Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

  “That’s the job.” Tuvok turned toward the voice as Tom Riker approached them. Sahde, Khob, and the Bynars were on the far side of the cargo bay, out of earshot, but the human had caught a fraction of their conversation. “It may not be Starfleet-style neat and nice, but you heard what Velk said. We’re operating off the grid here.”

  “And that is my core concern,” said Tuvok. “Mister Riker, you were once a serving officer, so you understand how Starfleet operates. You yourself expressed disquiet at Velk’s announcements.”

  “That wasn’t it. . . .” Tom waved away the statement.

  “The problem with being off the grid is that the chain of command gets a little fuzzy,” said Nog. “Kincade is commander here, but who is she supposed to report to? Velk? He’s a civilian. He doesn’t have any direct military authority.” He gestured at the walls. “And you may not have noticed, but we’re totally isolated on board the Snipe. All communications are controlled from the bridge, everything we do is monitored. . . .”

  Tom folded his arms. “Why is that a surprise? We have to stay dark, Nog. The people we’re hunting are ruthless, and if they get one whiff of us coming after them, they’ll scatter. We don’t know what connections they might have within the Federation or who might be listening. We might never be able to locate them, and then Bacco’s killers get away free and clear.” He shook his head. “I’m willing to leave the rulebook behind for a while if it means tracking down that scum.”

  “For how long?” asked Nog, meeting the human’s gaze. “How long will you leave the rulebook behind?”

  “You know what I mean,” Tom added, scowling.

  “I do,” Nog said, nodding, “and I agree with you. I was there on Deep Space Nine, I saw what happened with my own eyes. Believe me, I want the people who murdered the president made to pay their butcher’s bill in full. But we have to do it by the book.” He looked away, and Tuvok saw his manner become somber. “Or else it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tom was silent for a long moment, weighing the Ferengi’s words. “They’ll get their day in court, in front of the whole galaxy, you can count on that. But to make that happen, we may have to go places we don’t want to. I don’t like it any more than you, Nog. . . .” He glanced at Tuvok. “But we have to make a logical choice here, right, Commander?”

  Tuvok considered the question and found that the answer was difficult to frame. Could logic ever be the guiding force behind an endeavor such as this one? Arguably, the mission to capture those responsible for President Bacco’s death was motivated by emotion; it could be said that as much as it was a quest to find justice, it was also a call to vengeance.

  Before he could voice any reply, the Vulcan heard the subsonic tremor through the Snipe’s hull, a precursor signifying the shift in engine power. A moment later, the humming of the stardrive shifted in pitch.

  “We’re dropping out of warp,” said Tom.

  Kincade’s voice crackled out of the overhead speakers. “Yellow Alert. All Active Four team members, report for tactical briefing in five minutes. We have a go.”

  * * *

  The flare of light and energy from the transporter faded, and Nog felt the press of the icy breeze on his chest. Indicators at the edges of his visual field immediately blinked on, showing the sudden temperature drop from the interior of the Snipe’s transporter room to the surface of the frigid planetoid. He surveyed the clearing where the group had materialized; all around, the long, spindly fingers of hardy plants poked up through the snowpack, clustering at the foot of wind-sculpted ice towers.

  If anything, the nameless world looked even less inviting from the surface than it did from space. He glanced to his right where Kincade was crouching as she unlimbered a sniper rifle. Like the rest of the team, she was rendered in her stealth gear as a gray, vaguely human-shaped outline.

  The lieutenant colonel’s terse briefing back on the ship had outlined the operation in quick order; they were to scout a location in the next valley over and scour it for clues as to the whereabouts of their targets.

  “I thought we were heading to Beta Rigel,” he muttered. “I hear it’s warm there.”

  “Change of plan,” Kincade replied, panning the rifle back and forth. “This is our lead.”

  Nog accepted this with a glum nod, and he resisted the urge to reach up to adjust the semirigid hood over his head. The stealth suits were not designed with the bodies of Ferengi in mind, and the hood pulled uncomfortably tight over his large ears. He drew his phaser and shot a look at the tricorder clipped to his hip.

