The Three-Handed Game 43

The Siohonin had completed whatever project needed the crystal, and now the prisoners were assigned to straightforward mining tasks - extracting kelbonite ore, one of the Remans had said. It was relentless, punishing, tiring work, but it had one advantage. There was no way the Siohonin could monitor everything that went on at the workface, so the prisoners had opportunity to talk, and to plan....

"I have their patrol pattern logged," Therya whispered to Daniella one day. The tall, fierce Reman had established herself as a natural leader - she had been in the early Reman resistance, they said, had even worked under Obisek himself. She looked down at the human woman from her great height, now, and her eyes burned in her starved face.

Daniella looked down at her hands, calloused and filthy from hauling ore. There had been a time, once, when she had been free, had dreamed of being a dancer.... Dreams. It all seemed like a dream now, an impossible one. The Federation, Farnon's World... her family, her friends... all gone. Reality was the mines, was the never-ending toil, was the arbitrary harshness of the Siohonin guards.

But, underneath the fear and the exhaustion and the semi-starvation, there still burned a deep core of fire within her... a core that said to her that no, she was no Siohonin slave, she was a free woman... and would stay free, or die trying, no matter what they did to her.

She looked at Therya and whispered back, "What do you need?"

"A group passes through Gallery 12 and then doubles back along the upper level every hour," the Reman said. "They have to take the narrow turning in single file. The priest always goes second from last... I think, if we can take the last guard out quickly, one or more of us can jump the priest and get that damned rod off him. We need to stage a distraction on the upper level to draw the three guards who go ahead... Raya, T'Nol and Kahra will do that."

"So who takes the last guard and the priest?"

"I take the guard. You're small enough to hide in that little niche just by the turn. When you hear me jump the guard, you take the priest." She grinned; it was an unsettling sight. "The guard won't take me long, so I'll help with the priest, if you need it."

She was tired, sore, aching... Daniella realised that she was nowhere near too tired to try and hit back at the Siohonin priests. "When?"

"Fourteen minutes." The Reman seemed to have a clock in her head. "You do know we'll probably all get killed?"

Daniella glared up at her. "Then we die on our feet, not on our knees," she snapped.

Therya gave a harsh, whispering laugh. "You're learning, human," she said.

---

Gallery 12 was a long, low-roofed one, which ran at an odd angle to the main mining shafts. The route through the mine was a complicated one, and it took the patrols some time to cover it... and, as Therya had said, there was a narrow chicane to negotiate, before the Siohonin could reach the upper tunnel that ran towards their barracks.

"If it heartens you any," whispered Therya, as Daniella squeezed herself into a crevice in the rocks, "the priests haven't burned anyone in days. There's a rumour going around that their damned rods don't work any more."

Daniella smiled without mirth. "Guess I get to find out." The Reman grinned back at her.

"I hear boots," she said. "Good luck." And she was gone, into the darkness.

Boots. The Siohonin guards wore boots. The prisoners were issued with soft shoes that wore through on the rocks in no time.... Daniella thought about her feet, scarred and calloused. Once she had had a dancer's feet.

The Siohonin were coming. She could hear their voices, harsh and querulous as they talked among themselves. They had been different, of late. The punishments, the vile things they did, those had not changed... but the guards themselves seemed sullen, withdrawn, hostile to each other as well as to the prisoners.

They were coming. Daniella squeezed herself tighter into the crevice, and held her breath. The first Siohonin came into view, she could see him through a small slit in the rock, perhaps he couldn't see her -

Then he sparkled with blue-white light, and faded, and was gone.

There was no more sound of marching feet. Cautiously, Daniella unfolded herself from the crevice. There were soft footsteps, and Therya came into view. She looked dumbfounded.

"Transporters," she said, in a sort of amazed monotone. "Those were transporter beams...."

Daniella nodded. "Federation transporters. Blue lights."

They stood and stared at one another, and then a voice spoke from all around them. The mine's public address system, Daniella realized - but it had never spoken with a voice like this.

"Attention, please, all prisoners. This is Rear Admiral Skolek aboard the USS Allegheny. Your Siohonin captors have been transported to detention facilities. Medical and support staff are beaming down now. Please make yourselves known to them, and we will provide immediate care, take any statements you wish to make concerning your treatment in captivity, and arrange for your repatriation and return to your homeworlds. We are here to help you in every way we can. Please do not hesitate to make your needs known. You are free, and we are here to help."

Daniella's jaw dropped. "It's... over?" she whispered.

"Yes." Therya swallowed audibly. "It's over... they must have beaten them. Beaten the Siohonin... the priests and their damned wands.... It's over. It's over."

