Tales from the Captain's Table

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  The strangeness of the unfolding scene mesmerized me. Plin wasn’t kidding about the illusion of the Officers’ Club. Placing false memories in the minds of Cardassian members. Using the guise of pleasure to facilitate interrogations. The operation was pure genius.

  “Later?” Teara said, her eyes soft. I heard a plea in her voice that told me a good deal about her connection to my brother.

  “Page me,” Reon said, “I’ll come find you.” He hooked his hand to my elbow, pulled me through the antechamber and out into the service passageway. After he’d changed the suite’s status indicator back to red, he fixed an inscrutable gaze on me. “We’re going to Plin.” He gripped my forearm and tugged me a few steps away from the suite toward the exit.

  “I expected as much,” I said, prying his fingers off my arm and stepping away from him. “You know what she wants?”

  He gestured for me to follow him into the turbolift and waited until the door closed before whispering the answer in my ear.

  A shock of anxiety electrified me and I shivered. I met Reon’s serious gaze with my own questioning one. For while Reon’s answer had retired one of the most pressing questions of my own—where his loyalties lay—it raised more troubling questions, questions that I wasn’t sure I knew how to find the answers to.

  I sat in Plin’s office, where an interconnected series of jamming devices would thwart the efforts of any eavesdropper.

  “You’re the only one outside my operation that’s in a position to identify the double,” Plin said. She rested her elbows on her desk, linked her hands together and waited for my reaction.

  “How can you know for sure that your operation’s been compromised?” I said. I knew from observing other cells that sometimes paranoia at the mere suggestion that a group had been infiltrated could do as much damage as the alleged traitor might. Accusations were made, loyalties tested. Some cells never fully recovered.

  “About six months ago, Doblana Base had a visit from Central Command. Not an unusual occurrence except that a military medical official was brought along as part of the group. In more than a decade, he’d never been here. And while I pride myself on the excellence of the services we provide at the Officers’ Club, Doblana isn’t exactly a prime R&R destination for the Cardassian military. Because the doctor didn’t have any obvious reason to visit, we kept a close eye out hoping that his presence didn’t signal an epidemic or a new regime of medical experimentation on prisoners or those in the labor camps.

  “When one of my girls had him alone, she loosened him up, got him talking, and he let it spill that he was visiting to follow up on a special patient, a Cardassian who had been surgically altered to resemble a Bajoran. Beyond bragging about what an accomplishment it was, he wouldn’t provide any specifics.” Plin spun her chair to the side and tapped an alphanumeric series into a touch panel by a shelving unit that deactivated a lock on a wall safe. She removed several tablets and passed them across to me.

  Paging through reams of data, I gave the contents a cursory glance. Plin had conducted a thorough investigation. It was also the first time I had a sense of the breadth of her operation. Talk about impressive. She had her fingers in almost every aspect of the Occupation. Placing an agent in her ranks would be a huge coup for the Cardassians.

  Plin sat back in her chair with a sigh. “We don’t know if the patient was male or female. We combed through every surveillance recording, every computer log, and talked with every witness we could find to see if we could compile a timeline as to where the doctor was when and with whom, but came up with nothing. The only individuals we could specifically identify him having contact with were my senior operatives.”

  “So there are two possibilities: Either the meeting happened and you didn’t know about it or one of your senior operatives is a plant,” I said, drawing my conclusions from the data she’d given me.

  Plin nodded.

  “And since I’ve never been here and I have a well-documented track record with Shakaar, I might be able to see something that you can’t because you’re too close to it.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Teara’s on the list, isn’t she?”

  “As are Reon and about ten other of my most trusted agents. Right beneath them are the names of a dozen employees who aren’t involved in our resistance work but who have access to the most sensitive areas of the Club. Any one of them could destroy what we’ve built.”

  “I’m one person and you run a massive operation. I don’t know how much help I can be.”

  “Be my eyes. Have an open mind.”

