Star Trek: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses

by David Mack

  Now the freighter captain had Bowers’s full, irate attention. “We’ve covered this, Captain Satal. Your ship is registered on Betazed and operates under Federation authority. If you—”

  Kedair cleared her throat loudly enough to cut Bowers off. She handed him a civilian version of a padd. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, sir. The Ibiza’s license was transferred to Ghidi Prime three days ago. All their paperwork checks out, including the security seal.”

  The first officer waved his padd at Kedair and Satal. “Then why does this ship still show up in the Federation’s merchant marine database?”

  “Because it takes your fat-assed bureaucrats six to twelve weeks to update their records and disseminate them to Starfleet.”

  The security chief’s face blushed a darker shade of green, a telltale sign that the freighter commander was firing up her temper. “Unfortunately, Captain Satal is correct. This vessel operates under Typhon Pact authority. It’s exempt from Federation law in interstellar space.”

  Bowers pointed around them at the mountains of shipping containers stacked in orderly rows and columns, all the way up to the ship’s lofty overhead. “What about the cargo?”

  Satal inched forward, as if trying to provoke a fight. “What about it?”

  “Where’s it from? I don’t care whose flag you fly under, if you’re transporting contraband on or off Federation worlds with the intention of delivering it to Andor, we’ll beam every last bit of it into deep space on a wide-dispersal setting.”

  His threat prompted an arrogant smirk from the Thallonian. “Not unless you feel like starting an interstellar incident, Commander. My manifest is on that padd. Have a look.” He spread his arms in an all-encompassing gesture toward his cargo. “These are all Typhon Pact goods, aboard a Typhon Pact commercial vessel, bound for a neutral planet.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Bowers stepped off to one side and paged through several screens of data on the padd—not enough to read the entire manifest of the Ibiza, but enough to get the gist of this elaborate, brazen ploy. He turned back and confronted Satal. “Diverse inventory you have here.”

  Satal feigned innocence with a shrug. “I just move what the clients pay for.”

  “So I see. Rare and perishable foodstuffs. Industrial fertilizers and bioengineered seeds. High-end medical equipment, computers, replicators, construction technology, weapons, not to mention two million metric tons of gold-pressed latinum.” Bowers feigned surprise. “Who knew the Typhon Pact did such a bustling trade in goods that are specialties of the Federation?”

  “Learn something new every day,” Satal said.

  Bowers handed the padd back to Kedair. “The most interesting thing about this ship’s cargo, Lieutenant? It all came from the same corporate client on Ghidi Prime. Captain Satal expects me to believe that one company produces such a wide range of commercial goods.”

  “I never said they produced any of it. Just that they paid to ship it to Andor. It’s not as if Seboz Holdings is the first aggregate retailer in corporate history.”

  Kedair’s anger became a cold fire as she studied the information on the padd. “A Typhon Pact shell company sets up shop on a planet just over the border inside Tzenkethi space. Using middlemen, they buy up all the Federation goods they know Andor needs most. Then they recruit the Ibiza and who knows how many more ships to switch their registries to Ghidi Prime. In a month or two, they have a legally untouchable black-market fleet.” She huffed out a snort of derision. “If they set this up correctly, they might even be turning a profit.”

  “Something I’d like to be doing myself,” Satal cut in, “if the two of you would be so kind as to take your goon squad and get off my ship.”

  Bowers took the padd from Kedair and slapped it against Satal’s chest. “With pleasure.”

  The security chief tapped her combadge. “Kedair to boarding party. Regroup at the transport site, on the double.” She and Bowers walked aft to the bay’s largest open area, which the Aventine’s operations officer, Lieutenant Mirren, had designated as the key site for transport on and off the vessel. Within a minute, the rest of her boarding team met them there.

  Satal called out, “Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry, Commander?”

  The taunt compelled Bowers to look back with contempt at the Thallonian. “If you can warp this tub of crap outta range before I give the order to blast it into dust, you can call that an apology.” He tapped his combadge. “Bowers to Aventine. Beam us back. Before I shoot someone.”

