Worf reported, “Scans confirm vessel identity. It’s Aventine. The other vessel is Laplace, under Captain Kwelm.”
“Get me Laplace.”
“Sixty thousand kilometers,” the flight controller said.
A chirp indicated they’d connected with the engineering ship. “Laplace, Enterprise. Report your status.”
“Unharmed,” replied a female Tellarite voice. “Captain Picard, we are so glad to see you! Aventine arrived and began—”
“Hello, Jean-Luc,” interrupted another, more familiar voice.
Picard looked back at Šmrhová. “On-screen!”
Admiral Riker appeared, head and shoulders visible before a black background. “That was some way to say hello. ‘Stand down immediately or we’ll fire?’ ” A hint of a smile crossed his face. “I’ve had better greetings.”
Picard was momentarily dumbstruck. He’d been hoping that it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding. He’d hoped to find something that could explain away the visual evidence from the Ferengi station. Even on seeing Aventine, there had remained some small room for doubt: outsiders had commandeered Federation starships before.
But he wasn’t expecting to see his former first officer sitting there calmly, while Aventine continued to fire on the beacon. “Admiral, you’re attacking a Federation station!”
“That is what this looks like,” Riker said, sounding mildly apologetic. “Aventine is on an important mission, Captain. There’s no time to explain, but we could really use your help.”
“Help?” Picard blinked. Help?
“The Corvus Beacon must be taken down. The crew has already been safely evacuated, so between the two of us, we should be able to make short work of it.” Riker spoke matter-of-factly, as if he were suggesting nothing out of the ordinary. “I recommend Enterprise target the far edge, working its way in. We’ll meet at the center. Working together, like old times.”
Old times? Picard couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you ordering me to fire on a Federation scientific outpost?”
“I told you, there’s no time to explain. But it’s of critical importance.”
“To whom? To you?” Picard shook his head. “Will, Starfleet is reporting a number of attacks like this one on communications outposts. I can’t believe you’re involved. What possible reason could there—”
“I’m following orders. I’m sorry you can’t do the same.”
“Orders? Whose orders? Admiral, if you’ll just stop and talk—”
“Wrong strategy, Captain.”
Picard blinked, startled by Riker’s tone. “What do you mean?”
“I know you’re buying time talking to me until I’m in range. We’re done here. Riker out.” The admiral vanished, his image replaced by the sight of Aventine pummeling the beacon, while Laplace sat off to the side.
Picard looked at Worf. “That—that was Will, wasn’t it?”
Worf looked bewildered. “It seemed so.”
Shrugging off what had been one of the stranger conversations he’d ever had, Picard called out to Laplace. “You’re right there. Why haven’t you acted?”
“It’s a Federation ship,” Kwelm said. “And we haven’t wanted to engage, for fear of damaging the beacon!”
Picard frowned. “Raise your shields, Laplace, and move to interdict.”
“They’re faster than we are—”
“Get in the game, Captain Kwelm.” He looked back to Faur. “Range?”
“Twenty thousand kilometers.”
“Raise shields,” Picard said gravely. “Let’s do this.”
AVENTINE
“Security team to holodeck one,” Dax said. It was the third time she’d given the order. But every time she touched her communicator badge, she was serenaded by jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. Or at least that was who Bowers thought was playing the music. It would have been comical had the situation not been so dire.
Kedair had left her tactical station, which wasn’t responding to her commands anyway, to deal with something equally unresponsive: the turbolift doors, which had seized shut. The powerful woman had been joined by three other bridge officers in trying to force the portal open, after the manual override failed. “Aventine’s in a mood all of a sudden!”
“No mystery who caused it,” Dax said. Riker’s takeover of her communications systems had sealed it for her. “You called it, Sam.”
“I didn’t predict this,” Bowers said. Her first officer was going from station to station, futilely entering commands.
“You still think he has some kind of secret admiral-only override?”
