Obsidian Alliances

by Various

  Damn them! The security measures weren’t active in the control room itself, as both the anesthezine and the nerve gas were too risky to let loose around the sensitive antigravity equipment that kept Stratos in the air.

  Not nearly as risky as letting two rebels in there, though. “Transporter room, beam me to the corridor outside the control room, now!”

  “Yes, Supervisor.”

  She wished she could have beamed directly in, but transporters didn’t operate within the room, either, for the same reason the gases didn’t.

  It wasn’t until she materialized that she realized that she had forgotten to retrieve her disruptor from Thomas’s corpse. Well, it’s not like I would’ve used an energy weapon in there anyhow.

  It still put her at a disadvantage, however. Harry and Seska would have no qualms about firing their weapons, as their likely goal was to sabotage the antigrav generators that kept Stratos aloft.

  The phrase control room didn’t do the space justice, since the word room implied a relatively small, enclosed area, even on Ardana where spaciousness was the order of the day. The control room took up the entire length and breadth of the city, save for that one corridor that led to the turbolift into which B’Elanna had materialized. The four corners of the space were taken up with huge cylindrical generators, protected by duranium sheaths, and each half a qelI’qam in diameter. Throughout the massive space were various control consoles. B’Elanna moved toward the nearest of the generators.

  Sure enough, she saw Harry and Seska operating one of the consoles—B’Elanna didn’t know which one, as the minutiae of engineering bored her to tears. Besides, unlike the equipment in the security office and operations, these generators hadn’t been replaced with Alliance models, as it was deemed too risky to take the existing Ardanan equipment offline in order to replace it.

  To B’Elanna’s relief, that very feature was vexing Harry and Seska right now, as they appeared to be having difficulties with the interfaces.

  Quickly, she reviewed her options. She doubted she could sneak up on them—certainly not on Harry. Only the room’s sheer size had allowed her to remain unnoticed so far. She had no energy weapons, and couldn’t risk firing them in any case. As for Harry and Seska, they’d be more than happy to risk it and, she could see now, they were both quite well armed (though not well dressed; Harry was as covered in gore as B’Elanna, and was wearing only some stolen Klingon uniform pants, and Seska had yet to put on any clothes).

  Then she broke into a smile. She didn’t need to confront them at all.

  Slowly, she backed out of the control room, then ran down the corridor toward the turbolift. Activating an intercom, she said, “Transporter room, beam me back to the security office.”

  “Yes, Supervisor.”

  As soon as she materialized, she immediately went to the computer and implemented a biohazard protocol, which meant quarantine procedures had to be undertaken. That meant that bulkheads would close over any access points to level ten. They may sabotage the generator, but they’ll be trapped here.

  There was a part of B’Elanna that was quite willing to die along with Stratos. She had lost Kes, lost her favorite Terran plaything, lost two of her three best scientists, and lost her informant on the Terran Rebellion. A quick computer check revealed that Katie had begun her report on the rebellion’s activities, but she hadn’t gotten very far when Chakotay shot her. The supervisor had nothing left.

  But no—I’m still alive.

  Just then, Crell Moset ran into the office. “Supervisor, what’s happening? Security won’t respond to my—Oh, dear.” That last was added when Moset caught sight of the decapitated bodies. Looking up at B’Elanna, he asked snidely, “Has Zimmerman taken more brains for his experiments?”

  “Zimmerman’s dead.” She whirled around, startling Moset, who likely hadn’t expected to see his supervisor covered in Terran blood. “You have a ship in Bay 9, yes?”

  “Of course.” Moset was a very wealthy scientist, after all, and had several private ships. Most were at his home on Chin’toka II, but the one he originally came to Ardana in was docked here.

  “Good.” She turned back to the computer. “Give me the access codes to your ship’s computer.”

  “What?”

  Turning back around, she snarled, “Now!”

  Recoiling as if slapped, Moset quickly dashed over to stand next to B’Elanna and input an access code. B’Elanna then core-dumped Monor Base’s entire memory to the ship.

