Текст книги "Declassified "

Автор книги: David Mack

Соавторы: Marco Palmieri,Dayton Ward
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

THE STARS LOOK DOWN

David mack

For Ripley,

my beloved feline companion of eighteen years:

requiescat in pace.

“. . . Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair?

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”

–John Milton, Paradise Lost

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

The events of this story take place in early 2268, approximately two months after the end of the novel Star Trek Vanguard: Precipiceand shortly before the events of the original-series episode “The Tholian Web.”

FEBRUARY 2268

1

“Dammit, Bridy,”Cervantes Quinn pleaded via the communicator, “don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

Bridget McLellan—Bridy Mac to her friends—ignored her partner’s advice. She drew her phaser, aimed at the master control panel for the Klingon research facility’s main generator, and fired. Her weapon’s scathing blue beam sliced through the array of buttons, levers, and displays. The slagged console spat sparks and belched smoke. An alarm blared over the compound’s PA system and was followed by a guttural male voice barking orders in Klingon. She lifted her communicator and smiled. “Too late.”

“Goddammit, lady, you love to make my life difficult.”

“It’s a living. Be at the gate in ninety seconds.”

“Already on my way, darlin’.”

Bridy sprinted past a spreading wall of fire that had been ignited by her forced entry moments earlier, winced as flames licked at her face, and bashed open the door ahead of her with her shoulder. Disruptor blasts sliced past her close enough to singe her hair. She tumbled to cover behind the low retaining wall of the landing outside the operations shack’s entrance, at the top of a short flight of stairs. She snapped off a shot without aiming, firing down the stairs and stunning a Klingon soldier who had been standing between Bridy and her escape route. She scrambled past him as he collapsed to the ground.

Energy pulses crisscrossed the Klingon research compound, but most of them weren’t aimed at Bridy—they were converging on the biomechanoid alien artifact around which the base had been constructed. The massive device, which to Bridy resembled a terrifying, four-fingered hand whose talons were plunged into a slab of obsidian, crackled with blue lightning as the shimmering energy being trapped within it struggled for freedom.

Bridy had no idea how or when the Klingons had captured one of the ancient aliens known as the Shedai, but her orders from Starfleet Command had been clear: terminate the Klingons’ research program on Zeta Aurigae IV immediately and with prejudice. At first it had seemed a tall order for two undercover agents such as herself and Quinn. Then she had realized that all she’d needed to do was disrupt the power to the artifact. The Klingons’ captive Shedai would do the rest.

The entity was more than living up to her expectations. Massive ribbons of energy lashed out from within the artifact, cutting down entire squads of Klingons with each stroke and filling the air with terrifying cracks, as if from a giant bullwhip. Blood and viscera sprayed from dismembered Klingon bodies, clouding the air around the artifact with a grotesque fuchsia mist.

Counting off the seconds in her head, Bridy sprinted for the compound’s gate, dozens of meters from the operations shack. Behind her, the screeching of disruptors tapered off and was replaced by the agonized groans of the dying. Her shadow stretched away ahead of her, preceding her to the gate. Then another shadow arced toward hers. She dodged left and dove for the ground.

A javelin-tipped tentacle of shimmering fluid shot past her, close enough for her to feel its rush of displaced air. The Shedai’s pointed appendage tore a long, ugly divot into the ground ahead of her.

I set it free and this is the thanks I get?She rolled away while firing her phaser back at the wildly flailing creature. Talk about ungrateful.

Quinn’s ship, the Dulcinea,appeared from behind a nearby ridge and sped toward the compound’s main gate. Bridy pushed herself up from the ground and ran flat out toward the gate while using her thumb to increase her phaser’s power setting to maximum. The droning of Dulcinea’s engines was drowned out by the Shedai’s roar, an unearthly noise like a thousand rusty horns. The din overwhelmed Bridy, who felt it like needles being stabbed through her skull. Her stride faltered. She fell to her knees and instinctively covered her ears. Then the shrieking was replaced by thunderous impacts that shook the ground.

Bridy looked back. The Shedai was free of the Conduit and pummeling the structures inside the Klingons’ compound into rubble and dust.

She forced herself back into motion and staggered toward the gate. Her gait was sloppy, like that of a drunkard, and as she lifted her arm to aim her phaser, she could barely keep it pointed in the gate’s general direction. Pressing the trigger, she hoped she wouldn’t hit Quinn’s ship by mistake.

A blinding flash of phaser energy vaporized more than half the metal gate and a significant chunk of the reinforced thermocrete wall to its right, creating a gap more than wide enough for Bridy’s escape. She stumbled through, careful not to touch the glowing-hot metal or stone with her bare hands. As she cleared the phaser-cut passageway, the Dulcineatouched down directly ahead of her. Its starboard-side hatchway was open, and its ramp had been lowered.

