Stay focused—Halak programmed the aircar’s speed and angle of descent— one thing at a time.
On an afterthought, he tossed in his phaser and the pulse-gun, heard them clatter against something metallic and disappear into the well in front of the driver’s seat. Best not to have them on him. Then, reaching up with both hands, he forced the doors of the aircar down and shut. The movement made the pain in his side much worse.
“Please,” he panted, pushing down hard on the door until he heard the lock engage. “Please, please, please, God, please.”
Staggering back, he watched as the aircar shivered, then rose on its column of compressed air. The aircar turned, and Halak felt air puff against his face, and a chill rippled through his sweat-slicked skin. The aircar turned a lazy circle and then began its climb, heading east. The aircar’s lights dwindled then winked out.
They might not find the body for a long time, if ever. Halak turned and began to trudge back to the shuttle. Every step made his stomach lurch and heave. He didn’t know how long it would take the aircar to sink, but with the speed at which the aircar would slam into the sea, there might not be much left to sink anyway. Probably not much of a body left either. That would be good for Arava and give her some time to get away.
Inside the shuttle, he found a flashlight. Then, he went back out and crawled along on his hands and knees, feeling and looking for the explosive. He found it, finally, nestled at the very back of the port nacelle, attached to the outside of the hull and rigged to detonate as soon as anything other than short-range communications was accessed. They would have disintegrated the instant they hailed Enterprise.
It took him an hour to reach hailing distance. During the flight, he hadn’t looked at Batra’s body, because he had to work hard on the simple act of flying the shuttle. That, and staying conscious. He’d figured out how to bypass the preprogrammed flight path not because he needed to—the computer lockout was programmed to drop as soon as the shuttle’s sensors told the computer that the ship was out of Farius Prime’s space—but because it gave him something to do. He felt drained, dull. Empty. Dead.
Halak opened a channel. “Enterprise,”he said, slurring the word, “Enterprise,this is Halak. Enterprise,this is an emergency hail, this is…”
His gaze fell on Batra’s body, and then it was as if he peered through a pane of flawed glass.
She never answered.Grief balled in his throat, and it was as if a giant fist had reached in, taken hold of his heart, and squeezed. She never really answered the question, and now she never can. Never will.
“Enterprise,”Halak said again. Tears crawled along his cheeks, but he didn’t care if they knew he was weeping. “Enterprise.”
Chapter 13
“Captain, I’m busy,” Marta Batanides protested. Her coiffed pillow of brown hair was showing the strain; errant tendrils feathered her neck. “I don’t have time to argue with you about this.”
Captain Rachel Garrett gave a short bark of derisive laughter, though none of this was funny in the slightest. She was so angry the muscles in her neck were taut as Vulcan lute strings, and her shoulders hurt. She knew she’d pay for this later—a migraine to beat the band for sure. Just as soon as she had the time and luxury to have one.
Thank God, she was in her ready room (where she seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time these days, tending to business). When the Vulcan warpshuttle had come alongside Enterprisean hour ago, Garrett had such a heated exchange with the Starfleet Intelligence officer onboard—a Lieutenant Laura Burke—the Enterprise’s bridge hummed with tension. After that, she decided that it was better to do battle with Starfleet Intelligence in private, with the gloves off: mano a mano,as it were.
“You don’t have time? Gee, that’s too bad. I suggest you make it, Marta.” Unlike Commander Batanides, Garrett didn’t take refuge behind formalities. The two women had known each other—albeit briefly—when Garrett had been on a layover on Starbase Earhart in 2327. Garrett had been heading back to the Carthage,where she was XO. Batanides was fresh out of the Academy. Batanides was a striking woman then—a lean brunette with a long neck and wide, almost oval-shaped blue eyes—and Garrett had seen nothing in the face that stared out of her companel to change her opinion. The two women had struck up a casual friendship; Garrett wasn’t there long enough for more than a few drinks in the bar. Garrett remembered Batanides as a somewhat anxious young ensign waiting for her first assignment. There were two others from her class, she recalled, close friends that Garrett hadn’t met at all, though she’d heard through the grapevine that there’d been a bar fight the day after Garrett shipped out: a couple of Nausciaans and one of Batanides’s friends. The friend was unarmed, and so, of course, one of the Nausicaans pulled a knife. Stabbed Batanides’s friend in the back, right through the heart, or so Garrett understood. It figured; Nausicaans were never known to worry about little things, such as fair play.
Well, as far as Garrett was concerned, it would be fair play all the way as long as she was in charge of Enterprise:everything on the up and up, and out front, something Starfleet Intelligence wasn’t exactly famous for.
“Now,” Garrett said, taking aim with her right index finger, “either you deal straight with me, or your people are going to hang in space a long, long time, and I mean it, Marta. I’ll take this as high as it needs to go. I am not going along with this until I understand why the hell they’re here in the first place. They show up unannounced, noadvance warning, nocontact from Starfleet Command, nothing. I don’t get a single communiqué; no one’s on the horn to me. Last time I checked, our communications systems were working just fine. So I’ll just chalk it up to an oversight on your part. But you want cooperation from this moment forward? Then you damn well ask me for it. Now, on whose authority is Burke here?”
To her credit, Batanides sat through Garrett’s diatribe without a squeak of protest, though Garrett could tell by the way that Batanides’s lips thinned until her mouth disappeared that the woman was not pleased.
“Burke has authorization from Starfleet Intelligence,” said Batanides.
“Meaning you. Sorry, Marta, not good enough.” Garrett wagged her head from side to side. “That’s not the way things run on my ship. Icall the shots, not Starfleet Intelligence, and in case you haven’t noticed, Commander,you don’t outrank me. The way I see it, you’re asking for a favor I don’t have to grant. Okay, fine. You want me to do you a favor? Then you goddamned make the time and tell me why the hell Starfleet Intelligence is so interested in Halak— myfirst officer, might I add—or I send your people packing.”
“Captain, don’t force me to…”
“To what?” Garrett interrupted. Batanides didn’t know, but Garrett didn’t respond well to threats, and was just as likely to come out swinging if Batanides so much as twitched. “Go to a higher-up? Great. Do it. The more higher-ups involved, the better.”
“Whyare you being so antagonistic?”
Maybe because I got to be the lucky one to give notification to Anisar Batra’s mother. Maybe because these aremy people.“Let’s just say I don’t like people who make their living working in the shadows. I prefer things straight on. I like to know whom I’m dealing with. Now I know there’s good and valuable work that SI does,” Garrett said, not believing a word but knowing she had to give Batanides something, “and I understand that intelligence operatives have their place. I’m not naïve, and I’m not particularly pugilistic.”