After the disastrous events in the Bajoran system, Captain Benjamin Sisko must confront the consequences of the recent choices he has made in his life. At the same time, the United Federation of Planets and its Khitomer Accords allies have come to the brink of war with the Typhon Pact. While factions within the Pact unsuccessfully used the recent gestures of goodwill—the opening of borders and a joint Federation-Romulan exploratory mission—to develop quantum-slipstream drive, they have not given up their goals. Employing a broad range of assets, from Romulus to Cardassia, from Ab-Tzenketh to Bajor, they embark on a dangerous new plan to acquire the technology they need to take control of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. While UFP President Bacco and Romulan Praetor Kamemor work feverishly to reestablish peace, Captains Sisko, Jean-Luc Picard, and Ro Laren stand on the front lines of the conflict . . . even as a new danger threatens the Bajoran wormhole as it once more becomes a flashpoint of galactic history.
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Captain Ro Laren closed her eyes and saw the end of her life rapidly approaching.
She held her injured right arm against her body, feeling the ache deep within it, the fall she’d taken that had pinned it beneath her still fresh in her mind. Breen disruptors had thrashed Deep Space 9, sending her sprawling to the deck in ops. She had picked herself up, though, and fought back—just as all of her command crew there had.
But DS9 had been compromised when a pair of bombs planted in its lower core had detonated, causing the loss of containment for two of the station’s reactors. Her crew jettisoned one of the reactors, but the explosions had damaged the second ejection mechanism. There had been no time for Ro and her officers to even attempt anything else.
And then, as though the Prophets objected to the impending loss of Deep Space 9 and all aboard the station, the wormhole had blossomed into existence, a refulgent flower denying the great desert of space. Befitting its cognomen among the faithful, the Celestial Temple then delivered a potential savior into the Alpha Quadrant: U.S.S. Robinson. Not a believer herself, Ro nevertheless focused on the identity of the Galaxy-class starship’s commanding officer: the Emissary himself, Benjamin Sisko.
But whatever hope Robinson might have brought with it had vanished as quickly as the wormhole. The Tzenkethi marauder wheeled around, its tail demolishing Kasidy Yates’s cargo vessel. Suddenly, Captain Sisko’s presence on the battlefield seemed less like a cause for hope than a brutality conveyed by indifferent circumstance.
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ISBN 978-1-4516-4956-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-4958-1 (ebook)
To Margaret Clark,
An editor whose professional talents and creativity
Only ever helped to improve my work,
And a person whose intelligence, kindness, humor, and friendship
Continue to enrich my life
Contents
In Medias Res
Part I: Awaked an Evil Nature
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II: The Abjuration of Rough Magic
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Transitus
Summa Summarum
Ab Initio
Prospero: Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance; they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1
Each eve brings unexpected light—
A newfound truth, a redemption,
Or some complex revelation—
To vanquish dark and raise the dawn.
—K. C. Hunter,
Cycles in the Sky, “Nyx and Eos”
In Medias Res
Deep Space 9 exploded.
In the center of the U.S.S. Robinson bridge, Captain Benjamin Sisko felt shattered. From where he had fallen to his knees on the deck, he watched the main viewscreen as a massive blast ripped through the lower core of the space station. The reactors, he thought automatically, a reflexive response born of his years in command of DS9. Two of the tubular power-transfer conduits that connected the lower core to the midcore fractured, and Sisko thought—he hoped—that the reactor compartment might tear away completely, sparing the station further damage and possibly saving the lives of everybody aboard.
What happened? he wondered, incredulous, even as he understood that no answer would suffice. He’d brought his ship home days early from a six-month exploratory mission to the Gamma Quadrant, after his crew had lost touch with Deep Space 9. They’d come through the Bajoran wormhole to a devastating scene. Torpedoes and energy discharges blazed through sp
ace as Defiant battled a Romulan warbird, and as DS9 itself faced down a Tzenkethi marauder and a Breen warship. Other, smaller vessels—Starfleet runabouts, civilian ships, a Breen freighter—buzzed about, some joining the conflict, others apparently seeking escape.
Sisko had leaped up from his command chair almost as soon as Robinson had emerged from the wormhole. Then he saw the smooth, silver-clad Tzenkethi vessel perform a maneuver he’d come to know too well during the Federation’s last war with the Coalition. The teardrop-shaped starship whirled on its minor axis, its tapered end whipping around and slicing through the hull of an Antares-class freighter.
