Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice (7 page)

Her husband nodded. “They fit the bill all right. The Holy Order of the Kinshaya, the Breen Confederacy, the Romulan Star Empire all making treaty with the Gorn, the Tholians, and the Tzenkethi. . . . There's not a single member of the Pact that hasn't at one time been a player in an armed conflict with us.”

Deanna nodded. The Typhon Pact was difficult to anticipate and cunning in its affairs of state, and while there was weakness in the places where the Pact's members worked at cross purposes, it could not be denied that they represented the gravest military threat to the Federation's borders. “All that is true, but still they've shown no intent to invade. They've made plenty of attempts at subterfuge, some successful and some not, but that's to be expected. They're pushing at their boundaries and measuring the response, but Bacco herself was reaching out to some of them. . . . Hopefully that opportunity won't be lost now.”

“We can hope. Any intent for war is absent, or so
it appears,” Will concluded, finishing the thought for her. “That was well enough and good for the previous administration. Starfleet's job was to carry on, project quiet and steady strength while we kept the chance of some kind of friendship on the table.”

“I remember Ishan Anjar being quite vocal about how much he disagreed with that. And he hasn't changed his mind,” said Deanna. “Now his calls for a harder line against the Pact are in the ascendant.” It seemed to her that anti–Typhon Pact sentiments were growing by the day, led in part by the belligerent stance of the president pro tem. Although he had yet to openly say the words in any public forum, it was the worst-kept secret on Earth that Ishan considered the Typhon Pact to be the prime suspect in the killing of Nan Bacco.

“If the Pact
is
going to be our enemy,” Will said quietly, “then it's the Tzenkethi driving them to it. That's how the wind is blowing.”

The cunning Tzenkethi had waged war on the Federation many times, and the recent battles still lived in the memories of many senior Starfleet officers and older civilians alike; it was this faction of the Typhon Pact that rhetoric targeted, despite the fact that nothing beyond circumstantial evidence connecting them to the DS9 incident had been revealed. Means and motive were not enough on their own, Deanna reflected, but in desperate times such things could slip away beneath the tide of public opinion.

“Do you believe that?” she asked him. “Do you think they are responsible?”

“History is full of wars that have started with a single assassin's bullet,” Will told her. “If somebody took Bacco's life in order to cause turmoil in the Federation,
then they've already succeeded.” He paused, then shook his head. “She stood for something, Deanna. For the best of us. The Federation she wanted was one built on a foundation of honesty and reason. We can't let the last of her be the echo of a shot.”

*  *  *

The machine drifted there, some three hundred meters up above the city of San Francisco, floating on a stiff breeze. If one could have seen it clearly, the device might have been described as resembling an avian form rendered by an avant-garde sculptor. It was slightly smaller than the common gulls that wheeled and turned over the water's edge down by the bay, metallic wings canted to ride the thermals over the cityscape.

Its skin was a composite of near-weightless aerogel compounds, built around a core of advanced microduotronic circuits. It could mimic the flight patterns and some behaviors of a real bird if required, but tonight that functionality was inactive. Its skin tone was matched to the shaded, cloudy sky above. For all intents and purposes, the little drone was invisible.

Bobbing on a compact antigravity motor no bigger than a pencil, the device held its station directly over the open courtyard of the La Sorrento restaurant. Sensor pits along the length of its body continually mapped the target zone beneath it, and the memory center of the unit monitored the ambient environment. It had only one target, and with a machine's faultless patience, the drone watched Admiral William Riker in everything he said and did.

The bistro's weather-shield had caused a minor issue at first, necessitating the need to recalibrate the audio scanners in order to isolate Riker's conversation
from the ambient noise surrounding him, but that had been dealt with in short order.

The drone continued to loiter as it had for the past hour. Capable of solar charging or even wireless energy induction, it could remain on station indefinitely. Silent. Unseen. Watchful.

Meet the new enemy. Same as the old enemy.

