Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

“Orders held are directed to a covert tactical force in commission under the codename ‘Active Four.’ By the direct command of the Federation Council and authorized by Special Executive Order of President Pro Tem Ishan Anjar, Active Four was sanctioned to track, isolate, and capture the terrorist cell responsible for the assassination of the late president Nanietta Bacco, by any means necessary, up to and including extralegal actions.”

  For what seemed like long minutes, no one spoke, each of them taking on board the full meaning behind the hologram’s words. Finally, it was Keru who broke the silence. “Who . . . provided oversight for this?”

  “No oversight is in place,” the program replied. “In direct contravention to both Federation civil law and the Starfleet Code of Military Justice.”

  “Wait,” said Ssura, his paws coming up before him. “There is confusion. The statement is that this secret unit was tracking the late president’s killers. Was. Past tense.”

  Riker felt a chill run through him. “You’re saying that they captured the . . . targets?” He frowned; he had almost said “the Cardassians.”

  “Affirmative. The core directive of these new orders is to re-direct Active Four to a new destination. Previous directive to return at high warp to Sol III, Sector 001 is countermanded. New destination is Nydak II, Archanis Sector, Klingon Empire.”

  “Someone orders the secret capture of the most-wanted criminals in the Alpha Quadrant and then sends them into the depths of Klingon space?” Palzar was shocked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Actually,” ventured Keru, “I can think of a way it would.” He glanced at Riker. “Sir, if this is what it appears to be, then we have something explosive on our hands.”

  “And then some,” said Riker gravely.

  “But one co-opted holoprogram isn’t enough. If there are unsanctioned military operations going on out there, we need proof positive.”

  The admiral found himself nodding. “Yes, we do.”

  He raised his hand to tap his combadge—and then hesitated. He hadn’t seen his wife and daughter in days. Could he do what he was about to without them at his side? Or would they be safer where they were? Once he committed to this course of action, there really would be no turning back.

  At length, he pushed the concern away. Deanna Troi was the most capable woman he had ever known—that was one of the many reasons why he had married her. She’ll know what to do.

  “Riker to main engineering,” he said, and a moment later Xin Ra-Havreii’s acerbic tones answered him.

  “Admiral. Still on board, sir? Perhaps you’ve decided at last to inform your chief engineer as to exactly what you’ve been using all my staff for.”

  He shut down the Efrosian’s prickly reply with a hard retort. “Is Titan ready to return to active duty?”

  “Of course she is. Warp drives, impulse engines, all in full working order. All systems go.”

  “Then have the bridge signal McKinley Station for departure. I want this ship undocked and free to navigate immediately, is that clear?” Riker was aware of his officers watching him intently. “If they ask you why, you tell them that the admiral has decided to take his flagship out for a spin, skeleton crew or not.”

  It was to Ra-Havreii’s credit that he didn’t question the order for a moment; he knew that Riker meant business. “Understood, sir.” There was a moment’s pause. “Might I ask where it is we’re actually going?”

  “The Klingon border,” he replied. “Maximum warp.”

  “I guess that answers that question,” muttered Melora.

  “Admiral . . .” Lieutenant Ssura touched Riker lightly on his arm, holding up the padd. “I think you should see this. It is the recruit roster for the Active Four unit.”

  He looked down at the padd and his heart seemed to tighten in his chest. Two entries leapt out at him from the list.

  Thomas Riker/Human/Male/Operations Specialist

  Tuvok/Vulcan/Male/Tactical Specialist

  “What does that mean, sir?” asked the Caitian.

  “It means that things just got more complicated,” he replied.

  Eleven

  “And here we are,” said Alex Thompson, peering over the Lionheart’s helm console at the vista unfolding before them. “Wherever that is.”

