by David Mack
Half a second later the monofilament line jerked taut and pulled Bashir out of the tube. He swung through the air as he was pulled simultaneously forward, toward the center of the cavernous space, and up, toward the underside of the launch pad. Gritting his teeth, Bashir gripped the bolt thrower with both hands and hung on. Its tiny motor whirred as it winched him steadily upward.
By the time he reached the superstructure beneath the platform, it had risen more than a hundred meters above the water and was close to entering the shaft in the center of the tower. He detached the bolt thrower’s cable from its anchor in the metal beam, retracted the slack in the line, and tucked the device back into his suit. Clambering inside the dense network of beams and pipes packed into the base of the launch pad, he pulled himself from one handhold to another, leaped across gaps with no margin for error, and fought his way upward to a ladder that led to a locked hatch. One shot from his disruptor blasted out the lock. With effort he slid the heavy panel open and climbed up onto the pad.
Everything was as dark as night. Bashir switched on his visor’s night-vision mode, which revealed his surroundings in a crisp, high-contrast green twilight. He was under the Breen scow’s aft port thruster. The pad was less than a hundred meters from the top of the tower, which was veiled behind a blinding wash of daylight. Within seconds the ship—and Bashir—would be exposed. Can’t stay here, he told himself. When those engines kick in, I’ll get fried. Looking around, he saw no means of infiltrating the ship. He knew better than to try to climb up through the landing gear bays; at a glance he saw that they had been designed to leave no empty space when retracted. If he tried to stow away inside one of them, he would be crushed. Cutting through the hull would set off alarms for certain. No open ports, no emergency hatches on the ventral hull. He grimaced in frustration. This thing’s tight as a drum.
The top of the shaft was only seconds away. Bashir made a fast inventory of the systems of his modified environment suit. He looked no farther than the standard-issue features before finding what he needed: full vacuum support and magnetic clamps built into the boots and gloves, for deep-space extravehicular repair work.
He looked over the ship from bow to stern and assessed its aerodynamic profile, noting stress points, likely airflow during atmospheric operations, and what areas of the hull were least visible from the likely vantage points of the Breen ground crew and control tower. Then he made his best guess, picked a spot between two bulges on the ship’s port side, activated his suit’s magnetic clamps, and scaled the ship. As the ship’s dorsal hull breached the top of the lift shaft, Bashir pushed himself as far back into the gap on the hull as he was able. Looking down at his torso and legs in full daylight, he was relieved to find that his armor was roughly the same color as the Breen scow’s hull.
The ship’s engines powered up with a piercing shriek that felt like a knife through Bashir’s skull, and then a thunderclap shook him to his core as the vessel began its ascent into the dreary, tin-colored sky. A moment of powerful acceleration and hammering wind shear threatened to rip him loose from the hull until the ship’s exterior inertial dampers engaged. Even with that protection, it was a battle to hold himself in place, to resist the brutal impact of wind and the merciless pull of delta-v as the ship soared into a banking turn.
Dozens of kilometers below, the gradual curve of Salavat rolled past, its details vanishing as the scow continued to climb. As the haze of atmosphere faded to reveal the cold beauty of space, Bashir wondered for the first time how long and wild a ride he had just hitched…
…and whether he would ever see Sarina alive again.
35
Consciousness returned as the heavy, dark hood was lifted from Sarina’s head in one rough pull. Her blond hair fell in a crazy mess over her face as she squinted against the glare of a white-hot spotlight aimed into her eyes. She tried to turn her head only to find her range of motion limited by metal restraints on either side.
A quick look down confirmed that she wasn’t imagining the chill of cold air across her bare limbs and torso. Her Breen armor and mask had been removed and heaped on the floor in front of her, and she had been stripped to her undergarments. Her arms and legs were stippled with gooseflesh, and her feet felt as cold as ice from resting on a bare concrete floor.
She heard a door open and close behind her. Slow footsteps. On the other side of the spotlight, a shadow moved across a canvas of deeper darkness.
