by David Mack
Jorncek’s apartment looked as if it had been ransacked. Chekov and Uhura stepped around overturned pieces of furniture and between scattered personal effects. Drawers had been pulled from dressers and emptied; the contents of closets had been strewn about like refuse. Chekov imagined that if the dead Tiburonian’s possessions had been dropped from low orbit they might still have landed in better order than this. “What are we supposed to find in this mess?”
“Look for anything the local police missed,” Uhura said. “Hidden data chips. Comm devices. Traces of non-Tiburonian genetic material.”
He lifted the tricorder slung at his side and switched it on. Its oscillating whine filled the living room as he scanned for anything that might register as a data storage medium. “Won’t the police have already done this?”
“Definitely.” Uhura pawed through the pockets of garments draped over a chair lying on its side. “But they don’t have Starfleet-grade tricorders. We might find something they missed.”
Chekov adjusted the range and direction of his scan as he moved to the open bedroom doorway. “Why don’t we just ask them to share what they already have?”
“Because they aren’t being very cooperative right now. Something about a stolen body, they said.” She moved to the sofa, which lay on its backrest, and dug through the pockets of a pair of pants. “Be sure to scan inside the walls, above the ceilings, and under the floors.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Once again he tweaked the tricorder’s settings.
Uhura stood and looked around. “They seized all the comms and data terminals, didn’t they?”
“I think so. I don’t read any inside the apartment.” He tiptoed through the casual wreckage of the bedroom to make a detailed scan of the bathroom. “No sign of data cards or memory chips. No electronics except clocks and kitchen appliances.”
“What about DNA? Any non-Tiburonian traces?”
“Hang on. Changing scan modes.” He felt her impatient stare as he keyed in more adjustments. “Filtering out our genetic patterns.” Another null result left him scowling at his tricorder. “Nothing. Just half-decayed Tiburonian hair and skin cells.” He returned the tricorder to standby mode. “If our suspect had visitors, they left no traces.”
Uhura shifted a toppled desk away from one wall. “But the forensics team did.” She lifted a data cable. “A standard duotronic local network connector. Jorncek had a terminal, right here.”
“A terminal now in the hands of the police.”
“True—but they couldn’t take the whole local network. Not without cutting off every apartment in this building.” She beckoned Chekov. “Let’s plug this into the tricorder.”
He approached her and handed over his tricorder. “What for?”
The communications officer patched the cable into an auxiliary data port on the device. Keying in commands, she explained to Chekov, “The tricorder should be able to map the local data network and identify any data caches, intermediate nodes, firewalls, or proxy servers being used by this complex.” A few more fine-tuning changes, and she smiled. “There we go; all of the above. If I’m reading this right”—she threw a coquettish look Chekov’s way—“and I like to think that I am . . . the local network’s hub server is located in the basement.”
It took a moment, but Chekov caught on. “The local hub has comm and data logs.”
“Very good, Ensign.” Uhura unplugged the cable from the tricorder and nodded toward the front door. “Let’s get down there and see if the police left it in better shape than this place.”
They checked the hallway with the tricorder to make certain it was empty, then unlocked the door and slipped out of Jorncek’s trashed domicile. Uhura led Chekov through an exit at the end of the corridor, then down the building’s emergency stairs.
“The lift would be faster,” he said.
“And would run the risk of us being spotted and reported to the locals,” Uhura said. “Trust me, this is safer. Besides, a bit of exercise won’t hurt you.” At the bottom of the switchback staircase they arrived at a door marked BASEMENT. It was unlocked, and Uhura was through it before Chekov could think to reach for his tricorder.
He caught up to her outside a locked door. Next to it was a simple placard: SERVER ROOM. She drew a compact phaser from her belt. “Look for security sensors. If you read one, jam it.”
“Scanning,” Chekov said. He made a quick sweep of the basement level. “Just smoke detectors and an alarm on the door itself. Signals blocked.”
A harsh shriek of phaser fire. Chekov winced at the searing brightness of the blue beam from Uhura’s weapon as it sliced through the door’s security mechanism. The beam ceased, and the door swung open, smoke rising from its slagged lock.
On the other side was a cool, dry, windowless room. Banks of computers and comm relays stood in racks along the walls to their left and right, and a master control console occupied the far wall, opposite the door. Uhura smiled at the sight of it. “Jackpot.”
She moved to the console and sat down. Chekov expected her to ask him to use the tricorder to help crack the system’s security, but she accessed the system within seconds. Noting his wide-eyed reaction, she smiled. “Civilian systems have lots of factory-default backdoor codes. Luckily for us, I know most of the ones used in the Federation.” Her hands were a blur across the console’s controls as she dug into vast troves of archived data. “Here we go. Full comm and data archives for Mister Jorncek’s unit.”
Chekov perused the data over Uhura’s shoulder. “What does it all mean?”
“He hasn’t had much contact with anyone on Centaurus.” Uhura pointed out some lines of code that looked like gibberish to Chekov. “These are encrypted signals—some incoming, some outbound. Based on the packet metadata, I’d say he was piggybacking on someone else’s channel and routing these messages through the planet’s subspace comm satellite.”
