Rise Like Lions

by David Mack

  “No. The rebels would either outrun them or outgun them. Alert the Central Command and let them formulate a response.”

  “Yes, sir.” Teska switched the display to a magnification of the Azanja’s view of Bajor. “The rebels left behind several occupied lifeboats, as well as a large number of sublight spacecraft that are currently adrift in orbit of Bajor. Orders?”

  Domal cracked a thin, malevolent smile. “Have the gunners use them for target practice.” He shared a brief laugh with Teska, then stepped back. “If you need me, I’ll be in my quarters, revising the invasion plans,” he said. “As soon as the Seventh Order joins us, the conquest of Bajor will begin.”

  14

  Shadows upon Shadows

  Passions were high inside Excalibur’s nerve center. Faces were taut with fierce anticipation of the battle to come—none more so than that of its captain.

  Mac slowly flexed his fist several times while watching the image of swirling multihued gases on the forward bulkhead’s main screen. Somewhere beyond that opaque, lightning-slashed storm, an Alliance convoy was drawing near. Lying in ambush to greet it was every ship under Mac’s command.

  Soleta looked up from a sensor console. “Convoy is twenty minutes out.” Mac glanced at her and responded with a barely perceptible nod.

  Patience had not always been one of Mac’s virtues, nor had it been prevalent among the Xenexian freedom fighters he’d recruited or the Romulan refugees to whom he’d given succor. He and they had always preferred action to words, deeds to ideas. In his youth, Mac had found his decisiveness to be an advantage. Whenever his enemies had made the mistake of wasting a moment to taunt him, he had used those precious slivers of time to seize the initiative.

  Things change, he reminded himself. Either we change with them, or we die.

  Leading an armada on a long-term military campaign against overwhelming odds had taught him the difference between tactics and strategy. At the point and moment of engagement, the readiness to act was all. But in the grander scheme of a conflict, what mattered was knowing when not to act—when to bide one’s time, wait for the enemy to make a mistake, maneuver for advantage, or avoid an unwinnable confrontation. Battles and wars, he was learning, often were won or lost before their first shots were fired. The key to survival was learning how to tell the difference between a lost cause and a call to glory before committing oneself to the fray.

  “Nineteen minutes out,” Soleta said.

  The silence inside the nerve center was oppressive. Normally, Mac paid no attention to the low-frequency hum of the ship’s ventilation system or the subtle feedback tones from the consoles. Without a steady, low buzz of comm chatter as white noise, however, he found himself tuning in to every tiny sound around him. The cadence of Jellico’s breathing from the tactical station. The scuffling of someone’s shoe on the deck as they shifted their weight. A distant, eerie howl of dense nebular currents buffeting his ship’s hull.

  Amid that stillness, the alert chirping on Selar’s console was sharp in Mac’s ears. The lithe Vulcan woman silenced the warning and began working at her station with unusual speed and intensity.

  Mac turned his chair toward her. “Selar, what’s going on?”

  “I have detected several unusual readings inside the nebula.”

  Concerned looks passed among Jellico, Soleta, and Mac. It was the Terran who asked, “Can you be a bit more specific, please?”

  “Numerous sudden changes in the expected fluid dynamics of the nebula’s core currents,” Selar said. “They appear to be displacements of sufficient mass and volume to affect the nebula’s natural convection patterns.”

  Making an effort to remain calm, Mac said, “Sum up, please. Quickly.”

  “We are not alone inside this nebula.”

  Jellico frowned. “Of course not, our whole armada’s out there.”

  “You misunderstand,” Selar said. “I had accounted for our forces’ effects on the nebula’s currents. These are new disruptions.” She pointedly looked away from Jellico to address Mac. “Captain, I think there is another fleet in the nebula.”

  He got up and stepped toward Selar. Soleta and Jellico joined him, and they surrounded the Vulcan woman’s science console.

  Discreetly, Mac asked, “How large a fleet?”

  “At least equal in size to our own,” Selar said.

  Soleta’s features hardened with cold fury. “A trap.”

