Star Trek: The Children of Kings

by David Stern

  In his mind, he pictured that instant now, Number One hunched over the auxiliary science station, drawing heavily on the ship’s processing resources for reasons that at the time he did not then understand.

  He was beginning to now.

  “Ah.” She nodded. “I recall the query. It is not important. A potential line of inquiry, now abandoned.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “No. As I said, it is not important. Particularly given the number and complexity of tasks we have before us, with the arrival of Potemkin and—”

  “I would still like to know the rationale for your decision.”

  She looked him in the eye.

  She was lying, Spock knew, just as T’Koss had been, yet in Number One’s eyes, he saw no sign of agitation, trepidation, insecurity.

  She was far more practiced at falsehood.

  “I thought I made myself clear, Lieutenant. I abandoned the query. I suggest you do the same.”

  “I understand. If I could simply examine the responses the Archives may have passed along …”

  “No.”

  “Shall I repeat the query myself, then?”

  “No,” she repeated, her voice taking on added gravity. “Mr. Spock. I am now giving you a direct order. You are hereby forbidden to pursue this line of inquiry. Or to order your subordinates to do so. You are also prohibited from discussing this subject with them or with any other personnel, Starfleet or civilian. Are these orders clear?”

  “They are.”

  “Good.”

  “I cannot, however, comply with them.”

  “Orders are by definition not voluntary, Lieutenant. Disciplinary charges will be filed for failure to obey the ones I have just given you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? These are serious charges.”

  “Against which I shall have to raise a serious defense. Which will not only involve revelation of the query but any and all related research.”

  Number One stood stock-still, a few feet in front of him, hands clasped behind her back. Impassive. Unperturbed, undisturbed by his threats.

  “I will give you a moment to reconsider your refusal, Mr. Spock. And its consequences for your career.”

  He shook his head. “The time will not be necessary. I am prepared to face any and all consequences.”

  Anger flashed across her face for a moment and then was gone, replaced by a series of less easily identifiable emotions. Impatience? No, Spock thought. Not exactly.

  “Mr. Spock,” Number One said. “I do not wish—”

  “The query is innocuous enough, on the face of it. I fail to understand the need for secrecy.”

  “Believe me when I say it is better that way.”

  “I sense concern in your voice.”

  “You sense correctly. I would ask you again to abandon this line of inquiry, Lieutenant. For your own sake. Your own safety.”

  “I cannot,” Spock said, in that instant discerning something else of critical importance, a motive of his own, which until this instant he had not been conscious of. “There is something wrong here, Commander. Something to do with the attack on Starbase Eighteen, with the circumstances of Captain Pike’s death, with the confrontation between Starfleet and the Klingon Empire …”

  His voice trailed off, as he found himself suddenly at a loss for words.

  “Something wrong.” Number One looked at him and sighed. “You are correct. Something is wrong indeed. Terribly wrong.”

  She turned and walked away.

  It took Spock several seconds—and her glancing back and gesturing to him—to realize he was meant to follow.

  The Vulcan paused on the threshold of Number One’s cabin.

  He had never been in the first officer’s quarters before. They were considerably more spacious than his, made to seem even more so by the lack of ornamentation and furniture. Within the entire living space, there was but a single couch, a single table. The walls—customized from regulation Starfleet gray to a lighter beige—were bare as well. Spock was surprised. Most humans, particularly the enlisted crew, tended to fill every square inch of cabin space with some sort of personal memento.

  But then, as he had come to realize over these few months, Number One was not like most humans.

  He entered; the door closed behind him.

  Number One had gone directly to the alcove containing her sleeping quarters. She came out now, having removed the landing-party jacket she’d worn to protect her from the cold of the unheated shuttlebay.

  “Would you care for tea?” she asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I drink it regularly.” She went to the materializer and keyed in a series of instructions. “It helps to maintain my focus. My concentration.”

  “I use meditation for that purpose.”

  “As do I. Occasionally.” She gestured toward a corner of the room, where Spock saw both mat and holographic projectors. And something else: a photographic image, hung on the wall in such a way that it was visible only from certain angles within the room.

  He walked toward that image, till he was close enough to pick out details. It was a picture of perhaps two dozen people, most adults, standing in a shallow horseshoe shape around three young people. Two males flanking a single female. All dressed in light green, single-piece jumpsuits, all with similar haircuts. All wearing similarly placid expressions of contentment.

  The girl was holding a plaque in her hands. He suddenly recognized her.

  “This is you,” he said to Number One.

  “At my investiture as a citizen of Illyria.”

  “Your graduation from the Illyrian Cultural Academy.”

  “Yes.” She came closer; the smell of tea came with her. “Eleven standard years ago. I was first in the class. Hence the plaque.”

  And the name Number One, Spock knew from a casual, curious perusal of her publicly accessible personnel file.

  “And this is your family,” he said.

  “Yes. Those are my brothers, on either side of me,” she said. “Hudek is an environmental systems engineer at the Utopia Planetia yards. Leighton is chief minister on Salazar V.”

