Текст книги "Days of the Vipers"

Автор книги: James Swallow

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

The Bajoran’s isolinear chip got them through the entry grid and onto the port grounds. The sliver of plastic had a glyph on it, and Nechayev nudged Jones from her daze, waving it under her nose. “What does this say?” she demanded.

“Kaska,” she replied. “It’s a girl’s name.”

“Or a ship’s?”

“Sure,” Jones slurred. “Why not? Can we sit down? The medication is wearing off.”

Nechayev pulled her toward a hangar. “Soon.” Inside there was a dart-shaped vessel crouching on spindly landing skids. The same glyph was painted on the side, and it looked ready to throw itself into the air at a moment’s notice. “Soon,” she repeated, leaving Jones at the foot of the boarding ramp as she crept aboard, her phaser drawn.

Nechayev was halfway across the compact cockpit of the Kaskawhen she realized she wasn’t alone. She whirled to find a Bajoran man in a dark brown overcoat holding a weapon on her.

“Korto City Watch,” he explained. “Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head. You’re under arrest.”

22

The last of the containers shimmered into solidity inside the cramped cargo bay. Syjin levered the top off the battered drum and ran a sensor wand over the sealed packets inside.

“Well?”Grek’s pinched voice grated from the communicator bead in his ear. “The unlock code, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Just a moment,” insisted the Bajoran. “I’d like to check my merchandise first.”

“You don’t trust me?”The Ferengi sounded genuinely hurt. “After all the goodwill between us, after every deal we’ve done and all the profit we have made throughout our lucrative relationship?”

“Yeah,” Syjin said, “and mostly because of what you did on Quatal III.”

Grek gave a nasal snarl. “How long are you going to keep beating me with that? I told you it wasn’t my fault those Mantickian olives were spoiled! I was as much a victim as you.”

“But it didn’t stop you taking my money, did it? Now shut up and let me finish checking the load.” The Ferengi reduced his grumbling to a background mumble, and Syjin completed the sweep. He frowned at the results. “I thought you said this agnamloaf was vintage?”

Grek let out another explosive noise of exasperation. “Oh, are you going to give me a hard time overthis cargo now?”

“This is two years old. I wanted five years, the proper mature stuff.”

There was a moment of silence from the other end of the channel. Syjin glanced out of the viewport in the hull to where a crab-shaped transport drifted alongside his vessel in close orbit over Ajir IX. “It’s just as good,”Grek insisted. “There’s been a shortage of the fungal cultures used in the dough due to an infestation ofgree worms, and—”

“All right, all right.” Syjin shook his head. “I’ll take it.” He drew a padd from his pocket and keyed in a code string. “There. Funds have been transferred.”

The inevitable blast of invective came seconds later. “You deal-breaking wretch! You’ve cheated me! This is a quarter less than what we agreed upon!”

“You deliver what you promised, you get paid the full amount. I’m taking a discount.”He loved using that word in Grek’s company; the reflexive reaction of disgust it created in the alien always amused him.

But Grek’s usual spitting and frothing was strangely absent. Syjin went to the window again and saw his vessel shifting, puffs of reaction mass jetting from the maneuvering thrusters as it turned toward one of the gas giant’s moons.

“Fine,”came the reply. “A chore doing business with you, as always. Grek out.”

Syjin’s brow furrowed. That wasn’t like the Ferengi at all, to simply roll over and agree without even trying to haggle; and he sounded distracted, as if something else had caught his attention. The Bajoran bounded up to the cockpit of his ship and toggled his sensors up to maximum, afraid that the Ferengi was about to cut and run, perhaps that there were privateers in the area that Grek’s larger and more powerful scanners had detected. But they were alone in the Ajir system.

As he watched, Grek’s vessel drifted away, closing on one of the moons of the gas giant. “What are you doing, you ugly little swindler?” Syjin asked aloud. He narrowed the focus of his sensors to sweep the barren moon, and the display flickered with a constellation of bright returns. Duranium alloy fragments were scattered across the surface of the satellite. “Wreckage,” he realized. The Ferengi’s crew must have spotted the debris while the deal was taking place. That would explain Grek’s sudden loss of interest in his trade; he could smell salvage.

Syjin shot a look at his full cargo compartment, and then back at the sensor display. It was definitely starship-grade metals, probably with enough scrap value alone to double the latinum he’d get from the exotic foods. The Bajoran reached for the gear locker that contained his environmental suit. “No harm in taking a look, I suppose,” he said to the air.

