Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Part Three

Instruments

of Darkness

29

Six days of reclusive brooding had not assuaged Reyes’s grief. Reading through detailed after-action reports from the captains of the Lovell and the Endeavour had forced him to relive the Gamma Tauri IV tragedy several times over, and each new reading deepened his sense of how indelibly bloodied his hands had become. Eleven thousand colonists, thousands of Klingon scientists, and every living thing on the planet’s surface all were dead and reduced to radioactive glass and vapor.

And what did we learn? He asked himself that question over and over, knowing that the answer was “almost nothing.” The mission to Gamma Tauri IV had gleaned no significant insights into the artifacts, the meta-genome, or the Shedai. Having ended in bloodshed and fire, it was a tragedy for which Reyes knew himself to be directly responsible.

The only good news of the week had been the rescue of the Sagittarius from the surface of Jinoteur IV, and even that was not really a success but just another disaster narrowly averted. In a few hours the ravaged scout ship would return to Vanguard, accompanied by the civilian tramp freighter Rocinante. A heroes’ welcome had been planned, and Reyes clung to the hope that the Sagittarius crew’s debriefing would prove more informative than the abortive mission on Gamma Tauri IV. At the very least, he was looking forward to hearing their theories about how the entire Jinoteur star system had vanished from space-time.

His coffee was still warm, so he took a large sip and reclined his chair while he studied the sector activity chart on his office wall. The Endeavour had been redeployed to the Klingon border on another preemptive patrol, and the Lovell was en route to Pacifica, a beautiful and recently colonized pelagic world deep in the Taurus Reach, to help set up its basic civil infrastructure. Klingon and Tholian fleet activity had increased slightly, but for the moment the local status quo appeared intact.

Things looked calm, and that worried Reyes.

With a steep tilt of his mug, he drained the last of his coffee and turned back to the orderly stacks of data slates and data cards arranged on his desk. Two of his yeomen, Greenfield and Finneran, had obviously coordinated their efforts over consecutive shifts to keep his administrative paperwork straight for him. He stared at the neatly grouped piles of work and couldn’t find the motivation to do any of it.

Set apart from the rest of the items on his desk was a nondescript, thin gray binder. He picked it up, rested it on his lap, and opened it to admire the old picture tucked inside.

It wasn’t a particularly good photo; its composition was awkward, and because Reyes had taken it by pointing the camera at himself and Jeanne from arm’s length, its up-their-noses perspective was somewhat unflattering. In its favor, the light had been good that day in the New Berlin park, filtered through the static boughs of massive trees growing in low gravity, and the smiles that he and Jeanne showed to the camera had been genuine. It was proof that once, long ago, they had been happy and in love, before the routines of marriage and the burdens of rank had accomplished their slow attrition of all that had been good and joyful and honest between them.

I’d give anything to be back in that moment, he lamented, imagining the life he could have had if only every single thing had happened differently for the past twenty years. All we’d had were dreams about what we might be. Now all I have left is the memories of what we were…. It’s not enough.

He traced the outline of Jeanne’s younger features with his fingertip, a delicate, feather-light brush of skin over the matte print, as if he feared inflicting some new misery upon her ghost with his seemingly inverted Midas touch. I’m sorry, Jeanne.

Rationalizations and excuses deserted him, leaving only unanswerable questions. Why did I put the mission above her life? Because some admiral told me to? How many times did they tell us at the Academy that blindly obeying orders was not the mark of a good Starfleet officer? I listened, and I nodded, and I said I understood—but did I? He closed the binder, unable to bear the reminder of a happy memory that he felt he no longer deserved. What am I doing out here? Who am I really doing it for? Why am I doing it at all?

His dark musings were cut short by the buzzing of his desktop intercom. He sighed and jabbed the switch to open the channel. “Yes?”

Yeoman Greenfield replied, “Ambassador Jetanien and Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn are here, sir.”

Feeling antisocial, Reyes snapped, “What do they want?”

Jetanien answered with deadpan sarcasm, “To bask in the radiant glow of your charisma.”

“I don’t turn on the glow till noon,” Reyes said.

“Commodore,” Jetanien said, his impatience mounting, “twice in two days you have declined to receive us. Are we now to conduct our classified business by means of correspondence?”

Experience had convinced Reyes that publicly debating Jetanien was a quick means to profound embarrassment. His thick, dark eyebrows pressed down in a heavy scowl as he said, “Send them in, Greenfield.”

