Assassination Game (5 page)

“A
Deltan
,” he lamented with a moan.

“Daydreaming again, Jimmy?”

Kirk snapped up straight. He knew that voice. He knew that voice all too well. Before him stood Jake Finnegan, an upperclassman who’d tormented him from the day Kirk had
set foot on campus. He was bulky and silver-haired, with ruddy cheeks and a mean smile. Future redshirt material. He’d never known what he had done to draw his attention, although Kirk suspected he’d just happened to be the first plebe Finnegan had seen on that first day of school. From that point on, Kirk had been Jake Finnegan’s personal project.

“Finnegan. What happened? You eat your handlers?”

Finnegan pulled a spork from his pocket and twirled it between his fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “And now I’m ready for dessert.”

A spork.
The Assassination Game
, Kirk realized with horror. Finnegan had pulled
his
badge from the black velvet bag? How unlucky was that?

Kirk scanned the room. It was empty! There had been at least three other cadets in here working when he’d come in, but he’d been so focused on his own work, he hadn’t even noticed them leave.

Finnegan smiled and took a step closer.

Kirk stood quickly, knocking over the test tubes he’d been mixing chemicals in. Finnegan was around the lab bench in a heartbeat, bearing down on Kirk with the spork.

“Hold it, Finnegan! Seriously! Stop!” Kirk cried, his eyes on the spilled chemicals.

Finnegan paused, looking back and forth between Kirk and the lab bench. “What?”

“Don’t … move,” Kirk said. He held himself rigid and
stared wide-eyed at the lab bench. “Finnegan, do you have any idea what corbomite is?

“No.”

That didn’t surprise Kirk, as he’d just made it up.

“It’s highly reactive,” Kirk explained. “Just the slightest bump, the smallest vibration, can set it off. It takes the energy of whatever hits it and returns it a thousandfold. A millionfold. And I just … accidentally … made some.”

Finnegan looked like he didn’t want to believe Kirk, but he didn’t know enough to be sure. Kirk kept his eyes on the grayish blob, even though Finnegan was close enough now he could have reached out and touched Kirk with the spork if he’d wanted to. The fact that Kirk was ignoring him completely and focusing on the “corbomite” helped sell it.

“Just this much could destroy everything within ten kilometers and leave a dead zone for four years,” Kirk told him.

“What the hell are you doing making a bomb for?” Finnegan asked.

“I told you. It was an
accident
. You come barging in here while I’m working with chemicals and—”

The chemicals began to bubble and hiss.

“Get out! Get out!” Kirk cried. He dropped to the floor, his hands over his head, and watched from under the table as Finnegan bolted from the room.

Kirk stood quickly, swept the harmless mixture into
the sink, snatched up his PADD and his backpack, and ran for the door. He had to put as much distance as he could between him and Finnegan before the lunkhead realized there hadn’t been a boom.

“A
Deltan
,” Kirk muttered as he ran. “I could have been getting my mind blown by a Deltan….”

“It’s a phoretic analyzer,” McCoy explained to Nadja as they walked along a trail in the Marin Headlands. A bright, glowing panorama of San Francisco at night was framed across the bay by the Golden Gate Bridge. “Dr. Huer developed it, and a few other cadets and I were invited to be a part of the laboratory trials. The idea is that it can take a complex mix of substances and identify individual molecules within it.”

“A superscanner,” Nadja said.

Nadja’s dog, a little cairn terrier, stopped to sniff a bush.

“You could call it that. With a very specific medical use. Nothing like those scanners the Varkolak are supposed to have, of course. What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on one of those.”

The conversation lulled, and McCoy realized he’d been doing all the talking—a cardinal first-date sin.

“So. Enough about my boring research project,” he said. “Tell me everything about yourself, beginning with
your parents and your parents’ parents and leading up to, oh, this afternoon.”

Nadja laughed. “Well, my grandfather was German, and my grandmother was Russian. I’m named after her. After my parents met in college, they got the crazy idea to move to the Vega colony. I was born on the way.”

“A space boomer, eh? That explains a lot.”

“Does it?”

“Sure. Why else would anyone want to join up with an organization that ships you off into space on five-year missions, trapped inside a glorified tin can with a warp engine strapped to it?”

“That doesn’t explain why
you
joined up, Leonard McCoy.”

“Oh no. We’re talking about you, remember? I think you left off around the time you were born, which means you’ve got another couple of decades to cover.”

The path they were walking on came out into a large open area where tourists from around the quadrant were taking holo-pics of the San Francisco skyline. Mrs. Penelope barked at a squirrel and gave chase, and McCoy and Nadja sat on a bench.

“There’s not much else to tell. I spent the early part of my life in the Vega colony, then my parents died, and I was shipped back to Earth to be raised by my grandparents in Frankfurt. I spent a couple of years in college, then applied for Starfleet Academy and got in. And here I am.”

“Seems like there’s an awful lot in there to tell,” McCoy said. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

Nadja shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

She left it at that, and so did McCoy.

Mrs. Penelope emerged from a copse a few meters away and ran toward a small group of people farther down the overlook, barking her head off.

“Uh-oh,” Nadja said. “Looks like we have a distress call.”

McCoy nodded. “Starfleet regulations mandate we check it out.”

As they got closer, McCoy saw Mrs. Penelope harrying a group of protesters with signs. They chanted, “Varkolak, go home,” over the little terrier’s barking and held signs that read
IF YOU’RE NOT WITH US, YOU’RE AGAINST US
, and
FEDERATION FIRST.
The tourists were doing their best to avoid them, but the group had claimed one of the best photo-op spots on the headlands.

