Takedown

by John Jackson Miller

  Immediately after his sudden emergence from the darkened hatch, Leishman had brought Riordan into port accessway storage B. They had tried twice to extract the ensign’s story from him, but his reporting abilities ranked just beneath his social graces. Dax had, so far, picked up bits and pieces of a winding travelogue, a tour of Aventine’s innards by narrow Jefferies tubes by night-vision goggles.

  Dax tried again to steer him on course. “Once more, Ensign, how long have you been crawling around in the tubes?”

  He answered between chomps. “You ordered me to serve out the rest of my sentence working on the exterior lighting problem.”

  “Didn’t you notice the Red Alerts? Or the fact that we were in combat?”

  “I noticed them . . . uhm . . . Captain. I even saw some of the fights, out the viewports.” Mouth half full, he shook his head. “You guys really are going for the court martial to end all courts martial, aren’t you?”

  Leishman rolled her eyes while Riordan wiped the wrong side of his face. “Ensign . . . ?”

  Bowers took the ensign by his uniform. He had little patience for Riordan and had been the one to throw him in the brig. “Did it occur to you, Mister, to present yourself in main engineering when the shooting started? As a courtesy to your commanding officer.”

  “I’m not on the duty roster.” The first officer released him, and Riordan shrank back a little. “I’m still on report. I’m not part of whatever’s going on.”

  Dax sighed. I wish I had that excuse. “Aventine’s systems didn’t try to block your passage?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s why I’ve been gone so long.” He cast the empty wrapper onto the deck and drew pictures in the air. “I’d go one way and get stopped by a force field or a hatch slamming down. Another way and the tubes would start depressurizing. I’ve had to get pretty good at defeating the lockouts on hatches in the dark.” He looked at Leishman. “I think something’s wrong with the ship, Lieutenant.”

  The chief engineer put her hand over her face. “Captain, if you can spare me from this fool, I have things to do.”

  “Wait, Chief. Ensign,” the captain asked, “where were you when the ship started acting up?”

  “Ah, yeah. One of the engineering crawlspaces on the underside of the saucer section. I found a flutter in the power distribution router by the port registry lights.

  “A flutter?” Bowers asked. “Is that your report?”

  “I don’t want to tax you, Commander.”

  Bowers stared coolly. “That’s decent of you.”

  “Anyway,” Riordan continued, “I took the control unit for the lights off the main grid and transferred it to my portable engineering padd. I was in the middle of a test when the ship went after the Corvus Beacon—I guess that’s what it was—when everything went wacko. So I got moving.”

  Dax’s eyes narrowed. “But what happened with what you were working on? Did you put the lights back under control of the main computer?”

  Riordan laughed. “Hell, no. I was busy trying to figure out how to wiggle backwards through a meter-wide tunnel in the dark.” He caught Bowers’s expression. “I mean, ‘Hell, no, Captain, sir.’ ”

  “So the engineering padd is still in there, with complete control over some high-profile lights on Aventine’s hull. And they were disconnected from the main computer before Riker took over.” Dax looked to Bowers and Leishman. “That could be it, couldn’t it? That’s our way to communicate outside the ship.”

  Bowers laughed. “What are we going to do, flash Morse code at people? I don’t think anyone’s trained on that, even on Enterprise!”

  Dax frowned. In the warp age, starships and starbases had such advanced sensors that exterior lighting had become, in large measure, superfluous as a means of communicating a vessel’s position and bearing. One of the major reasons it continued to exist was as an aid for spacesuited workers during extravehicular activity. Some of the more comical—and embarrassing—stories from busy spacedocks were tales of engineers who’d done modifications on the wrong ships. It was like a doctor doing surgery on the wrong patient.

  Leishman didn’t think it would work as a means of ship-to-ship communication, but not for the reason Bowers said. “The big lights use a lot of juice. The admiral—or whoever has him—has shown he’s wise to any change to Aventine’s power usage. We haven’t even been able to recharge phasers. Switching the marking lights off and on—I can’t help but think that something as simple as that would be noticed.”

