Takedown

by John Jackson Miller

  With most of the renegade ships having arrived, the meeting could begin. It was the improbable scene from outside the Far Embassy again: a vessel apiece from each major power floating around a central point in space. And the circle repeated on a virtual plane: Through ship-to-ship transmissions, Bretorius, using the Taibak visual interface, had logged into a meeting with the other Summit of Eight diplomats.

  The senator didn’t know whether it was a result of yet another subliminal suggestion by the Cytherians, but the mental arena in which they met was an identical representation of the meeting room aboard the Far Embassy. The exchange was entirely over short-distance comms—and yet it felt to Bretorius as if he were in the room with the others hearing them speak normally, their words automatically translated.

  And how they had changed in the short time since their first meeting. Yes, there were the cosmetic changes: just as Bretorius appeared in his torture chair, several of the others were seated in various contraptions with electrical currents flowing to their heads. The Tholian had a variety of cables feeding into its helmet, all of them pulsating with light. The Tzenkethi representative, who went by what Bretorius considered the needlessly complicated name of Pikatha Tor Nim Gar-C, was a living rainbow, her skin coruscating with color as her throne channeled energy into her extremities. The species and their ships differed in many ways; the Cytherians had allowed them to find their own methods for implementing their assignments.

  But more than their appearances had changed. Bretorius had gained confidence and authority since his transformation, and so had all of the others. Vekt, the Gorn, had gone from cautious to determined. DaiMon Igel was still a puny little greed-monster, but now the grandiose schemes he described had the ring of possibility. And while Gul Rodrek was still a cranky old man even with his mind fused to a warship, he seemed to have sobered up at least.

  Only the Federation vessel had yet to arrive. Their true business could not begin, they all knew, until Riker appeared—or until one of them gained definitive knowledge that he had been taken out of action. It was another niggling thing that had been implanted in their minds by the Cytherians. Only a complete gathering would unlock their next assignment. Bretorius supposed it was a measure to keep their scheme running—and to prevent the participants from attacking each other.

  But it could not stop them from making side deals while they waited. The seven had already worked up a variety of arrangements for a future time in which they would have more independence; most, like Bretorius’s plot, involved taking control of their own peoples at home. But Riker’s absence had led to a number of bargains at the Federation’s expense, too.

  “I want them out of our quadrant,” General Charlak said. “I want everything along the old Neutral Zone.”

  “Everything to Algol is the Gorn’s,” Vekt said.

  “You can have all the territory you want,” Igel piped in, “so long as I get my end. The mortgages, remember?”

  Bretorius sadly did. The Ferengi had concocted a bizarre scheme in which he would conquer Federation space if he could rent certain planets back to their original owners at usurious rates. It had reminded Bretorius of the property he had not been able to reclaim from his wretched sponging in-laws, and even as far away as that life now seemed, it still pained him to think about them.

  Figuring out what to do with conquered peoples would be a problem, if the predilection against deadly force the Cytherians had implanted in them could not be overcome. The limit had chapped General Charlak most of all. “It’s obvious why they don’t want us killing,” she said. “The Cytherians—thanks for sharing the name, Bretorius—intend all this so they can soften us up for invasion. They want all the slaves left intact.”

  “I won’t allow it,” Rodrek said. “I’ll destroy them all—er, that is, if I’m allowed to destroy.”

  Bretorius sighed. He would never have considered either Charlak or Rodrek allies in their pre-elevated forms; if they had his same level of intelligence now, they lacked his cleverness and foresight. “The Cytherians do not travel. The Federation found that out. Whatever their intentions, they aren’t—”

  The Tzenkethi spoke up. “There is an arrival. A Federation ship.”

  Finally. Bretorius used D’varian’s external sensors to get a view of Riker’s ship. “Aventine,” he said, as the vessel slowed to approach their circle. Just a moment later, the open space at their gathering was filled. Admiral Riker blinked into being, seated motionlessly in an interlink chair like the others had.

  Bretorius had the first question for him. “What’s the meaning of this, Riker? That’s not the vessel you left the Far Embassy in.”

  “I transferred my flag,” Riker said. “From the look of it, Bretorius, a lot of you appear to have done the same. So don’t give me any lip.”

  “Aventine?” Pikatha’s form seemed to crackle with the power she was bathed in. “Aventine is a vessel of superior speed. Why are you the last to arrive?”

  “I’m on time,” Riker said. “I have better things to do than sit around with you people.”

  Bretorius chortled. “I’ll tell you what happened. Romulan intelligence files describe Aventine’s captain, Ezri Dax, as a firebrand. She was even recently imprisoned. I’d bet that our Federation colleague has been busy fighting to control his own ship.”

  “Think what you want,” Riker said. “And I know a lot more than you do about some things. Like who the Cytherians are, and what they did to us.”

  Bretorius laughed. “And now here is the benevolent Federation admiral, here to tell us poor unfortunates how the galaxy works. You’re too late. Some of us figured it out on our own, and I told the rest.”

  “You don’t have to be obnoxious about it,” Riker said. “I thought you’d be wondering.”

