Star Trek Terok Nor 01: Day of the Vipers

by James Swallow

  “Oh please, enlighten us,” Ico sneered. “I cannot wait to hear sage council from the common son of a minor archon!”

  “You think you know the Bajorans. You don’t know them at all.” Dukat felt a flash of sudden insight, a moment of hard, sharp self-knowledge. I know the Bajorans. They are like me. At heart, struggling, fighting, searching for a path, nursing old hates. Seeking vengeance. He gave the others one last look, and when he spoke it was with such conviction that neither Kell or Ico could find the words to deny him. “History will prove me right, and I will walk on Bajor again. Of that”—Dukat smiled coldly—“you can be certain.”

  OCCUPATION DAY TWENTY

  2328 (Terran Calendar)

  Epilogue

  The darkness opened up for him, just once, a rush of painful white light flooding into his sensorium. Everything about Darrah ached, as if he had been taken at both ends and twisted like wire. Among the blurs there was a face framed with dark hair, a pleasant face with kind eyes.

  “Wenna?” Speaking came hard, but he managed it. He tried to raise a hand to touch her face, but he couldn’t get it off the bed. She reached down and took it, her smooth skin against his rough, scarred flesh.

  “My name’s Gwen, actually,” she said, in that not-quite-Hedrikspool accent. “Just rest, Mace. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He had been dreaming, or something close to it. Fires, he remembered. The smell of burning. And dry, rough skin being drawn across his body, serpents massing in the dark. He blinked the motes of dream-thought away, concentrating on the woman. Part of her face seemed pinker than the rest, as if she’d been sunburned. He slowly remembered her in the hangar, the burns there from a phaser’s near hit. She looked much better. He wanted to tell her that. But something about her was wrong. He couldn’t place it.

  The hangar—that seemed like only moments ago. Like the ship, like Syjin, like the explosion. Only moments ago. “How…long?” Darrah labored to make the shape of each word.

  Gwen’s pretty face clouded, and the darkness started to roll back over him. “Just rest,” she repeated.

  Darrah didn’t want to, but the choice was taken from him. He fell away into the black.

  He had no sense of intervening time, just disjointed images, sounds, sensations. When all these finally stitched themselves together, he awoke in the medical center of the Starfleet ship, surrounded by busy people in white jackets. They ministered to him for a while and pronounced him well.

  A severe-looking Andorian brought him to a bowed room where one wall was a series of portals looking out over the disk of the starship’s primary hull, over a cluster of warp nacelles and out to the static blackness of space. The void reminded Darrah a little too much of the darkness that had claimed him, and he sat with his back to it. He didn’t understand the shape and meaning of the rank sigils worn by the blue-skinned woman. She told him her name was sh’Sena. She sat across from him with a human male who tried to look friendly, watching. The Andorian dipped her head forward in that way that her species did, so that the antennae rising from her skull were trained upon Darrah, sensing him. She told him this was a debriefing, but he had given enough interrogations in his life to know when he was on the wrong end of one.

  After a while, after a few questions too many, he began to get irritable. “I’m tired of giving you answers and getting nothing back,” he snapped. “I want you to do some talking now.” He pulled at the collar of the nondescript coverall garment they had given him to wear. It was itchy against his flesh, rubbing the dots of scar tissue from the dozens of small lacerations he had suffered aboard Syjin’s dying ship. His hand kept falling to the place on his hip where his phaser would have been; they had let him keep only his earring, although it was tarnished and in need of some repair. He pitched forward suddenly, startling the human. “I’ve told you what happened on Bajor, now what are you going to do about it?”

  “That’s not up to me,” said sh’Sena.

  “Then, who is it up to?” he demanded.

  A door slid open and another human entered. He was of average height, athletic, but he carried himself with a poise that Darrah noted immediately. The reactions of the other Starfleet officers confirmed it. This was the commander.