The two of them hugged each other fiercely, and burst into long delayed tears.

The Three-Handed Game 32

Daniella had no idea where she was. The Siohonin had put her aboard one of their freighters, and they had travelled - not for long, it hadn't seemed to be any great time - and, when they brought her out, it was into this vast cavernous underground space, where she was set to work.

It might, she thought, be one of the Reman mining colonies. The lighting was dim, and a lot of her fellow prisoners were Remans. She had tried to ask, at first, but conversation was quickly and brutally discouraged by the guards. The Siohonin military guards were bad, vicious men. The robed ones, the priests of Sebreac Tharr... they were far, far worse.

It was from fragments of conversation among her captors that she gleaned the little she knew so far. The priests moved with the arrogance of new conquerors, ready at any moment to deal pain or death with their flame-tipped wands. Even the Siohonin soldiers lived in fear of them. And they spoke, sometimes, of the "great work", of the "building of the tabernacle". It seemed to be going well. Danielle hated them for that, hated herself for helping them, however unwillingly.

The work occupied eighteen hours of every day, so by the time she fell into her bunk in the common dormitory, she was too tired to ask questions, even if it had been allowed. Huge slabs of black crystal were deposited before her by a robot loader, to be shaped and polished to exacting standards with a sonic probe. If the piece, once finished, met the Siohonins' quality tests, she ate - basic ration bars, but it was food, at least. If it failed - and many did - then she began again, with a new block. Too many failures, and the errant prisoner was given to the guards for punishment. Danielle had witnessed a punishment... and she had resolved not to make too many mistakes.

So she worked, and she watched and listened when she could, because she owed it to them, to Thom and Maury and all the others. She owed it to them to survive, and somehow, to make things right.

She was a Federation citizen, the product of a utopian social order, but more and more she felt the word revenge coming to her mind.

---

One day, one of the Remans cracked. She hard turned in four blocks of crystal, and each one had been rejected; the Siohonin soldiers were standing behind her, speculating loudly about what they would do to her when she was sent for punishment. First, theirs were the only voices, and then the woman's voice made itself heard over the rumbling of the loaders and the whirring of the sonic probes: a thin wordless wail of outrage that grew to an unearthly screech. She flew at them, then, the sonic probe in her hand her only weapon - that, and sheer fury and desperation.

One soldier stepped back, astonished, when she came at him, and tripped over a loaded cargo hopper, and fell. The Reman swung her sonic probe at another, and there was a snarling buzz of weird harmonics as the tool hit his skull, and suddenly he was down too. Three more soldiers rushed her in a body, and for a few moments there was a confused jostle, and then the sound of shots.

The Reman had seized a laser pistol from one of her attackers, and was blazing away with it indiscriminately. One soldier dropped screaming, another silent; the third turned and fled. The Reman sent more shots in all directions, some perilously close to other prisoners - and then everyone was running, Daniella among them, fleeing from the woman's crazed fear and desperate anguish -

Then she gave one last shriek, and blazed with fire, and was gone. One of the priests, Daniella thought, he had seen the disturbance and taken it in hand. Those damned wands - they didn't even need to see you, to use those damned wands -

From high above, a mechanical voice boomed out. "Prisoners will cease from disturbance and return to their work. There will be no more warnings. Prisoners will return to their work."

One by one, the prisoners left their hiding places and trooped dejectedly back to their workstations. More Siohonin soldiers were arriving, picking up their dead and wounded, making threatening gestures at the prisoners... but they were concentrating on the Remans, and there was just a moment when Daniella was unobserved.

Just one moment.

She was standing by one of the cargo hoppers, and it was full of blocks that had been approved by the Siohonin, that were on their way to... whatever the Siohonin were doing with them. She still had her sonic probe in her hand; she drove the tool hard into the black-gleaming surface of one block, pressed the activating stud. The noise was drowned by all the other sounds in the cavern; there was no visible change in the block. Daniella went meekly back to her place, began her work again. She didn't know if she had made any difference. She hoped she had.

The Three-Handed Game 28

"Dammit, dammit, dammit!" snarled Maury Lansing. Daniella Quar said nothing, but passed another of the dwindling supply of missiles up to him.

A shout. Daniella turned her head. Thom was running towards them, his phaser gripped firmly in his hand. "They're onto us!" he yelled. "Targeting lidar just lit up this building! Come on, move!"

"I can get him when he swings round again!" Maury shouted back.

"No!" snapped Thom. "They've got better range, they'd fry us before you got the shot off. No time to argue! Move!"

