Lesser Evil

by Robert Simpson

  The Celestial Temple? The parasites couldn’t possibly pose a threat to the Prophets. Could they? “With such big plans, seems like you’re wasting a lot of effort going after Trill.” Kira peered over the balcony for some sign of Montenegro on the lower level. Nothing.

  “You still don’t get it, Colonel. You think the symbionts of Trill are benign little creatures sharing their intellectual immortality with the meat species on their planet. But believe me, they’re even more dangerous to your kind than we are.”

  “How?” Kira asked, her eyes tracing the path she’d taken to the ladder.

  She felt a breath in her ear….

  “Boo,” Montenegro said.

  Kira reacted instantly and swung the butt of her rifle with all her might against Montenegro’s ribs. She felt a crunch, but Gryphon’ s first officer didn’t even flinch. Instead, he grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off the balcony with one hand, tore the phaser rifle away with the other, and threw her over the railing.

  Ingoring the choking pain in her windpipe, Kira tried to control her fall, landing hard but rolling in time to avoid a bone-breaking impact. She looked up.

  With inhuman strength, Montenegro swung the phaser rifle against the balcony railing and the weapon shattered. Fragments showered her. Montenegro held on to the jagged remains of the rifle and leaped down effortlessly, landing on both feet in front of her. He showed her the pointed shard of metal he held and smiled.

  Kira charged at Montenegro and started flailing him with her fists, each blow a direct hit to his face as she pummeled him repeatedly, left, right, left, and left again. Montenegro staggered back, making no move to deflect the blows, his head snapping back with each punch. At one point Kira felt bone cracking, but wasn’t sure if it was her opponent’s cheek or her hand. Feeling the strength in her arms starting to ebb, Kira pivoted on one leg and landed a devastating kick into Montenegro’s chest with the other, knocking him back against a bulkhead.

  Kira bent, hands on knees, panting as she waited for her enemy to fall to the deck. Instead, Montenegro stood up straight, flexed his neck, and said, “My turn.”

  Faster than she would have thought possible, he jumped up and spin-kicked her against the warp core. Her back hit the guard rail hard, and for a moment she found it difficult to breathe. Montenegro strode toward her without haste and kicked her legs out from under her. She was flat on her back when he suddenly reached down and grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling her up to one knee. He forced her to look up at him, once again waving the shard of her phaser rifle above her.

  Defeated, Kira’s hands fell to her sides.

  “Now, I want you to tell me something, Colonel,” Montenegro said.

  Kira’s fingers found her boot.

  “Now that you have some small indication here at the end of your stupid, brainless little life about what you’re facing, do you really think any Bajoran has even the slightest chance against my kind?”

  Her hand found Captain Mello’s hand phaser.

  “Why don’t you ask Shakaar?” Kira whispered as she brought up the weapon and fired.

  Montenegro caught the beam point-blank in the face. His head pitched back, followed by his body. His tensing hand yanked out a clump of her hair as he fell back, landing in a heap on the deck in front of the warp core.

  Kira climbed to her feet and walked around the body, wanting to be certain he was dead. The beam should have taken his head off, but it didn’t, though most of Montenegro’s hair had been singed away.

  Then his jaw moved.

  Kira staggered back, expecting him to get up and attack her again at any second. Instead, something came out of Montenegro’s mouth.

  Led by a pair of oversize pincers, a clawed, six-legged creature small enough to fit in Kira’s hand slowly emerged on a trail of blood. Its pincers felt the air searchingly before it suddenly scurried toward Kira.

  Kira waited until the thing was half a meter away, then raised her foot and brought her heel down with enough force for the impact to echo through the engine room, sending a jolt of pain up her leg. She scarcely noticed, and proceeded to scrape off the smashed remains of the parasite against the lip of the warp-core base.

  Kira then went to the master systems display and attempted to power down the engines. She tried once. Twice. Three times.

  “Kira to bridge. Montenegro is dead, but whatever he’s done to the engines, I can’t stop it. Warp power is unchanged.”

