Caught in the flash is a warrior with a white robe and long, brown locks, He glares defiantly at the hunters and their weapons as if daring them to come after him, though his hands are empty of weapons.
Recognizing him, the hunters snarl at each other with annoyance. One by one, they slip their daggers back into their sheaths.
As the ground shakes with the drone of thunder, they approach the white-robed figure with respect and even reverence—but he dismisses any difference between him and them with a gesture of disdain. Then the warrior poses a question to the hunters.
The hunters glance at each other, mulling it over. Finally, they tell the warrior what he wants to know.
The celebration at Ty’Gokor is going on its sixteenth hour. Warriors are howling with memories of glorious victories and even more glorious defeats. They regale their listeners with tales of the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Dominion, and the Breen.
Sirella, daughter of Linkasa, stands by the statue of Sompek and continues to glance at the entranceway. Finally, her vigilance seems to be rewarded. A powerful-looking figure strides into the midst of the revelers.
He looks around, his gaze stern, the corners of his mouth turned down in a scowl. Then, little by little, he begins to smile.
“Worf!” one of the warriors blares.
“Worf!” cries another.
“Worf!” roars Martok, loudest of all.
I know the name. Worf is the generals adopted kinsman. He’s also the new Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire.
Martok crosses the room and embraces Worf. Then, his arm wrapped around Worf’s shoulders, the general leads him to the cauldron of bloodwine and fills a goblet for him.
Worf grins at Martok, then tosses back the bloodwine. A clamor of approval goes up from the assemblage.
The general’s wife looks pleased at Worf’s arrival as well. However, she doesn’t move from her place by the statue of Sompek. And after a minute, she begins glancing at the entrance again.
The setting sun turns Lake Lursor into a pool of blood. Two figures walk alongside it, one a middle-aged warrior of proud bearing in a white robe, the other an older Klingon with plain garb and a thick, gray beard.
The volcano looms above them, an immense shadow against the twilight sky. Kri’stak has been quiet lately, not even bothering to rattle the cookware of the villagers in the vicinity, though it’s been less than thirty-five years since an eruption made changes in the landscape.
Fiery red birds with hooked beaks glide across the lake, breaking its surface every so often to go after fish. When they get one, they fly it to shore and tear into it with undisguised zeal.
The wind is salty—not with the scent of Lursor, which contains fresh water, but with the briny flavor of the not-so-distant sea. The men breathe it in, their chins thrust out, their nostrils flaring.
Then they sing an old song—one that mentions the volcano and the lake and purports to explain the development of the bat’leth. But before long, the older man’s singing turns into a coughing fit. His lungs are diseased, he explains, and he hasn’t got long to live—a result of his exposure to plasma residue almost a decade earlier.
The graybeard has regrets, he says. He wishes he had become an officer. But then, he adds, that’s the dream of every civilian laborer on every battle cruiser in the fleet.
The warrior asks him about a man with whom he served on General ShiVang’s flagship many years ago. The older Klingon nods at the name. He remembers the man, he says.
Then he gives the warrior the information he came for.
In the city of Kling on Qo’noS, dawn is breaking with its customarily savage splendor. But here on Ty’Gokor, time’s passage is measured only in the number of warriors who’ve passed out on the floor.
I’ve been smart enough not to sample the bloodwine, or I would certainly be among them. Instead, I’ve subsisted on the water and food rations I brought along with me.
Martok, whose eyes are hideously bloodshot, is leading a booming chorus of his favorite song. All those still standing are singing along as best they can, though it seems even to an alien ear that the lyrics are slurred.
Worf still looks as if he’s got a handle on his senses, but it doesn’t keep him from chanting as loudly as anyone else. And at the rate he’s dipping into the cauldron, he’ll soon be staggering as badly as the others.
Suddenly, I hear the sound of footsteps from the entryway. I turn and see a newcomer to the festivities—a burly warrior dressed in a white robe with long, brown hair falling about his shoulders.
Sirella eyes him like a hawk. Clearly, this is the individual for whom she’s been waiting all this time.
Martok sees him too. As a hush falls over the Hall of Warriors, the general leaves his knot of friends and goes to meet the newcomer.
For a moment, the two of them stand chin to chin, appearing to size each other up. Martok is taller, but the Klingon in the white robe is broader. I get the feeling that they’re about to fight.
But they don’t. Instead, the newcomer speaks up in a deep voice. “I have traveled the length and breadth of Qo’noS,” he says. “And I have spoken with those who knew you.”
“Those who knew me?” Martok echoes, the slightest hint of suspicion in his otherwise amiable tone.
The newcomer nods. “I asked an old warrior named Sejokh what you were like as a boy, when you were growing up in the Kentha lowlands. I went to Kang’s Summit to ask the brothers Abbakh and Kedjesa what kind of hunting companion you made. And I visited Mojjar of the House of Delagh to see how you comported yourself when you were a laborer on General ShiVang’s flagship.”
Martok’s scowl deepens with each mention of his humble past, as if he’s enduring a series of blows. However, he keeps his temper.
“And?” he snaps.
