Текст книги "Serpents Among the Ruins "

Автор книги: David George

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“That’s why I came toyou, Tirasol,”Sulu said, the intent of her statement—that she could trust her friend—clear. “Think about this: there are no records of the deaths of these officers, since they died on a classified mission; they have extensive Starfleet records; and so nobody would question their posting to a starship.”

“You may be right,” Mentir said, knowing of nothing else that he could say. “What is the location of Enterprise?”he asked, although he was already fully aware of the ship’s movements.

“We’re en route to the Echo Sector,”she said, “to patrol the Neutral Zone.”

“I’m issuing you new orders, Commander,” Mentir said. “Enterpriseis to report at once to Space Station KR-3, and you are to report directly to me.” He needed to recruit a starship and its commander anyway.

“Sir?”Sulu said.

“Demora,” Mentir said, leaning closer to the screen and lowering the volume of the snaps and chirps that formed his voice, “we’ll discuss what you’ve found when you arrive.”

Sulu looked silently at him for a moment, as though trying to judge his intentions. Finally, she said, “Yes, Admiral. Thank you.”

“Mentir out,” he said, and he saw Sulu reach forward, obviously ending the communication from her end. The screen went blank. Mentir reached forward himself and deactivated the comm system.

He sat for a while without moving, his thoughts racing. He suspected that Sulu would continue to scour Starfleet’s personnel records in search of additional anomalies, and that she would eventually piece all of the information together and confirm the truth. Fortunately, he trusted few officers as much as he trusted Sulu, and so it would be no more of a risk to recruit her for the mission than it would be to recruit any other officer. Enterprisehad not initially been considered for the assignment because of its recent trip to Algeron, but the Romulan Imperial Fleet and the Romulan Intelligence Service would know that Starfleet’s flagship had been patrolling the Neutral Zone during the past few months, and so this could work.

Satisfied with his decision, Mentir made his way around his desk and headed for the lock, and for the comforting waters of his inner office. Considering the circumstances, he felt sure that Sulu would do as he asked, but he did not look forward to telling her what they had done, and what they would yet do. He could only hope that she would understand.

And forgive.

“The general is preparing to act.”

Ditagh stood in front of the monitor in his quarters and smiled broadly at the welcome news. His time aboard Algeron had grown frustratingly long, and his tolerance for Kage’s continued obeisance toward the Empire’s historical enemies had waned almost completely. Once the general seized power, though, Ditagh knew that Qo’noS would immediately remove itself from these pathetic efforts to pacify the Romulans and the Federation. After that, he would finally be able to bolt this sterile space station and return home.

“Do you know the timetable?” Ditagh asked his compatriot, a member of the general’s staff.

“Not precisely, but it’s going to happen soon.”

“Good,” Ditagh said. “The might of the Klingon Empire will be—” The flat tone of the door chime sounded in the small room. He looked away from the monitor and over to the door, which he had taken to locking after Kage had burst in here not long ago. The ambassador no doubt stood on the other side of the door right now; no one else on the station would have cause to call on him. “I must go,” Ditagh said, peering back at the monitor. He did not need the old man questioning him about his communications back to Qo’noS.

“I understand.”And he clearly did, because he closed the channel, blanking the screen. Ditagh touched a control and deactivated the comm system on his end, then turned and walked to the front of his quarters. He reached up and operated a panel set into the bulkhead, and the door slid open. As he’d expected, Kage stood in the corridor.

“Ditagh,” the old man said, “I would speak with you.” He employed the same voice as he did in the negotiating sessions, the calm, even tones of diplomacy—the tones of weakness. It embarrassed and angered Ditagh that such a man represented the Empire.

Turning his back to Kage, Ditagh strode into the center of the room. “What do you want?” he said, showing no respect at all to the ambassador. Although he allowed Kage to maintain his appearance of authority in front of the Romulan and Federation representatives, it pleased him that the charade had ended outside of those meetings. In private, Ditagh no longer hid his disdain for the peace-loving old man. Now he rounded to face him.

“I want to know your mind,” Kage said, stepping inside. The door eased shut after him. “I want to know what you think of the data presented by the Starfleet captain.”

