by David Stern
“I have a toast as well, Dmitri. If you don’t mind.” Captain Harrari stood now. She was small, dark-skinned, and slight and spoke with a very clipped, very precise accent. A British accent, she informed Spock when he asked during the meal. She, her siblings, her parents, and her grandparents were long-standing citizens of the British Isles.
“Not at all. Go ahead,” Vlasidovich said. “Please, Michaela.”
Harrari raised her glass. “To peace,” she said.
“To peace,” Vlasidovich replied instantly. “With those who want peace.”
Harrari smiled. “Whose toast is this, Dmitri? Mine or yours?”
Vlasidovich bowed. “Yours, of course. Forgive me.”
“Thank you. To peace, then.” Everyone drank, some with noticeably less enthusiasm than others.
Spock could not entirely determine the nature of Harrari’s relationship with Vlasidovich. Her views on the threat posed by the Klingon Empire and the wisdom or necessity of any potential war were diametrically opposed to his. And yet the two of them obviously greatly enjoyed each other’s company; from what Vlasidovich had hinted at earlier, they had been friends for a long time.
“If the Klingons wanted peace, they wouldn’t have appointed K’Zon to head their fleet.” That comment came from Captain Nolan, Vlasidovich’s former first officer, a lean, intense-looking man, who sat at the far end of the table, at Vlasidovich’s right hand.
“Precisely.” Vlasidovich nodded. “K’Zon is general at Malboundian. Commander of fleet at Dourami. A great warrior. War hero. That tells us a lot, yes?”
“It tells me the Klingons are running out of officers, if they have to drag a relic like K’Zon out of mothballs to take charge.” Harrari’s security officer—a Tellarite female named Greekang, who had been, for a Tellarite, at least, uncharacteristically silent during most of the meal—took a sip from her drink as laughter filled the room.
“It could be a negotiating tactic,” Harrari said after the laughter died down.
“A bluff.” Vlasidovich smiled. “Do you think Klingons this subtle, Mr. Spock?”
“Unlikely. But possible.”
“Klingons subtle.” Nolan snorted. “Tell that to the people at Starbase Eighteen. Oh, wait. I forgot. You can’t. They’re all dead.”
The room went silent a moment.
“You know …” Harrari sipped at her own drink—coffee—and then set her cup back down on the table. “Those sensor readings on that recording of yours, Mr. Spock, there’s something a little funny about them.”
“If by funny you mean the associated fluctuations . . .”
“I do.”
“I agree.”
“Is fluctuation in readings not to be expected?” Vlasidovich asked. “If we are dealing with cloaking device?”
“If indeed.” Harrari shook her head. “I’m not so certain about that.”
“You have other explanation for readings?”
“No. But I have other facts.”
“Go on.”
“Some chatter we’ve recently picked up from Kitulba.”
“The Klingon weapons facility?” Spock asked.
Harrari nodded. “One and the same. The prototype was being constructed there.”
“Black Snow,” Spock said.
“Black Snow.” Harrari nodded. “Exactly.”
“What does this chatter say?” Vlasidovich asked.
“It doesn’t say anything explicitly. But reading between the lines, it appears the device has been stolen.”
“The cloaking device stolen?” Vlasidovich frowned. “By whom?”
“The prototype is less than two meters tall,” Spock pointed out. “A thief could carry it away on a vessel as small as a shuttlecraft.”
“Kitulba’s at the base of the Phalanx,” Harrari added. “Which puts it within striking range of a lot of different races. The Airee, the Romulans, the T’landra . . .”
“Near enough to Federation territory that the Klingons most likely consider us a suspect as well,” Number One added.
“I don’t buy it,” Nolan said. “Who could sneak into a Klingon weapons facility and make off with that kind of technology? Not possible.”
Number One cleared her throat and spoke, for the first time all evening that Spock had noticed.
“Starfleet Intelligence,” she said. “They have operatives—”
“Starfleet Intelligence.” Chief Pitcairn snorted. “Now, there’s an oxymoron.” The chief took a sip from his drink. It was almost empty. Spock wondered how many the man had had.
“Reminds me of this joke I heard,” Pitcairn went on. “This guy applies for a job at Starfleet Headquarters. It’s him and these two other people. They take all three—”
Number One leaned forward. “Chief, perhaps now is not the best time to—”
“No, no. This is funny. They give them each a flimsy, a message in an envelope. Sealed, so you can’t read what’s in it. Then they tell them to take the message to the fourth floor, where they’ll get directions on what to do.”
Pitcairn drained his glass and continued. He was talking, Spock noticed, much more loudly than usual. “So these other two head up in a turbolift. The first guy, meanwhile, the second they disappear, he rips the envelope open. You know what the note says?”
Pitcairn looked around the table expectantly.
“Come on. Somebody? Anybody? What does the note say?”
“Congratulations, you’re just the kind of person we’re looking for. You got the job,” Nolan said.
“That’s it exactly!” Pitcairn beamed. “Congratulations, you got the job!” He laughed and slapped the table.
Nobody else even smiled.
“What?” Pitcairn said. “It’s a joke. Doesn’t anyone here like jokes?”
