by David Mack
New waves of fear rolled through Ezri’s thoughts, but she refused to let them control her. She pursed her lips and nodded to show she understood.
Moments later, the team of medics surrounded her table. While the nurses and technicians monitored her vital signs, one of the surgeons began making an ultrafine incision just below her solar plexus. Ezri’s eyes were locked on the ruby-red beam that was slicing her open until the second surgeon stepped into the circle, holding the viscera-slicked vermiform symbiont in his hands. Despite the mask over his mouth and nose, she could tell that he was smiling.
“Ezri,” he said, “meet Dax.”
July 2379
38
An Epitaph to War
Captain Picard stepped out of his ready room and let the hum and chatter of orderly activity on the Enterprise’s bridge wash over him. Over the past several months of peacetime service, he had learned to enjoy the patterns and rhythms of daily life on a crowded starship. It had been a difficult adjustment for him at first, after a lifetime spent traveling and living in solitude, but the experience had begun to grow on him once the additional stresses of life during wartime had been removed from the equation.
As he moved toward his chair, Troi stepped away from the forward operations console to walk beside him. Her black-and-gray uniform flattered her. “We just got news from Deneva,” she said. “Our government finally has a name.”
He settled into his chair, cocked his left eyebrow, and teased her with a smile. “And…? Don’t keep me in suspense, Deanna.”
“The Galactic Commonwealth. It passed by a majority vote this morning.”
Picard repeated the name under his breath, then approved it with a half nod. “I like it. Describing itself as galactic might seem a bit self-aggrandizing, but one has to respect the ambition in it.”
Troi folded her arms and struck a haughty pose. “I just like that they omitted the word Terran from the name.”
“Well, that seems only fair, wouldn’t you agree? After all, it wasn’t just Terrans who fought to make this new order. It belongs to all of us—and the whole idea is to share it with anyone who wants to join.”
The half-Betazoid woman stifled a chuckle. “If you say so. I think it’s more important that they chose to start from scratch. A clean slate never hurts.”
“Very true,” Picard said. “In fact…” He was about to underscore the point by regaling Deanna with one of his examples from ancient Iconian lore when the turbolift door swished open, and Reg Barclay stepped out.
Barclay swiveled his head like a predator on the open plain, froze when he spotted Troi, and smiled. The pair hurried to greet each other with a quick kiss that Picard imagined they thought was discreet but which had been noted with varying degrees of disquietude and amusement by the rest of the bridge crew.
Taking Troi’s hand, Barclay asked, “Busy?”
“No more than usual. Why?” Troi suddenly beamed with delight, apparently having read good news from her paramour’s surface thoughts. “You finished it?”
“Just this morning,” Barclay said. “Cargo Bay Six is fully converted.”
“So now it’s a…” She came up short of a word. “What did you call it?”
“A holodeck. Just like we had in the Genesis Cave, but a lot smaller.”
Troi seemed positively giddy at the news. Struggling to put on a professional demeanor, she looked over her shoulder at Picard. “Excuse me, Captain? Would it be all right if I finished my shift a few minutes early today?”
“Go,” Picard said, eager to have the fawning couple off his bridge. “Please. Lieutenant ch’Sallas, take over at Commander Troi’s station.” As the Andorian junior officer stepped in to relieve Troi, she and Barclay headed for the turbolift.
Picard picked up a data slate and pretended to ignore the departing couple while he reviewed the Enterprise’s latest orders from its new civilian government: a six-week patrol of the Neutral Zone, followed by an autonomous, one-year exploration mission that he could hardly wait to begin.
Once the lift doors closed, K’Ehleyr sidled up to Picard’s chair. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to let the chief engineer date the chief of security?”
“I don’t care whether it is or not. I’m just pleased to see Deanna so happy.”
K’Ehleyr sat down in her own chair, leaned toward Picard, and cracked a sardonic smile. “I’m kidding. Frankly, I’m relieved he finally found someone to moon over besides me. I was getting tired of having a pet.”
“We all have our crosses to bear, Number One.”
The half-Klingon first officer scrunched her face in disapproval. “I’m sorry—what did you call me?”
