“No.” He stepped back. “No, sir. I can do it. I will do it.”
“Good. Now get back on board that ship and plant the bomb. And if anyone gets in your way, eliminate them.”
“Yes, sir.” He nodded to his superior officer, turned on his heel, and walked through the door, his head filled with a cacophony of mixed emotions while his heart rose higher and higher into his chest and threatened to choke him.
Riker’s interviews on the starbase failed to turn up anything new. And as for discovering anything else in the rubble, Daniels and Sage did little more than upset the delicate constitution of Snowden, who did keep a discreet distance from Travec.
After a simple dinner and a light concerto concert in the lounge, Daniels met Data in the art sciences studio, his first visit in nearly a week.
As he sat down, he realized Data had asked the computer to play a pleasant violin piece—not one that he recognized. He peered with curiosity at the android, who was happily painting away at his own easel.
Though the music was relaxing, he was having trouble getting past the odd attitude of Admiral Leyton, as well as the over-the-top reactions of Snowden.
It’s like he’s overcompensating for something. Putting on a show of some kind.
And as for finding out the reason for Hahn’s presence at ground zero—
“I’m missing something.”
Data stopped painting and peered out from behind his easel. “Do you require a new paintbrush?”
Daniels realized with a start that he’d loaded his brush several minutes ago but had yet to apply it to the canvas. “I’m sorry, Data. With everything we’ve found—the logs, Admiral Hahn’s disappearance and then reappearance—we’re still no closer than we were before. I’m feeling frustrated.”
“I too am experiencing that same emotion of late.” Data set his brush down and came to stand to the right of Daniels’s easel. “Much of what I see in my mind is not what my hand is painting. This is adding to my frustration as I start over. I have now used sixty-seven canvases since starting my portrait of Spot.”
“Data.” Daniels blinked at him, his mouth open. “You’ve used how many canvases?”
“Sixty-seven. I am on my sixty-eighth tonight.”
Daniels set his brush down and moved off the stool. “Show me.” He followed Data to a stack of discarded canvases in the back of the room, neatly tucked out of the way—or as out of the way as sixty-seven twenty-by-forty canvases could be.
With a glance at the android, Daniels knelt down beside the stack and pulled one of them toward him.
An orange tabby cat leaned back in the picture, licking himself. Daniels tried not to laugh because in truth the stroke quality and precision were incredible even if the subject was a bit—quirky. He pulled another one out. Same image, only with different hues and stroke patterns. With a sigh he pulled canvases at random and looked. All of them were the same image.
An orange tabby cat, its right back leg thrust into the air, its head bent down in front.
Daniels laughed the first good laugh he’d experienced in weeks.
“Why are you laughing?” Data frowned, looking from the paintings to Daniels. “See? I have failed. These were not meant to incur humor.”
Daniels put a hand to his chest as he laughed and then wiped at the tears in his eyes. “But, Data…” He gave a wide smile. “These are great. I don’t know about meaning to make them humorous, but you did. Why—why did you pick this pose to paint?”
“It was the pose I saw in my head when I closed my eyes.” He leaned his head to his left shoulder, toward Daniels, and grinned. “It is also her favorite position.”
“Data, you do realize what Spot’s doing, right?”
And then Data joined in the laughter as Daniels picked out several canvases and lined them up against the well shelf. He couldn’t believe the android had painted a series of a cat cleaning herself.
“T’Saiga to Daniels.”
“Daniels here.”
“Do you have a sec? I have something you should see in engineering.”
“I’ll be right there,” Daniels said.
“I will continue my series.” Data turned and ambled back to his painting.
Daniels found Sage ensconced with La Forge and Travec in the far corner of engineering at one of the diagnostic consoles. The latter leaned up as he approached. “We might have found what it was the shape-shifter was looking for.”
Sage nodded from where he sat in front of the console. “About a week ago Lynch handed me a padd he said was yours. I left it in the holodeck and earlier today Travec here got frustrated with it.”
