by David Mack
Gorkon’s arch tenor was just as icily calm as Sarek’s, yet somehow it conveyed a far more palpable sense of impending violence. “You have said quite enough, Prang. Sit. Down.”
In measured motions, both Zeroh and Prang sank back into their chairs, humbled but still seething. Sarek feared this would not be the last toxic outburst from either of the two men.
All in all, it was, Sarek concluded, a most inauspicious start to the proceedings. And as distasteful as he had found Gorkon’s solution to his belligerent subordinate, he admitted to himself a grudging respect for its simplicity, efficiency, and efficacy.
The Klingons may be violent, cruel, and on occasion irrational, he mused, but they do have a knack for accomplishing their objectives in a timely manner. He spared a moment for a look across the table at Gorkon, who just then happened to be looking back at Sarek.
I can only hope Councillor Gorkon is as committed to securing a true and lasting peace as I am—or else this peace summit is already as good as ended.
* * *
Threats flying like arrows, knives meeting throats, all in the name of a peace conference—it was as close to a working definition of irony as Elara had ever seen.
She hadn’t expected the Federation-Klingon talks to go smoothly—no one had. Back on the Orion homeworld, bookmakers were taking odds on the conference’s outcome. The best bet seemed to be a stalemate ending without a treaty; running a distant second was a diplomatic catastrophe culminating in open hostilities that would accomplish little beyond expanding the Romulans’ sphere of control in local space.
None of which mattered to Elara. She had no use for gambling or politics. She believed in being well paid for a dishonest day’s work. The rest was just theater and excuses.
So far no one inside the conference room had detected the passive sensors she had hidden on the light fixtures, on the corners of the trays used for the beverage service, or in the towering arrangements of fresh flowers tucked into the room’s corners beside the windows. Though she, along with the rest of the event’s catering staff, was required to wait outside until summoned, she was able to tap into any of the sensor feeds by using the holographic lens in her left eye and the subaural implant embedded in her left ear. With nigh-imperceptible shifts of her gaze and half-blinks, she could switch from one feed to another with great speed, giving her prime vantages on every heated moment of the burgeoning political fiasco transpiring behind closed doors.
To the staff of New Athens University and the organizers of the conference, she was just Elara Soath, a Catullan refugee earning her keep as a waitress while attending classes at NAU on Centaurus, thanks to a generous Federation scholarship. Having tamed her wild mane of pink-and-violet hair into a neat ponytail to comply with the university’s health regulations for food service employees, Elara would have been indistinguishable from other colorfully coiffed members of the student body if not for the green-and-yellow geometrically inspired tattoo on her high forehead—a cultural emblem that telegraphed her Catullan origins.
No one who knew her on Centaurus suspected she was, in fact, an expertly trained spy and assassin on retainer to an interstellar crime organization known as the Orion Syndicate.
A blink, and she was in the thick of the fray between Gorkon and his right-hand man, Prang. The insults flew, fast and sharp, and the Izarian from the Federation delegation was only making matters worse. It was clear even to a political novice such as Elara that the only two people in the room who were doing anything to maintain the peace were Gorkon and Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan.
If anything were to happen to the two of them, the Klingon Empire and the Federation would be at war before we could clear the water glasses from the table.
Elara was not at all privy to the agendas of her employers, or their patrons’ true identities, but she could guess at their motivations—and friction between the Klingons and the Federation seemed to be high on their wish list. As she listened to the increasingly fractious argument transpiring inside the conference room, she was certain this was a development her handler would want to be apprised of as soon as possible. It was a breach of protocol for her to access her hidden data recorder in the building’s subbasement during daytime hours, when there might be custodial staff working in its vicinity, but that was a danger she was prepared to risk.
The sooner I give them what they want, the sooner I get paid and go home.
Slinking away from the conference room, she caught the eye of another part-time member of the university’s catering staff, a young male Bolian. “Yutt? Can you cover me?”
“For how long?”
She pressed her hand to her belly and feigned distress. “Fifteen?”
He looked around, frowned. “Fine. It’s not like we’re in the middle of lunch. But make it quick. If the Klingons get a hankering for raktajino, I’m not making twelve of them by myself.”
“I’ll be fast, I promise.” She blew him a kiss and slipped out the door.
The main hallway of the university’s alumni center was deserted. It had been cleared hours earlier by teams of Starfleet security personnel, followed by a separate inspection conducted by Klingon military security specialists. Elara wasn’t sure what she had found more amusing—their mutual, openly demonstrated mistrust, or their shared failure to detect any of her illegal quantum surveillance devices.
She suppressed the urge to smirk. If they really wanted to find common ground, they’d start by admitting they’re both completely incompetent.
