by David Mack
The Tiber was back on the ground. Its controls stuttered and went dark, and then the tiny ship fell as silent as the grave. Blackmer sensed this was no ordinary malfunction: it was sabotage. Bashir must have booby-trapped his runabout as a precaution. Through the cockpit viewport he watched as the Rio Grande streaked away like a missile into the cloudless blue sky. Blackmer tapped the combadge on his uniform. “Blackmer to Defiant.”
Captain Ro answered. “This is Defiant. Go ahead.”
“Doctor Bashir has escaped custody and stolen the Rio Grande. He’s heading for orbit.”
• • •
As Blackmer’s report of Bashir’s flight from Bajor filtered down from the bridge’s overhead comm, Prynn Tenmei glanced over her shoulder from the Defiant’s forward console to gauge Captain Ro’s reaction. The Bajoran commanding officer’s stern face gave nothing away, and her voice was level and calm as she responded to Blackmer. “Can you join the pursuit?”
“Negative. He sabotaged the Tiber. It’s down for the count.”
“Understood. Defiant out.” Ro looked toward Ensign Crosswhite at the tactical console and made a quick slashing gesture. Crosswhite closed the comm channel as Ro stood from the command chair. “Tactical, get a lock on the Rio Grande. Helm, set an intercept course.”
Crosswhite and Tenmei both replied “Aye, sir” as they executed Ro’s commands. The magenta-haired tactical officer was the first to add, “I have a lock on the runabout.”
Ro folded her hands behind her back and projected quiet confidence. “Raise shields, charge tractor beam, and arm phasers, one-quarter power. Target the Rio Grande’s engines.”
“All systems ready,” Crosswhite said. “The Rio Grande will enter weapons range in nine seconds.” Sensor data appeared on the main viewscreen, superimposed over the runabout.
All eyes were on the viewscreen or on Ro, so no one noticed as, with a subtle tap of one little finger, Tenmei triggered the sabotage she’d prepared four days earlier.
Thunder resounded through the hull as the ship lurched and heaved, knocking the captain off her feet and pinning the rest of the bridge officers against their consoles. On the viewscreen, the heavens pitched and rolled, turning bright stars into chaotic streaks. The overhead lights stuttered into darkness, and Tenmei winced and braced herself for her pièce de résistance.
The bottom half of her duty station erupted into sparks and shrapnel, and she barely jumped clear of a fireball that belched from her fractured wraparound console, blackening the overhead. She hit the deck with her hands singed and bleeding and her uniform smoldering from dozens of tiny bits of red-hot debris.
Captain Ro kneeled and swatted glowing embers off Tenmei’s torso and arms. “Lieutenant! Are you hurt?”
Tenmei’s voice was hoarse from the toxic smoke she’d inhaled. “I’ll live.”
Reassured, the captain turned to get answers from Crosswhite. “Report!”
“Primary systems offline.” The ensign struggled in vain to coax information from her console. “We have comms, but sensors are down. Not sure what hit us, or where it started.”
Ro slapped her combadge. “Bridge to engineering! Damage report!”
Chief O’Brien sounded calm over the comm despite the cacophony of shouting and warning sirens in the engineering compartment. “No damage to the engines, but command-and-control systems are shot—even the auxiliaries. I hate to say it, sir . . . but we’re adrift.”
The captain simmered for a moment. Then she turned her eyes upward, as if she saw something far off, through the ship’s bulkheads. She tapped her combadge. “Ro to Rio Grande. Well-played, Doctor. I salute you. But if I ever catch you, I am going to kick your ass.”
Crosswhite silenced a soft chirping on the communications panel. “BPOC reports the Rio Grande has gone to warp, Captain.”
“Noted, Ensign. Hail the station and tell Commander Stinson to send the Glyrhond to tow us home for repairs.” Ro extended a hand to Tenmei, clasped her forearm, and helped her to her feet. “Go get yourself patched up.”
Tenmei shook her head. “I’ll be fine, Captain.”
