Holly’s last report from outside the Federation involved the Tzenkethi. “Our listening posts along the border have picked up some chatter about one of the Tzelnira’s children being sick.”
Jas added, “The Tzelnira are—”
“The appointed ministers of the Tzenkethi government serving under the autarch, yes, I know, Jas.” Nan glowered at her security advisor. “My son-in-law was a relief worker during the Tzenkethi War.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t—”
“It’s not like you see me every day or anything,” Nan said dryly, “but I would think you’d have figured out by now that, if I don’t know something, I’ll ask.”
Jas didn’t sound in the least bit contrite when he said, “I did say I was sorry, ma’am.”
Nan stared at the old Trill for several seconds before turning back to Holly. “Sick with what?”
“We don’t know, ma’am. We’re not even sure it’s true, but there’s been a lot of similar chatter.”
“All right.” She smiled. “If that’s the worst we’re hearing out of Tzenketh these days, I’m just gonna count my blessings. What else?”
Chapter Three
ASHANTÉ PHIRI WAITED for Z4 to explode.
It didn’t happen in the turbolift down one flight to the fourteenth floor, where a third of the offices of the presidential staff were located, including those of the chief of staff and her four deputies. It didn’t happen while she gave Fred a quick kiss before she, Z4, and Xeldara got off. Fred was heading down to thirteen, where he and the rest of the speechwriting staff were headquartered; Myk was proceeding to the second floor, where Kant Jorel’s office, as well as the press holocom, were.
Xeldara tugged on her left earlobe as the three of them moved away from the turbolift doors. “I’m off for my scolding. What do you figure, Esperanza has five more minutes with the president before she comes down and hits me over the head with a rock?”
Ashanté glowered as the three of them exited into the office area. “If she doesn’t, I will. How many times did I tell you not to bring up the travel office again on fifteen?”
“I think it’s an issue, and I think it’ll bite us on the ankle if we’re not careful.”
Z4 made a tinkling noise. “Softs have the most peculiar metaphors.”
Snorting, Ashanté said, “You’re only just noticing this now? The point is, Xeldara, it’s not an issue on fifteen anymore. You want to bring it up again, bring it up with Esperanza.”
“Who then won’t tell the president about it. I wanted to—”
“Get yelled at by the leader of the biggest political entity in the Alpha Quadrant?”
Z4 made a different noise. “You certainly don’t aim low.”
“I said my piece, and I’m happy with that.” Xeldara sounded both stubborn and petulant.
“Hope you’re happy with the job market,” Ashanté muttered.
Xeldara bore right toward the chief of staff’s office, which was smaller than the president’s and only had about half the view but was still pretty spectacular. Ashanté and Z4 moved straight ahead toward their own offices, which had no windows, located as they were in the center of the circle that each floor in the Palais formed. Aside from the chief of staff, members of the cabinet got the other offices that lined the outer walls of the fourteenth floor. The four deputies and their staffs worked in what was generally referred to as the warp core, because it was the center and where all the work that kept the government going got done.
To his credit, Z4 waited until they were in Ashanté’s office and the door closed behind both of them before exploding.
“Why did you shoot C29 down?”
“Because he’s a crappy candidate, Ziff.”
Z4’s antennae curled up. “How many times have I told you not to call me that?”
“About the same number of times I told you that C29 Green was a bad choice for the seat on technology.”
“Very funny.”
Ashanté sat down on her chair and activated the workstation at her desk. Fourteen messages were waiting for her. And it’s not even midmorning yet. I love my job. She looked up at Z4. “We shouldn’t have him on the list.”
“I want the president to make that call.”
“She’s not gonna take him.”
Z4 threw out four of his arms. “You keep saying that, but you don’t know him.”
