Rise Like Lions

by David Mack

  Exiled in paradise, Miral reflected, luxuriating under the touch of her magnificent masseurs. How lucky I am that Worf was a fool. Outside her sunroom, wavetops tore themselves to pieces across a seabreak of jagged rocks, and the hissing of sea foam whispered the secrets of the deep into Miral’s waking dreams.

  Then the squawk of an alarm shattered her bliss to pieces.

  Cursing, she pushed herself up and off the massage table. Her slaves backed away, well practiced at avoiding Miral’s wrath when she was in a hurry. The dark brown man-boy hurried forward from wherever it was he stood awaiting her summonses, and he held open her bathrobe. She slipped into the loose-fitting garment of brushed Bolian linen and let the slave dress its line across her shoulders, then she tied it shut and stepped into her sandals. “This had better not be a false alarm,” she muttered, stepping briskly toward her private transport pad.

  In a cascade of golden light accompanied by a mellisonant hum, Miral went from her beach house in the Maldives to her office at the Klingon Consulate in Okinawa. Erected atop the ruins of Spock’s former palace, the Empire’s patch of sovereign soil on the homeworld of its former rival was little more than a bunker, but it was as secure a headquarters as Miral had ever seen.

  She stepped out of her office and started shouting questions and orders. “What the hell is going on? Somebody activate the planetary defense screens, and power up the nadion-pulse cannons.” Spotting her chief of staff lurking on the far side of the situation room and trying not to be noticed, she directed her ire at him. “Szopa, you Cardassian bug, get over here!”

  The long-limbed, gawky Cardassian man rushed to heed Miral’s call, but she found his gait so awkward and ungainly that she could hardly bear to watch him. He arrived at the steps leading to her office and looked up at her. “Yes, Intendant?”

  “You’re out of breath,” she said with disgust. “Do you need a medic?”

  “No, Intendant.” Composing himself, he added, “We’re under attack.”

  “You don’t say.” She descended the stairs in quick strides and shouldered Szopa out of her path. “By whom?”

  He followed her to the central command table. “The lead ship matches the description of the rebel dreadnought Excalibur.”

  She spun around to glare at him. “Calhoun’s ship?” As soon as Szopa gave her the first hint of a nod of confirmation, she cried out, “Destroy that ship the moment it’s in range!”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Intendant: It’s already—”

  A deafening boom, like the strike of an angry god’s hammer, drowned out every other sound inside the command center. Screens and consoles went dark, and the ground beneath Miral’s feet continued to shake for several seconds.

  Miral pounded the side of her fist on the nearest console until it stuttered back to full function. Then she looked down and saw Szopa cowering on the floor. “Stand up or I will kill you like the vermin you are.”

  Szopa got to his feet with terrible reluctance. “As I was saying, Intendant—the attack fleet appeared out of nowhere, from a wormhole in orbit above us.”

  More blasts rocked the consulate, and dust rained down from the fractured ceiling, coating all the consoles in fine gray powder. Furious, Miral grabbed Szopa by his armored breastplate and pulled him down so his nose was against hers. “Our orbital platforms should be shredding that fleet! Why aren’t they firing?”

  “They’re trying,” he said. “We all are, but there’s an error in the system. We can’t get any of our weapons to fire.”

  She threw him against the console. “Tell the gun crews to fire manually!”

  “They can’t!” He was hyperactive from panic. “They all keep saying they can’t make their hands work the controls! They try to obey, but they can’t!” He pointed at the flood of emergency bulletins flooding into the comm stations. “There are slave uprisings all over the planet! What are we going to do?”

  It was impossible, but it was happening. Every incoming signal brought news of a new revolt, another mass murder of the planet’s Klingon masters by their slaves, another gun battery or military installation blasted into slag by Calhoun’s ship and its attack fleet. In less time than it would have taken for Miral to order dinner from her kitchen, her private paradise had been laid waste.

  She stepped back from the console and pushed Szopa forward to take her place. “Organize a counterattack. I’ll contact Qo’noS for reinforcements.”

