Star Trek: TNG: Cold Equations II: Silent Weapons (6 page)

As agreed, Data was alone in the last booth at the end of the room, with his back to the wall and his eyes on Tohm from the moment she stepped through the front door. She sat on the banquette opposite his and folded her hands as she leaned forward. Heady fumes wafted up from his glass, and she wrinkled her nose at the potent perfume of alcohol. “What’re you drinking?”

“Based on my oral analysis of the compound’s ingredients, I have surmised this is the bartender’s failed attempt to mix a Saurian Slammer. His ratio of Saurian brandy to Delovian nectar seems to have been inverted, and he failed to finish the recipe with the traditional dash of Arcturian bitters. If your question was a solicitation for a suggestion, I cannot recommend this.”

“Noted.” Her delicate fingers snaked up her jacket’s sleeve and inside the fold of her shirt cuff, from which she retrieved an isolinear chip that she palmed and slid across the table to Data with expert sleight of hand. “The intel you wanted.”

Data laid his hand over hers, as if they were intimates sharing a moment of comfort in contact. “Bless you.” He let her slip her hand free, leaving the chip behind under his palm, and then he drew his hand back to his side and pocketed the chip. “Were there any complications?”

She shrugged off the question. “Nothing insurmountable.” Watching his face for any sign of betrayed emotion, she added, “I have to admit, I was impressed by the sheer volume of raw data we found on this Vaslovik and his aliases. Who is he to you?”

“An acquaintance of interest.”

His emotional control was absolute, showing not a hint of what might lurk beneath his surface. Tohm remained committed to drawing him out, somehow. “He’s quite a peculiar fellow. I’m intrigued by some of the implications in his financial history. If I’m reading those reports correctly, he has to have been around for an unusually long time—centuries, at least. But his profile lists him as human. Did I miss something, or does that seem a bit strange?”

“I would be the first to admit that Mister Vaslovik is a
singular
subject.”

The android’s face gave away no secrets, but his evasiveness in the face of leading questions was telling, so Tohm pressed harder. “Even more remarkable is the fact that when I tried to run a cross-referenced search on Mister Vaslovik, there wasn’t a shred of information about him or any of his aliases in Starfleet’s databases. And that’s odd, since almost every known person in recorded history has at least some kind of abridged biographical extract. But not your subject. He might as well be a figment of our imaginations for all Starfleet claims to know about him. . . . Which would make sense if his virtual history had been, shall we say,
expunged
.”

“A fascinating hypothesis,” Data said, artfully neither confirming nor denying any aspect of her supposition. “Not one I recommend you pursue, however.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Her accusatory question seemed to amuse him. “A great many things. For the most part, I am doing you a favor. The less you know about Vaslovik’s life and work, the safer you will be.”

“No doubt.” He sounded sincere, but Tohm had met too many expert liars in her career to accept his assurances at face value. “Your concern for my safety is touching, Commander, but in my line of work, knowledge is power. I’ve taken some serious risks to get these records for you. A bit of quid pro quo doesn’t seem like much to ask in return.”

He frowned. “Things are not always what they seem.” He shimmied out of the booth, stood, and offered her his hand. “Thank you for your help. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

It was time to concede rhetorical defeat. She shook his hand. “You’re welcome.”

“Good-bye.” He let go of her hand and walked away down a dim, narrow hallway to the bar’s rear exit. Tohm heard the door open, admitting the dull roar of the city night, and then it slammed shut, filling the hallway with echoes.
So much for getting a straight answer.

An Orion waitress, barely out of her teens and so rail-thin that it made Tohm want to break the girl like a dry twig, shuffled in lazy steps to stand beside the booth. She looked down at Tohm, her eyes half-closed from either exhaustion or boredom. “What can I bring you?”

“Nothing. I was just leaving.”

The green-skinned youth rolled her eyes, as if this were the greatest imposition she’d ever suffered, and then she slouched away to annoy some other customer. Tohm got up from the booth and left the bar by the front entrance, emerging onto a sidewalk bustling with pedestrian traffic, a dense mix of tourists and locals, Orions and offworlders, all jumbled together.

Swallowed up and made anonymous by the steady current of moving bodies, Tohm walked without fear down familiar streets, following a well-known route back to the Federation Embassy. Hands tucked into her pockets, head down, she felt all but invisible in the night . . . and yet, just as she had the last time she’d met with Data, she felt a sudden rush of paranoia, an inescapable sensation of being observed and tracked. Making use of reflections in vehicles’ windshields and storefronts’ windows, she searched for any sign of her shadow, only to once again find herself seeking after phantoms.

Her unease abated only slightly as she reached the embassy gate, flashed her identicard to the Starfleet sentries, and passed through to the secure diplomatic compound. Safe once more on friendly ground, she cast a final look back at the street, only to find her fears still at large.

Searching the night for a threat she couldn’t name, she recalled a bit of advice she’d been given years earlier by one of her first mentors inside Starfleet Intelligence:
Never go looking for danger,
he’d told her.
It’ll find you soon enough all on its own.

5

Hours had passed since the
Enterprise
’s arrival in the Tirana system, and the crew had used every moment since then to execute their most intensive search patterns and thorough sensor sweeps, all to no avail. Worf stalked from one bridge station to the next, hoping at each stop to receive welcome if belated news of progress, but no one had anything positive to report.

Chen had reconfigured the bridge’s aft consoles to search for subspace transmissions, distress signals on any and all known frequencies, any sign of artificial interference, and naturally occurring subspace radio “dead zones,” but she had found the Tirana system quiet except for the constant scratch of cosmic background radiation. Šmrhová had found no evidence of wreckage, debris, or energy emissions consistent with beam weapons or high-yield detonations, such as plasma charges or photon torpedoes, and Dygan’s meticulous survey of the surface of Tirana II, an airless world that had been deemed more habitable than Tirana I solely by virtue of the fact that its surface wasn’t a molten hell, had yielded no sign of the missing Federation Security interceptor
Sirriam,
or its two patrol officers.

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.