Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

“I know! Don’t you think I know that?” Uhura said. She sat down at the base of Yuri’s statue, putting her head in her hands.

  “Is someone—is someone making you do this?” Kirk asked.

  “No.” Uhura moaned. She looked up at Kirk, as if sizing him up, though he couldn’t imagine what she was looking for in his face that she hadn’t already seen there a hundred times before. She seemed to come to some sort of new decision about him.

  “I’m working to help bring down a secret society at school.”

  “What?” Kirk sat down beside her.

  Uhura told him all about it: a secret group called the Graviton Society, dedicated to protecting the Federation at all costs. How she was working at the request of someone higher up in Starfleet—she wouldn’t say who—and how she was trying to gain more access to the organization by carrying out the first of their orders: steal a Varkolak “sniffer.”

  “Get you closer to who?” Kirk asked. “Who’s behind it all?”

  Uhura gave him one of her patented eye rolls. “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be much of a secret society now, would it?”

  It was all a bit much to believe, but then again, it was too crazy to be made up. And Kirk trusted Uhura. He might still be after her for her first name after all this time, but he counted her among his friends at the Academy. He had to believe her.

  And then there was Bones and his Federation First medical cadet. Bones had just told him he suspected this Tellarite was up to no good, and now Uhura was telling him there was a whole group, a whole society of people, up to no good at the Academy. He felt his optimistic, naive view of Starfleet come crashing down, like a starship in the atmosphere. But if this medical cadet was involved, what would he want with a Varkolak sniffer?

  “Do you know if this cadet, Daagen, is one of the Gravitons? He’s a Tellarite.”

  Uhura shook her head. “I’ve never seen any of them without cloaks on. I just don’t know.”

  Kirk stood. “I want to help. Get me an invite. I’ll go undercover with you.”

  Uhura laughed. “Ah, no.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You? Kirk, they’d see you coming a mile away. Subtlety is not your strong suit.”

  “No?” Kirk smirked. “So what is my strong suit?”

  “Your overweening arrogance.”

  Kirk pointed a finger at her. “That’s something you like. That’s one thing.”

  Uhura stood. “Please, Kirk. Just … don’t rat me out. I promise it’s for the right reasons.”

  “All right,” Kirk told her. “But I hate this cloak-and-dagger nonsense.”

  Uhura sighed. “Me too.”

  Leonard McCoy hated all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

  He’d kept an eye on Daagen all afternoon in the lab, trying to catch him doing something suspicious, and when he’d failed to do that, he’d followed him—surreptitiously, he hoped—across campus to his dorm. Now he sat on a bench across the courtyard, pretending to read something on his PADD while really watching the door for Daagen to reemerge.

  Maybe Jim was right, after all. Maybe it was crazy to think anyone who would willingly enroll in Starfleet would ever do something illicit, even if they thought it was for the greater good. Starfleet was about ideals, damn it. It was about seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no one had gone before. Not to conquer the galaxy, but to explore it. To learn from it.

  “Oh, this is just ridiculous,” he told two pigeons strutting nearby.

  McCoy cycled down his PADD and stuffed it back into his satchel. He was ready to go get something to eat in the cafeteria and forget all this stupidity when Daagen emerged from his dorm carrying a knapsack. The Tellarite looked around furtively, then headed off at a quick pace. Away from the main campus.

  McCoy cursed himself inwardly, but he followed, anyway.

  “Leonard!” someone called. It was Nadja. She was waving to him from across the quad. If she called out again, Daagen might hear her and turn around. McCoy hurried to intercept her, signaling to her to be quiet, and pulled her along behind a statue of Yuri Gagarin.

  “Whoa, reduce to impulse engines, Leonard,” she said with a laugh.

  McCoy peeked out from behind the statue. Daagen was just turning the corner of the barracks where the Varkolak were stationed. The Varkolak!

  “Come on,” McCoy told Nadja. “But be quiet.”

  “Are we hunting wabbits?” she asked as they skulked along.

  “No. Spies. Maybe. I don’t know. You know Daagen, that fellow I was telling you about? The one who gave me back your communicator? I’ve been watching him. He just left his dorm with a knapsack.”

