Assassination Game (17 page)

The wooden door to the room flew open, and a red-faced cadet with fire in his eyes came rushing in.

“What do you think you’re doing, sneaking around in robes and hiding out in smoky backrooms?” the man demanded. “Damn it, man, you’re Starfleet cadets, not Romulan spies!”

Stunned by the sudden explosion, Sulu took a step back. It drew the angry cadet’s attention, and he tried to whip off Sulu’s hood. Sulu reacted instinctively. He grabbed the cadet’s hand, delivered a quick but powerful chop to his stomach, then flipped him to the ground. Sulu
recoiled in horror from his own actions, immediately sorry he’d hurt a fellow cadet. He looked around for some way out, wondering why the others were just standing there, when he felt the familiar tug of a transporter beam catching him up and scattering his atoms….

Sulu rematerialized on a transporter pad he didn’t recognize. There were two other Gravitons with him on the pad, but no transporter operator. The room was empty but for the transporter’s three passengers.

The other two stepped down off the pad and hurried for the door.

“Wait!” Sulu called.

One of them hung back while the other ran.

“What’s happened? Where are we?” Sulu asked.

“You must be the new guy,” said the Graviton. It wasn’t Daagen’s voice, nor anyone else’s he recognized. “By the looks of it, we’re in the engineering building, back on campus. We’ve always got people waiting to beam us out if we need an emergency evac. The others will have beamed back to other places. You’re safe now. Just get someplace where you can lose the robe and then head back to your dorm or wherever. I don’t know who that guy was, or how he found us, but those were some nice moves you put on him. Shields up,” he said, and hurried from the room.

“Yeah, shields up,” Sulu said, beginning to understand
that the Graviton Society was a lot bigger and a lot better organized than he had ever imagined.

Nadja helped McCoy up from the sticky floor of the dive bar’s backroom and brushed him off.

“Son of a bitch,” McCoy said.

“Are you badly hurt?”

“No. It’s not that,” he said, rubbing his stomach. Probably a hematoma of the rectus abdominis muscle, he quickly diagnosed, then reminded himself there were more pressing issues. “They transported out, the cowards. Transported out! Secret societies and their damned secret clubhouse meetings, working against everything we swore an oath to uphold—”

Nadja pulled him into a hard, passionate kiss, and his anger about the group’s escape evaporated. When she finally let him go, he felt like he’d been caught up in a transporter beam himself and deposited in someplace entirely new, where the gravity was half that of Earth normal.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“You,” she said, not letting him go. “Charging in here, like Archer against the Xindi. You’re my hero.”

She kissed him again, and he was transported somewhere there was no gravity at all.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” she told him.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the police?”

“And show them what? An empty room? I can think of better ways to spend the night. I just want to do one thing first,” Nadja said.

“What’s that?”

“Stop by my room and get my toothbrush,” she told him with a smile.

James T. Kirk could barely keep his eyes open.

It wasn’t just that he’d slept in the library all night long while Bones was entertaining a guest (Bones had certainly returned the favor plenty enough times that Kirk wasn’t put out about it). It was the medical lectures. It was bad enough he zoned out when Bones started talking medicine, but to hear these doctors get going, you’d think Bones was just a kid with one of those games that buzzed when you tried to take out the funny bone. These were some seriously heavy hitters in the interplanetary constellation of medicine, with enough data to choke a sehlat.

Or put a layman like Kirk to sleep.

Lartal wasn’t faring much better, although today he wasn’t dozing off. Today he was restless. He tapped his paws on the table in front of him so much the J’naii doctor beside him had to shush him, and his wagging tail thumped against the table behind him.

Clapping snapped Kirk awake, and he realized the session was over.

“Let’s go, Kirk. I need to move,” Lartal told him.

Kirk couldn’t agree more. At least they would have fifteen or twenty minutes to stretch their legs before the next session began. Lartal was immediately flanked by his equally bored Varkolak escorts and then by the four just-as-bored Starfleet Security officers assigned to him for the morning. Kirk couldn’t feel too sorry for them—at least they got a shift change at lunchtime.

Lartal’s complicated entourage made its way from the great hall slowly, just like everyone else, as two thousand nattering doctors clogged the few exits out to the lobby and the old parade grounds beyond.

“Rather be playing chase, wouldn’t you, Kirk?” Lartal asked.

“Anything,” Kirk said. “Anything besides this. But of course, as a doctor, you find this all terribly fascinating, I’m sure.”

“Terribly,” Lartal growled.

Finally, they got past the doors and into the lobby, which was loud with the echoed conversations of all the doctors. A refreshment table was set up along one side, and multiple bathroom facilities along the other wall were already drawing lines. Kirk figured Lartal would go for one or the other, but he suddenly found himself cut off from Lartal by his two big Varkolak companions.

“Hey, guys, coming through,” Kirk said. He tried to squeeze between them, but they closed ranks even farther, keeping him from getting through.

Kirk had a very bad feeling about this.

