Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“We’ve got them, Captain,” said Glemoor. “Barely.”

“Bat-Levi, go to red alert.” As the klaxons sounded and the bridge lights shaded to crimson, Garrett turned to the helm. “Castillo, get us out of the jet and then plot us a course out of here, best possible speed. Straight line, don’t waste any time.”

Castillo glanced back once, nodded, and then executed the command.

Now with the extra power drain, Garrett felt the ship working hard. The engines didn’t grind and groan as they’d done in starships from years past, but she could tell from the vibrations coming up through the floor and into her chair that she was pushing the ship to its limit. Ironically, it was at times like this—when there was nothing to do but give orders that her crew executed and her ship strained to make good—that she felt the most superfluous, with nothing to do but wait and pray.

Come on, girl, just hold together. Just hold together long enough for us to get out of here in one piece, and then we can all take a vacation.

Her ship couldn’t answer her, not in words. But she felt Enterprisestraining to do her bidding, and for not the first time, she found herself urging her ship on, gripping the arms of her command chair as if she could infuse the very force of her will. For the briefest of instants, she believed that she and her ship were one, and she imagined it was the same way that ship captains throughout time had felt, or fighter pilots before a battle, rocketing in their planes across an azure sky. The difference, of course, was there was no sea for her and her ship to fight here, no real air in which to bank and sideslip, to roll and spiral, and no enemy dogging her tail—nothing but a howling maelstrom of supercharged particles ready to destroy them.

Come on, girl, come on.Garrett felt a thin line of sweat trickle down her right temple. Go,go.

As if in defiance of her prayers, the ship lurched. The lights on the bridge stuttered. She heard a circuit blow somewhere behind and to her right. “What was that?”

“Gravity wave, Captain,” said Bat-Levi. Her black hair had come loose of its braid and brushed her shoulders. With an impatient gesture, she used her right hand—the good one—to push a shock out of her face. “When we weren’t pulling the other ship, we didn’t feel them as much. But there are gravity wavefronts emanating from those protostars.”

Alarmed, Garrett snapped her attention to Castillo. “How’s our speed?”

“Dropping. Down to one quarter impulse.”

“That won’t be enough, Captain,” said Bat-Levi, “not to get us out. It’s the additional mass. We need more speed.”

“No can do, Captain,” said Castillo, before Garrett could ask. “That’s all I can get out of her.”

A hail: Kodell again. “I know you don’t have good news,” said Garrett.

“No. Shields at sixty-seven percent. Our impulse engines are starting to overheat, and starboard tractor beam is down to seventy percent. It’s the extra load, Captain. I can’t steal enough power to keep our shields up andextended andtractors at full andengines.” A pause. “Believe me, Captain, if it would help for me to go out and push, I would. But it won’t.”

“Starboard tractor beam now sixty-eight percent,” reported Bat-Levi. “Port tractor beam eighty-five percent. Rate of power drop isaccelerating.”

“Captain, we’re starting to lose ground. It’s one or the other,” said Kodell.

Garrett’s jaw firmed. “Unacceptable. Now we’ve got them, we’re not letting that ship go. You keep two tractor beams on that ship. Shut down life support on Decks 12 to 22, if you have to, but keep those tractor beams going.”

“I can do that. But I can’t manufacture more speed. Simple physics, Captain. We don’t have the power. So, if we don’t let that other ship go, we’ll fall back into the star together.”

“Captain.” It was Glemoor. “Why not jet our way out?”

Garrett’s brows met in a frown. “You mean, go backinto the plasma jet?”

“No, create our own. There’s all this gas and ionized plasma,” Glemoor waved a hand toward the viewscreen, “plenty of fuel all around us. All we have to do is to detonate strategically placed charges behind the Enterpriseand then ride the jets we create. The pressure waves will push us out.”

“A good idea, Glemoor, but we can’t contain the explosion. There’s no way to direct the charges so we don’t take out the entire region. Even if we could, our shields wouldn’t hold for that other ship, and not compensate for the sheer from our tractor beams. Either they or we—or maybe both—would rip apart.”

