Текст книги "Harbinger"

Автор книги: David Mack

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“Precisely,” Reyes said. “More than twenty colonies and half a dozen mining operations have come to the Taurus Reach in the last sixteen months—half of them since this station opened. Our job? Protect them as best we can with what few resources we’re given. In other words, standard operating procedure.”

“I can’t imagine the Klingons or the Tholians have been happy about our move into this region. And I’m sure a starbase on their shared doorstep pleases them even less.”

“True,” Reyes said. “I’d be lying if I said we didn’t ruffle a lot of feathers by building this station. But the alternative would have been much worse.”

This time, Kirk really didn’t follow. “What alternative?”

“Letting the Klingons expand their reach until they hit the Tholian border. We’d be front row to a war that could last decades; whichever side won, we’d be fenced in, stuck navigating hostile territory in order to explore the galactic rim…. We need to keep our options open, for now and for the future.”

“With all respect, Commodore, space is three-dimensional, and it’s big. Even if the Klingons make a push for the Tholian border, we’d hardly be ‘landlocked’—we’d still have options.”

“You’re talking about taking the long way around,” Reyes said. “Away from the galactic plane.” He lifted the remote and turned off the screen. “No thank you, Captain. I read the report on your mission to the energy barrier. I’ll pass.”

Kirk shook his head. “If you think colonizing this region will stop the Klingons from trying to conquer it, you don’t know the Klingons.”

Reyes’s voice became quiet and intense. “The hell I don’t. I was commanding a starship while you were still at the Academy.” Regaining his composure, he continued, “You’re right about one thing, though. The Klingons will try to take the Taurus Reach. My job is to make sure they don’t succeed.”

“What about the Tholians? If this turns into a battle on two fronts—”

“It won’t,” Reyes said. “The Tholians have never shown any interest in this region. They expanded from Tholia in every direction except this one. As long as we steer clear of their border, I don’t expect any trouble from them.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“We’ll be sitting on a powder keg.”

Kirk frowned. “On that, we agree.”

Reyes leaned slowly back in his chair, eyeing Kirk with darkening suspicion. “You think I’m just some paper-pusher, don’t you, Kirk?”

“No, sir, of course—”

“Yes, you do,” Reyes said, cutting Kirk off. “You think I sit here, safe on a starbase, playing games with people’s lives.” No longer young or foolish enough to be goaded into embarrassing himself, Kirk stayed quiet. The commodore leaned aggressively forward as he continued, “I take my command just as seriously as you take yours, Kirk. I deal in life and death, war and peace, and everything in between, every day. Bottom line: I make it my business to know my business. So, when you walk into my office and presume to give me the third degree with questions I answered to the admiralty months ago, I get the impression you think I’m just some rubber stamp with heavy braid on his cuff.”

Choosing his words and his tone with care, Kirk said, “If I offended you, Commodore, please accept my apology. No slight was intended, I assure you.”

Reyes gave a small nod of acknowledgment. “Enough said.” Turning his chair, he rested one arm on his desktop and glanced sidelong at Kirk. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes, sir,” Kirk said, and smirked wryly. “Keep the matches away from the powder keg.”

7

Lieutenant Commander Kevin Judge had his hands full. With one word from Captain Gannon, the Bombay’s shore leave had been canceled, and repairs that he and his engineering teams had expected to have four days to finish now were being shoehorned into twelve frantic hours.

The gangly chief engineer stalked through main engineering like a hunting tiger, seeking out whatever was going wrong. He found it, in the form of a well-meaning young ensign who was disassembling the controls for the impulse reactor’s primary heat exchanger. “Anderson,” Judge said loudly, then coughed. His voice was hoarse from nonstop barking of orders. The rasp of his overtaxed larynx, when added to his already clipped Liverpool accent, made him sound like he had a horrendous cold. He recovered his breath and continued, “Are you mad? Didn’t I say to leave the impulse systems until after we leave spacedock?” The ensign rolled her eyes and looked glumly at her half-dismantled pile of hardware. “Put it back together,” Judge said.

