Star Trek: Lineage Ch. 09

"Kara, what's wrong?" Casana asked, still holding her head. Kara ignored her, finally finding what she was looking for: a tricorder. She turned back towards the hallway, shoving the security officer aside again, and pushing past Suvak.

"Residual electrostatic charge. Phaser on high power?" she muttered to herself as she scanned the area. "No residual organic matter. No phaser, so it must be..." Kara dropped the tricorder and returned to the desk, pushing past Suvak again.

"Kara, what's wrong?" Casana asked again, her hangover forgotten for the time being.

"It was a transporter!" she shouted at the security officer. "Where are they?"

"What? Who?" he stammered. "I don't-"

Kara grabbed him by the lapels, lifted him off the ground, and slammed his back down onto the desk. "Where are they? Where's Sahar?Where is my daughter?!"

****

Location Unkown, 0221 hours GMT

"Lieutenant Commander Tehrani, can you hear me?" A voice echoed in Sahar's ears; she heard the words but couldn't make sense of them. Her head was pounding and the rest of her body felt strange. She felt numb, but could still sense the pressure of the surface she was lying on. She could move, but her muscles seemed impossibly weak: she barely had the strength to flex her fingers. Her eyes were open and squinted reflexively as though she were looking into a bright light, but she couldn't see. When she tried to speak, nothing came out. Nothing felt right.

"Can you hear me?" said the voice again, and this time the words began to make sense. Sahar strained against gravity, trying to lift the dead weight of her head. Her neck muscles burned and she felt dizzy, but she managed to nod her head enough to be noticed by... whoever the voice belonged to.

"Good. Now, try to stay calm, and don't move. You're still recovering." Sahar's chest burned from the exertion of breathing, and she wasn't sure she could continue to draw breath. She tried to speak again, to tell someone that she couldn't breathe, but she still couldn't make a sound. Starting to panic, she tried sit up, to raise her arms or move her legs, but her body wouldn't respond. Exhausted, Sahar went limp and her head fell to one side.

Sahar stared at the wall for a few moments, trying to figure out what she was seeing. Then it dawned on her that she actuallywasseeing. She managed to move her fingers, and nearly cried when she felt them rub against each other. Encouraged, she flexed her fingers, and felt her hand become a fist.I'm alive,she thought. The more she moved, the faster she seemed to recover. When she again tried to speak, she finally heard something. It was quiet, almost nonexistent, but it was something.

"Wh..." she hissed. Her voice gave her strength, made her bold, and she tried to sit up. As soon as she began to rise, however, she was overwhelmed with nausea and collapsed back onto the bed. "Where..." she whispered.

"In a safe place. What's the last thing you remember?"

"I..." she tried to answer, but couldn't finish. Then a word emerged from the confusion in her mind.Starfleet. Her mind latched onto the word, clung to it like a raft in a storm.Starfleet. Then another word followed:Officer. "T... Teh..." she panted.

"We know who you are," the voice said coldly. Anger flashed through Sahar's mind.Good for you.

"Tehrani... Sa... Sahar Elaheh," she said, her voice returning quickly now. "Lieutenant Commander... Serial Number S-"

"You're not under interrogation."

"Tehrani, Sahar Elaheh. Lieutenant Commander, Serial Num-"

"We have a proposition for you."

****

Cardiff, 0235 hours

"Just fucking trace it, now!" Kara shouted at the ensign in front of her. The man shrank away from her, but Casana came to his rescue.

"Kara, do you know how many transports are underway on Earth at any given moment?" she pointed out. "Tracking the confinement beam of one transporter using passive sensor data is like trying to pick out the sound of one instrument in an orchestra by listening to an echo."

"You said you could do it."

"And I can, but it's going to take time. Now stop harassing my assistant."

"I'm... sorry. Carry on," Kara apologized, and walked away. Casana watched her go for a moment before returning to her work. Since Sahar's disappearance five hours ago, Kara, Suvak, and the increasingly sober Casana had been fighting an uphill battle to find her. So far, they were losing.

Kara had spent most of that time contacting every security officer she could think of. Fortunately, most of them were at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, meaning that she was talking to them in the middle of the day instead of the dead of night. Unfortunately, none of them had been able to provide any meaningful assistance.

