Rise Like Lions

by David Mack

  Stored in the deepest recesses of the Obsidian Order’s bioweapons lab, behind multiply redundant layers of interlocks, safeguards, and barriers, is a weapon unlike any ever used in all of known history: a metagenic pathogen. Unleashed into a planet’s atmosphere, it will self-replicate and feed off every bit of DNA and organic matter it encounters, devouring all in its path. It is capable of destroying entire ecosystems and exterminating all organic life on an average inhabited planet within a matter of days.

  Selona reprograms a phalanx of forty-eight missiles whose warheads are loaded with the metagenic pathogen. She sets their guidance matrices to target populated Cardassian planets purely at random once deployed. Then she launches them. As the sleek drones lift off and head for space, Selona draws a small disruptor from her pocket and destroys the missiles’ control console.

  One more task, says a voice in her head that she knows is not hers but that compels her obedience all the same.

  She releases the last of the safeguards on the reserve stockpile of the metagenic pathogen and purges it into the atmosphere of Kora II. Based on today’s weather reports, wind patterns will likely carry it first to the military academy, and afterward to the population centers along the seacoast.

  It is finished, the voice says, and Selona breathes a sigh of relief. No more struggling, no more lying, no more playing the part of the puppet.

  She strips the respirator mask from her face, breathes in, and sinks into a dreamless sleep without end.

  Gil Penar has no idea what is happening. He is just a low-level officer, freshly minted by the military academy on Kora II, and he is all alone in a remote subspace comm relay station, in deep space between Orias and Sarpedion.

  The comm network is going haywire.

  Frantic reports fill him with terror: From every corner of the Alliance, he is receiving reports of Cardassian fleets being rent asunder by infighting. Senior officers are wiping out their crews, junior officers are betraying their commanders, soldiers of the Alliance are turning their weapons on one another.

  Each passing minute brings more reports of greater madness from farther away. Insanity is spreading faster than the speed of light, devouring Cardassia’s best and brightest. Lost in the cacophony are several planetary distress signals. Normally, Penar would relay those pleas for help, but as he watches his entire civilization descend into chaos, he realizes there is no one left to call.

  T’Nara’s face is wet with blood—not her own but that of her so-called mistress, Natima, the lady of the aristocratic Cardassian household into whose servitude T’Nara had been born decades earlier.

  Decades have slipped past while T’Nara played her part as a meek and faithful servant, a pliant slave willing to submit to whatever depredations her host family chose to inflict upon her. For the patriarch, Damek, she has been a concubine; for Natima, a whipping girl; for their spoiled, vicious children she has been a cook, a maid, a nurse, a confidante, an alibi.

  Tonight she is the dark whisper in Damek’s ear, willing him to murder.

  Planting the idea was a simple matter. Damek has always been a simple man, despite his prominence in Cardassia’s government. So simple, in fact, that even now he thinks it was his idea to butcher his own family in their sleep, one by one. In all likelihood, he will continue to believe that pathetic untruth for the rest of his life, and it will cause him no end of misery and self-loathing.

  T’Nara has no regrets. Too many times she has been forced to close her eyes and bury her rage while surrendering to Damek’s ugly violations. His disgrace will send shock waves through the upper castes of Cardassian polite society, though it will be only one of countless such incidents that the people of the Cardassian Union will studiously avoid discussing ever again. Just as they do not suspect who drove them to this madness, they will probably come to believe that they gave this awful night its name, rather than admit it was given to them.

  For centuries to come, T’Nara is certain, Cardassians everywhere will blanch when they dare to remember the atrocities of the Red Hour.

  She opens the doors to a wide terrace off the townhouse’s main room and steps outside into the night air, which is heavy with far-off cries of terror. Across the boulevard, on another terrace, stands another Vulcan, an older man. T’Nara has met him a few times. His name is Sanok. Like her, he is a portrait in spilled blood. It speckles his face and slicks his hands.

