Star Trek Terok Nor 01: Day of the Vipers

by James Swallow

  “No,” insisted the alien, “this is mine.” He clapped his gloved hands together. “Under the auspices of the Ferengi Salvage Code, I’m claiming this wreckage as my own. I don’t think you’re in any position to contest that.” Grek nodded left and right to the other crewmen with him, who each had disruptor pistols holstered at their waists.

  But Syjin wasn’t listening. He looked around. The reprisal fleet from five years ago…Could this be one of those vessels? His thoughts raced. The final fate of the Clarion, the Glyhrond, and the scouts had never been determined, and ships sent to search for their remains had come up empty. Syjin recalled the announcement by First Minister Lale, stating that even with the help of Jagul Kell’s cruisers, the four lost starships had not been recovered.

  “What do you think you’re going to do, anyway?” Grek swaggered forward, his boots crunching on pieces of bridge console half-covered by the sand. The sound drew Syjin’s attention to something buried there and his eyes widened.

  “Even if you dumped that load you just took off me, you still wouldn’t have room for any of this!” The Ferengi grinned.

  “I’m gonna take it all!”

  “No,” said Syjin, “you’re not.” He flicked his hand and the palm phaser he kept concealed in the suit’s wrist pocket dropped into his grip.

  Grek’s faceplate fogged as he shouted. “You’re pulling a gun on me? What? After all we’ve been through together?” He shook his head ruefully. “Oh, Syjin. And I said such nice things about you to the boys here, didn’t I?”

  The heads of the other two crewmen bobbed in agreement, hands hovering over their holsters.

  “Syjin, I said, Syjin almost has the lobes to be a Ferengi, I said! As close to one of us as a Bajoran could get! And this is what comes in return?” He sighed theatrically. “I thought we were friends!”

  The statement brought a sneer to the Bajoran’s lips. “What’s the twenty-first Rule of Acquisition?”

  “Never place friendship above profit,” said one of the other Ferengi, with rote diction.

  “All right, not friends, then, but fellow businessmen,” Grek admitted. “Look, put down the weapon. There’s enough here for everyone.”

  “I only want one thing,” Syjin replied, “and you’re standing on it.”

  Grek jerked back in shock and glanced down. Gingerly, he dragged a cylindrical object out of the sand. “What is this? Looks like a memory core…”

  “Log recorder,” said Syjin. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about, but the pilot had earned the money to buy his own ship by working the recovery docks on Andros, and he knew a flight recorder when he saw one. Those days still came back to him on dark, lonely nights, scrapping dead ships and stripping them for parts. “Give it to me.”

  “Give?” Grek said the word like a curse. “And what do I get?”

  “I won’t put a hole in your e-suit.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s a fair trade.” The Ferengi tossed the device toward him and it sailed slowly to land at his feet.

  Syjin gathered it up with his free hand and backed away.

  “Look”—Grek took a step toward him—“let’s not let this minor difference of opinion sour things between us, eh? I’ve got a line on a consignment of live porwiggies coming into the sector next month, and you know they’re good eating.”

  The Bajoran shook his head. “I think we’re done, you and I. And if there’s an iota of empathy in you, Grek, you’ll light out of here and leave the dead to rest.”

  The Ferengi snorted. “Yeah, sure. I’ll get right on that.” The other crewmen laughed nasally.

  For a moment, Syjin thought about shooting Grek anyway, but what good would it have done him? He was only one man, and Grek had a crew of ten on his scow. He couldn’t stop them from looting the crash site, but the recorder—that would be important. Without another word, he tapped the recall key on his glove and the transporter took hold of him.

  Aboard his ship, Syjin secured the memory core and programmed a speed course for Bajor.

  The flames had taken hold by the time Proka got there. Emergency flyers were hovering around the roof of the night market temple, shooting puffs of fire retardants into the plume of black smoke, but they were barely keeping the inferno contained. He pushed through the people flooding outside over the steps—merchants and civilians, women and men, monks and ranjens. They were dirty with soot and were coughing. Green-uniformed medical techs moved among them with breather cylinders and hypo-sprays.

