Why, Talma Pren, I couldn’t agree more.
There. Talma clambered up the short stretch of gangway to the bridge. She’d checked with Command. Now all she had to do was manufacture the forged confirmation from Starfleet Intelligence— Dear Halak: Anything for you, darling. Love, Marta.Thank the heavens, she’d had the foresight to know this might come up and had accessed Batanides’s personal authorization codes from the records of the real—and very dead—Laura Burke.
Tsk-tsk, Laura, how many times have I told you:Always lock your door when you go to sleep aboard ship. You never know justwho might break out of her quarters in the middle of the night and leave a nice, bright, shiny, and very sharp souvenir in your back.
Vaavek— no, Sivek, he’s Sivek for the time being—sat with perfect Vulcan poise over the pilot’s console: back straight as a titanium rod, the seal-skin black of his hair gleaming in a soft white light that suffused the bridge from a bank of lighting panels recessed in the ceiling. Talma Pren paused a moment, eyes roving the bridge, her body reveling in the pristine orderliness of Vulcan engineering. She’d been on many ships in her lifetime. Some she’d stolen. (Well, actually, she’d stolen mostof them. Maybe she’d bought one, two at the most.) She’d had Klingon shuttles, Starfleet shuttlecraft, even a Cardassian two-person trimaran liberated from a hapless Cardassian trader floating somewhere between Farius Prime and the Malfabrican Sector—and not many people living who could make that claim. (Cardassians didn’t take kindly to people liberating anything.) But in terms of ships, the Vulcans won, hands down. Their ships were so much more streamlined, so functional; they eschewed luxury and favored steely blue hues and well-lit workspaces. Not as fancy as Starfleet shuttles: Starfleet loved those delicate, homey touches so pleasing to the eye but with no functional purpose. The Klingons made suffering a virtue, so their ships were not only ugly, they were no fun at all; and the shadows that fell through the grills and latticework on Cardassian ships always reminded Talma of a prison cell. But the Vulcans knew how to build ships. Surveying the bridge, Talma gave a sigh of appreciation. Play her cards right, and she could buy herself a whole damn fleet. Why, she might even buy Vulcan.
“What’s our status?” she asked, slipping into the copilot’s chair. Again, not luxurious but padded just enough and sensibly proportioned, with a high back and a lumbar support. (For those long space flights: absolute murder on your lower back.) “Any Cardassians around?”
Vaavek’s head swiveled so smoothly it might have been oiled. “None, but I suspect that will change within the next twenty-four hours when that Cardassian scout comes through on patrol.”
“What’s our position?”
“On the perimeter of the system; 600,000,000 kilometers from the neutron star.” Vaavek’s sensitive fingers played upon his console. “Magnetic field is quite high, but one would expect that of a magnetar. Accreting gas from the remnants of this system’s supernova as well as the weaker brown star of the binary are being forced to flow along field lines to the magnetic poles of the neutron star. That shouldn’t pose much of a problem for us, but because the magnetic axis and rotational axis of the star aren’t co-aligned, the star’s an accretion-powered pulsar, with X-ray pulsations sweeping out once per rotation. Those pulsations combined with random gamma ray bursts from the star itself and a strong stellar wind from the brown star make more detailed sensor resolution quite difficult.”
“Mmmm,” Talma murmured, not really listening. Science always had given her a headache. She indulged in a stretch, arching her back and finishing with something very close to a purr. “Less technobabble, if you don’t mind.”
Vulcans were not known to smile, though they would, on occasion, give the ghost of a smirk. One touched Vaavek’s lips now. “There are two stars. One’s brown, and the other isn’t. The one that isn’t is stealing matter from the brown one. That means, there’s a lot of junk floating around out there, and that makes it very hard to see anything. Right now, we’re far away from the planet. At long range, our sensors and communications aren’t so hot, but then again the Cardassians will be blind as Torkan cavefish, too. At best, they’ll see sensor ghosts, or nothing at all. At worst, their sensors may be able to resolve a signature, but they will still have to rely upon visual.”
“Why, Vaavek,” said Talma. “I never knew you had a sense of humor.”
“It is always advisable to know the ways of one’s adversaries.”
“But we’re working together.”
“Precisely.”
Talma gave him a sidelong glance. “What about Chen-Mai?”
“He should have no idea we’re here. We’re early for the rendezvous. He won’t even begin to look until he’s ready to leave the planet’s surface.”
“Yes, we do want to keep that nice element of surprise.”
Vaavek arched his left eyebrow (a feat Talma never could master, though all Vulcans seemed capable of it from birth). “I doubt Chen-Mai will share your enthusiasm.”
“Likely not,” Talma said, pulling her features into a look of mock regret. “Well, he won’t live long enough to worry much about it.”
Chen-Mai had been the perfect choice for her scheme. The man had been in Mahfouz Qadir’s employ for the last seven years, and he’d never once been suspected of skimming. Talma knew. She’d been the one to bring him into the Qatala network. For her glowing reports to the Qatala, Chen-Mai always paid her extremely well and Talma adjusted the take she reported to Qadir accordingly. A beneficial arrangement: collateral built up against the day when Talma made her move. Today, she had decided, was as good a day as any. She had no intention of parting with whatever Chen-Mai and company had found, whether that was specs for a portal, or lots and lots of treasure. (Jevonite didn’t exactly grow on trees.) Likewise, she had no intention of letting Chen-Mai—and whomever he’d been careless enough to leave alive—get a day older.
And that,though he didn’t know it, included Vaavek. Sivek. Whatever.
“Well,” she said, her tone bright and cheery, “then let’s get on with it, shall we?”
Chapter 29
Nothing: nothing in his mind, on the planet, or under the rock. There was simply nothing because there was nothing to find.
Try again.Clad in his environmental suit, the sound of his breaths loud in his ears, Ven Kaldarren stood so still that he imagined anyone spying him would’ve thought he’d turn into a pillar of the same hard stone that formed the mountains, the land itself. Failure is not an option. Try again.
Yet he was going to fail. He felt it. Only a day left, and he knew. He would never find the portal. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough, or his psionic signature wasn’t a match. Maybe whoever had built this fabled portal had such an individual mindprint that, like a fingerprint or DNA, there was no way for anyone else to detect, much less access, the device. Not terrifically useful then, but Chen-Mai’s anonymous employer didn’t seem to care about that.
Try again.
He could lie. He could say he’d picked up something faint, but they’d have to wait awhile, come back. Then, before that time came, he could take Jase and go someplace far away. Not back to Betazed: That was the first place Chen-Mai would look. But Kaldarren could take Jase to Earth, leave him with the boy’s grandparents. A good thing Chen-Mai didn’t know who Jase’s mother was, so he’d have no way to trace the boy. As for Kaldarren, he could watch out for himself, something that was easier to do if he didn’t have to worry about Jase.