  “We see it, Commander,” Spillane said. “Can you return helm control to the bridge?”

  “Stand by,” Kira said. She searched the maze of Montenegro’s reconfigured engineering console and found the manual override for helm and navigation. It was a search of only a few seconds to find the cancelation command. “Computer, this is Commander Kira. Transfer flight control to the bridge.”

  “Transfer executed.”

  “That did it, Commander! We can change course—oh, no…”

  “What is it?” Kira demanded, an instant before the ship shook beneath her.

  “Three Federation starships on attack vectors,” Spillane said. “They’re ordering us to lower shields and power down, or be destroyed.”

  Akaar, Kira thought. Those have to be the ships that Mello mentioned. He probably ordered the attack if Gryphon got beyond a certain point without contact. Kira searched the board once more, cursed, and started out of engineering. “Take evasive action. I’m coming up.”

  “Sir, communications—”

  “Are not an option,” Kira said as she searched the corridor for the turbolift. “He slagged both the subspace and RF transmitters. We’re mute. We’ll have to figure something else out. Bridge,” she told the elevator.

  Kira stepped onto the bridge to find the Gryphon officers glued to their seats. Spillane noted her arrival and stood up from the command chair. Without thinking about it, Kira settled into the center seat. The Gryphon shook again.

  “They’re targeting our after shields,” Spillane reported.

  “Show me a tactical display,” Kira ordered.

  A strategic overlay suddenly superimposed the starfield on the viewscreen. Their attackers were the Nebula-class T’Kumbra, along with the Sagittarius and the Polaris, both Norway-class starships. From the look of things, the two Norways were in pursuit, closing in from behind and below. Up ahead and above them, T’Kumbra was swooping down to intercept. They’d make very short work of the Gryphon, unless Kira tried to fight it out. But as far as she was concerned, firing on another Federation starship was not an option.

  “T’Kumbra…” Kira murmured, thinking.

  “Incoming fire!” Spillane announced. “Hang on!”

  Kira grabbed the armrests of the captain’s chair as the ship rocked again.

  “Shields reduced to forty percent,” Bhatnagar said. “Sir, what are your orders?”

  “Captain Solok still commands the T’Kumbra, doesn’t he?” Kira asked the room urgently.

  It was Xiang who answered. “I believe so, yes.”

  Solok, Kira thought. Abrasive, arrogant Academy classmate of Captain Sisko. Solok was so certain of the innate superiority of Vulcans over humans and most other Alpha Quadrant humanoids that he’d once challenged Benjamin to a game of baseball during a quiet moment in the middle of the Dominion war. Kira had played on Sisko’s team, and they had lost spectacularly, but nevertheless claimed a victory by simply taking joy in playing the game—something the Vulcans would never do.

  “You are attempting to manufacture a triumph where none exists,” Solok had said.

  Kira smiled. All right, Solok, let’s see if you remember….

  “We need to communicate with the T’Kumbra,” Kira said.

  “But, sir,” said Croth. “You said yourself that the transmitters were destroyed….”

  “We need to send Captain Solok a message,” Kira insisted, “something he’ll know immediately is from me so he’ll order the task force to stand down. I need an alternative to conventional communi
cations.”

  Croth considered. “We could tap out a message using the running lights on the hull,” he suggested.

  “No good,” Kira said. “It might take them too long to notice, assuming they noticed at all. We need to get Solok’s attention immediately.” An idea occurred to her. “What if we used the phasers?”

  “Sir,” Spillane said, “if we start using the phasers now, the task force almost certainly won’t hesitate to use deadly force against us.”

  The ship rocked again. Bhatnagar reported shields were down to fifteen percent.

  “I don’t think they’ve been pulling their punches up to now, Lieutenant. Reconfigure the aft phasers to one one-hundredth power and fire short bursts away from those ships. We want to tap out a message in Starfleet’s most basic code.”

  Spillane nodded, working her console. “I can do that, but it better be damn short, sir.”

  “Just two words: Manufactured triumph.”

