Assassination Game

by Alan Gratz

  “Oh good. I see we’re letting the krogs into the vorsch pit now,” said a sarcastic voice from behind McCoy. He turned. It was Daagen, the medical cadet McCoy had seen here the night before, waving a VARKOLAK, GO HOME sign. McCoy took his comment to be a Tellarite expression, along the lines of letting a fox into the henhouse, but he didn’t challenge him. Not here. Not now. The Varkolak just being here was argument enough against Daagen’s xenophobic attitude.

  McCoy saw another familiar face: Cadet Uhura, doing some kind of a wiggling dance in front of one of the Varkolak doctors. He realized it was a form of communication only when the doctor she’d been dancing for started barking and dancing in response. Now there was somebody who would actually change the face of the galaxy one day, he thought. Not a doctor or an engineer or a starship captain, but a linguist. Someone who could bridge the biggest gap facing interplanetary peace: simply understanding what the devil everyone else was talking about.

  Someone pointed, and McCoy saw a shuttle flying over the fog bank from San Francisco. The Federation president was on her way. On the dais, the various groups awaiting her arrival hurried to their places, pulling on tunics and straightening their hair or fur or antennae. Federation News Service reporters scrambled into position, and McCoy caught sight of Nadja Luther among a group of engineering cadets ready to help receive the shuttle and prep it for its return trip. The gang’s all here, he thought, and he couldn’t help staring at her until the descending shuttle cut her off from view.

  The craft touched down far more smoothly than any shuttle McCoy had ever ridden in, but then he wasn’t Pellan Fel, president of the United Federation of Planets. She emerged wearing a dark-blue pantsuit in the military fashion favored by Andorians and nodded her thanks to her Japanese pilot, a cadet McCoy hadn’t met. Starfleet’s Chief Medical Officer, Admiral Cindy Wójcik, welcomed the president and escorted her to the podium.

  “Hail and well met, fellow citizens of the Federation and honored guests from around the galaxy. I come here today as the president of the United Federation of Planets to officially open an historic conference, one that will see the unprecedented attendance of more than two dozen governments, spanning thirty-four sectors and two quadrants, all of whom have come together today in a spirit of understanding and cooperation, to advance that most noble of pursuits, the—”

  Pellan Fel never finished. An explosion ripped through the shuttle behind her, and McCoy’s world went black.

  CH.08.30

  Course Changes

  Uhura sat in the conference room in the Varkolak compound, picking at the dermal patch on her arm, where shrapnel from the explosion had caught her. She’d been lucky. They all had, apparently, as whatever had caused the explosion had blown out the side of the shuttle away from the dais, and no one had died. If it had been on the other side, though …

  And not whatever had caused the explosion. Whoever. Shuttles didn’t just explode, especially not shuttles that carried the president of the United Federation of Planets and had security and engineering teams going over them before and after every flight.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Dr. Cameron asked. He was the oldest member of the linguistics team, easily eighty years old, and like a father to most of the team. A grandfather. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with sitting this one out after what you’ve just been through.”

  “No. No, I’m fine,” Uhura told him. Which was true, physically speaking. Mentally, Uhura was not fine. She felt her hand start to shake and hid it under the table. She had never been that close to a terrorist attack before. Never had something just a few meters away from her explode with such force, it threw her to the ground and showered her with debris.

  She had never been so close to dying.

  She’d died in simulations, of course. Been on her share of bridge crews who’d fought computer versions of Romulans and Varkolak and Klingons, and lost. The simulations were tense. When everything went to hell and your console was busted and the red-alert klaxons wouldn’t stop and smoke filled the room, your adrenaline got pumping. And when your ship exploded and the lights came up and you knew you were dead—or would have been in real life—it felt like getting thrown from a playground merry-go-round. But all along you knew it was fiction. Even though you went through the motions, with all the energy and excitement of a real situation, your head still knew it wasn’t real.