Through a pane of the cockpit’s windshield, Bridy saw Quinn beckoning urgently, and she heard his voice over the open communicator in her hand: “C’mon, sweetheart! We gotta go!”

Bridy all but threw herself onto the ramp and used its railings to pull herself inside the ship, a state-of-the-art Nalori argosy that Quinn had “inherited” from his late rival, Zett Nilric, after killing the assassin in self-defense a few months earlier. The ramp lifted shut behind her, pushing her the rest of the way into the vessel’s main living compartment. The deck and bulkheads thrummed with vibrations from the ship’s engines as she moved forward to the cockpit. Its door slid open ahead of her, revealing a slowly rolling view of the distant horizon.

“We’re clear,” Quinn said. The lean and weathered former soldier of fortune had one hand on the ship’s flight controls and one on its sensor panel. A small display on the center console between the pilot’s and copilot’s stations showed the Shedai laying waste to the few Klingon structures still half-standing and slaying the remainder of the base’s personnel. Quinn nodded at the image of the berserk Shedai. “Any idea which one it is?”

“The Warden, I think.”

“Not a friend of ours, then.”

The Conduit on the surface crackled with violent energy, and the Shedai transmuted into a serpent of black smoke. Intense white light flashed in the Conduit’s center, and when it faded the black smoke had dissipated, leaving no trace of the homicidal alien hegemon. Quinn shook his head. “Great. Now that thing could be anywhere in the Taurus Reach. God help whoever finds it next.”

Bridy laid a reassuring hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Let’s just hope it’s not us. The Shedai tend to hold grudges.”

“No kidding.” He glanced toward the planet’s surface as he guided the Dulcineathrough a steep, banking turn. Except for the Shedai Conduit itself, nothing remained of the Klingon research base except debris and ashes. “Looks like our work here is done,” he said. “Let’s call in the cavalry and have dinner.”

2

Ganz curled his hand into a fist as he stared at the comm display.

“Where is he?”

Kajek, a Nausicaan bounty hunter, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You said you’d found him.”

“No, I said I found his ship.”Kajek uploaded a series of images to Ganz’s screen via the subspace comm link. “It was on Zeta Aurigae IV two days ago.”

The Orion gangster studied the photographs and paid close attention to their details. The markings on Zett’s vessel were unmistakable, as was the unique bit of battle damage visible on its dorsal hull, just behind the cockpit canopy. “That’s his ship,” Ganz said. Then the image switched to one showing the vessel’s registry. “Those aren’t Nalori markings. Those are human symbols.”

“It says ‘Dulcinea’ in Federation Standard. I have no idea what it means.”

“It means someone stole Zett’s ship. Who has it?”

More images appeared on Ganz’s screen, narrated by Kajek. “Two humans. A man and a woman. I suspect he is the pilot and she a passenger.”

“You’re half right.” Ganz massaged his left temple to stave off a nascent headache induced by the bass-heavy music resounding from the gaming floor outside his office. “The man is Cervantes Quinn, and he’s almost certainly the pilot. But that woman is no mere passenger—she’s a Starfleet agent. I suspect they’ve been working together for some time now.”

It had been over a year since someone—Ganz had never been entirely certain who—had cleared all of Quinn’s debts with Ganz’s operation. All his attempts to trace the money to its source had proved futile. The only fruit of that labor had been a stern warning, delivered through intermediaries, that Quinn was to be left alone unless Ganz wanted to awaken one day with his throat cut.

Since taking that advice to heart, Ganz had suspected Quinn was working with Starfleet Intelligence, but until he had seen evidence of Zett’s stolen starship, he would not have believed Quinn bold enough to risk inviting Ganz’s wrath.

The Nausicaan interrupted Ganz’s somber reflection with a loud grunt. “Am I finished, then? Or do you have a new commission for me?”

“Hang on, I’m thinking.” He put the comm on standby and looked past its display toward his lover, Neera. She reclined in a seductive pose on the sofa, her raven mane spilling wildly over her jade-hued shoulders and concealing the choicest bits of her bare torso. “What do you think?”

She fixed him with a cold stare. “You knowwhat I think.”

“The situation has changed.”

“No, it hasn’t.” She finger-combed a thick fall of hair from her eyes. “Quinn still has powerful friends. The only difference is that now he also has Zett’s ship.”

“Which means he just spat in our eye.”

“Your eye, maybe. I never liked Zett. He was a disaster waiting to happen.” She shot a diabolical smirk at Ganz. “Mister Quinn might have done us a favor.”