  The other officers looked at each other. Kira realized she must have sounded as if she were out of her mind. Fortunately, they all knew they had no time to argue with her.

  “Firing phasers,” Spillane said. Her hand danced rhythmically on her control interface. On the viewscreen the phaser beams flashed in perfect synch with Spillane’s taps, firing harmlessly into the void.

  Another blast shook the bridge. “Shields are gone,” Bhatnagar announced, and Kira knew she had failed.

  “Sir,” Croth said suddenly. “T’Kumbra is matching course and velocities alongside us. Sagittarius and Polaris are doing likewise above and below.”

  Kira rose from her chair and stared at the viewscreen, now showing an image of the Nebula-class ship. “Any new transmissions?” Kira asked.

  Croth studied his console and shook his head. “Negative. However, their torpedo tubes are open and loaded.”

  Kira held her breath, waiting. Come on, Solok, put it together….

  Seconds went by in silence. Then the sound of transporter beams filled the bridge, and six columns of light solidified into the forms of a half-dozen armed Vulcans in Starfleet uniforms, standing in front of the view-screen. Solok was among them. His eyes found Kira, who stood in the middle of the bridge, and he raised an eyebrow. “Colonel Kira. Permission to come aboard.”

  Kira almost laughed. “Granted, Captain. Thanks for dropping in. We could use some help getting the Gryphon back under control.”

  Solok put his people to work with the Gryphon’ s crew, then turned his attention back to Kira. “Captain Mello?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Kira reported. “Killed by her first officer, who engineered this mess to begin with and who is also dead.”

  Solok simply nodded. “You took quite a risk, gambling that I would grasp the meaning of your phaser barrage.”

  “Not really,” Kira said evenly. “I had nothing to lose.”

  “And what would you have done if you had faced a different starship captain?”

  Kira arched an eyebrow at him. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “Indeed,” Solok said. “I’m beginning to believe I may have much to learn from further study of manufactured triumphs.”

  “Good luck with that,” Kira replied. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find as good a teacher as the one I had.”

  Twenty-six hours later, with the help of T’Kumbra’ s engineers, Gryphon was restored to full functionality. Sagittarius and Polaris had recovered all of Gryphon’ s escape pods with no fatalities, and reunited them with their mothership. Kira bowed out of leading the memorial services for Captain Mello and Commander Montenegro, allowing those of Gryphon’ s officers who knew them best to eulogize them, while she stood among the crew, mourning as one of many.

  When the services were over, Kira returned to the bridge as the ship prepared to get under way for its return voyage to Deep Space 9. Once back at the station, she would relinquish command. This wasn’t over by a long shot, she knew. But at least they’d saved Trill.

  “Message coming in, Commander,” Spillane reported from tactical. “It’s from a Trill military transport, approaching us on an intercept course.”

  Kira looked toward the viewer. “On screen.”

  The starfield was replaced by the face of large male Trill with white hair and deep frown lines mingling with the dark spots that ran down either side of his face. “Colonel Kira,” he began. “I’m General Taulin Cyl of the Trill Defense Ministry. I request permission to come aboard.”

  Kira’s eyes narrowed. “May I assume this is about the assassination of First Minister Shakaar?”

  “It’s about much more than that, Colonel,” General Cyl said. “I’m aware of what you’ve been through during the past few days. And you deserve to know the truth—you need to know the truth, so we can work together to face what’s coming.”

  “Which is what, precisely?” Kira asked.

  “The parasites are waging a war, Colonel. And regardless of what you may think, it isn’t a war for power. It’s a war of revenge.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against the symbionts,” Cyl explained. “Humanoids are not the targets of the parasites’ war, and we never were. We’re the battlefield.”

  Epilogue

  “Wormhole in one hour, sir,” Bowers said. “Still no response from the station.”

  “The relay might be malfunctioning,” Dax said, standing at Vaughn’s shoulder.

  Vaughn nodded. “Let’s hope that’s all it is.” Four months ago, in preparation for their mission, Defiant and her crew had deployed a subspace relay at the Gamma terminus of the wormhole in order to make communications practical between the Alpha Quadrant and the Gamma Quadrant. During the last few days, however, ever since Vaughn had lifted the comm blackout, there had been no word from the station, and no indication that Defiant’s own attempts at communications were being received.

