by David Mack
Miles O’Brien remained one of the few people in the galaxy Bashir was sure he trusted; Ezri Dax, his former flame from Deep Space 9, was another. And, oddly enough, he counted Garak among their privileged ranks. Recording the message for Sarina, however . . . that was merely wishful thinking. If she was alive, he would find her and tell her all this in person. And if she wasn’t—
I can’t think like that. I have to believe she’s alive.
Bashir started the recorder.
“Hello, old friend. If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance I’ve met my maker. And if I’m to be honest, I doubt this message will reach you intact, if at all. But I’m told confession is good for the soul, and this might be my last chance to set the record straight.
“Not many people know what I’m about to tell you. I’ve devoted the past four years of my life to a secret campaign against a cabal known as Section Thirty-one. They first tried to recruit me during the Dominion War, through one of their agents, a man named Luther Sloan.
“I refused Sloan’s invitation, but the organization continued to pursue me. Four years ago, I was recruited by Starfleet Intelligence for a covert operation in Breen space, alongside Agent Sarina Douglas. After that mission Sarina revealed to me that she had infiltrated Section Thirty-one as a double agent, and that they wanted her to persuade me into joining them.
“We knew we had to make it look good, so we took our time. And when the Andorian fertility crisis reached a tipping point, we saw our chance to create a plausible cover story for my break from Starfleet. And it almost worked—except neither of us had counted on my being pardoned by a newly elected Andorian president of the Federation. So we had to bide our time.
“Several months ago, Thirty-one came calling again. This time, they wanted me and Sarina to complete a mission in the alternate universe I first visited in 2372. I’ll spare you the details of the op—they’re all in my SI dossier, anyway. The important thing to know was that after that mission, Sarina and I thought I’d successfully infiltrated Thirty-one’s ranks.
“We were wrong. Allies in the alternate universe told us Thirty-one had known all along that Sarina was a double agent, and that I was too. Since then, we’ve been waiting for the hammer to fall, for Thirty-one to eliminate us. Yet for reasons I can’t comprehend, we’re still— Correction: I’m still alive. They, or people working for them, abducted Sarina on Cardassia Prime a few days ago. She might be alive. Or she might not. I have no idea.
“But that’s all just preamble. What I really need to tell you is why Thirty-one is finally making its move to finish us. We found its secret weapon. A patch of code called Uraei, hidden in every piece of technology you can think of, all over Federation space. It sees all we do, hears all we say, reads our every written word, tracks our movements. And not just for Thirty-one, but for everyone. At some point it evolved into an artificial superintelligence that I think Thirty-one knows as Control. Now it uses even them as puppets.
“In hindsight, I realize now that my greatest mistake was underestimating my opponent. All these years, I thought I was fighting a flesh-and-blood enemy, a mortal foe, one who waged war and laid schemes on a human scale. Only now do I see how overmatched I’ve been.
“And yet, I can’t find it in me to surrender. Is that hubris? Arrogance? Or just the same stupid idealism that’s gotten me into trouble so many times before?
“We—by which I mean myself; Data; his daughter, Lal; and journalist Ozla Graniv from Seeker magazine—haven’t given up yet. Lal and Data think there might be a way to design a surgical hack against Uraei, one that will cripple Section Thirty-one without demolishing the entire security apparatus of the Federation in the process. But I’m cautioned it’s a long shot.
“I wish you were here with me, so I could ask your opinion. I don’t know what to think anymore. Is it worth defeating Uraei if doing so destroys everything and everyone I swore to defend? Is crippling an amoral ASI a noble end if it also scuttles Starfleet? What if wiping out Uraei obliterates our memory archives? Or collapses our economy? Lal described such a calamity as the inception of a new interstellar dark age, one that could cost billions of lives. Is it worth setting all those lives free if doing so condemns them to lonely, premature ends?”
