A Weary Life

by Robert Greenberger

  “No, there’s something else,” she said.

  “Plasma manifold’s shot and I bet you don’t have a spare,” he continued, sounding off, even to himself.

  “Commander, go ahead and ask me,” she said with a touch of defiance in her voice.

  “You knew him, didn’t you,” he softly asked.

  “Yes.”

  He wished Daniels and Maass would go away so they could speak privately. Talking about Tom to anyone, with the possible exception of Deanna, was uncomfortable. Still, they were here and weren’t going anywhere, so he just hoped they’d keep quiet.

  “When?”

  “I was part of his crew when he stole the Defiant,” she said. “I was its pilot before joining Maass.”

  “What happened?”

  “When? When my homeworld was suddenly in occupied Cardassian territory? Or when my sister was taken to work for the Cardies? A sister I haven’t seen since, by the way.”

  “No,” Riker said.

  “When I joined the Maquis to reclaim my world, my freedom?”

  “No,” he said, a tightness in the word.

  “How I found myself in the cell that worked with Ro?”

  “No, damn it! Tell me about him.”

  Kalita blinked, but her expression didn’t change and she met his eyes, her cool gaze hiding her pain.

  “He’d been sent on a courier mission from the Gandhi, to deliver medical supplies to a Federation outpost. A Maquis cell operating nearby intercepted his shuttlecraft, hoping he had medicine that could help stop a plague on a little out-of-the way world, Helena.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Riker. Helena was a Federation colony world in the DMZ, ceded to the Cardassians by the treaty.

  “As the plague spread and the Cardies threatened to sterilize the planet to prevent the plague from spreading into the union, he saw that the Federation—and your Starfleet—was all too willing to stand by and do nothing as innocents died. All of us in the Maquis, we’ve seen what your Starfleet ideals mean. Nothing. Tregaar’s seen it. I’ve seen it. Tom saw it. He had nothing on the Gandhi left for him. But the Maquis? There he stood for something.”

  Riker’s mind flashed on the image of a knife flicking at his neck, at yet another Starfleet betrayal. In a way, his betrayal. He said nothing, hoping Kalita would continue.

  “We’d learned of a shipbuilding facility in the Orias sector, and it was Tom who conceived the plan to steal the Defiant, to pose as you to do it…and it was going so well. That is until Kira disabled us briefly and then the Cardies found us. We never imagined the ships were not under Central Command’s control.”

  Riker recalled the reports, how Gul Dukat and Captain Sisko flushed out the Obsidian Order’s secret manufacturing facility at Orias. He owed Sisko a tremendous debt for arranging the return of the ship, even if it meant his “brother” would be a prisoner. But Sisko got the Ministry of Justice to agree to spare his life so the chance would exist that somehow, someday, Tom Riker could be rescued.

  Not that Will necessarily wanted to be the one to do the rescuing. After all, Tom impersonated him, traded on the trust he had developed as a Starfleet officer during the years Tom clearly struggled to find his own way. Like a stern parent, Will assumed hard labor would teach Tom a lesson, and when fate had decided he had learned it, then he could come back. But then he thought of Tom’s escape and his subsequent recapture, and he realized darkly that perhaps Tom Riker would never learn that lesson.

  “He gave his freedom to spare you,” Riker finally said.

  “Yes. Me, Tamal, and the others. He turned command over to Kira, and she took us into custody once we cleared the Federation border. We spent weeks in the space station’s brig waiting for the Federation to determine how we were to be tried.”

  Riker tried to recall what happened but couldn’t come up with information so gestured for Kalita to continue, despite her reticence.

  “We were to be taken back to Earth since we were the largest group of Maquis in custody at one time. They wanted to turn it into a show, with us as the entertainment,” she said bitterly.

  “We left Deep Space 9 in a runabout, to be transferred to a starship at Starbase 375. A different cell learned the plans and flew to our rescue. They got to the runabout before the rendezvous and we were free. We joined up with their cell and have been at work ever since. Happy?”

