Return Fire Complete 1-3: Confederation Reborn Read online

  Return Fire 1-3 Collected Edition

  CONFEDERATION REBORN

  Bernard Schaffer

  Table of Contents

  Author's Dedication

  1. Return Fire 1: Return Fire

  2. Return Fire 2: Resistance is Hostile

  3. Return Fire 3: Darkwater

  Eras of Confederation

  About the Author

  Author's Dedication

  To the creators, cast, crew, and especially fans, of Star Trek who have kept its bright flame burning all these many years.

  I only did it out of love.

  Return Fire 1-3 Collected Edition

  CONFEDERATION REBORN

  Bernard Schaffer

  Once

  mankind explored space and welcomed

  every civilization to join their interstellar Confederation.

  This promise of dignity and diplomacy

  which has echoed throughout history,

  is now broken.

  A devastating attack has left Confederation

  and all humanity in grave peril.

  Now, after years of terror

  they seek out that which has been lost.

  A brightly burning flame

  that guides us all.

  The fire

  has returned.

  1. RETURN FIRE

  The professor looked out over the crowd of eager cadets and waited for them to be silent. They were the best students in the Academy, and they knew it. Top performers in all their classes. The most decorated. Singled out by their own peer groups as leaders, marking them as potential candidates for command assignments in just a few days. Soon, they would take their final exam and it would determine their fate. Some were destined for distant research facilities. Others would board Hercules-Class starships and find themselves immediately thrust into war.

  The young male cadets in the class were strong and decisive-looking. They sat, heads cocked sideways, or flexing their arms just enough to make their biceps bulge inside the fitted uniforms, doing whatever it took to attract the attention of the few females sitting nearby.

  None of the women noticed.

  Even at such a young age, the women in the Academy, and in fact, all of Confederation, were so used to being outnumbered and sought after that they no longer noticed. In a traditionally male organization like Confederation, even during the Golden Era of the Professor's youth, there were twice as many male officers. Now, he was lucky to have five females in each class.

  The girls always sat up front. Always fixed intently on what he was saying. Most of them had struggled to get there, going against the deepest wishes of their families and communities, and they would not allow themselves to get distracted.

  So focused, Professor William Cushing thought. The women are the ones who truly want revenge.

  The class was still talking about the upcoming test, and Cushing finally tapped the end of his cane on the floor and said, "May I continue?"

  He balanced himself momentarily on his good leg as he leaned back against the podium and stroked his full, gray beard. He looked around the room, making eye contact with as many of them as he could, trying to help them understand the gravity of what he was about to say. "This next block is probably the most difficult one I teach during the course of the school year. This section causes more controversy than anything else you've learned during your time here, and probably with good reason. It's also the one we get the most complaints about from parents, not that too many of them were that excited about you coming in the first place," he added with a wry smile. "You see, Confederation has a way of lying to its young. Actually, it has to, or none of you would ever have signed up."

  He let that one sink in a moment, watching how the class shifted uneasily in their seats, as if they were unsure whether he was being serious or not.

  "We obviously can't come right out and say it, of course, but your entire Academy curriculum, this entire facility, and the whole of Confederation Command, has a way of propagating this myth about what you will experience in space. It's all about the adventure, right? What's the name of the Hall next to the recruitment office? Adventure Awaits!" he said. "That's the one. All of you signed up because you wanted to seek out brave new worlds. Make first contact with all those exciting new civilizations. I mean, that is why you're all here, isn't it? Nobody ever signs up to be a requisitions officer or a cook, right? Anyone?" He scanned the room with his finger, daring one of them to raise a hand. When no one did, he said, "Of course not. You want to fly a starship! You want to be a tactical officer and work the cannons! Maybe, even some of you imagine yourselves as Captain, sitting on the Bridge in that big chair."

  Some of the students nodded, and Cushing smiled gently at them. He worked his hands behind his back, finding that his black professorial robe was getting too tight around his middle to stand like that now. The excuse he gave his doctor was that he wasn't really becoming a saggy old man. It was simply the effects of the Earth's gravity on him after spending his adolescent years in space.

  Cushing looked around the room and said, "Who here thinks they might die in the performance of their duties?"

  None of the students spoke or raised their hands.

  "Statistics prior to the Great Invasion say that twelve percent of all Confederation Officers would either die or suffer a critical injury during the course of their careers. Obviously, we cannot accurately factor what those statistics were at the time of the Invasion. The casualty rate, particularly among women, was appallingly high during that period. I am certain that many of you were already aware of this sad fact."

  He looked at them, studying their faces, seeing them go flush with emotion. Now he had their attention. "Let me ask you this instead. If you were going to die while in service to Confederation, how would it be?" He pointed at the students and encouraged someone to speak up.

  "In battle," the young man sitting nearest to him said. "Killing Ovan."

  There were many murmurs of agreement to that and Cushing nodded, "Understandable. But the Ovan are far away and the Swarm has not dared cross the border in decades. What else, I wonder, besides battle, might take your young lives?"

