Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  There’s always a chance, he reminded himself. They might be alive but without communications. Until we know otherwise, this remains a rescue mission.

  His door signal buzzed. For a moment he considered making whoever was outside wait while he tossed his damp towel back into his shower nook and swapped his loose civilian shirt for a proper uniform jersey. Then he reconsidered and said, “Come.”

  The door slid open, and Lieutenant Robert D’Amato stepped inside. “Pardon the interruption, Captain. Is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all, Mr. D’Amato. What’s on your mind?”

  D’Amato took a few moments to choose his words. “I saw that Mr. Spock’s roster for the landing party on Ravanar includes Ensign Pawlikowski from earth sciences.” After a brief hesitation, he added, “I also noticed that my name wasn’t on the list, sir.”

  Kirk nodded. “And you feel this was an oversight?”

  “I am the ship’s senior geologist, sir. It should be me.”

  “You’re still on bereavement leave,” Kirk said. “For now, Pawlikowski is top of the list for your department.”

  “Captain, I understand that landing-party assignments are made at Mr. Spock’s discretion, but—”

  “I selected the landing party, Mr. D’Amato.”

  Heavy silence followed Kirk’s declaration. The thrumming of the Enterprise’s engines, straining to maintain maximum warp for an extended run, pulsed through the deck under their feet.

  D’Amato seemed to be struggling to restrain a floodtide of temper and grief. “I hereby request permission to return to active duty, and to serve on the landing party at Ravanar.”

  “Request denied.” Kirk walked past D’Amato and tossed his used shower towel into the corner.

  “May I ask why, sir?”

  “You know why,” Kirk said, opening his drawer and removing a clean uniform shirt. “A landing party’s no place to work out a personal agenda.” He backed off from his reflexive authoritarian mode. “Besides, I think you need to give yourself more time to deal with this. It’s been less than three days.”

  Shaking his head in protest, D’Amato said, “I can be objective, Captain.”

  “Can you? I’m not so sure.”

  Pausing to take a calming breath, D’Amato closed his right hand into a fist, which Kirk took as a sign that the man was barely holding himself together. “This isn’t about revenge,” D’Amato said. “And it’s not about some denial fantasy that she’s still alive if only I can find her.” His jaw trembled as he forced out the words, “I know that she’s gone.”

  “What’s it about, then? Proving you’re not in pain?”

  “No, sir. It’s about making this mean something.” The shadow of grief darkened D’Amato’s face. “I can accept that she died in the line of duty, but not that she died for nothing.” Tears of sorrow and anger welled in the corners of his eyes. “Something on that planet was important enough that Oriana and her shipmates were killed for it. I want to know what it was.”

  Kirk put down his jersey on top of the dresser, then walked slowly back toward D’Amato. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make sense of tragedy, D’Amato.” He placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “But it doesn’t always work. I can’t promise you that we’ll find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, the truth is that accidents happen—acts of nature, of random chance, of God, if that’s what you want to call it. You want an answer so badly that you might fool yourself into seeing one that’s not there.”

  “No, Captain, I won’t.” D’Amato straightened his posture, as if he were defying the weight of grief burdening his heart. “I’m a scientist. I have my training, standard protocols, simple rules for reporting only what I can detect, observe, and quantify. You can trust me to do my job, sir…to bring you facts, not wish lists. You have my word on that.”

  The captain considered D’Amato’s request. He is better qualified than Pawlikowski, Kirk thought. And the briefing from Xiong suggested we would want an expert in subterranean geology. Looking back at D’Amato, however, he remained worried about the deep emotional wound the man had just suffered. Letting this man be part of the investigation into whatever events had claimed the life of his wife wasn’t against Starfleet regulations, but it felt like a risky decision. What if I were in his place? Could I put my faith in science? In procedures and protocols and cold, hard facts? Kirk admitted to himself that he probably couldn’t…. But I’m not a scientist.

  “I’ll ask Mr. Spock to tell Pawlikowski you’ll be taking her place,” Kirk said. “Join us in transporter room one tomorrow at seventeen-thirty hours.”