  He grabbed the arm of a passing constable. “Casualties?”

  “Eight dead,” she replied. “There’s a dozen or so more unaccounted for.”

  Proka swore under his breath. “You were here? You saw what happened?”

  The woman nodded gravely. Her face was pallid beneath the patina of smoke dirt on her cheeks. “My shift just finished and I was coming up to the temple for the dawn mass…” She stifled a cough and spat out a blob of black spittle. “They get a lot of folks here for that.” Behind them, the burning building gave a cracking thud, and a jet of orange fire shot out into the sky as something collapsed inside.

  “They only just finished rebuilding this place…” Proka said to himself.

  The constable nodded. “I was coming up the street and I heard shouting. There were a bunch of people calling out, making noise. I picked up the pace, and when I got there I saw what the fuss was all about. There were Oralians, three of them in those funny robes they wear.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Shouting out slogans, chanting. They were deliberately goading the people coming to worship, sir. Disrespecting the Prophets.”

  Proka glared at the burning church and the injured people streaming away from it. “How did that turn into this?” He stabbed a finger at the building.

  “Firebombs,” said the woman. “Just as I thought someone was going to start trading punches, they all pulled out these little glass balls and threw them.” She mimed a fireball with her hands. “I don’t know what they had in them. They went up like lightning. Everyone panicked and broke. I got pinned in the crowd and the temple went up like tinder.”

  “What happened to the Oralians?” he demanded.

  She led him toward an alley between some of the shuttered market stalls. “They went down there.” The constable gestured around. “You see? There’s no security monitor coverage in this area. They must have known that.”

  Proka shone a torch down the alley. It was a dead end, terminating in a sheer wall with no other means of exit.

  “They kept yelling about Bajor,” she said. “They said that the Prophets were phantoms, that Oralius was the only true way.”

  Shouting drew the attention of the law officers. A man with ash all over his clothes was bellowing at the top of his voice. “You! You there!” he screamed. “How could you let this happen? Those Oralian freaks, they did this! Aren’t you going to do something? Round them up!” A chorus of angry agreement joined him from several of the other people. “Make them pay for this!”

  “We’re going to do all we can—” Proka began, but no one was listening. A mob was forming right in front of him, jeering for rough justice.

  Ico studied the active map of Bajor and considered the implementation of the endgame. Assets that she had spent the last decade cultivating and positioning were being called into action all across the world, triggered like an avalanche started by a handful of pebbles. In a small way, she had been loath to move to the active phase of the destabilization. The intricate construct of influence and subterfuge she had made was one of her finest pieces of work; she sat back and admired it in the same way one might consider a delicate piece of glass sculpture, so elegant but at the same time so fragile. It was music written and ready to be played, a great piece of theater waiting for one single shattering performance.

  That was part of what thrilled Rhan so much about the work: the danger inherent in it, the challenge of keeping so many shifting alliances on the field of play, th
e insight and totality of dedication required to bring a world to the brink of collapse.

  She recalled the words of a Terran—perhaps one of their philosophers or a strategist, she couldn’t recall which—who had said that all civilizations existed on the brink of barbarism, only a few days away from brutality and violence. Cardassia Prime had balanced on that knife edge for so long it had become a way of life for them, but fat and complacent Bajor knew nothing of that; it amused Ico to think that her work had taken these aliens to the same place. And now we’ll see how the play unfolds. The set is dressed, the actors in their roles. The curtain rises.

  She examined the map. In Relliketh, a woman whose gambling debts made her vulnerable had closed a sensor window over the Bajoran polar ice cap; a priest in Jo’Kala was taking poison rather than have the identity of his lover revealed to the world; churches were on fire in Hathon, Ashalla, and Korto; the minister for Qui’al was turning a blind eye to troop movements outside his city; unmarked containers were being unloaded from a Son’a transport ship in Tempasa; a Militia commander in Janir had come home to find his wife in the arms of another man.

