We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
- Tennessee Williams
Max Vasser lay on the narrow bunk in West's cabin aboard the Rocinanté unable to fall asleep. She had to bend her knees because her feet hit the bulkhead at the lower end of the bed and she kept bumping her head on the bulkhead at the upper end. Even Defiant class ships have bigger berths than this! No wonder West offered it to me.
But it wasn't the physical discomfort that was robbing her of rest. The events of the last few hours whirled around her brain in a maddening frenzy, and try as she might, she just couldn't accept some of the things that West had told her about her father.
The man she had never known.
No, it was even worse than that. Even the few things she thought she had known about him were lies.
Her father hadn't been a crewman on an old grain freighter -- he'd been a spy! And if what West had said was true, he had worked for a secret shadow group known as Section 31, the embodiment of everything that Starfleet was not. It was a sore issue with her. She had fought in three wars -- the Dominion War and the First and Second Mulluran Wars -- to uphold the ideals of the Federation, to ensure its continued prosperity for following generations, only to discover that an organization so reprehensible operated with impunity within the very government she had sworn to uphold. And her father was a part of it!
No! West had to be wrong!
Max tossed in the cramped bunk. She turned onto her side and buried half her face in the pillow. There was nothing to look at in the tiny cabin, just a small desk and chair along the opposite wall beside a basic replicator alcove. No window, not even any pictures. Nothing to distract her from her tormented feelings. Nothing to give her any clue as to what kind of man West was. Could he be believed? Could she trust him?
Her thoughts turned to the strange black box found inside Claude Vasser's grave marker, the one Section 31 had wanted, the one the Orion Syndicate was still after. In all the excitement, she hadn't even asked West what it was. It didn't really matter to her. It could hold the meaning of life, the universe, and everything for all she cared. All that mattered was that her father had found it twenty years ago and then he'd been killed because of it.
Or was he?
She suddenly realized she had no proof one way or the other. She had not been present at the burial twenty years ago. She didn't know anyone who had. She'd never thought about it before, but in light of recent developments she suddenly found it very strange that her father had died and was buried without any known witnesses. Not even her mother had been there. Her father's death had been so unexpected that there simply hadn't been time to fly all his relatives 5000 lightyears from Earth.
Was that all a carefully constructed cover?
She had to know. Before she went any farther with West, she had to find out the truth with her own eyes.
Max tried to be as quiet as she could, but her high boot heels clanged off the metal deck plates of the Rocinanté. She stepped through the hatch into the ship's wide, empty cargo hold. On the far side were three more hatches, evenly spaced along the rear wall. She knew the center one was a bathroom, and West's raucous snoring could be heard reverberating from the door on the left. It was door number three that was her goal, however.
The hatch creaked open on poorly-lubricated bearings and the light inside flicked on revealing a broad cargo transporter. Max walked over to the wall controls and began inputting coordinates.
She had rummaged through West's cabin and failed to come up with any weapon, but she did find an old model tricorder in one of the desk drawers, and now wore it slung over her right shoulder. It would be good enough for what she needed it to do.
She pressed the activation key and jumped up onto the transporter pad. The unit powered up, filling the small room and indeed the entire ship with its characteristic harmonics. The noise was sure to wake West, but by then it would be too late. The tingling of the matter stream took over her senses and the transporter room of the Rocinanté faded from view...
...to be replaced a few seconds later by chill grayness. It was the early hours of pre-dawn in the Cairn Hills. Max had chosen a spot about a mile from the old graveyard on the other side of a line of low grass-covered hills in hopes that her arrival would go unnoticed by anyone still lurking here in wait.
Her breath steamed in front of her face and she suddenly wished she'd remembered to bring a jacket. The standard Starfleet uniform she was wearing wasn't made of quantum fibers like her flightsuit with its automatic thermal properties, and the night out here on the prairie was cold.
Putting her discomfort aside, Max headed off in a northwesterly direction. She estimated it would take her about twenty minutes of cautious progress to get to the outskirts of the graveyard where her father was supposedly buried.
West's eyes snapped open and he was instantly wide awake. It was an ability he had learned many years ago while in the service of Starfleet Intel and it had saved his skin on a number of occasions. Of course, there were the times it hadn't saved him and he had the scars to show for those lapses.
He heard the distinctive hum of the Rocinanté's cargo transporter. He swung out of his hammock and dashed from the small compartment where he'd strung it, across the main cargo hold to the transporter chamber just in time to see the last fading sparkles disappear.
"Dammit!" he muttered. "Why can't things ever be easy with you, Max?"
He headed for the Rocinanté's control room at a trot.
Max was crouched low behind a clump of tumbleweeds surveying the area around the graveyard. It was difficult to see anything definite in the dim pre-dawn. In the medium distance she could make out the uneven shape of the shuttlecraft she had used to get here yesterday, and just as West had predicted, someone had 'blown the hell out of it.' A thin column of smoke still issued from its broken shell, ascending straight up in the still morning air.
Max's scowl grew darker. She already had a reputation for getting her starfighter blown up on every mission. Those two pinheads Jo and Alex razzed her constantly about it. The joke would surely be expanded now to include civilian craft as well.
The sun was still below the horizon but the sky had lightened to a pale silver in joyous expectation of the coming day. The landscape was painted in a monochrome grayscale palette. Aside from the blown up shuttle, Max could see nothing untoward.
