Control

by David Mack

  Twenty-two

  MAY 2156

  Ikerson had learned there was an easy way to tell from the start of any meeting at Starfleet Command whether it would turn out to be laudatory or critical. If the aide of some admiral or other made a point of offering a beverage while ushering one into the admiral’s private office, what followed would be empty smiles, bland praise, and a request for a favor. If no drinks were offered at the time of entry, an ass-kicking was certainly imminent.

  A stern-faced young yeoman motioned him and Admiral Rao through an open door into the office of Admiral Ko Ji-hoon, the chief of Starfleet Intelligence, without so much as mentioning water or tea.

  It was going to be one of those meetings.

  Admiral Ko did not stand to greet them. He motioned to the guest chairs. “Sit.” As Rao and Ikerson complied, Ko pushed a data slate across his desk. “Have a look at this.”

  Rao picked up the slate and perused it. “What am I looking at?”

  “I was hoping one of you could tell me. All the orders on that transcript originated from your division, Admiral Rao.” A pointed look at Ikerson. “And unless I’m mistaken, they were all processed through the computer network you developed.” He reclined and steepled his fingers. “Would one of you care to explain what the hell is going on?”

  Confusion and concern marked Rao’s reaction. She paged through the slate’s contents. “How much of this is there?”

  “Reams. Your division has been busier than expected, even for wartime.”

  His remark drew a glare from Rao. “A war my division predicted years in advance. One that would’ve caught the rest of Starfleet by surprise if not for us.”

  Ko arched one eyebrow. “Let’s not sink to exaggeration. We all knew it was coming.”

  “Yes, but only my division correctly anticipated exactly where and when.”

  “Of which you never tire of reminding me.” He nodded toward the slate in her hands. “But I notice none of your predictive models made any mention of these actions.”

  She skimmed over the information and made soft clicking noises with her tongue. “All I see here is a log of successful missions. Spies and collaborators neutralized, enemy bases sabotaged, data breaches prevented—”

  “Perhaps you should look a bit more closely.”

  Ikerson gestured toward the slate and asked Rao, “May I?”

  She handed him the device as she answered Ko. “What would I see if I did?”

  “That the ‘spies and collaborators’ your division ‘neutralized’ were disappeared without due process. That the enemy bases your black ops units destroyed also vaporized Romulan civilians as collateral damage. And the data breaches your computer system prevented were actually legitimate queries by our civilian counterintelligence services.” Ko sat forward, and his countenance turned grave. “But all of that is secondary to the fact that your division is supposed to be limited to intelligence analysis and recommendations. You have no remit for field ops.”

  His implied accusation seemed not to faze Rao. “Nor have we engaged in any.”

  “Those transcripts say otherwise.”

  “We merely relayed recommendations to field units.”

  “Without clearance from my office, or Starfleet Ops, or the C-in-C, or anyone else.” Ko stood, no doubt to reinforce his position of authority in the room. “Tell me who Commander Helena Maslany is and where I can find her. Because if I could have called her in here, I would have. It’s been her name, her face, her voice, her signature, and her command codes behind all these clandestine orders. Just one problem: Even though she has one of the most distinguished service records I’ve ever seen . . . no one in Starfleet knows who she is. Nobody’s ever met her in person. She’s never been seen in the flesh. As far as I can tell, she’s a living fiction, concocted to relay orders to special operators in the field. But I’m almost certain she doesn’t exist.” The director of Starfleet Intelligence stepped out from behind his desk to loom over Rao and Ikerson. “Did your division create a phony officer to bypass the chain of command?”

  Ikerson noted the proud rise of Rao’s chin and surmised she was about to lie. His conscience compelled him to cut her off with the truth—or part of it, at least. “Not intentionally,” he said. “You’re correct about these orders originating from Admiral Rao’s division—but she wasn’t the one who issued them. And she didn’t create Commander Maslany.”

  “Then who did? You?”

