by David Mack
That’ll have to do, she decided. Another tap on the sluggish maneuvering jets lifted the nose of her ship ninety degrees. Showing her ventral profile to her attackers was virtual suicide—it presented them with the largest possible target and exposed her ship’s most vulnerable systems. Under the circumstances, however, Sarina saw no better alternative.
Her range to Bashir, displayed in her visor’s HUD, ticked down past forty-two thousand kilometers. The sensor console inside the cockpit showed the pursuit fighters closing to weapons range in less than thirty seconds. At intercept-minus-twenty, her range to Bashir dropped below forty-one thousand kilometers. It broke forty thousand at i-minus-ten. Counting down the final seconds, Sarina closed her hand white-knuckle tight around her seat’s ejection handle.
At i-minus-four her passive sensors detected multiple weapons locking onto her ship’s ventral fuselage. At i-minus-two she pulled the ejection handle.
The acceleration was so fierce that Sarina thought she had struck something and was being crushed. The immense g-force of ejection abated as she rocketed away from her stolen vessel, the momentum of the escape system targeted to follow the same vector as that of her ship, increasing her velocity toward Bashir.
A searing flash of yellow-white light scattered her abandoned interceptor into scrap and free radicals. She caught a fleeting glimpse of engine glows from the pursuit craft as they raced by her.
Her visor’s HUD confirmed she was less than thirty-nine thousand kilometers from Bashir and continuing to close the distance. Ahead of her she saw a dark lump of rock with a bright spot in its center, and she wondered whether that was the hidden shipyard she and Bashir had come to find.
Watching the kilometers tick away on her HUD, Sarina knew she would reach Bashir’s position in less than seven minutes. Only then did she realize she had no means of slowing herself down. Which meant that in eight minutes she would be well past Bashir and hurtling away into empty space—and away from their planned rendezvous with the Aventine.
Bashir watched hope growing closer by the second. His visor’s HUD registered the slow but steady approach of Sarina’s recall beacon. He wondered what kind of ship she had commandeered. Whatever it was, he was certain she’d have a plan for retrieving him. Even if the Aventine never came back for them, even if Starfleet had cut them loose or some politician had written them off, he had faith that Sarina would find him and together they would escape and make their way home.
Home … He didn’t know what that word meant anymore. Was it wherever he laid his head? Was it on Earth with his parents? Or on Deep Space 9 with the few familiar faces that still populated his increasingly lonely life? Or did he dare to imagine that “home” might mean wherever he could be with Sarina? The longer he entertained that notion, the more right it felt. She was his home. And if she wanted him to leave DS9 and go hopping through the galaxy on one covert mission after another, he knew he would follow her without hesitation.
A blinding flash of light made him wince. His visor compensated for the glare, enabling his eyes to adjust and see the final moments of a fiery explosion—which lay on a direct bearing to Sarina’s last coordinates. Terror stabbed him in the heart, and for the span of one breath, he was paralyzed with dread and doubt. The burning cloud faded. Noting that Sarina’s recall beacon was still transmitting, Bashir strained to pick out any sign of her, one tiny drifting figure against the endless expanse of deep space, but he knew it was a futile effort. He would have to trust his suit’s sensors, which told him Sarina was still moving toward him.
New questions troubled him. What if she’s in the same predicament I am? If that was her ship I saw explode, how are she and I going to link up out here? And without a ship, what chance do we really have?
His pessimistic musing was cut short as a pair of large, dark shapes zoomed past him, indistinct blurs in the darkness. Following their paths, he caught the bright glow of engine pods. Looks like we’re not alone out here. If those are patrol ships, they’ll be able to pick us off with ease.
He looked over his shoulder at the asteroid. The bow of the Breen’s slipstream prototype vessel was passing through the hangar’s main entrance. In less than two minutes it would be clear of the hangar and free to navigate. That’s it, then, Bashir despaired. Game, set, and match—we lose.