Picard set down the data slate and responded with a jovial, sidelong glance. “I called you ‘Number One.’ It’s a term from ancient Terran naval practice. It was used by captains as a nickname for trusted first officers.”
She cocked an eyebrow at Picard’s slyly implied compliment, then played it off as if it were no big deal, in case any of the bridge crew was eavesdropping, which they all very likely were. “If it makes you happy,” she said with a coy smile.
He took a moment to appreciate the turn his life had taken, and couldn’t help but smile back. “Yes,” he said, “I think it does.”
January 2380
39
People of Hope
Sevok was only a child when the Cardassians invaded Vulcan, took him from his family, and made him a slave. Today he is a man of middle years standing on the surface of a world he has not seen in over eight decades.
The wind is rich with the clean scent of the deep desert as it moans and shaves the crests off sand dunes, along the outskirts of a heap of rubble once called ShiKahr. On either side of Sevok, lines of repatriated Vulcans stand mute, holding a silent vigil in remembrance of their ancestors who died here to protect the promise carried off-world by Spock’s army of sleepers.
Though it is not the Vulcan way to indulge in emotion, they have become a people of hope. Other liberated species of the Commonwealth have pledged to help the Vulcans rebuild their world. Even the Terrans and the Andorians, who both lost so much more, have sworn oaths to see the world of Surak restored.
It will be a long time, Sevok knows, before those oaths can be called fulfilled. He expects that it will not be accomplished in his lifetime, but he has reason to think this generation’s heirs will see it achieved. That thought gives him pause, during which he collects himself to prevent an unseemly show of grief. He has come home, but his mate and children have not. They were caught up in the Cardassians’ great Purge, rounded up and put to death before Sevok could ferry them off Chin’toka II to safety. When the time comes, he will see their names inscribed on memory stones in his city’s main square—along with tens of millions of other sons and daughters of Vulcan who perished in the Alliance’s holocaust.
He finds no solace in knowing he is not alone in his grief. If anything, it leaves him with no one from whom to seek condolence. On a world where all are in mourning, no one remains to give comfort.
Eager to put his sorrows behind him, he steps out of line and begins the trek toward the fallen city of his forefathers. There is work to be done.
L’Tal is only a child, just shy of turning seven, but she is old enough to sense that she is in the middle of something important. The sun is setting, and the red sky has become a dark shade of purple. Her mother, Sakara, holds her hand and leads her through a city she says is called Vulcana Regar.
Most of what L’Tal can see of the city has been half-buried by the desert’s creeping sands. Wild animals roam freely through narrow vales that Sakara insists were streets. A fierce, growling roar echoes from somewhere close by, and L’Tal can see that it makes all the adults around her nervous. “That was the cry of a le-matya,” her mother says. “It is a very dangerous creature.”
Sakara leads L’Tal inside a low building, and the other dozen or so members of their group follow them inside. A pair of men and two adoles
cent boys begin gathering stones and other heavy objects to barricade the entrance. Sakara and three other women retrieve food and water from their backpacks.
“It is time to rest,” Sakara tells L’Tal.
After dark, the air grows cold, and howling winds hurl sand through cracks in the walls and gaps in the makeshift barrier. Soon the refugees and all they own are coated in dust the color of curry. Outside, the night is alive with animal cries that will haunt L’Tal’s dreams.
Dawn comes all too soon, and L’Tal is bleary-eyed as the men dismantle the barricade and lead the group back out into the sun-bleached ruins of Vulcana Regar. L’Tal sees other groups of Vulcans emerge from other buildings in the distance. Confused, she looks up at her mother. “Where do we go now?”
“Nowhere,” Sakara says. “Now we rebuild.” She reaches out and gently strokes L’Tal’s straight black hair. “This is our home, now.”
Vulcan’s Forge at midday is an anvil of fire, and the blazing orb of Nevasa is the hammer, striking down the weak and ill-prepared who dare to pit themselves against the Forge’s power. Robed-and-hooded Vulcans trudge slowly through a desert canyon, following their leader, Sarok. Even by Vulcan standards the heat of the Forge is extreme, but Sarok masters his discomfort, for he knows it is only an illusion of the mind. That is a core teaching of Surak, whose aeons-old wisdom is preserved inside the minds and memories of Sarok and his fellow disciples of the Seleyan Order.
