A call came up from the transporter room. “We have the maintenance team, Captain.”
“Resume pursuit!”
It was too late. The warbird, having done its damage, sped away and faded from sight, its cloaking device activated.
Picard sat back in his seat and took a breath. The main superstructure of the array was intact, but multiple sections had calved off like metal icebergs in space, and sections still glowed intensely, fires clearly burning in the outpost’s interior.
La Forge called up from the transporter room. “We got everyone out, Captain.”
Picard nodded. “Are you all right, Mister La Forge?”
“I’m a little confused. What did we do to them?”
Picard stared at the wreck, bewildered. What, indeed?
Twelve
AVENTINE
STAGING AREA TWO
The fusion of symbionts with the bipedal natives of Trill resulted in beings with one mind and one will. But life with two cerebral nuclei with their own brainwave patterns was something one needed to prepare for—and Ezri’s Joining with Dax had been unplanned, necessary to save the latter. In the days immediately after, her own doubts about “living up to Dax” had led to many a sleepless night.
She was having another one now, worrying over Aventine’s guest. Walking quickly through the halls with Kedair, she was dreading another meeting.
The black-haired Takaran tried to cheer the captain. “Admiral Riker will be fine. We did a great job at the Annunciator. It’s all over.”
“I’m not so sure it is.” Dax had reason for her doubts. After-action reports normally took place in an observation lounge, where all concerned reported. But Admiral Riker had scheduled the post-Kinshaya action briefing for stellar cartography. That suggested to Dax that what lay ahead of them was more important than what they had just done.
Riker was already inside, standing amidst the stars of the galaxy. They were holographically projected around the catwalk and balcony he was on. Bowers stood beside him. The admiral was looking up and around, Dax saw, his face lit by stars and with fascination. Meanwhile, Bowers looked at the deck, as worried as she’d seen him.
“What’s the story, Sam?” Dax asked.
He looked up. He hadn’t slept much either. “I was just about to tell you about it when I ran into the admiral. It’s about the admiral’s report back to Starfleet.”
Dax’s heart jumped. “Did . . . they have a problem with it?”
“They never got it,” Riker said, not looking back at them. “The subspace message never got through.”
Bowers nodded. “From our location, there are three different subspace repeater stations we normally would relay messages through.” He turned and pointed to some blinking images above his head. “Two of ours, and one run by a nonmember world in Federation space. They’re all offline.”
Kedair bristled as she looked up. “Even Outpost 11?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s only one rational explanation,” Riker said, turning to face them.
Dax felt a headache coming on. This was the sick feeling that Bowers had already gotten. They’d failed, had been too late in disabling the Annunciator. “The Kinshaya have already used Takedown. That’s why they weren’t on their guard.”
“That’s not it.” The admiral shook his head. “It’s what I was afraid of. Someone else used Takedown.”
“Who?”
“I think I know.” Riker touched a control at the railing, and a nearby sector of space enlarged. “The Annunciator was one of two places we suspected might unleash Takedown. Admiral Akaar told me that a nearer vessel would deal with the other one, but now we have to assume that mission failed. There’s no doubt that the other target was trickier.” He turned and pointed. “The other transceiver is operated by the Breen.”
The Breen? Dax’s eyes focused on the location Riker was pointing to. There was no image of any station, just the golden twin-crescent symbol of the Breen Confederacy floating in air. The Breen were a multispecies coalition operating in the Alpha Quadrant—obfuscation was their stock in trade. Breen encased their bodies in armor and used vocal encoders to hide what race they belonged to; an egalitarian gesture that also meant no outsiders could see with whom they were dealing. The Breen had been on the other side in the Dominion War and were one of the charter members of the Typhon Pact. They were a strange and difficult people.
She wasn’t expecting to find a Breen installation in this neck of the interstellar woods, however. “What’s a Breen station doing in the Romulan Neutral Zone? They’re a long way from home.”
“That’s the reason for it,” Riker said. “It’s a repeater station, capable of communicating across long distances with their Typhon Pact allies. That ought to be enough reason to blow it away.”
Dax and her crewmates looked at each other, startled by his last statement. “Excuse me, Admiral,” Bowers said. “Blow it away?”
Seemingly realizing that he’d put things too forcefully, Riker turned to face them and backtracked. “If we were at war, I mean. But we have cause—and orders—to put it out of commission today. You were asking earlier how the Kinshaya got hold of the Takedown program. I can tell you now that it was the Breen that developed it for them.”
Dax inhaled. It made sense. The Breen always spoke in their encrypted speech using their vocoders; they weren’t much interested in communicating with anyone else the normal way. If they wanted to damage all outsiders—including their ostensible Typhon allies, who, Admiral Riker reported, had just met at the Summit of Eight without them—this would be a way to do it. “It’s not too far from here.”
“Four hours and seven minutes at warp nine point eight,” Riker said.
Dax looked up at the display. Distance was calculated next to the station, but not travel time. She grinned. “You just did the math?”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot.” Riker passed her a padd. “We are now acting under contingency orders signed by Admiral Akaar. The other ship clearly failed. We have to take the Breen station offline.”
