Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified

by Dayton Ward

  Each day brought him a new discovery about Dulcinea. Every time he dared to think it had run out of surprises, some new imperfection revealed itself.

  He heard a door swish open behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Bridy crossing the shuttlebay. She waved. “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged. “Same as always.”

  “I’m sorry.” She joined him beneath the ship and looked up at the exposed section of its underbelly. “Still looking for that pesky noise?”

  “I think I might flush out the plasma conduits.”

  “Will that fix it?”

  “Couldn’t hurt.” He wondered why Bridy had taken a sudden interest in the repair of a problem she didn’t believe existed, and he surmised she was avoiding discussion of something else. “How’d your debriefing go?”

  She ambled toward Dulcinea’s bow. “Fine.”

  “Were they pissed about the casualties?”

  “More than somewhat.” Bridy stroked her hand along the ship’s ventral hull.

  Quinn wondered what she was thinking. “What’d they say about the Shedai that got away from us?”

  “Not much.”

  “So, no court-martial?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good.” He followed her. “Any chance we’re free for a while? I heard about some easy-money jobs hauling gray-market cargo to Pacifica—which, as it turns out, is a mighty fine place to kick back on a tropical vacation.”

  “Sounds great.” She mustered a sad smile. “But we have new orders.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.” Tired and disgruntled, he breathed a heavy sigh. “What is it this time? More monkey-wrenching? Or another monster hunt?”

  “A classic heist job—just your style.” She smiled. “You’ll love it.”

  Her appraisal of the op was far too upbeat for Quinn’s comfort. He had learned to be suspicious whenever Bridy sounded optimistic. She followed him as he paced around the port side of the Dulcinea, inspecting the hull. “Are we expecting competition on this job?”

  “Some, probably from the Klingons.”

  “Great.” He used his arm to buff a dark scuff off the ship’s hull. “Do I even want to know where we’re being asked to commit this ‘classic heist’?”

  “In a port called Tzoryp on a planet named Seudath.”

  “Never heard of it.” Passing under the wing, he realigned an off-center aileron with a light upward jab of his fist. “Where is it?”

  “The Gorn-Klingon border.”

  Quinn stopped, turned, and regarded his partner with a mirthless smile. “I admire the casual way you just said that—as if it weren’t an omen of doom. Pray tell, which side of that border is it on?”

  “The Gorn side.”

  He shook his head. “Days like this make me sorry I gave up drinking.”

  “Could be worse. At least we aren’t dealing with the Tholians.”

  “The Gorn aren’t much better.” He led her up the ramp and inside the ship. “Remember that guy we met in the cantina on Deskereb? He’d just come back from Gorn space—said they’re the most cold-blooded bastards he ever met.”

  “Well, they are reptiles.”

  “Dammit, you know what I mean.” He took off his tool belt and draped it by its buckle from a hook inside the open equipment locker, then continued on his way toward the cockpit. “The Gorn see the law as something for themselves only. They let their border worlds run wild because they think aliens are little better than animals. As long as no Gorn get hurt, they’ll gladly stand by and do nothing while offworlders shoot each other all to hell.”

  He sidled into the cockpit and slumped into his seat to start the preflight check. Bridy leaned over his shoulder and fixed him with a dubious stare. “Don’t you think you might be exaggerating just a bit?”

  “Like hell I am. If this goes south, we could wind up in the middle of a goddamned free-for-all down there.”

  Bridy smiled. “That’s what you have me for, honey.” She kissed his cheek, patted his shoulder, and added, “Let me know when we’re ready to take off.”

  “You’ll be the second to know,” Quinn said, powering up the navigation computer. Bridy turned and left the cockpit while Quinn continued prepping the Dulcinea for its next journey.

  Looking up, he caught his worried reflection in the cockpit’s canopy. How do I get myself into these messes? Why can’t I master the fine art of saying “no” to beautiful women? He reclined his chair and palmed a sheen of sweat off his forehead and over his gray crewcut. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.

