Bender had expected to get at least a chuckle from that, but none was forthcoming. Looking up, she saw that neither Kochman nor Vandermeer was even looking at her anymore. They were quite clearly looking past her.
The com officer cast a glance back over her shoulder to see what was more interesting than a mouthful of chicken cacciatore. What she saw was the advancing figure of Pug Joseph, the ship’s acting security chief. Judging by the clouded expression on his face, Joseph hadn’t come to the mess hall to satisfy a sweet tooth.
That was the first observation Bender made. The second, which came just a moment or two later, was that Joseph was headed precisely in her direction.
When he finally stopped in front of her, he didn’t smile or greet her. He just said, “Lieutenant.” And his tone was every bit as grim as his expression.
Joseph was acting downright ominous. And judging by the stares he was attracting from Bender’s friends, she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Joseph didn’t answer her question. All he told her was “I need you to come with me.”
“What’s going on?” Vandermeer asked.
The security chief didn’t make any further reply. He just stood there, waiting for Bender to accompany him.
“Yes, sir,” she said a little uncertainly.
Getting up from the table, she exchanged looks of surprise with her companions. Then she did as Joseph had asked and followed him out of the mess hall.
Andreas Nikolas, formerly of the Stargazer, peered into the dense, twisted nest of finger-thick conduits glinting in the eerie beam of his palmlight.
“Obviously,” he said, “this isn’t the first time this power relay has been repaired.”
His pal Eddie Locklear chuckled, his freckled face and unruly red hair thrown into sharp relief. It was Locklear who had gotten Nikolas a job on the cargo hauler Iktoj’ni, where he could put some of his Starfleet experience to work.
“I’ve personally dug into it at least a half-dozen times,” Locklear told him, “and I only shipped out on this bucket a couple of years ago.”
“Comforting,” said Nikolas.
“Shut up and pass the hyperspanner,” his friend told him.
Nikolas rummaged through the leathery bag of tools with his free hand. Finally, he came up with the one Locklear had asked for—a metallic, Y-shaped device designed to seal off old conduits and open new ones.
“Here you go,” he said.
As Locklear took the device, he cast a grin at his friend. “I’ll bet you never saw anything like these on those big, shiny Federation starships.”
“Not once,” Nikolas conceded.
He watched Locklear turn the hyperspanner on, a yellow-white energy field appearing between the tool’s upper projections. Somehow, even that managed to look sickly and second-rate.
“This shouldn’t take long,” said Locklear.
“Meaning what?” asked Nikolas. “Twenty minutes?”
His friend didn’t say. He just laughed, leaving the answer to Nikolas’s imagination.
Clearly, the Iktoj’ni didn’t have the state-of-the-art equipment found on the Stargazer. And judging by the tangled mess of conduit cables in the power relay, she didn’t have the expertise one found on the Stargazer either.
Still, Nikolas was certain that he had made the right choice in putting Starfleet behind him. He saw that more clearly with every passing day.
On the Iktoj’ni, he didn’t have to worry about seeing Gerda or Idun in the mess hall or some corridor. He wasn’t constantly reminded of what he had lost when Gerda Idun vanished.
Of course, he missed his friends from time to time, his buddy Obal in particular. The Binderian had really grown on him in the short time they had served together.
But Nikolas didn’t regret moving on. Not in the least.
Or so he told himself.
Bender had never seen the inside of Captain Picard’s ready room. She had only heard about it.
It was a good deal smaller than she had imagined, a good deal closer and more confining. Or maybe it was just her discomfort in being there that made it seem that way.
Technically, she wasn’t alone. Pug Joseph was keeping her company as she stood there. But for all the talking he was doing, she might as well have been alone for real.
“You’ve got to tell me something,” she said at last.
The security chief looked sympathetic, but he didn’t make an attempt to satisfy her curiosity. All he said was “The captain will be here soon.”
Bender frowned. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Suddenly, she saw the door slide open, yielding to a familiar figure—that of the captain. As Picard entered the room, he looked every bit as grim as Joseph did. Not a good sign. But at least Bender would find out why she was there.
“Lieutenant,” said the captain, acknowledging her presence. He came around his desk, clearly in no great hurry, and sat down. “Thank you for coming.”
I didn’t know I had a choice in the matter, Bender thought. “Can you tell me why I’m here, sir?”
Picard nodded. “It’s Lieutenant Ulelo.”
Dikembe…? “Is he all right?”
“His health is not the problem.”
Bender didn’t understand. “Then what is?”
“Apparently,” said Picard, “Lieutenant Ulelo has been using his position as com officer to transmit technical data on the Stargazer to an unknown party.”
He might as well have said that Ulelo was a Regulan bloodworm. It would have made as much sense.
“There must be some mistake,” said Bender, her throat uncomfortably tight all of a sudden.
“I wish there was,” the captain said, with what seemed like utter sincerity. “Unfortunately, there is no question as to Ulelo’s guilt in this matter. He was caught red-handed—in the act, as it were.”
She couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. Not from Ulelo. “Can I speak with him?”
“Not at this time,” said Picard, “but soon enough.”
