Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

The source of the datachips? An overly ambitious Federation citizen trying to grab at a little glory, falsifying documents—as witness his earlier debacle with a paper on Bendii Syndrome! Koval had kept copies of all Thamnos’s “research,” and if the Federation operatives denied they’d found the datachips in Thamnos’s possession, he could produce the knife, no doubt containing traces of the murderer’s DNA. The accusations and counteraccusations could go on for years.

It would also have served as a test case for creating a larger pandemic at some point in the future. Ah, well. The only thing for Koval to do now was to make sure all traces of involvement were removed.

Which reminded him. Best get the call to Papaver Thamnos over with before they reached home.

“Go to bed?” Benjamin Sisko echoed Jennifer’s words as she grabbed the front of his tunic and began to tug him along with her. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! I’m not even tired.”

“Who said anything about sleeping?” Jennifer wondered whimsically, still tugging. Laughing, Sisko found himself being pulled toward the bedroom. “Jake’s on a class trip to the arboretum this afternoon; I don’t have to pick him up for another hour and a half.”

“A man can get into an awful lot of mischief in an hour and a half….” Sisko mused as the bedroom door slid softly shut behind them.

“Don’t owe you anything anymore!” Papaver Thamnos said stonily once he fully understood Koval’s message about his son. “Don’t know what your involvement was, but he wasn’t dead before you went looking for him. Got nothing to say to you. Had nothing to say to that other fellow, got nothing to say to you. We’re finished. Go away.”

“What ‘other fellow’?” Koval said, more sharply than he intended. But Papaver Thamnos was playing with his hounds. A moment later he terminated the transmission.

The ensign who had brought Zetha the sundae approached her table after Tuvok left, but his smile reminded her too much of Tahir’s, and she excused herself and left the lounge. There was something she had to do.

Wending her way through the corridors to find sickbay on her own without asking for directions, she found Selar conferring with Okinawa’s chief medical officer. Seeing Zetha, the Vulcan raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction.

“When you have time,” Zetha said, a little shyly, “may I have my freckles back?”

Epilogue

It was mop-up time.

The planet Renaga was placed under joint Federation/ Romulan jurisdiction. A Romulan warbird and a Federation starship would become permanent fixtures in orbit for the next little while. In addition to a raft of diplomats, teams of observers from both sides, including a joint medical team, would be stationed down-planet. Their final report would indicate that hiloponwas in fact not the panacea Thamnos had described in his paper. It worked only under specialized conditions—the missing “ingredient” turned out to be exposure to a particular rare element in Renaga’s sun—which meant that the stuff was useless once it was taken offworld. And if the Renagans didn’t want visitors on their world—the Council of Elders was still ignoring them, but some of the ordinary citizens from the villages nearest the observer site had made friendly overtures, though it was too soon to tell whether the Elders or the villagers would win—the curative effects of its only valuable resource would remain limited at best. Those in the know were of the opinion that Renaga would eventually prove of little interest to either side and, given the costs of maintaining a presence there, abandoned to its own devices.

Upon condition of his donating a half-liter of blood to be transformed into a vaccine to inoculate the citizens of Sliwon against the Catalyst virus, the noisy Rigelian huckster whom Tuvok had confronted in the Sliwoni marketplace was eventually released after a very thorough questioning. He steadfastly denied any involvement with Romulan authorities or any member of the Thamnos family. He left Sliwon immediately after his release.

Unbeknownst to him, a subcutaneous transceiver, legal under Sliwoni law, was injected at the site where the blood was drawn, making it possible for the authorities to track his movements throughout the Neutral Zone for a period of half a year. If he kept his nose clean for that amount of time, the transceiver would go dormant, and he’d be free to disappear once again into the hordes of itinerant peddlers the galaxy over.

Citizen Jarquin of Quirinus received a carefully worded document from one Citizen Leval of Romulus, which informed him, with regret, of his sons’ deaths. Soon other Quirinians began requesting information about their lost kin, but received no answer, and Citizen Leval’s sources for the information were never revealed. While some Quirinians steadfastly refused to believe that everyone who had ever emigrated from their world to Romulus was dead, conscription and further emigration trickled to a standstill, and most Quirinians began to rethink their relationship with the Empire.

