Текст книги "Lesser Evil"

Автор книги: Robert Simpson

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

17

Ten hours away from Trill, Dr. Xiang looked up and said, “I can’t believe what you’re suggesting.”

The three of them—Kira, Montenegro, and Xiang—were gathered in the dining area of Montenegro’s quarters. The doctor and the first officer were seated at the table, arguing back and forth. Kira paced the floor restlessly.

“I can’t believe it, either,” Montenegro agreed. “But it’s true, Mei. It all fits. Admiral Akaar’s message to Colonel Kira, the file she obtained from Gryphon’s own computers—what else do you need to convince you?”

“Proof!” Xiang said. “So far all I’ve heard is a lot of guesswork based on circumstantial evidence. What proof do you have that it’s the captain?”

This is taking too damn long.Kira turned and slammed an isolinear chip down on the table.

Startled, the doctor’s eyes darted to the chip, then back to Kira. “And what exactly is that?”

“The program that the parasite used to fake the cloaking-device reading. It was uploaded from the captain’s quarters. Commander Montenegro found it after I told him about my suspicions.”

The doctor looked at Montenengro.

“It’s true,” he said. “She created a fake datastream, uploaded it to the sensor arrays, and waited for the bridge crew to detect it. I took the report to her myself, and she contacted Admiral Akaar to suggest that Gryphonpursue it. She needed an excuse to head for Trill at high warp without revealing herself.”

“But why? What’s on Trill?”

“Revenge,” Kira said. “These parasites, whatever they are, have some connection to Trill. It was a Trill who killed First Minister Shakaar, and Shakaar was the host to one of these life-forms. Akaar thinks the thing inside Mello could be using Gryphonto launch a retaliatory strike.”

“This crew would never carry out an order to attack a Federation planet,” Xiang insisted.

“They won’t have to,” Montenegro said. “Using the right codes, Mello can voice-authorize the main computer to fire phasers, empty the torpedo tubes, even eject the warp core toward the planet. She could kill millions of people.”

The doctor looked trapped. “So what do you propose? A mutiny? How can you even think—”

“She’s not your captain!” Kira hissed. “Not anymore! Didn’t you listen to the admiral, or read Captain Picard’s report? These parasites subsume the identities of their hosts and use them to achieve their ends.”

“But I can’t—”

Kira came around the table, grabbed Xiang’s chair, and turned it roughly so that Kira was speaking directly into Xiang’s face. “Look, Doctor. No one is suggesting we kill her. If she submits to arrest quietly so Commander Montenegro can assume command of Gryphonand return us to Deep Space 9, all this could end without bloodshed. But we need to be prepared to fight for control of the ship if we have to. One way or the other, though, I promise you, I’m not going to allow this ship to reach Trill.”

Xiang stared into Kira’s eyes for a long moment, then seemed to sag within herself. “What do you need from me?”

Montenegro breathed a sigh of relief. “We’ll need you to try to save her, to separate the captain from the creature. It’s not clear how long a parasite needs to be joined before separation becomes fatal to the host, but if there’s a chance to cure Captain Mello, you’re the one to do it. There’s a physical symptom of the creature’s presence in the host: a pale blue gill like a barb protruding from the back of the neck, just below the base of the skull. Once we confirm the presence of the creature, you’ll need to keep her sedated. That file we gave you contains all the medical information Starfleet has on these creatures and their effect on humanoid bodies. While you’re attempting to separate them, we’ll inform the crew of what’s happened.”

Xiang took the chip out of the companel next to her and stared at it, shaking her head before she looked back at the ship’s first officer. “I hope to God you’re right about this, Alex.”

“Then here,” Kira said, tossing Xiang one of three phasers on the table. The doctor fumbled to catch it. Kira handed another to Montenegro and kept one for herself. “Let’s get this over with.”

“What should we expect?” Xiang whispered as they marched down to the captain’s quarters. A quietly issued order from Montenegro had managed to clear the corridors nearest Mello’s cabin, at least temporarily.

