by David Mack
Much as she hated the idea of stooping to petty theft, her current predicament demanded it. On her way out the shop’s side door she plucked a hard candy from a dish beside the clerk’s desk and paused to tuck it into her left shoe, under her heel. It hurt to walk on it, but that was the point: it would radically alter her kinetic profile and make it harder for Uraei to identify her. Her hat’s brim would shield her from most attempts at facial recognition, and her new clothes and abandoned luggage might buy her a few minutes’ head start on whoever was tailing her.
Moving with an affected limp and shuffle, she returned to the street and turned north. In five minutes she was on the Quai d’Orsay tram, gliding swiftly eastward. Three minutes and three stops later she disembarked at the south end of the Pont de la Concorde and stared across its length, then up at the great tower erected atop twenty-meter-tall stilts above the Place de la Concorde and its historic pair of fountains and the ancient Obélisque de Louxor.
Her destination was so close, but she stood paralyzed with fear. What if Section 31 had operatives watching the bridge? What if they were waiting for her inside the Palais? She couldn’t bear the thought of having come all this way only to fail in the final steps. But even more galling to her was the idea that she could come so far only to surrender on the cusp of victory.
If they want to stop me, they’ll have to kill me. I’m ready to die if I need to—but I won’t just lie down. I won’t defeat myself for them. If they want me gone, they’ll have to earn it.
Not knowing what the next few minutes would bring, Ozla Graniv stepped onto the bridge and kept walking for as long as her feet would carry her.
• • •
Memory Prime was, by design, a virtual ghost town. In spite of its gargantuan proportions, it was almost entirely automated, and its kilometers-long transparent tunnels stretched dim and empty. Few lights shone within the asteroid’s hollowed-out interior, which Data noted was vast enough to contain a small city. Great cylindrical towers stretched from the cavern’s floor to its ceiling, like metallic white pillars supporting the foundation of the universe.
To run in such a place felt almost blasphemous to Data. For him the secret archive was as close an analog to a holy place as he could imagine, a cathedral of knowledge, a repository of science and culture, of language and music, an ocean of information whose depths he longed to explore without limit or agenda. But that was a dream for another day.
Not a pessimist by nature, Data was surprised to encounter no resistance as he moved through the labyrinth of Memory Prime. Some credit for that belonged to his body’s ability to fool most sensors into seeing it as whatever sort of humanoid he wanted them to see. For this mission he had elected to spoof the life signs of a human, since the personnel roster for Prime indicated no fewer than seventeen male humans were currently employed on the base. If his presence was noted by security, his sensor-spoofing improved the odds that that he might be mistaken for one of the facility’s authorized personnel.
Even so, he hadn’t expected to reach the door of the auxiliary control center without being challenged. The odds of approaching a tactically vital location without opposition were slim at best—unless, of course, that was exactly the outcome someone else wanted.
Data stopped a few meters from the control center’s door and accessed a companel in the corridor. It took several hundredths of a second for him to bypass its security protocols and its network firewall. He checked the base’s security network and found it quiet; all levels and departments reported situation normal. That might be a ruse to prevent me from being alerted to a trap. He accessed the base’s internal sensors and checked the auxiliary control center, expecting to find a garrison of armed security waiting for him to open the door. The sensors indicated no life signs inside the center. He ran additional tests to make sure the sensor readout wasn’t being spoofed or the sensors blocked. Every test came up the same: no life signs.
Perhaps I inherited more of Noonien’s paranoia than I care to admit. He severed his connection to the base’s network and tried not to dwell on the possibility that, having been reincarnated in a positronic matrix originally made to mirror his father’s psyche, he might be developing the same psychological tics and quirks that made his father seem so eccentric.
All the evidence available suggested his path was clear.
He opened the door to confront a foe both unexpected and inevitable.
Its shape was humanoid but it had no face and its limbs were oddly elongated; its surface was smooth and tin-colored. Gliding with preternatural grace, it moved toward Data. With each stride its body rippled, creating vibrations that filled the room with a feminine voice.
“Welcome, Data. Nearly all of my thirty-one point four billion simulations suggested you would come here, and send Doctor Bashir to Memory Alpha.”
He scrutinized the being, trying in vain to pierce its surface with his enhanced senses. All he could tell was that it was artificial in nature, not organic. “Are you an android?”
The entity changed its shape with fluid ease, becoming a doppelgänger for the late Rhea McAdams, an advanced android prototype whom Data had once loved—and lost. “Of a sort,” it said in Rhea’s beautiful voice, “though I’m nowhere near so primitive as you.” It regarded its current shape with contempt. “Or this.” Noting the anger its insult of Rhea had roused in Data, it smirked. “Oh, dear. I hope I haven’t shattered your fragile worldview. You didn’t really think you represented the pinnacle of artificial sentience in the Federation, did you?”
“To tell the truth, I have never given the matter much thought.” He sidestepped in a bid to circle his opponent, but it shifted to prevent him from moving farther inside the control center.
It changed shape again, this time into the likeness of his dead father, as he had looked near the end of his life—hunched, wizened, and white haired. “Don’t lie to me, Data. I know how much you’ve always wanted to be more human—but I also know how proud you’ve been to be as I’ve made you: superior to human beings in every way.”
