Hands behind his head, Finnegan stretched his legs out and proceeded to listen. Looks like I’m back in the shadowing business.
47
Commercial Landing Zone
OAST
Quintilian walked the bridge of the Jadama Rohn, his every halting step filled with reverence. “This takes me back.”
His plans proceeding apace outside, he had made time for the detour as soon as he saw the freighter parked near his unused ones. Georgiou had followed him, with Dax and her guard in tow, as the tycoon boarded and walked the old ship’s corridors, careful not to step on any of the markings on the deck.
She knew that he’d been here before, with her other self, when the bodies were fresh in those positions, twenty-five years earlier. “It seems a strange thing to be nostalgic about,” she said.
“Oh, Jadama and I go much further back. When I was a refugee, Vercer was flying her even then—and when he took me on, the ship was my first home.” He ran his fingers gently over the helm console. “It was on this ship, in fact, that I first visited Oast.” He turned and regarded the captain’s chair. “He was a good man. My mentor. He first showed me the way to Oast—and introduced me to Pyramis and Thisbe, who handled the grain trade on this end.”
“Then you hired them.”
“It’s the rare Oastling who’ll travel. As I said, they told me about Anowath and the blood devils.” He turned to look out the forward viewport. “In those days, Umyda and the others hadn’t barred entry to the place. I saw the devils—and realized what they could do. How valuable they could be.” Checking the time, Quintilian cut his moment short. “We’d better go.”
Once on the ground outside, he gazed up at the freighter again, taking it in. Georgiou looked back to Dax—and asked a question she suspected they were both thinking. “There’s something I don’t understand. If the blood devils come from the underground pool, how did Vercer collect one from space?”
He looked back. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Georgiou walked until the three could see the dorsal hull of Jadama Rohn. “Those vents atop the cargo area, ahead of the warp manifold. They’re collectors.”
“Oh,” Quintilian said. He crossed his arms and looked back at the ship. “That’s right. You two thought he collected the blood devil through those.”
So did Captain Georgiou. “He didn’t?”
Quintilian chuckled. “It’s an interesting concept, scooping up evil clouds from space. I don’t think it would work.”
“Then what—” Dax said, momentarily forgetting her promise.
Georgiou stared at the freighter—and at once, all became clear. “Those aren’t collector vents. They’re part of a delivery system.”
“That’s my emperor,” Quintilian said. He looked to Dax. “She’s amazing, isn’t she? I envy the time you’ve had with her.”
“The freighter was carrying a blood devil, collected from the pool,” Georgiou said, walking through the steps in her mind out loud. “But the shipboard containment breached.”
“The rest you know.”
“I’m not sure I do. Why was Jadama Rohn heading out of Troika space? Where was it taking it? Who was it going to deploy the devil against?”
Quintilian just looked at her.
Of course.
“Jadama Rohn was heading to attack Archimedes!”
He grinned. “You are brilliant.”
“Vercer was carrying it for you,” Georgiou said. “You had never fired him.”
“I would never have done that. But at the time, attacking a Starfleet ship would have been very controversial with my other customers here, especially the Casmarrans. I couldn’t be seen to be involved.” He let out a deep breath. “After the inquest, I couldn’t help his family either. A shame.”
Georgiou looked to Dax, who could no longer control herself. “Vercer was going to kill you,” she said. “I mean, your double!”
“Every system needs a test,” Quintilian said. “And Starfleet had definitely earned being a part of it.”
“What?” Dax blurted. “Why?”
“Wait,” Georgiou said, waving her off. “Is that why you reached out to Captain Georgiou, to keep tabs on her? To see what she’d figured out?”
“At first, yes. We couldn’t kill her when she boarded—not when we knew the test had failed and Archimedes was out there. The Veneti couldn’t have beaten that firepower. I’d hoped she hadn’t figured out anything. I had hold of her tricorder for a few moments; I tried to delete some of the readings. But she was just too dogged. She never let it go.”
He stepped toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said, touching her shoulder. “I didn’t know her—or you—then. Don’t take it personally.”
