Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

  Nadja relaxed and put down the laser welder. “No. I—Sorry. You startled me. I thought I was alone. What are you doing here?”

  “Got out of jail, and you were the first person I wanted to see.”

  “Oh. Right. I’m glad you’re out.”

  McCoy had hoped for a bit warmer reception than that, but she was probably still recovering from the release of epinephrine from her adrenal glands, which his shock had given her.

  “Come on. I’ve got a bottle of wine and a picnic basket waiting back in the control room,” McCoy told her.

  “Let me just get my things,” she said. She pulled a tool bag from the Jefferies tube and sealed it back up.

  “What were you working on?”

  “Nothing important. A faulty ODN relay. Thought I’d save the SCE a trip to install a few feet of new conduit. You know, they charge you by the hour,” she joked. She slipped an arm through McCoy’s. “Come on. Let’s go celebrate your release from captivity.”

  Secrets within secrets within secrets. Kirk was so tired of chasing shadows. But how could he get a straight answer out of anyone when he couldn’t find them? He’d tried Uhura’s communicator all day, but she was clearly avoiding him—and there was no way he was going to chance going back to her dorm room to look for her. Resisting Gaila’s charms twice in one week would be impossible, even for a Vulcan.

  So when Kirk saw Daagen in the Academy dining hall that afternoon, he decided he was done playing games. He marched right up to the table where Daagen sat with two human cadets.

  “You. Daagen,” Kirk said. “It’s time to talk.”

  The Tellarite turned his pig nose up at him. “I know you,” he said. “I knitted your leg bone back together. If you’ve come for a checkup, I’m on call at 1600 hours.”

  “I know all about your little secret society, Daagen.”

  Two cadets from the next table over turned to look. Daagen smiled and poked at what was left of his lunch with a spork.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Kirk planted both hands on the table so forcefully, it rattled their trays and made their drinks slosh. Daagen’s two buddies slid out their chairs and stood menacingly, but Daagen waved them back into their seats.

  “No need for any more spectacle than there already is,” he told them. They sat, and Daagen smiled up at Kirk. “Have I done something to offend you, Cadet … Kirk, was it?”

  “You’re messing with my friend. Leonard McCoy. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

  “Oh, yes. Unfortunately. You’re right if you think I dislike him. But I’m not ‘messing with him,’ as you put it. Nor are any of my friends,” he said cagily.

  “You mean your Graviton Society buddies,” Kirk said. He honestly didn’t know much more than that, but that little nugget had made Daagen’s buddies squirm. The Tellarite was made of sterner stuff, though.

  “Again, neither I nor any of my fellow cadets have attempted in any way to interfere with Dr. McCoy. It is he who has been interfering with us.”

  “Because you’re trying to start a war between the Federation and the Varkolak. Because you’re hurting innocent people.”

  “Please,” Daagen said.

  “You stole Nadja Luther’s communicator and used it to get rid of Bones, so you could use his password and taint the evidence to point the finger for the shuttle explosion at the Varkolak.”

  “I was in space that night. On duty at the Argos telescope. You can look it up.”

  “Fine. One of your minions, then,” Kirk said. “You set up Bones, in case Starfleet discovered what you’d done, to put the suspicion on him. When that didn’t work, you set another bomb, using that Varkolak sniffer.”

  “What Varkolak sniffer?” Daagen asked, all trace of humor gone.

  “That scanning device you had stolen from them. You used it as the detonator on that bomb at the conference, to pin it on the Varkolak. To drag us into a war. What I want to know is, why?”

  Daagen stood. Even hunched over the table, Kirk was still taller than the Tellarite.

  “Are you saying Starfleet has evidence of Varkolak involvement in the second explosion, and they haven’t said so?”

  “You know damn well they do, because you put it there!” Kirk told him. But he was beginning to have his doubts even as he said it. Daagen was no longer staring at him defiantly. Instead, his quick, dark eyes looked this way and that as he absorbed what Kirk was telling him. Kirk suddenly worried he’d been wrong—and that he’d just given this stupid secret society insider information Starfleet Security was obviously looking to keep under wraps.

