by David Mack
Mirren worked her console. “Message packets standing by for transmission. Initiate breach in three…two…one…mark.” Flurries of data scrolled across her and Helkara’s consoles as they worked. “Uploading the batch of messages to the Breen comnet, Captain. It’ll take about fifteen seconds for them to move through the rest of the nodes in this sector.”
Helkara added, “Once all the nodes are primed, the virus should self-activate and begin sending phony planetary distress signals.”
Moving to stand behind Kedair, Bowers said to her, “Pipe in those distress signals as soon as we pick them up. I want to hear what the Breen hear.”
“Aye, sir,” Kedair said. “Looks like it’s starting a few seconds early.”
Kedair tapped her console, and from the overhead speaker Dax heard the machine-speak of the first message, low and muffled beneath its stilted translation. “All allied vessels, this is a Priority Alert! Ocram III is under attack by Klingon forces! Repeat, Ocram III—” A harsh blast of static ended the message.
“I’m reading dozens more transmissions like that one, Captain,” Kedair said. “Most of the Breen’s border colonies on the far side of this sector are under siege by Klingon forces.” She smiled. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard…”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Dax said.
Bowers joined Helkara at the science console. “The Breen’s comnet is starting to fail,” the first officer said. “It should look to the blockade fleet like part of a full-scale attack on the Breen’s civil infrastructure.”
“Well done, everyone,” Dax said. “If our intel on Breen and Romulan ships is still up to date, all those systems reporting attacks should be just outside their maximum sensor range—which means that if they want to investigate, they’ll have to break formation and abandon the blockade between us and the Alrakis system.”
Returning to Dax’s side, Bowers said, “This is a hell of a gamble, Captain. If that fleet doesn’t take the bait, we’re in big trouble. After pulling this gag on us just a couple of days ago, I don’t see the Romulans falling for it.”
Kedair looked up and said, “We don’t need the whole fleet to buy this ruse—just the Breen ships. They’re most of the blockade. If we can lure them off-station, that’ll create more than enough gaps for us to exploit.”
“Never underestimate the power of paranoia, Sam,” Dax said. “The Breen are known for having hair triggers and for responding in force to invaders.”
“Assuming they believe this invasion is real,” Bowers said.
“Imagine you’re one of those Breen starship commanders,” Dax said. “After spending days playing cat and mouse on the border with a Federation starship, you’ve just received word of a massive Klingon assault on all the worlds you’ve left undefended. Your local communications network has been disrupted, which means you can’t get any real-time orders from your central command or civilian authorities…. It probably looks to them as if we were sent here to lure them out of position as a prelude to the Klingons’ attack. Even if they think it’s a trick, they can’t take the chance of ignoring what might be a real invasion. If they abandon the blockade and lose track of one Starfleet ship, that’s bad, but if they fail to respond to a multiplanet invasion, that’s grounds for summary execution.”
From tactical, Kedair said, “Captain, we’re picking up a lot of encrypted comm chatter between the ships in the blockade.” She shook her head. “No idea what they’re saying, but it seems like a very busy conversation.”
“No doubt,” Dax said. To Bowers, she added, “I’ll bet you the Breen ships in the blockade warp away in the next three minutes.”
“No bet,” Bowers said. “But even if they do, we’ll still have to deal with the Romulans, and there’s no telling how many of them there are. We’re reading up to three warbirds out there, but who knows how many might be lurking under cloak?”
Kedair replied, “By my best estimate, at least two and no more than five.”
Cocking one eyebrow, Bowers said, “And that’s based upon…?”
“My analysis of standard Romulan fleet deployment strategies, cross-referenced with their known ships on active duty in this sector and recent Starfleet activity reports that pinpoint the locations of forty-one of them.”
“That sounds very thorough, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Carry on, then,” Bowers said, cracking an amused half smile.