Empty spaces abounded along the main passage. Most of the university’s staff who worked here had been relocated for the duration of the conference. Only she and the rest of the skeleton crew assigned to cater the event and tend to the needs of its delegations were allowed to move freely through the open spaces of the alumni center, though much of the building’s interior had been cordoned off or secured behind locked doors. In practice, the only areas to which Elara had regular access were the kitchen, pantry, refrigerators, storerooms, and the utilities room in the basement. Though she had yet to see any armed security inside the center, she knew beyond a ghost of a doubt they were there, alert to the least sign of trouble.
Stick to the routine, she told herself. Do what they’ve seen you do a thousand times before, just the way you’ve always done it.
She paid a visit to the kitchen and made small talk with the cooks for a minute or two. Her own passive sensors had confirmed that while the Federation’s security detail was keeping a duotronic eye on the kitchen, they had no ears there. Local laws on Centaurus permitted a limited degree of visual surveillance for security purposes, but it prohibited most forms of eavesdropping on conversations, even for purposes of national security, without a specific court order.
If only more of the Federation’s laws showed such concern for the rights of the individual, Elara lamented, I could almost stand to live in it.
Satisfied she had dallied long enough with the cooks, she made her way down a back stairwell to the subbasement, where she ducked inside the utilities room. Interference from the room’s various power-transfer nodes obstructed most forms of eavesdropping technology. Consequently, this was where she had set up the recording node for her quantum transceivers, which were not affected by the plasma relays that snaked in and out of the cramped space.
The recording module was nondescript; it had been disguised as a power-consumption monitor, a function it performed in addition to its more surreptitious purpose: storing every sound and image received from the conference room while the delegates were in session.
Installing the node inside the building had been an unavoidable risk. To protect the conference, the Klingon Defense Forces had been permitted to erect an energy shield over part of the campus of New Athens University. Though its chief function was to defend the conference from outside attack, it also scrambled unauthorized signals that tried to pass through it in either direct
ion. The node could record signals that originated within the shield’s area of protection, but it couldn’t retransmit them.
That was where Elara came into play.
She keyed in her codes to access the device’s memory banks, then downloaded the morning’s handful of recordings to a data card, which she hid inside a pocket of her catering uniform. Her next task would be to carry the card to a transmission point outside the energy shield and relay its contents to her handler on an encrypted channel. There was an ideal transmitter in a laboratory inside the university’s engineering building. All she had to do was get there with the data card . . . without being stopped, searched, or questioned.
Back up the stairs, then down the main hall. Out the front doors, and across the quad. No one even looked at her twice. In the drab uniform of a catering waitress, she was nearly as invisible here as she had been on Catulla Prime or Orion. Some experiences were the same, no matter where one went: No one ever pays attention to a servant.
Inside the engineering building, she shed her uniform. In that setting, she knew, it would look out of place and attract unwanted attention. Dressed in street clothes, she was once again utterly forgettable, just another young woman roaming the corridors of academia. She found it laughably easy to gain admittance to a subspace communications research lab, upload the contents of her data card to a temporary server, and send it in a hashed burst transmission to an anonymous relay beacon that would pass it along to her handler, the enigmatic Red Man.
Let’s see what he thinks of that, she gloated.
Elara left the engineering building and walked back across the quad to resume her mundane catering duties. A glance at her chrono: Two minutes late. She was about to castigate herself, then demurred. Why worry? Yutt always forgives me
She smiled and shook her head. Men. They’re so predictable.
Six
Despite her accomplishments and swift ascent through the ranks of Starfleet’s command echelon, Una had never accustomed herself to the practice of “holding court.” Aboard every ship on which she had served, there had always been one or more officers—and in a few cases, senior noncommissioned officers—who had excelled at compelling the attention of groups great and small, regaling them with ribald jokes and stirring tales of derring-do. Such personalities often became quick favorites with their crewmates, magnets for social activity on and off the ship. All that Una had ever been able to do was watch and listen from a distance, and feel mild pangs of envy at her peers’ natural ease in social settings.
Now she was the one surrounded by eager faces, the singular focus of nine of her former Enterprise shipmates. None of them appeared to have aged since their abductions to this strange parallel universe, and they all were desperate to learn what had transpired during their years in exile. For what had felt like hours, she had answered their questions as best she could.
Whatever happened to Captain April?
Is Deneva safe? Did my family ever ask you about me?
What new species did Starfleet meet while we were gone?
How many members does the Federation have now?
Did that war with the Klingons ever happen? Did they attack Axanar?
Deceptively simple in their brevity, each query had taken Una nearly an hour to answer, and every detail she offered up spawned half a dozen more follow-up inquiries. At last, with raised hands she stemmed the tide of her old friends’ interrogation. “Enough.”
The others diminished in the face of her rebuke. Ensign Bruce Goldberg said, “We didn’t mean to offend, Captain.”
Ensign Cheryl Stevens wore a sheepish grimace. “It’s just . . . it’s been so long.”
“I understand. Really, I do.”
“I doubt that,” said Ensign Le May. “It’s been longer than you think. Time is different here.” Her voice took on a haunted quality. “Everything is different here.”
