by L. A. Graf
Trying to salvage my department, Chekov wanted to answer, but knew that wasn’t entirely honest—he wasn’t convinced there was anything wrong except for the auditors. Scrubbing at his eyes again, this time to clear away sleepiness, he turned to poke through Sweeney’s boxes until he could find one with enough small space to stow the guards’ mementos. “Trying to do my job.”
Sulu made a noncommittal noise. “You know, the whole point of having subordinates is so they can do your job for you when you’re off duty. Or do COs get higher efficiency ratings if they fall asleep at work?”
That struck deeper even than Chekov expected. He had to repress a sudden urge to slam the boxes against the facing wall. “Sulu, go home.”
“Hey—”
“Go home!”
He heard the helmsman shift position, and hoped for a moment that Sulu had actually taken the hint for once and left him to be alone. Instead, the squadroom door slid shut and Sulu asked quietly, carefully, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fi—”
“Look at me.”
Chekov hesitated, caught with the spray of flowers in his hand and nowhere in the box safe enough to keep them from being destroyed. He finally laid them crosswise atop the waiting photos and turned to meet Sulu’s stare.
The helmsman always surprised Chekov with the frank intensity of his attention. It was that same superhuman focus that let him squeeze the life out of a hobby in less than two weeks, and let him pilot a starship better than any other being alive. It also made him very difficult to face when he chose to direct his attention to somewhat more personal matters. “Pavel, what’s the matter with you?”
Chekov took advantage of his answer to glance away from Sulu’s expectant frown. “I’ve just had a lot on my mind since the murders, that’s all.” He made the mistake of looking up to check his progress with the dodge, and his resolve unraveled like mist in a stiff breeze. Damn Sulu—if they weren’t friends already, Chekov could probably learn to hate him. “Oh, Sulu, I’m so tired,” the lieutenant sighed abruptly, sinking into the chair across from his friend.
“Then go to bed,” Sulu said with a shrug, obviously at a loss for what else to suggest.
Chekov leaned over his knees to bury his face in his hands. The whole business of sitting upright seemed suddenly too strenuous, and he wanted nothing so much as to fastforward through his sleep period and get back to trying to invent solutions for problems he wasn’t sure he could identify. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, his voice muffled against his hands. “John Taylor wants to take away my department—he wants to reassign my people and put me out of my job, and I don’t know what to do to stop him.”
“Can he actually do that?” Sulu asked, startled.
Chekov nodded and sat back, his hands in his hair. “So far as I know. Why couldn’t he? Isn’t that why the Federation sent them here—to tell us how well we do our jobs?” He looked over at Sulu, dark eyes meeting dark eyes across the empty table. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be a good officer. I never expected someone like Taylor to come in and tell me I wasn’t.”
“Don’t be stupid—you’re a good officer.”
Chekov had a feeling even Sulu knew how close that sounded to condescension.
“I just don’t know anymore,” Chekov sighed. “I keep thinking that I should be more certain, more dedicated, more sure of where I’m going. I keep being a—” Afraid, he wanted to say. Afraid that I’m not really good enough to have so many lives depending on me. But the admission seemed to border dangerously on weakness, at a time when nothing but the very best would do. “I just don’t want anything else to go wrong,” he finally settled on, looking almost anywhere but at Sulu. “I don’t want anyone else to die—not when I’m here this time, and in charge, and supposed to be able to prevent it.”
Sulu didn’t answer right away, and Chekov caught himself thinking, I shouldn’t have sat down, when his muscles started lodging sleepy complaints. He was just summoning the willpower to push to his feet when Sulu asked, “What did you mean just then—’here this time’”
A little shot of adrenaline flashed through him, and Chekov knew that Sulu saw the startled embarrassment on his face before he could remember how to school his expression. Lack of sleep, he told himself. Talking and not even knowing what he was saying. It was his own fault for dwelling too much on the Kongo, and Robert, and how nothing he thought of now could save them.
“It’s nothing.” He tried not to seem flustered as he stood, but lying didn’t come to him easily enough even to serve in stupid situations like this. “I’m just tired and not making sense.”
