Stay strong, she ordered herself. Just a while longer.
Her escalating weakness came as no surprise. She was paying the price for splitting herself in two, that night after the reception, but judged it worth the cost. The trick had proved a creative way to smuggle an extra operative aboard, while simultaneously diverting suspicion from her double. One Gast had provided an alibi, as prearranged, while the other had carried out the dirty work of disposing of A’Barra and General Tem.
Memories of the assassinations were burned into her brain at least. Killing Tem had been regrettable, but easily enough accomplished; he had never once suspected her. And getting to A’Barra had been readily accomplished as well. The promise of some backdoor diplomacy, along with his lustful nature, had been sufficient to gain her admission to his quarters. A quick application of a hypospray loaded with zetaproprion and he had died gasping upon the floor, far too quickly for her liking.
If only I could have taken my time with him, she thought vehemently. Made him pay for all the Pavakians maimed and killed by his unconscionable terrorism!
Anger and adrenaline gave her the strength to stride confidently through the gleaming corridors of the Enterprise. Busy crew members, responding to the emergency, rushed past her without a second look. Emergency sirens blared through the halls. The smell of smoke and charred circuitry wafted into her helmet. She relished the harsh aroma. It was the smell of “peace” going up in flames.
Another explosion went off several decks above. Startled crew members froze in their tracks and stared upward in alarm. “What was that?” a shaggy Tellarite ensign bellowed. “Where was that?”
The impulse engineering section, Gast guessed. The auxiliary driver coil assembly, to be exact.
She smirked behind her helmet. It appeared that an overeager repair crew had not been cautious enough to avoid one of her booby traps. So be it, she thought mercilessly. There might have been a time when she would have regretted inflicting injuries on unwary Starfleet personnel, but that was before the Federation had chosen to meddle in Pavakian affairs, while treating the bloodthirsty Oyolu as though they were a legitimate civilization on an equal footing as Pavak.
Equal!
The very thought filled her with righteous fury as she recalled the ambush on Oyolo that had nearly killed her three years ago. She had been part of a six-person covert demolition team dispatched to seek out and destroy a suspected Oyolu training camp and arms depot in the densely forested hills outside Usesu. The mission had been going smoothly until they found themselves under fire by superior numbers of insurgents. Her entire team had been slaughtered and she had been captured and “interrogated” for days before finally making her escape. It was then that she had truly grasped the unspeakable barbarity of the Oyolu—and realized that they could never, ever be trusted. You could not make peace with such creatures. You could only subdue them.
Or exterminate them altogether!
The painful memories fueled the volcanic anger growing inside her with every step. Bile churned in her gut. She caught herself glaring at the self-righteous Starfleet idiots passing her in the corridors. The nine-inch knife was concealed in the left sleeve of her engineering suit; part of her wanted to slash at every infuriating crew member she saw.
Control yourself, she thought. Focus.
Where was this murderous fury coming from? Was she simply on edge due to weakness and stress, or was this some peculiar side effect of the transporter trick? During the original incident at Alfa 177, at least one version of Captain Kirk had proved violent and out of control. Perhaps I did not entirely eliminate the polarization factor after all. . . .
Distracted, she nearly collided with a nameless ensign who came rushing around a turn. He skidded to a halt only a heartbeat away from slamming into her. “Excuse me,” he apologized before darting around her.
She gritted her teeth. It was all she could do to keep from slashing his throat.
Clumsy oaf! I ought to—
The feverish intensity of her reaction startled her. This was more than just strain and exhaustion. There was something else affecting her.
I am not fully myself, she realized, in more ways than one. We need to reintegrate . . . soon.
Avoiding crowded turbolifts, she ducked into an emergency stairwell and began racing up the steps toward G Deck—and the primary transporter room. The plan was to rendezvous with her other half after the bombs went off and the warhead was launched, in hopes of reuniting into a single being before it was too late. They had employed the emergency transporters before, but it had been thought that, with the lower decks and Engineering in disarray, the main transporter room in the saucer section was more likely to be unattended. She took comfort from the knife tucked into her sleeve. With luck, she would have to dispatch only a single transporter operator.
