“Then you must know that he lived in the Alpha Quadrant for many years,” Sisko said. “The space station on the other side of the wormhole . . . we served together there for seven years.”
“You’re lying,” Vannis said.
“I’m not,” Sisko said. “But even if you think I am, are you willing to chance displeasing Odo? Are you willing to risk disappointing a Founder?”
The Vorta smiled, and Sisko suspected that she wanted to have one of the Jem’Hadar snap his neck. But she said, “Contact your ship, Captain, and tell them to remain where they are. Tell them that this craft will remain where it is while I go check your story.”
“Please tell Odo that I need to speak with him about an urgent matter,” Sisko said, hoping that Vannis would actually do as he asked.
“Captain—”
“Yes, I know, if I’m lying, then the Jem’Hadar will kill me and my crew,” Sisko said, anxious for the Vorta to be on her way.
To the Jem’Hadar, Vannis said, “If they try to escape, kill them.” Then she touched a device on her wrist, and a transporter beam whisked her away.
13
In his cramped cabin, Denison Morad worked his padd to confirm the vessel’s location: it had just entered the Nivoch system, on course for the second planet, which supported a midsized Cardassian colony. Then he sent a signal to the other three of his associates on board. Renest Kener and Govar Hekt replied at once, confirming their preparedness, but valuable time passed without a third response. Just as Morad thought he would have to leave his cabin, skulk along the crew deck, and quietly knock on a door, Koler Trang finally transmitted his readiness.
Morad quickly bent to his travel case and extracted from it the disruptor pistol that Kener had assembled during their journey. Needing to pass through security scans, Morad and his True Way sympathizers had each carried component pieces of the tools they would need to accomplish their task. Once under way, Kener, their tech expert, had constructed two disruptors, two explosive devices, and a computer-override interface.
The group of four had all separately signed on to work aboard the tow vessel Formek after half of its eight-member crew failed to arrive for duty prior to its departure from Olmerak. Hardly uncommon, such defections from crews on for-hire vessels occurred for a variety of reasons, among them illness, an overindulgence in kanar, a pretty woman, a handsome man, arrest, death, and even, on rare occasions, a better opportunity on another ship. In this case, the missing crew had suffered from encounters with Hekt and Trang. Desperate to deliver their cargo on time, Formek’s master had taken on the first four qualified individuals who’d happened by looking to work for a berth—although Morad suspected that the master’s requirements included only the abilities to walk, draw breath, and pull an antigrav sled.
After tucking the disruptor into his waistband, Morad pulled on a jacket to cover it. Not by nature a violent man, he would nevertheless do whatever he needed to do in order to push Cardassia back to its days of greatness. Ready to continue that pursuit, he touched a control on his padd that would signal the others to take action.
Morad tossed the padd onto the cot—he’d have time enough to retrieve it later—then slapped at the button beside the door. The single panel slid halfway open, then ground to a halt. “Worthless scow,” he grumbled, though he knew well how valuable the old tug would be. He threw a shoulder against the door jamb, then lifted his leg to the panel and pushed. The door moved a finger’s length, then another, and at last withdrew completely into the bulkhead.
Stepping into the corridor, Morad glanced to his left, where he saw Trang standing several doors down, outside his own cabin. Peering in the other direction, he spotted Kener, and ahead of her, Hekt. All three looked to Morad, who raised his hand above his head and pointed one finger to his right, toward the center of the ship.
A vessel designed to tow large objects, Formek more or less resembled the wings of a bird. Tractor beam generators occupied the tips and midpoints of those wings, and focusing emitters lined the aft hull. The bridge, which served as the pilothouse and the towing control room, filled a superstructure set above the intersection of the ship’s two wings.
The group moved quickly forward, leaving the crew deck and making their way through cargo holds that they had themselves loaded. When they reached the center of the ship, they chose not to board the turbolift there, thinking that it could alert the two officers working the bridge. Instead, Hekt started up a ladder set into the bulkhead. Morad expected his associate to find the hatch locked when he reached the overhead, but it opened with just a push, its locking mechanism apparently not working. Morad didn’t know if the ship’s master had grown careless over time, or if perhaps he lacked sufficient resources to repair and secure his old vessel, but whatever the case, Morad appreciated anything that made his task easier.
Once Hekt had climbed to the deck above, the others followed. They quietly approached the door to the bridge. Making a show of drawing his disruptor, Hekt then reached for the button beside the door. Standing beside him, Kener grabbed his forearm and held it still. Then she looked over at Morad and pointed to a boxy, handheld device that hung at her hip. He recognized the computer-override interface she had fashioned, and so he nodded.
Kener pushed Hekt’s arm down before releasing it. She examined the bulkheads around them, then dropped to her knees and pulled off an access plate. She spent a few moments surveying the equipment inside, then crawled forward and hauled off another plate. Again, she peered inside, and almost immediately, she reached to detach the interface from her hip. She placed it on the deck, then pushed at the boxy device, causing one side to spring open. From within, she selected two leads, which she attached to something inside the bulkhead.
