A lot of fast talk and a call to their ship finally convinced the Security people that they didn't know useful about anything about T.J. or his past and present whereabouts. They were courteously shown the door to the bar and generously given twenty minutes to report back to their ship.
"What did he give you?" Riley asked, finally breaking the sullen silence between them as they made their way towards the nearest elevator.
"Why didn't you tell me he was your brother?" Sulu countered. "I thought lost your whole family on Tarsus because of…."
"Kodos?" the navigator supplied when his friend shied away from speaking that horrible truth.
"Yeah," the helmsman confirmed apologetically.
The Irishman compressed all the horror of that experience into a deep sigh and blew it out slowly. "Jefferson…Jeff… He was Jeffie then," Riley recalled. "Just a toddler. Had terrible allergies. Medical facilities on Tarsus weren't much, but we had relative on a commercial agriculture planet in a sector nearby. Said he could get him fixed up. No problem. The procedure was usually reserved for employees, but my uncle could pull a few strings. Ten months and our Jeffie would be back. Perfect little farmboy…"
"You grew up on different planets," Sulu concluded, realizing that perhaps having a surviving brother might be more of a source of constant anxiety rather than a comfort.
"My aunt and uncle never meant to have a kid." Riley shook his head as they stepped into the lift. "And Jeffie was always a brat. I've done what I could… but that was… nothing."
Once inside the enclosed car, Sulu reluctantly pulled out the object that Riley's brother had passed to him. It was a small chip of metal. On it were printed the tiny letters.
"Am in danger," the navigator read over his shoulder. "Pick up package at 235C. Box 112. Combination - 45960804."
"Riley, I know what you're feeling…" Sulu began firmly. "But…"
The Irishman reached out and changed the lift controls so that they'd let him out on level seven - where an address starting with a two and ending with a C would be. "I'm not asking."
Sulu knew it was an unbelievably stupid thing to do, but when the elevator doors opened he stepped out with Riley.
"Okay, we get the package and then go directly to the ship," he said, trying to convince himself that things could be that simple. "We don't know where to find him down here, but he'll know he can get in touch with you on the Enterprise."
"Yeah," Riley agreed resolutely.
235C turned out to be storage warehouse. After paying a few credits to a bored attendant, they were escorted back to a huge room lined with locked cabinets of a variety of sizes. Container number 113 was rather small. Inside it they found only a small box with a turquoise cover and black sides. It was rectangular - no more than six inches long and 4 inches wide. It was only about two inches deep.
"I guess we shouldn't open it," Riley said, obviously fighting with his own curiosity.
"Don't open it." This advice seemed to come out of the air above them.
"Jeff?" Riley asked incredulously as the grill of one of the ventilation ducts on a wall a few feet away from them pushed out.
"Hold this," Riley's brother wriggled out of the shaft and handed the grill down to them. He landed with a squishing noise that prompted Sulu to look down and notice that the tall man's left leg was wet almost up to the knee.
He didn't have much time to reflect on this peculiarity for T.J. gestured them forward and made a step out of his hands. "C'mon - You're being followed. There are cops all over the place outside."
Sulu vowed that he'd never go on another shore leave with Kevin Riley again as his brother boosted him up into the air shaft. After climbing in himself, T.J. wedged the vent cover back into place.
"It's going to be dark," he said, crawling past them, "and we'll have to crawl for a while, but everything's going to be okay."
Sulu had serious doubts about that, but there wasn't much choice other than to fall into line on his hands and knees behind Kevin. "Is this how you got out of the bar?"
"No." He had to assume it was T.J. who answered, because he couldn't even see his own hand in front of his face now. "There's a way to get out of any men's room on this station if you don't mind getting wet."
"Jeff, Officer Manheim said you killed a guy," Kevin said, before his brother had time to expound further on that intriguing claim.
"Officer Manheim?" T.J. repeated, coming to a dead stop and starting a chain reaction of collisions. "Michelle Manheim?"
The navigator, who was in the middle, got the worst of it.
"I don't know," he answered irritably.
"About six feet tall with red hair?"
"Yes."
"Damn."
The sound of crawling started up again. Sulu followed only to run into Riley as his brother stopped to ask, "Was there a black-haired girl too?"
"Yes."
"Damn."
This time Sulu let them get a good lead on him before following. "Does it make any difference?"
"They're both girlfriends of mine. Michelle Manheim and Racheal Lorca are in the same squadron, but don't know I'm going out with the other." Sulu was grateful when he heard the sounds of a ventilation panel being opened. "Man, it would have put a serious dent in my sex life if the two of them had caught me."
