Star Trek Terok Nor 01: Day of the Vipers Page 31

  “Worse than you know.” He handed the inspector a hand communicator.

  Darrah raised it to his ear. “This is Darrah,” he said warily.

  “Inspector.” Jas Holza’s voice was tight with tension. “Don’t talk, just listen. Get to the Naghai Keep and collect my wife and my sons. Take them immediately to my villa. You are to stop for nothing, you are to talk to no one, do you understand?”

  “Sir,” he said, and the word was laced with the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm him, “I don’t know if I can—”

  “Just do it!” roared the minister. “I don’t argue with Ke’lora, do you understand me? Do what you’re told, do your job! I don’t want to hear a word from you unless it is to tell me they are safe, is that clear?”

  Darrah felt a cold burn of anger at the slight. Jas had never invoked the inferiority of Darrah’s D’jarra before, and now that he had done it the lawman felt irritated and disappointed; but none of that showed in his next words. “Yes, sir. I’m on my way.” He snapped the communicator off and glared at Proka as they climbed back into the flyer. “Safe? What the kosst is he so worked up about? Safe from what?”

  Darrah listened with growing alarm as Proka explained the priority message that had come over the general Militia channel just minutes before Darrah had landed at Korto. An attack was coming, and the planet was going to a maximum state of alert; but by then they were already airborne and it was too late for him to get a call through to Karys and the children.

  16

  The marauder came in toward Bajor’s orbit from high above the plane of the ecliptic, dropping down in a fast, near-light-speed approach across the rim of the Denorios Belt. The ship’s commander was canny, using the natural dispersal effect of the plasma phenomenon to mask his approach. The flotilla of Space Guard assault vessels and impulse raiders had little time to respond, but they were well-trained men and women, and it was their home that was at stake. They did not shirk from the engagement. All hails were, as expected, ignored by the Tzenkethi ship.

  The first shots were fired with Bajor at their backs, the small two-man raiders leading the interception. The few pilots who survived the engagement would later remark in debriefings how the warship, easily two or three times the mass of a heavy assault vessel, made punishing turns that would have shredded the hull of a Bajoran craft. They outnumbered the marauder, but still they were outmatched.

  The darkness became a web of phaser fire and missile trails as General Coldri’s crews threw up a wall of destructive energy, fighting to cordon the invader and force it back into open space.

  The Tzenkethi ship took hit after hit, but they were glancing blows that the streamlined hull shrugged off, deflector shields glittering and denying anything but the most cursory damage. The marauder’s main armament threw lances of searing white light against the Bajorans; impulse raiders caught in the nimbus were blown apart or sent tumbling, their control systems and crew flash-burned to ashes. The alien ship turned and avoided every attempt by the Guard to converge fire upon it, answering with shots from secondary disruptor cannon arrays. Assault ships were hit with pinpoint attacks that blew out power grids or targeted their warp cores, leaving them dead in space or drifting out of control toward the Denorios Belt. The gunners aboard the Tzenkethi ship seemed to know exactly, precisely where to hit them, rendering the Cardassian-made drives fitted aboard the Bajoran ships inoperative.

  At last, weathering some minor damage but still combat capable, the marauder slowed to pass through the disruption it had caused in the Bajoran intercept force, as if the ship’s commander were evaluating his work. No killing shots came, no executioner’s blows; the disabled ships were left behind and the marauder moved on, turning over Bajor’s terminator toward the sunward side of the planet. Unopposed, it dropped into a low orbit, turning vertical to present its prow and the plasma cannon emitter to the unprotected surface of the world.

  “Status?” said Dukat, shifting on the alien command dais.

  The glinn at the oddly proportioned helm control turned to face him. “We are ready to move to phase two of the operation at your discretion, Dal.”

