“Are we going to make it, Mac?” Shelby asked.

  “We always do,” he said. He didn’t lack for confidence.

  “Sir!” It was Lefler. “Corinth. dead ahead. Fifty thousand klicks and closing. At current rate, we will be able to overtake her in four minutes.”

  “Ready tractor beams.”

  “Tractor beams remain out of commission,” I had to tell him.

  “Very well,” he said. “Bring the port photon cannons on line. Prepare the grappling hooks and lines. Mr. Kebron,” he said briskly, getting to his feet, “prepare a boarding party of about twenty men.”

  “Will you be leading us, Captain?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Shelby took him briefly in her arms, held him tight. “Good luck,” she said breathlessly.

  “I make my own luck,” he assured her.

  Just as Lefler has foreseen, within minutes we were alongside the speeding Corinth. We, the boarding party, were poised atop the saucer section, our space suits protecting us from the ravages of space. You see, firing upon the Corinth would have done us no good because the ship’s shields were up. However, individual men could easily pass between them, and that was our plan. Our boots magnetized, each of us was holding a grappling gun, and we waited for the captain’s order.

  “Open fire!” the captain called through the comlink in his helmet.

  The port phaser cannons snapped out of the engineering section and targeted the Corinth. Within seconds they were firing, hammering the sides of the fleeing starship, trying not to destroy it, but to slow it down. In this regard, the cannons succeeded. The Corinth began to slow, and it was at that point that Captain Calhoun called out, “Fire grappling guns!”

  We took aim and fired. The hooks sailed across the vacuum of space and, with perfect precision, sank into the hull of the Corinth.

  “Go!” shouted the Captain, and we swung across the void, firing our phasers as we went. Several of our men were blown off into space as the Corinth tried to pick us off with their phasers, but the rest of us managed to land on the side of the runaway starship.

  “Get us inside, Zak!” Calhoun ordered. It was not a problem. We had landed right near an access port. I gripped the side of the port door, pulled with all my strength, and the entire port came away in my hand. It left a gaping hole in the side of the vessel through which we were able to enter.

  We stampeded through the corridors. The Cardassians came at us, trying to pick us off one by one, but they had no success. We were too thorough, blasting at anyone coming near us. The Cardassians were blasted backwards and, with the sort of efficiency that only a crack team can command, we made our way up to the bridge.

  None of us knew, of course, that the Cardassian commander was a shapeshifter…one of the members of a race called the Founders.

  “You are most resourceful to have gotten this far,” he told us. “But you will go no further.”

  His skin began to ooze and twist, and suddenly he was the size of…well, of me.

  “Get back, Captain!” I shouted, putting myself between the Founder and my commanding officer. The Founder charged, slammed into me, and I staggered inside my space suit.

  “Kebron!” Calhoun cried out, “don’t sacrifice yourself for me!”

  “Just doing my job, sir,” I assured him. The fortunate thing was that the Founder couldn’t do much damage unless he was willing to harden his body. Every time he did, I pounded on him, harder and harder. We struggled, grappling, and I shoved him up repeatedly against the wall, until he cried out in pain and then shattered into a thousand pieces.

  And so ended the attempt hijacking of the Corinth. It was our only major involvement in the Dominion War…but if we hadn’t been there, who knows how much the new information from the stolen ship would have prolonged it…or even changed its outcome. I even received a Federation Medal of Valor for my actions during the incident.

  It was a proud time for us all.

  Zak Kebron was not entirely surprised when Cal’s Mentor demanded to see him. He made an appointment at his leisure to visit with the Mentor at the school. When he arrived, not only was the Mentor waiting for him, but so was Cal. If Zak thought Cal had given him dirty looks before, they were nothing compared to what was being fired his way now.

  As was customary, the Mentor addressed Zak by house name, since he was the seniormost of his family. “Kebron,” he said tersely, seated behind his desk with his massive fingers resting lightly on the surface. “Cal turned in his report today on your time in the Dominion War.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pregnant pause. “Is there anything you wish to say?” the Mentor asked him.

