The Adventures of Augment Gothic (A Star Trek SI)

by Joe Lawyer

A present-day Star Trek fan is forcibly thrust into that dimension and made anew as an Augment, a genetically engineered superman, on the whim of a mischievous god. Armed with knowledge of this dimension's past and future, he's determined to live well, have fun with alien women, and make it look easy. Elements of DS9/TNG/Voy/Ent. Originally co-written with GothicJedi666.

24. Chapter 24

Disclaimer: I own nothing related to or part of Star Trek.

"Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazis are responsible. That, unfortunately, is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization." - Franklin Roosevelt, August 1944

The Adventures of Augment Gothic

Chapter 24

Onboard The Flighty Temptress. Inside Nebula 3254671.

I was surrounded by constantly moving swirls of lavender and pink. While I remained still, these clouds moved around me and surrounded me, sometimes blinding me entirely for several moments, until a small break in the storm opened up and I could see even greater majesty for a time. Sights like these still filled me with wonder and I hoped that that never changed.

Of course, these weren't 'clouds' per se, nor was I in the middle of a 'storm'. What they were was dense concentrations of energetic particles, made up of many, many different compounds and elements, all moving to an unseen music. This nebula hadn't even been given a proper name by the Federation, being an all-too-common class 9 nebula in their classification system, but it served my purposes well as it had sensor deceiving properties that would hopefully hide my ship from detection until it was too late. It might be common, but that didn't take anything away from its beauty, or its utility in this specific situation.

Nebulas were beautiful things, especially when looking at them from the outside in space. From the inside, not so much…normally. With my neural control interface helmet on, though, I was the ship and the ship was me. Even my genetically enhanced eyes did not have the ability to take in the sheer beauty of this nebula from the inside or even detect the delicate movements of the particles' celestial dance. My ship's sensors, though, opened up the universe to me in ways my limited human body and senses never could and I found myself almost hypnotized by the sight, my consciousness expanded far outside my limited physical body.

As I had discovered on several other occasions when using the helmet, which still reminded me of the Cerebro helmet Professor X had used in the X-Men movies, that was both the beauty and the danger of this technology. For someone like me, who could fully utilize and take advantage of the technology, it was addicting and the temptation to spend more and more time connected to my ship like this grew the longer I used it, making it also harder to find the strength to return to my body and its many limitations, especially without the distraction and level of concentration needed during combat. It was only my iron hard will and the life affirming acts that I would need to engage in after our mission was complete, aka lots and lots of sex, that kept me from falling to the temptation.

With the helmet on there was nothing in my sensor range that I couldn't see, though the nebula was interfering with my mid- to long-range sensors, just as I hoped it did the Cardassians'. Section 31's stealth probe was outside the nebula in full stealth mode relaying a constant stream of information back to me though, somehow able to cut through the interference. With the helmet on there was also nothing on the ship that escaped my notice or control, which made Kira, Ro, and Neela's jobs on the bridge superfluous, but I knew better than to say anything like that or stop them from doing their jobs. Idle hands and terrorists were not a good combination.

"Gothic, I don't understand why we're even here," Kira complained from her position at tactical, again; we had been waiting in ambush in this nebula for nearly 12 hours already and her patience had run out. "We should be back on Bajor taking the fight to the Cardassians, not waiting here endlessly to act like thieves and pirates!"

'Shakaar and the other Resistance leaders hadn't required this much convincing,' I complained in the privacy of my thoughts. Kira could be very stubborn at times, especially if something was outside her experience. This was both a great strength and a great weakness of hers.

'Sigh…we've talked about this, Kira,' I explained, again, trying not to let my annoyance show. 'Our acting like pirates, as you put it, is going to hurt the Cardassians and the Occupation far more than anything we could do planetside! We could blow up five factories and assassinate a hundred Cardassian officers and not accomplish a tenth of what this will do in the long-run!'

"Why are your words appearing in text form on our consoles?" Kira complained further after looking down at her console, ignoring my written words. "And did you just type out the word 'SIGH'? Speak normally, damn it, and be serious!"

Ro and Neela laughed at the sheer absurdity of this conversation. I just couldn't help myself from needling her a bit, even during this tense period of waiting for the fucking Cardassians to show up.

To infuriate her even more, I decided to mentally 'speak' via a thunderous and bombastic voice from the ship's speakers normally used for communications. My ship's sensors picked up Ro and Neela rolling their eyes at my little joke, though I could tell they wanted to laugh.

"You may not want to hear this put in such stark, unemotional terms, Kira, but at its heart the Occupation is an economic engine for the Cardassians, akin to a business," I explained. "Its purpose is to make them a profit, not just monetary, of course, but in slave labor and valuable materials to support the buildup of their military and increase their ability to project power in the quadrant. With the right knowledge, you'd be surprised at just how easy it can be to make it all fall apart."

"And this knowledge came from Starfleet Intelligence?" Kira scoffed. "Why would Starfleet and the Federation help us now, when they never have before?"

That was a valid question. When I had decided on this course of action, to attack the most valuable Cardassian shipments back to their homeworld, I knew I'd have to share something with the Resistance, something to justify and explain how I'd gotten ahold of so much classified information to make these attacks not only possible, but highly likely to succeed. Section 31 had accepted my suggestion that I tell the Resistance that it was Starfleet Intelligence who had given me the information. They'd done their part afterwards to sell it in case anyone ever checked in the future. Section 31 had liked the idea that it would endear the Bajorans to the Federation and generate some goodwill that they could use.

"I called in a very big favor," I answered. "But it's not only that, or even pure altruism that motivated them. The Federation is still at war with the Cardassians. Helping us weaken the Cardassians will help them in their war efforts too and they pay off their debt to me."

That was actually true and why I was ultimately assigned to help the Bajorans in the first place by Section 31. Ro, ever the peacemaker, decided to chime in before our conversation got even more contentious.

"Gothic, I think Kira doesn't quite understand your thinking or how this mission is the best use of our resources or time, or worth the risk something like this entails. You have to admit, this is really not something the Resistance has any experience with. Nor you, really," Ro asked, placating Kira.

She wasn't exactly wrong there. It was the same hesitation I had encountered when I suggested that we take on that mobile supply convoy years ago, and that had paid off in a big way.

"Like I explained to Shakaar so long ago, the Resistance can't beat the Cardassians. We just can't do it. What we can do, though, is make the Occupation so unprofitable that it's not worth the effort to continue when better options are available. After I analyzed the data I concluded that the ore shipments back to Cardassia, especially the most valuable ones, which we're targeting, are the best way to make the Occupation unprofitable. Capturing these shipments will not only cost the Union valuable resources that kept the Occupation in the black, it will humiliate them and make them look like fools to the rest of the quadrant's other powers when it gets out. That will encourage and give the civilian powers back on Cardassia Prime the rationale they need to push for the end of the Occupation," I explained. "In their minds, they'll be stemming the losses and refocusing their resources on better opportunities. At least that is the current thinking."

My girls looked very thoughtful at my answer, so I hoped to the Prophets that I had finally gotten through to them. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Attacking Cardassian starships was so far outside the normal capabilities and experience of the Resistance that it was hard to wrap their heads around it, especially when I said that this would net better returns than anything we could do on Bajor itself, which was both familiar and understood. Capturing a Cardassian military starship so far from home, and not something small, like a shuttlecraft, was very much in unfamiliar territory.

You had to take the emotion out of your thinking, to see the Occupation in the most dispassionate terms, before it made some sense. When you could set aside the suffering and horrors perpetrated on the Bajorans, it was much easier to see the big (economic) picture.

Looking like I was getting through to them, I continued, hoping to keep the momentum up.

"With the loss of these highly valuable shipments, coupled with the threat of the Collectors on everyone's minds, one more push from the right direction will be all it takes to end the Occupation and force the Cardassians to withdraw."

"Assuming we're successful, the Cardassians are going to respond and adapt," Ro warned. Like so many times before, she was the voice of reason among my girls, the one most often to think of the long-term consequences and implications of our actions. "The loss of those ships will mean Cardassian warships will have to be reallocated to protect the shipments…which will also mean they'll be unavailable to patrol the skies and space around Bajor."

With a smile on my face at them finally getting it, I explained more of my plan.

"I carefully chose our targets. My best analysis suggests we should be able to capture 3 to 4 shipments before the Cardassians realize that their shipping schedule and routes have been compromised and they adapt, probably by providing a warship to escort each shipment at a minimum. By that point, though, the damage will be done. Unfortunately, once they adapt to this new threat, our window will have closed. The Temptress just isn't capable of going toe to toe with a Galor-class and there is no one else capable of assisting us."

"Assuming we survive this crazy plan of yours, what are we going to do with the ships and their cargos?" Kira asked, a smile on her face at the challenge that this would be and probably at how much this would hurt the Cardassians. She was so bloodthirsty when it came to them. It was a huge turn on, had to admit. She wasn't some weak pacifist Federation woman who would condemn me for the terrible things I did to my enemies during war. She'd always accepted me for who I was, darkness and all, which was probably why I had fallen in love with her and all my girls.

"Have you ever heard of Treasure Island?" I asked, smiling at her, sending a copy of the classic novel to all their PADDs with a thought. "I have a plan for that. What I ask now, as your leader and your lover," they all laughed at that, "is that you trust me. Can you guys do that?" I asked, though this time the words actually came out of my own mouth, rather than the ship's speakers, hopefully showing how serious I was now.

"We trust you, Gothic," Kira said, acting as the spokesperson for the group.

"I promise to be worthy of that trust," I solemnly responded, locking my eyes with each of them in turn, though the impact might have been diminished by how silly I probably looked in this helmet.

XXXXX

Section 31's information on the Occupation, including the ore shipments, was highly detailed and comprehensive, but the Cardassian military freighter was now 18 fucking hours late.

There could be any number of valid reasons for it. The information I had been given was static and hadn't been updated by Section 31, maybe the schedule had changed in the time since? Maybe the shipment had been delayed because of several recent successful Resistance operations? Maybe the Cardassians took longer to load the damn ship? Maybe they'd had engine problems or encountered some kind of space time anomaly? Maybe the captain had been busy banging his mistress?! The list went on and on and on. I couldn't help but be worried, though. Had we been found out?

No, it wasn't constructive to think like that when there was no evidence of it. Unfortunately, when you had this much time to stew in your thoughts, they often turned to worst case scenarios.

There was no indication whatsoever, other than the ship itself being late, that there was anything wrong, like seeing unusual ship activity in the system or any unexplained subspace signals. And besides, we hadn't truly committed to anything yet. My ship was still safely hidden away in the murky depths of the nebula with only the stealth probe 'exposed' and that piece of technology had been designed to be nearly impossible to see on even the most advanced modern sensors.

Of course, these feelings had been exacerbated by my lovely team. While they trusted me and my judgment, any long and unexpected delays on a mission like this was bound to make them nervous. An unexplained delay like this was usually the sign that an operation had been blown or that there was some seriously faulty intel at work, so I couldn't fault them. They were all veterans by this point.

I had sent them to bed 6 hours ago to get some rest. They'd be worthless to me if sleep deprived and exhausted and far more likely to make mistakes that could get us all killed. We'd already talked about the plan a dozen times already, so they each knew what to do. My genetic enhancements meant I could go a week or more without sleep before experiencing any kind of ill effects or diminished capacity.

Beep, beep.

The audible alarm snapped my full attention back to the console in front of me. My sensors indicated a ship had just dropped out of warp in the area, but was still too far out to identify. I was doing things the old fashioned way and had taken off the helmet when I'd sent my team to bed. It seemed like a very bad idea to leave it on when I had had it on for so long already and had no idea when the Cardassians would even show up.

"Gothic to team," I spoke aloud in the same command voice I had used in another dimension and time, knowing my voice would be transmitted into my cabin. "I need you on the bridge; we've got company."

This area of space had a number of dangerous navigational hazards that forced ships to drop out of warp when traversing this area, so most avoided it for that reason, also because there was really nothing here. According to my information, the Cardassians had been using it for years and had it well charted. They were extremely familiar with the area and liked it because it would minimize contact with other ships who could report any unusual signatures, like a cargo hold filled with something as valuable as dilithium. Anybody else that risked the area without detailed sensor scans, trying to take their shipments, for example, risked their ship being heavily damaged or destroyed.