And they moved, Maury manhandling the two-metre tube of the missile launcher and swearing all the way, Daniella struggling under the weight of the munitions satchel, refusing to let the other two see she was struggling -

They reached the manhole with scant seconds to spare, dived down it and pulled the cover to. Once, Daniella had gagged at the stench of Einsteingrad's main trunk sewer; now, it smelled like safety, like home, almost. Through the closed cover, they heard the shrill warble of Siohonin disruptors, heard the roar of flames and the crashing of shattered masonry as the warehouse building they'd been using as a vantage point collapsed in ruins.

"Damn those horn-head -" Maury began a long and inventive tirade, cut short when Thom came up to him and put one hand on his partner's shoulder.

"We can't afford to get ourselves killed now," Thom said simply. "They're still strafing the capital, and we don't have contact either with the home defence militia, or with Starfleet. It's up to us to keep the fight going until the military can regroup and push them off the planet."

He spoke with quiet conviction and intensity. Her brother had really grown into this role, Daniella reflected. Maybe Starfleet would be the right career choice for him after all.

"So what do we do now?" she asked.

"Link up with Sidak and Tahn," said Thom, "at the main waste processing plant. Then I reckon we take the service tunnel by the reclamation pipe, here -" He jabbed a finger at the map. The map was a plastic sheet, with the plan of the sewers drawn in luminous ink; low-tech, it wouldn't show up on scans, wasn't vulnerable to information warfare attack. The map was a lifeline, a talisman - it had saved them already, so many times.

Now they trooped through the malodorous tunnels, heads bowed, finding their way by the occasional maintenance lamps, not daring to turn on flashlights. Somehow, the Siohonin had ways of finding their targets. The citizens' defence militia had found that out, the hard way.

They paused for breath in the hollow of a maintenance supplies bay. "We got any word from Starfleet?" Maury asked. "Anything at all?"

Thom shook his head. "We reckon some of the frigates got out, though. They must have raised the alert at Starfleet Command by now. The Vespasian bought them time enough before they -" He fell silent. They had all heard the last transmissions from the cruiser USS Vespasian as the Siohonin fleet closed in.

Thom allowed them three minutes of rest before they pressed on. Daniella shouldered the munitions pack, tried not to think about how much it weighed... or how much it had weighed. They had seven photonic missiles left, three cartons of ammunition for the photon mortar, some plasma grenades - Daniella reproached herself for not knowing exactly how many plasma grenades they had left. She would make a count, at the first opportunity.

They reached the reprocessing plant, a mechanical wilderness of pipes and concrete, walkways and hatches. An army could hide in it for days. The thin Vulcan Sidak was there, and his friend Tahn. Daniella didn't know the name of Tahn's species; she was small and slight, with skin like tree bark, and a pair of antennae bristling from her forehead. The five of them crouched beneath a metre-wide pipe, and while Sidak and Thom talked tactics, Daniella counted the grenades. Sixteen. Was that enough? She had no idea.

"The Siohonin cannot exert effective control without ground forces," said Sidak. "Logically, transporter operations are too hazardous, given the random radiations associated with a battlefield, as well as such active transporter interdiction as we still possess. They must, therefore, attempt to land troop ships."

"And the capital is the obvious place to start," said Thom, "and we've already taken out some of the ground troops they have landed, so they must send reinforcements."

"Yes. The most logical approach for landing troop ships, given the site of the city's spaceport, is here." Sidak sketched in a line on a map of the city. "The dam face for the reservoir affords an adequate vantage point - and, if the Siohonin aim to take the city intact, they cannot respond with heavy weapons for fear of breaching the dam."

"If they aim to take the city intact," said Maury gloomily.

"It is logical to assume that is their intention."

"Yeah," said Maury, "but the horn-heads haven't shown a lot of restraint so far...." He shook his head, and picked up the missile launcher. "It's our best chance to hit them, though. Do we go for it?"

"I got some comms traffic off the Siohonin net." Tahn spoke up for the first time. "Something big's happening in an hour or so. Have to guess it's a troop drop."

It seemed like wishful thinking to Daniella, but she said nothing. They had to do something... they had to believe that what they did would make a difference.

Uncomplaining, she hoisted the munitions pack onto her shoulders and set off on the steep climb up the service tunnel to the dam. Her back ached, her thigh muscles burned. She steeled herself to ignore it - after all, it was no worse, wasn't it, than a hard day's training? She would not let the others down... even little Tahn was keeping pace, gamely, uncomplaining. She would keep going. However long it took. Whatever it took.