The mysterious illness that had caused pockets of death in several Quirinian provinces burned itself out and did not reappear. The walled up districts were razed, and memorials to the dead were soon buried under a new fall of snow.

Tuvok’s preliminary research on the identities of the seeds on Tenjin was confirmed by a thorough census of all persons arriving in the domes over the past three years. It was decided that the two Romulans, both posing as Vulcans, who had died in the tram accident at about the time the first cancer patients began appearing were most likely the only seeds sent to Tenjin, but the entire indigenous population was inoculated against the Catalyst virus all the same.

The earliest casualties on the Federation side, the seventeen Rigelians from a single extended family, were discovered to be members of a clan that had been engaged in a land dispute since the time of Papaver Thamnos’s great-grandfather. Uhura thought that sufficient to at least begin an investigation into the Thamnos family’s recent activities, but she was warned off by the Federation Council. The Rigel worlds were deemed too valuable, and the Thamnos family too deeply embedded in the governments of those worlds, to risk offending them. Despite her objections, Uhura was told, “Hands off,” and was obliged to comply.

She had been pondering secure ways to tell Cretak everything her team had discovered, when she received even more infuriating news.

It arrived in the form of a bland-looking young man from the C-in-C’s office, who handed her a padd whose contents were retina-scan classified, and waited silently and at attention while the padd scanned the admiral and she read the cover page.

“Did Commander Starfleet tell you why he was sending you with this instead of simply messaging me?” Uhura asked the young man, wondering if he had any idea what was in the document.

“Security, sir. All he told me. And I’m to await your reply.”

“I see,” Uhura said carefully. “It may take me a while to read this. Would you care to sit down? What’s your name?”

“Thank you, sir, no. Luther Sloan.”

He sounds like he thinks I’m interrogating him even when I’m just trying to be friendly,Uhura noted. Very well, let him stand.What she read in the C-in-C’s memo made her all but forget the young man was there.

No!she thought. He can’t do this to me! Hands off the Thamnos cartel—well, fine. Local politics, nothing I can do about it, except maybe plant a few extra Listeners on Rigel and see what if anything they came up with. But if I comply with this, thousands more Romulans may die! And the source or sources behind Catalyst may never be stopped.

She was too seasoned and too well trained to let her thoughts show on her face. She could feel Sloan’s eyes on her, though she knew if she glanced up at him she would find him contemplating the view out the window. He was one of those people who knew when he was being watched, and could glance away a millisecond before the person he was watching attempted to make eye contact.

A natural spy.

So why was he working for the C-in-C and not for her? Uhura wondered, determined to do a background check on him soonest. For now, she deactivated the padd and glanced up at Sloan, who was in fact looking out the window, though he did make eye contact with the admiral once he heard the beep of the padd recoding itself.

“Message, Admiral?” he asked, his voice absolutely devoid of inflection.

Uhura put her not inconsiderable acting talent into a show of reluctant compliance when she said. “Inform Commander Starfleet: Message received and acknowledged. No further action contemplated.”

It was apparently the only message Sloan was prepared to take back to his boss. He accepted the padd from Uhura’s hands, and all but clicked his heels before turning on them sharply and going back the way he came.

The door had not entirely slid closed behind him before Uhura had pulled his file.

Name, rank, serial number. Sloan, Luther, born on Earth, near Pretoria, South Africa. Academy graduate, though from one of the satellite campuses. Now why, Uhura wondered, did someone born on Earth choose to attend the Academy on another planet? It was the only quirk in a record that was too perfect, but impossible to challenge.

No, check that. One more odd thing. Under “personal statement/goals,” Luther Sloan had written “to someday be Head of Starfleet Intelligence.”

If she hadn’t met the man, Uhura might have taken that for what it was obviously meant to be—a brash young man’s egotistical fantasy, a little bit of top-of-the-world-Ma showing off. But there was nothing brash about the Luther Sloan who had just walked through that door.

