Assassination Game (19 page)

She tried to say all that and more with her eyes, but she knew her desperate apology was no substitute for the truth. It would have to do, though, and she hurried from the room before Kirk asked her to say more.

Kirk watched Uhura go. If she kept her tongue, Lartal would hang for a crime he didn’t commit, and two civilizations would go to war. He had to trust her to know what she was doing, but it couldn’t wait long.

Admiral Barnett got up to leave, and Kirk caught him.

“Admiral, wait. Bones—Cadet McCoy—why was he arrested?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t discuss it,” Barnett told him.

“But what’s he done? What’s he been accused of?”

“Maybe starting a war, Kirk. If we didn’t do that here just now already.”

“Bones? Start a war? You can’t be serious! What, you think he had something to do with the explosion today? Then why are you holding Lartal?”

The admiral sighed. When the last of the linguistics
team and security officers had left the room, he said quietly, “There is a possibility that the two incidents were initiated by different provocateurs.”

“Different—But you can’t be serious. Bones, bomb a shuttle? For what? How? Why?”

Barnett put up a hand. “I’ve said too much already. But they’ll all remain in custody until this mess is settled. If it ever is. Go back to the hospital, Kirk. You look like hell.”

“Aye, sir,” Kirk said as the admiral left, but he had no intention of going back to the hospital. There were too many people he needed to talk to first.

This time Uhura wanted to see Spock.
Needed
to see him. But all thought of romance was gone from her mind. They were in
trouble
. That was all that mattered now. They were in trouble, and she needed him to fix it.

Spock was waiting for her in the observation deck.

“Cadet Uhura,” he said as she hurried to him from the turbolift. “We must be careful. We are under suspicion by the Graviton Society. They have been feeding us false information.”

“Spock—Spock, be quiet and listen to me. It’s worse than that. Much worse than that. The sniffer. The Varkolak scanning device
I
stole. It was used to detonate that bomb.”

Spock frowned. “I had not heard this.”

“It hasn’t been released yet. But I was there, Spock. I saw it with my own eyes. It was the scanner I took. The scanner I gave to the Graviton Society!” She told him all about the interrogation, including how she’d kept quiet
about her involvement. “We’re being
used
, Spock.
I’ve
been used. It’s my fault all those people died!”

Spock put a hand on her shoulder. “Nyota. Be calm. It is not your fault people have died. It is the fault of whomever planted that bomb. No doubt they would have done so, whether or not we gave them the means to assign blame to the Varkolak or not. And yet … I am confused.”

“About what?”

“Immediately following the incident in the assembly hall today, I was contacted by my source within the Graviton Society, with word that they mean to falsely implicate the Varkolak … after the fact.”

Uhura huffed. “Spock, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! They already have!”

“And therein lies my confusion,” Spock explained. “Why would the Graviton Society feel the need to falsely implicate the Varkolak in the bombing if they had already done so with the detonation device?”

At last, Uhura thought she understood. She’d seen evidence of someone trying to pin the explosion on the Varkolak, evidence not everyone knew about, and now the Graviton Society was telling Spock they wanted to try and implicate the Varkolak in some other way. But why bother if they had already set them up by using the sniffer?

“Are you saying the Graviton Society didn’t know the
sniffer was being used as the detonation device? That they
didn’t
set the bomb?”

Spock walked away from her, holding his hands behind his back the way he did when he was thinking hard about something.

“The scanning device was given to someone within the Society,” Spock said. “And yet those at the top of the organization do not know it was used in the explosion. Therefore, we must assume that someone along the line intercepted the Varkolak scanner and created a bomb with it, unknown to those in the chain above him or her.”

“A rogue agent
within
the Graviton Society?” It was almost too dizzying a prospect. Wasn’t all this confusing enough without someone within the secret society doing something even
more
secret? “But who? And why?”

“I do not have enough facts to draw a hypothesis, but we may assume, I think, that it is someone who regards the Graviton Society as not going far enough toward its goal.”

That was a scary idea.

“For all we know, the Varkolak scanning device may never even have passed beyond your contact. You have no clue as to his or her identity?” Spock asked.

“No, although I’d wager it’s a her. Otherwise he would have had some serious explaining to do if he’d been caught in the women’s shower room.”

“Indeed,” Spock said.

“Wait, you said someone’s been feeding us false information,” Uhura said. “Are you sure this isn’t more of the same?”

“Yes. This information was not passed on to me through the usual channels. It was relayed to me by … a trusted source within the group.”

So Spock had more spies besides Uhura working for him. She’d been stupid to think he’d brought her in on this for any other reason than that the assignment required it. She felt herself getting upset again, and she put the emotion away. She still had bigger problems to deal with.

“Spock, we have to tell the truth. I have to tell them I took that sniffer. If I don’t, it could mean war.”