As they follow a hand-drawn map to their destination, Sarok silently laments the loss of the Temple at Mount Seleya. As significant as the site is, it will not be possible to rebuild there. The Alliance was quite thorough in its devastation. Nearly a century after their barbaric ravaging, the planet lies in ruins. Its cities are broken into rubble, its most revered monuments and landmarks have been vaporized or defiled, and many of its greatest natural wonders have been blasted sterile. It will take several generations to rebuild.
The scope of the challenge does not daunt the Vulcans. They are a patient people. And so the work to reclaim their planet begins.
Sarok and his fellow disciples have made the arduous journey into the Forge to do their part for Vulcan’s future. In this nightmarish place, where constant geomagnetic distortions and electrically charged sandstorms wreak havoc with sensors and navigational devices of all kinds, the safest method of travel is on foot—with safe being a relative term. No one comes here without a compelling reason. Many people Sarok knows will not make this journey for any purpose. For Sarok and the others, this trek is a long-overdue kahs-wan—a coming-of-age ceremony, a threshold moment in their passage to adulthood and independence.
A swift and terrible darkness blots out the horizon ahead. Lightning flashes, green and angry, inside the fast-moving sandstorm. Sarok knows they must hurry and reach their destination before the storm hits. Pain is an illusion, but the damage inflicted by Vulcan sandstorms is not. Without wasting precious breath on spoken orders, he starts running, sprinting over the rocky ground, trusting his native Vulcan stamina and years spent as a manual laborer in a Klingon-run dilithium mine to carry him through the deadly swelter to safety.
The canyon echoes with the rapid patter of running feet, assuring him that his fellow disciples are keeping pace with him. Overhead, the radiant, cinnamon-hued sky dims as the sandstorm begins to engulf them. Forks of viridescent electricity light up the soot-black clouds of volcanic ash, and a thunderstroke splits the air and rains a flurry of loose rocks down upon them from the cliffs above.
Rounding a bend in the canyon, they see their safe haven a short distance ahead, an ancient temple hewn from the rock: the T’Karath Sanctuary. Sarok reaches it first and beckons the others to hurry as the storm scours them. He counts the number of people who pass by him, and when he is sure that all are inside, he calls out over the wind noise to two of the adepts, “Tovar! Kaleris! Seal the entry!”
The young Vulcans hurry back to Sarok with portable force field generators, and they set them to create overlapping fields that will shield the interior of the sanctuary from the storm. Satisfied that they are secure, Sarok pulls back his hood, and the others in his entourage do the same.
Compared to the Seleyan leaders of ages past, they are all too young. Some, such as T’Eama and Kalok, would once have been barely old enough to qualify as adepts. Tovar and Kaleris are only novices, but so few initiates had survived the Exile that they all are needed now to lay the foundation for a new beginning. Of those gathered there with Sarok, his only peers in age and experience are Sturek and T’Ren. He motions for them to accompany him to the lower sanctum.
As they descend the carved-stone stairs into hand-cut tunnels beneath the sanctuary, no one speaks. They know why they have come.
In the deepest recesses of the sanctuary, they find the sepulcher wall. It is intact and untouched, exactly as their predecessors had hoped.
Contrary to the annals of history, the elders of Mount Seleya did not perish in fire with their secrets. All but a small handful had long since vanished into other identities by the time the Alliance came. In their place, they had left behind willing impostors, pawns to be sacrificed in Emperor Spock’s epic game of galactic chess. Memory Omega preserved written copies of the ancient texts, and even a few of the original documents. The old knowledge perseveres and has been brought home to Vulcan to guide the reconstruction of the people’s cultural identity. Safe in the minds of Seleya’s few remaining acolytes are the arcane mysteries of fal-tor-pan and the Kolinahr.