  “No, no, no. You’re missing it,” Riordan said, excitedly. Catching his supervisor’s look, he slowed down. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. But we don’t have to turn them on and off. A light is an emission—and Enterprise has got to be scanning the living hell out of Aventine for those. All we have to do is fiddle with the frequency and wavelengths of what we’re putting out. There won’t be power spikes.” He smiled. “You’ll be talking in pretty colors.”

  “Turning speech into modulated light.” Dax turned the idea over in her head.

  “Which can be transmuted back into speech. Free-space optical communication,” Riordan said. “It’s serious old-school. Alexander Graham Bell used it in his photophone. He always thought it was going to be the thing he’d be remembered for.”

  “I can tell you what we’ll be remembered for if we don’t come up with something,” Dax said. She looked to the chief engineer. “Can you make it work?”

  “We can certainly try it,” Leishman said. “But if Riker isn’t going to notice us sending a message, I don’t know that the people you’re trying to reach will notice, either.”

  “It’s what we’ve got,” the captain said. And if any ship in the fleet had personnel capable of figuring out what her crew was up to, it was Enterprise. “Ensign, can you rig the lights to send our message?”

  Riordan nodded. He ran his hand through his hair. “We’ll also need to position spotters at the viewports, with tricorders capable of reading the same kind of signals in return.”

  “We’ll see if we have any that are off the grid,” Bowers said. “But the data rate’s going to be slow. This is a step above smoke signals.”

  “We don’t need to send a holonovel.” Dax pointed to the first officer. “One of us should go back with Riordan to the control interface, to make sure the right message goes out.”

  Bowers put his hands before him. “You know what you want to say, Captain. And I might accidentally send him back to the brig before we got halfway there.”

  She cast a look at Riordan, who had wandered off from the conversation and was rummaging through the boxes in storage. He found the crate of boatswain’s whistles and drew one out. “These are neat,” the ensign said. “Can I have this?”

  She looked back at Bowers. “Okay, I take your point. I’ll go with him. I need you to set up a relay line of messengers between me and the bridge, to be ready to let me know when there’s a ship outside for us to hail.”

  Bowers frowned. “It’ll be tough to make that look casual.”

  “Sam, it’s got to be easier than trying to fly a shuttle off a ship that doesn’t want to let go.” Dax felt more enlivened than she’d been in hours. “People are the one thing we control right now. Let’s use ’em!”

  Twenty-eight

  D’VARIAN

  All her life, Nerla had wanted what many other Romulans wanted: advancement. Beraldak Bay was far from the halls of power, but she had seen what power could do in the way the locals treated the formidable individuals who vacationed there. She had determined then not to follow her loathsome family into their low trade, seeking hospitality work instead in the hopes that someone would notice her fire and intellect. They would then deliver her from her sunny purgatory.

  But she soon learned that no one came to a holiday retreat looking for administrative talent. She was no one’s prospective anything, and that had proved ruinous to her plans. Only Bretorius had been willing to entertain taking her on as an assistant—something that should have been a t
ip-off right there. She’d heard his sob stories and hadn’t minded: Nerla figured she would be the operator, the power behind the senator. But Bretorius was poor clay to work with. She couldn’t turn nothing into something.

  Worse, she found that rather than opening doors for her, working for Bretorius had shut them all. In the last few weeks, she’d given up completely, waiting out the end until she returned to the bayshore.

  But now, here Nerla was, in an interrogation room in the high-security ward of a Romulan warbird, injecting a stimulant into the neck of the commander Bretorius had deposed.

  Things had taken a strange turn.

  Commander Yalok, strapped to the chair, looked up at her with bleary eyes. “You . . . won’t get away with this.”

  “I’m sorry for the discomfort, Commander. It is the senator’s idea.” She paused to check Yalok’s restraints again, though it hardly seemed necessary given his state. “It’s all been the senator’s idea.”

