by David Mack
Data’s voice was calm and consoling. “Doctor, we need to leave immediately.”
“Yes.” A manic impulse seized Bashir. “Fire up Archeus, we’ll go after them.”
“No, Doctor. We cannot track them while they are cloaked. And it is imperative we leave here and retreat to a safe haven as soon as possible.”
He grabbed the android by his shirt. “They took Sarina! I won’t just give her up!”
“We will do all we can to find and rescue Ms. Douglas. But right now we all remain targets, and Thirty-one will use what it learned from tonight’s failures to improve its tactics for our next encounter. It would be in our best interest to be elsewhere before they return.”
Bashir seethed. Data was right. It made him sick to know he had no choice but to save himself first and look for Sarina later. But their enemy was not one to leave things half done. They would be back, and they would come shooting to kill.
“Load the ship,” he said to Data. “We’ll leave as soon as we’re all aboard.”
• • •
Too many times in his life Elim Garak had experienced the premonitory sensation that he was bidding farewell to a friend for the last time. That melancholy foreboding haunted him now as he stood with Bashir in the complex’s courtyard, at the bottom of the gangway to Archeus.
“I can’t really say as I blame you for not pursuing my offer of sanctuary, since it was never meant to be more than a ruse,” Garak said. “But since I can’t give you an explanation for how six of my private guards turned out to be traitors working for Thirty-one, I owe you at the very least my most heartfelt apology.”
The good doctor dismissed Garak’s contrition with a wave. “They have people everywhere, always have. You couldn’t have known.”
“But I can’t absolve myself of feeling that I should have.” All he could do was shake his head in dismay. “To have such a grotesque calamity unfold inside my own supposedly secure walls? The best word for what I feel, Doctor, would be mortified. I hope one day you can forgive me for this abject failure.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Garak. You took a terrible chance letting us land here, never mind offering us asylum.” Bashir took hold of Garak’s shoulders. “Thank you, for all your help, and for putting yourself in danger. I’m in your debt.”
Garak reached up and clasped Bashir’s forearms, reciprocating his gesture of friendship and connection. “I hope you find Ms. Douglas soon, and in good health.” Once more he was possessed by a fearful anticipation. “But do take care, Julian.”
“I will.” They released each other and stepped apart. “Au revoir, Castellan.”
“Safe travels, Doctor.”
Bashir turned and climbed the gangway into Archeus. The ramp retracted behind him as he entered the gleaming silvery vessel. The moment the ramp vanished and the outer hatch closed, Archeus floated upward, propelled by silent antigrav modules. It ascended to an altitude just above the complex, then its main thruster kicked on with a roar. The ship streaked away into a low bank of violet clouds. Garak stared after it, wondering if he might see it emerge arcing toward the heavens, but there was nothing on the horizon but the creeping edge of night.
The voice of his adviser Kinzel Sare jolted Garak from his reverie. “Castellan? Forgive the interruption, but we need to act quickly if we want to manage the narrative on this incident.”
“Manage the narrative?” He trained a look of contempt on the young politico. “Precisely what aspect of this fiasco do you think we are in a position to manage?”
His challenge left Sare recoiled and defensive. “Well . . . we should issue a statement. To condemn the Federation for this breach of our security and sovereignty.”
How can such stupidity ever hope to prosper in the political arena?
“We will do no such thing.”
“Certainly we can’t let such a grave insult pass.”
Garak cracked a knowing smirk. “What insult? All the intruders were Cardassian.”
“But sent by a rogue Federation organization!”
“Prove it.” He almost felt pity for the younger man’s passionate idealism, which the realities of politics soon would pummel out of him. “Let me spare you a futile effort, Mister Sare. The dead cannot be questioned, and the few attackers we captured alive are not only refusing to speak, they have all proved to be living under elaborate false identities. What does that suggest to you?” Sare shrugged, so Garak explained, “They were Obsidian Order agents.”
“But the Order was disbanded.”
“True. But its assets had to go somewhere. Apparently, some of them were recruited by foreign services and planted within our ranks.” He looked up at the complex’s roof, from which pillars of smoke still twisted. “If anyone would suffer from this matter being made public, it would be us, Sare. Consequently, there will be no statement.” He turned and walked back to the residence, with Sare at his heels. “In keeping with the long and storied tradition of politics everywhere, this travesty will be swept quietly into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.”
Twenty-four
NOVEMBER 2160
The admirals both were out of uniform and out of their element. Very few places on Earth were so free of technology that they were beyond the reach of automated surveillance and monitoring. Most such sites were nature preserves, remote locales all but inaccessible without the proper permits, which in themselves created trackable patterns. One exception was the isle of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, located just off Ireland’s western shore. Thanks to a law that had banned the use of transporters on the island except in cases of emergency, the barren strip of rocky land remained a destination only for those determined to “get away from it all.” It had a small landing pad that was sometimes used by shuttles, but flight operations entailed more detailed passenger records than did ferry transits, making them too precarious for the admirals.