But was her counterpart still free to meet up with her? For the sake of operational security, they’d had no contact with each other since the transporter had divided them. Gast’s skin crawled as she wondered what had befallen her double during that time. It was strangely unnerving not to know what your other self was doing, but they had agreed that it would be safer that way, with less chance of them being caught communicating. Gast had no idea what might have become of her other half.
Even stranger, she found herself oddly adverse to the prospect of reintegrating with the other Gast, as though that would somehow result in the “death” of the being she’d been for the last few days. She shook her head to try to clear it of this patently irrational instinct. The scientific literature on the Alfa Effect, including Doctor McCoy’s own declassified medical logs from twenty years ago, made it abundantly clear that neither she nor the other Gast could long survive without each other.
As her fading strength surely confirmed.
It was possible, of course, that her counterpart would be unable to make the rendezvous. No matter, she thought. There was a plan in place for that eventuality as well. Should her other half not join her in a timely fashion, Gast was to beam her atoms into space, eliminating all trace of her existence in order to preserve the other Gast’s alibi for the murders. Granted, this would ultimately doom her counterpart as well, but at least the assassinations would not be traceable back to Pavak or one Colonel Demme Gast. She had no shame concerning the killing of A’Barra or the sneak attack on Oyolo, but she would prefer that her name and record not be stained with the murder of General Tem, even if the esteemed military hero had finally allowed misguided pangs of conscience to undermine his resolve, necessitating his death.
Forgive me, General. May you rest in peace.
Climbing more than ten flights of stairs was exhausting. She was breathing hard and shedding by the time she reached the saucer’s main deck. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she wanted to kill anyone who got in her way. She loosened the collar of her helmet to let in a little fresh air. Steering clear of sickbay and the auxiliary control room, which was now under heavy guard, she made her way to the transporter room. Despite her fatigue, she managed to maintain a professional posture so as to avoid attracting undue attention. To her relief, no guards were posted outside the transporter room. Where could anyone go anyway? There were no vessels, planets, moons, or space stations anywhere within transporter range.
The door opened automatically and she slipped inside.
Only a single Starfleet officer was manning the transporter control booth. The redheaded woman looked vaguely familiar—Gast dimly recalled being introduced to her at the reception—but her name escaped Gast, for which she blamed her escalating infirmity. She glanced around the transporter complex, but she spotted no sign of the other Gast; she hoped that her counterpart had been only temporarily detained.
One of us had to get here first, she reflected, and perhaps it’s just as well that it’s me.
Fatigued or not, Gast felt better equipped to deal with the transporter oper
ator. If anything, her killer instinct felt stronger than ever. She clasped her hands behind her back as she deftly slipped her gloves off and extracted the knife from her sleeve. The fact that the controls were contained within an enclosed transparent booth posed a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. She merely needed to lure the unsuspecting operator from the booth.
“Yes?” the human woman greeted her. “Can I help you?”
“We’ve had reports of a radiation leak in this section,” Gast lied. In truth, she had taken care not to damage or disable any systems essential to the proper functioning of the transporters. “If you could step out of the booth, please, so I can take a look.”
The redhead annoyingly remained at the controls. “A radiation leak? That’s news to me.”
“This is an emergency situation,” Gast said, struggling to hide her impatience. “I need you to—”
A sneeze interrupted her attempt to draw the operator out of the booth. Twisting to the left, she saw Commander Chekov emerge from the landing party staging area on the opposite side of the chamber. Phaser in hand, he crossed in front of the transporter platform to hold her at gunpoint.
“Kindly remove your helmet,” he instructed.
Fury and frustration seethed inside her, but she tried to keep her voice calm. “The radiation—”
“Identify yourself,” he insisted.
