by David Mack
“Departed? For where?”
Dreading the regent’s inevitable harangue, Goluk said, “Unknown. None of our listening stations or patrols have detected any large-scale fleet movements in or out of the Badlands in months.”
Klag squinted at the star map. “Could the rebels have evaded our sensors if they’d left a few ships at a time, on different vectors?”
Goluk considered that scenario. “In theory, yes. Assuming they had foreknowledge of our surveillance patterns, they might have done so.”
Pointing at the projection, Klag said, “If they regroup, it will most likely be inside the Rolor Nebula or the Argolis Cluster.”
“That was our conclusion as well, My Lord. General K’mdar and his battle group are positioned inside the nebula, and the cluster is being patrolled by the Third Fleet under General Torgoth. However, neither has reported any activity in the past six weeks.”
That news put a broad grin on the regent’s face. He turned to his crowd of sycophants and cronies. “You see! Just as I predicted—the Terran Rebellion has scattered, gone to ground like frightened voles! O’Brien and his malcontents are finished.” Looking back at Goluk, he asked, “And what of Calhoun’s armada?”
“We’ve been unable to locate them, My Lord.”
Klag’s grin became a scowl. “What? A fleet that size? Are you telling me that many ships escaped the Joch’chal Nebula without being detected?”
It was hard for Goluk to preserve his air of detachment with Klag shouting in his face, but he did so because, as a professional soldier, he had too much respect for the chain of command and the demands of decorum to break them for the fleeting satisfaction of upbraiding a Regent of the Empire. To Goluk, the High Command was a place for cold facts and hard numbers, not politics. Not so long ago, Klag had shown this place the same respect, but he had since exchanged a life of war for one of words, and the traditions of honor for the trappings of power.
“It is unlikely that Calhoun’s fleet could have left the nebula without registering on our sensors,” Goluk said. “We’ve spent the past several months bombarding the nebula in random patterns to flush them out. However, we’ve not yet seen any evidence of a direct hit.” He added in a low deadpan, “Perhaps you could declare victory over Calhoun’s forces as well, My Lord.”
The regent shot a hateful, narrow-eyed stare at Goluk. “Perhaps I will.” He banished his anger with a low growl, then turned his attention back to the map. “If the rebels have removed themselves from our equation, all the better. We have a more important threat on our doorstep.” He held out his hand, and Goluk handed him the control pad for the star map. Klag centered it on the Empire’s border with the Gorn Hegemony. “The Taurus Pact grows bolder with each passing day. Taking advantage of the unrest inside the Cardassian Union, the Tholians have seized control over no fewer than ten star systems between Rudellia and Vanden, and the Breen have planted their flag on Lazon II, claiming its mineral rights for themselves. Now they’re threatening to move on Arawath.
“Ten hours ago, Gorn troops landed on Ogat. This error in judgment will be their undoing.” He thrust the control pad back at Goluk. “Tell me how you plan to respond to this brazen assault on our empire.”
Goluk magnified the sector surrounding Ogat. “The Second Fleet is en route, My Lord. The Gorn sent only a small expeditionary force, most likely to gauge our response. I doubt they expect to be able to hold Ogat once we counterattack.”
“So, they’re testing us, is that it?” Noting Goluk’s nod of confirmation, Klag’s eyes widened and his brow arched with malice. “Then let us show them more than they expect. While the Second Fleet forces them from Ogat, we’ll retask the Fourth and Eighth fleets for a full-scale invasion of the Gorn Hegemony.”
The regent’s entourage received his insane order with a chorus of approval, which only made Goluk’s role as the voice of dissent that much more difficult. “My Lord, redeploying the Fourth and Eighth fleets will leave our border with the Romulans undefended.”
Klag swatted away Goluk’s opinion as if it were a bothersome insect. “Irrelevant. Romulan space is under our control, and whatever military it once had has vanished along with that miscreant Calhoun.”
