The Rift

[Vianca]

This is good.

[ElPintoGrande]

Damn you and your false update!

[Anomie]

God damnit, I too thought that Noble Ire had posted another chapter.

When, man, WHEN?

[darthdavid]

Would all of you stop posting before I have to start maiming?

[DesertFly]

Bring it on, pritty boy.

[darthdavid]

Suck my gigantic penis ye of poor spelling!

[DesertFly]

I'm sorree, dus mi spelling affend you?

[Noble Ire]

I appreciate the attention, I really do, but could you two take it outside?
Thanks.

Oh, and I'll have an update soon, hopefully by the end of the weekend. I've just been busy; I have a new fic I'm working on as well, actually.

[Noble Ire]

Chapter Forty Seven


Reginald Barclay looked nervously at the large device cradled in his dirty, outstretched palms, a slight twitch of his lower lip accentuating the exhausted bewilderment in his eyes. It looked like a pair of elongated, blue shells, connected together by an enormous handgrip, and tapered on the sides and back with short fins, some of them obscuring a bright greenish glow that emanated from the interior of the object. Between the forward tips of each shell, a pair of teeth sprouted, angled at one another and bearing stripes of the same eerie glow.

“Um… what is it, exactly?”

By virtue of the charred wound on his head, now bandaged hastily with some sort of dark-colored cloth, and his generally alien features, the Arbiter’s reaction was not readily readable, but the way in which his massive shoulders slumped slightly suggested mounting exasperation.

Lower mandibles tightening upward, the Sangheili warrior placed a massive hand on the device, rotated it, and then placed the human’s outstretched right hand on its central handle column. He then let go, causing Barclay to sway forward unsteadily as he corrected for its significant weight, quickly supporting the object with his left. The Arbiter then indicated to a wide panel on the handle’s interior side with a long finger.

“This is a plasma rifle, favored sidearm of the Covenant foot soldier. It is designed for usage by those of my kind, but I believe it will serve you adequately. Operation is simple; target an opponent between the nodules at the rifle’s front, and depress this trigger. If you depress it too long, it will overheat, and become unusable for several seconds.” His yellowish eyes passed over the human’s exposed, fleshy hands. “I do not recommend firing more than a few bursts at a time in your case.”

Barclay, attention torn between the alien’s deadly-serious face, and the weapon in his hands, nodded slowly.

From the small cockpit of the small salvager they were standing in, the Arbiter, who had to hunch down in the enclosed space, pointed into the hold beyond, where five more figures lay, all seemingly unconscious. One, the Imperial infiltrator supposedly named Flitch, remained propped against an adjacent bulkhead, badly beaten, but still breathing. Nearby, a trio of creatures, two stocky, reptilian beings in bulky atmospheric gear, and a sickly-thin, bird-like alien were similarly laid up, piled unceremoniously in a small alcove. The Arbiter had identified them as Unngoy and Kig-Yar respectively.

The final member of the ship’s captured complement was a being of the Arbiter’s own species, nearly as tall and muscular, and dressed in angular, crimson and black plating, unlike the other’s elegantly-forged silver encrusting. Lying at the center of the small assembly hall, its thick wrists and ankles were bound by shackles that were silted with the same glow that emerged from Barclay’s weapon.

“Keep watch on them, and alert me if any of them awake.”

With that, the warrior stooped back deeper into small cockpit, leaving Barclay alone in the badly-lit chamber, nervously trying to figure out how to hold the bulky weapon without accidentally discharging it. After a long few minutes in which neither of them spoke, only the shallow breathing of the captives and the low hum emitted from the machinery buried in the deck below providing life to the eerie stillness of the craft, the Starfleet officer, began to slowly back into the smaller room, feelings of unease and bewilderment mounting.

Seated on the large, oddly back-sloping pilot’s chair, the Arbiter was monitoring the various gauges and panels mounted before his with focused interest. Despite the fact that he had served on starships for more than a decade, Barclay couldn’t decipher what was being shown; the raised, glowing holographic displays and chains of sprawling, irregular text were well beyond his experience. He did, however, recognize the flat disk that currently held the Arbiter’s attention, a 2D representation of local space, showing the wreckage left by the rapid arrival and retreat of Imperial forces, and beyond it…

“How many more ships are out there?” Barclay asked, lowering his weapon slowly and leaning in for a closer look.

Without looking up, the alien touched a segment of the immaterial field, and it ballooned upward, now showing the area in form. There were at least two dozen small, bluish blips in the immediate vicinity of the map’s center, where Barclay assumed they were, passing through clouds of tiny black marks. Well beyond the sphere that held most of the debris, three more blips floated in the void, these ones far larger, bearing long, contoured shapes. Further still, at the very edge of the hologram’s reach, a blur of blue clotted the void, far larger than any of the other icons.

“I cannot be sure; this vessel’s long-range scanning equipment is limited. There are twenty-four other salvage craft in this debris field, along with at least half a dozen Seraph fightercraft. The three warships beyond this cluster are likely their base platforms.” He paused, adeptly tapping controls beneath his large hands to magnify the blur on the edge of his display. The forms were still indistinct, and lined with static, but it was clear there were a great many of them, most apparently larger than the symbols that represented the salvage carriers. “That is what remains of the Covenant battle fleet that was instructed to destroy and occupy this system. Their battle with the Imperial Star Destroyer was highly costly, but there are probably still several hundreds capital ships still deployed here.”

Barclay looked at the tall, focused alien in surprise. “You know why these ships are here?” He had gathered that they were in the Arbiter’s own galaxy now, but he hadn’t known that he could actually identify the place and time. Of course, if the warrior had mentioned it, the engineer might not have heard; he wasn’t quite feeling himself yet, for obvious reasons. Flitch’s kidnapping, the battle on the transport, his rough and hurried subsequent extraction from the vessel, it was all largely a blur. All he had been able to definitively gather from the Arbiter was that they were now stranded in a potentially hostile world, most likely without hope of reinforcement. Barclay had experienced such perilous adventures before, many times in fact, but such experience had little bearing now; as he had learned many times before, holodeck excursion generally tended to pale in the face of hard reality.

The Arbiter did not reply for a long moment, instead turning his attention to the small wall panels that showed the space beyond the craft’s hull, drifts of distant stars blocked by the shadowed hulls of charred debris and the occasional pinprick of a passing searcher. When he at last spoke again, his voice was not as strong and assured as it usually; if Barclay didn’t know any better, he would have said it rang with regret.

“In this galaxy, I and my forebears have long been part of a great alliance of many species, the Holy Covenant. Guided by the Prophets (he emphasized the word with clear emotion of a type which the human could not identify), we spread across the stars, dominating others and absorbing them into out whole, until nearly every world belonged to us. It was our goal, preached by the Prophets, to unite all of the children of the Gods, our Forerunners, and then locate the sacred relics with which we could rejoin them in paradise.”

“But that changed when we discovered your people, the humans. The Prophets ordered their complete extermination, not adoption into our compact as we had always done before, for reasons known only to them. I was their loyal servant, and I complied; our fleets swept over the worlds of humankind like a plague, killing all we saw, hunting them until only a few remained. When our probes located this system, from which the last human warriors organized their resistance, I was one of many shipmasters dispatched to deal them a fatal blow, a strike that would expose their heart, leave their homeworld bear. And we did our job, all too well; that fleet out there is clustered around the human’s fortress, no doubt wiping away the last traces of life there.”

Again silence hung in the small chamber, the Arbiter having returned his attention the displays, leaving the human behind him to grapple with the information. He had known little of the Arbiter’s kind and past before now, only a few quips that Geordi La’forge had relayed about how the stoic Master Chief had initially mistrusted him, but beyond that, he was simply another alien warrior, stranded as they all were on a strange and aimless voyage. He had fought alongside them all against the Imperials, Barclay had even saved the warrior’s life, he recalled dimly; now he was supposed to believe that this creature was a mortal enemy of humanity, and had probably killed many with his own hands. Images of the skill with which Arbiter had dispatched the Stormtroopers on the Home One crawled slowly back into his mind…

“The captives?”

The Arbiter’s voice roused Barclay from his morbid reverie, causing him to raise his weapon fractionally towards the alien before he was able to stop himself. No, whatever this being had done before, he was an ally now, the only one he had right now. Besides, Barclay was an engineer, and not a particularly brave or even self-secure one at that; he would be no match for the muscular, trained soldier if he ever started to revert to his old ways. There was no choice but to trust.

Gulping to ride himself of apprehension, unsuccessfully, Barclay glanced back into the silent hold. “Um… they’re all still asleep… knocked out. No one’s moving. It’s all right.”

The Arbiter inclined his long, bare skull marginally in recognition, and turned his attention fully back to monitoring the distant ships.

Now even more unsettled by the quiet, Barclay spoke up again. “So, what do we do now?”

That was a question that the Sangheili had been wrestling since he had witnessed the Covenant armada do battle with the marauding Star Destroyer, a conflict whose ample detritus had fortunately given him some respite to choose his own path, deflecting immediate detection by the multitude of warships in the system. Now that an operable medium of transport, be it a short-range one, was at his disposal, the soldier had to begin planning out the future, and what repercussions his actions might have. Though somewhat overwhelmed by sudden realization he was once again in a world he knew, the Arbiter had been able recognize the flagship Ascendant Justice before it had been destroyed, and realize what the event meant. In his past, the chain of events that had lead to contact with the human’s Enterprise, that warship had not fallen in this system; it had pursued the Pillar of Autumn to the holy relic, to the Halo installation, and to his own disgrace.

But now, all of that had changed. The ship’s commander, Teno ‘Falanamee, the being he had once been, was dead, long before he could be cast down and raised up anew, the process that had birthed the Arbiter himself. And yet, in spite of the death, he still remained, and now stood in a position unlike any even the Gods had held. He was in a position to change anything, and everything.

There was still a voice, the little base urge that had tormented him while on the Mon Calamari vessel, that now sang with joy; this was an opportunity to fall back within the ranks of the Covenant. He would be saved of the disgrace that the failure around Halo had given him, it would be simple to remerge, say that he had escaped the destruction of his flagship. The loss would still be a troublesome, but it would not compare to what he had faced on the other path, he could redeem himself in the eyes of the High Council. He would have respect again, a warship at his control, master of his own honor and destiny, and not the disposable enforcer the mantle of the Arbiter had made him, a puppet of authority.

But, that voice held little sway with him now; he had conquered it long ago. There was too much to forgive, too much to forget. The warrior could not disregard the honor, the goodness, the right to live, he had seen in the humans these past weeks. More importantly, he could not forget that great betrayal, the one that had forever changed his world.

Memory of that dark hour rushed back to him: that cold, misty chamber, bodies of slain soldiers and war machines littering its ancient floor. In his role as fist of the Prophets, he had been dispatched to a newly found relic of their Gods, another Halo, to prevent a human strike force, among them the man that had caused him such disgrace, from destroying the structure, and to retrieve an artifact that would allow for the ring to be activated, heralding the prophesized reunion with the Forerunners. He had not questioned the quest, it was his duty, his lone purpose in life now, and as such he had fought through the ancient fortress where the artifact was housed with reckless abandon, slaughtering robotic defenders, and darker creatures as well, roused by the melee.

