Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation)

by George III, David R.

  “It’s not a problem,” Odo said. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon.” In the nearly eight years since his return to the Dominion—and to what at that time had been the Great Link—the Changeling had spent a great deal of time with Weyoun, as well as with Rotan’talag, a Jem’Hadar not reliant on ketracel-white. Initially, Odo sought to influence the two through his interactions with them, but that changed when the Founders, in the wake of the death of the Progenitor, had dispersed throughout the galaxy. Odo and Laas endeavored to chase down their fellow Changelings, to calm them and bring them back home. They managed to locate several individual Founders, as well as some who remained together in small links, but their efforts could not overcome the terrible despair that had infected their people.

  When Odo had finally abandoned his labors to restore the Great Link—though Laas had continued on his own—he’d focused on what remained of the Dominion. He aspired to drastically change the cultures of both the Vorta and the Jem’Hadar, the two species that kept order among the many others who served the interests of the Founders. But Odo quickly learned that, even in the guise of a god, he could not easily modify what genetics, time, and experience had wrought. Instead, he returned to his attempts to effect change in Weyoun and Rotan’talag as individuals, simply by way of his relationships with them.

  With the Vorta and the Jem’Hadar by his side, Odo had also worked to keep the Dominion intact after the disappearance of the Great Link. Fortunately, few Dominion denizens ever saw a Founder in person, and so the Changelings’ absence had little direct impact on day-to-day affairs. Through his instructions to the Vorta—and, to a lesser extent, to the Jem’Hadar—Odo strived to soften the entire civilization, to unite the separate societies within it into a more cohesive whole, to bring its component parts together in a way that benefited the most lives.

  It had been a long road, and Odo traveled it still. Laas returned at some point, and though he did not share Odo’s acceptance of solids or his ambitions for the Dominion, he stayed. Other Founders returned as well—twenty-seven so far, twenty-seven parts of a whole—and though they remained anguished and disconsolate, Odo believed that would change, especially as more of them came back and re-formed what might one day again be the Great Link.

  Odo had kept the borders of the Dominion closed, hopeful that he would have enough time to accomplish his goals. It troubled him that the Breen and the Romulans had felt emboldened enough not only to violate the sovereignty of the Dominion, but to steal from it, and to do so by way of kidnapping and the threat of additional violence. Odo had liked seeing Sisko, but that too had been an infringement of Dominion space.

  The sound of rattling metal broke the silence of the almost-empty plain. Odo and Weyoun turned toward the building, where a door rolled upward. A shape emerged from inside, low to the ground and moving quickly. It traveled in a sinuous motion, not side to side, but up and down. Its head remained steady as it snaked forward.

  When the Bronis reached them, she stopped, drew herself up, and balanced on the end of her body, which separated into four small segments at the tip. She had mottled gray flesh and a flat, wide head, with a thin slit of a mouth and two dark eyes that functioned independently of each other. She hissed in Weyoun’s direction, which the translator Odo had brought with him interpreted as, “Welcome, Vorta. I am Venetheris.”

  “Greetings, Venetheris, and thank you for meeting us,” Weyoun said. Bowing his head toward Odo, he introduced the Changeling.

  “We are honored to have you here, Founder,” Venetheris said, her original words a sibilant whistle. “We are sorry that it must be under such circumstances.”

  “You’re not at fault,” Odo said, and meant it. When Weyoun had approached him with Venetheris’s report of what had occurred on Bronis II, the Changeling had immediately cast the blame upon himself. He could have ordered different protections for the idle starship and weapons plants throughout the Dominion, but that would have required reassigning Vorta and Jem’Hadar from tasks he considered more necessary. Based on the information provided by Laas, and later by Sisko, Odo had treated the theft from Overne III as a singular event, unlikely to recur. That had evidently been a mistake. “Please show us,” he told Venetheris.

  The Bronis did not turn left or right, but swept her head backward over her body, then began to undulate toward the open door. Odo and Weyoun followed. When they entered the shadow cast by the building, Odo noted a significant drop in temperature.