  “Oh no. Do you think … do you think he plans on doing some knapping? Or”—she gasped exaggeratedly—“dare I say it, some sacking?”

  “Laugh all you want, but he’s up to something. I know it.”

  But whatever he was up to, it didn’t have anything to do with the Varkolak. Daagen left campus, and soon after, ducked into a public restroom. Nadja and McCoy hid in a shop across the street, watching through the front display window.

  “You wait here,” Nadja whispered. “I’ll go in and see if he’s executing secret plan number one or secret plan number two.”

  “Cut it out,” McCoy said.

  “Look, he couldn’t have anything too incriminating in that knapsack. He had to get past the security guards in the dorm just to leave with it.”

  “If you want to go back, go back,” McCoy told her.

  A cloaked figure emerged from the bathrooms, looked around, and continued down the road, away from campus. On campus, something like that would have stood out among all the redshirted cadets and their blue-uniformed instructors. On the streets around San Francisco, an intergalactic port of call, no one would bat an eye.

  “Okay, that’s suspicious,” Nadja said.

  “Do you think that was him?” McCoy asked.

  “He was the same height,” she said. “And he was carrying the same knapsack.”

  “Well? What did I tell you?” McCoy asked.

  “Lead on, secret agent man. Lead on.”

  Hikaru Sulu tugged at the oversized sleeves of his robe, feeling stupid. Why had he agreed to do this again? He sighed. He hated all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense, but at least the hood kept the others from knowing who he was. Then again, he didn’t know who they were, either. He looked around at the other nine hooded and robed people waiting with him in the dingy back room of a Sausalito dive bar. Who were these people? Did he know any of them? Were they in his classes with him? Did one of them sit next to him in exobotany? The only Graviton he knew was his contact, Daagen, a medical cadet, which was exactly how the Graviton Society wanted it.

  “We’re all here,” one of the hooded figures said. “Let’s do this. Report.”

  “Our plan to explose the mole failed,” one of them said. From his voice, Sulu recognized him as Daagen.

  “Was the information given to the suspect?”

  Everyone was quiet, and Sulu realized they were expecting him to speak. It had been his job, after all. “Oh. Um, yes. I did. I told her. Everything, just as we discussed. She bit—hook, line, and sinker.”

  “I can verify that contact was made,” said another voice; a woman. “I was in the gym that morning. I saw him engage her.”

  Sulu blanched underneath his hood. Someone had been there? Watching him? Making sure he did his job? He shook it off. He should have known better. Should have realized they would do that. He was a newbie, after all. He had to prove they could trust him.

  “Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps she’s not connected to the mole.”

  “Perhaps he’s not a mole, after all,” said another.

  “I still say he can’t be trusted. He’s Vulcan.”

  “Vulcans can be devilish creatures,” said another cool voice. “Let us not forget the P’Jem incident.”

  “That was a hundred years ago! Let it go, already!”

  “I’m just
saying,” said the cool voice that Sulu now figured was Andorian. “They have been known to be devious.”

  “It’s not that he’s a Vulcan that worries me,” said another woman. “It’s that he is the ultimate company man. He has to be a plant.”

  “He’s certainly as stiff as one,” someone joked.

  “Enough,” said the voice that had begun the proceedings. “We will have to approach the target directly. The floor is open to—”

  The wooden door to the room flew open, and a red-faced cadet with fire in his eyes came rushing in.

  “What do you think you’re doing, sneaking around in robes and hiding out in smoky backrooms?” the man demanded. “Damn it, man, you’re Starfleet cadets, not Romulan spies!”

  Stunned by the sudden explosion, Sulu took a step back. It drew the angry cadet’s attention, and he tried to whip off Sulu’s hood. Sulu reacted instinctively. He grabbed the cadet’s hand, delivered a quick but powerful chop to his stomach, then flipped him to the ground. Sulu recoiled in horror from his own actions, immediately sorry he’d hurt a fellow cadet. He looked around for some way out, wondering why the others were just standing there, when he felt the familiar tug of a transporter beam catching him up and scattering his atoms….

