by Shards
He wiped sweat from his high forehead. After more than fifteen years of working together, Barclay and K'Ehleyr now meshed with ease, like interlocking gears. They had been paired in their youth while growing up together in the Memory Omega headquarters hidden inside the Regula I planetoid, and they had been trained for much of their lives to function as a team.
The division of responsibilities had always been clear. K'Ehleyr was the field operative and mission commander. She set the agendas and called the shots. Barclay's job was to provide her with tactical support, impede their targets' security and communications, and arrange as many exit strategies for K'Ehleyr as he could, from his support center inside the Solomon.
The scrambled transceiver implanted in K'Ehleyr's ear canal kept Barclay aware of her position inside the detention facility while he raced to acquire the next set of floor plans and intel she would need. He muted his channel to K'Ehleyr and said to the AI, "Solomon, tap into the base's internal sensors, and give me positions of all personnel and prisoners inside the detention center, on screen three. I also need a tap on their internal communications regarding Alynna Nechayev."
"Operations in progress," the AI replied through an overhead speaker.
It was one of the cruel ironies of Barclay's life that the only time he didn't stutter was when he was talking to the AI. Real people made him nervous, but Solomon had always seemed non-threatening. He had hoped that if he worked with K'Ehleyr for long enough, he might achieve the same degree of comfort with her, but so far, that day hadn't come. And so the trim, gray-haired tactician and engineer remained alone, sequestered inside the cramped aft cabin of their tiny cloaked recon ship.
"Level-by-level floor plans ready," Solomon announced as the diagrams appeared on one of Barclay's many monitors. "And I have located General Nechayev."
"Good work," Barclay said. "Put it on the big screen."
The master display changed to show a red dot, which stood for Nechayev, moving at a walking pace through the facility.
Reactivating his comm link to K'Ehleyr, Barclay uploaded the floor plans and Nechayev's position to her heads-up display. "F-f-found her," he said, wincing in private frustration at his uncontrollable stutter. "Sublevel six, section t-two-twenty."
"Can you tell if she has the device with her?"
"No, the b-base's internal sensors aren't set up to scan for that," he said. "Still no c-c-comm chatter, though. If the Klingons have it, they might not know what it is."
K'Ehleyr was descending quickly, moving in the spaces between the walls and floors and then down a turbolift shaft. "Even if she dies, we need to get the device back," she said.
"I know," Barclay said, searching the base's records for any record of personal property that might have been taken from Nechayev when she was placed in Klingon custody. "L-looking for it now. Let you know if I f-f-find anything."
Barclay hoped they could save Nechayev in time. But he knew that her life didn't really matter. In the end, it was nothing.
The device, on the other hand, was everything.
A pair of gargantuan Klingon soldiers pushed Alynna Nechayev into the metal chair. Dull jolts shot up the trim, fiftyish human woman's tailbone. She bit down on her pain and fixed her glare on the pitted gray concrete wall in front of her.
The guards pulled her hands behind the back of the chair. Steel manacles snapped shut around her wrists, cold and tight. She shifted her weight to test the mobility of the chair; it didn't budge. Must be bolted to the floor, she realized.
Behind her, she heard the scuffle of boots on stone. The guards were keeping a close watch on her. She tilted her head back and squinted through a lock of her silver-blond hair at the naked light fixture that dangled above and slightly in front of her. With her eyes closed, she imagined she could feel the heat radiating from the bulb.
Outside the open door of the cell, she heard voices, a tense under-the-breath discussion. The corridor was dim compared with her circle of light, and the figures outside it were black shapes against a backdrop of shadow.
Then the debate ended, and a Klingon of medium build walked in and said to the two guards, "Get out."
The guards left. The new arrival shut the door after them. He pulled a communications device from his belt and keyed it on. "Computer, recognize my voiceprint."
"Acknowledged," a masculine voice replied in tlhIngan Hol.
"Deactivate all recording systems and internal sensors in this cell until I order otherwise," he said. "Authorization Duras-SuD-cha'Soch-vagh."
"Authorization confirmed. Internal sensors deactivated."
He grinned. "Now we can talk in private."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, General Duras," Nechayev said with an insinuating smirk.
His expression conveyed amusement and disdain. "Hmmph. No need for introductions, I see." He paced slowly to her left. "Whatever you have to say, you'll say only to me. Understand?"
"Perfectly," Nechayev said. "You want a monopoly on my intel. Probably to bolster your house's sagging fortunes."
Her verbal jab inflamed his temper. "What do you know of my family, you petaQ?"
