by David Mack
He nodded. “And everything ends.”
PART 3
WALKING SHADOWS
26
“No doubt about it, Chiro, congratulations are in order.” The angular jaw and cheekbones of Admiral Harvey Severson looked distorted to Nogura, not by any error of the subspace transmission but by the smile he wore. Nogura had never seen the man happy before.
“Everyone back here on Earth is singing your praises,” Severson continued, “from Starfleet Command to the suits at the Palais. Capturing all the Shedai in one shot is probably the most significant strategic and tactical victory we’ve had on the frontier in the last five years. I’ve personally recommended you get another stripe on your cuff for this.”
Nogura couldn’t muster much gratitude, because he suspected Severson’s parade of praise was merely camouflage for an impending barrage of bullshit.
“I’m glad you’re all so happy,” he said. “But you could have told me this in writing. So, are you going to tell me what’s so urgent that you’re spending energy and bandwidth on a real-time channel from Earth, or do I have to guess?”
Severson’s jovial mood vanished as quickly as if he’d pulled off a comedy mask—a simile that Nogura suspected contained as much truth as it did poetic license. “Just because Starfleet Command is happy with you, that doesn’t mean they’re satisfied with your team. Specifically, the research plan filed by your new project leader is, shall we say, unambitious.”
“I thought its objectives were more than reasonable,” Nogura said.
Severson’s scathing glower leapt across the light-years. “We’re long past the point of reasonable. Satisfactory isn’t going to cut it. We have an edge over the Klingons in the Taurus Reach for the first time in five years, and we’re not going to let it slip away.”
Nogura resented the implication. “We’re not letting anything slip away, I assure you.”
“You’re not pursuing the advantage, and that’s the same thing. We’ve had our people evaluate Lieutenant Xiong’s research plan, and it’s far too cautious for our taste.”
Suspecting he would not like the answer, Nogura asked, “Cautious in what way?”
“It reads like Doctor Marcus wrote it,” Severson said, as if that were a fault. “Instead of pushing the envelope on the array’s capabilities, it’s focused on studying the Shedai.”
“That’s not surprising,” Nogura said, “considering that Xiong is an A and A specialist.”
His answer only deepened Severson’s animosity. “That’s all well and good, but it’s not what we need right now. Xiong can do as much pure research and write all the history books he wants— after he carries out the experiments and operations we’ve deemed essential.”
“Essential?” It was a simple word, but Nogura knew from experience that when it was spouted by bureaucrats, little that was actually necessary or good ever came of it. “Precisely what are these essential experiments, Admiral?”
Severson relayed a packet of electronic documents via their channel’s data subfrequency as he spoke. “Our experts at Research and Development in New York have put together a set of experiments to test the power-projection capabilities of the array your team built. According to their analysis of Xiong’s report, that little gizmo should be able to alter the very shape of space-time from across virtually any distance, at any coordinates we choose.”
Unable to hide his misgivings, Nogura asked, “To what end, sir?”
“Whatever we want,” Severson said. “In theory, we should be able to crush planets into dust, or even just fold them out of existence entirely, by bending space-time in on itself until it vanishes into some kind of pocket dimension.” He shrugged. “I didn’t exactly follow all the technical mumbo-jumbo, but the end results they suggested sounded pretty exciting.”
“Exciting? I think the word you meant to use was ‘horrifying.’ Sir.”
“Puh- tay-to, puh-tah-to. The point is, Chiro, that’s just one avenue of investigation. We also want to run some tests that we think could help advance Doctor Marcus’s research into new applications for the Jinoteur Pattern. Ideally, we’d have those datasets ready for her by the time she and her team reach Regula One.”
Nogura rubbed his chin. “Two points, sir. First, I’m not comfortable with any of these recommendations. While I understand the enthusiasm the R and D teams have for the work we’re doing out here, I think they must have skipped the section of Lieutenant Xiong’s report in which he makes clear how fragile the array currently is.”
