Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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She saw his ears perk up at the word “younger.”

“Someone who?” McCoy demanded. “These youngsters today can’t be bothered doing hands-on lab work. They think you just push a button and the computer does everything for you. This thing I’m looking at here isn’t going to yield to that kind of slapdash technique. There are times when a good, old-fashioned empirical approach—”

“Leonard, I’m sorry, I’ve got a press conference,” Uhura cut him off. “It would have been great to have you on board to help us stop this thing a little sooner, maybe save a few extra lives, but I’ll tell Beverly you’re not available for consult. She did say you were one of her role models in med school, and she was hoping you’d help fill in the gaps in her knowledge. She’ll be disappointed, but never mind. Sorry to have bothered you. Uhura out.”

“Beverly?” McCoy ruminated, not noticing that Uhura hadn’t closed the frequency yet. “I wonder—? No, couldn’t be the same one. You might recall I gave a series of guest lectures at the Academy a few years back. So well attended Command asked me to do it again the following year. Told them no, too. Nobody listens.”

Yes, I do remember,Uhura thought. It’s part of my job to forget nothing.

“There was this sweet young thing who cornered me after the first lecture, asked me questions for about an hour. Got shipped out and couldn’t attend the rest of the series, though. Pity. Stunning-looking woman. Tall drink of water, legs up to here, flaming red hair…wanted to do more than just teachher anatomy, I can tell you. Young enough to be my granddaughter, but there’s something about redheads…”

While he was woolgathering, Uhura had sent him Crusher’s holo on a quick squirt.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” McCoy said as the picture arrived, genuine pleasure lighting his face for the first time. “There she is! Her name was Howard back then, though. Beverly Howard. I remember now. Married, I suppose.”

“Widowed,” Uhura reported. “With a young son. I’ll send her and Dr. Selar your regrets.”

“You’ve got Selar on this, too? Now, her I know by reputation. Wouldn’t mind sharpening my wits against a Vulcan’s again. It’s been way too long.” McCoy frowned. He suddenly realized he’d just been dismissed. “Wait a minute. Do you want my help on this or not?”

“Yes, repeat: No.” Uhura said, throwing his own words back at him.

“You said I can consult on remote.”

“Correct.”

“Don’t have to leave my front porch.”

“Affirmative.”

“Get to interact with bright, attractive women and maybe save a few lives in the bargain.”

“Affirmative.”

“You’ve talked me into it.”

Uhura gifted him with one of her dazzling smiles. “Welcome aboard!”

Only after she’d closed the frequency did she let her face relax and show what she was truly feeling, which was a bone-deep exhaustion. This mission had occupied her attention 24/7 ever since Cretak’s message had reached her from inside the Empire. In that time she’d done all the things she’d just told McCoy—put the medical team to work, gotten through to her operatives inside the Empire with instructions to track down every rumor of unusual illness anywhere in Romulan space, and scanned her files to determine who she had available to send into the Neutral Zone for what could at best be an exercise in futility, and at worst mean a death sentence.

Because if this was just some unusual bug, the potential was bad enough. But if, as her source suggested, it was an artifical pathogen designed to kill everyone it affected, the potential was too horrific to contemplate.

It had been almost fifty years since the infamous Tomed Incident, fifty years in which Empire and Federation had turned their backs on each other, shunned each other, withdrawn their diplomatic embassies from each other’s soil, and metaphorically glared across parsecs of space at each other in stony silence, neither side willing to take the step across the void that separated them and start again.

Which was not to say that the silence was absolute. Starfleet Intelligence had Listeners inside the Empire, just as Uhura knew the Romulans had operatives in Federation space. Occasionally one side or the other was able to turn one of their counterparts into a double agent. There was always some question about what could or could not be believed.

But sometimes the source was so well established it predated Tomed and the silence, and in that respect it could perhaps be trusted more.

Would the messenger have been sent at all if someone other than Uhura had been head of Starfleet Intelligence? What if she had stepped down this time last year, or even last week? Retirement was always on her mind, and yet—

No more!she told herself. Just this one more mission, then I’m stepping down.