  So this is it, Vaughn thought. I began this mission with such hopes, with so much exuberance, with a ship and crew ready to take on new challenges in the unknown. Now I end it feeling more battered and weary than I did before I encountered that Orb in the Badlands. Why? Why reunite me with my daughter only so we’d be driven apart? Why guide me here only to make me face the same choice? Why did Ruriko have to die again?

  “Captain.”

  Vaughn turned in the center seat. There was something in Shar’s voice that demanded immediate attention. “Ensign?”

  “Sir, I’m conducting long-range scans of the space surrounding the wormhole,” Shar began. “I had thought to determine the status of the relay…”

  “Yes, Ensign?”

  “Captain, the relay is gone.”

  Shar’s words were like a knife in the gut. Before the Dominion war, the first automated relay that personnel from Deep Space 9 had deployed in the Gamma Quadrant had been destroyed by the Dominion—a prelude to the years of conflict that followed. “Was it destroyed?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe it was, but—”

  “But what, Shar?”

  “Sir,” Shar said, uncharacteristically flummoxed by something. “My scans are showing that the space around the wormhole has been altered since we were last here.”

  Everyone turned to look at Shar.

  “Altered how?” Dax asked.

  “If these readings are correct,” Shar said, “the wormhole now opens within the Idran system.”

  “Idran?” Vaughn said. Idran was a blue dwarf star of eight uninhabited planets and, Vaughn knew, at a distance of three light-years, was the nearest Gamma Quadrant system to the wormhole. “Are you telling me the wormhole has moved?”

  “Not at all, sir,” Shar said. “The system has.”

  Vaughn stared at his science officer for a moment, almost ready to accuse Shar of making an exceedingly poor joke. But, of course, Shar seldom joked about anything, and certainly not about something like this.

  Vaughn exchanged a look with Dax, who joined Shar at his station to examine the readings herself. “My God,” he heard her whisp
er. “This is unbelievable.” Dax looked back at Vaughn. “According to this—”

  “Captain!” Bowers said suddenly. “Contact bearing zero-four-zero mark nine. Distance three hundred million kilometers and closing fast. It’s a Dominion ship.”

  “Red alert,” Vaughn said at once. “Give me a visual, Mr. Bowers.”

  On the viewscreen the menacing insectile form of a Jem’Hadar attack ship grew as it approached the Defiant.

  “Hail them, Sam,” Vaughn said.

  “Sir, they’re hailing us,” Bowers said. “And slowing to impulse.”

  Curiouser and curiouser. “Take us out of warp, Ensign Lankford. Sam…on screen.”

  The Jem’Hadar ship was replaced by a view of its bridge, where a Vorta wearing the monocular headset the Dominion employed in lieu of viewscreens smiled pleasantly at Vaughn. “Greetings, Defiant,” the Vorta said. “I trust your little sojourn went well. To whom have I the pleasure of speaking?”

  “I’m Commander Elias Vaughn, captain of this vessel. And you would be…?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Dax muttered, reacting to the Vorta. “Weyoun!”

  Weyoun? Vaughn thought. He remembered the name. Weyoun was one of the key figures among the Dominion forces stationed in the Alpha Quadrant during the war.

  “Lieutenant Dax,” Weyoun beamed, his buttery voice oozing affection. “How nice it is to see you again.”

  “I wish I could return the compliment,” Dax said. “I thought the Weyouns were extinct.” Like the Jem’Hadar, the Vorta were an engineered species, but one whose members enjoyed a kind of immortality in which memories were recorded and encoded into new clones upon death. At least, as long as the Vorta continued to be useful. Weyoun himself had died several times while in the Alpha Quadrant, only to be replaced by a cloned successor each time. But by all accounts, after the Vorta cloning facilities on Rondac III were destroyed, the last Weyoun had been killed during the final battle on Cardassia.