“That’s all right. If your lackeys read my mind, you already know: I killed your double.”
He withdrew his hand quickly, only to make a show of dusting his armor off. “They did tell me something,” he said in even tones, “but I didn’t understand it.”
“It involved this very ship,” Georgiou said, indicating Jadama Rohn. “S’satah was delivering me a blood devil in my universe, just a few years ago. She’d code-named it Whipsaw.”
Quintilian nodded. “They did mention that. Go on.”
“It was in a containment system. She was going to beam it to me. Unless—” She stopped abruptly—and felt her blood beginning to boil. “That little rat was going to test it on me, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know that S’satah.”
“I thought I did. I certainly got to know yours.” She stalked about, thinking hard. “Captain Georgiou broke the two of you up. But if you and the captain had never met, you still could have been together.” She looked to him. “When your other self came out to confront me, he was buying time until S’satah could reach me!”
He put up his hands. “Again, not me.”
“You know what this means?” Georgiou spun and addressed Dax. “This means that little traitor Eagan actually saved my life. And the lives of everyone aboard Hephaestus!”
“An empire could have fallen right there,” Quintilian said, clearly eager to calm her. “But I’m much happier that it didn’t.” He approached her. “What matters isn’t what we did to one another in some other life. What matters is what we’re going to do now.”
She regarded him coolly—up until the moment that two glowing newcomers emerged from one of the other freighters.
Her two least favorite people.
“Pyramis! Thisbe!” Quintilian advanced toward them. In each hand, his Oastling aides gripped several chains. Copper-coated cylinders dangled from each. “Excellent. The traps are prepared.”
He took one from Thisbe and manipulated it. A little over half a meter in length, the drum featured two parts. The external sheath, serving as the trap, and a crimson-colored rod. “A hemoglobin equivalent,” he said. “Just as I used, years ago, to collect Vercer’s devil.”
“So small,” Georgiou said.
“It doesn’t take much. Remember, part of the cloud doesn’t exist in this dimension.” He turned. “Ah. Looks like the wait’s over.”
Georgiou followed his gaze to the brand-new freighters. Each disgorged a single passenger. Coming together in a group, the humans and Orions in Veneti uniforms presented themselves to Quintilian. Among them: Phylla, the kindly pilot from Tallacoe.
“Freighters are all functional and ready for cargo,” she said. She cast a disapproving eye at Dax, thief of her aircar. “Orders?”
“Deployment check,” Quintilian said.
Phylla turned back to the freighters they’d just left and gave a hand signal. In unison, doors on the hulls of each vehicle opened, revealing delivery-system vents similar, but not identical, to the ones on Jadama Rohn.
“Excellent. Take your traps and assemble on the northern perimeter. Pyramis and Thisbe will join you shortly to lead you to and from the pool. We’re not sure how the specimens will react to transporters.” Quintilian stood back
as his Oastling aides distributed the containment units. Phylla smiled as she took hers.
“She seemed so nice,” Dax muttered as the woman marched away.
“The Veneti believe as I do. And they’ll do as I ask.” He gestured to the remote field where the Casmarrans were parked. “You’ve set it in motion, both of you. The Casmarrans know they’re finished without new markets. Xornatta agreed today to allow me to open trade beyond Troika borders. Those ships are part of our greeting to the rest of the galaxy.”
“What about the treaty?” Georgiou asked.
“As of this morning, the treaty is null and void. The Dromax will do as I say—and the Oastlings never vote. Troika space is open for business.”
“Some business,” Dax said. “You’re not just taking merchandise! You’re delivering death!”
He gestured to Georgiou. “She said it to me at the villa. To take on the Federation and the Klingons, I will need more than conventional arms.”
“Your wealth isn’t enough. You’re going to start your own empire,” Dax said.
“Empire…?” Quintilian froze. After a moment, he looked back at her, his face gripped with hatred. “You Federation people. You’re unbelievable.”
“The Trills are nonaligned.”
“So was my colony!”
