Lesser Evil

by Robert Simpson

  “That’s my conclusion as well. It wasn’t possible for me to know where he was listening from, but there are a finite number of places aboard the station from which such a thing would be possible.”

  Ro went immediately to her computer interface and called up a station schematic displaying the locations of all subspace tranceiver assemblies—the twenty-four Cardassian versions that were part of the station’s original equipment, and the six Federation models Starfleet had added after the withdrawal. Thirty sites to check, scattered throughout the station. And it doesn’t preclude the possibility that he’s kept moving. But maybe there’s a way to narrow the possibilities.

  “If you could tell someone else was listening in,” Ro asked, “does that mean he could have been aware of you as well?”

  “It’s possible,” Taran’atar said. “That may be why the echo ceased so quickly, and why my subsequent attempts to detect him in the same manner have yielded nothing. He may have gone off-line to avoid detection.”

  So he wasn’t expecting someone else to be eavesdropping on station communications. He got scared. In his position, Gard would conclude he was better off remaining still than taking a chance moving from his hiding place. So how to pinpoint him? She studied the rotating schematic. Red dots glowed where the transceivers were located: the “antennae farm” right over ops, the lower core, around the docking ring, up and down the docking pylons, along the habitat ring…

  Where would I go? she asked herself. I just killed someone and beamed out to escape. But I can’t leave the station, so I hide on board—someplace from where I can keep tabs on my pursuers, but where they’re least likely to look for me….

  Wait a second.

  “Computer,” Ro said. “Display detail on section 001–020.”

  Taran’atar leaned in behind her as the computer zoomed in on the coordinates.

  “Enhance,” Ro said.

  The computer enlarged the area.

  “Again,” Ro said.

  The image zoomed in closer.

  “Again.”

  On the fourth attempt Ro saw what she was looking for. A small space, but big enough for a humanoid.

  “Got you,” she whispered.

  Akaar scowled and cursed his luck as he studied the tactical display on the situation table in ops. Eight Federation starships were operating out of Starbase 51, the command base nearest the Trill system. He had planned to mobilize most of them to detect and intercept Gryphon’ s quarry. Unfortunately, four of the vessels were on battle maneuvers in the Murasaki sector, too far away to do any good. A fifth, the Appalachia, was undergoing refit at the starbase.

  That left only the U.S.S. T’Kumbra, the U.S.S. Sagittarius, and the U.S.S. Polaris available to assist Gryphon. Akaar knew that four starships should be more than enough for this operation, but he wanted nothing left to chance. He contacted the Starfleet personnel on Trill and coordinated increased runabout patrols on the edge of the system, just in case.

  I have done all that I can from here, Akaar thought. The rest is up to them.

  He glanced around ops. Everyone, Bajoran Militia and Starfleet, remained on high alert. Intelligence reports continued to pour in on ship movements and strategic operations throughout the Bajoran sector, as well as the situation on Bajor itself. But so far nothing suspicious had emerged that might shed new light on the assassination. There had been no claims of responsibility as might come from terrorists, and no strange activity within the Bajoran circles of power. Cardassia was being watched carefully as well, although its current representatives here on the station, Gul Macet and the elderly Cleric Ekosha, had been extremely cooperative in the security investigation. Nor had they, unlike the members of the Alonis delegation and several other visiting dignitaries, opted to leave the station once departure clearances had resumed.

  Lenaris emerged from the station commander’s office and walked down the steps into the pit. “The news is officially out,” the general said. “First Minister Asarem has addressed the Bajoran people, informing them of Shakaar’s death.”

  Akaar looked up. “What word on the public reaction?”

  “Grief, confusion, uncertainty—and a lot of angry voices talking over each other,” Lenaris said. “Militia HQ is receiving reports of demonstrations being organized by the isolationist groups, supposedly to commence in the next few hours. On the other side, the Vedek Assembly has come out in support of the First Minister’s call for calm and her request that people refrain from rushing to judgment until all the facts are known. Councillor zh’Thane’s appearance before the Chamber of Ministers and her interviews on the planetary newsfeeds have also gone over well. Advocates of unity with the Federation are planning a march on the Chamber of Ministers in Ashalla as a show of their support.”

