Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

  Uhura huffed. “Spock, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! They already have!”

  “And therein lies my confusion,” Spock explained. “Why would the Graviton Society feel the need to falsely implicate the Varkolak in the bombing if they had already done so with the detonation device?”

  At last, Uhura thought she understood. She’d seen evidence of someone trying to pin the explosion on the Varkolak, evidence not everyone knew about, and now the Graviton Society was telling Spock they wanted to try and implicate the Varkolak in some other way. But why bother if they had already set them up by using the sniffer?

  “Are you saying the Graviton Society didn’t know the sniffer was being used as the detonation device? That they didn’t set the bomb?”

  Spock walked away from her, holding his hands behind his back the way he did when he was thinking hard about something.

  “The scanning device was given to someone within the Society,” Spock said. “And yet those at the top of the organization do not know it was used in the explosion. Therefore, we must assume that someone along the line intercepted the Varkolak scanner and created a bomb with it, unknown to those in the chain above him or her.”

  “A rogue agent within the Graviton Society?” It was almost too dizzying a prospect. Wasn’t all this confusing enough without someone within the secret society doing something even more secret? “But who? And why?”

  “I do not have enough facts to draw a hypothesis, but we may assume, I think, that it is someone who regards the Graviton Society as not going far enough toward its goal.”

  That was a scary idea.

  “For all we know, the Varkolak scanning device may never even have passed beyond your contact. You have no clue as to his or her identity?” Spock asked.

  “No, although I’d wager it’s a her. Otherwise he would have had some serious explaining to do if he’d been caught in the women’s shower room.”

  “Indeed,” Spock said.

  “Wait, you said someone’s been feeding us false information,” Uhura said. “Are you sure this isn’t more of the same?”

  “Yes. This information was not passed on to me through the usual channels. It was relayed to me by … a trusted source within the group.”

  So Spock had more spies besides Uhura working for him. She’d been stupid to think he’d brought her in on this for any other reason than that the assignment required it. She felt herself getting upset again, and she put the emotion away. She still had bigger problems to deal with.

  “Spock, we have to tell the truth. I have to tell them I took that sniffer. If I don’t, it could mean war.”

  “It could mean war if you do,” Spock told her. “While Starfleet will understand when Captain Pike and I explain my mission and your involvement in it, the Varkolak will believe what they will. Or won’t, as the case may be.”

  “So what do we do, Spock? I can’t just sit on this! I have a duty, damn it! I swore an oath to uphold the laws and traditions of Starfleet. We both did. And this is breaking about twenty of them.”

  “We will tell the truth,” Spock assured her. “Together.” He paused, thinking. “But not yet.”

  He was cooking up something. Uhura could see it in his eyes, the way they were staring off into the distance without really looking at anything. She waited for him to put it all together.

  “This situation, and our particular knowledge of it, has presented us with a unique opportunity. We two are the only people within the Graviton Society who know that one of its members has gone rogue, and thus, the only two people who can exploit the situation to reveal the culprit.”

  “Exploit it? How?” Uhura asked.

  “By running, as it is called on Earth, a ‘con.’”

  The security officers in the Academy brig scanned Kirk and let him through to see Bones, who came right up to the edge of the force field to see him.

  “Jim! Jim, I’ve been framed. There’s a secret society on campus, and they—What are you doing out of the hospital? Who signed your release? Daagen? He’s part of all this!”

  “Whoa, whoa, Bones. It’s going to be all right. We’ll get to the bottom of all this,” Kirk told him, but he knew if their situations were reversed, he’d be just as frantic. Behind them, the security officers cleared another visitor, and Bones’s new main squeeze, Nadja Luther, joined them.

  “Leonard! I just heard! What in the world is going on?” she said.

  “I’ve been framed, damn it!”

  “Slow down and start from the beginning,” Kirk told him.

