Star Trek

by John Jackson Miller

  Agamalon had appealed to her to address the Dromax’s great problem: leadership. He had some promise—as much promise as a freakshow grotesque that talked through a box might—but he and his lieutenants were far outnumbered by the grunts, the beings whose bellies were marked. Finnegan had quipped that they were the “scars-on-thars,” invoking some Earthly children’s tale thankfully unknown to her. The lummoxes were dull in the extreme, capable of toting and firing a weapon but not much else.

  To hear Agamalon tell it, no Dromax had ever employed alien mercenaries. Certainly neither of the other two Troika powers would get involved, and Quintilian and the rest of his merchant ilk only ever stuck around long enough to make their trades and depart. With giant boulders hurtling haphazardly about through space, that seemed a sensible response. But Agamalon’s situation had grown ever more desperate, with his officer corps—who literally seemed to have superior brains—dwindling in number. Georgiou had shown more heroic individualism in her first hour on Thirty than most of his lieutenants ever had, and that had inspired Agamalon’s unusual offer: leadership of a Double Crescent platoon.

  With the promise of information about Jadama Rohn as the reward—and without many other options anyway—she had taken up the challenge. Before the unification of Terra, many decapitated regimes across history had invited great leaders to control them; it had even happened on this universe’s Earth, when divided Slavic peoples invited the Varangians to rule over them, eventually creating the Kyivan Rus. Georgiou saw herself in that tradition, even if the forces she was called upon turned her stomach with their ugliness.

  Hers was just a platoon. But in the first day, she had demolished Skove’s strongpoint on Thirty, putting out of commission the launch site from which his airships threatened Agamalon’s armor. That night, she’d found a way to upgrade the destructive power of the Double Crescent’s Casmarran-built disruptor cannons—and before dawn the second morning, the Jagged Spikes were decamping from the moon altogether.

  She’d then encouraged Agamalon not to rest on his gutsack, instead moving immediately to strike a neighboring moon currently in close proximity: Twenty-Six, sanctum of the One-Stars. The tribe’s name, to human ears, sounded like it belonged to lesser lights; on Terra as on Earth, it indicated a poor score. But the One-Star Dromax tribe was mighty, so much so that Agamalon initially rejected the idea out of hand.

  “You’re thinking like a loser,” she’d replied. “You live like one, you’ll die like one. They’re not expecting us. Use that.”

  It was working. As her hovertank circled behind an advancing column of Double Crescents, Georgiou smiled at the carnage the force—her force—was wreaking on the enemy. The smoke on the humid air was delicious, invigorating her. As good as it was to once again enjoy the spoils of rule in her brief time alongside Quintilian, there’d been something she’d been missing. The fighting, the killing, the striving that made those rewards seem earned.

  She loved it.

  A hatch in the vehicle opened, and Dax popped her head up. Seeing no disruptor fire about, she turned back to face Georgiou.

  The emperor guffawed. Dax had rubbed black powder under her eyes, an awkward attempt at camouflage. “A lot of sniper fire coming at you down in the hull, my dear?”

  Dax rolled her eyes, sullen. “Agamalon says he’s putting two more companies under you. He wants us to head for Grid Five-Six-Oh.”

  That made sense to Georgiou. Another One-Star strongpoint, it meant that Agamalon wasn’t letting go of the throttle. “Down in a second.” She called out commands to her sergeants in the swamp to disengage and follow—then she scrambled off her perch and made for the hatch.

  Most of the armor Georgiou had ridden in involved low ceilings; the hovertank, constructed for the troll-like Dromax, was even more uncomfortable. It lacked any seating whatsoever; Finnegan, she saw, was sitting cross-legged at the front of the compartment, driving the vehicle and operating its forward turret.

  He barely acknowledged her when she sat beside him. “We just spread goo everywhere,” he said. He looked peaked. “It’s a nightmare.”

  “Come now,” she said. “Blackjack would have loved this place. It’s a murder a minute.”

