Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

  Torvig’s tail gestured at the consoles. “This system is unconnected to any of Titan’s main functions. If there were a catastrophic effect from activating the program, it could not spread beyond this compartment.”

  “Catastrophic effect?” echoed Keru. “Tor, my friend, you’re not exactly selling me on this.”

  “I can rig an emergency shutdown,” said Modan, bringing up a subroutine. She indicated a flashing icon before her. “I press here and all power to this compartment will instantly be cut.”

  All eyes turned to Riker, and he nodded. “Run the program.”

  * * *

  Keru’s hand tensed and he found himself unconsciously reaching for a holstered phaser that wasn’t there. He watched Torvig’s manipulators scuttle across the control panel like metal spiders, and then with a flash of light, the holographic emitter array in the center of the lab came to life.

  Lacking the power or range of a full holodeck system, the emitter rig couldn’t produce something that would encompass the whole compartment, but then the content of the covert message wasn’t a simulation or a synthetic environment. A humanoid figure faded in from nothing, shimmering as the form gained the illusion of solidity.

  Riker’s first thought was of a child’s rendition of a human, a featureless sketch scaled up to the height of a man. The figure had nothing that was indicative of gender, species, or other identity, only the most basic structure of two legs, a torso, two arms, and a head. It was nothing but a placeholder construct, a thing to give the suggestion of a being without any of the actual substance of a real person.

  The face it wore was barely an outline of eyes and mouth, and for a moment it didn’t move. Then slowly the hologram’s bland aspect turned to examine the room around it, head cocked in a manner that was almost quizzical. When it spoke, the voice was flat and toneless. “Receiver mismatch has been logged. Please wait.”

  “What is the meaning of that?” Ssura asked.

  “It must be aware that it is not where it is supposed to be.” Modan alternated between watching her panel and scanning the hologram with a tricorder. “I’m seeing a lot of internal processing taking place.”

  Riker stepped forward and cleared his throat, addressing the figure directly. “Identify your origin and function.”

  “The origin of this program is protected,” it replied. “Function: messenger.”

  “It’s trying to determine its location,” said Torvig as red flags blinked into being on his console. “But it can’t connect out of the stand-alone server.”

  “Messenger?” Riker said it like a name, and the hologram looked up at him. “Disclose your information to me.”

  “No.” It stared at the admiral with those blank, doll-like eyes. Keru searched them for any sign of emotion, synthetic or not, and came up empty. “The recipient template is not present. Provide designated recipient for primary authentication.”

  “It doesn’t know us,” said Melora. “And we don’t know who the message is for, so there’s no way we can bring them here.”

  “Messenger, I am Admiral William Riker of Star-fleet Command, and by my authority I order you to immediately relinquish your information.”

  “I am not subject to your authority,” the hologram said flatly. Then it slowly turned its head to study Torvig and Modan. “I am aware of attempts being made to infiltrate my core functions. Be advised that any perceived intrusion into security layers will meet with a prompt response.”

  “That sounds like a threat,” Keru snapped. “Explain the nature of this response.”

  “Stage one: Security firewall is now active. Stage two: Data lockdown is pending. Stage three: Self-deletion . . . is pending.” Keru caught the pause in the reply and considered what that might mean. “I will divulge information only to the designated recipient,” concluded the hologram.

  “This program is clearly capable of a heuristic-learning response to outside stimuli,” Torvig noted. “It’s semi-intelligent. One could almost say it’s been programmed to be evasive.”

  “A message that encodes itself . . .” said Ssura. “Quite remarkable.”

  “Admiral, if I may?” Modan put down the tricorder and stepped forward as Riker gave her a nod. “Messenger, the recipient template is unavailable at this time. You must have auxiliary protocols for authentication in the event of such circumstances.”

  “Yes,” said the figure. “Shall I proceed to that phase?”

  “Go on,” Modan said warily.

  The hologram studied her blankly. “Queen to queen’s level three. Reply.”

  Torvig’s eyes widened. “That is a move from a game of three-dimensional chess. I do not understand. . . .”