  Though they are more than a dozen meters apart, Sanok and T’Nara are strong enough as telepaths that they can communicate in brief flashes. She shares a memory, only minutes old:

  I crouch in the darkness beside Damek and Natima’s bed. He kneels atop his wife and severs her carotid artery with a cooking knife. Blood sprays toward me, warm and wet, baptizing me.

  Sanok nods, accepting T’Nara’s memory for safekeeping. He entrusts her with one of his own:

  I push my masters into a verbal confrontation like the hundreds they have had before, but this time I free them from all their inhibitions. I enable them to be what they truly are. Within minutes they race each other to pluck ancient, family heirloom weapons from their walls and cut each other down with wild abandon. The master of the house emerges victorious, only to be overcome with grief when he sees he has beheaded his wife. He begs me for death. I reverently place his wife’s severed head into his lap and whisper, “No.”

  T’Nara accepts Sanok’s memory and pledges to vouchsafe it as if it were her own. He bows his head in gratitude.

  Around them, the night is rich with horrors. T’Nara is not blind or bereft of conscience. She knows that what is being done, and what must yet be done, is a cold and gruesome business—but her guilt is assuaged by the memories of the fall of Vulcan, of the Alliance’s mechanical cruelty, its practiced barbarism.

  Those memories, passed down telepathically from Vulcan parents to their offspring, will be preserved until the last of their kind passes from the universe. As slights go, it is a recent one, a new injury, a wound so fresh it has barely taken on the psychic equivalent of a scab, much less the venerable affect of scar tissue. But it is one that all living Vulcans have vowed to remember—and avenge at any cost.

  Glinn Teska stands, paralyzed, as he watches the last four ships of the Ninth Order break formation and purposefully steer into one another.

  He can’t appeal to his superior, Gul Domal, because Domal has just inserted his blaster’s muzzle into his own mouth and shot himself. Which is only appropriate, since the gul had just slaughtered all the other bridge officers, sparing Teska only because, Domal had said, “I want you to see what follows.”

  Teska activates the ship’s secure internal comms. “Command to Glinn Kirso, Priority One. Kirso, respond.” No answer comes. With no one to whom he can issue orders, Teska sprints to the flight controls and shoves aside the dead man slumped across the console. He tries to make his fingers enter the commands that will navigate the Azanja clear of the imminent four-way collision, but all the symbols on the panel seem to be written in gibberish. Ignore them, he tells himself. You know the sequence by heart. Just do it—evasive to starboard.

  It’s a rote pattern, one every officer learns during training. By now it is all but second nature to Teska. Nonetheless, his hands disobey him. He sees in his mind’s eye the sequence he desires, but his hands refuse to execute his instruction.

  The image inside the holographic frame is daunting. Very little space remains between the four warships; second by second they blot out the stars as they converge. Teska punches the console that he cannot adjust, certain that something is stopping him, thwarting his will, condemning him to die.

  In the distance, Bajor is a flickering light, a taunting glimmer, a goal that Teska knows will remain forever beyond his grasp.

  Azanja’s engines fire one last time, imparting a final blast of thrust.

  There is nothing for Teska to do but curse as the ship beneath his feet keeps its appointment with oblivion.

  16

  Blood for Blood
>
  The Great Hall thundered with angry voices as the High Council of the Klingon Empire unanimously excoriated Regent Martok. In the flickering crimson light of braziers packed with coal and sulfur, the councillors’ shadowy faces became fearsome masks, twisted and grotesque.

  “You arrogant fool!” shouted Councillor Kopek, his voice rising above the din. “Nearly a hundred ships, more than sixty thousand warriors, blown to bits because of your stupidity!” He turned his back on Martok and faced the other council members. “It’s a disgrace to the Empire!”

  Martok sprang from his throne, his thick eyebrows knit with scorn, and threw Kopek violently backward to the floor. “How dare you insult the sacrifice of our warriors!” He stalked in a tight circle, cowing the councillors out of his path with his stare. “War is a fickle mistress—she bestows bounty with one hand, and with the other she tears it away.”

  Kopek regained his feet and confronted Martok. “The spoils of war weren’t taken from your hand—you fumbled them!” Cheers of support roared from several of the councillors behind him. “You set a clumsy, obvious trap, and our soldiers were the ones who paid for it! Their blood is on your hands, Martok!”

