Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation)

by George III, David R.

  “And he succeeded to command of the ship?” Ventel asked. “That seems like a rapid ascent, from centurion to commander, from tactical officer to ship commander, in that period of time.”

  “All of his promotions and transfers have been handled by Admiral Vellon,” Devix said.

  Vellon! The puppet of the Tal Shiar. Kamemor knew that she would have to neutralize the admiral along with Chairwoman Sela.

  “You’re saying that Kozik is a part of this rogue element in the Imperial Fleet?” Ventel asked.

  “There seem to be too many connections to disregard it as a possibility,” Devix said.

  “I agree,” said Kamemor. “The question is: What can we do about it? How do we find the Vetruvis?”

  “Short of sending a wing of Imperial warbirds into Tzenkethi space—and possibly into Cardassian space—I’m not sure we can,” Devix said.

  Kamemor imagined the response that a squadron of Romulan vessels would draw from the Cardassians. Even the Federation, in answer to the awful events in Bajoran space, had increased their military presence at their borders. But while Starfleet often showed admirable restraint in reacting to provocative actions, Central Command could not be accused of such self-discipline. And once a Khitomer Accords ally had engaged in military action against a member of the Typhon Pact, others—the Tzenkethi, the Breen, the Klingons—would surely follow. The Federation would have little choice but to enter the fray as well.

  “Rather than searching for a single, probably cloaked vessel in potentially hostile space,” Kamemor said, “we need to know what action Kozik intends to take, and then prevent him from doing so.”

  “Sela?” Ventel said. “If you intend to interrogate the chairwoman, I don’t see that netting us actionable information. I believe she would rather take her own life than give up the cause to which she has put so much time and energy. She has long sought vengeance against the Federation.”

  “I agree with you, Anlikar,” Kamemor said. “But there is somebody else from whom we might pry what we need to know.” She stared into Admiral Devix’s tired eyes and saw the pride and determination that had brought him so far in his Imperial Fleet career. Or perhaps Kamemor imagined all that. Even after all that had happened, though, she trusted the admiral’s professionalism, his loyalty, and most of all, his reluctance to send his troops into battle as anything but a last resort. “Admiral,” she told him, “I’m going to need you back on the bridge of a warbird.”

  17

  Somebody walking through the atrium in the opposite direction said something to Bashir, but he only vaguely registered the sound of her voice. Her words did not penetrate the daze that had been enveloping him ever since Sarina had been seized by Starfleet security three days earlier. The doctor offered no reply to the woman, but just kept walking.

  The dim lighting in the building’s entry hall, reflecting the lateness of the hour, matched Bashir’s state of mind. He felt as though he’d existed in a fog since that terrible evening in Quark’s new place. He escaped the miasma just once, to bluster at Captain Ro about the injustice of taking into custody an innocent woman. But even then, his own doubts about Sarina circled him like vultures waiting for a wounded animal to finally die. He knew what he wanted to believe, pushed himself in that direction, toward the brilliant light of his love, attempted to hold his ground, but he continued to feel himself slipping closer to the darkness.

  Bashir reached the bank of turbolifts in the housing facility that Starfleet had taken over in Aljuli. The center of the three doors opened and he entered the cab. As the door slid closed behind him, he absently announced his destination—“Third floor”—before falling back into the seemingly endless loop of thoughts that had filled his mind during Sarina’s detainment.

  She worked for Section Thirty-one, he thought. He hated the simplicity of that fact, but he knew that he could count on the reality of it because Sarina had admitted it to him. She didn’t just admit it, he thought. She declared it to me.

  When the door to the lift didn’t open in a reasonable amount of time, Bashir realized that he’d tried to activate the cab via voice command, though it only had a manual interface. He reached out to the control panel and pressed the number 3, which lighted at his touch. The lift began to rise.

