by David Mack
He suppressed a chortle of sinister mirth. “Because, my dear—the moment they pull their triggers on each other, they’ll both be as good as neutralized.”
“I don’t understand.”
He tapped his index finger against his pursed lips, as if considering whether it was prudent to say more. For once, his enthusiasm overcame his caution. “Thanks to the indiscreet pillow talk of a Starfleet Command officer on Earth, we now know the only reason both sides agreed to this conference was their mutual fear of reprisal by an outside force known as the Organians. The details on this part are, admittedly, hazy—but the gist is that if either side reignites their conflict, the Organians will cripple both their militaries, galaxy-wide.” A broad, maniacal grin revealed the Red Man’s mouthful of perfect, immaculately white teeth. “It’s more than we’ve ever dared to wish for. And all we have to do to get it is push both sides just a little bit further—then step out of the way when they start shooting.”
Laid out in such stark terms, the Red Man’s interest in the conference became clear to Elara. Goading the Federation and the Klingon Empire into causing their own destruction would be a massive boon to interstellar piracy, smuggling, and sentient trafficking—the principal businesses of the shadowy criminal empire known to outsiders as the Orion Syndicate.
“How do you wish me to proceed, Master?”
“Do whatever you can to turn up the heat under this pot. It sounds like the Klingons are already simmering. Let’s see if we can’t bring their rage to a boil.”
“Understood.”
“One more thing. I just put some backup into place for you on Centaurus.”
That boded ill. “Might I ask who?”
“Jorncek, the Tiburonian.”
The name sounded familiar to Elara. “Isn’t he that hitter with a torque problem Ganz kicked off the Omari-Ekon last year?”
“A misunderstanding, I’m told.”
“A botched heist on a Starfleet pharmaceutical vault is a bit more serious than a ‘misunderstanding.’ Is he really the best backup you could send?”
“The Terrans have a saying, Elara: ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ ”
“True, though I don’t recall asking for any help.” Her suspicious nature asserted itself. “You aren’t sending him here just to get him as far from you as possible, are you?”
Her protests had erased the Red Man’s good mood as quickly as it had manifested. “If you do your job and avoid detection, there won’t be any need for him to show himself. So get back to the university and find some way to make the Klingons do what they do best.”
“As you command, Master.” She bowed her head in a show of respect and kept her mind blank of all thoughts as she closed the subspace channel.
As soon as it switched off, her buried resentment exhumed itself.
Jorncek. Here, on Centaurus. Just what I didn’t need. She yanked her duotronic cables free of their splice to the hotel’s comm network. As long as I don’t see him, he can live. But if I catch that fool torqueing when he’s supposed to be watching my back, I’ll kill him myself.
* * *
Days on Centaurus were less than twenty-three hours long, but to Joanna McCoy they always felt longer when she worked a double shift in the university hospital. As a second-year nursing student, she had fewer responsibilities than the full-time staff, but there was still more than enough work to make a night shift drag on forever.
Patient care was only half the story, of course. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, it was possible for the doctors and nurses and technicians with whom she worked to cure illnesses and heal injuries once thought to be beyond the reach of science. Damaged digits, limbs, and even vital organs were, as a matter of routine, repaired or replaced.
Still, more often than she had expected before embarking upon a medical career, there were occasional cases that challenged the physicians and their nigh-magical sensors: overlapping conditions that clouded the diagnostic process, rare drug interactions that resulted in bizarre side effects, or sometimes accidental injuries so gruesome or macabre as to be instantly memorable. Moments like those punctuated the long slog of routine and kept the job fresh, even for veterans who had been practicing medicine since the last days of stethoscopes. Oddity, as it turned out, was one of the profession’s few true perquisites.
Its ancient and so far unconquered bête noire was, as it had ever been, paperwork. Most of the easily quantified data was reported automatically by the computers built into the biobeds, which collected input from the staff’s array of handheld sensors. Limited-function artificial intelligence software transcribed patients’ symptom presentations and recorded doctors’ initial evaluations and intake sessions in vid files for later review. But at the end of each day, someone needed to sift through those mountains of raw data and qualify the reports with such intangible observations as each patient’s mood and presence of mind. Summaries had to be synthesized from multiple charts, vetted, and forwarded to the Federation Surgeon General’s office for dissemination to such agencies as Starfleet Medical and the Federation Center for Disease Control, as well as several others, for the purpose of detecting, preventing, and, when necessary, containing epidemics before they got a chance to spread.
Joanna had compiled twenty patient files in the past five hours, and her eyes itched from exhaustion and dehydration. A quick check of the queue on her slate showed she still had another eight cases to review before she could call it a night. She checked the wall chrono, which read 0213, and felt her spirits sink. I need to be back in class in less than six hours.
Caffeine was her only hope.
She stood and stretched, arching and twisting her back until she heard the satisfying pops of vertebrae releasing some of their pent-up tension. At this hour, the cafeteria would be closed, but there was a wall of automat food dispensers one floor down where she could score a coffee and a snack to help her soldier on through the end of her shift.