  This was real. The suddenness, the heat, the force of it. The violation of it. This was her place. The Academy campus, Fort Baker, Marin county, San Francisco—this was inviolable turf, like home. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen here. The explosion had changed everything.

  Uhura slid her shaking hand up her arm to her dermal patch again.

  The explosion had changed her.

  A detail of Starfleet Security officers led the big alpha Varkolak, Dr. Lartal, into the room, followed by two of Lartal’s Varkolak guards. Uhura felt herself stiffen. She was already sure he had been behind the explosion. Or if not him, one of the other “doctors” or guards visiting under a banner of truce for the conference.

  The security officers put Lartal in a seat on the other side of the table, and soon a Starfleet Security officer with commander stripes on his sleeves came in with a PADD and sat down across from him.

  “Why am I being detained?” Lartal growled.

  “Do I really need to answer that?” asked the commander.

  “You blame me for the bombing.” Lartal sat back in his chair. “Of course.”

  “Dr. Lartal, I understand you skipped the tours of the medical facilities yesterday and instead insisted on visiting other locations, including the area where today’s incident took place. Why?”

  “Sightseeing.”

  “And yet the security detail with you said you barely paid attention to any of the sights.”

  Lartal said nothing.

  “You weren’t scouting locations for a bomb?”

  “No.”

  The commander held the Varkolak’s gaze for a moment, then pushed a button on a video console on the table and spun it toward Lartal. “This is footage from one of the FNS cameras filming the speech today.” The commander froze the picture. “See here, how you’re diving away from the shuttle an instant before anyone else?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you explain how you knew that shuttle was going to explode before anyone else did?”

  “My gutsaina told me,” he said, using a Varkolak word.

  “Your what?” The commander looked to the linguist team.

  Dr. Cameron was shaking his head at the linguistic console again. “We don’t have a direct translation for it.”

  Uhura heard the Varkolak root word for “scent” in the word and saw the subtle way Lartal’s nose twitched as he said it.

  “Smeller. Thing that smells? Sniffer,” Uhura said. “His scanning device.”

  The Varkolak turned his wolfish eyes on her again. “Yes.” He plucked the scanning device off his belt and put it on the table in front of him—but not close enough for the commander to reach out for it.

  “No one near you reported hearing a sound from your … ‘sniffer.’”

  “The sound is inaudible to human ears.” His eyes were still on Uhura. “Not even, I think, this one’s exceptional ears.”

  Uhura shuddered under the Varkolak’s stare, but didn’t look away. His tongue wagged in a wolfish smile, and he looked back at the commander. “My gutsaina alerted me to an imminent plasma explosion. I took action.”

  “I didn’t say it was a plasma explosion,” the commander remarked.

  “No. You probably don’t even know yet, do you?” Lartal said. “I know it was a plasma explosion because my gutsaina told me.”

  “And just why was your ‘sniffer’ on?”

  “It is always on.”

  Uhura didn’t believe a bit of it. The Varkolak’s “sniffer” just happened to be on and just happened to go off at a frequency humans couldn’t hear, and Lartal just happene
d to jump out of the way before anyone else. She could see the commander wasn’t buying it either.

  “So. You heard the alert and you jumped out of the way, because you knew there was going to be a plasma explosion.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a lot of experience with explosives, do you, Dr.?”

  Lartal bared his teeth at the commander, but said nothing.

  The commander pointed to the screen again. “You’ll notice none of your colleagues knew to jump clear.”

  “No. They were fortunate. You should have better security.”

  The Varkolak behind Lartal chuckled, and the commander shifted in his chair. “Well. You can be sure we’re going to be watching a lot more carefully from now on, Dr. Lartal. And I’m going to have to ask you to turn over your scanning device.”

  Lartal picked up his sniffer from the table and clipped it back onto his belt. “No.”

  The commander stared across the table at Lartal for a long moment.

  “I’ll ask you again, Dr. Give us your scanning device.”

  “And again, I say no. Perhaps you are not aware, but Varkolak Prime is not a member of the United Federation of Planets.”

