Star Trek: The Next Generation - 113 - Cold Equations: Silent Weapons

by David Mack

  He closed his eyes and opened his mind, seeking out the soothing pulse of light and color that he had come to associate with his handler, Hain. Are you there?

  Her patient voice echoed inside his mind as if it were his own thought.

  I did. Using techniques he had practiced before the mission, he accessed the stored data and let it pass through him and over the river of light to Hain. Did you monitor the encounter?

  Hain’s reply was slow in coming.

  He imagined the risks that Sair would be facing, and he grew concerned. Do you need me to be there? I know the layout of the garden. I could help.

  Her thoughtcolors were agitated. A gray pause.

  He swiveled his chair to gaze longingly out the windows at the urban sprawl stretching away beneath him. Several, as instructed. How long until Sair is transfigured?

 

  Olar checked the chrono on his desk and considered how long it would take to traverse the building’s locked-down floors without attracting the attention of the Orions’ security forces, the Gorn’s imperial guards, or the Federation’s presidential protection agents. No problem.

 

  Already visualizing the means to his end, he replied, Yes. I’m ready.

  Hain’s hues of approval and confidence tinted their shared thoughtwave.

  I understand.

  Calming shades and dulcet tones preceded her reply.

  The connection between them receded into the background of his consciousness, but he knew his every action was being monitored and observed, recorded for posterity and analysis. Knowing he was under her watchful protection was a comfort; to be alone, to live without a witness, was the only notion that truly frightened Olar to his core.

  He checked the chrono. Twenty-eight minutes to the rendezvous. In nine minutes, he would leave the office and follow a circuitous route to the service level.

  Within forty-five minutes, Sair would be in position, and Berro would be clear.

  In an hour’s time, the fate of the galaxy would be sealed, and this day would become a turning point in history, a hinge on which would turn the fortunes of countless lives extant and to come. Everything—even the shape of the future itself—depended upon what Olar did next.

  It was almost enough to give him an inflated sense of self-importance, save for the one bitter irony that he had accepted as the price of his greatness.

  After the deed is done . . . I will be forgotten.

  Success would bring no accolades, no veneration, no statues—no reward except a fleeting moment of satisfaction. For Olar, that would be enough. He was a patriot.

  But if this really was his hour to die, he had come prepared.

  Because he had no intention of dying alone.

  13

  Nothing had been touched or moved. Sealed behind a Starfleet Security emblem hastily affixed to the door, Hilar Tohm’s apartment was exactly as it had been when her body was found. Her furniture was spare and simple. Few mementos adorned her shelves: a bright orange miniature conch shell, a vintage twenty-third-century Starfleet communicator, and a short row of hardcover books bound in black leather: the collected works of William Shakespeare, the horror fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and several volumes of Trill folk tales and poetry spanning four centuries.

  La Forge faced Šmrhová across the center of the living room. In the Dixon Hill pulp detective stories favored by Captain Picard, La Forge would have expected to find a silhouette of chalk lines, a negative-space caricature of Tohm’s demise. Instead there was a tiny flag on a slender metal pin, and on that flag an evidence-reference number and an embedded nanochip on which had been recorded a copy of the scans taken before the body’s removal.

  Šmrhová finished downloading the chip’s data to her tricorder. “According to this, her neck was snapped.” A detail raised her dark eyebrows. “Whoever did it was strong enough—and brutal enough—to splinter her third and fourth cervical vertebrae.”

  Picturing the moment sickened La Forge. Despite his years of service in Starfleet, including combat experience in two wars, he had never been able to inure himself to violence. No matter how many times someone told him it was necessary and righteous, he had never been able to divorce himself from the ugliness of sentient pain and the finality of death. Maybe I just have too much empathy, he speculated. Then he wondered whether that could ever really be considered a bad thing. Why would it be wrong to have compassion for others?

  Snapping fingers broke his spell of distraction. He blinked and saw Šmrhová staring at him. She sounded impatient. “I said, I’ll check the bedroom. Can you give the kitchen a look?”

  “Sure.” They split up, both of them straining to pierce the veil of the mundane and seize upon some clue that the embassy’s Starfleet Security detachment might have missed. La Forge tried not to feel self-conscious about the fact that he hadn’t known Tohm personally. How would he tell the difference between what was typical in her home, and what wasn’t? He searched the kitchen but couldn’t have said for what, exactly. Nothing struck him as odd. There were no strange residues, no inexplicable foreign objects, no signs of a struggle. Just as the original report had indicated, there were no fingerprints or DNA traces present except Tohm’s.

  He turned off his tricorder, disgruntled at the lack of progress, and returned to the living room as Šmrhová walked out of the bedroom. He shot her a hopeful look. “Anything?”

  She shook her head. “No signs of struggle, no DNA, no prints. You?”

  “The same.” La Forge frowned. “This is ridiculous. She didn’t snap her own neck.”

  “That much we know.” Šmrhová took another look at her tricorder’s screen. “There were ligature marks on her throat consistent with a large humanoid hand. Someone else was here—someone who left no biological traces.”