He dragged himself over to the master engineering console. Planting one hand on its edge, he awkwardly propped himself up while he studied the tall board’s blinking status displays. All bollixed up, as usual, he grumped, shaking his head. He reached across and thumbed the intercom to the phaser control room. “Castellano, why aren’t the phasers back online yet?”

“The plasma relays are still overheating, sir. We had to remove them for recalibration.”

Panic and desperation infused the chief engineer’s every word. “Castellano, we ship out in less than three hours.” He pulled his hand down over his hollow-cheeked face, then roughly scratched his crown of shock-cut hair. “Lock down the phaser capacitors at seventy percent of maximum and fix the plasma relays later.”

“Aye, sir. Castellano out.”

Another blinking light captured his attention. He opened another intercom channel. “Engineering to ch’Shonnas.”

“Go ahead, sir,” said Lieutenant Thanashal ch’Shonnas, the ship’s darkly reticent Andorian science officer.

“Your status indicator just went red, Shal. What happened?”

“That fix we talked about? Didn’t take. All the crystals you sent up were burned out.”

“Bloody hell.” Concentrate on my breathing, Judge told himself. Unclench fists. “Hang tight, I’ll see what I can do. Engineering out.” He flipped a switch and opened a line to the bridge. “Engineering to Commander Milonakis.”

“This is Milonakis. What’s up, Kevin?”

“Vondy, we’re in a bind. We need your magic.”

“Name it,” Milonakis said.

The chief engineer relaxed a little. Milonakis knew someone on every base and starship in the fleet, and the XO had a particular knack for trading and bartering. If anyone could find what the Bombay needed on short notice, it would be him.

“Regulator crystals for the sensor array,” Judge said. “All our spares are fried, and our main is cracked…. Mayday.”

“All right, I’m on it. Milonakis out.” The bridge channel clicked off.

For a moment, Judge thought he might have put out the last of the metaphorical fires plaguing his third consecutive shift without a break. Then he turned and found himself chin-to-snout with Lieutenant Loak, one of the more gratingly overeager junior officers on the Bombay engineering staff. Something looked different about him.

“Loak, why is your hair pink?”

“Long story, sir.”

“No doubt. What’s up?”

“Ensign Anderson informs me that you’ve postponed the repairs to the impulse control,” Loak said.

“That’s right,” Judge said. “You got a beef with that?”

“Certainly not a personal one, Commander,” Loak said. “But until we complete these repairs, we will be at less than sixty-three percent efficiency in maneuvers at half-impulse, and strenuous full-impulse maneuvers could overload the system.”

“I appreciate that, Loak, really I do. But you might notice we’re a little short of manpower down here tonight.”

“Sir, we cannot postpone this until after departure. Once the impulse system is engaged, we will be unable to make further repairs to these systems.”

“I’m aware of that,” Judge said. “I do know how engines work, you know. But we’re putting this boat back together with spit and promises right now, so we can ship out on an emergency milk run. We’ll be back in six days. Fix it then.” He shooed Loak away as he would a small animal that had overstayed its welcome. “Off you go.”

The Tellarite sulked as he stomped away. Judge looked around main engineering. At a monitoring station next to his main console, Engineer Donna Ford was cross-checking the warp power readouts against the rated norms listed on a chart in her hand. Ensign Robertson—whose first name, by coincidence, was also Donna—stood next to her, observing but not doing much else that Judge could see.

“Robertson, what are you doing?”

“Supervising,” she said, with a naïveté that Judge found endearing only when he encountered it in attractive young women.

“That’s lovely,” he said. “Why don’t you supervise recalibrating the alignment of the dilithium crystals? And you can do it yourself, to make sure it’s done properly.”

She glared at him with wounded pride, then walked toward the main warp reactor. “Yes, sir.”

He flashed a reassuring smile at the enlisted woman. “Ford, is it?”

She looked afraid, like a small woodland creature in a spotlight. “Yes, sir.”

