The Dark Veil

by James Swallow

  “Thaddeus is an immature human, sir,” offered Talov. “You must understand, at his age and development he has yet to fully grasp the effect of his actions on the greater universe.”

  “It’s not uncommon,” said Hernandez, in a deliberately chatty tone, trying to lighten the moment. She gave an affable what can you do shrug. “Some of the niños push the limit, it’s the way they learn. You know how kids are, right?”

  The seemingly innocuous query seemed to dismay Qaylan and the other Jazari. They exchanged glances and a sudden flash of insight came to Troi. No, she thought, they really don’t.

  In point of fact, since coming aboard the generation ship, she had seen no signs of any young Jazari—or, for that matter, any elderly Jazari. Their only encounters had been with males of the species, all of whom appeared to be in the same roughly uniform age grouping. It was difficult for her to estimate the maturity of their kind from anything other than mannerisms and behavior patterns.

  “Huh.” Hernandez seemed to sense the same thing. “Or maybe not?”

  “I am sure my son meant no harm,” Troi said. “He is curious about your species. That curiosity outstripped his caution.”

  “The boy is safe and well,” Keret said suddenly, looking up from the device in his hand. Troi was uncertain how he could have determined that, but all the concerns she had and the small inconsistences preying on her mind went away when Thad walked over the shallow rise behind the medical tent.

  He caught sight of his mother and gave a sheepish half wave. She wanted to run to him and gather him up, caught between the need to be sure her son was unharmed and the impulse to give him a serious telling-off. It took an effort for Troi to stand her ground and let Thad come to them. With each step he took, the reality of the boy’s situation was settling in on him.

  “Hello, Mom,” he said, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck. “Um. Am I in trouble?”

  Troi folded her arms across her chest and channeled the commanding voice she remembered her mother using when she was a girl. “Thaddeus Worf Troi-Riker.” She used his full name to let the boy know that he was indeed in trouble. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I’m sorry.” He turned to the Jazari. “I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t have gone poking around where I wasn’t supposed to.” His lip trembled. He was trying not to cry. “But I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, I was just… making first contact.”

  “You are grounded, young man, indefinitely,” Troi said firmly. “And you are going to give your father an explanation. You are the son of a starship captain and a diplomatic officer. You’re supposed to set a good example for the others.”

  “Yes, Mom.” Thad blinked furiously, his eyes shimmering. Behind him, Talov stepped up to examine the boy.

  “And that will be the end of it?” Qaylan said harshly. “It is not enough. I demand you all remove yourselves from our vessel immediately!”

  “With respect,” Zade noted, “you do not have the authority to make that request.”

  “We shall see,” retorted Qaylan, and he marched away. After a moment, Zade and Keret made their farewells and followed in his wake.

  “I am really suh-sorry.” Thad barely got the sentence out before he burst into tears, and Troi couldn’t hold off any more, letting her firm expression melt. She hugged him and he tried to talk, gasping out words between breathy sobs. “I… just… met a… Friend. Made friends, that’s… what we are supposed to do…”

  Troi caught Hernandez’s eye and the lieutenant gave her a smile. “Hey, kid.” She dropped to Thad’s level, so they were eye to eye. “You know, I got into a lot of trouble with my mom when I was your age. But it was okay, I learned from it.” She offered him her hand. “My name’s Macha. Tell you what, why don’t we walk back to your tent and I’ll tell you about the biggest trouble I ever got in, okay?” She looked up at Troi, who gave her a nod.

  “ ’Kay,” said Thad, and suddenly he seemed like the little boy he really was as he took the lieutenant’s hand and let her lead him away.

  “Sometimes I forget, he’s not even six yet,” said Troi, watching him go. “He’s so clever for his age, it’s easy to think of him as a little adult.”

  “Quite.” Talov raised an eyebrow, then held up the tricorder he had in his hand. “I conducted a medical scan of Thaddeus and I detected no issues of note, other than some dermal abrasions. However, there is a minor anomaly of which you should be aware. Specifically, with regard to bio-matter traces on his clothing.”

