“Congratulations, Captain Paris,” Shumar boomed over the screen after the second round of applause. “It’s a shame to have to lose you, but this honor is well deserved. Vesta’s crew will be just as lucky to have you as we have been.”
“Aw, I was getting tired of you guys anyway,” Paris teased. “But seriously—I wish we didn’t have to part so suddenly. I wanted my own ship, but not like this. I thought we’d have more time.”
“Don’t worry about it, Caroline. I’ve no doubt we’ll have plenty of opportunities to reconnect over the years ahead. And I’m certain that Mister Mullen will be more than capable of rising to the responsibilities of Essex’s first officer—isn’t that right, Steven?”
The younger, darker-skinned man beside Shumar tugged on the collar of his gray jumpsuit—its epaulets and trim still in sciences blue, for Mullen would need to double up as XO and science officer until a permanent replacement for the latter post could be found. That was a lot to ask of a new-fledged exec, and Paris felt a twinge of guilt at leaving Mullen in that position, even though she’d had no part in the decision. “I’ll do my best to live up to your example, Comm—Captain Paris.”
She laughed. “I know, it sounds weird as hell to me too. You know, if you need any advice, Steven, I’m a subspace call away. Not that I don’t trust you to do the job, but, you know, any outstanding projects or procedural quirks I haven’t had time to brief you on—”
“Understood and appreciated, Captain. But I’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the way back to Sauria.” He shook his head. “Under other circumstances, I would’ve been eager to go back. I really hope we can help the Saurians rebuild that lovely, inviting world we found three years ago.”
Admiral Archer spoke up. “We’re all counting on you for that, Mister Mullen. The Federation’s supply of Saurian brandy has gotten dangerously low since the embargo, so you can appreciate our urgency.” Everyone on both sides of the screen laughed, though there was a solemn undercurrent to it.
Once Shumar and the others had exchanged their farewells with Paris and signed off, she moved over to Malcolm Reed and blinked away a few tears, though she maintained the formal distance and decorum that befitted the setting. “I always thought I hated long goodbyes, but the abrupt, unexpected ones are even worse.”
“The nature of the service, I’m afraid,” Reed replied, though not without sympathy. “I had plenty of advance notice of my promotion to Pioneer, but it was still just as hard to say goodbye when the time came.”
“At least you were able to bring Travis with you. I’m starting out with a blank slate. Hell, I hardly even have a crew. Or a complete ship, for that matter.”
Archer moved closer, having overheard. “Sorry about that, Captain. But Vesta was the most suitable opening, given the timing. The Ceres class is meant to fill the Daedalus’s niche, so your experience with Essex makes you a good fit. But given the construction delays, I’m afraid you’ll have to be a dry dock captain for the next month or so.”
Paris nodded, understanding the challenges involved in the Ceres design, a joint project incorporating technologies from multiple Federation founder worlds. Outwardly, it looked like a more flattened version of Essex’s sphere-and-cylinder design—indeed, Vesta’s forward hull had a shape not unlike its namesake planetoid—but its internal systems were more fully hybridized than even those of Pioneer, which had been one of the early test-beds for the technological integration of the fleet. Ceres itself had been undergoing shakedowns for the past couple of years, with the lessons learned from its mistakes being incorporated into the systems design of its successors Vesta and Pallas, but even the refinements were proving challenging to achieve in practice. “That’s okay, Admiral,” she said. “I don’t mind starting off slow. I’m not as prone to rush into things as I used to be. I’ve learned that too much haste can lead to unintended consequences.”
Archer nodded solemnly. “That’s a principle we could all learn to live by.”
4
February 1, 2166
San Francisco
IT WOULD BE FITTING, thought Charles Tucker, if Sauria became the key to bringing Section 31 down.
