by David Mack
“No idea. But we have to assume they’re armed with at least one.” She gestured toward a wardrobe that stood in the corner, its doors open to reveal a single rifle and a pair of pistols. “We also found power cells for four different types of Romulan disruptors, but only two types of weapon. Which suggests the missing small arms are with the androids.”
La Forge grew anxious. “Explosives, combat weapons . . . Sounds like they’re geared up for a major attack.” He directed a meaningful look at Worf. “Is it possible that the reason for giving up their lair would be to draw our focus here while they take another shot at—”
Picard’s voice blared from Worf’s combadge: “Enterprise to Commander Worf! Stand by for immediate site-to-site transport!”
Data and La Forge scrambled to stand with Šmrhová and Worf as he replied, “This is Worf. What is happening?”
“The Bank of Orion is under attack!”
22
Through the fading shimmer of the transporter beam, La Forge beheld a scene of fiery bedlam. Moments later he was free of the transporter’s hold, and he sprang forward, waving his arms to part the curtains of black smoke that surrounded and suffocated him.
Wreckage and bodies littered the street. Most of the dead were Orions—some in the tailored suits favored by the bank’s employees and executives, some in the paramilitary garb of its armed security personnel. A twist of smoldering metallic debris was all that remained of a crashed hovercar, and as La Forge neared the bank’s towering main gates, he was startled to find them missing. They had been blasted inward, torn apart and ripped from their mighty hinges.
Moving ahead on either side of him were Worf and Šmrhová, who advanced toward the breached gateway with their phasers drawn. Several meters behind them, La Forge heard another rush of transporter noise and deduced that reinforcements had arrived to secure the perimeter.
Then he heard Data call out, “Commander Worf! Stop!” The first officer and Šmrhová turned around as Data emerged from the black fog. “The bank’s force field is still active. Two more steps, and you both will suffer a potentially fatal electrical shock.”
La Forge cycled through his eyes’ various wavelength sensitivities until he saw the radiant shell of energy surrounding the bank. “Good catch, Data!” After a few more adjustments, he found a wavelength that let him peer through the veil of smoke. Looking ahead, he saw the force field was only the first of their problems. “Guys, the bridge is gone.”
Šmrhová sounded as if she hoped he’d misspoken. “You mean it’s retracted?”
“No, I mean it was extended, and someone blew up the middle of it. It’s gone.”
The first officer tapped his combadge. “Worf to Enterprise!”
Picard answered, “Go ahead, Number One.”
“Captain, the androids have entered the bank. We are unable to pursue. Can you beam up the president and her delegation?”
“Negative. We can’t transport through the bank’s scrambling field.”
Šmrhová clasped Worf’s arm. “Sir, if the bank’s been breached, the Protection Detail will move the president to the secure sublevels. Even if we bring down the force field, the Enterprise won’t be able to beam her out of there.” She winced as smoke wafted into her eyes.
Explosions inside the bank blew out all the windows on the east side of the first floor, scouring the street with a storm of splintered glass. Everyone but Data reflexively turned away, ducked, and covered their faces as the blast stung them with its needle wind.
The delicate music of fine debris raining onto pavement was lost in the thunder of the detonation, which echoed and reechoed off the majestic steel-and-glass façades of the capital’s financial sector. La Forge’s ears rang and throbbed. He lifted his hands from his face and saw that Worf and Šmrhová were down, stunned from their wounds. Then he realized he was bleeding from hundreds of minuscule wounds all over his body—and so was everyone else in the street.
Everyone, again, except Data. The android’s synthetic skin was flayed and torn, revealing bits of the machinery underneath, but he seemed oblivious of his cosmetic damage. He stepped briskly to La Forge’s side. “Geordi, are you all right?”
“I’m okay, Data. . . . Mostly.”
“Please give me your phaser.”
Dumbfounded, La Forge stared at his best friend. “Why?”
“I need it to stop the assassins.” He looked toward the bank. “Please, Geordi. We do not have much time. Trust me.”
