Star Trek: TNG: Cold Equations II: Silent Weapons (32 page)

They fell like dead weight, and he hurdled over them without breaking stride.

Four steps later he arrived at the elevator’s control panel, ready to hack its systems. Instead, he found the panel dark and unresponsive.
The intruders must have overridden the system
. He tucked his phaser inside one of his jacket pockets, wedged his fingers into the sliver-thin gap between the elevator doors, and pried them open with one steady effort.

The shaft beyond was dark and reeked of burnt hair and scorched metal. A mournful groaning of metal echoed from the bottom of the shaft, and Data spied a flash of ruddy light briefly obscured by moving shadows. He adjusted his eyes’ magnification setting and shifted to an ultraviolet night-vision mode. The scene below snapped into focus in time for him to see two android endoskeletons, denuded of all but remnants of their fleshly guises, scrambling through the forced-open emergency hatch of the lift car parked far below.

In just under three picoseconds, he considered his choices.

It will take me two minutes and twenty-nine seconds to climb down. In that time, the attackers could reach the president and kill her
.

I could jump, but from this height there is an eighty-six-point-four percent chance the trauma of impact will inflict sufficient damage as to render me inoperable
.

Rappelling is the best choice under the circumstances, as long as it is feasible
.

He turned and evaluated the structural integrity of the office architecture behind him. Switching to an infrared mode, he saw the support beams inside the walls. Most of them were insufficiently anchored for his needs.
I will have to make my own anchor
. He drew his phaser, adjusted its settings to a drilling mode, and fired a snap shot at an angle through the wall above the elevator’s control panel. As he’d planned, the beam bored clean through the thermocrete, making a fist-sized gap ideal for his purposes.

He put away his phaser and pulled open his shirt, snapping off the buttons, which skittered across the floor. A mental command unlocked an access panel on the front of his torso, and he pushed it in and aside with a gentle nudge. Then he reached inside his abdominal core and found the spool of duranium microfilament wire that his father, Noonien Soong, had built into this new-and-improved body years earlier.
Lucky for me Dad was a planner
.

Attached to the end of the wire was a carabiner similar to those used by mountaineers but far more resilient. He unspooled a few meters of wire, passed the end of it through the hole he’d shot through the wall, and secured the carabiner around the wire in front of the hole. A hard tug satisfied him that the lock was secure and the wall was strong enough to bear his weight.

Then, before his emotions could cloud his resolve with doubt and fear, he jumped into the shaft and plummeted into free fall. Inside his torso the spindle whirred like a revving engine, filling the shaft with a crisp buzzing as it fed out slack without resistance. He drifted toward the wall and pushed off with a gingerly press of his toes. Noting the rapidly decreasing distance to the top of the parked elevator car, he engaged the braking mechanism on the spindle, which whined in protest even as it slowed his descent and then arrested it at the exact moment his feet touched down atop the elevator. He locked down the spindle, reached inside himself, and, in a coordinated action, retracted its anchoring pins with his mind and pulled it free with his hand.

Liberated from his body, the spool—which still had more than a hundred meters of wire on it—dangled from its slack. As Data lowered himself through the elevator car’s open top hatch, he made a mental note to retrieve the spool later.

Assuming I survive
.

Banishing pessimism from his thoughts, he drew his phaser and pressed onward, hoping for the president’s sake that he could reach her in time.

•   •   •

Worse than the anticipation of what might be coming, Bacco decided, was the simple fact of not knowing what was happening. Chatter over her agents’ in-ear transceivers was barely audible, and the safe room was completely insulated from everything outside, including sound. She considered asking Wexler for an update, but he and Kistler seemed intently focused on monitoring the actions of their comrades outside the safe room.

Sozzerozs startled her with a whisper so close she felt his warm breath on her ear. “Perhaps we should have retreated rather than fortified.”

“If that was an option, we’d have done it,” she said in the same hushed tone. “As fast as these intruders are moving, they’d almost certainly have caught us in transit.”

Wexler held up his hand and shushed them. “Something’s happened.” He pressed his hand to his ear. “Falcon, this is Eagle. Do you copy? . . . All units, this is Eagle. Respond.”

Beside him, the senior Gorn imperial guard muttered a string of untranslated guttural commands into his wrist comm. He, too, received no reply. He looked at his peer, and the two archosaurs lifted their weapons and braced them against their bare, scaly shoulders. The ranking guard looked back at Sozzerozs, Togor, and Azarog. “I recommend you get down, my lords.”

The imperator did as advised, pressing into a corner of the safe room’s rear wall and crouching low. Togor and Azarog moved with him but remained standing to shield him.

Sonorous vibrations coursed through the floor, and within seconds Bacco realized that the source of the tremors was the room’s ponderous metal door—its magnetic locks were being released and its bolts retracted. Her two protection agents traded grave looks, then lifted their own rifles and set themselves into combat postures. Over his shoulder, Wexler said, “Madam President, you might want to follow the imperator’s lead.”

There was no time to argue, no time to think—the door was starting to open. Bacco, Enaren, and Safranski retreated to the back of the room and huddled into the opposite corner from the Gorn. Further emulating their partners in distress, Enaren and Safranski did their best to position themselves between Bacco and whatever was about to come through the door.

Smoke billowed into the safe room as the door opened wide enough for air to move past it. The imperial guards and protection agents took that as their cue to start firing through the widening gap. Bacco covered her ears to block out the piercing shrieks of energy weapons. They continued firing as the door swung away, until at last it was fully open, and the four of them seemed to fill the narrow passageway outside the safe room with a wall of fire.

Two bolts of blue-white energy flew in from a low angle and felled the pair of Gorn. As the archosaurs collapsed, their chests hollowed and scorched, their limbs twitching, another blue-white salvo slammed into Kistler and Wexler. Both men were hurled backward and struck the steel floor with their eyes open but lifeless, and their rifles clattered away, just out of reach.