Ganz suppressed an angry sigh. Though he played the part of the boss aboard the merchantman Omari-Ekon,he was merely a figurehead for Neera, the organization’s true mistress. At times such as this, he had to remember not to let his role go to his head lest Neera decide to recast it with someone more pliable. “I agree that Zett’s knack for bloodshed was a liability at times, but he was a loyal employee and a good earner.”

“So what?”

“It’ll set a bad example if we let him get killed and do nothing about it.”

Neera regarded him with faint amusement. “You’re afraid our hired guns will start to feel expendable?”

“They aren’t loyal just because we pay them well. They stick with us because they think we’ll back them up when times get tough—and avenge them when things go wrong. Zett was my right-hand man. If we don’t settle this score, nobody worth having will ever be willing to watch our backs again.”

His lithe mistress got up and walked toward him in slow, elegant strides. “And if Starfleet should decide to avenge Mister Quinn’s death in return?”

“That’s why I’m farming it out to the Nausicaan.”

She stopped beside him and traced his jutting chin with one exquisitely manicured fingernail. “If this comes back at us, you’ll take the hit. Understood?”

“Yes, mistress.”

Walking away, she threw a dark look over her shoulder. “Good.”

He waited until she had left the room through her private portal, and then he reactivated the comm channel to Kajek. “Kill Quinn, but don’t hurt the woman.”

“What if she defends him?”

“Not even then, so pick your moment well.”

“As you wish. The price is fifty thousand.”

“Thirty.”

“Fifty. Half in advance.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Do you want this human dead or not?”

Ganz half sighed, half growled. “Fine. I’ll transfer the retainer now. The Bank of Bolarus should confirm the transaction within the hour.”

Kajek nodded. “A pleasure doing business with you. I will let you know when the human is dead.”He ended the transmission, and the screen went dark.

Sitting alone in the dimly lit office, Ganz wondered whether he’d ordered the assassination of Cervantes Quinn as a substitute for a different murder that he wished for but which Neera had refused to sanction.

He got up and stepped outside to a small balcony that overlooked the gaming floor of the Omari-Ekon. Below him, beautiful escorts of various species and genders mingled with his patrons, most of whom were Federation civilians passing through Starbase 47, also known as Vanguard, on their way to new lives on colony planets throughout the Taurus Reach. Cheers from players with winning hands infrequently rose above the steady beat of synthetic music.

Ganz looked up. Through the transparent-aluminum dome that served as the casino’s roof, he saw the towering majesty of the Federation starbase looming over his ship, simultaneously providing it with protection from Ganz and Neera’s rivals while posing the most immediate threat to its continued free exercise of commerce.

Standing on another balcony at the opposite end of the gaming room was the root of Ganz’s anxiety, the cause of his broken sleep patterns, the irritant he had been forbidden to remove: Diego Reyes, the former commanding officer of Vanguard, now a fugitive from Starfleet justice who resided on the Omari-Ekonthanks to a grant of political asylum and the technicalities of Orion extradition law.

The tall, weathered-looking human flashed an insincere smile at Ganz.

The burly, muscular Orion returned the empty gesture. Keep smiling, you clever bastard,Ganz fumed. Sooner or later, you’ll stop being useful. And when that day comes, I’ll be waiting to toss you out an airlock.

3

Lieutenant Ming Xiong leaned forward and looked with a stunned expression across the conference room table at Bridy Mac. “You let it get away?”

“It’s not as if I had a choice,” Bridy said. “Once the containment system failed, the entire op went pear-shaped. We were lucky to get out alive.”

The other officers attending the classified debriefing aboard the U.S.S. Endeavourdidn’t try to mask their disapproval. Captain Atish Khatami, the ship’s commanding officer, showed the greatest discretion, limiting her reaction to a thin frown. Her first officer, Lieutenant Commander Katherine Stano, let slip a barely audible sigh. The ship’s chief science officer, Lieutenant Stephen Klisiewicz, registered his opinion with a deep grimace and a slow swiveling of his head.

Xiong picked up a data slate and glanced back and forth between it and Bridy Mac as he continued. “According to your report, the containment system failed after you fired your phaser into the control panel for its main generator.”

Bridy’s face warmed with embarrassment and anger. “That’s right.”

Stano asked, “Did you forget that capturing the Conduit with the Shedai still inside it was one of the mission objectives?”

“No, Commander, I didn’t. But that wasn’t possible, so I—”

“Why wasn’t it possible?”

