Cybersong (13 page)

But you’re not. And you don’t want to be tested.”

“Right now we both have better things to do.”

She turned away and immediately went to the captain’s side as if there were something necessary for her to do there. The Doctor didn’t pursue her, and she was glad.

“How could it be set up?” Kes asked the sleeping form of the captain.

“How could that be and I wouldn’t even know it?” Then she paused and thought about how unlikely all the coincidences seemed. “How could it not have been set up?” she asked softly.

“Almost as if that explosion was planned and someone wanted to make sure that medical care was there. As if we were sent in as a rescue team.”

She turned the idea over in her mind, and the more she looked at it, the more it made sense. Even though The Doctor hadn’t bothered teaching her statistics yet, she realized just how unlikely the set of coincidences was.

She saw it, and it frightened her.

The bridge of Voyager was not a good place to try to dissect what was happening, Chakotay decided. He needed to glance over to his left where he could see the controls of the helm glowing as if they were perfectly functional. Behind him Tuvok had a nearly whispered conversation with someone Chakotay could not immediately recognize. He heard footsteps and then the slight whoosh as the turbolift opened, and he wondered what the conference was about.

Chakotay still could not help but speculate about what had prompted his own intuition to rush off to the alien ship.

He had thought that the idea of going over and checking on the away team was his own. But something else nagged at his awareness.

Voyager. He would not leave the ship without leadership. He knew his duty, and he knew the captain. Why had be become so concerned before they had missed their checkin?

That was not like him, Chakotay realized.

And then the explosion right as he and Kes were ready to leave, as if the whole thing had been timed to make certain that no one was hurt.

That rescue was there at the moment.

“Commander, we need authorization for a diagnostic on the holodeck.”

Chakotay glanced up to the face of a young ensign in gold. “Is there a problem with the holodeck?” he asked.

“No, sir. It’s routine maintainence.”

Chakotay sighed and pressed his thumb to the pad the junior engineering officer presented to him. Then he updated the log, speaking softly so as not to distract the bridge crew working around him.

He returned to his analysis, wondering wryly what Tuvok would think.

The Vulcan was just behind him on the bridge, and Chakotay knew that he wasn’t observing the bridge at all. No, Tuvok’s eyes would be glued to his monitors, his hands resting gently on the edge of the control pad ready to bring up the shields or target phasers if it came to that. So far it hadn’t.

The more he considered the subject of sabotage, the more disturbed he became. He didn’t like the idea of some alien being manipulating his judgment. It felt—Cardassian.

That was absurd. There were no Cardassians in the Delta Quadrant. And there were plenty of other aggressive races like the Kazon, all too hopeful of either acquiring Voyager’s technology or destroying it.

But the Kazon didn’t admire sneaks and sabotage. They did their killing in the open, if his experience with the Ogla was carried over to the other sects. So far, of the many cultures they had encountered in the Delta Quadrant he had not found one yet that seemed to enjoy subterfuge as much as the Cardassians.

Maybe Tuvok was right, there was a saboteur aboard, and there was nothing at all odd about this collection of junk and tachyons that now filled the large forward screen. A twisted piece of dark metal floated by so close to their sensors that Chakotay could make out orange images that had been worn to shadows on a broken curved beam. A tail of bright wires was attached in a clump that Chakotay thought looked like a jellyfish. The whole tumbled once, and then there was only the giant hulk they had explored left alone on the screen. From this distance the gash they had entered looked like a dark line painted down the side, something neat and decorative.

It was easier to think of a spy than the alternative. At least that made sense. It fit into his worldview, and things behaved in a reasonable and predictable way.

Spies were known to exist. But they had taken no new crew aboard since leaving the Alpha Quadrant, except for Kes and Neelix.

Chakotay tried to imagine either of them as spies. Both, he knew, had had dealings with the Kazon. And Neelix had been in contact with many local races.

