Survivors - Jean Lorrah [75]
“I give you my word,” she said, stifling the pain in her heart.
He smiled-a very small, quiet smile, but it brought back for the first time the handsomeness lurking beneath the stern lines of his face. Then he pulled her combadge from his pocket. “It still won’t transmit on Starfleet channels, but if you decide to work with us we’ll adjust it to the frequencies we use. Now let’s find Sdan, and see if he can calculate the position of the Enterprise.”
In the strategy room, Sdan had opened one of the cupboards to reveal a computer terminal far more modern than anything Yar had seen in Nalavia’s castle. Like the ones aboard ship, it had no buttons or switches, but responded to either voice or touch control.
Sdan might claim to be no scholar, but he certainly knew the mathematics of space-time, calculating the probabilities of the ship’s location along the continuum, and comparing them with the beam of the subspace radio traveling at a constant speed. The Enterprise would routinely monitor all messages on Starfleet frequencies, but the computer would ignore other frequencies unless there was something unusual about a message-such as its being beamed directly at the ship.
Dare left Sdan to his calculations, and showed Yar around the strategy room. It was all computerized, including a complete schematic of the castle with the position of every person in it. Yar felt her mouth thin as she realized, “You could trace my every move without leaving this room.”
“Actually,” said Dare, “Sdan watched the screens, Barb followed you, Poet was on the cliff side, and I made my way to the shuttle by the shortest route-which we had been careful not to show you earlier.” He pointed out on the map that if she had gone back upstairs there was a corridor directly to the courtyard. As it was, she had dipped down to kitchen level, then climbed the winding ramp, reaching the courtyard well behind Dare even though he had started more than a minute after her.
Suddenly she realized, “I forgot to ask how badly I hurt you!”
“You did exactly what you intended. I blacked out-but Sdan was here to revive me, so I was on my way to the shuttle faster than you counted on.”
“You took a stimulant? After a blow to the head? Dare-“
“No-just a painkiller. It’s nothing, Tasha-all in a day’s work in our profession.”
She managed to bite back the automatic response that they were no longer in the same profession.
They joined Rikan again for a light luncheon, after which Aurora took Yar back to the strategy room. There she showed her what they knew of Nalavia’s activities, the positions of her standing army, her armament and deployment systems.
Sdan was back at his console, calling up probabilities and swearing softly when they did not say what he wanted them to.
The two women worked at one of the large viewscreens, Yar becoming fascinated, appreciating Aurora’s skills and forgetting for the moment that this woman had apparently taken her place with Dare. No longer my place, she reminded herself when it did occur to her. I retired from the field years ago. Caught up in strategy as if it were a game, Yar suggested positions for the troops Rikan could muster, if they wanted to take Nalavia’s palace.
“Take the queen,” said Aurora, “and the game is ours.”
“It appears so,” Yar agreed. “Nalavia does seem to be a one-person operation. Both the most dangerous kind of tyrant, and the most vulnerable.”
“You are right,” said Aurora. “She has not created in her people any vested interest in keeping her in power, only in the things which they associate with her. The council, though, is another matter.”
“The people with the real power,” said Yar. “It’s an ancient strategy, but it always works. They vote for what Nalavia wants, and she provides them with wealth and power.”
“Such people have no real loyalty,” said Aurora. “We’ve considered infiltrating the council somehow, persuading a councilor or two that he really ought to be President or at least not trust the present one.”
“Good idea, but how do you implement it?” Yar