High above him, a bluish-white storm of light erupted as if from nowhere. It vanished in a momentous flash, and he felt a bizarre galvanic tingling on his skin. When he was at last able to relax and focus his eyes, he grinned at the most beautiful sight he could have imagined: the elegant, sharklike hull of the Aventine loomed a few kilometers above him, aglow from its own running lights.
Lieutenant Kedair’s voice crackled over his helmet’s transceiver. “Aventine to Doctor Bashir. Do you copy?”
“Affirmative, Aventine! I’m all right!”
“Stand by for transport,” Kedair said. “We’ll have you aboard in—” Energy pulses slammed against the Aventine’s hull. Seconds later, two Breen interceptors streaked past the starship, passing over its primary hull and between its warp nacelles. As the fighters swung around for another pass, Kedair continued. “Hang on, Doctor. As soon as we swat a few flies, we’ll beam you up.”
“Negative,” Bashir said. “Ignore them and forget about me. You’ve got to stop that prototype from leaving the hangar inside the asteroid!”
“Incoming,” Kedair said, sounding unfazed. Muffled thunder followed her warning, and she added, “More nuisance fire from the Breen fighters. No damage, shields holding. The Breen are breaking off and calling for reinforcements.”
From the science console, Helkara said, “Jamming their comms now.”
Bowers stood behind ops and asked Mirren, “What about the recall beacons? Do we still have a fix on Bashir and Douglas?”
“Aye, sir,” Mirren replied. “Holding station three point two kilometers from Doctor Bashir, and Lieutenant Douglas’s signal remains inbound at one hundred kilometers per second.”
Dax stood up from the center seat and watched the real-time updates to the tactical displays beside the main viewscreen. “Mirren, give me an angle on the asteroid,” she said. The image on the main viewer switched to show the Breen’s prototype vessel emerging from its rocky cocoon. “We have to stop them, on the double. Sam, Lonnoc—suggestions?”
“If we open fire, it’s an act of war,” Bowers said. “The ship was supposed to be destroyed before we extracted Bashir and Douglas.”
Kedair said, “If it never makes it out of the hangar, and the shipyard’s reactor blows up, it’ll be a moot point. The Breen can’t make a fuss about a ship they deny exists, right? So we just have to get it back inside the hangar and keep it there.”
Helkara turned from the science console and joined the discussion. “We can use the shields,” he said. “Extend them in front of us, full power, and push the prototype back inside the asteroid. The only catch—”
“—is that we’ll be right on top of the hangar when it blows,” Bowers said.
“Make it happen,” Dax said, returning to her chair. “Right now. Tharp, put us nose to nose with the prototype. Mirren, route auxiliary power to the shields. Kedair, reconfigure the shields for maximum forward effect. Sam, ready the ship.”
Bowers nodded. “Attention all decks, this is the XO: Brace for impact.”
The asteroid and the prototype filled the main viewer as the Aventine cruised toward its head-on confrontation. Dax felt the tension mounting on the bridge and noticed that she had reflexively clenched her fists on the armrests of her chair.
Mirren raised her voice: “The Breen fighters are moving into an attack profile against Lieutenant Douglas!”
“Warn them off,” Dax said. “Phasers only. Shoot to damage, not destroy.”
Kedair replied, “Aye, sir. Firing phasers.” She tapped her console twice and was answered by soft feedback tones. “Two hits, one on each fighter. Minor damage to both. They’re changing course and bugging out.”
The deck lurched, and a calamitous boom of collision rocked the Aventine. “Contact,” Tharp said over the din as he entered new commands into the helm. On the main viewer, the ship’s normally invisible shields crackled with white lightning as they were forced into repeated collisions with the Breen vessel’s bow.
“Now it’s a battle of engines,” Bowers said.
“Not exactly,” Dax said. “Now it’s a game of chicken. We’re gambling that the Breen ship isn’t armed because it’s a prototype. Whoever’s commanding that ship is probably betting we’ll cut and run before the asteroid explodes.”