  Venetheris stopped just a couple of meters inside the doorway and once again rose up to her full height. Odo and Weyoun stepped up beside her. Around them spread vast amounts of machinery, taking up a large area of the floor and reaching up toward the roof. Farther on, though, at the other end of the structure, a peculiar emptiness bespoke what had happened. As with the facility on Overne III, equipment had been stripped from its place and removed.

  “The machinery with which we manufacture deflector and structural integrity systems has been taken,” Venetheris said. “So too has the equipment with which we test those systems.”

  “And nothing else is missing?” Odo asked. It likely wouldn’t make a difference either way, but Odo wanted to be thorough.

  “No, nothing else,” Venetheris confirmed.

  “Do you know when this happened?” Odo asked.

  “Not with certainty,” Venetheris said, “but no more than a day or so ago. It might even have taken place earlier today.”

  “There is no indication that the protections against transporters have been compromised?” Odo wanted to know. “And no signs of forced entry?”

  “No,” Venetheris said. “It defies explanation.”

  But Odo knew the explanation: a phase-cloaked vessel and transport enhancers. “Do you have other production facilities on the planet with similar equipment?” he asked.

  “Yes, we do,” Venetheris said.

  Odo turned to Weyoun. “I want those plants protected from the inside,” he told the Vorta. “Here, and on Overne Three, and wherever else we’ve got such facilities.”

  “Yes, Founder,” Weyoun said. “I’ll make the arrangements as soon as we return to the ship.”

  Odo asked several other questions of Venetheris, until satisfied that he had all the information he needed. He thanked the Bronis, then started for the door. Weyoun followed. Once they had made it outside and moved beyond the influence of the building’s sensor-scrambling field, Weyoun contacted the ship for immediate transport. Within moments, the multihued lights of a transporter beam formed around them.

  Odo and Weyoun materialized in an alcove on the bridge of Jem’Hadar Attack Vessel 971. When they stepped from the platform, Weyoun said, “I will take care of reassigning Vorta and Jem’Hadar resources at our starship production facilities.”

  “Thank you,” Odo said. “I need to send a message myself.” As Weyoun marched to a nearby console, Odo considered what to say in the communication he would transmit to Sisko. He would inform him of the theft, of course, and of the apparent use of a phasing cloak in doing so, but somehow, he thought he needed to say more.

  But then he realized the flaw in sending a message to Sisko. If the vessel carrying the crew who had stolen the equipment from Bronis II had already made it back to the wormhole and successfully navigated past the Starfleet forces there, then Odo’s warning would arrive too late. And if the vessel hadn’t reached the wormhole—which seemed likely, since the theft had occurred so recently—if it still flew between Dominion space and the Idran system, then its crew would probably block any signal headed in that direction.

  Odo realized that he didn’t need to say more in his message. He needed to do more.

  He crossed the bridge to one of the Jem’Hadar there. “Third Rotan’talag,” he said, “set course for the Anomaly.” Even if he could not successfully transmit a warning, and even if he could not stop a vessel he could not find because it concealed itself with a cloak, perhaps he could still outrun it. If so, then he could deliver his warn
ing in person. To Rotan’talag, he said, “Highest possible speed.”

  25

  The praetor of the Romulan Star Empire stood outside a detention cell that looked larger and far more comfortable to her than it really needed to be. Back on Romulus, she would have expected a bare, compact compartment, with the barest necessities of life provided for in the most minimal of ways. She wondered if the difference resided in the presumed innocence upon which the Federation based its judicial system. Would an individual awaiting trial receive gentler treatment than one already convicted? She didn’t know, but the question interested her.