It had been Bridy’s experience that answering such a question truthfully and in detail would likely come back to haunt her the next time her name came up for promotion. Had she been the sort of officer who gave a damn about such things, she might have censored herself. Instead, she clenched her jaw and drew a deep breath. “The mission profile was flawed, sir. Whoever wrote it underestimated the number of Klingon troops by a factor of four. The map of the compound was labeled incorrectly, and the intel on its security grid was out of date. As a result, Mister Quinn and I lacked the appropriate resources to carry out the nonviolent capture of the Klingon personnel and the Shedai entity. It should also be noted that the Klingons have broken the encryption on cipher Seven-Tango-Red, which is how I wound up being ambushed shortly after I breached the base’s perimeter wall.” She paused, flashed a hostile smile at Stano, and added, “Sir.”

A tense, awkward silence followed Bridy’s critique. Then Captain Khatami cleared her throat. “Let’s move on, shall we?” She pushed a data slate across the table to Bridy. “You and Mister Quinn have new orders from Starfleet Command.”

Bridy reached for the tablet. “Another monster hunt?”

“Not this time,” Khatami said. “A black bag operation.”

Stano nodded to Klisiewicz, who used a small keypad on the table in front of him to activate one of the room’s wall displays. He nodded up at the screen, which showed a montage of star charts, log excerpts, and transcripts of signal intercepts. “Thirty-four hours ago, the Treana,an Orion freighter, was crippled by an unknown gravitational anomaly on the edge of Gorn territory. The Treanasent out an SOS and was rescued by a Gorn cruiser, which took the freighter into ‘protective custody’ on Seudath, one of its border worlds.”

Stano glanced at Bridy. “The Gorn say they’re repairing the freighter as a courtesy, but it’s obvious they want it for military analysis.”

Xiong entered a command on the keypad in front of his seat and activated the three-screen monitor in the middle of the conference table. The device displayed a series of waveforms. “ Endeavour’s long-range sensors picked up these fragmentary energy readings from the Treana’s coordinates at the time of the incident.” He shot her a wan, knowing smile. “Look familiar, Bridy?”

She nodded. “The Jinoteur Pattern. Last time I saw it, I was with you on the Sagittarius. All traces of the pattern vanished after the Jinoteur system was swallowed by an artificial wrinkle in space-time.”

Khatami arched her brow. “Well, it’s back.”

Klisiewicz added, “And we don’t know how or why.”

Xiong met Bridy’s stare. “Whatever produced these readings is of major importance. We need to track them back to their source, but there are too many gaps in our data to triangulate the coordinates.”

Grim anticipation made Bridy crack a thin smile. “You want me and Quinn to sneak aboard the Orion freighter and steal its sensor logs.”

“Precisely,” Khatami said.

Stano added, “The good news is that the Gorn don’t seem to be aware of the Shedai or the significance of this energy pattern, and we’d like to keep it that way. The bad news is that we have reason to believe the Klingons have already sent someone to retrieve the Orions’ data. It’s imperative you get to it first.”

“And that you make sure the Klingons never do,” Khatami added.

“How sure do you want to be? Should I destroy the Treana?”

Xiong winced. “Not exactly what we had in mind.”

Klisiewicz held up two data cards. “The yellow one is blank. Use it to download the sensor data. The red one contains a worm that’ll erase the data from the Treana’s memory banks and then erase itself.” He handed the cards to Bridy.

“Got it.” She tucked the cards into a pocket and looked at Khatami. “What about Endeavour? Will you be close enough to provide operational support?”

Khatami shook her head. “We can’t risk approaching Gorn territory. The cease-fire negotiated by Captain Kirk is barely holding, and we don’t want to tip off the Klingons about our intentions toward the Treana.”

“Knowing the Gorn,” Stano said, “the Treana’s probably docked in the segregated ‘alien quarter’ of Tzoryp, Seudath’s principal port of call. The Gorn patrol that part of the city, but they tend to be hands-off when it comes to policing aliens. Keep the collateral damage to a minimum and they should ignore you.”

The captain held up one hand in a cautioning gesture. “Move fast and keep a low profile. If this goes according to plan, no one should know you were there.”

Bridy chuckled. “Since when does anything ever go according to plan?”

“Good hunting,” Khatami said. “Meeting adjourned.”

Cervantes Quinn stood beneath an open panel on the fuselage of the Dulcineaand listened. Behind the rich purr of the ship’s primary power coupler lurked a high-frequency warbling. It was elusive to Quinn’s ear. Each time he thought he had a bead on its source it faded, leaving him staring into the guts of his ship with no idea which component to tear apart first.