He handed his weapon to Data. “How’re you getting in?”
Data checked the phaser’s settings. “My new positronic matrix has a low-power subspace transceiver similar to that used in tricorders. Using my native ability to perceive the force field’s specific frequency, I will interplex the subspace transceiver with my—”
“Never mind. Just go.”
Data smiled, nodded once, then turned and hurried toward the gateway.
As La Forge watched his friend jog toward danger, he braced himself to see the worst, to witness Data being violently repelled by the field or, worse, fried to pieces inside it.
Instead, he saw a shimmer of distortion envelop Data just before he reached the field—and then Data passed through the barrier, causing only the faintest ripple of disturbance as he went. Once through, he accelerated to a full run, moving faster than La Forge had thought possible for a biped, and then he launched himself from the edge of the sabotaged bridge. He soared across the gap as if weightless and landed on the far side without missing a step. Then he ascended the majestic marble staircase and was inside the bank, beyond La Forge’s sight.
• • •
After a decades-long career spent avoiding notice and evading confrontation, Berro had to admit he found a certain perverse catharsis in being ordered to unleash a truly manic rampage.
He moved through the bank’s corridors with Olar at his back, guarding their rear from pursuing bank security personnel, while he himself cleared the path ahead in an orgy of mayhem and bloodshed. His disruptor rifle screeched like a Berengarian raptor as he peppered the offices along his route with suppressing fire. Screams of terror and howls of agony came back to him like a chorus serenading his march to almost certain self-annihilation.
Behind themselves they had left a clearly marked trail of carnage. Not that it matters, Berro reminded himself. With the security center blown to bits, there’s no way they’ll get the force field down in time to keep us from getting to our target. He wasn’t worried about the bank’s pathetic security forces. They might be sufficient to stop a flesh-and-blood intruder who felt pain or gave a damn whether he lived or died. Against Berro and Olar, they were nothing more than targets of opportunity.
Their next task lay just ahead, at the end of the corridor: the elevator to the bank’s secure sublevels. Predictably, as they neared to within half a dozen steps of the elevator’s control panel, two bank guards in riot gear charged out from ambush positions, their weapons blazing. Searing bolts of energy cooked off another layer of Berro’s bioplast skin and armored undercoat, and he actually lost half a step of momentum before he steadied his aim, killed the guard on his right, then stopped in a blink, pirouetted like a dancer, and snapped off a second shot, killing the guard on his left. He was back in motion toward his objective before the second body hit the floor.
Olar was firing a steady barrage back the way they’d come, and stray shots from their pursuers slammed into the walls above and beside them. Berro ignored the fusillade and focused on patching himself into the elevator’s control panel with an optronic cable. The connection was verified in seconds, and he triggered the program stored in his body’s memory storage core. A virtual display was superimposed over his visual field, apprising him of the application’s progress. Another lucky shot by some underpaid Orion slammed into Berro’s back, momentarily jolting his system with static. To his relief, the program continued, unaffected.
It finished with an abrupt burst of data transfer, and the maintena
nce controls for the elevator unlocked. “We’re in,” he said as he keyed in the command to open the doors—and overrode the blast-proof barriers that were supposed to snap into place and obstruct the elevator shaft in the event of an unauthorized access. The doors cracked open, then parted fully to reveal the pitch-dark abyss beyond. He poked his head in and looked up to make sure the lift car wasn’t overhead, primed to be dropped on him. “Clear above.” Then he looked down and saw the top of the car far below. “Locked down at the bottom, just like we figured.”
Olar looked back over his shoulder into the shaft. “Think we could jump it?”
Not liking their chances, he goaded Olar, “You first.”
“No thanks. Start climbing.”
Berro slung his rifle and clambered inside the shaft, feeling for one of the built-in ladders recessed into the wall on either side of the doors. His hands found purchase, and once he had footholds, he started his descent.