“Like it said in Dr. Crusher’s report,” Kira said. “Enhanced physical strength, along with extreme resistance to pain and injury. Phasers on stun won’t work. If you have to fire, you need to set your weapon to kill.”

Xiang halted. “You said we wouldn’t need to—”

“I said we had to be prepared to fight for control of the ship,” Kira said hotly. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

“Colonel, please,” Montenegro said gently. “Doctor, the evidence we have is that a phaser at that high intensity will only incapacitate a parasite host, not kill her.”

“But you can’t be certain.”

“No,” Montenegro conceded. “But we do know that a lower setting won’t even slow it down.”

Xiang gritted her teeth and upped the setting on her weapon.

They reached Mello’s quarters. By consensus, Kira took point. She hit the door chime.

“Come,” came the reply.

The doors parted. Mello was seated on her couch, reading. “Colonel, this is unexp—”

Kira stepped inside and raised her phaser. “Get up,” she ordered. “Slowly.”

Mello’s mouth dropped fractionally. Then she frowned. “If this is a joke, it’s in the poorest possible taste.”

“I said get up!” Kira snapped. “We know what you are, and what you’re trying to do. But it’s over. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but I’m warning you, after what your kind did to Shakaar, I’m looking for an excuse to end your miserable existence.”

Mello set down her book and rose slowly. “You’re making a mistake.”

“Hands over your head,” said Kira. “Step to the middle of the room.”

Mello complied.

“Xiang,” Kira said. “Do it.”

The doctor cautiously approached the captain, phaser ready. She stepped around Mello and lifted the captain’s long brown curls, searching. Finally she said, “It’s not here.”

Kira went cold. “Look again.”

Xiang did, and shook her head. “I’m telling you, she’s clean. I… Alex, what are you—?”

Kira spun around, seeing Montenegro smiling at her from the corridor an instant before the doors snapped closed.

Prophets, no!

She ran to the door. A force field knocked her back. It was him all along—!

There was the sound of someone hitting the deck behind her—

Kira spun around again, phaser up, and froze. Xiang was unconscious on the floor, and Mello was holding the doctor’s phaser. She and Kira stood there at arm’s length from each other, each one holding her weapon inches from the other’s eye.

Montenegro smiled as he ran down the corridor, tapping his combadge. “Computer: initiate program Montenegro One, thirty-second delay.”

There was a chime of acknowledgment. “Program will initiate in thirty seconds,” the computer said as Montenegro entered a turbolift.

“Bridge,” he said. He was still smiling as the lift ascended.

18

With a profound feeling of déjà vu, Nog followed Bowers through the forest to the mock campsite they had set up before. They had beamed down at the site of the Borg wreckage with Gordimer, Shar, and T’rb. It was the task of the latter three to enter the ship and retrieve one of the Borg corpses. Commander Tenmei’s neuroprocessor—the device every drone possessed that contained its specific instructions from the collective—had been destroyed when she was damaged. Shar and his team would need to beam up a dead drone and extract another neuroprocessor in order to find out the exact circumstances surrounding the Valkyrie’s mission to the Gamma Quadrant.

Bowers and Nog, meanwhile, had a decidedly different job: convincing the changeling to return with them.

“So, what do you think our chance of success is?” Nog asked Bowers. “Two percent? One?”

“I’m not worried about not succeeding,” Bowers said, adjusting his tricorder. “I’m worried about what happens if we do. A Founder on the Defiant,that’s something to keep the security staff up at night. I heard about the one who almost took control of the old Defiantbefore the war.”

“It did take control,” Nog corrected absently as he double-checked his own equipment. He hadn’t been with Starfleet then, but he’d heard the story enough times from Chief O’Brien. “Captain Sisko almost had to destroy the ship.”

“Great,” said Bowers.