  “I’m Captain Mark Jameson,” he explained. “Mr. Darrah, you have to understand the circumstances. Things have moved very quickly.”

  Mace was about to argue when a horrible thought struck him. He swallowed hard. “How long? How long was I out for?”

  Jameson frowned. “By Bajoran reckoning? You were unconscious for twenty days.”

  A choke of air caught in his throat. Like only moments ago. “Where…where are we now?”

  “Still in the Bajor Sector. We’ve been monitoring the situation on your home planet, gathering information and tracking signals. As I said, things have moved quickly while you were recovering.”

  Darrah felt sick. What does he mean? He was gripped with sudden terror that Bajor had somehow been destroyed, the planet flashed to atoms by some catastrophe.

  “You do deserve answers,” said the captain, getting to his feet. The other two officers followed him to the door.

  “These people will try to give them to you, if they can.”

  As Jameson and the others left, two women entered the room. Alla and Wenna. But not.

  “I’m Lieutenant Alynna Nechayev,” said the blond woman. “You’ve already met Gwen Jones.” She nodded to the dark-haired girl.

  Jones placed a steaming cup in front of him. “Deka tea, from the replicators. It’s not quite the real thing, but I thought you’d like it.”

  “Thanks.” He sipped the drink; she was correct. Darrah blinked, and rubbed the ridges on his nose with his index finger. “You both look…weird without them.”

  Nechayev spread her hands as she sat. “This is who we really are.”

  Darrah nodded, but inwardly he doubted the woman would ever really show him that. She wasn’t like Jones, all close to the surface. Nechayev was one of those people who sank into their own depths, hiding almost all of themselves.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Jones.

  “Lost,” Darrah said, with a sigh. “Look, isn’t it possible for me to claim asylum or something with you people?”

  The women exchanged glances. “If you want to, yes,” said Jones.

  “And then you could do something? Call in Starfleet?”

  Nechayev shook her head. “Doesn’t work that way. Bajor is an independent world, Mace. We can’t just intervene in its affairs.”

  “But you can come and spy on us?” He blew out a breath, exasperated. “How can you sit back and let the Cardassians invade?”

  Jones’s face was sad. “We can’t stop it, Mace, because it’s already happened. Bajor is under Cardassian occupation.”

  “What? No! They had troops and tanks, but they don’t have control—”

  “Yes, they do. Two weeks,” Nechayev broke in. “It’s been two weeks.” She shook her head. “Key figures in the Bajoran Chamber of Ministers have officially announced that the unrest on your planet was caused by a terrorist group, the Alliance for Global Unity. They claimed they were working with militants in the Oralian Way to destabilize Bajor, funded by the Tzenkethi Coalition and the United Federation of Planets.”

  “Key figures?” he spat. “Lale?”

  “Lale Usbor is dead,” said Jones. “Murdered by Oralian radicals, so the newsfeeds would have you believe. Minister Kubus Oak is currently acting as interim secretary for planetary affairs.”

  Jones tapped a keypad set into the tabletop, and a monitor on the wall ran a series of clips from intercepted public broadcasts. Darrah’s gut twisted as he saw Kubus being sworn in at the Chamber. His eye was caught by the sight of Jas Holza in the background. The man’s face was a rigid, unexpressive mask. He looked beaten and cowed. Of Militia leaders like Coldri Senn and Jaro Essa there was no sign.

  “Kubus has officially gone on record as stating th
at the Cardassian troops on Bajor are ‘peacekeepers,’” Nechayev continued. “He says they were invited in to help bring stability to the planet.”

  “No one will believe that!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “The Federation cannot legally become involved in something that has been given official sanction by the Bajoran government.”

  “Kubus Oak isn’t the Bajoran government!” Darrah snapped. “He’s a Cardassian puppet!” He was going to say more, but then he saw new footage unfolding on the screen: images from the rebuilding site at the Kendra Monastery. There was Vedek Arin, calling for calm across the planet and endorsing Kubus’s stance; but Darrah couldn’t look away from the concerned, faithful expression on the man at his side. Vedek Gar’s head bobbed in agreement with everything that Arin said.

