Precipice Read online

  “Your medallion,” the man said, gesturing with his chin toward the mandala resting on Pennington’s chest. “It is quite unusual. How did you acquire it?”

  The manner in which the man asked his question made Pennington uncomfortable. “A friend gave it to me.”

  “Odd,” the man said. “Such rarities are usually bequeathed only to family members.”

  Pennington broke eye contact and tried to sidestep the Vulcan. “You must be mistaken.”

  Blocking his path, the Vulcan said, “It comes from the commune at Kren’than, does it not?”

  At the mention of T’Prynn’s native village, a technology-free retreat populated by mystics and ascetics, Pennington froze. He suspected the man was not really interested in the medallion. Facing him, Pennington was wary as he said,

  “Yes, it does.”

  “As I thought,” the man said.

  The Vulcan handed him a scrap of fragile parchment that had been folded in half. As soon as Pennington took hold of it, the stranger walked away at a brisk pace and blended back into the earth-toned sea of robed Vulcans crowding the spaceport.

  Pennington unfolded the note.

  There were three things written on it: a set of geographic coordinates, a precise time, and a date exactly three weeks in the future.

  He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  Other

  Star Trek: Vanguard books

  Harbinger

  by David Mack

  Summon the Thunder

  by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

  Reap the Whirlwind

  by David Mack

  Open Secrets

  by Dayton Ward

  STAR TREK®

  VANGUARD

  Precipice

  DAVID MACK

  Based upon Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that It was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  First Pocket Books paperback edition December 2009

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  Design by Alan Dingman

  Art by Doug Drexler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3011-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6651-2 (ebook)

  For my brother:

  thanks for always being on my side.

  Historian's Note

  This story takes place in 2267, beginning in early January and concluding at the end of December, a few weeks after the events of the second-season Star Trek episode “A Private Little War.”

  Good and bad men are each

  less so than they seem.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

  Precipice

  PART ONE

  Such Deliberate Disguises

  1

  January 3, 2267

  Disruptor pulses thundered against the unshielded hull of the Starfleet transport U.S.S. Nowlan.

  On the Nowlan’s bridge, Diego Reyes clenched his jaw and winced. The forward bulkhead blasted inward. Reyes ducked behind the command chair as shrapnel flew past and pattered to the deck around him. Fine, metallic dust rained down on his shoulders and into his thinning steel-gray hair.

  He looked up from behind the chair and peered through bitter smoke to see the ship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Brandon Easton, lying on the deck, his gold uniform tunic torn by jagged bits of metal and stained heavily with blood. The dull, unfixed quality of Easton’s stare was one Reyes had seen far too many times: the man was dead.

  Reyes looked aft for Lieutenant Ket, the Bolian security officer who had escorted him from the brig to the bridge minutes earlier. To his dismay, Ket was also gone, the victim of a wedge of duranium lodged in his left temple.

  At the forward console, two figures stirred.

  The first was the female human navigator and helm officer. She had been lying on the floor, apparently stunned rather than dead. Lucky gal, mused Reyes. If she’d been on her feet, she’d have a faceful of shrapnel right now. Sitting up from behind the flickering console, which housed the helm and navigator’s station on the left and the sensor controls on the right, was the sensor officer, a human man with crew-cut blond hair.

  The two shaken officers, both dressed in black trousers and gold command shirts with lieutenant stripes on their cuffs, looked at Reyes with desperate expressions. “Sir?” said the woman, pushing her curly brown hair from her eyes. “What do we do?”

  Years of command experience snapped Reyes into action. He nodded at the two officers. “Take your posts.” He brushed the grit from the seat of the command chair, then settled into it. “What’re your names, lieutenants?”

  “Paul Sniadach.”

  “Bronwen Hodgkinson.”

  For a moment, Reyes almost forgot that just five weeks earlier he had been convicted in a Starfleet court-martial, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to ten years in a penal colony. All it had taken was a surprise attack by an unidentified and heavily armed pirate vessel to remind him of who he’d been before being branded a criminal:

  A starship captain. A flag officer. A leader.

  “Hodgkinson, set an evasion course, full impulse. Sniadach, find that ship, and get the shields back up.”

  “Course set,” Hodgkinson replied. “Engines not responding.”

  Sniadach coaxed his stuttering, half-shorted-out panel back into service. “Hostile vessel bearing one-three-eight-mark-seventeen, coming about at quarter impulse.”

  Reyes thumbed a comm switch on the armrest of his chair. “Bridge to engineering! We need aft shields! Respond!”