"I know that you lost command of the Negh'Var to Kurn and that the higher his star rises beside Intendant Kira's, the farther yours falls." She made a show of looking around at the drab confines of her cell. "Though you couldn't have fallen much farther than this, could you? A worthless posting at the ass end of the Empire. Hardly a fitting billet for a warrior."
Duras reversed direction and plodded to Nechayev's right. "You're well informed about the Alliance's affairs," he said. "What I want to hear is what you know about the Terran rebellion. Their plans, resources, strongholds...everything."
"No," Nechayev said. "That's just what you think you want." Her smirk widened as she halted Duras's wanderings with a salacious gleam. "Let me tell you what you really want: the power behind the rebellion. The eminence grise that pulls the strings and sets the agenda. A secret society that's been plotting the fall of the Alliance and the return of the Terran Republic for more than a century."
Lowering his voice and leaning closer, Duras asked, "Does this mysterious cabal have a name?"
He gazed hard into her eyes and waited for an answer.
She met his unblinking stare with her own.
"Memory Omega."
The general had no visible reaction to her revelation. Then he snorted, stepped back, and shook his head. "And why should I believe a word of this outrageous story?"
"Because it will let you crush the Terran rebellion once and for all," Nechayev said.
He folded his arms and cast a suspicious look at her. "And why would you volunteer such vital information?"
She pinned her hopes on the truth.
"Because I want to defect."
Wedged in a gap between two walls, K'Ehleyr nearly fumbled her exosonic mic when she heard Nechayev utter the word defect.
Shock put a harsh note into her voice as she whispered, "Reg, did you hear that?"
"I heard it," Barclay replied over the subaural comm. "Is it a d-d-disinformation scheme?"
Through the clandestine listening device, K'Ehleyr picked up more snippets of Nechayev's discussion with Duras. "I don't think so," K'Ehleyr said. "She's telling him about the Vulcan sleeper agents. Dammit...she's telling him everything."
"This is b-bad. If she talks about the MQT-"
"Then it's all over."
She knew that Barclay understood she wasn't exaggerating. If the Alliance learned that Nechayev had given them the master quantum transceiver, it would be in a position to wipe out all of Memory Omega, and the Terran rebellion with it.
The MQT was a gadget small enough to be hidden in one's hand. It contained fermions whose quantum-entangled matching particles were concealed in hidden Memory Omega bases throughout local space. With the right kind of hardware, they enabled the possessors of the two particles to communicate instantaneously across any distance, and in perfect privacy-there was no way to inter
cept such messages, because there was no transmission of the signal. When one entangled particle vibrated a certain way, its mate vibrated in perfect sympathetic harmony, as if they were one particle existing in two places at the same time.
It was an elegant solution to the problem of coordinating operations in secret and across vast distances. However, it had a vulnerability. The MQT could be used to send out pulses that would give away the location of every Memory Omega facility in the galaxy-and perhaps even remotely seize control of them and trigger their self-destruct sequences.
"Do you think she'd really g-g-give it to them?"
"It wouldn't make much sense for her to come this far and not hand it over," K'Ehleyr replied as she finished a virtual inventory of her weapons and gear. "We can't let that happen."
She shimmied toward a ventilation grate that led into a corridor a few intersections from Nechayev's holding cell. As she slithered over a bundle of power cables, Barclay's voice pestered her. "K-K-Kay? What're you d-d-doing?"
"Changing the mission profile," K'Ehleyr said. "New prime objective is kill Nechayev and anyone she's talked to. Soon as that's done, we confiscate the MQT and breeze outta here."
K'Ehleyr reached the grate and peeked through it. The corridor beyond was empty. She used a silent ion drill to weaken the screws that held it in place.
"M-maybe a less direct approach would b-b-be-"
"Save it, I can take these guys." She poked her fingers through slats in the grate and took hold of it. One push dislodged it from the wall. "Cut the chatter, I'm going in."
She tucked the grate behind her and slipped hands-first out of the ventilation shaft, into the corridor. Her visor's heads-up display guided her toward an intersection.
Heavy, plodding footfalls drew closer. Two targets.
K'Ehleyr eased her d'k tahg from its sheath. She struck at the first glimpse of her foes. Her blade sank into the closer guard's throat, a perfect kill, swift and silent.
The second guard reached for his disruptor pistol. He'd pulled his weapon halfway from its holster before K'Ehleyr caught him under the chin with a palm strike. With fluid grace, she snapped her dagger from the first guard's carotid artery and slashed it across the second guard's exposed throat.
Both bodies fell in a bloody jumble at her feet.