  It took all of Ikerson’s courage to ignore Rao’s shut-the-hell-up glare and answer Ko. “Not directly. I suspect she’s an avatar of Uraei—our intelligence network.”

  “Are you saying your network is making executive decisions by itself?”

  Rao took back the reins of the conversation. “Only within a limited framework, sir. For the sake of security and defense.”

  “How limited a framework? Give me a sense of its param­eters.”

  “If Uraei relays intel that it thinks is critical for our protection, and we fail to act on it, it sometimes forwards that information to nonofficial covert operatives for resolution.”

  Ko’s eyes widened at Rao’s revelation. “Your system has its own black-ops units?”

  “I prefer to think of them as deniable nonstate assets who happen to act in our best interest, either by doing what we’re unwilling or unable to do, or by going to places where we can’t send personnel under our own color of authority.”

  Gobsmacked, Ko turned away from Rao and Ikerson and let slip a derisive snort of laughter as he gazed out his window at the cityscape of San Francisco. “That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

  Rao stood, a simple action but one clearly born of pride and defiance. “Call it what you want, sir. But our program works. It’s been keeping us safe for longer than anyone knows—and with the right access, it could be the key to our entire defense program for centuries to come.”

  Her boast turned Ko back toward her and Ikerson. “At what cost, Admiral? You admit this system of yours arrogated authority it shouldn’t have and that it usurped decisions that should’ve been ours to make. Is this just a quirk of its code? Or part of a larger pattern? If we surrender this power to it now, what will it take from us next?”

  “With all respect, sir, I think that fear is unfounded. Uraei isn’t programmed to take control of our society or interfere with our autonomy. The actions it’s taken are just a logical extension of its core mandate, a response to the increased threats of wartime. It won’t go beyond this—and once the war is over, Uraei will go back to being a passive monitor.”

  That, Ikerson knew, was a lie. He and Rao were both aware that Uraei had been modifying its own code for years; there was no longer any way to be certain what its true capabilities were or how it now interpreted its core mandate. But he knew not to share that truth with Admiral Ko. Based on the man’s reaction so far, he would almost certainly panic if he understood the true scope of Uraei’s perception and influence—and if, in a moment of justified fear, Ko dared to take action against Uraei, he would likely sign his own death warrant.

  I have enough blood on my hands, Ikerson decided as he let Rao’s lie pass.

  At any rate, he knew the crux of her argument to Ko in favor of Uraei contained one kernel of ugly truth: if Earth and its allies wanted to survive this war with the Romulan Star Empire, much less win it, they were going to need Uraei—not just plotting in the shadows, but pushing the front line of engagement away from Earth and as far as possible into Romulan space.

  To save the paradise Earth had become, he and Rao would have to unchain a devil—one that would never again consent to be contained or controlled. It seemed to him like a reasonable price to pay for guaranteeing victory in the war . . . but only because he suspected he wouldn’t live long enough to see humanity’s hard-won heaven transformed into a new hell.

  Twenty-
three

  Sarina closed her travel case. The lid locked with a soft click. There hadn’t been much in the hard-shell case when she had first packed it before leaving home on Andor, and it was still partially empty inside—a state she found familiar.

  Her life before being transformed by Julian’s medical prowess had been that of a semicatatonic near-invalid, thanks to the botched genetic enhancements her parents had foisted upon her early in her childhood. Consequently, for most of her life she hadn’t had much need of possessions. In the years since being emancipated from the prison of her own mind, that had remained true. Never had she owned more than a few changes of clothing, and she had long since discovered her profound distaste for clutter. Unlike Julian, she eschewed knickknacks, mementos, books, houseplants, or anything else she didn’t consider necessary. All of which made it a simple matter for her to pick up and leave on a moment’s notice.

  On the other side of their bed, Julian folded one of his shirts, then proceeded to roll it up tightly, to save space inside his over-the-shoulder duffel. His years of service in Starfleet had taught him how to travel with minimal accouterments, thought it was obvious to Sarina that the practice did not come as naturally to him as it did to her.

