Agents of Influence

by Dayton Ward

  Brax said, “Agent Binnix is correct. The last time Starfleet discovered such a spy, he was extradited back to the Klingon Empire. Of course, he was exposed in front of many witnesses on a Federation space station with an abundance of civilian traffic. That is not the case with Lieutenant Tomkins here.”

  “What he’s trying to tell you,” Watson said, “is there’s no one around to know you’re about to be delivered to a deep, dark hole from which there’s probably no escape, and sooner or later you’ll tell everything you know to anyone you can get to listen.” He leaned forward, his expression turning sinister. “And believe me when I tell you the journey will be a lot more memorable for you than the destination.”

  Khatami did not even want to consider the implications of what Watson described. Was it bravado? A bluff with the aim of unsettling their prisoner? Perhaps it really was the truth, a brutal, unwelcome truth that for reasons she did not want to fathom constituted the reality behind the mission of Starfleet Intelligence and other covert agencies. She did not want to believe such things were possible in this day and age; they did not have a place in the enlightened society she had sworn to protect.

  She knew better. In this moment, she almost did not care.

  Almost.

  Doing her best to rein in her volatile emotions, Khatami turned for the door. “Keep him here.” She looked first to Brax before giving one last glare to Tomkins. “Give my people any reason at all and you’ll take a walk outside to join the Orions. I hope you can hold your breath.”

  Her communicator beeped before she could say anything else, and she pulled it from her waist and flipped it open. “Khatami here.”

  “Klisiewicz, Captain. We’re getting updated reports from Commander Stano. They’ve engaged the Klingon ships. The trick to sabotage their shields worked, but it’s still a dogfight. Stano’s worried they can’t hold the line long enough.”

  If the lieutenant was experiencing any tension at the prospect of sitting down here with the rest of the crew, wholly vulnerable to a possible Klingon attack, Khatami decided he was doing a fine job hiding such feelings. She almost envied him.

  Along with Leone, Binnix, and Watson, Khatami stepped out of the room, waiting for its doors to close before continuing the conversation.

  “What’s the word on the shields?”

  The Endeavour’s science officer replied, “Still nothing from the impulse deck, Captain.”

  Behind her, Phil Watson said, “Maybe I can help.” When Khatami turned toward him, she saw that he along with Binnix and Leone were regarding her. Watson held out his hands. “At this point it can’t hurt, right?”

  Frowning, Binnix shrugged. “Same here, Captain. We’d like to try.”

  Khatami used a thumb to point down the corridor. “Go.”

  Nodding in thanks, the agents took off at a run down the passageway, heading for the nearest access ladder and leaving Khatami alone with Leone. The doctor looked at her with his usual expression of resting discomfort.

  “If you ask me to try and fix that thing, you may as well set the self-destruct right now.”

  “Lucky for you that’s not even an option anymore.” Raising her communicator closer to her mouth, Khatami said, “Klisiewicz, you and Estrada get on whatever’s left of our comm systems. Find me a way to contact the Enterprise. We’ve still got at least one of those buoys left, right?” She knew the sensor buoys were gone, destroyed either by the Orions or the Klingons. “Let’s get that damned thing flying.”

  The science officer replied, “We can launch it and reprogram it in flight. Let’s just hope the Klingons don’t shoot it down. We’re on it, Captain.”

  “I’ll be on the impulse deck. Keep me posted.” Snapping shut her communicator, Khatami turned to Leone. The doctor stared at her with obvious empathy. Then he offered one of his trademark sardonic smiles.

  “Just another fun day at the office, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  Leaving a pair of security guards to guard the entrance to the brig and Leone to return to sickbay or wherever he felt he might be needed, Khatami jogged down the corridor until she reached an access ladder. From there it was an easy climb up two levels to reach the impulse deck. She charged into the compartment to find it an even greater scene of chaos than during her last visit. All around the room, members of the Endeavour’s engineering team had pulled open consoles, junction boxes, equipment lockers, and even parts of the impulse engine manifolds and other components of the propulsion system. Tools and cabling littered the floor. Legs disappeared into access panels, attached to engineers working on something within the beleaguered ship’s innards that Khatami could not see.

