by Ilsa J. Bick
“What if they were seeded?”
“By what? Some benevolent god-race? Those are just stories, Halak. Anyway, even if there isn’t a portal, there may be a tomb, and if all Qadir finds is a bunch of jevonite, gold, and jewels, that’s still worth his time and effort, particularly when he’s not the one risking his neck.”
“But Starfleet Intelligence thinks there’s more.”
“Absolutely. Why would the Cardassians bother patrolling a planet where there’s nothing of value? Sure, the space is disputed, but they pay particular attention to that particular planet, and get very touchy if any Federation vessels request a flyby. In fact, I don’t think any Federation vessel is allowed to get close.”
“So, by a process of elimination, assuming it’s not a research facility, you’ve decided that the most likely scenario is some artifact the Cardassians can’t use but want to keep to themselves until they can.” Halak had cocked his head to one side. “Okay. A little tautological, if you ask me.”
“But I’m not asking you, Commander.” Burke had given him a dry look. “I’m telling you.”
“I noticed. But why me? I’m a killer, right? Murder my crewmates at the drop of a hat? Plus, I’m supposed to be in cahoots with Qadir, or want to take over, or something equally inane. Whatever I am, I’m most certainly not an agent, despite anything I got volunteered for in the past. Why not send trained personnel to infiltrate Qadir’s network, or a couple of operatives to this planet?”
“You’re an intelligent man, Commander. You tell me.”
“Easy. Plausible deniability.”
“Disavowal is more like it. You get caught, you were acting on your own.”
“How did I get here then? Wherever here is.”
“You overpowered SI agents escorting you to Starfleet Command. Being in Qadir’s network and having recently visited Farius Prime, you knew of his plans and so decided to take it upon yourself to secure a piece of whatever it was Qadir was after.”
“But, unfortunately for me, Qadir’s people got the better of me, or the Cardassians caught on, and Starfleet is off the hook.”
“As good a story as any.”
A good story. Discounting the fact that Burke was Starfleet Intelligence (all intelligence agents were trained liars), Halak knew: Burke was a liar. Halak didn’t know how he knew, but he did.
Staring at the ceiling, Halak felt the ship change around him and knew, without having to be told: They’d dropped out of warp. Halak pushed up on his elbows and swung his legs over the edge of his bunk. Burke would come soon. They’d go over the plan; she’d give him a chance to study the drop area and decide how he wanted to attack the problem of locating Qadir’s men and the portal, if it existed.
The faintest of vibrations. Footsteps. Halak heard the blip-blap-bleep of someone keying in the code to unlock the door to his quarters.
“I brought you something to eat,” Burke said. She held a phaser in her right hand, the tray balanced on her left.
“Thanks.” Without being asked, Halak jumped down and backed to the far corner as she slid the tray on to his bunk, keeping her eyes—and the phaser—trained on him the entire time. They’d gone through the same ritual twice a day for almost the last week, so Halak had it down. Odd behavior for someone who considered him a confederate, but Halak would have taken the same precautions. After all, it’s not like I volunteered. “I could use a shower, too. A change of clothes.”
“No problem.” Phaser still pointed in his direction, Burke backed toward the door. “I’ll have Sivek see to both.”
Looking over the items on his tray, Halak made a face: same monotonous, indigestible Vulcan tripe. “May I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“We’ve talked about the Cardassians and Qadir, what will happen if I get the specs on this portal for you,” said Halak, still inspecting what passed for food arrayed on his tray, “but what about Arava?”
There was a pause. Then: “What about her?”
“What will happen to her? If I cooperate, that is.”
“If?” Burke’s eyes were flat. “You having second thoughts?”
“No. But it seems to me that if you know so much about me, then you might know where she is, and how important she is to me.”
“And if we did? Know either? Both?”
“Can you get her off Farius Prime? Since I’m risking my life and all that, you know, for the greater good.”
“You’re risking your life and all that for your career,” said Burke. “Let me give you a suggestion. Do your job and don’t worry about anything else right now. You get those specs. Then we’ll talk.”
“But you’ll consider it,” Halak pressed.
“It’s not my decision.”
