His smile widened. No—make that the Maltuvian Empire.
14
June 26, 2164
Trojan asteroids, Rigel I L5 point
“YOU KNOW,” Samuel Kirk said to Grev, “I really thought Val would be better at hide-and-seek than this.”
Grev patted his shoulder, feeling him tremble despite the heat in their stony cell. “It’s a big system.”
“You say that like it’s supposed to be encouraging.”
If nothing else, Grev and Kirk’s forced relocation had confirmed to them that they were in space. Their new cell was in extremely low gravity; it took several minutes for anything dropped from arm height to settle to the floor. Thus, the artificial tunnels they and their captors now occupied must be within an asteroid. And judging from the oppressive heat that the tunnels’ inadequate environmental systems let through, they must be very close to Beta Rigel itself. Most likely, they were in one of the Trojan asteroid mines, one too new or too small to have gravity plating or effective environmental control. Grev could only hope they were deep enough beneath the asteroid’s surface to be adequately shielded from the subgiant star’s radiation.
Although he doubted Damreg and their other captors were concerned about their long-term health. As soon as Grev had decrypted the archives, he and Kirk would be ejected into space, or perhaps fed into the mine’s waste recycler. Grev hoped it would be the latter. He’d always wanted his remains to be interred in the soil of Tellar or one of its colonies, so that his biomass would sustain new life. This would not be quite the same, but his options were severely restricted at this point.
The problem was, with Damreg’s constant threats looming over Sam, Grev had had no choice but to produce results. He’d reached the point where his decryption algorithms were close enough to accurately translate about twenty percent of any file, but sometimes that was enough to give the Zami what they needed to blackmail an official or sabotage a corporation. Damreg had taken pleasure this morning in telling him how the leak of the proprietary engine designs of a major shipbuilding firm in the Colonies, courtesy of Grev’s decryptions, had already resulted in half a dozen other firms underbidding their contracts and throwing their stock into a death spiral.
At least Grev now had enough of a feel for the patterns of the encryption that he could attempt to target the files least likely to contain seriously damaging information. But there was simply no way to be sure until they were decoded.
The best he could do was to try to drag things out, to keep himself and Kirk alive until Pioneer could find them. Despite their hopes, their move to a new location had offered no opportunities to reach a transmitter or otherwise secure their escape. Damreg had kept them in harsher, more austere conditions than before. Vons had at least understood that mistreating Grev could undermine his memory and cognitive skills, so he had granted the communications officer relatively comfortable working conditions and saved his torture for Kirk. Damreg had been equally rough on them both—plus microgravity made Grev woozy and upset his digestion. Ironically, this was to Grev’s benefit, for it slowed his work and kept him and Kirk alive longer.
The question was whether that was really a desirable outcome. “Grev,” Kirk asked a while after Damreg had finished gloating and left, “do you think we should . . . find some way to . . . provoke them to kill us?”
“I think that would be a Pyrrhic victory at this point,” Grev replied carefully, hoping the historical allusion would go over any listeners’ heads. The truth, which he was in no hurry to reveal to Damreg, was that Grev had already laid sufficient groundwork that any competent operator of the decryption equipment could complete the task without him.
Kirk nodded, intuiting Grev’s meaning. “Then . . . maybe we should’ve done it days ago. Maybe if we were braver . . .”
Grev interrupted. “Where there is life, there is hope,” he said, adding an affirming nod.
The human stared. “How can you still do that? No matter what, you always try to cheer everyone up.”
“Heh. Everyone?” The Tellarite shook his head. “At this point I’m just trying to keep myself going.”
After a solemn silence, Kirk spoke again. “You know what? You were right.”
“Hm?”
“I should’ve asked Val out while I had the chance.”
“Hm.”
“I mean, she would’ve said no. Probably. But at least I would’ve asked. Let her know . . . that I think she’s worth asking out.”
Grev smiled. “Sam?”
“Hm?”
“I think you’re worth asking out.”
Kirk threw him a look. “Grev? Are you asking me out?”