Section 31 had managed to steal their detailed star charts for the area so I had them too now. This route, though, always had a warship escort in the past, but the war with the Federation and the Collector incursions had required some resources to be reallocated. It helped that in the more than half a century the Occupation had been going on, the Cardassians had never lost an ore shipment to hostile action. They'd lost a few to engine problems and the navigational dangers of this area, before they had fully mapped it, but never to hostile action. In other words, they'd gotten complacent.

As the ship got closer, my sensor resolution increased. Just as the information packet had told me, it was a Cardassian Groumall-type military freighter with a Cardassian name that didn't translate well into English and one I really didn't care about. Section 31's data had a full breakdown of the ship type, including blueprints and technical schematics, which outlined its defensive weaknesses. It also included commentary and reports from Starfleet captains that had had encounters with this ship type during the war so far.

This ship had been built in the Cardassia Prime Orbital Three Assembly Facility, which I didn't really see the value in knowing, but ok; Section 31 was a very, very detail-oriented organization. It comprised five decks and had a minimum flight crew complement of four, though it could accommodate 30 plus flight crew and passengers if needed. It had a matter/anti-matter warp system, with two impulse systems and a maximum warp speed of 6.5.

It was 255.65 meters long, 55.13 meters at the beam, and 63.21 meters high. Its armament consisted of four or more low yield spiral-wave disruptors, and one medium aft disrupter wave cannon. All of these weapons were underpowered for its size, most of the ship's power going into the engines to haul huge amounts of cargo, which were oversized.

My review of the schematics were interrupted as my girls entered the bridge and took their respective positions, their eyes immediately locking onto the viewscreen which had the ship displayed.

"They're finally here, huh?" Kira asked rhetorically, looking grumpy. She was always grumpy upon being woken up.

"Only 18 hours late, but better late than never," Ro said, now looking alert. "The sensors show no other ships in range, Captain. Estimated time to ambush coordinates is 36 minutes."

"It's quite phallic-like, isn't it?" Neela said out of the blue, causing me to smile and my team to break out into raucous laughter, the nervous tension being broken up quite nicely. I leaned over and gave Neela a kiss and a light grope.

It really was kind of phallic-looking. The front of the ship had the distinctive Cardassian fork design aesthetic, the entire ship the standard burnt orange in color, with huge oversized engines on the rear, the bridge located at the rear of the ship as well. From the front of the ship to the bridge, it was all cargo, like a series of 6 container boxes all connected to a central shaft. From my information packet, these were cargo containers that could be attached to and detached from the ship. For ease of unloading a Cardassian captain would simply release specific cargo pods to be tractored into a bay for unloading or clamped onto a different ship as needed. It was actually a pretty efficient design, in my opinion, and was used by several other races, though I wouldn't have cheaped out on the weapons and shields. I understood the thinking, however. This wasn't a ship that had been designed to operate far from Cardassian controlled space or without a better armed escort, and the Cardassians likely had hundreds or more of this class in their fleet.

The minutes counted down as the ship got closer and closer to our position, following exactly the course that Section 31 had told us that it would take to safely avoid the hazards of the area.

"Any indication we've been spotted?" I asked.

"No, Captain," Ro instantly reported, quietly, as if she was worried our enemy could hear us and would get spooked. "Our target has not raised shields, sent any subspace communications, or changed its expected course."

"Its cargo?" I asked succinctly.

"A very strong dilithium signature, though they've tried to dampen it, like we expected," Neela reported. "Their cargo bays must be full of the stuff."

"Stolen from our people," Kira angrily muttered.

Dilithium, for obvious reasons, was an extremely valuable commodity and a shipment like this only happened once every few years.

"That's why we're here, Kira, focus on your job," I gently admonished. "Prepare to power up disruptors and micro-torpedoes."

"Standing by," Kira reported "I've run the targeting simulations a dozen times, I'll hit the target."

In this case, the target was a weak point in the shield grid that had been identified. Our plan was to hit it with torpedoes to drop the shield and then take out main power, rendering them dead in the water. Section 31's information continued to be invaluable.

We waited.

"2 minutes to contact," Ro reported calmly and quietly.

"I have the helm," I stated, before donning the neural control helmet and took over helm control. The precision flying the helmet offered would be ideal for this attack. "Prepare to release the antilepton interference into subspace."

"Standing by; they won't be able to call for help," Neela answered confidently. I had given her the idea, but she had been the one to design and fabricate the device we'd needed to do this.

"30 seconds to contact," Ro reported, and I began to fully power up the ship. Doing it any sooner would have risked early detection. "20, 10, 5…"

When the countdown reached its end, the ship jumped forward at full impulse at my mental command, leaving the protective confines of the nebula soon behind. The Cardassians detected us quickly after, as the distance shortened, and they raised shields and engaged in evasive maneuvers. Smartly, the Captain of that ship didn't try to outrun us. A fully loaded freighter was never going to outrun a ship my ship.

Burnt orange beams of low-yield disruptor energy lashed out at me at extreme weapon's range, but my ship was nimble and could maneuver at the speed of my thoughts when I controlled the ship via the helmet.

I circled to the underside of the freighter, where the shield weakness was located, the Cardassians rolling their ship to prevent a good shot once they realized what I was doing, but it was futile and too late.

After lining up a perfect firing angle and matching the rotational velocity of the Cardassian freighter Kira unleashed 6 micro torpedoes into the same spot on the shield, immediately lashing out with the disruptor cannons to finish the job. The shield grid overloaded in a cascading failure, visible to the eyes of my ship's sensors.

"Target main power and fire!" I ordered, maneuvering around the ship with several powerful bursts of my reaction control thrusters to get into the best possible firing position.

We needed to keep the ship from escaping. Going to warp right now was a very dangerous proposition in this area of space, but I didn't want to risk the Cardassian captain saying 'fuck it' and trying his luck. That would likely see the ship destroyed, which would technically be a successful mission, but fuck that, I wanted that dilithium!

"Main power is down," Ro reported calmly, but I could tell she and the others were happy at how well this had gone so far, though they were less than pleased with what was coming next. "They're dead in space. I'm detecting 15 Cardassian lifesigns aboard."

"Prepare to dock with the freighter," I ordered, disengaging the neural link and pulling off my helmet.

"Gothic, are you sure this is necessary? Can't we just beam you over there or beam them off the ship into space?" Kira begged.

"The dilithium and whatever the Cardassians are using to dampen its signature is throwing up too much interference for transport," Neela answered, ever the engineer.

"Let's destroy their life support and let them suffocate then, you don't need to risk yourself!" Kira advised, trying once again to get me to change my decision to board the ship alone.

Suggesting this course of action was rather extreme, even for her, when it came to the Cardassians, but her desire to keep me safe meant even something she'd hesitate to do as too gruesome was on the table. I very much appreciated the thought and care behind the offer. I didn't want them to get hurt either and from a practical standpoint, they'd be more hindrance than help to me in the close confines of the ship's corridors.

"We need that ship, Kira," I patiently explained, giving her a loving look, all while I conducted a final check of my modified armor, personal shield, and the weapons I'd selected to take on this assault. I decided not to take a rifle, no one on this ship had advanced Collector armor to overcome and the narrowness of the corridors made a weapon of that size a liability in close quarters combat. "You know I'm not opposed to just destroying the life support, but that ship is huge. It'll take hours, maybe even days, for the crew of that ship to deplete the air supply in a ship that size and we can't risk giving the crew time to make repairs or self-destruct the ship. It'd also make capturing the ship and getting it out of here much easier if we don't cause any major hull breaches or damage or destroy any key systems that we can't easily repair."

Kira looked mutinous for a moment or two, before logic won out and she reluctantly nodded in agreement.

"Any other orders, Captain?" Ro asked, ever the professional, once she saw that the discussion was over.

"Yes, if my boarding is successful, a few may decide to abandon ship, rather than fight to keep it. If any lifespods get ejected, disable the lifepod's engines then transport anyone inside into the buffer then purge it. Destroying it completely is a last resort, otherwise I'll retrieve the lifeboat once I have control of the ship. Dead men tell no tales, especially if I vaporize them after I kill them, and we can't afford anyone in the Central Command learning what we did here today; that also means no debris left behind to study and analyze. Let them think it was someone else, like the ferengi, or some kind of spatial anomaly that caused the ship to disappear back in time," I joked.

"Aye, Captain," Ro, Kira, and Neela responded.

"Link up with the airlock closest to main engineering, and wait for my command," I ordered, before leaving the bridge.

XXXXX

Ro was an excellent pilot and the Temptress was soon connected with the Cardassian freighter, a soft vibration in the floor plates signaling the link up of our respective docking ports.

"Docking successful," the computer reported. "Atmospheric pressure has been stabilized."

Tapping the control, I opened the hatch and stepped into the passageway between my ship and the Cardassian side of the airlock, the hatch behind me to my ship closing with a hiss a moment later. Like I expected, there was a control interface on the outside of the airlock; thankfully Section 31 had provided me with the appropriate code to open this door else I'd have to hack it.

After entering the code, I knelt down and tapped a control on my armored boots, before pulling my upgraded phaser pistols from each hip and pointing them forward from my kneeling position on the floor, my mind flashing back to that awesome scene in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the scene where two members of Starfleet massacred practically an entire Klingon ship and assassinated Gorkon, the leader of the Klingon High Council, after they had disabled the ship's artificial gravity with a well-placed torpedo.

Yet again I marveled at how different this moment felt since becoming an Augment. I was about to go into combat and yet none of the familiar nerves were there, none of the fear and the anxiousness and the urge to vomit that I remembered so well from my time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it was all eager anticipation. I was still cautious, but more hyper focused on the mission and its objectives.

"Gothic to Temptress, fire," I ordered calmly.

Though I couldn't see it, a micro torpedo, set to a carefully calculated low blast yield, was launched from my ship, arcing around the freighter in order to reach its designated target, a secondary power conduit which, according to the blueprints, was a key power conduit linkage that fed power to the gravity plating throughout the ship. I felt it, though, when the ship shook and I could hear screams of surprise from the four Cardassian soldiers that had been waiting to ambush me on the other side of the hatch.

At my command, the hatch opened with a hiss and I could now clearly hear sounds of distress and confusion, yet I still knelt, totally still and silent, phasers pointing forwards. Unlike the soldiers waiting to kill me on the other side, I remained firmly attached to the floor due to the active magnetic boots holding me securely to the metal deck plate.

As a flailing Cardassian leg floated into view on the left, I fired a bright crimson pulse of phaser energy set on kill, severing the leg to screams of terror, the man firing the standard issue
Cardassian military disruptor pistol uncontrollably in his panic at suddenly losing a limb, hitting one of his comrades in the chest. I put another shot into the man's head silencing his screams, before quickly shooting the friendly fire victim in the forehead to make sure that he was dead.

Interestingly, unlike the movie, no globules of blood shot out of the wounds to float in the air. The phaser beams must have cauterized the wound. My pistol designs were from the 23rd century, but I had upgraded them with 24th century technology. Why hadn't they behaved the same? Had some 'modern' upgrade changed the way the beam interacted with flesh? Having a glancing phaser wound continue to bleed a target would be ideal for me who often was trying to kill his targets. I'd have to look into that.

"Two more life signs. Two meters to your right," Kira reported quietly over the personal comm device in my ear. She may not have supported this plan, but she sure as fuck was going to do everything in her power to see the Cardassians dead and me alive at the end of it.

I deactivated my magnetic boots and gently pushed off the floor to float forward, my body perpendicular and very close to the floor plating.

Two more floating soldiers appeared in my line of sight, each of my pistols independently tracking my targets and firing four shots each in an arc to account for any unpredictable movements they might make due to the lack of gravity now that the element of surprise was lost. One return shot from a spasming soldier who didn't yet realize he was already dead came close to hitting me in the head, but my personal shield would have been able to tank that shot. Hopefully.

Putting a few more shots into the heads of the slowly floating corpses who used to be part of the Cardassian military, I kipped up and activated my magnetic boots just as they reached the floor, bending forwards to fully stand up.

"Eleven more life signs remain. Six in main engineering, five on the bridge," Kira quietly reported so as not to break my concentration.

