by Dayton Ward
Tunol swore under her breath, and Kein caught the gutter oath as she reached the engineering console. She had never heard the gul stoop to such a thing. Kein knew the stories, that Tunol was from a commoner family and had clawed her way up the ranks with a mix of dogged obedience and ruthlessness, but that single utterance was the first sign that had confirmed it. Not that Sanir cared where Gul Tunol came from; in a military as dominated by patriarchs as Cardassia’s Great Fleet, to be a woman and reach gul’s rank was to be admired, and origins be damned.
Enkoa crossed to the upper tier of the bridge, stifling a cough. “Talarians,” he husked, speaking the name like a curse word. “Concealed below the rings of the gas giant. They must have been drifting in quiescent mode—”
“Where are they now?” demanded the gul. She shot a look at Kein. “Sensors, Dalin.”
Kein nodded, her hands already crossing back and forth around the discs of her keypad. “Severe loss of parity,” she reported, blinking as blood pooled around her eye. “But I have them.” She brought a fuzzy tactical plot to a tertiary screen and revealed three Talarian raiders in an unkempt V-formation.
Tunol’s face soured. “They dare?” she asked of no one in particular. “Enkoa, disruptors.”
He was denied the chance to respond. White light flared suddenly on Kein’s panel. “Weapons discharge!” she shouted. “They’re firing again!”
Tunol called out for evasive maneuvers, and the engineer felt her gut twist. The meters on her panel told the tale before it unfolded; some lucky shot by one of those barbarian gunners had caused a cascade discharge through the Rekkel’s power train, sending spikes of malfunction into every primary system. The ship’s main guns were cycling through a reset phase and the shields … The shields were sluggish, rebuilding themselves too slowly to block the full force of the next assault. The trickle of Kein’s blood became a sluggish line down her cheek, and for the first time she wondered if she might die today.
The enemy had spent what little tactical acumen they had on the first strike; the next was as artless as it was brutal. In some small mercy, one barrage of particle beam fire missed Rekkel entirely as the helmsman put the light cruiser on its port fin, impulse grids flaring yellow-orange with the effort. The other two warships did not make the same error. Kein felt the first hit through the soles of her boots as a discharge ripped away hull plating down the dorsal surface of the Cardassian craft. The second, a heartbeat behind, drove a spear of energy straight into the wound still smoldering from the initial surprise attack. Systems that had only just reset themselves, breakers newly refreshed and ready for action, were abruptly awash in a murderous overload surge. The Talarians dug in the knife and twisted it.
A wall of heat swept over Kein and she cried out as it buffeted her. She rocked forward, clinging to her console for support, and dared to glance back.
Plumes of hot gas backlit by electric discharges coiled overhead. The command throne was gone, crushed beneath a fallen section of armored ceiling wreathed in blue-tinted flames. She could see nothing of Gul Tunol; one moment there, and the next . . .
The concept was barely formed in her thoughts when a new realization crowded it out. Tunol was dead. Arlal with her. That meant that Kein and Enkoa, both sharing the rank of dalin, were now the senior officers. She searched and found him staring back at her, the same understanding in his eyes. And more there as well, she sensed. Fear. A moment of hesitance.
For a second she rocked on her feet, the muscles in her legs tensing as she hovered on the edge of stepping up and taking command; but would that hold? She was Rekkel’s chief engineer and an upper-tier officer, that was unquestioned. But Laen Enkoa was tactical chief, and this was a combat situation. The place was his to take. Kein swallowed a sudden, irrational flash of annoyance and, before she could stop herself, she gave him the ghost of a nod. Gave him permission.
Enkoa returned the gesture, moved to the helm console, and gestured at the screen. “Extend away,” he told the helmsman, fighting to keep his voice level. “Get us some distance. I … We need thinking room.”
Kein considered, and then rejected the idea of summoning a medical corpsman to the command tier. There seemed little point to it; they would either live or die in the next few minutes. She finally wiped her blood away with terse, sharp motions.
