ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY Read online

  Star Trek® Online:

  The Needs of the Many

  STAR TREK®

  ONLINE

  THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

  MICHAEL A. MARTIN

  & JAKE SISKO

  Based upon Star Trek®

  and Star Trek: The Next Generation®

  created by Gene Roddenberry

  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine®

  created by Rick Berman & Michael Piller

  Star Trek: Voyager®

  created by Rick Berman & Michael Piller & Jeri Taylor

  Star Trek: Enterprise®

  created by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga

  and Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek® Online

  (The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game)

  Pocket Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson

  Cover art: Melvin Yu, Denis Korkh, Chris Legaspi, and Patrick Moore,

  courtesy of Cryptic Studios

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8657-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8658-9 (ebook)

  This chronicle is dedicated to Studs Terkel

  (1912–2008), who blazed the trail, and to

  Congressman Dennis Kucinich of

  Ohio, a man centuries ahead of his time,

  for proposing the establishment of a

  Department of Peace.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  THE UNDINE WAR

  THE UNDINE

  LIFE DURING WARTIME

  FRAGILE ALLIANCES

  EARTH

  PAST AND FUTURE

  THE UNDINE WAR

  LURKERS IN THE SHADOWS

  MOVING FORWARD

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  It’s been a number of years since I ceased my labors mining a seemingly infinite vein of personal stories about the Federation’s war against the Undine—a truly alien race once known to us only by their Borg designation of Species 8472. The many teraquads of stories I spent more time than I could have imagined gathering ran the gamut from heroism and courage to villainy and cowardice, and made stopovers at just about every point in between. During my travels from Earth and Luna to Tau Ceti and Cestus III, from Cardassia Prime and Qo’noS to Galor IV and Altair VI, from Vulcan and Bolarus to Bajor and Omicron Theta, I preserved reminiscences of the best and worst deeds of which sentient beings are capable. This “Undine War history” project, which I undertook at the behest of the Federation’s Department of Peace, was both rewarding and exhausting and could have occupied many lifetimes—and that’s without reckoning the time and energy it would have taken me to edit those many gigaquads of interviews and other pertinent historical documents into anything resembling a coherent narrative.*

  Although it meant disappointing my friends in the DoP, the time finally came when I had to recognize that my ambition had finally exceeded my abilities. After all, I had only one lifetime to devote to writing of any kind, and the task of whittling the copious quantity of raw material I had assembled down to even a dozen fat volumes (one wag at the DoP described this venture as a “massively multimind memoir”) seemed all but impossible. And there were aspects of the war—nightmare horrors commingled with the gallant heroism—that I frankly had no desire to experience even vicariously yet again, the protective filter of the editorial process notwithstanding.

  Most importantly, my long-neglected fiction projects, having grown cold and lonely, were beckoning, and I wasn’t getting any younger.

  Then E’Shles, my editor on Collected Stories, suggested that my Undine War project might not have to remain forever in limbo. S/he suggested that all that might be needed was to “focus a couple of fresh sets of eyestalks” on the material I had gathered. I agreed, and gave hir access to the entirety of my interview collection. E’Shles then brought aboard another scrivener of note, contemporary historiographer Michael A. Martin, who is probably best known for his popular fictionalized accounts of late-twenty-second/third/fourth-century Starfleet missions (and who lacks eyestalks, by the way).

  From the very outset, Michael seemed convinced that this book (and the accompanying derivative holoprograms) would indeed see the light of day, once he’d spent a few weeks putting his shoulder to the wheel. His enthusiasm was contagious, so when he began contacting me with historical questions (probably as part of E’Shles’s fiendish scheme to lure me back to the project, if only temporarily), I was delighted to help—so much so that I even acceded to Michael’s request that I put my name on the book alongside his own.*

  So now you know how this book came to exist, as well as why: because somebody insisted. In fact, this volume came into being for the very same reason any of my works of fiction ever saw completion. Because someone—be it myself, an editor (as in this case), or an irresistible muse—insisted upon it. But this book is no more a work of fiction than it is a mere blow-by-blow recounting of Undine War events with which virtually every contemporary Federation citizen is already more than familiar. It is, rather, a slice-of-life remembrance of the conflict, a decades-spanning chronicle of how profoundly the Undine War affected us all, even when most of us had no earthly idea of what we were really up against.

  But before you forge ahead, let’s have a word about history.