With the help of numerous loyal Sangheili warriors, he had at last made it to the heart of the protected vault, only to find the humans had reached the prize first. He dispatched them with relative ease, and seeing no need to slay his defeated foes, picked the artifact from their prone bodies, his mission a success.

But it did not end there. The accursed beast Tartarus, favored minion of the Prophet Hierarchs, had arrived, relieving him of the relic, and unleashing his Jiralhanae brutes to gather up the unconscious humans. And then, leaving the Arbiter no time to even smart from the robbing of both prizes of his conquest, Tartarus had revealed his true intent; he planned to eliminate the Sangheili from their long-cherished post as the executors of the Covenant, and install his own race in their place. Then, in the moment before the giant cast him into a pit at the center of the chamber, he revealed that this treachery, the downfall and subjugation of the ancient warrior race, would be executed with the High Prophet’s sanction.

The betrayal was absolute; the Sangheili were a founding member of the Covenant, they had lead its armies to victory after victory for millennia uncounted, and yet the Prophet Hierarchs would cravenly replace their ancient role with the legions of the Jiralhanae, savage, dishonorable trolls who feasted upon the flesh of the fallen, even that of their own allies.

No, the Arbiter would never serve the Prophets again. He had vowed that even as he lay nearly broken at the bottom of that great pit, his life spared only by the intervention of an abomination that dwelt at the core of the Halo, a beast from a time when the Forerunners themselves roamed the galaxy. In that dark place, he had learned more of the great treachery; the great ring, supposed bringer of salvation for all believers, was really a weapon of terrible power, and its activation would wipe away all life in the galaxy. Even the basic tenants of the Covenant faith were a lie, and the Prophets knew it. What they could gain by such an act of complete extermination he did not know, but he knew that their machinations had to be stopped.

And now, he had an unexpected and unparalleled opportunity to save his kind, and those who might still be loyal to them, from the Prophets and their minions. Yes, that had to be his goal now. It was all that mattered.

Still, there were other matters to be considered. He alone might be able to rejoin the armada, claim that he had escaped the annihilation of his flagship, and meld back into the war machine, in a position to undermine the Prophets from within, but he was burdened with an additional charge, Barclay. Certainly, the creature was of no great significance, and an earlier him might have simply slain or abandoned the human, but that was a path he no longer followed, nor wished to rejoin. No, Barclay had proved himself to be brave enough when needed, if annoyingly talkative and nervous most of the time, and the Arbiter did, after all, owe him his life. No matter how it might waylay his new purpose, the human could not be sacrificed out of hand.

Then there was Flitch. A spy and traitor, the warrior felt little attachment to the man, and would not be so adverse to casting off the burden he represented. Nevertheless, the crumpled form was a reminder of a far greater threat; if he was right, that damnable wormhole at the center of the debris field remained open. If the human Empire chose to return in force, they would be a threat greater even than the Prophets…

Barclay shifted on his feet nervously, unsure what the alien’s long silence meant. He had finally worked up the courage to try and ask his question again when the Arbiter leaned forward and looked over at the human.

“Ships like this one are not equipped for long-range travel. Our first move must be to dock with one of those carrier ships. The other salvagers should be breaking off soon, and I can use this vessel’s logs to determine which squadron it is tasked with.” With a few key strokes, many of the displays disappeared or recessed into the hull, and a dual control stick rose between the Sangheili’s legs. Taking hold of it, the Arbiter eased the ship into motion, its docking claps disengaging from the derelict Alliance shuttle outside almost silently. Slowly at first, then far more rapidly, the ship accelerated into space, skirting around huge chunks of wreckage, the pilot’s skill in the role rapidly becoming apparent.

As he watched the ravaged chunks of metal race by, a new concern occurred to the human. “Won’t they… the people on the command ship be somewhat annoyed that we commandeered one of their ships and knocked out its crew?”

“Standing armada policy on hostile boarders and thieves is to shoot on sight.”

Barclay clutched his rifle tighter. “Oh.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------

“Sir, deep-range sensors are picking up an anomaly in relative sector four point three.”

Putting aside a readout on the continuing repairs of the Republica being overseen by her XO, who was at the moment in the ship’s primary sublight drive control center, Captain Ryceed leaned forward in her control seat, focused on the Mon Calamari lieutenant who was offering the report.

“Are you sure it isn’t simply another glitch? The deep-range systems haven’t been fully recalibrated yet.”

“No sir, Sensor Control has checked and rechecked it,” the salmon-skinned officer replied. “There is definitely something out there, although we are still unable to identify it.”

Ryceed nodded. “Very well. Sector four isn’t in the vicinity of the wormhole; it must be natives.” She turned to the bridge’s tactical station. “Do we have deflector screens back?”

“At seventy two percent, Captain.”

“Be ready to engage them, full coverage, on my mark. I want weapons control standing by as well, and a squadron of alert interceptors ready for launch.”

Ryceed turned back to her ship’s main viewscreen, which simply showed the placid, empty starfield beyond. The Republica had been immobile, its internal resources completed dedicated to repairs, for several hours now, and even though they were moving along quickly considering the impressive amount of damage the emergency transit had inflicted, the cruiser was still hardly in fighting shape. On top of that, the captain and her crew still had no idea where the ship lay; the long-range sensors had only recently begun coming online, and without them attempting to match up local space with known stellar configurations was next to impossible, even for the android Data, who still sat at the makeshift wormhole station that had been rigged up near Communication Control. The white-skinned being was now watching her intently, roused from his continued study of the invisible vortex’s nature. None of his comrades were on the bridge, likely still resting from the events of the previous day, but Ryceed secretly suspected Cortana was still watching her from the bridge security monitors above.

“May I be of assistance, Captain,” Data asked evenly, fixing her in his cool, feline gaze.

Ryceed considered. “I think my bridge crew is quite capable of this, thank you. However, if you wish, you may observe their readings. I suppose it is possible you might be more familiar with them than my regular staff.”

The android nodded, and then swiftly moved to the main sensor station, where the Mon Calamari Lieutenant and several others worked, attempting to clear the interference from their new readings. After another two minutes of tense silence, the static began to clear.

“Sir, we’ve locked on to it. The anomaly appears to be a starship of some kind, moving at approximately 2,500c, on a direct course with the Republica. It should be in weapons range in two minutes, twenty seconds.”

The captain frowned. A ship moving only several thousand times past the speed of light? Even civilian vessels moved orders of magnitude faster.

“Is its hyperdrive damaged?”

Checking his screens again, the officer shook his head. “No, sir. The object appears to be enveloped in some sort of realspace disruption; if it was simply using a faulty hyper unit, we would be reading a massive tachyon contrail behind it.”

Data, who seemed to be taking in the information displayed on the numerous terminals before him despite the fact they were in basic, leaned in closer, over the shoulder of an attending ensign.

“May I?”

The woman backed away from her input panel, eyeing the machine curiously. The service and protocol droids that filled out the ship’s ranks were rarely so bold.

With surprising ease, Data began to manipulate the screens, bringing up new readings and perspectives on the approaching anomaly, translating much of the text into the Federation common script, and even pulling up old sensor scans of the derelict vessel they had located near the wormhole’s mouth. Before Ryceed could question him, though, the android turned back to her, the expression on his artificial face changed somehow, almost relieved.

“Captain, I believe that ship is encased in a Warp bubble.”

Ryceed frowned; she had heard the term used once or twice by some of the Starfleet crewers, but it meant little to here. “And that means what?”

“Unless I am greatly in error, that ship was constructed in the Alpha Quadrant of my home galaxy, most likely by the Federation or the Klingon Empire, considering the harmonic frequency of its shell.”

“Well, it would seem that we’re finally where we are supposed to be,” Ryceed said, with no small sense of relief. Nevertheless, she was not looking forward to a first contact situation; diplomacy was not one of her strongest suites. “I want Councilor Organa up here immediately, and Captain Picard as well. Tell them that we’ve picked up a…”

Suddenly, a vacant display screen on the woman’s right lit up with a familiar bluish light. “No need, Captain,” Cortana reported cheerfully. “I’ve already alerted them. The ambassadors should be on the bridge within a few minutes.”

Ryceed glared at the AI’s representation. “Thank you very much, Cortana. However, as of this moment, my crew is still perfectly capable of executing such a task in the future. If an opening appears, you shall certainly be the first to know, but until then, I prefer it if you attempted to restrain yourself while tapping into my bridge surveillance system. You may be under Councilor Organa’s protection, but that won’t prevent me from initiating extra computer security counter-measures should I feel that the need has arisen. And I assure you, the programmers in my crew are more than up to the task.”

Cortana frowned, although Ryceed couldn’t tell if it was from honest consternation, or if she was being mocked. Considering their recent conversations, the later was the more likely prospect. “As you wish, Captain.” With that, the image dissolved into a haze of blue static, and then nothingness.

Sighing deeply, Ryceed sank into her command chair and glared out into space. I’ll take on a battalion of Stormtroopers with just a sporting blaster and half a box of death sticks gladly, but if I have to play nanny droid to this AI for another solar day…

“Why isn’t that blasted ship here yet?” she snapped at the lieutenant, who disregard her tone automatically. Captain Ryceed was easy to rile up, but she generally didn’t lash out in any significant or dangerous manner. Generally.

“Its just reverting to realspace now, sir. Two thousand clicks directly forward.”

With a nod from Ryceed, numerous tactical displays focused in on the targeted starship, as did the electronic cells in the main viewport, magnifying the starship to visual size. Though inexperienced with Federation designs, Ryceed immediately recognized the vessel’s unusual, sleek and polished white hull, a wide saucer mounted upon a low-slung, with a pair of long, exposed nacelles jutting behind, like those of a Y-wing starfighter.

“Data?”

“I believe it is a Galaxy-class starship, Captain. The one of the most advanced starship class in Starfleet,” the android replied, watching the approaching vessel with keen interest.

“Not, I think, anymore, Mr. Data.”

Ryceed and the machine turned to see Captain Picard mounting the low dais on which the command portion of the bridge sat, Commander Riker, Deanna Troi, Leia Organa, and C-3PO close behind. By the turbolift bank from which they had all entered, Major Truul took up a sentry position alongside the regular bridge marines, staring at the deck somberly.

“Captain?” Data asked, unsure what his superior was implying, but Picard held up a hand, a clear indication that he would fill the android in later. Data fell silent, positronic brain already switching gears.

The captain continued forward, staring at the distant ship with something akin to an awed grin on his face, stopping only when he reached Ryceed’s seat.

“You recognize it, Picard?”

“It can’t be sure,” he replied, still seemingly overcome by emotion. “But…” the markings on the forward disc of the craft at last became clear, unintelligible to Ryceed “ah, yes. The Magellan. I knew it.”

“That’s Gehirn’s ship, isn’t it?” Riker offered from behind them, his voice equally overcome by awed relief.

“There’s only one way to find out, number one.” Picard turned back to Ryceed. “Can you open up a communications frequency. Try…” he broke off, recalling his earlier realization of the technological sophistication of Alliance hardware compared to his own. “Try a frequency lower than the one you likely usually use.”