  “This is very interesting news,” Daagen said. “Very interesting, indeed.”

  “It’s not news. Not to you, Daagen.”

  “Oh, but it is, I assure you, Cadet Kirk. And very interesting news, indeed. Something that should be shared with the Federation News Service, I think. Don’t you? After all, if we’re about to go to war with the Varkolak, we ought to know why.”

  Kirk had been a fool. He saw that now. If Daagen and his group had planted the Varkolak sniffer, they wouldn’t have waited for Starfleet to announce a Varkolak device had been recovered. They would have leaked it to the interplanetary news services right away. Just like they were about to do right now.

  “You didn’t plant that bomb, did you?” Kirk said.

  “You’ve told me the truth, Kirk—a very valuable truth. So let me share one of my own. My friends and I,” he said, clearly meaning the Graviton Society, but without truly acknowledging their existence, “believe in the Federation. We love it, and we want to see it prosper. We would never do anything that would harm it, or any of its citizens—no matter how misguided they are. We want a stronger Federation, Mr. Kirk. Not a weaker one. And now I think I shall go and strengthen it considerably by rallying it against a common foe.”

  Daagen’s buddies got up, smiling, and they left the dining hall. Kirk sat at their table, thinking it all over. He’d been so sure Daagen was behind all this. Bones had been so sure too. But Daagen’s argument made sense. And when the story about the Varkolak sniffer hit the news within the hour, it would prove Daagen hadn’t known about the sniffer in the first place. If he had, why sit on the story? Daagen was a jerk, and his stupid secret society was a joke, but Kirk believed him when he said he hadn’t engineered any of this. But if not him, who?

  Across the dining hall, Kirk spotted Braxim, the big Xannon cadet. He was just finishing sweeping the last of his lunch into the recycling bins. Kirk felt the Starfleet badge in his pocket—the one with Braxim’s name on it—and snatched up a spork from Daagen’s tray. He’d had bigger things to worry about lately, but when opportunity came knocking, you didn’t ignore it.

  Kirk hurried after Braxim and caught up with him on the sidewalk back to the dorms. Alone.

  “Brax! Hey, Brax, buddy. You forgot your spork.”

  “Huh? But the spork I used belongs in the—”

  Kirk tapped the spork to Braxim’s chest, and the big Xannon’s eyes grew wide, understanding. He laughed, bellowing so loud, Kirk was sure they could hear him across the bay in San Francisco.

  “Excellent!” Braxim said. “Most excellent! I was very close, I think, but you have bested me. I yield, sir.” Braxim pounded his chest the way Xannons liked to do, smiling. That was one of the reasons Kirk liked Braxim so much. To the big guy, everything about life was entertaining, even getting beat—which, admittedly, didn’t happen very often for him. But Braxim was just about the best sport in the galaxy.

  “Here,” he said. He pulled another cadet’s badge out of his pocket and gave it to Kirk. “I wish you all success. I have not been able to track my target down, despite two days with no classes. She’s always sneaking off some place.”

  Kirk took a look at the name, then grinned. Winning this was going to be easier than he thought.

  Kirk’s communicator chimed, and he flipped it open. It was Chekov. He had something.

&nbs
p; “I’ll be right there,” Kirk told him. “I’ve gotta go, Brax. Buy you a drink later at the Warp Core?”

  “I accept!” the big Xannon said, and he walked off, shaking his head and laughing.

  “What have you got for me?” Kirk asked.

  Chekov was excited. Geeked out, you might say. Whatever he had, Kirk knew it was big.

  “It took me some time, but I was able to reverse master the message,” Chekov told him. He sat down at the computer in his room, where ten different windows were open with equalizers and graphs and strings of numbers.

  “So, you can prove someone scrambled their own voice to sound like Nadja Luther?”

  “Oh yes. It was very advanced work, too,” he said, butchering his Vs. Kirk tried not to smile. “To work backward, I actually isolated the baseline and ran it through a modified version of the universal translator. Then I ported it back through a—”

  Kirk waved him off. “Chekov, cut to the chase.”

  Chekov frowned, not understanding.

  “Just play it.”

