by David Mack
“Expunge? Who said anything about expunging it? I want it reined in, not erased.”
It was time for Ikerson to break the bad news. “That might not be possible. Uraei’s too smart, too fast. Trying to make such a subtle and complex change to its core functions would take too long. It could scuttle our virus almost as fast as we could deploy it. But a time-delayed worm, properly disguised, could disseminate widely enough to cripple Uraei in a single coordinated attack.”
“Leaving our entire counterintelligence network hobbled.”
“No one but us would know. Plus, we’d be free to rebuild—and get it right next time.”
A slow shake of his head telegraphed Ko’s disappointment. “What a waste. . . . How much longer will it take to set that operation in motion?”
“Several months, at least.” Hoping to preempt Ko’s next complaint, Ikerson added, “It’s a huge job, requiring access to master systems on dozens of planets and thousands of starships. But we can’t bring in new conspirators. The more people who know what we’re doing, the greater the likelihood Uraei will figure it out.”
Ko pressed his hands to his face, then pulled his palms down over his clean-shaven chin and sighed. “I appreciate the magnitude of the task, Professor, but we’re running out of time.”
The cryptic warning exacerbated Ikerson’s paranoia. “Why do you say that?”
“Because your invention is getting bolder by the day. I’ve been keeping tabs on it. Want to know what it’s been up to lately?”
“No, but I suspect you’ll tell me anyway.”
“It orchestrated and executed the assassination of Maria Caycedo, a senior member of the Martian Parliament, and one who vocally opposed the Martian Colonies’ entrance into the United Federation of Planets.”
“Caycedo?” Ikerson taxed his memory to recall details of the woman’s demise. “I heard about her death on the news. They didn’t say anything about foul play, just an accident.”
The admiral’s countenance darkened. “Exactly what Uraei wanted people to think. Its efforts were masterful. Subtle as hell, weeks in the making. It engineered a long series of tiny events, none of them noteworthy on their own. A production error in a food-processing plant contaminated a silo of corn meal with a tiny amount of peanut dust. A shipping delay ensured the contaminated corn meal was sent to fill orders that normally would’ve been handled by a factory with better safeguards. Supply shortages in Caycedo’s city guaranteed there wouldn’t be any noncontaminated corn meal available at her local pantries. And apparently, Caycedo’s penchant for making corn tortillas from scratch for her family’s dinners on Taco Tuesdays sealed her fate—because she just happened to suffer from a catastrophic peanut allergy.”
“My God,” Ikerson said, sagging into a chair at last. “Uraei did all that?”
“Yes, it did—all while it was busy doing several million other things, all over known space. Apparently, your pet ASI can commit the perfect murder as an afterthought. And in case you were wondering? Caycedo’s replacement in the Martian Parliament just cast the deciding vote to support the colonies’ application for Federation membership. So not only is Uraei making its own decisions about Federation security, it’s expanding its portfolio to include our foreign policy. If we don’t stop this thing . . . we might wake up one day to find out it’s decided it doesn’t need organic citizens at all. And if that happens”—he mimed cutting his throat with his index finger—“we’re all as good as dead, Professor.”
Thirty-one
It was a dangerous experiment. A foolhardy way to test the efficacy of Control’s methods. But L’Haan had her orders; any reluctance to obey might alert Control to her newfound suspicions.
She opened the outer door to the room where Sarina Douglas was held. The pressure lock was a redundant precaution, a fail-safe to be engaged in the event that the prisoner slipped her bonds. L’Haan had never seen it used. Many other measures, yes. Never this one.
The overhead bank of lights that had bathed the far wall in a blinding glare was dimmed now. A golden glow suffused the room, and cool air had whisked away the odors that tended to linger after a prolonged rehabilitation.