As the panel moved out of place, a hazy light began to penetrate into the shaft. Sulu could see first Riley's brother then Riley drop through the opening.
"I can't think of anything lower than sending a man's girlfriends out to get him." T.J. was grumbling as he helped him down the wall into the dimly lit area they'd entered.
Sulu could tell immediately that this forbidding and evil-smelling room had once been an apparel store of some sort. Denuded racks cordoned the large room into a maze of passages. He heard Kevin gasp as he backed into the arms of a mannequin. The only light in the room seeped in between the mesh of bars and smoky glass wall that separated the store front from the mall outside.
"Sorry about the smell," T.J. apologized off-handedly as he replaced the ventilation grill. "And about the lights - but the front glass is only one-way if there's no light in here."
He led them inside a door in the back of the store. Only after it had shut behind them did he turn on the lights. Sulu squinted in the unaccustomed brightness that confirmed his suspicion that this had originally been a dressing room. From the horrible smell of the place, it was hard to determine its current function. The space was divided up into little stalls. Most of them stood open and almost all of them were piled ceiling-high with clothes and shoes. Taking a step forward, Sulu noticed that in the stall immediately to his right was the prone body of a well-dressed blue-skinned man.
"Jeff!" Kevin knelt and checked the alien for signs of life. "This man is dead."
"As a Tuesday night on Juno," his brother agreed, unconcernedly continuing to strip off his wet shoes and pants. "You guys might want to change too."
Riley shared an uncomprehending look with Sulu before looking up at his younger brother. "Why?"
"Well, Kev, you are standing over a dead body holding about 5 million credits worth of illegal drugs." T.J. casually plucked a black body suit out of the pile. "I think you might want to keep a low profile."
Sulu closed his eyes and swallowed, hoping that he could live long enough to never take another shore leave with Kevin Riley.
"Drugs?" Kevin squeaked.
"Sorry," his brother replied, sighing as if he were being nagged about borrowing his brother's favorite shirt without permission. "You're not catching me on a good day, Kev."
"Oh, really?" Riley asked sarcastically. "Look, Jeff, I want a straight answer. Did you kill this man?"
His brother paused in the midst of stretching the impossibly small-looking body suit over his elongated frame.
Giving a straight answer apparently took some effort on his part.
"No, not directly," he answered at length, unable to resist hedging a bit.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that I didn't kill him, but that I don't think he'd be dead right now if he'd never met me." T.J. fastened the neck of the body suit with a triumphant snap. "Thank God for one-size-fits-all, hey?"
"Who was he?" Sulu asked, as Riley's brother began to sort through a pile of black and grey padded survival jackets. "Was he the guy who wrote the message you gave me?"
"Right. Very sharp!" T.J. rewarded him for his astuteness by tossing him an oversized jacket.
"I suppose you're going to try to tell us that you were framed," Riley said, trying to sound sarcastic instead of hopeful.
"I hadn't thought of it," his brother replied, trying on an undersized coat then throwing it to him. "But I think you'll find that in most cases where the guilty are rounded up before the body has been discovered, something is not on the up-and-up."
Sulu supposed that if he, like Kevin, was concerned with the question of T.J.'s innocence, that this might have been an encouragingly convincing statement. However, since he was only interested right now in getting back on board the Enterprise with his skin and his commission intact, the suggestion of a conspiracy pitting them against the local police was not a pleasing one.
Riley's brother finally settled on a jacket that fastened in the front but whose sleeves didn't quite cover his wrists. He slipped on his old shoes then pulled on a broad-billed all-terrain vehicle pilot's cap down low over his eyes and fastened with a broad strap under his chin.
When he straightened, he looked like a very tall version of the ambiguous figures that peopled the walkways outside.
Almost as an afterthought, he removed a small-gauged laser pistol from his other pants and put it into his pocket. "O.K. Give me the box and let's go."
Considering the nature of its contents, Sulu would have relinquished it gladly, but Kevin held onto the thing stubbornly. "Where are we going?"
"Well, I need to get to an un-monitored computer terminal and you guys need to get completely off this station," T.J. said, uttering the first sensible words Sulu had heard in hours. "Where's your ship?"
"We're in drydock on the port side," Sulu informed him, wishing to encourage this type of thinking in any way he could. "Access tubes 34 through 52 connect to it right now."
"But, Jeff," Riley protested. "You're A.W.O.L and wanted for murder..."