“I was kidding. We’ve lived this ship every day for years. We’d have known if something like that existed.”
Whatever Riker had done was a recent addition to Aventine—but that didn’t make sense to Dax, either. “The Admiral would need a team of the brightest minds in engineering in there with him to do all this.”
“Hell, I don’t know. He’s in a holodeck,” Bowers said. “He could have Montgomery Scott and Zefram Cochrane working side by side down there!”
“We could use them up here,” Kedair said, struggling. “They could help us open the damn door!”
ENTERPRISE
“Captain, Laplace is moving to ram Aventine!”
“Target Aventine’s nacelles and fire if she attempts to evade.” Picard gripped his armrests and watched as the starship skimmed just beneath the engineering vessel’s hull, very nearly clipping one of the broadcast towers on the Corvus Beacon. It was a wild, sudden move on Aventine’s part—not in the direction Picard or his security officer were expecting. “Pursue.”
Laplace had gotten into the game, all right—putting up a belated but spirited struggle to protect a scientific outpost her captain was clearly passionate about. But where Aventine’s dodge merely resulted in missed shots from Enterprise, the engineering vessel found itself soaring into a spherically emanating cloud of burning wreckage from a previous assault on the station. Weaker shields allowed colossal girders to slam against the forward section of Laplace’s hull, leaving one sparking gash, and then another.
“Laplace, status!”
“Shaken, Enterprise.” He could tell from Kwelm’s voice that there wasn’t any need to ask if Laplace would continue the fight.
“Photon torpedoes incoming,” Worf said, clearly startled. Aventine hadn’t fired at them before, but now three of the shining projectiles rocketed outward from the aft launchers.
“Evasive action.” Enterprise lurched. Aventine had fired them not to strike the ship, but to delay its pursuit—closing off an avenue of approach. Enterprise cut between two of them, Flight Controller Faur trying to keep the ship in Aventine’s wake. But the torpedoes detonated in space, delivering simultaneous twin jolts to Enterprise’s shields.
“Shields down to eighty percent,” Šmrhová said over the noise of the barrage.
“Target Aventine’s . . .” Picard began. But there was nothing for Enterprise to target. Aventine resolved itself into a bright blur, redshifting out of observable reality.
“Mark that departure vector,” Picard said. “Trace it!”
“Klingon space,” Faur said.
Worf was puzzled. “Why?”
Picard ordered reverse angle onto the viewscreen. Aventine had left a trail of destruction, indeed. Only the skeleton of the Corvus Beacon remained intact amid the burning wreckage. The facility’s tender, Laplace, loomed above, a visitor at a grave.
“We’re being hailed by Laplace.” Šmrhová completed the connection.
Captain Kwelm appeared on Enterprise’s viewscreen. There was smoke in the image, and Picard could see light structural damage had been done to the ship’s bridge. The engineering vessel, not meant for combat, had acquitted itself admirably.
“We’re in better shape than I thought we’d be in, Captain Picard,” Kwelm said. The seated Tellarite was misty-eyed not from the smoke, but from surveying the remains of the station. “Riker destroyed everythi
ng.”
Picard nodded. “That appears to be the case,” he said, choosing his phrasing carefully. It wasn’t the time to debate Riker’s guilt or innocence—not here, not before Laplace’s crew.
And certainly not when he lacked a shred of evidence absolving his friend.
“I—we will try to go on, Captain. Thank you for saving what you could.”
“Do you require assistance?”
“No. One thing,” Kwelm said, standing, “I want that human stopped. Stopped before he does this again.”
“We shall. Enterprise out.”
He looked to Worf, grim and speechless—and then back to Faur. “Follow Aventine’s last heading. Full speed.”
Clearly aware of the captain’s mood, Dygan turned to him. “Captain, there are other vessels making attacks in this region. Wouldn’t it make more sense to go after one of them? We can certainly stop a Ferengi ship faster than we can stop Aventine.”
