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  Bashir, however, was deep in thought. “I know someone who can help.”

  “Who?” Graniv asked.

  A winsome smile brightened Bashir’s face. “Let’s just say, if I’m right . . . Turan just described this man to a T.”

  Ten

  MARCH 2147

  It might have been presumption, but Aaron Ikerson had always hoped that the first time he set foot on a starship, it would actually have an outer hull. And interior bulkheads. Maybe a few deck plates. Doors he could consider optional, provided the other elements were all in place.

  Instead he trod in careful paces, heel to toe, one foot after the other, across a narrow beam some starship construction engineer had informed him was the vessel’s keel. If he took his eyes off the beam and looked down, the shallow bright-blue curve of Earth spread out beneath him. If he looked up, he found nothing but the indifferent glow of the stars—feeble pinpricks of cold fire scattered across the endless black of the cosmos.

  As best he could, he kept his eyes on his feet and the keel and his gloved hands tight on the guide cable threaded through a carabiner attached to the hip of his environmental suit.

  Admiral Rao walked a few paces ahead of him, her life tethered to the same guide cable but her steps on the keel far more steady and certain. Her voice rang clear through the transceiver inside Ikerson’s helmet. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t know if she meant the Earth, the starship’s naked spaceframe, or the universe, so he kept his tone flat and replied, “Sure is.”

  To either side of the starship’s frame loomed the gridlike walls of Earth Spacedock. They were festooned with work lights whose blinding glare discouraged prolonged inspection with the naked eye. Single-operator construction vehicles dodged massive robotic arms that were busy making welds to the outermost duranium bones of the starship’s skeleton. Based on artists’ renderings of the new vessel he had seen on the news, he realized he was looking at one of the pylons that would someday support the ship’s warp nacelles.

  Ikerson mustered his nerve. “Mind if I ask a question, Admiral?”

  “Not at all, Professor.”

  “Why am I up here?”

  She sounded amused. “Because you’re my guest. Being an admiral has its privileges on occasion, and this is one of them.” She paused at a junction of the keel and a crossbeam, pivoted from her waist so she could see Ikerson, and pointed to direct his attention past her. “See that?”

  He stopped and leaned right to get a better angle. “The fusion reactor?”

  “It’s part of the impulse core. A year from now it’ll propel this ship to within a quarter of the speed of light. But for now, it provides essential power to new systems as they’re installed.” She resumed walking and beckoned him onward. “Let’s keep going.”

  Their path toward the ship’s bow took them under the reactor. As they basked in its blue glow, he wondered aloud, “Is it safe for us to be here?”

  “Relax,” Rao said. “The reactor’s shielded, and so are we.” She paused just long enough to steal a look back at him. “Hurry up, we’re almost there.”

  It was irrational for Ikerson to fear falling. He and Rao were in zero gravity, tethered with a safety line, and secured to the keel by magnetic coils in the soles of their boots. Yet with each step he feared some unlikely series of tragic mishaps would send him floating off into the endless vacuum. It took several deep breaths to restore his singular focus on the keel under his feet and the cable passing through his hands.

  Rao halted just shy of a ring-shaped interior beam that seemed to demarcate the center of the vessel’s future saucer section. She turned to stand sideways, then put her hand on Ikerson’s back when he reached her. “This is it, Professor. Ready?”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. “For what?”

  “Look up,” the admiral said, pointing.

  Above them, a pair of mechanical arms lowered a cylindrical masterpiece of computer engineering into the empty space at the heart of the frame’s saucer-to-be. When it was aligned with the middle rings, it was secured in place. Then the safety welds began, and a squad of technicians in environmental suits initiated the tedious work of fitting the main computer core with bundles of cable that would, in months to come, link it to every system on the ship.

  “It’s marvelous,” Rao said. “One of the finest cores ever made. If the warp core is going to be this ship’s heart, this will be its brain.”

  “Then what’s its crew?”