  The star system didn’t have a formal name, just a collection of code numbers in some astronomical catalogue. A turbulent sun burning cold in the void was orbited by a pair of worlds, one a baked sphere bombarded by solar heat, the other a dead orb of lifeless rock; between them were the remains of what had once been a third world, now reduced to a broad, diffused asteroid belt by some cosmic catastrophe millions of years earlier. It was cheerless and barren here. As prisons go, thought Vale, this makes Jaros II look like Risa.

  She flicked a glance at the padd containing the coordinates given to her by Sarina Douglas. “Take us in, full impulse.”

  Thompson did as he was told, frowning. At her side, Vale saw her first officer lean forward in her seat. “A bleak and gods-forsaken place,” said Atia. “None would come here willingly. Let us hope we have reason enough.”

  “I’m reading heavy ambient radiation,” said Maslan at the science station. “High gamma ranges from the sun. It’s a flare star, Captain. We’re swimming in the spill from it.”

  “Mister Darrah, is it enough to cause us problems?”

  The Bajoran officer shook his head. “Deflectors have it in check. But we won’t be able to use transporters here.”

  Kader turned from her engineering panel. “Confirming that,” she said. “Anything beamed on or off the ship would . . .” She paused, trying to find the right word. “Suffer.”

  “Approaching coordinates,” Thompson announced. “Large asteroidal mass ahead.” On the main viewscreen a rough, bone-white ellipse dotted with craters and striations turned in a lazy orbit.

  Vale looked toward Maslan. “Anything on sensors?”

  His expression darkened. “There’s something not right here. Could be a dispersal field, perhaps. Or a—”

  He was cut off by a chime from another console. Darrah spoke up. “Captain, we’re being hailed.”

  “Here we go,” said Vale, almost to herself. “On speakers, Hayn.”

  There was a crackle of static, and then a precise, formal voice spoke. “Turn back, Lionheart. This is a secured Starfleet facility. You do not have clearance to be here. Do not force us to compel you.”

  “Identify yourself,” said Vale. “If you’re Starfleet, you have to do that. If you don’t, then I’ll assume otherwise and act accordingly.”

  “That sounded like a threat.”

  She shrugged. “Call it what you will. Now give me your name.”

  For a moment, Vale almost thought she had them; then the reply killed that hope. “I am sorry, Lionheart, but you leave us no choice.”

  As the voice fell silent, a strident alarm sounded from Kader’s panel, and she gasped. “Captain . . . something’s happening. . . .”

  Outside, the view of the asteroid shifted suddenly as the starship’s bow veered away. Thompson cursed softly. “The helm is not responding! We’re picking up speed, coming about.” He shot a look over his shoulder. “I have no control of the ship!”

  “Prefix code,” snarled Atia. “Pushed into Lionheart like hidden blade. Concealed under the communication . . .”

  Vale’s thoughts raced. To access and make use of a Starfleet vessel’s prefix command codes was no simple matter, and she chastised herself for not thinking to review them before setting out. Whomever had decided to turn them away from the asteroid not only had connections within the fleet but the will to use them. As she watched, open space loomed before them; with someone else’s hand on the tiller, there was nothing to prevent the Lionheart from being shot back out into the void on a reciprocal course.

  Darrah was frantically attempting to bypass the code lockout without success. “We have to stop this,” he growled. “We don’t know who is doing it; there’s nothi
ng to prevent them from purging the atmosphere or blowing the warp core . . .”

  Vale hesitated. The Bajoran was right, but if the destruction of the Lionheart was what they wanted, why go through the ruse of directing them away? Every second the prefix code was being used, there was a chance her crew could co-opt it. “No,” said Vale. “They don’t want us dead—they only want us gone.”

  In a single quick motion, Vale was out of her command chair and scrambling up to Basoos Kader’s station. “Lieutenant, do you still have engine control?”

  The woman looked up at her. “Some systems, aye.”

  “Good. Override the safeties and run a charged plasma surge through the warp nacelles.”

  Kader’s dark eyes widened in alarm. “Captain, that’ll blow out the intercoolers and knock the mains offline.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No mains means no deflectors,” said the engineer. “We’ll take the full force of the radiation. We’ll start cooking. . . .”

