Star Trek

by John Jackson Miller

  If Leland had another name, Georgiou didn’t know it. But she knew that the name of the group he led, Section 31, came from a portion of the Starfleet charter: evidently, the part that covered double-dealing and premature hair loss. The spymaster had shown up in her club on Qo’noS pretending to be a Trill, the disguise of choice for humans who wanted to look alien but didn’t want to put too much effort into it. He’d offered her a chance to evade the Klingon dragnet in exchange for work—the assignment that had brought her to Thionoga.

  Her cover story had required somebody to convict her of a crime; fortunately, her past was well stocked with routine incidents to which she could convincingly confess. She did so to a baffled magistrate for a mercantile league, who obliged her by putting her on the next prison transport. From recruitment to deployment was only a matter of days—but more than enough time for the emperor to decide that she hated Leland’s guts.

  “Looks like they’re taking you to the mess hall,” he said into her implant. “Your chance should be coming up. Do you read me, agent?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Georgiou said, dabbing at her temple as she marched. “And if you keep yammering, I will dig this thing out of my ear and shove it down your throat.”

  “That’s not much of a threat. The device is tiny.”

  “I didn’t say I would let go of it.”

  “Nice. Focus.”

  She did, looking in on every prison cell her processional passed. After a time, Georgiou whispered, “Target negative. She’s not here.”

  “You made it into the right section—congrats—but they keep her in solitary, except for meals.”

  “That doesn’t sound very solitary.”

  “Take the opportunities when they come. And yours should be in about twenty meters.”

  Sure enough, rounding the corner, Georgiou beheld a menagerie of the galaxy’s riffraff. Dozens of inmates, shackled as she was; many back from mining the asteroid Thionoga was attached to and all gorging themselves at long tables. Hogs at the trough—except for a small number of wretched individuals who lingered against the bulkheads and in corners, shrinking from the pandemonium. The others who’d been marching in line with her hurried toward the food, only to begin scuffling with those already there.

  “Even in the mental ward, you’ve got to fight to eat,” her Nausicaan escort said. “If you call this stuff food.” He tugged the manacles she wore toward him and touched a control on them. A light went from red to blue. “You’re checked in,” he said. “Someone else will take you back to your cell later.”

  “Abandoning me?” she asked as he stepped away. “I’m heartbroken.”

  “I’m not. That stuff Frietas tranked you with is about to wear off. I saw what you did to the team in the landing bay.”

  “The logical thing would be for you to keep me drugged all the time.”

  “Get the Vulcans to arrest you if you want logic. All you can hurt here are the other inmates.” He paused in the doorway and eyed her. “Something tells me you wouldn’t mind that.”

  “I don’t discriminate.”

  Actually, she did—and frequently. Thionoga was a genetic cesspool, populated by the trash of the universe. No Terran of any taste would wish to be in such a place, with these people, for longer than necessary. So she got on with it, fighting to ignore the smells and sounds as she scanned the dining hall.

  There, she thought, noticing a small Tellarite female huddled in a corner. Her hands clutched together, the young woman rocked back and forth, quaking—the whole world evidently shut out.

  Georgiou waited until an orderly brought out a steaming tureen. As other inmates crowded toward it, she made her way to the Tellarite’s corner. She spoke. “Dess Glon Tah?”

  The woman did not respond.

  “Are you Dess Glon Tah?”

  Nothing.

  “I can’t get a good look at her,” Leland said. “The imaging sensors are all facing the crowd.”

  “That’s what I’m for.” Leaning down, Georgiou yanked at the woman’s matted forelocks. She pulled upwards, forcing the Tellarite to stand and producing an anguished yowl. “So you do have a tongue,” Georgiou said. “Speak to me.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “That’ll do,” Leland said. “Voice print checks out. It’s Dess.”

  Georgiou pushed the Tellarite against the wall and spoke covertly. “You’re with the Forest Circle movement?”

  “I must be,” came the tired response. “That’s why they put me here.”

