Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night Page 20

  As she studied the list, the chairwoman noted that the Tal Shiar had received recent word from two of their deep-cover agents within the Federation. The communications did not rise to the level of actual intelligence, amounting to no more than coded bursts of seemingly random noise. The signals did indicate, though, the ongoing success of those missions.

  Studying the reports of other operatives—several of them Romulans physically altered to produce Vulcan life signs—Sela felt particularly satisfied with the efforts of the Breen. In light of the shared allegiance to the Typhon Pact of both the Romulan Star Empire and the Breen Confederacy, the chairwoman had reached out to the Breen Intelligence Directorate. Initially, Sela sought to unmask the mysterious aliens, a goal she had at least to some degree accomplished; she knew of three distinct species among them, and suspected more.

  To her surprise, though, the Breen demonstrated considerable abilities as spies. No doubt because of their physical variation, they managed to place agents on worlds notoriously difficult for Romulans to infiltrate. In the course of her term as chair of the Tal Shiar, Sela had developed a reliable working relationship with Haut, the director of the BID.

  “Chairwoman Sela,” came the voice of Retind over the comm system, “we have achieved orbit. We are setting course for the En’Vahj.”

  “Understood,” Sela said. She peered again through the port. Splashed with the white of cloud formations, the blue-green world of Terix II hung majestically in space. About it, sunlight glinted off numerous spacecraft, testament to the popularity of the famed tourist destination. The chairwoman saw many Romulan vessels, but also noted quite a few that originated outside the borders of the Empire: the asymmetrical ships of the Gorn Hegemony, the angular ships of the Tholian Assembly, the teardrop-shaped ships of the Tzenkethi Coalition.

  Looking back down at her data tablet, Sela closed the document she’d been examining. She then searched for another and opened it, revealing a single line of numbers. She stood up and, passing between her two security guards, made her way to the shuttle’s cockpit. Outside its closed hatch, she activated the comm unit set into the adjoining bulkhead. “Commander Retind,” she said, “I need to speak with you.” She added the classified but seemingly innocuous phrase that indicated to the pilot that she did not speak under duress. After a moment, she heard the locking mechanism of the cockpit hatch release. When it glided open, she stepped inside, and the hatch closed behind her, locking once again.

  Retind looked up at her, as did the navigator. The pilot’s dark eyes regarded her from beneath black hair dusted white from age. “Commander,” Sela said, “we’ll be making an unscheduled stop.” She looked through the wide front ports at the abundance of ships in the space about Terix II, though she could not distinguish her intermediate destination. She held out her tablet so that Retind could see its display. “Take the shuttle to these coordinates.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Retind signaled the navigator, who entered the coordinates enumerated on Sela’s tablet into his control panel. The shuttle altered its trajectory.

  “Inform me when we arrive,” Sela ordered. She nodded toward the hatch, and Retind touched a control on his own console. The hatch unlocked and slid open, and Sela passed back into the main cabin.

  She did not stop there, though, instead continuing on into the aft compartment, where she secured the hatch. Sela then reconfigured her data tablet as she awaited word from the cockpit. It arrived a short time later.

  “Chairwoman Sela,” said Retind, “the shuttle has reached the specified coordinates.”

  “Very good,” Sela said. “You will wait here until—” She checked the chronometer on her tablet, then provided the pilot with a definite time. “If you have not heard from me by then, inform my security team and proceed to the En’Vahj. Once aboard, report this conversation to the lead Tal Shiar officer.”

  For a moment, Retind did not respond, and Sela conjectured that, as doubts and concerns rose in his mind, he fought the urge to voice them. Experienced in dealing with the Tal Shiar, the commander clearly knew better than to question one of its members—particularly the chairwoman herself. “Yes, ma’am,” he finally replied.