“Ford, I’d like you to do a favor for me. Find Cargo Chief Hayes and tell him that if he doesn’t find our missing duotronic cables, I can’t guarantee that his quarters will continue to enjoy the benefits of working lights, ventilation, or plumbing.”

“Aye, sir,” the young woman said, and started toward the turbolift.

“Oh, and Ford? On your way back, stop by the mess hall and pick me up a spot of tea and some biscuits.” Remembering the subtle shades of mistranslation between her American dialect and his own, he shouted out a clarification before the turbolift doors closed. “And by biscuits, I mean cookies!”

A shrill voice came from behind him and cut like a knife. “Cookies? Is junk food all you eat?” Judge turned toward the scolding like a skipper steering his boat into a storm wave. Dr. Hua Sun Lee had snuck up on him to deliver one of her patented harangues. “No wonder you skipped your physical again. With a diet like yours, you must be an infarction waiting to happen.”

“I really don’t have time for this.”

“Five! That’s how many times you’ve made an appointment to take your physical and haven’t shown up! Five!” Physically, Dr. Lee was a tiny woman, but she had a temper and a voice that could overpower a charging bull.

Judge handed her his checklist. “It’s on my list, Doctor. Unfortunately, so are four dozen other critical items, all of which need to be resolved before we ship out in”—he checked the chronometer—“two hours and fifty-six minutes.” Despite his inner voice telling him to remain calm, he felt himself grow more hysterical by the moment. “I’ve got a mess hall whose food slots haven’t been restocked. I have a main sensor array that, for no reason I can possibly fathom, is suddenly blind to the element carbon. My engineering team seems committed to disassembling anything that still works, the cargo chief misplaced all my spare parts, and I haven’t slept in over twenty-five hours. I’ve seen naught but this compartment, the inside of that turbolift, and my own quarters for the past eleven months.” His desperation turned to bitter sarcasm. “So I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced you, Doctor, but, as you might have noticed, I have a few petty details to attend to at the moment.”

Dr. Lee frowned up at Judge and shot him the most venomous stink-eye stare he had ever seen. “All I ask is that you cancel appointments you can’t keep.” She turned, walked a few steps, then spun back. “Tomorrow at 1700 hours?”

His smile wasn’t the least bit sincere. “That would be lovely.”

“Show up this time.”

“Understood.”

Lee nodded once, affirming that the discussion was over. She walked away, through a gaggle of junior computer engineers who all were scrambling in a panic toward Judge. “Sir!” shouted Lieutenant Kashuk. “The library computer is offline!”

It was like Judge’s worst nightmare during his Academy days. “What? How?”

“We were running a standard optimization cycle after we installed the database upgrade, and—”

“Upgrade? I didn’t order any bloody upgrade.”

Kashuk and the others traded embarrassed looks. “We downloaded it from Vanguard.”

A sick churning feeling spun through Judge’s gut. “Tell me you didn’t install the Sigma Seven utility with it.”

More downcast eyes told him the worst was true: They had tried to load software that hadn’t yet been backward-engineered for the Bombay’s Mark II computer core. “Let me guess,” he said. “It’s locked in diagnostic mode and isn’t accepting input.” Dismayed nods all around. “Unbelievable! Who do you people work for? I thought we were on the same side. Show of hands: How many of you are paid saboteurs?”

“We’re sorry, sir,” Kashuk said. “We should have read—”

“Forget it,” Judge said, slipping into problem-solving mode. “Pull the plug on the main core, interrupt main power and cut off its backup battery, then do a full restart. Go!”

The engineers scurried away to try and repair their mistake before the next one made its entrance. Best-case scenario, Judge reasoned, they might have the computer back up in about two hours…which will leave me less than an hour to test the sensors and about a dozen other things. It took all his willpower and training to stop himself from hyperventilating.

“Mr. Judge,” a woman said from behind him.

Well past the point of civility, he snapped, “What?”

Then he turned to see the placid face of Captain Gannon.

“Something wrong, Mr. Judge?”

He brightened his face with a smile whose sincerity was undermined by the anxiety that pinned his eyebrows up around his hairline. “Wrong? What could be wrong?”

