Текст книги "Declassified "

Автор книги: David Mack

Соавторы: Marco Palmieri,Dayton Ward
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

4

Kajek found the rhythm of his own breathing hypnotic in the deathly silence that permeated his ship, a compact Andorian outrider he had never bothered to name. Outside his capsule-shaped cockpit’s wraparound canopy yawned the blackness of eternity, an endless void peppered with stars to mask its hideous emptiness.

The lean, wiry Nausicaan lounged in the broad, enveloping pilot’s seat. Most of his ship’s primary systems were in a low-power standby mode. Even the life-support system had been set to minimal levels, and the spacecraft’s artificial gravity had been deactivated. If not for the safety restraints crisscrossing his torso, Kajek would have long since floated out of his seat.

Zero gravity didn’t bother Kajek, but the bitter cold did. Several hours in the dark had dropped temperatures inside his ship to near-freezing. His exhalations spawned great gray plumes that dissipated ever more gradually. In the past hour, vapor condensed from his breath had started to fog part of the forward canopy. More troubling to him was the slow loss of sensation in his fingers and toes. He disliked wearing gloves in the cockpit because any that were thick enough to keep his hands warm interfered with his ability to operate the ship’s secondary control panels, which controlled such systems as sensors and access to the memory banks.

Only the passive optical sensors remained fully on line. Kajek had set them to monitor the Starfleet vessel Endeavour,which was twenty light-minutes away orbiting Zeta Aurigae IV, the same world to which Kajek had tracked Zett Nilric’s stolen argosy, Dulcinea. A magnetic disturbance above the southern pole of Zeta Aurigae III concealed Kajek and his ship from the Endeavour’s sensors, enabling him to spy on it at relatively close range while hiding in plain sight. His only concern was that if the Dulcinealaunched while the Endeavourwas on the far side of the fourth planet, he might not notice its departure until it was too late to track its escape vector.

It had been several hours since the Nalori ship had landed inside one of Endeavour’s shuttlebays. Kajek grew concerned that perhaps he had missed the Dulcinea’s exit—and then the bulkheads parted at the aft end of the Starfleet vessel’s lower hull. He spread his outer fangs in a broad grin. There you are. He permitted himself a low chortle, which clouded the air with a spectre of his breath.

As the Nalori vessel exited the shuttlebay and maneuvered to break orbit, Kajek clicked his outer fangs against one another. It was a nervous habit, one he had struggled to overcome but so far had failed to suppress, an unwelcome tic caused by his tendency to engage in obsessive-compulsive behavior. In many ways he had channeled that psychological trait into useful habits. His attention to detail and ability to plan ahead had made him a very effective bounty hunter. He always knew his current equipment inventory and the status of his ship’s fuel and provisions. His personal logs and files on bounty targets were alphabetized, meta-tagged, and thoroughly cross-referenced by more than a hundred criteria.

I am not crazy, just organized.

He leaned forward to observe the sensor data. Where are you going? Show me your destination. His quarry maneuvered clear of the Endeavourand broke from orbit. Not heading back to Vanguard, apparently. The small vessel came about on a bearing that would take it toward the Klingon Empire. A bold move. Seconds later, the Dulcineajumped to warp speed and moved beyond the range of Kajek’s passive sensors. Kajek kept his attention on the Endeavour.

Patience,he reminded himself. Don’t let your lust for the hunt make you careless. He watched and waited as the Endeavour’s standard orbital pattern took it beyond the curve of Zeta Aurigae IV. As soon as the Starfleet ship vanished from his sensor readout, Kajek pulled off his gloves, switched all his ship’s systems to full power, and engaged his active sensors to confirm the Dulcinea’s heading.

Still on course,he noted. He pulled his gloves back on and briskly rubbed his hands together. He called up a star chart and looked ahead along the Dulcinea’s trajectory, curious as to what populated systems lay along that heading. They seem to be treading a fine path between Gorn space and Klingon territory. Are they en route to one of the border worlds, perhaps?He ruled out Chirlow—it was a mostly automated mining operation on a volcanic greenhouse planet inhospitable to organic life. Likewise, he doubted they would be bound for Mazur Prime, a desolate ball of sand that the Klingons used as a toxic-waste dumping ground.

Ruling out those worlds brought him to Seudath: a major port under Gorn control, it received a fair number of alien visitors and had a sizable population of aliens, as well. Checking its position against a more precise analysis of the Dulcinea’s heading convinced Kajek that Seudath was the humans’ destination. He engaged his ship’s impulse engine, maneuvered clear of Zeta Aurigae III’s magnetic field, and set his navigation computer to begin calculating a warp-speed course that would enable him to reach Seudath ahead of the ever-elusive Mister Quinn.

The course coordinates appeared on his helm.

