by David Mack
Bashir felt sick. The part of him that was a Starfleet officer, sworn to obey the orders of his superiors and defend the Federation, knew that he had to go forward. It was why he had come here. Sarina had sacrificed herself to make this possible. But the part of Bashir that was a doctor was revulsed by the notion of committing murder in the name of the state. Taking lives in open combat during wartime, as he had been forced to do during the Dominion War, was one thing; blowing up a shipyard despite knowing that it would result in massive civilian collateral damage was another.
These aren’t innocents, he assured himself. They’re willing members of the Breen war effort, helping build a warship based on plans stolen from a Starfleet shipyard where their agent didn’t hesitate to kill our citizens.
He hardened his heart. The Federation’s clash with the Typhon Pact might be a cold war, but there was no longer any mistaking that it was a war.
Remembering Sarina’s warning a day earlier about the need to use lethal force when operational security was on the line, Bashir set his disruptor to kill.
The guards at the end of the hallway seemed to ignore him as he stepped around the corner. When he continued walking toward them, they tensed and raised their rifles to ready positions. Bashir didn’t wait to be challenged. He called out to them. “Attention,” he said. “My name is Hesh Gron, and I am here on behalf of the Confederate Information Bureau. Identify yourselves.”
As he’d hoped, the guards seemed confused by his demand. The one on the left said, “Chon Trem.” Half a second later, his partner added, “Chon Lok.”
Continuing to advance, Bashir said, “Two human spies have been detected on Salavat.” He stopped in front of them at less than arm’s length. “Have either of you seen anything unusual in the past three hours?”
Trem and Lok looked at each other, as if hoping to coordinate their answers by telepathy. In that fleeting moment of hesitation, Bashir drew his disruptor and snapped off two shots at point-blank range. Both guards collapsed at his feet. He grabbed Trem’s wrist and lifted the dead man’s hand to the biometric sensor pad beside the door. Pressing it against the pad, Bashir hoped he was right in his hunch that the guards would have access to the compartment they were assigned to defend. As the man’s hand made contact, the pad changed color from pale lime to bright magenta, and the door to the Master Ops Center slid open.
Bashir strode inside, not knowing what to expect. He found himself in an octagonal, two-level working space with one side devoted to situation monitors. It was manned by half a dozen Breen engineers, who all looked up as Bashir entered—and froze when they saw the disruptor in his hand and the two slain guards on the floor behind him.
He didn’t wait for any of them to speak, to ask him what was happening or what he wanted or who he was. He took aim and opened fire. Less than three seconds later it was over, and all six Breen were dead.
Bashir holstered his disruptor, pulled the dead guards inside the ops center, shut the door, and engaged the security override to prevent it from being opened from the outside. Satisfied with his precautions, he walked to the master control panel. Everything he would need to put an end to the Breen’s slipstream project was at his fingertips. He took off his gloves, laced his fingers together, and flexed his hands away from his body until his knuckles cracked.
Then he went to work.
“Be careful with that!” Thot Keer shouted at the engineers connecting the final component of the slipstream prototype’s navigational system. “If you damage it, I promise you will be flushed out an airlock without your masks.”
The workers appeared to take his warning to heart. Their foreman halted the assembly to run spot checks of all safety protocols and connection points. Satisfied that the chroniton integrator would be installed in one piece, Keer moved on to check the work of the next crew down the line.
Almost done, he thought. It was a struggle to contain his excitement. The final components are either in place or going in now. We should be ready to power up in less than an hour. He marveled at his good fortune. Despite being burdened with impossible deadlines, unreasonable superiors, short supplies, an inadequate budget, and a legion of doltish malcontents masquerading as a starship construction workforce, he had succeeded in adapting the Federation’s revolutionary slipstream drive to a modified Breen space-frame—and he had done it ahead of the governing board’s ridiculous and arbitrary deadline.
Some days Keer felt that being an engineer was a form of masochism. Today it felt like being a giant among the masses. It had the sweet taste of victory.
