Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

  Crack!

  Kirk jumped back as he got a jolt, but it worked: The hot-wired door hissed open. Nadja turned, surprised, and went for her phaser. Kirk dove in after her and slammed her back into the console. The phaser skittered away. Kirk grabbed Nadja’s wrists, and they wrestled in the small space, unable to do much more than elbow and knee each other.

  “Give up!” Kirk told her. “There’s still time to make this right!”

  “I’d … rather … die!” Nadja told him. She worked a hand free and mashed at the emergency launch override controls behind her.

  Red lights flashed. “Warning,” the computer said. “Rear escape-pod hatch is ajar.”

  Kirk looked down at Nadja, wide-eyed. “Don’t,” he told her.

  “Computer, override safeties,” Nadja said. “Launch escape pod!”

  Kirk had just enough time to throw himself at the station before the escape pod exploded away underneath them. With one hand he grabbed a handrail just inside the door. With the other, he held on tight to Nadja, keeping her from being sucked out into space with the pod as all the air in the room rushed out.

  Kirk’s Starfleet space survival training kicked in. He had about fifteen seconds if he did everything right. He breathed out the air in his lungs so the quick depressurization wouldn’t expand and force air into his blood, but that meant he had even less time before he blacked out. He would take the trade. Kirk could already feel the saliva in his mouth heating up as the superquick reduction in air pressure lowered the boiling point of his bodily fluids below his body temperature, but the depressurization had one benefit, at least. Now that all the air was replaced with vacuum, it made hauling himself and Nadja back inside easier. He dragged the already unconscious Nadja back over the sill, then pulled himself up over the handrail, and touched the spork to the exposed leads in the door panel.

  With a silent spark and a jolt Kirk could barely feel, the door slammed shut. He slumped to the floor, and the emergency systems repressurized the room, flooding it with breathable air again. Sweet, glorious air.

  Kirk wasn’t sure how long his communicator had been chirping at him when he finally realized it and worked it out of his pocket. His fingers were swollen and bruised from the blood vessels that had burst just under his skin, and as feeling returned to him, he knew he must be black and blue all over.

  He flipped his communicator open and listened, too tired to even say hello.

  “Jim! Jim, it’s me,” said Bones. “I did it! I defused the bomb! Did you get Nadja?”

  Kirk nodded, then realized Bones couldn’t hear that. “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “Jim? Are you all right?”

  “No,” he said. “Escape pods. Vacuum.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Bones said.

  Kirk let his arm drop. You do that, he thought. He turned to look at the bruised and unconscious Nadja Luther and realized he still had the spork in his other hand. He flopped an arm over onto Nadja and touched her with it.

  “Tag,” he told her. “I win.”

  CH.30.30

  Mating Season

  “Sit down,” Admiral Barnett told them, and Spock and Uhura sat down.

  “Admiral, before you begin, I’d just like to apologize for my part in giving the Varkolak sniffer to Nadja Luther,” Uhura said. “I take full responsibility, and I’m prepared to tender my resignation from the Academy.”

  Admiral Barnett waved her confession away. “You were acting as an agent of the Federation, Cadet. Besides, you had no way of knowing the Varkolak device would be used for anything like that.”

  “As I have told you,” Spock said to her. “In addition to the fact that you almost single-handedly averted an interplanetary war.”

  “Yes,” Barnett said. “There’s that too. Damn good work, Cadet. Both of you. You’ve made the Academy look very good today. Very good, indeed. You’ll both be receiving commendations on your records.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Spock.

  “What about Nadja Luther?” Uhura asked.

  Barnett frowned. “Not such a good day for the Academy. But rest assured that she’ll go to prison for a long time for her crimes.”

  “And what of the Graviton Society?” Spock asked.

  Barnett restacked the PADDs on his desk. “It’s being looked into.”

  Uhura and Spock exchanged doubtful glances.

  “With all due respect, sir,” Uhura said, “but it’s been ‘looked into.’ That’s what Spock and I were doing.”