“That’s as may be,” Una said, “but we have—”
A peculiar sound reverberated off the cliff sides surrounding the refugees’ box canyon: an eerie warbling electronic music, atonal verging on discordant. Its strangely phased melody rose and fell as its echoes amplified or canceled one another, creating a bizarre Doppler effect.
Una watched the refugees, human and Usildar alike, flee their camp’s open areas and scramble to cover under makeshift blinds camouflaged with dirt and rocks from the surrounding area. The only person who paused his flight long enough to look back at Una was Shimizu. “Come on!” He beckoned her with a sweep of his arm. “Take cover!”
Overhead, the dissonant, Theremin-like music grew louder and filled the box canyon. Searching her memory, Una recognized that haunting sound: it was a Jatohr sentry globe.
She sprinted after Shimizu and Martinez, then crawled under their rocky overhang to huddle with them in its shadow. Seconds after she had settled into place beside them, the silvery white Jatohr sphere floated past a few dozen meters above the ground.
It slowed as it drifted over the campsite. Una found its singsong humming punctuated by low, almost subsonic thumping noises strangely disturbing, though she couldn’t pinpoint why.
Perhaps its sonic emissions are meant to provoke anxiety and coax its prey into the open, she speculated. If that was the case, however, it was failing utterly.
After lingering for half a minute, the sphere ascended and sped away, into the mountain pass and its endless maze of crevices. Only once its eerie, haunting music had faded to silence did the Usildar and the Enterprise abductees emerge from their hiding places.
Una followed Martinez and Shimizu out from under the rocky overhang and regrouped in the middle of the camp with Goldberg, Stevens, Le May, and a handful of Usildar. Back in the huddle, Una asked Shimizu, “Does that thing come around often?”
“No.” He frowned as he squinted into the hazy distance, as if searching for signs of the alien device’s return. “Only when we get too close to the Jatohr city on the other side of the mountains, but no one’s been there in ages. Before that, they only came when . . .”
He left his thought ominously incomplete.
Una prompted him, “When what?”
Le May answered, “When someone new arrived from the other side.”
“How did it know I had come through the gateway?”
“The same way we did,” Martinez said. “Whenever the portal opens, this whole world ripples and shimmers like a mirage for a few seconds.”
Goldberg looked faintly amused. “How do you think Feneb and his boys got the drop on you in the canyon? They knew you were coming.”
Una’s mind reeled with questions. “Do new arrivals always land at the same spot on the salt flats?” Everyone around her nodded—even the Usildar. “Then we need to go back there. My friends on the other side are going to open the gateway again, very soon.”
Martinez shook his head. “It won’t matter. The Jatohr will be watching the gateway now, maybe for years. Going back there would be suicide.”
“Well, we can’t just sit here,” Una said.
Feneb swatted away her protest as if shooing an insect. “There is nothing more we can do. We are trapped here forever. This is our fate, Leader Una.”
“Where I come from, we don’t believe in fate. Or in luck. We believe in free will. In action.” Una stepped into the center of the huddle and mustered her best tenor of command. “Shimizu, you said there’s a Jatohr city on the other side of the mountains?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know how to get there?”
His eyes widened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Answer the question, Lieutenant. Do you know the way?”
Shimizu swallowed his fear, then nodded. “Aye, sir.”
“Then it’s time to get moving. Mister Martinez, Mister Shimizu, gather weapons and supplies, whatever you think I’ll need.” S
he checked her phaser to make sure it was still charged, then turned toward the trail that led out of the box canyon. “It’s time to pay the Jatohr a visit.”
Seven
The mood in the Enterprise’s briefing room was grim. Spock and his covert landing party had returned safely from Usilde, for which Kirk was grateful, but he was finding their after-action report less than encouraging. “How many troops do the Klingons have in the facility?”
“At minimum, one full combat company,” Spock said. He switched the image on the table’s three-sided screen to show a series of tricorder scans, each pinpointing the locations of numerous Klingon life signs. “I estimate less than ten percent of their personnel are scientists. The rest appear to be armed troops, with the highest concentrations located inside the generator plant and on the fortress’s command level.”
Kirk shifted his gaze toward Chekov. “Ensign, your tactical assessment?”
“A very hard target, Captain,” Chekov said, his Russian accent shifting his consonants and vowels in equal measure. “Now that they know we were there, that trick will not work again. The next time we go back, it will need to be in force.”
Exactly what I didn’t want to hear. He faced his senior helmsman. “Mister Sulu, your report noted there were no Klingon support vessels in orbit, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. But based on long-range sensor data, I’d say a D5 cruiser swings through the Libros system at least once every nine days. It might not be there now, but I doubt it’s far away.”
“A reasonable assumption.” Next in Kirk’s sights was his chief engineer. “Mister Scott. What did your scans reveal about that generator? Do you think you could rig a new control module to replace the one that was stolen?” Even now Kirk couldn’t bring himself to say Bates’s name; he knew he would choke on it as his anger at her betrayal resurfaced.