Reap the Whirlwind

Catching Pe

Nassir looked back, noticing T’Pry

T’Pry

“Yeah,” Pe

“You might want to fire it up on the sly,” Qui

Pe

When Qui

She didn’t look at him as she spoke. “You’ve done us a great service, Mr. Qui

“Glad to help,” he said. “But could you lay off me for a few weeks? I lost a lotta money on this trip, and I need to get back to work. I got debts to pay.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

Expecting another of her patented manipulations, he bristled at the coldness of her tone. “Run that by me again?”

T’Pry

“What? For this trip, you mean?” “All of them.”

He was still struggling to figure out what devious angle she was working against him. “You’re saying you bought up all my markers? Now I owe everything to you?”

“No, Mr. Qui

The moment was all too surreal for him to grasp. “You think Ganz’ll just let me off the hook? I didn’t even owe him money—I owed him work and favors. How’d you pay that off?”

“The details are not important.” She dropped her smoky-sweet voice to a warm hush and looked him in the eye. “If you wish to continue assisting Starfleet Intelligence, we will be grateful for your help. If you decide to keep on working for Ganz, that’s up to you. The key detail here is that you are not obligated to do either. Put simply, Mr. Qui

Qui

He tried to ask if she was kidding, but he realized as he started speaking that she probably couldn’t hear him over the explosion in the main docking bay.

Pe

His attention was fixed on the Vulcan woman, with a focus so acute that he worried it bordered on obsessive. The deception that she had perpetrated on him a few months earlier, to trick him into filing an easily falsified report about the destruction of the U.S.S. Bombay, still rankled him. When he had confronted her about it, she had insinuated that she knew enough about his private life to blackmail him. By that point, however, her ploy had already wrought so much damage to his personal life and his professional credibility that he’d had nothing left to lose.

I went to Jinoteur hoping to get one up on her, he admitted to himself. Between her and Reyes, I can probably forget about ever getting this story published. At least, not in my lifetime.

T’Pry

He checked his wrist chrono and glanced impatiently back at Qui

A flash of light filled the docking bay as an explosion thundered and shook the entire station. Red-alert klaxons whooped as pedestrians on the thoroughfare were thrown to the ground. Pe

“Red alert,” declared a male voice over the station’s PA system. “Explosion in the main docking bay! DC and fire-control teams to bay three!”

Pe

Large clusters of scorched, twisted metal ricocheted off the transparent aluminum observation windows, the ceiling of the docking bay, and the core of the station. Pivoting slowly left to track the path of one especially huge piece of debris, Pe

Only a few meters away, standing between himself and Qui

T’Pry

Staring into the smoldering cavity of the Malacca’s blasted cargo hull, she knew that denial was pointless. She had seen the container loaded onto the ship and had watched as the cargo hold was sealed for the vessel’s imminent departure from Vanguard.

Gazing into the hypnotic dance of flames and smoke, T’Pry

Sten’s blade slashes my cheek—

Pretenses and façades fell away, stripping her of decades of mental defenses and a lifetime of indoctrinated emotional paralysis. All the carefully constructed excuses, all the old barriers to candor, crumbled in her psychic grasp.

I feel his pain as I bend his fingers backward and break them at the knuckles—

Debris dispersed in chaotic tumbles from the Malacca, trailing twists and ribbons of smoke through the docking bay.

For the sake of duty, T’Pry