Now all that remains is for Sarok and his peers to ensure that Vulcan’s greatest treasure has survived its long abandonment in the desert. With care, he and T’Ren and Sturek press the symbols in a sequence only they know, thereby retracting the massive, internal dead bolts that hold the sepulcher wall in place. The final bolt withdraws with a heavy scrape.
The trio step back as the wall sinks into the floor, revealing a secret for which tens of thousands of Vulcans have laid down their lives since it was smuggled, piece by piece, from the Halls of Ancient Thought at Mount Seleya: the vast trove of katric arks, representing millennia of preserved Vulcan memories and personal essences, the single most sacred charge of the Seleyan Order.
Sarok dares to let his fingertip brush one ark, and it glows with ancient power. “The wisdom of Surak taught us to create these arks,” he says, his voice resonating deeply off the dusty stone walls, floor, and ceiling. “The wisdom of Spock enabled us to save them. Hallowed be Spock’s name.”
T’Ren and Sturek reply in unison.
“Hallowed be Spock’s name.”
2381
40
Peaceable Kingdom
History must never glorify me,” said the enormous holographic projection of Spock’s careworn face, which hovered like an angry god above the members of the Commonwealth Assembly. “Do not applaud me because I claimed to have noble motives. Do not venerate me if one day my plan should come to fruition. Instead, remember me for who and what I really am: a villain.”
The recorded message ended, and the ghostly visage of Spock vanished, leaving behind an uneasy silence in the amphitheater-style meeting chamber.
And then Bera chim Gleer, the Tellarite delegate, ruined it, in Michael Eddington’s opinion, by standing up and speaking as if he knew what the hell he was talking about. “While I don’t deny that was a very moving speech, I think we should keep in mind the context in which it—”
On the main dais, Eddington stood and banged his gavel, halting Gleer’s tirade before it could pick up steam. “Point of order, Delegate Gleer. Parliamentary procedure requires you to receive the recognition of the Chair before speaking.”
“May I be so recognized, Mister Chairman?”
“No. Sit down.” Eddington’s rebuke provoked gales of laughter throughout the assembly, and he rapped his gavel once more to quash the frivolity. “That’s enough. This message from the late Emperor Spock was not presented today by coincidence. It was shown here on this, the second anniversary of the
ratification of the Tripartite Armistice, at the request of our benefactors, Memory Omega. It’s important that we remember how far we’ve come—and that we work together to make certain we never repeat the mistakes of the past.
“Spock’s warning to us is clear. We have to be vigilant against those who would seek to divide us, to turn us against one another. Even more important, we can’t let one person seize all the power. Our government—our civilization—belongs to all of us. It needs to serve all of us, not just our strongest or most privileged. All our people, every last individual, have a right to equal treatment under the law. And we must never forget that as the elected agents of our people, we are here to serve them—not the other way around.”
As Eddington permitted himself the briefest pause to draw a breath, the Andorian delegate stood. Realizing he could not stall discussion forever, he set down his gavel. “Delegate zh’Faila of Andoria is recognized for five minutes.”
“Thank you, Mister Chairman,” said the regally dignified Andorian zhen. “If I might be so bold as to presume to distill your message to its essence?” She looked at Eddington, who nodded his assent. “I believe that what Spock and you wish us to understand is that evil is a choice. Our ancestors embraced evil because it was the easier path—but in the end it led them to destruction. Rejecting evil is the far more difficult road to follow, but it is the one we must choose together.” She favored him with an almost imperceptible nod. “I yield.”
Eddington stood and reclaimed his place at the lectern. “The delegate yields the balance of her time.” Min Zife stood, and Eddington nodded to the softly spoken, bald, blue gentleman. “Delegate Zife of Bolarus is recognized for five minutes.”
“If it please the Assembly, I would like to open a discussion regarding Resolution Four-Nineteen, which deals with the allocation of terraforming resources among the worlds of the Commonwealth. While the people of Bolarus recognize that worlds such as Vulcan and Earth have more urgent need of these technologies than do Bolarus or other member planets, we feel that the apportionment of atmosphere-processing hardware has been disproportionately weighted to those two planets, to the detriment of their Commonwealth partners. If you’ll all please refer to the presentation I’ve uploaded to the comnet…”
