Assassination Game Page 18

  The dorm was empty. The lobby, the turbolifts, the hallways. Everyone else was on their starships, warping off to meet the Varkolak. Kirk wanted to be with them out there. It was what he had trained for. Why he had joined Starfleet to begin with. But Starfleet was a “peacekeeping and humanitarian armada.” That’s what Captain Pike had told him that night back in Iowa when he’d talked Kirk into joining up. And what better way to keep the peace than to stop a war before it began?

  Kirk was imagining the medal he would get for this when he turned the corner and walked straight into Uhura. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs, the PADD she was holding skittering away on the floor.

  “Kirk!”

  “Uhura!”

  “McCoy,” Bones said, waving hello.

  “What are you doing here, Kirk?” Uhura demanded.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Uhura didn’t answer. Instead she tried to get up, but she and Kirk were still too tangled for either of them to get free.

  “Grr. Kirk, why is it, wherever I go, you end up on top of me?” Uhura asked.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Kirk said with a smile.

  The door beside them slid open, and a startled Nadja Luther stared back at them, a satchel slung over her shoulder.

  “Nadja!” Bones said.

  “Leonard?”

  “Kirk!” yelled Uhura.

  “Uhura—” said Kirk.

  “Mrs. Penelope, greif an!”

  Nadja’s little cairn terrier shot from the apartment and latched onto Bones’s pant leg, growling and tearing.

  “Ow! Down, you little devil! Heel! Halt! Desist!”

  Nadja barreled past them, knocking Bones into Kirk and Uhura and sprinting down the hall.

  Bones righted himself and kicked his leg out, flinging the little terrier harmlessly down the hallway. “Come on!” he said, dragging Kirk to his feet. “Before that holy terror gets its legs back!”

  “Sorry!” Kirk said over his shoulder to Uhura as Mrs. Penelope went after her instead.

  Nadja had grabbed the only turbolift, so they took the stairs. She was already out the door and halfway across the quad before they got outside, but Kirk was able to close the gap on her while Bones lagged behind. At first Kirk thought she might be heading for a transporter, but she took a left at the public transporter hub and ran for one of the shuttlepads. Kirk knew if she got there before he caught up to her, they would lose her. Nadja’s long legs and athletic training kept her out front. She blew past a stunned deck officer at the shuttlepad and threw herself into the only shuttle left, a short range Class F called the Davy Crockett. The door lowered shut just as Kirk got there, and he leaned on it and banged on the duranium hull.

  “Nadja! Stop! Wait!”

  She wasn’t about to do either one. Kirk heard the shuttle’s ion engine fire up, and he backed away as the shuttle lifted off and swung around, heading up into the atmosphere.

  Bones ran up, panting. Uhura was right behind him.

  “Now we’ve lost her!” she said. “Damn it, Kirk! You’ve ruined everything!”

  “Me? I’m not the one who was skulking around in what was supposed to be an empty hallway.”

  “I was skulking, as you call it, because I was trying to stop the person who planted those bombs!”

  “Nadja Luther,” Kirk said. “Yeah. We know. That’s what we were doing there too.”

  The confused deck officer ran up, checking her own PADD. “That cadet can’t just take a shuttle without filing a flight plan,” she said. “Where’s she going?”

  Kirk shook his head. “No telling.”

  Uhura checked her PADD and shook her head. “I’ve lost her. She’s out of range.”

  “No,” Bones said, trying to catch his breath. “No, wait. I know where she’s going.”

  Kirk, Uhura, and the deck officer all waited impatiently for him to get his wind back.

  “Spit it out!” Uhura told him.

  “Not all of us joined Starfleet because we like to run all over creation,” Bones groused.

  “Bones, where’d she go?” Kirk asked.

  His friend sighed. “The Argos telescope. I’d bet the horse farm on it.”

  “Argos?” Uhura said. “Why?”

  “I caught her rooting around in the machinery the last time I was there. She told me she was just fixing something, but …”

  “We need a shuttle,” Kirk told the deck officer. “It’s an emergency. That woman, she’s the one who planted the bombs at the medical conference, and now she’s headed for the Argos telescope.”

