The Fall: Revelation and Dust (Star Trek, Band 1) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David R. George III has written more than a dozen Star Trek novels, including Ascendance, The Lost Era: One Constant Star, The Fall: Revelation and Dust, Allegiance in Exile, the Typhon Pact novels Raise the Dawn, Plagues of Night, and Rough Beasts of Empire, as well as the New York Times bestseller The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins. He also cowrote the television story for the first-season Star Trek: Voyager episode “Prime Factors.” Additionally, David has written nearly twenty articles for Star Trek magazine. His work has appeared on both the New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller lists, and his television episode was nominated for a Sci-Fi Universe magazine award. You can chat with David about his writing at Facebook.com/DRGIII.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust

One

Captain Ro Laren waited uneasily atop a bluff that overlooked the rolling parkland below. She glanced down at the lush vista, at the walking paths that rose and fell throughout, at the stands of trees and arrays of colorful flowers. A gentle breeze wisped past, carrying with it fresh scents, including the crisp hint of water.

Ro peered down briefly at the small lake off to her right, then cast her gaze in the opposite direction. Atop the highest point in sight, Prynn Tenmei stepped toward the edge of a promontory. The lieutenant wore not her Starfleet uniform, but a formfitting lavender flight suit that contrasted dramatically with her porcelain complexion. Her jet hair—which, though not long, typically rose in wild kinks from her scalp—had been pulled back and gathered into a small bun.

Anxiety mounted in Ro as she watched Tenmei. The lieutenant stood ramrod straight, her arms tucked behind her back. With a quick motion, Tenmei suddenly took one more pace forward, to the brink of the stony outcropping, and then flung herself headlong into the open air.

Tenmei fell in a graceful arc, but at a rate noticeably slower than normal. Even so, she descended fast enough to injure herself—seriously, even fatally—if she struck the ground. Ro knew that couldn’t happen, that local sensors would detect an impending accident and trigger an automatic transport to safety, but she still tensed watching Tenmei plunge toward the park.

Seconds seemed to elongate, and the captain consciously stopped herself from clenching her hands into fists as Tenmei drew uncomfortably close to the ground. When the lieutenant reached a height of perhaps ten meters—surely close to the sensors’ safety limit—Ro expected her to vanish in a blur of white transporter light. At that instant, though, Tenmei thrust her arms out to her sides and waved them downward. The gossamer wings she wore swelled as they caught the air. Her descent slowed, and when she flapped her arms once, twice, her course curved upward. She banked to one side and described a fluid turn, fluttering her wings to gain altitude.

The susurrus of distant applause reached Ro. Satisfied that Tenmei controlled her flight, the captain looked away from Defiant’s primary conn officer and about the park. Around the tree-lined base of the half-dome–shaped enclosure, and interspersed along the footpaths and up and down the knolls, hundreds of her crew had congregated. Although still five days away from the station’s formal dedication and its transition to full operational status, Ro had made the decision to conduct a small celebration ahead of time, exclusively for the complement of the new Deep Space 9.

A grand amalgam of engineering and nature, of technology and beauty, the park occupied an arc of the station’s primary section, a central sphere. In addition to its use as a place for the crew’s recreation, it served as a functioning part of DS9’s life-support systems. Soil and stone and flora had been imported from Bajor to create the undulating, grass-covered hills, with rocky elevations rising up along about a quarter of the perimeter. Above, a simulated blue sky crowned the locale, although as the internal environment of the station progressed into the nighttime portion of its virtual twenty-six-hour day, the holographic morning and subsequent afternoon would fade, and the stars would become visible through the transparent hull overhead. The park had been intentionally positioned away from the three perpendicularly intersecting rings that encircled DS9’s main sphere, thereby affording evening visitors to the picturesque setting an unimpeded view of the nocturnal sky.

Ro wondered what that view would look like if the wormhole ever sprung back to life. The station had been oriented in such a way that the spectacle would be visible from the park. It had been nearly two years, though, since the events that had collapsed the wormhole, and although the official Bajoran position maintained that the Celestial Temple endured and would one day reappear, Federation scientists had so far been unable to detect any indication of its continued existence. The captain also knew that the design and construction of DS9 allowed for the capability to move the station safely from the Denorios Belt to the orbit of Bajor, should that become politically acceptable to the first minister and her people.

Lieutenant Tenmei completed three circuits above the park, occasionally flapping her wings as she glided easily through the elevated, low-gravity envelope that facilitated her flight. Finally, she alit opposite the location from where she’d begun, setting down in one of four designated landing zones, where the field of reduced gravity situated above the park reached all the way to the ground. Once more, a round of applause went up.

The captain saw several crew members approach Tenmei, while others disbursed throughout the park. The lieutenant’s flight—the first on the station, outside of testing—concluded the brief ceremony, which Ro had begun with a few words via her communicator to those assembled. She’d congratulated and thanked them for all their efforts during the previous twenty-three months. After the destruction of the original Deep Space 9, most of the surviving crew had stayed on, some on Bajor, some on the various starships that had patrolled the system, and some alternating between the two. Starfleet had quickly renovated an abandoned planetside transportation center, converting it into a place dubbed Bajoran Space Central, which helped substitute for some of DS9’s lost services while awaiting completion of the new station. Other services had required the use of orbital tenders, while still others had been undertaken by the crews of several Starfleet vessels.

In Ro’s remarks, she had chosen not to mention those who had perished with the first Deep Space 9. When rogue elements of the Typhon Pact—along with an Andorian Starfleet officer dispirited both by his people’s ongoing reproductive crisis and by their secession from the United Federation of Planets—had attacked and demolished the station, eleven hundred UFP citizens had died, a majority of them Starfleet personnel, and all of them Ro’s responsibility. The captain had not forgotten any of that, nor did she think she ever could, but in addressing her crew that morning, she’d wanted to focus on the positive as the Corps of Engineers released the final section of the new DS9—its park—for use. She intended to repeat her comments thirteen hours later, at the other end of the day, to ensure that, no matter the shift on which they served, every member of her crew—nearly twenty-five hundred strong on the massive station—would have the opportunity to attend. Ro also planned to host a memorial for her crew on the day before the dedication. Moreover, she would honor the fallen at the dedication ceremony, and felt sure that she would not be the only one of the speakers to do so.

“Impressive,” said one of the two people standing beside Ro. The captain turned toward Rakena Garan, castellan of the Cardassian Union. The woman owned a delicate figure, not much taller than a meter and a half, but she bore her status as the elected leader of her people with power and intensity.

Although noteworthy for Ro to be in the presence of an important political leader, it pleased the captain that it no longer discomfited her to stand beside a Cardassian. It had been more than a...