He paused on the central catwalk, which was suspended above the ship’s barely covered keel. Looking up, he watched an assembly crew lower the last of the prototype’s hull plates into position. As soon as it dropped into place, sparks rained down from its seams as it was welded to the spaceframe. And now we are one step closer to the end, Keer exulted as he moved on down the line.
Even though they were technically ahead of schedule, Keer still had the anxiety of racing the clock. He moved from station to station, ordering adjustments great and small, aware that even one mistake could undo all his accomplishments. It takes a million stones to build a castle, went a saying from his homeworld, but it takes only one out of place to bring down a kingdom. The old homily had never felt more true to Keer than it did at that moment, as he stood in the midst of naked beams and loosely bundled cables, exposed fuel pods and bare engine coils. Gazing upon the inner machinery of a starship’s propulsion systems without the obstructions of decks and bulkheads made Keer feel as if he were a stage magician revealing his tricks for all to see. Smoke and mirrors…quantum slipstream and sensors that can look into the future—are they really so different?
The engine core foreman, Tul Jath, approached him. “Sir, the reactor is assembled and ready. Standing by for your order to engage main power.”
Keer nodded. “Very good.” He looked around at the metal miracle he and his men had wrought. “It seems wrong to let our bird leave its nest without a name.” He turned toward Jath. “Any suggestions?”
Jath backed up half a step and bowed his head with humble respect. “I would not presume to claim such an honor, sir. That privilege should be yours.”
“Not that it will matter,” Keer said. “Once the militia takes control of the prototype, they will name it whatever they wish. Still…” Pressing his hand against one of the support beams, Keer felt a swell of pride and affection for his creation that had been so long in the making. I promised myself I would not indulge in maudlin sentimentality. But perhaps I can be forgiven this one time.
“Marjat,” he said. “For its maiden voyage, I anoint this vessel…Marjat.”
Jath seemed confused. “Is that a name of significance?”
“None that need concern you,” Keer said, feeling no compulsion to explain himself to his subordinates. His personal history was none of their business—and who other than him would really care that he had named this ship for his beloved daughter, taken from him so many years ago during the plague on Resinoor Prime? It is enough that I know, he decided. To Jath, he said, “Bring the mains online.”
“Yes, sir,” Jath said and passed the word down the line. Engineers and mechanics translated the order into action, and Keer watched with pride as the scores of personnel inside the Marjat executed their steps in his painstakingly choreographed start-up protocol for the prototype. They might have only one chance to get it right before time ran out. Keer had done everything he could to make certain their first attempt was successful.
He activated the comm circuit inside his helmet. “Keer to ops. Prepare to initiate final diagnostics and systems check on my order. Confirm.” The day’s communications had been rife with delays, but Keer had not yet acquired any patience for them. After a few seconds he added, “Keer to ops! Respond!”
There was no answer. He wondered if his helmet comm had malfunctioned. As a test, he patched into the internal network and said, “Keer to Jath.”
> Jath answered over the comm, “Go ahead, sir.”
“Can you raise the Ops Center on comm?”
“Hang on, sir.” Several seconds passed before Jath added, “Negative.”
Something was wrong. Keer was certain of it. He pushed through a group of mechanics who were running cables to an auxiliary control panel and shouldered his way up to the master console. “Move,” he said to the technicians working there. He keyed commands into the panel’s holomatrix and ran a firmware check on the comm lines and relays to the shipyard’s Ops Center. Everything was still active. He patched his helmet comm through the Marjat’s master console. “Keer to ops.”
Again, no response. Dread washed through him and left him hollow. Stay calm, he told himself. Send a runner up to ops, confirm that this is only a comm malfunction. If you panic and sound an alert for no reason, work on the ship will stop and the deadline will be missed. That cannot be allowed to happen.
It was the prudent course of action, but his conscience and his training as an engineer urged him in a different direction. If there is a real emergency, and I wait too long to sound the alarm, there might be an accident. The Marjat could be damaged. My workers might die. And everything I have worked for…will be lost.