Darrah used contact strips from his belt dispenser to secure the two women to seats in the Kaska’s cockpit and then went to the courier’s emergency kit, sifting through it for some pain medication for the dark-haired one.

“If you take us in, we’ll be killed,” said the blond woman. “You realize that?”

Darrah gave her friend a dose from the hypospray, and the woman’s color returned. She mumbled a thank-you.

“How did you know we were going to be here?” she tried again. The older one had a tone to her words that made it clear she was used to being in control of situations like this.

He leaned against the control console and folded his arms. “Nechen Alla and Jonor Wenna. From Hedrikspool.” He shook his head slowly. “The duty commander from the Jalanda City Watch is a friend of mine. Do you want to know what he said to me when I asked him to look up those names in his citizen registry?” He let the question hang. “Yes, in answer to your question, yes, I know what will happen to you if I take you in. The thing is, I figured out where you were going and pretty soon the Cardassians will figure it out too. I put a couple of things in place to slow them down, but they’ll be here, and I’ll turn over two terrorists to them, and you’ll never be seen again. Unless you give me a reason not to do that.”

Something shifted behind the eyes of the one who called herself Alla. She was measuring her circumstances, he could see the to-and-fro of it in her face. Weighing her options. I’d do the same in her place.

But it was the other one who spoke. “We’re not terrorists,” she said. “We’re here to help you.”

Darrah wanted to keep a rein on himself, but the words slipped out before he could stop them. “Like you helped Jekko Tybe?” He tossed the padd with a flick of his wrist and it landed in her lap. Jekko’s death-pale face stared back up at her, and she flinched. “Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Is that what you did?” His voice rose. “Did you force him to get you into the enclave and then throw him to the Cardassians when your plan fell apart?”

“No!” she insisted. “It was his idea—”

“Shut up!” spat the other woman. “Don’t say another damn word!”

Darrah crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed the blond woman by the chin. “Then you talk to me!” he growled. “He was my friend. One of the few men I’d be willing to put my life on the line for. Tonight I find out he’s dead and you were there with him. So you’re going to tell me what happened, or we are going to sit here until the Cardassians arrive.”

The dark-haired one was staring at the rank sigils on his collar. “You’re the chief inspector,” she said. “Jekko’s friend. His source inside the Korto police.”

The other woman looked at him. “You leaked him the documents about the enclave.”

Darrah blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“How do you think we got in there?” she retorted.

“Jekko used the intelligence you gave him.”

In all the turmoil, the thought hadn’t even occurred to Darrah, but now it did and he didn’t know how to respond. I just left some files open, that was all. Jekko said it would help. It would help them keep an eye on the Cardassians.But nothing more had been said of it; time had passed, and Darrah had thought no more about it. I gave him the way in. Prophets, amI partly to blame for his death?

The blond woman saw the train of thought on his face. “What did you think he was going to do with the files, Chief Inspector? Frame them and put them on a wall? He was trying to stop the Cardassian Union from engulfing your planet.”

Her words snapped him out of his reverie. “‘Your planet’?” he repeated. “Don’t you mean ourplanet?” Darrah grabbed his police-issue tricorder from his belt and toggled the device to a scene-of-crime forensic scan mode. Taking the woman’s chin in his hand again, he ran the sensor head over her skull. The DNA scan was in the green, but the bone structure readings were off. He released her. “You’ve been surgically altered.”

Both of them remained silent. He put the tricorder away and crossed to the canopy, shooting a look toward the hangar’s open doors. There was no sign of movement out in the predawn light.

“Who are you working for?” Darrah sat in a chair and studied the pair. “You’re not Bajoran. You’re not Tzenkethi, that’s a certainty.”

The blonde sniffed. “The Tzenkethi Coalition doesn’t have any interest in Bajor. They never have.”

“There’s a memorial at the City Oval with four hundred and ninety-two names on it that says different,” he retorted.

“What would you say if I told you the government on Ab-Tzenketh was as shocked by that attack as you were?”

Darrah’s lip curled. “I’d say you were misinformed.”

She smiled without humor. “The…people I work for, they’ve fought the Tzenkethi on overt and covert battlefields. And what happened on that day, that’s not what the Tzenkethi do.”

He shook his head. “You can’t know that for sure.”

“We do,” she told him, leaning forward with an absolute certainty in her eyes. “We know because we’ve broken one of the key Tzenkethi code ciphers. And let me tell you, on that day they were panicking like all hell had broken loose.”

