by David Mack
“Good,” Bashir said. “Keep me posted.”
The two men walked in opposite directions—Data back to his ship, Bashir to the guest room he had claimed for the duration of their exile on this planet of perpetual midnight.
They’re steering a course toward a head-on fight with Section 31, Graniv brooded. And I’m along for the ride, whether I like it or not. She forced herself to resume jotting down every last detail of the story, in the hope that one day her words might reach the galaxy at large.
If this story doesn’t win me another Gavlin, there’s no justice left in the universe.
Twenty-seven
Fatigue and despair taunted Sarina. Her eyes itched from having been clamped open for most of the previous thirty-nine hours. Injectors perched just beyond her peripheral vision kept her ocular surfaces moisturized with periodic sprays of ultrafine saline mist, but there was no relief for her body’s urge to shut her eyes to block out the world and all its myriad agonies. She was in her own personal hell, imprisoned in a waking nightmare.
The drugs with which her captors had dosed her had left her almost numb below the neck, and ahead of her lay nothing but a white wall splashed with blinding light to wash out even its broadest details. Unable to look away from it, Sarina felt as if she were a disembodied mind adrift in a pale void. Her only companion was L’Haan’s voice, which lived somewhere behind her shoulder but had come to feel like an echo inside her skull.
Her former handler said in a dulcet tone, “Tell me what you found in Dresden.”
It didn’t matter how much Sarina wanted to remain silent, to defy the Vulcan woman’s questions. Every synapse of her mind had been compromised by a cocktail of the most advanced and targeted neurochemical agents known to science. Her will was no longer her own.
“We didn’t find anything in Dresden.” It was the truth, at least on its face. But the moment Sarina spoke it, she knew that all the facts she was fighting to omit were being perused telepathically by L’Haan, who had been a constant lurking presence in her psyche, spectating on her every fleeting thought and memory.
“So. As we suspected, the code string was discovered by civilians. They brought it to the journalist, Graniv. Was she the one who enlisted you and Bashir?”
Sarina wished she could bite through her own tongue, but some compound or other flooding her brain short-circuited her ability to inflict self-harm. “Yes. It was Graniv.”
“We’ve already dealt with Professors Weng and th’Firron at the Dresden Technical Institute. Besides yourself, Bashir, and Data, who knows about the code?”
She shuddered and let slip a tear of impotent rage as more truth poured out of her. “Computer specialist Nyrok Turan. . . . Data’s daughter, Lal. His ship’s AI, Shakti. . . . Castellan Elim Garak. And Taro Venek, Cardassia’s intelligence director.”
“An interesting coterie of allies.” The Vulcan’s psionic probing felt like a serpent twisting through and around Sarina’s thoughts. “None of whom can help you now.”
“Julian will find me. He’ll never stop looking.”
“Even without my gifts I would know that was just bravado, Ms. Douglas. Have you spent so long in the doctor’s company that his delusional romanticism has infected you?” The Vulcan’s voice fell to a whisper. “Your fight is over, Sarina. You belong to us now.”
It had the terrible ring of truth, but she refused to accept it. “Never.”
“Everything you are . . . all that you know . . . is ours for the taking. Imagine your greatest fear.” Sarina did all she could not to comply with the order, only to betray herself with the effort. “As I suspected: you’re afraid the procedure Bashir performed to free you from your catatonia will reverse itself and return you to the dungeon of your own mind. Tell me your deepest shame.” Another pause led to Sarina’s next self-betrayal. “You regret helping Starfleet Intelligence recruit Bashir for the Salavat mission. Because it tainted his soul with state-sanctioned murder. How noble of you. Confess to me your most bitter regret.” Sarina tried to empty her mind and fill it with blinding white light, but it made no difference—once again L’Haan ferreted out the truth. “Your wasted adolescence. Your life that could have been. And the abiding hatred and resentment you bear toward your parents for inflicting that first failed procedure upon you. . . . All these years after Bashir cured you, and in all that time you’ve never spoken to your parents. Who knew such a waifish creature could bear such a heavy grudge?”
Sarina let out a ragged, anguished cry of rage, then screamed, “Stop! Please stop!” Tears flowed from her pinned-open eyes, painting her cheeks with angry heat. Sobs racked her chest until she could barely breathe—and through it all, L’Haan’s mind-shadow haunted Sarina’s innermost core of self like a reaper waiting to swing her scythe.
The room went quiet. Then came a few gentle taps of fingertips against companels, answered by soft feedback tones. Then L’Haan’s voice was once again warm and close behind Sarina’s left ear. “She’s ready.”
Ominous voices filled the room, all of them speaking in perfect unison. “Splendid. Let’s begin.” A spike of white-hot pain drilled through Sarina’s mind and focused her attention on the dread chorus. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Douglas. I . . . am Control.”
• • •
Night seemed to go on forever outside the Ivory Tower’s observation deck. Past shredded clouds that raced overhead, the sky flickered with clusters of stars, more than Bashir had ever been able to see from the surface of any other world with an atmosphere. The universe’s cold majesty had once filled him with awe, but tonight it served only to remind him that his life, like everyone else’s, was tiny, relatively isolated, and—in the end—most likely inconsequential.