  “Somebody tampered with the evidence from the shuttle bombing,” Bones explained. “I know this, of course, because I’ve just been through four hours of the same damn questions over and over again. The night after the bombing, somebody went back into the lab using my voice-print identification and contaminated the debris with kemocite.”

  “The fuel the Varkolak use in their gadgets,” Kirk said.

  “It wasn’t me, of course, but three people saw me leave the dorm that night on that snipe hunt to meet Nadja at Cavallo Point.”

  “And nobody saw you there,” Nadja guessed.

  “Of course not! It was the middle of the damn night. So naturally I have an alibi that’s as full of holes as a Bolian sponge worm. And then, of course, it’s me who discovers the kemocite in the lab the next morning, like I wanted to make sure everybody found it, when I was only running it through the phoretic analyzer. I was showing initiative, damn it!”

  Kirk put up a hand to calm his friend. “Let’s go back to the phone call from Nadja. The one that got you out of the way so someone could do all this and you wouldn’t have an alibi for it.”

  “Not Nadja,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

  “No. It was Daagen, that Federation First bastard. I’m sure of it. Next morning, he comes to me, smug as a Tarkanian pig, and tells me he just happened to find it on his desk.”

  “Did you tell Starfleet Security all of this?” Kirk asked.

  “Of course I told them! But they already had their minds made up. They think I stole Nadja’s communicator and called myself with it to give myself an alibi, then left it on Daagen’s desk that night when I broke into the lab to slather kemocite all over everything.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nadja said. “What made them start looking into all this in the first place? Why assume the kemocite had been planted?”

  “Apparently kemocite and plasma don’t just go boom. They create a chain reaction until one of them is all used up. But there was kemocite and plasma on the wreckage. There shouldn’t have been both.”

  “Unless someone planted it there, after the fact,” Nadja finished for him.

  “When they figured out that little puzzle, they went back to check the access records, and here I am. But wait. That’s not the kicker. Jim, they found kemocite in our room.”

  “They what?”

  “A canister of it. From the engineering building stores. In the closet behind that case of Saurian brandy I’m also not supposed to have.” Bones raised his hands in surrender and paced his small cell.

  “Somebody’s working awfully hard to see you take the fall for this one, Bones,” Kirk told him.

  “It’s that Tellarite, Daagen. I’m sure of it. Nadja and I followed him and his buddies to some kind of secret meeting down in Sausalito, but they beamed out before we could nab one of them. He’s up to something, Jim. I told Starfleet Security all about that too, but they didn’t believe it either, the buffoons!” Bones said, raising his voice so the guards at the brig door could hear him.

  “I’ll get to the bottom of it all, Bones,” Kirk told him. “I promise.”

  “So do I,” Nadja said.

  “We should have plenty of time, too,” Kirk said. “The Academy has canceled classes and suspended the end of semester exams until all this blows over.”

  “If it does,” Nadja said. “Everybody’s buzzing there might be a war with the Varkolak.”

  “Good
god,” Bones said.

  “Yeah, you hope. But don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here, buddy,” Kirk told him. The wheels were already turning. “And the first thing I’m going to need is your communicator.”

  Kirk got a few more answers out of Bones before leaving, and promised to meet up with Nadja later to let her know what he’d learned. On the way out of the brig, he was called over to another cell, where Lartal stood by the force field, as frantic and impatient as Bones had been.

  “Kirk,” Lartal said. “I wanted to thank you. For the way you stood up for me.”

  “I owed you one. Two, maybe,” Kirk said. Lartal was still coy about whether or not he’d saved Kirk from the shuttle blast, but Kirk was pretty sure the Varkolak had saved his life twice.

  “You are a man of honor,” Lartal said. “Thank you.”

  Kirk nodded and left, feeling certain that two people in that brig were there under false arrest. He was determined to clear them both.

