“And the pilot?”
“Turns out she’s a Suliban.”
Reed stared. “Not a leftover Cabal member?” he asked, though it seemed unlikely.
“Actually she wanted to be, but she was too young. Ran some errands for them back in the day, but the Cabal fell apart before she was old enough for the genetic augmentations. Still, she was a fellow traveler, which means the Tandarans came after her, so she ran away, went underground, and ended up on Rigel X, doing menial work for whatever syndicate had a use for her.” Williams shook her head. “Same as Kuldip, too low on the totem pole to know anything we can use.”
“That’s not unexpected,” Reed replied. “Whoever’s planned this operation is meticulous. We wouldn’t even have gotten this far if not for some ingenious improvisation by you and Doctor Dax.”
The armory officer smiled, lifting her chin. “Thank you, sir.”
Reed sighed. “Well, at least that’s one wild goose we’ve cooked. That improves our odds a bit.” He directed his gaze sunward, toward the inner system. “I just hope Travis and Rey are having better luck.”
8
Janxor, Rigel III
THE WRECKAGE OF THE SHIP was spread out over half the mountainside. Travis Mayweather and Reynaldo Sangupta gazed up at the debris field from the base of the low, scree-covered slope, with Director Sajithen towering over them from behind. An even bigger Chelon, one of her security escorts, flanked the group, while the other escort, a Jelna exomale, worked his way gingerly up the slope, scanning the debris. “How awful,” the director rumbled. “I pray that your crewmates were not aboard this ship.”
That was a possibility Mayweather refused to contemplate. He had lost far too many crewmates over the years, first to the Xindi while aboard Enterprise, later aboard the multiple ships he’d had shot out from under him in the Romulan War. Now he had the added burden of being their superior officer. He had given Grev and Kirk the okay to visit the archive—and he had assigned Kenji Mishima to protect them. For the first time, Mayweather had to live with the knowledge that he’d ordered someone to his death. For now, he was coping with it by reminding himself that the First Families were the ones truly responsible, the rightful targets for his anger. But he knew it wouldn’t be that simple to live with his own responsibility in the long term. The one thing that could make it easier was to help bring Grev and Kirk back alive. The thought that some random malfunction or pilot error had precluded any chance of their rescue was unacceptable.
Fortunately, Mayweather had good reason not to believe it. “I’m not sure anyone was aboard that ship,” he told the director.
“I do not understand.”
The first officer spread his arms to indicate the territory around them, a largely barren volcanic island about the size of Greenland but much hotter. “Why would they have come here? The Chelons who provided the hypnoids live in the Hainali rainforest, clear on the other side of the planet.”
“There is a major spaceport at the eastern tip of the island, in the direction the ship was headed. It draws in traders from all over the system, even Rigel IV.”
“Yes, and that makes it a plausible destination—if we didn’t know about the rainforest connection. And we weren’t supposed to, because the evidence was supposed to be destroyed in the explosion. If they were going anywhere on Rigel III, they would’ve gone to Hainali.”
“Except they wouldn’t have gone there,” Sangupta said, “because that would’ve tipped us off to the very connection they were trying to hide.”
“That’s right. But if they’d avoided sending a ship to Three at all, that would’ve looked suspicious in itself,” Mayweather went on. “They had to make Three one of the shells in the game—but they sent us here, to the far side of the planet.”
“Yeah,” the science officer answered, nodding as he filled in the rest in his own mind. “And a crashed ship in a place like this—spread out over square kilometers of an unstable rock face—we could spend days trying to find organic remains or a surviving data module before we ruled this out as a decoy.” He grinned. “But since we know they had a connection in the rainforest, that gives us an edge they don’t know about.”
Mayweather grimaced. “Well, if the nationalists even respond to the message Sajithen sent.”
“They will respond,” the director insisted. “But indirect channels of communication take time, particularly in that part of the world.”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t eat up all our head start,” Sangupta grumbled.