Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  “And the loss of the Bombay wasn’t a waste, Commodore?”

  “No, Lieutenant. When a Starfleet ship and her crew are lost in the line of duty, it is never a waste, only a tragedy.”

  She paused to digest that. “Of course, Commodore. Your Honor, I request that my last question be struck from the record.”

  “So ordered,” Desai said.

  Moyer took a breath, reviewed her notes again, then recovered her composure and resumed eye contact with Reyes. “Let’s discuss the periodic maintenance and supply of the Bombay in the weeks leading up to its loss in action, and in the hours immediately preceding its final departure from the station.”

  “Very well,” Reyes said, his own anger now subsided.

  “Subpoenas to this station’s operations center yielded more than sixty unfulfilled requisitions from the Bombay for spare parts, replacement tools, and backup components.”

  She handed a data slate to Reyes that displayed a menu of the unfulfilled requisitions, then continued.

  “Unfulfilled requisitions for similar matériel filed during the same period by the starships Endeavour and Sagittarius totaled only fourteen—combined. Six from the Endeavour, eight from the Sagittarius.”

  Another slate was pushed in front of Reyes.

  “Why do you think there is such a pronounced variance in these totals, Commodore?”

  For the first time since his midshipman days, he felt dumbfounded. “Well, the Endeavour is a younger ship than the Bombay was. Almost ten years younger…. The Sagittarius? Well, she’s almost brand-new. And small. Easier to maintain.”

  Moyer scrolled through her own slate.

  “Your records also demonstrate a sharp discrepancy in the total number of hours these three vessels logged in spacedock receiving scheduled maintenance to critical systems.” She retrieved a thick binder of printed records. “During the past one hundred days, the Starship Endeavour received more than four hundred sixteen hours of maintenance and repair by Vanguard personnel. The Sagittarius received two hundred fifty-one hours of service. The Bombay? A measly one hundred four hours.”

  The binder hit the table in front of Reyes with a slap.

  “Explain this to me, sir,” Moyer said. “Bombay needed ten times more matériel than the Endeavour, but got only one-quarter as much time in your spacedock. Why?”

  Fighting to muzzle his own temper, he concentrated on unclenching his jaw first and on breathing second. He cast an angry glance at his defense counsel, then permitted himself a fleeting glare at Desai. Finally, from beneath a creased brow, he answered, “I don’t know.”

  An hour ago, he had dismissed this inquiry as a waste of time. Now he asked himself if Moyer was right. Did I send them out too soon? Were they not ready? Did I push too hard?

  Moyer made another small mark in her notes and carried on. “Let’s talk now about this morning’s report via subspace from the Enterprise, and whether better tactical procedures on Vanguard might have prevented the ambush of the Bombay.”

  “Objection,” Liverakos said. “Such an inquiry would risk exposing classified tactical information and methods that are vital to the defense of this station, and to the security of the Federation.”

  “Overruled,” Desai said. “I’m not going to let you shut down an entire avenue of questioning, Counselor. You may object to the discussion of specific technologies, policies, and methods as necessary. Lieutenant Moyer, please continue.”

  Reyes knew that, like any good lawyer, Moyer clearly sensed that she had opened a gap in the information barrier, and would relentlessly exploit it until all his picayune mis-steps and misjudgments were laid bare and daisy-chained into a litany of failure, incompetence, and negligence. He resolved to remember Liverakos’s instruction to keep his answers as monosyllabic as possible, and to just get to the end of the deposition without incriminating himself.

  Then it would be time to find a way to stop this witch hunt before it derailed the entire mission and truly made the deaths of Captain Gannon and her crew a waste after all.

  17

  It was far too early in the morning, Reyes had slept much too little the previous night, and the coffee was barely strong enough to merit the name. Despite the carefully balanced climate controls inside the starbase, he felt the same rising wall of pressure in his sinuses that he had felt on landing missions just before storms broke. Leaning forward in his chair, he rested his elbows on his desk, cupped his face in his hands, and exhaled a long, tired breath that was heavy with frustration.

  The other four people in his office waited patiently for his moment of dismayed fatigue to pass.

  Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Xiong occupied the chairs in front of his desk. Standing against opposite walls, flanking the two seated officers like rooks at either end of a chessboard, were Jetanien and T’Prynn.

  Reyes spent a few seconds massaging the bone around his eye socket. It ached deeply. “Lieutenant,” he said at last, “what part of ‘classified’ did you not understand?”

  “I presume that’s a rhetorical question, sir?”

  “Do you think humor is your best tactic here, son?” Taking the commodore’s meaning perfectly, Xiong said nothing.

  “It’s not his fault,” Kirk said. “I gave him no choice.”

  “That’s very noble of you, Captain,” Reyes said. “It’s also a complete load of crap.” Kirk clearly meant to press his case, but Reyes kept going. “He could have briefed you in private, or told you only about the artifact. Instead he gave you—and most of your senior officers—the entire history of the project.”

  “True,” Kirk said. “And my officers gave you one of the best leads you’ve had on this project since it started.”

  “Also true,” Reyes said, though it galled him to admit it. He glared again at Xiong. “And completely irrelevant.”

  Kirk stood, apparently for no other reason than dramatic effect. “So what now?” He paused behind his chair and leaned on the back of it. “Unbreak the egg?” Talking and walking, he took a few steps toward T’Prynn. “Court-martial a young officer who only wanted to share what he thought was vital information?” Circling around toward Jetanien, he continued, “Ask Starfleet to relieve me of command?” He saved his big finish for his last turn, back toward Reyes. “Or maybe shanghai my ship and crew into your service?”

  “None of the above,” Reyes said.

  Xiong looked relieved. Kirk looked surprised.

  Moving away from the wall to loom over Reyes’s desk, Jetanien entered the conversation. “A court-martial, though it would be an eminently appropriate remedy for Lieutenant Xiong, is not a viable response at this time.” Spreading his arms in a gesture of acceptance, he added, “Let us just say it would be an exceedingly delicate matter to argue under the rules of Starfleet jurisprudence.”

  “You mean it’d be an embarrassment,” Kirk said cynically.

  “No, Captain,” T’Prynn said, still content to remain at a slight remove from the discussion. “It would be a national-security disaster for the Federation.”

  “Which naturally brings us back to the topic that initially brought us here,” Jetanien said. “The attack on the Bombay. Since our earliest scout flights pushed into this region, there have been rumblings of discontent from the Tholian Assembly and the Klingon Empire. Although a major initiative such as Operation Vanguard cannot help but provoke the ire of our rivals, one of our chief priorities is the avoidance of hostilities—at any cost.”

  Tapping two fingers on the cover of Kirk’s report, Reyes said, “Are your people sure it was the Tholians who destroyed her? Because I can’t work with educated guesses and maybes.”

  “We’re sure,” Kirk said. “My chief engineer confirmed that the wreckage of four Tholian cruisers was mixed with the debris from the Bombay. And the data on the log buoy indicates that just prior to their attack, they had detected six Tholian ships closing on attack vectors. The evidence is solid.”

  “Good,” Reyes said. For a moment, he a
llowed himself to be impressed by the fact that Hallie Gannon had taken out four enemy ships; then he had to remind himself that she and her crew were still dead.

  Like an angry dog pulling at its leash, Kirk seemed eager to spring back into action. “What’s our response?”

  “Your response,” Reyes said, “is to go back to the Enterprise, purge all data regarding the Ravanar mission and Operation Vanguard from your databanks, and never talk about any of this with anyone ever again. I’m granting you and your men retroactive security clearance so I won’t have to string up Mr. Xiong by his thumbs, but he’ll be spending the next few months serving the most horrible duty assignments I can find.”

  “Let me rephrase,” Kirk said. “What response will you be recommending to Starfleet and the Federation Council?”

  Jetanien interposed himself subtly between Kirk and Reyes. “We will consider a variety of appropriate courses of action, Captain. Our current circumstances afford us a significant degree of latitude in our decision-making.”