  During the year that he and Sarina had been together on DS9, only once, at the very beginning, had Section 31 contacted either of them. At least, only once as far as I know, Bashir thought. An operative named L’Haan appeared in his quarters while he’d been asleep—and lightly drugged, it turned out—and spoke to Sarina. In that conversation, L’Haan confirmed Sarina’s mission: to make Bashir fall in love with her, for the ultimate purpose of finally pulling him into Section 31 as a full-time operative.

  That’s what Sarina told me, Bashir thought. He’d believed it at the time, and he believed it still. But he’d come to doubt her reasons for telling him about L’Haan’s visit. Sarina avowed that she no longer wanted to be a part of the organization, and she didn’t want Bashir joining them either. Together, they conspired to try to develop a means of bringing them down. Deeply concerned about revealing their intentions to the ever-watchful organization, they discussed their plans only occasionally, utilizing a coded shorthand of their own devising. Of course, their precautions about plotting the demise of the organization would have meant nothing if Sarina had turned around and divulged them herself. But with no additional contacts—again, none that Bashir knew about—they began worrying about Section 31 less and less.

  The turbolift reached the third floor and its door glided open. Bashir stepped into the long corridor that ran the length of the building, and started toward his quarters. His footsteps thudded dully on the new carpeting that had been put down since Starfleet had taken possession of the facility. His head also thudded.

  Sarina told me about Section 31, Bashir thought, and about how they intended to seduce me to join them. But could her revealing that information, while accurate, also have been a part of the organization’s plan to lure him in . . . a part of Sarina’s plan? His mind spun when he considered the circles-within-circles machinations of the covert group.

  Bashir reached his quarters and tapped his access code into the panel beside it. The door withdrew into the wall, and he stepped inside the compact room that would be his home whenever he served at the updated control center in Wyntara Mas. He knew that he would also spend time aboard Defiant, and possibly aboard the other ships patrolling the system.

  As the door closed behind him, Bashir smelled the slightly sour air inside and decided to open the room’s one small window. He walked between the bed on one side and the computer interface on the other, over to the outer wall. He tugged at the window, but it seemed stuck. He gave up and moved to the bed—barely more than a cot—and dropped onto his back atop it. He wanted—he needed—rest, but he knew that he would have to slow down his thoughts for any hope of sleep. He closed his eyes and tried to blank his mind.

  Instead, more questions presented themselves. If he assumed that Sarina had been lying to him, that she worked willingly and completely as an operative of Section 31, and not, as she maintained, as a double agent working to bring them down, did it then follow that she had planted the bombs on Deep Space 9? He didn’t think so. What possible motive could Section 31 have for wanting the station destroyed? In their twisted way, they worked to protect the Federation, not to put it at risk, which the loss of DS9 surely did. And while they showed no reluctance about doing what needed to be done to achieve a particular aim, Bashir could not imagine that they would willingly cause the deaths of more than a thousand Federation citizens.

  Except that Bashir also recalled that Chief Blackmer believed the bombs hadn’t been set to destroy DS9, but to compel its evacuation. An empty station would have weakened the Federation’s defenses at the wormhole, and therefore created a more open path for the cloaked Romulan warbird to sneak back into the Alpha Quadrant. That sounded more like something the Typhon Pact would do tha
n Section 31. But whoever had planted the bombs, could the results—with the crew unable to eject one of the failing reactors—have been accidental? If so, did that mean—could that mean—that Section 31 or Sarina might have been responsible, since the intended goal would have fallen far short of killing so many people?

  Bashir rubbed at his eyes. The pain in his head had progressed from a mere thudding to an unrelenting pounding. He hadn’t brought any of his medical gear from the infirmary he’d set up at the rear of the control center, but he always left a medkit in his residence. He slowly stood from the bed and made his way past the computer interface and into the ’fresher.

