Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  The three Tholians were all bundled in their golden-hued envirosuits, about which Jetanien had prattled on during the long walk from his office. Composed of Tholian silk, the envirosuits were surprisingly lightweight and flexible around the Tholians’ crystalline, arthropod bodies. No warmer than room temperature on their exterior, their interiors sustained a combination of intense heat and crushingly dense corrosive gas—a Class-N environment that was duplicated in their quarantined residential suites. What little of their heads was visible through their translucent face-plates suggested that their species exhibited a wide variety of colorations. With their multilimbed physiques, Tholians reminded Sandesjo of the venomous ghewpu’tIn that populated some of the darker, untamed forests on Qo’noS. Being in the same room with them made her deeply curious as to how one of these exotic-looking novpu would fare in single combat against a Klingon warrior.

  Finally, the touch-telepathy link was broken, and Sesrene’s eyespots brightened slightly as he said, “A temporary affliction. It is of no further concern.”

  “We are greatly relieved to hear that, Your Excellency,” Sovik said with a small nod.

  “We have no more business with you at this time,” Sesrene said. He turned away from the table, and his attachés moved in synch with him.

  “Ambassador,” Jetanien said, his voice suddenly large enough to fill the room with its deep, booming resonance. Sesrene paused then turned very slowly back toward Jetanien, who continued, “Though our council has chosen the path of peace, do not be misled into thinking that we are fools. We know full well that your forces attacked and destroyed our vessel at Ravanar. Starfleet will watch your borders far more closely from now on…. We won’t betaken by surprise again.”

  The implied threat seemed to hold Sesrene and Jetanien in place, like the opposing poles of a magnet, filling the room with an undercurrent of violent reprisal.

  Then Sesrene ended the discussion.

  “Neither will we.”

  In unison, the Tholian delegation left the room, moving with almost mechanical precision. Once they were gone, Jetanien turned away and exited through a different door, saying nothing but clearly expecting Sovik and Sandesjo to follow him.

  The Chelon didn’t speak until the three of them were in a turbolift on their way back upstairs. “That was not good,” he said. Then, to Sandesjo’s amazement, he said nothing more. Even after they returned to the deserted Federation Embassy office, he had nothing to add to his statement in the turbolift.

  As the ambassador marched toward his office, Sandesjo said to his retreating back, “Should I postpone your morning meetings?” For once, Jetanien neither interrupted nor answered her. He went into his private office and closed the door, which emitted a soft double-beep to indicate that he had locked it.

  She and Sovik looked at each other. He raised one eyebrow. She shrugged. He departed, and she made the long, lonely walk back to her private quarters.

  The repetitive grind of long days, which by now had blurred together, left Sandesjo enervated. Filing a report with Turag would no doubt be a tedious matter, and it was one that she would prefer to put off until morning. Unfortunately, she knew that he would be livid if she waited that long to brief him.

  She locked her door, then unlocked her slim briefcase and opened it on her dining table. I hate the waiting, she fumed, as the device established its encrypted subspace link. It takes too long. Sooner or later, someone will notice.

  “bImoHqu’,” came the challenge-phrase.

  In a glum monotone she answered, “jIwuQ.”

  Turag’s harshly shadowed face replaced the Klingon trefoil emblem. He grinned. “Another late night, Lurqal?”

  “Don’t call me by my true name, you yIntagh,” she said. “I don’t like being reminded.”

  “Spare me your tale of woe. Report.”

  “Jetanien told Sesrene that the Federation knows the Tholians destroyed the Bombay. Both sides seem ready for war.”

  “Then why aren’t they at war?”

  “Clearly, Jetanien and his peers have a larger objective—one that war does not serve.”

  “If the Federation is unprepared to make war to hold its ground in the Gonmog Sector, we might find it easier to stake a claim here than we thought.”

  “Perhaps.” She transmitted to Turag an image she had clandestinely recorded during the meeting between Jetanien and Sesrene. “In any event, Sesrene and the other Tholians appear to have recovered.”