  "Teleporter malfunction," someone else said.

  The Indian girl sitting directly in front of him raised her hand slightly and Cushing pointed at her. "Alien disease," she said, speaking so softly that the only reason he heard it was that every male student in the room fell instantly silent.

  Out of all the other students in his class, she received the most amount of attention from the males. The funny thing was, she seemed to have no idea. She wore her long hair tied back in a severe knot, refusing even to wear jewelry. This deterred her admirers very little. They found her large, almond-shaped eyes to be like languid pools, and when she talked, those eyes fell on you directly and swallowed you whole.

  Cushing had heard from the other teachers that this girl had not just lost her family in the Great Invasion. Her entire village on the outskirts of New Delhi had been wiped out. She'd been found by Confederation rescue workers crawling around in the rubble of her home, surrounded by bodies that refused to answer her, or feed her, no matter how much she screamed and begged.

  And this girl was not unique. Every student he'd taught since then carried the scars of that black day. At times, Cushing's knees wanted to buckle when he considered how much they'd been through in order to come to this point in their young careers, and it gave him pause that he was about to rip the rug out from under them.

  But he did it anyway. It was his duty.

  "Yes, all tragically real possibilities," Cushing said as he reached for a small d
evice on his podium and held it up, searching for the right tiny button to push. He clicked it and a large holographic projection of a starship hurtling through space appeared in the center of the room. The cadets all leaned forward to inspect the perfectly detailed hull and nacelles of the ship, dozens of brightly lit planets and stars filling up the classroom as if they were floating through space itself.

  "This is highly classified footage of the ICSS Mulgrew Event," Cushing said somberly. "You will never see it again, unless you wind up working for Confederation Intelligence. The Mulgrew was on a routine mission to the Feynman Sector when a series of misfortunes struck. Pay attention. You are about to witness the end of what historians are calling our Golden Era. That fine time when we had the best fleet and resources and had quelled all of our opposition. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong. Until it did."

  Cushing paused the image with a wave of his device and pointed a bright red light at the ship's large nacelles. The footage began playing again, moving in slow motion, frame by frame, so that the students could all see the small crack appear along the ship's surface, and the bright yellow flame sparking to life beneath it. With ever advancing movement, the crack grew, until pieces of the ship started to break off into space.

  "Fifteen hundred people on board," Cushing whispered. "Fifteen hundred men, women and children. Fifteen hundred lives, here one moment, thinking about their work, their families, their problems, their lives. Working, eating, arguing, making love, sleeping, and all the things you can imagine happening at any given time on board a vessel," he said, his voice trailing off as the nacelle exploded in a ball of flame that overtook the rest of the ship.

  He snapped his fingers and said, "Gone like that. Not in battle. Not saving some civilization. Fifteen hundred lives gone because of a failed reactor coil."

  Their faces looked a little less confident now. Cushing clicked the device to end the demonstration and the image of space, and the flaming destruction, evaporated. The lights returned and everyone sat blinking as they stared forward silently.

  Cushing folded his hands together and said, "Still, mass tragedies like the Mulgrew Event are huge occasions. There's media coverage and boards of inquiry. At times like that, the entire weight of the Confederation is thrown into a frenzy, trying to root out the cause of the problem and ensure nothing like it never happens again. But those kind of large scale incidents are not the only thing that can go wrong in your career of dealing with the unknown for an extended period of time. Not by a long shot."

  Cushing pressed another button on his device and the shimmering hologram of a dark-skinned, bald-headed man appeared before the class. His Confederation Captain's uniform was so perfectly detailed, they could make out the fabric patterns on the man's shirt sleeves. "This is Captain Brooks, one year prior to leading the legendary attack on Caspian One. By all accounts, Captain Brooks was an exemplary commanding officer and probably a candidate for the Admiralty."

  Professor Cushing paused in front of the hologram, looking into its nearly black eyes, admiring the man's proud, determined gaze. "During his command of the McMurdo Farstation, Captain Brooks was contacted by an advanced alien species that occupied a nearby Lorentzian Hole. These beings would often pluck Brooks from his own dimension to use him for their own ends, completely at their own whim. Sometimes it lasted mere seconds, and other times it went on for days. When Confederation researchers spoke to him about it, he said the alien beings were holy creatures who existed outside of our understanding of space and time. He said he'd spent what felt like years in the Lorentzian Hole, when he'd only been gone an hour of our time. It became so distressing to the Captain that he could no longer suitably command the Station, for fear that he'd vanish in the middle of performing some vital duty. Finally, one day he vanished and did not return. At least, that's what we thought at first."

  The next hologram showed a shriveled man being wheeled in front of the class, pushed by one of the Academy's professors.

  On the day that hologram was recorded, William Cushing had been standing on the same spot he was now, watching his friend Murtagh O'Brian wheel the decrepit form of Captain Brooks to the front of the class. Twenty years had passed, and the vision disturbed him no less than it did that same day.

