“This is strictly ‘need to know,’ not to be repeated outside this committee.”
All eyes were on him now.
“Starfleet Technical is actively redeveloping personal phase-weapon technology.”
Tyler Light snorted. “And will we be bringing back blunderbusses and flintlocks, too?”
Mallory understood the psychologist’s skepticism. Personal phase weapons dated back to before the founding of the Federation, and had been on their way to becoming standard-issue sidearms throughout Starfleet, praised for their ability to safely stun combatants. Then had come the Romulan War, and though no Romulans had ever been engaged in face-to-face combat, too many humans had fallen before the onslaught of the Romulans’ laser-armed robotic forces.
By the end of humanity’s first and, it was hoped, last full-scale interstellar war, phase weapons had been replaced by much more powerful class-eight laser weapons, which added stimulated subspace energy frequencies to those of traditional laser light. The result had been a powerful new type of combat weapon with a far more efficient use of energy, and capable of blast and penetrative effects that the designers of the antique class-one lasers could never have envisioned.
The one drawback, though, was that it was notoriously difficult to employ a class-eight laser as a nonlethal weapon. Too far away from the enemy, and the laser would only prove annoying. Too close, and the laser could stun the target permanently, eliminating even the possibility of regaining consciousness. Thus Starfleet had gone back to basics and for years had been attempting to marry the blast effects of the standard-issue class-eight laser with the humane stun settings of the old phase-weapon technology.
According to the latest evaluation reports Mallory had read, it appeared Starfleet had finally come close to solving the technical issues and was ready to deploy, on a test basis only, a new weapon dubbed the “phaser,” which combined the best of both earlier systems.
Mallory now declassified this for the committee, and promised Admiral Mathur that his forces in the Helstrom Nebula would be the first to receive the new phasers. Any engagement with the general’s child army would be conducted with stun weapons and not deadly force.
“Do you know when these weapons will be available?” Admiral Mathur asked.
“No.”
“What do I tell my people in the meantime?”
Mallory had no prepared response ready. “They will have to use their best judgment.”
“And fire on children?” the senior admiral challenged.
But Mallory had seen even more of the universe’s darkest corners than Mathur.
“Admiral, it is Starfleet’s duty to protect the lives and well-being of all Federation colonists. If the general’s forces attack another colony and Starfleet Security forces are called upon to defend that colony, your people will be firing on the enemy. I’m sorry, but I can’t put it any plainer than that.”
The admiral stood, his posture rigid.
Mallory chose to go along with the moment and end the meeting. He got to his feet as well.
“Just be damn quick with that study group,” Mathur growled as he exited the room. “We need to know what this fanatic’s thinking.”
As the rest of the committee members left, Mallory finally flipped open his communicator.
“This’d better be good,” Mallory warned his assistant.
“Special Agent in Charge Luis Hamer needs to talk with you.”
Mallory automatically assessed his assistant’s tone, found no evidence of worry, and switched his attention from the tragedy on Helstrom III to yesterday’s excitement at Headquarters. He checked the time display on the viewscreen. “That took the boys longer than I thought.”
“Say again?”
“Never mind, Sally,” Mallory said. “I’ll take the call in my office.”
20
Two minutes later, the image of the angry SCIS agent appeared on the deskscreen in Mallory’s office.
“I told you you were making a mistake, Mr. Mallory.” Hamer was thoroughly annoyed and not bothering to hide it.
Mallory suppressed a smile, understanding that the agent’s emphasis was to underscore his displeasure at being forced to take orders from a civilian bureaucrat who headed one of Starfleet’s lesser known, and least useful, departments.
“One of the boys removed his tracking module, did he?”
“You expected this?”
“Whoever built that override wouldn’t have any trouble defeating a standard tracker. As a matter of fact, I was expecting you to call a few hours earlier than this.”
Mallory made a mental note to write a glowing letter of commendation to soften any lingering resentment the agent might develop for having been kept in the dark.
“So which one was it?”
“Which one?” Hamer repeated as if confused.
“We needed to know which one of the two kids built that device. So, putting them in the modules was the test. Whoever got out of his is our resident genius.”
What Mallory didn’t understand was why the SCIS agent suddenly looked pleased. “So?”
“They both removed the modules. At exactly the same time. About twenty-five minutes ago.”
There weren’t many times Mallory was surprised in his line of work, but this was one of them.
“They’re better than I thought,” he said softly, not caring if the agent heard him. “They really are working together.”
Hamer had the decency not to gloat excessively, but Mallory didn’t begrudge him the moment. “Shall I send out a fugitive alert to the protectors and travel hubs?” the agent asked.
“Not at this time, thank you. With any luck, now that the boys are out of the trackers, they’ll lead us to whoever it is they’re working with.”
Hamer’s mood darkened. “Except, without the trackers, how can they lead you anywhere?”
“Oh, we have our resources,” Mallory said, and unlike Hamer, he didn’t gloat.
At 0200 local time, another of Spock’s fractal programs became active.
