by Peter David
The silence was ponderous. No one on either bridge spoke as they watched the battle of wills. After several moments of forcing himself to remain calm, O’Brien replied simply, “No.”
“Don’t go all spineless on me now, O’Brien,” Zek taunted. “You were doing so well, why ruin it by turning into a—”
“Save your insults for someone who gives a damn,” O’Brien snapped. “I won’t order my crew to fire on that colony—I won’t let them fire on that colony. More important, I won’t let you do it, either.” The startled expression on Zek’s face put a smile on O’Brien’s. “That’s right, you bloodthirsty runt, this is a warning. If you target that colony, I’ll target your ship. If you attack that colony, I’ll blow you to bits.”
Zek shook with rage. “Have you gone mad?”
“The battle’s over, Zek. We’ve won. Let’s go home.”
His lobes flushed with anger and frustration, Zek mumbled a string of low Ferengi curses. “Fine,” he said at last. “We’ll leave the colony. But this isn’t the end of this, believe me.”
“I believe you,” O’Brien said, his voice full of hatred. “Cloak and return to base. Defiant out.” On cue, Muniz cut the channel, and the screen reverted to the dark serenity of the stars. O’Brien slumped back into his chair. “Helm, set course back to Terok Nor, warp seven. Muniz, raise the cloak.”
The lights dimmed as the ship slipped back into its shroud. Then the warp engines throbbed to life, and the ship accelerated to warp speed on its journey home. Several minutes passed before Leeta discreetly sidled up to O’Brien and leaned over his shoulder. “I’m curious,” she whispered. “Why didn’t we just destroy the colony like Zek asked?”
“Because it wasn’t a military target,” he said without looking at her. He was in no mood to look at anyone.
“But the Alliance destroys civilian targets all the time.”
Flustered, he turned his head and glared at the redhead. “Yeah, and if I wanted to do that, I’d join them. What’s the point of fighting them if we’re not gonna act any different?”
Leeta didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She tilted her head and raised her palms in a gesture of capitulation, then backed away to leave O’Brien in peace.
It would be a few days before the Defiant and the Capital Gain returned to Terok Nor. O’Brien had no doubt that Zek would use that time to formulate an argument to convince the other rebellion leaders to oust O’Brien from power, or at the very least reduce his influence.
Making the others understand why he was advocating a more conservative approach to prosecuting the war against the Alliance would not be easy. It would be even more difficult if he was unable to refute their allegations that he had allowed a spy to infiltrate his command crew on the Defiant. To his dismay, the only way that he could think of to exonerate his people from such charges was, ironically, to spy on them himself. The very idea of it sickened him. They’ve put themselves on the line for me a hundred times. And how do I repay them? By snooping on them like they’re common criminals.
Rationalizing that it was for their own good didn’t make it any easier to excuse, but if Zek and the others succeeded in removing him before he could vindicate his crew, there was no telling what might happen to them under Zek’s command. Determined to spare them that indignity, O’Brien swallowed his anger and resolved to do whatever was necessary to convince himself—and everyone else—that his crew was loyal, and that it was not harboring a spy.
Gamma shift. Last watch. Normally, O’Brien would have been asleep during this part of the Defiant’s duty cycle. Tonight he was ensconced in his ready room, reviewing comm and other signal traffic that had been sent or received by members of the Defiant’s senior bridge crew. There was so much of it, even for his small group of four top personnel. He had narrowed his review of files to the four of them because they had been the ones on bridge duty during each of the colony missions that Cal Hudson had alleged were compromised. One of the policies that O’Brien had always enforced strictly on the Defiant was the compartmentalization of mission-critical knowledge. If there was no reason for the engineering staff or the security detail to know where the ship was going or why, they weren’t told. Except in rare cases, he limited bridge access to his senior personnel. He, Leeta, and Ezri took turns in command. Stevens and Sito covered the helm during alpha and beta shifts. The helm was often set to autopilot during gamma shift; traveling cloaked made unplanned encounters in deep space highly unlikely.