  4

  Kajek found the rhythm of his own breathing hypnotic in the deathly silence that permeated his ship, a compact Andorian outrider he had never bothered to name. Outside his capsule-shaped cockpit’s wraparound canopy yawned the blackness of eternity, an endless void peppered with stars to mask its hideous emptiness.

  The lean, wiry Nausicaan lounged in the broad, enveloping pilot’s seat. Most of his ship’s primary systems were in a low-power standby mode. Even the life-support system had been set to minimal levels, and the spacecraft’s artificial gravity had been deactivated. If not for the safety restraints crisscrossing his torso, Kajek would have long since floated out of his seat.

  Zero gravity didn’t bother Kajek, but the bitter cold did. Several hours in the dark had dropped temperatures inside his ship to near-freezing. His exhalations spawned great gray plumes that dissipated ever more gradually. In the past hour, vapor condensed from his breath had started to fog part of the forward canopy. More troubling to him was the slow loss of sensation in his fingers and toes. He disliked wearing gloves in the cockpit because any that were thick enough to keep his hands warm interfered with his ability to operate the ship’s secondary control panels, which controlled such systems as sensors and access to the memory banks.

  Only the passive optical sensors remained fully on line. Kajek had set them to monitor the Starfleet vessel Endeavour, which was twenty light-minutes away orbiting Zeta Aurigae IV, the same world to which Kajek had tracked Zett Nilric’s stolen argosy, Dulcinea. A magnetic disturbance above the southern pole of Zeta Aurigae III concealed Kajek and his ship from the Endeavour’s sensors, enabling him to spy on it at relatively close range while hiding in plain sight. His only concern was that if the Dulcinea launched while the Endeavour was on the far side of the fourth planet, he might not notice its departure until it was too late to track its escape vector.

  It had been several hours since the Nalori ship had landed inside one of Endeavour’s shuttlebays. Kajek grew concerned that perhaps he had missed the Dulcinea’s exit—and then the bulkheads parted at the aft end of the Starfleet vessel’s lower hull. He spread his outer fangs in a broad grin. There you are. He permitted himself a low chortle, which clouded the air with a spectre of his breath.

  As the Nalori vessel exited the shuttlebay and maneuvered to break orbit, Kajek clicked his outer fangs against one another. It was a nervous habit, one he had struggled to overcome but so far had failed to suppress, an unwelcome tic caused by his tendency to engage in obsessive-compulsive behavior. In many ways he had channeled that psychological trait into useful habits. His attention to detail and ability to plan ahead had made him a very effective bounty hunter. He always knew his current equipment inventory and the status of his ship’s fuel and provisions. His personal logs and files on bounty targets were alphabetized, meta-tagged, and thoroughly cross-referenced by more than a hundred criteria.

  I am not crazy, just organized.

  He leaned forward to observe the sensor data. Where are you going? Show me your destination. His quarry maneuvered clear of the Endeavour and broke from orbit. Not heading back to Vanguard, apparently. The small vessel came about on a bearing that would take it toward the Klingon Empire. A bold move. Seconds later, the Dulcinea jumped to warp speed and moved beyond the range of Kajek’s passive sensors. Kajek kept his attention on the Endeavour.

  Patience, he reminded himself. Don’t let your lust
for the hunt make you careless. He watched and waited as the Endeavour’s standard orbital pattern took it beyond the curve of Zeta Aurigae IV. As soon as the Starfleet ship vanished from his sensor readout, Kajek pulled off his gloves, switched all his ship’s systems to full power, and engaged his active sensors to confirm the Dulcinea’s heading.

  Still on course, he noted. He pulled his gloves back on and briskly rubbed his hands together. He called up a star chart and looked ahead along the Dulcinea’s trajectory, curious as to what populated systems lay along that heading. They seem to be treading a fine path between Gorn space and Klingon territory. Are they en route to one of the border worlds, perhaps? He ruled out Chirlow—it was a mostly automated mining operation on a volcanic greenhouse planet inhospitable to organic life. Likewise, he doubted they would be bound for Mazur Prime, a desolate ball of sand that the Klingons used as a toxic-waste dumping ground.