“I didn’t ask you for a status report. I gave you an order.” A jog of her head. “Go.”
“Aye, sir.” Tenmei left the bridge holding her burned and shrapnel-torn palms in front of her chest like a surgeon with ungloved clean hands heading into an operating room.
As she made her way aft to the turbolift and down one deck to the medical bay, she reflected on the fact that there was little chance any hard evidence would ever be found to link her to the sabotage of the Defiant. Inevitably, someone would note the anomaly of her unscheduled relief of Crosswhite from the overnight watch a few days earlier, but that alone would not be enough to merit a court-martial.
But even if Tenmei hadn’t been certain of that—even if her role in Bashir’s escape would have cost her everything—she knew she would still have done her part, and done it gladly.
For Julian, her friend.
For the people of Andor.
And not least of all . . . for Shar.
Once, long ago, she and Shar had been in love. Or at least, they had thought they were. Circumstances had pulled them apart by subjecting them to forces greater than they could resist: family, duty, old vows, and, more than anything, an ever-widening gulf of time and space. But even though she was no longer in love with him, she still loved him, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to help him and his beautiful, tragic, passionate people.
The medical bay door opened ahead of her, and she held up her scorched hands to show Doctor Pascal Boudreaux the reason for her visit. The stout, dark-haired Louisiana native motioned for Tenmei to take a seat on the nearer of the compartment’s two biobeds.
As she settled in, Boudreaux grabbed a medical tricorder, a hypospray, and a dermal regenerator, then he joined her and turned on his bedside manner. “Lay back.” She admired his rich Creole accent and did as he said. He eased the hypospray to her throat. She felt a negligible tingle as he injected her and explained, “For the pain.” Like a promise fulfilled, the analgesic dulled the persistent hot stinging in her hands and left her woozy.
His hands moved with slow, methodical precision, guiding the dermal regenerator’s beam over her seared flesh, restoring it to unblemished perfection while she watched. He noticed her attention and paused after treating her left arm. “How do you feel, Lieutenant? You are okay?”
She answered with a calm heart. “Yeah, Doc. . . . I think I am.”
Eighteen
Leonard James Akaar was a powerful man, in many senses of the word. A scion of Capellan royalty, the son of a teer, he had inherited a fearsome physique. Taller than most other humanoids, his broad shoulders, barrel chest, and pronounced musculature would impress even the most jaded Klingon warrior, and despite having just celebrated his one hundred eighteenth birthday (by Earth reckoning), he was still healthy and robust, and his mind was as sharp as the blades of a kligat. Only his bone-white hair betrayed his age, though his subordinates assured him frequently that it made him look not elderly but “distinguished.”
He knew that all his physical attributes and prowess, however striking, were nothing compared to the true power he wielded as Starfleet’s highest-ranking general officer. When he gave the word, great fleets moved, armies took action, and the fates of billions were decided. Countless beings lived or perished each day by the force of his commands. In his right hand he held the power of life, and clutched in his left was the dark might of death.
So why did he constantly feel as if he were at the mercy of events beyond his control?
He trained his focus on the Efrosian woman from Starfleet Intelligence who had barged into his office moments earlier. “Repeat that, please?”
“Doctor Julian Bashir has escaped custody on Bajor.”
Commander Sarai’s report remained as much a non sequitur now as it had the first time Akaar had heard it. “I was not aware that Doctor Bashir was in custody.”
“He was, sir. President Pro Tem Ishan ordered his arrest three hours ago, from Betazed.”
Akaar suspected there was more to Sarai’s narrative. “On what grounds?”
“Conspiracy to commit espionage, and illegal access to the Shedai Meta-Genome.”
Her report jogged Akaar’s memory. “You mentioned something about that in a staff meeting last week, didn’t you?”
“Five days ago, sir. At the Monday morning senior staff briefing.”
“And I seem to recall you were ordered not to pursue this.”
“I didn’t.”
“So, it’s a coincidence that the president pro tem issued an arrest order based on a report that was never supposed to leave this headquarters?” Her pause was damning. “We’ll revisit that in a moment. Were Bashir and his colleagues working on the Andorian cure, as you suspected?”