  “I’m just firing in self-defense, and I hate it,” he said, scratching his fuzzy face. He hadn’t shaved since aboard Boyington. “I don’t know who these critters are. I don’t know what they did to me.”

  “They’re keeping you from your goal.”

  “What was that again? Why do I want it?”

  Dax crawled forward to give both of them canteens. She looked at Finnegan with sympathy. “It’s so we can make sure another cloud creature doesn’t kill our friends.”

  “So to defeat that, we’ve got to kill a lot of these beasties.” He shook his head. “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

  Georgiou sighed. “Not you too.”

  Almost healed from her injury, Dax had refused from the beginning to do anything that would harm the opposing Dromax. That had prompted Georgiou to relegate her to communications and other nonlethal duties. It had also given Dax plenty of time to complain. She started again. “I didn’t make it into Starfleet—”

  “Here we go.”

  “—so I didn’t learn all the rules and regulations. But I’m pretty sure that intervening in a civil war was on the list of don’ts.”

  “You’re right there,” Finnegan said. “Even I never did that one.” He pursed his lips. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

  “We’re all getting such wonderful new experiences,” Georgiou said. “I’m broadening your horizons.”

  Dax looked forlornly back at the comm panel. “I think we should call Leland.”

  The emperor chortled. “How well did that work when you tried it before?”

  The Trill’s eyes went wide. “I haven’t tried to call—”

  “Of course you have.” She turned her head, showing Dax she was only mildly perturbed. “He’s running silent outside the perimeter of Troika space—but the extremely low subspace-frequency unit we were using to contact him is back aboard Boyington. I highly doubt you can raise him on your handheld unit, or anything the Dromax have to offer.” She shrugged. “But keep trying, though. It’s time you’re not complaining to me.”

  A hush fell, the only sound coming from the hovertank’s engines. Finnegan rubbed his eyes and spoke, his voice uncharacteristically somber. “So how long do we have to do this?”

  “Who’s to say? Agamalon knows where Jadama Rohn is, and he’s not telling. Not yet. Not until I’ve helped him take back a certain amount of territory.”

  Dax commiserated. “Nobody else among the Crescents will talk about the freighter. I’ve asked, believe me.”

  “If you’d like me to torture the general to find out, I’d be happy to,” Georgiou said. “But I haven’t got any idea how to make him hurt that won’t spill his guts onto the deck. That leaves me out of options.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Finnegan said, “I think you found seduction worked with Quintilian.”

  Georgiou made a sour face. “Either of you want to try, be my guest. I’ll be elsewhere, retching at the thought.”

  Finnegan finished his water. “All I can say is if we do much more of this, I’m going to need something a little stronger.” Eyes on the canteen, he took a deep breath. “Maybe for a long time.”

  36

  Dromax Troop Transport

  DEPARTING MOON NINE

  Another day, another moon—and another victory. Georgiou felt as she hadn’t since she was aboard Charon, seeing one enemy after another fall before her.

  Of course, none of the Dromax tribes she was scoring against had actually been eliminated; their forces were too scattered, too decentralized for that, and Agamalon’s numbers remained small. What she had done, however, was execute the exact strategy necessary to permit a horde previously limited to the lunar hinterlands—hinterlunes?—to advance steadily closer to the gas giant.

  “Ground
forces report full control of big disruptor cannons on Nine,” Sergeant Garph reported to her on the bridge. It had been the reason for the strike, guaranteeing that Agamalon’s troop and material transports wouldn’t be threatened by boulders hurled across space during their next hop.

  “Well done,” she said, going over the plans on her display. It depicted the motions of all the satellites of Dromax, real and artificial, and the ranges of the weaponry associated with each. Over the past week, she had wended her way through the system like a dervish, curling inward and spiraling outward to strike at as many enemy tribes as possible. Agamalon was, suddenly, a name to be feared, regardless of the true leader behind the victories. She hadn’t even seen him for three days, always communicating remotely from wherever she was.

  She’d done enough; it was time for her prize. She addressed Garph. “Where is your general?”

