A Voice in the Wilderness

"Your people murdered our force commander and fired on us! You're supposed to defend us! I demand that you call off your troops or I'm taking this to the Security Council!"

"Sorry, Minister Q'Tira," I tell the infuriated Kobali with my sweetest smile. "The former is an internal matter between you and the Romulans. The Prime Directive forbids me from getting involved. As for the latter, the Eighth Fleet and the 103rd are under very specific orders to ensure that your government complies with the Alliance's demands. Way above my pay grade. I get involved and I'm court-martialed six ways from Sunday."

"But Ambassador Sugihara said—"

"Sorry, my hands are tied. Have a nice day," and I hang up on him.

"You do realize, Captain, that's a blatant misuse of the Prime Directive," Tess comments with some amusement. "And technically, it isan Alliance matter…"

"That moron has a problem with my phrasing, he can talk to my JAG rep. Diplo wouldn't let us deal with the problem because Sugihara had his head up his ass as usual, but I'm more than happy to let D'trel fix it for us. At least Ballard's working with us, even if her underlings are trying the same old tricks. Send the recording to the Premier's office so she knows what her minions've been pulling under her nose. And copy Command—Riker needs a laugh."

"Yes, ma'am," Tess says with a ghost of a smile, and waves a hand at Ensign Esplin; the Saurian busies herself with her console.

"Good. Come on, let's blow this taco stand." Wiggin turns and gives me a questioning look. "Don't look at me, Master Chief; I picked it up at the Academy. Conn, set course for the Vaad border and take us out of orbit. Warp 9."

"Aye, ma'am," Lieutenant Park agrees.

Time to go play diplomat.

Four hours earlier…

"Prophets, can you believe the look on Q'Nel's face when she comes storming in?" I laugh at the security feed from the forward command post in Kobol. "Phekk'ta pointy-ears have all the fun."

"Captain Kanril, I really don't think you get how serious this is," Commander Sibrin Korami of the Onondaga says, shocked. "She just—"

"She did what I have wished to do from our third day on Kobali Prime," Captain Garok of the IKS NaS'puchpa' interrupts. The big one-eyed Klingon continues, "quvha' Qobalnganpu'."

"But she just jeopardized the entire alliance!" the Zakdorn disagrees as the digital version of D'trel takes off the general's head.

I rotate in my chair in the Bajor's wardroom to let a Bajoran E-1 past with a bucket of paint for the still-bare metal where a hull breach from the fight before last was patched, then rotate back and fix Korami with my "Sergeant Kanril" glare. "Do you really think D'trel would've gotten away with that without a Security Council vote backing it? Oh, sure, Sugihara tried to stop it, but"—I start counting off on my fingers—"the Klingons, Hirogen, Benthans, and Octanti sided with Ambassador tr'Rllaillieu and the Hazari and Hierarchy abstained."

"It's not the human thing to do," complains Lieutenant Dzvonko Pandev, acting captain of the Sitak since the most recent skirmish.

I round on him, my expression dark, my voice cold as ice; he visibly recoils. "Guess what: she's not human, you idiot. And neither am I or Korami, in case you didn't notice. This isn't the Academy where there's always a perfect—" A chime from the intercom short-circuits my rant. "WHAT?!"

"Uh, sorry to interrupt, ma'am," Ensign Esplin nervously says. "I've got Vice Admiral Reynolds on gold channel 1."

I take a breath, stand, and straighten my uniform jacket. "It's all right, Ensign. Patch her through." The main screen flicks from theBajor's Orb-and-wormhole coat of arms over to a human female three-star. Marama Reynolds is easily my father's age, with bronze skin, silver hair tied up in a tight bun, and ornate tattoos across her chin, lips, and nose. "Sir."

"Captain Kanril, I have a priority mission for you. The rest of you can leave." She waits for others to file out of the room—Pandev seems somewhat skittish as he passes me; I wonder why?—then turns back to me. "The President's pissed."

"All due respect, sir, welcome to my world."