“Everything’s all right, then?”

“Couldn’t be righter.” She’s not buying it.

“Carry on, then.” She smiled and continued on her way aft.

“Thank you, Captain.” He kept the smile plastered on his face until he was sure that she was not coming back. Sagging with exhaustion and despair against his console, he muttered to himself, “We’re so right roundly pooched, it’s not even funny.”

Tim Pennington lurked in the shadows across from the gangway to the Enterprise.

He rechecked his notes while he waited. So far, he’d convinced five lower-decks personnel from the ship to talk with him, either off the record or on the condition of anonymity, about the ship’s recent jaunt to the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy. The mission had failed and resulted in nine deaths. But the true horror, his sources had said, was what transpired later, after the ship began its long journey home.

The first time he heard the story of Gary Mitchell’s transformation into a telepathic, telekinetic, homicidal übermensch, he had dismissed it as the tall tale of a crewman who had spent too many months on duty without R&R. But the next witness confirmed the report, as did the other three. Aside from expected variances on picayune details, their stories lined up with frightening specificity. If even half what they had told him was the truth, this had the makings of an incredible scoop.

He had multiple firsthand sources; he had been to the station’s operations office and received copies of the death certificates for Commander Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner; and he had filed a freedom-of-information petition with the station’s chief JAG officer, Captain Rana Desai, for copies of Captain Kirk’s official after-action reports regarding the deaths of Mitchell and Dehner. Rumor had it that Kirk had listed them as casualties of the failed attempt to breach the energy barrier, when in fact they had been killed under mysterious circumstances on Delta Vega.

From somewhere down the corridor, a turbolift door gasped open. Footfalls echoed brightly and grew louder, sharper, closer. Pennington peeked around the corner. At the first sight of a gold-colored sleeve adorned by two-and-a-half rings of braid, he emerged from hiding. Quickly interposing himself between Kirk and the gangway entrance, he held up his Federation News Service credentials. “Captain, a moment of your time?”

“No,” Kirk said. He tried to detour around Pennington, who sidestepped and blocked him again.

“How did Gary Mitchell die, Captain?”

Kirk’s expression hardened, and his posture became ramrod-stiff. Anger burned brightly in his eyes. Through a jaw tight with suppressed fury, he said, “In the line of duty.”

“Where did Mitchell die, Captain?”

“Are you implying something?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“And you want a simple answer,” Kirk said. Pennington nodded. Kirk added, “My answer is in my report. Excuse me.” The captain shouldered past Pennington and stepped onto the gangway.

“I’ve already requested copies of your report,” Pennington said. “I’ll be interested to see if they match up to the eyewitness accounts I’ve already compiled.”

Kirk stopped. For a moment, Pennington expected the young commanding officer to turn back and prolong the conversation. Instead, without turning around, Kirk resumed walking.

Maybe the witness statements were wrong; perhaps they were based on hearsay. It was possible that Kirk’s official report would contain no discrepancies at all. But if it did, his dismissive response was the same as saying “No comment.” In the court of public opinion, that would be seen as suspect at best.

Clicking off his handheld recorder, Pennington decided to head upstairs and ask Captain Desai to expedite his petition for Kirk’s report. If his hunch panned out, tomorrow’s FNS feed would be led by a report with his byline on it.

Montgomery Scott had just finished a very long double shift in engineering. The ship had been in dire need of new power cells for weeks; its warp coils had been overdue for recalibration. Multiple critical systems throughout the ship had required swap-outs, or upgrades, or tune-ups. To Scott’s elated satisfaction, Vanguard’s spacedock maintenance team had met all those needs in quick order; he hadn’t seen a starbase so large and well equipped since leaving the core systems of the Federation. The Enterprise still had more work ahead of it—most notably, a complete refit of its bridge—but those changes would have to wait until the ship returned home to Earth.

Taking advantage of a rare free moment in his schedule, he now was seeking out an item of personal desiderata that wasn’t likely to be available through official channels. A carefully worded question to his old chum Vondas Milonakis, along with a case of the Enterprise’s spare duotronic cables, had led Scott to the station’s lower docking wheel, where an Orion merchantman known as the Omari-Ekon was berthed.