  “Impressive accomplishments,” Spock said. “Your parents must be proud.”

  “I suppose they are.” Something in her tone of voice caused Spock to turn and study her face. He glimpsed something—sadness? regret?—in her eyes.

  Then she turned away from the picture, and the emotion was gone.

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Spock, I’m not entirely surprised that you discovered the query. I had expected, however, that it would take you a little longer to do so.”

  “The discovery came partially by chance.” He told her of T’Koss and his own reasons for seeking information from the Archives.

  “Captain Pike’s logs.” She nodded. “I’d heard they were sequestered.”

  He had a sudden insight. “The two matters are related—the logs and your query.”

  “They may be.” She sipped at her tea. “I don’t know for certain.”

  She fell silent again, lost in her own thoughts.

  “ ‘Explanation sought for discrepancy between Starfleet records and evidentiary findings on Fifty-five Hamilton,’ ” he repeated. “I am curious—”

  “Mr. Spock.” Enterprise ’s first officer looked at him directly. “I ask you one last time. Please. Let the matter lie. For your own sake.”

  “I am sorry. I cannot.”

  “Very well.” She finished her tea and returned it to the materializer. Then she went back into her sleeping alcove. She came back out, carrying a stack of flimsies about a half-inch thick. Odd. In the three months he had been aboard Enterprise, he could not recall seeing a single sheet of flimsy—recycled plastiform—before. And now it seemed to be everywhere.

  Captain Vlasidovich’s habits, rubbing off on his crew.

  That felt, suddenly, wrong to him as well.

  “Shall we?” she said, gesturing to the couch. Th
ey sat. She set the stack of flimsies on the table in front of them and handed the top sheet to Spock.

  It was an image, a photograph, very much like dozens of others he had seen over the last week. Twisted metal, pieces of gray and blue plastiform blocks scattered across the brick-red surface of a planetoid.

  “You recognize this?”

  “Starbase Eighteen,” he said.

  “A particular area of Starbase Eighteen.”

  Spock looked at the image again. It was a portion of the base that had caught his attention earlier, the remnants of a single, relatively large building—perhaps a hundred meters square—set far apart from the command tower and the base’s main living and work facilities. An unusually long separation; he had assumed that there was a logical reason for the anomaly and banished the sight from his mind. He had the sudden intuition that perhaps he had been too hasty in doing so.

  “Look at the extensive surface scarring, the multiple blast sites,” Number One said. “The attackers targeted this building in particular.”

  “Why? What was it?”

  “The same questions I asked, initially. Which proved much more difficult to answer than I’d expected.”

  “In what sense?”

  “We have a map of the base’s general layout in the ship’s computer. Copies of the original construc-

  tion blueprints as well. This building is not noted on either.”

  “A simple explanation. This is a later addition. Our records are out of date.”

  “ Enterprise ’s databases sync up with Fleet Archives regularly. Maintenance logs have them current as of two months ago.”

  Spock studied the image again.

  “This construction did not take place within the last two months.”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps the maintenance logs are in error.”

  “The databases are current according to the Archives as well.”

  Spock frowned. “Then … ?”

  “They have no record of the building, either.” Number One nodded toward the flimsy on the table. “As far as Starfleet Archives are concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

  Spock looked at Number One, at the image, and then frowned.

  He rarely dealt in absolutes. The universe was a strange, unknowable place. Scientific theory had yet to account fully for all of its secrets, its myriad inexplicable, implausible phenomena.

  This was an instance, though, where absolutes were called for.

  The Archives was the single largest repository of data in the known galaxy, custodians of Starfleet mission logs dating back to the original NX-series starships, keepers of the documents that had established the United Federation of Planets. Every transport manifest, every personnel transfer, every restraining bolt, uniform tunic, piece of vinyl, leather, or plastic that made its way aboard a starbase or a starship or even a lowly cargo vessel, the Archives had a record of it. An entire building? There had to be literally thousands of entries related to it—not just blueprints but material orders, construction logs, progress reports. The amount of data filed on a project of that size was simply enormous.

  “For the Archives not to have record of this structure’s existence is impossible,” he said.

  “I agree,” Number One replied.

  Spock understood now T’Koss’s agitation. For a single database to be in error was one thing; for multiple records to be missing—

  He sat up straight on the couch.

  That was impossible.

  “The Archives have been tampered with.”

  Number One nodded. “That’s what I think, too.”

  “Who would have done this?” Spock asked. “And why?”

  “I’ve found out a few things.” Number One handed him another sheet of flimsy. A data table, headlined “Materials composition analysis.” “This is a breakdown of the explosive residue Commander Tuval’s landing party sampled at the image site.”

  Spock studied the data. One piece of information popped out at him right away. “Duranite.”

  “Yes.”

  “A duranium alloy. One of the strongest construction materials currently available.”

  “As well as one of the most expensive.”