“Starboard tractor beam fifty-five percent,” Bat-Levi reported. “Shields at forty-five percent. Project shield failure in twenty-point-seven minutes.”

“Kodell?”

“I see it, Captain. Permission to shut down life support, Decks 12 to 22.”

“Go. Bat-Levi, get me more power to that starboard tractor beam.” Garrett stabbed at her intercom. “Jo, our shields…”

“Way ahead of you. Evacuating from the more exposed areas of the ship now. But, like I said, fifty minutes, maybe an hour, Captain. Then it won’t matter if we get pulled into a protostar, or drift over to that black hole and trip over that event horizon out there, we probably won’t…”

Tripping.Stern was still talking, but Garrett tuned her out. Event horizon’s just about as solid a thing as you can find in space and it’ll be more like jumping headfirst off a cliff…Dammit, the thing’s got ashape!

“That’s it!”she blurted, and she saw Castillo jump as though he’d been shot. “Gravity! We’ve been banging our heads trying to figure out how to beat it. But why not use it to our advantage?”

“My God,” said Bat-Levi, giving a little laugh of astonishment. “Of course, the gravity well around the protostar…”

“It’s like any other,” said Castillo, his voice ramping up with excitement. “It’s strong, but it’s got an outer limit, an edge just like that black hole out there.”

“We accelerate toward the well at a shallow enough angle, then we ought to ricochet off the gravitational field,” said Garrett. “We’ll rebound, like a stone skipping over a pond.”

“I heard that,” came Stern, who was still on speaker. “Captain, I’m just a doctor, but even I know that if there’s any miscalculation, we either burn up or come apart at the seams.”

Trust Stern to put a damper on things. A slingshot around a sun—now thatwould be a piece of cake compared to this.

“We’ll still need the speed,” said Garrett, thinking furiously. “And to do that, we’d need to make Glemoor’s plan work. I don’t see how we can do that without turning the immediate area into a fireball.”

“Captain.” It was Bat-Levi. “There isa way. Instead of the protostar, we go for the black hole. Like you said, Captain, it’s the shape.The gravity well of the black hole’s event horizon is spherical. Using it to our advantage will be riskier in a lot of ways. Its gravitational field will be much stronger than that of a protostar. But the pull will give us the speed we can’t build up now by ourselves, and without burning us all to a cinder.”

“Unless we trip over the event horizon,” said Stern. “Then we just get turned to vermicelli.”

“Well, look at it this way, Jo, we won’t burn up,” said Garrett. “But our angle’s shallow enough, we skip right off.”

There was a moment’s silence, broken by Stern: “Why do I think we’re going to try this crazy stunt?”

Garrett spun into action. “Mr. Castillo, lay in a course for that black hole. Ninety plus sixty. Keep us shallow. Kodell, divert auxiliary power to the shields. And what about my tractor beams?”

“Working.”

“Beg, borrow, and steal, Kodell.” Garrett watched as the nebulae swam on the viewscreen with their course change. She felt the ship lurch with a sudden acceleration as they stopped fighting gravity. It was as if the black hole had reached out and grabbed them.

“Picking up speed, Captain,” said Castillo, unnecessarily. “One-half impulse!”

“Sucking us in,” said Garrett. Suddenly, the ship shook, and Garrett felt her body momentarily pressed back into her chair as if a giant hand had planted itself square in her chest. Then, just as quickly, the pressure slackened, and Garrett jerked forward, almost slamming to the deck. Behind her, she heard Bat-Levi gasp, and then the stubborn squeal of her first officer’s servos as they fought to hold her upright.

“Mr. Castillo!” shouted Garrett. She staggered from her chair then clutched at an arm as the ship twitched and shuddered.

“I’m sorry, Captain!” Castillo’s fingers were moving desperately over his console. Another jolt nearly sent him face-first into his instruments, and he had to brace himself with his left hand as he worked with his right. “Electromagnetic turbulence is getting stronger the closer we get to the black hole. I can’t hold her steady!”