“It was broken,” Travec said, his hoofs on his hips. “I was in need of a working padd and it was—as you so often say, Mr. t’Saiga—giving me fits.”
Daniels smirked at Travec.
Sage glanced at the ceiling, his golden eyes bright, his ears twitching. “After he threw it at me, I noticed carbon scoring and something dark smeared on the back of it. So I gave it to Dr. Crusher for analysis.”
La Forge nodded. “It was blood.”
“Hahn’s blood?”
“Yes,” La Forge said. “But she also found Betazoid blood.”
Daniels frowned. “I don’t recall there being a Betazoid registered on the station. Did Crusher pull a DNA match?”
“Yep,” Sage said as he pulled up a standard Starfleet profile sheet. “Bael Nomine. A third-year cadet at Starfleet Academy. Specializing in holographic technology and a member of Red Squad.”
“Red Squad?” Daniels mouthed the name. It wasn’t familiar. “Never heard of it. Is it some special degree or classification?”
“No, it’s evidently some sort of elite cadet group,” La Forge said. “That’s what the captain knew about it.”
Daniels ran a hand through his hair. “Besides that, why would a damaged padd have this Bael Nomine’s blood on it? And why would a shape-shifter want it?”
“Might be because of this.” Sage held up a scuffed green isolinear chip.
Daniels took it and looked at it. “It’s not coded.”
“No,” La Forge said. “Which leads us to believe it’s a personal memory chip. I could see it inside the padd with my VISOR, jammed in on top of the padd’s original memory.”
“Someone hid it there.” Daniels smiled. “You think Hahn did it?”
“Well, the chip has Hahn’s blood on it,” La Forge said.
“Have you been able to read it?”
“Not yet. The chip was damaged in the explosion, though the padd was a great place to hide it.”
Daniels closed the chip in his hand. “I’m going to gamble that Hahn hid it, and the shape-shifter was after it. There’s something on this chip he doesn’t want discovered.”
“We’ll keep trying to pull the data off,” Sage said.
“Do you need the chip back?”
La Forge pursed his lips. “No, I’ve made a backup of what we’ve got. I’m afraid I damaged it in the process.”
An idea was forming in Daniels’s head—a way to bring the shape-shifter into the open. “Mind if I borrow this?”
Daniels turned left down the hall, the chip in his hand along with the damaged padd. He called ahead to Porter and Barclay, who were still conducting a full-spectrum scan of the starbase.
“Anything turn up yet?”
“No,” Porter said after a drawn-out pause. “That ghost image is back again, though. Barclay’s trying to pinpoint it.”
“I’d keep checking. I have to grab something in my quarters and I’ll be right there.” His plans were to send out a personal message to Sahvisha at the DPO to ask him about clearing data from a damaged isolinear chip, one he’d found inside of a padd. Daniels figured if the shape-shifter was watching them for it, then he’d be monitoring communications as well.
And such a request didn’t seem as suspicious as simply announcing the chip’s discovery on the Enterprise’s comm system.
And doing it from
his quarters seemed appropriate. Though it didn’t leave enough time to tell Picard or Riker what he was doing.
Daniels pressed his hand to the panel. “Lights,” he said as he came in, and once again froze in the doorway.
A young man sat at his comm station, his head bent, his shoulders slumped. In his hand he held a phaser. From the half line of red light, Daniels knew it was set for stun.
He also suspected he knew who this young man was. “Cadet Third Class Bael Nomine?”
Nomine nodded slowly, but kept his head bent down. “Please, Mr. Daniels, come in.”
Daniels stepped in, and the door shut behind him. “You killed Lieutenant Huff.”
“That was an accident. She caught me off guard.”
“You’re not a shape-shifter.”
Nomine sighed and raised his eyes. His dark, Betazoid eyes were sad, red-rimmed. “No. But I can create the illusion.” He closed his eyes and his appearance melted, blurred, and changed.