  Across the clearing, Ashur was using a tricorder to scan the local area. “No life signs nearby,” he reported. “But I am detecting some . . . large things . . . three kilometers farther out.”

  “Probably local apex predators,” said Sahde from nearby. “I hope they’re not the curious sort.”

  As well as the two females and the Zeon, Nog was accompanied by Tuvok and Tom Riker; Ixxen, Khob, and the Bynars had remained on board the Snipe to monitor them remotely. He looked around and found the Vulcan and the human approaching from the tree line.

  “No sign that anyone else is around,” said Tom. “But we shouldn’t let our guard down. Snow’s falling constantly here, so any footprints would fill in pretty fast.”

  “Stay alert,” ordered Kincade, and she set off across the ice. “Tuvok, you and Tom take point. Anyone sees anything, call it.”

  Nog kept pace with her, trying to keep one eye on the icy wilderness around them and another on the scan returns from his tricorder. “Why don’t people ever choose pleasant places to hide out?” Gusts of cold wind buffeted them, throwing up small blizzards of loose, gritty snow particles.

  “One being’s icebox is another being’s garden spot,” noted Sahde.

  He shrugged. “A Tzenkethi would find this as unpleasant as I do.” Nog made a face. “I think even an Andorian would.”

  “Who can know what the Tzenkethi think?” growled Ashur. “They’re not like the rest of us.”

  Kincade looked in the Zeon’s direction. “What do you mean by that?”

  “They’re a perverse species. Willfully contrary and . . . and . . .” He groped for the right word, but didn’t find it. “Weird,” he said, at length.

  “We’re all weird one way or another,” said Sahde playfully, “depending on who you ask.”

  “Speak for yourself,” growled the Zeon.

  “Structures ahead, forty meters southwest of our location.” Tuvok’s voice came over the comm channel. Nog squinted into the middle distance, and his monocle’s sensors painted the images of the other two team members farther off amid the pillars of ice. “Heavy damage evident. No movement.”

  “Stay put, Commander, we’re coming to you. Snipe, do you read?” Kincade spoke into her hood’s communicator.

  “We read,” came Ixxen’s reply, dense with the hiss of multiple encryption subroutines. “Go ahead, Colonel.”

  “We have visual on the site. Proceeding as planned. Out.” Kincade gestured to the others. “Move up. Maintain separation. Nog, Ashur—I want sensors on those buildings before we go in.”

  They went as close as they dared, and Nog picked out the shapes of the dome tents amid the drifts of greenish-gray snow. Rimes of ice coated their upper surfaces, and no light or energy bled out of them; the encampment was dead. He saw that the tents were ruined, ripped open so that their interiors were exposed to the punishing elements. Around the tears, ragged pennants of burnt hyperpolymer cloth flapped in the wind, crackling and snapping.

  “The site appears abandoned,” said Tuvok. “Whoever was here fled long before we arrived.”

  Ashur’s tricorder gave a low chime, and he turned in place, aiming it down at the snow. “I have something. Organic matter . . . there.” With the tip of his boot, he kicked at the top layer of snowfall and revealed a dark, indistinct object. “Someone give me some illumination.”

  Kincade leaned in with a simmslight that threw a sharp disc of white a
cross the dirty ice. At first glance, Ashur’s discovery appeared to be a damp, matted clump of fur and indistinct materials, ending in a black blot of frozen matter. The Zeon reached down and pulled gingerly at the object, and Nog’s gorge rose as he realized he was looking at a severed forearm. A pool of blood had solidified into ice around the cut, and gnawed fingers dangled at the opposite end.

  “Klingon,” Ashur announced, reading off the results of his scans. “Female of the species, it appears.”

  Sahde pointed at something else glinting in the ice. “There’s a weapon there too. A blade.”

  “Where is . . .” Nog swallowed hard. “The rest of her?”

  Ashur discarded his grisly discovery and continued to sweep the area. “Also reading animal spoor nearby. Predators must have dragged the rest of the remains away.”

  “There are more blood spots in this area,” called Tuvok, indicating the foot of a lumpy ice tower. “I would surmise the owner of that limb was not alone.”