“The Cardassians told us—” Darrah started to explain, but then the words he said registered with him and he fell silent.

“Now you’re getting it.” She nodded. “The Tzenkethi didn’t order that attack. They lost contact with that ship hours before it happened. I’ve seen the communications transcripts.”

He wanted to ask the question that burned in his mind, but he pushed it aside. “You’re Federation, aren’t you?” He got no reply. “If that’s true, if you knew that, why didn’t your Starfleet tell us?”

“If that information became public knowledge, what would happen? The marauder was totally obliterated by the Cardassians, wasn’t it? Nothing left there that could be used as proof either way. And all it would mean was that the Tzenkethi would know their communications had been compromised, and my people would lose that advantage.”

“Then who did it?” he snarled, his cheeks hot with anger.

The blond woman gave him a level look. “You already know the answer.”

Syjin set the transporter to beam him down to a point at the edge of the debris field, and he felt the shift in gravity instantly. The small moon curved away from him in every direction, and where the surface was a mottled white stone to his right and left, in front of him it was churned up into a blue-gray powder. He glanced up into a sky dominated by the cloudy orange mass of Ajir IX, trying to visualize the final moments of the craft that had come to rest here. It would have had to have been close to the moon,he reasoned. It suffered some kind of damage, got snared by the lunar gravity, and augured straight into the surface, shedding pieces of itself all the way down.The angle of the collision had been a steep one. Bits of hull metal were deposited all around a giant divot cut from the surface.

He walked on in a loping bounce, the sound of his own breathing resonating around the inside of his helmet. Without an atmosphere to act on the wreckage, there was no corrosion or weathering. All the pieces were perfectly preserved in the hard vacuum. At the edge of his vision, Syjin thought he saw something that could have been a corpse and he shuddered. He’d seen more than enough vacuum-desiccated cadavers in his life as it was.

A large slab of duranium that appeared to be a piece of outer hull was lying half buried in the sand. On an impulse he couldn’t really explain, Syjin tucked his fingers under it and turned it over. In the moon’s low gravity it was easy for him to shift the door-sized piece of metal, and it fell lazily back to the ground. There was pennant etched into the duranium in blue paint, a symbol like an inverted fork with circular tines. Syjin knew it well; many times he had been forced to make a quick getaway from ships bearing the sigil of the Bajoran Space Guard.

The shiver down his spine returned. I’m disturbing the dead.Suddenly, the idea of looting the wreck made him feel sick inside. This was a Bajoran grave, not the remains of some nondescript alien from a world he’d never even heard of. This place is probably teeming with angryboryhas.

Shadows moved up ahead and he jumped, startled; but these were not vengeful phantoms. Three figures with the wide-faced helmets characteristic of Ferengi spacesuits approached him, and through the glass bowl of his headgear Syjin saw Grek’s sneering, snaggletoothed expression.

“What are you doing down here?”demanded the trader. “You got a good deal out of me, isn’t that enough? Take your ship and go!”

“Did you know this was here?”

The Ferengi shook his head. “Of course not. If I knew there was salvage in this system, do you think I’d have brought you anywhere near it?”He grunted. “I picked this place at random.”

“Grek, this is a Bajoran naval starship,” Syjin retorted, gesturing around. The moment he said the words aloud, something registered in his thoughts. Lost Space Guard ships…

“No,”insisted the alien, “this ismine.” He clapped his gloved hands together. “Under the auspices of the Ferengi Salvage Code, I’m claiming this wreckage as my own. I don’t think you’re in any position to contest that.”Grek nodded left and right to the other crewmen with him, who each had disruptor pistols holstered at their waists.

But Syjin wasn’t listening. He looked around. The reprisal fleet from five years ago…Could this be one of those vessels?His thoughts raced. The final fate of the Clarion,the Glyhrond,and the scouts had never been determined, and ships sent to search for their remains had come up empty. Syjin recalled the announcement by First Minister Lale, stating that even with the help of Jagul Kell’s cruisers, the four lost starships had not been recovered.

“What do you think you’re going to do, anyway?”Grek swaggered forward, his boots crunching on pieces of bridge console half-covered by the sand. The sound drew Syjin’s attention to something buried there and his eyes widened.

“Even if you dumped that load you just took off me, you still wouldn’t have room for any of this!”The Ferengi grinned.

“I’m gonna take it all!”