This hadn’t been an easy meeting to plan. Rao and Ko both knew the perils of attracting Uraei’s notice, so they had avoided mentioning this rendezvous aloud or in transmitted communications of any kind. Neither of them had logged it into their journals or personal devices. Every detail of this secret conference had been arranged in carefully passed, handwritten notes, exchanged under mundane pretexts over the course of weeks. As a further precaution, they had come separately, by different routes, two days apart, and had agreed to meet not in the isle’s port community of Cill Rónáin, but several kilometers away, in the isle’s center, at the bed and breakfast in Cill Mhuirbhigh. As a final step, they had left their comms behind on the mainland, secured inside signal-shielded lockers in the Galway train station.
Rao was the second to arrive, early in the morning on the ninth. She hiked between centuries-old rock walls and waving stands of dried grass, up the cracked white road toward the quaint inn, with its austere gray masonry and twin chimneys.
She rounded the last curve in the road to see Ko waiting outside the inn’s front door. He walked out to meet her a short distance from the house. “You made it.”
She shivered inside her winter coat. “Could you have picked a colder place to meet?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to be here during tourist season.” With a tilt of his head he invited her to follow him onto a narrow trail that snaked up a gentle hill behind the inn, toward the ruins of an ancient Celtic fort. “Did anyone ask where you were going?”
She shook her head. “I’m so close to retirement, everyone assumes I’m trying to use up accrued leave.” Paranoid, she looked over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t being followed or watched. There didn’t seem to be another living soul anywhere in sight, just an endless tapestry of stone-walled farms under a marble sky. “When do I find out why we’re here?”
“A few more minutes. After we’re inside the fort.”
The climb wasn’t steep but the path was
rocky and uneven, which made it more difficult than it had seemed from afar. At last they reached the prehistoric stone ruins known as Dun Aonghasa, or “the Big Fort.” On three sides it had imposing walls of dark stone; the fourth was open to a hundred-meter sheer cliff that plunged to the crashing waves of the Atlantic. The space inside was a vast lawn, its dry blades rustled by icy sea winds.
Ko pulled a portable signal scrambler from inside his coat, switched it on, and set it on the ground. “This will create a privacy bubble around us. No signals in or out, and it uses infrared to block visuals from above.” From another deep pocket he produced a clutch of papers inside a bound-shut folder, and handed it to Rao. “I went old-school to keep Uraei in the dark.”
“So I see.” She unwrapped the parcel of documents. Papers fluttered in her hands as she leafed through them. They contained multiple accounts of sudden deaths, accompanied by what looked like official orders describing their execution. “Are these all kill orders?”
“Yes. The problem is, I can’t verify who authorized any of them. Which makes me think it might have been our mutual friend.” Ko’s grim mood darkened further. “Tell me when you see the link between the victims.”
Rao’s first instinct was to note the dates of the killings. “They’re all recent.”
“All since the end of the war,” Ko said.
She continued to skim through the dozens of pages, uncertain of what she was looking for—until she found it. “They’re all our people. Starfleet personnel, Earth officials, citizens of our allies.” Bafflement returned. “But why? None of them showed activity patterns consistent with espionage or treason. If they weren’t spies or traitors, why were they targeted?”
“I asked myself the same question. Flip to the last few pages.” Ko waited until she had done so, then he continued. “They were all involved in the Battle of Cheron. Either they were there, or they handled intel related to its planning, or they dealt with the aftermath.”
The significance of that revelation eluded Rao. “So? So what?”
A terrible weight seemed to impose itself on Ko. “They were all privy to classified intel acquired after the battle ended. Corpses recovered from the wreckage of a Romulan ship confirmed something we’d suspected after partially decrypting one of their final transmissions: there’s a genetic link between the Romulans and the Vulcans.”
“Are you sure?”
“Up until some point in the last two thousand years, they were one species—and further testing shows they definitely share a common ancestor, one that dates back nearly six hundred thousand years.” There was desperation in his eyes as he looked at Rao. “If that truth comes out now, it’ll jeopardize our talks for the Federation. Any new political union we hope to create depends on the Vulcans’ involvement as founding members. But if word gets out that the Vulcans and the Romulans are all but the same species? No one in the coalition would ever trust the Vulcans again. Any hope of forging a lasting peace would be lost.”
The facts made sense now. Armed with the truth, Rao saw the hand of Uraei at work in all the assassinations, each one engineered to look as innocuous as possible so as to allay suspicion. It was diabolical in its precision. “My god.”
“Parvati, I need to know the truth. If you know, please tell me. Were these killings the work of Uraei? Did Ikerson’s synthetic guardian angel do all this?”
Rao shook her head. “I don’t know—but if I had to guess . . . I would say yes. This seems like Uraei’s handiwork.”
Her answer left Ko forlorn. He took the folder and sheaf of papers from her hands, dropped them on the ground, and vaporized them with a single shot from his phaser. She could have sworn she saw tears in his eyes as he watched the evidence disintegrate. “Heaven help us,” he said. “We now live in a world where Ikerson’s monster makes policy.”