Dax leaned forward in her chair. She watched the stars on the main viewer and imagined Julian floating somewhere out in all that darkness, perhaps injured or worse, waiting for her to come and bring him home. “Stand ready, everyone,” she said to her crew, projecting a degree of confidence she didn’t feel. “The moment the road is open, we’re going in.”
Sarina remained steady and calm as her pursuers entered optimal weapons range. Their sensor profile had remained consistent throughout their approach; there were six of them moving in a close formation for zero-g combat, divided into three pairs, each with an obvious leader and wingman.
Because of their distance and the lack of direct illumination on the night side of a gas giant, where Sarina had chosen to make her stand, she was unable to see them directly and doubted that would change. At such ranges and velocities, unaided visual contact was all but unheard of.
Enough time had passed that she figured the incoming ships must already have locked weapons. She wondered whether they would attempt to hail her and demand her surrender before they—
Bright green flashes of energized plasma raced past Sarina’s ship, too far away to pose a serious threat but close enough to cause her breath to catch in her chest. So much for buying time with a surrender parley, she realized.
Several more volleys of emerald-hued plasma shot by her interceptor as it drifted, dark and completely powered down, relying only on its passive sensors, which were powered by an emergency battery. After a brief pause, several more plasma bolts blurred past and vanished into deep space. Alone in the darkness, Sarina smiled. Looks like their sensors are accurate enough to track my fighter’s transponder but not quite good enough to hit it.
Thanks to an online diagnostic manual Sarina had accessed, she had learned that the fighter’s transponder was accessible through a panel beneath the cockpit’s forward console. Without deactivating or damaging it, she had removed the fist-sized component; after depressurizing the cockpit, she’d opened the fighter’s canopy and hurled the transponder into space as an all but invisible decoy and then shut down her interceptor’s nonessential systems.
Even in a best-case scenario, she expected this ploy would gain her no more than fifteen to twenty seconds’ grace before the incoming pilots deduced what she had done and switched to active-scan targeting to compensate. She had no intention of giving them that much time to act.
She restarted her ship’s main power, armed her weapons, locked, and fired.
Viridescent beams shot from the forward gun of Sarina’s vessel, and the targeting scanner in front of her registered two direct hits, yielding two kills.
Positive she had wrung all she could from her advantage of surprise, she stepped on the thruster pedal and charged ahead at the Breen patrol, which split up and broke off into separate evasive patterns, presumably to buy its pilots time to acquire a true sensor lock on Sarina’s ship.
She picked the closer pair of ships and tried to slip into a pursuit course, but the second pair adjusted course and forced Sarina back into a defensive mode. Turning tail and going full evasive was not the situation Sarina wanted. Outnumbered four to one, she knew her chances of survival would be slim.
A new salvo of shots streaked past her ship from behind, and a few nicked her vessel’s wings and grazed its tailfin. Patching in a reserve booster, she rolled away in a hard turn that left her head spinning and her stomach heaving.
Get it together, she told herself, and she pushed through the handicap of her nausea and vertigo. An alert shrilled from her conso
le and a red light flashed on her cockpit’s flight display: someone behind her had locked weapons on her ship.
She fired her engines in full reverse and keyed her nav thrusters to put her above her attacker, who was now several hundred kilometers in front of her. Despite being so woozy that she could barely see, she engaged her targeting sensor and heard the chirrup of a lock-on. Struggling to regain her equilibrium, she fired.
A triple beep from the ship’s console confirmed the kill. Sarina pressed her foot down on the interceptor’s thrust pedal and pulled away from the conflagration.
Her pulse pounded in her temples, and her internal organs felt as if they had been put through a blender. Before that moment, she had understood the stresses of high-g maneuvers on humanoid bodies only in an abstract sense. Now she grasped it in an all-too-visceral manner.
As Sarina shook her head to clear the spots from her vision so she could select a new target—or maybe pick an escape vector—an alert flashed on her helmet’s HUD: it was the activation of Bashir’s recall beacon. Sarina felt a swell of hope. Regardless of whether he had accomplished his mission, he was alive and calling for extraction. That meant Sarina had a new objective.