“But most of what it accomplished, it could do because people didn’t know at first that it was there. Ezri says we’re just going to return this one to the Dominion, since we’re not at war anymore. I don’t think it’ll have any reason to try and harm us.”

“Does it need a reason?”

Nog shrugged. “They don’t think they’re a lot like us, but I don’t know. They do think about their actions. Not like the Borg.” He and Bowers exchanged another look. Nog was pretty sure having a Borg drone on board would keep security up at night, too. It might keep himup.

“We’d better get a move on. Ready?”

“If that changeling is halfway across the planet by now, we’re sunk.”

“I don’t think it is,” said Bowers. “There’s nothing here to interest it. When we showed up it was just waiting in that wreck. It’s ready to leave.”

Probably since the day it got here,Nog thought.

“After two years it’s got to know the Dominion doesn’t know it’s here,” Bowers went on. “We’re its only way out. It may be scared, but it may also want to find us again even more than we want to find it.”

The nonessential equipment they had left behind did not appear to have been disturbed, and Nog packed it up regretfully. He hoped Bowers was right about the Founder sticking around, but he was afraid Bowers was wrong.

They were headed farther north when Bowers gestured frantically for quiet and Nog froze, then glanced down at his tricorder. Just on the edge of their sensor range was the Dominion ship. And inside, again, were the faint humanoid readings they had picked up when the first arrived.

Bowers had doubled back to where Nog stood and now hissed in his ear, “We’re going in, and this time, no noise!”

Nog nodded to show he understood.

They approached the ship from the south, under the engine pylon. Although Nog was now familiar with the interior of the ship, the act of returning felt even more surreal. The smell of decay and moss still pervaded the air, and Nog tried not to wrinkle his nose. His feet sloshed as he moved toward the source of the humanoid readings: the bridge. Try as he might, he had a difficult time picturing the Founder sitting calmly within the wreckage, surrounded by attending corpses.

Then he turned the corner and she was there, waiting, sitting on her haunches in a puddle of brackish water. She looked up at them, calmly, her face blank of expression. “I thought you left,” she said, in a voice that sounded as young as she looked. She seemed completely unaffected by the Jem’Hadar skeletons less than four meters away.

“No, we didn’t leave,” Bowers said. “We returned to our ship. But our vessel is still in orbit.”

Her face didn’t change. “Why?”

“We wanted to find you,” Nog said, finding his voice. She turned her attention to him but didn’t say anything. “To apologize,” he improvised. “We didn’t mean to hurt you before.” Ezri had been less than thrilled to discover they had hit the Founder with a phaser blast.

She regarded him carefully. “It didn’t hurt,” she said. “It surprised me. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Yes,” he said. “Another Founder showed us how to do it.”

At that the girl did react—she looked angry. “No Founder would show you how to do that,” she said. “You’re lying.”

Bowers was shooting him a warning glare, Don’t make her mad,but Nog had figured from the beginning that the only way to close the deal was to put Odo on the table. “Maybe not a Founder who grew up with you,” he said shrewdly. “But what about one of the Hundred who were sent out to live among solids? That’s who our friend Odo was.”

Now she looked suspicious as well as angry. “I know about Odo,” she said. “He rejected the link. He caused the death of another Founder. He was cast out.”

“No,” corrected Nog. “He went back to the link, after the Federation and the Dominion made peace.”

“There is no peace between the Federation and the Dominion,” she said.

“There is,” Bowers interrupted. “We even have a Jem’Hadar living among us in the Alpha Quadrant. He was sent to us by Odo.”

She considered this. “I understand that kind of peace,” she said. “You have Vorta, also, overseeing you, and many Jem’Hadar.”

“No—” Bowers started to say, but Nog quickly interrupted.

“I don’t understand what a Jem’Hadar is doing there myself, actually. If you come back with us, I’m sure Taran’atar will tell you all about it. You could even order him to accompany you home,” he added, ignoring Bowers’s incredulous stare. I win, everybody wins.Looked at in the right light, it was even, finally, putting one over on Constable Odo.