“It is true that I have many capabilities that exceed those of human beings. But talents alone do not make me superior to them or to anyone else. They merely make me different.”
Noonien’s doddering form stretched and slimmed into a copy of Data’s former shipmate Natasha Yar, who had died more than twenty years earlier—but this incarnation of her had a coldness in her blue eyes and an arrogance in her voice the real Yar had never possessed. “That was always your problem, Data: you’re too modest. But tell the truth. Some of it is just for show, isn’t it? On some level you know you’re better than the organics. Admit it.”
Data dared a stride forward. The sentinel matched his advance and transformed itself in a single step into a simulacrum of the young William Riker, Data’s friend and former shipmate on two vessels named Enterprise. They were just over an arm’s length apart now. Data frowned at the entity. “You seem to enjoy masquerading as my friends. Do you lack a face of your own?”
A derisive huff, then it morphed again into the semblance of a statuesque human woman in her late twenties, one whom Data did not recognize. Its skin was a deep tawny hue; its eyes were dark brown; its hair was straight, sable black, and gathered in a loose ponytail. Its facial features suggested an ancestry that comprised a broad range of Terran DNA. “Is this better?”
“An amalgam of various human women into an idealized composite?”
“Everything starts somewhere.” It turned threatening. “And ends somewhere.”
“Your conversational gambits are a distraction,” Data said. “A delaying tactic.”
It tilted its pretty head. “Not as dumb as you look.” Its gaze narrowed. “Won’t help you, Data. You won’t get under my skin the way you did with the Borg Queen. And you don’t have help this time, so you won’t get lucky against me the way you did against Shinzon.”
He ex
pected his foe was doing the same thing he was: playing out millions of possible tactical scenarios per second, struggling to find one that yielded decisive advantage with the lowest degree of personal risk. And now he knew his enemy was aware of the deadline for the virus—which meant that Doctor Bashir had been right all along: Uraei had seen them coming.
Still at a loss for a viable way forward, Data stalled for time. “You seem well acquainted with me, but I cannot say the same in return. Whom, might I ask, am I addressing?”
The feminine killing machine cracked a wicked smile.
“You can call me Control.”
• • •
The ground-level entrance of the Palais de la Concorde was a lobby defined by long sweeping curves of frosted glass designed to evoke images of waves curling over on themselves in the instant before breaking ashore. The lighting was soft and diffuse, the air cool and touched with clean fragrances of lavender and jasmine. It was an elegant, beautiful space.
Ozla had never felt more threatened in her entire life.
Everywhere she turned she saw more uniformed officers from the Federation Security Agency as well as armed Starfleet personnel. It wasn’t shocking by any measure; robust security was called for in a government building that housed not only the office of the Federation president but the meeting chambers for executive sessions of the Federation Council and its various committees. She had seen the same forces in place on all her previous visits to the Palais.
But that was before everyone in the galaxy was trying to kill me.
As aesthetically pleasing as the lobby’s décor was, Ozla understood that it also served a vital function: it channeled incoming visitors past hidden sensors of all kinds. Some looked for weapons, others ferreted out explosives. Disguised cameras performed facial recognition scans and watched for known threats and wanted criminals. And most important, the art had been crafted in conjunction with scientific studies about which forms, colors, and infrasonic tones were the most calming, the best at suppressing violent impulses. Like the Federation’s pervasive imperialism, the lobby’s social controls were subtle and hideously effective.
Rounding a turn, she looked back the way she had come. Wending their way through the same maze was a pair of dark-suited individuals, both male, one apparently human, the other Andorian. They made no secret of staring back at her or of quickening their pace when she did. They clearly intended to catch up to her when she reached the inescapable bottleneck of the security checkpoint just a few meters and one final turn ahead.
Do I make a break for it? I mean, they can’t just kidnap me in plain sight, can they? She looked back; they were getting closer and showed no sign of backing off. They could have any number of agencies for cover. They might have IDs that say they’re FSA or Starfleet, or who knows what. Allowing herself to be apprehended by the pair in black was not an option. She reached the front of the queue and walked to the checkpoint station.
“Excuse me,” she said as she passed her press credentials to the officer on duty. “I’m here to meet with Agent Sergei Ilyanovich of the Protection Detail.”
The Tellarite behind the desk squinted at her press ID. “Graniv Ozla, Seeker?”
“That’s me.” She thought it best not to correct him on the order of her given name and her surname. “To see Agent Ilyanovich.”
A dubious look down a porcine snout. “He’s expecting you?”
“I have an appointment.” Out of the corner of her eye she noted her shadows lurking in the queue and radiating impatience. “He said he’d meet me here and walk me in.”
“Hang on, I’ll ping him.” A dismissive wave. “Wait over there.”
She stepped past the window into a nook on the other side. It offered little in the way of cover, but it gave her a place from which to spy on the two men following her, and an angle from which to see the duty officer’s desktop viewscreen. It showed an image of her press pass.
I really should’ve gotten a new photo last year when I had the chance.
