by David Mack
Worf lunged and threw himself against the end of the bin. Its weight was prodigious, and the effort required to shift it even a meter to expose the grate left him howling with exertion and agony. Funneling all his rage and frustration into one crazed push, he displaced the bin. The friction of metal on pavement filled the alleyway with an ear-splitting screech.
As soon as the grate was exposed, Worf leapt at the opening and poked his head down through it. He saw pipes, larger pipes—and an underground catacomb of maintenance passages. With a growl of annoyance, he pushed himself back to his feet.
“Worf to Enterprise. Suspect has moved underground, into the maintenance tunnels.”
“Acknowledged,” Choudhury replied on the open channel. “Delta Team, you’re up.”
• • •
The subterranean labyrinth of maintenance tunnels was immaculate and well lit, but that was no comfort to Lieutenant Aneta Šmrhová as she led Delta Team in a leap-frogging advance toward a confrontation with a subject who had already outrun two other teams and evaded one of the Enterprise’s best sharpshooters. The underground passageways were stiflingly hot and arid, the result of thermal radiation leaking from massive steam mains.
She reached the front of the squad and held up a fist, halting the rest of her team while she listened and checked the corners. There was no sign of activity. A glance at the tactical display mounted on top of her phaser rifle indicated that the point at which the subject had breached the maintenance network lay ahead twenty-nine meters to her right. There were no life signs on her weapon’s sensors, but minute changes in air pressure lit up the motion tracker. Something man-sized was on the move, and it was close. The dark-haired tactical officer looked back at her team and with silent hand signals deployed them forward in a covering formation.
Stealing forward, she glimpsed the markings on various conduits and bundles that were packed along the concrete walls. Delta Team was surrounded by countless junctions and relays that governed the capital city’s water, power, and communications.
Two soft snaps of her fingers drew her team’s attention, and she ordered in quick gestures that all weapons be reduced to light stun. Can’t risk any collateral damage down here, she realized. All it would take is one stray shot to knock out the city’s whole—
Pitch-black darkness fell without warning, followed by the dwindling hum of generators and other key municipal systems losing power. With a short, sharp whistle, Šmrhová directed her people to fire up the targeting beacons mounted atop their rifles. Shafts of pure white light sliced through the sepulchral gloom. Šmrhová whispered and hoped her combadge was able to pick up her voice clearly. “Šmrhová to Enterprise. We just lost power down here.”
“Acknowledged,” came the reply, much louder than Šmrhová’s discreet sotto voce. “The whole block just went dark. Be advised, Romeo Team is converging on your position from bearing two-seven-one.”
“Copy that.” With quick gestures she sent her team around a corner to the right, in a bid to trap the subject between her squad and Romeo Team. Her motion tracker confirmed the target was only one passage away and about to run headlong into a whole lot of heavily armed—
Shrieks of phaser fire and howls of pain echoed wildly in the claustrophobic maintenance passages, directly ahead of Šmrhová and her team. A flurry of motion overwhelmed the readout of her tracking device. She ran forward. “Move up!” The clamor of battle and the cries of the wounded escalated, and then just as suddenly fell silent. Heedless of the danger, she sprinted around the final corner—then she tripped over a body and nearly fell on her face.
Catching her balance with a lunging step, she swept her beacon over the fallen. All she saw were people in Starfleet uniforms. Then she heard the rising whine of something building up to detonation. As her team logjammed in the passageway behind her, she looked over her shoulder and pointed at her ear. “You all hear that?” Nods of affirmation. “Fall back!”
A mad scramble of retreat was obstructed by a clumsy series of collisions. Šmrhová and her team had just ducked back under cover when something ahead of them detonated with a low thump—but little else. No flash, no fire, no great sonic effect. Only when she opened her eyes did Šmrhová realize her rifle’s targeting beacon and tracking device had gone dead.
She tapped her combadge. “Šmrhová to Enterprise!” There was no response, not even the mournful chirp of a dysfunctional combadge. Subspace pulse, she realized. Damn it!