She wished Sam Beckett were here. Her teammate's cybernetic eyes would come in real handy right about now. She considered for a few seconds using the tricorder slung at her side to scan for lifeforms. If anyone was lurking out in the shadows between the old tombstones and weeds they'd detect her scanning beams. On the other hand, if someone had the ability to detect her scanning beams, they also had the ability to detect her hiding in the bushes. She decided not to risk it just yet, and instead crept out from behind her cover, keeping a sharp eye out and trusting in her esper ability to keep her safe.
The grounds of the old cemetery were gained through a broken section of fencing. There was her father's grave, beneath the large oak tree, not more than ten yards ahead. Still no one challenged her right to be here. If the Orion Syndicate's alleged snipers were out there, they were either waiting for a better shot or else they were asleep.
Then she was crouching at her father's grave. It was surrounded by small craters from the firefight yesterday, and the upright headstone was tilted and cracked from all the explosions. Max cursed silently and vowed to deliver a little R&R to whoever was responsible.
'Rage and retribution'.
But right now she had something more urgent on her mind. She unslung the old tricorder and popped the lid. The device commenced a high-pitched warbling, but when she tuned it to detect biological matter and aimed it at the burial plot it flashed a red light in her face, emitted a negative squawk, and went silent.
It took a few moments for the meaning to sink in.
Her father's grave was empty!
Max didn't quite know what to think or feel. She had spent the last twenty years believing her father was dead, and this new truth was just too incredible. But as she crouched there in the field in the morning light, a fierce determination grew in her heart. She would get to the bottom of this mystery! She would find out why her father had faked his own death -- why he had let her believe all these years he was dead and buried -- why he had left her and her mother alone so long ago. Because despite the fact that she had hardly ever seen him while growing up, Max loved her father fiercely and had always looked up to him. Her feelings for him demanded answers!
And she knew just who to ask first. West. She'd let her fist do the talking.
She'd have to find the man again first, however -- she'd left him three hundred miles above her in orbit and had no way of getting back. Now that she thought about it, she had no way of getting anywhere! The nearest settlement was Lake Town, a hundred miles to the northwest.
"Well ain't I the genius!" she uttered in abject self-ridicule. "I beam myself down with no way of getting back." She stood and dusted off the seat of her pants and wondered what she was going to do. "Well, I suppose someone's going to come looking for my rented shuttle eventually." Max suddenly noticed that she'd been speaking out loud. "Somebody better show up soon before I start talking to myself."
Just then, as if in answer to her wish, she heard a rustling of the bushes off to her left. She quickly turned her head to see what it was, memories of West's warnings about Orion snipers shouting for attention in her brain. The low morning sun was at her back and shining on the shrubbery and old tombstones in front of her. Something shiny caught the light and reflected it back into her eyes.
Max instinctively dove for the ground a split second before a sizzling energy beam sliced through the air she had just vacated. Suddenly the air was full of crisscrossing weapons fire and the unforgettable sound of disruptors set on 'kill'.
She cursed under her breath and crawled on her belly through the dirt back towards Claude Vasser's headstone. It wasn't much cover, but it was better than the dried up weed she was hiding behind at the moment. A second later, however, the tombstone ceased to be cover of any kind as it was blown to smithereens by a direct hit.
Max thought frantically. How was she going to get out of this one?!? She had no weapon, just the old tricorder she'd stolen from West. Was this old, forgotten graveyard about to become the permanent resting place of yet another Vasser?
A near miss blew a hole in the ground six feet from her face, showering her with clumps of dirt and broken masonry, and she covered her head with her arms.
An unpleasant alternative occurred to her -- one she'd never considered before in all her life. She could surrender. The question was, did the Orion Syndicate want her alive? Or would they just shoot her in cold blood? "I've got nothing to lose," she muttered and prepared to stand.
Just then, a new sound reached her ears and she froze -- the distinctive sizzle of Federation-issue phasers. She was saved!
Above her she could see the bright orange beams streaking back towards where the Orion Syndicate had been lying in wait, and she heard gruff, human voices shouting orders to cease and disarm. On the other side, she heard cries of panic as the Orions realized they were under attack.
Max jumped to her feet to offer the Starfleet forces a hand in rounding up the remaining Orions, but the sight that awaited her took her completely by surprise and left her horrified, confused and utterly speechless.
The cemetery grounds were littered with pale green-skinned Orions, fallen where they'd been shot. Stepping between the bodies and pools of dark green blood were a dozen men clad not in the expected familiar Starfleet colors, but in all-black uniforms of some kind that Max had never seen before. They were prodding the lifeless bodies with their boots, methodically making sure everyone was dead.
At the sound of booted feet approaching from behind her, Max spun around. Her eyes smoldered with indignation at the unjustifiable slaughter that had just been committed, but her expression quickly turned to that of alarm when she saw the black-clad figure before her raise his phaser rifle and point it at her chest.
The shock and betrayal she felt barely had time to register on her face before the trigger was squeezed and the bright orange phaser beam struck her in the heart. Searing pain unlike anything she'd ever felt before blinded her with a red sheet of agony. At the same time, she thought she felt the tingle of a transporter beam. Conscious thought only lasted another second, however, before everything went dark.
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