Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

  Spock moved to one side to reveal two cartons of Chinese food from a restaurant just off campus. “I took the liberty of procuring two orders of kung pao vegetables. Your favorite, if I am not mistaken. I thought we might eat lunch together.”

  Uhura was stunned. “You mean … like a date?”

  Spock frowned. “I merely meant to offer sustenance, as I have imposed upon your scheduled lunch hour. And as we should not be seen together during this operation, dining together in the faculty cafeteria or the student dining hall is inadvisable.”

  “Right,” Uhura said. “I uh, I appreciate the offer, but I have other plans.”

  “I understand,” Spock told her as she walked to the turbolift, but she doubted he did.

  “Ready for our big date?”

  Nadja Luther looked ready. She was wearing a lowcut, sleeveless dress that hugged her slight body—nothing too fancy, but not too casual either—and had her long dark hair done up on top of her head. McCoy caught the dull shine of something metal holding her hair in place, and shook his head.

  “Don’t tell me—that’s a spork.”

  Nadja slipped her arm in his. “Well, you never know who you’re going to end up alone with, do you?”

  “Well, I hope you’ve got it narrowed down, at least.”

  Nadja flashed him her beautiful smile, and McCoy felt an onset of what he might have diagnosed as presyncope, the light-headedness that preceded a fainting spell, though his symptoms were no doubt psychological, brought about by hyperventilation. In layman’s terms, Nadja was currently working some serious mojo on him.

  “So. ‘An evening under the stars,’” Nadja said. “Does that mean a night picnic? A fancy dinner under twinkling lights? A hidden garret under the stage at Madame Tussauds in Hollywood?”

  “You’ll see,” McCoy said. He wanted to keep it mysterious. He’d put a lot of planning into this.

  McCoy escorted Nadja across campus, but instead of heading for the streetcar line into Sausalito or the ferry landing to take them across the bay to San Francisco, he led her to one of the Academy’s transporter rooms.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” she told him.

  McCoy nodded to the transporter chief on duty. “Two to beam up,” he told her.

  “Up?” Nadja asked. But before McCoy could even smile in response, they were caught in the snowy white swirl of the transporter beam and broken down into subatomic particles, only to be reassembled moments later on the transporter pad of a fancy restaurant on an orbiting space station.

  McCoy took a deep breath and tried not to reel. He hated transporters, but this gag was the only way to get them where he wanted to go. Not without booking a shuttle—and a pilot to go with it.

  “Ahh,” Nadja said. “So that was your plan.” She started to step off the transporter pad, but McCoy held her back.

  “Two to beam up,” he told the tuxedoed maître d’.

  Nadja stared at him now, absolutely flummoxed. Good. An early point for him.

  McCoy closed his eyes as they were once more fragmented into billions of particles and transmitted across the vacuum of space, defragmenting on the transporter pad of the USS Potemkin. He swayed again, barely resisting the urge to pat himself down for missing parts.

  The stupid things men do for love, McCoy thought.

  “We’re eating on a starship?” Nadja said. McCoy could tell she was impressed. Most cadets never saw a real Starfleet vessel until the annual Zeta Fleet Training Exercise or the USS Eagle training run to Alpha Centauri and back. McCoy had interned with Tom Arnet, the Potemkin’s doctor, last summer, though, and he’d worked a favor from him while the Potemkin was home in the Sol system.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” McCoy said when Nadja tried to step down, and he held her back once again. Now she didn’t look mystified or flummoxed so much as crafty, trying to work out the puzzle of where they were going before they got there. McCoy didn’t wait to give her the chance.

  “Lieutenant Nguyen, two to beam up, please,” McCoy said.

  “Abra … cadabra,” the Potemkin’s transporter chief said. If there was one thing McCoy hated, it was transporter chiefs who tried to be cute. But before he could complain, they were swept up in the white whirlwind one last time and deposited at their final destination.

  “The Argos telescope!” Nadja said, and she burst out laughing.

  Laughter was all right. It was something of a joke to bring her here, after all. It was the one place every cadet tried so desperately to avoid. The assignment was paralyzingly dull, boring, and tedious.

