by David Mack
The feisty young Trill was tensed for action. “Locked.”
Bowers palmed a slick of perspiration from his smooth, dark-brown pate as he muttered grimly, “Here we go.”
On the main viewer, the fleet of Cardassian ships became a wall of rust-orange hulls that blocked out the stars. Blinding lances of energy slashed and crisscrossed wildly between the fleets. Disruptor pulses flashed as they intersected with phaser beams and streams of charged plasma. Dense clusters of blazing torpedoes streaked past one another in both directions.
Defiant heaved and lurched as it was buffeted by Cardassian ordnance and friendly fire alike. All O’Brien could do was hang on and try not to get thrown from his seat as his crew, battle-hardened and lightning-quick from years of war, cheated death by infinitesimal degrees, over and over again.
In a matter of minutes, Bajor’s orbit was littered with hundreds of shattered, burning starships. The wreckage of dozens of Cardassian battleships tumbled amid the broken husks of Talarian dreadnoughts and the glowing remnants of nearly half the rebels’ hodgepodge armada. As Defiant made a wide turn to prepare for its next attack run, O’Brien caught a glimpse of Bajor’s surface. It had not yet been fired upon. Its surface-based artillery continued to hammer away at the Cardassian ships, with limited success, but so far the Cardassians had not yet retaliated.
O’Brien turned toward his first officer. “Leeta! Give me a big-picture look at the Cardies’ deployment pattern!” As Leeta scrambled to compile the intel, O’Brien’s eye was drawn back to the main screen by a blinding flash. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes for a moment until the screen compensated and filtered out the glare. “What the hell was that?”
Tigan looked up from her console. “The Talarians are making suicide runs!”
More explosions lit up the screen. O’Brien’s heart sank. He’d hoped the prideful, stubborn Talarians wouldn’t resort to such tactics, but the loss of their homeworld and territory had broken them as a people. Unwilling to live as refugees or nomads, they had chosen instead to die in battle, giving the last of themselves for the cause of vengeance. Though he had expected this outcome, he was disappointed to lose them as allies for the rebellion.
Can’t cry about it now, he knew. We’ve got bigger problems to deal with.
“Captain,” Leeta said, routing her strategic analysis to the display beside O’Brien’s chair. “The Cardassians are focusing their attack on the station. Should we pull the fleet back to a defensive perimeter?”
O’Brien felt the blood drain from his face as he saw Leeta’s report. As much as he wanted to protect the station—in other words, Keiko—he knew it would take away his forces’ only advantages in this kind of battle, their superior speed and maneuverability at sublight. “No,” he said, swallowing all his emotions. “Continue the attack. What’s the next largest enemy ship?”
Tigan replied, “The Ketaras, bearing three-one mark five.”
“Sam, intercept the Ketaras. Ezri, lock all weapons. Destroy that ship.”
His crew snapped back into action, all eyes trained on the objective directly ahead of them… but all O’Brien could think of was the woman he had left behind.
The bridge of the Geronimo was ablaze. Smoke stung Neelix’s eyes and flames licked at his arms as he barked, “Someone put that fire out!”
Seconds later the hiss of a fire extinguisher squelched the crackling inferno, and the haze hanging in the air went from smelling like burnt ODN cables to reeking of the chemical fumes left over from the flame retardant. “Thank you,” Neelix said, then he turned his head to see Tuvok holding the extinguisher. “What are you doing on my ship?”
Before Tuvok could answer, a Tellarite at the helm cried out, “Incoming!”
“Evasive!” Neelix shouted. “Hard to starboard!” Detonations rocked the Condor-class raider, and burning phosphors rained from the overhead. A second barrage hammered the Geronimo, and a blast destroyed the helm console and sent its high-strung Tellarite pilot to the deck in a charred heap.
Tuvok leaped to an unmanned station and keyed in commands. “Rerouting helm control. Engaging evasive maneuvers.”
There was no time to argue. Neelix looked over his shoulder to his Cardassian-expatriate first officer. “Seska! Are the weapons back up yet?”
“Negative.” She held a hand over her ear-mounted transceiver to block out noise while she listened to the damage reports from the aft sections. “Ziyal’s still trying to seal the hull breach.”
