“Is Kazren still motionless?” she asked. “And still alone?”
Rixora consulted her panel. “Yes, Commander.”
“Then proceed with extraction,” T’Jul said.
“Proceeding with extraction,” Rixora replied.
On the platform, the silver rods began to move. T’Jul watched the frames that bordered the black, metal mesh shift, stretching and condensing the material. When the repositioning achieved the necessary dimensions, the pieces moved together to form a rectangular parallelepiped at the center of the platform—essentially a box roughly large enough to contain a standing humanoid.
When Diveln began to count backward from ten, T’Jul again looked to the viewer. There, the depiction of Dekkona slowly descended toward the connecting arm of the station. Not completely confident in the new technology, T’Jul braced herself for what seemed like the collision to come. Instead, as planned, the neck of the starship appeared to pass through the station’s arm, stopping at the moment of greatest intersection.
“Extraction point achieved,” said Rixora. “Initiating phase transition.”
The new Romulan cloak achieved more than practical invisibility. It altered the structure of matter in the objects it enveloped, allowing those objects to pass through normal matter. At the moment, the mesh enclosure surrounded the space the Breen operative occupied aboard the Utopia Planitia station, in unphased space.
The base of the platform glowed a brilliant white. Within the mesh box, T’Jul saw, the air began to shimmer and pulse. Amorphous splashes of blue-green slowly resolved themselves into the shape of a man, and then into the man himself. As the radiance of the platform faded, the mesh planes withdrew to reveal Kazren—the structure of the matter composing his body newly modified to a phased state.
To Diveln and Rixora, T’Jul said, “Disengage Dekkona from the station, then signal Commander Marius that we can proceed to the delivery point.”
“Yes, Subcommander,” said Rixora.
Kazren stepped off the platform and approached T’Jul. In contrast to the subcommander’s tall, lean form, the Breen operative possessed a stocky build, short but solid. He had wide, cloudy green eyes, and his bronze-colored skin contrasted dramatically with the thin carpet of white hair that crowned his head. “Subcommander,” he said, and he pulled a Federation isolinear optical chip from a pocket in the blue engineering jumpsuit he wore. “We have our objective.”
T’Jul felt a rush of energy inside her, satisfied at the accomplishment of the most perilous part of their mission, but also excited at what that accomplishment would mean for the Romulan Empire. She reached for the data-storage device Kazren held up before her, but he let the isolinear chip slip into the curled fingers of his fist. “Our orders are to deliver the schematics directly to Salavat,” he said, naming a world within the Breen Confederacy.
“Of course,” T’Jul said, containing her frustration; she knew that Commander Marius wanted the stolen data for the Romulan Empire. While he in general supported the alliance of Romulus with the five other Typhon Pact nations, he had often stated how difficult he found it to trust anybody outside the Empire. T’Jul fought back her impulse to seize Kazren’s wrist, forcibly peel his fingers from around the isolinear chip, and take custody of the data-storage device for Marius. She would content herself with the knowledge that, while the Breen operative retained possession of the stolen quantum slipstream drive schematics, Commander Marius retained possession of Kazren.
“With your permission, Subcommander,” the operative said, gesturing toward the crate below the viewscreen.
“By all means,” T’Jul offered, nodding with what she meant to appear as magnanimity.
Kazren slipped the isolinear chip back inside a pocket of his jumpsuit, then paced over to the crate. He keyed a code into its locking mechanism, which emitted a series of trills at his touch. Then he opened the top of the crate and pulled out a Breen full-body environmental suit. T’Jul had only ever heard the suits referred to as refrigeration units, a means of re-creating the frozen climate of the Breen homeworld. But Kazren clearly had required no such environmental adjustments to survive the more than two hundred days he’d spent posing as a civilian engineer aboard the Utopia Planitia facility, calling into question what little T’Jul thought she knew about the Breen.
Kazren pulled on the layered tan suit, then slipped on the distinctive snout-nosed helmet his people unaccountably wore. The complete outfit produced a slimming effect on the operative, who appeared not simply thinner, but also taller. A burst of electronic noise issued from his helmet, which T’Jul’s universal translator rendered as, “Thank you, Subcommander.”