  With a look of bittersweet gratitude, D’Amato nodded and said, “Thank you, Captain.”

  “Dismissed.” Several minutes after D’Amato had gone, Kirk was still wondering whether he had just made a grievous error in judgment. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow on Ravanar, he decided, then changed into his uniform shirt and left for the bridge.

  With a bucket of ice-cold water and a spin of the hammock, Zett Nilric rousted Cervantes Quinn from a drunken stupor aboard the Rocinante. The subsequent, heated exchange of exceedingly vulgar salutations led to Quinn’s quick beating by Morikmol, followed by a blurry drag through the corridors of the station. When the haze of Quinn’s minor battering began to abate, he blinked and realized that once again he was propped up inside Ganz’s dark sanctum on the Omari-Ekon, facing the big green Orion himself.

  “I have a job for you,” Ganz said, reclined on his mountain of rainbow-hued giant pillows.

  Acid churned, hot and sour, from Quinn’s stomach into the back of his throat. He couldn’t tell if the bile was the product of anxiety or of his hangover. With his hoarse croak of a voice, he said, “What kind of job?”

  “A delivery,” Ganz said. “To the camp on Kessik IV.”

  “The new dilithium mine?”

  Ganz nodded, then surveyed his manicured fingernails.

  Quinn continued, “What’s the cargo?”

  “Hardware.”

  “Hardware?” Quinn had a bad feeling about this. “Are we talking dynospanners, or the kind that’ll have Starfleet going up my tailpipe with a tricorder?”

  “The kind that repays the debt you owe me,” Ganz said.

  It’s contraband, huh? Whatever. “Where’s the pickup?”

  Zett cut in, “We’re loading your ship now.”

  “Whoa,” Quinn said. “I’m going out hot?”

  Ganz leaned forward. “You have a problem with that?”

  Quinn understood his situation clearly now: It was a setup. If I refuse it, he blasts me; if I take the job, I end up in jail. He sighed. It ain’t subtle, but I guess that’s the point. “No,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Good,” Ganz said. “The payment will be raw dilithium crystals, six kilos. Make sure they’re pure.”

  “Right,” Quinn said, even though he didn’t expect to get past his preflight check with a hold full of illegal cargo. “How do I contact the buyer?”

  “Zett’ll fill in the blanks before you leave. Which would be right about—”

  “Now,” Quinn said, “got it. See ya in a few days.” If you visit me in the brig, you green bastard.

  Grateful that he was walking out of Ganz’s place this time instead of being dumped out like garbage, Quinn descended the curving stairs two steps at a time and strode across the smoky gaming floor. He shouldered past dense knots of people who crowded around the center stage to ogle the striptease show. As soon as he left the compartment, he sniffed and groaned to realize that the cloying perfume of debauchery clung to his rumpled clothes like a chigger on a bare leg.

  He grew angrier by the minute. If he was gonna kill me, he could have at least been quick about it. That wasn’t how Ganz did business, though. The Orion merchant-prince had a knack for letting others do his dirty work for him.

  If Quinn got arrested, he could try to implicate Ganz, but that would lead inevitably to Quinn’s “suicide” in the brig. He imagin
ed how some intimidated medic would write up the cause of death: Subject snapped own neck in fit of depression. Instead, Quinn would play by the rules, keep his mouth shut, and spend the rest of his natural life in solitary confinement.

  Conversely, if Quinn made it to Kessik IV only to be gunned down while delivering a shipment of small arms, Ganz would be light-years away, safely removed from any stain of impropriety. No matter how Quinn looked at the situation, the rules of the game were rigged in Ganz’s favor.

  In the turbolift, his string of muttered curses bloomed into a shout of frustration. An irrational impulse drove him to kick the wall. Something went pop beneath his left kneecap. Hopping on one foot, he fell sideways as the door opened. He landed facedown in front of two young women, who recoiled with disgust, then stepped over him into the turbolift and shared a laugh at his expense as the doors began to close.