  “Something dangerous?” Troi’s chest tightened.

  “Negative,” said the doctor. “Merely… unusual.” He showed her the tricorder’s screen. “Thaddeus’s clothes and footwear show traces of a quadrilateral tetrad pollen, of a kind similar to that from trees native to worlds in the Lembatta Cluster and Pavonis Sector.”

  Troi frowned. “Those places are nowhere near this system.”

  “Correct. I believe your son has been in close proximity to plant life not native to the Jazari homeworld, or indeed anywhere within this sector.” He folded the tricorder up and put it away. “The only logical explanation is that ecodome bordering this one contains a transplanted alien biosphere.”

  “Why would Zade’s people have something like that?” Troi frowned.

  “I have no answer for you, Commander. It is another unknown,” said Talov. “The Jazari seem to… collect them.”

  EIGHT

  “I think this is a miscalculation,” hissed Vadrel, and his long-fingered hands found one another in an absent, nervous motion.

  “Your reticence is duly noted,” Helek told him. Her voice echoed off the walls of the dimly lit storage bay. The only illumination came from the glowing coils beneath the nearby cargo transporter and the idle-mode display on the operator’s console. The rest of the chamber was filled with towers of container modules stocked with spare parts and nonreplicable materials. Seldom used by the crew of the Othrys, it was an ideal staging point for the mission at hand.

  Helek adjusted the matte black shroud suit she was wearing, pulling it tight around her shoulders. The collapsible helmet mechanism sat like a heavy collar about the major’s neck, and with a tap of her finger it could deploy and seal the suit in half a second. Once she was concealed, no sensor scans would be able to register her life signs. Helek would be a shadow, a dark phantom free to do whatever was needed.

  It is easy to act without fear and compunction, she reflected, when one becomes a ghost.

  That freedom was what had first seduced her about the Tal Shiar, but it had been only the first stone in the path to something greater. She weighed her disruptor pistol in her hand, before stuffing it into a seal holster. The weapon was perfectly balanced for her. She had killed with it quite often, and not always in service to the Tal Shiar.

  The higher calling she served was worth any cost, any amount of shed blood and collateral damage. Such was the grave responsibility of the Zhat Vash, to protect a naïve universe from the threat of its own machine progeny.

  “Perhaps I could send a remote probe instead,” Vadrel went on. “Give me a day to engineer something, Major. I can make it work—”

  “We do not have a day to waste,” Helek snapped. “This opportunity may not come again. We act now. You have your part to play. Don’t try to change your role now, Vadrel. It’s too late for that.”

  He sensed the implied threat and bowed his head, admitting defeat. “Yes, of course. Do you wish me to remain here while you are… on task?”

  She shook her head as the storage bay’s door slid open and silhouetted figures entered. “Once the transit is complete, return to your lab and activate the surveillance mask. The target with be brought directly to you.”

  Two Romulan males stepped out of the shadows. The first was Centurion Garn, the other a low-ranked security guard from the noncommissioned ranks. “This is Hosa.” Garn indicated the man with a jut of his chin.

  “You know what to do,” said Helek, gesturing at an
open container near the cargo transporter. Inside were more shroud suits like hers, and as she watched, the men changed out of their shipboard uniforms and donned the stealth gear. She noted ritual scarification on the bare skin of Garn’s back as he took off his tunic and wondered what it meant. Such marks were usually the indicators of a criminal upbringing, of prison servitude—was that how he had first come to the Tal Shiar’s notice as a reliable thug? Helek filed the thought away for later consideration.

  Vadrel moved to the control console and attached a small device to it. “This will divert the matter stream through the warbird’s main deflector and conceal your transit. I have rigged it to automatically recall on voice command or, uh, after the cessation of an individual’s life signs.”

