by Dayton Ward
Here on Andor, the old day was still proceeding at high warp.
As had been the case for the past three days, Presider sh’Thalis and the rest of the parliament had been locked in closed-door discussions, emerging at infrequent intervals for brief respites before returning to the chamber and resuming their dialogue. Sh’Thalis and a few other representatives had expressed their worry to Picard over much of the rhetoric being put forth by some of the ruling body’s more vocal Visionist members, though disagreement on the current issue did not fall along party lines. Several Progressive advocates also had voiced their concern and displeasure over the Tholian ambassador’s contentious broadcast to the Andorian people, and such negative feelings were only being exacerbated by the Federation Council’s seeming reluctance to comment on the matter.
It was the last point that most concerned Picard. For what reason could President Bacco and the council be wavering? At least some of the secrets of the Taurus Reach that had been buried for all these decades were now revealed. The only thing that could be done now was to acknowledge the decisions made for better or worse more than a century ago, reiterate the Federation’s dedication to aiding the Andorians by any means available, and find a way to move forward in united fashion.
Apparently, he mused with no small amount of cynicism, some things are easier said than done.
“You look tired,” Beverly said, standing behind him and raising a hand to brush at his shoulder.
“Well, that’s exactly how I feel,” Picard replied. Satisfied with his appearance, he turned from the window and offered his wife a warm smile. “How’s René?” He had not seen his son since very early in the morning before he beamed down from the ship in order to await word of any progress from the parliament.
Beverly returned his smile. “He misses his father.” Reaching out, she placed a hand on his arm. “You know, I would’ve thought that all of us being aboard the same ship might mean you’d get to see him every night before his bedtime.”
Feeling a pang of regret, Picard took his wife’s hand in his own. It was a tender gesture, one he supposed was at odds with the sort of proper, composed bearing expected of a senior Starfleet officer. He forgave himself the momentary lapse of protocol, though habit did make him glance to where Lieutenant Rennan Konya and Ensign Ereshtarri sh’Anbi stood at a respectful distance, their attention on the passageway leading from the foyer and ensuring the captain and Dr. Crusher’s privacy.
“Presider sh’Thalis has asked me to speak to the parliament,” Picard said, “but I had no idea I’d be waiting this long.” The presider had come to him in the fervent hope that he might be willing to address the assembled representatives and attempt to somehow defuse the sharp tensions currently being directed at the Federation and Starfleet. After three days of being shut out of all such discussions, he was choosing to take this as a sign that the situation was taking a positive turn. Of course, the presider had extended the invitation much earlier in the day, and since then he had been waiting without any further information or updates.
“I know,” Beverly said. “Duty calls. That sounded more accusatory than I intended.”
Picard smiled again, squeezing her hand. “There’s no reason you have to stay. You should go back to the ship, if for nothing else than to kiss him good night for me.”
“I already did that,” Beverly replied. “He’s asleep, and Dr. Tropp is the perfect babysitter. Besides, I didn’t want to miss your big speech to the parliament.”
Releasing a small sigh, Picard said, “In that case, I should probably prepare some remarks. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my audience, now, would I?” In truth, he had only a vague notion of what he might say once he stood before the assembled politicians. Though he had received reluctant permission from President Bacco and Admiral Akaar to address the parliament, they had given him no direction as to what to convey on the Federation’s behalf. Instead, they were trusting in his judgment and experience to help ease the swelling turmoil now gripping the Andorian government and populace. Everything Picard had considered as part of a formal opening statement had sounded too trite to his own ears. There definitely needed to be some form of acknowledgment and concession in the wake of what had been revealed by Ambassador Nreskene.
“Choudhury to Captain Picard,” said the voice of the Enterprise’s security chief, emanating from his combadge and interrupting his thoughts.
“Picard here. What is it, Lieutenant?”
Her voice carrying a slight yet still noticeable tinge of anxiety, Choudhury asked, “Sir, have you been in contact with the Enterprise?”
Exchanging frowns with Beverly, Picard replied, “I haven’t. Is there a problem?”
“That is the problem, Captain,” Choudhury said. “I’ve tried several times to reach them, but there’s no answer. I’ve also had a few of my people try on their own, and no luck.” After a moment, and in a lower voice, she added, “If I didn’t know any better, sir, I’d think communications were being jammed.”
Not liking the possibilities that notion engendered, the captain said, “Stand by, Lieutenant,” before tapping his combadge to initiate a new frequency. “Picard to Enterprise. Come in, Enterprise.” When there was no answer, he repeated the call and received the same lack of response. Switching back to Choudhury, he said, “Lieutenant, put all of our people on alert, and wait for further instructions.” By now Konya and sh’Anbi had adjusted their stances so that they could divide their attention between the corridor and Picard. Both regarded him with expectant looks, awaiting his orders.
“What are you thinking?” Beverly asked, studying him with no small amount of concern.
Picard shook his head. “I don’t know yet, but something here is definitely wrong.”
