by David Mack
Sarina let out a derisive huff. “Maybe we were more persuasive than you.”
“I doubt that very much.” Passing in front of her, he continued. “If your mission is to contact dissident cells, why did you come to Utyrak? This is a one-industry city with an itinerant population. Certainly, you don’t expect me to believe there is a thriving dissident culture here?”
She masked her lies with a bit of truth. “Of course not. I was here to sabotage the recycling plant as payback for the attack on the warren.”
“Why target the recycling plant? Why not one of the factories?”
“Disabling municipal infrastructure does the most damage with the least effort,” Sarina said. She knew that she was putting the inquisitor in an untenable position. His line of questioning had telegraphed his desire to ask her about the mission to find the hidden shipyard, but obviously he was under orders not to reveal or confirm its existence. Because he couldn’t refer to it directly, it was going to be very difficult for him to impeach the veracity of her answers.
Just as she wondered how he would adjust his verbal strategy, the inquisitor jabbed the truncheon into Sarina’s rib cage. It forced her to scream so fiercely that she was left breathless, gasping, her diaphragm racked with spasms from the ongoing neuroelectric shock. Her vision purpled, and she started to gag on her tongue. When the torment ended, saliva spilled from her contorted mouth and tears streamed from behind her squeezed-shut eyelids. She wanted to surrender herself to heaving sobs of fury, but her lungs refused to fill with air.
The inquisitor sounded unmoved by Sarina’s miseries. “Where did you get your armor and mask?” He kicked the helmet off her piled Breen disguise.
Fighting for air and a voice, Sarina said, “I told you. Starfleet made it.”
“Another lie,” the inquisitor said. “Starfleet modified it. That much is clear. Many of the tools hidden within it are of Starfleet or Klingon manufacture. But the armor itself is genuine. Nanomarkers in its fiber matrix confirm it was made by the Breen Militia for paramilitary use. So, I will ask you again: Where did you get it?”
“Starfleet gave it to me.”
“Where, when, and how did Starfleet acquire it? Has the Federation captured a Breen vessel? If so, which one?” He turned and extended a hand toward the darkness. Someone lurking in the shadows handed him a data tablet, which he looked at before continuing. “Was it the Sitkoskir? By any chance is that how you came to be in our company? By posing as Ket Rhun and Minh Sann?” He waited a few seconds, handed the tablet back to his subordinate, and said, “I will interpret your silence as a confirmation of my suspicions.”
“I’ve never heard of any ship called Sitkoskir,” Sarina said.
“Then how did you reach Salavat?”
Blinding, jaw-clenching pain ripped through Sarina as the truncheon was jammed up into her armpit. Magenta spots swam in her vision as the pain abated. Her lungs felt as if they were full of fluid. Deep, wet coughs made her chest ache.
The inquisitor sounded as serene and patient as he had when he had first come in. “Perhaps you know of the Sitkoskir, maybe you do not.” He held the top of the neural truncheon in front of Sarina’s face. “We will know soon enough.”
37
The asteroids looked much closer than Bashir would have liked. He told himself that they were farther away than they appeared to be, that judging distances in space, without the benefit of intermediate objects to provide parallax or the subtle cue of atmospheric haze, was very difficult. But each ragged hunk of icy rock that drifted past the scow seemed closer than the last, and all he could do was hope that Breen pilots didn’t tolerate scrapes and near misses.
Vibrations traveled through the ship’s hull as its thrusters fired, filling the space beneath the scow with the warm glow of fiery exhaust. The starscape ahead of Bashir seemed to roll gently on two axes as the ship pivoted around a crater-pocked gray mountain in space. Its surface rose to meet the ship and blocked Bashir’s view of the heavens. Watching the rocky details of the asteroid’s surface resolve in ever greater detail, he wondered if the scow was going to land.
An X-shaped fissure appeared on the asteroid’s surface. It sharpened and spread into four triangles retreating from one another. The gap between them widened to reveal a dark space on the other side, and Bashir realized he was watching an enormous set of camouflaged hangar doors slide open. He strained to see what lay beyond them, but his eyes were unable to pierce the darkness.