  “I do,” said Riker. “It’s old Starfleet code. Nothing formal or official, just a quick and simple way for crews to signal if they were under duress or if they needed to confirm someone’s identity.”

  Keru glanced at him. “Do you know the correct response?”

  The admiral shook his head. “It could be any one of a thousand different counter-moves. That’s the beauty of it. Simple to learn, but with countless variables.”

  “And if we give the wrong answer, the program deletes itself, and we’re back to where we started,” said Modan.

  Keru studied the holographic figure, his jaw set in a scowl. “We wanted to intercept a message. Instead we appear to have captured a prisoner.”

  Nine

  The air-cab banked gently as it pulled into a shallow turn over the river Thames, arrowing through London’s late-afternoon sky. A light wind hummed over the windows as the flyer’s blunt prow moved to take up a path that would follow the line of Westminster Bridge, calm and unhurried toward the hotel in Holland Park where Deanna Troi had taken rooms for the evening.

  The crisp, clear air meant that the view of the Houses of Parliament and the tower of Big Ben was sharp and perfect, and Deanna instinctively reached out to tap her daughter on the shoulder, intending to bring her attention to the city’s ageless icons. But she halted, her hand resting over Tasha’s shoulder; the four-year-old was fast asleep, her head resting against the opposite window, one hand clutching the plush toy raven she had picked up at the Tower of London.

  Troi smiled, delighted by the simple normality of the moment—and then she stifled a yawn herself. It had been a long day, she reflected. Out to East Anglia in the morning to see where members of the Troi family had once lived, then crisscrossing the city to visit the sights, willfully going astray in backstreets filled with curious little shops and buildings that were half a millennium old or more. It had been easy to lose herself in Tasha’s enthusiasm for the new for a few hours, just to get away from the cheerless mood that seemed to have cast itself across everything else.

  A soft, melodic chime sounded from a pocket in her tunic, and Troi grabbed for the comm padd there, silencing it before it could wake her daughter. The device’s screen showed a Starfleet crest and a numeric code indicating a signal relay from off-world. A frown threatened to gather, but she pushed it aside. “Troi here,” she said.

  The display switched to an image of Christine Vale, in uniform and seated before what appeared to be a window looking out onto warp space. “Deanna. I’m glad I got you. Can you talk?”

  “Of course. Is something wrong?”

  Vale leaned in toward the image pickup. “Wait a second.” She did something at a panel by her hand, and the image quality lessened, the sound taking on a tinny resonance; Vale had activated an encryption subroutine at her end of the transmission. “Okay. Where are you now?”

  “A few hundred feet up over Hyde Park.” She shot a glance at the air-cab’s pilot behind a glass partition, who seemed unaware of the conversation going on behind him. “I’m in London with Tasha. We’re . . . taking a day or two.”

  “Make the most of it,” Vale told her. “Shore leave never lasts as long as it should.”

  “You’re not on the Titan,” said Troi, a note of concern entering her voice. “Is there a
problem?”

  Vale very deliberately did not address her first statement. “I’ve got some things I need to ask you. I’m going to need your help.” The commander’s body language spoke volumes; Troi knew that intense, focused expression of old. She’d seen it more than once, when Titan had been in harm’s way out in the depths of unexplored space.

  “Whatever I can do,” she replied.

  “First. Sarina Douglas. Do you know that name?”

  She shook her head. “Should I?”

  “Probably not. I’m just checking. That’s not the reason I contacted you. You know about what happened to Bashir, the CMO from Deep Space Nine?”

  Troi nodded. “Will explained it to me. He said he was looking into it. . . . I guess that means you are, too?”

  Vale returned the nod. “Strictly off book, you understand? Right now, the less attention this draws, the better. I spoke with Ezri Dax, the former captain of the Aventine, and I suspect that if I can find Bashir, he’s going to need all the help he can get from us.”

  Troi knew that Julian Bashir’s firsthand experience of what had happened on Andor was not something that could remain buried; but in the current political climate, such knowledge could have unpredictable effects if revealed to the galaxy at large. She had no doubt there were many who would not wish to see Bashir’s release secured any time soon, even as Vale sought to do just that. “That won’t be easy.”