Then she saw four more guards at the end of the corridor, all looking back at her with expressions of intense surprise.
They reached for their sidearms.
She sheathed her d'k tahg with one hand and tossed out a handful of gas capsules with the other.
The corridor filled with thick black smoke, which was laced with an anesthetic compound tailored for Klingon biochemistry. Thanks to her stealth suit's visor, K'Ehleyr peered through the haze as if it weren't there, and the suit's breathing filter protected her from the sleeping gas she'd unleashed.
Meanwhile, her enemies choked and flailed helplessly. She dropped to the floor and crept forward, beneath their flurry of blind disruptor shots. She didn't want to use her own disruptor to fire back, for fear of giving away her position. Instead, she opened a packet of incendiary capsules and pitched them forward.
The capsules scattered like pebbles between the feet of the four dazed soldiers. Then an eardrum-shattering blast and a blinding flash reduced the hulking foursome to an insensate heap of scorched and broken limbs.
K'Ehleyr scrambled forward to the blast-proof gate that led to the maximum-security holding area, where Nechayev was being interrogated. "I'm in position," she said. "Hack the gate for me, fast."
"On it," Barclay said. "C-c-company on your three."
She glanced right. Back at the intersection from which she'd come, another Klingon guard had stumbled into the corridor full of blinding sleeping gas. He tried to aim his disruptor rifle but clearly had no idea what to shoot at.
In front of her, the lock on the gate released.
"Open," Barclay said.
"Thanks, Reg." She casually drew her sidearm and popped off a shot that struck the distant guard in his forehead. He fell backward, and K'Ehleyr smirked at her marksmanship. Then came the flash that slammed her against the wall and dropped her to the floor, stunned and shaking.
Consciousness faded quickly. "Reg, abort mission," she mumbled. "Reg, acknowledge..."
No answer came.
Then she lost hold of herself and had nothing more to say.
The general would be upset about having his interrogation interrupted, but Colonel Gowron didn't care. He quickened his pace down the dim corridor toward the secured holding cell.
As far as Gowron was concerned, Duras was a mediocrity who had traded on his family name instead of earning his own glory. One lucky break after another had seemed to land in Duras's lap. At least, until Martok had come to power, that was.
Regent Worf's capture by the Terran rebellion months earlier had come as a shock to almost everyone in the Alliance. The vacancy at the top of the Klingon government had represented a unique opportunity, but only General Martok had been poised to exploit it. Long a rival of Duras and an open foe of Gowron, Regent Martok had wasted no time marginalizing the two warriors.
Then had come the heroic rise of Worf's brother, Kurn. Not only had his victory at Empok Nor dealt a major blow to the Terran rebellion, but it had given Martok the opportunity to expel Duras and Gowron to a backwater world of the Empire, while he gifted Kurn with Duras's previous command, the Negh'Var.
Most galling of all for Gowron was being Duras's executive officer. The very thought of it made him spit sour bile.
He approached the holding cell's door. A pair of gigantic warriors with chiseled features flanked the portal like statues. Neither looked at Gowron as he stepped between them and pounded the side of his fist on the locked door. He waited.
The door slid open, revealing the furious mien of Duras. "What?" he shouted.
"We captured an intruder," Gowron said in a low voice.
"So?"
Gowron smirked. "An extremely well-equipped intruder," he elaborated. "Here, inside the detention center."
Duras stepped out of the holding cell, forcing Gowron to backpedal away from him. The general looked at the two guards. "No one but me goes inside that room. Understood?" Both warriors nodded. He stepped away from the door, which shut and locked behind him. He nodded to Gowron to follow him down the corridor. They turned at the first corner. Duras ushered Gowron into an empty holding cell, followed him in, and shut the door.
"Quickly," the general said. "Details."
"A half-breed female," Gowron said. "Part Klingon, part human." He noted the wince of disgust on Duras's face and continued. "She emerged in the middle of a corridor on this level. Her weapons and equipment are very sophisticated."
The general frowned. "How sophisticated?"
"More advanced than anything known to the Alliance," Gowron said. "And far beyond the capabilities of the Terran rebellion."
Nodding, Duras asked, "Could they be of Romulan design?"
"Maybe," Gowron said. "The Romulan worlds have been funneling weapons to Calhoun and his people ever since the scouring of Romulus. But unless the Romulans have made a major leap forward in technology-"
"It wouldn't be the first time," Duras said. He paced the short distance to the rear of the cell and back. "Cloaking devices and their new warbird designs both came out of nowhere. They're the most likely source, so look into it."