“With all respect, sir, Romulan space will remain under our control only so long as we patrol it. Shifting our forces to the far side of the Empire to invade the Gorn will leave the Romulans’ territories open to annexation by the Kinshaya, the Thallonians, the Grigari—”
“I wasn’t soliciting opinions, General.” Klag let his rebuke settle in for a moment, and Goluk was keenly aware that the political tide had shifted against him with alarming haste. Klag continued in a more confidential manner. “I set the policy, and your duty is to carry it out. Is that clear?”
Goluk’s grim visage was as steady as if it had been hewn from bedrock. “Absolutely, My Lord.”
Ostensibly satisfied, Klag turned his attention back to the map. “The Breen and Tholians are too remote for us to deal with right now. If Damar can rein in the madness that grips his people, we’ll let them defend their own borders. For now, our primary goal is to make an example of the Gorn. We need to make them pay in blood for this trespass. Failure to retaliate will only invite further aggression.”
Moving the pieces in his imagination, Goluk envisioned the logistical challenges the regent’s new agenda presented. “Our forces can be deployed under cloak to attack positions within five weeks.”
Klag nodded and looked pleased. “Excellent.”
“But you should know, My Lord, that what you propose will be costly, and it will involve a high degree of risk.” He illuminated sections of the map with various icons and symbols as he laid out his case. “If the Tholians come to the Gorn’s aid, we could find ourselves on the receiving end of a pincer assault.”
“If you think the Tholians are getting involved, pull the Ninth Fleet back from Talar and open up a new front on the enemy’s rear flank.”
“Very well. But there is another concern.” He scrolled the massive display in a swift blur to the far side of the Empire. “If the rebels should reappear in or near Romulan space, many of our most important systems in that sector will be defenseless. Narendra, Khitomer, Mempa—”
Leaning almost close enough to touch his nose to Goluk’s, Klag said in a whisper laced with menace, “I’ve already told you: The rebels are finished. They’re gone, Goluk. Forget about them, and don’t make me repeat myself.”
Steady as a man of stone, Goluk said, “Yes, My Lord.”
Lifting his voice to address the room, Klag declared, “With Cardassia foundering, the future is ours to take—so let us take it!”
Klag’s megalomania was rewarded with the bloodthirsty roars of great warriors. Goluk hoped that Klag proved luckier as regent than Martok had been—or else those roars would soon be calling for Klag’s head on the end of a bat’leth.
The mental image made Goluk smile. We should be so lucky.
Supreme Legate Corat Damar stood at the three oval windows behind his desk and watched a hazy dusk paint Cardassia City in shades of crimson.
For the first time in months, the metropolis was quiet. All of Cardassia Prime was at peace. The capital of the Union was once again a place of unity and calm. One world, one people. On every planet under Cardassian rule, order had been restored—and all it had cost Damar was his soul.
Night’s purple cloak stretched languidly across the heavens, making its way by slow degrees toward the far horizon, while Damar stood motionless and stared into the distance, searching for himself in the deepening shadows.
He had suspected from the beginning that the plague of madness and violence that had ravaged the Cardassian Union had been inflicted upon his people by an external enemy. At first, he had sought to fix the blame upon the Alliance’s new political and military rival, the Taurus Pact, but the available intelligence about the powers involved had made that seem unlikely. Then, while reading reports of recent riots, Damar had noted an i
nteresting fact: None of the incidents ever involved direct harm to the alien servants of the wealthy and powerful who had suddenly run amok, or to the alien assistants of the Union’s preeminent scientists, or to the aliens who served as slaves for elite members of the military.
Then he had remembered Dukat’s Vulcan handmaiden at his back on the day he had inexplicably assassinated his best friend in full view of the public.
He had made his decision then without hesitation, despite knowing it would haunt him for the rest of his life, whether it proved to be correct or a grievous error. Issuing his first executive decree as Supreme Legate of the Cardassian Union, he had ordered every non-Cardassian servant and every alien slave summarily executed, without trial or delay, on every world, colony, and ship of the Union.