  Helek leaned closer to study the targeting scanner. The location she had chosen was inside the environment dome where the Starfleet encampment was situated. It was uncomfortably close, but there was no other viable option. The other domes and interior spaces of the Jazari ship were impossible to scan clearly at this range, and Helek had no desire to materialize inside a bulkhead.

  She moved to an intercom unit and activated it. “Command deck, this is Helek.”

  “Command deck responding, this is Maian.” Up on the bridge, the taciturn veteran was the acting senior officer while Medaka was off the ship playing games with the human captain, and she was undertaking her own mission.

  “I am returning to my quarters to meditate,” she lied. “I am not to be disturbed until Commander Medaka returns from the Titan.”

  “Confirmed,” said the lieutenant. Perhaps Maian suspected Helek was up to something, perhaps not. Either way, he was wise enough not to pry.

  She closed the link and stepped onto the transporter pad, where Garn and Hosa were waiting. “Seal up.” Helek tapped the helmet switch and the mechanism rose up to encase her head. The others followed suit, and she glanced toward Garn.

  Vadrel considered the situation. If Garn had brought her this man, it meant he trusted him, and he knew if Hosa failed, he would pay for it as much as he did.

  “Ready.” Vadrel licked his lips.

  “Energize,” said Helek, and in the next second a buzzing wall of emerald fire enveloped her.

  The transit was longer than usual, and painful with it—a side effect of the masking phase shift, she guessed—but then it was over, and they were standing in a woodland clearing. She saw the arc of a glassy dome far above.

  Garn drew his weapon and pointed. “Suit sensor is detecting a concealed hatchway in that direction.”

  “Lead on,” said Helek, her voice echoing inside the confines of the helmet.

  * * *

  The problem with adults, Thad told himself, is that when they tell you they’re listening to you, they’re really only listening to themselves.

  Lieutenant Hernandez had been really nice to him, but she never gave the boy the chance to tell her what had gone on during his unauthorized venture into the forest dome. In the end, Thad glumly accepted his situation and now he sat alone in the prefabricated bubble tent where his mother and he were temporarily accommodated. He sucked on a squeeze pack of fruit juice and stared into the middle distance.

  After the panic of the accident on board the Titan, coming down to the giant Jazari ship seemed like the start of a fantastic adventure. A camping trip, but more exciting than the tame experiences the family had on the holodeck.

  But the Ochre Dome wasn’t much better than a virtual simulation. It was real, but it was kind of fake as well. It wasn’t the same as being on an actual planet, it was just a pocket of the outdoors trapped under glass.

  Thad tried to tell Hernandez about what he had encountered in the other dome. He wanted to explain to her about Friend and the drones and the glowing trees, but in her nice and adult way she shut him down. He was told to wait here until his mother came to get him. How long would that be? He had no idea.

  “Mom will listen to me,” he said aloud. “Yeah. I’ll explain it all to her.”

  “Who are you talking to?” A shadow by the tent flap resolved into Shelsa, and the Denevan boy squeezed inside. He made a show of looking around. “No one here.”

  “This isn’t your tent,” Thad said with a scowl. “Get lost.”

  Shelsa glared at the smaller boy where he sat on a gear case. “Make me.” Thad heard a giggle from outside, and he realized that the bigger boy had probably come in here on some kind of dare. Some of the other children were watching the confrontation through the open flap. “Oh, you can’t,” Shelsa went on, “you can’t do anything, you’re grounded.” He said the last word as if it were an eternal curse placed on Thaddeus’s soul.

  “You better go or I will get Lieutenant Hernandez and—”

  “And you’ll tell on me?” Shelsa sneered. “Like a little baby?”

  Thad stiffened at the insult. He hated being smaller and younger than Shelsa, even though the other boy had barely a year on him.

  “You got in trouble because you were stupid,” he went on. “I came in here to check if you were still stupid now.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Thad, and he felt his cheeks redden. “Why are you always so horrible to everyone? Always pretending you’re smarter?”

  Shelsa blinked in surprise. “You are the one always doing that! You think you’re so clever! Your mom and dad tell everyone that, but you’re not! You’re not special!”

