The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [26]
“How very cloak and dagger of you, Miss Webber.”
“Don’t joke!” At her expression, he sobered at once. “I’m onto something big.”
“Go on.” He listened intently, his gray eyes fastened [75] on hers, as she told him what had happened. She left nothing out—not Covington’s order to start dating Harry again, not the story of a fictitious mole who would eventually “turn out to be” Kenneth Montgomery, not her stalking of and eventual meeting with Trevor Blake.
That did get a reaction from him. “Blake?” Aidan said, startled. “I had no idea he was borrowed expertise. He showed up one day with not much fanfare and just stayed. We all kind of forgot about him. He’s—well, I suppose you know.”
She nodded. “He’s not particularly memorable,” she said. “He kept every memo from Montgomery in his computer. I mean every single one—birthday parties, baby shower announcements, you name it.” She hesitated, then asked, “Aidan—does the term Royal Protocol mean anything to you?”
“It’s a horrible document that Starfleet ought to have banned as torture,” Aidan said. “Is there any other reference?”
“It was one of the files on Blake’s computer. I was slogging through it like a good little agent when all of a sudden it turned to gibberish,” said Libby.
“Gibberish?”
“As in deeply encrypted information. I’ve got the basic decryption skills they teach every agent at my level, but there’s much more there I simply can’t crack. Here’s what I have learned, though. This Borg virus didn’t come to Earth with Voyager. It’s been around for a long time—say, for a few hundred years. I think the Borg booby-trapped their vessels, trying to find a way to spread the virus eventually even if they were destroyed.”
[76] Aidan nodded. “It makes sense, but why hide this? It’s exactly what we should be doing. Investigating.”
“That’s what I thought. I guess Starfleet doesn’t want everyone to know they knew about this virus and did nothing to stop it, or even warn anyone about the debris.” Bitterly, she added, “I just broke a few more words that lead me to believe that the virus is spread by physical contact.”
Aidan stared. “You mean, if anyone touched the debris, they’d become infected?”
“It sounds that way.”
“But then why hasn’t it happened long before now? We’ve had some of that debris around for years.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Who knows? It could be a set program—the thing doesn’t become active until after a certain number of years.”
“Or the virus could be mechanical, not organic,” mused Aidan. “We know the Borg use nanoprobes for many things. Maybe it needed a command.”
“Then what’s the command? Who gave it? Why? But again, Aidan—my skills are so basic it’s entirely possible that I’m deciphering it all incorrectly. There’s so much I still don’t know and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”
He smiled. “As a famous Baker Street detective said, ‘It is a mistake to theorize without all the data.’ ”
She looked at him steadily. He made the leap quickly and said, “Oh. Now I understand why you contacted me.”
“I need your help. I need one of your cryptographers to do a blind decoding.”
“Impossible,” he said. “I can’t authorize that.”
“You have to,” she said. “If this goes as deep as I think it might, you would be put in danger.”
[77] “And you won’t be?”
“I’m already in danger. If Covington is going to suspect me, she suspects me by now. This could be nothing. As I said, I may be seeing conspiracies where none exist.”
“If the public policy is to shift blame to Voyager when it’s Starfleet poking and prodding that’s let the genie out of the bottle, that’s a conspiracy right there.”
She waved her hand impatiently. “A minor misdirection, easily rectified by a public apology when the virus is cured. If that’s really all it is. But things aren’t adding up, Aidan. It’s just too strange. My gut is telling me that there’s something more, a lot more, and I need to know what it is.”
“So do I. I’m your boss, remember?”
“Please just do this for me. As a favor. I’ve never asked anything from you before. You’re the only one I can