The senior admiral seemed to be losing patience with the conversation. “You’re just being overcautious. I know these things ripped a new hole in your station last year, but that’s the past. You need to put that behind you and focus on the present and the future.”
“I believe I am, sir.”
“Well, I don’t agree. And neither does Starfleet Command. You’re sounding all the same alarms you did when we pressed you to bring the array on line in the first place. You were wrong then, Chiro, and the R and D experts are telling me you’re wrong now.”
“I don’t care what your experts are telling you,” Nogura said. “The only person I know who deserves to be called an ‘expert’ when it comes to this array is Xiong. And frankly, I’m inclined to trust his recommendations over yours.”
The shift in Severson’s bearing was subtle, but Nogura read it clearly enough to know he had just lit the fuse on the man’s temper, and that it was about to blow. “All right,” said the senior admiral. “If you won’t heed my recommendations, then you leave me no other choice but to make it an order. Admiral Nogura, as of now, I am ordering you and all personnel under your command to carry out the research plan and experiment schedule proposed by Starfleet Research and Development and sent to you by me during this conversation. If your team wishes to run supplementary experiments, they may, but only after they have completed the test series prescribed by Starfleet R and D. Is that understood, Admiral?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good.” After a moment’s thought, Severson asked, “What’s your second point?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“A moment ago, you said you had two points. I heard your first. What was the second?”
Nogura nodded, his memory jogged. “Ah, yes. Don’t ever call me ‘Chiro’ again. Nogura out.” He stabbed the button on his desk that terminated the subspace channel, and his screen blinked back to black, erasing the shocked reaction of Admiral Severson.
Sitting alone with his cold coffee and simmering temper, Nogura dreaded the reaction from the team in the Vault when he relayed Severson’s orders. As much as Nogura disliked being micromanaged by the Starfleet brass, he knew that Xiong was going to hate it far more.
“Are they out of their goddamned minds?” Xiong’s dismay escalated as he read each successive page of the proposed experiments and protocols from Starfleet Research and Development. “It’s like they never read a single word I sent them.”
He sat behind the desk in his office, which overlooked the main floor of the Vault. Klisiewicz sat in one of his guest chairs, and Theriault stood against the wall. All three Starfleet scientists read from data slates on which was loaded the same report. As they pored through its contents, Klisiewicz was aghast and Theriault looked perplexed.
“Question,” Klisiewicz said. “Do they know that none of our software for the array is written to do any of this? ‘Blowing up planets’ wasn’t in the original program specs.”
“I don’t think they care,” Xiong said. “All they know is that we did it by accident, so now they want to be able to do it on purpose.” He hurled his data slate away, and it cracked against the wall. “Dammit! This is exactly what Carol Marcus warned us about!” He kicked his chair back as he stood, so that he would have room to pace behind his desk. “I told her not to worry, that Starfleet would handle this thing responsibly, that they wouldn’t try to weaponize it.”
“Got that wrong,” Theriault mumbled.
Xiong knew her ire was directed at the Starfleet brass, so he let her quip slide. “Yes. Yes, I did. Now we have to deal with this mess.”
“You can’t let them go forward with these experiments,” Klisiewicz said. “Forget that we aren’t set up to run any of them. Half of them run the risk of breaching the array.”
Theriault added, “He’s right. Some of these protocols will drain so much power from the support grid that we could start losing containment.”
“What are the odds of that?” Xiong asked.
“Call it sixty-forty for a breach,” Theriault said.
The new orders were a total nightmare, as far as Xiong was concerned. If he refused them, he was looking at a court-martial and possibly a life sentence in a Federation penal colony. If he obeyed them, there was a good chance he’d accidentally unleash the Shedai, destroying the station, killing thousands, and possibly subjecting the galaxy at large to innumerable horrors. All he’d ever wanted to do was find out who the Shedai really were, and maybe, over time, get them to shed new light on an entire era of history for which little hard evidence or firsthand accounts remained in existence. Pressing them into service as slaves and turning them into a top-secret superweapon of unimaginable power had not been part of his agenda.
