by David Mack
He felt more than he heard the low pop that accompanied the capsule splitting into two long halves, forced apart by miniature explosive charges that released its meager internal atmosphere into the vacuum beyond. As the halves separated, the straps holding Bashir in place detached, restoring his freedom of movement.
A single push was all he needed to send the pod’s starboard half tumbling away in a short-lived cloud of superfine dust. Watching the metal half shell and the dust linger through their arcing falls reminded Bashir to be grateful the gravity here was half of Earth normal. He sat up in the remainder of the capsule and surveyed his position. According to his HUD, he was 9.6 kilometers from the base’s energy shield. Looking in the opposite direction, he let out a soft whistle of amazement at the gouge the pod had cut across the landscape.
He stood and tested his balance in the low gravity. Turning toward the domes, he wondered if his HUD was wrong—they looked closer than the readout said. Then he remembered that the planet’s lack of an atmosphere meant there was no dust or air to cast a haze over distant objects. In a vacuum even things far away looked sharper and nearer than they would on a world with a Class-M atmosphere.
Which means I’m just as visible, even at night. Reminded of his own vulnerability, he started running toward the domes.
His first several strides sent him soaring. Only after he adjusted his gait to be more like a man trotting while wearing snowshoes was he able to keep a steady pace without bouncing like a fool and making a spectacle of himself. It was a harder stride to control, and it made the sprint more difficult than he’d expected in the low-g environment. He was panting for breath by the time he was only halfway to the maintenance hatch, and gasping like a fish landed on a hot stone by the time he made it to his first checkpoint.
So much for pretending I don’t feel my encroaching middle age.
Slumped against the elevated hatch, he looked back. In the dark he was unable to trace his footprints more than a few dozen yards, and the pod was nowhere in sight. He knew he must have passed under the edge of the energy shield somewhere in the last kilometer of his run, but he hadn’t felt any trace of its presence.
Probably for the best. Contact with the shield would fry this suit.
He used his HUD to check the time. Less than fifty-eight minutes remained until the virus was set to activate across known space, and he still had a long way to go.
Recalling his mission briefing, he found the engineering access panel next to the controls for the surface airlock hatch. He opened a panel on his suit’s left forearm, withdrew a cable with a compatible connector for the panel, and plugged it in. As Shakti had promised, the suit’s built-in systems did the rest. He watched as the security system was switched off and the hatch’s magnetic lock was released.
So far so good. He detached the cable and opened the surface hatch. The airlock on the other side glowed with intense green light. Eager to avoid drawing attention, Bashir climbed down the ladder into the airlock and closed the top hatch above him. After he secured it, he found the engineering access panel inside the airlock and repeated the procedure with the cable.
Half a minute later the airlock pressurized. The bright green lights switched off, and Bashir heard dull thumps as the inner hatch’s magnetic locks retracted. He opened the heavy portal—just a crack at first, to scout the platform outside. He was met by the deep roar of an underground city populated with titanic machines. His path looked clear, so he shouldered the hatch open far enough to slip past it onto a narrow, curved metal-grate walkway. He felt the tug of artificial gravity anchor his foot on the grating. It was a reassuring sensation.
No sooner had he shut the inner hatch behind him than he felt the vibration of footsteps on the walkway. He looked to either side but couldn’t tell from which direction they came. He was on a circular catwalk that ringed a silo devoted to heat exchangers and carbon dioxide scrubbers, on the far side from the only bridge that connected this tower’s walkway to the paths that linked the ever-larger concentric rings of databank towers. He could try to retreat if he knew from which direction the steps came—but what if they were coming from both?
There was no time for guessing games. He paid out some slack from his monofilament rappelling line, secured its end to a black metal carabiner, then locked the safety clamp around a support post for the catwalk’s railing. The approaching steps grew dangerously close as he ducked under the railing and let himself slide off into free fall above an abyss of black. Engineered for stealth, the rappelling gear made almost no sound as he plummeted, nor did it make any protest when he used the braking mechanism to arrest his fall a few dozen meters beneath the catwalk, where he swung in a shallow arc, like a weary pendulum.