Sulu, still seated, peered up at him suspiciously. “You were making sense before.”
Chekov stopped by the doorway and shrugged with a weak smile. “It happens like that sometimes.” He pantomimed shooting himself in the temple. “All at once.”
“Right.” Sulu didn’t look convinced.
“It’s late,” Chekov went on, not giving his friend a chance to pry further. “You really should go home and get some sleep. So should I.”
Sulu looked for an instant as though he might pursue the discussion, then relented and stood to follow Chekov down the hall. “I can’t go home. Some stunningly brilliant chief of security locked me out of my cabin by picking me a door code I can’t remember.” He stretched, then winced and rubbed at his shoulder. “I just wish that chief of security’s couch was more comfortable.”
Chekov smiled—mostly for his friend’s benefit—and felt a surprising twinge of gratitude that he had someone like Sulu nearby through all of this. “The chief of security picked you a nice, easy number to remember—7249.”
Sulu made a face as he latched the front of his jacket. “That’s what I typed.”
“No, you didn’t,” Chekov told him patiently. “If you had, it would have let you in.”
Still, when they got to Sulu’s cabin on Deck Six, the helmsman hurried ahead to punch four digits into his lock before Chekov could look at the readout. “Aha!” Sulu cried triumphantly.
Chekov gave a sigh and leaned over Sulu’s shoulder to look at the panel. “So what? That just means you tried an incorrect entry code at least three times and locked up your system.”
Sulu frowned at the locking mechanism. “I only tried once. And I swear I did it right.”
Chekov shrugged, not sure what else to tell him. “Then somebody tried to break into your cabin.”
“Oh, great,” Sulu groaned. “I still haven’t finished cleaning up from the first time!” He stepped aside to let Chekov open the panel and manually activate the door. “What is it they want, anyway? It’s not like I own anything valuable.”
“It didn’t look like they were interested in robbery when they were in here before.” Although he couldn’t imagine what else could motivate someone to harass the helmsman like this. Having no other comfort to offer, he said, “Your door system worked, though, so I don’t think you have to worry. Just let me know if anybody tries this again.”
Sulu nodded dejectedly and heaved a frustrated sigh. “In the meantime, could you do me a favor? Just in case someone does break in?”
“Probably,” Chekov admitted, not willing to commit before he was asked. “What?”
“Keep my lizards for me?”
Chapter Nine
A NIGHTMARE HOWL wrenched Sulu out of sleep, adrenaline exploding in his blood so fiercely that he’d bolted out of his sheets and made it halfway to the door before he quite knew where he was. The fuzziness of his thinking told him it couldn’t have been more than three hours since Chekov let him back into his quarters, and his gut recognized the icy bite of terror before his sleepy mind could identify the source: the ship’s decompression alarm had gone off. He skidded to a stop, cursing, but it was too late—his door’s automatic sensors had already hummed into motion. Expecting the other side to be cold and airless, Sulu forced himself to blow out all his breath.
The metal panels slid open, not to the
devouring black rush of vacuum, but to warmth and light and a jangle of worried voices. Other crew members were emerging from their quarters along the hall, their shocked-alert faces at odds with rumpled night clothes. Sulu took a thankful breath of air, then caught Uhura’s amused glance from across the corridor and blushed, ducking back into his quarters.
“—possible hull breach on Deck Six only.” Spock’s calm voice echoed along the hall as the ship’s intercom momentarily cut through the blaring alarm. Sulu listened intently while he pulled on his uniform and stamped into his boots. “Evacuate all sectors according to standard emergency procedure, then report to damage control. Repeat, we have a possible hull breach on Deck Six only. All personnel should evacuate their quarters immediately.”
Footsteps thudded outside as crew members hurried toward the nearest turbolift entrance. Sulu threw his jacket on over bare skin, spared one regretful glance for his unfilled lily pond and the small jungle of plants around it, then ran for the door.
It opened onto Uhura’s concerned dark face. “Are you all right?”