T.J. plucked the box from his older brother's fingers.
"...And holding five million credits worth of an illegal drug, I know. I can handle it, Kev. But let's get out of here before my old girlfriends start talking to each other and figure out where I am."
"But, Jeff..."
Sulu grabbed two caps from a heap and handed one to Riley.
"C'mon, Kevin," he said, guiding his friend to the door. "You can argue with him on the way."
"We can go through the vents most of the way," T.J. said, turning off the light before opening the door.
Although nothing about the murky appearance of the store seemed to have changed, Sulu could immediately tell something was very wrong. There was something too electric - too busy - in the air around them. Riley's brother must have sensed it too, because he immediately pulled out his gun. Sulu could see the light glint off the barrel as he said, "Someone's in here."
A thin beam of light sliced violently past him.
"Yeow!" T.J. yelped as it knocked his weapon from his hand with an audible crackle.
"You know I don't like guns, Riley." From a different direction came the sound of a woman's voice. She sounded young and had a peculiar sing-song accent. "Kick it away."
"Oh, sure, Chaxia. Anything you say." T.J. complied quickly, all the time shaking his hand to relieve the terrible stinging. "Oh shit, but that hurt! Shit, shit shit! You 'bout blew my damn thumb off that time, Tsu."
"Oh, I'm so sorry." The woman stepped out of the shadows. Her profile was lit well enough that Sulu could tell she was a small, well-built woman wearing a robe of some sort. As she came closer, he could see the finely chiseled Asian features of her face and the color of her shockingly platinum blonde hair. "I think you have something I want, Riley."
"I'm sure I do, sweetheart," T.J. replied gamely.
Four other figures in robe-length coats like the woman's emerged from the gloom carrying weapons.
"Perhaps it would be best if you and your friends placed your hands behind your heads and got down on your knees," the woman suggested sweetly as her associates moved to surround them.
Not liking that course of action at all, Sulu decided that it was a now or never situation. He chose now.
Grabbing the weapon of the man in front of him, he used it to lash out at the one behind him. Unfortunately he lost his grip on the gun in doing so, but wasn't shot by either man. The Rileys followed his lead - or at least he assumed from the noises around him. As soon as he was free he ran and dove behind the counter, figuring that was where the main controls would be. Only once there did he pause to consider that those controls might not be functional after all this time. He must have had some good luck left because after only a few seconds of fumbling he uncovered a panel that was gratifyingly full of lighted switches. Taking a deep breath, he reversed the settings on all of them as quickly as he could.
After nearly two decades of dormancy, the store sprang suddenly back to life like a crazed carnival. Incongruously happy music filled the air and lights blazed on from everywhere. The mannequin Kevin Riley was standing near glowed green and mechanically modeled its lack of clothing from side to side. A few feet in front of him stood the blonde haired woman who despite her stated dislike of guns was carrying a rather large one. Flame retardant foam rained down on the struggling figures making it more difficult to distinguish Riley's brother from his attackers.
"Run!" Sulu yelled over his shoulder to his colleagues as he sprinted for the slowly widening opening underneath the rising sheet of metal and glass blocking the store front.
A blue blast hit the glass above his head as he rolled under. At least a half dozen amorphous passersby had stopped to note the unusual goings on in the shop, but scattered as soon as he burst into their midst. Sulu scattered along with the best of them, hoping to use them for cover as he put as much distance as possible between himself and the shop. When another stream of blue light crackled against the walkway ahead and slightly to the left of him, he looked quickly behind him to find two foam-streaked figures in hot pursuit. This gave him sufficient impetus to increase his pace and turn off into the first right-hand passage that presented itself. Finding himself faced with a long run to a dead end, he checked desperately from side to side. He chose a dark corridor to his left that looked like it could offer temporary shelter. Sulu flattened himself against one wall and tried to bring his breathing under control as he considered his options.
Looking in front of him, he found himself faced with a door that announced in five languages and three forms of pictograph that behind it was a men's restroom. Sulu could hear the clatter of his pursuers' footfalls as he thanked his lucky stars and pushed the door open. After all, hadn't Riley's brother told them that a person could get out of any restroom on the station if that person didn't mind getting wet? At the moment, Sulu was prepared to crawl through raw sewage if need be.
As soon as he entered the dark room, both his common sense and his sense of smell told him that there wasn't going to be any water in this bathroom. Water-based waste disposal was cumbersome and inefficient and therefore rarely used on spaceships or space stations like this one.
Sulu reached beside him and found the lighting control panel.