  McCoy, of course, had plans to make it otherwise.

  He offered Nadja his arm. “I swapped duties with Cadet Morrow. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Nadja said, all smiles now.

  They stepped down from the space telescope’s small transporter pad, and McCoy led her down the short corridor to the station’s tiny control room. A small table and chairs had been set up there among the consoles, replete with candles and a bottle of champagne on ice. Nadja picked up one of the sporks set with the dinner plates and smiled, and McCoy knew his point total for the night was reaching high-score levels.

  But the pièce de résistance was the station’s main viewer, leaning out from the wall, just behind the table. There you could see whatever the telescope had been trained on, and just then it was pointed at a particularly stunning region of space, with towering greenish-brown gas clouds punctuated with glowing, pink, gemlike stars.

  “Oh. I think I can see my house from here,” Nadja said appreciatively.

  “Not unless you live in the Eagle Nebula, you can’t,” McCoy told her. “They call that the Pillars of Creation. That column of gas coming off the nebula there is one hundred trillion kilometers high.”

  Nadja squeezed his arm close to her. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a cautionary tale. That image you’re seeing right there, that column of gas? It’s long gone. Dead. Take a starship out there to see it, and you’ll find out it’s already been destroyed by a supernova shockwave. Light travels so slow, and it’s so far away, the Argos telescope won’t see it destroyed for another five hundred years.”

  Nadja tapped on his head. “Do you see doom and gloom in everything in space?”

  “Just about,” McCoy said. He put his arms around Nadja’s waist. “But there’s one thing in space right now that isn’t so bad.”

  “Oh ho. Nice save,” she told him. She gave him a kiss and then turned to the table. “So, what’s for dinner?”

  “Oh, garçon?” McCoy called.

  There was a fumbling, crashing sound from the corridor that lead to the rest of the station, and McCoy rolled his eyes. Jim Kirk appeared in the doorway dressed in white tails and carrying a towel over his arm.

  “Ah! Bonjour, madame and monsieur, and welcome to Chez Argos,” he said. After McCoy had bailed out Jim from having to walk across campus all by his lonesome, he’d pressed Kirk into playing waiter for him. Nadja laughed again and took her seat after Kirk had pulled it out for her. He pulled out McCoy’s chair next.

  “Ixnay on the dead ars-stay,” Kirk whispered in McCoy’s ear as he sat. McCoy scowled and waved him away.

  “Are you our waiter?” Nadja asked.

  “Either that, or I’m a flag admiral,” Kirk said. “I can’t tell which.”

  “We’ll start with the champagne,” McCoy told him. If he let Kirk go on, Nadja would end up talking to Jim all night, not him.

  “Ah. Chateau Picard,” Kirk said, reading the label. “Never heard of it.”

  “Just pour already,” McCoy ordered, exasperated.

  Kirk popped the cork, and it caromed off into the consoles somewhere. Nadja smiled at McCoy across the table as Kirk poured their drinks. Under the table, her legs found his, and he nearly jumped.

  McCoy cleared his throat. “Uh, thank you, garçon. I think we’ll have the fish and then you can go. By which I mean am-scray.”

  CH.14.30
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  Dog Fight

  Early the next morning, Kirk crossed the empty, secure campus alone, watching warily for Finnegan. He knew better than to call Bones in for escort duty again this time, not because it would anger his best friend, but because he had a feeling Bones wouldn’t even answer his communicator. Bones hadn’t come home last night after Kirk left him and Nadja together at “Chez Argos,” which Kirk took to mean the night had been a success. He smiled at the thought of all the planning Bones had put into that one, and reminded himself to get Bones to help him the next time he had a big night to plan. Maybe Bones could help him put something special together for the Deltan cadet Areia….

  First up with Lartal this morning was another round with the linguistics team. Then more sessions at the medical conference. After Velocity yesterday, Lartal had spent the rest of the day attending seminars, grumbling the entire time about not being able to leave the campus. He hadn’t taken notes like all the other doctors from the other planets, hadn’t participated in any of the Q & A sessions, and once had even fallen asleep during a session. Kirk only knew because he himself had fallen asleep in the same seminar and then jerked awake, hurriedly glancing at Lartal to see if he’d noticed. Kirk was more and more convinced that Lartal was no doctor. But then why had he come?

