Zero Hour 29

Pexlini

Roz has been busy. Identifying potential targets in the Tzenkethi sectors meant digging into a whole raft of Starfleet comms stuff that I'm not technically allowed to look at, just now - ferreting stuff out has become Roz's job, and fair play to her, she's good at it.

So now my ship's lurking on the margins of a destroyed system in Tzenkethi space, waiting for the scavengers to come by.

I don't know what's going through the Tzenkethi's leathery heads, these days. They're devoting some serious military resources towards scouring the local systems, seeking out and destroying some weird crystal formations that hatch out into bugs they call Drantzuli. These Drantzuli may or may not be a serious threat in themselves - jury's still out on that one - but the Tzenkethi's animosity towards them means they're tossing around protomatter weapons like there's no tomorrow, destroying not just the Drantzuli but also any innocent civilians who happen to be standing on the same planet. And, since the Tzenkethi offered no explanation of why they were doing this, their popularity in the quadrant has fallen roughly to "shoot on sight" levels. Which is a crazy way to do things, if you ask me. If they want to wipe out the Drantzuli, wouldn't that be easier without everyone else shooting at them? I suppose I'm lucky it's not really my problem just now.

"Still nothing," Nurnos grunts at me. The Nausicaan is eager for action, sitting around waiting isn't his idea of fun.

"Well, it might take a while," I say. "Try to noodge us in a bit closer to that hunk of wreckage, can you?" The Hirogen ship doesn't have a proper battle cloak, we need to hide behind things if we're going to do a proper job of lurking. Keeping us in the sensor shadow of a chunk of ex-Tzenkethi warship is the sort of technical challenge that might keep Nurnos busy a little bit longer.

The RCS arrays fire, and Anita cosies up to a half-melted slab of metal that used to be the front end of a Tzenkethi cruiser. I check the emissions filters. We are shut down as tightly as we dare, given we may need to be combat ready at any time - even if Thrang's people don't show up, wandering Tzenkethi could happen by at any minute. It's all getting very bad for my digestion, this.

"Sensor contact at extreme range," says Nyesenia. "I'm not sure what it is -" Her orange eyes widen, and she whistles through her teeth. "But it's coming in fast. I think this might be it."

"Terrific," I say. "OK, run the program on the weapons systems, and let's just hope I'm right. If not, it's gonna get kinda embarrassing, not to mention fatal."

"Warp deceleration shockwave," grunts Nurnos. "Big one. Equivalent of - hey, that can't be right."

"Oh, yes it can," I say. "Gimme everything we've got on passive sensors, and get ready to rumble."

Something just crashed out of subspace, very, very fast. "Low mass reading, big emissions profile," says Roz. "Comparable to an Orion corvette, but with a really complicated warp signature... reading some active sensor pings from it, but nothing coming specifically in our direction... no transponder code, no weapons targeting signatures, but that means nothing."

"Means their guns ain't hot right now," I say, "so let's show 'em ours are. Take us in, target all forward cannons, fire as they bear."

And Anita comes out of the shadow of the wreckage in a screaming tight turn, engines flaring with power, tetryon cannons spitting a dazzling barrage of blue bolts at our new target.

I clamp down on a sigh of relief when I actually get a good look at the thing. This isn't an actual copy of Thrang's super-fast ship, the Farah; it's something smaller and cheaper to build, a light courier, a very basic hull thrown together around the massive nacelles holding the complex super-fast drive. I'm still not sighing, though, because there's still room aboard that thing for some other nasties - I well remember Thrang's autonomous combat drones, that did such a good job of kicking my and Heizis's ships around the sky at our last encounter.

But we've caught this thing completely on the hop, and it's not launching anything. Beautiful coloured lights flame across space as its shields go down, and our next shower of tetryon bolts slams straight into its unprotected hull. With a salvo like that, you'd normally expect the ship to come to pieces at once, but in this case....

"OK. Recalibrate the cannons for normal firing, and open some hailing frequencies. We got some 'splainin' to do." I watch the lovely lightning crawling along those oversized nacelles, while Roz gets on comms.

