Open Secrets

It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it did, Moyer could not help the expression of shock that she knew appeared on her face. “Excuse me?” she asked. Then, realizing her slip, she immediately cleared her throat and reclaimed her bearing. “I’m sorry, Captain.” The idea of assisting Sereb was exciting and terrifying at the same time. Serving as the distinguished attorney’s aide would, of course, be quite an entry in her service record—but on this case? All of the discomfort she had been squelching, the unease as the reality of putting Commodore Reyes before a court-martial, came rushing back at her. Until this moment, she had been able to treat it as something abstract, possibly not coming to pass. Sereb’s presence reinforced that it was real, it would happen, and she would be one of the instruments that would decide the fate of a man she greatly respected.

I think I’m going to throw up.

“Very well,” Desai said, offering a curt nod. Turning her attention to Moyer, Simpson, and Pimental, she added, “See to it that Captain Sereb receives any assistance he requires.” Taking her leave of the Tellarite, she returned to her office, the doors closing behind her.

To Moyer, Sereb said, “We’ll begin at oh-seven-hundred hours tomorrow morning. Please see to it that I have an office at my disposal, and bring all of the case work prepared to date. I don’t know if it will be useful, but it will be a start. Good evening.”

As he turned to leave, his briefcase brushed against the nearby desk, catching Moyer’s coffee mug and sending it tumbling to the deck, where it clattered against the duranium plates, shattering into dozens of pieces of disjointed ceramic shrapnel.

Eyeing the mug’s remnants, Sereb released another snort. “Not the best place to put something like that, I suppose. Please offer my apologies to its owner.” He nodded once more to Moyer before turning and exiting the JAG offices, leaving Moyer to stare at her destroyed coffee mug.

If that’s not an omen, I don’t know what is.

23

It took every last ounce of his formidable will to keep Ganz from hurling the data slate across the room. Instead, he settled for simply crushing it in his hands.

The sound of plastinium cracking echoed in his office, followed by pieces of the data slate raining down on Ganz’s desk. Wiping his hands together to rid them of any remaining bits of shrapnel, the Orion looked down at himself, then brushed from his robe the few shards that had fallen on him.

“Feel better?” asked Zett Nilric from where he stood on the other side of the desk. One of Ganz’s most trusted assistants aboard his ship, the Omari-Ekon—with trust being a relative concept, of course—he held his hands clasped behind his back, smiling so that his black teeth reflected from the light of Ganz’s desk lamp. As always, the Nalori assassin was impeccably dressed in a dark blue, well-tailored suit that, to Ganz’s trained eye, appeared to have been designed from Andorian silk. The shoes he wore were polished to a high gloss, as black as the opaque, glistening orbs that were Zett’s eyes.

“I’ll feel better when the captain of that freighter is standing in front of my desk,” Ganz replied, moving from around his desk to the well-appointed bar dominating one wall of his office.

“That’s not likely to happen,” Zett said. “He and the crew were arrested, the vessel and its cargo impounded.”

Ganz did not bother to offer Zett a drink as he poured one for himself; the Nalori never imbibed any alcohol, at least not while anyone was watching. It was yet another of Zett’s rigid, unwavering habits, and it was that self-control that made him such a valuable asset in Ganz’s organization. In this line of work, one could not afford to be surrounded by undisciplined subordinates. At best, they could lose you money. At worst, they might get you killed.

“There was a lot of money tied up in that ship’s cargo holds,” Ganz said, turning from the bar with his drink in his massive left hand. The shipment had consisted of various prohibited items—weapons, illegal alcoholic beverages, pharmaceuticals, computer equipment, and so on—which ordinarily required special permits to transport. Any of the components on their own would attract scrutiny from an attentive border-patrol ship, but all of that seized at one time aboard a single vessel? Such a find would raise questions that might lead back to Ganz’s organization, if not to Ganz himself.

He took a long pull from the glass, enjoying the burn and sting of the Aldebaran whiskey as it flowed down his throat. Soothing warmth cascaded to his belly, and for a moment, at least, his anger was subdued. Finally, he asked, “How did this happen, at Arcturus, of all places?”

“They didn’t actually make it to Arcturus,” Zett said, his voice low and even, as always. “The Valinorwas two days out when it was intercepted by a Starfleet vessel on patrol in that sector.”

Ganz released a grunt of irritation. “That’s the point. What was a Starfleet ship doing in that sector at all? Since when does the Federation care about anything within ten light-years of Arcturus?” The planet’s location, on the fringe of Federation territory and close to the borders of both Romulan and Klingon space, made it an ideal center of free commerce, as none of the three interstellar neighbors seemed at all interested in dealing with the system and the type of travelers it attracted. It also was a key stop along travel routes utilized by smugglers and pirates of every stripe, drawing all ma

Making a show of examining the dark nails on his right hand, Zett said, “Relations between the Klingons and the Federation are tense at the moment. It therefore makes sense that Starfleet would increase its presence and attention all along the border. I understand there may even have been an incident with a Romulan ship.”

Very little surprised Ganz, but that new bit of information did. “Really?” he asked, taking another sip of his drink. “After all this time? Not a single Romulan ship has ever visited Arcturus, and that’s right next door to their border, or any of the other free-trade planets, but now they’re crossing into Federation space?” He had no idea what might prompt such a drastic change in behavior from the notoriously reclusive Romulan Star Empire, which had been—as far as was generally known, anyway—ensconced in a sort of self-imposed isolationism for more than a century. It had been that way since the signing of the peace treaty between them and the coalition of planets formed by the humans and a few staunch allies, the act that had signaled an official end to the Earth-Romulan War of the mid-twenty-second century.

He waved away his own question. “I don’t care. If the Romulans want to come picking a fight with the Federation, I’m happy to stay as far from that as I can, but only if we figure out that there’s no money to be made. What I care about is the Valinor.This could be a bad sign.” If the freelance merchant freighter his organization had contracted—after passing through several intermediaries, shadow companies, and legitimate business fronts designed to disguise the flow of information and currency to and from Ganz himself, of course—had made it all the way to Arcturus as pla