  • • •

  On the other side of Dax’s desk, Bowers prowled back and forth like an animal testing the limits of its cage. “This makes our mission even more pointless. You realize that, right?”

  “Sam, please—sit down. Watching you pace is like talking to a tennis match.”

  He stopped and sighed heavily, then eased himself into one of the guest chairs in front of the captain’s desk. “I’ve got Kedair investigating how many commercial ships have recently resigned their registries from Federation worlds, but ships get decommissioned all the time. We won’t know which ones are flying under new flags until we try to impound them and end up with a slap in the face. And I’ll bet we’re going to start seeing a lot of them, very soon.”

  “We knew it was only a matter of time before someone exploited that loophole. To be honest, I’m surprised the Ferengi didn’t do it first.”

  “Chalk that up to Grand Nagus Rom courting Starfleet’s help to secure his borders against the Tzenkethi.” Bowers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Captain. I just don’t see any point to this embargo. Now that the Typhon Pact’s figured out how to end-run us, we’re little more than traffic managers. Hell, I bet the Ibiza’s captain crossed our path just so he could thumb his nose at us. After word of this gets out, every fast-buck freighter jockey in the sector’s gonna be applying for a Ghidi Prime license and a slot on the Andor run. And there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

  “To be honest, Sam, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.” She noted his look of confusion, which turned quickly to one of accusation. “Don’t act so shocked. I’m not a monster; I know the embargo’s a useless cruelty. Your twice-daily briefings have made sure of that.”

  Her jape earned an amused glint of faux humility from Bowers. “Just doing my job.”

  “If only our diplomats were so relentlessly—”

  “Charming?”

  “Annoying.” She swiveled her chair so she could lean one elbow on her desk and stretch her legs. “I’m almost glad the Typhon Pact aced us on this one. The Andorians need those supplies, and playing politics with people’s lives never sat well with me. But you and I still have the same problem we had before: we’re under orders to enforce an embargo. Even if most of the ships we challenge are legally immune, we have to at least keep up the pretense. And if, every now and then, we stop a ship that we do have the right to impound, we’ll do it. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

  Bowers wore a resigned expression. “I understand why we have to play our part. But I’m concerned that when Starfleet Command”—he corrected himself—“I mean when President Pro Tem Ishan finds out what’s happening out here, he won’t accept it as the inevitable result of a failed foreign policy. I’m worried he’ll see it as a challenge. I’m afraid this mess will escalate.”

  Anxiety churned the acid in Dax’s gut. “So am I, Sam. . . . So am I.”

  Ten

  Parked in the middle of a docking bay designated for its exclusive use, the Tiber looked small. Sarina Douglas recalled how bulky the runabouts had seemed inside the narrow hangars of the old Deep Space 9. The maintenance and support areas on this new, Starfleet-built facility were much larger, better equipped, and so new that the odors of industrial chemicals and overheated metal had yet to take up residence.

  Her footsteps resounded in the empty space; the echoes returned to her, sharp and clear, from the off-white bulkheads and the pale-gray deck as she crossed from th
e corridor entrance to the port-side hatch of the Tiber. Just as she and Bashir had agreed when setting this plan in motion, the small starship’s hatch was closed and locked. She considered letting herself in—after all, she knew the code to unlock the hatch—but decided to hail Bashir instead. A light tap on the comm button next to the hatch’s controls opened a channel to the Tiber’s interior. “Julian?”

  Bashir’s voice over the comm was slow and weary. “Come in.”

  That didn’t sound promising. She keyed in the door’s security code. The magnetic bolts retracted with a low hum and a deep thunk from inside the ship’s hull, and the hatch slid open. Douglas stepped inside and turned aft, toward the work area. The runabout’s interior was steeped in darkness and shadow; its few spots of feeble illumination came courtesy of computer displays in the cockpit, a dull standby glow from the transporter arch, and dim emergency lighting that marked the center path on the deck. Douglas took her time, to give her eyes time to adjust. She stepped through the open internal hatchways, passed through the transporter arch, and moved through the narrow gap between the medical mission modules.

