by David Mack
The Xenexian captain studied the plans with a sharp eye. “I’d like to have a bit more time to study these before I commit the Excalibur to the attack.”
“We welcome your tactical advice, Captain,” Picard said, “but you and your crew will not be part of the SoHcha mission.” He glanced at K’Ehleyr, who switched the projection to the next part of his briefing. “The Excalibur will be leading a second, simultaneous attack. Your mission is to liberate Earth.”
Looking as if Picard had just slapped him, Calhoun said, “What?”
“While the Defiant leads the strike against SoHcha, the Excalibur will crush the Alliance garrison on Earth and declare that world’s independence.”
Nervous murmurs burbled up from the throng. Calhoun waved for quiet, and the crowd hushed. “Why Earth? It has no strategic value. As a matter of fact, it’s completely surrounded by the Alliance. Why plant our flag there?”
“Because we can,” O’Brien quipped in his raspy Irish accent.
Picard nodded. “Exactly. It’s true: Earth presently has no strategic value—at least, none recognized by the Alliance. But it has great symbolic value, Captain Calhoun. First, by liberating the former homeworld of the Terrans, we give them cause to celebrate. Reason for hope. It might seem frivolous to you, but don’t underestimate its importance to a people enslaved. Second, by launching coordinated attacks on targets hundreds of light-years apart, we will be demonstrating to the Alliance—and all other powers in local space—that we possess the means and the will to project military force on a galactic scale.”
Anger gave Calhoun a fearsome aspect. “But at what cost? How many lives are we sacrificing by splitting our forces for two attacks? I think we should hit SoHcha with everything we’ve got, with overwhelming force.”
It was an argument for which K’Ehleyr had prepared Picard. “Tactics that seem obvious are sometimes wrong, Captain. We’ve conducted countless battle simulations in preparation for the attack on the shipyard. The fleet being deployed with General O’Brien is, we believe, of optimal size. A larger force will impede its own ability to maneuver at close range against the station. The result would be a sharp increase in friendly fire damage and casualties, and easier targeting for the Klingons.” He added with an ironic smile, “Bigger is not always better.”
Calhoun opened his mouth to respond, but his executive officer, Soleta, cut him off by muttering, “Don’t even say it.”
Picard lifted his eyes to take in the sea of faces, committing them to memory. “Not all of us will survive what comes tomorrow. But know this: If you should be among those who fall in the war to come, your names and your deeds will not be forgotten. This is no longer a humble resistance, no mere insurgency. For far too long, we have all lived in the darkness, alone in the night. But that time is coming to an end. We who have gathered here, hundreds of thousands of light-years from the nearest star, will be the agents of a new dawn.”
O’Brien turned and offered Calhoun his hand. “Good luck, Captain.”
Calhoun shook O’Brien’s hand and smiled. “Good hunting, General.”
In his best voice of authority, Picard said, “Man your ships!” The commanders dispersed, heading for the exits, and Picard watched them depart, wondering in pained silence how many of them he had just sent to their deaths.
Miles O’Brien returned to his stateroom aboard the Defiant in a contemplative mood, his thoughts burdened with grim anticipation of the mission upon which he and his crew were about to embark. As the door of his spartan quarters opened, he halted at the sight of Keiko. She had been pacing, but stopped and turned to face him as he stood in the doorway, regarding her as if she were a stranger.
She wrung her hands into a knot. “Hello, Miles.”
He was momentarily lost for words. “Keiko.”
“I apologize for dropping in unannounced.”
He couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. “What do you want?”
Her voice was tight with remorse. “I just wanted to see you. Before…” She gestured vaguely away, toward the unwritten future. “Just… before.”
“Well, you’ve seen me.” He stepped back and aside, then beckoned her out of his cabin. She looked shocked, hurt, and angry all at once.
“You won’t even talk to me?”
O’Brien stood with his jaw clenched shut, fighting the urge to let loose a torrent of rage that would do no one any good. He pulled one hand down over his rough-whiskered mouth and chin, buying time in which to master his fury before he spoke. “What for, Keiko?”
