Sulu sat down across the desk from Admiral Mentir. They’d exchanged cursory pleasantries when she’d entered his office, and now she waited for him to begin their meeting. Under normal circumstances, she would have been delighted to see him again, would have wanted to have a personal conversation, but the current situation hardly qualified as normal.
On the corner of the desk, Sulu noticed, sat a model of a small sublight craft she recognized as a Nivochan asteroid runner. She’d never flown one herself, but she remembered her father telling her that he once had. She wished that she could have spoken with him about everything that had happened recently, but—
“Commander,” the admiral began, confirming the formal tone of their meeting. A faint, tinny quality underlay the sound of his translated voice. “Have you spoken with anybody besides me about your concerns?” He clearly referred to her discovery of Starfleet records indicating that officers she knew to be dead had apparently been assigned to starship duty.
“No,” Sulu answered. “I haven’t because…” She stopped and looked away from the admiral, uncomfortable with what she needed to reveal to him. After their last conversation, she worried that he might view her latest concern as paranoid.
“Commander?” Mentir said. Sulu peered back over at him, the silvery scales of his face visible through the helmet of his environmental suit.
“I haven’t said anything to any of the Enterprisecrew, not even to the senior staff,” she said, “because I think there’s a spy on board.”
“What?”Mentir exclaimed, obviously surprised at the revelation. “You’ve found records of a deceased officer assigned to your vessel?”
“No,” Sulu said. “But when I uncovered those discrepancies in the personnel files, it reminded me of an intermittent problem we’ve been experiencing aboard the ship for months. It’s a seemingly random dispersion of the navigational deflector, lasting just a second or two each time. It’s occurred less than a dozen times, and so we haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause. Since it hasn’t impacted ship operations, though, resolving it hasn’t been a priority.”
“And you believe that a spy aboard Enterprisehas sabotaged the ship?” the admiral asked.
“No,” Sulu said. “But I recalled the problem during our last conversation, and so I went back and checked the logs.” She lifted a padd from her lap and activated it with a touch. “The first dispersions occurred just before and just after a confrontation the Enterprisehad with a Romulan warship eighteen months ago. It happened again, twice, during the ship’s visit to the Koltaari homeworld, when the Romulans began their occupation of the planet, and then several times during our patrols of the Neutral Zone in the Foxtrot Sector.” Sulu pressed a control and scrolled down the list. “The dispersion appeared once more just before the Universetest—” She felt a knot tighten in her stomach at the mention of the ill-fated ship. “—and a final time just after our deuterium-flow regulator failed when we were departing from Algeron.”
“Obviously there’s a pattern there,” Mentir said, although the surprise he’d shown a moment ago seemed to have faded now.
“There’s a Romulan spy aboard the Enterprise,”Sulu concluded, “sending them information in a communications beam hidden in the output of the navigational deflector.”
“Yes,” the admiral said simply.
Sulu felt relieved at Mentir’s immediate acceptance of her judgment, and she said so. “I’m glad you agree, Admiral.”
“I’m not telling you that I agree,” Mentir told her. “I’m telling you that, yes, there is a Romulan spy aboard your vessel.”
“Admiral, I don’t understand,” Sulu said. “You know?” Her heart began to race and she felt herself flush as she realized that she had been right, that somebody in Starfleet Command hadhelped seed spies throughout the fleet. She had obviously been wrong to trust Mentir, and she wondered if she would be able to make it out of his office alive. In her mind’s eye, she imagined him lifting a phaser from beneath his desk and—
Sulu sought to restrain her frenzied thoughts. She’d known Los Tirasol Mentir for twenty years—known and trusted him. She would not have contacted him about all of this if she hadn’t.
Unless he’s been replaced too,Sulu thought wildly. Like the dead officers—
“I know,” Mentir said. “I didn’t until just recently, but I do now. Captain Harriman discovered the spy almost immediately after they’d been assigned to the ship. It was his idea to leave the spy in place, so that we could know what information was being passed to the Romulans, what information they were seeking.”
Sulu nodded slowly. It was a sensible plan, and she understood at once why the captain had not shared the information with her. The fewer people aware of the spy’s existence, the better the chance that the spy would remain unaware that they’d been found out, and the more likely that they’d continue to operate aboard Enterprise.Now, though, with Captain Harriman no longer on the ship…
“Who is it?” she asked. She expected the admiral to refuse to tell her, but he did not.
“Enterprise’s chief computer scientist,” he said. “Lieutenant Grayson Trent.”
“Trent,”Sulu said, and she immediately remembered when she’d encountered him near the second fire in the Koltaari capital. When she had first seen him, after she’d come out of the smoke, he’d initially turned away from her, and she realized now that he hadn’t wanted her to see him there. It had been too late, though; he’d seen that she’d already spotted him, and so he’d had to come over to her.
And he had a medkit with him,she recalled now. He’d given her a dose of tri-ox compound, but why would a computer scientist be carrying a medkit with him? Because he thought he might need it for himself,she surmised. I also was pleased that he’d made it back to the power plant,Sulu recalled. Trent had been assigned to a different area of the city at the time, but she had simply ascribed his presence back at the fire to his desire to help the Koltaari. But Linojj had concluded that the explosive charges had been set manually, and Sulu saw now that Trent had been the one to set the bomb in the power plant, and probably the first bomb as well. Fury rose within her.
“How much longer is Starfleet Command intending to leave him aboard?” Sulu wanted to know.
“Not another day,” Mentir said. “His usefulness to us is at an end.” The admiral reached forward to his desk and activated a comm channel. “Mentir to Sperber,” he said.
“Sperber here, Admiral,”came the immediate reply.
“We’re all set here,” Mentir said. “Carry out your orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mentir out.” The admiral looked over at Sulu as he closed the comm channel. “My executive officer,” he said. “He’ll contact Lieutenant Commander Linojj and explain the situation. Trent will be transported directly into a holding cell here on the station.”
“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, pleased that situation had been taken care of that quickly, at least from her perspective. “And what about the other spies?” she asked, and then something else occurred to her. “Do they have anything to do with why Captain Harriman remained behind at Algeron?”
“There are no other spies,” Mentir said.
“What?” Sulu said. “But the discrepancies in the personnel records…”
“There are no other spies,” Mentir repeated. “And Captain Harriman is not aboard Algeron.”
“What?” Sulu said again. “Then where is he?”
“I can explain all of this to you, Demora, and I will,” the admiral said. “But first, I need to tell you that Enterprisemust depart from KR-3 in—” He glanced at the monitor atop his desk. “—three hours and fifty-seven minutes. You’ll be returning to Foxtrot Sector, to outpost thirteen.”