Star Trek: Typhon Pact 01: Zero Sum Game Read online

  Sarina stole a quick look at Bashir’s wound and asked, “Can you walk?”

  “Not without help,” he said. He started opening a pouch on his suit to retrieve his medkit. “It’ll take me ten minutes to fix it.”

  She thrust her hands into his armpits and lifted him to his feet. “We don’t have ten minutes right now.” She reached inside the cab and pressed a button that opened the train’s doors. “We need to get off this train and into the city’s transportation system. If it’s like most cities’ transit networks, it probably has old tunnels that are no longer in use.”

  He let Sarina help him out of the train and down to the tracks. Once they were on foot, it was easy to see that her prediction had been correct: there were many levels of tunnels and several lines running parallel to one another. A few had obviously fallen out of use and been allowed to sink into darkness and disrepair. Within a few minutes of abandoning the train, they had retreated deep into a long-forgotten corner of the Breen city.

  Limping along with his arm draped over Sarina’s shoulders for support, Bashir asked, “What if they find traces of my DNA on the train?”

  “They won’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Somewhere above and behind them, a powerful explosion quaked the bedrock and rained dust on their heads.

  Sarina smiled. “Let’s just say I took a few precautions.”

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6079-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9164-4 (ebook)

  For Marco and Margaret:

  thanks for everything.

  Historian’s Note

  This story takes place in mid-2382, more than a year after the events depicted in the Star Trek Destiny trilogy and roughly three years after the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis.

  In war there are no winners.

  —Neville Chamberlain, speech, 1938

  APRIL 2382

  1

  “Intruder alert! Lock down all decks! This is not a drill!”

  The warning repeated and echoed through the corridors of the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards’ command facility. Red lights flashed on bulkhead panels, and pressure doors started to roll closed, partitioning the space station.

  Ensign Fyyl tried to block out the cacophony of deep, buzzing alarms as he sprinted toward his post, phaser in hand. Was it an attack? Fyyl had no idea what was happening. The skinny young Bolian was less than a year out of Starfleet Academy and until that moment had counted himself lucky to have been posted to the security detail on a platform orbiting Mars, one of the safest assignments in the Federation. Now it seemed as if he was in the thick of the action—the last place he’d ever wanted to be.

  He stumbled to a halt in front of a companel. With trembling fingers he punched in his security code, confirmed his section was secure, and requested new orders. A multilevel schematic appeared on the display. In real time, sections of the station switched from yellow to green as deck officers and patrolling security personnel such as Fyyl checked in. Then a number of sections turned red, and the chief of security directed all his teams to converge on the intruder.

  Here we go, Fyyl thought, sprinting from the companel to the nearest intersection. Courtesy of the station’s active sensor network, the junction’s airtight hatch slid open ahead of him and rolled shut behind him once he’d passed into the next section. Through the windows lining each tube-shaped passage he saw other security personnel moving toward the core ring ahead.

  Then he winced at the searing flash of phaser beams slicing through the air and steeled himself for the worst as he charged through the next doorway into the thick of a firefight. Pressing his back against a bulkhead, he snapped off a pair of quick shots in the same direction he saw other Starfleet personnel firing. Through the smoke and blinding ricochets, he couldn’t see if he hit anything.

  Fyyl ducked as a volley of electric-blue bolts blazed past him in the other direction. Two of his fellow Starfleeters collapsed to the deck, their eyes open but lifeless, their limbs splayed in the awkward poses of the dead. His heart pounding, Fyyl returned fire into the smoky darkness, trusting his training over his instincts, which told him to run and hide. Several meters ahead of Fyyl, visible even through the dense gray haze, a red warning light flashed.

  Someone behind him shouted, “Fall back!”

  Terrified and tripping over his own feet, Fyyl struggled to turn away from danger.

  The corridor lit up like a sun, swallowing Fyyl and everything around him in a flash of light and heat beyond measure.

  “There’s been an explosion inside the station,” declared Lieutenant Vixia, the half-Deltan operations officer of the U.S.S. Sparrow. “They’re venting air into space.”

  Commander Evan Granger leaned forward in his chair as he eyed the vapor jetting from a ragged wound in the hull of the command base. “Take us to Red Alert. If they don’t get that breach sealed in twenty seconds, get ready to close it with a force field from our shield generator.”

  Beyond the decades-old space station, nearly two dozen half-constructed starships lay moored in their spacedock frames, mere shells of the vessels they were meant to become. Spread out beneath them was the shallow, dusky curve of the Martian surface, its crater-scarred face dotted with the gleaming lights of cities.

  “Jex, any update from the station?” Granger asked his tactical officer.