  Kirk wasn’t a tall man to begin with, but standing in the shadow of Jetanien’s massive bulk exaggerated that fact. What he lacked in height, however, he clearly made up for with tenacity. “That sounds like a very diplomatic way of saying we’re not going to do anything.”

  “My interpretation might differ from yours,” Jetanien said.

  His face reddening with indignation, Kirk shouldered past Jetanien and leaned halfway across Reyes’s desk. “Don’t tell me we’re going to bury this. The Tholians ambushed a Starfleet vessel. They killed more than two hundred men and women.” He pounded his fist on the desktop. “It was an act of war!”

  “A full-scale conflict with the Tholian Assembly would compromise our mission in the Taurus Reach,” Jetanien said. “We have to weigh the costs of the Bombay’s loss against—”

  Kirk raged at Jetanien, “Weigh the costs?” Glowering at Reyes, he said, “He’s talking about politics—I’m talking about justice!”

  “You’re done talking, Captain,” Reyes said. “You ship out in three days. I suggest you use that time to work on your temper. Dismissed.”

  The fair-haired young captain straightened his posture into one of proud defiance. He looked down at Lieutenant Xiong. “You deserve better. Push for the court-martial.” Turning on his heel, Kirk walked in smooth, confident strides toward the door.

  As it opened, T’Prynn spoke, halting him at the threshold. “I know you think justice was betrayed here, Captain.” He cast an angry look over his shoulder at her. She added, “But believe me when I tell you that justice has a very long memory.”

  Kirk said nothing more. He walked out and the door closed behind him.

  Reyes concealed his annoyance as Xiong struggled not to make eye contact with anyone else in the room, even though everyone was now looking directly at him. “So how ’bout it, Lieutenant? You want to push for that court-martial?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Smart boy. Dismissed.”

  Xiong snapped out of his seat and was gone from the office before the order was ten seconds old.

  The commodore shook his head and frowned. “Best field archaeologist in Starfleet. And the biggest pain in the ass.”

  “With great talent often comes great impudence,” Jetanien said.

  “You’re just making that up,” Reyes said.

  “I was wondering how long it would take before you finally caught me.” Shifting his mood back to the serious, he continued, “This sudden increase in hostilities by the Tholians places us in a dangerous bind, Commodore. If the details of this attack reach the Federation Council, they will almost certainly insist on declaring war against the Tholian Assembly. Once we are so engaged, our forces will be unable to secure the Klingon border, and the Klingons are practically guaranteed to seize the opportunity to push into the Taurus Reach. If we permit this attack to take us to battle on one front, we will inevitably face a war on both fronts—and that is a war we cannot win.”

  “I’m not thinking that far ahead,” Reyes said. “Right now I’m worried about the board of inquiry; it’s starting to feel like it’s being run by the Salem judiciary. If the JAG office files enough subpoenas, somebody’ll say something they shouldn’t. And once it’s out—well, that’ll be that.”

  Jetanien folded the claws of his hands together in a slow, pensive gesture. “I might be able to open a discreet dialogue with one of Captain Desai’s superiors. Someone who could quash her inquiry.”

  “That’ll just make her more suspicious,” Reyes said. He sighed. “If I could just bring her into the loop, explain the mission to her, I know she’d find a way to shut it down, subtle or not.”

  In a tone that implied it was painfully obvious, Jetanien asked, “Why not just grant her security clearance, then?”

  “I gave clearance to Kirk and his men because I had to,” Reyes said. “It was that or court-martial Xiong and lose our best hope of piecing all this together. I’d have a harder time justifying a breach for a JAG officer.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jetanien said. “The risk is the same, only the circumstances are different. The admiralty would understand, I am certain.”

  “I’m guessing you’ve never met the admiralty,” Reyes said.

  “I sponsored several of their commissions,” Jetanien said.

  Reyes grimaced. “Well, that explains quite a bit.”

  “Gentlemen,” T’Prynn said with a lilt that sounded suspiciously teasing to Reyes’s ears. “This situation is not as intractable as you seem to think. There are…discreet options.”

