Star Trek: Typhon Pact 06: Plagues of Night

  In the wake of the final Borg invasion, which destroyed entire worlds, cost the lives of sixty-three billion people, and struck a crippling blow to Starfleet, six nations adversarial to the United Federation of Planets—the Romulan Star Empire, the Breen Confederacy, the Tholian Assembly, the Gorn Hegemony, the Tzenkethi Coalition, and the Holy Order of the Kinshaya—joined ranks to form the Typhon Pact. For almost three years, the Federation and the Klingon Empire, allied under the Khitomer Accords, have contended with the nascent coalition on a predominantly cold-war footing. But as Starfleet rebuilds itself, factions within the Typhon Pact grow restive, concerned about their own inability to develop a quantum slipstream drive to match that of the Federation. Will leaders such as UFP President Bacco and RSE Praetor Kamemor bring about a lasting peace across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, or will the cold war between the two alliances deepen, and perhaps even lead to an all-out shooting war?

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  “And what about you, Nerys?” Sisko asked. “What do you think?”

  Kira blanched, feeling her face grow cold as the blood drained from it. More than almost anything else, perhaps even more than the idea of lecturing the Emissary about his responsibilities, Kira dreaded facing that question. “I … I can’t answer that,” she said.

  “No?” Sisko said, halting in his tracks and snapping his head toward her. “Because as I recall, you thought that I was doing the right thing when I decided not to marry Kasidy based upon the Prophets’ warning. So now that I’m doing what they told me to do and not spending my life with her, don’t you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “Benjamin,” Kira started, but she didn’t know what to say. She looked away. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she finally managed to utter. “It’s not my business.”

  “No?” Sisko said, his voice rising. “You seem to think it’s enough of your business to come talk to me about it.”

  “I … I’m …” Kira faltered. She tried again. “Emissary—”

  “I’m not the Emissary!” Sisko roared, his voice bounding down the valley.

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-4955-0

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4957-4 (eBook)

  To Colleen Genevieve Ragan,

  Friend, sister, native, spirit,

  A woman who brings love and laughter with her,

  Forever the benevolent queen of all she surveys

  MacBeth: Do you not hope your children shall be kings,

  When those that gave [a noble title] to me

  Promis’d no less to them?

  Banquo: That, trusted home,

  Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,

  …………………… But ’tis strange;

  And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

  The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

  Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

  In deepest consequence.

  —William Shakespeare,

  The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3

  And each day brings a new darkness—

  A deception, a betrayal,

  Or some simpler brutality—

  Strung together like plagues of night.

  —K. C. Hunter,

  Cycles in the Sky, “Nyx and Eos”

  Ab Initio

  A river of fire flooded the corridor. Visible through ports in the outer bulkhead, uniformed Starfleet officers raced before the wave of the explosion, but not fast enough. Overtaken and engulfed by the flames, they surely could not have survived.

  Subcommander Orventa T’Jul stood before the main viewscreen on the bridge of the Romulan vessel Dekkona, aboard which she served as second-in-command. Alongside the ship’s commander, Marius, she peered at the drama playing out aboard Starfleet’s Utopia Planitia command facility. The space station orbited the fourth planet in the Sol system, located in the very heart of the Federation. A shallow arc of the rust-colored, largely desert world curved across the bottom of the viewer, the night-shrouded portion of the surface flecked here and there with the lights of cities. Above Sol IV, scattered in space about the station, a score or more of starships in various stages of construction hung suspended in docking scaffolds. The sizable number of vessels marked Starfleet’s ongoing efforts to recover from the devastation wrought by the previous year’s Borg invasion. T’Jul wondered how many of those ships would carry the revolutionary quantum slipstream drive, and just how long it would take the UFP to press its tactical advantage against Romulus. The thought reinforced the importance of the mission upon which Commander Marius currently led them.

  “They’re venting atmosphere,” reported Centurion Kozik from his tactical board. A green tinge suffused the dim lighting on the bridge, indicating to the crew that the ship’s cloak remained engaged and functional.

  “Very good,” Marius said beside T’Jul. “The first crack in the dam.”

  T’Jul studied the viewscreen, her gaze tracing along the narrow conduit that joined one of the station’s four outer, hemispherical modules to the tall cylinder that formed its core. Two-thirds of the way out on the connecting arm, a tattered gash had opened the structure to space, a jet of vapor streaming out into the void. The subcommander assumed that emergency bulkheads would automatically gird into place inside the station and halt the loss of air, but even before they could do so, a blue-white flash of energy cut across the compromised section of the hull, the telltale sign of a force field activating to seal the breach.