  “Maybe whatever ate them won’t come looking for a second course,” offered Tom. “And now I’m wondering what the hell Klingons were doing on this planet?”

  A grim thought occurred to Nog. “Could they have been involved in the assassination? Were they part of it?” But even as he said the words aloud, he found that hard to accept. Chancellor Martok had been there on DS9 when Bacco had been shot, and he had been as shocked and as horrified as the rest of them.

  “Anything you’re not telling us, Colonel?” Tom gave Kincade a hard look. “Jump in any time.”

  She sighed. “All I know is what was in the data Velk gave to me. The Security Agency had a lead that this site was being used as a staging point by our targets. The Klingons were here for the same reason we are.”

  “And they died of it.” Sahde turned to Nog. “Ferengi, scan this area. Look for low-level neutrino traces.”

  “All right. . . .” He did as she asked, quickly reprogramming his tricorder.

  “You have a hypothesis?” asked Tuvok.

  The Elloran nodded. “Predators didn’t kill anyone here. Those animals are scavengers. I think our terrorist quarry left some farewell gifts behind.”

  Nog’s eyes widened as his scans picked up a series of distinct readings set in a ring equidistant around the perimeter of the abandoned outpost. “There’s something buried in the ice. Metallic objects. They didn’t show up on the initial scans. . . .”

  “Show me where.” Sahde walked fearlessly out into the open ground between the ice pillars and the camp proper.

  “Stop!” Nog shouted. “At your feet!”

  “Don’t fret,” she retorted. “I’ve done this a lot.” Using her hands like spades, Sahde pushed the snow away until an orb-like device was revealed. “Beam sphere,” she explained. “Autonomous attack unit. A favorite toy of the Romulan Empire, Nausicaans, the Cardassian Union, the Orions . . . anyone who doesn’t like unwelcome visitors.”

  Nog manipulated the tricorder, dragging up records of similar devices from its dense memory core, lines of relevant data scrolling past his eyes.

  “All right, back off,” snapped Kincade. “No one is here to impress.”

  The Elloran shrugged. “Relax. Our stealth suits put us well outside the detection range of these devices. I could leap up and down on it and the thing wouldn’t know I was here—”

  Even through the thick material of the hood, Nog heard the snap-hiss of the beam sphere coming to life, and with a sudden jerk of motion, the steel-colored ball blasted upward to waist height on a rod of invisible force. He was dimly aware of a dozen others rising at the same instant, lines of glowing phaser energy uncoiling inside the devices.

  “Down!” shouted Tom, shoving Tuvok and Kincade toward the snow, but Nog instinctively knew that would do them no good; the weapons would scour the area with overlapping zones of fire, killing anything caught in the termination radius.

  Later, the engineer would think back to this moment and try to recall what had gone through his mind, but the act was pure instinct, as fast as muscle memory. Nog’s thumb mashed down on the tricorder’s emitter key and the device in his hand chirped as a broad-spectrum tachyon pulse bathed the area with a brief, eerie glow.

  At once, all the drone spheres gave a keening whine and dropped back to the snow, their lethal discharge unspent.

  Panting with shock, Sahde grabbed the one at her feet and peered at it. “What did you just do?”

  “He saved our lives,” grated Ashur.

  “Tachyons,” Nog explained quickly. “Overloaded the central processors in the spheres. They’ll be inert while they reset.” He took a breath. “So we should probably destroy them all right now!”

  Kincade didn’t bother to give the order; instead she aimed her rifle and shot the orb out of the Elloran’s hand, drawing a yelp of surprise from the other female. Ashur, Tuvok, and Tom followed suit, drawing their phasers and blasting the immobile drones before they could recover.

  The colonel shouldered her weapon and hauled Sahde to her feet. “No showboating here, do you understand me? You’re supposed to be a professional, so act like it.”

  The Elloran looked away, chastened. “Understood.”

  Kincade turned away. “Spread out in teams of two, search the camp, and be careful. Nog, good work. You’re with me.”

