Peter David

Peter David is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous Star Trek novels, including the incredibly popular New Frontier series, the next book of which is the forthcoming hardcover After the Fall. In addition, he has also written dozens of other books, including his acclaimed original novel Sir Apropos of Nothing and its sequels, The Woad to Wuin and Tong Lashing. David is also well known for his comic book work, particularly his award-winning run on The Incredible Hulk. He recently authored the novelizations of both Spider-Man motion pictures, as well as that of the Hulk film. He lives in New York.

Zak Kebron was feeling his age.

It wasn’t simply that the Brikar’s body was more attuned to the shifting seasons on the like-named planet of Brikar, and that those changes inflicted heretofore unknown pain into his joints.

No, it was that he was seeing himself.

As it so happened this particular day, with the sun high in the sky and the temperature a relatively balmy one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, Zak heard himself before he saw himself. He heard a thudding, a thumping, the ground shaking as something large approached. The Kebron home was largely devoid of furniture, as were most Brikar homes, since they were minimalist beings and saw little need for such frivolities. Nevertheless, what few bits of decoration were there trembled under the sustained impact, and Zak shook his head.

Actually, Kebron didn’t exactly shake his head. More accurately, his entire massive torso swayed a bit from side to side, since Kebron wasn’t possessed of a neck. His head was joined squarely to his shoulders, and the entirety of his humanoid body was covered with skin so thick and impenetrable that it was often perceived to be akin to rock. They’d had to develop new sizes of Starfleet uniforms just to accommodate him when he had joined up. At home on Brikar, as was the case with the rest of his race, he simply went unclothed. But Starfleet tended to be a bit more provincial.

He came as close to a smile as his physiognomy allowed him. Starfleet. That had been so long ago… so very, very long ago. He hadn’t thought about it in years, and when he did, it was almost as if he was dispassionately watching someone else’s life unfold in his mind. It had so little to do with the being he was now.

The source of the trembling drew closer and closer, and then the door to the three-room domicile burst open and Cal was standing there. Cal, looking so much as Zak had looked at that age. It was almost like staring into a mirror that opened up a portal back through time… which, now that Zak thought about it, he had on one occasion. This circumstance, though, wasn’t fraught with time paradox possibilities.

In essence, he was Kebron in miniature, except his outer husk was the typical gray of young Brikar. Although very young for a Brikar, not even an adolescent, he was already as large as a typical Terran adult and could easily break one of those poor, delicate creatures in half.

He had been stomping particularly hard in his approach, indicating that he was upset about something. He said nothing, though, just glowered at Zak, which indicated that somehow he felt whatever was bothering him was Zak’s fault. Zak, of course, had done nothing. That didn’t bother young Cal, who was perfectly content to blame Zak for whatever troubles befell him simply because Zak Kebron was responsible for his being born.

“Rough day at school?” asked Zak.

More glowering, although the intensity level seemed to have been notched up a bit.

“You’re my homework,” he said.

This announcement took Zak a bit by surprise. “Am I.”

“Mentor Kelner said we are to begin studying the glories of war.”

“The… glories of war.” Zak considered that. “That was the Mentor’s exact phrasing. The glories of war.”

“He said that wars are great endeavors, in which the truth of the enemy always comes out.”

“Did he, now.”

“You keep doing that,” Cal said. “Saying things that sound like questions, except there is no actual question in your voice.”

“Have I been doing that.”

Yet more glowering. It was comforting to Zak that, if he had the need to get Cal to glower, he knew how to go about it: Say anything aloud and that would provoke it. “I do not understand,” he said, “how your Mentor’s views on war translates into my being your homework.”

“He assigned me,” said Cal, sounding as if Zak were the greatest moron ever to walk the planet since he had not figured this out already, “to ask you about your experiences during the Opinion War a hundred and fifty years ago.”

Zak stared at him for a moment, his mind flying back a century and a half to try and recall what the hell it was that Cal was referring to. Tentatively, he said, “You mean the Dominion War?”

“I think so.”

“You think so. You should try to be sure, Cal, since the Dominion War happened and the Opinion War… well, that’s ongoing, I suppose, on every planet everywhere.”

“Who cares?” Apparently he thought that by adding even greater emphasis to the question, it would have more weight.

“Not I,” said Zak Kebron mildly. “I have retired from caring. So… I am to describe to you my involvement in the Dominion War.”

“That’s right. In as much detail as you can recall.”

“For your Mentor who celebrates the glories of war and the great purity of its moral truths.”

“Yes.”

“Let me consider it for a bit.”

