Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Kajel met his gaze with disgust. “Outrageous. That you’d be willing to abuse your IME ties in such a way. Your son murdered a friend of mine!”

  “As you have repeatedly reminded me. But I considered Sohon Retab a friend as well. In the brief time I was granted to know him, I came to value him as a man of enormous integrity, decency, and compassion. He died striving to save his son and several other innocent people, including myself. I owe him an enormous debt. And that is why I cannot endorse this unethical plan. I cannot believe Sohon Retab would wish anything so vindictive done in his name.”

  Even the more reserved Ruehn was looking offended now. “And what your son did doesn’t matter to you?”

  “Director, I despise what my son did, and I believe firmly that he should face justice for his crimes. But it must be justice achieved through legitimate means, as decided by the rightful institutions of society. Not a mockery of law performed as an excuse for an act of political assassination. Not a propagandistic endorsement of the violence that our peoples have spent three centuries trying to move beyond.

  “Mettus’s act of violence was reprehensible, yes. But we must counter violence with civilization, not with further violence. That is the only way we can ever transcend it.”

  Phlox took a deep breath. “And yes . . . I am personally invested in this. Mettus is my son, and I cannot help but love him. But I believe the only way I have any hope to change my son is by setting an example of a better way to live, not by sinking to his level. Tell me: Can the government of a world trying to outgrow the sins of its past do any less?”

  Ruehn spread her hands imploringly. “We have a chance to take them all down.”

  “To arrest a few people. People whose ideas will live on to infect others. It’s the ideas themselves that must be fought—that must be cancelled out by demonstrating that there is a better way.”

  The two Antarans were silent for a time. Finally, Kajel spoke softly. “Sohon would not have wanted vengeance.”

  Ruehn reached over to her desk console and began entering commands. “Here’s what we have on the cell that has your son. Their native districts, known movements, and so on. If we correlate them with their intercepted posts and messages, we may be able to predict a likely location for the trial. It will at least give us a chance to prevent the execution.”

  Phlox sagged in relief, feeling as drained as if he’d just free-climbed a sheer mountain face. Was this how it was for Jonathan Archer when his words had to make the difference between life and death?

  No, he answered himself easily. Because Jonathan Archer is not a father.

  October 13, 2165

  U.S.S. Pioneer, Etrafso system

  It felt good to Malcolm Reed to sit in his command chair again—though he judged Travis Mayweather to have done an excellent job filling it in his absence. Mayweather (along with T’Pol, admittedly) had overseen the crew’s efforts to analyze and reprogram the Ware. Reed had merely shown up in time to see that difficult and inspired work put into effect. Yet Pioneer’s first officer had readily handed the responsibility for the final order back to Reed. “You speak for all of us, sir,” he had said.

  “And many more,” Reed had replied, his thoughts focusing on sh’Prenni and her crew.

  Now he nodded to Tucker, who manned the engineering station with Olivia Akomo and Daskel Vabion looking on. Across the bridge, Rey Sangupta had ceded the science station seat to Hari Banerji, standing by the older man’s shoulder. “Are you ready?” the captain asked.

  “As we’ll ever be,” Tucker replied.

  At Reed’s right shoulder, Senior Partner var Skos let out an uneasy chirp. “This had better work,” the diminutive Enlesri warned.

  “Believe me, we want that as much as you,” Mayweather told him.

  Reed nodded at Tucker. “Transmit the signal.”

  Tucker activated the command sequence that broadcast a powerful, intricate signal into the primary data core of the orbital station on the viewer—a station that already had a temporary bioneural interface installed, but only enough to provide power and a simulation of a live sleeper in order for the signal to do its work. “Okay, it’s reacting as simulated,” Akomo said. “The bypass commands are getting through . . . the replication systems are engaging. Laying down the modified pathways to the transporter coils . . . Yes! Now the bioneural pattern is uploading . . . the circuits are growing in.”

  “Reading a power fluctuation,” Banerji advised.

  “Noted. We expected that around now. The new circuits should begin to compensate any moment.”