Glemoor looked over from his console toward the helm and then to Garrett. “Captain, we’re too steep! We won’t be able to break away!”

As if to confirm his words, Garrett felt her stomach drop in free-fall as the ship took a sudden plunge, slammed from above by what felt like a solid belt of hypercharged particles and compressed gases.

“It’s the gravity, Captain!” Bat-Levi shouted. The ship rocked, and the artificial gravity hiccupped enough to send her backpedaling on her heels, off-balance, and slamming into the guardrail. She wheeled around, clutching for support. “Captain, the gravity, it’s sucking all the matter in this region toward the black hole! Like a column of air in a wind tunnel, only it’s denser because the particles are being squeezed together.”

Garrett didn’t need her to spell out the rest. With the increased compression and electromagnetic winds, the ship would be slow to respond, like trying to turn on a dime in a pool of molasses.

Garrett whirled on her heel. “My ship, Mr. Castillo!”

My ship:an age-old command, one used by pilots of planes not starships, but Castillo needed no translation. He jumped to one side as Garrett leapt to the helm and activated first the starboard, then port thrusters.

“Forty degrees.” Glemoor threw a quick glance at his captain then back at his instruments. “Forty-five. Hull stress increasing, Captain. Approaching tolerance limits. The closer we get…”

“The higher the concentration and pressure of gas and particles,” said Garrett, her eyes on her controls. “I know,Mr. Glemoor.”

“Captain, we’re close,”said Bat-Levi, and “if we pass too close to the gravity well…”

“Fifty!” shouted Glemoor, the Naxeran’s calm breaking at last. “Impulse power at three-quarters! Hull stress at tolerance! Captain!”

At almost the same instant, the main computer shrieked an alarm.

“We’re not going to make it,” muttered Castillo, in an undertone. He stood just behind Garrett’s right shoulder, and she felt a slight jolt as his hands clutched the back of the chair. “We’re not going to make it.”

For just the briefest of instants, Garrett wanted to spin around and shake the young ensign until his eyeballs jittered. Later,she thought grimly. We live through this, then I’ll give him an earful, and he’ll be damned glad to hear it because it will mean we’re alive.

She grappled with the helm, trying to keep them on a steady course, feeling the ship going mushy and unresponsive and knowing that the space outside the ship was so thick with particles it was like trying to maneuver through sludge. Like the old fighter pilots. Get her nose up, get it up!She nudged the thrusters again and again, in short bursts. Only instead of a throttle and flaps, a shaker stick and a yoke, she had thrusters and gravity and a boiling hailstorm of superheated ionized gas and…heat. Garrett gasped. Hawks, gliding, and… heat.

“Glemoor!” Garrett barked. “Arm photon torpedoes two and seven!”

“Captain?”

“Doit! Numbers two and seven! Ten-second delay!” She fired a five-second blast from the thrusters along the ship’s belly and saw the positioning gyros record the shift in the Enterprise’s attitude as the ship angled up, exposing more of the flat of its belly to the gravitational front of the black hole.

“Aye!” Glemoor’s black skin was dripping sweat. His frills were stiff, and the yellow of his eyes had deepened to a hot gold. “Torpedoes armed! Fifty-five degrees, Captain! Fifty-six!”

Almost there.Garrett blinked sweat from her eyes and winced at the sting. Almost there. Come on, girl, come on, don’t let me down, don’t quit on me now.

But she had to protect the other ship. Her plan wouldn’t do much good to them if she ended up incinerating them. “Engineering! Kodell, reinforce aft shields! Steal from us if you have to, but give that other ship every gram of protection you can!”

Suddenly, the ship dipped precipitously. To her horror, Garrett saw that they’d lost five degrees, now ten….

“Kodell!”Gritting her teeth, Garrett brought the side of her fist down on her maneuvering thrusters and was rewarded with nothing. “Kodell, where’s my power, where’s my control?”

