“You’re not qualified to make that ruling, sir,” Tancreda replied. “I’m aware of all your accomplishments, but you’re not a criminal psychologist.”
“And you, Doctor, are not a Vulcan. Your insights, while well reasoned, will forever come from an alien standpoint.” He paused. “As long as Valeris remains a prisoner here on Jaros II, she will never have what she requires to move on in her life.”
“And that is?”
“An opportunity to redeem herself. Without it, she remains trapped in that moment.”
The Betazoid woman folded her arms and eyed him harshly. “Redemption? That’s a rather human conceit, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “Nevertheless, it is applicable in this matter.”
“Do you know what I think?”
“I am certain you will tell me.”
Tancreda met his gaze. “I think your line of reasoning is flawed, on a fundamental level, and that flaw stems from your personal guilt over the mistakes you made in your relationship with Valeris.” She took a step closer. “You assume that, if offered the opportunity, Valeris would take a different path from the one she did seven years ago. But what guarantee do you have that she will not betray the ideals of the Federation all over again?”
A memory unfolded in Spock’s mind, sudden and clear, as if it had happened only moments ago. His cabin aboard the Enterprise, as the ship approached the Neutral Zone to rendezvous with Kronos One. Valeris there, speaking in veiled terms of “turning points,” with a subtext concealed beneath her words that he failed to properly interpret. His reply to her in that moment returned to him, and he echoed it to Tancreda. “We must have faith.”
The doctor’s expression grew cold. “That will never be enough,” she told him.
Spock watched her vanish back into the shadows surrounding the landing pad.
Tancreda didn’t glance up as she heard the shuttle hum past overhead on its impulse thrusters. Instead, she moved with quick purpose to the administration block where her office was located. At this time of night, only one or two rooms were illuminated as some of her colleagues worked long shifts. Unnoticed, she slipped in and secured the door.
Taking a seat at her desk, she drew a small case from beneath her tunic. She kept it concealed in her personal quarters, and after what had taken place today, the doctor’s caution had proven prudent. A scan of the case with a tricorder would reveal a few personal votive items of Betazoid religious significance, but the actual contents were much different.
There was a dense isolinear memory drive that contained additional copies of all her case files—Valeris’s included—as well as material covertly duplicated from the databases of several of her colleagues; a phaser small enough to conceal in the palm of her hand; and a module that she now removed and slotted into the front of the monitor unit on her desk.
The module made quick work of tapping into the facility’s subspace communications gear, erasing any trace of its passage as it went. After a few seconds it asked Tancreda for a code, which she provided, and then opened a link across the interstellar void. With the device in place, there would be no record of the transmission or what it contained.
The screen showed a bald human male seated at a plain desk. He wore a dark tunic that had no insignia, although the cut of it recalled that of a uniform. “Hello, Malla,” he began. “I thought we might be hearing from you.”
“Hello, Control,” she said, frowning. She wasted no time on preamble. “You knew about this? I should have been warned.”
He shook his head. “No. It was better for your reactions to be authentic. What did Miller learn from the subject?”
“I have no idea,” Tancreda told him. “Miller decided to take Valeris with him aboard the Excelsior. I believe Ambassador Spock used his influence to smooth the path.”
The man on the screen leaned back in his chair. “Ah. We knew that was a possibility, but . . .” He considered it for a moment. “We’ll have to adjust. I’ll contact our operative on Sulu’s ship. They’ll pick up the observation from there.”
“Valeris wanted my case files, and Miller gave them up. The data has been purged, but I still have duplicates.”
“Good work, Malla. As thorough as ever.”
She looked away. “So. What next?”
He leaned in, filling the screen. “Execute your mission shutdown protocols. Leave the surveillance devices and data-taps in place. Tomorrow morning, you’ll have transfer orders, fresh from Starfleet Medical. We’ll get you back here, conduct a full debrief in person, and reassign you.”
Tancreda blew out a breath. “That’s it? I’m done here?”
He nodded, as if the question was a surprise. “Of course.”
“What’s going to happen to Valeris?”
“For the moment, that’s not your concern.” The man on the screen reached for the disconnect key. “But we’ll be watching her.”
U.S.S. Excelsior NCC-2000
En Route to the Klingon Neutral Zone
United Federation of Planets
The starship’s observation lounge was an elegant affair, a long room that followed the curve of the back of the bridge “island” atop the saucer-shaped primary hull. Through a line of large, circular portals that stretched from the deck to the overhead, Miller could look out down the length of Excelsior’s command section and out to the glowing spars of the warp engines. Stars, turned to streaks of light by incredible velocities, fell past him as the ship raced toward the Klingon border. Staring at them, he became aware of the sense of falling, as if the vessel and everything aboard it were plunging down a tunnel toward an unknown fate.
He dismissed the thought with a curl of his lip and turned away just as the door across the room opened to admit Lieutenant Vaughn.
The young officer had done a good job of rising to the challenge Miller had set before him, but it was clear he was also feeling the pressure of it. The commander noted the faint edge of nervous energy about the man; Miller had thrown him in at the deep end, and so far Vaughn had kept his head above water.