Taking off now at a run, the blueprints of this ship class firmly in my mind's eye, I made my way to main engineering. It took a few stuttering missteps before I adjusted my running stride to ensure that at least one boot was always magnetically locked to the deck at any given time so that I didn't fly off into the air, but I figured it out.

I had to go up 3 decks, but there was no way I was taking a turbolift till I had full control of this ship, assuming that it even worked, considering we had knocked out main power. Getting in it was just asking for trouble.

I entered a service tunnel with a ladder going up. Glancing up, I deactivated my boots and shot myself up three levels with a push off the deck, twisting in midair to face the opening and pulling myself through.

"Has anyone changed positions?" I quietly asked over the open comm.

"Negative," Kira responded.

Coming to the doorway leading into main engineering, I found the door locked from the inside. Smiling wickedly, I tapped an override code that Section 31 had given me into the panel, but didn't activate the open function; it was the same code that had allowed me to open the external airlock door. How they had gotten ahold of it, who fucking knew.

Reaching up to my bandolier I almost grabbed a plasma grenade out of habit, it was my standard room clearing device for this kind of situation, but we really needed this ship as intact as possible and severely damaging main engineering would make getting this ship out of here much more difficult. If needs must, I would, but we weren't there yet.

Tempering my more bloodthirsty tendencies, I pulled a flash grenade from my bandolier and hit the bright red button at the top with my thumb to activate the device. Burning off a few seconds of the countdown, I hit the door open command and as the doors were separating from each other I lobbed the flash grenade into the middle of the room and ducked back behind cover.

Bright white light and the sound of thunder followed and more screams of terror from inside the room greeted me as I sidestepped carefully, but quickly, across the entire open doorway, going from one side to the other, both phasers extended in front of me as I shot one disoriented floating Cardassian after another, before ducking back behind cover. Some people doubted how deadly someone like Hawkeye could be in the Marvel universe; you only had to look at the devastation an Augment could cause with a hand eye coordination score off the charts, coupled with insanely difficult marksmanship training scenarios on the holodeck, to realize how deadly he could be.

Never doubt the value of good marksmanship in a world of guns.

There had been no return fire and I heard no movement, so I peeked my head quickly around the corner again to do a quick scan. Five corpses and a bunch of random equipment floated in the air when there were supposed to be six life signs in this area.

"Life signs in my area?" I asked quietly.

"One life sign remains in main engineering," Kira reported quietly and succinctly. "Four meters to the right of your position."

Stepping carefully forward, I pushed a corpse that was in my way gently, causing it to float towards the ceiling in the corner of the room. Whoever was still alive in this room must be waiting to ambush me as I could hear nothing other than the electronic beeps and hums of active consoles aboard a starship. I really did not have time to fuck around here, there were five more Cardassians on the bridge and desperate men did desperate things, like blow up their own ship, and I still didn't have control of main engineering yet.

Looking carefully around, I found the last Cardassian member of the engineering crew wedged under an engineering console. It was a very small space, though, so the guy could not be all that large. I would have already taken a shot, but the risk of damage to the equipment he was hiding under was too great.

Dropping to a squat I lined up my pistols for a quick double shot, but I hesitated at the last moment.

"P-p-please, don't kill me!" the Cardassian stuttered while begging for his life. I had never seen any Cardassians this young on Bajor before, the posting tending to attract career soldiers with a bit more years under their belt. If I had to guess, he probably couldn't be more than 18 years old and was unarmed. "I'm just a technician. I'm a nobody! I've never even met a Bajoran before! I've only been on this ship for 3 weeks!" the boy continued to babble…and cry.

I found myself distinctly uncomfortable, in a way that I had never been before during the Occupation of Bajor. It was so easy to kill the Cardassian soldiers on Bajor when confronted with the horrors that they perpetrated on the people there every day. Most of them were monsters who quickly became drunk on their near absolute power over the populace. But this was just a kid. While this boy was an adult by the standards of both my people and his, I was uncomfortably reminded of that scene on the Tikuma, where that Collector gruesomely killed a 10-year-old boy, for no practical purpose.

No, this kid was not some 10-year-old civilian who had never touched a weapon in their lives and who posed no threat to anyone; this kid was a member of the Cardassian military. I knew from the start when I planned these missions that I could leave no survivors. Leaving any of them alive meant alerting the Central Command that their shipments were at risk, it would give them vital intel on our tactics and capabilities, and would alert them to the fact that we had so much classified information, even the ship's command override codes. I wanted them to wonder until the last possible moment what was going on.

If they thought the ship was lost due to natural phenomena in this dangerous region of space, even better, it would extend the shelf life of these missions before they caught on and adapted.

If I let this kid go, though, these missions were over and my plan to help topple the Occupation early would be put in jeopardy.

So, perhaps in rather cowardly fashion, I flipped the switch in my mind and the emotions drained out of me like they were never there in the first place.

"I'm sorry, kid," I offered in a monotone, before I gave him the only mercy that I could in this situation, a quick, painless death, by shooting him twice in the heart with rapid kill shots. The flash of surprise and horror locked on his face would stay with me forever, but I knew that I would do it again under these circumstances. Unlike so many sanctimonious Starfleet officers out there, I would shoulder this burden for the benefit of so many others. At least that was what I told myself. That was how I justified this sin.

Turning away from the new corpse, I plugged in a device into a nearby input interface. I had been given the command codes for this ship by Section 31, but I had fashioned the device that would interface with this ship and all the others we would take before the Cardassians wised up to our plan. Spending so much time on Bajor had made me an expert when it came to Cardassian technology and their specific style of computer programming.

This homemade device's primary function was to quickly take over the ship's systems, including locking out the bridge controls, while simultaneously disabling any self-destruct program the crew might have triggered. Looking over the monitor in front of me I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Cardassian captain had not activated the self-destruct, like I knew I would have under these circumstances. Was it arrogance? An unwillingness to die to keep his ship out of enemy hands? Or did he not realize yet that I had taken main engineering? Regardless of the reason, he no longer had the ability to activate it now. That would be quite the shock if he tried.

"Five life signs still on the bridge, Gothic," Kira reported.

Activating the ship's internal security grid, I activated a camera view of the ship's bridge. They appeared to be attempting repairs or to bypass the damage we had caused in our initial attack. Interestingly, they had somehow managed to restore power to the gravity plating on the bridge. They also looked like they were preparing to defend the bridge with their lives, they were all armed and they'd made a makeshift barricade. I guess they knew someone had boarded them and their security team was dead.

I was tempted to assault the bridge and take them out one-by-one, but my emotionless state encouraged me to work smarter, not harder, and use the program I had created ahead of time for a situation just like this. I had been inspired to create it by an episode of TNG where Data, while under a hidden compulsion to return to his creator, had put the Enterprise's life support system in negative mode, which essentially sucked out the air on the bridge to get the bridge crew to evacuate from the area so that he could take over the ship unopposed. In this case, there'd be no evacuation.

"Activate program 'Vacuum,'" I ordered, with cold dead eyes.

Watching on the screen, the men immediately reacted, probably having received a warning or alert from their consoles. They desperately tried to override my commands, but I had locked them out from command functions the instant I plugged my device into the ship's computer.

They pounded on the door to the bridge, helplessly trying to escape, even firing on it with their disruptors, but the bridge security door that they thought would protect them from boarders now sealed them in, like a tomb. Each time they fired their weapons they lowered the remaining oxygen content in the room even further, which sped up their demise. In 30 seconds, it was all over; every officer on the bridge was on the ground dead or dying. Luckily, they had not destroyed any of the consoles on the bridge in their panic or set their disruptors to overload like I might have done in the same situation as a final fuck you to my killer. I was reminded again that these men were part of a freighter crew, not the elite and highly trained soldiers I normally dealt with on Bajor who had drunk deeply from the Kool-Aid and would happily die for the Union if they could kill their enemy at the same time.

I watched dispassionately, as they all finally went totally still, but my work wasn't over. I had to vaporize all the bodies on the ship and make a few repairs to ready the ship for towing.

"Kira, confirm no life signs on the ship besides my own," I ordered, after the men on the bridge had been still for over 5 minutes. The ship's internal security grid had shown no life signs aboard besides my own, but it didn't hurt to double check.

"Confirmed. Good work, Gothic," Kira responded, sounding very glad that I was ok.

"Send Neela over, we have some repairs to make before we can tow the ship," I ordered.

"She's standing by in the airlock now with her tools and the parts we replicated in preparation," Kira answered.

"As soon as she's aboard, detach from the ship and prepare to activate the tractor beam on my command. Then set course and engage for Treasure Island."

Treasure Island was the silly name I'd chosen for where we'd stash the ships we'd captured. I'd chosen an uninhabited system off the beaten path with a dead moon that had numerous caverns that we could fly the ship into and 'park' long-term. When the Occupation was over I'd go back to retrieve them.

"Understood, we'll be ready," Ro answered.

While I had been assaulting the ship she'd been studying the sensor readings. The mass of the ship was immense, especially with it full of cargo. Ideally we'd soon be able to get the ship to Treasure Island on its own power, as the tonnage of this ship might exceed my ship's ability to tow for too long, but Neela and I would have to get main power back online first. Thankfully, we'd been successful in not actually harming the engines themselves during our attack. We needed to get out of the area, though. Who knew how long it'd be before the Cardassians realized that something was wrong? Maybe the ship's lateness would even work in our favor!

Pirate Gothic had a nice ring to it. Or was I more accurately a privateer considering I was doing this on behalf of Bajor? Should I replicate one of those iconic hats?

XXXXX

City of Ashalla. Capital of Bajor.

One of the tactics the Cardassians loved to use to demoralize their conquered populations was not to destroy the buildings and landmarks that had once served as their center of government before the Cardassians had arrived, but to take them over and render them near unrecognizable. It was a subtle, but effective tactic to break a people's spirits. I considered it a 'fuck you' tactic to the natives.

Looking around the waiting area outside the office of the newly elected First Minister of Bajor's new provisional government, the signs of recent Cardassian use of this building were obvious. Cardassian iconography was all over the building still and was slowly being removed. The none too gentle removal of various pieces of technology that the Cardassians hadn't wanted to leave behind were equally apparent.

Dukat, the Prefect of Bajor, hadn't actually used this building for his office, preferring to remain on the space station in orbit, but various higher ups in the Cardassian military and various administrative departments had had their offices in this building, along with all the bureaucratic infrastructure needed to maintain a decades long Occupation of a planet. Records still needed to be maintained, supply requisitions processed, payroll taxes deducted from a soldier's pay, the wheels of bureaucracy never stopped, no matter the circumstances.

"The First Minister will see you now, Mr. Gothic," a pretty, young Bajoran secretary informed me.

Walking into the office, I saw that the Bajorans had done their best to bring at least the First Minister's office to some semblance of order, though the gaping hole in the wall where the Cardassian replicator had once been was now filled with one of the portable replicators I had brought to the planet. It was a bit of a luxury, but I didn't begrudge the Bajorans from wanting to show that they could at least take care of the needs of their First Minister. It was important to put your best foot forward, to project strength, especially when various off world representatives met with the leader of the planet's government.

Coming around from behind his desk, the First Minister had a bright smile on his face. I plastered a mostly genuine smile on my face as I extended my hand and greeted the man.

"Gothic, thank you for coming!"

"First Minister, may I extend my congratulations on your recent election. May the Prophets' bless you and guide you in your efforts as you work to rebuild Bajor," I offered my congratulations and a prayer/call to the Prophets' that I hoped would be looked on favorably.

The man continued to smile at me, so it didn't appear that my invocation of the Prophets had offended him.

"Thank you, my friend. I'm not a politician and frankly I don't know why my people decided to give me this great responsibility, but I'll take all the help I can get, divine or otherwise," the man admitted with a smile. "Gothic, please call me Li when we're alone. You liberated me from that prison camp, after all, and brought me home to my people. That is a debt I can never repay."

"You honor me, Li," I responded genuinely, before he gestured to one of the two chairs in front of his large wooden desk. Interestingly, he took the other guest chair, instead of returning behind his desk.

Li Nalas and I had gotten to know each other quite well on the return journey to Bajor, after my Resistance cell had rescued him. He had been overwhelmed at his sudden change in fortune and at the news that his fellow prisoners had smuggled out his earring to prove that he was alive. Over the course of the journey home to Bajor he had even opened up to me in the same way that he had with Sisko on the show, sharing the truth of the story that had propelled him to infamy.

