Assassination Game Read online

  “The Varkolak aren’t dogs, and they’re not animals,” Kirk told her. “I’ve gotten to know one. They’re people, just like us. Sure, they’re a lot hairier and they shed all over the furniture, but—”

  Nadja fired the phaser, a blue bolt of stun energy erupting between them in the small corridor. Kirk pushed McCoy out of the way, but part of the blast still hit him in the arm. He spun and fell.

  “Bones!” Kirk cried.

  Nadja had already turned the corner and was running away. McCoy wasn’t unconscious. The stun blast had just glanced his left arm, but his nerves and his muscles were numb and useless. It felt like he had no left arm. He grimaced at the weird feeling.

  “Bones, you gonna be all right?” Kirk asked.

  “Yes, yes. Go. Get her,” he said.

  Kirk stood and ran. “Defuse that bomb!” he called over his shoulder.

  “And just how am I supposed to do that? I’m a doctor, damn it, not a—” he started to say, but Kirk was already long gone. “Oh, never mind.”

  In the Argos command center, Uhura found where Nadja’s shuttle was docked and disengaged the station’s locking clamps, setting it adrift. They might want that shuttle at some point, she thought, but it was safer that none of them could reach it. Once they caught Nadja Luther, they could just wait for a starship to come and pick them all up.

  If they caught Nadja Luther.

  And if all the starships weren’t already at war. Uhura had to trust Kirk could put his action where his mouth was and let it go. They had a job to do, and so did she. She retrained the telescope on the Varkolak Armada and gasped at the image that came up on the viewscreen. More Varkolak ships than she could count hung in the black of space, facing off against an equally formidable line of Federation starships. They weren’t shooting yet, but when they did, the carnage would be incredible—on both sides.

  Uhura heard someone running in behind her and turned. Spock! She stood and gave him a quick hug and a kiss.

  “Where is Nadja Luther?” he asked.

  “She’s being taken care of,” Uhura told him. I hope. “I was just about to try and contact the Varkolak. You contact the fleet.”

  Spock nodded, and without another word, they both set to their tasks.

  On the bridge of the USS Excalibur, all eyes were on the viewscreen, where the biggest starship armada the quadrant had ever seen arrayed itself in a wide semicircle. The Varkolak. Among the most feared warriors in all the galaxy. And soon the Excalibur would be flying straight into the wolves’ teeth.

  Sulu tried to keep his mind on his job and to not stare at the screen. While the primary helm officer would be flying the ship in, Sulu would be his second pair of eyes, feeding him telemetry on the rest of the ships in their theater of the battle. It wasn’t necessary work—one officer could pilot a starship without an assist from secondary helm—but when they had people to spare, every little bit helped. And this way, Sulu would be on the bridge to step in for Lieutenant Bunch if he, well, if he were no longer able to perform his duties.

  Ever since he was a boy, it had been Sulu’s dream to be on the bridge of a Federation starship. Now here he was. On a Constitution class, no less. One of the lead ships of the Federation’s defense fleet. He had dreamed of being here, and he had worked his tail off for it. He had earned it, all by keeping his head down and sticking to The Plan. He wished it could be under better circumstances, but he would do his duty to the Federation, in peace or in war.

  “Captain, Priority One signal coming in from … from the Argos telescope, sir,” Lieutenant Chang said.

  That pulled everyone’s attention away from the viewscreen for a moment. Captain Prax turned in his chair.

  “The Argos telescope?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s from a commander Spock.”

  Sulu perked up. Spock? Sending a Priority One signal? Had they caught Nadja Luther?

  Chang put a hand to the communications bud in his ear and frowned. “He’s—he’s insisting that the Federation fleet stand down, sir.”

  “Stand down? Does the man know we’ve got a dozen Varkolak target locks on us?”

  “Sir!” cried Bunch at helm. “Varkolak Armada changing position.”

  “They’re advancing, weapons hot!” said Larkin at tactical.

  “Helm, take us in. Full power to forward shields. Ready phasers,” Captain Prax ordered.

  Sulu spun back to his station, hands poised above his console to begin feeding Bunch the extra information he would need, but he paused.