“No,” said Syjin, “you’re not.” He flicked his hand and the palm phaser he kept concealed in the suit’s wrist pocket dropped into his grip.

Grek’s faceplate fogged as he shouted. “You’re pulling a gun on me? What? After all we’ve been through together?”He shook his head ruefully. “Oh, Syjin. And I said such nice things about you to the boys here, didn’t I?”

The heads of the other two crewmen bobbed in agreement, hands hovering over their holsters.

“Syjin, I said, Syjin almost has the lobes to be a Ferengi, I said! As close to one of us as a Bajoran could get! And this is what comes in return?”He sighed theatrically. “I thought we were friends!”

The statement brought a sneer to the Bajoran’s lips. “What’s the twenty-first Rule of Acquisition?”

“Never place friendship above profit,”said one of the other Ferengi, with rote diction.

“All right, not friends, then, but fellow businessmen,”Grek admitted. “Look, put down the weapon. There’s enough here for everyone.”

“I only want one thing,” Syjin replied, “and you’re standing on it.”

Grek jerked back in shock and glanced down. Gingerly, he dragged a cylindrical object out of the sand. “What is this? Looks like a memory core…”

“Log recorder,” said Syjin. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about, but the pilot had earned the money to buy his own ship by working the recovery docks on Andros, and he knew a flight recorder when he saw one. Those days still came back to him on dark, lonely nights, scrapping dead ships and stripping them for parts. “Give it to me.”

“Give?”Grek said the word like a curse. “And what doI get?”

“I won’t put a hole in your e-suit.”

“Oh. Well. That’s a fair trade.”The Ferengi tossed the device toward him and it sailed slowly to land at his feet.

Syjin gathered it up with his free hand and backed away.

“Look”—Grek took a step toward him– “let’s not let this minor difference of opinion sour things between us, eh? I’ve got a line on a consignment of liveporwiggie s coming into the sector next month, and you know they’re good eating.”

The Bajoran shook his head. “I think we’re done, you and I. And if there’s an iota of empathy in you, Grek, you’ll light out of here and leave the dead to rest.”

The Ferengi snorted. “Yeah, sure. I’ll get right on that.”The other crewmen laughed nasally.

For a moment, Syjin thought about shooting Grek anyway, but what good would it have done him? He was only one man, and Grek had a crew of ten on his scow. He couldn’t stop them from looting the crash site, but the recorder—that would be important. Without another word, he tapped the recall key on his glove and the transporter took hold of him.

Aboard his ship, Syjin secured the memory core and programmed a speed course for Bajor.

The flames had taken hold by the time Proka got there. Emergency flyers were hovering around the roof of the night market temple, shooting puffs of fire retardants into the plume of black smoke, but they were barely keeping the inferno contained. He pushed through the people flooding outside over the steps—merchants and civilians, women and men, monks and ranjens. They were dirty with soot and were coughing. Green-uniformed medical techs moved among them with breather cylinders and hypo-sprays.

He grabbed the arm of a passing constable. “Casualties?”

“Eight dead,” she replied. “There’s a dozen or so more unaccounted for.”

Proka swore under his breath. “You were here? You saw what happened?”

The woman nodded gravely. Her face was pallid beneath the patina of smoke dirt on her cheeks. “My shift just finished and I was coming up to the temple for the dawn mass…” She stifled a cough and spat out a blob of black spittle. “They get a lot of folks here for that.” Behind them, the burning building gave a cracking thud, and a jet of orange fire shot out into the sky as something collapsed inside.

“They only just finished rebuilding this place…” Proka said to himself.

The constable nodded. “I was coming up the street and I heard shouting. There were a bunch of people calling out, making noise. I picked up the pace, and when I got there I saw what the fuss was all about. There were Oralians, three of them in those funny robes they wear.”

“What were they doing?”

“Shouting out slogans, chanting. They were deliberately goading the people coming to worship, sir. Disrespecting the Prophets.”

Proka glared at the burning church and the injured people streaming away from it. “How did that turn into this?” He stabbed a finger at the building.

“Firebombs,” said the woman. “Just as I thought someone was going to start trading punches, they all pulled out these little glass balls and threw them.” She mimed a fireball with her hands. “I don’t know what they had in them. They went up like lightning. Everyone panicked and broke. I got pinned in the crowd and the temple went up like tinder.”

“What happened to the Oralians?” he demanded.