She circled in front of Douglas. The human woman was only half conscious and seemed oblivious of the fact she was naked. Douglas had been stripped of her soiled garments by junior personnel, who also had rinsed her head to toe with warm water and gentle detergent. L’Haan pushed a wet tangle of Douglas’s golden hair—surely not her natural color—behind her ear. At the touch of the Vulcan woman’s hand, Douglas’s eyes fluttered open. L’Haan pressed her palm to the other woman’s cheek. “Would you like to be released from those restraints?”
Douglas answered softly, “Yes, please.”
One by one, L’Haan unfastened the bonds that held Douglas to the experiment table. She started with the straps on the woman’s ankles, then the ones around her waist and chest, followed by the ring around Douglas’s throat. The last to be undone were the shackles on her wrists.
Free at last, Douglas all but melted off the table into L’Haan’s arms.
“Relax,” L’Haan said. She eased Douglas toward the deck and sat her against a bulkhead. “It might be a while before you feel comfortable standing.”
Douglas nodded. Her eyes drooped.
L’Haan slapped her, shocking Douglas to full awareness. “What is your name?”
A proud lift of her chin. “Douglas, Agent Sarina Milan.”
“Who is your supervising officer, Agent Douglas?”
“You are, Director L’Haan.”
Probing the human woman’s mind, L’Haan found no barriers, no prevarications, no hidden agendas lurking in Douglas’s mental shadows. She was present, focused, and sincere. “I am going to strike you again, Agent Douglas. This is for your own good.”
“I understand, Director.”
Another fierce slap, then a punishing backhand. Douglas’s head snapped from one side to the other with each blow, but she neither blinked nor flinched. No exclamation, no protest. Even more telling, her mind remained serene. L’Haan looked up at the viewscreens on the bulkhead. Douglas’s vital signs were rock steady. The abuse had caused no increase in her pulse or blood pressure, no shift in her brain wave patterns.
“Do you feel ready to stand?”
“I do, Director.”
L’Haan rose first, then helped Douglas to her feet. The Vulcan drew a dagger from a sheath on her black uniform’s belt. She handed Douglas the weapon. “Hold this, please.” Then she made a point of turning her back on Douglas and walking to the other side of the small conditioning chamber. Nothing stood between Douglas and the open doors to the corridor, or between her and L’Haan’s defenseless back.
Long moments dragged past as L’Haan pretended to be engrossed in some report or another on the viewscreens in front of her. When at last she chanced to look over her shoulder, Douglas remained where she had been left, dagger in hand, stoically awaiting new orders.
Then, intruding like an unwelcome god, Control’s synthetic voice resounded from above. “L’Haan, stand in front of Agent Douglas.”
She obeyed her superior’s command. Uncomfortable as it was to look the brainwashed woman in the eye, L’Haan did so. Then Control spoke again.
“Kneel in front of Agent Douglas—and raise your chin.”
It took all of L’Haan’s psychological conditioning to suppress her survival instinct and do as Control demanded. She kneeled in front of Douglas and tilted back her head to expose her throat—all the while paying rapt attention to the dagger still clutched in Douglas’s hand.
“Agent Douglas,” Control said, “this is Control. Act as your conscience dictates.”
The human woman looked down at L’Haan without emotion. Her eyes held no anger, but also no pity; no malice, but neither any mercy. Then Douglas turned the dagger so that she could of
fer it pommel-first to L’Haan. “Command me, Director.”
L’Haan took back the blade and stood. She looked into Douglas’s blank eyes and reached out with her psionic gifts to test the other woman’s mind. She found Douglas’s psyche calm and untroubled, pliant and ready to serve. “Return to your quarters,” L’Haan said. “Shower and put on a clean uniform. When that’s done, I’ll brief you on your next assignment.”
“Understood, Director.” Douglas walked naked out of the conditioning chamber as if she had not just endured a days-long ordeal. L’Haan monitored the woman’s mind for as long as she was able to maintain contact, and even after they were long out of each other’s sight, Douglas remained acquiescent. In spite of all of Douglas’s mental gifts, Control had broken her.
Under her breath, L’Haan remarked, “Most impressive.”