“Captain,” Choudhury said, “there’s something else. Our security grid’s pick—” Her voice disappeared in a brief burst of static before the channel went dead.
“Lieutenant?” Picard called out, before attempting to reestablish contact. When that failed, he looked to his security detail. “Ensign sh’Anbi, go to the security command post and get me an update from Lieutenant Choudhury.”
The young Andorian security officer nodded. “Aye, sir,” she said, turning to leave the foyer, when a piercing alarm began filling the corridor. Pulsing indicator lights stationed at regular intervals along the curved, high-ceilinged passageway began to flash, casting frenzied shadows on the walls.
“That’s an intruder alarm, sir,” Konya said, his hand moving to rest on the phaser in its holster near his left hip.
Sh’Anbi activated her tricorder. The warbling tone of its internal sensors echoed in the foyer. “The security grid is down, sir. Force fields are inactive, but the transporter and unauthorized-weapons inhibitors are still operating. I’m picking up activity at all of the security checkpoints. Dozens of bio readings.”
“The Treishya?” Beverly asked.
Was this it? Had the activists decided that the time for bold action finally had come? As if in response to his unvoiced thoughts, the lights in the foyer and corridor promptly extinguished, to be replaced seconds later by smaller, dimmer substitute emergency illumination. The shadows around them now became longer and more foreboding.
“We can’t stay here, sir,” Konya said, having drawn his phaser.
Picard nodded, his hand reaching as though of its own accord to take Beverly by the arm. “To the command post, Lieutenant.”
Everything, it seemed, had gone crazy.
In the feeble glow of emergency lighting within the security detail’s command post, Geordi La Forge scowled at the array of status displays and computer monitors before him. The workstation had been dedicated to overseeing the force-field grid and other protective measures requested by Worf and Choudhury for the duration of the conference. All of them were telling him the same thing: He was locked out of the system he had devised.
“What the hell?” La Forge said, tapping out strings of queries and other interrogative command
s on the workstation’s manual interface. None of the status readings changed in response to his instructions. In fact, it was not evident that the system was even acknowledging his attempts.
“I can’t get in, either,” said Ensign Maureen Granados from an adjacent workstation. “It’s like my credentials have been deleted from the system.”
La Forge nodded. “Same here. Did we lose anything with the shift to backup power?” The sudden loss of main power had caused a momentary degradation of system performance for the handful of seconds it had taken for the secondary systems to engage, but so far as La Forge could tell, everything was back online.
“It’s up and running,” Granados replied. “We just can’t do anything with it.”
Turning away from his console, La Forge saw that Choudhury and the three other security officers on duty had donned tactical gear over their uniforms, and each had retrieved phaser rifles from the weapons locker in the corner of the room. Though Choudhury had silenced the raucous and annoying alarm siren, the tension in the room was still conspicuous. “Lieutenant,” La Forge said, “I can’t explain what’s going on.”
“Can you get me communications?” asked the security chief, not looking up as she examined the phaser rifle cradled in the crook of her left arm.
“Working on it,” he said. “Whoever’s behind this knew what they were doing.”
That seemed to give Choudhury pause. “You think it’s the same people who were interfering with us before.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I think so, yeah,” La Forge replied. “The transporter inhibitors are still active. We could try to destroy them outright, but their force fields are still working.” Somebody had definitely thought through their plan of attack, if indeed that’s what this was. “We’ll have to move clear of them if we want to beam back to the Enterprise.”
Completing the inspection of her weapon, Choudhury shifted her gaze to La Forge. “Already ahead of you on that count, Commander,” she said, “but we’ve got another problem.” She held up the phaser rifle. “Our weapons have been neutralized.”
“What?” La Forge asked. Incredulous, he turned back to his workstation and brought up the status displays for the weapons oversight protocols. “I’ll be damned. If this is right, all particle weapons on the grounds have been deactivated, which should be impossible. That command can only be issued from here, and only by you or me.”
“Well,” Choudhury said, handing the rifle back to one of her subordinates, who returned it to the weapons locker, “if neither of us did it, then we definitely have a problem.”
La Forge released a frustrated sigh. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said, studying the station’s readouts in the vain hope that some new clue might present itself. Following the incident with the intruder and his unauthorized accessing of the security grid, the chief engineer and Granados had reconfigured the entire system, adding new layers of authentication and encryption to ensure such an infiltration could not be repeated. So far as he could tell, that had not occurred; this was something new.
“Lieutenant,” said another of her people, Ensign Ron Hanagan, from his station. A tricorder was in his right hand, and he held up the device for them to see. “I’m picking up an influx of bio readings on the complex grounds. We’ve got intruders all over the place.”