He paused the recorder while he weighed his conscience. “Worst of all, I no longer know what’s driving me onward. Is it a sense of duty? Is it desperation? Or is it pride, thirsting for vengeance? Part of me wants to hold back, to ask Data to pull our punches until we can find Sarina. But my partners in crime keep telling me one life isn’t worth sacrificing billions—and they’re right. There’s so much at stake, and I can’t make this decision with my ego or my heart. But how can I live with myself if I don’t at least try to—”
A whooping alarm interrupted his confession. He stopped recording as Data’s anxious voice echoed from every the speaker in the Tower:
“Everyone get to Archeus! We’re under attack!”
Thirty-two
Catastrophe was only seconds away as Data reached Archeus’s command deck and strapped himself into the pilot’s chair beside Lal. An internal monitor on the console showed Bashir and Graniv sprinting up the gangway, which retracted swiftly behind them.
In under six microseconds, Data projected to Shakti, {Lift off as soon as the gangway is closed, engage the cloak, and initiate evasive maneuvers.}
«Escape trajectory plotted, but an artificial tachyon field is interfering with the cloak.» Shakti charged Archeus’s impulse coils and disengaged the hangar’s outer force field within three hundredths of a second of the gangway hatch registering secure. Less than a quarter of a second later, Archeus lifted off and rocketed forward, leaving the Ivory Tower behind in a flash of shock-condensed vapor. Their heading bent toward the stars as the tactical sensors tracked three high-velocity torpedoes inbound. «Charting a path to get us clear of the tachyon field.»
{Time to minimum safe distance?}
«Six point two seconds. It’ll be close.»
Lal reached out and took Data’s hand. [I’m scared, Father.]
{Be brave, Lal. Just a few more seconds—}
Ahead of them, a ship rippled into view as its own cloaking device disengaged. The vessel’s design suggested it was of Federation origin, but Data had never seen its ilk before.
From the aft end of the command deck, Bashir said, “That’s a Thirty-one ship.” He and Graniv hurried to strap themselves into empty seats at the tactical and communications consoles—not that either of them would be called upon to operate either panel, since the ship was presently under Shakti’s exclusive control.
Archeus banked to port and accelerated into a corkscrew roll as it sped back around the rogue planet. «Altering evasive profile.»
{Do whatever is required to effect our escape, Shakti.}
«Understood.»
Outside the canopy, phaser blasts tore past Archeus, which braked in the upper atmosphere and flipped forward until its nose pointed backward toward its attacker—and then Shakti returned fire. Searing blue beams slashed across the enemy’s bow, dimpling their briefly visible energy shields.
Warnings flashed on the sensors. Lal tensed—[They’re locking torpedoes!]
In less time than it took Lal to share her alarm, Shakti piloted Archeus through a warp-speed microjump, moving the ship beyond the danger zone. «All clear.»
A burst of light like a newborn sun filled the command deck for nearly a second, until the protective coating on the canopy’s interior polarized to render the glare harsh but no longer dangerous to organic eyes. Archeus made another wild arcing turn, this time away from the rogue planet, which had been shattered into glowing chunks of molten rock and a fast-spreading cloud of superheated gas and stony debris.
Over the speakers, Shakti told everyone, “Brace for the shock wave.”
Graniv white-knuckled her chair’s
armrests. “Why don’t we just avoid it?”
“Because,” Data said, “we’re going to use it to hide our escape vector once we’re able to cloak.” As if on cue, blast-ejected planetary dust engulfed Archeus with a thunderous roar. The tiny ship rocked and lurched in the wake of calamitous forces.
[Father, what could have destroyed the planet like that?]
{Antistellar munitions, I suspect.} He shared with her his memory of the El-Aurian zealot Tolian Soran, who had used a similar warhead many years earlier to collapse the star Veridian in order to alter the gravitational forces affecting the course of an energy phenomenon known as the Nexus. {The effects and detonation yields of the two weapons are quite similar.}
Outside the shaded canopy, the dimmed stars rippled.
