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Star Trek: Pioneer Rating: R (For language, sexual references, and Sci-Fi violence) Woe is the lot of those who miscalculate. Of the ten hunters who beamed aboard, all but three were lost in airless rooms Pioneer’s crew had yet to repair. While they were prepared for this eventuality, they were not prepared to be sealed off in dark voids of the rooms they appeared in. After a few minutes of poking and prodding about the bulkheads, almost all of them began blasting away with their heaviest firepower. One hunter blew himself to pieces when the explosion of his polaric grenade failed to breach the security fields. Another managed to blow his way outside the ship with his gravon rifle only to be killed when he fell off the hull and into the rooster tail. Two managed to link up by blowing out the deck between them and overloading the security field emitters, but there they found that the concussion from the resulting overload had crushed their environmental gear. They managed to seal themselves in the galley before they frantically began to doff their gear before it suffocated them. When the security teams arrived, they were outnumbered and completely surprised. Not willing to give up easily, they fought and lost under an avalanche of phaser fire. The remaining six found themselves isolated and lost in a maze of pitch black, airless rooms and corridors. Nevertheless, being hunters they were still of a mind to pursue their prey, and all three had the gear with them to track the crew of this confounded ship. Heartstock scanned the absolute black night he found himself in carefully. After a careful study of his footing, he retrieved his marvel, and scanned the room with it. So named since that is what almost anyone did when one studied it or used it, the Hirogen Marvel was the hand-held equivalent to all the complicated sensors aboard his own vessel. It told him everything. From the shape of the room, to the properties of the walls, from the size and shape of his prey, to their individual pulse rates and EKG readings, the Marvel missed nothing. In fact, if the marvel had a problem it was presenting too much information to process by a single mind in an orderly fashion. Tuning out what he considered useless info, Heartstock made his way to the nearest bulkhead. Through his suit’s gauntlet, he gently caressed the metal. It was thin. Better yet, it was unnaturally distorted. In a single smooth motion, Heartstock hooked a magnetic concussion grenade from his belt and slapped it on the weakened bulkhead. Since no air was about to transfer the shock to his body, he stepped back only a single pace and let the device activate. The results were impressive. The metal seemed to boil and froth with waves as if liquefied. Unable to stand the onslaught any more, the bulkhead turned to powder in under two seconds and fell to the deck like sifting sand. Intensely bright lights lit the next room, but no air, and no one, lay inside. Confidently Heartstock stepped into the room and surveyed it. It was a tidy space of smooth contours and pleasant colors. The presence of a cot and what had to be a small privy confirmed his suspicions that this was a crewman’s quarters. Wanting to know more about his prey, the master hunter took another step into the room for a closer look. When the security field shimmered to life behind him, he knew he had made an error. Whether or not that error was fatal was yet to be seen he reasoned patiently. Experimentally he tapped the surface of the field with the muzzle of his gravon rifle. It didn’t budge, but it didn’t harm his weapon either. Foolish configuration for a trap, the hunter in him mused. A simple closed box like this one offered time to both trapper and snared. A potential trophy could batter itself to pieces before someone cam along to claim it. Likewise, it offered the opportunity for the trapped prey to find a way out while still fully armed. Hirogen traps were designed to disarm and stun their prey. Some more elaborate ones went so far as to be gene, or even individually, specific; allowing Hirogen hunters to snare the precise prey in mind. But this one, Heartstock thought in professional exasperation, this will be the ruin of any serious hunter! He had every intention of proving his point. He viewed it on his marvel and noted the level of type of energy being used. After a moment’s hesitation, he slid a magnetic mine across the floor and activated his personal blind. The blind was a energy sink that didn’t quite make him invisible, but made him appear as a dim shadow to the naked eye. Another upshot of this device was it absorbed all ambient energies from the outside. In such a capacity, it absorbed weapons fire until the buffers had to vent. If allowed to absorb enough energy, the device would explode on his belt, but Heartstock knew he had little to fear from what he had in mind. The magnetic mine began to distort the plates of the floor and, much to Heartstock’s satisfaction; the resulting tug on the metal began to distort the floor and even the walls beyond the field. Before long, the metal plates under his feet liquefied into a plastic goop that stuck to his boots and fluoresced a dirty blue. The magnetic mine’s effect traveled along the metal plates of the ship until a section of the strangers’ ship the size of a standard shuttle was affected. Bulkheads collapsed like burning boxes, floor plates caved in under their own weight, the mounts for the recently restrung plasma conduits pulled out of the structural bulkheads and broke apart with a sound like lightning strikes. Once the plasma hit the atmosphere of the sealed off room, it ionized every molecule in sight. A bright, concussive blast of raw static flashed through the space before the safety valves further up the power grid shut off the area with a loud bang like a large, flat plate hitting the calm surface of a pond. Anyone unfortunate enough to be in the room with Heartstock would have been melted by the sudden flash of heat from the blast, and then reduced to gobbets by the concussion, but behind the safety of the security field, he remained as secure as in his home. The bright flash dazzled him for a moment, but his vision cleared soon enough. The trap around him collapsed as the power grid tore itself apart in this room and power to the emitters first fluctuated then failed altogether. The room around him had been reduced to gelatin then blown out to a radius of five meters. A huge cavern of blackened metal replaced the once modest living quarters of the ship. When Heartstock pushed on one of the walls, it parted like so much paper exposing the darkened interior of the corridor beyond. Eager to find prey before they could recover from this blow, he checked his blind, and discovered almost no effect on the buffers. The trap had protected him from the worst of the blast and flash. How fortunate! He thought as he stalked down the corridor. Speer reached engineering in the midst of a vicious fight. Phasers hissed and he could hear the brrrap brrap of the alien’s weapons in a deafening crescendo. Never before had he heard such a relentless exchange of fire. Not even on a target range with a dozen students practicing with live fire. Accustomed to irregular phaser bursts between attacking fire, what he heard now was a hammering din of a hundred men desperately firing away. As he approached, he could see vital ship’s systems pulverized to ruined fragments of high technology all around him. When he rounded a corner at a dead run, he managed