At the end of a very long, conveyor-like gangway, he saw the closed airlock hatch to the Omari-Ekon flanked by a pair of hulking, green-skinned sentinels. Ever the quintessential Scotsman, he walked with unflagging confidence directly toward them.

From either side, each guard grabbed one of his arms, stopping him in midstep and lifting him off the floor. The one with the long, drooping mustache asked in a low hard voice, “Can we help you?”

“Aye, lad. I have a business proposition for your boss.”

The guard seemed unconvinced. “Do you even know who my boss is?” Scott winced at the sour stench of the man’s breath.

“I’m guessing he’s a man who can get things done.”

“My employer doesn’t like unannounced guests.”

“Announce me, then.” Scott’s biceps were starting to hurt from the two guards’ relentless grips.

“Are you carrying any weapons or communications devices?”

“I’m just here as a customer, lad.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

Scott was growing annoyed. “No, I’m not armed, and I don’t have a communicator.”

The guards let him down. Mustache, as Scott had decided to refer to the thug in charge, pointed at the wall. “Lean forward and put your hands there.”

“Is this really necessary?”

Icy stares and folded arms made clear that it was. He did as he was told. Mustache stood back and watched while the other guard frisked Scott. Several seconds later, having explored areas in which Scott was fairly certain no human could possibly have concealed anything larger than an ingrown hair, they allowed him to turn around. “Who shall we say is here?”

With all the patience and good cheer he could muster, he said, “My friends call me Scotty.”

“Rank, full name, and current assignment.”

So much for keeping things cordial, Scott concluded, his chipper grin turning to a frown. “Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, chief engineer, Starship Enterprise.”

“Hang on.” Mustache reached under his jacket and removed a small communicator-type device. He keyed in a sequence that Scott couldn’t see, and spoke quickly in a low whisper. All the while, he and his compatriot kept a close watch on Scott, who rocked on his heels, whistled softly, rolled his eyes from one ceiling pipe fixture to another, and otherwise made a deliberate nuisance of himself, simply because he could.

Mustache flipped his communicator closed and put it away. The hatch behind him opened with a grinding scrape. “Mr. Ganz will see you now.”

“Thank ye, lad,” Scott said. He walked inside, and the hatch closed quietly behind him. For a moment, he thought he was alone in the darkened but immaculate corridor of the Orion ship.

Then a hand slapped down on his shoulder. He turned to face a slim man in an exquisitely tailored ash-gray suit and polished, matching shoes. The man’s skin was an unnerving shade of pure coal black, a hue unlike any found in humans; it was glossy, like oil, and it reflected light so well that Scott could almost see his reflection in the man’s high, broad forehead. His head was shaved, and a tightly twisted braid of pale violet hair jutted from his narrow chin. “Commander Scott,” he said, flashing a smile composed of gleaming black teeth. His flat-black, almond-shaped eyes betrayed no hint of his thoughts. “I’m Zett Nilric. Welcome.” Polite as this man was, Scott’s intuition warned him that his host was undoubtedly a killer.

“Mr. Nilric, I was—”

“Mr. Zett.”

“Sorry,” Scott said. “No offense meant.”

“None taken,” Zett said. “Forgive my interruption. Please continue.”

“The bruiser outside said I was to see a Mr. Ganz.”

“Yes. He’s on the recreation deck. Please follow me.”

Zett led Scott a dozen meters or so down the corridor, to a small, exceptionally quiet turbolift. They rode together in silence for several seconds. When the turbolift doors hissed open, a strong, sweet-cherry aroma wafted in from the dim space beyond. No sooner had Scott followed Zett out of the turbolift than he was met by an impenetrable wall of sound, heavy with driving bass and raging with a drone of synthetic chords.