  I inhaled deeply, considering Plin’s request. How could I possibly know what was unusual behavior at a place like the Club? Layers within layers of deception made it nearly impossible to know what was real and what was gauzy illusion. Push away one curtain only to reveal another. “I’ll do what I can,” I said at last, “but my own operation comes first.”

  “As it should. If you succeed in using Gundar to stop the communications upgrade—or even better, install a backdoor to the network—the resistance could shift the balance of power within months.” Plin shrugged, flipped her palms up as if to say “Who knows?”

  Laughing, I looked over at my boss. “You’re sure you’re not part telepath? Because you have an uncanny way of knowing my secrets.”

  “Under different circumstances, I’d be running your op with my own people. Unfortunately, I don’t know who I can trust. I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Reon waited for me in the foyer outside Plin’s office. I watched him pace the length of the room, carrying on a conversation with an unseen person speaking into his earpiece.

  “Two dozen won’t do, Derna. You’ll need to up our order for the next transport.” A pause. “I don’t care what it costs, take care of it.” A longer pause. “Fine then. We’re done. Don’t get back to me until you have it fixed.” He sighed deeply, then switched his attention to me. “So we meet again, Nerys.”

  I couldn’t let him get off easily. “We wouldn’t be meeting if I hadn’t followed you out of the casino.”

  “I wasn’t planning on waiting much longer. I’ve been back less than a few days.” He placed his hands behind his back. “I wanted to figure you out first. See if you were still the headstrong, bossy big sister I remembered.”

  “Hardly fair considering I’m the one in strange territory.”

  “Ah yes, but now that you know what we’re up against, can you blame me?”

  Not wanting to reveal what Plin had told me, I shrugged. Reon was on her list.

  “I like your haircut.”

  “Really?” I ruffled the shaved hair at the base of my neck, smoothed the layers above my ears; I hadn’t quite become accustomed to the short length.

  “Most definitely. Though I was very young when we lost Mother, I remember she had kind of a coppery tint to her hair.” A distant look in his eyes took me back to our childhood in the camps. He continued, “It glinted in the firelight when she would hold me in her arms and rock me to sleep. She sang that song—the sea maid and her farmer prince?” After humming a few atonal bars, he stopped, probably noting my pinched expression. “Never was a singer.”

  “True. You weren’t. You aren’t.” I offered a polite smile: one that invited him to continue our discussion, but one that withheld my full trust. I wanted—needed—to believe what my eyes saw, that Reon had truly become the person I wanted him to be. Yet so many years had passed that I couldn’t let go of my doubts so easily.

  “I can’t undo the past, Nerys,” he said softly. “And I won’t make excuses for my choices, so I feel safe in disabusing you of any notion that you might be receiving an apology from me. But we can start from now.”

  He needed to know the stakes. “Our brother died.”

  “I know.”

  “This place you have here—this life you’ve led. You had the resources to save him and you didn’t come for him.”

  “I know
that too. I did what I had to.”

  I studied his handsome face, probed his blue-green eyes, whose color evoked a memory of summer sky in Dahkur. My heart still grieved for the child he had been.

  After a long pause, he said, “We’ll talk more over brunch in my apartment. It’s better than what they serve in the lounge, and since I’m the boss, I can excuse you from your next shift.” He winked, then offered me an arm.

  I inhaled deeply, paused. The impulse to forgive and move on warred with the impulse to demand more answers.

  “Come on, Nerys. Grant your brother clemency—at least for the duration of brunch—and if you still hate me when we’re through, at least you’ll know my side of the story.” He shrugged. “Since we’re working for the same cause, at least we have that in common.”

  I slid my arm through his. “So it appears.”