Neelix bit down on his rage. “Let me know as soon as we have weapons. We have to get back in the fight.”
“Yes, sir.” Seska turned away from him to focus on directing the ship’s skeleton crew through the ever-growing list of emergency repairs.
“Mister Vulcan,” Neelix said, “plot an evasive course that puts us outside the Cardassians’ weapons range for the next few minutes.”
“Plotted and laid in,” Tuvok said.
“Engage.” The raging battle on the main viewscreen spun and blurred as the Geronimo veered away at full impulse. As soon as Neelix was sure they were clear of the conflagrations that were rending both fleets, he sprang from his chair and loomed over the seated Vulcan. His voice was a strained, furious whisper. “Tell me what you’re doing here, Tuvok.”
Perhaps taking his cue from Neelix, Tuvok replied in a discreet hush. “Your ship was the only means of escape from the station when the attack began. Because I could not permit Kes to come to harm, I brought her aboard just before—”
He grabbed Tuvok’s collar. “You brought her onto my ship?”
“It was the only logical solution to our dilemma, Mister Neelix.”
“That’s Captain Neelix, to you.”
Tuvok made a humble nod. “My apologies, Captain.”
“Where is she now?”
“Sedated, in the brig.” He looked back at Neelix. “I regret what she did to you, sir, but at the moment we have more pressing concerns.”
From the other side of the tiny command deck, Seska called to Neelix, “We have shields and weapons, Captain!”
Neelix let go of Tuvok, returned to his chair, and prepared himself to rejoin the fray. “Mister Vulcan, set a course back to the battle. Seska, find the biggest, baddest ship the Cardassians have left. I want it blasted to bits.”
Keiko dodged between eruptions of fire and shrapnel as she crossed Ops, firing off orders each step of the way. “Maintain suppressing fire! Luther, transfer all power from the Habitat Ring to shields!”
Sloan grimaced as he jabbed at his console. “It’s not enough! Shields buckling in all sections!”
A power relay in the ceiling high above them burst into flames and rained molten slag onto the central command table. Waving caustic smoke and noxious fumes from her eyes, Keiko called out, “Fire teams! Over here!” She climbed a few short steps to look over Sloan’s shoulder in the engineering station. “Retract the shield perimeter to the core section and center decks.”
“And sacrifice the pylons?”
She slapped his back as she moved away. “It’ll buy us a few minutes. Best we can do.” She passed two Terran men who carried small chemical fire extinguishers. With a great hiss, the portable devices filled the air with fog.
Bone-jarring impacts rocked the station, and the irregular percussion of detonations against Terok Nor’s dwindling shields grew steadily louder. Keiko hunched over one of the few still-functional terminals at the command table. She tried to call up a tactical display and got nothing but hashed lines followed by a blizzard of gray static. “Someone get me an update on the fleet,” she shouted to the room. “I need hard numbers, and I need them—”
There was no sound but the roaring blast, no sensation but the mad rush of free fall, nothing to see but the jerky tumbling of bodies caught in the strobed light of a sparking cable ripped from its junction. Keiko slammed against a wall and bounced away from it in a daze. Then pale yellow emergency lights snapped on, partial gravity returned, and Keiko plummete
d to the deck. Echoes of the explosion lingered in the air and the deck, quaking in endless ripples through the skeleton of Terok Nor. As Keiko pulled herself to her feet, she saw that consoles all over Ops were flickering erratically. Only a few of her command personnel were still conscious. “Damage report! Anyone, talk to me. What hit us?”
At the science station, Lon Suder, a bug-eyed Betazoid man with a ragged mullet of gray hair, looked terrified. “The Cardassian frigate Mostar.” He looked up at Keiko. “She rammed us. Went right through our shields.”
From the tactical station, Sloan added, “We’ve lost the lower core. Main power and the central computer are gone. Shields and weapons offline, and we’re venting atmosphere.” He added with emphasis, “The Cardassians are coming around for another volley.”
Keiko activated the emergency channel, which would broadcast to the station’s PA system as well as to anyone within subspace radio range. “All hands, get to your ships or the lifeboats! Evacuate the station!” She switched off the channel and asked Sloan, “Transporters?”