He slumped back into his chair. “Y’know, when Carol Marcus came here a couple of years ago and told me we could use the meta-genome and the Jinoteur Pattern to do things like regenerate tissue or extend our subspace communication range, I thought that was cool. But when she started going on about making planets out of nothing, I thought she might be crazy.” He pointed at the data slate in Klisiewicz’s hand. “But these orders raise the bar on crazy around here. Compared to what these idiots want us to do, Marcus’s plan for spinning dark energy into new planets seems almost quaint by comparison.”
“Maybe we need to talk with Commander Liverakos, up in the JAG office,” Theriault said. “Capturing the Shedai was one thing. Enslaving them is another.”
Her suggestion made Klisiewicz perk up. “Can we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Shedai are essential to the operation of the array?”
“Maybe,” Xiong said. “Without an occupied crystal, we couldn’t interface with the Shedai’s network at all. It seems pretty clear to me that without the Shedai, there’s no machine.”
Eyes wide with hope, Theriault said, “Then that’s our case.”
“I don’t know,” Xiong said. “Sounds pretty flimsy to me. And if we’re wrong, we could be looking at twenty-five to life. Do we really want to take that chance?”
Theriault reproached him with a cockeyed stare. “Would you rather live with these evil experiments on your conscience?”
“I know I wouldn’t,” Klisiewicz said. “I think Vanessa’s right, Ming. We should ask for a legal opinion from the JAG office. If we have any grounds for declaring these orders unlawful, I think we should tell Starfleet Command to stick them back where they got them.”
In his heart, Xiong knew that Theriault and Klisiewicz were right. History was full of casual villains who had rationalized their crimes with the long-discredited excuse, “I was only following orders.” Xiong didn’t want his name added to the list of those who had tried to hide their own weaknesses of character behind an empty appeal to authority.
“I’m not sure who’s going to be angrier,” he said. “Nogura or Starfleet Command.” He took a deep breath that did nothing to calm the anxiety-driven bile creeping up his esophagus, then he stood up. “Who’s ready to volunteer for a free court-martial?” Klisiewicz and Theriault raised their hands with a comical eagerness that made Xiong smile. “All right, then.” As he led them out of his office, he muttered glumly, “Let’s go get crucified.”
27
Three days sober, Cervantes Quinn had no idea what to do next. His last few months had been little more than a hazy wash of intoxicated mishaps, punctuated frequently by afternoons impaired with hangovers brutal enough to kill a bull moose, and occasionally by stints of a day or more in the brig to “dry out,” as the station’s chief of security had quaintly put it. Ever since the mind-meld with T’Prynn, he had felt strangely at ease. His body still craved the anesthetic pleasure of alcohol, but now his mind had the strength to refuse its temptation.
Staring at himself in his bathroom mirror that morning, he had marveled at how much damage he had done to his body in so short a time. After spending nearly two years drilling his middle-aged form back into shape, he had reduced himself to a pear-shaped blob of humanity in a tenth of the time. The only thing masking the return of his jowls and double chin was a heavy growth of salt-and-pepper beard whiskers.
After lingering under the soothing warmth of his first real shower in close to a week, Quinn had spent the morning roaming the station’s seemingly endless circular corridors, riding its many dozens of turbolifts from the uppermost public levels of the station to its lowest. By midday he had taken to wandering the narrow lanes of Stars Landing, peeking through the windows of shops where he couldn’t really afford to buy anything, and averting his eyes from all the places in which he had inebriated and humiliated himself in recent weeks.
Now it was late afternoon, and his stomach growled, his hunger an echo of a more profound emptiness that seemed to define his existence. He knew he wouldn’t starve aboard the station, despite being destitute. If the Federation was good for nothing else, one could always turn to it for a free lunch, topped with a heaping scoop of pity and smothered in self-righteousness. They wouldn’t foot the bill for a decent meal at Café Romano, but they’d gladly serve him a tray of reconstituted organic slop in their public cafeteria. I’d rather starve, he told himself, but he knew that was just his pride talking. When he got hungry enough, he would take their charity and wolf down whatever gruel they gave him. And he might even say “thank you,” if he could bear to look anyone in the eye.
