Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  That had been eight years ago.

  He stared blankly at his reflection. He blinked and remembered what he had been doing.

  His wife was speaking again. He tried to push the crowded thoughts out so he could focus.

  “Did the Prime Minister agree to your proposal?” he heard Shara ask.

  “Not at first, but he knows we have the popular support to push it through, and he is a political realist. He backed down.”

  Shara said nothing else. She remained a still shadow facing the wall.

  “I’m sorry it took so long,” he lied.

  Danar sat on the edge of the bed and removed his shirt. A roadway of scars crisscrossed his chest and back. Once, his enhanced memory had allowed him to remember the exact circumstance of each wound, down to a perfect memory of the pain. Now it was all a dull mass of shadows and half-recalled trauma.

  The Tarsians had invaded Angosia’s outer worlds with such terrible violence that Danar’s people had been completely stunned. They were not warriors; they were thinkers, artists, and scientists. So they approached fighting the war like a scientific calculation, a problem that could be solved.

  Their reasonable solution damned the souls of an entire generation.

  “Does she help you?” Shara whispered. “Whoever she is. Does she take the pain away? Are you whole with her?”

  He looked down at his hands, hands that had killed eighty-seven men. Killing had been easier than this.

  “No,” he said.

  He rose silently and walked from the room. What else was there to say? That he was sorry? That it meant nothing? There was no comfort for either of them there.

  He wished the treatment dulled his senses enough to spare him the sound of her tears, but it did not.

  The ghost of his conditioning came to him even in dull, heavy sleep. Not even the treatment could keep the oldest instincts fully buried. Any soldier worth the name slept with one eye open.

  He felt, more than heard, the shiver of the air, the subtle change in air pressure. He rolled off the cushion and came up in a crouch, eyes blinking in the darkness, trying to adapt. His hands fumbled for a weapon, any kind of weapon, and settled on a flat metal tray off the end table.

  Someone had stealth-transported into his home. Two dark figures stood only meters away from him.

  “I have a phaser,” one shadow said. “Please, Councilman Danar, put down the tray. I’d hate to have to shoot you.”

  The tray dropped to the thick rug with a dull thump.

  “Thank you. Please sit down.”

  Danar slid back onto the couch.

  “If you would be so kind as to raise the illumination level so we can all see each other while we chat? As you know, the panel is to your left. Please, no tricks. I wouldn’t want your wife to run in here to see what is going on and meet with some unpleasantness. Just the lights, Councilman.”

  The light came up and Danar could now see the intruders clearly. The man with the phaser was tall, slender and bald with a fringe of black hair. His eyes were bright and hard. The man with him was younger, aquiline and handsome. They both carry themselves like military men, Danar thought, but the younger man’s posture carried less of a swagger. Both men wore black; polycarb combat cloth and leather—Special Forces gear.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Pressman,” the older man said. He slid into a chair across from Roga’s crouch. The Federation phaser in his hand never wavered from Danar’s chest. “This is Doctor Julian Bashir.”

  “The Federation doctor?” Danar said. He shifted his gaze to Bashir. “You developed the treatment with Doctor Crusher that helps counteract the genetic modifications the Angosian government used on us during the war.”

  “Yes, I did,” Bashir said softly. “We met briefly at a conference here a few years ago, Councilman. The treatment wasn’t a perfect solution, but the modifications were too ingrained into your genetic and psychological makeup to simply reverse or remove them. Beverly and I tried to…suppress them.”

  Feelings welled up inside of Danar. There was anger, long buried under a daily regimen of soul-killing drugs, and numbness. He remembered Garla and Koji and all of his other friends who had been lost to the twilight of the treatment, who couldn’t take the dissolution of themselves to a fog of chemical numbness. They had died either by their own hand or by simply giving up. Danar counted them as more war dead.

  “Yes,” he said through dry lips and clenched jaw. “It was far from a perfect solution, Doctor.”