  And there were dozens of others, all small fragmentary dramas that she had engineered, that had no relation to one another on the surface. But beneath, they all pulled upon strings that brought pressures to bear on Bajor.

  The screen chimed, and a report made itself known to her. She smiled to herself and tapped a control. Ico spoke into a communicator. “Dukat.”

  The gul’s voice was loaded with irritation. “This is a secure military channel.”

  She ignored the comment. “The Federation spies have been traced to the Korto starport. I thought you might like to know.”

  “How can you be certain of that?” he growled.

  “I have assets in place,” she said languidly, watching the motion of the players on her map. Jekko Tybe’s face and his personal records scrolled over an inset screen, revealing his life, his associations, his connections. “That’s all you need to be aware of.” Ico reached for the disconnect key.

  “And quickly, Dukat, quickly. I’m sure you don’t want to let them slip through your fingers.”

  Gwen Jones pulled against the restraints, but no matter how she moved, the plastic strips chafed against her wrists. She felt queasy, and not so much from the shock and the effects of the drugs in her system, but from the mounting fear that time was running out for her. She kept darting looks out of the Kaska’s canopy, afraid that each time she did, she would see Cardassian soldiers swarming across the thermoconcrete apron toward the hangar.

  Nechayev was trying to reason with the Bajoran lawman, who paced back and forth across the small cockpit like a caged animal. “Listen to me,” she was saying, “every minute we stay here is a minute more we could have used to put distance between us and the Cardassians. We have to get out, report what we’ve learned. Don’t you get it? We are Bajor’s only chance!”

  The man rounded on her. “So I let you go, then what? Starfleet rides in with a battle fleet and rescues my planet from the Cardassian Union? I let you go, and you make this madness stop?”

  “Yes.” Nechayev’s falsehood was instinctual and automatic. Jones saw it, and so did the Bajoran.

  “You’re lying to me,” he snarled. “You’re telling me what I want to hear.” He turned away from them. “You think I don’t know? I’ve been a police officer my entire life, I’ve faced down liars of every stripe!” He shook his head. “Everyone lies. ‘It’s not my fault, I’m innocent, I didn’t do it, it was the other guy…’” The lawman turned back and shouted, “I’m sick of the lies! I’m drowning in them!”

  “Then help me expose them!” retorted Nechayev.

  “Because if you don’t, the Cardassians will take us and turn us into two more fabrications, terrorists and murderers. They’ll do the same thing to Jekko, and then they’ll do it to you!” She rocked forward, pulling at the chair. “You have to trust us, damnit!”

  He sat heavily. “Give me one good reason why I should.”

  Jones licked dry lips. “Because your friend did.” The man turned to study her. “Jekko knew what was at stake. He trusted us. He gave up his life so that we could take what we saw and get away.” She took a shuddering breath, wincing at the pain in her cheek. “I didn’t really know him, but you did. You know what kind of man he was better than either of us, so you tell me. Would he have put his trust in us, died for us, if it hadn’t been worthwhile?”

  The Bajoran was silent for a long moment before he spoke again. “My name is Darrah Mace. I’ve spent the last ten years watching everything that is important to me slip away, moment by moment. My wife and children. My friends, my work. Bajor…” His words dropped to a whisper. “And no matter what I do, I can’t stop it. None of us can.”

  “We have to try,” said Nechayev.

  “You think the Federation can help us?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, and for the first time Jones felt that she was seeing the real Alynna Nechayev. “But I promise you I will do whatever I can to make sure that they do.”

  Motion caught Jones’s eye, and she jerked around in the chair. “Make a choice, Mace,” she said. Skimmers were crossing the runways, converging on the hangar. “We’ve got company.”

  Darrah shot to his feet and with two quick motions they were free of the restraints. Nechayev threw herself over to the pilot’s console and pressed the isolinear chip Jekko had gave her into a data slot. The vessel came alive, engines humming to power.

  “Unless you want to come with us, you’d better step out.” She nodded at the drop ramp.