  The ominous tone with which she’d added that last detail made her implication clear, and La Forge didn’t like it. “I know the absence of evidence doesn’t help Data’s case, but it can’t be used against him, either. We just . . .” He lost track of his sentence as a new thought occurred to him. “You said the marks on Tohm’s throat were consistent with a humanoid hand. Can we use them to estimate the size of the hand that killed her?”

  “Only within a range of probability. There was so much bruising and torn skin that the variance is fairly wide. Unfortunately, Data’s hand size is just within the possible range.”

  La Forge hid his disappointment as another exculpatory opportunity slipped away. “That figures. If it wasn’t, his lawyer would have pounced on that already.”

  “It’s a good bet.” Šmrhová turned off her tricorder and holstered it under her jacket. “There’s nothing new here. It’s just as much a dead end as the security report says.” She nodded toward the door. “Ready to head outside?”

  He put away his tricorder. “Might as well.”

  They resealed the room behind them, then took the lift down to the ground floor. Neither of them spoke as they passed through the residential building’s small foyer. Its double doors parted ahead of them, and they strode side by side into the night. It welcomed them with a wash of sultry heat, a humid gust perfumed with tropical scents and the ozone bite of air pollution. La Forge wrinkled his nose and grimaced as the late-nigh
t swelter leached sweat from his pores.

  The campus of the Federation Embassy Compound was quiet except for the faraway roar of the city, a deep and coursing wash of noise that reminded La Forge of crashing surf.

  Beside him, Šmrhová pointed upward at a number of not so artfully concealed surveillance devices. “No wonder the killer managed not to get caught on vid. Even a Pakled would be smart enough to steer clear of those.”

  He was skeptical. “Knowing the cameras are there doesn’t make them easy to avoid. The coverage of the compound was pretty tight, and there’s no record of anyone entering or leaving the residential building.” He nodded toward the main gate. “And unless it was an inside job, it’s unlikely the killer walked in or out through the front gate.”

  “All embassy personnel had alibis that checked out. All the Starfleet personnel were accounted for, and so were the civilian staff and the SI operatives. The only random variable in the equation is our killer—and the only motive on the table is Data’s.”

  “Sorry, I just don’t buy it.”

  They waved to the armed Starfleet guards manning the gatehouse, and the five-meter-tall, solid front portals swung inward. The avenue outside was quiet. La Forge led Šmrhová outside, and they began a slow stroll around the compound’s perimeter. A high wall encircled the embassy grounds, and it was topped at regular intervals with surveillance cameras—all of them angled inward, at the diplomatic campus. “So much for getting any footage of pedestrians in the area on the night of the murder,” Šmrhová said.

  “Looks that way.” La Forge pulled out his tricorder and began scanning the sidewalk as they continued their perambulation. It glistened underfoot, shimmering from recent rains, giving him little reason to hope he might find even a hint of trace evidence.

  Šmrhová peeked over his shoulder at the device’s display. “What’re you looking for?”

  “Anything that might lead back to Tohm’s apartment. If we can find a clue that suggests how the killer got out, or what direction he went, that would be more than we have now.”

  With needling humor, she replied, “I like how you just assume the killer is male.”

  “First, how many females, of any species, have hands big enough to have made the marks found on Tohm’s throat? Second, it’s just a quirk of speech for grammatical convenience.”

  “If you say so.”

  He was on the verge of thinking up something clever to say when he heard the hum of a hovercar’s motor behind him, and then came a flash of green lights and the single whoop of a siren. A man’s voice amplified by a loudspeaker barked, “Halt.”

  La Forge and Šmrhová turned to watch the police hovercar land a few meters behind them. Its gull-wing doors lifted open, and two civilian law-enforcement officers—one male, one female—stepped out of the vehicle. The male officer kept his hand on his sidearm as he and his partner approached the duo.

  Šmrhová feigned confused innocence. “Is something wrong, officers?”

  “Hand over your scanning devices, please,” the male officer said. As if in punctuation to his order, his partner set her hand on the grip of her sidearm.

  Offering up his tricorder with slow caution, La Forge wondered whether the shop owner whom Šmrhová had held at phaser-point had filed a complaint, after all. “Is there a problem?”

  The female Orion snatched the tricorder from La Forge’s hand, and the male officer took the tricorder from Šmrhová. The man tinkered with one device’s settings while his partner held the other and kept her eyes on the two humans. “The use of scanning devices in public spaces without a warrant is illegal on this planet,” she said.

  Her partner turned off the first tricorder. “This one’s wiped. Give me the other one.”

  They traded devices, then she continued talking to Šmrhová and La Forge. “Normally, this would get you a few weeks in jail. But seeing as this is your first offense, we’re letting you go with a warning.” She handed back the first tricorder to La Forge.

  Apparently unwilling to take good luck at face value, Šmrhová asked, “How do you know this is our first offense?”