  “That would be the logical assumption, yes.”

  Behind his mask of composure, Mac was furious. Keeping his voice down so as not to fuel rumors, he said, “If it’s a trap, that implies the Alliance knew we were coming. That suggests they have a mole aboard this ship.”

  McHenry’s telepathic voice answered inside his head with urgent sincerity. Not possible, Mac. If anyone on this ship had treasonous thoughts, I would have heard them and warned you.

  Mac exchanged a knowing glance with Soleta, who he was certain had also heard McHenry’s assurance. Soleta arched one eyebrow. “If McHenry is sure that our ship is secure from treachery, I believe him.”

  “So do I,” Mac said. “But our fleet has a lot of ships.”

  I have monitored all comm traffic between, to, and from the vessels of our fleet, McHenry insisted. Our transmissions have been secure and free of alien codes or embedded signals, and no one has let slip any details of our mission. There has been no betrayal, Mac.

  Soleta cocked her head to one side. “There is a simpler explanation.” She waited for Mac to train his withering glare upon her. “Maybe the Alliance lured us into a trap, and we got careless and took the bait.” Her proposition drew grudging nods of agreement from Jellico and Selar.

  “Grozit,” Mac muttered. In retrospect, it seemed so obvious, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. “Selar, patch into the tactical panel.” He waited until she called up the display showing his fleet’s position relative to the approaching Alliance vessels. “Now we’ve got a problem. If we show ourselves to take a shot at the convoy, their fleet inside the nebula will hit us from behind, and we’ll end up caught between them and the convoy’s defense squadron.” He frowned and looked at Jellico. “That’s a losing battle for us. We’d be out of position and outnumbered.” With a few deft taps, he began reconfiguring the icons on the screen to illustrate his points as he made them. “As much as we were counting on the supplies from the convoy, we’ll have to let them go if we want to leave here alive. But if we do nothing, we’re just as screwed. Once the ambush fleet realizes why we haven’t attacked the convoy, they’ll recall the escort squadron and come after us from two directions. So we can’t go forward, but we also can’t stay here.” He finished moving things around, then flashed a mischievous smile. “But that’s no reason not to have some fun.”

  “I don’t like it when you smile,” Soleta said. “It’s usually a bad sign.”

  “Not this time.” He enlarged part of the schematic on Selar’s screen. “We’re going to use the nebula’s natural convection patterns to our advantage. Ed, have all our ships release full torpedo salvos without propulsion into this thermal upswell. It’ll carry the warheads right up into the center of the hidden Alliance fleet’s formation. Soleta, after each ship has released its torpedoes, have them maneuver one at a time, on thrusters only, into this vortex. It’ll push us toward the eye of the nebula, where we’ll have more room to navigate.”

  Soleta caught on right away. “The torpedoes will be on delayed fuses.”

  “Precisely. It’ll take us roughly an hour to deploy torpedoes and ride the vortex clear. Ed, have all ships set their launched ordnance for detonation at precisely 1744 hours fleet time.”

  His plan drew a sly, approving look from Soleta. “In the vacuum of space, such a near miss would rattle the Alliance ships but do little real damage. But inside the nebula—”

  “The shock wave’ll rip their unshielded hulls apart like tissue paper.”

  Jellico grinned. “That’s diabolical.”

&
nbsp; Mac took a self-congratulatory half-bow. “Thank you.”

  Within minutes, the Excalibur had sent a dozen of its warheads into the upswell. An hour later, she lay at station inside the placid vacuum of the nebula’s eye, surrounded by the rest of Mac’s armada.

  Standing at the core of the ship’s nerve center, Mac listened with cold satisfaction to the reports of distant warhead detonations, and the subsequent aftershocks produced by Alliance starships as they imploded.

  “I’m going to call that a good day’s work,” he declared.

  Soleta grimaced. “We have a dissenting opinion on the comm.”

  “Let me guess. Hiren.”

  “Hiren.”

  A tired sigh. “Put him on-screen.”

  Flickers of static resolved into the image of Hiren. “We should pursue the convoy,” he said without salutation or preamble.