The Republica’s captain, along with Leia Organa, raised an eyebrow at the suggestion, but she nodded to the comms command officer, and he immediately began bombarding the opposing ship with hyperwave and subspace frequencies, attempting to find one that both ships could harness. As soon as he began doing so, the Magellan stopped cold, barely within the cruiser’s effective weapons range.

“What is it doing?” Ryceed asked Picard cautiously.

Picard frowned. “Are you scanning it?”

She nodded. “We have been for the last few minutes. The ship didn’t respond before now.”

“Well, I suggest you stop. If what I’ve heard is correct, that ship’s captain might not take well to any perceived threats, your probes included.”

Increasingly wary, but still compliant, Ryceed wordless confirmed the order. A moment later, the comm controller’s receiver panel began to crackle. “I think I’ve got something, sir,” he called out. “I’m trying to lock to down the right signal. It looks like they’ve opened up both an audio and visual line.”

“Link them both to my personal receiver,” Ryceed ordered, sitting back in her command alcove and directing her view towards a 2D display fixed near the bridge’s low ceiling. The others followed her gaze.

After a moment, the screen winked on, revealing a colorless haze amidst which a human form was vaguely visible. Gradually, the blob focused and cleared slightly, at last revealing a middle-aged human woman standing in the middle of an expansive, scallop-shaped chamber. Reflective phantoms continued to race across the image, and the whole thing had an unnaturally bluish tinge, but it was stable enough to show the woman in detail. She was tall, with short, blonde hair, and a worn face. The uniform she wore was similar in color and design to ones in which Riker and Picard were still draped, but it was darker, more formal, more military.

Satisfied that the image was as clears as it was going to get, Ryceed began to speak. “This is Captain Ryceed, commanding the cruiser Republica, of the Alliance to restore the Republic. My ship is carrying ambassadors from our Supreme Council; they wish to make contact your command structure.”

In response, the other woman frowned, and cast a glance to someone out of the image’s clear view, saying something soft and unintelligible. After apparently receiving some reply, she looked up again. “I am Captain Lena Gehirn of the United Federation of Planets starship USS Magellan. Our universal translator is having difficulty identifying the language you are speaking. If you can understand what I am saying, please attempt to adjust your own.”

Ryceed stared at the other captain for a moment, and then turned to Picard and the others. “I assume you can understand what she is saying?”

“Of course, Captain,” C-3PO piped up from the middle of the group, nudging his way forward with obvious eagerness. “I have familiarized with the language that the humans of the this galaxy use, and I would be more than happy to serve as a liaison for you. I am quite experienced in the capacity.”

Before the golden protocol droid could move far, however, Leia laid a hand on his shoulder, causing him to halt, bewildered. “No, C-3PO. I think Jean-Luc should do it.”

Expressionless as his mask of a face was, the droid began to exude an aura of disappointment, but stepped back nonetheless. “As you wish, Mistress Organa.”

Stopping only to offer an appreciative nod to Leia, Picard moved alongside Ryceed’s seat, within full view of the screen above. “I’m afraid the captain doesn’t have a ship to ship universal translator at her disposal. However, my personal one still appears to be in good repair; I’ll be happy to serve as an intermediary.”

Gehirn’s blue eyes were first attracted to Picard’s warn uniform, but before she had time to inquire about it, the remaining static cleared momentarily, and she got a good look at his face. A second later, the woman’s jaw dropped.

“Picard?” she managed, still gaping in disbelief. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But… how? You… the Enterprise, disappeared years ago, a decade. We all thought you were dead.”

The bald man grinned. “Yes, I’ve heard my absence has been unexpectedly… extended, but I assure you, I am still very much alive.”

Gehirn let out a short, although not joyless laugh. “Well, this is certainly not what I expected when we detected anomalous energy readings in this sector. I had thought it might be another…” she tapered off, her smile fading considerably. Behind Picard, Deanna fidgeted, her expression similarly changing from one of relief to sadness.

“Well, lets not get ahead of ourselves,” she continued at last. “I see you still haven’t lost that dramatic flair you so fond of showing off at the academy. That’s quite a ship you’ve got there; Lieutenant Morgan is having a hard time even scanning past its superstructure. So, what happened to the Enterprise? It’s not like you to travel on any other ship but your own.”

Now Picard’s grin began to fade. “The Enterprise… was lost a long time ago.”

“Lost? And her crew?”

Picard sighed, demons of memory he had been trying to restrain for weeks suddenly clawing at his heart. “Only Commander Riker, myself, and eight… seven other members of the Enterprise’s crew are onboard the Republica.”

“What of the rest?” Gehirn pressed, her concern increasing. “were they all…”

Picard shook his head. “I will be perfectly happy to explain what has happened to us, as well as other, more current matters, but I do not think this is the appropriate venue.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Ryceed said simply, clearly uncomfortable being forced to sit in on the reunion.

Gehirn eyed the other woman again, and then gave a Picard a quick nod. “Of course. If you wish, I can have my ready room prepped for you and… whoever else cares to come onboard immediately. Before that, though, I do have to ask, where exactly...”

The question remained unanswered, however, as the Federation starship’s bridge was suddenly doused with red light, and a klaxon began blaring in the background. Startled, Gehirn was distracted again as another woman, presumably her first officer, came into view and whispered something hurriedly into her ear.

“How far are we at maximum warp?” she responded immediately, her demeanor instantly stern and focused.

“Four hours, sir,” the second woman responded. “We might be too late.”

Exchanging worried glances with his own first, Picard attempted to regain Gehirn’s attention. “Captain, what’s going on?”

The woman looked even more worn now, all traces of good humor vanished. All that remained was the face of a human slowly being crushed by hopelessness. “We’ve just received a distress beacon from the Bajor system. Deep Space Nine and the fleet are being overrun.”
--------------------------------------------

For those of you who are interested, or are wondering why this update was so delayed, I'm working on an original work, set in my own Scifi universe. Check it out: Sindelin: Light Without Shadow

[Hawkwings]

awesomeness! I sense a fleet battle coming up! Do we get to see some ship-crushing by the Republica?

[Noble Ire]

awesomeness! I sense a fleet battle coming up! Do we get to see some ship-crushing by the Republica?

I think you can answer that particular question on your own.

[Hawkwings]

oh, I could answer, but it's more entertaining for you to show it, through another capter (hint hint?)

[Vianca]

Would be good (the battle, that is).

[Darksider]

God Dammit newbie!

I thought this was an update.

::::::: Glares angrily :::::

[Vianca]

God Dammit newbie!

I thought this was an update.

::::::: Glares angrily :::::

Sorry.

[Noble Ire]

Chapter Forty Eight


Though relatively modest in size, none of them more than a kilometer in length, the half dozen warships were nonetheless an impressive spectacle, gliding swiftly through space in a tight, diamond formation. At the center of this group moved the greatest of the vessels, a massive, pointed shell, reminiscent in its form of a bottom-dwelling sea predator, withdrawn into its carapace in anticipation of approaching prey. Across its surface were scattered dozens of emplacements of various size and function; ion cannons, laser turrets, tractor beam projectors.

The five ships that hung in space nearby were similarly shaped and adorned, near replicas of their host, albeit in miniature. And further out still swarmed a mass of tiny craft, flitting under and around the bows and curved hulls of their charges, forming up, break off, and rejoining one another with near-impossible coordination. Each was a tiny pyramid, each tip bearing a formidable turret fully capable of tearing apart any starship of similar size that was caught unawares by them.

This was the arm of the Ssi-Ruuvi Imperium, one of many fleets that enforced the homeworld’s edicts and ambitions. Out beyond the farthest reaches of the Galactic Empire, deep in the legendary and virtually impassable vastness known as Wild Space at the fringe of the cosmic disk, the Imperium held absolute sway over dozens of systems. Born of the fierce reptilian Ssi-Ruu and their submissive P’w’eck slaves, this conglomeration had for eons held absolute dominion over their star cluster, subjugating all those who resided there. To drive the war machines that made this conquest possible, the lizards had long developed a terrible and arcane technology; Entechment, a process through which the life energies of slaves and captives could be drained from the corporeal forms and be bottled up, a power source of great potential with which flowed through the cores of every one of their warships.

But the process left its victims lifeless husks, and eventually the Elders of the homeworld knew that a new source of slaves was required to maintain their fleets. Almost as a gift from the Gods, a being from beyond the worlds they knew, the ruler of a vast empire that encompassed stars beyond number, came forth with a proposition; in exchange for a sample of their entechment technology, he would allow the fleets of the Imperium to come to some of the fringe worlds of this mighty empire and harvest them, a crop of billions of vital, sapient lives. The Elders eagerly agreed, but before the bargain could be finalized, this mighty leader was destroyed, and negotiations ceased.

However, the Imperium had already staked its fortunes upon this new hunting ground, and would not be dissuaded. Surely, if the leader of such a great nation were to fall, it would collapse around him; who would notice the absence of the inhabitants of a few unimportant worlds in the ensuing chaos? And so the new conquest had begun, the essence batteries that drove the Ssi-Ruu horde filling once more, energized with alien lives, human lives.

The invasion had not gone according to plan.

Though seemingly motionless in the supreme vastness of interplanetary space, the Ssi-Ruuvi warships were accelerating as fast as their drives were able, dozens of small aft tubes burning with a fiery light. Similarly mobile, the mass of fighters that swarmed over their hosts now moved not in simple flight patterns or practice maneuvers; they waited to defend against a threat, one that might very well overwhelm them.

The source of this peril soon became evident. From both above and below the travel plane of the speeding vessels erupted a hail of emerald lances, each pulsing with a raging power that could smote mountain peaks. The larger of the vessels met the sudden barrage with an invisible barrier that sprang to life across their hulls, catching and dissipating the focused jets of ruination before they could unleash their full power, but the fields of the smaller ships could not cope with the onslaught. One, and then another were bisected once, and then again by the harrying beams, whose passage triggered a fireball within each of the afflicted ship’s hearts. In concert, the pair erupted with atomic fire, annihilated themselves, and then cast their remaining, charred components to the stellar winds, causing the escorting fightercraft to scramble into evasive maneuvers.

Then came a new wave of destruction, this time in the form of a hundred black and gray vessels not much larger than the multitude of pyramids they plunged into headlong. Flat-winged TIE fighters and their fast, angled Interceptor kin shredded the outmaneuvered defenders like parchment, choking the sky with glistening laces of energy. Certainly, the pyramid fighters were more heavily armed, and sported shielding and armor that the attackers did not, but the droid brain that drove each could not adapt to the changing combat situation quickly enough, and by the time the survivors had regrouped, nearly a third of their number was nothing more than scattered detritus. Nevertheless, they spiraled back into a fierce counterattack, the anti-fighter guns of the larger ships adding to their potency, but it was already too late; the TIE squadrons had pulled back, and in their place forged the true hunters of the pack.

The four Imperial Star Destroyers shrugged off the incoming fire as if it was merely a display of colorful sparks, and unleashed another terrible volley, like the one that had immolated the two escorting vessels moments before.

The battle was short and unremarkable. Ssi-Ruuvi warships were designed to capture their prey for entechment, not destroy it, and when faced with a truly worthy foe, they could do nothing but flee and hope that their swarms of droid fighters could slow their pursuers. In this instance, their gambit had failed.