Gast realized that there was little point in dissembling any longer. Discreetly tucking the knife in the insulated tubing at the back of her rad suit, she grudgingly removed her helmet and tossed it to one side. It banged against the floor as she let the Enterprise’s unwelcome security chief get a good look at her vexed Pavakian features. She clenched her jaw to keep from snarling. She wanted to spit in his hairless Terran face.
Chekov nodded, seemingly unsurprised.
“I was expecting you, Colonel Gast,” he declared. “Or should I call you the other Colonel Gast?” He smiled rather too smugly. “Quite the clever ploy, I admit. Reminds me of a story by the great Russian author Dostoevsky, ‘The Double.’ Are you familiar with it?”
“I can’t say that I am,” she replied. “I have little interest in alien literature.”
“A shame,” Chekov said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Gast realized that all her plans had just been sucked out of the airlock. Her mind raced frantically, attempting to calculate her next move. Her eyes darted back and forth, searching for an escape route. Rage made it hard to think straight. Should she resort to fight or flight or perhaps attempt to take a hostage? She began to edge toward the control booth.
“Uh-uh.” The other woman drew a phaser pistol from beneath the console. “Don’t even think about it.”
Banks, Gast remembered. That was the redhead’s name. Lieutenant Banks.
“You should know,” Chekov said, “that the other Gast will not be joining you. I’m afraid she is currently enjoying the hospitality of our brig.” He kept his phaser aimed in her direction. “I anticipated that you and your double would want to reintegrate yourself with all deliberate speed, so it seemed logical to assume that you would promptly find your way here. All emergency and cargo transporters are under watch as well.”
“Very thorough, Commander,” she said. “I underestimated you.”
“You would not be the first. I recommend that you surrender peacefully. It is not too late to put you and your doppelgänger back together.”
Again, the prospect of merging with her other self elicited a peculiar mixture of attraction and revulsion. Her skin crawled beneath her fur.
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” she said. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’ve apprehended both of us, you can’t stop the warhead from striking Oyolo . . . and reducing their capital to a smoking crater of unstable matter! The Oyolu will pay for their crimes against my people. I wish only to live long enough to see them suffer!”
Chekov’s smile faded. “Captain Kirk will not let that happen.”
“I doubt he has a choice,” she replied, encouraged that Chekov could offer nothing more than an empty expression of confidence in his captain. If Kirk truly had a means to halt the attack, Chekov would have said so. “Retribution is at hand. Oyolo will finally learn the true cost of defying Pavak!”
“But that is madness,” Chekov said, visibly appalled. “Millions of innocent lives will be lost.”
“They brought this on themselves!” she snarled, finally giving voice to the burning hatred in her heart. Spittle sprayed from her lips. “There is no such thing as an ‘innocent’ Oyolu . . . and there can be no peace with such vile and untrustworthy creatures!”
“That is quite enough.” Chekov shook his head in disgust. “We do not need to hear any more of your ravings. Please place your hands—”
A bomb went off elsewhere in the ship. Possibly in the starboard support pylon. The overhead lights flickered and the floor listed briefly to one side. Thrown off-balance, Chekov stumbled across the quaking chamber. His gun arm drooped.
Now! Gast thought.
Seizing the opportunity, she plucked the knife from behind her back and flung it at Chekov. Alas, the tumult and her own debilitated state threw off her aim and the knife merely sank into his shoulder. He grunted in pain as the phaser flew from his fingers to clatter across the transporter platform behind him. Alarmed, and clutching his injured shoulder, he scrambled onto the platform after it.
She lunged after him, propelled by an all-consuming fury she could no longer contain. There was no point in fleeing—she was a dead woman already—but at least she could take this arrogant Starfleet bastard with her. Bloodlust overcame sickness and exhaustion as she tackled him, knocking him off his feet. Snarling, she pinned him to the platform and drew back her fist to deliver a killing blow to his throat. Trained in hand-to-hand combat, she hardly needed a weapon to crush his windpipe.
