by David Mack
K’Ehleyr bowed her head slightly. “Kind of you to say.”
Dark emotions crossed Barclay’s face like a shadow. “We did what we had to, ma’am.” He gestured toward the door. “The others are waiting for you.”
“Of course,” Saavik said, leading them out of the transporter room. It did not surprise her that neither of the two field agents wished to dwell on their most recent assignment; it had been a most unfortunate affair from its inception.
One of the movement’s top strategists, General Alynna Nechayev, had absconded with Memory Omega’s master quantum transceiver during the emergency evacuation of the Regula base. When her absence had first been noticed, most of her peers assumed she had either become lost or stranded, or had been captured by the Alliance, so Saavik had sent K’Ehleyr and Barclay to rescue Nechayev. Soon afterward, the duo had discovered Nechayev’s lost ship in Alliance custody, and they tracked Nechayev to a remote Klingon outpost on Gamma Pavonis III—only to discover that Nechayev was not a prisoner of war but a defector, a traitor to Spock’s underground movement. In the end, after recovering the quantum transceiver, Barclay had been forced to kill Nechayev to prevent her from escaping and seeking another opportunity to betray Memory Omega.
Since his return, Barclay had seemed to harbor profound guilt for his slaying of Nechayev. Saavik regretted that the man’s conscience had been so cruelly burdened, but it also reassured her. Barclay’s remorse was further proof that Spock had been right about the malleability of human nature. If a Terran could exhibit such a noble regard for life and obvious disdain for murder, perhaps Spock’s vision of a better future for all sentient beings truly was possible.
The two agents followed Saavik down a broad, drab gray corridor stacked high on either side with battered old shipping containers. The contrast between the newly manufactured metal flooring and the century-old crates was striking. Saavik saw her reflection underfoot with almost mirrorlike quality, while flanked on either side by a hundred years’ worth of scuffs, scratches, dents, and gouges. That was nothing, however, compared to the contrast that awaited her.
As she neared the end of the long passageway, a pair of massive doors joined on a diagonal slid apart, revealing the lush splendor that lay beyond them. Intense artificial sunlight streamed through the portal’s widening gap, followed by a flood of warm air heavy with the perfume of flowering plants and ripe fruit. White noise greeted Saavik’s sensitive ears, which distinguished the hush of mechanically generated breezes from the susurrus of water crashing down from carefully engineered waterfalls. Her eyes adjusted to the brilliant glare as she passed over the threshold into an Eden born of science: a Genesis cave.
It looked like a paradisiacal jungle valley on any of a number of Class M worlds, with its clear blue sky and misty horizon beyond forested hilltops, but those details, Saavik knew, were only illusions. In reality, the cave, though vast, was entirely self-contained deep inside the asteroid. The sky was generated by a sophisticated holomatrix that provided the cavern’s flora—and inhabitants—with necessary cycles of nourishing daylight and restful night. The air and water were filtered regularly by machines buried in the bedrock, and concealed portable fusion generators supplied the base’s nearly two hundred occupants with clean energy. Advanced septic systems helped recycle waste into fertilizers and biofuels that were used to perpetuate the secret colony’s agricultural resources. Replicators were used sparingly, to fabricate precision parts for scientific research and high-tech repairs, while such essentials as clothing and daily meals were made by hand.
Remarkable as the cave was, it was not at all unique but rather only one of dozens of such redoubts created throughout local space by Memory Omega. Some were optimized for research and others for data archives; many were tasked solely with preparing to secure a future that now seemed to be at hand. This, however, was the command base that coordinated the actions of all the others, and it was the only one that dispatched field agents into the galaxy at large.
Saavik stood atop the broad cliff that overlooked the ersatz valley and basked for a few moments in the tropical microclimate while K’Ehleyr powered up one of several open-topped antigrav hovercraft parked to the right of the entrance.
The tall, athletic half-Klingon nodded to Barclay, who beckoned Saavik into the vehicle. “Ma’am, we’re ready to bring you down to the meeting.”