The door to his office opened, and Jetanien entered first. His raiment, as ever, was as flowing and gauzy as he was scaly and ponderous. Sashes of scarlet and plum were wrapped around his massive torso, and a matching drape hung from the back of his elaborate headpiece, which had been wrought from metal polished to a blinding brilliance. The Chelon rubbed his beaklike mouth back and forth, making a soft grinding sound as he strode toward Reyes’s desk.

T’Prynn walked in behind the ambassador, as ever presenting a portrait of discipline and control. Her crimson minidress was immaculate, her boots were polished to perfection, and her hair was pulled taut across her scalp and secured in a long, loosely bound ponytail. She carried a data slate.

The door closed behind T’Prynn, who joined Jetanien in front of Reyes’s desk. Jetanien made a slight bow of greeting. “First of all, let me express my profound gratitude for your magnanimity in actually deigning to grant us—”

“Stop,” Reyes said, holding up his palm toward Jetanien. “Are you two here for the same reason?”

Taken aback, Jetanien said simply, “Yes.”

“Okay,” Reyes said, pointing at Jetanien. “You talk too much.” He aimed his finger at T’Prynn. “What’s this about?”

“It is my duty to inform you both that a member of Ambassador Jetanien’s diplomatic staff is an agent of Klingon Imperial Intelligence who has been surgically altered to appear as a human female,” T’Prynn said.

Reyes smirked. “I knew there was something fishy about that Karumé woman.”

“Actually, sir, the spy is Anna Sandesjo—Ambassador Jetanien’s senior attaché.”

The commodore gave himself a moment to suck on his teeth and process that nugget of information. “Of course it is,” he said. “When did you figure out she was a spy?”

“Eleven months and twenty-two days ago,” T’Prynn said.

His coffee threatened to make a special return trip up his esophagus just so he could do a spit-take. “Eleven months?”

“And twenty-two days,” T’Prynn clarified.

He covered his eyes with one hand and exhaled. Count to ten, he counseled himself. One…two…

“Miss Sandesjo was coopted almost immediately after her detection,” T’Prynn said. “She has served us well as a double agent, providing valuable intelligence about Klingon priorities in this sector.”

Reyes stopped counting at six and removed his hand from his eyes. “You flipped an undercover enemy agent eleven months ago, and you’re just telling the two of us about it now?”

“Oh, I already knew about Sandesjo,” Jetanien said.

In unison Reyes and T’Prynn replied, “You did?”

“Of course.” Jetanien faced T’Prynn. “My staff intercepted one of her reports to Turag nineteen days before you turned her. I am well aware of the services she has performed for you.”

There was a challenge implicit in Jetanien’s tone, and it made Reyes feel as if he knew nothing about what was really going on aboard his station. “All right, let’s get to the meat on this bone. Why are you telling me now?”

T’Prynn tore her drilling-laser stare from Jetanien, blinked, and turned a neutral gaze back toward Reyes. “Miss Sandesjo’s status as a double agent has been exposed. It was a necessary consequence of disinforming the Klingons about events in the Jinoteur system. She is currently in protective custody aboard the station, but we need to move her to a safer location.”

“Hang on,” Reyes said. “You blew her cover six days ago, and she’s still here?” T’Prynn nodded. “And the Klingons know she’s still here?” Again the Vulcan woman confirmed his supposition. “Are you kidding me?”

Jetanien made some clicking noises and said, “I doubt the Klingons would risk an attack on the station over one agent.”

“They won’t launch a direct attack, no,” Reyes said. “But they aren’t gonna let this go, either—I guarantee it.” Turning to T’Prynn, he said, “I presume you have a plan?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “The Starfleet cargo transport Malacca is currently docked in bay three.” She handed her data slate to Reyes, who read it and followed along as she continued. “A standard cargo container unit has been modified to serve as a scan-shielded residential module for Miss Sandesjo. It will appear in the Malacca’s manifest as classified materials bound for the Starfleet Research and Development office on Deneva.”

Jetanien sounded dubious. “How likely is this to deceive the Klingons?” Reyes was keen to know the answer to that question as well.

“Because the Malacca is not a personnel ship,” T’Prynn said, “the Klingons are less likely to suspect it of being used to transport Miss Sandesjo. Furthermore, we can deflect their suspicion by maintaining a heightened state of security aboard the station for several days after her departure.”

Reyes looked over the plan that T’Prynn had drafted and compared it to the schedule of arrivals and departures. “When do you see this happening?”

