by David Mack
“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!”
Over the deafening rumbles rocking the hull, Dax said, “Mister Tharp?”
“The Breen ship is fully inside the hangar.”
“Full reverse on my mark,” Dax said. “Half-second warp jump!”
“Coordinates locked,” Tharp said.
“Five…,” Mirren counted. “Four…”
“Standing by to beam up Bashir and Douglas,” Kedair said.
“Three…”
“Drop shields,” Dax said. “Energize!”
“Two…one.”
Dax snapped, “Mark!”
Tharp tapped his console, and the asteroid vanished from the main screen in a blur of streaked light. Two seconds later, a flash of light filled the screen.
Turning slowly toward her tactical officer, Dax said in a quiet voice, “Lonnoc, I hope you have good news to share, or I’m going to be very upset.”
Keer turned from one subordinate to another in search of good news but found only catastrophes. “Are their shields down yet?”
“No,” said a newly hired engineer whose name Keer had not learned. “They changed the rotation cycle—we are unable to find the neutralizing harmonic.”
Fists clenched in frustration, Keer bellowed, “Set the energy-dampening field to maximum power, full range—smother everything, us included!”
It was Jath who delivered the next bit of bad news. “The Starfleet ship generated a feedback pulse in the dampener,” he said. “The system is offline.”
Turning the dampener against itself…I have to respect their ingenuity. “Charge the warp coils,” Keer said. “Prepare to ram them!”
“There is no time,” Jath protested. “The core will breach any moment—”
Raising a hand to silence the foreman, Keer said, “I know. Belay my last.”
On the master situation monitor, a countdown to the core breach dwindled to its final seconds. Keer had tried everything in his power, though he had hobbled himself by daring to hope he might escape with his ship and his life. If I had chosen to sacrifice myself sooner, we could have charged the warp coils. He bowed his head in shame and defeat. It no longer matters. The fight is over.
Behind him lay pandemonium. His crew was scrambling in all directions, their voices full of fear and desperation, each of them clinging to denial like drowning men to flotsam. Keer was determined to meet his end with more dignity.
On the main screen, the Starfleet ship vanished in a flash of light, and he knew he had been robbed of even his final act of spite. The enemy had escaped.
Keer dropped to his knees and, in defiance of all tradition and protocol, pulled off his helmet and cast it aside, revealing his true face.
“I have lived as a Breen,” he whispered as the Marjat vanished in a flash of white heat, “but I die a Paclu.”
44
No matter how many times engineers tried to convince Bashir that one was not able to perceive the passage of time while dematerialized inside a transporter buffer, he remained certain that he could feel the difference between a long transport cycle and a short one—and the one he had just endured seemed as if it had lasted an eternity.
He’d felt the immobilizing tug of the annular confinement beam, and then a haze of energized particles had surrounded him, scrubbing the starscape from view. In an eyeblink he had submerged into a sea of endless white light.
As the interior of the Aventine’s main transporter took shape before him, however, Bashir had the uncanny, mildly disoriented sensation of awakening from a long slumber. Feeling his feet on a solid surface, he wavered as he regained his balance and adjusted to being back in normal gravity. He spread his arms to steady himself, and his left hand touched something. He turned and saw another unsteady figure in Breen armor looking back at him.
Bashir unfastened the seals on his helmet and pulled it off in a fumbling rush as the person beside him did the same. He cast aside his Breen mask in time to see Sarina drop hers to the deck. They moved toward each other, half leaping and half falling, and collapsed into each other’s arms.
Behind the transporter console on the far side of the compartment, a male Benzite chief petty officer nudged his enlisted female Orion assistant. “Not bad!” he exclaimed, oblivious of the heartfelt reunion transpiring mere meters away atop the transporter platform. “Wouldn’t you say so, Taryl?”
The green-skinned brunette shrugged. “I guess.”
