ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

by Michael A. Martin

  Was every one of the Undine-in-human-form you encountered on Terrasphere 8 disguised as real, existing humans?

  We never found that out for certain, but I have a strong suspicion that the answer to your question is yes. It’s a safe, conservative assumption to make, but it’s one that Starfleet Command and I shared. After all, why would 8472 waste time and energy learning how to live the lives of fictitious humans and humanoids when it wouldn’t have been any more trouble to just morph themselves into doppelgängers of real ones?

  Didn’t Starfleet Security have some concerns about your personnel choices for that mission? You might expect them to worry that an Undine sleeper agent might really be lurking among them, since it was already an established fact that each member of your team had already been duplicated by an Undine agent.

  As a matter of fact, I did get some flack from Admiral [Marta] Batanides at Starfleet Security. Some of her staff could have taught even 8472 a thing or two about paranoia. We were both admirals, of course, but she had seniority on me. She could have shut the mission down.

  But she obviously didn’t succeed. Why?

  Marta didn’t reckon with my secret weapon: Admiral [Gareth] Bullock. Like the members of my team, he had a personal stake in the outcome of our mission—because he was also among those that we knew for certain 8472 had “doppelgängered” aboard Terrasphere 8 back in the ’seventies. Gareth backed me up, and even told Marta that by her logic, he ought to be clapped in irons and thrown in the brig. But unless he failed an identity scan, or started morphing like a cornered Founder, Starfleet Command wasn’t about to consider allowing Admiral Batanides, or anybody else for that matter, to do that.

  So you were off to Hobus, or what was left of it, for the first time. What did you find when you arrived?

  We began by confirming a great deal of what the initial long-range scans turned up. First of all, the neutrino counts were way off. Traditional supernovae give off pretty heavy neutrino emissions, but this one was an order of magnitude light on that score. We determined early on that the bulk of the neutrinos we should have detected coming from the Hobus remnant were somehow being shunted directly into subspace.

  Subspace. That must explain how all that hard radiation and all the other lethal effects of the supernova were able to cross the hundreds of light-years between here and Romulus in a matter of days.

  I think so. Of course, we still don’t fully understand the exact physical mechanism that allowed it to happen. Still, it’s the only explanation I’ve seen so far that makes sense and squares with all the data.

  But the low neutrino flux was only the beginning. Believe me, Mister Sisko, even a year after the “kaboom” part of the supernova event, what was left of Hobus wasn’t deficient in much of anything else. We had a damned rough ride, even with so much of the supernova’s initial energy output already dissipated. Hobus was still throwing off intense streams of X-rays, gamma rays, delta rays, epsilon radiation, and even Berthold rays and tetryon particles, and the combined effect strained our multiphasic shielding system to the limit. Standard deflector shields would have been completely useless so deep inside what we had already started calling the Hobus Nebula. Needless to say, subspace communication with Starfleet was a complete hash everywhere within a light-year of Hobus. We got to within two AUs of Hobus before the structural integrity field itself became a cause for worry. But we managed to get the highest-resolution scans of Hobus to date.

  You ran a significant risk to life and limb, Admiral. But you also stood a fair chance of being detected and attacked by the Romulans—or by one of the warring Romulan factions in contention for control of the wreckage of a post-Hobus Star Empire.

  Every member of my crew agreed to run those risks, Mister Sisko. It wasn’t just me.

  But the diplomatic dangers could have affected a lot more people than you and your crew. How do you answer those who accuse you of jeopardizing the Federation’s goodwill vis-à-vis the Romulans because of a personal vendetta against the Undine?

  I don’t have any answer for that, because I’ve always found that accusation ridiculous on its face. After all, that mission proved to be a fare-thee-well that the Romulans never had any intention of reciprocating any of the olive branches we’d extended to them since Shinzon’s mercifully brief time on the praetor’s throne. Their plan had always been to thank us by quietly slipping an Honor Blade between our collective ribs.

  I certainly can’t argue with any of that, Admiral. But at the time—and without the benefit of historical hindsight—your reputation inside Starfleet suffered quite a bit. Admiral Bullock notwithstanding, more than a few of your peers in Starfleet Command were critical of some of the risks you were willing to take in ferreting out possible Undine infiltrators.

