Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

  “That’s something of an understatement,” offered Troi. “I would have said furious.”

  “You may be right,” Vale allowed. “Let’s not forget, Bashir is technically ch’Nuillen’s nephew now, as Andorian law sees it. Not to mention a hero to that entire planet. So naturally, when the envoy asked me if the Imperial Guard could interview the suspect in Bashir’s attempted murder, I didn’t refuse.” She mirrored Maslan’s earlier smile. “I didn’t want to get on his bad side.”

  The science officer sniffed. “You can’t turn me over to the Andorians. They’re not part of the Federation. They have no legal claim on me.”

  “That’s probably true. But I’m going to do it anyway. And I’m sure, sooner or later, I’ll get in trouble for that. But not as much trouble as you.” She glanced at Troi. “They don’t still have the death penalty on Andor, do they?”

  “Federation member-worlds are legally bound not to endorse capital punishment,” said Troi. “But then, Andor hasn’t officially rejoined the UFP yet. So who knows what could happen?”

  Maslan rose to his feet and glared at the two women. “Don’t try to play me. I’m not falling for it.”

  Vale met his gaze. “Whoever briefed you clearly didn’t do a very good job, Seth, because if they had, you’d know an important fact about me. I don’t play games.”

  “You’re just as stupid as he is.” Maslan’s voice turned cold with contempt. “Bashir thought he was a law unto himself, and you think the same. But this isn’t like the old days, when captains were kings who could do what they wanted and damn the consequences! Your friend the doctor is a traitor, and you’re a reckless fool who doesn’t deserve command of this ship, or any other!”

  From the corner of her eye, Vale saw Troi give an imperceptible nod. Together they had pushed him far enough, and now all Maslan needed was the room to incriminate himself. “And yet, here I am, and there you are,” she said.

  “You people don’t understand. Don’t you get it? Haven’t you asked why it is we keep getting kicked to pieces by every aggressor species in the galaxy? I lost family in the Dominion War, I signed up to make sure that didn’t happen again. But it did; the same mistakes, the same weakness, and the Borg came in and almost wiped us out. Now the Typhon Pact are going to do the same, and still no one raises a hand to put them down. All because we’re the Federation. The good guys. The ones who never, ever start a fight.”

  Vale hesitated. As much as she hated to admit it, there was something in Maslan’s words that rang true to her; but that didn’t make him right, and she told him so. “We don’t make war. That’s not what we are.”

  “You’re living in the past, Vale!” he snapped. “And people like you are why we keep taking hits, time and time again. What if the next attack is the one that finishes us? What will your ideals be worth then?” He shook his head. “We need strength and order. There have to be consequences.” Maslan took a breath and stopped dead, glancing at Troi as he caught up to himself. “Yeah. Like I said before, I’m not talking to you anymore. Do your worst.”

  Vale watched him return to the pallet and lie down once again, and after a moment she strolled away.

  When the security doors had shut behind them, Troi gave her a look. “You’re not really going to give him to the Andorians, are you?”

  “Of course not; that would be illegal,” she replied. “And I’m pretty sure I’m already going to be up to my eyes with multiple charges as it is when this is all over. Why add more to the pile?” Vale shook her head. “No, I’ll just let Maslan stew. I think we all know who was calling the shots for him. I had Basoos pull the communications logs for me. It seems Mister Maslan got an unusually dense data packet sent to him right after we left Jaros II. A holomatrix messenger program.”

  “Which he has since erased from the system?”

  “Naturally. It explains a lot about his record, something I couldn’t put my finger on. The reason he’d been bounced from one ship to another. I don’t think it’s just because he’s something of a jerk.”

  “He was spying for . . . someone?”

  Vale shrugged. “Or maybe recruiting. I can’t be sure.” She walked on, and Troi fell in step. “Will was right, Deanna. We’re pulling at loose threads here, and I think it may make something big fall apart.”

  * * *

  Kincade’s manner had shifted so decidedly that Tuvok wondered if she were a true sociopath in the full sense of the word. Had the behavior patterns she showed to him and the others on board the Snipe been nothing more than a learned camouflage, a cloak that covered her real self? He studied the woman’s cold, dead eyes, searching for anything that could be a spark of emotion. He did not find it.

