Standing on the supervisor’s deck of Vanguard’s operations center with his arms folded, Reyes focused on several of the view-screens arrayed around the room and watched their depictions of activity currently taking place around the starbase’s exterior. A civilian merchant freighter was disconnecting from one of the lower docking pylons positioned around the station’s secondary hull. On another screen, a pair of single-person work bees hovered at the station’s bottom, maneuvering into place a replacement component for the massive sensor array Lieutenant Ballard had determined was defective. Other screens showed images of the outer hull and engineers, shrouded inside environment suits, standing on the tritanium plating with the aid of magnetic boots as they endeavored to complete the installation of one piece of equipment or another.
It was the sort of work that intrigued Reyes for reasons he could not explain, piquing his curiosity and compelling him to watch with rapt attention as his people carried out their duties in efficient, even mundane fashion. It was an interesting notion to ponder, he conceded, given the very real danger in which some of those in his charge presently had placed themselves in order to carry out such necessary tasks. Perhaps that was it; he felt beholden to observe those he commanded while they placed themselves in harm’s way, keeping watch over them until such time as they returned to the station’s comparatively safer confines.
That, or he was motivated by a desire to find something— anything—that might occupy his attention and prevent him from going back to his office and finishing the latest stack of incomplete status reports.
The first one sounds a lot better.
There was another reason Reyes liked to watch his people at work. It helped to ease his mind, particularly when he received a report or other news that was troubling, and about which he was powerless to do anything, such as what he now confronted.
“Any updates from the Sagittarius?” he asked, looking away from the screens to regard Lieutenant Judy Dunbar, the station’s senior communications officer, who sat at one of the eight workstations set into the octagonal conference table situated at the center of the supervisor’s deck. Nicknamed “the Hub,” it was from here that nearly every aspect of the station’s operation was overseen and directed.
Dunbar shook her head. “Not since their last message from this morning, sir.”
Reyes had with mounting concern reviewed the transcript of the message sent to Vanguard by the Sagittarius’s captain. It was troubling that the Klingons had taken an interest in Traelus II, a planet in a system located on the opposite side of the Taurus Reach from Klingon territory. There were dozens of star systems between Traelus and the Empire’s borders, and yet someone in their leadership had seen fit to send a scout vessel to investigate that planet and, presumably, the vast mineral storehouse it was now known to contain. Even more worrisome was the aggressive stance they had taken against the Sagittarius, which now was recovering from damage sustained during a brief skirmish with the Klingon ship. Though Adelard Nassir had made it a point to offer reassurances that his vessel should be repaired and moved away from the system before the Klingons sent reinforcements, Reyes still did not like being unable to send another starship to provide backup. The Endeavour was still en route to the station, and no other vessels in the vicinity were in range to be dispatched to the Traelus system in anything less than three days. For all intents and purposes, the Sagittarius and its crew were on their own.
Damn it, he thought. To hell.
“We’re going to a lot of trouble dropping subspace relays all over the place,” Reyes said after a moment. “I want them put to work. I want regular updates from the Sagittarius, even if they don’t have anything new to report.”
Dunbar replied, “Aye, sir,” before returning her attention to her workstation.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs leading up from the ops center’s main deck made Reyes turn to see Captain Rana Desai ascending into view. Her ubiquitous data slate was in her right hand, and the expression on her face told Reyes she was here on business.
“Uh-oh,” he said, offering a small smile. “I know that look. To what do I owe the pleasure, Captain?”
Holding up her data slate, Desai said, “If you have a moment, Commodore, I have a question about a message I received from one of the civilian ships making requests to dock.”
Reyes’s eyes narrowed. Knowing that Desai would not bother him with matters that had not caused anyone problems or inconvenience, he figured he knew to which vessel the captain was referring. “Let me guess: the Omari-Ekon.”
“That’s right, sir,” Desai replied. “You refused their request to dock at the station.”
“Imagine that,” Reyes said.
Desai added, “You discriminated against a civilian vessel, Commodore.”