  “This will go badly for you, too,” the woozy man said. He fixed his eyes on her and tried to focus. “You’re . . . an accomplice to piracy and torture. If you release me now . . . I’ll see that you are spared the harshest punishment.”

  The cuffs checked, she pushed at the metal frame. “I’m not releasing you. I’m just repositioning you so you can hear the speaker better.”

  Bretorius’s voice came over the room’s comsystem. “Good morning again to you, Captain.”

  “The honorable senator,” Yalok said. “What’s the matter, Bretorius—won’t face what you’ve done in person? Where are you hiding?”

  “I’m right down the hall, actually. But I’m much too busy to pay a call right now. Nerla will confirm, it’s been an active period.”

  “Indeed.” Yalok began to strain at his bonds. “I’ve heard crashing about. My crew is trying to break into here to free me!”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes. Some have been trying to enter, I suppose. But this deck’s defenses are formidable. Between the force fields and the paralytic gas dispensers, we’re quite alone.”

  Yalok turned, as best he could, to look at Nerla. “What are you trying to accomplish with this madness? The Imperial Fleet will not be broken to the will of some fool senator, even if he did once helm a warbird!”

  Nerla cautioned him. “Captain, I wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t what? Vex him? I don’t fear death, not by his hands!” He looked up to the ceiling, where the senator’s voice was coming from. “You were a terrible captain, Bretorius. The laughingstock of the fleet, a laughingstock of a senator. You were a nothing then, and a nothing now!”

  “I don’t think the Federation thought so, when I struck their station,” Bretorius said. “Or the Klingons. Or the Gorn.”

  Yalok’s blackened eyes widened. “The Gorn! They’re our allies!”

  “If that surprises you, you may be interested to know that as we speak, D’varian is completing a strike on Thenta Karos.”

  Yalok couldn’t believe it. “That’s—that’s our station!”

  “It was. I have to say, the Imperial Fleet did its best to protect it. But I know all their maneuvers, their tactical biases. It was a small matter to think several steps ahead of them.”

  Yalok said nothing for long moments. Then he spoke in low, grave tones.

  “Bretorius, you have brought shame not just to yourself, but upon every member of the crew of D’varian. Quarlis will rue the day she ever yielded to your demands!”

  “Subcommander Quarlis isn’t involved anymore. None of your precious crew is. I am making decisions and seeing them implemented.”

  “I can’t imagine how.” Yalok looked again to Nerla—and then back up to the speaker. “You’re delusional.”

  “Then you’re living the delusion with me,” Bretorius said. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter what you think. It is happening. And I am speaking to you now because I need something else from you.”

  Yalok swore. Bretorius ignored it and went on. “You see, I’m committed to a certain mission now—and I will execute it faithfully. But I can see many new possibilities arising once it is completed. Romulus has been weakened since the Shinzon affair and the subsequent civil war. Our empire is in need of a strong leader, a leader with vision.”

  Yalok laughed—though the act appeared to cause him pain. “And I suppose you nominate yourself.”

  “No, Yalok. The people of the Empire will nominate me by acclimation once they fully understand what I can do. And there is no reason to stop there. I will lead all the Typhon powers and more.”

  The captain turned his head again toward Nerla, who was staring blankly into space. “How can you serve this madman, Nerla?”

  “Just let him finish, Captain. It’s easier.”

  Bretorius went on. “I have plumbed the D’varian’s systems for its secrets—but there are some that only you hold, Yalok. I did as well, when I had your position. I know, for example, that you have knowledge of secret arsenals and refueling stations scattered across this region. Romulus has relocated them since my time, but you know their present whereabouts.”

  Yalok was incredulous. “What good would that do you? You are one man—and insane. Do you plan to load the torpedoes yourself?”

  “There are many disaffected peoples in the Empire who would serve a strong leader,” the senator said. “It is simply a matter of making the connections with them—and showing what I am capable of doing. And what I intend to do, once I have completed that to which I am committed.”