Manpower shortages had also played a role in how O’Brien chose to run his ship. Even if he’d wanted to have two or three full shifts of bridge personnel and engineers, there weren’t enough qualified people in the rebellion now that Zek and Bashir had begun expanding their fleet. Many of the best people who had served on the Defiant had been poached by Bashir to take higher-ranking positions on one of the new ships.
Have to get to it, he chided himself. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, sipped his lukewarm coffee, and settled on a place to start his overnight marathon of meddling in his crew’s private business. We’ll go by rank, he decided. Top to bottom.
Leeta seemed to have few incoming or outgoing messages. The bulk of her signal traffic was strictly internal on Terok Nor or aboard the Defiant, and most of it was brief text messages containing orders or schedules for other members of the Defiant’s crew. He had worried that he might end up sifting through endless kiloquads of embarrassing messages between Leeta and Ezri, but he was surprised to find almost none at all outside of their professional duties on the Defiant. Then he remembered that the two women shared quarters on Terok Nor. Whatever they have to say, they can do it in person, he realized. Leeta almost never secured any of her messages—which made the one she had chosen to encrypt all the more conspicuous.
It was a two-way audiovisual transmission from the comm unit in Leeta’s quarters aboard Terok Nor to a residential terminal on Bajor. The recording had been recovered from the memory cache of the station’s comm relay on O’Brien’s orders, along with several others. While the Defiant’s computer reassembled the message for playback, O’Brien checked its log data. The call had originated on Bajor, but its content had been encrypted by Leeta shortly before she’d attempted to delete it from the station’s comm system.
O’Brien tried to stifle a yawn but failed. He was blinking away the effects of exhaustion when a soft tone from the computer was followed by a synthetic-sounding voice that said, “File ready for playback.”
He picked up his increasingly tepid coffee, leaned back in his chair, and instructed the computer, “Begin.”
The monitor on his desktop showed both sides of the recorded conversation with a split-screen image. On the left was Leeta, on the right a middle-aged Bajoran couple, a man and a woman, both showing awkward, supplicative smiles. The man looked familiar; the woman bore a strong resemblance to Leeta.
“Hello, dear,” the older woman said. The man beside her added, “Hello, Leeta.”
On the other side of the screen, Leeta returned their faltering smiles with a frown. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”
Her parents traded nervous glances, then her father spoke. “How’s everything going up on the station?”
“I’m fine, if that’s what you’re asking,” Leeta said, her hostility plainly evident.
“And your friend, Ezri,” her mother said. “Is she well?”
“She’s not my ‘friend,’ Mother, she’s my wife.”
The man masked his wife’s consternation by interjecting, “Congratulations, sweetheart. We didn’t know.”
“How could we?” his wife complained in an angry mutter. “She never tells us anything.” It was also news to O’Brien, who hadn’t known until now that Leeta and Ezri had solemnized their relationship.
Leeta was obviously already losing patience with her parents. “I’m not supposed to talk to anyone off the station, so why don’t you stop wasting my time and tell me what you want?”
“The same thing we always want, Leet
a,” her father said. “We want you to come home.”
“No!” Leeta shouted as she pressed her hands against the sides of her head. “Not this again? You know I can’t come home, I joined the rebellion. If I come home—”
“We can fix it, dear,” her mother pleaded. “We—”
“No, Mother, you can’t,” Leeta said, almost hysterical. “If I come back to Bajor, they’ll put me to death!”
Waving his hands, her father said, “No, dear, they won’t. I’ve talked to Minister Lenaris, he assures me that he can arrange clemency for you.”
Leeta rolled her eyes. “Let me guess—on the condition that I renounce the Terrans and help the Alliance recapture Terok Nor, right?”
“Well,” her father said, “naturally, there would have to be some concessions—”
“Tell me something,” Leeta replied. “What part of ‘I’ve joined the rebellion’ do you two not understand?”
“If it’s about Ezri,” her father said, “we might be able to get her a pardon, as well.”
