by David Mack
“Sorry,” he said, composing himself and stiffly descending from the round dais. Looking around in confused wonder, he asked, “What is this place?”
“One of our dark sites,” Saavik said. She led him and K’Ehleyr out into a corridor that was identical to the one they had traversed underground on the Zeta Serpentis asteroid. “This is where we conduct operations that would be too likely to draw notice if conducted within range of the Alliance—or any other civilization of similar or greater sophistication.” She stopped at a door and entered a code on the keypad next to it. The portal slid open with a soft pneumatic gasp, and she stepped through it. K’Ehleyr stood aside and motioned for Picard to precede her.
He stepped inside to find a long observation lounge looking out on a vast shipyard. Legions of automated systems replicated parts, assembled them into spaceframes and hulls, and moved in and out of ships that looked ready for service in every way except that they were dark and apparently deserted. But as remarkable as the shipyard was, it was the view beyond it that left him speechless.
He pointed at it. “Is… is that…?”
“Yes, Luc,” K’Ehleyr said. “That’s the Milky Way galaxy—as seen from a distance of approximately three hundred thousand light-years.”
Picard spun to face Saavik. “What is this? One of your holographic illusions? Some kind of trick?”
“I assure you, Mister Picard, it’s very real.”
He clapped one hand atop his head. “How did we get here?”
“A subspace transporter,” Saavik said. “We use them sparingly because they consume vast amounts of power and are highly unstable. However, I considered our present situation grave enough to merit its use.”
Pondering the distance back to the tiny pocket of space he called home, his mind boggled at the calculation of travel times, even at insane multiples of the fastest warp speed he’d ever attained. “How do you propose to move this fleet hundreds of thousands of light-years in any reasonable period of time? Surely you don’t expect me to believe you have a subspace transporter that can move ships.”
“Of course not,” K’Ehleyr said. “As for how we get from A to B, let’s just say we haven’t shown you all our best tricks yet.”
It was overwhelming. Picard felt dizzy. “Why show me this at all?”
Saavik spoke more boldly than Picard would have expected of a Vulcan. “So you will understand that I am not exaggerating when I say we have the resources to challenge the Alliance—and most other powers in the galaxy. What we lack are the personnel to crew more than one of these vessels.”
Craning his neck and pressing his face to the transparent steel window, he still was unable to see all of the automated shipyard. “How many are there?”
“Hundreds,” K’Ehleyr said.
“Mon Dieu.” He shook his head in disbelief. “What do you wish me to do?”
“Captain one of our ships,” Saavik said. “We’ll provide the crew. With their support, you’ll carry our message to the rebels and rally them behind you.”
“Me? Don’t be absurd. I’m no leader of men.”
K’Ehleyr flashed a knowing smile. “Don’t underestimate yourself. I think that once you’ve had a taste of authority, you’ll find it suits you.”
“Quite the contrary.” He nodded at K’Ehleyr. “You seem far better suited to this role than I. If you like, I’ll join your crew, but—”
“I can’t sit in the captain’s chair, Picard! Look at me. I’m half Klingon. No matter what kind of ship I arrive in, I’ll never be able to command the respect and loyalty of the Terran Rebellion.”
Picard turned toward Saavik, hoping—perhaps foolishly—for some degree of support, but he found no comfort in her words. “Don’t look to me for absolution,” she said. “A Vulcan may have inaugurated this movement, but Spock knew that no Vulcan could finish it.” She placed her hands reverently on either side of his head. “From the very beginning we have known that when the war finally came, this revolution would need a human face.”
Mac was faced off once again with the two human men from the Defiant, in the Excalibur’s officer’s mess. He was starting to question why he had ever wanted to join the Terran Rebellion; in his opinion, people this stupid didn’t deserve his help. “Why the grozit are you fighting me on this, O’Brien? Can’t you see I’m trying to save your asses?”