Before the communications officer could answer, he heard a sound from beyond the metal hatch. He listened carefully, and in a moment he distinguished voices raised in alarm—and shots being fired. “I’ll get back to you,” he said.
The noises got louder, the shots coming closer. Then the hatch burst open and Damreg pulled himself inside just before an energy beam speared the air where he had been. He held on to the frame for leverage as he desperately dragged the hatch closed. He released his drawn weapon to do so, but in the microgravity it stayed too close to his grip for Grev or Kirk to make a grab for it. With the hatch shut, he grabbed the gun once more and waved it at them both. “You’re my hostage, Tellarite! You’re getting me out of here! And you, human—you’re dead weight.” He fixed his aim on Kirk.
The hatch blew open behind him, knocking the Zami assassin forward and sending his shot flying into the asteroidal rock. He tumbled in midair, trying to bring his weapon to bear on Valeria Williams as she surged into the room. But she moved with far more confidence in the negligible gravity, pushing herself off the frame to fly feet-first into his midsection. He spasmed, sending the gun flying, but he recovered and went for her throat. Before his meaty grip could close around her slender neck, she joined her hands into a club and delivered a fierce chop to his carotid. Damreg went limp in midair, sinking toward the floor in a slow spin.
Williams turned to Grev and Kirk, who were staring at her in amazement. “You good?” she asked. They nodded dumbly. “I need words, guys. You functional?”
“We’re, we’re good,” Grev said.
“Yes,” Kirk put in, grinning. “We’re fine now.”
“We’re just very glad to see you,” Grev gushed.
“Mutual. Where are they keeping the archives?”
“We’ll take you there.”
“Okay, come on. I’ll clear the corridor.”
She ducked outside, fearlessly rejoining the firefight that was still going on. As Grev helped Kirk to his feet, he leaned over to whisper in his friend’s ear.
“You should definitely ask her out.”
U.S.S. Pioneer
“Williams to Pioneer,” came the lieutenant’s voice over the bridge speaker. “I’m back in the shuttle. Sam and Grev are with me, and so’s the archive.” Malcolm Reed’s heart lifted, but he permitted himself only a small smile of contentment, though Mayweather and the rest of the bridge crew expressed their gratitude more vocally. “Grev wiped the outpost’s database, but there’s no telling what information they managed to send offsite,” Williams went on.
“Don’t worry about that,” Reed told her. “Just get our people home.”
“Aye, sir, as soon as we finish mopping up.” There was a distant sound of phase-pistol fire, then moments later: “About time, you guys! We secure? . . . Sir, undocking now. We’ll be home any minute.”
“We’ll keep a light on for you.” Fortunately, Williams wasn’t exaggerating about the brief travel time. The Rigelian asteroid fields were quite close to the star, so Pioneer was waiting in the asteroid’s umbra, letting its mass shield them from the heat and radiation. The entire mining facility had been built on the permanent dark side created once the asteroid’s rotation had been synched with its orbit. Even so, it was chiefly automated, like most of the mines here—which was no doubt why the First Fami
lies had deemed them a good hiding place. Also, the radiation would have made it problematical for a ship to spend too long searching here unless its crew knew where to look—as they had done once Hoshi Sato had decrypted and tracked a signal to the Thamnos estate alerting them to an ongoing fraud investigation whose exposure would endanger a number of undercover investigators on Rigel II. The Trade Commission had warned those investigators even as Pioneer, the nearer of the Starfleet ships, had flown to their crew’s rescue.
They’re not home yet, Reed reminded himself as he watched the shuttle undock from the mining outpost. The asteroid remained in hostile hands. It had no weapons to speak of, but there was still the possibility that—
“Sir!” Rey Sangupta called from the science station. “Energy buildup on the surface.” He frowned. “It’s a magnetic signature, not a weapon, but . . .”
“Shields,” Reed ordered, anticipating. Crewman Detzel at tactical complied just before the ship rocked from a fierce impact. Consoles sparked and flickered, suggesting that the blow was forceful enough to shake some internal connections loose. It certainly felt like it knocked some of Reed’s internal connections loose.
“What was that?” Travis Mayweather asked.