Kodell, on speaker: “Power drain, Captain, when I reinforced shields! Trying to stabilize now!”

“Kodell, I need control.”Garrett watched as the ship swung inexorably lower, being pulled into a perpendicular toward the gravity well. We’re heading nose down, no, no!“I need it now!”

“Can’t do it, Captain! That last surge knocked out the power couplings to the thrusters. They’re offline and I can’t reroute fast enough. Auxiliary power is tied up with the shields, I can’t rob…”

Garrett didn’t wait to hear the rest. Their angle was getting too steep and they were out of time. “Glemoor, launch photon torpedoes! Now!”

“Aye!” Glemoor stabbed at fire control. “Torpedoes away!”

“On main viewer!” The viewscreen swam as the angle changed, and then Garrett saw the tiny red-orange sparklers that were the torpedoes streaking away from her ship, and she imagined she could hear them sizzling across space. “Time to detonation!”

“Eight seconds!” Glemoor cried. “Seven, six!”

“Captain!” shouted Kodell. “Maneuvering thrusters nominal!”

“Four, three!”

“Thrusters!” Garret brought her fists crashing into the helm and felt the shuddering of the thrusters firing. My ship—she jerked her head back up to the viewscreen and saw the torpedoes fading, the violet and pink space swinging by in a dizzying arc and if it had been any other time or place, she would have marveled at how much beauty could exist in the heart of death– my ship!

“One!” Glemoor cried.

The viewscreen flooded with white light, and then gravity must have failed because Garrett felt her body rise out of her chair and hurtle backward to slam against the deck.

The viewscreen went black.

Chapter 27

“Just hold still.”

“I am.”Garrett’s fingers plucked at the thin green fabric of the patient’s tunic she wore. Stern and her nurse had stripped her out of her uniform when she’d been brought to sickbay—only Garrett had no memory of that, having been unconscious for a half hour after the torpedoes blew. In fact, she was a little foggy for the five minutes or so before the torpedoes went off; retro-and antegrade amnesia went with the territory when you had a concussion, Stern said. Garrett remembered giving the order to arm the torpedoes but not the order to fire.

She sighed. Her scalp itched, and her uniform was a mess from all the blood. Her eyes crawled to the soiled clothing still lying in a heap on the floor next to the biobed. Her nostrils twitched with the faint, sickly metallic aroma of wet rust.

“I’m fine,” she said, not believing it but hating having to lie there and do nothing. All doctors are overprotective.“When can I get out of here?”

“When I’m done,” came Stern’s voice. Garrett could hear the frown. Garrett was on her back and facing left so Stern could work, and she couldn’t see the doctor’s face.

“But I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. Sure, it’s every day you get knocked senseless and need stitches. Honestly, Mac was right. All captains are the galaxy’s worst patients. I’m almost done.”

Garrett sighed again, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going anywhere until Stern decided she was good and ready. She heard the steady hum of Stern’s autosuture as Stern repaired the wound on her scalp and, outside the small treatment alcove she picked out the buzz of voices, the shuffle of feet, the blip of monitors above biobeds. “What about the survivors?”

“Ten cases of radiation poisoning, two serious. All of them members of the crew, not the passengers.”

“Who got it the worst?”

“The ship’s engineer, and the captain. The engineer got a double whammy when she took their mains offline. Radiation flooded the compartment, though not enough to kill her straight off. But she knew she’d been exposed and so she volunteered to stay on the bridge, keep their shields up as long as she could. At least that’s how the rest of the survivors tell it. Engineer hasn’t regained consciousness yet. Hell of a brave woman.”

“And the captain?”

“Stayed with his engineer. Moved the rest of his crew from exterior portions of the ship but not to engineering; engineering could only accommodate the colonists, and so the captain decided the colonists took priority. Damn shame, you ask me. All those people wanted was a fresh start on a colony world, only they get it all blasted to hell by a bunch of pirates who chase them into the nebula and then leave them for dead.”