  She was just in time to see sparks erupt from one of the consoles that had been reconfigured to oversee the deflector shield controls. Standing in front of the console, Master Chief Petty Officer Christine Rideout ducked and rolled away from the workstation to avoid being caught by sparks or debris. She landed heavily on one knee before allowing herself to collapse to a sitting position on the deck.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Khatami lurched forward to help, but Morgan Binnix and Phil Watson, working together at an adjacent console, got there first. They each extended hands to Rideout and the engineer took them, allowing the agents to pull her to her feet.

  “You all right, Master Chief?” Khatami asked as she stepped closer.

  “Only hurt my pride and my ass, Captain.” Rideout swiped her left arm across her forehead, using her sleeve to wipe away perspiration. Her damp black hair was matted to her head and streaks of dirt ran down the sides of her face. With her right hand she pointed with the macrotool she still held toward the damaged console. “You can kiss that relay goodbye. We just overloaded the entire bank of transtators and the flow regulator.”

  “We don’t have any replacements?” Binnix asked.

  Rideout grimaced. “I think we’ve got another couple of regulators. What I don’t know is if we’ve got enough spare transtators.” Looking to Binnix and Watson, she said, “Find me thirty of those damned things. Pull them from any system that’s not keeping us alive right now.”

  “They might not all match,” Watson said.

  Waving away the observation, Rideout said, “At this point, I’ll take anything that can carry current. We’ll figure out how to configure whatever you find me.” As the agents moved to carry out their new task, the engineer looked to Khatami. “Get anything useful out of Tomkins?”

  “He’s a Klingon,” Khatami replied.

  “That just makes a perfect day even better.” Rideout stepped closer to where two junior engineers were assessing the damage from inside the monitoring station. “Without a way to control the power flow from the impulse engines to the shield generators—which is what this hunk of crap is supposed to be doing—we can’t risk bringing them online. They’ll blow apart and take nice chunks of neighboring hull with them, and anybody in the vicinity is a goner.”

  Khatami rubbed her forehead. “We’re running out of time to play it safe, Master Chief. I don’t know how long Stano and Kirk can keep the Klingons off our backs. Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast. Otherwise, the only thing that’ll be left to do is die.”

  “On the bright side,” Rideout said, “that’ll likely be fast too.”

  “I knew you were an optimist, Master Chief.”

  Rideout chuckled. “Captain, I’ve survived two ships crashing with me along for the ride. This is nothing.”

  Thirty-eight

  Kirk was getting tired of this game.

  “To port!”

  Katherine Stano’s warning came an instant before the helm console’s proximity alarm sounded, alerting him to the danger of colliding with an asteroid. He saw it in his peripheral vision, looming to his right as he guided the Dreamline into a sudden turn. The maneuver required an almost instant compensation in some other direction as he found himself steering the ship toward still another hunk of drifting rock.

  After a
ssisting Lieutenant McCormack against the Klingon scout ship pursuing her, exchanging the roles of hunter and prey with their adversaries was beginning to take its toll. This part of the asteroid field was much denser than the area closer to the Endeavour’s crash site. If it was foolhardy to draw the Klingon scout ship here in a bid to keep it from any attempt at attacking the helpless starship, it was all but insane to do so at the transport’s present speed. Kirk had accelerated the Dreamline to one-quarter impulse power, counting on instrumentation and his own reflexes to avoid catastrophe. He had given brief thought to allowing the ship’s computer to handle navigating the flurry of obstacles, but could not bring himself to fully trust the automated systems in a situation such as the one he and Stano now faced.

  “They had to slow down,” she said, before tapping a sequence of controls on her station. The targeting scanner now showed Kirk the Klingon scout ship decelerating in order to avoid plowing into the asteroid the Dreamline avoided by a narrow margin. Indeed, he was certain he could have reached through the cockpit canopy and brushed his fingers across the rock’s surface as they passed.