  Dukat nodded, a faint sneer on his lips as he examined a screen showing the fallout from the engagement. The marauder was an impressive ship, of that there was no doubt, agile and lethal. It was a pity that he could not return with it to Cardassia Prime as a prize, and he made a mental note to ensure that as much data on the craft was gathered as possible before the operation came to an end. The marauder had made short work of the Bajorans, and that had been in the hands of a crew of aliens inexperienced with the vessel. Dukat wondered what it would be like to oppose a Tzenkethi ship at the pinnacle of its capacity. In comparison, these Bajorans were poor sport; they fought in space as if they were still in sailboats on the surface of their oceans. They lacked the hard-won battle experience of the Cardassian navy. He shook his head. “If that was the best they had to offer, we should have invaded this planet five years ago.”

  “With respect, sir, the Bajorans weren’t using Cardassian-surplus warp drives five years ago,” offered the woman.

  “Today, our tactical advantage was much greater.”

  Dukat made a derisive sound. “You give them too much credit.” He glanced at her. “What are they doing?”

  “Regrouping, it appears,” she replied, reading what she could from the encrypted Space Guard communications networks. “As you planned, the ships that were neutralized are clouding the channels with emergency beacons. There are other defense groups returning to the planet at high warp from the outer edges of the system, but they will not arrive in time to interrupt phase two.”

  Dukat stood up, looking at the arc of the planet represented on a dozen of the small console screens. “We proceed, then.” He drew a padd from a sealed pocket and activated it with a tap of his finger. The device presented him with a string of surface coordinates and firing protocols. There was nothing else, no indication of what was being targeted or why it had been chosen for destruction. He relayed the numbers to the glinn, and when the job was done he deactivated the padd. Immediately, the device went hot in his hands and emitted a puff of acrid black smoke. The internal working fused into a mass of useless matter, and he grimaced at the object before he tossed it to the deck. The Obsidian Order do so enjoy their little flourishes of drama.

  “Targets locked in. Plasma reservoir is stable. We are ready to fire.”

  And now, all of them were to play their part in a different kind of theater. Dukat hesitated, looking inward. He searched within himself for the fragments of doubt that had surged to the surface of his thoughts at Ajir. I have come this far. The lives he had taken in the prosecution of this mission up to this point had been soldiers. Once he gave his word of command, it would be civilians that would be put to the sword.

  Dukat studied Bajor, and his hand came up to a screen to trace the line of the planet’s curvature. He looked, and found no uncertainty. It was regrettable, but there were sacrifices to be made, and they would not be the lives of his people, his family. Never again. I will do what I must.

  He gave the order to fire.

  The first bolt fell from the sky in a brilliant streak, atomizing the thin clouds over Korto, a rod of incandescent energy that drew thunder behind as it ripped air molecules apart.

  The polarized windows of the police flyer weren’t enough to stop the bright flare from hitting Darrah and Proka like a physical blow, and both men reflexively clutched at their faces, shielding their eyes. Darrah saw the hazy image of his bones through the flesh of his fingers, heard the screech and howl of the flyer’s controls as an electromagnetic backwash lanced through them.

  “Fires take me, what was that?” Proka spat, blinking furiously.

  Darrah ignored him, fighting through streaming eyes to hold the aircraft in the sky.

  The concussion hit them next, buffeting the craft in a burning updraft. Proka stabbed a finger at the city; they were no more than twenty kellipate
s distant from the Korto limits. A huge patch of the settlement down toward the docks was burning. Clouds of vapor roiled overhead.

  “Steam from the river,” said Darrah. “They hit the low districts.” He thought of the stacker blocks where he had once lived, somewhere inside that inferno.

  “We’ve got to get on the ground,” snapped Proka. “We can’t risk getting caught in—” He balked and pointed at the sky. “Another one!”

  Darrah was ready this time, and covered his face with the meat of his forearm. The hurricane scream of the energy bolts struck again, and this time there were more of them, hammering at the air. The flyer fought against him, desperately trying to throw itself into the ground, but Darrah resisted, riding the shock waves even as the wind shear ripped at the hull, shredding the stabilator winglets.

  When he looked up again, the entire city was shrouded in smoke, a spreading black cloud pooling in the shallow valley beneath the hill districts. Only the peak and the Naghai Keep were clearly visible, rising above the spreading darkness. The entire attack had lasted less than a minute.

