Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “But I know myself. I know that I won’t have the strength to go through with it. I can’t complete the course on my own.” Alexander looked pensively into the holoimager; then his eyebrows perked upward. “Maybe this will help illustrate my point.” His fingers tapped something offscreen and his image was replaced by that of a man running on a racetrack.

  “Of course, you know that I have had a fascination with human history and culture. This is an event that took place in the twentieth century on Earth. It was an athletic competition called the Olympics. In the year 1992, during the Barcelona Games, there was a runner named Derek Redmond.” A yellow line outlined and highlighted a black human runner, who seemed to be in the lead. Suddenly the runner stopped and fell. “Redmond tore a muscle in his right leg.” The other runners sped past him to the finish line while Redmond struggled to stay on his feet. Refusing to stop, he tried to run but couldn’t. He tried to hop but that didn’t seem to work either. Tears of anguish and pain covered his face. Suddenly, a man in the stands pushed past the security guards and onto the track. “When the security guards tried to stop Derek’s father, he was said to have replied, ‘That’s my son!’” The father put the runner’s arm around his shoulder and helped him limp to the finish line, long after all the other runners had completed the race; the entire stadium cheered them on.

  If Worf had tear ducts, he would surely have been weeping at this moment, so poignant was the scene.

  Alexander’s image returned and looked straight into Worf’s eyes.

  “Even if I don’t win, like Derek Redmond, I have a course to finish. No matter how painful. But, Father, I need your help. I know that you, like Redmond’s father, will help me fulfill my destiny and retain my honor.” He paused and his eyes became sorrowful. “I love you, Father.”

  “And I, you,” Worf whispered. He tried to touch his son’s face but the holoimage faded out. Only then did Worf fully understand what his son meant when he thanked him for helping him “stay the course.” His death was not without meaning. Worf shut his eyes. For the first time since Alexander’s death, he allowed himself to smile.

  Just then a security guard entered the office and interrupted his thoughts.

  “Forgive me, my lord. I have Admiral Picard on a secure channel.”

  Worf pointed to the terminal on the desk.

  “Put him through in Ambassador Rozhenko’s office,” the guard said over his communicator.

  The terminal came to life and Picard, his visage somber but strong, began the conversation.

  “Chancellor,” he began. “We have not been able to contact you for several hours.”

  Worf replied quietly, “I did not wish to speak with anyone.”

  “Words escape me at the moment,” Picard said. “I am truly sorry about Alexander.”

  Worf nodded his appreciation.

  “What your son did was beyond courage and nobility,” Picard continued. “Surely the Empire will honor him as a hero.”

  “Yes,” Worf replied. “His sacrifice was a testament to the Klingon heart.”

  There was a short moment of silence. Worf could see the message in Picard’s eyes that said, I am here for you, my friend.

  It was the admiral that broke the silence.

  “I thought you might like to know that after Toral confirmed Alexander’s body, he did not set off the Metreon Wave on Cygnus Three.”

  “But did he give us its location?”

  Picard shook his head. “No. In fact, he continued to make more demands.”

  Worf snarled. “Toral had more than just a political agenda in having Alexander killed. He wants to make me suffer for taking his father from him. However, his father died in dishonor while my son died in glory. Toral has failed.”

  Picard nodded. “Haven’t you heard, Worf?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Alexander injected a subcutaneous, phase-shifting beacon into himself before he died. We knew Toral would have his henchmen scan the body for any tracking device before bringing his body to him. But this one was virtually undetectable. Worf, don’t you see? Your son did more than save the lives of Cygnus Three’s citizens. He made himself the only possible means of locating Toral.”

  Worf stood from the chair. “Then…you have him?”

  “Yes, Worf! We have him in custody at a Starfleet detention facility. His clan has dispersed and relinquished their military assets and positions. Toral’s uprising has all but disintegrated.”

  That pahtk allowed himself to be captured alive? And his followers, they are running like the scared targ s that they are! This came as something of a relief for Worf. For several years Toral had been building up a strong following of extremists. He sought to take over the Empire and destroy its alliance with the Federation. With his recent terrorist tactics, something unheard of for any Klingon worth his mettle, he was actually gaining ground.