Olar scurried into the shaft seconds later. “Fire in the hole!” He raced to catch up to Berro, but he was still a few rungs behind as a massive detonation shook the entire building, and a wall of orange fire jetted through the open doors above.
Flames engulfed them, setting them ablaze. Berro blocked out all sensations from his olfactory receptors. Our hair might be synthetic, but it still stinks when it burns.
Dust rained down from above, and then the lights inside the shaft went out. It took a second for Berro to shift his eyes into night-vision mode. As soon as he did, the first things he saw in the cool-green twilight were his own hands, reduced to skeletal frameworks with barely enough bioplast on the palms and fingertips to grip the rungs or wield a weapon. He glanced at Olar, whose entire body now resembled an animated skeleton with glowing eyes.
“For the record,” he said as they continued their descent, “you look terrible.”
Olar looked back at him. “You’re no great beauty, either.” Despite clearly having no lungs, he breathed a tired sigh. “So much for job security.”
• • •
“Madam President, there’s no time! Move!”
It had been a long time since anyone had dared to bark orders at Nanietta Bacco, and it didn’t much matter that the shouting was coming from her senior protection agent. She still didn’t like it. “Dammit, Steven, I will not be locked in a vault like a piece of property!”
Agent Wexler had the intense demeanor of a man who knew he was about to wade into battle. “Ma’am, it’s the most secure space on this level, and that’s where you need to be!”
Through the open door of her private suite, she saw over his shoulder the other members of her elite protection team suiting up with body armor and charging phaser rifles. There was a scent of panic in the air, something she had never seen afflict them before.
“Steven, what’s going on?”
“The elevator shaft’s been breached. We have less than two minutes to get you to the safe room.” He pushed open her door and took her by the arm. “We need to go!”
On any other day, she would have demanded he take his hands off her, but the hardness in his eyes made it clear this was not the time or place to argue about protocol. She let him pull her into motion without a word of protest. As they jogged down the hallway toward the safe room, five more of her agents fell into formation around her, a moving wall of defenders.
They turned the corner at a run, sprinting the final meters to the safe room. Its circular, meter-thick duranium door stood open, primed for her arrival. Inside the safe room, Councillor Enaren and Secretary Safranski stood shoulder to shoulder with Imperator Sozzerozs, Wazir Togor, and Zulta-osol Azarog.
Agent Kistler stood inside the room, waving for them to hurry. “Come on!” He motioned for Bacco to continue past him, and she moved to the back of the room with the others. When she turned and looked back, she saw Wexler and Kistler standing with two of the Gorn imperial guards, all of them facing the closing safe room door. The massive portal shut with a resounding clang and a heavy boom. Then deep thrumming noises signaled the engagement of the door’s vault-grade magnetic locks.
Wexler and his counterpart from the Imperial Guard acknowledged each other with slow nods. Then the agent faced the door and said with deadly calm, “If anything comes through that door that isn’t one of ours, we kill it first—and ask questions later.”
The Gorn beside him hissed. “Agreed.”
• • •
Wounded and terrorized civilians flooded the bank’s corridors, a raging current of bodies in desperate retreat. Data knifed through the crowd, following the assassins’ trail of destruction.
From beyond a corner ahead of him, a cacophony of disruptor fire split the air. Stray shots and ricochets leaped from the passageway. He steeled himself for a headlong charge into the barrage. Suddenly free of fleeing civilians, he broke into an all-out run and turned the corner.
An intense flash of light nearly overloaded his visual receptors. Three-thousandths of a second later, a ground-shaking boom was followed by a shock front of displaced air that launched him backward and slammed him through a wall, into a long office space packed with hastily vacated cubicles. Propelled by the blast wave, he smashed through partitions and office furniture for several seconds before a jumbled mound of debris collapsed on top of him.
Punching and twisting, he fought his way free in a matter of seconds. All around him, the bank’s offices were on fire. Bundles of charred wiring drooped from the now-exposed ceiling infrastructure, spitting sparks and filling the air with the hot snaps of wild electricity. He spent 108 milliseconds running a self-diagnostic and determined he had suffered only cosmetic harm.