  After the morning when the mishap with Tulk occurred, I didn’t talk with Plin—or Reon for that matter—for several days. I knew what Plin expected from me, and frankly, I needed space to process what Reon had told me. His conversion to the resistance cause had happened gradually. By the time he’d grown to his majority, he understood why Plin took the risks she did running a resistance cell and why a mercenary existence would ultimately be unsatisfying to him. He hadn’t been a legna since he left me, living the luxurious life of a collaborator to its fullest. I was loath to call his reborn devotion to Bajor an “atonement” for his choices, but I did sense that he was trying to make amends for the past. I accepted him for what he’d become and determined we would start again. Unfortunately, what I’d fixed with Reon had broken with Teara.

  Since my intrusion on her interlude with Tulk, she kept her shields up, deflecting my friendly overtures with what I could describe only as cynical distrust. Her attitude didn’t make sense to me—after all, weren’t we now linked by devotion to a common cause? Instead, she became territorial, as if my presence at the Officers’ Club threatened her personally.

  I didn’t realize how threatened she felt until one morning when I checked in with my supervisor and discovered that my cleaning assignment had been changed from the senior suites, where I’d been since before the Tulk incident, to the junior suites. The change didn’t make sense. My tips had steadily increased over time; the girls seemed happy with my work. More important, my missions for both Plin and Shakaar were easier to do when I had access to the high-ranking officers hosted in the senior suites. I monitored who visited and the companions they arrived with. Since I anticipated Gundar’s arrival any day now, I couldn’t afford to be moved from the senior suites. I asked my supervisor why the change had been made and she mumbled some noncommittal explanation.

  At mealtime later in the day, one of the girls, who had just spent a few hours with the base commander, stopped by my table to tell me how sorry she was to see me transferred and that she hoped I’d be back soon.

  “I don’t know what Teara’s problem is,” she said, “but I wouldn’t take it personally. She gets in these moods sometimes.”

  I sat for a long time wondering what possible reason Teara would have to ask me to be reassigned unless she felt threatened by me. When I finished my shift, I sent a brief note to Plin simply informing her that I’d been reassigned to the junior suites. I trusted that she’d follow up. She did.

  Teara stormed into our rooms later that night.

  “Keep my mother out of this!”

  “You stay out of my work, I’ll stay out of yours,” I said.

  “I don’t know why she has such faith and in you—her and Reon both. But to me, it was just a little too providential that you showed up when you did. She’s so desperate to protect our work here that she’s grasping at whatever slender hopes she can, never mind that your presence here puts us all at risk.”

  “Believe what you want.” I wouldn’t defend myself against baseless accusations.

  “My mother will do what she needs to do,” Teara said, her eyes boring into me. “But I’ll be watching your every step.”

  I looked up at her placidly. “No you won’t. ’Cause I’ll be behind you—watching yours.”

  I returned to my old position the next day, adding close monitoring of Teara’s clients and schedule to my daily routine. I expected her to keep a low profile, and she did. Several days passed before anything unusual happened, and when it did, it was explosive, though at first it appeared fairly innocuous….

  In my review of the daily suite logs, I discovered an irregularity. Supervisors usually glossed over the reports; as long as everything appeared to be in order, no one raised an eyebrow. I knew, however, from my shift that one of the companions listed as entertaining a guest had abruptly taken ill midshift, but the logs didn’t indicate her departure. I asked around and found that another girl had been called in to take her place: Teara. Suspicion overtook me. I had to know what she’d been hiding. Early in my club days, I’d used some of the components in my cleaning tools to split a feed off the security sensors. I checked the pictures from time to time, but until now it hadn’t been critical to my operation, since Gundar hadn’t shown up yet.

  I wandered through the residential wing until I found an empty apartment. The employees who lived there worked nights and wouldn’t be back until dawn. I patched in to my feed through the club’s intranet, sorting through the day’s data, frame by frame, watching companions come and go without incident. After hours of examination, I had despaired of ever finding the answer when at last a frame appeared that illuminated Teara’s motive to doctor the logs.

