U.S.S. Dauntless NCC-80816
“… and I hope that when all this is over, you will know that I did this for noble reasons. Seven, out.” Sitting alone in the work nook of the diplomatic suite’s main room, Seven ended the recording of a personal message and programmed it to be delivered later, after an interval just long enough for her and Ellory to make their exit before it would be heard.
I can only hope it is received in the spirit in which it was made.
She left the nook and joined Ellory in front of one of the suite’s bulkhead-mounted companels. “Have you found an optimal route?”
“I think so. I have to say, the computer’s pretty helpful. I asked it to plot the shortest walking route between these different points, and then it asked if I wanted to know about routes that were technically longer in total linear distance but faster to traverse.” She threw a befuddled look at Seven. “It’s almost like the ship wants us to win.”
“Indeed. Show me what you think is the best route.”
Ellory called up the floor plan for their current deck of the Dauntless. “We go left from our suite. Split up here, at the fork. I take the port-side corridor to objective one. You take the starboard corridor to emergency ladderway B and slide down to H deck aft and objective two.”
Seven studied the route and nodded. “Excellent. Using the ladderway is a very good suggestion. It will help me avoid triggering any alerts for unauthorized turbolift access to the shuttlebay.” Seven pointed out a subtle detail in the deck plan. “Use compartment C-LC8 to reach compartment C-LC7 via this internal connecting door.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it be faster to stay in the corridor?”
“Yes, but if you use the main corridor you will be visible from the entrance to the ship’s armory when you enter C-LC7. Armories are often guarded, and we cannot risk you being challenged for moving around the ship without an escort.”
Ellory absorbed all that with a slow nod. “Got it. But are we sure C-LC8 will be empty?”
“No. But the risk of your being stopped is much lower if you use the detour.”
“Copy that. Now, what about final extraction?”
“Once you are in position, activate your Ranger SOS beacon. I will use it to find you.” Seven reverted the companel to its regular standby mode. “Remember, when we leave the suite, walk. Do not run. We are guests, not prisoners. Most of this deck is considered nonclassified. So there should be no reason for our presence to draw suspicion as long as we remain calm.”
“I’d be a lot calmer if they hadn’t taken our weapons.”
“If our plan works as intended, we won’t need them. And I would prefer that we not harm any Starfleet personnel if we can avoid doing so without compromising our escape.”
Ellory grinned. “I promise, I won’t even use sharp words.”
“Good enough.” Seven checked her chrono. “Time to go.” She led the way to the suite’s door, which slid open ahead of her. Outside, C deck’s forward corridor was quiet. Seven and Ellory left the suite, turned left, and walked together, side by side, their strides slow and casual.
A young female Bolian ensign in a blue-trimmed uniform with a sciences division emblem on her combadge passed them heading in the opposite direction. She offered the Rangers a pleasant smile, and Seven and Ellory returned it with equal warmth.
Less than ten strides after leaving their suite, they arrived at the fork in the corridor and paused. Seven leaned in close and whispered, “Remember, the door marked C-LC8. Don’t pass C-LC7 or enter the transverse corridor that leads to turbolift two.”
“I’ll remember,” Ellory said, her voice also hushed. “Three minutes, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Don’t leave me hanging, Seven.”
Seven kissed her. “Never.”
They clasped each other’s hands once for luck, and then they split up.
Seven strolled down the starboard corridor as if she had not a care in the galaxy, despite knowing that her and Ellory’s freedom was going to depend upon the swift execution of a desperate plan with almost no margin for error. Drawing a calming breath, she rounded the turn into the transverse corridor, and then she opened the disguised panel that led to emergency ladderway B. She stepped inside. Pulled the panel closed behind her.
And then she slid downward, gaining speed by the second, using the ladder’s outer edges like a pair of firehouse poles.
Time to see just how well Voyager’s crew taught me about Starfleet.
No matter how many times Ellory reminded herself to be calm and not show any anxiety, her body refused to listen. Sweat trickled from beneath her hair down the nape of her neck. Her pulse raced, and with each step she felt her breaths getting faster and shallower.
It didn’t matter that Ellory had a reasonable cover story and plausible answers for any questions her movements might provoke. Nor did her body seem to understand that Starfleet was about as benign an opponent as she had ever faced. All her adrenal system seemed to understand was that she was alone and moving through a figurative lion’s den with deceptive intentions.
If I ever wondered, now I know—I’d make a terrible spy.
She paused at the door Seven had pointed out to her on the deck plan. Next to it on the bulkhead was posted a simple piece of signage indicating its compartment number and its designation: C-LC8 SICKBAY / OFFICES.
Seven had promised her the door wouldn’t be locked, but there was only one way to find out. Ellory stepped forward. The door slid open. So far, so good.
She proceeded inside and let the door close behind her. As she and Seven had hoped, the physicians’ administrative offices were dark and empty during the ship’s overnight watch. If anyone had been there and asked what Ellory was doing, she had been prepared to say she had come looking for medical attention in sickbay and in her confusion had used the wrong entrance.