  “An interesting notion… No.”

  “We need those supplies, Captain!”

  Mac shook his head. “No, we don’t. They’d have been useful and would’ve made what lies ahead of us easier, but we’ll survive without them. At any rate, we’ve clearly lost the element of surprise here. It’s time to move on.”

  The former praetor of the Romulan Star Empire looked nearly apoplectic. “We had a deal, Captain! You promised my people we’d plunder this convoy and deal the Alliance a shaming blow, not just a paltry black eye.”

  “No, I let you request that, and I said I’d take it under advisement. But in case you haven’t been paying attention, Hiren, we just left the Alliance with a lot more than a black eye. The fleet the Alliance sent after us got turned into scrap a few minutes ago. Judging from my crew’s estimates of its size, I’d say the Alliance just lost most of its forces in the Acamar Sector.” He stepped forward and stared down the fuming Romulan. “They won’t have enough ships to patrol your former empire for at least a year. And in case you’ve forgotten, that is what I promised you I’d try to do. Now it’s done—and so is this conversation. Stand by for new orders. Excalibur out.” He turned his back on Hiren, and Soleta closed the channel before the irate ex-praetor could reply. Mac settled into his command chair. “Henna, set course for the B’hava’el system and relay coordinates to the fleet.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the young Xenexian woman at the helm.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the science station. “Selar.” When the Vulcan looked up at him, he beckoned her. With dignified grace, she stood and crossed the bridge to stand beside his chair. He motioned for her to lean closer. “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

  “If I am able, I will try.”

  “Without telling anyone else, I want you to send a message ahead of us to the Terran Rebellion. I’ve instructed McHenry to assist you as needed.”

  Selar asked in a whisper, “What message do you wish to send?”

  “Tell whoever’s in charge that I want to meet—and I want to join forces.”

  15

  The Face of Anarchy

  Corat Damar stands in the shadows, watching from a safe remove as his leader and best friend, Skrain Dukat, steps onto the balcony outside his office to make a rare public address to all of the Cardassian Union. It has always been this way between the two of them: Dukat has always been more at home in the spotlight, as the focus of attention, and Damar has been content to live as the éminence grise, the power behind the throne, acting as Dukat’s right hand.

  On the balcony, Dukat lifts his hands and basks in the roaring adulation of the crowd gathered in the plaza below. Applause crashes over him like a breaking wave. The people’s worship of him is a tangible thing, a tactile commodity. Damar is certain that if only he had the nerve to step into the light, he could touch that glory with his fingertips and revel in its warmth.

  “People of Cardassia,” Dukat bellows, his voice soaring into the honeyed sky, his words resonating in the arid morning air. “Today we rejoice! A great thorn has been plucked from the side of the Alliance. The Terran Rebellion has been routed from the Bajor system, its stronghold destroyed, and its numbers slashed to a mere fraction of its former strength. Mark my words: The Terrans… are… FINISHED!” Throaty cheers answer him. Voices full of pride and fury echo off the dusky building façades facing the plaza. “Soon we shall avenge the traitorous secession of Bajor. For too long we have let that tiny world dictate our affairs. It’s time the Alliance had a new master, one worthy of the role—and that master will be CARDASSIA!”

  Hope and joy swell in Damar’s heart. Dukat’s call to arms inspires him. It is a vision of a future for which he has long devoutly wished. Unable to resist the summons to greatness, for the first time in his life Damar steps from the shadows, into the light, and onto the balcony.

  He draws his sidearm and shoots Dukat in the back of the head.

  The moment is one of horrified silence. Far below, the crowd is silent. They stand stunned, not knowing how to react. On the balcony, Damar is slackjawed. He watches Dukat’s corpse sag to its knees and collapse at his feet. Though the hole in the back of Dukat’s skull is modest, his entire face is gone, leaving only a charred and bloody cavity. Damar stares in horror at the gun in his hand.

  Time slows. Nothing seems real. Damar feels like a spectator to his life, a puppet watching its own clumsy pantomime.

