Enterprise 12 - The Good That Men Do

by Star Trek

  “I’m so sorry, Captain,” Phlox was

  saying in tones that dripped with grief.

  “He’s gone.”

  A pause. Then Phlox spoke again: “Computer, record that death occurred at nineteen-hundred and thirty-three hours, fourteen February, 2155.”

  Feeling unaccountably calmed by the knowledge that the deed had finally been done, Trip opened his eyes. He looked up again at his reflection, which looked bizarre and funhouse-distorted in the curved, too-close metal ceiling of the chamber. He could see that the Denobulan physician had certainly managed to make him look gruesome, in spite of the haste with which he’d had to work. A large, livid burn snaked down his neck, and a profusion of other wounds and smudges covered both his flesh and his torn uniform.

  So this is what it’s like to be dead, he thought, really trying on the idea for the first time. Funny. Doesn’t hurt quite as much as I thought it would.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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  For Don Hood, who has shared my life

  for almost twelve years,

  and who often lives up to the phrase

  “the good that men do.”

  —A.M.

  For my wife, Jenny Martin, for understanding

  and patience above and beyond the call;

  for James Martin and William Martin,

  whose treks are just beginning;

  and for Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada,

  a man of wisdom, conviction, and courage who

  has brilliantly exemplified Sun Tzu’s dictum,

  “He will win who knows when to fight

  and when not to fight.”

  —M.A.M.

  Historian’s Note

  The main events in this book take place early in 2155, just after the crew of the Enterprise stops the xenophobic group Terra Prime from destroying Starfleet Command (“Demons” and “Terra Prime”).

  “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  —George Orwell (1903–1950)

  “He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.”

  —Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

  “All war is deception.

  ”—Sun Tzu (5th century B.C.)

  “The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk.”

  —Robert Anton Wilson (1932– )

  “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones.”

  —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

  Prologue

  The early twenty-fifth century

  Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana

  ALTHOUGH LIGHT-YEARS SEPARATED HIM from his homeworld, the cool rain falling through the moss-covered trees reminded Nog of Ferenginar. The smell was different here, of course; the Louisiana swamps were redolent with decay and rot, and the lukewarm rain—falling at not quite a glebbening level yet, but close—added a dampness that made the humid air almost palpably pungent.

  Nog stepped wide to avoid a greasy-looking puddle, and almost immediately regretted it as a sharp twinge went up his hyperextended left leg. Making sure the pack he carried slung over his shoulder was secure, he crouched down onto his right knee, his fingers deftly massaging the pained left leg.

  It seemed strange to him that the newer leg, regrown from his own tissues years ago to replace the biosynthetic limb he’d needed because of an injury suffered during the Dominion War, should always be the one that gave him trouble. Of course, a few of his other joints suffered aches and pains as well—it was all just part of the process of getting older—but his new left leg should have felt better, not worse, than either his natural limbs or the now-discarded biosynthetic one. His doctors had examined him several times in recent years, but they could never find anything inherently wrong with the new leg, and always ended up telling him that he probably just favored it differently than the bionic part he’d spent so many years getting used to, thus creating unfamiliar stressor points on his left side.

  Nog stood, peering up the path before him and thinking about his friend. Why did he choose to make his home so far off the beaten track? He imagined young Jennifer probably didn’t relish playing in the yard—if he even has a yard—since hew-mons generally seemed to have an aversion to muck and dampness.

  Another dozen meters, and as he rounded a bend in the pathway, he saw the two-story house directly ahead. Soft light was visible through several round-topped windows, and a wisp of smoke curled out of a chimney on the home’s southernmost wall, drifting lazily up through the damp twilight air. The fact that a fire was burning and lights were on gave Nog hope; he wanted to surprise his old friend, and hadn’t contacted him to let him know he was coming.

  The murky pathway ended at the edge of a small expanse of open, well-tended lawn, and Nog stepped onto a cobblestone walkway that meandered through the green on its way toward the home’s front door. He wondered idly if Jake had helped create the walkway.

  Nog stood in front of the door, his hand raised and poised to knock. He noticed that Jake didn’t appear to have any other kind of signaling device mounted on or near the door, and wondered when his old friend had become such a Luddite. No com panel, no security device…it was so different from what Nog was used to.

  He rapped his knuckles loudly against the door four times, then took a step back. He heard something—or someone—stirring inside, then heard indistinct muttering. The sound made his heart leap; although he couldn’t make out what was being said, it was the speaker that mattered, not the speech.

  The door cracked open several centimeters, and light spilled out from inside, momentarily silhouetting the tall, dark-skinned man who stood there peering out.

  “Greetings, old man,” Nog said, remembering what Benjamin Sisko used to call Dax. It seemed somehow appropriate now, here, as he saw his friend’s eyes widen in delighted surprise.