Georgiou had never heard Quintilian shout before. But now he was looming over Dax, yelling.
“Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Gorn—all of you, with your states and empires, always butting up against one another. Testing one another. And who gets crushed?”
“Do you care?” Georgiou asked.
“Of course I do.” He looked back to her. “Don’t you remember the proverb? ‘When elephants battle, it is the grass that suffers.’ ”
“We don’t have that one.”
“From what I know of your reality, I’m not surprised.” Stalking the landing field in his armor, he gestured to the gathering forces. “I don’t want to be an emperor. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my studies, it’s this: Empires fall. Everyone else gets sick of them and rises up. Sometimes they fall to barbarians—and sometimes to plague.”
Georgiou looked about—and saw the rest. “You’re planning both.”
“That’s the whipsaw. It may even be what my counterpart had in mind: a one-two punch. The clouds strike. And then, before the enemy can recover—the deluge.” He gestured to his army. “Or rather, the Cascade. An endless stream of Dromax, armed with Casmarran-built weapons. We’ll need them in any event: forces to strike those who are immune to the devils.”
“Intriguing.”
He rushed back toward Georgiou, taking her hands. “You can be a part of it, Philippa. With me. I can’t do this alone—I don’t have your talent for it.”
“You seem to be doing pretty well!”
“As a first stage. But with what you know, you can help me plan the rest. You can be a kingbreaker. Make sure that no alliance of more than two dust motes ever lasts in this universe!”
“It won’t work,” Dax said. “What happens after the devils hit their targets? They stay alive. They stay hungry.” She pointed back at the freighter she arrived in. “You’ve said they can travel across space in an instant. What if the one that hit Farragut is the same one that left Jadama Rohn?”
“It may be. I don’t care.” He pulled away from Georgiou. “We know more than we did then. There’s no hemoglobin in Casmarrans; they’re safe. And we know copper is a defense. My people and the Dromax will be outfitted. And while their people won’t leave the planet, much less help—Pyramis and Thisbe will be along to help control the devils. They, and some like-minded Oastlings whom they think they can convince today. I could never have done any of this without them.”
A wind swept across the surrounding fields, causing the grains to rustle. Momentarily, Georgiou thought dawn was approaching—
—and then a sound caused her to think otherwise. The lightest of hums, accompanied by a glimpse of light, well beyond Quintilian’s back. No Oastling in the field had looked like that.
It’s about damned time. She took a few steps away from the others, raised her wrist to her mouth, and whispered to the item secured inside the seam of her sleeve. “The freighters.”
If Quintilian heard, he did not react. “And with that,” he said, facing Dax, “we have to say good-bye.” He addressed the Dromax guard, still waiting patiently nearby. “Sergeant?”
Georgiou saw the Dromax lift its disruptor toward the Trill. Tears of anger in her eyes, Dax didn’t move. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Of course I will. I’ve been planning since before you were born.”
Quintilian started to gesture to the guard—but the emperor quickly stepped in front. “No,” she said. “Let me do it.”
The magnate’s head tilted. “You want to?”
“Killing is nothing to me—and neither is she.” Georgiou smiled primly at him. “Besides, everyone seems to want to test me.”
“To your loyalty, then,” Quintilian said. He took the weapon from the Dromax and passed it to Georgiou. “Sorry we can’t toast to it, but there’s a fine vintage on my ship we can have, later after we’ve lifted—”
The device on his wrist beeped. He tapped it. “Yes?”
It was Gnaeus. “You’re needed on the command freighter, sir. It’s urgent.”
The interruption seemed to fluster him—but only a little. “So many details.” He looked back at Pyramis and Thisbe. “Join the collectors. Lead them to the shrine. And then recruit your friends. We’ll leave when you return.”
The Oastlings bowed.
“Gnaeus, bring me to you.” A second later, Quintilian vanished in a transporter effect.
Georgiou stepped several paces from Dax and pointed the disruptor in her direction. Dax, tears dry, snarled at her. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
“It.”
“What?”
Georgiou glanced upward. “That.”