Within a matter of days, millions of slaves, most of them members of species that had been part of Spock’s fallen empire, had been slain. By the end of the first week following Damar’s order, the number of the slaughtered exceeded fifteen million. For nearly three weeks “the Purge” had continued. Allegedly, the Union’s last alien slave had been exterminated just that day. The final body count, according to the military, was just over thirty-one million, most of them Vulcans. Damar was surprised the streets weren’t awash in blood. He knew that in his nightmares, they would be.
That evening’s news feeds had been devoid of ill tidings. It was a day on which the billions of surviving Cardassians across the Union had breathed a collective sigh of relief—and it filled Damar with a toxic brew of shame and guilt. He was no stranger to war or violence; he had willingly employed both for the good of the state on more than one occasion and had suffered no remorse.
But this felt different to him. The Purge had been a slaughter unlike any in his lifetime, a premeditated mass murder on a grand scale. It offended him as a soldier and as a man of conscience and principle. He had served as Dukat’s right-hand man all those years in the hope of mitigating his late friend’s more brutal tendencies. The irony cut him to the quick.
I finally attain high office, and my first executive action is one of genocide.
Tired of waiting for night to finish its descent, he plodded to the liquor cabinet in the corner and filled a low glass with a generous pour of the most potent kanar he could dredge up. He emptied the glass in one toss down his throat, and then he refilled it. Another mindless guzzling, another refill, and a third mouthful for good measure. He felt the alcohol suffuse his bloodstream, softening the edges of his perception, bleeding the colors and muffling the sounds. For just a few minutes, he savored the ability not to care so much, but his pleasure was dulled by the knowledge that it was all temporary, and that no amount of kanar would ever be enough to let him forget what he had done. It didn’t cure shame.
Darkness fell at last. Damar donned a robe and pulled its hood low over his face as he slipped out of his office, got out of the lift a few floors above ground level, and left the Detapa Council headquarters through its kitchen service entrance. Stepping outside into the stifling night, he was careful to check over his shoulder and make certain no one was following him.
The streets of the Tarlak Sector were sparsely trafficked. Not many civil servants worked this late at night, and there were few other attractions in that part of the capital—certainly none that would be worth the risk of violating curfew. Though he knew it would have been faster to take the main thoroughfares to his destination, discretion was Damar’s chief concern that evening, so he restricted his movements to side streets, service alleys, and little-known shortcuts.
Despite his detours and circuitous route, he reached the Munda’ar Sector in less than half an hour. Much like the Tarlak Sector, which was dominated by government offices, the Munda’ar Sector was dedicated almost exclusively to one function: industrial storage. At night its clusters of warehouses made Damar think of great leviathans huddling in the desert for warmth. He knew from experience, however, that one needed to tread carefully in that part of the city, because the Obsidian Order frequently used some of the warehouses as black sites, for brutal interrogations and assassinations. Crossing the path of the wrong person at the wrong time in the Munda’ar Sector could be a fatal mistake.
Fortunately, he had been there many times, and he knew by heart which streets to avoid. As he neared his destination, he followed a route that was devoid of surveillance systems, and arrived at an unmarked door.
A soft knock and a moment’s patience.
At eye level, a small metal bar slid open, revealing nervous eyes. “Yes?”
“I’ve lost the way,” Damar said.
The eyes narrowed. “Did you ever know the way?”
“Yes,” Damar said, careful to keep his face hidden inside the hood. “I heard it once, in the song of the morning.”
He heard the soft, deep clack of heavy metal bolts retracting. The door was pulled open, swinging inward in a way that concealed the person behind it and left only one direction for Damar to go: to his left and down a steep flight of stairs into darkness. He hurried inside and down the steps, and heard the door close behind him. At the bottom of the stairs was an antechamber with two doors. One was an exit that let out on a street far from the entrance, in a concealed back alley not monitored by cameras or sensors; the other led to the Tabernacle.
Beside the second door was a long table stacked with generic masks. Damar picked up a mask and secured it over his face, then pulled back his hood and stepped through the door to join a few dozen of the anonymous faithful.