No one else had ever confirmed hearing the noise, no matter how many times Quinn had tried to point it out to people. Bridy had dismissed it as “transient tinnitus,” despite Quinn’s assertion that the sound was not imaginary. None of the technicians on Vanguard or the Endeavourwho had inspected Dulcinea’s internal systems had reported hearing anything unusual. Quinn didn’t care what they said. It was his ship, and he was certain the warble was in there, waiting to be found.

In the months since he had taken possession of the ship, he had come to know many of its idiosyncratic details. Its meal slot always clicked three times before serving solid food but only once before vending a beverage. Its air purification system had a curious rattle in the filter above the main corridor, just outside the cockpit entrance. One of the otherwise pristine metal deck plates in the main compartment was marred by a single, deep gouge; judging from the brightness of the exposed metal, Quinn suspected the damage was fairly recent, probably having occurred within the past couple of years.

Each day brought him a new discovery about Dulcinea. Every time he dared to think it had run out of surprises, some new imperfection revealed itself.

He heard a door swish open behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Bridy crossing the shuttlebay. She waved. “How’s it going?”

He shrugged. “Same as always.”

“I’m sorry.” She joined him beneath the ship and looked up at the exposed section of its underbelly. “Still looking for that pesky noise?”

“I think I might flush out the plasma conduits.”

“Will that fix it?”

“Couldn’t hurt.” He wondered why Bridy had taken a sudden interest in the repair of a problem she didn’t believe existed, and he surmised she was avoiding discussion of something else. “How’d your debriefing go?”

She ambled toward Dulcinea’s bow. “Fine.”

“Were they pissed about the casualties?”

“More than somewhat.” Bridy stroked her hand along the ship’s ventral hull.

Quinn wondered what she was thinking. “What’d they say about the Shedai that got away from us?”

“Not much.”

“So, no court-martial?”

“Not yet.”

“Good.” He followed her. “Any chance we’re free for a while? I heard about some easy-money jobs hauling gray-market cargo to Pacifica—which, as it turns out, is a mighty fine place to kick back on a tropical vacation.”

“Sounds great.” She mustered a sad smile. “But we have new orders.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Tired and disgruntled, he breathed a heavy sigh. “What is it this time? More monkey-wrenching? Or another monster hunt?”

“A classic heist job—just your style.” She smiled. “You’ll love it.”

Her appraisal of the op was far too upbeat for Quinn’s comfort. He had learned to be suspicious whenever Bridy sounded optimistic. She followed him as he paced around the port side of the Dulcinea,inspecting the hull. “Are we expecting competition on this job?”

“Some, probably from the Klingons.”

“Great.” He used his arm to buff a dark scuff off the ship’s hull. “Do I even want to know where we’re being asked to commit this ‘classic heist’?”

“In a port called Tzoryp on a planet named Seudath.”

“Never heard of it.” Passing under the wing, he realigned an off-center aileron with a light upward jab of his fist. “Where is it?”

“The Gorn-Klingon border.”

Quinn stopped, turned, and regarded his partner with a mirthless smile. “I admire the casual way you just said that—as if it weren’t an omen of doom. Pray tell, which sideof that border is it on?”

“The Gorn side.”

He shook his head. “Days like this make me sorry I gave up drinking.”

“Could be worse. At least we aren’t dealing with the Tholians.”

“The Gorn aren’t much better.” He led her up the ramp and inside the ship. “Remember that guy we met in the cantina on Deskereb? He’d just come back from Gorn space—said they’re the most cold-blooded bastards he ever met.”

“Well, they arereptiles.”

“Dammit, you know what I mean.” He took off his tool belt and draped it by its buckle from a hook inside the open equipment locker, then continued on his way toward the cockpit. “The Gorn see the law as something for themselves only. They let their border worlds run wild because they think aliens are little better than animals. As long as no Gorn get hurt, they’ll gladly stand by and do nothing while offworlders shoot each other all to hell.”

He sidled into the cockpit and slumped into his seat to start the preflight check. Bridy leaned over his shoulder and fixed him with a dubious stare. “Don’t you think you might be exaggerating just a bit?”

“Like hell I am. If this goes south, we could wind up in the middle of a goddamned free-for-all down there.”

Bridy smiled. “That’s what you have me for, honey.” She kissed his cheek, patted his shoulder, and added, “Let me know when we’re ready to take off.”

“You’ll be the second to know,” Quinn said, powering up the navigation computer. Bridy turned and left the cockpit while Quinn continued prepping the Dulcineafor its next journey.

Looking up, he caught his worried reflection in the cockpit’s canopy. How do I get myself into these messes? Why can’t I master the fine art of saying “no” to beautiful women?He reclined his chair and palmed a sheen of sweat off his forehead and over his gray crewcut. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.