“You guess? I, Neldok, with these two hands, successfully transported two subjects who were traveling with divergent velocities, acquired while the ship was moving at near warp speed, and rematerialized them together onto one pad!”
Taryl shot a bored look at her amphibian supervisor. “It’s been done.”
Neldok harrumphed. “I guess there’s no pleasing some people.” Belatedly taking note of Bashir and Sarina’s continued silent embrace, Neldok pointed at the door and said to Taryl, “Perhaps we should step out and give them the room.”
The crewman rolled her eyes. “You think?” She let Neldok usher her out the door. As the Benzite followed her out, he looked back and smiled with innocent admiration as he said under his breath, “What an adorable couple.”
The door closed, affording Bashir and Sarina a moment of privacy.
He reached up with one hand and gingerly touched her bruised face. Her lips were brittle, cracked, and caked with dried blood. “You’re hurt,” he said, tracing the line of her jaw with his fingertips.
“It’s nothing,” she said, lifting her hand tenderly to his cheek.
“Who did this to you? The Breen military?”
She shook her head. “No, a civilian. A BID inquisitor.”
He planted a soft kiss on her forehead. She winced. He pulled back and saw that she was trembling. “What did he do to you?”
“Went a bit overboard with his neural truncheon,” Sarina said. “I’ll be fine.”
Taking her hand, he tried to lead her off the platform. “We need to get you to sickbay,” he said. “There could be synaptic—”
“Julian.” She pulled him back to her. “In a minute. I promise I’m not dying.” Offering up a bittersweet smile, she stroked his bearded chin and pushed her fingers through his hair. “I’m just glad you’re not hurt,” she said.
“Actually, I am.” He averted his gaze, haunted by the memory of lives he’d taken in cold blood. My wounds are just harder to see.
She nuzzled his cheek. He saw no hint of judgment in her eyes—only compassion, affection, and understanding.
He sank into her arms, thankful to be done with the mission but even more grateful to have her back at his side. “There’s something I want…” He paused and reconsidered his choice of words. “Something I need to ask you.”
Sarina nodded. “Okay.”
“Now that this is over…what’s next? For us, I mean? Are you staying on with Starfleet Intelligence? Am I? Do you want me to put in—”
The door opened, and Dr. Simon Tarses entered, followed by a human nurse. Stopping in midstep, the young quarter-Romulan physician stammered, “Um, uh, sorry, Julian—I mean, Doctor. We, um, didn’t—”
“It’s okay, Simon,” Bashir said to his former Deep Space 9 colleague. He masked his irritation at Tarses’s unfortunate timing. “You’re not interrupting.”
“Ah, well, that’s good to know,” Tarses said with a nervous smile. “You two have had quite a rough week, I imagine.”
Bashir nodded. “It had its moments.”
“And then some,” Sarina added.
“Well, tell you what,” Tarses said. “Let’s get you two down to sickbay, swap those pressure suits for new uniforms, run a few tests—”
Sarina lifted a hand to interrupt. “We know the drill.”
“Throw in a hot shower, and you can run all the tests you want,” Bashir said.
Bashir and Sarina stepped off the transporter platform, and he led the way out. Once they were in the corridor, Sarina walked beside him and took his hand.
He threw her a sidelong glance, and she smiled and tightened her grip.
“In answer to your question,” she whispered, “I go where you go.”
Bashir smiled. He didn’t need to go anywhere ever again. He was home.
Lieutenant Mikaela Leishman stood in the middle of the Aventine’s main engineering deck. She was surrounded by loose parts, jumbles of cables, and several dozen frazzled engineers. The only thing she wanted more than a nap at that moment was someone else to take over her job as the ship’s chief engineer.
Captain Dax’s voice resounded from speakers in the overhead and echoed throughout the voluminous compartment. “Bridge to main engineering.”
Leishman closed her eyes, swallowed a sigh, and in a bright voice intended to mask her fatigue, said, “Leishman here. Go ahead, sir.”