It wasn’t what Bender had hoped to hear. “If I could see him,” she asked, “get his side of the story…”
The captain frowned a little, but remained unmoved. “Clearly,” he said, “this comes as a shock to you. I expected no less. However, you are Ulelo’s closest friend on the Stargazer, and—as you can imagine—it is important to us to identify the recipient of his transmissions.”
There is no recipient, Bender insisted inwardly. It didn’t matter what anyone said. Ulelo couldn’t have done it.
Unaware of her thoughts, Picard went on. “Do you recall his having said anything, at any time, that might shed some light on this matter for us?”
She shook her head—too soon to give the captain the impression that she had fairly considered his question. But he didn’t take her to task for it.
He simply said, “Perhaps later, when you have had some time to think about it. Dismissed, Lieutenant.”
Bender was about to ask again to see her friend, but she could tell it wouldn’t do any good. Feeling numb and a bit unreal, she left Picard’s ready room and—abandoning the idea of eating anything—wandered in the direction of her quarters.
Chapter Five
WU GAZED AT LIEUTENANT ULELO across the yellowish shimmer of the electromagnetic barrier that incarcerated him. He was sitting on the bed provided for his use, looking up at her.
If Wu had expected Ulelo to look repentant, he wasn’t. He didn’t even look worried, though he had to know that he was headed for a Federation penal colony.
But he didn’t look arrogant either. More than anything, he reminded the second officer of a small boy, caught up in something he didn’t quite understand.
A small boy, Wu reminded herself, who had put one over on all of them, betraying his crewmates and sending information on any number of key operating systems to some mysterious third party.
She glanced
at Pierzynski, the security officer on duty, and nodded. In response, Pierzynski fingered a code into the touch-sensitive, metal-alloy plate set into the bulkhead next to Ulelo’s cell.
A moment later, the barrier was gone. Wu stepped inside the enclosure, which housed a chair in addition to the prisoner’s bed, and then glanced at Pierzynski again. Inputting another code, the security officer restored the barrier.
Wu sat down in the chair and waited a moment. She wanted to see if Ulelo had anything to say for himself—protests of innocence, that sort of thing.
He didn’t. He just looked at her.
“Well,” she said finally, in an attempt to loosen things up, “to tell you the truth, I never pictured us having a conversation here in the brig.”
Ulelo frowned a little, but didn’t say anything in response.
It was all right. Wu hadn’t expected him to confess right off the bat. Not after he had run a covert operation for months without so much as a bead of sweat.
“I’d like you to answer some questions,” she said. “If you cooperate, it may make a difference in your sentence.”
He remained silent.
Wu saw that she had her work cut out for her.
“Our logs indicate a series of transmissions over the last several weeks. You made those transmissions, yes?”
Ulelo nodded.
At least he’s not denying it. “Each transmission,” said the second officer, “contained technical specs on one or more of the Stargazer’s systems. This was information you initially collected in your personal files.”
Again, the prisoner nodded.
“And when you had enough to justify the risk, you sent it—right from your com station.”
Another nod. Wu was encouraged.
“What I find puzzling,” she said, “is that those transmissions weren’t sent to any set of coordinates twice. They were sent in what seems like every possible direction.”
Ulelo had no comment.
“What were you trying to accomplish?” she asked.
“I was following orders,” he said, surprising her.
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Whose orders?”
Ulelo fell silent again.
But Wu wasn’t going to give up so easily. “Lieutenant, you said you were following orders. I asked you whose they were.”
The com officer just stared at her.
“Was it the Ubarrak?” she ventured, groping in the dark.
He shook his head. “No.”
Good, Wu thought. If we can’t get a direct answer, maybe we can at least narrow it down.
“The Cardassians?”
Ulelo hesitated this time. But in the end, he answered in the negative again.
Wu searched his eyes. Did his hesitation mean something? Was it the Cardassians after all?
She didn’t let on about her suspicion. Why put the com officer on his guard? Maybe he would say something later that would nail it down for her.
“The Klingons?” she asked.
The Federation wasn’t at odds with the Empire these days. Still, one never knew….
“No,” said Ulelo, as easily as he had ruled out the Ubarrak. No hesitation at all that time.
There weren’t too many other possibilities. Of course, Ulelo could have been in cahoots with a party heretofore undiscovered by the Federation, but Wu couldn’t inquire about entities of which she was unaware.
Ulelo would have to volunteer that kind of information. And judging from the way their conversation was going, he wasn’t about to do that.
“What about the Aristaani?” she suggested.
It was a belligerent species, and one with which the Federation had butted heads on occasion. But to Wu’s knowledge, they weren’t the type to engage in espionage.
That made it all the more surprising when Ulelo said, “Yes.”
He said it freely, too—as if he had no compunctions about saying it. And yet he hadn’t been willing to mention the Aristaani when Wu had asked him an open-ended question.
She didn’t understand. Unless Ulelo was trying to deceive her, throw her off the trail…
But her instincts, and the look on his face, told her that he wasn’t doing that at all. He was telling her the truth. She would have bet on it.
“The Aristaani,” she said, just to be sure.
