Star Trek Terok Nor 01: Day of the Vipers

by James Swallow

  The glinn nodded. “Countdown is under way, sir. Awaiting your final orders.”

  “Disengage from ground attack mode and return fire. Simulate damage to the targeting sensors. I don’t want any serious hits on either craft.” He got to his feet and tapped his comcuff. “This is the dal. Operations team, secure stations and gather at the designated transport points. You have one metric, mark.”

  “Next run, incoming,” The glinn was pale; the prospect of taking fire clearly didn’t agree with her.

  “Drop the shields after the first volley.” Dukat watched the time dwindle on his chrono. “Make it look like a cascade failure.”

  A blue light on his bracelet blinked once, twice. Tunol’s signal. The tingle of a matter transporter prickled his skin as clouds of orange energy snatched away the Cardassian crew, making the ship lifeless for the second time.

  The Kashai rolled away from the marauder, spitting energy bolts as it veered off. The Tzenkethi ship, suddenly ponderous and wallowing with none of the agility it had exhibited before, spun a lazy turn as if it were making a halfhearted attempt to place its main gun on the light cruiser.

  It was the Daikon that dealt the blow that signaled the end of the marauder’s performance. Concentrating every iota of energy in the ship’s spiral-wave disruptors, the Cardassian vessel ripped into the Tzenkethi fuselage, tearing away great divots of hull metal. Something critical failed inside the marauder; in the space of a microsecond orange spheres of explosive detonation appeared in the spaceframe at the bow, the stern, in the warp core, in the central tiers. The Daikon veered away as the Tzenkethi ship became a tiny, fleeting sun, an expanding ball of flame consuming the marauder and the secrets that it had so briefly concealed.

  Tunol climbed out of the Kashai’s command chair and surrendered it to Dukat, but the dal waved her away. He had come straight to the bridge without pausing to throw off his environmental suit, and he had no wish to take his place unless he was in a proper duty uniform; but he wanted to see the Tzenkethi ship die, and there it was on the main viewer, consuming itself in fire.

  “Mission accomplished,” said Tunol, with the hint of a grin.

  “A performance worthy of the grand theater itself,” Dukat replied. “You played your part well.”

  Tunol nodded. “The transporter signatures were masked beneath the discharges from the Daikon’s weapons. Any sensors directed toward the engagement from the planet’s surface or the surviving ships will see nothing to contradict the evidence of their own eyes.” Tunol’s grin returned. “A dangerous invader, brought down by Bajor’s bold comrades in the Cardassian Union.”

  “Misdirection,” mused the commander. “What the eye sees and the ear hears, the mind believes.” He could see that Tunol wanted to ask him why, she wanted to know more. Dukat knew she was intelligent enough to piece together the reasoning behind the mission by herself, but now was not the time to bring her deeper into the circle he had forged with Ico and Kell. He grimaced. No. That alliance was made in order to bring this to pass, and now it is done. I have no more need of it.

  Dukat left the bridge for his duty room, turning his back on the screen, the flaming wreck, and beyond it, a scarred and terrified Bajor bleeding from ugly wounds across its landscape. The hatch closed behind him, granting him privacy to discard the environmental suit.

  The deception was complete. Dukat detached his thick gloves and stared down at the gray skin of his bare hands. I have steeped myself in the blood of thousands of Bajorans, he told himself. How many of their deaths now lie at my feet, how many in the prosecution of this duty have I taken?

  He took a breath. “Necessity has a price,” he said to the empty room, “and one day, they will thank me.” Dukat found his chair and sat down, nodding at the rightness of his words. “What I have done today was as much for Bajor as it was for Cardassia.”

  Darrah brought the flyer in over the city low and fast, banking and turning to avoid heavy clouds of black smoke and the thermals from burning buildings. Many of the elevated highways and tramlines were broken or toppled off their piers, and the streets were choked with rubble and the shifting masses of people. He saw automated fire tenders dodging back and forth, spraying retardants over the worst infernos, but there was so much destruction, it seemed almost pointless for them to try.