He turned to Johnson, one of the two security officers behind them. “Do you have Lartal? Where is he?”

“We’ve got him,” Johnson said confidently. He flipped open his communicator. “Forlax, you’ve got Lartal up there with you, right?”

“What?” came the voice of Forlax over Johnson’s communicator. “No. We thought he was back there with you.”

Johnson’s eyes went wide, and Kirk knew they were all in big, big trouble. He barreled through the two Varkolak, but Lartal wasn’t there. He jumped, trying to see over the mass of people in the room, but Lartal was nowhere to be seen.

The two Varkolak guards snickered.

“Stay with them!” Johnson ordered his partner and Kirk, and he moved off calling for the building to be sealed off. Kirk saw more security officers converging on the front doors, but Lartal was smart. He had to know they’d lock him in the moment they lost him, and he’d never try something so obvious as to storm the front doors. That meant he had to find some other way out …

The stairs. Kirk thought it before he saw it, hidden away behind the lines of people queueing for the bathrooms.
Ignoring the indignant cries of the people he pushed out of the way, Kirk swam through the ocean of doctors and researchers toward the far wall.

“Sorry, people! Coming through! Bathroom emergency!” he said. That made more people get out of his way, but it was still agonizingly slow going. He finally got to the door to the stairs and pushed his way inside. The door slid closed with a quiet
whomph
and
click
, and suddenly the cacophany of the lobby was all but gone.

And replaced by faint sound of padded feet running up stairs.

“Lartal!” Kirk called. “Lartal, don’t do this!”

A high-pitched, playful sound echoed down the stairwell—somewhere between a laugh and a bark—and Kirk cursed inwardly.

Here we go again
, he thought, and he took off at a run.

Eight floors up, Kirk heard one of the stairwell’s exterior doors hissing shut, and he plowed through it. On the far side of the roof, Lartal was just dropping down over the side.

“Damn it!” Kirk said as he ran. “I knew a tour of the building was a bad idea.”

The assembly hall was enormous, built like a series of toy blocks stacked up in a sort of ziggurat shape. Lartal had led him straight up to the top of the stairs, and now he was going to go all the way back down, from rooftop to rooftop.

“I thought dogs didn’t like to climb,” Kirk complained.

He slid to a stop at the edge of the roof, looking down. Lartal’s grinning jackal face glanced up at Kirk before he leaped onto the next rooftop below, and ran for the corner of the building.

“Lartal! This isn’t funny! If you want to play chase, we can do it in the sports complex!”

Lartal wasn’t listening. He ran with all the pent-up energy of someone forced to sit and listen to xenobiology lectures all day. But so did Kirk. As much as he hated to admit it, he felt alive again, in his element once more. Give him action. Give him adventure. Give him danger.

He slid down the ladder to gain ground on Lartal and hit the surface too fast, landing on the gravel rooftop elbows first.

I hope he gets a scratched-up right elbow
, he thought. No time to cry over it, though. He put his hand to it, to staunch the bleeding as he ran, but he eventually abandoned it altogether. He didn’t have time to be hurt. Lartal was already heading down the next ladder.

Kirk followed him as fast as he could, taking this stretch more slowly, so as not to have a repeat of his fall. He saw Lartal run off toward the east side of the building, and he smiled. If he was right, the next ladder down was on the
west
side of the building, not the east. It was one of the ones you could see from the old parade grounds out front. He hit the rooftop and ran the opposite direction.

“Gotcha!” Kirk cried as he rounded the corner, but he pulled up short. The ladder was there, but Lartal wasn’t. Kirk ran to the edge of the rooftop to look down. Lartal
couldn’t
have beaten him around two sides of the building in the time it took Kirk to turn the corner. And he hadn’t. Lartal wasn’t on the ladder, either. Had he doubled back and gone up again? But what for? Was this just a game for him, a chase to work off his restlessness or—

“No. Damn it!” Kirk cried. Of course. He’d been so stupid. He sprinted around to the north side of the building in time to see Lartal scrambling up the side of Surak Hall, the closest building to the assembly hall. Kirk gauged the distance between the two rooftops for a jump, but his brain immediately told him it was impossible. For a human. But apparently not for a Varkolak. Or a Varkolak trained in athletics, like Lartal.

“There’s no way you’re a doctor!” Kirk called across the chasm.

Lartal smiled and saluted Kirk, as if to acknowledge it. “I’m sorry, Kirk! I just want you to know that—”

But Kirk never heard the rest because the building beneath him exploded, and he fell.

The Academy hospital was chaos again. Doctors were tripping over themselves to see to the victims of this second—and more deadly—bomb blast. Most of the victims were doctors themselves, and wanted a hand in deciding their own treatments, which only complicated matters. Still, it could have been worse: The bomb had exploded inside the great hall during a session break, sparing everyone in the lobby from the blast. But forty-six people were wounded and thirteen were dead—including, word had it, Admiral Wójcik, the head of Starfleet Medical.