Standing on the bridge of the Star Destroyer Fi with his arms crossed loosely at his back, Grand Admiral Peccati Syn looked out into space absently as the embers of the alien command ship faded into the blackness, the last of its escorts pitted in hopeless sorties against wing after wing of victorious TIEs. A tactically-minded and skilled man, Syn was typically fascinated by the carnage that his ships unleashed upon the foes of the Empire, but this time victory was simply too easy; besides, there were other, more pressing matters on his mind.

When the last of his squadron’s fightercraft had withdrawn from the battlefield, the Grand Admiral sighed and turned slowly to a subordinate, who waited at stiff attention.

“Grand Admiral, the last of the alien invaders have been cleared from Cattamascar and the surrounding systems,” the officer reported. “The battle group your squadron just defeated was the last of the major resistance. Vice Admiral Corcaka believes that there may be scattered pockets of resistance on the planet, and has dispatched several divisions to rout them and secure the surviving population centers.”

Receiving no noticeable recognition from his superior, the man continued. “Initial reports from joint elements of the 12th fleet indicate losses were minimal; several squadrons of attack fighters, a few support craft, and the Lancer frigate Mandor 67, which was garrisoned around Cattamascar when it was taken. Civilian casualties are more severe; the invasion force that attempted to take Bakura was intercepted before it could begin targeting population centers, but the aliens did have access to the occupied planetary system, and several colonies on a nearby moon, for several days. Early reports indicate at least two million civilians were executed or herded into slave ships of some sort. Vice Admiral Corcaka has been attempting to ascertain the destination and objective of these vessels, but…”

At last, Syn waved a dismissive hand, and the officer fell silent. “Enough. These figures are of no concern to me. When the home base of these invaders has been located, you may alert me. Until then, I shall be in my chambers.” He paused for emphasis, and glared into the officer’s eyes intensely. “Let nothing else disturb me.”

The subordinate delievered a smart salute, trying to keep his unease at the Grand Admiral’s order from becoming evident. Such orders were to be taken quite seriously in the Imperial Starfleet, especially from a Grand Admiral. They had authority at their disposal for punishing failure that well surpassed that of a mere captain or commander. “As you command, Grand Admiral.”

Beneath his stark-white uniform, bold rank plate, and twin golden epaulets, all marks of his high station, Peccati Syn was an ugly, corpulent man with a thin cap of blonde-white hair and a perpetually foul expression, but he nevertheless command respect from all who passed by on his short journey to the quarters he called home, buried deep with the durasteel titan that had long been the instrument of his will. Through moderate skill, the right connection, and a devotion to Emperor Palpatine’s New Order that was beyond fanatical, Syn had begged and bullied his way through the ranks, finally currying his supreme master’s favor, and becoming one of the first Grand Admirals, an elite core which acted as the penultimate authority over the unstoppable Imperial war machine.

There was another element of his regalia as well, not of his station, but even more telling of his psyche; a golden talisman that hung on a chain below his waggling chin, an artifact of a long repressed and largely extinct religion. It spoke of the man’s dedication and devotion, his unerring belief in whatever cause he chose to cling to, a trait that Palpatine had found most useful in his servants. And since the Galactic Republic’s fall, the object of Syn’s fidelity, his very reason for existing, had been that one man and his mission of ‘safe and secure society’ for the galaxy at large.

And then, even as he grew ever more powerful, the Emperor had fallen, slain by the insidious rebel threat, or so the media said.

In that instant, less than a standard month ago, Syn’s life had changed. He had never even considered in his darkest meditations that Palpatine, victor of the Clone Wars, savior of the galaxy, eliminator of the weak and corrupt, could die. It had shaken his core, and left him casting about for something new to believe in. This quest had consumed him for days and days on end, and the unease in the Imperial Center barely registered in his consciousness.

Darth Vader assuming the mantle of supreme ruler, the terrorist attack that left much of the old Emperor’s inner circle dead. And then further upset; the Dark Lord of the Sith had set off on some great new crusade, taking with him many of the Empire’s brightest commanders and a large chunk of the reserve starfleet. Who was in direct command of the Empire in his absence was unclear; some said COMPNOR, others the Central Committee of Grand Moffs, or even the cold-hearted Director of Imperial Intelligence Ysanne Isard. There had even been whispers that a new Imperial Senate was to be created. However, as of yet, the Empire had not devolved into disarray; Vader was still out there, ready to crush any rebellion now that the infamous Rebel Alliance had been all but obliterated, and there was much talk in hidden circles that he had had more than a passive role in the late Emperor’s fall.

But all these thing had seemed mere obstructions to Syn’s search, and when word had reached the core worlds that a hitherto unknown alien force was attacking border worlds along the Unknown Regions, the Grand Admiral had taken a large element of his command and struck off for the region without receiving orders from anyone; a new campaign might clear his head, or at the very least, remove him from the distractions of galactic politics. Alas, the menace had proved far too easily quashed, giving him barely any time for contemplation. Hopefully the alien’s homeworld would take some time to locate.

Syn’s chambers were spacious, but surprisingly barren, a testament to his own pious devotion. A few pieces of furniture, a handful of computer interface, each carved from cold, ebony metal. And of course there were the tapestries, ancient works, depicting battles and rituals on worlds laid to waste in millennia past and mighty warlords almost completely forgotten with the passage of eons. And of course, there was the towering statue of the Palpatine, the true Dark Lord of the Sith, that dominated the center of the chamber, three meters high and carved with immaculate detail, capturing all of the being’s vast power and terrible presence. Syn was one of the few that knew of Palpatine’s true nature, his power in the Force, but rather than disregard or revile it as most in the Empire now did, he had embraced it. Though he could not touch the mystical energy field, it consumed his passions; the Dark Side was all, and Palpatine was the Dark Side. Or so he had thought.

Pausing a moment to marvel at the towering form with a mixture of sorrow, confusion, and regret, Syn maneuvered himself around its base and towards his sleeping chambers, fingering the emblem around his neck as he ponder whether or not a brief nap could ease his mind. However, before he had traveled another dozen pace, Syn stopped short. There had been another shape behind the larger statue, one that he had never had placed there.

Whirling around and almost tipping over in the process, the Grand Admiral fumbled desperately for the holdout blaster tucked neatly near his waist. “Who are you?”

Shadowed by the massive edifice of wrought stone and metal, a figure did indeed stand, tall and motionless, its head and limbs enveloped in a long, black cloak. Even as Syn attempted to jerk his weapon from its holster, it revealed a single, gloved hand and raised it in calm supplication. “Calm yourself, Grand Admiral. I come under Lord Darth Vader’s sanction.”

At these words, though he did not fully believe them, Syn faltered, his pudgy hand falling away from the weapon at his side. Instead, he gaped at the form as it advanced closer put of the shadow, still impenetrably obscured.

“Darth… Darth Vader?” he gulped at length. “Why does he send you hear? Who are you?”

“A messenger, and a servant, nothing more,” it replied, voice soft, yet impenetrable and seemingly unmarked by gender or ascent. “I am here on your ship as the enforcer of his will.”

“And what does he wish?” Syn asked carefully. “Surely these aliens are of no interest to one such as him. They are weak and cowardly.”

“No, the Ssi-Ruu do not concern our lord,” it replied. “You seem to have taken care of them quite efficiently on your own, in any event.”

The Grand Admiral peered at the figure even more closely. “Ssi-Ruu? I have heard of no name for them. How do you…”

“It is of no importance,” came the reply suddenly, with a trace more emotion. “I am interested in far more personal and pressing concerns. Namely, your loyalties.”

Syn straightened up instantly. “My loyalties lie with the Empire.”

Though he could not see its face, the man knew that the figure peered at him carefully from its cover for a long moment as he stood tall with conviction, his sense of indignation, and below it an odd worry, rising. Syn was not easily cowed, but this intruder’s very presence seemed to be wearing on his composure badly.

“That much is clear,” the figure pressed, taking another step forward. “But it is not enough. Do you serve the new Empire, Lord Vader’s Empire, or Palpatine’s?”

Syn took a step back in response, bewildered. “What… what do you mean? I serve the Empire…”

In an instant, the figure was upon the man, and though he nearly matched it in height, it now seemed to tower above him, exuding an aura of indomitable power, and plain malice. Syn wavered, but before he could move fully, the gloved hand shot from its covering and grabbed the officer’s white collar tightly, pulling him close.

“Enough. You will answer, or you will die. Are you still committed to Palpatine and his ways?”

The dark maw that still lingered under the cloaked being’s hood stared down upon Syn’s quivering face, filling his vision and his thoughts. What did this… thing want? It spoke of being the new emperor’s servant, yet there was something, a hint of duplicity in its words, noticeable even through their obvious distortion. Syn was no Force user, and never could hope to be one, but he had been around them, dark mages of great power. And he knew this creature was one of such capability.

But if that was true, why did it ask for the information it desired. Palpatine and his minions could tear information from the minds of their subjects as easily as Syn could activate a data reader. It wanted him to the inquisition answer under his own willpower. But why? What did it want to hear?

Feeling the grip upon his tunic grow even more inescapable, the Grand Admiral at last managed to summon words. “No! Palpatine is dead. I owe no loyalty to him anymore. Lord Vader is my master now, our master.”

After a moment of motionless silence in which the figure seemed to regard him again carefully, the grip faded away, and Syn fell back under his own power.

“As you say,” it breathed, softly, and without perceptible emotion, turning its back on him.

As it began to pace away, Syn rubbed his throat reflexively, breathing heavily has he attempted to recover from the encounter. Relief flooded through his veins, but the dark presence the messenger exuded still prevented him from feeling any semblance of ease. Thus, when the figure paused again just as it passed the base of the massive statue, the man was instantly uneasy once more.

“A shame,” it said plainly. “I would have thought a Grand Admiral’s skills would have been more diverse.” From its side, a beam of blue light split the air with a piercing hiss. “You lie poorly.”

Syn’s eyes bulged and he stumbled backwards, disbelieving. But I…

A nearby maintenance sensor recorded the discharge of iron-rich vaporized liquid in the Grand Admiral’s quarters. The anomaly was logged and a cleaning droid was designated for cleanup during the next upkeep cycle. Sensing no other disturbances, the sensor returned to standby mode. All was well.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A lone Lambda-class shuttlecraft raced away from the quartet of dormant star destroyers, scything quickly through the cosmic emptiness before at last breaking with the physical coil and fading into the endlessness of hyperspace. At the small vessel’s helm, a robed figure checked the readings and navigational gauges before it one last time, and satisfied, leaned back into its seat in silence. After absorbing the soft glow of the dim running lights that illuminated the cramped cockpit for a moment longer, it at last reached up, and in a deft motion, removed the hood that obscured its brow.

“It is done, then?” Lumiya asked almost mechanically, seated in the co-navigator’s chair.

The Twi’lek pilot nodded once, allowing her lekku to sling freely from the base of her skull.

“He would not submit?”

There was no response.

Fixing her eyes keenly on her companion, the armored cyborg shifted her weight softly, meaningfully. “What happened back there? What really happened?”

