"I still think this is a mistake," I say glumly.
Paul Hengest looks even more miserable, behind the faint glimmer of the force shield. "You might be right," he says, "but, well, our strategists thought this was the best option." His voice sounds dull and flat, filtered as it is by the shield.
I eye him narrowly. "You don't agree with them," I say.
"I'm... not sure. I wanted to be somewhere isolated. An island, say, on Earth, where I could be a long way away from any other people - I could breathe fresh air, I wouldn't be dependent on environmental controls, and we could establish a perimeter and track anything or anyone that looked like it might breach it. But Intel Strategy thought there were too many variables that might not be controllable. So -"
"There are too many damn variables here," I mutter.
Paul raises his hand, starts to tick off points on his fingers. "Earth Spacedock has gone to full defensive alert and will stay that way for the next eight hours. The network is being swept, constantly, for data intrusion attempts - and, with respect, Tylha, our people are even better than your data-warfare experts. I've been medically scanned, within an inch of my life, for delayed action toxins and bio-agents. And this suite is going to be sealed, it's got its own force shield generators and environmental controls, and the units have been checked and double-checked - we can be as sure as humanly possible that they're not compromised. As soon as I close this door, I'm going to be sealed in, in a self-contained secure area, inside Earth Spacedock - which, itself, is as secure a location as you could find in the Federation." He manages a smile. "All I need, now, is for you to go away, so I can close the door. I'll see you in eight hours' time." His voice drops a little. "Seriously, Tylha, there's no point changing our plans at this late stage. Go. I'll be fine."
"I hope so." His countdown has four hours to run. We're allowing a certain amount of leeway... but, so far, the countdowns have been alarmingly punctual. But he's right - at this point, there's nothing more I can do. "All right, Paul. Good luck. I'll see you in the morning."
He smiles again, and reaches up to something on the wall before him, a control that I can't see. A solid tritanium plate slides across the doorway, just behind the force shield - which doesn't cut off. After a moment, another solid metal plate hisses out on the other side of the shield. It would take me less than four hours to cut through it with a hand phaser - but security would be alerted, would be on the scene within minutes, if I tried.
Paul Hengest is as safe as we can make him. I wish that were safe enough.
I walk away from the suite, passing three security checkpoints as I do, only one of which is visible. Starfleet Intelligence has tried to anticipate everything - psi influence, impersonation or mental control of friends and family, temporal portals opening, absolutely every dirty trick they could imagine, and they can imagine a fair few. But I'm still worried. The shadow OS is a dangerous, subtle, insidious tool... but whoever's using it has been anything but subtle; they've been happy to inflict massive amounts of collateral damage just to take out a single target. It adds up to a situation where all it takes is one chink in our armour... and wholesale destruction could follow.
I make my way down the levels of ESD, to the engineering control decks. I spare some time to check up on the construction of the new ship - everything seems to be on schedule there, at least, and she will be quite something when she's finally ready. Then I move on, to the main ops control room, where I look out over serried ranks of consoles and holo-displays, all showing the vast station ticking over in its usual routine. Everything seems normal. I go to a replicator and get a cup of katheka; I don't plan to sleep for the next few hours.
The technicians ignore me, all engrossed as they are in their own work. I head for a comms console and call the King Estmere. It doesn't take long to get in touch with Klerupiru; she isn't sleeping, either.
"No signs of the shadow OS," she says. "Of course, I don't have any sort of access to ESD's systems - not now, not with everything locked down -"
"Intelligence isn't telling you anything?"
"They ask me stuff. But they don't tell me anything, no. Need-to-know, I guess."
I nod, pensively. On the screen, Klerupiru looks hollow-eyed and ragged; Ferengi need regular sleep patterns, unlike Andorians, and Klerupiru's been pulling a lot of late shifts, recently. "Everything seems quiet enough right now. What about remote sensors? Anything?"
"Usual circum-Terra traffic. Which is to say, busy. Nothing seems to be moving outside assigned courses, though. What are you looking for?"
"I wish I knew. Kamikaze ships coming out of warp to hit ESD? C-fractional strike from the edge of the system? I just don't know."
"Anything that big would be tripping alarms already," Klerupiru points out.
"I don't know. If I knew Paul's exact position, and had the full parameters for all ESD's shields, maybe I could rig a long-range transporter to send a diffuse charge of antimatter through the shield and into his secure suite -"
"Shield frequencies are rotating on a random basis - same infinite-remodulation trick we use against the Borg," Klerupiru comes back promptly, "and the internal shielding on that security suite is rigged the same way. Besides, if you tried to punch an ACB through all the shields and sensors around here, now, you'd light up a whole bunch of alarms - there'd be countermeasures in place before you could try to materialize anything. Trust me. I've had the Caitians run sims -" King Estmere's Caitian flight deck crew are the best transporter operators in the Federation, I know; if they say they can't beat this security, then it can't be beaten.
"OK. I just wish -" I take a swallow of the cooling katheka. "How long is it now?"
"Countdown's got just over three minutes to run." Klerupiru looks away, at something out of my line of vision. "My screens are all clear. Everything's in the green."
I look at the techs, all seated at their consoles, and at the big display boards showing current status. "Everything looks calm enough here, too." The only thing that isn't calm, I think, is me.
I wonder what Paul's doing right now.
"Still nothing on scans," says Klerupiru. "Anthi's got King Estmere at red alert status. If anything happens, anything at all, we're ready to hit it with everything we've got."