“I met him once or twice when I was with Councillor Djinian, I’ve read his record of voting, and I know how he’s perceived on the first floor.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Leaning back in her chair, Ashanté said, “It means that the other councillors perceive him as someone with no thoughts of his own. He votes with the majority every time. He’s never had an unpopular vote, and he always swings the way the wind is blowing. He just does what other people tell him to do, and that’s not someone we can afford to have on technology. They’re building new toys every day, and we have to have people on technology who can keep up.”
Z4 made a noise similar to what wind chimes sounded like when they got tangled up. “You don’t know him. He’s a good man, Ashanté, and he has very far-reaching ideas about the uses of technology.”
“They’re not evident in his voting record, and that’s what we have to give the president, and what the rest of the council will look at.”
Z4 stared at Ashanté for several seconds. Then he said, “C29 used to be a forest quadrant governor, just like me.”
Ashanté knew that already. “Yeah, so?”
“About forty seasons ago, a scientist named V1 Red came up with a method of transporting among the forests. For the longest time we had bridges—and we still do—but they took a long time, and vehicles aren’t really practical in the depths of the forests on Nasat.”
Frowning, Ashanté asked, “How’d you guys—?”
“We built vehicles that could take us into the sky, and those were used for transport, too, but what V1 Red wanted to find was something that wouldn’t require a suborbital flight to just go across to the next forest but wouldn’t take more than a day. So he came up with a series of pneumatic tubes that would send Nasats at high speeds through to the other side, complete with inertial dumpers at each end to slow them down when they got there.”
Ashanté was about to ask how that was practical, but then she looked at the chitinous shell that covered most of Z4’s body and remembered that most Nasats could curl up into their shells, which would probably protect them, especially with that inertial dumper thing.
Z4 continued. “He was a relative of the governor of his own forest, V5 Red, but in order to properly test and construct this, he needed the cooperation of at least one other forest quadrant governor. So he went to every one adjacent to his own—including mine, by the way—and we all turned him down. The idea was impractical, it was dangerous, and it wouldn’t do any good. We all said that.
“With one exception.” A tinkle of amusement, then: “C29 Green. He didn’t even need convincing—he heard V1 out, liked what he heard, and gave approval to try it. A number of us took him to task for it, telling him it was insane to even try it. You know what he said?”
Ashanté shook her head.
“ ‘If it doesn’t work, what do we lose? But if it does work, we win a lot.’ ”
Chuckling, Ashanté said, “Down-home wisdom.”
“Something like that, yes. So they built it, even though every other governor on Nasat thought it was insane and that even if it worked, nobody would use it. And you know what? It did work, perfectly, and those tubes are all over Nasat now. You can read all about it in pretty much every history of Nasat that’s been written in the last forty seasons, but you know whose name will be left out of it? C29 Green.”
That surprised Ashanté. “Why?”
“He didn’t want credit. He said that it was V1 Red and V5 Red who got it going, he just agreed to be the other end. I asked him about it later, and his exact words to me were, ‘
Who cares who gets credit, as long as the right thing is done?’ ”
Ashanté stared at Z4 for several more seconds. Then she sighed. “You know why the president made me deputy COS?”
“Because you worked for her since she first ran for public office?”
“Not quite—I spent five years as the chief aide to Councillor Djinian, before I decided that spending most of my time several dozen light-years away from my husband wasn’t any fun and I went back to Cestus III. But in that time, I got to know the first floor very well, and I gotta tell you, Z4—I never would’ve even guessed that about C29.” She sighed again. “Put him on the list.”
“The list?” Z4 let out the tangled-wind-chime noise again. “What about—?”
“What about Severn-Anyar, Govrin, Gelemingar, Nitram, and Jix? They’re all qualified to some degree or other.”
Grudgingly, Z4 said, “I suppose.”
“But when you write up C29’s recommendation? Include that story. In fact, only include that story.”
“Why?”
Ashanté grinned. “The other reason why I got this job is because I know how Nan Bacco’s mind works. And that story you just told me is the kind of thing that’s right in her wheelhouse. If you’d told it on fifteen half an hour ago, we might not even be having this discussion.”
