Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (4 page)

He reached the end of the hallway and stopped in front of the drawn curtain on his right. Assured by a furtive glance back the way he’d come that he hadn’t been followed, he knocked lightly on the door frame and whispered, “The hunter stands ready.”

From within the alcove, a hand jerked the curtain aside. Valina, a striking young Romulan woman of unusual height and beauty, was clad in a sheer negligee that left precious little to Duras’s imagination. She flashed a salacious smile. “The prey awaits.” With her free hand she pulled Duras to her and met him in a ferocious kiss. Despite her lean physique, her strength never failed to impress him, and though her species resembled the stoic Vulcans, their hearts burned with passions worthy of Klingons. Pulling free of the kiss, she bit Duras’s lip, a playful nip just hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.

Duras pushed her aside. “Business first.” He turned and pulled the curtain shut behind him. As he stepped farther inside the small room, she stood with her back to the wall, twirling a lock of her long, wavy black hair around one finger and following him with her customary come-hither leer. He wondered if her brazenly sexual demeanor was all an act for his benefit. The first time he met her, she had seemed arch and aloof, just as one would expect of an attaché of the Romulan ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Or had that icy façade been the act, the mask she wore to conceal a lustful inner life? The only way to know for certain would be to untangle Valina’s intricate web of lies, a task that Duras suspected could take most men years, and an abundance of time was a luxury he did not have. “You know what I need.”

Her leer transformed into a steely glare. “And you know what I
want,
Duras.”

“I have it.” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and took out a data card. On it was a smattering of raw intelligence gathered by the Klingon Defense Forces about the beings known
as the Shedai, and the technology their extinct civilization had left strewn throughout the Gonmog Sector. Valina reached for the card, then frowned as Duras pulled it away, teasing her. “This is top-secret information, Valina. I need something of equal value in return.”

She narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin, and in the span of a breath she reverted to being the cold-eyed predator he had met months earlier, when the High Council had welcomed the Romulan ambassador and his retinue to Qo’noS. “What do you want?”

“I need to ensure my House’s rise within the Empire.”

Hostility shone in her dark eyes, betraying her waning patience. “Be specific.”

He stepped past her to the bed and ran his finger along the hard, smooth slab, which was surprisingly clean, considering its surroundings. “If an accident were to befall Chancellor Sturka, it could pave the way for my family’s advancement inside the High Council.”

Valina crossed her arms. “An accident? Or an assassination?”

“Let’s not quibble over semantics.”

His glib deflection of her query was met by a hard stare. “The Tal Shiar won’t do your dirty work for you. If you want Sturka dead, have the spine to do it yourself.”

Duras noted the undercurrent of pride in Valina’s voice as she’d said “Tal Shiar,” and he made two immediate mental connections. First, he inferred from the context that it was likely a proper name for the Romulan Star Empire’s military intelligence apparatus, or at least a part of it; second, he surmised that Valina was likely an undercover operative for the organization.

Both useful things to know
.

He expunged all aggression from his voice. “In that case, what
can
you do for me?”

“I can give you what you really came for.” She flashed an arrogant smirk. “Did you actually think you were being crafty? By asking for something you knew I’d refuse, just to make the thing you really wanted seem reasonable by comparison? If you plan on making a career of lies and deception, you need to work on
your conversational tactics.” She reached over to a stack of rough towels in the corner by the bed, plucked out the one second from the bottom, and unfolded it to reveal a concealed data card. “It contains all the technical information your House will need to figure out why your attempts to convert our cloaking devices to your ships haven’t been working—and how to fix it. With control over this vital tactical asset, the House of Duras can rise in stature through its public actions, and earn the thanks and praise of the Empire.”

Duras reached for the card on the towel, but Valina pulled it back and tsk-tsked at him. “You first, my love.”

He held up his card of stolen data in two fingers. “Both at the same time.” He waited for her to mimic his pose. “On three. One. Two. Three.” Their hands struck like serpents, each of them seizing their prize before the other decided to renege on the deal. Then they stood, facing each other, and smiled. “Well,” Duras said, “now that that’s over. . . .”

They flung the cards aside, and then Valina tackled him to the floor, where Duras found what he had really come for in the first place.