  The pattern of the firestorm was strange; some parts of the city had been left untouched by the bombardment, city blocks and tenements standing without injury next to blackened canyons scored through the residential district. Sunlight, where it made it through the cowl of smoke, glittered and flashed off broken glass lying in drifts through the streets. The ornamental park near the orphanage was a smoldering patch of black ruin, the aviary domes cracked open like mouths of broken teeth; the devotional tower in the dressmaker’s district had broken along its length; there was a heap of metal spines and dull flakes of drywall where the night market was supposed to be. Every scene of devastation bled into another.

  Darrah felt cold, chilled to his very core. The sights that lay before him were unreal; he had to struggle to process what he had seen. The city—his city—and the streets he had grown up in, that only a day ago he had walked upon, were passing beneath him shattered and thick with ash.

  The falling plasma blasts, dropping from the heavens like the spears of a vengeful god; it was as if it were happening at a great distance from him, like a dream. I will wake and this will all be a phantom. I am in bed with Karys and none of this has taken place. Prophets, please, make that the truth and this horror the lie.

  In the copilot’s seat Proka was hunched forward with a hand communicator pressed to his ear, breathing hard and cursing under his breath. The constable was working the dial on the channel selector, skipping across the emergency frequencies. “They hit targets in Lonar as well. Even got some shots as far east as Dahkur.” He was grim with the import of his words. Darrah could just about hear the tinny wail of a distant voice crying over the link into Proka’s ear. The lawman shifted the frequency dial back to the local channels.

  Darrah tried not to listen. He tried to stay in the here and now, but he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to know the full extent of the attack. Both men had seen the blaze in the sky, the day-sun that had guttered and died far above them. The invaders were gone, but the shock wave they had created would continue to echo around Bajor for hours, days, years.

  Proka repeated what he was hearing. “Kendra…The monastery is gone, totally obliterated. Most of the residents got out, but many are missing and presumed dead. The shrine was buried…” He blanched. “They’re saying…They’re saying that the Orb of Truth was destroyed.”

  Gar Osen’s face flashed through Darrah’s thoughts. “I shouldn’t have taken him back there.”

  “He might have made it out,” Proka offered, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  “I shouldn’t have left him.” Darrah went hot with anger.

  “I shouldn’t have left any of them!” He wrenched the controls around, sweeping though a bank of wood smoke, and threw the flyer toward the residential districts along the hillside road. His house stood out among the others, among the buildings with their broken windows and wind-ravaged roofs. The lawman’s heart leapt; the buildings showed only the signs of shock damage and none of the awful effects of the firestorms and plasma strikes.

  Darrah put the flyer down on the ash-coated road and threw off his safety restraints.

  “Boss, what are you doing?” said Proka.

  “Get out of here,” Darrah snapped at him, and he vaulted out of the hatch toward the ruined fascia of his home.

  The oval front door was halfway down the entrance hall, where it had been blown off its hinges. There were fans of glass radiating out from every window facing toward the ruined city. He saw streaks of blood, still fresh on the wall, and Darrah’s throat tightened, silencing him. He had come across sights of violence and destruction over and over throughout his career, in crime scenes all across Korto, but the ca
lm and professional detachment that he fell into there was lost to him. This was his home, it was the sight of an atrocity that had bled in from the city, a crime on a scale so large it was beyond him to deal with it.

  He couldn’t bring himself to call out the names of his wife and children; he was too afraid to do it, for fear that his only reply would be silence. The blood! The blood on the wall, whose is it? Karys’s, Bajin’s, or Nell’s? Was one of them up ahead in a room, or sprawled out in the yard, knifed by a piece of flying debris?

  “Hello!” He shouted it out, finding the strength to push the word out of his trembling lips. “Who’s there?”