  Bashir sat hunched, flanked by computer displays, his face buried in his hands.

  Suspecting she knew the answer, Douglas asked, “How’s it going?”

  He responded with a muffled, inchoate moan of exhaustion and frustration.

  She stood behind his chair and massaged his shoulders, which tension had turned as hard as oak. “That well, huh?”

  He lifted his face from his palms. His hair was mussed and his throat was rough with stubble below his trimmed beard. “I had no idea it could be this complex,” he murmured, as if in shock. “I’ve honestly never seen anything like it. Not even the Yrythny ‘turnkey’ genome was this Byzantine.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, then rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “A little past 2200.”

  Her answer made him swivel his chair around. His angular features were agape with horror. “You’re not serious.”

  “Julian, please tell me you haven’t been sitting here since yesterday.” Bashir looked away for a moment, and then he seemed to deflate. Douglas leaned down to reestablish eye contact. “When you didn’t come back to our quarters last night, I figured you’d been called to duty in the hospital. If I’d realized you were in here, obsessing over this—”

  He fended off her concern with raised palms. “It wouldn’t have mattered.” He gestured from one screen to the next as he continued. “I’ve tried isolating sections of the Meta-Genome for comparison against the major Andorian genotypes, but there are so many results that I can’t begin to tell which ones are promising and which are dead ends.”

  “What if you break it down by gender?”

  A tired head shake. “I tried. Even separated into four subgroups, the amount of raw data involved is staggering.” He keyed some commands into the control panel and called up a series of medical reports in side-by-side panels; some were from Starfleet records, others were from the Andorian Science Institute. “Shar and Professor zh’Thiin have documented their protocols to the last detail, so I tried approaching the task from a procedural angle. I compared their recent work to Doctor Crusher’s research from three years ago, and then I read through an entire file of top-secret reports written over a hundred years ago, by a Doctor Babitz on the Starship Sagittarius.” His diminishing patience and growing vexation became increasingly evident. “Few commonalities in their protocols, even fewer repeatable results, and not a clue where to start breaking this down to make it the least bit useful.”

  Douglas resumed kneading the knots from Bashir’s shoulders. “You need sleep.”

  “No, what I need is help. I’ve done my fair share of genetic research, but this is far beyond my level of expertise. I have to bring in experts, the best I can find.”

  She ceased her massage and spun his chair around, then she planted her hands on his forearms and leaned down to confront him, nose to nose. “You know you can’t do that, Julian. Never mind the risk to our security—if Thirty-one finds out, you’ll have put a death mark on the head of every one of those so-called experts.”

  “All right. So we warn the experts of the risks before we read them in. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s worth it can walk away.”

  “And immediately report us to Starfleet.”

  “I think you’re a bit paranoid.”

  “And I think you’re sleep deprived. Maybe now’s not the best time to make plans that affect our lives, the security of the Federation, and the survival of the Andorian species.”

  He pushed himself up from the chair, and Douglas let go of him and stepped back to give him room. He tamed his tousled hair with a slow push of his hands over his head. “I’m not delusional, Sarina. I know bringing in help increases the risk. But I can’t do this alone.”

  “You’ve only had the data for one day. Why not wait and see what you can do on your own over the next few months? Give it time to—”

  “We can’t maintain this charade for that long, and you know it. How long before someone starts asking why I’m never in my office? Or until someone retasks this runabout, and we lose our mobile lab? Time’s a factor—one we’re quickly running out of.”

  She knew that look in Bashir’s eyes. He was committed to seeing this through, no matter the cost. “How many experts do you need to get this done?”

  His eyes roamed over the screens of alien data. “No more than six. The best of the best.”

  “And how are we supposed to explain why you and half a dozen of Starfleet’s top geneticists are huddled inside this runabout for days on end?”