  Kirk checked in with the duty chief—not the chief who was out to get him, but some other chief he’d never met before—and went into the conference room, where two cadets stood pretending to be furniture, as he and Leslie had done.

  “At ease, boys. It’s too early,” Kirk told them.

  Unlike Leslie, they weren’t friendly or chatty. Kirk didn’t care. He welcomed the chance to close his eyes and get a little rest before he had to keep himself awake at medical seminars all day.

  The outside door slid open, and a familiar voice said, “Shift change. I’ll take over from here, boys.”

  Kirk opened his eyes. Finnegan stood in the doorway. The two cadets working the Added Security Detail in the corners smiled cruelly and walked out past Finnegan and into the hall, leaving Kirk and Finnegan alone.

  “A little bird told me you come here every morning to walk the dog, Jimmy boy,” Finnegan said. “So I thought I’d stop chasing you and meet you somewhere you can’t run. There’s only two ways out of this room, Kirk. One of them goes to the dog pound. The other goes out into the hall, where my friends are gonna stand guard and make sure nobody disturbs us.”

  Finnegan cracked his knuckles and pulled a spork out of his pocket.

  Kirk immediately assessed his options and stood. “You know what, Finnegan? I’m tired of running, anyway. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to beat you to a pulp without you touching me with that spork.”

  “I’d like to see you try it,” Finnegan retorted.

  Kirk grabbed the edge of the table, shoving it at Finnegan and ramming him in the stomach. Finnegan doubled over, and Kirk threw himself across the table, knocking the big cadet back into the wall. A flower vase on a pedestal rocked and fell, dumping its contents onto an imported Bajoran rug near the door. Finnegan got a good punch into Kirk’s stomach, and Kirk rolled away. Finnegan stood again, spork in hand and murder on his face, and Kirk snatched up the end of the rug, yanking it out from under Finnegan’s feet. He slammed into the ground with a thud, and Kirk hopped onto him, holding the rug between them so he couldn’t be tapped with the spork. They pushed and shoved and punched through the rug until Finnegan finally got a knee up, and while it didn’t catch Kirk where it would cause the most pain, it was painful enough. Finnegan shoved Kirk off and tossed the rug away, and Kirk took a step back to get out of spork range.

  “You’re gonna need that doctor roommate of yours when I get through with you, Jimmy boy,” Finnegan told him.

  “You’re going to need every doctor at this medical conference to figure out what species you are when I’m through with you, Finnegan. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind knowing that now.”

  Finnegan lunged for him, and Kirk threw a chair in his way to trip him up. They traded body blows, ducking and jabbing like prizefighters, both forgetting the Assassination Game and just fighting now out of pure hatred for each other.

  The door to the Varkolak rooms slid open, and Lartal and his two Varkolak escorts came in.

  “What’s this?” Lartal said. The room was a disaster area, and Kirk and Finnegan didn’t look much better.

  Kirk used the surprise of Lartal’s interruption to put a shoulder into Finnegan and send him to the floor again. While he was down, Kirk ran to the other side of the table, near Lartal.

  “Looks like I’m safe,” Kirk told Finnegan.

  “They’re not people, Kirk. They don’t count,” Finnegan told him. He got up and brandished his spork again.

  Lartal looked from Kirk to Finnegan and back again. He barked a command to his guards in Varkolak. Lartal grabbed Kirk and dragged him into the Varkolak common room behind them. Before Kirk could ask what he was doing, Lartal flipped open a large luggage crate and pushed him down inside it.

  “Hide here,” Lartal told him.

  “Wait, no, I can take care of—” Kirk started to say, but Lartal pushed his head down and closed the lid. It was dark and tight inside, and there were still pieces of equipment in the bottom, stabbing into his butt and back. Worse, Kirk wasn’t sure there were airholes. He pounded on the lid, calling for Lartal to let him out, but Lartal kicked the crate to silence him, and he heard Finnegan’s voice.