  Ruling out those worlds brought him to Seudath: a major port under Gorn control, it received a fair number of alien visitors and had a sizable population of aliens, as well. Checking its position against a more precise analysis of the Dulcinea’s heading convinced Kajek that Seudath was the humans’ destination. He engaged his ship’s impulse engine, maneuvered clear of Zeta Aurigae III’s magnetic field, and set his navigation computer to begin calculating a warp-speed course that would enable him to reach Seudath ahead of the ever-elusive Mister Quinn.

  The course coordinates appeared on his helm.

  Engaging the warp drive, Kajek watched the stars melt into bright streaks blurring past his ship, and he felt a surge of excitement. There was nothing he loved so much as the hunt, and never so much as when the prey could fight back.

  The chase begins.

  Quinn lay in bed, half asleep, listening to the steady thrumming of the Dulcinea’s warp engines. Despite his grave misgivings about his and Bridy’s new orders from Starfleet Intelligence, the ship was cruising on autopilot toward Seudath.

  It’s not like I could’ve talked her out of it, he mused. Lord knows I would if I could. He turned onto his left side, trying his best not to wake Bridy, who lay beside him, wrapped around a body cushion like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam. Her wavy dark brown hair spilled across the sage-colored pillows. As Quinn tugged on the sheets to try and cover his chest, Bridy stirred, blinked once, and squinted at him. He whispered, “Sorry. Go back to sleep, darlin’.”

  “In a minute.” She sounded groggy. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “A bit. At least I can enjoy the view.” That made her smile. It had been a few months since they had escaped a bloodbath on Golmira with their lives. Since then they had shared a bed—a fact that Bridy had stressed needed to be concealed from her superiors at SI. Quinn understood her need for discretion, but he hated having to hide the true nature of their relationship even from their friends. He adored Bridy and still found it hard to believe she was his lover. Not only was she smart and beautiful, she was more than twenty years his junior.

  He reached out and stroked a stray lock of her hair. It felt like silk beneath his fingertips. Can I really be this lucky? Does any man deserve a woman as perfect as her? When he was with Bridy, he could almost forget his own checkered romantic history. The death of his first wife, Denise, had stunned him, driven him to seek relief at the bottom of a bottle and look for escape in the ranks of a mercenary company. Since then he had been married three more times, each one a triumph of hope over experience. But I was a drunk then, he reminded himself. A broken man. This is different. Gazing at Bridy, he felt peaceful. She’s different.

  She opened her eyes. “I felt you staring at me.”

  “I wasn’t staring, just admiring.” She furrowed her brow, coaxing him to confess, “Okay, maybe I was staring, just a bit.”

  “Who could blame you?” She laid one hand on top of his. “You seem like you have something on your mind. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I just . . .” He let the sentence trail off and fade away.

  The silence seemed to worry Bridy. “What? What’re you thinking?”

  He had rehearsed and rehashed this conversation in his imagination so many times that he no longer knew how to begin. “Do you ever think we could . . . you know . . .” His eyes scanned the bulkheads while his brain searched for words. “Is there any chance that we could ever just walk away from all this?”

  More awake now, Bridy propped herself up on one elbow. “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. Just live, I guess.”

  “Wow, I can tell you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  Quinn shook his head. “I’m serious. In between gettin’ our asses half shot off, we’ve made some good money these last few months. We’ve got enough rare junk and hard currency stashed in our hold to go anywhere we want and be set up for life.” He reached over and gently stroked her perfect chin with his callused thumb. “We could buy a piece of beachfront property on some perfect, blue world and just ‘live large,’ as my pappy used to say.”

  “It’s a pretty notion,” Bridy said, “but that’s only ’cause it’s far away. If we cashed in and settled down, you’d be bored out of your mind inside a week.”