  Before he could protest or ask questions, Miral was moving up the stairs, back into her office. There was no time to waste. She activated her personal transporter and set it to send her back to her beach house. The flurry of light and sound enveloped her, and then she savored the fragrance of warm air off the sea. She sprinted across her poolside terrace toward the landing pad on the west side of the compound, where she kept an unmarked personal shuttle for just such a crisis as the one that was engulfing her. No time to pack, she told herself, burying the pangs of regret she felt at abandoning her wardrobe, as well as several mementos whose value was purely sentimental but whose loss stung keenly all the same.

  As she rounded the corner of her villa, she saw her coterie of beautiful men gathered at the entrance of her shuttle, waiting for her. How adorable, she thought as she ran to them. As loyal as gelded targs.

  Half a breath before she could tell her ginger man to open the shuttle’s hatch, the be’HomloD drew a disruptor from his loosely drooping sleeve and aimed it at her. Miral had just enough time to wonder what the pretty man was doing but not enough time to ask before he pulled the trigger and shot her in the chest.

  The blast brought her to a halt. A moment later her legs started to feel like weak rubber, and she dropped to her knees. Her bevy of male slaves prowled toward her, all of them except the be’HomloD drawing knives from under their tunics. Their eyes were hard and cold, just as vengeance demanded.

  Miral did not beg for mercy. It would not have become her as a Klingon.

  Her slaves set upon her with the savagery of wild animals, their blades ice-cold as they plunged into Miral’s body again and again, an orgy of violence many years in the making. As she vanished beneath their flurry of betrayal, her final thought was of her missing and disgraced half-human daughter, B’Elanna.

  I should have slain her in the womb.

  26

  A Price Paid in Blood

  O’Brien was roused by the distant comfort of human voices. Pinned beneath half a ton of warped metal and sparking cables, he could barely breathe, let alone move. Except for intermittent flashes from a severed plasma line or an occasional fall of sparks from somewhere overhead, all he saw was darkness. He wasn’t certain how long he’d been unconscious after the overhead of the Defiant’s bridge had caved in, but he had awoken to the falling hum of the ship dropping out of warp and maneuvering on impulse. Several long, agony-filled minutes later he had heard the buzzing and clanging of rescue teams beginning work somewhere above him.

  They’ll get to you, he told himself, willing his spirits not to flag. Just hang on. He took comfort in the familiar racket of groaning metal and crackling hisses, which he knew from experience meant that someone with a plasma torch was cutting their way down through the wreckage to him. He sucked air through dry teeth and realized that his mouth was parched and he was thirsty as hell. That wasn’t a good sign, he knew. It probably meant he had suffered an internal injury. For a moment he hoped that some impatient soul would simply lock a transporter onto his life sign and beam him out from under that heap of duranium. Then he remembered that beaming someone out of a mess like this—without knowing whether their body is depending on a penetrating piece of debris to prevent them from bleeding to death in the span of a breath—could be disastrous.

  He tried to dredge up his last memory from before everything had come tumbling down, but his mind felt foggy, scattered. Conjuring images of ships dodging artillery fire while maneuvering at breakneck speeds through tight spaces in a shipyard felt right, but he co
uldn’t be certain he hadn’t imagined it.

  White light bent its way through gaps in the junk pile atop O’Brien’s chest, as if the beam itself were searching for him. More pulses of bright light made him wince and left him seeing purple-black afterimages. He kept his eyes closed as two more cutting tools tore through metal with small, fiery jets of energy. The voices that had roused him back to consciousness drew closer and became clearer. Someone shouted, “Lift!” Grunts and groans of painful exertion accompanied a sudden decrease in the pressure on O’Brien’s sternum. He sucked in a full breath like a drowning man breaking through the surface of a black sea, and he savored the sensation of profound relief.

  Ponderous slabs of the ship’s inner hull were dropped to the deck with resonant clangs, or dragged aside with a hellish screech of metal on metal. Several beams of blinding light converged upon O’Brien’s face as someone asked, “General O’Brien? Are you all right, sir?”

  All he could say was, “Get me out of here.”

  Silhouetted figures worked in a frenzy, and within minutes they exhumed O’Brien from what he had feared might become his tomb. A male Tellarite kneeled beside him and scanned him with a medical device. “You have internal injuries,” said the porcine-faced physician.