  Using the momentary break in the constant pursuit, Kirk pushed the transport into a course around the asteroid before kicking away and accelerating. The ship’s engines groaned in protest at the abuse they were receiving, but Kirk ignored the accompanying warning status lights. He had seen the Orion transport piloted by Lieutenant McCormack enter the targeting scanner’s rangefinder, noting how the Endeavour helm officer was using the asteroid for cover even as it closed the distance with the Klingon scout.

  “Oh, Marielise, you sneaky devil,” said Stano. “You see what she’s doing, right?”

  Kirk nodded. “I think so.” At this range, there was no way the enemy ship did not see the Orion vessel coming at it, but each vessel’s respective course through the asteroid field saw to it there were only limited navigation options. Using this to her advantage, McCormack treated the field like a maze, choosing the correct path that led to her goal. There were few places for the Klingon ship to go that did not expose it to almost immediate danger from nearby asteroids. Its captain would have to choose which adversary to go after, with either option leaving the scout vulnerable to attack.

  “She’s good,” Kirk said.

  Stano grunted. “Damned right, she is. Just don’t tell her.”

  Using the targeting scanner to plan his next move as the Dreamline broke into a far less dense area of the asteroid field, Kirk applied greater acceleration. He knew he would only have a few seconds before the Klingon ship matched his move and began closing in for an attack. Adjusting the transport’s course, he aimed it for a much smaller asteroid near the edge of another grouping.

  “If you’re doing what I think you’re doing,” Stano said, “that looks like a pretty tight fit.”

  Kirk kept his eyes on his instruments and the scanner. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  He waited until the proximity alarm cried out for attention once again before cutting speed as the Dreamline closed to less than two hundred kilometers, and then he directed the ship on a curving dive that took it under the asteroid. According to the scans, the drifting rock was a few dozen kilometers across at its widest point. It took only seconds to navigate that distance before Kirk accelerated again, arcing the transport up and over the top of the asteroid. Had he correctly timed his maneuver?

  More adjustments rolled the transport over, bringing the Klingon scout into view just as it was attempting to mimic Kirk’s tactic. Stano did not wait, firing the Dreamline’s phasers at the oncoming ship. The salvo caught the other ship with a direct strike against its primary hull. Evidence of the damage was immediate, with sliced hull plating just below where Kirk knew the ship’s bridge was situated.

  “Nice shooting, Commander,” Kirk said.

  Stano replied, “He’s taking evasive action.”

  The enemy ship veered away in what the Dreamline’s targeting scanner told Kirk had to be an attempt to reach cover back in the asteroid field. It was the scout pilot’s bad luck that his quick maneuvering brought him into the weapon sights of Lieutenant McCormack’s ship. The Endeavour pilot unleashed full disruptors on the other vessel, with multiple strikes tearing into the scout’s hull. Kirk watched its impulse engines flicker and die and the ship’s nose drop as its pilot lost maneuvering ability.

  “Damn it.”

  Kirk watched the Klingon vessel plunge toward an asteroid, inertia guiding it into a collision course from which it could not escape. It took only seconds for the vessel to close the distance before it impacted on the asteroid’s surface.

  Stano released a long, slow breath. “It was him or us, sir.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

  As Kirk took to the helm console once more, the cockpit’s communications system crackled to life.

  “Sulu to Captain Kirk. We could use some help here! I can’t shake this Klingon ship.”

  Redirecting the Dreamline on a course back to the Endeavour crash site, Kirk replied, “We’re on our way, Sulu.” The flight through the asteroid field had taken them some distance from the ship.

  “I can plot us a speed course back,” Stano said. “The way you fly, it won’t take us long at all to get there.”

  Kirk nodded as he reset the targeting scanner for a wider range. It took a moment for the system to recalculate based on the Dreamline’s position relative to the Endeavour, and when the image coalesced he could see the remaining Klingon scout on its relentless pursuit course of Sulu’s ship. Somehow, the Enterprise helm officer had managed to stay fairly close to the crash site while continuing to evade his adversary.