Master Chief Petty Officer Mike Ilucci leaned forward—his hands on his knees, sweat running in steady streams from beneath his uncombed black hair, nausea twisting in his gut—and groaned.

Even though Ilucci had been careful to moderate his drinking in recent weeks, since technically the
Sagittarius
crew was not on leave but rather awaiting an opportunity to ship out, he had not been so careful in his choice of cuisines, and his epicurean tendencies seemed to have finally caught up with him. He couldn’t say whether the culprit responsible for his current gastrointestinal distress was the highly acidic Pacifican ceviche on which he’d gorged himself the night before, the overly spicy eggs Benedict with chipotle hollandaise sauce over Tabasco-marinated skirt steak he’d enjoyed for breakfast, or the huge portion of obscenely rich linguine carbonara he’d devoured for lunch that afternoon. Or perhaps some combination of the three.

It didn’t matter, he decided. Hot swirling pain moved through his gut, and it hurt so badly that he imagined he must have swallowed a plasma drill set on overdrive. All he wanted at that moment was a few minutes of peace to let the agony subside.

A moving shadow intruded upon his view of the deck, and then he saw the feet that trailed behind it. From above his bowed head, he heard the familiar voice of enlisted engineer Crewman Torvin. “You all right, Master Chief?”

Grotesque discomfort put an edge on Ilucci’s reply. “Do I
look
all right, Tor?”

The young Tiburonian sounded nervous and concerned. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Yeah. Kill me.”

Torvin shuffled his feet, apparently at a loss for a reply. “Um . . .”

“What do you need, Tor?”

The lean, boyish engineer doubled over so he could look Ilucci in the eye. His voice cracked as if he were suffering a relapse of puberty. “Before I kill you, can I get you to sign off on the repulsor grid?”

A tired moan and a grudging nod. “Help me up.”

With one hand pushing against Ilucci’s shoulder and the other hovering behind the husky chief engineer’s back, Torvin guided Ilucci back to an upright stance. The chief cleared his throat and lumbered across the main cargo hold of the civilian superfreighter
S.S. Ephialtes,
with Torvin a few steps ahead of him. Above and around them, teams of engineers and starship repair crews from Vanguard worked under the direction of Ilucci’s engineers, installing a host of new systems inside the freighter’s recently emptied, titanic main cargo hold. Several decks had been torn out, along with most of the ship’s cargo-handling machinery, such as cranes and hoists. The result was a vast, oblong cavity that accounted for the center third of the ship’s interior volume.

Torvin led Ilucci to the center of the deck, where he had installed a gray metal hexagonal platform that stood just over a meter tall and measured two meters on each side. The top of the platform was festooned with an array of smaller hexagons composed of a dark, glasslike substance. The enlisted man lifted a tricorder that he wore slung at his hip, keyed in a command, and powered up the repulsor grid. An ominous low hum filled the air for a moment, and then it faded to a barely audible purr. Shrugging out from under the tricorder’s strap, Torvin handed the device to Ilucci. “I set the amplitude, frequency, and angles according to your specs.” He pointed around the cavernous hold at five other devices: one on the overhead and one on each of the four main bulkheads—forward, aft, port, and starboard. “The load’s balanced on a six-point axis, has two redundant fail-safes, and can support five times the mass of the
Sagittarius.”

Ilucci scrolled through the benchmark tests Torvin had run, then nodded. “Nice work, but if this tub drops too fast from warp to impulse we could plow right through its forward bulkhead and end up as a hood ornament.” He shut off the tricorder and handed it back to Torvin. “Do me a favor: hop back to the salvage bay and bring back some more inertial dampers.”

“Just me?” Torvin fidgeted and looked over his shoulder.

“Yeah, just you.” He paused and eyed his flummoxed engineer. “Why? What’s the problem? Afraid you’ll get lost?”

The youth palmed the sweat from his shaved head and absent-mindedly tugged on one of his oversized, finlike Tiburonian earlobes. “No, I, um . . .” He took a breath and calmed himself. “I don’t think the civvies on this ship are too thrilled about us ripping up their hold.”

The chief couldn’t suppress a sympathetic frown. “I wouldn’t be, either, if I was them.” Noting the fearful look on Torvin’s face, he lowered his voice. “Did someone threaten you?”