  “Actually it’s your condition that brings us here, Councilman, and the condition of your fellow veterans,” Pressman said.

  Danar slid back onto the couch and Pressman continued.

  “As you are aware, the Federation is at war with the Dominion and its allies. About three weeks ago, a Jem’Hadar task force captured a classified Federation research outpost on an L-class planet in the Beta Quadrant. This facility is of vital importance to the survival of the Federation. You and some of your fellow Angosian veterans are going to help us recapture that planet.”

  “You’re Admiral Pressman, aren’t you?” Danar said. “I heard you were court-martialed, forced out of Starfleet in some kind of scandal involving the Romulans?”

  Pressman visibly darkened. Danar nodded.

  “So tell me, Admiral, why doesn’t Starfleet send its own troops and ships to retake this rock? Why are two Federation officers breaking into the home of a politician from a non-allied world in the dead of night?” He smiled at Pressman. “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that the Federation was engaging in some kind of illegal military operation.”

  “Not the Federation,” Bashir quickly interjected. “Not Starfleet. A rogue agency, created by ruthless men to protect and support the United Federation of Planets at any cost.”

  “Doctor Bashir’s interpretation of our organization is not very flattering,” Pressman said. “But it is essentially accurate. When I resigned from Starfleet, individuals of a like mind approached me. These people are patriots, like me. They realize that if the Federation is to endure, hard decisions must be made by men who possess the will to do whatever is necessary.”

  “Zealots,” Bashir said. “Fanatics. They call themselves Section Thirty-one. They routinely violate the very principles the Federation was founded upon.”

  “We’re not here to debate civic responsibility, Doctor,” Pressman said. “We’re here to recruit the councilman and his fellow veterans.”

  “Why me?” Danar said. “Why us? The treatment has reduced us to a state where we are barely functional as normal men and women. We are no longer supersoldiers, Admiral.” He snorted with disgust. “Far from it.”

  “Tell him, Doctor,” Pressman said to Bashir.

  “Tell me what,” Danar said.

  “The process, the treatment,” Bashir began. “It can be reversed. In effect, I can detox you. Very rapidly.”

  “I thought…they said…it was permanent,” Danar said, the blood draining from his face.

  “Doctor Crusher and I did the best we could,” Bashir said. “But the conditioning was too radical, much of it far in advance of Federation biological technology. We tried to suppress it as much as we could and hoped that with proper reinforcement and social support you and the other veterans could lead normal lives despite the powerful effects of the treatment. Part of that reinforcement had to be your belief that the treatment was permanent.” Danar focused on the small pulse jumping in Bashir’s throat. He had once known, like he knew his own heartbeat, exactly how much pressure it would take to exert on that point to end a man’s life in seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” Bashir was saying. “As I said, it wasn’t a perfect solution but neither was having hundreds of thousands of genetically engineered supermen, built to react with deadly force to virtually any perceived threat, wandering the streets of every Angosian city.”

  Danar’s voice was a knife wrapped in cloth. “Do you have a
ny idea how many of my friends are dead now because of your deception? Do you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bashir said. When he had been a resident, he had always prided himself on his bedside manner. Now his words sounded hollow and weak. They were. Danar was right. Lying to a patient was never a good idea, never the right thing to do; even a terminal one, especially a terminal one.

  “Do it,” Danar said to Pressman. “Detox me and tell about this research outpost you so desperately need back.”

  The ship was a small scout, hanging silently above Danar’s city. Its cloak hid it from local air traffic control sensors.

  It was nearly dawn, Angosia’s star cresting, in warm yellow brilliance, above the terminator of the globe. Danar, Pressman, and Bashir materialized on the small transporter pad near the aft of the vessel just in time to witness the star’s ascension.

  Danar noticed the trailing, glyph-like writing that burned bright emerald from dozens of different monitors and control panels.

