Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  “Why not declare war on both? Could save time later.”

  Reyes scowled at the doctor as he picked up his mug and gave it a cooling puff of breath. “Ravanar’s a long way from the Klingon border, and we’ve had Endeavour patrolling that for a few weeks now. But the Tholians haven’t shown any interest in the Taurus Reach, so I can’t figure out why they’d do this.”

  Stroking his goatee, Fisher said, “The Tholians might not have rattled their sabers as loudly as the Klingons, but I’d hardly say they welcomed us with open…well, open whatever it is they have.” He leaned forward and picked up his mug. “And ever since the Tholian delegation’s bizarre collective seizure last week…let’s just say they’ve been acting oddly.”

  Reyes pointed at the coffeepot and cast an inquiring glance at Fisher, who nodded. The commodore carried the coffeepot over to Fisher and refilled the doctor’s mug.

  “Thanks,” Fisher said.

  “De nada.” Reyes put the coffeepot back on its warmer pad. He had just taken another modest sip of the warm, soothing beverage when Rana Desai’s voice issued from the overhead speaker.

  “Captain Desai to Commodore Reyes.”

  Reyes went to the intercom panel on the wall and thumbed open the channel. “Reyes here. Go ahead, Captain.”

  In an effort to keep their romantic relationship private, they made a point of hailing each other formally and responding formally when third parties were present—even if, like Fisher, the person already knew about their status as a couple. Though Reyes felt awkward when using ranks to ask Desai over to his quarters for dinner, the strict observance of protocol had already averted a few potential embarrassments for them both.

  “Commodore, I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”

  “Of course, Captain,” Reyes said. “Shall I drop by your quarters?” He cast a wry grin at Fisher, who shook his head resignedly.

  “Actually, Commodore, I need to see you in my office.”

  The smirk left Reyes’s face.

  “Understood,” he said, his tone turning serious. “I’ll be with you shortly. Reyes out.” He moved toward the door.

  Fisher followed him and exuded sympathy. “Her office?” He shook his head. “That’s not good.” At the door, he gave Reyes a firm clasp on the shoulder. “Look on the bright side: If this is trouble, at least the JAG boss is your girlfriend.”

  “Just what I always wanted,” Reyes said with a humor-less half-smirk. “A girlfriend who can court-martial me.”

  Reyes’s shout was like a bullhorn. “You’re court-martialing me?”

  “No. Stop overreacting, Diego.” Ensconced behind her office desk, Desai could only hope that Reyes wasn’t as angry as he looked. “It’s a board of inquiry.”

  “This is the biggest load of—” Reyes caught himself, then pressed his palm over his sandpaper-stubbled chin and upper lip.

  “I don’t have a choice,” Desai said. “The Bombay was lost in the line of duty. There has to be an inquiry.”

  “Give me a break, Rana.” Reyes was pacing now, quickly and with mounting agitation. “This is what you do to a captain who comes home without his ship.”

  “The inquiry is standard procedure.”

  “Naming the ship’s captain is standard procedure,” Reyes shot back. “Not the captain’s supervising officer.”

  She leaned forward and placed her fingertips on the desk. “The Starfleet JAG wants me to depose living witnesses. It’s not like you’re the only one on the list.” His sidelong glance bristled with hostility. She continued, “What did you think I was going to do? Mark the file ‘case closed’ without doing an investigation? I have my orders.”

  “History’s greatest excuse,” Reyes said, rolling his eyes.

  “I hope you’re not this funny with your judge. You might get that court-martial for contempt.”

  A retort seemed on the verge of escaping Reyes’s mouth, when he hesitated. His indignation turned to confusion. “I thought you would be the judge.”

  “No,” Desai said. “I can’t.”

  He was staring hard into her eyes. “Why not?”

  She looked down and moved a few random items around on her desktop. “I’ll be recusing myself.”

  Reyes’s face hardened into a frown. “Because of us.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It would be unethical for me to—”

  “You can’t do that,” Reyes said. “Don’t recuse yourself.”

  “Diego, I have to.”