He could not really see either of them as saboteurs. Neither had the technical expertise, though his observation of Kes told him that she was well able to have acquired it, should she have desired. But all her time and energy had been consumed by learning medicine, and there was no indication that she had ever accessed any technical data on Voyager’s computer system.

Which left an invisible entity or someone who had been aboard since the Alpha Quadrant. And any spy who had come aboard in the original crew was more likely Cardassian than any of the other antagonistic races he knew from home.

To his right he noticed a sudden movement. Two crew members, one in blue, were consulting the monitors there. He turned, but from his vantage point could see no discernible difference. If it were anything important, they would report to him immediately.

But they stood, one with her head slightly tilted to one side.

Then she identified something and touched a green semicircle, drawing her finger toward the yellow. She nodded and returned to another station while the original observer appeared satisfied.

Chakotay returned to his ruminations. Members of the Obsidian Order had no qualms about mental control, if they were able to exercise such.

And there were rumors that the Obsidian Order indeed did have some experimental success with empathic control.

It even made sense that it would work on Kes and on himself. Kes seemed to have some empathic gifts, though precisely what and how they worked were unknown. As for himself, he was not an empath.

But his strong spiritual upbringing and nature had taught him to be more attuned to the spirit worlds. And he was certain that any psi abilities in any race worked on the spirit level. After all, wouldn’t human shamans and healers test high positive in one or several of the psychic ranges?

He wished that there had been a counselor aboard with the expertise to identify possible psionics.

True he had some small ability, enough that he was able to perform basic rituals. A small ability. Not trained, and therefore vulnerable to a great ability.

The loneliness he had felt, and the compulsion to find the away team when he should have stayed on the bridge. These were not his feelings then. They had come from elsewhere, and served some purpose that was not his.

He wanted to discuss this with Kes. Maybe she felt the same way.

Maybe her gift was larger than his or different, so that she had a clearer perception of who could be responsible. Maybe she could help him track down the traitor.

He decided to wait until the captain had taken command, until Kes was off duty in sickbay. She was needed there.

Meanwhile, however, he needed to talk with Tuvok. The Vulcan never had abandoned the notion of sabotage. Now Chakotay had a little more insight into how it was done, which would mean that they might be able to narrow down the field enough to find a Cardassian. Before someone else was hurt. Or killed.

Before he could even move discreetly over to the security officer, B’Elanna Torres burst onto the bridge and demanded his immediate attention.

“I can’t work with her,” Torres said loudly enough that no one could help overhearing. “It’s impossible. She’s impossible.

She wants to take everything so slowly, and we don’t have that kind of time.”

Chakotay spoke to her softly. “I think we should talk in private.”

B’Elanna glowered for a second and then realized what she had done and colored. “Yes, sir,” she said meekly, and followed Chakotay to the ready room. Once the door was decently shut behind them she started again. “It’s that Ensign Mandel. You’d think I was asking for fine art or something. I am sick of her criticizing the way we’ve done everything. As if we created the problem in the first place, not programming as prettily as she might like. Well, if she wants everything so neat and careful, maybe she should come down and change specs in the middle of an emergency. Why can’t Harry come and do some of this? At least he understands what we need.”

Chakotay waited a moment for her to calm down. Once she regained her composure, she was able to see solutions no one else could have imagined.

“Let’s take it from the beginning,” he said as her breathing returned to normal and she sat heavily in a chair. “First of all, I don’t know if you’ve heard. Harry was injured on the away team. He’ll be better soon, but he’s in sickbay for the time being.”

“Harry’s hurt?” Torres asked, her entire concern suddenly shifted to Kim. They’d worked together a good bit, Chakotay realized.

And they made a good team.

“He’s going to be okay,” the exec reassured her. “But he’s got to remain under treatment and observation for a couple of days.”

“Can I see him?” B’Elanna asked quickly.

“I think they’ve got their hands full for the moment,” Chakotay said.

“And I think you’ve got your hands full, too. The Doctor and Kes will take care of Harry. You’ve got to take care of the computer, and I don’t think I need to tell you which is the more seriously injured of the two.”