“Nobody bloody asked you to save anything, you puffed-up sack of—”
“I think we’re getting off topic here,” Eddington interrupted, drawing angry stares from O’Brien and Mac. “Maybe there’s some way we can work out a power-sharing agreement, or divide the responsibilities for—”
“Forget it,” said Soleta. “What you’re describing is a fine way to run a government, but a battle fleet is no place for a debate.”
Hiren nodded. “She’s right.” He directed an imploring look at the humans. “Look at me. I used to be the praetor of an empire. But I lost my homeworld, and with it my right to assert power. It galled me to surrender my authority to Calhoun, but this is his milieu, and in it there can be only one leader. One commander. Any other path leads to chaos—and defeat.”
“That’s fine,” O’Brien said. “When he’s ready to follow, I’ll lead.”
Mac tossed up his hands, fed up with the humans’ posturing. “This is insane. What’s it going to take to make you see reason? You have barely enough ships to stage a hit-and-run raid on a soft target. You’re on the verge of being exterminated. Is that what you want? To be erased from history?”
“It can’t be much worse than being a footnote in a chapter written about you,” O’Brien grumped. “And spare me your rant about how you can face the Alliance and we can’t, because that’s a pack of lies. You’re not in the fringe territories anymore—these are the core systems. We can’t just hit-and-run and skip back into friendly space, because there is no friendly space.” He raised his hand as if to point at Mac, then thought better of it and made a fist, struggling visibly to keep his self-control. “Name three strategically significant targets in this quadrant aside from Cardassia.”
“Qo’noS. The dilithium mine on Elas. The—”
“Wrong quadrant,” O’Brien cut in. “Try again.”
It took a few seconds for Mac to dredge up his memories of the Alliance’s possessions in the Alpha Quadrant. This region of space was more than two hundred light-years from anything he had ever cared about, and until now he hadn’t spent much time thinking about it. He decided to buy himself time by naming the most obvious target, which was the only one he had been able to think of so far. “Raknal Station, inside the Betreka Nebula.”
“That’s one,” Eddington said. “There are plenty more to choose from.”
McHenry’s voice murmured in Mac’s thoughts. Excuse me, Mac, but—
Not now, McHenry. I can do this on my own.
The Excalibur’s peculiar navigator was unusually persistent. I’m certain you can, Mac. It’s just that I—
Please just let me think, McHenry! Mac hated himself for snapping at McHenry, who he knew meant well, but sometimes the telepath’s intrusions into his thoughts were enough to turn a bad mood or a short temper into a burst of fury. He was excruciatingly close to extracting another bit of trivia from the dustiest nook in his brain when Eddington derailed his train of thought.
“Oh, come on. It can’t be that hard, can it, Captain? The topaline mines on Capella? The zenite refinery on Ardana? The Cardassian shipyards at Olmerak?”
Soleta stepped to Mac’s side and glared at Eddington. “Your point?”
“As fine a strategist and tactician as Captain Calhoun certainly is, he doesn’t know where the enemy’s vital targets are in this region of space.”
Mac was not impressed by Eddington’s ruse. “I can learn.”
O’Brien replied in his gruff rasp of a voice, “Who’s gonna teach you? Get this through your thick Xenexian skull: You may have all the muscle, but we have the brains. This war has to be fought and w
on here, which means you need to know what we know. Listen to your friend.” He nodded at Hiren. “When you’re forced to play on someone else’s turf, you have to play by their rules. My turf—my rules.”
Mac, this might not be a good time, but—
Not now! “Look, O’Brien. I know that in this fantasy life you’ve created, you’re leading your people to freedom and glory, but from where I’m standing, you look like a kid playing soldier and doing a lousy job of it. Don’t sit there and tell me that you alone possess the vital intel to win this war when it’s obvious all that information hasn’t done you or your people any damn good. What can you possibly tell me that I can’t learn for myself?”
“How to penetrate the defense network that protects the core planets of the Klingon Empire—including their homeworld, Qo’noS.”