to witness five crewmen blow a hole through a console the size of a hangar door while they huddled behind rubble they had stacked in front of them. An orange flash followed by a man cartwheeling backwards from the makeshift barricade announced that their opponents had no regard for the ship either. He had run into a full-tilt inferno not a fight. A hand grabbed him and yanked him back around the corner before he could look around it to see what he was facing. Looking to see whom it was, Speer saw the blacked face of Commander Gordon staring at him like a man divorced of his senses. The eyes were wide and frenzied, the mouth split into an animal like grin of aggression and panic, and Gordon’s entire frame shook like a flag in a high wind. The voice that shouted over the din was dry and crazed, but the words were remarkably cognizant. “They blew out the security field emitters just before you arrived,” Gordon screamed at Speer. “I’ve got to keep them from reaching the core!” “How many are there?” Speer demanded. “Two!” Gordon barked before he darted around the corner to empty a phaser at the unseen attackers. An instant later, he rounded the corner, snatched Speer’s phaser out of his hand, and darted around the corner again. Case and Moritz slipped beside Speer and were about to offer him one of their phasers, when Gordon darted around the corner again and snatched both out of their hands as neatly as if he were plucking dandelions. He dashed back into the fight again leaving the three security officers defenseless in the corridor. The three men stared at each other not knowing what to do about the current situation. Never before in all their years at arms had anyone plucked their phasers out of their hands before they had a chance to use them, and it took a moment to realize how to proceed. Case could only observe, “He’s good at that,” before his mind could churn into gear again. Moritz had the presence of mind to tap his com badge a heartbeat later. “Moritz to armory!” he shouted. “Armory, aye,” came the prompt reply. “Beam three phaser rifles and six security-grade phasers to my position on Lieutenant-Commander Speer’s authorization!” Moritz ordered. “I need…” the armory officer began. No doubt he was about to recite a string of regulations about transporting munitions around the ship, but Speer was in no mood. “This is Speer,” he shouted into Moritz’s com badge. “And double all of that now!” The weapons materialized three seconds later. Speer slung one rifle over his shoulder while he cradled another in his hands. “You two,” he barked at Case and Moritz, “pass out fresh weapons to the men out there.” Gordon emerged around the corner again and flattened himself against the bulkhead next to Speer. “This is gonna’ hurt!” he shouted just before a deafening boom thundered through the ship. Speer’s ears immediately began to ring like church bells. He clapped his hands over them, but the idiot note of total sonic overload rang without mercy in his head. He barely noticed Gordon snatch up two phasers from their fresh supply and dart around the corner again. “What the hell was that?” Okuma shouted at Lieutenant Shin as Pioneer shuddered like a tuning fork. Doing double duty as security team coordinator and monitoring the ship’s status, Shin watched a dozen warnings appear in an instant with panic inducing insistence. “The impulse auxiliary unit in main engineering just overloaded!” Shin managed not to scream. “We have structural failure on the sub-deck 2 of engineering.” As if to confirm her claim, a moaning screech of tortured metal, like the sound of ship hulls imploding while sinking at sea, howled through the bridge. A crunching, grinding sound followed it a moment later. “I’ve lost the impulse drive,” Forte reported. “The entire consol just went dead.” “Keep us going at warp, Lieutenant,” Koon said calmly. He turned to Spaulding and Totem to ask them if their control was damaged, but decided their continued stream of babble meant it wasn’t or they were working on it. Satisfied, he brought up a tactical display on his command display and watched the exchange between the alien ship and Pioneer. “Locke,” he announced, “I want a torpedo shot into the barrier adjacent to that ship.” “The launcher is jammed, Captain,” Locke reported, “I tried that a minute ago.” Koon thought about it for an instant then it dawned on him. “Drop a full spread of mines on my mark! Forte, change your heading hard to starboard!” Pioneer veered gracefully to starboard directly into the pursuing ship. The Rooster Tail behind her followed her in her turn. Koon might have worried about raising an uncontrollable flare of unimagined size, but he reasoned he had to survive to worry about that. He needn’t have worried at all. The Rooster Tail rose a few thousand kilometers above the surface of the Great Barrier before it lost its deadly density, dispersed and sunk back to the churning cauldron of slow fusion fires below. The Rooster Tail turned out to be quite narrow compared to the stem of the Flare. About thirty kilometers wide at the head, it was drawn to the shields which acted like an area of low pressure behind the ship that drew the head of the Rooster Tail into the ship. By keeping ahead of it at top warp Pioneer was barely avoiding serious power failure as an exponential amount of material would abrade the shields down to nothing and overload the main deflector. The hunter ship raced alongside the Rooster Tail off to Pioneer’s starboard side. When Koon ordered the hard turn, what resembled a wall of dangerous material spouting out of the surface of the Great Barrier, tuned into a corner the hunters risked running in to. With thousands of kilometers of Rooster Tail above them, the hunters were forced to climb away from the barrier to gain some maneuvering space, and turn with their prey to starboard. “Drop the mines in one… two… mark!” Koon ordered. Locke obeyed and a dozen mines tumbled into the Rooster Tail and were crushed. “They failed to arm!” she reported. As a weapons expert, she knew mines were a risky business to drop at any warp. Once they dropped out of the subspace field, they tended to retain immense inertia that overwhelmed the fuses, as such, they tended to damage the most aft part of the warp nacelles in a close explosion. With this in mind, she had set the fuses to arm only after they had dropped out of the subspace bubble around the ship. “Set to standard fusing and drop another spread now!” Koon ordered. “But…” Locke protested. “NOW!” Koon shouted. Locke obeyed and the mines tumbled out of the ship. These exploded less than a kilometer away from the ship, but the explosion slipped behind them before it could do any damage. Pioneer shuddered slightly but raced onwards like a frightened zebra. The affect on the Rooster Tail was impressive. The distortion created by having the mines explode in subspace while at the same time exploding in real space, caused the Rooster Tail to hit a wall of sorts. The energy of the explosion kept an opening into subspace for an instant, and the Rooster Tail rushed into the bubble to fill it past the saturation point. Since subspace cannot hold large quantities of energy in static balance, the bubble collapsed and dispersed its energies in real space. A huge ball of pure energy grew to a diameter of 20,000 kilometers before the energies reached equilibrium. The Hirogen ship had no way to turn from it in time, while Pioneer raced directly away from it. The hunter ship smashed into the sphere and underwent an experience Koon and his crew knew all