The warrior in the white robe eyes the general unflinchingly. “Sejokh said you weren’t the brightest petal on the fireblossom, but you were always the most determined. Abbakh and Kedjesa told me you weren’t very accurate with your bow, but you treat the sabre bears with the respect due a worthy foe. And as for Mojjar … he’ll die singing of how you single-handedly turned back the Romulans.”
Martok’s mood lightens. His mouth twists into a grudging smile. “Have some bloodwine,” he says, and he offers the newcomer his own cup.
Then the general grabs a new one off a table, dips it into the kettle and raises it in a toast. “To Kahless,” he bellows, “who tore down the tyrant Molor, withstood the attack of the five hundred at Qam-Chee, and carried the day all by himself at Three Turn Bridge!”
“To Kahless!” the assemblage answers resoundingly.
Of course, it’s not the Kahless of legend; I know that. It’s just a clone of him created by the clerics of the planet Boreth. But to many of the Klingon people, this Kahless means almost as much as the original, so his word carries a great deal of weight with them.
“No!” the clone thunders in protest, his voice echoing wildly from one stone wall to another. The warriors fall silent again, their goblets raised halfway to their lips. They look at each other, then at Kahless.
“Not to me,” says the warrior in the white robe, “but to Chancellor Martok … scourge of the Dominion, slayer of Jem’Hadar!”
This time, the roar in the hall is twice as loud, eliciting a nod from the daughter of Linkasa. The Klingons empty their cups of bloodwine and shuffle over to the cauldron to refill them. And with that simple gesture, a new age begins.
Long live Kahless.
Long live Martok.
This hall is usually reserved for the presentation of the Order of the Bat’leth, and is dominated by massive statues that are rendered in the traditional Klingon style. In the hall’s dim lighting it almost seems as if the chancellor is one of the ancient warriors come to life.
SAKARI & HIROGEN
THE HUNTED
The elusive Sakari have adapted impressively to living beneath the surface of their world. Stealth, camo
uflage, and strict isolationism have come to define their culture.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the place as Captain Kathryn Janeway and Commander Chakotay of the Starship Voyager saw it. I’m in a lush forest of green fronds and orange blossoms, standing on a level stone surface that goes on for several meters until it disappears into undergrowth.
There are chunks of rock scattered about, some of them in piles as high as my waist, some only a little higher than my ankles. Once, they made up a building of some kind, a place where a sentient species lived in harmony with its environment. Now they’re a monument to some historical disaster.
What happened here? Was there an earthquake? Or perhaps an accident involving the region’s power source, the scars of which have long since been covered by nature?
Voyager’s logs say it was neither of those things. In Janeway’s judgment, this planet fell victim to an invader. And she has good reason to feel that way.
Again, I use my mind’s eye to picture a place. Janeway wasn’t there, but some of her crewmen were. It’s a subterranean cavern with a hole in its ceiling. A smoky yellow sunlight filters down, illuminating gray rock walls and snaking tree roots and a cascade of greenery where the light and an underground trickle conspired to nurture life.
I also see a pair of obelisks with alien characters inscribed into their tapering surfaces. And though they tend to blend into their underground environment, I see the denizens of this place who erected the obelisks.
They’re humanoids with sharp-featured faces the color and texture of clay, though their black eyes are as hard and alive as river rocks gleaming in the sun. Their clothes and their headbands are gray and brown, the same as their stringy, uncombed hair.
They call themselves the Sakari.
Once, they lived on the surface, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Then their civilization was attacked by a mysterious invader from space. The entire assault took less than an hour, but the Sakari were decimated. Those who survived did so only by abandoning their homes and escaping into the mines they had dug years earlier.
The Sakari never learned the identity of those who attacked them. They never figured out the motive for the attack either. However, Janeway and Chakotay uncovered a clue on the planet’s surface.
It was the corpse of a Borg drone, its biological components deteriorated, reduced to its armor and its brittle, moss-covered bioimplants.
The Borg have made their impact on the Alpha Quadrant with tragic results. Anyone who lost a loved one at Wolf 359 can attest to that.
However, their impact on the Delta Quadrant, where they appear to have originated, has been many times greater. If the data we received from Voyager is at all accurate, the Borg collective has assimilated thousands of sentient species there.
But are their methods the same in the Delta Quadrant as they are here? Have they changed over the years? Have the Borg themselves changed?
These were some of the questions I wished to address when I petitioned the Federation Security Commission for academic research access to the Voyager logs. When permission was granted, I immediately set to work trying to identify the oldest incident of Borg invasion available.
The one I finally settled on took place no less than 110,000 years ago. In fact, it may have been one of the collectives earliest conquests, though that’s just conjecture on my part.
Of course, the crew of Voyager encountered this species as well. However, they didn’t seem to be aware that it had ever been victimized by the Borg. At least, that was the impression I got from their logs.
It’s easy to see how they might have been misled at first. The species in question was powerful, numerous, remarkably aggressive in its own right. It seemed more likely to conquer than to be conquered.
Besides, Janeway’s logs made it clear, she knew the Borg are nothing if not thorough. They don’t often leave unassimilated survivors in their wake … which made the Sakari situation seem even more intriguing to me.