  “And then some,” said Vale, grim-faced. “But we have to try. And that’s why we’re talking. Dax said something to me about what happened on Andor. I think it could be the key to getting the errant doctor out of whatever deep, dark hole he’s been dropped down. It’s going to require some things I don’t have an awful lot of, but that you’ve got in spades.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Tact. Subtlety. Diplomacy.”

  Despite herself, Troi smiled. “Chris, don’t sell yourself short. You can do subtle.”

  “Not like you. And this is going to be a big ask, Counselor. It’s also going to require some in-depth knowledge of Andorian legal process and a willingness to bend the rules.”

  The air-cab rumbled through a gust of wind as it circled and began a descent toward the hotel’s rooftop landing pad. Deanna leaned forward and rapped on the glass partition, attracting the pilot’s attention. “Not just yet,” she told him, raising her voice so it would carry. “Take us around the park a couple more times.”

  He gave a nod and turned the flight yoke, pivoting the aircraft away. Tasha mumbled in her sleep as the motion shifted her against the window, but she didn’t wake.

  Troi sat back in her seat and brought the comm padd close to her face, the smile still playing around her lips. “So where do I start?”

  * * *

  Iota Nadir’s binary stars burned cold and distant in the darkness, casting the rust-hued planet below with desultory radiance. IN-748 was a junkyard world, nestled in a ring of space wreckage and accreted debris, the legacy of a gravitational anomaly that had once made the world the endpoint for unlucky craft caught in its grasp. The anomaly had faded centuries ago, but the planet’s sad birthright as a grave for dead ships lived on. It was one vast scrapheap, the near-lifeless desert dotted with the hulks of broken vessels, the aged metal skeletons buried in the razor-sharp sands.

  The Snipe approached slowly and carefully, crawling at low impulse velocity through the layers of gravimetric shear that still laced the surrounding space. On the bridge, Lieutenant Ixxen and the Bynar One-One kept a watch over the planetoid, while on the lower decks the rest of the Active Four team had assembled in the makeshift operations room.

  Despite his misgivings about the greater mission at hand, Nog was still pleased to see that his laborious engineering detective work had been instrumental in tracking the targets to their bolt hole. There was a part of him that had feared Lieutenant Colonel Kincade might be right, that if he had made one small miscalculation in his scans, one assumption too many, the whole endeavor would be a waste of time. A wild-goose chase, he thought, recalling a human aphorism Jake Sisko sometimes used. Nog had never actually encountered a goose, but Jake had made them sound formidable and cantankerous.

  He dismissed the train of thought as Kincade used her hands to widen a holographic pane hanging over what had been the mess-hall table. “I won’t lie, I had my doubts about this, but it looks like we’ve hit pay dirt.” She threw Nog the sketch of a salute. “Good job putting this together for us, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Khob didn’t seem as eager to thank him, however. “We go from an ice cube to a trash heap, and you thank the Ferengi? What guarantee do we have that this is where the targets went to ground?”

  Tuvok pointed at a ray trace on one of the other displays. “Sensors have located the remains of an ion trail terminating here. A spacecraft made planetfall on IN-748 within the last four days.”

  “That proves nothing,” snorted Ashur. “They could be smugglers down there, void pirates, anything. . . .”

  Tom Riker was lounging up against a stanchion, and at the Zeon’s words he shot him a hard stare. “Suddenly you’re reluctant to get your hands dirty?”

  “I agree with the Ferengi,” said Sahde, peering at the image of the windswept surface. “This is a good location for a hiding place. Off the main space lanes, the surface cluttered with metallics that disrupt sensor scans from long range . . .”

  “And don’t forget heavy atmospheric distortion,” added Nog. “There’s enough energetic storms in the upper atmosphere to prevent any attempts to beam down.”

  Ashur grimaced. “So we have to land the Snipe, then? And risk crashing in a tempest? Unless you have another way to get us on the surface?” He fixed Kincade with a challenging look.

  “I was thinking I’d bundle you into a cargo pod and then just drop it,” she deadpanned.