“Today, shortly after the arrival of the Sagittarius,” she said. “Its homecoming should provide ample distraction.”

“Let’s hope it does,” Reyes said. “The last thing the Malacca needs is a Klingon welcoming committee waiting for it the minute it gets outside our sensor range.” He reclined his chair, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose to ward off the seed of a headache. “Either of you have any more surprises for me this morning?”

“Not at present,” Jetanien said.

T’Prynn shook her head. “No, sir.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies,” Reyes said. “Dismissed.”

Dr. Ezekiel Fisher stood behind Dr. M’Benga’s desk and watched over the younger man’s shoulder as he called up a new screen of deep-tissue imaging scans. “Look,” M’Benga said, pointing at a dark blotch on the screen. “Right there.”

As hard as he looked, Fisher didn’t see any sign of a tumor. “Where?”

“There,” M’Benga said. “Above the corolis gland.”

Fisher strained to pick out the tumor from the background, but the image was too muddy. “Did you take a lateral scan?”

“Yes,” M’Benga said. “Hang on, I’ll bring it up.”

The elder physician waited patiently and sipped his tepid cup of herbal tea—an indignity imposed on Fisher by Dr. Robles after the CMO’s latest physical revealed slightly elevated blood pressure—while M’Benga searched through the patient’s scans for the one they wanted. Fisher suspected that he knew what M’Benga had found, and he doubted very much that it was a cancerous tumor. He double-checked the patient’s chart. “Lieutenant Miwal’s blood work doesn’t show any of the antigens for an internal cancer,” he noted aloud.

“What if it’s an alkalo-carcinoid structure? Caitians can develop them without showing elevated alpha proteins.”

He’s a good diagnostician but a bit too stubborn for his own good, Fisher decided. “Maybe. But then why aren’t we seeing any catecholamines in his serum profile?”

“Well,” M’Benga said, and he paused. His search for a good answer ended as he put the lateral abdominal scan on the screen. “Yes,” he said. “You were right about the lateral scan. It’s much clearer from this angle.”

“It certainly is,” Fisher said. “And it should be fairly obvious that’s not a tumor.”

“But the calcified mass in the—” M’Benga stopped abruptly and took a new, focused look at the image on the screen. Fisher saw no need to say anything; he was certain that within seconds, M’Benga would realize that—

“It’s a bezoar,” M’Benga said with a slump of his shoulders. “In Miwal’s stomach. A harmless bezoar.”

“Or as I like to call it,” Fisher said, “a hairball.” He patted the younger man’s back. “Here endeth the lesson.” He handed M’Benga the data slate that held Miwal’s chart. “I suggest you prescribe the lieutenant a tricophage laxative and tell him to learn how to use the sonic shower.”

M’Benga chortled good-naturedly and started entering the information on Miwal’s chart. Fisher sipped his tea and had started thinking about lunch when the front door of the medical administrative office opened. Captain Rana Desai walked in, data slate in hand. She was followed by a pair of Starfleet security guards. Desai glanced first into Fisher’s empty office and then turned and saw him in M’Benga’s office.

He called out to her, “Morning, Rana. Help you?”

She said to her two escorts, “Wait here,” and proceeded quickly into M’Benga’s office. She shut the old-fashioned wooden door—an anachronistic touch that Fisher had insisted upon for the hospital’s administrative suite. Standing in private with the two physicians, Desai took a deep breath and looked at the floor. “I wish I didn’t have to be here,” she said.

“Don’t be coy, now,” Fisher said. “You came down here to say something. Let’s have it.”

She looked up and took another long breath. “First of all,” she said, “you have to know this is coming down from Starfleet Command. I’m just the messenger.”

Fisher folded his arms across his chest. “All right.”

“Gentlemen,” Desai said, enunciating with the stiff formality of a court officer reading an indictment, “did you, exactly three days ago, petition Admiral McCreary at Starfleet Medical to declassify and release to you the full medical history of Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn?”

The CMO looked over his shoulder at M’Benga, whose calm expression mirrored his own. Fisher looked back at Desai. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

She handed him her data slate, on which was displayed a document thick with tiny type and heavy with legal jargon. “You are both hereby ordered to cease and desist all such efforts to declassify documents related to Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn,” Desai said. “Furthermore, any attempt to circumvent or override security protocols put in place by Starfleet Intelligence will be treated as a court-martial offense. Lastly, you are both hereby prohibited in perpetuity from communicating with any and all parties regarding Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn’s medical history or this order from the Starfleet Judge Advocate General. Is that clear?”