  “Admiral, I know that the Federation will do all they can to bring Toral to justice,” Worf said. “But there is no death penalty in the Federation, am I correct?”

  Picard sighed. “Worf, there are many in the Federation who believe that we have evolved beyond the need for this method of correction. So, to answer your question: no, there is no death penalty in the Federation criminal justice system.”

  Worf gritted his teeth.

  “However,” Picard said, “the president has made for a provision that the Federation will file charges against Toral only after his extradition and trial under the Klingon judicial system. We await your orders.”

  The chancellor leaned down at the monitor and bared his fangs.

  “Bring him to me.”

  Home Soil

  Jim Johnson

  Sharon Ndame frowned when she realized Lieutenant Commander Data’s tetryon particle lecture contained nothing she either didn’t already know or couldn’t pick up from some other computer. Feeling guilty and self-conscious, she stood to leave the crowded Academy auditorium.

  Suddenly, the room exploded around her.

  The blast lifted Sharon off her feet. Her hearing dulled to a roar; her vision slid into a blur. Debris shredded her uniform and skin.

  She plowed into a row of filled seats, knocking down a bunch of her fellow cadets. She hit her head on something or someone then saw spinning stars amid the dust and debris and broken bodies.

  Sharon struggled to catch her breath, but the cloying clouds of dust she inhaled gave her nothing but a violent fit of coughing. All around her she could hear the moans and screams of fellow beings. Some of those cries might have been hers—she wasn’t sure. Distantly, she could hear the sounds of…thunder? Micro-asteroids hitting the city?

  She propped herself up on her aching elbows and screamed when jagged bits pushed deeper into her arms. Glancing down, Sharon saw her torn sleeves and the ugly debris violating her body. Dark blood oozed out of her wounds.

  Sharon clutched her arms as close to her chest as she could without making them hurt even more. She looked around, blinking to clear the smoke, dust, blood, and tears from her eyes.

  The auditorium looked like hell. Piles of bloodstained rubble lay everywhere. Broken bodies of cadets and officers slumped here and there, as if they’d been tossed around like trees in a tornado. Data-padds and chair fragments littered the floor. As a strange counterpoint to the chaos all around her, Sharon could see a bright blue sky outside the gaping hole in the wall.

  Not thunder, then. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. Sharon used a nearby chair that had escaped destruction to pull herself to her feet. She saw a few other cadets picking themselves up off the floor, tending to their comrades, or weeping over the dead. Her focus returning, she saw a Zaldan’s hand resting on a broken chair nearby, the delicate, translucent membranes stretched between the fingers contrasting with the bloody ruin at the wrist.

  Sharon leaned over and retched at the sight of it. As the pain in her arms competed with the misery in her mind, her body ejected the meal she had eaten prior to entering the lectur
e hall. Empty, her dry heaves soon changed to sobs. She placed her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath, and in doing that, find some measure of control. This wasn’t supposed to happen to cadets with science honors!

  She heard the crunch of someone stepping over debris. A pair of Starfleet boots moved into her vision.

  “Cadet, have you seen my arm?” asked a surprisingly calm voice.

  Confused by the question, Sharon looked up. Data stood there, looking at her with a quizzical glance. The android’s entire left arm had been ripped out of its socket. Sharon saw bits of wire and polymer sticking out of the lesion at weird angles. Thin streaks of some sort of fluid traced dark, greasy lines on what remained of the officer’s uniform.

  Speech returned to her, somewhat. “Uh, no…”

  She watched as it scanned the immediate surroundings. A chunk of its synthetic hair and skin had been ripped away, exposing tiny blinking lights and a section of dull metal skull. Sharon shuddered at the sight, as disgusted at it as she had been at the severed hand.

  She clutched her arms to her chest again and left the android to its search. Noticing a hole in the wall, she shuffled through the debris and looked outside.

