Assassination Game (13 page)

“Yes,” Uhura told him. “But I still don’t understand how Starfleet Security isn’t going to catch wind of it.”

Sulu smiled inwardly. Uhura had taken the bait, just as Daagen expected her to. Uhura couldn’t be a part of the Graviton plan to drive the Varkolak away because there
was
no plan to drive them off Earth. Not one Sulu knew about, anyway. But if Starfleet Security moved against this fictional one …

“The engineers say no one will be able to hear the high-frequency signal except the Varkolak. And any other dogs on campus, of course. Admiral Archer’s beagle will probably be howling for days, poor thing. They say they can mask the broadcast location, but who’s going to think the signal is being broadcast from the Academy’s own communication tower?”

“Right,” Uhura said, her mind on the plot, not the fight. Sulu feinted low, then attacked high, knocking Uhura off balance. Sulu threw her on her back, and she hit the mat with a thud.

Sulu offered Uhura his hand. “But at least we know they’re not going to hear it from us.”

“The game,” said Kirk, “is called Velocity.”

He activated the Velocity panel, and a spinning disk emerged from a slot in the wall and hovered in front of them.

Lartal sniffed at the thing with his long snout. “What does it do?”

“Well, it kind of just … spins there. Until you shoot it.”

Kirk and Lartal were the only two people in the small room. Their Starfleet Security escorts stood outside the only door to the Velocity court, which was closed so that it became a seamless part of the wall. Bones had suggested Kirk do something with Lartal that
he
liked to do, and Kirk immediately thought of Velocity. He had other reasons too.

Kirk pulled a phaser from a compartment in the wall and activated it. He’d never played Velocity until he came to the Academy—not too many gyms in Iowa had the facilities for a game that used live phasers—but he’d taken to it immediately. A game where you fired phasers at targets and ducked and rolled, avoiding obstacles? Starfleet Academy called it away team training. Kirk called it the best game ever invented.

Kirk shot the spinning disk with his phaser, and it changed color.

Lartal was unimpressed. “Is that all it does? Change color?”

“No. I’ve got the safeties on now.” Kirk shot the disk again. It changed color again, and spun faster. He shot it again, and again it changed color and spun even faster. “When the safeties are off, the disk flies around the room.
Every time one of us shoots it, it goes after the person with the other phaser, faster and faster, until one of us isn’t quick enough and gets tagged.”

Kirk disengaged the safeties, and the Velocity disk came flying at him. He shot it, knocking it away, only to have it come back at him faster. He ducked, rolled, shot it again. It kicked away and returned, faster. He fired, hitting it, and rolled back to where he had begun. He hopped up and tapped the safety on the console, stopping the spinning disk mere inches from his head.

“That was single-player mode,” Kirk said. He pulled a second phaser from the wall compartment and put it in Lartal’s hand.

The Varkolak raised an eyebrow, and Kirk laughed inwardly. Some expressions transcended race and space.

“You are giving me a Federation type-2 phase pistol?” Lartal said. While the Varkolak had the most advanced sensing equipment by far of anyone the Federation had yet come into contact with, their phaser technology reportedly lagged behind Starfleet’s.

“Let’s just consider that a loan, shall we?” Kirk said. “And you’ll note the kill setting is disabled on all game weapons.”

Lartal flicked the switch on the phaser that made the blue stun setting rotate to the red kill setting, pointed the pistol at Kirk, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing
happened, and Kirk didn’t flinch.

“Just checking,” Lartal said. He grinned his wolfy grin and flipped the phaser setting back to stun. “Every Varkolak captain in the armada would give his right paw for one of these.”

“Trade you one for that tricorder of yours,” Kirk told him.

Lartal howled with laughter. “An intriguing offer! But one that might get us both torn to pieces for treason.”

“Well, we don’t tear one another to pieces, but it would be something just as bad, yeah,” Kirk said. “What do you say? You want to try it?”

“By all means,” Lartal said.

Kirk knew he wouldn’t be able to resist. Lartal was more Kirk than Bones. More command officer than medical officer. Kirk nodded and reset the Velocity disk.

“Game on,” Kirk said.

The disk hummed around the room. Kirk shot first, changing the disk from violet to indigo. The Velocity disk recoiled, then came at Lartal.

“You intrigue me, Kirk,” Lartal said. He shot and missed the disk as he got a feel for the phaser. It came after him, still slow at this stage of the game, and Lartal adjusted his aim and fired again, striking it. “Your friends in the hall, all the cadets in the gym—they seem to have tried and convicted me for yesterday’s bombing.”

The disk changed from indigo to blue and did a circle of the room, homing in on Kirk.

“Well, I’m still not sure I buy the fact that your scanning device told you that shuttle was about to blow up,” Kirk said. He dodged the Velocity disk and shot it as it passed. “But was it my imagination, or did you knock me out of the way of that explosion?”

The disk turned green and got faster. This was the level of the game that began to separate the pros from the amateurs. The command officers from the medical officers.

“You humans are known for weak-minded fantasies. It was no doubt your imagination.”

Lartal rolled and came up firing. A hit. The disk changed from green to yellow and sped at Kirk. His first shot missed as he threw himself out of the way, but he crossed his body with his next shot and tagged the disk. It changed to orange and circled the room almost too fast to keep up with. If Lartal shot it out of the air, it would fly at Kirk at its highest speed, catching him before he could get back to his feet.