“It’s been weeks since we’ve seen each other.”
Noting some crewmen rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, O’Brien stepped inside his quarters and let the door close behind him to keep his conversation with Keiko private. “Not bloody long enough, in my opinion.”
“How many times can I say I’m sorry?”
He crossed his arms. “I’m not sure it matters.”
Stubborn as ever, she sat down on his bunk, uninvited. “Why not?”
A low growl rolled in his throat, a sound of pure vexation. This was not a conversation he wanted to have, and he resented that it was being forced upon him. “What can you possibly say to make me forget that you’ve been lying to me for two years? How can I forget all the lives that might’ve been saved if you’d told me the truth?”
Exasperated, she shot back, “You know why I couldn’t do that.”
“What? Because you were under orders? Is that supposed to excuse all the people you let die? All the people the other Ghemor murdered when she fragged Ashalla? All the folks who died when the Cardies took down Terok Nor?” He shook his head and looked away, fed up with her. “Makes me sick.”
Grief had a stranglehold on Keiko’s voice. “It makes me sick, too, Miles. Don’t you think I wanted to save all those people? You have no idea how many times I begged Memory Omega to speed up its timetable, to step in and help.”
“Fat lotta good it did.”
“Damn you.” She got up and faced off against him. “I made myself feel every one of those deaths, just like you did. I owned them, took responsibility for them. I won’t let you act like I’m some heartless bitch and you’re the patron saint of foot soldiers. I lost the same friends and cried at the same funerals you did, so don’t you dare lecture me about the lives I might’ve saved—because I know every one of them by name.”
O’Brien still couldn’t meet Keiko’s gaze, but now it was because he felt ashamed. He recalled those nights that the two of them had lain awake, sharing memories of friends and acquaintances lost in action, or vowing to erect memorials to the fallen someday when the war was over and they had made a life someplace safe. Those were sad but cherished memories, but they felt tainted now by Keiko’s deception, and as much as O’Brien wanted to ignore what he knew and live in the time that had been, he knew he was cursed like everyone else to live in the present.
“I don’t doubt that you mourn those people now every bit as much as you did then,” he said. “And I even believe you when you say you begged for Memory Omega to do something to help us. But that doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t tell us”—he corrected himself—“that you didn’t tell me.”
Keiko walked toward the door, and for a moment O’Brien thought she had surrendered her moral high ground. Then, as the door opened ahead of her, she stopped and looked back. “You know what it means to belong to something bigger than yourself. To fight for a cause that matters more than you do, and more than the people you love. Well, so do I, Miles. I was born into Memory Omega. I grew up in one of its secret bases. I was trained to be a field operative, to observe and report and not get involved. When I was sent to Terok Nor, I was just supposed to watch and listen. But after I met you, I couldn’t sit by and do nothing. Helping you, fighting at your side, risking my life with you—that was my choice, Miles. Even when Memory Omega told me not to, even when they told me to walk away, I didn’t, because I’d made my choice. You were my choice.
You still are.” She wiped a single tear from her cheek. “And you always will be.”
He turned away, shamed by his own misting eyes. He brusquely sleeved the tears from his cheeks, then looked back at her. “You know I still love you.”
“And I love you.” A sad smile made her all the more beautiful. “The question is, can you forgive me?”
“If we survive the attack on the shipyard… ask me again tomorrow.”
25
Nor Shall My Sword Sleep in My Hand
Despite the importance of the SoHcha Fleet Yards to the Empire’s war machine, they afforded no prestige to the officers and enlisted personnel who served there, much to the chagrin of their commandant, General Roka. Klingon culture glorified combat experience above all else, and it had little regard for the behind-the-lines technical expertise it took to make the Empire’s victories possible. Some days, Roka cursed whatever genetic quirk had gifted him with an aptitude for engineering rather than a talent for wielding a bat’leth or a knack for tactical planning, but his resentment was assuaged by the fact that he had been promoted into the only position in all of the Empire that permitted an engineer to attain the rank of general.