  Keep your head down, Sulu. Stay on course. That’s what got you here.

  But that might not be what would get him out again. Him and the thousand other people on the Excalibur, and the thousands of other people in ships on both sides. He took a deep breath and turned.

  “Captain, you need to listen to Commander Spock’s message,” he said.

  The senior officers on the bridge turned to look at the field-promoted cadet, like he had suddenly sprouted white fur and grown a rhinoceros horn out the top of his head. All around them, lights were flashing and alarms were sounding, but for the moment, they only had eyes for him.

  “I do, Mr….?”

  “Sulu, sir. Hikaru Sulu.” Sulu tried hard not to let his voice crack. “Sir, we’re about to fight the Varkolak for no good reason. It’s all been a plot by someone on Earth, and Commander Spock has been tracking down the truth. You need to listen to him, sir. It could stop a war before it starts.”

  The captain stared at him for what seemed like an eternity.

  “I wouldn’t be a very good captain if I didn’t listen to my bridge crew,” he said at last. “Helm, hold station. Tactical, keep a target lock.” He looked at Sulu, though he spoke to the communications officer. “Mr. Chang, let’s hear what all the fuss is about.”

  Nadja Luther moved like a cat through the Argos station’s tiny, winding corridors, crawling, climbing, dropping down chutes. Just when Kirk thought he was gaining on her, she would turn and fight back at him, keeping him at bay. But if she wasn’t going for her shuttle, where was she going? He scanned the station’s layout in his mind as he ran. Every one of the cadets had roamed this tiny little station while on telescope duty, looking for anything to distract them from the tedium of staring at consoles for hours on end. There wasn’t much to the station, though. Just the optical array, the communications array, the power core, the life-support systems, the shuttle locks, and—

  The escape pods. Of course. How could he have been so stupid? There were two of them, tiny things that couldn’t hold more than four people apiece, and that uncomfortably, but the station had them, nonetheless. And that’s where Nadja was headed.

  Nadja fired another phaser bolt at him, and the wall beside him exploded in sparks. He noticed now the blasts were coming in red and not blue.

  Nadja had switched from stun to kill.

  Kirk saw the station’s layout in his head, remembered the tunnels and Jefferies tubes, and ducked off to the right as Nadja went straight. His corridor would cut her off, but without a phaser, what good would it do him? Kirk scanned the ceilings and walls for something he could use and then saw it. He turned the corner, and there was Nadja, coming right for him. She jumped back and raised her phaser. Kirk leaped and grabbed one of the pipes that lined the ceiling—with warnings and exclamation marks all over it—and yanked it apart.

  The corridor erupted in a greenish-brown gas, making Nadja cry out and step back. Plasma coolant. Which, besides keeping plasma temperatures in line, would also pretty neatly liquify any organic matter on contact. Kirk opened another pipe facing the corridor he’d come down, cutting off Nadja’s route and setting off flashing red lights and computer warnings.

  “Give it up, Nadja!” Kirk called through the cloud of coolant. “If you want to live, you’re going to have to go back and turn off that bomb.”

  “Then I’ll die, Kirk,” she called back. “Why not? I should have died when I was a girl.”

  “With your mothe
r and father? On Vega colony?” Kirk yelled back. “I know that’s what this is all about.”

  “Then you know it doesn’t matter if I die. Not now. All that matters is the Varkolak get what’s coming to them. What they’ve had coming to them since they destroyed Vega V, and my parents with it. I hate them, Kirk! I hate the Varkolak. But I hate the Federation even more. Why didn’t they go to war then? Why did they make concessions? Back down? Damn it, Kirk—there’s a Varkolak colony on Vega V now! How many Federation citizens have died at the hands of the Varkolak, and still the Federation won’t fight!”

  “We do fight. Every time. There were just as many Varkolak who died at Vega V as Federation people.”

  “Women and children? Mothers and fathers?”

  “What about the Federation attack on Chi Herculis?” Kirk shot back. “Those weren’t soldiers there. And what about you? You tried to kill the president of the United Federation of Planets!”