  “Giving birth.”

  “Doing what?”

  Acting like nothing was out of the ordinary at all, Garph simply directed her to a room two levels above on the transport.

  The Dromax didn’t use furniture, but they did have turbolifts. Dax and Finnegan were in the one she stepped into. Finnegan looked haggard; Dax, irate. “We want to talk with you,” the latter said, her tone more shrill than Georgiou had heard from her.

  “One moment. Come along—I think there’s something you may both want to see.”

  No one stopped Georgiou and her companions from entering the general’s quarters, though the squishing sounds gave all three pause. In a bowl-shaped depression at the center of the room, assisted only by a single Dromax, Agamalon was indeed amid some sort of… change. All armor removed, the general appeared to be excreting something large from flaps Georgiou had never noticed—or wanted to notice—before.

  “Sorry,” Georgiou said. “You want privacy.”

  “Why? Stay, stay. I’ll be just a minute,” the general called out, a humdrum statement for such a bizarre spectacle. The voice box didn’t express any strain—and neither did Agamalon appear to be in any discomfort.

  Finnegan, on the other hand, cupped his hand to his mouth and ran out of the room.

  “There,” Agamalon said, exertions finished. “Brand the wretched thing.”

  The general’s aide turned toward Georgiou holding a writhing being—a Dromax, perhaps a fifth the size of the adults. After placing the child on the deck, the aide activated a small device that soon glowed.

  Dax, who Georgiou had noted seemed less put off by the event than Finnegan had been, reacted when the aide brought the white-hot implement closer to the child. “Wait! Don’t!”

  It was too late. The child howled as the aide seared it with a stamp, leaving two crescent moons on its glistening gut.

  “Another officer,” Agamalon declared, exiting the bowl. “Get it out of here. The next one better not come when I’m in the middle of a campaign.”

  Georgiou and Dax stepped aside for the departing aide. The prolific nature of the Dromax had been known to the emperor, but parthenogenesis wasn’t something she’d considered. “How… often does this happen?” she asked.

  “Nosy, aren’t you?” The general crossed the room as if nothing had ever happened. “A couple of times a month. Which is not as often as we need reinforcements.”

  Dax looked puzzled. “But I’ve never seen any of the soldiers go through this.”

  Agamalon snorted. “Of course not. Only the officer caste can reproduce.”

  “A shame Finnegan didn’t stay,” Georgiou observed to Dax. “A self-replicating officer corps sounds like a Starfleet nightmare.”

  The Trill remained puzzled. “Gnaeus was your kind. Why aren’t there more Dromax on Casmarra?”

  “Casmarra is at peace,” the general said. “Only Dromax in combat are moved to replicate. Now, did you come for something, or just to gawk?”

  “Nine is secured,” Georgiou responded. “We’re headed to the next waypoint.”

  “Excellent. I’m putting the entire division in your hands.”

  “You might want to wait on that,” she said, crossing her arms. “Tell me where Jadama Rohn is, or we’re done.”

  Agamalon didn’t miss a beat. “I figured we were coming to that. It’s all right—you’ve earned that much. It’s on One.”

  She wasn’t at all surprised. “Is this a deception? That’s where your precious is, your Cascade, as you call it. You just want us to help you take it over.”

  “Oh, we’re going there. That’s what this has all been leading to. But it’s also where your death ship is.”

  Dax’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a coincidence?”

  “It isn’t, freckle-head. But first things first.” Agamalon ascended a ramp to a portion of the room containing a screen. A map appeared on it, depicting two bodies of liquid nearly split by land. “The place we need to conquer is a cataract connecting One’s greatest lake with its largest ocean. The land it parts comes to points on the northern and southern sides.”

  “A waterfall?” Georgiou asked. “That’s what’s so special?”

  “What’s special is within the waterfall—in the cavern that runs behind it from north to south, a tunnel connecting both landforms.” Agamalon regarded the map. “We don’t have to worry about the northern entrance.”

  “Blocked?”

