Assassination Game (20 page)

Kirk got a few more answers out of Bones before leaving, and promised to meet up with Nadja later to let her know what he’d learned. On the way out of the brig, he was called over to another cell, where Lartal stood by the force
field, as frantic and impatient as Bones had been.

“Kirk,” Lartal said. “I wanted to thank you. For the way you stood up for me.”

“I owed you one. Two, maybe,” Kirk said. Lartal was still coy about whether or not he’d saved Kirk from the shuttle blast, but Kirk was pretty sure the Varkolak had saved his life twice.

“You are a man of honor,” Lartal said. “Thank you.”

Kirk nodded and left, feeling certain that two people in that brig were there under false arrest. He was determined to clear them both.

“Earlier today, the Varkolak Assembly denounced the arrests, calling for the immediate release of Captain Lartal and the other members of the Varkolak contingent here on Earth, but Federation officials assert that the Varkolak will not be released, pending the outcome of their investigation into the recent bombings. At this hour, FNS has reports that Starfleet is recalling its main fleet to Sector zero-zero-one, in anticipation of an expected Varkolak armed response for the arrests made earlier today. These images, collected from the Argos telescope at the edge of Sol Sector, reveal what experts say is a massing of the Varkolak Armada near Theta Draconis. A Federation travel advisory is in effect for Sol, Mizar, Denobula, and Tellar Sectors, and Federation citizens are cautioned to—”

Uhura switched off the Federation News Service feed
on the treadmill’s viewscreen and tapped the controls, increasing her speed. She wanted to run faster. Farther. To leave all her mistakes behind. Gloomily, though, she realized the treadmill was an apt metaphor for her situation. No matter how fast and how hard she ran, she was still going nowhere.

She glanced at the chronometer on the treadmill. It was almost 1900 hours. Time to see if she could start moving forward again. Uhura shut down the treadmill and stepped off, heading for the showers.

The Varkolak Armada was massing near Theta Draconis, she thought as she got undressed in the changing room. That was right on the border of the Theta Cygni and Tznekethi Sectors, if she remembered her astronavigation classes. She did some quick math. At warp five, the Varkolak could be in Federation space in a matter of days. Sooner if they pushed to maximum warp. There wasn’t much time left to put things right.

Uhura went to take a sonic shower, letting it massage the sweat off her. The Academy Sports Complex was fairly empty, with the restrictions put on cadets being out of their dorms, but she wasn’t surprised when someone got into the shower stall right next to hers and switched on the sonics. Nor was she surprised when the shadowy figure spoke to her.

“Cadet Uhura. We understand you have something
new for us.” It was the same woman who had contacted her before, and told her to steal a Varkolak sniffer. Or the same voice, at least.

“I do,” Uhura told her. “It’s a Varkolak phaser.”

“The Varkolak phaser technology is inferior to ours,” the woman told her.

“I know,” Uhura told her. “But I thought it might be useful for … other purposes.”

Uhura let her Graviton contact think about that. If she was the saboteur, she would see the opportunity immediately. If she wasn’t … Well, it wasn’t hard to imagine how a Varkolak phaser could be used to incriminate them, even if it wasn’t used for a more violent purpose.

“You’re right,” the woman said at last. “I’ll pass it along. Where is it?”

“Locker four ninety-two. In a satchel.”

“Good work, Cadet. Shields up.”

“Shields up,” Uhura warned the woman as she left her shower stall, and this time Uhura meant it.

Kirk hurried across campus. If he’d been worried at all about the Assassination Game—which he wasn’t at the moment—it wouldn’t have mattered. The eyes of Starfleet Security officers everywhere. They were posted at the doors to the dorms, the classroom buildings, and
the administration buildings. They were patrolling the old parade grounds and the paths around the quad. He got wary looks from a few of them, and one or two told him to hurry along to wherever it was he was supposed to be. But while there were security officers everywhere, the Academy’s cadets were noticably absent from the campus. It felt like a proverbial ghost town.

It wasn’t just the threat of more attacks. There was a general feeling of foreboding in the air, like at any moment, the public viewscreens around campus would light up with a flashing red alert, calling every cadet into active duty and sending them scrambling for shuttles and transporters. It had happened once before, Kirk knew—some response to a Tholian incursion into Federation space a hundred years ago—and everyone was buzzing that it might be happening again soon.

Kirk was stopped at the door to Nimitz Hall and asked his business there. The security officer finally cleared him, but only after scanning him with a tricorder. Kirk was fairly shocked, but if Bones was under suspicion, he supposed all cadets could be. All the more reason to get Bones cleared, pronto. He took the steps two at a time and punched a door chime.