  Inside the tiny compartment, Bashir ran cold water in the sink, put his hands beneath the spout, then slapped his face. He didn’t want to wake himself up, but to escape the haze surrounding his mind, which would not let him rest. He considered taking something to help him sleep, but settled for a simple analgesic. He found his medkit in the cabinet above the sink, pulled out a hypospray, found a vial of the palliative he sought, and administered the medication to the base of his neck.

  Bashir returned his medkit to the cabinet, which he then closed. Seeing himself in the mirror mounted on the cabinet door, he thought again about his contention that Sarina would never kill, and particularly not innocent people. But hadn’t he done that himself, during their mission to Salavat? Hadn’t he made the choice to kill—to murder—civilian engineers in his attempt to keep the slipstream drive out of the hands of the Typhon Pact? He’d rationalized his actions at the time, telling himself that he worked to prevent many more deaths than that—that if the Pact acquired slipstream, then the chances of war erupting became that much more likely. He didn’t know if he still believed his justification, because how could you quantify life? It seemed a simple matter to claim one death is better than two, but does that truly justify causing the one death?

  Bashir grabbed a hand towel and wiped his face dry, then exited the ’fresher, still drying his hands. He froze when he saw somebody in his room, sitting in the chair in front of the computer interface. Dressed wholly in black, the woman would not have to declare her affiliation. She had straight black hair that she wore down to her shoulders. He could not see her ears, but he knew that they tapered up to a point.

  “Good evening, Doctor.”

  “Don’t you people tire of this?” Bashir said in disgust. “Don’t you tire of it? All this cloak-and-dagger window dressing? Don’t you look stylish in your mysterious dark clothing, and aren’t you so terribly clever to have infiltrated my little cubicle of a room.” He threw the towel back into the ’fresher, then crossed to stand by the bed, opposite the woman in black. After he’d spent so much time thinking about Section 31 in recent days, it seemed uncanny that a member of the organization would suddenly appear before him. But his anger trumped his wonder. “Am I supposed to be impressed because you have a silent transporter? Or maybe it was something far more basic than that?” He pointed to the door on the other side of the computer interface than the ’fresher. “Maybe you had to crouch in my closet among the worn shoes and dirty laundry I haven’t gotten around to recycling in the replicator downstairs. Oh, my, yes, how very glamorous.”

  “My name is L’Haan,” the woman said.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Do you?” L’Haan said. “Then Ms. Douglas has mentioned me.”

  “I only meant that I know where you’re from, who your associates are,” Bashir said. “You’re L’Haan, fine, but you’re also Sloan and Cole and Ethan Locken. Because you’re all the same.”

  “All of us?” L’Haan said. “Including Ms. Douglas?”

  Bashir shook his head, then sat down on the bed. “Say what you like,” he told L’Haan. “I don’t care.” He harbored his own doubts about Sarina, but he wouldn’t allow somebody like this woman to contribute to them.

  “But you do care for Ms. Douglas,” L’Haan said. “Quite a lot, I’m given to understand.”

  “What do you want?”

  “She’s not guilty.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Bashir spat, launching himself off the bed and over to the outer door. “Of course she’s not guilty.” He’d reacted too quickly, he knew, too vociferously to hide his uncertainty. He also noted that he’d said not guilty; he hadn’t said innocent.

  “Well,” L’Haan said, “I’m glad that you do know that.” Her tone told Bashir that she saw through his declaration of support for Sarina, all the way to his fears. “The question I have to ask then is, why are you allowing her to wallow in custody?”

  “She hasn’t been charged with anything,” Bashir said. Not yet. “She’s being detained so she can answer questions about what happened on the station.”

  “Have you seen her?” L’Haan asked.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Bashir said. He walked back over to the bed.

  “Let’s just say I want to hear your version of things.”

  “I saw her briefly the night they took her in,” Bashir said.

  “And what did she tell you?”

  “What do you think she told me?” Bashir said. “‘Yes, of course I did it, Julian, I murdered a thousand people and I’d do it again.’” What Sarina had done had been to look deeply into his eyes and tell him that she had nothing to do with the destruction of Deep Space 9. And for a time—perhaps too short a time—that had been enough for him.