  Riker just stared at her. No one was happy about the turn of events. In fact, on the galactic front, he doubted anyone could be said to be happy. The Federation’s ties to the Klingons had been severed, the Klingons and Cardassians were going at each other, and the Dominion was continuing to make progress in establishing roots within the quadrant. Then there remained other threats such as the Romulans and, no doubt, lurking out in the void somewhere remained the Borg, who could assimilate everyone and end war once and for all.

  Not that he was willing to give up his humanity for galactic peace. Better they all fight for it and earn the peace rather than have a third party dictate it.

  Of course, that was probably how the original Maquis felt, with the Federation and Cardassia dictating their fates without representation. And look how well that turned out.

  “Thrilled,” Riker said. “We’re obviously not going to see eye to eye, so let’s fix this ship.”

  He rose, ignoring Kalita, who continued to gaze ahead, refusing to look at Tom’s doppelgänger.

  “Are you much of an engineer, sir?” Daniels asked as Maass led them toward the engine room, which was two decks below and at the ship’s rear.

  “Started off as a conn officer, to be honest,” Will admitted. “Still, you learn a thing or two when you hang around guys like Geordi.” He was sounding a little more like himself, away from Kalita. That was something.

  “She had some good points, you know,” Maass said as he led them down a ladder. “When you feel abandoned, you seek to protect your own with a certain ferocity.”

  “Which world were you on?” Daniels asked.

  “Valan III,” Maass said.

  Of course, the birthplace of the Maquis under Lieutenant Commander Calvin Hudson. It certainly explained some of Maass’s demeanor—passion tempered with experience.

  “Do you know what it’s like to suddenly go from Federation to Cardassian control? To suddenly have restrictions placed on your freedoms? When we gathered to meet, everyone was experiencing the same privations. You watch your children die from poisoned replicated food, you want to fight someone.”

  “I understand your grievance and you have my sympathy,” Riker said. “But you chose to remain. All of you said this was your home despite the change in government. No one hid the truth about the Cardassians for the previous twenty years.”

  “No, not at all. We entered this with our eyes wide open,” Maass said. “But when Hudson reported the problems to Starfleet, there was no action.”

  “What did you expect?” By then, they had reached the engine room. It was as dirty as the rest of the ship, showing signs of neglect, inexperience, or both. La Forge would certainly not like crawling through these conduits, but he doubted the problem was an external one.

  “I expected at minimum an investigation. We were abandoned, Riker. Do you know what that feels like?”

  No, but Tom Riker knew. Years in isolation, his starship long gone, with no one the wiser to his existence.

  “Starfleet wasn’t going to get involved, not so soon after the Cardassians took control. There had to be a reasonable period of adjustment.” Riker was carrying one of the tricorders Daniels thought to pack and he switched it on, taking a look at the general engine output. It wasn’t a pretty picture on the spectrographic analysis.

  “Tell me, Commander, what’s a reasonable period of adjustment when people are dying?”

  “That justifies you allying yourselves with the Klingons?” He suspected Maass lost family to the problem, so he needed to make this argument less personal for the Maquis leader, which meant this might be the mom
ent to bring the Klingons into the conversation. As he awaited a response, he probed deeper, finding the source of the neutrino leak, and at least that looked like an easy patch. Hell, he could do it himself but wasn’t about to leave Daniels on his own. The security chief was probably feeling like an unneeded appendage at this point, but he also seemed to be following the conversation closely. Not for a moment did he think he’d lose Daniels to the Maquis, especially after the speech he’d given earlier, but he did wonder how this might affect his overall outlook.

  “They offered help when we needed it, when no one else wanted anything to do with the problem,” Maass bitterly said.

  “They were no longer our ally,” Riker shot back.

  “Neither were you! We had no one else to turn to!”