Stern straightened, clicking off the autosuture. “I’ve done all I can for the time being. The engineer and captain are on life support. Now we wait, let nature take its course. That ought to do it, by the way. You’re done.”

Stern brushed Garrett’s auburn hair back over the wound that ran from the tip of Garrett’s right eyebrow and along Garrett’s scalp, ending just behind her right ear. Stepping back, Stern cocked her head to one side, seemingly admiring her handiwork.

“Not bad,” she said, finally. “You’re going to have a lump the size of an egg on your forehead there for awhile, nothing I can do about that. But you’re lucky. The old days, you know, I would’ve had to shave off all that hair.”

“Lucky me.” Garrett blew out in exasperation. She was tired of lying flat on her back. And she hated the way they never gave out sheets or blankets in sickbay but had you lie there in your uniform or a patient tunic, and freeze your butt off.

Garrett pushed up on her elbows. “Someone bringing…?” She’d been about to ask if someone was bringing her a fresh uniform when a wave of nausea made her moan and roll back onto the biobed.

“That’ll teach you,” said Stern, the trace of a smirk on her lips. “I didn’t tell you to get up yet. Just sit tight, and I’ll have someone bring you a fresh change of clothes.”

“Thanks.” Garrett blinked, swallowed. Closed her eyes until the urge to vomit passed. She waited quietly until Stern came back. Then she asked, “Why do I feel sick?”

“Because you have a concussion, that’s why. Here.” Stern turned aside, replacing her instruments on their tray and then plucking up the gray tube of a hypospray. Jabbed the business end of the spray into the angle of Garrett’s neck and right shoulder, and depressed the jet with her thumb. There was an audible hiss as the jet dispensed its contents into Garrett’s bloodstream. “That ought to help with the nausea. You’re going to have a whopper of a headache for a little while, though, and you’re bound to be stiff tomorrow. Next time, pick something softer to land on than the deck of a starship. Actually, you were lucky,” Stern amended, popping the empty vial of analgesic from the hypospray, “Castillo breaking your fall like that. Scared him out of a year’s growth, though. Scalp wounds bleed like stink. The way he sounded when the bridge hailed, I think he thought you were dead.”

Head still throbbing, Garrett eased off the biobed. The floor was icy against her bare feet. She straightened millimeter by millimeter. Her ribs complained, and she was certain she’d be black and blue for days. “How he’s doing now?”

“Castillo? Other than a knot the size of a grapefruit on the back of his head, he’s fine.” Stern eyed Garrett. “I just want to ask you one question. What the hell made you fire off those torpedoes?”

Garrett almost shook her head then, remembering her vertigo, thought better of it. “Just a hunch. Piloting the ship reminded me of flying in an atmosphere, and then I remembered how birds, hawks and condors, they’ll ride thermals for hours. So I thought: heat. Not a thermal exactly, but I thought if I could just get us shallow enough then detonate a couple of torpedoes, part of the shock wave would be absorbed by the black hole itself and the rest ought to blast us clear. We rode an energy wave.”

“Took a hell of a risk.”

Garrett was about to point out that there hadn’t been a lot of alternatives, but Bat-Levi hailed from the bridge. “Glad to hear you’re up and around, Captain.”

“Thank you, Commander.” But I’m freezing my butt off.“As soon as I get some clothes, I’ll be up. Status?”

“We’ve cleared the nebulae cluster. We took some minor structural damage aft. Repairs are under way. Other than that, we were lucky.”

“Seems to be the word of the day. Have you been able to reach Starfleet?”

“Actually, there’s a message coming in now. Commander Batanides, Starfleet Intelligence.”

Likely reporting that Burke and Sivek were back at Starfleet Headquarters, with Halak in tow. With everything that had gone on, thoughts of Halak had been far from her mind. But now Garrett felt a mantle of depression drape itself over her shoulders. “Pipe it down here.”

Garrett heard Bat-Levi giving orders. Then: “You’re on, Captain.”

Garrett straightened, even though she was on audio. She just wished she had some clothes. It was so cold in Sickbay her skin prickled with gooseflesh. Garrett chafed her bare forearms with her hands. “Garrett here.”

