by David Mack
“Probably,” Bowers said. “Not that anyone saw fit to share them with us.”
Dax added, “That sort of intel gets parceled out on a need-to-know basis.”
“Well, I need to know,” Kedair said. “Can we ask Starfleet Command to send us those access protocols on the double? I have an idea.”
Bowers felt his energy level perk up with a flush of excitement. “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “A fake distress signal.”
“Why not?” Kedair shrugged. “If it was good enough for them to try it on us, I see no reason not to return the favor.” To the captain, she added, “If we hack into their comm relay, we can use it to generate a message that will be indistinguishable from an authentic planetary distress signal.”
The captain looked skeptical. “Are you sure you have the skills to pull off that kind of a complex electronic forgery?”
“No,” Kedair said, “but I’m positive that Mirren and Helkara do.”
Dax nodded. “All right.” Then she asked, “What kind of emergency would be big enough to lure more than one or two ships away from the blockade?”
Bowers smiled. “How about a Klingon attack against multiple worlds?”
“Maybe,” Dax said, “but would that really be credible?”
He pointed at the map. “The Klingon fleet at Starbase 514 is scheduled to ship out in less than two hours. That’s our plausible threat.”
“Except that they’ve been recalled to Klingon space,” Dax said.
Kedair shot a sly glance at Bowers, then said to Dax, “True, but the Breen don’t know that. If the Klingon fleet cloaks as soon as it leaves the starbase …”
A gleam of comprehension lit up Dax’s face. “Then for all the Breen know, the Klingons could be anywhere.” She smiled. “It might work. I’ll contact Starfleet Command and ask for the codes to the Breen comm relay. Sam, contact Starbase 514 and tell the Klingons what we need them to do. Lonnoc, wake up Mirren and Helkara. I want them ready to hack that relay the second we get the codes.”
Kedair nodded in acknowledgment and made a quick exit. Bowers was right behind her, but he paused on the door’s threshold and looked back at Dax. “After I talk to the Klingon fleet commander, then can I get a shower and some rack time?”
“Sure,” Dax said. She checked the ship’s chrono and grinned. “But sleep fast. Your shift starts in three hours.”
31
After disembarking from the maglev train at the Utyrak terminal, Bashir had expected to find himself and Sarina in a city similar to the one they had left hours earlier. Instead, they followed the crowd of arriving passengers out one of several large archways that lined one wall of the terminal and found themselves on a long pier studded with broad docks, on the shore of a black subterranean lake that stretched away into unfathomable darkness.
Berthed at each dock were a variety of small waterships. Some were mere skiffs, barely large enough to hold a trio of passengers in front of their poleman. Others were like small yachts. A few were ferries capable of transporting up to a hundred persons. Breen civilians haggled with boatmen for passage across the lake, and hard currency changed hands quickly as people were ushered into vessels.
“We should hurry up and find a ride,” Bashir said to Sarina as they made their way down the nearest dock, “because I don’t see any other way out of here.”
Sarina pointed at the pilot of a small skiff tied at the end of the dock. “Let’s see if we can hire him. The fewer people we interact with the better, so I’d like to avoid those big ferries if we can.”
“Sounds good. Do you want to haggle, or should I?”
“Depends. How comfortable do you feel using Breen idioms?”
“Okay,” Bashir said, falling back half a step, “you do it.”
He let Sarina do the talking as they approached the pilot. At first, Bashir noticed nothing special about the content of Sarina’s conversation. Then he realized that important cues were being conveyed by shifts in posture, a tilt of the head, and subtle hand gestures. After a few seconds, Bashir caught on. One’s posture and the angle of one’s head could imply authority or subservience, confidence or humility. Verbal exchanges specified such details as distance, destination, and cost, while the hand gestures were a means of adding or diminishing emphasis, deflecting inquiry, or making ironic side comments.