  “They’re its conscience,” Rao said, not missing a beat. “And its soul.” She smiled at him. “And they won’t know it, but they’ll have you to thank for some of the best protection they’ll never see.” Perhaps noting his lack of understanding, she added, “Uraei. It’s embedded in the core’s root kit. And it’ll be in this ship’s every console, probe, and subspace comm buoy.”

  What could he say to such news? On some level he had always known this was the reason he’d made Uraei, but to see it come to fruition with so little oversight was unnerving. Yet all he said to Rao was, “Impressive.”

  “It is, Professor. My only regret is that we can’t give you the credit you’re due.” Her affect turned the slightest bit maudlin. “None of this ship’s crew will ever know your name. You won’t be listed on its dedication plaque or found in its design registry. There won’t be any mention of you or Uraei in the history books. But you’ll be the reason we have them.”

  “I guess I never really thought about it that way,” he confessed.

  “That’s why I thought you deserved to be here today. To see them put in the core. And to know that a piece of you will be with this ship and all those that follow her, as they take humanity to the stars. Say hello to the dawn of your legacy, Professor.” She gestured at the spaceframe around them with a dramatic sweep of her arm. “Say hello to the Enterprise.”

  Eleven

  There were worse places in the galaxy than the Orion homeworld, but none that Ozla Graniv held in deeper contempt.

  Orion was a study in unjust contrasts; an ultrarich minority cavorted in high-end casinos and hotels, gorging its every sinful appetite, while the majority of the planet’s occupants eked out subsistence livings in the service industries and unskilled labor sectors. Inside the gated havens of the wealthy, the air was crisp and the water sweet; in run-down arcologies clustered into ghettos on the outskirts of the planet’s major cities, everything was tainted, polluted, fouled beyond recovery. Streets stood choked with garbage. The elites schooled their scions in private academies; everyone else taught their children whatever they could when they weren’t putting them to work or, worse, auctioning them off into indentured servitude or sentient trafficking.

  All in the name of freedom, of course. To the Orions, this was personal liberty. It all sounded like a sick joke to Graniv. How could someone be free when the society in which they lived had been rigged against them decades before they were even born? Who could ever hope to excel to a degree that would let them escape such institutionalized squalor? When she looked at Orion society as an outsider, all she saw was greed masquerading as virtue, selfishness venerated as courage. It made her want to burn the whole planet down.

  Self-immolation worked for Earth a few centuries back, she brooded while following Bashir and Douglas out of the public starport toward a waiting queue of private transports. Who’s to say a worldwide economic cataclysm couldn’t do some good here?

  Bashir and Douglas climbed inside the transport pod, and Graniv got in beside them. Douglas flashed her phony identification card in front of the credit-chip reader and said to the automated vehicle’s onboard controls, “The Royal Pantages Hotel and Casino.”

  A voice made to sound a bit synthetic flowed from the pod’s speakers. “Welcome, Ms. Harrow. Would you prefer to take the expedited route for an extra fifty Federation credits?”

 
“Yes,” Douglas said. “Authorized.” The pod pulled away from the curb, made a graceful merge into traffic, gained altitude and speed, then shot forward into the express lane.

  The nightscape of the capital blurred past outside the pod’s tinted windows. Graniv watched the shapes and lights bleed into a wash of color and shadow. “I hope you two know what you’re doing,” she said. “If the Orion Syndicate finds out I’m here—”

  “They won’t,” Bashir said. “That’s why we got you a fake ID chip.”

  “They know my face, Doctor.” She bit her nails, a nervous habit she thought she’d outgrown years earlier. “My exposés sent more than a few of their people to prison.”

  Confidence and calm suffused Douglas’s reply. “Maybe. But we have something big going for us while we’re here.” She lifted her chin toward the city outside. “The Orions hate public surveillance. And they don’t like being tracked.”

  “This might be the one planet in local space that’s made a religion out of rejecting anything the Federation sends its way,” Bashir added. “Which means no Uraei hearing us talk or watching our every move.”

  “And you think we’ll find someone here to help us stop Uraei?”