No need for that now. One perfectly good lie, wasted.
Alone in the shadows, she moved like a ghost, her steps soft and quick. She passed one glass-walled office cube after another, checking the names on the plaques beside their doors. At the end of the row, after the offices for the orthopedic surgeon, the ob-gyn, and the chief medical officer, she found the one for which she had come: that of Doctor Valarius, M.D., Dauntless’s chief of forensic pathology.
Like most Starfleet officers’ workspaces, Valarius’s office was uncluttered and all but immaculate. Its one peculiar characteristic was that it also harbored a faint but still pungent odor of formaldehyde, which somehow persisted despite the prevalence of strong disinfectants. Ellory held her breath and settled into the chair behind the pathologist’s desk. A tap on his desktop activated his holographic interface with the ship’s computer.
Then the interface abruptly deactivated as a monotonal, feminine voice told Ellory, “Attention: biometric identity scan failed. This station is locked pending reauthorization.”
Ellory sighed but felt a grudging respect for her hosts. Contrary to reports, Starfleet’s op-sec isn’t a total joke. Now I just need to find another way to get the intel I need.
She poked around Valarius’s office, hoping to find a clue. Or a written manifest of the ship’s morgue. Or perhaps an unsecured padd that would conveniently be open to the page of information she happened to need. None of those things materialized.
This is starting to get annoying.
Frustrated, she muttered to herself, “I don’t get it. The ship’s computer seemed so helpful just a few minutes ago. I mean it’s not as if I can just say, ‘Computer, please tell me the location of the body of Fenris Ranger Keon Harper.’ ”
The feminine computer voice replied, “The body of Fenris Ranger Keon Harper is in the morgue: C deck, compartment C-LC7, stasis chamber nineteen.”
Ellory looked up toward the source of the voice and smiled. “Thank you.”
So much for their op-sec not being a joke.
She skulked out of Valarius’s office and back the way she had come, to an intersection whose yet-untaken path led to the morgue. Once more, Ellory prepared herself for the door to be locked, only to have it slide solicitously out of her way as she drew near.
At its threshold, she peeked around the jamb in one direction and then another, checking the corners and listening for any sounds of activity from the compartment beyond. All was quiet. She stole into the morgue, as quiet as fog, but not trusting her apparent good fortune.
I guess it makes sense the door wouldn’t be locked. Why would it be? It’s a morgue. There aren’t any open criminal investigations aimed at us. And nothing brought in with Harper would be tagged as evidence, because Starfleet’s not investigating anything about his death.
She stayed low and darted from one forensic examination station to another, using their conglomerated investigative equipment and drainage systems as cover.
At the back of the large compartment she found a wall lined with rows and columns of stasis chambers. Most were dark, but a few were filled with intense blue light. Those were the ones whose stasis fields had been engaged to inhibit decomposition of a body for long periods of time—in some cases, years, if that was what was required.
Halfway along the wall, in the fourth row of chambers, was 19.
Ellory checked its readouts, and then she double-checked its holographic record of contents. She didn’t want to risk opening the chamber only to find she had disturbed the repose of some soul other than Harper. Two looks confirmed it was him.
She opened the chamber and stood aside as its sledlike platform glided out of the bulkhead, until all of Harper was laid out in front of her, lying atop the Starfleet body bag in which he had been shrouded before being beamed up from Zirat.
Ellory wiped a tear from her cheek, and then she placed her palm against Harper’s chest. “Hey, Kee. Sorry I was late to the party on Zirat, but Seven and I are gonna make it up to ya.” With a press of her thumb, she activated her Fenris Rangers SOS beacon. “Just hang in there, old man. You wouldn’t want to miss the good part, would you?”
Seven landed on her toes at the bottom of the ladder. With a graceful pivot she turned and opened the emergency-access panel. The ladderway ended at G deck, but this far down in the center of Dauntless’s arrowhead-shaped primary hull, there was no actual deck to speak of—just a junction for intersecting Jefferies tube crawlways, and the cramped, dark confines of the ship’s mechanical infrastructure: EPS conduits, massive bundles of optronic cables, and thousands of other systems, all hidden away in the parts of the ship few souls ever saw.
To borrow an old Earth saying: time to take the low road.
She ignored the access hatchway to the Jefferies tube network. Newer ships such as Dauntless frequently monitored their Jefferies tubes for signs of intrusion or sabotage. If she were detected down here, in the bowels of the ship, moving through the Jefferies tubes beneath such restricted sections of the ship as main engineering or the aft magazine, where torpedoes for the ship’s aft launcher were stored, it would almost certainly trigger a red alert. That would put the ship on a combat footing—exactly what Seven did not want right now.
Using both her hands and her feet for traction and balance, Seven navigated through the superstructure and auxiliary systems like a spider traversing her web. She recognized various systems as she clambered past them. Using them as landmarks against her eidetic memory of the ship’s nonclassified schematics, she orientated herself and adjusted course as necessary.