The status boards are green. But I'm still jumpy, twitchy. My antennae are twitching -
"Hold on." My antennae are twitching. I try to concentrate on the sensation, isolate it. There are so many surges and flows of energy, here, washing across the periphery of my senses... but something here feels different, wrong, urgent -
I leave the console, look around the big room, find the officer of the watch - a short, dark-skinned human male, I don't know his name. I head towards him. "I'm Admiral Shohl. You know about our security situation?"
"Sir." He looks puzzled.
"There's something building up somewhere close. Might be an ionization charge. I know it's not on the status boards, but I can feel -" I gesture at my antennae.
He nods. "I've worked with Andorian engineers, sir." His hands tap out a series of commands on his console. "Beginning a priority diagnostic on the EPS grid."
"Better make it quick." The countdown must be in its dying seconds now. "There might be a computer virus -"
Then, suddenly, the world is full of noise and blackness. A dull rumble, like thunder, rolls through the structure of the station - and the lights fail, leaving us for a moment in absolute dark - and a rush of sensation hits my antennae, a jangling cacophony of stimuli that becomes a physical pain - I am sick, and giddy, and falling - no, I'm not falling, I'm weightless, the gravity plating has failed -
Light and weight come back; the light is red, emergency lighting, but the gravity is strong enough to suck me back to the deck and make me stagger. The console is flashing with static and gibberish - all the consoles and the boards are flooded with interference - and the rumbling has diminished, but not stopped, and there are other sounds: alarms, and the dreadful voiceless shriek of an atmosphere leak.
The officer of the watch is swearing as he slams priority overrides into the console. My comms link must have broken - I hit my combadge. "Shohl to King Estmere! Report!"
Anthi Vihl's voice answers me. "Sir, are you all right?"
"I'm fine! Report!"
"We're reading an explosion inside the station." Anthi's voice relaxes back into its cool, professional tone. "Hull breaches, minor, emergency force fields are sealing. But there's considerable energy release over several sections and decks. We're trying to process it now and get a picture of the damage -"
"Intercooler flare-out," the officer of the watch says hoarsely. "Inside the station. Sudden overload on the main EPS trunk at level two hundred, and the manifold there failed. Disaster protocols are coming into effect -" He stares, ashen-faced, at the screens.
Earth Spacedock's internal power stations are several times the size of a starship's warp core; the main trunk handles gigawatts of power in superheated electroplasma that has to be carefully contained. On a starship, an intercooler flare-out would disable a nacelle, and send a spectacular jet of plasma kilometres out into space. Here, the plasma flame has nowhere to go - it becomes a raging inferno inside the hull of the station itself.
There are safety mechanisms to prevent this, to shunt a plasma overload to a safe external vent, to shut down the power generators themselves if the need arises. Somehow, those safety mechanisms were all overridden. And the plasma explosion - I know exactly where it went.
"King Estmere, coordinate with disaster control on ESD. Prep sickbay to accept casualties. Ready engineering teams to support ESD's disaster relief operations." The commands come automatically to my lips. "Deploy auxiliaries to assist in evacuating the damaged sections. Coordinate with flight control to divert civilian traffic -"
The consoles are showing real information, now; disaster response is working. The shrieking of the atmosphere leaks has died away, leaving only the clamour of alarms and the drumming of running feet on the decks. The station will survive. It's already survived worse than this. But, right now, there is a gigantic molten hole where several decks used to be... and Paul Hengest's security suite is right in the middle of it.
---
Admiral Quinn looks like I feel. "Two hundred and twelve confirmed dead," I tell him, "and over twelve hundred injured."
"We got off lightly," he mutters. I can't disagree. Emergency response functioned magnificently - the damage was contained, the main EPS grid shut down and backups took over smoothly, the firefighters and damage control teams held the disaster at bay. The vast station is even back to limited operations, already.
"We still got hit, sir, where it counts the most." Quinn's eyes lock with mine, and he nods, slowly, once.
"Paul Hengest was a good man," he says quietly.
"Starfleet Intelligence is already getting to work on the computer forensics," I say. "I've put my team at their disposal, of course. Admiral Semok asked me to tell you that if there's anything else Experimental Engineering Division can do, just say."
"Of course," says Quinn, "of course." He shifts uneasily in his big chair.
"If there's anything -"
"We haven't been idle," Quinn says. "Station security has been running its own investigations. There's going to be a coordinating meeting with Intelligence at fourteen hundred hours. I want you in on it, too." He picks up one PADD from among the many on his desk. "You were involved in that business with the Rehanissen Archive... and I know you've got contacts in the KDF, you must have heard about their recent - adventures - in the Eridani sector." He hands me the PADD. There's an image on it. "You take a personal interest. I can't blame you for that."
The image is clearly a capture from a security camera - somewhere in the civilian section, from the nondescript look of the people in the crowded concourse. I touch an icon, and the image springs to life - a short loop, no more than ten seconds, in which people move, and meet, and talk....
And, in the background, near the top of the screen, one human male moves to a console on a wall, does something to it, turns, and leaves. But not before he looks around, and the camera gets a clear view of his face.
"I can't be sure -" My voice is shaking. "I never met the man - and he was disguised as an Orion during the Rehanissen business - but -"
"We have only that one image," says Quinn. "We have no idea how he might have got aboard the station - or how he might have left it. But, well, we know to keep a very sharp eye out for -"
For the man who tried to drag the Federation into war, with me as the immediate cause of it. For the rogue genetic augment with the will, and just possibly the means, to conquer the galaxy. For the man who, impossibly, was here on Earth Spacedock, just a few hours before something punched through our best security and took out more than two hundred of our people, including the one man we wanted to keep safe.
The image is too small, really, to make out an expression on the face. It's only my imagination that's telling me Kalevar Thrang is mocking me.
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