  The male Orion looked up from his work to glare at her. “You think we don’t know who you two are? You’re from the Enterprise.” He tossed the second tricorder to her. “Your scanning devices have been blanked. If we catch you using them outside your embassy again, they’ll be destroyed, and you’ll face criminal charges.” With a mocking tip of his hat, he added, “This little chat’s been a diplomatic courtesy. You two have a good night, and stay out of trouble.”

  The two Orions walked back to their vehicle and climbed inside. Its gull-wing doors lowered shut as the hovercar ascended into the hazy pink glow of the metropolitan night, and then the sleek aircar sped away and blended back into distant streams of traffic.

  Šmrhová looked at the memory-wiped device in her hands. “Well, that’s just great.” She jammed it back into its holster on her hip. “No wonder this place is called a criminals’ paradise.”

  As they started walking back to the embassy’s gate, La Forge played devil’s advocate. “On the other hand, you have to give them credit for their commitment to personal privacy.”

  Her gaze was a poisoned arrow of scorn. “Yeah. . . . I’ll bet that’s a real comfort to Commander Tohm.”

  • • •

  It would be so much easier to explain if only I could tell him why.

  Separated from his subordinate by light-years of distance, the buffer of the subspace channel, and the anonymity of their nearly identical uniforms, Thot Tran struggled to convey the urgency of his directive without exposing its true strategic rationale. “You already have your assets in place, Konar. Why can’t you complete Phase Two?”

  “First, because this updated mission profile has no exit strategy.”

  “Why should that be of concern?”

  Konar leaned forward, snout down, clearly treating the conversation as a confrontation. “Sir, this operation represents a massive investment by the SRD, as do each of our active assets. We’ve already lost one. Can we really afford to squander another so carelessly?”

  It was a problem of definitions, Tran realized. That, at least, could be easily remedied. “I do not consider the sacrifice of an asset, no matter how costly it might be, to be a waste when it happens in pursuit of victory. Even our most optimistic scenarios carry a high risk of losing any asset committed to this type of operation.”

  The discouraged scientist averted his eyeline, and his shoulders slumped. “I’m not suggesting a major delay. At most, it would take an additional hour to devise an extraction strategy to recover our asset once its mission is accomplished.”

  “Adding an extraction to the timeline increases the duration of the asset’s engagement, elevating the risk that it will be damaged or incapacitated, leading to its premature capture and analysis. Forcing our targets into action without a retreat scenario has a high probability of ending in the complete disintegration of the asset, which will preserve operational security.”

  “You want the asset destroyed?”

  Why did he sound so shocked? Was it so hard to imagine? “Not if it can be avoided without altering our timetable. But if the alternative is that the enemy acquires it intact for analysis before we’ve prepared it for them, then yes, I would prefer it be destroyed.”

  “I find your conclusion extreme, but so be it. However, that brings us to my second concern. Taking action now presents serious tactical hazards.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you were a master tactician as well as a scientist.”

  Konar tensed at the implied slight but struggled to conceal his reaction. “The scenario as written poses a threat to our allies, and it risks inflicting significant collateral damage—the one thing we’ve been expressly ordered to avoid, for fear of alienating our neutral hosts.”

  “That’s not your problem.”

  “So you say now. But if this operation goes wrong, where will the blame be laid?”

&nbs
p; Tran wondered if the scientist was being deliberately obtuse. “Konar, you’re in the midst of executing one of the most important covert operations on foreign soil in the history of the Confederacy. I should think you would have hundreds of concerns more pressing than worrying about something as inconsequential as blame.”

  “Spoken like someone immune from the consequences of his actions.”

  “Hardly, I assure you.” He uploaded a new data packet and transferred it to Konar on the data subchannel. “Here’s something new to occupy your thoughts: We’ve been ordered by the domo to commence full operational status, effective immediately. You and your associate need to have all assets on line in the next twelve hours.”

  Konar flinched. “That’s insane! How are we supposed to go fully operational while coordinating tonight’s already rushed mission?”

  “Calm down. The remaining assets don’t need to be deployed, just activated.”

  The clarification only added to Konar’s befuddlement. “What purpose will that serve?”

  Researchers, unlike soldiers, could be so very exasperating. “It isn’t necessary for you to understand the rationale behind my every command. What matters is that you follow orders.”

  “Without question? Even if I have reason to believe the orders you’ve given jeopardize the effectiveness, secrecy, and security of this operation?”

  “Even then.”

  After a moment of quiet seething, Konar asked, “What if I were to decide that you and the domo have both gone mad, and I refused to follow these reckless orders?”

  “Then you would be single-handedly responsible for sabotaging one of the most vital strategic operations in the history of the Confederacy, I would charge you with treason, and the domo would send a company of Spetzkar to storm your laboratory and kill you.” A mocking tilt of his head underscored his low-key affect of menace. “Any further questions?”

  Konar straightened his back, aware that his attempt to take a stand had backfired in the worst possible way. “No, sir. We’ll proceed with tonight’s operation as ordered, and we’ll have the remaining assets activated by morning.”