“I don’t think so, Mister Dygan. One of our own did this,” Picard said. “We will stop the Aventine.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Faur looked at the captain. “Warp speed available.”
“Engage.”
Picard didn’t know how he would keep his word to Captain Kwelm. But he would try.
Twenty-one
AVENTINE
You don’t realize how fast something is until it’s not, Dax thought. Aventine was an incredibly fast ship, and it had a speedy and efficient turbolift system. Now, with many of the turbolifts offline, she had been forced into an unscheduled tour of her ship’s Jefferies tubes.
She had just clambered from one into another featureless hallway when Bowers emerged from a maintenance hatch. “He’s making us waste time,” she said.
“He’s doing a good job of it. The approach to EPS distribution is protected by a force field,” Bowers said. “Riker’s got half the ship thinking the hull has been compromised. We need to tell Leishman we’ve got to try something else.”
Without thinking, Dax tapped her communicator badge—and was greeted by an up-tempo melody from a warbling clarinet. “Damn it!”
“Artie Shaw,” Bowers said. “I think this one’s called ‘Honeysuckle Jump.’ ”
She glared at him.
“I could be wrong,” he said meekly.
“Not something we need to worry about right now,” Dax said. “Come on.”
They made for a doorway that had been propped open at the end of the hallway. The access point beyond sat in the middle of a Jefferies tube, with ladders stretching up and down, out of sight. Looking up, Dax spotted Kedair sliding quickly downward, straddling the outside of the ladder with the insteps of her boots.
Dax stepped aside as the athletic Takaran hopped off and made a three-point landing on the metal deck. Standing upright, she looked winded. “He’s killed artificial gravity on the decks above and below holodeck one,” she said, wiping the sweat from her scaly brow. “He keeps alternately pressurizing and depressurizing the Jefferies tubes that run anywhere near the place.”
“Gravity boots and oxygen masks, then.”
“It helps to bring your own,” called a muffled voice from behind Dax. She turned to see Leishman clambering out of a hatch. The chief engineer’s face was barely visible behind her oxygen mask and night-vision eyewear. She had a pair of gravity boots hanging from a yoke around her neck.
“You look like you’ve been diving the dark ocean,” Bowers said.
“I feel like it,” Leishman said, pulling the mask down from her chin and lifting her goggles. “Every place we try to engage the overrides, he cuts the lights and messes with the air and the gravity.” Exhausted, Leishman pulled the gravity boots from over her shoulders and threw them to the deck with an angry clank.
“He’s eavesdropping,” Kedair said. “He knows where we’re going. You’ve got to manually kill the internal sensors.”
Leishman looked at the security chief with tired irritation. “We’ve been doing that. But there are only so many points from which we can try to get control of the ship back.” She looked sorrowfully at Dax. “We’ve been trying to establish an ODN bypass from engineering to the bridge. But we couldn’t get the systems on either end to accept the interface.”
“Something blocked you?”
“I tried like hell to hide what it was we were up to. An ODN bypass—that’s not something the average admiral knows about. But it’s almost as if he knew we’d be trying this specific thing.” Leishman looked at Dax. “Who games out every possible countermove?”
Dax patted the engineer’s shoulder. “I honestly think he’s baiting us, trying to get us to waste time while Aventine takes us—wherever.”
Actually, Dax already knew where Aventine was headed—sort of. The main viewscreen on the bridge had shown her ship turning toward Klingon space just before the slipstream drive was engaged. She wasn’t expecting a warm welcome.
Bowers walked around the circumference of the small room and tried a door. It worked. “The admiral has nothing against port accessway storage B,” he said, after peeking in. “The lights work.”
“He wants us where he wants us,” Dax said. She gestured for the others to follow her inside.
Port accessway storage B had a variety of cubes and cylinders stacked up—and, remarkably, two chairs. “What are these doing here?” Bowers asked. “Anyone want a seat?”
Leishman had already slid down against the inside wall to sit on the deck, spent. Kedair was stalking about, going through the stored goods. And Dax was too wired to sit.