The Czech-born tactical officer led her team forward, desperate to stay in the hunt despite having been left behind in the dark. “Move out!” They sprinted past the fallen members of Romeo Team, through an open doorway—and then Šmrhová slammed to a halt. Her team piled up at her back with a clatter of colliding rifles and stumbling footsteps. Ahead of them lay a wide-open section of the penumbrous underground maze. Despite all her efforts to discern fresh sounds from the reverberations of the space, she couldn’t hear any footfalls from their escaping subject, and her eyes were unable to pierce the dark curtain that surrounded them.
Mumbling curses under her breath, Šmrhová turned back to face her team. “We need to find the closest route to the surface. Tell me the second any of you gets a comm signal.”
She knew she would catch hell for losing the subject when she returned to the Enterprise. All she could do now was hope no one died for her mistake.
• • •
There was nothing to see through the rifle scope but a colorful flurry of fear-driven motion and patches of impenetrable white fog, but Lieutenant Austin Braddock kept on looking, hoping to catch sight of the unknown subject, or “unsub,” if he made the mistake of returning to the main street. Pivoting his telescopic sight from one intersection to the next, Braddock heard security chief Choudhury’s urgent query over the comm: “Does anyone have eyes on the target?”
“Braddock, negative,” he said, kicking off a round robin of bad news from the other sniper-spotters on the rooftop. When the collective check-in was done, he asked, “Any updates from Delta Team?” Seconds passed as he scoped another row of faces and came up empty.
Choudhury replied, “No contact with Delta Team. They don’t answer hails.” That was bad news. Braddock knew it; everyone did. Seconds later, his fears were confirmed by the security chief’s next round of orders. “Oscar and Sierra teams, redeploy into the tunnels and meet up with Delta Team. Tango and Victor teams, start a grid sweep. All other units, widen the cordon to two kilometers. Spotters, fall back to position two.”
As soon as the order came down, Braddock heard the Roanoke fire up its engines. He broke down the duopod support for his rifle and shouldered the weapon for the short jog to the runabout. Ignoring the painful crick in his lower back, he pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the ship.
The next thing he noticed was his fellow sharpshooters, all sprawled in various awkward poses on the roof, either stunned or dead, their weapons at their sides. Braddock’s imagination reeled. He’d heard no shots or sounds of conflict, felt no inkling of a sonic attack, smelled no toxins in the air. He waved to the pilot to power down the engines and get on the comm—and that’s when he saw the unsub through the runabout’s cockpit windshield, his youthful face framed by wild white hair, his eyes gleaming with excitement and mischief.
A whine and a roar kicked up a swirl of dust from the rooftop, and the Roanoke began its vertical ascent with a subtle pivoting of its nose.
Braddock hefted his rifle for a snap shot at the runabout.
The compact ship fired its phasers. An excruciating screech rent the air and forced Braddock to drop his weapon to cover his ears. Something off to his left exploded, peppering him with debris and scalding him with steam as a prodigious cloud billowed across the roof, slammed into him, and knocked him flat on his back.
It took a few seconds for him to regain his wits and hack out between rasping coughs, “Enterprise! This is Braddock! Do you copy?”
“This is Enterprise. Go ahead.”
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“Target has hijacked the Roanoke.”
• • •
Picard listened with mounting concern as the manhunt went increasingly awry. To his left, Choudhury pivoted nimbly between three separate consoles in a desperate bid to track all the data coming in from the pursuit on the planet’s surface and coordinate an effective response.
“Stand by on phasers,” Choudhury said. “If I can take control of the runabout remotely, we won’t need to . . .” Her sentence trailed off as new information appeared on her console. The svelte, no-nonsense security chief was visibly chagrined. “The subject disabled the runabout’s transponder. Now we have to shoot it down. Dygan, lock phasers on the runabout. One-quarter power. We just want to knock it down, not blow it up.”
“Target’s accelerating,” the Cardassian said. “Moving out of phaser range.”
At the helm, Faur reacted ahead of the order. “Increasing orbital velocity,” she said. “We’ll recover line of sight for targeting in eight seconds.”
