Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice

by James Swallow

  The Titan’s first officer wandered into the lower levels of the institute’s main complex, a building that had stood on this site for more than four centuries. Great glass panels rising high over her head held back thousands of gallons of seawater, and beyond them she could see humans in wetsuits and one native Arcadian drifting back and forth. Amid the divers were a pod of dolphins, some of them wearing manipulator waldoes in order to operate a waterproof data console.

  “I have no idea what they’re all working on,” said Will Riker, “but it’s fascinating to watch.” He was sitting on an observation bench, an overcoat folded across his lap.

  “Never been much of a swimmer myself,” Vale noted, glancing around as she approached.

  “You should try it,” Riker told her. “It’s liberating, in a way. Like being in zero-gee, but . . . different somehow.” He glanced up. “Did you know we had cetaceans on board Enterprise for a while?”

  “You mean, like them?” Vale pointed at the dolphins.

  Riker nodded. “The thing I remember the most? They love bad jokes.”

  She sat. “So. Did you ask me here to make small talk about fish, or was there another reason, sir?”

  “Mammals, not fish,” Riker corrected. “We need to have a conversation,” he went on.

  “Here?” Vale asked. “I was kind of hoping I’d get to see your new office.”

  “I wanted a more relaxed location.” He glanced away, and for the first time, Vale noticed a nervous-looking Caitian in a lieutenant’s uniform loitering some distance away. He was eyeing the glass barrier with what looked like both suspicion and curiosity. “Mister Ssura’s my new aide-de-camp,” explained Riker. “Comes with the job.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “We’ll see,” Riker muttered. “Look, Chris, you know I trust my instincts. I’m only just starting to find the edges of this, but I’m certain that Titan’s return home and my sudden promotion are more than just a reaction to the turmoil of recent days. Right now, I’m trying to put the pieces together, but I can’t be sure that what’s happened has been because someone wants me here, or because someone doesn’t want me somewhere else.”

  “The Andorian situation.” Vale weighed the words as she said them. “Even before the shooting, that was a mess. If Titan has been called home because of that—”

  “You think we would have been told right off the bat,” Riker finished. “For now, the fallout from the president’s assassination is casting a pall over everything. And you know me. I can’t stand idly by, warming a chair with my backside while things go to hell.” He sighed. “Nobody is giving me answers, so I’m going to get them myself.” He tapped the rank tab on his collar. “I have this. I see no better reason to start using it.”

  “Oh, I know that look,” she said, brushing back a stray white thread of her hair with a finger.

  “What look?”

  “The ‘I’m gonna put my shoulder to this and push it out of the damn way’ look. Ask Deanna. She knows the one. ‘The Full Riker,’ that’s what the rest of the officers call it.”

  “So noted.” He leaned back and gave her a nod. “I’m cutting you new orders, Number One.” Riker pulled a padd from a pocket in the coat and handed it to her. On the device’s small screen, Vale saw the image of a Starfleet Nova-class science vessel. “This is the U.S.S. Lionheart, a medical cruiser. Your new command, as of thirteen hundred hours today. You’ll keep your rank but serve as brevet captain for the duration of the assignment.”

  A hundred different responses flashed through her mind at once, but all she said was “Oh.”

  Riker gave her a quizzical look. “Oh? I give you a starship command and that’s what you have to say?”

  “So not the Titan, then?”

  He grinned. “Wait your turn, Chris. I’m not done with her yet. And not with you, either. This isn’t permanent. You’re going to be a caretaker CO. Lionheart has already been assigned to a new commander, Captain Ainsworth. But he’s out at Starbase 47. You’re going to take his new ship to him.”

  She frowned at the padd. “Permission to speak freely, Admiral?”

  “When have you ever done otherwise, Commander Vale?” Riker’s response was wry.

  “If this is some kind of attempt to keep me out of harm’s way, you can forget it.”

  “Perish the thought,” he retorted. “You’re doing this for me because it’s a long way from Sol to Starbase 47. And along the way . . .” He let the sentence hang.