  Spock nodded. Her point was well taken. There were dozens of less expensive duranium alloys of roughly similar strength that could have been used, though now that he was thinking of it, there was something peculiar about duranite …

  Ah.

  “Duranite’s secondary constituent,” he said, “is kreelite ore.”

  Number One nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Kreelite ore is virtually opaque to electromagnetic radiation, impervious to scanning instruments.”

  “That’s right.” She took the flimsy back from him. “Whatever was happening in this facility was intended to be kept secret, safe from prying eyes.”

  “And do you have any thoughts about what that secret might have been?”

  Number One slid the remainder of the stack of flimsies across the table.

  The top page, Spock saw, contained a single word of text.

  “Kronos,” he said.

  “Kronos.” She nodded. “The name repeats several times in the material I have gathered. It appears to be a clandestine project of some sort.”

  Kronos. The word had many connotations; one came immediately to mind.

  “The Klingon home world.”

  “Yes.”

  The look in Number One’s eyes made him suddenly ill at ease.

  “May I?” He gestured toward the stack of flimsies.

  “By all means.”

  Spock turned the top page of flimsy over and began reading.

  THIRTEEN

  Boyce had a hard time sleeping that night. He basically didn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about Argelius. About Jaya and Mobile 7. About the legacy he’d expected to leave … and now never would.

  He was sitting up on his cot, hands clasped on his lap, trying to sort things out in his head, when Hoto woke.

  “Sir?”

  “Lieutenant.” He got to his feet. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, sir. Are you all right?”

  “Fine. A little tired. A little confused.”

  He expected her to start asking questions then, to quiz him on where he’d gone last night, what he’d done. Hoto had been fast asleep by the time he came back to the treatment room.

  Instead, the lieutenant got to her feet and walked across the room. She stopped in front of a storage cabinet and ran her hand across the lockplate. The cabinet popped open. Hoto reached inside and pulled out something in a plastic wrapper.

  “Lieutenant?” he called out. “What are you doing?”

  She turned back to him and smiled. “Eating, sir. Breakfast.” She ripped the wrapper open with her teeth, set it down on a nearby counter, reached inside with her remaining hand, and pulled out what looked like bread of some sort. “As Mr. Spock tells us, an engine, even a finely tuned warp drive, is incapable of running without proper fuel.”

  “Mr. Spock tells you that?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe, however, he is quoting Chief Pitcairn when he does so.”

  Spock quoting Pitcairn. Boyce could only shake his head.

  “Would you care for one?” Hoto nodded toward the cabinet. “They are Orion field rations. According to M’Lor, they supply most basic nutrients required by humans. The taste does leave something to be desired, but—”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. Do they have coffee in there?”

  “No, sir. M’Lor informs me coffee is not stocked aboard this vessel.”

  Of course it isn’t, Boyce thought. More good news.

  Hoto brought her “field rations” back to where the cots were. She sat cross-legged on hers, eating, while Boyce told her what he’d done last night after leaving the room. Where he’d gone, what he’d discovered, what he’d concluded.

  “I find no flaw in your reasoning, sir. I think the situation most likely is exactly as you posit. They a
re undoubtedly experimenting on the girl. Which, to me, is a complication but not a determining factor.”

  “Not a determining factor.”

  “No, sir. Not in my opinion.”

  “They’re playing God with that girl’s life.”

  “Indeed. For all we know, she is dead already.”

  “That’s a cheery thought.”

  “We are speaking of but one life, Doctor. Measured against the continued existence of thousands, if not millions. It is ultimately inconsequential.”

  “Inconsequential? Lieutenant, Starfleet, the Federation, the UFP charter is built on the sanctity of all sentient life.”

  “Forgive me, sir.” Hoto bowed her head. “ Inconsequential was perhaps a poor choice of words. I—”

  The door to the medical wing opened. Two guards entered and took up flanking positions on either side of it.

  Liyan strode in.

  Boyce glanced at the chronometer on the wall. “You’re early.”

  “A few minutes. Forgive me.” She looked at Hoto and then at him. “Have you made up your mind?”

  The tallith looked as if she’d had trouble sleeping as well; there were circles under her eyes that her make-up couldn’t entirely mask. The veins on her neck seemed more prominent—darker—to him this morning as well. He wondered what those on her arm looked like.

  “I’ll help you,” Boyce said.

  “Excellent. We should—”

  “On one condition.”

  “You are hardly in a position to impose conditions.”

  “The girl.”

  “Girl?”

  “Deleen. The experiments stop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been experimenting on her,” Boyce said. “Testing out different versions of the serum. I won’t be a party to that.”

  Liyan, to his surprise, actually smiled. “That is your condition?”

  “Yes.”

  “The point is moot. But if that is your condition, I agree, of course.”

  “Moot.” The same little chill he’d felt earlier went down Boyce’s spine again. “She’s dead.”

  “On the contrary.” Liyan smiled. “She is, all things considered, doing much better. Would you like to see her?”