  “Any word yet on what caused their seizures?”

  She shook her head. “None.”

  “Jay’va,” Turag muttered. “If we could find the source, we could use it against them. It would be a great help when it comes time to conquer them.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” Sandesjo said.

  From the other end of the conversation, Sandesjo heard the beeping of a comm signal. “Lugok demands an update,” Turag said. “I must go. Qapla’.”

  “Qapla’,” she said, then shut down the channel as quickly as possible. She had just locked her briefcase when the door to her quarters opened without warning.

  Standing in Sandesjo’s doorway, shadowed by back-lighting from the corridor, was Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn.

  “Good evening, Miss Sandesjo.”

  She nodded politely, but her throat tightened. “Commander.”

  T’Prynn walked in uninvited. The door closed behind her. Standing in front of Sandesjo, she drummed her fingertips once on the closed lid of the briefcase. “Working late?”

  “Just finished,” she said.

  “Good.” Moving with exaggerated slowness as if to prolong the moment, T’Prynn circled the table, trailing her right index finger along its edge. Her fingernail left a subtle gouge in the table’s varnish. “Then I am free to take my time.”

  Sandesjo was convinced that T’Prynn’s dark brown eyes were staring clean through her pseudo-identity. The lithe Vulcan woman, who was slightly taller than Sandesjo to begin with, took advantage of the fact that the younger woman was seated and loomed over her. “Some things are best done by degrees,” T’Prynn said. “Do you concur?”

  Sandesjo stared back with equal intensity. “Absolutely.”

  T’Prynn’s hand shot forward and grasped a fistful of Sandesjo’s auburn hair. Sandesjo grabbed T’Prynn’s arm and dug her fingernails into the skin. Twisting Sandesjo’s hair as she pulled, T’Prynn yanked her, shrieking, from her chair and slammed her, back-first, against the wall.

  The Vulcan woman’s kiss was rough and hungry. Sandesjo reveled in it until their lips parted. They both breathed heavily and eyed each other through chaotic locks of ferally tousled hair. Sandesjo gasped for breath through a delighted smile. “You’re early, my love.”

  Saying nothing, T’Prynn gave Sandesjo’s hair another hard, aphrodisiacal twist and kissed her again. Blissfully surrendered into her lover’s embrace, Sandesjo savored the irony that not only had she forsaken Klingon tradition for the touch of other women, but that of all the women she might have loved she had lost her heart to a Vulcan.

  Breaking free of the devouring kiss, T’Prynn tugged on Sandesjo’s sleeve and, moving with the languid grace of a slow-dancing flame, led her toward the bedroom.

  The inevitable, eternal reproach of her ancestors haunted Sandesjo’s thoughts: They will never let me enter Sto-Vo-Kor. Sinking onto the bed beside T’Prynn, however, she decided that the dishonor of her next life would be a small price to pay for such a love in this one.

  Hours later, Pennington returned home to his cluttered, search-tossed apartment and glowering wife. After drowning his sorrows in the pub nearest his apartment, a bout of the spins and an episode of public vomiting had left him with no choice but to call it a night.

  Eyeing his miserable state, Lora sneered and said, “I see you’re taking the phrase ‘filthy, stinking drunk’ literally.”

  He wanted to act aloof, but tears rolled freely from his eyes as he slurred out, “ ’Sbeen a miserable damn day.�
�

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “You have some sob story that explains why I haven’t seen or heard from you for twelve hours?”

  “Liars!” He stumbled against the coffee table and kicked it over, impervious to pain for the moment. “I wanted truth with a capital ‘T’ and got crap.” As he staggered slowly to his liquor cabinet, his vision softened but his righteous anger didn’t. “Set me up, the bastards. Data card, Medina, all of it, just a sham.” He yanked open the cabinet door and fumbled to grab the whiskey.

  Lora tried to steal the bottle from his hands. He refused to let go. “Put that down,” she said. “You’re drunk.”

  “Am I?” With a violent tug, he pulled the bottle free of her hands. “Have you got physical evidence? A second witness?”

