STAR TREK - TOS (29 page)

No such luck. Just as she feared, she was unable to send a transmission out of the compound.
That darn
force field,
she realized; apparently, it was indeed fully operational.

That left her only one option: that computer in[257]Morrison’s office.
Now’s my chance,
she thought, while the general was out making his rounds.

Hastily screwing the top of the air cleaner shut again, she scrambled to her feet, wiped the dust from the knees of her khaki trousers, and headed off in the opposite direction from the route Morrison and Porter were taking. She knew she had to move quickly, before the general finished his inspection.

Fortunately, the remodeled post office was not far from the women’s barracks. Beneath a cloudless Arizona sky, she walked at a brisk but unsuspicious pace across the dusty grounds of the busy camp.

Target practice and boot camp training shared the repopulated ghost town with more domestic chores; Roberta’s mouth watered as she smelled barbecued spare ribs cooking over by the communal mess hall, while one of her fellow “Freewomen” was hanging laundry out to dry on a line stretched between two freshly plastered adobe buildings. There wasn’t much variety in the dangling garments, which came exclusively in varying shades of olive, tan, and khaki. Roberta found herself pining for the garish colors and fashions of her bygone hippie days.

Two rifle-toting guards, standing watch over the entrance to Morrison’s headquarters, posed a major obstacle to her plans. She briefly considered zapping them both with a tranquilizer beam, but that would pretty much blow her cover, especially in broad daylight. Too many people, including the guards on the watchtowers, were likely to notice.

What I really need is a good distraction,she decided. Glancing around furtively, she again noticed the paramilitary laundry hanging on the line. “Perfect,” she[258]whispered, setting her servo on Burn. An invisible beam zipped across the courtyard, igniting the dangling clothing, which burst immediately into flame, clothesline and all.

Roberta didn’t need to sound the alarm herself. Several passing militia members, including the startled woman collecting the laundry, did that for her. “Help! Fire!” the cry went up, drawing the immediate attention of everyone within earshot. “Help!”

As hoped, the two watchmen guarding the old post office ran to help put out the fire, which Roberta hoped would be chalked up to spontaneous khaki combustion. Taking advantage of their momentary absence, she sprinted for the front door of the squat adobe building and silently darted inside. A quick zap from her servo shut down the interior security cameras.

Closing the door quickly behind her, she made a beeline for Morrison’s office. The inner door was locked, but that presented little problem to her servo, which also served as a high-tech skeleton key.

Another zap and she quietly entered the general’s private sanctum. The droning hum of a working air cleaner sounded like a swarm of bees thanks to the sonic amplifiers in her headphones, but she kept the bogus Walkman on in order to keep an augmented ear out for the sound of Morrison’s return.

Thankfully, Morrison had a fast modem—and a sufficiently hackable operating system. Plopping herself down behind the much too orderly desk, Roberta searched the Web for news of the notorious Geneva operation, whatever that might be.

She didn’t have to search very hard. Although the[259]official news outlets were playing it cautious, acknowledging only unconfirmed “rumors” of some sort of disaster and/or terrorist attack at the United Nations offices in Geneva, Switzerland, the rest of the Internet was abuzz with horrific first- and secondhand reports of people dropping like flies during a special assembly at the Palais des Nations. A few survivors even mentioned a peculiar smell in the air right before the catastrophe—and speculated ominously about nerve gas.

Ohmigod,she thought, feeling sick to her stomach. She suddenly understood, with chilling certitude, that Morrison’s paranoia regarding poison gas was simply a psychological projection of his own monstrous agenda. Looking around the tidy office, trying in vain to understand how anyone could conceive of such an inhuman crime, let alone implement it, her gaze fell upon Morrison’s desk calendar, on which today’s date been circled in red with a thick magic marker. A date, she recalled, which had apparently been specified by Khan.

But why?she thought, racing to make sense of it all. Morrison’s motives, although insane, were pretty obvious; in the general’s warped worldview, the United Nations was synonymous with the many-tentacled Beast he blamed for Waco and other purported assaults on individual liberty. But where did Khan fit into this picture? Khan was ruthless, but he wasn’t crazy; why would he help Morrison carry out this unprovoked attack on the United Nations?

