Star Trek Terok Nor 01: Day of the Vipers

by James Swallow

  Urad grumbled under his breath and stepped forward to meet the dockers, pulling back the sleeves of his robes. “Let’s get this done quickly, then,” he said, nodding to the hooded men. “Hello. Vedek Gar sent us to—”

  The dockworker on the right brought up his fist, and there was a gun in it. Yellow light flashed, illuminating the area all around them, and Urad was thrown back by the force of the blast, rebounding off the airtruck.

  “Oralian filth,” spat a voice. “You’re poisoning Bajor! Get off our planet!”

  Tima screamed as more streaks of fire lashed out, each of the men panning beam weapons back and forth across the thermoconcrete dock. Two more of her fellow Oralians were hit, the Cardassians dropping into heaps, wisps of sweet-smelling smoke curling from ragged tears in their pastel robes. She grabbed at the front of the vehicle, fingers scrambling over the surface toward the door. Tima saw one of Urad’s friends clawing his way into the cab; then a bolt of the sun ripped into her and she spun away, crashing to the ground.

  Life ebbed from her in pulses. Dimly, she was aware of the airtruck humming to life, jetting away under the hand of a panicked driver. The hooded men came closer, and one aimed at the fleeing vehicle.

  The one who had fired first shook his head. “No,” he said. “We need a witness. Let him run.”

  The other man nodded and raised his wrist to his lips, speaking into a device there. “Reporting,” he said. “Assignment complete.”

  Blood bubbled in Tima’s throat and she spat it out in a reflexive cough.

  “This one’s still alive,” said the third.

  The man who had fired first knelt by her side, bringing his face close to hers. In the moonlight, she saw not the smooth lines and ridged nose of a Bajoran but the deep-set eyes and lined flesh of a Cardassian countenance. Her eyes widened in surprise.

  He reached for her, and Tima’s world ended.

  “Preliminary identity sweep has been completed, sir.” Glinn Orloc raised his voice to speak over the hum of the cutter’s impulse engines. “Nothing on the male as yet, but you were correct about the women. Hetman Foroe gave a positive identification of them as his passengers. Customs logs from Traffic Control list them as Nechen Alla and Jonor Wenna, agricultural technicians from a settlement in Hedrikspool province.”

  “Doubtless those are cover identities.” Dukat nodded.

  “Anything else?”

  Orloc continued. “We’ve intercepted a report from the City Watch. A skimmer with two females on board entered Korto from the plainslands at high speed, refusing to follow traffic codes.”

  “The Bajorans have been given a suitable pretext for the alert?”

  “Yes, Gul. The fugitives have been classed as terrorist suspects.”

  “Good. Inform the men to employ whatever level of force is required, but make sure they know I want the women alive.”

  Orloc saluted and Dukat looked away. Outside, below the cutter’s hull, the sprawl of Korto’s metropolis glowed against the dark of Bajor’s landscape.

  Nechayev ditched the vehicle near a public park and hauled Jones onto the first tram they could find. She changed direction twice before taking the route to the starport, all the time working hard to maintain her outward air of calm and control while her heart was hammering against the inside of her rib cage. Jones was muted, the bandage and the antishock drugs from the skimmer’s medical kit turning her into a pale ghost of her normal self. The lateness of the hour worked in their favor; there were fewer people around, so Nechayev had a better view of who might or might not be following them. They avoided Militia patrols and groups of Cardassians who seemed to be out on the town. It was only three hours since they had left Jekko behind, and yet it felt like forever, a drawn-out night without hope of a dawn.

  The Bajoran’s isolinear chip got them through the entry grid and onto the port grounds. The sliver of plastic had a glyph on it, and Nechayev nudged Jones from her daze, waving it under her nose. “What does this say?” she demanded.

  “Kaska,” she replied. “It’s a girl’s name.”

  “Or a ship’s?”

  “Sure,” Jones slurred. “Why not? Can we sit down? The medication is wearing off.”