too well. The warp engines buckled, then shut down when the mass inside the subspace field reached 200 times the mass and 50 times the density of the ship. Massive pressure buckled the hull and snuffed out the Hirogen warp drive. Heat rivaling that of stars, warped the keel of the Hirogen vessel. The tortured space around them, forced to bridge the gap between sister dimensions in nanoseconds caused what Federation engineers called “nucleic buckling:” the sudden and catastrophic breakdown of the very atoms that made up the alloys of the ship. Large sections of the hull broke down into useless isotopes as the very atoms that made up the ship stretched and broke apart. Finally, inertia brought them out of the cloud, and the Hirogen ship, now a distorted hulk, drifted away like a speck of dust. Koon breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his scheme had worked beyond his best hopes. The Rooster tail had sprouted up behind them again, but he thought he had a cure for that. “Forte, Kree,” he said calmly, “Pull away from the Barrier gently and find a place we can hide for repairs.” “Aye, sir,” they said in unison. Pioneer gently pulled into empty space, and the Rooster Tail gradually lost the energy to follow her. Over the next few hours, the tail would settle back to the turbulent surface of the Great Barrier, and no one would have suspected it had ever been there. “Do you have a plan?” Speer shouted at Gordon when he thought he could hear the man again. Eddie shook his head, “I just blew out the impulse buffers to block their path. If they can get through that mess, I’ve got nothing left to stop them.” Speer would have been astonished any other time to hear Eddie say that, but with the massive hail of fire still pounding through the engineering spaces, he was operating on an instinctive level only. “They’re holed up behind a partial field that’s blocking all our fire,” Eddie explained. “I’ve tried to blow out the emitters and the controls, but the system is on the other side of the field. They can shoot right through it, but we’ve been trying to shoot around it.” “Can you get around their flank to land shots on them?” Speer shouted over the din of the fighting and his own ringing ears. “They have a clear field of fire in that direction,” Eddie said. Speer peaked around the corner and caught a glimpse of the fight. About thirty meters away shimmered a security field under heavy bombardment from phaser fire. Rubble littered the floor in every direction, and bodies of dead crewmen lay fanned out from the aliens’ stronghold. He thought he saw the field waver for an instant, but watched it doggedly resist the onslaught. After a moment, he saw the point where the field ended and a clear shot could be obtained. Off to the right of the field, he could see some shots land on the far wall rather than the field. From that angle, the aliens would be wide open. A bulkhead prevented him from seeing the aliens directly, but he could guess what was there. Two powerfully built aliens crouching behind a shield barely wide enough for the two of them. “Koon to Speer,” Speer’s com badge squawked. Speer tapped the badge and barked out a toneless, “Aye!” “What do you need down there?” Koon asked. “Give me a little time,” Speer replied and tapped his badge again. “Speer to Shin.” “Go ahead,” Shin replied. “Shut down all security fields in engineering,” Speer ordered. Shin obeyed, but the field in front of the two aliens remained stubbornly solid. Speer was about to repeat his order when Gordon mused, “The control links must be a mess by now.” He turned to Speer and announced, “We’ll have to destroy the emitters on the other side of the room.” Exasperated, Speer grabbed Gordon by the shoulder and pinned him against the bulkhead. “Stay here!” he barked. Turning to Case and Moritz he ordered, “Standard assault by the right flank.” Case and Moritz peeked around the corner that shielded them from the ongoing battle one at a time. While Moritz was looking around the corner, he suddenly went rigid then fell dead to the floor along with a sizable chunk of the wall. Speer and Case took a glance at the dead man, then charged into the battle firing their phaser rifles. The loud brrrap brrrap of the alien weapons fully deafened them to the chaos all around them. On legs made fleet with terror and outrage, the two men raced across the deadly field of fire between the intruders and the battling engineers scattered about the deck. One of Speer’s legs was beginning to stiffen seriously by now, so Case darted past him in four bounding strides. It was a foolhardy and suicidal tactic that should have killed them, but as luck would have it the engineers were so shocked to see the two racing across their field of fire that they stopped shooting all at once. In the next few seconds, the room seemed to shrink as the cacophony of phaser fire shut down as if from a switch. The two aliens couldn’t help but notice the sudden change and scanned their surroundings for an instant to check what had happened. That instant was just long enough for Case to round the edge of the security field and fire a shot that knocked a leg out from under one of the aliens. The wounded alien fell back against his companion and fired a wild shot at Case that almost took his head off, but instead burned his left arm almost completely off. Speer rounded the extremity of the shield and fired wildly at the two aliens. In a blind rage, he sprayed the area behind the shield with shots and managed to land another shot on the already wounded one and keeping the uninjured one from returning fire. Seeing a brief chance opening up, the engineers charged the intruders firing wildly at a dead run. The remaining intruder was smothered in phaser fire and almost reduced to ash. When it was over, a vast quiet fell over the deck that belied the frenzied minds of the men aware of it. The engineers stood in wide-eyed, ear ringing silence, stunned by the events of the last few minutes. Some slouched in postures of complete exhaustion, while others shook with nervous energy. All faced the bodies of the aliens as if expecting them to stand and fight again. Speer let the phaser rifle hang from its strap while he struggled to collect his thoughts. Slowly his body began to inform his racing mind of tremendous pain along his left side. Case stared at the two dead aliens with a blank expression for a long time. Then without changing that expression one bit, he marched forward and fired two direct shots into each of the intruders’ heads. “Done,” he sighed then sunk to the floor as the shock from his ruined arm took him. Speer tapped his com badge again. In a calm, toneless voice he said, “Speer to Koon, engineering clear. Request emergency transport directly to sic bay for… for…” he looked around at the scattered bodies around the deck and suddenly felt confused as what he should do with them. Pain began to fill his mind and sap his concentration. His burned arm and leg suddenly felt aflame and swollen to impossible proportions. One side of his head felt somehow heavier than the other, and it took an act of will to keep it level with his shoulders. All of this information began to drown out his thoughts in a primal sea of agony. He never noticed Gordon bark out the orders to have him sent to sic bay. By the time he materialized in front of the doctor, Speer had passed out. “How bad is it, Eddie?” Koon asked. Gordon sounded close to tears, “The warp core is in tact, but almost everything else is wrecked. I think I can give you maneuvering thrusters, but