Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

  Most of them, anyway. Deanna had been disappointed to see that the Andorian sushi bar on Taylor Street where she had eaten many times was now gone, replaced by an austere Vulcan café.

  In the end, she had chosen Italian, and after calling in a favor with Chief Bolaji to babysit Tasha, it had been a relatively painless endeavor getting a reservation for that evening. She was still wondering how she had swung it; La Sorrento was a popular place, and the waiting list for a decent table was long.

  As if he was reading her mind, her husband sipped a little wine from his glass to wash down his tortellini, and then he leaned forward. “Good choice. I’m surprised you got us in here. Did you slip the maître d’ a bribe?”

  She smiled slightly, brushing a curl of dark hair back over her ear. “Hardly. They were a little sniffy at first, until I told them my name. Things got a lot smoother after that.”

  “Oh?” Outwardly, Will seemed to take that in stride. To someone who didn’t know him as intimately as his wife did—Betazoid empathy or not—he might have seemed almost indifferent. Deanna knew better. Beneath the surface, her husband was on edge. “I guess news travels fast in this town, especially fleet gossip. Doesn’t hurt to score some points with the new admiral.”

  “Who says it was your name that got us a table?” She tried to lighten the mood. “You’re not the only one with new responsibilities, dear.” Deanna had already been approached by the Federation diplomatic corp with a request to make herself available for the rounds of ambassadorial functions that were an integral part of life in what was Earth’s foremost interstellar town.

  Will didn’t smile in return, only nodding, his gaze lost in the straw-colored fluid in his glass. “How is that going?” he asked, at length.

  “Togren from the diplomatic corps has asked me to provide some support. You remember him? From Denobula?” Will nodded and she went on. “A new ambassadorial party is arriving in the next few days, and he wanted my expertise on hand to act as a liaison.”

  “Who is the ambassador? Someone we used to shoot at?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly, but there’s still going to be a strong chill in the room. We’ll be meeting with Envoy Ramasanar ch’Nuillen.”

  Will raised an eyebrow. “The Andorian?”

  Deanna nodded. “Presider zh’Felleth wants Andor to return to the fold, and the envoy is here to lead that venture.” She frowned. “It seems like it was only yesterday the Andorians were seceding, and now they want to put that behind them. It’s not going to be an easy road. . . . There is still plenty of ill feeling on both sides.”

  “The Federation Council won’t just let them back in,” Will mused grimly. “The Andorians have to know that. And the president pro tem has made no secret of his animosity about the whole secession business.”

  She nodded again. Ishan Anjar had put himself forward for the presidential office, and he had been campaigning hard, but one of Andor’s most progressive politicians, the outspoken Kellessar zh’Tarash, had already publicly stated her desire to seek the same office. Of course, there was the minor impediment of needing Andor to officially rejoin the United Federation of Planets first, and while public sentiment seemed to be behind the idea, nothing was certain. The politics of the moment were complex and ever shifting, and not for the first time, Deanna wished that Titan could have stayed out in deep space to meet the kind of challenges she felt better equipped to deal with.

  Will pushed his food around the plate, lost in thought. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said. “Let’s not both sit here and pretend like this is another ordinary day.”

  You always know what I’m thinking, Imzadi. She heard the words in her mind, sensing the shades of his mood clinging to them, smoky and dark. He forced a smile, but he knew she wasn’t going to be deflected.

  Finally, her husband put down his fork and frowned. “What the hell just happened?” he asked, frustration simmering in his tone. “A week ago we’re in deep space cataloging supernova remnants and looking for new species of cosmozoans. Now we’re here, eating pasta while the Federation reels like it’s been gut punched.” He flicked at his collar, where rank pins would have sat; while they were both dressed in civilian clothes tonight, she knew what he meant. “I never asked for this. Hell, I’m still trying to get a grip on what it is I’m actually supposed to be doing here.” Will paused, moderating his tone. “Deanna, someone is making me play catch-up, and I don’t like it.”