  “I figured as much. Can I get some water?”

  The doctor waved over a human woman. She crouched beside O’Brien and lifted a small canteen to his lips. “Drink slowly,” she said. “Small sips.”

  It took all his willpower not to wrest the canteen from her hand and guzzle it empty in one swallow. He restrained himself to half a mouthful at a time. After his second swig, his eyes had partially adjusted to the light. Squinting at his caregivers, he noticed they both were wearing the black and gray uniforms of Memory Omega personnel. “What ship are you from?”

  “Enterprise,” the Tellarite said. “I’m Doctor Mov, and this is Nurse Milioti.”

  Looking around, O’Brien saw that not much of the Defiant’s bridge was intact. Bulkheads had buckled inward, deck plates had heaved and bent, and most of the overhead had crashed down. A thick haze of dust lingered in the air, and the air was sharp with the acrid tang of burnt circuitry and overheated metal. “How did we get here?”

  “Through a wormhole generated by the Enterprise,” Mov said.

  “No. I mean, how did Defiant survive the battle?”

  “Your chief engineer, Muñiz. He and his team transferred helm and weapons control to engineering and navigated clear of the crossfire. They saved your ship.”

  O’Brien nodded. He was proud of Quiqué, but his face felt slack, and he couldn’t muster any praise more effusive than, “Good man.”

  Milioti said, “You’re in shock, General. Stay still until we can transport you to the Enterprise for surgery.”

  Two men, a Vulcan and a Bolian, carried another survivor out of the wreckage and laid him with tender care beside O’Brien. As the rescuers stepped away, he saw that the man at his side was Samaritan Bowers. Through years of war, O’Brien had learned to recognize the fading light in a dying man’s eyes, and he saw it now in Bowers, who asked in a weak, rasping shade of his rich voice, “Did… did we make it?”

  Mustering all his strength, O’Brien lifted one hand and rested it on Bowers’s shoulder. “Yes, Sam. We made it. Well done.” The news seemed to give Bowers a measure of peace as his life slipped away from him.

  A cry of rage and sorrow filled the bridge. Fearing what he’d see but knowing he had to look, O’Brien turned his head toward the bitter, funereal keening and saw Ezri draped over the scorched and twisted body of her wife, Leeta. As Ezri’s wails shrank to small, desperate sobs, listening to the young Trill weep beside her beloved became more than O’Brien could bear. His stoic mask cracked and then crumbled, and heavy sobs shook his chest. Tears rolled from his eyes and cut warm trails across his grime-covered cheeks. These people were his family, and they lay strewn around him, shattered and bleeding, and there was nothing he could do to help them, no words of comfort he could offer. Worst of all, there was no solace he could grant himself, because he had led them there.

  Bereaved and broken, all he could think about was Keiko.

  Doctor Mov stepped between O’Brien and Ezri as he said, “One for transport directly to sickbay. Energize.”

  O’Brien had just enough time to palm the tears from his face before the transporter beam snared him and whisked him in a wash of light and sound from the bridge of the Defiant to the sickbay of the Enterprise. He materialized on a state-of-the-art biobed, a few meters away from a team of surgeons in smocks and masks who were getting ready to perform the latest in that day’s string of medical miracles. He turned his head as he heard Picard’s voice.

  “I’m glad you’re still with us, General.” Picard stood at O’Brien’s bedside, his uniform pristine and untouched by the battle. “We’ve scored a great victory.”

  Sick with grief and seething with anger, O’Brien lay down and rolled onto his side, away from Picard. “Not from where I was standing, we didn’t.”

  Barely able to see where he was going, Tuvok navigated by memory as he carried Seska toward sickbay. The corridors inside the Geronimo were pitch dark and curtained with smoke, and the turbolifts had stopped working after the ship lost all power to primary and secondary systems, forcing him to carry the wounded over his shoulder while he climbed steep emergency access ladders one-handed.

  He stepped over the body of a person who had died mere paces from the ship’s tiny medical bay. From what he had seen while searching for survivors, the dead outnumbered the living aboard the small attack ship, and judging from the blood-soaked spectacle that greeted him in sickbay, he suspected many of those currently counted among the wounded soon would join the ranks of the fallen.