  Syjin’s words came back in a rush. They knew where to find us! They must be tracking you, or me—

  “Or someone told them,” he whispered. The import of that thought, that Gar Osen could be a traitor, made him feel sick. He performed my wedding ceremony. He blessed my children. We are…friends.

  And with the thought of Osen, Mace thought of Syjin, the laughing, wild fool torn apart in a welter of blood. He thought of Proka and Myda, still back there on Bajor. Were they still alive? Had they been gunned down in some back alley, named as terrorists after the fact? He held on to the table, feeling dizzy. With a trembling hand, he reached out and sipped at the unpleasant tea.

  After a long moment, Nechayev spoke in a low voice. “We can’t do anything for your planet now. But there are operations in place. Other people—this ship, even—are taking steps to oppose the Cardassians.”

  “And what can I do?” he asked in a dead voice. “A lawman without law to enforce. A man without a world.”

  “You can take asylum within the Federation if you want, like you said,” offered Jones. “Or somewhere else.”

  He nodded woodenly. “Yes. I’ll tell you where you can take me.”

  Jameson wouldn’t let Jones accompany them down to the surface of Valo II, so they said their good-byes in the Gettysburg’s transporter room. As Darrah and Nechayev materialized in the square of the main settlement, Mace still had Gwen’s D’jarra earring in his hand, the one she’d used during the mission. The gift was all she had to give him, she explained, a small piece of Bajor for him to carry.

  Darrah glanced at the Starfleet officer. “I can take it from here.” A group of Bajorans were approaching them.

  Nechayev nodded, hesitating with her hand over her communicator badge. “For the record, I wanted to tell you this. The Federation was wrong to let Bajor slip away. We had a chance to intervene and we didn’t. Now the Cardassians have a grip there, and they’ll coil around it like snakes with prey.” She leaned closer, and her voice became conspiratorial. “I will do whatever I can to help your people resist them. Someone has to.”

  With a nod, the woman stepped away from him, and in a moment he was alone. Darrah glanced around. He’d never visited Valo II, but he knew the place from images and newsfeeds. A small colony on a temperate world, farms and resorts, the kind of place a man might retire to.

  None of that applied to the planet he saw around him now. The settlement was overloaded with people, the adobe buildings crowded out by the sprawls of shantytown shacks made from cargo pods and scavenged metals. It was the mirror of the Oralian encampment outside Korto, but here the people peering warily from the flaps of makeshift tents were all Bajorans.

  He recognized the man at the head of the greeting party. “Minister Keeve.”

  Darrah got a shake of the head in return. “Not for a long time. I’m just Keeve Falor now. And we know you, Darrah Mace. We know you well enough.”

  They shook hands. Mace frowned. “Jekko Tybe was killed,” he told the other man, eliciting gasps from some of Keeve’s men. “He saved lives by giving up his own.”

  Keeve was silent for a moment, then nodded. “He spent it well, then. That’s like him. A good man. He’ll be missed.” He beckoned Darrah after him. “Come on, this way. Valo’s not the jewel it once was, but there’s still room here. Still room for Bajorans.”

  They walked. Darrah was curious to see that the place was open, without the divides between D’jarra castes he had expected. Keeve saw the question in his eyes and nodded. “We’re all Bajorans now, Darrah. Soldier, priest, lawman, minister. We need to look to what’s common to us, not what sets us apart from one another.”

  He halted near a shallow river where ragged children were playing and women worked. Even among all this, there was life and community. For what seemed like the first time in years, Darrah felt hope bloom at the sight of the simple ordinariness of it, the sight of life going on despite all the darkness that threatened it. “What can we do?” he husked, turning to face the other man.

  “Resist,” said Keeve. “Fight the Cardassians at every turn, gather our strength and weaken theirs. Fight for Bajor.”