  Zak thought about that. “Nice weather.”

  The Mentor leaned forward. “Grappling hooks? Side mounted phaser cannons?”

  “Do they present a problem?”

  “Somewhat. The means by which you describe boarding the Corinth is, in fact, classically associated with Earth pirates, circa the seventeenth century. The pirates would soften up the sailing vessel they intended to plunder by opening fire with their cannons—usually projecting out the side of the ships—and then would swing across onto their victim and board via grappling hooks.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “You lied.” It was Cal who had spoken.

  “Yes,” said Kebron.

  “What possible reason,” the Mentor demanded, “could you have to lie to you son?”

  “To counter the lies you told him,” shot back Kebron. “About the glories of war. The wonders of it.” He shifted his gaze from the Mentor to Cal. “There is no glory in war, Cal. There are great individual accomplishments. But these occur in spite of war, not because of it. They come from the individual spirit refusing to be beaten down.”

  “You could make your point without lies,” Cal said.

  “No. Because that’s what war is. Lies. All wars are based upon lies. All wars are fostered by lies. The specifics of the lies may change. ‘The war will be quick.’ ‘The war is blessed by God.’ ‘We will kill as few people as possible.’ ‘We will only commit a handful of troops.’ ‘The war will be over soon.’ ‘You can trust me.’ ‘Wars end.’ So many lies, on and on and on—”

  “Kebron,” Mentor began.

  Zak didn’t let him speak. “You wish to know the truth? The truth is that our one brush with the Dominion War involved responding to a distress signal from a Romulan warbird and arriving too late. The Romulan ship was gone. The Corinth—which, indeed, had been stolen by the Cardassians—was also gone. Although ‘gone’ may be too broad a word. Wreckage hung everywhere. We moved through it, and it was like a graveyard in space. Romulan bodies, pieces of them, arms, legs, heads, mixing with similar death and dismemberment from the Cardassians. We didn’t even fully understand what had happened until we spoke to Starfleet.

  “Heads in EVA helmets bounced off our viewscreen. You haven’t experienced the glories of war, Mentor, until heads have bounced off your viewscreen.”

  “It was for a good cause,” the Mentor said tightly, “and it flies in the face of what you said. There were no lies in the Dominion War…and it did end.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. Really.”

  Zak turned back to Cal. “The Mentor has apparently forgotten the Sisko lie.”

  “The…what?” asked Cal, looking interested in spite of himself.

  “That hardly can be taken into consideration,” Mentor told him. “Since it was hardly pivotal, and—”

  “Remember when I spoke earlier of the assassination of a Romulan senator by the Dominion? That was a lie, concocted by a Starfleet space station commander, to guarantee the Romulans would ally with the Federation. The Romulans didn’t find out about it until many years later. That led to the Third Great Earth-Romulan War. And more wars after that. Always more and more wars. Considering it’s something that every race becomes involved in so reluctantly, you’d think it would be more popular than it is.”

  “Sometimes,” the Mentor said, “there is no other way.”

  “And that’s the most popular lie of all.”

  “I do not need to be lectured by you, Kebron,” said the Mentor. “You’ve done enough damage to this child for one day. Grappling hooks, of all things.”

  Zak Kebron stood and gestured for Cal to follow him. Cal did so, and then the Mentor called after him, “Claiming you were awarded a medal…another lie, I suppose?”

  “No, it’s true. I was awarded a medal. Just not for that.”

  “For what, then?”

  “For killing my best friend,” Kebron told him. “But it was connected to a war…and that justifies everything that one does. Does it not, Mentor?”

  “I think,” the Mentor said stiffly, “you may want to consider alternate means of education for your son in the future, since we clearly do not see eye to eye on these matters.”

  Zak Kebron walked out of the office, and Cal fell into step next to him. “You made me look stupid,” Cal said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you made the Mentor look more stupid.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  Stopping and turning to face his son, Zak said, “Because I was in a war for shaping your views…and he needed to be a casualty of that war.”