Roberta was baffled at first, but the blurry picture came crystal-clear when she noticed just who the U.N. was hosting at the time of the massacre: Vasily[260]Hunyadi, now believed to be one of the many fatalities claimed by the deadly incident.
Of course,
she comprehended at last.
That’s why Khan
persuaded Morrison to stage the attack today. He was using one superman to take out another.

Just like Seven was trying to do, but with a lot more innocent casualties. Even now that she had figured out Khan’s part in today’s atrocity, she was still shocked to realize that Khan had willingly sacrificed hundreds of blameless bystanders just to eliminate a single enemy.
He’s getting more and more
dangerous,
she thought sadly, finding it hard to reconcile Morrison’s cold-blooded co-conspirator with the charismatic child she had rescued from Chrysalis twenty years ago.

A glance at her watch reminded Roberta that time was running short. Even with a small fire to distract him, Morrison was bound to be returning to his office soon.
Forget Phase One for a second,
she urged herself, as horrible as the disaster in Geneva sounded. That was over and done with, leaving an even more important question still to be answered:
What the heck is Phase Two?

Flipping through the upright desk calendar revealed another date circled in red: November 14. A handwritten notation on the page listed a specific time as well: 8:23 GMT. “Okay, that gives me when,”

she muttered, although the significance of the time and date escaped her. The “GMT,” short for Greenwich Mean Time, gave her a clue as to where. Now she just had to uncover the what.

Morrison’s anal-retentive tendencies came to her rescue once she used the servo to open the locked file

[261]drawer beneath the desktop, where she discovered, neatly and meticulously labeled, a hanging folder taggedOPERATION: APPLEJACK, PHASE TWO.
Thank the Aegis for genetically
engineered neat freaks!
she thought in relief.
I might just get to the bottom of this, after all.

Inside the folder she found, much to her surprise, a newspaper clipping concerning the beginning of passenger service, on November 14, of the recently opened undersea tunnel linking England and France.

A yellow Post-it note, affixed to the article, contained Morrison’s own scribbled annotations: Step One: Unite U.K. + Continent

Step Two: Complete European Union

Step Three: One-World Gov’t.

Uh-oh,Roberta thought, her heart sinking. It seemed all too clear that Morrison saw the opening of the Chunnel (as the brand-new tunnel was popularly known) as a vital first step in the establishment of the New World Order he so feared. She tried to imagine the consequences of releasing poison gas into the Chunnel once it was in full operation, then shuddered as the nightmarish scenario played out in her mind.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent commuters and tourists might be killed, even as a triumph of international cooperation was turned into a disaster site.

In an instant, all the time she’d spent worming her way into the AEV seemed more than worthwhile.

Reacting quickly, she fired off an emergency e-mail to Gary Seven, telling him everything she knew about Phase Two, including concise physical descriptions of[262]both Porter and Butch Connors, whom she assumed would be carrying out the attack on the Chunnel. She then efficiently erased the note from Morrison’s hard drive and software, along with any evidence of her prior Web surfing.

And none too soon. Just as she was finishing up, the sonic amplifiers in her headphones picked up the sound of Morrison’s irate voice booming right outside the adobe walls of the former post office. “A fire!”

he bellowed in angry disbelief. “How does a load of soggy laundry catch fire?”

Time to get out of here,she thought,
but how?
From the sound of it, she definitely wasn’t leaving the way she came in, and, thanks to Morrison’s handy-dandy new force field generator, she wouldn’t be catching the Blue Smoke Express either.
There’s got to be another way out,
she thought fervently, her blue-green eyes searching every nook and cranny of the sturdy and windowless office.
Morrison is too
paranoid not to have-some kind of emergency escape route!

Her servo scanned the sun-dried brick walls around her, trying and failing to locate a secret passage.

Roberta heard footsteps in the hall outside, along with the sound of Morrison and Porter heatedly discussing the mystery of the flaming laundry. She didn’t need the headphones to know that they were heading straight for the office.

Buying time, she used the servo to fuse the doorknob, locking the two men out. The door was a substantial one, constructed of dense oak, but she knew that it wouldn’t keep out the superstrong general for long. On a hunch, she scanned beneath the genuine Navajo rug covering the floor.