  She set her case at the foot of the bed. “I’ll go see if Ozla’s ready.”

  Julian kept on folding and rolling. “Right. I’ll check in with Data.”

  A sense of impending threat quickened Sarina’s pace as she crossed the suite’s main room and exited its front door. At either end of the corridor, near the lifts, armed Cardassians wearing the white suits of the castellan’s private guard stood sentry in pairs. None of them stirred as Sarina hurried to the door of Ozla Graniv’s suite and pressed the visitor signal. Though the closed portal was soundproofed, she heard the feedback tone from the panel beside the door. Seconds passed without a response.

  Not good.

  Ozla’s door was unlocked, so she opened it and entered the journalist’s quarters. All was quiet. Purging any note of fear from her voice, Sarina called out, “Ozla? It’s Sarina. Are you packed? We need to get going.” No reply came.

  Don’t panic. Don’t assume the worst. Stay calm.

  Quick steps carried her to the bedroom’s open door. Ozla wasn’t there, or in its attached bathroom suite. There were no obvious signs of a struggle or foul play, but Sarina had a bad feeling nonetheless. She tapped the personal comm pinned to her jacket’s lapel. “Sarina to Ozla. Ozla, do you read me? Please respond.” Silence reigned. She checked the device’s settings. They were just as they had been when Data had issued them from his personal cache on Archeus—right down to the encryption mode and synchronized rotating frequency.

  Now it’s time to get worried.

  Another tap on the comm. “Sarina to Julian. Please respond.” Nothing. “Sarina to Data. Can you hear me? Sarina to all comms on this channel. Anyone hearing this, please answer.” Three seconds of silence was enough to convince her their comms were somehow being jammed—which meant they had run out of time to make a clean getaway.

  I’d better get some reinforcements.

  Sarina ran toward the door, which slid open ahead of her to reveal the corridor outside had been plunged into darkness. She lurched to a halt as the lights inside Ozla’s suite switched off, submerging her in a sudden sea of black.

  Then came the sting of contact—something hard, like the stock of a rifle, slammed into Sarina’s forehead. She let the force send her backward, and as she tumbled in the dark she relied on her enhanced memory to recall the positions of the room’s furniture. Her back hit the floor, then she rolled right, narrowly dodging what sounded like a stomping boot. Deep pain radiated through her skull, and vertigo seized her as she fought to regain her balance.

  Need a weapon. She reached toward a metal vase she knew was on the table against the wall. Her hand found it, closed around its narrow base—

  Another hard blow, this time from a gloved fist, struck her face. Her head snapped sideways, and the vase fell from her hand. It clanged across the tiled floor as she collapsed onto her side. The coppery tang of blood filled her mouth.

  Someone grabbed her ankles and started dragging her. Her hand shot out, a reflex, and latched onto the leg of the table by the wall, arresting her abduction.

  Flashing orange lights pulsed outside the window of the suite’s main room, heralding the arrival of Cardassian military police. In the flickering glow Sarina glimpsed her attackers: a pair of men in full-body stealth suits, complete with spectrum-enhanced visors. They had Cardassian-issued military small arms strapped across their backs, and they moved like trained professionals in the art of kidnapping. Which meant they most likely were ex–Obsidian Order agents.

  The one guarding the door said to his partner, “Hurry up.”

  “She’s stronger than she looks,” said the one fighting to wrest Sarina from the room. He shifted his weight to keep her pinned, then pulled a miniature hypospray from his suit’s utility belt and jabbed it against Sarina’s thigh. “This ought to calm her down.” The hypo let out a sharp hiss as it flooded her bloodstream with a fast-acting sedative.

  Feeling her senses fade, Sarina opened her mouth to shout a warning, in case any of her friends were able to hear her. “Julian! Help! Ju—” Her assailant’s gloved hand clamped down on her mouth and nose, silencing and smothering her.

