by David Mack
“This is just what we need,” Sarina said as Bashir stole into the shadows behind her. “A variety of businesses and civilians who look like they hail from more than one social stratum. It’s an anthropological gold mine.”
“I don’t understand,” Bashir said. “What are we supposed to do here?”
“Just watch and listen. Use your helmet’s sensors to eavesdrop on conversations, and pay attention to the speakers’ body language, like we talked about last night. This street is about to become our master class.”
“I thought we were supposed to be looking for the secret shipyard.”
“If we don’t learn the finer points of the Breen’s language and culture, we’ll be lucky to find our way back to the surface, never mind the shipyard.” Turning her attention to the comings and goings of the street, she added, “We need to learn how to walk before we can run, Julian.”
To Bashir, lurking and observing felt like a waste of time. He wanted to be in motion, in action, but when he tried to imagine where he would go and what he would do when he got there, he understood that Sarina was right. Their helmets’ translators provided only a rudimentary grasp of the Breen language and no context at all for its cultural quirks. Spending some time spying on the locals would give the heuristic circuits in Bashir’s and Sarina’s suits more raw data, which would, in theory, lead to more accurate translations of verbal and printed communications.
None of which made eavesdropping on mundane interactions the least bit more interesting. Customers haggled with vendors about retail merchandise or asked questions about raw food for sale. Random conversations bled together: complaints about work schedules, insufferable supervisors, or slipping deadlines; small talk about ill-behaved children, ungrateful spouses, or music; people asking for directions, requesting transportation, or offering unsolicited advice.
Then a snippet of one-sided conversation caught Bashir’s attention, though he was unable to tell which person in the crowd was speaking: “I’d like to report unusual activity. Two individuals on Level Twenty-eight, Tyzil Sector … Merchants Circle, the nine hundred block…. They’ve been standing in an alley for a few hours. I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re acting strangely.”
Bashir nudged Sarina. “Someone’s reporting us to the authorities.”
“I hear them,” Sarina said. “We should go.” They merged back into the fast-moving crowd.
Somewhere far away but rapidly getting closer, a siren wailed.
On any world and in any language, Bashir knew that to be a bad sound.
So did Sarina, because she started running.
They bladed through dense knots of people blocking their way. More sirens wailed from other directions, ahead of them and from side streets.
Crowds stopped, congesting the streets and rendering Bashir and Sarina conspicuous by virtue of the fact that they were running. None of the civilians made any effort to stop them, but their passive obstruction of the streets was a major hindrance to the duo’s escape.
A swarm of silvery antigrav drones converged a few blocks ahead of Bashir and Sarina, regrouped into a wedge formation, and started moving toward them.
Sarina stumbled to a halt, and Bashir skidded to a stop at her side.
“We have to get off the street,” Bashir said.
“But we can’t lead them to our hiding place.”
From behind them, an amplified voice barked, “Stop and submit!”
Looking around for an escape, Bashir saw stairs beneath a sign that he now recognized as a marker for the city’s mass-transit system. “This way!” Running, he elbowed one civilian out of his way and hip-checked another clear of his path.
Disruptor bolts ripped apart the sign above Bashir’s head as he and Sarina sprinted down the stairs. Civilians scattered in a panic as several more shots screamed past the staircase. Bashir and Sarina dashed across the platform and through a massive scanning arch as civilians scrambled out of their path or dropped to the ground. The percussion of running footsteps echoed off stone walls and ceilings. Warning alarms buzzed, low and angry, reverberating in the transit station and nearly drowning out the hum of an arriving maglev train.
Conditioned by years of living aboard a Starfleet-run space station, Bashir expected the doors of the train to open ahead of him as soon as it stopped. Instead, he collided with the train’s closed portal and fell backward. In the fraction of a second between his head hitting the train door and his ass hitting the ground, a disruptor blast streaked by him and disintegrated half the door.
Sarina dropped to one knee, drew her own disruptor, and returned fire. Over the screech of weapons, she shouted at Bashir, “Get inside the train!”
He scrambled to his feet, leaped over the remaining half of the door, and somersaulted to his feet inside the train. Pivoting about-face, he drew his disruptor, shot out one of the train’s windows, and laid down suppressive fire at their Breen pursuers. “Come on!” he called to Sarina. “I’ll cover you!”
She snapped off a few more shots, then turned, ran to the half door, and hurdled over it. Breen civilians inside the train cowered and shrank from Bashir and Sarina. “We have to move,” Sarina said. “Head for the driver’s cab, and stay down.” She ducked and hurried toward the front of the train, shooting out more windows as she laid down suppressing fire on the run.
Disruptor pulses peppered the train, showering the duo with sparks and shrapnel as ricochets slammed into the civilians around them. Bashir blasted apart the lock on the door leading to the first car of the train and pushed the door open. As he lurched into the next car, a flurry of energy blasts tore through the metal skin of the train, and a stray shot cut a searing wound through the top of his thigh.
He howled in pain but forced himself to stagger onward toward the driver’s cab. Sarina rushed into the lead car and caught up to him. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Bashir snapped. “Do what you have to do, I’ll cover you.”