a complete rebuild of the impulse drive will have to be undertaken before I can fire it up.” “What happened down there?” Koon asked. “They materialized right in front of the main diagnostic panel and shot everyone in sight, Captain,” Gordon explained. His voice betrayed a tremor of emotion as his nerves cooled and the loss of his people set in. “I’ve lost six people at least, maybe more.” “I’ll try to find a quiet place to repair the damage, Commander,” Koon promised. “I’ll have to ask you keep the core running a while longer.” “Aye, sir,” Gordon replied sounding drained. “I’ll keep you informed of any trouble.” The com went dead without Eddie signing off. Koon turned to Lieutenant Shin. “Any more aboard?” “Unsure right now, sir,” Shin replied. “We have reports coming in from every deck filling the com channels reporting damage. Sensor logs indicate at least ten of those aliens beamed aboard, but we can only account for seven.” “Everybody pair up. Nobody travels alone anywhere in the ship until we’re sure the ship is secure,” Koon ordered. Turning to Okuma he assumed a quieter tone. “Compile a detailed list of damage and get started on any system that threatens the basic safety of the crew. I want people to get some rest in a few hours at least. Maintain red alert until the ship is declared clear, then stand down to an engineering alert.” These orders struck Okuma as somewhat foolish. An engineering alert wasn’t even a yellow alert in terms of readiness. Unlike yellow alerts that commanded all crewmen man their stations in preparation for a threat, engineering alerts split the crew up into their watches and were intended as a form of ship wide diagnostic. Crewmen were instructed to start in their quarters and move to their work stations in the search for breakage. Repair teams were to organize by sections and in shifts. Under ordinary circumstances, such alerts were the tools of tyrannical Captains as a kind of prolonged drill. Called “white glove alerts” throughout the fleer, the kind of Captains that used an engineering alert were thought of as perfectionist tightwads trying to shave time from the private lives of crewmen. In this case, she could see the sense of it. The ship was still underway, the damage they had sustained over the last hour was largely uncataloged, and after the last few weeks of frantic work merely to survive, the crew approached the threshold of complete exhaustion. While the work repairing the ship could not stop, especially now, a measured response to it could allow them to sort out a strategy to apply the energies of the crew. Lieutenant Shin drew her attention again, “Sir, engineering reports they’ve discovered the bodies of two more aliens.” “Was there a fight?” Okuma asked. “No, sir,” Shin replied. “They were caught in the explosion of the impulse buffers.” She paused a moment before adding, “Apparently there’s not much left of them.” “That makes for how many?” Koon asked. “Six,” Okuma told him. “Make that eight,” Shin said. “The galley just reported taking down two more.” “Casualties?” Koon asked. “Fifty-five in sic bay with more coming in,” Shin said. “Eighteen confirmed dead.” Okuma froze in horror at the figure. On a ship as close-nit as Pioneer, the initial loss of a dozen crewmen a few weeks ago had been bearable only by the need to survive. Now more were added to the tally, and she knew this was a career-breaking figure. No peacetime ship had lost half so many people in over seventy years. Koon remained outwardly unmoved and practical, “Are there any in danger right now?” In fact there were. Hidden away in the darkened corridors between the crew’s quarters, an alien hunter stalked silently, and almost invisibly, the prey he had so lusted after. Although he did not know it, Heartstock was alone on Pioneer. Also unknown to Heartstock he was being tracked by another predator. Lieutenant M’rath was an unlikely candidate to take on a Hirogen hunter. Short, spare, and dispassionate the scientist had a scholarly demeanor and a history of avoiding confrontation of any kind. However, there was more to the man than the crew understood. Although he was registered as a Vulcan in the crew manifest, he was in fact a Romulan mole. Born on Earth to Romulan agents posing as a Vulcan couple, he had been raised to revere his heritage while maintaining the outward demeanor of his parent’s cover. His parents had told him the grand history of Romulus, and instilled in their son a true desire to serve it. Romulans, he was told, are passionate yet filled with purpose. They would go to war, but only on precise, measured terms that they could dictate. They focused their energies with the same discipline Vulcans used to conquer their emotions, but with the full-blooded passions that had overwhelmed their enemies for millennia. M’rath may have been short, but he hid a powerful frame. He may have been light, but he was obscenely agile. He may have been scholarly, but his life as a mole had sharpened his objectivity to a fine point. Moreover, it was this last part that troubled him now. Not his strength, not his fighting skills, but his cover; his all-important cover he had nurtured and maintained for his entire life would be permanently damaged by acting against this interloper in any way. A display of his fighting skills would raise questions he would be uncomfortable answering. An action taken in an effort to preserve the lives of a Starfleet crew would raise an eyebrow or two from his Romulan masters once they found out. On the offhand chance he did not survive, the encounter with the stranger, a detailed look into his past would raise questions he would be unable to deflect from either sic bay or the grave. On the other hand, how could he allow this interloper harm his fellow crewmen? As part of his deep cover, he had fully integrated himself into the crew as any other officer, and his present duty was clear. He had friends aboard, good friends he cared for no matter his ultimate allegiance. How could he allow them to come to harm and face a mirror the next day? How could he face his superiors on the day he returned to the splendid peaks of Romulus? I have to get home to worry about the Tal’ Shiar’, his acquired Vulcan logic reasoned. I must get home to confront the Tal’ Shiar’, his Romulan character added. Either way he saw no long-term compromise to the short-term dilemma in front of him. As the human philosopher Machiavelli had surmised: it wasn’t how things happened, it was how things are received that dictated action. If he failed to act before the intruder did something to the crew, he would be labeled a coward. If he took this alien down, he would draw attention to himself. Unwanted attention was the real hub of the matter. Keeping his calm, dispassionate demeanor over the last six weeks was nothing short of impossible. With emotions running at an all time high after literally years of bland day-to-day routine had fried his nerves and those of the crew. Working almost non-stop for six weeks, under intense pressure, with the threat of imminent death around every corner of the ship would frazzle the most stoic of men let alone Romulans. Indeed, two weeks ago he had knocked his work partner senseless with a Vulcan neck pinch when a panic attack overcame the man. No sooner had he done it than he regretted it. Impatience was not a Vulcan hallmark, and at the time, he had expected an immediate investigation. Fortunately, Lieutenant Commander Gordon and Commander Okuma met his fit of temper with chagrin. The incident had gone into the grapevine as a