Shaking her head, Leeta looked like she was on the verge of a homicidal rampage. “You’ll never understand, will you? You’re part of a tyrannical empire—a passive part, sure, but still part of it. This isn’t about Terrans, or Vulcans, or any one species. It’s a fight about what kind of—”
“Here we go,” her mother said, infusing her tone with bitter sarcasm. “The lecture. Yes, dear, please do tell us all about how everything we know and stand for is wrong and terrible and how we’re just such rotten people because we don’t see the universe exactly the same way you do.”
Her face reddened with shame, Leeta bowed her head. “That’s not what I—” She paused, collected her thoughts. “I’m not saying you’re bad people. I know you’re not…. But the people you follow are, and I wish I could make you see that.”
Remorseful looks passed between Leeta and her parents.
“Leeta, honey,” her father said. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you have to see the rebellion is doomed, don’t you? How many of you are there, across the galaxy? Maybe a hundred thousand?”
With contempt, Leeta replied, “I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew.”
“I just want you to see what a difficult position you’re in,” he said.
Adding disgust to her contempt, Leeta said, “Don’t you mean what a difficult position you’re in? Less than half a year until the next election, and you’re the candidate with a rebel for a daughter. That’s what you’re really worried about, isn’t it?”
Her father nodded as his eyes narrowed and his expression tightened into one of stern disapproval. “As selfish as ever, aren’t you? Not a care in the world for me and your mother—for everything we gave you, all we did for you. All you care about is your wants, your needs. Who cares who gets hurt along the way, right?”
Leeta’s sarcasm cut like a scalpel. “Yes, Daddy, because that’s the only reason I joined the rebellion: to hurt you and make you lose your precious seat in the Chamber of Ministers. I’m just such a simple girl, and you know me so well.”
“This is a waste of time,” her mother said.
Her father nodded and mumbled in reply, “You’re right.” Raising his voice, he said with cold authority, “Good-bye, Leeta.”
Tears of anger streaked down Leeta’s face as she cut the channel. Both sides of the split screen on O’Brien’s monitor went dark. A sigh heaved in his chest. He felt ashamed of himself, even as he resolved to press on.
Next up for review was Ezri. O’Brien had thought that Leeta was sparing in her use of the comm systems until he looked over Ezri’s logs. As far as he could tell, Ezri neither sent nor received any signals except between Terok Nor and the Defiant. She’d limited her text messages to mission-specific tasks and information. The only significant use the young Trill woman had made of the station’s information network had been frequent queries to its public news archives. Not wanting to take a chance on overlooking anything, O’Brien ran a program to seek out patterns in Ezri’s news-reading habits. One common factor quickly emerged: she had diligently tracked a particular newsfeed from Trill for several months after taking up residence on the station. Then, less than two weeks ago, she had abruptly ceased querying that news service. On a hunch, O’Brien pulled up the last article that Ezri had retrieved.
It was a short text article from the Alliance News Network, Trill Sector edition. The accompanying photo showed a finely featured, attractive woman in her mid-fifties beside a burly man in his early thirties. The caption beneath the photo read “Yanas Tigan and her son, Janel. (Archive Photo)”
NEW SYDNEY, SAPPORA VII—Yanas Tigan, owner and operator of the Sappora system’s sixth-largest pergium mine, was killed late last night with her eldest son, Janel, during a raid on her home by local police and troops of the Klingon Defense Force.
According to official sources, the Tigan Mining Consortium (TMC), a family-owned business, had been indicted as a “corrupt enterprise” for its role in aiding and abetting escaped slaves who wished to join the Terran Rebellion.
Tigan Mining had utilized its extensive drilling and excavation capabilities to engineer a vast network of subterranean passageways that linked several prominent locations throughout New Sydney. The tunnels funneled escaped workers to a remote loading site, where they could be smuggled off-world aboard TMC ore freighters. New Sydney Security head Yeroff Fuchida said that he believes Tigan and her son Janel may have helped more than three hundred slaves escape from Sappora VII.