He pressed his forehead to the observation deck’s transparent aluminum dome. It was cool against his skin and relieved his lingering headache by some small measure.
I guess I can be thankful for that, at least.
He had come to the top of the tower to find some solitude. Footsteps crossing the metallic deck behind him told Bashir his bid for privacy had failed. Beside his own reflection on the dome he saw Ozla Graniv’s. She walked toward him with an air of resolve that faltered as she drew near, until at last she halted a couple of paces behind him.
“We need to talk, Doctor.”
He had been expecting this confrontation. Resigned to it, he faced Graniv. “About what?”
Her courage wavered. “I’m sorry. I hate to ask this of you. . . . I’d hate to ask this of anybody. I know it’s not really my place—”
“Please, Ozla, spit it out.”
His demand steeled her nerve. “I’m here to beg you to reconsider this crazy ransom scheme. I know you said it’s just a ruse, a bid to get eyes on Sarina. But it’s too dangerous.”
“For who? You won’t be anywhere near this.”
“Dammit, I’m not talking about me, or even you, or her, or Data and Lal. Consider all that’s at stake here.”
He almost laughed at her patriotic fervor. “You mean the Federation.”
“Yes, the Federation.”
Bitterness got the better of him. “The same Federation whose Starfleet is hunting us, alongside its allies and its illegal espionage group?”
“No, not the abstract political entity, but the hundreds of billions of people, hailing from thousands of worlds and hundreds of species, who live in it. They don’t know it, but every one of them is counting on us to do the right thing.” She poked his chest. “To do the smart thing.”
Bashir filled with resentment in the face of her condescension. “Would it surprise you to learn I made this argument to myself some time ago?”
She matched his cold burn of anger with her own. “Yes, it would. Because you’re supposed to be some kind of genetically enhanced supergenius. But if you can’t see that risking the future security and liberty
of hundreds of billions of people isn’t worth some harebrained suicide mission to try to save one woman, I might need to question your whole mythology.”
He started to move past her. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
Graniv caught his sleeve and halted him. “Make me understand, Doctor. This scrap of code on a data chip—you’ve all been telling me since we found it that it represents some rare, possibly unique opportunity to expose and destroy this Section Thirty-one group. So why throw it away over one person? What would Sarina tell you to do?” When Bashir froze, unable to admit what they both knew to be true, Graniv said it for him. “She’d tell you to let her go. To use the code to take down Thirty-one. She wouldn’t want you to give it up just for her.”
“It’s not her choice to make.”
“And why do you think it’s yours?”
Years of guilt and regret surfaced from a dark corner of his soul. “Because what’s happening to her is my fault. I set all this in motion when I agreed to perform the surgery to correct the flaws in her original enhancement. I thought I was doing her a service. Setting her free. Giving her back her life. But when I did that, I made her like me—and that put a target on her back. One I should’ve known Starfleet Intelligence and Thirty-one would both try to exploit.” He looked past Graniv, toward the sky full of stars, and thought of all the places he and Sarina had been—and all the blood they had shed in the name of duty. “Before I did that, she was an innocent. Because of me, she got caught up in all this . . . ugliness.”
“And because of you, she got to experience beauty.” Sympathy infused Graniv’s words. “And love.” She took Bashir’s hand. “Honor the gifts you gave her, by respecting her sacrifice.”
He pulled his hand from hers. “You mean by giving up on her. Abandoning her.”
Exasperated, the journalist struggled not to let her hands become fists. “Of all the selfish bullshit I’ve ever heard! Yes, fine. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Abandon her. Because if you don’t you’ll be playing into your enemy’s hands. And based on what I’ve seen so far, they’ll gladly kill you, me, and everyone we’ve ever met to make this chip full of code disappear. But never mind all that—go ahead and plan your ransom swap. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen if you’re wrong? Just the proliferation of a cruel, amoral shadow government that will last for the foreseeable future and undermine everything our civilization claims to stand for.”
Duly chastened, Bashir fixed Graniv with a glum stare. “I know you think I’m either a fool or a madman to gamble the fates of billions for the sake of one woman. And to be quite honest, you’re probably right. But I love her, more than anyone, more than anything. And I cannot surrender her to the enemy, not when there’s even the slimmest chance of saving her.”
Graniv seemed to succumb to the futility of arguing the point further. “There’s no standing in the way of true love, I suppose.” She shot a weary frown his way. “I just hope your sense of chivalry hasn’t doomed us all.”
• • •
One step through the door and Ozla felt the hairs on her arm and the nape of her neck stand up in response to the galvanic potential in the ozone-scented air.
A far cry from the comfort of the penthouse suite, the Ivory Tower’s computer laboratory was a sterile haven of cold metal and subdued light. It housed three faster-than-light computer cores, which were arranged in concentric rings, with the most accelerated unit in the center. Two offset gaps permitted passage through the outer rings to the inner ones, but Data, Lal, and Bashir awaited her at a console situated in the circular walkway outside the largest ring.
Data noted her arrival and beckoned her with a wave. “Join us, Ms. Graniv.”