  “No! No one died in that explosion! I made sure of it! It was carefully controlled. I wasn’t really trying to kill her—just make sure everybody thought the Varkolak wanted her dead.”

  “And the bomb at the medical conference? People really did die there. I almost died.”

  “That bomb was set to go off in between sessions! That room was supposed to be clear! It’s not my fault if people stayed around to talk.”

  “Are you listening to yourself, Nadja?”

  “I thought you of all people would understand, Kirk,” Nadja told him through the hiss of the coolant leak. “Wasn’t your father killed by some alien ship?”

  “Yeah,” Kirk said. “Yeah, he was.”

  “I’ll bet that made your childhood pretty wonderful, didn’t it?” Nadja said.

  Kirk looked away. Of course it hadn’t. His childhood had been terrible. Awful. Of all people, he did know what it was like to lose a parent that young and to know that somewhere out there was the person responsible for it.

  “All right, yeah,” Kirk said. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me and my mom and my brother. And yeah, I’d like to give whoever did it a bloody nose someday. But that doesn’t mean I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out a way to kill off their entire race.”

  “I have,” Nadja said, and a cluster of bright red bolts of phaser fire came tearing through the cloud. Kirk hit the deck just in time to feel them scorch past and hit the doorway behind him, destroying it in an explosion of sparks and twisted duranium. Kirk put his hands over his head until she was finished shooting and had run away.

  Ahead of him was a poisonous cloud that would eat him alive if he so much as touched it. Behind him was a mangled corridor he couldn’t get through without a phaser. He was trapped.

  Kirk thunked his head down on the metal floor and cursed himself. He’d forgotten that plasma coolant wouldn’t stop phaser fire.

  CH.29.30

  Depressurization

  Leonard McCoy was lost.

  He stared at the mass of conduits and circuits and coils and who knew what else that made up the bomb Nadja had made, desperately trying to remember the few general engineering classes he’d been forced to take as a cadet. He’d done his best in those courses, but he had plenty enough to remember from his medical classes. The human brain was only capable of so much recall, damn it! How was he supposed to defuse a bomb an engineer—and a damn good one, at that—had jerry-rigged in Argos’s Jefferies tube? There wasn’t even a visible timer or blue and red wires. In the old holo-vids, bombs like this always had stuff like that, didn’t they? But not this one. For all he knew, this damn thing was going to blow up in his face any second.

  “Think, McCoy,” he told himself. His eyes swept the machinery again, trying to make sense of it. “Think, damn it.”

  Was that a cryogenic fluid transfer there? Or a synthetic gravity-field bleed? Wow, doctors and engineers even used a different language.

  Wait. They might use a different language, but the principles, the underlying mechanics, they were similar, weren’t they? Ships, stations—they were living things, in their way. They had hearts (reactors) and minds (computer cores). They had eyes and ears (scanners and sensors) and other organs besides, like transporters and gravity generators. And feeding those systems, linking them, were the nerves and arteries of conduits and pipes.

  And this bomb—it was a cancer. An anomalous growth that had attached itself to its host, using its own energy, its own resources, to kill it. All he had to do was remove the tumor, and the patient would survive.

  Starships and bodies: The underlying subjects were the same. Only the terminology was different.

  Sort of.

  If McCoy wanted to survive, he was going to have to pretend they were, anyway. That, and a few half-remembered lectures on starship systems were the only chance they had.

  McCoy pulled Nadja’s abandoned tool kit to him and sifted through it, looking for a likely instrument. Finally he found something that reminded him of a laser scalpel and turned to the improvised bomb.

  “Don’t worry,” he told the station. “This isn’t going to hurt a bit. I hope.”

  Nyota Uhura was nervous.

  Unlike Spock and his communication to the Federation fleet, she needed not only audio but video as well. Varkolak was a complicated language—far too complicated to be transmitted by audio only. Without a slight twitch of the tail and a raised snout, the verb “to retreat” sounded the same as the verb “to attack.” She definitely didn’t want to say one thing when she meant the other or have her meaning be ambiguous. This was too important.