When she finished, Kener looked up at Morad and nodded. He pointed at Hekt and Trang, then at the door to the bridge. The two men braced themselves, ready to rush inside. Morad peered back down at Kener and nodded. She pressed a control on her device, and the bridge door slipped open.
As the two Cardassian men at the controls turned in their chairs, Morad recognized the ship’s master and his second officer. The first officer and the relief pilot doubtless slept down in their cabins. Before either of the two men could even say anything, their eyes grew wide as they faced the emitter end of Hekt’s disruptor.
“What—?” the master started to say, but the shrill blare of Hekt’s weapon filled the bridge, its brilliant golden beam blinding in the small space. The master collapsed in a heap to the deck. Morad saw smoke rising from the charred hole in his chest.
The second officer raised his hands high above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “You can have whatever you want.”
“We want your ship,” Hekt said, and fired again. The disruptor beam threw the second officer back against the forward port, where he slid down the control panel and joined the master on the floor.
Morad felt numb. He hadn’t intended to harm anybody—and particularly not Cardassians—unless absolutely necessary. He didn’t know what to say, but then Kener said it for him: “You didn’t have to kill them.”
“We don’t need any hostages or witnesses,” Hekt snarled back.
Kener shook her head in apparent disgust, but she said nothing more. She stood from the deck and pushed past Hekt and Trang. With her foot, she tried to move the bodies of the two men from where they blocked the chairs. “Help me,” she said, looking over at Hekt. “This is your doing.”
Hekt grunted, but he moved forward and dragged away first one body, then the other. Kener sat down and began studying the console. “Morad,” she said, “we need to find the controls for the tractor beams.”
As Morad headed toward the bridge, Hekt hurried by him and punched at the call button for the turbolift. “Where are you going?” Morad asked.
“We still have two potential liabilities aboard,” he said, brandishing his disruptor. The door to the lift glided open, and Hekt disappeared into the car. Trang followed.
Morad entered
the bridge and sat down beside Kener. As he did, he saw a bank of monitors in the port bulkhead beside him, all of them trained from different angles on the tug’s primary cargo. Out behind the ship, a web of a dozen or more tractor beams connected to an enormous solar collector, obviously intended for orbit above the Nivoch colony.
“I’ve got impulse engines and warp drive over here,” Kener told him. “I’ll start programming our course.”
“Good,” Morad said as he searched his console for the tractor controls. When he found them, he threw one switch after another. As he did so, he watched the monitors, where the beams began to wink off in sequence. The solar collector shifted menacingly with the uneven forces applied to it, but once the last tractor vanished, it fell behind Formek, set adrift.
“We’re ready to go to warp,” Kener said.
Morad turned to her. “Do you have a comm system over there?”
Kener looked. “Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“Send a message to the Nivoch colony,” he said. “Send them the coordinates where they can find their solar collector.”
“Are you sure?” Kener asked.
“It’s a Cardassian colony,” Morad said. “And we’ve got sympathizers there.”
“I know, but sympathetic or not, we don’t need anybody coming after us.”
“Do you think Nivoch has enough ships that they can send a squadron out to corral their runaway solar collector and chase after us?” Morad asked. “Besides, as long as they get their cargo, they’re not going to care about what happens to this ship.”
“What about the other cargo we loaded?”
“Didn’t you look at the manifest?” he asked. Kener shook her head. “Yamok sauce and rokassa relish. I think the colonists are going to care a lot more about getting their solar collector into orbit.”
Kener offered him a smile. “I think you’re right.”
“Good,” Morad said. “Then let’s get this ship moving. Once you clear the ecliptic, take us to the highest warp factor you can manage without making this crate fall apart.”
“I think we should be able to make warp five.”
“Excellent,” Morad said. “That should get us there in time. I don’t want to leave the Tzenkethi waiting.”
Standing with her colleagues on the lateral floor of their lab, Nelzik Tek Lom-A saw activity begin on her sensor interface. She watched the readings march across her display, marked in particular by extremely high proton counts and rapidly increasing wave intensities. Recognizing their meaning, she turned her gaze skyward, peering out past the transparent superior floor, out into the space above the Vir-Akzelen asteroid. The awful openness that the extent of the stars threatened normally would have set her on edge, but her excitement at completing the final phase of project testing mitigated her anxiety.
Out past the superior floor and against the backdrop of stars, space unfurled, creating a great hole in the firmament. Lightning-white at its center, it spun blistering red at its edges. It reeled around almost like a living thing.
Then, at its heart, the faintest speck appeared. Nelzik could see no detail on the object, but she knew its identity. Not long ago, she and her colleagues had sent the probe into the wormhole they had created. They programmed it to make its journey through the cosmic tunnel until it emerged in a new locale. They had set it the task of surveying its new surroundings for a specific length of time, then reversing course and heading back through the wormhole.
In just days, Nelzik and her colleagues had prepared and launched more than a dozen such probes, each encoded to attempt their voyage with different timing. Some remained at the far end of the wormhole longer, some shorter. Not all of them had returned, but the scientists had expected that; their calculations had predicted it.
