With a furious growl he pushed one of his two swords into his attacker’s throat. The dying Jem’Hadar stumbled awkwardly forward and twisted his weapon.

  Vkruk howled as the saw-toothed edge tore at his ribs. With a cry of rage he grasped the knife by its blade and wrested it from the dead Jem’Hadar’s hand. He pulled it free of his own ribs and, with a flick of his wrist, caught it by its grip and used it to parry another adversary’s slashing cut.

  Vkruk saw the tide of the battle turning in the Remans’ favor. The enemy’s advantage in numbers had been overcome; the Remans were clearly more skilled and more at home fighting in the darkness.

  However, if Shinzon’s plan failed to eliminate the second wave of Jem’Hadar currently trapped inside the laboratory, that would soon change. Fewer than a hundred Reman soldiers were still in the fight, while more than two hundred Jem’Hadar waited inside the lab, eager to join the fray.

  A wounded Jem’Hadar fell to the ground beside Vkruk. The Reman elder lifted his foot. Our fate is with you, Shinzon, he thought. He stomped with his heel and was rewarded by the wet crack of the Jem’Hadar’s neck breaking beneath his spiked boot. Don’t fail us.

  Shinzon wiped the sweat and blood from his hands with a rough smear across his chest. He worked from memory as he disconnected several insulating elements from the thalaron core and channeled its output into the lab’s primary power grid.

  The lab was still offline, as was the thalaron core. But he knew that the subspace disruption caused by the Draco’s suicide attack would dissipate in a matter of moments. If he didn’t finish his sabotage of the thalaron core in time, he and his troops would be annihilated.

  Many of the core’s secondary components were dangerously hot, even after being offline for more than three minutes. The underground crawlspace around the core was pitch-dark, and Shinzon identified each element by touch, comparing the shape against his memory of the core’s schematic diagram. The controls of the primary manifold burned Shinzon’s fingertips as he reshaped them to a new and deadly purpose.

  Above him he heard the grunts and rattling gasps of the dead falling from the battle. Then the metallic cacophony was muffled by Vkruk’s telepathic voice inside his mind.

  Our fate is with you, Shinzon, Vkruk said telepathically. Don’t fail us.

  The mind message did not trouble Shinzon; it was not the first time that Vkruk had spoken to him this way. Shinzon made his final adjustment to the thalaron core and began inching his way backward to the ladder.

  Fear not, father, he replied, reaching out with his mind to the man who had raised him. Victory is ours.

  As he climbed the ladder, the core hummed back to life.

  Inside the sealed and power-deprived laboratory, Rayik stood with his back to his second company of Jem’Hadar troops. He was a fixture of calm in opposition to their seething mass of anxious bloodlust. The serene Vorta could sense that Mogano’gar, the company’s First, was brimming with resentment at having been held in reserve.

  That is why I am in command, Rayik thought. That many Jem’Hadar crowded together on the battlefield would only have made a better target for the Remans’ grenades.

  Rayik felt a slight vibration through the floor as the facility’s generators recovered from what he could only guess had been a subspace shockwave. The door would be open in a few moments when power returned. The emergency lights weakly flickered back to half-strength. He nodded to Mogano’gar.

  “I am dead!” Mogano’gar bellowed to his troops. “As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives.”

  So single-minded, Rayik mused smugly. So expendable.

  “This we do gladly because we are Jem’Hadar. Victory is life.”

  “Victory is life!” The Jem’Hadar soldiers cheered. Rayik sighed quietly. He turned to issue the attack order.

  Rayik stared mutely at the swarm of glowing motes that cascaded out of every free power node.

  The corridor was filled with the tiny luminescent specks, which swirled down the corridor and flowed through the walls like a river with no boundaries. The shimmering particles passed without sensation through Rayik and the Jem’Hadar. Then, just as quickly as the phenomenon had appeared, it faded away.

  A sensation of being incinerated from within filled Rayik’s quickly desiccating body. He stared at Mogano’gar. He felt his face start to crumble before he saw it reflected in Mogano’gar’s cold, angry eyes. The Vorta’s reflection vanished as the Jem’Hadar collapsed into powder at his feet.