  Darrah slammed the throttle forward to full power and threw the ship toward Korto, aiming the nose toward the hills.

  “Where are you going?” Proka asked.

  “Job’s done,” he snapped back. “We got Jas’s family out, now I’m going to get mine!”

  The constable didn’t reply. He was craning his neck to see up into the ash-smeared sky. A new storm of killing fire lanced overhead, the angle from the attacker in orbit too shallow to strike the city again.

  “They’re targeting something to the east,” said Proka.

  “Not the enclave…”

  Darrah’s voice caught in his throat. “The Kendra Shrine.”

  The cloisters of the monastery were filled with prayers and panic in equal measure. Built high into the hillside, the ancient campus commanded an excellent view of the provinces to the west. It was with silent terror that the novices, prylars, and ranjens assembled for dawn mass on the square were witness to the streaks of sunfire falling from the sky to strike the distant blur of Korto’s conurbation. The sounds of the detonations were only now reaching them, the shock wave rumbles rattling the ornamental stainedglass windows in the halls.

  Then the first blast fell on Kendra, hitting the compound of service sheds and habitats for the visiting penitents at the base of the hill. The concussion turned the ancient glass to molten bullets, the plume of hellish flame behind it erasing the cluster of stone buildings in a heartbeat. The next shot came and tore the tallest towers from the high levels of the monastery. A construction that had stood on the surface of Bajor for thousands of years, that had weathered wars and famines and storms beyond counting, now cracked and crumbled under its own weight, stone breaking with a mournful cry that carried down the valley. No more strikes followed; there were other targets scattered across Bajor’s dayside to be prosecuted. No more were needed at Kendra. The damage was done, fires and collapse spreading with roaring, snarling fury.

  The sound made Vedek Arin freeze where he stood, halfway down the length of the grand corridor toward the shrine. The polished floor beneath his feet shook as if wracked by an earthquake. His calling as a servant of the Prophets warred with his instinct for self-preservation. The Orb…Dare he leave it to whatever fate was to come, trusting in his gods to preserve it so that he might flee—or should he enter the shrine and carry out the ark holding the Tear, risking his life to venture inside and perhaps be buried alive? A way behind him, a huge chandelier made of brass and crystal tore free of the ceiling and struck the ground with a colossal crash. Arin’s terror leapt a hundredfold and he gaped in panic, rooted to the spot by his fear. He took a hesitant step toward the shrine; he registered that the doors were hanging open. The priest staggered forward, and his foot touched a rent in the floor where a stone tile should have been. He pitched forward, crying out, and he struck the stonework hard. The impact dizzied him, pain blurring his sight. “Prophets…” he called out. “Aid me…”

  Strong hands dragged him to his feet, and the vedek blinked. There was blood in his eyes from a streaming cut on his forehead that sang with pain. Cascades of dust and falling tiles were impacting all around him. “The cloister…”

  “It’s coming down, Vedek!” He recognized the voice, saw the man who was holding him up.

  “Osen?” He staggered. “What…Were you inside the shrine?”

  “I came after you!” insisted the ranjen. “We have to get out!”

  “But the Tear of the Prophets is still in there!” cried Arin. “We can’t leave the Orb of Truth!”

  Gar was dragging him away. “The Prophets will protect it,” he shouted over the grind of stone on stone, “and we must protect ourselves!”

  Great chunks of the walls and the pillars supporting them were impacting all around them now, and finally Arin surrendered to his fear, letting the young priest drag him away, out of the building.

  Outside, the vedek stumbled and fell to his knees, turning in time to see the monastery groan like a dying man and collapse in on itself in a final tide of noise and gray-brown dust. The clouds of powdered stone and ash washed up and engulfed the monks, coating them in the cloying powder, painting them the color of ghosts. Arin looked up into the sky and saw white fire falling toward the horizon, in the direction of Janir and Ashalla.