  Sela operated her data tablet, sending a signal to a second set of spatial coordinates she had brought with her. She received a confirmation at once. Calling up a set of instructions she had programmed into her tablet, she executed it. On her display, she saw verification that the shuttle’s shields had temporarily lowered, and an instant later, her vision clouded with the bright motes of a transporter effect.

  Sela materialized in a dark place, barely illuminated by the glow of a freestanding console across from her. Behind it stood a pair of armored Breen. They both walked forward, around the control panel, and approached her. Neither appeared to carry weapons.

  They don’t need to, Sela thought. Not while we’re standing in the middle of a Breen starship.

  “Chairwoman Sela,” said one of the two Breen, his words translated into the electronic output of his helmet, and then interpreted by Sela’s universal translator. “I am Haut. It is good to see you again.”

  Sela took a step toward the two Breen, leaving the pad onto which she had transported. The pulse of the ship’s power hummed through the decking. “Director Haut,” she said. She understood that she had no way of confirming his identity, but he had proven himself trustworthy in their previous encounters. If somebody had replaced him, if somebody sought to dupe Sela, it mattered little; Haut had called for their meeting, and so while the chairwoman expected to learn something new, she had no intention of conveying any classified information herself. Turning to the second Breen, she said, “May I ask who your colleague is?”

  “This is Trok,” Haut said. “He is an engineer working to restart the development of a quantum slipstream drive for the Typhon Pact.”

  Sela regarded Trok. Other than a slight difference in their postures, she could not tell the two uniformed men apart. “I see,” she said. “And he has something to report to me?”

  “I do,” Trok spoke up. “I have been working on a means not just of constructing a safely functioning slipstream drive, but of creating one easily installable across a wide variety of starship classes. To that end, I have been studying deflector and structural integrity technology—and I think I’ve found what I need to make this work.”

  Sela looked to Haut. “And what is it he needs?” she asked.

  Haut turned to Trok. “Tell her.”

  “Let me first say that we have in our possession a Jem’Hadar vessel that crashed within Confederacy territory during the Dominion-Federation War,” Trok said. “We found the ship relatively intact, and we have subsequently repaired its deflector and structural systems in an effort to test them. What we have learned is that we can adapt those Dominion technologies to provide us a sustainable, cross-platform slipstream drive.”

  The report surprised and impressed Sela. With the current balance—or imbalance—of power between the Typhon Pact and the Khitomer Accords, the realization of a quantum slipstream drive for the Pact remained a top priority. After the debacle that ended the Breen’s first attempt to develop such a technology, Sela had expected neither such perseverance nor progress from the Confederacy. “That is welcome news,” she said. “And so am I to understand that you require a fully functioning Jem’Hadar starship?”

  “No,” Haut said, to the chairwoman’s surprise.

  “No,” echoed Trok. “While we have confirmed through exhaustive testing that Jem’Hadar deflectors and structural integrity fields will allow us to produce the quantum slipstream drive, we have so far been unable to replicate those technologies ourselves, and to this point, we have no expectation that we will be able to do so anytime soon.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sela said, though she feared that she actually did. “Are you saying that for every ship in which you install the quantum slipstream drive, you require a separate Jem’Hadar vessel from which to pirate its structural integrity an
d deflector systems?”

  “No,” Haut said. “That would be unworkable in the extreme.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way,” Sela said, “because short of going to war against the Federation to gain control of the Bajoran wormhole, and then fighting the Dominion, I don’t see how we could accomplish that.”

  “We don’t need Jem’Hadar ships from which we can remove their deflector and structural integrity systems,” Trok said. “We need the equipment they employ in the production of those systems so that we can manufacture them ourselves.”

  The idea, Sela thought, seemed as absurd as trying to take a fleet of ships from the Jem’Hadar. But is it? she asked herself. She recalled Praetor Kamemor’s recent proposal to the Typhon Pact, and the likelihood before long of its approval. If Sela could convince the praetor to add another component to her proposal—

  Or better still, she thought, if one of her proconsuls could convince her.

