by David Mack
L’Haan narrowed her eyes. Did she know Sarina was lying? Her hands parted, and she set them on the armrests of her chair. “Did you see the other members of your team die?”
“No,” Julian answered. “We were in a different part of the ship.”
Not bad. Until that moment, Sarina hadn’t realized what a splendid liar Julian could be.
Now that he had drawn L’Haan’s attention, she directed her next query at him. “Tell me about the end of your mission. How did you stop the Spetzkar from stealing the jaunt ship?”
“I made my way to the lowest level of the engineering section. Sarina went to the ship’s computer core. She sabotaged their comms and the software for their jaunt navigation. I tampered with the chroniton integrator, which made the jaunt drive’s artificial wormholes unstable. Then we—”
“I thought you said you were prisoners of the Breen.”
“We were,” Sarina cut in. “Some of the Commonwealth officers helped free us from the ShiKahr’s brig. They also told us what systems to hit to prevent the Breen from escaping with their vessel.”
Julian nodded. “We couldn’t have done it without their help.”
The Vulcan looked down her nose at the duo. “Continue, Doctor.”
“After we sabotaged the ship, we escaped before the Breen activated the jaunt drive. By the time they found out what we’d done, we’d been picked up by a Commonwealth starship.”
Sarina leaned forward and hoped to shift the conversation’s direction. “The Breen ship didn’t make it through, did it?”
“Not as far as we’ve been able to tell. Our latest intel from the Breen capital is that Domo Pran has scuttled the wormhole research program—due in no small part to the fact that its chief scientist, Thot Tran, defected to the Tzenkethi Coalition.”
L’Haan’s news reminded Sarina of Tran’s chivalrous defense of his female Tzenkethi research partner, Doctor Choska. A mirthful smirk slipped through her mask of disinterest. “Good for him.”
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing. Just a small salute to the power of love.”
The Vulcan wrinkled her brow in disapproval. “Nature’s most overrated aberration.” In a breath, she expunged all vestiges of emotion from her face. “Are there any other relevant details I need to know regarding your mission?”
Sarina shook her head. “No, that’s it. I’ll have a more detailed written report ready for you tomorrow.”
“Very well.” L’Haan got up, and Sarina and Julian stood to see her out. “I’ll be in touch, Agent Douglas.” She dipped her chin at Julian. “Doctor.”
They followed her to the front door. The Vulcan let herself out, and she pulled the door closed behind her.
Julian stepped past Sarina and cracked open the door to peek outside. Then he closed it and turned a baffled look at Sarina. “She’s gone.”
“And not a moment too soon.” She took his hand and tilted her head toward their bedroom suite. “C’mon. I hear a shower calling our names.”
He scooped her up in his arms and carried her with a grin toward the bedroom. “You need to get your hearing checked, my dear. Because that siren call is coming from the bed.”
Thirty-five
Tangled together beneath the sheets, Bashir and Sarina lay facing each other. Her skin was warm against his, and the air between them was rich with the scents of their coupling.
Tucked under Bashir’s pillows was a surveillance-blocking device developed by Starfleet Intelligence to shield them from Section 31’s seemingly omnipresent eavesdropping. He activated the scrambler to keep their whispers private. Then he stroked a lock of Sarina’s blond hair from her forehead and tucked it gently behind her ear. “Do you think she believed us?”
“No idea.” She pressed her forehead against his. “But I don’t think it matters. If they’re on to us, they’ll think we killed Cole and the others, even if we show them proof we didn’t.”
He sighed. “You may be right.”
“So? What now? If our cover’s blown, we should walk away from this.”
“It’s too late for that.” He felt the truth like a weight on his chest. “We’re in too deep. We’ve seen too much, and they know it. Thirty-one can’t let us walk away. If we try to scrap the mission, they’ll have no choice but to kill us.”
Disbelief put an edge on her voice. “It’s too dangerous. They know our true objective. How are we supposed to finish our mission if they’ve already seen us coming?”
“It’s a double bluff,” Bashir said. “They know why we’re working for them—but they don’t know we’ve been warned our cover’s blown. But if we run—”
“—they’ll know,” Sarina said, seeing his point, “and they’ll kill us. But if we go forward, we’ll be able to see the traps they set for us. We’ll be expecting them.”
“Exactly.”
There was fear behind her words. “But what’s our plan, Julian?”
