The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [51]
“‘Sloppy’?” Troi asked.
“Yes, Commander,” Hek replied. “We had faith that their supervision of us would grow lax and that the Lethanta would gradually assign to us more technically sophisticated chores that they were no longer willing to do. We began to learn things, and we learned very quickly. Generations of my people with no hope of ever seeing liberation in their own lifetimes selflessly dedicated themselves to obtaining the eventual freedom of our people.”
“Your eventual rebellion was successful, thanks to them,” Picard said. “The Lethanta left your planet and did not return.”
“They tried to return again and again,” Scrodd said. “We drove them away every time, Captain, but at a terribly high cost. Finally they sued for a permanent peace, and we gave them one. It lasted for about a century and a half.”
“What happened then?” Worf asked.
“Our people started dying,” Hek said, and Picard and the others could see every Krann face at the table cloud over. “Our entire world was suddenly in the throes of an epidemic of unprecedented severity and mortality. All our people on Ma’ak Krannag were dead within two weeks.”
“But some of you lived,” Troi said.
Hek nodded. “Some of us were in space. There were a few thousand of us engaged in mining the moons of the fifth planet in our home system, and there were more thousands aboard military defense stations in orbit around our world. There were even a couple of hundred thousand of us who’d freely chosen to live on Eul Ma’ak Lethantana, and some of them left that world in time.”
“In time for what?” Picard asked, already knowing what Hek would say.
“Our military defense stations still had control of our strategic weapons on Ma’ak Krannag,” the Presider told him. “They could be launched by remote control. We responded to the bioweapon attack on us by unleashing a nuclear assault on Eul Ma’ak Lethantana. We intended the planet to be sterilized, and so it was.”
“You were successful,” Picard said, keeping his tone neutral. “But that left you nowhere to go.”
“Precisely,” Hek said. “Our people had to leave that star system. We had thousands of interplanetary-capable spacecraft, a population of perhaps eighty thousand people remaining, all the recycling and sustenance reprocessing equipment we could ever need, and a very powerful motive. We knew the Lethanta had launched an interstellar colonization effort using asteroid ships at some point not long before their attack on us. Our revenge would not be complete until we located and destroyed the last Lethanta—but we didn’t know how fast their ships were going or in which direction. We formed the First Fleet and struck out for one of the more likely stars nearest Ma’ak Terrella, hoping that was the Lethanta’s destination. It turned out not to be so, of course.”
“There is a G2-type star three point nine light-years from Ma’ak Terrella, Captain,” Worf said. “It is uncatalogued at present. That may be the star system Presider Hek is speaking of.”
“Thank you, Mr. Worf,” Picard said. “Presider Hek, how long did it take your people to travel those nearly four light-years?”
“We don’t know, Captain—not precisely, anyway. The trip is said to have taken twenty generations. The archived designs of those original ships seem to indicate that the slowest of them could maintain an acceleration of about a tenth of a gravity, and they had fuel reserves adequate for about two months of acceleration. If they used half their fuel to reach cruising speed and half to stop—and that leaves them no margin for maneuvering—then our First Fleet might have been able to reach a top speed of about twenty-three hundred kilometers per second.”
“That would have made the trip about … about five hundred years long, at a minimum,” Picard said. “As you suggest, Presider Hek, it might well have been much longer.”
“One can only imagine the privations, the sacrifices, our people made on that first long voyage,” Pwett rasped. “They had fled their