He told me how he had stumbled down an embankment onto his back to find a near naked, bathing and unarmed Cardassian in a lake, who went for his weapon by his clothes and Li shot and killed the man. The man's body had fallen on top of Li like they had been in an epic and savage struggle, and that had been how Li was found by the rest of his Resistance cell. It turned out that the man was a rather infamous Cardassian officer, Gul Zarale, who had been responsible for the massacre of half a dozen Bajoran villages and his death at Li's hands had been twisted in the subsequent retellings to a legendary struggle, despite Li's best efforts to set the story straight. And just like that he had become the reluctant hero of the Bajoran people and the Resistance. In telling the 'true' story of Gul Zarale's death, Li told me how he would never forget the embarrassed look on the Cardassian officer's face as he died in his underwear.

Perhaps unoriginally, I had given Li the same pep talk that Sisko had once given him, telling him that Bajor needed a symbol, someone that the people could believe in. While Li had been rescued much earlier than in canon, with the Occupation still going on, he had actually done a lot to help drive recruitment up even further and encouraged more coordination amongst the various Resistance cells to take on bigger targets.

No matter how he felt about his unearned fame, the man had stepped up and done a lot to aid his people as they struggled to drive the Cardassians out.

"I don't claim to understand what my people see in me, Gothic, but I will work very hard to be worthy of their faith," Li admitted. "I pray every day for the Prophets to guide me and give me the strength to keep this all from falling apart."

I nodded solemnly, "You will need that strength, Li. The recovery and rebuilding of the planet will not be an easy task. The Bajoran people had a common enemy in the Cardassians to unite them, but I fear the divisions of the past may crop up again."

"I feel the same way, Gothic, which is why I have asked Kai Opaka to do everything she can to help me bring the people together in common purpose," Li explained. "Enough of that for now, I have good news for you!"

"What's that?" I asked, confused.

"You have done a lot for the people of Bajor, Gothic," Li answered. "The Resistance leadership made promises to you for your assistance and I, and the New Provisional Government intend to honor them. With my power as First Minister of the new Bajoran Provisional Government this morning I officially granted you citizenship, with all the rights, duties, and privileges that that entails."

"Thank you, Li. I'm honored," I said with a smile, glad that the new government was honoring those promises.

"You were also promised land on Bajor, 50 square miles in the end, I believe. We intend to honor that as well. Just submit your selection to my office and we will give you official ownership of the land," Li continued. "May I ask what you intend to do now that the Occupation is over? Will you return to Earth?"

"No, I intend to stay here for a while, select some land and build a home, maybe travel a bit," I answered honestly, but I was hoping for something that would give me a more official reason to involve myself in the canon events of DS9.

"I would like you to consider an alternative," Li asked carefully. "As you know, many former Resistance soldiers have transitioned from freedom fighters to officially joining the Bajoran Militia. Kira Nerys, Ro Laren, and Neela from your cell have all been made offers, but they haven't accepted yet. Did you know that?"

"No, I actually didn't know that," I admitted. And I hadn't.

"Your cell is very loyal to you. When I asked them why they were hesitating, they said they wanted to wait to find out what you chose to do," Li explained with a smile. "I've spoken with Shakaar and many other cells across the planet and all of them have nothing but good things to say about you. They respect you greatly and would follow you into battle again. Your victories and assistance in providing weapons and replicators and other technology probably saved thousands of lives and helped bring the Occupation to an end."

"I thank you for your kind words, First Minister, but I was one of many. The true heroes are the ones who gave up their lives for the cause," I responded.

Yes, I had done a lot I was proud of on Bajor, but just like I had felt when in Iraq and Afghanistan, the true heroes were the ones who had given their lives and would never return home.

"Well said, Gothic," he offered. "You know my true story, you know I feel the same. So, I ask you to take the same leap of faith that you asked of me. While this wasn't the world of your birth, you are of Bajor now. Bajor needs you now more than ever. I want you to join the Bajoran Militia, with the rank of General, to lead our off-world forces and assets in protection of the planet."

"I- I don't know what to say," I admitted. I had hoped for something like this, but honestly had not expected to be made a General with such a large remit. "Are you sure I'm the right person for the job, First Minister? I'm a human, not Bajoran!"

Li laughed hard at that, "That fact hadn't escaped me, Gothic! Your nose is quite handsome for a human, but it lacks the true beauty of a Bajoran's," he joked and I couldn't help but laugh at the silliness of his words. "You may be human, but you're also a Bajoran citizen now and a hero of the Occupation. The men and women under your command will listen to you, I'm sure of it. I thought long and hard about this, and asked Kai Opaka and the Prophets for guidance. They have spoken to my heart. Bajor needs you to fight for us again. Can I ask this service of you, my friend? For you to take up arms and defend this world and its people once again? It will be a thankless job. The only major off-world asset we have is the station itself and a handful of sub impulse ships and raiders, but I believe you are exactly what Bajor needs."

What the fuck?

Had the Kai and the Prophets wanted this? Had they engineered events to ensure this happened? What did this mean for me? They must be aware of my extradimensional origins and possibly the fact that I had knowledge of the events of the future, like they did. Was this in repayment for not killing Dukat and Winn? Or was this me doing them another favor? More and more questions were raised in my mind and unfortunately none were satisfactorily answered.

What was the bottom line here though? I had hoped for an offer to join the Militia at the end of this mission, but never had I expected to be made a general and placed in command of the station itself! Talk about flipping the script. How would this affect the events of canon DS9?

Like a good leader, Li Nalas has waited patiently for me to get my thoughts in order.

"Will I be able to pick my own staff?" I asked.

Li's smile was wide, "Of course. If you want your former cell by your side, you can have them."

"Thank you, First Minister," I said. "I accept."

"Good! Good!" Li Nalas responded, looking very happy that I had agreed, before turning very serious. "Now I want your opinion and advice, what do you think of Bajor inviting the Federation in to help with the rebuilding?"

XXXXX

Quark's Bar. Deep Space Nine.

9 Months After the End of the Occupation

Life for me was pretty damn good, I thought to myself as I took in the hustle and bustle of Quark's Bar from an out of the way table in the corner of the room, where I nursed an ice-cold glass of neon blue Romulan ale, a spot that incidentally had a perfect view of the goings on in the bar.

Many Bajoran militia officers were here drinking and eating in their off-duty hours. As they looked around, many would meet my eye and give me a nod of respect that I happily returned. The bar was filled with a frenetic energy, the dabo wheel spinning and putting out those pleasant chimes indicating people were winning (and losing) some money. As expected, the majority of people visible were Bajorans, but there were many different races in the bar at the moment, all drinking and talking and bumping into each other in one big chaotic mass of life.

It was wonderful.

There were no armed and sneering Cardassians here, nor despairing Bajoran slave labor days away from being worked to death. No, there was a lot of hope in those eyes these days, hope for themselves and hope for a better future for Bajor, and I was overjoyed to have played a part in making that a reality.

The Occupation was finally over, over for 9 months now. Years of my life while on an undercover mission with Bajor and a sea of Cardassian blood had helped bring it to a close and thankfully, the Bajoran people knew of my many contributions. Of course, I couldn't claim all the credit. This was the outcome in canon and I'm sure the Prophets had a major hand in things, not that anybody else knew that besides the various God-like beings of Star Trek.

In fact, I'd felt the Prophets' direct touch on two separate occasions when they had stayed my hand in killing Ducat and Winn. Part of me at the time had seriously resented that, forced to keep to the canon script, but another part had said to listen, that these were beings that perceived the past, present, and future simultaneously after all and had consistently worked for the betterment of Bajor. Canon had proven that again and again. Killing those two monsters may very well have resulted in something worse happening. I just hoped they realized that they owed me at least two favors for not flipping their chess board.

Another external factor that led to an earlier end to the Occupation were the Collectors. The destruction of a Romulan colony and battle fleet was not something that could be covered up from the who's who of the alpha quadrant, nor did the Romulans even really try. With the Collector threat looming over everyone's heads, no more Cardassian warships, men, or material were given to Bajor. That meant it was the perfect time for the Resistance and yours truly to strike as every successful mission had a lasting and cumulative effect on the Cardassians' ability to sustain their control of Bajor. Every soldier killed, factory or ore refinery destroyed, would not be replaced. Death by a thousand little cuts was a very real thing. 'Terrorist' activities multiplied fivefold all across Bajor as blood and weakness were in the water and it was the perfect time to strike. The Cardassians stationed on Bajor itself knew the end was coming and their morale was the lowest we'd ever seen.

My raids on their shipping was another significant contributor in bringing the Occupation to an end. My pirate attacks had made the Occupation temporarily, but significantly unprofitable for a time, but it would also make me even filthier rich, even with the 20% I had promised to the Resistance. I was waiting for the proverbial 'heat to die down' before moving my pirated treasure.

With Section 31's breakdown of the Occupation, I knew exactly which shipments had the rarest and most valuable contents to target, like those containing starship-grade dilithium, refined liquid latinum, and pergium. Just as I had predicted, we had been able to successfully capture four military freighters before the Cardassians changed their schedules and routes and assigned a warship to escort the shipments. While tempted to roll the dice one or two more times, I had to temper my greed with caution.

Those captured ships were still hidden away on a dead moon, waiting for me to retrieve them. While I was very tempted to get them now and the new Provisional Government was eager to get their 20% cut of the profits to jumpstart their rebuilding efforts, not all Cardassians were happy that their government had essentially abandoned their claim on Bajor and they were looking for any excuse to strike at Bajor or her interests. No, it was better to let things cool down a bit so that no one did anything stupid. When I had sold the value of these raids to the Resistance, I had stressed how much damage it would do. The timing of the end of the Occupation couldn't have been better in reinforcing the truth of my claims.

My aid in driving the Cardies off their planet and destabilizing the Occupation in ways they'd never seen before had led to my star rising even further in the hearts and minds of the Bajorans. My fame was worldwide now and my many victories over the Cardassians with the Resistance was talked about with pride and reverence, despite being human. Liberating Li Nalas from a Cardassian world and bringing him back to his people alive and well? Now that had sealed the deal.

However, while the Collector incursion and my raid on their valuable shipments back to Cardassia had certainly played a role in bringing the Occupation to an end, that hadn't really been the ultimate cause. Sure, the Resistance had given the Cardassians a bloody nose and hit them in their wallets for a time, causing the Occupation to run at a substantial net loss for a while, but the real reason for the withdrawal had been the end of the Federation-Cardassian War.

The Cardassian Union, like Section 31 had long predicted, had received major territorial concessions in the form of a half dozen planets from the Federation and the formation of a new demilitarized zone (DMZ). Those planets were rich in untapped resources and had the benefit of not being inhabited by zealous Bajoran freedom fighters willing to joyfully lay down their lives to free their home. Of course, the Cardassians would have trouble with the eventual rise of the Maquis in the demilitarized zone, but they didn't know that yet as the Maquis didn't exist yet.

With the end of my multi-year mission on Bajor, part of me had been eager for a break. I had been very tempted to get in my ship and just warp off to Risa with my new wealth and drown myself in alien pussy as a reward. Unfortunately, I had decided to wait for a while before returning to that pleasure world for a much deserved vacation. As much as it pained the hedonist in me to admit, duty came before pleasure.

While many of my friends in the Resistance, including my girls, wanted a break from the fighting, this was a dangerous and tumultuous time for Bajor given the chaos of this transitional period. The Bajorans needed to rediscover what it meant to be free once again, to rule themselves and to be in control of their own destiny. While the Cardassians had been murdering and raping the planet, old grudges and prejudices native to any planet had been set aside to fight a common enemy. In this transitional period, it was critical that the Bajoran people didn't fall back into those old patterns and become divided once again. If the Bajorans reverted to the d'jarra, for example, the rigid caste system that had shaped Bajoran society before the Occupation, it would be a disaster.

Thankfully, it wasn't all duty and work and worry, there were plenty of things here to keep me amused, such as scandalous holodeck programs, Dabo girls, and strange aliens to meet and bang female members of. I hadn't forgotten my list that I had started oh so long ago, after all.

Amusement aside, the First Minister, Li Nalas, and the Bajoran Provisional Government, had gone well beyond the citizenship and land that the Resistance had offered me so long ago, which they happily granted just as they'd promised, but they had put me in charge of all of the planet's off-world Militia forces, meaning that any militia soldier or ship that wasn't stationed on Bajor was under my direct command.