“Offline,” he said with a grim shake of his head. He pointed toward the single lifeboat attached to Ops. “That’s our only way out in time.”
It was the worst news Keiko could have received. The Cardassian-made lifeboats had been designed for little more than a brief powered descent to a planet’s surface. Unfortunately, during that descent, the lifeboats would be completely vulnerable, and if they failed to land or splash down on Bajor within twenty minutes of launch, they would become little more than orbital debris waiting to burn up on entry into Bajor’s atmosphere. At least the transporter would have put us on the surface before the Cardassians use us for target practice, she lamented, but there was nothing to be done except the inevitable.
“All right,” Keiko said, herding her people with broad gestures. “Time to go. Everybody in.” She took one final look back and made sure no survivors had been left behind in Ops, then she stepped inside the lifeboat, shut the hatch, and gave Sloan the order: “Launch.”
He pressed the button, and the lifeboat rocketed away from the station, into orbit above Bajor—and into the crossfire.
“Hit them again, Ezri,” O’Brien said as he watched torpedoes from Defiant rend the hull of the Cardassian cruiser Prisika. “Leeta, get ready to change targets.”
More crimson flashes raced away from Defiant’s bow and obliterated the crippled Prisika. As the rebel frigate punched through the firestorm of debris it had wrought, O’Brien heard Keiko’s voice through the heavy chatter on the subspace comm: “All hands, get to your ships or the lifeboats! Evacuate the station!”
Terror froze him in place as the battle raged around him. All he could do was speculate about Keiko’s fate. Would she have beamed down to Bajor? He sprang from his chair and shouldered past Tigan to take control of the tactical console. He turned the Defiant’s sensors on what was left of Terok Nor. The station’s lower core had been destroyed. Fires raged throughout the inner and outer rings, and the pylons were breaking apart. No lower core—that’ll mean no main computer, he reasoned. Which means no transporters. He clamped a hand over his sweat-slicked forehead. God, I hope she didn’t use one of those shoddy Cardassian lifeboats. She’ll be dead meat floating around in one of those things.
Leeta grabbed O’Brien by the shoulder and pulled him up and around to face her. Towering over him, the redhead scowled and asked, “Orders, sir?” He knew that what she’d really meant was, Get your head out of your ass, Captain.
She was right—he wasn’t doing anyone any good standing like a mute, least of all Keiko. He stepped in front of his chair and faced the main screen. “Leeta, tell the fleet to fall back and start rescuing survivors from the lifeboats. Work in threes, like we practiced—two cover while one transports.”
Bowers looked back from the helm, dismayed. “What about the survivors still on the station?” No one on the bridge was cold-blooded enough to say what Bowers should have known: There were no survivors left on the station. All that remained now of Terok Nor was a smoldering husk on the verge of oblivion.
“Sam,” Leeta said, “set a search-and-rescue pattern. Ezri, tell Kearsarge and Independence to stay close, this is gonna get ugly.” The first officer looked up reflexively as she said, “Bridge to transporter bay! Get ready to beam in survivors, as many as you can find and we can fit!”
On the forward viewscreen, Terok Nor glowed like an ember in the night. Angry blazes of energy surrounded the disintegrating station with massive bouquets of fire, in a steady cycle of blooms and dissolutions. Pointing into the heart of the storm, O’Brien said with rock-solid calm, “Take us in, Sam.” He turned to Tigan and Leeta. “Drop shields and begin transport.”
Seconds felt like minutes and minutes like an eternity as enemy fire dealt the Defiant one thunderbolt after another. The tiny ship rocked wildly under a steady barrage of punishment that became only marginally less brutal when it raised its shields and served as a defender for one of its two wingmen. One by one the Defiant’s systems hiccupped and went dark. Bitter smoke choked the air, sections of the overhead fell in, and fried cables spilled from the bulkheads like viscera.
After each critical failure, Leeta asked, “Fall back?”
Each time O’Brien fixed his hard gaze on the fire. “Not yet.”
For a moment, it seemed they might pluck a victory from the flames, as the few remaining Cardassian warships abruptly retreated.