Mac tried to hold a straight face, but a tiny snort of derision squeaked from one of his nostrils, and the edges of his mouth curved upward. “Really? And how, exactly, did you acquire that intel?”
“Worf, the former regent of the Klingon Empire, is our prisoner of war.”
Not missing a beat, Mac asked Hiren, “What would your government have done had you ever been captured alive during your reign as praetor?”
“All my codes would have been nullified, my biometric access revoked, and all contingency plans to which I had been privy would be considered compromised. Within hours, my successor would initiate new protocols to secure all military, political, economic, and communications assets of the Empire.”
Sporting a taut smile of condescension, Mac looked back at O’Brien. “How long did you hold Worf before he coughed up this allegedly vital intel?”
Nervous, embarrassed looks passed between O’Brien and Eddington. Under his breath, O’Brien said, “Two years.”
Hiren, Soleta, and Mac all laughed. It was impossible not to. The sheer stupidity of it, the cluelessness, the utter incompetence was so stunning that hilarity seemed the only rational response. The more they laughed, the angrier the two human men became—which served only to make Mac laugh even harder. He was almost to the point of pounding his fist on the table for cathartic release when McHenry put an end to the frivolity. Mac, you have company.
The door of the officer’s mess opened, and two people walked in. One was O’Brien’s comrade, Colonel Ishikawa. Behind her was Selar. Both of them looked deadly serious. “Enough of this,” Keiko said. “A decision has to be made, and this is it. Neither of you is the right one to lead the rebellion.”
Instantaneously, Mac and O’Brien redirected all their ire at Selar and Ishikawa. Mac also saved some small measure for McHenry. Why didn’t you warn me sooner?
I am quite certain I tried.
Try harder next time. Imagining the worst, he added, Within reason.
O’Brien bellowed, “What the hell is this, Keiko?”
“Call it an intervention,” she said.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with O’Brien, Mac stared down his shipmate. “Selar, I trust you have a better explanation than that.”
To his surprise, Selar looked at the human woman before she spoke. Only after receiving a nod from Ishikawa did Selar respond. “For two days, you have done nothing but argue among yourselves. We had hoped for an amicable fusion of your respective forces, but that now seems unlikely. Though both sides are needed for the war to come, they must be united beneath a single banner. Since neither of you can provide that, Memory Omega will.”
The name meant absolutely nothing to Mac. With the deliberate pace of a glacier, he turned his head toward O’Brien—only to see the human man doing likewise, looking to him for some hint as to what the grozit was going on.
In a low voice, Mac asked him, “Would you like the honors?”
O’Brien’s eyebrows climbed a millimeter higher on his forehead. “It’s your ship, Captain. I think you should take it.”
Despite being relatively certain he wouldn’t like the answer, Mac asked the women in the mess doorway, “What’s Memory Omega?”
Selar replied, “To use a human idiom, it is the cavalry riding to your rescue.”
Ishikawa said, “Please join us in the nerve center. We have something to show you.” They turned and walked away without a backward glance.
Reluctantly, Mac followed them. Soleta and Hiren followed him without needing to be prompted, as did O’Brien and Eddington. Moving at a quick step and in a tight cluster, they reached the ship’s nerve center less than a minute later. Selar and Ishikawa stood at the forefront of the compartment, limned by the glow of the main viewscreen. After Mac and the others had gathered behind the duo, he said, “All right, we’re here. What are we supposed to see?”
Ishikawa took a small, innocuous-looking cylinder from her jacket pocket, gently tapped commands into a miniature panel on its side, and spoke into it. “We’re ready, Director.” Then she put away the device and nodded at Selar. The two women stepped apart, ensuring that everyone else had an unobstructed view of the main screen, which for several seconds showed nothing but the churning violence of the Arachnid Nebula.
From the sensor console, Robin Lefler declared, “Gravitational anomaly, Captain—dead ahead, range fifty thousand kilometers.”
“Source?”
Lefler shook her head, bewildered. “No idea.”