  Sulu rematerialized on a transporter pad he didn’t recognize. There were two other Gravitons with him on the pad, but no transporter operator. The room was empty but for the transporter’s three passengers.

  The other two stepped down off the pad and hurried for the door.

  “Wait!” Sulu called.

  One of them hung back while the other ran.

  “What’s happened? Where are we?” Sulu asked.

  “You must be the new guy,” said the Graviton. It wasn’t Daagen’s voice, nor anyone else’s he recognized. “By the looks of it, we’re in the engineering building, back on campus. We’ve always got people waiting to beam us out if we need an emergency evac. The others will have beamed back to other places. You’re safe now. Just get someplace where you can lose the robe and then head back to your dorm or wherever. I don’t know who that guy was, or how he found us, but those were some nice moves you put on him. Shields up,” he said, and hurried from the room.

  “Yeah, shields up,” Sulu said, beginning to understand that the Graviton Society was a lot bigger and a lot better organized than he had ever imagined.

  Nadja helped McCoy up from the sticky floor of the dive bar’s backroom and brushed him off.

  “Son of a bitch,” McCoy said.

  “Are you badly hurt?”

  “No. It’s not that,” he said, rubbing his stomach. Probably a hematoma of the rectus abdominis muscle, he quickly diagnosed, then reminded himself there were more pressing issues. “They transported out, the cowards. Transported out! Secret societies and their damned secret clubhouse meetings, working against everything we swore an oath to uphold—”

  Nadja pulled him into a hard, passionate kiss, and his anger about the group’s escape evaporated. When she finally let him go, he felt like he’d been caught up in a transporter beam himself and deposited in someplace entirely new, where the gravity was half that of Earth normal.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “You,” she said, not letting him go. “Charging in here, like Archer against the Xindi. You’re my hero.”

  She kissed him again, and he was transported somewhere there was no gravity at all.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” she told him.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the police?”

  “And show them what? An empty room? I can think of better ways to spend the night. I just want to do one thing first,” Nadja said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Stop by my room and get my toothbrush,” she told him with a smile.

  CH.16.30

  A Game of Chase

  James T. Kirk could barely keep his eyes open.

  It wasn’t just that he’d slept in the library all night long while Bones was entertaining a guest (Bones had certainly returned the favor plenty enough times that Kirk wasn’t put out about it). It was the medical lectures. It was bad enough he zoned out when Bones started talking medicine, but to hear these doctors get going, you’d think Bones was just a kid with one of those games that buzzed when you tried to take out the funny bone. These were some seriously heavy hitters in the interplanetary constellation of medicine, with enough data to choke a sehlat.

  Or put a layman like Kirk to sleep.

  Lartal wasn’t faring much better, although today he wasn’t dozing off. Today he was restless. He tapped his paws on the table in front of him so much the J’naii doctor beside him had to shush him, and his wagging tail thumped against the table behind him.

  Clapping snapped Kirk awake, and he realized the session was over.

  “Let’s go, Kirk. I need to move,” Lartal told him.

  Kirk couldn’t agree more. At least they would have fifteen or twenty minutes to stretch their legs before the next session began. Lartal was immediately flanked by his equally bored Varkolak escorts and then by the four just-as-bored Starfleet Security officers assigned to him for the morning. Kirk couldn’t feel too sorry for them—at least they got a shift change at lunchtime.

  Lartal’s complicated entourage made its way from the great hall slowly, just like everyone else, as two thousand nattering doctors clogged the few exits out to the lobby and the old parade grounds beyond.

  “Rather be playing chase, wouldn’t you, Kirk?” Lartal asked.

  “Anything,” Kirk said. “Anything besides this. But of course, as a doctor, you find this all terribly fascinating, I’m sure.”

  “Terribly,” Lartal growled.

  Finally, they got past the doors and into the lobby, which was loud with the echoed conversations of all the doctors. A refreshment table was set up along one side, and multiple bathroom facilities along the other wall were already drawing lines. Kirk figured Lartal would go for one or the other, but he suddenly found himself cut off from Lartal by his two big Varkolak companions.