  “Nog!” Jake Sisko’s voice cracked slightly as he shouted his friend’s name, and then he opened the door wide, holding his arms out.

  Nog stepped forward, opening his own arms and clasping them around Jake’s torso. It was only after he had hugged his friend for several seconds that he remembered that he was soaking wet. He pulled back, looking up at Jake.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” Nog said.

  Jake’s expression changed instantly—was it bemusement regis
tering there?—and he good-naturedly whacked the Ferengi on his shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Right. Whatever. Bygones, Nog.”

  Turning, he gestured inside. “Let’s get you out of the rain and into my warm, dry den. Then you can tell me what brought you out to my hideaway in the middle of hurricane season!”

  Nog stepped inside, purposely keeping the grin on his face. He wondered if the problem he was bringing Jake would constitute a stronger storm than the weather outside.

  Jake Sisko pulled the cork from the top of the bottle with as much élan as he could muster, given the way his fingers were cramping up these days. He poured two glasses of the dark liquid and set the bottle down as Nog reached for one of the deep, round wineglasses.

  “Twenty-three seventy-six? That was an…interesting year,” Jake said, looking at the date on the bottle. Nog had chosen an Italian wine, a rich pinot noir that smelled enticingly of fruit and oaken casks.

  “Not as interesting as twenty-three seventy-seven,” Nog said, grinning. “But I know how much you hewmons like the older vintage beverages.” He hoisted his glass toward Jake.

  Jake raised his glass as well, regarding the dark liquid inside thoughtfully and giving it a gentle swirl. “You’ve certainly come a long way since the old root beer days back on the station.”

  Nog snickered. “We live and we learn, Jake.” He paused to swirl the contents of his own glass. “To an old friendship.”

  Jake clinked his glass against Nog’s. “Not so old,” he said, smiling. He took a sip, eyeing the Ferengi over the rim of his glass. His friend still looked barely a week older than his teens.

  “Well, not so old for you,” Jake finally added, smiling. “I swear, you Ferengi don’t ever seem to age.”

  Nog grinned back, his sharp, pointed teeth gleaming. “Oh, I’ve had a few nips and tucks over the years, Jake,” he said, running his right hand over his right lobe. “Don’t want my lobes to get too droopy. Hard to get another wife if I look like a melting candle.”

  “Haven’t you had enough wives?” Jake asked. “I think I’ve lost of track of how many times you’ve been married. Three? Four?” He caught himself before mentioning that he hadn’t been invited to several of the weddings.

  Nog pondered for a moment, then grinned sheepishly. “I guess it depends on whether you count Diressa as a separate wife both times I married her.” He gestured toward the rest of the spacious house. “Speaking of which, where’s Korena?”

  “She’s on Bajor,” Jake said. “The weather’s better there, and I wanted some time by myself to write. I’ve got half a dozen novels started, but nothing seems to be grabbing me and shaking itself out of my brain.” It was a bad metaphor, and one Jake never would have used with anyone who didn’t know better; a problem writers faced since the days of ink and papyrus was that non-writers thought the creative process came to them like a visiting muse, depositing a manuscript on their desk as simply as a replicated cup of raktajino.

  “I read your latest about six months ago,” Nog said, settling back onto a replicated nineteenth-century chair. Its tall back, padded with a rich red velvet, towered over the diminutive Ferengi’s head, making him look like a child. “It was quite entertaining. I wasn’t able to figure out who the killer was before you revealed it…or them, actually.”

  “Well, that’s part of the fun of writing a mystery set in the era before scanning technology,” Jake replied. “The detectives have to work a bit harder to figure out their cases.” He took another sip of his wine. “Rena was also very happy with that particular book.”

  “She was surprised by the ending, too?” Nog asked.

  “No. She’s happy that it got optioned. They’re supposed to be making a holoprogram out of it. On Mars.”

  “Ah-ha, profit!” Nog raised his glass in a mock toast. “I always knew that girl had a bit of Ferengi in her.”

  Jake grimaced slightly, mocking his friend right back. “She couldn’t care less about the profit. She just likes seeing my credits and telling people about her famous-but-reclusive husband. Besides which, holo-authors are so much more respectable and important than book authors these days. Didn’t you know that?”

  Nog rolled his eyes. “Not that old song again. I think you’ve had more than your share of fame.”

  “More than I ever wanted,” Jake said, nodding.

  There was a flash of movement to the side, and Nog flinched as a fat ball of gray and brown fur jumped up on the arm of the chair, and then collapsed heavily onto his lap.

  “Ah, cue the cat. Odo has decided to join us,” Jake said.