It had been Harris’s refusal to let Tucker organize a resistance against Maltuvis that had planted the seed of the ex-engineer’s disaffection with the Section. Harris’s willingness to let another civilization suffer tyranny for the profit and convenience of the Federation had been a harbinger of his decision to condemn the Partnership to destruction for the same end. The shocking video of Maltuvis’s latest, greatest atrocity had only intensified Tucker’s conviction that the Section must fall—particularly since he recognized the narrator as Antonio Ruiz, the passionate young mining engineer whom Tucker had befriended and harnessed as a resource in his time on Sauria, only to let him down when Ruiz had most needed his support. The young Cuban had pledged to stay behind and organize a resistance against Maltuvis, the very thing that Tucker’s orders from Harris had prevented him from supporting—and it looked as though he had succeeded. It would be poetic justice, then, if his heroic act in documenting the atrocity for the galaxy gave Tucker the leverage he needed to expose and dismantle Section 31 for good.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said about the noninterference policy,” he told Harris now, by way of setting his stratagem in motion. “You’re right that the Federation would be better off if we avoided meddling in other worlds’ affairs—at least openly. Our foreign entanglements in the past few years have made us some enemies.”
“I’m glad you agree,” Harris replied.
“But Archer’s having a hard time selling the idea. It’s mainly about the Partnership mess for him, but that’s too ambiguous a situation for the public to come to a consensus on. It’s too easy to blame the Ware or the Klingons instead of admitting Starfleet’s responsibility.”
“Yes, that is a conundrum. It would be handier to have some clear-cut example where Starfleet interference went disastrously wrong, due to our insufficient understanding of a native culture.”
“What Maltuvis did on Sauria is sure clear-cut,” Tucker said.
“The brutality of it, yes. The culpability less so. Maltuvis is undeniably a monster, and it was our ill fortune that the minerals we found most valuable were concentrated in his lands. Too many people see it as him taking advantage of our need.”
Tucker nodded, as if he were letting Harris lead him to the idea instead of the other way around. “So what you’re saying is that the best way to make Archer’s case would be a different kind of disaster. One where the blame was undeniably on Starfleet. Like, say, if the mission to assist the rebels went horribly wrong somehow.”
Harris peered at him. “Are you suggesting a specific kind of horrible wrongness?”
“Well . . . look at the way similar things on Earth went wrong. Like when the United States went into the Middle East to train resistance groups against the Soviet bloc, except those resistance groups included religious fanatics who ended up using the tactics and organization they got with American help to launch terrorist movements against their own people, and occasionally against the Americans as well. Say maybe the Starfleet advisors hook up with a resistance group without realizing they’re extremists, as bad as Maltuvis. Say those extremists get their hands on Starfleet weapons and use them to pursue their own agenda, maybe make a terrorist strike.” He shrugged. “Or at least it looks that way to the galaxy.”
The silver-haired spymaster folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “Just so we’re clear . . . are you proposing that we intervene on Sauria to engineer just such a catastrophe? See that Starfleet gets the blame, and thereby tilt public opinion in favor of Archer’s new directive?”
(“Of course I don’t plan on actually going through with it,” Tucker had insisted to Malcolm Reed when he had suggested this plan to him the night before. “The last thing I want is to see more Saurians slaughtered. But it’s just the sort of plan Harris would go for. If we can get him involved i
n planning the disaster, then expose the plan before it gets carried out, then we have our smoking gun, right in Harris’s hand. We bring him down, and the rest of Section Thirty-one comes with him.”)
Now Tucker simply said, “Do you think it wouldn’t work?”
“On the contrary—it very well could have the desired effect,” Harris replied. “It’s just unexpectedly ruthless, coming from you. I know you’ve objected to such exigencies in the past.”
“And you’ve insisted they were necessary for the greater good of the Federation. I have to accept that.” He sighed. “If I want to sleep at night, I have to.”
“And what about the continued oppression of the Saurians if Starfleet intervention is sabotaged? What about the immediate death toll of such an engineered incident?”