  “W-What?” the deck officer stammered. “But—”

  “We don’t have time to explain,” Uhura told her. “Please. We need a shuttle.”

  “That was the last of mine,” the deck officer said. She checked her PADD. “There are still shuttles at pads one, three, six, and nine, but they all have cadets on them for transport to McKinley. They’ll be leaving any minute.”

  Think, Kirk told himself. Think. You don’t have a shuttle. How do you get to Argos?

  “Wait! Can I see that?” he asked the deck officer. She shrugged, handing him her PADD. He scrolled through the passenger manifests. Please, please, please—Yes! There!

  “Hold this shuttle!” he told the deck officer. “Tell them … tell them there’s turbulence, or something’s wrong with their antimatter containment, or there are turtles on the runway—something. Anything. Just don’t let them take off yet!”

  “All—all right,” the deck officer said, bewildered.

  “Kirk, they’re never going to let us have one of those,” Bones said.

  Kirk shook his head. “We don’t need a shuttle. We’ve got something better.” He took out his communicator and flipped it open.

  “Kirk to Chekov; come in, buddy.”

  CH.27.30

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to Starfleet

  Pavel Andreievich Chekov waited for his transport shuttle to lift off, clinging to his personal safety harness in exactly the way the instructional vid told them to. He didn’t care that all the other cadets around him weren’t paying attention to the vid or holding on in the correct fashion; it wasn’t an order, after all, just a recommendation. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust the shuttle or had any doubts about the pilots. It was just that there were reasons for doing things the right way. In this case, holding on would help prevent minor bumps and abrasions should they experience turbulence in the atmosphere or loose artificial gravity in space, which had been known to happen.

  The safety vid ended, and Chekov took a deep breath and relaxed, trying not to think about his assignment. It was important not to get too excited. Getting excited made him look like he was a kid, which he practically was, but he wanted—he needed—his senior officers to think of him as an adult. In less than an hour he’d be standing by as the relief navigator on the USS Nautilus, an important posting for the Academy’s youngest cadet.

  Just telling himself not to get excited got him excited, though. Calm thoughts, he reminded himself. Breathe. Taking his Vulcan mathematics teacher’s advice, he began to recite pi in his head to focus himself. 3.141592653589793238462643383—

  Chekov’s communicator rang.

  At first he just stared at his pocket, not understanding. Who did he know who would call him in the middle of a red alert?

  Alex Leigh, one of the many twentysomething women in his dorm who looked upon the teenage Pavel Chekov like a little brother, sat beside him on the shuttle. She nudged him.

  “Your communicator’s ringing.”

  “Who do I know who would call me in the middle of a red alert?”

  “Why don’t you answer it and find out?”

  Chekov let go of the safety harness, all worries about turbulence and weightlessness tossed aside. He fished out his communicator and flipped it open.

  “Who do I know who would call me in the middle of a red alert?” he asked. “Oh! Hello! … You are? She is? You do? Yes—yes, I can do that. I
can do that! I’ll be right there.”

  Chekov flipped his communicator closed and unbuckled himself.

  “Pavel, what are you doing?” Alex asked him. “We’re just about to take off.”

  “I can’t go. They need my help!”

  “Who needs your help?”

  A redshirted officer came down the narrow aisle of seats. “Cadet, refasten your safety harness. We’re getting ready to leave.” At the other end of the shuttle, the outer door began to close.

  “No! No, wait! I have to get off the shuttle!” Chekov broke for the door, his runner’s instincts kicking in and his thin, nimble legs dancing between the outstretched legs of his fellow cadets.

  “Cadet! Come back here!” the redshirt called. “You leave this ship and you’re AWOL!”

  Chekov glanced back in time to see the big officer stumble and fall at the feet of the other cadets, thanks to a trip from Alex.

  “Oops,” she said. “Sorry, sir.” She winked at Chekov, and he blushed and nodded his thanks before diving out through the closing door.