Above him a pair of armed guards convened near the maintenance hatch. As he had both feared and suspected, they had approached from opposite directions.
Now as long as they don’t look down . . .
The duo lingered and talked, but Bashir couldn’t hear what they said. From so far below, their voices were swallowed by the droning of the subterranean industrial complex. When at last they continued on their patrol, each exiting the way the other had entered, Bashir breathed a sigh of relief—until he realized he was dangling in the dark nearly forty meters below the catwalk, with fewer than fifty-one minutes to hoist himself back up, make his way to the central core tower, and climb to its auxiliary control center.
Complaining won’t get me there any faster, he scolded himself. Then he started pulling himself back up the rappelling cable, one excruciating arm’s length at a time.
• • •
An asteroid tumbled through deep space. Even the most intense scans would reveal it to be devoid of interesting elements. It was just a hunk of silicon and carbon, with traces of lead and nitrogen. Not a speck of life, not a single microbe. Nothing worth bothering to extract.
Just as unremarkable was its heading. Locked into a multimillennial orbit of a white dwarf star with no habitable worlds, its trajectory posed no hazard to interstellar shipping, and the nearest habitable world was light-years away. If this were all one ever saw of this officially nameless mountain tumbling through space, one could be forgiven for thinking there had never been a more boring chunk of rock in the history of the universe.
Data knew better. Hidden inside that drab shell of stone was one of the Federation’s best-kept secrets: Memory Prime, a top-secret backup archive constructed after Memory Alpha’s security was breached and all its personnel killed in 2268 by energy beings known as Zetarians. Prime’s design had been inspired by weapons-testing sites, and though its original configuration had included a shell of powerful deflector fields, those had been abandoned in the early 2340s in favor of moving the asteroid to a new position and letting a low profile be its primary defense.
Irregular in shape, the asteroid exhibited very little tumbling motion. The relative stability of its orbital behavior was, perhaps, its only true oddity. It was also a fortunate coincidence for Data, who drifted alone through the silent vacuum. He floated toward the asteroid, propelled by residual momentum he’d acquired during his egress from Archeus, and attracted by the massive rock’s minuscule verging on negligible gravity. Having a steady target had made this phase of his task just the slightest degree less complicated, though no less dangerous.
Nothing about the asteroid was really what it seemed. Its surface looked barren, but it teemed with hidden military-grade outer defenses, enough to defend itself from a small battle fleet. Linked to those weapons was a network of passive sensors and layers of concealed invasion countermeasures. An ordinary intruder attempting to free-fall to the surface, without the advantages Data’s creator had built into his new and more sophisticated android body, would most likely be blasted into a cloud of superheated free radicals from a hundred kilometers away.
Dampening the energy emissions from his body was the first precaution he had taken. It
wasn’t something he did often, because containing all of the various energies produced by his body, not to mention his positronic matrix, sorely taxed his heat sinks. He could go up to a few hours without purging excess emissions as waste heat, but more than that might start to degrade some of his neural net’s more delicate operations.
To conceal himself from visual scans and other passive sensors, he had used his body’s newly restored chameleon circuits—another recent invention of the late Noonien Soong—to shed all his hair and turn his outer dermal layers and his eyes a highly reflective and radiation-resistant silver. Drifting alone and relatively still, he was a mirror for the stars and darkness. If he registered on Memory Prime’s sensors at all, it would be as a momentary signal glitch, a shadow in the night, nothing worth investigating, much less wasting the power for a phaser shot.
If there was a drawback to Data’s strategy, it was that it required him to land on the asteroid naked, a condition at odds with the demands of his modesty subroutine.
Desperate times, he rationalized.