The blue-skinned alien did not meet her eyes, instead staring forward, motionless.

“It is of no consequence; I did not deem him trustworthy, and I executed my pledged duty.” Her eyes slid shut, and she moved back even further upon the headrest. “Call up the file. There is still much work to be done.”

Lumiya did not break her unblinking, probing gaze. “Of course.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like all carriers of its class, the August Judgment’s port and starboard sides were pocked by numerous large cavities, each one a portal into a three-tiered docking bay, where shuttles, scouts, and starfighters berthed on repulsor tethers side by side. Illuminated by an ethereal glow from the surrounding, softly scalloped bulkheads, these areas were typically hives of activity, crews being loaded and off-loaded, ammunition and fuel being piped and carried in from the mains and dozen broad passages that opened onto the vast, open space, vessels moving back and forth through the permeable energy shield that served as the barrier with the icy blackness of space beyond. This day was no different; the carrier had been tasked with recovery and salvage of the fleet elements obliterated by the impossibly powerfully alien attackers that had vanished many time parts earlier, and with it all of the warships tasked with pursuing it.

As the first Phantom transport retrofits, modified for just such a duty, began to return with salvage and survivors, hundreds of crewers prepared themselves for the onslaught. Stocky Unngoy readied their dense muscles for the wearying task of offloading whatever material the searchers might have deign appropriate to bring back. Others waited with personal hoverlifts, prepared to ferry the wounded to waiting medical areas. With them waited the globular, tentacled Huragok, each eager for equipment to repair, transports to refuel and restock. So too lingered armored Sangheili and towering Lekgolo, supervisors and enforcers of the operation. Both warrior races, they would have much preferred to be back on the battlefield, hunting humans or crushing heretics, but there was always menial work to be done on the side; it was the way of thing. There would be time for glory later.

The atmosphere fields hummed, and sets of brilliant guide lights erupted all across the waiting bays, each welcoming the approaching transports back to their berths. And so, one by one, the beetle-like ships passed into the gapping maw, slowing to a crawl, and alighted on invisible moorings with barely a sound. Then, a dozen circular hatch iris opened at once with a hiss of pressurized air, and the rush began. Few, save one preoccupied Sangheili dock master, noticed that one of the waiting ports remained vacant, its guiding lights still blinking in anticipation. But there were other matters to attend to; a single missing shuttle could wait. It was probably simply running behind, and the pilot would be disciplined accordingly.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Slowly, Migaw began to come too. His head still rang with a dull concussion, but the blow that had put him down had been glancing, designed to immobilize, not kill or even badly injure, and his thick skull had been able to absorb most of the impact. Nevertheless, the Unggoy did not relish the experience; it took what felt like and eternity for his eyes to begin to work again, much less move his weary limbs.

Upon fully cognizing that he was in fact still alive, and momentarily gagging on the breath tube that was still lodged into his mouth, the soldier began to cast about for what was going on. He and Cakap had just returned to their transport from the derelict that had frightened the other so, there had been something about food rations, he had seen the bodies of the rest of the crew collapsed on the floor, the strange dorm that was with them. Then a new figure had appeared from the cockpit…

Though not the most intelligent of his kind, and still coping with a tremor that ran between his ear nodules, Migaw could still put two and two together. The ship had been hijacked, and its crew immobilized (an element of the events that confused him greatly; virtually all those who were brazen or vicious enough to attack Holy Covenant vessel weren’t likely to leave survivors).

Presently, a pair of voices intruded on his confused consciousness, and Migaw finally had some motivation to try and rouse himself. Looking about from where he lay prone on his stomach, the Unngoy deduced that he had been shoved into one of the storage compartments that flanked the main assembly bay at the rear of the transport. Beside him lay a body he assumed to be Cakap’s by the tank on its back, breathing shallowly, but evidently still unconscious. Probably for the best, he contemplated sourly, Cakap didn’t do well in situations where tact or subtly were required.

Slowly, he raised his head over the obstruction, giving him a clear view of the main disembarkation area, which was obscured slightly by a shimmering veil that sprang from the storage alcove’s entrance bulkhead; a confining field. At the center of the room beyond, a drop door gapped open, a purplish light emanating from below. Beside it stood two beings, one obviously a Sangheili, who seemed to be bearing armor identical to that worn by the ship’s pilot, although a distinctive scar on one side of his face clearly distinguished him. The other was far shorter and slighter of build, and though he was partially obscured by the darkness inside the ship, Migaw was quite sure he had never seen a being quite like him.

Could it be a…

The two were engaged in some sort of discussion, apparently oblivious to their new spectator. They spoke softly, but the rounded, almost bowl-like shape of the chamber propelled their voices to his ears. Nevertheless, the discourse was unintelligible.

“You’re sure we’re safe here?” the shorter one said in a timid voice, using words Migaw had never heard before.

“I cannot be certain,” the Sangheili intoned in response. “However, if I executed the maneuver away from the primary return path undetected, this shuttle should remain unfound for at least a few days. The ancillary dorsal fins in warships of this class are marred by a sensor shadow all along their anterior sides. It would take an active scan or a terminal flyby to locate us, assuming reactor output is kept to a minimum.”

The smaller being nodded slowly, and then glanced to the side, towards another one of the cargo areas. “So, what’s your plan now?”

The other hefted its skullcap, which had been cradled in its huge hands, onto its wounded scalp and fastened it to the bodysuit that lay below. “To get both you and I into a position of security, I must take on the mantle of ship master of the Covenant armada once more. When my place has been assured and suspicion dissuaded, I will hopefully be able to arrange an incident that will distract ship’s security long enough to get both you and… him” the Sangheili jerked its head towards one end of the assembly area, where another body lay motionless “to get onto a deep-range craft and escape the system. From there, you should be able to use data I can provide you on likely military patrol route used by the humans of this galaxy. You should be able to find safety with them.” The figure looked away, slouching slightly. “For the moment, at least.”

The shorter figure was motionless. “The humans… of this galaxy? But the wormhole… the crew…”

The Sangheili suddenly straightened, made sure its reflective shoulder plates were properly attached, and then stepped closer to the drop door, past his frozen companion. “I should be able to contact you again before the times comes, but if not, be ready to act on my signal. And be wary of Flitch, he will slay you if given the opportunity, no doubt. If the traitor tried, do not hesitate to kill him.” The warrior glanced around the small chamber one last time. “The same goes for the crew of this vessel. Unarmed and imprisoned they may be, but do not underestimate them. They are all Covenant warriors, and will kill you if they can, both for locking them away, and simply for what you are.”

Now at the very brim of the glowing hole, the Sangheili turned his long, narrow head back to the side a last time, a large, yellow eye fixed on the other. Without a word, it nodded once, deliberately and with respect.

Then the figure was gone, leaping into the pit without hesitation.



I hope you enjoyed this latest chapter.
If you will recall, I posted a while back that I would like a proof-reader for The Rift. The need was satisfied for a while, but the person who was doing it had to stop, so I'm looking for someone else. I know a few of you showed interest before. Any takers?

[Darksider]

I'll do it

E-mail chapters to Darksi4190@yahoo.com

[Murazor]

So we have the little twi'lek Sith rounding up Palpatine's supporters, perhaps sabotaging her master's efforts and with Lumiya growing suspicious... This is going to get nasty.

Now, let's see the Circle of the Twelve and decide who is likely to buy it:

-Totl Grazre. Your creation, considering that I have found no mention of him anywhere else. mention him as a co-conspirator in one of the early moves against Vader, so we can count him dead. Possible replacement for Batch.

-Pecatti Syn. Already dead.

-Ishin-Il-Raz. One of Palpatine's flunkies with little military ability. He could send his Star Destroyer inside the star now and save Vader the trouble of finishing him.

-Osvald Teshik. Emotionless, brilliant and with little love for Palpatine. I can even see some cyborg sympathy between him and Vader. Likely survivor.

-Martio Batch. Utterly unreliable, but useful with his research of cloaking technologies. He had already defected at the time of the battle of Endor and was hiding in the Outer Rim, where he was eventually murdered by his own crew (shortly after Endor).

-Demetrius Zaarin. Already blown to atoms by the time of the battle of Endor. Thrawn was his replacement.

-Nial Declann. Brilliant, a loyal Palpatinian and a Darksider of moderate power with a useful skill (his ability for Battle Meditation). He could be useful, but is probably going to die. In the OTL he died on board the DSII.

-Miltin Takel. Intelligent and rather skilled, although not particularly loyal. In the OTL he got shot during the Trioculus affair. Possible survivor.

-Danetta Pitta. One of the worst criminals in the Galactic Empire's history, guilty of xenocide, who attempted to claim the title of Emperor in the OTL. His public execution would do much to raise Vader's popularity among the non humans. Very unlikely survivor.

-Afsheen Makati. Although he had some kind of feud against some of Palpie's Darksiders, he seems to have been loyal to the Empire at large (he never made any moves for the Imperial throne). Possible survivor.

-Josef Grunger. Power hungry (he attempted to seize Coruscant as soon as he learned of Palpatine's death). Unlikely survivor.

-Grant. Apolitical, skilled and pragmatic, perhaps slightly vain. Likely survivor.

-Rufaan Tigellinus. A court politician. He can do much to secure the support of some factions for Vader, supposing that Vader bothers to be subtle. Possible survivor.

[Noble Ire]

Chapter Forty Nine


I can feel it, even now. Their anger, their malice, their hunger, all swell in anticipation. Only blood will sate their desires. The time has come at last. It starts all over again.


“Commander, geosynchronous orbit over Dahkur has been achieved.”

The deck plates of Deep Space Nine’s spartan bridge pit groaned and shook slightly underfoot as the stars outside of its main viewport slowed to an infinitesimal crawl. A few more tremors rocked the huge space station as its maneuvering thrusters reoriented it with the planet below, drifting on a lazy course around its yellow primary. Set at the center of the interior ring of the huge, circular space station, the bridge was now afforded an elliptical sliver of the blue-green world through its viewport, seemingly set ablaze by the system’s distant star as it seemed to pass behind the body, heralding night below.

Perhaps the final night it would ever see, the station’s commander reflected with a mix of bitterness and deep apprehension.

Kira Nerys, a native of the planet Bajor beyond, was not as religious as some of her people, but the significance of omens and portents were not lost upon her. The sight of the waning sun and the weary creaking of the vessel beneath her feet, though both quite normal occurrences, this day bore deeper meaning; they spoke of death.

Weaving between the trio of angled pylons that gave the station its distinctive, imposing form, a squadron of comparatively modest-sized warships swept past the viewscreen, vectoring out into the deep space beyond the planet and its silent protector, each priming its own array of weaponry. A triad of green, bird-like attack ships, a long, balled-headed central pylon flanked by down sloping wings, Klingon Birds-of-Prey, followed close behind their leader, a far more streamlined and compact vessel, which glinted white in the starlight. The Defiant, first of a long line of warships the United Federation of Planets had been forced to produce by a nearly endless series of dire conflicts, forged swiftly ahead, like a knight leading his vassals into battle on a mighty steed.