This is why my visor has a night-vision filter, he remembered, activating his mask’s light-amplification mode. As it powered up, an enormous form took shape inside the hangar. Its flattened profile and long, fluid lines resembled those of the Aventine and its sister ships in the Vesta class. Upon closer inspection, it reminded Bashir of a sand shark. Though most of its exterior had been hulled, he saw through a few holes that most of the vessel’s interior was still empty. That must be the prototype, he concluded. Not much more than a spaceframe with a stardrive and some impulse coils.
The doors had retracted fully into the walls of the asteroid, but the scow held its position and made no move to enter the hangar. Examining the cavernous spacedock, Bashir noted there was no place for the scow to dock. The work traffic surrounding the prototype was so dense that Bashir doubted the scow could even pull inside to offload its cargo and personnel.
They must be beaming everything over, he figured. Which makes sense. It’ll take less time than moving it all manually. But then why open the hangar doors?
On a hunch, he adjusted his visor’s sensor frequency to scan for ambient energy readings. The ship to which he clung gave off a brilliant halo of random particles, and the hangar—which had looked pitch-dark to his naked eyes—gave off an intense aura, but only through the open doors. The rest of the asteroid around it appeared inert, just a worthless hunk of rock drifting in the void.
There’s the energy-dampening technology at work, Bashir thought. Now he understood why the doors were open: to provide a narrow window for transport, one that would be temporary and angled away from the Federation’s listening posts. With the cargo ship and other asteroids obstructing the view, it was no wonder that the hidden shipyard had evaded detection. This changes the plan, he concluded. If they’re using transporters to move their cargo, this ship isn’t going to land. So how am I supposed to infiltrate the shipyard?
The scow’s maneuvering thrusters fired, sending a mild quake through the hull. On the asteroid’s surface, the tips of the four triangular hangar doors emerged and started creeping back toward one another.
There was no longer any time to plan, only time to act. Bashir turned off his suit’s magnetic clamps and pushed himself away from the cargo ship and toward the hangar doors with as much force as he could muster. He drifted through the vacuum in a slow, awkward tumble. Behind him, the cargo ship negotiated its way clear of the big asteroid and its smaller neighbors. Ahead of him, the space between the hangar doors shrank all too rapidly. He checked the readings in his visor’s holographic HUD, which confirmed his distance and speed. I’m not going to make it, he realized. I’ll either get crushed or stranded on the surface.
Calling upon his zero-g training, Bashir stabilized his tumble and faced himself away from the hangar doors. He drew the bolt-throwing gun from its pouch on his suit and loaded a bolt without a cable attached. Using his visor’s HUD to help guide his aim, he fired the bolt on as close to a straight line away from the hangar doors as he could manage. He felt the recoil of the bolt leaving the gun and knew it meant that he’d added a tiny kick of speed to himself. I just hope it’s enough, he thought, noting that he had only one anchor bolt left.
Floating backward, drifting blind toward his destination, he loaded the last bolt into the thrower and attached a cable to it. Setting the device for an inertia-free launch—a trick that made him glad he’d taken a few minutes back on the Aventine to memorize the bolt thrower’s standard operating manual—he took a deep breath and held it as he waited to see whether h
e was about to make an unscheduled drop-in or an unceremonious crash down.
The tips of all four hangar doors were close enough that, if he’d wanted, he could have reached out and grazed one of them with his fingertips as he passed through the gap in their center. As soon as he was inside the pitch-dark hangar, he pointed the bolt thrower at a faraway rocky wall on his right. Aiming at a spot just beneath a long promontory, Bashir fired and waited for the line to stop feeding out. A second later, it did. He activated the winch and hung on as he was towed at high speed through the microgravity environment. Braking the winch just before he hit the wall, he tucked under the metal walkway and looked back to see if anyone had spotted him.
Work on the prototype continued, and no one seemed to pay any attention to Bashir’s side of the hangar. He began to think of how many ways his jury-rigged plan might have backfired, but he stopped himself. You’re in. Stop thinking about what might’ve gone wrong and focus on what has to happen next.