“He was talking to someone offworld?”
“Looks that way.” Another flurry of commands into the console. “I’m patching into the satellite and searching its logs for subspace signals relayed with these time stamps. With a little luck, we should be—” A feedback tone and a flood of new data interrupted her. “There we go. Trackbacks indicate most of his messages came from or went to the Orion homeworld.”
“So we connect him to the Orion Syndicate—which we already knew.”
“Hang on, Ensign. I’m not done yet.” Uhura punched in more filtering parameters and initiated another virtual sifting of the data. “Now let’s see if his Orion friends know anyone else on Centaurus.” In seconds another batch of transmissions was isolated on a tertiary display. “All right, who’s this? Another recipient of Orion communiqués, right here in New Athens. I’ve got their network address . . . identifying their router . . . and now the local hub.” A small monitor above the console switched to show a street map of New Athens, with one building highlighted. “Let’s ping that hub to see who else the Orions have been talking to.”
A name appeared on the main display, along with a face from a New Athens University staff identification card. Chekov leaned forward and read it aloud: “Elara Soath. Catullan. Granted entry as a permanent resident on a work permit with the university catering office.”
Uhura looked up in alarm. “She could be on campus, and even inside the conference, right now!” She logged out of the console with one jab at a master switch, then stood, drew her communicator, and flipped it open with one smooth flick of her wrist.
“Uhura to Enterprise.”
The captain answered, “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
“Captain, we’ve identified a possible Orion agent with access to the conference. Alert all security personnel to arrest university catering employee Elara Soath on sight.”
* * *
Spock and five Enterprise security officers materialized outside the entrance to the New Athens University catering off
ice at nearly the exact moment that Commander Lomila and five armed Klingon soldiers beamed down from the HoS’leth to the same location. The two first officers acknowledged each other, then moved together toward the door. Spock reached it first and opened it. Lomila marched through the chivalrously opened portal without a word of thanks, and Spock handed off the door to one of her troops as he followed her inside.
A long corridor stretched away to either side. From the left came the aromas and commotion of a large, busy institutional kitchen. From the right came the low chatter and muted feedback tones of an administrative office. Heads poked out of office doors down the length of the hallway as middle managers overcome by curiosity strained to see what was happening.
Lomila and Spock both headed straight toward the kitchen. He had wondered whether the Klingons had acquired the same intelligence the Enterprise had—work schedules and personnel assignments, acquired by means of information-warfare tactics in the name of expediency. The moment Lomila had turned toward the kitchen, without the least hesitation or consideration of the office suites, Spock’s suspicion was confirmed: the Klingons on the HoS’leth had accessed Elara Soath’s work schedule with the same ease as the Enterprise crew.
The booted footfalls of the ten armed personnel behind him and Lomila made almost as much racket as the banging of pots and pans that greeted them in the steam-filled kitchen. Flames danced from open grill ranges. Dozens of employees—most of them humanoid—clad in white culinary uniform jackets toiled in long rows at various stainless-steel prep stations inside the massive space, whose walls and floors were dominated by blue-and-white checkered tile.
In unison, Spock and Lomila directed their teams to pair off—one Enterprise officer with each HoS’leth soldier—and split up around the cavernous kitchen’s periphery. The two executive officers remained together as they moved down the kitchen’s center aisle, both of them studying the faces of everyone they could see, in search of their target of interest.
At the far end of the kitchen, Lomila and Spock regrouped with their respective teams, having found nothing but the shocked stares of the university’s culinary staff. He met his counterpart’s simmering fury with a dry observation. “She does not appear to be here.”
“Really? Thank you for pointing that out, Vulcan.” Lomila seized a young Bolian who was trying to sneak past unnoticed. With one hand the female Klingon hoisted the cook off the floor. “Elara Soath. You know who she is?” A panicked nod. Lomila continued. “Where is she?”
“D—don’t know. On break?”
Spock asked, “Where does she go on her breaks?”
The Bolian pointed at the kitchen’s rear exit, which stood ajar. Lomila dropped him and marched toward the door with her men at her back. Spock and the Enterprise team stayed close beside their Klingon counterparts, determined not to be cut out of any action to come.
Lomila pushed open the back door, which let out onto a pleasant manicured lawn tucked into a U-shaped bend in the catering facility. Beyond its open far side was a promenade around the campus’s main quad, which led to both the dormitories that had been commandeered for the delegations to the conference. The two landing parties advanced to the quad and spread out as they searched for their quarry.
A female Enterprise security officer pointed and called out, “There!”
Everyone followed her cue and looked north, up the paved walkway that led to the university’s medical complex. There, halted in midstep like a prey animal frozen with fear by a sudden bright light, was Elara Soath, staring in abject terror at the combined force of Starfleet and Klingon personnel now charging in her direction with weapons drawn.
The young Catullan woman hurled her comm at the ground hard enough to shatter the device, whose fragments promptly erupted into smoke and sparks. Then she turned and ran. She sprinted with speed and grace, zigzagging through a crowd of passersby who became her innocent living shields. For once the Klingons demonstrated restraint.