“Captain.” Batanides’s voice was tense. “We’ve been trying to reach you for days. What’s going on there?”

Briefly, Garrett went over the events of the past few days, concluding with their rescue of the Atawhean ship. “We’ve just gotten clear of interference from the nebula…”

“That’s just it,”Batanides broke in, clearly agitated. “Whywere you there to begin with?”

That brought Garrett up short. She and Stern exchanged glances; Stern hiked her shoulders. “Those were our orders,” Garrett said.

“From whom?”

“Why,” said Garrett, confused, “from you.Don’t you remember? We spoke. When Commander Halak was remanded to Lieutenant Burke’s custody. I lodged a formal protest and…”

“Captain, I assure you,” said Batanides, her voice saturated with urgency, “after our first contact about Lieutenant Burke coming aboard, you and I never spoke. And I know for a fact that Commander Halak couldn’t have been remanded to Burke.”

“Whaaat?” Stern drawled. “What the hell kind of game…?”

Garrett cut her off with a wave of her hand. “What are you talking about, Marta?”

“I’m saying that you never received orders to proceed to the Draavids. Commander Halak never made it to Starfleet Headquarters. And I knownow that Lieutenant Burke was in no position to be aboard your ship, taking custody of anyone.”

“And why not?”

“Because, Captain Garrett,” said Batanides, “Lieutenant Laura Burke is dead.”

“All right, here’s the situation,” said Garrett, an hour later. After signing off from Batanides, she’d taken a hasty sonic shower and thrown on a clean uniform. But she still felt like hell. Ignoring the ache in her head, she leaned her forearms on the table in the briefing room next door to her ready room and eyed each of her senior officers in turn: Stern and Bat-Levi to her right, Glemoor, Bulast, and Kodell ranged along her left. And, finally, Tyvan: Garrett had debated then decided that, for better or worse, part of Tyvan’s job was to take the pulse of the crew…and its captain. And doing a damn good job of that.

“Commander Batanides indicated that debris from the shuttle piloted by Lieutenant Burke—the realBurke—was discovered several parsecs away from Starbase 12, in an isolated section of space lousy with asteroid fields. A navigator’s nightmare, which probably explains why it took so long for anyone to connect up the wreckage with Burke, or findit, for that matter.”

“How did they know to start looking, Captain?” Tyvan asked. “Did you inquire?”

Garrett and Stern exchanged glances. “You want to answer that?” asked Garrett.

“Not really.” Stern fidgeted an instant then said, “Me.” She continued, a little defensively as if someone were about to take her to task for going behind her captain’s back, “I got an old friend on the horn. I asked him to do some checking up on a couple of things, and he asked questions, and that got back to Batanides, and then shestarted digging around, and well,” Stern’s voice trailed off. She punctuated the silence with a shrug.

“Okay,” said Tyvan, in the silence. He gave Stern a bland look. “Just asking. Didn’t know if I’d been making myself too scarce to have been in the loop.”

“Good thing she did,” said Garrett, amused despite the current situation. Ah, Jo, someone who gives as good as he gets, how do you like them apples?“Anyway, there’s no doubt. Burke’s ship was sabotaged. The recovery team found traces of divalent triceron.”

“An explosive,” said Glemoor. “Very powerful, highly unstable. Also illegal.”

“Clearly, whoever blew up Burke’s shuttle wanted to make it look like an accident, or pilot error. Starfleet Intelligence thinks the Qatala planted the bomb.”

“And Burke’s body?” asked Bat-Levi.

“Vaporized. Burke also had a passenger. Batanides said that Burke had been undercover for months, infiltrating the Qatala. Her mission was to make contact, gather information, and, if possible, secure a contact willing to turn on the Qatala and provide detailed information on the Qatala’s drug distribution network as well as arms sales to various parties, particularly the Cardassians. Two weeks ago, the real Burke informed SI that she’d secured a contact and was on her way back.”