He felt a gentle tremor in the rocky wall as the hangar doors made contact with one another. Then four banks of work lamps snapped on, floodlighting the prototype starship hovering fewer than a hundred meters away from Bashir. Hull-assembly teams swarmed over the experimental vessel, and two armies of robotic arms—one on each side of the ship—constructed its slipstream nacelles.
Bashir used a compact plasma drill to cut a two-millimeter hole in the walkway above him and pushed through it a tiny remote transmitter that relayed images and sounds to his helmet. Up on the promontory, a cluster of workers passed over his position. They were headed to a hatch that he guessed led to the facility’s interior.
His next move was a gamble, but he saw no other option.
As the workers gathered at the hatch, he climbed up onto the walkway behind them. He picked up a bundle of optronic cables, affected an air of weary boredom, and sidled up behind the group. As he’d hoped, they ignored him. The one at the front of the group unlocked the hatch with a security code that Bashir took the opportunity to memorize. Then they filed inside, with Bashir at their backs—and one step closer to completing his mission.
Limp in the interrogation chair and drooling bloody spittle, Sarina found it easy to feign unconsciousness. The difficult part was going to be not actually losing consciousness. Every part of her body that she could still feel throbbed and burned from the neural truncheon’s electrical shocks, and the dark comfort of oblivion was tempting. She felt herself starting to slip into its numbing embrace.
No, she commanded herself. Focus. Stay in the moment.
A few meters away, she heard the inquisitor talking at a low volume to whoever had been lurking behind the spotlights during her torture session. “For a first session, this has been quite productive,” the inquisitor said. “However, I still have doubts about her story. It sounds to me like equal parts truth and lies, but separating the one from the other will be no easy task.”
A voice Sarina had not heard before said, “We could use a psychoactive drug to coax the truth from her.”
“No,” the inquisitor said. “We lack reliable information about human neurochemistry. One mistake with a narcosynthetic and we might kill her—and she is far too valuable an asset to risk such an outcome.”
“How then shall we proceed?”
“Take her out of the chair and let her rest. When she regains consciousness, we can resume our standard interrogation protocols.”
Footsteps. Sarina recognized the timing of the stride as the inquisitor’s. A door opened with a muffled swish.
The underling said, “Where will you be when she awakens, sir?”
When the inquisitor spoke again, there was a slight echo of open space behind his voice. “My office,” he said. “Hail me on Channel Twenty-three.”
“Understood, sir.” More steps, and the door closed with a soft hiss. The underling said to someone else, “Help me undo her straps.”
The two Breen stood on either side of Sarina’s chair and loosened the restraints on her head, arms, torso, and legs. One stood back, taking up what Sarina supposed was a covering position, while the other finished releasing the restraints that had kept her immobilized during her hours of questioning. She knew what to expect next. The Breen military’s standard procedure for detaining prisoners of war was to suspend them upside down from their ankles.
As the Breen soldier undid the last of Sarina’s restraints and folded her forward over her legs, he said to his compatriot, “Help me put her on the hook.”
“Do your own job,” said the other Breen. “I will do mine.”
“I think you can put away your disruptor, Gesh,” said the first soldier. “I doubt the human poses any threat in her sleep.”
The second Breen’s vocoder crackled with a noise that suggested it was hiding a sigh of disgust and resignation. “As you wish.”
Each Breen grabbed one of Sarina’s legs. Together, they dragged her forward out of her chair and, with grunts of effort, hoisted her toward the ceiling.
Every part of Sarina’s body—every muscle, bone, and joint—throbbed and ached and burned with deep pain. She felt as if her limbs each weighed a hundred kilograms. All she wanted was to pass out.
Instead, she willed herself into action.
She opened her eyes, plucked the disruptors from the Breen’s holsters, and fired the weapons into their guts. They crumpled into fetal curls, and she rolled free to a kneeling position, pistols ready, facing the door.