  “If you do, you’ll have to say why.” He shook his head with frustration. “We…us…our relationship—it’d be public.” She wondered if he had any idea how stupid that sounded. “I think that came out wrong,” he added.

  “You think?”

  Exasperated and exhausted, he rubbed his eyes. He folded his arms and thought for a few seconds. She kept him in her accusatory glare and waited patiently to see how he planned to dig his way out of this faux pas. “I’m just not ready to add grist to Vanguard’s rumor mill,” he said. “We’re in high-profile jobs. People will talk.” He reached down and picked up a large, polished hunk of blue volcanic glass from Desai’s desk. “I know that we’d hardly be the first or even the most glamorous couple in the officer corps…but I value our privacy.”

  She couldn’t deny that she sympathized with him. Being the topic of lurid gossip was a notion that made her feel ill. And part of the thrill of their romance so far had been in the hiding of it. But this was not about their relationship. “I feel the same way, Diego. But I’d rather recuse myself than give people reason to question my ethics.”

  Studying the hunk of blue glass in his palm, Reyes drew a long breath then exhaled slowly. He seemed much calmer than he had just minutes earlier. For Desai, one of the most difficult aspects of being romantically involved with him was the volcanic quality of his temperament. His fury could lay dormant for the longest time, then, without warning, boom. When he was truly angry, he frightened her a little. At the same time, once he vented his rage, it subsided quickly. Just to complicate the situation further, she was still learning which irritants were most likely to trigger his explosions.

  Finally, he broke the tense hush with a dejected-sounding sigh. “I trust you to be a fair and impartial judge, no matter who’s standing in front of you.”

  That makes one of us, Desai reflected.

  He put the chunk of glass back on her desk. “Use your best judgment. Let my yeoman know when you need to see me.”

  Reyes turned toward the door, which hissed open, letting in the soft murmur of whispered conferences between members of her JAG office staff. The commodore walked out without looking back. When the door closed, Desai eased herself into her chair. She imagined what it was going to be like, sitting at a table with her lover, watching him be deposed about his role, however peripheral, in the deaths of more than two hundred Starfleet personnel. I’m going to hate this case, she brooded.

  On her desk was the report of the loss of the Starship Bombay. To her eye, the file looked very, very thin.

  Starting tomorrow, she knew, that would change.

  Pennington dropped his duffel on the floor. “I need a storage unit,” he said to the quartermaster, Senior Chief Petty Officer Sozlok. The dark-furred, vaguely simian-looking noncom seemed in no hurry to service the frantic journalist’s request.

  Sozlok slid a data sheet on an automated pad across the counter to Pennington. “Fill this out.”

  The form was long, and it was complicated, and it was everything that Pennington had no time for right now. Keeping up the pretense would be essential, however. “Could you check to see if you have any units large enough to hold a dozen cases of Loperian reelkot?”

  “Reelkot?” Sozlok looked intrigued. “You’ll be needing refrigerated storage, then.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Why the hell did I say reelkot? He kicked himself for mentioning something so unusual. This was the kind of visit he would prefer be forgotten. Instead, he’d made it bizarre enough for
this guy to tell someone else about it tomorrow over drinks, and interesting enough that it might be repeated.

  While he busied himself completing the form, Sozlok clicked through several screens of data, apparently on a search for an available refrigerated storage unit of unusual size. There was no point in falsifying the form, Pennington knew. The noncom would ask for his identification before finishing the rental. For a moment he wondered how he might avoid leaving a trace of his visit, until he remembered that there was nothing inherently suspicious about his actions. People do this all the time, he reassured himself. Nothing to worry about. Calm down.

  A few minutes later, Pennington’s form was filled-in, and Sozlok seemed to have settled on an appropriate unit for him. “Here we go,” he said. “Level forty-nine, section three, quad two, unit fourteen-echo.”

  “Great,” Pennington said. As if it were an afterthought, he added, “Do you mind if I check it out before I commit to it? You know—just to make sure.”

  “Fine by me,” Sozlok said.

