Agents of Influence

by Dayton Ward

  Letting his tricorder hang from the strap across his chest, Yataro used both hands to pull himself out of a horizontal shaft and onto the landing of a maintenance ladder well. A bright orange, tri-sided ladder ran through the center of the vertical conduit, and he reached for it to steady himself. Behind him, the slightly labored breathing of David Horst preceded the Starfleet Intelligence agent’s arrival into the shaft. He had done a commendable job keeping the pace Yataro set, but his human physiology made the transit a bit more difficult.

  “I think I’m starting to get a little old for this kind of thing,” Horst said as he pulled himself to his feet. He wiped his forehead with his right sleeve, and as during their initial meeting, Yataro was struck by the man’s Klingon appearance. His surgically altered features remained at odds with his Starfleet jumpsuit, but by themselves the engineer decided it was an impressive feat of alteration.

  “Something wrong?” Horst asked.

  His wide eyes blinking several times in rapid succession, Yataro replied, “No. I apologize, Mister Horst. I admit I was… intrigued by your Klingon countenance. I also admit to more than a small measure of admiration for the training and preparation you and your colleagues must have undertaken to ready yourselves for your assignment. Then you spent three years working with and among an entire civilization not your own, unable to reveal your true identities for fear of prosecution.”

  Horst held up a finger. “And death. Don’t forget that part.”

  “Indeed.” Yataro shook his head. “It really is quite remarkable. I do not know that I would be capable of carrying out such a demanding task.”

  The agent smiled, revealing that even his teeth had been subtly manipulated to appear more Klingon than human. “No offense, Commander, you’re not really the ideal body type for this kind of thing.”

  Though he understood humor and in particular the propensity for many of his shipmates to engage in it, such things were not his strong suit. Still, he recognized the agent’s remark for the harmless quip it was intended to be, and nodded in agreement. “Quite right.” Gesturing with his tricorder, he said, “We are almost there.”

  It took several minutes of crawling and climbing through the network of maintenance conduits linking decks and turbolift shafts to reach their present location. Starting from an access point near the transporter room on deck seven, they worked their way down and across to a cargo bay two levels below. According to his tricorder they were now on the correct deck. Yataro pointed to another Jefferies tube leading from his left.

  “Cargo bay one is in that direction,” he said, using his tricorder to indicate their path.

  Horst asked, “And you’re sure this is where the signal came from?”

  “According to the system logs, the transmission originated from a communications router located on this level.” Yataro led the way into the next Jefferies tube, crawling once again on hands and knees. “What the logs do not show is how the router was accessed or by whom.”

  His quick review of the automatic archives, which recorded all interfaces with any of the Endeavour’s onboard systems, told him a second block of entries had been deleted from the database. He had already discovered one section removed in the wake of the trouble visited upon the ship’s port impulse engine. The entries corresponding to one hour before the incident were missing. It was an obvious maneuver designed to mask someone’s activities and identity. In response, the chief engineer took small comfort from the knowledge that only a small percentage of the ship’s crew possessed the technical expertise and authorization to access computer logs in this fashion, but that still left a pool of more than forty potential suspects. After discovering the first log-entry deletion, Yataro placed a trace in the system in hopes of identifying the culprit. He was only somewhat surprised to discover that same measure countered as easily as the access logs themselves. Might this actually help him to narrow his list of persons who might be responsible for this sabotage? Yataro did not know yet.

  After crawling through the conduit for nearly a minute, Yataro heard a telltale signal from the tricorder still hanging from his shoulder. A glance told him they had arrived at a gray rectangular box mounted to the bulkhead to his left. Relay hubs like this one were scattered throughout the bowels of the ship, assisting the main computer’s communications subsystems without routing recorded and real-time data through an extensive network. Ahead of him, he observed the sealed, reinforced hatch where he knew it would be. Having memorized the Endeavour’s interior schematics and after spending a fair amount of time traversing the ship’s network of maintenance crawlways, he knew precisely where he was.

  “Cargo bay one is on the other side of this wall,” he said, tapping the bulkhead next to the hub. Maneuvering himself into a sitting position, he shifted to his right so that Horst had room to join him. “According to the access logs, this is the junction used to send the message.”

  Horst gestured to the hub. “Want me to open it?” He reached for the unit’s front panel, then stopped himself before casting an embarrassed look in Yataro’s direction. “Sorry. You should be the one to do that. You want to make sure there’s no inadvertent evidence tampering.”

  “You believe I suspect you of this act?” Yataro asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  Regarding him for a moment, Yataro replied, “If I did, you would not be here.”

  Indeed, he had discussed the matter with Captain Khatami even before the Orion raid. Morgan Binnix’s decision to surrender the sensitive information cache collected by her and her fellow agents during their assignment on Qo’noS, Horst’s and Phillip Watson’s continued assistance with the Endeavour engineering team despite working under a cloud of suspicion, and Binnix’s actions out on the asteroid surface during the raid had done much to engender trust from the starship’s crew. Further, Yataro considered the notion of one of the agents being a saboteur or spy to be simply too convenient.