  “You could say that. So we only have to take the southern entrance to enter.”

  “Who controls it now?”

  “Who knows? It’s always changing. We haven’t controlled it in many cycles. I honestly never thought I’d get back there—but you may be the key. If you want your cursed ship, give us the Cascade.” Agamalon turned away. “Dismissed.”

  Georgiou and Dax stepped into the hall, ducking the low overhead supports as they went. “He keeps stringing it out,” Dax said. “Always one more stop.”

  The emperor agreed, but didn’t want to seem dissuaded. “There is an end. In the meantime, we fight.” She entered a strategic briefing room. Empty at the moment, it had ports facing outside—and multiple screens showing where various forces, friend and foe, were located.

  “More war.” The Trill sighed. “Sean and I were coming to tell you that this has to stop.”

  “What else is new?”

  “Those last couple of battles were new,” Dax said, stepping before a port. Several moons gleamed outside. “You’ve broken Finnegan, do you know that?”

  Georgiou laughed. “Which bones this time?”

  “I’m serious. Sean was holding it together when he was in the hovertank. But having us on the ground with the infantry—”

  “He’s the one who wants to shadow me. He’s got to go where I go,” Georgiou said, surveying the strategic maps. “The last two targets required commando tactics. Why are you upset? You only had to patch me and Finnegan up.”

  “Because Sean felt like he had to carry a disruptor and fight. But I don’t think he ever wanted to fight a war.”

  “He worked security for Starfleet. What did he think he’d have to do?”

  “He waited out the Klingon War playing bodyguard for merchants and barons. He’s good for a barfight.” Dax turned and gestured broadly to the strategic maps. “This—this meat grinder he never wanted at all.”

  “Not my Blackjack,” Georgiou lamented.

  “That’s something else. You keep comparing him to someone he’s not, and should never want to be.” Dax looked back at her. “Yeah, he told me. He wants you to stop it.”

  Georgiou was amused. “He’s certainly sharing a lot. Another fan gone sweet on you?”

  Dax groaned. “You wouldn’t understand people being nice to one another.”

  The emperor laughed. “You sound just like Michael Burnham.”

  “Good for her. What would she say about you now, running another killing machine?”

  Georgiou turned and faced a screen. “I do wish you’d make up your mind. Back on Casmarra you were afraid I was going to try to stay with Quintilian. To hear you tell it, I was goin
g to live the high life forever with him. Could you blame me if I did?”

  “No, probably not. I mean, it was obvious you were missing how you got treated in your reality. But now you’re here, and you’re up to the same thing, only different. You’re getting to lead. To conquer.”

  Georgiou turned abruptly and leered at her. “What’s wrong with that? I was good at it. I am good at it. It’s what I was born to do.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just it.” Dax waved again to the maps. “This isn’t your empire. The Dromax aren’t your army, and Quintilian’s villa wasn’t your palace. You’re just borrowing these things.”

  Georgiou turned toward the port. She stepped before it and looked out at the moons beyond.

  “I get it,” Dax said, standing behind her. “By the lights of people in this universe, you’re a bad person, from a bad place—and you don’t see any reason to prove otherwise to anyone. The only person I’ve ever heard you speak of with any respect is Burnham. You don’t want anyone to identify with you at all.”

  “I am the emperor. I am the empire. You could never understand.”

  “Well, maybe there is something I understand. You had it all, and then you lost it.”

  Georgiou looked back and smirked. “Why, little Emony, are you really going to compare your hopping around for shiny medallions to my ruling the known portion of the galaxy? You have developed some cheek.”

  “I’m not saying we were the same. But the same on a different scale. I was trained from childhood to do one thing better than anyone. My whole world consisted of the gymnastics circuit. And I got treated really well, too, though I didn’t get to eat like you did. But then it ended.”

  “So?”

  “So I think between Section 31, Casmarra, and here, you’ve been raging against starting over. After all the time you put in becoming emperor, you don’t want to go to the bottom rung of a different ladder.”