In the next second another shock of impacts resonated through the decking as one of the alien ships fired again. Enkoa stumbled and grabbed at a support brace; for a moment she thought she saw the beginnings of real panic there,
The Rekkel moved in lethargic spasms that made the walls vibrate, and Kein hissed through her teeth as the relays from main engineering painted a steadily worsening picture of the cruiser’s health. “Sensor palette is severely damaged. Disruptor grid does not respond,” she reported.
Enkoa nodded. “What are our other options?”
She eyed him. The real question he was asking was Can we flee? Kein’s frown deepened. “Impulse power is at three-quarter capacity. Warp drive may be possible, perhaps for a short jump.” She did not want to apply too much strain to the engines, not with the stress readings streaming at her from the Rekkel’s wounded warp core.
“There are torpedoes in chambers one through four,” offered the helmsman. “Armed with trilithium warheads.”
“Without sensors, we’d be firing blind,” Kein added.
On the tactical plot, the Talarians were looping around ahead of them, coming in and dropping to low impulse. It was the prelude to a boarding action.
Are they laughing at us over there? Are they mocking Cardassia and toasting their good luck at catching us by surprise? Kein’s gray hands tensed around the edges of her console. The cut on her eye-ridge was throbbing.
Enkoa took a shuddering breath and drew himself up. “Stand by to execute Standard Engagement Plan Tul Six-Two. We’ll fall back and . . .” He swallowed, losing some of his impetus. “Regroup.”
Kein grimaced. Her fellow dalin was behaving true to form, in moments of stress falling back into his usual, predictable patterns. It was the same behavior that allowed her to win so many leks from him in mess hall games of ueppa rods; but now the fate of the Rekkel was turning on his lack of imagination and she could not stay silent in the face of it. Steadfast but dogged, Enkoa would get them killed. The Talarians, sharp with their animal cunning, would know a standard fleet maneuver the instant they saw it happening. The enemy had fought the Cardassian Union through so many border skirmishes that such book-learned tactics would be transparent to them. Now was the time for boldness, for chance.
“No,” she muttered. “There’s another option.”
Enkoa blinked, his train of thought arrested abruptly. “Then, quickly?”
She didn’t have his permission yet, but Kein was already programming the control macro she would require as she explained. “Drop what little shields we have. I’ll make it look like a system failure. Then, when they’re close enough, generate a subspace pulse through the main deflector.” She jerked a thumb at the ships on the screen. “The shock will knock their warp cores offline.”
“And ours along with it,” Enkoa noted.
“But unlike them, we’ll be ready,” she retorted. “I can hot-start the core in less than a metric, and while I’m doing that—”
“The torpedoes.” Enkoa’s head bobbed as he caught up to her idea. “Yes, we can blind-fire.” He glanced at the helmsman and got a nod of confirmation in return. “Do it,” he told her.
Kein looked away. “I already have.” She tapped out the activation protocol and the deflectors collapsed.
The shields about the Cardassian cruiser shimmered as they melted away, and abruptly the manta-shaped warship was naked and open for the taking. The Talarians—who made too many sorties ending in nothing but exchanges of blood and angry retreats—were eager to plunge in and stock their raiding parties with close-quarter weapons. It was rare for warriors of the Republic to have the chance to battle Cardassians face-to-face
, and they wanted it so much that what little caution they had was trampled beneath the promise of pillage and payback. Talarian hatred of Cardassia was a crude and steady thing, pulling at its leash, impatient to expend its thuggish energy upon an arrogant invader.
It mattered little that the zone of space where the Rekkel had been ambushed lay beyond the declared borders of the Talarian Republic, out in unclaimed reaches light-years past the Tong Beak Nebula. The raiders were a law unto themselves, given orders of marque and reprisal to harry anything bearing the Galor Banner.
And so, in this frame of mind they came in, dim starlight flashing off the cruciform solar wings of their ships, ready to overmatch the straggler they had caught in their net. They expected their prey to run, or to beg.
The Rekkel, in turn, bid them pay the butcher’s bill for Gul Tunol, Dal Arlal, and the other dead littering the ship’s corridors.