  “I take it back,” she said quickly. “So what am I really looking for?”

  When Riker spoke again, his voice was low and firm. “I want to know exactly what happened on Andor. I don’t want the paper-thin explanations that are circulating around Starfleet Command and not the slant on things that Velk is putting out into the media. You’re going to find out for me.” He paused. “I’m putting you on the Lionheart because that’s not going to draw too much attention. Once you’re out there, I want you to look into this situation with Julian Bashir. Find out where he’s being held, if you can. The longer this goes on, the more I want to hear Bashir’s side of the story. Something isn’t right here. This goes beyond issues of Starfleet protocol and Federation security.”

  Vale nodded. She felt the same way, but she couldn’t accept this without voicing her own misgivings. “Admiral . . . Will. You know I’d follow you to Hades and back if you gave the word. I trust you.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “Shady orders? Doing an end-run around Admiral Akaar and the rest of the admiralty board? You’ve been in that nice office less than a week and already you’re bending the rules. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I am saying you’d better be right.”

  “My name is on the authorization for those orders, Chris. No one else’s.”

  She shook her head, staring into the depths of the tank. “That’s not what I mean. Just think about this; if someone inside the fleet or the council is manipulating things, using you and the Titan as game pieces . . .” Vale gestured with the padd. “Maybe what you’re doing right here is what they want you to do.”

  Riker was silent for a long time. Then abruptly he stood up, pulling on the coat. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” he said, beckoning to Lieutenant Ssura as he prepared to leave.

  “First Tuvok and now me, huh?” she asked as an aside, getting up from the bench. “I should have guessed.”

  Riker’s hand went out to halt her before she could turn away. “What about Tuvok?”

  “He was given detachment orders yesterday, took off without a word. High-security stuff, way above my clearance level. I thought it was from you. . . .”

  “No.” He looked troubled. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  Christine felt that chill again. “Okay, now I’m starting to think you might be right about someone pulling strings.”

  He paused. “I’ll look into it. In the meantime, proceed as ordered. Clear skies and good hunting, Commander.”

  “Thank you, sir. And watch your back, Admiral.” Vale tapped her combadge. “One to beam up.”

  Her last image of her captain and her friend was of his face, set in a grim and uncertain cast; then a humming white light whisked her away.

  * * *

  Nog prowled the corridors of the Snipe like a caged treni cat, uncomfortable with his new surroundings and skittish into the bargain. He kept fidgeting, and it had taken a while for him to figure out why.

  It was the uniform—or rather, it was the lack of it. In its own way, his reaction was ironic. Back when he had first followed his ambitions to the Academy, the awkward cut of Starfleet cadet grays had not hung well on his small frame, and he remembered constantly fiddling with the cuffs, the collar, the itchy head skirt. Always ill at ease being the one Ferengi among countless aliens.

  But somewhere along the line that had changed, and no matter how hard he tried to pin down exactly when, Nog couldn’t remember when being in uniform had gone from feeling odd to feeling
normal. So much now that it dismayed him to be wandering the decks of a starship in anything other than the mustard undershirt, black tunic, and trousers. It just wasn’t right to be on duty and out of colors. In the end, he had made do by replicating a slate-gray freight crew jumpsuit that vaguely resembled his old cadet’s gear. The Snipe’s name and registration were emblazoned across his back, and wearing it Nog felt like he could blend in. Almost.

  The collar was scratchy, though.

  He wanted to pretend that he was just wandering aimlessly, but that was a lie. There was another thing that was bothering him, another itch he couldn’t scratch. The Snipe didn’t ring true to him.

  It was hard to put it into words. Nog had no doubt that if he’d been here with, say, Chief O’Brien, the other engineer would have understood what he was getting at immediately. The flow of the ship was off.