Twenty-five
For the first thirty-six hours after making a forced departure from Cardassia Prime with his companions, Data had occupied himself with concealing Archeus from hundreds of nearby starships and multiple long-range, wide-area sensor arrays. Though Archeus was equipped with a cloaking device, there were myriad emanations and disturbances created by a starship traveling at warp, and even the best cloaking system could not compensate for all of them without a bit of fine-tuning along the way.
His shipmates had, for the most part, left him alone on the command deck. Ozla Graniv had been dosed by her would-be kidnappers with powerful sedatives, so, despite having been revived by Bashir, she had slept most of the time since leaving Cardassia. Bashir had devoted the bulk of his time to monitoring Graniv’s condition; except for a few brief visits to the command deck for updates—which Data had chosen not to point out could have been accomplished using the intraship comms—the doctor had remained in the medbay with his patient.
That left only Lal’s prolonged absence to trouble Data.
Though she had often made a point of asserting her autonomy, and could at times be jealous in the guarding of her privacy, it was not like Lal to withdraw from all contact with Data, especially not in times of trouble or danger. Now that he was confident Archeus was invisible during its transit of the interstellar void, he locked down the ship’s autopilot system and ventured in search of his daughter.
He found her in the farthest aft compartment of the cargo bay, sitting on top of a sealed shipping crate, staring at the point where the bulkhead met the deck. It was as if she had retreated as far from him as she had been able without launching herself out an airlock. Taking care to speak in a soft and nonthreatening tone, Data said, “Lal? Are you all right?”
She answered without looking up. “Go away.”
Her posture was slack, her arms draped loosely in front of her, her head drooped. Everything about her manner projected despondency. Concerned, Data took a few steps more in her direction. “We have not spoken since we left Cardassia Prime. I have been . . . worried about you.” After a few seconds he surmised she wasn’t taking his conversational bait. He would need to resort to more direct methods of inquiry. “Is something troubling you, Lal?”
She looked up, and Data was surprised to see her eyes were puffy from crying. It was a behavior she had been designed to emulate, just as he had been, even though it served no physical need in their android bodies as it did for the humans on whom they had been modeled. For them it was a means of expressing emotional distress and nothing else. Lal palmed fresh tears from her cheeks, and her voice cracked with anguish. “I killed those men, Father.”
His matrix flooded with empathy for his daughter’s remorse. “I understand, Lal.”
Data’s sympathy only worsened Lal’s heartbreak. “Do you?”
“Yes. I, too, have taken lives to protect my own and others.” He moved to her side and sat down on the crate. “You acted in self-defense, Lal. You did nothing wrong.”
Her eyes brimmed with sorrow. “But I did nothing right. I have replayed that moment in my memory sixty-eight thousand three hundred eleven times, and each time I find a variable I missed in the original encounter. In more than forty-six thousand variations, I have calculated possibilities that could have resolved the matter without lethal force.”
How could he counsel her away from a path he knew would lead to madness? “They are only simulations, Lal. While they represent possibilities, they are not what occurred.”
“Only because I failed to consider them, Father. My positronic matrix could have run seven hundred ninety-six thousand scenarios between the time the lights went out and the first intruder crossed the threshold. I had the time to envision a better resolution.” She studied her hands as if they were bloodstained. “One that could’ve ended without taking lives.”
Data draped his arm gently over Lal’s shoulders. “Lal, you and I are beings of great ability. We possess many talents and can perform tasks our designer would have envied. But even we cannot predict the outcome of eve
ry decision. And because we are creatures of both passion and reason, we will sometimes make decisions based on emotion rather than logic.”
“But I should have—”
“Shh. Lal . . . after a traumatic moment, especially one as tragic as this was, it is natural to feel regret. In fact, it is one of our more human qualities that we find ourselves prone to second-guess our actions and doubt the decisions we have already made. But unlike humans, we have perfect recall of the events, and we can analyze them in femtosecond increments and in multiple frequencies. So for us the danger of becoming lost in our own memories is even greater. At moments such as this, our gifts of perception and memory can become a curse—unless we learn to let go of those moments we can no longer change.”
Lal pondered his words. “You’re telling me that what is done . . . can’t be undone.”
“That is correct, Lal.” With his free hand he clasped one of hers. “You must come to terms with the knowledge that you, like countless beings before you, have done what you must in order to survive. There was no malice in your actions, Lal. And if you search your feelings, I trust you’ll find you took no pleasure in what you did. Am I correct?”
Her head tilted at a birdlike angle as she explored her memories. “Correct, Father. I felt no positive emotions when I took those men’s lives—only a slight abatement of my fear.”
“Then there is no reason for you to feel shame or regret. You have every right to live, and to defend your life and your freedom from those who would try to take it from you.”
“But now I am a killer.” Tears shimmered in her eyes as she looked up at Data. “Do you think less of me now, Father?”
“That is not possible, Lal.” He pulled her close, planted a tender kiss on her forehead, then heard himself echo his creator. “Because I am your father, and I will always love you.”
• • •
Sensation returned all at once, without grogginess or disorientation. Sarina opened her eyes. She was surprised to find she was neither blindfolded nor gagged. Then her eyes adjusted to the overhead lights, and she looked down.