  Nechayev pulled her toward a hangar. “Soon.” Inside there was a dart-shaped vessel crouching on spindly landing skids. The same glyph was painted on the side, and it looked ready to throw itself into the air at a moment’s notice. “Soon,” she repeated, leaving Jones at the foot of the boarding ramp as she crept aboard, her phaser drawn.

  Nechayev was halfway across the compact cockpit of the Kaska when she realized she wasn’t alone. She whirled to find a Bajoran man in a dark brown overcoat holding a weapon on her.

  “Korto City Watch,” he explained. “Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head. You’re under arrest.”

  22

  The last of the containers shimmered into solidity inside the cramped cargo bay. Syjin levered the top off the battered drum and ran a sensor wand over the sealed packets inside.

  “Well?” Grek’s pinched voice grated from the communicator bead in his ear. “The unlock code, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Just a moment,” insisted the Bajoran. “I’d like to check my merchandise first.”

  “You don’t trust me?” The Ferengi sounded genuinely hurt. “After all the goodwill between us, after every deal we’ve done and all the profit we have made throughout our lucrative relationship?”

  “Yeah,” Syjin said, “and mostly because of what you did on Quatal III.”

  Grek gave a nasal snarl. “How long are you going to keep beating me with that? I told you it wasn’t my fault those Mantickian olives were spoiled! I was as much a victim as you.”

  “But it didn’t stop you taking my money, did it? Now shut up and let me finish checking the load.” The Ferengi reduced his grumbling to a background mumble, and Syjin completed the sweep. He frowned at the results. “I thought you said this agnam loaf was vintage?”

  Grek let out another explosive noise of exasperation. “Oh, are you going to give me a hard time over this cargo now?”

  “This is two years old. I wanted five years, the proper mature stuff.”

  There was a moment of silence from the other end of the channel. Syjin glanced out of the viewport in the hull to where a crab-shaped transport drifted alongside his vessel in close orbit over Ajir IX. “It’s just as good,” Grek insisted. “There’s been a shortage of the fungal cultures used in the dough due to an infestation of gree worms, and—”

  “All right, all right.” Syjin shook his head. “I’ll take it.” He drew a padd from his pocket and keyed in a code string. “There. Funds have been transferred.”

  The inevitable blast of invective came seconds later. “You deal-breaking wretch! You’ve cheated me! This is a quarter less than what we agreed upon!”

  “You deliver what you promised, you get paid the full amount. I’m taking a discount.” He loved using that word in Grek’s company; the reflexive reaction of disgust it created in the alien always amused him.

  But Grek’s usual spitting and frothing was strangely absent. Syjin went to the window again and saw his vessel shifting, puffs of reaction mass jetting from the maneuvering thrusters as it turned toward one of the gas giant’s moons.

  “Fine,” came the reply. “A chore doing business with you, as always. Grek out.”

  Syjin’s brow furrowed. That wasn’t like the Ferengi at all, to simply roll over and agree without even trying to haggle; and he sounded distracted, as if something else had caught his attention. The Bajoran bounded up to the cockpit of his ship and toggled his sensors up to maximum, afraid that the Ferengi was about to cut and run, perhaps that there were privateers in the area that Grek’s larger and more powerful scanners had detected. But they were alone in the Ajir system.

  As he watched, Grek’s vessel drifted away, closing on one of the moons of the gas giant. “What are you doing, you ugly little swindler?” Syjin asked
aloud. He narrowed the focus of his sensors to sweep the barren moon, and the display flickered with a constellation of bright returns. Duranium alloy fragments were scattered across the surface of the satellite. “Wreckage,” he realized. The Ferengi’s crew must have spotted the debris while the deal was taking place. That would explain Grek’s sudden loss of interest in his trade; he could smell salvage.

  Syjin shot a look at his full cargo compartment, and then back at the sensor display. It was definitely starship-grade metals, probably with enough scrap value alone to double the latinum he’d get from the exotic foods. The Bajoran reached for the gear locker that contained his environmental suit. “No harm in taking a look, I suppose,” he said to the air.