Sulu nodded, still feeling the flustered warmth in his cheeks. “Nobody ever died of embarrassment,” he said wryly. Farther down the curving passage, an orderly file of crew members waited to pack themselves into the open turbolift compartment. Sulu glanced around, worry swamping all other emotions. No panicked civilians were disrupting that welldrilled response.
“Have you seen any of the auditors?” he asked over the howl of the alarm.
“No.” Uhura’s long bronze robe rippled in a gust of wind. Sulu’s pulse jumped with fear, but when he looked up he saw it was only the turbolift compartment moving away without closing its outer doors. Another lift slid into place, and the evacuation continued with barely a pause. “Maybe they went to a different turbolift.”
“But this is the closest one to their quarters.”
“They may not know that,” she pointed out.
“They were told how to evacuate their area in an emergency. They must have been!” Sulu turned to look down the empty corridor, tension crawling up his back. He made his decision abruptly. “Wait here—I’ll be right back.”
“Hey!” Uhura grabbed his arm with surprising strength, dragging him to a halt. “Where do you think you’re going? The turbolift’s that way.”
“I’m going to go look for the auditors. If they don’t get out soon, the bulkheads will come down and trap them.” Sulu shook off her hand as gently as he could. Behind them, the turbolift sped away with the last of their sector’s crew, and a third empty compartment took its place. He swallowed a longing to dive into it. “You stay here and hold the lift for me. The computer may not send another one down.”
Uhura’s intelligent dark eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Sulu, are you trying to make sure I’m safe?”
“Yes,” he said frankly. “Because if the bulkheads come down while I’m still on this deck, I want someone else on board to know about it.”
“Oh.” She frowned for a moment, then nodded reluctantly. “All right, you win. Go check the auditors—I’ll wait for you here.”
“Thanks.” Sulu took a deep breath and pushed himself away from the wall, somehow feeling as if this were zero gravity and he needed the momentum. He saw Uhura watching him as he rounded the corridor’s curve, her hand poised over the manual controls for the turbolift. She looked as worried as he felt.
The empty corridor felt huge and echoing, splashed with pulsing red where alert beacons lined the walls. Sulu ran to the auditors’ quarters without stopping to check at any of the other cabin doors. Starfleet people knew the dangers of a decompression alert, knew how to evacuate an area before the atmosphere evacuated it for them. Civilians were the ones who had the luxury of growing complacent about their safety. “Don’t worry about it,” a station administrator had told him once, when a station decompression alert had sent him and seven other Starfleet officers hurrying for emergency bulkheads. “It goes off all the time around here—it doesn’t mean anything.”
And, sure enough, it hadn’t.
Alarms didn’t work like that on the Enterprise, though. If the ship hadn’t located the hull breach yet, it would do so soon, and then nothing would be able to save the auditors from being trapped by the emergency bulkheads that would protect the rest of the ship.
The door panel on the first of the auditors’ cabins refused to yield to the quick slap of his palm, its golden flare of light indicating that it was still locked from within. Sulu stepped back and toggled the internal speaker. “Ms. Chaiken! We have a decompression warning! You’ve got to evacuate your cabin!”
There was no reply. Sulu cursed and ran to the next door down the corridor. The auditors’ quarters were connected through a shared bathroom—maybe they were having a late-night conference.
Right, Sulu, he thought. I can just see them shouting out efficiency estimates over the noise of the alarm—
The second door startled him with its hiss, sliding obediently open as soon as he hit the access panel. Sulu scowled and took a cautious step into the dimly lit interior. The air inside smelled faintly metallic and stale.
“Mr. Taylor? Mr. Taylor, are you here?” Seeing no sign of motion in the darkness, Sulu reached to turn on the lights. The male body on the floor seemed to leap into sight with the sudden brightness, ruffled hair and rumpled suit dark against the beige carpet. The stilted angle of head and neck, flung back like an envelope flap against his shoulders, told Sulu there was no use in calling sickbay. John Taylor was dead.