“Look, I don’t like it. But doing ugly things when necessary for the greater good is what we’re here for. Starfleet intervention on Sauria could become a quagmire, for all we know. These things hardly ever go smoothly. If we mess up once, pull out, and leave it up to the Saurians to save their own world, that might actually be better in the long run. They’re a strong, determined people. I’ll just have to hope they can pull through on their own.”
“Still, I know it would weigh on your conscience to be responsible for the immediate casualties.” Harris gave him a sympathetic look. “There’s no shame in admitting that. We aren’t the bad guys, you know.”
Right, Tucker thought. Hence the black suits and shadowy meetings. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not an easy thing to suggest.”
Harris smiled. “Then you’ll be relieved to know that the answer is no. I have no interest in engineering such a mishap on Sauria.”
Tucker tried to mask his surprise. “May I ask why not?”
“For one thing, it’s too soon. With the investigation still under way on the Partnership affair, the last thing we want is to get embroiled in another heavily publicized, scrutinized galactic event. At this point, we’re better off keeping our heads down. If an existential threat on the level of a looming Klingon invasion rears its head, then we will certainly intervene. But for anything less than that, we’re better off biding our time and trusting the conventional authorities to do their jobs.” He chuckled. “I suppose it’s my own version of a noninterference directive.”
Tucker let a feigned chuckle mask his disgust at the comparison. Archer’s cause was about respecting others’ right to self-determination. Harris’s only concern was not getting caught. And that was a problem for Tucker, who needed to maneuver him into a position where he could be caught.
“You said ‘for one thing.’ Is there another reason?”
Harris steepled his fingers. “Why, yes, there is. The reason we don’t need to sabotage Starfleet’s advisory efforts on Sauria . . . is because someone else already is.”
He worked his console, bringing up an image feed on the desk screen. Tucker instantly recognized the lovely green face of Navaar, not only from years’ worth of intelligence reports on the current head of the Orion Syndicate, but from his own firsthand encounter with her and her sisters aboard Enterprise eleven years back, when the trio and their nominal “master,” Harrad-Sar, had attempted to collect a Syndicate bounty by capturing the starship and its crew. Tucker and T’Pol had been instrumental in foiling their plans, since their mating bond had somehow allowed Tucker to share in T’Pol’s Vulcan immunity to the effect of the Sisters’ overpowering pheromones. Tucker remembered it vividly, for it had been the incident that had made him and T’Pol aware of that bond in the first place.
Navaar stood in the foreground of a lavishly appointed suite; according to the metadata readout below the image, it was in the Sisters’ estate on the Orion homeworld. Her junior sister D’Nesh watched from behind her, smiling maliciously as Navaar said, “Yes, be sure to thank Harrad-Sar for giving us a sneak preview of the big show. The destruction was quite spectacular. Maras particularly enjoyed it when the hospital blew up.” Tucker noted that the youngest Sister lounged idly in the background, watching a lissome nude female slave dance erotically for her and seeming uninterested in the discussion. The time code marked it as soon after Maltuvis’s bombing of the Lyaksti capital, and a day before Antonio Ruiz’s recording had gone public.
“You’re sure the resistance documented the attack as well?” Navaar went on.
“No question, my lady,” came the anonymous male voice at the other end, presumably one of the Sisters’ enslaved agents. “One of their cells has already begun making attempts to transmit a report.”
“Make sure Harrad-Sar impresses upon Maltuvis’s censors how important it is that they allow this broadcast to pass. The Federation needs an irresistible incentive to intervene.”
“Not to doubt your wisdom, my lady, but can you be sure Maltuvis will cooperate? Even if the Federation does take the blame, the level of devastation will—”
“Maltuvis has one thing in common with us,” D’Nesh interrupted. “He doesn’t care how many of those ridiculous-looking lizards get roasted as long as it benefits him. And destroying the Federation’s reputation, making them too afraid and too hated to ever butt into anyone else’s business again—that will benefit all of us.”