  The captain rolled his eyes. “This is ludicrous. Is that all? Anything else?”

  “Yes. You have served as escort for both the praetor and the proconsul. You know the locations of their protective retreats and the codes for bypassing their defense stations.” He paused. “Nerla?”

  Yalok turned his head again to see her at one of the cabinets against the wall of the interrogation room. “What are you doing?” he said, seeing the hypospray injector in her hand. “What is that?”

  “A drug that will make you more cooperative. Please try to speak clearly; Nerla will be listening, and so will I. Even if you don’t hear me.”

  Yalok fixed his eyes on the ceiling and glared angrily. “You will die for this, Bretorius!”

  “I used to fear death,” Bretorius said, as Nerla approached the captain. “I feared a lot of things. But I have learned much since then—and I have much to do now. Good-bye.”

  Yalok looked up at Nerla as she administered the drug. His eyes pleaded with her. “Nerla, this is wrong. This . . . is wrong . . .”

  “I’m sorry about this,” she said—and she was. “Bretorius. He’s—he’s changed . . .”

  Twenty-nine

  ENTERPRISE

  So much of space was lifeless. It was a natural condition, nothing to provoke despair in the experienced traveler. But Jean-Luc Picard had seldom found any place lonelier than when visiting a system where life had been—before being snuffed out.

  The population of Adelphous IV had been destroyed several years earlier during the invasion in which the Borg had changed its tactics from assimilation to annihilation. Picard had visited the system on Enterprise-D before the destruction; it was a routine stop about which he remembered absolutely nothing. That saddened him deeply. There were so many worlds out there; no one could know about all of them. The Borg had wiped out so many. Yet seeing the remains of that golden world glistening far in the distance off Enterprise-E’s bow, he felt like he should remember.

  He’d once experienced the last days of a long-dead world called Kataan through the eyes of its residents, thanks to a probe that took control of his mind. It was meant as a memorial, and he now felt privileged to have learned about them; not all episodes of alien control were necessarily negative. By contrast, the Adelphousians were known to the Federation, having offered their system as host to the massive communications array beyond the fifth planet. Records of the people and their lives existed. But Picard knew it was no substitute for walking among them, and that w
ould never happen now.

  The Adelphous Array was exactly like the Argus Array on the far side of Federation space: a giant gray honeycomb of hexagonal subspace telescopes networked together. Interferometry had been practiced by the earliest radio astronomers on Earth, using facilities like the Expanded Very Large Array in New Mexico; sites like Adelphous had applied descendants of those techniques to subspace in order to peer farther than any ship could currently go. But the workers at the offsite operations center on Adelphous had died with everyone else, and while the Federation had plans to bring the Adelphous Array back online, it hadn’t yet done so.

  “It’s a shame they’re taking so long with it,” La Forge said from the engineering station on Enterprise’s bridge. His artificial eyes were locked on the space station growing larger on the massive main viewscreen. “There’s still a lot of good this place could do.”

  Picard agreed. “I believe they’re being respectful of the sympathies of the Adelphousian refugees.”

  Worf, seated to his side, observed, “A watchtower would honor those who died.”

  Picard felt the same way. The fact the array was out of service explained something else: the absence of Federation vessels ready to defend the place. That wasn’t unexpected. Of greater concern was the absence of a certain Federation vessel attacking the place. He’d played a hunch that he would find Aventine here; now, he worried that his thinking all along had been wrong.

  His first officer would never voice his disappointment, but Picard could tell the Klingon was frustrated. Picard thought he might as well give Worf a chance to get his thoughts out into the open. “Recommendations, Number One?”

  “Perhaps we should backtrack along our route. If Aventine has been disabled so long that we could beat her here, she might be unable to move at all.”

  La Forge stepped into the command well. “Slipstream’s new enough—fixing it might take a minute, it might take a day.”

  Picard looked to his chief engineer. “Your recommendations?”

  “When he does get it going, he can probably continue to use it for several more jumps without stalling again. Maybe we ought to—”