  Nog’s eyes widened sharply. “Odo? You mean—”

  Jake almost choked on the sip of wine he had taken. He swallowed loudly and wiped his hand over his mouth. “Not Odo-Odo. Cat-Odo.” He laughed. “What, did you think I’ve been keeping the station’s old security chief around here as a pet all these years?”

  Nog shrugged, staring peculiarly at the cat, which padded around on his lap, kneading its claws in and out against the thankfully tough fabric of his uniform pants. “I don’t know. Stranger things have happened to us.”

  Jake raised an eyebrow. “Not that strange.” He leaned across the table, making sure his elbows didn’t topple either the wine bottle or the glasses, and scooped the chubby cat off Nog’s lap. “Here, I’ll take the constable off your hands.”

  Nog took a sip from his glass, and then fidgeted for a moment. “Actually, I don’t want to make it sound like I had to have a reason to visit you, but something just came up and I thought of you.”

  “So, what is it?” Jake leaned forward slightly. Odo jumped off his lap and scampered away, undoubtedly heading toward his food dish.

  Nog pulled a small isolinear chip out of a pocket in his tunic. The firelight glinted off it, making it appear as though it had a firefly trapped within its slender, emerald-colored confines.

  “I discovered this when I was researching twenty-second-century warp mechanics,” Nog said. “I was digging around in some of the newly declassified files.”

  Jake raised an eyebrow. “Declassified files? From where? By who? And when?”

  Jake peered at the chip, as if trying to divine its secrets just by studying its translucent surface. “The when is part of what makes this complicated. It concerns events we’ve been told happened in 2161. But the real events actually occurred years earlier, in 2155. And I can’t tell whether the where and who are related solely to Section 31, or whether this apparently deliberate cover-up was something sanctioned by those in charge during the earliest days of the Federation.”

  “All the answers aren’t in the declassified information?” Jake was intrigued, especially with the mention of Section 31. It hadn’t been so long ago that the secretive organization—a shadowy spy bureau as old as Starfleet—had finally been exposed and, Jake hoped, rooted out once and for all.

  “I hope they are,” Nog said, interrupting Jake’s train of thought. “But as soon as I started to get into it, I thought ‘I know one hew-mon who would not only find this fascinating, but also might be able to write a bestselling book about it.’ So, here I am.”

  Jake chuckled. “I see. Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. But do you really think this is important enough that people will care, two hundred years after all the facts and fictions have become part of dusty history?”

  Nog looked surprised again, and then his features took on a conspiratorial, almost sinister, cast. “Jake, from what I’ve seen, this story involves hew-mons, Andorians, Vulcans, Denobulans, and Romulans. It has kidnapping, assassination, slavery, death, resurrection, and cover-ups. And it may just change everything we know—or everything that we’ve been told—about the founding of the Federation itself.”

  Jake found himself grinning widely. It had been a long time since he and Nog had played detectives in the shadowy corridors of Deep Space 9, trying to solve the mystery behind some strange occurrence or other that they were naively certain would stump even the formidable dedu
ctive abilities of Constable Odo. And now, he felt the same surge of boyhood adrenaline rush into his system.

  He held out his hand for the chip.

  “So, let’s get to it.”

  One

  Day Five, Month of Tasmeen

  Unroth III, Romulan space

  DOCTOR EHREHIN I’RAMNAU TR’AVRAK stood before the research complex’s vast panoramic window, listening to the control center’s background wash of electronic chirps, beeps, and drones as he looked out over the remote firing site where the prototype would shortly thrum to life. For the past several days, every console in the cramped control center had shown reassuring shades of orange, with hardly a hint of the green hues that Romulans tended to associate with blood and danger. The only green the elderly scientist had seen since his arrival here more than ten of this world’s lengthy rotations ago was that of the carpet of forest that spread from the base of the gently rolling hillside beyond and below the control facility’s perimeter walls, all the way to Unroth III’s flat, eerily close horizon.

  Unlike most of his research staff, Doctor Ehrehin was unwilling to keep his gaze perpetually averted from the sea of greenery that lay beyond the control room windows. But he also refused to allow the forest’s alarming hues to unnerve him, concentrating instead on the soothing, ruddy light of the planet’s primary star, which hugged the forest canopy as it made its preternaturally slow descent toward evening. Despite the low angle of the diffraction-bloated sun, several long dierha remained before the wilderness outside would become fully enshrouded in darkness.

  “It is time, Doctor,” said Cunaehr, Ehrehin’s most valued research assistant. “Are you ready to begin the test?”

  His gaze still lingering on the forest that sprawled beyond the window, Ehrehin offered Cunaehr a dry, humorless chuckle. A better question would be, Is the prototype finally ready to begin the test? he thought, leaving the query unspoken lest he draw the unfavorable attention of the malevolent cosmic force that sometimes caused field tests to go awry in new and unexpected ways.