  McCoy paced the engineering building’s transporter room, wondering what Kirk was playing at. There was no way they could transport up to the Argos telescope from here. Not directly. It was hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, well outside the range of any standard transporter. He kept telling McCoy to be patient, but every second they wasted was another second Nadja Luther had to do whatever it was she had started that night he’d joined her on the Argos telescope.

  “We’re wasting time,” McCoy said again, and again Kirk told him to calm down. His friend was actually leaning casually against the transporter console, like he was doing nothing more urgent than waiting on a pizza to be delivered.

  Across the room, Uhura flipped her communicator closed. She’d been talking to someone, filling them in on everything after they had all compared notes, but she hadn’t wanted McCoy and Kirk listening in. Secrets within secrets within damn secrets.

  “All right. How are we doing this?” Uhura asked. “We’re wasting time.”

  “That’s what I keep trying to tell him,” McCoy said.

  “You guys relax. We can’t do this without—and there he is!”

  A slight, curly headed, red-faced cadet came running into the room, smiling.

  “Here I am!” he said. “I made it!”

  Kirk ruffled the boy’s hair. “You made great time, buddy. Thanks for coming.”

  “I am glad to help!”

  “Wait a minute,” McCoy said. “This kid? Aren’t you the one who runs around barefoot all the time?”

  “Yes. I find that the foot’s natural arch acts as a spring, absorbing the shock of striking the ground and converting the energy of the fall into forward motion, like this,” the kid said, demonstrating.

  “Well, it’s true that running on the balls of your feet remove stress from the plantar fascia,” McCoy said. “There’s a study of the human foot in the latest—”

  Kirk tapped an imaginary chronometer on his wrist. “Um, Bones? Maybe we can table this fascinating discussion for another time?” Kirk turned to Chekov. “We need to get to Argos. You think you can do it?”

  “I’m sure I can,” Chekov said. He hurried behind the transporter console and began tapping at the controls.

  “There’s just no way,” McCoy said. “The distances are too great. And if you think I’m letting him shoot my atoms off into space in the hopes that they land somewhere—”

  “McKinley to Excalibur, to … the USS Prester John, to the USS Surprise, if she’s still holding station by then … then Jupiter Station, back to the Tennessee—”

  “Wait. You’re going to bounce us there, pad to pad?”

  McCoy said. “It can’t be done, Jim!”

  “You did it, Bones,” Kirk said.

  “Not in five minutes! It took me a week to set up that stunt!”

  “You went to Argos by transporter?” Uhura asked.

  “To impress Nadja Luther,” Kirk told her. “For their big date under the stars.”

  “Wait, you’re dating this girl?” Uhura said.

  “Was dating her,” McCoy corrected. “I’d say things started to go downhill when she tried to frame me for treason.”

  “Later,” Kirk said, hustling them up onto the transporter pad. “You can override all the pads you need from here to there?” he asked Chekov.

  “I think so.”

  “He thinks so?” McCoy said. He tried to get back down off the pad, but Kirk held him where he was. “Jim, I had my first drink before that boy was even born!”

  “You’ve got enough transporters to get us there?” Uhura asked.

  “Um, mostly,” Chekov said.

  “Mostly?” Kirk said, his grip on McCoy loosening.

  “Initiating transport in three … two … one …” Chekov said, and McCoy felt that awful tug in his gut that said he was being broken down into atoms.

  He just hoped the junior space cadet could put him back together in one piece somewhere.

  Kirk, Bones, and Uhura rematerialized on the familiar small transporter pad of the Argos telescope and stumbled off, trying to regain their senses.

  “Hell’s bells, how many transporter pads was that?” Bones said. He began his usual routine of patting himself down and looking for misplaced pieces.

  “I counted eleven,” Uhura said. She looked a little sick herself.

  Kirk glanced at Bones. “I think that last one might have been the Potemkin. I recognized that transporter chief. I hope he didn’t recognize us.”

  Uhura pulled out her PADD and tapped it. “The signal! It’s here!”

  “Well, looks like we didn’t take the trip for nothing. Good call, Bones.”