“First, I want to commend you and your team for a fine job inverting the subspatial geometry of the main warp coils.”
The compliment drew a weak smile from Leishman. “Thanks, Captain. It’s always nice when someone understands the miracle.”
“That said, I need to interrupt your victory celebration.”
Turning her head to survey the engineering deck, Leishman saw only weary faces looking back at her as if to ask, What ship is Dax serving on? For the sake of diplomacy, she said simply, “We’ll try, Captain. What’s up?”
“Four Breen heavy cruisers are closing fast on our position. Whatever you did to make the warp coils go backward, you need to undo it.”
“I presume this is a rush job.”
“You’ve got three minutes.”
“I stand corrected. No problem, sir. We’re on it. Leishman out.”
She waited until the channel clicked off. Then she squatted, picked up part of a plasma regulator from the deck, and held it over her head for her engineers to see. “Listen up,” she said, addressing the entire team. “We set a record taking this apart. Now we have two minutes to put it back together—before the Breen kill us all.” She added with a sweet but obviously insincere smile, “No pressure.”
TWO WEEKS LATER
45
Dax sat at the desk in her ready room, sipped from a mug of raktajino, and faced the holographic comm display projected above her desktop. Looking back at her was the visage of Admiral Nechayev. The middle-aged, silver-blond human woman sounded apologetic. “I know you thought this matter closed, Captain. I hope you’ll forgive me if my next question comes off sounding…indelicate.”
“Go on,” Dax said between sips of her drink.
“Have you ever known Doctor Bashir or Lieutenant Douglas to embellish their accounts of events?”
Dax set down her mug. “Why do you ask, Admiral?”
Nechayev sighed. “Some members of the admiralty and the administration are finding it difficult to believe the details of Sarina’s escape from enemy custody, or Bashir’s debriefing with regard to how he reached, destroyed, and subsequently escaped from the target.” Holding up her hands, she added, “I don’t share their doubts, Captain, but without evidence to support—”
“Admiral, we do have evidence: the solid-state drives built into Bashir’s and Douglas’s disguises recorded a complete log of their activities. But since Bashir’s also contains secondhand recordings of the slipstream schematics, and both contain classified intel regarding Starfleet’s preparations for the mission, I decided it was unsafe to risk transmitting them over subspace channels, regardless of encryption. I arranged with Starfleet Intelligence to hand over the drives to Commander Erdona once we reached Deep Space 9.” She keyed in a command to relay a file over the channel to Nechayev. “I’m uploading the chain-of-custody log. It verifies that Erdona received the drives this morning at 0840 station time.”
The admiral perused the data as it came up on her screen. “So, Starfleet Intelligence has possession of the mission logs?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nechayev frowned. “Nice of them to keep me in the loop.”
“Admiral,” Dax said, “as long as I have your attention, I’ve been hearing chatter that the Typhon Pact is making waves because of what happened in the Alrakis system. And rumor has it the Romulans are especially irked about getting ambushed by the Klingons out by the Black Cluster…. I hope we didn’t stir up more trouble than we were supposed to.”
“No more than usual,” Nechayev said. “Stick to the version of events in your logs and there shouldn’t be any problem. The Typhon Pact’s ambassador will do her best to blow it out of proportion, but that’s not your concern.”
Unsure whether Nechayev’s nonchalance was genuine, Dax asked, “Are you sure, Admiral? I have enough commendations in my record that if adding a reprimand or two might help the diplomats back on Earth smooth things over—”
“Ezri, you and your crew performed commendably under near-impossible circumstances. Cut yourself some slack and don’t worry about the political fallout. The wonks at the Palais put us in this mess—let them clean it up. That’s an order.”
“Aye, sir,” Dax said with a smile.
“Nechayev out.”
Dax’s screen went dark as it shifted back into standby mode. She finished her raktajino, placed the mug in the matter reclamator, and walked out of her ready room.