  He wrinkled his brow with concentration. Then his mood brightened. “A medical conference! And we can hold it on Bajor. We’ll draw less attention away from the station.”

  “Not bad. Make it sound boring enough and you can probably quell Starfleet’s interest. But your little ruse won’t fool Thirty-one.”

  “No, it won’t. That’s why I’m counting on you to keep them at bay.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  A stymied roll of his shoulders. “No idea. But you’ll think of something. You always do.” He stepped past her on his way forward to the hatch. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go send irresistible invitations to six of the most brilliant genomic-medicine specialists in Starfleet.”

  Douglas said nothing as she watched Bashir leave, not because she relished letting him have the last word, but because his rash disregard for his own survival—not to mention hers and that of anyone else he was callous enough to embroil in this fiasco—had left her speechless.

  • • •

  Antarctic winds howled like nightmares outside the Science Institute dark site, rattling its ramshackle walls and vibrating the transparent-aluminum windowpanes in their frames. Inside the building, hidden drafts from slipshod construction filled the corridors with frigid air and an omnipresent sepulchral groaning. To Shar, all the lighting inside his project’s new base of operations looked sickly green—that is, when it wasn’t flickering or failing outright. Had they set up shop at Andor’s opposite pole, they could simply have relied on sunlight; unfortunately, the planet’s south pole had just entered its annual two-month period of constant darkness.

  I would almost rather go back to the building the fanatics burned down.

  He tried to turn on the computer terminal in his new office, only to find that it had no power. It took him a few minutes of crawling, first under his desk and then around the room’s periphery, to trace the Gordian knot of power cords and data lines to their appointed junctions. The gentle-featured chan was squatting with a tangle of wires clenched in his fists, swearing under his breath, when he noted a faint shadow settling over him. Swallowing a mouthful of undignified vulgarities, he turned to see Professor zh’Thiin standing in his doorway. The middle-aged zhen offered him friendly sympathy. “Settling in, I see.”

  “As best I can.” He dropped the wires, stood, and clapped his ha
nds clean.

  “Doctor th’Noor says he’ll have the main server up within the hour. After he runs a few routine diagnostics on the core, we’ll be ready to get back to work.”

  Shar tried to sound excited by the news, but failed. “That’s great.”

  His supervisor edged into the room. “Shar? Is something wrong?”

  He threw up his arms at the cracked thermocrete walls, the water-damaged ceilings and floors, the naked wiring. “Look at this place. How are we supposed to perform cutting-edge biomedical research here? Was this place even designed as a medical facility?”

  “If memory serves, it was built to be a weather station.”

  He waved toward the window, which was being pelted by wind-driven ice. “Forecast for the future of our project: dark, frozen, and trapped in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Look on the bright side. We won’t get many protesters bothering us.”

  The light above Shar’s head chose that moment to die with a flash and a fizzle, plunging his desk into shadow. “It won’t matter if we do. They won’t be able to see us in the dark.”

  Zh’Thiin stepped one foot back into the corridor outside Shar’s office and motioned for him to follow. “Let’s grab something warm from the commissary.” Shar was in no mood to be cheered up, but he trailed her out of the lab and down the long, drab passage.

  He indulged a moment of hope. “Is there any raktajino left?”

  “Don’t count on it.” The professor snuck a look at Shar while they walked together. “You’re not happy about the new facility.”

  “What gave it away?”

  “I’m serious, Shar. You really think we can’t continue our work here?”

  Her prodding opened the floodgates of his dudgeon. “How can we? The computers are all decades out of date. We don’t have anywhere near the network bandwidth or processing power we need to perform virtual sequencing on something as complicated as the Meta-Genome.” He pointed at a dank and foul-smelling room on his left as they passed by it. “Even the lavatories don’t work. Not that we’ll need them, since all the pantries are empty and the only replicator works only half the time. Frankly, I’m surprised this place hasn’t been swallowed by a crack in the ice shelf or blown into the sea by a stiff wind.”