“Chief,” Vlasidovich began.
“Chief,” Number One said, at virtually the same instant. “Do you think you’ve maybe had a little too much?”
Pitcairn frowned. “A little too much what?”
Spock stood. “Commander Pitcairn, would you accompany to my quarters?”
“I’m fine,” the chief said, waving him off.
“Consider it a personal request,” Spock said. “I am feeling a bit under the weather.”
Pitcairn frowned.
“In fact, Chief,” Vlasidovich said. “Consider Mr. Spock’s request an order.”
In the turbolift, Pitcairn kept grumbling. “Not funny. Those guys wouldn’t know funny if …” The chief shook his head.
“Humor is a difficult concept,” Spock said.
“I guess. My dad used to say you meet a man without a sense of humor, turn around and run as fast as you can.” Pitcairn turned around, leaned his back against the wall. “Of course, Captain Pike had a terrible sense of humor.”
Not having anything relevant to add to that statement, Spock remained silent.
“It’s all messed up,” Pitcairn said, a sudden, very serious expression on his face. “Everything is all messed up.”
“You are talking about Captain Vlasidovich’s assumption of command, I assume?”
“Yes. No. I …” Pitcairn sighed and leaned his head back against the turbolift wall. “Never mind, Spock. Just never mind.”
They rode in silence for a few seconds. Spock could sense, however, that the chief’s mood had not altered. If anything, he sensed a growing frustration.
“Something is clearly bothering you, Chief. If you wish to discuss it, now or later, I am available.”
“Yeah, sure.” Pitcairn barked out a laugh. “Discuss it. Like that would do any good.”
Spock frowned. “Chief …”
“Look, Spock, I know it’s not your idea. Your fault. So don’t worry about it.”
“I do not know what you are referring to.”
“Hey,” Pitcairn said, turning to face him. “How long have we known each other, three months? We get along okay, right? You don’t have to lie …” The chief’s voice trailed off. “Wait a minute.�
� He looked Spock dead in the eye. “Is it possible you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Pitcairn yanked the control lever. The turbolift came to a sudden stop, so sudden that Spock almost lost his balance.
Pitcairn put a finger to his lips and then pulled something out of his pocket. A communicator. He pressed a button on the side of it, and a blue light lit up, which was when Spock realized the device had been modified. The standard Starfleet communicator did not have blue lights.
“There,” Pitcairn said. “Now we can talk.”
“I do not understand.”
“Jamming signal.” Pitcairn held up the communicator. “Broadwave. High frequency. Although I think I can hear it, too. Maybe I messed up the calibration. Or maybe I had too much vodka. Maybe both.”
“Chief …”
“It’ll read like a power shunt on the main board. A disruption of audio and visual circuits. We got about a minute.”
“To do what?”
“To talk about this.” He looked at Spock closely. “I figured you had to be in on it. Or that you’d at least spot it right off.”
“Chief, will you please tell me what you are talking about?”
“The bug.”
“What bug?”
“On the computer system. Well, not a bug, actually, if you want to get technical about it. More like a feedback circuit, so that everything that goes in—every query, every piece of data—gets sent somewhere else. Another terminal. I’m not sure exactly whose, but I can make a couple good guesses.”
Spock raised an eyebrow. A surveillance circuit? On the ship’s computer?
He was about to speak in absolutes again, to respond with the word impossible, because he would have, as the chief said, noted the placement of any such circuit on the system immediately, except …
He realized he had not been on the computer system for several hours, since meeting Number One in the shuttlebay. He had been with her, looking at flimsies. He would have had no opportunity to notice any kind of slowdown in the system, any glitches.
“This is disturbing,” Spock said.
“You’re telling me. Hell, it’s more than disturbing. It’s—”
The little blue light on the chief’s modified communicator began flashing orange.
“Ten seconds,” the chief said. “Surveillance on Enterprise . Captain Pike is rolling over in his grave right now, I can tell you that.”
Something suddenly occurred to Spock. “You’re concerned about the captain’s legacy, Chief. Captain Pike.”
“Yes.”
“Then there are some things I wish to discuss with you in private.”
“Such as …”
The communicator beeped. Pitcairn straightened and started the turbolift up again.
“Maybe I did have too much, after all, Mr. Spock,” he said, miming, once more, inebriation. “Maybe you can help me to my quarters.”
SEVENTEEN
Boyce worked through lunch; he worked through dinner as well. The doctor kept the tallith’s medical file active but also spent a great deal of time studying in a historical database he found after a bit of searching—probably the very database Lieutenant Hoto had referred to earlier. He read about some of those Klingon-Orion conflicts she had mentioned and about some of the relatively recent events in this sector, the ones that did indeed show—as she and the tallith had said—how influential and stabilizing a role Liyan had played in the Borderland over the last half-century.
Now, of course, Boyce knew how.
He yawned. Coffee. He could sure use a cup; he hadn’t realized how addicted he’d gotten to the stuff. He missed it. He could practically smell it.
“Dr. Boyce.”
He turned and saw Deleen standing behind him. In her hands, she held a steaming mug of brownish-black liquid.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked.