Touchdown was slow and gentle. Data landed like a dust mote coming to rest. A shift in the spectrum sensitivity of his visual receptors exposed the sensors and defense systems littered about the asteroid’s pockmarked surface. He triangulated his position by making a survey of several notable rock formations, then set off toward the nearest point of ingress.
Minutes later he found a removable chimerium plate that had been camouflaged to look like stone weathered by cosmic dust. Even in microgravity it was far too heavy and unwieldy for an ordinary human to shift out of place; Data got two hands underneath its edge, pried it up, and with ease pushed it half a meter aside. He set it down, then peered into the vast metallic chasm he had exposed. It was a passage for launching emergency evacuation pods by means of precisely timed electromagnetic pulses. In past centuries such technology had been used to create brutally effective weapons known as rail guns. Data found this application far less grotesque.
He lowered himself into the launch tube and let go. Quickly the base’s artificial gravity pulled him downward, and he let himself slide down the sleek metallic passage, thankful that the silvery texture he had chosen for his outer layer also had a minimal drag coefficient.
Several high-speed curves later, his momentum flagged and he came to a halt inside a level portion of the launch tube. To either side he saw escape pods secure in their docks. Next to them were maintenance airlocks, whose security protocols he bypassed with almost reflexive ease. Less than three minutes after having landed on the asteroid’s surface, Data emerged from a maintenance airlock into one of Memory Prime’s lower levels. He retrieved a tightly folded Starfleet standard-issue utility jumpsuit from a concealed compartment inside his torso, unrolled it, and slipped it on. He was still barefoot, but he turned his feet coal black to make his lack of boots less noticeable from a distance. Next he adjusted his appearance. First he restored a medium-beige human complexion to his outer dermal layers; then he gave himself hazel eyes before extruding a new crown of gray hair complete with a trimmed matching beard.
This should be sufficient disguise to get me to the auxiliary control center.
Data walked with an unhurried stride and a bored demeanor, following the path he had memorized, and he made a mental check of his internal chronometer to gauge his progress.
He had nineteen minutes and eleven seconds to complete his mission.
Four minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, it all went, as his old friend Will Riker would have said, “straight to hell.”
Thirty-six
“Hang on, lady—this is about to get rough.” That was how Captain Murtaza, the Gallamite skipper of the Trewlok, greeted Ozla Graniv as she arrived on his bridge.
She parroted his brusque manner. “I felt us drop out of warp—what’s going on?”
Murtaza pointed at the ringed gas giant receding on the forward viewscreen. “We made it to the Sol system, but we’re being followed.” He barked at one his cronies, “Magnify it!”
The younger man, a Tiburonian—Ozla hadn’t been aboard long enough to learn any of the crew’s names aside from the captain’s—keyed in the command, and the image on the viewscreen enlarged to show the southern pole of Saturn. Emerging from behind it was a sleek black ship whose orientation suggested it was most definitely in pursuit of the Trewlok.
Ozla asked Murtaza, “Any chance that’s one of your enemies?”
“I’ve never seen a ship like that.” The transparent-skulled captain snapped at his bridge crew, “Any of you ever see a ship like that before?” Gestures of negation all around. “Looks like this one’s on you, lady.”
The memory of the rogue planet being shattered still loomed large in Ozla’s thoughts. If this new attacker was armed with similar weapons, the argosy wouldn’t stand a chance. She masked her abject terror with icy detachment. “You can’t outgun them.”
“Didn’t plan on trying, but thanks for the tip.” Murtaza fastened the safety restraints on his command chair. “Strap in, lady. We’ll have to outrun ’em. Vanick, take a detour through the rings, see if we can lose ’em.”
The Catullan helmsman embraced the challenge with a grin. “On it, Skipper.”
Thirty vertiginous seconds later, Ozla wished the Trewlok had better inertial dampers and that she had followed the captain’s example and strapped herself in before the argosy started its high-impulse game of follow-the-leader with its unidentified pursuer. Queasy and dizzy, she clung to the armrest of Murtaza’s chair as if for dear life. “Did it work?”