"Not at you this time, Captain," she corrects me, chuckling, then sobers. "FNN just aired a two-hour exposé on all the Kobalis' various dirty dealings. You should see the flame wars on the extranet—public support for Operation Delta Rising just went in the bog, along with Okeg's approval rating. I haven't seen poll numbers drop that fast since Councillor Steiner turned out to have Orion Syndicate ties."

"My heart bleeds. I voted straight-ticket Labor."

"Can I finish, please?" she asks in an exasperated tone.

"Sorry, sir."

"Thank you. Anyway, the President just sacked Sugihara as Ambassador to the Delta Alliance—"

"Finally," I mutter.

"—and replaced him with Councillor zh'Thane from Andoria." I nod approvingly. "He wants to try and salvage something from this clusterfuck before the election"—she stops and glares at me, and my mouth snaps shut—"and after consulting with the Council and Starfleet Command, he's decided getting a peace deal with the Vaads is our best bet. We want you and the Bajor to make the approach."

My eyes widen in surprise. "Me on a critical diplomatic assignment? Remember what happened last time?"

Her mouth quirks in a grin. "Of course I do. It's why I recommended you. Think about it: the Vaadwaur Supremacy is a military dictatorship, and the culture is one of militaristic nationalism, like the old Cardassian Empire. Overseer Eldex probably won't respect a privileged, wide-eyed idealist, but he might go for a career soldier who talks plain."

"Did the President approve you using me?"

"He didn't like it, but between myself, Riker, and Secretary Shad we were able to convince him of the logic." He gives me a pointed look. "You still have supporters in the brass, Kanril, especially after that thing in the mirror universe. Don't squander it."

"Uh, noted, sir."

"I'll send the details in an encrypted squirt."

"Captain, we're coming up on a Vaad border picket," Master Chief Wiggin announces. "Make it one Astika-class artillery ship, fourManasa-class attack ships of various makes, and a dozen fighters."

I pull the jumja stick out of my mouth and order Tess to bring us to red alert. "Any hostile moves, Wiggin?"

"They're forming up into a standard attack formation, fighters screening escorts, escorts screening the cruiser."

"Park, bring us out of warp two astronomical units from their position and make plenty of noise."

"Crash-translating now."

The harder you decelerate as you come out of warp, the more tachyonic matter you drag with you and the bigger the shockwave you send through subspace. Usually that's not a good idea, but in this case I want to be noticed.

And they know it, as the bell-necked Vaad female who hails us from the artillery ship attests. "Delta Alliance vessel, this is Commander Darva of the Vaadwaur Supremacy Warship Revenge. You're either an incompetent or you wanted us to know you were coming. Explain yourself or we will attack."

"Commander Darva, I'm Captain Kanril Eleya of the Federation Starship Bajor. By now you've scanned us, and you'll notice that while I have my shields up because I'm not a moron, my phasers aren't charged and my torpedo tubes aren't loaded. I've got no interest in fighting you. I'm here to formally request an audience with Overseer Eldex to discuss peace terms."

"Peace?" she hisses. "Your Federation comes out here, aligns itself with the murderers of billions and those who keep our people captive, awaiting their deaths to profane their bodies and rape their souls, and you want to talk peace?"

"Look, I get that you're angry. I've been there; long story. But you'll notice that when we hit Vaadwaur Prime with the Alliance we held the Turei back from glassing the place again, and they wanted to, believe me."

"A foolish mistake."

"No, a pragmatic decision." A moral one, too, but that's not productive to mention so I leave it out. "We made a bet that keeping you around could be a good thing. A, you've got the firepower to take the Borg ship-to-ship and win, and that's a rare thing in this region. B, the bluegills controlling your leaders were a skirmish in a much bigger war that involves the whole galaxy, not just your little pocket of it, and if we're going to beat them we need all the help we can get."

