by David Mack
“We don’t have time to wait, Data. If anyone’s going to know where Sarina is, it’ll be L’Haan. So let’s find her, as soon as possible.”
Data switched off the holoprojection. “We will do our best to be ready within a few hours. But if we do this, Doctor, we need to ask a favor of you in return.”
Bashir felt a sucker deal coming. “What would that be?”
“We will make only one attempt to ransom Sarina. If L’Haan refuses to negotiate for her, or if contacting L’Haan compromises this hideout, we abandon the search. Agreed?”
Success meant bringing Sarina home, and failure meant not just losing her forever, but surrendering all hope. It was a steep price, but Bashir saw no other way forward that wouldn’t cost him the only friends he had left. He accepted Data’s terms with a nod. “Agreed.”
• • •
Time crawled for Bashir while he waited for Data, Lal, and Shakti to finish their preparations. In the interim there was nothing for him to do but isolate himself. He didn’t want to distract the androids or their AI, and he had no interest in chancing another argument with Ozla.
Sequestered in his room, Bashir lay upon the bed, stubbornly awake. He had considered replicating a mild sedative to ease himself into slumber, only to reject the idea in favor of keeping his mind as clear and sharp as possible. It was ironic, he supposed, that fear and sleep deprivation might prove as detrimental to his cognition as a synthetic soporific drug, but he preferred to take his chances with the affliction he already knew.
What if I’ve made the wrong choice? What if Sarina’s already gone? It was too bleak a prospect for him to accept. After all they had endured together, he had to believe they would find a way to weather this. That they would be reunited, whatever the cost. Because the notion of going on without her, of confronting the possibility of decades of continued existence without her in his life . . . that was a future he didn’t know how to accept.
A soft tone from the overhead speaker ended his maudlin reflections. “Data to Doctor Bashir. We are ready to begin as soon as you can join us.”
Bashir sprang from the bed and headed for the door. “On my way.”
On the short walk and lift ride down to the Tower’s computer laboratory, he wicked the cold sweat from his palms by wiping them across the front of his shirt. His mouth was dry, and he felt his pulse quicken as he neared the lab’s door. He took a deep breath and touched his carotid artery to monitor his pulse. Using biofeedback techniques he had learned from studying yoga in his youth, he slowed his heart rate and willed himself to relax the muscles of his face, neck, and shoulders. L’Haan will be able to read my body language and microexpressions. I need to project confidence, and I can’t give her any reason to doubt me. Satisfied he had shed his outer trappings of anxiety, he entered the lab with his chin up. “Let’s get this started.”
Data looked up from the console he manned with Lal and pointed Bashir toward a blank stretch of wall a few paces away. “Stand there. We need to give the enemy as few visual clues to our location and capabilities as possible.”
“Eminently sensible.” Bashir took his place as directed. He listened to the low hum generated by the lab’s three rings of computer cores. Their steady droning gave him something on which to focus, something to help him clear his mind and center himself in the moment.
He heard Lal tell Data, “Opening a channel now. Proxies in place.”
“Spoofing relay headers,” Shakti added via the console’s speaker.
“Channel secure,” Data said. “Doctor, stand by while we ping Director L’Haan.”
Bashir opened his eyes and watched the viewscreen mounted in front of him. At the moment it was dark, awaiting an active signal. But that could change at any—
It snapped to life, filled with the visage of L’Haan. The Vulcan woman assessed Bashir through dark eyes narrowed by disdain. “Doctor. How unexpected.”
“Before we start, L’Haan, tell me one thing: Is she alive?”
“I find your query vague, Doctor. Please be more specific.”
Her icy demeanor stoked his ire. “Sarina Douglas. I know Thirty-one took her. Is she alive?” He studied L’Haan’s features for any microexpressions that might hint at the truth, but the woman was too disciplined, too well trained to give anything away for free.
“You should come in for debriefing, Doctor. We have much to discuss.”
“Such as Uraei, you mean?”
That question provoked what seemed to be a genuine, spontaneous reaction from L’Haan: confusion. “I am unfamiliar with that term. Can you elaborate?”
Her response made Bashir wonder whether L’Haan was feigning ignorance. Might she really have no idea what Uraei was? If someone as highly placed in the organization as L’Haan didn’t know about Uraei, could it be that none of Thirty-one’s people knew the truth?
“You might know it as the ghost in the machine—the system behind the system.” He considered what he and the others had learned from the files Lal and Shakti had unearthed, the name of the organization’s enigmatic top officer—and he risked an intuitive leap. “You might also call it Control.”
Her entire affect shifted. No longer aloof, now she struggled to mask her burning curiosity with exaggerated suspicion. “What do you know about Control?”
“We know what it is. Where it is. And how it works.” He held up an isolinear data chip. “And we have proof of it all, right here. Along with two centuries’ worth of Thirty-one’s classified archives, all of them unabridged and unredacted.”