“Oh, my God—” Sulu approached the auditor’s body, not sure what he should be looking for but feeling vaguely that someone ought to examine it. There were no obvious signs of struggle in the room—the scattered notebooks and recorders around Taylor’s sprawled form looked as if he’d simply dropped them when he fell. No bruises or abrasions discolored his skin, and even his face wore only an expression of mild surprise.
Sulu edged past the dead man, just far enough to dart a glance through the open bathroom door. He saw a second still form draped across the polished tiles, long hair cascading across her caved-in forehead to join the sticky red halo on the floor.
The sour warmth of sickness pushed at the back of Sulu’s throat, and he spun around, desperate for clean corridor air to wash away the metallic smell of blood.
A short, insistent signal pierced Chekov’s sleep, jerking him into wakefulness and bringing him bolt upright in his bed before his conscious mind had identified the sound. A throb of amber light drew his attention quickly through the dark, and he focused on the security panel by his workstation. His private alarm, telling him someone was trying to access the security office without coming to him first. He struggled out of bed, kicking sheets to the foot of his bunk, and grabbing trousers and tunic from the top of his dresser. In the bathroom, Sulu’s lizards chirruped happily, echoing the alarm’s strident whistle with their own peeps.
Chekov glanced at his desk chronometer while he stepped into his pants, then shouldered into his tunic on his way out the door without bothering to locate his boots. 0300 meant Davidson and Tate were the two guards manning the duty desk, and they knew better than to go into his office without first telling him—all the guards knew better. Which meant the trespasser wasn’t from security, probably wasn’t from the Enterprise at all. Chekov thought about Kelly and the bogus intruder alert, but dismissed this sort of stunt as too stupid for even the auditors. Then he thought about Scott’s insistence that Sweeney, Gendron, and Purviance had to have been killed by someone else’s deliberate action, and he couldn’t dismiss that line of thinking quite so easily.
Chekov’s office was the first door inside the entrance to security. The outer office was empty and darkened, but Chekov could just glimpse faint light from beyond the open inner doorway. He padded, stocking-footed, up to the inside door and leaned around the jamb. His activated work terminal cast an icy glow against the equipment locker behind his desk, but no one waited for him inside the tiny room
, and nothing else seemed to be missing or disturbed. Grumbling about whoever had pulled him out of sleep for nothing, he stretched across the desk to power down the monitor.
He stopped when the graphic on the screen caught his eye.
The circular spiderweb of blue lines was a blueprint schematic for Deck Six of the Enterprise’s primary hull. A thick, white-light X obscured a portion of sector thirty-nine, and, next to the mark, someone had printed sloppily: “BOMB.” Under that: “BETTER HURRY.”
Chekov felt his hands go cold. Pushing away from the desk, he sprinted down the security corridor for the squad room and its lockers full of equipment. The lights came to half-power when he slapped the controls on his way through the door, but he still slid across the last meter of deck for lack of shoes or traction. When he collided with the kit locker and slammed open the door, one of the ensigns at the duty desk clambered out into the hall. “Who’s there?”
“Davidson!” he shouted, tearing the bomb kit off its rack. “Put the department on standby alert!”
“Lieutenant Chekov?” She came halfway into the room, only to duck into the corridor again when he dove past her at a run. “What’s happened?”
He didn’t slow to explain. “Just stay here at the duty desk with Tate in case the captain needs you! I’ll be on Deck Six.”
“Aye-aye!”
He thundered up the access ladder to the deck above, afraid of being trapped inside a lift shaft if there really was a bomb and it detonated before he could reach it. The decompression alarms swarmed around him as soon as he threw back the upper hatch. An urge to search every cabin on the deck gripped him, and he fought it back. The closest thing he had to useful knowledge was that warning on his terminal, and he couldn’t afford to ignore it if there were even the slightest chance it might be true. Sector thirty-nine, he reminded himself. Sulu’s quarters. Uhura’s quarters. The quarters for more than fifty crew members.
The deck was well evacuated by now. Chekov wondered with an ache in his stomach how old the decompression alert was, and how little time there might be left to find an explosive device and disarm it. Tightening his grip on the bomb kit, he wished insanely that he’d stopped to put on his boots, so that he could run full out, like he wanted to.