  “You want to help,” she said, nodding. “We all do. But this promotion . . . you’re afraid it’s the opposite of that.”

  “Why would Akaar sideline me and haul Titan back in? It doesn’t make any sense, not with everything that’s going on. . . . Bacco, the Andorians, and these arrests . . .”

  “Have you talked to him since the ceremony?”

  Her husband shook his head. “All of a sudden he’s like a ghost. His staff take my messages, but he doesn’t return them. And meanwhile I’m chained to a damn desk.”

  Deanna put a hand on Will’s arm. “You know Admiral Akaar. You know he doesn’t do anything without a good reason. You may just have to be patient.”

  “I’ve never been good with that,” he admitted. “I just don’t want to get caught in the undertow here. I’m not a political animal; I never have been.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason why Akaar pulled you in.” She smiled again. “It’s all right for you to have doubts, Will. Change does that to you. Some times we don’t get to choose when and where it happens.”

  “Thank you, Counselor Troi,” he replied, not unkindly. “But this time around it’s not just my immediate future that’s in the wind. There’s you and Tasha . . . Are we going to be Earthbound from now on? And what about Christine and Tuvok and the rest of our crew? Titan can’t be tied to a base, that’s not what she was built for. . . .” He met her gaze. “I’m wondering what the hell I have let myself in for.”

  She paused. “I think you’re where you need to be. I think we both are.”

  “How so?”

  “Have you seen the news broadcasts since we made port? The network is full of tirades and counterarguments. Every pundit on the planet and off it has something to say. People are afraid, Will, and they’re angry. Bacco was respected by millions, even by those who were her political opponents, and now that she’s been taken from them, they have nowhere to direct their grief.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” noted Will. “There’s more than enough blame to go around, deserved or not. And every day there seems to be a new nugget of information conveniently leaked to the media from some ‘credible source’ or other. . . .”

  “What troubles me,” Deanna began, “are the public reactions being fomented by the rhetoric coming from the Federation Council.” She noted that the kind of language being used by politicians across the UFP reflected a troubling rise in sentiments directed against the newest player on the galactic stage, the Typhon Pact.

  “Meet the new enemy,” said Will. “Same as the old enemy.”

  Some more hyperbolic commentators described the Typhon Pact as a dark mirror of the Federation, a coalition of agitator member-states that had gathered behind a united front in the wake of the Borg crisis. It couldn’t be denied that the Pact was a force to be reckoned with; the mere fact of its existence had irrevocably altered the geopolitical map of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

  “They’re the perfect monster-under-the-bed for alarmists,” said Deanna. “A gathering of old Federation foes, drawing their plans against us.”

  Her husband nodded. “They fit the bill all right. The Holy Order of the Kinshaya, the Breen Confederacy, the Romulan Star Empire all making treaty with the Gorn, the Tholians, and the Tzenkethi. . . . There’s not a single member of the Pact that hasn’t at one time been a player in an armed conflict with us.”

  Deanna nodded. The Typhon Pact was difficult to anticipate and cunning in its affairs of state, and while there was weakness in the places where the Pact’s members w
orked at cross purposes, it could not be denied that they represented the gravest military threat to the Federation’s borders. “All that is true, but still they’ve shown no intent to invade. They’ve made plenty of attempts at subterfuge, some successful and some not, but that’s to be expected. They’re pushing at their boundaries and measuring the response, but Bacco herself was reaching out to some of them. . . . Hopefully that opportunity won’t be lost now.”

  “We can hope. Any intent for war is absent, or so it appears,” Will concluded, finishing the thought for her. “That was well enough and good for the previous administration. Starfleet’s job was to carry on, project quiet and steady strength while we kept the chance of some kind of friendship on the table.”

  “I remember Ishan Anjar being quite vocal about how much he disagreed with that. And he hasn’t changed his mind,” said Deanna. “Now his calls for a harder line against the Pact are in the ascendant.” It seemed to her that anti–Typhon Pact sentiments were growing by the day, led in part by the belligerent stance of the president pro tem. Although he had yet to openly say the words in any public forum, it was the worst-kept secret on Earth that Ishan considered the Typhon Pact to be the prime suspect in the killing of Nan Bacco.