Then came a synthetic male voice speaking in mono-tonal English, its every syllable cobbled from harsh scratches of metallic noise—the hallmark of words translated by a Breen vocoder. “We have taken away your costume, human,” he said. “For an outworlder to wear the garments of a Breen—never mind the insignia of a hesh of the Confederate government—is a disgrace.” He circled behind her. “What is your name? And do not waste my time with your Breen aliases. I know already that you are neither Hesh Rin nor Minh Sann.”
“Alice,” she lied, picturing herself well and truly down the rabbit hole. “Which I guess makes you the Mad Hatter.”
“I am your inquisitor.” His iron voice betrayed no emotion. “That is all you need to know.” He paced around her with a predator’s slow deliberation. She could almost sense him taking her measure, assessing her weaknesses from a safe distance, searching her eyes for the faintest glimmers of fear or prevarication. “I must admit, however,” he continued, “that I enjoy questioning outworlders. Interrogating someone whose background is unknown to me, whose personal history is not a matter of public record in the Confederate database…the challenge it presents is exhilarating, like that of an artist facing a blank canvas.”
Sarina smirked as the Breen stepped back into her field of vision. “Is that what I am to you? A work of art in the making? Am I to be your masterpiece?”
The inquisitor stopped and faced her directly. A faint spill of reflected light revealed the details of his mask’s snout. “You taunt me? Interesting. Your defiance is refreshing. All I got from your accomplice Nar was silence—that is, until I broke her. Then she gave me everything I wanted.” He resumed his slow orbit of Sarina. “Would you like to know how long she resisted? Or what it took to break her?”
“Not especially, no,” Sarina said. “I’d much rather find out what it’s gonna take to break you.” Her challenge seemed to go unnoticed; the inquisitor continued his steady pace without missing a step.
“It amuses me that you think yourself capable of testing my limits,” he said. “You act as if oblivious of your peril, but your obvious intelligence makes such a charade hard to believe. I assure you, any delusions you might possess about escaping and revenging yourself upon me are merely that—delusions. I hold your fate in my hands, so do not test my patience.”
She let out a snort of derision. “Who’re you kidding? You expect me to believe that you hold the power of life and death over me? I strongly doubt that. You seem like a smart man yourself, so I’m guessing you understand what a high-profile prisoner I am. And if you know that, then it’s a good bet your superiors know it, too. Which means if you kill me, they’ll have your head on a spike.”
“I do not have to kill you to change the shape of your existence,” he said. “My superiors will forgive my exuberance if I deliver you to them in a somewhat maimed condition. Their concern is for your survival—not for your well-being.”
“Touché,” Sarina said. Then she added, in stilted but grammatical Breen Standard, “Puhun hitaasti, koska et nïytü ëlykøs. Olyn vierosta olet Fenrisal?”
Her condescending query caught the inquisitor off guard. He paused in his circling and seemed to take a reflexive half step back from her. “Impressive. You speak our tongue without a vocoder. Can you also read our written language?”
Rolling her eyes, she replied, “Probably better than you do.”
“Doubtful,” the inquisitor said. “But I respect your spirit. It will make your eventual surrender all the more satisfying to me—professionally speaking.”
“I notice you ducked my question,” Sarina said. “Are you a Fenrisal? With a build like yours, I can tell you’re no Silwaan. And your body language is all wrong for an Amoniri. I guess you could be a Paclu…”
The inquisitor rubbed his gloved palms together. Then he extended one arm, and some unseen figure in the darkness behind him passed a neural truncheon forward into his hand. Batting its half-meter-long shaft against his open palm, the inquisitor stepped out of the shadows and loomed over Sarina.
“You seem to be very knowledgeable about my people,” he said. “Now let us see what you can tell me about yours.”