She said the same thing every year. And every year, when the winter rains began to sweep across San Francisco Bay and her birthday came around, she pulled up the resignation letter she’d kept on file since the day she took this job, updated it, and thought: I’ll submit it on New Year’s Eve. Secure all my agents-in-place, give the C-in-C my recommendations for who should replace me, help groom that person for the job, and, before the year is out, quietly step aside.

And then what?she wondered every time. When do I decide it’s enough, that someone else can take my place, and it’s time for me to do what, exactly?

She supposed she could always retire to the country house near the ruins of Gedi, and sit under the jacarandas watching the blue flash of agamalizards flitting through the leaves and the giraffes making their stately parade through the clearing, or sling a Vulcan lute over her shoulder and hitch a ride on the first freighter headed toward a star beyond Antares, or write her memoirs….

Ah, now, there was the rub. There was so much she couldn’t tell, and so many biographies and autobiographies and historical overviews and intimate portraits had already been written by and about the crew of Enterprise,but what the historians and biographers knew about Nyota Uhura was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And because she couldn’t talk about so much of what she knew, they would more likely than not sum up her career as being nothing more than “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.” No, that wouldn’t do. There was still good work that she could do here.

Besides, she’d miss the parties. The Klingon flagship K’tarrawould be in town next week, and Starfleet was holding a reception for her senior officers. Sarek of Vulcan would be there trying to maintain his dignity while Thought Admiral Klaad and Curzon Dax drank bloodwine and swapped tall stories all night, and she wouldn’t want to miss that for the world. Retirement from Starfleet Intelligence meant a special kind of retirement. It meant either you submitted to having your memory selectively erased, in which case you ended up smiling vacuously when people mentioned missions you were on because you truly didn’t remember them, or else you stepped out of the limelight altogether and lived somewhere quietly, probably under a new identity and no doubt under observation, because there were things you knew that could be extracted from your mind and used with terrible consequences. They never told you that when you entered intelligence work, only when you tried to leave.

I’d miss the parties,Uhura thought. And the sense that once in a while what I do makes a difference to the cosmos at large. I don’t want to give that up just yet. But all the rest of it…

Oh, hell!Uhura thought. I’m a long way from being able to retire. But this will be my last hands-on case, I swear. From now on, I delegate. This will be a fitting swan song, the final sentence in a conversation that began in an unlikely spot on Khitomer almost seventy years ago…

“Admiral Uhura,” a stringer for the Altair Information Syndicate wanted to know, “is there any truth to the rumor that you’re planning to retire at the end of this year?”

“I’ll tell you this much,” she said seriously. “I do not intend to die at my desk.”

By now she could play the reporters like a string quartet. She wondered why they came back year after year, just as the academic year was starting, to ask her the same questions again and again, plead for a chance to sit in on the most popular class ever taught at the Academy, pester her for insights into the workings of SI that were retina-scan classified and that she couldn’t possibly give them.

But Command said interaction with the media was necessary. Keep the public informed, Academy personnel were told; let them see that Starfleet is their friend. So Uhura played along, poised and in control at the speaker’s podium, her rich contralto voice with its three-octave range caressing their auditory receptors regardless of their species.

What did they see when they looked at her? A petite human woman of African ancestry, well past the century mark, with a single wing of jet-black hair sweeping back from her brow into the aura of white hair that framed her face like a cloud, accentuating her upswept amber eyes and what at least one old admirer had once called “cheekbones to die for.”

Her heritage was Bantu, from among those tribes whose tradition was matrilineal, where sons inherited from their mothers and every woman was a queen. She held herself like a queen and moved like a dancer, and it was not unknown for her male students to fall all over themselves with schoolboy crushes trying to impress her. Nor were they alone. Part of her skill at moving among the influential of many worlds was her ability to attract the appreciation of males from a multitude of species.

She was at peace with herself, comfortable in her own skin, and it showed.

“So how did you get involved in intelligence, Admiral?” a Benzite asked, his aerator huffing between phrases.

Uhura smiled her careful official smile, no less dazzling than the range of others she possessed. Her voice went low and conspiratorial, and her eyes went hooded with mystery.