Despite being over a century in age, Saavik was still quite fit by the standards of most humanoids, and she moved with alacrity and grace as she boarded the hovercraft. Once she sat down, K’Ehleyr piloted the craft away from the cliff and down into the deep basin. The speed of their descent whipped the women’s hair behind them. Raising her voice to be heard above the rush of wind, Saavik asked, “Are we really in need of such haste?”
“Yes, ma’am,” K’Ehleyr said, “I believe we are.”
Less than a minute after lifting off from the cliff, the hovercraft dropped through a break in the forest canopy and settled gently into a clearing ringed by a tight cluster of prefabricated structures. There were fleeting signs of activity in all of them, but the closest of them, the dining hall, was alive with agitated voices. Saavik stepped out of the vehicle and climbed the steps to join the discussion. Barclay and K’Ehleyr followed close behind her.
Standing off to one side of the spacious hall were two Vulcan undercover operatives, Tuvok and Chu’lak. They were a study in contrast. Tuvok was of average height but quite muscular; he had deep brown skin and wore his hair shorn tightly to his skull. Chu’lak was tall, pale, and gaunt, and his silvery gray hair had grown a bit wild during his years lurking among the cells of the Terran Rebellion. Standing a short distance from them was Tuvok’s wife, T’Pel, who was a member of Memory Omega’s senior leadership alongside Saavik.
None of the three Vulcans were speaking, and Saavik realized all the shouting she’d heard from outside was coming from just two people in the center of the hall: Martin Madden, a high-strung human man who was part of Memory Omega’s operations team, and Curzon Dax, who, in addition to being the galaxy’s only remaining Trill joined with a symbiont, was the most ill-tempered and foul-mouthed old man Saavik had ever encountered. Dax’s invectives and Madden’s protests bled into a wall of impenetrable noise—which crumbled like a sand castle in the tide when K’Ehleyr bellowed, “Both of you, SHUT UP!”
The sudden silence remained tainted by the two men’s vitriol. Saavik studied them with her cold gaze. “What are we discussing?”
Madden pointed at Dax. “Don’t listen to him! It wasn’t my fault!”
Dax snapped, “Of course it’s your fault, you chuQa! It was your job!”
A hint of Saavik’s temper, dormant but never extinguished, put an edge in her voice. “A topic, gentlemen, please.”
From the side of the room, Tuvok interjected, “Kes is missing.”
K’Ehleyr shot back, “Missing, as in, we’ve misplaced her?”
“No,” Dax said, “as in, Madden let her escape!”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Madden pointed at Tuvok and T’Pel. “They were supposed to be in charge of moving her from the old HQ to this one, not me!”
Tuvok arched one eyebrow in a distinctly accusatory fashion. “There were exigent circumstances, Mister Madden, as you well know. We had no choice but to entrust her safe passage to you.”
“She used her powers to scramble my memory. That’s not my fault!”
“That’s quite enough,” Saavik said, in a quiet voice that forced the others to be silent in order to hear her. “Cease your protests, Martin. No one will blame you for Kes’s escape. You had been assured”—she aimed a keen stare at Tuvok—“as we all were, that Kes lived among us of her own free will. You couldn’t have known she meant to flee during our forced evacuation of Regula.” She folded her hands behind her back. “We need her back in our custody before the Alliance finds her. She’s dangerously unstable, and will inevitably draw attention. If they learn how to clone her talents as B’Elanna did, all ho
pe for the revolution will be lost.”
Barclay and K’Ehleyr exchanged determined looks, and then she said, “We’re ready to go find her, ma’am.”
Tuvok stepped forward. “With respect, I should be the one to pursue Kes. I was the one who brought her into the movement and vouched for her. That makes her, and the potential threat she represents, my responsibility.”
Saavik looked at K’Ehleyr. “Tuvok is correct. He is the one best qualified to bring Kes back into the fold. More important, I have an urgent assignment for you and Mister Barclay.” She faced Tuvok. “Time is against us. Go now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tuvok walked quickly toward the door but halted when K’Ehleyr caught his arm and asked, “How the hell are you gonna track a superpowered telepath who doesn’t want to be found?”