Cal stared at him. “Consider it?”

“Precisely what to say and how to say it. Much happened. Plus, it was quite a long time ago. My memory may not be everything it once was.”

“Father…”

“Plus,” Zak said with quiet emphasis, “a ‘please’ might not be out of line.”

“Is that what this is about?”

Zak said nothing. He simply sat there. Finally he heard a low, growled word trickle from between Cal’s lips like water drops from a rusted spigot.

“I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Please,” Cal repeated, a bit louder and far more resentfully.

“Very well,” Kebron said at last. “Take extensive notes on this. I am quite sure you will want to write this up.”

And then he began to talk…

I stood on the bridge of the Excalibur in my customary spot at the tactical station. Ahead of us was the Starship Corinth, hurtling through space as quickly as its warp engines would propel it. Behind us, hanging in space and effecting repairs-but not quickly enough to be of any use-was a Romulan warbird. The reason it was crippled was because of us, and we were desperate to try and undo the damage we had done.

Understand that the return of the Excalibur could not have been at a more poorly timed moment. We had been time traveling, you see… leaping through time by hurling ourselves around a sun at top speed. Our return from the past had not gone exactly as we would have liked, unfortunately, since we’d overshot our original time of departure by eighteen months. The result was that for eighteen months of relative, “real” time… the Excalibur had ceased to exist. Starfleet had lost track of us, and the general belief was that we had been destroyed.

The problem was, we didn’t dare attempt to go backward and then forward yet again. First, the continued strain of time jumping might well have torn the vessel apart. And second, since a “reality” had been created in which the Excalibur was MIA for a year and a half… we didn’t dare to “unwrite” that reality. There was no way of calculating the ripple effect such a move might have had. Frankly, considering we had just had a singularly unpleasant and unfortunate encounter with the realities of changing reality on the planet Haresh, none of us-particularly Captain Mackenzie Calhoun-had the stomach for embarking upon such a venture yet again.

Nor was Captain Calhoun’s first officer, Commander Shelby, especially happy with him. More often than not, she would try to confine their disagreements to behind the closed doors of his ready room. But she was feeling somewhat frazzled at that point, and I cannot say I entirely blamed her.

“With all respect, Captain, this is a hell of a fix you’ve gotten us into,” she told him.

“I appreciate the respect, Commander,” replied Calhoun with that trademark sarcasm of his. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that some months later they would wind up getting married. Or perhaps it’s not all that difficult to believe, at that. “Mr. Kebron… kindly inform Starfleet of our return.”

I went ahead and did so without even acknowledging that he had spoken. I think I grunted slightly. That was about the most I did to let someone know their request had been heard. I was not remotely the erudite father you’ve come to know and… well, know.

Then, while preparing to send out word of our return, I noticed something coming through on the tactical warning systems. Before I could say anything, however, Robin Lefler-I think she was an ensign at that time-spoke up. Lefler was at the ops station, and very little, if anything, escaped her notice. “Captain,” she said abruptly, “we’ve picked up a starship heading toward us, bearing 227 mark 3, moving at warp five.”

“It appears we have company,” said Calhoun, but he sounded suspicious. When I first met Mackenzie Calhoun-and for a good portion of the time thereafter-I was wary of him. But slowly I learned to trust him, at least as much as I trusted anyone. And one of the things I knew of a certainty was that his instincts were unimpeachable. If something felt off to him, the reason for it was that it was off.

“Confirming approach, Captain,” said Lieutenant Soleta. Soleta was the Vulcan science officer. At least, we thought she was a Vulcan at the time, although we learned differently later. “Energy signature identifies her as the Corinth, a Cheyenne-class starship.”

“That’s Captain Taggart’s boat,” said Shelby.

“You know him?” asked Calhoun.

She nodded. “A bit. Very much by-the-book. You’d like him, Captain, if you happened to be completely different from the way you are now.” She turned to me and said, “Mr. Kebron, open a hailing frequency- “

“Belay that,” Calhoun said. “Maintain radio silence.”

Shelby looked at him in surprise. “May I ask why, Captain?”

“You may,” he said, pacing the bridge. Without giving her time to inquire, he called out, “Bridge to Engineering.”

“Engineering, Burgoyne here.”

“Burgoyne,” said Calhoun, “shut down power throughout the ship. I want us to look dead.”

Well, naturally this caused some confusion among the bridge crew. “I want to see what he does,” was the only explanation Calhoun would give us.