  The Founders are wise in all things, Rayik reflected, before disintegrating into a cloud of fine, crystalline dust.

  Shinzon tied a tourniquet above the wound in his thigh while six of his men, working under Vkruk’s supervision, carefully opened the double doors to the Tal Shiar laboratory.

  The battle had been over for a few minutes, but Shinzon’s body still quaked from adrenaline overload. As always, he had been impressed by the tenacity of the Jem’Hadar soldiers. Even after their defeat had become all but inevitable, they had refused to surrender. He had personally slain the last of them, a veteran who had demanded to face him in single combat.

  Now, the forty-one other Remans who had survived the battle were policing the dead. They collected supplies and trophies from bodies that had been dismembered by blades, scorched by still-burning chemical fires, or shredded by grenades.

  Shinzon twisted the tourniquet until it bit into his skin. His leg began to grow numb.

  He swept his dirt-encrusted hands over his sweaty shaved pate. His burned, blistering fingertips lingered over the jagged gash on the back of his head. At his feet, a Jem’Hadar and a Reman lay side by side in death. Both their faces looked gruesome to Shinzon, who suddenly felt very much like a man alone on a field of monsters.

  The Tal Shiar lab’s double doors opened with a metallic groan followed by a violent, sibilant hiss.

  “Shinzon,” Vkruk said. “It’s time.”

  Shinzon nodded and limped stiffly to Vkruk’s side. Hefting his now-working disruptor rifle, he led his brethren down the sloped corridor into the lab.

  As Shinzon had expected, they met no resistance inside the laboratory.

  As the Remans had scanned each corridor and room, they had found no life signs. Not even bacteria had survived the thalaron radiation Shinzon had unleashed; the weapon had annihilated all organic material in the lab at the subatomic level.

  Shinzon monitored his troops’ progress from the lab’s antiseptically clean command center. Twenty of his soldiers were quickly but carefully taking apart the lab’s computer memory banks and loading them into two of the dropships, all of which had been moved to the lab’s main entrance in the crater. The remaining Reman troops were removing the now-deactivated thalaron core from its underground bunker and loading it into a third dropship.

  As Shinzon watched the steady activity on the control center monitors, however, his thoughts were consumed by the information he had just obtained from the Tal Shiar computer. He had always wondered where he had come from; how he had ended up being schooled by the Romulan scientists Tran and Svala; and why the Romulans had enslaved him in the mines of Remus.

  He had asked the computer a simple question: “Who am I?”

  The answer had torn his identity apart. He was a copy. A fabrication. A living lie. I’m a clone.

  He had hoped the computer might know something about him. He wasn’t ready to accept that it knew everything about him.

  “Shinzon, I’ve found something,” Vkruk said over the comm. “I think you should see this.” He had sent Vkruk to make a final sweep of the lab’s lower levels before they triggered its self-destruct system.

  “Where are you?” Shinzon said.

  “Sublevel six, compartment five.”

  “On my way.”

  Shinzon touched the smooth, metallic-hued skin of the android’s face. It stood in its storage pod, eyes closed, its body clad in a drab, gray utilitarian overall.

  Shinzon skimmed through the documentation that Vkruk had found with it. The information on the holographic tablet was incomplete, but Shinzon recognized certain names in it from his own recently discovered biography.

  “Activate it,” Shinzon said, nodding upward at the android.

  Vkruk hesitated. “Are you sure that’s—”

  “Do it.” Vkruk reached behind the android’s back and flipped a switch. Its eyes fluttered open. It looked back and forth between Shinzon and Vkruk.

  “You are human,” the android said to Shinzon. It looked at Vkruk. “I do not know what you are,” it said simply.

  “What is your name?” Shinzon said.

  It looked at him blankly. “I am B-4.”

  “Do you remember how you came to be here?” Shinzon said.