Good-bye, Commander. Who underestimated whom?
But before she could strike, her fist dissolved into atoms . . . along with the rest of her.
• • •
Stuck inside the control booth, Banks was unable to fire her phaser through the transparent partition dividing her from the platform. Thinking quickly, she did the next best thing and energized both Chekov and Gast before her superior could take any more damage. She let out a sigh of relief as Chekov and his berserk attacker vanished into a rippling curtain of energy. The familiar whine of the transporter effect replaced the jarring sounds of violence.
With no target destination selected, their patterns remained stored in the transporter buffer. Operating the controls, she worked swiftly to isolate and separate their respective patterns into individual files. She would have preferred to have a veteran transporter operator, ideally Mister Scott, perform the procedure, but there was no time to request assistance. The patterns could be held in the buffer for only a few minutes before they began to degrade.
Here goes nothing, she thought.
She reassembled Chekov first. A column of energy coalesced into the wounded officer, who was momentarily disoriented by the sudden change in his circumstances. He looked about in confusion, bleeding onto the platform.
“Where . . . where did she go?”
“Still in the buffer, sir.” She eyed his injured shoulder with concern. “Are you all right, sir?”
Wincing, he climbed back onto his feet and reclaimed his phaser. “This little scratch? Nothing to be alarmed about, Lieutenant. Believe me, I’ve been through worse.”
He hopped off the platform and raised his phaser with his uninjured left arm. He aimed the weapon at the empty platform from a safe distance. Blood trickled from his wounded shoulder.
“Shall I rematerialize her, sir?” Banks asked.
“Proceed, Lieutenant. But please try not to make any more copies. Two Gasts are more than enough.”
Banks had to agree. ?
??Aye, sir.”
She operated the controls, more confidently this time, and the assassin reappeared upon the platform, crouched over an enemy who wasn’t there anymore. She blinked in confusion, her upraised fist suspended over the bloodstained floor of the platform.
“What—? Where—?”
Banks watched intently, just in case the hate-crazed Pavakian still had more fight in her, but she only managed a few puzzled breaths before collapsing facedown on the platform. For a second, Banks feared that the shock of the transport had killed Gast, who was supposed to be dying from being split into two people, but, on closer inspection, she saw that the prone assassin was still breathing shallowly. Gast lay sprawled upon the platform, moaning faintly.
“Careful, sir,” Banks warned, emerging from the booth to cover Chekov with her own phaser. “She might be playing possum.”
Chekov cautiously checked on the unconscious killer. “It appears not.” He placed a hand against Gast’s throat, feeling her pulse. “She’s still alive . . . for the present.”
“That’s good,” Banks said. “I guess.”
Chekov stepped away from the prisoner. “Contact sickbay. Tell Doctor McCoy he’s going to need room for two Gasts.”
“Yes, sir.” She nodded at his injured shoulder. “Don’t you need to report to sickbay, too?”
Chekov shook his head. “The captain needs me on the bridge.”
“But . . .”
“There are first-aid kits in the supply lockers.” He indicated the adjacent staging area where the landing parties prepared for their missions. “Get one.”
Banks knew better than to argue with him.
Twenty-Six
Lieutenant Mark Duncan wanted to be somewhere else.
The Enterprise was on red alert, bombs were going off throughout the ship, and the scuttlebutt was that there was an alien saboteur aboard and that the Pavakians had launched a sneak attack on Oyolu, violating the cease-fire. More than anything, Duncan wanted to join his fellow security officers in tracking down the saboteur and dealing with the crisis, but instead he found himself posted outside Lenore Karidian’s quarters, keeping watch over the suspect who remained confined to the premises. Duncan knew that the actress, who was allegedly an old flame of the captain’s, was possibly the killer of two visiting delegates, but even still it seemed a waste of resources to have him on guard duty here while there was a more immediate emergency going on.