Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“I am merely fatigued,” she said, and he knew it was a lie. Stoic prevarications by patients were not uncommon, but in his experience Vulcans were unlikely to tell such naked falsehoods.

“Lieutenant Commander,” he said sternly, “minutes ago you collapsed in my ER. Your vital signs were highly irregular and not consistent with a diagnosis of fatigue.”

She met his stare. “What is your diagnosis, Doctor?”

“Though it doesn’t account for your unusually high pain indications, your other symptoms are consistent with the peak stages of Pon farr.”

T’Prynn pushed herself to a standing position and wavered slightly as she replied, “Absurd.”

M’Benga asked, “Are you close to your natural cycle?”

“No,” she said. “I am not.”

He lifted his eyebrows and tilted his head in a gesture of concession. “I see,” he said. Thinking back over the reams of medical literature he had studied in ShiKahr, he said, “There have been cases of premature Pon farr. Some were caused by external triggers, such as—”

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, trying to move past him. “But I am not undergoing Pon farr.”

Interposing himself between T’Prynn and the door, he said, “Wait a moment, Commander. Making a diagnosis is my job. I still need to ask you some questions. How old were you when you first experienced the Pon farr impulse?”

“That is a private matter,” she said.

He held up his hands to ward off her protest. “I know. But how can I be certain you’re not suffering premature Pon farr if I don’t even know when your normal cycle would kick in?”

“I have already told you, this is not Pon farr.”

Sensing that she would become only less cooperative if he continued on his present tack, he tried a different approach. “Very well. That still begs the question: Why did you collapse tonight? Was it something you ate? Something you drank? Did you experience any kind of unusual stress?”

His last inquiry provoked another fleeting twinge near her temple, but she kept her eyes locked with his. “As I said, Doctor: I am suffering from fatigue. If you will excuse me, I would prefer to recuperate in my quarters.” She stepped around him and headed for the door.

“I haven’t discharged you, Commander,” he said. “If you leave now, you’re doing so against medical advice.”

As she stepped through the door, she said, “So be it.” Then she was gone, and the door closed after her. Alone in the exam room, M’Benga realized that everything had happened so quickly that no one had been able to create a chart for T’Prynn. Now that she had left the hospital without answering even simple questions regarding her medical history, he would be forced to track them down himself through her official Starfleet medical records. Wonderful, he thought cynically. More paperwork.

“Commodore,” came Yeoman Greenfield’s summons over the intercom. “The Terra Courser’s about to leave spacedock.”

Reyes put down the data slate he had been perusing but not really absorbing, got up from his desk, and walked out to the shadowy operations center. The vast circular space loomed high and wide around him as he made his way up to the elevated supervisors’ deck in its center. Faint comm chatter and the muted voices of Vanguard’s flight-control team gave the command area a steady undercurrent of focused activity. Scores of eyes were turned upward, away from the pale blue glow of dozens of work screens, toward the center’s enormous display monitors, which formed an unbroken ring of moving images along the top third of the compartment’s nine-meter-high bulkheads.

Commander Jon Cooper looked up from his post at the hub as Reyes climbed the steps and bounded onto the supervisors’ deck. “Commodore,” Cooper said, straightening his posture. “What can we do for you?”

Lifting his arm and pointing at the bay one monitor, Reyes said, “Just came to observe a departure, Commander. As you were.” Reyes folded his hands behind his back and stood at ease while he watched the colony ship clear its moorings. Cooper made a show of working for a moment at his duty station before sidling over to a workstation beside Reyes. In a covert tone of voice he said, “The Sagittarius is in position, sir.”

“Good work, Coop. I want you to send a message for me.”

Tapping keys, Cooper said quietly, “Go ahead, sir.”

“Send to Starfleet Command, marked urgent: Sagittarius departure delayed. Require reinforcements for escort…. That’sall. Send it on scrambler India Tango Nine.”

Reyes hoped that the Klingons were not yet aware that Starfleet knew that its IT9 cipher had been broken. For now it could be used to feed the Klingons disinformation.

Cooper confirmed the order with a nod to the communications officer, Lieutenant Dunbar. “Message transmitted, sir.”

That ought to throw the Klingons off the scent for a few hours, Reyes mused. As long as the pilots on the Sagittarius and the Terra Courser don’t do anything stupid, we might just catch a break. Watching the bulky colony transport inch its way out of Vanguard’s spacedock, he tried not to think about the fact that the Sagittarius would have less than three meters’ clearance above and below as it snuck out beneath the Terra Courser’s massive bulk. One miscalculation, and all that would be left of the state-of-

the-art Starfleet scout ship would be a streak of paint on the transport’s belly and some mangled hull plates.