T’Jul nodded in response, looking at the horizontal green light above the pronounced muzzle of Kazren’s helmet, roughly where his eyes would be.
“Have quarters been assigned to me?” he asked via his electronic garble. “I am fatigued.”
T’Jul raised her hand in the direction of the control console on the opposite side of the room. “Lieutenant Diveln will escort you there.” Kazren bowed his head in reply, then headed for the doors after Diveln.
“Trop Kazren,” said T’Jul, employing the Breen’s title, though she had no clear idea of what the designation meant. He stopped and turned back to face her. “Once you are settled into your quarters, but before you lay your head down, Commander Marius would appreciate the opportunity to debrief you.” It occurred to T’Jul that she did not even know if Breen actually slept lying down—or if they slept at all.
“Of course,” Kazren said. “I’ll expect him shortly.” He then followed Diveln into the corridor.
T’Jul looked over at Rixora, who busily secured the phase-transition console. The subcommander then glanced back at the viewscreen, where an empty field of stars had replaced the Starfleet space station. Dekkona and its crew had spent too long a time in enemy territory for her liking, and it pleased her that, at last, the ship headed, if not for the Romulan Empire, then at least for the friendly provinces of an ally.
Exiting into the corridor, T’Jul headed back to the bridge. She would provide Commander Marius with a status report. After an appropriate interval, T’Jul knew, she would accompany Marius to Kazren’s guest quarters, where the commander would insist on a full description of the Breen’s leg of the mission. As she considered the acquisition of the slipstream schematics, T’Jul again felt energized.
She had no appetite for war, but she respected the balance of power. It unsettled her to know that, even with the Romulan fleet’s development of the phasing cloak, the quantum slipstream drive provided the Federation with a first-strike capability. Once Commander Marius delivered Kazren to the Breen Confederacy, once the operative delivered the schematics to their engineers, and once those engineers turned those technical specs into reality, everything would change.
No, T’Jul did not want war. If it came, though, she wanted her side to achieve a decisive victory. And so she would do everything she could to ensure the military superiority of the Romulan Star Empire and the Typhon Pact.
I
Fears and Scruples
Banquo: Fears and scruples shake us.
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
Against the undivulg’d pretence I fight
Of treasonous malice.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act II, Scene 3
April 2382
1
Kasidy Yates watched as a seething sea of fire cascaded toward her. Within the roiling flames, she spied sections of hull plating hurtling forward, end over end, the conflagration feasting on the lost atmosphere and fractured fragments of the wounded space station. The blaze grew until it filled the screen on her companel, and then the image changed to a view of the aftermath of the explosion. From above, with the red globe of Mars in the background, Utopia Planitia floated in orbit with a substantial chunk of its main cylinder ripped away. The great dome at that end of the station, dark and seemingly a
bandoned, barely remained attached to the structure.
Tension gripped Kasidy’s chest, as though a cold hand had reached in and seized her heart. According to the news feed, some sort of industrial accident had befallen Utopia Planitia. Starfleet had yet to offer casualty figures, but she had no doubt that lives—many lives—had been lost.
Kasidy reached up and stabbed at the controls of the companel to deactivate it, then pushed herself away from the wall-mounted device. The wheels of her chair rolled smoothly on the hardwood floor, and she stood up as though propelled from her seat. She stalked across the room that served primarily as a home office, but doubled as a guest room for any visitors who stayed overnight. Framed photographs of family, friends, and special places adorned the walls, and a sofa to her left converted into a comfortable bed.
The heels of Kasidy’s shoes clocked against the floor as she crossed the room and over to the window. Pushing aside the wine-colored drapes, she glanced out the back of the house. She slid open the window, and a warm drift of air greeted her, carrying with it the bittersweet scents of autumn. In the distance, atop the rolling hills of Kendra Province, the skeletal forms of denuded trees marched along a base of yellowing grass, the groundcover partially veiled by the vibrant crimsons, ochers, and golds of fallen leaves. Just three weeks earlier, the sky had grown pale, and a cold snap had attested to the impending arrival of winter. Over the previous few days, though, the cerulean expanse of summer seemed to return, with higher temperatures bringing a temporary reprieve from the snows that would eventually blanket the land.