He pulled his arm free of K’Ehleyr’s grasp and resumed walking. “By reaching her destination before she does.”
Kes drifted like a ghost through the back alleys of Okara, a dilapidated spaceport on the planet Tammeron. The young Ocampa woman traveled alone, a picture of innocence, beauty, and frailty—a magnet for all manner of degenerates and thugs.
They were everywhere, lurking in shadowy doorways below street level, watching her through windows and from rooftops, observing her from vehicles that crossed her path—all of them oblivious of the malevolent energies they projected and the intentions they telegraphed, emanations that only Kes’s telepathic skills could detect; unaware that as they watched her, she watched them.
All around her, alien minds blazed in the night, psionic beacons announcing their presence to a deaf world. Daydreams and revenge fantasies mingled with lies still being honed to perfection before being spoken aloud. Emotions of every color bled together into one without a name, and Kes had to concentrate to keep her telepathic barriers raised, to filter out the sheer noise of so many untrained minds trumpeting their desires to the universe at large.
For a moment it was almost enough to make her miss the relative tranquility of the Memory Omega base inside the Regula asteroid. Most of her close company there had been Vulcans, natural telepaths who had developed great discipline to shield their own thoughts and conceal their talents from a galaxy of hostile neighbors. Before Tuvok and his wife, T’Pel, had taken her to live there, Kes had been indiscriminate in the use of her abilities, and until she met Tuvok she had never even considered the need to actively mask her gifts. T’Pel, Saavik, and several other Vulcans had shared a great deal of knowledge with her, and their teachings had helped Kes hone her abilities and magnify them many times over.
But as grateful as she was for their tutelage, she had never stopped thinking about Neelix, the only person in the galaxy who loved Kes for who she was rather than for what she could do, the one who had risked his life to save her when her first steps into misadventure had led twice to her capture—first by the Kazon-Ogla and then by the Alliance. When T’Pel and Tuvok liberated Kes from the clutches of Intendant B’Elanna of Ardana—who had tasked her minions with unlocking the secrets of Kes’s abilities so that they could clone them into anyone they wished, starting with B’Elanna herself—the Memory Omega agents had told Neelix some absurd tale about Kes transforming into a being of pure energy, as if such a thing were the least bit believable. From that moment, Kes’s and Neelix’s lives had been forced onto separate paths. This had been done not only for Neelix’s safety, Tuvok had explained, but for the sake of the entire Terran Rebellion, whose status within the Alliance would have been elevated from “nuisance” to “primary target” if it was believed to be harboring a telepath of such unrivaled potential as Kes.
She was not unsympathetic to the rebellion’s cause, and she bore more than a small measure of lingering hatred for the Alliance, but Kes was no longer content to live as a prisoner for someone else’s sake. After aiding a mission years earlier to capture the psionically enhanced B’Elanna, Kes had gone so far as to take the precaution of switching the holocube inside which B’Elanna’s consciousness had been imprisoned, reasoning that she could use it as leverage against the Alliance when the time came for her escape from the rebellion. Unfortunately, the complete lack of response by the Alliance to B’Elanna’s disappearance had soon made it obvious to Kes that the renegade Intendant of Ardana was worthless as a hostage, so she had erased B’Elanna’s quantum pattern and discarded the cube. As best she could tell, no one within Memory Omega had yet detected her deception, which made it clear how little value they, too, placed on B’Elanna’s life.
None of which concerned Kes. There was only one life she cared about now. Even across vast interstellar distances, she still sensed Neelix’s consciousness and emotions, and knew that he lived a life of constant peril and worry. He needed her, and Kes had decided that nothing in existence would ever keep her from him again.
No sooner had she made that choice than the Memory Omega leadership had declared that a security breach required them to evacuate the secret base inside Regula. During the chaotic exodus to the new safe haven in the Zeta Serpentis system, senior personnel such as Tuvok and T’Pel had been consumed with many pressing duties, and it had been a simple matter to persuade them to let Kes travel with young Mister Madden. An ordinary human male, Madden had a mind like soft putty, and Kes molded it to suit her aims. After he had dropped her off in Okara, he helped her erase his ship’s navigational logs, and then she sent him on his way with a delayed-onset episode of transient global amnesia.