“All except the reason why,” Fisher said.

Desai sighed. “Just sign the top page next to your names.”

Fisher scrawled his signature on the form and handed it to M’Benga, who affixed his own illegible autograph. Desai leaned forward and snapped up the tablet. Then she turned to head for the door. As she reached it, Fisher asked, “Does Diego know about this?”

She turned back. “The only reason you’re not both in the brig is that he refused to press charges for insubordination.” Softening her tone, she added, “I’m really sorry about this, Zeke. Whatever you’ve been doing…stop it.” She opened the door, stepped out, and let it swing shut behind her. It closed with a heavy thud in the doorframe.

“Not exactly the result we were hoping for,” M’Benga said.

“Nope. Wasn’t.” Fisher looked back at his protégé. “Pull everything you can find on Vulcan psychological and neurological disorders. They might not give us her history, but we still have our own data to analyze—and I plan on finding out what it adds up to, whether Starfleet likes it or not.”

Not having been told in advance of the hour or even the day of her departure from Vanguard, Anna Sandesjo was a bit startled when her escorts stepped out of the wall in her bedroom.

A human man and woman, both attired in Starfleet uniforms of black trousers and red jerseys, stood in a narrow, machinery-packed access passage behind the open panel. “I’m Agent Cofell,” said the woman. “He’s Agent Verheiden. It’s time to go.”

Cofell ushered Sandesjo to step past them.

Sandesjo got up from the edge of the bed. “I’m already packed,” she said, moving toward a rolling luggage bag tucked against the wall in the corner.

“Leave it,” Verheiden told her. “You need to make a clean break—the past stays here.”

Having already surrendered everything that had mattered to her, Sandesjo did as she was told. She stepped past the agents into the passageway, which was illuminated by widely spaced, backlit blue panels. The air inside was cooler and drier than in the temporary quarters where she had been living for the past several days. Its claustrophobic confines beat with the low pulse of ventilation systems, hissed with the rush of waste-removal plumbing, and echoed with the regular patter of their footfalls on the metal floor plates.

They passed three junctions as they followed the gradual curve of the passage. Before reaching a fourth junction, Cofell opened another disguised panel, revealing a narrow switch-back staircase. “Eight levels down,” she said, and led the way into the stairwell. Sandesjo followed her, and Verheiden closed the hidden panel behind them.

Their descent was steady and mechanical. Grated metal steps and a narrow gap between the sides of the switchback afforded Sandesjo a view of the space that loomed above her and yawned beneath her. She estimated that the hidden staircase reached from somewhere inside the operations center at the top of Vanguard’s command tower to a level deep inside the station’s power-generation facility in the lower core.

Eight levels down, Cofell unlocked and opened another panel that led into a new maintenance passageway. In a routine that had quickly become familiar, she and Sandesjo stepped clear while Verheiden secured the hatch they had just passed through. Then they continued through the narrow channel between gray walls packed with deeply thrumming machinery.

The uniformity of the surfaces and passages and junctions was disorienting. Only the bulkhead numbers, changing in an orderly and logical manner, gave Sandesjo any sense of where they were inside the station. By her reckoning they were behind the maintenance bays inside the core, along the station’s primary docking bay. Finally they turned left into a short passage that terminated at a bulkhead. Cofell unlocked it, opened it, and stepped through.

Sandesjo exited the passageway into a small enclosed space behind a stack of cargo containers in one of the station’s auxiliary cargo bays. Because the maintenance area was reserved for Starfleet vessels, the containers there were packed with classified or restricted military components and materiel.

Behind her, Verheiden halted a few paces shy of the open hatch. As soon as Sandesjo was clear, Cofell stepped back through the hatch and closed it. For a moment Sandesjo thought that she had been abandoned in an empty cargo bay—then the back panel of the container in front of her detached with a hydraulic hiss and slowly lowered open. She stepped back out of its way. When it was slightly more than half open she glanced over its top edge…and saw T’Prynn standing inside what looked like a Spartan but comfortable windowless apartment with no door.

The panel touched down on the deck with a metallic scrape and a resounding boom.

Rage and longing twisted together inside Sandesjo’s chest and left her speechless. She yearned to reach out to T’Prynn, to seek her touch one last time, but her pride blazed brightly, stung by the Vulcan’s recent betrayal.