  “Oh! Yes. All right.” Chekov tapped his screen, and the same message played again in Nadja Luther’s voice.

  “No, not the masked one,” Kirk told him. “I want to hear the original one. The one you un masked.”

  Chekov was practically bouncing in his seat. “That is the one I unmasked.” Kirk didn’t quite understand what the young cadet was saying, and Chekov clarified it for him. “This is the original. This is what was first recorded and then scrambled.”

  “But … but that’s Nadja’s voice. It sounds just like the message left on Bones’s communicator.”

  “Not exactly, but close enough to fool him into thinking it was her voice, yes.”

  “It was Nadja?”

  “Yes! With just enough digital noise to make somebody like me think it was someone else’s voice being masked. It is a very clever piece of engineering.”

  Kirk sat back on Chekov’s bed. Nadja Luther used a voice masker to hide the fact that she was using her own voice? Nadja had left the message on McCoy’s communicator, then denied it to his face? But why?

  There was only one reason Kirk could think of, and he didn’t like it. But the more and more he thought about it, the pieces began to fit together. He pulled the badge he’d won off Braxim out of his pocket. What was it Braxim just told him? I haven’t been able to track her down. She’s always sneaking off someplace. He flipped it over and read the name on the back again: Nadja Luther. Nadja Luther, who’d been sneaking around. Nadja Luther, who’d been pulling Bones’s strings.

  Nadja Luther, who’d been orchestrating everything from the very beginning.

  CH.24.30

  Red Alert

  “Let’s be frank here,” said Captain Littlejohn. “We may be looking at the end of the Academy.”

  Littlejohn’s statement was met with a great deal of muttering and open dissent around the faculty table. Spock, as usual in these unnecessarily contentious faculty meetings, held his tongue.

  “Preposterous,” said Professor Usarn, an Illyrian. “The end of the Academy? This institution has existed for almost a hundred years, and it survived worse crises than this.”

  “All I’m saying,” Littlejohn said over a new round of arguing, “all I’m saying is that when we go to war with the Varkolak, we’re not going to have the luxury of training cadets. They’ll be thrown into service on starships as soon as they sign up.”

  “If we go to war,” said Captain Martinez.

  “If? If, Captain?” said Commander Naan. “Have you seen the latest feeds? The explosion at the medical conference’s opening was detonated with a Varkolak device! It must be war!”

  Spock had seen the FNS news feed just before the faculty meeting. The word that a Varkolak scanning device had been used to trigger the explosion was finally out, though it did not sound as though the announcement had come from Starfleet itself. A leak, then. Spock had too little information to hypothesize who had released the information, but he certainly knew whose cause it would help: the Graviton Society.

  Talk around the table turned to the Varkolak device and then to a heated debate over the definition and appropriate application of the term “circumstantial evidence,” which the Academy’s instructors attacked with the kind of dogged zeal only a room full of academicians could muster. Ordinarily, Spock would have enjoyed the course of the debate, but at that moment, he was more interested in an alert that had just popped up on his PADD.

  The object was on the move.

  “Come on, Spock,” Captain Shimada said. “You’re too quiet over there. Back me up on this one.”

  “I beg your pardon, but I must be excused,” Spock told the assembled faculty. He stood, gathering his things to a stunned silence. His departure was unprecedented, he knew. He alone had never missed a single second of faculty meetings in all his time at the Academy. The amazement over his departure was short-lived, though. By the time he reached the door, they were arguing among themselves again, oblivious to his absence.

  In the hallway just outside, Spock flipped open his communicator. “Cadet Uhura, the object is on the move,” he said.

  After a moment, Uhura answered, “Spock! Sulu and I are already on it.”

  “I’m outside Yi Sun-Sin Hall,” Sulu said, joining in on the communication. “I see someone. It has to be her. She’s moving in the same direction as the tracking signal.”

  “Cadet Uhura, do you have a visual?” Spock said. After the night they had spent together, it was difficult not to use her first name when speaking to her, but decorum was required.

  “I’m almost there. Wait—Yes. I have her now.”

  “Do you recognize her?”

