Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night

by David R. George III

  Ro smiled. “That’s it?”

  “It’s not complicated.”

  “No, I guess it isn’t,” Ro agreed. Making a calculation, she walked over to the control panel set into the bulkhead beside the cell. She keyed in her security code, then lowered the force field, which deactivated with a flash and a buzz. “For whatever it’s worth to you, I’m sorry.” Blackmer’s explanations—about his presence in the reactor core, about his lack of trust in the crew and in the captain herself, about his transfer to DS9—all rang true to Ro, but they did not fully convince her of his trustworthiness. She recognized the risk in freeing him, but that risk threatened only Ro, not the station or its crew. The captain had left Cardok and Hava as sentries outside the holding area, with orders to take Blackmer back into custody if he exited alone.

  Instead of standing aside to allow the security chief to leave the cell, Ro walked past him and sat down inside. When he turned to gaze down at her, she said, “You need to tell me specifically what drove you down to the lower core tonight.”

  Blackmer appeared to give the matter some thought, then sat down beside Ro. “Three days ago,” he said, “Lieutenant Douglas reported to me that she’d overheard a heated exchange.”

  After embarking on a mission for Starfleet Intelligence with Doctor Bashir, Sarina Douglas had transferred to Deep Space 9 and joined the security staff. She and Bashir shared quarters in the habitat ring, and Ro knew that Quark had taken hundreds of wagers throughout the station on both the date they would announce their intention to marry, and the date of the wedding itself. Ro had already missed out on the former, but still hoped to recoup her losses by winning the latter.

  “Douglas was on duty at the airlock where the Vren-thai was docked,” Blackmer continued. “While she was there, she claimed that Ensign th’Shant arrived to say good-bye to Ensign zh’Vesk.” Of the thirty-nine Andorian Starfleet officers on DS9 at the time of their world’s secession from the Federation, seventeen had immediately resigned their commissions. In the intervening eight months, another eleven had followed suit, including two who departed the station three days earlier: Ensign zh’Vesk and an enlisted crew member, ch’Rellen. “Douglas claimed that in a whispered conversation, both th’Shant and zh’Vesk became agitated, and she heard one of them make reference to avenging themselves on the Federation.”

  “That sounds like angry hyperbole,” Ro said.

  “Maybe,” Blackmer said. “But Lieutenant Douglas considered the words menacing enough to report the incident to me. She interpreted it as a threat to Deep Space Nine, and she believed that it was Ensign th’Shant who made that threat.”

  An engineer on the station for more than two years, Rahendervakell th’Shant had reacted to Andor’s secession much the way many Andorians in Starfleet had: with a mixture of confusion, depression, and anger. Many became conflicted about whether to remain in the service or return to their homeworld. Not only had some stayed and some gone, but some had left and then come back, while others had at first stayed and then gone later.

  “Did you speak with th’Shant?” Ro asked.

  “I did,” Blackmer said. “He denied that either he or zh’Vesk ever said such a thing. Another security officer there at the time, Jacob Smith, also said that he didn’t hear anything resembling that conversation.”

  “Do you feel that either Douglas or th’Shant was lying to you?” Ro asked.

  “I don’t know,” Blackmer said. “It could be just a misunderstanding: misheard words or a misinterpretation. But it seemed too serious a situation to ignore, so I’ve been monitoring Douglas’s and th’Shant’s movements on the station. Yesterday, both of them ended up in the lower core, Douglas as part of a security exercise, and th’Shant on an engineering maintenance team.”

  “Which is why you ended up there tonight,” Ro deduced.

  “Yes,” Blackmer said. “Particularly with civilian ships from the Typhon Pact set to arrive here in a few days, I just felt that I had to.”

  “You’re concerned that Douglas or th’Shant sympathizes with the Typhon Pact and is looking to help them take action against the Federation?”