  “Just one thing: I forgot my jacket, and it’s going to be colder than hell frozen over in there. Got a spare I could borrow?”

  “Probably,” said Sozlok, who lumbered away into a back room to scrounge up a loaner coat.

  The moment Sozlok was around the corner and his footsteps began to recede, Pennington all but launched himself across the counter, until he was lying on top of it. Reaching over, he turned the noncom’s monitor toward himself and started deftly keying commands into its control panel. He knew time was short, but his need was simple: He wanted to know which storage unit belonged to Oriana.

  It took only seconds to coax the data from the intuitive interface. Staring at the compartment number, he committed it to memory. During his third pass of mnemonic reinforcement, he heard the growing clap of approaching footfalls. Resetting the interface and turning the monitor back to its prior facing, he slithered in reverse across the countertop and landed softly on his feet. He was standing tall and looking utterly trustworthy as Sozlok returned.

  The hirsute alien handed Pennington a bulky, fur-lined parka. “Keep it. It’s from lost-and-found.”

  “Thanks.” He slung the coat over his duffel and hefted both over his shoulder while Sozlok encoded a key card for him.

  Handing the card to Pennington, Sozlok said, “This card is single-use only. Go check out the unit. If it’s what you want, we’ll start an account for you.”

  “Sounds good.” He tucked the key in his pants pocket. “Back in a bit.”

  “Take your time,” Sozlok said, then sighed. “I’m here all night.” He wore the fatigued mien of a person trapped in a job he wasn’t yet prepared to spurn.

  “Hang in there, mate,” Pennington said. “Back in a jiff.”

  Pennington pushed away from the counter and walked away quickly, before he found himself lassoed into another round of depressive banter. Quickening his pace to the turbolift, he told himself for the hundredth time that he wasn’t breaking into Oriana’s storage unit for selfish reasons. If her husband found those mementos, it’d be a disaster, he rationalized. Bad enough to hear that your wife is dead, but, “Oh, yeah, mate, she was cheating on you, too.” That’s just beyond the pale.

  Continuing down to the refrigerated-storage area, he kept telling himself that. He expected to believe it any minute now.

  An hour. An entire hour.

  That’s how long it had taken Cervantes Quinn—battered, bloodied, and crawling like a wounded animal—to arrive at a bar that would still let him in to drink. The revulsed stares and the horrified gasps that he’d endured from passers-by hadn’t bothered him. Nor had he allowed himself to be upset by the creeping suspicion that more of his blood was soaked into his favorite shirt than was coursing through his veins. He was glad he had saved his ire for this moment.

  Hand over hand, with a mighty effort and labored breaths, he lifted himself from the floor and climbed, one exceptionally careful motion at a time, on to the first empty barstool he reached. Sitting upright, he felt the tug of gravity against his body shift. He steadied himself, licked the blood from his own teeth, swallowed, and croaked out a one-word request: “Tequila.”

  The bartender—a heavy, profusely sweating, and ill-mooded middle-aged Bolian—shot Quinn a disdainful glare. “Got cash?”

  It took a few seconds for the question to sink in.

  Disgust and indignation lurked behind Quinn’s soft tone. “I paid my tab here last month.”

  “Yeah, I know,” the bartender said. “But you also look like you just got rolled. No offense, but you don’t strike me as a good credit risk right now.”

  Quinn dug into his pockets and dredged up one loose bit of currency after another. He piled them haphazardly on the bar. A Federation credit chip, a few Klingon jiQ, and half a dozen exotic alien coins lay scrambled together. The bartender scooped them up in a single swipe of his hand and reached for the good Anejo. It splashed into a low glass, the long legs of it clinging to the sides, its sweet aroma pulling Quinn closer, like the ambrosia of Tantalus. The bartender pushed the glass toward him. With aching fingers, Quinn reached for his drink.

  A hand clamped on to the collar of his jacket.

  He had just long enough to think the word damn, but not long enough to say it, before he was yanked backward off the barstool and dragged toward the doorway—his precious and fully paid-for glass of tequila abandoned on the bar, which grew farther away with each passing moment.