  Without being too metaphysical about the whole thing, Nog was someone who believed that a vessel, an engine, a machine of any kind, had a sort of rhythm to it. Not like music exactly, not even like mathematics, but just a sense of action and motion that—when it was working right—was close to perfection. He’d heard Montgomery Scott say something similar back on board the Challenger before everything that had happened there. It was the same kind of sense that allowed an engineer to sense the subtle vibrations in a ship’s systems, sometimes before the dials and gauges showed anything awry; an affinity for technology, perhaps.

  And Nog’s affinity had been telling him Snipe was out of balance since the moment he had boarded her. Finally, he couldn’t ignore the nagging sensation anymore and slipped away into the lower decks to sniff around. He let his ears catch the oscillations of the freighter’s subsystems, mapping their patterns in his mind’s eye.

  In short order, he found himself at the point where the starboard engine pylon connected the main hull and the number two warp nacelle. More than anything, he wanted to climb in there and take a look around at the innards of the faster-than-light drive, but it was a risky thing to do while at warp speed, and picking the locks on the access hatches was likely to raise red flags on the Snipe’s bridge. Instead he peered at the screens of untended system monitors, watching the pulsing of the warp bubble insulating the ship from normal space-time.

  It wasn’t long before he found something odd. The engines were being throttled; rather than operating at their peak efficiency, their function was being deliberately retarded by a series of restrictor subroutines built into the system. That in itself was unusual enough, until Nog asked himself why. A ship of this class and tonnage typically topped out with engines capable of a warp-six cruising speed, maybe with enough power to make a short sprint to warp seven if they were pushed hard. But Snipe’s engines were currently running at a steady six-point-two, and the power curve showed that they were almost idling. The Ferengi ran the numbers in his head and estimated that in the speed stakes, the freighter was probably capable of giving a Defiant-class starship a run for its money.

  Once he understood what he was seeing on the Snipe, Nog began to find more patterns, more anomalies. Starfleet regulations meant that civilian craft could carry only a small number of low-level offensive systems and non-military shield emitters, but as he backtracked through the lower compartments, Nog picked out conduits and power trains that shouldn’t have been there. He saw electroplasma taps and channels for phaser coolant that at first glance went nowhere and did nothing. They were hidden well, good enough to fool someone who didn’t give them a second look, but now the young engineer was seeing them everywhere. Was it possible that Snipe’s bland hull hid additional phaser emplacements and other military-specification hardware? It seemed so.

  The detail that finally confirmed it for him was the shoddy appearance of the transport ship. The rusty, patched hull, the grimy interior spaces and flaking paintwork, all gave the impression of a vessel held together more by good wishes and repair tape than by stem bolts and alloy. But it was fake.

  There was decay on the Snipe, but it was layered on like a cosmetic. Making certain he wasn’t being observed, Nog scrambled up into a channel bus and put his face close to what appeared to be a corroded section of EPS conduit. The pipe was perfectly intact but cowled with a redundant outer sheath that gave the appearance of oxidized, aged metal.

  Inside and out, the freighter was a falsehood, one thing masquerading as another. Nog had heard of such ships before; in the Ferengi Alliance there was a tradition of Marauders fitted with sections of frangible outer hull and sensor baffles, designed in such a way that they would resemble slow, poorly armed cargo barges. Thus, they could move freely and not draw attention to any deployment of military might. In addition, pirates and rival mercantile clans who swept in to prey on such vessels would get a nasty shock when their target turned out to be a gunship bristling with disruptor cannons. The Ferengi called this kind of ship a Qardok, a word that had no direct translation into Federation Standard; the closest approximation in the human language was Gotcha!

  “What are you—”

  “Doing up there?”

  His attention fixed on the conduit, the sudden sound of the two trilling voices from below him caught Nog totally off guard. He jerked and banged the top of his skull on a panel, a hiss of pain escaping his lips.

  Dropping back to the deck, he found himself standing between the two Bynars, their unblinking eyes watching him intently. “I was just . . . uh . . .”

  “What were you—”

  “Looking for?”