  “I’ve heard that, yes,” the commander replied, deadpan.

  “Then of course you will understand that I am not bound to oblige.”

  “Nor are we bound to continue to extend our hospitality,” the commander said.

  “But you have no evidence any Varkolak was responsible for this heinous deed. You would expel us on suspicion alone? Where is the spirit of understanding and cooperation your president spoke of?”

  “You could cooperate by giving us your scanning device,” the commander persisted.

  Lartal stood. “And you could attempt to take it from me.” His voice was suddenly much lower, and Uhura saw in his words a more aggressive posture and delivery. She looked nervously to the commander and wondered if she should caution him.

  “But I warn you,” Lartal went on. “To do so would be to provoke a response from the Varkolak Assembly. And it will not come in the form of a carefully worded letter.”

  Whether he heard it in Lartal’s words or just decided now was not the time for an international incident, the commander did nothing to further provoke the Varkolak. He turned off the video console and cycled down his PADD. “You and your contingent are hereby restricted to the Academy grounds. Everything else is off-limits,” he told the Varkolak.

  Lartal growled, which only meant to Uhura that he was more guilty of something. Why would he need access to anything except the campus if he was really here for the medical conference? That he wanted more meant he was here for some other reason, none of which could be good. Uhura stared at the sniffer on Lartal’s belt. Spock was right. The rest of the universe didn’t play by the same rules. Had the situation been reversed, the Varkolak would have simply taken the scanner from the commander. But Starfleet was going to let a valuable piece of evidence walk right out of the room. And for what? Principles? Moral high ground? How would ethics help them the next time the Varkolak attacked?

  The commander left the room, and Dr. Cameron and the other senior linguists packed up their equipment. “Go on back to your room,” Dr. Cameron told her. “Your help was invaluable, but go now. Rest. You are more tired than you know.”

  Uhura held her shaking hand again and nodded. “I will. Thank you, Dr.” Lartal and his lackeys left the room, escorted by a complement of Starfleet Security, and Uhura followed along a few steps behind.

  “OrrRain nola haRapatzan gu beRe duzan?” one of Lartal’s Varkolak guards asked him.

  Lartal leaped on the other Varkolak, biting his neck and riding him to the floor. “Itxi guza engaina!” Lartal growled, his teeth still clamped around the other Varkolak’s throat.

  The Starfleet Security officers immediately scrambled to the periphery, phasers pointed at the two Varkolak, but it was over almost as soon as it had begun. Lartal got up and the other Varkolak remained crouched, whimpering, his tail between his legs.

  Lartal turned quickly, and Uhura couldn’t wipe the shock off her face in time. Lartal’s eyes narrowed and he bared his teeth. Lartal knew she alone had understood their words, and Uhura knew she alone was in terrible danger because of it.

  Hikaru Sulu woke in the hospital. He lay on a bio bed, his vital signs charted by the mysterious beeps and chirps from the console behind his head. A white plastic screen separated his bed from the rest of the room, but through it he could hear the soft shufflings of doctors and nurses as they tended to other patients.

  The explosion. That’s why he was here. There had been an explosion at the opening ceremonies. The shuttle—

  It came back to him now. Piloting the president of the Federation across the San Francisco Bay; politely answering her questions about his studies before she went back to talking to her advisors; bringing them in for a landing at the overlook. A pretty perfect touch down, if he did say so himself. The president had thanked him when she’d disembarked and then he’d seen to the shutdown sequence and done the requisite pilot’s examination of the outside of his vessel after landing. He’d been at the front of the shuttle when it went up, throwing him clear, but showering him with shards of transparent aluminum and duranium.

  Sulu tried to sit up, but his whole body was sore, and his chest and arms and face were tight, like he had a sunburn. The beeping behind him became more insistent, and a Tellarite doctor emerged from between the sheets of plastic. He wore an Academy medical uniform, which meant he was a proper doctor, but in rank, still a cadet, like Sulu.