Engaging the warp drive, Kajek watched the stars melt into bright streaks blurring past his ship, and he felt a surge of excitement. There was nothing he loved so much as the hunt, and never so much as when the prey could fight back.

The chase begins.

Quinn lay in bed, half asleep, listening to the steady thrumming of the Dulcinea’s warp engines. Despite his grave misgivings about his and Bridy’s new orders from Starfleet Intelligence, the ship was cruising on autopilot toward Seudath.

It’s not like I could’ve talked her out of it,he mused. Lord knows I would if I could. He turned onto his left side, trying his best not to wake Bridy, who lay beside him, wrapped around a body cushion like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam. Her wavy dark brown hair spilled across the sage-colored pillows. As Quinn tugged on the sheets to try and cover his chest, Bridy stirred, blinked once, and squinted at him. He whispered, “Sorry. Go back to sleep, darlin’.”

“In a minute.” She sounded groggy. “Trouble sleeping?”

“A bit. At least I can enjoy the view.” That made her smile. It had been a few months since they had escaped a bloodbath on Golmira with their lives. Since then they had shared a bed—a fact that Bridy had stressed needed to be concealed from her superiors at SI. Quinn understood her need for discretion, but he hated having to hide the true nature of their relationship even from their friends. He adored Bridy and still found it hard to believe she was his lover. Not only was she smart and beautiful, she was more than twenty years his junior.

He reached out and stroked a stray lock of her hair. It felt like silk beneath his fingertips. Can I really be this lucky? Does any man deserve a woman as perfect as her?When he was with Bridy, he could almost forget his own checkered romantic history. The death of his first wife, Denise, had stunned him, driven him to seek relief at the bottom of a bottle and look for escape in the ranks of a mercenary company. Since then he had been married three more times, each one a triumph of hope over experience. But I was a drunk then,he reminded himself. A broken man. This is different. Gazing at Bridy, he felt peaceful. She’s different.

She opened her eyes. “I felt you staring at me.”

“I wasn’t staring, just admiring.” She furrowed her brow, coaxing him to confess, “Okay, maybe I was staring, just a bit.”

“Who could blame you?” She laid one hand on top of his. “You seem like you have something on your mind. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I guess. I just . . .” He let the sentence trail off and fade away.

The silence seemed to worry Bridy. “What? What’re you thinking?”

He had rehearsed and rehashed this conversation in his imagination so many times that he no longer knew how to begin. “Do you ever think we could . . . you know . . .” His eyes scanned the bulkheads while his brain searched for words. “Is there any chance that we could ever just walk away from all this?”

More awake now, Bridy propped herself up on one elbow. “And do what?”

“I don’t know. Just live, I guess.”

“Wow, I can tell you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

Quinn shook his head. “I’m serious. In between gettin’ our asses half shot off, we’ve made some good money these last few months. We’ve got enough rare junk and hard currency stashed in our hold to go anywhere we want and be set up for life.” He reached over and gently stroked her perfect chin with his callused thumb. “We could buy a piece of beachfront property on some perfect, blue world and just ‘live large,’ as my pappy used to say.”

“It’s a pretty notion,” Bridy said, “but that’s only ’cause it’s far away. If we cashed in and settled down, you’d be bored out of your mind inside a week.”

The accusation stung. “The old me.” He clasped her hand. “But I’ve changed—you’ve seen it. I let a lot of my life slip away while I wasn’t looking, and I ain’t gettin’ any younger, that’s for damned sure. I don’t know how much time I got left, but whatever I got coming, I want to spend it with you.”

Bridy sat up and tucked her knees to her chest. “I have to give you credit—you never fail to surprise me.” She hugged her knees with one arm and used her free hand to finger-comb her tousled hair from her eyes. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a domestic breed. You’ve always struck me as a rover.”

“No. Just a guy runnin’ from his past.” He pressed his hands over his face and tried to massage away a lifetime of accumulated stress and fatigue. “Fact is, I’m tired. Can’t do it anymore. Time to stop runnin’ and start livin’.”

“You make it sound so easy.” She pushed aside the sheet and got up to pace beside the bed. “I spent half my life working to get intoStarfleet and the other half working forStarfleet. How am I supposed to turn my back on that?”

“Think about what you just said. You’ve given them your whole life so far—don’t you think maybe that’s enough? Shouldn’t some of your life be yours?”

She shook her head. “I took an oath.”

“For life? Are you saying you’ll never hang up the uniform?”

“Never’s a long time.” She threw a nervous glance his way. “What are yousaying? That if I stay in Starfleet, you’ll leave without me?”

He looked away to hide his frustration at having his bluff called. “No. If you say we stay, then we stay.” He put on a crooked smile. “I’d rather be in hell with you than in heaven by myself.”