  “No we won’t,” Vale insisted. “They won’t let us.” She jerked a thumb in the direction of the asteroid.

  “You have certainty of that?” called Atia. “To gamble life on chance of adversary’s goodwill?”

  “They’re not our enemies, Commander, they’re Starfleet officers like us,” she replied. “We just have to force their hand. Get everyone to the core decks, now.” Vale fixed Kader with a hard look. “Do it, Lieutenant.”

  “Captain, this is a bad call!” Maslan shouted across the bridge.

  “It’s mine to make,” she replied, and Vale hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.

  Kader’s tawny face paled, and she tapped in the command. Moments later, the Lionheart reacted as if it had been struck astern by a massive hammer blow, and Vale felt the internal gravity quiver as the ship’s power train went dark. Crimson emergency lighting snapped on as several consoles flickered out.

  The main screen was still operable, and she turned to see the view outside shift sharply as Lionheart’s angle shifted abruptly, the vessel tumbling as impulse power faded.

  “It worked,” Kader gasped. “We’re dead in space.”

  “That was a mistake—” began Maslan, advancing across the dimly lit bridge.

  Atia, the sharp planes of her face thrown into stark relief by the hard red glow, halted him with a raised hand. “Quiet.”

  “Attention, Lionheart!” The voice returned, and the careful tone from before was gone. “Do you read? What is your status?” There was real concern there now.

  “Adrift,” she snapped back. “You must have broken something trying to take control of my ship!”

  “Can you make repairs?”

  Kader was nodding, but Vale ignored her. “No,” she lied. “We’ll need help. Will you assist? Lives are at stake here. Do you hear me?”

  Moment of truth, she thought. Atia is right: I’m risking this ship on the hope that whomever is out there won’t just let us burn. She took a long breath. Nice work, Christine. You may have just doomed eighty people on a gut feeling.

  All at once, Lionheart’s tumbling motion slowed to nothing. “We’re in a tractor beam,” said Darrah. “It’s coming from the asteroid.”

  “New reading from the surface,” Maslan reported. “They must have been using a holographic cloak. There are structures . . . a docking gantry. We’re being drawn toward it.”

  “Stand to, Lionheart,” said the comm voice. “We’re bringing you in—our dispersal field will protect your ship. But I warn you; try anything like that again and you’ll regret it.” The signal cut, and Vale let out the breath she had been holding in.

  The bridge crew said nothing, each of them watching her and wondering what her intentions were. She drew herself up. “We need to make this last as long as possible,” Vale told them. “Draw out the repairs as much as you can.”

  “Why?” demanded Maslan. “You just broke this ship, Commander Vale. Deliberately. You dragged us out to the middle of nowhere, way off our actual heading, to someplace we clearly are not supposed to be! I think you owe us an explanation!”

  “She is captain,” Atia replied with force. But then the Magna Romanii woman looked up at Vale and her expression changed. “Are you not?”

  More than anything, in that instant she wanted to spill it all out to them. To explain every doubt and fear that Admiral Riker had expressed to her, to make them understand what was at stake. But this wasn’t the time. For now, she didn’t need their understanding—she only needed their obedience.

  “I’m going in there,” said Vale, pointing toward the complex of domes now revealed on the surface of the asteroid. “Commander Atia, you have the ship.”

  * * *

  Through the circular porthole in the airlock door, she could see the gantry coming ever closer. A fat umbilicus emerged from one section and reached out toward the hatch. Vale stepped back and waited.

  “Is she insane?” She turned toward the sound of the voice and found that Atia had followed her down to the docking level. Farther away, just out of earshot, two of Lionheart’s security officers stood waiting and watching.

  “Are you asking me?”

  “The question is asked of me,” retorted the first officer. “With no lack of healers and doctors to hand, there would be ease in finding one to speak to the matter.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t look good for me to be declared unfit for command on my first time in the center seat, would it?” She kept her tone light, but Atia didn’t share it.