But the battle they forged into headlong was completely unlike those of old. There was no honor out there amidst the void, just chaos and desperate hopelessness. At one time, the force the squadron moved to reinforce would a crowning achievement of galactic diplomacy and unity; Federation cruisers and retrofits, Klingon attack vessels and battleships, Cardassian escort craft, even a handful of domed Ferengi marauders, all fighting as one. Now, though, the significance of this remarkable concord was completely forgotten; death took the allied and opposed with equal prejudice.

To one inexperienced in the conflict in which thousands upon thousands of lives were currently drowning, the forces that were overwhelming the unlikely associates would appear to actually be their compatriots; virtually every member of the horde that was bearing down upon Bajor had found its birth in the shipyards and foundries of one of the allies, and still bore embalms and marks of allegiance. But Kira Nerys knew better; what lay at the hearts of those ships were not human, or Klingon, or Cardassian, or Bajoran. No, they were not even deserving of the comparison. Creatures that bent the captured machines they inhabited to aims as abominable as their own were not worthy of a name befitting sentients. They were beasts, nothing more.

“What’s the status on the evacuation of the city?” Kira demanded, glancing away from the large viewport. Behind her, a dozen Starfleet and Bajoran Militia officers worked various interfaces and displays, feverishly preparing the station’s defenses and coordinating communications for the embattled fleet that was, for the moment, holding the invading force just beyond Bajor’s outer orbital perimeter. However, nearly half an hour of intense combat with a numerically superior force had begun to wear down the system’s weary defenders, and after that line was broken, Deep Space Nine would be the planet’s final shield.

“About half the evac fleet has taken off and is heading out-system,” a Bajoran officer replied. “The other group should be ready for liftoff in ten minutes. The rest of the population is being lead into the northern hills for the old Cardassian orbital shelters. Colonel Chechea reports that panic is widespread, but the operation is moving along as well as can be expected. The city should be mostly vacant within an hour.”

Kira gritted her teeth. Those transports, assuming they could even be defended long enough to escape to warp, held perhaps four thousand people. Countless millions more of her brothers and sisters below were trapped, forced to seek shelter in a handful of old shelters and hidden bases leftover from the Dominion War and the long Cardassian occupation of the planet that had preceded it. If the fleet and her station fell, such fortifications would be worthless. Bajor and its people would die, and with them would die the last hopes of the quadrant and its people.

“Is Kai Ungtae on one of those ships?” Kira asked at last.

The Bajoran shook his head, a weak grin crossing his lips. “You know he would never leave the homeworld at a time like this. At last report, he was still leading the Vedek Assembly in their prayer to the Prophets”.

Kira nodded reluctantly. The Vedek was the spiritual leader of the Bajoran people; she supposed it was all he could do to stay with his people in such a time, even doing so almost ensured his destruction. Of course, what point would his position have if all of his followers perished? It was better to stay on and grant at least some small hope to those who fought above and waited in terrible anticipation in fortified caverns below.

But it was just that, a small hope. The Prophets, enigmatic beings of great power who formed the basis of Bajoran theology and had protected the world from total domination by the Dominion a scant year before, seemed to have abandoned their children, withdrawing into the artificial wormhole that the previous invaders had been forced back through. These gods had protected them in the past from annihilation, but each of those events was foretold by the ancient texts and artifacts that formed the cores of temples across the globe; if the Prophets had not foreseen this new and most terrible threat, one that had already engulfed world after world, perhaps they could do nothing to stop it.

“Commander!” a cry suddenly broke the nervous hum of the control chamber, just as alert klaxons began to chime above. “Beta Wing reports a small enemy force has broken through the fallback line! They’re heading directly for us!”

Kira snapped from the observation window, allowing the tension of impending combat to force the almost overwhelming dread of defeat from her mind. “Full alert stations! Get me a fix on the attackers, and increase shield strength to maximum.”

The others immediately stepped up the execution of their respective duties, perhaps equally eager to ride themselves of the encroaching shadow, a blast door lowering over the main viewport and seemingly isolating them from worries beyond the one at hand.

She glanced at her second in command, a Bajoran woman of around her age. “Are there any evacuation craft in our immediate vicinity.”

The officer nodded. “Yes sir. The Nobel just departed dock one with the last of the station’s civilian population.”

“Can she get back within the station’s shield radius before the attackers are in firing range?”

The officer checked a sensor station quickly. “Yes, I think so.”

“The give the order,” Kira said as calmly as she could. Without any remaining escort craft available, letting the shuttle try to escape on its own would be damning its crew to death if the approaching attack force decided to alter its objectives. Hopefully they’d be able to release them before another major attack assailed the station.

“I’ve got a clear lock,” the tactical officer announced. “A Galaxy-class and what looks like an Andorian heavy freighter, both significantly damaged.”

Kira frowned at the tactical display. Why would they bother with such a minimal force? The aliens were brutish and often suicidal in battle, but they weren’t stupid, and though the tide of battle was turning in their favor, their numbers were not quite so overwhelming that they could waste a vessel like the Galaxy in a useless probing strike. And then there was the freighter, which was barely armed at all…

“Photon torpedoes, full spread!” she ordered suddenly, urgently. “Take that freighter out!”

The human officer at tactical frowned up at her. “Sir, the ship is still out of optimal range. I can’t guarantee all of the…”

“Now!”

Emerging from the gray, armored exterior of the docking pylon closest to the approaching vessels, a pair of boxy weapons emplacements kicked in rapid succession, firing six golden bolts of brilliant luminescence into deep space. Crossing dozens of kilometers in seconds, the first chain of three torpedoes arced harmlessly past the long, spiraling freighter, but the next trio impacted its nose cone directly, sheering through weakened deflector shielding and tattered armor plate. Two tore all the way through the ship, exiting its aft side before detonating an instant later, while the third exploded inside the stricken ship, tearing away a huge portion of its dorsal hull.

The concussion sent the remnants of the ship spinning to the side, narrowly missing its escort before finally succumbing to its own overloading reactor and streaking the darkness with rivulets of molten duranium.

“Are you picking up any activity in the wreckage?” Kira demanded as soon as the display indicated the target had been destroyed.

The human officer shook his head, still confused. “Nothing sir, Just debris.”

“The Galaxy is returning fire!” another called out. “Brace!”

A second later, a stream of torpedoes and prolonged phaser bursts erupted from the curved bow of the still-charging capital ship, crossing the ever diminishing gap between itself and the station in moments. The first volley was intercepted harmlessly by the translucent sphere of the station’s deflector, but a second round of fire caused the barrier to flicker, if only slightly.

Deep Space Nine’s command section shuddered slightly from the recoil of the attack on the installation’s shield generators, but none of the half dozen status displays around the room reported any significant damage.

“They must have burned out half their phaser emitters with that second full power volley,” Kira’s second commented.

“They don’t intend on ever having to repair them,” Kira muttered. She had never faced the invading creatures in direct combat before, but she had heard battle accounts from a dozen Federation and Klingon commanders. The aliens seemed to care absolutely nothing for their own lives, and if they saw the advantage for a tactical gain by doing so, a ship and its crew would sacrifice themselves in a moment. “Forward phasers, target its impulse engines. Get another torpedo spread on it too. The things on that ship want to get here pretty badly, and I don’t intend on letting them.”

The second attacker withstood the station’s counterattack better than its companion, but the final burst of one grid tore through its forward deflector shield, and cut a shallow gash that spanned its entire saucer section. Undaunted, the warship pressed on, unloading another torrent of crimson torpedoes, which smashed the target’s energy barrier in rapid succession, sending stronger tremors through the facility beyond. And again the station’s pylons lit up with weapons fire, and now that their prey was so close, almost to the point of dashing itself on the shield bubble, few of the blasts missed. With a sparking, chaotic pulse of raw energy, the Galaxy-class detonated, showering the barrier with tiny fragments in a final defiant gesture.

Breathing a small sigh of relief along with her crew and sure that no more alien-controlled ships had broken the distant, bloody line, the commander had just enough time to turn her attention back to the Nobel, which had been spared the ravages of the last incursion, and was now waiting nervously just outside the station’s protective globe. However, she was forced to delegate its redirection to her second as she was summoned to a priority comm station, and informed of a signal from the embattled fleet.

“Admiral.”

Alynna Nechayev, typically drawn face made even gaunter by the strife and loss she had to endure over the last few months, watching superiors, friends, and comrades die one after another until she had found herself at the head of the scattered and desperate remnants of Starfleet, stared back at Commander Kira, attempting to retain some composure even as the bridge of her flagship, the Sovereign-class Versailles, bulked and groaned around her.

“Commander, I’ve just lost most of Omega wing and my right flank to enemy reinforcements.” She paused as another impact shook the viewscreen image and sent showers of sparks racing along the tactical panels at the rear of her bridge. Her executive officer yelled an unintelligible order beyond view. “General K’Nera has ordered his remaining forces to begin to break off and make for rendezvous point RGN, and I intend to withdraw as well.”

Kira stared at the screen, bile rising in her throat. “Admiral, you can’t withdraw. Without the allied fleet here, Deep Space Nine and Bajor will be overrun. There are still millions of civilians down there!”

Nechayev stared back, unblinking and absolutely serious. “I understand the repercussions of this withdrawal all to well, Commander, but we simply cannot hold. The enemy numbers are too great, and if we do not withdraw soon, my ships will be surrounded and utterly destroyed. We were not prepared to face them here, not yet.”

Kira moved to speak out again, but the Admiral stopped her with a wave of her hand. “There is nothing I can do, Kira. There is still fight left in the fleet, and if we can bring it to them on our terms, we may still have strength of arms to break their hold on the quadrant. If we stay and fall in a heroic last stand here and now, and we will fall, this alien plague will sweep across every world from here to the Founder homeworld, and the war will truly be lost. There is no other option.”

Kira grabbed the sides of the display, and the fire in her eyes spoke of a mounting rage and sorrow that was screaming to be released, to destroy the cowardly Admiral where she sat. But the Bajoran said nothing. What could she say? The human was completely, undeniably correct. Bajor could not be traded for the lives of every sentient being within ten thousand light-years.

“We’ll try to hold them long enough for you to evacuate as much of the crew as you can from…”

“No.” Kira’s voice returned to her at last. “I will not abandon my homeworld, and neither will my crew. I will relay your order to the Federation crew on station, but I cannot…”

The view of the Versailles’s suddenly burst into static.

“Admiral? Admiral!” The commander lunged at a passing comm officer. “Why have we lost contact?”

Before he could respond, however, the image reappeared, heavily distorted, but viewable. “Commander, the helm just picked up something strange on long range scanners at the edge of the system, but our sensor array is damaged,” the image flickered out, and then in again. “… you confirm? Repeat, coordinates zero-nine-eight-eight, can you confirm anomaly?”

Kira glanced at her own comm officer, who was already programming the coordinates into his tracker. “Affirmative. Interference from the battle is heavy, but I am picking up some sort of supra-spatial anomaly. Possibly tachyonic. Wait, yes, there’s definitely something there. A physical mass, possibly two.”

The commander peered at the sensor display intently. Given their circumstances, such an occurrence shouldn’t rate very high on her list of priorities, but there was something about this anomaly that just felt… odd.