Kasidy concentrated on the vista before her, attempting to put thoughts of the Utopia Planitia calamity out of her mind. Away to the right, she could just make out a short arc of the Yolja River as it bent southward, to where it twined through valley plains and dense forests until it spilled into the turquoise waters of the Korvale Ocean. To the left of the house stood an outbuilding that Kasidy had built during the past six months, a constructive outlet for her anxious energy. The oversized shed lodged the escape pod that Nog had long ago modified for planet-based emergency use. A good friend, Nog had worried about her when she’d been pregnant and alone back then, and he hadn’t wanted her to have to walk the couple of kilometers into Adarak if the town’s local transporter went off line for maintenance or some other reason. At the time, six years earlier, Ben had yet to return from his mysterious sojourn in the Bajoran wormhole.
Ben.
Just thinking about him hurt.
Except that it didn’t just hurt. Even more than a year after her husband had gone, thoughts of him dredged up a complex mix of emotions. Kasidy recalled vividly the last time he had been home—and how she had pulled open the front door and told him to leave. In retrospect, that night had not brought an end to their marital troubles, nor had it truly been the beginning of their separation. Emotionally, they had parted ways months prior to that, perhaps even years.
No, not years, Kasidy thought. She had waited for Ben through her pregnancy, choosing to believe the veracity of the vision she’d experienced just after the end of the Dominion War. In it, her husband spoke to her from within the wormhole—what Ben and the Bajoran faithful called the Celestial Temple—and told her that he would someday return to her.
And he had. Just a moment after Kasidy gave birth to Rebecca, Ben walked through a doorway in the Shikina Monastery, as though he’d simply been away on some ordinary excursion. The three of them—mother, daughter, father—went back to the house outside Adarak, to the land that Ben had secured, to the house that he had planned and that Kasidy and Jake had built during his absence.
For years, all had been well. Rebecca grew up healthy and happy, and despite her status among adherents of the Ohalu religious sect as the Avatar—a harbinger of a new age of awareness and understanding for the people of Bajor—the Bajorans for the most part respected the family’s privacy. Kasidy and Ben settled into a relatively quiet life centered around raising their daughter.
Starfleet had wanted Ben back, of course. They offered him an admiralty, which he declined, preferring instead to step away from active duty. Kasidy, too, distanced herself from her vocation; though she continued to remotely oversee the operations of her freighter, Xhosa, she turned over the actual day-to-day running of the ship to her first mate, Wayne Sheppard.
Those days at home in Kendra had brought simple but deeply abiding joys. With Ben’s attentions not continually given over to the responsibilities and vagaries of command, and with Kasidy not away for weeks at a time on cargo runs, she felt closer to her husband than ever. And the emotions engendered in her by their daughter filled her so completely, she could scarcely believe it; Kasidy never before knew anything like the bond she shared with Rebecca.
As though summoned by Kasidy’s thoughts, a high-pitched peal rang out. In the instant before she recognized her daughter’s laughter, her brain processed the sound as a scream. A sensation like an electric charge flowed through Kasidy’s body. Two years prior, such shrieks had haunted her dreams. A religious zealot had kidnapped Rebecca, and in the nights before they safely recovered her, Kasidy’s nightmares frequently woke her with the echoes of Rebecca’s shrill cries for help still seemingly in her ears.
Kasidy watched as her daughter came racing around the corner of the house, dressed in her pink jumper. Her thin little legs carried her confidently past the once-colorful flowerbeds that mother and daughter had planted in the spring. Behind Rebecca followed Jasmine Tey, the young Malaysian woman she and Ben had retained after their daughter’s abduction. While Tey nominally helped around the house a few days a week, her advanced security training provided peace of mind with respect to Rebecca’s safety. Kasidy and Ben—and now just Kasidy—felt sure in their ability to protect their daughter, but when Rebecca went to school, or when they sometimes needed to focus their attentions elsewhere, they brought in Tey. That morning, Kasidy had required a few hours to plan out Xhosa’s manifest and itinerary for the next month, and in the afternoon, she’d wanted to go into Adarak, so Tey had agreed to spend the day there.