Pushing back against the gnawing, acidic sensation in his gut, he crossed Fontana Meadow and admired the rich color of the lawn. It reminded him of Kentucky bluegrass, but it seemed much more resilient in the face of heavy foot traffic and sports activities, which made him wonder if it might be Rigelian mountain grass. The one thing he knew for certain about it was that it made for a very comfortable place to sleep—unless one happened to be there at 0315 when its automatic sprinkler system activated.
His meandering brought him to a halt in front of the lone Denevan dogwood planted at the edge of the meadow, beside a paved walkway that ringed the terrestrial enclosure. In front of the tree was a large plaque of brilliantly polished metal, not yet old enough to have acquired the slightest patina of tarnish, affixed to a large, broad rock. The plaque was inscribed:
IN PROUD MEMORY
USS BOMBAY NCC-1926
“OUR DEATHS ARE NOT OURS; THEY ARE YOURS;
THEY WILL MEAN WHAT YOU MAKE THEM.”
Three years I avoided this spot, Quinn moped, and he knew why. Thinking of the Bombay always reminded him of his misadventure on Ravanar IV, a badly planned burglary gone wrong. At the time he had thought the most serious fallout of his botched theft would come in the form of retribution from the Orion crime lord Ganz. Instead, he’d learned that by damaging a sensor scrambler he’d been hired to steal, he had unwittingly exposed a secret Starfleet operation—and that exposure had incited an attack by the Tholians that resulted in the eradication of all life on Ravanar IV, as well as the destruction of the Bombay and five Tholian warships.
I made one mistake and sent all those people to their doom. His thoughts fixated on that bitter reflection. No wonder Karma has it in for me. Nothin’ I do could ever make that right.
Amid the soft patter of distant footsteps and happy voices, he heard one set of footfalls close at his back—and then they stopped. Someone was standing behind him. He turned, half expecting a confrontation. Instead, he was met by the placid presence of T’Prynn.
“Hello again, Mister Quinn.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned ba
ck toward the tree. “Hey.”
The Vulcan woman stepped forward to stand beside him and regard the dogwood. “Time is of the essence, so forgive me for being brief. It seems my superiors at Starfleet Intelligence have decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness.”
Quinn couldn’t help but laugh. “Hell, I could’ve told them that five years ago.”
“I don’t think you understand their sentiments,” T’Prynn said. “I’ve been given explicit orders to covertly terminate your life at my earliest opportunity.”
Disarmed by her candor, he wrinkled his brow as his lips curled into a crooked half-smile, half-grimace. “You don’t say.” He let out a snort of cynical amusement and wondered if maybe this wasn’t a blessing in disguise. “Can I at least trust you to make it quick and painless?”
“I have no intention of obeying this order,” she said. She discreetly slipped a modestly sized vinyl-wrapped packet into his right hand. “I have prepared a new identity for you. It is complete with a long history of good credit, solid employment, shifting residences on several different worlds, and an education similar to the one you earned in your youth.”
He sneaked a look at the black-wrapped package in his hand. “And what am I supposed to do with this? Apply for a loan? I think a few folks around here might still recognize me.”
T’Prynn seemed mildly irked by his reaction. “Do not be obtuse, Mister Quinn. I have arranged for you to be smuggled aboard a colony ship leaving in an hour from Docking Bay Twenty-nine. It will carry you beyond the periphery of explored space, to the far frontier.” She looked back at the tree. “Inside your travel packet is a credit chip encoded with a small fortune. Budgeted wisely, it should be more than enough to finance your new life in exile.”
It sounded as if she had thought of almost everything. He eyed her skeptically. “What about my biometric profile? Won’t it trip me up if someone scans my DNA or my retina?”