  He entered the kitchen just as Nell called back to him. In the shambles of the room they were all there, frozen in a tableau. Every detail of the moment etched into Darrah’s mind like acid burning steel, fixing the image: Nell, an adhesive bandage covering her cheek, red dots spotting across the shoulder of her white cotton dress, the streaking of dirty tears down her perfect little face; Bajin, shocked into silence at the far door, two bags stuffed with clothes in his arms, his expression ragged with fear; and then Karys.

  His wife exploded toward him, and she hit Mace hard across the cheek, the slap stinging him with the force of the impact. He recoiled, not so much from the attack as from the look of pure fury on her face. Karys swore at him and threw another swipe, but he caught her wrist. She spat and tore away from his grip, shoving him back with the heel of her free hand. “Bastard!” The word was caustic.

  “Karys, you’re all right, I—”

  “Shut up!” she bellowed. “Don’t speak to me! Don’t say anything, you don’t have the right to say anything to us!” Karys gathered up Nell, as the girl started to cry. “You left us here alone!”

  Mace swallowed a gasp of breath. “I had to…The minister’s family, we had to get them to safety…” The words sounded weak in his ears. “No, it’s just…I didn’t know this was going to happen.” He cast around at the destruction. “I never would have—”

  His wife cut him off with a savage glare. “You left us here, Darrah Mace.” Ice gripped his heart. “You put your job before your family, like you did before, like you always do!”

  “I didn’t know this was coming!” he shouted back at her. “You have to believe me!”

  She was retreating away from him, taking Nell and moving to Bajin and the bags. Mace read the intentions in her expression before she said another word, and he shook his head. Karys nodded tearfully, denying him. “Yes, Mace, oh yes. We can’t stay here anymore. We’re leaving.”

  He took a desperate step toward her. “Where can you go?” he cried. “The city is in chaos, there are thousands of frightened people out on the streets! You think it will be any better in Ashalla with your mother?”

  “I’m not going to Ashalla,” she snapped back at him.

  “I told you before, I can’t live here. Ships will be leaving.” Karys was guiding the children to the door, and Mace felt his heart tearing open as Nell and Bajin followed their mother, casting sad and piteous looks toward him.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said desperately.

  “No,” she shot back. “You’ve let us down too many times. I’m leaving, Mace. I’m going to the Valo colony.”

  Everything Mace had been terrified of losing he had found safe, only to have it snatched from him. “Karys, please!” The pleading became a shout that made the children flinch.

  On the threshold of the broken doorway, his wife threw a harsh glare at the wounded city beyond. “You care more about Korto than us, you always have. Now you can keep it.”

  They left him there, mute among the ruins.

  17

  When the central tower of the Naghai Keep had been constructed, the level below the battlements was known simply as the upper hall. An open space, studded with pillars supporting the roof and the ramparts above, in the days of the Republics it had been where the lord of the castle held his court, the high arched windows that ringed the room allowing him to look out over the region and see the breadth of his realm. In the centuries since that time, the upper hall had been used for many other things, but today it had turned back to some echo of its original purpose. In a mirror of the layout in Ashalla’s Chamber of Ministers, a triad of tables were set out across the room, and Lale Usbor sat in the spot where Jas Holza’s great-great-great-grandfather had once held domain. Several of the chairs were empty, in memorial to the men and women who had perished in the attacks.

  The windows had been replaced only days earlier, and in some places the old polished wood of the floors was still scored where shock wave damage had ripped the aged surface. There was nowhere outside the keep where one could look and not see the devastation wrought in the aftermath of the Tzenkethi incursion. Behind Lale was the main mass of Korto, the proud spires and glittering domes broken and wounded. Here and there floater platforms from Cardassian military engineering squads dithered over sites of importance: the power station, the water purification plant, the central hospice. It had been raining earlier in the day, and the smell of dead fires was heavy in the air. The rainfall sluiced down in streaks of gray, tainted by the ashes that had been thrown into the sky. It would be months before the atmosphere worked the effluent from the attack out of its system; for now, each time it rained, it was a fresh reminder of the assault on their world.