“Aye, sir. Their computers and storage systems were impounded, but it seems as if all the Meta-Genome data had been securely deleted before we arrived.”
“What about the cure? Did they find it?”
“If they did, they left no trace of it, sir.”
Her news perplexed Akaar. “Why would they go to so much effort, only to erase all their work?” A troubling thought occurred to him. “Do we know where Bashir’s headed?”
“His departure trajectory from the Bajor system suggests he’s en route to Andor.”
More notions and theories spun in the admiral’s imagination. “Why go to Andor, unless . . . unless he already has the cure. He must have hidden it, smuggled it out somehow.”
“Sir, if we can make that deduction, the Typhon Pact likely can as well. It’s against their interests to let Bashir deliver that cure to Andor. If they capture him, they could present the cure to Andor as their own work—and that would be a political disaster for the Federation.”
She was right, and that vexed him. He paced behind his desk. “We need to handle this with care. One mistake and we could end up in a shooting war with the Typhon Pact.” He tapped the internal comm switch on his desk. “Yeoman, get in here.”
Seconds later his office door slid open, admitting the low bustling of comm chatter, muted conversations, and computer feedback tones from the command center on the lower level outside Akaar’s office. His yeoman, an absurdly young-looking Vulcan man whose name Akaar had yet to learn, hurried in clutching a padd and a stylus. “Yes, Admiral?”
“Get admirals Nechayev, Batanides, and Bennett in here, on the double.”
The Vulcan furrowed his steep brows. “Admiral James Bennett from the JAG office?”
“Do you know of another admiral in Starfleet named Bennett?”
The yeoman about-faced as he answered. “No, sir. Right away, sir.”
“Get back here.” Akaar waited while the Vulcan pivoted around to stand at attention.
“Sir?”
“Track down the Aventine and get me Captain Dax on a real-time subspace channel.” He shooed the Vulcan out of his office with urgent waves. “That’s all. Proceed. Move.”
The yeoman made a hasty exit. As the door closed, Akaar returned to his desk and sat down. He folded his hands on the desktop and trained the full force of his stone-faced condemnation on the Efrosian subordinate in front of him. “Now, then, Commander—let’s take a moment to discuss what I’m going to do about you.”
Nineteen
It was an inescapable fact of life in Starfleet, Ezri Dax had decided, that on the Aventine crises only ever happened when she was trying to sleep. After tossing and sprawling for nearly two hours after she had turned in for the night, she had drifted off sometime just after 0315—which made the shrilling of the overhead comm so damned unwelcome at 0439.
“Bridge to Captain Dax.” It was the ship’s senior science officer and third-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Gruhn Helkara. The young Zakdorn’s voice trembled with urgency.
Dax stifled a groan and a softly muttered curse, then pinched the sleep from the corners of her eyes as she sat up. “Gruhn, unless we’re under attack—”
“Fleet Admiral Akaar is waiting to talk with you on a secure channel from Earth.”
That explained Gruhn’s tone of alarm. “Patch it down to my quarters.”
She pushed off the covers and forced her weary limbs out of bed. A yawn contorted her face as she scooped up her dark-blue bathrobe from the bench at the foot of her bed and wrapped it around herself on the short walk to her quarters’ main room where a secure comm terminal sat on a desk, its incoming-signal light blinking in the darkness.
With both hands, Dax pushed her sleep-mussed black hair from her forehead, then sat down in front of the terminal. She opened the channel and squinted slightly as the screen burst to brilliant life with a sunlit image of Starfleet’s white-haired, stern-faced commander. “Admiral. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Akaar skipped the preambles and pleasantries. “I have new orders for you. Because of their sensitive and personal nature, I want to discuss them with you directly.”
“Personal for who, sir?”
“For you, Captain.” There was regret in his eyes as he continued. “I’m to understand you once had an intimate relationship with Doctor Julian Bashir, did you not?”