  We’re all familiar with the kind of history that gets entombed in textbooks. It is the edited monologue of victors, milled and processed to make the raw stuff of past events digestible for succeeding generations, reducing the warp and weft of human toil and triumph and folly to dry box scores of bloodless dates and places, key battles fought, venerated documents signed. Such “histories” are usually filled with more convenient errors, omissions, and contradictions than even professional historians probably realize. Of course, it could hardly be otherwise. History is all too often an exercise in mythopoeia, the vast, sub rosa, and not-always-conscious self-justification in which every civilizati
on indulges once time’s passage has allowed worlds-shaking events to drift to a comfortably safe, numb-nerved temporal distance. Interred deep in the archives of the Federation News Service, the Proxima News Service, the Tellar News Service, or the Ferengi Commercial News, its factual truths lie out of sight, and therefore out of mind.

  And then there’s the other variety of history. The kind that’s been branded forever into the living memories of those on whom fate has chosen to bestow history as firsthand experience. It’s the kind of history that’s the stuff of holonews headlines, and which very often comprises the proverbial “interesting times” that the ancient Chinese regarded as a curse. This variety of history keeps and preserves the journalist’s craft—what Washington Post owner and publisher Philip L. Graham called “the first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand”—and prevents it from being utterly erased by subsequent historical consensus. This kind of history takes to heart Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s assertion that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

  I hope that this volume is such a work: a partial overview of the Undine War, compiled from the running recollections of key figures who served as eyewitnesses to the Federation’s long conflict with that enigmatic species. History as remembered by those who experienced those turbulent times as headlines. This is an attempt to balance the Department of Peace’s initial goal of revising and preserving that “first rough draft” of Undine War history with the need to analyze that history, walking that history backward from our still-unfolding twenty-fifth-century vantage point while trying to soften the sometimes unforgiving lens of accumulated hindsight.

  Because there can be no better witnesses to history than those who were there—especially the relative few who were called upon to risk everything on behalf of the needs of the many.

  —Jake Sisko

  Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana

  Thursday, February 16, 2423

  Jake Sisko is the author of the Betar Prize–winning Collected Stories and the acclaimed novel Anslem.

  “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

  —THOMAS MERTON

  “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

  —SURAK, ANALECTS

  THE UNDINE WAR

  UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

  Chef’s Personal Log, U.S.S. Cochrane (NCC- 59318) Crewman Bradley S. Cowper, recording Stardate 73968.8*

  Commander Drake, the agent from Starfleet Intelligence, has spent the past two days conducting lengthy interviews with every member of the crew who might have witnessed any part of the… incident that resulted in the sudden arrest and removal of Captain T’Vix, First Officer Donovan, and Security Chief Patel at Draken during one of the Cochrane’s routine patrols of the Romulan Neutral Zone boundary. Even I got interviewed for a couple of hours, and I was nowhere near the bridge when whatever was supposed to have happened there happened. After all, I’m just a cook.

  It didn’t take long for me to size up this Drake character as an inherently untrustworthy bastard. Commander Donovan probably would have described him as “oleaginous,” but I’ll settle for smarmy, or maybe just oily. Adjectives aside, I don’t trust him any more than I trust those… creatures that Ensign Farquar tells me he somehow unmasked impersonating the captain, Commander Donovan, and Chief Patel. Which is why I’m making this recording on my own personal tricorder rather than on the Cochrane’s computer system. Before he leaves us, Drake will no doubt purge the main computer of any explicit reference to what’s just happened to the top of the Cochrane’s chain of command. That is, if he hasn’t got around to doing it already.

  This afternoon, Drake called me in to the temporary Starfleet Intel HQ he’s set up for himself in Captain T’Vix’s ready room. He assured me that I’m above suspicion now, though he won’t tell me exactly why that is. Has he managed to run some sort of medical scan on me without my noticing? He isn’t telling. Still, it was a relief to hear that I’m no longer considered a serious risk of suddenly transforming into a vicious, three-meter-tall praying mantis.

  Then the oily bastard told me what he expects me to do next—entirely in my capacity as chef for the officers’ mess, of course. Apparently, Drake is convinced that T’Vix, Donovan, and Patel weren’t the only disguised monsters still trying to blend in among the Cochrane’s senior staff. He suspects that there at least two others, and he hopes an experimental food additive that SI has just developed—to be dispensed discreetly by me—will flush out any remaining infiltrators.

