoteur system was swallowed by an artificial wrinkle in space-time.”
Khatami arched her brow. “Well, it’s back.”
Klisiewicz added, “And we don’t know how or why.”
Xiong met Bridy’s stare. “Whatever produced these readings is of major importance. We need to track them back to their source, but there are too many gaps in our data to triangulate the coordinates.”
Grim anticipation made Bridy crack a thin smile. “You want me and Quinn to sneak aboard the Orion freighter and steal its sensor logs.”
“Precisely,” Khatami said.
Stano added, “The good news is that the Gorn don’t seem to be aware of the Shedai or the significance of this energy pattern, and we’d like to keep it that way. The bad news is that we have reason to believe the Klingons have already sent someone to retrieve the Orions’ data. It’s imperative you get to it first.”
“And that you make sure the Klingons never do,” Khatami added.
“How sure do you want to be? Should I destroy the Treana?”
Xiong winced. “Not exactly what we had in mind.”
Klisiewicz held up two data cards. “The yellow one is blank. Use it to download the sensor data. The red one contains a worm that’ll erase the data from the Treana’s memory banks and then erase itself.” He handed the cards to Bridy.
“Got it.” She tucked the cards into a pocket an
d looked at Khatami. “What about Endeavour? Will you be close enough to provide operational support?”
Khatami shook her head. “We can’t risk approaching Gorn territory. The cease-fire negotiated by Captain Kirk is barely holding, and we don’t want to tip off the Klingons about our intentions toward the Treana.”
“Knowing the Gorn,” Stano said, “the Treana’s probably docked in the segregated ‘alien quarter’ of Tzoryp, Seudath’s principal port of call. The Gorn patrol that part of the city, but they tend to be hands-off when it comes to policing aliens. Keep the collateral damage to a minimum and they should ignore you.”
The captain held up one hand in a cautioning gesture. “Move fast and keep a low profile. If this goes according to plan, no one should know you were there.”
Bridy chuckled. “Since when does anything ever go according to plan?”
“Good hunting,” Khatami said. “Meeting adjourned.”
Cervantes Quinn stood beneath an open panel on the fuselage of the Dulcinea and listened. Behind the rich purr of the ship’s primary power coupler lurked a high-frequency warbling. It was elusive to Quinn’s ear. Each time he thought he had a bead on its source it faded, leaving him staring into the guts of his ship with no idea which component to tear apart first.
No one else had ever confirmed hearing the noise, no matter how many times Quinn had tried to point it out to people. Bridy had dismissed it as “transient tinnitus,” despite Quinn’s assertion that the sound was not imaginary. None of the technicians on Vanguard or the Endeavour who had inspected Dulcinea’s internal systems had reported hearing anything unusual. Quinn didn’t care what they said. It was his ship, and he was certain the warble was in there, waiting to be found.
In the months since he had taken possession of the ship, he had come to know many of its idiosyncratic details. Its meal slot always clicked three times before serving solid food but only once before vending a beverage. Its air purification system had a curious rattle in the filter above the main corridor, just outside the cockpit entrance. One of the otherwise pristine metal deck plates in the main compartment was marred by a single, deep gouge; judging from the brightness of the exposed metal, Quinn suspected the damage was fairly recent, probably having occurred within the past couple of years.