They’ll be fine, he told himself. The station’s tractor-beam systems were guiding both ships out of spacedock, with the main computer making any necessary adjustments to speed or direction. Pilot error was all but eliminated from the equation. Despite knowing that, dread still twisted in Reyes’s gut.

He wondered if there was any way the Sagittarius or her crew could possibly be ready for what was ahead of them on Jinoteur. With each new discovery Starfleet made in the Taurus Reach, the stakes of that exploration seemed to increase. Ravanar, Erilon, and Palgrenax had been stepping stones to something larger, and Reyes was convinced that the something was Jinoteur. Whatever we woke up is willing to destroy starships and blow up planets to keep us in the dark, he brooded. How’s it going to react when we show up on its doorstep?

Reyes knew he had just sent Captain Nassir and his crew into grave danger, but watching the Terra Courser clear the docking bay doors into open space, he knew that the people he was truly frightened for were the colonists on Gamma Tauri IV, and most of all their leader, the woman who had broken his heart seven years ago. We should warn them, protested his conscience. At least Nassir’s people know they’re in danger. His sense of duty shot back, There’s no way to evacuate the colonists without compromising Operation Vanguard. You can’t tell them about the threat without revealing everything—and once it’s public, every moron with a stardrive will come runnin’, guns blazin’, lookin’ to get rich quick or die trying. Emphasis on the “die trying.”

On the monitor above and ahead of him, the docking bay doors began to creep shut as the Terra Courser engaged its impulse engines and cruised away from the station. Before the doors closed, Reyes caught a glimpse of the Sagittarius tucked under the hulking transport, like a tiny white remora hugging a shark’s belly. Then the pale gray doors met, and the image on that screen changed to the majestic nebula that dominated one angle of the starscape outside the station.

Cooper checked the reports forwarded to his station by a handful of subordinates and reported discreetly to Reyes, “The jump to warp went perfectly, sir. The Terra Courser and her shadow are away.”

The commodore nodded and stared at the dark sprawl of space and stars, not brave enough to imagine what was in store for the crew of either ship. “Vaya con Dios,” he said softly. Then he returned to his office—walking, as always, under a dark cloud of concern for those he had just placed in harm’s way.

7

“What do you mean it’s gone?” raged Turag, his ire palpable even across a long-range subspace channel. “We told you to watch its every move! How could you have missed its departure?”

Sandesjo struggled to keep her temper in check. Lambasting her Imperial Intelligence handler with vulgarities might draw attention in the Federation Embassy office, even from behind the closed door of her private office. “Starfleet normally announces arrivals and departures,” she said. “This time there was no announcement. Furthermore, Jetanien was left out of the loop. Reyes concealed the Sagittarius’s deployment from all non-essential personnel, including the station’s diplomatic staff.”

“A sorry excuse, Lurqal,” Turag said, sneering through her true name as if it were a slur. “You have eyes. Couldn’t you see the ship was no longer in the hangar?”

I’m just going to throttle him, she fumed. Quieting her thoughts, she replied, “The Sagittarius is a very small ship, Turag. After it reached port, the maintenance crew covered it with scaffolding while making repairs. Apparently, the ship navigated clear of the scaffolding, which was left in place to create the illusion that the vessel was still in spacedock.”

“An answer for everything,” Turag said. “How convenient. How could the Sagittarius have left undetected by our fleet?”

“Not all our warriors are as cunning and alert as you are, Turag,” she said with syrupy insincerity. “The Sagittarius probably left at the same time as the Terra Courser and used her for cover—much as she deceived the crew of the Heghpu’rav into thinking she was a battle cruiser.”

“Assuming your guess is right,” Turag said, “how much of a lead would they have?”

“Two days and nineteen hours,” Sandesjo said.

Turag pounded his fist on the tabletop in front of his monitor. “Jay’va! They could be halfway to Jinoteur by now!” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “Every week your reports grow shorter and less useful. Now you’ve let a major Starfleet deployment slip past you. This is the last time, Lurqal. Fail us again, and you’ll be making your excuses to Fek’lhr!”

A jab of his index finger cut the channel. The screen hidden inside Sandesjo’s briefcase went dark. With a calmness of motion that belied her distress, she shut the briefcase and slid it under her desk. Her mouth was dry and tasted sour.

For a few minutes she sat with her face hidden in her hands. Solid intelligence had become harder to obtain in the weeks since the death of Captain Zhao on Erilon, but Sandesjo’s privileged position still made available a great deal of useful information. During her first several months aboard Starbase 47 she had mined the Federation Embassy’s records repeatedly for items of interest that could be passed along to Turag and Lugok. Though that supply of internal memoranda was far from exhausted, she had become tired of sifting through it for material to pad out her reports. It had come to feel like busywork. More to the point, she had lost interest—in that task and in her mission.

