by David Mack
“A fool’s errand,” the human said, rolling his eyes, “but go on.”
“—then we could focus on supporting the dissidents inside the Breen Confederacy, and lay the foundation for a future peace. In a decade or two we—”
Anger drove Worf to interrupt, “If you think you can make deals with the Breen, then you are a fool.” He thrust his plate into Dygan’s free hand, slopping some of his appetizers onto the man’s polished dress armor, then he poked his finger against the shocked Efrosian’s chest. “The Breen have no use for diplomacy, and they are not to be trusted.”
The human tried to interpose himself between his friend and Worf, but he failed. “I know the Breen aren’t receptive to diplomacy now, but if Bodell’s right, and the dissidents are able to supplant the current regime—”
“That will not happen,” Worf warned. “If there are Breen dissidents, the best they can hope for is escape. If they oppose the domo’s forces, they will be cut down like taHqeqpu’.”
The Efrosian stammered, “But—but if we support them, then they—”
“Then they will pull us into a civil war,” Worf said. “More of our people will be slaughtered by the Breen, and once again we will gain nothing.”
Perplexed, the human and Efrosian wrinkled their brows at each other. Then the human cast a quizzical look at Worf. “Once again? I’m sorry, but we don’t know what incident you’re referring to. Could you enlighten us?”
Only then did Worf realize he had alluded to Jasminder Choudhury’s murder.
Fury and shame warmed his face, and he shouldered his way free of the two politicos, eager to be anywhere else, doing anything else, with anyone else. As he expected, Dygan hurried after him, portering both their plates like a dutiful squire chasing his knight. When they stopped near the far side of the arboretum, he held Worf’s plate out to him. “Sir?”
“Throw it away.” He turned and stared out the towering windows at the sparkling midnight jewel of Orion’s capital. “I am not hungry.”
• • •
“This is absurd,” Picard said. “Why have a political reception if the guests won’t talk to one another?”
Bacco sipped champagne through a sardonic smile. “Welcome to my world, Captain.”
Her chief of staff risked a furtive glance over her shoulder. “No one wants to make the first move.” She finished off her own drink in a quick tilt. “Or start an interstellar incident.”
Picard stood with Doctor Crusher in a closed circle that included Bacco, Piñiero, and Captain Bateson and Commander Fawkes from the Atlas. On the far side of the arboretum, gathered in their own closed ring, were Imperator Sozzerozs and the elite members of his retinue. It reminded Picard of the way teenagers tended to divide themselves into cliques, discrete sets that rarely if ever overlapped. “There must be some topic of interest that’s free of controversy.”
His assertion met with stares that ranged from incredulous to weary. Bateson cocked an eyebrow. “You think so? Name one.”
“The weather is usually a reliable source of small talk.”
The president grimaced. “The Gorn have done nothing but complain about how cold Orion is, and at least once in every meeting they remind us of the huge favor they’re doing us by suffering what they consider to be freezing temperatures for our comfort. So, as you might imagine, the subject of weather has become rather a bone of contention around here.”
“I see.” Undeterred, he offered another idea. “What about sports? Or games of chance?”
Piñiero made a sound that was equal parts grunt, snort, and chortle. “The Gorn have never really seen the point of competitive sports that don’t involve mortal combat. As for gambling, Togor has insisted since the first day of the summit that he was cheated by a rigged table in one of the capital’s swankier casinos.”
All at once, Picard was on the spot, and he saw Crusher fighting an urge to laugh out loud. “I had no idea there were quite so many impediments to social integration with the Gorn.” He stole a look at Sozzerozs and his entourage; the archosaurs were making a blood-soaked, flesh-spattered mess out of a corner buffet that had been stocked with assorted raw meats to meet their nutritional requirements. “I presume food and wine hold little promise as ice-breakers.”
“Good guess,” Fawkes said under her breath.
From the far side of the roof, Picard thought he heard the sound of Worf raising his voice, but he couldn’t make out what his first officer was saying. The Klingon was engaged in some kind of intense discussion with two men, junior aides attached to Bacco’s delegation, an Efrosian and a human. For the moment, the situation seemed under control if a bit tense, so Picard returned his attention to the matter of inspiring his wallflowers to cross the room.