  “I understand what you need—what we need,” Sela told Haut. “And it just might be possible.”

  Haut tilted his head slightly to one side, a nonverbal sign that appeared to cross cultural boundaries to indicate surprise. “Indeed,” he said. “As always, I am impressed by your abilities, your confidence, and what I assume must be your ingenuity.”

  “And I’m impressed by the progress you’ve made on the slipstream drive,” Sela said. She turned and stepped back onto the transporter pad. “If there’s nothing else, Director Haut, I’d like you to return me to my shuttle.”

  “Of course,” Haut said. He retreated to the console, and Trok followed. “Whenever you are ready, Chairwoman.”

  Sela raised her data tablet and touched a control that would again lower her shuttle’s shields, which she had programmed to reactivate after she’d beamed over to the Breen vessel. “I am ready now,” she told Haut. “But I will contact you again soon.”

  Haut worked the controls, and once more, the transporter effect took Sela. She materialized back in the aft compartment of the shuttle. After checking to ensure that her command sequence had once more raised the shields, she contacted the cockpit. “Sela to Retind.”

  “Retind here.”

  “Commander, make your best possible speed to the En’Vahj,” Sela ordered.

  “Yes, Chairwoman.”

  Sela unlocked the compartment hatch, went back into the main cabin, and returned to her seat along the aft bulkhead. As she looked through the port at the sight of Terix II receding below, she already set to composing the argument Tomalak would need to make to the praetor. If he could convince Kamemor, then Sela felt confident that Kamemor could convince the other leaders of the Typhon Pact. And the Federation, ever desirous to appear that it sought peace, would doubtless fall in line.

  Fools, Sela thought. Not just the Federation, but all of them. Had she lived, Tal’Aura would not have allowed the Federation’s tactical technological advantage to stand. Once she had reunited the divided Empire, she had begun planning to take on the Federation and its Khitomer Accords ally. And since Kamemor won’t do that, Sela thought with steely resolve, that duty shifts to the chairwoman of the Tal Shiar.

  And I won’t fail Romulus.

  At the scheduled time to which all parties had agreed, Federation President Nanietta Bacco walked down an elegant hall toward the Grand Assembly Chamber. By her side walked her chief of staff, Esperanza Piñiero, and behind followed a pair of guards from Bacco’s security team. Under normal circumstances, she knew, the head of presidential security would have insisted on additional protectors for her, but the Boslics had been firm in their requirements. When their government offered their world as a neutral site to host a summit between the nations of the Khitomer Accords and those of the Typhon Pact, they stipulated specific conditions in order to minimize any possible threat to the visiting heads of state.

  Marching along with her small entourage through the impressive hall, Bacco felt the weight of the moment upon her, the importance of the event manifest in the imposing surroundings. Great fluted columns lined the walkway, and the stone walls and floor had been buffed to a reflective gloss. High overhead, the walls curved outward, capped by a transparent half-cylinder from one end to the other, affording a long view of a stately mountain range. The incorporation of the vista into the architecture emphasized the Boslics’ general appreciation for nature.

  “Well, if this is a trap,” Bacco said to Piñiero, breaking their tense silence, “at least we’ll be going in style.”

  “It’s not a trap, Madam President,” replied Piñiero. Despite her use of formal address, her tone conveyed her frustration with Bacco for even joking about such a notion.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” the president told her. “If we’ve been duped, if this is all an elaborate ruse designed by the Typhon Pact to assassinate all of us, it’s too late now to turn back.” Bacco did not think for a moment that the Romulan praetor had requested—had virtually pleaded—for the summit as a means of weakening the Khitomer Accords states, or as the first shot in a massive interstellar war. From a practical standpoint, the Federation maintained technological superiority over the Pact by virtue of Starfleet’s quantum slipstream drive. More than that, even in the wake of the loss of Andor, the addition of the Cardassian Union and the Ferengi Alliance to the Accords reinforced both the size and strength of the military force available to defend the UFP and its allies.