And with rank came privileges—not the least of which was the right to abuse one’s subordinates with absolute impunity.
“How did you get this posting, J’mek? Did you blackmail someone?” Roka flung a data slate at the lieutenant, who was so young he could barely sport a full beard on his trembling chin. “I asked for results, not excuses!”
J’mek fumbled the data slate, dropped it, then scrambled to pick it up and resume his at-attention stance in front of Roka’s desk. “Yes, General.”
“Yes, what? Fek’lhr’s beard, boy—say something useful!”
The flustered lieutenant stammered, “The, um, tests of the cloaking device are, um, scheduled to resume tomorrow after the power fluctuations are fixed.”
“Very well.” He shooed the junior officer away. “Out.”
Looking relieved, J’mek made a hasty retreat from Roka’s office. As the door slid closed, the general stood and turned to look out the wide viewport that dominated the bulkhead behind his desk. The block of transparent aluminum had a microscopic layer on its interior surface that acted as a polarizing filter, to cut the harsh glare reflecting off the facility’s numerous construction frames and the hulls of the starships being built around them. Though it would have been a necessary feature at nearly any orbital facility, it was especially critical at the SoHcha Fleet Yards, which had been constructed in relatively close orbit of its namesake star in order to draw upon its nigh-endless reserves of raw solar energy.
Just two more years and then I can retire, he reminded himself. The Klingon ideal of dying heroically in battle had never held any appeal for Roka, since the warriors had never seemed to have much regard for him. Freed of the illusion that he was destined for a place in Sto-Vo-Kor, he had dared to plan a very different kind of future. Though the Empire had little use for privatized industry, the Cardassians respected an individual’s right to profit from dealing with the military. For the better part of the last decade, Roka had been planning a post-military career as a defense contractor inside the Cardassian Union. Though the recent troubles inside the Union had given him a moment of concern, Damar seemed to have restored order in a relatively expeditious manner, reviving Roka’s confidence that he could enjoy a stable and reasonably affluent life on a Cardassian world.
He considered it a shame that he couldn’t take the cloaking research with him when he left. The capture of the Romulan device, which had been far more advanced than anything the Klingons had possessed up to that point, had launched a flurry of analysis, reverse-engineering, and new developments. Design plans for entire fleets had been scrapped so that their spaceframes and warp geometries could be optimized to work with the new cloaking systems. And to ensure that the Romulans didn’t make another quantum leap in the science of stealth before the Klingon Empire deployed its adaptation of their stolen cloak, an elite force had unleashed a thalaron weapon on Romulus, incinerating the homeworld and capital and transforming the few Romulans who survived the calamity into nomads.
Somewhere in the dark corners of Roka’s imagination, he concocted the beginning of a plan to smuggle a copy of the cloak’s schematics with him to Cardassia—and then a proximity alarm jolted him back into the moment. He spun and hurried out of his office into the command center just outside. Harsh white lights had snapped on, which meant the facility was at full alert. Moving into the center of the room, Roka barked, “Lankar! Report!”
His executive officer was hunched over the tactical display, apparently having shouldered aside the junior officer who normally manned the post. “Severe gravimetric disturbance, General!”
“Charge perimeter defenses,” Roka ordered. “Arm all weapons and stand by to relay target coordinates to our patrol fleet!” He moved closer to Lankar. “What’s causing that disturbance, Commander?”
“Unknown,” Lankar said, his attention fixed on his console. “Distortion increasing, bearing five-eight mark nine. Range eighteen-point-four qelIqams!”
From a nearby weapons station, J’mek exclaimed, “That’s inside the defense grid!”
“On-screen,” Roka snapped, turning toward the main viewer. As the image switched to a view of the shipyard, the general’s jaw slowly went slack. A wormhole spiraled open like a fiery blue flower unfurling in the night, and a fleet of ships raced from its mouth, weapons blazing. The command center quaked as one blast after another hammered its shields. Roka recognized a handful of the ships’ designs, but several that led the attack were of a type he had never seen before. Reasoning he would identify them after they were dead, he shouted, “Return fire! Tell our fleet to engage and destroy!”