  “An environmental activist. They tell me that’s a rare thing for the Tellarites here.”

  “It’s rare for Tellarites anywhere,” Dess grumbled. “But this shouldn’t be happening. I’m a Federation citizen.”

  “Who was arrested outside the Federation.”

  “On Coridan V. I have no rights there. Or so they say.” Dess slumped down the bulkhead and returned to her head-down stance. “Now go away.”

  Georgiou turned her head to survey the room. Nobody had noticed the conversation. “This is who you want?” she asked Leland quietly. “I can’t believe she’s worth the trouble. Barely more than a child.”

  “That ‘child’ was charged with trespass and willful destruction,” Leland said. “The mining guild buried her here.”

  “If she interfered with my mining operations, I might too. But the Tellarites are part of your little club. You can’t get her out?”

  “Ambassador Gav runs interference for a lot of their dilithium mining operations. Admitting that Dess is in Thionoga would force the Federation Council into a confrontation with the Tellarites it doesn’t want.”

  “You’re such cowards.”

  “Harmony in the ranks is a priority right now. We’ve just finished a war that a lot of our allies say was started by a human who defied orders!”

  Georgiou didn’t need to be reminded of the story—and the role her and Burnham’s doubles had played in it. Studying the exits, she announced that her chance had arrived.

  Leland agreed. “Go for it.”

  Georgiou knelt down beside Dess and spoke quickly. “Listen closely, girl. I’m a—” She checked herself. “I work with your friends. I’m here to get you out.”

  Dess looked up, eyes bleary. “What?”

  “I said, I’m here to rescue you. There’s a supply shuttle waiting. The pilot’s left the cargo hatch unlocked, with a nice spot in the hold for us.”

  The young woman didn’t understand. “Who are you?”

  “That’s not important.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe this.” Georgiou held up her manacled wrists before Dess. “Leland: be useful.”

  “Done.” A remote command sent through the mainframe caused Georgiou’s cuffs to deactivate. They snapped open and fell from her wrists. She quickly reached for Dess’s manacles and read Leland the number labeled on them. A second later, the Tellarite’s hands were free.

  Astonished, Dess rubbed her wrists. “How’d you do that? They’ve had those on me for weeks.” She perked up. “They say I’m crazy, that I’m dangerous!”

  “What you are is loud.” Georgiou studied her for several moments, before rising. “Hang on to those manacles and wait here—while I make some more noise.”

  A cheer from the inmates heralded the arrival of another huge tureen. “More slop, vermin!” the Ktarian cook yelled. “Fill your mugs and fill your bellies!”

  Georgiou stepped between inmates at a table and snatched a metal mug. “Hey!” shouted its owner.

  “Sorry,” she said, advancing on the cook. “Yoo-hoo!”

  The cook’s head snapped toward her. “Wait your turn, human!”

  “Don’t think I will,” she said, swinging the mug and smashing the Ktarian in the face with it. The cook reeled but did not drop his steaming vat. Georgiou sidestepped him—and a good shove sent him and the tureen barreling into the hungry queue. Within seconds half a dozen inmates were tangled with him on the deck, covere
d in scalding gruel.

  Spinning, she grabbed one inmate after another, pushing them toward the pile and preventing anyone from rising. The sentries stationed nearby went for the scrum, not for her—and quickly slipped and were pulled under. The other diners got into the act, hurling dinnerware and dinner alike.

  Georgiou hustled from the fray. “It’s begun,” she said aloud to herself. “Too bad there’s no war cry for a fight involving food.”

  “Matter of fact,” Leland replied, “this universe has one.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  Dess, on the other hand, was startled by the events—still cringing and clutching the deactivated manacles. Georgiou delivered a roundhouse kick to an advancing guard before rejoining the activist. “Come on, girl. Let’s go!”

  Georgiou shoved Dess toward the kitchen, pausing briefly to deal with another couple of sentries. A third appeared while Georgiou’s back was turned—only to receive a smashing blow in the face from someone else: Dess, wielding a metal tray.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks,” she said.

