Marinta turned back a fold of her robe to show she had her own IDIC pin. “Our intelligence was correct. They didn’t find you at the s’url, so they’ve begun a search.”
Kirk could see that Marinta wanted to hurry along this new narrow wooden corridor, but his suspicion regarding her motives was undiminished.
He held up the transparent viewing cylinder. “Convenient that the authorities arrived just as we were going to discuss this.”
Marinta didn’t bother to hide her annoyance. “The recording you saw was an intercepted transmission. We obtained it eighteen months ago from a Tellarite freighter.” She gestured down the corridor, urgent. “We have to go.”
She started to walk quickly. Kirk made no further protest, kept pace.
“Wherever you got it from, the recording’s been altered.”
Kirk had seen enough visual sensor logs to recognize the cruder forms of forgery. Years ago, he had been victim of that kind of fraud himself.
“Not altered,” Marinta said. “Enhanced. The original subspace signal was severely degraded. It traveled three hundred and fifty thousand light-years.”
“Which is, of course, impossible.”
Marinta stopped by another wooden door-this one distinguished by carved Vulcan script and an ornamental inlay of oxidized copper.
“On the face of it, yes. And yet, you’ve seen the recording for yourself. You recognized Captain Lewinski?”
She tapped a fist against a section of the dirt-stained wall, and a hidden panel opened, revealing a palm scanner. Marinta placed her hand against it and the scanner bed glowed green.
Taking one last look back along the corridor, Kirk confirmed that he had indeed recognized the captain in the images he had seen. Nine years ago, Lewinski, Kirk, and Jean-Luc Picard had undertaken a joint mission on the Monitor. At the time, Lewinski had done Kirk and Picard the honor of changing the name of his vessel from Monitor to Enterprise.
The heavy carved door swung open to reveal a narrow wooden staircase leading up into total darkness.
Marinta stepped back, indicating for Kirk to go first. With some misgivings, Kirk complied.
Marinta continued her efforts to convince him as they climbed. “And you’re familiar with the trajectory and the capabilities of the Kelvan Expeditionary Return Probes?”
Again, the Romulan was correct. Kirk himself was responsible for that audacious mission.
More than a century earlier, a generational ship from the Kelvan Empire in the Andromeda Galaxy survived passage through the galactic energy barrier only to crash in Federation space. Though the Kelvans on that ship had intended to lay the groundwork for conquering the Federation’s own galaxy, they were in fact refugees from what they described as a natural disaster affecting Andromeda-a rise in radiation levels that would make all of their home galaxy uninhabitable.
Within two years of this first contact with the Kelvan scouts, the Federation launched three high-speed robotic probes to the Kelvan Empire in order to relay the Federation’s offer of planets suitable for Kelvan colonization. Even with the probes’ use of advanced Kelvan warp technology, the Federation’s leaders of today knew the spacecraft would still require two more centuries to reach their destination. Presumably it would be an additional three centuries until the Federation bureaucrats of the twenty-ninth century could look forward to handling the disposition of the Kelvan evacuation armada.
“I’m very familiar with the probes,” Kirk said. He saw no reason to offer further detail.
The staircase shook slightly as the wooden door at its base closed solidly.
Kirk wheeled around, suddenly certain he had heard running footsteps an instant before.
“Did you hear something?” Kirk asked.
Marinta shook her head, pushed him forward. “We need to get to a place of safety, where they won’t be able to scan us individually.”
Kirk kept climbing the stairs, picking up his pace in response to Marinta’s increasing insistence.
She paused at the top of the stairs, producing a small sensor padd. In the dim light from its screen, Kirk could see a narrow metal door only a meter ahead.
“What now?” he asked. He hated being at this woman’s mercy. He couldn’t be sure whether they were being followed. He couldn’t be sure whether she was merely leading him on.
Marinta kept her attention focused on the sensor padd’s screen. “We have to wait,” she said.
“For what?”
She looked at Kirk, changed the topic. “In addition to the Kelvan probes, do you recall the unusual colony world that some call Mudd?”
“I know it, but I don’t see the relevance.”
“Two hundred thousand synthetic humanoids,” Marinta prompted, undeterred. She stared past Kirk, down the stairs into darkness. “Robotic survivors of a scientific outpost established by another Andromedan species. Unlike the Kelvans, they claimed they were escaping their sun’s destruction.”
“I remember the world, and the humanoids,” Kirk said. The planet had been the site of his second run-in with the exasperating Harcourt Fenton Mudd. “But how does it tie in with the Monitor transmission and the Kelvan probes?” He peered into the darkness, too. But saw nothing. Heard nothing.
“Consider the distance the makers of those synthetics traveled,” Marinta said. She’d dropped her voice to a cautious whisper. “Surely if it were only a single star’s death they faced, there were other safe havens more readily available in their own galaxy.”
That simple fact was all it took for the answer to crystallize for Kirk. “Something else is happening in Andromeda,” he said.
“The signs have been there for decades,” Marinta agreed. “But no one put the details together. The synthetic beings, the Kelvans…”
Kirk didn’t need her to continue. “It’s not a natural disaster. It’s not dying stars or rising levels of radiation. They were all escaping the Totality.”
Marinta snapped the sensor padd closed. “Now!” she said, then pressed her shoulder against the metal door.
It creaked open onto a deserted street, illuminated only by the pale light of the planet’s companion stars.
Kirk hesitated, about to demand that Marinta provide a full explanation of what she was implying before he took another step.
Then he heard the low-power hum of a phaser and the crack of wood splintering.
Flashes of light flickered at the bottom of the stairwell, spiking through the suddenly shattered door.
Marinta hissed, “Keep moving!” She dragged Kirk onto the street by the sleeve of his cloak.
Kirk ran beside her until they rounded a corner and found themselves on a more crowded street.
Shops were open and light spilled from them onto the sand-covered walkways.
Marinta settled into a purposeful walk, lowered her head as if she were nothing more than a novice.
Kirk did the same at her side, all the while listening intently for the sound of running footsteps behind them.
As if they weren’t in danger, as if they weren’t being pursued, Marinta continued their conversation. “Whatever the Totality is,” she said quietly, “we must conclude its conquest of Andromeda is complete.” She glanced at Kirk from the recesses of her hood and he saw her dark Romulan eyes flash at him. “And now it’s invaded our galaxy, to do the same.”
Kirk kept walking, weaving through the crowd of pilgrims and tourists, almost overcome by the chilling pattern that was coalescing in his mind.
From a strategic perspective, everything the Totality had attempted to date fit perfectly with a plan for military conquest.
Even for a life-form that could, as the Monitor transmission implied, construct transwarp passageways between galaxies, the logistics of projecting enough force and combatants from Andromeda to this galaxy had to be an enormous undertaking. So what better way to conquer this new island universe than by turning its own
