Serpents Among the Ruins

by David R. George III

  “And why is it that you think they’ve been our allies?” Ditagh asked. “Because they’ve provided us food and energy?”

  “Yes, of course,” Kage said. “They’ve helped to prevent the disintegration of the Empire.”

  “Have they saved us, or have they found a means of controlling us?” Ditagh leaned forward, warming to the subject despite his contempt for the ambassador. “The Federation has done only so much for Qo’noS. They’ve stopped short of giving us what we’ve needed to grow as strong as we’d been before the disaster on Praxis. They’ve kept us from becoming a threat to them, restraining our progress by enthralling some of our people—as they’ve done with Azetbur. And with you.”

  Kage gazed at him, his eyes narrowing. “Do you not even grant the possibility that the Federation is our ally?”

  “Do you not even grant the possibility that it is our enemy?” Ditagh returned. “You accuse me of finding ends based upon my assumptions, but do you not support your vision of the Federation as a Klingon ally with favorable interpretations of their actions?”

  Kage lifted his chin, then glanced away for a moment. At last, to Ditagh’s surprise, he said, “Perhaps.” But then he asked, “Have you ever been to a Federation world?” When Ditagh did not bother to answer, he said, “I thought not.”

  “If you’re here to try to convince me of the truth of your position, there is no point,” Ditagh said. He sat back in his chair. “I would die protecting Klingons from the imperialism of the duplicitous Federation.”

  “Yes,” Kage said slowly. “I’m sure that you would.” A glimmer in the ambassador’s eyes hinted that he either hoped or believed that such a fate would befall Ditagh. “It astonishes me how different our views can be, based upon the same information.” He paused, and then added, “But then, I have actually been to the Federation, and worked with its people.”

  “Then why don’t you go back to some Federation world, old man?” Ditagh stood up. “Maybe you can spend the last days of your life being administered powders and liquids for the sick. You can prolong your fearful little life in safety, absent the fires and glories of battle. Like a human, or a Deltan.”

  Kage peered up at him and nodded. He stood up and faced Ditagh for a few seconds—a pitiable attempt to show strength, Ditagh figured—and then headed for the door. As it opened before him, he looked back into the room. “You call me an old man,” he said, “and I am. But you are out of date, and so are all of those like you. And because you are all out of power—real power—the Empire has survived, and will continue to survive.” Then he continued out into the corridor.

  Ditagh watched him go. “How wrong you are, old man,” he said to himself. Before long, he knew, Kage and Azetbur and their ilk would be forcibly rendered obsolete. The Empire had survived under their reign, but only once they had been removed would it flourish.

  He crossed the room, making his way back over to the food synthesizer. He operated the control panel, steering through its menus and submenus until he reached the selection for Klingon bloodwine, and then found the specification Warm. Ditagh would toast to the future of the Klingon Empire, which would not include Kage or Azetbur or any of their minions.

  Sulu sat down across the desk from Admiral Mentir. They’d exchanged cursory pleasantries when she’d entered his office, and now she waited for him to begin their meeting. Under normal circumstances, she would have been delighted to see him again, would have wanted to have a personal conversation, but the current situation hardly qualified as normal.

  On the corner of the desk, Sulu noticed, sat a model of a small sublight craft she recognized as a Nivochan asteroid runner. She’d never flown one herself, but she remembered her father telling her that he once had. She wished that she could have spoken with him about everything that had happened recently, but—

  “Commander,” the admiral began, confirming the formal tone of their meeting. A faint, tinny quality underlay the sound of his translated voice. “Have you spoken with anybody besides me about your concerns?” He clearly referred to her discovery of Starfleet records indicating that officers she knew to be dead had apparently been assigned to starship duty.

  “No,” Sulu answered. “I haven’t because…” She stopped and looked away from the admiral, uncomfortable with what she needed to reveal to him. After their last conversation, she worried that he might view her latest concern as paranoid.

  “Commander?” Mentir said. Sulu peered back over at him, the silvery scales of his face visible through the helmet of his environmental suit.

  “I haven’t said anything to any of the Enterprise crew, not even to the senior staff,” she said, “because I think there’s a spy on board.”

  “What?” Mentir exclaimed, obviously surprised at the revelation. “You’ve found records of a deceased officer assigned to your vessel?”

  “No,” Sulu said. “But when I uncovered those discrepancies in the personnel files, it reminded me of an intermittent problem we’ve been experiencing aboard the ship for months. It’s a seemingly random dispersion of the navigational deflector, lasting just a second or two each time. It’s occurred less than a dozen times, and so we haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause. Since it hasn’t impacted ship operations, though, resolving it hasn’t been a priority.”

  “And you believe that a spy aboard Enterprise has sabotaged the ship?” the admiral asked.

  “No,” Sulu said. “But I recalled the problem during our last conversation, and so I went back and checked the logs.” She lifted a padd from her lap and activated it with a touch. “The first dispersions occurred just before and just after a confrontation the Enterprise had with a Romulan warship eighteen months ago. It happened again, twice, during the ship’s visit to the Koltaari homeworld, when the Romulans began their occupation of the planet, and then several times during our patrols of the Neutral Zone in the Foxtrot Sector.” Sulu pressed a control and scrolled down the list. “The dispersion appeared once more just before the Universe test—” She felt a knot tighten in her stomach at the mention of the ill-fated ship. “—and a final time just after our deuterium-flow regulator failed when we were departing from Algeron.”