That meant that I was in charge of Bajor's space fleet, such as it was, and its few off-world bases, mostly on the moons of Bajor. The fleet, at the moment, were a handful of sublight ships and DS9 itself. DS9 was the real prize, but even that was being directly administered now by Starfleet while the Federation helped Bajor rebuild. This I would have to do something about, though I did know that Starfleet's presence was the only thing keeping the Cardassians from returning now that the wormhole had been discovered. Thankfully, I had plenty of time before the Dominion War started.

I was now exactly where I wanted to be. The Bajoran Provisional Government had even posted me to DS9 with permanent offices and staff there, so that I could more easily coordinate with Starfleet and the many men and women of the Bajoran Militia working on the station, all of whom were connected to me in some way and ultimately reported to me, at least on paper.

Ro Laren, who had been given the rank of major by the new government, like Kira had been, was my hand-picked adjutant; she handled a lot of the day-to-day administrative tasks for me and was doing a fabulous job of it, so I had free time for my other projects.

Just like in canon, Sisko had requested a Bajoran militia officer to serve as his liaison and second in command of the station, just like on the show. As all of Bajor's off-world military assets and personnel were under my purview and this officer would serve on DS9, I appointed Kira to the position. She was completely loyal to me, though, giving me significant influence over DS9 and all of its personnel, including the Starfleet personnel as well, not just those who were in the Bajoran militia. This whole situation made me laugh at the irony of it all.

I imagine Commander Sisko (and Starfleet) found this to be quite a strange set of circumstances, as unlike in the show, where he was pretty much in charge of everything and everyone, there was another power center on the station separate from him, a General in the Bajoran Militia stationed permanently on his station to whom all the Bajoran Militia members technically reported to as their commanding officer. These were the circumstances ripe for a power struggle, and he probably knew it.

In a very real sense, the Bajoran militia personnel on the station reported to two commanders, but Sisko and I both knew who they would ultimately obey. The Federation and Starfleet were probably none too pleased that a human Augment had such a high position in an ally's (and future Federation member) military, but were likely unwilling to rock the boat considering the level of esteem the Bajorans had for me and Bajor's new strategic importance because of the wormhole. If the wormhole wasn't there, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had given an ultimatum to the Bajoran Provisional Government that would see me dismissed entirely. With control of the wormhole at risk, though, they couldn't risk that ultimatum potentially failing. Section 31 might also have put their finger on the scale as well to see me keep my position, though if they had, they hadn't bothered to tell me.

Neela, who made up the third part of my former Resistance cell, was also working here on the station working as part of the station's engineering staff. Her devotion and loyalty to me at this point was absolute, and she would report anything to me that was worth knowing about. With her engineering skill I wouldn't be surprised if she found herself on O'Brien's personal team. They both could learn a lot from each other, in my opinion.

"Business is good, Quark," I heard Odo say to the bartender over the noise of the bar. "You're almost making an honest living now."

The Ferengi manager and owner of this establishment rushed off his feet to help a new customer. The station was extremely busy these days, as news of the wormhole had quickly spread all over the Alpha Quadrant. The commerce and docking fees were a great benefit to the new government as it helped pay for more rebuilding.

Ships from worlds both near and ridiculously far were coming to DS9 daily so that they could explore the wonders of the Gamma Quadrant, and that drew in many new customers for businesses like Quark's, and not just explorers, traders too came looking for new markets to exploit. Certain metals were easier to mine than replicate, or outright impossible at the moment, and the Gamma Quadrant was so far proving quite rich in those resources.

I'd yet to come up with a way of safely getting a piece of that action as investing in those ventures was very risky, especially with so little being known of the Gamma Quadrant. And even with my newfound wealth, which was extreme, the costs for such a venture were also extreme and the risks just as high. I was, frankly, sitting on a shitload of liquid latinum (pardon the pun) after my payday for the Collector database and my pay for a successful mission on Bajor, to the tune of another 1.5 million bars of latinum. Sloan hadn't even haggled when I named my price. That was ignoring the payday I'd eventually get from my days playing pirate on Cardassian shipping and the slowly rising, but steady income from selling my holo-novels.

Having so much liquid cash was a weird problem to have, but I simply had too much 'dark' money and not enough streams of legal and visible income that I could put to work through investment in safer markets and businesses based in the Federation. I'd spent quite a bit recently, but I really wanted to invest in various alpha quadrant companies that would see sharp increases in business as wartime came.

With legitimate investment came scrutiny, though, as they would want to know where I had earned my money, especially since I was a pseudo-Federation citizen, and now a recognized Bajoran citizen. Times may have changed, but governments wanted their tax money and the increased scrutiny was something I wanted to avoid. Of course, the galaxy was a big wide place with many opportunities to make, stash, and invest shady money, but that was a lot more risky than Federation based investments and banking. Bottom line was that I needed a continuous visible and taxable income stream, rather than these large one-off paydays in payment for services that I couldn't admit to, paid by a secret Federation intelligence agency that no one even knew existed.

I considered being on the ground floor investing in various mining expeditions heading to the gamma quadrant in this period before the shit hit the proverbial fan, but while the shows were great for giving me information on the broad strokes, the big events of the near future, it didn't exactly give me detailed information on the successful mining expeditions in the gamma quadrant, or the ones that were destroyed by the Dominion in the future.

One of my preferred methods for creating a continuous income stream was in the writing of holo-novels, like I'd once done on the Enterprise and then on Earth. My Tron holo-novel was still making me money, even to this day, though I had slacked on making any new updates to it.

During my brief stint as a pirate/privateer, preying on Cardassian freighters, I'd discovered that being a pirate could actually be rather dull the vast majority of the time! Shocking, I know! Ambushes had to be set up hours or even days in advance, and since I had to be careful to avoid military patrols, I'd needed something to do while sitting in the cockpit for hours on end, something that I could stop doing at a moment's notice.

Writing the storyline for holo-novels had been that distraction. I'd not written anything truly original, and not because I lacked the required imagination, but because there were hundreds of successful games, movies, and books that had existed in my world/dimension, but that had never been made in this universe due to the huge wars at the end of the 20th century, wars that had never happened in my reality of birth. Why reinvent the wheel when there was so much untapped potential in my memory and no one present who knew that I had stolen them?

While my memories before waking up in this time as an Augment were foggy, at best, I found that if I used my nascent 'occlumency' and certain Vulcan meditation techniques T'Maz had helped me with, my enhanced mind was able to 'unlock' much of my memories of those games and movies. When I considered how to better remember all those stories pre-arrival, I remembered reading stories of elderly people in my time, who were suffering from Alzheimer's, being able to remember the minutest of details from 50 years in the past. The scientists of my time had postulated that our brains remembered everything we'd ever seen, but our minds were not developed/evolved enough to recall the full volume of all that information long past short-term memory. 24th century medicine had confirmed that idea. Of course, my memory was still limited by the baseline human senses that I had ultimately made the memory with, but it was better than nothing.

The use of the neural interface technology found on my ship helped make the transition from my mind's eye to usable holo narrative parameters and programming far quicker, more comprehensive, and more accurate. Where the game or movie didn't have any details, I filled in the blanks as needed from the various databases I had access to. Need an alien cityscape full of details? Just look one up in some planet's historical database, copy and paste. It almost felt like cheating.

After my success with Tron, I chose the subject of my next holo program by creating what I knew best, what the modern day Federation types would call 'combat simulations,' but which were, in fact, the plots of first-person shooter games from my time and dimension.

My first attempt was partially reproducing a hit from my time, Dead Space. That had not exactly been my smartest decision. Thankfully, I had released a beta teaser of a few hours of gameplay before fully committing to the project, in order to gauge the market. That holo program, to my shock and surprise, had been banned from sale everywhere other than the Klingon Empire! Supposedly I had traumatized a lot of folks. Fucking pansies. Those fuckers needed to toughen up. It was supposed to be a little freaking scary, it was a survival horror action story, after all!

The Klingons, thankfully, found it amazing fun and their money was just as good as anyone else's. At least one race was enjoying the game, so it didn't bother me too much, but it did give me a better sense for what my wider audience would and would not accept (and buy). It wasn't even like it was too anachronistic for people to understand and get in on the fun or too based on human history and culture to find enjoyment in. It was set on a freaking mining spaceship in the future! How 24th century could you get?

Yes, it was overrun by monsters called necromorphs, but the player's character was an engineer…who is forced to struggle for their survival by cautiously navigating the spaceship, fighting monsters, struggling with increasing psychosis, solving environmental puzzles and finding ammunition and equipment to survive the horrors. What's not to like?! I'd hired a few lawyers on Earth to appeal the decision, but it could be quite a while before I got a ruling.

Supposedly I had developed quite a cult following in the Klingon Empire these days, fans who were eagerly looking forward to buying my next work. The first installment of Halo and Call of Duty, which I had released teasers for to gauge the potential market for them, were particularly popular right now, especially in the Klingon Empire. Since Call of Duty was a historically based interpretation/depiction of World War II and thus did have cultural value to Earth, the seat of the Federation government, the Federation couldn't justifiably ban that game. It was part of the planet's history, after all, warts and all, and not some monster horror holo program that they could ban by claiming it had no redeeming cultural value…and had traumatized people needlessly.

Currently, I was hard at work bringing the first installment of the Mass Effect story to this galaxy for the first time, with no plans for any other games or movies to develop in the short-term. I figured these three games/stories/holo programs would net me a very tidy profit long into the future, especially as each game already had numerous sequels I could publish once the market for the first installment reached saturation.

Once I'd decided to continue writing holo programs for fun and profit, I'd put out some feelers to connect with a recognized holo publisher who could actually increase my reach. With my successful self-publishing of Tron, surprisingly, many had been interested. After numerous meetings over subspace with half a dozen different major publishers in and outside the Federation, I decided to sell all my works (for now) through a very successful and well regarded Ferengi holo-publisher since they used actual money, could sell to anyone since 'Ferenginar was at war with no one' (as they loved to say), and they had no restrictions on what kind of work I could publish. I could write the smuttiest porn holo-novel to the most bloody one you could think of and they wouldn't care a whit, as long as it sold. I really liked that pragmatism. They also didn't give a shit that I had a weird and unsettled status as a pseudo-Federation/Bajoran citizen.

Working with a Ferengi publisher also better protected me from the Ferengi themselves bootlegging my work and selling it illegally.

Since my publisher's business dealt routinely with creative types, I even found their race's usual attempts to cheat me were more perfunctory than real. Just like with Gaila, that Ferengi arms dealer I helped the Resistance buy weapons from, there were times when it made no sense to engage in shenanigans, especially with a prolific author with great sales who they wanted to maintain a long relationship with. Their commission was actually very reasonable and only slightly higher than what I'd get with various Federation holo-publishers, but their distribution network was actually larger as they sold to powers like the Cardassians, Romulans, and many other powers that weren't friendly with the Federation.

With my current project, Mass Effect, meant for a very wide audience, including Federation types, I was trying much harder to balance the action with more problem-solving situations, including giving the player many chances to resolve issues by being diplomatic. Commander Shepard, if played on paragon, would fit well with the Federation mindset; he/she encouraged humans to work with aliens for the common good and I knew that they'd eat that shit up. The less virtuous player could decide to shoot first and engage in diplomacy never and the program would still work very well for them on that front.

"A lot of new faces," was all Quark said in reply, when he had a free moment to talk between customers. As much as Quark and Odo were genuine adversaries, I could tell that there was a lot of mutual respect there.

Indeed, there were a lot of new people around, but some regulars as well. Morn, the veritable fixture at Quark's in the show was here, the bald and orangish skinned alien who no one could shut up once he started talking, hadn't moved from his stool in what seemed to be hours. That would continue for many years to come.

"The wormhole does bring them our way, doesn't it?" Odo commented idly.

Beings from many different worlds were now visiting DS9 daily and a lot of trade was going on these days. Some of it even legal judging by what I could hear with my genetically enhanced senses that could beat even a Ferengi's fabled hearing, which was a windfall for Bajor as the planet needed all the off-world tax revenue from commerce and docking fees it could get to help with the rebuilding effort. Smuggling had always been a persistent issue in Bajoran space, in fact it was how I'd made myself an ally to the Resistance before fully joining them. Unfortunately, even with the Occupation over, there was still plenty of smuggling still going on. Only now the Bajorans wanted it to stop. Their Cardassian slave masters were no longer being denied more profit, it was the Bajorans themselves that were now getting shafted and they needed that money.