  “I used to be in a lab,” B-4 said. It looked around the lab, its head jerking in staccato, birdlike movements. “It was not as nice as this lab. I was taken away by people with gray skin. They put me in a box and turned off my power.”

  The android pointed at a metal examination table. “I woke up here. There were people with pointy ears and angry voices. They yelled at me.”

  Shinzon studied the android’s childlike manner. He suspected the machine was likely not capable of lying. That was a programming defect he would have to correct. “What did the people with pointy ears say to you?” Shinzon asked.

  “They told me I was too stupid to be of any use,” B-4 said. “They said they would let me know if they needed me for spare parts. Then they put me back in my pod. Now I am here.”

  “How long you have been here?” Shinzon said.

  “Nineteen years, five months, three days, nine hours, eleven minutes, and twenty-two seconds.”

  Shinzon looked again at the android’s documentation. Like Shinzon himself, it was a duplicate of a high-profile Starfleet officer. Also like himself, it had been consigned to oblivion nineteen years ago when the Tal Shiar abandoned an overly ambitious plan that relied on doppelgängers to infiltrate an enemy’s military hierarchy.

  Shinzon had been engineered from flesh and blood to take the place of a captain named Jean-Luc Picard. This stolen android had been marked to replace an android officer named Data—who, ironically, now served as Picard’s second officer aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. It became clear to Shinzon that long ago he and B-4 had been part of the same, aborted Tal Shiar scheme. While he had been exiled to die in the mines of Remus, this android had been abandoned to a mechanical coma and forgotten.

  “Can you walk?” Shinzon said to B-4. The android stepped forward. It looked down at its feet, then back at Shinzon.

  “Yes.”

  “Follow us,” Shinzon said. “We will bring you to our ship. We will set you free…” Shinzon clasped B-4’s shoulder. “Brother.” Shinzon nodded to Vkruk, who gestured to B-4 to follow. The android exited behind the hulking Reman, and Shinzon walked out behind them. He activated his comm. “Shinzon to Xiomek. Are you finished loading the transports?”

  The Reman antecenturion’s voice crackled over the comm. “Affirmative, sir.” Shinzon followed Vkruk and B-4 into the turbolift.

  “We’re on our way out,” Shinzon said. “Set the self-destruct timer for ten minutes, then get to the transports.”

  Shinzon gasped for breath. He was down on his hands and knees. His fingers clawed at the muddy ground as searing pain tore through his insides. It felt as if it were twisting him in knots until he was about to rip apart.

  The viselike sensation abated, and he inhaled greedily. Even though the toxic smoke from the wrecked attack flier burned his sinuses and throat, he was grateful that it had concealed his moment of weakness from his troops.

  He lifted one knee, planted his foot, and paused to let his dizziness pass. The smoke thinned, and he saw the dropships less than twenty meters away. Behind them the sky swiftly grayed with the approach of the Goloroth dawn. The day that would follow behind it, darkly overcast as it was certain to be, would be too painfully bright for his Reman troops to bear.

  Shinzon wished he could stay to watch it, just this once. Though he considered the darkness-bound Remans his kin, part of him was still tempted to step out of the shadows. His irrepressible fascination with the fine line that separated light and darkness had been what inspired Vkruk to name him Shinzon, the Reman word for twilight.

  He stood and limped forward toward the dropships. The ground rumbled angrily beneath his feet as the Tal Shiar lab imploded. He stopped short of the gangway to the dropship on which Vkruk awaited his return. He waited until all his surviving men fixed their attention on him. The air was growing warmer, and he felt a fresh sheen of sweat dampening his skin and mingling with the blood-caked mud that flecked his face.

  “Our comrades did not fall in vain, my brothers,” he said loudly. “But they did not die for Romulus. Nor for the Tal Shiar. Our victory was for Remus—” he lifted his sword and held it horizontally above his head “—and for freedom!”