  Anticipating the commander’s next order, T’Jul looked to Marius, who nodded once. “Take us into position,” T’Jul said, turning to address Lieutenant Torlanta, whose pilot console stood on the starboard side of the bridge, angled toward the main viewer.

  “Yes, Subcommander,” said Torlanta, immediately moving her hands across her control panel.


  T’Jul looked back at the viewscreen, where the image shifted as the ship began to move. She imagined that she could perceive Dekkona springing to life about her, that she could feel the thrusters firing, pushing the great hawklike vessel closer to the Utopia Planitia station. She craved those sensations, wanting a command of her own, a starship that would function as an extension of herself, her orders translated into action by its crew in the same way that her central nervous system converted her thoughts into movement.

  On the viewer, the space station grew larger and slipped downward as Dekkona neared it, rising up along its cylindrical core. The ship approached the second, upper row of structures that extended from the central body of the station on slender arms, a quartet of circular assemblies. A pair of large, dome-shaped constructs at either end of the core completed the facility.

  Beside T’Jul, Marius turned and climbed the steps to the command chair. He took his seat, then told her, “Prepare for extraction.”

  “At once,” replied T’Jul, knowing that the most critical moment of their assignment drew close. She quickly moved to the console she crewed on the port side of the bridge and keyed in a signal to Lieutenant Rixora.

  Sparing another glance at the space station, she hoped that the Breen operative would succeed in carrying out his segment of the mission. The explosion aboard Utopia Planitia signaled that he’d begun implementing his endgame. It would soon require precise coordination between Kazren and the Dekkona crew to complete it.

  T’Jul spun crisply on her heel and headed for one of the bridge’s aft doors. As it glided open before her, Lieutenant Korvess spoke up from her communications console, which adjoined the tactical board off to port. “Commander, internal comm traffic within the space station suggests that they’re closing in on the operative.”

  As concern rose within T’Jul, she turned to see Marius face the stout, aging officer. Korvess stood with a hand raised to the side of her head, one fingertip extended to the earpiece protruding from beneath her graying hair. Before Marius could respond to her, Kozik said, “The Starfleet patrol ship is energizing its tractor beam.”

  “Have they detected us?” Marius demanded.

  T’Jul’s gut tightened. She knew that the latest generation of cloaking device should have rendered Dekkona largely undetectable to Federation technology, but until now, no Romulan vessel had deployed the improved practical-invisibility apparatus in the field. For all the subcommander knew, the ship could be trailing positrons or some other particles that would lead Utopia Planitia’s patrol vessel—identified as U.S.S. Sparrow—directly to the ship and its crew.

  Kozik worked his tactical panel. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The patrol ship isn’t mov—”

  A bright light bloomed on the main viewscreen, halting Kozik in mid-sentence. T’Jul looked to the viewer and saw a huge fireball erupting from the station’s lower core. A mass of broken hull and burning atmosphere surged toward Sparrow, reaching it in seconds. T’Jul watched as the vessel quaked beneath the assault, though it did not appear to sustain much damage.

  She could not say the same for the space station. A great, gaping hole had been blasted through the lower quarter of its cylindrical core, the large dome at that end nearly severed from the rest of the facility. Lights visible through the station’s many ports all went dark, then flickered back on above the wrecked area, though not below it.

  “Utopia Planitia’s shields are down,” Kozik said.

  “Go. Now,” said Commander Marius. “Get us to the rendezvous.”

  Without waiting to hear an acknowledgment of the order, but knowing that the command crew would follow it, T’Jul rushed out. Past the open blast doors that allowed Dekkona’s bridge to function as its own escape pod, one of two parallel corridors extended the length of the ventral conduit that connected to the main, aft body of the ship. Doors lined either side of the passage, all the way to the hatch that sealed off the forward third of the conduit from the middle third. With the crew on high alert, the passage stood empty.

  T’Jul hastened forward. As she bypassed the turbolift, she broke into a sprint. She passed conference rooms, engineering substations, equipment junctions, two weapons caches, transporter rooms. Her long legs easily devoured the decking, her footfalls thudding along the matte gray carpet that padded the space.

  The second explosion shouldn’t have followed the first so quickly, she thought as she ran. Kazren’s plan had called for the first blast to cover his theft from Utopia Planitia’s computer system, and for the second to bring down the station’s shields once he’d reached the extraction point. The interval between the two actions should have required more than a few moments. He’s in trouble, she concluded, and that put the success of the mission at risk.