“Da?” asked a heavily accented Russian voice.

“It’s Jim Kirk,” he told the intercom.

The door slid open, and the young teenage wunderkind,
Pavel Chekov, met him with a huge smile on his face.

“Welcome!” he said. “What brings you to Nimitz Hall?”

Kirk loved this kid. Just last semester, Kirk had tried to drown Chekov in the kid’s own room. Kirk had been infected with a neural code that had hot-wired his brain and made him do things he didn’t remember, but still … Most people would take something like that personally. Not Chekov. The kid was smiling at him like Kirk was his big brother, and Kirk found he kind of liked that Chekov thought of him that way.

Kirk clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Chekov, I need your help.”

“Of course! Yes! Come in!” The young cadet gestured to a pot of something violently reddish purple simmering on a hot plate. It smelled like beets and sour cream. “Would you like some borscht?”

“Um, no, thanks, I just ate,” Kirk said. “How did you get a hot plate up to temperature to make soup?”

“What? Oh, I made a few modifications to it. You know what they say, ‘You don’t own it until you open it.’”

Kirk had never heard that line before, but then again, he and Chekhov didn’t exactly run in the same circles. “I need you to tell me who called my roommate’s communicator,” he said.

Chekov frowned. “Um, forgive me, but can you not just check the call log?”

“We know whose phone it came from, but she says it wasn’t her who called. Somebody used some software or something to imitate her voice.”

Chekov’s eyes went wide. “Oh, yes. I see! Very clever! Very clever! But … why is your roommate recording his calls?”

“It got pushed as a Priority One message, just in case he had his phone on standby. Somebody
really
wanted him to wake up and take this call.”

“And all Priority One calls are recorded! Yes! It is clear to me now. What is the message?”

Kirk called up the recording and played it for both of them to hear.

“Who the hell calls at two thirty in the—”

“Priority One call from Nadja Luther.”

“Leonard? Leonard, it’s Nadja.”

“Nadja? What’s wrong? Why are you calling—”

“Leonard, I need you to meet me at Cavallo Point, right way.”

“What? Now? Why?”

“Please, hurry.”

“Nadja? What’s wrong? Nadja?”

“Priority One call ended.”

“It’s the girl’s voice that’s the fake one,” Kirk said, just to be clear.

“Oh. Aye. You can hear just a hint of distortion. But it
is a very good mask. Very good indeed.”

Kirk couldn’t hear any difference in the recorded voice and Nadja’s voice at all, but that’s why he’d come to Chekov.

“Can you do it? Can you … back-mask it, or whatever?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I can. I’ll have to run it through an acoustic resonance inverter and then feed the digital file to a sonic parser and then perhaps run a harmonic analysis of—”

Kirk held up a hand. “I knew I came to the right person. Do whatever you have to do.”

Kirk’s communicator chimed, and he flipped it open.

“Kirk here.”

“Jim, it’s Nadja. It’s Daagen. He’s up to something. Can you meet me behind the astrosciences building?”

“I’ll be right there,” Kirk told her. He snapped his communicator shut and stood. “Sorry. I’ve gotta run. You’ll call me when you’ve got something? It’s kind of urgent. Fate of the galaxy and all that.”

“I will get on it right away!” Chekov promised. He grinned, picking up a hyperspanner from the random tools and devices on his desk and spinning it in his fingers. “You don’t own it until you open it.”

Daagen was taking a field trip, and Kirk and Nadja were going with him.

He didn’t know they were going with him, of course. But when he slipped out the back of the library by the loading dock, to avoid the security officers patrolling the campus, they followed a few minutes later. When he took the nature trail down to the harbor, so did they—fifty meters behind him. And when he took the ferry across the bay to San Francisco, they hopped into a cab to take them over the bridge, to wait for him on the other side.

Nadja threw her backpack in next to Kirk, and they were off.

“What’s he doing, going into the city?” Kirk asked.

“Nothing good, I’ll wager,” Nadja said.

They arrived just after the ferry did, and Kirk spotted
the short Tellarite moving quickly toward the streetcar line.

“Keep the car! Keep the car!” he told Nadja, just as she was paying the fare, and he slid into the back seat. To the driver, he said, “Follow that streetcar!”

Kirk shot Nadja a smile. “I’ve always wanted to say something like that.”

The taxi followed at a discreet distance. Daagen didn’t get off the streetcar for a long while, and when he finally did, it was in one of San Francisco’s most colorful, vibrant neighborhoods.