  The short young Bajoran man replied, “Not yet, sir.” He tapped at his console. “I’m still picking up heavy comm chatter from inside the station. Sounds like the intruder’s still alive and on the move.”

  “Prep a tractor beam. Be ready to snag any ship or escape pod that leaves that station without clearance.”

  “Aye, sir.” Jex began entering new commands on his console, then stopped, his eyes widening with alarm. “Another explosion inside the station.”

  Granger look
ed at the Sparrow’s main viewscreen. Before the young commanding officer could ask Jex for more details, he saw all he needed to know: a massive conflagration had ruptured the station’s lower core, and a crimson fireball now surged toward the small patrol vessel.

  “Evasive!” Granger cried out, gripping his chair’s armrests in anticipation. “All power to shields!” No sooner was the order spoken than the blast rocked the Sparrow. For several seconds stretched by fear and adrenaline, there was nothing for Granger to see on the main screen except static and a hellish cloud of flames, and nothing to hear but a deep roar of thunder against the hull.

  The quaking ceased, and in the hush that followed Granger heard all the sounds of the bridge with perfect clarity: the soft chirps of feedback tones, the low thrumming of impulse engines beneath his boots, the gentle hum of ventilators.

  “Damage report,” he said. “Jex, any casualties?”

  “Negative, sir. All decks secure.”

  Vixia said over her shoulder from the ops console, “Shields holding, sir.”

  “Jex, hail the station, see if they need medical personnel or damage-control teams. And see if you can find out what the hell just happened over there.”

  Sitting back, Granger wasn’t sure anyone would ever give him or his crew a true account of what had just occurred, but as he watched the station continue to burn, he wasn’t certain he really wanted to know.

  “Do I even want to know what just happened at Utopia Planitia?”

  Admiral Leonard James Akaar’s rhetorical question reverberated off the walls of his office on the uppermost level of Starfleet Command and gave way to a pained silence that none of his half dozen assembled peers seemed eager to disturb.

  A tiny, throat-clearing cough snared Akaar’s attention. He turned his glare toward Admiral Alynna Nechayev, a trim, middle-aged human woman whose blond hair had begun to show the slightest traces of turning silver in the months following the previous year’s Borg invasion. “Preliminary reports,” she said with the practiced calm of a political veteran, “suggest that the fleet yards’ command station was sabotaged as a diversionary tactic, to conceal the theft of classified data from its main computer.”

  Troubled looks passed among the other admirals in the room. Akaar got up from his desk and took his time stepping out from behind it. He towered over the other Starfleet flag officers, and his broad chest and shoulders made it easy for him to part their ranks as he moved to stand in front of Nechayev. The svelte woman held her ground, tilting her head back to meet his gaze as he loomed over her and asked, “What was stolen?”

  “The schematics for slipstream drive.”

  Akaar’s jaw clenched. He sighed. “Everyone else, get out.”

  Nechayev stood with her hands folded behind her back as the other admirals left the room. As the door slid closed behind the last person to exit, Akaar inquired, “How much do we know for certain right now?”

  “Not as much as we’d like,” Nechayev said. “We’re fairly certain the spy was a civilian engineer named Kaz-ren. His dossier lists his species as ‘Dessev,’ but he appears to be the first of his kind we’ve ever met. He gained access to the main computer on Utopia Planitia’s command station at 1431 hours, using stolen credentials and specialized tools to fool the biometric sensors.” She stepped over to a companel on the wall and called up a series of classified reports from Utopia Planitia. “The first explosion he set off helped him evade capture while he transmitted a locator signal. The second explosion appears to have been planned to disable the station’s shields and conceal his beam-out.”

  Settling back into his chair, Akaar asked, “Beamed to where?”

  Punching up a new screen of graphs and data, Nechayev said, “Sensor readings from the station and its patrol ship, the Sparrow, suggest there was a cloaked Romulan vessel waiting nearby to pick Kazren up.”

  “How did a cloaked vessel get past our perimeter defenses?”

  “We didn’t think the Romulans had this kind of cloak yet.” Nechayev pointed out an isolated section of the graph. “Judging from these readings, I’d say the Romulans have put phasing cloaks into active service.”

  Akaar frowned. “If that’s true, they could be roaming at will throughout Federation space.”

  “I know,” Nechayev said, “but right now we have a bigger problem. If the Typhon Pact develops their own version of the slipstream drive, we’ll lose the only tactical advantage we have left—and with it, our only hope of keeping this cold war from turning into a real one.”

  All at once, Akaar understood why Edward Jellico, his immediate predecessor as Starfleet’s chief admiral, had always seemed to be on the verge of a migraine. Massaging an oppressive ache that throbbed in his temples, he said in a somber tone, “Can you give me the room, please, Alynna?…I need to call the president.”