"Everybody wants a piece of the new frontier," Quark commented.

Until the Dominion turned up and ruined everything this would indeed be the new frontier. On the other side of the wormhole were countless alien civilizations to make contact with, unoccupied worlds full of untapped resources with no claim on them, and M-class planets to colonize.

If I was a more moral person, one who did what was right instead of what was easy, I would have tried to seal the entrance to the wormhole already. That act alone would save billions of lives in the short-term. With no easy way to traverse the tens of thousands of light years in an instant I could delay the alpha quadrant's confrontation with the Dominion for hundreds of years, at the very least. The Prophets, on the other hand, might not be too happy with me for upsetting their carefully laid plans.

Even if I did care enough to try, no one would listen to me anyway, whether I failed or succeeded. I had no way to justify the act, no proof of the horrors to come, and while I ranked quite high in the Bajoran militia, if I blew up the home of their gods the entire Bajoran people would call for my head. The most I was willing to do was to subtly discourage the Bajorans from starting a colony in the Gamma quadrant, which would be one of the first settlements destroyed when the war with the Dominion truly began. It remained to be seen whether I'd even be successful at that.

"And I'm sure you've already tried to sell it to a few of them," Odo snarked.

Someone angrily yelled, so I diverted my attention from Quark and Odo's conversation to the source of the new noise.

"We made the decision together!" a male angrily responded.

By now I knew who was having a domestic squabble on the promenade and I smiled as I knew for a fact that it would work out between Chief O'Brien and his wife.

"Not true. That's not true," the woman responded, equally angrily. "You decided first and asked me to agree with it second."

Chief O'Brien's wife was named Keiko. They had presumably met and married while stationed on the Enterprise during the last few years, while I was on my mission on Bajor. I had also met her on the Enterprise, when she was still single, during my first few months in this dimension, and we'd had a very brief, but intense series of on and off sexual encounters. The woman had discovered with me that she could be a hardcore submissive in the bedroom given the right partner, and had greatly enjoyed our time together. It had never become more than that, but I strongly suspected she hadn't forgotten me. We hadn't seen each other on the station, even in passing, but she must know I was onboard. Meeting her again should prove to be interesting, I thought with an evil chuckle.

By the sounds of things, she was not happy to be here. I didn't quite blame her, going from the flagship of the Federation to a slave built Cardassian designed space station in the middle of nowhere would be jarring for anyone, especially if it wasn't her choice to come here in the first place. It was a great career move for the Chief, though.

"Grapevine says Chief O'Brien and the Mrs. are having problems," Quark told the shape-shifter.

If I recalled correctly, the issues they were having would blow over once Keiko had the idea and got approval for the creation of a school for her to teach the children of the station's permanent residents. Until then their domestic situation was a source of great amusement for many others. Everyone loved a bit of drama, especially when it wasn't their drama. Sisko had been a strong proponent of the school, but I would throw my weight behind it as well, maybe even making a donation of some sort in terms of money or equipment.

"I'll never understand the humanoid need to couple," the constable commented.

Well, it had its upside. Sex was very nice, if done right. And beds could get mighty cold when you were alone, which I rarely was these days. Odo didn't sleep, though, well not exactly, so maybe that was part of it.

"You've never coupled?" Quark asked, with emphasis clear that he wasn't referring to just a relationship.

Given that shape-shifters didn't sexually reproduce, as far as I knew from the show, then it made sense that he would have little in the way of physiological based desire to form a romantic relationship. I felt the same way, but for very different reasons, at least with regard to an instinctual desire to have a child. Augments weren't trusted much on Earth due to the whole Eugenics thing, as such I didn't want to have children currently, and actually wasn't allowed to within Federation space if you followed a strict interpretation of the laws currently on the books that hadn't been truly tested in near a century. Even if that hadn't been the case, any child I had would likely find themselves labeled an Augment with limited career choices in the Federation and met with distrust. That wasn't an issue on Bajor, at the moment, but Bajor would one day join the Federation. I had no desire to subject a child to that, but again, who knew what the future held. What I felt today might not be the same tomorrow.

"I choose not to," Odo was now saying. "Too many compromises. You want to watch the karo-net tournament, she wants to listen to music, so you compromise. You listen to music. You like Earth jazz, she prefers Klingon opera, so you compromise. You listen to Klingon opera. So here you were ready to have a nice night watching the karo-net match, and you wind up spending an agonizing night listening to Klingon opera."

Yeah, that was pretty much how it worked, and without the promise of sex that sort of thing really wasn't worth putting up with. Not that I did anyway, if I wanted to watch the karo-net tournament then I would. Not that I knew what 'karo-net' was. My girls knew who the boss was in our relationship and thankfully they seemed to get off on being the submissive around me these days, aided even further by the fact that I literally was their official superior in the chain of command. It also helped that I rarely felt strongly enough about anything to deny them what they really, really wanted.

"That's exactly what I'm saying!" a now familiar female voice yelled.

Mrs. O'Brien's voice was now drowning everybody else out, and to my Augment enhanced hearing, it was a little painful. Quark similarly reacted due to his sensitive hearing.

"Keiko, sit down, please!" the Chief shouted, looking around as if embarrassed at all the attention he now realized that they were receiving.

"Ah, domestic bliss," I muttered into my glass of wonderful blue alcohol.

Being a super human with an enhanced physiology, including kidney function, it was extremely hard for me to get drunk, but I was giving it the old college try. Besides, Romulan Ale was really damn good and not illegal to sell or drink in Bajoran space, I'd made sure of that. I had quite a few former Resistance friends in the government who remembered that I'd done a lot for their planet, and I knew other people who could be persuaded to see things my way. The Federation personnel were certainly enjoying the ale, which was a bit of a gray area in terms of legality as they were Federation citizens, but stationed in a place governed by Bajoran law.

The government had also followed through on their promise of land once the Occupation was over. Over the course of the Occupation, I had been 'paid' with a lot of land and it kept getting added onto as I continued to provide for the Resistance's needs. Weapons, replicators, medicine, ships and parts, it all went into the count. By the end of the Occupation, I was owed the equivalent of 50 square miles of land or 32,000 acres, a not insubstantial amount of land, but the Bajorans were an honorable people and had honored their promise.

With Section 31's information in hand, containing over 50 years' worth of deep scans and exploration on all the unexploited minerals and ore veins on the planet, I had a lot of information to work with to make an informed choice. Rich people owned islands in my time, so that's what I wanted too, the fact that it gave me privacy and complete exclusivity also helped. I wanted complete control of the area and no nosy neighbors.

Luckily, there were many unowned and completely uninhabited islands all over the planet, including some quite large ones that the Cardassians hadn't destroyed with mining for various reasons. And since it was hard or impossible for Bajorans to live on islands too far away from the population centers at this point in the planet's recovery, I had my pick of the bunch. Once more replicators were available and a planetary transporter network was put in place that wouldn't be the case any longer.

After quite a bit of research my girls and I eventually chose a large 45 square mile island with a 'mountain' at its center, which of course was just a very, very tall grass and tree covered hill made of solid rock. The island was a semi-tropical paradise with pristine white beaches, a natural harbor, white sheer cliff walls, a hundred waterfalls, hot water springs, and a thriving ecosystem. Even its soil was rich and good and could be used to grow my own crops the old fashioned way if I wanted to.

The panoramic views of the island and surrounding ocean from the summit of the 'mountain' were also amazing. The extra land that I was promised, which exceeded the total area of this island, was made up in ownership of the surrounding water, which worked just fine for me as that area also included several valuable underwater ore deposits. When my girls and I had gone to 'island shop' in The Flighty Temptress, I had made the mistake of landing on one of its sandy white beaches, gentle, amazingly turquoise, crystal-clear waves crashing on the shore. Within minutes my beautiful Bajoran babes had shucked off all their clothing and ran nude into the waves giggling, splashing each other and me, acting completely carefree. You'd never know that these same women had gone into battle with me multiple times and had taken many Cardassian lives, coming home covered head to toe in gore and blood. With such an enticing view, I felt it was karma or maybe the Prophets' will and had signed the papers granting me ownership of the island that day.

With my big beautiful island now in my name I had wasted no time at all drafting a wish list with the help of my girls. My goal was to create a highly defensible high-tech palace fortress that could withstand the troubles to come, including concerted attempts to hack into it or infiltrate it, but also to make it beautiful and functional with the ability to add on to it if I needed to.

I had asked my girls to come up with their own wish lists for our island home, including how they'd like their personal and permanent bedrooms decorated. They had been touched I even asked and that I was giving them permanent living quarters in my new home.

With our list of wants finalized, I had considered hiring an architectural firm to draw up plans and designs, but on a whim I actually reached out to Commander Data on the Enterprise who I had worked on a few design projects with over the years. Because of how outlandish one of my requests was, I actually told him this was to be part of a new holo program I was designing, the truth being stranger than fiction. I'm not sure there was anyone else in the quadrant who had the ability to mix so many disciplines together to accomplish what I wanted. That guy was a master of anything he set out to do!

And he came through for me, big time. He drew up architectural plans with exacting precision and incorporated all our wants into a cohesive whole that just blew us away. From the layout of the foundation to the perfect placement of the smallest power and data port, it was all there, including what technology to buy to make this a state-of-the-art home of the 24th century that could be upgraded and added onto as needed, though given the size it was I couldn't see that happening anytime soon. Did I mention that Data works fast and for free? He saw this as an interesting intellectual challenge that required research into a myriad number of fields and disciplines. He even agreed, at my request, to destroy his records beyond even his retrieval after he was done.

I had offered to pay him for his work, but he refused, so I had made a 10,000-bar donation in his name to the organization currently exploring the sentience of the exocomps. I also invited the Enterprise's entire senior staff to spend time on my island the next time they were in the system as thanks. Hopefully they'd take me up on it.

With his plans in hand to guide construction, perfect to the last measurement, given the detailed scans of the island I had, my palace fortress home had taken over 6 months to build, mostly. Its construction had required over five hundred workers working on it at any given time, the vast majority of which were Bajoran (which the Provisional government was very pleased about as it gave a huge injection of capital into the economy). Shipments of technology that the Bajorans couldn't produce themselves, from the Federation, paid for with their credits, or from Ferenginar and other independent providers, with latinum, came continuously for months during the construction.

The house I built was on the summit of my very tall mountain-like hill, after I had flattened it a bit, in order to take advantage of those amazing panoramic views. Data's design was an interesting mixture of French chateau, which I had expressed admiration for, and classical Bajoran architecture, with large party spaces for dining and receiving guests from the Provisional government, including many spare bedroom suites for overnight stays. The summit of the mountain also provided quite a bit of land to develop so I put in beautiful gardens of all sorts, meditation areas, water features, and walking trails that led down to the surrounding beaches, etc. My beautiful Bajoran ladies were very happy that I thought of them when designing such beautiful spaces to commune with the Prophets. It had been on each of their wish lists.

My addition to the outside was the 'public' hangar bay for the Temptress, which was artfully hidden underneath the large front lawn. At a signal from my ship a section of lawn would retract in two pieces, and a ship elevator would rise from the hangar on which I would land, or guests could land their own ships. Once I was on the platform it would retract and lower my ship into the hangar bay. It was actually similar to some of the smaller hangar bays seen on DS9.

The really fun bits of my new island home were in the subterranean levels under my home. Those levels were located deep in the heart of the mountain connected by an underground elevator shaft or by transporter which only I could activate. Luckily the 'mountain' my house was on was already riddled with sensor defeating materials, but I included a sensor dampening field as well to further hide those levels. The vaunted Enterprise herself could be directly over my home and its sensors would still not indicate that there was anything else under the house or in the mountain, Data had assured me. It took an incredible amount of planning, but by strategically dividing the labor, no one group of laborers was privy to my home's secrets or would be able to learn about the subterranean levels, especially as most of it had been dug through automated machines. Hopefully that would stymie any collaborators or spies.