The mood on the bridge was muted but busy. On the main viewer, Deep Space 9 loomed large, and the space around it was heavy with shipping traffic.
Bowers stood from the command chair. “Captain on the deck.” The bridge crew snapped to attention.
“As you were,” Dax said, continuing toward her chair.
Nodding at Dax as she approached, Bowers said, “Refueling operations complete, Captain. All requested provisions have been loaded and stowed, and Deep Space 9 has replaced our expired munitions with fresh ordnance. All personnel are aboard and accounted for. The ship is ready for service.”
“That’s nice,” Dax said. “Give the crew three additional days of liberty and send them ashore.”
The order caught Bowers off guard, just as Dax had intended.
“I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t understand.”
“Give the crew three more days of shore leave, Commander. Schedule it as you see fit—stagger it by shift, whatever works for you.”
Bowers nodded once. “Aye, sir.” Lowering his voice, he added, “I still don’t understand, sir. Did we receive new orders to stay at DS9?”
“No,” Dax said. “I got something better—slack. And I intend to use it.”
“For what?”
Dax shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Can I get some?”
“What would you do with it?”
“I don’t know. Catch up on personnel reports?”
“Then the answer is no, you can’t have any.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“My ship, my rules.”
President Bacco stood with a phony smile on her face as four of her protection agents escorted Tezrene, the Typhon Pact’s ambassador to the United Federation of Planets, into her office on the fifteenth floor of the Palais de la Concorde. As usual, the Tholian diplomat wasted no time on courtesies; she launched into a tirade while crossing the room the moment she saw Bacco.
“Madam President, I hold you personally accountable for delaying this meeting,” Tezrene said, her razor-screech of a native voice translated by her environment suit’s vocoder into something that sounded equally sharp.
Bowing her head in a facsimile of contrition, Bacco said, “My apologies, Madam Ambassador. Pressing matters of state demanded my full attention.”
The six-limbed crystalline arthropod parked herself in front of Bacco’s desk. “To what matters of state do you refer, Madam President?”
Bacco widened her smile and narrowed her
eyes. “I’m not at liberty to elaborate, Your Excellency. I’m certain you understand.”
The squad of protection agents standing at the back of the room tensed as Tezrene gesticulated in a vaguely threatening manner with her two upper forelimbs. “What I understand, Madam President, is that your Starfleet committed acts of unprovoked aggression, and you, through your protracted silence over the past two weeks, have implicitly sanctioned it.”
Stepping behind her desk, Bacco said, “That’s simply not true, Ambassador. Captain Dax and the crew of the Aventine entered Breen space in response to what sounded like an urgent distress signal—one that was documented by the Breen Militia in that sector. Dax and her crew tried to confirm the signal, but the Breen Confederacy’s local comnet had failed. In accordance with interstellar law, they crossed the border for strictly altruistic reasons.”
“Doubtful,” Tezrene said.
“Check the logs, Madam Ambassador. As soon as the Aventine’s crew determined there was no emergency, they withdrew from the Alrakis system.”
Tezrene’s vocoder voice crackled with anger. “Only after they sabotaged and destroyed the Salavat shipyard!”
“Once again, the evidence seems to disagree with your version of events,” Bacco said. “The explosion that destroyed the shipyard appears to have been the result of an internal accident—a reactor core breach, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Sensor logs show your vessel firing on Breen patrol vessels,” Tezrene said.
“In self-defense,” Bacco said. “Those craft fired first on the Aventine. Captain Dax’s response was appropriate and proportional. Her vessel easily could have destroyed those interceptors, but it warned them off instead.”
“You deny that the Aventine was sent to destroy the vessel being constructed at the Salavat yard?”
“I assure you, Ambassador, the Aventine’s crew had no such orders.” Bacco leaned forward on her fists. “Why would I risk a war to destroy one vessel at one shipyard? What possible strategic or tactical value would such a mission have?”