Harris froze the image when he recognized that Tucker was about to speak. “My God,” the younger man said. “The Sisters are already doing it.”
“Devious minds think alike, it seems.”
“But I wasn’t thinking of anything on that scale. Enough to make the case for noninterference, not to damn the Federation in the eyes of the galaxy. Are you really all right with letting that happen?”
“I think the Sisters underestimate the goodwill the Federation has earned among our neighbors. As well as underestimating our resolve. The Federation’s peoples are not so timid as to retreat completely from galactic affairs, whatever Navaar and D’Nesh may fantasize.
“But if they think a nonintervention policy would mean complete isolationism, I’d say it’s in our interests to let them believe that. If their actions on Sauria help sway public opinion in favor of Archer’s directive, so be it. The Federation may come away with a black eye in public relations, but in the long run it will be safer, and the Orions will be overconfident about just how much of a free hand they’ll gain. If necessary, we can arrange for the Orions’ complicity in the disaster to come out after the directive is firmly in place.
“But in the short term, the Sisters are doing our work for us. We can just sit back and do nothing. Which should surely be a relief for your conscience, Mister Tucker.”
Tucker offered a feeble nod of acceptance, cloaking his real concern as best he could. It did him no good if the engineered disaster could not be linked to Section 31—and it did the Saurians no good if Tucker was not controlling the situation enough to prevent the disaster before it happened.
But as he studied the frozen image of the Three Sisters on Harris’s screen, he realized that he recognized the slender, pale-skinned female slave who was performing for Maras in the background. And the idea began to form that maybe there was a way he could make this situation work to his advantage after all.
February 2, 2166
“Her name is Devna,” Tucker said as T’Pol studied the image he’d called up on the computer of her groundside apartment. “I met her on Rigel during the Vertian incident. That’s where this image came from—well, actually from the records of the ministerial conference leading up to it. But it’s definitely the same woman. She’s pretty hard to miss.”
T’Pol threw him a look. “Really?”
“I-I mean because she’s so pale for an Orion. Really contrasts with how black her hair is. Not as curvy as you’d expect, either.” T’Pol continued to stare. “I just mean she’s easy to pick out of a crowd of Orions.”
“I see,” she answered dryly. “And your meeting was significant?”
“She helped me crack the whole case. Tipped me off to how the Syndicate was stirring up the entire affair to distract Star
fleet from their planned raid at Deneb Kaitos. She was the one who was manipulating Commissioner Noar to go on the warpath, but once I confronted her, she confessed everything.”
“How did you persuade her to do so?”
Trip reflected back on the encounter—a brief, single incident, yet one that had stuck with him for the past three years. “By giving her something I don’t think she’d ever known. Trust.”
T’Pol examined him. “Go on.”
“I had her cornered, and I was immune to her pheromones—thanks to you.” T’Pol nodded in acknowledgment. “She expected me to try to torture her—said she’d been conditioned to enjoy pain.” He winced. “I let her see how wrong I thought that was, that anyone would have to live like that. I offered her a better life. To get her away from slavery, take her someplace the Syndicate would never find her.”
“Obviously she declined that offer.”
“She said freedom was an illusion. Said I was just as trapped as she was.” He gave a faint smile. “She realized it before I did. Maybe it was just that obvious to someone else in the game.”
“Trip,” T’Pol replied, “it has long been obvious to anyone close to you.”
He stared at her for a moment. “I guess it has at that. You remember after that mission? How I finally told you what happened to me at the Battle of Cheron, and how it haunted me?” She nodded. “Well . . . I told her first. I didn’t think anyone could understand, but she knew. She was the same as I was. So I just . . . I felt I could confide in her. No pheromones, no manipulation—she knew I was immune, she knew what I was, I knew what she was, so we dropped any pretense. It was the most honest either of us had been with anyone in who knows how long. It was weird, how easy it was. Maybe it was something we both needed.”
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