“And the rest of you made a big difference yourselves,” Paris went on. “If your Groundskeepers had invaded us, there’s no way we could’ve survived a war on two fronts. The whole galaxy owes you a debt.
“And more importantly,” he went on, “you supported and advanced the Federation’s ideals at a time when we in the Alpha Quadrant had to concentrate on survival alone. In so doing, you’ve built something very special and given us all renewed hope for the future of the Federation.”
“Well, I think that’s my cue,” Neelix (or his hologram) said, stepping forward. Next to Paris, the Federation’s ambassador stepped forward as well, ready to accept transmission of the document his counterpart held. Ambassador Neelix cleared his throat and began to speak.
“On behalf of the member worlds and habitats of the Delta Coalition, and in the spirit of galaxywide cooperation and friendship…I hereby present our petition for membership in the United Federation of Planets.”
Blinking away tears at his words, Janeway looked down and laid a hand on her belly. Welcome home, she told her daughter. Welcome home.
Seeds of Dissent
James Swallow
For Pete and Nicola, who both understand that the best reality
is the one you make for yourself.
1
Defiance moved through the darkness, a predator on the hunt, visible light bending and reshaping around her hull. The ship was a wraith, a ghostly knife slipping unseen toward its target, ready for the kill.
The command deck was running with battle lighting, a deep red that gave every console a patina of crimson, like spilled blood. From his control bench on the command dais, the warship’s captain glanced down at his tanned, strong hands and studied them. Clean, he mused, hard-worked and resilient, but clean. There was no trace of the blood he had shed with those hands, no scarring, no disfigurement; but then, it was the nature of his kind. He, and all his kindred, were embodiments of the quest to become perfect. Flaws, even of the smallest sort, were things to be overcome, not to be dwelt upon.
He looked away, peering briefly into a viewing pod on an armature. The display showed a map of the Bajor Sector, the lines of demarcation and jurisdiction for the territories of each of the local commanders, and the minefields that ringed the Cardassian Control Zone. A glowing glyph signifying Defiance’s position placed them at the umbra of the Ajir system. The device sensed his scrutiny, and without waiting for his orders, it presented him with a data-digest on Ajir; it was an unremarkable, uninhabited collection of rocks around a nondescript sun. At first glance, there seemed to be little of interest there to a ship of the line.
The rest of the tactical map remained static. Their target did not present itself, even though he knew for certain that it was out there. He threw a look across the chamber. “We will not return to home base without a victory,” he said, addressing his crew. The commander’s words were level and they were not spoken in censure; but anyone who had served aboard the Defiance for more than a few weeks knew that he seldom raised his voice, seldom railed at his crew or denigrated their rare failures. He had no need to. His cool disappointment, and the inevitable punishment details that would follow, were enough to keep them focused on their duties. “If that means we stay out here until we are on quarter-rations, then so be it,” he went on. “We will not give them up.”
In the red shadows, a woman cleared her throat with studied care. “Princeps, if I may have permission to speak?” He gave her a curt nod and she continued, absently tracing the line of a copper torc around her throat. She was shorter than the rest of the command crew, but her height was not all that differentiated the woman from them; whereas the others wore uniforms of ornate cut, her clothing was simplistic, just an oversuit with a nondescript tunic. She seemed awkward and out of place. “The data-sets we received before we set sail were several days old. It is quite possible that the rebels have already left this region, or perhaps gone to ground. I would respectfully suggest that—”
The tactical officer, a stocky man with a severe military haircut, turned in his chair to glare at her. “What gives you the right to question my work?” he demanded. “You should remember your place!” The officer looked up at his commander. “Lord, with all due respect, perhaps you might keep your helot silent unless she has something of use to add to the day.”
“Optio,” said the commander, putting a hard emphasis on the other man’s rank, “she is here because she has a duty to perform, just like you. Do not sully yourself by turning your anger on her. Just find me my target.” When the tactician didn’t reply straightaway, the commander’s lips thinned and he leaned forward. “Optio!”
The officer held up a hand. “A moment, sir.” Something shimmered on the officer’s console and he turned his head, the flicker of a cold smile there and then gone on the other man’s lips. “My apologies. It looks like we have no issue after all, Princeps.” He tapped a key and the command deck’s primary screen altered to show a three-dimensional strategic plot. “We have them.”
There, visible through a slight haze of stretched starlight, was a spindly ship with downswept wings, resembling a bird as it took to the air. It moved cautiously at a low warp velocity, clearly attempting to avoid detection.
The commander saw the woman shrink a little, chagrined. He ignored her reaction and brought his palms together beneath his chin. “Good. We will close to engagement range. What is the status of our cloak?”
At the console to his right, the commander’s adjutant broke his silence. “Unchanged, Princeps,” said the ebon-skinned youth. “The rebels have no idea we are here.”
“We are certain it is them?” murmured the woman, but no one answered her.
“Tactician,” the commander said, drawing himself up. “Bring the nadion pulse antenna to bear on their drive chamber. I want them disabled on the first pass.”
“At your command, aye.”
He gestured with a wave of his hand. “Commit.”