Her comment provoked a worried look from Bowers. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? We’re staying here through the detonation?”
“No,” Dax said, “but we’ll have to cut it very, very close. Mister Tharp, have you ever plotted and executed a half-second warp-one hop?”
“Yes, sir,” Tharp said while keeping his hands and eyes on his work.
“Have you ever done one in reverse?”
The Bolian’s eyebrows lifted in slow surprise. “No, sir. No one has.”
“Well, then, get ready to make history. Lieutenant Mirren, how long do we have to reconfigure our warp-field geometry for reverse propulsion?”
Mirren replied, “Two minutes and forty-nine seconds until the shipyard’s reactor core breaches and destroys everything within ten kilometers.”
“Work quickly, Gruhn,” Dax said.
“Aye, sir,” said Helkara. The Zakdorn science officer turned back toward his console and muttered grimly, “Leishman’s going to kill me when she hears this.”
“Lonnoc,” Dax said, “tell the transporter room we need to beam up two targets moving on separate vectors at different speeds just before we go to warp.”
“I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear that, Captain.”
“I’m not here to make their job easy, Lieutenant. Just get it done.”
“Aye, sir.”
As the crew snapped into action, Bowers walked back to stand beside Dax’s chair. Lowering his voice to a confidential level, he said, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re risking the ship, the crew, and the mission on the assumptions that Helkara and Leishman are engineering geniuses, Tharp is a piloting savant, our transporter chief can work miracles, and the Breen are unwilling to sacrifice themselves in a kamikaze attack?”
Dax folded her arms, looked up at Bowers, and nodded. “Yup.”
He grinned. “Damn, I love this job.”
43
Thot Keer kept his curses to himself as he watched the Starfleet cruiser charging into a head-on collision with his one-of-a-kind prototype. He appreciated the irony and symmetry of the contest: the enemy vessel was one of Starfleet’s new slipstream-enabled Vesta-class starships, whose designs the BID had stolen to facilitate Keer’s work. The parent comes to smother its bastard, Keer fumed.
The two ships smashed together and filled the Marjat with a terrible sound of wrenching metal. The impact sent Keer and most of his crew sprawling across the Marjat’s mostly empty decks. He slammed against a bank of computer terminals, winced as he suppressed a groan, and scrambled to his feet.
“I need more power,” he shouted to his skeleton crew. “Engage impulse drive on full—we need to push that ship out of our way!”
Jath, the foreman, replied, “Impulse coils are already at overdrive, sir!”
Keer seethed. This was no battle of equals. The Marjat was a shell housing an antimatter reactor and a propulsion system. Its greater power-to-mass ratio might have given it an advantage over the Starfleet ship had it been equipped with anything more than rudimentary life-support systems. No shields, Keer raged, no weapons, not even ablative hull plating. What am I supposed to do? Go outside and throw rocks? Even the prototype’s engines were not at full capacity. Someone—most likely the same saboteur who had killed the ops crew, Keer suspected—had crashed a work vehicle into the Marjat’s aft main thruster, forcing the ship to crawl out of its hangar on feeble maneuvering jets.
With the Marjat’s bow safely past the hangar’s threshold, however, it was safe to engage the impulse drive. Pushing the Starfleet ship aside would be a matter of raw force. “Patch the main reactor into the impulse coils,” Keer said to Jath. “Disengage the safeties—if we achieve relativistic velocity after breaking through, all the better. But we must break through!”
After relaying Keer’s order to the crew on the decks below, Jath approached the commander and said, “Even with all power to the coils, will it be enough?”
“I think it will,” Keer said. “The Starfleet ship has comparable engine power and greater mass, but it needs to expend energy to keep its shields up. They know our base’s reactor is critical, which means they cannot risk dropping shields to increase their engine output. That is our only advantage, and I mean to press it.”
Jath looked at the situation monitor mounted on the forward bulkhead. “What if the Starfleet ship opens fire? We have no defenses!”