dark joke instead of an assault. Taking on the intruder would add fuel to suspicions if he had to answer for it. Adding confusion to the mix was his partner aboard Pioneer. If he exposed himself to an inquiry, then Tylan would come under suspicion, and he didn’t want that either though he wanted to defend her more out of duty to Romulus than any personal attachment currently. Tylan and M’rath had grown up together, trained together , gone to the Academy together, taken their leisure time together, and ultimately been assigned together aboard Pioneer. It went without saying this was far from an accident. Tylan’s parents were operatives from the Tal’ Shiar’ as well, and the two of them long suspected their destinies, right back to their separate conceptions, had been decreed by Romulus. One of M’rath’s parents fellow infiltrators had been discovered frequenting the home of a human woman where he had struck up a passionate affair. Since his cover was that of a Vulcan citizen, Starfleet Counterintelligence had managed to expose a sizeable fraction of the Tal’ Shiar’ network on Earth as a result. The countermeasure against another operative being exposed by his overbearing passions was to send couples to act as the most private of safety valves for one another. Since children only improved the deep cover of their operatives, it made sense to pair up the offspring in a similar manner to keep their secret insulated against the Federation snoopers. In the beginning, it seemed more than fair to have Tylan as his mate, but the marathon session of cohabitation over the last seven years had worn affections thin. M’rath suspected Tylan was tired of him. He knew she had become tedious to his sensibilities. Their arguments had grown from chilly disagreements to frenzied and hushed shouting matches. It was only a matter of time before one of them lost their composure in front of the crew. Be that as it may, he did not want to break cover under any circumstances. M’rath had invested his entire life into his potential service to his unseen masters. If that meant committing the vast majority of his active service to the Federation, that was a frustrating conundrum he was willing to bear. He was willing to utilize his every fiber in the service of his master’s enemies until the day those distant, and so far silent, masters called him to rise against Starfleet. If that meant he had to lie, cheat, and murder close friends within the Federation, then so be it. His hopes and desires came a far distant second to the schemes of Romulus. Most frustrating of all, he was willing to do so even without knowing the ultimate purpose in mind. Until that glorious day of release, he had to maintain cover, garner the trust of those about him, and wait for the order to complete his ultimate mission. Whatever that is, a disgusted, bitter part of his Romulan character thought. Ever since he could command language, the two things burned into his mind: his mission and why he had to obey it. Age and maturity had only made these two opposed ideas more strident in arguing their individual cases. I must serve the Empire without question or hesitation, the part of him that had been trained and disciplined from birth insisted. Why? The part of him that spoke so bitterly asked. I trust in the judgment of the Empire, his training patiently explained. Why? The bitter part of him asked again. The decisions of the Empire are good and just, he would reason. How are you sure? I believe it in my bottommost fiber. Why? Over the years, that one word had gained an implacable authority. Why could send his ordered mind into an internal argument he could neither stop nor win. Why could stir his emotions to the boiling point. Why could cast an ever lengthening shadow of doubt over his most cherished beliefs. Why could frustrate, enrage, hinder, and goad him. Why rattled his skull and made his teeth ring. Only a supreme act of will could sidestep why and he doubted he could keep the ultimate confrontation from falling on his tortured mind. His internal turmoil manifested in ever-increasing frequency. During stressful times all the more so. He’d resorted to the Vulcan meditation he’d learned as part of his cover to combat the ongoing division in his thoughts, and while it did help, it was maddeningly flimsy. Logic and suppressed emotions held no small amount of appeal compared to the clamor his thoughts subjected him to without mercy. Logic held its drawbacks though. Not the least of which was the conclusions logic led him to. Logic insisted not only was his mission never going to be activated, but also he was blind to larger issues he had observed all his life. The Federation may be flawed, but they did make a diligent effort for justice. Romulus may be grand, but it was undeniably corrupt. Starfleet may be large and powerful, but it was not arrayed or designed to confront Romulus. The Tal’ Shiar’ may be infinitely shrewd and powerful, but its motives stemmed from paranoia and ambition. Further examination of logic led directly into the internal argument he from which he sought refuge. Only action offered the relief he desired. Silencing his partner two weeks ago had prompted a feeling close to blessed oblivion in his mind. Allowing that one flash of anger to play out in concise finality had left him almost faint with pleasure. His blood seemed to flow easier, his limbs had obeyed with unnatural speed and control, and when he managed of few hours of rest, his dreams bathed him in every delight he could imagine. …And in front of him stood an opportunity to step into action again. The hunter was little more than a shadow, though M’rath knew not how. He had watched the wall open up like a slit skin and the shadow emerge carefully into the corridor. The intruder alert and the muffled sounds of battle told him this intruder was a threat to the crew, hardly a leap of logic but his methodical mind catalogued the probabilities just the same. He could serve the crew and avoid suspicion by advancing on the threat he found himself hedging. He could garner the trust of Captain Koon himself and thus strengthen his cover. After all, Vulcans fought to defend themselves. There would be few questions in attacking the creature. He could do it and no one would be the wiser. His mission would not be compromised, and that paramount qualification must be obeyed. Why? The bitter part of him asked with a note of implacable glee. It was like a parent catching him lying only to allow himself to add to the humiliation by inflaming the falsehood to obvious nonsense. Something in M’rath broke. With a speed he could scarcely credit, he sprung on the shadow and knocked it to the floor. He sought out the throat of the shadow in an effort to slide his fingers around it and choke the life out of the creature, but the shadow solidified into a dark shape and threw him off with casual ease. M’rath saw a weapon swing down towards his head, and he sidestepped it with deft grace. In a quick gesture of open palms and probing fingers, he knocked the rifle from the intruder’s hands. The hunter brought around a powerful swing intending to knock M’rath senseless, but M’rath stepped inside the arc of the blow and slipped a blow behind one of the hunter’s knees. With a clatter, Heartstock fell to the floor like a pile of rocks. The outrage he felt in being accosted by so small a quarry didn’t stop him from landing a foot directly in M’rath’s chest sending him flying across the corridor. Heartstock regained his feet and tossed a stun grenade at the little man. To his