Ditagh stared at the ambassador for a second, just long enough to ascertain the seriousness of the request. When he saw that Kage actually expected an answer, he laughed, a deep, hearty guffaw filled with derision. “You want myopinion?” he said. “Are you now mediating harmony within the Empire?”

“Why not?” Kage asked. “We are both Klingons. Should we not battle together against our enemies, rather than fighting each other?”

Ditagh peered at the ambassador, but now found it impossible to determine the sincerity with which he had asked his questions. “The problem,” he told Kage, “is that you do not know who the enemies of the Empire are, and you do not do battle against them.”

“I know who youthink our enemies are,” Kage said. “I know who your sponsor thinks our enemies are.” Ditagh listened to the obvious attempt to insult him and did not react; Kage’s words meant nothing to him. “But is there no room in your worldview for new facts?”

“And what ‘facts’ are those?” Ditagh asked. He moved to the food synthesizer, intending to order a flagon of bloodwine, but then he decided against it. The Romulan approximation of the Klingon drink provided yet another impetus to flee Algeron. “Facts such as manufactured data files? Doctored sensor readings? Useless blueprints? Are those your ‘new facts’?”

“Have you actually looked at the data?” Kage asked, stepping farther into the room. “Are those your genuine conclusions, or are they merely assumptions?”

Ditagh studied the ambassador, attempting to take the measure of his questioning. Did he really want to know Ditagh’s view, or did he seek something else, perhaps some item of information that he thought might help Azetbur’s cause? Kage had previously acted on both motivations, although it seemed unlikely that he would wish to seriously discuss matters with Ditagh after their confrontation.

“I’ve examined the Federation data,” Ditagh disclosed. He walked over to a chair and dropped heavily into it, his large frame filling the piece of furniture. Kage followed him over, though he did not sit down.

“You’ve examined the data, and concluded the readings to be counterfeit?” he asked. “What about the designs for the new drive?”

“I’m not an engineer or a scientist,” Ditagh said, beginning to tire of this interrogation.

“What does that mean?” Kage asked.

“It means that I’m not qualified to make a determination about the authenticity of the Federation data,” Ditagh said.

Kage leaned forward, resting his hands on the back of a chair. “But you just characterized the data as manufactured, the drive plans as useless.”

“The veracity of the data is irrelevant,” Ditagh said, dismissing the integrity of sensor logs and engine designs with a wave of his hand. “What matters is the intention of the Federation. They are our enemy, and so it is clear that they strive to defeat us. If the readings are genuine, then the Federation must be distracting us from some other important truth. If the drive plans are accurate, then they most certainly will fail in operation, or lead the Empire to develop starship engines inferior to whatever Starfleet is now devising.”

“But your interpretations are self-fulfilling,” Kage said. He circled the chair he had been leaning on and took a seat directly across from Ditagh. “You do not trust the Federation, and so you ascribe dishonorable motives to them. You then use those perceived motives as fortification for your belief that the Federation is our enemy. But since the destruction of Praxis almost twenty years ago, they have demonstrably been our allies.”

“And why is it that you think they’ve been our allies?” Ditagh asked. “Because they’ve provided us food and energy?”

“Yes, of course,” Kage said. “They’ve helped to prevent the disintegration of the Empire.”

“Have they saved us, or have they found a means of controlling us?” Ditagh leaned forward, warming to the subject despite his contempt for the ambassador. “The Federation has done only so much for Qo’noS. They’ve stopped short of giving us what we’ve needed to grow as strong as we’d been before the disaster on Praxis. They’ve kept us from becoming a threat to them, restraining our progress by enthralling some of our people—as they’ve done with Azetbur. And with you.”

Kage gazed at him, his eyes narrowing. “Do you not even grant the possibility that the Federation is our ally?”

“Do you not even grant the possibility that it is our enemy?” Ditagh returned. “You accuse me of finding ends based upon my assumptions, but do you not support your vision of the Federation as a Klingon ally with favorable interpretations of their actions?”

Kage lifted his chin, then glanced away for a moment. At last, to Ditagh’s surprise, he said, “Perhaps.” But then he asked, “Have you ever been to a Federation world?” When Ditagh did not bother to answer, he said, “I thought not.”