  2

  President Nanietta Bacco rubbed the sleep from her eyes as she asked her secretary of defense, “Is this as bad as Starfleet says it is, or are they overreacting?”

  “I don’t think they’ve exaggerated the threat, Madam President,” said Raisa Shostakova, a short and squarely built human from a high-gravity homeworld. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be standing in your bedroom at three a.m., waking you from a sound sleep.”

  “Don’t be silly, Raisa,” Bacco said. “I haven’t had a sound sleep since I was sworn in.” She stood and cinched the belt of her robe around her waist. Another visitor signal buzzed at her door. “Come in.”

  The door slid open. Bacco’s chief of staff, Esperanza Piñiero, hurried inside, followed by the director of the Federation Security Agency, a lanky but dignified-looking Zakdorn man named Rujat Suwadi. Heavy dark circles ringed Piñiero’s brown eyes, but the white-haired Suwadi carried himself with a crisp, alert demeanor that did little to endear him to the Federation’s sleep-deprived head of state. “Sorry we’re late,” Piñiero said, sounding short of breath. She brushed a sweat-soaked lock of brown hair from her eyes and added, “The transporter network is all backed up because of the elevated security status.”

  “I know,” Bacco said. “Raisa filled me in about the breach on Mars. Do we know for sure who hit us?”

  Piñiero threw a look at Suwadi, who replied, “Not with absolute certainty, Madam President. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests a Romulan vessel facilitated the spy’s escape.”

  Shostakova said, “I’ve ordered Starfleet to step up patrols along our border with the Romulan Star Empire. If they were involved—”

  “Then that ship could be bound for any of a dozen nearby worlds aligned with the Typhon Pact,” Suwadi cut in.

  Piñiero noticed a pointed look from Bacco and took the cue to ask Suwadi, “How likely is it that the Typhon Pact was involved in this?”

  “Extremely probable,” Suwadi said with confidence. “They are the only power in local space with the resources and motivation to perpetrate such an act.”

  “That we know of,” Shostakova added, apparently hedging her bets against the unknown. Her comment seemed to irritate Suwadi.

  “Well, yes,” he said, rolling his eyes at her. “It wouldn’t be possible to speculate on the capabilities of entities we don’t even know of, would it?”

  In the interest of preventing an unproductive feud between the intelligence chief and the secretary of defense, Bacco interjected, “Actually, an unknown entity was involved in the breach. What species was the spy?”

  Piñiero plucked a thin padd from her coat pocket and glanced at its screen. “Admiral Akaar says the spy called himself a ‘Dessev.’ Whatever the hell that is.” Narrowing her eyes at Suwadi, she added, “Have you ever heard of these people?”

  Suwadi’s mouth wrinkled into a grimace. “No. To the best of my knowledge, there might not even be such a species. It is entirely likely that the infiltrator misrepresented himself entirely—from his given name to his world of origin.” He sighed. “Clearly, more stringent controls are required in our hiring process for civilian employees at
high-security facilities.”

  Bacco wondered if it would be impolitic to slap the Zakdorn in the back of the head. “Really? Are you sure?” She cast an intense glare at her chief of staff. “Esperanza, initiate full security reviews of all personnel at facilities that require clearances higher than level five—Starfleet and civilians.”

  “Yes, Madam President.”

  “Suwadi, I want to know what the hell you’re doing now that the barn is burning and the horses are gone. Are we looking for the stolen plans? Digging up background on the spy? Tell me you’re not just standing there looking smug.”

  The intelligence chief shifted his weight awkwardly back and forth as he replied, “Well, I’ve been in contact with my opposite number at Starfleet Intelligence, and they appear to have taken the lead on researching the background of the spy known as Kazren. As far as tracking down the plans—”

  “Let me guess,” Bacco interrupted. “Starfleet’s already moving on that, too?” She exhaled angrily and shook her head. “Once again, I am reminded of why we need the military. You can go, Mister Suwadi. I’ll call if I need you.” Suwadi stood and blinked a few times in surprise, his jaw moving up and down despite no words issuing from his mouth. Bacco added, “I said, you can go.”

  Verbally lashed into retreat, Suwadi nodded at his president, backpedaled three steps, then turned and made a swift exit. As the door closed behind him, Bacco turned her focus toward Piñiero. “How do we spin this for the media?”

  “An accident. It’s a shipyard, an industrial environment. Mistakes happen, and sometimes the best safeguards fail.”

  Bacco nodded her approval. “Good. Tack on some verbiage like, ‘Our hearts go out to the families of those who were killed in the explosion, and we pledge our support to those who were wounded, blah blah blah.’ That ought to keep the vultures in the press pool happy for a while.”