  She walked toward him. “I had hoped we could talk,” said Kincade, this newly revealed version of the soldier. “I had questions about your kind. Vulcans and the no-emotions thing.”

  “A common misconception,” Tuvok corrected. “Vulcans possess emotions, but we choose to suppress them in order to attain a more logical state of being.”

  “So you don’t actually know what it is like to feel nothing? Not really?”

  He shook his head. “Some of my species seek that state. I do not. To deny or expunge emotion is to deny part of the self. I have learned that through countless years of—”

  She waved him to silence. “I didn’t ask for a lesson. But let me give you one instead. Feeling nothing? It’s very liberating.”

  “I believe you are psychologically impaired,” he said flatly.

  “That’s been said,” Kincade replied, handing her sniper rifle to the Elloran. “Time for the next lesson. For the Klingons, this time.” She drew a curved blade from a hidden holster in her belt. “They believe I’m a poor warrior because I’m only able to kill from a distance. I’m going to show them they’re wrong.”

  “Kincade, don’t do this!” Thomas Riker stepped forward, taking care not to raise his weapon. “You kill a Starfleet officer and there’s no going back from that.”

  “You are right,” she said, pausing to consider his words. “So that gives you a choice, then.” Kincade nodded at Tuvok and Nog. “Shoot these two, and I’ll consider bringing you back into the fold.”

  He grimaced. “I won’t do that.”

  “You don’t owe Starfleet anything!” called Sahde. “They abandoned you, remember? Took away your life, made you into a deserter!”

  The human shook his head and threw his stolen gun on the ground. “It was never about the uniform. It’s about what is right.” He looked up at Kincade. “Something that means nothing to you and the people holding your chain.”

  “Who do you really work for?” asked Tuvok.

  “Not Starfleet or anything like it,” she admitted, “not for some time. You could say we didn’t share compatible goals.” Kincade jutted her chin toward the bodies of the dead Cardassians. “You know we were never going to take them back for trial, right? Too problematic.”

  “I assumed so,” Tuvok noted.

  She nodded in agreement. “So. Now I’ve found someone who can better utilize my skills, and it’s working out well for me.” Kincade held up the blade. “Speaking of which . . .”

  At the back of the group, one of the Klingon mercenaries reacted to a sharp tone from the communicator on his arm, and he muttered into it. The warrior called out urgently to Kincade. “There is a signal—”

  “Not now,” she barked, never taking her eyes off Tuvok. “Do your kind really bleed green?”

  “Yes.”

  And then, for an instant, Tuvok glimpsed the smallest fragment of an actual emotional response in Kincade’s icy manner: a chilling need to harm him. “Show me,” she said.

  He heard the sound then, and Nog turned as his ears caught it too. From out of nowhere, a heavy, thunderous roar rolled from the ragged clouds above, and an angular shape exploded over the ridgeline, buffeting them with an echoing rumble of downwash and the shriek of phaser bolts.

  Tuvok was blown off his fee
t and he stumbled, landing badly as a black shadow passed over him, leaving chaos in its wake. He rolled, blinking through plumes of disturbed dust to see a wedge-shaped craft perform a hard climbing kick-turn over the roof of the domes and turn back toward them.

  It was a Starfleet Type-11 shuttlecraft; more specifically, it was the Marsalis, an auxiliary vessel from the complement aboard the Titan. Deep in the core of Tuvok’s own carefully controlled emotions, there was a momentary flare of relief before he shuttered it away and returned to the matter of staying alive.

  The Klingon mercenaries were in disarray, some of them firing wildly at the intruder ship, others shooting in Tuvok’s direction. He heard Thomas Riker call out and saw beam fire ripping past him. The air was filled with dust and fire smoke as the Marsalis made second and third swooping passes, blasting divots from the landing pad and blowing apart the frames of stalled cargo lifters.

  The Vulcan struggled as he tried to get to his feet, but he had landed badly and his ankle was twisted at an unnatural angle. The pain signals from his leg told him he had broken bones there, and with a thought he shut off the signals. “I feel . . . nothing. . . .” he said aloud, righting himself.