“They fired their mass driver at us,” Sangupta replied. “Launched a packet of asteroidal ore at high speed.”
Ensign Tallarico threw him a quizzical look. “They’re throwing rocks at us?”
“Don’t knock it, Ensign,” Reed said. “Kinetic energy’s still as potent as any other kind. So I suggest you move us out of its line of fire.”
“Easier said than done, Captain,” Sangupta said. “The driver track circles the whole asteroid, so they can launch on various trajectories. And we have to stay in the umbra, for the shuttlepod’s sake if not our own.”
“Don’t worry about us, Rey,” came Williams’s voice over the open channel from the pod. “Keep the ship safe.” She left it unsaid that the pod was stuck outside as long as Pioneer’s shields stayed up.
“Incoming!” Detzel called. Tallarico’s hands raced, but the ship suffered another glancing blow before she could dodge completely. The hull rattled and groaned, and Reed struggled to stay seated.
Mayweather clung to the safety handle on the front of the science station. “Damage report!” he called when the shock subsided.
“Shields at half strength,” Detzel replied. “Damage to hull plating and subsurface conduits. And one of the impulse reactors is down.”
“Polarize the plating,” Reed belatedly instructed.
“These shields aren’t designed for a low-tech attack like this,” said Mayweather.
“Then let’s stop relying on them,” Reed replied. “Detzel, target that damned mass driver.”
The crewman frowned. “Sir, which part?”
“The part that a projectile would launch from to hit us! Surely you remember tangents from geometry class.”
A humbled Detzel hastened to comply, and his phase-cannon blast damaged the track at the appropriate place. The ore packet that had already been accelerating toward launch struck the damaged section and crashed, producing a nice splash of ejecta from the impact site. “Excellent,” Reed said. “Shuttlepod, proceed to docking!”
Williams acknowledged, and the pod began to move toward Pioneer again. But then Reed saw lights on the asteroid’s surface, and Sangupta announced, “Thrusters, sir! They’re rotating the asteroid!”
“Detzel, keep firing at the track! Take out as much as you can!”
“Sir, the shuttle’s too close to the line of fire!”
“Val, abort approach!”
But it was too late. Another ore packet flew from the surface, missing the shuttlepod by only a few hundred meters, and clubbed Pioneer hard and head-on. Reed was knocked halfway out of his chair, Mayweather thrown to the deck. Once the captain recovered from the ringing blow, he saw that the bridge lights had dimmed, making it easier to spot the small fire that had erupted on Detzel’s console. Its cooling fan whirred fiercely as the crewman batted the fire out with a gray sleeve.
“Sir,” Detzel reported grimly a moment later, “the power grid on F deck is damaged. Our weapons are down.”
Reed didn’t pause to dwell on the news. “Will shields hold long enough to get them working again?”
“Negative, sir.”
Mayweather stepped closer to Reed. “Captain, let’s grab the pod in a tractor beam and get out of here, best speed.”
“That mass driver has unlimited range, and impulse drive is hobbled.”
“Sir, we’ll go back in,” Williams offered. “If we can reach the driver controls—”
“Negative! We can’t risk letting that archive fall back into their hands. And I won’t risk you again either.” He paused. “Make a break for the nearest asteroid, use it for cover. We’ll shield you as long as we can. As for the radiation, you’ll just have to hope—”
“Sir!” Sangupta interrupted, beaming. “It’s Endeavour!”
Multiple phase-cannon bolts and spatial torpedoes speared from the black into the mass driver, striking the track in enough places to render it useless. Moments later, the Columbia-class starship hove into view on the screen, taking up position in the asteroid’s umbra near Pioneer. Then the image changed to a sight Malcolm Reed had never found more beautiful: the face of Captain T’Pol. “Captain Reed. Do you require assistance?”
Reed decided it would be ungrateful to tell her she had a talent for the obvious.
• • •
“Kirk and Grev will both be fine physically in a few days,” Doctor Therese Liao told Captain Reed as Valeria Williams stood at his side. “Mentally,” the compact, middle-aged physician went on, “it’s harder to say. They’ve both been through rough treatment, and Sam was subjected to several sessions of torture. I’m going to need to have him in for regular psych counseling for a while, and I recommend a reduced duty schedule.”