“Taran’atar. This is your First?” she asked.

“He’s First aboard our station,” Nog said.

“My First is dead,” the Founder said, and pointed at a body across the bridge. Her look turned almost melancholy. “I miss First.” Incredible to think anyone could actually miss a Jem’Hadar.At various points throughout the mission, Nog had found he missed everyone he knew on board the station—with one exception.

“I’m, uh, sorry for your loss,” Bowers said into the sudden silence.

“I miss Second, I miss Fourth…” As though aware of how that sounded, she stopped. “I do not miss Third,” she said decisively.

“Good riddance,” Nog agreed under his breath. Bowers elbowed him in the ribs.

“Do you have a name?” Bowers asked the girl.

“What use would I have for a name?” she replied. “I am but a drop in the ocean.”

“Aren’t we all?” Bowers muttered.

“Why did you come back?” the Founder asked.

“We came to invite you up to our ship. When we leave, we can take you with us.”

“To your quadrant.”

“For a short while, yes,” Bowers said. “From our station, we’ll send a message to the Dominion, let them know we found you. You’ll be able to go home. That is, if you want to.”

“Your station…where you have your Jem’Hadar.”

“Absolutely,” said Nog, who could see her waving goodbye from the platform already, Taran’atar packed and at her side. He tried to look so sincere that it hurt.

She regarded him carefully for a moment, then turned back to Bowers. “I was taught to believe that solids can never be trusted.” Before Bowers could respond, she added, “But I trusted my own kind to come for me, and here I have been these two years. I’m ready to leave this place. I accept your offer.”

*  *  *

Vaughn marched into science lab one and looked into the faces of the officers awaiting him. Their guest, the young changeling, was studying the corpse of a Borg drone stretched out on a lab table. “Report,” he said.

“Sir,” Shar began, “we’ve decrypted the data encoded into the neuroprocessor and have been able to verify the Valkyrie’s mission to the Gamma Quadrant. Apparently since its assimilation seven years ago, the ship and its crew have been used by the Borg for reconnaissance, as a prelude to larger-scale incursions by the Borg if new species are detected and determined to be desirable for assimilation.

“Three years ago, during the Borg’s most recent incursion into Federation space, the Borg ship that attacked Earth apparently updated its Federation database from the ships it destroyed and transmitted that knowledge to the collective. Two items in particular that caught the collective’s attention were the Dominionand changelings.The Borg spent the next year erecting a transwarp conduit that would open into the Gamma Quadrant, and eventually deployed the Valkyrieas their advanced scout for the express purpose of finding a changeling and attempting its assimilation for the continued ‘perfection’ of the collective. The encounter with the Jem’Hadar ship two years ago was the result, in which both ships were destroyed.”

“Do we know if the collective ever learned what happened to the Valkyrie?”Vaughn asked.

“We can’t be certain,” Bowers said. “But we know the Jem’Hadar managed to do considerable damage to the Valkyrievery early in the battle. As far as we can tell, the drones aboard were cut off from the collective almost immediately. It’s very possible that the Borg decided they weren’t prepared to deal with that much resistance. Or it may be that circumstances forced them to deprioritize the Gamma Quadrant—according to the Pathfinder database, the Valkyrie’s mission to the Gamma Quadrant coincided with the Borg first contact with Species 8472.”

Vaughn nodded thoughtfully, recalling that the extradimensional alien civilization the Borg had encountered had very nearly destroyed the collective, and might have become an even worse scourge than the Borg had it not been for intervention of the U.S.S. Voyager.Small wonder that the Dominion became a lower priority to them. “Excellent work, gentlemen. We need to make this data available to the Dominion as well as Starfleet Command.”

“The Dominion, sir?” Bowers asked.

“Think about it, Sam,” Vaughn said. “Preparing the Dominion for the possible return of the Borg can only help us in the long run, and I can think of no better way to demonstrate our own peaceful intentions than by returning a marooned Founder to their keeping, along with the information you’ve obtained. This isn’t just a tactical opportunity, it’s a diplomatic one.”