Lal continued to work, entering commands into the console. Bashir stared in rapt fascination at the complex network of connections being mapped on the viewscreen mounted above the interface and recessed slightly into the ring-shaped server casing. Ozla sidled up to Lal and tried to make sense of the expanding chaos. “Found something?”
“Yes and no,” Data said.
Bashir added, “Still no leads on Sarina’s location. But we have something bigger.” A nod at the screen. “Have a look at Uraei’s complete network in local space.”
Cued in to the map’s context, Ozla looked again. This time she recognized the names of stars and planets and was able to identify certain points as major starbases. Others, tracked along recorded and projected trajectories, were lone starships and mercantile convoys. Fleeting pulses indicated signals intercepted from subspace radio relays or surveilled on planetary hard-line networks. It was a map of information and resources, updated in real time, that encompassed a spherical region with a diameter of nearly a thousand light-years. “This . . . is amazing.”
“This is everything,” Bashir said. “Except for a few items the system is actively concealing, this is what Uraei sees right now.” He enlarged a portion of the map and pointed to an empty region of interstellar space. “Fortunately for us, Data tells me our current location is somewhere in here—free of Uraei’s attention.”
“For the moment, at least,” Data cautioned.
“Incredible. Data, is this what you were trying to create back on Orion?”
“It is.” He reset the map to its widest view. “We lacked the proper resources and safeguards there. But with the tower’s computers to buffer and amplify Shakti’s efforts, we’ve been able to infiltrate Uraei’s network without betraying our presence or our position.”
The scope of the network felt overwhelming. “Can you make sense of all this?”
“Yes, by applying filters,” Lal said. She cycled through a few as a demonstration. “We can look at just starships in transit. Or view the known locations of Section Thirty-one personnel, assets, and command sites. We can also review their active targets”—she made her final adjustment with a flourish—“or limit our results to their comm logs.”
Ozla nodded in approval. “Very impressive. Dare I ask how we plan to use all this?”
“Very carefully,” Bashir said.
Data volunteered a bit more detail. “We are conducting subtle tests of their information security, to see if their master system has functions we can usurp for our benefit.”
That struck Ozla as ominously vague. “What sort of functions?”
“We would prefer not to elaborate until we know more.” Data traded a knowing glance with Lal before he added, “If we find what we are looking for, there might be a way to pursue Doctor Bashir’s plan for rescuing Agent Douglas without compromising her safety or ours.”
“That would be ideal.” She backed away from the console. “Unless there’s something else, I should probably get back to working on my story.”
Bashir gently caught her arm, arresting her departure. “In fact, there is.” He directed her attention to Data with a sly nod.
“In the course of testing the scope of our access to Thirty-one’s command systems, we succeeded in downloading a significant number of their archived files.”
Ozla sensed that her fellow exiles had found something major. “What kinds of files?”
Lal called up a slew of documents on the viewscreen. “Operational records. Comm logs and recordings. Shipping manifests. Personnel rosters. And executive orders from the organization’s directors, including its top officer, referred to only as Control.”
“In other words,” Bashir said, “full documentation of everything Section Thirty-one has done for nearly the last two centuries. Its agents. Its assets. And its victims.”
Data removed a data chip from the console. “The full archive has been stored on here.” He handed it to Ozla. “You can access all its contents on the modified padd I left in your room.”
“I have it right here.” She reached into her jacket’s deep inner pocket, pulled out the slender device, and inserted the chip into it.
Before she could access the chip’s contents, Bashir set his hand on the padd’s screen to stop her. “Once you look at those files, there won’t be any turning back.”
“I think that ship sailed quite some time ago, Doctor.”
A solemn nod. “In that case, there’s one particular set of documents you need to see.” He removed his hand. “Call up the files tagged Tezwa, dated October of 2379.”
Her hand halted above the padd’s touchscreen, frozen by dread. Her memories flashed back to an exposé she had researched in 2380 about the Federation’s ill-fated intervention on Tezwa. At the time, she had thought the most damning aspects of it were the suggestion that Admiral William Ross of Starfleet had colluded in some manner with criminal elements from the Orion Syndicate to smuggle contraband to the neutral planet of Tezwa and then cover it up afterward, and that he had played a role in a conspiracy to pressure President Min Zife to resign his office. Now she feared that she was about to learn something far worse.
I’m here to serve the truth. Can’t shy away from it now.
She opened the files.
Within seconds, she feared she would throw up before she was done reading. “Are we sure this is all true?”
“There are multiple confirmations in Thirty-one’s own files,” Data said.
“And independent corroboration in Starfleet and civilian records,” Bashir added.
Ozla reflexively covered her mouth as she continued to pore through the classified documents. It was a stream of transcripts and logs confirming Section 31 had orchestrated the Starfleet admiralty’s coup against President Zife, with the assistance of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Ambassador Lagan Serra. Worse, not only was the Federation’s former head of state illegally forced from office, he and two senior members of his administration had been assassinated by Section 31 directors L’Haan and Zeitsev shortly afterward, rather than taken into exile as Zeitsev had assured his Starfleet conspirators he would do.