Riker's words were gathered up by the synthetic ear of the device before being shot in microsecond bursts of data to a receiver in the top floor of a nondescript office building several blocks west, near Alamo Square.

On paper, the office was the server hub for a networking concern, a largely unmanned facility populated by rows of data cores and communication routers. In reality, the center of the space was a set of isolated cubicles, each sound shielded from the others by baffle fields. Each cubicle contained a monitor and an operator who worked shifts gathering surveillance data on a dozen different subjects. Some were scrutinized through drones similar to the one shadowing Riker; others through the monitoring of personal communications or data traffic patterns. The facility was known as Active Two.

The operators were trained to show no interest in the identity of their subjects, to treat them with dispassion and clinical regard. They were simply there to provide an observer's oversight to the mechanical recovery of intelligence material—because no matter what the era, or where the act took place, it remained a truism that even the most clever thinking machine could not spy on someone so well as another living being.

The Vulcan watching the live feed from the drone continued to listen to the admiral conversing with his wife. There were several of her species assigned to this
posting; Vulcan physiology and mental acuity were particularly well suited to the lengthy, concentration-intensive and frequently tedious work of monitoring.

She glanced briefly at a tertiary display that indicated the passage of the recovered data. Typically, surveillance intelligence was parsed and then sifted for usable data on site at this location, before a digest version of the sensor recording was passed on to a higher level; but in this case, it appeared that someone at a more senior security clearance was already tapped into the direct feed, watching it unfold live just as she was. She paused, musing. This was highly irregular, and she considered alerting her superior, who sat several cubicles away at another station.

The Vulcan briefly allowed herself to wonder what it was about Admiral William T. Riker that required such scrutiny, then dismissed her own question as irrelevant. That was not a matter for her to dwell upon. She had her orders. She would carry them out.

We can't let the last of her be the echo of a shot,
Riker was saying. A moment after the words were relayed back from the drone, the indicator showing the outside connection winked out, the feed to the higher clearance source abruptly terminated.

On the screen, the admiral refused a dessert in favor of a coffee while his wife indulged. Riker glanced up briefly, and his watcher noted he was frowning.

*  *  *

Despite the lateness of the hour—or perhaps because of it—the streets of the portside district were busy with ship crews on liberty and the occasional group of adventurous tourists. The Centauri sun had set just as Tuvok's transport had made landfall, and in the hours that had passed since then he had followed a circuitous
path around the port city, taking maglev trams up and down the lines around the industrial zones to ensure he had not been followed. It was a standard espionage tradecraft technique and as automatic to the Vulcan as breathing. Even here, in the heart of the Federation's member-worlds, he did not lower his guard. The secret orders had set him on alert for even the smallest sign of something awry. He drew into the depths of his hooded jacket, his dark face lost in shadow.

A cold wind pushed down the streets as Tuvok arrived at the location designated for his rendezvous. A generous critic might have been willing to call the place a “tavern,” but it barely qualified as such. Built into the side of a decaying hangar complex, a handful of merchant marine cargo modules had been welded together around a rig that appeared to be made of surplus parts from an old
Ptolemy
-class tug.

He entered through a tall steel door and a wave of distasteful odors washed over him. The sour organic smell of stale sweat from a dozen humanoid species, the tang of fermented alcoholic beverages, all mixed with ozone from what was likely a poorly shielded electrical system. Tuvok had to step aside as a pair of tall, reedy Xelatians ambled past him on the way out, their movements stiff and jerky. One of them bumped into the Vulcan and glared blankly from behind a rectangular brass breather mask before going on its way.

The tavern was divided into booths cut from hull metal. A long, curving bar that had once been part of a warp nacelle dominated one side of the establishment. Here and there, jury-rigged gaming tables hosted dom-jot or kella, although the surly manner of the players did not invite any casual approach.