  Pikatha shimmered with ire. “What’s noxious is that your Federation encountered the Cytherians and simply left them alone, knowing what they might do if they turned on us.”

  “There was no evidence they would,” Riker said.

  Bretorius gave an exasperated sigh. “I should think enslaving one of your officers and stealing your starship would have been the tip-off. But no matter. We are finally all here, and we know why we are here.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  The Gorn snarled. “Just shut up, Federation. And concentrate.”

  Bretorius did. And then he knew his future.

  “That’s it,” Pikatha said. “We have all arrived, just as our patrons expected we would—and another door has been unlocked.”

  “Amazing,” Igel said. “It just came to me: where we’re all supposed to go next.”

  Bretorius considered the list of coordinates that had just seemingly popped into his head. “Interesting. They’ve had us wrecking the border between the Romulans, the Federation, and the Klingons. Now we’re to go to the Alpha Quadrant, to territory between the Cardassians, Tzenkethi, and the Ferengi. Another flashpoint.”

  “Another six targets,” the Klingon woman said.

  “That makes forty-eight, for you laggards at math,” Igel said.

  “That’s not the important thing,” Pikatha said. “Do you sense it?”

  “Yes,” Riker said, after a pause. “This might be it. They’re cutting us loose afterwards.”

  Silence fell across the group, as all contemplated the thing that they all now felt.

  Bretorius was first to announce his conclusions. “I have given it much thought. It’s likely that after we’ve completed this mission for the Cytherians, they will find some way of either removing our powers or making us irrelevant to their next steps.”

  “You said they wouldn’t be coming to invade,” Charlak said.

  “No, but they almost certainly have an aim, to go to such trouble. But no matter,” the Romulan said. “We will prevent the mission from ending—ever. And in so doing, we will be able to pursue whatever things we desire.” And many of those things, Riker, you won’t like at all.

  “We can’t subvert th
e orders,” Riker said, his voice troubled. “That goes against the directives.”

  “Why, Admiral Riker, I’m surprised at you. I’ve seen in our database how often you and other Starfleet officers have disobeyed directives. And are you so obtuse that you haven’t seen how the Cytherian orders can be gamed?”

  The Tzenkethi representative agreed. “We simply need to concoct conditions that prevent the execution of the final task. We cannot directly disobey our own orders, but we may certainly conspire to raise difficulties for one another.”

  “That’s been their mistake,” Bretorius said. “They’ve left too much to our own individual styles, to our creativity. And they are not here to police it.”

  Assents rose from the group. “We’ll have time to figure out how to do it,” Igel said. “It will take a while for our ships to travel that far, anyway.”

  “Your ship,” Riker said. “I want in on this.”

  Bretorius laughed. “I don’t recall inviting you. Perhaps you should just do away with your six targets and allow the Cytherians to decommission you, if that is what they intend.”

  The Tholian, who had said nothing the entire time, spoke in chilling tones. “Or we could solve two problems at once—if the rest of us together imprisoned you here, unable to ever complete your assignments.”

  That was a popular suggestion, from the sound of the responses. Bretorius liked it. If all eight needed to complete their assignments to trigger the next stage of the operation, likely all eight were needed for the project to terminate.

  Riker laughed. “You see? It’s starting already. The group of us can’t get along even independent of the people we represent. Your little cabal might cooperate for a while—but eventually, sides will be chosen again. It’ll all fall apart.”

  “Hardly,” Bretorius said. “We all have the intelligence now to see beyond rivalries—to see what is necessary for each of us individually to thrive. This pact will hold.”

  Riker’s voice rose in ire. “Under whose leadership? Yours?”

  “Oh, no. You won’t fool me into going there,” the senator said. “We don’t need a leader. To seal this bargain, we only need a sacrifice. You—and your bloated Federation. We’ll rise to power within our own peoples by taking you apart. But first things first.”

  Bretorius gave a mental command—and D’varian’s weapons systems and tractor beams came on line. One after another, his companions joined him in the act. Here, for once, the Cytherian rules made sense. They had more than enough power to take Riker alive—and in doing so, they could prevent the sun from setting on their abilities. Riker could hardly complete his missions buried for all eternity in a cave beneath the surface of Kalpaius III.

  “You can’t do this,” Riker said. He clearly saw the danger, as Aventine’s shields had just gone up. But it wouldn’t matter. Bretorius would see to that—

  “Incoming subspace message,” Igel said, surprise in his voice. “A long-distance one.”

  Bretorius paused. They had destroyed most of the network in the region. Could it be the Cytherians?

  It turned out to be something else entirely—something Bretorius had never imagined.

  A subspace connection made, three interlink chairs appeared atop the large simulated table between the participants. The chairs’ occupants, unmoving, sat like gods above the gathering. A human, a Klingon, and a Cardassian.

  “Greetings to the members of the Summit of Eight,” the bald human said. His mouth did not move. “Search your intelligence files, and you may recognize us as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Commander Worf, and Glinn Dygan.”

  “That is who we were,” Dygan said, his mouth not moving either. “Who we are now is something else.”

  “And,” Worf added, “we are only the beginning!”