Hiren moved to Lefler’s side and peeked over her shoulder. “Maybe it’s from the twin pulsars inside the nebula?”
“No,” Lefler said, “I already checked that.”
Then Soleta pointed at the main screen. “Look!”
Mac turned and saw the dark maelstrom spinning wildly into a vortex, transformed by some unseen force into a massive funnel of black emptiness, a yawning void spiraling wider by the second and threatening to swallow the Excalibur and the Defiant whole. “Shields up! Battle stations!”
Selar raised her voice over the chatter of people preparing the ship for combat. “That won’t be necessary, Captain. Trust me.”
Soleta scrambled to the science console and ran her own scan of the terrifying phenomenon taking shape ahead of them. “It’s a wormhole,” she declared. “And it’s abnormally stable, almost as if…”
“As if it were artificial,” Mac said, with good reason.
Emerging from the center of nothingness inside the wormhole was a ship unlike anything he had ever seen. Its design was reminiscent of those favored more than a century earlier by the Terran Empire, but it was far sleeker. Its forward profile was sliver-thin, its lines graceful and fluid, its overall bearing one of speed and power. As it cleared the mouth of the wormhole, the phenomenon irised closed behind it, propagating shock waves into the nebula around them. The wave thundered as it passed over the Excalibur, and on the viewscreen Mac saw the Defiant bobble and yaw as it weathered the disturbance.
The new ship glided off its intercept course with Excalibur and Defiant, turning to show them its starboard side as it came to a halt nearby.
A signal warbled on Lefler’s console. She silenced it, swallowed hard, and looked up. “Sir? They’re hailing us.”
Mac looked at O’Brien and with a sideways nod invited him forward. The two men stepped up and stood front and center, facing the main viewscreen. O’Brien nodded his readiness to Mac, who told Lefler, “On-screen.”
The main screen switched to an image of a starship bridge packed with sleek, high-tech consoles and crewed by personnel of many species. A Tellarite and an Andorian manned the forward stations. Bolians, Vulcans, Caitians, and Benzites worked at the aft consoles, and a woman of partial Klingon ancestry stood at a panel not far from the center chair. But it was the middle-aged human man in that center chair who commanded Mac’s full attention.
Lean and bald, he had a weathered, worldly look that his black-and-gray uniform couldn’t hide. His face was etched with the lines of a lifetime of sorrow, but in his dark brown eyes burned the light of a powerful intellect. He stood and with a small tug smoothed the front of his uniform jacket before stepping forward. Eve
rything about him—his stride, his carriage, his expression—conveyed an unmistakable air of dignity and gravitas.
He introduced himself in a rich baritone, with words that Mac would remember for the rest of his life:
“Greetings. This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard, commanding the free starship Enterprise.”
PART II
Deballare Superbos
2378
23
Crowns of Blood and Fire
Rise for Him Who Holds the Throne for Him Who Shall Return!”
The announcement reverberated in the cathedral-like space of the Klingon High Command’s strategic command center, where hundreds of the Empire’s most skilled war planners and tacticians directed the movements and activities of its armed forces. Few things could compel these professional warriors to set aside their duties, but a rare visit by the Regent of the Empire was one such occasion.
Klag strode onto the main floor flanked by his retinue of advisers and selected members of the High Council. The one-armed head of state gave only a cursory upward glance to the tiers of officers who had risen to honor his arrival. “Resume your duties,” he said, enabling the busy staff to go back to work, their obligations to protocol fulfilled. The regent and his entourage joined Goluk at the center of the situation floor, which was a transparent steel surface above a deep pit inside which was projected a holographic map of local space. Klag stood beside Goluk and eyed the map. “What news of the Terran rebels, General?”
“Still no sign of them, My Lord.” Goluk used a data tablet to manipulate the projection beneath their feet, magnifying different areas as he continued. “The Sixth Fleet converged upon Athos IV as you ordered, but found the rebels’ camps deserted and all their ships long since departed.”