  “Yes,” Banerji said. “Power stabilizing—no, intensifying! The station is entering full-power mode!”

  “At last,” var Skos breathed, though Reed could not be sure whether he was impatient or astounded.

  “And how about that?” Banerji went on. “Our simulated volunteer has been beamed out of the data core and materialized safe and sound in the medical bay.” He chuckled. “I imagine the biosensors won’t know what to make of our little surrogate brain.”

  “Is the station operational?” the Senior Partner pressed. “Try approaching. See if it responds.”

  “Be patient, Partner,” Reed suggested. “We’ve just given your station a brain transplant. It’ll need some time to find its bearings.”

  “To be sure,” Banerji put in. “Yes, the temperature, gravity, and atmosphere are fluctuating wildly. Although the medical bay seems to be spared, luckily for our fake fellow. But the system is feeling its way toward a new equilibrium as the altered pathways finish growing in. Let’s not confuse it with new sensory input.”

  The Enlesri spokesperson fidgeted for several moments. “How much longer?” he finally asked.

  Tucker replied, “The pathway formation should be slowing down by now. Just a couple more minutes.”

  Akomo frowned, studying the readouts. “Wait. The replicator and transporter activity . . . they’re increasing. Power’s still surging.”

  “What?” Tucker studied the console intently. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

  “What is wrong?” var Skos snapped.

  “Please, Senior Partner,” Reed cautioned. “Let them work.”

  “Materialization activity still increasing,” Tucker reported.

  “No,” Akomo realized. “It’s dematerialization! The station is disintegrating parts of itself!”

  “Send the abort command,” the chief engineer ordered.

  Akomo tried, then shook her head. “Nothing. If anything, it’s getting worse.”

  Events soon outraced any verbal report. Reed watched in disbelief as the large gray station orbiting beside Pioneer began to tear itself apart. The repair arms and cutting tools in its docking bays began to turn on its own structure, cutting and dismembering the docking structures themselves and their connective pylons, even as increasingly large pieces of the station were simply beamed into nonexistence. “Power system shielding is beginning to fail!” Banerji cried.

  “Regina, pull us back!” Reed ordered. Ensign Tallarico fired the thrusters and pushed Pioneer away from the station. They had barely managed to make it to a safe distance when the dissolving structure finally reached its breaking point. The explosion was less forceful than Reed had feared—perhaps because the station was already half-disintegrated, offering no resistance to amplify the blast. But it was just as thorough either way. Where an advanced space station had orbited a mere minute before, there was now nothing but an expanding cloud of debris.

  Tefcem var Skos stared dumbstruck for several moments before he finally gathered himself. “What . . . happened?” he asked with tight control.

  His shocked delay had given Tucker time to study the readings. “The bioneural implants . . . we thought we’d developed a workaround for the Ware’s immune system. Convinced it to accept the new circuitry as part of its own system. It should’ve i
ntegrated.”

  “Instead,” Banerji said, “our program modification seems to have triggered, well, an autoimmune response. We confused the Ware’s identification of self and other, and it essentially rejected itself.”

  Vabion gave a cold chuckle. “We underestimated the sheer paranoia of the Ware’s original programmers. We thought that blurring self and other would cause it to accept the alien wetware and software as part of itself. Instead, its vehement rejection of anything outside its parameters won out, as we should have anticipated it would. And so it destroyed indiscriminately.”

  “My God,” Mayweather said. “Four months ago, we would’ve welcomed this. It’s the perfect anti-Ware weapon. But now . . .”

  “Too perfect,” Reed pointed out. “A reaction like this would kill any sleepers before they could be rescued.”

  “This is a disaster!” var Skos cried. “Look what you would unleash upon us! If this station had been active and networked with the rest of the Ware, you would have doomed us all!”

  “Now, hold on,” Tucker cautioned. “This was just our first trial. The whole reason we tested it here was to make sure any mistakes wouldn’t spread beyond the one station. We have a pretty good idea what went wrong—we just need to find a way to compensate for it.”