Then someone else made the decision for him: an alarm sounded.
“Report!” Keer shouted over the klaxon.
Jath ran up to him in a panic. “Reactor malfunction! Breach imminent!”
Keer pointed at the master console. “All readings are nominal.”
“Not on the ship, sir,” Jath said. “Inside the base. Its main reactor.”
“Evacuate the base and bring the mains online.” Walking away from the ship’s main console, Keer added, “We have to get the Marjat out of here!”
Jath called out, “Where are you going, sir?”
“Ops,” Keer said, still on the move. “I need to open the hangar doors and upload the final schematics in case we fail to escape.”
“How long should we wait for you, sir?”
“Until the doors open. If I am not aboard by then, leave without me.”
Core-breach warnings flashed on every holomatrix display in the Ops Center. Bashir glanced at the readings from inside the matter/antimatter reactor, noted the rate at which its magnetic containment fields were collapsing, and was satisfied with his handiwork. If his estimate was correct—and he was reasonably certain that it was—then the Breen crew would have barely enough time to abandon this facility but not nearly enough time to halt the impending disaster.
I have enough blood on my conscience, he reasoned. I won’t kill if I don’t have to. As long as the prototype is destroyed, that’s what matters.
There was one last task he had to complete, and he was grateful that someone at Starfleet Intelligence had already done most of the work for him: he had to sabotage the Typhon Pact’s copies of the slipstream design schematics. Among the various bits of equipment SI had concealed inside his suit was an optolythic data rod configured and programmed to interface with Breen computer systems. Once connected, it was supposed to do the rest automatically—delete the primary copies of the file, corrupt all the backup copies with dangerously inaccurate data, and upload a stealth virus into the Breen mainframe that would lurk and similarly corrupt any new slipstream-related data it encountered. According to his mission-briefing packet, all he had to do now that he was inside the Operations Center was find a compatible data port and insert the device.
Standing in the middle of the octagonal room, Bashir was at a loss. He hadn’t seen even a single port on any of the center’s consoles that looked remotely compatible with the data rod. This could be a problem, he admitted to himself. He circled the room’s upper level in fast strides, his eyes searching the walls for data ports but finding only glassy-smooth touchscreen panels and metallic shells over data cores. Holding up the data rod, he eyed it with dismay. Is it possible the SI techs got this thing wrong? Could it be obsolete? Looking around, he considered the possibility that the base was obsolete. The data rod had been made to work with the newest systems on a Breen warship; who knew how old this facility was?
Bashir couldn’t give up, not yet. If I don’t get this data into the system, the Breen’ll just start over somewhere else. Desperation made his thoughts race almost too quickly to process. Think! Where else would a Breen patch into one of these consoles? He had a moment of insight: What if a console’s touchscreen broke?
He ran to the nearest console and lay down on the floor beside it. Probing with his fingers along a groove in a panel, he found a small recessed lever and pulled it. The panel lifted away from the console and then shifted aside on hinged supports, revealing an intricate-looking spaghetti junction of cables. Bashir traced the paths of the cables to a circuit board—on which he saw a data port that looked to be the right size and shape for the optolythic rod in his hand. He took a deep breath and inserted the rod into the port.
A screech emanated from the holomatrix above him. He got up and saw a wild flurry of Breen mathematical notation hashing across the display. Images of the prototype ship Bashir had seen in the hangar were subtly modified as he watched, and a symbol that he knew meant “Warning: permanent deletion” appeared repeatedly. As quickly as the blizzard of data traffic had appeared, it vanished. An update appeared in the holographic HUD of Bashir’s visor: “All data updated—purging storage media.”
Inside the console, the optolythic rod exploded with a delicate sound, like the shattering of a tiny icicle. The console went dark. Bashir shut its access panel.