Maybe it was some other Antares-class freighter, he thought in desperation. But no. He’d recognized the old cargo vessel: Xhosa. Kasidy’s ship.
For just an instant, Xhosa had hung in space, cleaved in two, but otherwise intact. Sisko dared hope for the impossible, but then in the next moment, his wishes evaporated like beads of moisture beneath a hot wind. A great fireball bloomed where the vessel’s hull had been breached, the ship disintegrating into pieces as it blew apart. “No!” he’d cried out, and then collapsed to his knees. “Kas . . . Rebecca . . . no.”
He’d felt a hand on his back, and had heard the voices of his crew all around him. But for the second time in his existence, Sisko felt his life draw to a close. More than fifteen years earlier, when the Borg attack at Wolf 359 had taken his first wife, Jennifer, from him, his heart and mind had seemed to spill out, his very essence washing away in a torrent of loss and despair. Had it not been for Jake, and Sisko’s need to care for his young son, he couldn’t say what he would have done.
Sisko knew that, with her first mate away from the ship, Kasidy had intended to make Xhosa’s latest cargo run herself. She’d also spoken about the possibility of bringing their daughter along with her. I tried everything to save them, Sisko thought. I gave up everything. I stayed away so that they would be safe. If I’ve lost them both—
On the main viewer, Sisko saw another jet of fire erupt from DS9’s reactor compartment. That explosion appeared to trigger another, and a chain of destruction traveled up through the station’s central core, and then higher, through the structures that housed the Promenade and the operations center. In his mind, Sisko imagined all the places in which he had spent so much time—the Replimat, Quark’s, station security, the infirmary, ops, what for seven years had been his own office. He imagined the detonations splintering their decks, bulkheads, and overheads. He pictured the conflagration engulfing and devouring all of it—along with all those on board.
I wish it had been me, he thought, utterly defeated. I wish I had been on the station.
In that terrible moment, Ben Sisko did not see how he could possibly go on.
Commander Anxo Rogeiro, first officer of Robinson, NCC-71842, squinted from where he stood in the middle of the bridge as the image on the main viewscreen flared brightly. He watched through narrowed eyes as a succession of explosions climbed up the central hub of Deep Space 9, annihilating the core structures at the heart of the station. The radial crossover bridges ruptured, causing the inner habitat ring and the outer docking ring to fragment. Two of the hooklike docking pylons sheared off and went tumbling through space. Broken sections of the station flew outward in all directions.
Surprised and dismayed by the canvas of destruction painted across the viewer, Rogeiro glanced down to where the captain had slumped to his knees on the deck. With an empty look in his eyes, his mouth hanging open, and the trails of his tears running in quicksilver streaks down the dark flesh of his face, Sisko appeared as stunned as the first officer felt. More than that, though, the captain looked like a beaten man.
Rogeiro understood what had just happened—that Sisko, prior to seeing DS9 blow up, had witnessed the destruction of his wife’s cargo ship—though not why it had happened. Rogeiro had reached down to settle a hand on the back of his captain—of his friend—in an attempt to offer some small measure of solace through the simple act of providing human contact. He also needed to bring Sisko back to the present, to where three Typhon Pact starships still occupied Bajoran space at the threshold of the wormhole—and one of which continued a firefight against a Starfleet vessel. Rogeiro had already ordered Robinson’s shields raised to their maximum level, and if the captain didn’t soon regain his composure, the first officer would likely also have to take the ship into battle.
“Captain, the Breen have sealed their hull breach,” reported Lieutenant Commander Uteln from the tactical console on the raised rear section of the bridge. “And it appears that the Tzenkethi are on the verge of restoring their shields.”
Rogeiro waited a moment for Sisko to reply, but the captain did not react. He gave no indication at all that he’d even heard Robinson’s chief of security speaking. Rogeiro looked over to where Lieutenant Althouse, the ship’s counselor, sat in her customary position to the left of the captain’s chair. She worked intently at the console beside her. Before the first officer could get her attention, Uteln spoke again.
“The Defiant’s shields are below sixty per—” started the security chief, but then he stopped in mid-sentence. “Captain!” he called out, his tone urgent.