  “Negative. She’s a cadet, that much is clear, but I don’t know her name. I’m sending you a picture.”

  Within seconds, the picture appeared on Spock’s PADD.

  “She is a senior cadet by the name of Nadja Luther,” Spock told them. He saw almost every cadet at some time or another in the simulations, and of course he remembered them all.

  “Is she the one?” Sulu asked. “Or is she just delivering it to someone else?”

  Before Spock could answer, klaxons blared in the hallways and classrooms, accompanied by flashing red lights. A campus-wide emergency. The screen of his PADD immediately filled with an official emergency broadcast signal, heralded briefly by the light blue–and-white logo of the United Federation of Planets. The logo blinked away and was replaced by the head and shoulders of Admiral Barnett.

  “Cadets and faculty, may I have your attention. I have just received word that the Varkolak Armada has entered Sector zero-zero-one. All Starfleet ships in the area are rendezvousing to intercept. Starfleet reserve officers are hereby recalled to active duty, and cadets are ordered to report to shuttle hangers and transport stations for assignment at once. The Federation is mobilizing for war.”

  The Academy faculty spilled out of the classroom where they were meeting, and the hallway erupted into chaos. As they ran past, talking and shouting, Spock finally answered Sulu’s question.

  “I do not know, Cadet. But we may have run out of time.”

  Bones was digging through the pile of clothes in his closet when Kirk came running into their dorm room.

  “Bones! Bones, it’s war. We have to report to the transporters.”

  “I know! Why do you think I’m rooting around in here for my damn blue tunic? I’m not going to show up looking like a first-year plebe in an Academy uniform. Aha!”

  Bones came up with a blue shirt that would identify him as a doctor, and sniffed at it. He recoiled at the smell, but still stripped out of his Academy reds and pulled it on.

  “Here,” Kirk said. He tossed Bones back his communicator.

  “You’re done with it? Did you figure anything about about my mystery caller?”

  “Yeah,” Kirk said. How in the world was he going to tell Bones about Nadja Luther? He had to. He knew that. But that didn’t mean it was goin
g to be any fun. Instead, he yanked out his gold command-division tunic and pulled it on over his black undershirt.

  “It was Daagen, wasn’t it?” Bones said. “The little devil.”

  “No,” Kirk said. “It wasn’t Daagen.”

  Bones waited for Kirk to go on, but Kirk pretended to be looking for something.

  “Well?” Bones said. “Don’t leave me in suspense, man! Who was it?”

  Kirk sighed. No sense putting it off any longer.

  “It was Nadja.”

  “What?”

  “Look, Bones, I’m sorry, but it’s not Daagen or anybody else who’s been messing with you all this time. It’s Nadja.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, Bones. I know you don’t want to know this, but just listen, all right? The message on your phone? The call you got that night you went out to Cavallo Point? It’s Nadja’s voice, scrambled, then modulated to sound like her voice again.”

  “But why on earth would—”

  Kirk held up a hand. “That first night you went on a date, that night you went for a walk with her dog in the park. You told me she showed up at the research lab and told you you were late, even though you could swear you weren’t.”

  “So?”

  “So, when you left, was she with you when you said your access code to the computer?”

  Bones sat down on his bed, his eyes seeing another time and another place.

  “Bones, Nadja planted that kemocite on the shuttle. She was there, on the dais, remember? She set it up not to hurt anybody, but she caused the explosion. She’s an engineer. She knows better than anybody what kemocite and plasma do when they come together. But she also knew all the kemocite would be consumed in the chain reaction, so she used a recording of your access code to sneak back into the lab and contaminate the shuttle debris. She probably had a recorder in her purse when you said your access code. She wanted Starfleet to point the finger at the Varkolak. But just in case her sabotage was discovered, she set you up to take the fall for it by sending you on that wild goose chase to Cavallo Point. She thought no one would see you. You’d be seen leaving the dorm late at night, but nobody would see where you went. You’d have no alibi in the investigation. She contaminated the shuttle debris with kemocite while you were gone, then left her communicator on Daagen’s desk and claimed she’d lost it. It was misdirection. Daagen didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”