  Thirty-nine

  Bretorius couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “What did you think,” Picard said, “that no one would track your activities back to their origin? And that the rest of us wouldn’t figure out how to use an airlock?”

  “This must be a trick!”

  “Track my signal. You will find it is coming from the direction of the Paulson Nebula—where the Far Embassy rests. I brought Enterprise to it and took control.” The human captain paused for effect. “Clearly, we have discovered its secret.”

  Bretorius’s mind reeled. Since the Cytherians had touched his mind, nothing had posed a challenge for his intellect. He had conceived of grand strategies; he had envisioned long strings of tactical moves and countermoves. But it had never once occurred to him that the Cytherians weren’t done transforming people.

  “We are not beholden to the Cytherians as you are,” Picard said. “You are only the drones. We are the warriors.”

  “We have freedom of action,” Dygan put in.

  “And we can use all the force we want,” Worf added. His expression was frozen in a growl.

  Bretorius wasn’t alone in being stupefied—or skeptical. “We’ve laid waste to much of the subspace network out here,” Igel said. “How could they be coming to us so clearly?”

  Picard’s tone showed little patience. “The Far Embassy has its own transceiver. How else could our governments have learned of the summit? Now remain silent. Our message to you is brief.”

  Before Bretorius could object, Picard continued. “The Federation has control over the Far Embassy, and we intend to use it. A call has gone out. Soon our starships will be arriving here—and we will see that the best and the brightest of our citizens enter the station to join us. We will not tolerate intelligences such as yours to threaten the Federation. If there is to be an intellectual arms race, we will win.”

  Riker spoke up. “You’ve done it, old friend—and just in time. They were about to betray us all.” His voice was jubilant. “The tables are turned, Bretorius. The Federation won’t be threatened by the likes of you!”

  Picard’s tone was not welcoming. “Neither will the Federation tolerate officers who fall so easily under the spell of alien influences. You, Admiral Riker, are relieved of command.”

  Bretorius sat, stunned, as the humans squared off across subspace. Riker’s voice grew angry. “You’ve exceeded your authority, Picard. Enough of this!”

  “Enough yourself,” Picard said. “I didn’t appreciate you leapfrogging over me in rank, ‘old friend,’ not when you had been my junior. When I learned you’d betrayed your own people to secure the Cytherians’ ends, I knew I had to do something.” He paused. “We could not stop you, but as you can see, we have learned to counter you. You have been made irrelevant.”

  Riker said nothing for a few moments. When he spoke again, his voice was cold. “Why did you call, Picard? Why are you telling us this?”

  “Because I want you to know that you have been passed over. I am the admiral of the only fleet that matters. In less than twenty-four hours, dozens of our ships will arrive at the Far Embassy—and you all become irrelevant. Good-bye.”

  The trio vanished.

  Had it been a real room the eight summiteers were sitting in, it might well have shook under the cacophony of raised voices that followed. They all knew of Picard and Enterprise, of course; several knew of Worf, and the Cardassian knew of Dygan. The prospect of the races of the Khitomer Accords having sole control of the Cytherian station was intolerable. All had assumed that the Summit of Eight had been called explicitly to transform the eight, and no more. If Picard really had no list of tasks to complete, nor subliminal checks against his actions, then he and those who followed him would be supremely powerful.

  “Does this mean I’m not going to get my rents?” Igel grumbled.

  “Are you such fools you didn’t realize the implications?” the Cardassian railed. “Forget your damned fool rents—and forget borders and races. The danger is to us. We are no longer unique!”

  “Could Picard really have learned so much?” the Ferengi asked.

  “I faced Picard at Epsilon Outpost 11,”
Bretorius said. “He would have been aware of us.” Bretorius felt as though he’d betrayed himself. Had he shown up Picard so badly that he’d forced the captain to his current course?

  “It is known that Riker passed Picard in rank,” Pikatha said. “Our spies learned of it.”

  “I can see being humiliated by that,” Charlak said. She let loose with a digital snort. “That Picard’s a man after my own cold heart, Riker. He’s shown you up, well enough!”

  Riker, who had said nothing since Picard vanished, sounded humbled. “He’s stabbed me in the back. I had an excuse, at least, in what I did.” His tone grew morose. “It’s all ruined now.”

  “You’re ruined, you mean,” Bretorius said. He wasn’t about to give up so soon—to let this happen. “We have to take the Far Embassy back.”

  Charlak agreed. “And if we can’t—then we must destroy it.”

  “What?” The suggestions appeared to have startled Riker. “Destroy it? That might revert us all back to what we were before.”

  Bretorius frowned. “You’re lying. I’ve read your report from years ago, Riker. You destroyed a Cytherian device with no effect on the human it had granted intelligence to. You’re just trying to protect your Federation’s edge.”

  “That’s not true. This is something we should talk about . . .”

  The Federation admiral’s suggestion was met with silence. The other members of the Summit of Eight were too busy laying in headings and preparing their ships to go to warp, Bretorius among them. Their collective programming had dictated that they travel to the Alpha Quadrant for their next mission; the Far Embassy happened to be along the way. They could all go there—and act—while there was still time.