The subspace pulse rippled out in a shock-wave sphere, strange fires shimmering against the dull halo of the gas giant’s ice rings. In any other circumstance, the tactic would have failed; but so close, with each raider poised to launch a transporter assault, the shock hit the craft with full force before it could dissipate. Kein’s promised shutdowns occurred more or less as she predicted—one raider’s warp core did not deactivate, but spiraled into a loop of fluctuations that rendered it momentarily useless, so the effect remained the same—and at once four space-dead craft drifted in a loose cluster, framed by the dark orb of the massive planet below them.
On battery power, the maws of Rekkel’s torpedo bays irised open and ejected their contents into the void on puffs of compressed gas. Smart software programmed to locate the silhouettes of a thousand different craft deemed threats to the Cardassian Union sniffed the darkness and found the Talarians floating unprotected. Fusion torch motors flared and the weapons crossed the short distance to their targets.
A string of proximity detonations blossomed, spheres of deadly flame briefly unchained. The raiders were consumed, their deaths adding to the blaze of color. Rekkel was buffeted, and damaged still further by the aftermath, but when the momentary suns died away it was only the Cardassian craft that remained whole.
Afterward, the warship’s log would show that the entire engagement had taken less than ten metrics to occur. Some days the knife was slow; some days the knife was swift.
Kein strode from the tribunal chamber with her head held high, as was fitting for a soldier of the Union. The final deliberation was at last concluded, and her actions aboard the Rekkel had been found to be without fault. She had never doubted the outcome, not even in the moments when the panel of hard-eyed guls had challenged every choice she had made in those fateful few instants.
It was her suggestion, and later the work of her engineering staff, that had enabled the Rekkel to survive long enough to make it back into Cardassian space. The poor craft had not lasted all the way back to Cardassia, but only to here, the colony on Sunzek, and briefly Kein felt an odd pang of loss for the vessel. Their rescuers had been forced to scuttle the cruiser, and in some way she felt as if this was giving the Talarians their victory after all. Absently she reached up and traced the new scar on her brow.
Out in the corridor, beneath the statue of a planetary prefect decades dead and gone, Enkoa stood, hands clasped together around a data tablet. Kein extinguished the moment of mawkish sentiment and walked toward him. She had not seen him to speak to since the examinations had begun, isolated from her fellow officer as a matter of course to ensure the veracity of the debriefing.
Caught in shafts of pale light from the Sunzek day as they fell through the slotted windows overhead, Enkoa seemed restless and wound tight with unspent energy. The tribunal had been challenging for him, but he too had passed beneath the scrutiny of the court-martial and not been found wanting. Both of them had shown ample courage and presence of mind, and in the past few days the engineer had begun to entertain the notion that this random turn of events could be the making of them. Promotions had been granted for lesser acts, after all, and both she and Enkoa had served long enough at the rank of dalin.
The tactician stepped toward her, out of the statue’s shadow. “It’s done with, then,” he noted. “In all honesty, Sanir, I’d rather face the Talarians again than that pack of hounds.” He nodded toward the tribunal chamber.
“The Talarians owe us a ship and our crewmates,” she told him, “and three of them weren’t enough. A tenfold repayment, perhaps. That might balance the scales.”
He let out a brief bark of laughter and toyed with the bars of facial hair at his jaw. “You’d take us back to war, would you?”
She gestured at the carved granite of the prefect’s statue, depicting the figure with pistol and dagger at deceptively casual rest in his robed hands. “Look at him. We’re always at war, Laen.”
“I have heard that said,” he agreed airily, and waved the data tablet under her nose. “Perhaps you’d like to join me to discuss it further with Jagul Hanno?”
“Hanno?” repeated Kein, momentarily wrong-footed. “He’s here? On Sunzek?” Her mouth became arid. She remembered the hawkish, barrel-chested figure of a man from her ascendance day on Prime, the thunderous and impassioned speech he gave as she and the rest of her cadet class graduated into the Fleet. Kein had dared to meet the officer’s gaze as she, like all her classmates, stepped up and tore the apprentice ribbon from her duty uniform and cast it into the mud of the training quad. His stare had cut into her, those ice-hard eyes measuring her with scarcely a blink. Years past now, but the moment was still vivid in her memory.