“I’ll make a note of that.”
“Good. Now, since we need to get these together today—”
“Right.” Z4 turned to leave. The door opened at his approach, but then he stopped. “Ashanté? What’s a wheelhouse?”
She laughed. “It’s a baseball term.”
“That’s that sport the president likes?”
Ashanté nodded.
“Do you think my job would be easier if I understood the sport?”
“Ziff, I’ve been to a hundred baseball games, both with and without the president, I’ve been listening to her stories about Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige and Willie Mays and Barry Bonds and José Ramirez and Buck Bokai and Aloysius McSweeney and Kornelius Yates for over twenty years, and I still don’t understand the sport. Just nod a lot and pretend you understand all the references, and for God’s sake don’t actually use any of them in her presence, and you’ll do fine.”
“All right, thanks.”
“I’ll do Severn-Anyar, Govrin, and Jix. Can you do Gelemingar and Nitram?”
“You do Nitram—I don’t think I’ll be able to recommend him with a straight face after the way he voted on disaster relief last year.”
Ashanté sighed. “He voted with his conscience, Z4.”
“That’s great, but I still don’t want to—”
“Fine, I’ll do Nitram, you do Govrin. See you at noon.”
Ozla Graniv nearly leapt out of her chair when the beeping started.
It took her a moment to orient herself and remember where she was. Finally it hit: She was in the Earth bureau offices of Seeker, one of the leading newsmagazines on Trill. She was Seeker’s Palais de la Concorde correspondent, and the alarm that just went off was there to remind her that the morning briefing was about to start and she should activate her holocom, which she did. Then she simply had to wait for the other side to activate, and, from her perspective, she would no longer be in her tiny office in Chartres but in a room full of reporters from all over the Federation and beyond.
Part of her missed the old days, when the press would roam the Palais and get their briefings in person. That had ended when the Breen had attacked Earth during the Dominion War. The Palais had become a fortress after that, with no one who hadn’t been there on official government business allowed in or out. However, President Zife hadn’t been able to justify cutting the press out altogether, but he’d benefited from the recent advances in marrying holographic technology to communications technology. Now the press could be briefed without having to leave the comfort of their offices, homes, or, in some cases, homeworlds. Also, if reporters were offworld for whatever reason, they could still participate in the briefing.
And they can also do it when they’re up all night crashing on a deadline. Ozla had toured the Palais in the company of Kant Jorel and Myk Bunkrep in order to write a story on how the Bacco administration had made over the top three floors of the Palais in their own image, as each administration was wont to do. The story wasn’t due for another few days, but tomorrow morning Ozla was getting on a transport to take her to Tezwa, a story she had been begging her editor to let her do for ages.
“You’re our Palais correspondent,” Farik had said on the screen on her workstation, his enviable view of the Tenaran ice cliffs behind him, “you don’t do this sort of thing.”
“I used to. Remember that exposé I did on the Orion Syndicate? The one I—”
“Won the Gavlin for, yes, I know, and that’s why you got the Palais gig. You deserved it.”
“And I’m grateful, Farik, I really am. But I feel like I’m trapped on Earth. I want to get out some more. Besides, you’ve been wanting to do a follow-up on Tezwa, and with Vara gone and Baleeza retired, you don’t have anyone who—”
“All right, all right!” Farik had laughed, then, and held up his hands in surrender. “I’ll get Gora to cover the Palais for a month or two while you go to Tezwa.”
Tezwa had almost been the flash point of a war between the Federation and the Klingons. The Tezwan prime minister, a lunatic named Kinchawn, had acquired Federation nadion-pulse cannons from the Orion Syndicate and had threatened a Klingon colony. The Klingons had responded, along with a Starfleet ship, and they’d been decimated by the cannons until the Starfleet crew had managed to disable them. The commanding officer of that ship—a rather infamous captain named Jean-Luc Picard—had then claimed the right of batyay’a, which meant that he took credit for conquering the world, thus keeping it out of Klingon hands.