T’Prynn spoke as she walked down the ramp toward Sandesjo. “This unit has been equipped to sustain you for a prolonged journey. It is provisioned with food customized for your true physiology, and its climate controls are adjustable. Water and air will be filtered and recycled.”

She stopped in front of Sandesjo, who refused to make eye contact. Sandesjo stepped around the Vulcan and walked halfway up the ramp. She paused. “It’s a lovely jail cell.”

“Its affect is regrettable but necessary for security purposes,” T’Prynn said. “No one aboard your transport vessel will know that you are inside. Only I and the agents who will greet you at your destination will know of your presence.”

Examining its multilayered metallic skin, Sandesjo speculated, “Scan-shielded duranium composites?”

“Yes,” T’Prynn said.

Sandesjo walked the rest of the way inside the box and stood in the center of its main room. A single-person bed was pressed against the wall on the right. Beside it was a low table. A round-cornered viewscreen was mounted on an adjustable swing arm attached to the wall near the foot of the bed. Tucked into a corner on the other side of the compartment were a food slot and a waste reclamation slot. In the middle of the rear wall was an open door leading to a lavatory and shower. Much of the rest of the interior volume of the large shipping container appeared to be filled with life-support apparatus.

T’Prynn watched Sandesjo fiddle for a moment with the viewscreen. “A variety of prerecorded audiovisual material has been made available for you,” she said, “as well as a broad selection of printed matter. I regret that our catalog of original Klingon works is scarce.”

Every attempted kindness by T’Prynn felt like the twist of an emotional knife in Sandesjo’s heart. Baring her hostility, she said, “I guess you thought of everything.”

“I saw to necessities,” T’Prynn said.

Sandesjo had thought she would have more to say to T’Prynn, but as she looked at her she was unable to put words to her feelings. Bitterness was tangled up with desire, sorrow with resentment, hopelessness with denial. All that was left to her was surrender. “Just close the door,” she said.

For a moment she felt as if T’Prynn might say something, but then the Vulcan took a small device from her belt and pressed one of its buttons. With a low groan and grind, the open side of the container slowly lifted. Sandesjo thought she saw a glimmer of regret on T’Prynn’s face, but then the panel blocked her view and shut with a hollow thud.

All was silent inside Sandesjo’s dull gray purgatory. She sat on the bed and folded her hands across her lap. No one had told her how long she would be inside this portable prison, or even where she was going. Probably some remote dustball at the far end of the Federation, she predicted pessimistically.

A new name, a new face, a new beginning—these were three things she wanted no part of. She had already endured all of them when she gave up being Lurqal and became Anna Sandesjo. How was she to submerge into yet another identity, yet another life?

I’ve already forgotten what I used to look like, she thought. Now I probably won’t even recognize the sound of my own voice. I’ll look in the mirror and see a stranger.

She growled and shook off the numbing comfort of self-pity. Stop whining like a petaQ, she scolded herself. You’ve done this before, you can do it again. Wild things don’t feel sorry for themselves. Be a Klingon.

From outside the container came a bump and a slight lurch. She was in motion. Sandesjo wanted to be brave, to face her circumstances head-on without fear or mercy, and to believe that she was participating in her own destiny. But bouncing around inside a sealed box, being shipped away like an unwanted parcel, she thought of T’Prynn and realized what she was—and what she had been from the moment she first fell in love: a prisoner. Worst of all, she had been condemned, not to a life in love’s thrall or even to death in its name, but to oblivion.

She lay back on the bed and folded her hands behind her head. Like any prisoner, she knew that her future was out of her hands. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened.

Cervantes Quinn didn’t feel like himself. For one thing, he was sober. He also had showered and shaved, and his clothes were mostly clean. In addition, and to his own surprise, he had shorn off his tangled, shoulder-length white locks, leaving him with a pale gray shadow of stubble covering his round head.

“You look like you’re going to a job interview,” Pennington joked as they walked together along Vanguard’s main hangar deck, where the Sagittarius was berthed.

“Just turnin’ over a new leaf, that’s all,” Quinn said.

They dodged around a loose knot of Starfleet personnel walking in the opposite direction. Quinn caught his reflection in one of the massive, wall-sized transparent aluminum observation windows that looked out on the main docking bay. Embarrassed by his own profile, he tried to suck in his gut, but the effort of holding it in for more than a few seconds was too difficult. Letting it go with a huff of breath, he resolved, Have to do somethin’ about that one of these days.

Pennington smirked at him. “Little trouble there?”

