Star Trek: The Next Generation - 113 - Cold Equations: Silent Weapons Read online

  The turbolift door opened with a low hiss, and Captain Picard stepped out, this time attired in his standard duty uniform. He moved with a quick stride, his impulse to action clear in his bearing. “Any progress, Number One?”

  “Not yet, sir.” Worf met Picard in the center of the bridge. “We have detected no transmissions, found no evidence of battle, and no sign of the ship or its pilots.” He nodded at the image of Tirana II on the main viewscreen. “Our initial sweep of the second planet’s surface was negative, but we have begun a Level One search, starting from the polar latitudes.”

  Picard’s concern manifested as a frown. “And what if the Sirriam is on the third planet?”

  “I have ordered the Roanoke to conduct its own independent search. Lieutenant Commander Havers will command the runabout. She is gathering her flight team now.”

  “Very good.” Speaking more confidentially, the captain asked, “Have we been able to acquire any reliable sensor readings of this system made during the time of the disappearance?”

  Worf shook his head. “No, sir. The system is unpopulated and has few exploitable natural resources of any significance. Because it has no obvious tactical or strategic value, no long-range sensors monitor its activity, and it is rarely patrolled.”

  The captain stared at the screen, his brow creased in concentration. “If this system is so unremarkable, why was the Sirriam here?”

  “Punishment detail,” Worf said. Noting the captain’s surprised reaction, he added, “Governor Nolon of Tyberius Prime took offense when the pilots arrested his son for a civil infraction.” He shot a dour look at the screen. “What I want to know is, if the Sirriam was destroyed, who did it, and for what reason? And why is there no evidence of it?”

  Picard met Worf’s queries with a grim nod. “Excellent questions, Number One.” He sighed. “For the moment, however, we need to confine our investigation to matters of a more timely nature.” The captain stepped forward, closer to the ops and conn stations. “Glinn Dygan, how many terrestrial moons orbit this system’s gas giant planets?”

  The Cardassian checked his console. “Nineteen, Captain.”

  “Could the Sirriam have crash-landed on any of them?”

  Dygan sorted through vast amounts of sensor data, winnowing his results with swift precision. “Yes, sir. The interceptor could, in theory, have survived an emergency landing on eleven of those moons. The others are too geologically active to make survival feasible.”

  “I want every shuttle we have prepped for a recon mission,” Picard said. “We need close-range scans of every possible landing site for the Sirriam as soon as possible.”

  The ops officer struck a dubious note. “Does that not seem . . . excessive, sir?”

  “Mister Dygan, if the Sirriam is intact and stranded on some solid body within this star system, then its pilots very likely have less than eight hours of air left to breathe. Whatever steps we take to locate and rescue them, it is imperative that we do so with great haste. Is that clear?”

  Duly chastised, Dygan turned his gaze back toward his console. “Aye, sir. I will need two additional operations managers to coordinate that many simultaneous recon missions.”

  “Conscript whomever you need.” Picard returned to his chair, and Worf stayed close at his side. After they sat down, the captain’s demeanor became graver still. “Number One, has Lieutenant Šmrhová run any scans to check for cloaked ships in the system?”

  “Yes, sir. She used the protocols we refined during the mission to Mangala.”

  As if Worf might be hiding something, Picard prompted him, “And . . . ?”

  “She detected no cloaked vessels in the vicinity.”

  The captain appeared unconvinced. “Assume for a moment, lack of evidence notwithstanding, that the Sirriam was destroyed. If so, it must have been taken by surprise.”

  Worf nodded. “That stands to reason.”

  “Interceptors such as the Sirriam are fast and highly maneuverable, at both impulse and warp, and they have excellent sensors. The only way I can imagine that ship being attacked and unable to escape would be if it were ambushed—which suggests a cloaked adversary.”

  “Perhaps,” Worf said. He did not want to contradict his captain without cause, but too much of Picard’s hypothesis depended upon facts not in evidence. On the other hand, he had learned to trust Picard’s instincts during their long years of shared service. The captain had more than earned the right to ask for Worf’s support, even when all he had to go on was a hunch. For now, Worf decided, that was enough. “I will ask Šmrhová to run variations on the cloak-detection protocols. If there is a ship here using an updated cloaking device, we might be able to expose it by making unexpected random changes to our sensor frequencies.”