  True enough. Ironic, isn’t it? I mean given Starfleet Command’s worries that 8472 might have infiltrated my first Hobus mission crew. But I had to go with my own assessment of the damage that a species as hostile, intractable, and patient as 8472 was capable of inflicting on us over the long haul. It wasn’t a pretty picture. It was the Dominion War all over again, only amplified by an order of magnitude in both severity and duration.

  In view of that, a reputation never seemed like such a big thing to sacrifice.

  And then there was the risk posed by Hobus itself: the supernova remnant was still spraying out intense streams of lethal radiation. Even given the valuable nature of the data you collected, that first survey mission seems like a pretty risky venture on a purely human level.

  Sure it was. But was it excessively risky? Obviously I didn’t think so at the time, and I still don’t now. Remember, Starfleet couldn’t allow 8472 a chance to secretly consolidate an invasion force on this side of fluidic space. It would have been riskier not to check out any place that might have provided them with a concealed beachhead from which they could have launched a large-scale attack. When O’Halloran’s sensors picked up the warp signature of an 8472 vessel, it looked like that was exactly what we’d found.

  Your shuttle was obviously pretty well equipped in terms of sensors and shields. How well armed were you?

  We had two type-4 phaser arrays, as well as a pair of photon torpedoes. It gave us a sharp enough bite for a quick hit-and-run attack, though our teeth obviously weren’t sharp enough to do any sustained damage. In other words, if we were put in the position of having to use our weapons, we’d be doing so either to cover our escape—or to make one last defiant gesture before being blown to atoms by a much bigger, much better armed enemy.

  Of course, history shows that the Undine vessel that appeared on your sensors was really something else entirely. Do you ever wonder whether the personal stake you had in repelling a possible Undine invasion—not just you, Admiral, but your entire crew of “doppelgänger templates”—had left you predisposed to seeing something that wasn’t really there?

  That might or might not be true, Mister Sisko. But it’s also irrelevant, as my old friend Annika [Hansen] might say. I still believe that any dispassionate analysis of those sensor profiles could have led to only one conclusion: we were on the trail of at least one 8472 vessel. And where there’s one, there’s always another, and another. We had no choice but to remain in the vicinity long enough to find out whether the Hobus disaster had created a quantum singularity capable of bringing that ship—or potentially a whole invasion fleet—into our universe.

  And there was still another possibility we needed to check out: whether 8472 had actually caused the Hobus supernova, either to create a portal from their realm into ours, or simply to sow conflict between the Romulans and their neighbors.

  I suppose it would have made sense to assume that they’d try to do both—even though history hasn’t borne out your team’s findings about any large Undine incursion having come our way via Hobus.

  So far. Never make the mistake of thinking that history is over, Mister Sisko. A lot of Earth’s best academic minds made the same mistake about four centuries ago, after the
conclusion of a long period of bitter, mostly stalemated geopolitical conflict known as the Cold War. As the great Gallamite historian O’d’taa wrote, “History is one damned thing after another.”

  Yes, we were wrong in interpreting that warp signature as belonging to an 8472 vessel. But we also weren’t so blinded by our previous brushes with them that we weren’t capable of figuring that out for ourselves. Starting with an unusual subspace echo in the other vessel’s warp field, which is something we’d never seen an 8472 ship produce before. Once we started tugging on that particular string in the sensor tapestry, a lot of the team’s assumptions began to unravel.

  According to your own logs, the Undine warp signature you found turned out to be a deliberate creation of the Romulans.

  To cover up their tests of a new subspace weapon. We learned later that they developed it from dormant Borg transwarp technology that somehow fell into their laps deep in Beta Quadrant space.*

  Why would the Romulans create fake Undine warp footprints when they could have covered their tracks using their cloaking technology?

  Romulan cloaking devices don’t work any better inside the Hobus Nebula than ordinary deflector shields do. So they needed another way to hide what they were really up to—especially in light of Starfleet’s conclusion that the Romulans’ own subspace weapons tests were the likely cause of the Hobus disaster.