The inquiry summoned old habits of defensiveness Dax had thought long expunged. “I did, sir. But that was years ago. It’s long behind us.”
The admiral’s demeanor turned cagey. “But you remain close, correct?”
Where was he going with this? “We’re still friends, yes. Has something happened?”
“Doctor Bashir is facing charges of espionage and high treason. He was arrested on Bajor a few hours ago, but he broke custody and fled in the Rio Grande. Attempts to pursue him were foiled by acts of sabotage on the Tiber and the Defiant.”
Uncharitable as it was, Dax imagined such a fiasco must somehow be connected to Bashir’s romance with former Starfleet Intelligence field agent Sarina Douglas—but she pushed away that notion for lack of proof. “Admiral, there must be some mistake—”
“I wish there were, Captain. But there is more than ample evidence that Doctor Bashir and his accomplices acquired classified Starfleet Intelligence archive files through—”
“Pardon me, sir—accomplices?”
Akaar’s expression darkened. “Four of the Federation’s preeminent medical experts appear to have been helping him analyze and repurpose the stolen intel.”
“To what end?”
Her question seemed to put Akaar on the spot. His mandibular muscles clenched and relaxed, as if he were grinding his teeth. “That’s not important, Captain. What matters is that we believe he escaped with a copy of some or all of this classified information, and it’s imperative that we capture him and recover the data before it falls into the wrong hands.”
“And you feel the Aventine is best suited to this mission because . . . ?”
“You know him, Captain. How he works, how he thinks, what he’s capable of. Who he might turn to for help. And because we suspect his current destination is Andor, you and your ship are perfectly positioned to intercept him.”
Dax had to concede the admiral’s reasoning was sound, but questions lingered. “Why do you think he’s heading to Andor?”
Another pause by Akaar signaled another attempt to deflect Dax’s question. “Again, Captain, for now we think it’s best to compartmentalize such intel on a need-to-know—”
“Sir, if you want me to get inside Julian’s”—she cleared her throat—“inside Doctor Bashir’s head, I need to know as much as possible about what he’s doing, and even more important, what he thinks he’s doing. If you need me to withhold certain details from my crew, so be it. But I can’t even begin to predict his behavior unless I know his objective.”
Her argument left Akaar mute for a moment. When the admiral looked up, he wore a resigned expression. “Very well, Captain. The following information is for you only—it is not to be shared with your crew, not even with your XO.”
&n
bsp; “Understood, sir.”
“Through channels of which we are currently unaware, Doctor Bashir acquired a copy of Starfleet’s archive file about the Shedai Meta-Genome. He and his colleagues claim that they used the Meta-Genome to design a cure to the Andorian fertility crisis. That’s what we think he’s trying to deliver to someone on Andor, most likely Professor Marthrossi zh’Thiin, or your mutual former crewmate Thirishar ch’Thane. Our orders are to prevent that delivery, recover all copies of the cure, and take Doctor Bashir into custody, as quickly as possible.”
Confusion and indignation made Dax recoil slightly in her chair. “Admiral, are you telling me that we’ve been ordered to stop him from completing a mercy mission?”
“Ours is not to reason why, Captain. Ours is but to obey the whims of the chief executive.”
“Sir, enacting a politically motivated embargo is one thing, but—”
“Let me clarify the situation, Captain.” Akaar leaned in, filling the screen with his weathered visage. “I am under direct orders from the president pro tem to apprehend Bashir with all due haste. To that end, he has directed me to redeploy all ships currently tasked to the Andor embargo to the capture of Doctor Bashir. If someone other than you finds him first, I would dread to think how they might interpret Ishan’s subsequent orders. I, for one, would sleep better tonight if I knew that Bashir was safely in custody aboard the Aventine.”
Dax knew better than to ask the admiral to elaborate on what “subsequent orders” Starfleet might receive from the president pro tem following Bashir’s arrest. Realizing that she was being tasked not with a manhunt but with a clandestine search and rescue, she accepted the orders in the spirit they had been given. “Understood, sir.”