  “Obviously there’s a pattern there,” Mentir said, although the surprise he’d shown a moment ago seemed to have faded now.

  “There’s a Romulan spy aboard the Enterprise,” Sulu concluded, “sending them information in a communications beam hidden in the output of the navigational deflector.”

  “Yes,” the admiral said simply.

  Sulu felt relieved at Mentir’s immediate acceptance of her judgment, and she said so. “I’m glad you agree, Admiral.”

  “I’m not telling you that I agree,” Mentir told her. “I’m telling you that, yes, there is a Romulan spy aboard your vessel.”

  “Admiral, I don’t understand,” Sulu said. “You know?” Her heart began to race and she felt herself flush as she realized that she had been right, that somebody in Starfleet Command had helped seed spies throughout the fleet. She had obviously been wrong to trust Mentir, and she wondered if she would be able to make it out of his office alive. In her mind’s eye, she imagined him lifting a phaser from beneath his desk and—

  Sulu sought to restrain her frenzied thoughts. She’d known Los Tirasol Mentir for twenty years—known and trusted him. She would not have contacted him about all of this if she hadn’t.

  Unless he’s been replaced too, Sulu thought wildly. Like the dead officers—

  “I know,” Mentir said. “I didn’t until just recently, but I do now. Captain Harriman discovered the spy almost immediately after they’d been assigned to the ship. It was his idea to leave the spy in place, so that we could know what information was being passed to the Romulans, what information they were seeking.”

  Sulu nodded slowly. It was a sensible plan, and she understood at once why the captain had not shared the information with her. The fewer people aware of the spy’s existence, the better the chance that the spy would
remain unaware that they’d been found out, and the more likely that they’d continue to operate aboard Enterprise. Now, though, with Captain Harriman no longer on the ship…

  “Who is it?” she asked. She expected the admiral to refuse to tell her, but he did not.

  “Enterprise’s chief computer scientist,” he said. “Lieutenant Grayson Trent.”

  “Trent,” Sulu said, and she immediately remembered when she’d encountered him near the second fire in the Koltaari capital. When she had first seen him, after she’d come out of the smoke, he’d initially turned away from her, and she realized now that he hadn’t wanted her to see him there. It had been too late, though; he’d seen that she’d already spotted him, and so he’d had to come over to her.

  And he had a medkit with him, she recalled now. He’d given her a dose of tri-ox compound, but why would a computer scientist be carrying a medkit with him? Because he thought he might need it for himself, she surmised. I also was pleased that he’d made it back to the power plant, Sulu recalled. Trent had been assigned to a different area of the city at the time, but she had simply ascribed his presence back at the fire to his desire to help the Koltaari. But Linojj had concluded that the explosive charges had been set manually, and Sulu saw now that Trent had been the one to set the bomb in the power plant, and probably the first bomb as well. Fury rose within her.

  “How much longer is Starfleet Command intending to leave him aboard?” Sulu wanted to know.

  “Not another day,” Mentir said. “His usefulness to us is at an end.” The admiral reached forward to his desk and activated a comm channel. “Mentir to Sperber,” he said.

  “Sperber here, Admiral,” came the immediate reply.

  “We’re all set here,” Mentir said. “Carry out your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mentir out.” The admiral looked over at Sulu as he closed the comm channel. “My executive officer,” he said. “He’ll contact Lieutenant Commander Linojj and explain the situation. Trent will be transported directly into a holding cell here on the station.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sulu said, pleased that situation had been taken care of that quickly, at least from her perspective. “And what about the other spies?” she asked, and then something else occurred to her. “Do they have anything to do with why Captain Harriman remained behind at Algeron?”

  “There are no other spies,” Mentir said.

  “What?” Sulu said. “But the discrepancies in the personnel records…”

  “There are no other spies,” Mentir repeated. “And Captain Harriman is not aboard Algeron.”

  “What?” Sulu said again. “Then where is he?”

  “I can explain all of this to you, Demora, and I will,” the admiral said. “But first, I need to tell you that Enterprise must depart from KR-3 in—” He glanced at the monitor atop his desk. “—three hours and fifty-seven minutes. You’ll be returning to Foxtrot Sector, to outpost thirteen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sulu said. “To patrol the Neutral Zone?”

  “In a matter of speaking,” Mentir said. “Enterprise needs to be there for the start of the war.”

  Vaughn crawled through the dark, cramped access channel, pulling himself along with his fingers, pushing himself along with his toes. The small beacon he carried in his mouth revealed his surroundings in stark tones, throwing inconstant shadows as he moved past equipment protruding from the bulkheads. The heat, the closeness of the air, enveloped him completely, like cloth strips wrapping a mummy. His elbows and knees, knocking repeatedly against the metal decking and sides of the conduit, felt raw, even through the material of his Romulan uniform. The crew of Tomed clearly used this tube infrequently, if at all; Vaughn suspected that they utilized robotic maintenance devices for such areas of the ship, devices small enough to maneuver through the confined spaces. If true, then it left him less vulnerable to detection, although the narrow passage also caused the completion of his tasks to be both more uncomfortable and more difficult.