  Jas studied the city and felt within for some kind of emotional reaction to the wrecked vista; he could bring back only a cold fury, a detachment to the sight he saw before him. In the weeks since the attack, the deadness had grown worse. In moments of privacy, he had been able to conjure some flashes of emotion when Lonnic Tomo’s face was there in his thoughts, but for the most part Jas was consumed by a dark, numbing anger. He saw the same feeling reflected in the faces of other ministers, those of them who weren’t too afraid to step outside of their homes, or who flocked like whipped children to the sides of Kell and the Cardassians when they arrived with repair crews and emergency relief supplies, pathetic in their gratitude. They were a microcosm of Bajor as a whole. The people were torn between two polar sentiments: a fierce mixture of furious anger and dull shock at the murderous lethality of the attacks; and, in lesser numbers, a gratefulness toward the Cardassians who had put themselves in harm’s way in order to destroy the Tzenkethi invaders. Resentment was on every street, the hard need for retribution burning in the eyes of every man and woman.

  With the Chamber in Ashalla sealed closed while engineers worked to make the old building safe, the First Minister had chosen the Naghai Keep for the site of this assembly so that everyone could look out and see the harsh realities of the matters they were here to debate. Jas took his seat, pausing for just a moment to rest a hand on the empty chair to his right. He had yet to name a replacement for Lonnic as his adjutant.

  “The Tzenkethi Coalition has formally stated that they did not order the bombing of the Lhemor or the attack on Bajor,” said Jagul Kell, arching his hands over the table. A wave of derision followed his statement. Jas watched the Cardassian carefully. Offworlders had been granted access to the assemblies many times in the past, but today was the first time that an alien had been given formal permission by the chamber to take part in the debate. Kell sat at the benches as if he were a minister, and Lale was giving the man the same degree of respect and consideration he would give any Bajoran official. It was unprecedented, and yet no one had been able to stir up a majority to prevent Lale’s introduction of the alien. Kell let the reactions of the ministers fade before continuing. “The statement is, as I warned you, exactly what we expected. Furthermore, they state that any such attacks, if they were indeed committed by Tzenkethi citizens, were the exploits of renegades and therefore beyond their control.”

  “They lie to our faces?” spat a minister from Hedrikspool.

  “Do they take us for fools?”

  “Finally,” Kell concluded, “the Coalition’s governing body wished it to be known that they will consider any attempt by Cardassi
an or Bajoran citizens to take reprisals against Tzenkethi property or nationals as an act of war, and they will retaliate in kind.”

  The minister banged the table with a balled fist. “War? They started this! These creatures attack us and then make threats? We should blast them from space!”

  “Minister,” said Lale, cutting off the other man. “We all feel as strongly as you do. Everyone on Bajor has lost a friend or a family member in the cowardly attacks four weeks ago. We all want to see a price paid for that violation, but I called this session of ministers to Korto for a reason.” He pointed out of the window. “This city was the first to be struck. It is a symbol of the great hurt done to Bajor. Look at it.” There was a moment of silence as all the ministers did as Lale asked them. “Even with the help from our Cardassian friends, this city and the other settlements that were struck, at Janir and elsewhere—all of them need our every effort to rebuild. So I ask you, do we direct our energies to seeking revenge or to ensuring that we have clean water and shelter for those who were fortunate enough to survive the attacks? Do we bury our dead and sing the chants for them or do we let their spirits falter while we take up arms?” The last question was directed to the priests gathered at one end of the triangle. Vedek Arin nodded sagely at Lale’s words.

  “And what if another attack comes?” Kubus Oak’s words carried down the length of the hall. “How will we defend against it?”

  Lale laid his hands flat on the table. “Bajor must heal before she can unsheathe her sword,” he replied firmly. “I will not set this world down a path to conflict with an enemy we do not even know, without first staunching the wounds we have suffered!”

  Kubus nodded. “There is merit in your words, First Minister. A battle joined in the heat of passion offers the chance for mistakes. If the Tzenkethi that attacked us were indeed renegades, we would make a new enemy of the Coalition.”