Tuvok took in the room, looking for the best
vantage point, as a humanoid female resembling a Betazoid walked swiftly toward him. She appeared to flicker, her aspect shifting slightly.
A hologram, then,
he decided,
doubtless projected by a computer system behind the bar
. It had to have been scanning him as he entered, measuring what kind of server would be most enticing to a new customer.

The device was poorly calibrated and lagged, however. The faux-Betazoid first became a Terran woman of Asian extraction. “Hey, honey! What can I get—” The holographic waitress flickered again and transformed into a demure Vulcan female, her expression snapping from slyly welcoming to serious and thoughtful. “Greetings, traveler,” she began again, with a poor imitation of a Shir'Kar accent. “How may I provide for you this night?”

“Altair water,” he replied, moving past her toward a vacant booth.

Tuvok sat and nursed his drink for a while, feigning interest in a wall screen display showing an ice hockey game in progress elsewhere on the planet. Under cover of this, he cast a practiced eye over the rest of the tavern's clientele and noted several other patrons acting in a manner that could have been described as suspicious. None of them, however, seemed to be interested in him. He had no doubt that this place was the nexus for one or more criminal enterprises of minor scale, but his purpose here was not to interfere with such minutiae.

The fact remained that Tuvok was uncertain as to exactly what his purpose here
was
. Again he went over the orders in his mind, sifting the terse language for any deeper meaning. He recalled the words of his former commander Kathryn Janeway when confronted
with similar directives in the past; “cloak and dagger,” she had called it, an apt—if somewhat theatrical—description that illustrated not only the inherent obfuscation, but also the potential for danger.

As he mused on this, the Vulcan became aware of someone moving past the edge of his booth. A human male, dressed in the jumpsuit and gear vest of a dock worker, slid into the seat opposite him. Only the lower half of his face was visible, the rest hidden behind dark pilot's eyeshades and a grimy gray ushanka hat. Tuvok's immediate sense was that this was a disguise of some sort; it did not match the man who wore it. He had an ill-trimmed beard that split into a smile that Tuvok found immediately familiar. “Mind if I join you?”

“I am waiting for a friend,” Tuvok said automatically, appending the code phrase he had been given. “From the barge.”

“The barge sank,” came the correct counter. “What a shame.” The man reached up to remove his hat and glasses, and what Tuvok had taken at first glance to be a mistaken observation on his part was revealed as quite the opposite.

“Sir?” he whispered.

William Riker's face looked back at him, a humorless twist to his lips. “Yeah,” said the newcomer with a shrug. “I get that a lot.”

Tuvok's eyes narrowed as the moment of surprise faded. It was almost impossible that this man could be
Titan
's commander, and equally there were myriad explanations for who or what else he
might
be. Anything from an android simulacrum to another hologram or a Changeling. . . . There were many possibilities, all of them troubling.

“Come on, Tuvok, let's cut to the chase,” said the other man. “You remember me, don't you? Think back. We met on the
Spartacus,
you and me and your Maquis friends. That whole incident with the plague outbreak at the Helena colony? Of course, at the time I didn't know you were with Starfleet Intelligence.”

“You are Thomas Riker,” said the Vulcan, with a sudden rush of insight.

“Most people just call me Tom, for simplicity's sake.”

For all intents and purposes, Tuvok was looking at William Riker's identical twin, but the circumstances that surrounded the two men did not stem from something as natural as sharing a mother's womb.

Tuvok had first encountered this man while under deep cover with a cell of Maquis renegades, later learning the full details of the incident that had led to Tom Riker's “birth” through mission reports from the
Enterprise
-D, under Jean-Luc Picard.

In 2369, the
Enterprise
had returned to the planet Nervala IV after a science team that included William Riker had been forced to evacuate eight years earlier; there, Picard's crew encountered a duplicate of the
Enterprise
's first officer, created by a freak combination of atmospheric effects and a transporter malfunction. That duplicate—the very man who sat across from him now—had eventually taken Riker's middle name and set out to live a life of his own. But he had become disenchanted with life in Starfleet and thus was prime material for recruitment into the Maquis resistance movement.