Her preparations brought her to a ventilation node. She bypassed its security sensors with a few deft rearrangements of its wiring, and then she entered the broad airway. It led her to a grate that looked down into the ship’s spare parts depot on H deck, just aft of the point where the ship’s primary and secondary hulls met. She slipped her fingers through the grate, took hold of it, and with a push ripped it free of the bulkhead. Rather than let it fall, she pulled it back into the airway with her and tucked it behind her, out of her way. Then she climbed out of the airway and landed in a low crouch inside the depot.
By Seven’s mental count, close to two minutes had elapsed since she and Ellory had parted. She needed to make up for time she had lost slithering through the ship’s tangled innards.
She moved to the compartment’s door. Using the override functions on its control pad, she unlocked it, and then she manually slid it open just enough to peek out at H deck. Directly across the corridor was the door to the shuttlebay’s preflight area—a fancy name for an airlocked compartment with lockers for storing EVA suits and other gear.
The door was clearly marked with a red warning label, on which bold white letters declared RESTRICTED AREA / AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
That door, she knew, would almost definitely be locked.
Until it wasn’t.
A male human ensign who looked barely old enough to need to shave approached the door to the preflight area and pressed his hand to a biometric sensor on the bulkhead beside it. “Dehler, Ensign Brody. Authorization two nine chase fox run blue.”
A masculine computer voice replied, “Authorized.”
The light on the panel beneath the ensign’s hand changed from red to green, and the door to the preflight area unlocked with a gentle thunk of magnetic seals being released.
As the door in front of the ensign slid open, Seven opened the depot’s door.
Ensign Dehler stepped over the threshold into the preflight area as Seven strode across the corridor with pantherlike stealth. She snaked her right arm around his throat and used her left hand to cover his mouth. He thrashed and struggled until Seven applied gentle pressure to his carotid, rendering him unconscious within seconds. She lowered him gently to the deck and then she stepped over him to survey the shuttlebay through the preflight area’s windowed hatch.
As Seven had expected, Dauntless’s shuttlebay had been cleared of Starfleet auxiliary craft to make room for Veris’s captured Romulan harrier, which was parked with its port hatch open. A trio of Starfleet engineers stood beside the expertly refitted ship, arguing over something displayed on a padd and occasionally pointing at the harrier. Of the three engineers, the insectoid Kaferian seemed to be the one in charge. Its subordinates, a bronze-skinned Vulcan woman and a Benzite wearing an old-fashioned external vaporator, did not seem to like the Kaferian very much.
A more careful check confirmed for Seven that there were no other personnel inside the shuttlebay—just the three engineers.
She opened the airlock hatch. Slipped into the shuttlebay. Closed and secured the hatch behind her. No going back now.
The engineers, consumed by their debate about some trivial bit of technobabble, paid no attention to Seven’s arrival. She ducked behind a long row of triple-stacked cargo containers and used it as cover as she scampered to a huge, bulkhead-mounted companel. With a few taps she accessed the refueling system and commanded it to flood the shuttlebay with highly volatile, explosive hydrogen. Predictably, a fail-safe caused the system to refuse the order.
Seven entered an override code she had learned from B’Elanna Torres on Voyager. She had no idea if the code would work on a different, more advanced ship, several years after—
The system accepted the override and began pumping odorless, flavorless, invisible hydrogen into the shuttlebay, in quantities that would swiftly become hazardous.
Time to go.
Using the companel, Seven set a timer on a ten-second countdown, at the end of which part of her override code would be canceled—specifically, the part that kept the ship’s internal sensors blind to the threat. The part of the override that blocked them from stopping the leak, she left in place. Then, counting off the seconds in her head, she prepared herself to sprint.
A stentorian alarm resounded inside the shuttlebay, followed by a masculine voice declaring on a loop, “All personnel, evacuate the shuttlebay immediately. Imminent explosion risk. Repeat: Evacuate shuttlebay immediately. Imminent explosion risk….”
The three engineers bolted toward the preflight area.
Seven dashed across the shuttlebay and into the harrier. She slapped the panel switch to close its hatch on her way in and kept running toward the cockpit.
Dauntless’s automated emergency response would activate within seconds, as soon as the ship’s sensors confirmed there were no personnel left inside the shuttlebay. Seven had only that long to do what needed to be done.
She threw herself into the pilot’s seat. With the flip of a toggle she manually deactivated the harrier’s magnetic docking clamps, but deliberately left the ship cold and dark.
Outside, red warning lights flashed, and the shuttlebay’s outer doors snapped open. Seven knew that time was up when she felt the pull of artificial gravity disappear, and the harrier, like every other loose object in the shuttlebay, floated like a feather dancing on a warm breeze.
The force field holding in the shuttlebay’s atmosphere crackled—then it deactivated, explosively decompressing the shuttlebay and ejecting into space the shuttlebay’s dangerous buildup of hydrogen, along with a few dozen cargo pods, two sets of engineering tools… and one unsecured Romulan harrier.