His data device registered a steady flow of incoming text messages from former colleagues at FNS, as well as several from editors and peers at other news services. The missives were all but unanimous in their congratulations; several contained offers of long-term column-writing assignments or invitations to pitch feature stories. Checking the bottom of the alphabetical list, he even found a terse message of congratulation from Arlys Warfield, his former FNS editor, who had fired him after the debacle of the Bombay story.
He savored the taste of victory along with his espresso.
Get over yourself, he thought, popping the suddenly inflated bubble of his ego. You’re just a word monkey who likes to snoop. Don’t go believing your own press.
As he lifted a forkful of eggs Benedict, his data device beeped twice to signal an incoming transmission. He set his fork on the plate, picked up the device, and keyed the transceiver. “This is Tim Pennington.”
“Mr. Pennington,” replied the coarse, familiar voice of Commodore Reyes. “Think you can handle another scoop?”
A quick look around assured Pennington that no one was eavesdropping. “I’m willing to try.”
“Get to my office in the next five minutes. Reyes out.”
Pennington pulled his portable recorder from his pocket and ran for the turbolifts.
Flanked by a pair of serious-faced young male security guards, Captain Rana Desai waited outside Reyes’s office. Business as usual continued around her until his door slid open, with a hiss barely audible over the hubbub of Vanguard’s operations center.
Reyes stepped through the doorway and stood in front of her. All activity on the deck stopped, and the mood grew heavy with grim anticipation. Several meters away, a turbolift opened. Tim Pennington dashed out and stumbled to an awkward halt.
From the first day she had started assembling the chart in the JAG office, Desai had known this moment might come. But she had not expected it to arrive so soon, or for Reyes himself to have forced her hand. In a voice just for him, she asked, “Diego…you know I have no choice?”
His bearing was proud but forgiving. He answered her in a discreet tone. “You have to do your job, Rana.”
Around them, the onlookers slowly had pressed closer. Junior officers, Reyes’s yeoman, and particularly reporter Tim Pennington all were within easy eavesdropping distance.
Her heart swelled with regret. She blinked, cleared her eyes, and steadied her breathing as she forced all vestiges of emotion from her face. “Commodore Diego Reyes,” she declared in her clipped London accent, “by order of the Starfleet Judge Advocate General, you are hereby charged with willfully disobeying the direct order of a superior officer; deliberately releasing classified Starfleet intelligence to the public; and conspiring to disclose classified information.
“You have the right to legal counsel. You have the right to refuse to answer questions. Do you understand these rights?”
Reyes nodded once. “Yes, I do.”
“You are hereby relieved of your command, relieved of duty, and placed under arrest.” Desai looked to the guard on her left. “Take the commodore into custody, and escort him to the brig.”
“Aye, Captain,” said the guard, who stepped forward, looked at Reyes, and gestured with his arm toward a nearby turbolift. “Sir, if you please.” Reyes did as he was asked and walked calmly toward the turbolift, with the two guards following close behind him.
Anger and desperation clashed inside Desai’s thoughts as she watched the man she had come to love being taken away as a prisoner on what had been, until moments ago, his own station. Unable to continue watching his exit from the operations center, she turned and faced Commander Jon Cooper, who stood looking down from the supervisor’s deck. “Commander Cooper,” Desai said. “You’re in charge…. Good luck.”
Guessing she would likely be persona non grata in ops for a while, Desai left the stunned first officer to ponder his sudden promotion and stepped toward a different turbolift from the one into which Reyes was being led. Her only aim was to get back to her office and start preparing her case. Focusing on work felt heartless, but for her own good—and for Diego’s as well—she knew it was the right thing to do. She had a lot of gaps left to fill in, but there was no more time to pin photos on walls and collect anecdotes; it was time to get serious.
She had a court-martial to win.
Epilogue
Ministers
of Vengeance
Two to Tango
Zett Nilric’s ship, a new Nalori argosy named Icarion, had been drifting for nearly two days with its engines offline. Its life support had been kept at a bare-minimum level, and its effective communications range was less than one light-minute. Unless another vessel was making a determined effort to find it and knew exactly where to look, it was unlikely that the Icarion would be detected. But because his employer had made specific arrangements with Starfleet to keep this sector of deep space clear of patrols and unwatched by long-range sensor arrays, Zett had every reason to believe that he was working in privacy.
It was time. He passed one glossy, midnight-black hand over his ship’s immaculate main console and tapped the secure-frequency transmitter, sending a brief, ultra-low-power pulse of encrypted data into the emptiness of Sector Tango-4119. If his contact was punctual, the wait would be short.
Behind him, in the main cabin beyond the cockpit, the stone sarcophagus sat secured to the deck. Zett was not a man who spooked easily, but he wanted this cargo off his ship. He had sneered at the obvious terror its contents had inspired in the primitive aliens from whom he had acquired it, but within two days of taking possession of it, he had become wary of the artifact. An aura of menace emanated from it. He was certain that it was infecting his dreams with terrors and disquieting his waking thoughts with demoralizing subliminal insinuations. Less than four days in its presence had convinced him that evil was more than an abstract concept—it was a concrete reality, lying silent inside a two-meter-long coffin of dark gray, rough-hewn granite.
He jolted with surprise as the double beep of a response signal shrilled in the silence of the cockpit. A deep breath restored his calm, and then he opened the channel and issued the challenge phrase. “If you approach for the attack, never forget to wait for the right moment.”
A gruff voice answered over the comm, “In waiting for the right moment, never forget to attack.”
Zett transmitted beam-in coordinates to his contact, got up from his seat, and walked back into the main cabin. Four signal-blocking pylons stood at the corners of the sarcophagus, as insurance against the client’s potential impulse to try to steal it via transporter beam. The Nalori assassin stepped past the stone coffin and placed himself between it and the beam-in coordinates. Then he waited.
Moments later a shimmer and a singsong, oscillating drone of high-pitched white noise filled the air a few meters in front of him. The swirling glow of light coalesced into a humanoid shape and faded to reveal a ridged-headed, black-bearded, swarthy Klingon named Qahl. As the last traces of the transporter effect faded, the visitor took one step forward, looked Zett in the eye, and pointed at the sarcophagus. “Is that it?”
“Yes,” Zett said. He stepped aside to give Qahl an unobstructed view. “Examine it first, if you like.”