  “The sooner you stop fighting, the less this will hurt,” he said.

  She would have loved to argue the point with him, but that was when the flashing lights went out, and her consciousness with them.

  • • •

  By the standards of organic beings the attack was swift and decisive. To Lal and her father, it might as well have transpired in slow motion.

  Lal’s first warning that something was amiss came just before the lights went out. A pulse from an energy dampener swept through the suite, darkening powered devices and appliances of all kinds. It rippled around her without effect because she was protected by a new defensive mesh Data had retrofitted into her body. A creation of Doctor Noonien Soong, the mesh had already been part of Data’s new body when his consciousness had awoken inside it, reincarnated from memories he had copied years earlier into his older brother B-4.

  Her matrix was still compensating for interference caused by the energy-dampening pulse when the front door of the suite was forced open from outside. The delay between the door’s opening and the first bang of a chemical-combustion-propelled projectile was less than 0.78 seconds, but that was more than enough time for Lal to switch her visual sensors to ultraviolet night-vision mode with false-spectrum overlays for infrared and subspace frequencies. The intruder in the doorway wore a full-body stealth suit to conceal his appearance, but she was able to identify his armament as a primitive Cardassian military carbine assault weapon, one whose operation would be unaffected by the energy-dampener. His muscles tensed. She calculated his likely arc of fire and the direction in which he would sweep his barrage of projectiles.

  When his first shot screamed past where she had just been, she was already four meters away, moving with all the speed and agility her engineered form allowed, diving and rolling for cover behind furniture that had been reinforced with interior ablative plates so that it could be used for cover in situations such as this. Cardassian accommodations lacked style, and were far from the most comfortable Lal had experienced, but as the product of a paranoid culture they offered exactly what she and her father needed: solid defensive barriers.

  Beneath the mad chatter of automatic weapons Lal heard running steps. She analyzed the acoustic profile of each set of footfalls, charted the delay in their echo patterns, and determined that four men had entered the suite and split into pairs, one bearing down on her, the other on her father, all of them unleashing a steady rain of lethal armor-piercing incendiary bullets.

  In less than three seconds, they would have her pinned in
a cross fire.

  She lifted her knees to her chest, then used both feet to kick the sofa with all of her android strength. The huge piece of furniture shot across the smooth, polished floor, slammed into one of Lal’s attackers, and pinned him with crushing force against the room’s far wall.

  Rolling and twisting, she landed at the feet of her second assailant, sprang up—and found herself directly in his weapon’s crosshairs as his finger tightened against its firing stud. She reacted on instinct, batting his weapon upward as she dodged left. It fired. The bullet missed Lal’s ear by millimeters but singed her black hair. Three hundredths of a second afterward she finished the follow-through of her palm strike and slammed the carbine into the commando’s face hard enough to shatter his jaw, nose, and right cheekbone—and to launch him backward, through the room’s picture window, to his death on the ground twenty meters below.

  It was all over in the heat of a moment. Only as the second man vanished into free fall surrounded by a storm of shattered glass did Lal realize what she had just done.

  On the other side of the room, Data held one of his opponents immobilized in front of him, a living shield against the man’s comrade. “Lay down your weapon,” Data said.

  The second man fired. Tiny explosions riddled the chest of Data’s prisoner, who went limp as a rag doll.

  Data hurled the body with a thrust of his arms and sent the bullet-riddled corpse slamming into the last intruder standing. The dead man knocked the gunman against the wall. In the fraction of a second it took the last man to push his way free, Data was upon him.

  With one hand Data crushed the barrel of the man’s firearm, then he tore it from his foe’s grasp and threw it aside. Lal watched her father lock one hand around the attacker’s throat and lift him off the floor. With his free hand, Data pulled off the mask of the man’s stealth suit, revealing him to be a ­Cardassian—one Lal recognized as a member of Garak’s personal guard corps. Data asked him in a calm voice, “How many of you are there?”