“All right,” the first officer said, flipping the chair around and plopping down in it.
Dax looked up. “Sensors?”
“Still active,” Leishman said.
“Then he’s here,” Dax said. She raised her voice. “Aren’t you, Admiral?”
“I hear you,” Riker said, his disembodied voice almost god-like from above. “I know you must be concerned, Dax, and I fully understand why.”
Dax’s eyes darted to Leishman, who scrambled to her feet. Together, the engineer and Kedair casually began searching for sensors. “If you’re concerned,” Dax said, “then give us command back!”
“That’s not going to happen. I have a mission—and it can’t be interfered with.”
“A Starfleet mission?” Dax’s eyes narrowed. “That won’t fly, Admiral. You told us your mission was to prevent the spread of Takedown. But we no longer believe Takedown exists.” Dax paused. It was a small matter, given the circumstances, to take the next step. “You fabricated those orders from Akaar, didn’t you?”
“It was important to my mission that you cooperated, while I completed preparations.”
“Preparations for what? To take over my ship?”
“She’s Starfleet’s ship, Captain. Don’t get attached.”
Dax was flabbergasted. “If she’s Starfleet’s ship, then give her back!”
“I will—when my mission is complete. And let me spare you a little dramatic scene: I’ve disabled the self-destruct systems aboard Aventine.”
Dax and Bowers looked at each other. It wasn’t something they’d considered yet, but it was certainly on the list of options. Or it had been.
Across the room, Leishman had guided Kedair to a small bubble-like protrusion in the far corner of the room where the walls reached the overhead. Kedair turned and gave Dax a silent thumbs-up sign, while Leishman casually worked her way to the opposite corner.
“I realize this is uncomfortable for you to have to sit and watch,” Riker said. “If I had time, I’d beam your crew off. Someplace safe.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“You wouldn’t have a choice in that. But Enterprise’s shields were up, and I’m not about to leave you stranded where we’re headed.”
“Thanks for caring,” Dax said. She wanted to say something worse, but for some reason, she had trouble swearing at the admiral. Some vestigial respect for his rank? She didn’t know. “We’re hea
ded to Klingon space. Why?”
“ ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ Dax. Didn’t you ever learn that?” He chuckled—a strange sound, when coming from all around. “Never mind. I forgot who I’m speaking with.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, something, Admiral. The William Riker I knew would never follow orders blindly, whoever they came from.”
A pause. “I don’t forget anything. Not now.”
Dax didn’t know what to say to that. It was Riker’s voice, for sure, but he sounded as if he’d aged decades in a week.
“I have to go. You can tell Kedair and Leishman they can destroy the sensors now. I understand people like their privacy.”
The room went silent, and Dax saw the women looking to her for guidance. Dax ran her finger across her throat. Simultaneous crackling flashes later, the sensors were dead.
“There aren’t any more in here,” Leishman said, clambering down from the boxes she was on. “He can mess with the systems all day, but I don’t think he had time to install more hardware in storage B.”
Phaser still in hand, Kedair looked at Dax, astonished. “Did you hear what he said, there? He actually thinks he could run the vessel without any crew at all.”
Leishman waved dismissively. “That’s a nice dream, but it’s simply not possible.”
Dax remembered something. “Didn’t Riker say he’d served on the task force that worked on quarantining holodeck functions from the rest of starships’ systems?”
“The safeguards they put in place were many and complicated. I can’t see a lone admiral undoing them, even if he did show a sudden talent for engineering.”
Dax looked to Bowers, who was hunched over, lost in thought. “What about Sam’s idea? That Riker generated a team of assistants down there on the holodeck to reroute Aventine’s functions there?”
Leishman shook her head. “Holodeck entities are only as intelligent as the ship’s main computer—and they’re bound by its functioning parameters. You can’t program it to invent ways to subvert its safety protocols. That was one of the task force’s reforms.”
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