surprise, M’rath caught the grenade and flung it further down the corridor. The flash of light and noise only served to highlight the little man charging at him again. Heartstock tried to sidestep the charge, but he failed to land the blow to the ribs that would have crippled M’rath. The little man seemed to slide past his arm and hand and used the force of the intended strike to unbalance Heartstock. In an untidy heap, he lurched to the floor again only to have the indignity of a heavy kick to his helmet force the precious gear off his head. Heartstock managed to land another powerful kick to M’rath’s chest, but the little man landed on his feet even as he slid backwards. In desperation, he slid a stun grenade along the floor knowing the little man could not catch this without setting it off. Impossibly M’rath spun about and caught the grenade with the toe of his shoe, whirled around and sent the grenade right back at Heartstock. Though he had never seen ballet, Heartstock knew a dance move when he saw one. This deft pirouette had caught the grenade so smoothly, whipped it around the little man so quickly, and aimed it back at him so precisely the grenade caught him already agape with shock. How could this be happening? His frantic mind wondered before the grenade flashed him senseless. He never felt the beating M’rath gave him that kept him unconscious. It was like breathing the fresh air after a deep dive. M’rath’s relief bordered on ecstasy after he withdrew to survey his handiwork. Panting from exertion, he leaned against a bulkhead and basked in precious, blessed relief. Tears of joy ran freely down his face. Eventually the release of pent up emotions was so great it unhinged his knees and he slid to the floor. He raised his hands to his eyes and watched the tremors vibrate with delicious relish. His palms were bleeding green blood, and it felt good. His body was exhausted and that felt good as well. Fingers angled off in unnatural knarls of twisted and broken bones. A lumpy, misshapen mass on the back of his hands indicated more bones were damaged, but he felt no pain. He felt more at ease, more natural than at any other time in his life. …But his cover was blown. There was no way he could convince anyone the stranger had received the damage to his head and face from a simple fight. He’d stunned and brutally beat the hapless alien until he broke the bones in his hands. Vulcans didn’t do things like this. The only redeeming quality was the alien had survived his attack. While not much was left of the thing’s face, M’rath saw the rise and fall of the intruder’s chest and heard the wet sniffles of his breathing. Even if he killed the alien, there was no way to hide what he had done. I don’t care, he thought impulsively. The notion pleased him. It felt correct and fulfilling. I DON’T CARE! He thought again with more certainty. Again the sheer liberating power of this unholy defiance soothed in his mind like water in a parched throat. I don’t care if they find out, he thought then added aloud, “I don’t care,” with sudden resolution. He would break his cover and be done with it. Anything was better than the agony of being someone he was not and never had been. M’rath tapped his com badge and called out, “Security.” “Go ahead,” Lieutenant Shin’s voice replied. “Two to beam to the brig. I just dropped,” using the word dropped instead of a more Vulcan turn of phrase sent a thrill of delight through him, “one of the intruders.” An instant later, he was sitting on the floor of the holding cell too overcome with relief and physical exhaustion to rise. The guard took one look at him and assumed he was injured. He dashed forward and hauled M’rath out of the cell by his armpits. The guard almost dropped M’rath when he noticed he was giggling. Before M’rath could stop himself, he was laughing hysterically. New tears of joy rolled from his eyes as his belly began to hurt from the laughter. He laughed so hard he gasped for air desperately and painfully. The guard watched M’rath with idle fascination at first. Then fascination turned to worry. Then worry was overcome by a hitch in the guard’s breathing. Soon he was infected by M’rath’s laugh and began to stagger about the room when he couldn’t stop. M’rath decided to begin his new existence that day by announcing it to the guard when he caught his breath. “Friend,” he gasped, “might I have the…” he gasped for air again before he could finish, “…pleasure of your name? I’m afraid it’s escaped my mind.” Pioneer ran from the Great Barrier at Warp 9.993 for over an hour before she slowed to a more manageable Warp 8.5 cruising speed. Battered and crippled, she still could run from danger to escape. Her exterior was scored and dented by meteorites close in to the Flare. One of her nacelles stuck out at an odd angle and wobbled drunkenly on the end of its pylon. The stump of the mission module mast stuck out of her back like a broken tooth from diseased gums. She listed to starboard slightly and required constant correction by her computer to keep her on the desired course. The decks around her main impulse drive had imploded and there was little doubt once she dropped out of warp, she wouldn’t move again for a long time. Gordon mixed is metaphors when he considered how to describe the ship’s condition. The incident with the Lassen’s Cutoff had been like a venomous snake bite. They had been paralyzed true, but with a great deal of care, Pioneer had pulled through. The damage from the Flare jump had been like getting the recovering patient to rise from her sick bed and run a fast sprint in a sleet storm; thus causing the onset of emphysema. The attack from the hunters had been like a crippling dose of pneumonia along with it. The patient was now running as fast as she could, but once she stopped she would drop where she stood without pausing to find a suitable bed to rest. Pioneer was in a bad way and there wasn’t a soul aboard who would doubt it. Fortunately, most of the damage was localized and easily isolated in terms of crew safety. Unlike the Lassen’s Cutoff damage which had first crippled their control leads, then collapsed the entire power network at a stroke, the new damage could be reviewed and studied in comparative leisure. Once shut down, the damage to the impulse drive posed no threat to the crew at all, and if kept sealed off, the broken mast could be ignored completely. Everything else was more akin to minor, more irritating than life threatening, breakdowns. Gordon reported as much to Okuma and she agreed to allow most of his people some rest. It was not that way in sick bay. Doctor Mashdi Fahdlan was inundated with a sudden rush of over a hundred bodies in under an hour. Ranging from bad cuts and burns to serious trauma, he quickly set up triage out in the corridor with the help of two of the patients he had confined to their beds earlier that day. One of them was still so ill she staggered around the corridor in a near delirium of fever and the drugs he had administered to fortify her system. The other hobbled around cheerfully on a bad leg atrophied with not-quite-healed nerve damage glad to walk about and help for the first time in a month. Doctor Fahdlan had spent much of the past six weeks treating what he called “playtime injuries” cuts, bruises, broken bones, strained muscles, tendons, and backs; the sort of things that involved a great deal of pain here and there but not infectious of life threatening. In the past seven years, he had operated primarily as a clinician dealing with infections, minor parasites, and the