  “If the Pact is going to be our enemy,” Will said quietly, “then it’s the Tzenkethi driving them to it. That’s how the wind is blowing.”

  The cunning Tzenkethi had waged war on the Federation many times, and the recent battles still lived in the memories of many senior Starfleet officers and older civilians alike; it was this faction of the Typhon Pact that rhetoric targeted, despite the fact that nothing beyond circumstantial evidence connecting them to the DS9 incident had been revealed. Means and motive were not enough on their own, Deanna reflected, but in desperate times such things could slip away beneath the tide of public opinion.

  “Do you believe that?” she asked him. “Do you think they are responsible?”

  “History is full of wars that have started with a single assassin’s bullet,” Will told her. “If somebody took Bacco’s life in order to cause turmoil in the Federation, then they’ve already succeeded.” He paused, then shook his head. “She stood for something, Deanna. For the best of us. The Federation she wanted was one built on a foundation of honesty and reason. We can’t let the last of her be the echo of a shot.”

  * * *

  The machine drifted there, some three hundred meters up above the city of San Francisco, floating on a stiff breeze. If one could have seen it clearly, the device might have been described as resembling an avian form rendered by an avant-garde sculptor. It was slightly smaller than the common gulls that wheeled and turned over the water’s edge down by the bay, metallic wings canted to ride the thermals over the cityscape.

  Its skin was a composite of near-weightless aerogel compounds, built around a core of advanced microduotronic circuits. It could mimic the flight patterns and some behaviors of a real bird if required, but tonight that functionality was inactive. Its skin tone was matched to the shaded, cloudy sky above. For all intents and purposes, the little drone was invisible.

  Bobbing on a compact antigravity motor no bigger than a pencil, the device held its station directly over the open courtyard of the La Sorrento restaurant. Sensor pits along the length of its body continually mapped the target zone beneath it, and the memory center of the unit monitored the ambient environment. It had only one target, and with a machine’s faultless patience, the drone watched Admiral William Riker in everything he said and did.

  The bistro’s weather-shield had caused a minor issue at first, necessitating the need to recalibrate the audio scanners in order to isolate Riker’s conversation from the ambient noise surrounding him, but that had been dealt with in short order.

  The drone continued to loiter as it had for the past hour. Capable of solar charging or even wireless energy induction, it could remain on station indefinitely. Silent. Unseen. Watchful.

  Meet the new enemy. Same as the old enemy.

  Riker’s words were gathered up by the synthetic ear of the device before being shot in microsecond bursts of data to a receiver in the top floor of a nondescript office building several blocks west, near Alamo Square.

  On paper, the office was the server hub for a networking concern, a largely unmanned facility populated by rows of data cores and communication routers. In reality, the center of the space was a set of isolated cubicles, each sound shielded from the others by baffle fields. Each cubicle contained a monitor and an operator who worked shifts gathering surveillance data on a dozen different subjects. Some were scrutinized through drones similar to the one shadowing Riker; others through the monitoring of personal communications or data traffic patterns. The facility was known as Active Two.

  The operators were trained to show no interest in the identity of their subjects, to treat them with dispassion and clinical regard. They were simply there to provide an observer’s oversight to the mechanical recovery of intelligence material—because no matter what the era, or where the act took place, it remained a truism that even the most clever thinking machine could not spy on someone so well as another living being.

  The Vulcan watching the live feed from the drone continued to listen to the admiral conversing with his wife. There were several of her species assigned to this posting; Vulcan physiology and mental acuity were particularly well suited to the lengthy, concentration-intensive and frequently tedious work of monitoring.

  She glanced briefly at a tertiary display that indicated the passage of the recovered data. Typically, surveillance intelligence was parsed and then sifted for usable data on site at this location, before a digest version of the sensor recording was passed on to a higher level; but in this case, it appeared that someone at a more senior security clearance was already tapped into the direct feed, watching it unfold live just as she was. She paused, musing. This was highly irregular, and she considered alerting her superior, who sat several cubicles away at another station.