  Jones slipped into the copilot’s chair and ran through a sequence of preflight checks; the Kaska wasn’t too different from the Starfleet shuttlecraft she’d trained on. “They’ll be here in less than two minutes,” she reported, watching the approach of the Cardassian ground vehicles. “We have to go now.”

  Nechayev reached out and snatched Darrah’s tricorder from his belt, tapping in a string of numbers. “You trusted us and now I’m going to trust you. This is an authentication code and a subspace radio frequency. There’s a ship in this sector, the Gettysburg. They’ll be monitoring that channel.”

  He took back the tricorder and nodded. “If I learn anything, I’ll contact you.” Darrah turned and opened the hatch. “Good luck—”

  Nechayev never let him finish his sentence. Her hand struck out and she grabbed his phaser before he could stop her. A pulse of light enveloped him and he crumpled backward, tumbling down the drop ramp to land in a heap on the hangar floor below.

  “You shot him!” Jones cried.

  Nechayev tossed the phaser after him and sealed the hatch. “Just a stun.” She jumped into the pilot’s chair and eased the Kaska off the landing skids and out of the open hangar doors. “Shields up,” she ordered, and Jones complied, just in time to prevent a cascade of phaser shots from burning into the forward hull.

  “But you shot him,” Jones repeated.

  “If I hadn’t, the Cardassians would have known he let us go. This way, he just looks like he was unlucky.” They were moving down the apron now, picking up speed. “Honestly, I did him a favor.”

  More beam fire thudded off the deflectors. “How are we going to get out of this?” Jones demanded. “Those Cardassians are contacting their ships in orbit right now. They’ll intercept us the second we break atmosphere.”

  Nechayev pushed the throttle forward, and the courier leapt into the lightening sky, crashing seconds later through the sound barrier with the twin thunders of a supercompressed shock wave. “Jekko had some tricks up his sleeve.” She smiled, and jerked her thumb at a compartment in the rear. “See that? I noticed it as soon as I got on board.”

  Jones looked and saw a cracked white spheroid with battered blue components at either end. It was wired into the main power bus, but it seemed out of place. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Romulan cloaking device, the kind they used to use in the m
id–23rd century,” she explained, “probably salvaged from an old bird-of-prey.”

  Jones gaped. “We’re pinning our escape on an antique piece of Romulan salvage?”

  Nechayev gave a gallows-humor smile. “Well, as we’re all being truthful with each other, I should tell you that this courier’s practically a museum piece as well.” She shrugged. “I rate our chances of making our rendezvous at less than forty percent.”

  Dukat stood over the unconscious form of the Bajoran law officer and his fists tightened. He wanted to haul the man off the ground and beat an answer out of him.

  “Do you know him, sir?” Orloc asked.

  The gul ignored the question and pushed the glinn out of his way. “Wake him up,” he snarled. “Find out what he knows! Now!” Dukat strode out of the hangar to the line of hovering skimmers. He slapped at his comcuff. “Tunol! Status?”

  The reply he got stoked his annoyance even higher. “Sir, sensors have lost contact with the target vessel. There was an energy surge in low orbit and then it just vanished.”

  “Ships don’t vanish, Dal,” he barked. “They cloaked. Recalibrate sensors and get me a trail. I want it this very second!” He cut the signal before she could reply, but a heartbeat later the communicator signaled an incoming message. “Dukat,” he growled.

  “Oh, Skrain.” Ico’s voice was cold. “I am so disappointed in you.”

  23

  Outside the shack the encampment used as its infirmary the congregation gathered and muttered darkly. Bennek could hear them through the thin metal walls—not things they were saying, not the words that they used, but the sense of them. The mood of the Oralians was one of fear and confusion, and it hung over the ragged settlement like a waiting storm.

  The airtruck was out by the perimeter, the engine still idling and the cab door hanging wide open. The driver was a youth the cleric remembered as being from Culat, and he sat on one of the collapsible metal-framed canvas beds, weeping. Bennek and a woman named Seren, who had been a nurse before she had found the Way, were the only others in the hut.