  “But that’s a lie.” Kincade emerged from the haze, bloody from cuts on her face where rock chips had scarred her like shrapnel. “I’m disappointed,” she told him, coming at his throat with the knife. The shuttle darkened the sky again as she lunged, and Tuvok parried, taking a glancing cut across his forearm to his cost. Dark emerald-hued blood stained Kincade’s blade, and she gave it a quizzical look. “Ah. It is true, then.”

  Then the shot came and she jerked, all animation suddenly fleeing from her body. The woman’s face did not change—there was no final moment of agony, no shock or fury. Kincade collapsed to her knees, and then went facedown against the ground.

  A few meters distant, Lieutenant Nog stood holding the TR-116 rifle at his hip, the spindly extent of the firearm almost as long as the Ferengi was tall. “Found it,” he managed. “Sahde must have dropped it.” Shouldering the ungainly weapon, he came forward and took Tuvok’s weight. “I have you, Commander.”

  “Your assistance is greatly appreciated, Mister Nog.”

  Both of them recoiled as the Marsalis completed another low-level attack run, marching streaks of phaser energy down the length of the open landing pad. The mercenaries had scattered, retreating back toward the safety of the mining complex, and the shuttle’s pilot dogged them all the way, strafing the ground with pulse-fire.

  Tuvok caught sight of movement and pointed. “There, Lieutenant.” Sahde was racing across the landing pad toward the Snipe’s drop-ramp.

  Tuvok’s weapon had been lost in the first explosion, and Nog fumbled with the unfamiliar rifle. The Elloran saw them and shouted something that was lost in the noise of the shuttlecraft’s engines. She pointed the grenade launcher in their direction, and it fired with a hollow, concussive thud. A glowing blue orb leapt from the mouth of the launcher, describing an arc toward the two Starfleet officers.

  “Get down!” Thomas Riker called out to them from behind a crumpled cargo container, and they were within arm’s reach of him when the photon grenade detonated somewhere behind them. The shockwave shoved both of them into the side of the module with pitiless force.

  His senses briefly deadened by the power of the explosion’s overpressure, Tuvok felt—rather than heard—the throaty snarl of the Snipe’s engines as the ersatz transport ship took off, the drop ramp closing as it rose away into the clouds.

  As the whistling note in his ears began to fade, a gust of thruster gas plucked at Tuvok, and he limped toward the Marsalis as the long, low shuttle settled to the ground before them.

  Hatches snapped open behind the cockpit and at the stern, disgorging Starfleet security officers equipped with phaser rifles and hazard team gear. A pale but familiar face found his, and he saw a smile of relief. “Commander Tuvok? Are you all right, sir?”

  “Crewman N’keytar,” he replied, recognizing the Vok’sha woman from Titan’s security detail. “Your timing was impeccable.”

  “I’d have liked it more if it wasn’t a nick-of-time rescue,” said Nog. “A five-minutes-earlier or even a day-or-so-before rescue would have been much better.”

  “Ferengi,” rumbled a voice with a deeper register, “are never grateful.” Lieutenant Commander Ranul Keru dropped down from the shuttle and offered Tuvok his hand. “Good to see you in one piece, sir.” The Trill officer turned to his team. “Fan out; hold the perimeter! We’re not stopping here!”

  “How did you know where to find us?” asked Nog. “We’re in the Klingon outlands, light-years from anywhere . . .”

  “We cashed in a favor with the chancellor,” Keru told him. “That, and some code-breaking.”

  “The ship . . . the freighter . . .” Thomas Riker came forward. “We have to get after it. . . .” There was a moment of shocked silence as every member of the squad from the Titan halted at what appeared to be the sight of a bloodied and beaten version of their captain. “I’m not him!” he snapped angrily. “Tuvok, tell them. We have to go, right now! With Kincade dead, we need what’s on the Snipe. It’s our only proof!”

  “Correct,” said the commander. He turned to Keru. “These two gentlemen are with me. We must withdraw to the Titan immediately.”