  “We’re hit!” Sulu’s cry of alarm barked from the intercom. “We’ve lost impulse power. I’m trying to use maneuvering thrusters to bring us back under control.”

  Stano pointed to the targeting scanner. “Captain, look.”

  The compact readout showed an icon representing Sulu’s ship slowing almost to a stop while another symbol, this one depicting the Klingon scout, seemed to increase its speed as it pulled away from its quarry.

  “They’re going after the Endeavour,” Kirk said. “And they’re still a sitting duck.”

  * * *

  Atish Khatami had certainly considered her own death by various means on various occasions over the course of her career. Such a possibility was an unfortunate reality one simply accepted as part of life in Starfleet. She had imagined dying on the bridge of her ship during a fierce battle or falling to an enemy attack on a planet’s surface, or even just a simple accident while exploring a newly discovered world. Unpleasant images of hull breaches, alien contagions, and illnesses of the sort that still plagued her species haunted her thoughts every now and then.

  Never, in all her years of service, did Khatami ever imagine dying in an engine room while holding a power cable attached to what for all intents and purposes was a live bomb.

  “All right, everybody,” said Master Chief Rideout, who was holding on to another section of the same cable with which Khatami had agreed to help. “We’re almost there.” The engineer had her other hand inside the access panel to the damaged console overseeing the deflector shield controls. All around her were pieces of burned, broken, or simply discarded components. The cable in Khatami’s hands led into the access panel, before which stood Rideout and Phil Watson. Standing next to the agent was his colleague, Binnix, who held a macrotool in one hand and a fistful of transtators in the other.

  “What about these?” Binnix asked, holding up the transtators.

  Without looking, Rideout replied, “Forget them.”

  Binnix cast a glance in Khatami’s direction before looking at the components in her hand. “You don’t even know what—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rideout snapped. “No points for cuteness now.”

  Watson asked, “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

  “Could be.” Rideout pulled herself from the access panel. �
�But I really am hoping to avoid that.”

  “Master Chief?” Khatami prompted. “What’s going on?”

  Stepping over to the nearby workstation, Rideout began keying several of the multicolored buttons. “There’s no time to configure the replacement transtators to work with this setup. There’s too much damage to the flow-regulation subsystems, and half of the damned things would likely blow with the power demand anyway. So I reconfigured the distribution nodes on a second impulse capacitance cell and tied it directly to the shield generator’s flow regulator, bypassing all that other junk.”

  Peering inside the conduit, Khatami eyed the squat, gray hexagonal cylinder. The cable she held was attached to one end, while another length of cabling ran from its other end deeper into the innards of the shield control system.

  “That sounds like a lot of things that add up to something I’m really not going to like,” she said. “Sound about right?”

  “Sounds exactly right.” Rideout glanced over her shoulder and gestured to the cable in Khatami’s hands. “You can let go of that now.”

  The captain did as she was asked, and the cable dropped to the deck. Connected as it was from the access panel to another conduit on the opposite wall, there was no way for Khatami to know what Rideout had just joined together.

  “It bleeds off the excess energy that will come through the cell,” Rideout said. “Instead of just letting it go, I’m channeling it to another power relay feeding the shield generators.” She looked at Khatami again. “Beats letting it loose in here and cooking all of us.”

  “Do we want to be somewhere else when you turn this on?” Binnix asked.

  Rideout nodded. “I would. I like the Bahamas myself. Or Pacifica. That’s a nice tropical planet. Maybe I’ll go there if I live through this.”

  “Take me with you,” Watson said.

  “It’s a date.”

  “Auxiliary control to engineering,” said Lieutenant Klisiewicz over the intercom, which Rideout had ordered restored so she and her people would not have to fumble with personal communicators. “Sensors are picking up a Klingon ship descending into the canyon. Two of our ships are in pursuit but it looks like the Klingons will get here first. We need those shields!”