Страница 51 из 81
Once that was done, all that was left was the wreckage—and twelve dead bodies. Troi stood before what was left of the building as the last of the rescue workers started to leave. A semipermeable force field was keeping all but the workers and Starfleet perso
At the sight of the twelve corpses being left on the ground, Troi grabbed one of the departing rescue workers by the arm. The worker looked at Troi’s hand like it was diseased. Troi quickly removed it.
“What’s to be done with the bodies?”
The worker shrugged. “Disposed of in some ma
“Don’t you have any—well, funerary rites?”
Again, he shrugged. “They are not warriors. If they lived dishonorable lives, then Fek’lhrwill escort their spirits to the Barge of the Dead, which will take them to Gre’thor.”
Troi knew that that was the Klingon equivalent of hell. “What if they lived honorable lives?”
At that, the worker scowled. “Then they deserved better deaths than this.”
Troi found he couldn’t argue with that either way.
After the last of the rescue workers departed, Troi was alone with the building. Vaughn was interviewing people who were nearby when the building collapsed, and had asked the Carthagesecurity chief to do the same with the survivors in sickbay.
Troi, meanwhile, was tasked with examining the site itself. He looked up at the building. It had been made from plasti-form over a metal frame. Parts of the frame—which looked to be an alloy of rodinium, iron, and a metal the tricorder couldn’t identify—remained intact. A preliminary scan with the tricorder indicated that the frame had weakened and collapsed in the southwest quadrant of the foundation. When that gave way, a large chunk of the building went down.
Troi proceeded, as Vaughn had instructed him, to go over every millimeter of the building. All the evidence pointed to a simple structural collapse, which would make Monor happy, if not Qaolin. Wonder what that third metal in the alloy is,he thought. That may have been responsible. Iron and rodinium are pretty tough, but that third metal’s an x-factor.
It took two hours to do most of the job. The items he found in various states of repair ranged from the obviously personal—clothes, furniture, pictures, artwork, padds labeled in the angled Klingon script, well-worn weaponry, cooking implements, food—to the assorted items that were for sale in the stores.
When he came across a small figurine that was vaguely in the shape of a targ,Troi felt a lump in his throat. Up until this point, he had managed not to think about what it had been like going through Kestra’s things seven years ago—a task that had been left to Troi alone, since Lwaxana had already started her campaign to eradicate Kestra’s very existence—until he came across this toy targwhich, despite looking nothing like Kestra’s teddy bear, reminded Troi almost painfully of My Bear. Troi had given Kestra the stuffed black bear when his daughter turned four. It had floppy arms and legs, a tiny smile, wide brown eyes, and a sufficiently soft interior to make him eminently huggable—a feature Kestra employed often. Kestra had never come up with a name for the bear, insisting on simply referring to the toy as “my bear!” The name stuck.
After Kestra’s death, Troi had given My Bear to Commander Li for her daughter.
He set the toy targback down amid the wreckage. Once he and Vaughn were through, someone was supposed to come and sort through all this. Troi was grateful that his assignment to Vaughn’s detail meant he would be spared that duty. Once was more than enough.
The one part of his job he hadn’t done was to do a full check of the southwest quadrant. He clambered over pieces of plasti-form and shards of blades and precious stones—the store over the collapsed part of the building sold weapons and jewelry; both proprietors and one customer were among the dozen dead—to see if he could better determine the cause.
Unfortunately, the weakened beams in question were under more material than he could move safely, because of both the weight and the number of items with sharp edges. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the building collapsed the rest of the way—the remains of the foundation couldn’t bear the added concentration of mass for much longer.
Luckily, Troi didn’t have to move it himself. He trained his tricorder’s sensors on the broken beams under the wreckage, then tapped his combadge. “Troi to Sulma.”
“Sulma here.”
“Chief, I need some help here. Can you tie in to my tricorder?”
“Hang on.”A pause. “Yeah, okay, got it.”
“Can you lock onto the pieces of metal I’m sca
“Don’t see why not. Hang on.”Another pause. “Got it.”
“Thanks, Shawn. That’s a big help.”
The transporter chief laughed. “No big deal. It’s not like I’m doing anything difficult. Not like that time Commander Li needed me to beam that funky alien gourd off her arm. Anyhow, energizing.”
Seconds later, several bent, broken, and shattered fragments of metal materialized three meters to Ian Troi’s left.
“Thanks again, Shawn. I owe you lunch. Troi out.”
Now Troi did an in-depth scan of the beams. The tri-corder still couldn’t identify the third metal in the alloy—but it did identify some resonance traces that matched a similar investigation they’d done in the Barradas system near the Romulan border a few months earlier. “Oh, this isn’t good.”
“What isn’t good?”
Troi turned to see that Vaughn had come back inside the force field.
Before Troi had a chance to answer the question, Vaughn added, “Just so you know, I’ve cleared the area of all onlookers. There’s one Klingon guard outside the force field, but otherwise, it’s just you and me for dozens of meters around.”
Smiling at his friend, Troi said, “The joys of a sparsely populated colony that has transporter technology. No need for crowding. In any case, I’ve discovered two things.”
“Which is the one that isn’t good?”
“Both, unfortunately. One is that the rest of this is going to come crashing down in the next half-hour or so. We’ll want to bring the force field in a little, use it to minimize the damage to the surrounding area.”
“Good idea. What’s the other thing?”
Pointing at the shattered framework, Troi said, “This wasn’t because of shoddy construction. That beam was weakened by an explosion.”
“What? How the hell did we miss that?”
“It was a very small bomb with a very low yield and a detonator that works well at this size. That’s all they needed, as long as they put it in the right spot. This beam, as it happened, was.”
“What kind of explosive?”
“Standard triceron. That’s not the kicker, though. You ever hear of molecular-decay detonators?”
“I’ve heardof them.” Vaughn shrugged. “I know that they’re virtually undetectable and that Romulans are the only ones who’ve been able to get them to work reliably.”
Smiling grimly, Troi said, “Only half right. Yes, Romulans are the only ones who use them, but they’re not as undetectable as they used to be. A few months ago on the Carthage,we figured out how to detect them in the Barradas system.” He held up his tricorder display so Vaughn could see it. “I’m picking up residue of one now.”
“That doesn’t make sense. The Romulans have pretty much kept to themselves since Tomed. Why would they get involved in thismess?”
Troi shrugged. “I don’t know, Elias, but this is definitely a Romulan operation.”
“Or someone trying to set up the Romulans.”