  “Or that they could pass vital information to the Pact,” Blackmer said. “Or that they could commit violence against citizens of the Pact in a way that implicates the Federation.” The security chief stood up and strode forward, out of the holding cell, before turning back to face Ro. “I know it was foolhardy for me to visit the lower core; anybody who would commit an act of sabotage on the station wouldn’t leave it visible for the naked eye. I didn’t even intend to stay there for long, but then I found myself searching the entire compartment, even up into the power-transfer conduits.”

  “You were doing your job,” Ro said gently. She waited, not rising, providing Blackmer the opportunity to quickly raise the force field and imprison her in the holding cell. While she found the security chief’s recounting of events believable, she didn’t assume that they were true. Blackmer could have visited the lower core because he feared that he or a confederate had left behind a tricorder or a tool or something else when they had sabotaged the station.

  “It’s obviously not a job for one person,” Blackmer said, making no move toward the control panel.

  “No,” Ro said, finally getting up. “But now we can launch a full-scale investigation.”

  “That might just drive any potential saboteurs to exercise more caution,” Blackmer said.

  “Yes, but it will also make their task more difficult to accomplish,” Ro said. “The crew will be alert to anything out of the ordinary, and it will give us more resources to determine if there even is a threat to the station from among the crew.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Blackmer said.

  Ro moved forward and out of the holding cell, and together she and Blackmer started toward the exit. “I’ll convene a meeting of the senior staff,” she said. “After that, we can talk to the security team. We’re already on high alert for the arrival of the Typhon Pact ships, so we’ll just have to tighten our procedures to include restrictions for our own crew.”

  As the captain and the security chief walked out of the holding area, Ro understood the seriousness of the situation. A threat might have been made against the station and lies might have been told. Worst of all, after her encounter with Blackmer, she came away suspecting not just one of her crew in plotting to sabotage Deep Space 9, but three.

  17

  Tenmei walked out of the infirmary and stopped in the middle of the Promenade. Somebody jostled past her, but she paid them no attention. She stared down at the deck, pressure mounting behind her eyes. She felt like crying—she wanted to cry, wanted a release—but she had wept so often since her father’s torpid body had been brought to Deep Space 9’s infirmary that she wondered if any tears remained.

  What am I doing? Tenmei asked herself as the people on the Promenade maneuvered around her. For so long, she’d sat by her father’s bedside, missing him and irrationally hoping that the terrible injuries his body had suffered would eventually heal. Reading aloud beside his dormant form, she pretended to connect with him, told herself that in some fashion he could hear her, but really she connected only with her memories of him. She recalled the merry, carefree times of her childhood, and then much later, at DS9, all the joys she’d shared with her father after their reconciliation. She remembered so vividly the world of the Prentara in the Gamma Quadrant, where she at last began to really know herself, and to grow, and to understand her father and all the reasons for their ruptured relationship. When her mother had died—

  No! Standing outside the infirmary, where her father’s fractured body still lay swaddled in a veneer of life, she could not allow herself to think about her mother too. That Tenmei had effectively become an orphan pained her in a way that seemed almost impossible to endure.

  Maybe that’s why I can’t let go, she thought.

  It had taken eighteen months from the time of her father’s injuries at Alonis, but Tenme
i had eventually summoned the courage to have Doctor Bashir remove him from the respirator that breathed for him. But his body hadn’t died then, and nearly a full year later, it continued to survive. Tenmei still hadn’t been able to bring herself to order the elimination of her father’s feeding and hydration tubes, the last steps in allowing him to slip into his final rest.

  Do it, she told herself. Give the order and let him go.

  But how could she? He was her father. He was all she had left.

  Tenmei raised her head, wanting more than anything to stop thinking, to stop feeling. She looked left and right down the Promenade, saw the late-night activity as people bustled about, mostly to and from Quark’s. Without consciously deciding to do so, she started toward the bar.

  Inside, the place brimmed with activity. Voices competed with the clink of glassware and the chirp of the dabo wheel. A cornucopia of colors splashed across the scene from the bottles on the shelves, the attire of the customers, and the three-story red, orange, and yellow lighted mural that dominated the main room. At the bar itself, she spotted Morn, a small group massed around him, no doubt listening to one of his interminable stories.

