Growling under his breath, Worf started downward. His duty was to get to his captain any way he could. If that meant wading through ankle-deep slime or swimming frigid rivers, then that was what he must do. With any luck the Jarada would find this shaft as distasteful as he did. Looking at the carpet of grayish-green and black stuff that covered the ramp, he could well believe that he was the only living creature to have blundered into this shaft in decades. Even the bioluminescent glowstrips were fading, their internal nutrients all but exhausted and the bacteria inside them dying.
It was slow going, keeping his footing on the tricky descent. At each door he paused, listening to the sounds in the adjoining shaft. The shrieks and the massed clatter of Jarada claws made it obvious that an entire army of guardians was searching for him. If they ever thought to check this shaft, he was in serious trouble. However, at least for the moment, their oversight let him put more distance between himself and the location of the attack.
The shaft grew damper as he descended, until the water flowed in runnels along the walls. He approached one door where the noise on the other side was so loud that he was sure he had been discovered and the Jarada were about to pour into the shaft. As he crept closer, he saw that the bright crack that marked the opening was uneven, the door warped too much to form a tight seal against the jamb. A dozen Jarada were milling around on the other side of the door, their chittering claws and discordant voices reverberating inside the shaft.
Worf continued downward, descending the equivalent of five more decks before he found another door. Its outline was dim, barely brighter than the surrounding walls, and he almost missed it. However, a rivulet of water leaking through a crack between the warped door and its frame caught his attention. Holding his breath, Worf listened for several minutes, but nothing moved in the corridor beyond the door. It was either a clever ambush, worthy of a Klingon, or he had reached an unoccupied portion of the complex. The only way he would find out was by leaving the shaft.
It didn’t take him long to decide. Vertical movement would not bring him back to the Governance Complex and, when the Jarada finally realized where he had gone, this shaft was the ultimate trap. Also, while the ramp continued downward, the last thing he wanted was to take the predictable exit on the lowest level.
His decision made, he raked his fingers along the wall, shuddering as he touched the algae- and mold-covered stone. Nothing happened, but three light-colored streaks marred the organic coating on the wall. Worf growled under his breath, realizing there was no way to escape this slime hole without leaving road signs to mark his passage. He tried again with no better luck. The control panel, if indeed there was one for this door, appeared to be dead.
He was about to start downward again, when he remembered his fight with the door at the top of the shaft. Maybe this one would succumb to the same treatment. Worf checked the edges and found that the door was warped enough for him to force his fingers into the crack. Bracing his feet against the jamb, he pulled with all his strength. A low, tortured groan came from somewhere inside the wall. He kept up the pressure and felt the mechanism yield marginally.
Encouraged, he summoned another all-out effort and was rewarded with the shriek of metal dragging against metal. Slowly, he forced the door back into its frame. From the sounds, he thought the door was operated by a spring and piston device. With luck it would hold the door against his pursuers, if he could get it closed again.
When the opening was large enough, Worf squeezed through the door and released it. It rebounded partway and stuck, a beacon to anyone that he had forced his way through. He examined the door, surprised to find its surface incised with carvings. Much of the wood veneer was rotten and crumbling, but he found enough purchase for his hands. Grunting with the effort, he pushed the door toward its closed position. The squeals and moans were almost as loud as when he had opened the door, giving him hope that the Jarada would have as much trouble with it as he had had.
Worf couldn’t seat the door completely into its frame, but the final gap was only a finger’s width. He doubted that the Jaradan exoskeleton provided enough leverage to open the door by brute force, and he hoped his pursuers would not realize the full potential of his superior Klingon anatomy.
With his back protected as best he could, Worf examined his surroundings. A tunnel, in no better shape than the shaft he had just left, stretched before him. The flickering glowstrips, the mold-streaked walls, and the damp floor told him that this area had long been abandoned. He concentrated on his location for a moment, trying to decide where he was in relation to the Governance Complex.
Breen had headed generally east when they left the Council Chambers, and he thought the tunnel ahead of him was pointing south, which meant that he would have to go to his right when he got the chance. To the right and up, he promised himself, looking at the wet and moldy passageway with distaste. If someone had tried to design a Klingon’s worst nightmare, this would be a championship contender. The only thing left to complete the horror was a swarm of Tribbles. Suppressing a shudder, Worf started down the corridor, his boots squelching in the damp slime.
Chapter Thirteen
THEY WERE ENTERING the third hour of the search and still Data had found no sign of the missing crew members. He had concentrated his scans around the city, where most of the away team should have been located, but so far he had had no success. Once or twice he had registered a trace that might have been Riker, but when he tried to focus in for a transporter lock, he lost the scan. Either Riker had been moving very fast or someone was deliberately screening his sensors. At the moment either hypothesis was equally likely, although the android suspected his human colleagues would favor the sabotage theory.