While Kara was busy irritating high ranking officers, Suvak was busy working through official channels, chiefly because neither Kara nor Casana had the patience for it. Filing the initial report had been easy, mostly because they were already in a Security Station. Suvak had also filed official requests for resources to help their investigation, none of which had materialized.

Casana was the only one of the three who was making any real headway. She had been able to contact an acquaintance and convince them to supply her with some equipment and access to the planetary sensor grid. Kara had "recruited" one of the men staffing the Security Station to assist her. The two of them now sat hunched over a console in the back of the station, the ensign quivering under the pressure while Casana grew increasingly suspicious.

She had not truly lied to Kara. Itwasdifficult to track a single transport on a planet as populous as Earth, but it was also true that Earth's sensor grid was beyond compare. In addition, all transporters on the planet were carefully monitored, and their logs were easy for Casana to acquire, but they had proven useless. She had fully expected the logs to have been altered when she pulled up the records of every transport made in the Sol system at the time of Sahar's disappearance. It would have been hard enough reconstructing the original file, but what she found was worse.

None of the logs showed any transport to or from the Cardiff Security Station, but neither had any of them showed evidence of tampering. This led Casana to conclude that the log entry had not been erased, but instead had never been created in the first place. That meant an unregistered transporter, one not officially tracked, and that sat poorly with Casana. It was far too familiar.

"Focus, kid," she told the ensign when he looked up at the sound of Kara in the next room, screaming at another official. "Just be thankful they took Harry instead of Kara."

"Why is that, sir?"

"'Cause Harry would have kicked your ass by now." The man's face paled, and Casana went back to work, barely able to keep a straight face. The logs had not been any help, but that was not her only idea. She had been able to calculate the precise time of transport based on the decay of the residual electrostatic charge. Casana then pulled the records foralltransporters in range at the moment of transport, and scanned the records for anomalous readings.

She found 132.

Most proved to be little more than power fluctuations or equipment failures, incidents common enough on a planet as populous as Earth. Another few dozen were aborted transports or operator errors automatically corrected by the transporter itself. One had been a report, filed in Kuala Lumpur, describing a duck whose poor choice of flight path had resulted in it being transported to Oslo along with a pair of Bolian dignitaries. And one was a record of an aborted transport that set off alarms in Casana's head.

The log was from a civilian transporter in Capetown that had attempted to beam down a crate of Livanian beets from a freighter in orbit. Two things about the log caught Casana's attention. First, the transporter was described as a cargo transporter, incapable of moving living matter safely, but the power signature indicated that it had been modified for personnel transport.

The transport itself was more troubling. The beets had been beamed directly from the ship's cargo bay, but the Capetown transporter failed to rematerialize them. The computer redirected the transporter pattern to the freighter's cargo transporter. The pattern never arrived. Casana tried to contact the freighter, only to discover that it didn't exist.

Casana reached over and grabbed the ensign's phaser right out of its holster. "Need to borrow this," she said as she stepped out of the room. Casana found Kara and Suvak in the lobby, trying to coordinate the staff's efforts.Useless, she thought. "Kara, Sue, come with me."

"What's going on?" Kara asked, but Casana ignored her and walked off down a hall, phaser in hand. She opened each door and poked her head inside, searching for a suitable place to talk. When she finally found one, she pulled Suvak and Kara in before locking the door. It was a storage closet with no windows, no consoles, and no other doors. Without a word of explanation, Casana pushed Kara and Suvak back from the door and welded it shut with the phaser. "What the hell-" Kara started, but Casana turned and fired again, this time destroying the security monitor.

"I know who has Harry," she said.

****

Location Unknown, 0244 hours

"What kind of proposition?" Sahar asked suspiciously.

"We'll get to that. First, we have some questions for you."

"I thought this wasn't an interrogation," she snapped.

"It isn't. Think of this as an unofficial review."

"Smartass," Sahar mumbled. She had regained enough strength to sit up and look around, but she wasn't ready to risk walking yet. Not that she had anywhere to go. The room she was in was painted bright white, and seemed to be lit from every direction at once. She was in a biobed, but aside from that the room was completely bare. There were no doors, no windows, no other furniture, and no other occupants.

"Let's begin with the recent attack on the USSAthena. Could you describe the events leading up to the attack?"

"There were no 'events'," Sahar answered disdainfully. "Two Birds-of-Prey decloaked and attacked us without warning or provocation. We were in Federation space on patrol. Our shields were down and our weapons were inactive."