Gauzy, translucent curtains of multicolored fabric were draped in long overlapping swoops, creating a clearly marked path into the heart of this compartment. From the reverberating acoustics and the multiple layers of music, Scott deduced that the space was enormous. Emerging from the maze of curtains, he saw that he was right. Intense shafts of roaming light sliced through the low, smoky haze of narcotic smoke that polluted the air. As his eyes adjusted to the subdued illumination, he observed that the sprawling split-level space occupied most of two upper decks aboard the Orion vessel. Movement from above caught his eye. Looking up, he saw that several sections of the deck overhead had been removed, adding to the impression of an airy, luxuriously open environment.

In every direction something new captured his interest: table after table of different games of chance; exotic women of various humanoid species, either mingling with patrons or dancing around metal poles on raised platforms beneath strobing lights; aliens whose species he had never encountered before; the scent of something tantalizing or something revolting; drinks that bubbled, drinks that frothed, drinks that changed color when they made contact with one’s lips. Cloyingly sweet vapors, like honeyed cloves, mingled with the bite of acrid smoke, all of it originating in the countless ornate water pipes—or hookahs, as Scott had learned they were called—that were scattered throughout the room.

Scott felt like a child on Christmas morning.

Zett moved in smooth strides through the maze of gaming tables, which were crowded with loud, staggering, inebriated miners and prospectors. Scott assumed the laborers had come here to squander their earnings and bolster their spirits for another six months of lonely digging on another unnamed rock. Though he hoped he’d be smarter than that with his money, he couldn’t really say that he blamed them. Life on the frontier was hard and it was lonely—more for some than for others.

Zett led him aft, to one of two broadly curving staircases that ascended through a crescent-shaped cut to the deck above. The staircase was narrowest at its bottom, and it widened quickly as they climbed. As they passed the middle stair, a lithe, green-skinned Orion woman draped with several carefully overlapped strips of diaphanous Tholian silk stepped between them as she descended. Her very proximity charged the air with erotic energy. Scott’s pulse quickened at the scent of her; his eyes were drawn to her dark, voluminous cascade of unkempt curls, her pouting lips and come-hither glance….

Looking at Scott with tired cynicism, Zett said simply, “You couldn’t afford her.”

“I was just—”

“Not for an hour. Not for half an hour.”

“But I wasn’t—”

“When you’re an admiral, maybe we’ll talk.”

As the duo reached the top of the stairs, Scott noticed that the music from the lower level faded quickly into ambient background noise. Acoustic dampeners, he figured.

Unlike the lower deck of this sprawling private oasis, there were no gaming tables upstairs. In the two rear corners were doors, likely to private offices or residential quarters. The denizens of this deck, Scott noticed, were easily divided into two categories: men and women who exuded the cruel bravado and cold lethality of career criminals and gangsters, and scores of impossibly beautiful, scantily clad men and women whose sole occupation in this environment was painfully obvious.

Zett placed a firm but gentle palm on Scott’s back and guided him to stand between a pair of black carved-marble obelisks, in front of a broad dais piled high with cushions and pillows. The dais, Scott noted, was bordered on either side by the two wide gaps for the curving staircases, which nearly met at their apexes, leaving only a narrow strip of floor as an ingress. Like a moat, Scott surmised. Around it were more curving draperies. Behind it was an enormous wraparound window framing a broad panorama of the Taurus Reach starscape.

Seated in the center of all this opulence, puffing from a hookah by means of a long ribbed tube with a metallic nozzle, was Ganz, an enormous, thickly muscled, bald green Orion man in a midnight blue caftan. He regarded Scott with caution as he exhaled a plume of earthy-smelling, pale-orange smoke through his broad nose. “Lieutenant Commander Scott,” he said, his voice low in both register and volume.

“Scotty, to my friends.”

A small crease above the bridge of Ganz’s nose wrinkled into a tight knot of suppressed annoyance. “What can I do for you, Commander?”

“I was hoping you could help me procure some special spirits for my private stash on the Enterprise.”

Ganz thrust his chin forward as his eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry—did you just say you came here to buy liquor?”

“Aye,” Scott said, the minor vibrato in his voice betraying the apprehension he suddenly felt. “But no—”

“You are aware that several establishments on the station serve alcohol?”