  Static was all he heard over the open audio circuit. Engineering had been one of the first sections hit, and a coolant leak had likely forced a temporary evacuation of the deck while the crew struggled into environment suits.

  “The enemy vessel is scanning us,” Sniadach said. “Closing to ten thousand kilometers.” Swiveling his chair to face Reyes, he added with surprise, “They’re powering down their weapons.”

  “Are they hailing us?”

  “No, sir,” Sniadach said, checking his console.

  “Just like pirates,” Reyes said with disdain. “They don’t even have the cou
rtesy to tell us we’re being boarded.” He got up from his chair—and belatedly remembered it wasn’t really his chair. “Prepare to repel boarders,” he said, grateful they weren’t facing the Klingons, who’d put a price on his head after the Gamma Tauri fiasco. He kneeled beside the slain Lieutenant Ket and took the security officer’s phaser from his belt. “Arm yourselves. We’re about to have company.”

  Hodgkinson got up and sprinted to a panel on the port bulkhead. She opened it, revealing four phasers. The brunette took one for herself and lobbed another to Sniadach.

  Reyes adjusted the setting of his weapon. “Heavy stun,” he said. “Let’s not go blowing holes in our own ship.”

  His order received overlapping replies of “Aye, sir.”

  An alert tone beeped twice on the sensor console. Sniadach glanced down at the board and confirmed Reyes’s suspicion. “Transporter signals,” the lieutenant said. “All decks.”

  “Here they come,” Hodgkinson said, readying her phaser. Sniadach did the same as Reyes stepped back between them to form a skirmish line.

  A low, eerily musical drone emanated from the aft section of the cramped compartment. A few meters in front of the two Star-fleet officers and their prisoner-turned-commander, a compact shape sparkled into view.

  It was a fat cylinder about as long as Reyes’s hand.

  “Down!” shouted Reyes, anticipating the worst.

  They ducked behind the forward console. The transporter effect faded, and silence fell upon the bridge.

  Then came the soft hiss of gas spewing into the air.

  Pale blue mist jetted from one end of the canister and swiftly filled the command deck.

  Sprinting toward the emergency equipment, Reyes snapped, “Oxygen masks!”

  Hodgkinson and Sniadach were close behind him.

  Reyes felt as if he were running on rubber legs. His head spun and his stomach heaved. He pitched forward to the deck. The masks were only a meter away but behind a panel at waist height and out of his reach. He struggled to pull himself forward, but his eyes crossed against his will and left him seeing the world as if through a kaleidoscope.

  All his strength ebbed at once, and he collapsed to the deck, rolling onto his back as he fell.

  Once more the unearthly siren song of a transporter rang in his ears. Reyes saw several figures dressed in environment suits—or was it one figure multiplied by his blurred vision?—materialize on the bridge. No, it was more than one person; they weren’t all moving the same way…

  One of them checked a scanner and pointed at Reyes.

  Another one leveled a disruptor at Sniadach and shot him in the back of the head, bathing the bridge in crimson light. Then he dispatched Hodgkinson with the same cold precision, another ruby flash illuminating an innocent woman’s execution.

  Two other intruders kneeled beside Reyes. One pressed a hypospray to Reyes’s neck.

  As his vision dimmed and his hearing dulled, Reyes reflected bitterly that he should have expected something like this. Ten years in prison? I knew I’d never get off that easy.

  He gave up his breath and sank into darkness.

  2

  February 18, 2267

  The situation was on the verge of spinning out of control, and Bridget McLellan was standing in the middle of it.

  She was just one among dozens of nameless faces huddled around a weak fire in the middle of a ramshackle shelter. Outside, a frigid wind wailed in minor chords and pushed icy drafts through gaps in the scrap-metal walls.

  Everyone’s attention was on Scalzer, the grizzled, fearsome leader of this multispecies rogues’ gallery. McLellan didn’t know the name of Scalzer’s species, but she’d seen his three-fanged, ridged-headed, black-haired kind a few times before, when she’d been closer to Federation space.

  “Someone in this room has decided to go into business for himself,” Scalzer said, casting an accusatory glare at the assembled smugglers. His right hand flexed on the grip of his holstered disruptor pistol. “Whoever did it, I admire your guramba. But when I find you, I will take your head.”

  Nervous looks traveled from one pirate to the next as the members of the circle sought to evade blame by averting their eyes. Scalzer pivoted slowly, his ire palpable. “I will not ask the traitor to confess.” With his left hand, he reached under his jacket and pulled out a Starfleet-issue tricorder. “Your guilt will speak for itself.”