He watched L’Haan’s dark eyes fix upon the data chip. “Then congratulations are in order. I had no idea you and your friends were so resourceful.” She looked him in the eye. “If I might be so bold as to inquire: What do you mean to do with that information?”
“That’s up to you. Give me Sarina, alive and unharmed, and the chip’s yours.”
“After you broadcast its contents across the galaxy, no doubt.”
He shook his head, then lied with perfect sangfroid. “It hasn’t been shared, and there are no copies. If you and your associates want to preserve that status quo, release Sarina now.”
“I wish we could believe you, Doctor. Regrettably, your history of antagonizing behavior toward the organization compels us to doubt your trustworthiness. Perhaps if you were to offer us something else in addition, to serve as—”
“Collateral?”
“I was going to say ‘a show of good faith.’ But call it what you will.”
He suspected he wasn’t going to like L’Haan’s terms. “What do you have in mind?”
She made no effort to disguise her treachery. “In exchange for reuniting you with Ms. Douglas and letting you both live, we want that chip—and Ms. Graniv, with all her notes.”
“I see.” Bashir felt his hatred rising. “We aren’t negotiating. Just taunting each other.”
“Not at all. I’m doing the same thing you are, Doctor—dragging out this pointless confrontation while my people try to unravel your pathetic web of proxies and spoofed relays, so we can figure out where you are.” A smug lift of a high-peaked eyebrow. “What you seem to have forgotten is that my side possesses the home field advantage.”
His bluff was called, and he had no idea what to do next. He looked toward Data and Lal, who were engrossed in the struggle to erect new virtual defenses faster than their enemy could rip them down. Most of their proxies had gone red on their master console’s viewscreen, meaning they had been compromised. As the last of their blue icons flashed amber in warning, Data nodded at Lal, who reached for the improvised comm network’s kill switch.
On the screen in front of Bashir, L’Haan nearly smirked. “Give my regards to Mister Soong and his daughter. We’ll see you all soon.”
A scratch of static, then silence as the screen went offline.
Bashir’s shoulders s
lumped, and he bowed his head. “They were ready for us.”
“So it seems,” Data said. “They had concealed signal trackers standing by to find anyone who contacted Director L’Haan. Which suggests her contact node was made visible—”
“As bait,” Bashir said, finishing the thought with a weary frown. “Which means I just led us straight into a trap. . . . Again.” His conscience weighed upon him. “What do we do now?”
Lal replied with a new hardness in her voice, “What we should’ve done from the start: we kill Uraei.”
• • •
Every detail of L’Haan’s interaction with Bashir had played out just as Control had assured her it would—all except for one, and that was the revelation of a name she had never heard before.
Uraei.
Did it mean something? Was it a clue to Control’s true identity? Or its location?
L’Haan had spent years wondering about and slyly seeking after the name and face of the mysterious figure who for so long had held sway over the organization. Never had she found a single clue. Control had always taken care to conceal its face, disguise its voice, scrub its signals clean of identifying metadata. Once, in her impetuous youth, she had been brazen enough to ask why Control, alone among the organization’s directors, remained anonymous.
“It has always been so,” her superiors had told her.
Some of them speculated that Control wasn’t even a single person, but rather another echelon of leadership above the directors, a small group of elite senior personnel acting as a steering committee of sorts. The alleged facts surrounding its perpetuation lent that notion credence. Often, two or three senior director posts would open up at once, without any explanation of what had befallen their former officeholders. Most of those in the upper echelons assumed that the vacancies were the result of promotions from within, empty chairs left behind when capable directors were elevated into the rarefied ranks of Control’s executive committee.
It was a good story. Almost plausible, if one didn’t look too closely.
L’Haan hadn’t been able to resist digging deeper. It hadn’t taken her long to find evidence that all the past senior directors who had supposedly been promoted were, in fact, deceased or had been mind-wiped and condemned to new lives of blandly obscure mediocrity. As far as she could determine, no one had climbed the organization’s ladder of success to any office higher than her own in decades, perhaps not even in her lifetime.
The myths surrounding Control were lies. She was sure of it.
The most difficult part of L’Haan’s search for the truth had been finding ways to keep it hidden from her superiors. She had buried her inquiries inside other tasks, official duties of her office. She had become adept at finding ways to do two things at once—whatever Control demanded, and whatever was possible to achieve in parallel without drawing attention. But after learning about her predecessors, her line of inquiry had run dry. She’d had no idea what questions even to ask. Not until Bashir connected the dots for her.
Uraei.
You might also call it Control.
Now, with the current operation’s dossier open in front of her, she began to draw new inferences and make fresh deductions. The current crisis had been set in motion when two scientists involved in computer engineering and artificial intelligence research had contacted journalist Ozla Graniv of Seeker magazine. Graniv had made the decision to involve Bashir and Douglas, thereby triggering a manhunt by the organization unlike any L’Haan had ever seen. And now Bashir was trying to barter for Douglas’s freedom . . . with a data chip.
What was on that chip?
The ghost in the machine. The system within the system.