  Lying on the ground and clutching his knee, Quinn decided—between expletives—that this was shaping up to be one of the worst weeks of his life.

  The crawl to the bar seemed mercifully shorter this time.

  He was nursing his second double of tequila when he faced facts. I can’t turn down the job. I can’t do the job. I can’t run. Circumstances had dealt him a losing hand. Recalling his father’s lessons about playing cards for money, he knew what he had to do. If all the rules work for Ganz, it’s time to cheat.

  Swallowing his pride, he made the call.

  An hour later, Quinn sat waiting in the meeting place, surrounded by every depressing shade of gray he could have imagined, and a few more to boot. The brig, he brooded. Not my first choice, but I have to admit it’s private.

  He had entered through the front door. When the back door opened, he knew it must be T’Prynn. She walked in and was all business. “What is your ‘emergency’?”

  It confounded him that a woman with a voice so warm could have a heart so cold. “Ganz is setting me up to take a fall.”

  She arched one eyebrow. “Details.”

  “His boys are loading my boat with enough guns to buy me twenty years in here.”

  “So your difficulty is with Vanguard customs?”

  “For starters. Knowing Ganz, even if I make the drop, the buyer’s got my number.”

  T’Prynn looked away briefly, thinking. Quinn spent the moment admiring her gentle, innocent-looking profile. She reminds me of Molly, he realized. He hadn’t seen his third wife since she had tracked him down—on his honeymoon with his fourth wife, Amy—to remind him that their divorce wasn’t actually final yet. He shook his head and grinned at the memory of those roof-raising arguments. It was always something with Molly.

  Turning back in his direction, T’Prynn said, “What is your destination?”

  “The dilithium mine on Kessik IV.”

  She nodded slightly. “Make the delivery.”

  He blinked. “Maybe I haven’t made the situation clear.”

  “I understand your predicament perfectly. Make the delivery and bring Mr. Ganz his payment.” She took a few steps toward the rear door, then paused and looked back. “Our meetings must become far less frequent, Mr. Quinn. Furthermore, in the future they will be set at my discretion. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t call you, you’ll call me.”

  “Precisely. Good night, Mr. Quinn. Safe travels.”

  She left quickly, without sparing him another word or glance. Just like Denise, he reminisced, recalling his first wife with nostalgic fondness. Yeah, she ditched me with style.

  Swaddled in dark clothes of an exotic alien pedigree, and tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of the enlisted men’s club, Tim Pennington sipped slowly at an orange soda.

  As usual, he went unnoticed while he listened.

  Surreptitiously adjusting the settings on his recording device, he aimed it slowly from one table to another, eavesdropping, seeking out tidbits of conversation. Most of what he overheard were run-of-the-mill grumblings—double shifts taken, priority work orders with conflicting needs, broken equipment, and the like. Every now and then, however, he caught something interesting.

  “No telling what’s even in half those cases,” one stevedore groused to a table full of his comrades. “ ‘Category-one matériel, handle with care.’ That’s about all we ever get.”

  “We loaded one on the Bombay last time,” another man said.

  “I put a ton of C-1s on the Endeavour last month,” said one woman. “No bills of lading, though.”

  “There never are,” said the first stevedore, and the conversation veered away once more into generalized complaints.

  Pennington put away his recorder and slipped out of the bar. He had been hearing this kind of talk ever since he had first arrived on Vanguard. Throughout the lower decks, noncoms and enlisted personnel complained about work orders couched in secrecy, movements of shipping containers whose contents were all but unknown and therefore required the most stringent safety and security precautions, as a safeguard against every imaginable mishap. No one seemed concerned about the insistence on secrecy so much as they were vexed by the labor it added to their daily work schedules.

  Riding alone in a turbolift to the cargo levels, he shed his “lurking” disguise, revealing his regular clothes. He tucked the easily compressible alien fabric into his empty satchel and combed his hair briskly with his fingers, shaking out the dry-powder darkening agent he had treated it with. It was a quick change he had practiced for some time, and he now was quite adept at it. Stepping off the turbolift, he orientated himself quickly and walked toward Vanguard’s main cargo facility.