  Tenmei made her way into Quark’s and peered toward its far periphery, where shadows muted the vibrancy of the place. She looked for an empty table, but didn’t see one. She almost abandoned her impulse to visit the bar, but then she saw Cenn Desca, Jeannette Chao, and John Candlewood sitting together at a table for four. Not giving herself a chance to change her mind, she headed toward them.

  When she arrived at the table, her friends did not see her as they talked spiritedly with each other. But then Candlewood, the station’s lead science officer, glanced up and noticed her standing there mutely. “Prynn,” he said loudly, though his raised voice barely competed with the din of the bar. “Come join us.”

  “Yes, come have a drink,” said Chao. Turning to Cenn, the chief engineer made a shooing motion with her hands. “Move, move.” Cenn shifted over to the one empty chair at the table, right beside the bulkhead. Then Chao moved over as well, freeing up the seat in front of Tenmei.

  She sat down. Across from her, Cenn leaned forward, presumably so that she could hear him. “How are you, Prynn?” he asked. “It’s good to see you on the Promenade.”

  And not heading into or out of the infirmary, Tenmei thought, completing what she thought must have been the first officer’s full sentiment. Forcing a smile, she said, “I’m fine. It’s good to be out.”

  Chao started to say something, but then a voice at Tenmei’s shoulder asked, “And what can I get for you?” She looked up to see Quark, who carried a tray filled with empty glasses in a wide array of sizes, shapes, and colors. He quickly reached in over the table and collected two more empty glasses, one from in front of Cenn and one from Chao. When he tried to grab Candlewood’s, though, the lieutenant commander pulled it back, a finger or so of liquid still swilling around inside it.

  “Not done yet,” Candlewood protested.

  “When you’ve only got that much kiriliona left,” Quark insisted, “you’ve lost all the infused vapor.” He lunged for Candlewood’s glass, this time seizing it and placing it on his tray with the others. “So then, another round?” After nods from Cenn, Chao, and Candlewood, the barkeep turned to Tenmei. “And for you, Lieutenant?”

  “Double vodka on the rocks,” she said. “The real thing,” she added, not wanting synthehol and its easily dismissed intoxicating effects.

  “I love a discerning palate,” Quark said. “Like father, like daughter.” Then he dashed away as quickly as he’d come, headed back toward the bar. He left behind an uncomfortable lull.

  Tenmei quickly peered at each of her friends to include them, then said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”

  “You didn’t,” Candlewood said. Silver strands had begun to weave their way through the dark-brown ringlets on his head, Tenmei saw, and she wondered when that had happened. “We were just talking about our visitors,” Candlewood said. “What do you think?” He nodded past her, indicating the main room of Quark’s, through which she had just passed.

  Tenmei turned in her chair and gazed around. At first, she saw nothing more than an unusual preponderance of Vulcans in the bar. But then, over in an alcove, she spotted large, golden orbs peering out from the green, leathery scales of a saurian face. The Gorn’s presence on a Federation space station seemed so incongruous that, despite knowing that civilian Typhon Pact vessels had begun arriving at Deep Space 9 earlier that day, Tenmei did not immediately make the connection. But then she looked back around the room and realized: Not Vulcans. Romulans.

  Tenmei had earlier spent her duty shift aboard Defiant, helping to keep the ship at full readiness should trouble arise. She also knew that U.S.S. Canterbury, a Galaxy-class starship, orbited Bajor, its temporary presence in the system designed to discreetly discourage any deviation from the procedures that the Federation had negotiated for Pact vessels traveling to and from the wormhole through UFP space. In addition to being prohibited from encroaching on Dominion space—a quiet peace had held sway for seven and a half years, since the Dominion had withdrawn from the Alpha Quadrant and closed its borders—the civilian craft could carry only minimal armaments and defenses, and no cloaking devices. Further, their cargo could include no martial wares.