  This belief was only strengthened when considering the predicament in which the agents and the rest of the crew found themselves. Trapped here with no means of escape? It would be sheer lunacy to act in such a compulsive and ultimately futile manner. For seasoned operatives trained to think and act without any support, committing such clumsy acts of sabotage that could be so easily traced back to them seemed unlikely. Finally, there was the simple matter that neither Horst nor his companions had been left unsupervised long enough for any of them to get this far into the maintenance crawlways and transmit the message from this location.

  Which meant someone else was responsible. Barring the unlikely scenario of a stowaway hiding somewhere aboard the wrecked ship, that left only one alternative: a member of the crew.

  “So far as I am concerned, Mister Horst, you and your fellow agents have demonstrated your trustworthiness. Further, I brought you with me as I thought I might require your particular talents. You have advanced experience in communications systems and subsystems, do you not?”

  Horst nodded. “I do.”

  “Very well, then.” Yataro gestured to the junction box. “Open the relay and let us see what we can learn.”

  Releasing the catches holding the box’s access panel to the bulkhead, Horst asked, “I was going to ask you about that. What are we hoping to learn? You said whoever did this wiped their activity from the access logs.”

  “That is correct.” With the panel cover removed, Yataro leaned closer and examined the junction box’s compact control pad, which consisted of a small display and two rows of multicolored buttons. While communications typically were routed through devoted subsystems within the ship’s main computer, one could still access the system directly from entry points like this one in cases of emergency or malfunction elsewhere in the internal network.

  “Now I see where you’re going,” Horst said after a moment spent studying the panel. “Each of these direct interfaces has its own memory storage.”

  Yataro nodded, pleased at the man’s astuteness. “The contents of their on
board memory banks are transmitted every hour to the main computer for inclusion in the primary system access logs. However, the buffer itself is not usually cleared. It is simply overwritten with new information as needed. Most of the time, these direct interfaces are not utilized because we can access the primary systems more easily via computer terminals and workstations.” He pointed to the control box. “Without additional data to overwrite the buffer, its last entry should still be in there.”

  “And you think our saboteur may have forgotten that little detail?” Horst shrugged. “Maybe they were in a hurry and didn’t have time to wipe the buffer before they had to get back to wherever they wouldn’t be missed.”

  “That is my theory.”

  Raising his tricorder from where it rested in his lap, Yataro activated the unit and set its scan function to receive external data. He reached for the junction box’s control pad to complete the connection, but paused at the sound of movement to Horst’s left. A figure lay on the Jefferies tube deck plating, cloaked in shadow but holding what Yataro immediately recognized as a small, palm-sized type-1 phaser.

  “Mister—”

  The weapon’s whine drowned out the rest of his warning, and harsh blue-white energy washed through the conduit as the phaser beam lanced across the empty space and struck Horst as he turned to face the new arrival. It expanded, engulfing his body, and he vanished, disintegrating in an instant without a sound.

  Dumbstruck by the attack’s speed and brutality, Yataro fell back from his sitting position, scrambling away from the control box but finding no cover or other safe harbor in the cramped passageway. His mind raced with an endless stream of panicked thoughts in what he knew with utter certainty would be his final seconds of life, until settling on one frantic realization: he had seen his killer’s face in the flash of the phaser beam that had killed Horst.

  “You!”

  Then everything disappeared, consumed by unrelenting white light.

  Thirty-one

  Mi’zhan watched the last vestiges of Commander Yataro disappear, leaving behind only the faint odor of his phaser’s energy discharge along with disintegrated flesh. Under normal circumstances he knew the automatic atmosphere scrubbers that were components of the ship’s life-support system would remove the last remnants of such aromas from the air. With power to noncritical systems reduced or eliminated while the Endeavour operated on only one impulse engine, such luxuries were not currently available. Not that it mattered. He suspected no one would venture this far into the maze of access crawlways while whatever lingering evidence of Yataro’s and Horst’s deaths remained. For the moment, he was safe.

  Rotating the compact phaser in his hand, Mi’zhan grunted as he examined the weapon. Its size was deceptive, not nearly as large or robust as the disruptors with which he had become proficient so long ago. He still had to admit it was a useful tool. Before undertaking this assignment, he believed Starfleet phasers were small and weak, possessing no real power and certainly not on par with traditional Klingon energy weapons. His training under the unwavering gaze of his instructors soon disabused him of that uninformed opinion, and those lessons were now cemented by the action he had just been forced to take.

  “Damn it,” Mi’zhan said, aloud even though there was no one to hear.

  Shaking his head, he slid the phaser into a pocket on the right leg of his green, Starfleet-issue maintenance jumpsuit. He had not wanted to kill the engineer or even the intelligence agent. The former was too valuable a member of the Endeavour’s crew and his absence would be noticed in short order. As for the agent, instinct made Mi’zhan want to neutralize him as penalty for the uncounted crimes he must have committed against the Empire. However, he knew Horst and his fellow spies would be of great value if they could be returned to Qo’noS. That was of no matter now, given what Mi’zhan had been forced to do here. He would not miss the spy, whose altered features were an insult to all Klingons. Even if it became necessary to kill the other two agents, whatever information they had collected during their time slinking about the shadows of the homeworld would still be of immense interest.

