“We’ve no shortage of qualified pilots up here, Lieutenant,” the captain said from the front of the cockpit. Picard then turned his chair toward Zweller and regarded him coolly. “Commander?”
Zweller looked significantly at Picard and Batanides for a long moment. Hawk knew that something important was passing between these three people, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. But it seemed clear they all shared some history together.
Zweller turned away from Picard and Batanides, and regarded Hawk with a shrug. “Why not?” he said, then began making his way aftward.
Hawk followed Zweller into the main crew compartment, past Troi and several members of the Slayton’s crew. They stepped over Grelun’s unconscious form, which was splayed across the floor while Dr. Gomp and Counselor Troi watched over him; none of the seats aboard the vessel were designed to accommodate anyone so large. Nearby, Crusher tended to what appeared to be a superficial wound on Riker’s scalp, and a nasty‑looking burn on his shoulder. Then Hawk followed Zweller down a companionway ladder and into a cramped, equipmentfilled lower compartment that reminded him of one of the horizontal Jefferies tubes aboard the Enterprise.Hawk could hear Roget and Hearn discussing their work on the engine core from around a corner junction.
Zweller removed an access panel just above the deck gridwork, revealing the cloaking device’s winking, glowing interior. Hawk found a tool kit in an adjacent drawer and handed it to Zweller, who lay supine in order to reach the leads running from the device to the ship’s main EPS lines.
After a few passes of an isodyne coupler, Zweller signaled to the cockpit that the cloak was operational. Then he rose, handed the tool kit to Hawk, and headed back toward the companionway ladder.
Hawk took a deep breath. I may never have a better chance than right now.He put a firm hand on Zweller’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.
“I need to speak to you,” Hawk said softly, not wanting to be overheard by Roget or Hearn. “About Section 31.”
Zweller turned slowly around and regarded Hawk with a sober expression. “I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Lieutenant,” he said in an admonishing tone, his gaze dilithium‑hard.
Hawk stood his ground and stared right back at Zweller. “Ambassador Tabor told me about Thirty‑One. He told me you’re working for them, too. And he tried to convince me that losingChiaros IV and the Geminus Gulf would be better for the Federation than winning them. He even tried to recruit me to help him accomplish that goal.”
Zweller digested this in silence. He appeared to be a difficult man to catch by surprise. But that must be part and parcel of the spy game,Hawk thought.
Zweller spoke quietly after a long, introspective pause. “I suppose Tabor died before he could answer all of your . . . fundamental questions.”
Hawk nodded. “And now that we know the Romulans are mixed up with the Army of Light, I have even more questions.”
“So it appears you have a choice to make, Lieutenant. The same choice I had to make when I was around your age.”
Hawk nodded slowly. “I either have to help you or stop you.”
Zweller smiled. “You’ve got a third option, kid. You can back off. Pretend you don’t know anything about Section 31. Believe me, that would be your safest option.”
Hawk considered that for a moment, then dismissed it out of hand. If he’d been of a mind to play it safe, then he never would have gone against his father’s wishes and entered Starfleet Academy. And he’d be on a safe, dull tenure‑track in the antiquities department at some Martian university right now instead of piloting the Federation’s flagship out at the boundaries of human experience.
“Ignoring what Tabor tried to do here would be the same as helping you, wouldn’t it?” Hawk said. “No, I can’t just pretend I’m not involved, Commander. I aminvolved. And I need to know what you and Tabor were really trying to do here, and why.”
Zweller folded his arms across his chest and paused once again, evidently weighing options of his own. Finally, he said, “Let’s strike a deal, then, son: I’ll tell you whatever I think you need to know. But only afterwe get safely away from this hellhole.
“And assuming, of course, that both of us live that long.”
And with that, Zweller crossed to the ladder and climbed out of sight, leaving Hawk alone, the coppery taste of fear in his mouth.
Chapter Nine
Koval strode into the control center of the warbird Thrai Kaleh,his thoughts dark. Speculations about the Empire’s future had weighed heavily upon his mind of late. Despite the best efforts of the Tal Shiar’s vice‑chairman, Senator Vreenak, to negotiate a nonaggression pact with the sprawling Dominion, Koval found it difficult to believe that those shape‑shifting Gamma Quadrant devils–and their unctuous Vorta middlemen–would honor any such agreement for long. For months now, a sense of urgency had been steadily growing within the Tal Shiar leader’s gut, an almost desperate need to prove that the best days of the Praetor’s venerable congeries of worlds had not already passed.
Of course, there were things to be thankful for, to be sure. Nine years previously, Tarod IX, a world just on the Federation’s side of the stelai ler’lloann–the Outmarches, which the Federation called the Romulan Neutral Zone–had suffered a devastating attack by the rapacious Borg collective. Koval often wondered what would have happened had the conquest‑driven cyborgs continued across the Neutral Zone toward the core of the Empire. Could Romulus itself have survived such an onslaught? Would he have been forced to seek a long‑term alliance with the Federation, whose continual, omnidirectional expansion many in the Empire regarded as a threat in and of itself?
If the Dominion behaves as treacherously as seems likely,Koval thought glumly, then I may yet be forced to take just such an action.
Fortunately, some of the reassurance Koval sought was now displayed upon the Thrai Kaleh’s central viewscreen. He looked upon a vast assemblage of spaceborne constructs, a colossal loop of machinery, energy‑collectors, and habitat modules that dwarfed even the largest warbirds of the Praetor’s armadas. And in the ring’s center lay a concentration of unimaginably potent forces, a discovery that promised to revivify the Empire–and perhaps, one day, even to extend its reach to every quadrant of the galaxy.
Taking a seat in the command chair, Koval silently watched the coruscating energies in the screen’s center for the better part of an hour, while junior officers busied themselves monitoring the banks of equipment. It was their responsibility to assist the energy station’s technical crews in locating and dampening out all local subspace instabilities before irreparable harm could befall either the energy‑extraction equipment or the power source’s delicately balanced containment apparatus.
Koval was unpleasantly aware that the crew had failed to mask allevidence of the phenomenon’s presence; the recent unwelcome intrusion of the first Federation starship into the cloaked zone had amply demonstrated those failures. In the aftermath, an overzealous warbird captain had overstepped his authority by destroying that Federation vessel, forcing Koval to have him summarily executed. Now that the incident had attracted the attention of the Federation’s flagship, Koval would countenance no further errors or unforeseen complications.
A hatchway opened and a distraught young decurion entered the control center, practically at a run. “ Chairman Koval,” he said breathlessly. “We’ve just received a stealth signal from the Chiarosan orbital comm tether. There has been an . . . incident on the planet.”