Title：Star Trek - The Brave and the Bold 2 (VOY, TNG) # Keith R. A. DeCandido.epub

Chapter One

THARIA DIDN’T CRY when his three mates died.

It had been nine months, and not a single tear had run down his blue cheek.

He sat with two of his fellow Maquis rebels in a cave on some planet or other. Tharia wasn’t even sure where they were, to be honest. He’d been too busy trying to repair one of the consoles to pay attention to wherever it was that they had crash-landed their shuttle. There had been four of them, but their pilot—a Bolian who had replaced Tom Paris after the imbecile Earther had gotten himself caught by the Federation—died in the crash. That left Tharia ch’Ren, Gerron Ral, and B’Elanna Torres.

“When’s Chakotay supposed to get here?” Gerron asked in a whiny voice that made Tharia want to strangle him.

“He’ll get here soon,” B’Elanna snapped in a voice intended to intimidate. She didn’t bother to look at Gerron. She was too busy keeping her eyes glued to her ancient tricorder, hoping it would tell her of Chakotay’s imminent arrival with their ship, hoping it wouldn’t tell her that Gul Evek or some other Cardassian had found them and was going to blast them into atoms.

At least their mission had been more or less successful. The shipment of grenades that Cardassian Central Command had earmarked for occupying forces on Dorvan V had been annihilated, first stolen from the freighter that was taking them to Dorvan, then destroyed an hour later in the shuttle crash. (Mercifully, the grenades hadn’t been primed yet; had they been, more than the Bolian pilot would have been lost, and Chakotay would only have been able to find their remains with a tricorder—or tweezers.)

It would have been better if they had managed to keep the grenades intact and thus be able to add them to the Maquis’s arsenal, but the important thing was that the Cardassians wouldn’t be able to use them. Sometimes it didn’t matter if you won, so long as the other side lost.

“It’s going to be dark soon.” Gerron, Tharia noted, sounded wholly unintimidated—which meant he was a foo