Enkoa nodded, apparently unfazed by the jagul’s fearsome reputation. “This colony falls under his sector command.” Laen allowed himself a slight smile, as if he was holding a confidence from her. “I have been informed that he wishes to give us our next tasking orders personally.”
Kein schooled her expression carefully, betraying no emotion, but inwardly she felt her pulse race. Suddenly, the possibility of new rank and new privileges seemed just within reach. She inclined her head. “We should not keep him waiting, then.”
Enkoa swept past her. “This way.”
There was nowhere to sit in the jagul’s chambers. The officer glanced down at them from a high console before the oval window that was the room’s only decoration, and beckoned them closer without breaking off from a conversation he was having with an adjutant. There were screens on every vertical surface, and each shimmered slightly as they passed it, security protocols fogging the images and text so Kein and Enkoa, with their lower ranks and correspondingly low security clearances, would not see something beyond their pay grade.
Kein snapped to parade ground attention and gave a crisp salute, Enkoa mirroring her a heartbeat later. Once again, she was spared a look from those hard eyes. The face in which they were set had grown older and more careworn, the scalp above now shorn and hairless, but the gaze had not softened, not one iota. Kein caught a glimpse of herself in the window behind the jagul; the gentle, lined ridges of a Lakarian lineage, dark brown eyes that betrayed nothing, a cowl of hair cut tight to her head, and that fresh, darkening scar. She looked every inch the model of a Cardassian warrior; Kein wondered if Hanno was convinced by her. In contrast, Enkoa was rail- thin in almost every aspect of his appearance, the trim strips of beard he sported a vague attempt to make something of the flat lines of his face.
The jagul dismissed the other officer and crossed to the window, watching the sunset. The door closed behind them and they stood silently. Kein worked to keep her thoughts steady. Now that the initial surprise of Enkoa’s announcement had worn off, she found herself thinking beyond the moment, wondering why Hanno was actually on Sunzek. The man had a reputation as a maverick, and in the Fleet such repute could kill a career; Cardassia wanted warriors who followed the orders of the homeworld, men and women who did not question, who understood the nature of duty. She had no doubt that Jagul Hanno was a patriot who respected his oath, but he was outspoken with
it. Rumor carried through the Fleet as it did through the skeins of any clan and family, and rumors about Hanno told of how he frequently came into conflict with the prefecture. His candid commentary on Cardassia’s expansionist sorties against the United Federation of Planets and the so-called progression into the Bajor Sector were well-known. Hanno’s arguments for a metered military approach stood in sharp contrast to his peers, who favored more direct conflicts. Some said it was only his family’s web of internecine fealty and obligation that kept him in command of the Eighth Order’s squadrons; that, and his sheer, bloody-minded tactical genius.
At last, the jagul granted them some fraction of his attention. “I have followed the review of the Rekkel engagement with some mild interest,” he rumbled. “Meka Tunol was known to me. She served briefly under my command as a gil. I saw great potential in her, if properly tempered.”
Kein considered the comment, unsure of what the senior officer meant by it. From the corner of her eye, she saw Enkoa shifting slightly.
“A pity that she will never fulfill her promise,” he concluded.
“If I may say, Jagul,” Enkoa ventured, “the gul served the Union with dignity and honor.”
“And those things are of great import to Cardassia.” Once more, Hanno’s words were curiously without weight.
Kein became aware that the man was watching her. She swallowed and fought down the urge to fill the moment of silence.
“You both performed with composure during a crisis,” he went on. “Although the Rekkel was lost, it was through no fault of yours. The Fleet needs officers with the wit and fortitude to handle such situations.” Hanno drifted toward a screen where a display of local space—bare of any tactical data, naturally—showed the span of the Union’s borders in rust red, ranged against the dark patches of adversary nations like the Breen, the Federation, and the Talarians. “Now, more than ever,” he added.