  Before the brash, loudmouthed politician knew what had hit him, Martok buried his d’k tahg deep inside Kopek’s guts, gave the blade a savage twist, and bared his fangs. “Now I have your blood on my hands, Kopek.” With a sharp tug he yanked his blade free, splattering the floor with Kopek’s viscera. Wide-eyed and speechless, the councillor sagged at the knees and collapsed, dead, at Martok’s feet. Prowling in another tight circle, Martok kept his bloody dagger at the ready, an open challenge to anyone with a mind to emulate his expired rival.

  “Our honored dead will not go unavenged,” Martok said, his voice as rough as a boot on gravel. “We’re going to hunt down the rebel Calhoun and his Romulan taHqeqpu’ no matter how far they run, no matter how long it takes.”

  From the back of the room, an unfamiliar voice asked, “What of Bajor?”

  The circle of councillors cleaved itself in twain, and the two clusters stepped back into the shadows, leaving Martok alone in the harsh light that shone in the center of the chamber. Facing the regent from the hall’s main entrance was a figure that Martok recognized even in silhouette: a one-armed warrior.

  “General Klag,” Martok growled. “You forget yourself. Only scions of the Great Houses are permitted to speak inside this hall.”

  Klag marched forward, his eyes gleaming in the darkness, matching Martok’s stare with his own. “They and those they invite, Martok.”

  Martok chortled. “All right, then.” He pivoted to one side and then the other, eyeing the councillors. “Which one of you invited this yIntagh into my hall?” His stare met nothing but averted eyes and downward glances.

  The answer came from behind him. “I did.”

  Amusement turned to frigid hatred as Martok turned to see his chief of staff, General Goluk, looking back at him from his throne’s dais. The grizzled old veteran stood proudly, chin lifted in defiance. Seething, Martok asked, “Why?”

  “His request was honorable,” Goluk said. “I granted him entrance out of respect for his standing as a fellow member of the Order of the Bat’leth.”

  Vile curses tumbled from Martok’s lips. Any mention of that dusty, useless old brotherhood was enough to drive him to vulgarity. He despised its outdated devotion to a lesser incarnation of the Empire, and its members’ snobbish secrecy. Disgusted, he spat upon the ground at Goluk’s feet. “Had I known you belonged to that band of toDSaHpu’, I’d never have made you my chief of staff.” Then he turned back to face Klag, who stopped just out of reach. Martok met him with a menacing grin. “Though it seems fitting that the Order of the Bat’leth would induct a member who can’t even hold the weapon it’s named for.”

  Klag drew a mek’leth from his belt and dropped it to the floor in front of Martok. The curvaceous short sword clanged brightly as it struck the stone tiles. Then the one-armed general drew another mek’leth from a scabbard on his back.

  “Pick it up,” Klag said, “if you dare.”

  That was all the invitation Martok needed. He maintained eye contact with Klag as he sheathed his d’k tahg and squatted slowly to retrieve the melee weapon. His hand closed on its hide-wrapped grip, and he straightened while waiting for Klag to strike. The weapon felt balanced and solid, and a quick test with his thumb verified that both its short and long blades were honed to razor-sharp perfection.

  He beckoned Klag. “Lay on, One-Arm.”

  The two warriors circled each other, and the councillors surrounding them stepped back to stay clear of the fight. Klag tested Martok with a few quick feints. Impatient, the regent lunged, determined to draw first blood.

  Klag ducked and whirled clear of Martok’s blade, and the next thing the regent felt was a slash of heat across his back. Instinctual reflex led him to clutch at the wound, and his hand came away stained fuchsia with his blood. Recovering quickly, he lowered his center of gravity by crouching slightly as he pivoted to keep Klag in front of him.

  The general looked pleased with himself. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “Less than you think,” Martok rasped. He struck at Klag’s left side to draw his defense, then sidestepped and swung at the general’s exposed right side. His blade rang as it was parried by Klag’s mek’leth.