36
Bashir watched the gray surface of Salavat drift by hundreds of kilometers below. He remained stuck fast to the hull of the Breen scow with his suit operating at its lowest power setting, his comms off, and his visor at maximum screen to shield his eyes from the unfiltered white glare of the star Alrakis. The ship had made two orbits of the planet, and Bashir expected it to begin its descent at any moment.
Envisioning the next few minutes of his mission, Bashir foresaw two serious complications: first, not getting torn off the ship’s hull as it reentered the planet’s atmosphere at several multiples of the speed of sound; second, detaching himself from the ship after it landed at the hidden shipyard and getting back to cover before being seen by the Breen ground crew.
He suppressed his rising tide of anxiety and took stock of his physical condition. His limbs trembled; holding on to the Breen ship during its liftoff had been exhausting. I’m probably starting to dehydrate, he realized. And I should eat one of my ration bars as soon as I can, to keep my strength up.
Looking back down at the planet, he thought of Sarina. I never should have left her, he castigated himself. He pushed back against his guilt. You had no choice. She didn’t give you one. If you’d stayed, her sacrifice would’ve been for nothing. For a moment, he felt ashamed. He was a commissioned Starfleet officer; he knew his first duty was to complete the mission and that he and Sarina were considered expendable. She had been able to accept that and do what was necessary—so why did he find it so difficult? Why did she need to force him to do what was right?
Vibrations in the hull alerted Bashir that the ship’s impulse engines were engaged. He checked his hold and braced himself as the ship began to accelerate. Studying the ship’s exterior, he noted the Breen vessel didn’t seem to be equipped with ablative plating, which suggested that it relied on navigational shields to protect itself during atmospheric entry maneuvers. Good, Bashir told himself. Whatever protects the hull should protect me, too.
He waited several seconds to see the curve of Salavat flatten into a horizon. It didn’t happen. Twisting at the waist and craning his neck, he looked up and back. Are we making an inverted approach? All he saw were more stars and darkness. When he looked back down, Salavat was visible again, most of it in darkness, a thin crescent radiant with reflected sunlight—and it was also very small. No, not small, Bashir corrected himself. Far away—and getting farther away by the second. We must be moving at full impulse.
Clinging like a barnacle to a ship speeding off into deep space, Bashir felt more vulnerable than ever. His suit still had several hours of air, but would it be enough? If the scow’s destination was on the next planet, it might be, but if its destination was the edge of the system, Bashir knew that would mean trouble. At full impulse it would take the ship more than twenty-five hours to reach the system’s outer comet ring. If this ship doesn’t reach someplace habitable before I run out of air, Bashir realized, I’ll have two choices—find a way inside the ship without getting detected, or abort my mission, let go, drift away, and activate my extraction beacon. The first option seemed all but impossible, and the second option was unacceptable; for Bashir, quitting after Sarina had given herself up to the Breen would feel like a betrayal.
During the next several minutes, Salavat receded. It shrank to a bright but tiny pinpoint barely distinguishable from the billions of stars around it. Bashir waited to see another planet loom large ahead of the scow, but the vista surrounding him remained static and placid.
All right, he reasoned, either Starfleet was wrong about the shipyard being hidden on Salavat, or Sarina and I were wrong about this scow being used to smuggle parts and personnel to it. Or maybe we were all wrong, Sarina and I have wasted our time, and I’m hitching a ride to a toxic-waste dumping site. But if this scow is going to the shipyard, that would put it somewhere in the Alrakis system. So how did Starfleet fail to detect an orbital shipyard?
The question nagged at him and fueled his imagination. Maybe it’s cloaked, he thought. But hiding something that big that would kick up tetryons, tachyons, and about half a dozen other exotic high-energy particles. And it’s not as if the Breen are known for cloaking technology. He ruled that out, but still the mystery tantalized him. So, what are the Breen known for? That query sparked his memory of the destruction of Deep Space 9’s first Starship Defiant by the Breen during the closing days of the Dominion War. Energy-dampening weapons, Bashir recalled. If they can cripple energy-distribution systems, maybe they can also hide their own energy emissions. If that’s true, then as long as their shipyard doesn’t look like one, they could put it almost anywhere. Unless someone knew exactly what to look for…it would be as good as invisible.