Out in space, the rolling flurry of radiance pulled in on itself, disappearing with a pinpoint flash of light, as though it had never been. But it definitely exists, Nelzik told herself with pride. With the last probe, they would know with certainty the precise parameters of that existence. Nelzik and her colleagues had initially calculated those values according to theory, but although their mathematical results had been close, they had not proven completely accurate. A slight variance in the density of subspace had decreased the values of both the length of the wormhole and the time it remained stable. Still, the actual figures would suffice for their purposes.
“We are receiving telemetry,” announced Vendez Tek Lom-A from where he stood at his own computer station. Nelzik walked over to him and peered at his screen.
“Do the numbers reflect our latest calculations?” she asked.
Vendez reached up and pointed to a series of equations and a table of numbers. The glow of his greenish-yellow flesh reflected in the display. “They are exact,” he said, the chiming sound of his voice tolling with the thrill of their accomplishment. Nelzik shared his satisfaction.
Crossing back to her own workstation, Nelzik initiated a link to Vendez’s interface and collected the fresh data he’d received. She then used those numbers as input for the program she had written to extract the final parameters of their creation. In just moments, a table of information appeared on her display.
Nelzik read through the results. She saw that the machinery she and her colleagues had crafted could generate a wormhole anywhere from 1.2 to 5.3 light-years in length. Anything shorter and the gravitational stresses within would not allow it to open into normal space-time; anything longer, the structure would not be strong enough to support itself. They could target the far end to a precise location, but that terminus would remain there only for a brief period, equating to four times the interval required to traverse the wormhole; after that, the far terminus would fluctuate, moving in an unpredictable direction and settling elsewhere.
When Nelzik had originally been assigned to lead the project, not long after the discovery of the Bajoran wormhole, the objective she’d been given had been to develop identical technology. It had taken some time and numerous failures to determine that Tzenkethi science—and Romulan science, and Breen and Klingon and even Federation science—lacked the technical sophistication required to achieve such a goal, and would fall short into the foreseeable future. But Nelzik perceived something else beyond inevitable failure. She saw another way, a less complex way, to realize a form of the project’s aim—a less useful form, but not a use less one.
As she and her colleagues had neared the end of their work, she’d been informed by a representative of the autarch himself that the Coalition and other elements within the Typhon Pact urgently needed the product of their labor. They needed it, she understood, for the purpose of neutralizing the military superiority of Starfleet, which the UFP enjoyed by virtue of its quantum slipstream drive technology. As a zealous Tzenkethi patriot who had matured under the shadow of continued Federation imperialism and aggression, she would take great pride in helping to keep her people safe from that evil empire.
Nelzik knew that her colleagues felt the same way, as did their contact with the True Way. It pleased her to know that the Coalition did not wage its ongoing battle with the immorally, foolishly republican Federation alone. With the aid of Denison Morad and his True Way partisans, as well as the assistance of the Breen and the Romulans, Nelzik would soon provide the Tzenkethi and all the Typhon Pact worlds with the tools they needed to combat the UFP and its Khitomer Accords allies.
For even though Nelzik could not provide the Coalition and the Pact something exactly like the Bajoran wormhole, negotiating tens of thousands of light-years and remaining stable across millennia, she could, in a very real way, give them the Bajoran wormhole itself.
14
As evening neared, Julian Bashir walked hand-in-hand with Sarina Douglas down the main thoroughfare of Aljuli, a stretch of interlocking brick pavers only marginally wider than the other lanes in the town. Situated just a few kilometers due south of the Wyntara Mas Control Center—soon to be Starfleet’s ad hoc Bajoran Space Central—the town of Aljuli had,
according to what Bashir had read, sprung up decades ago, when construction had first begun on the transportation control hub. At the time, transporter technology had been in regular, if not widespread, use across Bajor, but the cultural imperatives of the era supported people residing close to wherever they plied their vocation. Bashir knew that mentality still existed on Bajor, instilled by a society more inclined to walk to their destination than to beam there. Hardly Luddites, the Bajorans nevertheless tended to prefer life in pastoral settings; much of their world continued to be dominated by an agrarian lifestyle, with only a small number of large cities.
“I like it,” Bashir told Sarina as they walked along. They’d been on and off the planet since the destruction of Deep Space 9, but had spent most of their time aboard the ships patrolling the system. Unfortunately, Bashir had been assigned to Canterbury, while Sarina had ended up on Venture. But the day before, Captain Ro had recalled Sarina to Bajor so that she could assist Chief Blackmer in identifying and implementing the security needs of their refurbished control center. And just an hour earlier, the captain had ordered Bashir to the planet in order to help configure a medical facility for the crew in Wyntara Mas.
“Really? You like it?” Sarina said, making a show of looking around at the town. “When you talked about the excitement of being posted on the Federation’s frontier, I didn’t think this was what you had in mind.”
Bashir peered around as well, and saw a few other people out strolling. The walkway ran between a couple of restaurants, an inn, and a number of storefronts—several of which appeared to specialize in farm products and equipment, others in local arts and crafts. Bashir thought that the inn looked more like a private home than a public house, and he doubted that it had seen many guests in the years since the control center had last closed down.
“I think it’s quaint,” Bashir said.
“You mean it’s old,” Sarina said.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation) Page 23