“We meet again,” P’rou said. He pointed his weapon at her. “Five different people tipped us off. Three at the bar, one in the street—and just now, her, through the window.”
When trashing the curtain, Georgiou remembered. I’m such a fool.
“I’m Junah—and I know who you are,” her betrayer said to P’rou. “I don’t want the reward she offered, but I’ll take one from you.”
P’rou gestured to one of his partners. “A worthwhile transaction. Pay her something.”
“And one more thing,” Junah said as P’rou’s toughs dragged Georgiou to the door. “Make sure she doesn’t come back. I’m sick of seeing her.”
The Caitian released a growl, smiling all the while. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
27
Alien Region
CASMARRA
Leland had wanted Georgiou to play secret agent. In her universe, that recalled images from old Terran video dramas where heroic masterminds fought to prevent scurrilous enemy spies from interfering with their plans for domination. No children ever wanted to play the spies, who usually died horrible and deserved deaths, often staged with exotic creative flourishes.
Those were all in fiction, of course, something busy Terrans seldom had time to bother with. They were too busy making their dreams a reality. It was in that spirit that Georgiou had agreed to work as Section 31’s infiltrator in Troika space: because of the potential reward, a weapon with which her empire could be created anew. The prospect for a theatrical demise wasn’t on her sensor screen.
P’rou, on the other hand, had clearly watched too much of something, if his choice of lairs was any indication. After her capture at Jadama’s home, the Caitian and his thugs had carted Georgiou to a near-abandoned factory close by in the Alien Region. For half an hour, the emperor had lain strapped to a metal table in a shabby old foundry, now rumbling reluctantly to life. Smelting equipment and molds were all about; the only light came from kilns being relit.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” P’rou said, returning from a control station on the other side of a partition. “We only operate this place when we have enough ore—it takes some time to restart. And I didn’t want to send you off before my mother saw you.”
“Always thinking of Mommy,” Georgiou said.
The bruiser moved to strike her—only to stop, his fist centimeters shy of her face. “No, better you remain pristine until we’re ready.”
“You’d better not wait around too long. I’ll be missed.”
“You won’t be found.” He held up the communicator Phylla had provided; it had been wrested from her before she could use it. “I turned off its homing device back at the flat.”
Georgiou exhaled. The building stank of charred metal. Her place of restraint offered her full view of the high ceiling, where giant vats hung suspended from railings. Some were being pumped full of water, clearly part of some cooling system. Other containers, parked outside an enormous furnace, awaited something far more threatening.
P’rou saw where she was looking. “We’re melting kironium now. You’ll get a closer look soon enough.”
The name gave her pause. “Kironium? I didn’t think that was found in nature.”
“That’s di-kironium. Kironium’s rare, but Troika space is lousy with it. Everywhere but here, that is. The Casmarrans dug all theirs up centuries ago.”
Another connection, Georgiou thought. Dikironium, Dax had said, was detected as a component of the cloud that had beset Farragut. She eyed the jet-black vats, beginning their automated move into the furnace. “What exactly does kironium do?”
“To flesh? You’re going to find out.”
“As long as we’re waiting, indulge me.”
He snorted. “Kironium is good for only one thing: it pleases the stinking Casmarrans. It replaces tin in kironium bronze; they can’t get enough of the stuff. Something in the alloy triggers their pleasure receptors.”
Georgiou had seen the statues everywhere. “So their art gives them a high.”
“Or something. It’s pretty to look at, and the Dromax still have plenty of ore. If the Troika ever threw the gates open to the galaxy, they could probably move a lot.”
“They don’t want to do that?”
“Some things are more important than wealth,” he said. “Mother says you Starfleet people poison everything you touch.” He glanced at the kiln, its safety barriers keeping in most of the blazing heat but releasing a fair amount of light. “The Casmarrans are great at manufacturing, but they despise high temperatures. That’s given us a business here. All the hot work goes to outsiders.”
“Like you,” she said. “I’m not surprised. You’re a parasite, living on the fringes. Never going for the real chance.”
Newly enraged, P’rou advanced toward her again—
—only to turn when he heard his mother’s voice: “Where is she?”
“Right where you want her.” He stepped aside to admit S’satah, again dressed as if she’d come from a business meeting.
Hovering over Georgiou, S’satah looked her prisoner up and down, feline eyes flaring with glee in the light of the glowing furnaces. “Wonderful. It’s not even my birthday.”
“We celebrated your birthday once,” Georgiou responded. “As I recall, you were the one in restraints.”
“Stop talking nonsense.”
“Ah, yes. I was thinking of someone who was more fun.”
Bewildered by the comments, S’satah held up a comm. “You were a fool to come here.” Her expression turned quizzical. “P’rou’s message said you were asking about Captain Vercer.”
“Looking up an old friend.”
“Old friend?” S’satah laughed. “You’re the one who found him dead!”
Georgiou’s eyebrow arched. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody needed to tell me,” S’satah said. “I was there!”
The emperor’s eyes narrowed as she tried to remember all the details from her counterpart’s report. “There was no Caitian aboard that day.”