  Cal stared at him for a very long time. “You’re very strange,” he decided.

  Zak Kebron chuckled low in his throat. “You, my son, do not know from strange. Let me tell you about what happened with Mark McHenry.”

  “Does it involve lies?”

  “It’s bizarre enough not to require any.”

  “Is there a war?”

  “Actually…yes.”

  “Great,” said Cal. “Let’s hear it. I love stories about war, true or not.”

  Zak Kebron sighed. “Splendid.”

  Requital

  Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

  War correspondence: The bulk of this story takes place at the end of the war, during the final Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, “What You Leave Behind.”

  Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

  Michael A. Martin’s solo short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He has also coauthored (with Andy Mangels) several Star Trek novels, a pair of eBooks in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, and three novels based on the Roswell television series. Martin was the regular cowriter (also with Andy) of Marvel Comics’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series, and has written for Atlas Editions’ Star Trek Universe subscription card series, Star Trek Monthly, Dreamwatch, Grolier Books, WildStorm, and Platinum Studios. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.

  Andy Mangels has coauthored several Star Trek novels, two Starfleet Corps of Engineers eBooks, and three novels based on TV’s Roswell (all written with Michael A. Martin). Flying solo, Andy has penned Animation on DVD: The Ultimate Guide; Star Wars: The Essential Guide To Characters; Beyond Mulder & Scully: The Mysterious Characters of The X-Files; and From Scream To Dawson’s Creek: The Phenomenal Career of Kevin Williamson. Mangels has written for numerous licensed properties as well as a plethora of entertainment and lifestyle periodicals. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his longtime partner, Don Hood, and their dog, Bela. Visit his website at www.andymangels.com.

  The approaching Jem’Hadar were relentless. Dozens of them drew inexorably nearer to the defense perimeter. They were massive, scowling gargoyles, their heavy bodies moving quickly on incongruously catlike feet.

  Sweat ran down Reese’s dust-caked brow and stung his eyes. He ignored the irritation, raised his phaser rifle, and drew a bead on one of the nearest Jem’Hadar soldiers. The captured ketracel-white tubes that dangled from Reese’s neck—his trophies of war—clattered like an orchestra’s percussion section in the relative silence of the arid Chin’toka wasteland that surrounded him.

  Reese’s orders were to hold the captured array for Starfleet—and to keep the Jem’Hadar from reclaiming it—at all costs. He and about a hundred and fifty other Starfleet soldiers had spent the past five months doing just that.

  Now Reese was one of only forty-three surviving defenders. He was certain that in a few seconds that number would decline even further.

  But there was no time to worry about that now. He had a job to do. Letting his training overcome his fatigue and fear, Reese held his breath and fired.

  The first Jem’Hadar went down. The men and women who crouched beside Reese in defense of the perimeter, all of them Starfleet soldiers and engineers who were every bit as tired, frightened, and angry as he was, fired as well. The harsh traceries of intermittently crossing phaser beams briefly turned the postsunset gloaming into high noon.

  Jem’Hadar were falling, crashing to the hard-packed, dusty earth like so many boulders. But behind them, scaling the mounds of the dead and dying, still more came. Their faces bore testament to their berserker rage; they were every bit as implacable, every bit as contemptuous of death as those who had just preceded them into its jaws.

  The phaser fire became more frantic all around Reese as the Jem’Hadar front line drew steadily nearer. Men and women screamed in pain and rage as some of the Jem’Hadar stormed across the perimeter, penetrating the front line.

  Breathe. And keep firing, Reese told himself silently, his heart pounding.

  He heard a distant shriek; it sounded like Kellin, one of the engineers in charge of figuring out—unsuccessfully, so far—how to tap into the Dominion communications array. Reese turned and saw a Jem’Hadar shoot Vargas right between the shoulder blades before he could get off a shot of his own.

  Reese mowed down Vargas’s killer. Where are the goddamned reinforcements?