Lartal sprinted around the room, dodging, ducking, rolling, twisting out of the disk’s way, but for some reason he didn’t shoot at it. The Varkolak’s delay gave Kirk just enough time to get up. The moment he was on his feet, Lartal hit the disk square on. A direct hit, on the
highest and hardest level of Velocity.

Definitely not the marksmanship of a doctor
.

It was the last thing Kirk thought before the Velocity disk came screaming at his head.

McCoy dragged himself into the medical lab with the rest of the medical cadets, wishing the security officers outside hadn’t made him pour out his coffee. No outside liquids were allowed into secure facilities now. Preposterous! A simple phoretic scan could have cleared his coffee and allowed him to self-medicate with caffeine, but the scanner hadn’t passed peer review yet. He went to his carrel and put his head down on the desk instead, hoping to catch just a few more seconds’ rest before the instructors put them to work sifting through the debris from the shuttle explosion.

“I wondered how you could sleep knowing that foolish idealism like yours allowed the Federation’s worst enemies into our own backyard, and now I see that you can’t,” said a familiar voice.

Lifting his head felt like waking from anesthesia, but McCoy looked up.

“Cadet Daagen,” McCoy said. “Go jump in a lake.”

The Tellarite frowned. “Does this expression have some metaphorical meaning on Earth besides its literal one?”

McCoy put his head back down on the desk. “Yes. It means go the hell away.”

Something clattered to the desk beside McCoy.

“Here. You can give this back to your equally foolish girlfriend. I found it on my desk this morning.”

McCoy’s eyelid fluttered open, and what he saw woke him up faster than a hypospray full of cortalin. It was a communicator.
Nadja’s
communicator.

“Found this on your desk? That’s a load of hooey, and you know it!” McCoy said. He stood and glared down at the diminutive Tellarite. “What’s the big idea, Daagen, prank calling me at two thirty in the morning, pretending to be Nadja, sending me on some damned fool snipe hunt!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Daagen said.

“The hell you don’t!” McCoy punched up the call log on the communicator. “Look here. This is where somebody called my phone at two twenty-six in the morning. Maybe you can explain to me how somebody used this phone to call me when it was sitting on
your
desk all night.”

“I can’t explain it, because I didn’t call you.”

“Cadets, if I can have your attention,” a Starfleet Medical officer called from the front of the room. “We’re going to begin bringing in the debris samples in
just a moment. If you could each return to your carrels, we’ll bring you a tray to analyze. Please run the usual tests: electron resonance scanner, molecular scanner, biocomputer. The Starfleet Corps of Engineers will run mass spectrometer readings and other tests to check for explosive particulates when we’re finished, but what we’re looking for is anything biological that will give us a clue to the perpetrator.”

Daagen turned to leave, but McCoy caught him by the arm. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Daagen, but it’s not funny.”

The Tellarite yanked his arm away and went to his seat. Prank calling someone you didn’t like was nothing new, but McCoy didn’t see what was so funny about this one.

A security officer set a tray of metal fragments in front of him, and McCoy put the first of the pieces in the molecular scanner. The duranium was twisted and scarred from the blast, and it brought back, vividly, the horror of the moment when McCoy had been caught in the blast. If Daagen’s little stunt hadn’t woken him up, reliving the explosion certainly would have.

McCoy put the piece through the rest of the standard medical scanners, but there was nothing unusual about it. He was about to set it aside and move on to the next piece when he had the idea to run the specimen through
the experimental phoretic analyzer he’d been testing for Dr. Huer. It certainly wouldn’t hurt anything, and if it turned up something useful … Well, they’d have to confirm it with an independent analysis. But in a case like this, the sooner they could get a lead on something, the better.

The phoretic analyzer scanned the debris, then flashed and hummed as it processed the individual molecules. Most of it would be duranium, with a little carbon thrown in from the scoring, and random particulates from wherever the piece had landed. What McCoy hadn’t expected to find made him call a medical officer over right away. A Starfleet Security officer joined him.

“What is it, Cadet?” the officer asked. Cadets peeked over the tops of their carrels, curious to see what McCoy had found too.

“Kemocite,” McCoy said.

“Kemocite? That’s a radiolytic compound, isn’t it? What kind of medical scan turned up kemocite?”

“The engineering teams would have turned it up with a mass spectrometer, but the phoretic analyzer found it when I was scanning for biological molecules.” McCoy explained the phoretic analyzer to the officers, and they reviewed his results.

“I still don’t understand,” the medical officer said. “How does this help?”

“Kemocite’s a power source,” the security officer told him.

“Yeah,” said McCoy. “The same power source the Varkolak use in all their technology.”

The medical lab buzzed with this new development, but the officers in charge quickly got everyone back to work. The kemocite discovery was damning, McCoy knew, but nowhere near conclusive. Kemocite could be had most anywhere. Hell, the Academy engineering lab probably had a kilo of the stuff in storage.

McCoy’s communicator rang, and he stepped outside to take the call.

“Bones! Bones, am I glad you picked up.” It was Jim Kirk, of course.

“Yeah, look, I’m kind of in the middle of something here, Jim.”

“Whatever it is, you’ve got to drop it and get over here right away. Academy Sports Complex.”

“Jim, it took me thirty minutes to get through all this new security, just to get inside the damn medical building. I can’t just pop over for a game of Parrises Square.”