  Of course he’s learned to defend his open right side, Martok chided himself. He wouldn’t still be alive if he hadn’t mastered that. Feeling a slick sheen of blood coating his flank and leg, Martok knew he would need to regain the advantage soon if he was to win this duel. He mustered his strength, let out a battle cry, and charged at Klag, raining attacks down upon him with speed and ferocity. Mighty swings crisscrossed Klag’s chest with bloody lacerations, and an aggressive lunge tore a chunk of meat from the ribs on his right side.

  Time to end this, Martok decided. He brought his mek’leth down in a powerful stroke, and as he expected, Klag parried it and their blades locked together. With his free hand, Martok drew his d’k tahg and raised his arm to deliver the killing stroke. As his arm fell to land the fatal blow, Klag shifted his weight, forcing Martok off balance, and before the regent realized what was being done, his arms were tangled together, both his blades snared.

  Klag snaked his leg behind Martok’s knee and swept the regent’s legs out from under him. As Martok fell, his mek’leth was torn from his hands. He saw a flash of metal and raised his d’k tahg in a desperate bid to block it.

  The next thing he saw was his d’k tahg spinning through the air, followed closely by his severed hand and a gout of blood. He was screaming in rage as Klag’s mek’leth plunged into his skull.

  The rest was silence.

  Klag left his blade where he’d put it: in the middle of Martok’s head. Bits of the dead regent’s brain and bone flecked Klag’s arm and chest, and he stood surrounded by a swiftly spreading pool of blood.

  If he had harbored the slightest regard for Martok—as a leader, a warrior, or even simply as a Klingon—he would have honored his demise with the Hegh’ta, prying open the eyelids of the vanquished and roaring as a warning to the legions of Sto-Vo-Kor that one of their own was coming to join their august company.

  Instead, he planted his boot on Martok’s chest. “Follow me now.”

  The councillors were silent. Some looked perplexed. Was he making a request? Extending an invitation? Giving them an order? He did not care how they interpreted his imperative, so long as none of them challenged him. If forced to fight them all, one by one, he would do so. He did not fear them, nor did he fear death. Power or oblivion—either would be acceptable.

  Goluk seemed unwilling to wait for the council to achieve consensus. He stepped down from the dais and handed the regent’s scepter to Klag. His voice filled the Great Hall and shook dust from its rafters: “All hail, Regent Klag!” No one spoke in opposition, so Goluk repeated, “All hail, Regent Klag!”

  A few voices answered the
chant, followed by a few others. Within moments it was unanimous, and Klag climbed the dais steps and sat himself on the throne.

  For the price of one monstrous life, the Empire was now his.

  17

  Gone to Ground

  What a bloody mess.” O’Brien shook his head. He and Eddington stood on either side of the situation table along the aft bulkhead of the Defiant’s bridge. Exhausted and aching, O’Brien was hunched, palms flat atop the reflective black interactive console. Eddington, as usual, maintained his perfect posture, but his eyes were bloodshot and his normally clean-shaven face was rough with stubble.

  Rubbing his eyes, Eddington said, “I don’t like the thought of leaving people behind any more than you do, Miles, but we lost too many ships back there. And without the station, we just can’t support this many people at once.”

  O’Brien was too tired to be angry anymore. Enervated from days spent in disorganized retreat with ships packed from bow to stern with refugees, and tweaking every emission from the Defiant’s warp drive to avoid accidentally ionizing or igniting the gases in the Badlands, all he wanted to do was collapse into a bunk and sleep, preferably forever. He picked up his mug of cold black coffee and took a bitter sip. “So, we have no defensible base. No resources. And less than half the fleet we did a week ago. Am I missing anything?”

  “Only the good news,” Eddington said.

  “There’s good news?”

  Eddington called up geological scans of Athos IV, above which the damaged remnants of their fleet lingered in orbit and to whose surface the majority of its refugees had been transported. “The abandoned mines are full of fistrium, which plays hell with long-range sensors.”

  “I know that,” O’Brien groused.

  “We can move our people underground to keep the Alliance from detecting them if they send a patrol this way.”