  Angry cries rise from the plaza. A riot breaks out. Cardassian civilians turn against one another, and within moments the crowd, which had seemed so happy and united only moments earlier, descends into violent chaos.

  Damar staggers back inside the Supreme Legate’s office. He drops his weapon on the floor and struggles not to weep.

  Standing in the middle of the room, holding a tray with two beverages upon it, is one of Dukat’s mousy Vulcan handmaidens. Her eyes are cold, passionless, and seem to Damar as if they are gazing straight through him to his essence.

  He looks back at her, desperate in his grief. “What have I done?”

  She answers without pity, “Only what was logical.”

  The rifle is warm in Legate Remok’s hands, a reassuring totem of power, and its screeching as he holds down its trigger drowns out the screams and pathetic cries of his officers until he is the last one left alive on the command deck of the dreadnought Ostrava. They were traitors, he reminds himself, unworthy of mercy, undeserving of his remorse or remembrance.

  He seals the hatches to the command deck and enters his command override codes into the ship’s main computer. From every deck of his ship, reports flood in of officers turning against one another, enlisted men rising up against their officers, mutinies devolving into senseless mobs. The comm chatter among the other ships of the Seventh Order tells the same story, over and over again: a sudden descent into madness, a pandemic of irrational violence consuming each ship’s crew.

  There is only one solution, Remok decides. Only one way to defend Cardassia and the Alliance from whatever mindless fury has seized his men. Whether the madness lies in their blood or is being forced upon them by some malevolent force, he sees only one recourse.

  The computer acknowledges his codes. “Override all command directives for the Seventh Order,” he says, and the computer complies. “Initiate counterinsurgency protocol Skurov on all vessels.”

  “Protocol armed.”

  Remok takes no pleasure in what he has to do, but he permits himself a modicum of pride. This is his sworn duty, his solemn responsibility: to defend his people, even if only from themselves. “Arm all self-destruct packages. Command authorization Remok-three-cheska.”

  “Confirmed. All packages armed. Set delay.”

  “Ten seconds, silent countdown. Execute.”

  “Confirmed. Ten seconds to self-destruct.”

  He drops his rifle to the deck, relieving himself of its burden. His task is complete, and what has been done cannot be undone. None of the starship commanders in the Seventh Order has the command authority to override Remok’s directive—not that it matters, since none of them will know he has trigge
red it until after their ships have been reduced to fractured debris and free radicals.

  Falling to his knees, Remok laughs and weeps all at once.

  The mad compulsion fades, and in the final seconds of his life he is afflicted with a moment of terrible clarity: Someone has done this to me.

  Everything he knows is transformed into white light—and then it’s erased, lost in time’s fathomless abyss, as if it had never existed at all.

  Selona has devoted her entire adult life to science. Growing up in Lakarian City on Cardassia Prime, she consistently tested at the top of her class in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology. Despite her doting father’s misguided emphasis on praising Selona for her beauty, she knew from a tender age that the real path to prominence in the Union and the Alliance was prowess—to be the best at something important, something valuable.

  That understanding had propelled her into one of Cardassia’s finest universities, where she’d excelled beyond all expectations, even her own. More than a year before receiving her doctorate in applied biochemistry, she had been deluged with job offers from corporations and the military—but she’d known the only position worthy of consideration was the one offered by the Obsidian Order.

  Today, her work comes to fruition. Her lifetime of study and labor, and her years of isolation in a secret bioweapons lab, yield their bitter reward.

  She disengages the lab’s internal sensors and biocontainment systems. Using her supervisory code, she shuts down even its most fundamental safety systems. Then she dons a protective respiration mask and opens the valve on a large tank of cytozine gas. Odorless, colorless, and silent, it disperses swiftly through the laboratory and is pulled into the main ventilation system.

  Within minutes, all her colleagues—people with whom she has worked, socialized, flirted, fornicated, and competed—fall dead en masse. Soon enough she is alone in the massive underground facility, carrying out an objective for which she has spent most of her life in preparation, though until this moment she had no idea that she was doing so.