He’d meant what he said back at the starbase: someone sharp enough to find the Kallisti link would certainly be an asset to him. If he was honest, at the start he had given Vaughn’s suggestion a fifty-fifty chance of panning out, but even those odds were better than what he’d had before. The commander had good instincts, and he’d learned the hard way that ignoring them was usually a bad idea: those instincts had told him that the lieutenant was onto something.
But Miller was under no illusions to the fact that he had kicked over a hornet’s nest with Commander Egan and the OIE with his impromptu recruitment of one of their officers. Egan actually had the temerity to demand that Vaughn be placed on a shuttle back to Earth and Miller be put on report for his actions. Commodore Hallstrom had apparently taken those suggestions “under advisement.”
Miller argued the point; he’d originally intended to draw someone from Sulu’s crew to assist him, but even the best of them didn’t fit the bill as well as Vaughn did. He recalled something his mother had once told him about moments of providence: only a fool would stand by and let one pass when the opportunity arose; what happened afterward you could fix later. Darius Miller had always believed that it was easier to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.
Vaughn gestured with a padd. “Updated report from SI’s data trawl,” he explained. “They swept the records for any information on Kriosian conflicts and this ‘Thorn’ group.”
“Any hits?”
“Yes and no,” said the lieutenant. “We’ve got some historical background on Krios but not a lot of current material.”
Miller nodded. “Start with that.” He took a seat at the obs room table and Vaughn followed suit.
“The Krios System is out on the far border of the Klingon Empire, right in the Deep Beta. Humanoid population, got some outward physiological similarities to species like the Trill . . . ” Vaughn paused to draw an imaginary line of pigm
ent spots down his face. Miller nodded and he went on. “They’ve had an ongoing conflict with a nearby system, Valt Minor, for most of their post-colonization history. The Kriosians were originally from the Valt System . . . There was a schism between two ruling bloodlines, and their colony was the offshoot of the group that left Valt behind. They’ve been trying to kill each other ever since.”
Miller took the lieutenant’s padd from him and scanned the files. According to Starfleet’s xenographic research division, Valt had been the nexus of a small stellar kingdom in the twenty-first century, ruled by a line of monarchs from noble houses—a similar structure to the early Klingon hierarchy or Earth’s medieval period. However, at some point, the two brothers who had risen to rule Valt Minor together had fallen out over that most traditional of home wreckers, the love of a woman. The split ended in one brother spiriting the woman away, and thus began the war that tore the kingdom in two. The errant brother was named Krios, and he and his followers made planetfall on a Valtian colony world and called it their own. The battle lines drawn there had lasted for centuries.
“How do the Klingons figure into this?” he asked. “I can’t imagine they took kindly to skirmishes on their doorstep, unless they were the ones starting them.”
Vaughn shook his head. “No sir. From what we can gather, the Empire annexed Krios sometime in the late twenty-third century, apparently to ‘enforce stability in the region.’ “
Miller snorted. “But we know what they really wanted.”
“More resources. Krios has a lot of mineral wealth. The Klingons suspended the rule of the Kriosian Sovereign Dynasty—for reasons of stability, of course—installed their own governor, and started systematically strip-mining the Krios system for ore.”
“Biltritium and pergium,” said Miller, recalling Spock’s earlier statement. “So let me guess. These Kriosian activists, they’re resistance fighters?”
“SeDveq.” Vaughn nodded. “They were the literal thorn in the side of the Klingon Empire.”
“Were?” Miller seized on the word.
“After the destruction of Praxis, all signs of any Thorn activities have ceased. At least until now, with these Kallisti messages.”
“How long has Starfleet Intelligence been monitoring the Krios situation?”
“Actively since the 2260s, when the Klingons first started sniffing around there,” said Vaughn.
The commander’s expression darkened. “So, what are we saying? At some point, Cartwright sets up a back-channel line of communication with the Thorn . . . Why?”
“He could have been cultivating an intelligence source hostile to the Klingons . . .” Vaughn sounded it out. “Maybe even going so far as to encourage and support them in their resistance.”
Miller nodded slowly. “All feasible. But those are both covert operations plays, and that wasn’t Cartwright’s turf. He was in Fleet ops back then.” He sighed. “This is all supposition. Pity we can’t ask the man himself.” The admiral had died in prison, apparently of a respiratory infection, but in his darker moments Miller couldn’t help but wonder if Cart-wright might not have been helped along the way. There were certainly enough people who had axes to grind with him.
“Cartwright was building his own network of influence,” said Vaughn. “The first foundations of his conspiracy?”
The commander shrugged. “Again, feasible.” He leaned forward. “What about the rest of the data?”
“That’s all there is.” Vaughn frowned. “This is a song we’ve heard before, sir. All intelligence reports we have—or, rather, had—were purged from the system by the same hunter-killer virus program that destroyed the data connected to the Gorkon conspiracy. We know Lance Cartwright wasn’t alone in what he did. After his arrest, a kill-switch was triggered in an attempt to obliterate anything that could incriminate him.”