  Riker paused, biting back a comment. Instead, he took a deep breath and switched off the tricorder.

  “Maass, what did you do before this all started?”

  The man blinked a few times, surprised by the question and the calm in Riker’s voice. “I was a computer programmer, developing new methods for statistical analysis.”

  “What happened after the Cardassians took over?”

  “I was allowed to continue to work, but suddenly there were curfews. We couldn’t congregate in numbers greater than five. Then they demanded to look at my source code and began conducting surprise inspections of my workspace.”

  “Could you lodge a protest?” Daniels asked.

  “We sent representatives to the Cardassian governor and different people spoke with Hudson, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the Cardies for us.”

  “Did anything change?”

  “The harassment increased, and then…then, they got sneaky…began tainting the organics…the replicator…Taliana…” His voice choked and he broke off, turning his back to the men for the briefest of moments. Riker felt a pang of regret and sympathy, also admiring the manner in which he quickly composed himself.

  “You can imagine why I might have a…grudge…against the Cardies.”

  They both could. Riker tried to imagine himself in Maass’s place. To not freely work, or to lose a daughter. Actually, he suspected that Daniels, the married man, might understand even better. If the Klingons offered help, he could see a chance he might actually accept.

  Not that that changed the wanton destruction the Maquis as a whole caused Starfleet and the Federation. There were most definitely two sides to this argument, and he couldn’t lose sight of that.

  He was tired of the circular arguments and disliked how he allowed himself to be so easily baited. No doubt, thoughts of Tom were proving more of a distraction than he had hoped.

  “We need to get started on the repairs,” he told Maass. “Things are more of a mess than I imagined. Is your other ship this badly off?”

  “God, I hope not,” Maass said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s something.” He tapped his badge.

  “Riker to La Forge.”

  “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “What’s your status?”

  “The Anaximenes is in pretty good shape, actually. Not perfect, it took a little more of a beating than I first thought.”

  “Good work. We most definitely need your skills here.”

  “That bad?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I’ll secure things here and hurry over,” La Forge said. “Out.”

  Maass looked at Riker, recognizing that the time for politics was over, for now at least. “You know, Kalita, Tregaar and the others won’t like having this many from Starfleet aboard.”

  “You have two choices,” Riker said grimly. “Let us help you or be blasted to bits before you clear the gravity well.”

  “Under the circumstances, I’ll happily deal with their scowls for a few hours.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  While La Forge didn’t mind getting his hands dirty fixing the Anaximenes, he was less than thrilled to be helping the Maquis. After all, they more or less spat on everything Starfleet stood for and were pretty much terrorists who used legitimate complaints to become a stepping-stone for general anarchy. He also knew that there were those who climbed on for the thrill of it, and people like that bothered him. No doubt he’d be dealing with some of them on the ship.

  And then there was Ro Laren. When she first came on board, La Forge hadn’t wanted anything to do with her, but he eventually came around—they’d even shared a traumatic experience, being sent out of phase with the crew thinking them dead. When she defected to the Maquis, La Forge found himself coming back to his original instinct—that Ro wasn’t to be trusted and didn’t belong in a Starfleet uniform.

  He had been brought along in case there was something truly unique or dangerous being handed off from one ship to another. Now that they had it, whatever it was, he just wanted to turn around and begin the trip home. Not that he really liked the smaller confines of the shuttle, but it was better than being out here on a moon and exposed to hostiles.

  Whatever he found would no doubt be a far cry from the cutting-edge sophistication of the Enterprise. The Sovereign-class starship was an engineer’s dream and he continued to delight in learning and tinkering with the engines and systems. The shakedown period had proved uneventful from a technical standpoint, so he had plenty of time to work with his team to boost efficiencies and report back to Starfleet Command. While he had briefly pondered a different assignment before the newest Enterprise was ready, he couldn’t resist being part of the future.