  Just as the computer finished, the floor tilted under her feet, and she and Moset both fell to the floor and slid toward the back wall.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The end of Stratos.” The base started shaking uncontrollably, making B’Elanna’s teeth rattle as she struggled toward the intercom—now an uphill climb up the angled floor—and said, “Transporter room, this is the supervisor—two to beam to Doctor Moset’s ship.”

  There was no answer.

  I suppose I should be grateful they stayed at their posts this long. She allowed herself to slide down the floor toward the exit, grabbing Moset along the way. “Come on, Doctor. We’re leaving.”

  Tuvok sat in the pilot’s seat of Geronimo, the unconscious Neelix next to him in Seska’s chair. Once Kes had completed her rather impressive display, the way was clear for Tuvok to retrieve Geronimo, start it up, and pilot it away from Stratos. After taking care of one last piece of business—also putting on a coverall, treating Neelix’s wound, and treating his own lesser one—he was ready to proceed back to the Badlands.

  However, it behooved him to attempt to rescue as many of his cohorts as he could. He scanned the base—

  —and was rather shocked to discover that the city was now listing a bit. Further scans revealed a catastrophic failure in one of the antigravity generators. Tuvok would have thought that the generators were designed to withstand the failure of one of them, but either the Ardanans hadn’t programmed such redundancy, or the generator had been sabotaged in such a way as to bypass that safety feature. A life-sign scan of that particular area revealed a Terran and a Cardassian, at which point Tuvok suspected he knew who was responsible for the sabotage.

  Unwilling to take any chances, he activated the security field around the two-person transporter pad at the back of the flight deck and then beamed the two life-forms aboard.

  Harry Kim and Seska materialized a moment later, at which point Tuvok lowered the force field. Harry was quite disheveled, and also quite armed, and dressed in Klingon uniform pants. Seska, despite her nakedness, looked better than she had when Tuvok had last laid eyes on her.

  “Good timing,” Seska said. “Someone locked us into the bottom level.”

  “It is fortuitous that my assumption that you were in the generator room proved correct.” Tuvok turned back to the console. “I have, however, been unable to determine the precise location of Captain Chakotay among the Terran life-sign readings I am detecting.”

  “Don’t bother,” Harry said, taking Tuvok’s usual seat. “Chakotay’s dead—he and Janeway killed each other.”

  Tuvok raised an eyebrow. “Indeed?”

  “No loss, on either front,” Seska said. “I see you rescued the annoying one. What about the telepath?”

  “She is no longer a concern,” Tuvok said. “Her psionic potential has turned out to be far greater than any of us anticipated. Her final blow against the Alliance officers on Stratos—that which allowed Mister Neelix and me to board Geronimo and depart without interference—was a psychokinetic display of such magnitude that it left Kes—” Tuvok hesitated. “I am afraid I have no words that can properly convey precisely what happened to Kes after that, except that it was most…fascinating.” He turned to look at his comrades. “I can say that Kes is no longer corporeal. For many centuries, scientists have theorized that the next stage in humanoid evolution would be to become beings of energy. I believe that Kes has, in that sense, evolved.”

  “So she’s out of All
iance hands?” Seska asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I care about. I’m gonna put some clothes on.” She turned on her bare heels and left.

  “I assume,” Tuvok said to Harry, “that you wish to bathe and change your clothing as well?”

  “Not yet,” Harry said, his eyes fixed on the viewscreen. “I want to see this first. I didn’t get to kill B’Elanna, so this is the next best thing.”

  Following Harry’s gaze, Tuvok saw Stratos City start to sink into its cloud.

  The antigravity generators on Stratos kept it at the top of one of Ardana’s clouds, which was artifically kept in place and intact in order to create the illusion that the city sat atop it at all times. In reality that was, of course, impossible without artificial means—but so was keeping an entire city afloat. Tuvok appreciated that the visual impact of a city on a cloud was greater than a city simply floating, and so understood why the ancient Ardanans had constructed the city thus.