“It could have been one of his coconspirators that pushed the button,” Miller agreed. “God knows, Drake had the means and the opportunity after the fact.” Admiral Androvar Drake, a man who had briefly ascended to a role as chief of staff at Starfleet following the Gorkon assassination, had later been revealed to be a silent partner in Cartwright’s cabal of pro-conflict agitators. Drake’s duplicity was exposed, but at the cost of his own life and the loss of the Enterprise-A over the planet Chal.
Miller slowly let out a breath. “So, if we take what we have, and what Valeris told us, what kind of picture can we see?”
Vaughn was quiet for a moment. “Sir, that’s assuming that Valeris told us the truth about the Kallisti code word and the link with the Kriosians.”
“Do we have a reason to believe she’s lying to us?”
The lieutenant matched his gaze. “Do we have a reason to believe she’s not?”
“Beyond personal dislike?” Miller asked.
“I was thinking more based on her past record.”
“I see your point,” the commander allowed. “But, for the moment, indulge me.”
The other man frowned again. “What we have is the detonation of an illegal weapon, which may or may not have been facilitated by a faction of hard-line isolationists or a radical group of freedom fighters, or maybe both. A connection to a seven-year-old plot to murder the Klingon Empire’s first peacemaker in centuries and cause interstellar war. A bunch of deleted files and missing data. Oh, and a prisoner convicted of treason and murder who may well be lying right through her pointed ears—not to mention a command authority who doesn’t buy any of that, and may have me cashiered for sticking my neck out . . .”
Despite the lieutenant’s dour reply, Miller smiled slightly. “I bet I can guess exactly what you’re thinking right now.”
“Sir?”
“Next time, Elias, write a goddamn memo. Am I close?”
He nodded. “Very perceptive, Commander.”
Miller leaned in, his gaze turning steely. “We’ve got less than thirty hours before we reach Da’Kel. We need something coherent by the time we get there.”
The lieutenant nodded again and went back to his padd. “Aye aye, sir.”
Valeris opened her eyes. Her attempt to return to a meditative state had failed; it wasn’t just the circumstances that she found herself in that arrested any chance of it. No, it was something about being on board a starship, traveling at warp. The faint sensation of motion, coming up through the deck of her cabin and the couch where she had placed herself.
They hadn’t given her a room with an external viewport, but still she glanced at the wall and imagined what she might have seen if they had: the warped luminosity of passing stars, the color and motion of faster-than-light travel. On some level, Valeris had never expected to set foot aboard a starship ever again, and now that she was here on Excelsior, it was a mild surprise to the Vulcan to realize that she found the sensation curiously agreeable.
She recalled her first experience on the bridge of a starship, as a child in tow with her parents when they visited the command deck of a Vulcan diplomatic courier. It had fascinated her, especially the actions of the helmsman as he took the vessel into warp velocities. Valeris had no doubt that that early, formative moment of her life had led her to train for the same role when she joined Starfleet. There was something compelling about riding with one’s hand on the controls of an interstellar vessel. Perhaps it was an echo of that she was experiencing, or perhaps some primitive element of her mind mistakenly associated this voyage from the stockade with freedom.
That was a fallacy. Valeris had left her prison behind, but she was not free, not by any rational measure.
She looked around the cabin once more. It was the same kind of single-occupant quarters given to all junior officers on most starships of cruiser-class tonnage or larger, basic but not without functionality. Valeris had expected to be housed in Excelsior’s brig, as befitting her status as a convicted felon, but Miller had ordered her escorted here instead. Still, while the cabin gave the impression of comfort, it was no less a cell than those down in the security secti
on. Outside her door, a pair of noncommissioned crewmen wearing security crimson stood at guard, each armed with a phaser. Valeris had not attempted to open it or operate the intercom, desk computer, or food slot: she imagined all those mechanisms were being monitored for signs of tampering or misuse.
The cabin reminded Valeris of her first billet aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, and once more she was surprised to discover that the thought brought with it the distant echo of an emotion. Was that . . . regret? She tried to examine the sensation, but it retreated from her, fading away to nothing.
Valeris considered that for a moment. From a human standpoint, regret would be an understandable reaction, triggered by the visual and sensory stimulus of something so close to her time on Enterprise. Her service on that illustrious vessel, first as a cadet and later when she returned as a fully-fledged officer of the line, had without doubt been among the greatest achievements of her life. She had hoped for so much from her posting to Kirk’s command—but at the end, it had all turned to ashes.
She cut off the train of thought: it accomplished nothing to dwell on those past matters. Instead, Valeris returned to her casual but careful scrutiny of the cabin. She understood what would be expected of her, and she understood the offer that Miller had made. And yet, Valeris could not fully trust the face reality presented to her . . .
Her experiences dealing with humans had taught her that they could be by degrees mercurial and challenging. The inconstant nature of emotional beings was what raised Vulcans above their concerns, and as such Valeris knew she would need to remain on her guard.
On the way to the cabin, she had already noted several avenues of approach for potential escape attempts. She estimated a sixty-two-point-two percent chance that she could disable her guards and flee into Excelsior’s Jefferies tubes, but the odds against her grew longer beyond that point. For the moment, the situation was too fluid for an accurate prediction. She would watch for an opportunity, even if one would be unlikely to arise.
Star Trek® Cast no Shadow Page 8