  CH.19.30

  The Fate of the Galaxy and All That

  “Earlier today, the Varkolak Assembly denounced the arrests, calling for the immediate release of Captain Lartal and the other members of the Varkolak contingent here on Earth, but Federation officials assert that the Varkolak will not be released, pending the outcome of their investigation into the recent bombings. At this hour, FNS has reports that Starfleet is recalling its main fleet to Sector zero-zero-one, in anticipation of an expected Varkolak armed response for the arrests made earlier today. These images, collected from the Argos telescope at the edge of Sol Sector, reveal what experts say is a massing of the Varkolak Armada near Theta Draconis. A Federation travel advisory is in effect for Sol, Mizar, Denobula, and Tellar Sectors, and Federation citizens are cautioned to—”

  Uhura switched off the Federation News Service feed on the treadmill’s viewscreen and tapped the controls, increasing her speed. She wanted to run faster. Farther. To leave all her mistakes behind. Gloomily, though, she realized the treadmill was an apt metaphor for her situation. No matter how fast and how hard she ran, she was still going nowhere.

  She glanced at the chronometer on the treadmill. It was almost 1900 hours. Time to see if she could start moving forward again. Uhura shut down the treadmill and stepped off, heading for the showers.

  The Varkolak Armada was massing near Theta Draconis, she thought as she got undressed in the changing room. That was right on the border of the Theta Cygni and Tznekethi Sectors, if she remembered her astronavigation classes. She did some quick math. At warp five, the Varkolak could be in Federation space in a matter of days. Sooner if they pushed to maximum warp. There wasn’t much time left to put things right.

  Uhura went to take a sonic shower, letting it massage the sweat off her. The Academy Sports Complex was fairly empty, with the restrictions put on cadets being out of their dorms, but she wasn’t surprised when someone got into the shower stall right next to hers and switched on the sonics. Nor was she surprised when the shadowy figure spoke to her.

  “Cadet Uhura. We understand you have something new for us.” It was the same woman who had contacted her before, and told her to steal a Varkolak sniffer. Or the same voice, at least.

  “I do,” Uhura told her. “It’s a Varkolak phaser.”

  “The Varkolak phaser technology is inferior to ours,” the woman told her.

  “I know,” Uhura told her. “But I thought it might be useful for … other purposes.”

  Uhura let her Graviton contact think about that. If she was the saboteur, she would see the opportunity immediately. If she wasn’t … Well, it wasn’t hard to imagine how a Varkolak phaser could be used to incriminate them, even if it wasn’t used for a more violent purpose.

  “You’re right,” the woman said at last. “I’ll pass it along. Where is it?”

  “Locker four ninety-two. In a satchel.”

  “Good work, Cadet. Shields up.”

  “Shields up,” Uhura warned the woman as she left her shower stall, and this time Uhura meant it.

  Kirk hurried across campus. If he’d been worried at all about the Assassination Game—which he wasn’t at the moment—it wouldn’t have mattered. The eyes of Starfleet Security officers everywhere. They were posted at the doors to the dorms, the classroom buildings, and the administration buildings. They were patrolling the old parade grounds and the paths around the quad. He got wary looks from a few of them, and one or two told him to hurry along to wherever it was he was supposed to be. But while there were security officers everywhere, the Academy’s cadets were noticably absent from the campus. It felt like a proverbial ghost town.

  It wasn’t just the threat of more attacks. There was a general feeling of foreboding in the air, like at any moment, the public viewscreens around campus would light up with a flashing red alert, calling every cadet into active duty and sending them scrambling for shuttles and transporters. It had happened once before, Kirk knew—some response to a Tholian incursion into Federation space a hundred years ago—and everyone was buzzing that it might be happening again soon.

  Kirk was stopped at the door to Nimitz Hall and asked his business there. The security officer finally cleared him, but only after scanning him with a tricorder. Kirk was fairly shocked, but if Bones was under suspicion, he supposed all cadets could be. All the more reason to get Bones cleared, pronto. He took the steps two at a time and punched a door chime.

  “Da?” asked a heavily accented Russian voice.

  “It’s Jim Kirk,” he told the intercom.

  The door slid open, and the young teenage wunderkind, Pavel Chekov, met him with a huge smile on his face.

