by David Stern
“You bewitched him, Codruta. Those vows mean nothing.”
“Gurgis will have your head.”
“Gurgis is not here. And I am in charge of the Singhino.”
Liyan glared. “You are a fool.”
Boyce wasn’t sure if he should jump in or not—if Liyan wanted him to speak up, to certify that Gurgis was not only fine physically but in full possession of his mental faculties. Probably, the doctor inferred, for the first time in quite a while.
Tell the one who whelped you I am no longer in her thrall.
Boyce could see why the tallith was desperate for gamina—a gamina that would work.
Before he could speak, though, the Singhino onscreen before them leaned forward.
“We are through with talk, Codruta,” he said. The screen went dark.
Liyan remained standing, glaring at the screen.
“They are moving out of sensor range once more, Majesty,” one of her officers said.
“No doubt rejoining the remainder of their ships. Preparing for another attack.” Those words came from an older male, one Boyce hadn’t noticed before, a male dressed in a simple gray coverall, who rose now from a seat behind the tallith’s command chair.
“Fools. Ready the image projector,” Liyan said. “We will bring them to heel once more.”
She was smiling. She was, Boyce noticed, the only one.
The older male spoke again. “Majesty, may I remind you, the journey to the Federation starbase has taken us far from our own lines of support. We remain several days’ journey away from such territories at maximum warp. Given the tactical situation, would it not be prudent—”
Liyan spun around. “You are questioning my orders, Gorlea?”
The older man shook his head. “No, Majesty. Of course not. But—”
“I am tallith!” she roared, and slapped the armrest of her chair with an open hand. “They will be brought to heel. All who disobey will be brought to heel. Do you understand? All of you?”
She looked around the command center and was met for a second by stony, absolute silence.
“I understand,” Gorlea said, and bowed his head.
The others followed suit.
“Human.” Liyan turned her gaze on him then. “You will return to the lab. You will sleep there if necessary. You will find a way to duplicate this serum!”
Boyce nodded and bowed his head as well. He didn’t dare ask Or what?
All he wanted to do was get off the command center—and away from the tallith—as soon as possible.
Judging from the looks on the faces around him, the others felt much the same way.
He made a quick stop at the medical wing first, intending to fill Hoto in on what had just happened, what he’d witnessed, not just the Singhino’s apparent determination to attack the Codruta but Liyan’s behavior. The door to the room he and the lieutenant had been sharing was open. Hoto was standing across the chamber, looking at a computer terminal, deep in thought. She hadn’t even, Boyce realized, heard him come in.
He started toward her. “Lieutenant.”
She looked up, surprise on her face. “Dr. Boyce.”
Her voice came from behind him. Boyce stopped in his tracks. He was staring, the doctor realized, at Hoto’s reflection, her image in a mirror at the far end of the treatment room. He should have realized that instantly; the sleeve of her missing arm, pinned next to her tunic, was on the wrong side.
Mirror image. The phrase, for some reason, struck a chord in his mind. It lingered there for a second and then vanished.
“Why are you here?”
He turned to face Hoto, who sounded not just surprised to see him but affronted.
“Is everything all right, Lieutenant?”
“Is everything …” She took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. You surprised me. I was not expecting anyone.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He understood her reaction even more when he came around to see what she was looking at on the terminal.
A blueprint of the ship. A cross-section of the entire Orion vessel—the label Karkon’s Wing on the top of the screen—with thin, multicolored lines running in every direction on the diagram.
“What’s this?”
“The ship’s power grid. I have been studying it for some time. I have determined that an initial overload of the processors here and here”—she pointed—“will trigger a sequence of events that will give us time to reach the nearest shuttlecraft.”
“You’re really going to destroy the ship.”
“No,” she said. “My intent is simply to cripple the vessel, in particular its weapons and sensor systems, thus allowing us to escape in the shuttlecraft.”
“They’ll be a sitting target.”
“Sir?”
“Karkon’s Wing.” He filled her in on what had just occurred, Liyan’s outburst, the Singhinos’ apparent determination to attack.
She was frowning by the time he finished. Her hands raced over the controls; the power grid vanished, replaced by a map of space.
Hoto studied it and shook her head. “There are no vessels in sensor range at the moment.”
“No. The ship moved away as soon as they finished talking. But according to one of Liyan’s officers, there are several nearby, within striking range.”
“We will have to act immediately, in the next few hours.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible. For one thing, I’m going to be in the lab. And you’ll be here. For another . . .” He nodded toward the door. “The guards. There’s at least one with me all the time, and I know there are two at the entrance to the medical wing.”
“I will handle the guards,” Hoto said, in a very matter-of-fact way. “You must use your time in the lab productively.”
“Excuse me?”
“Proof. We must secure proof of the image projector’s existence. Proof that the Orions were behind the attack on Starbase Eighteen. Our testimony will mean little without hard evidence to corroborate it. One moment.”