“If you’re here to try to convince me of the truth of your position, there is no point,” Ditagh said. He sat back in his chair. “I would die protecting Klingons from the imperialism of the duplicitous Federation.”

“Yes,” Kage said slowly. “I’m sure that you would.” A glimmer in the ambassador’s eyes hinted that he either hoped or believed that such a fate would befall Ditagh. “It astonishes me how different our views can be, based upon the same information.” He paused, and then added, “But then, I have actually been to the Federation, and worked with its people.”

“Then why don’t you go back to some Federation world, old man?” Ditagh stood up. “Maybe you can spend the last days of your life being administered powders and liquids for the sick. You can prolong your fearful little life in safety, absent the fires and glories of battle. Like a human, or a Deltan.”

Kage peered up at him and nodded. He stood up and faced Ditagh for a few seconds—a pitiable attempt to show strength, Ditagh figured—and then headed for the door. As it opened before him, he looked back into the room. “You call me an old man,” he said, “and I am. But you are out of date, and so are all of those like you. And because you are all out of power—real power—the Empire has survived, and will continue to survive.” Then he continued out into the corridor.

Ditagh watched him go. “How wrong you are, old man,” he said to himself. Before long, he knew, Kage and Azetbur and their ilk would be forcibly rendered obsolete. The Empire had survived under their reign, but only once they had been removed would it flourish.

He crossed the room, making his way back over to the food synthesizer. He operated the control panel, steering through its menus and submenus until he reached the selection for Klingon bloodwine,and then found the specification Warm.Ditagh would toast to the future of the Klingon Empire, which would not include Kage or Azetbur or any of their minions.

Sulu sat down across the desk from Admiral Mentir. They’d exchanged cursory pleasantries when she’d entered his office, and now she waited for him to begin their meeting. Under normal circumstances, she would have been delighted to see him again, would have wanted to have a personal conversation, but the current situation hardly qualified as normal.

On the corner of the desk, Sulu noticed, sat a model of a small sublight craft she recognized as a Nivochan asteroid runner. She’d never flown one herself, but she remembered her father telling her that he once had. She wished that she could have spoken with him about everything that had happened recently, but—

“Commander,” the admiral began, confirming the formal tone of their meeting. A faint, tinny quality underlay the sound of his translated voice. “Have you spoken with anybody besides me about your concerns?” He clearly referred to her discovery of Starfleet records indicating that officers she knew to be dead had apparently been assigned to starship duty.

“No,” Sulu answered. “I haven’t because…” She stopped and looked away from the admiral, uncomfortable with what she needed to reveal to him. After their last conversation, she worried that he might view her latest concern as paranoid.

“Commander?” Mentir said. Sulu peered back over at him, the silvery scales of his face visible through the helmet of his environmental suit.

“I haven’t said anything to any of the Enterprisecrew, not even to the senior staff,” she said, “because I think there’s a spy on board.”

“What?”Mentir exclaimed, obviously surprised at the revelation. “You’ve found records of a deceased officer assigned to your vessel?”

“No,” Sulu said. “But when I uncovered those discrepancies in the personnel files, it reminded me of an intermittent problem we’ve been experiencing aboard the ship for months. It’s a seemingly random dispersion of the navigational deflector, lasting just a second or two each time. It’s occurred less than a dozen times, and so we haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause. Since it hasn’t impacted ship operations, though, resolving it hasn’t been a priority.”

“And you believe that a spy aboard Enterprisehas sabotaged the ship?” the admiral asked.

“No,” Sulu said. “But I recalled the problem during our last conversation, and so I went back and checked the logs.” She lifted a padd from her lap and activated it with a touch. “The first dispersions occurred just before and just after a confrontation the Enterprisehad with a Romulan warship eighteen months ago. It happened again, twice, during the ship’s visit to the Koltaari homeworld, when the Romulans began their occupation of the planet, and then several times during our patrols of the Neutral Zone in the Foxtrot Sector.” Sulu pressed a control and scrolled down the list. “The dispersion appeared once more just before the Universetest—” She felt a knot tighten in her stomach at the mention of the ill-fated ship. “—and a final time just after our deuterium-flow regulator failed when we were departing from Algeron.”

“Obviously there’s a pattern there,” Mentir said, although the surprise he’d shown a moment ago seemed to have faded now.