All was quiet. She checked the fallen men’s throats for pulses. Both were alive. As a precaution, Sarina took prisoner restraints from their belt packs and bound them at their wrists and ankles.
She gathered the pieces of her disguise from the floor and checked to make certain they hadn’t been damaged. Everything was intact. Listening for any sign of trouble, Sarina put her disguise back on and holstered her stolen disruptors. She retrieved a medkit from one of her suit’s pockets and dosed herself with a pain-relief shot from a hypospray. Within moments, her suffering eased to a level she could master.
One of the guards stirred. Using her palm, she struck the man at the back of his head just hard enough to nudge him back into unconsciousness.
A quick systems check confirmed that her vocoder was functional. She grabbed the inquisitor’s neural truncheon. It was heavier than she’d expected but well balanced. This will do nicely, she decided. She stepped over to a comm panel, hailed Channel Twenty-three, and said, “Sir, the human woman is awake.”
The inquisitor replied over the comm, “Good. I will be there directly.”
“Understood, sir.” She closed the channel and slapped the truncheon into her gloved hand. And I’ll be here waiting for you.
38
With every step Bashir took, he expected to be found out, exposed, captured, and shot on sight. Turning each corner, he imagined himself being met by a line of Breen soldiers with disruptors aimed and set to kill. Instead, he worked his way through fast-moving knots of workers and supervisors, clusters of people arguing over break schedules and blueprints, lines of technicians laden with tools. Every room of the shipyard’s administrative facility seemed to be packed with people.
More astonishing to Bashir was that, even after walking through most of the base’s four lowest levels in search of turbolifts on which he could discreetly hitch rides upward to the command level, he had yet to see a closed door or be challenged once for his credentials. They’re all so busy, no one has time to check identichips, he noted as a pack of fast-talking Breen wearing tool sashes detoured around him. If the people in charge are pushing the crew this hard, they must be on a short deadline. And judging from the mood around here, it must be getting close.
He ducked down a short passageway to avoid running into a supervisor wearing a thot’s rank insignia. At the end of the passage he saw a ladder that led up through a hole in the ceiling. Though he anticipated finding nothing but a sealed-tight hatch, he peeked up the ladder—and saw part of a lit room at its apex.
&n
bsp; Looks like an invitation to me, he told himself and started climbing. Based on the ceiling heights inside the base, he estimated that this vertical shaft was bypassing at least three levels. At the top of the ladder he emerged into another passage like the one he’d left. He hurried to an intersection with the main corridor at its far end. Quick looks in each direction confirmed that this level was not as busy as the others. Bashir heard no footsteps and saw no workers.
Restricted access, peace and quiet…this has all the marks of a command level, he concluded. He stepped lightly as he made his way down the corridor. Stolen glances into each office revealed Breen military officers hunched inside task pods, each one’s attention fixed on a large, complicated holomatrix. The grinding-gears scratch of vocoder voices talking over one another made it difficult for him to eavesdrop on particular conversations. He wondered how the Breen ever learned to pick out one another’s voices from such a cacophony.
Still cautious, he paused at the next corner and peered around it. At the end of a long hallway he saw a door marked with a symbol he now understood meant “authorized personnel only.” Two armed Breen guards stood sentry on either side of it. He increased the magnification of his visor’s HUD so he could read the smaller symbols above a biometric security panel beside the door. Translating the ideograms with ease, he knew he had reached his destination: the shipyard’s master operations center. He exhaled. Nothing left to do now but walk up and knock.
He hesitated. His mission parameters specified the destruction of the slipstream prototype as well as the corruption of the Typhon Pact’s copies of its schematics. Only now, on the verge of his assignment’s endgame, did Bashir understand that his actions would wipe out more than a spacedock and a test bed starship. He thought of the hundreds of workers he had seen on the base’s lower levels, the multitude of technicians and engineers and construction specialists, many of whom were probably civilians. If he obeyed his orders, most—if not all—of those people were about to die. No, he chastised himself, don’t let yourself off the hook that easily. They’re all about to be killed . By you.