“Says you. I was in a spacesuit. You couldn’t see my face—but I stuck a disruptor in yours.” S’satah did so again, now. “Remember?”
The emperor did not, but there was no explaining that. There had, however, been mention in Lieutenant Georgiou’s notes of the person who’d threatened her. “There was someone Quintilian called Zee.” She looked up. “Zattah?”
S’satah laughed derisively. “He was always renaming people. The world’s his toybox and we’re his playthings.” Venom dripped from the Caitian’s voice.
I get it now. “Were you his plaything, S’satah?”
The woman slapped her with her free hand.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
S’satah stepped back and pointed outward, in the general direction of Tallacoe. “That place beside him was mine! The job of master trader was going to be P’rou’s!” She jabbed a furry finger at Georgiou. “But all those years, he kept messaging you. Again and again. You don’t think I knew? He didn’t even hide that he was doing it. He’d even get up from our bed to contact you!”
“Then you definitely aren’t the woman I knew,” Georgiou said. “She was more distracting.”
P’rou balled his fist. “Let me at her!”
S’satah was about to—but then she held him back. “Wait a minute,” she said, glancing at her son. “She’s Starfleet.”
“You have a grasp of the obvious,” Georgiou droned.
“So she’s got a pretty uniform back in her luggage. What of it?” P’rou asked his mother.
“So why would she risk her neck asking around here?” S’satah loomed over her again. “Why do you care about Vercer? About Jadama Rohn?”
“You know Starfleet. Driven by curiosity,” Georgiou said. “And we’re all bleeding hearts. A gerbil dies across the galaxy, we send an inquest team.”
“But twenty-five years later?” S’satah tilted her head. “Or was that also why you were here five years ago?�
��
“You used to be a sport, S’satah. Let’s torture each other and find out what we all know.”
S’satah glowered at her—and then looked to the furnace, where a vat of white-hot kironium bronze emerged. Noisy motors above the overhead track carried it, suspended, out over the work floor. “P’rou, what’s going on?”
P’rou smiled. “I thought we’d send Quintilian a nice statue.”
“A gift to commemorate old times?” S’satah grinned. “I like it.”
Georgiou had suspected all along that was the plan. “It won’t work. My body will burn—or melt. You’ll have nothing but a messy metal lump. Believe me: I know whereof I speak.”
“Then we’ll send him a messy lump,” S’satah said. “With a recording of its creation.”
Georgiou strained at her bonds, to no avail. Her head turned, she saw mother and son step partway across the foundry floor. Three of his four Orion henchmen were gathered, anxiously awaiting what was sure to be a grisly spectacle. Preparing her comm unit to record the emperor’s death, S’satah asked, “Who’s running the show?”
“Wemmis.” P’rou pointed to the booth that held the control station. He cupped his hands and shouted to be heard over the machinery. “We’re in position, Wemmis. Let it rip!”
After a moment, the enormous overhead vats went into action, trundling along. Georgiou’s exertions took on greater urgency. Vats crossed beneath one another in midair, changing direction and heading toward her.
As gears ground, P’rou looked up. “Wait!” His call only barely audible to the struggling Georgiou over the din, no one in the control cabin heard it at all—or, at least, nothing changed in the motions of the vats overhead. P’rou shouted at the booth. “Wemmis! What’s going on?”
A static-ridden message came over the public address system. “There’s a problem in the mrflfnff!”
S’satah looked to her son. “In the what?” she asked.
“There’s a problem in mrflfnff!”
P’rou started toward the booth. “That’s the wrong vat. And the wrong way. Wemmis!”
“Sorry, he’s not home,” boomed an accented human voice over the public address system. “Bath night!”
S’satah looked up and saw the hinged bottom to the vat directly over her head opening. She screamed—only to be literally drowned out as thousands of liters of machine-chilled water pummeled her and P’rou’s goons.
“Mother!” Seeing S’satah and his companions flattened beneath the still-cascading torrent, P’rou dashed toward them. Realizing they were choking but alive, he pivoted to charge back toward the booth. He didn’t get but a step before he ran into what the restrained Georgiou had already seen: a large metal bar swinging at his face, wielded by a grinning human.
“You should’ve gone for the shower!” his assailant shouted, the words covering a sickening crack, as metal met fur. P’rou tumbled backward, unconscious, into the coursing puddle that held his cohorts.
Georgiou called out, “Finnegan!”
Finnegan doubled over in laughter, dropping the crowbar with a clang. “Never thought I’d get to use the bucket trick on duty!”
“Finnegan, you moron. The vats!”
He looked up and saw what she did: the herky-jerky transit of a molten-metal-filled vat, splashing superheated liquid as it made its way toward her. “Whoops.”
He ran to her side—not what she wanted him to do. “Go turn it off!” she said.
“I was lucky to turn it on!” Unable to pull loose her restraints, he glanced up at the approaching vat before running back across the foundry floor.
Georgiou saw there was no way he could get there in time. “What are you doing? Come back here!”
“Make up your mind!”
Finnegan had just passed the pile of coughing prank victims when he spied the disruptor S’satah had dropped. He snagged it and headed back to Georgiou.