“I could tell you but, as the saying goes, I’d have to kill you.” She waited for the translators to render it, for the requisite laughter that followed, then added: “If you’d asked my grandfather, he’d have said I was born to it…”

The old man sat watching the sunlit pattern of the leaves at his feet. The morning was quiet enough for him to hear the chirring of insects, the squawk of the go-away birds, the sough of the breeze through the feathery leaves of the jacaranda whose powerful branches arched above him. He shifted his bony frame on the bench, his long-fingered hands clasped contentedly on the knob of the cane he used more as a symbol of his dignity than as an aid in walking for, even at 120 years, he was still straight and limber and strong.

The silence and his contemplation were broken by the sound of something wild running breakneck through the bush.

A blur of skinny arms and legs shot out of the trees, zigging left and right, but headed toward him. He could hear her labored breathing, see the terror in her eyes, and could only imagine what was pursuing her. When she was almost past him, the old man snaked out one remarkably quick hand and snagged her by the shirttail.

Nyota jerked to a halt, her bare feet kicking up dust, and ducked behind the old man, making herself as small as possible.

“Polepole,my girl!” the old man chided her in kiSwahili, trying not to laugh at the sight of her. Her little ribs were heaving; there were twigs stuck every which way in her halo of small braids. “Slowly, child. Where do you think you’re going so fast?”

“They’re after me, Babu!”she wheezed. “They’re going to get me!”

“Who is?”

“Juma and Malaika.” Her ten-years-older cousin and his girl.

“And why would they be doing that?”

Nyota took one deep breath and calmed herself, drawing herself up to her full height, looking very serious. “They were kissing,”she reported, saying the word with a frissonof intermingled disgust and delight.

“And you were spying on them,” her grandfather suggested.

“I was not!” she said, indignant at the very thought. She settled herself on the bench beside the old man, legs swinging, confident he would protect her. “I was only climbing the old mangrove tree. They just happened to be kissing under it.”

“The same place they go every afternoon, and you know it,” the old man said dryly. “You were spying. So. What happened?”

“The branch I was sitting on started to crack. I was falling, but I caught myself. I wasn’t hurt, but they heard the snap and they saw me. Malaika was laughing so hard she fell off the big root where they were sitting. But Juma said he was going to get me. So I ran.”

“Ah, I see,” the old man said, just as the young couple emerged from the bush, holding hands and laughing, and looking not at all as if they were chasing anyone.

Most of the year, Nyota lived with her parents in Mombasa, a coastal city of high-rises and traffic and noise, where her entire childhood was regimented into school and after-school and music and dance lessons and swimming classes and gymnastics and languages, and it was only during the height of the January heat, just after her birthday and the holidays, when her parents packed her off to the country for a month to be with her grandparents and a raft of cousins, that she felt truly free. The happiest memories of her childhood were here.

But Babu was right; she had been curious from the day she was born.

“You’re a terror, you!” the old man told her more than once. “Tumbiri,monkey-child, climbing trees and spying through windows and listening on the stairs. Asking questions ever since you could talk. ‘Why, Babu, why?’ You are uhuru.Independent. Free as the wind and completely untamed. But someday your spying is going to get you into trouble, and I may not be around to save you…”

She was the same age now that Babu had been then, Uhura realized with a start, hoping the lapse had only been in her mind and not something the reporters might have noticed. They were still smiling up at her expectantly.

“I have an idea!” she announced, as if it were something that had just occurred to her, and not the same suggestion she made at the end of the press conference—she could see the veterans already nodding—every year. “How would you all like to sit in on my class this morning?

“It’s called Communications 101,” she explained, leading them down the corridors. “It’s been called that since the Academy was founded. When I took over, the deans suggested I could change it to whatever I wanted, but I’ve kept the designation. After all, if you think about it, the secret to understanding the universe is communication…”

Just this mission and then no more,she thought, the disease vectors she’d passed on to McCoy still active in her mind, resonating with visions of death and more death. Because if in fact my source inside the Empire is correct and this is not a natural phenomenon, but something someone has created for whatever hideous reasons, and if I and my “shadow people” can’t resolve it, it could be yet another excuse for war.