“What about art?” When no one pounced to tear down his idea, he elaborated. “It’s my understanding that the Gorn have a highly refined aesthetic sense, and that they have a long tradition of thermal sculpture, which appeals to their ability to see heat signatures.”
Bacco nodded. “I’ve been to some of those exhibits. I had to use special glasses to see something that approximates what the Gorn perceive, but it was quite lovely.”
Fawkes interjected, “They also have a fascinating musical tradition. They use focused sonic pulses the way Terran music uses bass frequencies. A Gorn symphony can leave you feeling like you’ve been pummeled by a prizefighter.”
“Well,” Crusher said, bright with optimism, “it sounds like there’s plenty to talk about with the Gorn. Plus, inviting them to tell us about their culture not only helps us understand them, it might make them feel more at ease—and make the next round of negotiations a bit less tense. Which I thought was the entire reason to hold an event such as this.”
“Yes and no,” Bacco said. Her mask of propriety faltered, and she turned a sheepish look at Picard. “The fact is, I understand the Gorn far too well. I dealt with them for years when I ran Cestus III, more than enough to know they’re dragging these talks out, though I don’t know why. But if you want to know the real reason I’m in no hurry to go chat with them, it’s that we’ve been talking to these annoying lizards for almost a week now. We’re running out of things to say. And if I can be completely honest, I’m getting sick of looking at them across the table.”
Bateson raised his glass to her. “Seconded, Madam President.” To Picard, he added, “Try spending a week maintaining an antipodal orbit from a Gorn battleship that changes velocity without warning, forcing you into a never-ending game of ‘your side, my side.’ Trust me, Jean-Luc, it gets old very quickly.”
Disappointed but not yet resigned, Picard summoned his courage. “Times like this are when we most need diplomacy, Madam President. It’s when our rivals and our enemies least want to talk that we should seek understanding. It’s when we most desperately yearn to give in to the temptation of isolationism that we must reach out.” He glanced toward the Gorn, then smiled at Bacco. “Even when we know it will leave us bored beyond belief.”
Bacco chuckled and shook her head. “All right, Captain. You win.” She started the long walk across the room, with Piñiero at her side and the four Starfleet officers close behind her. Over her shoulder, she added softly, “But I’m warning you right now: if this works, I just might name you ambassador to the Gorn Hegemony.”
Crusher grinned at the president’s good-natured threat, and so did Picard.
“Madam President,” he said, “that’s a risk I’ll simply have to take.”
• • •
They were waiting in the executive floor’s lobby as La Forge and Šmrhová stepped out of the lift: an archosaur from the Gorn Imperial Guard and a black-suited Vulcan from the Protection Detail, both armed and deadly serious. The duo from the Enterprise was barely clear of the lift when the Vulcan fell into step with them. “Why did you demand our presence here?”
La Forge said, “We have a credible witness who says the bank’s chairman, Siro Kinshal, facilitated a security breach, and the
bank’s security division failed to investigate it.”
They moved with purpose toward the entrance to the executive suites beyond the lobby. As they and their Gorn counterpart approached the door, the Orion receptionist sprang from her chair to block their path. “This is a restricted floor! You can’t go in—”
A shoulder-check by the Gorn knocked the young woman from his path, and she tumbled wildly backward across the polished marble floor. Unlike the sliding portals that were endemic to modern buildings and ships throughout local space, the door to the bank’s private suite of senior executive offices was made of an intricately textured wood, stained a deep reddish brown and embellished with ornate carved designs. Šmrhová reached the door first, gripped its golden knob, and found it locked. She glared at the receptionist. “Open this door. Right now.”
The undernourished-looking young woman had tears in her eyes as she reached under her desk. “I’m calling security! You have no right—” Her rant was interrupted by a deafening slam and the splintering of wood as the Gorn punched the elegant wooden door clean off its hinges. The fractured wooden slab struck the floor with a resounding boom, and then he stomped over it on his way toward the chairman’s office. Šmrhová and the Vulcan followed him inside.