She made an abrupt course change, flipping the nose of her ship up and over and then veering away from her remaining three pursuers in a wild corkscrew evasive pattern. Reaching Bashir had become her only priority. She relayed the coordinates of his signal from her HUD to the fighter’s navigational system.
Abandoning caution, she patched in every bit of thrust her ship could muster and set it all for an extended, nonstop burn. Multiple indicators redlined—hull stress, engine temperature, fuel consumption. The fighter shuddered with such violence that Sarina feared it might break apart all on its own. She pushed it past all its rated tolerances, setting it on a path of pure acceleration all the way to Julian.
Within a few seconds she was out of her pursuers’ weapons range, and she noted that they didn’t seem to be making an effort to match her speed. They know this flying scrap pile can’t keep this up for long, she reasoned. They’re just waiting for me to fry its engines so they can swoop in and pick me off.
She smiled as she triggered her own suit’s recall beacon and hoped that Captain Dax and the Starship Aventine didn’t keep her and Julian waiting.
Plates on her ship’s forward fuselage spiderwebbed with cracks, and worry erased Sarina’s smile. Here’s hoping I make the rendezvous in one piece…
Bashir drifted alone in space, engulfed by silent darkness, a mote in the eye of the universe. The fire extinguisher had run empty, leaving him with no means of adjusting his course or speed, so he cast it away. The canister tumbled off into the endless night. I know how it feels.
The recall beacon’s icon flashed in the lower left corner of his HUD. It had been several minutes since he triggered it. Dax had estimated the lag between signal and retrieval at five minutes, but that mark was past. Bashir tried to stay optimistic, but anxiety crowded his thoughts with worst-case scenarios.
Might the Breen be preventing the Aventine from coming after him? What if the ship had been destroyed? He shut his eyes and cursed himself for even contemplating the possibility. Dax wouldn’t let that happen, he assured himself. She’d find a way to survive. He took a deep breath and cleared his thoughts, but other calamities rushed in to fill the vacuum. Even if the Aventine hadn’t fallen victim to an enemy attack, what if it had been recalled by Starfleet Command or the Federation Council? It wouldn’t be the first time that an operation was cut short in the service of a larger strategic goal or to advance a political agenda.
One paranoid musing led to another. Is it possible, he wondered, that Starfleet abandoned this mission? What if they lied to me and Sarina? The Federation’s never been fond of the genetically enhanced. What if this mission was just an excuse to get rid of us? Field agents are usually considered expendable. Why would we be any different? What if sacrificing us was the plan all along?
His years of experience in Starfleet made him want to dismiss his suspicions as absurdities, but he was alone and drifting through Breen space with all his hopes linked to a recall beacon no one seemed to be answering.
With a quick twist of his torso he initiated a slow turn of his body so he could look behind him. As he finished the turn he jerked his arms in the opposite direction to arrest his momentum. The hollowed-out asteroid was far behind him and shrinking by slow degrees, but it was still the largest object in his field of vision. Its surface erupted with numerous small explosions, most likely precursors of the massive detonation soon to come.
Through the open doors of its hangar, he saw the sleek prototype vessel inching its way forward in a bid to escape. It was propelled by an assortment of small maneuvering jets. Though it seemed to be creeping forward, Bashir was certain it would clear the hangar’s threshold in less than three minutes—well ahead of the explosion he’d arranged to destroy it.
He weighed his options and was dismayed to find he had none. There was no way for him to go back to the asteroid, and he had no weapons or munitions capable of affecting the ship’s progress. All he could do was hang in space, watch, and wait. I’ve failed, he lamented. I let Sarina sacrifice herself, I took lives in cold blood, all for nothing. Once that ship clears the hangar, it’s over.
Bashir prepared himself to surrender his last shreds of hope and accept the inevitable…and then a miracle happened. His visor’s HUD lit up with an alert. A signal had been detected—Sarina’s recall beacon had been activated, and it was on the move, heading directly toward him. Even if the mission failed, she was alive. He closed his eyes and hoped that his fears were baseless and that the Aventine was on its way. Two miracles in ten minutes might be asking a lot, he admitted to himself, but it’s pretty much all I have left.