“A rudimentary labor.” Control, predictably, was still listening. “We’ll have no more trouble from Agent Douglas. I will send you the dossier for her next assignment after you finish the strike on the rogue planet.”
“Understood, Control.” Years of practice enabled L’Haan to maintain her emotionless façade as she left the conditioning chamber and made her way up to the Kóngzhí’s bridge.
She didn’t know yet what purpose Control had in mind for the mentally dominated Agent Douglas, but she knew the organization’s history well enough to realize that if Control came to suspect she had begun to glean its true nature, she would be the first target of its new genetically enhanced slave-as-assassin. That was a fate L’Haan was determined to avoid at any cost—the organization and its “higher calling” be damned.
• • •
Submerged in an ocean of old secrets, Ozla had to remind herself to come up for air every few hours. Thirty-one’s troves of classified files were addictive. The deeper Ozla dug, the more connections she found; each horrifying revelation hinted at half a dozen more.
Assassinations. Cover-ups and coups. Wars fomented by lies and false-flag attacks. Widespread surveillance run amok. It all read like a demon’s curriculum vitae.
One section of the archive was devoted to transcripts of executive-level meetings in the Palais de la Concorde—the private conversations of Federation presidents dating back nearly two centuries. So far she had reviewed only the ones flagged by Thirty-one itself for follow-up. There were so many others dismissively tagged as “routine” that she doubted she could ever read them all, even if she spent the rest of her life immersed in them.
She knew what her editor would want her to focus on: the murders. There was an old saying in the news business, one that had been coined independently across dozens of worlds and cultures, with only slight variations in phrasing: If it bleeds, it leads.
It was a crude reduction of a bitter truth. Even though Thirty-one’s invasions of privacy and violations of foreign sovereignty were, arguably, greater threats to the safety and survival of billions of sapient beings, the complexities of those crimes sometimes made them difficult to explain to a busy, distracted populace. But pain, death, blood, and violence—those never failed to find an audience. And once they were hooked, one could force-feed them the rest of the truth.
Do I open with Thirty-one’s coup and murder of President Zife? Or with its attempted genocide against the Dominion’s Founders? The latter is the greater crime by orders of magnitude, but it won’t resonate the way a crime against an elected Federation leader—
A chime from the overhead comm, followed by Data’s voice. “Ms. Graniv, could you please come down to the laboratory for a moment?”
She set aside her padd. “What’s going on? Did you find more files?”
“Not exactly.” He sounded dismayed. “I will explain when you arrive.”
“On my way.” The comm channel closed with a soft click as she left her room.
Less than a minute later she reached the computer lab to find Data, Lal, and Bashir waiting for her. All three of them wore the same defeated look. She halted just inside the door. “Do I even want to know what’s wrong now?”
“We find ourselves confronted with an ethical dilemma,” Data said.
Ozla tried to lighten the mood. “If you’re torn between exposing Thirty-one and killing them all, I see no reason we can’t do both.”
“As it happens,” Data said with regret, “we might not be able to do either.”
A long pause failed to produce a punch line. Ozla eyed Bashir. “Why not?”
“Because it turns out Uraei isn’t quite what we thought it was.” He cast a forlorn look at the code scrolling across Lal’s viewscreen. “We’d assumed it was an invasive string of code. Like a virus, or some sort of virtual parasite living off of the existing information architecture.”
More silence. Extracting the truth from these three made Ozla feel like she was pulling fangs from a rabid sehlat. “So if it’s not any of those, what is it, exactly?”
Lal regarded her viewscreen with a mix of awe and fear. “Uraei itself is the architecture. We thought it interjected itself into the activity of other systems, but the truth is that those systems all rely on Uraei as their operating platform.”