And yet, these particular conquerors had been conquered. This information was represented quite clearly in Voyager’s database. So why did it seem that Janeway and her officers were ignorant of the fact?
It took me a while, but I finally figured it out. The data on the conqueror-species wasn’t originally part of the holographic datastream that Janeway sent to the Alpha Quadrant. It was inadvertently added to the stream by one of the alien relay stations involved in the process.
How is it that the relay station contained data on the conqueror-species? As it turns out, it was the conqueror-species who built the relay network more than a hundred millennia ago.
The species’ name for itself was Hirogen.
I close my eyes, but not to see the planet of the Sakari again. This time, I see a fleet of ships knifing through the void—hundreds, perhaps thousands of iridescent blue vessels with elegant lines and graceful, sweeping warp nacelles. Their lizardlike occupants are running away from their homeworld, abandoning it in the interest of survival, because they know that a Borg cube is coming to assimilate anyone left.
And there are Hirogen who have remained—those who believe they can stave off the collective despite everything they’ve learned about it, those willing to defend their homes at any cost. There’s no hope for these Hirogen, of course. They’re completely and utterly doomed.
For those who’ve taken flight, however, there’s a good deal of hope. There’s an opportunity to preserve the virtues of their civilization, which have become considerable.
A Borg scout ship is caught in the final stpges of the hunt. Prized above every trophy, a Hirogen hunter can become an Alpha Hirogen with one simple capture—the skeleton of a Borg. Destruction of this ship forced the hunter team to the planet surface and into the collective nightmares of the Sakari.
Unfortunately, even these Hirogen haven’t escaped the Borg unscathed. They’ve become reluctant nomads, their souls scarred by the knowledge that there was a force in the universe powerful enough to destroy them—a force they may meet again some day. In each of their ships, they vow never again to play the role of the hunted. From that time on, they say with emotion in their voices, the Hirogen will become the hunters.
And they do.
They develop ultra-strong body armor and fearsome handheld particle weapons. They abandon the slender grace of their ancient ship designs, manufacturing massive, monotanium-plated vessels with dicyclic warp engines capable of traversing huge distances. They breed their young for height and muscle mass and endurance, with immune systems that can neutralize almost any kind of poison imaginable.
Everything the Hirogen do, every iota of energy they expend, is designed to enhance their people’s efficiency as predators. All aspects of their culture come to revolve about the hunt … their arts, their sciences, even their religion. It pays off in one successful expedition after another.
But so dedicated are the Hirogen, so expert at their chosen activity, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find a species who can pose a challenge to them. So their armada begins to split up into smaller packs and ultimately into a far-flung array of lone vessels, each one competing with the others for the honor of the most impressive kill.
But they don’t give up their ability to exchange information with each other, because that would weaken them as a species. In fact, they go to great lengths to create a network of powerful communications relay stations fueled by harnessed micro-singularities.
Over the span of more than a hundred millennia, the Hirogen lose the details of their flight from their homeworld. They forget exactly who it was that they feared. And yet, the trauma of the event continues to drive their need for prey.
They adopt primitive rituals and practices. They start daubing their metallic headgear with hunt colors—white to signify dominance and leadership, red to signify loyalty and obedience. Their victims are daubed as well when possible, their alien faces marked with blue for imminent death.
Even more bizarre is the Hirogen’s practice of
stocking their cargo holds with grisly trophies of the quarry they’ve run to earth. If I try, I can picture the hold in which two of Janeway’s crewmen were held.
To my human sensibilities, it seems like a medieval torture chamber. Metal blades and vicious-looking probes hang from hooks and chains anchored in the ceiling. Nets contain as-yet-unprocessed body parts, waiting to be denatured in transparent tanks full of green liquid. The bulkhead; are decorated with skulls and spines and internal organs ripped from the living, thrashing bodies of the Hirogen’s helpless victims.
It serves as graphic evidence of the Hirogen’s prowess as hunters. But no matter how many trophies they amass, no matter how many innocent aliens they eviscerate, it’s never enough.
Because even if they’ve forgotten the minutiae of their flight from the Borg, they still know in the dark, dim depths of their blood that there’s a force they’ve yet to overcome, an enemy that sent them running for their lives a long, long time ago …
And who may try to do it again someday.
If the Hirogen only knew. Their societal ritual comes not from their ancient culture but is instead the by-product of the attempted assimilation by the Borg. The only clothing the Hirogen wear is armor, which resembles the stripped and fused bones of many hunts. Could this have been donned first as protection from the cutting tools of Borg drones?
The memories of the Hirogen might have dimmed over the years, but the relay stations remembered with uncanny precision. Powered by the energy of collapsed suns, they retained every scrap of information that had passed from one of them to another since the day they were built. Quite clearly, they recalled the Borg. But from what I’ve been able to gather, the Hirogen seemed disdainful of this resource. They used the relay stations only to transmit tactical messages, ignoring the networks greater potential.
That’s why the hunters who captured two of Voyager’s people didn’t identify one of them as a former Borg, a drone whom Janeway had rescued months earlier. Anyone at all familiar with the collective would have recognized the distinctive nature of the drones implants.
Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations Page 4