Unfortunately, Kinchawn hadn’t yet finished. Though he’d been deposed after the cannons’ destruction, he’d gone into exile and made dozens of guerrilla attacks on the capital city, which, combined with the damage done by the Klingons in their initial attack, had led to a body count on Tezwa that had been at Dominion War levels.
However, in the last few weeks, the Romulans had crowded Tezwa off the newsfeeds.
Vara deserves better than that.
Vara Tal was the reporter from Seeker who’d been sent to cover Tezwa. She’d been killed when a runabout had been blown up by Kinchawn’s forces—an explosion that had also claimed the lives of several civilians and Starfleet personnel. Farik had sent Seeker’s seniormost reporter, Baleeza Gral—who also reported for Seeker when he was Renna Gral and Tristor Gral—to replace Vara. What he’d seen had been sufficiently awful to convince him to retire from reporting, after doing it for two hundred and fifty years as three different people.
Nobody’s reporting this story anymore. Somebody has to do it for Vara.
A moment later, her holocom beeped, and she found herself sitting, as usual, between Edmund Atkinson of the Times—who would no doubt claim to be in his office in London but who she knew was really on a beach in Mexico—and Regia Maldonado of the Federation News Service, who was, she was sure, in FNS’s Tokyo office. Several other reporters were scattered around the room, most legitimate, a few not so much, in Ozla’s estimation. She was amused to see that Annalisa Armitage of the Free Vulcan Gazette—probably the most laughable publication in a Federation that, thanks to the total freedom of the press, had its share of laughable publications—was still coming to the briefings, despite being mocked at every turn. Then again, the FVG’s probably used to that, since they’ve been advocating Vulcan superiority since the twenty-first century. Hell, the only reason the Vulcans themselves don’t mock the FVG is because they don’t do that kind of thing….
At the podium stood the only two people who were physically in the room: Kant Jorel, the liaison between the press and the Federation Council, and his assistant, an Andorian named Thanatazhres th’Vroth. Zhres had actually lasted in the job for more than two months,
which, Ozla thought, was probably a record. Kant had been the press liaison since shortly after his native world of Bajor had joined the Federation three years earlier, and he had gone through over half a dozen assistants in that time.
“First of all,” Kant said, and his words quieted the room down, “President Bacco has said that she’s looking forward to the negotiators on both sides of the current dispute between Delta and Carrea coming to Earth to resolve their differences here in the Palais. She also knows she has the support of the ambassadors from both worlds, as well as Councillor Eleana, who has said several times that she looks forward to a peaceful solution to the dispute.”
Edmund raised his hand. “So you’re saying that they’ve agreed to come?”
“I’ve said they are coming, Edmund. Please listen to what I say, not what I imply.”
Smiling, Edmund asked, “Where would the fun in that be?”
“You want fun, stay on that beach in Mexico.”
Ozla had to cover a smile at the wounded look on Edmund’s holographic face.
On the other side of Ozla, Regia spoke up. “Jorel, I have a source that says that a shipload of Reman refugees is heading for Outpost 22 along the Romulan Neutral Zone.”
“Bully for your source,” Kant said with an insincere smile. “I can’t comment on that.”
Another reporter was about to say something, but Regia didn’t give him a chance to speak. “I’m sorry, Jorel, but what does that mean?”
Kant fixed Regia with a withering gaze. “I should think that’d be obvious, Regia. Either I know all about it but am not allowed to say anything yet, or I know nothing about it and am saying I can’t comment by way of covering, or some third possibility that I can’t say out loud. You people use words for a living, I would think you’d be able to recognize my own choice of words for precisely what it is. Maria?”
Maria Olifante, the reporter from Pangea’s news service, asked, “Has there been any word from ex-President Zife since his resignation?”
Frowning, Kant said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
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