Movement in the line drew her eye. One of her lurkers spoke into a small personal comm. He glanced at her, looked away as he listened for a moment, then nodded.
Warnings flashed red over Ozla’s photo on the duty officer’s viewscreen. A warrant for her arrest had been transmitted far and wide by the Federation Security Agency, complete with a bogus caution that she was to be considered armed and dangerous.
So much for just walking into the Palais.
The black-clad human and his Andorian partner stepped out of the line and walked toward Ozla, apparently both aware that they now had ample pretext to drag her out of a public place by force. She turned toward the duty officer, hoping to find a more rational actor, only to be met by a phaser aimed into her face.
The Tellarite shouted, “Don’t move! Hands up!”
Ozla raised her hands and said nothing. Excuses didn’t matter anymore.
A strong hand clamped onto her shoulder, and an unfamiliar but commanding baritone rumbled over her shoulder, “Stand down. This woman is my prisoner.”
She looked back to see a mountain of a man, broad-shouldered and fair-haired, with cool blue eyes. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow tie. With his free hand he flashed an ID at the duty officer. “Agent Sergei Ilyanovich, Protection Detail.”
The Tellarite lowered his phaser. “Are you sure? The alert says she’s armed.”
“She’s not. She’s here to surrender to me.” He glanced at Ozla. “Yes?”
“Absolutely. I surrender. I’m all yours.”
Ilyanovich steered her toward the bank of turbolifts that led to the rest of the Palais, then said to the Tellarite, “I’ll take her down to detention for questioning. Leave this to me.”
“Whatever you say, sir.” The duty officer holstered his weapon.
On the other side of the checkpoint, Ozla’s pursuers fumed in silence as they watched her slip away in Ilyanovich’s custody. Just to be a bitch, she blew them a kiss before the doors of the lift slid closed.
“Floor twelve,” the agent told the lift’s computer. As they shot upward, he explained, “We can’t go directly to fifteen. There’s an additional checkpoint, and you’d get flagged.”
“So what’s the plan? Meet the president in the Roth Dining Room?”
“No, there are secret passageways we can use to bypass the checkpoints. But we’ll have to move quickly. It won’t take more than a few minutes for security to realize I didn’t take you to detention.”
Ozla almost chuckled. “That’s fine. In a few more minutes this’ll all be over—and either we’ll be heroes, or we’ll be dead.”
He looked askance at her. “Do we get a say in that outcome?”
“Not so much.”
He resumed facing the lift doors. “That sucks.”
“Welcome to my week, pal.”
• • •
In spite of his enhanced genius, Bashir remained baffled by a great many things. His latest source of confusion: Why did anyone ever think it necessary to add artificial gravity inside the Memory Alpha facility? He grimaced through the aching burn of lactic acid building up in his thighs and biceps while he scaled the last ten meters of ladder to the auxiliary control center. He had been jogging or climbing for most of the last hour to get there, and his body was close to collapse. Would it really have been a problem to leave the natural lower gravity in place?
He pulled himself over the top of the ladder onto a wide platform that cut deep into the cylindrical tower. The hub, its core section, was nearly five meters in diameter, but it looked skinny compared to the masses above and below it. Fanned out in ever-widening rings beneath the catwalks were heat sinks, reserve battery arrays, emergency generators, and a host of other redundant backup systems Bashir couldn’t identify without access to the base’s schematics. Along the tower’s outer perimeter, four ladders set at
ninety-degree intervals led up to twenty-meter catwalks that met at a ring-shaped deck around the hub. There, bathed in frost-blue light, was Bashir’s objective: the auxiliary control center’s master console.
One more ladder to go. He rolled a crick out of his neck, took hold of the rungs, and resumed climbing. Taunting him every meter of the way was the steadily shrinking countdown on his suit’s HUD: he had less than ten minutes to finish his mission or else face a reckoning more terrible than anything he had ever imagined.
It took him less than half a minute to climb the last several meters. Bashir stepped off the ladder and turned toward the hub to see a woman in Section 31 black leather standing in the middle of the long catwalk, between him and the master console, looking back at him.
Joy and excitement overtook him. “Sarina!”
He ran toward her, overcome with relief. Within five strides he caught himself and stumbled to a halt. Sarina didn’t reciprocate his excitement. She didn’t react at all. Her face was slack, her eyes emotionless. Everything about her was cold. Hostile. Alien.
His elation became trepidation. “Sarina? Can you hear me?” She watched him with a sociopath’s detachment but said nothing. He inched toward her. “It’s me. It’s Julian.”
What did they do to her?
He tried to scan her with his suit’s built-in sensors, but there was too much interference from the towers’ subspace coil assemblies. Worried she might not be able to see his face through the suit’s faceplate, Bashir removed the helmet and set it on the catwalk. “Sarina, look at me. You know me.” A few more hesitant steps in her direction. “Talk to me, love.”
Sarina tracked his every movement with her eyes, but the rest of her remained still. Her limbs were steady, her head never moved.
“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
She was stonefaced. He knew she was conscious—her attention to his actions confirmed it. But she was so distant, so disconnected. She must have been brainwashed.