  “Nothing,” he lied, then quickly appended something vaguely truthful. “I was bored. Wandering. Examining . . . stuff.” He gave a weak, snaggletoothed grin. “Those things.”

  “Given what we know—”

  “Of the Ferengi character—”

  “It seems unlikely you were—”

  “Trying to sabotage the ship.”

  Nog’s head went back and forth between the two of them as if he were a spectator at a springball match. Were they being sarcastic? Do Bynars even understand what sarcasm is? The pair of them glanced at each other and exchanged a string of high-speed code blips. Nog considered that to be somewhat rude, like sharing secret whispers in front of someone. Then they were looking at him again, and his fake smirk faded.

  Although he liked the fact that having a pair of Bynars aboard the ship meant he wasn’t the shortest person on the Snipe, Nog had to admit he found them slightly unsettling, with their odd mirror-image clothing and strange, birdlike movements. What struck him the most was the silver nub of a computing implant sitting on the side of their domed skulls. Having dealt with computer hardware of many kinds for years, and having experienced some of the worst effects a computer malfunction could produce, Nog found the idea of having something similar wired directly into his cortex by choice disquieting.

  “Do you wish to—”

  “Ask us a question?”

  He took the opportunity to change the subject. “Do you two ever play cards? Tongo? Poker? I’m guessing with a neural implant, you must be pretty good.”

  They both nodded in unison. “We are banned—”

  “From gambling.”

  “Risa.”

  “Orion Casinos.”

  “Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet.”

  “We win—”

  “Too much latinum.”

  Nog started away down the passageway, the two Bynars trailing after him. “Oh. Shame.”

  “We have an alternate—”

  “Revenue stream. Our skills are—”

  “In demand.”

  The engineer was still considering what that could mean when the Snipe’s intercom chimed and Kincade’s voice crackled through the air.

  “All team members to the mess hall immediately. Mission briefing in ten minutes.”

  * * *

  The transport had dropped out of warp in the time it took Nog to climb back up to the main deck, and he and the Bynars were the last to arrive for the meeting. The other seven members of their erstwhile tea
m sat or stood around the edges of the compartment. There was a subtle divide between those who were in Starfleet and those who were not, the former grouped on one side of the room, the latter on the other.

  Nog took a seat on the bench next to Tuvok, giving the Vulcan a nod of greeting. “Commander.” He wanted to tell him what he suspected about the Snipe’s secrets, but not within earshot of the others. Across the table, Tom Riker was sipping from a mug of raktajino, and the Zeon mercenary Ashur was toying with a small throwing blade.

  “Mister Nog,” Tuvok replied.

  Ashur grunted as he watched their exchange. “Your pardon if I don’t salute,” he sneered. “I don’t have a fancy uniform in my closet like you.” He waved a thick finger, taking in Tuvok, Nog, and the Bolian pilot seated nearby.

  “Saluting is not a compulsory protocol for Starfleet officers and crew,” Tuvok noted. He was either ignoring or unaware of the Zeon’s belligerent tone.

  Ashur was going to say something else, but then Kincade walked past the table and put down a padd with a hard clack of plastic on metal. “Okay. We’re all here. Let’s begin.” She shot the Bynars a look. “Is the comm relay ready?”

  They nodded in unison, and both of them reached for a dormant console in a corner of the chamber. Nog had thought it was just an entertainment module, but at the touch of a few switches the lights in the mess hall dimmed and an emitter head dropped out of a hidden compartment in the ceiling.

  There was a white flash, and suddenly a cloud of holographic pixels formed into a humanoid shape, there in the open center of the room. For the first couple of seconds, the hologram was indistinct—a vague, ghostly form of indeterminate gender or species—but then by degrees it took on layers of detail. Clothing defined itself, then facial characteristics, sharpening until at last it appeared that a stocky and unsmiling Tellarite was standing among them.

  The face of the civilian was vaguely familiar to the engineer, and when Tuvok said his name, Nog blinked in surprise.