  She pushed on through a tear in the side of one of the larger tents, and the Ferengi jogged to keep up with her, adrenaline still coursing through him.

  * * *

  It took the better part of three hours to scour the interiors of the outpost, and by then the weak sun was below the horizon. Nog was unpleasantly surprised to discover exactly how much colder the planetoid became, and he knew that the temperature would continue to drop with each passing moment. He toggled the stealth suit’s power system to shunt more energy to its internal thermal regulators and sighed, thinking about the cup of hot raktajino he was going to replicate the moment they beamed back to the Snipe.

  With effort, Nog shouldered a small cargo container up from where it had fallen. The box was empty, and the lid yawned open like a laughing mouth. He grimaced; it was a metaphor for the entire encampment, all of it hollow and devoid of clues. The assassins who had hidden in this place had been thorough with their withdrawal, taking the time to remove anything that might have been useful to their pursuers. They knew they were being hunted, and they had clearly been ready.

  He turned as Kincade slipped into the tent. “Anything?”

  “The box is of Vulcan manufacture. Should we add them to the list of suspects as well?”

  The woman made a negative noise. “Damned Klingons. This is their fault. They stuck their ridged heads in where they didn’t belong and spooked the targets. Now the Tzenkethi are in the wind.”

  “I still don’t understand why the Klingons were even here.” He rose and walked out into the blizzard that had blown in. Nearby, lights danced in the middle distance as the others picked through the remnants, still searching fruitlessly. “If they had a lead on the targets, why didn’t they tell us?”

  “You know the Klingons.” She followed him out. “They act out of instinct, fight before they think. Probably thought they were doing us a favor, honoring a debt to Bacco. A lot of good that did us.”

  “It still doesn’t feel right to me, Colonel.” Nog paused, consulting his tricorder. Scans from orbit combined with the data gathered on the ground had given the team a rough plot of the camp’s layout. They could guess which tents had most likely been for storage or accommodation, which had been their common area, and so on. An open area a short distance away still defied explanation, though. The ice pillars and spindly trees had been cut away to form a small quadrangle, and at first Nog thought it might have been a kind of training space, but the inclement weather on the planetoid made that seem unlikely. He switched the tricorder to a slow pulse deep-scan mode and moved to investigate, sweeping the open ground in cautious arcs.

  Kincade shrugged. “Maybe Martok didn’t even
know about it. You know how it goes with the Empire, all those noble houses and clans jockeying for position. Maybe one of them was trying to one-up the others. . . .” She paused. “Whatever the reason, I don’t like it. We don’t need another variable in this operation. There’s too much at stake.”

  He gave a distracted nod. “There’s something here, under the ice.”

  Her weapon was raised in a heartbeat. “More of those spheres?”

  “No, it’s nillimite alloy plating. Prefabricated sheets, the kind of thing the Corps of Engineers lay down on colony worlds as basic foundations. They reinforced the ground here.”

  “What for?”

  Nog dropped into a crouch and dug out a few fistfuls of ice until his gloved fingers touched metal. “I think . . .” He looked up into the sky. “I think this might have been a landing pad for a shuttle.”

  “Good catch,” said Kincade. “You’re a sharp one, Lieutenant Commander. First that booby trap and now this. I can see why you were picked for this assignment.” She came closer, peering at the edge of the exposed alloy plate. “How did you do that, by the way? The thing with the tachyon pulse? That was quick thinking.”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I’ve had run-ins with similar threats before, back on Deep Space Nine.” Nog paused to correct himself. “The old Deep Space Nine, I mean. Terok Nor, the Cardassian station. It was a bit eccentric, to say the least. Part of its security framework was a counter-insurgency program that used a similar system. It caused problems for us on more than one occasion, I can tell you.”

  The tricorder scanned the structure of the metals, and data fed back to the small screen and Nog’s head-up display. A slow smile formed on his lips.

  Kincade seemed to sense it. “Make my day, Mister Nog. Tell me you have a clue there.”

  He nodded. “I think I do.” Then his face fell as he realized what that would entail. “And it means we’re going to have to remain on this ice cube for another couple of hours.”