  The Vulcan briefly allowed herself to wonder what it was about Admiral William T. Riker that required such scrutiny, then dismissed her own question as irrelevant. That was not a matter for her to dwell upon. She had her orders. She would carry them out.

  We can’t let the last of her be the echo of a shot, Riker was saying. A moment after the words were relayed back from the drone, the indicator showing the outside connection winked out, the feed to the higher clearance source abruptly terminated.

  On the screen, the admiral refused a dessert in favor of a coffee while his wife indulged. Riker glanced up briefly, and his watcher noted he was frowning.

  * * *

  Despite the lateness of the hour—or perhaps because of it—the streets of the portside district were busy with ship crews on liberty and the occasional group of adventurous tourists. The Centauri sun had set just as Tuvok’s transport had made landfall, and in the hours that had passed since then he had followed a circuitous path around the port city, taking maglev trams up and down the lines around the industrial zones to ensure he had not been followed. It was a standard espionage tradecraft technique and as automatic to the Vulcan as breathing. Even here, in the heart of the Federation’s member-worlds, he did not lower his guard. The secret orders had set him on alert for even the smallest sign of something awry. He drew into the depths of his hooded jacket, his dark face lost in shadow.

  A cold wind pushed down the streets as Tuvok arrived at the location designated for his rendezvous. A generous critic might have been willing to call the place a “tavern,” but it barely qualified as such. Built into the side of a decaying hangar complex, a handful of merchant marine cargo modules had been welded together around a rig that appeared to be made of surplus parts from an old Ptolemy-class tug.

  He entered through a tall steel door and a wave of distasteful odors washed over him. The sour organic smell of stale sweat from a dozen humanoid species, the tang of fermented alcoholic beverages, all mixed with ozone from what was likely
a poorly shielded electrical system. Tuvok had to step aside as a pair of tall, reedy Xelatians ambled past him on the way out, their movements stiff and jerky. One of them bumped into the Vulcan and glared blankly from behind a rectangular brass breather mask before going on its way.

  The tavern was divided into booths cut from hull metal. A long, curving bar that had once been part of a warp nacelle dominated one side of the establishment. Here and there, jury-rigged gaming tables hosted dom-jot or kella, although the surly manner of the players did not invite any casual approach.

  Tuvok took in the room, looking for the best vantage point, as a humanoid female resembling a Betazoid walked swiftly toward him. She appeared to flicker, her aspect shifting slightly. A hologram, then, he decided, doubtless projected by a computer system behind the bar. It had to have been scanning him as he entered, measuring what kind of server would be most enticing to a new customer.

  The device was poorly calibrated and lagged, however. The faux-Betazoid first became a Terran woman of Asian extraction. “Hey, honey! What can I get—” The holographic waitress flickered again and transformed into a demure Vulcan female, her expression snapping from slyly welcoming to serious and thoughtful. “Greetings, traveler,” she began again, with a poor imitation of a Shir’Kar accent. “How may I provide for you this night?”

  “Altair water,” he replied, moving past her toward a vacant booth.

  Tuvok sat and nursed his drink for a while, feigning interest in a wall screen display showing an ice hockey game in progress elsewhere on the planet. Under cover of this, he cast a practiced eye over the rest of the tavern’s clientele and noted several other patrons acting in a manner that could have been described as suspicious. None of them, however, seemed to be interested in him. He had no doubt that this place was the nexus for one or more criminal enterprises of minor scale, but his purpose here was not to interfere with such minutiae.

  The fact remained that Tuvok was uncertain as to exactly what his purpose here was. Again he went over the orders in his mind, sifting the terse language for any deeper meaning. He recalled the words of his former commander Kathryn Janeway when confronted with similar directives in the past; “cloak and dagger,” she had called it, an apt—if somewhat theatrical—description that illustrated not only the inherent obfuscation, but also the potential for danger.