“Coffee.” He stared at the mug. He was dreaming, that was it. He had to be dreaming. “Where did you get this?”
She held the mug out, and he took it from her, shaking his head.
“The ship’s stores are extensive. It was simply a matter of asking the right people.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Boyce brought the mug to his lips, bracing himself for the worst. It wasn’t. Far from it.
“Something the matter?” Deleen asked.
“No,” he managed. “Not at all. It’s … good.”
Better than good, in fact; it was the real deal. Not synthesized, not reconstituted. He could tell right off. He hadn’t had a cup this good in years. He wondered if there was more.
“I heard you were still working; I thought you could use a stimulant.”
“You were right.” He smiled and raised the mug. “And this is my stimulant of choice.”
She looked over his shoulder and frowned. “Those are my mother’s personnel files.”
“Yes. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time looking them over.”
“And what have you learned?”
He looked her in the eye and had a feeling she knew exactly what he was about to say. “Gamina’s not just an immortality serum, is it?”
“No.”
“No. Of course not. It changed her. Outside and in.”
He reconfigured the display screen, brought up a chart he’d been looking at. A chart of the Orion circulatory system and associated organs, superimposed on top of a humanoid form.
“My Orion anatomy was a little rusty,” he said. “Which was why I needed this.” He pointed to the neck area. “These glands here at the clavicle. They’re unique to your race.”
“Yes.”
“Sex glands,” Boyce said. “During adolescence, they release a series of chemicals into the bloodstream. Different chemicals for the two sexes. Testosterone analogues in the males, pheromones in the females. The former accelerate growth, the latter sexual attraction. The glands stop functioning after a certain point—child-bearing years in females, late middle age in males. But with gamina …”
He cleared the chart and brought up Liyan’s file again, the image of her that had struck him so forcefully earlier.
“The glands don’t seem to shut off. Production of the chemicals apparently continues,” Boyce said. “On and on. Ad infinitum.”
He turned to Deleen. “This is what you were talking about before, isn’t it? The tallith’s quandary? Biology as destiny?”
She nodded. “It is.”
Boyce could only shake his head.
Government by seduction. The tallith had been ingesting modified versions of gamina for seventy-five years. That explained her ever-increasing influence within the Confederacy, the way she’d been able to draw the other clans to her side and keep them there.
It explained other things he’d been wondering about as well. Why the little cocktail he’d given the Magellan landing party hadn’t worked as advertised, perhaps even the speed of her reactions earlier, when he’d tried to attack her. Her speed and her strength.
It explained her desperation now as well.
“We are not proud of it, Dr. Boyce,” Deleen said.
“Then change.”
“Easier said than done. And impossible at the moment.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She studied him a moment, considering. Then a small smile crossed her face. “Come,” she said. “I will show you.”
Deleen led him downward into the bowels of the ship. It didn’t take Boyce long to realize where he was going now, either. The lights grew dimmer; the temperature rose slightly. They were nearing the ship’s engineering section, though their destination had nothing to do with warp drive.
They were going back, Boyce realized, to what on Enterprise he would have called the brig, the cells where he had been kept his first few days aboard Karkon’s Wing.
“What’s down here?” he asked.
“Not what,” Deleen said. “Who.”
A second later, she stopp
ed in front of one of those cells, one that looked like—and for all he knew, could have been—the one he had been imprisoned in.
Boyce peered inside it, through the haze of the lime-green energy curtain, and saw Gurgis. The Orion was sitting on his cot, hands in his lap, staring down at the floor.
“Singhino,” Deleen said.
He looked up. “Codruta. What do you want?”
“I came to see how you were doing.”
“Liar.” The man’s face was in shadow somehow. Boyce took a step closer and realized that he was wrong, that what he had taken for shadow was in fact a large bruise on one cheek. There were others, too, smaller ones on his face and hands. Some looked as if they were just beginning to heal. Others looked as if they weren’t healing at all, as if they were infected.
“You came to taunt me,” Gurgis said. “To remind me I live at your whim.”
“That’s not true,” Deleen said.
“Are you injured?” Boyce asked.
Gurgis looked at him. “You are the human. Boyce.”
“Yes. You didn’t answer my question. Are you—”
“You have chosen poorly, Boyce. The Codruta are destined to fall.”
“I haven’t chosen anything.” Boyce took a step forward, till he was right up against the energy curtain. He could feel its warmth, could hear the hum of the machinery that powered it. “What happened there?”
“The burns?” Gurgis put his hands on his thighs and stood. “Come inside and see.”
“That would not be a good idea,” Deleen said.
“Why not?” Boyce asked.
“We tried to treat him before. He was not cooperative. To say the least.”
“You going to hurt me if I come in there?” Boyce asked, looking right at Gurgis. “That strikes me as pretty counterproductive.”
The prisoner screamed and leaped right at him.
Boyce exclaimed in surprise and took a step backward.
Deleen cried out as well. She backpedaled, tripped, and fell to the ground.
Gurgis slammed into the energy curtain. Boyce heard the crackle of electricity, smelled ozone.