She led him toward an alley between some of the shuttered market stalls. “They went down there.” The constable gestured around. “You see? There’s no security monitor coverage in this area. They must have known that.”

Proka shone a torch down the alley. It was a dead end, terminating in a sheer wall with no other means of exit.

“They kept yelling about Bajor,” she said. “They said that the Prophets were phantoms, that Oralius was the only true way.”

Shouting drew the attention of the law officers. A man with ash all over his clothes was bellowing at the top of his voice. “You! You there!” he screamed. “How could you let this happen? Those Oralian freaks, they did this! Aren’t you going to do something? Round them up!” A chorus of angry agreement joined him from several of the other people. “Make them pay for this!”

“We’re going to do all we can—” Proka began, but no one was listening. A mob was forming right in front of him, jeering for rough justice.

Ico studied the active map of Bajor and considered the implementation of the endgame. Assets that she had spent the last decade cultivating and positioning were being called into action all across the world, triggered like an avalanche started by a handful of pebbles. In a small way, she had been loath to move to the active phase of the destabilization. The intricate construct of influence and subterfuge she had made was one of her finest pieces of work; she sat back and admired it in the same way one might consider a delicate piece of glass sculpture, so elegant but at the same time so fragile. It was music written and ready to be played, a great piece of theater waiting for one single shattering performance.

That was part of what thrilled Rhan so much about the work: the danger inherent in it, the challenge of keeping so many shifting alliances on the field of play, the insight and totality of dedication required to bring a world to the brink of collapse.

She recalled the words of a Terran—perhaps one of their philosophers or a strategist, she couldn’t recall which—who had said that all civilizations existed on the brink of barbarism, only a few days away from brutality and violence. Cardassia Prime had balanced on that knife edge for so long it had become a way of life for them, but fat and complacent Bajor knew nothing of that; it amused Ico to think that her work had taken these aliens to the same place. And now we’ll see how the play unfolds. The set is dressed, the actors in their roles. The curtain rises.

She examined the map. In Relliketh, a woman whose gambling debts made her vulnerable had closed a sensor window over the Bajoran polar ice cap; a priest in Jo’Kala was taking poison rather than have the identity of his lover revealed to the world; churches were on fire in Hathon, Ashalla, and Korto; the minister for Qui’al was turning a blind eye to troop movements outside his city; unmarked containers were being unloaded from a Son’a transport ship in Tempasa; a Militia commander in Janir had come home to find his wife in the arms of another man.

And there were dozens of others, all small fragmentary dramas that she had engineered, that had no relation to one another on the surface. But beneath, they all pulled upon strings that brought pressures to bear on Bajor.

The screen chimed, and a report made itself known to her. She smiled to herself and tapped a control. Ico spoke into a communicator. “Dukat.”

The gul’s voice was loaded with irritation. “This is a secure military channel.”

She ignored the comment. “The Federation spies have been traced to the Korto starport. I thought you might like to know.”

“How can you be certain of that?”he growled.

“I have assets in place,” she said languidly, watching the motion of the players on her map. Jekko Tybe’s face and his personal records scrolled over an inset screen, revealing his life, his associations, his connections. “That’s all you need to be aware of.” Ico reached for the disconnect key.

“And quickly, Dukat, quickly. I’m sure you don’t want to let them slip through your fingers.”

Gwen Jones pulled against the restraints, but no matter how she moved, the plastic strips chafed against her wrists. She felt queasy, and not so much from the shock and the effects of the drugs in her system, but from the mounting fear that time was running out for her. She kept darting looks out of the Kaska’s canopy, afraid that each time she did, she would see Cardassian soldiers swarming across the thermoconcrete apron toward the hangar.

Nechayev was trying to reason with the Bajoran lawman, who paced back and forth across the small cockpit like a caged animal. “Listen to me,” she was saying, “every minute we stay here is a minute more we could have used to put distance between us and the Cardassians. We have to get out, report what we’ve learned. Don’t you get it? We are Bajor’s only chance!”

The man rounded on her. “So I let you go, then what? Starfleet rides in with a battle fleet and rescues my planet from the Cardassian Union? I let you go, and you make this madness stop?”

“Yes.” Nechayev’s falsehood was instinctual and automatic. Jones saw it, and so did the Bajoran.