  I considered my options. Plin had a vested interest in protecting her child. She might or might not take my concerns seriously. If Teara was tipped off about my suspicions, any hope I had of my op succeeding would effectively end. An accusation of this magnitude had to be backed up with incontrovertible proof before I could move.

  Reon could help me. The conflict with Teara had preoccupied me for the past few days; I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about my brother. Maybe I’d been avoiding it. But now I needed him. He might ridicule my request—especially since I suspected that he and Teara were lovers. One fact was indisputable, though: If he wanted me to trust him, he would need to trust me. He owed me that.

  I found him in his office attending to the bureaucratic details that running an operation the size of the Officers’ Club entails.

  Surprised, he looked up from the tablet he was reading. “Nerys?”

  “Can I talk?” The implication being, “Can anyone overhear what I’m about to say?”

  Reon pressed a series of buttons mounted on his desktop and studied me expectantly.

  “She called him ‘Father.’ ”

  He blinked, his mouth puckered in confusion. “Who?”

  “Teara. I saw it on the visual sensor readings from this afternoon. She called Gundar ‘Father.’ ”

  “Gundar’s here?”

  I nodded, taken aback that such a high-profile client had made it into the Club without Reon knowing. “Teara had him in the suites this afternoon.”

  “Are you sure you heard her correctly?” He looked dubious.

  “No question.”

  Reon rolled his eyes. “Our members have all kinds of odd sexual predilections, Nerys, who’s to say that he didn’t ask her to call him that as part of some warped fantasy—”

  “She called him Father in Cardassian.”

  When Gundar showed up the next day, I was prepared. Reon, without consulting with Plin, had provided me with access to any surveillance feeds and data I wanted. I spent the greater part of the night combing through every Cardassian database the Club had, searching for information on Gundar. What I discovered didn’t bode well for Teara. Not only did Gundar have a daughter—Kayana—but his daughter had reputedly joined the Obsidian Order after graduating from an elite military academy. All recorded traces of her vanished about two years ago. An intercepted Central Command communiqué had a vague reference to Kayana being on a deep-cover intelligence assignment.

/>   If indeed the woman I knew as Plin Teara was Kayana Gundar, she’d have a vested interest in keeping close tabs on my every move, protecting her father from the resistance. She’d make sure she was assigned to be his companion, providing him with alibis and cover should any questions be raised. In short, she’d behave exactly as Teara had been behaving since the Tulk incident. I just had to make sure that next time Gundar showed up, I was watching.

  Gundar’s physical appearance surprised me, though I didn’t quite know what I should have expected from a Cardassian academic. From all reports, Gundar’s mathematical genius had protected the empire’s communications from prying Federation eyes for years. I’d envisioned him as a razor-lean, pensive, scholarly type. So when a husky, squarish glinn with drooping jowls and a protruding belly showed up at the reception desk, I checked the feed twice after I heard him identify himself as Gundar. On a monitor provided by Reon, I watched Teara approach him, her arms outstretched; Gundar folded the willowy Bajoran woman into his embrace, practically lifting her off the floor. She took him by the hand and guided him toward the turbolift. Within minutes, they’d be in the suites and within five meters of my position.

  If Teara was an Order operative, she wouldn’t be foolish enough to break cover anywhere in public, so I watched the sensor feeds from the turbolift with marginal interest. Once she was in the suites, though, I’d have to be prepared to move quickly if I perceived that Teara’s behavior might put my mission at risk. Yes, I’d agreed to help Plin find the double in her operation; my first allegiance, though, was to Shakaar, and nothing—nothing—would prevent me from fulfilling my promises to him.

  The suite door opened. Leaning forward in my chair, I hovered within centimeters of the viewscreen, hearing Gundar cross the floor behind Teara’s buoyant footsteps.

  She spun around, her hands clasped together beneath her chin. “I’m so pleased to see you again,” she said, rocking back and forth; she gazed on Gundar with a shy smile.