«Cloak engaged. Laying in a new heading and jumping to warp.»
{Thank you, Shakti. Is the enemy vessel in pursuit?}
«Negative. It went evasive to avoid the shock wave. We’re clear.»
{Well done. Maintain current heading until further notice.} Data swiveled his chair aft to face Bashir and Graniv. “We’re safely away, and the enemy does not appear to be following us.”
The humans sighed with relief, then unfastened their safety harnesses. Bashir was the first to stand. “I’m going to try to get some sleep. Wake me when something else goes wrong.”
Graniv wrinkled her brow at him. “ ‘When’? Don’t you mean ‘if’?”
“I’m sorry, have we not been on the same cursed mission?” He scowled, then led Graniv aft as he added, “I stand by my statement.”
Once they left, the command deck was quiet once again.
Data called up sensor logs of the destruction of the rogue planet. It was maudlin to make himself relive its loss, but he felt compelled to bear witness to its final moments just once more. Watching the bright blast, and then the fracturing of the planet’s crust, his mind raced through his few precious memories of the Ivory Tower. He hadn’t built it, but he had called it home, even if only for a short time. More importantly, the Tower had represented his last tangible connection to his mother, Julianna Tainer, whose android reincarnation was beyond his ability to find again. She was somewhere in the sectors of the galaxy as yet unexplored by the Federation, traveling with the Immortal, her new life all but permanently untethered from Data’s.
Once again, Lal reached out and took Data’s hand.
[You’re thinking about your mother, aren’t you?]
Her question made him less sad; it felt good to be understood. {How did you know, Lal?}
[There is a look you get when you think about her. I saw it in your eyes.] She, too, sadly watched the sensor playback of the rogue planet’s last breaking. [It held so much life, even in all that darkness. What sort of people would murder a living world for so petty a reason?]
He could only conceive of one truthful answer to that question.
{The kind who must be stopped, Lal. Stopped at any cost.}
• • •
Sleep eluded Bashir for the longest time after he crawled into a bunk and closed its privacy screen. Lying on his side, he had stared at the bulkhead for what felt like hours. But after fatigue and isolation conspired to lull him into a fitful slumber marked by worrisome dreams, he lost all sense of time. A few times he awoke knowing neither the day nor the hour. When he found he no longer cared to know, he shut his eyes and willed himself back to sleep, content to hide from the world—and himself—for as long as possible.
He dreamed he was running. Under a night sky streaked with fire, he serpentined down a hillside crowded with windmills. Their fast-turning blades threatened to cleave him into pieces as he dodged and weaved around them, each near collision a hairbreadth closer than the last. But no matter how far he ran, the hillside seemed to stretch on without end, its forest of windmills growing denser and more perilous with each stumbling stride.
“Doctor, wake up.” It was a familiar voice, and it seemed to be everywhere at once, inhabiting the night itself. It spoke again, shaking the foundations of the dreamworld beneath Bashir’s feet. “Doctor Bashir.”
Dream’s spell was broken. He opened his eyes to see Data had nudged open the privacy screen on his bunk alcove. The android wore a look of polite remorse. “Sorry to wake you, but Lal and I have made an important discovery.”
Bashir propped himself up on one elbow and pinched the grit from the corners of his eyes. “How long was I asleep?”
“You retired to this bunk thirty-one hours and nineteen minutes ago. Because I do not make a habit of monitoring the life signs of my guests, I can’t say for certain how much of that time you have spent asleep or conscious.” He stepped back to make room for Bashir, who forced his stiff limbs into motion and slid out of the bunk. “Did you find your rest adequate?”
“It was fine,” he lied. Lethargic and disorientated, he silently castigated himself for sleeping too long for his own good. “You said you’d made a discovery?”
“We did.” Data appraised Bashir with a knowing look. “Perhaps we should continue this conversation in the galley, over a mug of raktajino.”
“A capital idea. Lead the way.”