  Thad saw the other boy blink furiously and ball his hands into fists, and belatedly something occurred to him. Shelsa lived on the Titan with his dad, but the boy’s mom had died a year ago, and it was something to do with the bad things that had happened on Mars. Shelsa seemed sour and angry all the time, but maybe that hadn’t always been true.

  “You’re in deep shit,” Shelsa insisted, grinning around the swear word, an unkind smirk forming on his lips. “And I think it is funny.”

  “I met an alien,” Thad retorted. “Her name is Friend and you’ve never seen anything like her!”

  Shelsa made a sneering noise. “You are such a liar. Always making things up, like your stupid stories and pretend languages!”

  Thad leaped to his feet. “No!”

  “Then prove it,” Shelsa prodded him. “Where is your new friend?” He made a mock-thinking face. “Oh, I forgot. Thad doesn’t have any friends because no one likes him.” He leaned in. “People only say they like you because your dad is the captain.”

  For a second, Thad wanted to say something spiteful back, something about Shelsa’s mom, but he couldn’t do it. He could almost sense the other boy’s anger, like a distant, flickering flame. He didn’t want to be like him.

  “You are mean and you are wrong.” Thad pushed past the other boy and stormed out through the tent flap. He ignored the knot of children lurking nearby and set off in the direction of the tree line. His eyes were burning with brimming tears, but he refused to let Shelsa and the others see him cry.

  “Thad is a liar-liar-liar!” the older boy called after him, singsonging the words.

  “I am not,” he said to himself, stalking into the undergrowth. “I’ll prove it.”

  * * *

  “I have something here.” Hosa broke his silence, and Helek’s head snapped up, finding the soldier crouched by a low boulder. “Beneath this.”

  She tapped controls on her stealth suit’s gauntlet, double-checking to be sure their scattering field was still in place. Blue lights pulsed back at her, signifying that the masking aura hiding them from any Jazari internal sensors was working at optimal capacity. Satisfied, she picked her way through the knee-length orange grasses and approached him.

  The short-range scanner in her helmet projected a warning into her visual field. Hosa had found a power node beneath the ground, doubtless feeding energy to the dome’s environmental systems. The node pulsed softly, and Helek smiled. This was exactly what she needed.

  “Log these coordinates,” she told Hosa. “We’ll make use of it on our departure.” But Ho
sa didn’t seem to hear her, and she snapped her fingers in front of his helmet. “Pay attention!”

  “Apologies, Major.” Hosa’s head bobbed. “I thought I saw something. Movement in the undergrowth.”

  She saw only the grass and the thick trunks of heavy trees. “Probably an animal. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.”

  “Major Helek.” A hundred meters away, Centurion Garn was in the shadow of a rock wall rising up to join the dome overhead. “There is an egress port hidden here.”

  “Show me,” she ordered.

  Garn dropped into a crouch and drew his disruptor. He carefully adjusted its settings, then fired a low-resonance beam into the stone.

  Helek watched as a wide patch of the rock wall wavered and became insubstantial. Overloaded by the beam, the holographic mask winked out and revealed the steel hatch it had been concealing.

  Helek and Hosa approached as Garn set to work on an oval control panel in a recess near the hatch. He had it open in short order, and the major was quietly impressed by the big man’s efficiency. She wondered if Garn’s criminal past had involved some kind of housebreaking. The hatch split along a diagonal line, retracting halfway before it halted.

  “Make ready,” she told them. “I want a prisoner, not a corpse. Understand?”

  “Aye, Major.” Garn holstered his disruptor and replaced it with a different weapon, a stubby baton with glowing tines at one end. Hosa produced a baton of his own, testing its weight. The devices were similar to those used by warrigul trainers to stun their animals into obedience, and on most unprotected humanoids they had an immediate and powerful effect.

  Helek glanced at the chronometer display in the corner of her field of vision. So far, everything was running according to her schedule. “Move in,” she ordered, and gestured into the corridor beyond.