Bridy circled the bed and sat down beside him. “Seriously? In hell? Is our life out here that bad? I know it gets hairy now and then, but we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?”

“Maybe a few,” he admitted with reluctance. “But I’ve had my share of rotten luck, and I know the longer we keep goin’, the better the odds one or both of us’ll wind up dead.”

“So, what’s the alternative? How would this play out, if you had your way?”

“In a perfect world? You’d resign from Starfleet by subspace radio, and then we’d get the hell out of the Taurus Reach as fast as this ship’ll go. Find a place to settle down, sell the ship, and make a few munchkins. Just be regular folks.”

She looked amused, and that made him nervous. Planting a hand on her hip, she said, “Hypothetically speaking, what if I wanted to finish this mission before we go and start pricing beach houses? Would that seem like a reasonable request?”

Quinn shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

“And I’d need to be in charge of naming any munchkins.”

“Now hang on just a—”

“Take it or leave it.”

“ Hrmph. Okay. Sold.”

Bridy planted a quick kiss on Quinn’s mouth. “In the interests of starting our new life as soon as possible, do you think you could squeeze a few extra tenths of a warp factor out of this heap?”

His knees creaked, his back ached, and his stomach gurgled loudly as he stood. Plodding out of their cabin, he mumbled, “I’ll see what I can do.”

5

Descending the Dulcinea’s ramp, Bridy tugged at the neck of the wheat-colored garment Quinn had insisted she don before leaving the ship. “Why are we wearing cloaks with hoods? What, are we joining Robin Hood’s merry men?”

Quinn pulled up his cloak’s hood. “You’ll thank me once we get outside.”

A hot, foul wind greeted them as they disembarked. She followed him away from the Dulcineaand across the dingy, open-air starport hangar. True to his word, he had shaved nearly an hour off their travel time to Seudath, and he had overloaded only one plasma relay to do it. Compared to the wear and tear he had routinely inflicted on his previous ship, the Rocinante,the sacrifice of a single plasma relay seemed like nothing. With muted amusement, she wondered whether Quinn was getting cautious in his old age.

“Nice place.” She eyed their run-down environs, which in searing midday sunlight resembled a deep and heavily rusted iron pit, and waved away a cloud of noxious smoke wafting over them. “Really first-rate.”

“You get what you pay for.” Quinn squinted against the harsh daylight and nodded at the four-person ground crew, which was busy attaching umbilicals to the Dulcinea’s underside to provide it with local comms, waste extraction, fuel, and the replenishment of its air and water reserves. “At least the basics are covered. If you’d wanted luxury, Starfleet should’ve given us a better cover.”

She scowled at him. “They had to work with what you gave them.”

They paused at the entrance while Quinn programmed in their standard temporary security code. Once he confirmed the code, the door lifted open, revealing a street busy with vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The air was heavy with the scents of exotic spices, the savory aroma of cooked meat, and the acrid bite of smoke and combustion-engine exhaust fumes. He stepped over the threshold and led Bridy outside. “Away we go.”

They moved in careful steps through a dense crowd of aliens, most of them humanoids, all of them being observed by armed Gorn soldiers moving in pairs or squads of four. Right away, Bridy noticed strangers glaring in her and Quinn’s direction. “I get the impression humans aren’t very popular around here.”

“Not just humans—anybody from the Federation. We’re about as welcome here as a shit stain on a wedding dress.”

“Thanks for the visual.”

“Pull your hood up. You’ll draw less attention.”

As they rounded a corner into an intersection, they could see the city of Tzoryp sprawled around them. Built on and between six low hills, it was uneven and incomplete. Its main starport had been erected atop its broadest and highest elevation, affording Quinn and Bridy a commanding view of the cityscape. Squat industrial structures stood flanked by mid-sized residential towers and hotels, and entire blocks were filled with half-constructed buildings, steel skeletons gleaming beneath the brutal white glow of a Class F star.

Quinn stopped and seemed to listen for something. All Bridy heard was the rumbling of traffic, the scuffling of hundreds of feet, and the rasping growls of Gorn conversation. Staying close to Quinn, she said in a low voice, “If you’re a Gorn, I guess this planet looks like paradise.”

“Well, I ain’t, and I think it looks like an overbaked turd.” He nodded toward a nondescript, unmarked doorway in a building across the street. “Over there.” Then he gently nudged Bridy into step beside him as he hurried toward it.

Dodging oncoming vehicles, Bridy asked, “Where are we going?”

“Fact-finding mission.” They scrambled off the street, slipped through the open doorway, and descended a short staircase to a dim basement cantina thumping with aggressive music. The air inside the bar was cool and thick with several fragrances of smoke, some that Bridy found pleasant and a few that made her want to retch. Quinn sucked in a deep breath and grinned. “My kind of place.”