I went into intelligence work for one reason only, because I believe that the military solution must be the last and not the first choice. This has always been my philosophy both as a Starfleet officer and as a private person. Consequently I must use all the Starfleet resources at my disposal to try to stop this thing before it’s too late!

Chapter 2

When Crusher had completed the first round of tests at Uhura’s request, she had asked the same thing McCoy would ask a few days later. “Where did these tissue samples come from?”

“Inside the Romulan Empire,” was all Uhura said.

“How did—?” Crusher started to say, then realized she wouldn’t get an answer. She thought of a different question. “How can you be sure they’re genuine?”

“I trust the source. I’ve also got my Listeners trying to get confirmation.”

Uhura’s Listeners were many and varied, the backbone of Intelligence under her command, from sleepers who committed themselves to a lifetime on the inside—Vulcans passing as Romulans, humans surgically altered to resemble a dozen other species that bore watching—to troubleshooters thrown into crises while they were happening, who landed on their feet and did their best at damage control, to dozens of communications officers on Starfleet ships flung across the quadrant who, in between their assigned duties, monitored every stray frequency that passed through their consoles, listening for…anything. A sudden flurry of trade agreements in an Orion-controlled sector which meant the pirates were smuggling arms again, a rumor that a Coridan ambassador’s death by food poisoning might not have been food poisoning at all but a carefully planned assassination or, now, a tale from the heart of the Empire of a disease thought all but eradicated a thousand years ago which in its latest incarnation killed everyone in its path—there was little that escaped the eyes and ears of the Listeners, even after half a century of “official” silence.

While Crusher had been running preliminary tests, Uhura had been fielding any number of transmissions that began with “Admiral, this might not mean anything, but…” Her job was to pull all the strands together and weave them into a tapestry of information that presented a coherent picture, however long it took.

“Is there enough there to go on?” she asked Crusher now.

“I don’t know yet,” Crusher said. “The tests I’ve run so far indicate this thing is particularly virulent. And it doesn’t respond to antibiotics, known antiviral agents, or even household bleach. Radiation will kill it back temporarily, but only in amounts that would kill the patient. Turn the radiation off and the bug regenerates.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Uhura asked.

“I’ll need to grow a big enough batch of it in culture to run some more tests. If we had time, we could work on cracking the genetic code, then developing an antigene to combat this.”

“What kind of time are we talking about?”

Crusher shrugged. “Weeks, maybe months, maybe not at all without samples from healthy Romulans to compare this with.”

“Could you compare what you’ve got with samples from similar species?” Uhura asked. “Rigelians, let’s say, or Vulcans?”

“Theoretically I could compare normal specimens from any vulcanoid species with the disease specimens, but the match wouldn’t be exact,” Crusher said. “Romulans, I gather, from what little there is in the databanks, are different. And I’m still not clear on why I’m doing this.”

“Need to know, Doctor. I can’t tell you that now, but it’s urgent. Can you give me an ETA on when you’ll have those additional tests completed?”

“As soon as I can get this thing to grow in culture,” Crusher responded. “Even I can’t hurry Mother Nature.”

“Keep me informed,” Uhura said, and moved on.

Something one learned as a comm officer in a crisis was what Uhura called operational triage. Overwhelmed with multiphasic transmissions and often under fire, you had to decide in a heartbeat which messages were most important. Very often the voices yelling the loudest were the ones you could most safely ignore. It was the whispers you had to pay attention to.

This mission had begun with a whisper.

The fog in the Bay Area was particularly heavy that morning, and Uhura walked the winding paths of the gardens on the academy grounds more by familiarity than by sight, nodding to Boothby, who was dead-heading a row of rosebushes in front of the C-in-C’s office, and silently saluted her with the trimming shears as she passed. By midday, she knew, the marine layer would burn off, leaving a brilliantly sunny day, but for now the world existed only as far as the eye could see, which was only a meter or two in any direction.

By rights she could have had a groundcar bring her from home, or even beam directly in to her office as she did during emergencies, but unless it was raining she preferred to get off the monorail one stop early and walk to work, even on a day like today. If she had to be stuck behind that desk all day, at least she could start with a morning walk. It kept her young.