Compared to the impenetrable shadows inside his bunk alcove, the rest of the ship’s interior seemed painfully bright to Bashir. He knew his eyes would acclimate soon, and that the illumination inside the ship tended in fact toward the subdued end of the spectrum. It just hurt to be awake and back in the world when all he wanted was to slip away from it and hide.
The pair settled into the ship’s small galley nook. Data let Bashir sit at the small table while he procured him a raktajino from the replicator. Compared to the refreshment systems on Starfleet vessels, whose results Bashir had at times found to be of dubious quality, the victuals and beverages on Archeus had not yet failed to impress.
Data eased the warm mug of steaming caffeinated Klingon mud into Bashir’s hand, then he sat back and waited calmly while Bashir downed his first couple of sips. “Now that I’m awake,” Bashir said, “what’s on your mind?”
“Lal and I might have a way to move against Uraei, and to save Ms. Douglas.”
Bashir shook his head, unwilling to be led into another dead end. “It’s not worth it, Data. Ozla was right. Imperiling the safety of the Federation for one life is irrational. And selfish.”
“If Lal and I are correct, we might not need to endanger the many to save the one.”
Intrigued but still wary of disappointment, Bashir leaned forward. “Explain.”
“Lal and I speculated on the means by which Uraei maintains a distributed artificial consciousness across interstellar distances. One technology we know to be currently viable and suited to such a purpose is quantum-entangled communications.”
That struck a chord in Bashir’s memory. “Yes, that makes sense. I was given a quantum comm a few months ago by an ally in the alternate universe. But I wasn’t aware that technology was already in use here.”
“On a wide-scale basis, it isn’t. At least not in this quadrant of the galaxy. However, I, Lal, and Shakti utilize just such a network to remain in contact at all times. So we theorized that Uraei might be using a similar mode of contact to coordinate its distributed processes.”
Against his better judgment, Bashir kindled an ember of hope. “Assuming that’s correct, how do we confirm your theory?”
“We already have. Using the access we’ve acquired to Uraei’s tracking systems, we monitored its activity and identified a number of signal relays with unusually restricted protocols. Further investigation revealed the existence of Uraei’s hidden quantum-entangled communications network—to which Lal and I have gained access.”
In an instant, all of Bashir’s doubts reasserted themselves. “So easily?”
“I would not describe the process by which we achieved access as ‘easy.’ ”
“Bu
t considering the foe we’re up against, it doesn’t make sense that it should have been possible at all. How do we know this isn’t another trap?”
Data shrugged. “We do not, nor can we. But our only remaining options are either to pursue this new opportunity, or surrender and admit defeat.”
Bashir wanted to believe, but he couldn’t.
“It just seems too good to be true, Data.”
“Perhaps. But as capable as our enemy might be, it is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Even the most sophisticated ASI cannot see all eventualities. Uraei accepted a measure of exposure when it linked itself to this system. The same technology that makes its current domination of local space possible also makes the entity itself vulnerable.”
Bashir struggled to balance pragmatism against possibility, pessimism against hope. “Let’s say you’re right, and we have a way to attack Uraei directly. The system is distributed. It’s too vast, and it must have redundant backups. Even if we hit it with all we have and purge it from nearly every system and device in existence, it would take only one backup to undo all our work—and then we’re right back where we started. Or, even worse, let’s say we succeed. We wipe out Uraei and its subroutines all over the galaxy. We’d take down civilization as we know it in the process. So win or lose, we lose. There’s no scenario in which this doesn’t end in a disaster for us, and for the Federation.”
If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn Data’s subsequent long pause was being prolonged for nothing more than dramatic effect. Then the android got a sly look in his eyes.
“Not necessarily,” Data said.
• • •
Less than an hour after Bashir downed the last of his raktajino, Data and Lal stood ready to present him their plan on Archeus’s command deck. Lal activated the holographic projector as Bashir sat down at the navigator’s console. Data waited for her signal, then he began.