  “Mr. Sulu. You’re awake. Good. I’m Dr. Daagen. I’m your attending physician. You took a real shot from the explosion.”

  “What happened? Do they know?”

  “No official word yet. But the words on everyone’s lips are ‘Varkolak terrorist attack.’”

  “How bad is it?” Sulu asked.

  “No fatalities. Most are like you. You received multiple lacerations to your face, arms, and chest; bruising along your upper sternum; and a broken clavicle. We’ve patched, treated, and regenerated your respective injuries. You’ll make a full recovery. Your face, of course, will look like mine for the rest of your life,” said the wrinkled, pug-nosed Tellarite.

  Sulu’s eyes went wide.

  “That’s a joke, Cadet.”

  Sulu closed his eyes, and sighed. “Nice.”

  “I assure you, on Tellar Prime this face is considered quite handsome.”

  “Just keep telling yourself that,” Sulu joked.

  The Tellarite snorted in amusement.

  “In all seriousness, you’re going to be fine. I’m afraid it’s going to put a crimp in your piloting reaction times for a little while. And your fencing.”

  Sulu moaned. His fencing was the one thing he did that wasn’t a part of his grand plan to work hard, study hard, and graduate with a top posting. He competed for the Academy fencing team so he could have sparring partners, but he was really fencing just for himself. To disappear behind that mask and parry, lunge, redouble, riposte. To anticipate, to defend, to advance, to attack. Fencing was the one thing Sulu had in which he could lose himself entirely and put away, if only briefly, his single-minded determination to succeed in Starfleet. It was his own private retreat from the world, and even losing that escape for a short time was enough to shake him.

  “Wait,” Sulu said. “How did you know I was a fencer?”

  “We make it our business to know everything we can about our recruits before we invite them to join,” the doctor said quietly. He pulled up his sleeve and showed Sulu a tattoo of a graviton particle. The Graviton Society. This doctor was a member. “After today’s attack on the Federation, on you, are you more inclined to accept our offer, Cadet?”

  Sulu leaned back onto his pillow and stared at the ceiling. The strange summons on his PADD had been an invitation to join a secret society that claimed to protect the Federation when it couldn’t—or wouldn’t—protect itself. S
ulu had been surprised by the offer and somewhat flattered. He’d heard rumors about the Graviton Society. That they were the real movers and shakers in Starfleet. A cadet with a plan to end up at the helm of one of Starfleet’s flagships would do well to become a member. As long as it didn’t distract him from his studies.

  Sulu had started to call it The Plan—capital T, capital P. The Plan was to keep his head down, work hard, and graduate with top honors, which would get him any posting he wanted. That’s why he didn’t fool around with things like the Assassination Game. In helmsman’s terms, Sulu’s plan was the course he’d laid years ago, and he’d been traveling at maximum warp toward his destination ever since. He’d made course corrections along the way, to stay on target, certainly. But the Assassination Game, fencing—maybe this Graviton Society—were all detours. Course changes. Temporary layovers. And temporary layovers were never profitable. They diverted you from your mission. Made you late. Sometimes kept you from arriving at all.

  But there was also duty to consider. Why Sulu had chosen this course in the first place. He couldn’t forget that or The Plan became just a long, difficult journey to an empty planet in space.

  “I accept,” Sulu finally said. “I’m ready to join.”

  “Good,” said Daagen. “I thought you might. I will be your contact from now on, and I already have a mission for you, Mr. Sulu. There is a mole inside the society, and we’re going to dig it out.”

  CH.09.30

  Human Courtship Behavior

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Kirk finally saw the sun again. Where had the day gone? Well, there had been the business of escorting Lartal to the opening ceremonies overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge … and then the explosion. And the brief period of unconsciousness—that had to account for some of the time, of course. And then the hovering doctors who wouldn’t let him leave the hospital because of a few scratches and bruises, and the waiting security team who wouldn’t let him leave before asking him a few questions. Five times over. His stomach growled and his feet changed course toward the dining hall without him even thinking about it.