  Akaar shook his great head. “After all my years serving the Federation, I still marvel that democratic systems work at all.”

  Lenaris looked faintly amused. “That’s not something I ever though I’d hear a Starfleet officer say, much less a fleet admiral.”

  “Most Starfleet officers did not start life on Capella IV, General,” Akaar said. “There, clashes between conflicting ideologies are resolved on the edge of a sword, or a kligat.”

  “General Lenaris,” Ensign Ling called from communications. “I have Vedek Yevir standing by. He wishes to speak with you about returning to Bajor.”

  Lenaris sighed, but wasn’t surprised. After instructing Ling to put the call on screen, the general looked up to face the hollow oval frame suspended from the ops ceiling. An instant later Yevir’s face filled the frame. The Cardassian woman, Ekosha, was visible behind him. “Hello, General. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I know you must be very busy.”

  “My communications officer tells me you want to return to Bajor, Vedek.”

  “That’s correct, yes. In the face of the tragic events we have just experienced, it is more imperative than ever that we work together to give the people hope. Cleric Ekosha and I will bring the recovered Orbs to Bajor together, and begin moving forward with our plans for the Vedek Assembly and the Oralian Way to exchange permanent religious embassies.”

  Ironic, Lenaris thought. Yevir is willing to create a foundation for peace with another planet through its religious leaders, yet he’s afraid of new ideas on matters of faith from his own people. Lenaris looked at the acting chief of operations, Lieutenant Nguyen. “Next available transport to Bajor, Lieutenant?”

  “Departing from docking port three at 0830, sir.”

  “Please arrange for Vedek Yevir and Cleric Ekosha’s passage on that ship, along with their cargo.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Thank you, General,” Yevir said.

  “You’re welcome, Vedek. As you say, this is a time when we must all come together.” He allowed the real meaning of his words to sink in before adding, “Walk with the Prophets.”

  “Walk with the Prophets,” Yevir echoed, and signed off. But Lenaris knew from the look on his face as he spoke the words that the general had scored a hit.

  Lenaris had never cared much for Yevir Linjarin and his rigid orthodox pontifications on the Bajoran faith. That he had once been an officer in the Militia until a chance encounter with Captain Sisko changed his life somehow made it worse. Lenaris knew Yevir to be intelligent and sincere in his dedication to the spiritual welfare of Bajor, but it sometimes seemed as if the vedek had come to believe the touch of the Emissary had made his judgment infallible.

  Yevir’s spearheading the Attainder of Kira Nerys had been the final straw for a growing number of the faithful. Increasingly alienated by a religious leadership that had become mired in politics and conformity since the halcyon days of Kai Opaka, many of these Bajorans, including Lenaris, had recently broken away from the mainstream religion. Now they walked their own path, choosing to exercise the free will that Kira Nerys had sacrificed her place in the faith to empower them with.

  Bajor was evolving, Lenaris believed. Not just in body an
d mind, but in spirit. And it was this fundamental idea that Yevir and his fellow conservatives seemed incapable of accepting—that there might be more than one true way to experience the Prophets, more than one true way for Bajorans to explore their pagh.

  The thought spurred him to look at Akaar. “Admiral, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What is it, General?” said Akaar, who had been watching Lenaris’s conversation with Yevir without any obvious reaction.

  “Bajor’s religion,” Lenaris began. “It can’t have escaped your notice, or Councillor zh’Thane’s, that a schism has developed among our faithful these past few months. Doesn’t such growing internal disharmony work against our eligibility for Federation membership?”

  Akaar tilted his head to one side. “Are you attempting to convince me the Federation should reevaluate its acceptance of Bajor, General?”

  “No,” Lenaris said. “But I confess to being a little confused. I had always understood that a planet had to be united before it could become a part of the Federation.”