  Several Academy buildings had collapsed into rubble. Fires blazed in several more buildings and on other areas of the Academy grounds. A bitter lump formed in her throat as she turned her gaze toward San Francisco. A veneer of smoke and dust hung over the city; the miasma punctuated with outbursts of flame.

  Several small fighters of alien design darted here and there, raining down bursts of superheated plasma. Again, she realized that it hadn’t been thunder or micro-asteroids she’d heard—the whole city was under attack! Numb, she wondered if other cities also burned. Who in the great galaxy would dare attack the heart of Starfleet—would dare attack Earth?

  As if it had read her mind, she heard the android speak from behind her. “Those are Breen fighters.”

  She turned. “Why are they attacking us?”

  It stepped toward her, still partially unarmed. “I am uncertain, though I suspect their recent alliance with the Dominion encouraged them to make a bold maneuver.” She grimaced at the calculated tone of its voice.

  “Attacking San Francisco, the base of both Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy, was perhaps the boldest move they could have made. The Breen have clearly caught us…” It paused as if scanning its memory banks. “…with our pants down.”

  Sharon shuddered. The android’s infuriatingly calm voice sounded so cold, so indifferent to her. Didn’t it feel anything for the dead and dying people all around them? Couldn’t it feel anything? She posed those questions to the thing, blinking tears out of her eyes.

  The robot didn’t answer her. It was looking out of the building toward the Academy gardens. Curious, in spite of herself and the whole situation, she followed its stare.

  Several heavily armed and armored troops moved across the verdant grounds, crushing plants and flowers underfoot, firing their heavy disruptors indiscriminately.

  She moved her gaze from the troops to the android. “Are those Breen?”

  Data looked at her with an expressionless face and nodded. “They are.”

  She took an involuntary step back, stumbling on some loose debris. The Breen were going to come up here and kill them all, and this machine wasn’t going to do a thing to stop them.

  Several battered cadets worked their way over to her and the android. A cacophony of questions rang out all around her.

  Data raised its remaining hand, halting their queries. “Stand fast, Cadets.” It gestured toward the Breen troops. “San Francisco, and perhaps all of Earth, is under attack. Starfleet Academy is under attack. I need anyone who can fire a phaser to come with me.”

  Sharon felt most of the cadets move in closer. She flinched. Were they all so willing to rush to their deaths?

  Data said, “Anyone with medical training should remain here and treat the injured.” It moved toward the auditorium’s entrance. “The rest of you, come.”

  Data led a ragtag group of cadets out of the ruined auditorium, leaving Sharon and a handful of others behind. A Vulcan cadet caught Sharon’s confused stare and raised an eyebrow.

  Sharon stared at the girl, dredging up her name from her overworked mind. “What are we going to do, T’Lang? I don’t want to wait here. Not with those Breen running around.”

  Cadet T’Lang answered, “Perhaps you can assist me in moving the wounded to better surroundings.”

  Sharon panicked. “I can’t do that! I’ve only been here a couple weeks—I’ve only had my basic first-aid classes! I wouldn’t know what to do!” She ran a bloody hand through her short hair.

  The Vulcan inclined her head. Sharon wondered if T’Lang realized that she looked like the android when she did that.

  T’Lang said, “In that case, I would recommend you go with Commander Data.”

  Sharon considered it, then nodded. Going somewhere with a group of people sounded way better than standing in a slaughterhouse waiting for the Breen to gun her down.

  Without a glance back, Sharon hurried to catch up with the few cadets following the android. As she closed the distance, she heard the android say, “…make our way to the armory near the combat range. We will arm ourselves and do what we can.”

  Joining the rear of the group, she heard several cadets make assenting comments. She shook her head. A bunch of kids going into battle with a robot in command? It would send them all to their deaths without feeling a thing, wouldn’t it? Crazy—this whole situation was just crazy.

  Sharon grabbed the arm of the cadet closest to her, a lanky Bolian third-year. His face was flushed bright blue and he had large splotches of someone’s blood on his uniform. She didn’t know his name. “What are we doing?”

