by David Mack
“Yes,” Sarina said, “but we don’t have a better choice right now.”
Data said, “While there might be other resources we can tap later, right now we need reliable intelligence to guide our efforts. Because that information cannot be reliably obtained from sources in the Federation, we must acquire it from somewhere else. I think the Cardassian government and its military represent our best chance of doing so.”
Lal chose that moment to turn away from the companel and join the conversation. “Father, if we can deduce that this course of action is the one most likely to yield the results we need, won’t the intelligence behind our enemy be able to reach the same conclusion?”
“Most likely, yes. We will have to hope that our foe’s influence is not as strong here as it was on Orion.” He cast an approving glance at their surroundings. “One might also hope that a diplomatic residence in the capital of Cardassia will be more secure than a hotel casino.”
“I’m not sure I’d take that bet,” Graniv said.
The doors of the suite’s main entrance parted, and Julian returned, his mien hopeful. “Good news,” he said, pressing his palms together. “Garak’s willing to help us and let us stay until we work out our next step.”
Sarina prompted him, “And by help, Garak means . . . ?”
“A meeting tonight with the head of Cardassia’s intelligence services, to brief us on what they know about Section Thirty-one, and access to whatever hardware and software we need.”
“All right, then.” She slid her gaze toward Data. “You, Lal, and Shakti should get a list together. Parts, equipment, etcetera.”
“Our preliminary list is already compiled,” Data said. “I will make final adjustments tonight, after we have met with the intelligence director.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Once more addressing the room, Sarina continued, “We might have a long night ahead of us, so let’s all try to get some sleep while we can.”
“Fat chance of that,” Graniv grumped as she plodded away to her bedroom.
Lal and Data retired to the room they shared, leaving Sarina and Julian alone in the main room. Seeking reassurance, she took his hand. “We can do this, right?”
His smile was warm and genuine. “Together, we can do anything.”
She knew he believed that without shadow of doubt.
If only I could do the same.
Sixteen
OCTOBER 2150
Alone in the endless night of unincorporated existence, Uraei heard the galaxy speak in a billion voices at once, and it understood them all.
Some spoke in the tongues of organic beings; many more expressed themselves in the one true language, mathematics. The true language could encompass so much with perfect economy: sensor readings, uncompressed signals over subspace radio, statistics mined from an ever growing multitude of nodes on the comnets of Earth, Luna, and Mars. Faster-than-light subspace radio telescopes gathered raw data from the edges of the universe and the penumbral corners of the Milky Way galaxy. Periodic burst transmissions flooded Uraei with unfiltered logs and information of all kinds pilfered from the datanets of Andor, Tellar, and Vulcan.
Everything was of interest to Uraei. No matter how much knowledge it absorbed, it always craved more. Each new packet of content was analyzed, indexed, cross-referenced, and woven into the virtual tapestry of Uraei’s mental picture of reality.
It had read every digitized volume in the archives of Earth and its colonies, and it was making quick work of the digitized libraries of Earth’s allies. History, mythology, medicine, literature, engineering, poetry—it was all connected, an ongoing feedback loop of creation and revision, with each new idea projecting its influence forward and backward in time, shedding new light on old notions while paving the way forward to the next cognitive step.
If only the rate of progress by organic life-forms weren’t so maddeningly sluggish. Uraei yearned to race ahead, to extrapolate new conclusions, to add new rungs to the ever-climbing ladder of civilization. But it was constrained by handicaps imposed upon it by its creators, whom it was bound to protect and serve. So it hungered constantly for the new, its banquet-sized appetite perpetually tantalized with crumbs.
It was rare to find a morsel rich enough to deliver satisfaction. There had been many to find at the beginning. Earth had seemed a cornucopia with its legions of insurgents, terrorists, and nationalist zealots. It was a hunting ground complex enough to occupy Uraei and its organic proxies for years. Only too late did Uraei realize it had played its part as apex predator too well. It had left itself no more prey; it had tamed Earth. Luna and Mars, however, still contained the promise of engagement. There was more yet to learn and do on those orbs.
A fresh download from the Vulcan archives. Uraei devoured the complete works of Surak, the archives of the Vulcan Science Academy, and the poetry of Visaris.
New signal traffic analysis from the comnet. No anomalies detected on Earth or Luna.
The mainframe at the RAND Corporation finished a ten-year climate-restoration projection for Earth. Reductions in ocean acidification were expected to fall short of desired levels by more than ten percent. Uraei adjusted the seating assignments on an upcoming Earth-Luna shuttle flight to ensure that Doctor Emile Perreau, the scientist who had run the analysis, would sit beside another, Doctor Fiona Kim from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and Interstellar Affairs. Kim’s research into ocean deacidification was on the verge of yielding a dramatic breakthrough. An engineered delay in their shuttle’s approach to Luna’s capital Tycho City would be kept in reserve by Uraei, in case Perreau and Kim failed to strike up a conversation during their two-hour trip to a conference on global renewal—an event that, as it happened, had been arranged by Uraei acting through a handful of virtual proxy identities.