The blast seemed to come from nowhere. There was barely a motion of perturbed radiation from the concealing sphere generated by the Defiance’s cloaking device before an emerald rod of light connected the unseen warship with the rebel transport. The nadion pulse, tuned to filter through conventional deflector shields, bathed the other vessel’s aft quarter in a wash of hard energy.
Organic forms inside the strike zone perished instantly, bodies overloaded in a concentrated blast that destroyed neurons and electrochemical impulses. The same field effect blew out dozens of duotronic conduits and smothered the churning matter/antimatter reaction in the ship’s warp core like a hand snuffing out a candle.
Automatic safety protocols snapped into place, and with a sudden, punishing deceleration, the rebel vessel crashed out of warp and into the unforgiving reality of normal space. Listing, spilling streams of crystallized breathing gas from vents in the hull, the smaller ship was immediately caught by Ajir’s gravity and began a slow drift into the system.
Defiance, her first strike a complete success, followed suit and dropped below lightspeed. The cloak disengaged, allowing the lethal shape of the warship to be revealed. She came in on a fast, showy arc, her hull shedding energy in a glowing halo, her gun ports open and phaser maws drawn; it was a calculated display designed to unman any surviving rebels still reeling from the surprise attack.
There were codes of engagement that demanded protocol be followed, that the warship’s identity be declared and the usual offer made, even though the likelihood of acceptance was near to nil. Still, rules were rules. Across a subspace waveband, the commander’s voice issued out to the rebels.
“Attention. I am Princeps Julian Bashir, of the Earthfleet Starship Defiance, a duly appointed naval officer and empowered agent of Quadrant Command. You will immediately disarm yourselves and surrender your vessel without resistance. All citizen and bondsman privileges have been revoked. As of this moment, you have no rights.”
Julian chose the short sword and clipped the sc
abbard to the molecular adhesion pads on the back of his torso armor, securing his assault phaser in a holster at his right hip. He went without a helmet, instead fixing a communicator monocle-headset over his eye; it was not good battle practice, as O’Brien often reminded him, but the tactician was inclined to be rule-bound, and Bashir knew that there was something to be said about letting an enemy see your face. A man of the rank of princeps should not go about concealed behind the blank mask of blast armor; his face should be known—known and respected.
He joined O’Brien and the rest of the boarding party at the teleport pad. The other officer gave him a curt nod and signaled the controller. A silent blaze of seething red enveloped them; Defiance’s interior re-formed into the dank, smoke-choked corridor of the rebel transport, and they were aboard.
Julian turned to give O’Brien his orders, and something moved at the corner of his eye. With a guttural cry, a figure threw itself off an overhead gantry and fell at him. Bashir registered the keen silver shape of a naked dagger in his attacker’s hand, the accelerated neural pathways of his mind processing the threat in a fraction of a second, reflex turning him to defend against it. He pivoted on his heel and his hands shot out to block the attack; one snared the forearm that held the knife, the other clamped about a throat of soft flesh, cutting off his assailant’s war cry in mid-voice. Julian let the man’s momentum do the work for him, distantly registering the nasal ridges that identified his target as a Bajoran, spinning him about. He felt bones in the attacker’s wrist snap like twigs under his viselike grip, and heard the man gasp for air through a strangled throat. Bashir let go, and the Bajoran tumbled headlong into a stanchion, striking his head with a dull cracking noise. Julian turned away, his enemy dismissed, knowing that the man would never rise again.
O’Brien and the rest of the men in the optio’s cohort were quickly dispatching other rebels foolish enough to try and engage them in hand-to-hand combat. Bashir watched the tactician slay a Cardassian with a single downward slash of his bat’leth. The gray-faced alien wailed and dropped to the deck, slumping into a pool of himself. Bashir’s second-in-command had taken the curved weapon from the body of a Klingon he had killed in single combat many years ago, in a duel on the surface of Ixion. Julian considered the weapon to be crude and inelegant, but it was certainly quite lethal and it had its uses—rather like the Klingons themselves.
The kills were fast and efficient, just as the princeps expected. He gave a grim nod of approval. “Any sign of Kira?”
“Negative,” said the optio, and his face soured. “It is possible she may not be on board.”
“We shall see,” he began. “Leave it with me. Take men and move to the engine core. You will not allow them to scuttle the ship.”
“Aye, lord.” The tactical officer barked out orders in the clipped snarls of battle language and ran aft, with black-armored troopers at his heels.
Bashir paused, surveying the chamber. The craft seemed old but well-maintained, and he frowned at the thought. The rebels were supposed to be poorly equipped, lacking in support and matériel; but even a cursory look at this ship revealed otherwise. For all the assurances that the Bajoran government was giving Quadrant Command, someone among them was still helping the rebels prosecute their guerrilla war. Sisko will not be pleased, he mused, filing away his impressions for later dictation into the mission report his commander would demand.
“Lord?” Tiber, the squad leader, beckoned him over to where an olive-skinned Bajoran male lay panting on the deck. The man’s face was darkening with a bruise where a blow to the head had put him down. “This one is still alive.”