“Not even a bit. They’re gaining on us.”
“And they’re trying to lock weapons,” shouted a Bolian at an aft station.
Murtaza noted Ozla’s nauseated state with worry. “You might want to lie down for this next part.” This time she did as he’d suggested. No sooner had she sprawled herself across the deck than Murtaza told his helmsman, “Ditch ’em.”
“You got it, Skipper.”
The image on the viewscreen stretched into warp distortion for almost a full second—then all the stars snapped back into points, but nearly all of them had shifted a few degrees. Before Ozla could ask if what she had just seen was a technical error, it happened again, then again. Each time the stars jerked in one direction or another. On the fourth and fifth hiccups the ruddy globe of Mars grew large; by the seventh it was no longer visible, but the blue speck of Earth started to swell in the center of the viewscreen.
Short-range warp hops, Ozla realized. I had no idea these idiots were that crazy.
Most people, even those with only a basic understanding of how warp drives worked, understood the simple premise that using a warp drive too close to a planet, or inside a solar system crowded with planets, moons, and heavy space traffic, was wildly dangerous. The gravity wells of large masses—such as planets and moons—could disrupt the balance in warp fields and send ships hurtling to their doom at faster-than-light speed. And while the risk of colliding with another vessel at warp speed was minuscule, the result of such an accident would be disastrous.
So to see the crew of the Trewlok jaunt through the Sol system—one of the busiest and most densely packed systems in the Federation—using a series of barely plotted warp-speed hops made Ozla curse their name and pray for deliverance in the same breath.
“Two more hops to transporter distance,” Vanick said.
Murtaza snapped his fingers at Ozla. “Get up. Time to go.”
She scrambled to her feet. “What do you—”
“Ziya, lock onto our guest and stand by to energize.”
A human woman at an aft console replied simply, “Locked.”
Another warp hop made Earth pop into a giant presence on the viewscreen. Ozla had a bad feeling she knew what was coming. “Please don’t tell me you’re—”
“Energize!”
Everything Ozla knew went whi
te and sounded like a million buzzing insects—then the shimmer and song of the transporter beam faded, leaving her and her travel bag in the midst of a startled crowd on the Champ de Mars, less than half a kilometer from the Tour Eiffel. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon in Paris, and a great throng had gathered on the park’s manicured lawn. But being surrounded by a few thousand strangers left Ozla feeling exposed and vulnerable. The park had to be under some sort of routine surveillance—which meant Uraei had almost certainly taken note of her unorthodox and very public arrival.
Ozla had a clear line of sight to the majestic tower of the Palais de la Concorde, the location of the Federation president’s office. She picked up her bag and walked northeast. Based on her experience as a Paris correspondent in recent years, she estimated the walking distance to the Palais was just over two and a half kilometers. Paris was not the largest city she had ever visited, but for her, alone, on foot, and being hunted by an enemy with unlimited resources and no scruples, it was more than large enough to put her life in danger.
Paris’s seventh arrondissement was rich with centuries-old architecture and style. It was also one of the biggest tourist magnets on Earth. There was no point in trying to explain herself or blend in; her first priority now was to get out of sight as quickly as possible. She shouldered one sightseer after another out of her path and left behind a hundred mumbled apologies.
By the time she reached Rue Saint-Dominique, her street sense, honed by years of investigative reporting, told her she was being tailed. Doubling back and peeking at shop-window reflections failed to draw her shadow into the light, but she could feel it haunting her. She waited for a surge in traffic, then darted across the street just ahead of it. Then, with just a few seconds of cover from spying eyes, she dropped her travel bag at the curb and ducked inside a small couture shop. One fast stroll through its aisles was all she needed to trade her jacket for a new one, plant a wide-brimmed hat atop her head, and wrap a scarf of Tholian silk dyed imperial violet around her neck to conceal her prominent Trill spots.