  I almost wouldn’t put it past him to give me poison to spike the food with, so that anybody who doesn’t have to rush to sickbay before dessert will stand revealed as an enemy infiltrator.…

  JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #S-13

  Kaferia (Tau Ceti IV), just outside the spaceport city of Amber

  A man of early middle age greets me at the seafront resort, where a strip of low, modern hospitality structures fronts a wide swatch of fine white sand that borders a preternaturally calm, cerulean ocean. A few families and small children stroll the beach and wade out into the peaceful waters. When I turn my gaze inland past the buildings, I see groves of slender Kaferian apple trees swaying gently in the warm breeze. Although this place is the stuff of holosuite fantasies, I have it on very good authority that it is indeed real. If I had lived this man’s life—that of a soldier who had survived an attempt to beard the Undine/8472 monster in its lair—I suspect I’d be sorely tempted to retire to someplace as peaceful as this.

  Speaking with a faint but unmistakable Texas twang, the man introduces himself as Paul Stiles, a former Starfleet ensign turned enlisted private in the MACO (Military Assault Command Organization) during the “hot” part of the Undine War. He tells me he’s now a master sergeant, retired, though a MACO is always a MACO.

  Stiles’s handshake is as firm as duranium, and his eyes—or some of the memories lodged inextricably behind them—look every bit as gray and unyielding. His gaze, though superficially warm, only barely conceals a cold, distant cast that reminds me of the million-mile stare I’ve seen in the eyes of Jem’Hadar soldiers. I can’t quite tell whether his smile indicates genuine appreciation for an opportunity to record his combat experiences for posterity, or whether he’s merely eager to get this interview done so he can go back to the business of putting the horrors of the war behind him. After we’ve been speaking for a few minutes I notice that this man often straddles a line between what I call “military briefer mode”—an emotionally unconnected, stick-to-the-facts mode of communicating—and the strained, melancholic silences of a soldier afflicted with survivor’s guilt, a man who believes that he somehow let his fallen comrades down by making it safely home from the field of battle. I’ve encountered a lot of people like this. No matter what their counselors may tell them, no matter how many Christopher Pike Medals of Valor such men and women may receive, they will never measure up in their own uncompromising eyes, simply because they failed to do the impossible.

  I notice right away that Sergeant Stiles is quick to scowl at my freely admitted ignorance of military lore, and that he is plainly uncomfortable hearing anything that sounds remotely like hero worship. Recollections of combat sometimes make him shudder visibly, making me wonder if the Undine stalk him in his dreams even now. But he doesn’t quite fit the profile of a chronic post-traumatic stress case, since he frequently dons a warrior’s bluster that fits him like a comfortable pair of running shoes. His boasts might impress a Klingon, though they sometimes make him sound as though he’s really whistling—or perhaps shouting—past the graveyard. But he is also quick to chuckle, and I get the feeling that he does so in response to some private joke rather than to any of my questions. I find that strangely reassuring—it almost makes me overlook the sense of hypervigilance the man r
adiates.

  Almost, but not quite.

  You were a junior officer on a path toward a solid Starfleet career when the Undine conflict entered its “hot war” phase.

  I was an ensign. A junior tactical officer with pretty good prospects for promotion. I was expected to be career Starfleet. There’s always been a Stiles or three in the service, going back to the Earth-Romulan War. And we were a clan of web-footed wet-navy sailors before that.

  So with all that tradition behind you, why did you transfer over to the MACO?

  I have relatives who’d disagree with me loudly for saying this, but serving in Starfleet was never an end in itself to the Stiles clan. At least it shouldn’t have been. I always saw it as merely a means of keeping humanity safe from whatever Big Bad might be out there sharpening its claws, getting ready to snuff us out, be it paranoid Xindi or Romulans, or those giant three-legged stick bugs who call themselves the Undine.

  But Starfleet was heavily involved in the Undine War from the very beginning, just as it was in those earlier wars with the Xindi and the Romulans.

  Mister Sisko, there’s “involved” and then there’s “committed.” Those two concepts don’t overlap as much as you might think in times of war. The difference between them is the same thing that separates the chicken from the pig at an old-fashioned breakfast. You see, the chicken is “involved” with breakfast.

  But the pig is “committed.”

  That’s it exactly. I wanted to be closer to the real action. Not sitting on the bridge of a ship, launching torpedoes by tapping at some tactile interface.

  So you wanted the pig’s greater “commitment” to the cause. But if you play that metaphor out to its conclusion, you’re talking about a level of commitment that nobody can survive. A suicide mission.

  As a MACO infantryman, you have to make peace with a truth as old as the Trojan War: you might come back with your shield carrying you instead of the other way around. And that’s assuming that you were lucky enough to come back at all. I’ve lost count of how many of my buddies were either vaporized in space, or buried on some godforsaken nowhereworld after a slash from some Trike’s claws left him full of cooties that ate him from the inside out.