Rebecca ran with abandon along the back of the house, her wide smile exposing the gap where she’d recently lost her two upper front teeth. A bit small for her age, she otherwise tested normal for a five-and-a-half-year-old human girl. She favored neither of her parents particularly, her features seeming to blend the best of both of them. Rebecca possessed her father’s rich, dark coloring, but with the smooth texture of Kasidy’s own complexion; she had Ben’s penetrating eyes and self-assured bearing, but Kasidy’s high cheekbones and slender nose; she smiled with her father’s lips, but expressed amusement with her mother’s laugh.
As Rebecca darted past the window, she waved a hand in Kasidy’s direction without looking. “Hi, Mommy,” she yipped, and kept running.
Kasidy had not seen her daughter take notice of her standing at the window. Kasidy dismissed the odd moment, but not quite as easily as once she would have. Such episodes—Rebecca perceiving some detail she had apparently neither seen nor heard, knowing some fact that seemed beyond her knowledge and experience—had occurred from time to time, even all the way back to her infancy. How often in the middle of the night had she stopped crying the moment Kasidy opened her eyes, as though Rebecca somehow sensed that she would soon receive food or a diaper change or whatever would satisfy the need that had caused her tears?
Tey chased along after Rebecca, looking up at the window, also waving and offering a “Hi, Ms. Yates” as she passed. With a slim figure and a personable demeanor, the young woman, just turned thirty, did not appear especially formidable. Her extensive law-enforcement training and experience told a different story, though. Skilled in the implementation of protective techniques, in the use of numerous weapons, and in myriad forms of hand-to-hand combat—including the rigors of Klingon martial arts—Jasmine Tey constituted an impressive one-woman security force. At the time Rebecca had been seized by the Ohalu extremist, Tey had just stepped down after a five-year to
ur on the detail safeguarding Bajor’s first minister, Asarem Wadeen. At Asarem’s suggestion, Tey had been brought in to assist in safely recovering Rebecca, and she had been instrumental in those efforts.
From the first time Rebecca had met her, she’d loved “Auntie Jasmine.” For her part, Tey seemed to return that affection. On days when she came out to the house, the two spent all their time together, sometimes playing, sometimes reading, sometimes staying outdoors.
As Kasidy looked on, Tey caught up to Rebecca, reached down, and grabbed her around the waist. Rebecca let out a loud burst of laughter, and the two tumbled to the ground together. Kasidy could not help but smile at her daughter’s unbridled delight.
Kasidy turned from the window, intending to return to her work on Xhosa’s upcoming schedule. Instead, she felt the smile melt away from her face as she saw the shattered form of the Utopia Planitia station still on her companel; she had meant to switch off the device, but evidently had only paused the news feed. She quickly paced back across the room and punched with a finger at the proper control. Mercifully, the screen went blank.
You’re being foolish, Kasidy told herself. Under normal circumstances, she simply would have grieved for those who had lost their lives in the accident, but the ache that once more rose within her stemmed from a cause more specific than the accidental deaths of people she didn’t know. All roads lead back to Ben, she thought. Fifteen or so years before, after the destruction by the Borg of U.S.S. Saratoga, the ship on which Ben served as first officer, Starfleet assigned him to Utopia Planitia. He spent nearly three years there before his transfer to the command of Deep Space 9.
Kasidy peered at the empty screen of the companel, but in her mind’s eye, she still saw the battered hulk of the Utopia Planitia station. The fact that Ben had served there more than a decade earlier should not have troubled her. When he left Bajor last year and returned to Starfleet, he took command of U.S.S. Robinson, and the last she knew, the Galaxy-class starship patrolled the Romulan border in the Sierra Sector, far from Mars and Utopia Planitia.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact 06: Plagues of Night Page 2