  “Welcome!” he said. “What brings you to Nimitz Hall?”

  Kirk loved this kid. Just last semester, Kirk had tried to drown Chekov in the kid’s own room. Kirk had been infected with a neural code that had hot-wired his brain and made him do things he didn’t remember, but still … Most people would take something like that personally. Not Chekov. The kid was smiling at him like Kirk was his big brother, and Kirk found he kind of liked that Chekov thought of him that way.

  Kirk clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Chekov, I need your help.”

  “Of course! Yes! Come in!” The young cadet gestured to a pot of something violently reddish purple simmering on a hot plate. It smelled like beets and sour cream. “Would you like some borscht?”

  “Um, no, thanks, I just ate,” Kirk said. “How did you get a hot plate up to temperature to make soup?”

  “What? Oh, I made a few modifications to it. You know what they say, ‘You don’t own it until you open it.’”

  Kirk had never heard that line before, but then again, he and Chekhov didn’t exactly run in the same circles. “I need you to tell me who called my roommate’s communicator,” he said.

  Chekov frowned. “Um, forgive me, but can you not just check the call log?”

  “We know whose phone it came from, but she says it wasn’t her who called. Somebody used some software or something to imitate her voice.”

  Chekov’s eyes went wide. “Oh, yes. I see! Very clever! Very clever! But … why is your roommate recording his calls?”

  “It got pushed as a Priority One message, just in case he had his phone on standby. Somebody really wanted him to wake up and take this call.”

  “And all Priority One calls are recorded! Yes! It is clear to me now. What is the message?”

  Kirk called up the recording and played it for both of them to hear.

  “Who the hell calls at two thirty in the—”

  “Priority One call from Nadja Luther.”

  “Leonard? Leonard, it’s Nadja.”

  “Nadja? What’s wrong? Why are you calling—”

  “Leonard, I need you to meet me at Cavallo Point, right way.”

  “What? Now? Why?”

  “Please, hurry.”

  “Nadja? What’s wrong? Nadja?”

  “Priority One call ended.”

  “It’s the girl’s voice that�
�s the fake one,” Kirk said, just to be clear.

  “Oh. Aye. You can hear just a hint of distortion. But it is a very good mask. Very good indeed.”

  Kirk couldn’t hear any difference in the recorded voice and Nadja’s voice at all, but that’s why he’d come to Chekov.

  “Can you do it? Can you … back-mask it, or whatever?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think I can. I’ll have to run it through an acoustic resonance inverter and then feed the digital file to a sonic parser and then perhaps run a harmonic analysis of—”

  Kirk held up a hand. “I knew I came to the right person. Do whatever you have to do.”

  Kirk’s communicator chimed, and he flipped it open.

  “Kirk here.”

  “Jim, it’s Nadja. It’s Daagen. He’s up to something. Can you meet me behind the astrosciences building?”

  “I’ll be right there,” Kirk told her. He snapped his communicator shut and stood. “Sorry. I’ve gotta run. You’ll call me when you’ve got something? It’s kind of urgent. Fate of the galaxy and all that.”

  “I will get on it right away!” Chekov promised. He grinned, picking up a hyperspanner from the random tools and devices on his desk and spinning it in his fingers. “You don’t own it until you open it.”

  CH.20.30

  Dragons, Dog-men, and Ninjas

  Daagen was taking a field trip, and Kirk and Nadja were going with him.

  He didn’t know they were going with him, of course. But when he slipped out the back of the library by the loading dock, to avoid the security officers patrolling the campus, they followed a few minutes later. When he took the nature trail down to the harbor, so did they—fifty meters behind him. And when he took the ferry across the bay to San Francisco, they hopped into a cab to take them over the bridge, to wait for him on the other side.

  Nadja threw her backpack in next to Kirk, and they were off.

  “What’s he doing, going into the city?” Kirk asked.

  “Nothing good, I’ll wager,” Nadja said.