“If they were going to fire, they would have done so by now,” Keer said. “They need to destroy every trace of us in order to deny their crime. Even if we cannot save the ship, Jath, we must break free so that our deaths may be avenged.”
The Marjat rang with the rising hum of engines being pushed past their safe operating limits, and its hull groaned. Together they made for a mournful sound, one that Keer regretted having to inflict on his greatest creation. It reminded him of his daughter’s pained cries, the heartbreaking sounds that had issued from her dry, cracked lips as her illness wrought its final ravages on her tiny body.
I let this job consume my life, he reflected with bitterness. I gave it all I had—my youth, my vigor, my imagination. When I lost my family I submerged myself into this. Now it is all I have left. He would not let enemies of his people take the Marjat from him. “Jath,” he shouted over the clamor of straining engines, “is the base’s main computer still online?”
Jath spun and keyed commands into a terminal behind him. “Yes, sir.”
“Get me a line to its command systems,” Keer said. “We need to redirect the base’s energy-dampening field toward the Starfleet vessel. If we match their shield frequency, we should be able to break through and ram them out of the way.”
“Yes, sir,” Jath said. “Accessing the command systems now.”
It was a wild tactic, and Keer knew the odds were weighted against him. A glance at the chrono made it clear that escape was no longer an option; the best he could hope for now was to make certain the Marjat was not erased from history by an act of terrorism, and that the Starfleet crew that had come to seal his fate was forced to share it. I will not go alone into the fire and the night, he vowed.
• • •
“Sixty seconds,” Mirren said over the shuddering and creaking of the Aventine’s hull, as if Dax and the rest of the bridge crew couldn’t see the countdown ticking away on the main viewscreen.
Dax steepled her fingers in front of her. “Acknowledged.” Looking over her shoulder at Helkara, she added, “Gruhn? Report.”
“Calculations complete,” the science officer said. “Leishman’s making the hardware adjustments now. Awaiting final confirmation.”
Bowers cast a tense stare at Helkara. “She knows we’re in a hurry, right?”
“Yes, I made that quite clear, sir.”
Kedair declared in a tone of alarm, “Shields are losing power!” Her hands flew across her console to summon new data. “It’s the Breen base—their energy-dampening field is being recalibrated to cancel out our shields!”
Mirren swiveled her chair to face Dax and Bowers. “If we lose shields, the Breen ship’ll ram us!”
“Thank you for stating the obvious,” Dax said. “Lonnoc, switch to random shield-frequency nutation. Gruhn, pinpoint their energy dampener and knock it out with a feedback pulse. Tharp, if our shields buckle, dip our bow and try
to come up under theirs—maybe we can pin them to the roof of their hangar.”
Flashing a smile, Bowers said to Dax, “Never a dull moment, eh?”
“Not if you’re doing it right.”
The overhead lights, which were already dimmed, flickered and went out, leaving the bridge bathed in the crimson glow of its alert panels and the pale twilight cast off from its duty consoles and forward viewscreen. “Sorry,” Kedair said. “That was me. I’m stealing every bit of power I can to keep the shields up.”
“Core breach in thirty seconds,” Mirren said.
“Warp coil polarity reversed,” Helkara said. “Recharging now …”
A thin haze clouded the air between Dax and the main viewscreen, and she was fairly certain she smelled smoke. “Number One—damage report!”
“Overloads in the power-transfer system,” he said, checking an aft engineering console. Keying open a priority channel, he continued, “Bridge to damage control! Plasma fire in deck one overhead. Respond RFN, that’s an order.”
Hunched forward over the conn, Tharp mumbled, “This is gonna be close.”
“You have no idea,” Dax said. To Kedair she added, “Lonnoc, as soon as we drop our shields, beam up Bashir and Douglas. I don’t want them ending up as collateral damage when that hunk of rock goes boom.”
“Aye, sir. Alerting Transporter Room One to stand by.”
An alert buzzed on the ops console. Mirren silenced it. “The core breach is starting! Ten seconds to critical!”