  “There is a clear and present danger, Admiral,” said Spock. “Left unchecked, the Graviton Society might grow into something far more dangerous. Nadja Luther is a disturbing case in point.”

  “Nadja Luther was a rogue agent. You’ve said so yourself in your report,” Barnett said.

  “Admiral—” Uhura began.

  Barnett held up a hand. “You are hereby under orders not to mention the Graviton Society or to pursue this matter any further. Either of you. Is that understood?”

  Uhura couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She looked to Spock. One of his eyebrows was raised higher than she ever thought it possible for an eyebrow to rise.

  “I was asked to investigate the Graviton Society at Captain Pike’s request,” Spock told Barnett.

  “And I’m an admiral, and I’m telling you to drop it,” Barnett replied. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Damn it. Do you two realize how many current Starfleet officers were members of the Graviton Society when they were cadets? Still are members?”

  “Were you a member, Admiral?” Uhura asked.

  “You’re out of line, Cadet.” He leaned back in his chair. “You have your orders. Both of you. Dismissed.”

  Uhura began to stand, but Spock stayed in his seat.

  “I am afraid I am unable to comply, Admiral,” Spock said.

  Uhura couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Apparently neither could the admiral. He blinked in confusion, like Spock had just confessed to being an undercover Romulan.

  “Are you—are you disobeying a direct order, Commander?” he asked finally.

  “No, sir. Or rather, I disobeyed it before it was given. I cannot go back in time and alter history; thus, I am unable now to comply.”

  Barnett frowned, trying to understand what Spock was telling him. “You mean … you’ve already done something? About the society?”

  “Yes, sir. I communicated the group’s existence and complicity in this matter to the Federation News Service. Along with the names of everyone we discovered were members of the Graviton Society. I believe the news is already circulating on the feeds.”

  Barnett was apoplectic. “No one gave you an order to release that information, Commander!”

  “And no one gave me an order not to. Until now. My apologies.”

  Uhura almost laughed at Spock’s half-hearted apology, but she knew it would only make things worse.

  “Out,” Barnett told them. “Just … get out.”

  This time they both left as quickly as they could. When they were finally outside in the bright sunshine of the California afternoon, Uhura took Spock’s arm in hers.

  “That was pretty devious, Spock.”

  “I suspected our discoveries might be covered up at some point, so I took prohibitive action. The only thing that can erase a shadow is light.”

  Uhura laughed. “Remind me never to get on your bad side, Spock.”

  “Nyota, never get on my bad side.”

  Uhura brought them to a stop. “Spock, was that a joke?”

  “A small one. Yes.”

  Uhura smiled. Maybe there was hope for them yet.

  Proximity alerts went off and red lights flashed as Sulu steered the USS Yorktown between two shuttle-sized asteroids. He winced as one of them glanced off the underside of the ship, jolting them, but he quickly forgot about it as phaser blasts from the pursuing Romulan scout ships rocked them harder.

  “Shields down to fifty-one percent!” Chekov cried from the seat b
eside Sulu at the conn.

  “Return fire!” Tikhonov yelled from the captain’s chair. “Full power to aft shields!”

  “Aye, aye, aye,” Chekov muttered. “If the phasers don’t get us, the asteroids will.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” Sulu told him, swinging the Yorktown out of the way of a space station–sized asteroid.

  “Stay away from the big ones!” Tikhonov cried.

  “Yeah, thanks for the advice,” Sulu whispered.

  A series of phaser blasts knocked them around, and a part of Sulu’s console sparked. He waved the smoke away and tapped at it, a pit of dread forming in his stomach.

  “We’ve lost impulse engines!” he announced. “Thrusters only!”

  “We’re dead,” Tikhonov said.

  “No,” said Sulu. He pointed to an enormous asteroid on the viewscreen. “Chekov, what’s the mass of that asteroid? The big one there?”

  “Its mass?” Chekov tapped at his sensor readout. “Four times ten to the sixteenth kilograms. I suggest we not run into it.”