  McLellan’s eyes widened as she saw the device in Scalzer’s hand. She had no idea how he had acquired it, but she knew she couldn’t leave it in his possession. Bad enough he might use it for crime, she reasoned, but if it falls into the hands of the Klingons …. Her hand closed around the compact phaser in her coat pocket. Can’t let that happen.

  Scalzer activated the tricorder. McLellan watched him through faint licks of orange flame that let off black wisps of smoke. He fiddled with its settings and continued his slow turn as he aimed the device around the room.

  One of his cronies shouted, “What is that thing?”

  “Starfleet scanning device,” Scalzer said. “Very advanced. It will tell me who was the last among you to touch the missing tannot ore.”

  A Tiburonian henchman just a few meters from McLellan protested, “That won’t prove who took it!”

  Scalzer drew his disruptor, aimed at the man who had just spoken, and shot him in the knee. The hireling collapsed, writhing in agony and biting back howls of pain.

  “Maybe not,” Scalzer said, holstering his weapon and stalking toward his fallen retainer. “But it will give me a good place to start.” The leader continued scanning, paying particular attention to the man curled up at his feet.

  McLellan understood why Scalzer was in a hurry. He’d already agreed to sell to the Klingons his three hundred kilos of tannot ore—a primary ingredient in Klingon munitions that the smugglers had stolen from a Nalori mining colony several weeks earlier. The meeting was less than a day away, and there were few things more embarrassing for a thief than to admit to having been robbed of that which he’d stolen fair and square.

  Looking up from the tricorder, Scalzer wrinkled his brow in confusion. “None of you shows recent traces of tannot isotope,” he said. “But according to this scanner … one of you is human.”

  That was McLellan’s cue. Artificial skin pigment and a touch of synthetic pheromones had been enough to let her pass as an Orion and gain entry to the smugglers’ cove, but her disguise wasn’t going to fool a detailed scan.

  She fired her phaser from inside her pocket, a blind shot. The blue beam sliced through her coat’s cheap fabric and lanced through the tricorder in Scalzer’s hands.

  The device erupted in fire, sparks, and a plume of smoke. Scalzer fell backward, surprised but unhurt. Everyone else scattered away from him, widening the circle for a few moments until everyone logjammed at the exits.

  Everyone except McLellan, who had prepared an exit strategy hours earlier. Triggering her encrypted emergency transponder, she rolled across the floor and through a wall panel she’d loosened that led to a snow-covered lane behind the building. Springing to her feet, she sprinted across a dark and narrow street and dashed into a meter-wide gap between two flimsy, jury-rigged structures.

  She heard Scalzer bellowing orders. The moonless night echoed with the wet slapping footfalls of men running across muddy roads. Tinny voices squawked from two-way radios on either side of McLellan as she reached the end of the sliver-thin passageway.

  Sneaking onto the surface of Amonash had been easy. Getting off it was promising to be a bit more challenging.

  McLellan checked the corners ahead of her. Both directions looked clear. Brandishing her phaser, she darted into the street and straight toward the extraction point.

  Bolts of charged plasma screamed past her head.

  She ducked and returned fire on a wide-dispersal setting. The shots might miss their targets or not do much damage, but she hoped they would stun a few of her pursuers or blind them long enough for her to get ba
ck undercover.

  A disruptor blast streaked past her, red and angry, as she somersaulted over a low stack of cargo crates. More shots flashed against the durable metal shipping containers as McLellan rolled to cover. Too close, she admonished herself, fleeing down another alleyway into the cold night.

  One dead end after another forced McLellan to double back, risking capture—and who knew what else—with every step. Stumbling upon a downhill grade, she followed it, remembering that her ride off this miserable rock was waiting for her in a ravine near the bottom of the hill on which this abandoned town-turned-smugglers’ hideout had been built.

  Behind a dilapidated warehouse she skirted the edge of an industrial yard that occupied the last patch of level ground above the ravine. Inside its low-walled perimeter, a labyrinth of pipes, stairs, ladders, and catwalks filled the gaps between dozens of rusted silos, which sat several meters aboveground on corroded metal stilts. Beyond the enclosure, the ground sloped sharply downward into the end of the narrow gorge below.

  Ahead of her, at the far edge of the silo field and past the corner of the warehouse, was a road that led to a hidden trail into the dry ravine where her escape vessel lay.

  Flashlight beams swept back and forth across that road. Searchers with palm beacons were closing in on her.

  She turned back and walked a few steps before she heard more voices drawing near, then she saw more harsh-white beams slice through the darkness, cutting off her path of retreat.