  “Romulan?” he said. “I heard they were in the war now but how did you get them to give you…”

  “They didn’t,” Pressman said, smiling, as he made his way to the helm of the small craft. “We salvaged it from a vessel that crashed near Nelvana. I was able to coax its cloak back online. I’ve some small expertise in Romulan cloaking technology. We figured it would be the perfect insertion vessel for the operation. With the modifications I’ve made to its particle shroud, we should be able to avoid detection by the Jem’Hadar.”

  “Should?” Bashir frowned as he took a seat next to Danar. He leaned forward to regard the Angosian. “How do you feel? Is your head clearing?”

  Danar narrowed his eyes at the young doctor. “Oh, yes, Doctor. It is.”

  His hands moved with no doubt now, no forcing them to obey him. They were nimble again, faster than any normal eyes could track. Instantly they were around Bashir’s neck, his thumb resting on the gently thudding pulse. Just an instant, just a gradual increase of pressure and…

  “Look down,” Bashir whispered. A small Federation hand phaser, its discharge indicator blinking crimson, was pressed against Danar’s stomach.

  “It’s set to maximum,” the doctor told him. “I understand you want to kill me, but do you want to die to do it? Let me go, please.”

  The hands slid away from Bashir’s throat. He powered down the phaser and put it away. Danar sat back in his chair.

  “Fast hands,” he said.

  “Yes, I suppose they are,” Bashir said somewhat hesitantly.

  “Did Section Thirty-one do that to you; genetically alter you?”

  “No. It was my parents.”

  “Your parents?”

  “To compensate for learning disabilities I suffered from as a child.”

  Both men felt motion as the inertial dampers registered the change in speed and direction. Pressman’s long fingers danced across the helm console as he altered the ship’s hidden orbit.

  “Genetic resequencing was illegal in the Federation,” Bashir said, “so they took me to Adigeon Prime when I was six to undergo the process. I never asked for it.”

  “I volunteered,” Danar said. “We were at war. Everyone was frightened. I remember people walking around pale and quiet and terrified, like their voices might set off another attack. No one could believe that such savagery could occur in such civilized times. We were all wrong, Doctor. Civilization exists at the sufferance of barbarians.

  “Now, I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I was turned into a murdering machine by one set of doctors and scientists and then turned into the walking dead by another group.”

  “Roga, if there had been any way for us to reverse the conditioning, we would have, but your scientists were too good at their job.”

  “Yes,” Danar said with a gallows smile. “My people are very good at doing what they are ordered to do, especially ‘for the good of Angosia.’”

  Pressman walked back to them from the cockpit of the ship.

  “We’re over the coordinates for your first team member, Danar,” he said.

  “This won’t take long at all, if I know Ketlan.”

  “I can’t believe you were stupid enough to go along with this…sir,” Ketlan Farr said. She was a few centimeters shorter than Danar, with long brown hair pulled back severely from her face and secured in a tight bun. Her unit tattoo was identical to the one on Danar’s face.

  “Well, that’s why I asked you to join us, Guardsman Farr,” Danar said, addressing the entire team of seven veterans who sat in the Romulan scout’s cramped passenger compartment. “You will hold my hand and produce the appropriate amount of screaming, if I do something too foolish, won’t you?”

  A chuckle ran through the complement of newly recruited Angosian soldiers. Bashir had administered the detoxification hypospray as soon as they had materialized on the scout ship and they were starting to act like real people again, instead of glass-eyed robots.

  Danar clapped his old friend warmly on the shoulder as he took her aside.

  “It’s good to see you again, Ketlan.”

  “You too, sir,” she said. “Orders?”

  Danar handed her a Starfleet data padd.

  “Get them familiarized with the Jem’Hadar. All the data Pressman has on them is in here. Assume it’s not complete.”

  “Just like any other military intelligence report I’ve ever read,” Farr said.

  “Then make sure everyone gets their equipment and weapons squared away.”

  Farr grinned. “Just like old times, sir.”