  With Harry and Seska’s sabotage, however, that was undone. Stratos was now listing at a forty-nine-degree angle and seemed to be falling into the cloud. Within three-point-nine seconds, the entire base was invisible, but only for point-seven seconds, as the lower portion that had first sunk into the cloud was now emerging beneath it.

  A flash of light suddenly appeared within the cloud, which Tuvok’s sensors indicated were chemical explosions. He hypothesized that the sudden change in pitch had a deleterious effect on some of the experiments that were no doubt being conducted on Monor Base. In addition, several small vessels were flying out of the cloud, each on an orbital course. One was an atmospheric craft with a wing that was on fire. It could not achieve escape velocity; the flames spread to the rest of the ship, and it plummeted toward Ardana in a plume of fire.

  Stratos itself was picking up speed. A section of the base that was becoming visible under the cloud was aflame, probably from one of the generators malfunctioning.

  Tuvok kept the image translation of the sensor images trained with the base at the center of the viewscreen for Harry’s benefit. The curve of the base’s descent increased as it fell. The fire in the section where the chemical explosion had been continued to blaze, though it blew upward as the base accelerated.

  Two of the city’s buildings were ripped from their foundations. Tuvok saw several bodies plummeting into the sky out the buildings’ windows. The two structures were soon torn apart by wind shear. Only some of the bodies made it as far as the ground—many were pulverized in midair. From this distance, Tuvok could not determine individual characteristics or species, but as each life was snuffed out, Harry Kim’s smile grew wider.

  More explosions racked the lower portions as the generators failed. Within nine-point-one seconds, the entire base was sheathed in flames. Tuvok projected the descent of the base and saw that it was going to make planetfall in a lake—one that, if his calculations were correct, would become much larger from the impact crater, and also much shallower, at least for a time, as the flaming base would boil away a large percentage of the lake’s water.

  “I’m picking up a ship scanning us,” Harry said. He looked up. “It’s a Cardassian civilian ship, but I’ve got an anomalous life-sign reading that I’m willing to bet is the supervisor.”

  Tuvok immediately started the warp engines. “We must depart immediately.”

  Harry nodded. Tuvok was grateful that the Terran’s bloodthirsty need to see the complete destruction of Stratos was not overwhelming his common sense.

  Geronimo went to warp, and began the journey back to base.

  B’Elanna couldn’t figure out which ship was which in the dozens of warp signatures that were fleeing Ardana like rats departing a sinking windboat. She had hoped to find Kes on one of them, but that appeared to be a forlorn hope.

  Instead, she resigned herself to the inevitable and set a course for Archanis. She had a friend there who would take her in, at least until she figured out her next move.

  And that would take a considerable amount of figuring. She didn’t have her alien telepath, she didn’t have her rebellion mole, and she didn’t have her state-of-the-art facility and brilliant scientists.

  “Excuse me, Supervisor?”

  Well, she had one brilliant scientist, at least. Turning to Moset, she said, “Yes?”

  The doctor was holding a padd. “I’ve been reviewing the notes Zimmerman made when he was working with that alien girl, and—” He smiled. “It’s most fascinating. I believe that his work points in some very promising directions.”

  Again, B’Elanna found herself growing impatient with the scientist’s equivocation. “What ‘directions’ might that be?”

  “I believe it’s quite possible that, using this and other information Zimmerman gathered, I might be able to genetically engineer telepaths.”

  B’Elanna’s eyes grew wide. “Is that so?” She leaned back in her chair. “Tell me more, Doctor.”

  15

  T he flitter was a one-person craft, considerably smaller than Geronimo. Tuvok took it, explaining that he needed to go meditate, as was traditionally done on Vulcan on the fifth of Tasmeen.

  It was a lie, of course, one that was readily believed thanks to Tuvok’s carefully crafted persona as someone who observed antiquated Vulcan ritual. It was the fifth of Tasmeen, true, but the only ritual associated with that day involved lighting a candle.

  It did, however, provide excellent cover for his trip to Regula.