  Turning to see who had delivered this injustice upon him for the second time in one evening, he looked into the passionless face of Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn. “Hey,” he said, his words slurred by pain and loosened teeth. “I’m not this easy, you know. You have to woo me.”

  “Be quiet,” she said, and he could tell that she meant it. “We are going to speak privately. Until then, I would prefer you did not speak at all.”

  “Can I at least do my own walking?”

  T’Prynn halted, looked him over, and let go of his collar.

  He collapsed in a heap on the ground.

  “Okay,” he said. “Dragging’s fine.”

  Breaking into Oriana’s storage locker was proving more difficult than Pennington had expected. The dislodged door-control panel dangled from a lone duotronic cable. With sweaty fingers, he guided the lock-picking tools through the bramble of wires, chips, and capacitors. Taking care not to trip the security alarms, he disabled the door’s redundant lock mechanisms.

  It had been a while since he had needed to call upon these less-than-respectable skills, which he had learned from Unez, his Scoridian journalism mentor in Edinburgh. Working his way through the lock, he thought of an incident several years ago, when Unez had snickered smugly while Pennington fumbled with a simple magnetic bolt on a decrepit old building’s service door. As criticism went, it had been decidedly unconstructive, but it was also effective: Pennington had vowed never to suffer that embarrassment again.

  The last interlock released with a soft clack.

  He picked up his duffel bag and opened the door, which swung outward, expelling a stale gust. The storage unit was about two meters high and as narrow as the door. An overhead light glowed automatically to life, revealing a shallow space. It was only slightly deeper than he could reach without leaning over the frontmost row of stacked plastic containers.

  Like a stevedore, he hauled out the boxes and opened each one in turn. Rooting swiftly through their contents, he plucked out items that could link him to Oriana. A photograph of them he had taken with his FNS recorder. Some small handwritten notes of the exceptionally trivial variety—“Stepped out for coffee,” or “Missed you this morning,” or “Saw these and thought of you”—that he had left for her when their schedules had failed to synchronize as planned. The first bouquet of flowers he had ever given to her, desiccated and bundled in a cone of fragile paper. And, most damning of all, a stack of his passionate letters, which had been instrumental in his courting of her.

&
nbsp; He stuffed all of it into his duffel and tied it shut. Slack and half-filled when he’d come here, it now bulged full.

  Once all the boxes were resealed and neatly put back in their places, he swung the door closed. It moved slowly, its hydraulic hinges designed to prevent slamming. As it neared the doorjamb it slowed further, inched into place, then suddenly was pulled inward by the magnetic bolts. Whirring and clicking sounds overlapped for a few seconds while the other locking mechanisms automatically secured the heavy gray metal portal.

  After repairing the door-lock panel, Pennington hefted the duffel over his shoulder with a grunt of effort and walked slowly away from Oriana’s storage unit, in search of a garbage-disposal chute. This entire section of the station smelled mechanical, like hydraulics and ozone. In the rush to make the station operational, some of the less-visible areas, like this one, had been slap-dashed together and still weren’t quite up to Starfleet specs. Some of the lights flickered, intercoms crackled and cut out, and the ventilation system rumbled constantly, filling the corridors with a steady flood of dull white noise.

  He was grateful for the roar of the air ducts, though, and for his soft-soled shoes, which enabled him to skulk along in near-silence. The last thing he wanted to deal with tonight was running into someone who would ask what he had in the bag.

  Roaming for several minutes in an arbitrary left-turn, right-turn search pattern, he paused at every corner, listened for company, and peeked to make certain he wasn’t blundering into an unfortunate encounter. He glanced down a short, remote stretch of dimly lit corridor and finally saw a garbage-disposal chute large enough to accommodate his duffel. Or a body, his cynical reporter’s instincts suggested.

  He entered the corridor just as he heard footsteps—and a dry scraping sound—approaching from around the far corner. Ducking quickly back the way he had come, he clutched his duffel, afraid to set it down lest something inside it settle noisily or clank against something else. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, calming himself, remaining still.