  Darrah used contact strips from his belt dispenser to secure the two women to seats in the Kaska’s cockpit and then went to the courier’s emergency kit, sifting through it for some pain medication for the dark-haired one.

  “If you take us in, we’ll be killed,” said the blond woman. “You realize that?”

  Darrah gave her friend a dose from the hypospray, and the woman’s color returned. She mumbled a thank-you.

  “How did you know we were going to be here?” she tried again. The older one had a tone to her words that made it clear she was used to being in control of situations like this.

  He leaned against the control console and folded his arms. “Nechen Alla and Jonor Wenna. From Hedrikspool.” He shook his head slowly. “The duty commander from the Jalanda City Watch is a friend of mine. Do you want to know what he said to me when I asked him to look up those names in his citizen registry?” He let the question hang. “Yes, in answer to your question, yes, I know what will happen to you if I take you in. The thing is, I figured out where you were going and pretty soon the Cardassians will figure it out too. I put a couple of things in place to slow them down, but they’ll be here, and I’ll turn over two terrorists to them, and you’ll never be seen again. Unless you give me a reason not to do that.”

  Something shifted behind the eyes of the one who called herself Alla. She was measuring her circumstances, he could see the to-and-fro of it in her face. Weighing her options. I’d do the same in her place.

  But it was the other one who spoke. “We’re not terrorists,” she said. “We’re here to help you.”

  Darrah wanted to keep a rein on himself, but the words slipped out before he could stop them. “Like you helped Jekko Tybe?” He tossed the padd with a flick of his wrist and it landed in her lap. Jekko’s death-pale face stared back up at her, and she flinched. “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Is that what you did?” His voice rose. “Did you force him to get you into the enclave and then throw him to the Cardassians when your plan fell apart?”

  “No!” she insisted. “It was his idea—”

  “Shut up!” spat the other woman. “Don’t say another damn word!”

  Darrah crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed the blond woman by the chin. “Then you talk to me!” he growled. “He was my friend. One of the few men I’d be willing to put my life on the line for. Tonight I find out he’s dead and you were there with him. So you’re going to tell me what happened, or we are going to sit here until the Cardassians arrive.”

  The dark-haired one was staring at the rank sigils on his collar. “You’re the chief inspector,” she said. “Jekko’s friend. His source inside the Korto police.”

  The other woman looked at him. “You leaked him the documents about the enclave.”

  Darrah blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “How do you think we got in there?” she retorted.

  “Jekko used the intelligence you gave him.”

  In all the turmoil, the thought hadn’t even occurred to Darrah, but now it did and he didn’t know how to respond. I just left some files open, that was all. Jekko said it would help. It would help them keep an eye on the Cardassians. But nothing more had been said of it; time had passed, and Darrah had thought no more about it. I gave him the way in. Prophets, am I partly to blame for his death?

  The blond woman saw the train of thought on his face. “What did you think he was going to do with the files, Chief Inspector? Frame them and put them on a wall? He was trying to stop the Cardassian Union from engulfing your planet.”

  Her words snapped him out of his reverie. “‘Your planet’?” he repeated. “Don’t you mean our planet?” Darrah grabbed his police-issue tricorder from his belt and toggled the device to a scene-of-crime forensic scan mode. Taking the woman’s chin in his hand again, he ran the sensor head over her skull. The DNA scan was in the green, but the bone structure readings were off. He released her. “You’ve been surgically altered.”

  Both of them remained silent. He put the tricorder away and crossed to the canopy, shooting a look toward the hangar’s open doors. There was no sign of movement out in the predawn light.

  “Who are you working for?” Darrah sat in a chair and studied the pair. “You’re not Bajoran. You’re not Tzenkethi, that’s a certainty.”

  The blonde sniffed. “The Tzenkethi Coalition doesn’t have any interest in Bajor. They never have.”