This was no fantasy. Behind that bland mask of a face was a man driven by ambition. He’d meant every word. The very statement was a dare. He was showing his hand in the most blatant way possible, and daring anyone to challenge him.

“Head of SI? Not while I live and breathe, Mr. Sloan!” Uhura said very quietly, wiping the screen and any trace that she’d been prying into his file. Then she focused her attention on the message from Starfleet Command.

The virus heretofore designated Catalyst, it stated, did not exist. The entity which had claimed 1,076 Federation lives was judged to be a rare and self-limiting mutant off-shoot of R4b2 Rigelian fever, and precautionary vaccinations were just that, precautionary. No additional outbreaks of said R-fever had been reported effective this date, medical experts (Uhura wondered if Crusher, Selar, or McCoy were among them) were on record indicating no further outbreaks were anticipated, case closed.

Any rumors about an unusual fever affecting Romulans were just that, rumors, and had no connection whatsoever with R4b2 R-fever or the mythological Catalyst. There was no reason to suspect bioterrorism, and no information about the R-fever outbreaks would be relayed to any individual within the Romulan Empire or elsewhere, end of report.

Even as Sloan stood there pretending he wasn’t looking at her, Uhura had been running scenarios in her head, trying to think of a way around the interdict. There weren’t any. Once she gave the C-in-C her word, her hands were tied.

Now, if Sloan had arrived five minutes earlier…

Luxury, Zetha decided, is a hot shower. Not just a mob of you lined up to make a quick pass under the sonics to kill the bugs in your hair the way we did in the House, not the rusty lukewarm trickle that was all the plumbing in Aemetha’s house would ever yield, but hot running water coursing down your body, first thing in the morning, every single day. Maybe again at night before you went to bed, or any time you wanted. A real hot-water shower, the water pulsing so hard it hurt, or caressing you, flowing over you, washing away all the bad things, so that you always looked forward to the new day.

Luxury is clothes that fit, that have never been worn by anyone else. Luxury is knowing that you can fill your belly without anyone else going hungry. Luxury is knowing you have a right to live, a right to your own identity that no one can take from you.

But with that luxury comes uncertainty. When you have something to push against, the pushing becomes everything. When the fear is taken away, it’s as if the ground you’re standing on has suddenly slipped out from under you.

Who am I? What am I? Where do I go from here?She had never had time to ask those questions before, and now that she did, she wasn’t sure she wanted the answers.

Dr. Selar had restored her freckles exactly where they belonged. She was still a ghilikwith no family name, but that didn’t seem to matter here. She still wore the sash Aemetha had given her; Tahir’s smooth stone was still in her pocket. And she had an important piece of information, courtesy of Dr. McCoy.

“Whoever told you you’re a hybrid never really studied your codes,” he told her, having completed one last favor for Uhura and double-checked the initial tests Crusher had done by performing a complete genetic scan. “Or else they flat-out lied. You’re as Romulan as I am human.”

And?she thought. That bit of knowledge was at once a shock and an indifference. Had someone, perhaps the lord so aloof she never learned his name, manipulated her data from birth so as to control her all her life? Did it mean she could return to Romulus and demand her birthright as a fullblood? Did she care?

“If you were human, I’d recommend counseling,” was Crusher’s opinion. “After a lifetime of being told you don’t exist, you’re suddenly faced with a lot of choices.”

“Am I?” Zetha asked. It had never occurred to her that she would be free to decide. She assumed the reason Admiral Uhura had asked to see her was in order to give her instructions for her next mission. Wasn’t it obvious that she must now be used as a weapon against her own people?

Don’t anticipate,she told herself. Wait until you hear what the admiral has to say.

For what seemed like the thousandth time, Uhura reread her resignation letter, fiddled with the commas and semicolons, saved it, and considered. Her perfectly manicured finger hovered over the Send button and almost came down. She thought of her Listeners still in the field, the numberless spiderweb threads flung out from this office across two quadrants, constantly sending information her way and resonating to her guidance. Not for the first time, she wondered what would happen to all of them if she resigned.

What makes you think you’re the only one who can do this?she asked herself. Offhand you can think of half a dozen people you’ve handpicked and trained yourself who could do as well or better.