Data adjusted the settings on the scanners for the tenth time in as many minutes, trying to improve their resolution. As he watched the results scroll across his screen, a part of his brain kept returning to the idea of how one might disrupt a sensor scan without making it immediately obvious. It would take some subtle programming and a complex algorithm to simulate random noise, but the more he considered it, the more the idea seemed plausible.
The only way the Enterprise’s sensors could have missed the entire away team for so long was if all of them had been removed from the city. Keiko and Tanaka were probably outside the range of his scans, since he had no idea what direction they had gone when they left the city. He should have found the others, however, since their destinations were supposed to be inside the city limits.
While part of his brain monitored the sensor readings, Data started working on plausible mechanisms for disrupting the scans. Given how little the Federation knew about the Jarada or the precise levels of their technology, he had no hard evidence for rejecting any known jamming technique. For that matter, they had no firm idea of how much the Jarada knew about the Federation. What he had was two very large systems of unknowns—which he had to solve to locate the missing away team.
While he was working on that problem, two unrelated facts swam to the surface of his brain. First was how much the Jarada had seemed to know specifically about the Enterprise and its crew from the beginning of this assignment. They had requested the Enterprise and its captain by name, they had known the first officer was a competent amateur musician, and—despite their adherence to strict protocol in previous encounters with the Federation—they had presented a friendly and genial façade to their visitors, almost as if they had known the exact approach that would win Picard over with the least amount of effort.
The second fact was the scan that the Jarada had run on the Enterprise when the ship had met them for the first time at Torona IV. After briefly disrupting key elements of the ship’s computer and control systems, the Jarada sensors had apparently done no further damage to the Enterprise. But what if the disruption had been a side effect, the result of a high-speed data grab from the ship’s main computer? The computers were heavily shielded to prevent such thefts, but the protection could never be absolute in a dy
namic system. As long as the computer’s users needed to get information into or out of its memory, vulnerable access paths into the computer existed which could be exploited by a determined enemy. In the relief of successfully completing their mission at Torona IV, they had not questioned what the Jaradan scan had been looking for, but now Data wondered.
He called up the ship’s logs and sorted through them to find the unreduced scan records he needed. It took several minutes to find the information, since much of it had already been archived to provide working space for current projects. Even when he located the records, they were too complex and too ambiguous to give him an immediate answer. After ordering the computer to run simulations on the readings and to show him the most likely scenarios of what had happened to the computer’s memory banks when they were scanned, Data turned his attention back to the current sensor readings.
A warning light caught his attention, indicating an anomaly in the orbital scans. He switched to those inputs, checking for the signals that had triggered the alarm. The number of objects in their immediate area—in orbits around Bel-Major, Bel-Minor, or both—was staggering. In the last day he had seen more collision warnings than he had ever encountered outside a simulator, but a brief look at his screens told him that a stray moonlet was not what had triggered the computer.
Radiation trails of the kind normally associated with old-style nuclear propulsion systems fanned out from the planet like the lines in a children’s hypertext on gravity potential. The readings were faint, difficult to separate from the high background radiation in the area. Data ordered the computer to repeat the scans and to refine its calculations to minimize the uncertainty. It still reported the same results. To the limits of the analysis, between ten and twenty one- or two-person nuclear-powered spacecraft had taken off from Bel-Minor within the last six hours and were in all probability hiding among the moonlets that littered the area. Data was about to report his findings to the captain when the proximity detectors sounded yet another collision warning.
The three small fighter craft swooped from behind a large asteroid so quickly that they were on top of the Enterprise almost before they had registered on the sensors. Picard signaled for red alert and the emergency lights began flashing. “Collision alert,” Data announced for broadcast throughout the ship. “Brace for impact. This is not a drill.”
“Mr. Data, report! Conn, warn them off!” Picard snapped, his words overlapping the warning from the proximity detectors. Chang’s voice, telling the approaching ships to change course, wove a muted counterpoint to the android’s report.
“The ships are single-man fighter craft, Captain. They apparently lifted off from Bel-Minor when our orbit carried us to the far side of the planet,” Data said. “I had just finished analyzing our sensor data, which is extremely ambiguous due to the high radiation levels around Bel-Major, and was about to report the probable presence of up to twenty of this class of vessel in orbit with us. From the sensor readings I am getting now, I surmise the pilots are Jarada, but the information is extremely peculiar. It does not correspond to anything else we have on the Jarada.”
“Twenty—” Picard glanced at the screen, saw the smaller ships still headed straight for the Enterprise, and interrupted himself. “Chang, warn them off!”
“I’m trying, sir. They are not responding to our signals.”
Data answered Picard’s next question before he even asked it. “The shields will hold against a direct impact, Captain. Some people may be affected by radiation on the decks nearest the collision point, but the Enterprise should sustain no permanent damage. However, the approaching vessels will be completely destroyed.”
“Chang, get a tractor beam on them and try to keep them from hitting us.”