La Forge paused in the doorway just long enough to flash a sarcastic smile at the sprawled receptionist. “That’s okay—we’ll just let ourselves in.”
The quartet’s passage through the broad, artfully appointed hallways was met by shrieks of alarm and a steady stream of calls to the bank’s security center. Doors slammed shut and executive assistants scattered ahead of them. In less than a minute they were only a few meters away from the chairman’s closed door, and the rumble of running footsteps echoed from every corridor behind them, drawing closer by the moment.
Guarding the door to Siro Kinshal’s office was a tall and elegant Trill woman who wore her black hair in a stylish crown atop her head. She stood with arms crossed over her white blouse, her left leg straight beneath her and the right extended, revealing one long and shapely thigh from under her knee-length gray skirt. “And just where do all of you think you’re going?”
Two teams of Orion security personnel in black-on-black faille suits converged with weapons drawn on the foursome outside Kinshal’s office. The Vulcan and the Gorn each faced off toward a different group of Orions, their own military-grade sidearms at the ready.
La Forge and Šmrhová dared to step forward, and the Trill woman advanced to meet them. The engineer held up his empty hands. “Let’s all calm down here”—he glanced at the nameplate on her desk—“Idina. We need to speak to Chairman Kinshal immediately.”
Idina looked down her elegant nose at La Forge with unbridled hauteur and defiance. “Do you have an appointment?”
He heard the smack of contact and the crack of breaking cartilage before he realized that Šmrhová had cold-cocked the woman with a blindingly fast jab. The Trill collapsed to the floor, her once-perfect nose broken and bleeding, consciousness wrenched from her grasp. Šmrhová stepped over her, all business. “Appointment, my ass.”
She tried the knob on Kinshal’s door, then shook her head at La Forge. “Locked.”
He lifted his foot, and she stepped aside as he kicked the door open.
Half a second later he barely dodged clear of the disruptor blast from inside the office.
The beam slammed into the Gorn’s flank and blasted away a chunk of his torso. Šmrhová and La Forge dove to the floor as the Vulcan protection agent somersaulted to cover behind the receptionist’s desk, rolled into a squat, and returned fire.
A searing flash and a peal of thunder were followed by pitch-black darkness and the delicate music of shattering glass swallowed by a roaring wind. La Forge set his eyes to night-vision mode, transforming the darkness into frost-blue twilight. Looking up, he saw that the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of the chairman’s office had been blasted out, likely by shaped charges, exposing the corner space to open air more than four hundred meters aboveground.
Then Chairman Kinshal emerged from cover beneath his huge, heavy desk. He looked straight at La Forge, who clearly observed that the chairman’s left hand had been stripped of flesh by the explosion—revealing the distinctly Soong-type android mechanisms underneath. Then Kinshal turned and ran—and leaped out into the night, falling like a stone.
La Forge sprang to his feet and dashed inside the smoke-filled office, and Šmrhová followed him. At the edge of the now open floor, he grasped one of the bent structural beams to anchor himself. He looked down, expecting to see Kinshal’s body strewn across the avenue far below. Instead, he saw the fleeing executive on the rooftop of the slightly shorter building across the avenue from the bank—scrambling to his feet and looking for his next route of escape.
He reached under his jacket and tapped his combadge. “La Forge to Enterprise!” Then he nudged Šmrhová. “Your tricorder! Get line-of-sight coordinates to that roof.”
As the security chief powered up her tricorder, Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen’s voice replied over the comm, “Enterprise. Go ahead, Commander.”
“We’re in pursuit of a suspect. We need site-to-site transport, ASAP.”
Šmrhová pressed the tricorder’s transmit pad. “Coordinates sent!”
“Received,” Chen said. “Stand by for transport.”
The duo tensed in anticipation of the transporter’s embrace. Šmrhová kept her tricorder powered up and in hand. “Ready for this?”
Pride demanded he not speak the truth, but honor prevented him from lying. That left evasion. “Are you?”