  “Mock all you want,” Ashur shot back, “but we saw what happens when these people know someone is coming for them. I don’t want to end up cut apart like those Klingon fools before us.” He shook his head. “Tzenkethi ingenuity with autonomous weapons borders on the spiteful.”

  Nog and Tuvok exchanged a look but said nothing.

  Kincade went to the equipment racks and removed a hexagonal device on an armband. “We’ve got another way down. It’s not without hazards, but it gives us a fighting chance to approach the targets without them knowing about it.” She tossed the device to Zero-Zero, who examined it closely.

  “Inverter,” declared the Bynar. “Common designation: folded-space transport module.”

  Nog took the unit and turned it over in his hands. “Exposure to folded-space domains is toxic to carbon-based life-forms,” he said.

  “In large amounts,” Kincade corrected. “But we’re only going to use it to get us there and back. You said it yourself: Standard matter transporters won’t be able to cut through the ionization effects of IN-748’s atmosphere, but these will get us there.”

  “At the price of a high radiation dose,” added Tom. He glanced at Ashur. “You weren’t thinking about procreating one day, were you?”

  Kincade snatched the inverter from Nog’s hand. “Khob will make sure everyone has a full dose of hyronalin to counteract any ill effects.” She looked around the room, taking them all in. “Ixxen and the Bynars will stay here. The rest of you, get your gear and assemble in the main cargo bay. Orders remain the same. Find all targets. Isolate and secure them.”

  Tuvok watched the woman intently. “And if there are complications?”

  “If in doubt,” Kincade said firmly, “shoot to kill.”

  * * *

  The transition felt like being dipped in fire.

  The actual duration was less than two point six three seconds, but Tuvok’s nerves registered the pain and conspired to create the illusion of a burning eternity trapped in the nonexistence of the transport. White flame enveloped him, searing through the stealth suit he was wearing as if it were made of Tholian silk, but he swallowed the agony. H
e recalled his training, sent his conscious mind somewhere far away from the interval. The Vulcan made the pain a distant, ghostly thing as the interior of the Snipe was smothered by the glow of dislocation.

  Then he felt the pull of a different gravity on his limbs, and the scorching light faded, releasing him into a hissing storm of red dust particles.

  Tuvok staggered a step and shrugged off the last flashes of the folded-space transporter effect. The agony retreated as if it had never been there, and the memory of the moment melted away. He took a breath inside the mask clamped over his mouth and nose, hearing the faint click and hiss of the filter module. Stale, oxide-heavy air entered his mouth, boosted by the atmosphere processor pack on his belt; but even that wasn’t enough to sift out the dead-metal taste of the junkyard planet.

  Other white flashes—slow fades of light and energy—came into being around him as one by one the rest of the ground team arrived on IN-748’s surface. Some of them cursed, others flinched as if they had been struck. The inverter devices had performed exactly as Kincade promised, but she had deliberately understated the level of discomfort their functions inflicted on the user.

  The colonel herself shot Tuvok a look that he could not read; only her eyes were visible behind the holographic monocle she wore, the rest of her face hidden behind a similar breather mask and the hood of her combat gear.

  He looked away, taking in the area around them. Low, fast-moving clouds of dirty brown dust scudded past overhead, borne in wailing winds, the haze reducing visibility to less than a few hundred meters. All around there were rusting piles of ancient wreckage, much of it so corroded and broken that it was nearly impossible to guess what function each piece might have served when new. The discarded trash and broken spoils of a dozen different civilizations littered the planetoid’s surface, much of it half-buried in the gritty sands beneath their boots. Scavenged hulls from old starships lay in severed chunks along the edge of what might once have been a shallow arroyo. Engine pylons, their exterior coatings wind-smoothed back to bare metal, and hull support frames covered in dust curved up toward the dead sky. The shape of them recalled the rib cage of some great dead animal, its flesh long since decayed away. In other places, jagged-edged chunks of fuselage had been ripped open, revealing the layers of decks inside now open to the elements. High up in the clouds, a distant storm cell released a flash of actinic lightning that briefly illuminated the serrated landscape. Tuvok glimpsed movement farther down the line of the gorge, but it was too brief for him to be certain of its origin.