“Aye, sir.” Chang punched in the coordinates of the leading vessel and activated the tractor beam. However, the small ship was under heavy acceleration and the tractor beam could not lock onto the ship’s hull. The fighter plunged straight for the Enterprise and disintegrated against its shields. The viewscreen flared white and the ship rocked briefly before the inertial dampers compensated.
“Do the same thing on the next one, Mr. Chang,” Data ordered. “I will work Tractor Beams Two and Three to shift it away from us.”
“Yes, sir.”
While Chang tried to hold the next fighter with his tractor beam, Data programmed two additional beams to help force the Jarada ship away from the Enterprise. Despite the android’s speed and his ability to work each hand independently, Data and Chang managed to get only a partial grip on the attacking ship. It tumbled away from them and crashed into the Enterprise’s shields, exploding in a blaze of hard radiation.
“Get the pilot first,” Picard ordered as Chang and Data tried for the next ship. “Security to Transporter Room Four.”
Data relayed the coordinates for the pilot of the third vessel to the transporter room. While they waited for the report, the sensors picked up three more fighters approaching under extreme acceleration.
“Mr. Data.” Picard’s voice held a note of frustration. “What are our chances of stopping these vessels?”
For a long moment the only sounds on the bridge were the mechanical chirps of various status indicators and the brush of Data’s fingers on the touchpads of his console. After what seemed an eternity to the waiting bridge crew, Data answered. “The probabilities are that we will do no better getting a tractor beam on any of these ships than we did on the others. Our shields are holding, with two small radiation leaks reported on the lower decks. All projections indicate that there will be no significant damage to the Enterprise even if all three of the approaching vessels collide with us. The radiation levels from the explosions will make transporting the pilots risky, but the chances for the pilots surviving are significantly greater than if they crash their ships against our shields.”
“Make it so, Commander.”
Just then the report came in from the transporter room. “We couldn’t keep the signal lock on him, Captain. The radiation levels were too high.”
After a moment’s hesitation Data relayed the coordinates for the three approaching ships. “Pull these in as fast as you can, Mr. O’Brien,” he added. “Their ships are rapidly approaching the danger zone.”
“Aye, sir.”
With an outward show of calmness Picard waited for word from the transporter room. Watching the fourth ship burst into a spray of blinding light against the shields, he considered destroying the fighters before they hit the Enterprise’s shields. However, if he fired the phasers too soon, O’Brien would not be able to rescue the pilots. And to protect himself from any more attacks, Picard wanted those pilots. If there was any reason behind these suicide runs, any explanation for his missing crew members down on the planet, Picard’s instincts told him he would get it from the Jarada in those ships.
“Data, try contacting the Jarada Council of Elders again. I wish to speak with Zelfreetrollan.” Picard felt the deck shudder beneath him as the fifth ship destroyed itself against the Enterprise’s shields.
“Aye, sir.” There was a brief pause while the android tried to open a channel to the planet. “They still are not responding, Captain.”
“Captain,” came O’Brien’s voice from the transporter room. “We’ve managed to rescue two of the pilots from those ships, but they’re in pretty bad shape. Security had to stun one of them and the other is under restraints. Raving like a lunatic, he is.”
Picard suppressed a groan. It figured that the Jarada pilots would be incapable of answering his questions. “Have security take them to sickbay for observation, O’Brien, and keep them under restraints at all times.” He glanced up at the ceiling, signaling a new call. “Sickbay. Dr. Selar.”
After a moment the Vulcan doctor answered the page, her voice calm and unruffled even though Picard could imagine the sudden influx of patients she was having due to the collisions. Somehow, despite the warnings and the drills, people always managed to get hurt. “Selar, he
re.”
“Doctor, security is bringing you two prisoners. I need a full medical workup on them as soon as possible. Also, notify me the minute they are able to answer questions.”
“Yes, Captain. Do you need anything else?”
Was that a hint of irony in her voice? Picard wondered. If it had been Crusher, the sarcasm would have bordered on insubordination. All doctors, it seemed, learned that skill as part of their medical training. “Thank you, Doctor. That will be all.”
He shifted position, wondering why his chair should suddenly feel so uncomfortable. After a moment he remembered something Data had said earlier. “Data, how many of those ships did you say were out there?”
“Between ten and twenty, Captain. The radiation levels in this system create too much background noise for me to get any more precise readings than that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Data.” Picard settled back in his chair, trying to look calm and in control. It was going to be a very long night, waiting to see what would happen next. Too many lives were at stake for him to move before he had enough information. At the same time—what could he do to speed up the process? Somewhere in the last day and a half the away team must have discovered something he could use to reach the Jarada. The attacks on the ship, the disappearance of the away team, even the apparent ease of the negotiations—all had to be part of the same pattern.
The question still was—why? If he knew the why of the Jarada’s puzzling behavior, he should be able to anticipate their next move. And for the safety of his ship, he had to anticipate it. The Jarada’s next attack might be with something more lethal than antiquated one-man ships. Picard shuddered, feeling desperation finally kick his brain into overdrive.
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