“Departing from docking port three at 0830, sir.”
“Please arrange for Vedek Yevir and Cleric Ekosha’s passage on that ship, along with their cargo.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Thank you, General,” Yevir said.
“You’re welcome, Vedek. As you say, this is a time when we must all come together.” He allowed the real meaning of his words to sink in before adding, “Walk with the Prophets.”
“Walk with the Prophets,” Yevir echoed, and signed off. But Lenaris knew from the look on his face as he spoke the words that the general had scored a hit.
Lenaris had never cared much for Yevir Linjarin and his rigid orthodox pontifications on the Bajoran faith. That he had once been an officer in the Militia until a chance encounter with Captain Sisko changed his life somehow made it worse. Lenaris knew Yevir to be intelligent and sincere in his dedication to the spiritual welfare of Bajor, but it sometimes seemed as if the vedek had come to believe the touch of the Emissary had made his judgment infallible.
Yevir’s spearheading the Attainder of Kira Nerys had been the final straw for a growing number of the faithful. Increasingly alienated by a religious leadership that had become mired in politics and conformity since the halcyon days of Kai Opaka, many of these Bajorans, including Lenaris, had recently broken away from the mainstream religion. Now they walked their own path, choosing to exercise the free will that Kira Nerys had sacrificed her place in the faith to empower them with.
Bajor was evolving, Lenaris believed. Not just in body and mind, but in spirit. And it was this fundamental idea that Yevir and his fellow conservatives seemed incapable of accepting—that there might be more than one true way to experience the Prophets, more than one true way for Bajorans to explore their pagh.
The thought spurred him to look at Akaar. “Admiral, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What is it, General?” said Akaar, who had been watching Lenaris’s conversation with Yevir without any obvious reaction.
“Bajor’s religion,” Lenaris began. “It can’t have escaped your notice, or Councillor zh’Thane’s, that a schism has developed among our faithful these past few months. Doesn’t such growing internal disharmony work against our eligibility for Federation membership?”
Akaar tilted his head to one side. “Are you attempting to convince me the Federation should reevaluate its acceptance of Bajor, General?”
“No,” Lenaris said. “But I confess to being a little confused. I had always understood that a planet had to be united before it could become a part of the Federation.”
“Politically united, yes,” Akaar said. “But no world—no union of worlds—is a monolithic entity in all things…most especially metaphysics,” he added with a wry smile. “Besides—and this is something that frustrates many of my fellow admirals, but amuses me no end—Federation science has yet to discover anything—and I do mean anything,General—about the Orbs, the wormhole, or the beings within it that is in any way inconsistent with the Bajoran religious interpretation. Many of these things still defy the understanding of our finest minds. Who, then, are we to judge your internal debates on the question of Bajor’s relationship to the Prophets? It may be that Bajor has much to teach us about that, and about many other things as well. That is our hope with every new world we embrace.”
Lenaris considered that before asking, “And where do you stand on the question?”
Akaar looked at him and smirked. “I am a soldier, General. I stand with the people I took an oath to protect. Always.”
The irony of having his own earlier words to Akaar bounced back to him didn’t escape Lenaris, but before he could fire off a retort, the illumination level in ops abruptly fell. The situation table and several interface screens went completely dark. Emergency lights came on, but the room was only a third as bright as it had been.
“We’ve lost primary power in ops,” Nguyen said. “Auxiliaries have kicked in, but most of our systems are down.”
“Can you get the primaries back up?” Lenaris asked.
“Trying,” Nguyen said. “It looks like an override from somewhere….” He tapped different sequences into his control interface, then slammed his hands on the console in frustration. “I’m locked out. We no longer have control of the station.”
“Then who does?” Akaar demanded.
An electronic hum from the transporter stage gave him his answer. A figure materialized and took a single step forward, phaser in hand, surveying the operations center with a glare that, Lenaris thought, could melt neutronium.
Ro Laren.
7
Bowers couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A Borg ship, here in the Gamma Quadrant—a region of space the collective wasn’t known to have penetrated before. And if the evidence could be believed, it had clashed with a Dominion ship, to the destruction of both vessels.
Bowers had faced the Borg only once before in his career: during their last attempt to assimilate Earth three years ago, he had been the tactical officer on the U.S.S. Budapest,part of a hastily assembled fleet whose mission was to defend Earth from an invading Borg cube. In the midst of the battle Budapesthad apparently been targeted by the cube for assimilation, because drones began beaming into key points throughout the ship. Bowers had killed two on the bridge before the drones began to adapt to the crew’s modified hand phaser frequencies. The Borg were very quickly overrunning the ship, and Bowers had been too late to stop one of them from assimilating Captain sh’Rzaan.
Fortunately, the crew had gone into the battle with a contingency plan. At that time Budapesthad been one of five test-bed starships for a new offensive hand weapon, one radically different from phasers and designed to be used specifically in situations when particle-beam weapons were useless: the TR-116. Essentially a rifle that fired chemically propelled metal projectiles, the TR-116 was immune to the adaptive beam shields that made Borg drones able to withstand phaser attacks. With Bowers leading an assault team armed with the prototype weapons through the ship, bullets from the TR-116s tore through drone bodies like paper. The Borg never knew what hit them.
How many of his friends had he been forced to kill that day because of the nanoprobes consuming them from the inside out, turning them into creatures of the collective? He tried not to remember, but the faces still haunted his nightmares. Jalarin, Hughes, Selok, Perez…Bowers had even looked into the pale, transformed face of sh’Rzaan as his former captain attacked Ensign Demarest, knowing he had no choice except to fire if Demarest was to be spared the same fate.
Budapesthad won the day, but the cost had been horrific.
Now as he stood in the furrow created by the crash of the Borg ship, staring up at the broken hull that lay almost completely buried in the cliff, Bowers recalled that terrible day three years ago and found himself wishing Starfleet had never taken the TR-116 out of service.
Nog was walking up to the wreckage. Something had caught his attention. “Woah…Sir, this isn’t a Borg ship. Or at least, it wasn’t always.”
Vaughn didn’t respond. He seemed to be somewhere else. “What do you mean, Nog?” Bowers asked.
“The hull plating under the Borg technology…I’d know it anywhere. It’s Starfleet.”
Stunned, Bowers looked at Vaughn for a reaction. He hadn’t moved. But then, speaking quietly, he said, “U.S.S. Valkyrie,Paladin-class, NCC-68816. Crew complement: 30. Lost with all hands stardate 46935 during a Borg engagement at the planet Uridi’si. Presumed destroyed.”