  Danar nodded. “Unfortunately.”

  He left his guardsman to her work and sat down next to Pressman, who was still at the helm of the Romulan ship.

  “The troops sound motivated,” the former admiral said briskly. “They trust you, Danar.”

  “Well, I don’t trust you, Pressman. I’ve been wondering about something. Why didn’t your Section Thirty-one just create your own covert Federation supersoldiers? It seems less risky to use a known quantity for black ops than farming the work out to us.”

  Pressman nodded curtly as his eyes scanned over the sensor data logs.

  “You’re right, it would be, and we did consider it. Unfortunately, Doctor Bashir made sure all the data he and Doctor Crusher received from your government about your conditioning was destroyed at the end of their research project. The good doctor can be quite irritating when he puts his mind to it.

  “It seems he took a personal interest in keeping your magnificent combat training program from ever being replicated. So, when the war came, we had no choice but to look to you and your people as a viable asset.”

  Danar chuckled dryly and shook his head. Pressman looked up from the instruments.

  “Sorry,” Danar said. “It’s just been a long time since anyone called me a ‘viable asset.’ I still don’t care for it.”

  “This is war,” Pressman said tersely. “The most horrible, most decisive conflict the Federation has ever been involved in. The stakes here are the survival of our culture, our way of life. In this kind of a struggle every sentient being is an asset, to be used to maximum effect, no matter the cost.”

  “So, you are ignoring the laws and moral codes of your society in order to protect and preserve them?” Danar said. “Very democratic of you, Admiral.”

  Pressman ignored the barb. His eyes were focused on someplace past the tunnel of Dopplering stars that hurtled past the viewscreen. Danar had seen the look before in commanders and knew it was pointless to continue trying to be reasonable with this man.

  “You’d best spend this time getting your team ready,” Pressman said softly. “You are impressive but you’ll need every trick, every edge to deal with the Jem’Hadar.”

  Danar left him alone with his mad clarity and the ghost-light of long-dead stars.

  The planet had no name. It didn’t even exist on Federation star charts. It was an arid corpse of a world orbiting a bloated, ancient star that was the
color of blood. Three Jem’Hadar warships hung in orbit, like vultures, silent, sleek, and deadly, circling a desiccated carcass.

  Pressman dropped out of warp well outside the star system and made a few last-minute adjustments to the cloaking device. He shut down every nonessential system on the scout and then edged the hidden vessel with painful slowness closer and closer to the unnamed world.

  In the darkened, crowded cabin, Julian Bashir’s thoughts were not on the immediate threat of detection by the enemy, nor in preparation for battle, like the Angosians. Instead he wandered down corridors of memory. He thought of his father and mother, of his childhood and the changes his parents had made in him, against his will, without considering what he might have wanted.

  And what would I have wanted? he thought. I was six years old. I had severe learning disabilities. Was I even capable of making a choice about myself? For myself?

  He looked across the aisle at the Angosians. They were calm, serene. The genetic coding in them ensured that they only truly felt relaxed and comfortable in stressful situations. Was that cruel or merciful? It had kept them alive through years of bloody conflict but it had stolen the life and people they had been fighting for from them.

  Did my parents love me and change me to make my life better, to help me succeed, to survive? Or was it really for them, so they didn’t have to endure the embarrassment of a substandard child?

  The scout’s gravity seemed to flicker for an instant. Pressman was hunched over the console, his eyes locked on the sensor data from the warships they were nearing. Pressman’s brow was damp; his breathing was hard and quick. His pupils were wide. It suddenly occurred to Bashir that Pressman was the only person on the scout ship who was behaving the way normal humans should in such a dangerous situation. Everyone else had been programmed to be more than human.

  I’ve always felt like a replacement part, he thought. That the child I began as was cast off and I’m the refit. What if all that I am, all that I do, all the poems I enjoy, the battles I fight with Miles in the holosuite, the way I love; what if all of that was never what I was supposed to be?