Operating in a highly distributed pattern that was too diffuse to trigger a security alert in the Vulcan compound’s computer network, the program diverted the feed from the imagers in the main reception hall and then processed it to remove Spock and his activities before resending it to the databanks.
Free from surveillance, Spock approached a display cabinet along the back wall. It was from a pre-enlightenment museum on Vulcan, long buried under once-radioactive rubble, now meticulously restored and decontaminated. Because it predated Surak’s teachings, the cabinet was intricately carved, with complex ornamentation of intertwined beasts and leaves brought into high relief by careful shading with a blue vegetable dye, unique to the era in which the piece was built.
Earthmen invariably declared that the ancient relic was breathtakingly beautiful. The Vulcans who were posted here were pleased to provide an aesthetic experience to their hosts. Those same Vulcans, though, preferred the simpler lines of the cases that flanked the cabinet. Those pieces were constructed much later in Vulcan’s history, and the subtle abstract designs carved into their woodwork tactilely expressed an equation for deriving prime numbers. That meant they were pleasing to look at, and educational. A far more logical style of design.
Spock, however, found the older cabinet more interesting, not that he’d ever admitted his preference.
But this night, his interest in it was not because of its beauty. Inside, protected behind doors of rose-tinted glass made from the sands of the sil’Rahn Desert in Vulcan’s southern hemisphere, there rested the embassy’s collection of primitive clay figurines produced by the planet’s earliest known culture. One of the figurines in the display was the original from which Spock had fabricated the forgery he had sold to Dala. Twelve others completed the collection.
From his other late-night visits to the reception hall, Spock had determined that five of the thirteen were, in fact, forgeries, replacing originals that had been stolen and
sold by the real theft ring operating from the Vulcan compound—a criminal enterprise that Sarek had now admitted the staff knew about, yet would not interfere with.
Spock had deconstructed the logic of his father’s position over and over, and had been able to come to one conclusion: Whoever was responsible for the thefts was known to the staff, and the staff had deliberately chosen to ignore the crime. Only two possibilities existed to justify that decision.
The first was that the person responsible was a high-ranking Vulcan official, and disclosure would disrupt that official’s dealings with the United Earth government, the Federation Council, or some other equally important body.
The second was that the person responsible was a prominent member of the embassy’s local staff—a human. In that case, disclosure of the crime would prompt a disruption in Vulcan-Earth relations.
With the fervor of youth, Spock viewed both ethically flawed positions as typical of so-called pragmatic adults, and an affront to all that the Vulcan culture stood for.
Some of the staff who worked in the compound had been on Earth for more than twenty years, so Spock understood how their ethical standards might have been eroded in that time. After all, in the more than twenty years his mother had spent among Vulcans, she readily described how she had changed, willingly embracing the benefits of the Vulcan way. No doubt the Vulcans posted to duty on this world had reacted in a similar though less positive fashion, and embraced the slippery ethics of the nonlogical.
Spock had done the right thing, he knew, first by noticing that figurines were being stolen and replaced, and then by reporting what he had learned to Sarek.
That his father’s logic had also been made uncertain by his exposure to humans was regrettable, but not surprising. Sometimes Spock wondered how Vulcan culture could survive in the hands of the older generation, who often seemed to have lost touch with the pure message of Surak.
In any event, whatever the future might hold for his world, Spock did not consider himself obliged to follow it into ethical decline. He had tried to work within the rules, but if those in authority here refused to abide by the same conditions, then he had no logical choice but to proceed on his own to gather insurmountable evidence that he could present to authorities on Vulcan.
If that meant prominent Vulcans or human staff would be called upon to account for their transgressions, then so be it. The teachings of Surak were clear to every Vulcan who cared to study them, and Spock was Vulcan—he would permit no equivocation, human or Vulcan, to deter him. Logically, he could do no less than what he did now.
He used a small scanner he had borrowed from the scholars’ library that the compound maintained for Earthmen. The palm-sized device was specially calibrated for archaeological use.
He aimed it at the figurines behind glass. Each one registered with an authentic spectrographic and isotope-dating profile.
Then he inserted a polykey into the antique cabinet’s security latch—a feature not found on the cabinet as originally built, but considered necessary on a planet that still had occasional crime. No offense intended to the Vulcans’ human hosts.
The key vibrated, its nano-scale filaments filling the mechanical space reserved for a standard key, then transmitted an encoded magnetic pulse that he had already decrypted from the databanks.
The cabinet doors clicked open. Without the barrier of the rose-tinted glass between him and the figurines, Spock scanned them again.
Six registered as forgeries now.
The scheme was clever, Spock admitted. Somewhere in the frame of the door there was a series of sophisticated transmitters that responded to the pulses from any type of scanner or sensor. That triggered each device to return a fabricated sensor signature for the figurine it was paired with, containing all the details necessary to confirm the figurine as an original.
Spock had deconstructed the transmitters and had built one of his own, which he had placed in the forgery he sold to Dala. The human female’s sensor had been tricked by the false signal, and she had accepted it without realizing the deception, and without suspecting that she had taken into her possession an inert lump of fired clay, not much more than ten days old.