  “Make it so, Number One.” The captain drew a deep breath and put on a brave face. “But for all our sakes, let’s hope I’m wrong, and that we find the Sirriam before its time runs out.”

  • • •

  “The Enterprise is continuing its orbit of the second planet. They don’t appear to have detected us, but increased energy levels inside its shuttlebay suggest they are preparing to launch an unknown number of support craft.”

  Thot Raas, commander of the Breen cruiser Mlotek, acknowledged tactical officer Zadlo’s report with a single nod and took a moment to consider the evidence in hand. As he’d feared, the disappearance of the Federation patrol ship several days earlier had triggered a swift response—and, as he’d warned his superiors would be the case after reviewing the latest reports of Starfleet’s deployments in the sector, the Enterprise was the first starship sent to investigate.

  We meet again, Raas brooded. But this time the advantage is mine. He took a perverse satisfaction in concealing his ship from the Enterprise’s sensors using the same methods the Enterprise had employed during its recent action against the factory he’d discovered on Skarbow III. Hidden within the polar magnetic field of Tirana IV, a massive gas giant, the Mlotek was operating at minimum power, a virtual ghost in the EM maelstrom.

  Pazur, the first officer, ended her muted conversation with communications officer Vess and crossed the command deck to join Raas. “The Enterprise continues scanning all frequencies and transmitting hails to the missing patrol ship. It would appear they are proceeding on the assumption that this remains a rescue mission, or, at worst, a salvage operation.”

  “Good. Starfleet’s search-and-rescue protocols are far more labor-intensive than their search-and-destroy patterns. That should buy us some time.” He laid his hand on Zadlo’s padded shoulder. “How long until the Enterprise is out of range, on the far side of the planet?”

  Zadlo keyed several variables into his panel and studied the results on his screen. “Four minutes. They’ll be in the sensor blind for just under two minutes.”

  Raas looked at Pazur. “Coordinate all stations. As soon as Enterprise enters the dead zone, we need to climb free of the magnetic field. Then we have to alert Thot Tran, before the Enterprise finds something it shouldn’t. I’d prefer not to start a war by engaging them directly, but I will if necessary. I’m counting on you to make sure I don’t have to.”

  “Sir, the difficulty in that scenario lies not in emerging to send the transmission, but in returning to cover afterward, before we’re detected. If your objective is to avoid confrontation, it would make more sense to remain under cover and wait for the Enterprise to withdraw.”

  He wondered sometimes whether his second-in-command hoped to usurp his position by luring him into a clumsy error, or if she might in fact be guilty of harboring a negligent degree of naïveté. “Pazur, the Enterprise isn’t going to withdraw until it finds what it came for, or until it’s given a compelling reason to do so. We can satisfy neither of those needs, so we must seek aid from someone who can. As for the risk of breaking cover to send the alert, it can’t be avoided. If we do nothing but wait and hope for the Enterprise crew to grow bored with their search, we’ll all but guarantee our eventu
al discovery—and this entire mission will have been for nothing.”

  Pazur struck a defiant pose. “After the setback we suffered at Skarbow, I thought you’d welcome a chance to settle accounts with the Enterprise and its captain.”

  “If you ever hope to command a ship of your own, you’ll need to learn how to separate the personal from the professional. Knowing one’s opponents—understanding their strengths and shortcomings, their tendencies and passions—is not about developing vendettas. Grudges are nothing but dead weight, Pazur. Never forget that.”

  “What, precisely, should our message to Thot Tran say?”

  Raas pondered that. He had to at least consider the possibility that the Enterprise or some other ship or entity might intercept the message in transit and eventually decode it. Prudence demanded he take steps to guard against such a breach. “Set encryption mode zagadka, idiomatic cipher klamac. Message to read as follows: ‘At sunset, the weevil digs in the grain. Raptors circle the hollow. The steed stands in the forest. The farmer must ring the bell before dark.’ Message ends. Make certain it is marked for Thot Tran’s eyes only.”