On a raised dais at the front of the room, a man and a woman, each wearing an ornamental recitation mask, stood facing the congregation. Behind them on the dais was a table, directly below a wall-mounted sculpture of the winged goddess Oralius. Two plain masks lay on the table. The speakers were in the latter half of the opening ritual, as the man finished his recitation from the Hebitian Records:
“That can destroy his body with my hand,
Reduce his spirit with my hate,
Separate his presence from my home:
To live without Oralius,
Lighting our way to the source,
Connecting us to the mystery,
Is to live without the tendrils of love.”
Having completed the salutation, the man and woman faced each other in silence for a moment, and then they turned their backs to the congregation as they removed their recitation masks and replaced them with the plain masks that had been on the table. Once again anonymized, they sat down several seats apart from each other in the front row. Blessed, perfect silence filled the room.
In a few moments, Damar knew, someone would begin to hum, and that resonant sound would be answered by a contrapuntal harmony, and then others, until the music washed away every thought in Damar’s mind for a few exquisite minutes. But until then, alone with his thoughts in that brief moment of stillness, he prayed to Oralius and begged her to cleanse his heart of murder’s black stain.
24
Agents of a New Dawn
All eyes were on Picard as he stepped onto the dais inside the Enterprise’s main cargo bay, which had been cleared for his en masse briefing of all the rebel commanders and their senior personnel. He felt the pressure of their expectations and their hunger for inspiration. Against his advice, Memory Omega had set him up as the leader of this untamed rabble, and now it was incumbent upon him to live up to the role in which he had let himself be cast.
Heaven help us all.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, his voice sounding deeper than he’d imagined as it boomed from the overhead speakers and echoed inside the vast compartment. The crowd before him settled into expectant silence. “We have arrived at a threshold moment. Until now, you all have been limited to waging defensive battles or small-scale guerrilla attacks. Large-scale offensive operations have been beyond your purview. No more.” He pointed over their heads, through the enormous open doorway and its invisible force field, at the fleet of ships gathered outside, around Erebus Statio
n. “Training simulations have been completed for the crews you’ve provided, for the ships that Memory Omega built. We now possess sufficient numbers, in both ships and personnel, to engage the Alliance from a position of strength. Approximately one day from now, that is exactly what we are going to do.”
He stepped aside to the edge of the dais and nodded at K’Ehleyr, who activated the interactive hologram she had prepared. The first images to take shape depicted a heavily fortified and well-patrolled star system. “This data is based on reconnaissance scans of the SoHcha system, deep inside the Klingon Empire,” Picard said. “It is the site of their largest, most advanced, and best defended shipyard. This is where the Klingons have been reverse-engineering the Romulan-made cloaking device that they captured from the Capital Gain, after the battle of Empok Nor.” He smiled at O’Brien. “And you, General O’Brien, are going to lead the attack to destroy it, denying the Klingons a major advance in stealth technology and crippling their military infrastructure for most of the next decade.”
O’Brien cast a dubious look at the hologram. “Am I, now?”
“Yes, you are. And the Enterprise will be there with you, as will several of her sister ships.” Picard updated the hologram with a complex overlay of tactical diagrams. “Taking full advantage of our wormhole-based propulsion methods, our attack force will emerge inside the Klingons’ defensive perimeter. Based on our analysis of the Klingons’ response times and tactical protocols, we believe this will enable us to destroy the shipyard while minimizing our losses.”
Calhoun, who stood beside O’Brien at the front of the crowd, sounded concerned. “What kind of losses do you think we’ll suffer?”
Picard’s mask of optimism faltered. “Memory Omega estimates our losses at ten to fifteen percent of all ships committed, and casualties of thirty percent among all crews that survive.” Looks of dismay spread like a virus through the rebel leaders. “This will not be an easy victory, but I believe it will be worth the price we pay for it. Without the SoHcha shipyard, the Klingons will be hard-pressed to replenish their fleet—and that will be the advantage we need going forward. Unless we accomplish this objective first, all others will remain out of reach.”