But that detail was for the next stage of his operation. For now, Spock was eager to try his newest discovery—an algorithm that would allow him to read the security log on the cabinet, and see who had last opened it.
Whoever was stealing the figurines clearly was able to manipulate the security imagers in the compound as easily as he could. He had watched the recordings after each theft, and there was never the slightest indication that anyone had entered the reception hall, opened the cabinet, and replaced a figurine.
But the security register installed in the cabinet was separate from the main network. Every time a key was inserted into the lock, the register noted the biosignature of the person holding that key.
Spock now used a small, personal bicorder to transmit his algorithm to the security device that monitored the lock.
Vulcan codings scrolled rapidly across the bicorder’s screen as the register was decrypted.
With inner calm befitting a Vulcan, he waited patiently for his mathematical innovation to complete its work. In just a few seconds, he would have the name of the person responsible for the thefts, and he faced that moment properly this time, without the emotion of pride.
The screen flashed. The algorithm completed its work.
Spock read the name of the thief, numb not from self-control but from shock.
The thief was his father.
21
At 0600, slowly in the dawn, the Academy came to life.
Small groups of newly returned upperclassmen, male and female, jogged along park trails, anxious to get back into peak shape after either a short liberty or a specialty summer posting to a low-gravity environment.
Instructors poured out from the monorail station or beamed into the Erickson Hub or simply cruised through the main gates in their personal vehicles.
In just over a week, the new plebe class of almost a thousand young men and women would assemble for a two-week indoctrination session prior to the start of the first semester. A whirlwind of activity would immediately commence as the Academy’s full complement of almost four thousand midshipmen—from first-year plebes in basic grays to upperclassmen in metallic shirts—dug in and applied themselves to their studies.
But that whirlwind was still in the future. For now, the leafy grounds were a peaceful contrast to the inner turmoil Elissa Corso suffered as she thought about the honor board hearing she faced in two days.
Zee Bayloff strolled beside her on the path that linked Archer Hall and what the mids called Regurgitation Row—the Academy’s food distribution complex. The two dormmates were wearing their standard gray midshipman’s uniforms—after breakfast, they planned to do research on propulsion faults before returning to Tucker Center and their disassembled shuttlecraft.
Elissa walked, head down, in self-absorbed silence.
“Hey, Corso,” Zee said, sounding far more upbeat than anyone should without her morning coffee, “do you remember that first orientation meeting after you got your acceptance?”
Elissa didn’t reply, but she remembered.
“I was in a group of about fifteen,” Zee prompted, encouragingly.
Elissa brought up the memory of her first orientation meeting. “Yeah, I was the only one on Risa who got in that year. I had my meeting with a lieutenant on the Lexington. It was the first one he’d given.”
“That had to be exciting, being on a starship.”
Elissa shrugged. “Yeah, I guess it was.” Back then, in the full flush of her astonishment at actually being accepted into the Academy, the unsullied promise of a Starfleet career still lay before her. She’d been only seventeen, yet the crew of the Lexington, at Risa for shore leave, had welcomed her as a sister-in-arms. They’d even let her stay aboard in visitor’s quarters for three days. The officers had regaled her with tales of their
own Academy experiences, heaping welcome advice upon her. Specialists from every department had made a pitch for their particular area of expertise, saying how much they’d enjoy having her back. Captain Korolev had even let her take the center chair on the bridge.
When she’d finally beamed back home, she could have floated on air without antigravs. To be part of Starfleet had always been her lifelong dream.
Now, she could lose it.
“Did they give you the standard lecture? You know, about what you could expect here?”
“Zee, I got three days of lectures.”
“The official ones, Corso. Me, I remember this one part, where the recruiter told us that, in any other educational institute, we’d be given a standard speech on our first day. The instructor, or whoever, would tell us to look at the person on the right, then look at the person on the left, and then keep in mind that in four years, only one of those three people would be graduating.”
Elissa nodded glumly. “Yeah, I got that, too. It was on a recording in the ship’s library.”
“So you remember what the rest of it was? How for centuries, the most elite academies have been completely different from universities and colleges? That going back to the old Naval Academy at Annapolis, or the Space Force Academy at Colorado Springs, those institutions didn’t exist to drive students out. That after all the time and effort they had expended to seek out and select the best of the best, they were committed to retaining each member of the first-year class.”
Zee gave Elissa a friendly bunt with her hip, obviously trying to cheer her friend up any way she could. “When we looked to the left and right on our first day, remember what old Superintendent Lee said: It was each mid’s duty to do all we could to make sure those same people were at our side on Commissioning Day.”
Elissa’s dormmate tucked her chin into her neck and intoned in a mock impersonation: “ ‘Not one member of Starfleet will ever be left behind, in space, or at the Academy.’ ” She laughed. “And he was sort of right. I mean, the attrition rate here is something like fifteen percent, compared to around forty at most civilian institutes. And most of the attrition is due to accident or—”
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