  “Hey, guys, coming through,” Kirk said. He tried to squeeze between them, but they closed ranks even farther, keeping him from getting through.

  Kirk had a very bad feeling about this.

  He turned to Johnson, one of the two security officers behind them. “Do you have Lartal? Where is he?”

  “We’ve got him,” Johnson said confidently. He flipped open his communicator. “Forlax, you’ve got Lartal up there with you, right?”

  “What?” came the voice of Forlax over Johnson’s communicator. “No. We thought he was back there with you.”

  Johnson’s eyes went wide, and Kirk knew they were all in big, big trouble. He barreled through the two Varkolak, but Lartal wasn’t there. He jumped, trying to see over the mass of people in the room, but Lartal was nowhere to be seen.

  The two Varkolak guards snickered.

  “Stay with them!” Johnson ordered his partner and Kirk, and he moved off calling for the building to be sealed off. Kirk saw more security officers converging on the front doors, but Lartal was smart. He had to know they’d lock him in the moment they lost him, and he’d never try something so obvious as to storm the front doors. That meant he had to find some other way out …

  The stairs. Kirk thought it before he saw it, hidden away behind the lines of people queueing for the bathrooms. Ignoring the indignant cries of the people he pushed out of the way, Kirk swam through the ocean of doctors and researchers toward the far wall.

  “Sorry, people! Coming through! Bathroom emergency!” he said. That made more people get out of his way, but it was still agonizingly slow going. He finally got to the door to the stairs and pushed his way inside. The door slid closed with a quiet whomph and click, and suddenly the cacophany of the lobby was all but gone.

  And replaced by faint sound of padded feet running up stairs.

  “Lartal!” Kirk called. “Lartal, don’t do this!”

  A high-pitched, pl
ayful sound echoed down the stairwell—somewhere between a laugh and a bark—and Kirk cursed inwardly.

  Here we go again, he thought, and he took off at a run.

  Eight floors up, Kirk heard one of the stairwell’s exterior doors hissing shut, and he plowed through it. On the far side of the roof, Lartal was just dropping down over the side.

  “Damn it!” Kirk said as he ran. “I knew a tour of the building was a bad idea.”

  The assembly hall was enormous, built like a series of toy blocks stacked up in a sort of ziggurat shape. Lartal had led him straight up to the top of the stairs, and now he was going to go all the way back down, from rooftop to rooftop.

  “I thought dogs didn’t like to climb,” Kirk complained.

  He slid to a stop at the edge of the roof, looking down. Lartal’s grinning jackal face glanced up at Kirk before he leaped onto the next rooftop below, and ran for the corner of the building.

  “Lartal! This isn’t funny! If you want to play chase, we can do it in the sports complex!”

  Lartal wasn’t listening. He ran with all the pent-up energy of someone forced to sit and listen to xenobiology lectures all day. But so did Kirk. As much as he hated to admit it, he felt alive again, in his element once more. Give him action. Give him adventure. Give him danger.

  He slid down the ladder to gain ground on Lartal and hit the surface too fast, landing on the gravel rooftop elbows first.

  I hope he gets a scratched-up right elbow, he thought. No time to cry over it, though. He put his hand to it, to staunch the bleeding as he ran, but he eventually abandoned it altogether. He didn’t have time to be hurt. Lartal was already heading down the next ladder.

  Kirk followed him as fast as he could, taking this stretch more slowly, so as not to have a repeat of his fall. He saw Lartal run off toward the east side of the building, and he smiled. If he was right, the next ladder down was on the west side of the building, not the east. It was one of the ones you could see from the old parade grounds out front. He hit the rooftop and ran the opposite direction.

  “Gotcha!” Kirk cried as he rounded the corner, but he pulled up short. The ladder was there, but Lartal wasn’t. Kirk ran to the edge of the rooftop to look down. Lartal couldn’t have beaten him around two sides of the building in the time it took Kirk to turn the corner. And he hadn’t. Lartal wasn’t on the ladder, either. Had he doubled back and gone up again? But what for? Was this just a game for him, a chase to work off his restlessness or—