  He glanced to his right. Captain Sisko was crouched there, fighting hand-to-hand against a pair of snarling Jem’Hadar. The captain’s uniform was still improbably pristine, spit-and-polish clean.

  That’s because he hasn’t been stuck in this hellhole for the past five months. A flicker of anger toward the senior officer flashed across Reese’s mind, but it was gone as quickly as it had ignited.

  A Jem’Hadar leapt straight at Reese from across the trench that marked the front line. Reese swung his rifle like a club, landing a stunning blow on the Jem’Hadar’s temple. Letting the rifle dangle from its strap, he drew a wicked-looking knife he’d taken off a Jem’Hadar corpse after an earlier battle and sliced his current foe’s throat from ear to ear. The monster collapsed into the dust, gurgling, already well on its way to the same place its kind had sent Captain Loomis, Commander Parker, Lieutenant McGreevey, Chief Larkin, and so many other good people—

  Reese turned and saw that two more Jem’Hadar soldiers had suddenly cleared the barrier, their rifles and razor-sharp kar’takin raised high in Sisko’s direction. One of them struck the captain, and he went down, apparently unconscious. As one of the enemy raised a rifle to deliver the death shot, Reese rushed him. Bobbing and weaving, he buried his blade deeply in the creature’s belly and twisted with all his strength. A phaser blast struck the Jem’Hadar beside him, blowing an enormous hole in the creature’s torso.

  “Die, you bastard,” Reese hissed as he withdrew his gore-slathered knife, then shoved the Jem’Hadar’s heavy body away from him.

  Time seemed to stop as the creature swayed. Then, in spite of an apparently mortal abdominal wound, the Jem’Hadar steadied itself.

  And began to laugh.

  “It doesn’t matter how many times you kill us in your sleep,” it said, its voice a sepulchral rumble. “It will change nothing.”

  “That’s fine,” Reese said. “I’ll just keep killing you over and over again. Until you quit coming.”

  “But that is exactly my point, Reese. We will not stop. We cannot stop. Any more than you were able to prevent this.”

  The Jem’Hadar grinned and held up a human head.

  It was Billy, his eyes empty, his bloodless lips forming an ellipse of horrified surprise. Until now, Reese had thought he’d been vaporized a year earlier.

  Reese screamed his rage and pain. His knife raised, he threw himself straight at the grinning Jem’Hadar.

  “Rough night, Reese?” Nog said, hobbling toward the table and carrying his breakfast tray with one hand. The little Ferengi leaned heavily on a metal crutch, his newly installed biosynthetic leg evidently still too weak to support his weight.

  “I’ve had rougher ones,” Reese lied, then tore off another hunk of his too-dry bran muffin. He offered Nog a smile that he hoped would discourage any more questions. “About five months of them, when the Jem’Hadar were doing their damnedest to kill me.”

  Reese had spent many of his mornings with Nog since arriving at Starbase 235’s convalescent hospital, a facility that specialized in treating wounds that left no external scars.

  “I’ve had a nightmare or two of my own,” said Nog, who was staring intently into a plate of wriggling tube grubs.

  “Understandable,” Reese said, wondering what it would have been like to have lost a limb permanently the way Nog had. “I take it they’ve got you visiting with a counselor?”

  The young Ferengi nodded.

  “Does it help?”

  “Sure. At least that’s what they tell me.”

  Now Reese saw the same haunted look in Nog’s eyes that he’d seen in the mirror every day for the past few weeks. Deep down, he knew that no amount of counseling could fix that.

  “How about you, Reese?” Nog asked. “Do the Jem’Hadar still visit you in the dead of night?”

  Reese took a large swallow of hot coffee, actually reveling in the pain as it burned its way down.

  He recalled the empty, terror-stricken eyes of the only woman he’d ever truly loved—the woman the Jem’Hadar had taken from him. He shivered slightly as the memory of the nightmare-Jem’Hadar’s cruel laughter returned unbidden.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, pushing his plate aside as he rose from his chair. “I don’t have dreams anymore.”