She had tried to convince herself that she could serve her Klingon masters and T’Prynn at the same time without betraying either one. T’Prynn had never asked her to surrender information that would endanger Klingon lives, though the Vulcan had asked her to omit items from her reports that could place Starfleet personnel at risk. On occasion, the Vulcan had asked Sandesjo to pass along particular items of interest to the Klingons. Sometimes it was accurate intelligence of dubious strategic value; sometimes it was disinformation. Caught between Turag on one side and T’Prynn on the other, Sandesjo had tried to treat her predicament like a game, or like a high-wire act.

The time for games was over. Turag could sense that she was not delivering useful intelligence. She would need to give him exclusive information of genuine value to safeguard her deep-cover assignment, lest her own people move against her.

My own people, she thought ruefully. Do I still have the right to call them that? I’ve lain down with the enemy and fallen in love…. I’m a traitor.

Accepting that as true meant letting go of a comforting lie. She had told herself for months that her loyalties had been “divided” or her motives “conflicted.” The truth of the matter, she now knew, was that she had been turned. Whether the deciding factor had been falling in love with T’Prynn or simply remaining too long submerged in an assumed identity, she was uncertain. Regardless, she admitted to herself that it was a fact: her only interest in serving the Empire was to serve herself, so that she could remain in T’Prynn’s good graces—and in her bed. Likewise, she harbored no illusions of loyalty to the Federation. Its ideals and values held little interest for her.

Her true loyalty was to T’Prynn. If the only way to remain with her lover was to give Turag intel that would harm the Federation, Sandesjo had no reservations about doing so. If placating T’Prynn meant betraying crucial secrets of the Empire and sending Klingon warriors to their deaths, she resolved to act without remorse. All would be expendable in love’s name.

I will burn in Gre’thor for this, warned the faltering voice of Sandesjo’s conscience, but she paid it no heed.

Her love demanded blood, and it would not be denied.

Dr. Fisher sipped his coffee and knocked on the open door to his colleague’s office. “You asked to see me?”

Looking up from behind several orderly stacks of data slates, Dr. M’Benga’s face brightened when he recognized Fisher. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Do you have a minute? Please come in.”

M’Benga kept his office well organized and very clean. Fisher approved. He slouched into a comfortable, padded leather chair in front of M’Benga’s desk. It had been quite some time since he had been the one sitting in front of another physician. “What’s on your mind, Doctor?”

The younger man handed Fisher a data slate. “A few days ago I treated Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn in the ER,” he said. “She presented to the triage nurse with a nonspecific report of pain, then lost consciousness. I revived her with a low dosage of asinolyathin.”

Scanning the information on the slate, Fisher remarked, “You’ve got a few gaps in your patient profile, Doctor.”

“Yes, sir,” M’Benga said. “T’Prynn left AMA before I could take a history or compare her readings to baseline data.”

Fisher chuckled. “The higher the rank, the more difficult the patient.” He set down the data slate on M’Benga’s desk. “You can just request her file from Starfleet Medical, you know.”

“I’m aware of that, sir,” M’Benga said. “That’s why I called you. I requested T’Prynn’s records and was denied.”

That made Fisher sit up straight. “Denied?”

“Yes, sir. Starfleet Medical informed me that I don’t have sufficient security clearance to review her file.”

The older doctor put down his coffee mug on the desk and grabbed the data slate that showed T’Prynn’s incomplete work-up. “Did you tell them she’d collapsed?”

“Yes, sir,” M’Benga said, his manner far more calm and professional than Fisher expected his own would be under the circumstances. “They still refused to release her records.”

Fisher studied the unusual bio readings taken during T’Prynn’s ER visit and tried to make sense of them. “Doesn’t add up,” he said. “Why would medical records be classified?” He tapped the face of the data slate. “Quite a fever she was running. Any sign of viral infection?”

“Not that we found,” M’Benga said. “No sign of injury, either. But lots of pain response in her somatosensory cortex. My first diagnosis was premature Pon farr.”

Nodding slowly, Fisher said, “That fits with the elevated temperature and pulse. But I don’t see the pain connection. That sort of thing usually happens when they can’t get back to Vulcan to mate. Are we sure it’s not her usual cycle?”

“I asked,” M’Benga said. “She insisted it’s not time. Then she left.”

“And you didn’t stop her?” Before the other man could answer, Fisher continued, “This isn’t some backwater private practice, Jabilo, this is a Starfleet starbase.” As he got up from the chair, he felt his temper rise with him. “You were the attending physician, and she was your patient. Order her to the ER for a follow-up exam and a complete history. Make it clear that if she refuses any part of that order, I’ll suspend her from duty immediately. Clear?”