Within moments, everything but the auxiliary power and emergency lighting was off. Which isn’t to say that we couldn’t crank up at a moment’s notice; we could. But Calhoun clearly felt that something was amiss. He had some sort of awareness for danger that bordered on the supernatural, and he’d learned that to ignore such concerns was to court disaster. So he never ignored them.

The Corinth almost went right past us without slowing, but then dropped out of warp space at the last moment. She circled back around and then hung there, just staring at us.

“What do you expect to happen here, Mac?” asked Shelby.

“If he’s by the book,” Calhoun told her, “he’ll hail us. Attempt to establish contact. Possibly even raise shields…”

“Sir!” Lefler suddenly announced. “They’re bringing shields on line- “

“See?” Shelby said. “Totally by the b- “

“And they’re running weapons hot. Targeting our primary and secondary engines.”

Shelby’s head snapped around. “What?!” she practically barked.

“Shields up!” called out Calhoun. He didn’t sound at all perturbed.

I brought the shields up… and suddenly our entire viewscreen was filled with another image altogether. The starship was blocked from view by none other than a Romulan warbird, shimmering into existence barely a thousand klicks to our starboard. In terms of distance in space, that was practically right in our laps. The warbird was between us and the Corinth.

Shelby sounded almost relieved. “The Corinth wasn’t aiming at us! She was targeting the warbird!”

“How?” demanded Calhoun. “How did they penetrate the cloaking device?”

“We’ve been out of touch for eighteen months, Captain,” Soleta pointed out. “New developments in technology could easily have- “

“The warbird and the Corinth are exchanging fire, Captain!” Lefler suddenly said.

She was absolutely right. The Romulan warbird was firing upon the Corinth with as much ferocity as the starship was shooting at the Romulan ship.

With only seconds to make a decision as to whose side to take, Calhoun took the only reasonable course. He ordered us to fire upon the Romulan vessel.

This we immediately did. Our forward phasers ripped into her and the warbird staggered under the dual barrage of ourselves and the Corinth.

Just as suddenly, however, Calhoun ordered me to open a channel and, once I did, said, “Excalibur to Corinth. We’ve got a handle on the Romulan. Back off and let us take charge.”

Under ordinary circumstances, the Corinth would have done exactly that. Once again, though, somehow Calhoun anticipated the result. At the very least, he wasn’t surprised by it.

As the critically wounded Romulan warbird dropped down and away from us, the Corinth angled around and opened fire on us.

The shields absorbed the brunt of the attack, but the Excalibur still trembled under the assault. Systems went out throughout the ship. “All auxiliary power to shields! Mr. Kebron,” called Calhoun over the pounding, “kindly inform the Corinth that we don’t appreciate their attitude.”

We returned fire, hitting the ship’s port nacelles and striking a glancing blow off their engineering hull. But that was about all the damage we were able to inflict, because the Corinth was smaller and more maneuverable than the Excalibur. It peeled out of there immediately, leaving us floating nearby the newly crippled Romulan vessel.

That was when the Romulan commander appeared on our screen, and he was extremely angry, to put it mildly. What he told us sounded insane, as if the entire galaxy had been reordered in our absence.

The Romulans were now our allies, thanks to the revelation of a Dominion-backed assassination of a prominent Romulan senator. As for the Corinth… she’d been captured by the Cardassians.

The Corinth had been stolen out of drydock by Cardassian spies and was being piloted, at high speed, out of Federation space and toward Dominion space. If she was able to make it there, it would provide the Dominion with a world of information about Starfleet vessels that we didn’t want them to have.

As the Earth saying goes, we had been thrown into the deep end of the pool. Out of touch all those months, and suddenly we were in the middle of a key moment in a war that had only just started when we left.

But did that slow us down? It most certainly did not.

Making best possible speed, we took off without hesitation after the Corinth.

There was a good deal of tension on the bridge, not much conversation. Calhoun watched the stars hurtle past, a look of fixed concentration on his face. Every so often, Burgoyne would send updates from engineering as to how repairs were coming along. Even the normally chatty Shelby was silent, although I noticed that one or two times as she passed Calhoun, she allowed a hand to rest briefly on one of his shoulders. It was as if she drew comfort from it.

There was no strategy or elegance in what we were doing at that point. It was a pure race. We were able to follow the Corinth; it was purely a matter of being able to overtake it. Our navigator, Mark McHenry, was doing everything he could to try and plot an intercept course, but there really wasn’t any way to do it when the ship you’re chasing is making a beeline.

We were also faced with the harsh reality that, if we didn’t get them soon enough, we’d wind up in Dominion space along with the Corinth, and they’d have two prizes instead of one.

“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.”