  It makes sense. A subspace weapon touches off an accidental stellar explosion whose effects are felt almost instantaneously across entire sectors of space—via the shortcut of subspace.

  It does make perfect sense. Maybe even a certain amount of poetic justice, too, so long as you’re willing to overlook the billions of innocent Romulan civilians who died as a consequence of the Hobus disaster. But all we really have to link the Romulans to the Hobus supernova is circumstantial evidence.

  Once again, you seem to be saying you don’t agree with Starfleet’s official conclusion that the Undine played no role in the Hobus disaster.

  As I said, I’ve kept an open mind about that. I’m still not convinced that the energy levels the Romulans were playing with were sufficient to have caused an ordinary supernova, let alone a one-off stellar oddball like the one Hobus became.

  Does that mean that your current crew might be scanning the Hobus Cinder and vicinity for Undine footprints right now?

  Let’s just say I’m not prepared to dismiss any possibility prematurely.

  I’m about to ask Admiral Janeway a follow-up question concerning her obvious, if usually well-concealed, preoccupation with the Undine, when a voice from her combadge interrupts us to report that the long-range sensors have picked up another strange warp signature. I am frozen in place, still seated before her desk as she gets to her feet and acknowledges this surprising development with a curt “On my way, Lieutenant.” She apologizes and vanishes, leaving me alone in her small office.

  Later on in this voyage I still hope to probe more deeply into a few issues that deserve closer scrutiny. Does she second-guess herself because the truce she’d thought she’d negotiated with the Undine came unraveled? Does that arguable failure make her feel responsible in any way for the Long War that some say continues even now in the dark wainscoting of the galaxy? And what about the fact that Janeway continually referred to the Undine by the designation given them by one of their deadliest enemies (the Borg collective), rather than using the name by which Species 8472 refers to itself (the Undine)? That wouldn’t seem to bode well for the prospect of an eventual Federation-Undine rapprochement, following the precedents set by the First and Second Khitomer Accords.

  And what about the apparent Undine warp signature that the Tucker has just detected? Could Admiral Janeway’s initial instincts about an Undine presence at Hobus turn out to have been right all along? I rise from my chair and exit the ready room, determined to find out.

  Once I reach the bridge, my eyes are drawn to the enormous forward viewer, like iron filings to a magnet. Through the haze and distortion of the nebular material beyond the ship’s hull, I can just barely make out a [REMAINDER OF INTERVIEW AND COMMENTARY REDACTED BY STARFLEET INTELLIGENCE]

  FRAGILE ALLIANCES

  A WAR SPANNING TWO QUADRANTS

  Intercepted from the Ferengi Commercial News, stardate 85365.2*

  Dateline—Mol’Rihan [New Romulus, aka Roma Nova, the Romulan Star Empire’s post-Hobus capital on Rator III]

  Romulan military vessels released the Ferengi Commercial Hauler Noble Avarice from impoundment today, following three days of intensive interrogations and intrusive medical examinations of the vessel’s commander, DaiMon Brog, and his twelve-man crew.

  “Being arrested for doing nothing other than fulfilling our commercial commitments to the Romulan Star Empire is an outrage,” Brog told FCG shortly after his release. “Ferengi ore haulers have been handling a thick percentage of the Romulans’ resource-extraction and transport needs ever since the Hobus disaster wiped out Romulus—and the Romulan Mining Guild along with it. The treatment my crew and I received is a damned strange way for the Romulan government to show its gratitude for everything the Ferengi Alliance has done for them over the past twenty years.”

  The Romulan government has issued no official statement about the detention of the Noble Avarice, though it seems likely that the incident had something to do with the installation of Sela, the new empress of the Romulan Star Empire, whose official coronation is now under way in Mol’Rihan, where the most stringent imaginable security measures have been instituted. Unnamed sources have told the FCN that the Romulan authorities have reason to believe that alien assassins disguised as Romulans may attempt to infiltrate the proceedings. Government officials refused to comment on this possibility, or whether it had any bearing on the Noble Avarice’s impoundment.