“Yes, Doctor,” M’Benga said, standing up with Fisher.

Collecting his coffee mug from the desk, Fisher added, “As for her medical records being classified? We’ll see about that.”

The spray from the shower nozzle was warm and forceful on the top of Diego Reyes’s head. Jets of white water pushed through his graying hair and tingled his scalp, ran in long rivulets over his shoulders and down his torso. He reached up and massaged the back of his neck. Surrounded by the white noise of the running water, secluded briefly from the burdens of command, he reminded himself to breathe. With his eyes closed, he could almost imagine himself somewhere else.

Reyes pressed his palms against the tiled wall in front of him and bowed his head beneath the falling cone of water. Fatigue imbued his limbs with a leaden quality. I wish I could sleep for a year, he thought. There’s never time to think, no time to read, no chance to catch up. This is no way to live.

Cool air wafted across his back. Even with his eyes shut and his head submerged in spray, he recognized the sensation. “Hello, Rana,” he said with a bemused grin.

“You’ve been in here almost an hour,” Desai said as she slipped into the shower behind him. She slid her arms around his waist and pressed her body against his back. “Hiding from me?”

“Why would I do that?” he said with a grin, adjusting the shower nozzle to toss some water over his shoulder at Desai.

She laid her head in the valley between his shoulder blades. Her soft London accent gave her voice an especially wistful quality. “I don’t know. Maybe you were regretting taking us public the other night in Manón’s?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Switch?” In response to his offer, she shuffled around him to step under the main thrust of the spray, while he moved behind her. The water added weight and shine to her short but lustrous black hair. Thanks to the difference in their heights, a generous portion of the water angled over her and continued to pelt Reyes’s chest.

Desai took half a step back and pressed her hands against her head. With a backward push she squeezed the excess water from her hair. “What’re you still doing in here?” she asked with a coquettish grin. “Trying to use up Vanguard’s hot water?”

“Just wanted a quiet place to think,” he said.

Her delicate tan fingers explored his wet, steel-gray chest hair. “About work?” she pried. “Or about Jeanne?”

“They’re kind of the same thing now,” he said. “If something happens to her—”

“It won’t be your fault,” Desai said, her mien both firm and comforting. “You didn’t send colonists to Gamma Tauri.”

“No,” he said, cupping his hand to collect a palmful of water. “But I didn’t warn them, either.”

“You couldn’t.” She rested her head on his chest. “They’ve been there almost a year, Diego. Did you know that planet was part of your mission when they set up their camp?”

“Of course not,” he said. He pressed his handful of water to his face. Wiping his eyes clear, he continued, “I’d never put civilians at risk just to cover an op. But now that they’re there, I can’t force-evac them just ’cause Xiong and his white-coat brigade think we might find something useful under the surface.” He sighed heavily, feeling the pressure of his command reasserting itself. “And by the time we know for a fact that they need evac, it’ll probably be too late.”

She traced her fingernails up and down along the flanks of his back. “They have the Lovell and the Starfleet team on the surface, and the Endeavour will be there in a few days. If anything goes wrong, they’ll protect the colony.”

“Sure,” Reyes said glumly. “But if they end up defending it from the Klingons, it’ll mean war. And I can’t let that happen.” He stepped back from the spray. “A bigger problem is what’ll happen if Jeanne talks to one of our people on Gamma Tauri. She’s too good an esper not to know they’re hiding something.”

Shutting off the water, Desai said, “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” She turned to face him and slid open the translucent stall door. Cool air rushed in, creating thick clouds of water vapor that rolled around them. “For now, you have to trust the people under you to do their jobs.” She stepped out of the stall, grabbed two towels, and handed one to Reyes. “Dry off and come to bed,” she said. She wrapped her towel around herself and padded away toward the bedroom.

Reyes tied his towel around his waist and stepped out of the stall. He stopped in front of the sink and looked at himself in the mirror, despairing at the dark canals that concern had etched into his face over the past thirty years. His father’s favorite saying echoed in his memory: “By the age of fifty, we all have the face we deserve.” Eyeing his own weathered, grim countenance and the deep, dark crescents of fatigue beneath his doleful eyes, Reyes decided that his father had been right.

Desai called to him from the other room. “If you’re not in bed in sixty seconds, I’m going to sleep.”

“I’ll be right there,” he answered. Knowing she would make good on her teasing threat, he turned out the bathroom light and exited to his bedroom, where Desai was already ensconced under the covers. These are the good times, he reminded himself as he climbed into bed beside his girlfriend. Enjoy it while it lasts…. Because it always ends sooner than you think.