He’d become Daniels’s old friend Jonathan DeNoux as he stood, the phaser trained on Daniels’s chest. “Alien technology, adapted and perfected by me.” He tapped his left temple. “All controlled from an implant in here. Little did I know it’d be used like this.”
“For murder?”
“In the service of Starfleet.”
Daniels eyed his quarters. His own phaser remained strapped to his hip, but his hands weren’t free. One held the chip, the other the damaged padd.
“Please, don’t try to run,” Nomine said, still wearing a dead man’s face. “I can read your surface thoughts. It helps me when I’m camouflaged in the field—to gauge the reactions of my marks.” He smiled. “I know you have the chip and the padd. Which is good. And I can shoot you now and the ship’s sensors won’t detect it.”
“Dampening field?” Daniels looked over at the comm station and saw a small, spherical device that he didn’t recognize. “Is that how you do it? Create the holograms that surround you?”
“No. That device is going to get me and you out of here without detection.”
Daniels did not like the sound of that.
He held up the chip and the padd. “Here they are—and you have to know the chip’s too damaged to read. We’ve tried. We did ID your blood on it. And Hahn’s.” He focused his gaze on the cadet. “He found out about you, didn’t he?”
Nomine nodded. “He was a smart man. A man I respected. He was paying attention. Checked the communications logs.”
Daniels’s eyes widened. “The missing data.” He glanced at the chip in his hand. “It’s on here, isn’t it? Proof that you were communicating with…” He frowned, hoping Nomine would fill in the blank and give him the name of the man the young cadet worked for.
Nomine abruptly held the phaser up high, aiming it at Daniels’s face. “What I did was for the good of the Federation. It must be protected.”
Suddenly a few things became clearer to Daniels. “You didn’t set the bomb to kill Hahn.”
“No, I set the bomb to prove to everyone that the Dominion is a real threat. That we need to change our security measures. It was all supposed to go without a hitch—no casualties.”
“But that’s where it went wrong,” Daniels said, looking about the room to find a way past the phaser fire. He tried masking his thoughts, thinking of Data’s cat portraits. “That was the flaw in the plan. You planted it too far away. The Dominion killed twenty-seven people, Bael. You couldn’t do it, could you? You couldn’t kill more innocents.”
“He was already dead.” Nomine’s exterior broke. His own face returned, melting away to reveal black eyes and a thinner face. “I didn’t kill Hahn, but I was told to put him there, near the bomb. And then the Enterprise came early and we were rushed to finish…”
“Who? Who was rushed?” Daniels leaned forward. “Cadet, who are you working for?”
Nomine sniffed, tears rolling down his cheeks. “He told me to do it again—and I did. I didn’t want to. But I have to follow the chain of command.”
The color drained from Daniels’s face. “Do what, Nomine? What did they tell you to do?”
“…another bomb.”
“Where?”
“Engineering.” He smiled. “It was so easy.”
Another bomb. Dear God…
Daniels didn’t have a choice, he had to risk contacting the captain. He took a step forward and set the padd and chip on the bed. “Nomine, you have to tell me where the other bomb is. You’re not the type of person that can kill so easily.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Nomine said as he wiped at his eyes with his free hand. “And I can’t let you leave this room.”
Before Daniels could reach for his own phaser, Nomine fired.
CHAPTER
10
Th’ Unworthy Takes
“You told me to do a little digging,” Riker said as he sat down in the chair in front of Picard’s desk. “And, as you can see, what I discovered from my father’s old friends back home proves what t’Saiga and La Forge found.”
Picard nodded as he reviewed the information sent to him from engineering. “This is astounding.”
“It’s treason,” Riker said. “My guess is Hahn discovered what they were doing—about the bomb—”
“And they killed him for it,” Picard said as he looked up from the padd. “Have they been able to identify the receiver of the communiqués?”
“Office of Security,” Riker said, his expression filled with disgust. “There’s no identity tag, but they’re all coded with a Starfleet alpha priority.” Riker’s expression hardened. “Admiral Leyton.”