[263]
Eureka!
The servo detected a hollow passageway beneath the carpet.
Yes!
Roberta thought. The fused doorknob rattled in its socket and she heard an incensed voice on the other side of the oak timbers. “What in thunder—?” Morrison pounded on the door with his fist. “Is anyone in there? Open up, dammit!”

Yanking the colorful Native American rug aside, Roberta discovered an old-fashioned trapdoor with a flat metal ring for a handle. She wondered briefly if it dated back to the town’s mining days, then pulled open the trapdoor with both hands. Well-oiled hinges made nary a squeak.

“Let me in, you trespassing spy!” The oaken door shook in its frame as Morrison vented his volcanic displeasure. “You can’t get away!”

I
beg to differ,
Roberta thought. Beneath the trapdoor, a rusted metal ladder led straight down into a beckoning black pit. Shining a bright beam of light from her servo into the abyss, she glimpsed the rocky floor of a shadowy tunnel about twenty yards below.
The old mines,
she guessed at once, now providing refuge rather than riches.

A gun went off outside as either Morrison or Porter fired blindly into the office. High-caliber ammunition slammed into the wall behind Morrison’s desk, shattering the glass sheet protecting the Waco photo and ripping the antique Revolutionary War banner to shreds. “Don’t Tread on Me” abruptly became “Fire at Will” and a ricocheting shot struck the monitor of the general’s computer, which exploded in a shower of sparks and plastic shards.

Her head ducked low for fear of shrapnel, Roberta[264]decided that she had definitely outworn her welcome. She hurriedly clambered down the ladder, tugging the door of the trapdoor shut above her.

There was no way to put the rug back into place, so it was going to be pretty obvious how she’d escaped, but hopefully she’d be able to find a way out of the mines, and maybe even back up into the camp, before anyone noticed that “Bobbie Landers” had gone missing. Knowing Morrison, he was probably going to blame the CIA or the ATF anyway.

The important thing was that she had gotten the word out to Seven. Now it was up to him to see that the Chunnel didn’t suffer the same ghastly fate as the Palais des Nations. She had plenty of faith in Seven’s ability to save the day, but there was still one more thing that worried her more than anything else.

What else was Khan up to these days?

OCTOBER 2, 1994

“YOU MAY BRING IN THE SUBJECT NOW.”

Dr. Phoolan Dhasal waited patiently as her assistants wheeled the test subject into the hermetically sealed experimental chamber. Fluorescent lights shined down on the scientists and their subject. Strapped onto a gurney, the specimen squirmed against its restraints, appearing highly agitated.

“Stop! You can’t do this!” Brother Arcturus cried out. Electronic sensors, affixed to his skull, limbs, and torso, monitored his vital signs, which, at the moment, included a significantly elevated heart rate. “I demand you release me!”

Dhasal briefly wondered if she should have had the specimen sedated, but, no, that would cloud the results of today’s experiment. Better to observe the subject in a natural, undrugged state, even if his hysterical vocalizations bordered on the distracting.

[266]“Please!” the specimen begged. Stripped of his customary chartreuse robes, his epidermis completely shaved of body hair, the captured cult leader was recognizable only by the astrological tattoo upon his forehead. “Do not do this, my sister! The stars forbid it!”

Standing next to Dhasal, wearing an identical yellow hazmat suit, Donald Williams flinched visibly. “Can’t we put a gag on him or something?” he asked squeamishly.

“No,” Dhasal stated flatly. “It may be necessary to interrogate him regarding his symptoms, if any.” She inspected a tray of medical instruments resting on a wheeled metal cart; among the apparatus was a compact electronic excruciator, to be used if the subject refused to cooperate. “A verbal description of his subjective experience could be extremely illuminating.”

At her instruction, the assistants elevated the gurney until the subject was at an eighty-degree angle to the floor. Dhasal checked the restraints to make sure they were secure; given the subject’s genetically enhanced strength, she did not wish to take any unnecessary chances.

“Please, for the love of our celestial starfathers, release me!” Arcturus’s arms were strapped to his sides, and his shaved head held in place by a reinforced leather band across his throat. His brilliant sapphire eyes glowed with an unattractive mixture of fright and religious fervor. “I must prepare the way.”