On the wall of displays behind him, the core-breach countdown continued. Escape pods were leaving the base en masse through a network of disguised ejection shafts. I’d better make sure the prototype doesn’t follow them, Bashir decided. He drew his disruptor and shot apart all the consoles. That ought to slow down anyone looking to open the hangar doors. He looked up.
“Computer, do you accept voice commands?”
A voice like shredding steel replied from an overhead speaker in the center of the room, “Affirmative, Hesh .”
“Computer, where is this room’s voice-command input sensor?”
“It is part of the overhead speaker assembly, Hesh .”
“Thank you.” He drew his disruptor and shot the speaker into slag. He walked toward the door. Time to go. He stopped to the right of the door, released the security override, and unlocked the exit. The door sprang open.
Two Breen soldiers rushed in carrying disruptor rifles. Bashir shot the first one in the side of the head. The slain commando fell onto the man behind him, preventing him from bringing his weapon to bear on Bashir, who calmly shot the second man in the chest. Both soldiers collapsed in a heap. Bashir poked his head around the corner and saw no other reinforcements. He listened. There was the faintest sound of masked breathing outside to the right of the door, directly behind him. He angled his disruptor pistol around the corner and fired three blind shots. He was rewarded by crackling sounds of impact, groans of agony, and the solid thump of a body landing like dead weight. Sure that the other side of the passageway was clear, Bashir left the Ops Center and, as a precaution, fired a head shot into the third commando as he passed his body.
The mission had gone according to plan, more or less. All that remained now for Bashir was to escape the base alive, get clear of its energy-dampening field, and signal the Aventine for extraction. He could think of about a thousand ways those three objectives might go fatally wrong, but he chose not to. There was no more time to look back, and it was too late now to wallow in regret.
It was time to go home.
39
Sarina walked close behind the inquisitor and pressed the muzzle of her disruptor pistol against his lower back. She had subdued him with three jolts of his neural truncheon when he had returned to the interrogation room, disarmed him, disabled his helmet’s built-in transceiver, and marched him out as her hostage. No one had tried to stop them, and the dim lighting in the corrid
ors of this branch of the Breen Intelligence Directorate had helped keep her weapon from being seen.
As they approached the next intersection, she said, “Which way?”
“Turn right,” the inquisitor said. “There is a cargo lift at the end of that passage. It leads up to the flight deck.” Glancing over his shoulder at Sarina, he added, “It will do you no good. The flight deck is for security patrols only.”
“Face forward,” Sarina said, “and don’t speak unless you’re saying something helpful.” She prodded him to walk faster as they turned the corner. Another Breen was at the far end of the corridor and walking toward them. Sarina said to her hostage, “Stay quiet and you’ll both live. Try to call for help and you’ll both die.” The inquisitor acquiesced to her warning with silence. They passed the other Breen without incident and reached the cargo lift portal. “Open it,” she said.
The inquisitor pressed his hand to a control pad that lit up on contact. From the other side of the doors, Sarina heard the low hum of machinery. The doors opened, and Sarina nudged the inquisitor inside the lift. When the doors slid shut, she slammed the bottom of her pistol grip across the back of the inquisitor’s head. He collapsed to the floor, apparently unconscious. Sarina struck him again to make sure he was down and bound him using restraints taken from the guards she’d stunned in the interrogation room. As she tucked the inquisitor into a corner beside the doors, a falling whine heralded the lift’s arrival at its uppermost level. Reasoning that darkness would be to her advantage in more ways than one, she used her disruptor to shoot out the lift’s overhead light.
Kneeling in a shadowy corner as the lift’s doors parted, Sarina scouted the path ahead. Before her sprawled a hangar wide open to the icy gray surface of Salavat. Bitter winds gusted in from outside, driving thin drifts of snow over the hangar’s threshold. Sleek patrol fighters were parked in rows on the painted concrete floor. Teams of mechanics and support personnel moved from one aircraft to another checking fuel levels and ammunition load outs. Pilots mingled in a ready room on the far side of the hangar, seated in orderly rank and file as a senior officer droned through a briefing while pointing at a map.