Computers had never been L’Haan’s forte, but she knew enough about them to hold a few expert-level classifications. Using the expertise she had amassed over her many decades of life and her long service to the organization, she isolated and analyzed the code used by Bashir and his allies to infiltrate the organization’s archives. Embedded deep within its compiled machine language, she found the name Bashir had uttered like a deity’s forgotten name.
Uraei.
It was an innocuous bundle of commands buried in the root kit. When she looked to find its duplicate on her own systems, she found it everywhere. In the firmware. In the viewscreens. The replicators. Her combadge. Her phaser. It was as ubiquitous as it was insidious.
What does our network look like to Bashir and his friends?
She ran their code on a workstation she separated from the organization’s network, and from the ship’s systems on the Kóngzhí. It took only a moment for the analysis engine to map the organization’s entire hidden network. Driven by an insatiable curiosity she hadn’t felt in years, she used it to set active trackers on all organization personnel, to see how effective it was at penetrating their security. In a matter of seconds it pinpointed everyone—every agent, asset, cutout, handler, and director—everyone except Control itself.
Time to run a test, she decided. L’Haan had access to both her copy of the intruders’ software and the internal servers coordinating the organization’s response. She resolved to pit them against each other and monitor their actions.
The organization’s firewalls intercepted the foreign signals with ease and triggered executive-level threat responses. L’Haan noted that none of the executive responses registered on the intruders’ tracking system. It doesn’t recognize the executive nodes. She amended a key string of the intruder program to help it track the executive signals. She wanted to see from what point Control’s orders originated. Then she ran the head-to-head test again.
Staring at the results, she was baffled.
There was no clear data trail back to Control. Directives tagged with its unique code were emanating from multiple points across all of explored space, some of them simultaneously, all of them within a matter of seconds of the start of the test.
Control, it seemed, was both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
If Control were an individual, or even a committee of persons, it could not respond with such speed, nor would its actions be so expertly calibrated and synchronized.
The implication was clear to L’Haan—and it horrified her.
Before she could ponder how to act upon her discovery, Control’s synthetically altered voice filtered down from the overhead comm. “You have new orders, L’Haan.”
She ignored the sick feeling brewing in her stomach. “I stand ready to serve, Control.”
“Finish testing our new asset, then order your crew to set a new course. I need the Kóngzhí to neutralize our latest security breach.”
The viewscreen on her office’s bulkhead switched on to show her a blurry image of a dark sphere. She studied it for a moment, then said, “I do not recognize this world.”
“It’s a rogue planet moving through deep space,” Control said. “Bashir and his friends are there, and I want it destroyed—immediately.”
Thirty
JUNE 2162
As soon as the secure conference room’s door slid shut, Ikerson spoke his mind. “You shouldn’t have brought me here, Admiral. It’s dangerous for us to meet at all.”
“Relax.” Ko lifted his hands and looked up and around, as if he could see through the blue walls and gray ceiling. “This room’s a Faraday cage, even better than the one at your lab.”
Ikerson paced along the far side of the room’s black oval conference table. “It’s also in the Starfleet Command bunker.” The room’s overzealous air conditioning raised gooseflesh on his bare forearms. Or was it his fear? “Uraei knows I’m here, and that we’re talking right now.”
“But it can’t hear a word we’re saying.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He wondered sometimes if the admiral fully understood what they were dealing with. “For us to be in the same room, especially concealed from its sensor
s, must be sending up red flags. It already knows we’re both aware of its existence. It’ll see this as a threat.”
The admiral sank into the high-backed chair at the head of the table. “Paranoid as ever.” He pointed at a chair. “Take a seat, Professor.”
“I’d prefer to stand. It’ll give me a reason to keep this short.”
“Suit yourself.” Ko folded his hands atop the table. His grave concern, so well hidden most of the time, showed on his face. “Tell me you’re making progress on scaling back Uraei.”
“If I had, I would’ve let you know.”
The truth left the admiral frustrated. “Dammit, Ikerson, it’s been ten months!”
“I’m doing the best I can, Admiral. But there are complicating factors.”
Ko didn’t try to hide his incredulity. “Such as?”
“The program evolved. I gave it the ability to patch its own code, so it could stay compatible with the latest upgrades to whatever systems or devices it runs on.”
“So what? You invented the damned thing.”
“You don’t understand. It modified that subroutine to remove the limits on what it could alter. Now its code’s been through so many generations, I barely recognize it. It took me months to learn its last configuration, and as soon as I started to identify vulnerabilities, it upgraded itself. Patched every flaw I’d found.” He leaned on the table. “Do you get what I’m telling you? It knew I was studying its code offline. It knew what I would find, and when I’d find it—and then it rewrote itself to make sure I’d wasted as much of my time and effort as possible.”
The admiral rolled his eyes. “Or you had some bad luck.”
“There’s no such thing as luck, Admiral. Just probability versus entropy—factors Uraei is much better at manipulating than we are.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, then resumed his pacing. “I might still be able to write a worm that can expunge Uraei, but—”