  “To Jaros II, that the crew were willing to accept, but now this? You speak with known criminals, talk to me of secret messages that leave no trace. Now this? Our ship damaged, our status unclear? What must I think?”

  “There’s a good reason for everything I am doing, Commander. You have to trust me on that.”

  The other woman held her silence for a moment. “That becomes more difficult with each passing hour. Rank demands obedience, and it is given.” Her eyes flashed. “But to a point. Only to a point.”

  Vale folded her arms. “You’ll let me know when you reach it, right?”

  Atia gave a slow nod. “Distance falls short, Captain. But I will see you to discernment.”

  With a heavy thud, the umbilicus locked onto the Lionheart’s hull, and the airlock doors retracted into the walls. Vale looked out into a space formed from laser-cut rock and drab gray thermoconcrete. A thin, sandy-haired man in the uniform of a Starfleet commander stood on the other side of the doors, a hawkish cast to his face. A knot of security troopers, each armed with a phaser rifle, stood around him. They held their weapons down, but there was nothing accommodating about it.

  Vale didn’t wait to be asked. She strode through the hatch, leaving Atia behind, and set foot inside the asteroid base, her boots ringing on the metal deck. The air and light inside the facility had a peculiar, dense quality that immediately felt oppressive.

  The guards moved to raise their weapons, but the officer shook his head. “Commander Christine Vale,” he said, and she knew it was the same voice she had heard over the comm. “I was warned that you might show up here.” He had a tense manner. Vale guessed he didn’t want to be in this situation any more than she did.

  I can work with that, she thought. “Does my reputation precede me?”

  “It’s not meant as a compliment.” He frowned. “I’m Commander Chessman. I’m in charge here.”

  “And where exactly is here?”

  “The designation of this facility is classified.” Chessman turned and gestured to a group of officers in engineering tunics, each of them carrying equipment cases and tricorders. “Here’s how this is going to work. My team is going to board your ship and help your crew get it operational again. When that’s done, you’re going to turn around and leave here. All mention of this facility will be erased from your logs, and your crew will not discuss it or anything seen here, under penalty of court martial. Is that clear?”

  “You seem to have it all worked out,” Vale
replied. “It might have been easier just to fly us straight into the sun.” She threw out the harsh retort just to gauge Chessman’s response, and he reacted with a flash of shock and dismay.

  “If that’s a joke, then it’s in very poor taste,” he replied. “You’ve put me in a difficult situation, Commander Vale. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’ve compromised our security here, and that’s going to have serious repercussions.”

  “No doubt.”

  Chessman stood aside as the engineering team boarded, a handful of the security guards following, some remaining on the dock. “At no time will any member of the Lionheart’s complement be allowed to leave the vessel. Anyone who does will be placed under arrest.”

  Vale held up her hands and made a show of looking down at her feet. “Whoops. Does that mean you’re going to throw me in the brig now? Forgive me, Commander, but you don’t seem like the type to be a jailer.”

  “I didn’t take this assignment by choice,” he snapped. “Believe me, Commander Vale, guarding a rock in the dark is not how I intended to spend my career. But I have my duty, and I take it seriously.”

  “Clearly,” she pressed.

  The other officer’s reserve finally broke. “What the hell are you doing, Vale? I could have you and your entire bridge crew in deep lockdown just for knowing this place exists! I would be in my rights to send you back to the nearest starbase in irons, so don’t test my patience. How did you even get the coordinates for this system?”

  “Does that matter now?” She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “All you need to know is that I’m here under orders from Admiral Riker at Starfleet Command. And I want to see Julian Bashir.”

  “Who?” Chessman was good, she had to give him that. His denial was almost believable.

  “How about this,” she continued, “how about we both stop playing games and talk to each another like two officers?”

  He was silent for a moment. “We were told you might come here,” he said, at length. “A priority holocomm message from Earth, no less. They said you are acting outside of orders. That your judgment may be unsound.”