  Kamemor had no idea where on Earth her escorts—Federation Security Advisor Jas Abrik and a pair of security officers—had taken her. When she had contacted Admiral Devix aboard Enderavat to tell him that she would be removed from Paris to an undisclosed location, he had voiced grave concerns. Perhaps foolishly—though she didn’t think so—Kamemor felt no concern regarding her own safety while in the custody of President Bacco’s government, but Devix insisted that one of his officers be permitted to accompany the praetor on her journey. The president left the decision to Abrik, whom she charged with the logistics of the trip. Consequently, Subcommander D’Voral had transported down to watch over Kamemor.

  The group of five had beamed from the Palais de la Concorde in Paris to a secure, secondary location. There, they embarked on a self-contained, cylindrical shuttle and traveled at high velocity through subterranean tubes—at least, the tubes seemed subterranean, though Kamemor realized that she did not know for sure. When they arrived at a third site, they then boarded a lift and descended what seemed like a considerable distance, until they reached a detention facility.

  While the security officers took Subcommander D’Voral to a room where they could all observe Kamemor on a display screen, Abrik ushered her to a door. He described in detail precisely what she would find on the other side, which didn’t amount to much. He also told her that he would ensure that the door secured behind her, and then he would join the others so that he too could observe. Finally, Abrik allowed her to enter the room on her own.

  Inside, she’d found exactly what Abrik had described to her. The small room possessed few features. The door through which she passed marked the only interruption in the wall around it. Directly across from her, a second door led to a ’fresher. Between the two doors, in the center of the space, sat a plain bench, with a padded seat and back. To her right, a huge display formed the entire wall, though it did not look like a display as much as it did a vista—a street-level view of Ki Baratan, the capital city of Romulus. And finally, to her left, a force field composed the fourth wall, containing the detention cell beyond it.

  When Kamemor had first entered the room, Tomalak had been lying supine on the narrow mattress at the far end of his cell, his eyes open and staring toward the ceiling. He didn’t bother to glance over when she stepped inside and sat down in the center of the bench, and so she did not say anything. Eventually, as he shifted his position on the bed, she saw his gaze dart briefly in her direction.

  Had anybody else been in the room besides Kamemor, perhaps Tomalak would have pretended as though he hadn’t stolen a glance, hadn’t seen who had come to visit him—or, more likely, to interrogate him. But he did see her, and clearly her presence shocked him. When she thought about it herself—that she stood somewhere on the planet Earth—it shocked her too.

  “Praetor,” Tomalak had said, leaping to his feet and racing toward her. He wore a multi-toned brown jumpsuit, belted at the waist. “I can’t believe that you’re here.”

  “I can’t really believe it either,” she’d told him. “But I needed to find out for myself what happened in the Bajoran system, and why you are here.”

  Tomalak had lied to her almost from his first word. He claimed that he’d been unwilling to carry out Commander T’Jul’s plan to attack the Federation, and so he’d been forced to escape to a civilian vessel. He said that he had no idea that the cloaked Eletrix had attempted to follow the Breen freighter through the wormhole. He and the crew of the freighter tried to flee because they did not wish to take part in the action against the Federation, and they feared their own destruction. The freighter crew, rather than be captured, chose to commit suicide.

  For a while, Kamemor had listened. For a while, she even affected belief. But the more the two spoke, the more apparent Tomalak’s fabrications became, and the more he realized that the praetor grasped his mendacity.

  But all of that had been at least half a day earlier, perhaps longer. They hardly stopped speaking, one or the other of them finding things to say. At first, Tomalak acted forthcoming, but as their interaction wore on, the praetor saw behaviors and emotions she readily recognized in her former proconsul: derision, sarcasm, annoyance, anger.

  Through it all, she had a sense that she should wait for his fatigue. Kamemor did not threaten Tomalak, nor did she promise him anything. She asked mostly indirect questions, but would from time to time approach an issue in a straightforward manner. She doled out bits of information, hinted about other things she knew—some of which she did, some of which she didn’t. She understood from the beginning that she would not achieve instant success, but that if success came, it would be as the result of a process.