"So, you propose an alliance, not only a truce. The temerity—"

"We've already got a truce," I interrupt. "The army that beat your troops on Kobali Prime is now enforcing a ceasefire line in no-man's-land. I got a report as we approached that one of our armor units has already fired on Kobali forces to keep that truce intact." I suppress a grin at that thought. With their fleet mostly destroyed by the Vaads in the initial invasion and the Samsar reduced to a flying wreck in the clusterphekk earlier in the week the zombies don't have anything that can hope to counter a T-204, not even the anti-armor weapons we gave them. They're good enough against Voth and Vaad mechs but they can't punch through a Starfleet main battle tank, and they won't target our own people anyway. "As I speak the Romulans and Benthans are confiscating the contents of the cryo vault and any Vaadwaur corpses the zombies haven't already … used."

As I talk her expression changes from indignant rage, to surprise, to cautious curiosity. "What will become of them?"

"You can have your dead back as a show of good faith; we'll leave them at the abandoned Talaxian mining colony in the Entaba system in a couple of days. We're going to transport the cryo tubes to the Alpha Quadrant." I hold up a hand to forestall an outraged answer. "They'll be revived and well cared-for—you can inspect the facilities on request—and we'll repatriate them to the Supremacy as part of any peace settlement, no questions asked." I take a breath. "In return, we want the Supremacy to join the Delta Alliance."

"We are Vaadwaur. We fight our own battles."

I laugh derisively. "You're missing the point. There's no throne, there is no version of this where you come out on top. There's what, a couple hundred thousand of you left? No matter your technical advantages Starfleet can counter anything you can pull together by itself, just by moving a few fleets from less-critical areas—you really don't get what you're up against here. But if you come on-side, you get trade partners, military backup, breathing room to build up a sustainable population, rights to colony worlds, and we're even willing to enforce reparations on the Kobali, within reason."

Darva looks at me critically. I glare back at her. Finally she says, "You have the authority of your government behind this?"

"My orders come straight from the President and the Delta Alliance Security Council endorsed the plan, so yes."

"You make a compelling case, Captain Kanril. I make no promises but I will pass it up the chain of command."

"Thank you, that's all I wanted. We'll pull back for now, but we'll be in the area for the next two weeks. Broadcast a message on subspace radio, frequency, uh—"

"750 kilohertz, ma'am," Esplin supplies.

"—if you want to talk further. Bajor out." The screen flicks back to the starfield. "Conn, reverse course. Get us out of here before she changes her mind. Maximum warp."

"Aye, aye."

My comm awakes me from a sound sleep and I gently push Gaarra's arm off me to get to my combadge on the nightstand. "Kanril. Word from the Vaads?"

"No, ma'am," the officer of the watch, a lieutenant from Gunnery, answers. "We've picked up an odd signal from a moon on the seventh planet of a nearby system."

"'Odd' how?"

"Looks like Borg, but it doesn't match any known Collective or Cooperative protocols and there's no sign of any active Borg presence in this system."

Maybe more of the Vaads' handiwork. "Go to yellow alert. Change course and go check it out. I'll be up there in a couple minutes." If there's Borg activity this close to Allied space we need to know about it.

I quickly dress. Gaarra murmurs behind me in the bed and I lean in to kiss him. Poor guy just got off-shift three hours ago after spending what should've been his light-duty time fixing a serious failure in the nav deflector, so I let him sleep.

I get up to the bridge as we approach the planet in question. Biri's looking over Wiggin's shoulder. "Don't you ever sleep, Biri?"

"Caught a catnap a couple hours ago. Come here; you're not going to believe this."

I glance at the screen but it's all gobbledygook. "Biri, I have no idea what I'm looking at."

"You know what a radioactive half-life is?" I nod. "Well, we can use the decay rates of radioisotopes to calculate the age of things. Really old trick."

"Right, like carbon dating. So?"

"So, based on the amount of platinum-190 and its nuclides in these alloys, we're looking at something about four and a half billion years old."

"Sher hahr kosst. That's old."

"Older than most Class M planets, and about the same age as the oldest Preserver ruins."

"Beginning deceleration," the Gamma Shift conn officer, Ensign Pakniso, announces. "Coming out of warp in five, four, three, two, one, mark."