“You’re lying to me,” he snarled. “You’re telling me what I want to hear.” He turned away from them. “You think I don’t know? I’ve been a police officer my entire life, I’ve faced down liars of every stripe!” He shook his head. “Everyone lies. ‘It’s not my fault, I’m innocent, I didn’t do it, it was the other guy…’” The lawman turned back and shouted, “I’m sick of the lies! I’m drowning in them!”

“Then help me expose them!” retorted Nechayev.

“Because if you don’t, the Cardassians will take us and turn us into two more fabrications, terrorists and murderers. They’ll do the same thing to Jekko, and then they’ll do it to you!” She rocked forward, pulling at the chair. “You have to trust us, damnit!”

He sat heavily. “Give me one good reason why I should.”

Jones licked dry lips. “Because your friend did.” The man turned to study her. “Jekko knew what was at stake. He trusted us. He gave up his life so that we could take what we saw and get away.” She took a shuddering breath, wincing at the pain in her cheek. “I didn’t really know him, but you did. You know what kind of man he was better than either of us, so you tell me. Would he have put his trust in us, died for us, if it hadn’t been worthwhile?”

The Bajoran was silent for a long moment before he spoke again. “My name is Darrah Mace. I’ve spent the last ten years watching everything that is important to me slip away, moment by moment. My wife and children. My friends, my work. Bajor…” His words dropped to a whisper. “And no matter what I do, I can’t stop it. None of us can.”

“We have to try,” said Nechayev.

“You think the Federation can help us?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, and for the first time Jones felt that she was seeing the real Alynna Nechayev. “But I promise you I will do whatever I can to make sure that they do.”

Motion caught Jones’s eye, and she jerked around in the chair. “Make a choice, Mace,” she said. Skimmers were crossing the runways, converging on the hangar. “We’ve got company.”

Darrah shot to his feet and with two quick motions they were free of the restraints. Nechayev threw herself over to the pilot’s console and pressed the isolinear chip Jekko had gave her into a data slot. The vessel came alive, engines humming to power.

“Unless you want to come with us, you’d better step out.” She nodded at the drop ramp.

Jones slipped into the copilot’s chair and ran through a sequence of preflight checks; the Kaskawasn’t too different from the Starfleet shuttlecraft she’d trained on. “They’ll be here in less than two minutes,” she reported, watching the approach of the Cardassian ground vehicles. “We have to go now.”

Nechayev reached out and snatched Darrah’s tricorder from his belt, tapping in a string of numbers. “You trusted us and now I’m going to trust you. This is an authentication code and a subspace radio frequency. There’s a ship in this sector, the Gettysburg. They’ll be monitoring that channel.”

He took back the tricorder and nodded. “If I learn anything, I’ll contact you.” Darrah turned and opened the hatch. “Good luck—”

Nechayev never let him finish his sentence. Her hand struck out and she grabbed his phaser before he could stop her. A pulse of light enveloped him and he crumpled backward, tumbling down the drop ramp to land in a heap on the hangar floor below.

“You shot him!” Jones cried.

Nechayev tossed the phaser after him and sealed the hatch. “Just a stun.” She jumped into the pilot’s chair and eased the Kaskaoff the landing skids and out of the open hangar doors. “Shields up,” she ordered, and Jones complied, just in time to prevent a cascade of phaser shots from burning into the forward hull.

“But you shot him,” Jones repeated.

“If I hadn’t, the Cardassians would have known he let us go. This way, he just looks like he was unlucky.” They were moving down the apron now, picking up speed. “Honestly, I did him a favor.”

More beam fire thudded off the deflectors. “How are we going to get out of this?” Jones demanded. “Those Cardassians are contacting their ships in orbit right now. They’ll intercept us the second we break atmosphere.”

Nechayev pushed the throttle forward, and the courier leapt into the lightening sky, crashing seconds later through the sound barrier with the twin thunders of a supercompressed shock wave. “Jekko had some tricks up his sleeve.” She smiled, and jerked her thumb at a compartment in the rear. “See that? I noticed it as soon as I got on board.”

Jones looked and saw a cracked white spheroid with battered blue components at either end. It was wired into the main power bus, but it seemed out of place. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Romulan cloaking device, the kind they used to use in the mid–23rd century,” she explained, “probably salvaged from an old bird-of-prey.”

Jones gaped. “We’re pinning our escape on an antique piece of Romulan salvage?”

Nechayev gave a gallows-humor smile. “Well, as we’re all being truthful with each other, I should tell you that this courier’s practically a museum piece as well.” She shrugged. “I rate our chances of making our rendezvous at less than forty percent.”