  “Yeah, I’m ecstatic,” he said.

  “All right. She’s probably trying to set a bomb using the fake Varkolak phaser you gave her,” Kirk told Uhura. He took the PADD from her. “Bones and I will take care of Nadja and the bomb.”

  “What? Why?” Uhura said. She yanked the PADD back from him.

  “Because,” Kirk said, taking the PADD back again, “you need to get to the telescope’s communication array and tell the fleets not to fight, and you’re the only person here who speaks Varkolak.”

  Uhura frowned, but she knew he was right.

  “Detach her shuttle so she can’t get away,” Kirk called as he and Bones set off at a run. “And don’t worry. We’ve got everything covered. Trust me!”

  “Right,” Uhura muttered.

  Back in the engineering building’s transporter room, Chekov pulled his hands away from the console and smiled.

  “I did it,” he said out loud to the empty room. “I did it!”

  To his surprise, one of the Academy’s instructors ran into the room. Commander Spock, from the simulation room. Chekov instinctively stood at attention.

  Spock raised an eyebrow. “Cadet Chekov. Should you not be on a shuttle to McKinley Station right now?”

  “I—” Chekov began, not sure how to explain his presence here.

  “Never mind. I will deal with it when I return,” Spock told him. “Stand aside. I need to see if it is possible to transport myself to the Argos telescope.” Chekov held up a finger to stop him. “I can do that.”

  CH.28.30

  The Dogs of War

  Kirk had Uhura’s PADD and the tracking signal to help them find Nadja, but McCoy knew where she would be: in the Jefferies tube where he’d found her before. Replacing an ODN conduit, she’d told him. He’d been such a fool. Love did that to you, McCoy thought. Made you blind, made you deaf, made you stupid. Maybe those Vulcan bastards who denied themselves emotions had it right after all. But then McCoy wouldn’t have gotten to feel the righteous anger he was feeling right now, which felt pretty damn satisfying.

  Nadja was just climbing out of the access tunnel when they caught up to her. She was as surprised as last time to see them, but this time she leveled a Federation-issue phaser at them.

  Kirk and McCoy
pulled up to a stop. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a phaser on you, do you Jim?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I carry one around so I can stun people whenever I want to.”

  Touché, thought McCoy, and he and Kirk put their hands in the air.

  “That’s right,” Nadja said, backing away. “You just stand right there.”

  “Nadja, wait,” McCoy said. “Let’s talk. There’s nowhere to go, anyway. We set your shuttle adrift.” Or we hope Uhura has, he thought.

  Nadja’s eyes darted between them, trying to figure out if they were lying.

  “We know what you’re doing, Nadja,” Kirk told her. “You planted a bomb in there with the Varkolak phaser to make it look like the Varkolak did it. It’s not a real one, though. It’s a fake. People are on to you.”

  Nadja shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. Once this telescope goes up, the Federation will blame the Varkolak, and before anybody knows any different, we’ll be at war.”

  “How could you do this?” McCoy said. “How could you do this to me?”

  Nadja shrugged again. “I knew they’d bring the fragments back to your lab for analysis. I needed someone’s codes to get in and contaminate the evidence with kemocite. And somebody I could lay it all off on if they figured it out.”

  “You used me,” McCoy said. He could feel his right supraorbital vein bulging on his forehead. “Played me like a cheap fiddle, right from the start. You were never interested in me at all. It was always about your little vendetta against the Varkolak.”

  “The Varkolak are dogs!” Nadja said. There was a wild look in her eye, and her hand shook. Kirk took a half-step forward, but Nadja jerked the phaser back up at him. From where McCoy stood, he could see that the phaser was set to stun, but with a bomb about to go off, the stun setting might be as deadly as the kill setting.

  “Starfleet has been too conciliatory. The Varkolak push, and we give. They push more, we give more. You know what happens when you let your dog win a game of tug-of-war with you? They start thinking they’re the alpha dog, and you’re some whelp. Then they’ll never listen to you. Never take another order. We need to show the Varkolak who their master is. One good stare down, one good lesson, and they’ll heel.”