“Sir, I’m also picking up something strange, just outside our deflector grid…”
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“Are you positive, ensign?” Captain Gehirn asked, seemingly dumbstruck as she stared out at the starfield that lay beyond the Magellan’s smooth hull, deceptively serene and motionless. “Absolutely positive?”

Seated at the helm before her, the ensign at the helm nodded slowly, evidently equally disbelieving of the information he conveyed. “Yes, sir. There’s no doubt; we’re just outside of the Bajor planetary system.”

When Picard had suggested that the captain of the alien vessel Republica might expedite their journey back to the now embattled stronghold system, Gehirn had been dubious, but had nevertheless transmitted an astrological route map to the planet to the Republica, and allowed the larger ship to seize her own an some sort of tractor field, despite the protests of her tactical officer. He had doubted that the ship could get them to the battlefield any faster than the Magellan’s own top-of-the-line warp drive, and for a few brief moments at the start of their piggyback jump into “Hyperspace”, as Picard had called it, she had begun to doubt her own acquiescence to the proposal. And yet, here they were, barely a half an hour later, right at doom’s doorstep.

Recovering from her own shock, Gehirn fell back into her previous, battle-ready mood. “Get me a status report on the allied fleet and the planet, and see if you can contact Admiral Nechayev. I also want Picard back on that screen, now.”

“Sir, I’m having trouble reestablishing contact with the Republica. The energy barrier around the vessel seems to have strengthened astronomically.”

The captain’s eyes narrowed, suspicion rising once more. “Onscreen.”

The tubular cruiser blinked onto the screen, its dented and scarred hull only vaguely tinted by a scant reflective quality, the only sign that some sort of energy barrier existed. And yet the tactical analysis of the vessel indicated the field was mind-bogglingly powerful, quite unlike anything any member of the bridge crew had ever seen before.

“Sir, it’s moving.”

Sure enough, jets of burning, bluish light had begun to issue from the massive tubes that protruded from its aft hull, and the whole vessel was soon moving away from the Magellan at an impressive clip.

“Where is it going?” Gehirn demanded.

“I can’t be sure, sir,” the helm replied “but the sensor grid is detecting a very large number of vessels in close proximity to Bajor, along with a lot of phaser fire. I believe that the Republica may be moving to engage the hostile fleet.”
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“COM-scan registers approximately four hundred contacts, Captain,” a lieutenant reported, feeding the information to an upright, 2-dimenisonal display on which groups of starships were beginning to appear in relation to the huge opaque mass that represented the planet Gehirn had called Bajor. “Most appear to roughly similar in design to the Magellan, although there are also at least three other distinct structural patterns throughout the group. However, they all appear to be using the same low-yield weaponry and antimatter core systems.”

Ryceed regarded the chart thoughtfully, her hands folded loosely behind her uniformed back. “So, Picard, which are our targets?”

The Starfleet captain, along with Councilor Organa, and the rest of the “ambassadorial” delegation regarded her with surprise and even confusion. Upon arrival in the system, when the Republica’s sensors had confirmed a Federation fleet was under attack nearby, Commander Riker had made a comment about wishing to aide them. Without further prompting, despite all the caution and reservations about their mission she had shown over the last few days, Ryceed had jumped on the idea, and ordered her ship to forge forward into the thick of the battle. Perhaps, Picard reflected, the opportunity to take control of a battle situation after so many retreats, defeats, and desperate flights had been too tempting an opportunity for the Alliance captain to ignore. Indeed, he knew how she felt; there were few things left to him in the galaxy that Picard wouldn’t have traded for his old command chair at that moment.

Nevertheless, he was at somewhat at a loss as to the answer to Ryceed’s question. If the officer they had rescued from the Cornwall was correct in her account of the Zerg power grab, differentiating between stolen and allied vessels might be difficult. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely certain, Captain. I think perhaps we should attempt to reestablish contact with Captain Gehirn. Starfleet has probably developed some system of identifying the seized ships at range.”

A sudden sensation in the back of Picard’s mind that made the thin hairs on his neck stand on end, all too familiar, directed his attention to the turbolift bank at the rear of the bridge. Issuing smoothly and silently from the main tube, draped as ever in his long, dark cloak, Tassadar stooped into view, and his very presence seemed to attract the notice of everyone nearby. Seemingly oblivious to the two dozen pairs of eyes now fixed on him, he brushed past the marines guarding the entry shafts, whom Major Truul held back with a silent hand motion, and swiftly mounted the low terraced steps to the command area.

His posture was as cool and unreadable as always, but those who had been around the Protoss before noticed that the nebulous pattern that typically glazed his glassy eyes was now supremely focused, each pupil now a roughly serrated slit. Tassadar at last halted before Captain Ryceed, whom had never even seen the alien before, even if she had heard mention of him spending most of their journey in one of the supply bays, and thus was cowed slightly by his imposing size and ominous presence.

“You wish to engage the Zerg?” he asked her, filling the chamber with his impressively powerful ‘voice’. Quickly overcoming the oddity of his evidently psychic speech, Ryceed glanced at Picard, who nodded calmly, broadcasting what he hoped was an affirmation of the alien’s status and authority on the subject.

Craning her neck up so to look him squarely in the eyes, which was in itself an unsettling experience, Ryceed cleared her throat. “If you mean the entities occupying the ships attacking this world’s defensive fleet, then yes. Can you identify them?”

The high templar looked past her to the bridge’s main viewport, which now bore the magnified images of a dozen distant dogfights, ships of all forms engaged in a confused and vicious melee. He watched the individual drama of each play out for a few long moments; a ship bursting into flames and then shattered from an unseen attacker, another lobbing glowing missiles at a pair of greenish ships that attempted in vain to avoid the blasts, packs of ships that wove amongst one another with reckless abandon, angling off whenever they targeted another vessel that had been separated from its respective squadron or task force. Once or twice a minute, one of the vessels in the macabre play would flare into an incandescent star, and then fade into nothingness, spreading what remained of the lives within to the stars.

At last, Tassadar deflated slightly from his full height and looked back down at Ryceed; a Protoss nod of sorts. “I shall guide your weapons as best I can. Does the artificial mind Cortana still reside within your vessel’s computer core? I require its assistance.”

“Right here, big guy.” Cortana flickered into view on a vacant display screen. “What do you need?”
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They die. We grow. The Queen’s will be done.

Deep within the artificial shell of the mechanical beast, forged by puny creatures that called themselves Klingons, now slaves in their own machine, a mind lay open, riveted. Hideous and glorious, a mound of livid convulsing flesh, its physical tendrils stretched throughout the possessed vessel feeding constantly on the biomass of lesser servants, provide for its sole usage. Other beings shambled erratically through the iron titans corroded bowels, endlessly maintaining the shell and the consciousness it housed, never resting, never sleeping. Still more stood at panels and controls that gave the ship guidance and direction, some virtually fused to their charges by grasping strands of scaled flesh, awaiting orders with animalistic eagerness. But not one of them thought, or felt any emotion save the most base of desires. There was only driving force there, one mind for all.

But for all its power, its ultimate will and authority over spawn innumerable, it was but a servant itself. Though supremely clever and driven in its own right, there was a far greater force always just at the edge of its being, inescapable and privy to its every machination and motivation. The Queen. She was all, the mother of the great swarm and all its children; it existed to serve her and make her every dream an immutable element of reality. And this shipboard mind was one of her most cherished minions, a direct executor of her will, one whom was born with both intellect and a will to command; it was a Cerebrate, immortal and unstoppable.

As both gift and method of its vital service, the Cerebrate was granted the control of a brood of its own mindless, inherently loyal slaves, and on this day it had bent them to the favored pursuit of the swarm; slaughter. Through the eyes of its children, the mind watched with satisfaction as an insurmountable tide smashed against the pitiful adversaries the Queen had tasked it to destroy in endless hammer blows of energy, metal, and flesh. Using mechanical beasts seized from their now besieged creators, the Cerebrate, directly reaching into a thousand minds, slowly wore away at line after lines, formation after formation of enemies, relishing the dying flash of each vessel. Even if it had not been bred to be incapable of defying the Queen’s will, it would have hunted these pitiful nonetheless; be it by some twisted aspect of its genetics, or a simple glorious depravity of its personality, the mind enjoyed war, and reveled in the dying breaths of every single sentient that died within the range of its comprehension. And range was long.

Of course, the mind’s reaction to the deaths of its own servants was somewhat different. Each time one of the ships under its dominion succumbed to desperate enemy weapons fire, it felt the very slightest pang of psychic release somewhere in the endless roles and knots of its neural cord, but was only most minor of annoyances, and quite easy to ignore. The minions on each ship were unthinking, easily replaceable tools, nothing more; they were bred and mutated to serve and die unquestioningly. It mattered not how many had to be sacrificed to crush those who opposed the swarm. In any event, there were plenty more to replace those who fell; as with most engagements in which servants of the Queen fought, the odds were thoroughly one-sided.

A new wave of absences flickered into the Cerebrate’s notice, registering in faster succession than was normal. However, the mind was untroubled by the loss, and was more focused on another area of the battle, where his horde was close to encircling an impressive number of holdouts. With barely a thought, it sent a new wave of minions to replace those who had been erased from the battlefield, and returned to plotting the target squadron’s imminent extermination. However, mere moments after the reinforcements reached their new assigned positions, they too disappeared. This still was not unusual enough by itself to attract the Cerebrate’s full attentions, but something new accompanied the losses this time.

There was another great mind at work in this star system now.

Forgetting its previous pursuit, the Cerebrate turned its full gaze to the sector of the battle where he felt the emerging presence. It was on a far fringe, and few enemy vessels remained functioning within the area, but though the eyes of one its minions on a nearby ship, he saw new vessel plowing through the wreckage previous duels and assaults had left drifting in its path. It was of a completely alien design, an elongated oval of grayish metal, larger than most of the combatants already assembled, and evidently already bearing many scars of battle.

As the mind watched, a pair of vessels under its command broke from their pursuits of another ship and angled for the large ship, each unleashing a torrent of deadly beams and pinpoints of light. The onslaught, sufficient to give pause to even the greatest of warships immersed in the fray, impacted their target unperturbed by any extended energy field, and unleashed an explosion of impressive magnitude, one bright enough to give the observing creature to squint its eyes slightly. However, when the discharged distortion faded away into the night moments later, the segment of hull the attack had stricken seemed completely unharmed, the only sign of any effect at all being a faint flicker of bluish white over the target area.

A moment later, without pausing in its course deeper into the fray, nodules and turrets along the thing’s hull trained on the harrowing vessels and unleashed their own pulses of brilliant light. The mind had a brief moment to marvel at their form and movement, quite unlike any weapons the swarm or its enemies employed, before the long bolts found their way to the other ships, striking with pinpoint accuracy.

Both exploded instantly.

Had the Cerebrate been spawned with eyes, they would have bulged. The two attackers had been among the most powerful hulks at its disposal, and yet each had been obliterated completely by a single shot from the new comer. Not even the titanic vessel the mind had chosen for itself possessed such great power.