  “There’s a memorial at the City Oval with four hundred and ninety-two names on it that says different,” he retorted.

  “What would you say if I told you the government on Ab-Tzenketh was as shocked by that attack as you were?”

  Darrah’s lip curled. “I’d say you were misinformed.”

  She smiled without humor. “The…people I work for, they’ve fought the Tzenkethi on overt and covert battlefields. And what happened on that day, that’s not what the Tzenkethi do.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “We do,” she told him, leaning forward with an absolute certainty in her eyes. “We know because we’ve broken one of the key Tzenkethi code ciphers. And let me tell you, on that day they were panicking like all hell had broken loose.”

  “The Cardassians told us—” Darrah started to explain, but then the words he said registered with him and he fell silent.

  “Now you’re getting it.” She nodded. “The Tzenkethi didn’t order that attack. They lost contact with that ship hours before it happened. I’ve seen the communications transcripts.”

  He wanted to ask the question that burned in his mind, but he pushed it aside. “You’re Federation, aren’t you?” He got no reply. “If that’s true, if you knew that, why didn’t your Starfleet tell us?”

  “If that information became public knowledge, what would happen? The marauder was totally obliterated by the Cardassians, wasn’t it? Nothing left there that could be used as proof either way. And all it would mean was that the Tzenkethi would know their communications had been compromised, and my people would lose that advantage.”

  “Then who did it?” he snarled, his cheeks hot with anger.

  The blond woman gave him a level look. “You already know the answer.”

  Syjin set the transporter to beam him down to a point at the edge of the debris field, and he felt the shift in gravity instantly. The small moon curved away from him in every direction, and where the surface was a mottled white stone to his right and left, in front of him it was churned up into a blue-gray powder. He glanced up into a sky dominated by the cloudy orange mass of Ajir IX, trying to visualize the final moments of the craft that had come to rest here. It would have had to have been close to the moon, he reasoned. It suffered some kind of damage, got snared by the lunar gravity, and augured straight into the surface, shedding pieces of itself all the way down. The angle of the collision had been a steep one. Bits of hull metal were deposited all around a giant divot cut from the surface.

  He walked on in a loping bounce, the sound of his own breathing resonating around the inside of his helmet. Without an atmosphere to act on the wreckage, there was no corrosion or weathering. All the pieces were perfectly preserved in the hard vacuum. At the edge of hi
s vision, Syjin thought he saw something that could have been a corpse and he shuddered. He’d seen more than enough vacuum-desiccated cadavers in his life as it was.

  A large slab of duranium that appeared to be a piece of outer hull was lying half buried in the sand. On an impulse he couldn’t really explain, Syjin tucked his fingers under it and turned it over. In the moon’s low gravity it was easy for him to shift the door-sized piece of metal, and it fell lazily back to the ground. There was pennant etched into the duranium in blue paint, a symbol like an inverted fork with circular tines. Syjin knew it well; many times he had been forced to make a quick getaway from ships bearing the sigil of the Bajoran Space Guard.

  The shiver down his spine returned. I’m disturbing the dead. Suddenly, the idea of looting the wreck made him feel sick inside. This was a Bajoran grave, not the remains of some nondescript alien from a world he’d never even heard of. This place is probably teeming with angry boryhas.

  Shadows moved up ahead and he jumped, startled; but these were not vengeful phantoms. Three figures with the wide-faced helmets characteristic of Ferengi spacesuits approached him, and through the glass bowl of his headgear Syjin saw Grek’s sneering, snaggletoothed expression.

  “What are you doing down here?” demanded the trader. “You got a good deal out of me, isn’t that enough? Take your ship and go!”

  “Did you know this was here?”

  The Ferengi shook his head. “Of course not. If I knew there was salvage in this system, do you think I’d have brought you anywhere near it?” He grunted. “I picked this place at random.”

  “Grek, this is a Bajoran naval starship,” Syjin retorted, gesturing around. The moment he said the words aloud, something registered in his thoughts. Lost Space Guard ships…