“Calling the Omari-Ekon a civilian vessel is something of a misnomer, Captain,” Reyes said. “We’re still talking about an Orion ship, right?”
Nodding, Desai replied, “Yes, sir, but as you know, the Orions officially have declared themselves a neutral body.”
“Yeah,” Reyes countered, “and if you pull on my other leg, it plays the Starfleet Hymn. We’re talking about Orions, Captain. Pirates. Gunrunners. Slave runners. Gambling, prostitution, controlled and banned substances. They’re a threat to the security of this station.”
Desai said, “I’m not suggesting we allow any of that aboard the station, sir, but under current laws and treaties, any civilian merchant vessel from anyone who hasn’t been officially declared an enemy has a right to dock or make port at any Starfleet facility that welcomes such traffic, so long as its crew is willing to abide by all applicable rules and regulations. Has the Omari-Ekon provided any evidence or other reason to suspect they’re not willing to do that?”
“Are you seriously suggesting that I allow an Orion vessel to make port here?” Reyes asked, frowning.
“So long as they’ve committed no crime,” Desai said, “that is precisely what I’m suggesting. Once they’re here, if they get out of line, you’re free to rescind their authorization to dock, but you cannot do so preemptively.”
Glancing at the data slate in her hand, Reyes asked, “I suppose you’re able to provide the proper legal and procedural references to support this?”
“Yes, sir,” Desai replied. “I am.”
Reyes released a deep sigh. “Assuming I agree with whatever precedent you can pull out of that thing, I want there to be no mistake about what they can and can’t do while they’re here.”
“What about our people?” Dunbar asked, looking up again from her station. “Is the ship off limits to station personnel?”
Desai replied, “Declaring it off limits probably wouldn’t send a very nice signal to the Orion government, or our own.”
“But it’d make my life a hell of a lot easier,” Reyes said, making his way around the Hub. He started down the stairs, gesturing for Desai to follow him.
“That’s another thing,” she continued. “The ship is sovereign Orion territory, so we’d have no jurisdiction there. Essentially, whatever happens there stays there.”
Grunting in irritation, Reyes stepped off the stairs and began heading toward his office. “If this is your best sales pitch, Captain, you’re not doing a very good job of convincing me.” Crossing the ops center main deck, he entered the area designated as his outer office and assigned to his still-nonexistent assistant. “Okay, so the regs say we have to let them dock, at least until such time as they give us reason to boot their asses off. Fine, but here’s how we’re going to play it: I want every member of the station’s crew briefed on what’s expected so far as their own conduct is concerned, and I want that ship’s captain told in no uncertain terms that if any of our people encounter any trouble there, I’ll place it off limits until such time as I rescind their authorization to be here in the first place. Fair enough?”
Desai nodded. “I’ll make the formal response a bit more diplomatic than that, sir, but otherwise I think that’s more than fair.”
Lowering his voice, Reyes added, “There’s one other condition.”
Her expression turning to one of confusion, the JAG captain asked, “What’s that?”
Reyes paused, looking around to make sure none of the ops center staff might overhear him. “Have dinner with me.”
The blunt statement seemed to take Desai by surprise, if the look on her face was any indication. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You, me, dinner,” Reyes said. “Nothing fancy. Just a quiet meal away from all of this.” He gestured toward the ops center. “It can be a bit overwhelming, and I like to get away from it at least for a little while every day.” It was not like him to be so forward, but there was something about Rana Desai that fascinated him. He also considered whatever perceptions might be held by members of his crew if and when they observed him and Desai interacting in a social setting, but he decided there was no reason to worry. He was only talking about a simple dinner in the officers’ mess.
For the moment, anyway. It was an addendum that surprised even him.
Despite her apparent determination to maintain her bearing, Desai eventually smiled, her features relaxing as she nodded. “Invitation accepted.”
“In that case,” Reyes said, “bring on the Orions.”
T’Prynn sat in her office, staring at her computer monitor and the distressing information displayed on it. After careful review and examination of the data she had been compiling for the past several weeks, she had finally come to the point where only one conclusion could be reached.