B’Elanna sighed heavily. “Yes. I get it. But that Mandel creature, she’s impossible.”

“What is she doing, precisely?”

“She’s taking way too much time with all the details.”

“Why do you think it’s so out of line?” Chakotay asked softly.

Torres looked at the ceiling and bit her lip. Long moments of silence passed as she reviewed the data. Then she looked back at Chakotay.

“The only times we’ve touched any of the navigation programs has been for the star charts. Her star charts. Most of what we have done has been in ship’s systems, especially power sharing. Trying to get a little more for the replicators, basically. Sometimes the shields.

But those are peripheral systems, and you know that they’re discrete in the architecture.”

“No,” Chakotay said. “I didn’t know that. Computers are not my field of expertise, and Voyager’s system is a couple of generations more sophisticated than what I learned to work with anyway. How much interaction between subroutines is there?”

Torres blinked. “None. Or almost none. The thing is, the more I look at it, the more I am certain that the patching we’ve done couldn’t have affected the navigational systems and especially couldn’t have done anything to the base connections. That’s the first level of recognition. Whatever changes happened, they were right at the center of our programming and they affected things as basic as breathing.”

Chakotay nodded. He followed that much. “So you’re saying that you don’t believe this could be an accident and that she’s wasting time looking at an improbable scenario?”

“That’s it. Exactly,” B’Elanna got up and leaned her hands on the table. “I can’t tell whether she’s doing this on purpose because she wants to be back up in Stellar Cartography, or whether she just doesn’t have any idea of what the word urgent means. You would think she’d be happy to stay here for the rest of her life and never get home. Let alone to the next food and fuel stop.”

Chakotay froze in thought for a moment. He had wondered about a Cardassian spy, and here was someone vital to their needs who was making life difficult. It fit. It fit far too neatly.

He wanted to confide in Torres, to get her reaction to his suspicions.

He didn’t. He knew he could be wrong, and he didn’t want to prejudice her. If Mandel was reliable, they needed her skills. More than ever now that Harry was incapacitated. Daphne Mandel was a first-rate programmer, at least according to her records.

And what if those records had been forged? Chakotay had no illusions about security against the Obsidian Order. If they wanted to create a false background, even one that included Starfleet Academy, they could do it.

“Get back to work,” he said heavily. “Tell Mandel to look at the transmission from the aliens before getting more involved in other programming fixes, and you can tell her that’s a direct order. If she has a problem with that, she should come to me, not you.”

Torres looked at him with growing comprehension. “There’s something else going on here,” she said slowly. “And you’re not telling me.”

Chakotay smiled. “I’m not telling you because I’m not sure if anything is going on. But tell Tuvok I want to see him when you leave.”

B’Elanna’s look was pure speculation as she left. Chakotay regretted that he couldn’t let her in on his suspicion. But she was going to be working with Mandel, and B’Elanna Torres was not capable of hiding her feelings. If she suspected Mandel was a saboteur, the programmer would know it in two seconds flat. That wasn’t the way to catch a spy.

He missed having B’Elanna’s input, though. When they had been fighting the Cardassians together, she had been almost as valuable for her assessment of a situation or a Cardassian tactic as she had been for her engineering talents.

She understood their engines, their mechanics, their programming almost as well as she understood her own. And that gave her some insight into what they could do and how they thought about tactics. It also meant that she might be able to identify a Cardassian writing code, even in their own language for their own computer. A signature.

She could have identified it better than anyone. Certainly better than Harry Kim, who had never fought them. Harry had graduated from the Academy after the final peace accords, and all the classes in the world and all the history of the various Cardassian conflicts wouldn’t teach him the quirks and turns of mind that would show up in a computer.

“You wished to speak with me, Commander?”

Tuvok’s arrival broke into his wool gathering. “Sit down, Commander,” Chakotay said. “We discussed the possibility of sabotage earlier, and you were planning to continue your investigation. Have you found anything yet?”