  Plus, there was Captain Picard’s unwavering faith in his abilities. They’d been through a lot, and the fact that Picard stood by whatever decision he reached regarding his VISOR meant a lot to him. Beyond his father and sister, his crewmates really were his family, and he’d do just about anything for them. Even fixing Maquis engines.

  A moving star caught his attention as he neared the first vessel. He focused his newly augmented eyes on the object and suddenly began reading engine emissions. The star was clearly one of the Cardassian fighters. His analytical mind presumed it was likely the farthest of the quintet, the one to have had the least sensor damage from their escape stunt. And they were running ahead of his schedule, which did not bode well.

  The ship seemed to have locked in on his life sign as it enlarged in his view.

  “La Forge to Riker. Cardassian fighter in the vicinity. I think it’s got me in its sights, so I could use a little help.”

  “Acknowledged. Get somewhere safe!”

  “Not a lot of big rocks to hide behind, Commander,” La Forge replied, then cut the signal.

  With increasing desperation, he scouted the vicinity, seeking any place for refuge since reaching the Maquis ship was out of the question. Though plenty of big rocks were in fact in the area, none would dwarf him from a visual scan. One chance was a crater, deep enough to hide within, but reaching it was iffy. Still, moving was better than just standing still for target practice.

  He broke into a trot while still tightly gripping his tool kit, then built up momentum to begin taking leaps, letting the lighter gravity carry him farther. His first landing was clumsy and he was reminded that this sort of physical activity was uncomfortable in an EVA suit. His knees ached from the tumble and he may have tweaked an ankle, but his mind forced him to keep moving. The second leap was better and the landing was more accomplished, but it also kicked up a considerable amount of dust, which virtually begged for visual sighting.

  For his third leap, he chose to begin a zigzag pattern, at least to be less of an easy target. Between jumps, he glanced up and saw the ship coming closer and, with his prosthetics, began to read the identifying lettering on the ship’s prow. Not that he could read Cardassian, but its clarity was a cause for concern.

  He could see the lip of the crater and figured he was two leaps away when the fighter opened fire. La Forge decided to cross the distance in one leap or at least try, and as he flew into the air, the yellowish beam of pure energy stru
ck nearby. The rock it hit was shattered, pieces blowing high into the sky, creating a cloud he hoped would obscure their next shot. On the other hand, with targeting sensors, he was still all too visible.

  The concussive force actually aided his trajectory and carried him farther than he thought possible under his own power. Still, he was not yet at the crater and once there, it offered no guarantee of protection. His landing was rough and awkward, forcing him to let go of the tool kit, which skittered several feet away. His ankle announced its discomfort with a shooting sensation that caused La Forge to bite his lip, attempting to suppress the pain.

  He braced himself to take a final leap when the ship unleashed a fresh volley, this one coming closer to his position. Something must have been affecting their sensors to miss one target at this range, but he shoved the quandary from his mind as he focused on the takeoff, leap, and landing. He hunched over, letting bits of rock pelt his suit, which easily withstood the assault. Better rocks than disruptors, he thought as he launched himself into the air.

  At that moment, a ruby red beam cut over his head, distracting La Forge, who then essentially crashed down the side of the crater. He rolled over and over, dust spewing in all directions, announcing his position. La Forge fought back bile that rose in his throat, ordered his ankle to stop sending out alert signals, and spread his arms wide to slow his skid. He fell a good twenty meters before managing to slow himself and regain his bearings.

  What fired at him?

  Nothing, he realized. The shot’s trajectory was going up, not down. Someone was firing on the fighter, risking calling attention to the ships that were clear targets to anyone conducting a visual sweep of the moon.

  He caught his breath and rested for a moment, happy to have survived the fall. His suit’s communicator was damaged since no signal was going out, and he cursed to himself. Then he rose to his knees and assessed his condition. His knees bothered him, his ankle meant no running, and he was sweating profusely, which was going to make extended time in the suit no fun at all. But he was breathing and alive, which counted for something.