Then came footsteps unlike any Bacco had ever heard: hard and metallic, uneven and scraping. Two monstrous shapes, walking skeletons with eyes of fire, limped down the hallway, silhouetted by firelight as they lurched forward through smoke and shadow.

Togor sprang forward to seize a rifle from one of the imperator’s fallen defenders. Safranski tensed, as if to make a leaping bid for Wexler’s weapon.

One of the skeletons raised a pistol and snapped off a shot with casual ease, and the top half of Togor’s head vanished in a flash of light and heat, followed by a sickening stench. Safranski backed down, apparently not willing to test his luck or his reflexes against such odds.

The killers emerged from the smoke. It was clear the androids had suffered horrendous damage—they were dented and scorched, one of them was missing a foot, and the other had lost its lower jaw—but they remained intimidating enough that no one in the room dared to move as the duo crossed the threshold into the safe room.

For a moment the androids stood, disruptor pistols in hand, studying the room. Bacco wondered if they were deliberating whether they needed to kill everyone, or just the heads of state. Then she stood, determined not to meet her end on her knees, cowering like a child.

Sozzerozs also rose up to his full height, as if daring the androids to execute him.

One-Foot took aim at the imperator, and No-Jaw pointed his weapon at Bacco.

Waiting for the end to come, she realized she was more angry than afraid.

Shots were fired, and the safe room filled with blinding light.

No-Jaw sank to its knees, its guts smoldering with reddish fire, its eyes dark and lifeless.

One-Foot spun to return fire at someone behind it. A man sprang from the smoky darkness and slapped the weapon from the android’s skeletal hand. The weapon clattered across the floor as the skeleton grappled with its attacker, landing blows that Bacco thought would be fatal—but her rescuer fought on, hammering the android with brutal punches and elbow strikes. Then he snared the mechanical terror in a jujitsu-style hold, twisting its body and tackling it to the floor. He jabbed his hand through a recessed panel beneath the android’s metallic ribcage, thrust his fingers sharply upward—and the android went limp. Its eyes dimmed and went dark.

The hero of the hour stood and turned toward Bacco and Sozzerozs—revealing the exposed mechanical parts of his own ravaged face and head. Despite herself, Bacco recoiled, and Sozzerozs hissed with alarm. Holding up his empty hands, the last android standing spoke with an almost comical degree of formality. “Madam President, Lord Imperator: There is no cause for alarm.” He lowered his hands. “I am Lieutenant Commander Data,
U.S.S. Enterprise
.”

23

It felt strange to see fellow Breen without their armor and masks, but Thot Konar knew these were special circumstances whose importance outweighed the Breen’s greatest cultural taboo. He stood between the last two functioning uplink pods as their lids lifted open like a beetle’s wings, hinged at the end nearest the obsidian uplink transmitter, whose violet inner fires baked the isolated chamber with a steady dry heat.

Berro, a golden-furred Fenrisal, sat up inside Uplink Pod One, his tongue dangling beneath his snout, his nostrils flaring with each labored breath. “I need a drink.” His paw-like hands gripped the sides of his gray cocoon, in which he’d dwelled for the last hundred-odd days.

Ninety degrees around the transmitter, in Uplink Pod Two, sat Olar. The burly, broad-shouldered Paclu palmed a heavy sheen of perspiration from his bald, four-lobed, pale blue head. “And I thought it was hot when you stuck us into these things.” He groaned and rubbed his neck.

“Welcome back,” Konar said. “You’ve both performed magnificently.”

His compliment drew a homicidal glare from Berro. “No thanks to you.” He continued through bared fangs. “We could’ve finished it, you know. We had every advantage.”

“Be grateful. If I hadn’t intervened, you’d have ruined everything.”

The confrontation put Olar on his guard. “Berro? What happened?”

“After you went down, I still had a shot. And I’d have taken it—but my hand froze.” Hate blazed in his eyes as he glared at Konar. “I couldn’t fire. Then something forced me to go to close quarters against the Starfleet android. Even then, I still might’ve had a chance, if my proprioceptors hadn’t been cut.”

Konar said nothing; he hadn’t come to argue.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Olar said. “We’d taken a lot of damage.”

Berro’s ears flattened against his head, a sign of anger. “No. I know exactly what my operational status was. I was banged up but battle-ready. The only explanation for what happened is that someone here cut my connection before I could finish my mission.”

“You accomplished your mission the moment you entered the safe room.”

Olar seemed almost ashamed to speak up. “Negative, sir. My avatar was terminated before I could fire, and it sounds like Berro was—”

“What did you two think your mission was?”

The two agents stole wary glances at each other. It was clear they sensed they had been challenged with a trick question. Berro answered, “You ordered us to enter the Bank of Orion by force and assassinate the Federation president and the Gorn imperator.”

“Had that been your true objective, you’d both be eternal heroes of the Confederacy.” Konar spread his arms in salute. “Instead, you’ve made possible an even greater victory.”

A pall descended as the two agents began to grasp the implications of Konar’s praise. Olar’s face remained blank as he swallowed, betraying his alarm. “If our real objective wasn’t to assassinate the two leaders . . . what was it?”

“Unfortunately, the two of you aren’t cleared for that information.”

Berro sniffed, apparently having caught a scent in the air. He leaned to his right to look past Konar, through the open airlock and down the long corridor beyond—at the end of which lay Hain’s corpse, most of her back reduced to a concave disruptor scorch. Olar followed his partner’s gaze and noted the dead body with a stare of cold, stupid terror.

Konar shrugged. “All part of the plan, I’m afraid. As for you two . . .” He stepped back and aimed his disruptor at the naked agents. “Let’s just say we have one more job for you.”