Kedair’s violet eyes were filled with puzzlement. “But the damage from Takedown has already started.”
“As long as they can propagate it, we’re charged with stopping them. We will disable the station and return to what I’ve labeled as Staging Area Three.” He spoke in low, serious tones. “And we can make no mistake now. We can’t just run silent. We have to run deaf—not even ancient radio sets. If Takedown is being transmitted by the Breen via subspace, Aventine is at risk—and anyone Aventine communicates with. Is that understood? This ship’s electronic systems are the target. You have to shield it as if it’s just another crewmember.” He paused. “No, more important than any other crewmember.”
Kedair nodded. “I’ve already been working with Lieutenant Leishman to harden our systems—and plug any leaks.”
“Aventine will be an island unto itself,” Dax assured him. But she shared Bowers’s concern. “Has Starfleet thought through the ramifications, here? Nobody takes the Kinshaya seriously. But I know the Breen, Admiral. Attacking them like this could quickly spin out of control.”
“It’s already spinning,” Riker said. “There’s been a strike at our communications systems.”
“But that’s not attacking a manned station,” Dax countered.
“Isn’t it?” The Admiral looked directly into her eyes. “This kind of thing isn’t new, Captain. Cutting telegraph lines was a common tactic in the nineteenth century on Earth. In those days it was the prelude to an attack—but now we understand it as an attack all on its own. It doesn’t matter whether Breen fleets start moving on us the next day. It’s begun. They don’t have to kill our people to damage us.”
Kedair nodded in agreement. “And if we attack, the political situation wouldn’t necessarily metastasize. The Breen attacked Titan at Garadius, and it didn’t spin out of control then.”
Bowers was still troubled. “It’s different when your ho
use gets hit. We were lucky the Kinshaya outpost was so easy. These things have a way of going wrong. We could try as hard as possible to be surgical—and still accidentally kill Breen.”
Riker raised his hands to end the debate. “People, caution is healthy—to a point. These are very big fleets operating out there, sometimes bumping each other and crashing. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being on the diplomatic side, it’s that not every incident is the start of something else. My experience tells me this operation is both necessary—and unlikely to snowball.”
He gestured back to the holographic display. “I think this is simple. I think the Garadius incident caused the Breen to lose standing with the rest of the Typhon Pact. The Breen decided to let everyone have it, signing on junior partners in the Kinshaya. Maybe the Holy Order was supposed to be their patsy in this—I don’t know. But the Summit of Eight was called by the Typhon Pact so we would take care of it.” He deactivated the holographic display, the false night being replaced by warm lighting. “And take care of it, we will.”
“Yes, sir,” Dax quickly said. Under normal lighting, she could see dark circles under Riker’s eyes. He seemed to have all the energy in the world, but even admirals were mere mortals. “Sir, have you gotten any sleep? Your orderly said you sent him away from the holodeck—I mean, from your office.”
Riker walked past the officers toward the exit. “I can make my own bed, Captain. And if I need anything, the holodeck will provide.”
“I’m sure, Admiral. I’m just concerned.”
“Noted and appreciated.” He looked back from the doorway. “Give the Breen your attention. I don’t need it.”
After seeing the doors close behind Riker, Bowers turned to Dax and Kedair and threw up his hands. “I don’t know what you two thought, but that man was five steps ahead of us during that whole conversation.”
“That’s why he got the call,” Kedair said.
Bowers shook his head, looking searchingly at Dax. “You think Starfleet is playing this right?”
Dax shrugged. “Above my pay grade, Sam. Let’s get ready.”
Thirteen
ENTERPRISE
EPSILON OUTPOST 11
Picard had no problem walking around the fallen girders. For all the ordnance expended by the Romulan warbird—the ship had been identified as D’varian—astonishingly little damage had been done to the living area aboard Outpost 11. But almost all of the external systems were down, and EPS feedback had fried many of the computers.
Worf had joined him in his tour of the damage. The Klingon’s mood had not improved since the Romulan warbird went to warp—and seeing the condition of the outpost’s command center hadn’t helped. “This area was barely touched. We should have given chase.”
Picard nodded. He certainly would have liked to, but there was no way of knowing what sections of the station would be spared, and securing its personnel came first. That, and sending a warning to Starfleet—which they had done.
Or rather, they had tried to do it. La Forge was working on that problem.
The captain walked around the command center, glancing both inside—and out, looking through the large ports toward the metal morass floating outside. “Number One, does anything about what the Romulans did strike you as odd?”
“Everything about the Romulans strikes me as odd.”
“I mean the nature of the damage, here.”
Worf looked around the command center. “They took pains to preserve the inhabited areas of the station. You think they intend to return and put it into operation for their own use?”
“It’s a possibility,” Picard said, although even as he said it, he couldn’t imagine what value the place held in its current condition. “I don’t think a dozen Geordis could get this place running within a year.”
“And you only have one,” La Forge said, eyes glistening slightly blue as he appeared in a darkened doorway. He didn’t need a light with his synthetic ocular implants, but the repair workers behind him had them. “From the diagnostics we can still check from here, one of the inward-pointing arrays seems salvageable. But the Brightman-Laird equipment is done for.”