The face that finally appears on the viewscreen is Lethean. "Aw, shoot," I say. "I had a traditional Thexemian greeting prepared, as well. I am Pexlini, and when I say my name men cross their legs and women go woobly-woobly-woot, sort of thing. Hi, there, anyway."

"I know who you are," says the Lethean. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you. And making sure you're not going anywhere soon. Take a look at your drive - you should see your two warp systems are totally out of sync, now. Be lucky to make warp two, and that with a following wind." I settle myself down in the command chair and try to look confident. "See, I remembered how to do that trick, from the last time I beat Thrang. And I knew where to come looking, too, didn't I? After that little spectacular, everybody and his pet goat Simon is going to be locking down trilithium technology, so I figured Thrang would be switching over to a different weapon of mass destruction, and where better to scavenge some weaponized protomatter, huh?"

"No doubt you are congratulating yourself on how clever you are," says the Lethean.

"Well, nobody else is gonna do it, right?" No point mentioning the additional help we've been getting from Angelica Moreno. Something clicks in my head, about the intelligence digests Heizis shouldn't really have shown me. "You're not Tharval, by any chance, are you?"

"That is my name." His expression gets uglier, which is a pretty good trick from a Lethean.

"Ace. Super. So you're way up there in Thrang's hierarchy. How is the boss man just now, anyway?"

"Confident. And justifiably so. He remains convinced he will attain his aims." Tharval's nasty little Lethean eyes get narrower. "I am not so certain, especially with some of his minor ambitions."

"Like getting me to work for him, right?"

"Correct. He seems to think you are a pragmatist, that you will ultimately realize the folly of fighting on the losing side, and switch to the winning team. I am not so sure that you have that much intelligence."

"Well, now," I say. "Let's see if I can convince you, a bit. Because, well, I'm not exactly flavour of the month with Starfleet Intelligence, yeah? But if I go back to ESD with you in custody, well, I'd be seeing lots more smiley faces there, wouldn't I?"

"Assuming you could take me alive."

"Oh, that's a safe enough assumption. You're a pragmatist, I don't see you dying for the cause any time soon. Besides which, the news that Thrang's collecting protomatter, well, that's another datum point Intelligence could use, isn't it?"

"None of this is enough to buy your way back into favour with your masters."

"Maybe, maybe not. I can look pretty winsome when I try, you know. But maybe you're right. In any case, we ain't gonna find out today. I'm letting you go. OK, fairly slowly, till you get your drive fixed, but I'm letting you go. Because things ain't exactly going my way, and maybe I do want to talk to Thrang."

"Oh, I am sure you want to talk to Thrang," says Tharval. "With a phaser in your hand and a division of Starfleet Security to back you up."

"That'd be ideal, yeah, but I don't think it's gonna happen. So, let's talk ways it can happen. We both know he wants it to, yeah?"

"He might want it. Others might advise against it. Thrang knows me. He will take my advice."

"Will he now? Well, you better give him my message, anyway. Tell him I wanna talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey." Hey, the guy doesn't like me anyway, no point being polite.

"Oh, I will pass on the message. Thrang will want to know what minor inconvenience disrupted my schedule, after all." There's a definite sneer on that ugly Lethean mug. "And if you want to join us, be aware - I conduct many of the initial interviews, face to face. I will meet you, and when I see deceit in your mind, I will destroy you."

"OK, fine. See you then, then." And I cut the channel.

Tharval's ship is limping away on impulse drive. "They'll have to take one of their warp drives completely out of the circuit, until Thrang can do his engineering-genius bit and rebalance it," I say. "Guy's gonna be annoyed."

"We could destroy them at will," says Nurnos.

"Yeah, the point is sorta to get the message to Thrang, so we kinda won't do that right now, OK?"

"Thrang will take that Lethean's advice," says Roz. "Almost certainly."

"Yeah. Well, that kinda works in our favour, too." Tharval's ship vanishes into warp, in a flare of lightnings from its unstable drives. I gaze pensively into the screen. "Fact is, I'm gonna have to fast-talk my way through the next bit, and that's actually gonna be easier if I'm not talking to Thrang. I don't have to worry about pulling the wool over Thrang's eyes. I just have to out-fox a mind-reading super-spy and psychic assassin, instead." I smile. "Easy-peasy."