  The Bolian looked down at her, his eyes hard. “Following orders, Cadet. I know you’re just a rat, but you are Starfleet. Commander Data is our CO until we hear otherwise. Do you understand?”

  Sharon gave the Bolian a reluctant nod. He gave her a final once-over, then rushed off to join the others.

  She took a deep breath, searching to retain the control she had had difficulty finding earlier. What was she doing here? She had joined Starfleet to study spatial anomalies and explore distant stars, not fight the Breen on her home soil! She realized that the Bolian was right: she was just a “rat”—a first-year—she didn’t know anything about fighting a war!

  Disruptor blasts exploded somewhere close. Scared, she looked over her shoulder. A pair of Breen soldiers had shot their way through a door. They were looking for targets, looking for her! She jogged after the Bolian. When she heard more of the Breen shots crash nearby, she turned her jog into a run.

  As she neared the armory, a few disheveled cadets with phasers and grim looks rushed past her toward the Breen. She didn’t turn to watch them enter the battle.

  Sharon halted in front of the building, realizing that other officers and cadets must have had the same idea as Data. About thirty Starfleet personnel were there, most of them injured. A few prepared phasers and some treated minor injuries. A medical student caught Sharon’s eye as she stood there in a daze.

  “Over here, Cadet. Let me take a look at your arms.”

  Obediently, Sharon moved over to the blue-uniformed ensign and hesitantly offered her limbs. “I got caught in one of the blasts,” she said, surprised at the petulant and weak tone of her own voice. Was she going to die?

  The corpsman examined her, being careful not to touch the pieces of debris sticking out of her arms. Sharon bit her lip to keep from crying out.

  “Most of these are superficial, fortunately.” The corpsman gave her a quick glance. “Much pain?”

  She nodded. A flurry of weapon fire opened up nearby, the distinctive whines of Starfleet phasers punctuated by the deeper poundings of Breen disruptor blasts. She flinched.

  The corpsman pulled a topical applicator from his medical satchel and sprayed her arms wi
th a mild anesthetic. In moments, the constant prickles of pain in her arms dulled to mere aches.

  The firefight nearby increased in intensity and narrowed in distance. Sharon heard the android order several more cadets to go join the fight. She saw a handful of cadets, most of them wounded, jog off toward the Breen. Sharon wondered if any of them would make it back, wondered if that Data cared.

  The corpsman brought her back to the present. “This is the best I can do right now. If I had more time, I’d pull out some of the smaller chunks.”

  Before Sharon could offer a response, the corpsman took a disruptor blast full in the chest. His surprised expression and heat-blistered torso were the last she saw of him.

  Someone—Sharon didn’t know who—pulled her into the armory, behind the heavy walls. Heavy phaser fire burst out all around her. The cadets were fighting back. The flare from their weapons imprinted on her vision, blinding her. She heard someone barking out orders and felt someone else press a phaser into her hands.

  She blinked away the lightning-like flashes in her eyes. A cadet outside of the armory fell to the ground near the door, the wound in his side smoldering. A second disruptor blast hit him, then a third.

  Horrified and desperate to get away, Sharon pushed her way farther into the armory, trying to put as much space and as many bodies as possible between her and the Breen. She saw the android in the room. It gestured in her direction. She heard its voice call out over the deafening din of the pitched battle.

  “Cadets! I need your help!”

  Sharon looked at the cadet next to her, a second-year Andorian female. The girl had a bloody compress fastened over her face and a desperate look in her one good eye. She had a phaser in hand, though, and appeared to know how to handle it.

  The girl said, “Come on, he’s talking to us!” She led Sharon over to Data. Sharon thought the android looked terribly out of place with its missing arm and still calm expression.

  The Andorian said, “Cadets reporting, sir.”

  Data nodded at the cadet. “Thank you. As you can see,” he indicated the entrance to the armory and the heavy firefight outside, “we are pinned down and outgunned. You two are all I have left to help me create a diversion. We have to help the rest of our people get out of this building.”