Picard shook his head, disappointed. “It’s complete madness. There wasn’t a single offensive thing about the work this station was doing.”
“ ‘A mad Romulan’ is redundant,” Worf said.
“Let’s hope they don’t try to repeat this somewhere else.” The captain looked to La Forge. “We still haven’t received any confirmation of our alert.”
La Forge shook his head. “No, sir.” Enterprise hadn’t been able to raise Command on any of the regular channels, although they had connected with a number of vessels that promised to relay the alert. It was a peculiar state of affairs and suggested that other stations just like Outpost 11 had been interdicted.
But that seemed impossible. “Could something be interfering with the functioning of the other stations?” Picard asked.
“Like a Romulan photon torpedo?” Worf asked, not joking.
“Let’s hope not,” the captain replied. “But I had more in mind something technical—like a cyber attack on the stations themselves.”
La Forge thought for a moment. “It’s possible, I suppose. The Federation has a lot of protections against that, but not all the stations are ones we built.” The engineer found a working display console and pointed to locations on the starmap. “This region is already poorly served. This was always such a chancy place to build, being situated between us, the Klingons, and the Romulans. Apart from the defensive installations, like this one used to be, there’s not much out here. And we know what happened to the starbases out here.”
Picard well remembered. Starbases 157, 234, and 343 had been destroyed in the Borg Invasion. Enterprise had listened to the hopeless distress call from one of them.
Picard gestured to the hallway La Forge had emerged from. “You said one of the arrays might function. Is there any way to get us a direct link to Admiral Akaar? We’re in a position to do something to stop the D’varian.” He saw Worf’s eyebrow rise approvingly at that sentence. “But we still require orders. We can’t just send a message—we have to have feedback.”
La Forge pointed to a small dot on the starmap. “If I can get the array working, I think I can bounce a signal off the Ferengi station.”
“They have one out here?”
“Their merchant fleets were eating up local comm capability, so the Federation permitted them to build in our space.”
“Industrious.”
“I’ll have to be, too, to make this work. I need to get some power back online out there.”
“We’ll hold the fort,” Picard said, watching the engineer returning into the darkness.
Actually, the captain knew, there wasn’t a reason to stay. They’d seen everything—and every moment his first officer remained only seemed to annoy the Klingon more.
“Speak your mind, Worf.”
“I do not believe this was an isolated incident—and I don’t think our communication problems are unrelated. There is a plan here, coordination.” His eyes glinted. “And that makes it Romulan.”
AVENTINE
The Dax symbiont had been in many different kinds of space combat before—including frequent raids while joined to Jadzia, aboard the Defiant during the Dominion War. Jadzia Dax had seen that many space battles were little more than three-dimensional chess games, a pastime starship captains favored for obvious reasons.
Yet Ezri Dax had never seen a game that had ended so soon after the first move—especially not when the competitors were so mismatched.
It was a rout. A rout, by a single ship, against three Breen battle cruisers. Titan had successfully fought off a single cruiser and three landing vehicles months earlier at Garadius IV, but that force had nothing like the firepower of the force Aventine had faced. And it had ended in less than ten minutes.
Nobody knew with a degree of certainty what the Breen called anything. The sta
tion had been known, in Aventine’s planning sessions, by the tactical nomenclature Breen Array Alpha, a term whose acronym had resulted in a number of sheep jokes. No one had expected the Breen to act that way when the wolf was in the fold, however, and they hadn’t. The cruisers had been alerted to something; Dax had assumed it was the raid on the Kinshaya. Dax remembered wondering, on seeing the vessels guarding the station, how Aventine could ever execute its plan.
Then Riker had stepped in.
As with the attack on the Annunciator, Riker had positioned himself just off to the right of the command chairs on the bridge, standing without apparent fear of being toppled by any impact. He had been mostly silent, but on seeing the Breen defenders, he had spoken up. Dax and Bowers had divided their responsibilities on the mission so she could focus on attacking the array while Bowers coordinated Aventine’s defense against the Breen. Her first officer had yielded when he heard Admiral Riker begin to issue orders.
Riker had called the shots, directing which of Aventine’s defensive batteries fired at which Breen ship. At the same time, he had called out to Dax angles of approach that would best suit both the ship’s defense and her own task. Freed of the need to dictate navigation, Dax was fully able to act as bombardier, directing photon torpedoes against the station’s dark metal spars festooned with sending and receiving apparatus.
Left with nothing to do, Bowers had sat, dazzled. She knew he regarded Riker as one of the best officers ever to sit second chair. Now he had a literal ringside seat. Kedair had offered, with the most polite irritation in her voice, to step aside and let Riker take the tactical station—but he had simply held his position, calmly calling out one instruction after another.
It was the sort of thing every captain feared admirals would do on their bridges; the sort of thing Dax imagined that Riker himself would have been annoyed by. Yet it was hard for anyone to get too upset when the man was constantly right in his calls. Aventine had screamed away from the Breen array without a scratch—and left behind a disabled station and three cruisers with neatly severed warp nacelles.
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