  “What in God’s name are you going on about, Tim?”

  The cork of the whiskey bottle came free with a delightful, hollow-sounding foop. He swigged a hefty mouthful and didn’t bother to sleeve the excess from his chin afterward. “I lost my damn job! They fired me…. Jesus, don’t you read the news?”

  “This is about your Bombay story?”

  “That’s what I always liked about you, Lora—you’re quick.”

  She threw up her arms and stormed away from him, seeking the safety of a little distance. “Well, excuse me if I find you a little hard to follow when you come home a drunken mess.”

  “They buried the whole thing,” he said, falling backward onto the couch. He grunted heavily on impact. “FNS denied the story.” He put the bottle to his lips and upended it, dumping a solid double down his throat. Seconds later, he felt sick. “And those bastards at the Federation Council…said they can’t go to war ’cause all the evidence is fake. Fake! Are they kidding?” He fumbled the bottle and spilled half its contents into his lap. He rubbed his face vigorously. It was numb to his touch. “Is this right? The goddamned Tholians killed her, but Starfleet does nothing! Is that fair? Am I supposed to call this justice?”

  Lora folded her arms. “Who did they kill?”

  “What do you mean, who…? They killed the whole damn crew, two hundred people, the team on the planet—”

  “You said they killed her.”

  Paralysis set in instantly. He grappled with his whiskey-fogged short-term memory, trying to replay his own words of a few seconds earlier. The warmth of the booze departed his face, which he felt turning cold and gray with dread. A shiver of guilty horror trembled his entire body.

  His wife glared at him with a hatred like ice.

  “What was her name?”

  He had rehearsed a thousand lies in case this day ever came. Telling stories fleshed out with fine details was his stock-in-trade. He dealt by day in facts and obstinate truths, which had only given him a better appreciation for what they sounded like. Inventing a clever but unimpeachably simple cover story had been easier than he had expected. All that remained now was to let the story work its wonders.

  Instead, his mouth blurted out “Oriana.”

  Lora’s fury dissolved into agony, then she screamed with rage as she hurled her knickknacks at him, one after another. A porcelain rabbit pelted the top of his head. He yelped in pain as the horn of a pewter unicorn impaled his thigh. Pennington fell to the floor and retreated into a fetal curl behind the overturned coffee table as his wife continued her barrage.

  When it finally ceased, he opened his eyes to find her sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room, weeping angrily into her palms. “You bastard,” she said between distraught whimpers. “Damn you.”

  He was still too shell-shocked to leave the protective cover of the coffee table. “Lora,” he began, “I…I just—”

  “Shut up, Tim. Just shut up.” She thrust her hands away from her face, revealing her tear-streaked makeup and swollen eyes. “I’m done talking to you. Get out.”

  “It’s my apartment,” he said.

  “You found another bed before, you can do it again. Get out.”

  Pennington crawled first on to the couch, then he pushed himself back to a standing position from there. He picked up his bottle of whiskey, which lay on its side on the sofa. Inspecting it close up, he realized it was empty. He cast a bitter glare at Lora, then he turned and hurled the empty bottle into the bedroom. It shattered on the wall above the bed, sprinkling the sheets with countless shards of glass.

  “Sleep well,” he said, then staggered out of his home with no other place to go. Walking away from his front door, he grew more aware with every step that because of one critical mistake, the life he had known was gone—his reputation, his career, his marriage…and then he realized, with the perfect clarity of the damned, who he had to thank for his current circumstances.

  Time for a little talk, he decided. Face-to-face this time.

  19

  Lieutenant Uhura read through the results of her work one additional time. Soft synthetic tones signaled incoming transmissions and completed computer functions. The Enterprise’s computer had been working overtime comparing Tim Pennington’s allegedly fraudulent evidence with the Enterprise’s own databank records regarding the destruction of the Bombay, and with its copy of the recordings on the Bombay’s emergency buoy. A gentle whirring emanated from the console in front of her, caused by fans that were cooling some of the more sensitive circuits in the delicate duotronic system.