"Where were you at the time of the attack?"

"The Armory."

"Which deck?"

"19."

"Were you on duty at the time?"

"No."

"Were you posted at the Armory?"

"No."

"Then why were you at the Armory?"

"Excuse me?" The question caught Sahar off guard, and she had to think back to remember.

"Why were you at the Armory, on the same deck as the Battle Bridge, at the time of the attack?"

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?" Sahar snarled angrily, though she didn't have anyone to glare at.

"Did you have advanced knowledge of the attack, Lieutenant Commander?" The voice had suddenly become accusatory.

"Fuck you."

"In your report, you state that you were called to the Armory by Master Chief Petty Officer Zula, is that correct?'

"Yes, but-"They have my report?

"Yet Chief Zula's report makes no mention of any such communication. Furthermore, the ship's comm logs show that there was no communication between the Armory and your quarters. Can you explain that?"

"What?" stammered Sahar.And the ship's logs?

"Lieutenant Commander Tehrani, why did you redirect damage control teams from the bridge after you took command?"

"Warp drive was offline, we had no shields, and we were losing weapons. We didn't have enough men to fix everything. I prioritized combat systems."

"Can you explain why the residual energy readings left by the Birds-of-Prey matched Romulan weapon configurations?"

"Theywhat?!" Sahar was starting to lose track of what was going on. The questions were coming fast, and she still wasn't at full strength.

"Or why sensor readings indicated that the Birds-of-Prey were crewed by Orions?"

"I-"

"Lieutenant Commander Tehrani, have you ever been in contact with the Orion Syndicate or the Tal Shiar?" the voice shouted. Sahar had heard enough, and leapt to her feet. The moment she was off the bed, however, she felt queasy, and fell to her hands and knees.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Answer the question, Lieutenant Commander! Have you ever been in contact with the Orion Syndicate or the Tal Shiar?"

"No, I-"

"What really happened, Lieutenant Commander? Your CO is dead. The First Officer is dead. 117 men and women are dead. What happened?"

"I don't know!" Sahar cried, struggling to her feet.

"We know the Tal Shiar provided experimental weapons to the Orion Syndicate. We know they used your ship to test them. We know you took command after the Bridge was hit. We know that your quarters were destroyed in the opening volley for the Orions. What we do not know is why you were in the Armory when you should have been in your quarters!"

"I got a call!"

"From who? Chief Zula does not report contacting you. The comm logs show no calls to your quarters. Who called you to the Armory and out of your quarters? Why are you not dead?"

"I don't know!" she shouted again. There was a long pause.

"We believe you, Lieutenant Commander," the voice said quietly.

****

Cardiff, 0250 hours

"Who is it, Cass?" Kara demanded, grabbing Casana by the shoulders. She didn't seem to notice.

"Well, it's not like I have names. I don't even think they have names. Well, I'm sure they do, they just don't use them," Casana rambled. She broke free of Kara and began pacing around the room. "Besides, we don't need to know 'who', we need to know 'where'."

"Fine, where?"

"I don't know." Kara threw up her hands in frustration.

"Lieutenant Shen, what do you know?" Suvak asked calmly.

"Nothing."

"I do not understand. You clearly stated that you knew who had Sahar. Logically, you must know something, or you would not have made that statement."

Casana ignored her and continued to pace, her mind racing and her mouth trying to keep up.

"They must have rigged the transporter to hand off her pattern to some other system. No transmission was made by the transporter, so it had to have been hardwired to another transporter. They could have just materialized her next door. Or they could have bounced her across the planet, there's no way to know."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"We can't trace the transport. How do you track someone if they don't leave a trail?"

"I believe she is attempting to say that Sahar's transport cannot be traced."

"Well, duuhh!" Casana mocked, anger building in her voice.

"You look everywhere. Scan the whole planet," Kara suggested.

"No, they'll have her in a hardened facility. Sensor's won't penetrate." Casana was still and quiet for a moment. "I need to call Jeff."

"What?" Kara was almost completely lost, but Casana didn't bother to explain. Instead, she flipped open her communicator.

"Who is this?" asked Black when Casana finally got him.

"Jeff, how do you hunt something when you can't find any tracks?"

"Casana?"

"How, Jeff?"

"I don't know. You find places where you know it will be. Rivers, streams, thing-" Casana closed the communicator and cut him off.