  “Understood, sir.” Pazur walked back to Vess to see the message prepared, and then she continued her circuit of the command deck, preparing each station for the intricate choreography Raas expected of them in just a few minutes’ time. On the main screen, the Starfleet cruiser slipped out of view beyond the curve of the second planet’s northern hemisphere. As the last trace of it vanished from sight, Pazur posted a countdown on the viewscreen. “Thirty seconds until they enter the blind spot. All stations, stand by.” Seconds ticked away, a steady erosion of moments, and when the timer on-screen ran out, it switched to a new, two-minute countdown. “Helm, z plus thirty thousand, full thrust. Comms, stand by to transmit on my mark. Tactical, stand ready to engage cloaking device.”

  Helm officer Tren replied, “Clearing the magnetic field in nine seconds. Eight. Seven.” The scant moments stretched out as he counted down the seconds, as if tempting fate to expose the Mlotek to discovery, until finally he declared, “We’re clear.”

  “Transmitting now,” Vess said. “Initiating signal, waiting for confirmation.”

  “There’s no time,” Raas insisted. “Send the burst now.”

  Pazur put herself between Raas and Vess. “Sir, that’s a clear contravention of protocol.”

  He was in no mood to argue with her. “We have seconds in which to act, Pazur. If we—”

  “Confirmation received,” Vess said, obviating the brewing debate. “Burst packet away.”

  Fortune favors us for a change. Relieved beyond words, Raas decided not to test his luck. “Helm, z minus thirty thousand, full thrust. Comm systems back to standby.”

  Tren guided the ship on its vertical drop back into the shelter of Tirana IV’s magnetic field. “Z minus thirty thousand, sir. Now answering all-stop, holding at station.”

  The timer on the main screen ticked down through its final seconds, and a few moments later, the Enterprise reappeared from behind the thumbnail curve of Tirana II.

  “Good work, everyone,” Raas said. “The delicate part is done. Next comes the hard part. Now . . . we wait.”

  6

  The chronometer on the bridge of the U.S.S. Atlas flipped from 0759 to 0800, and first officer Commander Sophie Fawkes swiveled the center seat toward the turbolift, which opened as if on cue. As reliable as a quantum clock, Captain Morgan Bateson emerged and greeted his XO with a polite but taut smile behind his dark brown beard. “Good morning, Fawkes.”

  “Good morning, Captain.” She picked up the padd at her side, stood, and handed the device to Bateson. “No news from the planet, and all decks answer sitrep normal.”

  Bateson reviewed the shift report. “I’d hardly call our current status normal, would you?” He handed back the padd and shook his head. “It feels like a ghost ship, it’s so damned empty. What operational genius thought a skeleton crew could run a Sovereign-class starship?”

  She wrapped the bad news in an awkward smile. “Um, I believe that would be you, sir.”

  “Blast it to hell, don’t remind me.” He settled into his chair, and Fawkes remained on her feet beside him. A quizzical look scrunched his brow. “When you say ‘no news from the planet,’ does that include the shore patrol?” She tried to hide a frown, only to wince instead. Bateson sighed. “It’s all right, Sophie, I’m sitting down now. Just tell me what happened.”

  To refresh her memory, she called up the arrest reports on her padd. “The consensus appears to be that some kind of a brawl started at an . . . adult entertainment center, sometime around 0320. About two dozen of our personnel were involved, and witnesses claim one of our officers assaulted and incapacitated five members of the local police force.”

  The captain pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me it wasn’t Or-Tal.”

  “I would, but that would be a lie, sir. He’s being held pending bail.”

  Bateson winced. “Doesn’t that set a fine example for the crew. Our second officer gets himself arrested fighting with police. I can hardly wait to explain this to Starfleet Command. Contact the Federation Embassy on the surface and have him bailed out, please.”

  “Aye, sir.” Fawkes chose not to add insult to injury by pointing out the irony that Or-Tal was also the ship’s chief of security. She reasoned the irascible Miradorn would catch enough hell as it was when he finally made it back to the ship. No need to throw fuel on the fire. “What about the rest of our people who got nicked last night?”