occasional injury. Now he had to shift his work habits to that of a trauma surgeon. Had it only been a patient or two, he might have accepted the challenge cheerfully as a welcome change of pace. Instead, almost half the crew invaded his sick bay dumping bodies pell-mell wherever they could find room. The med units were filled almost at once, and then the patients unceremoniously kicked out of them as more serious cases arrived. It was total bedlam. Before leaving Earth, Doctor Fahdlan had read about the installation of Emergency Medical Programs in all Starfleet vessels, and had been appalled. Taking medicine out of the hands of men and into the logic circuits of computers stabbed at his professional ethics on so many levels. At the time, he had been glad Pioneer launched before this new technology had matured; now he needed fifty of the cursed gadgets. Appraising the situation briefly, he weighed the advantages and disadvantages of asking for some help. Cramming more people into sickbay could cause more problems than they solved, but he had to admit his staff of eight couldn’t handle the load alone. He tapped his com badge and said, “Sickbay to Okuma.” The reply was immediate, “Go ahead.” “Things are getting ugly down here. Can you spare some people?” “How many injured do you have?” Okuma asked. “Ninety at last count. I can’t be sure yet.” “My God!” Okuma gasped before she could stop herself. She seemed to gather her thoughts a moment before announcing, “I’ll be there shortly.” Dr. Fahdlan didn’t actually see her arrive for several hours, but he noticed her arrival almost at once. Sickbay emptied of everyone except the worst cases and his staff five minutes after he called Okuma. Ten minutes later the shouting, frantic free-for-all had turned into something he could follow. An hour later, he glanced out in the corridor and noticed two orderly rows of bodies lined up outside the door. On the far bulkhead lay an orderly line of recovering patients while on the near bulkhead lay another orderly line of patients awaiting treatment. Some of the wounded crewmen tended to the recovering patients across the corridor. A sobering look the other way down the corridor revealed an alarming number of shrouded bodies. “Commander Okuma!” he shouted in alarm. The Commander trotted around the corner and asked him, “Yes, doctor?” In a near rage he shouted, “Get those bodies out of sight! I can’t have my patients seeing that!” Okuma paled, “I’m sorry, Doctor, it didn’t occur to me…” Fahdlan cut her off, “Now, Commander!” “Yes, Doctor,” she replied sheepishly and ran down the corridor to muster some help. Fahdlan noticed his knees go week for an instant, and he leaned heavily against the door for support. “Need help, Doc?” a voice asked. Fahdlan looked up to see a man calmly sitting in the corridor awaiting his turn for treatment. Despite being a seasoned doctor and having been looking at this sort of thing for the last hour, he was appalled by what he saw. The speaker had serious burns over half his head and torso. Raw flesh throbbed an angry white on the man’s face while a trickle from one of his eye sockets told Fahdlan that the eye hidden in that distorted flesh had been ruptured. “We could move the bodies, Doc,” the man said kindly enough. “We don’t want to upset some of the other cases.” Fahdlan stared at the man in shock for what seemed a long time. How could this man conceive of a case worse than his own? The kind of pain he must be enduring had to be enormous. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t allow this man out of his sight for hours. The familiar voice of one of his staff broke his train of thought. “Doctor, we have the patient ready.” Fahdlan spun around and marched into surgery. His mind remained totally blank for the better part of two minutes before he could focus on the patient in front of him. In fact, he scarcely remembered a thing for the rest of the day as one patient after another was presented to him. He later remembered weeping in a most undignified manner while treating someone, but he never remembered who. He remembered a dying woman crying out that she didn’t want to die with gradually decreasing strength until her protests faded to nothing. He remembered particular injuries and exceptional cases, but he couldn’t match faces with them. He remembered insisting on seeing each of them, individually, one after the other, without exception before either taking the patient himself or delegating the case to one of his staff. He managed to catch a couple of nasty traumas that might have been overlooked by an orderly or even an experienced nurse in this way, and no one breathed a letter of criticism for doing so. By the time he’d seen the last one, he’d been working without a break for over two days, and had to be physically carried back to his bunk for some rest. While he remembered very little about the time, almost everyone he treated noted his insistent, tender concern for his or her welfare. Later when he told others he was running on automatic and couldn’t have told them what he had treated them for without the proper reference, no one would believe him. The total losses amounted to thirty-two dead, fifty far too badly injured to be released for duty for anytime between a week to six months, seventy-two minor injures that would keep people off duty for a day or two, and one hundred fifteen outpatient cases, almost a third of the crew. A few more encounters like this one would use up this crew. Levran awoke to find every cubic centimeter of his body throbbing with a dull ache. Nucleic buckling tended to act on organic matter like a bad case of the bends since most organic material is made of simple atoms in constant chemical reactions with more complex molecules. Unlike the heavier elements that made of the alloys used to build ships, flesh is made of comparatively simple stuff and thus there was less to break down. That didn’t mean there wasn’t damage, that tended to be quite extensive, but most of it was limited to leaching out suspended gas in the blood and tissues. By happy coincidence, Hirogen metabolism was uniquely suited for this kind of trouble. Amphibious by nature, their system could purge or absorb expanding gases in their blood and tissues with only mild cases of aches, pains, and the occasional hemorrhage. The humans who had done this to Levran would all be dead by now with exploded lungs and seized joints. Painfully Levran got to his feet and examined his surroundings. The ship was a blackened mess of smashed technology and broken hunters. Surely, the kind of prey who could do this to the Hirogen was a worthy prey indeed! His first instinct was to check on the others who remained aboard, but the lighting was so dim and the hazards of carelessly walking about so obvious that he decided to do something about that first. A moment later, the lighting came back on and he could survey the room. The room resembled the caves under the forests of Gli’Tok where tree roots grew into the caves in every size and shape. Columns of girders twisted about the ship from floor to ceiling while messy sprays of circuitry and connectors lay about like hair that could snare and tangle. Panels had torn loose from their mounts and cluttered the floor everywhere he looked. Strangest of all, every char in the room was stuck to the ceiling with their armrests sunk into the metal above right up to the seat. Under other circumstances Levran might have laughed. The crew, stripped down to a total of five for the assault, were all trapped under the debris and