  “Who’s slinking about the shadows now?” he asked, though of course no one answered.

  Out of habit, Mi’zhan had long ago taught himself not to speak aloud in native tlhIngan Hol even when he was alone. It was another harsh lesson instilled without mercy by his instructors. Candidates were forced to wear bracelets that could not be removed and transmitted everything they said to computers used by the faculty of the school where he received his training. Any breach in the language rules—speaking in his own tongue rather than Federation Standard, even in private or alone—resulted in an electric shock channeled by those same computers through the bracelet. The effects were painful to an almost incapacitating degree and only increased in intensity if multiple infractions occurred within a prescribed time frame.

  At the beginning of his instruction, Mi’zhan had experienced unconsciousness from the force of the shocks he received. That punishment occurred only once, after which he took steps to conform. He stopped reading or accessing any information offered in tlhIngan Hol. He forced himself even to think in Standard, penalizing himself for failure in this regard by speaking aloud in his own language until he received the obligatory bracelet shock. By the time he graduated from the indoctrination program and received the surgery to transform him from a Klingon into a human, he had all but subsumed his real identity far beneath a detestable Earther facade. The only thread to his true heritage he allowed was to refer to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts by his given name. This small act reminded him of his parents and his family house, and that he was acting to bring honor to them as well as glory for the Empire.

  Deploying on his first assignment had been far easier than he anticipated. He was told during his training that agents like himself—far more experienced, of course—had been operating in secret from a time just before the outbreak of the Klingon-Federation War more than a decade earlier. While he was skeptical, it soon became apparent his instructors were truthful. How else could he have been inserted into Starfleet personnel records and maneuvered into an assignment aboard one of the Earthers’ most advanced, even prestigious battle cruisers? His entire existence to that point was nothing more than a fabrication, an elaborate lie forged as part of his cover identity. The Empire, over the course of years spent grooming agents like himself for such duty, had learned the risks of attempting to replace an actual person with someone altered to resemble them. It was better to create a person without ties, someone whose past could be configured to meet the requirements of a specific assignment, and incorporate the necessary skills into that individual’s preparation and training.

  His routing to the Endeavour was just one of several personnel assignments earlier in the year with the purpose of restoring the ship’s complement to its full strength. Along with the other starships of its design, the ship represented the greatest threat to Klingon interests. Serving aboard one and learning all its secrets was an assignment carrying with it much honor, provided Mi’zhan successfully completed his mission and returned to Qo’noS to relay all he had learned.

  Such a task was not always easy to accomplish, as he had already discovered. One such example was his attempt to learn just why the Endeavour was recently required to replace so many members of its crew. A pitched battle involving the cruiser with another of its class, the Enterprise, had resulted in numerous casualties. The details of the incident were classified far above the station of someone such as the human Mi’zhan had been groomed to portray. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to learn anything prior to arriving aboard the Endeavour. Even his attempts to glean information from the ship’s crew after he began his assignment here proved fruitless. It was as though everyone involved and who survived the battle had either erased all traces of memory from their consciousness, or else they operated under an agreement that commanded their secrecy. Surreptitious investigation of the vessel’s library comp
uter failed to uncover anything, but expunging computer files was easy to accomplish.

  As I well know.

  Moving to the communications hub, he examined the open access port, trying to determine how much progress Yataro and Horst had made before he interrupted them. A press of the appropriate control on the module’s keypad told him the component’s onboard memory still retained a record of its last activity. As the chief engineer surmised, Mi’zhan had indeed left incriminating evidence of transmitting the unauthorized signal from the ship. Along with the sabotage of the ship’s impulse engine, it was the first deviation from his normal routine since joining the Endeavour’s crew.

  “What is life without the occasional risk?” he murmured. He glanced to his left and right, ensuring he was alone in the Jefferies tube. So far, no one had seen fit to encroach on his solitude, but he knew he could not remain here for long without his absence from his regular duties being noticed. Further, there was precious little time before someone, perhaps even the captain herself, asked after Yataro or Horst. He needed to finish his work here and return to his station as quickly as possible.

  In the months since his arrival aboard the vessel and its subsequent assignment to explore the Taurus Reach, he carried out his assigned shipboard duties, acting just like the officer he pretended to be. He did nothing that might draw unwanted attention upon himself. The goals of his being placed here were long-term, many if not most of them unknown to him. During his training, he came to understand that he might operate in his undercover capacity for great stretches of time, doing nothing beyond the normal tasks of a Starfleet officer. Contact from his superiors might come only after months passed, at which time he would be given specific mission parameters and instructions. As was the case with other agents he knew to be inserted deep inside Federation territory and the Starfleet hierarchy, everything about his assignment was designed to safeguard his identity and mask his presence as a Klingon asset. Unless otherwise directed, his instructions were to observe and understand what was taking place around him. At some suitable point, he would be contacted, debriefed, and given further direction.