“Let’s just say I think it might be a good idea if we moved in pairs for a while.”

He gave Torvin a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Noted.” Then he turned and waved to get the attention of the
Sagittarius
’s senior engineer’s mate, Petty Officer First Class Salagho Threx. The hulking, hirsute Denobulan nodded back, then crossed the cargo hold at an awkward jog until he joined Torvin and Ilucci, both of whom he dwarfed with ease. “Yeah, Chief?”

“Tor says the civvies have a bug up their collective ass about us gutting their boat, and he thinks they might be looking for a bit of payback on any Starfleet folks they catch alone in the passageways between here and the station.”

Threx looked unsurprised. “I get the same feeling, Master Chief.”

“Okay. Go with Tor and get a pallet of inertial dampers to beef up this repulsor grid. And if any of those grease monkeys start some shit, you have my permission to kick their asses.”

“Copy that, Master Chief.” The bearded giant of a Denobulan beckoned Torvin with a tilt of his head. “Let’s roll.” The two
engineers walked toward the exit, both keeping their heads on swivels, looking out for trouble from whatever direction it might come.

Ilucci turned, hoping he might slip away to some dark corner of the freighter to collapse into a coma until his stomach cramps abated, but instead found himself face-to-face with another of his engineers, Petty Officer Second Class Karen Cahow. The short, indefatigable tomboy had grease on her standard-issue olive-green jumpsuit and grime in her dark blond hair, but she looked ecstatically happy. “I figured out how to mask us from sensors in transit!”

The bedraggled chief engineer tried to shuffle past her. “Good job. I’ll put your name in for a medal.” His escape was halted by her hand grasping the upper half of his rolled-up sleeve.

“Don’t you want to hear how I did it?”

Overcoming his urge to retch, he turned and smiled. “Are you sure it works?”

Her face was bright with pride. “Positive.”

“Then I’ll look forward to reading your report.” The perky polymath started to protest, so he cut her off. “Later.
Capisce?
”

His urgency seemed to drive the point home for her. “Got it.”

“Good. Now go make sure this boat’s ventral doors are rigged for rapid deployment. And if you need me, just follow the stench till you find my shallow grave.”

“Will do, Master Chief.” Cahow bounded away, a bundle of energy so infused with optimism that it made Ilucci want to drink himself stupid and spend a week asleep.

He made it to the cargo hold’s exit, where he collided with the first officer of the
Sagittarius,
Commander Clark Terrell. The lanky, brown-skinned XO had the muscled physique of a prizefighter and the razor-sharp, lightning-quick intellect of a scientist.

Probably because he’s both,
Ilucci mused. During their years of service together on the
Sagittarius,
he’d learned that Terrell, in addition to having double-specialized in xenobiology and impulse
propulsion systems, had been one of the stars of the Starfleet Academy boxing team.

Terrell cracked a brilliantly white grin. “How goes it, Master Chief?”

“By the numbers, sir. We’ll be ready to vent the hold and move our boat in here by 0300 tomorrow.” He rapped one knuckle against the top of his head. “Knock on wood.”

“Outstanding, Chief.” He studied Ilucci with a critical eye. “Are you all right?”

Ilucci swallowed hard, forcing a surge of sour bile back whence it came. “Nothing a year in the tropics wouldn’t fix, sir.” Eager to change the subject, he glanced upward and asked, “How’s Captain Alodae taking the news?”

The query drew a snort and a chortle from the commander, who shook his head in glum amusement. “Let’s just say I’m glad I’m down here with you right now.”

“That well, huh?”

“Master Chief, you don’t even want to know.”

Nogura stood his ground as Captain Alodae jabbed him in the chest with his index finger and raged, “I’m not signing anything! You people have no right to take my ship or my cargo!”

The thick-middled, heavily jowled Rigelian drew his hand back to poke Nogura a second time, only to find his wrist seized mid-thrust by the cobralike grab of T’Prynn, whose gaze was as fearsomely cold as her voice. “Control yourself, Captain.”

Watching from just beyond arm’s reach, the other officers at the meeting—Captain Adelard Nassir of the
Sagittarius
and Lieutenant Commander Holly Moyer from Vanguard’s office of the Starfleet Judge Advocate General, or JAG—tensed in anticipation of violence.