Data called up a real-time log of Uraei’s interstellar network activity. “In addition to providing crucial intelligence data to Starfleet and the Federation Security Agency, as well as a steady flow of reliable crime-prevention tips to a variety of planetary and local police agencies, Uraei optimizes data traffic over long-range subspace comm relays, flags potential navigational hazards for Interstellar Traffic Control, and monitors public health databases to contain outbreaks and prevent epidemics.” He added grudgingly, “It is not a parasite in the Federation’s security apparatus—it is in fact the system’s backbone.”
Lal tapped the console in front of the viewscreen, isolating in blazing crimson a handful of far-flung actions by the network. “Only a minuscule fraction of Uraei’s daily activity is connected to Section Thirty-one. Most of its ongoing traffic supports Federation defense, safety, and law enforcement. If we launch an attack designed to cripple Uraei, we would inflict immeasurable harm to vital organizations across known space, compromising the internal and external security of the Federation and its allies.”
Bashir sounded like a man still in denial after receiving a terminal diagnosis. “In other words, if we destroy Uraei, we might well destroy our entire civilization along with it.”
It was too grim a prospect for Ozla to accept. “This can’t be right. I mean, we knew this thing was everywhere, wormed into everything. But do we really have to wipe out the good parts with the bad? Why can’t we devise a more surgical approach and just target the parts of the network that serve Thirty-one?”
“Because those aren’t the only parts we need to worry about,” Lal said. “If our analysis is correct, Uraei long ago became sentient, which means we are in conflict with an artificial superintelligence of unprecedented complexity and power.”
Ozla was aghast. “Lal, in my line of work that’s called ‘burying the lead.’ ”
“I prefer to think of it as saving the worst news for last.”
Data said, “I fear the worst news is that Uraei would detect our attempts to neutralize Thirty-one’s access. I have no doubt that it has response measures in place for such an event, just as it would have defenses prepared for any direct assault on its core consciousness.”
Ozla couldn’t believe she had come so far, laid hands on the evidence to support the biggest exposé of her career—and perhaps in the history of journalism—only to find herself barred from ever telling a soul what she had found. There had to be a way out of this mess. “Data, are you saying there’s no way we can fight this thing?”
He and Lal exchanged a long look that made Ozla wonder if the androids were sharing thoughts on some private wavelength. Then he met her expectant stare. “Not with our current strategy. If we wish to move against Thirty-one a
nd Uraei, we will need to strike both at the same time, and prevent either of them from undoing whatever changes we make to Uraei’s code. But to do so we must find a weakness in Uraei’s network—and there might not be one.”
“There is another hazard,” Lal said. “Even if we succeed, one mistake on our part might destroy the entire information architecture of the Federation. Alternatively, depending upon Uraei’s interpretation of its protocols, it might be designed to inflict such collateral damage as a deterrent to attack. In either scenario, such a collapse would mark the onset of an interstellar dark age, one that would leave the Federation at the mercy of its galactic neighbors.”
Bashir shook his head and drifted out of the room, mumbling under his breath something that to Ozla sounded like, “We destroyed the Federation in order to save it.”
She watched him depart, then looked back at Data and Lal. “Can either of you see a scenario in which this plan actually works and we all live to enjoy it?”
Her question prompted another cryptic look between Data and Lal. After several seconds, Data looked at Ozla and did his best to mask his dismay.
“We will have to get back to you.”
• • •
Night went on forever beyond the balcony. Bashir stood on the small platform, trusting his life to the unseen force field that held in the Tower’s air and kept the rogue planet’s poisonous atmosphere at bay. In his solitude he wondered what Sarina might have done in his place. Gamble everything on a mad plan to finish their mission, consequences be damned? Try to strike a bargain with the devils in black leather? Or cut her losses and run for the Gamma Quadrant?
Standing alone in the face of darkness, Bashir didn’t know what to do next. He gazed out across a world lit only by starlight, and found himself at a loss for inspiration.
He took a personal recording device from his pocket. A press of his thumb switched it on, and he drew a breath to start recording a personal missive—but then he froze and turned off the device. Who do I send this to? Miles? Ezri? Garak? Or do I leave it as a last farewell to Sarina?