Hoto crossed the room to the diagnostic cot she’d been sleeping on. She reached underneath it and pulled out a small container. Using her remaining hand, she pried open the lid and set the container down on the cot. From it, she pulled out a tattered blue piece of cloth. Her Starfleet uniform, Boyce realized. Holding the cloth flat with the heel of her hand, she pulled the Sciences insignia off her tunic.
“What are you doing?” Boyce asked.
Instead of answering, she held the insignia up to her mouth and bit it.
There was a cracking sound, and the insignia popped open.
“Here,” Hoto said, holding out the back half of it. A small piece of blue metal.
“What’s this?”
“A data card. It should have sufficient storage capacity to copy the required information from the laboratory computer.”
“Funny place to keep a data card.”
Hoto smiled. “As Mr. Spock is always telling us, it is important to be prepared.”
Boyce shook his head. Spock the Vulcan boy scout.
He took the card and put it into his medikit.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
Twelve hours, approximately, was the timeframe they settled on for Hoto to trigger the system overload. When the power failures began, Boyce was to make his way back to the medical wing. The lieutenant would be waiting there for him; they would journey together to the ship’s other, operative shuttlebay, on the far side of the vessel. Climb in, and make their escape to Federation—or at least neutral—territory.
It sounded easy. Logical. Straightforward. At least, back in the treatment room.
Standing here in the lab, in front of the LeKarz, two guards watching his every move, Boyce gave it slightly less than a snowball’s chance in Vulcan of working.
The doctor turned his attention back to the data screen in front of him. He had been asking himself a lot of ‘what if’s’ these last few hours, hoping to stimulate his own thinking, hoping to sen
d his mind scurrying down avenues that Zandar and her predecessors hadn’t tried. Right now, he was considering the reactivity of chemicals within the serum besides gamina. The serum contained many of the same components as the universal-blood-donor packet—albumin analogues, other proteins, trace amounts of magnesium. Boyce had been running a series of simulations on the LeKarz, watching how those substances interacted with each other and gamina. The former series of simulations had been fairly predictable, the latter anything but. The LeKarz was unable to make heads or tails out of gamina’s behavior; it kept outputting the same screen. Internal error. Boyce had traced that error back to a conflict between the system’s database and the modeled molecule.
The gamina in the machine, in other words, was not behaving the way gamina did in real life. It was behaving like gamina-B, the replicated serum.
It wasn’t working.
“Dr. Boyce.”
He turned, and Deleen was standing there.
“How is your work progressing?”
“It’s not.” He lowered his voice so that the guards standing nearby couldn’t hear. “I haven’t learned much of anything new, to tell you the truth.”
She nodded. She didn’t seem surprised by the news. “I have,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you.”
She gestured toward a nearby terminal. Boyce, trying not to glance back at the guards, whose eyes he could feel on him every step of the way, followed her to it. She keyed in a series of commands; data filled the screen. A list of some sort, keyed to a series of numbers.
“These represent a series of recordings made by the sentry, along with associated stardates.”
The sentry. Boyce looked across the bay. “Gozen, you mean?”
“Yes, Gozen.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve been thinking about what happened before—in the command center.”
Boyce understood instantly what she meant: Liyan’s explosion, her temper.
“Go on,” he said.
“The tallith … she has not been herself these last few days. Weeks, even. The decision to attack Starbase Eighteen …” Deleen shook her head. “It was uncharacteristic.”
Boyce didn’t know what to say to that, so he simply nodded.
“And then … I was in my quarters, looking at the storage modules, when I remembered these recordings.” She gestured toward the screen; the list began scrolling past. There had to be hundreds of entries. “I have been viewing them, reviewing them, in light of the tallith’s recent behavior. I want to show some of them to you now, Doctor.”
Deleen keyed in another command; the list stopped scrolling. She touched the screen, one of the entries.
The terminal display went to black.
And then it filled with the image of an Orion male’s face. The sentry Gozen. He was sitting in the command chair of what looked like the bridge of a starship.
“Report from Imperial sentry ship Ligara to the Emperor K’rgon. The Klingons are in retreat, my Lord. Details of the battle. Following our engagement in the Musan system on stardate 211, we pursued the remaining Klingon force across the Denari line—”
Deleen reached forward and paused the recording.
“Stardate 211.” Boyce did the math in his head. “That’s more than two thousand years ago.”
“Yes. According to some of the historical material I found within the storage modules, the sentries were initially posted to all corners of the Empire as commanders of their own vessels. Subsequently, it seems, the decision was made to … isolate them. Here. A later recording.”
She touched the screen once more. Gozen appeared again. No longer on the bridge of a starship, though it was hard to tell exactly where he was, as his face was close to the recording lens.
“Stardate 814.454. The Imperial sentry Gozen, sector ten, reporting to the Emperor’s Council. The potential threat referred to earlier has been eliminated.”
The sentry’s features looked different to Boyce in this recording, thicker, fleshier somehow. As if he’d gained a great deal of weight. His eyes were bloodshot. The veins on his neck stood out like black ropes.