  The large hatch between the forward and middle sections of the corridor split along an angle and opened at T’Jul’s approach, the two panels retracting into the bulkheads. She cleared the raised threshold and immediately eyed her destination. A broad set of closed double doors on the left side of the corridor shielded the latest upgrade to Dekkona, the ship possessing the most advanced technology in the Romulan Imperial Fleet.

  When T’Jul reached the doors, she flattened her hand against a security plate. The scanner glowed yellow as it read the details of her flesh, and then the adjacent screen displayed some of the particulars of her service record: rank, serial number, posting, clearance level. She gazed at the image of her face that accompanied the facts of her life in the fleet. Her brunette hair and green eyes set her outside the norm of Romulan physicality, and the style in which she wore her hair—not quite so closely cropped or rigidly shaped as that of most of her fellow citizens—extended her individuality. Such distinguishing features had brought her both praise and disapprobation inside the military. As she had numerous times before, T’Jul wondered if she would need to bow to convention in order to receive a command. She had climbed to the brink of being given her own starship, but honestly didn’t know what more she might need to do in order to pull herself up the final rung.

  The hard, metallic sound of locks releasing reached T’Jul, and the doors divided to allow her entry. She quickly stepped into the phase-transition control room, the doors sealing loudly behind her. Directly ahead, a large platform filled most of the deck space within the compartment. Mounted atop it, an elaborate latticework of thin silver piping put her in mind of one of the Tholians’ energy webs. At the center of the mechanism, she spied six pieces of black mesh, paired along the height, width, and depth axes, each of them bordered and supported by four of the silver tubes.

  Along the right bulkhead, a viewscreen showed a portion of the Utopia Planitia station. A small crate sat on the deck below it, one side covered with minuscule, unreadable text, with a keypad set into the top. In the left-hand portion of the compartment, two officers—a man and a woman, Lieutenants Diveln and Rixora—crewed a long, freestanding control console. Without preamble, T’Jul pointed to the viewer and said, “Display the ship.”

  “Yes, Subcommander,” said Diveln. On-screen, a simulated image of the cloaked Dekkona appeared, superimposed onto the live view of Utopia Planitia. The perspective, fixed from beneath the aft hull of the Romulan vessel, showed the underside of the ship’s long neck stretching away at the top of the picture; at the bottom, one of the space station’s connectors that branched off the core filled the screen from left to right, becoming larger as Dekkona eased nearer. As T’Jul watched, the apparent forward motion of the ship ceased.

  “We’re in position, Subcommander,” Rixora said. “But we’re no longer reading the operative’s homing beacon.”

  “Resort to secondary protocol,” T’Jul ordered, snapping her head around toward the officers behind the control panel. “Employ passive sensors, restricted to the section of the space station containing the extraction point.” Kazren’s physical parameters had been recorded for just such a circumstance.

  “Yes, Subcommander,” Rixora said. “Initiat
ing scan.”

  If they couldn’t pinpoint Kazren, T’Jul knew that Commander Marius would not risk attempting to retrieve him blindly, nor would he resort to employing active sensors. While the success of the mission would provide great rewards for the Empire, recklessness could result in the destruction of Dekkona and the death of its crew—or worse, the capture of both. Before Marius would permit the chance of that to increase, he would allow the mission to fail. When Praetor Tal’Aura had approved the plan some time ago, she—

  “Subcommander, I’ve located the operative,” Rixora said. “He’s alive, near the extraction point, but stationary.”

  They must be closing in on him, T’Jul thought. “Is he alone?”

  Rixora worked her controls. “Yes. For now.”

  T’Jul wanted to order a wider sensor scan, an active scan, so that she could better understand Kazren’s situation. But she knew that Marius would not want her to chance giving up the location of Dekkona. Nor did they have the luxury of time; the sooner the ship and its crew could depart the Sol system, the better their chances of escaping Federation space safely.

  “Take us in,” she ordered.

  “Signaling the bridge that we’re taking over piloting control,” Diveln said. “Firing thrusters.”

  T’Jul peered back at the viewscreen, where the representation of the cloaked vessel slowly approached the Federation space station once more. Diveln recited the dwindling distance between the two, counting down from one hundred in increments of ten. As he reached fifty, the bridge of Dekkona passed above Utopia Planitia’s connecting arm. At twenty, Rixora reconfirmed Kazren’s location and status. At ten, the midpoint of Dekkona’s long neck—which housed the phase-transition control room where T’Jul presently stood—hovered above the station’s connector. At that point, the procedures that Commander Marius had put in place required her to issue the final order.