“It could mean war if you do,” Spock told her. “While Starfleet will understand when Captain Pike and I explain my mission and your involvement in it, the Varkolak will believe what they will. Or won’t, as the case may be.”

“So what do we do, Spock? I can’t just sit on this! I have a duty, damn it! I swore an oath to uphold the laws and traditions of Starfleet. We both did. And this is breaking about twenty of them.”

“We will tell the truth,” Spock assured her. “Together.” He paused, thinking. “But not yet.”

He was cooking up something. Uhura could see it in his eyes, the way they were staring off into the distance without really looking at anything. She waited for him to put it all together.

“This situation, and our particular knowledge of it, has presented us with a unique opportunity. We two are the only people within the Graviton Society who know that one of its members has gone rogue, and thus, the only two people who can exploit the situation to reveal the culprit.”

“Exploit it? How?” Uhura asked.

“By running, as it is called on Earth, a ‘con.’”

The security officers in the Academy brig scanned Kirk and let him through to see Bones, who came right up to the edge of the force field to see him.

“Jim! Jim, I’ve been framed. There’s a secret society on campus, and they—What are you doing out of the hospital? Who signed your release? Daagen? He’s part of all this!”

“Whoa, whoa, Bones. It’s going to be all right. We’ll get to the bottom of all this,” Kirk told him, but he knew if their situations were reversed, he’d be just as frantic. Behind them, the security officers cleared another visitor, and Bones’s new main squeeze, Nadja Luther, joined them.

“Leonard! I just heard! What in the world is going on?” she said.

“I’ve been framed, damn it!”

“Slow down and start from the beginning,” Kirk told him.

“Somebody tampered with the evidence from the
shuttle bombing,” Bones explained. “I know this, of course, because I’ve just been through four hours of
the same damn questions over and over again
. The night after the bombing, somebody went back into the lab using
my
voice-print identification and contaminated the debris with kemocite.”

“The fuel the Varkolak use in their gadgets,” Kirk said.

“It wasn’t me, of course, but three people saw me leave the dorm that night on that snipe hunt to meet Nadja at Cavallo Point.”

“And nobody saw you there,” Nadja guessed.

“Of course not! It was the middle of the damn night. So naturally I have an alibi that’s as full of holes as a Bolian sponge worm. And then, of course, it’s me who discovers the kemocite in the lab the next morning, like I wanted to make sure everybody found it, when I was only running it through the phoretic analyzer. I was showing initiative, damn it!”

Kirk put up a hand to calm his friend. “Let’s go back to the phone call from Nadja. The one that got you out of the way so someone could do all this and you wouldn’t have an alibi for it.”

“Not Nadja,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

“No. It was Daagen, that Federation First bastard. I’m sure of it. Next morning, he comes to me, smug as a Tarkanian pig, and tells me he just happened to find it on his desk.”

“Did you tell Starfleet Security all of this?” Kirk asked.

“Of course I told them! But they already had their minds made up. They think I stole Nadja’s communicator and called myself with it to give myself an alibi, then left it on Daagen’s desk that night when I broke into the lab to slather kemocite all over everything.”

“I don’t understand,” Nadja said. “What made them start looking into all this in the first place? Why assume the kemocite had been planted?”

“Apparently kemocite and plasma don’t just go boom. They create a chain reaction until one of them is all used up. But there was kemocite
and
plasma on the wreckage. There shouldn’t have been both.”

“Unless someone planted it there, after the fact,” Nadja finished for him.

“When they figured out that little puzzle, they went back to check the access records, and here I am. But wait. That’s not the kicker. Jim, they found kemocite in our room.”

“They
what
?”

“A canister of it. From the engineering building stores. In the closet behind that case of Saurian brandy I’m also not supposed to have.” Bones raised his hands in surrender and paced his small cell.

“Somebody’s working awfully hard to see you take the fall for this one, Bones,” Kirk told him.

“It’s that Tellarite, Daagen. I’m sure of it. Nadja and I followed him and his buddies to some kind of secret meeting down in Sausalito, but they beamed out before we could nab one of them. He’s up to something, Jim. I told Starfleet Security all about that too, but they didn’t believe it either, the buffoons!” Bones said, raising his voice so the guards at the brig door could hear him.

“I’ll get to the bottom of it all, Bones,” Kirk told him. “I promise.”

“So do I,” Nadja said.

“We should have plenty of time, too,” Kirk said. “The Academy has canceled classes and suspended the end of semester exams until all this blows over.”

“If it does,” Nadja said. “Everybody’s buzzing there might be a war with the Varkolak.”

“Good god,” Bones said.

“Yeah, you hope. But don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here, buddy,” Kirk told him. The wheels were already turning. “And the first thing I’m going to need is your communicator.”