Sarina paid the skiff pilot a few coins of Typhon Pact currency. Then the pilot stepped into his craft and beckoned Bashir and Sarina to follow him. Bashir boarded first. The flat-bottomed boat wobbled under his feet. He turned to help Sarina, but she climbed in with no apparent difficulty. As they sat down, the pilot untied the skiff from the dock, lifted his pole from its resting place against the bow, and pushed off into the great darkness beyond the docks.
All around the skiff, dozens of small vessels made their way across the lake. Light spilled from the hoverboat ferries and shimmered on the rippling waters. There was a faint sound of engines, and a handful of boats moved quickly enough to cut shallow wakes as they sped away from the rest of the flotilla.
Leaning close to Bashir, Sarina said in a low voice, “The pilot tells me it’s not usually this busy. Something big is happening in Utyrak, and people are coming in from all over Salavat to get work.”
His curiosity piqued, Bashir asked, “Does he know what kind of work?”
“Shipbuilding,” Sarina said. “A government contract.”
“Interesting,” Bashir said, leaving unspoken what they both already knew.
The skiff followed the other boats through a starboard turn. As one of the ferries navigated the turn ahead of them, residual illumination from the larger vessel enabled Bashir to see the corner of the massive, sheer cliff beside which they had been maintaining a parallel course. As the skiff completed the turn, Bashir and Sarina beheld a new and impressive vista.
Ahead of them, a city rose from the black water and reached up to the dark granite ceiling hundreds of meters overhead. The major structures of the city were shaped like wide hourglasses and looked as if they had been carved from the bedrock. Delicate bridges linked adjacent towers, and dozens of meters above the surface of the lake, causeways held up with wires traced curving paths around the bases of the majestic stone pillars. Small craft traversed the waterways of the sunless city, whose great towers flickered with a hundred hues of light. It was austere but lovely, and Bashir found it hard not to compare the Breen’s peculiar underground metropolis to such Earth cities as Venice, Amsterdam, and Bruges.
The pilot guided the skiff toward the nearest hourglass-shaped tower. Only as it loomed above Bashir did he truly appreciate its size. According to the HUD in Bashir’s helmet, the tower was more than three hundred meters tall, and its base at the waterline and its apex where it met the vast cavern’s ceiling both were approximately three hundred meters in diameter. At its center, the tower—which up close resembled a fortress—tapered to roughly fifty meters.
In the vast reaches of open space between the dozens of towers, tiny hovercraft darted to and fro, their dark hulls hidden by the perpetual night but revealed by the light-amplifying filter of Bashir’s mask. In the distance, he saw the end of the great cavern. Several far-off towers spat plumes of fire and smoke from their foundations, making the local air hazier than in Rasiuk.
The skiff landed with a loud scraping of metal hull over rough-hewn stone. Bashir let Sarina thank the pilot for the ride, and then they went ashore, where they found themselves amid a crowd of hundreds of Breen citizens who, like them, had just arrived by boat.
Sarina activated their private channel. “Plenty of manpower here. This must be the place.” She pulled Bashir through the crowd toward a nearby kiosk similar to the ones they had learned to use in Rasiuk. Reviewing its options and manipulating its interface with ease, Sarina muttered, “C’mon, where is it … ?”
Bashir whispered in reply, “Where’s what?”
“The shipyard,” Sarina said, still poking at the kiosk’s screen.
>
Bashir looked out across the cavern and considered the infrastructure that would be necessary to support a city in that environment. Then he imagined the needs of an experimental shipyard attempting to create a slipstream-capable starship and tried to picture where in Utyrak it might be.
He reached over and turned off the kiosk. “Stop. We were wrong.”
Sarina sounded annoyed. “What’re you talking about?”
“Look around,” Bashir said. “There’s nowhere to hide a shipyard in this city. We know they make slipstream parts here, but they must be sending them someplace else for assembly. Which means we have to find out where that someplace else is.”
32
Nar was long past the point of tears or of crying out. Her pain was too deep now, too pervasive. It was all she had left; the inquisitor had taken everything else.