“There’s a Romulan spy aboard the Enterprise,”Sulu concluded, “sending them information in a communications beam hidden in the output of the navigational deflector.”

“Yes,” the admiral said simply.

Sulu felt relieved at Mentir’s immediate acceptance of her judgment, and she said so. “I’m glad you agree, Admiral.”

“I’m not telling you that I agree,” Mentir told her. “I’m telling you that, yes, there is a Romulan spy aboard your vessel.”

“Admiral, I don’t understand,” Sulu said. “You know?” Her heart began to race and she felt herself flush as she realized that she had been right, that somebody in Starfleet Command hadhelped seed spies throughout the fleet. She had obviously been wrong to trust Mentir, and she wondered if she would be able to make it out of his office alive. In her mind’s eye, she imagined him lifting a phaser from beneath his desk and—

Sulu sought to restrain her frenzied thoughts. She’d known Los Tirasol Mentir for twenty years—known and trusted him. She would not have contacted him about all of this if she hadn’t.

Unless he’s been replaced too,Sulu thought wildly. Like the dead officers—

“I know,” Mentir said. “I didn’t until just recently, but I do now. Captain Harriman discovered the spy almost immediately after they’d been assigned to the ship. It was his idea to leave the spy in place, so that we could know what information was being passed to the Romulans, what information they were seeking.”

Sulu nodded slowly. It was a sensible plan, and she understood at once why the captain had not shared the information with her. The fewer people aware of the spy’s existence, the better the chance that the spy would remain unaware that they’d been found out, and the more likely that they’d continue to operate aboard Enterprise.Now, though, with Captain Harriman no longer on the ship…

“Who is it?” she asked. She expected the admiral to refuse to tell her, but he did not.

“Enterprise’s chief computer scientist,” he said. “Lieutenant Grayson Trent.”

“Trent,”Sulu said, and she immediately remembered when she’d encountered him near the second fire in the Koltaari capital. When she had first seen him, after she’d come out of the smoke, he’d initially turned away from her, and she realized now that he hadn’t wanted her to see him there. It had been too late, though; he’d seen that she’d already spotted him, and so he’d had to come over to her.

And he had a medkit with him,she recalled now. He’d given her a dose of tri-ox compound, but why would a computer scientist be carrying a medkit with him? Because he thought he might need it for himself,she surmised. I also was pleased that he’d made it back to the power plant,Sulu recalled. Trent had been assigned to a different area of the city at the time, but she had simply ascribed his presence back at the fire to his desire to help the Koltaari. But Linojj had concluded that the explosive charges had been set manually, and Sulu saw now that Trent had been the one to set the bomb in the power plant, and probably the first bomb as well. Fury rose within her.

“How much longer is Starfleet Command intending to leave him aboard?” Sulu wanted to know.

“Not another day,” Mentir said. “His usefulness to us is at an end.” The admiral reached forward to his desk and activated a comm channel. “Mentir to Sperber,” he said.

“Sperber here, Admiral,”came the immediate reply.

“We’re all set here,” Mentir said. “Carry out your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mentir out.” The admiral looked over at Sulu as he closed the comm channel. “My executive officer,” he said. “He’ll contact Lieutenant Commander Linojj and explain the situation. Trent will be transported directly into a holding cell here on the station.”

“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, pleased that situation had been taken care of that quickly, at least from her perspective. “And what about the other spies?” she asked, and then something else occurred to her. “Do they have anything to do with why Captain Harriman remained behind at Algeron?”

“There are no other spies,” Mentir said.

“What?” Sulu said. “But the discrepancies in the personnel records…”

“There are no other spies,” Mentir repeated. “And Captain Harriman is not aboard Algeron.”

“What?” Sulu said again. “Then where is he?”

“I can explain all of this to you, Demora, and I will,” the admiral said. “But first, I need to tell you that Enterprisemust depart from KR-3 in—” He glanced at the monitor atop his desk. “—three hours and fifty-seven minutes. You’ll be returning to Foxtrot Sector, to outpost thirteen.”

“Yes, sir,” Sulu said. “To patrol the Neutral Zone?”

“In a matter of speaking,” Mentir said. “Enterpriseneeds to be there for the start of the war.”