But what guarantee did she have that the C-in-C would take her suggestions and replace her with one of those handpicked agents? The answer, she knew, was no guarantee at all. For some reason, she couldn’t get Sloan out of her mind.

Her finger hovered over the Send button yet again. Who do you think you’re kidding?she asked herself ruefully, before putting the resignation letter away for another year just as Thysis buzzed Zetha in.

“You wanted to see me, Admiral?”

Uhura motioned her to a chair. The girl sat on the edge. She was as petite as Sisko was large, but her coiled and waiting posture at the end of this mission was a mirror image of his at the beginning.

“I have some news for you,” Uhura began. “It’s about your Godmother.”

“When…how—?” Please!Zetha asked whatever gods or Elements might be paying attention. Please tell me…

“Before the away team even left Earth, I sent word back to Senator Cretak that you and your message had arrived safely. I told her what you’d told Tuvok during your interrogation, in an attempt to get confirmation from her that your story checked out. At the same time, I had one of my Listeners search for Aemetha.”

Admiral Uhura paused and smiled. “Your Godmother is alive and well. In fact, my Listener reports that Senator Cretak has given the truth to your original story and more or less adopted her. I’m told she intends to put forward some legislation to pay some attention to the street urchins. She’s doubtful it will pass the full Senate, but she indicated that if it doesn’t, she will at least see to Aemetha’s house.”

Zetha said nothing. If Aemetha had escaped the Tal Shiar’s reach, likely Tahir had as well. Did she dare ask? If the admiral knew, she would have told her. Don’t ask for too much,she thought. She heard Uhura sigh.

“It’s been a luxury being able to communicate with Cretak this far,” the admiral said, almost to herself. “I’m afraid what happened on Renaga—even though officially it never happened—will make communication that much more difficult from now on. But—” Uhura seemed to remember she was thinking out loud. She stopped herself and smiled again at Zetha. “Neither your problem nor your concern, my dear. Do you have any idea what you would like to do next? Or have we yet convinced you that we don’t intend to kill you?”

Zetha suppressed a small smile, then grew serious. The question frankly puzzled her.

“I assumed I would now serve you.”

“Is that what you’d like to do?” Uhura asked. “You don’t have to, you know. You’re free to do whatever you want.”

“But—” Zetha started to say, then stopped herself. She didn’t even know what she was going to ask.

“You can go back home if you want. We can arrange for Zetha’s ‘death’ and give you a new identity, in case you’re concerned that the Tal Shiar might go looking for you…” Uhura began, ticking the suggestions off on her fingers.

To see Godmother again,Zetha thought, and maybe find Tahir. To create a life for myself as—what? I have a scrounger’s skills, and what Selar taught me in the lab, and I now speak Federation Standard, a skill I would hardly boast about on Romulus. Where would I go; who would I be?

“…you’re welcome to stay on Earth as long as you wish,” Uhura was saying. “We owe you immeasurably for giving us the means to stop Catalyst. You’re free to go wherever you wish, be anything you wish to be.”

And have Sisko invite me to share dinner with his family, as he did on the ship, and make mejambalaya. To learn from Tuvok’s wisdom, perhaps to count “the three doctors” among my friends as well. And to have Admiral Uhura’s gratitude. This is something I must consider….

“Someone has to speak directly to Cretak before the wall of silence grows thicker still,” she said. “If you wish, I will be that someone.”

“You’re under no obligation—” Uhura started to say.

“I know that, Admiral. But it is what I wish to do.”

“Are you certain?” Uhura asked. “Because once you’re inside, we may not be able to get you out again. If you wanted to get out.”

This time Zetha did shrug. “I will not know that until I go back in.” Then she smiled. “But, Scrounger’s Second Law: Hide in plain sight. If there’s a way out, I will find it.”

Uhura hesitated. Was this the right thing to do? Zetha’s life had been commandeered from the very beginning. She hadn’t asked to be abandoned by her family, recruited by the Tal Shiar, transformed into an instrument of death, not even to be sent by Cretak as an exile among strangers. What right did anyone have to ask her to return to that world?