“You have told us much, Deshinar,” the inquisitor said. “But I remain certain that you have concealed something from us. Something important.”
She said nothing. There was no point in lying, nothing to be gained from denying the obvious. The inquisitor’s tools measured her brain waves, her pulse, and the galvanic responses of her skin, rendering all her deceptions transparent. Her early attempts at disinformation had cost her the fingers of her left hand; her initial refusal to give up the location of the warren had cost her the digits of her right hand. A token gesture of defiance had led to hours of simulated drowning.
The inquisitor jabbed her with a neural truncheon, overloading her synapses with pure agony. For seconds that felt like forever, all Nar knew was suffering beyond measure, pain that defined her existence. Then it ceased, leaving her with the banal miseries of flesh and bone. Bloody froth spilled over her cracked lower lip. Dull aches and knifing pains filled her torso.
“Who were the two people you helped? You covered their tracks well, but we found enough to know you sheltered them in your home. Are they dissidents like your friend Chon Min?” The inquisitor circled Nar while waiting for her to reply, but she said nothing. Silence was the safest tactic because it was neither the truth nor a lie—it gave the inquisitor nothing to confirm or refute.
Standing behind Nar, the inquisitor leaned close to her and said, “Chon Min does not have to die. Tell me who the newcomers are, and I will spare Min’s life.”
“I do not believe you,” Nar said. Even in her broken state, she was neither so desperate nor so foolish as to accept an inquisitor’s word. Anything he offered, any promise he made, could be revoked as easily as it was given. Only the most naïve prisoners fell for such blatantly insincere ruses.
The neural truncheon slammed against Nar’s lower back. All-consuming fire raged up her spine and burned away her sense of self, time, and place. White heat left her burning from the inside out. She felt herself scream but heard nothing except the piercing screech that had usurped her auditory nerves.
Torment gave way to emptiness. All she wanted was to give in to gravity, fall to the floor, and sink into the cold comfort of the grave, but she was bound to the chair, propped up for the inquisitor’s convenience.
“Their names,” said the inquisitor. “Tell them to me.”
It took a great effort on Nar’s part just to speak. “They told me their names were Ket Rhun and Minh Sann and that they’d come from an outer colony.”
The inquisitor stepped in front of Nar. “Much better. Who are they?”
“Knowing their names will do you no good. They were zeroed.”
Technically, she had spoken the truth. The humans had identified themselves to her with those aliases and background stories, and they had been zeroed. Direct lies were easy for the inquisitor to uncover; Nar decided to see whether lies of omission were any more difficult for the BID investigator to detect.
“Zeroed? Did they cause the null-value errors in the surveillance matrix?”
Averting her eyes from the inquisitor’s mask, Nar said, “Yes. That was how I found them. Then I wrote a code patch to cancel out the errors.”
Slapping the truncheon against his open palm, the inquisitor asked, “Was that before or after you sheltered them inside your residence?”
“After,” Nar said.
“Then you saw them unmasked,” he said. “What species are they?”
Nar said nothing, even though she knew it would only stoke the inquisitor’s curiosity. Then he looked away, and Nar guessed that he was listening to a private transmission through his helmet or an earpiece. When he looked back at Nar, he waved the business end of the truncheon in her face. “You lied to me about writing a code patch. You hold a level-six rating as a software engineer—hardly sufficient to have created the perfect zeroing filter. What did you really create for Rhun and Sann? New identities?” He leaned closer. “I shall interpret your silence as a confirmation. Under what names are they traveling?”
“Bosh and Saar,” Nar said, spicing her lie with grains of truth, fragments of the humans’ real names. “I gave them fortunes and ranks worthy of envy.”
“No doubt,” said the inquisitor. “Tell me what species they are.”
He tolerated her angry silence for several seconds before thrusting the truncheon into her abdomen. Absolute suffering erased his question from Nar’s mind, along with every memory and feeling she’d ever known.