  Darrah nodded slowly. “We turned out backs, and look what it brought us. We turned our backs and they took our world from us.”

  Keeve smiled and pointed. “Not all of it.” Three figures were racing up the riverbank toward them: a teenage boy with long hair and wide eyes, a younger girl who was crying with joy, and behind them a woman who made Darrah’s heart lift.

  His face split in a smile, and for that moment everything he had lost was returned to him.

  THE TEROK NOR SAGA

  CONTINUES IN

  NIGHT OF THE WOLVES

  Appendices

  The following is a guide to the specific characters, places, and related material in Day of the Vipers. Where such an item was mentioned or appeared previously in a movie, episode, or other work of Star Trek fiction, its first appearance is cited.

  APPENDIX I: BAJOR

  Characters

  Arin (male) priest, aide to Kai Meressa

  Coldri Senn (male) a high-ranking Militia officer

  Cotor (male) a senior vedek at the Kendra Monastery

  Darrah Bajin (male) eldest child of Darrah Mace and Darrah Karys

  Darrah Karys (female) wife of Darrah Mace

  Darrah Mace (male) officer of the Korto City Watch

  Darrah Nell (female) youngest child of Darrah Mace and Darrah Karys

  Els Renora (female) public defender for Korto Justice Department (DS9/“Dax”)

  Gar Osen (male) priest, resident of Korto District

  Jarel (male) an artist, cousin of Darrah Karys

  Jaro Essa (male) Militia officer (DS9/“Homecoming”)

  Jas Holza (male) Korto District administrator and member of the Chamber of Ministers (TNG/“Ensign Ro”)

  Jekko Tybe (male) adjutant for Minister Keeve Falor, former partner of Darrah Mace

  Kalem Apren (male) member of the Chamber of Ministers (DS9/“Shakaar”)

  Keeve Falor (male) member of the Chamber of Ministers(TNG/“Ensign Ro”)

  Kored (male) junior officer aboard the Militia Space Guard vessel Clarion

  Kubus Oak (male) member of the Chamber of Ministers (DS9/“The Collaborator”)

  Lale Usbor (male) First Minister of Bajor, succeeding Verin Kolek

  Li Tarka (male) colonel in the Militia Space Guard; commanding officer of the Militia Space Guard vessel Clarion; father of Li Nalas (Li Nalas first appeared in DS9/“The Homecoming”)

  Lirro (male) duty technician aboard Cemba Station

  Lonnic Tomo (female) senior adjutant to Minister Jas Holza

  Meressa (female) kai of the Bajoran faith (DS9/“Indiscretion”)

  Myda (female) officer of the Korto City Watch

  Proka Migdal (male) officer of the Korto City Watch (DS9/“Cardassians”)

  Rifin (male) captain of the scoutship Eleda

  Rifin Belda (female) wife of the captain of the scoutship Eleda

  Syjin (male) freelance pilot and courier

  Tikka Rillio (female) a childhood bully who made Syjin’s life hell

  Tima (fema
le) religious novice

  Verin Kolek (male) First Minister of Bajor during 2318

  Wule (male) dock chief at Korto’s starport

  Yilb (male) an old priest who taught Darrah Mace, Syjin, and Gar Osen when they were youths

  Places

  Avenue of Lights: a central boulevard in the city of Ashalla

  Ashalla: capital city of Bajor (DS9/Mission: Gamma, Book One—Twilight)

  Cemba (aka Cemba Station): commerce station and civilian spacedock in high orbit over Bajor

  Derna: fourth moon of Bajor. (DS9/“Image in the Sand”)

  Golana: Bajoran interstellar colony (DS9/“Time’s Orphan”)

  Kendra Monastery: main site of theological study in Kendra Province (Kendra Valley first mentioned in DS9/“The Collaborator”; Kendra Province first mentioned in DS9/“Penumbra.”)