“Will, we don’t have any proof of Leyton’s involvement in this—”
“Yes, we do.” Riker sat forward, his hands on his knees. “I’ve been in contact with DS9. According to Worf, Captain Sisko asked them to check out the relay station on the other side of the wormhole a week ago.”
“What for?”
“To find an explanation as to why the wormhole had been opening and closing.”
“And?”
“Apparently they found a Lieutenant Ariaga there, who claimed he was ordered by Admiral Leyton to attach a subspace modulator to the relay station.”
Picard looked up from the padd sharply. “Admiral Leyton?”
“As much as I hated to admit it,” Riker said, “Daniels’s suspicions proved to be right. Worf’s taking the Defiant out to rendezvous with Sisko and Odo on Earth.”
“Leyton’s behind this?” Picard looked down at the padd. “And Hahn’s death?”
“La Forge to Picard.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sir, Barclay and Porter just finished up another perimeter sensor sweep of the starbase and the surrounding area. And…” He paused. “Well, I’ve found something you’re going to have to see for yourself.”
Daniels finally understood Stevens’s comment about avoiding a five-alarm headache. It did feel as if he had at least twice that number of alarms singing out in his head.
He put a hand to his temple and pressed it, hoping to turn at least one of them off.
Siobhan is going to laugh at me. I can just hear her voice telling me, “Had enough now?”
No one ever told him life on board a starship was this much fun.
After blinking back the lethargic effects of phaser fire, Daniels sat up and looked around.
He was on the floor of what looked like a closet. A quick check told him his combadge was missing, as well as his phaser. The room was dimly lit by a small light above. He pushed himself up and slammed his head into the ceiling. Painfully.
The door abruptly opened and light blasted inside, momentarily blinding him.
He could make out a figure. Tall, dressed in a uniform. He was holding a phaser. “Out.”
Daniels did as he was told, rubbing his eyes as he did. “Nomine, this isn’t going to work,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You can’t kill all those people. Starfleet will find out.”
“I’m afraid Starf
leet will learn nothing,” said a voice that was distinctively not Nomine’s.
Snowden.
Daniels kept his hands at his sides as he looked around. They were in a small ship of some kind, its configurations matching those of a type-6 shuttle. “This is the ghost we kept picking up on the sensors.”
“Yes,” Snowden said as he gestured for Daniels to move away. “Holographic technology at its finest.”
It was then that Daniels saw the still form of Cadet Nomine. From the position of his body on the floor between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, it looked as if he’d been in the pilot’s seat when Snowden shot him. “So you’re getting rid of all the loose ends?”
“He’s not dead. Not yet, anyway. He failed in his mission.” Snowden straightened up but kept his phaser steady. “Both missions.”
Daniels looked back at Nomine. “He was going to run.”
“Yes, with you on board. The only survivor—alive to tell the truth of what happened. Luckily he did plant the bomb. And having you here—though a minor inconvenience—could prove to be a boon. I still have enough unreplicated metamorphic matter to plant near the bomb so that any of your new protocols will detect it. And with you at the blast center…” He made a clucking noise. “It’s all very tragic.”
“So you’re doing this to garner sympathy from Starfleet?” Daniels continued to note the ship’s interior, locating vital stations. Ops, helm, tactical. “Why?”
“So that President Jaresh-Inyo and all of those with him will understand that fortifying Earth is the best thing to do.” He narrowed his eyes at Daniels. “And it worked—at least the blackout did. Until Leyton sent me this halfwitted cadet to confuse things here. He’s not a soldier, he’s a scientist. An engineer. He didn’t understand that some loss of life was necessary to achieve the greater objective.”
“As in killing Admiral Hahn,” Daniels said. “And now all on board the Enterprise.”
“Not everyone will die. Most—some decks will decompress. But there will be enough left for them to investigate.” He smiled. “Perhaps I’ll rig it so you’re suspected of planting both bombs.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation™: Slings and Arrows Page 11