  A diffident shrug from Bashir. “It’s worth a try.”

  The pod banked right and descended at alarming speed through crisscrossing waves of air traffic before slowing along a wide boulevard in the ritzy section of the capital. As the egg-shaped vehicle drifted to a gentle halt beside the curb, Graniv looked out—then up—at the towering majesty of the Royal Pantages Hotel and Casino. It was as garish as any other megastructure on Orion Prime, but as the pod’s doors opened, and she and her companions got out, she discovered the real wonder was the steady flow of beautiful people through the hotel’s main entrance. Creatures of multiple species and innumerable genders, all decked out in their cultures’ ideas of sublime formal­wear, constituted the clientele of the Royal Pantages.

  Graniv felt her stomach turn. “I can’t go in there.”

  “No one cares if we’re underdressed,” Douglas said.

  “I’m not worried about a fashion faux pas,” Graniv snapped. “Those are political power players from around the galaxy. People of influence. The kind I skewer in the press. They’re the only people in the universe who could spot me faster than the Syndicate.”

  A knowing smirk transited Bashir’s bearded face. “I doubt they’ll give any of us a second look. For one thing, we’re not going in through the front. For another, there was a reason I told you to wear all black.” He started walking and beckoned her with a nod. “Come on.”

  She watched Bashir and Douglas stroll with perfect nonchalance up the sidewalk. Unsure of what they were planning, but sure she didn’t want to be left outside on her own, she followed them. Less than a minute later they rounded a corner and approached a secondary ingress to the Royal ­Pantages—the staff and service entrance.

  Graniv stink-eyed Bashir. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “You wanted discreet,” he said.

  Predictably, Douglas was on her lover’s side. “The kind of folks you’re worried about never look at servants. Do it our way and we’ll be in and out, totally incognito.”

  “I hope you’re right. If not, we’ll all be dead before we hit the floor.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Bashir said, leading Graniv and Douglas inside.

  Their fraudulent credentials let them breeze through both of the hotel’s outer checkpoints. In under a minute they were inside, moving through bleak back-of-the-house corridors, past the engineering and housekeeping facilities, then the laundry, and finally the kitchen and dishroom. Bashir and Douglas each made a point of picking up a tray of clean glassware before leading Graniv through a pair of swinging doors onto the casino floor, then toward one of the luxurious hotel’s many well-stocked cocktail bars.

  There were only a few people sitting at the bar. Graniv studied each of them with quick, subtle glances, but found herself at a loss to recognize any of them. She pinched Bashir’s sleeve. “Which of them are we here to see?”

  “None,” Bashir said. “We’re looking for the bartender.”

  They reached the bar before she could ask Bashir why a mixologist of all people would be of any help to them. Douglas and Bashir set down their racks of glassware, and the bartender stood up from behind the counter. He was young looking, possibly human or Argelian. His tawny complexion had peculiar golden undertones that contrasted with his slick crown of black hair and pencil-thin dark mustache. Complementing his well-groomed visage was a ­dapper choice of work attire—his dark pants and cream-­colored dress shirt were accessorized with a silver-­embroidered vest of midnight-blue silk and a matching bowtie. On the breast of his jacket, above the pocket, was a nametag that bore what Graniv assumed was a surname: Soong.

  Soong’s brown eyes lit up at the sight of Bashir, and he spoke with a peculiar accent. “Julian! How long has it been, old friend?”

  “Seventeen years, give or take. For me, anyway. Maybe not so long for you.”

  The bartender waggled a finger at Bashir. “Clever.” He swung one arm toward his bar’s copiously provisioned shelves. “What can I get for you?”

  “Answers, I hope.” Bashir turned sly looks toward Douglas and Graniv. “My friends and I are here to see the man upstairs—and his capable assistant.”

  Apparently intrigued but cautious, Soong asked, “About what, exactly?”

  Douglas answered, “One of his areas of special expertise.”

  Bashir leaned closer to Soong. “Forgive us—time is a factor.”