“The Breen ships are breaking formation,” Lieutenant Kedair said. “They’re leaving the blockade and setting course away from the border.” She looked up at Dax with a conspiratorial gleam. “The road is open.”
Dax watched the shifting icons on the tactical display beside her chair and tried to conceal the profound wave of relief she felt. Up until that moment she had been plagued by nagging doubts about the plan. As the Aventine’s commanding officer, she had to put on her bravest face for the sake of her crew. Moments of vindication such as this made all her hours of secret trepidation bearable.
Bowers stood at Dax’s side and said, “Lieutenant Mirren, are the Romulan ships redeploying to cover the positions abandoned by the Breen?”
Mirren transferred her sensor data to the bridge’s main viewscreen. “Affirmative, sir. Looks like they’re scrambling, though.”
Kedair tapped commands into the tactical console and highlighted several Romulan ship positions on the main screen. “Look at these maneuvers,” she said. “The Terrinex made three rapid course corrections in under a minute—but for no apparent reason.” Four ostensibly empty subsectors flashed red. “The only way her uncorrected position would’ve made sense is if those areas were covered. Her new position makes them look undefended, but I’ll bet that’s where the Romulans’ cloaked reinforcements are waiting.”
Keying in her own annotations on the starmap, Dax said, “This part of the grid has a lot of ships in motion, but it’s completely chaotic. That’s where we’ll punch through—right now, before they get their bearings. Mister Tharp, set your course and confirm when ready.”
Tharp entered the new flight path with a few deft taps of his blue fingers and turned his chair to face Dax. “Ready, sir. Just give the word.”
“The word is given, Mister Tharp. Slipstream jump, maximum speed.” She pointed forward as she added, “Engage.”
The Bolian flight controller activated the slipstream drive, and the streaked starlight of warp travel became a bluish-white swirl twisting around the Aventine, whose hull rang with an eerie, almost musical resonance.
Dax imagined the stunned reactions of the hapless Romulans she and her crew had just left beh
ind at the border and permitted herself a gloating smile. Catch us if you can.
42
The life-support module was the first system to fail inside Sarina’s stolen Breen interceptor, followed half a minute later by the active sensors in the aft fuselage. Sarina didn’t care as long as the engines kept going. Heat warnings lit up her console, and the fighter’s flight controls were growing unresponsive. She could barely see through the cockpit’s canopy, whose outer layer was splintering.
Her pursuers were still well behind her, but they hadn’t given up the chase. They were waiting for her ship’s inevitable engine failure. As the dartlike craft shuddered and sparks flew from beneath its forward console, Sarina suspected that fateful event was mere moments away. She checked her range to Bashir: ninety thousand kilometers and closing fast. Forty thousand kilometers was the maximum range of a Starfleet transporter. Because Sarina had no idea where the Aventine might be if—when, she corrected herself—it came to retrieve Bashir, to have a chance of being beamed up with him Sarina knew she needed to get to within ten thousand kilometers of his position, which was in the midst of an asteroid ring.
She was sixty thousand kilometers out when her starboard thruster started to sputter and lose power. To avoid being thrown into an unrecoverable spin, she cut power in the port thruster to match. Then the engine core of her interceptor seized, and energy levels inside her ship plummeted. She continued to hurtle forward, but the corrections she had made to keep her course steady as the engines quit had cost her a fair amount of her speed, and she was no longer capable of acceleration.
Her pursuers reappeared on her long-range sensors. They were flying at their top speed and gaining rapidly on Sarina’s position. It took her a fraction of a second to calculate their velocity relative to hers and determine how many seconds it would be until they overtook her and entered optimal weapons range. In even less time she concluded that she would be just less than forty thousand kilometers from Bashir’s position. Sarina frowned. Not good enough.