With my new wealth in hand and knowing how the war to come in a few short years would make procurement of just about everything 10x more difficult and more expensive, I spent rather freely. I put in a full design and fabrication suite, a large industrial replicator, multiple holodecks, a holo laboratory 4x larger than even the Enterprise's which was incredibly useful for writing and testing my holo-novels, storage bays for emergency supplies, such as food and water, and other critical equipment. I also built a secondary hangar bay for The Flighty Temptress many times larger than what was actually needed in case my ship ever underwent a refit.

A hidden escape shaft with permanent holographic illusion would let me exit from the hangar bay out the side of the mountain. Any resemblance to Batman's cool exit from the Batcave was entirely intentional. These levels were cool, but also functional, and designed to withstand detection or a lot of punishment. To help keep those levels hidden I had even put in a completely separate and independent computer core, transporters, replicators, and power reactors, later upgraded with Minosian technology, if they had anything better. Prophets forbid, but if my home was destroyed by enemy fire, those levels would be fine and since they were self-sustainable I could hunker down there for years before needing to leave.

I may have overdone it on my wish list for the defenses for the island itself, as Data found it strange for even a fictional private holographic residence to be so well armed, but he dutifully designed it. The island now boasted a planetary-class shield covering my home and island, phaser and torpedo weapons' turrets, both anti-personnel and anti-air, and a sophisticated sensor network covering the entire island, though no orbital weapon satellites.

In other words, if a small bird landed on my island I'd know about it, or, alternately, if I wanted to shoot down a mid-sized cruiser in orbit over my house, I'd be able to do that too. There was no kill quite like overkill! Thankfully my reputation, position, and friendships with the who's who in the Provisional government allowed me to get away with having such a fortress with military-grade defenses.

My rank as a general on Bajor, also allowed me to bypass certain restrictions on the purchase of such advanced weapons and defenses. If various companies and independent worlds just assumed that my purchases were for the Bajoran military, well, I wasn't going to correct them. To be fair to them, it made sense on paper. I was the general of a planetary government's military recovering from a hostile occupation, purchasing weapons of such power and extreme cost likely fit their preconceptions for the kind of purchases a planetary military would make under those circumstances, rather than me as an individual. Why would I have need for so many weapons? How would I have the funds to purchase them?

Man… all this yelling really made me want to head back to my island and relax well away from this Cardassian designed monstrosity. My girls were similarly begging me to take some leave so that we could head back and frolic nude on my beach. They had had a great idea to use my industrial replicator to replicate all kinds of outdoor beach furniture, tiki huts and couches, fire pit for ambiance and grilling, etc., that you'd see at a high-end beach resort like on Risa. I had even installed mini drink replicators so that we could replicate frozen fruity drinks right there on the beach itself. We could go right now, as my ship was docked right here at the station. I didn't even have to pay docking fees, even though it was my personal ship and not owned by Bajor, as I still used it in the performance of my duties. In other words, I could leave the station whenever I wished.

I had come to realize that the Bajoran Provisional Government had originally thought that I would use my island palace fortress as my base of operations for all off-world Militia forces, a mistaken idea that I hadn't disabused them of till it was far too late. Not sure why they had thought that considering I was spending all my own money to build the thing, but whatever.

Section 31 was very happy with my work these days, especially with how I had taken their intelligence and used it to thoroughly destabilize the Occupation and force a withdrawal earlier than expected. With the wormhole being discovered and Bajor now a planet of incredible strategic importance in the quadrant, they were happy to have one of their assets, even a freelance one, here on DS9 and in such a high-level position in the Bajoran military. I'm sure they were scratching their heads wondering how I had lucked myself into such a prominent position on a planet that everyone in the quadrant would now know the name of.

"What could they be going on about like that anyway?" Odo asked the bartender.

For someone who claimed to have no desire to 'couple,' the shape-shifter seemed overly fascinated by domestic matters, didn't he?

"She doesn't like it here," Quark explained, being able to hear what I did because of his species' much more sensitive hearing.

"Who does?" Was the constable's acerbic reply, with a chuckle in his voice.

I, for one, did. This place was awesome, most of the time, at least when I didn't have the strongest urge to sunbathe on my private beach on my private island. There was a lot to like though, as it had so many different kinds of people going about their lives. There was enough drama and intrigue going on around me in just this bar to make a multi-season soap opera.

"Don't even think about it," I heard Odo warn Quark.

With my enhanced eyesight, it was easy for me to pick faces out of a crowd, so I saw that Commander Sisko and Jadzia Dax were having dinner together. It looked like a private affair. Quark must have been eying up Dax with interest and Odo had warned him off. When Dax had first arrived, she had been very excited to learn that we both would be living on the station and likely working together at times.

Hopefully Sisko's wife, Jennifer, who hadn't died in this version of Trek due to their being no Battle of Wolf 359, didn't get jealous. On a side note, Jennifer Sisko was a very beautiful woman. If it wouldn't potentially ruin my working relationship with Sisko I might have tried to seduce the woman by now. Maybe I should invite Sisko and some of the senior staff to my home on the Island for some team building, maybe make it something like a weekend away? Really should come up with a name for the place…

"I can so think about it," argued the bartender with a lascivious smile on his face.

Given that the station's new chief science officer was supposed to marry Worf in canon, assuming the timeline hadn't gotten messed up by my being here and having slept with her multiple times, then it was pretty clear that Quark wasn't her type. Really, Bashir had a better chance with her, assuming he matured a little. I was still screwing my Bajoran babes on the regular, and they were often in my quarters overnight, but since we now all had full time jobs we spent a lot less time together. Those were the harsh demands of life, I suppose, but we all still cared for each other deeply. Relying on each other to survive in battle after battle meant we'd probably always be close.

"You might as well try to find a drink of water in the Yadozi desert," Odo joked. "Besides, I'd say our new Commander is interested in her, which is odd since he's married."

He was interested, all right, but not in the way they were insinuating. I was sure he loved Dax, but that didn't mean he felt that way towards Jadzia . On the other hand, I was attracted to Jadzia, but didn't care much for the slug named Dax in her guts, even though her personality was a blend of both.

"Not at all," the Ferengi manager and owner of this bar said. "I know for a fact, when she was a he, you know, before she got this new body, they were old friends."

Curzon Dax was famous in the Federation. He'd been a very important diplomat, as well as a well-known womanizer. For reasons that made sense only to the Klingons he was greatly respected in their empire and was seen as a big part of how and why the Federation/Klingon alliance had lasted so long.

"Things change," was all Odo had to say about that.

That was when the shape-shifter spotted someone at the Dabo table and his posture changed. He went from being somewhat relaxed to very mad in a matter of seconds.

"How long has he been here?!" the security chief angrily asked the bartender.

The guy who now had all of Odo's attention didn't seem to be anyone special. But given how upset the shape-shifter clearly was, the Bajoran was a known criminal of some sort.

"He came in on a transport last night," Quark explained succinctly, obviously not recognizing the man beyond that, but now looking more intently at the man who had aroused Odo's passions.

By now I knew there was going to be trouble and my enhanced memory was working overtime trying to figure out what was going to happen next. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was the episode when some guy frames Odo for murder by killing his own clone, but I couldn't be certain so I decided to let things play out for the time being. If I was right about what was about to happen then I could prevent the murder. I would have to access the infirmary medical records to steal any data Bashir managed to acquire on this tri-phasic cloning technique that some Bajoran dissident had developed, though. It could come in handy if I ever wanted to create soldiers myself, like the Jem'Hadar.

The question remained, should I step in and save the day at an appropriate juncture or provide the needed answer?

Fuck that, I decided, as I just didn't care enough to get involved. Beyond stealing the cloning data, there was no benefit to me in getting involved at this point. No one was paying me and I had no positive feelings towards Odo at present, and the whole thing would work itself out when the real crook was eventually found without my help. Now that we were firmly in the time of canon DS9, I suspected that this issue would pop up over and over again, and the question of whether I should get involved and derail things entirely would need to be answered again and again.

No, a better use of my time was to focus on my work. This holo-novel wasn't going to write itself, after all, and I had to come up with seamless ways to keep the player on track in a fully immersive and interactive environment like a holodeck. This meant either predicting everything the players would do, which would be impossible even with my Augment mind helping me, or limiting their actions within the holo-novel. The tricks the Mass Effect designers used in a console gaming environment just wouldn't jive with this new technology. Maybe an 'open world' style holo program was too complex to be worth it at present.

"I don't want you on this station!" Odo was now telling that guy.

While I wasn't going to get involved, this was kind of entertaining to watch, remember, soap opera, so I stopped typing for a moment.

"Yeah, well, that's too bad, because I have every right to be here," the Bajoran man replied snarkily.

"I decide who has rights and who doesn't on this Promenade," Odo responded, well, more like growled.

That sounded all kinds of wrong and both the Provisional Government and the Federation would take issue with statements like that.

"You'd better ask your Federation superiors about that one," the criminal replied, rather astutely.

Having had enough of the drama, I caught Quark's attention and reserved a holosuite for the rest of the night, asking the man to put it on my tab. This whole thing was kind of amusing, but frankly I didn't want to see any lynch mobs going after Odo or expend my political capital trying to stop one. Not that hanging a guy made of goo would do any harm, I thought with a chuckle.

XXXXX

Office of General Gothic. DS9.

To many Bajorans I was a famous war hero. A warrior out of recent legend who had carved his way through his Cardassian enemies to drive fear into their hearts. Someone with many important victories to my name and who had single handedly dealt terrible blows to the Cardassians. A man that had helped drive the Cardassians off Bajor and brought the end of the Occupation. I'd even rescued Li Nalas and brought one of the holy orbs back to Bajor, and boy had that been an odd fucking day.

To many spoon-heads I was no doubt an infamous war criminal. A vicious insane monster who butchered and beheaded Cardassians for fun and wore their neck bones like trophies, the boogeyman in the night.

With those two equally accurate reputations in mind I wondered what they'd think if they saw me on the floor trying and failing to repair the Cardassian designed piece of shit replicator in my new office that was supposed to provide me with an ample supply of raktajino and Romulan ale as I worked. Would they be amused or confused?

While I'd been on the station for over nine months now, I'd previously been working out of Dukat's old office above Ops that whole time. With Sisko's placement on the station, however, it had been time to give it up and move on out.

The door chimed and I banished those random thoughts.

"Come in," I called aloud, the room's microphone pickup recognizing the intent behind my invitation and allowing the door to unlock and open. I had the highest-level security clearance on this station and even Sisko wouldn't be able to override my door lock if I had wanted it to stay locked.

I'd been expecting this meeting for a while now, for Commander Sisko to sit down and talk with me while he made it clear that he was in command of this station, which in turn put him nominally in charge of the wormhole. Just like I had expected he had decided to settle in properly and get the lay of the land before having this conversation. Kira had already warned me that he had been asking around about me, but didn't yet know that we were lovers. While Kira, Ro, Neela and I weren't hiding our relationship, we certainly weren't advertising it either. To my fellow former Resistance fighters, relationships within a cell were so freaking common, most just assumed that we were in one, even if they hadn't received any confirmation of it.

Technically, I outranked Sisko, by quite a bit too. A Bajoran Militia Major was about equivalent to a Starfleet Commander, a Militia Colonel a Starfleet Captain, so a Militia General would actually be akin to a Starfleet Admiral. All of that was academic as obviously the Bajoran military was probably as powerful as a mid-tier Federation colony planet, and that was being quite generous. What we lacked in technology and ships, we more than made up for in experience and sheer grit though. None of those mid-tier Federation colonies had tens of thousands of blooded troops experienced in combat. Necessity could be a harsh taskmaster, but she taught her lessons well. We knew how to fight and kill our enemy, we knew how to survive in a harsh galaxy.

Sisko looked like he was girding himself for a confrontation, but he had nothing to worry about from me; I had both encouraged and fully supported Li Nalas and the Bajoran Provisional Government's idea/decision to not only invite the Federation in, but to let them administer the operation of the station. When Li had asked for my opinion and advice, I had given it.