  Looking back through the crowd at the Gorn, Tenmei saw another seated at the same table, and beside them, a fully armored Breen. At once, a rash of memories crowded in on her, bringing her back to her days of piloting Sentinel during the war. She remembered well the crew’s encounters with the Breen, hard-fought battles that not all her shipmates had survived.

  There were tears then too, she thought, realizing just how much of her life had been spent in mourning.

  “It feels strange to have them around,” Chao said, “but then I guess it probably once felt strange to have Klingons around.” She turned to Cenn. “The way it once did for Bajorans to have humans around.”

  “Depending on the particular human,” Cenn offered with a smirk, “it still feels strange.”

  At that moment, Quark swooped back to the table, the tray he carried balanced atop one hand packed not with empty drinks, but full ones. He placed a small, stemmed glass in front of Chao, its tall bowl filled with a dark-green liquid. “A syntheholic Finagle’s Folly for the chief,” he proclaimed, as though bestowing an award. Before Candlewood, he set down a tall, straight glass from which a curl of light gas emanated, dissipating just above the rim. “A kiriliona for the scientist.” When Quark gave Cenn a tall glass of a pink beverage, he pronounced it a “Trixian bubble juice,” then set down Tenmei’s tumbler of vodka and ice, saying, “And the good stuff for the lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, Quark,” Cenn said.

  “Happy to be of service,” said the Ferengi with a wave of his empty hand, though he’d already started away from the table, obviously rushing to deliver the next set of drinks.

  Tenmei looked down at her glass and then past it, past the edge of the table to her lap, to where she saw herself twisting her hands together. None of her friends said anything for a moment. She wanted to fill the conversational void, or if not fill it, then at least pour something of herself into it, but she felt wholly incapable. Suddenly, she felt the urge to bolt, to run from the bar and isolate herself in her quarters.

  “How’s your father, Prynn?” Candlewood asked. “Has there been any change, any improvement?”

  Tenmei raised her head in time to see Chao throw Candlewood a withering glare. “That’s all right,” Chao told her, reaching forward and giving her shoulder a squeeze. “You don’t need to talk about it.”

  “I like talking about my father,” Tenmei said sharply. She plucked her drink from the table, the movement dislodging Chao’s grasp on her shoulder. Tenmei brought the tumbler quickly to her mouth and upended it. The cold alcohol paradoxically warmed her gullet as she drank it down in three quick gulps.

  “Prynn,” Chao sa
id, looking visibly rebuked, “I didn’t mean—”

  “He’s a good man,” Tenmei said. She put her tumbler back on the table, careful not to give in to her emotions and slam it down. “And it seems like everybody wants to forget about him.”

  “Nobody wants to forget Elias Vaughn,” said Cenn. “And nobody has forgotten him. He was an excellent commanding officer and a fine man.”

  “He is a fine man,” Tenmei said, firing her words across the table at Cenn. “He’s not dead.”

  “Oh, Prynn,” Chao said softly, impossible to hear over the clamor of other voices, though Prynn saw the words forming on the chief’s lips. Chao reached forward again, this time placing her hand on Tenmei’s uniformed forearm.

  Tenmei jerked her arm away. Chao’s jaw fell open in a look of surprise. Tenmei’s thoughts began to swirl. “Don’t tell me,” she said, sure that her friends meant to declare her father dead.

  “Prynn,” Cenn said from across the table. “You need to calm yourself.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need!” she yelled back at him. Around her, she could hear voices quieting. Anxious about people turning their attention to her, she stood up, but too quickly, and her chair toppled over backward, landing on the deck with a loud clang. She straightened her uniform, then addressed Cenn in a calmer tone. “Don’t tell me what I need, sir.”

  She turned as she heard Chao and Candlewood call after her. Tenmei pushed past other customers in the bar. She intended to leave, to go to her quarters. Or maybe to go read to my father, she thought. But as she stumbled past the crowd at the dabo wheel, she saw the two Gorn and the Breen peering across the room at her.