No point waiting for the lift, she decided, detouring into the stairwell. I could use a bit of exercise. Get the blood moving. Wake me up a little.
She reached the next floor and found its lighting dimmer than she remembered. The overhead lights were off in its northern corridor, where the automat station was located. At first she feared a circuit had been tripped, cutting off power to the north wing, but then she noticed a faint spill of light on the tiled floor—the glow of the automat machines. At least those are still working. She made a mental note to call the maintenance office when she got back to her station.
Halfway down the shadowy passage, an echoing groan, like wind moving through a canyon, turned her head. That was when she saw the doors of the turbolift were propped open with a metal bar, exposing the dark empty shaft on the other side.
She felt the hackles at the back of her neck rise. Paranoid, she looked over her shoulder, toward the lit end of the corridor. She was still alone. Treading with slow, soft footfalls—a task made easier by the soft-soled comfortable shoes preferred by those in her line of work—she crept deeper into the darkness ahead.
Just shy of the automat, the door to the pharmaceutical lockup was ajar. Joanna skulked toward it, listening for any activity from within, but heard nothing. From a pocket on the tunic of her scrubs she took a pen light, a simple tool for testing patients’ pupils for reactivity, and shone its beam on the door’s handle and lock. Both had been forced open with enough violence to leave them bent and dangling. She took a breath, held it, and nudged open the door.
Her narrow flashlight beam swept across a sprawling mess. The shelves had been raided for a variety of medical supplies, including hypospray dispensers, and the drug cabinets had been broken into and thoroughly pilfered.
“Sonofabitch.” She pulled out her personal comm unit and keyed in the code for the hospital’s security office.
One of the night-shift desk guards, Sullifeth ch�
�Laera, and Andorian chan she’d blessed with the nickname Sully, answered. “Security.”
“Sully, this is Joanna McCoy. We’ve had a burglary up on seven. Someone broke into the north wing’s storage—” Her voice caught in her throat as she felt the icy bite of a blade above her carotid artery. Eyes wide, she froze, with her heart slamming inside her chest.
A man’s low, hostile whisper was hot against the back of her ear. “One more word, and I’ll cut your throat. Drop the comm.”
Joanna let the comm fall to the floor. Her assailant stomped it into dust and shards. She felt the trembling of his hand through the blade of his knife. “Please don’t hurt me.”
His voice was so close, so menacing. “Don’t make me. Be a shame to waste a pretty thing like you.” He withdrew his blade from Joanna’s throat.
She had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief before the crushing blow hit the back of her head, turning her world white with pain for a moment before she sank into endless black.
* * *
Consciousness returned, driven by a demon’s drumbeat Joanna recognized as her own pulse. She struggled to open her eyes. She was on the floor in the pharma lockup. Her vision was hazy and out of focus; every sound sent throbbing pains shooting through her skull. “What happened?”
“Just lie back and stay still,” said a reassuring feminine voice.
The soft hiss of a hypospray accompanied a gentle sting against Joanna’s jugular. The pounding rhythm in her head abated, and her vision sharpened by degrees. Able to focus her eyes again, Joanna recognized the woman at her side as Doctor Jennifer Rock, that night’s on-call emergency surgeon. Lean and muscular, with a pixie cut of dandelion-yellow hair accented by hot-pink highlights, the striking half-human, half-Argelian physician projected keen intelligence but also an aura of empathy and compassion—qualities that had made her one of Joanna’s role models at the hospital. She asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Woozy.” Recent events flashed through Joanna’s memory. “Someone hit me in the back of the head. Doc, do I have a concussion?”
A sympathetic nod. “A minor one, but yes. I’ve ordered you a bed in the trauma center, just for tonight, so we can monitor your recovery. We should have you sorted out by morning.”
A sudden surge of panic. “Morning? But I have a class at eight.”
Rock gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Relax. I’ll write you a note.”
Joanna remembered the knife at her throat and reached toward the spot where the blade had kissed her skin. The doctor noticed the gesture and added, “Minor lacerations. Already patched them up.” A young man in a mustard-colored Starfleet tunic approached them. The doctor asked Joanna, “Ready to answer a few questions?”
“I can try.”
“All right. Joanna, this is Ensign Pavel Chekov, from the Enterprise.”
Up close he looked even younger than Joanna had first thought; his affect was almost boyish, with his bowl haircut and innocent smile. “Hello, Joanna,” he said with a Russian accent.
Sitting up, she winced. “Hi.”
“Did you see who attacked you?”
“No, but the voice sounded like a man’s.”
Chekov nodded. “You reported a break-in.”
“Yes, the pharmaceutical lockup.” Joanna looked around and saw that the hospital’s security guards and some local peace officers were inspecting the burgled storage room while the night-shift duty nurse conducted an inventory to identify missing items. She cast a suspicious look at Chekov. “Since when does Starfleet investigate petty theft?”