  She locked the latest results of her studies on the screen beside her work panel, then swiveled her chair toward the first officer, who was conferring quietly with Captain Kirk at the science station. “Captain? Mr. Spock? I’ve completed my analysis.”

  The two men needed no further prompting. They halted their conversation and joined her at her station. Kirk leaned forward, his hand on the back of her chair, while Spock stood tall behind him, hands folded behind his back. Before the change to the new uniforms, Uhura would not have paid much attention to the captain’s proximity, but the high cut of her miniskirt made her a bit self-conscious. Tugging it down, she corrected her posture and turned her chair demurely away from the captain.

  Kirk said, “Report, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s just as you suspected, Captain.” She pointed at some highlighted items on her screen. “The documentation itself is fake, but much of its content was accurate.” Switching the screen to a specific example, she continued, “For instance, the intercepted comm traffic that shows military activity by the Tholians is genuine, but Pennington’s source put it on the wrong frequency.” Another screen of information appeared at her touch. “His lead about the Bombay transporting a sensor screen to the outpost on Ravanar IV was correct, and the documents that supported it were in authentic Starfleet formats, but the names of supervising officers on the forms were obviously wrong.”

  “A logical tactic—if the forger wanted the documents to be easily discredited,” Spock said.

  Uhura wasn’t following Spock’s reasoning. “But if the goal was to discredit them, why fill them with real intelligence?”

  “Guilt by association,” Kirk said.

  “Precisely, Captain,” Spock said. Looking back at Uhura, he continued, “Discrediting the documents was not the goal, Lieutenant. Using the documents to discredit the truth they contained was the objective.”

  Uhura looked at the data again, and this time she was appalled. “Then whoever did this had access to all the real intelligence data,” she said.

  Spock nodded. “A logical deduction.”

  “In other words, Starfleet created this fraud,” Uhura said.

  Kirk straightened his posture. “I believe the preferred term is ‘disinformation campaign.’ ”

  “Sir,” Uhura said, turning her chair toward Kirk, “this ‘disinformation campaign’ smeared the reputation of a civilian reporter. Shouldn’t we do something to correct that?”

  The captain seemed reluctant to answer her. He looked at Spock, who arched an eyebrow, then said to Uhura, “There is nothing we can do, Lieutenant.”

  “I don’t understand,” Uhura said. �
�We have the evidence. We know that it’s real, that his facts were essentially true even if the fine print was wrong. Why can’t we—”

  “Because it would be a court-martial offense,” Kirk said.

  Uhura stared in shock at Kirk, then she looked to Spock for a second opinion. He lifted one eyebrow and said, “The captain is correct. Commodore Reyes ordered us to purge our databanks of all information regarding our mission to Ravanar IV. We can not use this information to exonerate Mr. Pennington in the court of public opinion…no matter how unfairly we know he was treated.”

  Shaking her head, Uhura said, “That’s not justice.”

  “No, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, “it’s not. But as someone recently told me, justice has a long memory…. And something tells me it won’t forget about Mr. Pennington any time soon.”

  Absorbed in his handwritten notes for his speech at the Bombay memorial, which was scheduled for the following morning, Reyes walked into his quarters and heard the door close behind him—taking with it most of his reading light.

  His quarters were almost completely dark. Looking around, he saw that the only source of illumination in the main room was a lone candle on his dining table. It cast a soft ring of golden radiance over a small circle of serving plates and bowls, all filled with food. Seated at the table was Rana Desai. She greeted him with a tiny wave of her hand. “I made dinner.”

  Reyes joined her at the table and set down his notes beside his place setting. He hesitated to sit down. “Everything looks wonderful,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “It was my turn,” Desai said.

  He nodded and sat down. “The chicken smells great,” he said, even though he wasn’t hungry.

  “Tandoori,” she said. “My mother’s recipe.”

  Sorrow fell across Reyes’s face like a curtain. His head suddenly felt heavy, and his chin drooped toward his chest.