  Soong’s mood turned serious. “I understand.” He turned away and raised his voice to tell another barkeep at the far end of the counter, “Loskur, I’m knocking off early. Take over.” The other man acknowledged the handoff with a salute, and Soong stepped out from behind the bar to stand with Bashir, Douglas, and Graniv. “The lift is this way,” he said, guiding them down a passage that led away from the casino floor.

  Graniv followed him and the others, troubled by the nagging suspicion that she had seen this bartender somewhere before . . .

  • • •

  The door to the penthouse suite slid open as the quartet approached, and as Data strode inside his residence du jour he shed his borrowed persona along with its semicomical Transatlantic accent—an affectation he had picked up from watching entertainments from the Hollywood cinema of early twentieth-century Earth. He addressed his guests in his normal, uninflected Federation Standard. “Please have a seat. Anywhere you like.”

  Doctor Bashir and Ms. Douglas took in the spacious surroundings and sparse furnishings with a measure of aplomb that eluded their journalist friend, who gazed in wonder at the 270-degree view of the cityscape outside the main room’s single arcing wall of transparent aluminum. Data couldn’t say he blamed her for her reaction. In truth, he also found his accommodations a touch ostentatious—but then, he hadn’t chosen them so much as he had inherited them. The penthouse suite of the Royal Pantages, which had gone by a different name before its sale to the current management, was one of a limited number of perquisites left to him by Noonien Soong, his father—or creator, depending upon one’s point of view with regard to the inception of synthetic life and artificial intelligence, such as an android with a positronic matrix for a brain—despite Noonien having sold off most of his interest in the hotel and casino business years earlier.

  Data activated a transceiver built into his matrix and initiated contact with his AI assistant Shakti—another boon bequeathed to him by his late father. {Shakti, I apologize for the short notice, but we have visitors. Please ready the suite’s guest rooms.}

  She responded, «Right away, Data.»

  Their interaction was finished in less than a millisecond, while he undid his tie. He cast the unraveled bow onto an end table and turned to face Bashir and Douglas, wh
o sat on the nearby sofa. Then he noticed their friend was still staring out the windows. “Ms. Graniv? Are you all right? Can I offer you a beverage? Or something to eat?”

  Graniv turned and regarded him with a quizzical look. “You know my name?”

  “Of course. I’ve read all of your published work.” He thought it best not to mention he had done so during a span of 19.0174 seconds during their ride together in the hotel’s lift.

  His omission seemed to have the desired flattering effect. Graniv blushed, then relaxed after a deep breath. “Well, then. You have me at a disadvantage, then, Mister . . . ?”

  “Data.” He usually preferred to be circumspect about his identity, but he trusted Bashir—after all, the doctor had helped him unlock his dreaming subroutines seventeen years earlier, on Deep Space 9—and Graniv’s reputation preceded her. Few people aside from his former Enterprise shipmates and certain high-ranking members of Starfleet knew of his recent reincarnation into an android body that once had belonged to his father, Noonien Soong. The late scientist had briefly copied his own consciousness into an android body before giving it up to serve as a new vessel for Data, whose memories had been trapped in the less-advanced matrix of his older brother B-4. Now Data longed for the day when he could live free as a regular citizen of the Federation along with his daughter, Lal, whom he had resurrected with help from the immortal human his father had once known as his rival Emil Vaslovik.

  The Trill woman moved away from the window to stand near Bashir and Douglas. “A pleasure to meet you, Mister Data. I hope you can help us. We’re in a bit of a bind.”

  Data looked at Bashir. “How can I be of help?”

  “Do you have a padd that can be blocked from sending out signals?”

  He scrunched his brow to telegraph his concerns about the question. “That is a difficult query to answer. Even a simple padd can be rigged to transmit information in a number of ways. Aside from subspace radio frequencies, padds can send data over a variety of wavelengths in the electro­magnetic spectrum, as well as in the form of ultrasonic or infrasonic pulses, or even as flashes of visible light. To guarantee signal containment would require—”