“You could put in a word or two. I’ve been cooperative.”
“As would anyone with the business end of a phaser pointed in his direction.”
“Yeah, but that’s now. How do you know I won’t try something later? Warp off, or give you phony specs, or something?”
“You won’t warp off because Sivek will be with you. I’m not stupid, Halak. And you stay with us, in Starfleet Intelligence’s custody, until we’re satisfied that the specs are genuine.”
“Fair enough. But you could still ask your superiors. Ask Batanides about getting Arava off Farius Prime. Otherwise, I won’t budge.”
“I don’t think you have many choices.”
“Screw that.” Halak slid back onto his bunk and crossed his arms. “And screw you. You get Arava off, or I don’t work. Period.”
Burke’s cheeks flushed. Her phaser-hand twitched. “You will.”
Halak laughed. “Or what? You going to shoot me? My career’s over, remember? Whether you shoot me now, or I get myself killed, or I refuse and get court-martialed and put in prison, it’s all the same. But if you lose me, you lose plausible deniability. So, manus manum lavat. One hand washes the other, in case you’re not up on your Latin,” said Halak, privately tickled that having Glemoor around was proving to quite advantageous. “You agree to my terms, or it’s no deal.”
Her brown eyes sparking, Burke stared at him a long minute. Halak returned the stare. Burke blinked first. “I’ll have to take it up with Command.”
“Great, you do that. Then I want to see a copy of those orders.”
“That may not be possible. We’re supposed to be in a communications blackout, Commander.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve got narrow-band, secured channels. Use one. Hey,” Halak gave a disingenuous smile, “this is the mission we’re talking here. Yeah, sure, it’s my career. But it’s yours, too, Burke. You screw up, and I’ll bet you don’t get to play secret agent again any time before the next star in these parts goes nova.”
The small muscles along Burke’s jaw jumped. She backed up, toward the door, and Halak saw her left hand come up, the fingers move as she keyed in the combination for the lock. “I’ll see what I can arrange,” she said then cursed when her fingers slipped, and she botched the combination.
Good. He was making her angry, and that was good. Anger made people feel pressured, and people who were pressured made mistakes. “That’s not good enough.”
“It will have to do.” Burke’s look bordered on venomous. She jabbed at the combination again, blew out when the lock double-bleeped, and the door hissed open. “I will talk to Commander Batanides. Perhaps we can arrange to get Arava and her son, Klar, off Farius Prime, and maybe not, Commander. One damn thing at a time, all right?” Without waiting for a reply, she stepped out.
The door slid shut. Halak stood quite still, hardly daring to breathe.
Klar. She’d said Klar. But she couldn’t possibly know about Arava’s son, or his name. Halak had never mentioned Klar—not by name, or in any of his personal log entries. It was too dangerous. But Burke had known about him. Could one of Burke’s sources have told her? Someone who had infiltrated Qadir’s organization?
But wait. Her information was bad.
She’d gotten things wrong about Arava. Yet she’d known about Klar, a boy about whom only three people, other than Arava, were in the know: Dalal, Halak ... and Qadir. No one else knew. No one suspected. So the only way Burke could have known there even was a Klar was either for her to have gotten to know Arava, very well—or to have set eyes on him herself. Or both. But she’d said to Garrett, at the inquiry: I’ve never been to Farius Prime, Captain.
My God, he thought, she’s lying. I knew it! She says she’s never been to Farius Prime, but she let slip about Klar.
“So what else are you lying about, Burke?” Halak whispered, out loud, to thin air. “Just who, or what, are you?”
Putting conditions on things now, huh? Thumbing on the safety of her phaser, Lieutenant Laura Burke—whose real name was Talma Pren, a person with no rank in anyone’s military—jammed the weapon into a holster hugging her hip. Not going to do what he’s told? Talma stalked the short corridor from Halak’s quarters to a gangway that led to the warpshuttle’s bridge. Well, Halak wasn’t making the rules. She made the rules, and he’d damn well do as he was told.
Check with Command, my eye. She smirked; fine, she’d check with Command.