She sighed quietly with relief, though, when they reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out onto the rim of the dam.. After so long in the tunnels, the daylight was dazzling. She crouched down and peered over the ferroconcrete parapet. Behind her, the waters of the reservoir were placid, untroubled; before her and beneath her, Einsteingrad was spread out, columns of smoke reaching into the sky from the most recent sites of Siohonin bombardment.

There were drifting shapes in the sky - Siohonin fighters, for the most part, though a few, a very few, interceptors from the defence force were still flying. Tahn knelt down beside Daniella, unstrapping a pack from her back. "Help me set this up," the little alien said.

The pack held a passive sensor rig, detectors which could track movements in the atmosphere. Under Tahn's terse directions, Daniella placed the little pyramid shapes of the antennae. They dared not use active sensors, not until the very last moment.

"Good," muttered Tahn, hunched over the instrument. "Good. Something's coming in, all right. Bigger than a fighter... smaller than one of their frigates...."

"On the course we anticipated?" asked Sidak. Tahn made an affirmative grunt.

"Set the shot up, quick," Thom ordered. He squeezed Daniella's shoulder as he scrambled past to check the exit to the maintenance tunnel, and she felt hugely grateful for the quick touch of her brother's hand. Quickly, she passed a photon missile from the pack to Maury, readied another. He might get a second chance, if he missed with the first. The Siohonin freighters were slow. Their atmospheric fighters, though, were pretty fast.

"It's reached the stratosphere," said Tahn. "Can almost feel the compression wave already."

There was a wind rising, Daniella thought. Or maybe it was just in her imagination. Maury was swearing under his breath as he checked and rechecked the missile launcher. Sidak was a stolid, calm presence, watching along the dam, phaser ready in his hand. Daniella felt for the sidearm at her own hip. She was not used to this. Not to any of this.

"Here it comes," said Tahn. Maury was down on one knee, the missile launcher raised, at the ready. There was a deep throbbing rumble like thunder in the air.

The Siohonin freighter hurtled overhead, its ungainly bulk blotting out the sun for a brief instant. And, in that instant, Maury fired. The launcher made a shrieking noise like some terrible animal -

But it was beautiful, Daniella thought, the missile itself becoming a silver streak of light, blossoming into a burst of yellow flame as it struck the Siohonin ship. The freighter slewed and dropped abruptly, smoke and blazing fragments jetting from one ruined engine... and suddenly it was toppling through the air, and off course, heading for the low rounded hills to the south of the city. The stricken craft disappeared behind the curve of one hill. An instant later, the hill was silhouetted in a burst of brilliant light, and a cloud of burning debris rose up above it. The ear-splitting sound of the explosion followed a few seconds later.

"Yes!" Maury yelled, almost inaudibly in the noise.

"Move!" It was Thom's voice. "Squad coming up the tunnel! Move!"

Daniella's mind raced. They would have to get to the other end of the dam, find the trails, scatter, head for the country, then double back and go to ground in the maintenance tunnels before the Siohonin sensors could sweep the area -

Tahn reached for her sensor device. Then she screamed, and glowed, flaring with light, an intolerable heat pouring off her, making Daniella flinch back. And then she was gone, nothing more than a scattering of glowing embers across the concrete surface.

"What the hell- ?" Maury stood aghast. "Where did that come from?"

"Move!" Thom shouted again. Daniella looked around in a panic. Where had it come from, whatever that force was, the one that killed Tahn? Was there a sniper somewhere, or -?

The shockwave caught her and knocked her off her feet, rolling her along the concrete until her legs were dangling over the edge, her feet splashing in the water of the reservoir. A Siohonin fighter - it had swooped overhead, not firing, simply bowling them over with the rush of its passage. Daniella's ears rang as she pulled herself back from the brink. Suddenly, there were Siohonin troops around them.

They were tall and bearded, their horns poking through slots in the metal helmets they wore. Most of them were military caste, wearing the field-grey uniforms with metallic chest panels, uniforms the people of Farnon's World had learned to loathe already. But one of them -

He wore robes of red and black and white, and there was the emblem of a stylized flame on his chest, and on the tip of the short rod he held in one hand. He was bare-headed, apparently unarmoured. The military caste held weapons, old-fashioned lasers for the most part, but this one held nothing in his hands but that flame-tipped rod. Daniella was most horrified by how young he was. He looked as though... as though he was the same age as her, and her friends.