probably dead. A futile search through the rubble confirmed his suspicions after an unknown time spent digging them all out. This didn’t bother Levran much. He’d only been a true part of this crew for a few days, and the injuries of the past year still stung enough to jade his memory of them. He was more concerned with survival. Moreover, despite all the abuse of the last year, he was an expert in this field. He turned to the communications panel and saw that much of the subspace shielding had done its job. Unlike the rest of the ship, this rarely used system was in working order. Activating the auxiliary backup to the communications array, he tried to link up with the Hirogen sensor net. The pride of Hirogen all across the Galaxy, the Hirogen net covered a huge amount of space in an arc from deep inside the Delta Quadrant, to a wide swath inside the Beta and Alfa quadrants, and a little nip into the Gamma. No other species had ever put in place so large a network, for so long, or so effectively. At the height of the Hirogen culture, this net was the lifeline of an empire that spanned three-quarters the way around the Galactic core. However, that had been millennia ago. Over time, the net had lost two-thirds of its effective area and the Hirogen had slipped into near chaos. The loss of a central governing body in the far reaches of the Gamma Quadrant over 8,000 years ago had signaled the onset of a long decline of the Hirogen as a whole. As the infrastructure collapsed, the net began to erode under the onset of time. Most Hirogen territory in the Gamma quadrant had been lost in a brief war with a strange reptile species that had since picked up the Hirogen love for hunting, and gone so far as to breed a specific species for prey in recent years. The rest of it had been lost gradually, bit-by-bit, star-by-star, in ones or twos over the passage of time, and was directly linked to the decline of the net. As the net began to age and fall into disrepair, the Hirogen, rather than maintaining it, abandoned settlements in favor of economy. Had they managed to produce another effective government, they might have overrun the Galaxy, but they let that slip away with the generations. In time, laws had turned into codes and customs. Communities had reverted into clans or feudal territories. By the time Levran was born, the Hirogen culture was rich and full, but their nationality was only a thing of folklore and legend. Living a nomadic life in search of prey, they couldn’t understand how much over hunting had decimated the species within their borders since no one stuck around to study it. The net was something they took for granted, and it was a testament to Hirogen technology what remained of it had functioned flawlessly for over 20,000 years without any help. To Hirogen, it was a vast snare that entangled the unwary, and they were justifiably proud and protective of it. Then Seven of Nine overrode it from Voyager’s astrometric lab in the Delta Quadrant, and almost everything began to change. No non-Hirogen had dared to use the net during the days of the Empire, and no one but the Hirogen had known about it during the decline. It came as huge shocks to have these strangers first discover the net, and then use it with more skill than they knew how to manage themselves. In places far removed from Levran and Pioneer, wheels were beginning to turn. After a long sleep, the massive Hirogen Empire was beginning to stir again. For now their concern consisted of proprietary use of the net, and the occasional message from one friend to another that might not have otherwise have taken place at all. For the most part, the general feeling of the Hirogen towards the strangers was one of annoyance. “How rude!” they would say to each other over gossip and hunting stories. “How dare they use our prized net! We must take steps to insure nothing so outrageous ever happens again!” Even though they had neglected it for thousands of years, to them it was sacrilege for anyone to use it but themselves. In human terms, the nearest equivalent would be to use the Pyramids at Gisa as low-rent apartments. It was downright offensive. Ships began to examine the network in some detail here and there, and what they found amazed the crews sent to investigate. A quiet minority of Hirogen was beginning to grow holding the opinion that the net had to be updated and preserved, but that would require the cooperation of every clan and every House. Since the clans constantly argued over hunting territory, such cooperation (albeit minor) was thought of as far-fetched by common wisdom. None of that mattered to Levran. All he needed was to send a distress signal. Hirogen, no matter how embittered, always stopped to help each other (there could be possible prey near a damaged ship after all) and he was counting on this courtesy to save his life. He tapped in the access code to access the local node. Strange, he thought as the information scrolled across the hologram. The local node had to be activated in order to access it. While not unheard of, network nodes tended to fail rather than shut down. Do they have a hibernation cycle? He wondered. Upon reflection, he’d never heard of any standby mode or longevity cycle. Then again, he knew next to nothing about the net itself. He faintly remembered the Chieftain telling the crew they had to move in before other Hirogen ships came to investigate the local break in the net. In terms of Hirogen procedure, everyone knew aliens shutting down or destroying the nodes in an effort to avoid detection, so gaps in the net were rigorously patrolled. But the kind of shut down prey species had to perform was a manual override impossible to overcome with a simple downloaded code. On impulse, Levran widened his network access to the next node and discovered an identical shut down. In a few moments, he had identified no fewer than six nodes in some kind of standby mode. Impressive, the strangers had shut down a sizable chunk of the local net in an effort to hide their activities. No other species had ever accessed the net, and even the Hirogen didn’t know how to place a node (let alone six) into a standby mode. When a node stopped transmitting Hirogen ships tended to destroy the device so other species couldn’t learn how to use them. That would have been an effective way of denying the use of the net to the ships in this area for good. As things stood, he was in a good position to call in other hunters to run this strange starship to ground. He couldn’t believe a ship capable of surviving an assault by a team of veteran hunters would be so foolish as to leave this most central of Hirogen assets at their disposal. Ah! A ship was nearby and answering his call. He would be safe in a few minutes. Levran looked around the ruined ship and wondered what would be the best trophy of his time here. He may not have drawn blood, but he had survived where all others had perished. This was still a position of honor, and he needed a trophy appropriate to the occasion. He had little time to speculate. A moment later, he received the signal from the approaching vessel to prepare for transport. On impulse, he decided the sensor logs would be a practical trophy to show to his brother hunters. He inserted a spherical gem inside the download jack and flashed the memory into it. Satisfied there was nothing left to take of value, he signaled his readiness to transport and left the hulk to drift by itself eventually down into the Great Barrier.
To Be Continued |
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