Then a single, majestic blast whited out the viewscreen, and the shock wave sent the Defiant and dozens of other ships hurtling away on chaotic vectors. When the glare faded from the screen, there was nothing left of Terok Nor but a gray mist and a massive field of debris that would soon burn up as it plunged out of orbit.
Tigan laid a hand on O’Brien’s shoulder. He looked back to see the young Trill regarding him with admiration and compassion. “We can’t fit any more,” she said, sliding her gaze aft. He followed her look and saw that the doors at the rear of Defiant’s bridge were open. Outside them, the narrow passageways were packed solid with standing refugees. Giving O’Brien’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, Tigan added, “All ships report they’re at maximum capacity. It’s time.”
He nodded, his mien solemn. “Sam, set a course for the Badlands. Leeta, order the fleet to regroup at Athos IV.”
Leeta stepped close and spoke in a confidential whisper. “Sir, the fleet is heavily damaged. We’ll be vulnerable all the way to Athos. Why not beam the rest of the lifeboat survivors to Bajor and then join them on the surface?”
“Because that’ll give the Cardassians the excuse they need to lay waste to the planet. The only way Bajor avoids a major bloodbath is if we retreat.”
Leaning closer, Leeta sharpened her tone. “And what about Keiko? What if she’s still out there in one of those lifeboats?”
Her words twisted like a blade in O’Brien’s heart, but he refused to permit himself the luxury of self-pity. “Give the order. Retreat and regroup.” He dropped heavily back into his command chair. “This battle’s over. We’ve lost.”
“The order is confirmed,” Seska said, wiping blood and black dust from her face as she swiveled her chair toward Neelix. “Retreat and regroup.”
“I can’t believe O’Brien would abandon all those people,” Neelix said, unable to mask his anguish. “Once we leave, they’ll be defenseless!”
Tuvok glanced cautiously back at Geronimo’s two senior officers and kept a civil tone. “With all respect, Captain, we have already taken aboard more people than we can support. Even if you wish to rescue more survivors, we have nowhere to put them. The logical course of action is to obey General O’Brien’s order and withdraw.” He entered coordinates into the helm. “Course plotted for Athos IV.”
Neelix looked at the swarm of Cardassian-made lifeboats drifting away from the scorched flotsam of Terok Nor. He had no idea how many still harbored living people and how many had been turned into ovens by the station’s explosion. Noting the small handfu
l of Cardassian warships that had fallen back just beyond the range of Bajor’s planetary artillery, he knew that O’Brien and Tuvok were correct: It was time to retreat, before enemy reinforcements arrived.
That didn’t mean he had to accept it without a fight.
“Seska, scan the remaining lifeboats. If you find one with someone still alive inside, put a tractor beam on it.” He nodded at Tuvok. “Mister Vulcan, engage.”
Gul Domal stood on the command deck of the Cardassian patrol cruiser Azanja. Less than an hour earlier, Domal had been a single starship commander in a great fleet. Now, through the magic of attrition and good fortune, he was the senior surviving officer—and de facto commander—of Cardassia’s Ninth Order.
Unfortunately, the Ninth Order now consisted of precisely four warships and a small handful of support vessels. Of those four ships of the line, none had a working warp drive, only two were fully maneuverable at impulse, and only the Azanja had escaped the fray without a major hull breach. Though an argument could be made that they had won the battle—after all, Terok Nor had been destroyed and the rebels were soundly routed—Domal knew that the pyrrhic quality of this victory would require him to be modest in his celebrations.
His third-in-command, Glinn Kirso, approached and handed Domal a data slate. “Damage reports, sir.”
Domal accepted the slate and reviewed its slew of jargon and numbers, the endless lists and conservatively inflated repair estimates. “How irritating,” he said under his breath. His ship and its remaining battle group likely were strong enough to repel any counterattack the undermilitarized Bajorans might send against them, but without reinforcements, the Azanja would be unable to mount a successful invasion and occupation of the planet. He thrust the slate back at Kirso. “Dismissed.”
As the junior officer hurried away, Domal joined his second-in-command, Glinn Teska, at the ship’s tactical station. “Report.”
“The rebels are in full retreat.” He called up a star chart overlaid with course projections. “They’re heading for the Badlands at maximum warp. Should we alert the patrol squadron at Koralis?”