  “Where is he? I know he’s still in here. Let me see what’s in that crate.”

  Kirk heard Lartal growl menacingly, and shivered. Even here, in the relative safety of the crate, the sound made his skin crawl instinctively. It was an animal sound. Feral. The kind of sound that had sent Homo erectus running for their caves two million years ago. Finnegan was apparently still enough of a caveman to feel the flight instinct too, and Kirk heard the sound of the door whisking shut before Lartal unlatched the crate and let him out.

  Kirk gasped for air and climbed out, clutching the back of a chair for support.

  “It is a ZanpantzarrRak, isn’t it?” Lartal asked excitedly.

  “I don’t know—I don’t know what that means,” Kirk said, still panting.

  “You and the other. A chase. A game you are playing.” Lartal’s tail wagged quickly.

  Kirk nodded. “Kind of.”

  Lartal frowned. “Is he your mate, then?”

  “What? No,” Kirk said. What a weird question.

  The door to the conference room slid open, and Uhura stepped through.

  “Kirk? What in the world is going on? The conference room looks like a tornado blew through.” Behind her, Kirk and Lartal could see the linguistics team and the other two Varkolak surveying the damage.

  “He has been playing at ZanpantzarrRak!” Lartal pushed past Uhura to speak animatedly in Varkolak to his companions in the other room. The linguists, excited to hear so much natural speech, quickly set to activating the big computer they brought with them as the door slid shut.

  “Kirk? What’s going on?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Kirk told her. “And it’s not a big deal. The Varkolak don’t seem to care, anyway.”

  Kirk thought Uhura would read him the riot act, but she was staring instead into the open luggage crate. She glanced back at Kirk, reached in, and pulled out a Varkolak scanner. It must have been one of the things in the bottom of the crate poking him in the back.

  Uhura slipped the scanner into her satchel and snapped it shut.

  Kirk was incredulous. “Wait a minute, Uhura,” he whispered. “You can’t just—”

  The door to the conference room opened again, and one of the linguistics officers stood in the doorway.

  “Cadet Uhura, we’re ready to begin. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Kirk opened his mouth to say something, but Uhura cut him off with a pleading look. When the linguistics officer turned away, Kirk grabbed Uhur
a’s arm and held her back. “Uhura, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Later, Kirk,” she whispered back. “I promise I’ll explain everything. Please.”

  Kirk let her go and said nothing more about it, but this one was going to need some serious explaining. And soon.

  CH.15.30

  Cloak and Dagger

  Kirk hurried around the side of the building to catch Uhura before she slipped away. He was doing a lot of running and chasing lately, he realized, only this time it was deadly serious.

  He caught her jogging the back way toward the dorms and ran her down, grabbing her arm again to stop her.

  “Hold up, Uhura. We have to talk.”

  “I said later, Kirk!” she whispered.

  “It is later. Look, I didn’t say a word back there the whole time you and everybody else were with Lartal, because I know you, Uhura. At least I thought I did. But I can’t just let this go.”

  Uhura glanced around to see if anyone was watching them. There was a Starfleet Security officer heading across the quad toward the communications building, but she hadn’t seen Uhura and Kirk yet. Uhura huffed and pulled Kirk behind a statue of Yuri Gagarin, where they wouldn’t be seen. Kirk put a hand to her satchel to unlatch it, but she wouldn’t let him.

  “Don’t.”

  “This is not cool, Uhura. What you did … It’s not right. No matter why you did it. Do you really think stealing one of those things is going to make that much difference for Starfleet?”

  “I didn’t steal it to turn over to Starfleet. Not directly.”

  Kirk raised his palms as if to say, “Why, then?”

  “I can’t tell you. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “I’m going to need a little more than that, Uhura. Starfleet doesn’t just go around stealing from our guests, no matter how guilty we think they are. There’s a high moral ground here, and the Federation owns a house with a view on it. You know what happens if it gets out you stole that thing? We’re talking interplanetary war here!”