In retrospect, whoever sent the messenger must have known even that much about her. And if the messenger had been anything other than a messenger—an assassin perhaps, or even someone who thought kidnaping the head of Starfleet Intelligence might affect the balance of power on any number of worlds—Uhura shuddered to think. She would never know how the messenger got through the Academy’s security cordon, which was supposed to be one of the best on the planet.

The fog played tricks with sound. Footsteps and voices might sound close but in fact belong to those few cadets and instructors who had braved the weather and were passing between buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. At the same time, nearby sounds were muffled, hard to distinguish. The messenger made no sound, but simply fell into step beside her.

“You are Admiral Uhura.” The voice was female and seemed young. The words were in carefully spoken Standard, with only a trace of some offworld inflection. The figure, swathed in a hooded Vulcan-style travel cloak, was no taller than Uhura herself, who only made people think she was tall by the way she carried herself. “I bring you a message from Romulus.”

As Uhura turned, startled, a pair of jade-green eyes beneath the characteristic dark upswept brows met her own. A delicate face with a wide, expressive mouth, a smattering of freckles across a high-bridged nose, a stray lock of chestnut hair fallen across her brow, were all that showed beneath the hood. The first impression was of a child playing dress-up. Nevertheless, Uhura felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and found herself thinking of phasers.

A Romulan? On Earth, after all this time? And here on the grounds of the Academy without anyone stopping her?

“Who are you?” was all Uhura could think of to say, in a voice much calmer than she felt.

“Pandora’s box,” the messenger said.

It was a code spoken by another in a time long ago, and Uhura decided to trust her.

“Pandora’s box?” a very young Romulan subaltern named Cretak had repeated Uhura’s words. “What an interesting expression. What does it mean?”

She and Uhura had met under unusual circumstances at a place called Camp Khitomer, where an interstellar peace conference had almost been derailed by a handful of militarists from the three major powers plotting to kill the Federation president.

“It’s from an old story about a woman to whom the gods entrusted a beautiful box, but with instructions never to open it,” Uhura explained. “Naturally, her curiosity got the better of her and she opened the box, letting all the evils inside escape into the world. But when in her despair she glanced into what she thought was an empty box, she found that a priceless jewel still lay within. That jewel was hope.”

Cretak tilted her head like a bird, considering this. “A moral, no doubt. There are many such tales in my culture as well.”

“Which shows we’re more alike than different,” Uhura suggested.

For the first time, the young Romulan smiled. “If only it were that simple!”

In the intervening years, Khitomer itself had been left a smoking ruin following a Romulan attack, for the usual reasons Romulans and Klingons carried on their multigenerational antagonisms: honor, as well as an inflexible attitude of absolute superiority, from each toward the other. As for the Romulans and the Federation, there was Tomed, always Tomed. Yet though their governments might posture and throw stones or, more recently, ignore each other’s existence, two resourceful individuals could get messages through the static if the need were great enough.

“From across the parsecs and across the years, I send my greetings,” the message began, composed in the traditionally flowery language of the Romulan court but, once Uhura and the messenger were ensconced in her office, delivered in Earth Standard. No need to translate from any of the Romulan languages, much less to decode it. Considering the source of the message and its means of delivery, Uhura was surprised, to say the least, but only for a moment. Cretak was, above all else, resourceful. There had been other third-party messages down the decades, but none so direct as this one.

“With satisfaction I report that I am well, and hope that you are also. I have, as much as possible in this turbulent weather with its recent storms—” A reference to the Neutral Zone, and to the supposedly ironclad silence between the Federation and the Empire since Tomed. “—followed your career with much interest, and wish you continued success…”

Even if my actions sometimes work against your own people, Cretak?Uhura wondered, holding up one hand to stop the message while she digested this much of it. No, let’s be clear: What I and my operatives do is not against any people, but is a means of checking and balancing those who would presume to make decisions in their name. Decisions like Tomed and Narendra III and a hundred lesser incursions that are enacted “for the good of the Romulan people,” meaning the good of those who stay in power by feeding off the fear of the populace, creating imaginary enemies to keep the war machinery in motion. My goal is to sniff out those plots in either Empire or even among my own kind before they gather momentum, and nip them in the bud.