"Rebels!" he said, in a high-pitched tone, as if his voice had not yet finished breaking. Thom dropped his phaser, raised his hands above his head. There were more Siohonin coming from the other end of the dam. Daniella realized bleakly that they had never stood a chance of escaping. But at least we brought the troopship down, she told herself. At least we did that much.

"Rebels!" the robed Siohonin repeated. "You defy the one true god! You bring harm to his worshippers, you try to stand in the path of our rightful conquest! You know now that you can never win! The one true god will not permit it! And now you will taste his vengeance!"

"We surrender," said Thom, thickly. "We surrender, and we request fair treatment as prisoners of war under applicable Galactic law." Maury should have said that, Daniella thought. Maury was going to be a lawyer.

"You are rebels," said the Siohonin, "no more than that." His gaze flicked across Daniella, dismissed her. "You have a female to serve you. She will be taken to serve us. As for the males -"

He raised the rod, and Thom and Maury and Sidak screamed and glowed and burned to ashes. It happened all in one instant, and Daniella was too stunned to speak, or scream, or grieve, as they seized her and took her away.

The Three-Handed Game 5

The night was warm and balmy, so after supper Daniella Quar climbed out through the skylight, onto the flat roof, to sit for a while beneath the stars.

"Hi, Dani." Daniella smiled. Maury Lansing had had the same idea. He was lying full-length on the roof, visible in the starlight. She sat down cross-legged beside him. Maury was, like her, a third-generation descendent of the original colonists of Farnon's World. The slightly lower gravity of the planet had made its children tall, lithe and willowy; the brilliant F8 sun had given them skin of a dark coffee-colour; she and Maury were much of a type, physically, though he lacked her trained dancer's grace. Daniella had always been fond of Maury, so much so that she had felt a pang - though only a brief one - of jealousy when he had begun dating her twin brother instead of her.

Now, there was a sound from the skylight, and Daniella's brother Thom put his head through. "Thought you guys would be up her," he said. He clambered awkwardly through the skylight, awkward because of the burden in his left hand. "Brought a bottle of the good stuff." And a stack of beakers, too; Thom was the practical one, Daniella thought.

She accepted a glass of the firewine, and the three of them sat, sipping, in companionable silence. Below them, the lights of Einsteingrad, the planetary capital, a planned community in the best Federation tradition; above them, the stars. At this time of year, the night sky was dominated by the huge nearby star cluster that the first colonists, for reasons of their own, had called the Dandelion. Daniella knew that this was some old Earth plant, but the star cluster never looked like a plant to her; it was more like a fireworks display, a starshell burst frozen in time at the moment of its explosion. It was beautiful.

"So, guys," said Thom, after a while, "you got any thoughts yet?"

Careers. Farnon's World was a Federation colony, a fully developed planet; there was no need for the hard labour that had tamed and terraformed the world in its early years. Everyone's basic needs could be met, by replicated food and materials... but who wanted to be a drone, living off a basic dole, when you could accomplish something with your life? For Daniella, at least, her choice was clear. "Cygni Dance Academy took my application already," she said. "If they like my holo-tapes for the audition, I'm in. Then, maybe, I get a shot at a scholarship on Andoria. OK, it'll be cold, but it'd be worth it. Maury? Still interspecies law?"

"Yeah," said Maury. "Got my applications out to the big ones, Harvard, ShiKahr, Xellan-Kaur. I'm gonna get in, I just know it. So that leaves you, big guy. What are your plans?" He reached up to ruffle Thom's hair.

Thom was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I was thinking, maybe, of trying for Starfleet Academy."

"Starfleet?" Maury raised himself up on one elbow, and Daniella could see his eyes widen in the starlight. "Seriously? Facing down the Klingons with a phaser in your fist? Seriously?"

"I know what you're thinking," said Thom, "but hear me out, will you? The war with the Klingons is over, guys, it was a stupid mistake, it should never have started in the first place, now it's stopped."

"And it's been replaced by a worse one," said Daniella soberly.

"I don't know about that," said Thom. "Yeah, the Undine are scary, and there's something worse behind them... but, c'mon, guys, we've got the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Republic, now, all on the same team. You can't tell me the Undine, or the Borg, or anybody will stand up to that for long. They'll find a way, you just watch. The war will end, and Starfleet will go back to being what it was always meant to be. Scientists, explorers... going into the galaxy for the sake of peace." His eyes were on the stars now, utterly entranced. "That's what I'd like to be part of."

"It's a beautiful dream, brother," said Daniella. Thom was the practical one... if anyone could make it happen, she thought, he could.

"I'll drink to that," said Maury.

And the three of them laughed, and drank, together, in the warm night, beneath the peaceful stars.