Looking ahead toward the origin of the blast, he saw only a wall of twisted steel and broken concrete, the aftermath of a major collapse triggered by the explosion.
So much for following the trail.
His built-in subspace transceiver picked up a flurry of panicked chatter on the frequency reserved for use by the president’s protection agents. One voice declared, “The elevator shaft’s been breached!” Another replied, “Condor, stand by to move Renaissance. Falcon, move Traveler and Chalice to the Grotto. We’ll meet you there.”
Data spotted a door to an emergency exit stairwell, ran to it, and nearly knocked it off its hinges as he bashed through it at full speed. To his relief, the stairwell, which had been reinforced against such disasters as fires and explosions, was unobstructed and brightly lit. There was no route down into the sublevels, which left him only one way to go. Taking the stairs three at a time, he raced up three floors to get above the damage from the blast.
Arriving at the fourth floor, he saw that its reinforced metal fire door had no handle and was marked in several languages with the advisory No Re-Entry on This Floor.
He lifted his right leg and kicked it with enough force to bend it in half. Then he ripped it off its hinges and flung it down the stairs behind him. Nervous-looking Orions in fancy suits scrambled out of his way as he charged into the hallway and rounded the corner at a mad run for the elevator at the far end. The low rhythmic buzzing of building alarms filled the air, their pitch rising and falling as he passed each office with an open door.
A trio of Orion guards in body armor and visored helmets charged into his path at the end of the hallway, converging between him and the elevator’s control panel. None of them bothered to issue a challenge as they brought their rifles to bear. Data snapped off three shots in under half a second. Each maximum-stun phaser shot struck one of the guards in the head.
They fell like dead weight, and he hurdled over them without breaking stride.
Four steps later he arrived at the elevator’s control panel, ready to hack its systems. Instead, he found the panel dark and unresponsive. The intruders must have overridden the system. He tucked his phaser inside one of his jacket pockets, wedged his fingers into the sliver-thin gap between the elevator doors, and pried them open with one steady effort.
The shaft beyond was dark a
nd reeked of burnt hair and scorched metal. A mournful groaning of metal echoed from the bottom of the shaft, and Data spied a flash of ruddy light briefly obscured by moving shadows. He adjusted his eyes’ magnification setting and shifted to an ultraviolet night-vision mode. The scene below snapped into focus in time for him to see two android endoskeletons, denuded of all but remnants of their fleshly guises, scrambling through the forced-open emergency hatch of the lift car parked far below.
In just under three picoseconds, he considered his choices.
It will take me two minutes and twenty-nine seconds to climb down. In that time, the attackers could reach the president and kill her.
I could jump, but from this height there is an eighty-six-point-four percent chance the trauma of impact will inflict sufficient damage as to render me inoperable.
Rappelling is the best choice under the circumstances, as long as it is feasible.
He turned and evaluated the structural integrity of the office architecture behind him. Switching to an infrared mode, he saw the support beams inside the walls. Most of them were insufficiently anchored for his needs. I will have to make my own anchor. He drew his phaser, adjusted its settings to a drilling mode, and fired a snap shot at an angle through the wall above the elevator’s control panel. As he’d planned, the beam bored clean through the thermocrete, making a fist-sized gap ideal for his purposes.
He put away his phaser and pulled open his shirt, snapping off the buttons, which skittered across the floor. A mental command unlocked an access panel on the front of his torso, and he pushed it in and aside with a gentle nudge. Then he reached inside his abdominal core and found the spool of duranium microfilament wire that his father, Noonien Soong, had built into this new-and-improved body years earlier. Lucky for me Dad was a planner.
Attached to the end of the wire was a carabiner similar to those used by mountaineers but far more resilient. He unspooled a few meters of wire, passed the end of it through the hole he’d shot through the wall, and secured the carabiner around the wire in front of the hole. A hard tug satisfied him that the lock was secure and the wall was strong enough to bear his weight.