  “Aye, sir.” To his credit, Keru didn’t query the order even though Tuvok sensed he was brimming with questions. “Everyone on board! We’re pulling out!” he called, before shooting the Vulcan a sideways look. “You can explain on the way.”

  * * *

  If he was pushed, William Riker might have described the situation on the bridge as fluid or dynamic or a damned mess.

  It seemed like he had been suspended here in this same moment ever since they left the Sol system at maximum warp, barely even pausing as they raced over the borderline of the Klingon Empire where the Titan gained two new wingmen in the form of ships from Martok’s elite brigade. Time had become a blur, shifts merging into nothing but a seemingly endless series of duty watches, one after the other. Without his wife and daughter on board, he had taken to eating in his ready room and catching sleep where he could on the couch in there. The headlong flight of the Titan had been broken only by regular complaints from Xin Ra-Havreii that running the vessel fast and hot would damage his precious engines; those, and the increasingly strident subspace messages from Starfleet Command calling them home.

  The latter he had turned over to Lieutenant Ssura to deal with, and the Caitian was proving adept at running interference for his admiral. Riker guessed that there were ships out there looking to rein Titan back in, but the Luna-class vessel was one of the fastest in the fleet; the only cruisers that had a chance of catching them were the Vesta-class ships with their slipstream drives, and he had won the gamble that they wouldn’t be pulled off their duties for the sake of one errant admiral.

  But all those concerns had been burned away in a single moment. Riker wasn’t sure what he had expected to find in the Nydak system, but it wasn’t open battle.

  How wrong I was, he thought.

  Approaching Nydak II, a pair of K-22s had decloaked, but the ships sent by Martok didn’t even allow them the opportunity for the normal declaration of bluster and threats. The void lit up with disruptor barrages; first one Bird of Prey and then the other fell to the guns of their fellow Klingons.

  Riker’s demand for an explanation was barely acknowledged. There will be no traces of this dishonor; those were the Klingon captain’s words. As the two ships systematically obliterated all communications relays in orbit, Riker gave Keru the order to take the Marsalis and scour the complex below for any traces of Active Four.

  Now a ship was coming back up from the surface, but it wasn’t the Titan’s shuttle. “It’s a modified Type-8 freighter,” reported Melora from her console. “Transponder identifies it as the Snipe, registered out of the Triangle.”

  “That’s a flag of convenience if ever th
ere was one,” said Lieutenant Rager, at ops. “What is it doing here?”

  Riker sank back in the command chair, and something about the action settled him. Ever since Akaar had pinned that rank sigil to Will’s collar, he couldn’t escape the fear that the center seat was going to be put beyond his reach. But being here, now, felt right again. All the frustrations of the past days could be put aside, because on the bridge of his ship, he could still do something to influence the moment.

  “Let’s find out.” He nodded toward Ensign Dakal at one of the secondary consoles. “Zurin, throw a deep scan over that craft. Tell me what you see.”

  “Aye, sir, working . . .” The young Cardassian leaned forward over his panel, his deep-set eyes narrowing. “Getting something. Admiral, there are conflicting readings. Very unusual power curves here. I detect higher-than-normal engine output, what may be military-grade weapons and defense systems . . .”

  “Life signs?”

  “Several, but difficult to isolate. Humanoid and . . .” He broke off as a new reading scrolled across his display. “Admiral, someone aboard that craft appears to be tagged with a Starfleet personal transponder.”

  “One of ours?” Aili Lavena, Titan’s Pacifican pilot-navigator, asked the question on all of their minds. “It might be Tuvok.”

  “No,” said Ssura, seated behind Riker at a standby panel. He had a paw at one side of his head, holding an earpiece there. “Incoming hail from shuttlecraft Marsalis. Lieutenant Commander Keru reports Commander Tuvok and two other individuals were safely recovered from the surface. He also relays a message from the commander. . . . Escape of Snipe must be prevented.”

  “Then who is over there?” Melora pointed at the viewscreen.

  “Only one way to be sure,” said Riker. He tapped the intercom panel in the arm of his chair. “Bridge to transporter room three. Mister Radowski, you’re needed.”