Graffiti covered most of what had once been blue and gold checked walls. There were gaping wounds in the masonry where sonic wash units for humans and particle vaporizers for other species had been. Sulu could see fragments of himself pass in the shattered mirror as he walked past a line of urinals whose surface was half-corroded by an excess of the chemical that once made them functional.
As he passed the clogged jet spout of a Nebulan silicon bidet, he decided that this bathroom was possibly the dreariest spot on this whole dreary station in which to die.
At the end of the long line of plumbing disasters was a closed stall marked with an intricate geometric pattern. A part of Sulu's brain told him that this was a religious symbol, but couldn't supply him with the name of the sect or what peculiarity of belief would cause them to emboss their sign upon a public sanitation facility. Intrigued and feeling the help of a deity - anyone's deity - couldn't hurt at this time, he pushed open the stall door.
There in pristine glory stood a squat little flush toilet like a gleaming white shrine to the past century when they'd gone out of fashion. After a dazed moment of contemplation, Sulu realized that he still didn't know what he could do that would get him wet while providing a way out of here.
The sudden sound of footsteps outside forced him into action. Remembering that T.J.'s leg had been wet halfway up to his knee, Sulu stuck his foot in the toilet and pushed the lever. As the bowel overflowed, there was the sound of the door bursting open.
"Oh, great," Sulu thought. "So I'm going to die in an abandoned public rest area with one foot stuck in a commode."
At that moment, though, the deux ex machina chose to kick into gear. Part of the wall behind the toilet slid away and he and the ancient plumbing fixture were drawn into the blackness beyond. Behind him an identical device rose from the floor to take the place of the one attached to his foot.
There was very little light after the panel slid closed again, but soothing music began to play and a recorded voice spoke to him in a language that sounded Acturian. Since he didn't speak that tongue, the message did nothing to cure his confusion as he blindly descended slowly in the darkness.
After a few moments, he was lowered into a lighted area. He found himself in a vast plain composed entirely of gigantic machines. All around him was the hum of things traveling through huge pipes. From behind the curve of a building-sized cylinder stepped a gnarled and dwarfish man.
The little man was fat and stump-legged and carried an old-style laser rifle that almost equaled his height in length.
His warty face was set in a gap-toothed sneer.
"Who the hell are you?" the dwarf asked in a voice that was surprisingly louder and larger than man-sized.
"I ... I ... I ..." Sulu faltered. It seemed as though his poor brain upon reaching its credulity limit for the day had gone on strike. "I'm lost."
The gnomish fellow waddled up closer, keeping his rifle trained at Sulu's head. "Get your frigging foot out of there, boy. Who showed you that trick? Wasn't that bastard Riley, was it?"
Sulu complied readily, but decided it was prudent not to admit any association with anyone that could be rightly referred to as "that bastard Riley".
"What's this doing here?" he said instead, pointing at the toilet.
The dwarf held his rifle on him a moment longer, then relented and lowered it with a long suffering sigh.
"Benenites," he answered shortly, but this helped clear things up somewhat for Sulu.
The Benenites were a religious sect who believed civilization should not have survived Earth's third World War. They observed strict taboos about using technology invented after the turn of the twenty-first century.
"We used to get bunches of them through here. 'Course these are only made up to look like old flush toilets, but they never found that out. I betcha couldn't tell that it was a single pipe fed mock up over a standard disposal unit, could you?"
"No, not at all," Sulu said politely.
"The only problem with 'em was that the Acturians would slip and use 'em." The little man shouldered his weapon and motioned him forward and deeper into the mechanical landscape. "You know how an Acturian loves water. Well, they'd get their long old asses sucked down into the pipework and we'd have to bring 'em down here to pull 'em loose. Not that I've seen an Acturian in years, mind you. It's usually them damn punk kids running from the cops or that damn bastard Riley on the lam from somebody's husband."
When they arrived at the center of another lighted area, the small man reached up and pressed the call button of mechanical configuration that Sulu recognized - to his great relief - to be an elevator.
"I keep answering the buzz though," the gnome continued. "I figure that with my luck the one time I don't bother to come running I'll be leaving an Acturian bigshot with his ass sucked up the john and then my boss will have my liver for his lunch."
The doors opened and the little man propelled Sulu into the lift car with a shove.
"You tell Riley one thing though," he warned, giving his huge gun a shake. "You tell him and his buddies that I'm shooting the next thing that drops down my tube that ain't Acturian. I'd don't care who that are or what they've got stuck up the pipes!"
* continued *