  In Dahkur, dawn had still to break across the city, but the streets were choked with people and vehicles desperate to flee the conurbation. Streetscreens were showing live broadcasts from the destruction wrought in Korto, and the citizenry was panicked.

  In the halls of the embassy of the Cardassian Union there was a skeleton crew on duty on the upper levels, soldiers guarding the doors to keep the place secure, but no staff members at the checkpoints or on the office tiers. All of them were a dozen levels below, in the emergency bunker along with the command staff and Jagul Kell himself. All of them but Rhan Ico.

  The embassy was replete with protected chambers, a monument to the Cardassian obsession with paranoia and security, but the room that Ico stood in was the most secure of them all, constructed to tolerances and designs that were so secret no living being had a hand in fabricating them. It existed on no plans for the building; there was no door, so access was only via a hidden transporter; it had nothing to connect it to the outside world. The machine-manufactured room was a module that, like the rest of the building, had been made whole on Cardassia and shipped to Bajor to be beamed into place. The walls were laced with complex circuits that could defeat a million kinds of listening devices and sensors. Ico had even heard rumors that the panels contained a bio-neural matrix based on cultured Vulcan brain tissue, which could fog penetration by telepaths. She was confident that no one on the planet could know what was going on in here.

  The folded-space transporter unit before her completed its phase-shift cycle with a hiss of displaced molecules and commenced the reintegration process. Inside the sealed receptor capsule a shape began to take form, and she pressed her hand to the transparent wall of the pod. A cool smile unfolded on Ico’s lips. It was a genuine emotion on her part, a rare thing for the woman. Certainly, it was not something she would have exhibited in the presence of anyone else. But here, in the room, she was utterly alone, and so she could drop her pretense for a short time. It was, in its way, refreshing.

  The transporter completed its work, and the capsule opened to her. Ico reached in and ran a hand over the careworn wooden case that lay inside. Intricate scrollwork in an ancient Bajoran ideogram script framed the planes of the box, looping around convex oval lenses set in the sides of the container. The carved wood was warm to the touch. For long moments Ico’s fingers dithered over the small iron latch on the front of the container. The glow of the object inside the ark cast a honeyed illumination that scintillated, compelling her to open it.

  “And this is what drove Hadlo to his folly,” she said to the air. Ico smirked and pushed aside any thoughts forming in her mind th
at she might actually give in to the same curiosity. Instead, she gathered up the box and placed it inside a padded cargo container, pausing only to seal it with a beam tool and tag it with an encrypted transporter locater. “The first of many,” Ico said to herself.

  A faint rumble made her look up at the ceiling. The bombardment of Dahkur had started. She returned to her work, secure in the knowledge that she was in no danger.

  The Cardassian warships dropped out of warp inside the orbit of Jeraddo, shedding velocity in flares of rainbow radiation. The maneuver, like every other event in the sequence, was a precisely timed, perfectly choreographed display to present the right image to the Bajoran ships still drifting damaged inside visual range. Their firing grids pulsing, the Kashai and the Daikon fell toward the Tzenkethi marauder like swooping raptors. Disruptor bursts arced through the vacuum around the teardrop starship, flashing off the force shields.

  “Phase three initiated,” said the glinn, gripping the helm console as the marauder shook under the impacts.

  The thought had crossed Dukat’s mind that if Ico or Kell or any one of a dozen other enemies he had made wished to end his existence, this was an opportune moment for him to do so. All that was needed was someone able to exercise the right amount of influence over Dalin Tunol, to have her turn her aim away from showy near-hits to a direct shot at the Tzenkethi command tier; but Dukat was not concerned. He had picked Tunol for her loyalty and her intelligence. The woman had placed her banner by Dukat’s because she knew the kind of man he was. Driven and ruthless, and in the Union such an officer would make his mark or die trying. He had known Tunol was of the same stripe from the moment she was assigned to his vessel.

  The ship rocked again, and a plasma conduit ruptured across the bridge, spitting sparks and white gas. “Are the charges set?” demanded the dal.