While Bashir fired his disruptor in the general direction of their pursuers, Sarina charged to the driver’s cab, shot off its lock, and yanked open the door. “Out,” she said, pulling the driver by the front of his uniform and tossing him aside. To Bashir she added, “Hang on, this might get rough.”
Gritting his teeth and wincing at the burning agony in his leg, Bashir replied, “I think that ship has sailed.”
All of the train’s doors opened, and over its PA system Sarina announced, “Attention, passengers: Everyone out—now!”
The civilians raced off the train and straight into the law enforcement personnel chasing Sarina and Bashir. As the last passenger scrambled out of the front car, Bashir noticed the driver still cowering on the floor. Bashir waved his disruptor at the driver. “You, too. Go.”
“Thank you,” the driver said and then fled at a full run.
“Here we go,” Sarina said, closing the train’s doors. The train lurched forward and accelerated with frightening speed. In seconds the whine of disruptor shots faded away, leaving only the quiet hum of the train’s magnetic-levitation generators. Then Sarina leaned out of the driver’s cab and said to Bashir, “Hit the deck and grab something heavy.”
He dropped to the floor, wrapped his arms around a seat rail, and prepared for the worst. The train slammed to a stop as if it had struck a solid barrier, and the sudden deceleration hurled Bashir against the car’s forward wall. All he could hear was the groaning of stressed metal as the train’s emergency brakes strained to absorb its momentum. Then the bone-crushing pressure of the high-speed stop abated, and Bashir almost relaxed—until another pang of red-hot pain in his leg reminded him that he’d been shot.
Sarina stumbled out of the driver’s cab and kneeled at Bashir’s side. She stole a quick look at his wound and asked, “Can you walk?”
“Not without help,” he said. He started opening a pouch on his suit to retrieve his medkit. “It’ll take me ten minutes to fix it.”
She thrust her hands into his armp
its and lifted him to his feet. “We don’t have ten minutes right now.” She reached inside the cab and pressed a button that opened the train’s doors. “We need to get off this train and into the city’s transportation system. If it’s like most cities’ transit networks, it probably has old tunnels that are no longer in use.”
He let Sarina help him out of the train and down to the tracks. Once they were on foot, it was easy to see that her prediction had been correct: there were many levels of tunnels and several lines running parallel to one another. A few had obviously fallen out of use and been allowed to sink into darkness and disrepair. Within a few minutes of abandoning the train, they had retreated deep into a long-forgotten corner of the Breen city.
Limping along with his arm draped over Sarina’s shoulders for support, Bashir asked, “What if they find traces of my DNA on the train?”
“They won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
Somewhere above and behind them, a powerful explosion quaked the bedrock and rained dust on their heads.
Sarina smiled. “Let’s just say I took a few precautions.”
13
Thot Keer knew that protocol and cultural taboos required him to accept the rebukes of his superior with quiet dignity, but the longer he worked on the slipstream project, the more fervently he harbored a secret wish to reach across his master’s encrypted subspace channel and choke him to death.
“I have the utmost respect for your work on this assignment,” said Thot Naaz, the director of the Breen Militia’s secretive Special Research Division. “However, the domo is demanding results sooner than expected.”
In his youth, Keer might have brashly asked, “Why?” Now he was old enough and cynical enough to guess at the truth: the Romulans and the Gorn were applying political and economic pressure in order to co-opt Keer’s work. He was disgusted by the notion that his people’s elected leader would yield so easily to the will of foreign powers, despite the Confederacy’s vast arsenal and numerous technological advantages.
Choosing his words with caution, Keer said, “I have no wish to disappoint the domo or our allies, but the prototype is not ready for testing.”
“So you said in your last report. Why, then, are you refusing aid freely offered by the Romulans and the Gorn?”
“Because their assistance comes at too high a price,” Keer said. “Our security as a nation hinges now on our ability to serve as the technological innovator of the Typhon Pact. Not once in our people’s history have we ever surrendered a military asset as valuable as this one.”
Naaz tilted his head forward into an aggressive posture. “We also have never before pledged ourselves to a multinational coalition. The Romulan Star Empire and Gorn Hegemony are not our rivals—they have become our allies.”
“Even allies can be rivals, in certain spheres of influence,” Keer said. “Look at the Federation and the Klingon Empire, for example. Staunch allies—but the Federation has not shared its slipstream drive with the Klingons, has it?”
His vocoder crackling with the anger in his voice, Naaz replied, “This is all beside the point, Keer. What matters now is whether you can have the prototype ready for testing in four days, as the domo has ordered.”
“I cannot,” Keer said. “There are too many design flaws for us to proceed.”
“What do you mean, ‘design flaws’? This is already a proven technology.”
Keer struggled to purge his voice of anger before he replied, “It has been proven only on a handful of specially designed Starfleet vessels. The more I study the slipstream formulas and engine schematics, the more certain I become that hull geometry plays an even more vital role in the application of this technology than it does in standard warp-drive designs.”
“Are you telling me the problem is that your prototype is the wrong shape?”