  “And if you cannot? The Klingons continue to drive closer to the core worlds every day.”

  “And Endeavour is heading to intercept them,” Reed told him. “With luck, Captain T’Pol can negotiate a cease-fire. Failing that . . . we’re prepared to bring in the rest of the task force in your defense.”

  It was the least they could do, Reed thought, given how much damage they’d done already. Normally, he would think twice about taking an action that the Klingons would surely interpret as a declaration of war. But the Klingons, it seemed, had already declared war on both the Federation and the Partnership. If anything, an alliance with the Ware-based civilization could be necessary for the Federation’s survival—if they could find a way to reprogram the Ware without destroying it.

  Reed gazed at the now-diffuse cloud of debris on the viewscreen. Whatever happens, he declared to himself, we must not let this weapon fall into Klingon hands.

  U.S.S. Essex, orbiting Ardan IV

  It was fortunate, thought Bryce Shumar, that Essex had transferred to Admiral Narsu’s command so recently. The shift from exploration to a more defensive footing entailed reassignments for much of the crew, as scientific specialists were rotated out in favor of more security, armory, engineering, and medical personnel. The scientists had already disembarked at Starbase 12 once Essex had reported there, but the bulk of the new combat crew had yet to arrive, leaving the ship with a lean 116-person complement, just over half the maximum a Daedalus-class vessel could support.

  Which made Essex the ideal ship for handling the evacuation of the Starfleet outpost on Ardan IV. The outpost, a fortress-like ground installation located near the planet’s modest but useful dilithium deposits, had a staff of two hundred and twenty Andorians, Tellarites, Arkenites, and humans. They would be in close quarters even by the standards of Essex’s tightly packed barracks, but the ship could support them for long enough to return them to Starbase 12.

  Or it would have, at any rate, had the Klingons not had the singularly ill manners to begin their attack on the planet while Essex was still in the middle of the evacuation and thus unable to break orbit to engage the enemy. “Three of them,” Lieutenant Commander Mullen announced from the science station. “Two D-five class battlecruisers, one standard Bird-of-Prey.”

  “Three of them, three of us,” Commander Caroline Paris said from the helm station, which the redheaded first officer had chosen to take over personally in the wake of Ensign Ling’s death in the battle with Gantin. “That seems fair.”

  “It’d be more fair if we could get in the fight,” Morgan Kelly replied from tactical, sounding frustrated.

  “Our responsibility is the safety of the outpost personnel,” Shumar reminded her. “Trust our Andorian colleagues to handle the rest.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelly said, not particularly mollified. Kelly had never liked being left out of the action, even when Shumar had been acquainted with her back during the Romulan War—although Morgan Kelly had been a “him” at the time, at least anatomically. Her sex reassignment following the war had left her more comfortable with herself, but that had paradoxically made her even more aggressive than before.

  But the Andorian Guard provided more than enough aggressiveness to go around. Docana and Atlirith soared ahead into the Klingons’ path, making them scatter. Over the open comm channel, Shumar heard the voice of Docana’s commanding officer, Senthofar ch’Menlich, issuing a warning, which the Kling­ons responded to with disruptor cannons and torpedoes. The two Kumari-class starships returned fire, and the viewscreen’s false-color enhancement turned the space between the five ships into a flickering, shifting cat’s cradle of green and blue threads, amplified far beyond what the naked eye could see at this range.

  Shumar followed the progression of the fight tensely, hoping ch’Menlich and Atlirith’s Captain sh’Retsu could succeed at preventing the Klingon ships from slipping past to come at Essex or the evacuation shuttles still rising from the surface. But they were two against three, and open space was not much of a bottleneck. All that the Andorians could do was to bombard the Klingons heavily in hopes of disabling or (if necessary) destroying them before they could break past for the outpost.

  But Atlirith took a serious hit to its port wing cannon from one of the battlecruisers, leaving a gap in their firing pattern that the Bird-of-Prey took advantage of. The compact, pudgy-looking warship followed a wide arc that took it past the battle and in toward the planet. “They’re vectoring in on the escape shuttles,” Mullen warned.