Lomila must have warned them to check their fire, Spock reasoned.
On the run, he retrieved his communicator and flipped it open. “Spock to Enterprise!”
Captain Kirk replied, “Go ahead, Spock.”
“Suspect sighted! She’s fleeing toward the medical complex!”
“Stay on her, Spock! We’re sending reinforcements!”
“Understood. Spock out.” He tucked away the communicator, holstered his phaser, and picked up his pace. A dozen strides later he passed Lomila and the rest of her troops to take the lead in the pursuit. Lomila pushed herself to catch up to him.
“In a hurry, Vulcan?”
“We need to stop her before she reaches the hospital.”
“You mean before she finds cover and hostages.”
For once, Spock appreciated the concision of Klingon discourse. “Exactly.”
* * *
The first thing Elara had done when she saw Starfleet and Klingon military personnel pour out of the university’s catering kitchen was activate her Orion-made signal scrambler to hide her Catullan bio-signature from sensors and transporters. The next thing she’d done was trash her comm. Then she ran, faster and harder than she had ever run before in her entire life.
Most of the doors that faced the quad opened only to those carrying authorized ID cards, the kinds with embedded microchips tagged with residents’ profiles. If Elara had been lucky enough to see the enemy coming, she might have nicked a few ID cards to get her through those restricted entrances. Instead, with only her scrambler and a miniaturized disruptor in hand, she had no choice but to flee for the nearest building on campus that was open to the public around the clock, every day: the hospital complex.
Far behind her, her pursuers ordered her to halt. She ignored them and darted left, then right, around individuals and clusters of people out strolling the tree-shaded walkways, using them for cover as she risked everything on her headlong flight to the medical center.
She reached the large revolving door, which moved with all the urgency of continental drift. The first shot from her disruptor vaporized one of its three broad transparent panels and scattered the crowd in the lobby. Her second shot drowned out the bystanders’ panicked screams as it took down the guard behind the torus-shaped information desk.
No one moved to stop her as she bolted through the lobby, weapon in hand. Elara hurdled over the security checkpoint and reached the lifts as several of them opened.
A warning shot into the ceiling high overhead secured the throng’s attention. “Move!” she snapped, eager to clear the riffraff and slip inside one of the lifts. If she could move deeper inside the complex and evade observation even for just a few minutes, it might be enough to find another way out and elude her pursuers. First she needed these stragglers out of her way—
Not her, she realized, her hand snagging a passing young woman’s uniform sleeve. The student nurse froze as Elara stared into her eyes. “You,” Elara said. “I saw you on the news. You helped them catch Jorncek.” She pulled her closer. “You put me in this jam.”
“No, please, it was a mistake, I just want to leave, I—”
Elara dragged the young human woman inside a waiting lift. “You’re coming with me, sweet-face. Tell me: Where’s the drug lockup?”
The question left the terrified human woman perplexed. “Why?”
“I’m asking the questions. Where is it?”
“Upstairs. Seventh floor.”
Heavy running footsteps echoed in the lobby. Elara pressed buttons for the top five floors the lift serviced, then thumbed its CLOSE DOORS button to set its ascent into motion. Reassured by the sensation of movement under her feet, she pressed her disruptor to the woman’s temple. “What’s the access code for the lockup?”
“I don’t remember.”
A hard punch in the cheekbone left the nursing student on the verge of tears. Elara put the woman’s back t
o the lift wall and pressed her disruptor between her hostage’s eyes. “Think—” She read the woman’s uniform name tag. “Joanna.”
The young woman’s jaw trembled, and a tear rolled from the corner of her eye. “I can open it for you,” she said, her voice small and quavering.
“Good. I need you anyway.” The doors opened onto the sixth floor. Elara stole a look into the corridor. There were ambulatory patients, half a dozen nurses, and a handful of doctors and specialists moving from one room to another. Elara ducked back inside the lift and moved behind Joanna, in case she had to use the woman as a human shield. As the doors started to close, a young Vulcan doctor caught them and stepped forward to board. He stopped and backed out as Elara lifted her disruptor to Joanna’s head and told him, “Wait for the next one, Doc.”
The doors closed, the lift ascended, and Elara nudged her prisoner forward. “Take me to the pharma locker. Try to run or fight back, I’ll put a hole in you so big you could park a starship in it. We reach, sweet-face?”
A terrified whisper: “We reach.”
The lift dinged as it stopped on the seventh floor. A nudge moved the nursing student in front of the doors, which parted with a soft gasp. Elara tucked her disruptor into the small of the other woman’s back. “Move.” Together they stepped out of the lift, which closed behind them and continued its upward journey. No one noted their presence or the strangeness of their being so close to each other as they progressed in tandem down the corridor.
“Up here, on the left,” Joanna said under her breath.
“Good.” Wary of an ambush, Elara shifted her gaze from side to side as they walked and shot a quick look over her shoulder to see if they were being followed. So far everything looked calm, a portrait of normalcy. Half a minute later, they reached the pharmaceutical lockup.
“Open it,” Elara said. “Quietly.”
Joanna took a deep breath and keyed numbers into the lockup’s security panel.
Then everything went to hell.