  “I’m not planning to,” Sulu said, but his actions proved otherwise. He heard Chekov gasp beside him as he used the Yorktown’s existing impulse inertia and the ship’s thrusters to aim straight for it, ignoring the smaller asteroids that banged off the shields and hull on the way.

  “No, no!” Tikhonov cried. “I said stay away from the big ones!”

  “We’re going to turn,” Sulu announced. “You might want to put all energy to the port shields.”

  “I—” Tikhonov said, ready to argue, but as the asteroid loomed large in front of them, Sulu hit the forward starboard thrusters and the aft port thrusters hard, swinging the back end of the Yorktown around the orbit of the asteroid, like a car losing its back wheels on wet pavement. The asteroid stayed in front of them the whole time as they swung around it, but their port side was exposed to the still-attacking Romulan ships.

  “Energy to port shields, aye!” Chekov said.

  The Romulan ships peppered them with phaser shots, but soon they were behind the moon-sized asteroid, and Sulu hit the forward thrusters, pushing them backward away from the asteroid—and backward out of the asteroid belt.

  “You used the asteroid’s gravity to propel us out!” Chekov cried.

  It had worked, but Sulu knew they weren’t out of the woods yet. On the viewscreen ahead of them, the Romulan scout ships dipped under and around the giant asteroid and came straight at them.

  “Go to warp! Go to warp!” Tikhonov said.

  Sulu was already laying in the coordinates. As soon as the Yorktown’s nose went below the outer edge of the asteroid field, he punched it, the starfield in front of them streaking away to a blur.

  The viewscreen went black, and the red-alert sirens stopped as the simulation ended and the lights came up. The sim crew breathed its usual sigh of relief, and Tikhonov celebrated.

  “We did it!”

  Chekov turned to shake Sulu’s hand.

  “Fantastic!” Chekov said.

  Sulu grinned. “Thanks.”

  The door to the observation room opened, and an Academy instructor came in the room. “Nice job,” she said. “Particularly there at the end.”

  “It was a simple matter of physics,” Tikhonov said. “I knew that if we—”

  “Actually, that was my idea,” Sulu said, speaking up. “We didn’t have impulse engines anymore, but we still had the forward momentum. All we needed was a little help from our big friend there. We didn’t have time to talk about it, so I just did it.”

  “Nice job, Mr.”—the commander checked her PADD—“Sulu. And well done, everyone. You’re dismissed.”

  Tikhonov wasn’t thrilled about Sulu taking the credit for the maneuver, he could tell, but he was happy to tell everyone about all the other brilliant decisions he’d made as he escorted them out. At the lockers outside, Chekov congratulated Sulu again—this time for not letting Tikhonov hog all the credit.

  “Well,” Chekov said. “Good-bye until next class, then.”

  “Pavel, wait,” Sulu said, catching the young cadet before he was gone. “Did you hear about this Assassination Game, where cadets run around trying to ‘kill’ one another with sporks from the cafeteria?”

  “Aye,” Chekov said. “But it is over. The admiral made them stop.”

  Sulu put his arm around Chekov’s shoulder. “He made them stop. But not us. What do you say we start our own?”

  “I say, we can do this! But are you sure? You are always saying you do not have the time for such things.”

  “Plans change,” Sulu said. “Now, what do you think about water pistols as weapons …?”

  Kirk and Bones got some strange looks on the trolley. Perhaps not surprisingly, they had one whole side of it to themselves, too.

  Kirk was sure it had nothing to do with the Varkolak sitting between them.

  Lartal’s tongue lolled out the side of his mouth as the streetcar rattled up and down San Francisco’s hills, and Kirk suddenly had visions of a dog hanging its head out the window of a car, tail wagging, tongue flapping in the wind. He smiled to himself, then tried his best to put the thought away. Very, very far away.

  The streetcar came to a stop outside the Dragon Gate, and the conductor announced the stop: Chinatown.

  “This is us,” Kirk told them.

  “You think she is here?” Lartal asked Kirk when they were out on the sidewalk.

  “Look. I started to think about it,” Kirk told him. “You triangulated her position. You know she’s inside a twenty-five-square-block radius. But that’s a lot of ground to cover, especially since you …” Kirk looked for a polite way to put it.