  “Politically united, yes,” Akaar said. “But no world—no union of worlds—is a monolithic entity in all things…most especially metaphysics,” he added with a wry smile. “Besides—and this is something that frustrates many of my fellow admirals, but amuses me no end—Federation science has yet to discover anything—and I do mean anything, General—about the Orbs, the wormhole, or the beings within it that is in any way inconsistent with the Bajoran religious interpretation. Many of these things still defy the understanding of our finest minds. Who, then, are we to judge your internal debates on the question of Bajor’s relationship to the Prophets? It may be that Bajor has much to teach us about that, and about many other things as well. That is our hope with every new world we embrace.”

  Lenaris considered that before asking, “And where do you stand on the question?”

  Akaar looked at him and smirked. “I am a soldier, General. I stand with the people I took an oath to protect. Always.”

  The irony of having his own earlier words to Akaar bounced back to him didn’t escape Lenaris, but before he could fire off a retort, the illumination level in ops abruptly fell. The situation table and several interface screens went completely dark. Emergency lights came on, but the room was only a third as bright as it had been.

  “We’ve lost primary power in ops,” Nguyen said. “Auxiliaries have kicked in, but most of our systems are down.”

  “Can you get the primaries back up?” Lenaris asked.

  “Trying,” Nguyen said. “It looks like an override from somewhere….” He tapped different sequences into his control interface, then slammed his hands on the console in frustration. “I’m locked out. We no longer have control of the station.”

  “Then who does?” Akaar demanded.

  An electronic hum from the transporter stage gave him his answer. A figure materialized and took a single step forward, phaser in hand, surveying the operations center with a glare that, Lenaris thought, could melt neutronium.

  Ro Laren.

  7

  Bowers couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A Borg ship, here in the Gamma Quadrant—a region of space the collective wasn’t known to have penetrated before. And if the evidence could be believed, it had clashed with a Dominion ship, to the destruction of both vessels.

  Bowers had faced the Borg only once before in his career: during their last attempt to assimilate Earth three years ago, he had been the tactical officer on the U.S.S. Budapest, part of a hastily assembled fleet whose mission was to defend Earth from an invading Borg cube. In the midst of the battle Budapest had apparently been targeted by the cube for assimilation, because drones began beaming into key points throughout the ship. Bowers had killed two on the bridge before the drones began to adapt to the crew’s modified hand phaser frequencies. The Borg were very quickly overrunning the ship, and Bowers had been too late to stop one of them from assimilating Captain sh’Rzaan.

  Fortunately, the crew had gone into the battle with a contingency plan. At that time Budapest had been one of five test-bed starships for a new offensive hand weapon, one radically different from phasers and designed to be used specifically in situations when particle-beam weapons were useless: the TR-116. Essentially a rifle that fired chemically propelled metal projectiles, the TR-116 was immune to the adaptive beam shields that made Borg drones able to withstand phaser attacks. With Bowers leading an assault team armed with the prototype weapons through the ship, bullets from the TR-116s tore through drone bodies like paper. The Borg never knew what hit them.

  How many of his friends had he been forced to kill that day because of the nanoprobes consuming them from the inside out, turning them into creatures of the collective? He tried not to remember, but the faces still haunted his nightmares. Jalarin, Hughes, Selok, Perez…Bowers had even looked into the pale, transformed face of sh’Rzaan as his former captain attacked Ensign Demarest, knowing he had no choice except to fire if Demarest was to be spared the same fate.

  Budapest had won the day, but the cost had been horrific.

  Now as he stood in the furrow created by the crash of the Borg ship, staring up at the broken hull that lay almost completely buried in the cliff, Bowers recalled that terrible day three years ago and found himself wishing Starfleet had never taken the TR-116 out of service.

  Nog was walking up to the wreckage. Something had caught his attention. “Woah…Sir, this isn’t a Borg ship. Or at least, it wasn’t always.”

  Vaughn didn’t respond. He seemed to be somewhere else. “What do you mean, Nog?” Bowers asked.

  “The hull plating under the Borg technology…I’d know it anywhere. It’s Starfleet.”