“What is this nonsense?” McCoy asked. Nadja picked up her dog and quieted her, but the protesters kept chanting without answering him. McCoy had little patience for close-minded, xenophobic attitudes like this, though he knew they still existed on Earth. Not all the protesters were human, though, including, he was angry to realize, a Tellarite medical cadet he knew from the Academy. He got in the cadet’s face.

“You. Your name’s Daagen, isn’t it? You’re a Starfleet cadet, man! You joined an organization dedicated to openness. Peaceful exploration. Diplomacy. ‘Varkolak, go home’? ‘Federation First’? You can’t have it both ways.”

The short, bearded, snout-faced Tellarite smiled. “You forget, Dr. McCoy—it is McCoy, isn’t it? You forget, Dr., that the Federation began as a defensive alliance. A shield raised against our common enemies. So I
can
have it both ways. I can at once be dedicated to the organization I chose to serve and insist that its enemies—who do not share its lofty ideals, I might note—not be allowed to wander the grounds of its headquarters.”

“Damn it, man, we’re not going to bring peace to the galaxy by alienating everyone who doesn’t agree with us. We’ve got to find common ground, and that starts by talking. Getting rid of some of the mystery. The misconceptions and misunderstandings. We show ’em enough of who we are, and maybe one day the Varkolak will join us.”

“Next you would have me believe we will one day be allies with the Klingons,” Daagen said.

Behind Daagen, the protesters continued to chant, “Varkolak, go home.” McCoy felt his fists clench involuntarily, and the doctor part of his brain unconsciously diagnosed his agitated condition as his hypothalamus releasing oxytocin and vasopressin, and his pituitary gland producing large amounts of adrenocorticotropic
hormones. In layman’s terms, he was plain mad as hell.

McCoy pointed a finger in Daagen’s face. “If we’d had your attitude a hundred years ago, your race wouldn’t even
be
in the Federation.”

“A specious argument, Dr. McCoy. Tellar Prime was a founding member of the Federation. We could hardly have been denied access if there was no Federation to join.”

McCoy fumed. “Damn stubborn Tellarites and your nitpicky arguments! You know what I mean.”

“There is a clear and accepted application process for joining the Federation, Dr. McCoy, and any race who sees the wisdom in joining the Federation will be welcome.”

“And any who don’t?”

The Tellarite put his
IF YOU’RE NOT WITH US, YOU’RE AGAINST US
sign in McCoy’s face. McCoy moved to rip it from Daagen’s hands, but Nadja was there to stop him.

“Don’t. Come on. You’re not going to win an argument with a Tellarite,” she told him.

“Listen to your lady friend, Dr.,” Daagen told him. He nodded at Mrs. Penelope. “Are you going to eat all of that dog?”

“I’ll give you something to eat,” Bones said. He wagged his fist at the Tellarite.

Nadja pulled McCoy away. “Down, boy. Are you always so easily excitable?”

“Only when I run into damn fool idiots!” he said,
making sure the last part was loud enough to carry back to the protesters.

McCoy calmed down some on the short walk back to Nadja’s dorm, but he was still worked up over Daagen. Such backward thinking, and from a Starfleet cadet, no less!

Nadja stopped outside the lobby to her dormitory and let Mrs. Penelope down to sniff the marigolds planted beside the sidewalk. Nadja put her hands behind her back and bounced ever so slightly on the balls of her feet.

“So. Here we are,” she said.

Here they were. At the door to her dormitory.
Good god, it’s the end of the date
, McCoy realized. The end of a date was as important as the auto-suture at the end of a surgery—and had to be planned just as carefully. There was the small talk to plan, the next date to line up, and, if the operation had been a success, the good-night kiss. Or perhaps even more. How on Earth had they gotten to this point without him seeing it coming?

“Right,” he said, realizing he’d been quiet for too long. “Here we are.”

“My roommate’s pulling an all-nighter in the astrometric lab tonight, in case you’d like to come upstairs for … a nightcap.”

McCoy really had meant to prepare for this. It was that damned Daagen, getting him all worked up. He took a deep breath. He and Nadja hadn’t gotten around to the last
two decades of
his
life or to the part about his ex-wife. His
recent
ex-wife. Damn it—Why the hell hadn’t he prepared for any of this? He looked up at the dorm room windows, as if he could see the future through them.

“Listen, Nadja, I … I appreciate the offer. Believe me. I had a terrific time, and I’d like to see you again. Soon. But I think for now, I need to just leave it at ‘good night.’”

“Ooh! Now you are playing hard to get.” She laughed, but it was a good laugh. “A man who can go against instinct. I’m impressed.”

Nadja kissed him good night and scooped up Mrs. Penelope.

“Until next time,” she said, and she went inside.

“Until next time,” McCoy said.

Nyota Uhura paced the small confines of the Academy observation deck. The lights in the room were dim at night, so visitors could see the lights of Sausalito across the water from the Academy grounds. Uhura thought the lighting was appropriate. She was both literally and figuratively in the dark, and while she wasn’t eager for the lights to be turned on in the observation deck, she was certainly hoping some light would be shed on a different, and very puzzling, part of her life.

The turbolift at the other end of the room
ding
ed and opened, and Spock stepped out.

“Commander Spock!” she said, practically running across the room to him.

“Please. Just Spock,” he reminded her. They had recently agreed to call each other by their first names when not in uniform. Or in Spock’s case, the only part of his name Uhura knew. He had assured her that his full name was unpronounceable
for most humans, even a linguist of Uhura’s ability.