  “Really, Doctor Bashir, you must learn to govern your passions,” L’Haan said. “They will be your undoing.”

  “I like my passions.”

  “Have you spoken with Captain Ro?” L’Haan asked. “Have you tried to make her understand that she’s made a mistake?”

  “Of course I have,” Bashir said. “And the captain’s not convinced that Sarina’s guilty.”

  “So Ro thinks that the investigation may clear her of any wrongdoing.”

  Bashir nodded.

  L’Haan shrugged. “Maybe that would happen. But we can’t take that chance. Because the Federation and Bajor took more than just a bloody nose on this one, and people are crying out for justice. It won’t be sufficient for President Bacco to say, yes, somebody destroyed one of our vital assets and killed a thousand people in the process, and no, we don’t know who it was, but let’s not worry about it, they probably won’t do it again. That would make everybody feel too vulnerable, and after the Dominion, after Tezwa, after the Borg, after the formation of the Typhon Pact, the Federation can’t have that. Bacco can’t have that. Akaar can’t.

  “And even you can’t.”

  “What are you saying?” Bashir asked. “That because these people need to blame somebody for what happened, they’re going to find Sarina guilty even if she’s innocent?”

  “‘If she’s innocent,’ Doctor?” L’Haan said quietly, her eyes boring into his. “How quickly we lose trust.”

  Bashir said nothing.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen, Doctor,” L’Haan said. “Federation Security will hold on to Sarina for questioning as long as they legally can. When that time runs out, as it soon will, they’ll indict her. They’ll indict her because they won’t want to let her go, and then public sentiment and everybody’s need for a villain will be enough to see her convicted.”

  “They can’t convict anybody without evidence.”

  “But there is evidence, Doctor,” L’Haan said. “There is her position in security, which allowed her access to the very locations on Deep Space Nine where the bombs were found. There is her unsubstantiated, and even refuted, accusation that Rahendervakell th’Shant made threats against the station. There is her survival of the disaster.

  “And then there would be the revelation of her illegal mission to Salavat, her violation of Breen borders, her abetting the murder of Breen civilians, all of which can establish Ms. Douglas’s character. There’s also the matter of her having been genetically engineered. The general public doesn’t like that.”

  Bashir’s legs suddenly felt as if th
ey could no longer support him, and he sat back down again on the bed. “At least half of that is immaterial to what happened on Deep Space Nine,” he said. “And the rest is at best circumstantial.”

  “But circumstantial doesn’t mean not convincing, Doctor,” L’Haan said. “You understand the way most humanoid brains operate, and so you must know how thoroughly unreliable eyewitness testimony is. In many crimes, particularly sophisticated ones, physical evidence is completely lacking. That leaves only circumstantial evidence, and it’s what puts most criminals in prison.”

  “If they truly are criminals,” Bashir said.

  “Because they need her to be,” L’Haan said, “they will make Ms. Douglas a criminal.”

  “That might be the way your version of justice works,” Bashir said, “but that’s not Federation justice.”

  “How naïve, Doctor,” L’Haan said. “But as I said, Ms. Douglas is not guilty, and she is far too valuable an asset for us to lose.”

  “So why don’t you do something about it?” Bashir asked, although he absolutely did not want Section 31 to come to Sarina’s rescue.

  “What do you think I’m doing by speaking with you?”

  “I mean, why don’t you just break her out of custody?”

  “We could do that,” L’Haan said. “You know that we could. But then what? She wouldn’t be as useful an agent because she’d be a fugitive. She’d lose all her value as an undercover operative. She’d have to stay in the shadows, and really, I’m not sure how satisfying that would be for her . . . or for you. Because then your choices would be to join us, or never to see Ms. Douglas again. No, it’s better that she keep an identity that people know and trust. But that means her name needs to be cleared. As the man who loves her, everybody would expect you to try.”