Harbinger

Riding alone in a turbolift to the cargo levels, he shed his “lurking” disguise, revealing his regular clothes. He tucked the easily compressible alien fabric into his empty satchel and combed his hair briskly with his fingers, shaking out the dry-powder darkening agent he had treated it with. It was a quick change he had practiced for some time, and he now was quite adept at it. Stepping off the turbolift, he orientated himself quickly and walked toward Vanguard’s main cargo facility.

Several hatch locks shy of reaching it, he stopped at the security checkpoint. Three red-shirted Starfleet security guards ma

The guard with the dark crewcut reached for his phaser. “Halt. Identify yourself.” His partner, a bald, dark-ski

“Tim Pe

The one in the booth spoke through an intercom. “What’s your business?”

“Personal visit,” Pe

“You’ll have to wait while we clear that,” the booth officer said. Over the open cha

Despite the fact he was hearing it secondhand over the intercom, Langlois’s response came through loud and clear: “Send him down, Wallingford.”

Glowering at Pe

Stepping through, Pe

The corridor on the other side of the hatch was shaped like a long, hexagonal tube. Its far end opened onto a broad walkway, which encircled the top level of the service side of Starbase 47’s enormous cargo and maintenance complex. The hum of activity echoed deeply in the yawning, torus-shaped space, which surrounded the energy-and resource-transfer lower section of the station’s core. Narrow shafts of bright blue light demarcated zero-g areas, which were designed for quickly shifting certain types of cargo from level to level, but in fact were most often used by the crew for quickly moving themselves between levels.

The cargo warehouse was abuzz with several dozen perso

Pe

“Checking in,” he said with a broad grin. “Everything stacking up okay down here?”

“Can’t complain,” she said, leading him out of the way of a fast-moving cargo loader. “Trying to load up the Meriden for another colony run tomorrow.” They stepped inside her cramped but immaculate office, which sat in a nook of the central core. She flumped into her swiveling, rolling chair. “Someone on gamma shift lost a power generator marked for the Trinay III outpost, and we get to pick up the pieces.”

Pe

“Something like that,” she said. A series of orange lights started to blink on the situation monitor above her desk. She sighed and got back up. “Look, thanks for the drop-in, but we’re busting down here today, and I really need to get back to it.”

“Right, sure,” Pe

“Depends,” Langlois said. “What’s on your mind?”

“C-1 cargo,” he said. “Do you move a lot of it here?”

“Hang on,” she said. Flipping her headset mic back down to her face, she keyed the transmitter on her belt. “Yellow one-alpha, checking in. Fred, what the hell are you doing up there?…Well, you’ve got a red-green overlap on platform four. Fix it.” Covering the mic with her hand, she looked back at Pe

“Come on, Elizabeth, I’m not looking for details. No names, no dates. Just general, deep background, right?”

“Just a sec.” Down came the headset again. “Fred, I swear to God, if you don’t make red nine-five secure that pallet, you’ll be on solid-waste detail for the rest of your hitch, capisce?” She looked back at Tim. “What kind of background?”

“A general comparison,” he said. “Do you see more C-1s here than you did on your last posting? Does Vanguard move more C-1 cargo than other starbases?”

“We move a lot,” she said. “But that’s all I can tell you.”

“Isn’t that odd, for a colony-support mission profile?”

“Step left,” she said, and he did as he was told. A large pallet loaded with photon torpedoes floated past, driven by a silent antigrav skiff. “We’re multimission-capable, just like every starbase. Colonization, exploration, combat-operations support…. Goes with the territory.”

“Right,” Pe

As he keyed in the command for the top level, Langlois called out, “Just so you know…yes, it’s odd.”

It began to rise, lifting him away from her. He shouted back down, “But what does it mean?” She shrugged her shoulders.

Ascending out of the “belly” of the station, Pe

Patience, he admonished himself. Someone on this station knows about the sensor screen and wants to talk. I will find that person. He knew it might take days, weeks, or a hell of a lot longer than that. Keeping promises had not been his strong suit of late. He resolved that this one would be different. I’ll find the truth, Oriana, he vowed. For you.

Reyes waited patiently after pressing the door signal for the second time in a minute. He felt exposed and transparent standing in the corridor, even though no one had passed by him while he had been waiting. The potential for embarrassment was more than sufficient to leave his face flushed with warmth.