  Several hatch locks shy of reaching it, he stopped at the security checkpoint. Three red-shirted Starfleet security guards manned this entrance to the cargo warehouse. Each barrel-chested man wore a pistol phaser on his belt. Two stood guard in the corridor, in front of the sealed hatch. The third, ostensibly the one in charge, was inside a phaser-proof booth, monitoring security-camera signals, communications from the station’s operations center, and other vital data. All three of them stiffened to alert postures at Pennington’s approach.

  The guard with the dark crewcut reached for his phaser. “Halt. Identify yourself.” His partner, a bald, dark-skinned man, rested his hand on his own weapon.

  “Tim Pennington, here to see Chief Langlois.”

  The one in the booth spoke through an intercom. “What’s your business?”

  “Personal visit,” Pennington said. Declaring his profession as a journalist was a surefire way to get himself sent back upstairs in a hurry, and it was for the best if scuttle-butt around the station didn’t mention who had received visits from a reporter. He currently enjoyed tremendous freedom of movement around the station, and he didn’t want to give Commodore Reyes any reason to revoke that privilege.

  “You’ll have to wait while we clear that,” the booth officer said. Over the open channel, Pennington heard the man hailing Chief Langlois down in the bowels of the cargo facility.

  Despite the fact he was hearing it secondhand over the intercom, Langlois’s response came through loud and clear: “Send him down, Wallingford.”

  Glowering at Pennington, the security officer in the booth keyed the control and opened the hatch.

  Stepping through, Pennington gave the man a jaunty three-finger salute and said, “Thanks, mate.”

  The corridor on the other side of the hatch was shaped like a long, hexagonal tube. Its far end opened onto a broad walkway, which encircled the top level of the service side of Starbase 47’s enormous cargo and maintenance complex. The hum of activity echoed deeply in the yawning, torus-shaped space, which surrounded the energy-and resource-transfer lower section of the station’s core. Narrow shafts of bright blue light demarcated zero-g areas, which were designed for quickly shifting certain types of cargo from level to level, but in fact were most often used by the crew for quickly moving themselves between levels.

  The cargo warehouse was abuzz with several dozen personnel and multiple cargo-loading veh
icles, all of them moving in carefully choreographed patterns, clearing one bay and loading another, checking in one load of supplies while tagging up another to ship out. Supervisors, recognizable by their mustard-colored coverall jumpsuits, tracked each action on small handheld devices and coordinated with the operations center via radio headsets. Small-arms and ordnance handlers wore burgundy jumpsuits, commercial-cargo movers wore olive drab, and the rest of the Starfleet cargo teams wore dark blue.

  Pennington rode an empty, open-sided cargo platform down to the bottom level, where he found Chief Petty Officer Elizabeth Langlois snapping out orders quickly, averting logjams and shipping errors. “Blue three-fifteen,” she said into her headset mic, “move those prefabs to pallet twenty-two-echo and clear the bay-two platform for red nine-five.” She noticed Pennington stepping off the elevator. “Yellow one-baker, this is yellow one-alpha, handing off, confirm.” A moment later, apparently having heard the reply she expected over her headset, she lifted the mic away from her face and nodded toward Pennington. “Tim,” she said, shaking his hand. “What brings you down to the belly?”

  “Checking in,” he said with a broad grin. “Everything stacking up okay down here?”

  “Can’t complain,” she said, leading him out of the way of a fast-moving cargo loader. “Trying to load up the Meriden for another colony run tomorrow.” They stepped inside her cramped but immaculate office, which sat in a nook of the central core. She flumped into her swiveling, rolling chair. “Someone on gamma shift lost a power generator marked for the Trinay III outpost, and we get to pick up the pieces.”

  Pennington leaned sideways in the open doorway. “Another fun-filled day of opportunity and adventure, right?”

  “Something like that,” she said. A series of orange lights started to blink on the situation monitor above her desk. She sighed and got back up. “Look, thanks for the drop-in, but we’re busting down here today, and I really need to get back to it.”