Bridy gave the joint a quick looking-over and noted two possible alternative exits. She also counted thirty-nine patrons and four employees and concluded that every single one of them was likely to be armed. “This doesn’t bode well.”

“It’ll be fine. We’re just here to do business.”

“I thought you said people on this planet hate Federation citizens.”

“Sure they do. But they still like our money. Call it Quinn’s Law.” He bladed through the knot of people crowding the room and reached the bar with Bridy close behind him. Then he waved over the bartender. “Two waters, please.”

The bartender—a burly, three-eyed, three-armed chap– said, “What kind?”

“Pardon?”

“We sell nine varieties of water.”

“Got one with just carbon dioxide in it?” The bartender nodded; so did Quinn. “Great. Two of those. With ice.”

“Which is it?”

“Sorry?”

Impatience put an edge on the bartender’s deep voice. “Ice is one of the varieties we offer. Do you want carbon water or frozen water?”

Bridy rolled her eyes at the simple transaction gone wrong.

Quinn made a fist behind his back, ostensibly in a bid to rein in his temper. “Can you break the ice into chunks and pour carbon water over it?”

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“What gave you that idea?” He drew a fistful of Gorn currency crystals from inside his cloak and dropped them on the bartop. “Two carbon waters with ice.”

“Coming up.” Wearing a put-upon expression, the barkeep stepped away and mixed the drinks. He returned, set them in front of Quinn, and plucked two small crystals from the pile Quinn had dropped on the bar. “That’ll be six szeket.”

Quinn maintained eye contact with the alien as he pushed a few more crystals across the bartop. “Here’s thirty.”

The bartender regarded Quinn and Bridy with suspicion, and he made no move to pick up the proffered crystals. “Was there something else you wanted?”

“An introduction,” Quinn said. “We need to meet someone who knows how to find things. For instance, ships in Gorn military custody.”

Dropping his dishrag over the crystals, the bartender leaned forward and said in a confidential tone, “Sorry. Can’t help you.”

“I understand,” Quinn said. He discreetly placed four more crystals on the bartop. “Thanks, anyway.”

Wiping up the bar—and sweeping the additional currency under his rag—the bartender replied, “You’re welcome.” Then he made a subtle tilt of his head toward one of the cantina’s corner booths. Then he walked away, cash in hand.

Quinn picked up the glasses of sparkling water and handed one to Bridy. “Let’s go say hello.” They navigated a weaving path through the crowd to the corner booth, where three people sat observing their approach. The two hairy brutes seated on the outer ends of the booth looked to Bridy like the bodyguards for the slender, dapper one secluded in the back corner, just beyond the pool of light from the shaded lamp hanging by a wire above the table.

The voice that emanated from the shadows was feminine– dark, smoky, and mysterious. “Are you two lost, perchance?”

“Don’t think so. The name’s Cervantes Quinn. And you are . . . ?”

“Not in the habit of introducing myself to strangers.”

“Then how do you ever meet anyone?” Quinn’s irreverent question seemed to befuddle the mystery woman, but her bodyguards wasted no time in standing up and moving to lay hands on their employer’s uninvited guests.

Just before the situation turned ugly, the woman spoke with a voice sharp enough to carve diamonds. “Geeter, Kresh—sit down.” The bodyguards froze, maintained threatening eye contact for a moment with Quinn, then slowly retreated and eased back into their seats. The woman continued in a milder tone, “Forgive their exuberance. Anticans are loyal to a fault, but they can be rather excitable.”

“No worries,” Quinn said. “This is my associate, Bridy Mac.”

“Hi,” Bridy said with a small wave.

The woman in the corner leaned forward. Her dark-bronze face was framed by long curls of sable hair. She looked human, but Bridy knew that looks could often be deceiving. “A pleasure. My name is Chathani. Now, if you will forgive me for speaking directly: what do you want?”

“I hoped we might drink together,” Quinn said.

Chathani dipped her chin and gave Quinn the skunk eye. “Unlikely.”

“And if, while we’re enjoying our drinks together, you should happen to let slip some bit of information that proves useful to me—”

“I fear you have been misinformed, Mister Quinn. I do not think I will be sharing a beverage—or anything else—with you today.”

“You sure?”

“Very.”

“That’s a shame.” He scattered another fistful of Gorn currency across the table. “Because I was buying.”

In the light of the hanging lamp, the crystals burned with inner fires.

Chathani’s eyes widened with avarice. She whispered in the ear of the Antican on her right. He calmly swept the crystals into one massive palm and pocketed them, and then Chathani smiled. “How gauche of me,” she said. “Please, join us”—her smile became a grin—“ friends.”