“Shut up,” he replied with his own crooked grin.

“Just kidding, mate,” Pennington said. “If this is the new you, it’s got my vote—for the smell factor, if nothing else.”

Shaking his head, Quinn replied, “Friends like you are the reason most people don’t bother with self-improvement.”

They neared the bay four gangway, which had just been opened by a chief petty officer. Through another observation window, Quinn noticed that the Sagittarius, docked at the end of the gangway, was already being swarmed over by a repair crew from Vanguard. Bright yellow work pods hovered beneath its main saucer, starting sorely needed hull repairs.

Captain Nassir was the first one to emerge from the gangway portal, followed by a slender, dark-haired woman and Theriault, the woman Quinn had pulled out of the water with Pennington. Nassir turned his head and saw Quinn and Pennington, and immediately he threw wide his arms and called out, “The men of the hour!”

More of his crew exited the gangway as he strode over to greet the two civilians. He put out his hand to Quinn, who took it in a firm handshake. Nassir smiled and said, “An honor to meet you face-to-face, Captain.”

“Most folks just call me Quinn.”

Nassir nodded. “Whatever you like is fine by me, sir.” He released Quinn’s hand and shook Pennington’s. “Mr. Pennington, it’s a pleasure. Ensign Theriault’s told me quite a bit about your heroics on Jinoteur.”

The reporter smiled. “I thought I panicked,” he said, “but I’ll take her word for it.”

Letting go of Pennington’s hand, Nassir asked him and Quinn, “What’s next for you gents?”

Quinn shrugged. “Scare up another job and get back to work, I guess.” Hooking his thumb in Pennington’s direction, he added, “I reckon he probably has a few stories to file.”

“No doubt,” Nassir said.

Behind the Starfleet captain, a trio of medical personnel from Vanguard Hospital approached the gangway entrance with a stretcher. Pennington noticed the medics as well and asked, “Is Commander Terrell all right, sir?”

“He will be,” Nassir said. “We fixed him up well enough to get him home, but he’ll need a few days of intensive care before he’s back on his feet.”

Quinn nodded. “Send him our best wishes, Captain. We’re both pulling for him.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that, thank you.” Nassir tilted his head back toward a nearby turbolift. “If either of you would like to join me and my crew in Manón’s for a celebratory drink, consider yourselves invited. First round’s on me.”

Pennington and Quinn traded quizzical glances. Quinn looked back at Nassir and asked, “Are you sure we’d be welcome there?”

“Absolutely,” Nassir said. “You put yourselves on the line out there. You gents are heroes; I won’t forget it.” Brightening his expression, he added, “So how ’bout that drink?”

Quinn was about to accept, but then he caught Pennington’s sidelong glare and remembered why he had sobered up in the first place. “Maybe just an Altair water,” Quinn said, and Pennington signaled his approval with a subtle nod. Nassir indicated with a sweep of his arm that they should follow him to a nearby bank of turbolifts. As they started across the broad thoroughfare, Quinn glimpsed T’Prynn standing like a statue in the middle of the massive corridor, watching him.

Catching Pennington’s shoulder and backpedaling, Quinn said, “Captain, we’ll catch up with you in a few minutes. I just remembered an appointment I have to keep first.” Pennington shot a confused look at Quinn and followed his stare to T’Prynn.

Nassir looked back, noticing T’Prynn as well. “All right, then,” he said. “Good luck with that. See you upstairs.” Wise enough to extricate himself while he had the opportunity, Nassir slipped into a turbolift just before its doors closed.

T’Prynn tilted her head toward a recessed seating area off the main passageway, in front of an observation window. The focus of her gaze made it clear that she only wished to speak with Quinn. He nodded his understanding to her and whispered to Pennington, “Still got that recorder gizmo?”

“Yeah,” Pennington said. “Why?”

“You might want to fire it up on the sly,” Quinn said. “Just in case she kills me in public or something. Might make a hell of a scoop for you.”

Pennington casually stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. A moment later the tip of the recording device poked out over the edge of the pocket. “It’s running,” he said, and pointed with his chin toward a nook on the other side of the thoroughfare. “I’ll be over there.” He strolled away, leaving Quinn to go and face T’Prynn alone.

When Quinn reached her moments later, she stood with her back to him, facing into the docking bay. He sidled up next to her and pressed his back against the window. “Howdy.”

She didn’t look at him as she spoke. “You’ve done us a great service, Mr. Quinn. Thank you.”