“My orders are to investigate any crime on campus, whether I think it’s related to the conference or not.”
“You think this is?”
“Did the man who hit you do or say anything to make you think so?”
She thought about it. “No.”
The young officer shrugged. “Then it might be an isolated event.”
Doctor Rock interrupted, “If you have enough, Ensign, I need to take Miss McCoy down to the trauma center for observation.”
Chekov’s eyes widened. “McCoy?” He now regarded Joanna with something akin to reverence. “You’re Doctor Leonard McCoy’s daughter?”
A pained nod. “That’s right.”
He reached for his communicator. “I should let him know you—”
“Please don’t,” Joanna said. “I’d rather keep him out of it.”
“Are you sure? He is your father.”
“I’m sure.” She took Doctor Rock’s hand and, with some help and difficulty, stood on uncertain feet. “I’ve had enough abuse for one night.”
The Russian was unhappy about the bind she had put him in. “As you wish. But I still need to file my report—which means he will find out, sooner or later.”
“I know.” Leaning on the doctor’s shoulder, Joanna shuffled toward the lift. “I just want a chance to finish with this headache before I let him give me a new one.”
* * *
It was uncommon for ship’s time aboard the Enterprise to correspond, even approximately, to local time when beaming down to a planet’s surface. There were many factors that conspired to keep one feeling out of synch in such scenarios. One was the variable length of a day from one world to the next. Another was the existence of time zones on a planet’s surface—dawn in one location meant it was dusk at its antipodal point. Exacerbating the sensation of temporal disconnection was the effect of living without natural light for months on end on a starship.
Consequently, it struck Uhura as a cruel irony that for once local time at the beam-down site on the New Athens University campus—0316 hours—was very close to the time shown on the Enterprise’s shipboard chronometer: 0358 hours, the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning, depending on how one preferred to frame the bad news. Either way, it meant she had been roused from a sound sleep and summoned planetside.
The transporter beam fell away like a dissipating rain of golden light to reveal Ensign Chekov standing in the middle of the campus quad, awaiting her arrival. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
“What can I do for you, Ensign?”
His shiny disposition tarnished a bit at her gentle reminder that she was his superior officer. “I need your help with a . . . technical matter.”
“Care to be a bit more specific?”
He beckoned her to follow him as he walked toward a nearby building. “We asked the campus security office to let us set up our own operations office. They put us in here.” He entered an access code into the panel beside the locked front door. Its magnetic bolts retracted with a muffled thump. He turned the handle and pushed the door open.
The office inside was dusty and dilapidated, a portrait of institutional neglect. Tucked into the far corner was a workstation with an antiquated computer built into the desk. “They gave us one terminal. Their sick idea of a joke, I think.”
Uhura crossed the room and studied the machine. “Is this an optronic system?” She checked its auxiliary data ports. “I haven’t seen anything like this since before the Academy.” Her fingertips brushed its activation button. “Does it power up?”
“Yes. But that’s all it does.” When she shot him a questioning look, he added, “They won’t let us use their network. Which means I can’t monitor current criminal activity, review past crimes, or look for patterns.”
She switched on the terminal and noted the boot-up data that scrolled down its monitor. “A system this old? You’d be lucky to get it to play solitaire.”
“I already tried. It doesn’t have any games.”
She asked over her shoulder, “So, what do you expect me to do about it?”
“That is up to you. But if I had your skill for accessing secure networks—”
“Such as the campus security data system.”
“For example, yes. Then I could uplink their system with the Enterprise’s computers.”
“True.” Uhura wondered what Chekov was holding back. “Ensign, why not let the local authorities handle their own investigations?”
“Three reasons. First, my orders from Captain Kirk were to investigate all criminal activity on campus and look for threats to the peace conference. But I think the local police and campus security are deliberately preventing me from doing my duty.
“Second, the woman who was attacked in the university hospital tonight was Doctor McCoy’s daughter. And I do not want to be empty-handed tomorrow when he asks me what happened and what I did about it.
“Third—” He gesticulated in frustration at their decrepit surroundings. “This.”
His first rationale felt flimsy to Uhura, but she couldn’t fault his other two arguments. “Fine. But you’re going to owe me, mister.” She sat down at the terminal and began keying in code injection exploits that she was certain could bypass the software lockouts with which the locals had hobbled the machine’s network access.
It took her less than a minute to establish full command-level access to the campus’s security data network as well as an interlink to the New Athens Police Department databases. “Better than Christmas morning. What are we looking for?”
“Internal security vids from the hospital. Seventh floor, north wing, starting around two-fifteen this morning local time.”
Uhura pulled up a grid of twelve vid feeds, most of which overlapped one another’s fields of view to some degree. “Here we go.” She jogged the vids forward at double speed—and in rapid succession they blinked out, one by one, until all were dark. “That’s interesting.” She continued fast-forwarding until the cameras resumed working, shortly after 0231.
Chekov’s brow knit with determination. “That was no accident.”