  “Caroline,” Shumar ordered, “bring us down closer to the shuttles. Brush the atmosphere if you have to—we’re due for a new paint job anyway.”

  “I want racing stripes this time,” Paris bantered back. “Or maybe flames.”

  “I’d rather you avoid any flames at the moment, if you don’t mind.”

  “Right, take all the fun out of it.”

  “Kelly, a spread of torpedoes at the Bird-of-Prey. Lock phase cannons and fire as soon as it’s in range.”

  “Aye, sir!” The deck shook five times in quick succession as the torpedoes burst from Essex’s tubes. Their engines flared brightly as they homed in on their target, needing little amplification to be seen. Shumar often thought torpedoes could do their jobs better if they were less easily detectable, but starships moved so swiftly that a torpedo without active thrusters would be as useless as a cannonball. Thus, there was little that could be done to prevent the Bird-of-Prey from targeting the incoming torpedoes, other than relying on their high velocity and the lag time of light-speed sensors to throw off the Kling­ons’ aim. The bulbous, winged vessel managed to pick off only two torpedoes before two others struck its shields. The fifth was a clean miss, its thrusters unable to bend its course enough to strike home.

  “Its shields are weakened,” Kelly reported, “but still online. Reading damage to starboard wing power relays and forward hull plating.”

  “Not good enough. Take out their weapons before they get in range of those shuttles.”

  Kelly kept firing, but the Klingons must have improved their shields and hull armor in the few years since their last battle against Starfleet, since the Bird-of-Prey kept coming. “How many shuttles left?” Shumar asked Steven Mullen.

  “Three,” the science officer replied. “One is on final approach now.”

  That left two shuttles with at least twenty persons each. Shumar could only watch in dismay as the compact but powerful warship came into range and unleashed green fire toward both Essex and the defenseless shuttles below. Where is their precious honor now? he wondered.

  “The leading shuttle’s hit
!” Mullen cried. “Their propulsion’s down . . . they’re losing altitude.”

  “Can we get a tractor beam on them?” Shumar asked as disruptors continued to pound against the shields.

  “Not yet,” Paris said, setting her jaw. A moment later, Essex swerved and headed downward into the atmosphere, a dull and intensifying roar replacing the thud of the disruptors. Perhaps the Klingons had simply been too surprised to keep firing.

  “The other shuttle, sir!” Kelly reminded him.

  Nothing for it now. “Advise them to take evasive action,” he ordered Miguel Avila at communications. “Kelly, keep the Bird-of-Prey busy as best you can.”

  Essex continued to shudder and thrum still harder as it descended. Shumar could see licks of red-orange plasma dancing across the viewscreen. “Careful, Commander. You do remember we’re not built to handle atmosphere, I trust.”

  “I prefer to think the atmosphere isn’t built to handle us,” Paris replied. She blinked. “I have no idea what that means, but it sure sounds good.”

  “Range to shuttle?” Shumar asked.

  “Still outside tractor beam range, sir,” Kelly replied, working her console intently. Then she grinned, her teeth clenched. “But I’ve got the tractor beam on it anyway!”

  “Morgan?” Paris asked. “Did you just void our warranty?”

  The Klingons chose that moment to resume firing, and Paris was all business again. “Pull them in, fast,” she ordered, rotating the ship to put its spherical prow in the Klingons’ line of fire. Kelly cut loose with all four forward phase cannons and both torpedo tubes while Mullen took over the tractor beam operation, guiding the damaged shuttle into the aft bay.

  “The Bird-of-Prey’s breaking off to pursue the other shuttle, Captain,” Kelly announced.

  Shumar could hear a distant shriek of atmosphere beyond the hull as Paris fired the thrusters to bank the ship around. “I can’t get us there in time, not with this drag,” she said. “Anyone got an idea?”

  Kelly snapped her fingers. “I can blind their sensors!”