  At a T-shaped intersection, Vaughn took the beacon from between his teeth and shined its beam down the tube stretching away to his left. He eyed the nearest access panels, trying to pick out the Romulan characters identifying the ship’s systems they covered. He saw a word that translated as Environment, and knew that life-support functions could be found there, though he did not bother to read the words in smaller characters that would have specified exactly which functions.

  On the other side of the tube, Vaughn spied what he needed: Communications, and a specific relay that supported it. He stuck the beacon back between his teeth and struggled around the corner. After hauling himself into the intersecting conduit, he paused, setting the beacon down and resting his forehead on the back of one hand. He’d been down here in the bowels of Tomed for a long time, working to locate and sabotage the ship’s external communications system. That effort had entailed finding and reconfiguring not just one subsystem or relay, but many, including independent backups, so that when the system was brought down, the Romulan crew would not be able to repair it.

  Now, finally, Vaughn had come to the last site. He positioned the beacon on the deck so that it illuminated the area in which he needed to work. The access panel came free with a metallic click, and he set it to one side. Inside the bulkhead, fiber-optic clusters twined around various pieces of equipment. Vaughn studied the layout until he positively distinguished the coupling he required. Once he finished modifying it, all the critical points of the ship’s external comm system would be tied together into a single control circuit, and by way of that control, Tomed could be rendered mute and deaf.

  Vaughn retrieved a Romulan scanner from his belt, where it hung beside a sensor veil. He checked the chronometer on the display, verifying that he would have enough time to complete his tasks, then grabbed a small pack of handheld engineering tools. After performing a thorough scan of the coupling, he reached into the bulkhead and set to work.

  As Vaughn toiled over the comm system, he felt the slight pulse of its operation beneath his touch. He had executed this same series of modifications several times already, and he used the tools quickly and expertly on the equipment. In just a few minutes, he, Commander Gravenor, and Captain Harriman would be one step closer to completing their mission. Success would justify the significant personal risk, Vaughn knew, but failure…failure would leave the blood of many on his hands.

  In recent days, as this scenario had begun to unfold, he had begun to wonder if he had chosen the right career for himself. He recalled his boyhood dreams of exploration, but circumstances and his own natural abilities had conspired to send his life in another direction—in this direction. He had enjoyed his years of deskwork and training for Starfleet special operations, his sense of accomplishment particularly high when his efforts had contributed to the success of a field mission.

  Still, he had looked forward to his own promotion to field duties with great anticipation, and he’d found his half-decade of service in that capacity more than satisfying, despite the vagaries of special ops work. Proportionate to his talents, Vaughn’s responsibilities had increased quickly and significantly, and as a consequence, so too had the stakes for which he worked. In the last two years or so, he had come to face his own peril almost as a matter of routine. But while he did not wish to die, the possibility of his own death did not scare him; the possibility of the deaths of others, though, specifically as a result of his actions, did.

  As Vaughn withdrew one hand from the communications equipment in order to exchange one tool for another, he asked himself whether or not he believed in what he was doing. It did not require a great deal of introspection for him to conclude that he did; he would not have stayed in special ops otherwise. Evil existed in the universe in many forms, and he found not only necessity, but virtue, in fighting it.

  The difficulties he experienced now, he realized, lay not only in the cost of failure, but in the price of success, both paid for by wounds heaped upon the innocent, and by
death. The destruction of Universe had sent waves of anguish heaving through Starfleet, and though not destroyed, Ad Astra had endured damage that would probably end up being measured in a life. Vaughn did not like being a party to that. He had never believed that virtuous ends justified anything but virtuous means.

  He removed one hand from within the bulkhead and dragged the sleeve of his uniform across his face, wiping away the patina of perspiration that had formed there. The old simile Hot as Vulcan should have had a companion phrase, he thought: Hot as Romulus. Vaughn would have removed his tunic had there been more room to maneuver within the narrow equipment tunnel.

  The modifications took nearly an hour to complete. When he had finished, he replaced the access panel, then packed the engineering tools back inside their case. After gathering up his equipment—tool case, scanner, and beacon—he activated the circuit now controlling the critical points of Tomed’s external comm system. For now, the ship’s Romulan crew had been cut off from the rest of the universe. So too had Vaughn, Gravenor, and Harriman.

  Vaughn retreated backward down the conduit, past the intersection, and finally headed back the way he had come. It took him twenty minutes to reach a junction. He burst from the access tunnel as though throwing off fetters. His body spilled onto the deck of the junction well, and he lay there on his back for a second, shining the beacon upward and peering at the various tunnels—some narrower, some wider—that connected into this area. Then he pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned against the bulkhead, resting for a few moments and gathering his strength. Time remained before his scheduled rendezvous with Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman. As with him, he knew that both officers had been charged with tasks to accomplish once they had stolen aboard Tomed: the commander, to secure the helm, and the captain, to access internal sensors and—