Ulelo nodded. “Yes.”
But the more she thought about it, the less she believed it. The Aristaani were even more bullheaded and battle-hungry than the Klingons. It had always been their practice to meet their enemies head-on.
So why change now? Wu wished she knew.
“Did the Aristaani tell you what they were planning to do with this information?”
Ulelo shook his head. “No.”
Of course not. That would have made Wu’s job too easy. “How did you come to work for them?”
The prisoner’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. Then he said, “Work for whom?”
What is this, a game? “The Aristaani.”
A strange look came over Ulelo’s face. An almost frightened look. “I didn’t work for the Aristaani.”
“You just said you did,” Wu told him, feeling more than a hint of annoyance now.
The prisoner shook his head from side to side. “No,” he said, “not the Aristaani. The Andorians.”
“The Andorians…?” she echoed incredulously.
The Andorians were members of the Federation. Some of their people were serving on Federation starships. It seemed unlikely that they would go to such trouble to obtain technical information on the Stargazer.
Ulelo looked at her, his eyes full of innocence. “Yes.”
Anger tightened Wu’s jaw. “Do you know what you’re saying, Lieutenant?”
His eyes glazed over again, as if he were trying to see something far away. “No,” he whispered, “not the Andorians. Of course not. It was the Vulcans….”
Wu took a breath, then let it out. The Vulcans. As if that made any sense at all.
It was pretty clear that she wasn’t going to get anything out of Ulelo. What wasn’t clear was why. Was he just pretending to have lost his mind in order to stonewall her? Or was there something truly wrong with him?
One thing was certain: She wasn’t going to find out by remaining in the brig. Getting to her feet, she signaled to Pierzynski, who had been watching from the other side of the barrier.
The security officer let Wu out, then reactivated the forcefield. It hummed a little—or rather, its generators did—as the second officer paused to consider Ulelo again.
He looked peaceful once more, innocent, returning her scrutiny with the same mild interest he had shown earlier. It was as if they hadn’t had a conversation at all.
Wu regarded him a moment longer. Then she looked up at the intercom grid hidden in the ceiling and said, “Wu to Doctor Greyhorse.”
“This is Greyhorse,” came the reply.
“I’d like you to examine Ulelo,” Wu told him.
“You think there’s something wrong with him?” Greyhorse asked. He sounded skeptical.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He seems confused at times. Muddled. Hardly the behavior of a man clever enough to do the things we’ve accused him of doing. I want to find out why.”
“All right,” said the doctor. “Bring him down to sickbay. I’ll put him through the ringer.”
“Thank you,” said the second officer. “Wu out.”
“It angers me,” said Gerda Asmund.
Her twin sister, Idun, who was sitting beside her at the Stargazer’s helm console, glanced at Gerda. “Ulelo?”
“Yes,” said Gerda, the muscles bunching in her jaw. “Ulelo.” She said the name as if it were rancid meat, as if she found each syllable more loathsome than the one before it.
Idun was angry as well. As someone who had been raised on Klingon virtues, she despised the notion of treachery. It made her skin crawl like a plate of serpent worms.
She remembered the stories her Kli
ngon father had told them about those who betrayed kin and comrades. There was Lifdag, who—appalled by his brother Farrl’s treachery—not only killed Farrl but took his own life thereafter. And then there was Tupran, son of Tuprox, who opened the doors of his father’s house to its enemies—and ironically became their first victim.
Traitors were even worse than cowards, Idun’s father had said. Tradition said that cowards were to be shunned, but traitors had to be killed on sight.
Gerda made a sound of disgust. “Had I been the first to discover Ulelo’s deceit, I might not have been as patient or as restrained as Lieutenant Paxton.”
Idun felt the same way. Once Ulelo’s guilt became plain to her, it would have been difficult indeed not to go after him.
“But you didn’t know,” she reminded her sister. “You never even suspected that Ulelo had another agenda.” Which was why Gerda and Idun were as surprised as anyone when security showed up and took the com officer away.
“You’re right,” said Gerda, her voice husky with emotion. “I didn’t suspect Ulelo. I didn’t question his loyalty for a moment.” She turned to Idun, her eyes hard and fierce. “And that is precisely what angers me.”
There were three of them in the captain’s ready room—Wu, Greyhorse, and Picard himself.
The doctor, who didn’t come to see the captain there very often—didn’t leave his office very often, for that matter—looked cramped and constrained. It wasn’t just that the plastiform chair was too small to accommodate his bulk. It seemed that the whole room was too small for him.
“You have examined Ulelo,” said Picard, already regretting that he hadn’t called this meeting in the roomier precincts of Greyhorse’s sickbay.
“I have indeed,” said the medical officer. “Actually, I gave Ulelo a routine checkup just the other day and found nothing of concern. But at Commander Wu’s request, I ran an expanded battery of tests on him—including anything I could think of that seemed at all relevant to Ulelo’s situation.”
“And?” the captain asked.
“By all physical standards,” said the chief medical officer, “Ulelo is the picture of health. No chemical imbalances, no blockages, no evidence of injury. In short, nothing that would result in aberrational behavior.”
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