Starbase 47 was harboring a spy. Of that much, T’Prynn was certain.
What remained a mystery, despite her best efforts to this point, was the identity of the clandestine operative, or even if there was more than one. She did not know to whom the agent pledged loyalty, or if he or she was simply a hired mercenary with no allegiances beyond the monetary.
Most distressing.
Discovering proof of covert activity had proven a challenge even for T’Prynn’s formidable investigative talents, in itself another issue that gave her cause for concern. The spy was well trained and quite adept at concealment. The search protocols T’Prynn had created to monitor the station’s main computer and communications systems had been working for weeks, hunting for references to any of the numerous key words and phrases she had included as search criteria. Additional algorithms had been deployed to look for signs of encryption, or even messages that appeared to contain nonsensical passages, which of course might indicate a low-level form of encoding designed to thwart attempts at eavesdropping. Every correspondence transmitted to and from the station, no matter its contents, was subjected to the audit. Even though other parties might balk at this infringement of their privacy, for T’Prynn the measures were both prudent and logical so far as maintaining the starbase’s operational security was concerned. Safeguarding the truth behind Operation Vanguard was her paramount concern, and the station’s presence in the Taurus Reach, situated as it was between two contentious Federation adversaries, invited all manner of clandestine activities. She had decided from the moment she undertook this assignment that she would make use of any and all resources and methods at her disposal—ethical and otherwise—to carry out that duty.
Despite the effort T’Prynn had expended in the development of the various search routines, she did not expect any of them to yield any tangible results. Any spy of worth would avoid such obvious routes for passing information, electing instead to utilize some other surreptitious means to contact a superior or to receive instructions. It was therefore surprising when one of her watchdog programs did in fact find something.
Her program had detected a single message, divided into multiple data packets that in turn were embedded within other messages transmitted from the station more than three weeks earlier. To the casual reviewer, such information components could easily be dismissed or mistakenly viewed as portions of the communiqués in which they were inserted. Only by piecing together several of the packets did a pattern emerge, and even then it was but a portion of the entire message. While the search program reported finding more than two dozen such data fragments, its findings remained incomplete. As for the segments that had been discovered, they of course were written in some form of code, which T’Prynn was faced with attempting to translate. It had taken her in excess of six hours to decipher enough of the message that her suspicions could be confirmed: someone was reporting on the station’s activities to what remained an unknown benefactor, though examination of other data fragments was leading T’Prynn to conclude that the recipient of this information either was a Klingon, or someone working for the Empire.
A logical development.
That concession was only strengthened upon her decrypting a partial reference to the U.S.S. Sagittarius and its current assignment to reconnoiter the Traelus system. The Klingon Empire’s seemingly sudden interest in that system now made sense, as did the Sagittarius’s running afoul of a Klingon scout vessel while carrying out its survey mission. Other segments T’Prynn had reviewed appeared to contain references to the movements of other Starfleet and civilian vessels between Vanguard and destinations throughout the Taurus Reach. Even information collected by the station’s long-range sensors with respect to Tholian ships passing through the region was mentioned. The amount of intelligence this agent was able to gather was as impressive as it was disconcerting.
Despite what she had found, T’Prynn had not yet discovered anything that might be construed as a reference to the Taurus Meta-Genome. This was encouraging, especially if the Klingons indeed were the ones benefiting from the efforts of a covert operative. Still, if the Empire succeeded in establishing footholds on worlds known to harbor samples of the complex, artificially engineered DNA strand—or, perhaps, other artifacts or evidence of the unknown race responsible for creating it—Starfleet’s mission to contain the secrets surrounding Operation Vanguard would be jeopardized.
That is not your concern now, T’Prynn reminded herself. Her immediate priority was tracking down the spy and ending his or her clandestine activities before such efforts could undermine or even expose Starbase 47’s mission.
And what will you do to achieve that goal?
Whatever was necessary, T’Prynn decided.