It certainly made sense considering the new treaty between the Federation and the Cardassians which had ended the war. Neither side wanted to jeopardize the treaty and return to a state of war, which should keep the Cardassians from doing anything too stupid or overt. Both governments had gained and lost quite a bit, though I still felt the Cardassians had been the net winner based on the information available at the time. The calculation became terribly skewed when you factored in the discovery of the wormhole though. Starfleet's administration of the station now acted as a potent shield to the spoon-heads returning. And they so, so badly wanted Bajor back in their control with the discovery of a stable wormhole, the only one known in the galaxy. I'm sure that many Cardassians who had supported the withdrawal from Bajor had lost their positions (and their lives) in the aftermath, despite having had no reason to know. Cardassians were extremely petty like that.

"Hello, Commander," I greeted with a smile, shaking his hand briefly after getting up from the floor and returning to my seat behind the large wooden desk I had replicated in pieces onboard the Temptress. It was warm and inviting and looked quite out of place amidst the austere Cardassian design aesthetic of the station itself. What no one besides my girls and I knew was that the inner core of the desk was made of solid duranium and would stop several kill shots if I flipped it over and used it like a shield. "Welcome to my office, such as it is. I would offer you something to drink, but…" I said while stopping mid-sentence as I gestured helplessly to the pile of parts on my office floor.

He took the offered seat in front of my desk, where we both remained silent for several long moments. There was a lot of power in silence and I was fully willing to wait patiently for Sisko to break that silence first.

When I had envisioned this meeting, I'd thought he would have invited me to his office in Ops, perhaps as a not-so-subtle power move, so that people would see me coming to him on his terms, in his seat of power. Yet he'd come here, surprisingly. I wondered what that meant.

Was it some attempt to give me the illusion of being superior or in control of this situation? Or was he paying me respect, by acknowledging my official power on this Bajoran installation and over its Bajoran personnel? Or was he, in essence, stating that he wasn't going to play that game, that he was above it? Or had he been ordered to play extremely nice by the Federation and Starfleet and this was in furtherance of that order? So many questions that I really didn't have the answer to and I was extremely reluctant to rely on my future knowledge from the shows as a way to understand and interpret his actions and decisions. This was an alternate universe after all.

This wasn't the Ben Sisko I had watched seven seasons of in another dimension. For one, his wife hadn't died in this dimension, which meant I doubted he wanted to resign from Starfleet at the first opportunity like before or had a deep-seated hatred for Picard's role in that massacre. Regardless, this Ben Sisko, like in canon, had played a huge role in discovering the location of the wormhole itself, had negotiated with the Prophets themselves for safe travel through it, and Kai Opaka had named him the Emissary of the Prophets, granting him enormous influence over Bajor and all its people. If he wanted me gone from my position and was willing to use the power of his Emissary title, I strongly suspected I knew who would win in the end. He also had a keen mind and enough balls to punch Q right in the face, I would not be underestimating him. This was a captain who'd one day be regarded in the same league as other Federation legends like Archer, Pike, Sulu, Picard and Kirk.

"I quite understand; thank you for the offer though. The Cardassians appear to have been quite hard on the station in their withdrawal," the Commander said pleasantly, looking over my disassembled replicator.

"Yes, they certainly were. I'd say they were even quite petty in what they chose to take with them in their withdrawal, showing a preference for ripping out any piece of technology, critical part, or piece of station infrastructure to ensure life would be a little harder on the Bajoran people they'd leave behind, even things that really weren't all that valuable. Other times, they were quite malicious in what they left behind, like this replicator, for instance, which I believe they deliberately sabotaged to explode upon reactivation. Thankfully, I'm quite good with Cardassian technology and the Bajoran engineering staff on the station have gotten quite good at spotting the many deadly little traps they left behind for fun," I explained.

Sisko looked shocked and confused that the Cardassians would do this, probably wondering what they gained from it.

"When I first came to Bajor, so much of the Cardassians' actions made little sense to me, Commander, so I don't blame you for not understanding. I didn't either!" I laughed with a small smile. "You know my background in my country's military; I actually have experience on the other side of this equation, as a member of the occupying military force. An occupying force needs to win the hearts of minds of the natives if their mission is to succeed and be sustainable long-term. The Cardassians never cared for such things or even viewed the Bajorans as sentients worthy of respect, or life. Rape, torture, summary executions for real and imagined slights against them, or simply for fun, were commonplace. It made no sense to me! These were actions which served no strategic purpose and provided no benefit, beyond making the Bajorans hate them even more, which galvanized the Resistance and increased their recruitment. Acts of evil for the sake of evil, was the conclusion I reached. They did these evil things just because they could, because there was no consequence for it, because they delighted in causing suffering and exercising their power over the Bajorans in many twisted ways."

Sisko looked shocked at my words, whether that was at the sentiment I expressed about the Cardassians when as a Starfleet officer he was supposed to look at all races as essentially good, or because that wasn't the galaxy he thought he lived in, or because he felt like I was attacking him…I didn't know.

"You have had little to no dealings with the Cardassians, have you, Commander?" I asked, but already knowing the answer. "Nor have you fought against them in the Federation-Cardassian war, is that right?"

"That's right," Sisko answered, looking like he was unsure if he was being insulted by my words or his competence and suitability for this post questioned.

"As I understand it, Chief O'Brien fought them personally in the war and has a great deal of experience. He might be a good person to speak to if you doubt the veracity of my words or they confuse you. Of course, any Bajoran serving on the station, whether they fought in the Resistance or not, would freely share their experiences with you as well, if you asked," I advised, keeping my facial expressions and voice carefully neutral. "They all will have tales of horror and suffering that someone raised on Earth in the Federation would scarcely believe could happen in the same supposedly civilized galaxy. And if you really want to be horrified, ask about the horrors of Gallitep, which my Resistance cell helped liberate. Major Kira, herself, spoke directly with many of the survivors afterwards."

I really wasn't attempting to rile him up or insult him, rather I was actually trying to help him better understand what Bajor had gone through during the Occupation and how it had scarred them as a people. I was trying to open his eyes to the cold, harsh realities of this galaxy. In canon it took a long time for him to gain that perspective, maybe too long.

"Why are you telling me this?" Sisko asked, through gritted teeth.

"I once heard a saying, a piece of wisdom that I want to share with you, something that I think you could benefit greatly from. Though, it's a piece of wisdom that you might not yet be ready to accept or understand. 'It's easy to be a saint in paradise,' I said, parroting back the words and wisdom that Sisko would have uttered many years in the future when faced with a hard decision, where he had to sacrifice his Federation morality for the good of everyone. "Paradise is the safety and comforts and kindness of Earth and most of the Federation. You are far from paradise here, Commander, and the quicker you realize that, the better your service here will be and the more good you will be able to do the people of Bajor. It will be hard to abandon those rose-tinted glasses a citizen of the Federation wears all their life when viewing the galaxy, but you'll be better for it, I promise."

Sisko chose to remain silent.

"But that's neither here nor there! I'm certain you did not seek me out for my thoughts on the nature of Cardassians, or how the Occupation has shaped and hardened the Bajoran people, or the true nature of the galaxy," I demurred with a bright smile, changing the subject in a very ham-handed fashion on purpose. "What did you want to speak with me about, Commander?"

"Yes, yes," Sisko answered, visibly shaking himself to get his thoughts back on track. "Our duties and command have a curious amount of overlap that I'm unaccustomed to, so I just wanted to make sure that we won't be stepping on each other's toes."

I looked at him for a moment; he seemed almost embarrassed at his words after the weighty topics we had just been talking about. He seemed so young at this moment, and I suddenly felt so old. The weight of being the Prophets' whipping boy/catalyst and the bloody war with the Dominion would change him in the years to come.

"The Federation has made it very clear that Starfleet is only here to administer the station and to help the Bajorans recover from the Occupation, eventually leading to possible Federation membership, should Bajor seek it down the road," Sisko explained. "As I understand matters you'll be in charge of the Bajoran militia personnel stationed here, its ships, and any Bajoran installation off the planet, which technically includes this very station, with the remit to protect Bajor itself. This does make my job a little harder as this station's commander. I need to know you won't be countermanding my orders, for example, at least with the station's Bajoran personnel, when you don't agree with them. That kind of situation is untenable and would represent a danger to everyone on this station."

That would certainly be a problem. This station was under his command, but I was the commanding officer of all the Bajoran Militia forces here on the station, including the station itself. Regardless of how blurry the command structure was on paper, it was an absolute necessity that the Cardassians view Starfleet and their officer, Commander Sisko, as being in full control of this space station. They needed to fear that taking this station and the planet itself back by force would be tantamount to going to war with Starfleet and the Federation once again and abrogating the treaty which had given them half a dozen new worlds. Of course, I suspected they would happily give those planets back in exchange for control of the wormhole, but fuck them. That wasn't on the table.

Fear of the Bajoran militia was not going to keep them from doing anything that they really wanted to do. Even beyond that, chaos would result if I took too direct a role here. If I countermanded his orders the Bajorans would want to obey me, as a hero of the Resistance and their commanding officer, but Sisko was the Emissary of the Prophets. They'd be conflicted and that could be a disaster in the making. All the fuel for a Bajoran civil war was already there without me doing anything to add to it.

"Commander, let me assure you, I have no intention of getting in the way of your running this station," I calmly assured the commander to his visible relief. He obviously thought I was going to put up a big fight, perhaps because he was worried that I was a tyrannical dictator drunk on power, like the Augments of Earth's past. "My focus will be primarily on building up Bajor's burgeoning space fleet and any off-worlds bases we set up. DS9 is a good platform for me to do that from, but it's yours to run. I'll try not to step on your toes as long as you do the same, but there will be times when I need to run battle drills and war games involving this station and its personnel. You, of course, will be notified and involved to minimize disruption."

Anything else was just meaningless small talk and soon the Commander was heading out the door.

"I'll have the Chief come down and see to that replicator right away," Sisko promised.

I'd already put in a repair request after I ensured it wouldn't explode, but there had been much more important things for him to do around the station and any spare parts this station had once had available, parts that could have been used for repairs, had been reallocated down to Bajor when the station had still been in orbit of the planet. Heating homes on the planet and feeding people had been a far higher priority than getting the station repaired and fully operational. The large industrial replicator that Starfleet had provided the station would be invaluable in meeting the station's needs now.

My actions had led to the Occupation ending nearly 9 months to a year earlier than in canon, even with the Cardassians dragging their heels at the end. Curiously, it had taken that entire time before Starfleet personnel like Sisko had been assigned. It was a curious gap in time that I suspected the Prophets had a hand in making happen to preserve their best timeline.

The Cardassians had not been kind to the station in their withdrawal and had taken everything of even the slightest value that could fit in their ships. Other times, they had sabotaged things or left deadly traps. They were very petty like that. I'm sure they had been tempted to take even this replicator too, but they did have limited space in their ships' cargo holds, especially since they had 4 less military freighters to work with, I thought with an evil grin, hence the sabotage.

The commander was no doubt making a goodwill gesture by offering, and I was grateful because somehow, even though this spoon-head designed piece of shit was decades behind Federation replicators, it was somehow even more complex and prone to breaking down. Which really didn't make any sense to me since it didn't have anywhere near the range of capabilities of a Federation replicator in what it could produce, or its quality. The ultra-high end Federation replicators I had at my home on Bajor put these suckers to shame. If there wasn't an issue in the compatibility of the power systems, I'd have already installed one in my offices here, image be damned.

"Thank you, Commander, for your candor," I replied. "Hopefully we can work well together for the peace and prosperity of Bajor in this difficult and tumultuous time of transition. If you ever need an extra ship, especially one that is faster and better armed than your runabouts, I'm always happy to assist you with my ship."

"Thank you as well, General Gothic, for this candid discussion and for your offer. I will keep it in mind should I find myself in need," Sisko responded in a pleasant tone, but I could tell that my words had shaken him, otherwise he sounded genuine.

The need for a faster and better armed ship would be real for several years to come as the shit hit the fan around here, but my ship had better not be destroyed helping him out. It was a running joke of fans of the show that every Runabout assigned to DS9 would eventually be destroyed somehow, and they'd gone through a lot of them.

Going forward, it would be good for me and for Bajor if we could build a good working relationship and get along even on a personal level. If nothing else it would make him more likely to ask for help, and that would give me more chances to drive events in a way that pleased me. The fact that he hadn't once mentioned that I was human and/or an Augment spoke well for him.

Maybe my knowledge from the show about his character would yet come in handy.

Maybe my words had reached him.

Only time would tell.

XXXXX

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Chapter 25: 23,232 words

Chapter 26: 21,166 words