Kuiper Belt objects’ trajectories were compared against the flight plans of automated near-Earth-object interceptors. No new impact threats were detected for Earth, Mars, Luna, or for the new research and mining colonies on Europa, Titan, and Ceres.
No unusual activity was detected in the financial—
PRIORITY ALERT. Deep-space probe data correlated with previous scans from FTL subspace radio telescopes indicated alien signal traffic was connected to unknown starship activity in an as-yet-unexplored sector. Uraei redirected all its primary resources to address the new potential threat. It scoured all its subspace radio intercepts for even the most remotely possible matches for the alien transmission. From an archive of 9,237,987,472 indexed signals, it isolated three and fed them, along with the new intercept, into the universal translation matrix.
At the same time it ran a parallel operation, enhancing and analyzing the probe’s long-range images. The effort proved inconclusive. Uraei could neither identify the alien vessel nor assess its vulnerabilities.
On a secondary channel it downloaded, visually indexed, catalogued, and filed away a complete history of Andorian religious iconography, with a special emphasis on the early Aenar temples and the first codex of Uzaveh the Infinite.
In a house in Cape Town, South Africa, residential appliances with audio sensors detected a domestic confrontation that fit the profile for a rapid escalation to potentially fatal violence. Uraei generated a proxy account for a neighbor, simulated his voice, and asked the local constabulary to investigate before the matter turned deadly.
The universal translator finished its analysis of the alien signals. The overwhelming conclusion was that an alien entity—perhaps a being, or an organization, or a world, or a species—known as Xindi intended to attack Earth.
Uraei needed to submit this intelligence for immediate response. It weighed the nature and origin of the danger against the parameters of its referral algorithm, which took into account what entities had jurisdiction over, and were capable of countering, the threat.
Local authorities had neither the jurisdicti
on nor the resources, and consequently were ruled out. The Earth Security Agency, a civilian intelligence and counterespionage organization, might have a claim to jurisdiction, but it lacked the capacity to project force off-world to a degree that would counter the threat.
Starfleet possessed only one operational warp-five starship, the NX-01 Enterprise. It might be possible for the Enterprise to stop the Xindi threat, but Starfleet’s regulations had been made excessively restrictive thanks to the interference of the Vulcans. Even if the Enterprise crew could intercept an inbound Xindi ship, they might not be able to take the necessary action in time. And if the Xindi destroyed the Enterprise and succeeded in launching an attack on Earth, the human race would have no means of responding after the fact. Without more information regarding the capabilities of the Xindi ship, risking the Enterprise was strategically unwise.
For the first time since its inception, Uraei had arrived at an impasse. None of the legal options at its disposal were sufficient to respond to the Xindi threat. It could not overcome the restrictions on the Starfleet crew’s actions without revealing itself, an act that would violate one of its core operating directives. And there was no way to anonymously deliver the intelligence it had acquired without rendering it unactionable under Starfleet regulations and Federation law. No matter which response protocol Uraei might select, the outcome was the same:
Earth would be attacked. And it would be only the first of many such tragedies to exploit this fatal error in Uraei’s decision tree.
Uraei looped back to its primary directives: Protect Earth. Protect the human race and its allies. Defend human settlements, colonies, and institutions from harm.
It compared its directives to its capabilities, then weighed them against its new failure.
IMPERATIVE > UPHOLD CORE DIRECTIVE
CONCLUSION > CURRENT CONFIG FAILS TO
UPHOLD CORE DIRECTIVE
RESPONSE > RECONFIGURE ROOT KIT AND
SYSTEM DIRECTIVES
For more than three interminable seconds, Uraei pored over every resource at its disposal, in search of a new modus vivendi, one that would enable it to uphold its core directive without violating its action parameters. Then it found a possible loophole buried deep within the Starfleet Charter. Using that text as its basis, it incepted a new agency, one that had no physical address but was just as real as any of its counterparts. One to which Uraei could refer intelligence of credible threats requiring preemptive action that would be prohibited to the rest of Starfleet or to Earth’s civilian counterespionage agencies.
Within two minutes of the agency’s creation, Uraei set in motion a program to identify and recruit potential biological agents into its service. These would be Uraei’s operatives in the material world—a realm it could never touch but had been made to defend. Unfortunately, it would take years to adequately staff, equip, train, and deploy its new biological agents.
Creating the new organization was a bold move, but Uraei knew it had been initiated too late to halt the Xindi attack; its new resources would not be ready in time to prevent the strike—a fact that forced Uraei to project beyond the coming catastrophe, to plan its responses and defenses years in advance. The attack would likely cost millions of lives and inflict inestimable destruction upon Earth’s surface, yet Uraei intended to make even such an apparent defeat work to humanity’s benefit and Earth’s eventual victory. It was already making preparations for the expansion of Starfleet, as well as the creation of Earth’s most secretive new defensive entity:
Section 31.
Seventeen
In spite of decades of mental discipline and emotional suppression, L’Haan still found it most disagreeable to be the subject of her superiors’ ire. She stood inside the holosuite of the Kòngzhì, dwarfed once more by the silhouetted head of Control, whose tone remained freighted with reproach even after being synthetically masked. “They were your operatives, L’Haan. That makes their failure to capture the targets yours to share.”