  She recognized the conflict raging behind Bateson’s glower. The disciplinarian in him clearly wanted to let his rambunctious junior personnel suffer for their mistakes, but his sense of duty to his crew made the notion of leaving them in foreign custody unacceptable. “Add their names to the bail bond and have Ambassador Císol expedite it. I want those people back here by 1400 and scrubbing out the heads on the rec deck by 1405.” He looked past Fawkes at the image of Orion on the main viewscreen and rubbed his thumb against his fist. “To hell with this ‘extended shore leave’ charade. Junior personnel can stay on the surface for now, but I want all senior officers and bridge officers recalled, on the double.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary, sir? I think this is the first shore leave Doctor Kitto’s taken since she came aboard three years ago, and I hear Mister Tzasiz is on a winning streak in one of the casinos.”

  Her appeal garnered no sympathy from Bateson. “You can offer them my apologies once they’re back on board, but I don’t want to risk our CMO and chief engineer winding up on the next arrest report from the shore patrol. Rescind their leaves with immediate effect.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fawkes worried that, in contrast to the quiet mood that reigned aboard the Atlas, her captain seemed extraordinarily on edge. She knew why, of course, but it troubled her.

  Before she could think of a politic way to raise the topic with him, an alert warbled from the security console, turning both their heads toward Lieutenant Karithal, a slender Thallonian woman with a ponytail of jet hair and a deep scarlet complexion, who served as the Atlas’s deputy chief of security. She silenced the alert and reported in a calm and softly lilting voice, “An attempted security breach has been reported at the meeting site’s perimeter.”

  The news brought Bateson to his feet. “Who tried to breach the site?”

  Karithal looked for an answer, then shook her head. “It doesn’t say, sir.”

  He became more agitated. “Is there damage? Was anyone hurt?”

  Once again, the deputy chief was at a loss. “I’ve read you the entire message, sir. I’ve sent a request for more details, but it hasn’t been acknowledged.”

  The captain paced toward Karithal, then back toward Fawkes, then toward his chair, his hands moving erratically, as if he were desperate to hit something or choke someone. “It might be hours before someone gives us a straight answer, if then.” He was like a wild thing suddenly caged, and it was obvious that it ra
nkled him. “To hell with this,” he muttered. He raised his voice as he quick-stepped toward the turbolift. “I’m going down there to find out what the hell just happened. Karithal, sound Yellow Alert and have an armed security team meet me in Transporter Room One. Fawkes, you have the conn.” He strode inside the waiting turbolift and snapped, “Deck Two!” Then the doors closed, leaving Fawkes once again in command—but no closer to having the slightest idea what the hell was happening on the Orion homeworld below.

  • • •

  For a few blissful moments, Captain Morgan Bateson was aware of nothing except the placid haze of the transporter beam, the ineffable sense of being outside himself, a consciousness in fleeting transition, free of its prison of flesh, however briefly.

  Then came the tingling embrace of the annular confinement beam, the subtle galvanic sting of rematerialization, and the fading mellisonance of the beam underscored by a low rush of displaced air. A busy street in Orion’s capital took shape around him, and it was pandemonium: shouting voices, soldiers and police running every which way, the distant bleating of alarms. It was an hour before dawn, but where Bateson expected to see a black sky filled with stars, he saw only a salmon-hued glow, the product of urban light pollution run amok.

  As the confinement beam released him from its protective grip, Bateson turned to look behind him. He stood outside the main gates of the Bank of Orion, a magnificent corkscrew skyscraper in the heart of the eclectic metropolis. Built not to resemble a fortress but to serve as one, the financial institution’s headquarters projected an aura of majesty and invulnerability. Exactly what one would want in a bank, Bateson realized. The enormous building loomed large in the capital’s skyline, and it was ringed entirely by a twenty-meter-tall fence of tritanium bars topped with barbed wire and backed by an invisible force field and a fifty-meter-deep drop that Bateson was surprised hadn’t been filled in with murky water and underfed aquatic predators.