So, Talma Pren, should we get that witch Arava off Farius Prime when her staying put is ever so much more convenient? After all, she is a little bit of a traitor now, isn’t she? Oh, true, true, she’s working against Qadir; that counts for something. Still, someone has to take the blame when Qadir’s precious money and portal disappear, right?
Why, Talma Pren, I couldn’t agree more.
There. Talma clambered up the short stretch of gangway to the bridge. She’d checked with Command. Now all she had to do was manufacture the forged confirmation from Starfleet Intelligence—Dear Halak: Anything for you, darling. Love, Marta. Thank the heavens, she’d had the foresight to know this might come up and had accessed Batanides’s personal authorization codes from the records of the real—and very dead—Laura Burke.
Tsk-tsk, Laura, how many times have I told you: Always lock your door when you go to sleep aboard ship. You never know just who might break out of her quarters in the middle of the night and leave a nice, bright, shiny, and very sharp souvenir in your back.
Vaavek—no, Sivek, he’s Sivek for the time being—sat with perfect Vulcan poise over the pilot’s console: back straight as a titanium rod, the seal-skin black of his hair gleaming in a soft white light that suffused the bridge from a bank of lighting panels recessed in the ceiling. Talma Pren paused a moment, eyes roving the bridge, her body reveling in the pristine orderliness of Vulcan engineering. She’d been on many ships in her lifetime. Some she’d stolen. (Well, actually, she’d stolen most of them. Maybe she’d bought one, two at the most.) She’d had Klingon shuttles, Starfleet shuttlecraft, even a Cardassian two-person trimaran liberated from a hapless Cardassian trader floating somewhere between Farius Prime and the Malfabrican Sector—and not many people living who could make that claim. (Cardassians didn’t take kindly to people liberating anything.) But in terms of ships, the Vulcans won, hands down. Their ships were so much more streamlined, so functional; they eschewed luxury and favored steely blue hues and well-lit workspaces. Not as fancy as Starfleet shuttles: Starfleet loved those delicate, homey touches so pleasing to the eye but with no functional purpose. The Klingons made suffering a virtue, so their ships were not only ugly, they were no fun at all; and the shadows that fell through the grills and latticework on Cardassian ships always reminded Talma of a prison cell. But the Vulcans knew how to build ships. Surveying the bridge, Talma gave a sigh of appreciation. Play her cards right, and she could buy herself a whole damn fleet. Why, she might even buy Vulcan.
“What’s our status?” she asked, slipping into the copilot’s chair. Again, not luxurious but padded just enough and sensibly proportioned, with a high back and a lumbar support. (For those long space flights: absolute murder on your lower back.) “Any Cardassians around?”
Vaavek’s head swiveled so smoothly it might have been oiled. “None, but I suspect that will change within the next twenty-four hours when that Cardassian scout comes through on patrol.”
“What’s our position?”
“On the perimeter of the system; 600,000,000 kilometers from the neutron star.” Vaavek’s sensitive fingers played upon his console. “Magnetic field is quite high, but one would expect that of a magnetar. Accreting gas from the remnants of this system’s supernova as well as the weaker brown star of the binary are being forced to flow along field lines to the magnetic poles of the neutron star. That shouldn’t pose much of a problem for us, but because the magnetic axis and rotational axis of the star aren’t co-aligned, the star’s an accretion-powered pulsar, with X-ray pulsations sweeping out once per rotation. Those pulsations combined with random gamma ray bursts from the star itself and a strong stellar wind from the brown star make more detailed sensor resolution quite difficult.”
“Mmmm,” Talma murmured, not really listening. Science always had given her a headache. She indulged in a stretch, arching her back and finishing with something very close to a purr. “Less technobabble, if you don’t mind.”
Vulcans were not known to smile, though they would, on occasion, give the ghost of a smirk. One touched Vaavek’s lips now. “There are two stars. One’s brown, and the other isn’t. The one that isn’t is stealing matter from the brown one. That means, there’s a lot of junk floating around out there, and that makes it very hard to see anything. Right now, we’re far away from the planet. At long range, our sensors and communications aren’t so hot, but then again the Cardassians will be blind as Torkan cavefish, too. At best, they’ll see sensor ghosts, or nothing at all. At worst, their sensors may be able to resolve a signature, but they will still have to rely upon visual.”