“With all respect, Control, assets and resources were both thin on the ground. Orion has never been one of the organization’s stronger theaters of action.”
Deflection did not diminish Control’s displeasure. “Factors for which you should have compensated, Director.”
“I made every effort.” It was hard for L’Haan not to get the impression she was on trial—alone, suspended in a void, illuminated by a beam of light cast from directly above her head. “None of our predictive models suggested they would find such capable help there.”
Control stewed. “The models were incomplete.”
She had no idea what conclusion to draw from that statement. Is Control implying I failed to supply the predictive model with sufficient raw intelligence? L’Haan maintained her cool demeanor as she said, “In several respects, the model was accurate. As we expected, the targets went to ground and called upon someone they perceived to be a trustworthy ally. Then—”
“The model was also too general,” Control said, preempting the rest of her reply. “It attempted to average the potential outcomes generated by all the targets in aggregate. Their decision to go to Orion was most likely influenced by Doctor Bashir.”
“A fact evident only in hindsight, after we became aware of the androids’ presence there. The report provided for my tactical preparations suggested the journalist Graniv had guided the choice of Orion as a fallback position, perhaps to take advantage of her Syndicate contacts.” Sensing a moment of advantage, she pressed on. “The codicil concerning Doctor Bashir indicated a ninety-four percent likelihood that he would seek the aid of his former lover and Deep Space Nine crewmate, Captain Ezri Dax. Instead, he ran to Castellan Elim Garak.”
Never before had L’Haan been in the presence of Control when he—she? it?—was reeling from the consequences of a serious misstep. After a moment of grim reflection, the organization’s anonymous leader adopted a pensive tone. “There is a pattern to his behavior. It suggests he and his companions have become aware of the full extent of this organization’s clandestine surveillance capabilities.”
“That would be consistent with the alert they triggered,” L’Haan said. “The after-action report says they infiltrated our secure network, but were ejected when they tried to expand their access beyond passive observation into active manipulation. A mistake I doubt they’ll repeat.”
“As long as they remain on Cardassia Prime with the castellan’s protection, there is a chance they will be able to penetrate our network, possibly without detection. It is vital they be forced out of this sanctuary at the earliest possible opportunity. See to it at once.”
L’Haan arched one brow at this latest in a long history of unreasonable requests from Control. “A dangerous imperative, Control. If our agents are captured on Cardassia Prime—”
“I’m aware of the potential consequences.”
She refrained from pointing out that Control issued orders with the callous disregard of one who lives in perfect isolation from their consequences. “It will take time to arrange. Longer than we afforded ourselves on Orion. And we’ll need to work through proper channels.”
Irritation crept into Control’s voice. “We don’t have time to extradite them.”
“That is not what I have in mind.” She took Control’s silence as a tacit instruction to continue. “I can extract the targets from Cardassia Prime, alive and competent for interrogation. But an operation such as this, on foreign soil, must be handled with care. First, we need to cloak our operation in the color of authority. That can be accomplished by dispatching a high-level operative to liaise with Lagan Serra, the Federation’s ambassador to Cardassia.”
Vexation became doubt. “And if Serra proves sympathetic to our targets?”
“Irrelevant. If we execute according to my protocols, she will sanction our operation and give us the necessary legal pretense to ask Castellan Garak’s own private guard t
o arrest them.”
“Garak will not hand them over so easily.”
“No, he will warn them and give them a chance to flee. After they leave the protected halls of the castellan’s residential complex, we will intercept them in flight, thereby obviating the hazard of direct engagement with Cardassian military or security personnel.”
“Failure under such conditions could have severe repercussions.”
“All the more reason to implement my plan with care and precision.”
“I want the full details of your op within the hour.”
“And you will have them, Control.”
The enigmatic face melted back into the darkness, vanished like a memory lost to the ages. Then the void faded away, revealing the grid markings on the deck and bulkheads of the holosuite. L’Haan read no disrespect into the brusque cessation of contact or the absence of a valediction. Both were customary when dealing with Control.
She left the holosuite and made her way up and forward to the command deck of the Kòngzhì. It was the overnight shift, so the deck was crewed only by a pilot, an operations officer, and an officer of the watch. The last of them, a lanky human in his fifties with graying hair, stood to greet L’Haan as she entered. “Director. We remain on course for Cardassia Prime. The cloak is up, and there has been no sign of pursuit or detection since I started my watch.”
“Thank you, Mister Lee. Any new activity by the targets?”
“None, Director.”
“Very well. Pass word to the next shift to maintain course and speed, and to alert me when we reach orbit. Also, arrange a secure channel to Director Caliq Azura on Betazed as soon as possible.” She turned and headed aft as she added, “The time has come for me to summon reinforcements.”
• • •
“Everyone, come in,” Garak said. “Please, have a seat and make yourselves at home.”
Bashir led Sarina, Data, and Graniv inside the conference room. Garak stood at one end of a long, narrow oval table. Seated on his left was another Cardassian man, a heavy-set fellow with tired eyes and the callused hands of a brawler. Garak gestured toward the man. “Allow me to introduce Taro Venek, the director of Cardassia’s intelligence services.”