Light reflected off the surface behind him, a faceted metal substance that the doctor recognized now.
“He’s in the shuttle,” Boyce said.
“Yes.” The screen went dark. “And one more.”
Deleen scrolled down the list and touched the last entry in the series. Gozen appeared again. He looked worse—much, much worse. There were deep, dark circles under his eyes. His face was splotchy, blemished. The veins on his forehead stood out. Those on his neck were like steel cables, pulsing beneath the surface of his skin.
“Stardate 834.3. The Imperial sentry Gozen, from the tenth sector, recording.” His voice was husky and drawn. “Re: previous report, civilization in sector Levy Six has achieved impulse flight. Recommended course of action—” The sentry blinked and shook his head. “Recommended course of action,” he said again, and twitched. Then he started to cry. “I cannot do this anymore,” he said, and looked straight into the recorder lens. “I cannot.” He blinked, and the screen went dark.
The two of them were silent a moment.
“The gap between the first two recordings is several hundred years,” Deleen said. “Between the latter two, only a matter of months.”
Boyce nodded. The sentry’s condition had deteriorated rapidly; that much was obvious. His mental condition, in particular.
Resisting once more the urge to look over at the guards, Boyce cleared his throat. “You think this is what’s happening now?” he asked quietly. “To Liyan?”
“Don’t you?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do, Doctor.”
“What happens if the tallith is unable to continue?”
“She must,” Deleen said. “There is no alternative.”
“There have to be provisions for succession. What happens in case of assassination?”
“The Confederacy has a council. Gorlea, whom you saw in the command center—”
“The older officer.”
“He would be in charge. Nominally. But the other clans—the Singhino …”
“What about you?”
“Me?” Deleen shook her head. “No. Succession is not dynastic. Besides which, this is not something I can do. My mother, the tallith, she has held the clans together for seventy-five years, through the force of her personality.”
Personality, Boyce thought. That was one word for it, he supposed.
“The serum, Dr. Boyce. You must find a way to replicate it.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said. And he really didn’t. Even if focused on that alone set aside Hoto’s escape plan and the preparations he was making for it … “Those kinds of things take time.”
“We must gain time, then. Remove the Singhino as a threat.”
“How do you propose we do that?”
“Gurgis,” Deleen said. “Couldn’t you give him something that would make him more pliant, suggestible?”
“I could,” Boyce said. “But the Singhino want to see him, don’t they? And any kind of drug I give him, anything that powerful …”
“They’ll notice. I understand.” Deleen was silent a moment. “It is all falling apart, Doctor. Everything we have achieved. All that the tallith has struggled to do, all that she has fought for.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yes. So am I. All of this …” Deleen gestured at the artifacts in the bay around them. “Will be lost. The Singhino will destroy all of it. Everything we have learned, all the technology we have salvaged from the time of the Second Empire.”
The doctor glanced over at the shuttle; the faceted surface reflected his own face back at him. He flashed on what had happened earlier, when he’d walked into the medical wing and seen Hoto. What he’d thought to be Hoto, rather, what had turned out to be her mirror image. The lieutenant, in the looking glass. Missing a left arm rather than a right.
“
Doctor? Are you all right?” Deleen asked.
“Yes.” He couldn’t get the image out of his mind. Hoto, working one-handed. Looking exactly the same but different.
Gamina, he thought.
“Gamina,” he said out loud.
“What about gamina?”
He turned to Deleen and smiled. “I have an idea.”
TWENTY-SIX
It took him the better part of an hour to detect their presence. It was only by running—and rerunning, not once, not twice, but a half-dozen times—the relevant simulation on the LeKarz and taking nanosecond snapshots of the chemical processes at work that he was, at last, able to find what he was looking for.
“There.” Boyce pointed toward the analysis screen. “There they are.”
“There what are?” Deleen leaned over his shoulder, squinting at the screen.
“Stereoisomers.” he said.
“What?”
“Stereoisomers. Substances that are chemically identical but are structurally—molecularly—mirror images of each other. A left hand and a right.”
“You can tell that from these numbers?”
“The numbers represent the bonding actions that are taking place. You can see they’re flipped here.”
“So that’s why the gamina-B doesn’t work? The molecules are backward?”
He smiled. “It’s a little more complicated than that. But basically, yes, I think so.”
“So if you flip them around …”
“That ought to do the trick, yes. I’ll set up another simulation.”
He got to work. Deleen got him coffee.
Halfway through the cup, the intellectual excitement wore off, and the ambivalence set in. Replicating the immortality serum? Why was he doing this? So Liyan could stay in power? For his own intellectual curiosity? For Deleen?
A lot of questions. Boyce couldn’t really answer any of them at this point.
It took him another hour to make the necessary changes in the gamina-B serum (or, rather, its computer-generated counterpart), another hour beyond that to set up the necessary simulation. The same split-screen simulation Zandar had shown him earlier, the original gamina molecule on the left, the new and improved gamina-B on the right.