  But it was going to be hard enough to reproduce the Varkolak body movements accurately, particularly as she didn’t have a tail—crass comments in the Warp Core not withstanding. But certainly there had to be some allowance for Varkolak who had lost their tails in accidents or in battle. She hoped a few good shakes of what tail she had would suffice.

  “Federation transmission complete,” Spock told her.

  Uhura nodded. On the viewscreen, the Federation ships were deploying to counter the movements of the Varkolak fleet, but so far no one had fired.

  It was now or never.

  Uhura hit the transmit button and hailed the Varkolak ships in their own language.

  No response. Not that she’d expected one.

  “All right, I’m talking, whether you’re listening or not,” Uhura muttered.

  She glanced back at Spock, who watched her intently. She felt a surge of self-consciousness under his gaze. She was about to wiggle and twitch and pose in what would appear to uneducated observers to be an embarrassingly silly, solitary dance without music. But the words of her high school Andorian language teacher came back to her again then, as they often did: Great linguists are great because they aren’t afraid to say the wrong thing and sound silly.

  Or look silly, Uhura silently amended.

  “Varkolak Armada,” she said in simple Varkolak, moving with the sounds. “I am U-hu-ra, of the Federation. A bad person/cur tricks the Federation. A bad person/cur tricks the Ones Who Remain Wild. The two groups/packs attack without reason/purpose. Contact/communication is wanted.”

  Uhura paused, trying to think how to proceed. How in the world did you say “call off the dogs” in Varkolak?

  Pack-Howler Woolart was surprised.

  The communications officer on the Txakarra-Hartz, the flagship of the Varkolak Armada, couldn’t believe his eyes and his ears. But there it was, as plain as the snout on his face. He turned and interrupted the barked orders and replies in the ship-den.

  “Alpha-Captain GarrRka! We are receiving a transmission from the Federation telescope at the edge of the sector.”

  “Ignore it,” GarrRka told him. “They only mean to distract us.”

  “Yes. But, sir—it is in Varkolak.”

  That seemed to get the alpha-captain’s attention. The rest of the bridge’s attention too.

  “Is it Captain Lartal?” GarrRka asked. “One of the others?”

 
“No, sir. It is a Tail-less. A Terran, I think.”

  GarrRka’s tail twitched with curiosity. “On screen,” he said.

  The forward viewscreen in the Txakarra-Hartz’s ship-den switched from the line of Starfleet ships ahead of them to a hairless, tail-less Terran female trying to speak Varkolak.

  “Varkolak Armada,” the ugly animal said. “I am U-hu-ra, of the Federation. A cur meddles the Federation. A cur meddles the Ones Who Remain Wilderness….”

  “She’s mauling our language!” the helmsman said.

  “Yes,” GarrRka said, leaning forward on his bed. “But at least she’s trying. And what she’s saying is far more important….”

  Jim Kirk was too late.

  The station’s safety programs shut down the plasma coolant leak, but not in time for Kirk to catch Nadja before she reached the escape pods. Nadja was already inside one, prepping it for launch as Kirk careened into the small emergency shuttlebay. He hit the door controls to her pod, but they didn’t respond. Nadja had locked him out. She saw him through the small window in the door and gave him an unhappy smile and a wave good-bye.

  Kirk wasn’t ready to say good-bye yet. “Come on, come on,” he said, looking around the room for something to use to get inside that escape pod, but there was nothing.

  A phaser would have come in really handy right now, Kirk told himself. He patted himself down in desperation, to see if he had anything useful on him, and his hand found something hard and metal in his pocket.

  A titanium spork!

  Kirk pulled it out and twirled it in his fingers triumphantly. “My kingdom for a spork!” he said. Inside the capsule, Nadja couldn’t hear him. Or didn’t care. She was tapping at the pod’s navigation computer. Any second now she would jettison away from the station and be gone.

  Kirk attacked the panel housing the door controls with the spork and pried it away. Inside was a mass of conduits and coils. He yanked some out from the wall, separated two wires from the rest, and used the sharp edge of the spork to cut through their plastic casings. Flipping the spork sideways, he touched it to the two exposed wires.