“I hope Command agrees with you, sir.”

Vaughn smiled. “That makes two of us.”

A scream suddenly cut through the lab. Vaughn turned and almost refused to believe what he saw.

The Borg corpse had come to life. Assimilation tubules had launched themselves from its inanimate hands and into the nearby changeling, whose form was morphing wildly before his eyes.

Bowers drew his phaser, ready to fire.

“No,” Vaughn shouted. “Not yet.”

The child’s terrifying howls continued. Black streams of nanoprobes snaked through the Founder’s undulating mass of metaplasm. Pseudopods reached out blindly across the room as it convulsed in apparent agony, lashing out in every direction. The Defiantofficers narrowly missed being struck by a pseudopod that smashed into the bulkhead behind them.

Then all at once the morphing mass contracted, straining violently to compress itself into a tight opaque sphere. It vibrated madly on the deck as it continued to shrink, becoming Borg-black as it condensed.

“Prepare to fire,” Vaughn said.

Suddenly the sphere morphed again, expanding and elongating into the changeling’s humanoid form. She seemed to be struggling to maintain her shape before finally stablizing.

Shar took out his tricorder and began scanning.

“Are you all right?” Vaughn asked.

The changeling nodded, flexing her hands.

“You resisted the assimilation,” Bowers said. “How?”

A third arm grew out of the center of the Founder’s narrow chest and opened its slender, symmetrical, two-thumbed hand. The arm lengthened until the hand was only inches away from Bowers’s face. In the center of its palm, Vaughn saw, was what looked like a black pebble.

“The nanoprobes?” Bowers guessed.

“They were trying to overwhelm me,” she said. “They were quite painful. They kept twisting me inside out. I knew I had to make them stop. So I did the only thing I could think of. I squeezed them together until they stopped.”

“Mr. ch’Thane,” Vaughn said. “Explain, please.”

Shar shook his head. “She’s fine. She really was able to withstand the assimilation.”

“How?” Bowers asked.

Shar continued studying his tricorder. “Borg nanoprobes are designed to assimilate life-forms on a cellular level. But a changeling’s morphogenic matrix has no cellular structure in its natural state. In essence, it was as if the nanoprobes were trying to assimilate a body of water.”

“More good news for the Dominion, I guess,” Bowers said. “And for us.”

“Wait a minute,” Vaughn said, peering at the Borg corpse across the room. “That drone is dead. How is it possible that the assimilation tubules are still functional?”

“The Borg are proving to be increasingly difficult to understand,” Shar said, “but apparently, even without a living humanoid to act as host for the technology, the Borg imperative to assimilate other life-forms can survive the death of a drone under certain circumstances, lying dormant until the right opportunity presents itself.”

“My God,” Bowers said, looking at Vaughn. “That means—”

“Prynn,” Vaughn said, drawing his phaser as he ran from the science lab. The medical bay was just down the corridor….

Vaughn’s phaser was up and aimed as he stormed into the room. But all was peaceful. Prynn was exactly as he left her, still at Ruriko’s side, softly reading to her mother from The Silmarillion,Ruriko’s favorite book. Ruriko herself seemed peaceful, even serene, her eyes almost tender as they regarded Prynn, never leaving her.

Tears began to form in Vaughn’s eyes. My family,he thought, unsure who he was addressing. This is my family. Isn’t this why I’m here?

Vaughn lowered his phaser. “Prynn,” he said.

His daughter paused from her reading and looked up. She saw the phaser in his hand and frowned. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” Vaughn said. “But I need you to step away from your mother right now. We have to make sure everything’s all right. Please, Prynn. Move now.”

To her credit, Prynn didn’t argue. She put the book down and started to rise.

The tenderness abruptly fell from Ruriko’s eyes. She reached out to Prynn with her remaining hand.

Vaughn brought up his phaser and fired.