Lieutenant T’Ryssa Chen spun around from the master systems display. “Power surges on the planet’s surface! Someone’s charging an ion cannon!”
“It’s Admiral Andell’s garrison,” Picard said, bolting from his chair and hurrying back to join Chen at the MSD. “Hail him! Tell him to stand down before—”
“Too late,” Chen said, pointing at a screen packed with ominous sensor readings. “They’ve fired on the runabout.” Checking the latest intel, she added, “Direct hit.”
Dreading what he’d see next, Picard returned to his chair and faced the main viewer. “On-screen, Lieutenant.”
A high-orbit vantage of the smoldering runabout appeared on the forward display, flanked by flight telemetry relayed from several ground-control stations. The badly damaged small starship corkscrewed at a shallow angle through the lower atmosphere, leaving a thick twist of black smoke in its erratic wake. Moments later it cut a fiery scar across the landscape as it crashed in an unpopulated marsh several dozen kilometers shy of the seacoast.
Picard shot a disapproving glance at Choudhury, who seemed to need no reminding that this was not the outcome they had hoped for. She worked quickly at her console. “Locking in the coordinates of the crash site.” A tap of her finger opened an intraship channel. “Fire and rescue teams, beam down and secure the site. Signal when it’s ready for evidence recovery.” Another tap switched her outgoing channel to the teams on the surface. “Alpha and Delta teams, stand by to beam to the runabout’s crash site as soon as we get the fire under control.”
“Acknowledged,” Worf answered. “Standing by.”
The Enterprise team had followed the rules of engagement to the letter, Picard knew, and he didn’t blame Choudhury for the operation’s outcome. Someone else would have to take the blame for this. He got up and walked toward his ready room with a steady bearing. It had been a while since he had been in a position to dress down a superior officer. He planned to enjoy it.
• • •
The hum and glow of the transporter beam faded away, leaving Worf to squint into the searing glare of portable searchlights and wrinkle his nose at the fetid stench of the marshlands across which the Roanoke had gouged a kilometer-long wound.
A firefighting team in soot-stained full-body gear trudged away from the mangled wreck, most of them toting heavy equipment over their shoulders. Within ten meters of the downed craft, the temperature was so extreme that Worf couldn’t move any closer. All he could do was stare at the pillar of jet-black smoke climbing into the sky from the ship’s broken-open midsection. At least the heat and smoke mask the stench of this forsaken place.
He waved over the chief of the firefighting team. The brawny noncom joined him and removed his headgear, revealing a face made for going to blazes: splotchy skin, thinning hair, crooked teeth, and eyes ringed by dark circles of fatigue. He sounded tired. “Yes, sir?”
“The pilot.” Worf nodded at the runabout. “He’s dead?”
Raising one grayed eyebrow, the chief petty officer shook his head. “There is no pilot. That thing was empty when it went down.”
Šmrhová stepped up beside Worf and asked the chief, “Could the pilot have beamed off the ship before it was shot down?”
“Anything’s possible,” the chief said. “As soon as we cut the flight recorder out of the slag, you’ll know as much as we do. Till then . . . I need a drink. Excuse me, sirs.” The chief waved good-bye and departed with a stiff gait, despite not having been formally dismissed.
The XO masked his anger with solemn intensity and tapped his combadge to deliver the bad news. “Worf to Enterprise. Our subject has escaped.”
4
As soon as the door of the Enterprise’s observation lounge closed behind Captain Picard, his senior officers started talking.
“Whoever that was,” Worf said, circling the table to his chair, “it was not B-4.”
Choudhury took a seat opposite Worf. “He was a step ahead of us all the way.”
“More like two steps ahead,” Šmrhová concurred as she sat beside Choudhury. Doctor Beverly Crusher circled the end of the table to sit beside Worf.
Picard claimed the chair at the table’s head. “How did he gain the upper hand?”