It was a question he had dreaded answering. He knew what had to be done, though he still had no idea how to do it. But the only way to set the future in motion was to say the words.
“We no longer have time to go slowly. We have to jump ahead to the endgame as soon as we can.”
She looked into his eyes, perhaps in search of some reassurance that he wasn’t out of his mind. “Meaning what?”
“We have to turn the organization’s agents against one another. We need to make Section Thirty-one destroy itself from within.”
Sarina shook her head. “No, that’s insane. It’s too soon. We don’t have the time or the resources. It takes years to pull off an op like that.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.” He hugged her close and whispered into her ear. “Because it’s the only move we have left.”
* * *
Enlarged holographic images of the other senior coordinators’ heads surrounded L’Haan inside the audience chamber. They were being transmitted over secure subspace channels so that they all could remain in seclusion as much as possible—a precaution made necessary by the increased attention the organization had received from Starfleet Intelligence in recent years.
Every whisker in Vasily Zeitsev’s snowy beard looked as thick as rope, and the wrinkles in his old and weathered face had been rendered as if they were tiny canyons in a sun-bleached desert. He asked in his heavy Russian accent, “Do we believe them?”
L’Haan considered his question. “I see no reason we should.”
“Then why not put an end to this charade?”
“Because we can’t be certain of what happened to Cole,” L’Haan said.
“And because Douglas and Bashir might still be useful,” said Caliq Azura. The Betazoid woman’s black irises were overpowered by her broad streaks of lavender eye shadow. Despite her youth, there was a shrewdness in her gaze. She had a knack for exposing others’ secrets—and for making everyone she met see her as whatever they hoped she might be. “It never hurts to have willing pawns.”
Her argument failed to sway Kestellenar th’Teshinaal, the organization’s eternal pessimist. “Pawns that turn against their own hardly seem worth keeping.”
Zeitsev scowled at the Andorian’s remark. “We were never their own, Tesh.”
“All the more reason to be rid of them,” said Jhun Kulkarno. The Zakdorn was a veteran of the organization, one whose decades of service were exceeded only by those of Zeitsev and L’Haan. “We know they want to act against us. How many chances should we give them to destroy everything we’ve fought and bled for? When do we say enough and cut them loose?”
“When I say so,” replied the only disguised voice in the conversation, the one that belonged to an ominous but conspicuously undefined silhouette—that of their mutual superior, the one they all knew only as Control. “Then, and no sooner.”
Julian Bashir and Sarina Douglas will return in
SECTION 31: CONTROL
Acknowledgments
Kara, my wife: Thank you for waiting until I finished writin
g this novel before starting our new diet. And thank you for persuading me to go on a diet. And for not smothering me when I snore.
My esteemed editors, publisher, and licensor: I offer you my gratitude for letting me continue to play with the coolest toys in one of science fiction’s all-time greatest sandboxes.
To former Star Trek: Deep Space Nine writer-producers Ira Steven Behr, Bradley Thompson, and David Weddle: Thank you, gentlemen, for incepting Section 31. Without shadow, light has no definition, and your creative contributions to the Star Trek universe have made it a richer and far more fascinating milieu, one that my imagination loves to call home.
Lucienne, my agent: Yes, I will get to work writing a new original novel now. Thanks for being patient. I’ll do my best to make my next original manuscript not suck.
Bourbon and vodka: You complete me. At the very least, you make it possible for me to complete my manuscripts. Don’t ever change, you crazy kids.
Last, I extend my gratitude to you, gentle readers, for continuing to support my flights of fancy, my acts of linguistic mendacity, my crimes of literary deception. Without you, there would be no reason for me to continue spinning tales in this fictional setting that I’ve loved all my life. So, because your support has made it possible for me to go on contributing to a shared universe whose core message is one of hope for the future, I say to you all: Thank you.
Until next time, adieu!
About the Author
David Mack is too weird to live and too rare to die.
Find out more at his official website:
www.davidmack.pro
Or follow him on Twitter:
@DavidAlanMack
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover art by Tim Bradstreet
Cover design by Alan Dingman
ISBN 978-1-4767-5308-9
ISBN 978-1-4767-5313-3 (ebook)
Contents
Historian’s Note
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Tirty-One
Chapter Tirty-Two
Chapter Tirty-Three
Chapter Tirty-Four
Chapter Tirty-Five
Acknowledgments
About the Author