“Obviously, it’s difficult for us to be certain which escaped slaves were aided by the Tigans, and which were abducted by members of the Orion Syndicate for resale on other worlds,” Fuchida said. “However, based on the last reported locations of several of the escapees, and the proximity of those sites to access points in the Tigans’ underground network, we have a pretty good idea which escapees joined the rebels.”
Suspicion first fell upon the Tigan family after reports from Klingon Imperial Intelligence linked them to the Terran Rebellion through Yanas’s only daughter, Ezri Tigan, who is believed to be an active member of the rebellion aboard the occupied space station Terok Nor, in the Bajor system.
“We have an extensive dossier on Ezri Tigan,” Fuchida confirmed. “Although we haven’t found any evidence of direct communication between her and Yanas Tigan during the past year, we haven’t ruled out the possibility that Ezri served as Yanas’s contact inside the rebels’ organization.”
New Sydney Security and Klingon forces decided to take action against TMC after receiving incriminating intelligence from Norvo Tigan, Yanas’s youngest child and sibling to Janel and Ezri. Citing “accounting irregularities” and the “suspicious deployments” of excavation equipment and resources, Norvo Tigan warned New Sydney Security that TMC might be involved in criminal activities.
After analyzing TMC communication logs and financial data provided by Norvo Tigan, security officials were granted a classified indictment. They secured a warrant for the arrest of Yanas Tigan and Janel Tigan and the seizure of all Tigan Mining Consortium assets. During the subsequent raid on Mrs. Tigan’s residence, she and Janel allegedly resisted arrest and attacked security personnel and Klingon troops with deadly force. In the course of defending themselves, the security team and soldiers returned fire, killing the two suspects.
In return for his cooperation, Norvo Tigan has been cleared of all criminal charges and released. An investigation into what other business entities, if any, might have collaborated with the Tigans is ongoing, and is expected to require the cooperation of several off-world security agencies.
O’Brien closed out the news report. A quick search algorithm on the other articles Ezri had downloaded from the network made it clear she had been keeping tabs on her family through their local news. Most of it had been reports of a rather banal variety—business association awards, public recognition for charitable gifts, flattering remarks in the social columns. None of it had carried even
a hint of the tragedy that had been to come. Poor kid, he thought with sadness. To find out in the news that her mother and brother are dead, and her kid brother snitched to the Alliance. To see her own name in print as a wanted criminal…. No wonder she stopped reading the news.
He got up from his desk and walked to the replicator. “Coffee, hot. Double strong, double sweet.” The machine whirred and hummed melodiously as it produced his steaming beverage in a colorful swirl of energy. He took the mug from the replicator nook and returned to his desk. Two down, two to go. Continuing to work his way down the roster by rank, the next person under his microscope would be Enrique Muniz.
At a glance, O’Brien could see that he wasn’t going to get off easy this time. Unlike Leeta and Ezri, Muniz had made extensive use of the comm system over the past several months. He had sent and received a combination of text and audiovisual messages, more than three hundred in all. Deciding that chronology was the least important concern at this stage, O’Brien sorted the files based on whom Muniz had been communicating with, and where those persons were located.
As far as O’Brien could tell, Muniz had at least respected the moratorium on communications with people on Alliance-controlled worlds. Instead, he had traded messages with fellow members of the rebellion—some of them on ships passing through the same sector as Terok Nor or the Defiant, some of them in the rebellion’s semi-permanent installations in the Badlands.
How’m I supposed to whittle this down? O’Brien wondered. “Computer,” he said. “Open all text-only messages sent or received by Enrique Muniz during the past six months. Show them in chronological order, oldest first.”
“Working,” the computer responded, and the messages appeared on O’Brien’s screen, accompanied by a simple, icon-based navigation pane down the left side of his monitor.
The first message was sent to Muniz by a man named George Primmin, who was part of a group of rebels that had seized control of a small privateer called the Vesuvius.
Hey, Quique. You still at Terok Nor? The rest of us sweatbacks finally took your advice and nabbed a ship. Write back if you’re okay.—George