  In the hologram, O'Brian looked at Cushing and nodded to him, then turned and walked back up the ramp to leave the room. Cushing had known that it was all his old friend could do to remain composed for the short period of time it took to bring his former commanding officer down from the Academy's Sickbay. Twenty years ago, O'Brian had walked up the ramp from the classroom and gone straight to the nearest tavern to drink himself stiff. Now, the hologram simply appeared to be walking past a row of students seated to the far right of the room. As the image of Murtagh O'Brian headed out of sight, Professor Cushing paid careful attention to one cadet in particular, a young man with startlingly green eyes that slanted ever so slightly at the corners as evidence of his Irish and Asian heritage. That cadet, Liam O'Brian, looked up as his grandfather walked past him to leave the classroom, his eyes never leaving the shimmering image until the moment it vanished.

  Cushing cleared his throat and collected himself as he walked up to the hologram of the shriveled man sitting in the wheelchair. He clasped his hands behind his back, making sure all of the students were watching and paying attention. It was clearly uncomfortable for them, that much was certain. Captain Brooks had been rendered invalid. His limbs were bone-thin and his hands curled up close to his body compulsively. His head drooped to the side and long streams of drool spilled out of his open mouth that was devoid of teeth.

  "Nineteen years later," Professor Cushing said, "This is what returned to McMurdo Farstation. By that point, no one who had served with the Captain remained aboard or had any idea he might someday return as suddenly as he left. He'd been declared dead by the Confederation and his wife had already remarried and moved halfway across the galaxy. My colleague, the late Professor O'Brian, whom you just saw in the hologram, came upon a posting on the Engineer's Network regarding the matter and immediately recognized his former Captain." Cushing looked out over the class, "Captain Brooks lingered in this state for another five years in a Confederation hospital."

  One of the females in the front row raised her hand, "Why did those aliens from the Lorentzian Hole want him? What did they do with him?"

  Cushing shrugged, "We will never be certain. At the time, Captain Brooks believed he was destined to fulfill their grand scheme, and in some ways, he may have been. Except maybe it wasn't a grand scheme that benefited him or humanity, maybe it was simply for the benefit of those aliens. The whole story is never quite apparent to us, though, and whatever their reasons for keeping him inside the Lorentzian Hole, he was not the same when he returned."

  Some of the cadets were visibly distressed by the image on the hologram, covering their eyes with their hands, or looking down at their desks. Cushing paused the image and brought up the first one, of a proud, strong Captain Brooks, standing before them in his Confederation Uniform. Cushing stood beside the hologram and said, "I suggest that any of you would be lucky to earn the privilege of finding yourselves compared to this man, both in terms of service and capability. I also suggest that if something like this can happen to him, it can happen to you."

  He clicked off the hologram and clapped his hands together loudly, breaking the spell of despair that had fallen over his audience, "Okay, now that you're all thoroughly depressed, I have some good news. You're getting out early today."

  Their faces instantly brightened and the cadets began to gather their things, forcing the Professor to raise his voice and say, "Those of you taking the Test tomorrow should go home and get some rest. In other words, don't go out to the bars."

  He watched as his class hurried out of their seats and assembled themselves into a line to exit through the door. For a moment, Liam O'Brian stopped during his walk toward the door and looked back at the professor as if he were about to say something
. Cushing nodded at the young man and said, "Yes?" but by then, Liam had already turned away.

  The sun was setting over the battered remains of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was shattered in several places, leaving massive piles of antiquated iron sticking up from the Bay. The Great Invasion had done more than alter the landscape of the Confederation home world. Its targeted attack had leaked so much fuel and radiation into the Bay that it had wiped out most of the sea life, including the sharks and the dolphins. Even the damn whales, William Cushing thought grimly. After everything those crazy bastards went through to get them here. Along with everything else, you even took our whales.

  He looked down at his ruined leg and rubbed it instinctively, trying to massage the ache away. That's not all you took, he thought.

  As the Academy's most senior professor, Cushing had his choice of offices. The one with the best view also happened to be located closest to his classroom, and with his disability, none of the other instructors ever challenged him for it. It was his choice to walk, of course. The medical bastards had kept trying to get him to use a damned hover chair for years.

  The hover chair still sat in the corner of his room. It was the same one they'd placed him in the day he'd left the hospital. His home was in wreckage after the attacks and anyway, there was no one there for him to see, so he'd done the only thing he could think of and headed for the Academy. Luckily, it was only half-destroyed, and even though the Great Invasion had happened only a few weeks prior, they were making fast work of rebuilding it.

  Desperate to latch on to the momentary surge of interest in recruiting, he'd thought at the time. Men and women from all over the galaxy who were eager for revenge.

  When he hovered into the Academy that first day, there were crowds of people in the halls, trying to find their way to one of a dozen different makeshift training or processing centers. Every one of them turned and looked at him as he whirred past them, floating several inches off the floor like he was riding an elaborate flying carpet.