“Why, Vaavek,” said Talma. “I never knew you had a sense of humor.”
“It is always advisable to know the ways of one’s adversaries.”
“But we’re working together.”
“Precisely.”
Talma gave him a sidelong glance. “What about Chen-Mai?”
“He should have no idea we’re here. We’re early for the rendezvous. He won’t even begin to look until he’s ready to leave the planet’s surface.”
“Yes, we do want to keep that nice element of surprise.”
Vaavek arched his left eyebrow (a feat Talma never could master, though all Vulcans seemed capable of it from birth). “I doubt Chen-Mai will share your enthusiasm.”
“Likely not,” Talma said, pulling her features into a look of mock regret. “Well, he won’t live long enough to worry much about it.”
Chen-Mai had been the perfect choice for her scheme. The man had been in Mahfouz Qadir’s employ for the last seven years, and he’d never once been suspected of skimming. Talma knew. She’d been the one to bring him into the Qatala network. For her glowing reports to the Qatala, Chen-Mai always paid her extremely well and Talma adjusted the take she reported to Qadir accordingly. A beneficial arrangement: collateral built up against the day when Talma made her move. Today, she had decided, was as good a day as any. She had no intention of parting with whatever Chen-Mai and company had found, whether that was specs for a portal, or lots and lots of treasure. (Jevonite didn’t exactly grow on trees.) Likewise, she had no intention of letting Chen-Mai—and whomever he’d been careless enough to leave alive—get a day older.
And that, though he didn’t know it, included Vaavek. Sivek. Whatever.
“Well,” she said, her tone bright and cheery, “then let’s get on with it, shall we?”
Chapter 29
Nothing: nothing in his mind, on the planet, or under the rock. There was simply nothing because there was nothing to find.
Try again. Clad in his environmental suit, the sound of his breaths loud in his ears, Ven Kaldarren stood so still that he imagined anyone spying him would’ve thought he’d turn into a pillar of the same hard stone that formed the mountains, the land itself. Failure is not an
option. Try again.
Yet he was going to fail. He felt it. Only a day left, and he knew. He would never find the portal. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough, or his psionic signature wasn’t a match. Maybe whoever had built this fabled portal had such an individual mindprint that, like a fingerprint or DNA, there was no way for anyone else to detect, much less access, the device. Not terrifically useful then, but Chen-Mai’s anonymous employer didn’t seem to care about that.
Try again.
He could lie. He could say he’d picked up something faint, but they’d have to wait awhile, come back. Then, before that time came, he could take Jase and go someplace far away. Not back to Betazed: That was the first place Chen-Mai would look. But Kaldarren could take Jase to Earth, leave him with the boy’s grandparents. A good thing Chen-Mai didn’t know who Jase’s mother was, so he’d have no way to trace the boy. As for Kaldarren, he could watch out for himself, something that was easier to do if he didn’t have to worry about Jase.
And he had a lot to worry about because he’d tried to scan Chen-Mai. Doing so broke every vow he’d ever made not to misuse his gift. But this was his life they were talking about now; this was his son’s life. So he’d scanned Chen-Mai—and run into a brick wall. A mind block: Kaldarren had run the fingers of his thoughts over the wall, touching it here and there, and in a way that reminded him a little of what snakes did, flicking out their tongues, tasting the air. Then he’d tried probing Mar—same wall. Same feel to the wall. And then Kaldarren was certain. The men were taking a neural blocking agent, probably an anti-scopolaminergic compound. The drug wouldn’t inhibit their conscious cognitive processes but would render them telepathically opaque. Metaphorically speaking, he might as well have tried seeing into a room through a frosted window. Kaldarren could catch shapes now and then, vague outlines of thoughts but nothing definite.
So. The blocks and the fact that both men were taking a drug so he, Kaldarren, couldn’t crack through telepathically were proof enough. Kaldarren got a certain grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that you didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that a man fearful of you seeing inside definitely had something to hide. That both Mar and Chen-Mai were taking the drug told Kaldarren that both men knew the same thing, and neither could be trusted. They were going to kill him. They were going to kill Jase.