"That wasn't very helpful," she frowned. "I wonder-"

Kara slapped her. The two of them looked at each other in stunned silence.

"Cass, they have Sahar. Who are they?"

****

Location Unknown, 0255 hours

"What do you want from me?" Sahar asked as she struggled back onto the bed.

"We need help. We need men and women with courage, with conviction. People willing to do what needs to be done. People like you."

"Who are you?!"

"We protect the Federation - from its enemies, from its allies, and from itself."

"I have had enough of these fucking riddles," she sighed.

"Very well," the voice said, and the room changed around her. The light faded into grey, and the walls disappeared. Sahar found herself in a small room, like a storage area, but the walls were covered with strange devices she had never seen before. In front of her was a door, and next to it, a man. He was in his forties, thin and tall with light brown eyes and hair. He was dressed all in black, but the Starfleet emblem was sewn onto his shoulder. "My name is Tyson Gregory."

"What the fuck..."

"Holographic projections. The technology is still in its infancy, even for us, but it is still impressive. Objects created with force fields and transporters, creating illusions you can touch and feel."

"You're Starfleet?" Sahar asked pointing to the patch.

"In a sense. We are a branch of Starfleet Intelligence. Technically, at least. In practice, we operate independently, outside of the chain of command," the man explained.

Sahar steadied herself, and found her strength returning quickly. "What did you do to me?"

"A transport neutralization field. Still in the experimental stages, but used to incapacitate a target during transport. The effect seems to be enhanced by the holoprojectors. Not sure why yet." Gregory spoke casually, as though all of this was a mundane part of everyday life.

"That's a great recruitment tool," Sahar grunted.

"Oh, we aren't recruiting you. After all, you can't join us. We don't exist."

"You know what?" she barked, turning to face him. Her strength was returning quickly now. "I wasn't all that patient before I got pregnant. Get to the point."

"Very well," he shrugged. "From time to time, we require the assistance of certain individuals in order do what must be done to safeguard the Federation. We would like for you to be one of those individuals."

"I'm touched."

"You should be," Gregory said with sincerity. "Very few people even know about us, much less assist us. We only take the best. And we think you are one of the best."

"Who's we?" He opened his mouth, but Sahar didn't let him speak. "And don't give me some bullshit about not existing or whatever." The man hesitated, but answered.

"We are known, at least to the extent that we are known at all, as Section 31."

"Section 31?" Sahar was unimpressed.

"An unofficial name, to be sure," he shrugged. "It comes from the original Starfleet Charter. Article 14, Section 31."

"I'm not a lawyer."

"Then I'll spare you the full text," Gregory shot back, irritation evident in his voice. "Not that any lawyer would know about it anyway. It is a secret provision, allowing Starfleet to... circumvent certain restrictions in times of crisis. Section 31 is the unit responsible for taking such measures."

"In other words, Starfleet realized that not everyone plays by their rules, and proceeded to wet themselves."

"It means that Starfleet realized the harsh realities of life," Gregory barked.Finally,Sahar thought,hanging around Cass is paying off."The Cardassians have the Obsidian Order. The Romulans have the Tal Shiar. Even the Klingons have assassins and saboteurs, though they'd never admit it."

"What? No Tholian spy rings or Gorn infiltrators?"

"Don't be so naïve!" Gregory yelled, taking a step towards her.

"Naïve?!" Sahar laughed at him. "I suppose that's true. After all, the only way to survive is to be more ruthless than your enemy. Why, I'll bet you could out-ethnic cleanse anyone in the quadrant!"

"You arrogant fool!" he shouted. "Do you think we take pleasure out of torture, like the Cardassians? Or that we use assassination like you use a transporter, like the Tal Shiar? We do what has to be done!"

"To keep your secrets!" Sahar shouted back.

"To save the Federation! From its enemies, and from itself!" He took another step. It was a step too far. Sahar lunged forward and grabbed him by the lapels. She caught him off guard, turning and hurling him over the bio-bed. He scrambled to get to his feet, but Sahar slipped around the bed and landed a kick in his ribs. Gregory rolled over onto his back and gasped for air. Sahar grabbed him again, pulling him up and onto his feet. She slammed him into the bio-bed again. Dazed and bleeding, Gregory slumped down to the ground, his back against the bed. Sahar knelt beside him.