  The Chelon ambassador turned his body to look at T’Prynn. Reyes reclined his chair and folded his hands on his lap. “I presume,” the commodore said, “that you have a proposition?”

  She arched a single, thin eyebrow. “Indeed.”

  For several hours, on the far side of a semiopaque security curtain that had been erected in the main spacedock hangar, a team of stevedores had been off-loading from the Enterprise mangled piles of metal, and shipping containers packed tight with small debris. One load at a time, it was all being transferred into Vanguard’s repair and salvage bay.

  Isolated on the observation deck, watching the dim outlines of the activity from afar, was Tim Pennington. He leaned against the cold, floor-to-ceiling transparent aluminum barrier. He pressed his forehead against it, and the empty compartment behind him fell away from his thoughts as he watched the final, tragic homecoming of the U.S.S. Bombay.

  For the past three months, word of the Bombay’s return to Vanguard had been cause for celebration. This morning there had been no cheerful reveille to herald its approach. Federation banners throughout the station remained at half-mast, and more than a few Starfleet personnel had bucked the regulations and worn black armbands of mourning when on duty in more remote areas of the station, away from the eyes of supervisors. Pennington had mistakenly thought the period of mourning passed after the first few days, but news that Bombay’s remains had come home had reopened this fresh emotional wound.

  He had intended to write an exposé. Tell everyone why the ship had been lost in action. Secure justice for Oriana and her shipmates. He had overheard T’Prynn speaking about the listening post on Ravanar, about the sensor screen damaged by an inept thief, but he had no hard evidence, no witnesses he could trust not to recant. He had been reading smuggled transcripts of the Starfleet JAG’s board of inquiry about the loss of the Bombay. The thrust seemed to be toward blaming Reyes and the Vanguard staff for over-working the ship and failing to provide it with proper maintenance. He had considered sharing his leads with the prosecutor, but he changed his mind when he realized that his complete lack of evidence would make his tip even more useless to her in court than it was to him in print.

  Desperate to vent his pent-up emotions, he’d written a memorial instead, culled from the personal recollections and anecdotes he’d been inundated with while devoutly pursuing some unnamed and elusive secret. His personal contributions, about Oriana, had
been altered enough to protect their privacy—and to prevent her husband from learning of their affair. He’d read his own memoirs and cringed at how maudlin and banal they seemed. Yet those were the ones that his editor, Arlys, confessed had made her weep for the lost men and women of the Bombay. “You put faces on them, Tim,” she’d written in reply to his submission.

  His mirage-like, long-faced reflection looked back at him from the transparent aluminum. Over the past few days he’d had time to think, and to recant the convenient lie he had been telling himself. I didn’t scrub every trace of Oriana from my life to protect her husband’s feelings. Telling myself it was for his benefit was just an excuse.

  Down in the docking bay, the off-loading was complete. The Enterprise slowly shut its scalloped aft hangar doors, and a team of zero-g workers in lightweight EVA gear retracted the gauzy privacy screen that had been obscuring the view. With the transfer finished, Pennington saw no point in prolonging his vigil. He pressed his right hand against the barrier, and his throat tightened with grief. Welcome home, Oriana.

  The first clue that word of his dustup on Kessik IV had reached Vanguard before Quinn did was the cordial nods of greeting he received from Ganz’s two hulking doormen. Normally when Ganz entered the Orion’s ship of sybaritic delights, the two bouncers either watched him suspiciously or, on their more extroverted days, sneered slightly in his direction. Until today, however, a courteous welcome had never been on the menu.

  Strolling through the gambling parlor on the lower deck, Quinn sensed people noticing him, heard his name bandied about under the music. For a few seconds, he felt like a celebrity. Being just a little bit famous excited him—until he thought about it for a few moments too long. All these people know who I am, and they know what happened on Kessik IV…. All these strangers. His exhilaration turned to a feeling of violation.

  Midway between the roulette wheel and the card tables, Zett intercepted him. On this occasion, the slender Nalori killer was decked out in a light-khaki casual suit. He made a point of invading Quinn’s personal space. “Welcome back,” he said loudly, over the music. “Mr. Ganz has been expecting you.”