“Any idea about the contact?”

“Not a clue. Starfleet Intelligence believes that someone caught on to Burke and alerted Qadir, who then arranged for her accident. That way, Qadir could take care of Burke and the traitor at the same time.”

“I’ll wager the Burke wesaw was the real Burke’s passenger,” said Tyvan.

“Probably, and the person Qadir used for the job. Except she seems to have her own agenda.” Garrett nodded toward Bulast. “What do you have?”

“I ran an analysis on Burke’s transmission to Starfleet,” said Bulast. “Remember, shewas the one who gave me the coded frequencies. By filtering successive frequencies, I found a coned signal insidea real secured channel, like a hand in a glove. This coned signal rerouted the Enterprise’s transmissions to a subspace transceiver programmed with Starfleet authorization codes. You talked to the real Batanides at first, of course; that’s how Burke was able to get aboard the ship. Thereafter, you were talking, for all practical purposes, to a computer program. If we’d been on visual, which we weren’t, you’d have seen a holographic projection. The technology exists, of course; it’s a variant of cloaking technology, but more primitive. When I traced the subspace transceiver signals, I found they emanated from Enterprise,specifically from a shielded compartment in the floor panels of that shuttle Halak brought back from Farius Prime. Burke probably planted the transceiver when she searched the shuttle. She had to have stolen the transceiver, though. It’s programmed with top-secret authorization codes that SI confirms are the genuine article. Anyway, this probably explains why we were ordered to the Draavids. Burke must have known that, eventually, Starfleet would contact us with news about the real Burke, or that we might use another channel to raise Starfleet. The nebulae were insurance; it kept us in a communications blackout.”

“But they—she, whoever she is—had to know we’d find the transceiver eventually,” said Bat-Levi. “Why leave it behind?”

Garrett scooped her auburn hair with her hand, wincing as she tugged on her scalp wound. Gingerly, she fingered the lump on her forehead. Stern was right; the lump was the size of a small orange. “I think eventuallyis the operative term. All she needed was to get away, and she has. But I’ll just bet those records Burke foundin Halak’s log and the shuttle are fakes. Bulast, any word from the V’Shar?”

“Confirmation received just before you called this briefing, Captain. Vulcan Space Central reports that the warp shuttle T’Poldisappeared twelve days ago. The shuttle’s last known position was 30 light-years from Farius Prime. Sivek really isa V’Shar operative, only he’s really quite dead:murdered. Body was found today in a cave outside Naweeth City, on Vulcan.”

Bat-Levi was shaking her head. “Captain, who arethese people? And what do they want with Commander Halak?”

Garrett weighed her response. “I think it’s safe to assume that thesepeople are Qadir confederates. That would explain why they know so much about Halak. Some of what they presented is, apparently, the genuine article—Halak’s family, the Qatala connection, and the falsified information he gave on his Academy application.”

She waited for the general shuffling as her crew absorbed that to die away before continuing. “As for whythey want him, I don’t know. Right now I don’t care. Our job is to find him and worry about the rest later.”

Bat-Levi gave a little laugh. “It’s a big galaxy, Captain.”

“A…what do you call it?” Glemoor frowned then brightened. “Needle in a haystack, yes?”

“Worse,” muttered Kodell.

“Not necessarily.” Garrett glanced at Stern. “Doctor?”

Stern crossed her arms over her chest. “I examined Halak before he left the ship, and I injected him with a nanosubcu-transponder. And no,”she glowered at Tyvan as if daring him to make an issue of it, “there was no loop, and no one ordered me to do it. Did it all on my own. Captain Garrett didn’t know a thing. Just had a feeling, that’s all.”

There was a moment of shocked silence. A beat-pause. Garrett saw Tyvan hide a grin behind his hand. Then Bulast said, “Well, okay. All I’ll need is the transponder code. You get me that, and we backtrack, I’ll find him.”

“But they could have gone anywhere from there. Like I said, it’s a big universe,” said Bat-Levi. “Reallybig.”