  “Hope you enjoyed it.” Georgiou pointed to the manacles Dess had dropped in order to pick up the platter. “I said, bring those.” Seemingly unsure why she needed to, Dess retrieved the cuffs.

  Georgiou directed her through another aperture. “Left and then right,” Leland called out, guiding the pair through corridors to a stairwell. “There’s a spoke of the station connecting your wing to the cargo shuttlebay.”

  The pair made good time toward it—surprising Georgiou, who might have expected Dess to be worse for her ordeal. With youth came resilience. Leland’s coaching helped, directing the two away from advancing sentries; the couple that couldn’t be avoided, Georgiou made short work of. Nobody had wielded a disruptor against her, so she didn’t yet have one of her own—but it hadn’t mattered. Thionoga’s brutes weren’t accustomed to people who fought back.

  Soon, Georgiou and Dess emerged from a passageway onto a catwalk suspended over a landing bay. “Your ride’s down there,” Leland said. Georgiou spotted the shuttle in question on the deck down below. “There’s a ladder at the far end of the catwalk, just before engineering storage.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” Georgiou said. She turned to Dess, who was looking down at the ships. “You’re almost there. Ready?”

  The Tellarite gushed with glee. “Whoever you are, I don’t know how to thank you!”

  “More to do first. Manacles.”

  “Uh—here,” Dess said. She passed them to Georgiou. “Are you going to put them on me? Pose as a guard?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Georgiou stuffed them into her waistband. “I have a better plan. Climb that railing.”

  Puzzled, Dess nonetheless complied. “Like this?” Feet on a lower part of the railing, the Tellarite looked out over the landing bay, a great height off the deck. “Won’t they see me?”

  “I need a distraction. You’re it.” Abruptly, Georgiou grabbed Dess by her collar and backside and hurled the young woman headlong over the railing. The Tellarite screamed as she fell—all the way down, until her body caromed off the side of a gantry and smashed into a pair of unsuspecting workers.

  Georgiou looked over the side at the spectacle. “Huh. I was hoping to see her bounce.”

  “Wait!” Leland called out. “What did I just see?”

  Georgiou ignored him as she rushed up ahead to her real destination, the engineering substation. It didn’t take long for her to find what she was looking for. She opened a panel on a console and began fishing.

  “What happened to Dess? What did you do?”

  “Nothing that wasn’t going to happen,” Georgiou said, finding the relay she was looking for within the mass of ODN cabling. “Nothing she didn’t deserve.”

  “What?”

  “That girl wasn’t a prisoner,” she said as she pulled out the manacles Dess had saved. “Tellarites have disgusting skin under the best of circumstances—but those wrists were baby smooth. She said she’d been in those cuffs for weeks.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything! She’s scared, she’s disoriented!”

  “She’s pretty damn muscular for someone who can’t get fed,” Georgiou said, talking even as she used a tool to expose the manacles’ electroshock coils. “And she’s never been to the Coridan system. The dilithium’s on the third planet. I should know—I reduced it to its mantle supplying my ships.”

  “That’s still no reason to—”

  “But what really gave you away was the environmental front. Iaponius is literally my middle name—I know Japanese. And one of a number of ways to say Forest Circle is… Kobayashi Maru.”

  Leland went quiet for a moment. Finally: “Too cute, huh?”

  “By half.”

  The spymaster laughed. “You’re good.”

  “I’m gone.” Georgiou’s patience was at an end. “I’m not some cadet to be tested. I won’t be manhandled and drugged to prove myself.” She finished wiring the manacles to the cabling. “This pulse will direct back into the surveillance systems. It should knock out your ability to see and hear me for a while—and it will shut you the hell up.” She smirked. “That’s the best part, actually.”

  “Wait! You can’t do this—”

  “I can do anything. I quit.”