I warned Command about Narendra III but, alas, not in time to save theEnterprise. If Cretak, who travels the corridors of the Romulan Senate and knows things none of my operatives can get near without losing their lives, sends me a message by way of a living messenger, it’s important.

“Go on,” she told the messenger.

“I could wish that this were merely a social call, but the very form my message has taken may suggest to you that it is in fact a matter of some urgency.”

Again Uhura stopped the message and studied the messenger.

“How much of this do you understand?” she asked carefully in Romulan.

“Nothing, Lady,” the messenger replied in the same tongue, masking any surprise at hearing her own language spoken by a human. “I do not understand your language. I only repeat what I have been told.”

“Told to you by Cretak,” Uhura prompted her. She could see the young woman’s eyes flicker, as if she were searching the corners of the room for hidden meanings. No doubt she had been told only to repeat her message, and given no further instructions, not even any indication of what was to become of her once the message was delivered. Uhura remembered something else she had learned about Romulans, something which any good Federation spy ought to be mindful of as well. Romulans don’t trust walls. Nor, even in the office of the head of Starfleet Intelligence, should they.

She had made a point of bringing the girl to her office initially, to make certain she hadn’t brought company, and so that the security sensors could scan her for concealed weapons or listening devices. Now that she was determined to be “clean” and acting alone, she could safely be moved elsewhere.

Uhura got up from her desk and surveyed the grounds below her window. As she’d anticipated, the fog had burned off and the day was radiant. Cretak’s messenger had had enough faith in her to allow herself to be brought indoors for the preliminaries, but now it was time for a change of venue.

“It’s a beautiful day, and I need some air,” Uhura said. “Walk with me.”

The young woman hesitated. Did she think she was going to be imprisoned, even executed, once she had delivered the core of her message?

“Sometimes the walls have ears,” Uhura suggested.

“Indeed,” the Romulan said, and instinctively pulled the hood of her travel cloak up over her own.

“You know my name,” Uhura began after they’d walked in silence for a while. “May I know yours?”

“Zetha,” she replied at once.

“Zetha,” Uhura repeated. “That’s your family name?”

“It is my name,” the young woman said tautly. “I was born in Ki Baratan. I have no family.”

And that, Uhura realized, was all she would get out of her. But it told her a great deal. Romulan society was built on kinship lines. A Romulan without family had no identity, and legally did not exist.

“I see,” Uhura said. They were in a remote part of the grounds few frequented. A pity really, since it was some of Boothby’s best work. Dewdrops sparkled on the glossy leaves of the gardenias, and a maze garden of carefully trimmed yews and azaleas beckoned to them, but Uhura deliberately kept them out in the open, amid the groundcovers and low-growing flowerbeds, so that Zetha could see they were not being followed.

Which was not to say they couldn’t have been monitored from across the quadrangle or across the sector, Uhura thought, mindful of some of the equipment her field agents and their Romulan counterparts had at their disposal, which could listen through fortress walls or starship bulkheads or photograph the rank pips on a subcommander’s uniform from a system away as he strolled the streets of the Capital on market day, but the gesture was necessary.

And if the occasional passing cadet noticed the two in conversation, they made nothing of it. Tomed had happened decades before any of these youngsters was born. Even the battle simulators were no longer programmed for Romulan scenarios, which Uhura personally thought was a mistake. On any Federation planet, someone like Zetha would be taken for a Vulcan, no questions asked.

Out of the corner of her eye, Uhura watched her young charge react to the weather and her surroundings. San Francisco had rewarded them with one of its better sunny days, and the girl had lowered the hood of her cloak and turned her face up to the sun like a flower, breathing deeply of the warm, scented air. But even then she did not relax. She watched and listened, absorbing everything.

No, not a child playing dress-up, Uhura decided, studying the grimness of the mouth, the stubborn set of the chin, but a child who never had time to be a child. It had occurred to her from the outset, code words or no, that Zetha might not have been sent by Cretak at all. What she learned about her in the next few hours would be vital in deciding that.