Bashir conjured a map of the Alrakis system in his mind’s eye and made an educated guess, based on Salavat’s position and the scow’s departure trajectory, as to which way he and his ride were headed. The system’s outermost planets were gas giants with many small satellites, but Bashir doubted that any of them were the scow’s destination. Even with its energy signature masked, the shipyard would still have been detected by visual scans if it were in the open. No, Bashir concluded, there was only one place the Breen could have hidden it:
The Alrakis system’s asteroid belt.
His best estimate placed the shipyard approximately an hour ahead of the scow at full impulse. Until he saw it, there would be no point in trying to devise any further strategies; he would simply have to hang on and, when an opportunity presented itself, improvise.
He hoped that Sarina was in a position to do the same.
Sarina screamed as the inquisitor stabbed his neural truncheon into her back for what felt like the hundredth time. She had thought the pain was something to which she could adapt, or develop a resistance, or learn to block out, but she saw now that she had been wrong. The agony only grew worse with each injury.
Another burning jolt forced a primal cry from her, and she went limp as the horrific stimulus was withdrawn. Before then, she had known everything about the Breen’s infamous neural truncheons except what it felt like to be struck by one. It was worse than she could ever have imagined. The suffering it inflicted was so consumptive that it left her drained. Her existence had been reduced to a binary state: hideous torture or an aching void, with nothing in between.
Sagging in the chair, she imagined how she must look to the inquisitor. Weak. Helpless. Broken. Perfect, she gloated behind her slack expression.
The Breen interrogator leaned close to her and asked in his machine-noise vocoder voice, “Are you ready to answer my questions yet?”
“Anything,” she said, straining to push out more than a whisper.
“Tell me about your partner. The one named Bashir.”
She was trembling—not as a deception, but for real. Looking away from the inquisitor’s mask, she asked, “What do you want to know?”
“Start with where he is.” The inquisitor grabbed Sarina’s chin and forced her to look at him. “Did you and Bashir split up inside the recycling plant?”
“He was never there,” Sarina said, using lies to goad the inquisitor into telling her what the Breen knew. “When we left Rasiuk, I went to Utyrak and he went to Tanhevit. The plan was to rendezvous in Pohodok two days from now.”
Fiery blades of pain shot down her spine as the inquisitor pressed the tip of the truncheon against Sarina’s
neck. When the pain stopped and the echoes of her screams faded, the inquisitor leaned close. “I do not believe you.”
“Well, then we’re both in for a very long day, because it’s the truth.”
“Why were you in Rasiuk?”
She hesitated just long enough to draw a small breath. “We came to make contact with the dissident cells in the warren. Nar was our contact.”
“The dissidents have little influence and few resources,” the inquisitor said. “Why would Starfleet risk two intelligence operatives to contact them?”
“Because they were our ticket into your society,” Sarina said. “The plan is to infiltrate your outer colonies first by sending agents posing as cultural observers to establish relationships with the dissidents. Once we win their trust, they’ll help us put operatives onto the Confederacy’s core worlds.” She forced a small smile onto her ragged, bloody lips. “And I have to tell you, the fact that your entire society walks around wearing masks makes all of this a hell of a lot easier.”
“It must appear so to an outworlder,” the inquisitor said. “I think that if your people had penetrated deeper into our society, you would find its reality is much more complex and difficult to navigate without detection.”
Sarina broadened her smile into a grin. “If…?”
Her taunt seemed to have no effect on the Breen interrogator. He circled her in slow steps. “Where is Bashir now?”
“I told you. He’s in Tanhevit, contacting dissident cells there.”
The inquisitor was behind her. “How would he find them?”
“Nar gave us contact information.”
“Unlikely. I questioned her at length. She made no mention of other cells.”