The driven young tactical officer wore a look of concentration. “If I had to guess,” she said with a mild Slavic accent, “I’d say he tapped into our comm frequencies. He knew to run just before we called for the transporter lock; he waited until the spotters lost sight of him before he went underground; and he successfully ambushed two different security teams.”
The security chief seemed doubtful. “None of the vids show him with a combadge, or anything else he might have used to tap our comms.”
Worf scowled. “If he was an android, he might have such a system built into his brain.”
That speculation roused Picard’s concern. “Do you think he’s an android?”
“Yes, sir.” The Klingon picked up a padd and used it to call up an orbital view of the alleyway between Merchant and Foundry streets. “He eluded pursuit here by slipping through a grate into the maintenance passageways under the streets. This grate was covered by a fully loaded metal trash bin that I found extremely difficult to move. When I did move it, it caused a great deal of noise as it dragged over the pavement. But the subject made no such sound during his escape, which suggests he lifted its end, held it up as he opened the grate, and lowered it on top of the open grate as he made his descent—all without making a sound. To do so would require a tremendous amount of strength.”
The implications of Worf’s account troubled Picard. He reclined and considered the facts for a moment. “Such a feat would be within the capabilities of most Soong-type androids. Are we absolutely certain this wasn’t B-4?”
“Yes,” Worf said. “I looked into his eyes. It was not him.”
Šmrhová appeared confused. “How could you tell? If they all look alike, I mean.”
The first officer searched for the right words. “If you had ever met B-4, you would understand. He was . . . simple. Guile was not in his nature. The person I saw in the square . . . the man who looked back at me . . . was no stranger to deception.”
Choudhury threw a question out to the group. “Could it have been a Changeling? They could easily mimic a Soong android, and they’d have no trouble lifting that bin.”
Crusher shook her head. “If it was a Changeling, alarms would be going off all over the planet. Sensor networks in most major cities and starports throughout the Federation now have detection protocols for Changeling life signs.”
“Assume for the moment that we’re dealing with an android,” Picard said. “If, as Worf says, it’s not B-4 . . . what is it?”
Tapping a slender, swarthy index finger on the tabletop, Choudhury projected a pensive demeanor. “Is there any chance this might be Lore?”
Worf’s stern features grew even more tense. “I do not see how. His positronic brain was destroyed when the Enterprise-D
’s saucer crashed on Veridian III nearly thirteen years ago.”
The assembled officers seemed stymied. Picard broke the silence. “Then it stands to reason that we’re dealing with a previously unknown Soong-type android—one whose identity, allegiance, capabilities, and motivations are all currently unknown to us.”
“Not entirely unknown,” Šmrhová said. “We’ve confirmed that this android has great strength and agility, can mimic human life-readings, and might have a native ability to eavesdrop on subspace comm frequencies. If his other senses are also enhanced, it stands to reason that we might be up against a very formidable opponent.”
Picard nodded. “Excellent points, Lieutenant.”
Casting a confused look at Worf and Picard, Choudhury said, “Sirs, I thought all the Soong-type androids had been accounted for.”
“We’ve thought so many times,” Picard said with a self-deprecating smile. “Before we met Lore. And Juliana Tainer. And B-4.” He breathed a sigh of resignation. “I often marvel at how prolific Doctor Soong really was.”
Heads turned as the lounge’s starboard door swished open, and La Forge strode in, holding high a padd. “We’ve finished analyzing the data from the runabout’s flight recorder—what was left of it, anyway.” He stepped in front of the master systems display and called up the engineering report on the main screen. “Our hijacker fired a phaser directly into the recording unit about sixteen seconds into his flight, just before the runabout slipped out of our view”—he highlighted a segment of the recorder’s data—“and just after the pilot powered up the emergency transporter. But before you ask, we couldn’t recover any coordinates. He put those in after he shot the recorder. So I can deduce that he beamed out, but I can’t say to where.”
Leaning forward, Šmrhová narrowed her eyes as she studied the data. “He clearly knew he couldn’t outrun us if he tried to break orbit. And it looks like he chose the only course out of the city that would make sure the runabout ditched in an unpopulated area.”