  7

  Red Sector

  THIONOGA DETENTION CENTER

  Since reaching the stars, the Terran Empire had grasped ever outward. Yet even as it seized far-flung worlds, many of its rulers turned inward—and backward. Every moderately successful monarch, general, or revolutionary in Earth’s history had been claimed as an antecedent by one Terran emperor or another, whether or not a familial tie really existed. If it bolstered one’s legitimacy to invoke kinship to Alexander, Shaka, Rommel, or Khan, why not? Every little bit helped.

  As emperor, Georgiou had drawn on her share of historical names—but unlike many of her predecessors, she also had studied their ideas. It did not impugn her intelligence to draw upon the tactics of another, especially not when that other was long dead. By using the best ideas, she made them her own; making them solely hers was the job of the historians commanded to cultivate her legend.

  Nobody in either universe, for example, had definitive creatorship of the Thirty-Six Stratagems of ancient China. Some attributed them to Sun Tzu, while others considered them an amalgamation of warfare tactics passed down orally. Georgiou had claimed them as hers early on; her ancestral homeland on the Malay peninsula wasn’t exactly next door, but most of her subjects didn’t know the difference. And the teachings were, after all these centuries, useful—even for someone escaping an interstellar prison.

  “Hún shuǐ mō yú,” she recited to herself as she crept out from a maintenance accessway. Disturb the water and catch a fish. She had disturbed many ponds on Thionoga in the two hours since ditching Dess, causing chaos on a tremendous scale. It was easier than she’d imagined possible—because while her mission had been a sham, the space station had turned out to be a real prison, one that had sublet part of its facility to Section 31 for Leland’s game. The second Georgiou stepped out of the path he had plotted for her and into the rest of the facility, one opportunity for mischief after another had come her way.

  There were the Blue and Orange Sectors, made indistinguishable to their workers after she deactivated the lighting. There was the delicious misdirection in cargo bay three, where she’d powered up a space tug she could never have escaped in and debarked the second it started moving. It had slammed into a parked chemical hauler, setting the whole deck on fire. That emergency made possible her masterstroke in Violet Sector, repeated since in Tan and Red: convincing the prison blocks’ command computers to open every cell in the area. The inmates, no fools, had obliged by running amok.

  “Almost too much fun to stop,” she said aloud, delighted not to hear a response from Leland. Then again, it was hard to hear anything over the sirens—especially here, in Red Sect
or’s command center. The staffers having long since decamped to a more secure location, she had no difficulty finding an unattended terminal. The trouble was searching for one that hadn’t been smashed.

  Finally reaching one in working order, she assessed her location and looked for a likely escape vessel—a warp-capable ship that wasn’t a prop left by Leland. Only one fit the bill, well away from her position. Another gauntlet to run—of course.

  She gnawed her lip on realizing there was no way around a simple fact: she would need help. She wasn’t going to be able to steal a ship and open the landing bay doors and hold off her pursuers all alone. The last problem was the biggest. Even with the disasters rumbling through Thionoga, there were just too many sentries roaming about—whose number, she had seen, occasionally included officers in Section 31 uniforms. She needed help—or a force amplifier.

  She walked around a bank of terminals. A disruptor sat on the deck, still beside the body of a guard the mob had coldcocked. It was a sign of how well the revolt was going that the rioters had ignored the weapon. By now, they had plenty. Georgiou knelt and reached for it—

  —only to pause. She hadn’t killed anyone in her escape. Not yet, anyway. She’d broken jaws and limbs and shattered a lot of egos. But Dess was alive; Georgiou had heard her howling after her impact. So far, nothing she’d inflicted on anyone was beyond the medical science of a universe of softies who flinched at the suffering of others. Georgiou had no compunctions, of course, but she knew if she started killing now, she might be sentenced to Thionoga—or a prison that actually functioned—for real.

  And the Michael Burnham of this continuum certainly wouldn’t approve.

  But neither was she present to object.

  So be it, Georgiou thought. She needed no excuse to rid the universe—any universe—of people who didn’t matter, of those who stood in her way. It was the answer she was heading toward all along, and it was also logical. Even amid the chaos, escape would require more than just tricks or—