“Of course, Doctor,” said Reed. “Whatever he needs.”
Williams let the rest of their conversation wash over her, too preoccupied with the thought of what Kirk had endured over the past week. Finally Liao gave her permission to speak to the historian.
Kirk’s face brightened when he saw her. “Val!” He beckoned her forward, clasping her hands when she drew in range. “I . . . I really wanted to thank you for saving us. I, I know that’s not adequate to—there are no words—”
She shook her head uneasily. “No, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
“Val, you saved my life. And I want you to know . . . that is, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you—”
“Sam, wait.” She pulled her hands away. “There’s something I need you to know first.”
She told him about Rigel IV, about how she’d had the opportunity to discover where he and Grev were being held but had passed it up to rescue a stranger. “That was five days ago. Before you were—Sam, if I’d done my job then, we might have found you before . . .”
He just lay in the medical bed, staring at nothing, absorbing what he’d heard. She spoke again, tentatively. “Sam . . . if you’re mad at me, I understand. I’m so sorry.”
“Mad.” He scoffed gently, and Williams realized what a totally inadequate word it was. But then his eyes met hers, very briefly. “No . . . I understand why you . . . felt you had to do that. I can’t blame you for it. What they did—I blame them. It was all them.”
She was more relieved than she fully understood. “That’s good. I’m glad—I mean, I appreciate—” She broke off. After a moment’s silence, she said, “You, um, said there was something you wanted to tell me?”
Kirk looked at her for a long moment. Finally: “No. No, there’s nothing to say. In fact . . . I think I want to be alone right now, if that’s okay.”
She lowered her head, understanding that it would be a while before things were okay. “Of course. I understand.”
He said nothing more to her. There was a tear in her eye as she left.<
br />
15
June 27, 2164
Thamnos estate, Rigel IV
“WHAT’S HAPPENING, THAMNOS?” a panicked Vemrim Corthoc demanded over the viewing screen. Behind him in the Corthocs’ communications parlor, his senior siblings were undertaking more important tasks, delegating the panic to the otherwise useless Vemrim. “Our people are being arrested all over Two and Five and the Colonies! Our offworld assets have been seized—the secret ones nobody was supposed to know about! And our peasants have risen up! They’ve taken the armory and they’re heading for the mansion! We tried shooting at them from our ships, but someone sabotaged the weapon systems!”
Retifel Thamnos smirked. That Starfleet woman was more resourceful than I realized. No wonder the lizard liked her. “It’s Garos,” she told Corthoc. “Apparently he was playing our own game against us—accumulating data on our activities and holdings that he could use as blackmail fodder if we turned on him.”
“That’s just low. Who would sink to such a thing?” She didn’t deign to answer. “Retifel, dear, you have to help us.”
“Do you imagine that Garos spared us the same assault? We’re dealing with crises of our own. At this point, Corthoc, it’s every Family for itself.” A distant explosion sounded over the comm, and the ornate chandeliers behind Vemrim shuddered and chimed. “And it sounds as if you have your hands full, so I’ll leave you to it. Sorry, dear.”
She shut off the screen before Vemrim could spew more desperate babble, finally letting herself laugh out loud at the Corthocs’ misfortune. True, the seizures and arrests of the Thamnos’ own offworld assets were no mere jest, and the populist uprisings were undoubtedly just beginning. The Thamnos, and other clans less brazen in their brutality than the Corthocs, were managing to censor the news of their worst atrocities for now, but it would surely reach the masses in time, and Retifel had no illusions about her Family’s ability to fend off an insurrection with its offworld assets so severely compromised.
But Retifel had faith in the Thamnos’ ability to adapt to change. It had been that adaptability that had enabled them to displace older, more ossified Families and claim their lands and wealth. This latest hardship would simply clear more of their rivals, the Corthocs included, from the field and give the Thamnos a clearer path to power.
Star Trek: Enterprise - 016 - Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel Page 24