  The roar that answered him was long, feral, and deafening. Rather than taper off, it segued into a deep, overpowering chant accompanied by the heavy stomping of the Remans’ booted feet: “Shin-ZON! Shin-ZON! Shin-ZON! Shin-ZON! Shin-ZON!…”

  Shinzon limped into his dropship. The fanatical chorus continued without pause as the gangway closed behind him. Battered, broken, and bloody, he settled into the cockpit beside Vkruk. As the dropship ascended, the newly self-proclaimed liberator of Remus set a course for a rendezvous with a Romulan senator who had a promise to keep.

  Eleven Hours Out

  Dave Galanter

  War correspondence: This story takes place immediately prior to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “The Changing Face of Evil.”

  Dave Galanter

  Dave Galanter has authored various Star Trek projects, among these the Voyager novel Battle Lines, the Next Generation duology Maximum Warp, and the S.C.E. eBooks Ambush and Bitter Medicine. His not-so-secret Fortress of Solitude is in Michigan, from which he pretends to have a hand in managing the message board Web sites he co-owns: ComicBoards.com and TVShowBoards.com. He also edits and is the main contributor to his own Web site, SnarkBait.com. Dave spends his non–day-job time there, with family and friends, or burying himself in other writing projects which at some point might actually see the light of day if he ever gets off his duff. He enjoys feedback on his writing, positive or negative, and would appreciate seeing any comments you have on his work. Feel free to email him at dave@comicboards.com.

  In the distance there was war, yet Earth sat in an uneasy bliss. No battle touched her shores, no fire singed her sky. But as the bright sun shone on San Francisco Bay, sparkling brighter than any starscape, Captain Jean-Luc Picard could not fully embrace its beauty. Death fogged over all. War always found its way home, if not in deed then in the souls of tired soldiers.

  “You’re morose,” Deanna Troi told him. “I could feel it from the corridor.”

  Picard turned to look toward the lounge doorway. He thought to mention how lovely Troi looked in her formal gown, then reconsidered, only to change his mind again. “Didn’t you tell me you were going to wear your dress uniform instead?”

  “That was before I found a dress shop nearby.”

  As he gestured for her to sit in one of the large, overstuffed chairs, her smile made him smile, if only just a bit, before he lost the expression in more somber thoughts.

  “You’re going to give me empathic whiplash,” she told him as they both sat. “Are you worried about the Enterprise?”

  The captain tugged at his tunic collar and wondered if he still had time to get into his dress uniform. Suddenly he felt underdressed with Deanna in such formal wear. “Worried? No. Storms delay ships all the time. And we’re far enough away from…”

  “The war.”

  “Yes.” Picard paused. He didn’t feel so far away from the battle. “I don’t really feel like I’m home,” he admitted.

  “Maybe you should have visited Labarre?” Deanna suggested, hands elegantly cupped together on her lap. “There was time. You could take the time, after the ceremony and before Enterprise returns.”

  Picard shook his head. “Enterprise will be back by 1900 hours.”

  “You’re the captain. You can make time.”

  He pulled in a long breath. “There’s a war on.”

  “You could still—”

  He cut her off with a motion of his hand. “Deanna, there is little there for me now.”

  Deanna Troi didn’t give up quite so easily. She would press this until she knew her captain would take no more. Being an empath, she was quite good at knowing when that was. “What about your sister-in-law? Friends? Other family?”

  “I’ve neither had, nor had time for, extended family. Robert and I didn’t even have much use for one another until recently. Without him there seems to be no family left.”

  She paused, pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and then continued. “I thought we were here to see your niece graduate the Academy.”

  “Amarante is my sister-in-law’s niece,” he said with a slight sigh. “I’ve only met her twice. Marie is trying to give me some sort of family.”

  “And you’re taking it,” she said with a short nod. “That’s good.”

  Picard half shrugged and pulled his tunic down in front. “I’m humoring her. She’s trying to rebuild her life after Robert and René died in the fire and I want to help by being family to her, but…” He looked away a moment, not wanting to think about the fire and the events after and his inability to make it to the funeral. “And the girl and I have talked since she’s been in the Academy. She’s asked advice. She’s smart. We were scheduled to be here, and she asked if I could attend.”