  The asteroid served as one of the bases for Emperor Spock’s plan, which had the code name of Memory Omega. Several scientists, and their descendants, were sequestered here awaiting the day the final stages of the late Emperor’s plan would be put into effect.

  When Tuvok brought the flitter in to land, he saw another small craft docked there, one he had last encountered four days, three hours earlier in orbit of Ardana.

  After disembarking, he walked across the landing bay to the duranium door that provided ingress to the rest of the Memory Omega base. Tuvok placed his right hand on the plate and said, “Tuvok of Vulcan.”

  The door slid aside. He walked through a long corridor, then came to another door, which slid aside at his approach.

  On the other side of the door were T’Pel and Kes.

  Back on Monor Base, it had been extremely difficult for Tuvok to carry both the wounded Neelix—whom he had rendered insensate with a nerve pinch—and Kes—who had collapsed from the effort of mind-blasting every Klingon within a half a qelI’qam and also damaging much of the equipment in that same radius—onto Geronimo by himself, but the lack of resistance from Alliance security, either personnel or devices, eased Tuvok’s burden considerably. He placed Kes on the transporter pad, after determining that her breathing was regular, if shallow, and Neelix in Seska’s usual chair. Then he started the preflight sequence.

  After a quick trip to his footlocker to retrieve a coverall, he returned to the flight deck just as the preflight concluded. As he guided Geronimo out of Monor Base’s Bay 5, he sent out an encoded subspace signal.

  That signal reached a ship that was hidden in the Oort cloud of the Ardana system, a ship that now moved out of the relative protection of the cloud and set course for Ardana. Within seven-point-eight minutes, it was within visual communications and transporter range. The face of T’Pel appeared on the screen.

  “Are you ready for transfer, husband?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Tuvok said. “Please treat her carefully, my wife, as she has been badly abused by the Alliance.”

  “That is not surprising,” T’Pel said.

  “Transporting now.” With those words, Tuvok beamed Kes to his mate’s ship, which then left the system at warp eight, headed for Memory Omega.

  “Tuvok!” Kes said now as he entered. “What happened? Where am I? This woman won’t tell me anything, and I—”

  “My apologies, Kes. This is T’Pel, she who is my wife.”

  Kes frowned. “Your wife?”

  “Yes. Sh
e, and this base, are a part of the plan I revealed to you. And you, Kes, can be a very important part of that plan.”

  “I don’t understand—Where’s Neelix? I want to—”

  “Mister Neelix is in the Badlands. He believes that you have…have evolved to a higher plane of existence.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Tuvok inclined his head. “It was misdirection in order to convince the others that you were out of the picture, as it were.”

  T’Pel added, “It was necessary. If you were alive and known to be part of the Terran Rebellion, it would become a much greater target for the Alliance’s ire. Your existence must remain a secret, even from the other members of the rebellion—even from Mister Neelix.”

  “At least,” Tuvok added in the hope it might mollify her, “for the time being.”

  At that, Kes stood up. “Tuvok, this isn’t fair! I didn’t ask for this, and I certainly didn’t ask to be taken from Neelix! You have to take me back to him!”

  “I am afraid that I cannot. The risk is too great.”

  “What, the risk to your rebellion? You think I care about that?”

  Calmly, Tuvok said, “The risk to the rebellion is of considerably less consequence than the risk to you, Kes. Do you recall what happened on Monor Base before you fell unconscious?”

  “I—” Kes hesitated, looking down. “I don’t remember. We were heading for that staircase, and then I saw Neelix struck down, and then—” Again, she hesitated, then looked helplessly at Tuvok.

  Suddenly, her eyes widened, and she sat back down again, whispering, “No…”

  Tuvok saw no reason not to be blunt. “Yes. You killed dozens of Klingons, as well as damaging a considerable amount of equipment. What’s more, you were able to protect myself and Mister Neelix, as well as the ships in the bay from your psionic assault.”

  “I don’t know how I did that,” she said in a small voice.

  T’Pel nodded. “That is the risk. Your power is too great, and too uncontrolled. You must be trained, and that must be done in seclusion.”