  The ship’s Denobulan medic, Tropp, noted Tuvok’s arrival—and the unconscious Cardassian woman in his arms—with a tired glower. “Put her over there,” he said, gesturing toward an empty spot on the deck by the aft bulkhead.

  Tuvok eased Seska to the deck and then joined Tropp, who was performing a crude job of abdominal surgery on one of the ship’s mechanics. “Is there anything I can do to assist?”

  “Stop bringing me wounded,” Tropp grumbled. “I can’t help most of ’em, anyway. Might as well save time and space ’em now.”

  Looking around, Tuvok had his doubts regarding the accuracy of Tropp’s diagnostic skills. “Perhaps I could perform basic triage and prioritize the—”

  “The ones who really need my help are as good as dead. We’re out of most drugs, half my surgical tools don’t work, and we have no blood for transfusions. Tell me who has superficial wounds, and I’ll do what I can for them.”

  Hiding his contempt for Tropp’s fatalism, Tuvok surveyed the room full of injured people. “Seska has serious burns, but a dermal regenerator should suffice to repair most of—”

  “Fine, she’s next. Who else?”

  “That man’s leg is broken. If we fix it, he—”

  “Osteofuser’s busted. Best I can give him is a splint.”

  Tuvok eyed the scarce supplies that were at hand. He reached into a nearby cabinet and took out a medkit. “May I borrow this?”

  Tropp replied with defensive suspicion, “For what?”

  “I intend to see if anyone on the bridge requires medical attention.”

  The medic harrumphed and returned to botching his surgical procedure. “Fine. While you’re up there, see if you can get us moved up in the queue for help from those freknarka at Memory Omega.”

  “I will see what I can do.” Medkit in hand, Tuvok abandoned Tropp to his impromptu abattoir and made his way forward.

  In the passageway that led to the bridge, Tuvok was halted by the echoes of desperate sobbing followed by bitter, muffled screams. The hatch was ajar, and he edged toward it, his steps light and all but silent. Sidling up to the doorway, he peeked through it.

  Neelix was slumped limply in the center chair, his head tilted sideways at an unnatu
ral angle. Kes kneeled in front of him, with her arms wrapped around his torso and her face against his chest as she wept. The rest of the bridge crew lay on the deck at her feet, their bodies torn and blackened, their eyes open but unseeing.

  At a loss for words, Tuvok lurked outside the doorway, reluctant to intrude upon Kes’s grief. He chastised himself for his absent-mindedness; overwhelmed by the relentless clamor and confusion of the battle, and then by the severity of the damage to the ship and the sheer number of casualties, it had never occurred to him that the loss of main power would lower the force field on Kes’s jury-rigged cell, or that she might be loose and wandering the ship. It is of no consequence, he decided. The issue of her confinement can be revisited later, at a more appropriate time. He backpedaled slowly from the hatchway, intending to leave Kes in peace.

  Her voice was low and raw and laced with bilious fury.

  “I know you’re there, Tuvok. I can hear you.”

  The challenge in her words was implicit. Tuvok stepped forward and slipped sideways past the half-open door. He met her stare of cold hatred with humbly downcast eyes. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “No you’re not.” She stood and stalked toward him. “You’re a Vulcan. You don’t let yourself have feelings. Not for him, not for me, not for anyone.” Though she was many centimeters shorter than Tuvok, she was fearless as she invaded his personal space to confront him. “You have no idea how much he meant to me, how deeply I loved him. I would have gone anywhere to find him, given anything to be with him. And now he’s gone forever, because of you. He’s dead because of you!”

  “You are mistaken. I did not kill Captain Neelix.”

  “Oh, yes, you did.” Kes stabbed at Tuvok’s chest with her index finger. “You flipped the switch on whatever this thing is that your friends put in my head. You took away all my power. If it hadn’t been for you, I could have saved him, Tuvok!” She pointed at the bodies surrounding them. “I could’ve saved them all! And everyone else in our fleet who died today! But you didn’t let me—so now their blood’s on your hands. And I will never forgive you for that.”