Vaughn crawled through the dark, cramped access channel, pulling himself along with his fingers, pushing himself along with his toes. The small beacon he carried in his mouth revealed his surroundings in stark tones, throwing inconstant shadows as he moved past equipment protruding from the bulkheads. The heat, the closeness of the air, enveloped him completely, like cloth strips wrapping a mummy. His elbows and knees, knocking repeatedly against the metal decking and sides of the conduit, felt raw, even through the material of his Romulan uniform. The crew of Tomedclearly used this tube infrequently, if at all; Vaughn suspected that they utilized robotic maintenance devices for such areas of the ship, devices small enough to maneuver through the confined spaces. If true, then it left him less vulnerable to detection, although the narrow passage also caused the completion of his tasks to be both more uncomfortable and more difficult.

At a T-shaped intersection, Vaughn took the beacon from between his teeth and shined its beam down the tube stretching away to his left. He eyed the nearest access panels, trying to pick out the Romulan characters identifying the ship’s systems they covered. He saw a word that translated as Environment,and knew that life-support functions could be found there, though he did not bother to read the words in smaller characters that would have specified exactly which functions.

On the other side of the tube, Vaughn spied what he needed: Communications,and a specific relay that supported it. He stuck the beacon back between his teeth and struggled around the corner. After hauling himself into the intersecting conduit, he paused, setting the beacon down and resting his forehead on the back of one hand. He’d been down here in the bowels of Tomedfor a long time, working to locate and sabotage the ship’s external communications system. That effort had entailed finding and reconfiguring not just one subsystem or relay, but many, including independent backups, so that when the system was brought down, the Romulan crew would not be able to repair it.

Now, finally, Vaughn had come to the last site. He positioned the beacon on the deck so that it illuminated the area in which he needed to work. The access panel came free with a metallic click, and he set it to one side. Inside the bulkhead, fiber-optic clusters twined around various pieces of equipment. Vaughn studied the layout until he positively distinguished the coupling he required. Once he finished modifying it, all the critical points of the ship’s external comm system would be tied together into a single control circuit, and by way of that control, Tomedcould be rendered mute and deaf.

Vaughn retrieved a Romulan scanner from his belt, where it hung beside a sensor veil. He checked the chronometer on the display, verifying that he would have enough time to complete his tasks, then grabbed a small pack of handheld engineering tools. After performing a thorough scan of the coupling, he reached into the bulkhead and set to work.

As Vaughn toiled over the comm system, he felt the slight pulse of its operation beneath his touch. He had executed this same series of modifications several times already, and he used the tools quickly and expertly on the equipment. In just a few minutes, he, Commander Gravenor, and Captain Harriman would be one step closer to completing their mission. Success would justify the significant personal risk, Vaughn knew, but failure…failure would leave the blood of many on his hands.

In recent days, as this scenario had begun to unfold, he had begun to wonder if he had chosen the right career for himself. He recalled his boyhood dreams of exploration, but circumstances and his own natural abilities had conspired to send his life in another direction—in thisdirection. He had enjoyed his years of deskwork and training for Starfleet special operations, his sense of accomplishment particularly high when his efforts had contributed to the success of a field mission.

Still, he had looked forward to his own promotion to field duties with great anticipation, and he’d found his half-decade of service in that capacity more than satisfying, despite the vagaries of special ops work. Proportionate to his talents, Vaughn’s responsibilities had increased quickly and significantly, and as a consequence, so too had the stakes for which he worked. In the last two years or so, he had come to face his own peril almost as a matter of routine. But while he did not wish to die, the possibility of his own death did not scare him; the possibility of the deaths of others, though, specifically as a result of his actions, did.

As Vaughn withdrew one hand from the communications equipment in order to exchange one tool for another, he asked himself whether or not he believed in what he was doing. It did not require a great deal of introspection for him to conclude that he did; he would not have stayed in special ops otherwise. Evil existed in the universe in many forms, and he found not only necessity, but virtue, in fighting it.

The difficulties he experienced now, he realized, lay not only in the cost of failure, but in the price of success, both paid for by wounds heaped upon the innocent, and by death. The destruction of Universehad sent waves of anguish heaving through Starfleet, and though not destroyed, Ad Astrahad endured damage that would probably end up being measured in a life. Vaughn did not like being a party to that. He had never believed that virtuous ends justified anything but virtuous means.