Rogeiro peered up at Uteln, then followed the Deltan’s gaze back to the main viewer. There, the first officer saw a large, curved assemblage spinning through space, its ends bent and twisted where it had torn out of Deep Space 9’s docking ring. It grew larger on the viewscreen as it neared, apparently on a collision course with Robinson.
Sparing another quick look down at Sisko, who showed no signs of recovering from his obvious state of shock, Rogeiro removed his hand from the captain’s back and stepped forward. Leaning in past Lieutenant Commander Sivadeki at the conn, he said, “Move us out of its path and away from the wormhole.” Sivadeki worked her controls at once, and on the viewscreen, Rogeiro saw the mass of DS9 wreckage slip away to the ship’s port side.
That danger averted, the first officer considered what actions the Robinson crew needed to take next, and in what order. “Set a course for the Defiant and the Romulan ship,” he told Sivadeki, “but hold our position.” Then, straightening and turning back toward the security chief, he said, “Hailing frequencies. Warn the Tzenkethi and Breen ships that if they don’t stand down immediately, we will open fire on them.” With the shields of the two enemy ships disabled, such an attack would prove catastrophic for them.
“Aye, sir,” Uteln acknowledged.
As the security chief complied with his orders, Rogeiro again peered over to the ship’s counselor. Althouse saw him, quickly finished working at her console, then stood and darted over to the first officer. Having joined Starfleet late in her life, the pixieish blonde nevertheless carried herself with the confidence that long experience in her field afforded. They stepped to the side of the bridge together. “I’ve got a medical team on the way,” she said in hushed tones. “But I can relieve Captain Sisko right now and take him to sickbay.”
Rogeiro nodded, noting that the counselor had left to him the actual decision of whether or not to remove the captain from command, though only she and Doctor Kosciuszko, the ship’s chief medical officer, possessed that authority. “Enter the action in your log, and I’ll answer it in mine,” he said, matching her whisper with his own. Rogeiro felt tremendous sympathy for Sisko, but he also understood that the responsibility for the lives of the Robinson crew—and for perhaps many more lives than that—had suddenly fallen to him. “Escort the captain yourself,” he told Althouse. The counselor nodded, then padded over and crouched beside Sisko. She took the captain gently by the arms and began trying to coax him to his feet.
“Sir, there’s no response from either the Tzenkethi or the Breen,” said Uteln. Obviously mindful of Captain Sisko’s condition, the security chief spoke directly to Rogeiro. “Power distribution levels in the marauder—” Uteln cut himself off again, this time interrupted by a series of three tones emanating from his console. He examined his tactical display
, then announced, “The wormhole is opening.”
The Enterprise, Rogeiro thought expectantly. The Sovereignclass starship had been conducting an unprecedented joint exploration of the Gamma Quadrant with the Romulan vessel Eletrix—ironically enough, as a means of helping to establish peaceful relations among the worlds of the Khitomer Accords and the Typhon Pact. When the warbird had apparently crashed on a moon with the loss of all hands, and the Enterprise crew had subsequently lost communications with Deep Space 9, Captain Picard had contacted Captain Sisko. With neither crew able to reach DS9 via subspace, the two men had agreed that both ships should proceed at once back to the Alpha Quadrant. “On-screen,” Rogeiro ordered.
On the viewer, the Bajoran wormhole swirled in a spectacular flurry of blues and whites. As Counselor Althouse accompanied the captain toward the portside turbolift at the forward reach of the bridge, Sisko jerked his head to the right to look at the main viewer. Rogeiro thought he saw the captain’s expression harden when he saw the wormhole, but Althouse urged him on, one hand on his arm, the other at his back. The two entered the turbolift, and the doors glided shut behind them.
Rogeiro peered back at the viewscreen and waited to see the Federation flagship appear in the bright center of the maelstrom. It didn’t. Instead, the section of DS9’s docking ring that had almost struck Robinson spun end over end as it entered the wormhole. Then the great vortex rushed in on itself, ultimately vanishing in a pinpoint flash of light, taking the piece of wreckage with it.
Suddenly, Robinson shuddered. A roar filled the bridge, and Rogeiro lurched to his left, pinwheeling his arms in order to stay on his feet. The overhead lighting flickered once.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation) Page 1
