Chapter 4 – Motive

Stardate: 60556.85

Jabohr watched his sensor screen closely. The Luminous crew had finished their repairs an hour ago; he was expecting them to leave the nebula any time. He could of course attack them in the nebula, but he really did not want to damage the ship too much. He wanted that ship. No he needed that ship. The problem was, he had no idea how to take the ship without destroying it.

It was no use trying to discuss his plans with his friends. The Kazon were always victorious on the battlefield, but that is directly because of their ruthlessness. They did not care how many of their own men had to die to win, as long as they won. Moreover, they certainly didn't care about the condition of the opposing vessel when they finished with it.

OOOOOOOOO

Jabohr knew he was different from his cousins and friends at an early age. Aside from his strange forehead shape, he reasoned things out differently. While his friends were fighting each other for dominance in their crowd, he stood back and waited. Finally, there emerged a winner, a first cousin by chance, big for his age and angry. He had pounded and pulverized the rest into submission, and though he had not engaged Jabohr, he felt that he had control. Then, the time came. Jabohr had watched his cousin fight repeatedly, had studied his every move, and after finding his weaknesses he went in to fight with a plan. There was no doubt it was a sneak attack, but that did not matter. It was a solid victory; Jabohr came out without a scratch while his cousin was in the infirmary for a month and marked for life with the scars of his defeat. No one dared challenge this new leader, one look at that wired up broken jaw deflated the biggest of egos.

Through the years, Jabohr had learned of his parentage. His father told him about his mother and her untimely death at the hands of the Federation. He learned from others who knew her, of her brilliant tactics in battle. Of course, no Kazon male would ever speak of a woman as smart or clever but Jabohr could read between the lines. Some of the battles and attacks that he heard about were obviously too complex to have been conceived by his father or uncles as he knew them.

As he grew older and began training as a pilot and a soldier, he realized that he had inherited this gift from his dear mother. He could almost see the battle in front of him as if on paper. He anticipated his enemy's moves and acted on those instincts. Some of the families whose kids had been humiliated in battle because of his tactical genius accused him of cheating; spreading rumors of sabotage and various other cowardly acts. He paid no attention to these things and worked harder and harder at developing his skills as a tactician.

Understandably, he became discontent after a while. The drills and practices among his peers offered no challenge. He found himself going out looking for fights among the surrounding races. He learned a lot from them, gathering their technologies from the destroyed ships and gathering information from their databases. Anything mentioning Voyager got his undivided attention as he scoured the information for mention of his mother. He hit the jackpot one day as he found an old computer containing the entire downloaded database from Voyager in an old abandoned cargo ship. He learned about the Cardassians and their long history with the Federation. He also found a personnel record for Seska, as he read the information contained in that database about his mother he began to get a full understanding of his own unrest. His was wasting his life and talent among these barbarians in the Delta Quadrant. He needed to be with his mother's people, fighting alongside them, and furthering the cause for which his mother lived and died.

From that day forward, he had put all his efforts into finding a way to join his Cardassian brothers. He worked with the technologies of various races, one of which had been experimenting with natural phenomenon in space. With hard work and pure will driving him, Jabohr and his new friends, the Phinarians, did the impossible. They grabbed the end of a wormhole and forced it into opening a passage to the Alpha Quadrant. Granted, most of the work was completed way before Jabohr was born, but it was his ingenuity that had made it work in the end.

One thing you can count on in any Kazon or Cardassian, is a lack of loyalty. The scientists responsible for creating the device used to manipulate the anomaly didn't see it coming. One day they came into their lab and it was gone, with a few dead bodies left around to warn them not to pursue its disappearance. Jabohr got his way home, and some of the greatest minds among the Phinarians were silenced forever.

In every road, there is a bump, and Jabohr hit his when he started experimenting with his new toy. None of the vessels within his reach was able to make the journey through the anomaly and still be intact on the other side. He experimented with any metal he could get his hands on with the same result. One day he came across an old message buoy in a debris field with a Federation signature. He sent it through and retrieved it back without incident. Of course, he could not fit into the buoy, but he got an idea. He needed to lure a vessel with the same hull signature into his wormhole, take control of it, and ride it back to his mother's home world.

Reexamining the Voyager database, now located in his own ship's computer, he learned how to scan for warp trails. Therefore, through the wormhole into Federation space his scans began, searching for an unsuspecting vessel to come along and fall into in his trap.

OOOOOOOOO

Ready or not, Jabohr had to make his move. The sleek, elegant shape of the USS Luminous was carefully moving its way out of the nebula ahead. He had to complete his self-assigned mission before his father or anyone else for that matter caught on to an intruder in Kazon space. He knew this was his only chance, and he was not about to screw it up.