He removed one hand from within the bulkhead and dragged the sleeve of his uniform across his face, wiping away the patina of perspiration that had formed there. The old simile Hot as Vulcanshould have had a companion phrase, he thought: Hot as Romulus.Vaughn would have removed his tunic had there been more room to maneuver within the narrow equipment tunnel.

The modifications took nearly an hour to complete. When he had finished, he replaced the access panel, then packed the engineering tools back inside their case. After gathering up his equipment—tool case, scanner, and beacon—he activated the circuit now controlling the critical points of Tomed’s external comm system. For now, the ship’s Romulan crew had been cut off from the rest of the universe. So too had Vaughn, Gravenor, and Harriman.

Vaughn retreated backward down the conduit, past the intersection, and finally headed back the way he had come. It took him twenty minutes to reach a junction. He burst from the access tunnel as though throwing off fetters. His body spilled onto the deck of the junction well, and he lay there on his back for a second, shining the beacon upward and peering at the various tunnels—some narrower, some wider—that connected into this area. Then he pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned against the bulkhead, resting for a few moments and gathering his strength. Time remained before his scheduled rendezvous with Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman. As with him, he knew that both officers had been charged with tasks to accomplish once they had stolen aboard Tomed:the commander, to secure the helm, and the captain, to access internal sensors and—

“Alert,”a stilted male voice announced loudly in Romulan, accompanied by the short blasts of an alarm tone. “Singularity containment malfunction. Containment will fail in twenty-nine minutes.”The words rang in the enclosed space.

Vaughn quickly rose to his feet. An artificial quantum singularity—a microscopic, synthetically created black hole—powered the warp drive of Romulan starships, he knew. A complex containment field about the extremely efficient power source prevented the black hole from devouring the vessel, but once the singularity had been enabled, it could not be deactivated. If its containment failed, the ship would be doomed.

“Alert,”the voice repeated, obviously part of an automated warning system. “Singularity containment malfunction. Containment will fail in twenty-eight minutes and forty-five seconds.”

Vaughn shined his beacon around the junction well and picked out the right access tunnel, fortunately wider than the one from which he had just emerged. He jumped over to it and dove inside, racing to meet Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman before Tomedcollapsed into nonexistence.

Sulu marched through the arc of a corridor on Space Station KR-3, her feet pounding rapidly along the deck, her thoughts and emotions whirling. The briefing she’d just received from Admiral Mentir had delivered to her unexpected and even shocking information. Her perspectives on recent events—the treaty negotiations with the Klingons and Romulans, the loss of Universe,Captain Harriman staying behind on Algeron, her unearthing of incongruities in Starfleet personnel files—had all shifted dramatically during the meeting. Likewise, her feelings had slipped their moorings, drifting not only from the surest of her convictions, but also to unanticipated extremes. She understood what had been done—and what would be attempted—even as some of those actions had injured, and would injure, her and others. She felt conflicted and aimless, despite that she would do what had been asked of her.

A corridor intersected with the curve of KR-3’s central hub, and Sulu turned right into it. She had left Admiral Mentir’s office headed for Enterprise,forty-five minutes short of its departure for Foxtrot XIII, but partway to the airlock she had changed direction. Right now she did not know if she would ever see John Harriman again, but whether she did or not, there was something she felt she needed to do for him.

Sulu slowed when she reached the infirmary, padding quietly through the main room and into the intensive-care section. A thin, long-limbed man sat working at a console off to the right, and he turned when she entered. “I’m Dr. Van Riper,” he said, rising and walking over to her. In his hand, he held a long, silver device, tapered at one end—some sort of medical instrument, Sulu assumed, but one she did not recognize. “May I help you?”

“Yes, thank you. I’m Commander Demora Sulu, executive officer of the Enterprise,”she said. “I wanted to check on the condition of Admiral Harriman.”

Van Riper’s expression changed little, but it was as though a gloom had settled across his face. “The admiral is not doing well,” he said. “Our expectations for his recovery have diminished.”

Those expectations, Sulu knew, had never been particularly high in the first place. “Is he awake?” she asked. “May I see him?”