“Let’s get the bastard,” she said with a fierce look.
Then the world turned white and filled with a euphonic hum as the transporter beam took hold—and flung them headlong into the chase.
• • •
“Red Alert!” Snapping out orders like a drill chief had never been T’Ryssa Chen’s style, but circumstances demanded it, and by a quirk of fate, scheduling, and Picardian whimsy, she was the one occupying the center seat while the ship’s five most senior officers were on the planet’s surface. “Weinrib, get us into a geostationary orbit, directly above the capital! Balidemaj, get a lock on the suspect in case they lose visual contact.”
Ensign Jill Rosado responded to multiple alerts on the ops console. “Site-to-site transport complete. Transporter Rooms Two through Eight standing by for new coordinates.”
La Forge’s voice squawked from the overhead speaker, “He jumped again!”
An urgent, rapid beeping shrilled from the ops panel, signaling the receipt of new coordinates from Šmrhová. “Target locked,” Rosado said. “Transporter Room Two has the ball.”
The alert Klaxon whooped and red situation lights flashed on the bulkheads as Lieutenant Abby Balidemaj reported from the security station, “I can’t get a lock on their suspect. He’s using a sensor blind.” She keyed in new commands. “Switching to visual tracking.”
“We’re splitting up to cut him off,”Šmrhová said via the comm. She sounded breathless, and her normally satin-smooth voice quaked while she ran. “Get ready for new coordinates!”
Chen spun her chair around to face the master systems display. “Elfiki?”
The ship’s senior science officer looked overwhelmed by the task of coordinating the Enterprise crew’s actions with those of the Atlas crew, the Federation Security agents and Orion police, and to the limited degree that it was permitted, the Gorn. She composed herself and looked back toward the command chair. “The Atlas is maneuvering to a complementary angle for visual tracking. Federation Security is locking down the bank, and the Orion police are threatening to arrest everyone.” She shifted her gaze toward the viewscreen. “And the Gorn have left their orbital position and are accelerating into our hemisphere.”
Oh, great. The last thing Chen wanted to deal with right now was a combat scenario.
More strident tones emanated from the ops console. Rosado quelled them with a fe
w fast taps. “Target locked. Transporter Room Three has the ball.”
“Visual tracking’s up.” Balidemaj relayed the sensors’ data stream to the main viewer. It was a vertiginous view of the Orions’ capital city, less than a degree shy of a perfectly vertical angle on the close-packed rooftops of the metropolis. The deputy chief of security made some adjustments. “Magnifying.” A small quadrant of the image on the screen swelled to fill the rectangular frame, and all its details resolved into hyper-real sharpness.
A lone figure leaped across the chasm between two skyscrapers, landed hard on the far rooftop, and tumbled. Seconds behind him, two figures met at the first building’s edge. Then came the warbling from ops, and Rosado reacted with speed and precision. “Locked! Transporter Room Four has the ball. Transporter Room One reports ready and standing by.”
“Automatic tracking engaged,” Balidemaj reported. “As long as we maintain visual contact, we—” Her voice trailed off as the image on-screen shifted to a rooftop veiled in mist.
Propelled by anxiety, Chen sprang from the command chair. “Reduce magnification!”
Balidemaj scrambled to reacquire visual contact as La Forge’s angry voice resounded from the overhead speaker. “Enterprise! We’ve lost visual contact! Please advise!”
Elfiki called out, “Stand by, sir!” She spun back toward the master systems display and started reconfiguring one of the sensor stations.
Chen moved quickly to her friend’s side and lowered her voice to a discreet hush. “What’s the plan, Dina?”
“I’m resetting the sensors to look for changes in the mist cloud on that roof that aren’t consistent with standard models of Brownian motion. It should just take a few more . . . got it!” Working with grace and speed, she transmitted her data to Šmrhová’s tricorder and patched into the comm channel. “Commander! Target is bearing two-five-one from your position and descending. I think he found a staircase access! Routing civilian police to your location!”
A few seconds later, La Forge hollered back, “Found it! Heading inside!”