  The accusation stung. “The old me.” He clasped her hand. “But I’ve changed—you’ve seen it. I let a lot of my life slip away while I wasn’t looking, and I ain’t gettin’ any younger, that’s for damned sure. I don’t know how much time I got left, but whatever I got coming, I want to spend it with you.”

  Bridy sat up and tucked her knees to her chest. “I have to give you credit—you never fail to surprise me.” She hugged her knees with one arm and used her free hand to finger-comb her tousled hair from her eyes. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a domestic breed. You’ve always struck me as a rover.”

  “No. Just a guy runnin’ from his past.” He pressed his hands over his face and tried to massage away a lifetime of accumulated stress and fatigue. “Fact is, I’m tired. Can’t do it anymore. Time to stop runnin’ and start livin’.”

  “You make it sound so easy.” She pushed aside the sheet and got up to pace beside the bed. “I spent half my life working to get into Starfleet and the other half working for Starfleet. How am I supposed to turn my back on that?”

  “Think about what you just said. You’ve given them your whole life so far—don’t you think maybe that’s enough? Shouldn’t some of your life be yours?”

  She shook her head. “I took an oath.”

  “For life? Are you saying you’ll never hang up the uniform?”

  “Never’s a long time.” She threw a nervous glance his way. “What are you saying? That if I stay in Starfleet, you’ll leave without me?”

  He looked away to hide his frustration at having his bluff called. “No. If you say we stay, then we stay.” He put on a crooked smile. “I’d rather be in hell with you than in heaven by myself.”

  Bridy circled the bed and sat down beside him. “Seriously? In hell? Is our life out here that bad? I know it gets hairy now and then, but we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?”

  “Maybe a few,” he admitted with reluctance. “But I’ve had my share of rotten luck, and I know the longer we keep goin’, the better the odds one or both of us’ll wind up dead.”

  “So, what’s the alternative? How would this play out, if you had your way?”

  “In a perfect world? You’d resign from Starfleet by subspace radio, and then we’d get the hell out of the Taurus Reach as fast as this ship’ll go. Find a place to settle down, sell the ship, and make a few munchkins. Just be regular folks.”

  She looked amused, and that made him nervous. Planting a hand on her hip, she said, “Hypothetically speaking, what if I wanted to finish this mission before we go and start pricing beach houses? Would that seem like a reasonable request?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

  “And I’d need to be in charge of naming any munchkins.”

  “Now hang on just a—”

  �
�Take it or leave it.”

  “Hrmph. Okay. Sold.”

  Bridy planted a quick kiss on Quinn’s mouth. “In the interests of starting our new life as soon as possible, do you think you could squeeze a few extra tenths of a warp factor out of this heap?”

  His knees creaked, his back ached, and his stomach gurgled loudly as he stood. Plodding out of their cabin, he mumbled, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  5

  Descending the Dulcinea’s ramp, Bridy tugged at the neck of the wheat-colored garment Quinn had insisted she don before leaving the ship. “Why are we wearing cloaks with hoods? What, are we joining Robin Hood’s merry men?”

  Quinn pulled up his cloak’s hood. “You’ll thank me once we get outside.”

  A hot, foul wind greeted them as they disembarked. She followed him away from the Dulcinea and across the dingy, open-air starport hangar. True to his word, he had shaved nearly an hour off their travel time to Seudath, and he had overloaded only one plasma relay to do it. Compared to the wear and tear he had routinely inflicted on his previous ship, the Rocinante, the sacrifice of a single plasma relay seemed like nothing. With muted amusement, she wondered whether Quinn was getting cautious in his old age.

  “Nice place.” She eyed their run-down environs, which in searing midday sunlight resembled a deep and heavily rusted iron pit, and waved away a cloud of noxious smoke wafting over them. “Really first-rate.”

  “You get what you pay for.” Quinn squinted against the harsh daylight and nodded at the four-person ground crew, which was busy attaching umbilicals to the Dulcinea’s underside to provide it with local comms, waste extraction, fuel, and the replenishment of its air and water reserves. “At least the basics are covered. If you’d wanted luxury, Starfleet should’ve given us a better cover.”