  Stunned, Bowers looked at Vaughn for a reaction. He hadn’t moved. But then, speaking quietly, he said, “U.S.S. Valkyrie, Paladin-class, NCC-68816. Crew complement: 30. Lost with all hands stardate 46935 during a Borg engagement at the planet Uridi’si. Presumed destroyed.”

  Seven years ago, Bowers thought. Then the realization hit him and he stared at Vaughn. My God, he was there.

  As if rousing himself from a dream, Vaughn opened his tricorder and pointed toward a narrow breech in the hull. “Let’s go. What we’re looking for is in there.”

  The transponder signal! Bowers had almost forgotten about it. Nog glanced at him, looking worried. Sam knew that entering the wrecks of two deadly Federation enemies in one day had to be fraying the engineer’s nerves. But he also knew Nog had proven time and again that he was made of sterner stuff than he himself realized. Nervous he might be, but Nog would never fail to come through when the situation required it. Sam watched him steel himself and follow Vaughn through the breech, with Bowers bringing up the rear.

  Once again relying on wrist lights to navigate the dark, dead interior, the away team half-climbed through the bowels of what had once been a Federation starship. Familiar corridor configurations had been transformed by Borg technology that seemed to have invaded every square meter of the ship. Unlike the wreckage of the Dominion craft, animals and plant life had not encroached on the interior of the Borg ship. Maybe the conditions inside wouldn’t sustain anything long enough to allow life to thrive; it was cold in here, and there was an almost antiseptic taste to the air. Or maybe the animals just knew instinctively that they should stay away.

  Nog narrowly sidestepped the inert body of a drone—a Vulcan, Bowers guessed, judging from the distinctive size of the skull—collapsed over a Borg interface panel near engineering. Bowers paused to see if there was any indication of what had been displayed on the panel when it ceased to function, but the surface was dark. Vaughn stopped for nothing, not even when Nog reported that there was a faint energy reading inside the engine room. They pressed on, past more Borg corpses and ruptured conduits, following the commander’s tricorder.

  Vaughn stopped outside a door. It still bore a label that read SHUTTLEBAY, but without it, it might have been impossible to tell what the room’s original purpo
se had been. A labyrinth of corridors and catwalks lined with Borg regeneration alcoves greeted them as they pried the doors open. Most of the alcoves were empty, but a few were occupied, the drones still plugged into the ship’s systems, their organic remains long since decayed within their inert cybernetic shells.

  Vaughn ignored them all, his pace picking up as the signal on his tricorder grew stronger. Nog showed Bowers the reading on his own tricorder: another energy signature, very faint, but matching the one he’d picked up in engineering. The conclusion was obvious. Something back there was still trickling power to something in here.

  Vaughn disappeared around a corner. Cursing, Bowers and Nog rushed to catch up. While they marched, Sam made some quick adjustments to his phaser, setting it to cycle randomly through different frequencies with each shot. He gave it to Nog and then made the same modifications to the engineer’s phaser. If one or more of these drones suddenly came to life, he wanted to be as ready as possible. Every shot would count.

  Vaughn had stopped in front of an occupied regeneration alcove down a long catwalk overlooking the gutted remains of the shuttle maintenance bays one level down. Wondering idly if the Borg had jettisoned the shuttles or cannibalized them for raw materials in their assimilation of the rest of the Valkyrie, Bowers heard his heavy footfalls rattling the framework of the catwalk as they reached the commander. Vaughn was passing his tricorder over and over the drone in the alcove, which Bowers saw wasn’t decayed like the others. It looked dead, but showed no evidence of decomposition. A hairless chalk-white face obscured by invasive prosthetic enhancements was mottled with charcoal-gray rivulets, the telltale sign of a circulatory system saturated with Borg nanoprobes. Like its dead companions in the room, the drone was plugged into the the ship’s power grid through its regeneration alcove, but a telltale light winking dimly by the interface port showed that power was still being fed into it. A thick layer of dust covered the drone and every surface of the alcove. My God, Bowers thought, has it been here like this for two years?