She returned to herself feeling only half formed, as if her hold on her mortal body was being pried loose. Distanced from its physical torments, she felt as if she had become a mere spectator to her life’s final moments, an empty vessel that could no longer be touched by the inquisitor’s brutal hand.
He locked a gloved hand around Nar’s throat. “What species are they?”
“Human,” she said, realizing only too late that her body was answering questions as if it had a will of its own. She struggled to retake the reins of her mind as the inquisitor hurled away his truncheon and grabbed Nar with both hands.
“What are humans dressed as Breen doing on Salavat?”
“Spies,” Nar’s body said, against her wishes. “Said they were cultural observers, but Starfleet made their tools.” Must regain control, she raged.
“Where are they going? Are Bosh and Saar their real aliases?”
Resisting a desire to sink into unconsciousness, Nar said, “Those are their new identities: Thot Bosh and Thot Saar.” She coughed. “Destination unknown.”
The inquisitor let go of Nar and detached a communication device from the belt of his uniform. “Issue a general alert to all stations on Salavat: We have two human spies on the planet’s surface. Secure all sites and information networks, and put out warrants for Thot Bosh and Thot Saar. Check all transit records for their movements within Rasiuk, and cross-reference with intercity transit logs.” He put away the comm device and returned to Nar’s side. “Thank you, Deshinar. You have been most helpful.”
Nar said nothing in reply. As the inquisitor left the room, Nar submerged into the embrace of her final slumber, taking solace in the knowledge that her last lie about Bashir and Sarina’s aliases, though minor, would permit her to go into the darkness with one tiny shred of her dignity intact.
33
Scaling the lower half of the hourglass-shaped rock tower had been relatively easy. Despite its steep angle, the tower’s exterior had been rife with fissures and protrusions, affording Bashir and Sarina no shortage of purchase.
Ascending the tower’s upper half was proving far more perilous. Dangling by his fingertips from the inverted slope, Bashir was certain this was the most arduous physical challenge he had ever faced. Even with assistance from his suit’s myoelectric enhancements, which amplified the strength of his grip as well as the power of his limbs, Bashir’s body was quaking from the effort of the free climb.
Giving up was not an option; neither was going back down. It would be just as difficult—maybe even more so—to retrace his path to the lower slope as to continue upward toward the nearest opening, and there were no such entrances on the tower’s lower half, which lay doz
ens of meters below his feet.
Sarina was a few meters ahead of Bashir. Despite having less upper-body strength, she seemed to be having an easier time coping with the inverted climb. Bashir surmised that Sarina’s slimmer physique and lower mass made her suit’s strength-enhancing technology proportionally more effective than his own. Looking down at the rocky slope far beneath him, he winced as his subconscious reminded him, The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
He was relieved when Sarina pulled herself over the edge of an opening in the tower’s rocky façade. Over his helmet’s transceiver he heard her say, “All clear.”
“Copy that.” It took him half a minute more to reach the ledge. Sarina grasped his forearm and helped him up and over, then eased him down onto the floor of a deck that led to two corridors, one at each end. Back on level ground, Bashir felt depleted. All he wanted to do was lie still and breathe.
Pushing him up to a sitting position, Sarina said, “We have to keep moving.”
If he’d had more strength, he might have argued the point. Instead he let her pull him back to his feet, and he plodded along behind her, summoning whatever stamina he could coax from his body to keep his footfalls as light and quiet as hers.
The inside of the tower was as sleek and modern as its exterior had seemed rough and primitive. Sarina led Bashir down a corridor past what appeared to be executive offices and communal work areas, all of them dim and unoccupied. Several cubicles contained computer terminals. Gesturing at one, Bashir said, “We’re surrounded by unsecured workstations. Why don’t we log on to one?”
“Because they probably won’t have the access level we need.” Sarina paused at a corner, peeked around it, then beckoned Bashir forward. Pointing ahead, she said, “That’s what we’re looking for, I think.”
He looked over her shoulder at a locked office suite. “Good point.”