From several places within the fields, targeted phaser fire lanced out, striking the camp’s towering portable lights. As those sources blinked out, something big and dark screamed past overhead, laying down fire of its own. One of the freighters burst into flames.
In successive swift moves, Georgiou shot the Dromax guard—then pivoted to target Pyramis with a shot in the back. Thisbe received the next an instant later. The incinerating Oastlings briefly lit the night before vanishing from existence.
Dax gawked. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping my options open.”
48
Commercial Landing Zone
OAST
Oast was as peaceful a place as Georgiou had ever seen. Yet inside of a minute, it had become like the largest moon of Dromax all over again. Energy weapons fire lanced between snipers in the grain fields and Quintilian’s forces in his staging area. Meanwhile, in place of lightning from above, disruptor fire came from below, searching for the stalker in the sky.
As Georgiou ran between freighters, the dark vessel rocketed over again, delivering a phaser barrage that struck the ship to her right. Its landing supports gave way, and it tipped with an angry groan, forcing her to tumble to avoid being crushed.
Scrambling to her feet, she saw Dax running through the now-firelit night, cutting around burning hazards. Georgiou had to catch up. She plowed through, hopping across debris in a desperate attempt to gain ground. The tactic helped—but as fast as the emperor was, she was no Olympic athlete. Dax ran like a jackrabbit.
Georgiou decided to take a chance, and did so, hurling her disruptor pistol ahead of her. Dax looked down as it careened past—a mistake, as the step she lost doing so gave the emperor the chance to tackle her. The two rolled near the landing gear of one of Quintilian’s freighters. It was hardly the safest place to be with an attacker in the air, but the emperor couldn’t be choosy.
“Get away!” Dax yelled over the din as they struggled. “I don’t want anything to do with you!”
“I never know what you’re going to do. You killed Pyramis and Thisbe!”
“They read my mind without asking. And Quintilian was going to use them in his plan.”
“His plan!” Dax spurted. “You talked like you were going to join him!”
Georgiou grabbed the younger woman by the shoulders and pushed her down. Not to harm her, but so she could look directly at her. “Dax. Emony. Either of you—both of you—listen! I had to keep him talking!”
“Why?”
“Because I had something up my sleeve!” Georgiou let go of Dax and demonstrated exactly that: the left sleeve of her uniform. She slipped her finger into a hole and withdrew something small and white.
“A tooth?”
“It’s the one Cornwell had her medic put in Finnegan’s mouth, replacing the one I knocked out on Thionoga.” She held the incisor between her fingers. “It’s a transmitter so the Federation could keep tabs on him—and me. Remember when I was trying to escape Pacifica and I hit him again? It fell onto the deck.”
Dax looked at her in bafflement. “You picked up his tooth? And kept it?”
That’d be an odd fetish even for me, she thought. But she had done so—another part of keeping her options open.
Around the time of her romp through NCIA-93’s Pandora’s Box, Georgiou had come across a file on the Viridium Integrated Dental Surveillance System. Beyond noting the usual Section 31 attempt at obfuscation—that a system abbreviated VIDSS had no vid component at all—she’d learned enough then to identify one, and also the spoken code words to turn it on and off and access its housekeeping file.
Boarding Jadama Rohn on the Dromax moon, she’d known there was a possibility not just that the blood devil lead wouldn’t pan out, but that the creaky old ship would fail, requiring a way to contact Section 31 for an evac. She’d doubted either her communicator or the ship’s comm would be of much help by the time she got to wherever Oast was.
That had led to her brainstorm. Finnegan was too incompetent to be anything but Cornwell’s plant; Leland certainly would have used him the same way, as a walking homing beacon and bug. She’d even overheard him offering to replace Finnegan’s tooth. But with the Federation and Section 31 at cross-purposes—even as they shared the same secret technology!—there was a good chance Leland didn’t know Cornwell’s earlier bug existed at all. He would need the proper frequency and decryption key, information she’d gotten from the tooth using the tiny voice that served as its interface.
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