  As she stood before the force field and peered into the cell, she watched Tomalak carefully. He sat on the edge of the bed, bent over, elbows on his knees, head bowed. He could have been feigning weariness, but Kamemor didn’t see how. She felt exhausted herself.

  “I’m going to try again, Tomalak,” she said quietly. “And I’m going to keep trying until you give me what I need. But not only what I need—what the Romulan Empire needs.”

  Tomalak lifted his head and laughed. “You have no notion what the Empire needs,” he said. “If you did, I wouldn’t be sitting here, because I wouldn’t have needed to save Romulus from its own leader.”

  “It’s interesting you should characterize things in that way,” Kamemor said, “because during my time as praetor, I keep finding myself having to extract the Empire from situations you caused—situations that, by your own estimation, put Romulus and the Typhon Pact at risk.”

  “You’re blathering, old woman.”

  “You stole the plans for Starfleet’s quantum slipstream drive from Utopia Planitia,” Kamemor said. She hadn’t mentioned the attack on Utopia Planitia during their long conversation, much less associated Tomalak with it. When she did, he flew to his feet, though he seemed to resist the impulse to charge across his cell toward her. “You succeeded in stealing the plans, but in doing so, you also blew up part of an orbital facility and killed Federation citizens. You provided President Bacco justification to retaliate militarily against the Empire and the Pact, even to declare war. If that had happened, if the Federation and its allies had gone to war, Romulus would have been forced to fight without the slipstream drive. Yes, you’d stolen the plans for it, but how many hundreds of days would it have taken to make it operational?

  “So you worried that the Federation enjoyed a military advantage,” Kamemor continued, “then forced a potential situation for them to employ that advantage against us.” She stared at Tomalak, then added, “You’re not very bright, are you?”

  This time, Tomalak did rush across his cell, so quickly that Kamemor thought he would strike the force field. He stopped just short of it, though it buzzed at his close approach. From very near, he looked at her with undisguised hatred. “I did not endanger the Empire,” he said. “The Breen . . .” He shook his head and turned away. Perhaps he thought he’d told Kamemor too much.

  “So I’m wrong?” she said, trying to keep the conversation alive and heading in the direction she needed it to go. “You didn’t plan to kill Federation citizens, and thereby risk a war that even you believe the Empire was not equipped to win?”

  “No, of course not,” Tomalak said. “There were to be no deaths. Explosions, yes, but carefully timed and precisely placed.”

&
nbsp; “You speak of explosives as though they were exacting instruments,” Kamemor said. “That seems . . . optimistic.”

  Tomalak shrugged. “A few dead Starfleeters,” he said with disdain. “The Federation doesn’t have the spine to go to war over so little a loss.”

  “So you thought you would see if you could provoke them by blowing up an entire space station?” Kamemor said.

  Tomalak offered a guttural response, throwing up a hand and stalking away. He ended up across his cell, with his back to her. But Kamemor knew—and he must have known—that he could not escape.

  “What you did at Utopia Planitia,” she said, “you did again in the Bajoran system. You so desperately wanted the slipstream drive for Romulus, and yet you again risked war without delivering it.”

  Tomalak turned and peered over at Kamemor. She had not revealed to him until that moment that she knew the goal he’d carried into the Gamma Quadrant with him. She thought she saw him reevaluating her, reevaluating what she knew. She seized the opportunity.

  “Yes, I know that you stole equipment from the Dominion that would allow you to develop slipstream drive,” Kamemor said. “And so in that action, you risked another war with the Founders, with the Jem’Hadar.”

  Tomalak hurried back over to stand opposite Kamemor. “A minimal risk,” he said. “We killed no Changelings, no Jem’Hadar. We captured some in battle, but we let them go. We did not seek enemies; we sought strength for the Empire.”

  “So you took pains not to antagonize the Founders—at least not too much—but you still had no problem provoking the Federation, whom you believed had a tactical advantage?” Kamemor said. “It makes no sense.”

  Again, Tomalak shook his head. He appeared more tired than ever. Kamemor sensed defeat in him.