For the first time, La Forge saw signs of genuine annoyance clouding Choudhury’s face, even more so than when she had been cut off during her conversation with Captain Picard moments earlier. “We’re blind and deaf up here,” she said, moving toward Hanagan. She reached for the hand phaser on her belt, then, realizing it was as useless as the weapon she had just discarded, shook her head in apparent disgust before looking back to La Forge. “I need communications, Commander. I don’t care how you get it, or if it means you and your people stand at the windows and shout at each other, but I want to talk to my security teams. Now.” There was no malice behind the security chief’s words, but rather simple determination and singular focus. She was uninterested in causes or details. All that mattered right now were results, by any means necessary.
“We’re on it,” La Forge said. Then, seeing that Choudhury and Hanagan were heading for the door, he asked, “Where are you going?”
Choudhury gestured downward. “To the main level checkpoint. It’s the quickest way over to the parliament building.”
“Captain Picard?” La Forge prompted.
Nodding, Choudhury said, “Konya knows to bring him here, but I want to make sure he has backup if he runs into trouble.” She then pointed to him. “With all due respect, Commander, let me worry about the captain. I need you to get us back in control of our systems, or else blow up the whole damned thing. I don’t care, but if we can’t use it, I don’t want whoever’s doing this to have it, either. Got it?”
“Got it,” he said, but by then Choudhury and Hanagan were gone, leaving him and Granados alone with two junior security officers, neither of whom looked old enough even to have been born when La Forge had first reported for duty aboard the Enterprise-D.
Don’t be an ageist. The joke came unbidden, serving to relieve his tension only the smallest bit. But, it was a start.
“Okay, Granados,” he said, returning his attention to the hash that made up the status readouts on his monitors. Though it still all seemed like gibberish, he forced himself to look at it as though it were fresh, searching for some hint, some clue that might be useful. “Let’s see what we can do about this mess.”
36
“Commander Worf.”
Standing near the front of the bridge, his arms folded across his broad chest as he regarded the image on the main viewer of the two Andorian ships following close behind the Enterprise, Worf turned at the sound of Ensign Balidemaj’s voice. As he beheld the young tactical officer, he saw the look of uncertainty in her eyes, but there also was something else. Hope? Triumph? The first officer could not be sure.
“Have you found something, Ensign?” he asked.
Balidemaj nodded. “I think so, sir.” Waiting until he crossed the bridge to her station, she pointed to one of the computer monitors set at eye level into the wall of her console. “I’ve been going over the sensor and communications logs from the moment we encountered the power fluctuations. Remember that burst transmission we got just before everything started going haywire? It makes sense that it had something to do with all of this, but what I couldn’t figure out was how.” She shrugged. “Then I started breaking it down, piece by piece. That wasn’t a broad-spectrum hail like we normally get, or even like the one th’Gahryn sent before we established communications with him. It was focused, sir, for a particular receiver.”
His eyes narrowing in suspicion as he contemplated what this revelation might mean, Worf asked, “Can you pinpoint the location of that receiver?” Such a discovery implied the presence of an intruder aboard the ship, or even possibly a collaborator among the crew. Despite himself, he thought immediately of the seventeen Andorian members of the Enterprise complement. Could one of them be working in concert with Eklanir th’Gahryn and the Treishya? As much as he did not want to consider the notion, common sense told him he could not dismiss the possibility.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do, sir,” Balidemaj replied, indicating another monitor with a wave of her left hand. “The signal’s no longer active, so I only have the previous logs to go on. Still, I’ve been tightening the search radius, and so far I’ve narrowed it to the secondary hull.”
Deflector control, engineering, cargo storage, and the aft shuttlebay were areas of the ship with sufficient space to offer isolation for someone to work in relative privacy. Even with the limited area, searching the ship for a single person who might not want to be found posed a significant challenge.
“I think I’ve got it, sir,” Balidemaj said, pointing again to one of her status monitors. “When the burst signal was sent, there also was a reply, but on a frequency so low that it’s below our system’s nor
mal operational range. Very weak, which explains the short duration. It wasn’t meant for anything more than one or two short dispatches.”
“Were you able to decipher the message?” Worf asked.
The tactical officer shrugged. “There wasn’t much there. All I found was a simple command: ‘Proceed.’ Nothing else.”
Worf considered that. “Perhaps nothing else was needed. It’s in engineering, isn’t it?”
Turning in her seat, Balidemaj frowned. “Yes, sir. How did you know?”
“There are only a few places aboard the ship that lend themselves to the kind of widespread systems infiltration and interruption we are experiencing,” Worf replied. “Assuming our systems are otherwise secure from outside penetration, that means something or someone has to have allowed such unauthorized access in the first place.”
Her attention once more on her instruments, Balidemaj shook her head. “I’m not picking up any unexplained communications or other readings coming from engineering.”
“Notify Commander Taurik of what you’ve found,” Worf said. “His team will take it from there.” Then, before turning away from the station, he added, “Excellent work, Ensign.”
Balidemaj nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
Stepping down into the command well, Worf moved to take his seat in the captain’s chair. He studied the images of the modified Andorian freighters on the screen, already feeling his anticipation rising at the thought of finding and quashing the source of whatever influence Eklanir th’Gahryn used to hold the Enterprise hostage.