“At the base,” she said, pointing to where the metal straps holding her down were connected. Finnegan knelt, trying to figure out where to shoot.
“Oh, bloody hell,” he cried. He stood and took aim. Not at the vat itself—or S’satah and her Orions, trying to regain their feet. Instead, he targeted something much farther away: the overhead motor controlling the vats. His shot struck something mechanical, causing the vat to jerk to a halt, spilling a drizzle of molten alloy that just missed Georgiou’s table.
The danger wasn’t over, she saw: the motor was still running, somehow, gears grinding away even though its burden made no progress. Finnegan adjusted the disruptor and fired once at the connection locking the strap holding her arms. Georgiou sat up immediately, seized the weapon from him, and directed his attention back to her drenched captors. “Stop them!”
While she reached around the table to target the straps holding her legs, Finnegan ran back across the floor and found the crowbar—just steps short of a rising Orion. Finnegan swung again, causing the male to fall backward across a crawling S’satah.
“Ha ha!” he shouted, waving the crowbar in a fencer’s riposte. “En garde!”
“Run, you fool!”
He looked back to see the shouter: Georgiou, standing free—and pointing. Pointing at the track suspended from the ceiling, where the damaged motor, having finally decided which direction it wanted to turn, slung the vat of kironium bronze on a headlong trip to the far side of the foundry floor. In seconds, the vat violently reached the end of its possible journey—and, with nowhere left to go, dumped its contents. The superheated metal blossomed onto the floor, showering nearby equipment and setting off a chain reaction of explosions.
Finnegan made a panicked dash in Georgiou’s direction, while S’satah and her Orions gathered up the fallen P’rou. “Run!”
Georgiou took aim with the disruptor at her former captors, but there was no time to change the setting, much less shoot. Not when the track structures all around the foundry started their own groaning collapse, spilling water and alloy as they descended. Instead, she grabbed Phylla’s comm unit from the floor where P’rou had dropped it and fled, following Finnegan into the street.
The foundry burned and churned, exploding as the pair bolted through the alleys. They were three blocks away when the din subsided.
There, winded and leaning against the back wall of a slum, Georgiou looked at him in amazement. And when Finnegan’s breath returned enough for him to double over with riotous laugher, she did something she’d never thought she would.
She joined him.
When the elation subsided, she finally asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I saw that you were trying to sneak off with that pilot lady. What’s-her-name? Pillow.”
“Phylla,” Georgiou corrected. “I didn’t sneak off. I had Quintilian’s okay.”
“But you left without me or Dax.”
Wiping sweat from her hair, she regained her cool. “Why would I need either one of you?”
“I’m assigned to watch you. They said you’d try to ditch me.”
“Perhaps it’s because you belong in a ditch,” she said, reaching for the pager. She cracked it open and reconnected the power source. “You’re not Blackjack. You’re of no use to me.”
“Seems like I was a lot of use back there.”
She closed the pager and activated it. “I had things fully under control.”
“Didn’t look like it.”
She wasn’t going to argue that point. She walked briskly past him, knowing Phylla would need room to land. But she stopped and turned when a different question occurred to her. “How did you even know where I was?” She held up the pager. “This wasn’t working—and I haven’t had my ear implant since Thionoga. Leland didn’t give you some way to track me, did he?”
“I wish he had—it would’ve been easier.” He pointed to the sky. “I hitched a ride on the roof of your aircar.”
You what? Georgiou looked to the sky. “We were in the air for half an hour.”
“It was a bit br
isk, I’ll admit.” He flexed his fingers. “Rough on the knuckles too. I’m just glad it wasn’t raining.”
Looking up again, she saw the aircar approach. Yes, Phylla would have stayed in the area—and definitely would have seen the conflagration. It was just possible that someone might perch atop the vehicle, she saw—but one question eluded her. “Why would you do something like that?”
He shrugged. “It’s my job.”
She took a full step backward. A willingness to risk his neck insanely in the performance of his duties? That’s Blackjack.
Then she did a double take. “Wait. I was ambushed earlier. Why didn’t you help me then?”
“To be honest, I stepped away for a bit. I’d seen you stop in that pub and I figured I’d be a poor guest to visit and not pay my respects. Then I see they’re dragging you down the street.” His expression grew thoughtful. “In retrospect, I probably should’ve mentioned I don’t have the local currency before I opened my tab.”
She rolled her eyes. That’s Finnegan.
Phylla landed ahead at an intersection. Georgiou waved him toward the vehicle. “Let’s go. I don’t know how much of this I want to get back to Quintilian.”
Finnegan looked at the black plume of smoke rising in the north. “I have a feeling he’ll find out.”
“I’ll think on it.”
Then he followed her. “Hey, can I ride inside this time?”
“I’ll think on that too.”
28
Domus Quintiliana
CASMARRA
Quintilian had indeed learned about the disaster at the foundry, and Georgiou’s proximity to it; she had expected there was little chance that Phylla would not have reported back to her boss at some point. But the pilot had also evidently shared Georgiou’s cover story about a possible Federation award for him, and while it had not fully satisfied his curiosity regarding her whereabouts, he had pressed her no further about it.
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