  The office of the Grand Nagus has demanded a complete explanation and a full apology, and is expected to make an announcement shortly regarding the status of the Ferengi Alliance’s existing business contracts and diplomatic treaties.…

  JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #G-72

  Lakarian City, Cardassia Prime

  As I walk along a mostly empty downtown sidewalk following an early morning tour of one of Lakarian City’s newest construction projects, I imagine I’m being surveilled by any number of armed agents of the Cardassian government. That’s unfair, of course; after all, Cardassia has undergone fundamental reforms during its decades-long transition from the rigidly authoritarian ideology that nearly allowed the flames of the Dominion War to consume it.

  Even though I am standing at the side of one of Lakarian City’s larger vehicular thoroughfares, I have seen only relative handfuls of Cardassian passersby so far this morning. Did my host arrange this for the benefit of his human guests, or is this apparent dearth of people normal for this time of day, or day of the week? Because my host has been oddly evasive about this, I force myself to go only by the evidence of my eyes, which tell me I’ve been noticed so far only by the two men who now flank me as I walk along the boulevard’s broad sidewalk: Elim Garak, who has become a Cardassian official of no fixed title and seemingly limitless influence, a sort of diplomatic jack-of-all-trades; and Federation Council liaison Franklin Drake, whose dossier reveals a long career in Starfleet Intelligence, a fact that might explain the apparent ease with which Franklin appears to relate to Garak.

  A forest of slender, thorn-studded duranium towers looms over us in every direction as Garak leads us ever more deeply into the downtown district, which appears to be the home of government, commerce, and art all at once. The dour beauty of Lakarian City’s skyline—which the Jem’Hadar reduced to ashes during the Dominion War’s waning hours—appears to have been restored to its former glory, right down to the street-level religious murals I’ve seen before only in archived prewar photographs and holoimages.

  Unsurprisingly, our peripatetic conversation is largely a monologue on the part of our host, Garak, who has probably forgotten more about this place and its unique culture th
an I’ll ever learn. Drake remains mostly silent during Garak’s lecture, apparently as interested as I am in absorbing our tour guide’s good-natured pedagogy.

  The man who is doing most of the talking is a walking contradiction, a potent mixture of refinement and danger. He has become far more than the exiled former-spy-cum-tailor that he was when I first encountered him during our respective tenures on DS9. Although he was instrumental in Legate Corat Damar’s revolt against the Dominion, he has repeatedly described himself as a mere apparatchik in the political machine of the new Cardassia, an edifice that remains perpetually under construction.

  Garak is certainly that, but he is also a great deal more; following the devastation that this city and so many others suffered at the Dominion’s hands, Garak helped to lay much of the groundwork for the progressive, democratic postwar governance that followed, from the Cardassian Union’s first great democratically elected castellan, the late Alon Ghemor, down through Natima Lang, the current holder of that high office. And with a long and storied career in the shadowy world of Cardassia’s intelligence networks behind him—he was once a highly effective agent of the late, unlamented Obsidian Order—Elim Garak is at least as well placed as anyone on the planet to understand the extent to which the Undine may have succeeded in infiltrating not only his own government institutions but also those of the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and other Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers.

  As he shares his knowledge of the Undine with Mr. Drake and me, Garak’s pleasant, personable manner falters only briefly. From somewhere behind the facade of refined Cardassian civility, I hear a slightly bitter timbre enter his voice whenever his narrative wanders too close to the topic of the earlier war with the Dominion. Though the change in his manner is both brief and subtle, it hits me like a bucket of cold water, delivering a forceful reminder of the two-million-plus innocent people who died in Lakarian City during the Dominion War’s twilight. I try not to wince at Garak’s occasional bouts of gallows humor, which have no doubt often served as his only buffer against the soul-devouring despair that can afflict anyone whose people have been as thoroughly defeated as the Cardassians. Though they come and go in the space of heartbeats, those subtly pain-wracked moments in our dialogue surround him with an almost palpable shroud of grief that only serves to increase his authority and credibility on virtually any topic. That air of credibility extends even to his otherwise highly dubious tale of a recent life-or-death struggle with an Undine agent, years after the conclusion of the Long War.