Its original targets forgotten, the mind suddenly bent its total focus on the marauding ship, which continued to bat aside any opposition with contemptuous ease, and seized the primitive pilots of nearly a hundred of his ships, forcibly focusing them on the new threat. As one, vessels of all sizes and class broke from previous engagements and rocketed full tilt through space, leaving their former opponents bewildered and alone in unexpectedly vacant space. The first wave of this new assault met the starship as it entered the lunar orbital ring of the planet below.

It was a slaughter. Even as scores of ships emptied their full armament upon the metal beast, it moved on unperturbed, absorbing each blow as though it were a wayward micrometeoroid, and returning the onslaught a thousand fold, methodically destroying squadron after squadron with precise blows. It appeared that many of the weapons arrayed on its hull were inoperable, or simply not engaged, and thus the return fire was not sufficient in volume to combat all of its attackers at once, but considering the effectiveness of each strike, and the comparable uselessness of the Cerebrate’s assault, it hardly mattered.

A new sensation had begun to take hold of the mind’s thoughts; fear. The terrible feeling was brought on not only by the seeming impotence of the swarm against this new threat, but also the growing power and focus of the Cerebrate could sense emanating from the ship’s core. This opposing mind seemed to be able to target and devastate each successive target without pause or misfire; indeed, even in hotspots where near-identical combatants were locked in mortal combat mere ship lengths apart, the foreign mind seemed able to locate brood-held vessels without any effort at all, guiding barrages of annihilating strikes with nary a miss or impact on a defender’s hull.

And now the Celebrate came to realize there was an even more basic cause of his fear. The attacker’s unbreakable stride was taking it straight into the heart of the mind’s swarm; it was seeking out the heart of its enemies.

Now the Cerebrate’s priorities changed completely. Completely abandoning all thoughts of his previous tactics and ambitions during the earlier part of the engagement, it drew all of the ships it could into a vast wall before its command ship, a barrier of a hundred thousand lives arrayed against the approaching assassin.

The ship met the forward face of this wall in moments, so besieged by torpedoes and phaser bursts that it was nothing more than a vague outline in the blinding storm. The barrier collapsed inwards immediately, the warships that had not been directly in its path and thus survived unscathed now desperately trying to halt it from the rear as still more ships beyond formed into a loose knot, suddenly the front line.

By now, the Cerebrate’s own ship was in motion, veering away from the rapidly-disintegrating bulwark at full speed, its pilots now filled with their central mind’s terror as it continued to mount with each failed defense. Escape had become the Cerebrate’s sole ambition now, and it bent its crew toward the task of readying his vessel for warp flight with an eagerness and furious need unprecedented through its entire preceding existence.

And low, the stalling tactic at least seemed to be bearing fruit; motivated by their master’s terror, the remnants of the mind’s vanguard had begun dashing their vessels full speed against the attacker’s blunt nose. The bluish light that seemed to render the craft impervious to damage at last began to flicker more noticeably under the renewed assault, and be it by actual damage, or the simple opposing inertia imparted by the kamikaze attacks, the attacker slowed in its advance. Perhaps, the mind considered, this offending thing was not quite as invincible as had first been suspected.

Then an explosion split space, not one engulfing a defending ship, but rather far closer. One of the slaves manning a control station on the vessel’s command bridge moaned. The swarm flagship was under attack. The Cerebrate was in deadly danger.

Whatever semblance of confidence that had renewed itself amidst the controller’s cluttered thoughts evaporated instantly, and it began to search desperately for the new harasser.

Seven small, almost inconsequential flecks of metal raced into the mind’s direct field of notice, surging forward from the chaos that still raged far aft of the command ship. The Cerebrate was about to disregard them as fragments of debris and continue its search, but a flurry of bolts and sparks of burning light erupting from them dragged his attention back. A second later, a large number of the multicolored cloud disappeared into a protruding section of his mechanical shell, losing only a few of its number to the ship’s shield bubble before it gave way, and the pylon was enveloped in a massive cloud of expanding flame and charred detritus.

As the tiny squadron surged forward for another attack, a flurry of green and golden bolts from the fleeing titan forced them to break formation. This apparent fear for their own safety once again inspired some hope in the Cerebrate; if these vessels could be harmed by those weapons, then they might be held off long enough for the command ship to escape the gravitic shadow of the rapidly receding planet that still blocked the mind escape. Only a few more moments…

A new series of detonations against the metal shell’s deflector shields, this time impacting its forward section. Confused, the Cerebrate cast its attention to the source of the attack; none of the tiny harrying craft could have angled a weapon to strike that part of its ship. An instant later, the mind’s puzzlement dissolved.

The Cerebrate and his broods may have forgotten the previous battle, but the weary defenders of the world they had sought to engulf had not.
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As the forward section of the fleeing Negh’Var-class battleship evaporated under the combined assault of a dozen Starfleet and Klingon warships, a cheer swept the Republica’s bridge. Though the battle had been a veritable slaughter, the sheer volume of opposition the ship had faced pursing the Zerg flagship had been highly unsettling, and towards the end of the pursuit, the waves of suicide attacks had actually begun to deplete the cruiser’s deflector field, and inflicted minor damage to some of the ship’s shield generators. Nevertheless, the sheer disparity in firepower between the Mon Calamari ship and their opponents was not lost on any of the crew, especially not Captain Ryceed and the Federation officers, although true repercussions of the realization had yet to sink in.

Still, such a bold attack would not have been possible without the aid of Cortana and Tassadar. With Ryceed’s grudging permission, the former had taken full control of the ship’s active sensors and FoF tagging systems, and the Protoss instructed Ryceed to have her ship plunge straight into the thick of the melee around Bajor. When she had instructed her crew to do as much, the templar had collapsed into some sort of meditative posture on the deck before the main viewport, and had started listing coordinates relative to the ship’s bow as they moved into the battle, each of which Cortana applied to a warship battling around them. Ryceed’s gunners could then begin to pick off Zerg-infested ships without risk of accidentally destroying those still controlled by thinking crews.

It was all everyone else on the bridge could do to stand in awe of Tassadar’s cold, methodical precision, and when he had directed the captain to lock in course to pursue a ship at the very heart of the enemy’s fleet, the flagship, she had complied immediately. Considering the exponential increase in resistance this had triggered, it seemed that the Protoss’ hunch, or whatever it was, had been correct.

“Captain, a large number of the defending warships have broken of pursuit,” an officer announced, quickly settling back into the conflict at hand.

“Their squad formations appear to be breaking apart as well, sir. Some even appear to have stopped functioning altogether,” another confirmed, plainly puzzled.

Ryceed frowned. “They’re abandoning ship?”

“No.” Tassadar had not yet moved from his meditative position. “When the Zerg Celebrate on that ship was killed, its control over the broods here disappeared. Without direction, the drones piloting those vessels are nothing more than animals.”

“Sir, General Solo is requesting permission to continue the attack,” a communications officer called from a bank of transceiver panels. When the Celebrate’s final assault had reached its fiercest, Ryceed had been forced to order the sublight drives to slow in order to reduce the possibility of increased damage from the kamikaze attacks. Already prepped for flight, the Millennium Falcon and the cruiser’s complement of A-Wings had been launched to prevent the flagship from escaping, although they’re efforts had been made somewhat irrelevant due to the timely arrival of a remnant of the Bajoran defense fleet.

“Permission granted,” Ryceed replied, walking over to a holographic display of the surrounding area, on which a handful of the tagged ships still appeared to be fighting, although they’re maneuvers had become highly erratic and barrages random, occasional striking their own ships. “Launch squadrons one and two to assist them. Instruct General Solo to target those ships that seem to be flying erratically. They might still be able to do some damage.”

“Captain.” Councilor Organa’s attention was fixed on the main viewport, which still was trained on the location of the Zerg battleship, now drifting debris, beyond which the dozen victorious starships hung in space, apparently still deciding how to react to the newcomers. “Perhaps we should attempt communications with the local fleet now. I’m certain they are most appreciative of our assistance here, but I doubt ignoring them will preserve our welcome long.”

Picard nodded in agreement. “Yes, we should reestablish contact with the Magellan as soon as possible. Captain Gehirn ought to serve as an effective intermediary between us and the Federation fleet.”

As the humans behind him busied themselves with the resolution of the battle, Tassadar slowly rose, allowing his limbs to stretch and hang loose for a moment. The detection of the Zerg minds on those ships had not been difficult, the terrible psionic impression they left on his mind even from great range was unmistakable, but the effort had drained him. Evidently, even after so long, he had not fully recovered from the encounter his with that dark-clad human on the bridge of the Alliance flagship. This lingering weariness, whose source was seemingly completely unable to identify, persisted to occupy and disturb the Protoss’ mind. It was as if the well of psionic energy all of his people could call upon for strength, high templar especially, was somehow blocked, and only a trickle of the invigorating power he was used to could reach him.

Determined to find the root of the strange weakness before it stymied his energy further, Tassadar began to turn from the viewport and was about to make for the calm, quiet emptiness of the ship’s storage bays when a distant object, just barely visible through the thick transparisteel window, caught his slowly-fluctuating eye. A mere silhouette against the darkening green of the world beyond, he was able to make out a spindly form, evidently in orbit, circular and bisected by a trio of long pylons. In the sea of starships and scattered detritus around Bajor, such a sight would not normally have held his notice, but he felt something more from it now, strange. There was the vaguest hint of sentient thought emanating from the construction, virtually imperceptible at this range, but with it too was something that did not belong. A raw, thoughtless, animalistic presence.

Even with their master dead, it seemed that the Zerg had one last hunting ground open to them yet.

[Perseid]

First post!!

Great chapter Ire, it always cracks me up to think of how out matched a fleet of ST-verse ships is against just one cruiser.

[Academia Nut]

Awesome! I love this story and the way you're weaving together these four different universes so well. And if I understand the last bit correctly, not only has the Federation just seen what a single badly damaged SW cruiser can do, but they're also about to pay dearly for their retarded ground combat doctrines. Those poor Bajorans.

[DesertFly]

Heh heh, it's awesome that the SW ships were able to completely slaughter a whole fleet of Zerg infested Star Trek ships. One note, the minds that control the Zerg are called Cerebrates. Zerg hunting on DS9? Sounds good to me.

Also, sorry about that earlier. You know what I mean.

[ElPintoGrande]

Jesus Jumped Up Christ on a pogo-stick! Do mine eyes decieve me? A new chapter of one of my all-time favorite fics, what a way to end the day. Glad to see the story back by the way, can't wait to see what you have in store for the Feds home galaxy.

[Noble Ire]

One note, the minds that control the Zerg are called Cerebrates.

Thanks for picking up on that. I'm still not sure why I thought they were named otherwise.

Ah, and thanks as always for your comments, everyone. As for the Republica's capabilities, I decided to maintain at least "realism" in regards to respective firepower capabilities.

[The Grim Squeaker]

One note, the minds that control the Zerg are called Cerebrates.

Thanks for picking up on that. I'm still not sure why I thought they were named otherwise.

Ah, and thanks as always for your comments, everyone. As for the Republica's capabilities, I decided to maintain at least "realism" in regards to respective firepower capabilities.

You Do know that without a Dark Protoss to use their own flavour of psionic energy, the Cerebrate will regenerate from preyy much anything?
The campaign has one of the weaker Cerebrates regrow from a few chunks and restart a colony [You're called about it after you killed it].