“No, sir. I am saying the problem is that all our ships are the wrong shape. They are too wide, have too much mass, and are marred by too many hard angles.” He patched in an image from the microgravity hangar outside his office. “As you can see, my crew is dismantling those sections of the prototype that I have flagged as being unsuited to the final configuration, which needs a more fluid aesthetic.”
Naaz pounded his fist on the desktop in front of him. “Have you lost your senses, Keer? Why would you take the prototype apart? And why now?”
“I have no choice, sir. It needs to be stripped down to its spaceframe and retooled from the keel up. I have begun my calculations for a stable slipstream geometry that will work with our basic hull shape, but many changes will still be required. Resolving the variables in these equations will take considerable time, but until I have done so, it is not safe to proceed.”
Keer’s explanation was met by a long, bitter silence. Naaz turned his body a few degrees away from Keer, signaling his intention to distance himself from Keer’s act of career suicide. “Work quickly,” he said. “Our allies gave us only a limited window of exclusivity with this technology. If we fail to master it in a timely manner, they will move to seize control of it.”
“My staff and I are working as swiftly as we are able. If you could intercede with the domo to gain us more time, it would be appreciated.”
“I will try, but it is not the domo who holds our hands to the fire.”
“Understood. I will contact you as soon as I finish the equations. If possible, I would be grateful if I could be kept apprised of events in the political arena.”
Naaz’s vocoder buzzed—a mechanical rendering of a derisive snort. “Trust me, Keer. If our allies see fit to ruin my day, I will not hesitate to ruin yours.”
“Of that I have no doubt, sir.”
Naaz terminated the transmission, and Keer switched off his terminal. He looked out his office window at the gutted prototype hovering before him.
I should be thankful I’m not rebuilding a complete starship, he decided. His directive was to produce a proof of concept—to solve the issues of quantum-slipstream field geometry as they pertained to Breen starship designs. Most of his prototype’s interior volume was empty. It had barely enough habitable decks and compartments for a skeleton crew of engineers and designers to monitor its power output and engine functions. Once the redesign was finalized, they might be able to assemble a new prototype in six days. But we have only four, he reminded himself. And I still haven’t finished the redesign. He drew a deep breath and focused on remaining calm. Just prove it can work, he told himself. Turning this husk into a working starship is someone else’s headache. He sat down at his desk and called up the seemingly endless formula that governed the generation, manipulation, and controlled termination of a slipstream effect.
The digits and mathematical notations seemed to melt into a blur while Keer stared at them, and he knew he was in for a very long night.
14
Bashir kept his attention on the dermal regenerator in his hand and its progress repairing the wound beneath it, and he blocked out the unpleasant truth that it was his own leg he was treating. The pain-suppressing neural inhibitor diodes he had affixed on either side of the ugly scorch in his flesh helped; because he no longer felt his injury, he could pretend it wasn’t his body he was fixing but someone else’s. It reduced the task to an abstraction, a rote procedure.
A few meters away, Sarina stood guard at the hatch that linked the maintenance passages to the transit tunnels. Her disruptor was in her hand, held ready, and she had the door cracked open so she could watch and listen for trouble. She glanced back at Bashir. “How’re you doing?”
“Almost finished. What’s our next move?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”
He nodded. “Yes, running for your life tends to build an appetite.” Brushing his fingertips over the new skin on his leg, he was pleased with his handiwork. “Good as new,” he said, removing the neural inhibitors. Sensation returned to his thigh almost immediately. There was no serious pain, only a dull ache deep in the muscle an
d a strong tingling just under his epidermis.
“Go ahead and eat first,” Sarina said. “I’ll keep an eye out for trouble. When you’re done, we’ll switch.”
“All right.” Bashir dug out his rations, which consisted of a high-calorie, high-protein candy bar of his own invention, a pill that contained both a multivitamin compound and a booster for his immune system, and several generous sips of water recovered from his breath, perspiration, and urine and then filtered by his suit’s life-support system—another detail he was trying to ignore.
After he finished, he put his gloves and helmet back on and joined Sarina at the door. “Your turn,” he said. Sarina holstered her disruptor, and he drew his. She stepped behind the limited cover of some protruding pipes a few meters from the door, removed her helmet, and wolfed down her own meager dinner.
She returned to his side, once more submerged into her disguise. “Ready?” He nodded, and she reached past him and pushed the door shut. It locked automatically. “They’ll be watching the tunnels. We need to find another exit.”
They walked for more than two hours through what seemed to Bashir like endless catacombs. Sarina seemed to make random turns at intersections and climb or descend ladders at various junctions on a whim. As they neared a T junction, Bashir mustered his courage to ask, “Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Level Thirty-five, Gevat Sector, the industrial ring, behind the eighteen hundred block.” She stopped, turned, and looked at him. “What? You thought I was making this up as I went along?”
“The possibility had crossed my mind.”
“I wanted to get us a good distance away from our dust-up in Merchants Circle. The entire city’s probably on high alert by now, so I thought we might want a less-trafficked area for our next public appearance.” She turned the corner, led Bashir down a terminal passage to a heavy door, scanned it, and declared, “It’s not locked.” Bashir tensed as Sarina pushed the door open a few centimeters and scouted the area outside. “Looks clear,” she said.