  “Were recently public enemy number one,” Bones filled in.

  “Thanks, Bones.”

  Bones shrugged, as if to say, Well? Am I wrong?

  “So, you can’t just go roaming around the city again, or you might cause a riot. But I got to thinking, the way you track is by sense of smell, isn’t it?”

  “Mostly,” Lartal said.

  “So once your mate picked a planet to hide on, she would choose some place crowded to lay low, where she’d be hard to find. And,” Kirk said, waving a hand at the Dragon Gate, “some place with lots of new smells to mask her scent.”

  Lartal sniffed at the air with his snout. Even from here, Kirk could smell roast duck and incense, bundled herbs and rotting vegetables, baking fortune cookies, ramen and dim sum.

  “Yes!” Lartal said, taking off at a run. “She is here!”

  “Whoa! Hey!” Kirk called, but Lartal wouldn’t be stopped. Instead, Kirk and Bones ran with him as best they could as he followed his nose through the neighborhood. He would stop to sniff at a lamppost or a fire hydrant, then be off again just as quickly, following a scent.

  “For crying out loud,” Bones said as he pulled up panting alongside Kirk on one of their frequent stops. “The only thing I can smell anymore is the garbage.”

  Kirk had to agree. Chinatown might be full of wonderous sights and smells, but it was equally full of disgusting ones. And it didn’t help that it was apparently trash collection day.

  Lartal’s nose led them to Portsmouth Square, the big public park in the heart of Chinatown. The place was full of people of all races and species. A group of Andorians practiced ushaan-to beside Chinese San Franciscans doing tai chi. Some Rigelians played Frisbee, and an aged Vulcan and a human child played three-dimensional chess.

  Lartal slid off into the trees.

  “Wait a minute, what’s he—” Bones started to say, but Kirk shushed him, pointing.

  Sitting on a bench beneath the statue of the Goddess of Democracy was someone in a dark brown cloak that covered her face.

  And most of her tail.

  She sat on the bench reading a PADD as Lartal stalked closer. Before either Kirk or Bones could gasp, she was up and running, Lartal at her heels. But she wasn’t running the way you ran when you wanted to get away from somebody; she was runni
ng the way you did when you were playing with them, leading them on a chase. She wove in and out of souvenir stalls and food carts, jumped benches and retaining walls, scattered bocce players and jugglers.

  Lartal finally caught up with her in the middle of a grassy lawn, bowling her over and nipping at her, like two dogs at play. Kirk and Bones ran up to where they lay, still pawing and wrestling with each other, and Kirk suddenly got the feeling he was intruding on something private.

  “Bones, wait,” Kirk said. “Maybe we should just, you know …” He nodded away from them.

  “Wait!” Lartal said, laughing. “Kirk, meet my mate, Gren.”

  The two Varkolak got up from the ground and tried to make themselves presentable. When her cloak was shed, Kirk saw that Gren’s fur was a startling white with gray-brown patches, almost a complement to Lartal’s patterning. Her face was thinner and longer, her tail bushier and shorter, and, though it seemed strange for Kirk to think it, she was altogether rather beautiful.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” Gren said, giving Kirk her paw.

  “My friend Bones,” Kirk said. Gren’s eyes grew wide at the word.

  “Leonard McCoy,” Bones told her. “Nice to meet you.”

  Lartal and Gren nipped and nuzzled each other, and Kirk definitely began to feel like he and Bones were a third nacelle.

  “So, we’ll just leave you alone so you can have some privacy, then,” Kirk said, realizing that there was little privacy to be had in the middle of Portsmouth Square. “Although, you might want to try those trees over there …”

  Lartal laughed. “The trees, Kirk?”

  Kirk groaned. If Lartal and his mate did what he thought they were about to do, it would be an interplanetary incident all over again.

  “Come on, Lartal,” Gren told him. “I have a room at the Huntington.”

  “The Huntington?” Kirk asked. That was one of the oldest, fanciest hotels in San Francisco.