  On a less strategic note, but perhaps of greater importance, the president believed that Gell Kamemor genuinely wanted peace. After she had succeeded to the praetorship of the freshly reunited Romulan Star Empire sixteen months earlier, Kamemor’s background of diplomacy and public service had served as a beacon of hope for Nan Bacco. That hope faded several months later when a Romulan starship employing a new, advanced cloak aided in the theft of the quantum slipstream drive schematics from Utopia Planitia. Since that time, though, and despite Starfleet’s own successful covert operation to destroy the Pact’s slipstream prototype, the praetor had taken no other provocative action, not even engaging in any bellicose rhetoric.

  But such had not been the case with other members of the Typhon Pact. The Tholians had worked to drive a wedge between the Federation and one of its founding members, leading directly to Andor’s secession. The Tzenkethi, too, had continued to harass several of the UFP populations relocated after the Borg invasion to planets near Coalition space, to the point where Starfleet had needed to intervene. For the previous two months, the Federation had detained thirty-five members of the Tzenkethi military who had attacked an Argelian freighter carrying humanitarian aid through unclaimed space—and on which Captain Picard had sprung his own trap. Despite repeated efforts to open a dialogue with the Coalition about the release of the soldiers, the autarch and the Tzelnira had refused even to talk to Bacco or her representatives. All of which, to Bacco’s way of thinking, generated a real need for a meaningful summit, but also confused her about the aims of the Typhon Pact as a whole.

  “It might be too late for us to avoid a trap,” Piñiero said, “but at least I won’t be the target.”

  “Nonsense,” Bacco said at once. “You play an absolutely vital role in our government. I’ll make sure the Typhon Pact knows that.”

  “Thank you, Madam President,” Piñiero said. “You’re too kind.”

  As they approached the end of the corridor, a massive block, made of the same polished stone as the floor and walls, glided open. Initially, it appeared to Bacco as though the doorway led to the outside, but when she passed through it, she saw differently. Before her, a wide, shallow staircase—one of several such sets of steps—descended between raked sections of empty seats, down to an open space dominated by a large, semicircular table. Glancing quickly around, she saw that half of the round chamber echoed the interior design of the corridor through which they had just passed: tall, grooved columns rimmed walls of gleaming stone. But the walls and ceiling in the other half of the chamber, beyond the conference table, had been constructe
d of a transparent material so clear that it seemed as though the neighboring landscape reached directly into the room. Just off to one side and slightly angled with respect to Bacco’s point of view, a waterfall plunged perhaps a hundred and fifty meters to a passing river, throwing up a delicate mist and providing a spectacular backdrop.

  “Wow,” Piñiero said in a whisper.

  “Wow is right,” Bacco agreed, just as quietly. “Makes me think we need to take a field trip the next time the Federation Council is in session.”

  Peering down at the conference table, the president saw that several other dignitaries had already arrived. Along the left arc of the table sat the Cardassian and Ferengi leaders, Castellan Rakena Garan and Grand Nagus Rom, while along the right arc sat their Breen and Gorn counterparts, Domo Brex and Imperator Sozzerozs. One of the three members of the Boslic Triumvirate, Letix Kortaj, stood at the center of the table’s diameter, her back to those already assembled, and apparently waiting to greet the other delegates as they arrived.

  Bacco turned and nodded to her two presidential guards, who responded in kind. As one of the conditions for hosting the summit, the Boslics had demanded that all security officers remain just inside one of the five entrances to the Grand Assembly Chamber. While the Boslics did not confiscate any energy weapons, they made it clear that a dampening field surrounding the entire government complex housing the chamber rendered such arms useless. Looking around again, Bacco saw other security duos at the heads of the other staircases, as well as a number of Boslic personnel. To Piñiero, the president said sotto voce, “Wish me luck.”