A blue-green Class I super-Jovian gas giant redshifts into view as our warp field collapses. I grab for the top of Wiggin's chair as Pakniso swoops in way faster than I generally like, feeling the g-forces through the dampers. She's a Karemma exchange officer from the Gamma Quadrant and she's not as careful as Park.

She angles the Bajor towards a moon the size of an average Class M planet. The computer generates the designation Adaris VIId based on the Benthan maps of the region, and overlays a description on the viewscreen. My eyes try to slide past the technobabble but I can make out enough of it to get an idea. Class N, temperature in the high hundreds of Kelvins, highly acidic atmosphere, geologically active, no sign of any life with more than one cell.

That's apart from the structure that comes into view as we enter geosynchronous orbit on the night side. Wiggin starts a detail scan and throws the readouts up on the main viewscreen; the telescope shows a sprawling ziggurat of hard cubes, almost black with faint green circuit tracery. "By jingoes," Wiggin breathes.

"Borg, definitely Borg," I growl. "Sound battle stations!"

"Just how big is that thing?" Tess asks from behind me as the klaxons start to blare and the tac display comes up. I didn't hear her come in.

"The central ziggurat is seventy-seven kilometers tall, forty-nine on a side. There's also roughly a thousand spires ranging from seven to twenty-eight klicks. The entire complex covers a little over 2400 square kilometers."

"Weird," Biri says. Off my look, "They're all multiples of seven, Captain."

"Yeah, I worked that one out myself, Biri. So?"

"It's a prime number."

"Still not telling me anything I don't know."

"And it's considered an important number in cultures all across the galaxy. The humans have the seven deadly sins and so forth, Trakor made seven prophecies, there's seven books in the Hebitian Records, the—"

"You sure you're not reading too much into this?" Tess asks. "Do the Borg even use kilometers?"

Biri opens her mouth, then cocks her head thoughtfully. "Okay, maybe I jumped to conclusions. Still, it's an interesting coincidence."

"That's nice. Any reason we shouldn't just wipe the whole site from orbit?"

"Always the way, isn't it, El?" the Trill complains. "We finally find something worth studying and your first instinct—"

"Biri, it's Borg!" I point out. "I don't know if the Bajor can safely take a cube. She probably can, but I'm not eager to test that, you get me?"

"Well, then, ma'am, you'll be happy to know I'm not picking up anything resembling a ship anywhere in the system," Wiggin says.

"Really?" He nods. "What about the ziggurat? You getting anything?"

Out of the corner of my eye I see Gaarra rush onto the bridge, still pulling his jacket on. "Place looks dead but there's still that faint subspace signal we picked up as we were going by. The same fragment of binary machine language, over and over."

"Esplin?"

The communications officer types a few commands, then shakes her head. "Translation software can't make out much; OS and base language is probably too different from ours. But, educated guess, it's a warning signal of some kind, or maybe a mayday."

I tap my foot for a moment, pondering. Finally, "Stand down from battle stations but continue to monitor the area. Biri, you up for an away mission?"

"Captain, the place is older than some star systems," Tess points out. "I doubt anyone's still alive down there."

"We've seen weirder," Gaarra retorts. "Remember that thing with the Xucphran geese at Klaestron IV?"

"Gaunt's hosts, I still don't know what that was about," Biri chortles, pressing a hand to her face. "But anyway, even if there's nobody down there, this is still the earliest example of Borg archeotech anyone's ever found. Might be we learn something useful, Tess."

I stare out at the mud-colored world below, eyeing the dark green splotch on the surface. A knot of fear roils in the pit of my stomach. "El, are you all right?" Gaarra asks, touching my shoulder.

I take a steadying breath. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm fine," I repeat more confidently, then reach for my combadge. "Dul'krah, you awake?"

"Yes, Captain. We are at battle stations."

"Prepare an away team for insertion in a potentially hot LZ."

"Our opponent?"

"The Borg."

END OF PART ONE

Author's Notes: The bit where Lieutenant Pandev complains that "it's not the human thing to do"? Yeah, the original speaker was Janeway.