Bashir bent at the knee and put his face close to the rebel’s, examining the contusion. “That is unsightly. You may have a concussion. You should probably have a doctor look at it.” He reached out and took the front of the Bajoran’s tunic in his fist, and without any effort, he lifted him off the deck until his boots dangled in the air. The princeps studied him coldly. “Understand me,” he began, “you are going to die here unless you answer my questions.”
The Bajoran made a gasping noise.
“Where is Kira Nerys?”
“She’s not…here,” he managed. “Gone…”
Bashir looked into the Bajoran’s eyes, his gaze hard and steady. “You are lying to me.” It was a skill he had honed throughout the years, a talent that many said ran strong in the men of his bloodline; there was nothing preternatural about it, nothing beyond the physical, but to those who had never seen it before, one might have thought Bashir possessed some measure of psychic ability, like a Vulcan or a Betazoid. It was nothing so distastefully alien as that, though. Julian Bashir had simply mastered the ability to read a face, to see it like the page of a book. He could see the difference between a falsehood and a truth, and he had never encountered a time when he had been wrong. It was a useful tool.
The Bajoran seemed to know it; he swallowed hard and blinked.
“I will ask you once more,” Bashir told him, “and if you lie to me again, I will choke the life from you.”
The injured man nodded weakly.
O’Brien reported in that the nadion pulse had done its work; not a single rebel was found alive on the drive decks, and with the application of a few carefully aimed phaser bolts, the warp core’s control conduits were severed from the rest of the ship’s systems, ensuring that power would never be restored. Lights flickered as the craft switched over to emergency battery stores, and almost immediately the temperature began to fall. Faint vapor puffed from Bashir’s mouth with each breath, but the chill was a distant, unimportant distraction. It would take some time before the vessel’s interior reached subzero temperatures low enough to affect the Defiance boarding party; but the same could not be said for the rebels. For a moment, he considered simply waiting them out. The Cardassians among them would succumb first, of course. Being from a hot and arid environment, the gray-skinned aliens loathed the chill of space; and after them, the Bajorans would follow their allies into the grip of hypothermia.
But why delay the inevitable? There was too much risk of a premature fatality, and there was one particular rebel aboard this ship whose death had already been ordained, to take place in surroundings much more public than these.
Predictably, he found his target in the escape pod gallery, attempting to bleed power from a disruptor pistol into the stalled ejection mechanism. He was slightly disappointed that she chose to flee over a confrontation, but then again her kind were of a lower order. It was wrong to expect them to show human courage.
There were others with her, and they leapt to the woman’s defense. The narrow gantry had little room to fight along it, but the short sword made easy work in the circumstances. Those he didn’t kill, Bashir sent spinning away with open cuts that steamed in the icy air.
The woman, Kira, abandoned her stillborn escape plan and struck him across the head with the butt of the spent disruptor, at last in the desperation of the moment exhibiting some sort of strength of character—not that it did her any good. In return, Bashir hammered her away with the brass eagle-head pommel of his sword and spun the still-bloody blade about to rest its tip on her throat.
“Nerys!” One of the wounded Cardassians cried out in stark terror, stumbling to his feet.
Bashir drew his pistol with a sweep of his free hand, aimed at the alien, and hesitated with his finger on the trigger. The lined brow of the male seemed familiar, and in an instant he had drawn an identity up from the depths of his eidetic memory. “Skrain Dukat,” he said carefully. “Now this is an interesting happenstance. Lord-Commander Sisko will be pleased. Two birds with one stone.”
The woman spat something in gutter Bajoran, her eyes burning with raw hatred. Beneath all the dirt and fury, she might have been attractive under other circumstances.
Troopers emerged from behind the Cardassian and forced him to his knees at Kira’s side. Bashir drew back the sword slightly and Dukat pulled the woman to him, ignoring the thin runn
els of blood darkening his arm from the deep wound on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Skrain,” she managed, her breathing labored, her bitter face turning to him.
“It’s all right, my love,” replied Dukat, cradling her gently, his eyes wet. “We’re still together.”
Bashir sheathed his sword. “Touching,” he offered, and glanced at O’Brien as he arrived. “Take all the survivors back to Defiance for interrogation and processing.”
“Aye, lord. Shall I put these two in stasis tanks?”
Julian smiled thinly. “We are not barbarians, Optio. Give the lovers adjoining cells in the brig.”
Dax was waiting for the princeps in his quarters when he returned to the warship. Bashir threw her a sideways glance as he discarded his weapons and unlimbered his armor.
She approached him cautiously, gracefully. With a hand, she reached out and traced the line of his chin. Ezri had changed clothes since he had seen her last on the command deck, substituting her nondescript helot uniform for something more flattering, a gossamer thing made of Tholian silk. Only the copper bondsman’s torc about her neck remained. She came closer.
Julian did not look at her. “I knew you would be here,” he said quietly. “You like the scent of combat on me.”
Dax’s hand fell away. “If you want me to leave, Princeps, you have only to give the order.” She looked at the deck. “It has been a while…. I thought, perhaps, as the mission had gone well, you might wish to—”
She wasn’t allowed to finish. Bashir pulled her roughly to him and kissed her. She gasped and surrendered to him, as she always did.
Star Trek®: Myriad Universes: Infinity’s Prism Page 35