But by volunteering to return, wasn’t she saying “I choose!” and wresting control from those who had presumed to control her? Zetha needed this as much as Uhura needed a messenger inside the Empire.

“Very well, if you’re sure,” Uhura said now, making arrangements even as she accepted Zetha’s offer. When she’d done, she beamed at the girl. “Whatever you ultimately decide, I’ll see to it. Hailing frequencies open, young lady, always.”

Zetha beamed right back at her. Her parting words were, “Tell Lieutenant Sisko I’ll be back for the jambalaya!”

Yes, word was already on its way to Cretak. While it might take weeks or even months to reach the senator’s pointed ears, oh, well, the genie was out of the bottle and no way for Uhura to stop it. She wondered if Sloan had made particular note, during his carefully trained scanning of her office that, like a psychiatrist’s office, there were two doors, so as each new visitor arrived, the previous one could, if necessary, leave by a different door to avoid being seen by the subsequent one.

She had sent Sloan out the way he’d come in. Zetha had left in the opposite direction.

Who will spy on the spies?Uhura wondered as, with a bitter smile, she considered the order she’d just received. She was pleased that Catalyst would have no diplomatic or military repercussions, but furious at the thought of its perpetrators’ escaping unscathed. Had she not been able to dispatch a Listener to Cretak, she’d have been more furious still, but a Pyrrhic victory was better than none.

And it wouldn’t surprise her, months or even years from now, to receive a return message from Cretak saying that her government, too, had informed her that Catalyst did not exist.

We and the Empire are more alike than different,Uhura thought, but equally perverse!

How many such “nonevents” had she had to countenance in her intelligence career? How many more could she stand before she snapped? With a sigh she again opened the resignation letter she’d kept on file since the day she took this job.

Sisko couldn’t bear to look at Dr. Heisenberg’s face once he’d told him how Albatrosshad met her death. He thought at first that the older man was going to cry. He did turn his back on Sisko for a moment, and Sisko thought he saw his shoulders shake. Then Heisenberg straightened with a sigh and said wryly: “Oh, dear!”

“Dr. Heisenberg, I’m really sorry…” Sisko began.

“No, no, dear boy, it’s I who should be sorry for you,” Heisenberg said. “Albatrosswas just the prototype. I’ve much more interesting gadgets up my sleeve. I’m more concerned with the amount of paperwork this will generate. Forms, requisitions, explanations…” The old man sighed. “But you, to have to sacrifice your ship on your first command…” He clapped Sisko on the shoulder sympathetically.

“But she wasn’t—that is, I wasn’t—” Sisko said, but then he realized Heisenberg was right. He’d wondered why, even with the relative success of the mission, even reunited with Jennifer and Jake, he’d still felt a niggling sadness. He’d have to think about that some more. “Guess I’ll think twice before accepting another command, sir. But I’m honored that Albatrosswas my first.”

Long after he’d left Heisenberg tinkering with his latest gadget and returned to his post on Okinawa,Sisko realized what he’d said. Accepting another command?he thought. Me? I’m an engineer. I’ve ducked the command track all my life. What was I thinking? What bizarre Freudian slip of the tongue made me say that? Could Curzon have been right?

He’d barely arrived in the engine room when a Level-2 diagnostic soon occupied his entire attention. He never noticed Curzon observing him from the upper level, a knowing smile on his otherwise angelic face.

Uhura left the resignation letter on one screen and opened another to her to-do list. Notify all members of her away team, plus the medical team, of Commander Starfleet’s instructions, each of them individually so as to keep cross talk at a minimum. Brace for the howling she knew she’d get from Dr. Crusher’s direction. Maybe she’d talk to Crusher last.

Tuvok was already back on the Billings,Selar on her science vessel, Sisko in Okinawa’s engine room. McCoy was out on the lake communing with the trout. She’d probably have to bark at Crusher to make her settle down, or let her oversee the vaccination program on the starbases to keep her too busy to be angry but, ultimately, all was well.

Uhura reread her resignation letter one more time, and one more time her finger hovered over the SEND button. With a sigh, she filed the letter for another time and went back to work, for now.