Disruptor blasts and torpedoes, fired from weapons platforms spread across the shipyard, converged on the enemy ships. Several were vaporized instantly, and others peeled off, burning and crippled. The ones that Roka didn’t recognize, however, weathered the tempest of fire with ease. One barrage after another flared against those vessels’ shields but did nothing to slow their advance.
An explosion ripped through the command center, peppering Roka, J’mek, and Lankar with shrapnel. The general collapsed to the deck with a white-hot chunk of twisted duranium protruding from his gut. He clutched impotently at the wound, unable to touch the burning-hot metal even as it seared his organs and cooked the skin of his abdomen black.
J’mek lay just out of arm’s reach from Roka. The lieutenant pressed his hands to his ravaged, bloody face. Roka feared that the wet, gurgling noise coming from the young engineer’s throat was a scream with no larynx to give it voice.
Lankar clawed his way to his knees and clung with fierce pride to his failing console. “Critical hits, sir,” he said. “Shields gone. Targeting sensors offline.”
“Order gunners to use manual targeting,” Roka said, choking out the words between agonized grunts. “Send all logs to the High Command, now.”
“Transmitting,” Lankar said, hanging on to his station with one hand and entering commands with the other. “The enemy is blocking our comms.” Another thunderous concussion rocked the command center, knocking out the white action lights. Emergency lights activated, suffusing the center with the sickly green glow of chemical illumination. “Main power hub destroyed,” Lankar said.
Roka watched the main viewscreen, horrified, as the shipyard’s primary power-collection facility plunged toward the star that had fueled it. He knew that when it reached the corona, it would trigger a gargantuan stellar-mass ejection. For a moment he hoped he might at least have the satisfaction of knowing his killers would perish with him. Then he saw a new wormhole open, and the surviving enemy vessels vanished into it, abandoning the SoHcha facility to its fate. Roka wanted nothing more than to curse them as they fled, but his mouth was filling with blood welling up from his esophagus.
As the wormhole twisted shut and vanished, a
blinding flash on the surface of the star served as the portent of Roka’s imminent demise. He spat the blood from his mouth and laughed. “A warrior’s death, after all,” he spluttered. He grinned at Lankar. “I’ll see you in Sto-Vo-Kor.”
A moment later his world turned white, and his prediction came true.
It had been nearly a decade since Worf, the former regent, had exiled Miral to Earth for rejecting his crude advances. He had disguised Miral’s banishment as a promotion by appointing her Intendant of Earth, a title of honor on most worlds in the Alliance. Earth, however, was a useless rock, a low-value Klingon possession long since stripped of precious elements. Its chief export now was cheap human slaves, culled from the few native survivors of the Alliance’s conquest of their homeworld decades earlier.
Miral, however, had been shrewd enough not to let on that she viewed her so-called punishment as a gift. The reason Worf had sent her to Earth, of all places, was because he had mistakenly believed he could embarrass her by calling attention to her sexual fetish for human men. From her point of view, he had simply granted her the one thing she desired more than anything: an endless supply of male human slaves to feed her insatiable appetite.
Stretched out on the massage table in her solarium, she had everything she had ever wanted. Two buff, young human men—one golden brown with raven hair, the other pale and blond, both shirtless—to massage her, one on each side. Another beautiful young man, barely old enough to no longer be a boy, his skin dark like raktajino and his head shaved smooth as glass, fetched Miral’s drinks and served her meals. At night, she enjoyed her most exotic specimens of human manhood: One was as tall, broad, and muscled as a Klingon, with hair the color of fire and a ruddy complexion; the other was effeminate and slender, his body nearly hairless even though he had flowing brown tresses to rival Miral’s own. When Miral wanted a challenge, a bit of exercise, she used the ginger male; the be’HomloD she reserved for nights when she wanted to be pampered and adored.