She had spent the days since his departure discreetly acquiring a ship and arranging to have it fueled, provisioned, and armed. Now she was on her way back to her tiny vessel, the Valaria, having completed an impromptu visit to the home of the spaceport’s Cardassian chief administrator, whom she had compelled to issue immediate departure clearances that would guarantee her safe passage to Bajor.
Turning a corner toward the docking slips, she halted abruptly as three brawny male aliens blocked her path. Warts and freckles covered their hairless heads, which each sported a prominent bony ring stretching around the back of the skull from ear to ear. Attired in dark garb and brandishing blasters, they advanced on Kes. She tried to reach inside their minds to turn them away and make them forget they had seen her, but their minds were utterly unreadable, as if they weren’t even there. The leader bared a sharp-toothed grin. “What have we here?”
Rather than retreat, Kes stood her ground. “Move aside and let me pass.”
One of the henchmen chuckled and said to the leader, “That didn’t sound very friendly, did it, Gorta?”
“No, Paluk, it didn’t.” He stopped in front of Kes and teased her blond hair with the muzzle of his blaster. “Maybe we need to teach this little veska some manners.” He traced the line of her jaw with his gun. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Holster your weapon and walk away. I won’t warn you again.”
Gorta swung his arm up and back to pistol-whip her.
Their minds were impervious to telepathy, but Kes had many other talents, not the least of which was telekinesis—which meant their bodies were fair game.
The blaster in Gorta’s hand collapsed into its constituent parts, which warped and twisted as they fell to the ground. His hand remained trapped high above his head—and then his arm twisted right as his torso was wrenched left. The sickening crack of breaking bones and ripping ligaments was crisply audible in the stillness of the night. As the two henchmen behind him backed away, Gorta met Kes’s hard, unblinking glare with a look of terror. Then his rib cage imploded, his femurs snapped like dry twigs, and his head was forced to turn 180 degrees, shattering his cervical vertebrae.
His broken corpse dropped to the pavement with a dull thwap.
The two henchmen turned to run. Kes knew they couldn’t be allowed to escape. If they ever spoke of what they’d seen, the Alliance would initiate a hunt for her unlike any in its history. For her own sake as well as Neelix’s, Gorta’s partners in crime had to die, but that didn’t mean they had to suf
fer. She gave them swift deaths—telekinetic stabs through their heads. Blood, bone, and brain matter erupted from the aliens’ foreheads, and they collapsed instantly to the sidewalk.
Kes stepped over Gorta’s body and resumed walking. She had waited long enough for her reunion with Neelix, and this world had nothing else she needed.
Minutes later she was aboard the Valaria, riding a black wind into space and charting a course to the stars. Be strong, my beloved, she projected, hoping desperately that Neelix could hear her. I’m on my way.
5
The Promise of Shadows
Sweat dripped from Jean-Luc Picard’s forehead and soaked his loose-fitting linen shirt. Sand filled his boots and caked his pants, and he was surrounded by mounds of excavated dirt. A sharp scrape echoed inside the cave as his entrenching tool made contact with something metal. He cast the shovel aside, dropped to his knees, and pawed at the rocky sand, clearing it from the container, a cube whose edges each measured fifteen centimeters. Right where the legend said it would be, he rejoiced, and a rare, broad grin brightened his usually grim countenance.
He had just begun translating the symbols on the cube’s exterior in a bid to open it and retrieve the ancient treasure locked inside when he heard the telltale hum of the Vorgons’ transport beam reverberating off the cavern’s walls. He glanced up at a high ledge that overlooked the subterranean chamber and was unsurprised to see Ajur and Boratus gazing back at him. Equally expected, the two criminals from the future were brandishing small handheld weapons.
“You’ve found the Tox Uthat,” Boratus said, “just as we predicted.”
Picard stood, still holding the box. “Indeed. But you don’t think I’ll simply hand this over, do you?”
Ajur cocked her head at an odd angle. “Not without persuasion. That is why we have come prepared to use force.”